EMERSON IN EGYPT

“Philae and Parnassus” “On October 23, 1872, he sailed with Ellen for England, the Continent, and Egypt… After seeing Alexandria and Cairo, they set off by boat up the Nile. He found it ‘a wonderful country, but easily seen. Egypt is practically nothing but a strip of land, only a green ribbon on either side of the Nile, but 520 miles long.’ Emerson found it humiliating not to know the language. Egypt put questions to which he had no answers. ‘The sphinxes scorn dunces,’ he wrote in his journal. He was more interested in the organic foundation of Egyptian forms. ‘The lateen sail is the shadow of a pyramid: and the pyramid is the simplest copy of a mountain, or of the form from which a pile of sand or earth takes when dropped from a cart.”… “The traditional goal of a trip to Egypt was the island of Philae, the jewel of the Nile, situated near Aswan, where the Nile widens at the first cataract. The point marks the edge of ancient Egypt, and the beginning of ancient Nubia, now Sudan. Philae was a small island, less than a thousand feet long, and five hundred feet wide. The Italian explorer, Belzoni said it contained ‘the most superb group of ruins I have ever beheld together in so small a space of ground.’ The temple of Isis at Philae was the last place where the ancient Egyptian religion had been practiced until it was closed down by Justinian in the sixth century A.D. “Emerson always associated Philae with the tomb of Osiris. He knew from Plutarch that Isis had opened the coffin of Osiris and that Osiris’ body had been torn apart and scattered. Isis later buried the pieces bit by bit as she found them. Emerson was really attracted to Egypt by the wish to see the tomb of ‘him who lies buried at Philae,’ his son noted.” pp.568-9, EMERSON: THE MIND ON FIRE by Robert D. Richardson, Jr. (1995)