Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/248/en

Advancing from east to west, the second cultural age of ancient Persia is followed by the third post-Atlantean cultural epoch, which extends to the south-west into the cultural sphere of ancient Egypt and, in the west, through the land between the two rivers, articulates itself into the successive cultures of Babylonia, Chaldea, and Assyria. This third epoch unfolds from the beginning of the third millennium down into the eighth century before Christ. Within it, the humanity of that time steps — without transition — out of the mythological prehistory of the Neolithic into an outwardly historically graspable development of the Bronze Age. In ancient India it was the seven holy Rishis who inspired the course of culture from oracle-sites assigned to the individual planets. Upon the holy Rishis followed Zarathustra, who inaugurated the ancient Persian culture and its Mysteries. The founders of ancient Egyptian culture and its Mysteries were Thoth or Hermes Trismegistos; and those of ancient Mesopotamia, of the ancient Babylonian/Chaldean culture and its Mysteries, were Gilgamesh and the initiate Eabani who belonged with him. In place of the priestly kingship of ancient Persia stepped kingship proper — in Egypt the Pharaohs — which nevertheless stood in close relationship to the Mysteries. In this cultural age humanity advanced, largely with the loss of the old instinctive clairvoyance, to the development of the sentient soul. Under the guidance of the kings and the Mysteries working in the background, the sentient soul developed, through the progressive awakening of the I, into an independent soul-member. This step toward a further illumination of consciousness appears openly from the very outset in the most monumental sacral artistic creations of humanity: in the pyramids of Saqqara and Giza in Egypt, and, in Sumer — early Babylonia — in the founding of cities that set themselves apart from surrounding nature with mighty walls. Here, as in the following times and especially in the Egyptian