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The Golden Rule is the principle of treating others as one would want to be treated by them. It is sometimes called an ethics of reciprocity, meaning that you should reciprocate to others how you would like them to treat you. Various expressions of this rule can be found in the tenets of most religions and creeds through the ages.
Osiris was the god of fertility, agriculture, the afterlife, the dead, resurrection, life, and vegetation in ancient Egyptian religion. He was classically depicted as a green-skinned deity with a pharaoh's beard, partially mummy-wrapped at the legs, wearing a distinctive atef crown, and holding a symbolic crook and flail. He was one of the first to be associated with the mummy wrap. When his brother Set cut him up into pieces after killing him, Osiris' wife Isis found all the pieces and wrapped his body up, enabling him to return to life. Osiris was widely worshipped until the decline of ancient Egyptian religion during the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire.
Nut, also known by various other transcriptions, is the goddess of the sky, stars, cosmos, mothers, astronomy, and the universe in the ancient Egyptian religion. She was seen as a star-covered nude woman arching over the Earth, or as a cow. She was depicted wearing the water-pot sign (nw) that identifies her.
Maat or Maʽat comprised the ancient Egyptian concepts of truth, balance, order, harmony, law, morality, and justice. Ma'at was also the goddess who personified these concepts, and regulated the stars, seasons, and the actions of mortals and the deities who had brought order from chaos at the moment of creation. Her ideological opposite was Isfet, meaning injustice, chaos, violence or to do evil.
The Great Hymn to the Aten is the longest of a number of hymn-poems written to the sun-disk deity Aten. Composed in the middle of the 14th century BC, it is varyingly attributed to the 18th Dynasty Pharaoh Akhenaten or his courtiers, depending on the version, who radically changed traditional forms of Egyptian religion by replacing them with Atenism. The hymn bears a notable resemblance to the biblical Psalm 104.
Yaldabaoth, otherwise known as Jaldabaoth or Ialdabaoth, is a malevolent God and demiurge in various Gnostic sects and movements, sometimes represented as a theriomorphic, lion-headed serpent. He is identified as the false god who keeps the souls trapped in physical bodies, imprisoned in the material universe.
"Know thyself" is a philosophical maxim which was inscribed upon the Temple of Apollo in the ancient Greek precinct of Delphi. The best-known of the Delphic maxims, it has been quoted and analyzed by numerous authors throughout history, and has been applied in many ways. Although traditionally attributed to the Seven Sages of Greece, or to the god Apollo himself, the inscription likely had its origin in a popular proverb.
Wisdom literature is a genre of literature common in the ancient Near East. It consists of statements by sages and the wise that offer teachings about divinity and virtue. Although this genre uses techniques of traditional oral storytelling, it was disseminated in written form.
Matthew 5:44, the forty-fourth verse in the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament, also found in Luke 6:27–36, is part of the Sermon on the Mount. This is the second verse of the final antithesis, that on the commandment to "Love thy neighbour as thyself". In the chapter, Jesus refutes the teaching of some that one should "hate [one's] enemies".
Djedi is the name of a fictional ancient Egyptian magician appearing in the fourth chapter of a story told in the legendary Westcar Papyrus. He is said to have worked wonders during the reign of king (pharaoh) Khufu.
John 17 is the seventeenth chapter of the Gospel of John in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. It portrays a prayer of Jesus Christ addressed to his Father, placed in context immediately before his betrayal and crucifixion, the events which the gospel often refers to as his glorification. Lutheran writer David Chytraeus entitled Jesus' words "the prayer of the high priest". Methodist theologian Joseph Benson calls this prayer "Our Lord’s Intercessory Prayer", because "it is considered as a pattern of the intercession he is now making in heaven for his people". The New King James Version divides this chapter into three sections:
Instruction of Amenemope is a literary work composed in Ancient Egypt, most likely during the Ramesside Period ; it contains thirty chapters of advice for successful living, ostensibly written by the scribe Amenemope son of Kanakht as a legacy for his son. A characteristic product of the New Kingdom "Age of Personal Piety", the work reflects on the inner qualities, attitudes, and behaviors required for a happy life in the face of increasingly difficult social and economic circumstances. It is widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of ancient near-eastern wisdom literature and has been of particular interest to modern scholars because of its similarity to the later biblical Book of Proverbs.
The Maxims of Ptahhotep or Instruction of Ptahhotep is an ancient Egyptian literary composition by the Vizier Ptahhotep around 2375–2350 BC, during the rule of King Djedkare Isesi of the Fifth Dynasty. The text was discovered in Thebes in 1847 by Egyptologist M. Prisse d'Avennes. The Instructions of Ptahhotep are considered didactic wisdom literature belonging to the genre of sebayt. There are four copies of the Instructions, and the only complete version, Papyrus Prisse, is located in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. According to William Kelly Simpson, scholars tend to believe that the Instructions of Ptahhotep were originally composed during the Middle Kingdom, specifically the Twelfth Dynasty. The earliest extant copies of the text were altered to make them understandable for the Egyptians of the New Kingdom. The text presents a very good picture of the general attitudes of that period. The Instructions of Ptahhotep addresses various virtues that are necessary to live a good life and how to live accordingly to Maat, which was an important part of the Egyptian culture.
The Dispute between a man and his Ba or The Debate Between a Man and his Soul is an ancient Egyptian text dating to the Middle Kingdom. The text is considered to fall into the genre of Sebayt, a form of Egyptian wisdom literature. The text takes the form of a dialogue between a man struggling to come to terms with the hardship of life, and his ba soul.
The Immortality of Writers is an Ancient Egyptian wisdom text likely to have been used as an instructional work in schools. It is recorded on the verso side of the Chester Beatty IV papyrus held in the British Museum. It is notable for its rationalist skeptical outlook, even more emphatic than in the Harper's Songs, regarding an afterlife. The scribe advises that writings of authors provide a more sure immortality than fine tombs. The text is dated to the transition period between the 19th Dynasty and the 20th Dynasty.
...Those writers known from the old days, the times just after the gods. Those who foretold what would happen, whose names will endure for eternity. They disappeared when they finished their lives, and all their kindred forgotten. They did not build pyramids in bronze with gravestones of iron from heaven. They did not think to leave a patrimony made of children who would give their names distinction, rather they formed a progeny by means of writing and in the books of wisdom they left...
They gave themselves [the scroll as lector]-priest, the writing board as loving son. Instruction are their tombs, the reed pen their child, the stone surface their wife..... Man decays, his corpse is dust. All his kin have perished; But a book makes him remembered through the mouth of its reciter. Better is a book than a well built house...
Double-mindedness is a concept used in the philosophy and theology of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) as insincerity, egoism, or fear of punishment. The term was used in the Bible in the Epistle of James. Kierkegaard developed his own systematic way to try to detect double-mindedness in himself.
The Instructions of Kagemni is an ancient Egyptian instructional text of wisdom literature which belongs to the sebayt ('teaching') genre. Although the earliest evidence of its compilation dates to the Middle Kingdom of Egypt, its authorship has traditionally yet dubiously been attributed to Kagemni, a vizier who served during the reign of the Pharaoh Sneferu (r. 2613–2589 BC), founder of the Fourth Dynasty.
The Golden Verses are a collection of moral exhortations comprising 71 lines written in dactylic hexameter. They are traditionally attributed to the Pythagorean philosophers.
Three Upbuilding Discourses (1844) is a book by Søren Kierkegaard.
References
- 1 2 3 ”Ancient Egyptian Literature, Volume II: The New Kingdom”, pp. 135–146, Miriam Lichtheim, University of California Press, 1976, ISBN 0-520-03615-8
- ↑ "Religion and Magic in Ancient Egypt", Rosalie David, p262, Penguin, 2002, ISBN 0-14-026252-0
- ↑ Wisdom in Ancient Israel, John Day,/John Adney Emerton,/Robert P. Gordon/ Hugh Godfrey/Maturin Williamson, p23, Cambridge University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-521-62489-4
- ↑ "The Living Wisdom of Ancient Egypt", Christian Jacq, Simon & Schuster, 1999, ISBN 0-671-02219-9