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Author: Jeff Sheets

Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (part 1)

DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGION AND THOUGHT IN ANCIENT EGYPT

Lectures delivered on the Morse Foundation at Union theological seminary.

by James Henry Breasted
London : Hodder & Stoughton

[1912]

Scanned, proofed and formatted at sacred-texts.com by John Bruno Hare, 2009. This text is in the public domain in the US because it was published prior to 1923.

Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt, by James Henry Breasted, [1912], at sacred-texts.com

[p. xiii]

PREFACE

CONTRARY to the popular and current impression, the most important body of sacred literature in Egypt is not the Book of the Dead, but a much older literature which we now call the “Pyramid Texts.” These texts, preserved in the Fifth and Sixth Dynasty Pyramids at Sakkara, form the oldest body of literature surviving from the ancient world and disclose to us the earliest chapter in the intellectual history of man as preserved to modern times. They are to the study of Egyptian language and civilization what the Vedas have been in the study of early East Indian and Aryan culture. Discovered in 1880-81, they were published by Maspero in a pioneer edition which will always remain a great achievement and a landmark in the history of Egyptology. The fact that progress has been made in the publication of such epigraphic work is no reflection upon the devoted labors of the distinguished first editor of the Pyramid Texts. The appearance last year of the exhaustive standard edition of the hieroglyphic text at the hands of Sethe after years of study and arrangement marks a new epoch in the study of earliest Egyptian life and religion. How comparatively inaccessible the Pyramid Texts have been until the appearance of Sethe’s edition is best illustrated by the fact that no complete analysis or full account of the Pyramid Texts as a whole has ever appeared in English, much less an English version of them. The great and complicated fabric of life which they reflect to us, the religious and intellectual forces which have left their traces in them, the intrusion of the Osiris faith and the Osirian editing by the hand of the earliest redactor in literary history–all these and many other fundamental disclosures of this earliest body of literature have hitherto been inaccessible to the English reader, and as far as they are new, also to all.

Magna Carta

Written by Archbishop Stephen Langton in1216 – Â It was in force for only a few months, when it was violated by the king. the version presented here is the one that preceeded all of the others; nearly all of it’s provisions were soon superceded by other laws, and none of it is effective today.

The Gwarchan of Maelderw

By Aneurin the Bard

Every ode of the Gododin is equivalent to a single song, according to the privilege of poetical composition. Each of the Gwarchans is equal to three hundred and sixty-three songs, because the number of the men who went to Catraeth is commemorated in the Gorchans; and as no man should go to battle without arms, so no bard ought to contend without that poem.

Enuma Elish

Enuma Elish

From Ancient Near Eastern Texts Translated by N. K Sandars.

This long poem was written principally in the twelfth century BCE to celebrate the city of Babylon. It recounts the creation of the universe and the events that lead up to the building of Babylon, home for the gods.

It evolved from Sumerian myths and the text that it is taken from is Assyrian, an empire that followed the Sumerian.

The almost complete text is set out on seven tablets with about 150 lines on each tablet. It was written probably to be sung at festivals in honor of the gods and Babylon. In its origi­nal language, it is written with no rhyme or alliteration but with some assonance that lends it a hypnotic sound. It probably sounded similar to Georgian chants in being sung by several voices.