mahendra’s egypt

© mahendra myshkin 2024

In March 2024, I went to the Egyptian Red Sea coast near the ancient port Al-Quoseir and visited the ancient sites around Luxor and in Dendera in the Nile valley. With great fascination, I explored the surprisingly well preserved ancient temples, statues, paintings, and tombs.

Over a period of more than 3000 years—from the time of the first pyramids to the Temple of Hathor at Dendera—the soil and the sands of Egypt bore the longest lasting culture in history, which produced an unparalleled succession of  achievements in the fields of art, architecture, politics, religion and science.

I realized that many elements of the ancient Egyptian culture had a central function in the development of the human mind. Many ideas, especially about gods and the afterlife which had come from animistic sources were further developed in Egypt and spread from there into Iran, Mesopotamia, Greece, the Roman empire and even to India.

[When we look at the Egyptian animal deities or animal-headed gods,] we are confronted with the remnants of an older, shamanistic past. The Egyptian pantheon, until the Old Kingdom period, represented female deities in human shapes, while the male gods were depicted in four progressively diverse forms as:

(1) zoomorphic, either animals or birds;
(2) zoomorphic, but with parts of the human body;
(3) humans, with animal or bird heads;
(4) fully anthropomorphic.

It can be argued readily that polytheism had its roots in totemism and shamanism. The symbolic contingencies leading to the transition from the totemic-shamanistic to the polytheistic system are attributed to the interplay of newly emerging phenomena; an increased preponderance for conceptual thinking effected a decline in the use of visual imagery in cognitive processes, in turn, leading to intensified reliance on metaphors and analogues in conceptualization. These phenomenological developments threw open the doors for speculative and abstract configurations in symbolic thought. (Anthropologist Michael Ripinsky-Naxon. The Nature of Shamanism : Substance and Function of a Religious Metaphor)

We can observe today the metamorphoses that the ancient metaphors underwent over the centuries, because the Egyptians left us a lot of inscriptions written in hieroglyphs—symbols  that may be representing the objects that they depict but usually stand for particular sounds or groups of sounds. In 1822, French orientalist Jean-Francois Champollion published his first breakthrough in the decipherment of the Rosetta hieroglyphs, showing that the Egyptian writing system was a combination of phonetic and ideographic signs. Western scientists have deciphered hieroglyphs and their development into hieratic and demotic signs during the last two centuries. Thanks to these people we know a lot about the pharaohs and the culture they created and lived in, even though the rise of Christianity in the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE caused the decline and ultimate demise not only of the ancient Egyptian religion but of its hieroglyphics as well.

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