Andite Expansion in the Occident

80:6.1From the times of the ter­mi­nal And­ite mi­gra­tions, cul­ture de­clined in the Eu­phrates val­ley, and the im­me­di­ate cen­ter of civ­i­liza­tion shifted to the val­ley of the Nile. Egypt be­came the suc­ces­sor of Mes­o­po­ta­mia as the head­quar­ters of the most ad­vanced group on earth.

80:6.2The Nile val­ley be­gan to suf­fer from floods shortly be­fore the Mes­o­po­ta­mian val­leys but fared much bet­ter. This early set­back was more than com­pen­sated by the con­tin­u­ing stream of And­ite im­mi­grants, so that the cul­ture of Egypt, though re­ally de­rived from the Eu­phrates re­gion, seemed to forge ahead. But in 5000 B.C., dur­ing the flood pe­riod in Mes­o­po­ta­mia, there were seven dis­tinct groups of hu­man be­ings in Egypt; all of them, save one, came from Mes­o­po­ta­mia.

80:6.3When the last ex­o­dus from the Eu­phrates val­ley oc­curred, Egypt was for­tu­nate in gain­ing so many of the most skill­ful artists and ar­ti­sans. These And­ite ar­ti­sans found them­selves quite at home in that they were thor­oughly fa­mil­iar with river life, its floods, ir­ri­ga­tions, and dry sea­sons. They en­joyed the shel­tered po­si­tion of the Nile val­ley; they were there much less sub­ject to hos­tile raids and at­tacks than along the Eu­phrates. And they added greatly to the met­al­work­ing skill of the Egyp­tians. Here they worked iron ores com­ing from Mount Sinai in­stead of from the Black Sea re­gions.

80:6.4The Egyp­tians very early as­sem­bled their mu­nic­i­pal de­i­ties into an elab­o­rate na­tional sys­tem of gods. They de­vel­oped an ex­ten­sive the­ol­ogy and had an equally ex­ten­sive but bur­den­some priest­hood. Sev­eral dif­fer­ent lead­ers sought to re­vive the rem­nants of the early re­li­gious teach­ings of the Sethites, but these en­deav­ors were short-lived. The And­ites built the first stone struc­tures in Egypt. The first and most ex­qui­site of the stone pyra­mids was erected by Imhotep, an And­ite ar­chi­tec­tural ge­nius, while serv­ing as prime min­is­ter. Pre­vi­ous build­ings had been con­structed of brick, and while many stone struc­tures had been erected in dif­fer­ent parts of the world, this was the first in Egypt. But the art of build­ing steadily de­clined from the days of this great ar­chi­tect.

80:6.5This bril­liant epoch of cul­ture was cut short by in­ter­nal war­fare along the Nile, and the coun­try was soon over­run, as Mes­o­po­ta­mia had been, by the in­fe­rior tribes from in­hos­pitable Ara­bia and by the blacks from the south. As a re­sult, so­cial prog­ress steadily de­clined for more than five hun­dred years.