The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs

ALSO BY JAN ASSMANN

Moses the Egyptian The Search for God in Ancient Egypt

THE MIND OF EGYPT

JAN ASSMANN

THE MIND OF

EGYPT History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs

TRANSLATED BY

ANDREW JENKINS

METROPOLITAN

BOOKS

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY NEW YORK

Iiil Metropolitan Books Henry Holt and Company, LLC Publishers since 1866 115 West ISth Street New York, New York 10011

CONTENTS

Metropolitan Books TN is a registered trademark of Henry Holt and Company, LLe. Copyright © 1996 by Carl Hanser Verlag Translation copyright © 2002 by Metropolitan Books All rights reserved. Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

PREFACE

Originally published in Germany in 1996 under the title Agypten. Eine Sinngeschichte by Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich.

INTRODUCTION:

The Meaningful Form of History

The translation of this book has been subsidized by Inter Nationes, Bonn. PAR TON E:

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1.

Assmann, Jan. lAgypten. English] The mind of Egypt : history and meaning in the time of the Pharaohs / Jan Assmann. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-S050-5462-6 (hc.) 1. Egypt-History-To 640 A.D. 2. Historiography-Egypt. I. Title.

2.

DTS3 .ASSI3 2002 932'.01-dC21 20010 44504 Henry Holt books are available for special promotions and premiums. For details contact Director, Special Markets. First American Edition 2002 Designed by Cathryn

s.

Aison

Printed in the United States of America 13579

1OS6

4

2

IX

The Predynastic Period and the Old Kingdom

The Beginnings The Old Kingdom

PAR T TWO:

3· 4· 5· 6.

1

The First Intermediate Period

Historical Outline Traces Messages Memories

PART THREE:

81

86 93 106

The Middle Kingdom

7. Historical Outline 8. State, Script, Education: Despotism Illuminated from Within 9. The Politicization of Connective Justice 10. Wrath and Love: The Two Faces of Power and the Rhetoric of Decision 11. The Foundation of Connective Justice in the Hereafter: The Judgment of the Dead 12. The Two Worlds and the Language of Despair Vll

117 121

135 143

13. Representation, Mediacy, the "Riven World;'

and the Problem of Evil

The New Kingdom Historical Outline 15. Cosmotheism as a Form of Knowledge 16. Akhenaten's Revolution 17. Personal Piety and the Theology of Will 18. Ramesses II and the Battle of Qadesh 19. Changing the Structure of the Past 20. The Decline of the New Kingdom

PAR T F 0 U R: 14.

Theocracy, Polyarchy, Archaism 21. Tanis and Thebes: The Age of Division 22. Libyan Polyarchy and the State of Napata 23. Memory and Renewal: The Ethiopian and Saite Renaissance

197 204 214 229

PREFACE

247 27 2 280

PAR T F I V E:

PAR T S I X:

335

Egypt under the Persians and Greeks

24. Historical Outline 25. The Demotic Chronicle and the Political Messianism

of the Late Period 26. The Cultural Construction of Otherness: Trauma and Phobia 27. Re-Membering Osiris

377

CONCLUSION:

Egypt as Trace, Message, and Memory

421

ABBREVIATIONS

435 437

NOTES

KEY TO THE EGYPTIAN GODS

477 4 85

INDEX

4 87

CHRONOLOGY

a history of the development of the ancient Egyptian mind ... a pity" -this note is to be found among Jakob Burckhardt's jottings in 1868 for a lecture, "On the Study of History." In parentheses he adds: "At best in hypothetical form, say, as a novel.'" In a sense, then, this book sets out to do something that the great Swiss historian consigned to the realm of impossibility and would have countenanced, if at all, only in parentheses and "in a hypothetical form." The terms used by Burckhardt-Geist (which means "spirit" as much as "mind") and "development" -are part of a paradigm of the philosophy of history that has become alien to us. "Spirit" conjures up an idea of something that infuses cultures, nations, and epochs from within and expresses itself in the testimonies they bring forth. By contrast, the word "meaning," which I propose to put in place of "spirit," refers to something that is an integral part of those testimonies themselves, something that cultures construct and produce. Unlike the singular Geist, "meaning" as used in this book exists only in the plural, as the kaleidoscopic range of "semiologies" or "semantic paradigms" that mark and define cultural difference, competing with, influencing, replacing, and inheriting from one another. This book describes certain preeminent semantic paradigms identifiable in ancient Egypt, how they originated, and what became of them. Though I recast them in the intellectual and conceptual mold of our own century, I am still addressing issues that Jakob Burckhardt saw ~s belonging to the "study of history." And though I replace his conJunction of "history and spirit" with that of "history and meaning," " T H E IMPOSSIBILITY OF WRITING

IX

I am still inquiring, as he was, into the intellectual, religious, cultural, and political parameters of human action and the traces, messages, and memories of that action that make up the subject matter of historiography. Where I examine ideas articulated and reflected upon in texts and images, I move in the realm of what Burckhardt meant by "spirit." But my approach also extends to the fundamental attitudes generally referred to as "mentality," attitudes that are implicit in texts, images, and the events of history without being explicitly expounded or commented upon. Accordingly, events and "major" historical data and dates recede into the background. Only the most significant of them figure prominently. History is seen here above all in terms of the way changes, crises, and new departures reflect shifts in existing structures of meaning. Their sequence may indeed be understood as a "development," but only as long as we resist seeing it simply as progress and declinethat is, as a one-way process heading straight for some ineluctable destination. If we discern coherence in this process, it is a coherence we owe to cultural memory and the way it contrives to take past meaning preserved in the written word and the pictorial image, reactivate it, and incorporate it into the semantic paradigms of the present. Meaning and history belong together. We see this most clearly when dramatic upheavals occur, as, for example, at such major turning points as 1789 and 1989. In both the French Revolution and the collapse of the socialist empire, history stands revealed as a cultural form. As Reinhart Koselleck has shown, the concept of "history" as a collective singular emerged in the years of the French Revolution; the semantic paradigm that originated then is that of historicism, the total historification of reality. In the years after 1945, and especially before and after 1989, we find precisely the opposite taking shape; the relativization of the historical. The late eighteenth century taught us to think in the categories of "history" rather than in terms of individual (hi)stories. The post-1945 period generated various attempts to develop concepts of nonhistory and posthistory and to relativize the inherited idea of history. History appears to us today not as an abstract, immutable category but as a cultural form that changes in accordance with the semantic framework society places it in. History is a profoundly human affair: we produce it by producing meaning. A "history of meaning" discusses history as a cultural form in which the course of

events forms the backdrop and the discourses generating and reflecting meaning occupy the front of the stage. The idea of writing a history of meaning with reference to Egypt was born to some extent of the experience of witnessing a historical turning point of the kind described in this book. In a narrower sense, however, it owes its existence to two external impulses. In 199 2 , Jorn Rtisen invited me to take part in a project on "historical meaning formation." While practical reasons prevented me from participating, the idea of approaching the history of Egypt from the point of view of "meaning formation" captured my imagination so completely that I was unable to get away from it. In the same year, Christian Meier developed a plan for a "World History in Essays," and the Carl Hanser publishing house approached me for an essay on Egypt. While the size of the present book drastically exceeds what they proposed, its "tentative" approach remains that of an essay. Ancient Egypt is still too alien and remote to justify a study that merely sets out to shed new light on things we otherwise take for granted. The most difficult thing about such a work is not starting but finishing. Where and when does one call it a day and declare the enterprise over and done with? Here my thanks go to Eginhard Hora, whose critical and encouraging reading left its decisive imprint on the final version. His perspicacious editing rid the text of many superfluous digressions, and his was the deciding vote when the time came to draw the line. Much of the book was written at the J, Paul Getty Center in

S~nta ~onica, and such qualities as it may have owe a great deal to

diSCUSSion with and suggestions from Salvatore Settis Carlo Ginzburg, Jacques Revel, Krzysztof Pomian, and Louise A. Hi~chcock, who also assisted me in obtaining the books I needed. My heartfelt thanks to all of them. For the American edition, my gratitude goes to Andrew Jenkins, Bruce King, and especially Sara Bershtel, whose careful reading saved me. from. so many imprecisions. Shara Kay was ever helpful in prepanng thiS manuscript for publication.

THE MIND OF EGYPT

INTRODUCTION

The Meaningful Form of

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