Where Past Was Present

The grand sweep of ancient Egyptian civilization encompasses 3,000 magnificent years. The Egyptians themselves were well aware of the antiquity of their civilization. Egyptian priests at Naukratis in Lower Egypt chided the Greek sage Solon when he talked history with them in 530 BC. “You Hellenes,” they tartly reminded him, “are but children,” and they were right.

Thirty dynasties of pharaohs span these 3,000 years, achieving three apogees of magnificence. The Old Kingdom was the age of Pyramids (circa 2550 BC), the Middle Kingdom a time of high artistic and religious achievement (circa 2000 BC) and the New Kingdom (1570 to 1070 BC) the time of Egypt’s imperial glory. The great traditions of Egyptian civilization endured another millennium, to be finally submerged under the dictates of Rome and the beliefs of Christianity.

Ancient Egypt exercises a powerful fascination. We live in close familiarity with the ancient Egyptians, with the best-known pharaohs, Cheops, Akhenaten and Ramesses II. Theirs is the face of ancient Egypt, which is turned toward us, recovered from inscription and papyrus and with the archeologist’s spade. But there is a hidden face, too, that of the infinitesimal changes, unnoticed by those who experience them and visible only to the analytical gaze of the historian.

In his magnificent “The Mind of Egypt,” Jan Assmann likens humans to spiders, who act within the invisible webs they have woven: webs of interaction among themselves and worlds of meaning whose horizons define action, experience and remembrance.

He asks what meaning Egyptians obtained from their own constructions of their history. How did they incorporate the legacy of the past into the present? Assmann examines patterns of continuity and disruption. Assmann writes: “The old remained present; it never became alien in the sense of representing something left definitively behind.”

Using three approaches--archeological, mythic and epigraphic or iconographic--Assmann takes us on a chronological journey, starting with the formation of the unified state in about 3100 BC, and going through the three great kingdoms. He ends in the late period with the final whimpers of Egyptian civilization. The archeological and pictorial evidence for the beginnings of Egyptian civilization chronicles campaigns of military conquest that unified competing city-states into a single civilization.

The famous myth of Horus, the falcon god of Upper Egypt, uniter of the two lands, and Seth, ancient master of Lower Egypt, symbol of chaos, depicts them locked in deadly combat, then reconciled as the two lands become a unified kingdom. The reconciliation of Horus and Seth legitimizes conquest as a way of creating a world of order. Unification became the central canon of Egyptian civilization during the Old Kingdom, which lasted until 2150 BC.

Assmann also identifies the fundamental dichotomy between mud brick and stone, the latter becoming the material for monumental edifices (and hence for immortality), the former the building material for the living. This symbolic conjunction between the state and immortality began in the Old Kingdom with the pyramids and other masonry edifices.

Then came the First Intermediate Period of about 2150 BC, when the state fell part and chaos reigned at a time of drought and political instability. Former provincial governors ruled their domains like pharaohs. The life-giving Nile flooding became a mere dribble; food riots erupted. In places, we are told, one could walk across the river dry-shod. Assmann shows how the collapse of established order became embedded in the Egyptian mind.

The Middle Kingdom began with another process of unification, followed by a great cultural apogee of civilization, which defined the timeless and definitive expression of Egyptian civilization--connective justice in the hereafter--into the Late Period. The Middle Kingdom kings introduced three new ideas, derived in part from the earlier centuries of chaos, disunity and famine: the ruler as the son of god, the importance of loyalty and the value of achievement.

The provincial warlords of the chaotic centuries had practiced patronage in exchange for loyalty. The Middle Kingdom pharaohs, who reestablished the unified state, elevated patronage to a religious ideology, according to which faithful adherents enjoyed success in this world and eternal life after death. The pharaoh became a good shepherd protecting his sheep from the wolves of chaos.

The New Kingdom began in about 1570 BC with wars of liberation. Thousands of Asian immigrants, many of them artisans and traders, had flooded into Lower Egyptian towns during the prosperous Middle Kingdom years. When succession disputes engulfed the court in Upper Egypt in about 1640 BC, Hyksos chieftains took control of Lower Egypt and ruled as divine pharaohs. An able ruler named Ahmose finally routed the Hyksos in 1570 BC. His victories brought a new element into Egyptian life: external menace, which accounts in part for the aggressive foreign policies of Egypt’s imperial pharaohs. The sun god Amon-Re, the dynamic force of life, creator of all deities, presided over a state in which war and religion were inextricably linked.

Assmann describes the wrenching effects on Egyptian culture and religious beliefs of the heretic ruler Akhenaten, who abolished the cult of Amon-Re and espoused a purer form of sun worship, that of the solar disk, Aten. His experiment was short-lived. Amon-Re was restored to favor at his death in 1335 BC. The disruptive reign of Akhenaten fostered a break with tradition, bringing new literary idioms and an emerging personal piety, wherein the past was the immediate expression of the will of god.

The strengths of ideas of Egyptian statehood were so strong that its civilization endured for more than a millennium after the collapse of the New Kingdom in 1070 BC. The complex meanings of the Late Period brought new forms of religious life that related to time. A new symbolism of passing time, as if the leaders, far more than their predecessors, knew how transitory their world was, as if the profound presence of the past that surrounded them reminded and sensitized them to the fact that everything was ephemeral.

Through the Greco-Roman period, cultural amnesia fostered by the sheer weight of imperial dominance threatened the integrity of Egyptian civilization as a coherent system of meaning. Pharaonic Egypt fell silent in the late 4th century, when hieroglyphic writing disappeared in the face of Christianity.

But, thanks to the work of the Egyptian-born Greek priest Manetho in the 3rd century and others, Egypt remained in the cultural awareness of many later civilizations. Assmann points to the compelling impressions left by pyramids and other monuments, to biblical and classical texts that described Egypt as a living culture. As he rightly argues, it is wrong to write of historical oblivion until Jean-Francois Champollion deciphered hieroglyphs with the aid of the Rosetta Stone in 1822, as many Egyptologists and other authors, including this reviewer, have assumed.

Assmann has looked closely into the mirror of the ancient intangible with telling effect. Every student of early civilization has something to learn from these pages, which will help cure us of intellectual myopia.

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From ‘The Mind of Egypt’

History has two faces, one turned toward us, the other averted. The face turned toward us is the sum total of event and remembrance. It is history recalled by those involved in it, as shapers or witnesses, doers or sufferers. The hidden face of history is not what we have forgotten, but what we have never remembered, those products of imperceptible change, extended duration, and infinitesimal progression that go unnoticed by living contemporaries and only reveal themselves to the analytic gaze of the historian.