CeJ --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>CB: Ha ha. Egyptology has not completely failed; hieroglyphs have been translated, etc. There's the _Book of the Dead_,<< Which I'm sure you read everyday at lunch, right CB? That is, afterall, why you and your descendants practice memorial mass retainer burial and advanced mummification techniques. ^^^^^ CB: Well, we still use writing , like on this email list. Writing got through to you too. The concept of "book" even got through to u. We still have irrigation systems in farming , too. Then an Egyptian Pharoah invented mono-theism. There are billions of monotheists in the world today. Imhotep the Egyptian physician said "Eat, drink and be merry; for tomorrow we die". Still seems like a valid point of view in 2010. The Egyptian performed surgery. The fundamental idea of surgery may be something we got from them. Egyptians worshipped the Sun. Maybe what we call "worship" was some kind of recognition that the Sun is the source of just about all energy on Earth. Actually, some cultures don't bury their dead. They put them up in the air to get eaten or they burn them. That we have the custom of burying them might be an Egyptian custom coming to us "across the death barrier from the ancients", that would be the dead coming across the death barrier. Actually, in a certain sense, the Egyptian mummies do carry messages from the ancient Egyptians to us, across the death barrier. Why preserve your dead ? Perhaps they were trying to send messages to future generations of how their lives were. This point is critical in my hypothesis concerning sending messages across the death barrier. _Some of the original or early inventors of symbols were probably trying to send messages across the death barrier to future generations_. They were trying to "live" after death, seek immortality. I always forget to mention that aspect of the hypothesis. This immortality in symboling is a notion found in Shakespeare's sonnets. He probably didn't invent it, but rediscovered it in the essence of language. ^^^^^ >>CB: How would you know that the cultures weren't as ancient, if none of their content got through to you ? I was just observing that it is a popular myth about 'the ancient' and what it is when people often have in mind late antiquity and even early middle ages. For example, the 'ancient Hebrews' (who quite possibly were Iron Age Indo-Europeans who assimilated to Canaanite --Semitic--culture), the 'ancient Etruscans', the 'ancient Egyptians'. Even in the case of the very impressive Egyptians, 2500 BC is not the Stone Age unless you are some kind of weird fundamentalist on a 5000 year timeline to the current moronic post-modernity of now. CJ ^^^^^^^ CB: I should say that I wasn't saying that Egypt was in the stone age (smile) That was a sort of "creative" thought that use of stone as a prime material to embody symbols reaches a high point with pyramids. It is a part of the stone age that gets across the "death barrier" of the stone age ( yea i'm equivocating on "death barrier' a little here) into the societies that arose after the origin of agriculture, post-paleolithic. The speculation is the stones are the medium of a form of "writing" in the stone age, the carvings in the stone and the sculpturing of stones. In other words ( pun), stone tools were not just utilitarian , but concrete symbols. We still have monumetal architecture, as the pyramids are. Egyptian sculpture is can be quite "well done". Despite Ralph, it is very likely that Greek and Roman civilization got a lot from Egypt civilization, and so in turn modern Western Civ inherited it. Of course, the Egyptians had papyrus. We still write on paper. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
