Is the History of Human Thought Upside Down? Writing to an Egyptologist.

I wrote to this particular Egyptologist because I found that Daniel Richard McBride, the author of 'The Egyptian Foundations of Gnosis', had been a postgraduate student of his. McBride's work is truly extraordinary, and approaches the nature of Neoplatonic philosophy in a way no-one ever has before. Or at least since the Neoplatonists themselves, who, in late antiquity, understood ancient religion in both Egypt and Assyria as the product of philosophical thought. Iamblichus, author of the
The Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians, was the most explicit exponent of this idea. 

Is this a viable understanding of the evidence? It is. And McBride's work associates ideas in Neoplatonic thought with the various Egyptian priestly colleges and their views on the divine. It is an extraordinary achievement, which (so far), has not been taken on board or even discussed, by any tenured scholars of the ancient world in the West (to my knowledge at least).

Daniel McBride used to have a website, from which it was possible to download his thesis. That disappeared a long time ago. It is still possible to find his thesis online (there is a link to the PDF file on my site), but he himself seems to have disappeared. I continue to wish to make contact with him to discuss his work and its implications. 

The Egyptologist did not reply. 

TY, June 26, 2019.

To:******@*****.edu

November 3, 2016 

Subject: Is the history of human thought upside down?

Dear ****,

Weve not met, but we may have trod something of the same path, or similar paths over the past twenty plus years.

I published a book a year ago about the idea that our intellectual history, for one reason and another, is actually upside down (The Sacred History of Being). And that the earliest history of the human race can only be understood if we understand that there was a very sophisticated level of abstract thought at the beginnings of civilisation.

My background is a heavy engagement with philosophy, both ancient and modern, from age fifteen onwards (I am now sixty years old). I was also interested in art, religion, history, and some other subjects. Eventually, in the early eighties, I noticed that there were concepts present in texts from the second millennium B.C.E. (principally in Akhenaten's 'Hymn to the Sun') which were embedded also in the philosophical writings of the Greeks from nearly a thousand years later. I understood that they shouldn't be there, if there was no sophisticated philosophical thought present in the second millennium. Iconography was also particularly revealing.

I decided in the end to major in ancient history at university (as a mature student of thirty or so), rather than philosophy, though I did some of that too. I wanted to know if I was barking up the wrong tree (I didn't think I was).

So I spent three years studying Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and also Assyria, in great detail at UCL and SOAS in London (1989-92). Finding abundant evidence for the heretical idea that the human race had a profound capacity for abstract thought from the earliest times. And I became increasingly perplexed at the fact that scholars could not see what was before their eyes, or understand what the evidence actually meant.

Sometime before moving to London (I lived in Edinburgh in the eighties) I had read On the Mysteries by Iamblichus. So I was aware that the Neoplatonists had the idea that there was a common intellectual system underpinning both Assyrian and Egyptian theology. Which, by itself, suggested that there was an immense level of abstraction involved, stretching back thousands of years. And that I might, just possibly, be on the right track.

I found myself focusing on ancient Assyria while I was in London. I had already noticed the continuities between Greek and Egyptian ideas, but if Iamblichus was right, I should find the same intellectual system underpinning their theology, and the structure of their divine pantheon. I thought of that as a check on the idea that a high level of abstraction was present in both cultures.

I was not at all disappointed. And there were also direct connections between Greek and Mesopotamian thought. None of which made any sense to the historians.

[.......]

And then, in 1997 (I think), I discovered the thesis of Daniel Richard McBride, on The Egyptian Foundations of Gnosis. That had a huge impact on me.

So, if philosophy could draw on Egyptian theology, then Egyptian theology necessarily was essentially based on a series of philosophical arguments. Otherwise none of it would have made sense to the Neoplatonists.

I could go in several directions from here, but some of them might be conversations for the future. So I will confine myself to the suggestion that the Egyptians were philosophical, and concerned with abstractions, and everything around these abstractions, and that, given the antiquity of Egyptian religion, these ideas are of immense antiquity.

I have tried to contact Daniel McBride. He had a website at one point, now gone. He is referenced often, but he seems to be impossible to contact. As the supervisor of his thesis, it occurred to me that what he was writing about was something which interested you.

I know how tight Egyptology is, not least in avoiding any conflict with the classicist view that the Greeks invented philosophy. You are a working and eminent Egyptologist - I have no intention of making problems for you [....]. But I would be interested to know if we are sharing the same heresy.

My website is at: http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/



Best regards,

Thomas Yaeger

Philosophical Thought in the Neolithic (and why we cannot see it)

While responding to a mail from the managing editor of a scholarly magazine,  who I'd pointed in the direction of a couple of articles on my blog, I found myself condensing my project into the compass of just four paragraphs. This covers both what I am doing, and why. I reproduce them here:

Years ago I read Adolf Erman's collection of Egyptian Literature in English translation. One text in particular made me sit up, since it involved the use of concepts I associated with classical Greece. The text was Akhenaten's 'Hymn to the Aten'. Akhenaten lived some nine hundred years before Plato and Aristotle, yet he seemed to be comfortable with concepts which are supposed to have been first discussed among the Greeks. I looked for other 'anticipations', and found them.

That propelled me to study in London (in 1989). By that time I'd started to look at antiquity quite differently from the way I'd been taught by classicists. Instead of seeing classical Greece (and the work of the later philosophers all the way up to the closure of the philosophical schools in 529 CE) as the beginnings of sophisticated thought about abstract concepts, I began to treat major components of classical thought as the possible end point of a way of thinking, which might conceivably stretch back into the neolithic. The notion of excellence is one of those components, which as we now know was a concern for the megalith builders.

That's the basic hypothesis. The idea of Greece as the birthplace of philosophy is a modern construct. Plato himself said it was a very old discipline, but classicists don't bother to discuss what he had to say about that when they are writing about the history of philosophy. The evidence from around the eastern Mediterranean however, bears out what Plato said.

My focus so far has been mainly on Mesopotamia, and back to the 14th century BCE, because it is the area where I have the most expertise. It is now pretty clear however that the hypothesis that the presence of abstract ideas stretches back into the Neolithic is sound, and that this insight can deliver great riches. If only we can escape our enlightenment presumptions about the intellectual poverty of our distant ancestors.

Best regards,

Thomas Yaeger

The two articles the managing editor was pointed at were: Stone Circles, Phenomenology, and the Neolithic Mind, and: Frazer and the Association of Ideas, 

I introduced the first article as looking at the context and function of Stone Circles, particularly when looked at as structures which may have served a similar function to divine statues in both Greece and Mesopotamia. In Mesopotamia, during the installation of divine statues, the three day ritual necessarily involved pointing them at defined areas of the sky, because the heavens were understood to represent an image of the Divine - of Being and Reality itself. 

The second article I described as a review of J. G. Frazer's approach to the meaning of evidence from the ancient world. He was trained in Classics, and knew the works of Plato virtually backwards and his concern with the idea of Being, but chose to write his account of ancient thought entirely without reference to the idea of Being in antiquity. He suggested that since nothing could be predicated of Being, it was an entirely barren concept. So Frazer's voluminous output is really a species of fiction, replacing sophisticated thought about the nature of reality with the argument that ancient human thought was, more or less entirely, built on intellectual error.

70 Million Animal Mummies: Egypt's Dark Secret

There was an interesting item in the running order of the Today Programme this morning (11th May 2015) on BBC Radio 4:

0740 am

Scientists have discovered that most of the animal mummies sold to Ancient Egyptians as religious offerings had little or no animal remains in them. Researchers estimate that up 70 million animals may have been mummified by the Ancient Egyptians, in a large scale industry which included factory farming. Dr Lidija Mcknight is an Egyptologist at the University of Manchester, she has spent 15 years working on this research.

[The link to the broadcast recording was at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05tkchf [Scroll to 1.45.50, which is the actual time the interview was broadcast. Recording no longer available 25 June 2015].

That’s quite a lot of mummies! But over three thousand years of Egyptian history that works out at around 23,300 per year, assuming the practice remained at the same level throughout. Or around 442 per week across the whole country. That’s about 70 per day, assuming that the mummifiers didn’t stop for weekends. I’m not sure that counts as a ‘large scale industry’ and ‘factory farming’. But they weren’t all cats, and included larger bodied animals, up to and including bulls. Perhaps various animals were more popular as gifts to the gods in some periods than in others, but we probably don’t have that level of detail available to us, except in a small number of cases.

The interview was with Lidija Mcknight, who has been using radiological imaging and other scanning techniques to explore animal mummies in a non-destructive way. The purpose of the interview was to promote a TV programme, ‘70 Million Animal Mummies: Egypt's Dark Secret,’ to be broadcast on the same evening at 9pm on BBC2. This programme is part of the Horizon series, which focusses mainly on science and research subjects. The key theme of the interview was that a surprising number of the mummies they investigated did not contain any of the expected contents – around 30 per cent of those that they examined (which is different to the suggestion made in the running order for the programme, which says ‘most’). So an apparently mummified cat might not contain any cat remains at all.

A number of explanations were offered, including that those providing the mummified cats, which were a popular offering to the gods, simply could not keep up with the demand, and resorted to using other materials. It was speculated that these might have been simply stuffing materials lying around the workshop, or perhaps the mummifiers were using materials which did have some sacred qualities, on account of where and how they might have been sourced. We were given some indication of the materials they found inside the mummies: these included reeds, mud, and eggshells. The possibility was mentioned that it was, for the purpose of the gift to the gods, not necessary for the cat mummies to contain cat remains – the offering would be considered sufficiently sacred on the basis of its contents.

The order of the explanations offered is interesting, since it starts from the one likely to be the most intelligible to a modern audience, which also is the most cynical: the animal mummy specialists were sometimes pulling a fast one on their customers. Which may be the dark secret. Knowledge isn’t much advanced by telling a modern audience that times never change. Times do change, which is why doing research into animal mummification is interesting and important.

It is hard now to communicate how important the concept of the sacred was in the ancient world, and how sophisticated it was. A phenomenon of ancient civilisation, which pervaded every aspect of life, and at this great distance, one which is scarcely intelligible to us.

The last explanation offered is likely to be the correct one, though no further discussion took place during the interview about why the offerings might be considered sufficiently sacred on the basis of the contents - whether actual animal, or reed, mud and eggshell. It will be interesting to see if the full documentary does elaborate on the sacred connotations of what they found.

[The programme will be available shortly after the 9pm (BST) broadcast ends, and will remain available (within the UK) for 29 days, in line with the BBCs unfathomable access policy (I know how they explain it to themselves). ]

Update - Programme now available on YouTube (25th June 2015):

Horizon Season 54 Episode 8 70 Million Animal Mummies Egypt's Dark Secret
The hashtag for the documentary is #animalmummies. 

In an article published by the Washington post today, Dr Mcknight said:

These wildly popular votive offerings help to explain why Egyptians would want animal mummies that were actually empty or, in some cases, filled symbolic items such as feathers and egg shells.“We shouldn’t view animal mummification through our modern, subjective standpoint of fakery and everything being some kind of con,” McKnight said. “There was probably much more to it than that and there was probably a much more innocent explanation for what was going on. The materials that they were using was just as important as the animals themselves.”

Symbolism

Mud and reeds recall stories of the creation, and the primeval mound of mud in the waters. Reeds also are symbolic of coming into existence, of generation, emerging as they do along the edges of waterways, and in the Nile Delta. The symbol of the cosmic egg sometimes stands in for the primeval mound. The image of the chick emerging from its eggshell is used in Akhenaten’s ‘Hymn to the Sun’. So these three things – mud, reed and eggshell recall as images the circumstances in which existence comes into being.

Mummification

Much of what we know about mummification procedure comes from Herodotus, who arrived on the scene rather late. It is unfortunate that so much Egyptian social anthropology comes from Greek sources. We also know about the processes from excavation and the unwrapping of mummies, which shows that procedures varied in different periods of Egyptian history. Modern experimental archaeology has told us that the use of dry natron results in more efficient dessication of the body, so not all we have been told is reliable. Until the last 15 years or so, there has not been a great deal of work done in the area of animal mummies, so the Manchester research is in new and interesting territory, and is telling us new things.

Review of the Programme (12 May 2015)

The quality of the documentary was high (not all offerings by the Horizon series over the past ten years have been so satisfactory). We got clear information about what the researchers are doing, and how they are acquiring new information. We also got contextual information about the role of votive offerings, which mummified animals represented, and an interpretation of why the cult was so popular (animals were regarded as messengers to the gods who could plead on behalf of the person who dedicated the offering). An instance of such observance based on a papyrus from someone who was concerned about the likelihood that his father would survive was quoted to illustrate this. That's detail!

The cult of mummification seems to have reached a peak in the late first millennium BCE, which suggests that the incidence of animal mummification in earlier centuries might have been very much lower. Which indeed suggests that there was industrial production of mummies during the first millennium. Evidence was produced about diseased animals, which is what you would expect if they were being farmed in relatively confined circumstances. The geographic spread of the centres where mummy production was happening was also shown, but the chronology of this 'industrial' production was not clearly spelled out (it may not be known).

We also got a demonstration of experimental archaeology, with a piglet undergoing the process of mummification in the laboratory. The bandaging wasn't up to Egyptian standards, but that wasn't the point.

The cult of mummification probably ceased at about the time that Rome effectively proscribed the Egyptian religion by closing the temples in the fourth century CE.

We didn't get further detail about the contents of the ersatz mummies (sticks, reeds, mud and eggshell), but this wouldn't have made much sense to the general audience (even some Egyptologists), so I'm not surprised that they didn't include it. But odd to get more detailed information from a promotional interview than the actual documentary programme.

We never did find out what the 'dark secret' was. Just a clever promotional device. But I'm sure a lot of people watched it because of that title, who might not otherwise have watched.