Reading Notes: Ancient Egypt Part A

For this week’s reading, I decided to go over the Ancient Egypt stories because I’ve always found the gods of Egypt extremely interesting. First off, these stories were definitely not what I was expecting – I never realized that the gods of Egypt were at one point human. That makes the gods that much more relatable in the stories told about them, that they walked the Earth just like their believers/subjects, that their power could be seen directly by those who followed them.

However, moving on from this, some of these stories were a little disturbing. The most obvious disturbing event from these stories happened in the “Death of Osiris” story, where his brother Set tricks him into laying in a coffin, thereby trapping and killing him. Furthermore, the coffin is thrown into the Nile, where it eventually lands in Syria. It doesn’t end there, though. Osiris’s wife, Isis is so distraught over his death that she endlessly looks for his coffin – when she finds it, she winds up slaying multiple people who took it from her. Furthermore, there are multiple child deaths in the stories – Horus is bitten by a snake and then brought back to life because it’s the will of the gods. A youth is eaten by a wax alligator for sleeping with a scribe’s wife.

A final interesting thing was that I never realized that so many different cultures have a flood story that winds up wiping out half of the world. In this case it was Hathor slaying a bunch of people on the earth along with having it be flooded.

Overall, these stories were cool enough to stick, but personally I don’t think these are my favorite out of the readings that we’ve done so far.

Depiction of the Egyptian god, Ra

"Ancient Egyptian Myths" written by Donald Mackenzie (1907)