The earliest cosmologies Author:William Fairfield Warren Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER V THE EGYPTIAN UNIVERSE In the year 1888 an eminent Egyptologist published in France and in America his conception of the world-view of the ancient... more » dwellers upon the Nile. Finding it clearer and more confidently set forth than any I had previously seen, I immediately made it, and the criticisms to which at the time I considered it open, the subject-matter of a lecture. This was given before a class of graduate students in Boston University early in 1889. In the "Outline" sheets distributed to the auditors illustrative diagrams were inserted. From the outline then used the following paragraphs are a verbatim extract: The cosmology of the Egyptians has received almost no attention at the hands of professed Egyptologists. No treatise on the subject has yet been published. In a number of articles on other subjects Maspero has incidentally set forth the opinion that the Egyptians considered the form of the earth to be that of a flat oblong quadrangular slab with Egypt in its center.! At each of the four corners there was an incredibly high post, forked at the top; these four pillars supported an immense "slab of iron" which constituted the firmament of heaven. Above this was a celestial ocean, the source of rain. The setting sun in returning to the east was not supposed to pass under the earth-slab noryet over the heaven-slab, but to slip through a hole in the mountain of the sunset; and embarking on a horizontal river to float between two parallel semicircular mountain ranges which extend on the same general level as the earth-slab from the west point of the horizon round beyond the north point to the east point. This nocturnal voyage required twelve hours, during which time the sun was neither above nor beneath either heaven or earth, but in Douaout,1 a region of dar...« less