The New Penguin History of the World (16 page)

Yet it remains something with which it is peculiarly difficult to come to grips. Words like ‘vigour’ can be misleading; religion in ancient Egypt was much more a matter of an all-pervasive framework, as much taken for granted as the circulatory system of the human body, than of an independent structure such as what later came to be understood as a church. There were, of course, religious personnel, priesthoods associated with particular cults and places, and already under the Old Kingdom some of their priests had status sufficient to ensure their burial in expensive tombs. But their temples were economic agencies and storage centres as well as the foci of cults, and many priests both then and later were to combine their ritual duties with those of scribes, administrators and royal bureaucrats. They were hardly what later ages would think of as clergy.

Egyptian religion is best seen not as a dynamic, lively social force, but as a way of dealing with reality by managing different parts of an unchanging cosmos. Yet even to say that requires qualifications. We have to remember that concepts and distinctions which we take for granted in assessing (and even talking about) the mentalities of other ages did not exist for the men whose minds we seek to penetrate. The boundary between religion and magic, for example, hardly mattered for the ancient Egyptian, though he might be well aware that each had its proper efficacy. It has been said that magic was always present as a kind of cancer in Egyptian religion; the image is too evaluative, but expresses the intimacy of the link. Another distinction lacking to ancient Egypt was the one most of us make automatically between the name and the thing. For the ancient Egyptian, the name was the thing; the real object we separate from its designation was identical with it. So might be other images. The Egyptians lived in symbolism as fishes do in water, taking it for granted, and we have to break through the assumptions of a profoundly unsymbolic culture to understand them.

A whole world view is therefore involved in appreciating the meaning and role of religion in ancient Egypt. At the outset there is overwhelming evidence of its importance; for almost the whole duration of their civilization,
the ancient Egyptians show a remarkably uniform tendency to seek through religion a way of penetrating the variety of the flow of ordinary experience so as to reach a changeless world most easily understood through the life the dead lived there. Perhaps the pulse of the Nile is to be detected here, too; each year it swept away and made new, but its cycle was ever recurring, changeless, the embodiment of a cosmic rhythm. The supreme change threatening men was death, the greatest expression of the decay and flux which was their common experience. Egyptian religion seems from the start obsessed with it: its most familiar embodiments, after all, are the mummy and the grave-goods from funeral chambers preserved in our museums. Under the Middle Kingdom it came to be believed that all men, not just the king, could expect life in another world. Accordingly, through ritual and symbol, through preparation of the case he would have to put to his judges in the afterworld, a man might prepare for the afterlife with a reasonable confidence that he would achieve the changeless well-being it offered in principle. The Egyptian view of the afterlife was, therefore, unlike the gloomy version of the Mesopotamians; men could be happy in it.

The struggle to assure this outcome for so many men across so many centuries gives Egyptian religion a heroic quality. It is the explanation, too, of the obsessively elaborate care shown in preparing tombs and conducting the deceased to his eternal resting-place. Its most celebrated expression is the building of the Pyramids and the practice of mummification. It took seventy days to carry out the funerary rites and mummification of a king under the Middle Kingdom.

The Egyptians believed that after death a man could expect judgement before Osiris; if the verdict was favourable, he would live in Osiris’s kingdom, if not, he was abandoned to a monstrous destroyer, part crocodile, part hippopotamus. This did not mean, though, that in life human beings need do no more than placate Osiris, for the Egyptian pantheon was huge. About two thousand gods existed and there were several important cults. Many of them originated in the prehistoric animal deities. Horus, the falcon god, was also god of the dynasty and probably arrived with the mysterious invaders of the fourth millennium
BC
. These animals underwent a slow but incomplete humanization; artists stuck their animal heads on to human bodies. Such totem-like creatures were rearranged in fresh patterns as the Pharaohs sought through the consolidation of their cults to achieve political ends. In this way the cult of Horus was consolidated with that of Amon-Re, the sun-god, of whom the Pharaoh came to be regarded as the incarnation. This was the official cult of the great age of pyramid-building and by no means the end of the story. Horus later underwent another transformation, to appear as the offspring of Osiris, the central
figure of a national cult, and his consort Isis. This goddess of creation and love was probably the most ancient of all – her origins, like those of other Egyptian deities, go back to the pre-dynastic era, and she is one development of the ubiquitous mother-goddess of whom evidence survives from all over the Neolithic Near East. She was long to endure, her image, the infant Horus in her arms, surviving into the Christian iconography of the Virgin Mary.

Egyptian religion is immensely complicated. Different places had different cults and there were even occasional variations of a doctrinal and speculative kind. The most famous of these was the attempt of a fourteenth-century pharaoh to establish the cult of Aton, another manifestation of the sun, in which has been discerned the first monotheistic religion. Yet if there is a recurring sense of a striving after synthesis, it is often the expression of dynastic or political interest. Much of the history of Egyptian religion must be, if we could only decipher it, the story of ebbings and flowings about the major cults: politics, in fact, rather than religion.

Not only the pharaohs were interested. The institutions which maintained these beliefs were in the hands of a hereditary priestly class, initiated into the rituals to whose inner sancta the ordinary worshipper almost never penetrated. The cult statues at the shrine of the temple were rarely seen except by the priests. As time passed, they acquired important vested interests in the popularity and well-being of their cults.

The gods loom large in the subject-matter of ancient Egyptian art, but it contains much more besides. It was based on a fundamental naturalism of representation which, however restrained by conventions of expression and gesture, gives two millennia of classical Egyptian art at first a beautiful simplicity and later, in a more decadent period, an endearing charm and approachability. It permitted a realistic portrayal of scenes of everyday life. The rural themes of farming, fishing and hunting are displayed in them; craftsmen are shown at work on their products and scribes at their duties. Yet neither content nor technique is in the end the most striking characteristic of Egyptian art, but its recognizably continuous style. For some two thousand years, artists were able to work satisfyingly within a classical tradition. Its origins may owe something to Sumer and it showed itself later able to borrow other foreign influences, yet the strength and solidity of the central and native tradition never wavers. It must have been one of the most impressive visual features of Egypt to a visitor in ancient times; what he saw looked so much of a piece. If we exempt what was done in the Upper Palaeolithic, of which we know so very little, it is the longest and strongest continuous tradition in the whole history of art.

It did not prove to be transplantable. Perhaps the Greeks took the column
from ancient Egypt, where it had its origins in the mud-plastered bundle of reeds of which a reminiscence survives in fluting. What is clear apart from this is that although the monuments of Egypt continuously fascinated artists and architects of other lands, the result, even when they exploited them successfully for their own purposes, was always superficial and exotic. Egyptian style never took root anywhere else; it pops up from time to time down the ages as decoration and embellishment – fluted columns, sphinxes and serpents on furniture, an obelisk here, a cinema there. Only one great integral contribution was made by Egyptian art to the future, the establishment – for the delineation of the huge incised and painted figures on the walls of tombs and temples – of the classical canons of proportion of the human body. These were to pass through the Greeks, and European artists would still be fascinated by them as late as Leonardo, although by then the contribution was theoretical, not stylistic.

Another great artistic achievement not confined to Egypt, though exceptionally important there, was calligraphic. It seems that Egyptians deliberately took the Sumerian invention of representing sounds rather than things, but rejected cuneiform. They invented, instead, hieroglyphic writing. Instead of the device of arranging the same basic shape in different ways which had been evolved in Mesopotamia, they deliberately chose lifelike little pictures or near-pictures. It was much more decorative than cuneiform, but also much harder to master. The first hieroglyphs appear before 3000
BC
; the last example of which we know was written in
AD
394. Nearly 4000 years is an impressively long life for a calligraphy. But the uninitiated could still not read it for another fourteen and a half centuries after its disappearance, until a French scholar deciphered the inscription on the ‘Rosetta stone’, brought back to France after its discovery by scientists accompanying a French army in Egypt. None of the classical writers of antiquity who wrote about Egypt ever learnt to read hieroglyph, it seems, though enormous interest was shown in it. Yet it now seems likely that hieroglyph had importance in world as well as in Egyptian history because it was a model for Semitic scripts of the second millennium
BC
and thus came to be a remote ancestor of the modern Latin alphabet, which has spread around the world in our own times.

In the ancient world the ability to read hieroglyph was the key to the position of the priestly caste and, accordingly, a closely guarded professional secret. From pre-dynastic times it was used for historical record and as early as the First Dynasty the invention of papyrus – strips of reed-pith, laid criss-cross and pounded together into a homogeneous sheet – provided a convenient medium for its multiplication. This invention had much greater importance for the world than hieroglyph; cheaper than skin
(from which parchment was made) and more convenient (though more perishable) than clay tablets or slates of stone, it was the most general basis of correspondence and record in the Near East until well into the Christian era, when the invention of paper reached the Mediterranean world from the Far East (and even paper took its name from papyrus). Soon after the appearance of papyrus, writers began to paste sheets of it together into a long roll: thus the Egyptians invented the book, as well as the material on which it could first be written and a script which is an ancestor of our own. It may be our greatest debt to the Egyptians, for a huge proportion of what we know of antiquity comes to us directly or indirectly via papyrus.

Undoubtedly, the rumoured prowess of her religious and magical practitioners and the spectacular embodiment of a political achievement in art and architecture largely explain Egypt’s continuing prestige. Yet if her civilization is looked at comparatively, it seems neither very fertile nor very responsive. Technology is by no means an infallible test – nor one easy to interpret – but it suggests a people slow to adopt new skills, reluctant to innovate once a creative jump had been made. Stone architecture was the only major innovation for a long time after the coming of literacy. Though papyrus and the wheel were known under the First Dynasty, Egypt had been in contact with Mesopotamia for getting on for 2000 years before she adopted the well-sweep, by then long in use to irrigate land in the other river valley. Yet she invented the water-clock, whose basic mechanism was to undergo millenia of elaboration in later civilizations.

Perhaps the weight of routine was insuperable, given the background of the unchanging reassurance provided by the Nile. Though Egyptian art records workmen organized in teams for the sub-division of manufacturing processes down to a point which faintly suggests the modern factory, many important devices came to Egypt only much later than elsewhere. There is no solid evidence of the presence of the potter’s wheel before the Old Kingdom; for all the skill of the goldsmith and coppersmith, bronze-making does not appear until well into the second millennium
BC
and the lathe has to wait for the Hellenistic age. The bow-drill was almost the only tool for the multiplication and transmission of energy available to the mass of Egyptian craftsmen.

Only in medicine is there indisputable originality and achievement and it can be traced back at least as far as the Old Kingdom. By 1000
BC
an Egyptian pre-eminence in this art was internationally recognized. While Egyptian medicine was never wholly separable from magic (magical prescriptions and amulets survive in great numbers), it had an appreciable content of rationality and pure empirical observation. It extended as far
as a knowledge of contraceptive techniques. Its indirect contribution to subsequent history was great, too, whatever its efficiency in its own day; much of our knowledge of drugs and of plants furnishing
materia medica
was first established by the Egyptians and passed from them, eventually, through the Greeks to the scientists of medieval Europe. It is a considerable thing to have initiated the use of a remedy effective as long as castor oil.

What can be concluded from this about the health of the ancient Egyptians is another matter. They do not seem to have been so worried about alcoholic over-indulgence as the Mesopotamians, but it is not easy to infer anything from that. Some scholars have said there was an exceptionally high rate of infant mortality and hard evidence of a negative kind exists for some diseases of adults; whatever the explanation, the many mummified bodies surviving reveal no instance of cancer, rickets, or syphilis. On the other hand, the debilitating disease called schistosomiasis, carried by blood flukes and so prevalent in Egypt today, seems to have been well established already in the second millennium. Of course, none of this throws much light on ancient Egyptian medical practice. Nevertheless, Egypt provides our oldest surviving medical treatises, and their evidence of prescriptions and recommended cures suggests that Egyptian practitioners could offer a mixed bag of remedies, no better and no worse than most of those deployed in other great centres of civilization at any time before the present (it seems that much emphasis was long laid on purging and enemas). Considerable preservative skill was attributed to the practitioners of mummification, though unjustifiably since the climate was on their side. Curiously, the products of their art were later themselves regarded as of therapeutic value; powdered mummy was for centuries a sovereign cure for many ills in Europe. It is interesting, too, that Egyptians devised and used certain rudimentary contraceptive techniques. Whether these had any efficacy in reducing the risk of over-population and therefore of the likelihood of infanticide remains wholly unknown and speculative.