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The Egyptian Worldview
From: The British Museum
| By:
Gay Robins |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Understanding the Egyptian worldview is essential to understanding the products and practices of their culture, from the pyramids to the representation of the human form, to their concept of divinity. Gay Robins argues that the essentially dualistic nature of ancient Egyptian beliefs had its origin in their environment, extrapolating, as they did, the concepts of chaos and order from their orientation toward the outside world. |
The way the Egyptians perceived the world was greatly influenced by their geographical environment. Ancient Egypt was situated in the north-east corner of the African continent in an area that would have been total desert were it not for the river Nile that ran and still runs north from central Africa for thousands of miles before splitting into the several channels of the Delta that empty into the Mediterranean Sea. In Egypt the Nile forms a thin thread of life-giving water in an otherwise waterless region, for there is far too little rainfall in the area to support life. |
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| Part of the Book of the Dead of the king's scribe Ani, showing Ani, followed by the smaller figure of his wife Tutu, adoring Osiris, the ruler of the underworld, and his sister-consort Isis, who are enclosed within a shrine. Thebes. Paint on Papyrus. Nineteenth Dynasty. | |
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The miracle of the river was its annual inundation that flooded the land to either side of the river channel, watering the soil and spreading fertile black silt in which farmers could plant their crops. However, the area of land brought under cultivation extended only as far as the floodwaters reached. Beyond that was desert, and the edge of the cultivation formed a clear line, with the fertile fields on one side and sterile sand on the other.
This phenomenon was reflected in one pair of names that the Egyptians gave to the region they inhabited: Keyrtet, 'the black land', and Desheret, 'the red land'. Together the pair formed a contrasting duality that represented more than just the opposition of fertile and sterile land, but also a cosmic struggle between the forces of order and the forces of chaos. |
At the time of creation the ordered world was brought into being. Before that, nothing had been ordered, and there had been only the primaeval waters called Nun. Out of these waters a mound had arisen, just as muddy mounds emerged out of the flood waters of the Nile each year as the inundation retreated, and it was on this mound that the creator god, who came into being of himself, appeared. How the creator god generated the universe was conceptualised in a variety of ways. According to one version he masturbated and brought forth the first divine couple, Shu and Tefnut, thus separating the male and female principles of the universe. Shu and Tefnut, in their turn, gave birth to the deities Geb (earth) and Nut (sky), who subsequently bore the deities Osiris, Isis, Nephthys and Seth. |
In many ways Osiris represented the ordered world. He came to be regarded as having ruled Egypt as a beneficent king who brought the benefits of civilisation to his country. Seth, by contrast, represented the antithesis of order. His very birth from his mother Nut had been irregular, and he caused the death of Osiris, so as to claim the kingship of Egypt for himself. However, Osiris' sister-consort Isis brought Osiris back to life through her powerful magic and conceived a son, Horus, who was to avenge his father's death and, as his father's heir, would challenge Seth for the kingship. Seth was displaced and Horus became king of Egypt, while the resurrected Osiris became ruler of the underworld. Thus order was re-established in the universe and chaos brought under control. |
Every king of Egypt was identified with Horus during his lifetime and then with Osiris after his death. One of the main functions of the king was to maintain the order of the world and to prevent it from slipping back into chaos: this is reflected over and over again on the monuments. The king was the mediator between the divine and the human worlds. In temple decoration he was always the one shown performing the rituals for the gods, although in practice the task was delegated to priests. By maintaining the cults of the gods through the various temple rituals centred on the cult statues, the king persuaded the gods constantly to reenact creation and maintain world order. In building and decorating temples, or in commissioning furnishings and items to be used in cult, the king engaged in acts of creation that strengthened order and banished chaos. |
Just as the ordered, cultivated area of Egypt was opposed to the chaotic regions of the desert, so Egypt itself stood in contrast to the foreign lands that lay outside its borders. In Egypt the world was ordered in the correct way and people behaved in a proper manner. Outside Egypt everything was at odds with these norms. Other countries had no Nile to bring water and had instead to make do with rain. Mesopotamia did, indeed, have the river Euphrates running through it, but it flowed the wrong way. Customs in foreign countries differed from those in Egypt, and people wore different clothes, worshipped unfamiliar deities and spoke incomprehensible languages. They did not behave in accordance with the norms established at the time of creation. Therefore foreign lands and their inhabitants were regarded as representatives of the forces of chaos, and the king could strike a blow for the maintenance of order by trouncing Egypt's foreign enemies in battle. A major icon of kingship showed the victorious king about to smite cowering enemy captives, in an image that symbolised the triumph of order over chaos. |
This fundamental pairing of order and chaos illustrates the Egyptians' tendency to see their world in terms of dualities. Another name for Egypt was the Two Lands, referring to the Valley (Upper Egypt) and the Delta (Lower Egypt). One of the king's most important titles was nesut bity, usually translated as 'King of Upper and Lower Egypt', but increasingly rendered as 'Dual King'. It was once believed that this division of Egypt into two parts was based on historical fact, that before the country was first united into a single state there had been two kingdoms, one in the south and one in the north. Today it is thought more likely that the duality of Egyptian kingship was conceptually rather than historically based. It was a concept that affected the decoration of temples and royal monuments throughout pharaonic history. Whatever their origins, the king's white crown came to be associated with Upper Egypt in the south and his red crown with Lower Egypt in the north. Paired figures of the king, for instance on either side of a doorway, would be placed so that the southern figure wore the white crown and the northern figure the red. Each of the two areas also had its own goddess and the heraldic plant: the vulture goddess, Nekhbet, and the 'lily' for Upper Egypt, and the cobra goddess, Wadjit, and the papyrus plant for Lower Egypt. Their appearance on monuments was also carefully positioned according to the overall orientation of the structure. The two heraldic plants as a pair stood for the entire country, and a very common motif found in royal contexts, especially on the sides of the king's throne, showed the plants with their stems knotted around a large version of the hieroglyph meaning 'union', the whole symbol reading sema tawy, 'the union of the Two Lands'. Thus it was in the single person of the king that the duality of Egypt was bound into one. |
The king not only united Upper and Lower Egypt but he was also the link between the human and divine worlds. Although the king was himself a human being, the office of kingship was divine; the human body of the king was the vessel in which divine kingship manifested itself in the form of the royal ka or life force that was passed on from one king to the next. The king was thus in some way similar to, though not identical with, the gods, and one of his titles, netjer nefer, meant 'Perfect God'. In the hierarchical ranking of beings, this title placed him in a junior relationship to the major gods, who bore the title netjer aa 'Great God'. Indeed the king was clearly not the same as one of these gods, since he could be deified after his death, or even during his lifetime when the living king could be depicted performing ritual actions before his own deified form. |
If the king was junior in relation to other gods, he was the most important figure in the world of the living. He stood at the head of the government, ruling Egypt through a male scribal bureaucracy. Literacy was the basic qualification for a government position, and it has been reckoned that only a very small percentage of the population was literate. Thus these officials, together with their families formed a small, elite group that was itself hierarchically organised. At the top were the high national officials, like the vizier who was second only to the king, who themselves had a series of officials under them. Lower than the national officials were high-ranking administrators in important provincial regions and their staffs, and lower still were local scribes. Beneath the scribal elite were artists of various kinds and other semi- or non-literate professionals who produced goods and provided services for the elite. Finally, the mass of the population worked on the land as independent farmers, tenant farmers or landless labourers in order to produce the surplus necessary to supply the non-food-producing classes. |
It is the smallest part of the population, the king and the elite scribal class, about whom we know most. They were the ones who commissioned the monuments and wrote the texts that form much of the source material that we use today in order to study ancient Egypt. The vast bulk of the population had neither the resources to commission monuments nor the knowledge to write texts. What we know of these people comes from what the elite class chose to record about them, which is tantalisingly little. When depicted, they were shown only in their service to the elite group with no independent lives of their own. Whether the non-elite had their own tradition of folk art is not known, since we have little knowledge archaeologically of the villages and houses they lived in, where we might expect to find evidence of any such tradition. Thus, the works of art that form the subject of this feature were produced for the elite and express their worldview. |
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