Rick Baudé Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> Getting ahead of myself. YOu can see the
> evolution of AE religion and chart it out. "The
> eye of HOrus" is mentioned hundreds of times in
> the PT's but in the BOD of Ani it's only mentioned
> a handful of times. Clearly as time went on the
> EOH became less important.




Yes, that's based on evidence. However, if you were to JUST use the BotD, you would not be able to know how significant the EoH was in the Old Kingdom.


> Sorry you're wrong. I've seen many examples where
> false ages were and are attributed to literature,
> it's a whole class of literature called
> "pseudepigraphia", similar techniques are employed
> in all the arts and sciences to uncover forgeries.
> It would take a good future archeoloigst about 10
> seconds to figure out that this was the remains of
> an ancient amusement park and not Harry Potter
> land.




In contrast to your objection, you are actually proving my point. A good archaeologist will realize this is fiction and therefore doesn't need to follow any real rules of evolution.




> >
> > Even if every element in the Pyramid Texts
> was
> > factually accurate, the links between them
> are
> > little more than mythological fiction. They
> do
> > not need logic to link them together, so you
> > cannot use logic to backdate them. They
> cannot
> > reliably be reverse engineered.
>
> They aren't factually accurate.


Au contraire. The sun really does rise every day, and the stars really do cross the sky at night. These are the kinds of facts that others have used to make the argument that because these facts are accurate, the mythology connecting and explaining them must also have been a constant. Clearly, that is a non sequitur.


> They can be
> reliably reverse engineered there are dozens maybe
> hundreds of verses refering the dead ones bones
> being gathered together, to their bones being put
> back together. It strikes me that all of these
> verses must have predated mummification.


Great. But that doesn't mean the mythology surrounding the bones and dead bodies existed even ten minutes before the texts were written down. (in this particular case, although other tests can verifiably date sections to earlier times).



> There
> would be absolutely no sense in writing about
> "gathering bones" after mummification had been
> invented because they would all be in the same
> place at the same time and the whole purpose of
> mummification was to preserve the corpse in one
> piece. Therefore I don't think it's a giant leap
> of imagination to propose that these verses date
> back to predynastic times.



Or simply somebody paying hommage to an earlier time. The Egyptians were experts at this, by the way.



> >
> > Now, this is not to say that the hieroglyphs
> > themselves, or the grammar, cannot be dated
> > properly, but simply saying that because
> something
> > is in the PTs is therefore proof that it is
> the
> > "bedrock foundation" for understanding Old
> Kingdom
> > mythology is simply unsupportable.
>
> On the contrary for the 5th and 6th dynasty it's
> the bedrock foundation for those kings, those
> kings lived in the OK. Therefore the statement is
> entirely supportable.




The Old Kingdom in Egypt lasted a lot longer than the Sixth Dynasty. There is the problem of those first five that lead up to it...




> >
> > In fact, there are times when the PTs
> contradict
> > what we know about OK mythology. It was a
> dynamic,
> > evolving, UNscientific data set. It only
> takes
> > one person and one split second to imagine
> > something new.
>
> Hardly anything new here. The PT's contradict
> themselves. In one section the king climbs on a
> boat to get to the amduat, becomes a bird, and
> most amazingly becomes a grasshopper and jumps
> into heaven.


So how do you reverse engineer that?





> >
> > It's that simple. I know this steps on a lot
> of
> > toes, but I think as more and more evidence
> is
> > discovered that predates the Pyramid Texts,
> we
> > will find that a huge amount of religious
> > evolution occurred between 2650 and 2300
> BCE...
> > and it most certainly was not linear!
> >
> I don't doubt that the PT's represent the current
> thought at the time of their writing, and I agree
> that it certainly wasn't linear.



We are in agreement. When there's evidence, there's a way to track the change. When there is no evidence, we cannot begin to extrapolate backwards from our data set, since the data we are attempting to predict is not bound by any rule of logic or cause and effect.



Anthony

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him think.