Byrd Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

>
> 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?
>
I haven't gotten more than a smattering of the heiroglyps yet. Most of this has just been absorbed rather than studied. Internet Explore 7 is going to change the way these appear in English so I'll probably wait until I need a new computer if I study them.

I know a little phsyiology and know something of the way things work. I've seen no original references to medicine before the 5th dynasty. Later stuff has little interest to me.


> 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.

> 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.
>

This is exactly what I've been trying to say for months now; almost everything we know about the Great Pyramid builders and their beliefs is based on a very few number of sources. The Pyramid Texts are central to this understanding. If there are fundamental errors in our understanding of this then there will be fundamental errors in our understanding of the ancients. The Pyramid Texts have to be dissected carefully because they are obviously written over a long period of time, but far more important are the actual meanings and translations. What was true at one time might have been much less true at another and what is translated incorrectly can rend the meaning far asunder.

By "invoke" I mean call on them for any purpose. This would include building temples and praying as well as making sacrifices or relating to Them in Their capacity as a creator or devine power. Yes, I remember that it was established earlier in this thread that there were cults which worshipped individual kings long after the 4th dynasty. But this appears to be a specific worship by a specific group rather than a general worship by at least a small percentage of believers.


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Man fears the pyramid, time fears man.