Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (16 page)

The Joseph story continues as, years later, his brothers come to Egypt in the midst of a drought in their land and are brought before Joseph, now a highly placed adviser to the pharaoh. The brothers do not realize who Joseph is, but he recognizes them, and in an act of forgiveness, Joseph is reconciled with the brothers who had sold him. Joseph’s father, Jacob—or Israel, as he is called—and all his descendants make the trip to Egypt, where they are welcomed by Joseph.

After hundreds of years in Egypt, in the biblical version, the Hebrews are eventually viewed as a threat by a new pharaoh—unidentified in the Bible—and they are enslaved, put to work building cities and fortifications. Eventually the pharaoh is so worried about these Israelites that he orders the killing of their firstborn. A Jewish woman places her child in a basket of reeds to save his life. Found floating in the Nile by the daughter of the pharaoh, the child—Moses—is raised as a prince in the royal house. Moses later sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew worker and he kills the Egyptian. Frightened, Moses leaves Egypt, has a divine encounter with God in the form of a burning bush, and returns to Egypt to set his people free. After the ten plagues are visited upon the Egyptians, the pharaoh—usually identified as Ramses II, but there is considerable disagreement over that—consents to let Moses leave with his people, who cross into the Sinai Desert and receive the Ten Commandments; then, after more tribulations, they eventually enter Canaan, the Promised Land. Moses, however, does not go with them. He dies before entering the Promised Land, his final resting place a complete mystery.
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Does Egyptian myth matter?

What difference do all these stories of thousands of gods with animal heads really make? Was Egypt simply one more great civilization that fell into history’s dustbin? After the Ramessid Period, Egypt began a long decline, starting with the Twentieth Dynasty (1186–1069 BCE), as struggles for royal power among priests and nobles divided the country. Egypt lost its territories abroad, and its weakness attracted foreign invaders. The decline accelerated rapidly after about 1070 BCE, and during the next seven hundred years, more than ten dynasties ruled Egypt, but many of them were formed by foreign rulers, including Nubians, Assyrians, and the Persians, whose king Cambyses conquered Egypt in 525 BCE. According to Egyptian accounts, the Persian king respected Egyptian religion and assumed the forms of traditional Egyptian kingship.

After declining for centuries, the glories of the pharaohs finally ended in 332 BCE, when Alexander the Great conquered Egypt and added it to his empire. When Alexander died in 323 BCE, his generals divided his empire, and one of them, Ptolemy, gained control of Egypt. In about 305 BCE, he founded a dynasty known as the Ptolemies, which spread Greek culture in Egypt, with Alexandria becoming Egypt’s capital and central city. Famed for its magnificent library and museum, Alexandria emerged as one of the greatest cultural centers of the ancient world. The dynasty of the Ptolemies (305–30 BCE) claimed the title of pharaoh and treated the Egyptian gods respectfully, but the ancient connection between the ruler of Egypt and the gods had finally ended.

In 30 BCE, Egypt’s ability to produce vast surpluses of grain made it a great prize in the intrigues that created the Roman Empire. The period included one of the most extraordinary chapters of history, the brief reign of Cleopatra—the last of the Ptolemies—and her involvement with two of Rome’s most powerful men, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. As Caesar’s lover, Cleopatra went to Rome and was there when he was assassinated in 44 BCE. She returned to Egypt, had her brother killed, and placed her son—fathered by Caesar, she claimed—on the Egyptian throne. She then became involved with Mark Antony, coruler of Rome. Antony and Cleopatra hoped that their combined armies could win control of Rome against Octavian, Julius Caesar’s nephew and heir and another coruler of Rome. In the sea Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, the navy of Antony and Cleopatra lost to Octavian’s fleet. The famed lovers later separately committed suicide, and Octavian, who would be renamed Augustus and complete the transformation of Rome from republic to empire, made Egypt a province of Rome, which ruled it for the next four centuries. Rome’s control of Egypt gradually weakened after 395 CE, when the Roman Empire split into Eastern and Western parts. By 642 CE, Muslims from Arabia had conquered Egypt.

Having faded from its glory and majesty, the three-thousand-year empire saw its lights dim. Did its history and beliefs matter? Did the great civilization make a difference? Unquestionably, the answer is “Yes.”

Aside from its obvious artistic, cultural, and technical achievements, Egypt had great impact on its neighbors and later conquerors, including Greece and Rome, which both assimilated aspects of Egyptian religion, art, and architecture.

There is also considerable evidence that Egyptian writings may have influenced the Bible, aside from the stories of Joseph and Moses. A series of Egyptian moral precepts called the
Wisdom of Amenenope
(c. 1400 BCE), one of the most famous instructional texts in ancient Egypt, has very close parallels to the biblical Book of Proverbs.

Perhaps most significant for world history is the overlooked role of Egypt in the history of Christianity, which took root in Egypt at a very early date. By the end of the second century, Christianity was already well established in the Nile Valley, and soon came to replace the old religion of the gods.

In
The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt
, Richard H. Wilkinson concludes: “The spread of the religion was aided by the fact that many aspects of Christianity were readily understandable to the Egyptians in terms of their own ancient myths and beliefs…. [The] fact that the Egyptians, since ancient times, had viewed their king as an incarnation of a god meant that the Christian concept of Jesus as the incarnate son of God was far more readily embraced in Egypt than elsewhere in the Roman world…. [Even] major Christian motifs may have Egyptian origins. The sacred mother and child of Christianity are certainly foreshadowed in the countless images of Isis—whom the Egyptians called the ‘mother of god’—and her infant son Horus, as is even the symbol of the cross which is first attested in Egypt as the ‘Egyptian’ or
tau
cross—a form of the
ankh
sign.”

But is there something else? Does Egypt’s extraordinary history speak to any deeper spiritual or cosmic significance? Setting aside theories of ancient astronauts, cursed mummies, the psychic power of pyramids, and dozens of other “New Age” obsessions with things Egyptian, does the “gift of the Nile” matter? For those with a Jewish or Christian background—as well as those people whose exposure to Egypt was limited to the annual airing of
The Ten Commandments
with Charlton Heston as Moses—there has always been a cultural hangover of animosity toward ancient Egypt. Through this Judeo-Christian framework, Egypt existed only as the home of the ruthless pharaohs, a place of servitude and inhumanity. It was an image that carried through to the American Civil Rights era, when the Deep South was symbolically associated with Egypt and American blacks saw themselves as the Hebrews trying to escape the pharaoh’s cruelty.

Lost in this somewhat narrow view of the Egyptians as the “bad guys” is a different view of Egypt—a society where the values of truth, justice, charity, and other virtues played a critical role in shaping a civilization that produced extraordinary beauty and a spiritual view of the universe, which, at its best, believed that a just life was justly rewarded.