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La religione degli egizi
L'Egitto, generalmente, è sinonimo di Piramidi, Sfinge, mummie ed eserciti di schiavi frustati a sangue per lavorare alla costruzione di edifici enormi, soprattutto templi e tombe. Ebbene: è vero che la religione, la divinità del Faraone, il culto dei morti furono componenti fondamentali della cultura e della civiltà egiziane, ma è soprattutto vero che quella degli Egizi non fu una religione tenebrosa e grottesca, una "industria dei morti" alimentata dal culto di obbrobriosi corpi umani con teste d'animali.
Quella degli Egizi fu anche religione liricamente ispirata, di mirabile elevazione spirituale e persino di profondo misticismo in una visione di un Cosmo vivificato dalla bontà infinita della Divinità, di un Sole datore generoso di vita coi raggi che sono braccia e mani protese ad aiutare tutti i suoi figli, gli uomini.
Dalle pagine di questa "Religione degli Egizi" di Adolfo Erman - lo studioso che ebbe il grande merito di aver introdotto il metodo storico negli studi di egittologia e, quindi, di aver inaugurato l'egittologia moderna - questo quadro complesso ed affascinante della religione e della vita religiosa della quasi mitica Valle del Nilo, emerge vivo, con tutta la sua pensosità, con tutta la sua forza, con il suo vigore consapevole della capacità dell'uomo, di rinnovarsi e di scrutare i misteri della vita e dell'oltretomba.
Quella degli Egizi fu anche religione liricamente ispirata, di mirabile elevazione spirituale e persino di profondo misticismo in una visione di un Cosmo vivificato dalla bontà infinita della Divinità, di un Sole datore generoso di vita coi raggi che sono braccia e mani protese ad aiutare tutti i suoi figli, gli uomini.
Dalle pagine di questa "Religione degli Egizi" di Adolfo Erman - lo studioso che ebbe il grande merito di aver introdotto il metodo storico negli studi di egittologia e, quindi, di aver inaugurato l'egittologia moderna - questo quadro complesso ed affascinante della religione e della vita religiosa della quasi mitica Valle del Nilo, emerge vivo, con tutta la sua pensosità, con tutta la sua forza, con il suo vigore consapevole della capacità dell'uomo, di rinnovarsi e di scrutare i misteri della vita e dell'oltretomba.
286 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1905
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March 30, 2020
كتاب ومرجع عظيم جدا لاي حد سواء دارس أو محب للحضارة المصرية، هو في نظري عبارة عن رحلة كفاح هؤلاء الكهنة للحفاظ على دينهم وفلسفتهم ابتداء من المهرطق "أخناتون" حتى عام 391 ميلاديه عندما أصدر قرار باغلاق كافة المعابد الوثنية في كافة العالم البيزنطي.
يتحدث واحد من أعظم علماء المصريات، أدولف إرمان عن الديانة المصرية القديمة منذ نشأتها في عصور ما قبل التاريخ عندما مصر كانت منقسمة حتى انتهائها مارا بكل فترة من قترات مصر السياسية والتي كانت الديانة المصرية فيها تتغير تبعاً لتلك الظروف السياسية حتى انتشار المسيحية في مصر واستخدام وسائل العنف لردع الديانة المصرية.
الجميل أن تلك الديانة التي جرت في عروق المصرين القدماء كمياه النيل أصبحت جزءا لا يتجزأ منه، فعلى الرغم من انتشار المسيحية في القرن الرابع الميلادي وعلى الرغم من اتباع المصري للمسيحية ألا أننا نجده يدون تعاويز وتمائم تمجد حورس وأوزريس على توابيتهم ويدون على نفس التابوت أدعية للسيد المسيح.
كذلك حفظ الكهنة المصريون للشعائر وللطقوس التي كانت تقام من قبلهم بآلاف السنين هو أمر مذهل، حيث أن تلك الطقوس لم تكن تسجل بشكل مفصل بل كان يتم تناقلها من الأب للابن وهكذا، كذلك في العصر البطلمي والخلط الذي حدث بين الالهه المصرية والآلهه الإغريقية، ولكن لم يدخل ذلم الخط داخل المعابد يعتبر أمرا مذهلا.
والمميز في ذلك الكتاب أنك تشعر أنه قد كتب في ذلك القرن أو على الأقل في تسعينيات القرن المنصرم، ولكنه قد كتب عام 1905 وعلى الرغم من ذلك هو كتاب علمي مائة بالمائة، ففي إحدى فقرات الكتاب يستعجب من الأثريون الذين (يعتقدون أن الغرض من الأهرمات توليد الكهرباء! ) ولكنه، لحسن حظة، لا يعلم أنه يوجد شخص يروج بمثل تلك التراهات ليل نهار هو وسيم السيسي.
الكتاب جميل ومفصل جدا حتى فهرس الكتاب مفصل جدا.
الكتاب في مجمله شيق جداً بالأخص آخر فصلين بالكتاب واللذان كانا بمثابة معلومات جديدة ألا وهو انتشار الديانة المصرية بل بمعنى أصح غزو الديانة المصرية لأوروبا، فعلى الرغم من أنها قد أنتهت في مصر إلا أن المعابد ظلت تبني في روما وإنجلترا وفينيقيا..إلخ للمعبوده إيزيس، فبعض من هؤلاء المتصوفون قال ذات مرة:
أيا مصر، إنه لن يبق من عقائدك غير قصص وروايات، لن تصدقها الأجيال المقبلة، ولن تبق غير كلمات على الحجر تحكي أعمال تقواك
يتحدث واحد من أعظم علماء المصريات، أدولف إرمان عن الديانة المصرية القديمة منذ نشأتها في عصور ما قبل التاريخ عندما مصر كانت منقسمة حتى انتهائها مارا بكل فترة من قترات مصر السياسية والتي كانت الديانة المصرية فيها تتغير تبعاً لتلك الظروف السياسية حتى انتشار المسيحية في مصر واستخدام وسائل العنف لردع الديانة المصرية.
الجميل أن تلك الديانة التي جرت في عروق المصرين القدماء كمياه النيل أصبحت جزءا لا يتجزأ منه، فعلى الرغم من انتشار المسيحية في القرن الرابع الميلادي وعلى الرغم من اتباع المصري للمسيحية ألا أننا نجده يدون تعاويز وتمائم تمجد حورس وأوزريس على توابيتهم ويدون على نفس التابوت أدعية للسيد المسيح.
كذلك حفظ الكهنة المصريون للشعائر وللطقوس التي كانت تقام من قبلهم بآلاف السنين هو أمر مذهل، حيث أن تلك الطقوس لم تكن تسجل بشكل مفصل بل كان يتم تناقلها من الأب للابن وهكذا، كذلك في العصر البطلمي والخلط الذي حدث بين الالهه المصرية والآلهه الإغريقية، ولكن لم يدخل ذلم الخط داخل المعابد يعتبر أمرا مذهلا.
والمميز في ذلك الكتاب أنك تشعر أنه قد كتب في ذلك القرن أو على الأقل في تسعينيات القرن المنصرم، ولكنه قد كتب عام 1905 وعلى الرغم من ذلك هو كتاب علمي مائة بالمائة، ففي إحدى فقرات الكتاب يستعجب من الأثريون الذين (يعتقدون أن الغرض من الأهرمات توليد الكهرباء! ) ولكنه، لحسن حظة، لا يعلم أنه يوجد شخص يروج بمثل تلك التراهات ليل نهار هو وسيم السيسي.
الكتاب جميل ومفصل جدا حتى فهرس الكتاب مفصل جدا.
الكتاب في مجمله شيق جداً بالأخص آخر فصلين بالكتاب واللذان كانا بمثابة معلومات جديدة ألا وهو انتشار الديانة المصرية بل بمعنى أصح غزو الديانة المصرية لأوروبا، فعلى الرغم من أنها قد أنتهت في مصر إلا أن المعابد ظلت تبني في روما وإنجلترا وفينيقيا..إلخ للمعبوده إيزيس، فبعض من هؤلاء المتصوفون قال ذات مرة:
أيا مصر، إنه لن يبق من عقائدك غير قصص وروايات، لن تصدقها الأجيال المقبلة، ولن تبق غير كلمات على الحجر تحكي أعمال تقواك
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July 11, 2017كتاب موسوعي وكلاسيكي وعظيم، اي حد عاوز يعرف عن الديانة في مصر القديمة لازم يقراه
March 10, 2026
I will review Erman's Handbook and Henri Frankfort's Interpretation of Egyptian Religion concurrently, and copy this text into my reviews of both books, as I think they compliment each other well.
The Erman is a text for beginners (yet it's a very hefty 300 pages, intended to serve as a guide for an exhibit at a 1920s Berlin Imperial Museum exhibition) and covers all the basic facts engagingly, but in a manner which makes clear Erman's great erudition. The most interesting parts of the book for me were discussions of the areas where the Egyptians' deeply held beliefs ran counter to the conditions of scarcity they laboured under. Example: they believed that the maintenance of the body after death was key to autonomy and a good afterlife. To this end, the rich ones paid a caste of mortuary priests (and then later on a stratum of graveyard entrepreneurs) to continually give offerings to their tomb and maintain the place. Of course, it costs a lot of to do this for lots of dead people, so you'd end up with many situations where, say, a man would decide to transfer the contract he had inherited with the priests to look after a venerated ancestor over to his recently passed wife. This was probably a pretty terrible thing to do to your venerated ancestor, but needs must, and it wasn't necessarily frowned upon - after all, that's your wife! Most of these contracts didn't last beyond a couple of generations.
Some problems with the text: Erman is entertainingly convinced that he would have made a much better priest of Egyptian religion than the actual priests, who he considers to have dreadfully botched the whole thing. He takes a firmly declinist view of Egyptian religion, which descends from a solemn glory in the Old and Middle Kingdoms to a pantheistic mush in its later years. He does not hide his disdain for the delight the Egyptian theologians took in taking Re or Horus or Osiris' characteristics and ascribing them to each other or some other gods, and he finds the repetitiveness of the religious literature grating. He's especially harsh on the homogenising effect the Egyptians' fascination with the Osiris-Set-Isis myth had on the diversity of their mythology. His undisguised irritation with the Egyptians makes the book much more fun than a dry introduction would be, but as a good value-neutral historian I can't condone it.
A criticism of Erman's book that Frankfort makes is that Erman does not really attempt to systematise the religion and so ends up with a 300-page cabinet of curiosities. This is an overstated criticism - Erman's narrativisation of the religion's decline provides a throughline for the book - but there is something to it. Frankfort provides an antidote.
In his An Interpretation of Egyptian Religion, Frankfort's main argument is that the Egyptians believed that what was significant in the universe was that which was unchanging. For them, the daily inundation of the Nile, the progress of the sun through the sky, the eternal political regime, etc. were metaphysically decisive. It was the place of the virtuous human to live harmoniously integrated in this unchanging natural order. This explains some of the things Erman was irritated by. The repetitiveness of Egyptian religious literature mirrors the repetitiveness of the universe. It also helped me understand why studying change in Egyptian history can be rather difficult. It's very hard to divine any traces of a Pharaoh's personality in his (or her!) statues and art, because what is good in Pharaohs and thus worth immortalising in art is unchanged from the previous one. Last pharaoh was a good warrior and a good mediator between nature and humanity, by all accounts, and so was this one (by all accounts!). Of course, this love of stasis made social change utterly traumatising for the Egyptians.
Another important part of Frankfort's argument is the Egyptians' use of a 'multiplicity of approaches', which rescues them from Erman's accusations of nonsensical pantheism. The natural world did not confront the Egyptians as a mindless thing, but as a host of people and agents. A person has many faces, and many people look alike. One person does not always appear to you in the same guise. There's no essential contradiction in believing the sun is Re in a boat or a dung beetle pushing its load. In the end, these are different approaches to understanding the same sacred universal repetitiveness.
I have an intuition that Frankfort goes too far in welding coherence out of the Egyptian doctrines, especially in the chapter on death. The dead are their bodies in the tomb that need maintaining and who will be utterly lost without their offerings, they are birds who can leave the tomb, they are stars in the sky in the entourage of the gods... Frankfort asserts these are compatible beliefs, and clearly they were, because plenty of Egyptians believed all three at the same time, but he isn't able to explain how in a theoretically satisfying manner.
My final comment is that I am glad my country's in a religious tradition where they figured out a way to cope with death without having to be paranoid about the state of the body after death, because all that work the Egyptians did was very stressful for them.
The Erman is a text for beginners (yet it's a very hefty 300 pages, intended to serve as a guide for an exhibit at a 1920s Berlin Imperial Museum exhibition) and covers all the basic facts engagingly, but in a manner which makes clear Erman's great erudition. The most interesting parts of the book for me were discussions of the areas where the Egyptians' deeply held beliefs ran counter to the conditions of scarcity they laboured under. Example: they believed that the maintenance of the body after death was key to autonomy and a good afterlife. To this end, the rich ones paid a caste of mortuary priests (and then later on a stratum of graveyard entrepreneurs) to continually give offerings to their tomb and maintain the place. Of course, it costs a lot of to do this for lots of dead people, so you'd end up with many situations where, say, a man would decide to transfer the contract he had inherited with the priests to look after a venerated ancestor over to his recently passed wife. This was probably a pretty terrible thing to do to your venerated ancestor, but needs must, and it wasn't necessarily frowned upon - after all, that's your wife! Most of these contracts didn't last beyond a couple of generations.
Some problems with the text: Erman is entertainingly convinced that he would have made a much better priest of Egyptian religion than the actual priests, who he considers to have dreadfully botched the whole thing. He takes a firmly declinist view of Egyptian religion, which descends from a solemn glory in the Old and Middle Kingdoms to a pantheistic mush in its later years. He does not hide his disdain for the delight the Egyptian theologians took in taking Re or Horus or Osiris' characteristics and ascribing them to each other or some other gods, and he finds the repetitiveness of the religious literature grating. He's especially harsh on the homogenising effect the Egyptians' fascination with the Osiris-Set-Isis myth had on the diversity of their mythology. His undisguised irritation with the Egyptians makes the book much more fun than a dry introduction would be, but as a good value-neutral historian I can't condone it.
A criticism of Erman's book that Frankfort makes is that Erman does not really attempt to systematise the religion and so ends up with a 300-page cabinet of curiosities. This is an overstated criticism - Erman's narrativisation of the religion's decline provides a throughline for the book - but there is something to it. Frankfort provides an antidote.
In his An Interpretation of Egyptian Religion, Frankfort's main argument is that the Egyptians believed that what was significant in the universe was that which was unchanging. For them, the daily inundation of the Nile, the progress of the sun through the sky, the eternal political regime, etc. were metaphysically decisive. It was the place of the virtuous human to live harmoniously integrated in this unchanging natural order. This explains some of the things Erman was irritated by. The repetitiveness of Egyptian religious literature mirrors the repetitiveness of the universe. It also helped me understand why studying change in Egyptian history can be rather difficult. It's very hard to divine any traces of a Pharaoh's personality in his (or her!) statues and art, because what is good in Pharaohs and thus worth immortalising in art is unchanged from the previous one. Last pharaoh was a good warrior and a good mediator between nature and humanity, by all accounts, and so was this one (by all accounts!). Of course, this love of stasis made social change utterly traumatising for the Egyptians.
Another important part of Frankfort's argument is the Egyptians' use of a 'multiplicity of approaches', which rescues them from Erman's accusations of nonsensical pantheism. The natural world did not confront the Egyptians as a mindless thing, but as a host of people and agents. A person has many faces, and many people look alike. One person does not always appear to you in the same guise. There's no essential contradiction in believing the sun is Re in a boat or a dung beetle pushing its load. In the end, these are different approaches to understanding the same sacred universal repetitiveness.
I have an intuition that Frankfort goes too far in welding coherence out of the Egyptian doctrines, especially in the chapter on death. The dead are their bodies in the tomb that need maintaining and who will be utterly lost without their offerings, they are birds who can leave the tomb, they are stars in the sky in the entourage of the gods... Frankfort asserts these are compatible beliefs, and clearly they were, because plenty of Egyptians believed all three at the same time, but he isn't able to explain how in a theoretically satisfying manner.
My final comment is that I am glad my country's in a religious tradition where they figured out a way to cope with death without having to be paranoid about the state of the body after death, because all that work the Egyptians did was very stressful for them.
March 19, 2021
من الكتب المهمة والمرجعية لكل مهتم بالتاريخ الفرعوني أسلوب رائع وترجمة ممتازة
November 12, 2014
don't know I just want to read
August 16, 2015
La deliziosa traduzione à la D'Annunzio datata 1908 è un valore aggiunto, archeologia nell'archeologia.
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