Egypt in the Shadows

An interesting response from a doctoral student (Benjamin Murphy, studying philosophical theology, Oxford) on the question of whether or not the Greeks were the first to practice philosophy, or whether philosophy was first practiced by the Ancient Egyptians, and also in ancient India. The response, which appeared originally on the Quora site,  reveals a great deal about the presumptions western scholars bring to bear on such questions.

He begins by referencing Frederick Copleston on the question. Frederick Copleston wrote a voluminous History of Philosophy, the first volume of which was published in 1944. As he says, it was one of the most widely used histories of philosophy for decades. There was, and still is, nothing quite as comprehensive available to scholars, though the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is perhaps its nearest rival. Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy is short in comparison, and in some cases covers important subjects rather crudely, and with much important detail missing. All three are focussed on Western philosophy, and aren’t much concerned to establish connections with bodies of thought elsewhere.

Murphy tells us that Copleston ‘…considers the claim that Greek philosophy was derived from Egyptian, Indian or Chinese Philosophy and rejects it.’ He gives some reasons for Copleston’s rejection of the notion that Greek philosophy owed something to other cultures:

Copleston explains that the idea that Greek philosophy was derived from Egyptian philosophy originated in Alexandria during the Hellenistic era. (As I’m sure you know, Socrates taught Plato, Plato taught Aristotle, Aristotle taught Alexander the Great whose conquests inaugurated the Hellenistic era, and who founded the city of Alexandria in Egypt). As Copleston also points out, Philo, a Jewish writer who lived in Alexandria during the Hellenistic era claimed philosophy was a Jewish invention, because Moses was a philosopher, and the Torah is a work of philosophy. In other words, when the prestige of Greek philosophy was established, people from other cultures liked to claim “Of course, we invented that first”, and they could point to old writings and say “See, that is philosophy.” But of course, the Torah isn’t philosophy. 

The argument that Greek philosophy was a phenomenon which owed something to Egyptian philosophy, and perhaps Moses, is an old one, and it is true that there was a great deal of competitiveness between cultures during the Hellenistic era. The Babylonian priest of Bel, Berossus, wrote an extensive work, the Babyloniaka, in order to show the antiquity of Babylonian civilisation by means of a kinglist stretching back many thousands of years, and quoted stories to illustrate the sophistication of that civilisation.

Among these stories we find a description of the Babylonian myth of the Creation, and an account of how man came to acquire useful knowledge from a Divine sage (apkallum). Unfortunately the Babyloniaka has been lost for at least fifteen hundred years, possibly more, but the Christian scholar Eusebius made extensive excerpts from it. The general accuracy of the account of Eusebius is confirmed by the fact that we now have access to original Mesopotamian cuneiform texts which describe the Babylonian creation.

The Egyptian scholar Manetho also produced a chronology of Ancient Egypt during the same period, which covered a notional timescale of 432 thousand years, and the thirty dynasties he describes, which (apart from the earliest, which are regarded as entirely mythical) now form the basis of the chronology used by Egyptologists. Again, Manetho’s chronology has come down to us largely via the pages of Eusebius. This list of dynasties, at least in its later phases, also bears some relationship to the chronology as represented in papyri and inscriptions found in Egypt. The Persian invaders in the 5^th century (including Darius) are represented as pharaohs by Manetho, and also by the Egyptian records which survive.

In addition, Plato tells us in the Timaeus that his ancestor Solon visited Egypt, and spoke with Egyptian priests, who told him that the Greeks were very young, and did not possess knowledge ‘hoary with age’. Herodotus mentions that the names of some of the Greek gods came from Egypt. The philosopher Isocrates, a contemporary of Plato, refers explicitly to Egyptian philosophy in his Busiris. Pythagoras travelled around the Levant and the Ancient Near East collecting knowledge from priests and philosophers, including those in Egypt. Plato himself in his Protagoras describes philosophy as a very old practice, and tell us that it was practised in Sparta and in Crete - both territories which received an influx of people from north Africa and Egypt in the middle to late 2^nd millennium BCE.  

But intense cultural competitiveness is insufficient to explain the persistence of the idea that the Egyptians were philosophers. Copleston had not studied Egypt, and pulled this idea out of the air. 

Many Greek words have plausible etymologies from Egyptian. Some of the concepts used by Aristotle in his philosophical writing were known to Egyptians nine hundred years before his time, such as the idea of completion (it is connected with the idea of birth in Akhenaten’s Hymn to the Aten, which dates to the fourteenth century BCE).

As for the claim that the Jews practiced philosophy, this cannot be written off as an empty claim by Philo Judaeus. There is abundant evidence for the existence of philosophical thought among the Jews in the books of the Old Testament.  Yahweh is described as ‘the first and last, and beside me there is no God’. His name (minus the vowels) is a variant of the verb ‘to be’, which suggests that his isolation is due to the fact that he was understood to be Being itself. In the third chapter of Malachi, Yahweh says ‘I do not change’, which is a characterisation of the nature of Being which would have been familiar to philosophers and sages around the Mediterranean and the Near East. It is an explicitly philosophical description of Being itself, since Being cannot be what it is, if it is subject to change.

What we don’t have from Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Hebrew Kingdoms is recorded philosophical discussions which closely parallel the writings of Greek philosophers. There is nothing strange in that. What is strange is that we have philosophical arguments from Greece, since both Plato and Aristotle distinguished two forms of teaching: exoteric and esoteric. The exoteric teaching was suitable for anyone to hear, but the esoteric teaching was of a different nature, and was restricted to those who were capable of understanding it. Which means that they were discussing matters relating to the gods, and to divine things. So in the versions of these discussions which were circulated, there is often elision, obfuscation, misdirection, and alternative terminology. Plato does not refer to the ‘one true thing’ as god, but as ‘the good’, for this reason. Arguments which are not resolved in the course of discussion, are deemed to ‘necessarily’ be the case, for otherwise communion with the gods would be impossible, or motion would be impossible, etc. The genealogy of the gods is not discussed, as too complicated a matter, and those who claim to have divine ancestors (says Plato), should know the truth of the matter better than anyone else.

In the 2nd century CE, the Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria wrote:

Philosophy, then, with all its blessed advantages to man, flourished long ages ago among the barbarians, diffusing its light among the gentiles, and eventually penetrated into Greece. Its hierophants were the prophets among the Egyptians, the Chaldeans among the Assyrians, the Druids among the Galatians, the Sramanas of the Bactrians, and the philosophers of the Celts, the Magi among the Persians….  and among the Indians the Gymnosophists, and other philosophers of barbarous nations.

— Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 1.15.71 (ed. Colon. 1688 p. 305, A, B).

Alexander himself consulted the Gymosophists when he arrived in India, and we have what purports to be some of their conversation together in Plutarch’s life of Alexander. The idea that only the Greeks practiced philosophy was not what he had been taught by Aristotle. Aristotle argued that philosophy began when there existed a leisured class with time to think and conjecture (by which he probably had in mind the fully professional class of priests in Egypt). Diogenes Laertius also mentioned that there was a school of thought in existence which argued that philosophy originated outside Greece. 

One of the comments by Caleb Beers following the article,  articulates the important question:

…. define “philosophy.” Are alchemical texts philosophy? Is divination (an attempt at?) philosophy? Is a discourse on mystical states philosophy? Is mythology philosophy? You can argue that there are philosophical dimensions to all of these things. The Bhagavad Ghita certainly waxes philosophical, and some sections are oddly reminiscent of Parmenides (or Parmenides is reminiscent of the Ghita).

Is there nothing philosophical in this passage from a hymn to the Sun-God from Egypt?

Grant that I may come into the everlasting heaven and the mountain where thy favoured ones dwell. Let me join myself to those who are holy and perfect in the divine Underworld, and let me appear with them to behold thy beauties at eventide. I lift my hands to thee in adoration when thou the living one dost sets. Thou art the Eternal Creator and art adored at thy setting in heaven.

[From the Papyrus of Ani *1]

It is a passage which expresses a desire for union with the divine, the creator of the world. Union with what is holy and perfect. And expresses adoration for what is beautiful in heaven when it (the living one) meets the limit of what it is. Is that not something like Plsto's conception when he talks about the philosopher ascending to the Good via the Forms?

Murphy in fact redefines what he will accept as philosophy, in a manner reminiscent of James Frazer: he embraces what is practical and useful. Which is not how philosophy was understood in antiquity. Ironically the possibility of an Egyptian contribution to the development of philosophy is sometimes dismissed by modern scholars because they consider that Egyptians dealt in concrete practicalities and useful things, and were simply not capable of abstract thought. 

He says:

...Greece is the starting point for what would become a strictly logical philosophy based on reasoning and empiricism. There’s some stuff about gods and afterlives in Plato, of course, but by the time you get to Aristotle, you find elaborate theories on the external world using what is not yet a rigorously scientific method but still draws on observation of the world around us to draw general conceptual conclusions using reasoning.

He concludes
:

...Greece is credited - rightfully, in my opinion - with giving birth to the philosophy that would later become science. That, I think, is what ultimately makes us defer to the Greeks.

1. The Papyrus of Ani is a papyrus manuscript created c. 1250 BCE.  Egyptians compiled an individualized book for certain people upon their death, called the 'Book of Going Forth by Day', containing declarations and spells to help the deceased in the afterlife. The Papyrus of Ani is the manuscript compiled for the Theban scribe Ani.

This papyrus was (shockingly) stolen from an Egyptian government storeroom in 1888 by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, which theft he describes in By Nile and Tigris, for the collection of the British Museum. Before he shipped the manuscript to England, Budge cut the seventy-eight foot scroll into thirty-seven sheets of nearly equal size, damaging its integrity.