Ancient Egyptian mythology is not as widely popular as the mythology of Ancient Greece, primarily because the worldview of the ancient Greeks is incomparably closer to us. Hellenic ideas about beauty, justice, the ideal state structure, the hierarchy of moral and ethical values and, most importantly, the artistic understanding and expression of all these categories largely coincide with certain analogues from our time or from eras relatively close to us in time. Therefore, the ideological and semantic subtext of the Greek myth is easily understood (to a first approximation) by an unprepared reader.
The poetics of ancient Egyptian mythology is alien to the worldview of a person brought up on European culture. This makes it very difficult to perceive myths, and therefore their popularization. In Egyptian myth, events may seem to have no cause-and-effect relationship, the actions of the gods may seem psychologically unmotivated or blatantly inconsistent, and the plot itself is often incomprehensible. But even in the case when the reader is able not only to perceive the text, but also to see all its associative connections and semantic parallels, understanding will still be only rational, unemotional, because an alien system of images cannot cause an adequate sensory reaction.
The most difficult thing to understand is ancient Egyptian mythology because of its illogicality. The god Nehebkau constantly guards the entrance to the other world, but at the same time he is still present at the Afterlife Court and accompanies the sun god on a night voyage from west to east. According to one version of the cosmogonic legend of the city of Hermopolis (which, in turn, existed along with other legends about the creation of the world), the solar deity is born from a lotus, and the lotus becomes the “Eye” of the god; however, God spends the night in this flower, and during the day leaves it and flies around the earth.
Crocodiles, snakes and hippopotamuses are traditionally considered the embodiment of world evil – “non-existence and darkness”: evil forces are depicted in the form of these animals – but the good goddess Taurt is also depicted in the form of a hippopotamus, and the patron goddess of Lower (northern) Egypt is also depicted in the form of a snake. in the form of a crocodile or a man with the head of a crocodile – Sebek, lord of floods, the god on whom the harvest depends, the patron of hunters and fishermen. In another legend the same Sebek is spoken of as the enemy of the Sun. The goddess Serket appears in different versions of the same myth either as a good or an evil deity.
Even more indicative in this regard are the transformations of Seth: the god of droughts and desert, the killer of Osiris, the most beloved and revered by the Egyptians; the god whose birthday was considered the most unlucky day of the year is at the same time revered as the patron saint of the pharaohs, sanctuaries are erected in his honor and children are named – and these two mutually exclusive trends coexist for centuries.
For most gods, there are no strict rules of iconography that prescribe how these gods should be depicted: the same god was depicted either as a man, or as an animal, or as a man with the head of an animal. Finally, some gods do not even have constant names: they change depending on the time of day, on the action that the god is performing at the moment, etc.
For a person of the twentieth century, accustomed to thinking logically and systematically, such inconsistency prevents him from systematizing and logically comprehending the material – that is, putting it into some kind of holistic picture, within which it would be possible to identify some general patterns and with their help, if not explain, then at least classify disparate facts.
Illustration 1. The Sun God Ra, crowned with a solar disk, with a staff in the form of a bunch of papyrus. Bronze figurine; XXII Dynasty; British Museum, London.
It remains to add that the ancient Egyptian texts have mostly reached us in fragments; many of the hints and references contained in them are incomprehensible to us; finally, some myths were preserved only in retellings of ancient authors, who gave their own interpretation and, therefore, distorted the original meaning. The illogic of ancient Egyptian mythology is a natural consequence of the fact that in the polytheistic religion of Egypt for a very long time the concept of “religious dissent” did not exist: there were no dogmas in which belief was prescribed as mandatory, nor dogmas denied by theologians as “heresy.”
In fact, every nome (administrative district) of the country developed its own versions of the same tales and legends, interpreting the same religious postulates and mythological events differently.
The discrepancy between the versions of the legends was aggravated by the fact that the legends themselves influenced each other: plots and images were borrowed, different concepts were mixed, different ideas were syncretized, etc.; as a result, the gods of the ancient Egyptian pantheon over the centuries changed their iconography, roles, and were identified with each other for one reason or another – due to similarity in appearance, identity of functions, consonance of names; or, on the contrary, the image of some deity split into many varieties (hypostases).
All this led to the fact that even myths that developed and coexisted within the same theological center and in the same historical period interpreted the same provisions in completely different ways. With rare exceptions, the pronunciation of ancient Egyptian words is unknown. The vocalizations of their transliterations are purely conditional and in no way pretend to be phonetically accurate.
In particular, it was initially customary to place stress in vowels on the penultimate syllable. However, for various reasons, many violations of this, also purely conditional, rule took hold. In the future, stress is placed (by highlighting the stressed vowel in italics) at the first mention of a name or reality and only in those cases when they do not fall on the penultimate syllable.
It is better to trace how ideas about deities have changed over time using a specific example. The Egyptians depicted the supreme god of their pantheon, the sun god Ra, as a man with the head of a falcon, crowned with a golden solar disk (illustration 1). The cult of this deity finally took shape during the reign of the pharaohs of the IV-V dynasties, two thousand years before the “age of Pericles” in Ancient Greece. Along with the cult of Ra, there was also a cult of the Sun goddess Mafdet, a female cheetah. But even earlier, in the Predynastic era, the inhabitants of the Nile coast honored other solar gods – Horus and Verus.
The chorus is a falcon flying through space with outstretched wings; his eyes are the Sun and the Moon; Depending on the direction of the deity’s flight, the time of day and seasons change. Unlike Horus, Verus was not the god of the Sun, but the god of sky and light, but since he, like Horus, was depicted as the same sun-eyed falcon, the images of these two gods in mythology often merged together. As Ra’s popularity grew, so did his religious significance. From the V Dynasty, the Sun God became the supreme, primary god.
It was no longer possible to think of the solar disk as just the eye of some other, more powerful deity. The image of the Choir – mainly thanks to the creativity of theologians – fell into several forms: Harmachis (Greek; Egyptian. Khor-em-akht – “Chorus in the sky”), Khorakhti (“Choir in the sky”) and some others. However, according to tradition, the original image of the Horus-Falcon still continued to exist – just as the image of Vera-Falcon still existed in popular imagination. One of the hypostases of the Choir gradually became identified with Ver, as a result of which a new deity arose – Harver (“Great Choir”).
Illustration 2. God of the rising sun Khepri with a scarab instead of a head. Drawing of the relief from the tomb of Ramesses I in the Valley of the Kings; XIX dynasty.
Around the same time, the ancient solar god Khepri began to be identified with Ra (illustration 2): from now on, Khepri appears as a hypostasis of Ra – “young Ra,” the god of the rising Sun. As many as four gods were now associated with the solar cult: in addition to Ra and Khepri, two hypostases of Horus were also added here – Horakhti and Harmakhis (for their very names imply “the inhabitant of the sky,” that is, the Sun). Therefore, Harmachis and Horakhti became the hypostases of Ra. The cult of the goddess Mafdet was relegated to a secondary level, but her image apparently influenced the iconography of the solar god: Ra was sometimes depicted as a cat.
The above description is very simplified: in reality, there are more than 20 hypostases of the Chorus (as well as gods, the historical genesis or iconography of which goes back to the idea of the solar falcon). The most common reason for identifying gods with each other was the desire of the provincial priesthood to give the cult of their local, local deity a greater “specific weight”, greater significance in the national religion.
Identifying with some well-known god, revered in all the nomes of Egypt, the provincial god became his hypostasis. Thus, Andjeti, whose cult center was located in Busiris, where this god was revered as the patron of nome, was at a certain moment identified with Osiris, and the Osiris-Anjeti hypostasis was formed.
At the end of the XI – beginning of the XII dynasty, after the promotion of the city of Thebes as the new capital and, therefore, the leading religious center of the state, the Theban god Amon was to take the main place in the pantheon. However, by this time the supremacy of the Sun God was too established in the country; his cult as the main god had too long a tradition and deep roots. Therefore, two trends coexisted for a long time, but then they merged, as a result of which the new god Amon-Ra appeared; at the same time, both Ra and Amon continued to be revered as “independent” gods.
It is noteworthy that the interweaving of the cults of two gods did not always entail a seemingly logical identification of them. During the reign of the pharaohs of the XI dynasty, the local god of Thebes Montu was extremely popular, appeared in theology even as one of the hypostases of Ra himself and was considered the “soul” (Egyptian Ba) of the solar god. But with the advancement of the Theban Amon, Montu did not identify with him, as one might expect, but, despite his popularity, was supplanted by Amon and remained a minor, local deity until the new heyday of his cult (XVIII-XX dynasties).
In the process of changing popular ideas about deities, the consonance of names played a crucial role. The Egyptians attached sacred meaning to the name (and in general to any words spoken out loud or written on papyrus). In the Hermitage collection there is a figurine depicting (presumably) the XII dynasty pharaoh Senusret III, on which the name of Ramesses II (XIX Dynasty) is engraved. During the reign of Ramesses II, who was deified during his lifetime, many statues immortalizing previous rulers were usurped. In such cases, no importance was attached to external resemblance: everything was determined by the name.
One should not, however, think that religious concepts were changed solely by the conscious will of the priests, who allegedly represented a caste of ideologists exploiting the “underdeveloped consciousness of the people.” The process of changing mythological and religious ideas was basically an objective historical process.
In the country of the Nile, like nowhere else, “antiquity” and “custom” were cultivated; therefore, if the reform of any ideological aspect was imposed too artificially, in most cases it failed. As for the “artificial god-creation” of the Egyptian priests, the overwhelming majority of theological calculations, despite their speculative nature, were based on faith in the gods, and not on ideological interest, suggesting conscious deception.
There is no paradox in this – history knows many analogues. The fathers of the Christian Church also speculatively canonized the Gospel texts and established rules for icon painting; and the founders of entire religious movements (such as Luther), and Augustine – they were all believers, but this did not prevent them from comprehending and modifying religious postulates. It seemed completely natural to the Egyptians to identify the gods – and not only the gods, but even people with the gods. Mysteries (ritual theatrical performances based on mythological themes) were perceived by them not as images of mythological events, but as the events themselves, where the “actors” are the gods themselves.
When the embalmer put on the mask of the jackal-headed god Anubis during the mummification of a corpse, he was considered Anubis himself as long as the mask was on him. The deceased Egyptian became the god of the Underworld, Osiris, and the name “Osiris” was automatically added to his name. During the funeral, the mourners were considered the goddesses Isis and Nephthys – the sisters of Osiris, and the son of the deceased – the son of Osiris, the god Horus.
There is a myth according to which Ra was once bitten by a poisonous snake and was cured with the help of magic spells. Therefore, if someone was bitten by a snake, the doctor would read spells and thereby identify the victim with the god Ra. The evil demon, at whose instigation the snake acted, was no longer dealing with a mere mortal, but with a deity, and just as the supreme god himself had once been healed, so the victim had to be healed.
Illustration 3. From left to right: Ra, Atum, Khepri – the daytime, evening and morning Sun. Drawing of the relief from the rock tomb of the dignitary Pennut in Aniba; XX dynasty.
If the emergence of mutually exclusive ideas about one deity and their synchronous existence in different regions is historically relatively easy to explain, then it is much more difficult to understand how these mutually exclusive ideas could coexist in the minds of one and the same person. In other words: how did the ancient Egyptian manage to believe in several contradictory positions at once?
What is, for example, the Sun? This is the golden calf. He is born in the morning, taking the form of a cow, by the sky goddess Nut. Within a day, the calf matures and becomes a bull; This bull is the embodiment of Ra. In the evening the bull copulates with the cow Nut; After this, Nut swallows the solar bull, and in the morning gives birth again. “Ra is resurrected in his son.”
At the same time, the Sun is not a calf, but a golden disk. Khepri, in the guise of a scarab beetle, rolls it across the sky to the zenith and hands it to Ra. The Sun God transports the disk in the Boat of Eternity (literally: “Boat of Millions of Years”) to the west and there gives it to the god Atum, who, in turn, lowers the disk beyond the horizon (illustration 3). At night, the Sun is transported back to the east through the waters of the underground Nile, which flows through the Underworld.
What is heaven? This is the river along which the Boat of Eternity floats, and the wings of a kite, and the body of the goddess Nut (when Nut is thought of as a woman), and her belly (when the goddess takes the form of a cow (illustration 4)). These contradictory mythological images arose in different periods of the history of Ancient Egypt, but in the minds of the Egyptians they then coexisted all at the same time.
To understand this, we must first remember that myth and fairy tale are not the same thing. A fairy tale is always a deliberate fiction, and a myth is always the truth. A myth represents a very definite picture of the world around us and a definite system of views on life. Any people, any era, in their own way, try to explain the world around them, the meaning of life, develop a certain hierarchy of values - and create their own mythology (although this term in this case may not be entirely appropriate).
Mythology is sometimes more rationalistic, sometimes less, but in all cases it contains, in addition to the rational, a poetic element. In Egyptian mythology, poetry dominates. And it is quite natural that in poetry the sky can be at the same time a river, and the wings of a bird, and a woman, and a cow. These are symbols, “poetic definitions” of the sky.
Illustration 4. The sky in the form of a cow with stars on its belly. The Heavenly Cow is supported in front and behind by guardian gods; in the center (with raised hands) is the god of wind and air Shu; in front of him and behind him are the evening and morning hypostases of the Boat of the Sun. Drawing of one of the images of the “Book of the Cow”; XIX dynasty.
“No Egyptian was expected to believe in any one idea of heaven, since all ideas were accepted as legitimate by the same theologians,” notes R. Anthes. “Moreover, since the Egyptians had as much common sense as we do, we can safely conclude that no one, except perhaps the most naive, took the combined image of the Celestial Cow in a literal sense.
This conclusion is supported by the fact that in the same royal tombs, built around 1300 BC. e., there are (and) other images of the sky. Anyone who would look for a representation of the actual shape of the sky in these images would only be completely confused.
Therefore, they were meant to serve only as symbols of heaven. The picture we are examining is an artistic combination of symbols, each of which reflects the sky and heavens. There is no doubt that at the very beginning of their history, around 3000 BC. e., the Egyptians understood that the idea of heaven cannot be comprehended directly by reason and sensory experience. They deliberately used symbols in order to explain it in terms that were understandable to the people of their time. But since no symbol can capture the whole essence of what it expresses, increasing the number of symbols tends to enhance understanding rather than mislead.”
This idea of R. Antes is very well explained by I.M. Dyakonov using a historical analogue, close and understandable to modern man: “Let’s take an analogy to the ancient myth-making semantic series in the form of a classic example of poetic metaphors from the literature of modern times: in Pushkin “… a bee from a cell waxy / flies for the tribute of the field…” Expanding these metaphors, we can put it this way: a bee is like a nun in that it lives in the dark and closed wax honeycombs of a hive, like a nun in a cell; a bee is similar to a tax collector or a warrior in that it collects nectar – the property of flowers, just as a warrior collects tribute from the subjects of a king or queen.”
The fact that the nun does not at all resemble a tax collector does not impoverish the image of the bee by its inconsistency, but enriches it, making it more versatile. In the same way, the sky – a cow, the sky – the beloved of the earth and the sky – a river do not contradict each other, but in the mythological sense they only enrich the understanding of the image of the sky.
And it turns out that even the fact that both Nut and the cow must be thought of completely physically and receive real sacrifices does not interfere with the matter.” It can be added that from the point of view of formal logic, for example, Nekrasov’s lines “You are wretched, / You are abundant, / You are powerful, / You are powerless, / Mother Rus’!”, and Derzhavin’s “I am the Tsar – I am a slave – I am a worm – I am God! ”However, in both cases, the thought with the help of figurative means is expressed not only no less accurately and clearly than it would be expressed in the language of logic and reasoned arguments, but it also received an emotional coloring.
Perhaps even clearer is the comparison of the ancient Egyptian hymn to Osiris:
Your essence, Osiris, is darker [than all other gods].
You are the Moon in the sky,
You become young when you wish
You become young when you want
And you are the great Nile on the banks at the beginning of the New Year:
People and gods live on the moisture that pours out of you.
And I also found that Your Majesty –
this is the king of the Underworld –
with the initial stanzas of B. L. Pasternak’s poem “The Definition of Poetry”:
This is a cool whistle,
This is the clicking of crushed ice floes,
This is the night that chills the leaf,
This is a duel between two nightingales.
These are sweet rotten peas,
These are the tears of the universe in the shoulder blades,
This is from the consoles and flutes of Figaro
Falls like hail onto the garden bed
It is easier to understand another historical era, someone else’s way of thinking, if you can understand what feelings caused the actions of people of that era. Many of their actions now seem blatantly absurd, but there are almost always analogues to such actions in our behavior – psychological analogues: it is not external actions that need to be compared, but the sensory impulses that caused the action. In the 17th century in Spain, villagers in the entire village whipped a bell (it didn’t ring well); the same thing was done in Uglich after the death of Tsarevich Dimitri.
We chuckle condescendingly at this, attribute it to ignorance and naivety, but we ourselves, having tripped over a snag, kick it out of frustration; breaking dishes during family quarrels; we painstakingly make something, but it just doesn’t work out, we have no more patience – and we throw the product against the wall; and these actions, completely absurd from the point of view of common sense, seem natural to everyone. The Egyptians brought food to their tombs; we bring flowers to our graves.
The Egyptians perceived the mysteries not as images of mythological events, but as the events themselves taking place in reality, and, although they knew the “scenario” in advance, they nevertheless waited with excitement to see whether the sun god (pharaoh) would defeat his enemy – the giant snake Apep (painted rope made of palm fiber), whether he will chop it up with a sword – but this is simply the “effect of presence” in art: with unrelenting emotional impact we reread our favorite novel many times and worry about the hero, even though we know the plot; we watch the film, forgetting that, for example, Peter I is played by an actor: for us he is Peter I himself, just as for the Egyptian the priest in the jackal mask became the god Anubis himself for the duration of the funeral mystery.
The Egyptians knew several mutually exclusive legends about the origin of the world and believed in all of them at the same time; the contradictions between the legends did not make them doubt that the world was created by the gods, but now scientists also put forward many mutually exclusive hypotheses about the origin of the universe, and no one denies astronomy as a science on this basis. We probably don’t attach sacred meaning to words spoken out loud, but still words mean much more to us than they might seem at first glance.
In the mythology of Ancient Egypt, poetry prevails, and it is quite natural that there is much more symbolism in poetry than in a rational system of views on life. Therefore, the Egyptian gods, unlike the Olympic gods, often did not have strictly defined functions. There were Ra – the god of the Sun, Hathor – the goddess of love and motherhood – there are analogues to such deities in Hellenic mythology; but along with this, in the religion of the Egyptians there were many pure abstractions that were not characteristic of the Greek religion.
For example: Hu, Sia, Sekhem and Heh – “will”, “mind”, “energy” and “eternity”, gods are personifications of the forces that maintain order and harmony in the world. The Heken Choir is the personification of one of the phases of the daily path of the Sun. Goddess Sokhmet is the embodiment of the forces contained in the Solar Eye. There were gods – embodiments of the creative will of other gods, or gods – embodiments of some law.
According to the author, images of “non-abstract” gods – such as the aforementioned Hathor and Ra – were also perceived symbolically. Although the Egyptians, at least until the 14th century. BC e., they did not know such an abstraction as “spirit”, yet, it seems, they only depicted the Sun God in the form of a man with the head of a falcon, but no one took this image literally, just as, for comparison, none of us imagine our Motherland in the form of a woman, and at the same time the Motherland, which rose up to fight the occupiers, was depicted on military posters as a woman with the text of the oath in her hand, monuments depict her in the form of a woman with a sword, etc.
This assumption is partly confirmed by Herodotus: “Artists paint and sculptors carve images of Pan (Herodotus calls the Egyptian god Banebdjedet Pan. – I.R.) like the Hellenes – with a goat’s head and goat’s legs, although, of course, they do not consider such an image to be correct, believing that this god has the same appearance as other gods. But why they still portray him like this is hard for me to say.”
The symbolism of ancient Egyptian mythology can be judged not only by religious texts – wall paintings, reliefs, and drawings in papyri are full of symbolism. In this respect, the canon of Egyptian fine art and its traditions differ significantly from those in the art of Ancient Greece.
Illustration 5. Sunrise. Drawing of the painting of a Greek vase.
Illustration 5 shows a fragment of the painting of a Greek vase Sunrise. In a chariot drawn by four winged horses, Helios soars to heaven. The rays of its crown golden the ocean, the waves splash sparkling foam, and sun-drunk youths frolic, rejoicing at the beginning of a new day. Everything is depicted literally: exactly as it is described in the corresponding legends. The Egyptian artist thinks in completely different categories. The illustration to the text of the papyrus that belonged to the temple singer (illustration 6) also depicts a scene of sunrise.
The Boat of Eternity appears from behind the mountainside. She floats along the waters of the heavenly river, the symbolic image of which is supported by the horns of the goddess Mehet Urt (hypostasis of Nut) in the guise of a cow. The goddess gave birth to a golden calf – the solar disk. The mountain from behind which the Rook emerges is painted pink – this is the color of dawn, and the blood of Nut during childbirth, and the color of the actual Mount El-Qurna (Arabic for “Horn”; the name, obviously, goes back to the ancient Egyptian toponym, based on the metaphorical comparison of a mountain with the horn of the Heavenly Cow).
The newborn Sun, a burgundy stylized disk, hovers above the Rook; he is rolled across the sky by the scarab beetle Khepri (Khepri himself is not present, but he is implied). Inside the disk is the head of a ram: this, firstly, is one of the forms in which Ra (Amon-Ra) was depicted, and in this case, in addition, the stylized image of a ram as if associatively contains the image of a golden calf.
Illustration 6. Sunrise. Contour reproduction of a drawing from the “Mythological Papyrus of the Singer Amon Ta-hem-en-mut”; XXI Dynasty; National Museum, Warsaw.
The lotus opens its petals towards the rising luminary, and the baboon lets out a jubilant cry, welcoming the new day. The baboon in combination with the lotus symbolizes the flora and fauna. The lotus itself, the sacred plant of the god of flora Nefertum, personifies beauty, birth and resurrection after death. The baboon was associated with the solar cult and the cult of the god of wisdom Thoth, which means that in the context of the picture it symbolizes two gods at once, Thoth and Ra, as if they were “merging together.” This could be, for example, an allegory of the unity of light that Ra gives to the earth, life (lotus) and the wisdom of the existing world order.
And what does the goddess of world order Maat (with a feather on her head) standing on the bow of the Rook mean? The law established by the gods: The sun dies in the evening and invariably rises in the morning? Justice? Justice, the observance of which Ra vigilantly monitors? You can find as many associations and interpretations as you like, and all of them will be legitimate to one degree or another. And the baboon, and the lotus, and Ra, and Maat – all the images presented in the figure, in their functions, resemble the hieroglyphs of ideographic writing: each image in itself means something, and if you combine these images with each other in different combinations, then any new combination will give a new meaning, a new allegory.
Baboon and lotus – flora and fauna. Baboon and Maat – the wisdom of the law established by the gods. Lotus and Maat are its beauty. Maat and Ra – the justice of the ruler god. Lotus, baboon and Ra – life, the source of which is the heat of the sun. If, for example, you add another young man to the scene of Helios’s flight or replace the young men with Nereids, this will not affect the meaning of the picture as a whole. But if you do the same with an Egyptian drawing – for example, depict a papyrus stalk there – new allegories will immediately arise. Papyrus is the emblem of Lower Egypt, the lotus or water lily is the emblem of Upper Egypt, and together they will symbolize the unification of the Two Lands: the whole country welcomes the resurrected god Ra.
Let us note once again that in the fine arts of Egypt, mythological and religious ideas are often reflected not literally, but figuratively: the image does not act as an illustration for a specific episode of a myth or a fragment of text, but as if in the role of a metaphor. In the scene of the Afterlife Judgment of the deceased, the action unfolds in time, stage by stage. The first scene (left) – the jackal-headed god Anubis led the late Egyptian to the Great Hall of Two Truths – the hall where Judgment is carried out.
Next scene: Anubis weighs the heart of the deceased on the Scales of Truth, which are depicted as the goddess of world order and justice Maat (metaphor!); on the right side of Libra is the feather of the goddess, symbolic “truth.” God Thoth (with the head of an ibis) writes down the result of the weighing and the verdict. Next to Libra, the monster goddess Amt (Ammat) froze in impatient anticipation – she is waiting for the verdict to be announced, and if it is not acquitted, Amt will devour the heart of the deceased. But the deceased was acquitted, and, accompanied by the falcon-headed god Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris, he appeared before the face of the ruler of the dead – Osiris himself.
Behind Osiris are the goddesses Isis and Nephthys, at the foot of the throne are the sons of Horus in a lotus flower, and at the top left is the winged Solar Eye with the feather of Maat. There are many myths about the Solar Eye, but there are no myths where it appears in the guise of a winged creature holding a feather in its claws.
And although in all such cases the iconography goes back to mythological ideas that existed one and a half millennia earlier (in our case these are echoes of the same ancient image of the falcon Horus and his right Eye-Sun), it would still not be a mistake to say that the traditional idea has given way place for symbolism, and before us is a visible metaphor: outstretched wings are an allegory of protection, a feather is an emblem of justice and justice… – The eye of the solar god hovers over the world, protects justice and world order, vigilantly monitors their observance.
“Egypt” is a Greekized word. The Egyptians themselves called their country “Ta-Kemet” – “Black Land,” that is, fertile, living land, as opposed to “Red Land,” the desert. The ancient Egyptians settled on the eastern bank of the Nile; the western shore was given over to “eternity” – otherworldly existence: pyramids, mastabas and tombs were built there. This custom was also based on symbolism: just as the Sun is born on the eastern bank of the celestial river and dies on the western bank, so people, “the cattle of Ra,” spend their earthly life in the east, and after death they move to the west, to the Reed Fields – the afterlife. paradise,” a place of peace, bliss and eternal life.
For the ancient Egyptian, death was a departure to another world, where he continued to live in exactly the same way as on earth: eating, drinking, cultivating fields, tending herds, etc. The otherworldly existence seemed in every way similar to the earthly one, only it was better, happier : the dead did not need anything and lived forever. This idea of “eternity” permeates all the fine art of Ancient Egypt. Civil architecture and sculpture have not survived to this day: “temporary” earthly dwellings were built from raw brick, and for buildings associated with “eternal life”, an eternal, timeless material was used – stone.
Pyramids also personify the idea of eternity: their unshakable bulks seem to remind people that all the changes taking place around are insignificant and fleeting, and earthly life, compared to the eternity of pyramids and rocks, lasts only one moment. The Greeks called the pyramids “the first wonder of the world” – and in this case, “eternity” was justified: this is the only “wonders of the world” that has survived to this day… The strict symmetry and monumentality of ancient Egyptian sculpture creates a feeling of balance, peace, stability, symbolizing eternity.
All ancient Egyptian mythology is also “monumental”. The Olympian gods help Perseus kill the Gorgon Medusa, Odysseus – to safely overcome the dangers of the journey, the whole of Olympus takes an active part in the Trojan War – and the gods of the country of the Nile, unlike the Olympians, are much less engaged in any activity and almost never of their own free will do not interfere in human disputes. Almost the overwhelming majority of gods do not even appear in myths as “actors.” We know what the iconography of these gods was, we know the texts of the hymns of praise dedicated to them, their sanctuaries have reached us, but there are no legends in which they would be active participants in the events.
The plots of Egyptian myths themselves, as a rule, are not full of exciting adventures: they are dominated by philosophical discussions of the gods and majestic monologues. The main content is not the events, but the philosophical subtext that lies behind these events. Myths, like poems, symbolically, in figurative and artistic form, convey the Egyptians’ ideas about the laws of nature, about beauty, about the meaning of life, about what, according to their concepts, a fair state structure should be. The myths of Hellas are filled with the same content, but in them it is conveyed in other ways.
Full of acute events, the Hellenic myth glorifies the capabilities of man, his ability to transform the world through his activities, to improve it. The monumental, static myth of Ancient Egypt calls on a person to merge with nature, accept the established wise order once and for all, submit to it and not try to change anything, because any changes will only be for the worse.
The systematization of material in two sections, traditional for all popular mythological collections – “stories about gods” and “stories about heroes” – is not suitable for this book: in ancient Egyptian mythology, heroes who perform feats, like Hercules, are neither among people nor among gods; Egyptian myth does not glorify military prowess. It glorifies the creator, creator, preserver and defender of stability in the world.
“Management of a country, even if not very large in area, but stretching over a thousand kilometers, required the creation of a comprehensive bureaucratic apparatus with a strictly hierarchical structure, starting with the smallest bosses, who were not much different from their subordinates, and ending with the vizier, who headed the state machine. In conditions of a rigid bureaucratic hierarchy, a well-developed system of social roles develops, within which only conscientious service allows one to rise to a higher level, and the position held serves as a criterion for evaluating an individual.
This in no way means that initiative was unnecessary – it was necessary for a career, but lay within the strict boundaries of job responsibilities. In a society organized on these principles, a hero is simply dangerous – any of his activities will inevitably be aimed at destroying the order achieved with such difficulty and thereby lead to the weakening of the foundations of the entire universe. As a result, heroism is completely crowded out of Egyptian life. One rather peculiar monument allows us to see the same problem from a slightly different aspect.
Sometimes the Egyptians wrote letters to their deceased relatives asking for help and intercession. And so the widow Irti complains to her dead husband about certain Behezti and Anankhi, who took away her house with furnishings and servants. Irti asks her husband to take revenge on the scoundrels and to do this, raise all his dead ancestors.
It would seem that these angry dead should punish or at least thoroughly frighten the scoundrels, but the Egyptian simply cannot imagine such arbitrariness – the intercessors must sue the offenders, prove their guilt and thereby “overthrow” them. This short text well illustrates the atmosphere of the Egyptian bureaucratic order, where even the area of the supernatural is so regulated that even in it an act that goes beyond the norms of state regulation is impossible.
The plot of the text written down just during the New Kingdom, dedicated to the struggle of Horus and Set for the inheritance of Osiris, seems perfectly suited to the heroic myth. However, there is no hint of heroism in it. Although the characters fight among themselves, they rely not on strength, but on various kinds of magical tricks; the question of the fate of the rank of Osiris is determined not by the victory of one of the parties, but by the decision of the Nine Gods observing the struggle. This astonishing bureaucratization of myth serves as an excellent illustration of the Egyptian value system of this period.”
