CONTENTS
01 ~ The Takeoff of Egyptian
Culture
02 ~ The Totalitarian Theocracy
03 ~ The Empire of the Nile
04 ~ The Structure of Dynastic
Egypt
05 ~ The Dynastic Way of Death
06 ~ Hieroglyphs
07 ~ The Anatomy of Pre-Perspective
Art
08 ~ The Decline and Fall of
the Pharaohs
09 ~ The Rediscovery of the
Pharaohs
#1 THE TAKEOFF OF EGYPTIAN CULTURE
At one time scholars
believed that the civilization of ancient Egypt was the first in the history
of the world and the progenior of all others. We now know this to be untrue,
but the ancient Egyptians retain one unique distinction: they were the
first people on earth to create a nation-state. This state, embodying the
spiritual beliefs and aspirations of the Egyptian race, was in all its
major manifestations a theocracy. It served as the framework of a culture
of extraordinary strength, assurance and durability which lasted for 3,000
years and which retained almost to the end its ow unmistakable purity of
style. In the Egypt of antiquity, State, religion and culture formed an
indisputable unity. They rose together, the fell together, and they must
be studied together.
Moreover, there was
a fourth essential element in this creative unity: the land. It is impossible
to conceive of the civilization of ancient Egypt except in its peculiar
geographical setting. It was nurtured and continued to be dominated right
to the end by the physical facts of its setting: the rhythm of the Nile
and its productive valley, and the circumscription of the desert. They
gave the Egyptian people and their culture certain fundamental characteristics:
stability, permanence and isolation. The Egyptians, indeed, were self-consciously
aware of their national immobility and separateness.
The Egyptians were
perhaps the most self-confident people the world has known: the cultural
egocentricity of the later 'Celestial Empire' of China was less exclusive
by comparison. The Egyptians did not regard themselves as a chosen people;
they were, quite simply, people. Other humans fell into another category.
The Egyptian word for 'man', as distinct from gods or animals originally
applied only to Egyptians.
This exclusiveness
was not primarily racial, for the Egyptians were of mixed race and seem
to have accepted everyone who adopted their culture wholeheartedly, but
geographical. The Egyptians were people because they lived in Egypt.
Their word for right
order was 'maat', which also stood for justice and morality. The pharaoh
embodied maat, and also dispensed it. His divinity enabled him to determine
what was maat and what was not. Thus Egypt, unlike the Mesopotamian city-states
and later the Israelies, had so far as we know no written code of law,
but (it seems) an unwritten customary law derived from pharaonic judgments,
and altered by the pharaoh as he saw fit. Maat was also the form of justice
dispensed when a man died and appeared at the last judgment: his soul was
then weighed in a pair of scales against maat. There was, in short, a very
close association in the Egyptian's mind between moral goodness, mundane
justice and artistic canon.
Since art was ordered
by a geometric sense, it is therefore not surprising - almost inevitable
- that its supreme expression, to the Egyptians, should have been the purest
of solid geometrical forms, the pyramid, a symbol for them at one and the
same time of maat or order, of pharaonic authority and of eternity.
The pyramids of the Old Kingdom chart the rise and fall of the monarchy with some precision. They grew in size as the pharaoh's earthly power and divine attributes accumulated; and when both were eroded, the pyramids shrank and finally disappeared.
One reason why the pyramids were built was to baffle tomb-robbers by their size, terror, majesty and complexity. Great thought was given to the exact location of the burial chamber and to the provision of security devices. But nothing availed. Tomb-robbing in Egypt is as old an industry as pyramid-building; probably older.
We must face the possibility, difficult though it is for us to comprehend, that the gigantism of the pyramids was the product of religious fervour, rather than of royal egomania concripting a servile multitude. The Egyptian nation evidently did not regard these funeral works of their Horus-kings as expressions of a private whim but as public works of compelling importance, which had a direct bearing on the future well-being of all. In this sense Egypt was a collectivist society of a very rigorous kind. The King personified the collective. If he passed safely into eternity as a fully-fledged god, then the immortal status of his people - serving him in the next world as they had served him in this - was somehow also guaranteed. We must assume then, that the craftsmen and labourers of Egypt worked on the pyramids as though their eternal lives depended on it. Tombs of the kings they may be but we should also see them as collective cenotaphs of the people.
About 2181 we enter what Egyptologists call the First Intermediate Period, a time of actual confusion and documentary obscurity, which lasted for perhaps 100 years until the emergence of the Middle Kingdom under the Eleventh Dynasty of Thebes. This was an early 'Dark Age' of human history, by no means confined to Egypt, when the precarious civilization of the time collapsed from a combination of internal decay and external assault. In antiquity, these spasms tended to occur when civilized war technology - in this case copper weapons, and perhaps some bronze ones - became available to barbarians.
To the historian the central truth of ancient Egyptian society (is that) the health of the pharaonic throne was the index of prosperity and the only guarantee of civilization.
The texts which originate
rom the Intermediate Period and the Middle Kingdom seem to come from a
different age, almost a different moral universe. Men no longer believed
they were part of a collective personality, subsumed in the pharaoh. An
ever-growing circle of people were no convinced that each of them had an
individual soul in eternity, which implied a separate personality on earth.
This process of spiritual
democratization, which gave the diginity of a separate soul, and the right
to an individual judgment in eternity, first to the rich and then to masses
of ordinary people, is one of the most important phenomena in workd history.
To use a phrase of the great American Egyptologist J.H. Breasted, it is
'the dawn of conscience'. Once the idea of individual conscience has become
established, mankind can never be the same again, even though its rights
are subsequently denied and suppressed. Indeed, the development is political
as much as spiritual.
#4 THE STRUCTURE OF DYNASTIC EGYPT
"The father of the
orphan, the husband of the widow, the brother of the divorced woman and
the apron of him who is motherless."
- Nerferti, writing in the early Middle Kingdom on the proper role of the
Chief Steward
The royal service prided
itself on feeding its men well. It was part of the Egyptian genius for
organizing manpower, perhaps their greatest gift. Yet in many ways this
gift, and the vast human resources which made it so effective, was a positive
obstacle to progress. The Egyptians displayed extraordinary ingenuity in
making the best possible use of primtive techniques, but their massive
deployment of muscle-power acted as a disincentive to developing labour-saving
technology. There was no internal marker of any size for manufactured goods,
no private sector, no profit motive.
Egypt was never in
the forefront of new technology, and tended to fall further behind as time
went on. She clung to the Copper Age. Most of the novelties which made
it possible for her to become an empire in the New Kingdom were the direct
result of the Hyskos invasion, which in effect pulled Egypt into the full
Bronze Age. Egypt seemed even more reluctant to enter the Iron Age and
was, in fact, the last major civilized country to do so.
Egypt's technical backwardness
was a consequence of intellectual limitation as well as social conservatism...
in this respect they were primitives, unable to think in the abstract,
or to remove their minds any distance from the actual loaves or jars of
beer they were calculating. Left to themselves they always worked empirically,
and they often worked very well, for their patience and accuracy in going
through a monstrously tedious sum or measurement were admirable.
It was their long-suffering
patience which formed the Egyptian's chief intellectual handicap: they
lacked the inmpatient drive towards the short-cut which animates science,
just as they lacked the incentive to save muscle-power which animates technology.
Originally only the pharaoh enacted this cyclical drama but from the late Old Kingdom onwards the right to struggle with Seth and be immortalized with Osiris was gradually extended to all Egyptians. The unversalizing of the myth accompanied the historical development of the individual conscience, Egypt's greatest spiritual gift to mankind, and to the idea of a last judgment for all, presided over by Osiris.
The democratization
of religion and conscience, the ascent from collectivism to humanism, brought
home to ordinary people the momentousness of death, the need therefore
to organize their life on earth with this in view, and to make preparations
for death every bit as elaborate (according to their means) as those of
the pharaoh. The great majority of fine Egyptians tombs were built in the
lifetimes of their occupants, a source of pride and self-satisfaction to
them and very likely the most valuable items in their property.
This helps to explain
why the overwhelming mass of the surviving evidence of Egyptian art and
civilization is connected with death and fashioned for tombs. Egyptologists
deny that this in any way indicates that the Egyptians were morbid. They
were, so far as we can judge, a lively, extrovert, cheerful people, greedy
for the pleasures of the senses and all the good things of this world.
All this is true. But it is also true, as the instinctive modern Western
reaction to the externals of Egyptian civilization indicates, that the
Egyptians were, to our minds, obsessed by death. Death always had the first-fruits
of Egyptian culture. Writing to his son, King Ammenemes I did not boast
about his palace but his tomb, made in far more magnificent materials.
An Egyptian spent
his adult years planning for eternity just as, today, insurance companies
tell us we should plan for retirement.
The overwhelming majority
of Egyptians did their best to conform to the notion that a well-preserved
body was the best guarantee of life after death. Yet the origins of mummification
were peculiar and based on misapprehension. The Egyptians identified body-preservation
with eternal life by observing that bodies did not always decay. This was
a result of the exceptionally dry climate of the Nile valley and above
all the absence of bacteria in the sand and air. Even in modern times,
archaeologists have dug up well-preserved mummies, placed without coffins,
unenbalmed and uneviscerated, in sandy graves. In short, the best chance
a body had of total survival was simply to be placed in the sand. But the
Egyptians did not know this. In early attempts to guarantee the process
of preservation, that is during the predynastic period, they built burial
chambers. To their consternation the bodies, no longer in contact with
the dessicating sand, putrified. So, by trial and error they moved towards
the clumsy science of mummification, which was first practised, it seems,
in the Second Dynasty.
The Fifth Dynasty
'Pyramid Texts' make it clear that the basic aim of mummification was to
keep the bones intact and in place and above all to keep the head attached
to the body. Hence the bandages to maintain the characteristic structure
and bodily shape, but they quickly discovered that they had to remove the
internal organs (to prevent decay) and, sometimes during the Old Kindgom,
they began to take these out.
The existence of these well preserved cadavers has made some contribution to paleopathology, the study of disease in the ancient world - though mainly in a negative direction. No mummy has been found suffering from syphillis, for example, which helps to bolster the theory that the disease was imported from the New World in post-Columbian times. There is no evidence of cancer either.
They did not make for
themselves pyramids of metal, with tombstones of iron. They were not able
to perpetuate themselves through their children... but they made their
heirs for themselves in their writings and in the works of wisdom they
left behind... wise books were their pyramids and the pen was their child.
- Theban papyrus circa 1300 BC praising seers Hordedef and Imhotep
The Canaantite-Egyptian
alphabetic script (containing only the alphabetic signs from the hieroglyphs,
rejecting the consonantal groups and the ideograms) was gradually adopted
by the entire region, in various forms, and above all by the Phoenicians,
who had an alphabet of 28 letters. In the ninth century BC, the Greeks
took over the Phoenician alphabet more or less as they found it, retaining
even the names of the letters.
The ultimate source
of the Western alphabet, therefore, is ancient Egypt and the measure of
its usefulness to subsequent civilizations through its amazing simplicity
and flexibility is a measure of the opportunities lost by the Egyptians'
failure to expand the alphabetical element they had introduced in their
script.
With many aspects of Egyptian culture a plateau of achievement was reached comparitively early in the process of development and never thereafter surpassed. In architecture and sculpture the plateau was scaled in the Old Kingdom; in literature in the Middle Kingdom. The Egyptians seem to have felt this themselves.
#7 THE ANATOMY OF PRE-PERSPECTIVE ART
When we look Egyptian art, we must remember that the artist is not striving primarily to present, whether in two or three dimensions, what he sees in his eye, but to give the maximum information, in pictorial or plastic shorthand, about what he knows intellectually to be there. We have to see the artist as communicator and his work as closer to hieroglyphics than photography. Hence, when we look at the Egyptian rendering of human figures in two dimensions, we should never judge them as human forms comprehended in one glance from a single viewpoint. They are in fact composites... put together to provide the archetypcal human form, rather than one seen in the artist's eye. Every part of the body was shown from the side which revealed it most characteristically... it conformed to the code of giving the maximum information.
What is reality in art? The ancient world asked the question and disagreed about the answer. Before they staged their perspective revolution, the Greeks learnt virtually everything they knew in art, above all in sculpture, from the Egyptians.
In the 'Republic', Plato mounted a polemic against perspective art as morally bad: it depicted the visual appearance, in the eye of the artist, rather than the actual reality. He advocated a return to the Egyptian system, which avoided the apparent contradiction between perspective sense-data and 'objective' reality. He reflected the views of children, savages and and the comparitively primitive societies of the Bronze Age, who wanted to cling to the comfortable, familiar world, in which the image corresponded to the 'known' truth.
#8 THE DECLINE & FALL OF THE PHARAOHS
The Late Bronze Age,
which can be placed roughly between 1500 and 1100 BC, was the first period
of international civilization in world history. For the first time the
light of culture cast its beams over wide spaces and became, for vast numbers
and varieties of men, a shared system of illumination.
To a great extent
this internationalism was confined to court and palace, but trade was beginning
to radiate into lower levels of society and, perhaps most important of
all, the movement of gods and goddesses across the frontiers gave even
the humblest peasant a hint of wider worlds.
The rise of empires
produced also, alas, a cosmopolitan slave class, the pitiful victims of
lost battles and fallen cities. Slavery was the great cancer of the ancient
world. As slaves rose in numbers, so their price fell and the availibility
of cheap muscle-power was a deadening disincentive to technical innovation.
Enterprise tended to drown in oceans of human sweat.
The Romans did not
succeed in stamping out any aspect of Egyptian religious magic. With the
destruction of the Egyptian State and its political-religious institutions,
magic gradually took over the whole system of popular Egyptian belief,
as it had been threatening to do for a millennium.
With its mild winter
climate, easy living and its relaxed atmosphere of religious tolerance,
Roman Egypt became a haven, like modern California, for abstruse religious
cults, cranks and heterodox preachers and seers. Even before the coming
of Christianity, it gave birth to innumerable gnostic sects, who claimed
to possess secret knowledge about the inifinite, and to hold intellectual
communion with angels and other spirits.
The Roman authorities respected the religious truce of Philae, even after the emperors became Christians. But towards the end of the fourth century, Christian fanatics, whipped on by their bishops, destroyed the Serapeum at Memphis and many other shrines which had hitherto survived. Even Philae was not spared, and the sacred falcon was slaughtered... the priests were dispersed and no more hieroglyphs were carved. Thus the last link with the ancient culture of Egypt was severed. All living contect was irrecoverably lost, especially after the Coptic tongue ceased to be spoken or written in the last Middle Ages. Happily, however, the dry sands and the protective climate of Egypt cocooned the relics of the past against the ravages of time and preserved them for the modern world to rediscover.
#9 THE REDISCOVERY OF THE PHARAOHS
By the time the last hieroglyphs were carved on the island of Philae towards the close of the fourth century AD the civilization of ancient Egypt was dead; it had already ceased to function in the rest of the country... a great chasm yawned between Late Roman and Byzantine Egypt, and the Egypt of antiquity, which no one had the knowledge to cross.
The "Description de l'Egypte" published by Vivant Denon between 1809 and 1813... recorded many hieroglyphs but made no real contribution to their decipherment; Silvestre de Sacy, France's leading Orientalist, thought the problem 'scientifically insoluble'. The Rosetta Stone, of which the French had copies made from a wax cast, plainly provided a clue. It was in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek. The Greek texts, in 54 lines, recorded the award by the high priests of special divine honours to King Ptolemy Epiphanes, in 196 BC. Manifestly, the demotic text, in 32 lines, and the hieroglyphic, in 14, said the same thing... it was now apparent that hieroglyphic was not a philosophical ideas-code, but a script, albeit a strange one.
The discovery of the principles of the hieroglyphs demolished at one stroke the pretentious monument of nonsense which had been erected on the basis of a false symbolism for nearly two millennia. It robbed the ancient Egyptians of their non-existent esoteric knowledge, but instead it allowed scholars to begin the serious reconstruction of their true history and way of life, and the interpretation of their religion and culture. A new generation of professional Egyptologists emerged, combining some knowledge of the language with the elementary skills of the archaeologist.
During the first half
of the 19th century, the looting of Egypt by wealthy antiquaries and museums
was virtually uncontrolled. Of course these depredations must be placed
in the perspective of vandalism going back millennia. The pharaohs themselves
did not show the respect to their predecessors' monuments which the modern
mind would expect. The Romans respected Egyptian antiquaries, sometimes
keeping them in repair, until the coming of compulsory Christianity round
the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries, when the still-active temples
were demolished.
Cumulatively, however,
the worst damage by far was inflicted by generation after generation of
Egyptian villagers, who stole millions of limestone blocks for burning
in the limepits, and who consumed the ancient mud-brick palaces for agricultural
fertilizer: thus the wealth of the pharaohs went back to the peasants who
originally created it and that was how enormous monuments like Labyrinth
of Ammenemes III, which astonished the ancients, literally vanished from
the face of the earth.
But Egypt also numbered
among its native inhabitants men whose hereditary profession was the pillaging
of tombs... tomb robbery undoubtedly increased during the 19th century,
when the market prices even of antiquities with no intrinsic value in metal
or stones rose steadily. The last great outrages occured during the 1870s...
such thefts continue to this day, though on a reduced scale.
The ancient Egyptians
themselves treated their life-giving river with the greatest respect, knowing
that the Nile was not easily trifled with, and had ways of dwarfing her
human constrictors, however ingenious. A similar view was taken by all
the various conquerors of Egypt, down to and including the British. While
Britain was in power in Egypt, from the 1880s to the 1940s, many successful
efforts were made to improve the Nile's performance as an irrigation system,
and to diminish its periodic destructiveness. The British, who had immense
experience in India and the Middle East of devising river control systems
in low-rainfall territories, had learned to respect the nature of rivers
and not to risk draconian changes in their flow. However, when Egypt attained
full control of its affairs in the early 1950s and especially after the
arrival in power of revolutionary leader President Gamel Abdul Nasser,
other counsels prevailed. He flouted ancient wisdom and defied the advice
of elders. His idea was to construct a new, immensely high dam at Aswan,
to create a vast artificial lake in Nubia, to be called after himself and
to generate large quantities of electricity. The British never liked the
scheme, which they calculated would inflict irreparable damage on the Nile
valley and change the climate of Nubia for the worse.
The long-term results,
which continue, were pretty well as the British had predicted. The effect
of the High Dam was to drown many ancient sites in the new lake. Lake Nasser
offers warm hospitality to the malaria-carrying mosquitoes and to the snails
which spread the curse of Egypt, bilharzia. Vast quantities of water lake
from the lake, drift downstream underground, and rise in unwanted places,
especially some of the sites, undermining and destroying yet more precious
relics of the past.
The rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Lower Egypt, especially Cairo, poses threats both to Egypt's past, and to our enjoyment of it. The fundamentalists care nothing for antiquities, which to them are relics of infidel paganism, better destroyed than preserved. They are actively hostile to the tourist trade, which they see as responsible for many vicious infidel customs. So tourists visiting the sites are a prime target for their atrocities, and Egyptologists working on the sites are also at risk.
It is such scholars - archaeologists, cartographers, numismatists, linguists, historical sociologists and the like - who have together succeeded, during the 20th century, in placing ancient Egypt, for the first time, in its correct historical context, and in relating its development to that of other ancient civilizations.
Egypt was not the first
civilization, but it was the first to emerge as a national, as opposed
to a city, culture. Egypt was not only the first State, it was the first
country: it was the product not only of human ingenuity but of racial grouping
and, above all, of a felicitious geography. Therein lay Egypt's initial
strength. But the durability of the State which thus evolved was ensured
by the overwhelming simplicity and power of its central institution, the
theocratic monarchy.
All power and, to
begin with, all personality and all rights whatever, rested in the king.
Let no say that dictatorship cannot work in human societies: the throne
of Egypt, legitimized as it was not by any doctrine of human selection
but solely by its own divine sanction, lasted for 3,000 years. And it was
the principal reason why the civilization of Egypt produced such riches
and lasted so long, for it provided a framework of absolute certitude.
But the second point
we should ponder is a necessary corrective: clarity and certitude are not
enough. There was no freedom in the Egyptian State, and in the end its
absence was fatal. In the course of the second millennium, Egyptians secured
for themselves individual rights in eternity - as opposed to those subsumed
in the divine person of the pharaoh - but they never won any rights on
earth.
Egypt was a great Bronze
Age power but it was already technically backward even during the glory
of its Nineteenth Dynasty, and by the middle of the Twentieth it was a
culture in rapid and manifest decline... it retreated into its past and
reinforced the regulated collectivism of its society.
But all civilizations
are born to die. Those fortunate enough to live in one should study the
past to learn from its errors, and with the wisdom of hindsight strive
to keep at bay for a while the drifting sands of decay.
>> Quotes from Paul Johnson's 20th century epic "Modern Times".