Life in You, the City, was rich and abundant, yet at the same time peaceful. It is very difficult for a person of the XX century to imagine what life was like there. Prejudices of the present age blind us like an opaque veil, preventing us from understanding a life so different from our own. Perhaps the most significant characteristic we can point out is the absence of negative emotions among the residents. Despite their large number (Tebya could have had more than ninety thousand inhabitants), they managed to maintain themselves as a big family, with a unique psychology that a family, as a permanent social core, possesses. This does not mean that there were no problems; there have always been good and evil people because there is no system that can restrain malicious human nature or corrupt the good. However, their law, at the same time natural, practical, and above all, fast, maintained a harmonious order in which thefts, murders, and insults were truly exceptions that confirmed the rule of peaceful coexistence.
JORGE ANGEL LIVRAGA RIZZI (1930-19) 91.)
He published a series of works, and one of them is Teba, a book about ancient Egypt and one of its main centers, Tebi with a hundred gates. On the twentieth anniversary of his death, we bring an excerpt from the book.
In contrast to the “clichés” portrayed in our history books, the Tebanac was a cheerful and simple man.
He was very capable and effective in everything he did. Joy accompanied him, and when he was sad or depressed, he openly expressed it. Forced intellectualism and criticism of everything others think or do were considered unusual, if not funny.
For the ancient inhabitants of the City, life and death did not exist in the same way. In the way we imagine them today. The pain they felt when the lives of their loved ones ended could now be compared to the feeling that would overwhelm us when a dear person embarks on a journey forever. The belief that God and the gods created the world in the best possible way freed them from any existential anxiety, without diminishing their sensitivity, love, and longing. It was always imbued with complete certainty in a universal order that is fair and good, and therefore, such was human destiny.
There were no slaves in Egypt. Moreover, war captives sentenced to work outside the cities were often freed. Those who worked on erecting an obelisk did so as a Christian would build a cathedral or a Muslim would build a mosque.
One of the most frequently mentioned criticisms of the ancient Egyptians is their attachment to the dead body, as they performed complex mummification rituals to preserve it.
Anyone familiar with the Egyptian climate knows that such actions funeral procedures were not carried out to preserve the body. If the bodies were simply buried in the dry areas of the western coast, they would have been preserved – as modern archaeology has shown – in better condition than after the process of mummification. On the other hand, this psychopompic process after death was intended only for pharaohs, nobility, priesthood, and those who distinguished themselves through their service to the community. Only during the period of decadence, when plutocracy finally distorted the original theocracy, funeral ceremonies became accessible to anyone who could afford them, regardless of their spiritual qualities. However, this was just one of the accompanying consequences of foreign influences and the disappearance of ancient customs. Egypt took a long time to be born, and it took just as long for it to die. During the Roman era, this land of magic par excellence became nothing more than the main granary of Europe. When the gigantic theocratic state fell apart, with its already ruined buildings and knowledge of nature, it You have amazed the world and inspired new spiritual aspirations, from Greek to Islamic, and the Great mysteries have returned to the source of grace from which they originated, awaiting more favorable times.
We have written something about You, the living, and now we will dedicate ourselves to the other You, You, the dead, who flourished on the western coast in historical times, the coast of the Setting Sun, Maamon. It was not the opposite of You, the living, but complemented it (or vice versa), on Lying on the other bank of the river called Hapi, Happiness, Blue or River that descends from the sky, is the visible life stream. This river was a divine breath stream filled with gifts, a river that unites distant places and is the earthly reflection of another river, the river of stars that flows across the sky and which the Sun must cross, as well as the gods and man.
To the west, about eight kilometers from the river, behind the hills of Deir el-Bahari, lies the so-called Valley of the Kings. It is located at the entrance to a large canyon or basin that today’s residents call Wadi Biban el-Moluk, or the Valley of the Royal Gates. This valley is now a desert, and it has two entrances, east and west. In ancient times, when the Red Sea was a fertile valley, this valley, like the others nearby, was fertile. Prehistoric hunters left drawings on the rocks that depict them hunting elephants and ostriches. On its other side rise the tall Western mountains with the highest peak, Gurna. If we cross over this gently rounded relief, today so extensively modified. Eroded and affected by human activity, we arrive at a vast desert, once the bottom of a prehistoric sea.
Near the Valley of the Kings lie the so-called Valley of the Queens and the Valley of the Nobles.
The entire area takes the form of natural amphitheaters where the merciless sun reflects, further raising the temperature and making it one of the hottest places on the planet. It is hard to imagine that just a few thousand years ago, or even less, waterfalls cascaded through the forests here, and due to the moderate temperature, this area was home to a large number of living beings.
The Arabic name for the Valley of the Kings points us to what more insightful historians are discovering: that the current desolate atmosphere, further emphasized by successive excavations that have left traces resembling those after heavy bombardment, does not correspond to the appearance the valley had during the XVIII or XX dynasty. Several indicators, which the great explorer Belzoni already drew attention to in the early 19th century, point to this fact. The graves, carved into the rock, whose entrances are bare today, once had exquisite decorations and doors made of light wood that would stay open during the day, similar to cemeteries in some areas today. In certain parts of the year, the doors would remain closed for ritual purposes.
Lastly, it should be mentioned that in the second You, the Land of the Dead, brotherhoods lived under the banner of the lying jackal, which can still be seen on seals as a representation of the esoteric god Anubis. These brotherhoods resided in specific parts of the city of the dead, overseeing armed guards and trained animals who protected the treasuries from the insatiable greed of desert raiders.
It is possible that, like other ancient peoples, the Egyptians gathered there periodically to bring gifts to their relatives, pharaohs, nobility, and priests, whose bodies rested in inaccessible depths of underground temples – “launch ramps” for the souls of the righteous. Their relics were revered in the same way as they would be thousands of years later. Other religions also do this with their saints, to whom great works and miracles are also attributed.
Thus, this transcendent unity connected two of You in complementary harmony.
Several funerary temples were erected on the western coast, as evidenced by the giant ruins of the Ramesseum and the temple of Queen Hatshepsut. There are also enigmatic statues of Memnon dedicated to the Rising Sun. Birth, noon brightness, and the sunset of the day are their names – Memnon, Amon, and Maamon, and death was the birth and dawn on the other shore of life.
According to today’s archaeologists, the figures of these giants sitting on ritual thrones were in front of the funerary temple of Amenhotep III, and they are the only remaining evidence. However, esoteric tradition considers them much older than any monument dedicated to a “historical” pharaoh, claiming that they were offered as a sacrifice to the Rising Sun, as they are still called by the not always naive popular tradition.
Today, they are around eighteen meters high, although They were probably several meters taller with crown and equipment. They were renovated and carved countless times. They were very famous in ancient times, so Greek musicians would come on pilgrimage to hear the seven basic tones that one of the colossi would sound at dawn. In Roman times, there was talk of one tone that corresponds to the tone “fa” in our scale. The restorations by Emperor Septimius Severus in 199 AD silenced the northern giant forever, which created the sound. One of the many researchers from the 19th century stated at a scientific conference in London that he heard the same sound again, but there is no evidence for it, nor did extensive experiments conducted in the 20th century produce any results. Official science explains this phenomenon (and as we know, today’s alienation consists of explaining everything, regardless of whether the truth is known or not) by attributing it to the expansion of one of the stone blocks that heats up under the first rays of the sun after a cold desert night. We cannot confirm this with We cannot grasp it, because the enormous mass of colossi does not allow the sun to cause a noticeable change in temperature on the surface of the stone in cool mornings. We believe that the truth is as elusive as the two giant monuments, even though both of them were damaged by immense ignorance and vanity of the human race.
We can only imagine with great effort what the Valley of the Kings looked like three thousand or more years ago, because after the almost complete destruction of the Valley of the Living, its gardens and artificial lakes, the climate has changed. Moreover, looting and damage from explosions, continuous excavation, natural sand deposits, and the network of tourist visits have fundamentally and irreversibly altered the face of Western Valley. Drawings from the 18th and 19th centuries, and even photographs from the early 20th century show us the last major changes. But what did it look like before? We are not able to see its grandeur, so everyone can let their imagination run wild.