\m [music playing--no dialogue] \m \m

>> Dean Allen Lanham:
It's a pleasure to see you here on this lovely day, as we continue our journey through Egypt, especially Ancient Egypt.

Our journey began last Thursday evening, and we are now in, I think, our fifth session, and many of you have been here for the entire series and we appreciate that.

If this is your first, make sure you have a program which is provided at the back of the room so that you can join us for subsequent activities that go on until the first part of November.

So without further ado, I will introduce Wafeek Wahby, the coordinator of this series.

>> Dr. Wafeek Wahby:
Thank you, thank you.

\I [audience applause]

\P >> Dr. Wafeek Wahby:
Thank you all for coming to this session of the symposium, and I can understand what runs in your minds and hearts, what brought you to this session being born and raised in Egypt.

I am so anxious to see what Dean Bonnie Irwin will tell us about the myths of Egypt, so how about you?

Anybody born and raised in Egypt other than myself?

Okay.

[laughter]

Ancient Egypt, yes, well I had a hard time finding words to introduce Dean Bonnie Irwin, and I said this fits no it doesn't do justice to her.

But I'm going to tell you this story about her before I give the six words of introduction.

She is one of the very few, one of a kind, that can't stand or sit in front of an audience like this and hold a pen like this in her hand and capture attention and stimulate the mind of the audience for 45 minutes non stop.

And don't tell me they were sleeping or something because I looked at their eyes, and they were just captured.

She just simply talked about technology, writing, and the English language, and the symposium about technology a few years ago.

I was really, what do you say [unclear dialogue] in English is that a good word, so I am looking forward to her presentation today and here are my six words of introduction.

Here she is Dean Bonnie Irwin.

\I [audience laughter]

[audience applause]

\P >> Dean Bonnie Irwin:
And for those of you who don't know Dr. Wahby, he is someone to whom I cannot say no, which is probably more the reason I'm here today.

While I know a whole lot about writing and how it changed our world, and I know a whole lot about myth, I know very little about Ancient Egypt.

I'm just going to put that out there, right now.

We do have some folks in the audience who know quite a bit more about Ancient Egypt than I do, so I'm hoping that we can generate a conversation eventually, but I do want to talk a little bit about what we know and what we don't know about the myths of Ancient Egypt.

And one of the things I'd start with is there's probably a whole lot more that we don't know than we know, although we know a lot more than we did a hundred years ago, so that's where we are today.

With my literature class this week, we are reading Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Ovid was a Roman writer who recaptured Greek and Roman mythology in a series of kind of amusing anecdotes, and one of the stories he tells is the story of Phaethon.

Phaethon is the son of the Sun, Apollo, and one day he really wants to drive his father's chariot, which is the Sun that goes over the horizon, so Phaethon's father Apollo does something that no parent should ever do before he hears the question he says anything you want.

And so when the young man says, "I want to drive the chariot," he has no choice but to say no.

The reason I'm telling you this story is it's really quite funny and tragic at the same time, the way Ovid tells it, but near the end as Phaethon is driving the chariot which is the Sun for this particular story and he loses control, and so imagine if you will that you are a human being walking the face of the Earth and all of a sudden the Sun is just racing all around the sky.

You see it, you don't see, it has no pattern, it's going really fast, well one of the things that supposedly happens in the aftermath of Phaethon driving this chariot is that he gets too close to the Earth in Africa and when he does African people turn darker than the people in Europe.

And also the Nile is boiling, and she's fearing for her life and so she goes and hides and this is their way of explaining the fact that we don't know where the source of the Nile was, at least we didn't in Ancient Rome.

So there's this whole narrative that explains these different things.

And that's one thing that myth attempts to do is explain those things that we don't have easy answers for.

So if you don't know where the River Nile begins, here's one reason why it used to be there but it ran away.

Now Egyptian myth isn't quite so light hearted, most myths are not.

Ovid likes to twist them in his telling of them.

What myths are by a scholarly definition are sacred stories, they are stories that typically deal with gods, supernatural phenomena and are believed by the people who tell them to be true, but truth is a pretty broad concept.

Does it mean that all the little details were believed?

Probably not, and when I start telling you this one myth from Egypt, I think you are going to realize that there are probably some things here that people didn't literally think happened, but they represent larger phenomenas.

They represent basic truths, so they're true to that extent.

So by this definition for example the Bible is a myth, and when I go into a mythology class and say that, they take offense because they think I'm saying it's not true.

I say, "that's not what I'm saying."

I'm saying that it's a group of sacred stories told by people who believe in the truth of those words, but they are stories, they are the creation of human beings.

So some myths about myth, and in particular, Egyptian myth, one is that there is, and obviously I'm using myth in two ways here right, there is one myth that tells the whole story of Egypt and you cannot in most cultures point to a single myth and say this explains it all.

Okay, Egypt is also like that, there are so many stories, there are hundreds of them.

Ancient Egyptians believed their myths literally, again probably not.

The Egyptian gods are just like the Greek gods, well in some ways there are many of them, but they don't represent particular things the way the Greek gods and goddesses do.

Greek mythology for example, you've got a god of love, you've got a goddess who represents the earth.

You have all these different ones, and some of those are there in Egyptian mythology, but it's much more fluid.

Here's an interesting one that kind of goes back and forth, I think, goddesses are less powerful than [unclear dialogue] God.

This again becomes a matter of semantics.

What do you mean by power because there are some very powerful figures.

They're not necessarily in charge, but they exert tremendous power and story.

Egyptian creation myths are all of one type, and I'll talk about different types of creation myths here in a moment.

That's also not the case.

Egyptian gods were all powerful, perfect beings, the way Judeo-Christian culture would identify with the god, certainly not.

They have their flaws, perhaps not as flawed as some of the stories we hear about the Greek gods and goddesses, but flawed nonetheless.

It would also be a myth to conclude that these myth traditions were stable over time.

We're talking about a history of stories that goes thousands and thousands of years and any time you have a story like that, it's going to change.

It's not as simple as the game telephone, which is the conclusion we always sort of come to like well they were in an oral tradition before they were ever written down, therefore they're going to change all the time.

The fact is that it's not the case, they change very slowly, but they do change.

And identities change, particular themes morph into other themes, but there are probably some basic truths that remain constant.

Okay, so when we look at myth, the primary type of myth that many people study are creation myths because every culture wants to know where they came from.

And while evolution answers the question of how a human being got to be a human being a lot of people find it unsatisfactory because it doesn't say why what are we doing here, what is the point of human existence?

Now from a biological perspective, we define that as to perpetuate our species all of that, but what is really the purpose of being a human being on Earth?

All cultures seek to answer that question.

And in trying to answer that question, they come up with different stories and versions of how the world came to be.

These tend to fall into three major categories.

One is the god speaks or thinks and having done that, something is created.

So for example, let there be light in the book of Genesis, and there was.

Right, this was an example of a god sort of speaking light into existence.

Or in the New Testament, and the word was God, words of gods are very powerful.

And sometimes that's all it takes, where even a god can just think a thought and all of a sudden something will appear.

Okay that's one way of explaining how things are created.

Another one is that creation was a manual process, that a god or powerful creator being took some substance and shaped it into something.

If we look at Native American myth for example, there's lots of stories of a creator being taking something like clay and forming it into human beings or into coyote or into some other thing, and if you think about this as you're trying to figure out how anything came into being, we know if we speak or think sometimes things happen as a result of that.

So that is a logical way to think about how creation takes place.

We always make things with our hands, that's another logical way to think for things to be made.

What is the other one?

What is the one that I haven't mentioned?

It's the reason we're all here, right?

There is some kind of, and I'm going to expand that, because it's not always sex, it's some kind of bodily function because we have some gods and some cultures who are regurgitating the world or producing the world through other means.

But the idea is it is some physical, human function.

For a long time, some of these were pushed to the side because early myth scholars didn't really want to think about some of the things that ancient cultures were pretty open about that later societies have not been.

The interesting thing about some of the Egyptian myths is that all of these things are present.

The creation is taking place in all of these different ways, and in that respect Egyptian myths are somewhat unique.

I'm not saying that's not the case ever in other cultures, but the fact that we have all three in some very short stories is really interesting.

Some of the challenges of studying Egyptian myth--and if you've been coming to some of the other talks, you know what some of those challenges are--and that begins with language.

It took a really long time for anyone to figure out what hieroglyphics meant and the combination of the hieroglyphics that represent sound versus a symbol that might represent a particular god or an animal, and they're all mixed together and they're carved in stone or they're written on papyrus.

The ones written on papyrus didn't last quite as long as some of the ones on stone, so we have pieces--lots of little pieces of things--in many many different languages and those languages take different forms depending on how old it is.

So imagine, if you will, trying to figure out what is the creation story of Egypt and you see this whole array of things.

Archaeologists, historians, literary scholars, language scholars, had to work for centuries to figure all of this out and I would argue that we still don't have all the answers that we might like to have.

And this is just what we have in writing.

What the stories were before they were committed to stone or papyrus is another topic entirely, and that went on for who knows how long, but at least a thousand years before anything was ever committed to writing.

So then you, when you try to speculate on what an ancient Egyptian, say from 4000 BC, might have believed, it's nearly impossible, which is one of the few things that gave me the courage to actually talk about this because nobody really knows much of anything so, I can specualte with the best of them.

I'm not just trying to say that we don't know anything because we do know quite a bit.

Also because so much of Egyptian mythology appears in artwork--so some of the stories are told by sculpture or again being carved on the side of a tomb--we have pieces of a story, we don't have a nice long narrative that's bound up in a pretty book that we can just read.

There never was anything that resembles a Bible or a Qur'an for ancient Egypt.

There were hundreds of little pieces of little stories and what we can do is cobble those together and kind of figure some things out.

The other language challenge that we have are the names.

There were myths in all areas of Egypt.

Just any time there were human beings who tell stories, there are going to be stories about how we came to be.

Lots of different languages in what we now call Egypt.

Three major cities fairly close to the north, all along the Nile, each of which had their own myth tradition.

The story remains fairly consistent, but the names change a little bit, which adds another level.

So here's an outline of a version of creation according to the Egyptians.

First, there was water--this is pretty common, we see this around the world.

A lot of creation myths start with a watery chaos.

Then a creator appears--now if you're in Thebes in ancient Egypt, you call this creator being Amun or Amun-Ra.

If you are in Heliopolis, which was what is now Cairo, or at least a piece of it, Atum or Atum-Ra, and those obviously are connected to each other.

Those names are too similar to be totally disconnected.

But then we go to Memphis, which is a little bit further south or up the Nile River, we have Ta.

Completely different consonants in a very different conglomeration but he plays pretty much the same role.

So, this creator god creates some land in the middle of the watery chaos, generally referred to as a mound of land, but imagine any continent--so a piece of land gets created.

Why--well we know people live on land.

They don't live in the water, so if we're going to get to explain where we are today, that's how we have to get there.

Then we see the sun.

The sun comes out, there's emergence of the sun, the first sunrise, the sun makes an appearance.

The sun god is threatened by forces of chaos and loses and eye, in some versions loses his daughter, but he loses something--most versions will argue it's an eye--and living being are created either by the hands of the creator, the thoughts of the creator, or by bodily fluids of the creator, and I'll give you some specific examples.

So there are various ways of describing the actual act of creation itself, and this is how the world and living things were created, but then many of the myths tell us that human beings were created from the tears of this creator god.

Someone goes in search, any number of characters goes in search of the missing eye and finds it.

Meanwhile, the god has created himself a new eye, so he's got two eyes again and his old eye is upset because it no longer has a home and it starts to cry and these tears become human beings--this is a version.

And that's kind of interesting.

Human beings are made up of 96 percent water.

An ancient Egyptian probably couldn't give you that precise percentage, but they know that we're  a very liquid species and you also think about the fact that human beings are very emotional and we weep.

Why not a tear, as opposed to anything else.

Okay, so we then have two god-like beings.

One represents air and sunlight in many versions, and the other is that character's sister--two female characters that descend from this original creator god, and then the next generation is Geb, which is the earth, and Nute, which is the sky.

There is often, in a creation story that describes the creation of the whole world, a moment when the earth and the sky separated.

It's hard for us in this day and age, to imagine what it would've been like before they were separated and what does that mean, but there is a moment where people recognize the earth and the sky are two different things, so clearly at some point they were separated.

All through this, one of the things that Egyptian myth does demonstrate is the attempt to impose some kind of order on chaos, so all the way through Egyptian myth traditions you have a struggle between order and chaos, the chaos being that primeval, watery sort of nothingness and then order being starting to actually create particular things that we see in the world around us today--plants, human beings, soil, air, sun.

There can be any number of causes, but the sun god leaves the earth, because of course the sun doesn't live on the earth, we all know that.

So the sun god leaves the earth in these stories, and then we have Osiris, who's probably the first name who you may or may not be familiar with, but Osiris is an Egyptian god that many people have heard of.

He was sort of the ruler god of Egypt, and he is murdered by his brother Seth.

So we have Osiris and Seth, Seth murders Osiris.

Osiris' wife and/or sister, Isis, and their other wife and/or sister--and again, it depends on the story whether all four of these characters are siblings or not---but there is Isis and Nepthys and they are the two females in this group of four characters.

They go searching for Osiris' body, because not only has Osiris been killed but they can't find him, so they go in search of his body and some versions have both of them being married to Osiris, some of them have Nepthys being married to Seth, Isis being married to Osiris--lots of different versions, but you've got these four characters, two male, two female.

They find Osiris, Isis revives him long enough to have him father her child--and the child's name is Horus, not H-O-R-A-C-E, but H-O-R-U-S.

He was born in the reedy marshes, so in the wetlands, and chaos tries to destroy Horus, too, and fails.

Horus and Seth fight for control, and Horus wins, so now we've got Horus being this sort of world god in charge of everything.

He becomes the ruler of the living.

His father having died again because Isis only revives him temporarily, is now the lord of the underworld.

And here's another myth you could add about ancient Egyptian culture--we like to think when we see all those tombs and mummies and pyramids with all the stuff in them, the Egyptians were obsessed with death, but if you look at these stories, it really seems like Egyptians are more obsessed with this idea of rebirth.

The sun sets in the west every day, and so cemeteries on the western bank of the Nile.

The sun rises in the east, temples, celebration of life.

So yes, there were things needed for the world of the dead, but there was always this sense of the coming back, the rebirth.

Eventually the creator god kind of grows weary of the world and retreats back into the ocean because, of course, as people are creating these stories, there aren't gods roaming the earth with them, so they have to sort of explain their absence and there are many many ways in which that happens.

There are many other gods but those are the major players.

There's a group of 8 or 9 of them that figure very prominently in a creation myth for the Egyptians.

And as I said earlier, unlike the Greeks, the Egyptians didn't really assign any particular identities to their gods.

And what I want to do now is read to you a translation of an Egyptian myth, and then we can sort of open up and just talk about it and what it might mean and what it doesn't mean and see where we go.

Okay, it's about 3 or 4 pages long.

This one dates from about 2400 BC, and in my book, which I probably should've made some photo copies of, there is all of the hieroglyphics and symbols and then an English translation underneath.

There are several different words for the god, but the primary one that this text uses is Atum.

"The words of Ner-er-tcher, he spake after he had come into being. 

I am he who came into being in the form of Khepera, I was the creator of what came into being."

Alright, so 'I came into being, I am the creator of what came into being.

"The creator of what came into being all; after my coming into being many things which came into being coming forth from my mouth."

Now here's where we start to get into the ambiguity.

Beings came from his mouth--did he speak them, did he regurgitate them, how did they come out of his mouth?

"Not existed heaven, not existed earth, not had been created the things of the earth--plants--and creeping things in place that."

This is a fairly literal kind of translation, so it's awkward.

"I raised up them from out of Nu--that primeval water--from a state of inactivity."

So our creator god is bringing things out of that water.

"Not found I a place I could stand wherein."

I started reading this translation again recently--it sounds, to me, a lot like Yoda for some reason.

[laughter].

Putting verbs in strange places.

"I worked a charm upon my heart.

I laid a foundation in Maā--which is this order--I made attribute every.

I was alone, not had I spit in the form of Shu, not had I emitted in the form of Tefnut."

Shu and Tefnut are those two sisters that existed really early on.

"Not existed another who worked with me."

So when he is beginning the creation, Shu and Tefnut do not yet exist nor was there any other god, it was just the one.

"I made a foundation in my heart, my own.

There came to being the multitudes of things which came to being of the things which came into being from out of the things which came into being of births"--

So are we implying a chain of creation here, or are we just repeating for emphasis?

--"from out of the things which came into being of their births."

My apologies to any of you with sensitivity to human things here.

"I, even I, had union with my clenched hand, I joined myself in an embrace..."

Alright, so we have, essentially, this myth telling a story of human creation with no woman involved.

"...with my shadow, I poured seed into my mouth my own--and by seed here, he is referring to human seed, so his semen--and sent forth issue in the form of Shu.

I sent forth moisture in the form of Tefnut."

So this is how, according to this version, Shu and Tefnut--those two very early figures--were created.

"Saith my father Nu, 'They make to weak my eye behind them because for double periods they proceeded from me.

I became god, one gods three"--so here we have a creator go Shu and Tefnut implying that there's some kind of a trinity relationship--"that is from out of myself and after I came into being in this earth.

Were raised up therefore Shu and Tefnut in the inert watery mass wherein they were, brought they to me my eye in their train.

After therefore I had united my members I wept over them and came into being men and women"--okay, the return of the eye or the return of something that's been taken from him , he's weeping, creating human beings--"came into being men and women from tears which came forth from my eye.

It raged against me after it came and found that I had made another in its place.

I endowed it with the power which I had made.

Having made to approach therefore its place in my face, afterwards therefore it ruleth earth this to its whole extent.

Fall their season upon their plants, I endowed it with what it hath taken possession of in it.

I came forth from the plants, creeping things all and things which came into being all in them.

Give birth Shu and Tefnut, Geb and Nut.

Give birth Geb and Nut to Osiris, Horus, Seth, Isis, Nepthys from the womb, one after the other of them, they give birth, they multiply in earth this."

So, that's a version from 4500 years ago of a creation story in Egypt.

So what do we know, what can we conclude from this?

There are lots of ways to interpret myths.

Many of you are studying this as part of your class, I'm assuming, and sometimes we look at them in ways of is this just an explanation of where we came from, are there values being communicated here, are there geographic implications?

There certainly are geographic implications to many myths and Egyptian myths are not alone in this.

There's a lot of mention of liquid and of water, both the primeval ocean and also the tears and other kinds of liquids, and in ancient Egypt the Nile flooded annually and it was a very different country than it is today.

It wasn't a vast desert and so there was a need to, I think, explain some of these things and how the Nile came to flood and how that was a good thing and that was what fertilized the soil and that is what allowed them to have an agricultural community.

But then there are other Egyptian myths that start talking about deserts because as the desert starts to encroach more and more, there's more discussion of that and what that means, and sometimes those two forces are pitted against each other, as you might expect.

So would, you know, an Egyptian in 2500 BC really believe this letter for letter?

It's a kind of strange story if you think about it.

We've got a god speaking, we've got a god essentially masturbating other beings into existence, we have a god that's planting seeds, both human and vegetable.

All of these things are going on almost simultaneouslyin this story because people know that that's where creation comes from, but do they believe this?

Probably not, it's probably more speculation and metaphor, but what it actually represents, I think, is difficult to determine.

When I look at Egyptian myth I always have way more questions than I do answers, and that's what makes it interesting but I think I'm going to just stop here.

I'm not going to guarantee that I can answer a whole lot of questions, but I just wanted to introduce you to some of the stories that we see in ancient Egypt and how you can sort of think to yourselves about how they compare to other ones you've heard in other cultures.

[applause].

\I >> Dr. Wahby:

Now you can imagine how hard children, when they were young, went to sleep with [unclear dialogue].

\P >>Dr. Irwin:

There are other stories I could tell much better than this one.

I would really like to hear from Dr. Patterson, who does know way more about ancient Egypt than I do.

[laughter].

But that's okay.

>> male speaker:

But I actually do have a question.

In the myth that you just read, does the book say what the context was where this inscription was found?

I have a reason for asking this so...

>> Dr. Irwin:

I want to say it was--no it's not telling me here.

I could probably find that out though.

\I >> male speaker:

Well the reason I asked--you said around 2400 BC, so that's late 4th Dynasty or the 5th Dynasty--the reason I ask is although, and certainly Egyptian myths and most myths develop organically and so on, in the case of Egypt, so many of the myths that we have we have in context of funerary complexes, you know, royal complexes, things like that.

A lot of the myths that we get were shaped by royal ideology.

These pharaohs and others, and many nobles and so on used these myths to project certain ideas.

I guess if there's one word that is fundamentally important to all of these, it's Maat, M-A-A-T, the concept of orderliness that derives from the regularity of the Nile.

I know that, in terms of how to interpret some of the strange imagery in that--as you say, it's kind of hard to do that, but certainly sometimes what you get with this imagery, very vivid imagery, you get it in the context of a ritual.

Sometimes it will be a royal ritual reinforcing the pharaoh's divinity or the pharaoh's authority or the pharaoh's legitimacy and so on, and this imagery of live giving, this imagery of renewal and so on expressed in very vivid ways is going to be a part of that ritual that will have a very strong visual component in the ritual, and then later in the tomb or in the temple, the funerary temple.

And of course most people won't see that imagery in that context.

Most people will have to go somewhere else, but so much of what survived, because it was hidden away is what we get and that's a very vibrant, visual feast that is often what punctuates or what tells these stories.

So a lot of it is driven by a sort of, I don't want to say political because it's not just political--it's a combination of political, religious, social and so on.

All kinds of factors working together.

As you say, the Egyptians were very very--maybe they still are--but certainly the ancient Egyptians were a very complicated people.

There's nothing simple about anything they did, nothing.

And there's all these different interlacing things going on in terms of how myth relates to politics and...

\P >> Dr. Irwin:

Well and that's actually, I neglected to say, one of the reasons that I thought it was a good idea to open with Ovid is when Ovid is telling or retelling those Greek myths, he's doing it under the context of the emperor Augustus, and there you've actually got some talkback to Augustus.

It's more, not what Augustus perceives, it's what Ovid has kind of thrown in his face, I think a lot, and here you get that, more of the opposite.

That just as a creator--I hesitate to use the word god because it is very different--but a creator being giving order to the world just as, you know, our leaders give order to our civilization and our society.

And so I think there is definitely some holdover there.

I don't know enough about Egyptian history, and I wasn't clear exactly where this particular version came from, which is one of the reasons I didn't go there, but the other thing that you brought up I think is really important to keep in mind about any myths, anywhere, is the connection between myth and ritual.

Some people see them as the same thing, other cultures you really have more of a verbal storytelling piece and less of the ritual piece, but they are innately connected to each other, and a great example in Judeo-Christian culture, of course, is a Catholic mass, where there are certain actions that are always performed the same way either before or after the telling of the passages from the Bible.

And so there are all of these connections between action and words, and in some cultures--look at the ancient Mayans and Aztecs--there's human sacrifice going on and then stories being told alongside that.

And every culture sort of puts those two things together in different ways, but you're right, the ancient Egyptian cultures, we have enough evidence to show that they were highly ritualistic in many regards, particularly around death and funerary rights and then the sort of celebration of the day and the resurrection of one kind or another.

\I >> Dr. Wahby:

Other questions or comments.

This is your time.

I have a question for you regarding the history of myths.

You mentioned something about the myths connected or tied to gods or goddesses.

Do we have any light--which came first, did they have the god first and then created this myth around them or did the myths just happen and [unclear dialogue].

\P Dr. Irwin:

My own take on this, I think what a lot of scholars will argue is that the myths, the stories create the gods and not the gods creating the stories.

All myths harken back to a day supposedly when human beings and gods interacted in one way or another, but they're all written and told by human beings after the god has departed the earth or the culture or the area, so what's happening is people are telling stories and they're creating stories in which they frankly are inventing a god.

Now I think you can, if one is a person of faith, one can read back into that that god inspires these stories in one way or another, but because we have so many different stories with different god figures and different cultures, it's really hard to determine that.

And when we talk about story--and the reason that I talked about myths being about gods, that line isn't real clear either, but typically myths are more about gods, legends are more about heroes and tales are more like, you know, our fairy tales that no one believes are true--it's just a fanciful story, so when we study them in folklore we tend to divide them in those three categories.

Folklores love to classify things, and so we do that with abandon.

[unclear dialogue].

Yes, exactly.

\I >> Dr. Wahby:

Any other questions?

I have another question [unclear dialogue].

When you look into the myths of Egypt and other cultures, you find themes sort of reoccurring.

Example, dark and light--a dualism or something--good and bad, good cop, bad cop, something like that.

How would you account for this, how do all these cultures have these common threads but different?

\P >> Dr. Iriwn:

Some theorists will take a psychological approach.

Jung would say that it's  something embedded in a human's psyche, that we think in binary terms and therefore we're going to get contrasting pairs in any set of myths.

Light and dark--some people will again take the natural explanation and just because we have day and night, we're going to have light and dark as a primary, one of those binary oppositions.

Myth, just like any other academic area, there have been several succeeding theories which attempt to explain it.

Everything from the simple, it's just a story to it has something to do with the sort of inner machinations of the brain.

A good example of this--I'm going to take us away from Egypt for a little bit--is Oedipus.

You know, does the complex precede the story or does the story just provide a nice label for a complex that says, you know, the boy loves his mother and hates his father.

Freud got a whole lot of mileage out of the myth of Oedipus, but why did anyone tell the story of Oedipus is a good question.

I think it's actually a story that has a whole lot more to do with fate and free will than it does with boys loving their mothers, but that question, I think, persists.

I'm not going to have a good answer for any of your questions.

[laughter].

Like any good scholar.

>> Dr. Wahby:

[unclear dialogue].

Any other questions?

\I >> male speaker:

Toward the end, when you were talking, you mentioned about do we think Egyptians really believed everything that you just mentioned, and I would just say well I think there may be different levels, because I was thinking like today--to jump from ancient Egypt to here--is there is a lot of people in America who believe every single word that the Bible says, but then there's others who [unclear dialogue], well there's some stories to help explain things, how we should act, how we should believe.

I'm wondering maybe that's how a lot of Egyptians were--some literally believe and some maybe none, and then there's the middle crowd.

[unclear dialogue].

\P >> Dr. Irwin:

He's talking about the diversity of opinions.

We can't say one way or the other that the Egyptians just absolutely did believe or absolutely didn't believe.

There were probably some who did believe them literally word for word and others that saw them as completely symbolic and there were probably a lot of people in the middle that saw things, and I keep harkening back--and this is my apologies for this--because I'm in the midst of teaching Roman and Greek mythology right now.

But the Greeks, I mean you have a god of love.

To what extent is that just explaining that love is just this uncontrollable force that we really can't get a grip on?

It can make our lives miserable, it can also make them wonderful, but do we believe that there's really a little naked baby with wings and a bow and arrow out there?

I would argue that most people probably didn't believe in that being per se, but somebody came up with the story.

[laughter].

I think you're right, there's gradations of belief here.

\I >> female speaker:

My question's going to go further away from what you were saying, but you mention that, in general the Egyptian gods, in contrast to the Greeks and Romans, were not identified with a single element, but what about Ra?

Where does he fit in?

I've always thought of him as the sun god.

\P >> Dr. Irwin:

She asked about the god Ra being equated with the sun, and isn't that one that is consistent.

I would say it's consistent over time, but I would think it's also that Ra was seen as being broader than just the sun, so not a sun god in that you point up there and say that's Ra, but that's part of Ra's total being.

He was a much broader kind of creator by that point.

>> Dr. Wahby:

Other questions?

\I >> male speaker:

I know that some of the cradles of civilization, the different civilizations have had mythology about, I think it was the Epic of Gilgamesh or like Noah's Ark.

I was just curious, the ancient Egyptians, did they have something in their history in their mythology about a family surviving on a boat when the world was flooded?

\P >> Dr. Irwin:

I don't know the full corpus of Egyptian mythology but I will say that almost every culture has a flood myth with the exception of most cultures in Africa.

Now when I talk about this in my myth and culture class, I make the argument it's because--and this doesn't apply to Egypt but it certainly applies to Sub-Saharan Afirca-it doesn't flood in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Egypt uses the concept of flooding very deliberately in their stories because the Nile flooded every year but there was not, I don't think, a story of a cataclysmic flood that wipes out the entire earth the way other cultures have.

Unless, am I missing one, I don't know.

>> male speaker:

Can I respond to that?

No, I think you're right, I don't know of any either and I think the reason is that, to simplify it, the thing about Maat is that the relationship between humans and the divine was generally a very positive relationship, in large part because the Nile was so regular if you look at it over 4000 years.

It comes away with a very positive [unclear dialogue], whereas Mesopotamia, life was very precarious [unclear dialogue] were not as reliable as the Nile, they weren't as consistent and you get myths where you have the gods smiting humanity, with a flood or whatever, then we'll build a boat and then there will be a favorite few, so Ziusudra, Atrahasis, Noah or Deucalion in the Greek world and so on--which was clearly [unclear dialogue], no flooding in Greece really.

So in those societies where there's a need for that sort of story, for an ark, something like that, or in the case of the Hebrews an ark--well let's put it this way--those societies where you have that kind of story, there's usually a need to explain the relationship between humanity and the divine, so in the case of the Hebrews, there's a covenant that's involved.

Now you don't get that in the others, but you do in the Hebrew world.

You don't really need that in the Egyptian world as far as I can tell, and I'm not an expert either by any means because I'm a Greek and Roman person, but still I don't think that Egyptians needed that kind of a story and thus I don't think, that's why I don't think we have it.

>> Dr. Irwin:

And there wasn't that sense, and the one thing that they did really deify was the sun and that is absolutely regular.

And the sun never betrays us except occasionally when there's an eclipse, and then a story will come up about that, but it's not, Egypt didn't have the same kinds of weather issues and sort of geological issues that some of the other places in the world had.

>> Dr. Wahby:

Another question if you don't have...

We understand why they worship the sun because it's strong and has light and other stuff.

Why should they worship cats, or animals or something like that?

>> Dr. Irwin:

I think, the way I look at that is those types of stories and myths I do see as more metaphoric.

It's more worshipping the characteristics of certain animals.

One of the major gods is Sobek-Ra, which is a combination of the sun and a crocodile, but the crocodile piece is seen as being very strong, lives in the water but is not just strong but is fierce and so there's certain characteristics there, and I prefer to see most animal roles in myth more in that way, not that they necessarily would believe the cat itself was a god, but that there were certain characteristics about cats that they found--maybe they saw intelligence there or the fleet of foot or something...

>> Dr. Wahby:

Or incarnation of the god in the image of this creature so they say it's god in this image.

>> Dr. Irwin:

Right, and the other thing that I didn't go into is when you start looking at gods, there are major gods and then there are all of these demi-gods and then there are personal gods, just as the ancient Romans, there are household gods and village patrons.

It's hard to use that word god to explain all these different things, but there were these sort of supernatural spirit things that were respected and sometimes feared in any number of pieces of creation in Egyptian culture and in many others.

I know we have to go to our 2 o'clock meeting or something, or class, so I will give you some time to do that.

One more question if you have, if you don't, I have.

[laughter].

Now, do you have, in your readings, find any trace of Darwinian evolution trace--and that back then that says the creator, the creation happened by itself and gradually did by natural selection.

Always you have a god image in all these stories [unclear dialogue], it was a person who brought creation to existence.

I think that was common in all cultures.

Is there any stories that says nothing was and then, after while, it became?

>> Dr. Irwin:

There are some but there almost is some kind of intermediary in these stories.

I mean there's--they all start with water, almost all of them, and then we get land.

Sometimes there's a person that brings the land, sometimes the land emerges, but there's generally a human-like agent at some point early in the story.

>> Dr. Wahby:

Someone wrote an article about back 5000 years ago, until the 20th Century or 19th Century  when Darwin started to say nothing--the human nature says there is a supreme power, there is a superpower that, something must be done by somebody, somebody must do something.

Except in the late 19th Century and then 20th Century and 21 Century when people started to say 'no, it just happened by itself' and, just happened over a long time, but only history, they always have a figure, a person who did something.

>> Dr. Irwin:

And I think just as that impression starts--and I'm not going to say it's going to decline because there are a lot of people who still believe in that very strongly--we also have the rise of science and more and more sort of tangible explanations for things and I think that's...

>> Dr. Wahby:

Even science would tell us that every action is done by something, so scientifically speaking there must be a person, but science today [unclear dialogue] except this, this happened, so it's kind of frustrating.

[laughter].

Well 2 o'clock is approaching.

I want you, please, to give her a round of applause, big one.