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Did ancient Egyptians have a version of Yoga?

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Poll Question: Did ancient Egyptians have a version of Yoga?
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rakovsky View Drop Down
Knight
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    Posted: 25-Aug-2016 at 10:57
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Knight
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  Quote rakovsky Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 25-Aug-2016 at 10:56
Some modern proponents of Egyptian culture or religion propose that Egyptians had a version of Yoga or a philosophy similar to that of Hindu yogis.

China has Tai Chi and India has yoga. Meditation is common across the world even among primitive people.

The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies by Thomas McEvilley, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc., Feb 7, 2012, says:
Ancient Egyptian texts contain memories of fakirs who begged in the temple vicinities and purveyed scraps of magic and doctrine outside the priesthoods...

Yogic asanas or postures have often been popularly derived from positions seen in Egyptian art especially the sitting position of the sculptures known as scribes who sit on the floor with the soles of their feet beneath the knees and facing upward. In terms of asanas, their posture relates to both sukhasana and siddhasana but to neither exactly. ... the argument for hat ha yoga in ancient Egypt is weak.

Something like the ahimsa or nonviolence doctrine occurred in ancient Egypt in connection with the priests' obsession with physical purity. ... the Egyptian priest... various classical authors inform us that they did not eat beef, pork, sheep, fowl, fish, or certain vegetables. This amounts to a form of vegetarianism as among ... various Indian groups.
This does not make a clear argument that they used yogic relaxation exercizes, only that they had some kind of religious rites or observances that they thought could lead to divine or magical status or power (as with fakirs).


Yoga: Or, Transformation; a Comparative Statement of the Various Religious Dogmas Concerning the Soul and Its Destiny, and of Akkadian, Hindu, Taoist, Egyptian... and Other Magic by William Joseph Flagg (J. W. Bouton, 1898) claims:
Egypt had a yoga and one which like all others was only attainable through rigorous self-discipline, which, acting on the very nature of the practicer, transformed him into a magician. It amounted to a junction, and a junction with a god. All magical work was esteemed to be no more or no less than god=work. What a god could do a magician could, and what a magician could do a god could do. Thus, just as in the case of the Hindu idea of absorption in Brahman, that of assimilation with a secondary divinity would naturally arise in the Egyptian magician's conceit, as one by one he acquired, by his efforts and patience, god-like powers, while the blissful experience underwent, together with the bewildering senssations of the trance, always incident to yoga practice, would aid the illusion.
In the book he next cites some scholars who talk about Egypt.
https://books.google.com/books?id=Jj0MAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA218&lpg=PA218&dq=patience,+god-like+powers,+while+the+blissful+experience+underwent,&source=bl&ots=PAFBKl1Wzr&sig=bP3Zfl8V-1IvY6dx-85PjWd_XuM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjhodHA6dzOAhVHLB4KHbTjCpoQ6AEIIDAA#v=onepage&q=patience%2C%20god-like%20powers%2C%20while%20the%20blissful%20experience%20underwent%2C&f=false

Wikipedia mentions a writer named Babacar Khane who wrote about Egypt having a version of Yoga:


[en.wikipedia.org]
Illustration from the White Chapel of Sensuret

Khane wrote several books about "Egyptian yoga". He claimed in those books that some hatha-yoga asanas were practised in ancient Egypt. Khane claims in addition that other poses represented in Egyptian temples and graves had similar effects to the Indian one and could be considered as yoga postures. As Khane mentions himself,[4] some "Egyptian" postures had been taught in the past by Hanish (Mazdanan, 1932), and A. de Sambucy, who wrote in the sixties the book Le Yoga irano-égyptien. Khane built a complete pedagogic system based on the Egyptian bas-reliefs and paintings, and studied the similarities between some Egyptian words or pharaonic symbols and Indian yogic concepts. He proposes to see in Pharao a model of the human realization.[5]

The assertion made by Khane in many of his books, lectures, interviews and articles is that signs of the existence of yoga appear at approximately the same time in India and Egypt, and that the two traditions are very close, but parallel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babacar_Khane






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