The Ancient Egyptians

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A traveler coming down from the desert in summer would have seen it as a single line: a band of dark earth, no wider in places than a man could walk in an hour, laid through a waste of pale sand that ran to the horizon on either side. The line was the floodplain of the Nile. Each year, in the weeks after the southern rains, the river rose and spread across it and went down again, leaving behind a film of black silt so dark and so fertile that the people who farmed it named their whole country after it. They called it Kemet — the Black Land. The desert beyond, red in the low sun, they called Deshret, the Red Land, and the two words held a whole cosmology between them: the fertile and the barren, the living and the dead, the ordered and the formless. The Egyptians were the people of the black thread. Everything they made — the kingship, the writing, the gods, the tombs cut into the cliffs at the desert’s edge — grew out of that yearly miracle of the water and the silt.

A people gathered by the river

The Nile did what no king could have done: it gave the valley a single rhythm. The flood arrived everywhere at once, the harvest followed everywhere at once, and a population strung out for hundreds of miles along one waterway came to share one calendar, one set of seasons, one dependence. By the late fourth millennium BCE the scattered farming communities of the valley had consolidated into two realms — Upper Egypt, the long southern reach, and Lower Egypt, the broad northern delta. Around 3100 BCE a king the later tradition remembered as Menes, and whom most Egyptologists identify with the figure named Narmer on a carved slate palette from Hierakonpolis, brought the two together into one kingdom. On that palette he wears the white crown of the south on one face and the red crown of the north on the other, and he founded, by tradition, a capital at the junction of the two lands, the White Wall that became Memphis.

The Narmer Palette (c. 3100 BCE), Egyptian Museum, Cairo — the king wears the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt on its two faces, an emblem of unification. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

What followed is the fact that most distinguishes the Egyptians among the peoples of antiquity: they lasted. From the unification to the death of the last Macedonian queen and the absorption of the country into Rome in 30 BCE runs a span of roughly three thousand years, and across it the culture stayed recognizably itself — the same evolving script, the same family of gods, the same conception of the king as the living link between heaven and earth. The continuity was not unbroken. Historians divide the long story into three great ages of centralized power — the Old Kingdom that built the pyramids, the Middle Kingdom of the classical literature, the imperial New Kingdom of the great temples — separated by “intermediate periods” in which central authority dissolved into rival local powers, and closed by a Late Period of Libyan, Kushite, Persian, and finally Greek rule. But each collapse was followed by a reunification that restored the old forms, as though the model of the single kingdom under one god-king were too deeply set to be replaced. The river, the writing, and the religion held the people together across every interval. To be Egyptian was to belong to that long line.

The king and the order of the world

At the center stood the king, and the king’s first duty was not to conquer or to build but to do maat. Maat is the word, untranslatable by any single English term, for the right ordering of the world — truth, justice, balance, the cosmic harmony established at the first sunrise. It was personified as a goddess crowned with a single ostrich plume, and that plume was the hieroglyph for the concept itself. Against maat stood isfet: chaos, falsehood, violence, the formless dark out of which the world had been made and into which it perpetually threatened to fall back. The Egyptians did not assume that order was the natural state of things. They held the opposite — that order had to be created and then continually sustained, that the sun’s daily rising and the river’s yearly flood and the justice of the courts were all one labor, the labor of keeping isfet at bay. The king performed that labor on behalf of the gods and the people: he offered maat to the deities in the temples, and in return he was charged with maintaining it on earth. When kingship failed and the land fell into disorder, the literature of the intermediate periods describes it as a victory of isfet — the rich made poor, the river running with blood, the son striking the father — and the restoration of a strong king is described as the return of maat. This was not a metaphor for good government. It was the conviction that the moral and the cosmic order were the same order, and that human conduct bore directly on whether the sun would rise.

The gods through whom maat was sustained were many, and the Egyptians felt no need to reduce them to a system. The creator could be told as Atum of Heliopolis, who brought forth the first pair of gods from himself and so generated the great family of nine, the Ennead; or as Ptah of Memphis, who thought the world in his heart and spoke it into being with his tongue; or as Khnum, the ram-headed god of the southern cataract, who fashioned each living body on his potter’s wheel. The sun was Ra, crossing the sky by day and the underworld by night. Divine identities flowed into one another — Amun-Ra, Ptah-Sokar-Osiris — without the seams being felt as contradictions. A god could be present in a cult statue, a sacred animal, the king, and a force of nature all at once. To the Egyptians this was not confusion but the abundance of the divine, mirrored in the fertility of their land.

The conviction that life was good

No people has been more associated, in the imagination of others, with death — with mummies, tombs, the embalmer’s table, the long preoccupation with the world beyond. The association is exact, and it is almost completely misread. The Egyptians built the pyramids and cut the painted tombs and refined the embalmer’s art not because they were morbid but because they were the opposite. They loved the world — the river and the fields, the banquet and the hunt, the family and the body — so intensely that they could not believe such a life was meant to end. The whole vast apparatus of their funerary religion was an attempt to carry life, whole and recognizable, across the threshold of death. The tomb paintings do not dwell on dissolution; they show the dead man fowling in the marshes, his wife beside him, the harvest gathered, the table laid — the good life, fixed and made permanent. Death, for the Egyptian, was not an ending but a dangerous passage, and everything was bent to getting safely through it.

A person was held to be composed of several parts that death pulled apart and the funerary rites had to reunite. There was the body, which had to be preserved — hence the mummification, the careful drying and wrapping that kept the physical form from corruption. There was the ka, the life-force, born with a person and sustained after death by the offerings left at the tomb. There was the ba, the mobile aspect of the self, depicted as a human-headed bird, free to leave the tomb and return to it. And there was the akh, the transfigured spirit that the rites brought into being, joined to the imperishable stars. The mummy was the body’s anchor; the statue and the painted images were backups, places the ka could inhabit if the body failed. At the funeral the priests performed the Opening of the Mouth on the mummy and the statue, touching the mouth and eyes with ritual implements to restore the senses, so that the dead could once again breathe, eat, see, and speak in the world to come.

The judgment scene from the Book of the Dead of Hunefer (c. 1275 BCE), British Museum — the heart of the deceased is weighed against the feather of maat, with Anubis at the balance and Thoth recording the verdict. Image via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The passage culminated in judgment. In the hall of the underworld — the Duat — the heart of the dead was set on a balance against the feather of maat, Anubis adjusting the scales and Thoth recording the result. If the heart, weighed down by wrongdoing, sank below the feather, a waiting monster devoured it and the person ceased utterly to be. If it balanced, the dead one was declared “true of voice” and passed into the company of Osiris, the murdered and resurrected god who ruled the blessed dead. This weighing of the heart is the moral hinge of the whole system: the afterlife was not bought with wealth alone, however much the rich spent on their tombs, but turned on the conduct of a life, recited before the assembled gods as a list of things the dead one had not done — I have not stolen, I have not killed, I have not caused tears. The spells that guided the dead through these dangers were written first on the walls of the royal pyramids (the Pyramid Texts), then on the coffins of officials (the Coffin Texts), and at last on papyrus scrolls placed with the dead of every rank — the collection the modern world calls the Book of the Dead, which the Egyptians called the book of coming forth by day.

The god’s words

The instrument that carried all of this — the religion, the king-lists, the medicine, the accounts of grain — was the writing, and the Egyptians regarded it as a gift of the gods. They called their sacred script medu-netjer, “the god’s words,” and credited its invention to Thoth, the ibis-headed lord of wisdom. Hieroglyphs were a system of extraordinary beauty and difficulty: hundreds of signs that were at once pictures and sounds, some standing for whole words, some for consonant clusters, some silent markers that told the reader which sense was meant. For everyday use the scribes developed cursive hands — hieratic, and later the rapid demotic — but the monumental hieroglyphic script kept its pictorial form, carved and painted on temple walls, for more than three thousand years. To learn it was the privilege of a small literate class; a famous schoolbook urges the boy to study, for the scribe alone is exempt from toil and his name endures.

The very sacredness of the script became, in the end, its tomb. When the temples closed and the priesthoods that had transmitted the writing died out, the knowledge of how to read it died with them. The last datable hieroglyphic inscription was carved at the island temple of Philae, far up the Nile, on the 24th of August in the year 394 — a graffito by a priest named Esmet-Akhom beside an image of a god. Within a generation, no one alive could read it. For roughly fourteen centuries the script that had recorded a civilization stood mute on the monuments, gazed at by Greeks and Romans and Arabs and European travelers who took its signs for mystic symbols, allegories of hidden truths, anything but the ordinary writing it largely was. The lock held until 1822, when a French scholar, Jean-François Champollion, working from the three parallel scripts on a stela found at Rosetta — Greek, demotic, and hieroglyphic — established that the signs were phonetic as well as pictorial and read the names of the kings. The god’s words spoke again, and an entire lost world began to be recovered.

The Rosetta Stone (196 BCE), British Museum — its decree in hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek gave Champollion the key to the script in 1822. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The Egyptians were not only priests and scribes. The same precision that ordered the temple ordered the calendar: they reckoned a civil year of 365 days, twelve months of thirty with five added at the end — the earliest such solar calendar known, and the distant ancestor of the one the world keeps now. Their physicians, while they treated by spell as readily as by drug, also recorded careful clinical observation; the surgical papyrus bought by the collector Edwin Smith sets out forty-eight cases of wounds and fractures in a sober order of examination, diagnosis, and treatment, with hardly a charm among them — the oldest known treatise on trauma. The sage Imhotep, who designed the first great pyramid in stone for the king Djoser, was remembered for two thousand years afterward and at last worshipped as a god of healing.

The oldest and wisest of nations

When the Greeks came to know Egypt, they came as latecomers to something immensely old, and they never quite recovered from the encounter. Herodotus, traveling there in the fifth century BCE, reported that the Egyptians were the oldest of all peoples and that the Greeks had taken from them the names of the gods and the practices of religion. The tradition grew that the great names of early Greek thought — Pythagoras and Plato among them — had studied at the feet of Egyptian priests; modern scholarship treats those journeys as a Greek way of honoring Egypt rather than documented biography. But the conviction became a force in history. Egypt was fixed in the Mediterranean mind as the homeland of the oldest and most secret wisdom.

Out of that conviction grew the figure who would carry Egypt into the Western esoteric tradition. In the Greek-speaking world of Roman Egypt, Thoth, the scribe of the gods, was fused with the Greek Hermes and exalted into Hermes Trismegistus — “Thrice-Great Hermes” — a sage of immeasurable antiquity to whom was ascribed a body of philosophical and revelatory writings, the Hermetica. These texts, composed in Greek in the first centuries of the common era, presented their teaching as Egyptian wisdom of unfathomable age, a revelation older than Moses and the Greeks alike. Renaissance readers, recovering the Hermetica, took this claim at face value and built upon it the idea of a prisca theologia — an ancient theology, one true wisdom given to humanity at the dawn of time and handed down through a line of sages from Egypt onward. The historical Egyptians did not write the Hermetica; the texts are creatures of the Greco-Roman world. They were written under Egypt’s name because Egypt, by then, had become the very emblem of the ancient and the hidden — so that the long afterlife of the Nile people in Western imagination begins not with the Egyptians’ own theology but with what others made of its reputation.

The black thread, after the river

The old religion did not end at a single stroke; it thinned and was overtaken. As Christianity spread through the Roman province from the second century onward, the temples lost their endowments, their priesthoods, and at last their legal standing. The emperor Theodosius ordered the pagan cults closed at the end of the fourth century, and the temples that survived a while longer did so at the margins. Philae, on its island near the first cataract, held out longest of all, sustained by the devotion of the desert peoples to the south; the historian Procopius records that its temple of Isis was finally closed by an officer of the emperor Justinian around the year 537, the priests imprisoned and the divine images carried off to Constantinople. With that, the cult that had run for more than three thousand years came formally to its end.

Yet the people did not vanish, and neither, entirely, did the tongue. The language of the pharaohs survived into Christian Egypt as Coptic — the same ancient Egyptian language, in its final stage, now written in Greek letters with a few signs borrowed from demotic, and used by the Egyptian Christians for their scriptures and their liturgy. Arabic displaced it as a spoken language after the conquest of the seventh century, but it never wholly died: in the Coptic Orthodox Church the old language is still chanted in the services, the last living thread of the speech of Kemet. And after the long silence, the decipherment of the script opened the rest. The reading of the Rosetta Stone gave rise to a new discipline, Egyptology, which over two centuries has reconstructed from the monuments and the papyri a civilization that for so long had been only a rumor of wisdom — the actual Egyptians, with their tax records and their love poems, their physicians and their farmers, their conviction that the world was held in being against the dark and that a good life could be carried, whole, across the river of death. The image of secret wisdom the Greeks bequeathed to Europe was always partly their own invention. The thing itself, recovered, turned out to be stranger, plainer, and older than the legend — a people who looked at the black silt left by the flood and built three thousand years upon it.

→ In the library: Budge — The Book of the Dead (Papyrus of Ani, 1913) · Budge — Egyptian Magic (1899)

→ Related: Ancient Egypt · The Egyptian Priesthood · Priests Of Amun · Maat · Thoth · Hermes Trismegistus · Pyramid Texts · Coffin Texts · Book Of The Dead · The Ennead · Opening Of The Mouth · Weighing Of The Heart · Ka Egyptian Soul · Ba Egyptian Soul · Duat · Ra · Atum · Ptah · Hathor · Anubis · Osiris · Isis · Imhotep · Akhenaten · Memphis · Thebes