Customer Reviews

the 42 Preceps of Maat and Their Foundation in the Philosophy of Righteous Action of the Wisdom Text Sages of Ancient Egypt

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Dr. Ashby is a learned man, but he does himself and his readers a grave disservice with his books about Ma'at and "Egyptian yoga". As an attempt to fuse Buddhist/Indian spiritual philosophy and the wisdom found in Ancient Egyptian writings the books would be interesting, but instead Ashby has taken Egyptian funerary & wisdom texts and altered them to serve as a veneer to present teachings belonging to a completely foreign culture. His interpretation of Ancient Egyptian culture/spirituality is very unorthodox, and his conclusions do not hold up under scrutiny. As examples: Ashby states that the Ancient Egyptians practiced a form of yoga dating back five thousand years, and that the role of AE priests was to teach this yogic system to the people. In close to twenty years of studying Ancient Egypt I have never encountered anything to support that claim. Indeed, in AE the temples were literally considered the homes of gods, and the priests' title "hem-netjer" translates as "servant of the god". Ashby presents pictures of supposed AE yogic poses (asanas), but in reality these are disparate images taken from unrelated funerary art: as far as I know, no AE treatise on yoga (or indeed any form of such discipline) exists. Ashby also liberally sprinkles his work with quotes attributed as "Ancient Egyptian proverbs" without identifying said proverbs' actual physical or literary source. These are only a few of many discrepancies that lead me to seriously question the author's knowledge of Ancient Egypt... and of Ma'at. Readers interested in Ashby's work would be better served seeking out the teachings of the Buddha and/or a local certified yoga instructor.