Ancient egyptian culture

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ANCIENT EGYPTIAN CULTURE

Leschinskaya N.D.

Vladimir State University

ancient egyptian culture

From time immemorial, ancient Egyptian civilization attracted the attention of mankind. Egypt, like no other ancient civilization, creates an impression of eternity and a rare integrity. On the land of the country, now called the Arab Republic of Egypt, in ancient times one of the most powerful and mysterious civilizations arose, which for centuries and millennia attracted the attention of contemporaries.

At a time when the era of the Stone Age and primitive hunters still dominated Europe and America, ancient Egyptian engineers built irrigation facilities along the Great Nile, ancient Egyptian mathematicians calculated the base square and the angle of the Great Pyramids, the ancient Egyptian architects erected grandiose temples, the greatness of which is not is capable of belittling the time... The relevance of the chosen topic is determined by the active development of international cognitive tourism in Egypt. The purpose of this course work is to describe the culture of ancient Egypt. The history of Egypt is more than 6 thousand years old. The unique monuments of ancient culture preserved on its territory attract a huge number of tourists from all over the world every year. The grand pyramids and the Great Sphinx, the majestic temples in Upper Egypt, many other architectural and historical masterpieces - all this still amazes everyone who is able to get to know this amazing country more closely. Today's Egypt is the largest Arab country in the northeast of Africa.

Why do we, like many other European nations, use the word "Egypt"? This name came from the ancient Greeks. It comes from the name of the ancient Egyptian city of Memphis - Hikupta. At the beginning of the 1st millennium BC, when the ancient Greeks began to penetrate Egypt, the first of the largest cities that they met was Memphis on the border of the Delta and the Nile Valley. Its name (or rather, one of the names, as "Memphis" is also an Egyptian word) "Khikupta" or "Aiguptos" Greeks took for the designation of the whole country. So our word "Egypt" is also very ancient, but it came to European languages not directly from the Egyptian language, but from the Ancient Greek.

The primitive, or primitive, mythology is that figurative, the poetic language used by the ancient peoples to explain the phenomena of nature. Everything visible in nature was accepted by the ancients for the visible image of the deity: earth, sky, sun, stars, mountains, volcanoes, rivers, streams, trees - all these were deities whose history was sung by ancient poets, and their images were sculpted by sculptors. Egyptian mythology closest approaches the Greek. The Greeks, having subdued Egypt, began to take an interest in its history and culture and to study its beliefs; they gave their Egyptian myths their color and identified many Egyptian gods with Olympic gods. "At the top of the divine Egyptian pantheon," says Mariette, the famous French Egyptologist, "there sits a single god, immortal, uncreated, invisible and hidden to ordinary mortals in the depths of his being. He is the creator of heaven and earth, he created all that exists, and nothing was created without it. It is a god who exists exclusively for consecrated sanctuaries. " The newest discoveries of Egyptology have confirmed these assumptions. But outside the sanctuary God takes a thousand images, the most diverse. All the various forms that the Egyptian gods take in the portrayals of artists can be explained by the different conditions of the country and beliefs. Egyptian mythology does not resemble any of the mythologies of other nations.

The religion of Egypt is a very diverse phenomenon. For more than three thousand years of history of Egypt, his religion underwent various changes, the gods of individual nomas became the main gods of the state, changed names or merged with other gods, but the basic concept remained unchanged. Belief in the afterlife, judgment on the deeds committed during life, the need to take care of the safety of the body of the deceased person, deification of the pharaoh, etc. was preserved until the appearance of Christianity, and later gradually converted to Christianity in the form of veneration of bodies or their remnants of various martyrs, saints, etc. guardians for all of humanity.

It should be mentioned that in Egypt there was no state religion in the modern sense, as there was no single church organization. Although each god had his own high priests, but they were not united and there was a constant rivalry between the priestly factions for influence. In this regard, there was no binding religious dogma for the whole country, there was no unification of religious beliefs. The religion of the Egyptians was a mix of often contradictory, and sometimes even mutually exclusive, beliefs that emerged at different times and in different parts of the country. The Egyptians themselves sensed these contradictions, the priests of such major religious centers, such as Heliopolis, Hermopolis, Memphis, Thebes and others, were trying to order the historically arisen chaotic conglomeration of religious beliefs. But the psychological impossibility to abandon ancient religious views, even with their contradiction to new religious concepts, a deep commitment to tradition is characteristic of the Egyptian religion.

Egyptian magic, emerged in pre-dynastic times became the basis of religion. It existed in two varieties: on the one hand, it was used for the good of the living and the dead; on the other, it was an instrument of secret conspiracies and was intended to harm those against whom it was applied. Important value ancient Egyptians attached to amulets, they were called to protect the body of a living or deceased person from the disastrous effects and attacks of visible or invisible enemies.

Along with the amulets, the Egyptians also believed that it is possible to convey to the figure of any living being the soul of the person she portrays. These include the so-called "ushashti" who were put together with the deceased, so that in the afterlife he would fulfill all the duties that the deceased gods would command.

Figures of people or animals with the appropriate magical words were also used to protect people from evil forces. Great importance was attached to the same magic pictures, spells. The Egyptians believed that without food the soul of the deceased can begin to harm the living. Initially, near the mummy, food was left and, at regular intervals, brought new food. The Egyptians knew the movement of celestial bodies as well, on the basis of this they laid the foundation of astrology. They also introduced the concept of happy and unhappy days.

The ancient Egyptians settled on the eastern bank of the Nile. The West Bank was given to "eternity" - the afterlife. Here they erected pyramids and built tombs. This custom was also based on symbolism: just as Ra, that is, the sun, is "born" on the eastern shore of the celestial river and "dies" in the west, and people, the "cattle of the god Ra", spend their earthly life in the east, and after death they move to the west - in the fields of Kamysh, the afterlife, the place of rest, bliss and eternal life. The death for the Egyptian was just a departure to another world, which in everything looked like the earthly world: the deceased ate, drank, harvested, enjoyed hunting and fishing. Only death in the Grave Kingdom was not: there the Egyptian lived forever.

The body of the deceased was artificially preserved, for which the insides were removed and put into special vessels, and the body was mummified - it was impregnated with special saline solutions and resinous compounds. The mummy thus manufactured was wrapped in a multitude of linseed impregnated with special resins and placed in a tomb. On the walls of the rooms located inside the tomb, scenes of the life of the deceased and his family were usually depicted, providing them with explanatory inscriptions and texts; The interior of the tomb was interrupted by household items, food, wine, etc. This was to enable the deceased to continue to lead the way of life habitual for him and to use his property in the afterlife. In addition to these religious and magical inscriptions, hymns, prayers and spells appear, which were also written on the walls and then on papyrus scrolls, forming the so-called "Book of the Dead", which described the fate of a person after his death. The Book of the Dead was the largest and most widely spread religious-magical collection.

Finally, other crafts, in particular the processing of clay, papyrus, leather, and the dressing of linen fabrics, are of considerable development in this epoch.

For the era of the Old Kingdom was characterized by domestic and foreign trade in a primitive exchange form. On the walls of the tombs of this time, images of market scenes were preserved, and the artist carefully depicted the exchange of some goods for others. Among these products are found food products, such as grain, bread, sweet pies, vegetables, fruits, oil, fish, as well as handicrafts, in particular jewelry, mirrors, shoes. The commodity equivalent of the cost was grain and ingots of metals, most often copper.

A striking indicator of the development of the spiritual culture of this period is the appearance of writing, which, like the Sumerian, arises from the simplest drawings and patterns of the primitive epoch. This complex picture-writing system was very graphic, but not convenient. As the complexity of the language and the need to designate a set of abstract concepts, the sign-icon turns into an alphabetic sign. Thus, already in the era of the Old Kingdom, an alphabet system appeared in the Egyptian alphabet, which served to denote 24 basic sounds. However, the Egyptian scribes could not abandon the archaic remnants of antiquity and create a system of writing consisting of only alphabetic signs. Due to conservative traditions, Egyptian scribes preserved a large number of complex syllabic and picture verbal signs, denoting whole words with hieroglyphics.

The main fairy-tale heroes are innocent and righteous sufferers; such are the "Tale of Two Brothers" and "The Tale of Truth and Falsehood." The motive of the first of them - about the evil wife and innocent young man whom she wants to seduce, the wonderful transformations of the main hero of the fairy tale and, finally, about the triumph of the unjustly suffering righteous - is found not only in Egyptian literature, but also in the literature of many peoples of later times, influenced by Egyptian culture.

High development in Egypt reached the fine arts and architecture. On the technical perfection of architectural forms say preserved to this day temples and tombs. The forerunners of the huge royal tombs - the pyramids were burials in the rocks and small land tombs, topped with a pyramidal plate. As the construction technology of the tomb developed, everything became more monumental. The classical monumental pyramid, constructed from plate blocks, was obtained by filling empty spaces between the ledges of the pyramid with the help of an external cladding. Near the pyramids were built funeral "temples of kings." The walls of these churches were decorated with reliefs depicting the life and exploits of the deified king.

One of the major achievements of Egyptian mathematics was the development of the decimal number system. In the Egyptian script there already existed special signs for the numbers 1, 10, 100, 1000, 10 000, 100 000 and even a million, denoted by the figure of a man who raised his hands in astonishment.

Characteristic units of length are very characteristic for Egyptian mathematics. These units were a finger, a palm, a foot and an elbow, between which the Egyptian mathematician established certain relations.

Mathematical knowledge was widely used in art. The Egyptian artist, in order to depict the figure of a person on the plane, drew a square grid into which the human body "inscribed", using at the same time knowledge of the mathematical relationships of the length of the parts of the body.

The ancient Egyptians had knowledge of astronomy, in particular, they distinguished the planet from the stars; on the ceilings of various buildings, mainly tombs and temples, there were preserved the maps of the starry sky, intended for determining the time at night. During the day time was determined by means of solar and water clocks. The maps of the location of the stars compiled by the Egyptians were also used much later, in the Greco-Roman era.

Significant development in Egypt was given to medicine. The autopsy performed during the mummification promoted the development of medicine; Egyptian doctors had reliable knowledge of the structure of the human body and the functioning of the human body; The papyri surviving up to us describes the symptoms of many diseases, the ways of their diagnosis and treatment. In medical texts specialization is noted for certain types of diseases - gynecology, eye diseases, surgery. In the era of the Middle Kingdom, a high level of development reached the surgery.

The original culture of Ancient Egypt from time immemorial attracted the attention of all mankind. She aroused surprise at the proud of her civilization of the Babylonian people. The Egyptians studied the wisdom of philosophers and scholars of ancient Greece. Great Rome bowed before the harmonious state organization of the country of the pyramids. In Egypt, all kinds of fine arts can be called born of architecture. Architecture of Egypt - the leading form of art, largely determines the nature of plastics and painting. Sculpture and wall painting, obeying the architecture, make up with it a single and organic whole. The development of architecture and art in ancient Egypt is closely dependent on changes in Egyptian religious beliefs about the afterlife and the rite of burial of the deceased pharaoh and his nobles. The earthly life and well-being of the tribe and the whole of the great country were considered directly dependent on how prepared for death and how the ruler of the tribe or country was buried. The art of Ancient Egypt amazes with its grandeur, extraordinary scale, majesty and beauty. The peculiarity and peculiarities of the ancient Egyptian culture consisted in the following: first-early establishment of class relations and statehood there; second, an isolated geographic country, which hampered cultural borrowing from the outside, - the third, a close relationship between art and religious worship, a special funeral ritual. Egyptian art with its characteristic monumental architecture and static sculpture was the basis for ancient art and the European as a whole. Egyptian art was a model for the Mycenaean culture in Ancient Greece. Egyptian culture had a great influence on the ancient Romans. The cult of the Egyptian goddess - the mother of Isis - was widely spread in Rome. Egyptian sculptural portrait, landscape painting, obelisks and other elements of architecture, lions and sphinxes were perceived by ancient art, and through it European. Ancient Egyptian culture and civilization laid the foundation for the subsequent cultural development of many peoples.

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