Egypt The Habit of Civilization

Egypt was one of the earliest of the great civilizations which arose independently on earth 5,000 years ago the monuments the ancient Egyptians left behind like this the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza are still among the most impressive and the most long-lasting creations of humanity in the pyramid are enshrined some of the central concerns of their culture concerns shared by all civilization even by the modern West but no civilization held them for longer or more tenaciously than the ancient Egyptians over the last 20 years we in the Western world have become painfully aware of how our well-being is inextricably bound up with that of nature and that understanding has given us a fresh insight into the psychology of Egyptian civilization their attitude to religious cult to rulership to the afterlife and to the idea of the unchanging stability of the cosmos and what more dramatic illustration can there be in the whole world than the great pyramid and this room in particular of the human yearning for immutability for the human concern for life after death and the fact that this place has the power to move so much after so many millennia whatever culture we come from is a testimony surely not only to its grandeur of conception and execution marvelous as that is but also to the fact that we still share the impulse which lies behind it and in that sense we have the late 20th century for all our modernity are still Bronze Age people since ancient times the Egyptians have experienced so many changes above all in the triumph of Islam but they might appear now to be cut off forever from the age of the Pharaohs but perhaps there is a deeper sense in which a society's ideals are passed on a habit of civilization do you really believe read the novelist tawfiq al Hakim but the thousands of years that make up Egypt's past could have vanished without trace as if in a dream you the Nile said the great Arab traveller even a Battuta surpasses all the rivers of the world in sweetness of taste in length of course and utility the civilization of Egypt like those of Iraq India and China drew its life from a river but this was a country like no other running for 600 miles between dunes and cliffs a narrow ribbon of blue water and green fields on average only six miles wide this geography shaped the civilization where the Spirit of Iraq was pessimistic here when the Nile flooded each year as the ancient said the fields laugh men's faces light up and God rejoices in his heart you from the life renewing soil left by the inundation the Egyptians drew a cheerful confidence in humanity in the permanence and stability of things theirs was an optimistic civilization you their civilization grew out of a long prehistory of culture in the Nile Valley the coming together of many small egalitarian farming communities communities sustained as today by hard-working peasantry tilling the soil creating an elaborate filigree of ditches and dikes to capture the annual flood the Aswan High Dam built in 1970 may have changed this age-old rhythm but today's Egypt still depends on the Tilly's the fella he and what the ancients called the black earth not long before 3,000 BC these local cultures were unified into a single state the first in history and here at the very beginning there are clues which will determine the shape of Egyptian civilization right down to the Islamic our search begins in an obscure little village in Upper Egypt called karma Lakmal the red man this was the center of a prehistoric tribal kingdom shrine of a local divinity called horus the hawk hence its Greek name Heydrich on Pallas in 1897 two British archaeologist squib Ellen Greene came here looking for the origins of Egypt the Americans came back in a field beyond the village they made a stunning discovery a heap of ceremonial pallets and mace heads from the ritual stores of Egypt's first Kings Kings called cobra catfish scope pork so so the so the Old Kingdom temple is this whole area here the temple of Horus yeah is that right in Egypt begin here the first owns I will my little anymore would you dinner : area did any of their fathers working on those excavation but cuca nationally known yeah among the finds was perhaps the most significant object ever dug up in Egypt a slab of black slate 2 feet long cut with scenes commemorating the deeds of a king called Norma whom legend said was the unifier of Egypt here is the very moment of Norma's triumph wearing the crown of Upper Egypt he dashes out the brains of the captive king of the Delta headless enemies lion rose before the standards of horus the hawk and already a superhuman aura ron's the king himself and aura of divinity 90 years on it's very difficult to see any trace of those momentous discoveries here in the area where the palates and the mace heads were found but a year later Green made an equally intriguing find in the same area he came across the remains of a large circular mound of clean white sand about 50 yards across an 8 feet high enclosed by a sloping sandstone revetment there was evidence of a of a walkway leading to some central feature Greene thought the dating was prehistoric before the first kings of dynastic Egypt and he interpreted the mound as being a symbolic representation of the mound of creation itself the first Island which had risen out of the Seas of chaos at the beginning of time and on which the first life had landed the hawk the divine kingship of Horus would last as long as ancient Egypt itself here in the great temple at edfu that same creation myth would be expounded in loving detail for colonial greek overlords nearly three millennia after namaste it was at the heart of the Egyptian conception of civilization every Egyptian temple then was a symbolic representation of that original mound of creation with that simple read shrine surrounding the perch on which the hawk had landed which was created at high rekon palace and no matter how big the temples became in later ages the holy of holies was still that simple read shrine depicted here at head foo 3,000 years later you can make a line of reads surrounding the chamber in which the image of the hawk was kept the temple was not only though a depiction of the first place but of the first time the time when the pattern of a stable society was handed down to humankind of kingship law religion and ritual a pattern which it was believed would suffice for eternity as long as the rituals were correctly performed the universe then and civil society were conceived of a static progress change new questions new answers were not required because they were not needed and indeed they wouldn't be needed until Alexander the Great conquered Egypt three millennia later for the Egyptians then divine kingship was the guarantee of a stable cosmos the same idea can be traced across the world from Shang China to Aztec Mexico and here at Abydos those first kings of Egypt were buried with immense brick mortuary temples like earthly palaces and so the key themes of Egyptian history were laid down centralized power royal rituals and the cult of the dead intertwined to form the ideology of the world's first state themes still potent even in our own day moving northwards along the Nile the narrow valley meets the green expanse of the Delta at this strategic point close by today's capital Cairo the Horace Kings built their Royal City Memphis on the sandstone escarpment above the floodplain is the great funeral complex of the 3rd dynasty kings here at Saqqara the mud brick architecture of Abydos was turned into Stern an immense 200-foot high - of King Josie the first of the pyramids in a handful of generations around 2500 BC a series of gifted Kings who nee-san through Khufu Khafre building bigger and bigger as each seems to try to outdo his predecessor created the greatest series of funeral monuments but world has ever seen you the most famous the Giza pyramids are now all but engulfed by the suburbs of Cairo stripped of their polished limestone casing and plundered for building stone but still awesome there are many myths surrounding the building of the pyramids the Hollywood epic version had slave gangs whipped along by tyrannical masters but Egypt was not a slave Society the mass of the workforce was not enslaved in a long reign it was perfectly possible for a government to mobilize huge scale state employment to build such monuments using the workforce in the wet season when the Nile flood left idle hands the graffiti in the cloris we can get some idea of the character of the gangs built these pyramids the tough gang the boys who stay forever Khufu's boys but exactly how it was done there's very little evidence for that they must have worked from an enormous ramp running from the river with feeder feeder supports of wooden earth perhaps to bring the the stones round the Greek traveler Herodotus who came here in the 450s BC said that he was told by tour guides that it took twenty years with the gangs of a hundred thousand men to do it the ancient Greeks with typical cockiness called them pyramids after the triangular cakes they knew back home we can see them now in the light of the artificial mountains built by other cultures Babylonians Maya and Aztec for all civilizations have sought validation for their power over the masses by creating great public symbols but more than that the dead King is now a manifestation of the Sun God himself when the construction job was finished the pyramids were covered with a case of fine Tura limestone and although most of that has disappeared over the centuries you can see over there on Catherine's pyramid the top coating is still there that's what they look like but what were they for they were tombs but what did the shape me well the pyramid clearly was what it seems to be a staircase on which the Kings spirit could ascend to heaven and then go back to his tomb and what we're looking at over here is an image of the Rays of the Sun God coming down to earth a typical piece of the Egyptian imagination in which an immaterial concept is represented in such a material form and on winters days here in Giza you can actually sit here and watch the Sun breaking through the clouds and falling down at the same angle as the pyramids a stairway to heaven then the Rays of the Sun on which the king nimble and wise could ascend to the indestructible stars the Egyptians created the world's first unified state in modern terms it was a provider state providing a basic standard of living to all its people through control of irrigation in return for enormous surpluses to be spent on tombs temples and palaces through these great buildings it expressed its ideologies of power its belief in the indivisibility of divine and earthly rule in the need for a stable cosmos such ideas may have been essential needs of civilization at the start and yet even today almost all of us still live in nation-states with some or all of those same characteristics our thinking is still shaped by their religious and social myths and especially by the myth of the great ruler king or God for it was in his name in the Bronze Age but the many surrendered power to the few to live in the condition in which most of the people of the planet still live today worship of the great ruler was perhaps a necessary stage in the development of civilization but even now in the TV age kings and presidents and popes used the vast array of visual aids invented here in which we see all around us to boost their authority and do we not still engage in ruler worship ourselves whenever we chair a presidential motorcade as it sweeps by or to celebrate the Jubilee of the Queen of England the street passes escorted by beefeaters in 16th century costume or watch Musketeers give an antiquated salute on the White House lawn perhaps then we are only just emerging from the spell of the Bronze Age Revolution which created civilization and shaped our ways of thinking in the long term in history we have perhaps still too close to them to see ourselves as we really are in ancient Egypt the ties binding people to the state were not only economic but religious and the great event in its religious life was the pilgrimage to Abydos each year thousands of people set out for the little town in middle Egypt to celebrate the resurrection of Osiris king of the Dead the pilgrimage provided a focus for feelings of ordinary Egyptians and rather like Hindus today at Banaras or Shia Muslims of Corolla many asked to be brought in Abydos for Barry you and at abydos we find another of egypt's great legacies to the world it's still a haunting place cradled in an immense curve of the western cliffs the realm of the Dead a holy place since prehistory in the ruins of the sacred city the temple of seti the first built in 1300 BC still survives it's one of the peaks of ancient old moving from daylight into its darkened inner sanctum the visitor has an uncanny intimation of a still active residue of spiritual power long before the Christians and Muslims even ordinary Egyptians came to believe in an eternal soul in a Last Judgment and in resurrection after death these great conceptions were acted out in a public passion play at abydos and are depicted on the temple walls here as a rite of passage for King SETI himself here too are many motifs familiar to Christians especially the role of the Divine Mother Isis here Isis is caressing SETI on her knee and she says to him you're my son come out of me I have nourished you that you may be Lord of the two lands I have made your body strong in victory against all the enemies who may come against you your Majesties King of eternity a Falcon abiding forever and here's Isis giving the breath of life to SETI and above her her words are you have made your mansion your temple to magnify our nature and adorned it with all the kinds of excellent stonework and your reward for this will be the lifespan of the sky or as long as Abydos shall exist first sight these gestures and actions may seem more archaic and bizarre but if you just step back a little and feed for example what a Muslim or a Buddhist or even a Protestant would make of seeing for the first time a solemn Roman Catholic Mass then a lot of those tender gestures which are so familiar to Christians would lose their meaning in all religions in the world simple and often strange gestures can carry profound truths and it was just the same in Egyptian religion which certainly did not lack ethical content but the key to understanding the function of this great building lies in these little chapels just at the end of this room in this inner shrine the climax to the whole riddle it's concerned the installation king setting nothingness Cyrus's heir living king but with his union with a cyrus after death here Isis and Paris perform rituals for him and SETI is now dead and deified here he's represented as a mummy in a wide round and over there on the far wall blackened by smoke and age SETI restored to the colors of living flesh and blood comes into the presence of a cyrus where he will become one resurrected himself with the resurrected King of the Dead so the simple and strange gestures reveal a simple yet profound message a belief in righteousness on earth in the Last Judgement in eternal life though not in damnation which had no place in the Egyptians optimistic view of things but these ideas would play a key role in the later development of Christianity and of Islam art in the desert at Abydos millions of broken pots still lie where the ancient pilgrims left them as offerings to their God for them the wind roaring down the great gorge in the western cliffs was the sound of the spirits of the Dead whose annual pilgrimage to a cyrus they believed would continue as long as Abydos exists in 332 BC Egypt was conquered by Alexander the Great and then Egyptian civilization turned away from its immemorial roots towards the sea and a wider world on the Mediterranean coast a new capital was founded which became the meeting place of Europe and Asia on the shore of Africa Alexandra the greatest market in the inhabited world wrote the Roman strable beacon to traders from all nations who came by land and sea bearing spices from South India and the treasures of the Silk Route to China it's paradise here said the poet headed us you can get anything you want money shows games women wine boys the best library in the world in short all Earthly Delights like twenties New York Hellenistic Alexandria was a land of opportunities whose streets were paved with gold it drew immigrants of all kinds bankers Clark's engineers poets even religious dropouts these extraordinary mummy portraits allow us literally to look into the eyes of such people even we feel to sense their hopes and fears vain and violent rich and prosperous it was said they've only one God here ma'am our good life in Alexandria was brief read the code colorful but how potent were the perfumes how splendid the bed on which we lay and to what sensual delight we gave our bodies down here in the catacombs of Alexandria you can still enter that weird and wonderful world where Egyptian and Greek Jewish and oriental religion and magic met and intermingled the Greeks who came here to Egypt were very open-minded by the local gods the deep experience of Mediterranean paganism made it easy for them to identify a modern with Zeus or to say the Egyptians worshipped Aphrodite the goddess of love but they called her Hathor and how that worked in practice you can see in this astonishing tomb deep below the streets of Alexandria at first sight it looks like a typically Egyptian tomb with papyrus columns and the winged disk of the Sun behind the row of cobras heads but when you look closer you notice human figures in ancient Egyptian poses but with greco-roman faces on each side of a door Guardian serpents but carrying the snake entwined staff of Hermes the Greek guide of souls and above them Medusa's heads and when you go inside the tomb itself you can see that the sarcophagi are decorated with traditional Greek motifs bunches of grapes wreaths cattle skulls and masks but above them are the ancient gods of Egypt there's Isis protecting the sacred bull with her wings and over here fought the god of wisdom the falcon-headed Horus tending to the mummy of the dead and here even the jackal-headed Anubis the guardian of the Dead wearing greco-roman military gear this then is the strange synthesis that emerged in Greek Egypt it was said that Alexander had hoped to create a new world order based on his multiracial ideal of brotherhood among nations but with hindsight ironically we can see that his Hellenistic Empire actually laid the cultural foundations of Islam when he died in Babylon age 32 Alexander's body was brought back for burial in a lavish tomb in Alexandria it's never been found but the clues point to this tiny mosque in the heart of the old city an arab traveller who came here in the ninth century a.d described this place as the mosque of the two-horned prophet strange echo of the ram's horn helmet with which the Egyptian priests of Amun had crowned Alexander the Great and through the Middle Ages it was revered not only as the tomb of the prophet Daniel which is still done but also as the tomb of the king and prophet Iskandar Alexander the Great himself the tunnels and cellars fan out from underneath this mask have never been explored properly but that's not really surprising the city's absolutely honeycombed with them and they're really dangerous there's a great Alexandrian story of the fat bride who on her wedding procession fell through a hole in the street and disappeared and despite the best efforts of the guests she was never seen again in 1850 a servant of the Russian consulate came down here and got lost in the corridors when he came out he said that he'd seen in a gap in the stonework a chamber with a glass coffin and a human body with a gold ID around its head and fragments of papyrus everywhere that description closely matches the last classical witnesses of the tomb of Alexander the Great but suspiciously so he was probably lying nevertheless it's an intriguing thought that solution to the greatest mystery in the history of Alexandria could lie somewhere behind one of these blocks up corridors it's 3 a.m. in the remote monastery of st. Paul near the Red Sea the monks begin their devotions before dawn Oh these are Christian cops their name means Egyptians and their language and music contains survivals from fair onic times their culture goes back to the early centuries ad when Egypt became part of a Christian Roman Empire and even today they represent nearly 10% of Egypt's population this church was founded in the 3rd century AD by Saint Paul the anchorite and with the Christians we come to the second great foreign transformation of the native culture of the Nile Valley in late Roman Egypt an upheaval began as momentous as any political revolution a change in the psyche of Near Eastern culture which has helped shape the Western mind ever since a vision of life which believed in withdrawal from the world monasticism at this time the blue water and emerald fields of the Nile Valley were exchanged for the inhospitable desert there are strange parallels with our own time in the widespread feeling that civilization itself had failed better cities may arise one day said the Egyptian philosopher platini's our children though conceived in a sinful age may build better than their fathers and so the old fabric of pagan culture the stable cosmos which had sustained Egyptians for so long was eroded by Christianity with its appeal not to a great earthly ruler but to a distant High God this was a time said one when we realized how insecure the human condition is these fateful changes were mirrored in the way people saw the world for nearly a thousand years classical Mediterranean art had glorified the physical world in the belief that mankind as the Greek said was the measure of all things now artists retreat into a crude language of symbols to us in the age of Freud and Jung it looks like a failure of nerve a loss of faith in the material world perhaps even deeper psychic trauma everything has gone said Cyprian honesty friendship skill in the arts standards in morals this vast and wonderful world is heading for destruction and so with st. Paul of Egypt the stage was set for fundamentalists of all persuasions to fight over the legacy of the Ancients be sure and other horrid things chief of the anchorites for the city Alexandra ad - too late died 83 for three a revolution of the mind was now in process and out of this crisis a new religion would emerge as the dominant culture of the whole region in 641 Egypt was conquered by Muslim Arabs barring a new gospel that of the Prophet Mohammed and here in ed foo the town of Horus ordinary Egyptian people in their mud-brick slums around the temple soon began to abandon the uncertainties of the past for the certainties of a single God Islam and so here in ed foo in Upper Egypt as throughout the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world's the Christians and the Muslims were the inheritors of the ancients and their belief in a single God which the Morrisons are chanting now from their minarets developed out of a tendency long apparent in the ancient world for the the Catholic papacy the Muslim Caliphate the Orthodox churches of the Greeks and Syrians and cops all stem from the attempt of men to rule their fellow men and women under a distant high and all-powerful God and the effects of that tremendous revolution at the end of the late antique world still shape our lives today the last Greek religious papyrus from 7th century Egypt sets the seal on that revolution for it gives in Greek the very words we can hear around us now in the name of God the merciful and the compassionate there is one God and one God alone and it goes on in Greek Marc med Apostolou steel Muhammad is the apostle of God with that to all intents and purposes the world of the ancient Egyptians had passed the change to Islam would take many centuries and out in the countryside especially in Upper Egypt that deeper layers of the past are still visible today it's the eve of the full moon in mid-march heralding the onset of the heat of summer and at this time tens of thousands of people coming from the countryside to descend on the little town of Luxor for a great annual festival up here people still celebrate the ancient feast days the spring festival the rising of the Nile and especially the 40 days of mourning for the dead but this is the biggest it's a Muslim festival for an Islamic saint but it takes place at a mosque inside one of the great pagan temples of ancient Egypt the Coptic Christians take part too for they also once had a church inside the temple the saint himself Adil ha GOG died in the 11th century at the point when Islam was becoming the majority religion here his tomb inside the mosque has been a place of pilgrimage ever since as everywhere orthodoxy may demand one thing but what the people do is another matter and in the worship of sheiks and saints the ordinary people the fella Hien fill the void between their daily hopes and fears and that distant High God the night is passed in passionate celebration with the traditional music and songs of Upper Egypt the two lands may have been United 5,000 years ago but the South is still a distinct country and tonight a man from the Delta would be a complete stranger here next day the festival reaches its climax the living descendants of the saint lead a huge procession around the ancient temple and it's mosque bearing representations of the coffins of Haggai in his sons bringing up the procession our luck soars gilda ferryman bearing boats there on trucks these days but nonetheless the ferryman are discharging their traditional duty just as their ancestors did thousands of years ago when around the streets of ancient Luxor they bore the boat of the Sun God on the day ends not in solemnity but in carnival and license you Oh the ancient legacy also survived in the city Kairo the mother of cities as even about to toss said it's numberless buildings peerless in the beauty and splendor a meeting place of travellers shelter of the strong and weak whose throngs of people's surged like the scene founded in sight of the ancient capital Memphis and the pyramids of giza and sakara cairo has long been the cultural capital of Arab Islam and here too even today in its mosques and university we can still find a living link with the world of the Pharaohs a civilization conservative in character like it's ancient predecessor here in the al-azhar the leading teaching mosque of Islam older than Oxford / Sorbonne learning is still the study of the sacred texts binding the land together as it did in ancient Egypt in City and countryside then the modern Egyptians still do some of the things their ancestors did for all the apparently cataclysmic breaks in their history now here in Cairo in the late 14th century those questions were examined by the greatest of all Islamic historians even a khaldoun his concerns were the same as ours in these films the nature of civilization is rise and decline he considered that settled cooperative human life was the goal of civilization but it went in cycles of growth and decay like all forms of life he thought incidentally that overconsumption in society was an inevitable cause of decline but but under certain favorable conditions of geography and climate and the character and customs of the people culture could acquire a rootedness that he called the habit of civilization and in all history Egypt was perhaps the best example of that habit the Pharaohs he points out had political paths for 3,000 years they were followed by the Greeks and the Romans and then the legacy taken on by Islam so the habit of civilization was continuous here nowhere else in the world was it more firmly rooted and that perhaps explains Egypt's continuing cultural leadership in the Islamic world today at the beginning lay the early Egyptian state the first comprehensive attempt in human history to satisfy the needs of men and women to live together in an ordered state with a degree of happiness and material well-being and so far it's been one of the most successful and so even after the triumph of Islam the legacy of the Pharaohs did not give up all its numinous path and it has not yet you

Channel: undefined

Views: 760,372

Rating: 4.3619165 out of 5

Keywords: sharm el sheikh, ancient Egypt, Hurghada, sharm el sheik, egypt holidays, el gouna, Taba, pyramids of Egypt, cairo, egypt, egypt pyramids, hurgada, dahab, red sea, holidays, ETA

Id: 09YBbgr-GaI

Length: 51min 21sec (3081 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 24 2013