The following is a response to a friend of mine, who had re-posted a third-party comment about what ancient Egyptians "really believed." As a postmodern mystic Pagan fantasy author who's spent decades with his face buried in occulto-spiritual/ historical texts and who has read a metric shit-ton's worth of "facts" regarding people and societies whose daily lives remain virtually inconceivable to us, I have a Kong-sized pet peeve regarding this sort of thing. Sure, we can make educated guesses about the "real facts" of bygone days. But - as the Internet reveals about the age we live in - the subtle totality of human experience and belief, even now, is a vast enigma, not a certainty.
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I'm gonna get smacked for saying this, but...
We have no earthly idea about who meant what to the ancient Egyptians. All we have to go on are a reconstructed language that was translated from a Greco-Roman transcription tablet found accidentally by French soldiers almost two centuries ago. The fragments of that language are based on suppositions, little bits of modern Egyptian interpretation, a predominantly male academic tradition, and a whole lot of guesswork. Even then, the fragments of authentic Egyptian lore are pictograms (often incomplete) gleaned from the few remaining fragments of temples and government records. Those pictograms are extremely basic, with little nuance, no distinct subtle grammar, lots of room from interpretation, and a very high percentage of erroneous interpretation.
Saying "the ancients really believed such-and-such" is an absurd proposition. Even when we have detailed transcriptions in still-living languages (say, the Bible), the "real" meanings behind an author's thought are suppositions at best. The idea of insisting that "the ancient so-and-so's believed [Bleh]" is as accurate as assuming that a Sino-Hindustanian visitor from the 25th century would know what you "really believed" because they'd read a reconstructed version of English based on fragments of a menu found at an excavated Dennys. In France.
Pet peeve on the loose! Run for your lives! :)
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