 |
| 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…’ 
