فكرة في صورة: مقالات في الفكر المصري القديم

by Erik Hornung, إريك هورنونج, حسن حسين شكري (Translator)

كانت مصر بالنسبة لمؤلفي العصور القديمة هي مصدر الحكمة ومهد المعرفة ومنشأ الفلسفة. وكتاب " فكرة في صورة" لعالم المصريات السويسري إريك هورنونج - أحد أبرز وأشهر وأهم علماء المصريات المعاصرين - هو بانوراما للفكر المصري القديم تنقل لنا الإحساس بالثراء والتنوع، وكيف بحث قدماء المصريين منذ زمن سحيق مسائل لا تزال تشغل بال العالم حتى اليوم في: الوجود واللاوجود وطبيعة الكون والإنسان ومعنى الموت والخلود وجوهر الزمن وأساس المجتمع البشري وشرعية السلطة، وتبرز مجالات عملية كثيرة كان لمصر فيها قصب السبق والريادة

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Egyptology, Egypt, Philosophy

167 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1992

About the author

Hornung was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1933 and gained his PH.D. at the University of Tübingen in 1956.
He was Professor of Egyptology at the University of Basel from 1967 to 1998.
His main research field has been funerary literature, the Valley of the Kings in particular.
He published the first edition of the Book of Amduat in three volumes between 1963 and 1967.
J. Gwyn Griffiths described Hornung as the foremost authority in such literature.
His book Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt, The One and the Many has become his best-known work, in which he concludes, whilst acknowledging previous work by Henri Frankfort and his "multiplicity of approaches" and John A. Wilson's "complementary" treatment of Egyptian modes of thought, that "Anyone who takes history seriously will not accept a single method as definitive; the same should be true of anyone who takes belief seriously".
Hornung became Vice-President of the Society of the Friends of the Royal Tombs of Egypt in 1988. His books have been published in German, but many have been translated into English.

Reviews

[Sense of History]

The original German version of this work is entitled “Geist der Pharaonenzeit”, which already indicates that this book is an intellectual history, one that focuses on how the Egyptians viewed the world and translated their idea of that world into sign and image, hence the much more concrete English title. Erik Hornung (1933-2022) was one of the most prominent Egyptologists at the end of the last century. His focus was on cultural history, and in particular spiritual representations. That is why, for example, in this book you also get a very interesting chapter on the role of magic.

When I started my reading marathon on Ancient Egypt 5 months ago, I still had the image in mind of a very static society and culture that remained roughly the same for 3,000 years, with a pharaoh who was all-powerful from start to finish and with a material culture (pyramids, tombs, statues) that appeared very rigid (stiff even) and had hardly evolved. The work of John Romer (see A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid and A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom ) already made it clear to me that this is not correct, and Hornung is now reinforcing that adjustment.

In the chapter on creation myths, for example, he indicates how diverse and changeable Egyptian culture was, with the principle of creation and destruction reflecting the dynamism of life: “creation bears within it the germ of decay, but regenerate and rejuvenate. This is a basic idea of ancient Egyptian culture, explaining much of its creative power and achievements. Creation is not a once-finished work, on the contrary it must be constantly repeated and reaffirmed. The world of the created, which springs from it, floats on the shorelessness of the uncreated, of the non-being, which sustains the being from immeasurable depths, but from the same depths also threatens it with collapse and total disappearance.”

In material culture this manifested itself in the constant search for new forms of expression, usually by 'expanding' the existing, but also by crossing borders: “in ancient Egypt we find both the desire for limitation and the desire to overcome and to lift all boundaries. Both are deeply human, and the balanced character of this culture stems in part from the fact that it was able to satisfy both desires. (…) The consciousness of the Egyptian is always alive that the world can be creatively changed, that every negative and imperfect condition can be turned in the direction of the originally perfect creation. From this arises the impressive dynamics of ancient Egyptian culture. Any kind of fatalism, any acceptance of a given situation is alien to her.”

That is clearly something different than rigidity and immutability. The same goes for what is expressed in the many historical inscriptions on monuments, sculptures and tomb walls. These are of course not aimed at representing what we now understand as historical truth, on the contrary says Hornung, in the eyes of the ancient Egyptians, historiography is a cultic drama that is essentially related to creation: “History in ancient Egypt is a cultic drama involving all of humanity. History is the greatest of all great feasts, in which the cult manifests itself outwardly by emerging from the seclusion of the chapel of the gods into the public eye. (…) The action of Pharaoh and his associates in history is aimed at returning to the world some of its original perfection.”

That sounds a bit pompous, but if you look at the concrete expressions of culture through those glasses, then you seem to come a step closer to 'grasping' that strange civilization that was Ancient Egypt.

[Mounir · Rating 4 out of 5]

[ The review in English at the bottom ]
كتاب جيد جدا ومهم. من بين كل ما قرأت عن الحضارة المصرية القديمة أعتقد أن هذا الكتاب الصغير نسبيا هو أهمها وأعمقها. إختار المؤلف منهج صعب وعميق وغير معتاد لدراسة الحضارة المصرية : إذ أنه لا يركز على إنجازات هذه الحضارة في حد ذاتها وإنما على الفكر الذي وراءها، وكيف أن كل مظهر من مظاهر هذه الحضارة المهمة لم يحدث عشوائيا أو بالصدفة، وإنما كان وراءه فكرة أو عقيدة أو أسلوب في الفهم وفي إدراك العالم.
يرصد الكتاب الأفكار الأساسية لدى المصريين القدماء حول الإنسان والكون والتاريخ، وحول الآلهة والعالم الآخر، وحول الجسد والروح، هذه الأفكار التي تجسدت في أنماط معينة من الحياة ومن الدين والفن والبناء، والتي تجلت أمامنا في المظاهر النهائية التي نراها جاهزة أمامنا : التماثيل والنقوش والكتابات والمومياوات والمعابد، وأيضا القصص والأساطير والعقيدة وأسلوب الحكم والتفكير.
لا أجد "عيب" في الكتاب إلا أنه بسبب تركيزه على الأفكار المجردة في أغلب صفحاته فإنه يبدو جافا إلى حد ما في بعض المواضع ويحتاج لتركيز كبير في القراءة.
كتاب لا غنى عنه لكل المهتمين بالحضارة المصرية القديمة

A very good and important book. Of all the books I read about ancient Egypt, I think that this relatively small book is one of the best and deepest. The author chose a difficult, deep and unusual approach to study this topic: he does not concentrate on the achievements of ancient Egypt in themselves, but on the ideas behind them, showing how every outer aspect of that civilization did not happen in an arbitrary manner or by chance, but that behind them were a thought, a belief or a style of understanding or view of the world.
The book follows the principal ideas of ancient Egyptians about humans, the universe and history, about the gods and the after-life, about body and "soul"; those ideas which were crystallized in certain styles of living, religion, art and architecture; and which we can see as the final achievements : statues, inscriptions, mummies and temples, also in the stories, mythology, religious beliefs, and in the styles of government and thinking.
The only "drawback" I found in this book is that, because it speaks to the reader mostly in an abstract way, some parts appear dry and need a lot of concentration in reading.
An indispensable book for all those interested in ancient Egypt.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those books I finally got around to reading after many years that would have been more interesting to me if I had read it when I first got it. Oh well. Erik Hornung is a highly respected Egyptologist who writes about the religious ideas of the ancient Egyptians, and this book is derived from a series of lectures on that subject. As such, it really is a series of disconnected essays without a central argument or overall structure, but each essay is interesting. The book is rather old now (almost 30 years), so it's hard to know how much new information might challenge what he says here.
Overall, Hornung finds great wisdom in the Egyptian approach, and he will surprise casual researchers into Egypt when he says for example that Egyptians didn't think mummification was necessary to achieve eternal life or that Egyptian art was deliberately a-symmetrical. At times, one wonders if he is idealizing his subject, and it's important to keep in mind that Egyptian beliefs evolved and changed over time, so some of what he finds to be true in the Middle Kingdom might not have applied at the time the pyramids were built. It's a fairly interesting book, but probably not an ideal stating place for reading about ancient Egyptian religion - you'll need more context to really understand what he's saying here.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is easy to view the Ancient Egyptians as ancient versions of ourselves: modern westerners without color TV or cars and with an unusual fixation for building pyramids. Hornung lays out in these essays, in a very readable way, some of the ways in which the basic elements of Egyptian culture were dramatically different from ours.

[Victoria Schreiber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ein gutes Übersichtswerk mit verschiedenen Aufsätzen zur ägyptischen Pharaonenzeit. Sowohl für Laien als auch für Studenten geeignet.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating 3.5 stars. There is little more to say about this book than that this is solid and enticing. Finally an expert who doesn't follow the traditional historiography that reviews pharaoh after pharaoh, dynasty after dynasty. Instead, Hornung offers nothing less than an attempt to grasp the essence of Egyptian civilization, a cross-section that provides insight into aspects of that civilization that are very strange to modern man. He does so in an understandable way, because the 12 chapters of this book are based on lectures given by the author (1933-2022), professor emeritus of the University of Basel, Switzerland.

The main drawback is that Hornung, like almost all other Egyptologists, hardly ever looks at other, nearby centers of civilization (Mesopotamia, the Levant, Anatolia and the Eastern Mediterranean). Hornung's approach also is limited to 'intellectual history': social and economic aspects are left out of the picture. And perhaps the book is also slightly outdated: the first edition (in German) appeared in 1989. Nevertheless, it still is worth the read! I look into some of the content features provided by Hornung in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[DAJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hornung was one of the most insightful and influential people to ever write about the ancient Egyptians' worldview. These essays don't form a full description of that worldview, but they contain a lot of lesser-known details that work well as a supplement to more extensive books about Egyptian religion. Those details are rendered accessible by Hornung's incisive but amiable style.

The essays are: "Word and Image", about hieroglyphic writing; "Origins", about creation myths; "Time and Eternity" (fairly self-explanatory); "Limits and Symmetries", about how those concepts shaped aspects of Egyptian culture from artwork to cosmology; "The Hereafter", about afterlife beliefs and the major features of the netherworld; "The Temple as Cosmos", about the symbolism in the design of Egyptian temples; "The Concept of Maat", the way things ought to be; "History as Celebration", about how the Egyptians idealized historical events as periodic renewals of maat; and "Body and Soul", focusing mainly on how those concepts pertained to the afterlife. Even in the first essay, on as basic a topic as you can imagine when it comes to ancient Egypt, Hornung notes things that don't make it into standard descriptions, such as oddities in the usage of the earliest hieroglyphic texts, or the colors used for particular hieroglyphic signs.

The book would be most relevant to someone studying Egyptian cosmology: how the Egyptians envisioned the shape of the world, and still more broadly, space and time. In fact, I consider it one of the four key works on the subject (the others being Mysterious Lands, 'Never Had the Like Occurred', and A Journey Through the Beyond). But anyone interested in ancient Egyptian culture can get something out of this book.