For the Teaching of Amenemipet, links between Egypt and the Bible were found easy to read out of proportion, given the limited preservation of other literatures among their numerous neighbors. The same warning applies to attempts to find connections over time. First-millennium AD religious teachings in circulation in Egypt draw on varied sources across vast geographic scope, not least from long periods of Nubian, Iranian, Macedonian Greek, and Arab rule. Similarities in spirit or literal content must be treated with great caution, when they span millennia. Yet relatively few places preserve religious writings over these millennia, and the comparative project should include methods for testing connections. North European and American academic and general public may tend to polarize world religions into dogmatic institutions (bad) and groups of freer, purer thinkers (good). For Egypt, that approach would separate the Coptic Church and Sunni Islam from, respectively, early gnostic and sufi movements. These easy distinctions contradict the content of gnostic and sufi writings, which propose views that have as much potential for dogmatic reading as any other orthodox or unorthodox view. Orthodoxy is a historical development rather than a property of one or other religious content. Modern external preferences for gnostic or sufi may belong within the same Eurocentric reflex as orientalism. This reception complicates comparisons with these writings, on top of the problem of their varied geographical historical sources. Yet the writings remain to be read, both for possible historical echoes and for asking again some of the questions put to more ancient teachings in the same landscape.
Where we found no ancient Egyptian teaching from mother to daughter, one famous gnostic composition gives a Gospel of Mariam, perhaps Mary Magdalene, the woman who gave up prostitution to follow Jesus, in the Christian New Testament (Ehrman and Plese 2011, 587-599). In the second part, at the request of the disciples of Jesus, Mariam says, “what is hidden from you, I will tell you,” and relates the safe passage of the soul past the seven forms of Wrath: darkness, desire, ignorance, envy of death, kingdom of flesh, folly of flesh, and wrathful knowledge. The disciples first refuse to accept her difficult teaching, wondering “did He really speak with a woman secretly from us?,” but Levi rebukes them and urges them to go out and teach. Here, elements from Christian evangelism combine with a recurrent theme of gnostic writing, the primacy of spirit over material. For the gnostic emphasis on knowledge and light (Ehrman and Plese 2011, 306-307), similar motifs might be found in ancient Egyptian writings. Yet the focus of comparison may fall instead on what is absent in the ancient teachings but present in other writings: the teaching woman (see Chapters 4 and 6 for goddesses as instructors and healers).
Equally, comparison with sufi writings might start from the discovery of something previously invisible in writing. The Andalusian writer Ibn Arabi (ad 1165-1240) wrote an account of the life of Dhu al-Nun the Egyptian, a ninth-century mystic at home in the temple of Akhmim, then still standing, said to understand hieroglyphic script (Deladriere 1980); his quest for knowledge looked beyond intellectual knowledge (Arabic ’ilm) to an intuitive sacred knowledge (Arabic ma'rifa). Dhu al-Nun inhabits the same city as the Amenemipet of the first-millennium Bc Teaching and where Gnostic writings were also found. An intellectual history of that or another city might be one more productive approach to reading writings from whichever their traditions. If it would be an error to ignore all this later evidence, there remains the danger of constructing an idealized history by lifting similar features out of context. Future reading will require multiple authors in concerted interdisciplinary research programs.
Conclusion: combining the evidence types Contexts of domination and equality
If modern readers find ancient writings hard to follow, particularly in issues of social organization and justice, part of the problem may stem from evolutionary thinking. Crudely, European history writing may have primed us to expect successive phases of human society, each with its own characteristic manner of treating human beings: a simple or primitive society, where all are equal; the early civilization or class society, where one set of people can be ruled or exploited by another, with the extreme example of enslaving societies; and then the modern industrial society, with an aspiration of individual freedom. In such concise terms, some flaws of this scheme are obvious, such as the relocation of enslaving societies from the democracies of Athens, Britain, or the United States to other past tyrannies. However, there may be still more fundamental failures in the vocabulary of primitive and egalitarian. Anthropologists such as James Flanagan have analyzed how misleading the categories may be, because they omit to state what precisely is simple or primitive about the human groups so labeled (Flanagan 1989). Where technology may be simple, other features such as technique, thinking, and indeed language may be extremely intricate. At the same time, the idea of a harmonious egalitarian community in the earliest times fails to account for different treatment of men and women, or adults and children, or differently abled individuals.
In order to understand human groups more clearly, Flanagan proposes that we distinguish between social stratification and hierarchy, with the following definitions:
• Social stratification: one group dominates another such that all members of the group are treated the same way, whatever their age or sex.
• Hierarchy: here, domination is at individual level, one person dominating another.
He also advises against confusing ideal and practice, by separating out:
• Egalitarian ideologies: here, the society or part of it claims to work for equal opportunity, with, for example, the ideal of a fair start in life for all.
• Egalitarian practices: here, the society aims at equal outcome, with methods for removing differences in opportunities.
Historically, so far, as noted from Janet Hendrickx at the beginning of this chapter, there are no egalitarian societies. Yet all societies may offer greater or lesser scope for localized contexts where individuals are treated on equal terms. For more accurate social descriptions, including for ancient Egypt, we can avoid labels such as primitive and civilized altogether and apply labels such as egalitarian to particular aspects of a society rather than to a society as a whole.
World History
