Tuesday, March 31, 2015

"Don't mess with me." Draconian ancient Egyptian authority

British Museum

Of course many take a less radiant view of Egypt. I had an email from an historian with a religious bent who took issue with my view of Egypt: 
 ‘Dynastic Ancient Egypt was not a land of allure, as you like to imagine; it was the most draconian civilization the world has ever known,’ he wrote. ‘Why can you not see it? The truth is there in the museum cases of the world, captured in the Egyptian paintings and carvings in wood or stone or on plaster of ordinary folk, the servant girl, the baker, the boatman, the seated scribe. The expression in their eyes, wide in their whites, is fear. They lived and died in terror. But if God punished this civilization as it was told in the Book of Exodus, why do you think you would have loved it?
‘Look at the carved Egyptian eye of Isis on the wall of a temple. Look at this eye of this goddess. You think it is a symbol of mystery, the single, feminine Egyptian eye in profile. Quintessential. But this black orb is not a symbol of allure; it is more like a dead planet in a pitiless universe. The oasis civilization of pharaonic Egypt was a hell where the sun beat down like a swordsmith’s hammer and reeds conspired in whispers at the edge of a river of tears. The land was hemmed in by deserts like the sides of a coffin and by a police, judicial, fiscal, priestly and bureaucratic system that arrested freedom like an image in diorite, the hardest of stone, which the carvers in the workshops shaped not with ease, as it seemed from their sublime achievements, but with the sacrifice of lifetimes. There is a reason why a people still celebrates their hasty exodus from this place with unleavened bread and bitter herbs 2000 years on. The Nazis of the twentieth century killed the Jews; the Ancient Egyptians ground their souls to stone dust…’