MENES OF EGYPT

Comparing Ancient Greece, to which the palm of raising the world’s first philosopher Thales belongs, to the much-much more ancient Egypt, although credited as being the first to invent the art of writing around 4000 BC, indispensable to the development of human civilization, yet not producing a single philosopher in more than six thousand years of its own history, one is greatly tempted to call Greece, in the spirit of this section’s title, the nation of the first geniuses, and Egypt, on the other hand, the nation of the first schoolmen. Here is the key argument made by Bertrand Russell to that effect, in the first chapter of his History of Western Philosophy:

“Much of what makes civilization had already existed for thousands of years in Egypt and in Mesopotamia and had spread thence to neighboring countries. But certain elements had been lacking, until the Greeks supplied them… They invented mathematics (Arithmetic and some geometry existed among the Egyptians and the Babylonians, mainly in the form of rules of thumb. Deductive reasoning was a Greek innovation.), and science, and philosophy; they first wrote history, as opposed to mere annals; they speculated freely on the nature of the world and the ends of life without being bound in the fetters of any inherited orthodoxy.”

This is, of course, the generally accepted view of the difference between the Greeks and their predecessors, but it would be still unfair to deny the Egyptians their own distinctive genius. And there should be no doubt that Menes, “the first man who became king of Egypt” (in the words of Herodotus), and the first “historical” man we know of, was a true man of genius, well worthy of his legend.

A great hero who becomes a legend for eternity or is made into a god cannot just die from some debilitating sickness or even from a senile old age. When he dies from human hand, that hand has been guided by gods, be that Achilles, struck by an Apollo-guided arrow, or Siegmund, defeated by Wotan, etc. Empedocles, the splendid philosopher and an equally great conman created for himself the legend of dying consumed by the flames of Etna. There are many other Heldentod stories of course, where the hero’s end is more traditional, but this pattern of a non-conventional manner of death has also been established beyond any doubt.

Death by the forces of nature is therefore one of the familiar motifs in many heroic tales. No wonder, then, that the earliest hero in recorded history had to die in such a manner. Indeed, an old historical legend does tell us that Egypt’s first known by name king Menes (Min to Herodotus, Narmer to some other historians), who ruled Egypt for sixty-two long years, died at a remarkably old age, killed by… an angry rhinoceros!

According to the Britannica, and to a number of other reasonably authoritative sources, Menes floruit circa 3100 BC. However, Donald Lateiner, in the 2004 Barnes & Noble Edition of Herodotus, gives us this date as 3400 BC, bringing it even closer to the year 3760 BC, which is of course the year of Creation, according to the “Judaeo-Christian” calendar. The fact of such a discrepancy is by no means surprising, though. Fluctuations of up to three thousand years are common even among the most respectable Egyptologists, while a number of chronologists are putting the beginning of history in Egypt firmly after the Biblical Great Flood (2348 BC?!), thus comforting the Judaeo-Christian fundamentalists. For more on these things, please, refer to my entry titled Where History Begins, currently placed in the From Acorn To Oak section, to be posted later.

Menes is the first historical figure of antiquity known to us by a name, the Founder of the First Dynasty of Egypt, the Uniter of the Lower and Upper Egypts, the Builder of Egypt’s ancient capital of Memphis (for which historical purpose, according to Herodotus, he ventured to alter the natural course of the Nile!), and, generally-speaking, the Creator of the whole ancient Egyptian Civilization, as we know it. Apparently, the first unification of Egypt, credibly attributed to Menes, had become such a singular event in world history, when we can thus pinpoint this birth of a great civilization to the workings of one man, “bestriding [Time], like a Colossus,” paraphrasing Shakespeare, with one foot grounded in world’s prehistory, while with the other, in recorded history of all human civilization.

In this respect, the palm of historical primacy belongs to Egypt with its Menes, rather than to Mesopotamia with Sargon, or to the Minoans, on the Island of Crete, solely by virtue of the glorious mystery surrounding their being, or to the otherwise undistinguished Phrygians, who according to Herodotus were declared to be the first of men by virtue of a test in which a Phrygian and an Egyptian child left to themselves, without any tutoring, “spontaneously generated” the word bekos, bread, in Phrygian, rather than in the Egyptian tongue. It is not on account of such spurious nameless legends that we make our judgment of history, but because of human geniuses, even if legendary, whom we are able to identify--and thus to identify with--just because, like with Menes, we know them by name.

…With the Egyptian series begins my subsection Rulers Of Genius, and Egypt occupies an important place in my heart. I’ve been to Egypt, I’ve breathed in the dust of its soil and the pure air of its ancient Pyramids. Egypt was never a third-world country to me. My old good friends Youssef El-Sebai, Mohamed Heikal and Dr. Louis Awad were all topnotch intellectuals, and remembering Egypt I always remember them…

I am naturally aware that the ethnic composition of modern Egypt is different from that of old times. But it is not only such heredity that defines a nation. It is also the particular soil that feeds it, the special air which fills its lungs, the primordial great rivers which flow through it. Modern Egypt in that physical sense is the only authentic reincarnation of Ancient Egypt, and it must be proud of its great history and try to live up to it with dignity. Egypt has a very big role to play in the tortured region where it is situated, and in the world at large. And it is historically entitled to play such a role. My Egyptian friends always wanted that for their country, and today’s Egypt owes that to them.

Nobody’s fool, nobody’s slave, nobody’s mindless follower, but a healer of internecine insanity and maker of peace… I wish Egypt well, and hope that it measures up to its historical past as an erstwhile flourishing center of Islamic culture, before then, the greatest center of Hellenistic culture, still before, the birthplace of the Pyramids, and ultimately the place where Menes The Uniter lived, and where history began.