The Ark of the Convenant and the virgin Mary? Sure I have thoughts on the Egyptian parallels. I'll even try to keep it short.
The Ark of the Covenant has a very close parallel in the ancient Egyptian ceremonial barques.
Those were shaped like ships and could be several meters long, but the smaller versions didn’t float on water, priests carried them on their shoulders in procession on long carrying poles - just like the Ark of the Covenant was transported. Sometimes the barques even travelled the river on real boats – there are depictions of a small boat carried in a big boat
(but often there would also be a separate, larger ceremonial barque that could travel on the river)
The procession, be it by land or by water, was the main event of most Egyptian religious festivals: The statue of the God, which was usually hidden away in the temple sanctuary, now travelled in its festival barque in a procession (often from one temple to another). This is the closest that common people could ever get to the cult images of the state gods. It was a huge event for the people of a city to witness their god leaving the holiest of holies and moving through their midst. Even though the cult image was still at least partially veiled in a shrine...
Those ceremonial barques, like the Ark of Covenant, were made from the finest materials and decorated with the head of their god on the prow. There’s a famous bit of ancient Egyptian literature that tells about the misadventures of a guy called Wenamun, who is sent to the Levant to get the finest cedar wood for a new barque of Amun.
The barques also rested in their own barque shrines in the temple when not in use.
There’s also the Sun Barque, the morning and evening ships that the sun god Ra uses to travel across the sky. And of course the idea of the Sun Barque is connected to those ceremonial barques. But since the Ark of the Covenant is described as being an actual physical object, its link to the ceremonial barques described above is much closer.
Here's a bit more info:
The Nile River was the source of life for the ancient Egyptians and so figured prominently in their religious beliefs. At night, the Milky Way was considered a heavenly Nile, associated with Hathor...
www.worldhistory.org
However, there is no link between the barque and any of the mother goddesses of Egypt. They are never, to my knowledge, described as the personified “barque carrying the young god”.
A somewhat similar motive can be found in Isis, whose Egyptian name can be translated as “seat, place” – she can be conceptualized as the actual throne carrying the young king Horus.
Isis is often compared to virgin Mary. But if you look at the Isis of Egypt’s imperial age (that’s the third and second Millenium BCE) the parallels are actually not that close.
Isis is not characterized by her purity and piety like Mary. Instead, she is a protective mother, characterized by her vast magical power and great cunning. She is not one who waits for an angel to tell her about the impending conception… she travels the entire land to collect the limbs of her dead, dismembered husband, she literally puts him together again, returns him to a semblance of life by her magic and hovers over his erect phallus in the shape of a kestrel to get pregnant with Horus.
She then proceeds to birth and raise the child Horus on her own, protecting and healing him until he grows strong enough to challenge Seth for the kingship. And even when Horus is grown, she still remains and active and guiding influence – read the “Contendings of Horus and Seth” and you’ll see what I mean.
Actually, if I look at the concept of Mary as the “new ark”, the one who carries and surrounds the god… the other parallel concept I see here is the “Celestial Cow”.
The celestial cow is a form of the sky goddess Nut, who lifts up and carries the Sun God. There are images of the Ra as a child, sitting on the head of the huge cow and holding on to her horns while she lifts him up. (main source is the “Book of the Celestial Cow” first attested on the golden shrines of Tutankhamun)
Other images show Nut, either as a woman or as a cow, with the sun god travelling along her vast body in his barque. She birthes him in the morning and swallows him in the evening in an eternal cycle.
And if we go even further back in time, to the oldest bits of Egyptian religion that may have existed even before 3000 BCE, there’s Hathor and Horus. (not Horus, son of Isis. A different god named Horus, who is called “Horus the great” or “Horus the Elder”. Horus simply means “the high one” or “the one above” in the Egyptian language).
We don’t have any detailed myths from that era, because writing was just being invented and was only used for labelling wine bottles and for names on tombstones at this point. (no joke. One of the oldest existing bits of hieroglyphic writing is a label for a wine jar). Anyways, we don’t have an older myth in a fully detailed text. But we know about the falcon god, Horus the Elder, who is addressed as a god of the sky with sun and moon being his eyes. And then there is Hathor, one of the oldest known deities of Egypt, with her close links to the celestial cow (same crown, same animal shape) - and her name, Hathor, is literally “Hwt Hr”: “Temple of Horus”. It’s even written like this in hieroglyphs: a falcon, Horus, sitting in a square enclosure, that’s the sign for “Hwt”, meaning temple, house or realm.
So I’m sure you can see the similarity between the sun god Ra being lifted up by sky goddess Nut, and being born and swallowed by her in an eternal cycle – and Horus, god of sky and light, and the cow-shaped goddess who is called the “realm of Horus”, as in: the vast sky who surrounds the falcon.
Anyway, those would be my thoughts. I tried to keep it short, but I guess didn't succeed all that well. If you need some more sources, literature or elaboration on any of those points let me know.
