Art and History of Egypt [antikvár]

To modern eyes the peoples of ancient Egypt seem bearers of some higher civilization whose sources lay in another world. While populations elsewhere, still in their infancy, were groping their way out of the stone age, generating cultures that were on more or less the same level in all the regions of the world, the Egyptians seem to have been born adult. They soon broke through the barriers of human possibility, six thousand years ago, almost in virtue of experiences sustained in some other extraordinarily civilized world. What happened here on the shores of the Nile was unprecedented and unique, an adventure which evolved at dizzying speed, creating works of art and science way beyond the prospects of the time. As yet, the building of the pyramid of Khufu (Cheops), in a period when iron and the wheel were still unknown, remains an inexplicable mystery. We are even more baffled when we realize that even before the Great Pyramid rose, the Egyptians had the technique and organization required to harness the floods of the Nile along thousands of kilometers and turn swampland and the desert itself into a new terrestrial paradise. The fact that other peoples developed at much slower rates, some remaining in the Neolithic period up almost to modern times, reinforces the feeling that the peoples of the "planet Egypt" anticipated the history of the world by two thousand years, with an impulse of such strength that it can still be felt five thousand years later. The arms used in this colossal conquest were water and fire — the Nile and the Sun. Arms not taken up, but forged, cultivated by this ancient peoples so that the destruction wrought by water and fire should render propitious the fertility of the earth, of the very life of Egypt. Mankind collaborated with Isis and Osiris to recreate life, to make the land look like paradise once more, a terrestrial paradise which joins anew with the celestial paradise. Egypt is not the Promised Land, but it is the land that man creates by his labor, day by day, year by year, in endless cycles where the Created and Creator fuse into one. No sharp distinctions separate the gods from man; the gods are in the midst of men; their features are those of man, or of the animals which surround him in the sky or on the earth; their hands are invisible and infinite, as infinite as the rays of the sun. Water and cosmic fire, death and resurrection, human essence and divine are present in every clod of Egyptian earth. Nile and the Sun trace two boundless rings which run throughout the universe of this and of the other world, the path along which the new man of the "planet Egypt" finds his becoming and the rea- son itself for his eternal course. Those of us who live now, two thousand years after Christ, can still find that ineffable equilibrium between the way of water and the way of fire by letting ourselves go on a sailboat in Upper Egypt. We can once more discover the invisible bridge that leads us to the sources of our history and feel our hearts throb with the same emotion that touched the hearts of our ancestors of five thousand years ago when at the beginning of the year they listened to the song that accompanied the rising waters of the Nile: "Come water of life which springs from heaven. The sky burns and the earth trembles at the coming of the Great God. The mountains to the west and to the east open, the Great God appears, the Great God takes possession of the body of Egypt".