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African Philosophy: The Pharaonic Period: 2780-330 BC
Theophile Obenga

Chapter: “The Cosmos Before the Present Universe”

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Over 2,500 years before our age, the thinkers of pharaonic Egypt grappled with the quintessential riddles of existence, reflecting upon such issues as the question of origins, the problem of knowledge of the world, of the cosmos and of the way it came into being. Their thinking was of an exceptionally radical character. They held that before the birth of the pharaoh himself, and of the entire universe of divinities, before the advent of sky, earth, death and the meaning thereof, there was neither Creator-God nor Void nor Chaos. Instead, there was Nwn, That which was like nothing known, a reality like nothing hereafter established. Nwn was a watery abyss, absolute in essence, which already contained all primary matter that would be used by the Demiurge [Ra], a sort of latent consciousness within this same primordial liquid abyss. At the origin of the universe, then, the ancient Egyptians posited matter in the form of an abyss of water. In time this matter would gain consciousness of itself, then manifest itself as creation, a multiform figure of all that was, is, and will be.

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The exceptional vision comes from Egypt. Unlike all other mythologies, Egyptian mythology came up with the concept of a universe preceding the present universe, a different universe that existed before the demiurge [Ra] and all its creation. Here the mind, liberated from orthodox approaches to issues of genesis and origin, enters a realm with no questionable premises. What is posited is a kind of “matter.” Yet it has no thematic form. It is absolute in its sovereignty, before it becomes involved, through the agency of the demiurge, in a process of becoming. The concept was of a sort of spatial medium antedating space and time, beyond time and space. All perceptible reality would, in future be projected from this originating “medium” and within it. The result of that activity would be the generation of the universe as we know it now, the reality explored and exploited by human ingenuity.