two fish posted:

On the topic of Egypt, did they have philosophers or other big thinkers similar to what you would have seen in Greece? Did any of their writings survive?

quote:

New research indicates that Plato and Aristotle were right: Philosophy and the term “love of wisdom” hail from Egypt.

A remarkable example of classical Egyptian philosophy is found in a 3,200-year-old text named “The Immortality of Writers.” This skeptical, rationalistic, and revolutionary manuscript was discovered during excavations in the 1920s, in the ancient scribal village of Deir El-Medina, across the Nile from Luxor, some 400 miles up the river from Cairo. Fittingly, this intellectual village was originally known as Set Maat: “Place of Truth.”

quote:

When it comes to writing, the Egyptian texts are “often consciously intellectual, making abundant use of wordplay through homophones and homonyms, in which the Egyptian language is particularly rich,” as Wilkinson underscores. Metaphors, idioms, and epigrammatic utterances are some of the other literary techniques applied.

Hence, it should come as no surprise that not only the oldest but also some of the most original ancient philosophical texts in writing stem from Egypt. A similar point was also made by the foremost of the Greek philosophers: Isocrates (b. 436 BCE) states, in Busiris, that “all men agree the Egyptians are the healthiest and most long of life among men; and then for the soul they introduced philosophy’s training…”

Isocrates was 16 years Plato’s senior, a founder of the rhetoric school in Athens, and he declared that Greeks writers traveled to Egypt to seek knowledge. One of them was Pythagoras of Samos who “was first to bring to the Greeks all philosophy.”

These Greek descriptions of Egypt have often been disregarded in the past couple of hundred years. But the scholarship of the 21st century has opened up a new possibility: the founding Greek word philosophos, lover of wisdom, is itself a borrowing from and translation of the Egyptian concept mer-rekh (mr-rḫ) which literally means “lover of wisdom,” or knowledge.

euphronius posted:

The library of Alexandria was probably one of the most important centers for big brains for hundreds of years

Judgy Fucker posted:

Well yeah, I inferred that poster was asking more about philosophers from the (more-) indigenous population and culture of Egypt.

quote:

The first recorded head librarian was Zenodotus of Ephesus (lived c. 325–c. 270 BC). [...] Zenodotus is known to have written a glossary of rare and unusual words, which was organized in alphabetical order, making him the first person known to have employed alphabetical order as a method of organization.Since the collection at the Library of Alexandria seems to have been organized in alphabetical order by the first letter of the author's name from very early, Casson concludes that it is highly probable that Zenodotus was the one who organized it in this way.

quote:

Zenodotus' system of alphabetization, however, only used the first letter of the word and it was not until the second century AD that anyone is known to have applied the same method of alphabetization to the remaining letters of the word.

EricBauman posted:

Maybe Zenodotus alphabetized the collection because he was an insecure guy who wanted his own books to be found last

(Yes, I know zeta is pretty early in the Greek alphabet, so this joke only works if you mistakenly assume he did it in Latin)

Nessus posted:

Obviously it's A B and so on; if it was Delta Gamma Alpha Beta we'd call it the deltagam.

that Wiktionary page posted:

An alternative related idea is that elementum was borrowed into Latin from a Semitic term (probably via Egyptian) halaḥama

First written record of Semitic alphabet, from 15th century BCE, found in Egypt posted:

On one side of the flake is Schneider’s recent discovery: the transliteration into cursive Egyptian writing of the sounds that signify the beginnings of today’s Hebrew alphabet (Aleph, Bet, Gimel). On the other, a contemporary, though now lesser-known letter order, called “Halaḥam,” which was deciphered in 2015, on the same limestone flake, by Leiden University’s Dr. Ben Haring.

quote:

According to Hebrew University’s head of Egyptology, Prof. Orly Goldwasser, the origins of the Semitic alphabet came from Canaanite quarry workers at the Serabit el-Khadim site, who, while experts in extracting the precious blue-green stone, were illiterate.

After enviously watching their Egyptian colleagues worshipfully engraving their devotion to their gods through beautiful hieroglyphs, around 1800 BCE these workers decided to adapt the 1,000-odd Egyptian characters into phonetic symbols and essentially invented our alphabet, says Goldwasser.

Thus, Aleph, today the first letter of the alphabet, was named after their primary god, Aluf (meaning bull in Canaanite), and symbolized by an ox head. For the sound “B,” they used a house or bayit, explains Goldwasser, in a video that accompanied an Israel Museum exhibit.

quote:

What exactly is on the ostracon?

Aleph is for ‘elta (lizard), Bet is for bibiya (snail), and Gimel is for grr (pigeon), according to Schneider’s new decoding of a side of the limestone flake.

quote:

The Serapeum of Alexandria in the Ptolemaic Kingdom was an ancient Greek temple built by Ptolemy III Euergetes (reigned 246–222 BC) and dedicated to Serapis, who was made the protector of Alexandria. There are also signs of Harpocrates. It has been referred to as the daughter of the Library of Alexandria. The site has been heavily plundered.

quote:

The Ptolemaic rulers intended the Library to be a collection of all knowledge and they worked to expand the Library's collections through an aggressive and well-funded policy of book purchasing. They dispatched royal agents with large amounts of money and ordered them to purchase and collect as many texts as they possibly could, about any subject and by any author. Older copies of texts were favored over newer ones, since it was assumed that older copies had undergone less copying and that they were therefore more likely to more closely resemble what the original author had written.

EricBauman posted:

Really cool that that weird thing my high school teacher told me in 1998 was actually more or less confirmed by a new translation in 2015!

Tulip posted:

This goes so hard that I almost want a tattoo of it.

quote:

Beginning with a complaint about getting old, The Maxims of Ptahhotep flows seamlessly between rules about civil obedience and social structure to those regarding personal relationships and sex. Crediting his wisdom and inspiration to a god, Ptahhotep ends his writing discussing his long life (110 years), his pleasure in doing Maat (the ancient Egyptian code of righteousness) for the king, and his desire to see his son continue his legacy of good works.

quote:

Great is Ma'at, and its foundation is firmly established;
It has not been shaken since the time of Osiris,
And he who violates the laws must be punished.
In the eyes of the covetous man it goes unnoticed
That wealth can be lost through dishonesty,
And that wrongdoing does not result in success.
He says, I will procure (wealth) for myself.' He does not say, 'I will procure (wealth) through my diligence.'
But in the long run it is Ma'at which endures,
And an (honest) man may state: 'This is my ancestral property.'

quote:

Maat is good and its worth is lasting.
It has not been disturbed since the day of its creator,
whereas he who transgresses its ordinances is punished.
It lies as a path in front even of him who knows nothing.
Wrongdoing has never yet brought its venture to port.
It is true that evil may gain wealth but the strength of truth is that it lasts;
a man can say: "It was the property of my father."

Carol Lipton's translation posted:

Be generous as long as you live
What leaves the storehouse does not return;
It is the food to be shared which is coveted,
One whose belly is empty is an accuser;
One deprived becomes an opponent,
Don't have him for a neighbor.
Kindness is a man's memorial
For the years after the function.

the page linked above posted:

Be generous as long as you live,
For what goes out from the storehouse does not go back in,
And men are eager for bread which is freely given.
He whose stomach is empty is an accuser,
And (such) an opponent becomes a bringer of woe;
Do not make of him a friend.
Compassion is a man's monument
Throughout the years which follow his tenure of office.

quote:

Great of heart are those whom God has established, But he who listens to his stomach is his own worst enemy.

State your business without concealing (anything), Proffer your opinion in the council of your lord. If he can speak fluently and easily, It will not be difficult for an agent to give his account, And no one will answer, 'What does he know of it?' Even an official whose property has fared poorly, If he thinks about reproaching him concerning it, Will be silent saying (only), 'I have no comment.'

If you are a leader, Take responsibility in I the matters entrusted to you, And you will accomplish things of note. But think on the days which are still to come, Lest some misdeed should arise to destroy your favorable position, For an occasion of hatred is (like) the entrance of a crocodile.

If you are a man of authority, Be patient when you are listening to the words of a petitioner; Do not dismiss him until he has completely unburdened himself Of what he had planned I to say to you. A man who has been wronged desires to express his frustrations Even more than the accomplishment of the (justice) for which he came; But concerning him who dismisses petitions Men say, 'Why ever did he reject it?' 9,7 Not everything about which he has petitioned will be done, But a sympathetic hearing is a means of calming the heart.

quote:

Do not repeat slander, And do not listen to it, For it is but the prattling of a churlish man. Repeat only what is seen, not what is heard, Or forget it and say nothing at all, For he who is listening to you can discern I what is trustworthy.

quote:

If you are influential, you should establish respect for yourself Through knowledge and through courtesy in speech. Do not be domineering I except in official matters, For the aggressive man meets with trouble. Do not be arrogant, lest you be brought low; Do not be silent, but yet be cautious of causing offence When you answer a speech angrily.

Koramei posted:

In a certain sense, what’s the difference between a philosopher and a priest? If your worldview is centered around your religion as opposed to natural science, your philosophers will be focusing their efforts on that. Maybe it makes it less applicable to other cultures, but aren’t they fundamentally similar?

Henri Frankfort’s “Ancient Egyptian Religion”: Preface posted:

Egyptian religion aroused the interest of the West long before the hieroglyphs were deciphered. The fabulous antiquity of Egyptian civilization and its stupendous ruins have always suggested a background of profound wisdom. Plutarch set the fashion of writing under that impression, and it has continued to the present day. But the decipherment of the documents has disappointed centuries of expectation: it revealed a remarkable lack of philosophical content, at least in a form which we can assimilate.

Henri Frankfort posted:

Instead the texts introduce us to an apparent jungle of religious matter, so impenetrable to our understanding that Egyptologists have increasingly shunned the task of interpretation.

Erman, the first to base a description of Egyptian religion on a full understanding of the language, gave in 1905 a masterly but patronizing account of weird myths, doctrines, and usages, while the peculiarly religious values which these contained remained hidden from his lucid rationalism. Breasted succeeded in taking Egyptian religion seriously, but only at the cost of its integrity; he described in 1912 a “Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt” towards ethical ideals which pertain to biblical but not to ancient Egyptian religion. Since then interpretation has lagged. W.B. Kristensen in Leiden continued the elucidation of specific symbols, but the most prolific writers—Kees and his followers—assumed towards our subject a scientist’s rather than a scholar’s attitude: while ostensibly concerned with religion, they were really absorbed in the task of bringing order to a confused mass of material.

quote:

Scholars who deal with our subject in this manner not only ignore religion as a phenomenon sui generis, but are unable to see the wood for the trees. The unity of the Egyptian people is an established fact with respect to language, material culture, and even physique. It would be absurd to assume that there did not exist a corresponding unity in the domain of the spirit.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maat posted:

Maat represents the ethical and moral principle that all Egyptian citizens were expected to follow throughout their daily lives. They were expected to act with honor and truth in matters that involve family, the community, the nation, the environment, and the gods.

Maat as a principle was formed to meet the complex needs of the emergent Egyptian state that embraced diverse peoples with conflicting interests. The development of such rules sought to avert chaos and it became the basis of Egyptian law. The significance of Maat developed to the point that it embraced all aspects of existence, including the basic equilibrium of the universe, the relationship between constituent parts, the cycle of the seasons, heavenly movements, religious observations and good faith, honesty, and truthfulness in social interactions.

The ancient Egyptians had a deep conviction of an underlying holiness and unity within the universe. Cosmic harmony was achieved by correct public and ritual life. Any disturbance in cosmic harmony could have consequences for the individual as well as the state. An impious king could bring about famine, and blasphemy could bring blindness to an individual. In opposition to the right order expressed in the concept of Maat is the concept of Isfet: chaos, lies and violence.

Several other principles within ancient Egyptian law were essential, including the importance of rhetorical skill and the significance of achieving impartiality and "right action". In one Middle Kingdom (2062 to c.1664 BCE) text, the Creator declares "I made every man like his fellow". Maat called the rich to help the less fortunate rather than exploit them, echoed in tomb declarations: "I have given bread to the hungry and clothed the naked" and "I was a husband to the widow and father to the orphan".

To the Egyptian mind, Maat bound all things together in an indestructible unity: the universe, the natural world, the state, and the individual were all seen as parts of the wider order generated by Maat.

www.sofiatopia.org/maat/ptahhotep.htm posted:

Great is Maat, lasting in effect.
Undisturbed since the time of Osiris.
One punishes the transgressors of laws,
though the heart that robs overlooks this.
Baseness may seize riches,
yet crime never lands its wares.
He says: ‘I acquire for myself.’
He does not say: ‘I acquire for my function.’
In the end, it is Maat that lasts,
(and) man says: ‘It is my father’s domain.’

quote:

Many of the earliest Sebayt claim to have been written in the third millennium BCE, during the Old Kingdom, but it is now generally agreed that they were actually composed later, beginning in the Middle Kingdom (c.1991–1786 BCE). This fictitious attribution to authors of a more distant past was perhaps intended to give the texts greater authority.

quote:

Is there anyone here like Hordedef?
Is there another like Imhotep?
There is no family born for us like Neferty,
and Khety their leader.
Let me remind you of the name of Ptahemdjehuty
Khakheperraseneb.
Is there another like Ptahhotep?
Kaires too?

“Immortality of Writers in Ancient Egypt” posted:

The inscriptions were set down by scribes, among the most highly respected professions in Egypt, and while most of their works have other people, professions, or events as subject matter, there are a number which celebrate the occupation of scribe above all others. The most famous of these is The Satire of the Trades (from the Middle Kingdom, 2040-1782 BCE) in which a father encourages his son to become a scribe because it is better than any other profession. Another well-known work, this one from the New Kingdom (c. 1570 - c. 1069 BCE), is A Schoolbook or Be a Scribe which delivers the same message, this time from a teacher to a lazy student.

“Immortality of Writers in Ancient Egypt” posted:

There is another work from the New Kingdom along these same lines which, in addition to listing the many earthly benefits of the scribal profession, make clear that it is the one sure path to eternal life: The Immortality of Writers (also known as The Endurance of Writing: A Eulogy to Dead Authors from Papyrus Chester Beatty IV (registered in the British Museum as number 10684, Verso 2,5-3,11). The poem makes clear that, even though everyone, no matter their occupation or social class, needed to be honored through remembrance after death, a scribe would be remembered, not only by family and friends, but by a much larger audience through the works they left behind.

The Immortality of Writers posted:

If you but do this, you are versed in writings.
As to those learned scribes,
Of the time that came after the gods,
They who foretold the future,
Their names have become everlasting,
While they departed, having finished their lives,
And all their kin are forgotten.

They did not make for themselves tombs of copper,
With stelae of metal from heaven.
They knew not how to leave heirs,
Children [of theirs] to pronounce their names;
They made heirs for themselves of books,
Of Instructions they had composed.

They gave themselves [the scroll as lector-] priest,
The writing-board as loving son.
Instructions are their tombs,
The reed pen is their child,
The stone-surface their wife.
People great and small
Are given them as children,
For the scribe, he is their leader.

Their portals and mansions have crumbled,
Their ka-servants are [gone];
Their tombstones are covered with soil,
Their graves are forgotten.
Their name is pronounced over their books,
Which they made while they had being;
Good is the memory of their makers,
It is forever and all time!

Be a scribe, take it to heart,
That your name become as theirs.
Better is a book than a graven stela,
Than a solid tomb-enclosure.
They act as chapels and tombs
In the heart of him who speaks their name;
Surely useful in the graveyard
Is a name in people's mouth!

Man decays, his corpse is dust,
All his kin have perished;
But a book makes him remembered
Through the mouth of its reciter.
Better is a book than a well-built house,
Than tomb-chapels in the west;
Better than a solid mansion,
Than a stela in the temple!

Is there one here like Hardedef?
Is there another like Imhotep?
None of our kin is like Neferti,
Or Khety, the foremost among them.
I give you the name of Ptah-emdjehuty,
Of Khakheperre-sonb.
Is there another like Ptahhotep,
Or the equal of Kaires?

Those sages who foretold the future,
What came from their mouth occurred;
It is found as [their] pronouncement,
It is written in their books.
The children of others are given to them
To be heirs as their own children.
They hid their magic from the masses,
It is read in their Instructions.
Death made their names forgotten
But books made them remembered.

quote:

[Maat] is great, and (its) keenness enduring.
It has not been overturned since the time of Osiris.
The one who overlooks laws is punished;
that is what is overlooked in the sight of the greedy.
It is the small-minded that seize riches,
but crime never managed to land its rewards.
Whoever says 'I snare for myself'
does not say 'I snare for my needs'.
The final part of [Maat] is its endurance;
of which a man says 'that is my father'.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt/literature/ptahhotep.html posted:

Do not cause fear among people
God punishes with the same.
Anyone who says 'I can live by it'
will lack bread for his statement.
Anyone who say 'I can be powerful'
will have to say 'I snare against myself by my cleverness'.
Anyone who says he will strike another,
will end by being given to a stranger.

The Maxims of Ptahhotep, vis a vis Zbynek Zába posted:

Do not stir up fear in people,
Or God will punish in equal measure.
A man may determine to live thereby,
But he will (eventually) be lacking in bread for his mouth.
A man may decide to become / rich,
And he may say, ‘I will snatch for myself whatever I see.’
A man may decide to cheat another,
But he will end up by giving (his gains) to a total stranger.

quote:

(For) it is not what men devise that comes to pass,
But what God determines comes to pass.
Live, therefore, contentedly,
And let what the Gods give come of its own accord.

Lead out in cuffs posted:

Yeah, welcome to the thread! This is way more interesting than the silly Vegeta derail I started.

Also, I'm guessing this explains the ankh you were always wearing in the selfie thread.

Nessus posted:

Plase continue postin' o Bird, this stuff rules. I am glad to hear the ancient Egyptians appear to have been sound on the philosophy basis other than what I had gathered from exhibits, which can be summarized as 'they sure did like living in Egypt'

quote:

Instruction of Amenemope (also called Instructions of Amenemopet, Wisdom of Amenemopet) is a literary work composed in Ancient Egypt, most likely during the Ramesside Period (ca. 1300–1075 BCE); it contains thirty chapters of advice for successful living, ostensibly written by the scribe Amenemope son of Kanakht as a legacy for his son. A characteristic product of the New Kingdom “Age of Personal Piety”, the work reflects on the inner qualities, attitudes, and behaviors required for a happy life in the face of increasingly difficult social and economic circumstances. It is widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of ancient near-eastern wisdom literature and has been of particular interest to modern scholars because of its similarity to the later biblical Book of Proverbs.

Wikipedia posted:

Amenemope belongs to the literary genre of "instruction" (Egyptian sebayt). It is the culmination of centuries of development going back to the Instruction of Ptahhotep in the Old Kingdom but reflects a shift in values characteristic of the New Kingdom's "Age of Personal Piety": away from material success attained through practical action, and towards inner peace achieved through patient endurance and passive acceptance of an inscrutable divine will. The author takes for granted the principles of natural law and concentrates on the deeper matters of conscience. He urges the reader to defend the weaker classes of society and to respect the elderly, widows and the poor, while he condemns abuses of power or authority. The author draws an emphatic contrast between the "silent man", who goes about his business without drawing attention or demanding his rights, and the "heated man", who makes a nuisance of himself and presses petty grievances. Contrary to worldly expectation, the author assures that the former will ultimately receive divine blessing, while the latter will inevitably go to destruction. Amenemope counsels modesty, self-control, generosity, and scrupulous honesty, while discouraging pride, impetuosity, self-advancement, fraud, and perjury—not only out of respect for Maat, the cosmic principle of right order, but also because "attempts to gain advantage to the detriment of others incur condemnation, confuse the plans of god, and lead inexorably to disgrace and punishment."

“Instruction of Amenemope”, The Literature of Ancient Egypt, 2003 posted:

Do not get into a quarrel with the argumentative man
Do not incite him with words;
Proceed cautiously before an opponent,
And give way to an adversary;
Sleep on it before speaking,
For a storm come forth like fire in hay is
The hot-headed man in his appointed time.
May you be restrained before him;
Leave him to himself,
And God will know how to answer him.
If you spend your life with these things in your heart,
Your children shall observe them.

Instruction of Amenemope posted:

Do not address an intemperate man in unrighteousness
Nor destroy your own mind;
Do not say to him, “May you be praised,” not meaning it
When there is fear within you.
Do not converse falsely with a man,
For it is the abomination of God.
Do not separate your mind from your tongue,
All your good plans will come to pass.
Your weight will have presence among men,
While you will be secure in the hand of God.
God hates one who falsifies words,
His great abomination is duplicity.

Instruction of Amenemope posted:

Do not provoke your adversary;
And do not (let) him say his innermost thoughts;
Do not fly up to greet him
When you cannot see how he acts.
May you first comprehend his accusation
Be calm and your chance will come.
Leave it to him and he will empty his soul;
Sleep knows how to find him out.
Do not disrespect him;
Fear him, do not underestimate him.
Indeed, you cannot know the plans of God,
You cannot perceive tomorrow.
Sit yourself at the hands of God;
Your tranquility will overthrow them.

Instruction of Amenemope posted:

Do not turn people away from crossing the river
When you have room in (your) ferryboat;
If an oar is given you in the midst of the deep waters,
So bend back your hands (to) take it up.
It is not an abomination in the hand of God
If the crew does not agree.
Do not acquire a ferryboat on the river,
And then attempt to seek out its fares;
Take the fare from the man of means,
But (also) accept the destitute (without charge).

Ghost Leviathan posted:

The apparent emphasis on truthfulness, politeness and not rising to anger unless you have a good reason is interesting. Reminds me of what I've heard about ancient Persia and how 'truth' was apparently more or less to them what 'freedom' is to the USA. (And probably with everything you can draw from that analogy)

https://egyptopia.com/en/articles/Egypt/history-of-egypt/The-Tale-of-The-Blind-Truth-of-Maat.s.29.13393/ posted:

This myth is one of the most interesting myths in the ancient Egyptian mythology that gives many moral lessons and highlights the value of justice. It is a story of two brothers: the good one called Truth, and the vicious one called Falsehood. The former borrowed the knife of his brother and unfortunately lost it, and this gave the chance for his vicious and hateful brother to harm him. Truth asked him to accept another typical knife, but Falsehood refused and when they stood before the nine gods of the court he claimed that his one was incomparable knife whose blade was made of the mountain of El's copper and whose handle from the Coptos' woods. Thus the court gave him the right to say any judgment he sees that it would satisfy him. He asked to blind one of his brother's eyes and make him the doorkeeper of his home. Whenever Falsehood saw his brother, he remembered his sin and this motivated him to command his servants to attack Truth and then leave him in the desert to be devoured by its wild monsters.

Fortunately, the servants of Falsehood sympathized with Truth, gave food and left him in the desert hoping that any passerby would find him and save him and came back to their master telling him that Truth is already dead. Few days later, a beautiful woman found the handsome Truth and was fascinated by his attractive appearance to the extent that she took him to be her doorkeeper. One day, the lady had had a relation with Truth and became pregnant in a baby boy but she did not tell the boy about the name of his father. This boy grew up to be a unique one in his physical and mental abilities and this raised the jealousy of his companions against him. One of the mornings, the boys tried to tease and enrage Truth's son for being the son of an unknown father, thus he returned home angry and insisted on knowing his father's name and the mother told him everything. The boy went happily to his father, brought him to his room and asked him to tell him the story of his life in detail. After realizing the injustice and villainy of his uncle, the boy decided to take his father's revenge and made a shrewd plan that depends mainly on the greed of Falsehood. He took a huge ox, many loaves of bread and a sword and directed to the land of Falsehood. The boy asked the keeper of Falsehood's herds to take care of his ox in exchange for all the bread and the staffs that he has and he would come back to take it.

One day Falsehood saw that beautiful ox among his herds and ordered to be prepared for him to eat but the herdsman refused saying that it belongs to a stranger who would come back to take it. Falsehood insisted on taking the ox and said that its owner is free to take any other one in exchange for it. Then the boy came to take his ox and when the herdsman asked him to take any other one or any amount of herds he want, since Falsehood slaughtered his one, he refused. Before the court of the nine gods, the boy said that no other ox can be like his own one that was as large as the whole world and there is no replacement for it. Then the boy announced that he is the son of Truth and that the judgment in the case of his father was unfair. At that moment, Falsehood assured that this boy is lying and if he proved that he is telling the truth he judges on himself by blinding both his eyes and serving as a doorkeeper of Truth. The boy brought his father and Falsehood was severely beaten and blinded and then became Truth's doorkeeper. This story highlights the value of truth and justice in human life and how the truth should win and justice be settled at the end.

Implications of "The Blinding of Truth by Falsehood" posted:

There are many implications. Some of these consequences are religious and cultural. One of them is the importance and popularity of certain myths in Ancient Egypt. The relationship between myth and literature in Ancient Egypt is that myths are generally integrated into literature, and "The Blinding of Truth by Falsehood" chooses to integrate the Osiris and the Horus and Seth/Set myths (Baines 377; Griffiths 90). Despite the many parallels to these two myths, it is only a partial allegory rather than a full one (Griffiths 90). It only concerns the names of the characters and is not used enough to make this story a full allegory (Griffiths 90-91).

Another religious and cultural implication involves the theme of "The Blinding of Truth by Falsehood:" the triumph of ma'at over isfet (Vinson 33). Ma'at had existed since creation but was in a constant struggle with the forces of chaos (Strudwick 366). If order broke down, chaos would follow (Strudwick 366). This concept is so important is it made the moral of "The Blinding of Truth by Falsehood." The tale's allegorical nature downplays the narrative's mythological aspect in order to highlight an important moral that Egyptians wanted to ensure in their society and culture (Baines 374). This would guarantee that ma'at would continue and ultimately triumph over chaos.

Other implications are political and historical. Since "The Blinding of Truth by Falsehood" uses the myth involving Horus and Seth, it brings up the problem of succession that drives the main conflict in that myth (Strudwick 118). At this time in Egypt, Ramesses II was on the throne of Egypt and a new dynasty was in control of the country (Lesko 99). Ramesses would have commissioned this in order to legitimize his own reign and succession as well as the new dynasty through this story (Lesko 100). Author Leonard Lesko even goes as far as to say that this is deliberate political propaganda (Lesko 100). Its audience would have to be a large one. Propaganda (legitimizing succession in this case) is meant to be seen by lots of people, not be kept hidden, and the popular myths it contains would help it reach a wide audience as well. This means that the source is also biased because it would be on the side of Ramesses II in order to secure his status in Egypt.

This myth also demonstrates the importance of ma'at in political terms. The pharaoh was the one who essentially keeps it by defeating Egypt's enemies, pleasing the gods as their high priest, restoring what was broken, and more (Strudwick 366). Ma'at's role is also seen in the important role the judicial system plays (Campagno 25). The main conflict between Truth and Falsehood is settled essentially in court with the Ennead acting as judge and jury (Campagno 26). The law and the order, truth, and justice that goes with it is personified by ma'at (Strudwick 366).

The final implications of this story are social. It reveals the social aspect of ma'at: harmony "between and amongst gods and human beings" (Vinson 47-48). "The Blinding of Truth by Falsehood" also illuminates the role of women at this point in Egyptian history. There seemed to be negativity towards the influential roles women played in the previous dynasty, and it manifests itself in this piece (Lesko 102). Ma'at, a female concept, is made male (Baines 374). The woman in the tale only exists to desire Truth and conceive his son; she does not play a major part (Vinson 47). This is in stark contrast to the major role the goddess Isis plays in the original Osiris myth (Griffiths 90).

CrypticFox posted:

Egypt is actually somewhat unusual in the ancient world for the large amount of non-mytholgoical literature they produced. Works like Sinhue and the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, which have only fairly limited mythological elements, were very popular in Egyptian scribal circles, but are not well known today.

quote:

Then the able retainer spoke:
Be of good cheer, commander;
We have now reached home.
The mallet has been taken off, the mooring post driven in,
The bowline cast ashore.
Praise has been offered, and God has been thanked.
Every man embraces his comrade.
Our shipmates have returned safe
Without loss to our expedition.
After we reached the limits of Wawat,
We passed the island of Senmet.
See us now, we are returning safely,
And we are reaching our land.

Listen now to me, commander,
I do not exaggerate.
Wash up, place water on your fingers
So you can reply when you are questioned,
So you can speak to the king with confidence,
So you can answer without stammering.
The speech of a man can save him,
And his words can cause indulgence for him,
Yet do only as you wish; for speaking to you is tiresome.

quote:

Now I shall tell you something similar
Which happened to me myself.
I went to the mining region for the Sovereign.
I went down to the Great Green* [*footnotes indicate scholars are divided on whether “the Great Green” is the Red Sea, or the Nile itself]
In a ship 120 cubits long and 40 cubits wide.
120 sailors were aboard from the best of Egypt.
Whether they looked at the sky or looked at the land,
Their hearts were braver than lions.

They could tell a storm before it came
And a tempest before it happened.
But a storm came up while we were on the Great Green* [*personally I definitely think this means the Nile]
Before we could touch land,
And the wind picked up and howled.
A wave of 8 cubits was in it.
As for the mast, I struck it.
Then the ship died, and of those who were in it
There did not remain a single one.
I was placed on an island by a wave of the Great Green* [*it fits better with the Nile being revered as itself Divine, and here being given credit for saving our protagonist]
And I spent 3 days alone, my heart as my companion.
I lay down within a shelter of wood,
And I embraced the shade.
Next I stretched my legs
To find what I could put in my mouth.

There I found figs and grapes
And all kinds of good vegetables.
Sycamore figs were there together with notched ones,
And cucumbers as if they were cultivated.
Fish were there with fowl.
There was nothing that was not in it.
Then I gorged myself, and I put some on the ground
Because of the abundance in my hands.
I removed the fire drill when I had lighted a fire,
And I made a burnt offering to the Gods.

Next I heard the sound of thunder,
And I thought it was a wave of the Great Green.
The trees were shaking and the ground quaking.
When I uncovered my face,
I found it was a serpent about to come.

quote:

He was 30 cubits long,
And his hood larger than 2 cubits.
His body was covered with gold,
His eyebrows were of real lapis lazuli,
And he was coiled up in front.

quote:

He opened his mouth toward me,
While I was on my belly in front of him.
He said to me:
Who has brought you, who has brought you, citizen,
Who has brought you?
If you delay in telling me
Who has brought you to this island,
I shall have you know yourself as ashes,
Turned into someone invisible.
He spoke to me, but I could not hear.
While I was before him,
I did not know myself.
Then he set me in his mouth
And took me off to his resting place.
He set me down without touching me.
I was intact without his taking anything from me.

He opened his mouth toward me,
While I was on my belly before him.
Then he said to me:
Who has brought you, who has brought you, citizen,
Who has brought you to this island of the Great Green,
The two sides of which are under water?

quote:

Then I answered him
My arms bent before him.

quote:

I said to him:
It was I who came down to the mining country
On a mission of the Sovereign
In a ship 120 cubits long and 40 cubits wide.
120 sailors were in it from the best of Egypt.
Whether they looked at the sky or looked at the land,
Their hearts were braver than lions.
They could tell a storm before it came,
Each one of them, his heart was braver,
And his arm more valiant than his companions.
There was no fool among them.

Then a storm came forth while we were on the Great Green,
Before we could set to land.
The wind picked up and kept on howling.
A wave of 8 cubits was in it.
As for the mast, I struck it.
Then the ship died, and of those who were in it,
Not a single one remained except for me.
See me now at your side.
Next I was placed on this island
By a wave of the Great Green.

Then he said to me:
Do not fear, do not fear, citizen
Do not turn white, for you have reached me.
See, God has allowed you to live:
He has brought you to this island of the spirit*. [*or, “of the ka”]
There is not anything which is not in it.
It is filled with all fine things.
See, you shall spend month after month
Until you complete 4 months within this island.
A boat shall return from the Residence,
Sailors in it whom you know.
You shall go with them to the Residence,
And you shall die in your town.

How joyful is one who relates what he has experienced
After painful matters have passed by.
I shall now related to you something similar
Which took place on this island
When I was on it with my siblings,
Children among them.
We amounted to 75 serpents,
Including my children and my brothers and sisters.
Without my mentioning to you a little daughter
Brought to me through wisdom.

quote:

Then a star fell,
And because of it these went up in fire.
It happened utterly.
But I was not with them when they burned;
I was not among them.
Then I died for them
When I found them as a single heap of corpses.

If you would be brave, and your heart strong,
You will fill your arms with your children,
You will kiss your wife, you will see your house.
It is better than anything.
You will reach home where you were
Among your siblings!

I was stretched out on my belly;
I touched the ground in his presence.
But I said to him:

I shall relate your might to the Sovereign,
I shall have him learn of your greatness.
I shall have brought to you ladanum, oil,
Spice, balsam, and incense of the temples
With which every God is pleased.
I shall tell what has happened to me
And what I have seen of your fame.
You will be thanked in the city
In the presence of the officials of the entire land.
I shall slaughter oxen for you as a burnt offering.
I will have the necks of fowl wringed for you.
I shall have barges brought to you
Laden with all the products of Egypt,
As should be done for a God who loves men
In a far-off land which men do not know.

quote:

But then he laughed at me for what I had said
In his opinion foolishly.
He said to me:
You do not have much myrrh,
Although you have become an owner of incense.
I am, sir, the Prince of Punt.
Myrrh belongs to me.
That oil which you said will be brought,
It is the main product of this island!

Now it shall happen
When you separate yourself from this place,
You will never see this island again,
Since it will be submerged under waves.

Then that boat returned, as he had predicted before.
I went and set myself on top of a tall tree,
And I recognized those who were in it.
Then I went to report it,
And I found him knowing it already.

He said to me:
In good health, in good health, citizen, off to your house.
You shall see your children.
Make a good reputation for me in your city.
This is my only request from you.

I placed myself upon my belly,
My arms bent in his presence.
He gave me a load of myrrh, oil, ladanum, spice,
Cinnamon, aromatics, eye-paint, giraffe tails,
Large cakes of incense, ivory tusks,
Hounds, apes, baboons, and all fine products.
Then I loaded them onto the boat,
And I was placed on my belly to thank him.

He said to me:
You shall reach the Residence in 2 months,
You shall fill your arms with your children.
You will become young again at home, until your burial.

Then I went down to the shore in the vicinity of this boat,
And I called out to the expeditionary force which was in the boat.
I gave praise upon the shore to the Lord of this island,
And those who were in it likewise.

We sailed north to the Residence of the Sovereign,
And we reached the Residence in 2 months,
According to everything he had said.
Then I entered before the Sovereign
And I presented him with these gifts
Which I had brought from within this island.
Then he thanked me before the officials of the entire land.
I was appointed retainer, and granted 200 servants.

See me after I landed,
After I have seen what I experienced.
Listen to my words. It is good for men to hearken.

Then the commander said to me:
Do not be so proper, friend.
What is the use of giving water to the fowl at daybreak
When it is to be killed in the morning?

quote:

It has come from beginning to end as found in writing,
In the writing of the scribe, skilled with his fingers,
Ameny’s son Amen-aa, may he live, prosper, and be in health.

bob dobbs is dead posted:

egyptology exists as a separate field because the ancient egyptians ability to keep stuff (what with the endless desert mere feet from settlements) was head and shoulders above any other ancient polity, so we have like random rear end receipts for poo poo in new kingdom egypt whereas we have substantively nothing for far far younger stuff in mesoamerica forex

so its a lotta evidentiary selection effect too

Mad Hamish posted:

I was under the impression that the Great Green was the Mediterranean?

quote:

This expression has traditionally been regarded as the Red Sea. Recent scholarship, however, has attempted to show that the term must refer to the Nile itself. See Claude Vandersleyen, “En relisant le Naufrage,” in S. Israelit-Groll, ed., Studies in Egyptology Presented to Miriam Lichtheim, vol 2 (Jerusalem, 1990), 1019-24; Wadj our: Un autre aspect de la valee du Nil (Brussels, 1999).

quote:

This cautionary tale was the last of four Demotic writing exercises composed as model letters on a jug formerly in the Berlin Museum but destroyed in the Second World War. Dating to the Roman era (first to second centuries CE) and probably deriving from Mit Rahina, the epistolary narrative has traditional antecedents in both form and content. Model letters are a feature of Egyptian education and literature from the Middle Kingdom onward. As a satirical letter, this Demotic example continues the genre best typified by the taunting letter of Hori preserved in the papyrus Anastasi I. Here, however, it is the theoretically unassailable Pharaoh himself who is satirized. […] The central imagery of the tale, the immensity of the desert and sea in terms of usual measurements, appears as early as the Amarna hymn of Ay that anticipates the wording of Isaiah 40:12.

The animal fable that forms the core of the letter is a traditional literary device as well. Attested on figured ostraca and in narratives, such fables are best exemplified by the collection in the “Myth of the Solar Eye” that influenced the later Greek tales popularly attributed to Aesop. The Berlin Demotic fable, in which the futility of Pharaoh’s threat to destroy Arabia is compared to that of a swallow’s attempt to destroy the sea, also reveals cross-cultural influence. Later versions of the fable appear in rabbinical literature of the fourth century and, more fully, in the Indian Panchatantra attested from the sixth century. Although these parallels were first noted in the textual edition of 1912, the coherence of all three versions has become evident only in 1999 through revisions in the Demotic text presented by Phillipe Collombert, who is preparing a new critical edition. Despite its importance, the fable is rarely anthologized.

quote:

The [petition of] Ausky, the chief of the land of Arabia, before Pharaoh:

“Hear the goodness of Ra, [regarding the] chiefs of the land [of Arabia].
Great is my lord!
O may he celebrate millions of jubilees!
What does it mean that Pharaoh, my great lord, has said ‘I shall devastate the land of Arabia’?
Come, may Pharaoh, my great lord, come hear the tale of what happened to the swallow when it was giving birth beside the sea.
When she was coming and going out to seek food for her young, she said:
‘O sea, watch over my young until I come back in.’
It happened that this was her custom daily.
Now afterwards, a day occurred when the swallow happened to be coming and going out to seek food for her young. She said:
‘O sea, watch over the young for me until I come back in, in accordance with my custom that transpires with me daily.’
But it happened that the sea came up raging; it took the young of the swallow away before it.
With her mouth full, her eyes wide*, and her heart very happy, the swallow was coming back in.
But she could not find her young there before her. She said:
‘O sea, hand over the young whom I entrusted to you!
Should it happen that you haven’t given back my young whom I entrusted to you, I shall scoop you out on that day.
I shall carry you away.
I shall bail with my beak.
I shall carry you to the sand of the surrounding area and carry the sand of the surrounding area to you.’
It happened that this was the custom of the swallow daily; the habit which she did.
The swallow began to go, filling her mouth with the sand of the surrounding area and pouring it out in the sea. She filled her mouth with the water of the sea; she poured it out on the sand of the surrounding area.
It happens that here then is the daily custom of the swallow before Pharaoh, my great lord.
Should it happen that the swallow does scoop out the sea, then you shall devastate the happy heart from the land of Arabia.”

quote:

*An Egyptian idiom signifying happiness or good fortune.

quote:

Abstract:

The funerary papyri belonging to the priesthood of Amun-Re of the Twenty-First Dynasty offer a rich field for exploration. The socio-religious circumstances of the period influenced the representations within the papyri leading to a variety of innovative illustrations. Of these are the depictions of the barn swallow, which is the topic of the current study. The present work focuses on 24 representations of the swallow in a corpus of 22 papyri that are currently in various museums around the world. The study classifies those representations into two main divisions, namely those of Chapter 86 of the Book of the Dead and those depicting the bird on the prow of the morning solar boat.

quote:

The barn swallow, like other migratory birds, intrigued the ancient Egyptians, as they considered them to be of a mythical nature. They believed that they had come from the dark and damp region of the far north, in which they were human-headed birds speaking the language of man. They also believed that when these human-headed birds arrived in Egypt, the sunlight would make them turn fully into birds.11

The ancient Egyptians called the swallow mnt,12 which is the sign (G 36 of Gardiner’s sign list) that carries a positive connotation, as opposed to the negative connotation of G 37, which represents a sparrow.13 The pronunciation of the name of the bird may have added another positive connotation as it shares similarity with the word mnty, meaning endure. This was used in a description of the bird tȝ mnt nfrt mnty mnty n ḏt ‘the beautiful swallow which endures, which endures eternally’,14

skasion posted:

Herodotus already had the notion that the Egyptians were the oldest people (except the Phrygians) and invented a bunch of stuff and had the most religious wisdom, so finding that Egyptians knew the Greek name Heracles for a god worshiped in Egypt (without however necessarily knowing the Greek myths about him) he probably just assumed that the Egyptians had the god first.

Lady Radia posted:

i guess you could say you're DIS-A-PPOINT-ED?

Ghost Leviathan posted:

I'd make a joke about pulling some secret identity shenanigans but I'm pretty sure there's mythological precedent for it, it would explain a lot about the Bast, Hathor and Sekhmet thing.

Terrible Opinions posted:

Are there any stories about someone besides Hathor turning into Sekhmet?

Egyptian Myths: A Guide to the Ancient Gods and Legends, by Garry J. Shaw posted:

[Gehesty] is also mentioned in Papyrus Jumilhac as the location where Isis defended the body of Osiris from Seth by manifesting herself in various forms: becoming the lion goddess Sekhmet; a dog with a knife for a tail; and a serpent associated with Hathor.

Isiopolis.com posted:

Set once more regrouped His allies, but Isis marched against them. She concealed Herself in Gebal which is south of Dunanwi, after having made Her transformation into Her Mother Sekhmet. She sent out a flame against them all, seeing to it that they were burned and devoured by Her flame.

Terrible Opinions posted:

Thanks for the sources. I missed the last few pages of the previous page.

Jazerus posted:

in the early period the israelites were straight up polytheists, and once you know that then you see it everywhere in the old testament. it's woven into the stories so tightly you couldn't excise it without cutting the narrative apart entirely. yahweh was their patron god, and he was a jealous god who preferred you to just worship him, but y'know...a lot of people didn't, and recognized the whole pantheon. there was a lot of religious violence over it, but no actual resolution until well after babylon had rolled in. by the time stuff starts getting written down in the form we know today, monotheism is the order of the day and everything is shifted to cast the other gods as spirits, angels, or demons, but it was an imperfect effort at best. and after that, well, you can't just change it

EricBauman posted:

That's not to say that it's impossible for these guys to believe they were doing their work with full sincerity.
I guess it's the same as people who truly believe they're mediums who may or may not realize they're just cold reading their audience

Cyrano4747 posted:

edit: that said, while I'm sure there was some level of that poo poo going on, the usual best answer for this kind of thing is that yeah, they took that poo poo seriously and the priests were being honest agents when they stirred the entrails. Projecting modern sensibilities re: religion and the impact of spiritual matters back to ancient times rarely works out well.

Omnomnomnivore posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35Jz3A7tBgU&t=1495s

Kylaer posted:

I've seen this treated very believably in some historical fiction. "The lobes of the liver look like those hills right there, can't you see it?" "Yes, of course, a clear sign that this is where the gods want us to stand!" The characters believe in the gods, but they also have a result they want to see, and therefore they find reason to see it.

Koramei posted:

Is it necessarily a bad thing? We see with folks that plunge into conspiracy and such, you can view yourself as fully detached from religious baggage while imo basically embracing the same attitudes. I'm fully talking out of my rear end here because I've not so much as read a word of actual research on this, but it feels like a human inclination.

quote:

ARCHAEOLOGICAL MISSION FINDS HUNDREDS OF SEALED JARS IN TOMB OF MERIT-NEITH

An Egyptian-German-Austrian archaeological mission conducting excavations at the tomb of Merit-Neith have uncovered hundreds of sealed ceramic jars.

Merit-Neith, meaning “Beloved by Neith”, was a consort and regent during the first dynasty. Despite her name not being included in the king lists from the New Kingdom, Merit-Neith may have been the first female pharaoh of Ancient Egypt.

quote:

KUWAIT CITY, Oct 2: Dating back to the era of Queen Merit Neith, the first female ruler in human history, 5,000-year-old wine jars were found in southern Egypt (Xinhua) October 1, 2023 02:55 PM 3381

The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced, Sunday, the discovery of hundreds of sealed wine jars dating back to the era of Queen Merit Neith, the first female in human history to rule 5000 years ago in the Umm al-Qaab area of ​​Abydos, in Sohag Governorate, southern Egypt.

Dr. Mustafa Waziri, Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt, said in a ministry statement that the Egyptian-German-Austrian archaeological mission working in the tomb of Queen Merit-Neith of the First Dynasty in the Umm al-Qaab area of ​​Abydos in Sohag Governorate succeeded in uncovering hundreds of urns.

Closed and never opened, there is leftover wine inside. Waziri pointed out that the discovered jars are large in size and in a good state of preservation, and that the wine remains inside them are about 5,000 years old.

BrainDance posted:

I wish I had history questions related to this, because it feels like this thread is the closest fit, but then also not really.

Going from just reading Bart Ehrman's the Apocryphal Gospels I decided to just read all of the stuff from Nag Hammadi (reading Meyer's The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, probably gonna read Pagel's The Gnostic Gospels alongside it.) I don't even know why I'm doing this, I guess vaguely because I just wanna get a feel for that whole very early creation of Christianity kind of time and mindset, and the Orthodox "this was the early church they were unified in their beliefs x church is just like that/descended directly from that" is complete bullshit.

And it feels like the gnostic stuff is the closest thing we have texts from for one of those very Roman-era mystery religions.

A lot of it is a pain in the rear end to read, guys jerking themself off about "watch me say some contradictory thing and then say if you don't get it it's because you don't have gnosis!" but I just read the Gospel of Truth, it's genuinely incredibly well written and kinda beautiful. Whoever wrote it was really good at it, and I just kinda wonder who unknown incredibly talented author from 1800 years ago was. Maybe it actually was Valentinian?

Anyway, Gospel of Truth, absolute pro-read. Not even long but just really good and does explain a whole cosmology and stuff with a lot of that kinda gnostic "these words aren't what you think they are when you first read it" thing but still making sense.

Koramei posted:

eke out posted:

more details here

https://scrollprize.org/firstletters

some complicated series of machine learning stuff, first to "flatten" the 3d CT scans of the still-rolled originals, then to detect ink itself, then to detect characters. that then gets independently verified by a bunch of experts.

first guy found 'porphyras' then a second guy independently found the same word with a different method, plus a couple more words (and supposedly has even more promising model runs more recently, but that first bit was enough for second place)

quote:

Why were we successful?

There were many contributions from different people in the critical path for these discoveries. Our combination of competition and open source (through “progress prizes”) seems to work! To highlight a few key contributions:

Youssef used a model from the Kaggle competition and was inspired by Luke’s results to look in the same area.
Luke’s search for crackle was directly inspired by Casey’s work.
Casey was able to look through many sheets of papyrus because our segmentation team had mapped out hundreds of cm2.
The segmentation team was able to map out a lot of papyrus because of tooling built by contestants who worked on “Segmentation Tooling Prizes” (work by Julian Schilliger, Chuck, Yao Hsiao, and many others).
The segmentation tooling advances were possible because contestants built on top of existing open source tools by professor Seales’ team (work by Seth Parker, Stephen Parsons, and many others).

And of course, the contest itself wouldn’t have been possible without the foundation that Dr. Seales and his team, along with their funders, have laid out and continue to support.

Looking back at what got us to this point, it seems that almost every single thing we did in running this contest so far has been load-bearing. We’re not quite sure what to make of this! Perhaps that progress is more fragile and success is more contingent than it often seems in retrospect.

zoux posted:

I don't know if this is the case with that specific era, but there are a lot of art styles that we look at now as "bad" but there were clear cultural contexts and reasons for these depictions. Like new kingdom Egyptian art, it looks rudimentary and primitive, but ancient Egyptians had a rigid set of rules about proportions and aspective view. Then you look at the Amarna style created during and right after Akhenaten's reign and it's more stylized and dynamic and, to the modern eye, just looks better. But art criticism is eternal and all that art (and Akhenaten's reign) got damnato memoriaed by subsequent pharaohs almost immediately after he died. (This post has not been fact checked by LaB who knows about all this stuff way better than me and would love to see her elaborate on the transition into and back from the Amarna style, and Egyptian artistic conventions in general)

E. Karshner, Thought, Utterance Power 2011 posted:

In The Mind of Ancient Egypt, Jan Assman identifies this belief in the relationship between the perception and expression of existence as being characteristic of a “cosmological society.” He writes that a cosmological society “lives by a model of cosmic forms of order, which it transforms into political and social order by means of meticulous observation and performance of rituals” (2002, 205). According to Assman’s definition, a cosmological society creates meaning based on the close observation of foundational forms in a manner that closely references the original forms or order. Assman goes on to explain that meaning emerges from the ability to “adapt the order of the human world to that of the cosmos [and] to keep the cosmic process itself in good working order” (2002, 205). The cosmos itself becomes a heuristic revealing mystical knowledge that establishes the local, personal, and social order at the same time that the local, personal, and social order serves as a heuristic in establishing magical practices that maintain the cosmological order. In other words, while the agent is speaking from a social scene to a human audience, he or she is simultaneously addressing deities in the cosmological realm. The disputants and the discourse, then, speak from and to a complex, multilayered situation.

In magical utterances, there is an appeal to another set of circumstances outside the immediate scene of the agent. This rhetorical scene of magic is characterized by Mircea Eliade as a life lived “on a two-fold plane; it takes its course as human existence and, at the same time, shares in a transhuman life, that of the cosmos of the gods” (1957, 167). Symbolically, this twofold existence is represented by what Eliade terms a homology. Simply defined, a homology is a correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm.

J. Hellum, Toward an Understanding of the Use of Myth in Pyramid Texts 2014 posted:

The lack of narrative myth in Old Kingdom religious literature has long been the subject of discussion. Recently, the discussion has moved from whether myth existed in the Old Kingdom, to how it existed. The Pyramid Texts provide an excellent testing ground for the study of myth. Each king possesses a distinct group of texts, different from the other kings', but they are all used for the same goal and in exactly the same physical context. It is proposed that the architecture of the textual chambers works as a boundary for the texts, and that in doing so, it provides a framework for understanding the corpora of texts as a myth in themselves. Thus, the architecture is the metaphorical beginning and end of the myth, and the texts can be examined as the content of that myth. Together, they comprise a metamyth, a myth that includes the physical context of the texts and their literary content.

quote:

If there is a meaning to be found in mythology, this cannot reside in the isolated elements which enter into the composition of a myth, but only in the way those elements are combined. 2. Although myth belongs to the same category as language, being, as a matter of fact, only part of it, language in myth unveils specific properties. 3. Those properties are only to be found above the ordinary linguistic level; that is, they exhibit more complex features beside those which are to be found in any kind of linguistic expression. - Claude Lévi-Strauss

Toward an Understanding of the Use of Myth in Pyramid Texts posted:

From the evidence of the Pyramid Texts, and generally throughout the ancient literature, the Egyptian use of myth in the Old Kingdom seems to have been based on allusion. This is most obviously the case in the funerary texts, where the king was set side by side with the deities and his actions echoed theirs and vice versa. By alluding to situations in which the king was geographically on a divine plane, the actions of the king were paralleled with the actions of the deities on that plane.

Toward an Understanding of the Use of Myth in Pyramid Texts posted:

The fact that the king was placed into the cosmography, solar passage, and myth of ascent by virtue of his use of the texts as a vehicle of ascendance indicates that the foundational mythic ideas were understood to be as real as the ascendance of the king. For the king to ascend to the gods, he had to move through celestial geography. In the process, the concept of the sky as a part of the afterlife was dropped and the reality of the sky as part the afterlife was assumed. In other words, the king, being mobile in the afterlife and hence alive in that environment, reflected that quality of reality on his surroundings as a direct result of his own animation. The same was true conversely, the environment providing a goal to which the king endeavoured to attain. As with much of Egyptian religion, the idea was circular and unending.109

Wikipedia posted:

Atenism, also known as the Aten religion,[1] the Amarna religion,[2] and the Amarna heresy, was a religion in ancient Egypt. It was founded by Akhenaten, a pharaoh who ruled the New Kingdom under the Eighteenth Dynasty.[3] The religion is described as monotheistic or monolatristic, although some Egyptologists argue that it was actually henotheistic.[4] Atenism was centred on the cult of Aten, a god depicted as the disc of the Sun. Aten was originally an aspect of Ra, Egypt's traditional solar deity, though he was later asserted by Akhenaten as being the superior of all deities.[5] In the 14th century BC, Atenism was Egypt's state religion for around 20 years, and Akhenaten met the worship of other gods with persecution; he closed many traditional temples, instead commissioning the construction of Atenist temples, and also suppressed religious traditionalists. However, subsequent pharaohs toppled the movement in the aftermath of Akhenaten's death, thereby restoring Egyptian civilization's traditional polytheistic religion. Large-scale efforts were then undertaken to remove from Egypt and Egyptian records any presence or mention of Akhenaten, Atenist temples, and Atenist assertions of a uniquely supreme god.

Component Design as a Narrative Device in Amarna Tomb Art posted:

Narrative is usually perceived as a sequence of episodes conceived within a temporal continuity. A pictorial narrative often evokes in the audience a sense of time and space -- even if arbitrary or fabulous. However, the art historian who looks to Amarna tomb art for a unified story beginning with "once upon a time," followed by sequentially ordered images and ending with "they lived happily in the here-after," is likely to be disappointed, because the story does not unfold in a linear time or a sequential use of space.

Instead the narrative process in Amarna tomb art is selective and the "story" constructed in sequences of logically and temporally connected episodes within a timeless universal. As a result of the special role that time plays in funerary pictorial narrative, the images in the Amarna tombs are given a conceptual ordering that emphasizes contemporary scenes and events designed to induce audience participation. To succeed in this requires an audience with the capacity to share, to comprehend both the experiences depicted and meaning of the images. It is in this recreation of temporal events that we come to realize that there are a number of ways to organize narrative time and that temporal continuity can be maintained within the larger (universal) and timeless (cosmological) depiction of contemporary events.

Toward an Understanding of the Use of Myth in Pyramid Texts posted:

Klimkeit has made the observation that "the spatial type of thinking (is) more relevant to the Egyptian than the temporal," meaning that the area of the sky (and the general after-life) as the setting for the king's journey is more important than the time it took to be traversed. Time, in this context, was endless, one might almost say non-existent, with the sole indication that time passed being the movement of the sun through the sky; space, on the other hand, was there to be moved through. Events occurring within the limits of the sky were contingent on space rather than on time. The length of time it took the king to reach the seat of the deities was never mentioned or alluded to in the Texts; the journey and accompanying use of space provided the focus.

Component Design as a Narrative Device in Amarna Tomb Art posted:

Some of the most intriguing art of ancient Egypt was produced during the Amarna period. Among the art historical problems pertaining to the various artistic productions of the period are the forty-four rock tombs carved by the officials who served Akhenaten at Amarna. The tombs (seventeen in the northern group and twenty-seven in the southern group) comprise a unit of material contemporary with the reign of Akhenaten and thus form a primary source of information about the Amarna period and Akhenaten's role as king. However, while many unique features of Amarna tomb art have been discussed, scholars have not recognized their original purpose: to blend skillfully events from the career of the deceased official with the theological doctrine of Atenism and Akhenaten's authority as king. Embedded in the style and use of images, scenes, and events contemporary with the audience's perception of them are metaphorical expressions of the political, theological, and historical pressures of the Amarna period. Thus, Amarna as the seat of government during Akhenaten's reign represents both a political and a religious entity. When we regard the tombs in this order and context we find their structure is not an ancillary element, but one that is primary to the programmatic ensemble and order of political and religious circumstances.

Component Design as a Narrative Device in Amarna Tomb Art posted:

Closely related to the point of the deceased's status is the presence of an audience in the tombs, a fact that distinguishes Amarna tomb art from Egyptian tomb art in general. While Egyptian tombs are usually thought of as sealed for eternity, it is known that the Amarna tombs were open and that friends and relatives made memorial visits. There are several indications that there was access to the tombs including various desert roads leading to them and to and from the desert altars. Petrie has attributed use of the roads to workmen and funerary processions of friends and relatives. The presence of votive stelae in tomb 23 of Any verifies that during the Amarna period friends of the deceased made visits to the tombs.

In the tombs, status is asserted only in relationship to the king. He is the largest figure depicted and the authority behind all communicative acts with the Aten. The psvchological effect of Akhenaten on the audience is purposeful: to affirm his right to rule through the rites he performs to the god, in order to perpetuate the ideological and social order of his reign. While status may affect the manner in which a subject is presented, the way in which it is represented determines the political message the audience will take. It is precisely this existential dimension, that is, the exploitation of the audience's time and space, on which all else depends. Herein lies the key to the narrative technique of component parts in Amarna tomb art. The tomb space is contemporary with the spectator's time. In reality, representing space and moving in space are two different things, and they can be distinguished from the implied movement depicted in the reliefs. However, such movement also manifests itself in the duration of the spectator's time and represents not only a movement from but a movement toward something.

By attributing a temporal significance to the tomb environment, we are also admitting that the narrative aspect of the art must be grounded in the spectator's perception and that the spectator is the bearer of meaning. Because the pictorial space in the tombs is structured and oriented to the spectator, time mediates between the object and the audience's perception of the subject. The purpose of the syntactically marked narrative units [that is, the tomb design and layout] is to use time to shape the spectator's experience and give it meaning. Moreover, though the transitions from one tomb area to another area are spatial, the links between the tomb chambers and relief subjects are metaphorical expressions of Akhenaten's ideology and are by extension common political experiences held by the audience. Thus, while isolated from the real world, the tombs contain within themselves the constructed regulated structures of that world.

Component Design as a Narrative Device in Amarna Tomb Art posted:

Narrative has been defined as storytelling. It has been assumed that narrative necessitates some expenditure of time. While "story" may represent basic material of narrative, time has traditionally been considered a necessary condition. In pictorial narrative, space, actual or illusionary, must be considered an additional condition, whether the narrative unfolds in single or multiple images.

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But the Amarna artist goes beyond these themes and creates a system that illustrates a complex interweaving of images and texts to produce a message understandable only to viewers familiar with the religion of the Aten and not the earlier traditions of the worship of Amun. To comprehend the system one must understand Amarna tomb art against the climate of religious controversy raging throughout Akhenaten's reign. Without this background, it is difficult for us today to perceive the underlying narrative. Use of the typological facade image certainly limits the narrative as story. But the images that are evoked form a basic reference to the narrative theme, and it is a combination of images, rather than one story, that is significant for the development of theme in pictorial narrative. The genius of the Amarna artist lies in the originality with which he conceived and exploited narrative as theme. Thus regardless of the simplicity or complexity of each narrative, the structure of the narrative remains the same.

Against this thematic manipulation, the relief panels interact in such a way that the audience is brought into the narrative experience. Even though there is a greater emphasis on theme in Amarna narrative than on story line, the images and texts are able to communicate a profound historical story. All of this is possible and achieved through the use of metaphor, moving the audience to experience the real through imitation.