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By Root 2130 0

Nile begins visibly to stir, responding to rain falling in Central Africa. Increasing in momentum, it floods in fall and winter over the miles of flat land on either side, creating at its northern end an enormously broad, triangular delta. Consequently it is often called in modern Egyptian Arabic Baḥar An-Nil, the Nile Sea. When it recedes, it leaves a layer of fertile mud in which crops can be planted, almost seeming to seed themselves and grow magically, without help from man. This process continued yearly for millennia until the building of the High Dam at Aswan in the 1960s prevented the soil from reaching the farmlands and thus breaking Egypt’s ancient connection with the Nile’s annual flood cycle.

The Egyptian sun is incessant. Summer and winter, it is like a great broiler-oven. Every day it is ignited in the east, burns furiously all day, and is not extinguished until it mercifully falls below the horizon in the west, only to roar into flame again the next day. Plants, birds, and animals all respond to its rhythms. Even the winds seem to emanate from its disk. The path of the sun down the western mountains and under the earth, where the dead were buried, followed by its daily reascent from behind the Eastern mountains, was a source of wonder for ancient Egyptians as it was for all peoples. The notched, eastern and western mountain ranges let the Egyptians calibrate the sun’s movements exactly, designating seasons and festivals. The sun made an evident, diurnal journey under the earth, followed by a regular rebirth, slowly moving north then south annually along the mountain ranges. With the Nile, this movement was used as both a timepiece and a metaphor for the rebirth of the dead in eternity.

All of this imagery manifested itself in the ancient Egyptians’ view of the universe, which not only described their world but defined their place within it. The flood of the Nile, human reproduction, and the sun were the three obvious symbols for life in Egypt, and they also served as the basis for the Egyptians’ notions of the afterlife. To appreciate the influence of these symbols, we shall first have to look at the mesocosm, the social system, from the ancient Egyptian point of view. Like many other societies, Egyptians applied the term “humanity” to themselves only, sometimes using the words for “foreigner” and “subhuman” interchangeably. The Greeks called non-Greeks barbarians (from the word for bearded), because they were not civilized enough to shave. The Egyptian royalty and priesthood too shaved their hair off, but unlike the Greeks who shaved their faces, the Egyptian nobility shaved off all their body hair, wore perfumed wigs, and painted their eyes. Hairy outsiders were therefore seen more as animals than humans. Foreigners, having hair, were also infested with lice and vermin, like animals.

Foreigners were associated with disorder. Geography gave the Egyptians ways to describe foreigners as well as avoid them. The words for desert or mountain were synonymous with chaos, as they were characterized by inconstant rains and other irregular occurrences. The Egyptians hated chaos and praised the regularity of the Nile.2 For them, the capricious rain could only be understood as an imperfect example of the benefits available to them from the Nile.

Aten was so good he even gave the uncivilized, foreignors in strange lands an approximation of the Nile-rain-poor and unreliable though that may be in comparison to the regularity of the Nile floods. Exceptional as their life was, to them it was natural and everyone else lived in imperfect imitation of it. Inside the sheltered land of Egypt, however, all was blissfully ordered, regular, and patterned for well-being; anxiety came from the disruption of the plan. The word that the Egyptians used to express this well-being and truth was “life,” Ankh, symbolized by the famous Ankh sign, a cross with a loop at the apse. The Egyptians also personified order as justice, ma’at, which was depicted as a fragile feather or a lovely young goddess wearing a single feather in her headdress