The humanism of the ancient Egyptians and its relevance (II)

In the two dimensions of Being for the ancient Egyptians, wnn (absolute existence) and แธซpr (the relative existence of individual beings), the spirit, the vital breath, ankh, acts, whose hieroglyph is the famous crux ansata; the other fundamental Egyptian cosmic principle was Maat, translatable as "Justice-Truth", "Order" or cosmic "Balance", as opposed to isft, chaos, disorder, degeneration.


di Pier Vittorio Formichetti
part II of II
cover: Maat

[continued from first part]

ย 

The principle of identification of the human being, for ancient Egypt, consists in the intertwining of his corporeality and the spiritual principles that find a "fulcrum" in it. Primavera Fisogni, to explain this complex anthropology, uses a comparison with study The structure of the human person of the famous philosopher Edith Stein, according to which the principle of individuation is to be recognized in the "formed matter", a concept very similar to that of quantitate matter signata, elaborated in the late Middle Ages by Thomas Aquinas in his reflection on the Jewish-Christian doctrine of the resurrection of bodies at the end of time. The author also writes that ยซThe figure of the ba plastically renders the idea of โ€‹โ€‹an "embodied" immortality much closer to Christian thought than to Greek, and certainly in consonance with the phenomenology of the person that developed between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries " [1]; in the same decades, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin summed up in a very similar way: "We are not human beings who have a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings who have a human experience" (The future of man); and Jean Charon (1920-1998) defined the human body as the region of Space in which the omnipresent Spirit mainly manifests itself in the cosmos [2], namely the "continuum of cosmic consciousness" or "psychic substratum" of the entire Universe (William James) [3].

A similarity between Egyptian otherworldly anthropology and Christianity is also in the complex relationship between the individual soul and the god Osiris, the ancient divinity of the afterlife, depicted in green skin like the vegetation that always dies and is reborn. At least starting from the New Kingdom - writes the author - the deceased was considered deified as assimilated by the god Osiris (it has in fact been seen that he was given the title of baw, "Blessed", as to the gods): "the dead man, whatever his name [rn], became Osiris, and this was always specified also in the inscriptions " [4]. The person who passed away did not become a new god added to the other gods, as in the Greco-Roman civilization (the cases of Julius Caesar and Antinous, the lover of the emperor Hadrian); among the Egyptians the deceased becomes divine because he becomes an integral part of the supreme god. From this point of view, Osiris was understood in a similar way to the God of Divine Comedy (XNUMX. Paradiso, XXXIII, 124-132), that is a kind of totality of all blessed souls, each of whom discovers in Him that they have been His incarnation.ย 

Green Osiris
Green Osiris

In ancient Egypt there was also a reflection on the relationship between Being and Becoming, a topic addressed in recent decades in Italy by the philosopher Emanuele Severino, despite a sort of misunderstanding and isolation on the part of some other branches of contemporary philosophy more centered on political aspects. -social of reality. Being was named ifnn, the uninterrupted progress of the totality of the universe, perhaps similar to Henri Bergson's "Creative Evolution". The Becoming was instead designated by HPR, the change of individual entities within the ifnn, similar to the perpetual but orderly change of phenomena in Chinese Taoism. ifnn is what the existence of depends on HPR, is the passage of everything existing from power to act and is therefore the creative Act of all phenomena, analogous to the most transcendent, indefinable aspect of the Chinese Tao (here translated as "Cosmic sense"), and HPR it is the continuous passage of every phenomenon from one state to another: for example, I am HPR the seasons or aspects of the human body in the various ages of life (which the Egyptians called precisely แธซprw , "Forms" or "transformations"). The ifnn it is Existence in itself, the All; the HPR is the existing subject: the same distinction is at the center of the first work of the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995), From existence to existing (1947)

The symbol of the regular change was the famous divine scarab (whose name, Khprรฌ, includes the term HPR), symbol of the cycle of the Sun (called Ra or Horus) which was born, died and reborn every day. The image of the Sun crossing the sky on a boat is quite well known, but in general it is not known that the solar boat changed its name according to the middle of the day, or it was thought that they were two boats: 'Ntit o You gave it was the "morning ship", on which the Sun sailed across the sky at dawn to midday, Meskett it was the "evening ship," from noon to sunset. The word HPR therefore also indicated the most important human change: the transition to the afterlife, also a phenomenon internal to the great movement of ifnn. In funerary texts, HPR it also designates the form of oneself temporarily acquired, through the correct pronunciation of the established formulas, to overcome the various tests of the Hereafter. From the famous Book of the Dead in fact, it emerges that the word of the deceased "acquires, when the sentences are pronounced, a performative power such as to modify reality, starting with the personal one" [5]; therefore for the mindset of the Egyptian the word could be both sound and concrete action; conception that also explains the famous custom of erasing the name of the deceased from the writings on his sarcophagus when one wanted to condemn his soul (unrecognizable by the gods as it is nameless) to the Egyptian equivalent of hell, the mauling by monsters (who will return to medieval Christian iconography through "minor" ways of culture, since damnation is never described in this way in the Gospels).ย 

solar boat with Ra falco
Solar boat with Ra-Falco

In both dimensions of Being, ifnn (absolute existence) e HPR (the relative existence of individual beings), the spirit, the breath of life, expressed with the word, acts'nแธซ, often transcribed ankh, whose hieroglyph is the famous crux ansata, the cross surmounted by a vertically elongated ellipse. Together with thenแธซ o ankh, the other fundamental Egyptian cosmic principle was the Size, translatable with "Justice-Truth", "Order" or cosmic "Balance", like in fantasy novels The Terramare saga by Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (who are also allegorical and philosophical, like those of JR Tolkien or Michael Ende). There Size is opposed toisft, chaos, disorder, degeneration. The concepts of Size e isft they show how the Egyptian mentality perceived the interaction between the human being and the surrounding nature [6]:

ยซThe existence of the world is perceived as chaotic, not only and not so much in the sense of" confused "," dis-harmonic ", but because it constantly opposes order. It is an antagonistic force, in conflict with nature, with the individual and common human being, with the pharaoh - who also represents the personified Order - who is never completely safe, in antagonism even with the gods. "

La Worldview of the ancient Egyptian can therefore be imagined as a concentric structure of columns, in which the pharaoh is at the center of the cosmos as axis beat, around him are the gods, around whom are the priests, around whom are finally the laity. All the circles of columns are internally supported by the Size, but surrounded by a sea that can suddenly become rough (theisft) and undermine their stability. THEisft it manifested itself in every negative event: natural calamities, a hostile foreign people, an illness, aging, an accident, a bereavement; it could be said that for the Egyptians the popular saying "no new is good new" applied. In this, ancient Egyptian society was antithetical to ours, because - writes the author with a lucidity rare in today's collective thought [7]:

Our mentality looks to the new as something positive in itself, on the basis of an idea of โ€‹โ€‹progress still strongly fueled by positivist assumptions, even if it is not taken for granted that a social, political, scientific novelty goes in the direction of personal happiness and collective. The pessimism that animated the vision of the world of the ancient Egyptian, particularly intense in the Middle Kingdom, as revealed by the literary texts of the period on which we have largely drawn, finds a well-founded reason in the fact that life is constantly opening up to the new, to the unexpected, to destabilization.

Painted Maat
Size

In the famous Sinuhe's Tale (about 1950 BC), about a wall built against an invasion of Syrians it is said: ยซSize will return to its place and theisft will be left out ". therefore foreign peoples were viewed as potential vehicles of chaos, and this agrees with what we know from the biblical books Genesis e Exodus with regard to the Jews. First, the decision to concentrate the Jewish tribes that immigrated to Egypt in the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries BC. C. in the region of Goshen or Ghessen, east of the Nile delta, from where they could easily have been pushed back across the border in case of rebellion; it was also a way to limit, as far as possible, the mixing with the native Egyptians: despite the XNUMXth to the XNUMXth century BC. C. some pharaohs called "shepherd kings" reigned over Egypt because of Hyksos origin (a group of Semitic tribes probably coming from the Syrian area), semi-nomadic shepherds like the Jews were considered "detestable" (Genesis, 46, 34) by the Egyptians, who would never "take food" with them (Genesis, 43, 32). Then, after a few generations, the decision of another pharaoh to employ the Jews in forced labor, also for fear that, having increased in number in the meantime, they could join the enemy peoples of Egypt, undermining the kingdom from within: therefore the semi-slavery of the Jews is to be placed in a period of war or in an immediate post-war period.ย  ย  ย  ย 

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To the pharaoh ofExodus, Primavera Fisogni very conveniently dedicates a digression (which we integrate here) with which it confirms historical-archaeological data already acquired, such as the chronological collocation of the semi-slavery of the Israelites during the reigns of the pharaohs Horemheb (1319? -1292 BC), Ramses I (1292-1289), Seti I (1289-1279), Ramses II (1279-1212), Merenptร h (1234-1203). The first half of the 1274th century, characterized precisely by the wars against the Hittites (which ended with the famous battle of Qadesh in 1225), is indicated by the names of the two cities built by the Jews: Pi-Tom, "Gate of Atum" (but according to others "Gate of Tem"), and Pi-Ramses, "Gate of Ramses", which with this name can only be traced back to the two Ramses grandfather and grandson. To Merenptร h we owe the first and perhaps only hieroglyphic text that mentions the people of Israel with this name: "... Ysrael is also destroyed", on a stele of 1224-XNUMX BC. C .: therefore the pharaoh who "let the Jews go" was probably Merenptร h and not Ramses II, as the famous film reconstructs Ten Commandments by Cecil B. DeMille (1956). Ramses II was a man of rare longevity, and in Exodus 2, 23 there is a hint of a long reign: "those long days" in which Moses fled from Egypt (not exiled, as in the film) for the murder of an Egyptian (Exodus, 2, 11-15) lived in the oasis of Midian (north-west of the Arabian peninsula) during which the pharaoh died. But Ramses II died about eighteen years after leaving the effective government of Egypt to Merenptร h (and indeed in Exodus 11, 5 there is a hinted clarification: ยซthe pharaoh who sits on the throne", As if to say that there was also another, but no longer reigning): this makes it impossible that the pharaoh of the" liberation "was Ramses II, because the inscription of Merenptร h presents (in its own way) the problem-Jews already closed in the meantime; therefore, the pharaoh who died during the "long days" that Moses lived in Midian was most likely Seti I.ย 

Ramses II and Seti i 10 com., From nurnet.net
Ramses II (Yul Brynner) and Seti I (Cedric Hardwicke) in "The Ten Commandments" (Cecil B. deMille, 1956)

From all this we deduce that the first 25-30 years of Moses' life took place under Horemheb, Ramses I and Seti I, therefore the life of Moses was long (120 years?). L'Exodus he tells that, in Midian, Moses defended the daughters of the Bedouin "priest" Iethro from some prevaricating shepherds, and one of them, Zipporร  / Sรจfora, married him; moreover the Book of Numbers (12, 1) mentions a "Cussite" or "Ethiopian" wife of Moses, who cannot be Zipporah: he must therefore have married her in Egypt, and left her here when he fled to Midian [8]; all this indicates that Moses was young. It is therefore likely that he was really nearly 80 years old "when he spoke to Pharaoh" (Exodus, 7, 7) to convince him to free the slaves, that is, around 1230 BC. C., reigning Merenptร h. In DeMille's film it is said that the Israelites were slaves for four hundred years, but this is absurd: this enormous period (taken from Exodus 12, 40-41: "four hundred and thirty years") was that of the Jewish presence in Egypt, while the compulsion to forced labor probably affected only the generations of Jews during the thirteenth century. This chronology would also make the pharaoh's initiative to eliminate a number of Jewish male babies relatively reliable (Exodus, 1, 15-22) which Moses escaped. If Moses was between 25 and 30 years old during the reign of Seti I, he was born a few years before Ramses II (born in 1301 BC), then Horemheb would be the pharaoh of infanticide. Horemheb decreed the damnatio memoriae of Amenofi IV Akhenaton (1357-1335), father of Tutankhamun (1333-1323) and founder of the monotheistic cult of Aten, the Sun: it is therefore not impossible that Horemheb wanted to prevent any monotheistic return among the Egyptians also with this bloody deterrent; the Jews, the only monotheists of the Fertile Crescent, for their part easily appeared a potential pocket of return of the monotheistic "contagion".

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The author's original contribution is to examine why the Jews, adept at remembering the names of entire genealogies, avoided writing the name of the pharaoh (as in the Genesis the pharaoh who, in the eighteenth century a. C., appointed Joseph son of Jacob as governor or viceroy [9]), which they certainly did not ignore. The hypothesis is that the biblical authors were well acquainted with the pharaoh's proper name and various titles - Nsw-bit, That of the rush and the bee (ancient symbols of Upper and Lower Egypt; curious the assonance of bit, bee, with Anglo-Saxon: English bee, German bee); Will be, son of Ra; Nb, lord or master; Hm, Majesty; ity, father (of the nation) - but, adopting an element of the Egyptian culture that they had surely known, namely the cancellation of the name as a sign of disapproval for the one who bore it and as an act of devaluation of his power, they mentioned the pharaoh with the nickname more generic and less obsequious: Pr-ah, "Great house" (also with the meaning of "great house"); from this, pronounced Per'aoh in Hebrew, the term "pharaoh" derives (through the Latin pharaonis) that we still use today. In favor of the voluntary omission, in theExodus no Egyptian is ever called by name, not even the pharaoh's daughter who adopted the newborn Moses [10], while the names of almost all the Jewish characters are mentioned, including the two midwives Shifra and Pua, and Semites in general (the wife and father-in-law of Moses, Midianites, and an older family member, the "father" Reuel).

Maat statuette
Size

La Size emerges as the true center of all Egyptian thought about the human being, whose main quality, as we have seen, is or should be that of smsw , "Follower". The pharaoh follows and embodies the Size cosmic and for this reason he is king, priest and god at the same time; the priests follow the pharaoh and the gods; the people, military and civilians, follow the priests in their rites. A social structure like this has similarities with the Indian one, divided into the famous four castes (with the difference that in Egypt caste membership was determined by the profession and not by the family of birth, so in life it was possible to change caste): brahmana (priests and guardians of the See), ksatriya (warriors / military), goisha (merchants), shudras (workers), all follow, in the form relating to the caste they belong to, il dharma, the cosmic-social law, which is similar but also different from the Size. This, in fact, is present more in human beings than in nature, where instead theisft, while in India the dharma it is also the natural order of the cosmos, and chaos is not "automatic", it is caused by people who do not follow the dharma.ย 

The relationship between the person and the Size it was also intended in an original way that allows for another confrontation with Christianity. Size it could be represented in the form of a female divinity in a statuette, sometimes also depicted in the hands of the pharaoh in the act of offering it to one or more gods. These figurines were called qbb.t e แธซแธซ, two terms that mean "throat", referring to both the pharynx and the esophagus: two fundamental parts of the body, one essential to the voice and therefore to language, the other to nutrition. There Size therefore it allowed to speak with justice-balance, that is, saying the right things and pronouncing the words with the right intonation; the deceased who had lived and spoken with justice, and then had passed the tests of the Hereafter by correctly pronouncing the established formulas, were given the appellative, present on the funeral texts, of "Giusto di voce". The link between gluttony and nutrition suggests that Size was also intended as a spiritual food for which the human being is "hungry": this makes us think of one of the "beatitudes" of one of the principal public discourses of Jesus: "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice" (Matthew, 5, 6). Pharaoh himself, who also embodied Size, he could "offer his throat" to the gods, that is, he too presented himself "hungry" for Justice-Equilibrium, willing to assimilate it into himself, and at the same time he declared to dedicate his voice to the cosmic-social equilibrium, spreading it to his subjects in the forms of law and the cycle of religious rites. The pharaoh united two metaphorical actions in a single formula: through the throat-esophagus, he "ingested" Size to be intimately united to it (a conception that very much recalls the Eucharistic Communion of Christianity), and through the throat-pharynx, that is, with the voice and with the law proclaimed by it, he expressed his union with the gods and men Size, which is so intimate to him that it is almost one with his throat. In Islam there is a very similar metaphor: the Koran, to indicate the omnipresence of God, he says "We [God] are closer to him [man] than his own jugular vein" (sura 50, v. 16). ย  ย  ย 

Ursula Kroeber LeGuin
Ursula Kroeber LeGuin

The quoted Sinuhe's Tale, according to the author, exemplifies the existential bewilderment that gripped the Egyptian subject in the presence ofisft, in this case the death of pharaoh Amenhemat I killed in a palace conspiracy (1964-1962 BC) [11]:ย ย 

The cosmic chaos that [Sinuhe] experiences in the first person - with the death of the pharaoh, his lord and god - consigns him to an existential condition that we could define as desperation. Lacking an omnipotent and unique god, able to dominate all idols (of his own and that of others' faith), he just has to let himself go to his wandering destiny.ย 

This aspect of the Egyptian perception of life is also very current, in an era in which people are often induced to become modern wanderers, functional to the interests of those who manage the labor markets (precariousness and relocation), tourism, life ("moving" continuously and rapidly from one fashion to a new one and from consuming a product to a new one) and even feelings ("poly-love", fluid gender, etc.). Without a God who explains the existence of the Whole - wrote a Christian author - and who can be followed by Man, this is reduced to ยซa desperate and solitary fighter [โ€ฆ]. His existence, dominated by the fear of being overwhelmed and the desire to yoke everything and everyone to his chariot, will result in a daily, savage struggle against his fellow men and the forces of nature that have become hostile to him " [12].

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E Albert Camus, an atheist, was able to affirm [13]:

ยซ In the absence of a superior value that guides the action, it will be directed in the direction of immediate effectiveness. Nothing being true or false, good or bad, the norm will consist in showing oneself the most effective, that is, the strongest. [โ€ฆ] If destiny is not guided by a higher value, if chance is sovereign, here is the advance of darkness, the tremendous freedom of the blind. [โ€ฆ] Where no one can say anymore what is black and what is white, the light goes out and freedom becomes a voluntary prison. ยป

211494
Size

Note:

[1]ย Whistles, In the name of thought cit., p. 61.ย 

[2]ย Jean Charon, The Spirit, this stranger, Milan, Armenia Editore, 1987, p. 30.ย 

[3]ย See Leo Talamonti, Forbidden universe, Milan, Mondadori, 1966, pp. 43 and 51.

[4]ย Ibidem, P. 65.ย 

[5]ย Whistles, In the name of thought cit., p. 84. ย 

[6]ย Ibidem, P. 95.

[7]ย Ibidem, P. 107.ย 

[8]ย In the story of Numbers Postal Code. 12, the sister of Moses, Miriam, speaks against the marriage of her brother with the "Cussite" or "Ethiopian" woman and shows herself envious of the prophetic faculty of Moses. What relationship can there be between the two? Likely, Miriam at one point considered it unfair that Moses, raised by Egyptian idolaters and already married to a Hamitian foreigner (not a Semitic like Zippora), had been endowed by God with the prophetic charisma more than any other Jew who was not culturally โ€œcontaminatedโ€. The CEI edition of the Bible identifies the Ethiopian bride with Zippora herself, but this is nearly impossible. While Egypt is known to have ancient relations with Cus (Ethiopia) and other kingdoms south of its southern border, it is unlikely that the nomadic herding tribes of the Sinai Peninsula and northern Arabia also included groups from from the Horn of Africa, which instead of crossing the fertile lands along the Nile would have gone further, into a desert, to then look for oases. In DeMille's film there is a princess from Ethiopia who gives Moses a jewel of hers, alluding both to a union between the two of them, and to an alliance between Ethiopia and Egypt, but that it was Moses who annexed the 'Ethiopia is a pure artistic license. ย 

[9]ย In the Egyptian sources that list the pharaohs of Hyksos origin, Yakub'har or Iakobher is mentioned, who lived between the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries BC. C .. This name is incredibly similar to that of Jacob, the Jewish head of the family who, in venerable age, together with his sons went to Egypt to see his penultimate son Joseph, who in the meantime had been elevated to governor or viceroy with an Egyptian name , Zafnat-Paneah (Genesis, 41, 39-45). Yakub'har or Iakobher could not therefore be Jacob himself (as hypothesized by Enrico Baccarini and Andrea Di Lenardo in From India to the Bible. Remote contacts between India and the ancient Near East, Florence, Enigma Editions, 2018, pp. 143-147), of whose presumed role of government, in fact, the Genesis he says nothing, but his son Giuseppe, remembered with a sort of patronymic (Ben'Yahakob, "Son of Jacob") combined with the Egyptian name of the god Horus (Hor o Har), one of the names of the deified Sun. The Sun was worshiped (with the name Ra) in the city of On, later called by the Greeks Heliopolis (City of the Sun), and from On came the priest Potifera, whose daughter Asenath married Joseph (Genesis, 41, 45): it is therefore possible, in theory, that a solar name has been added to the latter.ย  ย  ย 

[10]ย According to the Jewish Antiquities of Josephus (37-110? d. C.), was Thermutis, daughter of Ramses II (also mentioned by Peter Kolosimo in Timeless land, Milan, SugarCo, 1974, p. 118). Among the daughters of Ramses II, the only one with a fairly similar name is Baketmut. In the midrash, the set of Hebrew exegeses to the Holy Scriptures, the adoptive mother of Moses appears with a Hebrew name, Bitiร  ("Daughter of Yร ", ie of Yahweh). Bitiร  appears only once in the Bible (I book of Chronicles, 4, 18) as "Pharaoh's daughter" and wife of a Jew, Mรจred. There have therefore been those who hypothesized that Bitah was the new name of Thermutis, who left the court of the pharaoh to live with the Jewish people, in turn grateful to her for having raised Moses. But all this does not coincide with the probable biography of Moses: the latter would have already been an adult when Thermutis was born. DeMille's film solves the problem in its own way by making Bitiร  daughter of Ramses I and sister of Seti I. However, if Moses was between 25 and 30 years old during the reign of Seti I, he was born under Horemheb between 1310 and 1305 a . C .; Bitiร , to be his mother, would have been at least twenty years older than him: she would therefore have been born within 1325 BC. C., that is in the very last years of Akhenaten, or under Smenkhara (1335-1333), or under Tutankhamun (who had only two dead newborn daughters). She may therefore have been the daughter of Smenkhara or Horemheb, born before purchasing, that his father became pharaoh, and grew up while the solar monotheism established by Akhenaten was still widespread. Her decision to adopt the newborn Moses, immediately recognized as "the child of the Jews", and to take on his real mother as a nurse (Exodus, Postal Code. 2), could therefore also be due to a possible intellectual affinity with the Jewish monotheists, derived from his sympathy for solar monotheism. ย  ย  ย 

[11]ย Whistles, In the name of thought cit., p. 101. ย 

[12]ย Efrem Bettoni, Is original sin a fairy tale?, Milan, New Publishing Academy, 1959, p. 56.

[13]ย Albert Camus, The man in revolt, Milan, Bompiani, 2014, pp. 7 and 83.


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