Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (8 page)

 

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ncient Egypt. Say the words and conjure the images. For movie lovers, it may be the buff and bald Yul Brynner in a chariot chasing down a white-bearded Charlton Heston as Moses in
The Ten Commandments
. For devotees of pseudoscience, it might be the premise of the best-selling book
Chariots of the Gods
, which argues that alien astronauts landed their spaceships in the desert and built the pyramids long, long ago. A younger generation of music fans might be forgiven if the best vision of Egypt they can muster up comes from Michael Jackson’s 1992 video “Remember the Time,” featuring comedian Eddie Murphy as a pharaoh, with supermodel Iman imperiously enthroned beside him as his queen.

Let’s face it. As victims of the myth-making mass media, we have been served up more than a fair share of badly distorted images of ancient Egypt, a culture that stood longer than any other in history. That’s unfortunate, because in reality, the Egyptians created a society that prized both morality and beauty—physical and artistic—and expressed those ideals through one of the most unique and rich systems of mythology in the ancient world. A very old set of gods and goddesses formed the soul of one of the most grandiose and unsurpassed civilizations in history. The Egyptian stories of animal-headed deities, sun gods sailing through eternity, and a pair of divine lovers named Isis and Osiris dominated that civilization, inspired its greatest accomplishments, and made an indelible mark around the world for centuries to come.

Springing up on a thin strip of fertile land along the Nile River, hedged in by unforgiving deserts, the great Egyptian culture of priests, pyramids, and papyrus was a remarkable one that dawned more than five thousand years ago and lasted until Rome emerged and Jesus was born. Over the course of more than three thousand years, Egypt’s people built a world of epic grandeur that was unparalleled in ancient times for its longevity, prosperity, and magnificent architectural and artistic achievements, all of which profoundly influenced its neighbors—including the celebrated Greeks.

But, as Egypt’s vast collection of art and antiquities attest, the pulsing heartbeat of this great civilization was its mythology and religion. From the dawn of Egypt’s history, it was a world in which the power of the gods was felt daily, at almost every level of society. In the temples of the sun god at Karnak, where priests tended to the gods and their flocks of sacred animals. In the lives of everyday Egyptians who mummified their family members and pets in the hope of helping them attain eternal life. In great cities like Memphis, where supplicants came each day to the corrals in which sacred bulls were used to divine the future. This was the true ancient Egypt, an extraordinary land of monuments, magic, and—most of all—myths.

How did myths “rule” in ancient Egypt?

We toss around the concepts of “god” and “country” quite easily, without giving much thought to how they got started. Both ideas have been fairly significant throughout human history. For centuries, people have believed that to serve god or country—or both—was a noble calling. But few of us may realize that Egypt—land of the pharaohs, sphinxes, and mummies—essentially invented both concepts.

Going back to a time before history, when Egypt was established as the first true nation along the banks of the Nile, it was a complete
theocracy
—a place where religion and government were inseparably linked in the minds of rulers, priests, and people. Not only were Egypt’s royalty the leaders of the nation, they were actually thought to be gods. The pharaohs’ status as gods incarnate was what motivated tens of thousands of workers to lift and arrange millions of blocks of stone that weighed more than two and a half tons apiece. These laborers were not beaten under the lash of oppressive overseers. They worked willingly in the belief that the king must have a proper resting place from which he could ascend to the heavens, joining the other gods in his eternal life. Making sure that the pyramids and other tombs were properly constructed and well provisioned with the “grave goods” required for a comfortable life in the afterworld was no small concern. Only then could the resurrected king help ensure that the Egyptian world and its timeless order would continue, uninterrupted by drought, flood, or foreign invaders.

The nearly obsessive interest in ritual and order in ancient Egypt was not limited to the affairs of the king. From birth to death, and covering nearly everything in between, rank-and-file Egyptians lived under a highly structured set of customs and beliefs that were designed to keep them and their blessed land in the good graces of the vast pantheon of gods they worshipped. Proper care for these gods—and their earthly manifestation, the pharaoh—ensured the cosmic order, a concept that the Egyptians called
maat
and that was personified in the goddess named
Maat
, beloved daughter of the sun god Re. It was
maat
that made the sun rise each day and brought the annual flooding of the Nile River, which guaranteed Egypt’s plentiful food supply and continued existence. The universal harmony of
maat
—a holy and ethical concept that meant truth, justice, and righteousness, as well as order—was achieved through a religious system in which the gods protected Egypt and held the forces of chaos, destruction, or simple, everyday misfortune at bay, both through proper individual behavior and obeying the ritual laws of the land.

Overseeing those ritual laws was a priestly class—one of the world’s first government bureaucracies—whose expertise was in knowing how to please the gods. Whether it was sacrificing an animal to bring the rains that assured a good harvest; collecting taxes for the temple complexes; conscripting workers for three months of each year to build the great stone mausoleums that glorified the king and eased his ascension to the afterlife; or simply shaving one’s eyebrows to mourn the death of a beloved cat—the priests saw to the rites that dictated Egyptian life, year in and year out. The rules they articulated and enforced helped Egypt achieve and maintain a remarkable degree of social organization and stability without resorting to draconian punishments, a vast slave economy, grotesque human sacrifices, or a rigid military state. Instead, as author Richard H. Wilkinson writes in
The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt
, this was a “spiritual world…which remains unique in the history of human religion. The character of that spiritual world was both mysterious and manifest, at once accessible and hidden, for although Egyptian religion was often shrouded in layers of myth and ritual, it…shaped, sustained and directed Egyptian culture in almost every imaginable way. The deities of Egypt were present in the lives of pharaohs and citizens alike, creating a more completely theocratic society than any other of the ancient world.”

And so, to understand ancient Egypt, you must understand its myths. And to know those myths, you must first understand the two great forces that shaped this ancient civilization’s history and destiny: the river and the desert, a perfect duality of life and death.

Why was Egypt the “gift of the Nile”?

The Greek historian Herodotus, who might also be called the world’s first great travel writer, coined the phrase the “gift of the Nile” to describe Egypt. It was a society that utterly fascinated this Greek tourist when he visited Egypt back around 450 BCE. When Herodotus traveled through Egypt, Greece was flourishing in its Golden Age. But Egypt was already three thousand years old, a great trading and military power in the ancient Near East. Having developed the world’s first national government, the Egyptians had also created the 365-day calendar, pioneered geometry and astronomy, developed one of the first forms of writing, and invented papyrus—the paperlike writing material that was essential to the birth of the book.

A long, narrow country through which the Nile River flows north into the Mediterranean Sea, Egypt is bordered mostly by vast deserts on its other three sides. The Egyptian word for these hot, sandy wastelands is
Deshret
, meaning “Red Land,” and the source of the word “desert.” Although the surrounding mountainous areas in the deserts were the source of the gold, gems, and hard stone that provided the raw materials of Egypt’s grand buildings and brilliant artistry, these deserts—to the ancient Egyptians—were hellish places that could only bring danger and death.

The lines between these two worlds of life and death were not viewed as metaphoric or symbolic, but were physically tangible realities to the Egyptians. It is literally possible to stand with one foot in the dry desert and the other in the moist soil watered by the river—fertility and life on one side, sterility and death on the other. That clear demarcation between life and death carried over into Egyptian myths and beliefs. Many prehistoric burial sites have been found in the desert, and the obsessive Egyptian preoccupation with death may well derive from the fact that the hot, dry sand created a natural form of mummification that the Egyptians later perfected thorough their elaborate funerary arts. From early times, it seems, Egyptians related the desert with one of their chief gods,
Seth
, who represented the force of chaos and the dangers of the desert. He would enter into a cosmic life-and-death struggle with his brother, the fertility god
Osiris
, which formed one of the core myths of ancient Egypt.

Cutting through the harsh landscape of the desert flowed the Nile, the world’s longest river, with its beginnings in the mountains near the equator in central Africa. Gathering the rainfall and snowmelt of the Ethiopian highlands and all of northeastern Africa, and wandering for more than 4,100 miles, the Nile was Egypt’s life force. Starting at the end of June, when the rainy season began in central Africa, the Nile flooded its banks each year, leaving a strip of fertile, dark silt that averaged about 6 miles wide on each side of the river. The annual rising of its waters set the Egyptian calendar of sowing and reaping with its three seasons of four months each: inundation, growth, harvest. The flooding of the Nile from the end of June till late October brought down the rich silt, in which crops were planted and grew from late October to late February, to be harvested from late February till the end of June. The ancient Egyptians called their country
Kemet
, meaning “Black Land”
*
—after this rich, dark, life-giving soil.

Barley, which was baked into bread and brewed into beer, and Emmer wheat—an Asian grain well suited to feed cattle—were the staples, along with lentils, beans, onions, garlic, and other crops that grew in abundance in this moist, fertile soil. At times, there were bad years when drought limited the rains, or flooding rains destroyed the crops. But usually, Egypt’s farmers could anticipate and rely upon a surplus that allowed for trading. Trading led to commerce, commerce led to a merchant class, which eventually allowed for the development of the ranks of artisans and craftsmen who didn’t need to depend on farming to live. All of this came from the Nile. As historian Daniel Boorstin puts it in
The Discoverers
, “The Nile made possible the crops, the commerce, and the architecture of Egypt. Highway of commerce, the Nile was also a freightway for materials of colossal temples and pyramids. A granite obelisk of three thousand tons could be quarried at Aswan and floated two hundred miles down the river to Thebes…. The rhythm of the Nile was the rhythm of Egyptian life.”

Since the welfare and existence of the whole country depended on this one central phenomenon—the annual flooding of the Nile—the river became the centerpiece of Egypt’s religious ideas. The flooding, or inundation, was personified in the form of different deities. The annual rising of the Nile—which was part of the
maat
—could be fixed to the regular appearance of the “dog star” Sirius, which gave the whole affair a sense of celestial as well as earthly order.

Egypt’s history begins with prehistoric villages that grew up along the banks of the Nile more than five thousand years ago. Before that time, Stone Age Egypt was probably settled by people who came from Libya to the west, Palestine and Syria to the east, and Nubia to the south. Adding to this “multicultural” melting pot were traders from what is now Iraq (ancient Mesopotamia) who may have also settled in the area, attracted by the fertility of the land beside the Nile. Grave sites from these early periods show that the dead were carefully buried, often in a fetal position suggesting notions of an expected rebirth, in burial pits that contained possessions needed for an afterlife—a clue to how ancient religious beliefs were formed very early in human history.

Over time, the small farming and herding communities became part of two kingdoms: one controlled the villages that lay in the Nile Delta, where the river spreads out before emptying into the Mediterranean, and which came to be known as Lower Egypt; the other controlled the villages south of the Delta area and was called Upper Egypt. Most of the people in ancient Egypt lived in the Nile River Valley and there may have been between 1 million and 4 million people living in Egypt at various times.