What did the ancient Egyptians call the Euphrates?

‘The great river running backwards’.

Such cosmopolitanism …

 

The perils of understanding the past

Goelet (1999) writes of ancient Egypt:

By now it is a well-worn truism among Egyptologists that the Egyptians were intensely religious, yet had no word corresponding to our term ‘religion’; that they had a highly developed aesthetic sense, yet had no single word for ‘art’; that they ran a stable, complex, and highly bureaucratic society, yet had no equivalent to the term ‘the state’. The common theme behind all these observations is that we frequently fail to realize that the Egyptians might have viewed the world entirely differently from the way we do.

He goes on the discuss what a ‘town’ or ‘city’ might mean, suggesting that the settlement was really an afterthought to a temple and a quay on the Nile.

 

Twitter/Facebook revolutions?

Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and now Yemen – increasingly the supposed experts are saying that facebook and twitter facilitated these revolutions. Apart from the obvious crap in such ‘opinions’ (the army is always key), Christina made a good point yesterday. Take a look at these pages from the protest leaflet from Egypt:

Sure, twitter and facebook get a mention – they are to be avoided at all costs, since they and other media (blogs etc.), are being monitored. Instead, the leaflet repeats the call to send by email, fax or print and hand them out. So much for the facebook/twitter revolutions.

 

Mubarak jokes

And: the Interior Minister asks Hosni Mubarak to write a ‘Farewell Letter’ to the Egyptian people. Mubarak replies: ‘Why? Where are they going?’ (ht mr)

Update: the end of the world came a day earlier for Mubarak:

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Live blog from Egypt

One of the few internet links from Egypt, after Mubarak cut internet access, is found here.

 

The Egyptian Revolution

With at least 1.5 billion in support from the US last year for Mubarak and his hated ‘security forces’ in Egypt, you’ve gotta love this revolution. Details, as usual, at the reliable Lenin’s Tomb.

 

Turin Papyrus: Is This Theological?

More Egyptian material for a family blog:

In case your eyesight is not the best, some detail:

All from the Turin Papyrus (ht tp).

 

 

Auto-fellatio in context

Following on an earlier post about those well-endowed Egyptians, it appears that the rudely-drawn image was actually cut-and-pasted from a much richer scenario:

Must have been something in the diet … (ht hs).

 

A blast from the past: on divine auto-fellatio

A little while back I posted a couple of comments (from ‘Too Many Dicks at the Writing Desk’) on divine auto-fellatio in Egyptian mythology, pondering the theological and liturgical outcomes should Egyptian religion have become a world religion instead of Christianity. To illustrate the point, this piece of sacred iconography sidled up to the argument:

Yesterday a certain medical doctor called Hanspeter Seiler wrote a comment on that post:

I also think autofellatio has a deep meaning in egyptian theology. I have written a paper (not published yet) about that in German. Now i am very interested in this picture of the british museum of horus or osiris doing it. Can you give me the exact source?

Now, before could raise the energy to find the reference, the goodly doctor wrote again:

just found the picture in british museum!
So I need no answer. Many thanks HP Seiler

All I can say is that more scholarship on this somewhat neglected theological topic is sorely needed.

 

Quote of the day: Benjamin Netanyahu

‘Tis the season for building fences:

In the end, there will be no choice but to close off the state of Israel by a fence on all sides… The state has to be fenced off completely on all sides. Why? Because Israel is the only country in the First World to which people can walk on foot from Third World countries and Africa.

Benjamin Netanyahu on the Israel-Egypt fence.

Now, it seems, that not only is Bethlehem off limits, but so is the flight to Egypt.