cladking Wrote:
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> The more important is the perspective of the
> ancients. My only insight to this is gleaned from
> their work and the Pyramid Texts. If I'm
> misinterpreting the PT then I'll be way off on
> understanding the people.

How many texts have you read other than the PTs (which were written over several hundred years and may have some cultural changes in them) and do you actually read hieroglyphics or are you starting to learn to read them? How much do you know about their daily lives and social structure? How much do you know about their medicine and how it was practiced?

Trying to make theories about a culture based only on a few references and one book is rather like trying to understand the British Empire based on the reading of William Blake's poems.

> This isn't to say that these explanations are
> necessarily wrong or that they fly in the face of
> human nature, merely that I'm a little
> uncomfortable with the concept that people would
> do these things for Gods they'll never again
> invoke. If the gods don't appear in the PT it's
> almost as though they don't exist. At the very
> least they are most assuredly not being invoked.

The PTs are local in time and space and do not encompass the beliefs of the whole Egyptian empire for the whole 3,000 years it existed. Again, it's like trying to understand the Roman Empire and theorizing about Caligula by only looking at Rome during the period of the Samnite Wars (several hundred years before Caligula's time.)

People do lots of things for gods they don't invoke, including building thousands of massive gothic catheddrals and putting millions of works of art in them and maintaining them even when the people are poor, starving, and suffering.