ORGni I go back to Egypt I am fascinated but also restless by what remains of that remote civilization. Ancient Egypt was not an empire, such as the axial or the Persian one. The Egyptians did not conquer the known world, unlike Alessandro Magno and Giulio Cesare. They did not expand throughout the Mediterranean, as the Arabs and the Ottomans will do.
They certainly fought wars, but above all defensive. Their legacy is in civilization and art. But almost everything that remains is linked to death, and to the afterlife. The Colosseum is an amphitheater built for the people, the Pantheon a temple erected in honor of every divinity.
The pyramids are tombs, as are the ones dug in the rock of the Valley of the kings and wonderfully decorated. What we know from the Egyptian world is linked to death and rites to guarantee immortality. And hope in a future life is linked to the woman.
Aldo Cazzullo (photo by Carlo Vangi Gilbert).
Even in the Egyptian imagination, as in the Roman one and as in the Bible, there is a fratricide: Seth kills Osiris and does it to pieces. But his wife Isis recomposes the fragments of the beloved body and returns life to him, albeit in the afterlife.
The Egyptian goddess Taweret, protector of the puerous and children (Courtesy Egyptian Museum of Turin).
The hippopotamus, very aggressive animal, is considered evil, when it is male, and good, when she is female. There is a divinity, Taweretdepicted like a female hippopotamus, with breasts and belly, because it is pregnant; It is no coincidence that it is the protector of the puerous.
To remain pregnant, athor, goddess of sex, beauty and motherhood, was prayed: on his temple, in Dendera, the figure of Cleopatra and the son who had from Julius Caesar, Cesarione, removed from the middle with his father, is carved.
While Sekhmet, head of lioness, is the goddess of war but also of healingthat the Egyptians played as a struggle against the disease. Since then many things have changed, but the idea of the woman who saves mankind is the basis of the history of thought, until the Divine comedy.
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