"The hymn says that in its long -distance voyage each day, for it a mere instant , the sun travels across a distance ...of millions and hundreds of thousands of leagues . Now let's do the math: one league is 10.5 kilometers . So a million leagues is 10,500,000 kilometers, while a hundred thousand leagues is 1, 050,000. According to the text, then , the distance travelled by the sun in the mere instant that a day represents to it, is several million plus hundreds of thousands of kilometers.
"We know that light travels from the sun to the earth, a distance of 150 million kilometers, in eight minutes and 22 seconds. We also know that sunlight takes 5 hours to reach the farthest of the known planets, Pluto. As for the moon, it is just a second distant from the earth, at the speed of light. Such are the enormous distances, crossed in a flash, by the light of the sun.
"Swthi and Hor's hymn to Amon is one of an exceedingly small number of ancient texts to refer to the speed of sunlight . And it uses orders of magnitude that , given the truly astronomical--that is to say, unimaginable--distances involved, seem quite realistic.
"It may be worth recalling here that the ancient Egyptians calculated the size of the earth, whose shape they knew to be spherical , by tracking shadows left by sunlight on earth. They knew the Great Bear. The Great Pyramid is oriented almost exactly true north. Somers Clark and R. Engelbach (1930) thought that the precise orientation might have been by using sightings of the movement of a star, plotting its positions at its rising and setting, then bisecting the angle between the two positions....
"It is also true, turning to Ancient Greece, that philosophers there made it their priority to grasp the entire world of experience in a single comprehensive view. The concept of the Whole (holon) was always of importance in Hellenic philosophy. The cosmos (the word, of course, is Greek) was coterminous with the Whole and outside the Whole there was nothing . Here, on the precise issue of knowledge of the universe, the ancient Egyptians were in a position to say to the Greeks: 'Solon, Solon , you Greeks are perennial infants. Not a single Greek is an Elder.'
What the Egyptian priest meant was that the Greeks of that age , unlike the Egyptians,had no body of thought bequeathed by antiquity, no ancient tradition , no knowledge hallowed by time. In time, the Greeks received much from abroad, especially from the land of the Pharaohs, where people had started out on the adventure of civilization millennia before them.
"Heraclitus of Ephesus (about 540-480 bc) thought that God, known as Harmony, was the eternal principle of an equally eternal universe. The universe was one, since its soul was one. And the ultimate goal of human existence was integration into the universal soul, which was God. There was also the thesis of Plato (428 or 427-348 or 347 bc), according to which the cosmos was born as a work of the Demiurge in his beneficent divinity. Created by the Demiurge , it lasts forever because that is the creator 's wish.
"These are restatements of Egyptian concepts, nothing more. Ra is the soul and consciousness of the universe, a god-universe, eternal , infinite, active as a universal force represented more or less felicitously by various images: Amon the solar ram, Khepri the sacred scarab , Ra the sun, Atum, and so forth . As for the idea of the fusion of the human soul with God after life, it is a recurrent motif in 'The Book of the Dead.'
"To be more explicit , Plato adopted from Pharaonic Egypt the idea of the nature of the universe . The Egyptians thought of the universe as an entity that emerged from 'Nwn' informed with spirit (Atum), and gifted with energy plus a conscious soul (Ra). In similar fashion, Plato endows the universe with a body (soma), penetrated by reason (nous) and gifted with a soul (psyche).
"Borrowings notwithstanding, all speculations of the Greek philosophers fell short, in a manner of speaking, of established ancient Egyptian insights on the speed of solar light and the astronomical scale of distances in the universe. Admittedly, as early as the middle of the 4th century BC , Greek astronomers were already propounding mathematical hypotheses about solar and lunar distances and dimensions. However, the degree of precision was lower than that indicated by the Egyptian text from the time of Amenophis III, who reigned from 1408 to 1372 BC."
P.142-143, 144-145, "The Speed of Light and the Astronomical Distances of the Universe, (Stele 826, British Museum)" AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY: THE PHARAONIC PERIOD 2780-330 B.C. by Theophile Obenga (2004)
Friday, September 23, 2016
AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY, EXCERPT
"The hymn says that in its long -distance voyage each day, for it a mere instant , the sun travels across a distance ...of millions and hundreds of thousands of leagues . Now let's do the math: one league is 10.5 kilometers . So a million leagues is 10,500,000 kilometers, while a hundred thousand leagues is 1, 050,000. According to the text, then , the distance travelled by the sun in the mere instant that a day represents to it, is several million plus hundreds of thousands of kilometers.
"We know that light travels from the sun to the earth, a distance of 150 million kilometers, in eight minutes and 22 seconds. We also know that sunlight takes 5 hours to reach the farthest of the known planets, Pluto. As for the moon, it is just a second distant from the earth, at the speed of light. Such are the enormous distances, crossed in a flash, by the light of the sun.
"Swthi and Hor's hymn to Amon is one of an exceedingly small number of ancient texts to refer to the speed of sunlight . And it uses orders of magnitude that , given the truly astronomical--that is to say, unimaginable--distances involved, seem quite realistic.
"It may be worth recalling here that the ancient Egyptians calculated the size of the earth, whose shape they knew to be spherical , by tracking shadows left by sunlight on earth. They knew the Great Bear. The Great Pyramid is oriented almost exactly true north. Somers Clark and R. Engelbach (1930) thought that the precise orientation might have been by using sightings of the movement of a star, plotting its positions at its rising and setting, then bisecting the angle between the two positions....
"It is also true, turning to Ancient Greece, that philosophers there made it their priority to grasp the entire world of experience in a single comprehensive view. The concept of the Whole (holon) was always of importance in Hellenic philosophy. The cosmos (the word, of course, is Greek) was coterminous with the Whole and outside the Whole there was nothing . Here, on the precise issue of knowledge of the universe, the ancient Egyptians were in a position to say to the Greeks: 'Solon, Solon , you Greeks are perennial infants. Not a single Greek is an Elder.'
What the Egyptian priest meant was that the Greeks of that age , unlike the Egyptians,had no body of thought bequeathed by antiquity, no ancient tradition , no knowledge hallowed by time. In time, the Greeks received much from abroad, especially from the land of the Pharaohs, where people had started out on the adventure of civilization millennia before them.
"Heraclitus of Ephesus (about 540-480 bc) thought that God, known as Harmony, was the eternal principle of an equally eternal universe. The universe was one, since its soul was one. And the ultimate goal of human existence was integration into the universal soul, which was God. There was also the thesis of Plato (428 or 427-348 or 347 bc), according to which the cosmos was born as a work of the Demiurge in his beneficent divinity. Created by the Demiurge , it lasts forever because that is the creator 's wish.
"These are restatements of Egyptian concepts, nothing more. Ra is the soul and consciousness of the universe, a god-universe, eternal , infinite, active as a universal force represented more or less felicitously by various images: Amon the solar ram, Khepri the sacred scarab , Ra the sun, Atum, and so forth . As for the idea of the fusion of the human soul with God after life, it is a recurrent motif in 'The Book of the Dead.'
"To be more explicit , Plato adopted from Pharaonic Egypt the idea of the nature of the universe . The Egyptians thought of the universe as an entity that emerged from 'Nwn' informed with spirit (Atum), and gifted with energy plus a conscious soul (Ra). In similar fashion, Plato endows the universe with a body (soma), penetrated by reason (nous) and gifted with a soul (psyche).
"Borrowings notwithstanding, all speculations of the Greek philosophers fell short, in a manner of speaking, of established ancient Egyptian insights on the speed of solar light and the astronomical scale of distances in the universe. Admittedly, as early as the middle of the 4th century BC , Greek astronomers were already propounding mathematical hypotheses about solar and lunar distances and dimensions. However, the degree of precision was lower than that indicated by the Egyptian text from the time of Amenophis III, who reigned from 1408 to 1372 BC."
P.142-143, 144-145, "The Speed of Light and the Astronomical Distances of the Universe, (Stele 826, British Museum)" AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY: THE PHARAONIC PERIOD 2780-330 B.C. by Theophile Obenga (2004)
