01x04 - Egypt: The Habit of Civilization

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Egypt was one of the earliest
of the great civilizations

which arose independently on
Earth 5,000 years ago.

The monuments
the ancient Egyptians left behind,

like this,
the great pyramid of Khufu at Giza,

are still among the most impressive

and the most long-lasting creations
of humanity.

In the pyramid are enshrined

some of the central concerns
of their culture,

concerns shared by all civilizations,

even by the modern West.

But no civilization held them for longer

or more tenaciously

than the ancient Egyptians.

Over the last twenty years,

we in the Western world

have become painfully aware of how

our well-being is inextricably
bound up with that of nature.

And that understanding
has given us a fresh insight

into the psychology of
Egyptian civilization,

their attitude to religious cult,

to rulership, to the afterlife,

and to the idea of

the unchanging stability of the cosmos.

And what more dramatic illustration

can there be in the whole world

than the great pyramid,

and this room in particular,

of the human yearning for immutability,

for the human concern
for life after death?

And the fact that this place
has the power to move us

so much after so many millennia,

whatever culture we come from,

is a testimony, surely, not only to its
grandeur of conception and execution,

marvellous as that is,
but also to the fact

that we still share the impulse
which lies behind it.

And in that sense,

we of the late twentieth century,

for all our modernity,

are still Bronze Age people.

Since ancient times,

the Egyptians have experienced
so many changes,

above all in the triumph of Islam,

that they might appear now
to be cut off forever

from the age of the pharaohs.

But perhaps there is a deeper sense

in which a society's ideals are passed on,

a habit of civilization.

Do you really believe,

wrote the novelist Tofik al-Hakim,

that the thousands of years
that make up Egypt's past

could have vanished
without trace, as if in a dream?

The Nile, said the great Arab traveller
Ibn Abat-Tuta,

surpasses all the rivers of the world

in sweetness of taste,

in length of course, and utility.

The civilization of Egypt,

like those of Iraq, India and China,

drew its life from a river.

But this was a country like no other,

running for six hundred miles
between dunes and cliffs,

a narrow ribbon of blue water
and green fields,

on average only six miles wide.

This geography shaped the civilization,

where the spirit of Iraq was pessimistic,

here, when the Nile flooded each year,

as the ancient said,

the fields laugh, men's faces light up,

and God rejoices in his heart.

From the life-renewing soil
left by the inundation,

the Egyptians drew a cheerful confidence
in humanity.

In the permanence and stability of things,

theirs was an optimistic civilization.

Their civilization grew out of a long
prehistory of culture in the Nile Valley,

the coming together of many small
egalitarian farming communities,

communities sustained as today

by a hardworking peasantry

tilling the soil,

creating an elaborate filigree of
ditches and dikes

to capture the annual flood.

The Aswan High Dam, built in 1970,

may have changed this age-old rhythm,

but today's Egypt still
depends on the tillers,

the fellaheen,

and what the ancients called

the Black Earth.

Not long before 3000 BC,

these local cultures were unified
into a single state,

the first in history.

And here at the very beginning,

there are clues which will determine
the shape of Egyptian civilization,

right down to the Islamic period.

Our search begins in an obscure
little village in Upper Egypt,

called Qom el-Ahmar,
the Red Man.

This was the center of a prehistoric
tribal kingdom,

shrine of a local divinity
called Horus, the Hawk,

hence its Greek name,
Hierochonpolis, Hawk town.

In 1897, two British archaeologists,

Quibel and Green, came here,

looking for the origins of Egypt.

About 20 years ago, the Americans
came back to the same place.

In a field beyond the village,

they made a stunning discovery,

a heap of ceremonial pallets and maceheads

from the ritual stores
of Egypt's first kings,

kings called cobra,
catfish, scorpion, hawk.

So the old kingdom temple

is this whole area here,
the temple of Horus?

Is that right?

Didn't Egypt begin here,
the first kings?

Did any of their fathers
work on those excavations?

Among the finds was
perhaps the most significant object

ever dug up in Egypt.

A slab of black slate two feet long,

cut with scenes commemorating
the deeds of a king called Nama,

whom legend said
was the unifier of Egypt.

Here is the very moment of Nama's triumph.

Wearing the crown of Upper Egypt,

he dashes out the brains of
the c*ptive king of the delta.

Headless enemies lie in rows

before the standards of Horus the Hawk,

and already a superhuman aura
surrounds the king himself,

an aura of divinity.

Ninety years on,
it's very difficult to see any trace

of those momentous discoveries

here in the area where the pallets
and the maceheads were found.

But a year later,

Green made an equally intriguing find

in the same area.

He came across the remains

of a large circular mound

of clean white sand, about 50 yards across

and eight feet high,

enclosed by a sloping sandstone
revetment.

There was evidence of a walkway

leading to some central feature.

Green thought the dating was prehistoric

before the first kings of dynastic Egypt,

and he interpreted the mound

as being a symbolic representation

of the mound of creation itself,

the first island

which had risen out of the seas of chaos

at the beginning of time,

and on which the first life had landed,

the Hawk.

The divine kingship of Horus

would last as long as ancient Egypt itself.

Here in the great temple at Edfu,

that same creation myth

would be expounded in loving detail

for colonial Greek overlords,

nearly three millennia after Nama's day.

It was at the heart of the Egyptian
conception of civilisation.

Every Egyptian temple, then,

was a symbolic representation

of that original mound of creation

with that simple reed shrine

surrounding the perch on which
the Hawk had landed,

which was created at the Hierarchon Palace.

And no matter how big
the temples became in later ages,

the Holy of Holies
were still that simple reed shrine,

depicted here at Edfu,

three thousand years later,

you can make out the line of reeds

surrounding the chamber in which

the image of the Hawk was kept.

The temple was not only, though,

a depiction of the first place,

but of the first time,

the time when the pattern

of a stable society was handed down

to humankind of kingship, law,

religion and ritual,

a pattern which it was believed

would suffice for eternity,

as long as the rituals
were correctly performed.

The universe, then, and civil society

were conceived of as static.

Progress, change, new questions,

new answers were not required

because they were not needed.

And indeed, they wouldn't be needed

until Alexander the Great conquered Egypt

three millennia later.

For the Egyptians, then,

divine kingship

was the guarantee of a stable cosmos.

The same idea can be traced
across the world

from Shang China to Aztec Mexico.

And here at Abydos,
those first kings of Egypt

were buried with immense
brick mortuary temples,

like earthly palaces.

And so the key themes of Egyptian history
were laid down.

Centralized power, royal rituals

and the cult of the dead

intertwined to form the ideology

of the world's first state.

Themes still potent,

even in our own day.

Moving northwards along the Nile,

the narrow valley meets

the green expanse of the delta.

At this strategic point,

close by today's capital, Cairo,

the Horus kings built their royal city,

Memphis.

On the sandstone escarpment

above the flood plain

is the great funeral complex

of the Third Dynasty kings.

Here at Saqqara,

the mud brick architecture of Abydos

was turned into stone.

An immense 200-foot high tomb

of King Jose,

the first of the pyramids.

In a handful of generations,

around 2500 BC,

a series of gifted kings,

Huni, Senefru, Khufu, Khafre,

building bigger and bigger

as each seems to try to outdo

his predecessor,

created the greatest series of

funeral monuments

the world has ever seen.

The most famous, the Giza Pyramids,

are now all but engulfed

by the suburbs of Cairo,

stripped of their polished limestone casing

and plundered for building stone,

but still awesome.

There are many myths

surrounding the building of the pyramids.

The Hollywood epic version had sl*ve gangs

whipped along by tyrannical masters.

But Egypt was not a sl*ve society.

The mass of the workforce was not enslaved.

In a long reign, it was perfectly possible

for a government to mobilize huge-scale

state employment to build such monuments,

using the workforce in the wet season

when the Nile flood left idle hands.

From the graffiti in the quarries,

we could get some idea

of the character of the gangs

who built these pyramids,

the tough g*ng, the boys who stay forever,

Khufu's boys.

But exactly how it was done,

there's very little evidence for.

They must have worked from an enormous ramp

running from the river,

with feeder supports of wooden earth paths

to bring the stones round.

The Greek traveller Herodotus,

who came here in the 450 BC,

said that he was told by tour guides

that it took 20 years

with the gangs of 100,000 men to do it.

The ancient Greeks, with typical cocunus,

called them pyramids

after the triangular cakes

they knew back home.

We can see them now in the light of

the artificial mountains

built by other cultures,

Babylonians, Maya and Aztec.

For all civilizations have sought

validation for their power over the masses

by creating great public symbols.

But more than that,

the dead king is now

a manifestation of the sun god himself.

When the construction job was finished,

the pyramids were covered

with a case of fine tura limestone.

And although most of that has disappeared

over the centuries,

you can see over there,

on Kefran's pyramid,

the top coating is still there.

That's what they looked like.

But what were they for?

They were tombs,

but what did the shape mean?

Well, the pyramid

clearly was what it seems to be,

a staircase

on which the king's spirit

could ascend to heaven

and then go back to his tomb.

And what we're looking at over here

is an image of the rays of the sun god

coming down to earth,

a typical piece of the Egyptian imagination

in which an immaterial concept

is represented in such a material form.

And on winter's days, here in Giza,

you can actually sit here and watch

the sun breaking through the clouds

and falling down at the same angle

as the pyramids.

A stairway to heaven, then,

the rays of the sun on which the king,

nimble and wise, could ascend

to the indestructible stars.

The Egyptians created
the world's first unified state.

In modern terms, it was a provider state,

providing a basic standard of living

to all its people

through control of irrigation,

in return for enormous surpluses

to be spent on tombs, temples and palaces.

Through these great buildings,

it expressed its ideologies of power,

its belief in the indivisibility of

divine and earthly rule,

in the need for a stable cosmos.

Such ideas may have been

essential needs of civilization

at the start.

And yet even today,

almost all of us still live

in nation states with some or all

of those same characteristics.

Our thinking is still shaped

by their religious and social myths,

and especially by the myth of

the great ruler,

king or god.

For it was in his name,

in the Bronze Age,

that the many surrendered

power to the few,

to live in the condition in which

most of the people of the planet

still live today.

The worship of the great ruler was

perhaps a necessary stage

in the development of civilization.

But even now, in the TV age,

kings and presidents and popes

use the vast array of visual A*DS

invented here, in which we see

all around us,

to boost their authority.

And do we not still engage

in ruler worship ourselves,

whenever we cheer

a presidential motorcade as it sweeps by,

or celebrate the Jubilee

of the Queen of England as she passes

escorted by beef eaters

in 16th century costume,

or watch musketeers give

an antiquated salute

on the White House lawn?

Perhaps then we are only just emerging

from the spell of the Bronze Age revolution

which created civilization

and shaped our ways of thinking.

In the long term in history,

we are perhaps still too close to them

to see ourselves as we really are.

In ancient Egypt,

the ties binding people to the state

were not only economic,

but religious.

And the great event in its religious life

was the pilgrimage to Abidos.

Each year, thousands of people set out

for the little town in Middle Egypt

to celebrate the resurrection of Osiris,

King of the Dead.

The pilgrimage provided a focus

for the feelings of ordinary Egyptians,

and rather like Hindus today at Banaras

or Shia Muslims at Karbala,

many asked to be brought to Abidos

for burial.

And at Abidos,

we find another of Egypt's

great legacies to the world.

It's still a haunting place,

cradled in an immense curve

of the western cliffs,

the realm of the dead.

A holy place since prehistory.

In the ruins of the sacred city,

the temple of Seti I,

built in 1300 BC,

still survives.

It's one of the peaks of ancient art.

Moving from daylight

into its darkened inner sanctum,

the visitor has an uncanny intimation

of a still active residue

of spiritual power.

Long before the Christians and Muslims,

even ordinary Egyptians came to believe

in an eternal soul,

in a last judgement,

and in resurrection after death.

These great conceptions were acted out

in a public passion play at Abidos,

and are depicted on the temple walls here

as a rite of passage

for King Seti himself.

Here too are many motifs

familiar to Christians,

especially the role of the Divine Mother,

!sis.

Here !sis is caressing Seti on her knee,

and she says to him,

You're my son, come out of me.

I have nourished you,

but you may be Lord of the two lands.

I have made your body strong in victory

against all the enemies

who may come against you.

Your Majesty is King of Eternity,

a falcon abiding forever.

And here's !sis giving the breath of life

to Seti, and above her, her words are,

you have made your mansion,

your temple, to magnify our nature,

and adorned it with all kinds of

excellent stonework.

And your reward for this

will be the lifespan of the sky,

or as long as Abidos shall exist.

At first sight, these gestures and actions

may seem a lot archaic and bizarre,

but if you just step back a little

and think, for example, what

a Muslim or a Buddhist

or even a Protestant

would make of seeing for the first time

a solemn Roman Catholic mass,

then a lot of those tender gestures,

which are so familiar to Christians,

would lose their meaning.

In all religions in the world,

simple and often strange gestures

can carry profound truths,

and it was just the same

in Egyptian religion,

which certainly did not lack

ethical content.

But the key to understanding

the function of this great building

lies in these little chapels

just at the end of this room.

In this inner shrine

is the cl*max to the whole ritual.

It's concerned with the installation
of King Seti,

not only as Osiris's heir
as the living king,

but with his union with Osiris

after death.

And here, !sis and Horace

perform rituals for him,

and Seti is now dead and deified.

Here, he's represented as a mummy
in a white wrap.

And over there on the far wall,

blackened by smoke and age, Seti,

restored to the colours of living
flesh and blood,

comes into the presence of Osiris,

where he will become one,

resurrected himself,

with the resurrected King of the Dead.

So the simple and strange gestures

reveal a simple yet profound message,

a belief in righteousness on earth,

in the last judgement, in eternal life,

though not in damnation,

which had no place in the Egyptians'

optimistic view of things.

But these ideas would play a key role

in the later development of Christianity

and of Islam.

Out in the desert at Abydos,

millions of broken pots still lie

where the ancient pilgrims left them,

as offerings to their god.

For them, the wind roaring down

the great gorge in the western cliffs

was the sound of the spirits of the dead,

whose annual pilgrimage to Osiris,

they believed, would continue

as long as Abydos exists.

In 332 BC, Egypt was conquered

by Alexander the Great,

and then Egyptian civilisation

turned away from its immemorial roots

towards the sea and a wider world.

On the Mediterranean coast,

a new capital was founded

which became the meeting place of

Europe and Asia on the shore of Africa,

Alexandria.

The greatest market in the inhabited world,

wrote the Roman Strabo,

beaconed to traders from all nations

who came by land and sea,

bearing spices from South India

and the treasures of the silk route

to China.

It's paradise here, said the poet Herodas.

You can get anything you want.

Money, shows, games, women, wine, boys,

the best library in the world,

in short, all earthly delights.

Like 20s New York,

Hellenistic Alexandria

was a land of opportunities

whose streets were paved with gold.

It drew immigrants of all kinds,

bankers, clerks, engineers, poets,

even religious dropouts.

These extraordinary mummy portraits

allow us literally to look
into the eyes of such people.

Even we feel to sense
their hopes and fears.

Vain and violent, rich and prosperous,

it was said, they've only one God here,

mammon.

Our good life in Alexandria was brief,

wrote the poet Cavafil.

But how potent were the perfumes,

how splendid the bed on which we lay,

and to what sensual delight

we gave our bodies.

Down here in the catacombs of Alexandria,

you can still enter

that weird and wonderful world

where Egyptian and Greek and Jewish

and Oriental religion and magic

met and intermingled.

The Greeks who came here to Egypt

were very open-minded
about the local gods.

The deep experience of
Mediterranean paganism

made it easy for them to identify

Amun with Zeus,

or to say the Egyptians

worshipped Aphrodite,
the goddess of love,

but they called her Hathor.

And how that worked in practice,

you can see in this astonishing tomb

deep below the streets of Alexandria.

At first sight it looks like

a typically Egyptian tomb

with papyrus columns

and the winged disc of the sun behind

and the row of cobras heads.

But when you look closer,

you notice human figures

in ancient Egyptian poses

but with Greco -Roman faces.

On each side of the door,

guardian serpents,

but carrying the snake-entwined
staff of Hermes,

the Greek guide of souls,

and above them Medusa's heads.

And when you go inside, the tomb itself,

you can see that the sarcophagi are

decorated with traditional Greek motifs,

bunches of grapes, wreaths,

cattle skulls and masks.

But above them
are the ancient gods of Egypt.

There's !sis protecting
the sacred bull with her wings.

And over here,

Thoth the god of wisdom,

the falcon-headed Horus

tending to the mummy of the dead.

And here even the jackal-headed Anubis,

the guardian of the dead,

wearing Greco -Roman military gear.

This then is the strange synthesis

that emerged in Greek Egypt.

It was said that Alexander had hoped

to create a new world order

based on his multiracial ideal of

brotherhood among nations.

But with hindsight, ironically,

we can see that his Hellenistic empire

actually laid the cultural foundations

of Islam.

When he died in Babylon aged 32,

Alexander's body was brought back

for burial in a lavish tomb in Alexandria.

It's never been found,

but the clues point to this tiny mosque

in the heart of the old city.

An Arab traveller who came here

in the 9th century AD

described this place as the mosque

of the two-horned prophet.

Strange echo

of the ram's horn helmet

with which the Egyptian priest of Amun

had crowned Alexander the Great.

And through the Middle Ages,

it was revered not only

as the tomb of the prophet Daniel,

which is still down there,

but also as the tomb of the king

and prophet Iskander,

Alexander the Great himself.

The tunnels and cellars

that fan out from underneath this mosque

have never been explored properly.

But that's not really surprising,

The city's absolutely honeycombed with them

and they're really dangerous.

There's a great Alexandrian story

of the fat bride who,

on her wedding procession,

fell through a hole in the street

and disappeared and despite

the best efforts of the guests,

she was never seen again.

In 1850,

a servant of the Russian consulate

came down here
and got lost in the corridors.

When he came out,

he said that he'd seen,

in a gap in the stonework,

a chamber with a glass coffin

and a human body with a gold diadem

around its head and

fragments of papyrus everywhere.

That description closely matches

the last classical witnesses

of the tomb of Alexander the Great,

but suspiciously so,

he was probably lying.

Nevertheless, it's an intriguing thought

that solution to the greatest mystery

in the history of Alexandria

could lie somewhere

behind one of these blocked-up corridors.

It's 3 am in the remote monastery of

St. Paul, near the Red Sea.

The monks begin their devotions

before dawn.

These are Christian Copts.

Their name means Egyptians,

and their language and music

contain survivals from pharaonic times.

Their culture goes back
to the early centuries AD,

when Egypt became part of
a Christian Roman Empire.

And even today, they represent

nearly 10% of Egypt's population.

This church was founded

in the 3rd century AD

by St. Paul the Anchorite.

And with the Christians,

we come to the second great
foreign transformation

of the native culture of the Nile Valley.

In late Roman Egypt,
an upheaval began

as momentous as any
political revolution,

a change in the psyche of
Near Eastern culture

which has helped shape
the Western mind ever since.

A vision of life which believed in

withdrawal from the world,

monasticism.

At this time, the blue water

and emerald fields of the Nile Valley

were exchanged
for the inhospitable desert.

There are strange parallels
with our own time,

in the widespread feeling
that civilization itself had failed.

Better cities may arise one day,

said the Egyptian philosopher Plotinus.

Our children, though
conceived in a sinful age,

may build better than their fathers.

And so the old fabric of pagan culture,

the stable cosmos

which had sustained Egyptians for so long,

was eroded by Christianity.

With its appeal not to a great earthly
ruler, but to a distant high god.

This was a time, said one,

when we realized how insecure

the human condition is.

These fateful changes were mirrored

in the way people saw the world.

For nearly a thousand years,

classical Mediterranean art

had glorified the physical world

in the belief that mankind,

as the Greeks said,

was the measure of all things.

Now artists retreat

into a crude language of symbols.

To us, in the age of Freud and Jung,

it looks like a failure of nerve,

a loss of faith in the material world,

perhaps even deeper psychic trauma.

Everything has gone, said Cyprian.

Honesty, friendship, skill in the arts,

standards in morals.

This vast and wonderful world

is heading for destruction.

And so, with Saint Paul of Egypt,

the stage was set for fundamentalists

of all persuasions to fight

over the legacy of the ancients.

A revolution of the mind
was now in process.

And out of this crisis,

a new religion would emerge

as the dominant culture
of the whole region.

In 641, Egypt was conquered

by Muslim Arabs bearing a new gospel,

that of the prophet Muhammad.

And here in Edfu, the town of Horus,

ordinary Egyptian people in their
mud-brick slums around the temple,

soon began to abandon
the uncertainties of the past,

for the certainties of a single god,

Islam.

And so, here in Edfu, in Upper Egypt,

as throughout the Mediterranean
and Near Eastern worlds,

the Christians and the Muslims

were the inheritors of the ancients.

And their belief in a single god,

which the Moazins are chanting now

from their minarets,

developed out of a tendency

long apparent in the ancient world.

For the Catholic papacy,

the Muslim caliphate,

the orthodox churches of the Greeks

and Syrians and Copts,

all stem from the attempt of men

to rule their fellow men and women

under a distant, high

and all-powerful god.

And the effects of that

tremendous revolution

at the end of the late antique world

still shape our lives today.

The last Greek religious papyrus

from 7th century Egypt

sets the seal on that revolution.

For it gives in Greek

the very words we can hear around as Nile.

In the name of God,

the merciful and the compassionate,

there is one god

and one god alone.

And it goes on in Greek.

Mahmed the apostle of Deium

Muhammad is the apostle of God.

With that, to all intents and purposes,

the world of the ancient Egyptians

had passed.

The change to Islam

would take many centuries.

And out in the countryside,

especially in upper Egypt,

the deeper layers of the past

are still visible today.

It's the eve of the full moon in mid-March,

heralding the onset of the heat of summer.

And at this time,

tens of thousands of people

come in from the countryside

to descend on the little town of Luxor

for a great annual festival.

Up here, people still celebrate

the ancient feast days,

the spring festival,

the rising of the Nile,

and especially the 40 days of

mourning for the dead.

But this is the biggest.

It's a Muslim festival

for an Islamic saint.

But it takes place at a mosque

inside one of the great pagan temples

of ancient Egypt.

The Coptic Christians take part two,

for they also once had a church

inside the temple.

The saint himself, Abu Hagag,

died in the 11th century,

at the point when Islam was becoming

the majority religion here.

His tomb inside the mosque has been

a place of pilgrimage ever since.

As everywhere,

orthodoxy may demand one thing,

but what the people do is another matter.

And in the worship of sheikhs and saints,

the ordinary people, the felahin,

fill the void between their daily hopes

and fears and that distant high god.

The night is passed

in passionate celebration,

with the traditional music and songs

of Upper Egypt.

The two lands may have been united



but the south is still a distinct country,

and tonight, a man from the delta

would be a complete stranger here.

Next day, the festival reaches its cl*max.

The living descendants of the saint

lead a huge procession

around the ancient temple and its mosque,

bearing representations of the coffins

of Hagag and his sons.

Bringing up the procession

are Luxor's guild of ferrymen,

bearing boats.

They're on trucks these days,

but nonetheless, the ferrymen are

discharging their traditional duty,

just as their ancestors did

thousands of years ago,

when around the streets of ancient Luxor,

they bore the boat of the sun god Amun.

The day ends not in solemnity,

but in carnival and license.

The ancient legacy also survived

in the city.

Cairo, the mother of cities,

as Ibn Abatutah said.

Its numberless buildings

peerless in their beauty and splendor.

The meeting place of travelers,

shelter of the strong and weak,

whose throngs of people

surge like the sea.

Founded in sight of the ancient capital

Memphis and the pyramids of

Giza and Saqqara,

Cairo has long been the cultural capital

of Arab Islam.

And here too, even today,

in its mosques and universities,

we can still find a living link

with the world of the pharaohs.

A civilization conservative in character,

like its ancient predecessor.

Here in the al-Azhar,

the leading teaching mosque of Islam,

older than Oxford or the Sorbonne,

learning is still

the study of the sacred texts,

binding the land together

as it did in ancient Egypt.

In city and countryside, though,

the modern Egyptians still do

some of the things their ancestors did,

for all the apparently cataclysmic

breaks in their history.

Now, here in Cairo

in the late 14th century,

those questions were examined

by the greatest of all Islamic historians,

Ibn Khaldun.

His concerns were

the same as ours in these films,

the nature of civilization,

its rise and decline.

He considered that settled,

cooperative human life

was the goal of civilization,

that it went in cycles

of growth and decay,

like all forms of life.

He thought, incidentally,

that overconsumption in society

was an inevitable cause of decline,

but that under certain

favorable conditions of geography

and climate and the character

and customs of the people,

culture could acquire a rootedness

that he called

the habit of civilization.

And in all history,

Egypt was perhaps the best example

of that habit.

The pharaohs, he points out,

had political power for 3,000 years.

They were followed by the Greeks
and the Romans,

and then the legacy taken on by Islam.

So the habit of civilization

was continuous here.

Nowhere else in the world

was it more firmly rooted.

And that perhaps explains

Egypt's continuing cultural leadership

in the Islamic world today.

At the beginning lay

the early Egyptian state,

the first comprehensive attempt

in human history to satisfy

the needs of men and women

to live together in an ordered state

with a degree of happiness

and material well-being.

And so far,

it's been one of the most successful.

And so, even after the triumph of Islam,

the legacy of the pharaohs

did not give up all its numinous power.

And it has not yet.