{ } = word or expression can't be understood
{word} = hard to understand, might be this

...a number of { }. We had -- we have 75 men in class, and we are -- have 25 copies. So I have divided -- you into groups of each -- three each. And I have put the numbers on top of the papers, and you will kindly read this paper, which illustrates what I'm dealing with in these nax- -- next -- in this week and the next. You will kindly have them circulate among you three people. It would be too impossible for you to find out who the other fellow is. So the first man is responsible to me for the ma- -- the return of the issue given out. I have numbered them. There are 25 copies. Lehman -- Lehman -- here, you take this. Lampe, here. Payne. Perron. You know Payne? Who knows Mr. Payne? You will help him, yes, Sir? L- -- {Lauber}.

[tape interruption]

...then it should be around. And it will serve you to see the difficulties which we incur to understand these ancient people. I only have here two reports. How is this possible? Who is -- whose report is this?

(Wittenberg, {Velon}, who has dropped the course, {Luis}, and Adler.)

Ja. Well, Mr. Adler -- Robert Adler, will you come forward and read it?

[tape interruption]

You will recall that I tried to persuade you, gentlemen--I don't know if I have succeeded--that in the history of antiquity, the sequence is: tribe, empire, Israel. This is the many spirits of the ancestors, the many gods, the one God. That's the story of antiquity. Many spirits, many gods, one God--in protest against { }. Our era, however, goes the opposite direction. -- In the year 0, what is given to the rest of the world is the one God in the form of the Trinity. So we have the first millennium, Christianity, the Church going out into the whole world and bringing the mission of the one God to all peoples. We have the second millennium, and that's -- interests us at this moment, turning the whole world into one globe. We have today two world wars, no pe- -- no world peace, but certainly global policy. That is, the whole earth today is that mass of land has to be organized according to planetary law.

So at this moment, gentlemen, for the last thousand years--we shall see how important this is--the empires of the world have been dissolved into one world. In the first millennium, the one God of Israel has knocked out all the many gods and spirits of the ancestors. And at this moment, we are entering the

rece- -- reception of this first layer of the family and the tribes in the big society, which we are trying to found. We can put here the word "world," because everything in the last thousand years is "world revolution," "world war," "world dis- -- corporation," "world trade," whatever you ha- -- have, you -- or "world history" -- a very familiar term to you. You think all history is world history. It isn't true. Only the history of the last thousand years is world history, because only in the last thousand years did people feel that the whole world had to become one. Before, they didn't. You see, there was no world history. It makes no sense to write the history of 500 B.C. in one volume: what's going on in Mexico, and what's going on in China. They're just separate, you see, different histories. But world history exists in the last 900 years, since the Crusades, and since the Icelanders came to America.

What I'm driving at then, gentlemen, is that we are in the Christian era, imparting the acquisitions, the qualities of these three great layers of antiquity in the reverse order. That's so very difficult for any American to understand, because it's all so far away, and you are all running head on; and to you, time is just one-direction stream. And you can hardly imagine that since the year 0, we have carefully plugged up, and plowed up, and rec- -- received into our own forms of life layers of history that were established in this obverse order, in the reverse order. First there had to be speech. Then there had to be monuments. Then could there be monotheism. However, when the world and the -- mankind underwent the influence of the Christian era, the first sermon was, "God is one. And Christ is His incarnation." Then the second Gospel only was, "Let's unify the world; let's discover America." You all know that America was discovered in 1492 of our era, but the Creed in one God, and Christ in His incarnation was already proclaimed in 325 on the Council of Nicaea. That's 1200 years earlier.

So the sequence of our era is: one God, one earth, one society. But the -- the story of antiquity is the opposite: found a society that will last: the tribe, family; then found empires, cut out one part of the globe and show what you can build there, what you can civilize there, how you can settle; and then we shall see, third, you see: establish the truth that this all is incomplete. That all these tribes, these thousands of tribes and these hundreds of empires must get together. That's the Israelitic, messianic hope.

The sooner you remem- -- recall -- I told you this in the beginning, but of course you have forgotten it now. It's important, the more you will understand what we can now learn from the Egyptian story.

I have put here--unfortunately, I have no colored -- colored chalk--we draw the situation of the Egyptian empire. As far as we can see, even today with all this -- story of Babylon and Sumeria, the greatest prototype of a complete

dialectical reversal of the tribal order to create writing, gentlemen, and to create a country in which people gave up migration. The Egyptians fought, tooth and nail, the tribal order from which they took their people, and which they had to annihilate. If there ever is a case of dialectics in history--in the famous Hi- -- -gelian dialectic, as you know, of proletar- -- and capitalism -- Communism and capitalism--it's a much stronger dialectic in Egypt than anything I -- I, with all my study of history, have found anywhere in the world. Perhaps Moses, we should see, is a strong dialectic of Judaism against Egypt, as the Egyptians against the tribes.

So I want to make this point, gentlemen, first of all. Just as a priest cannot be tattooed, and his clean skin is a protest against the old tribal order, so the relations of the dead and the living are reversed in Egypt. The temple-building is a means of putting the living present above the past and the future. The astrology, gentlemen, of the empires, their great principle is that the sky tells people on earth what to do. And we find here -- first of -- the great introduction of the permanent calendar, of which this paper also is a { }. And what is a calendar? A calendar is -- you have to read this -- write this down, I think, carefully--a calendar is not something you give as a Christmas present -- to your mother, but the calendar is the list of common operations in a special country under its climate and its seasons, which have to be performed in a centralized manner under the division of labor. The calendar says the -- tells the priest, tells the soldier, tells the worker, tells the peasant what to do.

So the calendar--in an old medieval manuscript I found this, of the 5th century of our era--a calendar of the {operae humani}. Calendar is the human work, organized. We would today perhaps best translate it with the word "organized work," calendar. It's not a luxury, then, you see, on the blackboard or in a book, the calendar. But the calendar is a prescription, a recipe: how people can cooperate, although they live in spaces that are so wide away from each other, that they do not see each other, and do not speak each other -- speak to each other. A calendar is the power, gentlemen, to have a division of labor in farflung spaces without personal touch.

Why has the calendar this power over Egypt, gentlemen? Look at this map. This little bit of a crayon here, the crayon -- dots, is all that is habitable in Egypt. It's 1500 miles -- thousand miles long. It's as far as from New York to Florida. That was unheard-of, 4,000 years before our era, that people could cooperate over such a distance. It would be the same as if we would have today cooperation between Patagonia--or South Arctic, you see, the Antarctic--and Alaska. At least. Ja, that's the same distance -- technically even a shorter distance today than it was then to go -- it took three weeks -- it took--what did I say?--six weeks to get from the beginning of Egypt down to the mouth of the Nile River.

Egypt is situated between the First Cataract of the Nile and the Mediterranean Sea. Now what we call the First Cataract is, of course, a strange count. As we -- if you -- have you ever gone up the White River Valley? Who has? Well, you may not have noticed it, but it is remarkable that the White River Valley is counting upwards. The first branch of the White River comes in Tunbridge, and the second comes in Bethel, and the third then goes up, higher up. So that according to the discovery -- the time of the discovery, the first branch is the nearest to the -- to the mouth of the river. You, of course, in your great geographical superiority, would count from the source downwards, you see. But when this country was discovered, people were very modest. They had to discover one after the other. And they first came from the mouth of the White River, you see, up into the mountains. So the first branch was exactly the same as the First Cataract in Egypt.

Practically the First Cataract is the last cataract, if you count from the source of -- of the Nile. But for the Egyptians, it was the entrance of the Nile into Egypt, into this divine country, gentlemen, where, when everything in the desert died from thirst and -- and dryness, when in July, the snow melted in Ethiopia and the Abyssinian mountains, and suddenly the inundation began at the First Cataract and flooded this whole valley, you see, for three months, and left the -- the mud of the inundation as fertile soil. That is the miracle of Egypt. Egypt is the creation of the Nile inundation. And the Nile inundation gives irrigation to a country which has no rain.

So all of Egypt is a miraculous -- a miracle. It's -- has been -- always been called the "gift of the Nile." But the Nile itself is a miracle, because the Nile is not the gift of rain waters, but oblations far away, in Abyssinia. Of course the ancients didn't know where it came from. It was unknown that the Nile water came from there. But it was the only river, gentlemen, for -- all antiquity, the water of which would be suddenly higher in July, at a time when everything else would be low and dying.

And to this day, Mr. Nasser is fighting with the special situation of Egypt. I think it is today indomitable, inconquerable. There live today 22 million people, gentlemen, in an area which is as big as Belgium, as to topsoil. And Belgium is the most highly populated country of Europe, and of the whole world--except Egypt, by the way--and it has 8 million inhabitants with a great industry. And yet in Egypt, there are 22 million people on the same amount of soil. And this soil is only in existence as long as the Nile inundates it every year. Otherwise there would be nothing. There would be desert.

So it's the most precarious -- existence any country can lead. Totally des- -- dependent on this miracle that once a year the flood rises, wends the way--all

localities, gardens, houses, everything--forces the people to go to the shore of the desert, to the rim of the desert, and wait till the water has again disappeared, and then you can sow and till. And the seasons are quite important in Egypt, gentlemen. The -- the flood rises in July; the new year in -- in Egypt in old days was 19th of July. And in October, the sowing takes place, because then only do the waters recede.

All this takes place, gentlemen, at various days, at the various -- in the various parts of Egypt, because it is a thousand miles long. And therefore, what I say: the calendar performs the miracle that people can do the -- the necessary chores in different places, with different flood periods, and with different -- dates, and yet be harmonized, be organized, get organized and be controlled by one central power.

Now we learn, gentlemen, that this dialectic of the temple state against the tribal order, this non-migrating group was in a most precarious, dialectically opposed position. It could not seek its hunting grounds by escaping, by going elsewhere, by finding better hunting grounds, more deer, and better -- better coconuts, trees, or cornfields, or whatever -- here, our Indians would have done. The problem was to outwit the law of the annual seasons, and to be always on time with responding to this miraculous, very critical, very dangerous flood, mud, dryness season. There were obviously three great periods in Egypt. The first of the flood, three months, by and large, or 100 days, 120 days; it was counted differently, var- -- variously. Then the time of the mud, which we despicably call "mud season" here. But this was of course topsoil season, you could -- they called it instead, the fruitful season. And then the drought, the terrible drought when everything died, when it was as dry as it should be -- in the desert, without the Nile. And that was from May -- in May, and June, and July. Again in April already, the drought.

So you have a country with three seasons: flood, mud, drought. Accordingly, the old ancient -- Egyptian calendar was divided into three times 120 days. And the oldest year of the world, gentlemen, is 360 days long. That's why I gave you this paper with the title, "360 and 5." And the five first days at the head of the year, were the days of Easter, of institution, of the Great Sabbath, the ya- -- day of the great entrance of the gods of Egypt upon their soil. Their fulfillment of the promise that every year, there shall be winter and summer, rain and drought, you see; there shall be this tremendous rhythm.

You can see, when you find the blessing of Noah in the Old Testament, that this is taken from the experience of Egypt--and to a minor matter of the Babylonians--that the whole population has embarked on trust -- on a credit system, "Let us trust Heaven. The miracle of the flood will return."

Very risky, gentlemen. A -- a bank credit today is just not more risky, you see, given to a new enterprise, than this banking of a whole population on this miracu- -- miracle that every year the Nile will give the flood. Well, you know from the Old Testament how precarious this was, because you have seven years of famine. What are seven years of famine in a country like Egypt, gentlemen? They are the end of the world, because there is nothing. There is the desert left and right. And there live far too many people on this topsoil. They cannot suddenly escape.

So the whole story of the old -- Jew -- Israel- -- Israel in Egypt and the pharaonic supply economy is simply true, because if the Nile did not rise seven yards--what is a -- what is this? Half? Half a yard? What? -- How do you call -- it's measured from the elbow down --?

(Cubit. Cubits.)

Cub- -- cubits, didn't mea- -- mea- -- didn't ri- -- mea- -- cubit, there was famine. And we have as the first {point} of Egypt, the meter of the Nile, at Gizeh. Every year the greatest patriotic prayer would go up: let the Nile rise at least seven cubits. If it didn't, not enough fields could be irrigated. Then the water would only well up, you see, to the immediate neighborhood of the river -- bed of the river, but it wouldn't reach the outskirts.

You must think that the whole of Egypt, thousand miles long, the territory that the Nile reaches by -- in its flood, is 30 kilometers, 20 miles on both sides. It's of course not invariably so. Sometimes it's 25 miles; sometimes it's 30 miles. But the average is 70 Kilometers -- kilometers all told, which as you know is 45 miles in -- as a cross-section from mountain to mountain, from desert to desert, with the Nile by and large exactly in the middle.

So you can imagine that any one cubit missing would omit under -- of miles, you see, of -- of acreage, all along this riverbed. And the results would be terrible.

This is the first thing to observe, gentlemen, that famine and abundance not only were natural, but from the very first provoked central government and a creeping socialism. You had to have {things}, you have to have provisions, which you only can have if you stay in the same country. so Egypt had to be sealed off against the outer world -- if those magazines, you see, these provisions should serve really the ancient people, they had to seal themselves off against the outside world.

Now the exciting story of this dangerous living, gentlemen, goes on. Since

the flood came over Egypt for three months, all the people had to evacuate their fruitland, their garden, their beautiful -- or more or less beautiful homes. They had to flee to the edge of this inundated area, and how were they fed? How were they supported? Why should they do it? It's after all, you would -- you go up -- the way your family goes to a summer camp in the summer, and you forgo the amenities. But first of all, you do it voluntarily, and second, you can pick and choose where you live in summer. You go to a -- agreeable place in the Green Mountains. These people, however, had to live during the flood at the edge of the desert, unshielded against the sun and the heat.

So gentlemen, the plan of Egypt's economy is very clear. The public works have to supply occupation and food for three months to the whole people of Egypt. What's the result, gentlemen, of such a planned economy, when the people are taken care -- have to be taken care of for three months, and have -- can live on their own only for nine months? What do you expect? What do you find in Egypt when you go there? Public works. What are the public works? The pyramids. The pyramids are the result of this artificial way of life. In the pyramids, the people did the public works. And they were for this supported for three months by the pharaoh, by the central power.

The -- in the three months then, gentlemen, of the flood, the Egyptians were welded together into one bloc of people. And it was a tremendous exercise. Take the militia. That's nothing--militia day or six weeks of service--compared to the upheaval of having to leave your home for three months and carry stones, to build these incredible pyramids.

The pyramids then are not there by accident. They are the way of en- -- enabling the people to live on the land the other nine months. The flood demands this shift. Can you see this?

Therefore it's highly dramatic. The people migrate within their settlement. To this day, gentlemen, the so-called "{trans-humans}" forces the shepherds and the cowherds of Europe to move from -- with their winter location up in May to their first pasture, and then in June to a higher pasture, and perhaps in July to the last pasture. And they also migrate. But you don't call it "migration." To you, this driving-up to a higher part of the pasture, you see, is something you overlook, and you seem to think that the peasants in Europe are stable.

Gentlemen, any settlement demands movement within it. And the first and primary example of this inner movement--which is repetitive, it is true--is the movement from the flooded area to the public works. I found a document, gentlemen, an inscription of 2400 B.C.--that's a long time ago, you think--where the pharaoh had 972 boats running on the Nile River in the summer -- during the

middle of the flood to transport the big obelisk of Karnak from the First Cataract to this mighty temple near Thebes--Luxor, today, call it -- as it is called. You may have heard of the temple of Karnak. Can't help seeing it -- magazines live by these Egyptian miracles, more or less. Or every once in a while, even Life has to pay its respect to the pyramids, and to the temple of Karnak. They have been over-photographed, I would say. But the miracle is -- much more in the way they were built, in this discipline, gentlemen, that Egypt, for 4,000 years -- 3,500 years, had public works, had -- this tremendous discipline, that the calendar organized the peoples of Egypt. For three months, they were all working together for one thing, and for nine months, they were all allowed to have their own specialty -- their wheat, and their fruit garden, and their palm tree, and what-not.

It is very strange that our modern historians do not -- bring out what is really interesting in the Egyptian venture. I think it's quite unique. It is the first study which you can make in a real economy. In the literal sense, gentlemen, Egypt is one house. "Economy" means the order of a household, one housekeeping, because no Egyptian could survive if not for a certain time of the year, he would be supported from the magazines of the central power. And therefore, gentlemen, "pharaoh" -- the word "pharaoh" means "great house," "big house." Just as "wigwam" means the -- the -- council place of the tribe, as you may know, "wigwam." And as we call the -- the high gate, the old government of the Turkish sultans, so the word "pharaoh" means--and I think that's very useful for you -- that's the old writing of "pharaoh" in Egyptian, p-r- and p-r-o -- this is the { }. And the hieroglyph, the sign with which it is written, is just the "house," and then a sign for "big." The big house, because Pharaoh is the big house.

Gentlemen, the first economy already had the name "housekeeping." "Ecos" is -- "oikos," a very important word, after all. You have the word "ecology," today, or botany. As you know, the meadow has an ecology; you have heard of this. And we all live by our more or less working economy. Now these words, gentlemen, are -- all go back to Egypt. There the first time the experience is made, what it means to organize a whole country as one household. And that's why pharaohs' palaces all over the country bear this name of "the great house."

Why is this something special, gentlemen? The old tribes -- only knew of tents, of huts, and shelters. And I come now to the total -- totally different character of a house, as compared to a hut. Our modern Sachem Villages, and Wigwam Villages are so rundown, and so dilapidated, that you may say it's not a question of principle, a house and a hut. But it is, gentlemen. A hut is a shelter, but a house is surveyed. That is, it is put in a place in the universe where it belongs, and where it righteously is erected with regard to east, west, north, south. That is, it is oriented. A house, and everything you call "architecture," they get their dignity not from sheltering you against rain. They have no rain in Egypt, or not

even sheltering you against the sun. But being a temple. That is, being surveyed, being oriented, and standing in the proper place, the only place in which they can stand.

The great invention then of the -- the Egyptians is architecture. As you know--as you don't know--the pyramids are so exactly oriented, that no modern architect can build them more exactly to the -- with regard to the re- -- directions of the compass. It has been tried. But a little deviation, of one-tenth of a second -- of a degree, you see, will always creep in, whatever you do. The exactitude, gentlemen, of the measurements of the old Egyptians are just as perfect as the mask in the tribe. The beauty of Egypt is in its architecture. The great pyramid cannot be surpassed in its simplicity, in its beauty. And I told you, that every period has its absolute greatness. I have tried to convince you--I'm sure I haven't convinced you, because you are very stubborn, and you have no -- much interest in art--that the ancient masks of the tribes are un- -- in- -- unsurpassable, that we cannot match their beauty. But if you should believe me, this -- is -- perhaps easier for you is still to believe that the buildings of the ancient Egyptians cannot be surpassed in their mastery of space. That they are so perfectly oriented that to this day, some fools always publish books on the mysteries of the great pyramids, because they think that it is so insurpassably correct that these people must have known everything, more secrets than there are under Heaven.

To give you an example, gentlemen, at the end of the first Great Year of Egypt--that -- it was in the year 1321 from -- before Christ--1460 years had passed since the first institution of the Egyptian calendar in 2780, by and large, before Christ. That's the oldest date in history which man can reach in some certainty. In 2780, the Egyptians began--had already, perhaps--successfully observed the sky so that they could predict that in 1460 years, the sun would rise on the same day of the year, at the same spot, despite the Leap Year, you see, despite the Le- -- the Leap Year, despite the irregularity that -- that this year is not 360 plus 5 days long, but as you know, it's a little more. It's not quite a quarter of a day more. We talked about this before.

So the Egyptians lived in the shadow of this great expectation, that their gods would serve them over 1460 years, with great faith. The oldest hieroglyph which--or one of the oldest, I should say--which we have, the -- one of the oldest writing forms of the Egyptians, has the meaning of millions of years. Because the Egyptians were so impressed that they could reach out now with the help of the observation of the sky to an infinite time. And that they were in their eon, in their era, far superior to these Bedouins, these tribesmen who only lived by six or seven generations. And therefore, were -- they were civilized people, because they could figure the future indefinitely. And they could also of course figure on a cosmological past. A little bit like our physicists, who tell us that we are 500

million years old, or 2 billion years old. And so we say, "So what?" because nobody can fathom that out. But it's very interesting to read.

In the same sense, gentlemen, the people in Egypt, after the first 1460 years, got very restless. And the Exodus from Egypt took place--this is my conviction--because of the disappointment of the first Great Year. Moses drew his conclusions from the waiting in vain, so to speak, for the first great period in Egyptian history. I'll come to this once, later.

But today I want to tell you that the Egyptian pharaoh, in order to recognize the importance of this first great epoch in human history, you may say, built a city in the middle of Egypt, called Tel-Amarna, and could read very much of Mr. Ekhnaton, and Nefertiti, perhaps, and this Tel- -- city of El-Amarna, and this alleged monotheism--which is not true--in our modern books. They try to tickle your palate by sensational reports on this first great monotheistic pharaoh, Ek- -- Ekhnaton.

The really interesting thing is -- about it is something different, gentlemen. Ekhnaton tried to settle the Egyptian country from the center. Tel-Amarna is exactly, to the inch, in the center of Egypt, measured by the length of the Nile. That is, not in our way, it is not measured, of course, by -- as the -- a crow flies, but the length of all the windings of the Ni- -- Nile, you see, with all its little eddies, and its little drawbacks -- throwbacks, is measured. And Tel-Amarna is situated halfway between the mouth of the Nile and the First Cataract. That's a great achievement in surveying, already, { }.

I'm now talking about the skill of a -- the Egyptian economy, and the -- superb and unsurpassable geodes- -- -desy or surveying art of the old Egyptian architects. And the first great feat is that they did find out successfully the exact middle of Egypt. And they had to do it, of course, from scratch, without any comparative method. Just in Egypt, they measured, obviously rod by rod, the whole length of the river, and then they found the -- the middle. For {several} thousand miles, that's an incredible feat. Then they put the city of -- who has heard of the city of Tel-Amarna? The name, Tel-Amarna? Some of -- who has heard this name before? The Sun City. Oh, must have. You see, the terrible thing is that you live by magazines and newspapers, but you don't read them. That is, your excuse when you don't read books is that you read magazines and newspapers. But when I inquire, "Do you read the magazines and newspapers?" you don't even read them. So what do you read? Because Tel-Amarna is mentioned at least every four weeks in some magazine. You can't help it. I thought Time and Life were your -- your life line.

Tel-Amarna. Ne- -- nobody -- really two people in this class have heard of

it? Is this true?

({ } the Sun City { }.)

Who has heard of this man Ekhnaton, and his alleged monotheism? Well, he built the city. In the middle of the 14th century B.C., 30 years before the Great Year was to be expected, he wanted, so to speak, to show his homage to the divinities, because they had come true so far, and he would celebrate as a jubilee, you see, of the first 1460 years, this -- you see why it broke down, why it was the wrong method, why Moses had to do the opposite.

Well, now comes the feat which I think is the climax of ancient workmanship. He fixed his city in a square. The mountains are quite high on both sides of the river, at a distance of perhaps 10 miles from the river bank. And he fixed his city so that it founded -- it formed a square exactly in the center of an -- his whole empire. And it was measured, this square, from mountain-top on the ri- -- side -- of one side of the river, to a mountaintop on the opposite side of the river, four points. And we have these points. They have been rediscovered. And we have found the inscriptions on these corners of this square. It was a magic square. And he tried to {band}, he tried to locate the divine powers in Heaven with the help of this so-called -- what we today would call a magic square, you see, inside of which he would conjure up the good spirits of this {spirit}, always to -- of the sky, always to be present over his earth. And he measured the distances from mountaintop to mountaintop, from ridge to ridge, and we have the report of the measurements. And the geographical survey of Egypt done by the British, some 30 years ago, has not been able to match the precision of their measuring, the Egyptian measuring, with all their modern instruments. And they have admitted it, that their margin of error this time was larger than the margin of error of the Egyptians, obviously. I think that is a tremendous feat of engineering, which may perhaps remain unforgotten for the next week in your memory.

I pick this out, because people do not think of the underlying economy of the Egyptian householding or housekeeping very often. You think of sensational building of one pyramid, or one pillar, or the temple of Karnak, or the -- the obelisk, or the Sphinx. Much more interesting, I think, is the underlying principle that Egypt is oriented by the heavenly powers. Can you understand what I mean? That it had an impact that is constantly influencing the life on earth. Gentlemen, the very word "influence," is an Egyptian term. You use the word of an "influential person," don't you? And you are under certain influences. Well, these influences stream from Heaven to earth, and that's the astrological idea from the Egyptians. The man who is influencing, or influenced, is under the power of Heaven. And Heaven speaks to earth.

The great dialectic of the Egyptian story then is, gentlemen, that a country that is oriented, and in which every building is oriented, in which everything is squared according to north, south, est -- west, and east, that such a country is blessed, because it reflects the order of the universe. It is obedient to what the skies demand us to do. And in Egypt, that's true. If you hit it off right, you know every day of the year where to be. These 975 ships on the Nile River during the flood, they had to be there in the decisive months to carry the granite stone down -- up from -- from Assuan, you see, from the First Cataract, down to Memphis on a stretch of a thousand miles. If they were late, they couldn't make it, because it took them six weeks to go. Everything had to be ready. Now think what it means that in 2400, by and large, these -- this obelisk was carried -- by 972 ships. What an organization! You understand that 972 ships, even were -- if they were small, take a tremendous amount of discipline, and -- and communication, and a whole staff of people. That's -- all was felt to be withi- -- done within the house of the god. It was a divine purpose ruling the earth. And whatever -- whenever you read in the New Testament, "Our" -- the "Our Father," you should understand that the -- the reason why God there is -- in Heaven and on earth is the reason because most of the people who had to be converted by the Chris- -- Christian missionaries lived in empires. And they are accustomed to know that the order had to be received from above, and to be written into the soil down below.

The great novelty of Christianity is only that the human -- the saints are the stars in the heaven of Christianity. In Egypt, the real stars were the saints who directed the course. But otherwise, gentlemen, the New Testament is everywhere preparing this march of the one God over these empires and tribes. I tried to tell you that therefore Christ is declared to be -- come to judge the living and -- the quick and the dead, the dead and the quick, because He had to appeal to the traditions of the tribesmen, the...

[tape interruption]

I have been asked several questions. One of them is quite interesting. Why cannot this new dam, if possible, regulate the life of Egypt so that there is no flood, but constant irrigation? { } -- in this climate, gentlemen, a constant humidity is at 30 degrees, south of Alabama climate, or even Key -- Key West, pardon me. If you go that far down, and you have this humidity spread in a desert climate, you get all kind of tremendous damages by locusts, by insects. Hookworm exists now as a terrible disease in Egypt, since the E- -- British have partly regularized irrigation. And there is water now in the ditches all over the year. Hence the hookworm makes havoc of the Egyptian people since 1881, whereas before, every year, every insect was killed off in the drought. And therefore there was a constant hygienic process, and the -- the -- these insects, you see,

were killed by the drought. So there is great wisdom in a natural economy, and there is great danger in an artificial economy. And Heaven knows what's going to happen if all of Egypt is constantly irrigated. Probably the -- all the people will die from some disease.

I mean, you -- you only think of life, gentlemen, as a -- a brutal destruction of nature. But nature has its own laws, and you cannot just say, "We do what we please." And the dam is not the solution of the ills of a country that stretches out between the -- between the -- the -- what's the -- between the -- latitude of Can- -- the -- Cancer and the 30th degree of latitude, which is in this tropical area. It's very complicated. I don't believe that any of these panaceas are panaceas. They are invented -- in the brain of an engineer, but not of people who have had to live there.

The second question I was asked by Mr. Prensner is: why anybody would put up with the river -- of the discipline of a calendar if he could remain a Bedouin. Now the answer is: some people preferred their freedom. And still are. I told you that there are still 40,000 Bedouins in the -- adjacent -- desert around Egypt. But gentlemen, have you never heard of the "fleshpots of Egypt"? The word "fleshpots of Egypt," have you never heard of this? Prensner, you don't seem to have heard the expression.

({ }.)

F-l-e-s-h-p-o-t-s. Well, the {main} expression for this, the American expression for this is "standard of living." That's what "fleshpots of Egypt" means. That for the good life and the forecast, you will sell your soul. That's what the Egyptians did. They sold their freedom, and they were despised by the tribesmen, so much that today people i- -- are very freely saying that the Jews who left Egypt far behind and transcended it were just tribesmen. You can read that -- {Jahweh} was a tribal god, written by the idiotic modern anthropologists. But he wasn't, as we shall see. But the fleshpots of Egypt certainly had to be forgone by the Jews, when they left Egypt, the standard of living.

My dear man, you can always have freedom if you forgo the iron discipline of our modern economy. But if you want to ride in a car, and drive -- and fly in a plane, you must have Pittsburgh. And Pittsburgh is discipline, and Pittsburgh is calendar.

(Well, what was their advantage in this?)

Life is not built on advantages, but on choices, gentlemen. You always pay with something for something else. What's the advantage for be- -- of being

married for being a bachelor? It's very disadvantageous. Just the same, one day you will be married. Life is not for advantages, you silly boy! It's a scandalous question! Life is serious business and has to be lived according to its rules. You have no choice in the matter. Advantages!

There was suddenly possible a predictable future for every man. He could eat. That's something. And you could -- didn't have to go to war. It was an eternal peace. It was for any pacifist society which says, "This place we will hold. We will not inun- -- invade the territory of another hunting group" -- would do away with this constant slaughter between the Indians who were -- had to go to war against each other all the time. Any settlement implies a much more perpetual peace, Sir. These are not advantages, but these are necessary steps you want to take, because you want to get rid of this bloodshed. But the word "advantage" is too low, Sir. You choose a different way of life; you have to sacrifice certain things, but this new situation is compelling, because usually we do not -- we do not -- chose the next step in life, gentlemen, because it is advantageous, but because the old -- stage has come to an end. It isn't advantageous to marry, but to stay a bachelor just is impossible, when your sap is -- is -- is flowing. You have to get married. It's necessity.

That's why I hate -- if you enter a new phase of life, to grow old, my dear man, to cease to be a child, to become a boy; to cease to be a boy and to become a Dartmouth student; to cease to be a Dartmouth student and become a man -- that's not advantageous. But it has to be done. And it -- follows a different road. Isn't that true? You live in a fool's paradise if you think that we -- man can act by ad- -- advan- -- by -- by advantages. We are driven by dire necessity, Sir. And we are blessed if we fulfill our necessary tasks in life. It's all -- it's called Manifest Destiny. You can embellish it with -- with -- but it's nothing, a question of advantage, gentlemen. There is very little advantage in -- that you can go in a Chrysler. But when the country wants to be -- harbor 200 million people instead of 10 million people, you have to have Chryslers, and cars, and highways and byways, you see.

Is this advantageous? I think we pay a terrible price for our modern civilization, you see. But can we go back? We can't. It's illusion. You can't go back to the one-family farm. But what is there advantageous about the big corporations, Sir? Only the other era has come to an end. That's the funny thing about history, gentlemen, that everything, because it is done well, comes to its own end, gentlemen. Good things are all transient. Your life is transient, because it's a good life. It is not advantageous. You have to live differently at 50 than you have lived at 20, because life has been lived to the full by you, I hope, to the brim as a boy of 20. You can't go on like that. Why? Mystery.

All temporal things, gentlemen, come to an end. And when all people have roamed over the surface of the earth, the desire came: "Can't we stop this mad rush, and this constant slaughter? Can't we say: we cut out a path which has nobody so far been able to master"? And this is the reason -- I tell you now the real reason of these big empires. The big empires enabled people to take possession of lands hitherto unmanageable. They were minus areas before. And now they became plus -- areas. They were, so to speak, the {sinners} of the first period of humanity, this un- -- indomitable floodland, you see, and now it became a plus area. It suddenly, with the new technique of -- of inner settlement -- movement, migration from public works to tilling the soil, you could make wasteland, so to speak--formerly, you see, it wouldn't be inhabitable--you could make it into something.

If you read the report of the flood of Noah, that's of course the background of the Bible story. The Bible in the story of Noah has eternalized and lifted up--the sublimated, you may call it--the story of the empire founders, the empire-builders. The flood which is sent there is the flood of the Nile Valley, of the Tigris Valley, of the Euphrates valley, of the Orinoco Valley, of the {Genesee} Valley, the Yangtze valley, of all the valleys in the world.

And it means that a new way of life is possible. You may say, gentlemen, that the Egyptians created the term "territory" or "soil" for earth. The earth for the tribesman was the jungle, the bush. That's the most polite word, you see. That is, it was a hindrance, an obstacle. For the Egyptians, it was the gift of the gods, this very fertile soil, this very thin soi- -- piece of land. And there are two words, I -- as far as I have been able to find out--unfortunately I do not know Hebrew enough to -- to test it myself--there are even two expressions for "earth" in the Old Testament. Of this, however, I cannot give proof, myself. That is, after you take possession of flooded land, the earth appears to you, you see, as something quite different from the bush, the second growth, with alders, where you make your way, you see, hunting. A hunting ground, as we still say, or a bush, or a jungle doesn't convey to you the term of "earth." It isn't impos- -- important that you put your foot or your hoe on this earth, but that you can go -- get through, you see, and can -- can move through it, wouldn't you feel? -- that's implied by the word "bush."

But the earth is something { }. The earth is offered to you, to be -- have something done to it. And therefore, gentlemen, you see -- again, you see it's a new discovery. It isn't advantageous to discover America. You will admit that we make -- committed terrible crimes in America. There is not one native left on any of the islands in the Caribbean. So is it advantageous to discover America? But it is inescapable, wouldn't you agree? Prensner, could you sit back in Spain and say to Isabella of Spain, "Don't discover America"? Could you? It's a silly ques-

tion, you see. That's not how life goes on. Life wants to supersede itself. We go on to new ways, without saying that they are better, but they are there. They have to be lived.

As long as you look for this moral question: is it -- or even utilitarian question, you cannot understand history. It isn't advantageous { }. It is necessary. The discovery of America, gentlemen, is not a useful -- question of usefulness, of advantage. Can't you see this? And nobody has ever made such a -- do you think it was useful for the United States to enter the two world wars? It was just necessary. But it was certainly not useful. Our public debt is now $287 billion. Is that useful? If we had saved that money, imagine!

I mean, this whole term of "advantageous" and "useful" is only possible, gentlemen, for quantitative measurements, you see. "Advantageous" is if something costs $10 instead of $20. But these great decisions cannot be measured by quantity. It's a different way of life which you suddenly dare to undertake. Then you find out in the process whether it ha- -- it has both, its drawbacks and its advantages. You'll never find out. It is just { }.

And you wouldn't build up the skyscrapers of today. You owe them all to Egypt. That you live in a -- this house here, my dear man, you have to be very grateful to the Egyptians. You couldn't say "no," because you live by it. My whole course, gentlemen, is posed -- after all puts you in a position to be the heirs of these achievements. Whether you like it or not, you write, you read books, you have the Bible, you have a -- a central government, you have an economy. Sir, that's all an Egyptian invention. How can you ask that's -- advantageous? It's you. You are not advantageous yourself, Sir. You are queer. But you exist.

We are not advantageous ourselves, gentlemen. We are formed in a certain way, and I tried to give you your ancestry. And one of your ancestries is the power of the division of labor. Can't you see this? That you devote certain time to one thing, while others devote other times to others. That's a miracle, this calendar business. That's -- that's the question of a new discipline of humanity, never undergone before. You don't have to write poetry. We have Mr. {Eberhart} for this, you see. Now in the -- in the old tribe, you had never great poetry, because everybody had to sing, and to rhyme, you see. Every one of them. Therefore, you have an average, which is very low. They have never the highest achievement.

To come back to my order of the Egyptian economy. The great economy is the whole of Egypt. All temples and all buildings in Egypt are subdivisions of the whole empire. And there now you come to see the next point. The Heaven is the

only visible newspaper of Egypt which can be read every morning, without paying a subscription price to The New York Times, everywhere in Egypt. The greatness of the empires, gentlemen, was made possible by the sky, because you see the same constellations in the sky, but you see different things on earth. Around every corner of the Nile, you see a different landscape: different animals, different climate, different everything. But if you look up to the clear sky, all the people can read the same law. The astrology, gentlemen, which you still find in your newspa- -- in our newspaper columns, all goes back to the Egyptian great idea that the sky is the universal book which can be read at the mouth of the river, as well as in Assuan at the First Cataract. And the whole problem, gentlemen, of the identity of people who live in different spaces has to be created artificially. I told you that the tribes had to create a common time by letting the dead stay with them, and being -- making them all the time frightened, so that every generation would still feel that they had an immediate call with the ancestors of the tribe.

{tape interruption}

And that there was absolute certainty that these 36 priesthoods in these 36 temples would record it, and they knew it.

[tape interruption; end]