There was a time when, in one small strip of the world’s land surface, man achieved an almost total equilibrium with his environment and created a society as near perfect as he has so far been able even to conceive. This was the Golden Age, as near as ever man has yet come to experience that fugitive state. Sadly enough for the race of men it ended all too soon, rather more than four thousand years ago.
The time in which this fusion of the marvellous and the real occurred was a magical millennium, a thousand years or so of superb achievement, of an unexampled advancement of the human spirit spanning the closing centuries of the fourth millennium before the present era and continuing through most of the third. In terms of historical time as it would be expressed today, this represents the period from around 3200 BC to c.2200bc. There has been no other time quite like it in all human history.
The land, of course, is Egypt and the times involved represent what historians categorize as the predynastic and Early Dynastic1 periods and the Old Kingdom, the time of Egypt’s first and finest greatness. The earliest phases represent as distant an epoch as may be found in the study of the emergence of a complex, literate society. Nonetheless we know that the people of that thousand years produced a way of life so powerful and enduring that it lasted, in outward form at least, for more than three thousand years, even surviving several extended interruptions. It continues to this day to exercise a unique fascination and to induce in its observers either a sense of almost fearful wonder or an exuberant borrowing of forms and motifs, often in the most bizarre and inappropriate contexts.
The recollection of Ancient Egypt (or, more accurately, what often stands for Ancient Egypt) has, in a quite extraordinary way, managed to infiltrate itself into so many aspects of the modern world and into the minds of countless individuals living today. But often what later ages have taken to be quintessentially Egyptian are in fact only simulacra, infected by centuries of foreign influence, of the real forms which can only properly be traced in the dawn and springtime of Egyptian civilization. It will be the purpose of this present study to analyze some of these characteristics, to attempt to identify their original forms and to
Understand the factors which determined the emergence of the historic Egyptian personality in its earliest manifestations. It will be seen that the concept of the archetypes, developed in particular by Carl Gustav Jung (see Chapter 13), seems particularly apt when applied to some of the mighty images which stream out of Egypt in the earliest periods of its existence as a corporate state. There can surely be little doubt that the extraordinary appeal which Egypt has exercised on the modern world (the world, that is, since the Renaissance when ancient Egypt first began really to penetrate European consciousness) is a consequence of this marshalling and unleashing of the archetypes. The unique inheritance which the world draws from most ancient Egypt consists not only of the pyramids and superlative works of art which survive in such extraordinary abundance from the earliest periods onwards, but also of the recognition and the subsequent releasing of the archetypes into the consciousness of men, the consequence of the genius of Egyptian artists and designers who first gave the archetypes their material form.
THE EXPERIENCE OF THE NUMINOUS
Whenever the people of other lands observed Egypt and speculated about the nature of her culture and society, they seem always to have harboured the suspicion that Egypt was in touch (or certainly at some time had been in touch) with powers beyond the confines of the world they knew. Understandably the Egyptians did nothing to diminish the aura of mystery and the numinous quality with which their land seemed to be suffused, as much as it was suffused with the light of the sun which lit the river banks and surrounding deserts with a brilliant radiance. They were not disposed to admit, even to themselves, that the wonders of Egypt and the proximity of the divine were alike the consequence of man’s invention. That the invention itself was so superlative that it seemed superhuman does not diminish the essential humanity of the Egyptian achievement, nor, for that matter, does it significantly augment it, for most in Ancient Egypt the sense of the human and the superhuman come very close together, as aspects of the same integral experience.
It is amongst Egypt’s most notable characteristics that in all essentials its nature was determined in the earliest days of its existence and that those essentials continued to dominate Egyptian history for her entire lifetime. Egyptian culture very swiftly reached peaks of elegance and sophistication and Egyptian art of technical perfection, which have hardly ever again been equalled. Once Egypt’s unique contribution to the management of human societies, the kingship, appeared at the end of the fourth millennium BC Egyptian state institutions rapidly achieved a maturity and effectiveness which allowed the state to endure in the same essential form over the succeeding three millennia.
World History
