Ancient India and Egypt were the oldest group of nations. The Egyptian Pyramids antedate the upheaval of the Sahara and other deserts. But there is no comparison between the Egypt of old, with its perfection of art, science, and religion, its glorious cities and monuments, its swarming The Egyptian art of writing was perfect and complete from the very first. It was used as early as the days of Menes, the protomonarch. Before Greece came into existence, the arts, with the Egyptians, were already ripe and old. Ancient Greece owes everything to Egypt. The Greeks learned all they knew, including the sacred services of the temple, from the Egyptians and, because of that, their principal temples were consecrated to Egyptian divinities. Orpheus was a disciple of Moses. Pythagoras, Herodotus, and Plato owe their philosophy to the same temples in which the wise Solon was instructed by the priests. If Chaldea, Assyria, and Babylon presented stupendous and venerable antiquities reaching far back into the night of time, Persia was not without her wonders of a later date. The Persian Empire was truly the garden of the world. Ecbatana, the cool summer retreat of the Persian Kings, was defended by seven encircling walls of hewn and polished blocks, the interior ones in succession of increasing height, and of different colours, in astrological accordance with the seven planets. The sublime profundity of the Magian precepts is beyond the reach of modern materialistic thought. Even the much admired Etruscan paintings and decorative borders, found on Greek vases, were but copies from Egyptian vases. Their figures can be seen on the walls of a tomb of the age of Amenhotep I, a period at which Greece was not even in existence. Egypt, grown grey in her wisdom, was so secure of her acquirements that she did not invite admiration and cared no more for the opinion of the flippant Greek than we do today for that of a Fiji islander. For she was much older and grander than Greece. The Egyptian Zodiac is at least 75 millennia old; the Greek, 17 millennia old. Egypt pressed her own grapes, made wine, and brewed her own beer. The superiority of the Egyptian lyre over the Grecian is an admitted fact. Pythagoras learned music in Egypt and made a regular science of it in Italy. The lyre, harp, and flute were used for sacred concerts; for festive occasions they had the guitar, the single and double pipes, and castanets; for troops, and during military service, they had trumpets, tambourines, drums, and cymbals. Amenoph II, who reigned at Thebes long before the Trojan war, is represented as playing chess with the queen. In India the game is known to have been played at least 5,000 years ago. The Egyptians had their dentists and ophthalmologists, and no doctor was allowed to practice more than one specialty. Phoenician sails whitened the Indian Ocean, as well as the Norwegian fiords. The Phœnicians were the earliest navigators of the world; they were Cyclopes, a one-eyed race of giants; they founded most of the colonies of the Mediterranean, and visited the Arctic regions, whence they brought accounts of eternal days without a night, which Homer has preserved for us in the Odyssey. Homer’s Odyssey surpasses in fantastic nonsense all the tales of the Arabian Nights combined; nevertheless, many of his myths are now proved to be something else besides the creation of the old poet’s fancy. Bel and the Dragon, Apollo and Python, Osiris and Typhon are all one and the same, and have travelled far and wide. The religious customs of the Mexicans, Peruvians, and other American races are identical with those of the ancient Phœnicians, Babylonians, and Egyptians. There was a time when Asia, Europe, Africa, and America were covered with the temples sacred to the Sun and the Dragons. It is true that the Phœnicians represented the Sun under the image of a Dragon; but so did all the other people who symbolized their Sun-gods. Initiatory rites and ceremonies were performed in crypts, catacombs, and temples interlinked by subterranean passages running in every direction. The perfect identity of rites, ceremonies, traditions, and even the names of deities, among Mexicans, Babylonians, and Egyptians, is ample proof of pre-historic South America being peopled by a colony which mysteriously found its way across the Atlantic. We believe the story of the Atlantis to be no fable, and maintain that at different epochs of the past huge islands, and even continents, existed where now there is but a wild waste of waters. At a remote epoch a traveller could traverse what is now the Atlantic Ocean, almost the entire distance by land, crossing in boats from one island to another, where narrow straits then existed. There never was, nor can there be, more than one universal religion. The Aztecs resembled the ancient Egyptians in civilization and refinement. Among both peoples magic, or the arcane natural philosophy, was cultivated to the highest degree. All ancient religious monuments, in whatever land, are the expression of the same identical thought, the key to which is in the Esoteric Doctrine. The grandiose Hindu ruins of Ellora in the Dekkan, the Mexican Chichén-Itzá in Yucatán, and the still grander ruins of Copán in Guatemala, were built by peoples moved by the same religious ideas, and who had reached an equal level of highest civilization in arts and sciences. The ruins of the past Egyptian splendour deserve no higher eulogium than those of Siam. If the same workmen did not lay the courses in both countries we must at least think that the secret of this matchless wall-building was equally known to the architects of every land. Nagkon-Wat is grander than anything left to us by Athens or Rome. On its sculptured walls there are several repetitions of Dagon, the man-fish of the Babylonians, of the Kabeirian gods of Samothrace, as well as of the reputed father of the Kabeiroi, Vulcan, with his bolts and implements. In another place we find Vulcan, recognizable by his hammer and pincers, but under the shape of a monkey, as usually represented by the Egyptians. The Ramayana itself, the famous epic poem, is but the original of Homer’s Iliad. The beautiful Paris, carrying off Helen, looks very much like Ravana, king of the giants, eloping with Sita, Rama’s wife. Herodotus assures us that the Trojan heroes and gods date in Greece only from the days of the Iliad. In such a case even Hanuman, the monkey-god, would be but Vulcan in disguise. Many historians claim that the Jews were similar or identical with the ancient Phœnicians, however, the latter were beyond any doubt an Æthiopian race. If the Jews were in the twilight of history Phœnicians, the latter may be traced to the nations who used the old Sanskrit language. All ancient temples and buildings belong to the age of Hermes Trismegistus. And however comparatively modern or ancient the temples may seem, their mathematical proportions correspond perfectly with the Egyptian religious edifices. The cold, stony lips of the once vocal Memnon, and of these hardy sphinxes, keep their secrets well. Who will unseal them? Who of our modern, materialistic dwarfs and unbelieving Sadducees will dare to lift the Veil of Isis? The Babylonian Nebo, the Thoth of Memphis, the Greek Hermes, were all gods of Esoteric Wisdom. Ammonius Saccas declared that all moral and practical wisdom was contained in the Books of Thoth-Hermes Trismegistus. Thoth means a college, school, or assembly, and the works of that name were identical with the doctrines of the sages of the far East. Thoth-Hermes, therefore, never was the name of a man, but a generic title. It is the Voice of Egypt’s Great Hierophants that speaks. Even in the time of Plato, Hermes was already identified with the Thoth of the Egyptians. But in reality Thoth-Hermes is simply the personification of the sacred teachings of Egypt’s sacerdotal caste. The first hour for the disappearance of the Mysteries struck on the clock of the Races with the Macedonian Conqueror. The Adepts of Egypt were then compelled to recede further and further from the laurels of conquest into the most hidden spots of the globe. And her sacred Scribes and Hierophants became wanderers upon the face of the earth. A dire prophecy about today’s Egypt, from a passage from the Asclepian Dialogue ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus: “Egypt shall be forsaken when divinity returns back from earth to heaven.”

"The ancient Egyptians were the first geographical planners to develop a system establishing an image of heaven on earth. This book completes ten years of research into how the Pyramid Field depicts The Constellation of Horus, the deity who bore the meaning of power and invincibility and who guarded the Pharaoh. Rather than randomly pick certain pyramids, Zitman is the first scholar able to make sense of the entire era of pyramid building. Is this depiction of Heaven on Earth an inheritance of the mythical Followers of Horus, who were said to rule Egyptian in Predynastic times? Zitman reveals how time and space were perceived by the Egyptians as sacred ingredients, and that they mixed into a divine master plan, which for the first time is unveiled in its entirety. The precision (of the Egyptians) was amazing by any standards, and there is no doubt that the Pyramids were astronomically designed." -- Patrick Moore.

First English-language edition, with revisions and additions by the author.This classic work by one of the world's most distinguished Egyptologists was first published in German in 1984. The Search for God in Ancient Egypt offers a distillation of Jan Assmann's views on ancient Egyptian religion, with special emphasis on theology and piety. Deeply rooted in the texts of ancient Egypt and thoroughly informed by comparative religion, theology, anthropology, and semiotic analysis, Assmann's interpretations reveal the complexity of Egyptian thought in a new way.Assmann takes special care to distinguish between the "implicit" theology of Egyptian polytheism and the "explicit" theology that is concerned with exploring the problem of the divine. His discussion of polytheism and mythology addresses aspects of ritual, the universe, and myth; his consideration of explicit theology deals with theodicy and the specifics of Amarna religion.

Sage, scientist, and sorcerer, Hermes Trismegistus was the culture-hero of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. A human (according to some) who had lived about the time of Moses, but now indisputably a god, he was credited with the authorship of numerous books on magic and the supernatural, alchemy, astrology, theology, and philosophy. Until the early seventeenth century, few doubted the attribution. Even when unmasked, Hermes remained a byword for the arcane. Historians of ancient philosophy have puzzled much over the origins of his mystical teachings; but this is the first investigation of the Hermetic milieu by a social historian. Starting from the complex fusions and tensions that molded Graeco-Egyptian culture, and in particular Hermetism, during the centuries after Alexander, Garth Fowden goes on to argue that the technical and philosophical Hermetica, apparently so different, might be seen as aspects of a single "way of Hermes." This assumption that philosophy and religion, even cult, bring one eventually to the same goal was typically late antique, and guaranteed the Hermetica a far-flung readership, even among Christians. The focus and conclusion of this study is an assault on the problem of the social milieu of Hermetism.

Exposes the secret world order's true purpose and how it has affected the United States.

A sweeping history of how writing has preserved cultural practices, traditions, and knowledge throughout human history. In How Writing Made Us Human, 3000 BCE to Now, Walter Stephens condenses the massive history of the written word into an accessible, engaging narrative. The history of writing is not merely a record of technical innovations—from hieroglyphics to computers—but something far richer: a chronicle of emotional engagement with written culture whose long arc intimates why the humanities are crucial to society. For five millennia, myths and legends provided fascinating explanations for the origins and uses of writing. These stories overflowed with enthusiasm about fabled personalities (both human and divine) and their adventures with capturing speech and preserving memory. Stories recounted how and why an ancient Sumerian king, a contemporary of Gilgamesh, invented the cuneiform writing system—or alternatively, how the earliest Mesopotamians learned everything from a hybrid man-fish. For centuries, Jews and Christians debated whether Moses or God first wrote the Ten Commandments. Throughout history, some myths of writing were literary fictions. Plato's tale of Atlantis supposedly emerged from a vast Egyptian archive of world history. Dante's vision of God as one infinite book inspired Borges's fantasy of the cosmos as a limitless library, while the nineteenth century bequeathed Mary Shelley's apocalyptic tale of a world left with innumerable books but only one surviving reader. Stephens presents a comprehensive history of the written word and demonstrates how writing has preserved and shaped human life since the Bronze Age. These stories, their creators, and their preservation have inspired wonder and an endless appetite for historical revelation.

The Hermetica are a body of theological-philosophical texts written in late antiquity, but long believed to be much older. Their supposed author, Hermes Trismegistus, was thought to be a contemporary of Moses, and the Hermetic philosophy was regarded as an ancient theology, parallel to the received wisdom of the Bible. This first English translation based on reliable texts, together with Brian P. Copenhaver's comprehensive introduction, provide an indispensable resource to scholars in ancient philosophy and religion, early Christianity, Renaissance literature, and history, the history of science, and the occultist tradition in which the Hermetica have become canonical texts.