The Egyptian Conception of Immortality: The Ingersoll Lecture, 1911Reisner, George Andrew
Religion
The Egyptian Conception of Immortality: The Ingersoll Lecture, 1911
Reisner, George Andrew
Eschatology, Egyptian; Immortality
The racial connection of the Egyptians may seem to have little to
do with immortality. But I beg a moment's consideration. The two
great dominating ideas of immortality are those held by the
Christians and by the Mohammedans, and these are essentially the
same idea. Both these religions are creations of the Semitic
race. It is, therefore, decidedly of importance to find that the
Egyptian race, the creator of a third great religion, has also a
large Semitic strain. In fact, the investigations of the last ten
years appear to show that this Semitic strain it was which gave
the Egyptian race its creative power and made possible the
development of the Egyptian civilization.
The Egyptian language furnishes us with indisputable proof of the
Semitic affinity, as Professor Adolf Erman showed years ago. The
anatomical examination by Professor Elliot Smith of a large
number of skeletons, dated by careful excavations, has given us a
further clue. There is a prehistoric race found in the earliest
cemeteries--neither Negroid nor Asiatic in characteristics. In
the late predynastic and the early dynastic periods, when the
great development began, this primitive race had become modified
by an infiltration of broad-headed people from the north. In the
Old Empire, this broad-headed people had become predominant, and
remain so throughout all Lower and Middle Egypt until the present
day. This intruding race, whose advent marks the beginning of
Egyptian civilization, I believe to have been Semitic.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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