Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (9 page)

Dark-skinned and dark-haired, the Egyptians spoke a language that was related to the Semitic languages spoken in the modern Middle East—including Arabic and Hebrew—and recent linguistic discoveries place ancient Egyptian among a family of languages called Afro-Asiatic, spoken in northern Africa. By around 3100 BCE, their language was also written in hieroglyphics, a complex system in which more than seven hundred picture symbols stood for certain objects, ideas, or sounds. Recent discoveries show bone and ivory with a form of hieroglyphic script dating as far back as 3400 BCE, and it is supposed that the Egyptian hieroglyphic system may have been invented for administrative and ritual purposes. Some scholars believe that Egypt’s writing system developed with Sumerian influence, as certain character types appear in both written languages; others argue that the differences between these two ancient writing systems are greater than their similarities. What is certain is that from the earliest days of Egyptian civilization, hieroglyphics were inscribed on monuments, temples, and tombs, and were set down on official texts, many of which were preserved over the centuries in Egypt’s hot, dry climate, providing generations of scholars and archaeologists with a rich array of sources for studying Egypt’s past.

Egypt’s long history has fascinated many other foreign people, including the Greeks going back to the time of Socrates, Plato, and Herodotus. But serious “Egyptology” began two hundred years ago with the cracking of the secret of the Rosetta Stone, which caused many previous theories and assumptions about Egypt to fall by the wayside. Recent research into Egypt’s prehistory has begun to transform a long-accepted version of the civilization’s earliest days. There is now evidence that a succession of southern (or Upper Egypt) kings, including one known as Scorpion, grew more powerful in the fourth millennium BCE, and references to well-known gods of Egypt have been found this far back in Egyptian history. The key event in the beginning of that history took place about 3100 BCE, when a king of Upper Egypt, traditionally called Menes the Uniter, but now often identified as Narmer, conquered Lower Egypt. One of the key pieces of evidence for this event is the Narmer Palette, a double-sided carved slate that depicts a king subduing a captive, along with other symbols that suggest a united kingdom.

Merging the two Egypts into one, Narmer and his successors, who may have included Menes (some historians think that they are the same person), began the process of forming the world’s first national government. Around 3000 BCE, Memphis was founded as a capital near the site of present-day Cairo. What is also clear from the Narmer Palette and other very old artifacts is that the close connection between gods and kings was well established by the time the country was unified. From its earliest beginnings, Egypt was a theocracy, and its very ancient gods were intricately connected to the Egyptian government throughout its long history.

While doubt has been cast on the existence of Menes, a king named Aha is now counted as the first of Egypt’s many kings in a succession of thirty-one dynasties—or families of kings—that ruled the country right down to the time of Alexander the Great in 332 BCE. During the early period of Egyptian history, the Egyptians developed irrigation systems, invented ox-drawn plows, and created the world’s first bureaucracy. Based at Memphis and anchored by religious beliefs, the Egyptian national government—in which god and country were not separate entities but completely interlocked—managed the enormous public works, including the construction of the pyramids, and employed an army of scribes to record it all.

While some scholars have questioned whether the Egyptian rulers were actually considered divine from earliest times, it is clear that these kings ruled the first nation-state as the political, military, and religious leaders. It is also clear from the earliest known tombs of these kings that the king was seen as the mediator between his people and the powers of the afterworld, and that the state religion gave legitimacy to the political order. Other documents and artifacts from this very early time show that another significant human invention was securely in place, too—taxes!

The priesthood existed to serve both the deities and the king, who was considered the chief priest of Egypt. The temple complexes run by Egypt’s priests were in many ways equivalent to the medieval cathedral towns of Europe. They were not visited on a once-a-week basis or occasional holiday, but were the economic and social center of Egyptian life. As in feudal Europe, most of Egypt’s land was in the hands of king and priests. The temples collected and distributed the bounty of Egypt and supported entire populations of civil servants, scribes, craftsmen, and artisans. They collected taxes on behalf of the king—they were the instruments of state power. In one census taken in the time of Ramses III, the two great temples in Thebes employed ninety thousand workmen, owned five hundred thousand head of cattle, four hundred orchards, and eighty ships.

After the earliest dynasties, Egyptian history has been traditionally divided into three major periods, known as the
Old
,
Middle
, and
New Kingdoms
, interrupted sporadically by stretches of social upheaval or foreign rule known as “intermediate periods.”
*
In spite of these interruptions, occasional periods of foreign control and occasional breakdowns in order, Egyptian life maintained its fundamental sense of order and stability with remarkable longevity.

The
Old Kingdom
, or the
Pyramid Age
, began in 2686 BCE and continued for some five hundred years until 2160 BCE. As the name obviously suggests, the period is famed for the construction of the first massive pyramids. During the Old Kingdom, the king’s absolute power was solidified, based on the belief in his divinity, his role as chief priest, and his control of the priesthood, and the promise that only the king would spend eternity with the gods, where he would continue to maintain the cosmic order that blessed Egypt with such plenty. To maintain the status quo, the king wielded unquestioned power. One stunning example of both the stability and total control can be seen in one of the Old Kingdom rulers, Pepy II, who took the throne at age six and ruled for ninety-four years.

The Old Kingdom went into decline and was followed by an unsettled century, called the First Intermediate Period, in which power shifted away from Memphis to Herakleopolis. This time of unrest and disorder was later believed to be a time when the gods withdrew their blessings from Egypt. A new generation of Upper Kingdom rulers restored national order during the
Middle Kingdom
(2055–1650 BCE). This was a four-hundred-year period of peace and prosperity, during which the kings of the Twelfth Dynasty conquered neighboring Nubia (modern Sudan) and began to expand Egypt’s trade with Palestine and Syria in southwestern Asia and the advanced Minoan civilization, based on Crete. Often described as a “Renaissance” period in Egypt, the Middle Kingdom saw Egyptian art, architecture, and religion reach new heights. With this exposure to other surrounding cultures, historian Gae Callender explains, “The Middle Kingdom was an age of tremendous invention, great vision, and colossal projects, yet there was also careful and elegant attention to detail in the creation of the smallest items of everyday use and decoration. This more human scale is present in the pervading sense that individual humans had become more significant in cosmic terms….”

After this golden era, atrophy set in and another succession of weak rulers brought an end to the Middle Kingdom around 1650 BCE. While Egypt was in this weakened state, warriors from Asia spread throughout the Nile Delta. Eventually these immigrants, who used horse-drawn chariots and carried improved bows and other more advanced weapons unknown to the Egyptians, seized control of much of Egypt’s territory. These invaders, called “Asiatics” by the Egyptians, are better known by their Greek name, the Hyksos kings, and they ruled much of the Delta area of Egypt in a Second Intermediate Period. But rather than attempting to replace Egyptian religion with their own gods and worship, as invaders often do, the Hyksos seem to have adapted Egyptian forms. Apparently the Egyptians also learned from the Hyksos invaders, adapting their arts of war, and eventually drove the Hyksos out of Egypt.
*

A new succession of kings emerged, originally based in the Upper Egypt city of Thebes, and began using the title “pharaoh.” These kings developed a permanent standing army that used horse-drawn chariots and other advanced military techniques introduced during the Hyksos period, ushering in the five-hundred-year period of the
New Kingdom
. Beginning in 1550 BCE with Ahmose, the Eigthteenth Dynasty pharaoh credited with expelling the Hyksos from Egypt, this era saw ancient Egypt become the world’s greatest power, and it includes some of the most familiar names in Egyptian history—Thutmose III, Queen Hatshepsut, Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, and a series of pharaohs named Ramses, of biblical fame.

During this era, Egypt also began an aggressive military expansion, and Thutmose I took armies as far as the Euphrates River. His daughter, Queen Hatshepsut, became one of the first known ruling queens in world history, but presented herself publicly and was depicted in art as a bearded man. Egypt reached the height of its power during the 1400s BCE under Thutmose III. Dubbed the “Napoleon of Ancient Egypt,” Thutmose III aggressively set out to expand Egypt’s boundaries, led military expeditions into Asia, and reestablished Egyptian control over neighboring African kingdoms, making Egypt the strongest and wealthiest nation in the Middle East.

What do we know about Egyptian myth and how do we know it?

History is sometimes mystery. We often “don’t know much about” the truth of events taking place in our own lifetimes. So how can we possibly understand or know about a place that existed in a time before books, newspapers, and photographs? In the case of Egypt, fortunately, we have a society that spent a great deal of energy on the idea of posterity. The Egyptians were proud of what they had achieved, and some kings in particular spared little expense in making sure the world knew about what they had done. And much of it was, as the expression goes, “set in stone.”

Remarkably well-preserved scrolls, thousands of years old, show Egypt as a highly literate society. We have Egyptian accounts of people doing their taxes, manuals of polite conduct that are 4,500 years old, and letters in which fathers admonish their sons to work hard at scribe school so they won’t have to make a living as carpenters, fishermen, or worse, laundry men—a job in which the occupational hazards included washing the garments of menstruating women while dodging Nile crocodiles. Achieving the status of a scribe was a high honor for an upwardly mobile young Egyptian commoner with social aspirations. Ancient Egypt, in other words, was a literate culture that prized learning.

Which makes it all the more surprising that there is no ancient Egyptian Bible, Koran,
Odyssey
, or
Gilgamesh
epic, in which poets would have organized and gathered an “authorized” version of Egyptian mythology. Much of what we know about Egypt’s myths, beliefs, and history has been carefully reconstructed from an elaborate array of funerary literature and art uncovered and translated during the past two hundred years. Few ancient civilizations documented their beliefs in as rich a detail and in so many locations as the Egyptians did. Obviously it helps that they had more than three thousand years to create that mother lode of art and architecture. Despite several centuries of grave robberies and plundering by invaders, the world has been left with a vast treasury that includes art, artifacts, and writings found in thousands of tombs, temples, and burial sites located throughout Egypt.

As anyone who has wandered through an old cemetery knows, you can learn a lot from burial plots. Sometimes a simple headstone can provide a world of information about whole families and what they believed and how they died. In Egypt, walking around cemeteries has provided a veritable library of information about thousands of years of Egyptian life and beliefs. For instance, in the carved limestone tombs near the Old Kingdom pyramid of King Unas (c. 2375–2345 BCE), archaeologists found a “house for the afterlife,” complete with men’s and women’s quarters, a master bedroom, and bathrooms with latrines. But perhaps more significant was the discovery of columns of hieroglyphics called the
Pyramid Texts,
considered the world’s oldest known religious writings, carved more than four thousand years ago in the tomb of King Unas.

If you grew up on a diet of Walt Disney witches, the word “spell” probably invokes notions of hocus-pocus and “eye of newt.” But the Pyramid Texts’ collection of “spells” and incantations (the exact Egyptian phrase for them was “words to be spoken”) was far less exotic. Actually, in modern parlance, the Pyramid Texts were more like “how-to” manuals—travel guides to the afterlife. Evoking the names of the enormous pantheon of Egyptian gods, the “spells” they contained provided the dead king with the “scripts” that were necessary for his safe passage, survival, and well-being in the land of the dead. They sometimes warned of dangers and included the correct dialogues with gatekeepers and ferrymen he would encounter along the way, providing the deceased with a “cheat sheet” of answers to questions that would vouch for his legitimacy as a king and heir of the gods. Typical of the Texts is this “Utterance,” in which the king is ferried across the sky to join the sun god: