When coronavirus ends, what can we see in the land of Egypt?

The image of Hebrew slaves toiling under the whip of Egyptian slave-drivers to build the pyramids is embedded into the collective visual memory of Western civilization. From the 1827 Rossini opera “Moses and Pharaoh” to the 1953 performance of “Go Down Moses” by Paul Robson in the 1998 animated film The Prince of Egypt, the motif of an enslaved people exploited to build one of the wonders of the world and then liberated by God had been powerful for countless souls.

Mounir Mahmoud, a lecturer at Afaak Academy in Cairo and an expert on Israeli-Egyptian relations, spoke with The Jerusalem Post via phone from his office. He sighs and says that in 30 years of guiding hundreds of Israeli groups in Egypt, not a single group did not try to argue when presented with the facts that the Hebrew people had nothing to do with the construction of the pyramids at Giza. I was also one of the Israelis he guided when I visited the country in 2019.

He then proceeds to quote in Hebrew the verse from Exodus 1:11 that speaks about how the Jews were forced to build the cities of Pithom and Rameses as store cities.

“From this alone,” he says, “we learn that the Bible speaks about the Hebrews baking bricks and building cities, whereas the pyramids are made from large blocks of carved stone.

“There are 1,400 years between the Pyramids in Giza and the arrival of the Hebrews to Egypt according to the Book of Exodus,” he says.

“In my opinion,” he suggests, “the confusion originates in how powerful the pyramids are as an image. All over the world people think about one thing when they imagine Egypt, and that thing is a pyramid. It is possible that Jewish illustrators of the Haggadah simply used that as a visual short-hand and that’s how this misunderstanding came into being.”

He has a point. While pre-modern works such as the Birds’ Head Haggadah from 1300 and the 1350 Sarajevo Haggadah are beautiful, they have no pyramids. In Christian art of that time, pyramids were believed to be the granaries suggested by Joseph to Pharaoh. A mosaic at St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice depicts workers storing wheat in pyramid-like structures.

Jews might have begun to draw pyramids in the Haggadah after Napoleon arrived in Egypt in 1798 and started the fashion of Egyptomania. In modern versions, such as the heart-breaking Holocaust Survivors’ Haggadah now in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the pyramids are presented above the barbed wires and guard posts of the Nazi concentration camp, mentally connecting the oppressive and brutal Nazi system to ancient Egyptian society.

Ever since Herodotus visited Egypt under Persian rule and wrote about it during the mid-fourth century BCE, people have been quick to misunderstand ancient Egypt, Prof. Bob Brier, from Long Island University, explains in his audio course “The History of Ancient Egypt” (available from the Great Course Series and at Audible.com.)

For starters, Herodotus could not speak or read Egyptian, so he believed his tour guide when he told him that on the beautiful white stone coating the pyramids, the amounts of onions given to the workers who built them are written. This might just have been a joke taken at face value.

The white stone coating had been stripped off the pyramids when the Muslims arrived and used to build mosques – showing, perhaps once again, how hard it is for us to fully appreciate what the pyramids actually looked like or how they functioned at the time.

Not only did the ancient Hebrews not build the pyramids, but no gentile slaves were involved either.

“If you ever saw movies that depict the Egyptian slave drivers whipping the slaves and you thought: ‘Gee, I wonder why the slaves don’t gang up on that guy and take away the whip and run away,’ well you’re right,” says Brier in his course.

The ancient Egyptians knew this, which is why the pyramids were built by paid workers. Very often they were farmers who couldn’t work the land when the Nile was flooding the fields, so this was a seasonal job. Far from being exploited until broken, workers were given medical care if they were injured. The social reality of work only being performed during one season of the year was one reason the construction of the pyramids took so long.

Oddly, there seems to be a tendency in the Western mind to believe in a powerful myth about the tyranny inherent to the Orient. “The beauty and grace of ancient Egypt,” this perhaps unacknowledged emotion whispers in our ears, “must have been created on the backs of slaves and over the bones of the dead. Ancient Israel may not have been able to compete with the glory of Egypt,” this emotion seems to imply, “but we had the vision of a universal moral truth to humanity.”

While the Greeks admired the Egyptians and saw them as the source of almost all wisdom, it was Rome that shaped the Western disdain toward the Orient as something that must be fiercely ruled and contained.

To this day Rome has more obelisks (eight) than any other place on Earth after Egypt. In the 1963 film Cleopatra, news of Julius Caesar having a son with the Oriental queen reaches Rome and causes a riot. The Romans refuse to be ruled by someone who is not like them. In contrast, Cleopatra herself was ethnically Greek, meaning white, and she was the last ruler of Egypt to read and speak Egyptian. The average Roman woman of the time, sadly, was illiterate.

For Egyptians, the period of British rule is marked by the black color in their flag. If the Romans exploited Egypt as the grain supplier to the empire, the British took so many mummies and ancient artifacts that they ended up grinding mummified cats and spreading them in English fields as fertilizer. To this day some of the most treasured Egyptian artifacts are held by European or American museums.

In addition to the ideas that ancient Egypt was built by slaves, or that the Egyptians of today are somehow unable to protect their cultural treasures, there is also the myth that it wasn’t the Egyptians who built the pyramids but aliens.

In some fictional depictions, such as the 1994 science fiction film Stargate, beings from other are depicted arriving to Earth in a spaceship are depicted. In other theories, ancient Egypt was actually created by people from Atlantis. To this, one can only say that life is much more rewarding when it is people, not monsters, who shape our fates.