ABSTRACT
The speculative thought of the ancient Egyptians, that is, roughly speaking, their metaphysics, politics, and ethics, are described and analyzed by John Wilson under the rubrics "The Nature of the Universe", "The Function of the State", and "The Values of Life". In order to illustrate the inability of the ancient Mesopotamian to think of natural events other than in a mythopoeic framework. Near East scholars are only too well aware how complex, difficult, and at times truly heart-rending a task it is to dig out, piece together, and formulate the philosophic and religious concepts of the ancients from their varied, fragmentary, and not too lucid literary remains. All that one is justified in coluding from the one-sided character of our Mesopotamian literary material is that the early Mesopotamian scribes and men of letters had failed to develop a written literary genre to serve as an adequate vehicle for the expression of their metaphysics and theology.
