Table Of ContentEGYPT
WALDEN: With a little more deliberation in the choice of their PEOPLE OF
pursuits, all men would perhaps become students and observers,
WALDEN
for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all
alike. In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity,
in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are
mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear
no change nor accident. The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher
raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and
still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh
a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold,
and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust has settled
on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was
revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is
improvable, is neither past, present, nor future.
ISIS
EGYPT
WALDEN: The religion and civilization which are barbaric and PEOPLE OF
heathenish build splendid temples; but what you might call
WALDEN
Christianity does not. Most of the stone a nation hammers goes
towards its tomb only. It buries itself alive. As for the
Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the
fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend
their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it
would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile,
and then given his body to the dogs. I might possibly invent some
excuse for them and him, but I have no time for it. As for the
religion and love of art of the builders, it is much the same all
the world over, whether the building be an Egyptian temple or the
United States Bank. It costs more than it comes to. The mainspring
is vanity, assisted by the love of garlic and bread and butter.
Mr. Balcom, a promising young architect, designs it on the back
of his Vitruvius, with hard pencil and ruler, and the job is let
out to Dobson & Sons, stonecutters. When the thirty centuries
begin to look down on it, mankind begin to look up at it. As for
your high towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in
this town who undertook to dig through to China, and he got so
far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles
rattle; but I think that I shall not go out of my way to admire
the hole which he made. Many are concerned about the monuments of
the West and East, –to know who built them. For my part, I should
like to know who in those days did not build them, –who were above
such trifling.
MARCUS VITRUVIUS POLLIO
DE ARCHITECTVRA LIBRI DECEM
EGYPT
HDT WHAT? INDEX
EGYPT EGYPT
WALDEN: But how do the poor minority fare? Perhaps it will be
found, that just in proportion as some have been placed in outward
circumstances above the savage, others have been degraded below
him. The luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence
of another. On the one side is the palace, on the other are the
almshouse and “silent poor”. The myriads who built the pyramids
to be the tombs of the Pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be
were not decently buried themselves. The mason who finishes the
cornice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut not so
good as a wigwam.
EGYPT
A WEEK: The true finish is the work of time, and the use to which
a thing is put. The elements are still polishing the pyramids.
EGYPT
HDT WHAT? INDEX
EGYPT EGYPT
WALDEN: Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not
be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that
fall on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast,
gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company
go, let the bells ring and the children cry, –determined to make
a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream?
Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and
whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows.
Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is
down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it,
looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine
whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the
bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music
they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our
feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and
prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that
alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London,
through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and
state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come
to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality,
and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point
d’appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might
found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a
gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might
know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from
time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a
fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it
were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the
heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal
career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are
really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold
in the extremities; if were are alive, let us go about our
business.
NILOMETER
“HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE” BEING A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR
POINT IN TIME (JUST AS THE PERSPECTIVE IN A PAINTING IS A VIEW
FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN SPACE), TO “LOOK AT THE COURSE OF
HISTORY MORE GENERALLY” WOULD BE TO SACRIFICE PERSPECTIVE
ALTOGETHER. THIS IS FANTASY-LAND, YOU’RE FOOLING YOURSELF.
THERE CANNOT BE ANY SUCH THINGIE, AS SUCH A PERSPECTIVE.
HDT WHAT? INDEX
EGYPT EGYPT
33,000,000 BCE
Aegyptopithecus zeuxis (fossil remains of this early primate would in 1965 be discovered by Dr. Grant E.
Mayer and Dr. Elwyn L. Simons of Yale’s Peabody Museum in the Fayum Depression of Egypt, about 60 miles
south of Cairo, a now semi-arid region which in that period had had seasonal rainfall and had had abundant
subtropical vegetation).
“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION,
THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Egypt
HDT WHAT? INDEX
EGYPT EGYPT
5,300,000 BCE
A channel opened through the Straits of Gibraltar and over a period of several months to several years the
Mediterranean Basin filled from the Atlantic Ocean. The water level rate of rise has been estimated as at times
more than ten meters per day. This would have been the period in which the “delta” of the Nile River began to
form by annual deposit of sediments.
NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Egypt
HDT WHAT? INDEX
EGYPT EGYPT
24,000 BCE
At this point the precession of the planet Earth was such that Polaris was its pole star.
The Earth’s axis precesses (it is like a wobbling top) in a 26,000-year cycle. This cycle known as precession
is caused by the gravitational attraction of the sun and the moon, acting on the fact that the planet Earth is not
quite spherical. In about 14,000 years, Vega (the brightest star in the constellation Lyra) would become the
North Star, and then in another 5,000 years it would be Alpha Cephei (the brightest star in the constellation
Cepheus), and in the time of the Pharaohs of Egypt, the pole star would be Thuban (the brightest star in the
constellation Draco), but at the completion of the entire cycle of 26,000 years –in our current era known as
civilization– it would come to be Polaris again.
ASTRONOMY
THE TASK OF THE HISTORIAN IS TO CREATE HINDSIGHT WHILE
INTERCEPTING ANY ILLUSION OF FORESIGHT. NOTHING A HUMAN CAN
SEE CAN EVER BE SEEN AS IF THROUGH THE EYE OF GOD.
HDT WHAT? INDEX
EGYPT EGYPT
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EGYPT EGYPT
17,000 BCE
Excavations at Wadi Kubbaniya, Nile Valley (Egypt) reveal charred remains of 25 different plants, including
wild nut sedge tubers, acacia seed, cattail rhizomes, and palm fruit.
PLANTS
DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.
Egypt “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project
HDT WHAT? INDEX
EGYPT EGYPT
6,000 BCE
Chufa and the sycamore fig were being domesticated in Egypt.
Jared Diamond’s Domesticated Plant Species
Era Plant Name Place
8,500 BCE pea Southwest Asia
8,500 BCE olive Southwest Asia
8,500 BCE wheat Southwest Asia
by 7,500 BCE millet China
by 7,500 BCE rice China
7,000 BCE eggplant Indus Valley
7,000 BCE sesame Indus Valley
7,000 BCE? sugar cane New Guinea?
7,000 BCE? banana Musa sapientum New Guinea?
6,000 BCE chufa Egypt
6,000 BCE sycamore fig Egypt
6,000-3,500 BCE oats Western Europe
6,000-3,500 BCE poppy Western Europe
HDT WHAT? INDEX
EGYPT EGYPT
5,502 BCE
According to the Egyptian Copts, the Lord created the world (the Egyptian churchmen would arrive at this
because-I-say-so announcement circa 284 CE).
LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD?
— NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES.
LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Egypt
