UNESCO Ancient Civilizations of Africa (Editor G. Mokhtar)

Pharaonic Egypt: society, economy and culture
ideal era was 'the days of Ra' and the priests of the Late Period even
conceived of a lost golden age when serpents did not bite, thorns did
not prick, walls did not crumble and Ma'at reigned on earth. 26 The perfect
system is not a utopia that one tries to achieve by inventing new rules; it
existed in the beginning and it becomes real again from the moment one
conforms to Ma'at. This means that the morality professed in the Teachings
written by high Memphis officials (Djedefhor, Ptahhotep) and by various
scribes in later periods (Ani, Amenemope), as well as the instructions to
priests carved in the later temples, are fundamentally conformist and that
teaching was scarcely propitious to the development of originality. Texts
where someone describes his new findings are very few in number by
comparison with the conventional autobiographies and standard formulas.
The talent of the many sculptors who managed to put their own personal
stamp on their works while unaffectedly complying with the traditional
constraints is thus all the more remarkable.
Everyday ethics equated the virtues proper with the intellectual qualities,
rectitude with decorum, physical impurity with baseness of character.
Based on a psychology without illusions, it extolled submission to superiors
and benevolence to inferiors. It was accepted that worldly success is the
customary consequence of virtue, and although the idea of posthumous
retribution for one's deeds developed very early, the magical expedients
provided in the funerary formulas in order to escape divine judgement
set limits thereto. Great care was taken in teaching correct behaviour: not
to talk too much, to remain calm in one's gestures and moderate in one's
reactions, an ideal that Egyptian statuary expresses to perfection. All excess
is harmful: he who is carried away by emotion disturbs others and courts
perdition himself. Some sages, however, introduced into their reflections
a strong personal religious feeling and expressed aspirations to individual
excellence. Better an upright heart than formal compliance with ritual. In
God one finds the 'path of life'. The debt of biblical wisdom to Egyptian
culture should not be underestimated. Even though it usually relates more
to social necessities than to charitable understanding, the concern for others
is great. Kings and scribes have left us good lessons in social ethics:
wholeheartedly to attend to the interests of the king and his people, not
to benefit the strong at the expense of the weak, not to let oneself become
corrupt, not to cheat over weight or measure. Egypt also developed the
concept of human dignity: 'do not use violence to men ... they were
born from the eyes of Ra, they are his issue'; in one of the celebrated
tales in the Westcar Papyrus, a magician refuses to carry out a dangerous
experiment on a prisoner 'for it is forbidden so to behave towards God's
flock'.
The picture of the ideal order presented by the official ideology corresponded,
all things considered, to that presented by the country when,
26. E. Otto, pp. 93-108.
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