Week 4 Reading Diary A: Ancient Egyptian Myths & Stories

This week I’m reading the Ancient Egyptian unit, and I LOVE IT. I went to Egypt when I was 10, and I was fairly obsessed with the history of the civilization before and after that trip. I got a gold cartouche necklace with my name written in hieroglyphics when I was there, and I still wear it almost every day. It’s a great conversation starter, especially for people who recognize it as Egyptian! For a time I even wanted to be an egyptologist, but I digress.

My name transcribed in hieroglyphs, though the ancient Egyptians didn't write with vowels. Generated at: Discovering Ancient Egypt

Though I found the Elizabethan English to be a little cumbersome to read, I really enjoyed the stories that I read. One story that I liked in particular was Creation, which details the creation of everything and each of the gods and goddesses that inhabit the universe. I found myself constantly looking up the names of each of the gods and goddesses, though, because they were not usually well explained in the story. Most people probably just go with it, but since I’m really passionate about ancient Egypt, I felt the need to look up each of the deities that I was not familiar with.

I really enjoyed the story of The Journey of Isis, too. Isis and Osiris are the two Egyptian deities with whom I’m the most familiar, so I’m not surprised that I enjoyed the stories about them. I was surprised to learn that I wasn’t completely familiar with the story of Isis after Osiris’ death, as I didn’t know she had to go to Syria to retrieve his body. The more I read these stories, the better I understood the Egyptians to be less isolated than I originally thought. We tend to speak of civilizations such as the Egyptians as discrete from others who might have arisen around the same time period, so it was good to get that notion out of my head.