Egyptian and Greek

UNDERSTANDING WORLD CULTURE: Egyptian and Greek
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Understanding World Culture: Egyptian and Greek
Located some 1500 kilometers away from each other are two of the most influential civilizations of the ancient world. One of them has left us unparalleled architectural and spiritual achievements, the other, has brought us discoveries that only the human mind is capable of reaching. These are Egypt and Greece, seats of civilizations in the West – substantially different at first glance, but essentially the same. In this paper, I hope to show the uniqueness of each civilization as well as highlight how their differences may be manifestations of the same archetypal quality.
Describing Egypt
Of all ancient civilizations, Egypt is probably the most recognizable and the most studied. In fact, a separate branch of study that focuses on Egypt’s history, language, literature, religion, architecture and art has been developed. In the United States alone, there are at least 10 universities offering Egyptology as an undergraduate and a graduate course ADDIN CSL_CITATION { "citationItems" : [ { "id" : "ITEM-1", "itemData" : { "URL" : "/egypt/education/egyptology_universities.htm", "accessed" : { "date-parts" : [ [ "2015", "6", "7" ] ] }, "author" : [ { "dropping-particle" : "", "family" : "Hawass", "given" : "Zahi", "non-dropping-particle" : "", "parse-names" : false, "suffix" : "" } ], "container-title" : "Dr. Zahi: The Man with the Hat", "id" : "ITEM-1", "issued" : { "date-parts" : [ [ "2015" ] ] }, "title" : "Where to Study Egyptology", "type" : "webpage" }, "uris" : [ "/documents/?uuid=a5de3428-925c-4f17-908a-f5cbf8fe4146" ] } ], "mendeley" : { "formattedCitation" : "(Hawass, 2015)", "plainTextFormattedCitation" : "(Hawass, 2015)", "previouslyFormattedCitation" : "(Hawass, 2015)" }, "properties" : { "noteIndex" : 0 }, "schema" : "https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json" }(Hawass, 2015).
Founded in 3000 BC, Egypt continues to fascinate even today. Visitors to the Pyramids at Giza still ask how such a structure can be built without the use of modern equipment. Tourists still gape at old papyrus scrolls and wonder how such a material could survive hundreds of years. Students are still in awe at ancient scribes and their capacity to write with the hieroglyph. We have discovered new insights into Egyptian culture through the different mummies found in various locations in Egypt. Perhaps what makes Egypt even more astonishing is that a civilization started there at all.
Surrounded by the hot Sahara Desert, Egypt would not have been able to support huge populations of people if not for the Nile River that provided fresh water daily and dumped fertile soil for agriculture annually. This annual flooding served as the basis for the entire Egyptian culture; its importance immortalized in the now popular Egyptian myth, reproduced in appendix A of this paper. This creation myth gives us an insight to the consciousness of ancient Egyptians and how their very culture developed. Of the many aspects of Egyptian culture, one of the most glaring is th...