Ancient Egypt – a land and people of duality and order

Ancient Egypt was a land of duality (Fletcher, 2009), you needed to have to have everything in equal forms and complementing each other. This duality even extended from the spiritual world with the gods to the physical world with humans. The ancient Egyptians understood the world in this duality, because it was what they could see, and what they could feel when you look at the geography of the country.

DUALITY IN THE GEOGRAPHY & SPIRITUAL WORLD

The duality expressed in the geography is seen in the Nile Valley with the fertile fields and the fertile soil and the water, which grew and sustained life, but on either side of it was the desert, which was dead. It had no life. So that was the first concept of their duality coming together was life and death as expressed in the geography and nature. The land itself was divided between north and south, upper and lower Egypt, east and west – the land of the living in the land of the dead.

It also extended to the spiritual world, where you would have a male god and his female counterpart. Such as Osiris and Isis, Amun and Mut, just to give a couple of examples. However, it’s interesting to note that the creator gods, or the fertility gods were all male. So, Atum was a self-creating God, but he then created the other gods by means of masturbating (Myśliwiec, 2001).

DUALITY IN CREATING LIFE

Men were seen to give life

This continues in another form of duality that the ancient Egyptians could see, that there was the duality in creating life, that is, the power to create life, and the absence of power to create life. And these were also expressed in male and female. The ancient Egyptians believed that the ability to create life was male not female. And this goes back to the fact that they could see it, they could see that through the act of sexual intercourse, and the male ejaculating that the next step would be that the female would be pregnant. And she would have a baby. The reason why the ancient Egyptians made this connection is because they could see the semen and they knew that this white sticky fluid could cause a woman to become pregnant, however they couldn’t see the eggs in the woman, thus reasoning that she couldn’t produce life but only receive life. But for the Egyptians, it was the act of ejaculating into the woman, which showed the man as having the power to create life and putting it into the woman (the vessel), which highlights once again the duality of the ancient Egyptian world and thought.

This brings in a connecting idea of cause-and-effect, where because of this duality certain things would happen which would then ripple into the counterbalance coming into effect as well. An example of this is the birth of a human being which would eventually lead to the death of a human being, which would then lead into the resurrection of this human being within the afterlife. Which then continued with the duality of this individual living in the afterlife while their loved ones continued in the mortal realm. Once again, with the concept of duality you needed the mortal realm to continue to give offerings to the deceased so that the deceased could continue living in the afterlife. So, life need death, and death needed life.

DUALITY, ORDER, MA’AT

This duality is also summed up in the concept of Ma’at, Ma’at actually means order (Teeter, 2001). Often people translate Ma’at as truth. It can be translated as truth, and it can have the connections of truth and honesty, or “the absence of falsehood”. However, as far as the Egyptians were concerned, the main aspect of Ma’at, was order. Everything had to be ordered, the universe was ordered that the Earth was ordered, life was ordered, there was counterbalances in place for that order, you needed one and the other for this order and for life to continue, this fit into the concept of the duality.

Ma’at was demonstrated in their religious practices within the temple. Certain rites had to happen at certain times of the day and in a particular sequence for order to be in place. It was believed that if these rites didn’t happen, and if they didn’t happen in the particular sequence that they needed to happen in, the universe would collapse, and order would be gone.

You can see this order, and the concept of duality, come about through their religious texts and stories. An example of this would be the story of Osiris and Seth. Osiris was the king of the Egyptians. He was well loved. He was well ordered. He gave them cultivation. He gave them Egyptian civilisation (Hart, 2005). He was a creator, while Seth His brother was chaos and was destructive, he was angry. He was the personification of what was bad.

If you have Osiris being good, you needed Seth to be bad. Osiris brought life into the world. Seth, by means of murdering Osiris, brought death into the world. The context of duality coming out again. And it’s also the same. When you look at Osiris and Isis, Osiris had the ability to give life to make the field grow to bring fertility to the land. And according to the ancient Egyptian religious texts. He gave life to Horace, the son of Isis and Osiris.

WHEN DUALITY AND ORDER WERE BROKEN

When this duality and order was thrown into chaos the ancient Egyptians struggled to comprehend what was happening. And when that particular event was over, they did what they could to erase that event so that no evidence could be found, therefore restoring order back to their world. This can be seen in two cases in ancient Egyptian history where the identity and period of history was systematically raised from the public’s conscious. That is the reign of Hatshepsut it and Akhetaten.

While women and men were equal they were not the same, there were things that neither gender could do, because the particular role had to be fulfilled by a particular gender to maintain order and counterbalance.

One of these roles was Pharaoh. This was a male role even though there were female pharaohs like Hatshepsut. The reason why it was a male role was because it need the aspect of giving life and fertility to the land, and his semen was required for this to happen. Since life and pro-creative powers were male, a female couldn’t fulfil this role appropriately, no matter how much she presented her self as a man.

There would have been crucial rites that she would’ve had to take party as pharaoh, however, she would not have been able to fulfil due to the fact that she was a woman. One of these rites was the fertility right where the Pharaoh would masturbate and ejaculate into the nile to ensure the fertility of the river. This was alleged to have happened at the Festival of Min, however there is some debate on whether this actually happened in the first place. If it did then this would present a serious problem for Hatshepsut.

This highlights the fact that everything had to be in its place for life to work. This is further reinforced in the story of the earth god Geb and his sister the sky goddess Nut. Because they didn’t keep to their proper positions, and fell in love with each other and consequently had children together. It was this fear that because of their love for each that they would forget their roles and life would not grow on earth (Leeming, 2005).

the concept of duality is a central tenet, to understanding the ancient Egyptians, and how they saw the world, what they thought about the world and how they felt and loved in the world. You can’t understand the ancient Egyptians, without understanding their idea of duality.

By Aaron Watson

Fletcher, J. (2009). The Egyptian Book of Living & Dying. Duncan Baird. (Original work published 2002)

Hart, G. (2005). The Routledge Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses. New York: Routledge.

Leeming, D. (2005). The Oxford companion to world mythology. [Oxford]: Oxford University Press.

Myśliwiec, K. (2001). Atum. In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt. : Oxford University Press.

Teeter, E. (2001). Maat. In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt. : Oxford University Press.