2023-08-12 13:25:01
What is it about the history of ancient Egypt that appeals to you as a historian?
For me, Egypt is like a magnet, from many points of view. In that empire we find historical, monumental, scientific, even esoteric elements that make ancient Egypt a culture that hooks many of us who are dedicated to ancient history.
We talk about Ancient Egypt as if it were a relatively short period of history.
And it is not like that. To begin with, it encompasses three thousand years before our era and recent studies suggest that it was even earlier, because although we do not have hieroglyphic evidence, it does not mean that it did not exist. Therefore, to speak of ancient Egypt is to speak of long before the Roman Empire and well into it, or at least until the entry of Christianity into Rome.
¿Egypt is it the Nile?
Undoubtedly the river is the mother of that civilization. All life was conditioned by the waters of the Nile. Agriculture, society, even the river was like the highway to connect different areas of the empire.
Why do we know so much about the lives of the pharaohs and the citizens Empire?
For one very important thing, and that is that the scribes wrote down everything, absolutely everything. So we have received a lot of data.
And where do we put the Rosetta Stone?
It is key above all to be able to decipher the hieroglyphic inscriptions, since the same text is found in it in three ways, including Greek. Something that would not have been possible if the conquerors had not allowed the Egyptians to preserve their culture and their own way of transmitting it. And that lasted until Christianity forbade it, considering it a culture linked to paganism.
This leads us to talk about the Library of Alexandria and Hypatia, its librarian.
The library was a creation of the Ptolemies, who, in addition to classifying all existing written knowledge, wanted to encourage the meeting between philosophers, thinkers and scientists, through debates. When the library was destroyed, a huge amount of works disappeared, it was something terrible for the transmission of ancient knowledge. Hypatia was killed for two reasons: for being a woman and for being an intellectual, and all within a context of eliminating everything that strayed from the mainstream Christian current.
What was the role of women in ancient Egypt?
He had a much greater position and rights than he had in the towns of the time. A woman could write a will and could have assets, and one very important thing, when she got married she could sign an annulment condition in case the couple did not work out in the future. We can say that, in a certain way, in Ancient Egypt there was a divorce that was always favorable to the woman.
What was the social structure like?
First, at the top, the royal house, that of the pharaoh, who was considered a god or a descendant of gods, but a short distance away we have the vizier, the trusted man of the pharaoh and who had a lot of administrative and judicial power, then came the in charge of the economic part and the granaries, until reaching the base that were mainly peasants and ranchers. Contrary to what many movies tell us, slavery did not exist at the time of the pyramids, it came at a very advanced time of Egyptian civilization, when the empire began to expand and conquer other territories. So these monumental constructions were designed by architects, naturally, and made by the workers of the Egyptian people. The pyramids are works of architecture and engineering, using very advanced mathematical knowledge and ways of building that we do not know, since the papyrus that explains them has not reached us. The day this happens, we will really have enormous information.
So movies and novels like ‘Sinué the Egyptian’ don’t add anything to the story.
Well, they have something positive, although there is much more fiction than reality. We find some negative examples in Land of the Pharaohs, in which there are many anachronisms and errors: camels, dromedaries and alligators appear, non-existent in Egypt, in a palace room there is a tiger skin, an animal that did not exist there either and soldiers appear with long swords when that is a much later invention. But on the other hand, in Cecil B de Mille’s film about Moses, the director had Egyptologists as advisers, so the battle tanks and other elements are really very similar to those used at the time.
And speaking of the Bible, the Ten Commandments are not originally biblical literature, they already appear in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the same happens with some of the Beatitudes.
What is the importance of Tutankhamen, the most famous pharaoh?
He is important because of what was found in his tomb, intact, but not because of his reign, which was short. So, more than Tutankhamun, we should talk about Howard Carter, the discoverer of the tomb and who was underestimated by the Egyptologists of the time, who did not consider him a scientist because he had not been trained in universities but on the ground, since he was cartoonist.
Why has the ancient Egyptian civilization given rise to so many esoteric theories?
These absurd and bizarre myths related to Ancient Egypt are mostly promoted in the novels of an English writer who deserves to be more recognized as a writer. I refer to Jane Wells Loudon that in her science fiction novel, The Mummy, set in the 22nd century, she tells how after the public dissection of a mummy in London, she recovers her life. Then came authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Louise May Alcott or Bram Stoker who put their grain of sand. And if we add to this that at the beginning of the 20th century English journalism magnified some coincidences that happened to some Egyptologists, then things skyrocket. Some have even conspired about the sinking of the Titanic, assuring that in the hold was a mummy in a cursed coffin. A whole breeding ground for esoteric and supernatural ideas.
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