Vedas and ancient Egypt

Through the Vedas we can reclaim the spiritual heritage of the

entire ancient world that can help take us beyond the current
materialistic culture and the many problems it continues to bring
us.

THE VEDAS represent a monumental spiritual literature, by far the

largest, that remains from the ancient world. We could therefore call the
Vedas, `the pyramids of the ancient mind.' The Vedas are the oldest
record of the great dharmic traditions of the East, with not only the Hindu
but also Buddhist, Jain, Sikh and Zoroastrian traditions part of the same
greater stream of spiritual striving. Apart from the biblical tradition, this
dharmic or Indic tradition is one of the two dominant streams of world
spirituality that has endured throughout the centuries and remains vital to
the present day, as the global popularity of Yoga, Vedanta and Buddhism
clearly reveals.

If we look at the Vedic tradition, we see that it was based upon an ancient
priestly order that was extensive and sophisticated, comparable to the
priestly orders of ancient Egypt or Babylonia. This priestly order was
concerned not merely with rituals but also with spirituality, yoga,
philosophy, medicine, astronomy and architecture that form the basis of
the various Upavedas and Vedangas.

This spiritual culture of ancient India can easily be compared with that of
ancient Egypt, which was similarly guided by extensive priestly orders,
their sophisticated rituals and an emphasis of mysticism and magic. As
ancient Egypt was arguably the spiritual centre of the West in the ancient
world, so India can be said to be the spiritual centre of the ancient East.

The Greek bias

One of the main mistakes that western scholars have made is to approach
Vedic civilisation using ancient Greece as their starting off point. They
look at the Vedas like the works of Homer, reflecting traditions like the
Greeks who only came on the scene during the late ancient period (after
1500 BCE). They view the Vedic people like the ancient Greeks as
mainly a warrior people, on the move, as part of various proposed Aryan
invasions/migrations of the time. They place Vedic culture in the mould
of the type of primitive tribal Indo-European culture much like what they
propose was at the root of Greek civilisation. The Western date of 1500
BCE for the Vedas was made to parallel their 1500 BCE date for the early
Greeks (though biblical constraints also entered into the picture).

However, Homer and the oldest Greek literature of the Iliad and the
Odyssey at best resemble Hindu epics like the Mahabharata that came at
the end of the Vedic period (but without the same depth of Vedantic
thought or a dominant guru figure like Krishna). The Homeric model was
of a less spiritual and more recent culture to which the materialistic
western civilisation could comfortably trace itself. It did not reflect a
mystic, rishi or yogi culture like that of the Vedas or that of ancient
Egypt.

Along with this mistake, western scholars have tried to use language as
the determinative factor for judging ancient cultures — as if groups that
spoke languages belonging to the same language family must possess a
similar or contemporaneous culture as well. However, we should note
that language families have persisted through various historical ages and
different types of cultures. For example, we cannot make medieval
Russian and ancient Persian contemporaneous or similar in civilisation
because of some linguistic affinities. On the other hand, cultures of the
same time period have similar civilisations in spite of language
differences. The ancient Romans, for example, had much in common
culturally with the Carthaginians who had a similar life-style and lived in
the same part of the world, in spite of speaking languages that did not
belong to the same family.

Therefore, we must look at the Vedas according to the cultural affinities

of ancient civilisations, not merely according to linguistic affinities. As a
type of spiritual/priestly culture, Vedic civilisation resembles more that of
earlier Egypt or Babylonia than that of Greece.

The Greeks, though speaking a language with affinities with Vedic

Sanskrit, represented a later ancient culture already moving away from
the spiritual and hieratic civilisations of the early ancient world.

A re-evaluation

Western scholars invented the term `henotheism' to describe how any one
of the many Vedic Gods could represent all the Gods (a situation that
prevails among the Puranic Gods as well). We should note that they used
the same term for the ancient Egyptian religion which had a similar view
of multiplicity in unity among its many Gods. The Vedic and Egyptian
Sun Gods follow the same model of henotheism, being both the One God
in essence and many different Gods in function.
Many symbols are common to ancient Egypt and India including the
worship of the Sun and Sun kings, the sacred bull, the hawk or falcon,
and the seeking of immortality as the main goal of life. Indeed the Vedic
ritual of the Yajur Veda reflects a similar spirit to the Egyptian Book of
the Dead. Like the Vedic, the Egyptians not only had a love of magic and
the occult, but with their symbols like the cobra at the crown of the head,
suggest a knowledge of Yoga as well. Yet such connections have been
ignored because they are cultural rather than linguistic in basis.

Egyptian culture endured from before 3000 BCE down to the early
Christian era. Isis and Osiris were worshipped in Rome as well as in the
Old Kingdom of Egypt. Similarly, Vedic deities need not be limited to the
later eras in which they are still mentioned. Their worship could easily
extend back to the 3000 BCE date that we commonly find in Puranic
texts as marking the beginning of the Kali Yuga.

The archaeological record of India is of a monumental civilisation that

persisted from 3000 BCE, if not earlier, not only into the late ancient era,
like Egypt, but with a modified continuity up to the present day. In India
today we find the same types of rituals and temple worship still being
practised as once occurred in ancient Egypt and Babylonia. That this type
of spiritual ancient civilisation has survived only in India suggests how
deep seated and original it must have been in the country.

While ancient India did not leave monuments like the pyramids of Egypt,
it did leave extensive urban remains and its great Vedic literature, its
pyramids of the mind. Connecting the monumental spiritual literature of
the Vedas, not only with the great urban civilisation of ancient India, but
with a similar spiritual civilisational model as ancient Egypt, will provide
us with a better approach to the Vedas that can help unravel their spiritual
secrets. Through the Vedas we can reclaim the spiritual heritage of the
entire ancient world that can help take us beyond the current materialistic
culture and the many problems it continues to bring us.

DAVID FRAWLEY