Summary of Preceding Section:
The Cheetah Proportions Are the First Key to Unscrambling the
Truth About When the Sphinx Was Built and Why.
The Distinct Characteristics and Nature
of Preliterate Art
I'll go into those characteristics later, but first I want to show you some basic forms of preliterate art. In addition to the cave drawings shown above, one of the most common forms are pictographs (simple pictures painted on rocks or wood) and petroglyphs (simple rock carvings). So you get a better understanding of them, I'm going to jump way ahead of myself to show you an equation I've extracted from a large one that ends Part One of this blog. You won't know what all the terms mean, but you will by the time you get to the end of Part One of this blog. At any rate, what I want to show you now is how this equation message would be done as a pictograph or petroglyph.
First Mother = Mother Goddess = Mut = Nut = Ma' at= Mafdet = Nubia = Spiritual/Psychic Practices = Cat/Cheetah = Soul Obsession = "Veiled" Giza face = Nubian Female Shaman = Carved Giza Sphinx Face
The equal sign here should be read as meaning one term implies the next term (either forward or backward).
The equation pretty much sums up my thinking on the preliterate Nubian/ Proto-Egyptian Mother Goddess culture that carved the face of a Nubian female shaman/leader on a Giza cliff to honor her as a living Goddess. You'll get a better feel for the muthos mindset of the preliterate Proto-Egyptians if I make you examine the above equation as pictographs (simple pictures painted on rocks or wood) or petroglyphs (rock carvings) both of which preliterate peoples would have used to communicate the essence of a situation. They are essentially story pictures.
Immediately below are some actual examples of pictographs.
The carvings below are actual examples of petroglyphs.
Author's Note
For those not familiar with the term muthos, it is from the Greek for story.. It is used to describe the way preliterate people knew the world: through stories (or story pictures) with stories being seen as an imitation of life. To imitate was to know for muthos consciousness peoples, i.e., to feel the truth of something was sufficient for preliterate peoples..
This way of knowing is diametrically opposed to that of logos consciousness. The term logos is again Greek for word, the written word. It is used to describe the way literate, rational peoples know the world, which is through reason and logic . Our modern consciousness is a logos consciousness.
End Author's Note
OK. Here's my equation again:
First Mother = Mother Goddess = Mut = Nut = Ma' at= Mafdet = Nubia = Spiritual/Psychic Practices = Cat/Cheetah = Soul Obsession = "Veiled" Giza face = Nubian Female Shaman = Carved Giza Sphinx Face
The equal sign here should be read as meaning one term implies the next term (either forward or backward).
I have supplied a picture for each of the terms in the above equation and arranged them in the same order as the word equation. Read them from left to right, then down to next sequence of pictures. In practice, the pictographs would most probably be strung out like a line of laundry if the surface were large enough. If it wasn't large enough, God knows how they would be strung out and the sequence might be hard to determine. I should add, however, that most probably preliterate humans with their muthos knowing would not have been overly concerned with the the sequence. Most likely what would have been important to them was knowing that one term implied its neighbor, which would have been enough for them to reach the muthos conclusion that all the terms were equivalent, and that, in essence, is pretty much the situation, isn't it?
This is how the relationships I have been talking about would have been portrayed in simple pictographs in our 6000 B.C. Proto-Egyptian culture. They would have been highly simplified of course, which is the nature of pictographs and petroglyphs as actual petroglyphs and pictographs are very simple in structure compared to my equation photos. The difficulty of expressing complicated thoughts with these preliterate story pictures is obvious, and one reason why hieroglyphs (codified pictographs that could be combined to express complex thoughts) eventually grew out of them.
Despite the difficulty, it would be a good exercise to try "thinking" in pictures, because it will give you an insight into the way the preliterate mindset worked. It knew the world by imitating it, not logically explaining it. It was an imitative, artistic mind, not the logical, examining mind we have today. It wasn't really concerned with the logical expression of complex ideas and thoughts, such as those contained in my equations. This is why it was content with pictures. Pictures were imitations of the world, whether it was the exterior world or the interior world. To imitate was to know for muthos consciousness, to feel the truth of something.
One of those purposeful distortions is that petroglyphs or sculptures of faces of the Gods or ancestors almost always contain extremely large eyes that are out of proportion to the rest of the face, or in some cases in very early preliterate art, they show the eyes only. Here are some more examples.
What is also clear to me about the face of the Sphinx is that the eyes were made purposefully larger. Why were the eyes made larger? Large eyes were the way preliterate artist signified that the face was of a God or Goddess who saw more (understood more) than mere humans.
Some might say that the eyes are larger because the carving itself is relatively crude. That's a legitimate argument, but why just the eyes then? Why isn't everything out of proportion, the nose, the lips, the eyebrows? OK. OK. Let's consider for a moment that the eyes are too large because the carving itself is crude by 2500 B.C. standards. Then how could it be carved in 2500 B.C.? We're going around in circles here, aren't we? I'll go into other preliterate artistic characteristics in greater detail later in this blog.
I've just described the preliterate characteristics of the face of the Sphinx, but I haven't said anything about the artistic quality of face as a portrait, and by that I mean, what kind of temperament or character does the face portray? I'm going to go into this later, but it's something to think about. The best way to do this is to forget it's the Sphinx and imagine it's someone you just met on the street and then stare at the face alone in a meditative state and see what comes to you. You'd be surprised.
Author's Note
When I stated earlier that preliterate Egyptians understood proportion, I must make note of the fact that there are two oddities about the face that have puzzled theorist s. The first is the flat head and the second is the extreme squareness of the lower face. They don't puzzle me however. I'll show lateron that these oddities also indicate a preliterate carving of a human face with cheetah characteristics.
End Author's Note