A hundred years ago,
Howard Carter unveiled the tomb of Tutankhamun. Within days, its contents
became world famous. Egyptomania, in Britain, France, and the US, was born.
اضافة اعلان
At the surface, the fascination seemed to be with
the ancient civilization’s richness, aesthetics, and refined artistry. At its
depth, however, there was the mystery of what the drawings, the burial methods,
and the symbols-full artifacts mean.
The discovery seemed a treasure (actually and
metaphorically) from which new understandings could emerge.
But this was hardly the beginning. By 1922, the
attempts to understand Ancient Egypt were already going on for a century, since
Champollion’s deciphering of the Rosetta Stone in 1822.
Perhaps the first
of these new understandings was order. Egyptologists had, since the
mid-nineteenth century, recognized several patterns in Egyptian hieroglyphics.
These transcended ways of recording names and numbers. Some observers —
especially with artistic backgrounds such as Edward Lane — spoke of Ancient Egyptian
patterns of telling stories. Stories indicate narrative, not merely in a
literary sense, but in terms of thought. In this view, Ancient Egypt had a
worldview that had gone beyond simplistic myths about the origin of the
universe and the existence of life. The idea here was that inherent in the
theology and science of Ancient Egypt there were deeply held convictions about
the universe, humans, and what connects them.
The findings in Tutankhamun’s tomb directed to the
same line of thinking. Behind the immense displays of gold and jewels, there
were clearly exact and exacting patterns according to which the site was
structured, the burial was undertaken, and the artifacts were organized.
The most fascinating of these patterns were
numerical. At the beginning — a decade or two after the discovery — only those
interested in numerology were paying attention. But as some explorers, with the
help of mathematicians especially from France, began to report on the
bewildering and often shocking measurements of several ancient Egyptian sites
and how they correspond to physical and astronomical measurements, the notion
that there lay behind the sites, the tombs, and the arrangements of objects, a
pattern that indicated a thought-order began to gain ground.
Some scholars started to invoke Pythagoras in their
writings about Ancient Egypt. That this towering figure in Greek philosophy and
science had come to Egypt was known. But few before the 1930s and 1940s had
linked his mathematical understanding of the world (as much as we are able to
piece it together) to an earlier worldview. The primary idea here was that
mathematical concepts, expressed in the material world, influence if not govern
the patterns we see in the observed universe, from cosmology to sound (hence,
Pythagoras’s contributions to the science of music). And that Pythagoras might
had learnt some (if not a lot) of these ideas in the period he had spent in
Egypt, prompted many to associate his observations with the numerical patterns
that Egyptologists were then discovering in the remains of Ancient Egypt.
For many, this indicated tremendous engineering
prowess. And as mass media began to gain power in the 1950s and 1960s, the
wonders —including bewildering mathematical marvels in Ancient Egyptian sites,
from the Grand Pyramid to Karnak — began to raise wider interest. Public
consciousness was waking up to the possibility that Ancient Egypt was a
reservoir of a richer and deeper knowledge than most observers, and scholars of
Egyptology, had thought.
For some, this knowledge transcended Egypt. In this
view, this knowledge had been there before Ancient Egypt became what it was and
remained after Ancient Egypt ceased to be. And so in this school of thought,
Ancient Egypt was a continuation of an earlier civilization whose remains had
been lost, in the same way that Ancient Greece was a continuation of Ancient
Egypt. And in both cases — and others — that continuing knowledge took a shape
that corresponded to the culture, temperament, and geography of the place and society
it was in during that era.
Ancient Egypt had a worldview that had gone beyond simplistic myths about the origin of the universe and the existence of life. The idea here was that inherent in the theology and science of Ancient Egypt there were deeply held convictions about the universe, humans, and what connects them.
Many historians dismiss this view, primarily on the
grounds that the evidence supporting it is largely anecdotal. Many Classicists,
on the other hand, entertain it because it explains how Egypt’s advanced
civilization had appeared with a sophistication unrivalled in its contemporary
world and without having a clear growth and development trajectory.
Perhaps Classicists are drawn to this view because
it is quite Platonic. The idea that there exists a continuing body of knowledge
— of truth — moving throughout human history, from one location to another,
being molded in one culture after another, has loud echoes of Plato’s view that
higher ideas and ideals inform, inspire, illumine, and guide humanity — or
enlightened communities — toward moral advancement.
This view solved a dilemma in early Egyptology work.
There we found rather simplistic explanations of Ancient Egypt’s view of the
world, the universe, and the place of humanity in it, which were hardly
commensurate with the mathematical and engineering prowess that Ancient Egypt’s
architecture demonstrated.
This led to new narratives that tried to see
symbolism in many of the stories that early Egyptologists had translated from
the drawings and inscriptions on temples and sites all over Egypt.
Deciphering symbols is all about connecting dots.
And so there started new narratives about Egyptian mythology that connected
observations in sites to mathematical facts revealed by studies of Egyptian
architecture, to comments attributed to Greek authors, most notably Herodotus.
These narratives indeed followed a Platonic view of
the world, according to which, there were two bodies of knowledge in Ancient
Egypt. One simple, aimed at the masses, that explained life and existence and
the role of humans in it in a binary way — a fight between good and evil,
temptations and tests to humans, and that their responses and actions are
rewarded or punished in the afterword.
The other was a deeper body of knowledge. In it, no
binaries existed; rather it rested on a sophisticated conception of unity that
encompasses the universe in which, and through which, humanity exists - a unity
that evolves all of its constituents, universe and man combined.
There was a bit of Goethe in this approach. These
narratives could only be perceived through an active imagination, a mind that
finds, if not creates, the images out of which a bigger fabric takes shape.
Interestingly these narratives prospered and found
major audiences far away from Egypt, particularly in Britain, France, and the
US. There, many writers found it crucial to anchor their Platonic-Goethite
narratives on Ancient Egypt in particular. In these writings, Ancient Egypt
became not merely a place in which this continuing knowledge had manifested and
advanced that civilization at a particular moment in time; rather, Ancient
Egypt became the center of that continuing knowledge.
Tarek Osman is an
author, essayist, and broadcaster.
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