How Not to Read a Civilization

Why Modern Minds Misfire on Ancient Egypt

Let’s play a little game.
It’s dartboard trivial pursuit—but with time.

The rules are simple: the board is history. The bullseye is now.

Chance goes first. Of course he does. And of course he nails the center. Describing the USA today in five words, he barely hesitates:
Technologically advanced. AI-driven. Divided. Anxious. Wired.
He steps back, smug.

Next up, Laura. She’s she is good for a girl—and she lands the second ring. That’s 50 years ago: 1970s America. Her words?
Flared jeans. Racial tensions. Nixon. Gasoline. Funk.
A little messy, a little soulful. Pretty accurate.

Then it’s my turn. And I’m useless. The dart veers off like it has a mind of its own and smacks the edge of the board. 1720. Pre-revolutionary colonies. Barely a whisper of what would become America.

My five words?
Muskets. Colonies. Tobacco. Slavery. Uncertainty.

And just like that, you feel it—the stretch.
The sheer absurdity of trying to define a culture.
But also—the beauty of it.

In just over 300 years, we’ve gone from smoke signals and bushfires to joyrides in low orbit. From woodcut sermons to ChatGPT.

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Throwing Darts at Eternity

Now imagine we’re not playing with American history—but with Ancient Egypt.

Suddenly, that little dartboard isn’t going to cut it. We need one the size of a wall—ten, twelve feet across. Still in 50-year increments. But now we’re spanning over three thousand years of recorded civilization.

What do five words look like for the reign of Hatshepsut? Or for the collapse of the Old Kingdom? Or the moment someone, somewhere, first carved a glyph into limestone and believed it could house a god?

By the time you’re describing the Pyramid Texts, you're not even sure if the people who wrote them saw the world the same way we see ours. And by the time you reach pre-dynastic times—if you even can—you’re throwing darts blindfolded, underwater, in a language no one speaks anymore.

The point?

When we speak of the past—especially a past as distant and layered as Egypt’s—we have to hold our claims gently. The deeper we go, the stranger it gets. The harder it is to say what was happening, let alone why.

So yes—I’m about to make a sweeping claim. But I’ll make it carefully. And with context.

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Rewriting Egypt

Let’s call in some backup.

“Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way; every new historian, not content with giving new answers to old questions, must revise the questions themselves.”
— R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History

What he’s saying—beautifully, and with typical British restraint—is that history isn’t fixed. It isn’t a file you open and read. It’s an act of interpretation. And every generation rewrites it—sometimes unconsciously—based on the questions they are bold enough (or limited enough) to ask.

Which brings me to one of the most unsettling realizations I’ve had.

We—perhaps the most materially obsessed culture to ever exist—are attempting to define and decode what may be the least material culture in history.

We use forensics, economic models, and digital reconstructions to interpret a civilization that may have used language and temples as bridges to other planes of reality.

Trying to understand Ancient Egypt with our current worldview is like sending Paris Hilton into the Amazon to document an uncontacted tribe. And not just any tribe—but one metaphysically advanced, whose very concept of reality diverges at the root.

(And let’s be honest: we saw how Paris handled The Simple Life. Imagine her explaining astral rituals, divine kingship, and glyphs that summon presence instead of recording data.)

Better yet, flip it. Drop one of the uncontacted tribe members into the Met Gala.

He returns home and says,
“There was a man… with a piano strapped to his back. Everyone cheered.”

Would they think he’d gone mad? Or worse—would they enshrine him as prophet of the Piano God?

That’s the problem. Perspective. Cultural translation. And this is exactly what we do—again and again—when we interpret Ancient Egypt through modern eyes.

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From Napoleon to the Wall of Silence

This is why, even within the last 300 years, our vision of Egypt has changed so dramatically.

When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, he brought with him not just soldiers, but savants. Their work—Description de l'Égypte—sought to capture the grandeur of Egypt with Enlightenment reverence. The Rosetta Stone had just been discovered. Egypt was seen as a source of ancient wisdom, not mystery. As Jeremy Naydler notes, it was widely believed that Egypt had birthed Platonism, Hermeticism, and sacred science.

Then came Champollion in 1822. The hieroglyphs were cracked. We began to read Egypt—and, slowly, to revise it.

The early Egyptologists—Champollion, de Rougé, Brugsch—still held reverence for Egypt's metaphysical depth. But the closer Egyptology moved toward modern academia, the more dismissive it became.

By the early 20th century, the sacred became symbolic, then metaphorical, then dismissed entirely. Egypt was cast as backward. Max Otto called it pre-philosophical. B.L. Goff in the 1970s bluntly stated:

“In ancient Egypt… there was no knowledge of consistent laws governing the operation of everything around us.”

Translation: they weren’t scientists. They were guessing.

Even when scholars like Otto Neugebauer and J.-Ph. Lauer found evidence that the Egyptians used Pi and Phi in their temples, they explained it away as “practical knacks.” As if they'd stumbled into cosmic precision by accident.

This was the apex of the materialist lens—dismissing a 3,000-year civilization as a long-running architectural fluke.

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Toward a Pharaonic Mindset

But now, we’ve moved another full ring outward on the dartboard—this time in our own thinking.

And I’m warning you: it’s about to get weird.

Because on this journey I’m going to make the case that we don’t need aliens, Atlanteans, or an ancestor race to explain what we see in Ancient Egypt.
Just humans. But not this kind of human.

To begin to grasp it, we have to do something radical: suspend our worldview. Let it go. Loosen its grip.

As Schwaller de Lubicz put it, we must try to adopt a Pharaonic mindset—not just think about the ancient Egyptians, but dare to think as they did.

Yes, it’s nearly impossible.
But it’s the only way their architecture, their rituals, their logic—even their hieroglyphs—begin to make sense.

Because until we can think with a mind not shaped by silicon and spreadsheets,
we’ll keep mistaking their temples for tombs—
and their science for superstition.

Final Note…do you agree? Do you disagree? Wanna talk about it?

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