671 Assyrian king Esarhaddon attacks Egypt, captures Memphis, sacks Thebes, and leaves vassal rulers in charge.

c. 670 Introduction of iron working.

Late Period 664332 664 Egypt regains independence from Assyria.

525 Persian army led by Cambyses occupies Egypt, which becomes part of the Persian Empire.

490 The Battle of Marathon marks the beginning of the Persian Wars between Greece and Persia.

457 The Golden Age of Athens under Pericles.

450 Greek historian Herodotus visits Egypt and describes customs and history, sometimes quite fancifully, in The Histories.

Ptolemaic Period 33230 332 Alexander the Great conquers Egypt; founds the city of Alexandria.

323 Death of Alexander the Great.

305 Ptolemy I Soter, one of Alexander's Greek generals, becomes king of Egypt; adapts pharaonic titles and Egyptian worship.

290 In Alexandria, Euclid sets out principles of geometry in Elements.

250100 In Alexandria, Hebrew religious texts are translated into Greek, the version of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint.

c. 200 Alexandria is the scientific capital of the world, famed for its museum, library, and university.

146 Rome conquers and destroys Carthage.

49 Roman civil war. Julius Caesar in Egypt with Cleopatra.

46 Caesar returns to Rome with Cleopatra as his mistress and is made dictator of Rome.

44 Cleopatra murders Ptolemy XIV, coruler of Egypt. Julius Caesar assassinated in the Roman Senate.

41 Marc Antony meets Cleopatra and follows her to Egypt.

31 Battle of Actium; Octavian defeats Marc Antony.

30 Deaths of Marc Antony and Cleopatra; annexation of Egypt by Rome.

4 Death of King Herod; widely accepted date of birth of Jesus.

For the next five centuries, Egypt remained a province of the Roman Empire. But the rise of Christianity, and later the ascendancy of Islam in the Arab world, marked the final end of the old religions of Egypt. According to Christian lore, St. Mark, a Christian missionary, founded the Egyptian (Coptic) church in Alexandria around 40 CE. The city, which already had a large community of Jews, soon also developed a thriving Christian community. During the early years of the Christian Church, the bishops of Alexandria exercised enormous influence in defining Christian beliefs and practices.

Following the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity under Emperor Constantine in 313 CE, the Roman emperor Theodosius ordered the closing of all pagan temples throughout the empire in 383 CE. Later imperial decrees by Theodosius and Emperor Valentinian in 435 CE called for the complete destruction of these temples, many of them replaced with Christian churches or shrines. (This was also the fate of the Olympian temples in Greece, site of the Olympic Games for more than 1,200 years.) Vestiges of the old Egyptian religion were permitted to continue in Egypt, even though Christianity was now the official religion in Egypt.

As the Roman Empire went into its decline, Arab armies claimed Egypt and introduced Islam. In 642, Arab Muslims conquered Egypt. The Arabs moved the capital from Alexandria to what is now Cairo. Modern Egypt is primarily Sunni Muslim (94 percent); Coptic Christians and other groups represent a small minority.

A.

ncient Egypt. Say the words and conjure the images. For movie lovers, it may be the buff and bald Yul Brynner in a chariot chasing down a white-bearded Charlton Heston as Moses in The Ten Commandments. For devotees of pseudoscience, it might be the premise of the best-selling book Chariots of the Gods, which argues that alien astronauts landed their spaceships in the desert and built the pyramids long, long ago. A younger generation of music fans might be forgiven if the best vision of Egypt they can muster up comes from Michael Jackson's 1992 video "Remember the Time," featuring comedian Eddie Murphy as a pharaoh, with supermodel Iman imperiously enthroned beside him as his queen. Let's face it. As victims of the myth-making mass media, we have been served up more than a fair share of badly distorted images of ancient Egypt, a culture that stood longer than any other in history. That's unfortunate, because in reality, the Egyptians created a society that prized both morality and beauty-physical and artistic-and expressed those ideals through one of the most unique and rich systems of mythology in the ancient world. A very old set of gods and goddesses formed the soul of one of the most grandiose and unsurpassed civilizations in history. The Egyptian stories of animal-headed deities, sun gods sailing through eternity, and a pair of divine lovers named Isis and Osiris dominated that civilization, inspired its greatest accomplishments, and made an indelible mark around the world for centuries to come.

Springing up on a thin strip of fertile land along the Nile River, hedged in by unforgiving deserts, the great Egyptian culture of priests, pyramids, and papyrus was a remarkable one that dawned more than five thousand years ago and lasted until Rome emerged and Jesus was born. Over the course of more than three thousand years, Egypt's people built a world of epic grandeur that was unparalleled in ancient times for its longevity, prosperity, and magnificent architectural and artistic achievements, all of which profoundly influenced its neighbors-including the celebrated Greeks.

But, as Egypt's vast collection of art and antiquities attest, the pulsing heartbeat of this great civilization was its mythology and religion. From the dawn of Egypt's history, it was a world in which the power of the gods was felt daily, at almost every level of society. In the temples of the sun god at Karnak, where priests tended to the gods and their flocks of sacred animals. In the lives of everyday Egyptians who mummified their family members and pets in the hope of helping them attain eternal life. In great cities like Memphis, where supplicants came each day to the corrals in which sacred bulls were used to divine the future. This was the true ancient Egypt, an extraordinary land of monuments, magic, and-most of all-myths.

How did myths "rule" in ancient Egypt?

We toss around the concepts of "god" and "country" quite easily, without giving much thought to how they got started. Both ideas have been fairly significant throughout human history. For centuries, people have believed that to serve god or country-or both-was a noble calling. But few of us may realize that Egypt-land of the pharaohs, sphinxes, and mummies-essentially invented both concepts.

Going back to a time before history, when Egypt was established as the first true nation along the banks of the Nile, it was a complete theocracy-a place where religion and government were inseparably linked in the minds of rulers, priests, and people. Not only were Egypt's royalty the leaders of the nation, they were actually thought to be gods. The pharaohs' status as gods incarnate was what motivated tens of thousands of workers to lift and arrange millions of blocks of stone that weighed more than two and a half tons apiece. These laborers were not beaten under the lash of oppressive overseers. They worked willingly in the belief that the king must have a proper resting place from which he could ascend to the heavens, joining the other gods in his eternal life. Making sure that the pyramids and other tombs were properly constructed and well provisioned with the "grave goods" required for a comfortable life in the afterworld was no small concern. Only then could the resurrected king help ensure that the Egyptian world and its timeless order would continue, uninterrupted by drought, flood, or foreign invaders.

The nearly obsessive interest in ritual and order in ancient Egypt was not limited to the affairs of the king. From birth to death, and covering nearly everything in between, rank-and-file Egyptians lived under a highly structured set of customs and beliefs that were designed to keep them and their blessed land in the good graces of the vast pantheon of gods they worshipped. Proper care for these gods-and their earthly manifestation, the pharaoh-ensured the cosmic order, a concept that the Egyptians called maat and that was personified in the goddess named Maat, beloved daughter of the sun god Re. It was maat that made the sun rise each day and brought the annual flooding of the Nile River, which guaranteed Egypt's plentiful food supply and continued existence. The universal harmony of maat-a holy and ethical concept that meant truth, justice, and righteousness, as well as order-was achieved through a religious system in which the gods protected Egypt and held the forces of chaos, destruction, or simple, everyday misfortune at bay, both through proper individual behavior and obeying the ritual laws of the land.

Overseeing those ritual laws was a priestly class-one of the world's first government bureaucracies-whose expertise was in knowing how to please the gods. Whether it was sacrificing an animal to bring the rains that assured a good harvest; collecting taxes for the temple complexes; conscripting workers for three months of each year to build the great stone mausoleums that glorified the king and eased his ascension to the afterlife; or simply shaving one's eyebrows to mourn the death of a beloved cat-the priests saw to the rites that dictated Egyptian life, year in and year out. The rules they articulated and enforced helped Egypt achieve and maintain a remarkable degree of social organization and stability without resorting to draconian punishments, a vast slave economy, grotesque human sacrifices, or a rigid military state. Instead, as author Richard H. Wilkinson writes in The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt, this was a "spiritual world...which remains unique in the history of human religion. The character of that spiritual world was both mysterious and manifest, at once accessible and hidden, for although Egyptian religion was often shrouded in layers of myth and ritual, it...shaped, sustained and directed Egyptian culture in almost every imaginable way. The deities of Egypt were present in the lives of pharaohs and citizens alike, creating a more completely theocratic society than any other of the ancient world."

And so, to understand ancient Egypt, you must understand its myths. And to know those myths, you must first understand the two great forces that shaped this ancient civilization's history and destiny: the river and the desert, a perfect duality of life and death.

MYTHIC VOICES.

Hail to thee O Nile! Who manifests thyself over this land and comes to give life to Egypt! Mysterious is thy issuing forth from the darkness, on this day whereon it is celebrated! Watering the orchards created by Re, to cause all the cattle to live, you give the earth to drink, inexhaustible one....

Lord of the fish, during the inundation, no bird alights on the crops. You create the grain, you bring forth the barley, assuring perpetuity to the temples. If you cease your toil and work, then all that exists is in anguish. If the gods suffer in the heavens, then the faces of men waste away.

-Hymn to the Nile (c. 2100 BCE).

Why was Egypt the "gift of the Nile"?

The Greek historian Herodotus, who might also be called the world's first great travel writer, coined the phrase the "gift of the Nile" to describe Egypt. It was a society that utterly fascinated this Greek tourist when he visited Egypt back around 450 BCE. When Herodotus traveled through Egypt, Greece was flourishing in its Golden Age. But Egypt was already three thousand years old, a great trading and military power in the ancient Near East. Having developed the world's first national government, the Egyptians had also created the 365-day calendar, pioneered geometry and astronomy, developed one of the first forms of writing, and invented papyrus-the paperlike writing material that was essential to the birth of the book.

A long, narrow country through which the Nile River flows north into the Mediterranean Sea, Egypt is bordered mostly by vast deserts on its other three sides. The Egyptian word for these hot, sandy wastelands is Deshret, meaning "Red Land," and the source of the word "desert." Although the surrounding mountainous areas in the deserts were the source of the gold, gems, and hard stone that provided the raw materials of Egypt's grand buildings and brilliant artistry, these deserts-to the ancient Egyptians-were hellish places that could only bring danger and death.

The lines between these two worlds of life and death were not viewed as metaphoric or symbolic, but were physically tangible realities to the Egyptians. It is literally possible to stand with one foot in the dry desert and the other in the moist soil watered by the river-fertility and life on one side, sterility and death on the other. That clear demarcation between life and death carried over into Egyptian myths and beliefs. Many prehistoric burial sites have been found in the desert, and the obsessive Egyptian preoccupation with death may well derive from the fact that the hot, dry sand created a natural form of mummification that the Egyptians later perfected thorough their elaborate funerary arts. From early times, it seems, Egyptians related the desert with one of their chief gods, Seth, who represented the force of chaos and the dangers of the desert. He would enter into a cosmic life-and-death struggle with his brother, the fertility god Osiris, which formed one of the core myths of ancient Egypt.

Cutting through the harsh landscape of the desert flowed the Nile, the world's longest river, with its beginnings in the mountains near the equator in central Africa. Gathering the rainfall and snowmelt of the Ethiopian highlands and all of northeastern Africa, and wandering for more than 4,100 miles, the Nile was Egypt's life force. Starting at the end of June, when the rainy season began in central Africa, the Nile flooded its banks each year, leaving a strip of fertile, dark silt that averaged about 6 miles wide on each side of the river. The annual rising of its waters set the Egyptian calendar of sowing and reaping with its three seasons of four months each: inundation, growth, harvest. The flooding of the Nile from the end of June till late October brought down the rich silt, in which crops were planted and grew from late October to late February, to be harvested from late February till the end of June. The ancient Egyptians called their country Kemet, meaning "Black Land"*-after this rich, dark, life-giving soil.

Barley, which was baked into bread and brewed into beer, and Emmer wheat-an Asian grain well suited to feed cattle-were the staples, along with lentils, beans, onions, garlic, and other crops that grew in abundance in this moist, fertile soil. At times, there were bad years when drought limited the rains, or flooding rains destroyed the crops. But usually, Egypt's farmers could anticipate and rely upon a surplus that allowed for trading. Trading led to commerce, commerce led to a merchant class, which eventually allowed for the development of the ranks of artisans and craftsmen who didn't need to depend on farming to live. All of this came from the Nile. As historian Daniel Boorstin puts it in The Discoverers, "The Nile made possible the crops, the commerce, and the architecture of Egypt. Highway of commerce, the Nile was also a freightway for materials of colossal temples and pyramids. A granite obelisk of three thousand tons could be quarried at Aswan and floated two hundred miles down the river to Thebes.... The rhythm of the Nile was the rhythm of Egyptian life."

Since the welfare and existence of the whole country depended on this one central phenomenon-the annual flooding of the Nile-the river became the centerpiece of Egypt's religious ideas. The flooding, or inundation, was personified in the form of different deities. The annual rising of the Nile-which was part of the maat-could be fixed to the regular appearance of the "dog star" Sirius, which gave the whole affair a sense of celestial as well as earthly order.

Egypt's history begins with prehistoric villages that grew up along the banks of the Nile more than five thousand years ago. Before that time, Stone Age Egypt was probably settled by people who came from Libya to the west, Palestine and Syria to the east, and Nubia to the south. Adding to this "multicultural" melting pot were traders from what is now Iraq (ancient Mesopotamia) who may have also settled in the area, attracted by the fertility of the land beside the Nile. Grave sites from these early periods show that the dead were carefully buried, often in a fetal position suggesting notions of an expected rebirth, in burial pits that contained possessions needed for an afterlife-a clue to how ancient religious beliefs were formed very early in human history.

Over time, the small farming and herding communities became part of two kingdoms: one controlled the villages that lay in the Nile Delta, where the river spreads out before emptying into the Mediterranean, and which came to be known as Lower Egypt; the other controlled the villages south of the Delta area and was called Upper Egypt. Most of the people in ancient Egypt lived in the Nile River Valley and there may have been between 1 million and 4 million people living in Egypt at various times.

Dark-skinned and dark-haired, the Egyptians spoke a language that was related to the Semitic languages spoken in the modern Middle East-including Arabic and Hebrew-and recent linguistic discoveries place ancient Egyptian among a family of languages called Afro-Asiatic, spoken in northern Africa. By around 3100 BCE, their language was also written in hieroglyphics, a complex system in which more than seven hundred picture symbols stood for certain objects, ideas, or sounds. Recent discoveries show bone and ivory with a form of hieroglyphic script dating as far back as 3400 BCE, and it is supposed that the Egyptian hieroglyphic system may have been invented for administrative and ritual purposes. Some scholars believe that Egypt's writing system developed with Sumerian influence, as certain character types appear in both written languages; others argue that the differences between these two ancient writing systems are greater than their similarities. What is certain is that from the earliest days of Egyptian civilization, hieroglyphics were inscribed on monuments, temples, and tombs, and were set down on official texts, many of which were preserved over the centuries in Egypt's hot, dry climate, providing generations of scholars and archaeologists with a rich array of sources for studying Egypt's past.

Egypt's long history has fascinated many other foreign people, including the Greeks going back to the time of Socrates, Plato, and Herodotus. But serious "Egyptology" began two hundred years ago with the cracking of the secret of the Rosetta Stone, which caused many previous theories and assumptions about Egypt to fall by the wayside. Recent research into Egypt's prehistory has begun to transform a long-accepted version of the civilization's earliest days. There is now evidence that a succession of southern (or Upper Egypt) kings, including one known as Scorpion, grew more powerful in the fourth millennium BCE, and references to well-known gods of Egypt have been found this far back in Egyptian history. The key event in the beginning of that history took place about 3100 BCE, when a king of Upper Egypt, traditionally called Menes the Uniter, but now often identified as Narmer, conquered Lower Egypt. One of the key pieces of evidence for this event is the Narmer Palette, a double-sided carved slate that depicts a king subduing a captive, along with other symbols that suggest a united kingdom.

Merging the two Egypts into one, Narmer and his successors, who may have included Menes (some historians think that they are the same person), began the process of forming the world's first national government. Around 3000 BCE, Memphis was founded as a capital near the site of present-day Cairo. What is also clear from the Narmer Palette and other very old artifacts is that the close connection between gods and kings was well established by the time the country was unified. From its earliest beginnings, Egypt was a theocracy, and its very ancient gods were intricately connected to the Egyptian government throughout its long history.

While doubt has been cast on the existence of Menes, a king named Aha is now counted as the first of Egypt's many kings in a succession of thirty-one dynasties-or families of kings-that ruled the country right down to the time of Alexander the Great in 332 BCE. During the early period of Egyptian history, the Egyptians developed irrigation systems, invented ox-drawn plows, and created the world's first bureaucracy. Based at Memphis and anchored by religious beliefs, the Egyptian national government-in which god and country were not separate entities but completely interlocked-managed the enormous public works, including the construction of the pyramids, and employed an army of scribes to record it all.

While some scholars have questioned whether the Egyptian rulers were actually considered divine from earliest times, it is clear that these kings ruled the first nation-state as the political, military, and religious leaders. It is also clear from the earliest known tombs of these kings that the king was seen as the mediator between his people and the powers of the afterworld, and that the state religion gave legitimacy to the political order. Other documents and artifacts from this very early time show that another significant human invention was securely in place, too-taxes!

The priesthood existed to serve both the deities and the king, who was considered the chief priest of Egypt. The temple complexes run by Egypt's priests were in many ways equivalent to the medieval cathedral towns of Europe. They were not visited on a once-a-week basis or occasional holiday, but were the economic and social center of Egyptian life. As in feudal Europe, most of Egypt's land was in the hands of king and priests. The temples collected and distributed the bounty of Egypt and supported entire populations of civil servants, scribes, craftsmen, and artisans. They collected taxes on behalf of the king-they were the instruments of state power. In one census taken in the time of Ramses III, the two great temples in Thebes employed ninety thousand workmen, owned five hundred thousand head of cattle, four hundred orchards, and eighty ships.

After the earliest dynasties, Egyptian history has been traditionally divided into three major periods, known as the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms, interrupted sporadically by stretches of social upheaval or foreign rule known as "intermediate periods."* In spite of these interruptions, occasional periods of foreign control and occasional breakdowns in order, Egyptian life maintained its fundamental sense of order and stability with remarkable longevity.

The Old Kingdom, or the Pyramid Age, began in 2686 BCE and continued for some five hundred years until 2160 BCE. As the name obviously suggests, the period is famed for the construction of the first massive pyramids. During the Old Kingdom, the king's absolute power was solidified, based on the belief in his divinity, his role as chief priest, and his control of the priesthood, and the promise that only the king would spend eternity with the gods, where he would continue to maintain the cosmic order that blessed Egypt with such plenty. To maintain the status quo, the king wielded unquestioned power. One stunning example of both the stability and total control can be seen in one of the Old Kingdom rulers, Pepy II, who took the throne at age six and ruled for ninety-four years.

The Old Kingdom went into decline and was followed by an unsettled century, called the First Intermediate Period, in which power shifted away from Memphis to Herakleopolis. This time of unrest and disorder was later believed to be a time when the gods withdrew their blessings from Egypt. A new generation of Upper Kingdom rulers restored national order during the Middle Kingdom (20551650 BCE). This was a four-hundred-year period of peace and prosperity, during which the kings of the Twelfth Dynasty conquered neighboring Nubia (modern Sudan) and began to expand Egypt's trade with Palestine and Syria in southwestern Asia and the advanced Minoan civilization, based on Crete. Often described as a "Renaissance" period in Egypt, the Middle Kingdom saw Egyptian art, architecture, and religion reach new heights. With this exposure to other surrounding cultures, historian Gae Callender explains, "The Middle Kingdom was an age of tremendous invention, great vision, and colossal projects, yet there was also careful and elegant attention to detail in the creation of the smallest items of everyday use and decoration. This more human scale is present in the pervading sense that individual humans had become more significant in cosmic terms...."

After this golden era, atrophy set in and another succession of weak rulers brought an end to the Middle Kingdom around 1650 BCE. While Egypt was in this weakened state, warriors from Asia spread throughout the Nile Delta. Eventually these immigrants, who used horse-drawn chariots and carried improved bows and other more advanced weapons unknown to the Egyptians, seized control of much of Egypt's territory. These invaders, called "Asiatics" by the Egyptians, are better known by their Greek name, the Hyksos kings, and they ruled much of the Delta area of Egypt in a Second Intermediate Period. But rather than attempting to replace Egyptian religion with their own gods and worship, as invaders often do, the Hyksos seem to have adapted Egyptian forms. Apparently the Egyptians also learned from the Hyksos invaders, adapting their arts of war, and eventually drove the Hyksos out of Egypt.*

A new succession of kings emerged, originally based in the Upper Egypt city of Thebes, and began using the title "pharaoh." These kings developed a permanent standing army that used horse-drawn chariots and other advanced military techniques introduced during the Hyksos period, ushering in the five-hundred-year period of the New Kingdom. Beginning in 1550 BCE with Ahmose, the Eigthteenth Dynasty pharaoh credited with expelling the Hyksos from Egypt, this era saw ancient Egypt become the world's greatest power, and it includes some of the most familiar names in Egyptian history-Thutmose III, Queen Hatshepsut, Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, and a series of pharaohs named Ramses, of biblical fame.

During this era, Egypt also began an aggressive military expansion, and Thutmose I took armies as far as the Euphrates River. His daughter, Queen Hatshepsut, became one of the first known ruling queens in world history, but presented herself publicly and was depicted in art as a bearded man. Egypt reached the height of its power during the 1400s BCE under Thutmose III. Dubbed the "Napoleon of Ancient Egypt," Thutmose III aggressively set out to expand Egypt's boundaries, led military expeditions into Asia, and reestablished Egyptian control over neighboring African kingdoms, making Egypt the strongest and wealthiest nation in the Middle East.

What do we know about Egyptian myth and how do we know it?

History is sometimes mystery. We often "don't know much about" the truth of events taking place in our own lifetimes. So how can we possibly understand or know about a place that existed in a time before books, newspapers, and photographs? In the case of Egypt, fortunately, we have a society that spent a great deal of energy on the idea of posterity. The Egyptians were proud of what they had achieved, and some kings in particular spared little expense in making sure the world knew about what they had done. And much of it was, as the expression goes, "set in stone."

Remarkably well-preserved scrolls, thousands of years old, show Egypt as a highly literate society. We have Egyptian accounts of people doing their taxes, manuals of polite conduct that are 4,500 years old, and letters in which fathers admonish their sons to work hard at scribe school so they won't have to make a living as carpenters, fishermen, or worse, laundry men-a job in which the occupational hazards included washing the garments of menstruating women while dodging Nile crocodiles. Achieving the status of a scribe was a high honor for an upwardly mobile young Egyptian commoner with social aspirations. Ancient Egypt, in other words, was a literate culture that prized learning.

Which makes it all the more surprising that there is no ancient Egyptian Bible, Koran, Odyssey, or Gilgamesh epic, in which poets would have organized and gathered an "authorized" version of Egyptian mythology. Much of what we know about Egypt's myths, beliefs, and history has been carefully reconstructed from an elaborate array of funerary literature and art uncovered and translated during the past two hundred years. Few ancient civilizations documented their beliefs in as rich a detail and in so many locations as the Egyptians did. Obviously it helps that they had more than three thousand years to create that mother lode of art and architecture. Despite several centuries of grave robberies and plundering by invaders, the world has been left with a vast treasury that includes art, artifacts, and writings found in thousands of tombs, temples, and burial sites located throughout Egypt.

As anyone who has wandered through an old cemetery knows, you can learn a lot from burial plots. Sometimes a simple headstone can provide a world of information about whole families and what they believed and how they died. In Egypt, walking around cemeteries has provided a veritable library of information about thousands of years of Egyptian life and beliefs. For instance, in the carved limestone tombs near the Old Kingdom pyramid of King Unas (c. 23752345 BCE), archaeologists found a "house for the afterlife," complete with men's and women's quarters, a master bedroom, and bathrooms with latrines. But perhaps more significant was the discovery of columns of hieroglyphics called the Pyramid Texts, considered the world's oldest known religious writings, carved more than four thousand years ago in the tomb of King Unas.

If you grew up on a diet of Walt Disney witches, the word "spell" probably invokes notions of hocus-pocus and "eye of newt." But the Pyramid Texts' collection of "spells" and incantations (the exact Egyptian phrase for them was "words to be spoken") was far less exotic. Actually, in modern parlance, the Pyramid Texts were more like "how-to" manuals-travel guides to the afterlife. Evoking the names of the enormous pantheon of Egyptian gods, the "spells" they contained provided the dead king with the "scripts" that were necessary for his safe passage, survival, and well-being in the land of the dead. They sometimes warned of dangers and included the correct dialogues with gatekeepers and ferrymen he would encounter along the way, providing the deceased with a "cheat sheet" of answers to questions that would vouch for his legitimacy as a king and heir of the gods. Typical of the Texts is this "Utterance," in which the king is ferried across the sky to join the sun god: The reed-floats of the sky are set down for me, That I may cross on them to the horizon, to Harakhti.

The Nurse-canal is opened, The Winding Waterway is flooded, The Field of Rushes are filled with water, And I am ferried over To yonder eastern side of the sky, To the place where the gods fashioned me, Wherein I was born, new and young.

More than two hundred of these "spells" were found in the tomb of King Unas, but more than eight hundred others have been discovered since in other tombs dating from this early period. The vast pantheon of Egyptian gods is hinted at by the fact that more than two hundred different gods are mentioned in the various Pyramid Texts. Although once reserved for kings, Pyramid Texts began to appear in the tombs of non-royalty by the end of the Old Kingdom's Sixth Dynasty, suggesting a fundamental change in Egyptian society that might explain the disorder that sent the Old Kingdom into decline.

Over time, the Egyptian obsession with preparing properly for the afterlife produced ornate coffins painted with hymns and requests to the gods in another collection of spells, known as Coffin Texts. This is the modern name for a collection of more than eleven hundred spells and recitations, some of them similar to versions from the Pyramid Texts, which were painted on wooden coffins. Some of these texts included maps showing the safest route for the soul to take as the dead person negotiated the treacherous path through the underworld.

The last-and perhaps best known-form of burial literature is another collection, which was misnamed The Book of the Dead when it was discovered and translated in the nineteenth century CE. Used for more than a thousand years, The Book of the Dead, known to the Egyptians as "The Book of Coming Forth by Day," was a New Kingdom innovation, consisting of almost two hundred spells or formulas designed to assist the spirits of the dead achieve and maintain a full and happy afterlife. These spells had such titles as "For Going Out Into the Day and Living After Death," "For Passing by the Dangerous Coil of Apep" (Apep was a terrible serpent in Egyptian mythology), or advice with the ring of a "Hint from Heloise"-" For Removing Anger From the Heart of the God." Another provided the incantation for preventing a man's decapitation in the realm of the dead: "I am a Great One, the son of a Great One. I am a flame, the son of a flame to whom was given his head after it had been cut off. The head of Osiris shall not be taken from him, and my head shall not be taken from me. I am knit together, just and young, for I indeed am Osiris, the Lord of Eternity."

At one time, these spells and rituals had been for the exclusive use of the pharaohs. But The Book of the Dead became everyman's chance at eternity, and copies of it eventually came to be buried with any Egyptian who could afford one. (See below, What was the "weighing of the heart"?) The many centuries of burials, tombs, temples, palaces, monuments, and statuary left behind by the Egyptians-all with elaborately carved accounts of kings, extolling their achievements-constitute a rough form of the first recorded history. This awesome collection of antiquities documents an Egypt which had a highly developed, unique mythology more than five thousand years ago. This vast record shows that the Egyptians believed from the earliest times that the gods had a profound impact on the shaping of their world and civilization. But the focal point of this complex religion evolved into a near obsession with life after death.

Long before Christianity and its hope of resurrection was born, Egyptian religion was the first to conceive of life after death. At the heart of this religion-and at the center of Egyptian government and society itself-were Egypt's extraordinary gods, a pantheon of breathtaking imagination and totality that found expression in every aspect of the Creation-animal, human, plant, and stone. The beginnings of Egyptian mythology and the elaborate stories of these gods go far back in time, before history, to the time when the first Egyptians imagined Creation.

MYTHIC VOICES.

All manifestations came into being after I developed...no sky existed no earth existed...I created on my own every being...my fist became my spouse...I copulated with my hand...I sneezed out Shu...I spat out Tefnut...Next Shu and Tefnut produced Geb and Nut...Geb and Nut then gave birth to Osiris...Seth, Isis and Nephthys...ultimately they produced the population of this land.

Extracts from the Papyrus Bremner-Rhind How does "creation by masturbation" work?

In the Book of Genesis, the Hebrew Bible offers two versions of the Creation. The first is the Seven Day account, in which God speaks and creates the universe. The second tells the story of Adam and Eve and is set in the Garden of Eden. These two biblical accounts differ substantially in details, facts, and style. They were probably composed centuries apart and only merged later on by the early Jewish editors who first compiled the writings that would become the Books of Moses, or the first five books of the Bible. But these two separate and distinct stories have been viewed as one by Jews and Christians for centuries. Raised on a Sunday-school or Hollywood version of biblical events, and not having read the Bible for themselves, many people are not even aware of the fact that two Creations exist.

Ancient Egypt goes Genesis several times better. There are at least four significantly different Egyptian versions of Creation, some with overlapping details and characters. Each of these Creation stories was connected to a prominent Egyptian city, and each emerged at different times in Egypt's long history. Just as the two Creation stories in Genesis reflect different writers working at different times, the various Egyptian Creation accounts developed over the immense prehistoric time frame that has to be reckoned with whenever talking about Egypt. Early in its history, Egypt had been divided into forty-two separate administrative districts called nomes, and each had its own deity. Every town or village also had a temple, often devoted to a localized god, so the number of Egyptian deities grew to the thousands over time.

Keeping this in mind helps to explain why the Egyptian Creation myths defy a simple, "logical" narrative. These are stories that go back to the most distant moments of early human civilization, and then evolve and change over the course of centuries. While some details differ in these various Egyptian Creation stories, there are similarities and recurring characters. All share a central belief that the sun-or more precisely, a sun god-was at the center of the creation, which emerged from a primeval watery chaos called Nun, an endless, formless deep that existed at the beginning of time and was the source of the Nile.

The primeval ocean of chaos that existed before the first gods came into being, these waters contained all of the potential for life, awaiting only the emergence of a creator. This watery creation provides an intriguing parallel to the opening lines of the Bible-"In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters."

Probably the oldest version of Egyptian Creation myth came from Memphis, the ancient political capital of Egypt. Memphis is the city's Greek name. The original Egyptian name is translated as "White Walls" and referred to the enclosure around the sacred city. Here, the belief held that the world was created by a very old creator god called Ptah, temples to whom were built all over Egypt. Most scholars believe that the Greeks translated the Egyptian word Hewet-ka-Ptah, which literally means "Temple of the Spirit of Ptah," as Aeguptos, and it was eventually transformed into the word we now use as Egypt.

A patron of craftsmen, Ptah was able to create the world simply by thought and word alone-" through his heart and through his tongue," as ancient priestly writings put it. Simply by speaking a string of names, Ptah produced all of Egypt, the other gods, including the sun god Atum (see below), the cities and temples. In other words, this Creation story was similar to the much later biblical Creation in Genesis 1, in which the Hebrew God speaks and creates the universe. ("God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light.") For centuries, scholars have speculated and argued about whether the parallels between the Egyptian and Hebrew Creation accounts are just coincidence or whether the Egyptian Creation stories could have influenced the ancient Hebrews. It is an unanswered, and possibly unanswerable, question.

Manifested by the sacred Apis bull in Memphis, the most important of all sacred animals in Egypt, Ptah was seen as a creator deity, and Egyptian kings were crowned in his temple. But Ptah never rose to become Egypt's supreme god and, at a later time, Ptah was merged with other gods to become a god of the dead. The Greeks later equated Ptah with their blacksmith god Hephaestus, known by the Romans as Vulcan. In another minor myth, Ptah was given credit for the miraculous defeat of an Assyrian army when he instructed an army of rats to gnaw through the attackers' bowstrings and the leather on their shields, forcing them to retreat. One of the most recognizable representations of Ptah is a small gilded statue found in the tomb of Tutankhamun.

A second major Egyptian Creation story came from Hermopolis, farther south in central Egypt, a prosperous city built in honor of the god known as Thoth. This god of wisdom and transmitter of knowledge is credited with the invention of writing. The ancient Egyptian name of this city was Khemnu, and Hermopolis was its later Greek name, because the Greeks associated Thoth with their god Hermes. But in ancient Egyptian, Khemnu means "Eight Town," and the myth that developed here held that four couples of frog-headed gods and snake-headed goddesses-technically referred to as the Ogdoad, or Group of Eight-were created by Thoth as the different aspects of the universe. Nun and his consort Naunet personified the original formless waters; Heh and Hauhet symbolized either Infinity or the force of the Nile floodwaters; Kek and Kauket embodied darkness; Amun and Amaunet were the incarnation of hidden power and were also associated with the wind and air.

While the specific details of how this Creation actually takes place are obscure, Thoth was credited as having commanded the Creation, and somehow the eight gods he produced were then responsible for the creation of the sun. In a variant of this myth, a lotus blossom arose from the waters, and from this flower, the young sun god emerged, bringing light and life into the cosmos. After this Creation, six of the gods receded from view, and only Amun and Amaunet joined the other gods of Egypt and continued to play an active role in Egyptian life.

A third Creation story focuses on the making of humans-an aspect of the Creation that is less significant in other Egyptian Creation accounts. This story features the god Khnum, an ancient ram-headed creator god who originated in Elephantine, an island in the Nile just above the first cataract at Aswan. In a highly folkloric tale, Khnum made humans by molding people on a potter's wheel, providing the first real link between gods and humans in Egyptian myth. The depiction of Khnum seated at the potter's wheel became a popular motif in Egyptian art. Khnum was especially significant because he controlled the Nile's floodwaters. The inundation of the fields, which produced the grain that allowed Egypt to prosper, was one of the most important aspects of Egyptian life, and Khnum was considered a great fertility god.

The most significant Creation story in ancient Egypt, however, was the one associated with Heliopolis, as Herodotus called it, for it was the City of the Sun (helio is Greek for "sun"). One of the most important locations in ancient Egypt, its ruins are near modern Cairo. Sometime around 3000 BCE, near the time of the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, a Creation account emerged in Heliopolis that became the dominant myth in Egyptian religion and history. This account is prominent in the Pyramid Texts, the collection of hieroglyphic writings found in some of the earliest tombs.

According to the Heliopolis myth, there was the great infinite ocean, described as a primeval being called Nu or Nun. At the beginning of time, the god Atum, "lord of the Heliopolis," father and ruler of all the gods, emerged from these primeval waters. As the sun god, Atum simply came into being and stood on a raised mound-a symbolic representation of the land that rises out of the receding Nile floodwaters. In other words, the essence of Egypt-the sun and water-were merged into this one god. The mound became known as the benben, a pyramid-shaped elevation on which the sun god stood. In a temple in Heliopolis, there was a rock, possibly a meteorite, which was venerated as the benben stone and was believed to be the solidified semen of Atum. The benben stone, the primeval mound from which creation emerged, is considered the inspiration for both the pyramids and the obelisk.

A god of totality and complete power, Atum immediately began to create other gods. (In later times, Atum was linked with the other major Egyptian sun god, Re or Ra, as Re-Atum. See below.) This is where the story gets tricky, because there are a couple of variations. Clearly, his first act is to masturbate, and by doing so, Atum gives spontaneous birth to his children, the twins Shu and Tefnut. But in a later passage, Atum is said to "swallow his seed" and then "sneeze" and "spit up" these twins. Shu is the god of air, and Tefnut the lion-headed goddess of moisture. With their creation, there now exists the sun, water, and the atmosphere. The Creation goes on from there, until there is a collection of the most significant gods in Egypt-the nine deities known as the Great Ennead.

MYTHIC VOICES.

The glorious god came, Amun himself, the lord of the two lands, in the guise of her husband.

They found her resting in the beautiful palace.

She awoke when she breathed the perfume of the god, And she laughed at the sight of his majesty.

Inflamed with desire, he hastened toward her.

He had lost his heart to the queen.

When he came near to her, she saw his form as a very god.

She rejoiced in the splendor of his beauty.

His love went inside all her limbs.

The god's sweet perfume suffused through the palace, the perfume of Punt, the land of incense.

The greatness of this god did to the woman what he pleased.

She kissed him and delighted him with her body.

-Egyptian Hymn on the Birth of Hatshepsut.