Why "osiris" Didn't Exist Before The 5th Dynasty.

[Wepwawet]

5 hours ago, cladking said:

I can't really disagree with such reasonable statements.  

From my perspective I'm seeing a definite obsession with death among the authors of the "book of the dead".  And lest we forget every single Egyptologist believes that the great pyramids were tombs (death) and they used very primitive and highly labor intensive means to build them that would require thousands and thousands of men to slave away most of their lives to construct them at enormous cost to the commonwealth and the commonweal.  This cost would include many killed during construction and the inability of the economy to support a far larger population.    If Egyptologists are correct about these things then I believe this alone constitutes a very unhealthy obsession with death at least as it applies to kings.  This required an entire culture to build these with primitive means so by extrapolation the entire society had an obsession with death.  

Then to add insult to this injury Egyptologists parse the Pyramid Texts to be about death and the means of the dead king to live after death and ironically flying up to heaven each day as a sort of reoccurring death.  

I agree it's very easy to slip into semantics and from your point of view I probably have But from my point of view these people are virtually more alive  than some of their descendants today.   I believe each individual strove to improve the lot of all people and those who were most successful were remembered by a pyramid (or mastaba) and a star.  We simply assume that it was a matter of wealth or power but there is little basis for this other than the high status of some of the individuals with large tombs.  If I'm right though power wasn't inherited so much determined by individual competence and knowledge because of the nature of Ancient Language to literally be Words of the Gods/ Word of Power.  Competence and knowledge were apparent with every utterance.  

 

Outta time.... will return... 

I've read that and will reply tomorrow.

[cormac mac airt]

2 hours ago, cladking said:

You mustta missed the part where i already said I was wrong.

The important part is the actual evidence; the human brocas area is very different than in animals.  There's no evidence that ancient people had "human" brocas areas.  

You never actually did, you did what you usually do which is skirt around admitting your error or attempting to divert the discussion in another direction. 
 

cormac

[Thanos5150]

4 hours ago, Wepwawet said:

Of course tombs are visible, except in the VoK for the reasons you stated, but the cemeteries are kept separate from the living, unlike with us where we have cemeteries among the living, I live by one, I need to walk through it if I want to get to the town center and not drive. Then there are churches, where, depending on the age of the church, you will be sitting on a pew above the dead, and may have the dead by you in an elaborate tomb, and in some Catholic churches you may have a dessicated corpse in view in glass case. The AE would I think have found this disgusting, maybe even a mental aberration, and some think this today. This was why I drew attention to what they did and what we do in order to provide some illumination as to why I say that they hid death, but perhaps I should have used a more powerful light. 

It stands to reason there a practical side to burying the dead on the west side of the Nile while the living were on the east, but it was also part and parcel of their religious beliefs that the land of the dead was in the desert west of the Nile. This separation in and of itself was a recognition of the distinction between the living and the dead.  

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However, there is still the fact that they never even mentioned death, nobody has a cause of death or date of death. We may, if they have a decorated tomb, or a BoD scroll, see them as a mummy, but how they get from being alive in the normal sense to having another existance as a mummy is never mentioned, and the reason is because to them they have not died, they have moved almost seamlessly from one state of existance to another.

It makes sense these things are not mentioned in the tombs, but while not common practice they do talk about death. The Dispute of a Man with His BA, for example, is basically about a guy wanting to commit suicide and arguing with his BA about it. The Admonitions of Ipuwer says:

Indeed, [hearts] are violent, pestilence is throughout the land, blood is everywhere, death is not lacking, and the mummy-cloth speaks even before one comes near it.

Indeed, many dead are buried in the river; the stream is a sepulcher and the place of embalmment has become a stream....

Indeed, the ways are [. . .], the roads are watched; men sit in the bushes until the benighted traveler comes in order to plunder his burden, and what is upon him is taken away. He is belabored with blows of a stick and murdered....

How comes it that every man kills his brother? The troops whom we marshaled for ourselves have turned into foreigners and have taken to ravaging. 

Prophecy of Neferti:

Weapons will be made of copper
the bread they request will be blood,
they will burst into laughter at grief,
no-one will weep at death,
no-one will sleep hungry for want for death,
and the heart of a man will only be after himself.
No mourning will be observed today - the heart is turned entirely to itself.
A man rests on his side - at his back one man kills another.
I can show you the son as attacker, the brother as enemy, man murdering his father.

A few that come to mind,  

They are not blinded by their religion-dead is dead. They get it. Murder, old age, disease. Death sucks and they do not want to die. The point of the funerary practices and how they live their life is to ensure there is an afterlife after the body has died, but no one was kidding themselves or "hiding" this truth.  

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So you might have the opinion that they did not hide death, but that is based on tombs having some degree of visibility, and I don't dispute this as it's the bleedin' obvious, but this is only part of the equation as they hid actual death to the extent of never, ever, (TA21 aside) depicting death (enemies aside), or described anybody as dying. 

Its not an opinion though is it...? I see what you are saying, and true they did not like to talk about death in and of itself extensively, but I think it is a little more nuanced than that and there are examples that they do in one way or another. And I am not sure why they would depict a dead person as non mummified in their tombs as this kind of defeats the whole purpose of the process. They do however commonly depict them dead as mummies:

Indeed, the ways are [. . .], the roads are watched; men sit in the bushes until the benighted traveler comes in order to plunder his burden, and what is upon him is taken away. He is belabored with blows of a stick and murdered....

While Osiris is not an actual person, his death sure is pretty well described. Good news though, they put him back together and he comes back to life.    

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Edit: I'll put this to you. While I can understand your stance on this, is this not informed by, and I'm sure you'll correct me if I'm wrong, your primary interest in Egypt being their structures, particularly those from the Old Kingdom, well of course it cannot just be that, but from reading your posts over the last several years that is the impression I get.

One of my primary interests but my opinion is informed by the entirety of my knowledge of AE history hence why my first response only references their beliefs and quote Assmann. My next response was a reply to your comment:

"The Egyptians hid death, and with the exception of in your face pyramids, the cemeteries were away from the living, and there is evidence, for instance in the VoK, that they wanted nothing more than to get the dead buried and out of sight as soon as they could, not mawkishly make "scenic spots"."

Which is not true hence the rest of what I wrote: #342. 

Quote

On the other hand, my primary interest in Egypt is in what they said, what they believed, and particulalry, but not wholly, in the New Kingdom. Therefore we may be coming at this this from two different directions, and coming to two different conclusions, both of which are essentially opinions, though with facts putting in an appearance, for instance, from your PoV the visibility of tombs, and from mine, not so much a visible tangible fact, but that they never mentioned or depicted death. So while death in the form of a tomb is present, everything else connected with death is hidden. Or to put it another way, physically present, but metaphisically invisible, which could lead into discussion about why they liked to wrap, to hide, cult objects, statues of gods for instance, and why these statues, the temple cult statues, were hidden away in the "holy of holies" except for festivals, when they were still hidden in their shrine anyway. Amun, the hidden one, why. That all probably seemed way too nerdy and esoteric, but to me it's all connected.

It is fair we would have different perceptions, for various reasons, but of course I am coming at it from all directions as said above. Though its not like they reveled in the macabre of death, they did not "hide" it, but rather choose to transmogrify the dead in accordance with their beliefs instead of dwelling on the actual death or physically dead.      

Edited November 6, 2023 by Thanos5150

[Kenemet]

8 hours ago, cladking said:

Off the top of my head I can't think of a single other physical characteristic of the human brain much different than that of animals.  

Perhaps this evidence that virtually proves my theory.  

No, it simply shows that you haven't studied anatomy at all.  

[Wepwawet]

6 hours ago, Thanos5150 said:

It stands to reason there a practical side to burying the dead on the west side of the Nile while the living were on the east, but it was also part and parcel of their religious beliefs that the land of the dead was in the desert west of the Nile. This separation in and of itself was a recognition of the distinction between the living and the dead.  

It makes sense these things are not mentioned in the tombs, but while not common practice they do talk about death. The Dispute of a Man with His BA, for example, is basically about a guy wanting to commit suicide and arguing with his BA about it. The Admonitions of Ipuwer says:

Indeed, [hearts] are violent, pestilence is throughout the land, blood is everywhere, death is not lacking, and the mummy-cloth speaks even before one comes near it.

Indeed, many dead are buried in the river; the stream is a sepulcher and the place of embalmment has become a stream....

Indeed, the ways are [. . .], the roads are watched; men sit in the bushes until the benighted traveler comes in order to plunder his burden, and what is upon him is taken away. He is belabored with blows of a stick and murdered....

How comes it that every man kills his brother? The troops whom we marshaled for ourselves have turned into foreigners and have taken to ravaging. 

Prophecy of Neferti:

Weapons will be made of copper
the bread they request will be blood,
they will burst into laughter at grief,
no-one will weep at death,
no-one will sleep hungry for want for death,
and the heart of a man will only be after himself.
No mourning will be observed today - the heart is turned entirely to itself.
A man rests on his side - at his back one man kills another.
I can show you the son as attacker, the brother as enemy, man murdering his father.

A few that come to mind,  

They are not blinded by their religion-dead is dead. They get it. Murder, old age, disease. Death sucks and they do not want to die. The point of the funerary practices and how they live their life is to ensure there is an afterlife after the body has died, but no one was kidding themselves or "hiding" this truth.  

Its not an opinion though is it...? I see what you are saying, and true they did not like to talk about death in and of itself extensively, but I think it is a little more nuanced than that and there are examples that they do in one way or another. And I am not sure why they would depict a dead person as non mummified in their tombs as this kind of defeats the whole purpose of the process. They do however commonly depict them dead as mummies:

Indeed, the ways are [. . .], the roads are watched; men sit in the bushes until the benighted traveler comes in order to plunder his burden, and what is upon him is taken away. He is belabored with blows of a stick and murdered....

While Osiris is not an actual person, his death sure is pretty well described. Good news though, they put him back together and he comes back to life.    

One of my primary interests but my opinion is informed by the entirety of my knowledge of AE history hence why my first response only references their beliefs and quote Assmann. My next response was a reply to your comment:

"The Egyptians hid death, and with the exception of in your face pyramids, the cemeteries were away from the living, and there is evidence, for instance in the VoK, that they wanted nothing more than to get the dead buried and out of sight as soon as they could, not mawkishly make "scenic spots"."

Which is not true hence the rest of what I wrote: #342. 

It is fair we would have different perceptions, for various reasons, but of course I am coming at it from all directions as said above. Though its not like they reveled in the macabre of death, they did not "hide" it, but rather choose to transmogrify the dead in accordance with their beliefs instead of dwelling on the actual death or physically dead.      

Perhaps I should have been a bit pedantic in my post then and mentioned that it is the death of an individual that they did not mention. The literary examples you quote do of course mention death, but they are just that, literary examples, a broad brush mentioning death as an occurance in fictional settings. Then we have the "Dispute of a Man with his Ba". This is of course a good example of a discussion about death, though again it is a work of fiction, not a biography or final words of a man who has died. The work itself though is not so much about death, but about avoiding death, of putting death off until the right time. It can be seen as a treatise against suicide.

When it comes to the depiction of a dead individual in their tomb, well, it is just that, a depiction in their tomb, a depiction that nobody can see. These scenes of a funeral procession also rather rare, and from the top of my head only KV62 has such a scene for a king, the one you post. Depictions of the mummy of the deceased tend to appear in the vignettes of the BoD and not so much on the walls in a tomb.You would have a point if these scenes were on public display though, for instance if there was a funeral scene on the walls of Medinet Habu, but there is not, there is, as far as the surviving evidence shows, no mention or allusion anywhere outside the tomb to the death of an individual, there is only the visible structure of that part of the tomb above ground to say that here is death, but it is not explicit, there are no scenes of death on show, no texts stating even that "Here lies X, tragically taken from us too soon at X age" a sentiment very common for us. What we can see in the chapel part of a tomb, if painted, is a celebration of the life of the deceased, and depictions of them living in the Duat as they lived on Earth. Of course as it's a tomb it signifies death, but not, I contend, in the mawkish, and at times obsessive way that we do.

Obsession, this is what this is actually about as it is how cladking describes the authors of the "Book of the Dead", and then states that as they were "obsessed with death", Egyptologists have transposed this "obsession" onto the meaning of the Pyramid Texts, and it is this that I dispute. We all die, we cannot get away from that, and all cultures have a way of dealing with death. To say that Egyptians after the Old Kingdom, which is what cladking either directly states, or at least strongly implies as the BoD is not much more than an illustrated version of the Middle Kingdom Coffin Texts, were "obsessed" with death is wrong, and that is the core of my argument. Is death present, of course, but aside from there being a tomb, was there an obsessive cult of death, the type of cult of death that appeared for us in the 19th Century, no, there is a desire for life, a belief that life continues after the physical body no longer functions, and there is some nuance there, and I know I am right in stating that they did in fact hide the death of an individual, yes, I changed emphasis there, but for clarity. Is there a tomb that says, here be the dead, yes of course, but as to how why and when they died, or any direct mention that they have died, nothing. If they had engaged in the type of mawkishness that we engage in, or certainly did not too many generations ago, with weeping angels and gloomy purple prose, obituaries, horror films and stories, then yes, a case could be made to say thet were obsessed with death, or at least that they did not hide death, but they denied death, and in their own words, "This Unas does not die" and the name of any deceased can be inserted.

[Wepwawet]

To continue about why I say that the AE hid from death. Firstly, when I mentioned the VoK and evidence showing death being hidden, I did not have in mind the fact that the tombs are physically hidden for protection, but rather that the evidence shows that while some of the more elaborate tombs would have taken a while to build, when a king died it seems like they wanted him, that is his mummy, out of the way as soon as possible, hence unfinished tombs, not an uncommon feature. Then, is death hidden when you have a visible tomb, a pyramid or mastaba for instance, no, of course not, and that is not what I meant either. Death per se cannot be hidden as such, people die and you cannot hide the fact, they were, for the few who could afford it, put in a tomb which all can see. What I am saying is that from the moment of death, they tried to hide the consequences as best they could, to hide from death itself by clouding it all with euphanisms and comforting words about "life after death", and of course we do the same. However, the AE, in my opinion, went much further than we do and tried to deny, as best they could, that death had occurred, or at least to disguise the fact of death. And yes, they did of course have funerals, I'm not denying that, but what did they think they were burying, a corpse or the "living dead".

In his "Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt", Jan Assmann quotes about the imagery of death on page 105 from "Der Tod in den Weltkulturen und Weltreligionen", München 1996, and I quote Assmann's quote in full:

"Death itself always already appears as an image, for even the corpse has already become an image that merely resembles the body of the living person.... It is no longer a body, but only an image of a body....

The true meaning of an image lies in the fact that it represents something that is absent and thus can only exist in the image. It makes something appear that is not in the image, but can only appear in the image. Under these circumstances, the image of a deceased person is not an anomaly, but the original meaning of what an image is. Dead, a person is always already absent, death is an unbearable absence that is quickly filled with an image so as to make it bearable.

This is now an artificial image, summoned to counter the other image, the corpse. Making an image, one becomes active so as no longer to remain passively delivered to the experience of death and its terror."

What is happening here is that while preserving the appearance of the deceased as best they could with mummification, they are also trying to deny death has occured, the corpse is put into stasis, sleeping, and no longer becomes a pile of rotting flesh that was your loved one. This is hiding from death, it's happened, there's no denying that, but it is obscured by turning the corpse into an image of them alive, and many euphanisms and denials in the texts concerning death, hence "This Unas lives". Here admittedly things are not always so straight forward, and cannot be with a culture that spanned over three thousand years, so while they would generally have believed that the dead were "alive" in the Duat and doing most of the things they did on Earth, by the time we get to the late 18th Dynasty clear scepticism appears. This scepticism comes primarily in the form of the harpers songs where very modern sounding sentiments are expressed. Without a long quote, what the songs are saying is that you should enjoy life while you can as that's it, and when you are gone there is nothing, no coming back. So here in these cases, which are in the minority, the tomb owner by having these verses in his tomb is being pesimistic about there being a life after death. It's of interest that these songs originate in this clear form during the Amarna period, when Akhenaten had abolished Osiris and the Duat, and this probably caused some confusion and discombobulated people. Allthough, as Assmann states, these sceptical views do have precedent in the Middle Kingdom, for instance in the already mentioned "Dispute of a Man with his Ba", but not so boldly stated like this from the tomb of Paatenemheb (Horemheb?), "Lo, none is allowed to take his goods with him, Lo, none who departs comes back again"

 

Edited November 6, 2023 by Wepwawet

[Wepwawet]

1 hour ago, Wepwawet said:

 

Here admittedly things are not always so straight forward, and cannot be with a culture that spanned over three thousand years, so while they would generally have believed that the dead were "alive" in the Duat and doing most of the things they did on Earth, by the time we get to the late 18th Dynasty clear scepticism appears. This scepticism comes primarily in the form of the harpers songs where very modern sounding sentiments are expressed. Without a long quote, what the songs are saying is that you should enjoy life while you can as that's it, and when you are gone there is nothing, no coming back. So here in these cases, which are in the minority, the tomb owner by having these verses in his tomb is being pesimistic about there being a life after death. It's of interest that these songs originate in this clear form during the Amarna period, when Akhenaten had abolished Osiris and the Duat, and this probably caused some confusion and discombobulated people. Allthough, as Assmann states, these sceptical views do have precedent in the Middle Kingdom, for instance in the already mentioned "Dispute of a Man with his Ba", but not so boldly stated like this from the tomb of Paatenemheb (Horemheb?), "Lo, none is allowed to take his goods with him, Lo, none who departs comes back again"

 

That's my error as the songs originate from the Middle Kingdom, and the part I quote is from the tomb of Intef. Though the points about scepticism about life after death, and what Akhenaten did, remain the same.

[Wepwawet]

21 hours ago, cladking said:

 

From my perspective I'm seeing a definite obsession with death among the authors of the "book of the dead". 

 

Given that the texts collectively known as the "Book of the Dead" were for the guidance of the deceased, then they cannot but have an association with death. However, I think you need to explain why you see an "obsession" with death, and can you define death in a way so as to have the texts fit your description.

[Tom1200]

19 hours ago, Wepwawet said:

Given that the texts collectively known as the "Book of the Dead" were for the guidance of the deceased, then they cannot but have an association with death. However, I think you need to explain why you see an "obsession" with death, and can you define death in a way so as to have the texts fit your description.

@cladking don' need to explain nuffin.

Claddy is like Yahweh or Jesus (or the other one, whose wrath I dare not provoke by naming him).  Gods are allowed to just say stuff, no matter how inconsistent or incomprehensible. 

It's up to future generations of scholars to debate and interpret the exact meanings of words and phrases, especially ones that apparently contradict other divine, infallible statements.

Perhaps centuries from now, when the Book of Cladking has been translated from the lingua franca of the day (Hindi is my guess) back into the original Confused English, it will all make sense.

[Piney]

1 hour ago, Tom1200 said:

(or the other one, whose wrath I dare not provoke by naming him). 

[Tom1200]

2 hours ago, Piney said:

Okay, I was talking about you.

[Piney]

3 minutes ago, Tom1200 said:

Okay, I was talking about you.

Prick.....

[Thanos5150]

On 11/5/2023 at 9:41 AM, Thanos5150 said:

He is erroneous. This is not a sane empathetic human being which for 20yrs down to a poster all fringe and ortho alike have completely rejected his quackpottery. Yet he keeps doing it every day day after day saying the same things:

He does not care one whit what anyone says about anything-it is all nothing more than a means to an end that allows him to keep doing it. 

....This is not true. Since the beginnings of Dynasty Egypt royal/noble tombs were meant to be monuments of wonder for all to see. At Saqqara the massive serekh mastabas were strategically perched on a high cliff side to lord over the new capital of Memphis.

The pyramids that came after, collectively known as the Memphite Necropolis, were obviously no different. They were not made to be out of sight but rather a constant reminder to the people, among other things, of the life that awaited them after the death of the physical body. They were not meant to be hidden or secluded but rather the opposite being an integral part of daily life not just to be seen by all travelling the Nile, but maintained and administered for centuries by cults and family specifically designed for the people to visit and give offerings. Since at least the OK lasting through the Late Period it was apparently common practice (implied) for usually family to visit these tombs, often built with areas specifically for them to come to as could be afforded, and leave letters for them inscribed on various medium.   

Thebes was the capital of Egypt during part of the MK and most of the NK which royal/noble necropoli were now largely located. The geography of this area presented different opportunities to build necropoli, namely rock cut tombs which were also cheaper and easier to build. This no doubt offered an extra level of protection and seclusion, but the motivation for this was not to ideologically make the dead/tombs "out of sight out of mind", but rather to protect against the wonton systematic looting that had been rampant for centuries none more so than in the NK. Tut's tomb was supposedly robbed twice just within a few years after his death. Hatshepsut ( Deir el-Bahari) certainly had no interest in being out of sight out of mind:

The VoK obviously was not spared from this which was so bad that at some point after the 10th century the burials of 50 previous kings, queens, and nobles including several from the VoK were "rescued" and reburied in one large tomb near Deir el-Bahari.   

At any rate, this change was not one of ideology but rather the opportunity of the geology of the area which further afforded, so they hoped which didn't work out very well, at least some level of protection against looting. 

They are separated because the west of the Nile was the land of the dead and the east the land of the living.  

Defining Selective Archaism in Royal Funerary Architecture: The Cenotaph of Ahmose I at South Abydos

The current paper discusses the nature of the adaptation of historic architectural models from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, demonstrating how they communicated religious, ideological, and structural concepts that were adapted within the design and function of Ahmose’s funerary architecture at the beginning of the Eighteenth Dynasty. In the context of the royal mortuary complex, the Ahmose complex is fundamental to understanding the shift from the royal pyramid to the unmarked subterranean tomb. Therefore, we will also examine how fundamental features of that site form a direct precedent for activities later undertaken by his Thutmoside successors at the Valley of the Kings.

 

[Wepwawet]

On 11/5/2023 at 5:41 PM, Thanos5150 said:

They are separated because the west of the Nile was the land of the dead and the east the land of the living.  

This reply can be seen as also a reply your post directly above this.

What needs looking at is why then was the west bank chosen for their cemeteries, local topography allowing, and why were cemeteries in the Delta, with no single Nile, located to the west of the towns. Well of course it's because it's the direction where the Sun "Dies". This though does not mean that they are not trying to deny death, for while the west is where the Sun "dies", it has to die in order for it to then return to life and be re-born in the eastern horizon, and the western horizon is the gateway to this process. A burial to the west is not terminal in the totality of their understanding of what occurs after the body stops functioning, but part of the eternal cycle that is neheh time, and within this cycle the dead are not dead at all, the body is in a form stasis, a state almost of being undifferentiated, as was Atum before he created himself. This ties in with the quote I made on images, and it also ties in with their liking to hide things away, to wrap them up, and not just the dead. By wrapping a cult statue of a god it puts them into an undifferentiated state, they are hidden, but have the potential to emerge, and in this the wrapped cult statue of a god and the mummy of a person can be seen as similar.

This is what I mean by wrapped statues of gods, which I'm sure you and just about everybody reading this will be familiar with. Carter did not know the significance of them being wrapped and presumed it was "packing". In descriptions of temple ritual the statues of the gods are said to be clothed each morning, and this for a long time was thought to refer to the statues being dressed in clothes, and some still think this, but it's what we see in the photo below, they were washed and then wrapped before being hidden in their shrines again, like a wrapped mummy in it's coffin. What I'm getting at is that this is not a death thing per se, it's putting the mummy into a similar position as a god, a god who is alive, but in the perpetual darkness of their shrines, their souls being within the statue and wherever else they want to be. Doing this to a dead person is an obfuscation, a denial of death, it is life by other means.

I do not dispute that death was visible in the form of a tomb, it is unavoidable, but I believe that they tried their best to avoid the entire death thing. A funeral and burial cannot be avoided of course, but by not even mentioning that a person had died, even if obvious, and essentially filling a tomb with the attributes of life, is in effect them hiding from death. Though here I need to go back to why this conversation has even started, and that is in @cladking stating that the AE in the "Book of the Dead" were obsessed with death, and that Egyptologists interpret the PT in the terms of this "obsession". So I state again that they were not obsessed with death at all, and did what they could to hide the fact of death, vide the Turin Judicial Papyrus as most glaring example. What I am not doing is saying that they hid death in it's entirety, how could they. This is not straightforward, the nuances are at times arcane, and I do not believe this can be addressed in terms of, and I'll simplify this for clarity, say "Look, there's a bunch of tombs, therefore they never hid from death", and in the physical sense that can be correct, but in the metaphysical sense we have something else, something that says they ran screaming from death, yes, we do, but not to the extent and manner that they did, and of course there is the issue of totally different religious beliefs.

[Harte]

9 hours ago, Tom1200 said:

Okay, I was talking about you.

I thought you meant Voldemort.
Harte

[cladking]

On 11/6/2023 at 7:43 AM, Wepwawet said:

Given that the texts collectively known as the "Book of the Dead" were for the guidance of the deceased, then they cannot but have an association with death. However, I think you need to explain why you see an "obsession" with death, and can you define death in a way so as to have the texts fit your description.

Egyptologists do say things in reference to ancient Egyptians from the time of the book of the dead like "they spent their lives preparing tombs" which is the very definition of the word 'moribund". I can certainly stipulate that your observations many well be pertinent and my understanding of these people may well be far off base and even that I have misinterpreted what Egyptologists have meant by the statements that led me to believe that Egyptology considers them obsessed with death. I have exceedingly little knowledge of these later people and have never studied them.  I'm not certain I've even read the entire "book of the dead" though parts I've read a few times. I have simply assumed these people were like us and Egyptologists and I might well be wrong.  I do not consider most younger people today obsessed by death. 

Much of what I ascribe to Egyptologists as beliefs in this regard is just extrapolation from possibly irrelevant statements about spending a life building one's tomb: If later people with tiny tombs were obsessed what would the implication be to someone like Khufu whom Egyptologists believe wasted vast resources and thousands of lives to mark their demise.  

No matter what words are used Egyptologists do believe the great pyramids were tombs built with with a huge expenditure of human effort as a tomb.  

I simply don't believe any of these things.  Pyramids were important mnemonics to these cultures and G1 was an even more important time capsule as well. They were easily built requiring less than 1% of the human effort Egyptologists have always assumed was necessary. The concept of "osiris" didn't even arise until the great pyramids were all completed about 2750 BC.  "Osiris" wasn't related to the means to build pyramids but was rather the stand in for "atum" who led the gods in their construction. "Osiris, in his name of seker towed the earth by means of balance" but at the time that the great pyramids actually were built it was in point of fact "atum" who was known to be towing the earth.  It is this substitution of "osiris" for "atum" that is the primary reason that the Pyramid Texts were not understood from the very beginning when Masperro first translated them.  It still would have been exceedingly difficult and unlikely to see author intent because nobody expects to see science, knowledge, and coherency in ancient writing. They expect to see nonsense, superstition, and obsession.  

Edited November 8, 2023 by cladking

[Wepwawet]

1 hour ago, cladking said:

Egyptologists do say things in reference to ancient Egyptians from the time of the book of the dead like "they spent their lives preparing tombs" which is the very definition of the word 'moribund". I can certainly stipulate that your observations many well be pertinent and my understanding of these people may well be far off base and even that I have misinterpreted what Egyptologists have meant by the statements that led me to believe that Egyptology considers them obsessed with death. I have exceedingly little knowledge of these later people and have never studied them.  I'm not certain I've even read the entire "book of the dead" though parts I've read a few times. I have simply assumed these people were like us and Egyptologists and I might well be wrong.  I do not consider most younger people today obsessed by death.

 

Only the elite, a very small percentage of the population, had the means to build a tomb. Therefore only a very small part of the population could be said to be "moribund", though they could hardly be moribund all through their lives, so perhaps the word you mean is "morbid", as you can have a morbid interest in death and all that surrounds it, and not be moribund. That's probably splitting hairs, but the point is that there is plenty of evidence that they did what ever they could, as we do, to enjoy life. With their religious beliefs it makes sense to expend the effort to build a tomb, for to them it is not a "hole in the ground to hide a rotting corpse" which it is for us, and most people through history, but their "home" for eternity which a grave is not for us, or for the majority without a family owned plot or mausoleum. For instance, in the UK after 75 years buried you become fair game to be exhumed and dispossed of, or have another burial placed over yours, after the grave diggers have smashed the lid of your coffin in, if it has survived for 75 years, to avoid more subsidence than necessary. Ghoulish stuff, but it's to point out that a tomb for the elite AE was for eternity, and a place were part of them "lived" for eternity, because they were not dead in their terms.

Generally when the "Book of the Dead" is mentioned, then the Papyrus of Ani comes to mind as it is the most complete example, but it's not the only one. But with Ani, in all the vignettes where he appears, only about three times is he shown as a mummy, the rest of the time he is shown "alive", usually with his wife. The book is about his continued existance, not him as a corpse, that which is never shown, barring the TA21 Amarna exception. Spell 125 states that he will live for "millions on millions of years". Another one of the books, that of Nebqed, while shorter, has different scenes in the vignettes, and one of them shows the transition of being inert, "dead", at the opening of the mouth ceremony at the entrance to the tomb, his mummy laying in the burial chamber, with his ba flying down the shaft with "virtual food" to sustain him, and note it is his ba, not ka, which is nowhere in sight, a matter for another discussion. We then see Nebqed "Coming forth by day", the proper title of these books, and I think we can thank Budge for the incorrect title, probably deliberate to thrill the masses. In this part of the vignette we see Nebqed alive and with the Sun and it's rays. It's a nice vignette that encapsulates in one scene the very short transition from an inert death-like state, yes, he's dead to us, to the continuation of life, a life that will last for millions of years. Death has been banished.

Without wrecking a book by bending back the pages to scan it, this is the best image of the scene I could find, and it is cropped. I've given a description of what is happening above, and will just point out that at the top left we see the back of Nebqed's mummy upright at the tomb entrance for the opening of the mouth ceremony, and that's him top right as well, not dead.

Edited November 8, 2023 by Wepwawet

[Kenemet]

On 11/5/2023 at 7:37 PM, Thanos5150 said:

It stands to reason there a practical side to burying the dead on the west side of the Nile while the living were on the east, but it was also part and parcel of their religious beliefs that the land of the dead was in the desert west of the Nile. This separation in and of itself was a recognition of the distinction between the living and the dead.  

Might have something to do with where the Nile was at that time.  According to this map (olive green and gray lines), most of the airable land was to the east... and they surely weren't going to waste valuable farmland with big monuments to the elites.

(source: https://brilliantmaps.com/nile/)

The distance from east to west across the Nile basin at that time (rough estimate using Google Earth) was around 5-7 miles.

[Thanos5150]

20 hours ago, Wepwawet said:

So I state again that they were not obsessed with death at all, and did what they could to hide the fact of death, vide the Turin Judicial Papyrus as most glaring example. 

Records of the Harem Conspiracy against Ramses III

There is no great theological mystery here as this a court document meant to be a list of defendants and what their punishment was. It speaks of several of those found guilty being sentenced to death by allowing them to commit suicide. All told 28 people were executed. There is no reason this document would go into detail about how the king was killed or detailing his death and actually doesn't even explicitly mention this as their crime with the charge being rather conspiring to incite "hostility against their lord." 

Regardless, obviously it has no problem talking about death, though it does not give details as to actually how they committed suicide or were executed, but there is no reason it would.   

"As for the words which the people have spoken, I know them not. Go ye and examine them. When they go out, and they examine them, they shall cause to die by their own hand, those who should die, without [my] knowing it. They shall execute the punishment [upon] the others, likewise without my knowing it.

Your argument as you said before is:

A prime example is with the Turin Papyrus which deals with the trial of the harem conspiritors. Not once in the papyrus is a there a single mention that Ramesess III was in fact killed, they completely ignore this and do not even allude to this, and it is only in this century that the truth has been revealed. That is hiding death to quite a high degree. 

I fail to see how this document has anything to do with any theological reasoning for not mentioning the king was killed which there are several other more practical explanations as to why this would be, like maybe this was not the event that actually killed him, political reasons, etc.   

Edited November 8, 2023 by Thanos5150

[Wepwawet]

1 hour ago, Thanos5150 said:

Records of the Harem Conspiracy against Ramses III

There is no great theological mystery here as this a court document meant to be a list of defendants and what their punishment was. It speaks of several of those found guilty being sentenced to death by allowing them to commit suicide. All told 28 people were executed. There is no reason this document would go into detail about how the king was killed or detailing his death and actually doesn't even explicitly mention this as their crime with the charge being rather conspiring to incite "hostility against their lord." 

Regardless, obviously it has no problem talking about death, though it does not give details as to actually how they committed suicide or were executed, but there is no reason it would.   

"As for the words which the people have spoken, I know them not. Go ye and examine them. When they go out, and they examine them, they shall cause to die by their own hand, those who should die, without [my] knowing it. They shall execute the punishment [upon] the others, likewise without my knowing it.

Your argument as you said before is:

A prime example is with the Turin Papyrus which deals with the trial of the harem conspiritors. Not once in the papyrus is a there a single mention that Ramesess III was in fact killed, they completely ignore this and do not even allude to this, and it is only in this century that the truth has been revealed. That is hiding death to quite a high degree. 

I fail to see how this document has anything to do with any theological reasoning for not mentioning the king was killed which there are several other more practical explanations as to why this would be, like maybe this was not the event that actually killed him, political reasons, etc.   

It's an example of them not mentioning that an individual has died. That they mention deaths is true, but again, not the death of an individual, and in the document that Ramesess III had been killed is not once mentioned. In other documents about trials they state that the guilty will be executed, that's how we know that some of them were impaled. But there is a big difference between the death of a crimminal and that of the rest of the population. By comitting a crimminal act the guilty has put themselves outside of normal society, they have transgressed against Maat, they have become no less an enemy than a foreign soldier, whose deaths are mentioned and shown. Then look at the fate of prince Pentawere, he was not mummified, his preservation was due to it occuring naturally, and he was wrapped in a goatskin.He  had made himself an enemy, and so of no consequence. Why his body was not destroyed we cannot know, but without ritual mummification and proper burial he would not have had an afterlife, his soul would have been destroyed by Ammit at judgement, if he even got to that stage as there is a presumption that if you got that far then you would pass judgement. So I still maintain my point that the death of an individual was not mentioned, no matter their position in society, if not enemies of society.

Edited November 8, 2023 by Wepwawet

[Wepwawet]

1 hour ago, Thanos5150 said:

I fail to see how this document has anything to do with any theological reasoning for not mentioning the king was killed which there are several other more practical explanations as to why this would be, like maybe this was not the event that actually killed him, political reasons, etc.   

That it was a trial of conspiritors within the royal household, and Ramesess III was found to have had his throat cut, mitigates for his assassination to have been carried out as the result of this conspiracy. The trial document and fatal wound on his mummy is all the evidence there is, so while we can speculate that the trial document and wound may not be related, it would need the discovery of further documentation as evidence, so until that time the trial document and physical evidence have to be seen as directly related, otherwise we are down a rabbit hole making un-evidenced guesses, and for what purpose.

[Spiros]

On 11/3/2023 at 10:24 PM, Spiros said:

Were the Giza pyramids erected to warn us of the end of the world, maybe through a nuclear holocaust? Did they encode information of the antichrist?

 

https://i.postimg.cc/yYJrC17J/Venus21.png

Just want to point out that this analysis of Venus as Lucifer Osiris is based on the birth info of Netaniahu. He was born on a Friday, the day of Venus.

[Spiros]

On 11/14/2023 at 10:40 AM, Spiros said:

Just want to point out that this analysis of Venus as Lucifer Osiris is based on the birth info of Netaniahu. He was born on a Friday, the day of Venus.

Venus is Greek is Aphrodite. The isopsephy value of the name the ancient goddess of love is 993. This is the square of the latitude of Gaza in degrees.

 

ΑΦΡΟΔΙΤΗ = 1+500+100+70+4+10+300+8 = 993

(Gaza city latitude) x (Gaza city latitude) = 31.516667° x  31.516667° = 993.3

[Kenemet]

27 minutes ago, Spiros said:

Venus is Greek is Aphrodite. The isopsephy value of the name the ancient goddess of love is 993. This is the square of the latitude of Gaza in degrees.

 

ΑΦΡΟΔΙΤΗ = 1+500+100+70+4+10+300+8 = 993

(Gaza city latitude) x (Gaza city latitude) = 31.516667° x  31.516667° = 993.3

Egyptians didn't have numerology and they didn't have latitudes or longitudes.  Nor did they have many (if any) expeditions to Greece.  There wasn't that much there to interest them.

[Thanos5150]

10 hours ago, Kenemet said:

Egyptians didn't have numerology and they didn't have latitudes or longitudes. 

Does Spiros strike you as someone who actually cares about such things....? 

Quote

Nor did they have many (if any) expeditions to Greece. 

And if they did that would mean therefore things like this were actually possible:

ΑΦΡΟΔΙΤΗ = 1+500+100+70+4+10+300+8 = 993

(Gaza city latitude) x (Gaza city latitude) = 31.516667° x  31.516667° = 993.3

...? Maybe its just that isopsephy (and all the rest of Sprios's crazy) is complete garbage.  

Quote

There wasn't that much there to interest them.

What a strange thing to say. Well, turns out there is silver. Or how about the Cycladic Civilization, they seem kind of interesting. For example:

Giant marble pyramid-shaped island complex rising from sea uncovered, revealing secrets of ancient Greece’s origins

Keros

Keros: Unexpected archaeological finds in the heart of the Aegean

Researchers Uncover Ancient Greek Island’s Complex Plumbing System     

Then there is Crete. And the mainland.  And even if the Agean was too "uninteresting" for the DE I am sure Egypt would have been quite interesting to the Aegean's, no? 

This is not to say there was direct contact, though there may have been expeditions to Greece or vice versa for all we know, but there is little reason to doubt they would or could have known of each other by way of Levantine trading posts like Byblos or Syria. Which has nothing to do with the validity of Sprios's nonsense. 

Edited November 20, 2023 by Thanos5150