"Along with the Sumerians, the Egyptians deliver our earliest -though by
no means primitive- evidence of human thought. It is thus appropriate to
characterize Egyptian thought as the beginning of philosophy. As
far back as the third millennium B.C., the Egyptians were concerned with
questions that return in later European philosophy and that remain
unanswered even today - questions about being and nonbeing, about the
meaning of death, about the nature of the cosmos and man, about the
essence of time, about the basis of human society and the legitimation of
power." -
Hornung, 1992,
p.13, my italics.
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