A thought on the Memorial Day weekend.

Entrance to the Karnak Temple with obelisk and statue of the pharaoh

Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial

Lincoln statue in the Lincoln memorial, Washington DC

I listened to The American History Guys special Memorial Day broadcast this morning and got to thinking the strange similarity between ancient Egyptian monuments and the most iconic modern American monuments.

George Washington was not only the president who first lead the American democracy, but he deliberately did all that he could to show he was an elected citizen, not a king by divine right. He set aprecedents by retiring to his home after leading the successful revolutionary army and again after serving two terms as president of the new nation. How strange that his monument is an obelisk, copied from the Egyptian originals, especially since the Egyptian obelisks have been used so often in European countries to demonstrate the power of the kings and popes.

Abraham Lincoln who led the fight to assure that this country conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal is represented in the Lincoln memorial in a statue very similar to that used to represent pharaohs in ancient Egypt. The pharaohs were god kings, ruling not by appointment by gods but deemed gods themselves. I suspect that the Egyptians who built these ancient monuments to their rulers were much like the slaves that Lincoln emancipated.

Statues of Ramses II at Abu Simbel