Key Concepts of Ancient Egypt

I mentioned in an earlier blog that I would be writing more about ancient Egypt. Many have done so, but I would like to address it in a different way. To begin, three of the most difficult concepts for we moderns to get our wits around are how truly old the Egyptian civilization is, how much of it we know, and how little we truly understand, given the extraordinary length of time it existed.

There is also the lag time between the most up-to-date research, the theories that have been validated by the academic world, and the ideas and concepts that have managed to filter into the minds of the public as general knowledge.

There have also been a great many new discoveries, many of which have yet to be fully understood as to their significance. Consider the following article:

10 stunning ancient Egyptian discoveries made in 2024, from hidden temples to hallucinogenic rituals

One might ask, why so many and why now?

One answer is that most of the new discoveries were funded and sponsored by the Cairo Museum and/or the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

Tourism is a big business in Egypt and accounts for 10-15% of the economy. It generates some 32 billion dollars per year and supports millions of jobs. New discoveries help to eclipse any second thoughts potential tourists may have due to political instability in the area. Discoveries fuel interest.

This doesn’t mean they are untrue or that I wish to disparage their worth, but to point out that they shift the focus to the sensational and the immediate from the more important: the ancient Egyptian concepts of time, stability, and balance.

For example, the civilization of ancient Egypt is the longest and oldest that we really know something about. It spans some 6,000 years.

Older civilizations may have existed, but none have remained so influential, so visible, and so present for so long.

Consider this: the United States is barely 200 years old. If we start with the Renaissance, European culture is only 600 years old. In India, most of the Indian subcontinent was unified under Ashoka around 200 BCE, or 2,200 years ago. The Roman world really began around the same time as China under Qin Shi Huang in 221 BCE.

Babylon came into its own around 2,000 BCE or 4,000 years ago. By then, Egypt had already existed for 2,000 years, or about the same amount of time if measured from the year zero by our reckoning to the present.

In many ways, this is exactly what the ancient Egyptians wanted the rest of the world to understand. They existed in the past, they are here in the present, and they will continue to exist so long as we remember them and continue to speak their names.

If one considers that thought for a moment, one begins to get a glimpse of just how powerful their concept of themselves really was and is.