THE MIND OF EGYPT

From a foremost Egyptologist (Moses the Egyptian, not reviewed, etc.), an insightful look at the framework of beliefs that supported one of the world’s oldest and most stable civilizations.

Girded with impeccable credentials, Assmann (Egyptology/Univ. of Heidelberg) embarks on an ambitious course of delving into the meaning behind the often larger-than-life events in the history of “the Two Lands.” While the author’s account is, for the most part, written in straightforward language, at times he bends at least one knee in obeisance to mind-numbing academic jargon, the intent seeming to be putting laymen off the scent. This gives rise to such typically obfuscatory and inelegant expressions as “semantic paradigms” and “the spatio-temporal evolution of civilizations,” as well as neologisms like Mikhail Bakhtin’s “chronotope,” a literary construction of time. These lapses are, thankfully, infrequent, arising in the context of the theoretical antecedents to Assmann’s work. Spanning the whole epoch of Egyptian history from 3,200 b.c. to a.d. 300, the current volume chronicles the “remarkable pattern of disruption and continuity, departure and return” that was maintained even during the eras of Persian, Greek, and Roman occupations, and the failed monotheistic revolution of the Amarna period during the New Kingdom reign of Akhenaten. Despite his care in drawing the distinction between the traditional historiography of collecting facts and artifacts, and the radical Enlightenment method of recollecting the history of mind inherent in texts and images, Assmann’s fascinating multidisciplinary approach within the ill-defined boundaries of this nascent ology often has more in common with poetry than hard science. Among his more noteworthy contentions is the idea that the concomitant rise and fall of hieroglyphic writing is anything but coincidental.

While aimed at the generalist, full enjoyment of this scholarly cultural history presupposes some background in the more traditional histories of ancient Egypt. (8 b&w illustrations)