Hundreds of relics will be displayed for the first time in a British Museum show that challenges our view of religious history

A trail-blazing British Museum exhibition about religion in Egypt after the fall of the pharaohs is to shine a light for the first time on an overlooked and difficult truth: how much the great world faiths and mythologies borrowed from each other and how many modern distinctions were made later.

The potentially provocative show, Egypt: Faith After the Pharaohs, opens next week and covers the millennium after the death of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, when Egypt was initially part of the Roman empire and arguably the greatest melting pot on Earth.

Curators at the London museum will use a series of items, many never put on public display before, to demonstrate the level of “entanglement” of religious symbols and rituals; with Egyptian emblems regularly appearing in classical Greek designs, depicting Jewish stories that were decorated with Christian crosses and Roman wreaths.

“Over the last 10 or 15 years in scholarship, there has been growing interest across the disciplines in looking at the way religions interacted, rather than just in isolation,” said Elisabeth O’Connell, a keeper in the museum’s Department of Ancient Egypt and the Sudan and a co-curator of the exhibition. “It is becoming clear that a lot of religious history has been founded on our modern distinctions simply being projected back.”

Proof of this borrowing can still be seen today, said O’Connell, thanks to the objects being exceptionally well preserved for centuries in the peculiarly protective, arid climate of Egypt.

Two hundred of these troublesome objects, many deliberately ignored by scholars in the past, have been gathered together to challenge the conventions of religious history. From architectural fragments, jewellery, paintings, gravestones and toys, to the paraphernalia of religious worship, they are all subversive evidence that faiths were once amalgamated in a way that was accepted by the ordinary people of Egypt, regardless of their birth-race or family’s religion.

“If you only take the work we have from Dioscorus of Aphrodito, it blows apart these distinctions,” said O’Connell. “He was a lawyer and poet, who lived in Egypt and wrote in Greek, although he was a Christian Copt.

“He is a great example of what was going on widely, because he used biblical sources and also wrote Homeric verse, one of them dedicated to a man with a Christian name, Matthew.”

The exhibition is the first major international show to deal with this 1,200-year period of Egyptian history, examining the transition to a majority Christian population after Roman rule and then a majority Muslim population that often coexisted alongside thriving communities of Jews.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A sandstone stele of Abraham, 7th century AD. The Trustees of the British Museum Photograph: The Trustees of the British Museum

A collaboration with the Staatliche Museen in Berlin which has been supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation, the show will also be mounted in Egypt at the Cairo Museum, where it will be the first to look at the way Christian, Islamic and Jewish communities reinterpreted the “pharaonic” past of Egypt, a part of the world that is now a frontier zone and close to many apparently intractable religious problems.

The obviously sensitive nature of the items being displayed means that the British Museum has taken a cautious approach. “We have reviewed security and we had a look, too, at what the British Library did for its 2007 show Sacred, when they had similar concerns,” said O’Connell.

“In the event, the library felt they had more than enough security in place and that the show was well received among religious communities. In fact, people were eager to know more, which is encouraging for us. If visitors had concerns, it tended to be about what people of other faiths to them might feel.”

The objects selected for the show are examples of the flexibility of religions and of the dual use of symbolism, so the exhibition as a whole makes a case that this extensive “entanglement” was the norm and not the exception.

“But our exhibition is not about the theology,” said O’Connell. “It is very much about the people and about how they lived.”

On public display for the first time will be a gravestone, or stele, for a man called Abraham. “It commemorates someone with a Jewish name and yet it bears Christian symbols inside a classical frame next to the ankh symbol, the ancient Egyptian sign of life,” said O’Connell. “What is more, the engraving on it says he was ‘the perfected monk’ and is written in Coptic Egyptian.”

The curators hope the exhibition will show how Egyptian society was transformed from one in which many gods were worshipped to one in which prayers were offered to a single god.

The impression it is likely to give, of a culture in which powerful religious symbolism was jumbled together, is a strange echo of the way in which fanciful writers in the west once saw Egypt. British Romantic poets and novelists often described it as a frightening and confusing place, made all the more mysterious because ancient Egypt was understood to be the origin of civilised European thought, the inspiration for the Greeks, and yet it was situated on the “dark” African continent.

Egypt: Faith After the Pharaohs aims to illuminate some of this darkness and show how widely the traditions from the classical world and powerful religious ideas were once shared.