The greatest contrast exists between the day, which is very hot and bright with light both direct and reflected, and the night, which is very dark and cool.
In contrast to the natural changes which annually prevail, making Egypt first a vast sea of water and then a blooming garden, the people of Egypt strive for permanency.
Their struggle to control nature is their perpetual education. They build enormous architectural structures—temples and pyramids. They love the past and will preserve it if possible. The pyramid is a gigantic tomb, for the high priest who is the king.
Not only the king but all good Egyptians shall have their bodies embalmed and preserved. Their mummies shall be saved from decay in the gigantic tombs of the hillside, above the reach of the Nile floods.
Egypt invented the writing by hieroglyphics, and developed out of that system of picture-writing two other systems of writing, the Syllabic and Alphabetic. Doubtless the Phœnicians borrowed their alphabet from the Egyptians, and diffused a knowledge of it among the peoples living around the Mediterranean Sea.
The priestly caste hold the directive power of Egypt, They administer the education, and rule in the counsels of the state, and give character to whatever is Egyptian.
The idea of death is ever present with the Egyptian. There seems to be some faint idea of its spiritual meaning in their religion.
The god Osiris dies, slain by Typhon, and yet proves himself triumphant over death, and attains perfect individuality after it. In East India there is transmigration of souls as a punishment for the exercise of appetites and desires in the life here. The properly prepared soul reaches extinction in Brahm or in Nirwana. In Egypt, too, transmigration punishes the individual by delaying his ascent into the heaven of Osiris, wherein he may become a companion to that god. While his body does not decay he need not be born again in another body, and if embalmed properly, he can avoid transmigration until he lives again with Osiris.
Egyptian religious ideas are in advance of Persian in the doctrine of evil. The evil is not a principle of such power that it is invincible by the Lord of the good.
The thought of death and the death-court which would decide whether the individual had lived worthily or not, was the greatest educational influence in Egypt.