Ancient Egypt And Hinduism

The present situation in Egypt reminded me to post something that I had thought of a long time ago. One of my favorite (favourite) topics is archeology (archaelogy), particularly that of the Middle East. The reason that I have never written much about it here is simply that this system of blogs is about new discoveries, new insights, or at least new ways of looking at things. Since I have never been to the Middle East, I am not really in a position to discover anything new concerning this topic.

Those who may have read my now long out of print book "The Bible And The Nineties" may remember that I briefly described the many close parallels between the religion of ancient Egypt and modern Hinduism. Let's look more at this today.

I consider Egypt to be the greatest of ancient civilizations. This is due not only to the artifacts and monuments left by the ancient Egyptians, but to the sheer longevity of the civilization. Assyria, Babylon and Persia all reached a peak that was as great as that of Egypt. But none of these lasted very long as a great power.

In later days, ancient Greece appeared suddenly as a brilliant light on the world, but then faded just as quickly. Even as widespread as Rome was, it lasted only a few centuries as a great power.

Egypt, in contrast, was a truly great kingdom for maybe two thousand years. A major part of the reason was certainly it's somewhat protected location and the reliability of the Nile River. I described my vision of how ancient Egypt has influenced the modern world in the posting "The Center Of The World" on http://www.markmeekeconomics.blogspot.com/ .

My belief is that Hinduism must be a continuation of the religion of ancient Egypt. The similarities, allowing for change over time, are just too close and numerous. Hinduism is a very old religion that arose in India at the time that Egypt was a thriving civilization. Unlike every other major religion, Hinduism cannot be traced to any one founder or event.

The people in Egypt in the days of the pharoahs did not seem to believe in the personal reincarnation that is so central to Hinduism. But in the clear skies of Egypt, they took note of the "death" of celestial bodies in the western sky every evening and their "rebirth" in the eastern sky. The Egyptians considered the constellations in the vicinity of the north star to be "immortal" because they never set below the horizon.

Egypt's world-famous pyramids, over a hundred of them, are always located west of the Nile River, except for one. Pyramids are tombs and west is where the sun and stars set ( or die ) every evening. It seemed natural to the early Egyptians for west to represent death.

Just as in Hinduism, astrology had great importance to the ancient Egyptians. Consider the Sphinx, for example, a huge stone carving of the head of a woman on the body of a lion. The woman represents the constellation Virgo as the beginning of the zodiac and the lion represents Leo as it's end. Both religions consist of numerous deities, the Egyptian Ra, the sun god, has a role similar to the Hindu Vishnu

The most important physical feature of Egypt is the Nile River. Without it, all of Egypt would be a barren desert. The Nile carried fertile soil upstream and deposited it on it's banks and it's Mediterranean delta. The ancient Egyptians clearly recognized the importance of the Nile and worshipped the river itself as a god.

To Hindus, it is the Ganges which is a holy river in a very similar way. Pilgrimage to Benares, which is situated on the river, and bathing in the Ganges is a sacred Hindu ritual. In Hinduism, the Ganges is a goddess just as the Nile was a god to the ancient Egyptians. You can read in detail about the many similarities between the ancient Egyptian religion and Hinduism by doing a Google search for "Ancient Egypt Hinduism".

The many close similarities are there and the timeframe is right, the next question is how the religion got from Egypt to India. For one thing, there were trade routes all over the Middle East and Near East in ancient times.

In the early 1970s, there was a project and then a movie made about it called "The Ra Expedition". This was the construction of a boat from papyrus reeds, following the plan of such a boat from ancient Egypt. The boat was sailed and, on the second attempt, it made it across the Atlantic Ocean. This proved that the ancient Egyptians could definitely have accomplished such a feat, and they did indeed have a fleet of ships in the Red Sea about 2,000 BC.

If such a boat had sailed from Egypt southward on the Red Sea, the ocean currents could have carried it from there straight to the west coast of India. My claim is that the evidence presented here makes it a better than even probability that modern Hinduism is a continuation of the religion of ancient Egypt, whether it was brought to India by land or by sea.