Before Philosophy [antikvár]

This book is an attempt to understand the view which theancient peoples of Egypt and Mesopotamia took of the worldin which they lived. They were the most civilized people oftheir time; and they have left us a rich and varied literaturewhich has been deciphered to a large extent during the lasthundred years. But the modern reader, confronted with thetranslations, will in most cases feel that the deeper meaningeludes him. This is true even of many texts dealing with thenorms of human behaviour - the so-called "wisdom literature'of which the books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in the OldTestament are familiar examples. It is certainly true of the greatofficial inscriptions in which rulers define their task or recordtheir achievements. And it is most conspicuously true of thosewritings which claim to elucidate the nature of the universe.For these assume throughout the form of myths, and the med-ley of tales about gods seem to lack a common viewpointaltogether.Yet nothing is more misleading (though nothing is morecommon) than a piecemeal interpretation of myths, based onthe tacit assumption that the Ancients were preoccupied withproblems very similar to ours, and that their myths representa charming but immature way of answering them. We havetried to show in our first chapter that such an assumptionsimply ignores the gulf which separates our habits of thought,our modes of experience, from those remote civilizations, evenin cases where man faced perennial problems: the problem ofman in nature, the problem of fate, the problem of death. Wehave attempted to penetrate into this alien world of 'mytho-poeic' - myth-making - thought and to analyse its peculiarlogic, its imaginative and its emotional character. The readermay find this first chapter the most difficult to follow and hemay prefer to read it after the main sections of the book, inwhich the myths and beliefs of Egyptians and Mesopotamiansare concretely described.