School of thought
Egyptian Thought
Tradition
Classification
- Period
- c. 3000-300 BCE
- Regions
- Africa (origin)
- Domains
- Metaphysics, Philosophy of Religion
Overview
Ancient Egyptian texts preserve a long-lived corpus of religious thought, wisdom instruction, mortuary literature, and reflection on conduct and order. Ma'at linked truth, justice, right action, and the ordered world, while instructions and funerary texts addressed social conduct, death, and relations with the divine. Whether this corpus should be called philosophy, wisdom literature, religious thought, or some combination remains a matter of how philosophy is defined across cultures.
Key ideas
- Ma'at: Ma'at joined ideas of truth, justice, right conduct, and cosmic and social order. Egyptian moral instruction framed good action as sustaining that order.
- Personhood and Afterlife: Mortuary texts distinguish the ka, ba, and akh among several aspects of a person. In the judgment scene preserved in Spell 125 of the Book of the Dead, the deceased's heart is weighed against Ma'at.
- Wisdom Literature: The Instruction of Ptahhotep belongs to Egyptian wisdom or didactic literature. It offers practical instruction about speech, restraint, justice, and conduct; calling it philosophy without qualification would prejudge the wider debate over how to classify the corpus.
Key figures
Ptahhotep · Amenemope
Later connections
- Milesians Influenced by this tradition
Egyptian land measurement, redone after each inundation of the Nile, is the practical geometry that ancient sources say Thales met in Egypt and brought back to Greece.
Uncertain: The ancient reports that Thales studied in Egypt are later than the events and partly legendary, so what actually passed from Egyptian practice into Greek inquiry is contested.
References
- Jan Assmann, The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs (Harvard University Press, 2002)
- Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vols. I–III (University of California Press, 1973–1980), including the Instructions of Ptahhotep and Amenemope
- Raymond O. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (British Museum Press, 1985), Spell 125
- Jan Assmann, The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs (2002), part I, The Old Kingdom, especially The Beginnings — Formation: pharaonic state formation, royal ideology and textual culture in the Nile valley.
- The Egyptian Book of the Dead — Raymond O. Faulkner (trans.)
- Ancient Egyptian Literature — Miriam Lichtheim