• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

But what a wealth of information we can infer from such sources as these regarding social customs, attitudes, and ethics! From the composite tale of Khufu and the Magicians we can begin to sense something that is almost impossible to get except by indirection—the moral attitudes of a long-dead culture. We are accustomed to state our views on ethical and spiritual matters in long tomes and in verbose speeches; we express them, and analyze them, and criticize them. The Egyptians did write books of wisdom literature, but for the most part these consist of advice to aspiring young men, and one is never certain that the smooth-tongued precepts are really sincere. It is in the actions, the daily responses, of human beings that we can see the ethical sense at work; and in the tales of Khufu there are several interesting points. The maiden who dropped her ornament was only a concubine, but when she spoiled the god-king’s plea sure, he did not order her thrown to the crocodiles; the patience with which he humored her unreasonable demands evidently did not strike the Egyptians as unusual, or worthy of comment. (It is interesting to note that the amiable monarch was none other than good King Snefru, whose reputation for benevolence may be well deserved.) The tale of the unfaithful wife reminds us of themes from Boccaccio and Chaucer, but there is no mockery of the cuckolded husband in Egypt. It is in the story of Djedi that the attractive qualities of the Egyptian conscience are most clearly demonstrated—the reverence paid the wise old man by king and prince, and, most significant of all, Djedi’s swift response to the king’s command that he use a criminal for his experiment—“Not a man, O sovereign, my lord!” Men were the cattle of the god, and not subject to the whims of even a king.

We are far from the subjects that are ordinarily thought of as the proper study of archaeologists—pottery and tombs, mummies and hieroglyphs. Yet material objects are only the naked bones of history; the ideas, and ideals, of a people are the flesh and blood of their culture, which animate the dry details and give them meaning. When we study the past we try to see the ethics, the doubts, and the hopes that moved men’s minds, as well as the products of their hands. And as we tend to identify ourselves just a bit with the people we study, we like to find signs that our remote ancestors cherished to some extent the same notions that we have accepted as universal moral values. One of the reasons why the ancient Egyptians have interested so many people is that they are a rather amiable set of human beings. We are seldom shocked by their activities, as we are by the cold-blooded ferocity of the Assyrians or the sickening brutality of the Aztecs. We sometimes think of the Egyptians as being preoccupied with death, yet actually the converse is true. They enjoyed life so much that they took every means possible to continue its pleasures after that change which men call dying.

The pyramids of the Fourth Dynasty represent the greatest effort ever made by any people to insure survival through material means. The kings of the Fifth Dynasty were less fortunate, or less prosperous; they lavished much of their substance on their imposing sun temples, which survive today, when they survive at all, only as crumbling foundations hidden in the sand. Several of them, known only by inscriptions in the private tombs of officials who served in them, are still missing. The end of the dynasty saw the end of the sun temples. Why? Speculation is still rife.

Fifth Dynasty pyramids were not built of stone throughout, but of rubble and sand held together by stone facings and covered with the usual handsome white limestone. Today these tombs no longer hold even the pyramid form; they are mounds of gravel that look like natural hills upon the great plateaus of Sakkara and of Abusir. The rubble of the superstructure of the pyramid of Unis, last king of the Fifth Dynasty, stands close by the towering steps of Djoser’s pyramid—the great