What is Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World about?
Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World is Gerald Massey’s last book, published in London in 1907, the year he died. In two volumes and more than 900 pages, its twelve Books argue that the world’s signs, myths and religions, and much of the Bible, grew out of the picture-language and star-lore of ancient Egypt, and before Egypt of inner Africa. Massey called it the work that had made his life worth living. Scholars today do not accept its central claims.
Massey’s argument in plain words: Massey argues that the first signs were taken from nature: animals, the stars, the yearly Nile flood. Egypt, in his reading, kept the fullest record of them, in its myths and in the Book of the Dead. Peoples who borrowed the myths but lost their meaning came to read them as history, and so, he says, Egyptian stories of the sky and the world below became the creation and the flood of Genesis, the Exodus and the gospel story of Jesus. The title sums up his claim that Egypt was the light of the world.
Books I to IV: signs, gods, the dead: Book I, Sign-Language and Mythology as Primitive Modes of Representation: how the first symbols were made, with animals as signs of nature’s powers. Book II, Totemism, Tattoo and Fetishism as Forms of Sign-Language: totems, body marks and charms. Book III, Elemental and Ancestral Spirits, or the Gods and the Glorified: where the gods came from, first the powers of nature, then the spirits of the dead. Book IV, Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Mysteries of Amenta: the Book of the Dead and the journey through the world below.
Books V to VIII: sky and scripture: Book V, The Sign-Language of Astronomical Mythology: the night sky as the first picture-book. Book VI, Part II of the same: the two horizons, the making of the world below, and the mount of glory at the summit of the sky. Book VII, Egyptian Wisdom and the Hebrew Genesis: Egypt behind the garden, the serpent and the fall. Book VIII, The Egyptian Wisdom in Other Jewish Writings: Egypt in the Psalms, Job and the prophets.
Books IX to XII, and the appendix: Book IX, The Ark, the Deluge, and the World’s Great Year: flood stories read as changes in the sky. Book X, The Exodus from Egypt and the Desert of Amenta: the Exodus as a journey of the soul. Book XI, Egyptian Wisdom in the Revelation of John the Divine: Egypt behind the Book of Revelation. Book XII, The Jesus-Legend Traced in Egypt for Ten Thousand Years, the longest Book: Horus and the story of Jesus. An appendix lists 270 Egyptian and Christian parallels.
What scholars say now: Egyptologists, linguists and historians of religion do not accept the book’s central claims. Scholars see similar myths arising in many places, not from one source, and linguists do not accept his links between words by their sound. Biblical scholars relate the flood of Genesis to older stories from Mesopotamia, and read the Gospels as first-century writings from a Jewish setting. The zodiac he reads in Books V and VI reached Egypt from Babylonia only in the last centuries BCE. His accounts of the Egyptian myths themselves are often recognisable.
In Massey’s words: “Thus it is provable and will be proved that “biblical history” has been mainly derived from misappropriated and misinterpreted mythology, and that the mythology is demonstrably Egyptian which can only be explained in accordance with the Egyptian wisdom.” (Gerald Massey, Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World (1907), Book X, p. 640)
In the app: Library › Book I. In the app, the Library holds the whole work, his preface, all twelve Books and his appendix, with a note in plain words under every part of the Books, beginning with Book I.