Many Egyptologists describe ancient Egypt as mysterious and magical,
denoting that indeed many aspects and features of its life, and crucially of
its religion, remain unknown to us.
اضافة اعلان
Indeed, 200 years ago, Champollion deciphered the
Rosetta Stone and opened for us avenues through which to read the open book
that is the drawings and carvings on the walls and ceilings of the temples and
tombs all over Egypt. But our command over the language remains far from
complete. There continue to be many symbols that have multiple interpretations,
sections — or what we could think of as paragraphs — that have multiple
contexts.
The Book of the Dead is one of the prime examples. A
big part of it is mere spells and incantations that ancient Egyptian priests
recited for the souls of the departed to produce certain effects in the dead’s
journey in the other world. For some scholars, it was not really a book of
religion, but of magic. But throughout the book, we find scattered short texts
that do not contextualize the incantations, and hardly explain the effects they
supposedly result into. These texts are effectively invocations of values,
particularly righteousness, justice, and truth — repeatedly put in that order.
To a large extent, the Book of the Dead is like the
books of several other religions, full of rituals on how to worship the divine,
and how to attain to heaven and escape hell (irrespective of how these concepts
were conceived of). But the values were there for a deeper meaning. Behind the
rituals and details, there exists in the book the monotheistic tradition of
ancient Egypt, and crucially its emphasis on elevating the human to achieve the
potential of divinization, not through rituals and incantations, but through
behavior.
Indeed in this tradition, through righteousness,
self-control, and discipline, the human would benefit from the inevitability of
justice (which ancient Egypt saw as a natural law always applicable in life),
and ascend to truth.
This tradition, not surprisingly, drives toward
order in life and society. But perhaps surprisingly for some, it revolves round
human agency. The success or failure in controlling oneself is here the
determinant of one’s destiny, not to attain reward and eschew punishment, but
to achieve the ultimate potential, transcendence toward divinity.
This was ancient Egypt’s idea of and route toward
divinization, which was the core of ancient Egypt’s conception of the divine,
the human, and the true meaning and purpose of life.
This conception not only links the sacred and the
secular; it connects the past with the present. Ancient Egypt was not a
civilization with self-contained beliefs, detached from what had preceded it
and what came after it. Ancient Egypt was far from a civilization that had
existed on this land and then dwindled and disappeared. Those who believe in
that view utterly miss the core ideas of ancient Egypt, as well as
misunderstand or ignore how philosophers such as Pythagoras and Plato viewed
Egypt and its contribution to the flow of knowledge throughout human history.
Indeed in this tradition, through righteousness, self-control, and discipline, the human would benefit from the inevitability of justice (which ancient Egypt saw as a natural law always applicable in life), and ascend to truth.
In ancient Egyptian thought, and that of some of the
most profound Greek philosophers who studied in Egypt, there is always a
connection between the past and the present; there is never a cutoff in the
flow of knowledge. In the tradition of ancient Egypt, that connection between
the past and the present is the land. That flow of knowledge that has existed
throughout human history – Plato’s higher ideas – settled in the land, or as
Goethe directed us to think, became one with nature in this part of the world.
These ideas – conceptions of the divine and of
humanity and the link between them – were not exclusively Egyptian. They had
been developed before ancient Egypt arose, and remained after ancient Egypt
handed the torch to ancient Greece. Nevertheless, their becoming one with the
land meant they have settled deep in the Egyptian psyche, becoming a link
between what was before and what was to come. Here the land, geography, became
not only a carrier of history, but part of it.
And so in this view, the land in the past was not an
auxiliary background to the development and growth of the ancient Egyptian
civilization. And the land today is not mere natural pastel through which our
eyes (windows of the consciousness) discern the marvels that that civilization
has left. The land is at the very core of that civilization.
The sand, the Nile, and the greenery of its banks
are constituents of that civilization. The land is Isis finding, gathering, and
resuscitating the sacred – Osiris – that is scattered in and across it, in
danger of being lost, unless there is a will, and an inspiration, to preserve
it. In this understanding, the land of Egypt is the vessel containing the
meanings that the ancient Egyptian civilization created.
This form of understanding is what this series is
about. It is a way of bringing back into our collective memory explanations of
ancient Egypt that decades of ignorance, of exiling true Egypt, and of
obsession with literalism squandered. It is also a reminder that, as Egypt now
rightfully celebrates its ancient heritage, the celebration must be accompanied
by innovative, imaginative attempts at delving beneath the simplistic views
about the civilization that prevailed in popular culture in the past decades –
views that neither explain ancient Egypt’s greatness nor revel in its grandeur.
By revealing the ingenuity, depth, richness, and
complexity of ancient Egypt, this series attempted to show how much we stand to
gain by understanding what the civilization of our land, and what our land
itself, mean.
Tarek Osman is an author, essayist, and broadcaster.
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