Centre > Travel diaries > Egypt 1998 > The world shaping Egyptian beliefs

The Egyptians knew death as a divine, happy continuation of life. As a matter of fact, what we call life was to them nothing but an unimportant passage whose sole purpose was to prepare them for the "real" life, in the beyond. Their houses but also their palaces, even the Pharaoh's palace, were built in mud bricks, a very fragile material that does not last long. The reason you can't visit any Egyptian palaces is that they no longer exist. They were never built to last. The focus of the entire Egyptian population was on building tombs that would last for eternity, because that "other" life, unlike this one, would be eternal. That did not make them dreary however: records show they were fun-loving and laid back, much like all mediterranean populations today.

As I mentioned, the West shore was the shore of death. Let me explain the state of mind of the Egyptians. The Nile valley is a narrow stretch of life, of fertile black earth (which makes black a colour of life), running North to South on a distance way greater than Egypt itself. On either side of the fertile area, lies a desert (the deathly red earth) bound by mountains. As a result, the world for the Egyptians was longitudinal, and not a 360¡ horizon like ours. The spine of Egypt appeared, in their minds, under the shape of a vertical line surmounted by a triangle head-down: the Delta, at the meeting of Nile and sea. Now, the Sun rising in the East and setting in the West is crossing the primary axis of the Nile. The course of the Sun was supremely important to the Egyptians as it was to many peoples of the Antiquity, so the axis described by it had its place with the Nile axis. Take the image above of the vertical line and triangle, and apply to it the perpendicular line of the sun-course. Do you recognize this? Yes, it is the Ankh, sometimes called Cross of Life or Key of the Nile.

This was the Egyptian total symbol of life, because it connects these two fundamental sources of life in the otherwise hostile land of Egypt. This explanation of the symbol was confirmed to me by a student of the School of Egyptology in Cairo. A popular explanation is that it is a phallic symbol representing the union of male and female: this is a very gratuitous interpretation that the shape of the Ankh doesn't support in the least, especially because there is another symbol, the Sam, explicitly representing a phallus and meaning "union". I suspect the false interpretation to derive from the infamous Crowley's personal reinterpretation of Ancient Egypt as a while, that then trickled down to Neopagans and New Agers. Yeah. Whatever.

Since the Sun rises, or comes back to life, in the East, then the East shore is where all the Egyptian cities and devotional temples were built, and the West shore, where the Sun dies, was entirely dedicated to the cities of the dead and mortuary temples (along with the temporary villages of the craftsmen working on these temples).

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 Article by Joumana Medlej .