Underlying much of the ancient Egyptian perception of the visible world is another world of symbols and symbolism. The subtle psychology of the Egyptians of the early centuries of the existence of the Dual Kingdom often led them deliberately to represent one object or concept by another. The capacity to do this permeated their works and is fundamental to an understanding of their world.
An important event in the development of the corporate Egyptian psyche, which exercised a profound influence on later events, was the shift in the middle of the third millennium from predominantly stellar cults to those which took their inspiration from the sun and which, from the Fourth Dynasty onwards, dominated the royal cults. Stellar cults have stronger Mesopotamian affinities than do those which acknowledged the sun as supreme; it may be that the observance of the stars was a vestige of the ancient Western Asiatic influences which percolated into the Valley to such notable effect in the late predynastic period. As such, they were perhaps considered inappropriate for a belief system which was based on the idea of the supreme divinity of the king, a concept which could obviously be more easily accommodated in the apparently unique nature of the sun, compared with the myriads of stars visible from the Egyptian deserts. The significance of stellar cults was not forgotten however, as witnessed by the constant identification of the king as a star in the Pyramid Texts.
If something of this sort happened, just as the Fourth Dynasty came to power, it would account for its expression in architectural form by changing the shape, though not the essential nature, of the pyramid tomb. The Step Pyramid is demonstrably a staircase to the heavens, a concept echoed by the stepped platform on which the king’s throne stood. The true pyramid represents the rays of the sun petrified and made eternal, to protect the body of the king for ever; it took its canonical shape early in the Fourth Dynasty during the lifetime of the remarkable King Sneferu. It then assumed its place as one of the great archetypes, standing in majesty on the plateau at Giza. The pyramid is the archetypal Egyptian symbol. Four thousand five hundred years later it evokes instant recognition; it has probably been reproduced more frequently in more media than any other human artefact.
The final seal of Egypt’s progress to statehood and the full achievement of her historic personality was the creation of the Pyramids during the Third and Fourth Dynasties. The Pyramid is the supreme artefact linking earth and heaven, land and sky, the mortal and the divine, and the most powerful assimilation of light then possible to technology. As we have seen, the Pyramids came out of the deep levels of the unconscious of the Egyptian people and of the state in its first supreme manifestation. With their erupting into three-dimensional form Egypt was in effect, fully mature, its historic destiny achieved: all afterwards was, inevitably, decline.
There is another symbolic form, associated with the pyramid shape, which lay even deeper in the Egyptian unconscious. This was the frequently depicted line of triangular hills which appears on the pottery of Naqada II, several hundred years before the pyramids appear. The Nile Valley is not generously supplied with sharply peaked hills; the limestone and sandstone hills which it does possess are usually not isolated in such a way as to emphasize a triangular shape. It may be that the triangular hill was locked in the collective unconscious of the Egyptians, whose basal population were immigrants into the Valley and who may have retained some recollection of a mountainous or at least a hilly landscape, with which they were once identified. The hieroglyph for ‘foreign land’28 is the same three hills, a similarity which might be thought to support such an association. More likely still is that the Naqada hills and the pyramid are expressions of the same archetype. The three-dimensional triangle is a peculiarly satisfying shape and one which is replicated in many forms, in many different contexts throughout history.
THE SYMBOLISM OF THE TOMB
Although the final, accepted shape of the pyramid arose both from the promptings of the unconscious and by the happy chance of a natural phenomenon inspiring an artist of genius, the pyramid has in fact a long evolution before its shape becomes determined. The evolution of the pyramid as tomb can be traced back to the shallow graves of the Badarians, the first identifiable culture in southern Egypt, who raised a little mound of earth over the burial to mark it. By late predynastic times, as for example at Hier-akonpolis, graves were marked by a lightweight superstructure, a canopy raised over the grave which might contain the burials of cattle and dogs as well as humans. At much the same time, more substantial tombs were being erected in Abydos and Naqada for high status individuals who, it has been suggested, may have been the rulers of important reaches of the Valley, before the arrival of the kingship. Similarly at Hierakonpolis, the famous painted Tomb 100 marks the appearance of a high status burial with painted decoration on the interior walls, which is the ancestor of the countless mastaba tombs of the Old Kingdom which are alive with scenes of life in Egypt carved on the walls. Later, the practice of painting the interiors of tombs would be resumed, with magnificent effect in Middle Kingdom, in the richly decorated coffins associated with that period and particularly in New Kingdom burials.
As with everything else in Egypt, elite burial practices were transformed with the coming of the kingship at the end of the fourth millennium. The burials of the First Dynasty kings in their funerary palaces at Abydos have already been described, as have the mastabas of the great nobles at Saqqara and other sites. In this present context however, all the early tombs have a common feature: in the centre of the tomb, over the actual burial, was placed a little mound, sometimes of sand alone, sometimes contained within a brickwork structure. In some cases the brickwork enclosing the mound is stepped.
It is the latter feature which gives the clue to the connection between the relatively simple predynastic graves and the later immense tombs which were built for the kings and their ministers. The internal mound becomes more important as the First Dynasty progresses, seeming to grow in importance. The mound which descends from the little piles of sand atop the Badarian burials finally erupts, first in the triumphantly powerful expression of the Step Pyramid complex and then in the huge monuments of the Giza plateau. This extraordinary ‘growth’ of the internal mound from the earth in which it has been germinating, to its final eruption fully realized in the form of the pyramid, is a very exact metaphor for the emergence of the nationstate, also apparently fully realized, from the land of Egypt and from the collective unconscious of its people.
THE EVOLUTION OF BURIAL CUSTOMS
The collective character of the society can also be seen in the customs attending the burial of the king. As a consequence of some extraordinary persuasion by the royal propagandists or by the evidently overwhelmingly charismatic figure of the king himself, the society was apparently prepared to accept the idea that only the king might, by right, avoid the dismal experience of death, and, as the supreme divinity, go on to an eternal existence beyond the stars.
All other creatures were evidently fated only to continue to exist through him and through his survival; only by ensuring his continued existence could the future of the whole land of Egypt be preserved. The individual was nothing; Egypt, in the person of the king, subsuming all others to himself, was all. It is in this sense, particularly in the earliest years of the kingship, that the king is Egypt’s self.
This belief had in it the seeds of its own decay. The idea that the people survived through the survival of the king led in time to the belief that the retainers sacrificed at the king’s death (and also at the deaths of the very greatest nobles) would continue to serve, and then that proximity to the royal burial could ensure their immortality with the king’s family and his ministers.
Gradually the nobles and high officers of the Dual Kingdom, particularly in the later centuries of the Old Kingdom, began to adopt the forms of what had been the royal prerogatives of burial. Eventually, in the late period every man was his own Osiris, when that god, originally an alien in the Valley, became the symbol of regeneration and the focus of the hopes of eternal life by even the most humble servitor or tiller of the land.
The change which overcame the Egyptian view of the ceremonies appropriate after the death of the individual may also reveal an awareness of the transition from the collective to that of the individual consciousness. In the earliest times the death of the individual may not have been considered as especially significant to the community. The community, particularly in the person of its leader and personification, continued undying. As the process of individuation wore away the old communal and collective spirit of the society and the individual psyche began to flourish and to demand its own recognition, so the needs of the individual even after death began to be apprehended and all the complex industry associated with the care of the individual’s immortality was brought into being.
The Egyptians have been described as a people inordinately preoccupied with death. Such an attitude misunderstands them: the Egyptians were wholly preoccupied with life and with its prolongation. Death was an incident in man’s experience of life; in the case of the king, death was attended by the most elaborate ritual. For all, death marked a transition from one state of being to another.
The considerable activity which was directed towards ensuring survival after death, first of the king, later of his closest assistants, and ultimately of all, had the effect no doubt of concentrating the Egyptians’ minds on an acceptance of the inevitability of death. More than most people, therefore, their lives represented a preparation for the experience of dying. In thus preparing themselves they proceeded further along the path to a still more fully realized individuation. Jung recognized the importance of accepting the inevitability of death as an aspect of life, though he did not link this perception directly with the Egyptian experience.30
Because they manifest a collective persona the Egyptians of this early period are, or at least seem to be, different from most people who have lived in the world after them; Jung, in the extracts quoted earlier, clearly apprehended this essential fact. Their genius is particularly expressed in the making of artefacts, from the relatively humble pottery vessel to the pyramid or the most majestic image of the Divine King; the most sublime artefact they made was Egypt itself, splendid, beautiful and richly complex. Whilst the underlying, seemingly eternal principles of Egyptian art and design are the products of the peculiarly Egyptian collective unconscious, there is another specific manifestation of this collective stream, that body of spells, incantations, the mutterings of priests, and the first recorded inspired literary expression of the striving after the Divine, known as the Pyramid Texts.31
World History
