Notes on Ancient Egypt

I am trying to distinguish the pre-Mosaic Egyptian teaching from the post-Mosaic, as in the Papyrus of Hunifer and the Papyrus of Ani. Akhenaton and this montheism seems to have occurred before Moses, but after Joseph went into Egypt with the teaching of Abraham of the name "God Most High," given by Melchizadek. The Pyramid texts, with the earliest copy of the Book of Life, contain spells and negative commandments, but lack anything like the transcendent theology attributed to the Akhenaton and later Egyptians. We will look for the explication that Amon, or the highest God, is "maker of heaven and earth," rather than a being that has come to be- though this too, as we know, can become complicated. It is very hard to fathom a nation whose history covers 3 millennia- look back at our own past 3 millennia, and try to say what sort of a people this means we are, or what we think. But the Egyptians changed very slowly or were quite stable, with three distinct dynastic periods and two inter-dynastic times. This history, available to us following Manetho, seems not to have been available to the Greeks. What endures is not even the race as Egypt, but the empire. This is a bit strange, and similar to the Papacy, if less like crowns such as that of England.

One wishes to find in our recovery of Egyptian texts what Solon, Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato extracted from the Egyptians of the 5th century B. C., by visiting the priests- the teaching of Atlantis, (Critas) recollection (Meno), Thoth (Phaedrus) and the invisible sun (Republic). From Timaeus and Critias dialogues, we learn that Egypt had no floods, but rather an Atlantis story- the Noah story came to Israel through Joseph, but came from Babylon or Shem and Malchizedek, brought into Egypt through Abraham (1800 B.C.). The negative confessions are similar to the ten words, but rather than saying one did not do many of these things, the Mosaic law says one must not. The Decalogue is also more concise than any Egyptian teaching, though there are similarities and this is not surprising, since Moses was studies in all the wisdom of the Egyptians (Acts 7:22), so that the words were communicable. Moses wrote in alphabetic writing, not pictographs or engraved images, and we think the alphabet developed when Israel was in Egypt and did NOT use hieroglyphs. The first known syllabic wring is on a cliff in Egypt, and the first alphabetic writing is found in the mines on the Sinai Peninsula.

   It is very interesting that Moses did not take over from the Egyptians the teaching of the sun as a god and of the immortality of the soul. The de-emphasis on the sun in Genesis should be compared with the recent event of monotheism in Egypt, with the reign of Akhan-aton and then the restoration of the many gods. This occurred about 1450-1350 B.C., while Moses occurred about 1350-1250. The emphasis of Christianity on resurrection may be present, but veiled in the Old Testament- there is the tree of life in Genesis, and the statement of Job, but otherwise, it is difficult to even establish that the Hebrew scriptures teach the immortality of the soul, and the Sadducees did not even believe in it. So immortality and the sun are two things Moses leaves behind in Egypt. As noted by a teacher, the sun is intentionally de-emphasized in the account of the creation in Genesis, not appearing in its Egyptian or archetypal analogy until a Psalm of David.

"Nietzsche refers to concepts related to Christianity as "Egyptian" or "Egyptianism" in his 1881 work Daybreak (Morgenröthe), Book I, Aphorism #72. 

In this passage, he discusses the development of the belief in an afterlife and the obsession with retaining the body for eternity, linking this desire to what he calls "refined Egyptianism." 

The Christian and Egyptian ideas are different: Flesh and blood cannot inherit, but the body is transformed as in the twinkling of an eye- Jesus tells Magdalene, "Do not hold me for I have not yet ascended..." (John 20:17). Something occurs that is different from the taxidermy of the physical body, evident in the Turin Shroud, regarding light... In the Herodotean study of Egypt- from which he excludes their religion, this literalization regarding the body is related to the making of gods in the images of animals, whole the Greeks are said by contrast to portray the gods as humans.

In 3 thousand years, through kingdoms and dynasties, civil wars and intermediate periods, Egypt never developed a council, congress, nor free republican government: There is no Polybian cycling of regimes- it's ALL monarchy! When a dynasty is deposed, the usurper simply becomes Pharaoh or there is no Egypt.

There are two beginnings of the city, in gathering together or in conquest, as shown in the examples of Theseus and Romulus. When this occurs as at Athens, there. selection among the customs of the various villages. Egypt is the first empire, and its history for us begins when northern and southern kingdoms are united- Empire is a kingship over kingships, repeating the pattern of the transition from village to city, with certain differences. Cities join to form nations, and that too is what a kingship is.

The seven empires of the West as considered from Daniel and the Protestant theologians are Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome and another, a revived Rome, yet to come.

For 3 thousand years, there is no council or deliberation in Egypt, nor did anyone consider it then, nor does anyone even notice- Egypt is 2 dimensional- the sun is a disk, but not a sphere. Geometry is straight lines, from surveying land, while round things seem to come from Babylon, where geometry developed out of astronomy and in relation to calendaration. Hence we get from Babylon the division of both the circle and the year into 360 parts. Egypt takes credit for the solar calendar, and this will have to be studied. They get the wheel very late, though human sacrifices ceases quite early, as in Babylon.

What if the stone circle at Nabta Playa were the pillars of Enoch? The dates nearly coincide, and Nabta Playa does record some profound astronomical knowledge. These may be a people different from those who became the Egyptians, and it has been suggested that the Sphynx may be pre-dynastic- from when it once rained in the land of Egypt.

The story of Osiris may well be a historical memory, from pre-dynastic Egypt, of which there are very few. Certain peoples, 5 or 6, are evident from the table of nations in Genesis 10. Osiris seems to be an actual king, very early, developing into a god through time, and Thoth as well. The story is collected and told by Plutarch in his Moralia. Most interesting is the antiquity of the time evident in his travelling east for 25 years to teach the peoples agriculture rather than cannibalism. Human sacrifice disappeared early in Egypt and Babylon, in the third millennium B.C., but not elsewhere. It is replaced in Canan by animal sacr