þ7%‡I²$‡DìDìFìFìFìFìFìFìFìFì@G,"GNGNDI’I’I’ I²I²I²I² Part One Religion and Common Life in the Pre-Islamic Near East Chapter 1 Early Civilizations and the Origins of Judaism and ChristianityEgypt the Land Islam arose in the same part of the world that witnessed the rise of civilization, including writing, large-scale agriculture, long-distance trade both by sea and by land, and a number of great religious traditions. From their beginnings, the civilizations of both Egypt and Mesopotamia placed religious symbols, beliefs, and practices in prominent positions. The Egyptians believed their wonderful land and its ordered people to be a gift of the gods, who deserved in return continuous praise, thanksgiving, and service. The Mesopotamians considered themselves to be the stewards of their land, which was believed to be a vast estate ruled by the gods in heaven. At the center of both systems was a ruler who had sacral and priestly as well as political, economic, judicial, and military functions and qualities. In Egypt the pharaoh was believed to be a god as well as a human, and so he provided a link between the earthly and heavenly realms. Actually, there seems to have been no sharp distinction made between the two, for, as the great American Egyptologist John Wilson has put it, the Egyptians lived in a ÒconsubstantialÓ universe in which humans, animals, gods, and inanimate nature were intimately and harmoniously interrelated.1 This helps explain the confidence that marked Egyptian religious, political, artistic, and social expression in its formative and classical periods, extending roughly from 3000 to 2200 b.c.e. and known as the Old Kingdom. This was the ÒpyramidÓ age, during which most of the characteristic institutions and concepts pertaining to Egyptian civilization were begun and perfected. For centuries, indeed millennia, afterward, Egyptians later looked back to this period and drew from it inspiration for continuing tasks as well as comfort in periods of failure and disintegration. The great innovator Ikhnaton (d. ca. 1353 b.c.e.), who instituted a monotheistic cult nearly a thousand years after the fall of the Old Kingdom, clearly meant to return to the original pattern that exalted pharaoh above all else on earth and worshiped him as the good god. The EgyptiansÕgeneral optimism and confidence, reflected in their graceful and imaginative funeral art, for exampleÑwhich both protected and provided for the deadÑwas at least partly a product of topography and climate. The Nile valley is a place greatly blessed by nature. The weather is generally mild most of the year, and the soil is rich and loamy, coming as it did until recent times in the annual inundation from central Africa. With irrigation, there is almost always sufficient and sometimes abundant water. Goods and people are easily and cheaply transported from one part of the narrow valley to another on the Nile, whose current flows north toward the sea, whereas the prevailing wind blows south, thus enabling propulsion either by wind or current in both directions. The land is both contained and guarded by steep walls in the valley and hostile deserts on both sides, and to the north the swampy delta and the Mediterranean Sea effectively check incursions from the outside, provided the minimal necessary defensive outposts are maintained, especially along the Gaza Strip between Palestine and Egypt. As Herodotus said, ÒEgypt is the gift of the Nile.Ó2 Throughout its ancient existence as a major Near Eastern power, Egypt capitalized on its unique endowments and its sense of miraculous emergence and continued maintenance from the interaction of sun, soil, and moisture. EgyptÕs Ancient Religion The annual inundation of the Nile, bringing forth once again the life-giving green crops, symbolized as well as embodied the cycle of life, death, and resurrection that the Egyptians came to embrace through the cult of Osiris. Originally, Osiris was thought to have been the king of Egypt.3 His jealous and treacherous brother Seth, who is traditionally associated with the desert and its scorching winds, contrived to kill Osiris so as to ascend to the throne himself. The body of Osiris, trapped inside a beautiful box, floated out to sea and eventually washed up at Byblos, on the Phoenician coast. The devoted wife of Osiris, Isis, searched all over for her husbandÕs body, finally discovering it in a pillar of the palace of the king of Byblos. Returning with the body to Egypt, she hid it and herself in the delta marshes, where she succeeded in reviving Osiris enough to become impregnated. Seth, out hunting one night by the light of the moon, came upon the body of his brother, which he cut up into pieces and strewed all over Egypt. The penis was dropped into the Nile, where it was eaten by a fish. Isis, who from this time forward was often depicted as a grieving woman, flew in her form as a kite all over the land in order to find the parts of OsirisÕs body. Wherever she found one, she dedicated a temple at the spot, burying the part there. (One version has her reassemble the body and then become impregnated by it, a mythological explanation of the widespread occurrence of Osiris worship.) After a while Isis gave birth to a son, Horus, who was always identified with the falcon. Later, when Horus grew up, he avenged his fatherÕs murder through a tribunal of the gods, who found Seth guilty. Horus thus became the rightful ruler. Thereafter the living pharaoh was thought to be Horus, and the dead pharaoh, Osiris.4 Horus kept watch over Egypt as a just and mighty ruler, eventually adding to his falcon symbolism the powerful symbolism of the sun. Since the earliest of times birds of prey and the sun have been royal symbols, for who else can oversee vast regions at one glance, dive down swiftly to deal with disturbances, and make the soil fertile? In the person of the pharaoh, the forces of nature are harnessed to those of politics and justice by means of religious symbolism and ritual. In addition, Osiris continues to live and bring new life through the power of the Nile and the green vegetation associated with its annual floods after the dry season. Religion and Afterlife.ÊÊDuring the period of the Old Kingdom, as each pharaoh died, he became Osiris, and his successor became Horus. As Osiris, the pharaoh continued in an external life of happiness and pleasure. As the centuries went by, the nobles and then the common people came to share in this identification with Osiris, through elaborate rituals of burial and continued tomb maintenance. James Henry Breasted, the pioneering Egyptologist, named this phenomenon the Òdemocratization of the Osirean afterlife.Ó5 It seems to be one of the first explicit doctrines of life beyond the grave to have appeared in world religious history. Significantly, such an afterlife was dependent on having lived a good life on earth. The supreme Egyptian virtue was MaÕat, Òjustice,Ó depicted in the form of a woman with weighing scales and a feather. At a postdeath trial, really a last judgment, the newly deceased was questioned and examined and his or her deeds were weighed on MaÕatÕs scales of justice. If the verdict was damnation, a fearsome-looking crocodilelike monster was on hand to devour the victim. But if the verdict was innocence, then the happy soul was ushered into the Elysian Fields. There seems to have been much litigation in the afterlife on the part of deceased persons seeking a good outcome. And both the living and the dead continued to have relations with each other and could affect each other for good or ill.6 Ideas of justice, final judgment, and punishment or reward that have descended from ancient Egypt became central to the Abrahamic religions, of which Islam is the youngest. Although there are structural similarities in the ancient Egyptian and the Christian, Jewish and Islamic doctrines of individual judgment and either punishment or blissful afterlife in a kind of heaven, the details are quite different. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam feature a resurrection of the body, whereas the ancient Egyptians embalmed the body for a postmortem existence based in the tomb. The Christian, Jewish, and Islamic forms of afterlife do not have any necessary connection with a specific geographic location, whereas Egyptians had always dreaded dying and being buried away from their sacred land. Ancient Egypt had multiple geographies of death, one of which was an idealized version of the land and the Nile in heaven.7 Whenever possible, the remains of Egyptians who died abroad were transported back to the Valley of the Nile for a proper funeral, which included the journey across the Nile to the Land of the Westerners, where the sun sets each day over the cemeteries. Of course, other differences are connected with the diversity of gods in ancient Egypt and the roles they played in the funerary cult, as in many other dimensions of the cultural and religious system. Religion and ÒTopocosm.ÓÊÊAncient Egypt, like other traditional agriculture-based civilizations in Mesopotamia, the Indus valley, and China, unified into a symbolic and ritual system the land, the people, and the founding myths. This complex but harmonious interrelationship of the individual, society, time, and location centered in the agricultural-seasonal cycle has been given by an American specialist in comparative religion, Theodor Gaster, the name of Òtopocosm.Ó8 It is a union between place (topos) and world structure (cosmos). Thus, the crops, their planting, and their harvesting are not subject merely to the vicissitudes of a...
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