Ways of Thinking: Death and Life in Ancient Egypt (2)

January 31, 2008

In talking about cultures one of the hardest things to realize is that people do not think like us. It is comforting to take refuge in the idea that people everywhere and at all times looked out upon the world just like us.. but this falls apart on actual examination of texts. People value surprising things and associate ideas in strange combinations. The fun of careful reading is in teasing out these differences.

Jan Assman in his chapter on "Death as Dismemberment" tries to get at something fundamental in the way ancient Egyptians thought. He begins with a summary of the theory of Emma Brunner-Traut, who

postulates a psychological, cognitive basis for certain especially striking peculiarities of Egyptian art, which she sets in parallelism with other phenomena in Egyptian culture... According to her theory, Egyptians cast a dissecting glance at the world, one that perceived only individual details and was incapable of seeing larger unities. In other words, they did not see the forest for the trees. [26]

This references a basic mode of processing the world. If anything, our own contemporary culture is marked by an over-willingness to group details into larger unities.. which we gleefully and unconsciously do on an hourly and even secondly basis. But what if ideas just kind of came and stayed and never joined a larger conceptual container? That would change dramatically the ways we express ourselves.

Assman proposes another way to think about this difference in mental processing. He notes that disintegration into parts was at the heart of Egyptian ideas of bodily death, drawing on texts as old as the Pyramid Texts. Social decay was also signified by disintegration of the whole into smaller parts. "Death was the principle of dismembering, dissolving, isolating disintegration, while life was the principle of integrating animation, which conferred unity and wholeness" (31). Assman accepts the notion that there is a non-organic principle at work in the Egyptian frame of mind.. but also finds a principle of binding together and salvation:

This preoccupation with the principle of integration is what I wish to call the embalming glance. For in Egyptian thought, that which integrated was also that which preserved, that which conferred continued existence. [31]

Assman subtly changes the issue from an analysis of how a people think to an analysis of the metaphoric relationships that govern their views of death. Parts=death; whole= salvation; embalming=art of integration. These metaphors are conditioned on culture and I find it helpful to think of varying metaphors rather than varying mental systems.. or software differences and not hardware differences. The job of the reader is to discover the associations that formed the mental chains of connection.