This photo was taken by my son, Chris last weekend when he an his family visited New York City for the Christmas festivities.  As you can see, the shot was taken from seats in the auditorium of Radio City Music Hall.   There are seats for 6015  people.  The shows run from the end of November until the end of December. Some days there are four shows, others have five, and there are even six shows on the very busy days. We took our children when they were growing up and  bought tickets in September . All the shows sell out.  This is the home of the rockets the amazing dancers, there is ice skating during the show, secular music, and Santa taking off and flying across the stage.  I will never forget the first time I went when at the end of the show, there was a living nativity…

Today, I was going to post on death rituals or mummification and reincarnation but as I was doing research, I got interested in learning about caste systems in India and ancient Egypt.   I always feel  a tad tenuous speaking as an authority on subjects, I have only read about…I dip my toes gingerly  into the pool of history and beliefs of cultures not my own. I would be most happy if any readers from India and or Egypt would step in and make corrections or comments. I can only say I have the deepest respect for both these cultures and the accomplishments and  ideas they have given to the world both then and now. Please know that any mistakes I make are not malicious but because I lack the knowledge.

First a caste system is defined as a way to organize society into groups based on heredity. For Americans…

Hinduism is the  world’s fourth largest religion with seven hundred fifty million  devotees. It was founded in the North of India, 4,000 years ago near the Indus River.  This makes it the oldest exiting religion in the world. 80% of all the modern Indian  population  are followers.  Reincarnation, a belief of “life after death,”  was begun with Hinduism.  They believe that the soul is eternal and lives many life times in one body after another while the  preceding body, or container of the soul, rots or is burned up.    The body may be  human,  animal, or plant.  They believe that any form of of life contains a soul (atman) and thus has a chance  to experience life in different forms. Good deeds or works preformed  means you will move up the cycle  in the next life. Moska is what all are working to attain which is the ultimate release…

Over 5000 years ago, ancient Egyptians wrote using a picture writing called hieroglyphics. The writers were called scribes. Not everyone had this training not even the Pharaoh and his family. There was a problem because Egyptians wrote down everything, and hieroglyphs were beautiful, but time consuming!  The scribes needed a faster way to write. They created the first shorthand called Demotic script. The new scribes used that exclusively and never learned the ancient hieroglyphs. They wrote faster and even  created some new scripts.

Hundreds of years passed and archaeologists discovered beautiful hieroglyphic writing on ancient walls of tombs and pyramids in Egypt. But there was a problem. Though they knew there was a story told there on the wall, and they could read Demotic Script, there was not one person on the face of the earth who could read ancient Egyptian!   This mystery wasn’t solved until about 200 years…