Think Like an Egyptian (24 page)

 

 

 

 

The hieroglyph shows a knife and another object tied to a staff with a curving top. The details and significance are obscure, though the temptation is to see it as an equivalent of the bundled ax and rods, the emblem of authority carried before Roman magistrates. The sign writes the word
ms (shemes),
“to follow,” and
šmsw
(
shemsu
)
,
“follower,” in contexts that are frequently mundane, as in a man’s description of his old age: “My legs refuse to follow.” In connection with gods and kings, however, the sign and the word take on a special significance.

The hieroglyph appears in representations of the Otherworld as a freestanding symbol, with the knife emphasized. Sometimes it stands in the barque of the sun-god. At other times the severed heads of some of the demons of the Otherworld are suspended from it. From this we might conclude that the sign symbolizes the potential retribution that accompanies the possession of absolute power.

The sign is closely associated with the kingship of early Egypt. During the first two dynasties the king and his entourage made a journey every other year to inspect his country and to remind everyone where their loyalty lay. Each king was an embodiment of the falcon-god Horus, and even directly referred to as Horus. The brief historical records for this time call these journeys the “following of Horus” (or “progress of Horus”) and add a picture of a boat. Perhaps it was on these occasions that the king’s retainers and bodyguards carried the bundles of objects represented in the hieroglyph as symbols of his authority and power to punish. The term for those who accompanied him, his “followers,” had legendary status. The “followers of Horus” (the archetypal king), were, together with spirits (see no. 53), listed as rulers of Egypt during the transitional period between the reigns of the gods and the first historical kings of the early dynasties. Whereas the word “spirit” was generally benign, “follower” in this context perhaps echoed the local warfare that had preceded the final unification of Egypt.

Much knowledge that the Egyptians took for granted is largely lost to us because they did not consider it necessary to write it down. Time and again we are left guessing at the layers of meaning that Egyptians attached to individual objects which, on their own, convey little.

 

 

 

 

The Egyptians defined themselves not just through geography and culture but through contrast with their enemies. Regarded as inferiors, these enemies were any people that lay outside Egypt’s boundaries but close enough to pose a threat. Their predisposition to menace Egypt provided a justification for the Pharaoh to attack them. One common word for enemies means literally “one already laid low, fallen,”
rw (kheru),
and takes as its determinative a picture of a prostrate man bleeding profusely from a head wound. The word is often combined with the adjective for “vile,” “cowardly,” or “base,”
sĭ
(
khesi
), which takes the sparrow determinative. Pictures or statues of defeated enemies, kneeling dejectedly with their arms fastened behind them by a rope at the elbows, sometimes simultaneously being savaged by a lion, were stock elements in the repertoire of court artists. Rows of these figures, roped together and amounting to several hundred, each one accompanied by a place name, helped to underline the king’s supremacy over the known world in scenes, often on temple walls, that show him in the pose of conqueror.

Between 3000 and 1500 BC, Egypt’s enemies were either weakly organized tribal societies in Nubia and the surrounding deserts or minor states in Palestine. The Egyptians saw them as serious threats only because over this long period of time they themselves had not yet elevated warfare and militarism to be a major feature of their society (see no. 85, “Soldier”). This only began to develop during the New Kingdom, but even then the Egyptian empire remained fairly modest in scope. Egyptian armies were regularly checked by those of medium-sized states on the borders of Syria, primarily the kingdoms of Mitanni and of the Hittites. The Egyptians never developed their military on the scale of the Assyrians, Persians, and Romans, who were able to subjugate distant major kingdoms, Egypt included.

Egyptian contempt for their enemies was more cultural than ethnic, and when large numbers of prisoners of war and sometimes aristocratic hostages were brought into the country, in time they were integrated into the population of Egypt, there being no concept of citizenship. Indeed, the Egyptians had a long tradition of employing foreign soldiers, some of whom settled in Egypt permanently. The Egyptian population was, in actuality, of diverse origin, and what made people Egyptian was adherence to the norms of Egyptian culture.

Fear and hatred were directed toward anyone who might pose a threat to stability. Particularly during the Middle Kingdom, scribes wrote lists of the enemies of the state on pottery vessels or on figurines of bound captives, which we term Execration Texts. After reading out a curse, the figurines were probably symbolically knifed or, in the case of the pottery vessels, deliberately smashed. When excavating one place where the ceremony was performed, outside an Egyptian fortress in Nubia named Mirgissa, archaeologists found the bones of a man who had probably been beheaded at the time along with many examples of the Execration Texts. Presumably he was a captured Nubian. Mostly the lists on Execration Texts are of foreign princes and their people, but they also included as a general category “all the Egyptians who are with them,” and even individually named Egyptians who had presumably planned treason. One of these, Intefiker, a son of the like-named vizier, was stated to be already dead, but he remained nonetheless a threatening spirit. Some of these texts were buried in Egyptian cemeteries.