Gift of the Nile

[The following is Episode 2 of my 16-part documentary series entitled Larger than Life, about the role that beliefs play in shaping the events of our civilization.]

            For more than four thousand years it has reclined on the plains of Giza, a silent witness to a land and a people whose greatness will never, can never be forgotten.  It is a sentinel, a scribe, and a survivor, a giant that was born in an age of giants.  It beckons us to come closer, to hear its secrets, but warns us not to come too close.  It speaks in riddles, and challenges us to understand them.  It speaks of an age of magic, and mystery, and of power that can still leave us in awe.  Is it a bygone age, as dead as the lifeless desert sands that cut across these silent monuments?  Or has its life been preserved, somehow, in these giants of stone?  Come closer, the Sphinx says, learn our secrets, and you may learn of your own destiny.

From Babylon, we move to Egypt, the land of the Nile.  The Nile was much more generous to the people that occupied its shores than the Tigris and Euphrates were to the inhabitants that lived between them.   The land of Egypt did not have to be conquered, or tamed – in its rich soil, two crops could be grown in a single year.  And natural barriers surrounding it protected its people from foreign invaders.  There were deserts in the west and east, harsh jungles in the south, and the Mediterranean Sea in the north.  Here, a civilization could grow and prosper in relative comfort and security.  Is it any wonder that an ancient historian called this land “the gift of the Nile”?

            For the first Egyptians, the Nile was literally the source of life.  Each year, the floodwaters of that river inundated the land, and as they receded, fertile lands were left in their wake.  It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the Egyptian creation epic begins with a watery chaos, called Nu, or Nun, and out of Nu everything else was said to have come into being.  But the sun was also an important, overpowering presence, and so from Nu there first arose the great sun god, who was given a variety of names to match the different attributes of the sun.  The rising sun was called Khepri, the great scarab beetle – an animal sacred to the Egyptians – or Ra-Harakhte, the winged solar disk.  The mid-day sun was Ra, the powerful, the setting sun Atum, the old man.  As it descended to the horizon, it became Horus.  Aten was yet another name for the solar deity.  From the sun god all of the other gods were descended, beginning with Shu, the god of the air, and Tefnut, the goddess of moisture.  When these two children were temporarily lost to him, and later recovered, his joyful tears were said to have produced the first human beings.

Ra-Harakhte

            We are told that Ra lived on the earth for a time, ruling over his human subjects directly, but as he began to grow old, their reverence for him gave way to disrespect and blasphemous mockery.  Angered at their insolence, he called a conference of the gods.  Addressing himself to Nu, the primordial god, he said, “Nu, you are first born, oldest of the gods.  I am your son, I seek your council.  The men that I have created speak evil of me.  They anger me, but I will not destroy them before you have spoken.”  Nu replied, “ You are a great god, you are greater than I, you are the son who is mightier than his father.  If you turn your eye upon the men who blaspheme you they shall perish from the earth.”  Following Nu’s advice, Ra turned his wrathful eye upon humanity, forcing them to flee into the shadows.  But the other gods were not appeased, and urged him to hunt them down.  Ra sent the goddess Hathor-Sekhmet in pursuit, but upon realizing that she would not stop until she destroyed all of humanity, Ra resolved to trick her, as he wished to punish his people into submission, not obliterate them completely.  He ordered his attendants to brew a powerful beer, pleasing to the taste and dyed red to attract her interest.  Upon drinking it, Hathor-Sekhmet sunk into a deep sleep, and abandoned her bloodthirsty quest.

            The story of ancient Egypt is marked off in dynasties – families of monarchs, thirty-one in all, with the first beginning about 5000 years ago.  During the centuries before then, the peoples of the land had banded together into small communities along the river, and these had gradually grown into independent cities, which had finally joined to form two distinct territories in the north and south of Egypt.  Menes, the first of the dynastic kings, created his dynasty when he united the two parts of Egypt into a single kingdom.  He also built the city of Memphis, around the same time that the legendary Gilgamesh built his city of Uruk.  Like Gilgamesh, Menes and the kings that followed him were considered to be living gods - direct descendants of Ra - and their power was absolute.  Today we call them pharaohs, but this term, which comes to us from the Bible, actually means “palace” or “Great House” in the Egyptian tongue, and wasn’t used by the people of that land until the later dynasties.  Just as we often talk of “the White House” or “the Pentagon” today, for the Egyptians back then there was no distinction between the palace and its occupant – the power that resided in the man and the office was the same.  His people were never allowed to look at him face to face, even if they had the privilege to talk to him.  He was addressed as, “Lord of heaven, lord of earth, sun, life of the whole world, lord of time, measurer of the sun’s course, Tum for men, lord of well-being, creator of the harvest, maker and fashioner of mortals, bestower of breath upon all men, giver of life to all the host of gods, pillar of heaven, threshold of the earth, weigher of the equipoise of both worlds, lord of rich gifts, increaser of the corn . . .” and so on, and so on.  Now these were some very awesome responsibilities, and in the eyes of the people, the power of the pharaoh could handle them.  In the land of the ancient Egyptians, it was the pharaoh that made the sun rise every morning and set every night, and he was expected to never disappoint them.  We can conclude that all of the pharaohs managed to meet this particular challenge, but they were not always as successful in performing the others.  Whenever the crops failed, for instance, the people blamed their king.  We might be tempted to scoff at this today, until we remember that a sour economy has cost more than one U.S. President his job.

Imhotep

Egypt’s golden age began in the third dynasty, under king Zoser, a patron of the arts and sciences.  It’s believed that the step pyramid, the earliest one known to us, was designed by his physician, Imhotep.  Like the legendary King Arthur and his tutor Merlin, Zoser, under Imhotep’s guidance, was a wise a benevolent king.  When a seven-year famine struck the land, Imhotep advised King Zoser to perform a pilgrimage to the land of Elephantine, where he built a temple to the God Khnum, controller of the flow of the Nile.  The famine ended, the people were saved, and the grateful subjects credited this to the religious faith of Zoser and his sage.  Born as a commoner, Imhotep had risen to prominence in the king’s court through the application of his brilliant talents.  A scribe, priest, architect, carpenter, magician, poet, and philosopher, he may have been the world’s first “Renaissance man” – he was also the one who first uttered that famous proverb, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”  His simple philosophy of contentment and a cheerful disposition, along with his impressive achievements in medicine and architecture, gained Imhotep such a reputation during his lifetime that after he died he was worshiped as a god – the “Prince of Peace”, as some of his worshippers called him.  Imhotep’s step pyramid, constructed as part of a funeral complex for his king and rising to a height of 204 feet, was an impressive achievement in his day, but it was only a prelude for the greater architectural marvels that would arise in the generations that followed his.  According to tradition, the famous pyramids of Giza were built during the fourth dynasty – the Great Pyramid constructed under the reign of Egypt’s greatest ancient ruler: Khufu, around 2600 B.C.  These pyramids, built with carved stones weighing up to twenty tons, are a marvel to behold to this day.  The Great Pyramid – 481 feet high when it was originally built - covers an area of more than 13 acres, and its edifice alone consists of more than two million limestone blocks averaging two-and-a-half tons each.  And while we still do not know exactly how these pyramids were built, we can guess that their construction took years to finish.  It is still popular to imagine the building being done with throngs of slaves, chained together and lashed on to greater exertion by cruel taskmasters, but actually the work was voluntary, and the laborers were well compensated.  When the Greek historian Herodotus visited Egypt in the fifth century B.C., his hosts told him that it took the work of one hundred thousand men over a period of thirty years to build the Great Pyramid.  This alone is evidence of the peaceful environment that the earliest dynasties enjoyed, undisturbed by external threats.

            If Egypt’s earliest leaders did not have to look outward, they were certainly looking upward.  For pharaohs like Khufu, the pyramid was literally a stairway to heaven, a bridge from this world to the next.  Of all of the peoples of antiquity, it seems that none were more obsessed with the idea of an afterlife than the Egyptians.  But during the earliest dynasties, the gift of immortality belonged exclusively to the pharaohs.  As direct descendants of a god, this was their natural right.  In the earliest age, the kings were born as gods, but around the time of the third dynasty, each king had to undergo a transformation and become a god.  This solved a potentially awkward problem for pharaohs who had many children.  If only the king could be a god, then only his royal successor could share in the privilege, or else within just a few generations there could have been a proliferation of divine human beings living throughout the land.  An elaborate coronation ritual was developed in which the priests would take the young prince into a temple, perform a secret ceremony, and then present him to his subjects as a new god-king.  The priests became an important class within Egyptian society.  They prepared statues of the gods for religious ceremonies, read ceremonial scrolls, prepared incenses and healing potions, and in later dynasties acted as the voices of oracles.  People who wished to commune with the gods would enter a temple where a priest would be sitting in a special compartment.  The priest would respond to a person’s questions or petitions by speaking through a special hole in the compartment that allowed him to remain unseen.  The priests were a living link between the king, his mortal subjects, and the world of the supernatural.

In addition to building massive stone monuments, the pharaoh’s people, under the guidance of the priests, took great pains to preserve his body, and to supply his tomb with food and drink to sustain his soul in the afterlife.  But the giant pyramids and elaborate funereal preparations that were created in the service of Khufu and other pharaohs eventually reduced the people to misery.  The central government of Egypt collapsed after the sixth dynasty, in part because it had exhausted itself from the huge expenditures required to support its massive building projects, and in part because the nobility began to demand a greater role in the kingdom.  Even the climate itself, which had cradled this empire for so many years, seemed to rebel against the established order.  By 2100 B.C., the united kingdom of Egypt had dissolved into separate fiefdoms.

After more than a hundred years of anarchy, the kingdom was resurrected when the governor of Thebes began the reunification of Egypt under the eleventh dynasty.  The restored kingdom, with its capital now at Thebes, ushered in a golden age for Egypt.  The pharaohs now directed their energies to public works projects that benefited all of the people, such as the construction of dams and water reservoirs.  And the people enjoyed what was to them a much more important gift –the pharaoh’s right to eternal life.  Temples and new cults began to appear throughout the land.  It was during this time that another pantheon of gods assumed a special importance to the Egyptians.

According to legend, two of Ra’s descendants, Geb, the god of the earth, and Nut, the goddess of the sky, together produced two sons, Set and Osiris, and two daughters, Isis and Nephthys.  Osiris succeeded Ra as king of the earth, and took his sister Isis as wife.  But Set, who hated his brother and coveted his sister Isis, brutally murdered Osiris, cutting his body into pieces and throwing them into the Nile.  Horus, the son of Osiris, avenged his father by defeating Set in battle.  He gathered up the pieces of his father’s body when they reached the delta of the river, and Isis, with the help of the god Anubis, restored her husband to life.  The resurrected Osirus became lord of the underworld, and Horus assumed his father’s role as king of the earth.

Osiris, God of the Underworld

Belief in the death and resurrection of Osiris offered comfort to the living that there was an afterlife.  They believed that Osiris was the great judge of the dead, judging pharaohs and peasants alike.  All had to appear before his tribunal after death and make an account of what they had done during life.  The testimony of each soul was judged by weighing the heart of the deceased on one side of a balance, and a symbol of truth and righteousness in the other.  Only those whose heart was not too light on the balance would be welcomed into the afterlife.  The Book of the Dead, a manual of conduct on how to conduct one’s soul in the trials of the underworld, became a guide to those who wished to attain immortality:

If this text be known [by the deceased] upon earth or if he causeth it to be done in writing upon [his] coffin, then will he be able to come forth on any day he pleaseth, and to enter into his habitation unrepulsed. Cakes and ale and joints of meat from those which are on the altar of Ra shall be given unto him, and his homestead shall be among the fields of the Field of Reeds (Sekhet-Aaru), and wheat and barley shall be given unto him therein, and he shall flourish there even as he flourished upon earth.

The need to preserve the body through mummification continued to remain an important practice.  Egyptians believed that the most important life force was the ka, a psychic element that accompanied the body in life, and that could not survive after death unless the body or a likeness of it was preserved.  In addition to the mummified remains of the deceased, wood or stone replicas of the person were usually left in the tomb in case the mummy was destroyed.  In this way, if the ka survived the judgment of Osiris, it could then pass on to a glorified existence in the afterlife.  Furniture, books, and other comforts of life were also left in the tomb so that they could be enjoyed by the deceased in the paradise of the dead.  But those who were judged unworthy by Osiris were condemned to perpetual hunger and thirst, or dismemberment at the hands of violent otherworldly executioners.  In Egypt, then, we see the earliest visions of Heaven and Hell.

This second, or Middle, Kingdom was an age of enlightened, more beneficent rulers, but it lasted for only 300 years.  At the end of this age, for the first time in their history, Egyptians were overrun by foreign invaders – the Hyksos, who overwhelmed them with weapons of war that had hitherto been unknown to them: horses, war chariots, and body armor.  The Hyksos defeated the Egyptians, but they could not conquer them, and in their wake a new kingdom arose.  The liberator of Egypt was Tutmoses, who led his armies into victory over the Hyksos in the north, and the Nubians in the south.  His crowning victory was at the battle of Megiddo – the Armageddon of our New Testament – where he defeated a rebel prince by orchestrating a cunning surprise attack against the city.  Tutmoses has been called the Napoleon of Egypt by some modern historians, and he more than lived up to the comparison.  Through his military exploits, he fashioned an empire, having extended his rule as far as Palestine and Syria, and he was a benevolent ruler.  And while he might have resembled Napoleon in height, unlike the little corporal, Tutmoses never lost a battle.  In fact, through his leadership he revived a nation that was on the brink of destruction and transformed it into the greatest world power that had ever existed up to that time. 

Tutmoses III

Under the leadership of Tutmoses and others like him, Egypt developed a radically different orientation toward the rest of the world.  Having been shaken by the experience of foreign invasion, and educated by the invaders’ weapons of war, the peoples of the New Kingdom were more aggressive, and outward looking.  From the eighteenth through the twentieth dynasties, the Egyptians engaged in a series of conquests, and two new classes of people appeared in the land: professional soldiers . . . and slaves.  In fact, it was probably during this time that the Israelites were in bondage until Moses led them out of captivity.  Like the pharaoh of Moses’ time, the kings of this age were bold, ambitious, arrogant, and, never modest.  Amenhotep III used a clever method of propaganda to win the admiration and loyalty of his people.  He distributed small statuettes of scarab beetles throughout the land, and on each one was written summaries of his accomplishments.  And it was during the New Kingdom that one of the greatest religious innovators, Amenhotep IV, came to power.  During his reign, he introduced the worship of a single god, Aton.  Changing his name to Akhenaton, which meant “Aton is satisfied”, the pharaoh ordered that all of the temples worshiping other gods be closed.  He compelled his people to worship him as a living god, who in turn worshiped the supreme god, Aton.  But his intolerance of other gods provoked a resistance among the people, and he met an untimely end.  His successor, Tutankhamen – the famous “King Tut”, restored the worship of other gods, bringing this brief experiment to a close.  And just what was this experiment?  Some have mistakenly called it monotheism – the belief in one god – but this was not what Akhenaton had attempted.  He had never tried to suggest that there was only one god – he merely wanted to give his god a place of unique prominence.  But for his time, and his people, this was still a very bold thing to attempt.

The New Kingdom produced great warrior kings, like Tutmoses, Seti I and Ramses II, and the Egyptians dominated their world until they met their match in a people called the Hittites, who they first encountered in 1400 B.C. and continued to fight for more than a century, until both sides finally wore each other out in the battle of Kadesh in 1274 B.C.  Each declared this battle a victory – it’s probably more correct to say that both sides lost the war.  After the twentieth dynasty, the exhausted Egyptians again found themselves on the defensive and succumbing to waves of foreign conquerors, becoming for a time a part of the same Assyrian Empire that had conquered the Sumerians, later falling to Alexander the Great, and finally becoming a protectorate of the Roman Empire.  The pyramids and other tombs of the great kings were victims to looters and grave robbers for more than two thousand years, until a new invader arrived in Egypt in 1798.  His name was Napoleon Bonaparte, and along with his soldiers he was accompanied by a corps of French scientists and historians who dedicated themselves to unlocking the secrets of the pyramids.  Napoleon had a fascination for ancient Egypt, and he hoped that by learning more about its glorious past, he might find a key to his own destiny.  Through the work of his scientists, a new appreciation of Egypt was born, along with a new field of study, called Egyptology.  Thanks in great part to the work of these scientists and others that followed in their wake, we have a better understanding of the culture, history, and religious beliefs of the ancient Egyptians today.

            For the Egyptians, as for the Sumerians, creation began with an act of usurpation, with a younger or newer god becoming dominant over an older one.  The gods quarreled, and plotted together, and betrayed one another.  They succumbed to jealousy, rage, grief, and all of the other emotions of mortal men.  They may have been more powerful, but they were not necessarily more perfect, and certainly not more moral, than human beings.  And their existences were intimately intertwined with those of mortals, in every sense of the word.  The pharaohs, not unlike Gilgamesh, prided themselves in having divine ancestors.  But in Osiris we see a special type of god – one who takes a personal interest in the right conduct of human beings, and rewards or punishes them accordingly.  And the death and resurrection experience of Osiris himself took on special meaning and relevance among his human subjects, offering them hope and consolation.  The age when men could speak directly to Gods in their lifetime had long passed in Egypt, even in the time of the earliest pharaohs, and yet in another way the gods moved closer to humanity.  As the gift of immortality passed downward, from their direct descendants the pharaohs, to the upper classes and personal attendants of the kings, to every Egyptian, the conduct of every man’s life was relevant to Osiris, and would be judged by him.  In a physical sense, human beings and gods had been progressively moving apart.  And we see, in the legends of both the Sumerians and Egyptians, that gods had been perturbed by the defiance of humanity, nearly being driven to destroy them.  But in a spiritual sense, the gulf between mortal and divine was actually closing.  Moral law was now beginning to hold sway over the lives of both.  Even gods, such as Set, would face punishment for acts of evil.  And in the hope of an afterlife, as evidenced in the quest of Gilgamesh and eventually in the desires and expectations of all Egyptians, humanity revealed its first yearnings to become more like gods.  These yearnings were reinforced by the stories and traditions of the Egyptians.  Not only were the pharaohs themselves capable of being transformed from mortals into gods, but so were other distinguished human beings, such as Imhotep, the designer of the step pyramid, and Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary sage credited with authoring the Hermetica, a multi-volumed work of inspirational writings.  The attainment of wisdom and practice of the good life offered more than the mere promise of immortality – for the adept, there was the hope of divinity as well.  In these legends and beliefs we see the beginnings of an idea that the human soul can be perfected, and can attain to a higher plain of being, perhaps that of godhood itself.  Gods could walk on the earth, and mortals could become gods.

And, just as we saw with the Sumerians, the fortunes of the gods and goddesses of Egypt often reflected the fortunes of their followers.  When Menes united Egypt into a single kingdom and established Memphis as its capital, Ptah, the high god of Memphis, was credited with creating the world.  But when the capital moved to Thebes hundreds of years later, Amon, the chief god of that city, became the “supreme and invisible creator”.  The Egyptian god Set was once highly venerated in certain parts of Egypt, but eventually lost his lofty place among the gods, apparently when his followers were conquered by devotees of Horus.  Afterwards, he was relegated to the status of a diabolical power, rather than a venerated one.  And we have already heard how Akhenaton later pushed all of these gods aside and gave Aton a special and supreme standing as the supreme deity, a short-lived preeminence that was lost immediately after Akhenaton’s death.  The history, status, and fate of the immortals continuously changed as the history of mortals in Egypt unfolded.

            The Greeks are generally credited with creating the science of history, but an ancient Egyptian would probably have scoffed at this.  As Egyptian priests once said to the Greek philosopher Solon: “You Greeks are mere children, talkative and vain; you know nothing at all of the past.”  They explained that in their histories were preserved accounts of many calamities, of global proportions:

There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes.

The Nile was the great protector of Egypt, allowing its citizens to survive holocausts of both fire and water.  When other civilizations rose and fell, Egypt survived.

And whatever happened either in your country or in ours, or in any other region of which we are informed – if there were any actions noble or great or in any other way remarkable, they have all been written down by us of old and are preserved in our temples.  Whereas just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the other requisites of civilized life, after the usual interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education, and so you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either amongst us or among yourselves.

. . . . you remember a single deluge only, but there were many previous ones; . . . you do not know that there formerly dwelt in your land the fairest and noblest race of men which ever live, and that you and your whole city are descended from a small seed or remnant of them which survived.  And this was unknown to you, because, for many generations, the survivors of that destruction died, leaving no written word.

And although the story of Atlantis has been preserved for us by the Greek philosopher Plato, according to him it is to the Egyptians that we must credit this, one of the most ancient and enduring legends that have fascinated mankind.