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Discovering Tomorrow
IT REQUIRES a life-time of study to understand the peaceful, creative and sophisticated society of Ancient Egypt – which lasted longer than all nations, cultures and civilisitions that have followed it. For those of us with little time, the only option is to begin with a month’s visit to Upper Egypt in the company of an Egyptologist; one who is an expert, but not an academic specialist; one who can communicate and has the patience to encourage your explorations. There are about 200 Egyptological societies scattered across most nations of this planet and there are bound to be knowledgable enthusiasts in all of them.
Our party had the good fortune to have with us the chairman of the Egyptian Society of South Africa, Keith Grenville. He has clarity; a deep, as well as extraordinarily wide, knowledge of Egypt, and he is succinct - which made up for the fact that our visit lasted less than three weeks. We also had an interesting if verbose Egyptian guide who lectures at universities in Italy and Cairo on the subject. An added bonus was the sight of these two experts making their own excited discoveries almost every day. . .
“Look at that, Keith!” our guide would say. “I’ve been here perhaps 30 times - and I never noticed before that heiroglyph up there. . . Up there in the corner. . . What a discovery!. Do you know what this means!” And the two of them would wander off in excited discussion. Later one would inform the other of news of a momentous find somewhere in Cleopatra’s world; or of yet another ‘Golden Mummy’ discovered in the Western Desert; or of a new dig about to take place at Karnak - the centre of Middle Kingdom culture, where four-fifths of the temple still has to be excavated.
The more time we spent examining mortuary temples the more we realised that today’s Egyptologists, far from being fascinated by the dead, use the dead past to focus on tomorrow, with the possibility of priceless treasures of knowledge still to be unearthed. There are Egyptologists who believe that even the tangible treasures of Tutankamun have not yet been properly assessed. As familiarity with Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and other forms of communication improve almost daily, there is a realisation that many modern interpretations may be false; that many ambiguities exist.
“To understand Ancient Egypt you have to take a holistic approach.”
You have to live it, Grenville explains. You have to be interested in weaving and bread-making; economics and religion; engineering and art.
“The Egyptians recorded nothing that did not arise out of their own logical system. And symbolism was everything. Every image they carved fitted a pattern or delivered a clear message. Look at this, for instance”. He gestures towards a quadrilateral hieretic symbol among the carved figures of gods. I stare at the simple shape of an elongated chisel-blade: the symbol of Truth. It confidently illustrates a concept which is undefinable in the modern mind. So much. In so small a space. On a wall.
Later he translates the heiroglyphics carved into a stone bank on which Ramses II’s son records his restoration of the pyramid of a king of an earlier millenium. “He’s making sure everyone understands his motives”, says Grenville. Then adds: “You have to think like an Ancient Egyptian to understand properly.”
To the suggestion that those people were the most self-confident who ever lived, Grenville says:
“Absolutely! What else can you say of a passage in the Book of the Dead which reads: I have seen Yesterday. I know Tomorrow.”
Personally, I was fascinated by these new insights; by the aura of permanence which Ancient Egypt still exudes, and by the demonstration of faith which its giant, ancient monuments proclaim. One begins to appreciate that, in place of warfare, pyramids and other tombs were the political focus and economic engine of the world’s longest surviving nation-state. Time almost stood still for several thousand years because the Ancient Egyptians - not just the priests and pharaohs - wanted it to stand still, and believed it could. Their contemporary pharoah would turn into a god when his ka, his life force, left to join his Akh, his other-world spirit. Each generation of people would join their Pharaoh when they died - and they wouldn’t want anyone rocking their stable world in the interim.
The Ancient Egyptians sought eternity with a sense of certainty. Personal immortality was a notion they probably invented. Although other communities - from the South Seas to the South American jungles and deserts; from European palaces to Indian temples; and from every major religion on Earth - conjured up the concept in one form or another, the Ancient Egyptians have been, in all history, the nearest to achieving the immortality they craved.
Shelley, in his ode Ozymandias (a corruption of the Greek name User-maat-Ra which was Ramses II’s throne title) gave pharaonic times a bad press when he described Ramses II’s ten-story-high statue, toppled by conquering Roman Legions after 1 500 years. Shelley imagined Ramses II's “shattered visage” upon the sand with “frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command”. The poet, admitting that the description he had was third-hand, visualised “trunkless legs of stone”,
And on a pedestal these word appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Shelley’s imagery, of arrogance and despotism brought to dust, is as appealing as it is grand. But the image created on the Nile’s West Bank by Ramses II’s sculptors is of a very different man, and their confidence in the concept of permanence still lives, despite the ravages of earthquake and time.
Shelley’s bad press has been overtaken by the lazer-beam sound-and-light shows on the new-made mountain of Abu Simbel, and the enthusiasm of the UN and other sponsors of 4,000 year-old temples . These are the monuments rescued from twentieth-century Lake Nasser and rebuilt above the water-level in the desert to stand, one might hope, for another 4,000 years. Hink of that: a mere 4,000 into the future – a brief space of time that measures almost the dawn of human civilisation.
There is no space to list all the subjects one might study - if one had time - among Egypt’s ancient ruins, but here are just three obvious samples among the many I noted:
Ornithology. If only there were time - the tiniest drop of eternity - to allow a keen bird-watcher to study the birds of Egypt, he or she would find most of them carved in stone among the heiroglyphics of myriad temples. Among the carvings are also some faithfully depicted birds that no longer exist. For all their vivid mythology, with its many sacred and magic birds, the Egyptians clung to breathtakingly skilled realism in their carvings and paintings, so that all known birds, and some extinct ones, are instantly recognisable.
Art. It contained a complexity hardly understood by artists today. The ancients were bound by their materials - gold, representing the flesh of the gods, silver their skin, stone representing eternity, and so on - and they had a mystical respect for the balance of Nature and the disciplines of Order, symbolised by maat. The approach to art was intellectual, not emotional. In formal art, no whimsical depictions or fanciful images were inserted. Nobles and gods, in beautiful, mathematically-composed proportions, remained ever-fixed in linear, motionless, symbolic - eternal - poses. However, scenes depicting families, farmers, dancing girls, fishermen and hunters, flowed with motion to the point where one might almost hear the laughter of peasants at play, or thundering chariots and the cries of the dying in battle. Egyptian art had the benefit of being revitalised after two thousand years by the aberrant ‘modernism’ of King Akhenaten’s in the New Kingdom. The realism of his Amarnan art was adopted - not just in famous contemporary images of the heretic king and his consort Nerfititi - but in all liturgical art for the next thousand years.
Religion. While it is said that there is always something new out of Africa, especially in Egyptology today, it appears in the end that there is little new under the sun. While the Egyptians worshipped many gods, one Pharaoh (probably Amenophis III, father of Akhenaten) ‘re-invented’ monotheism. Other Egyptian eras gave us the madonna and child image in countless depictions of Isis and her babe Horus. The concept of the Holy Trinity was vividly recorded in many ways and many guises of God-the-father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Ancient Egyptian ideas fed into Judaism, Christianity, and the Muslim faith as well as into the mythology of Crete, Greece, Rome and elsewhere. You can trace it for yourself in the stones of the monuments along the Nile.
Sociology. Except that Ancient Egyptians depicted Nubians as black, and with quite different features to the ochred or light-skinned citizens of the Lower Nile, they recognised no other differences between people of colour - unless they were declared enemies. Black African robbers, white Hittite maurauders, Assyrian, Bedouin or Asian invaders - these were depicted as the lowest order, humiliated and agonised, crushed beneath the great foot of a warrior-king such as Ramses or Thutmose. But Egypt, after questioning qualifications not colour, accepted Nubians as their pharaohs - and as their incipient gods - in the 25th Dynasty.
The role of women in Ancient Egypt is a subject too large to encompass here.. It is worthy of a separate article, [See ‘Cleopatra’s Forebears’]] and certainly worthy of further specialist study by Egyptologists. Suffice to say that it would seem that in all history, women enjoyed no greater political power, no higher status and sense of equality, no more freedom and social standing than they did in Thebes during the century 1400-1300b.c. One of the most powerful woman of all time was Queen Tiye, wife and mother of Egyptian Pharoahs, who co-ruled in this period. Other women leaders range from Queen Hatshepsut, a pharaoh and god - not goddess - in her own right four thousand years ago, and Cleopatra who arrived as the ancient civilisation was dying.
The mysteries- and myths - of the pyramids
THE ONE SUBJECT you may wish to explore during a visit, no matter how short, to the Great Pyramids might be the question of their origins. Did the pharaohs build those edifices - or did the Egyptians appropriate them from a superior civilisation of, say, 10,000 years ago?
Who can believe the ancient Egyptians were incapable of building the Great Pyramid of Khufu, with all its precision and technological sophistication? Who says they could not create tiny “star-shafts” inside those myriad tons of piled rock for their king to reach out in death to “The Imperishable Ones” - the fixed polar stars to the North, and Cirius, Star of Isis, in the South? How can anyone say the Great Pyramids arrived as if from nowhere? There are 100 other pyramids strung along the Nile that bear witness to the contrary - in particular earlier attempts such as the Bent Pyramid and the great Step Pyramid, where a statue of a pharoah was given a peephole through which to communicate with the Imperishable Ones. And if the first known archeologist in history, the son of Ramses II, repaired rather than appropriated a pyramid built a thousand years before his own time - why should his ancestors have done otherwise?
These are mere debating points, but the evidence in favour of the pharoahs building their own pyramids has become almost as heavy as the stones used to build Khufu, the heaviest structure on Earth.. Since publication of Fingerprints of the Gods and succeeding proponents of the earlier-civilisation/ other-world theme, orthodox archeologists have been rushing into print with evidence of palpable pyramid-building skills which they thought were self-evident. (You can see, if you care to look, remnants of the surveyors’ and stone-masons’ methods and other ingenious tools of the Ancient Egyptians. I also happened to see six modern Egyptian workers at a repair site in the Valley of the Queens, matter-of-factly move a metre-cubed block of stone casually across the hot desert - without a single tool or lever to help. They do it routinely, singing and shoving in unision, as other Africans workers like to do - though with much less energy and enthusiasm in modern Egypt).
The Ancients were far more enthusiastic. It was not the slaves, or forced labourers, who fashioned and built the pyramids. People worked for good pay - sometimes going on strike - and they did it because they too wanted to reach eternity. Faith moves mountains. And geniuses like Imhotep assuredly designed giant pyramids nearly five thousand years ago.
If you are keen on inexplicable mysteries from the past, as most of us are, then you might, instead, focus on the best-known sphinx. The evidence of when it was carved from the rock-bed is not yet set in concrete. The jury, surely, is still out. It is a pleasant fancy to enjoy an open mind on that one. Just as it is good to be able to agree with the author of Voices of the Rocks, the geologist quoted in support of Graham Hancock and other protagonists of the 10,000 bc.theory on pyramid building. Though Robert M Schoch questions the age of the Giza Sphinx as determined by some orthodox Egyptologists, he rejects much of Hancock’s theory as well as what he calls the “fringe New Agers, occultists, true believers and pseudo-scientists seizing upon Atlantis as the lost repository of a wisdom our ailing world desperately needs.”
Forget the pseudo-scientific theories and seek out wisdom when you visit Ancient Egypt. If it is old-fashioned wisdom the world wants, it need look no further than maat.
Or, as Schoch puts it: “I realised the sense of mystery and awe with which these people of long ago approached their world. Looking at the universe, with its cosmic rhythms, untold beauty and great dangers, they understood themselves as part of something bigger than they themselves were. They knew their place in the order of things.
“We need to recover that sense of the world.”
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