Some thoughts

I'm eating pizza right now. Isn't it weird that you now know that? I'm surrounded by a mess, which is surrounded by a wall, which is in a house in a town, city or even country separate from yours, and just from that first sentence you know that a) I exist or have existed at some point, b) I have access to a computer, c) I'm literate,  d) I have a pizza that I am eating, and e) I have enough time to eat pizza, and misuse my education and time on meaningless little posts like this. Just by encoding a few words into writing in a little electronic box, a collection of electronic magnetic waves magically changes them into a section of ones and zeroes, takes them over to your computer, and changes them back into words before your very eyes. So much information. 
From the language that I am using, it is enough to identify me from what must be more than 99% of human life. Even at a), I'm in the minority of all the humans that have ever lived. To be known from afar to have lived. 

It was important you know. For the dead to be remembered. Still is I suppose, but not so centrally. I'm talking core religious belief. The Egyptian monarchs dedicated mindblowing resources to ensure people would remember their dead kings, diverting rock and sweat and lives to construct towering monuments, commemorating the life and death of the pharoah and his lot. So much is difficult to grasp for us, but think about being an Egyptian man or woman, confronted with this building, far bigger than your limited imagination would have ever allowed. An immense building built for your dead leader, 20 times bigger than your own current dwelling, which not only holds you, but your spouse, 4 children, your parents and sometimes your livestock. We see big constructions all the time, walking down the street, crawling inside them like crabs feeding on a whale carcass. Very rarely do we ever stand back and look at them. See how truly magnificent they are. Appreciate the planning, the sawing, the chiselling, the broken bones, the burnt skin, the strained muscles and neurons it cost to erect them. I stand on the pavement and gawk upwards. Try it sometime. It feels like the bottom of your heart just opened, and the world peers in. 

So think about the poor Egyptian felt as he stared at the dead kings pyramid, or mortuary temple, or barque shrine. Nothing that size ever really existed that was man made til then, for him anyway. If he was lucky he may have glimpsed the treasures of the sort that may have been inside, at some point in his life. Sacred things from places you don't know exist. Colours on a gemstone on a necklace are even more brilliant when all you're used to is sky and sand and rock. And the shine! Nothing ever looks that clear here. My word, reflections like on the water but not, brighter and cleaner and clearer and more entrancing and frightening, like God flashing a grin at you!! And a slow understanding, entering your mind drip by drip, that you are tiny; a speck on a speck of sand that you think is the whole jostling, moving, unwieldly world. The brief insight that it is a speck and the whole world is elsewhere, pressing down and surrounding you like earth upon a buried person, the excrutiating horror and excitement about the size and number and sheer enormity of life outside. The realisation only lasts the briefest of seconds, before the mind instinctively pushes it away to the back of the brain. Dwelling on that sort of thing can drive a person doolally. Best just get on with things as best you can. 

Can you appreciate why they worshipped their leaders? Can you understand why they believed the king when he told them he was god and was to be obeyed? I didn't get it at first, but I think I do now.