Oswald Spengler and his Interpretation of the Ancient Egyptian Civilisation

Abstract

Spengler’s Decline of the West is generally read in view of his bleak prophecies concerning the future of the West. This somewhat obscures his contribution to comparative history and his interest not only in Classical Antiquity and the West, but also in the Ancient Near East. In this paper, we will first present and critically analyze the outlines of Spengler’s interpretation of Ancient Egyptian History in the field of art history, politics and religion, before venturing some conclusions and personal remarks about the important question whether Spengler’s endeavor must be considered helplessly outdated and refuted by modern research, or whether it still has a potential to serve as the basis of a new, up-to-date morphology of history.

Keywords

• Spengler
• Weimar
• historiography
• ancient Egypt
• philosophy of history
• cultural pessimism