Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [29]
Overseeing those ritual laws was a priestly class—one of the world’s first government bureaucracies—whose expertise was in knowing how to please the gods. Whether it was sacrificing an animal to bring the rains that assured a good harvest; collecting taxes for the temple complexes; conscripting workers for three months of each year to build the great stone mausoleums that glorified the king and eased his ascension to the afterlife; or simply shaving one’s eyebrows to mourn the death of a beloved cat—the priests saw to the rites that dictated Egyptian life, year in and year out. The rules they articulated and enforced helped Egypt achieve and maintain a remarkable degree of social organization and stability without resorting to draconian punishments, a vast slave economy, grotesque human sacrifices, or a rigid military state. Instead, as author Richard H. Wilkinson writes in The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt, this was a “spiritual world…which remains unique in the history of human religion. The character of that spiritual world was both mysterious and manifest, at once accessible and hidden, for although Egyptian religion was often shrouded in layers of myth and ritual, it…shaped, sustained and directed Egyptian culture in almost every imaginable way. The deities of Egypt were present in the lives of pharaohs and citizens alike, creating a more completely theocratic society than any other of the ancient world.”
And so, to understand ancient Egypt, you must understand its myths. And to know those myths, you must first understand the two great forces that shaped this ancient civilization’s history and destiny: the river and the desert, a perfect duality of life and death.
MYTHIC VOICES
Hail to thee O Nile! Who manifests thyself over this land and comes to give life to Egypt! Mysterious is thy issuing forth from the darkness, on this day whereon it is celebrated! Watering the orchards created by Re, to cause all the cattle to live, you give the earth to drink, inexhaustible one….
Lord of the fish, during the inundation, no bird alights on the crops. You create the grain, you bring forth the barley, assuring perpetuity to the temples. If you cease your toil and work, then all that exists is in anguish. If the gods suffer in the heavens, then the faces of men waste away.
—Hymn to the Nile (c. 2100 BCE)
Why was Egypt the “gift of the Nile”?
The Greek historian Herodotus, who might also be called the world’s first great travel writer, coined the phrase the “gift of the Nile” to describe Egypt. It was a society that utterly fascinated this Greek tourist when he visited Egypt back around 450 BCE. When Herodotus traveled through Egypt, Greece was flourishing in its Golden Age. But Egypt was already three thousand years old, a great trading and military power in the ancient Near East. Having developed the world’s first national government, the Egyptians had also created the 365-day calendar, pioneered geometry and astronomy, developed one of the first forms of writing, and invented papyrus—the paperlike writing material that was essential to the birth of the book.
A long, narrow country through which the Nile River flows north into the Mediterranean Sea, Egypt is bordered mostly by vast deserts on its other three sides. The Egyptian word for these hot, sandy wastelands is Deshret, meaning “Red Land,” and the source of the word “desert.” Although the surrounding mountainous areas in the deserts were the source of the gold, gems, and hard stone that provided the raw materials of Egypt’s grand buildings and brilliant artistry, these deserts—to the ancient Egyptians—were hellish places that could only bring danger and death.
The lines between these two worlds of life and death were not viewed as metaphoric or symbolic, but were physically tangible realities to the Egyptians. It is literally possible to stand with one foot in the dry desert and the other in the moist soil watered by