Think Like an Egyptian (5 page)

 

 

 

 

In giving sand and lentils the same hieroglyphic determinative, the Egyptians were acknowledging an accidental physical similarity between two quite different substances. Yet they instinctively recognized that things that pass through a cycle from birth or (in the case of plants) germination to death shared the special property of having life.

The word for “life,”
n
(
ankh
), always uses one distinctive hieroglyphic sign, a cross in which the upper vertical element is replaced by a circular shape. We do not know exactly what the object was. When internal details are added to the circular section, as is sometimes the case, the circle resembles a woven braid, and it could be a twisted shape made from plant stems around harvest time, intended to bring good fortune. The word for this object possesses a similar set of consonants to the unrelated word for “life,” and so the sign became the standard hieroglyph used in writing the latter.

Egyptian artists took advantage of this sign’s shape and drew it as something that could be grasped in the hand, usually by one of the gods. In endlessly multiplied scenes carved on temple walls, gods present the sign of life to the king. Streams of life-signs cascade over him, poured from water vessels. Egypt was ruled by a line of hereditary kings who were believed to be half divine. Scenes in two temples (of Queen Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari and of King Amenhetep III at Luxor) record the moment of the reigning monarch’s divine birth, when the god Amun, having taken on the form of the previous king, makes his queen pregnant. With exquisite delicacy the couple sit opposite one another, hands and arms touching, and Amun raises the sign of life to the queen’s face.

Death was to be feared: “Life is given to the peaceful, death is given to the criminal.” The Egyptians understood death as a human condition, and there was no comparison made with the lifelessness or inertness of, say, minerals—with one significant exception. The work of the sculptor was to “bring to life” the statues and images he created, and so we read of a “living statue.” This was not just a turn of phrase. The final stage in the making of a statue (as well as the making of a mummy) was the performance of an elaborate ceremony, Opening the Mouth, in which the priest touched the mouth of the statue with an adze (a tool similar to an ax, with an arched blade at right angles to the handle) and so symbolically opened it (see no. 96, “Statue”). No statue or memorial was complete without its name (far more important than its resemblance to the owner). The person (usually a relative) who commissioned the work might add his own name as the person who had “brought to life” the owner’s name.

The life cycle of crops prompted a different line of thought. Their seeds appear just prior to the death of the plant, and after a seemingly lifeless interval in the earth, the plant grows again. Here was a metaphor for personal resurrection after death. As the deceased says in a text on a coffin, “I am emmer [wheat] and I will not perish.” The Egyptian hope of resurrection centered on the god Osiris, always shown swathed in the wrappings of mummification, who ruled over the kingdom of the dead. In mythical time, when a ruler on earth, he had suffered death at the hand of his brother Seth, but had been brought back to life by the ministrations of his mother, Isis. Through this triumph he offered the prospect of life after death to whoever identified themselves with him. The myth inspired the making of wooden frames in the shape of Osiris, filled with soil and planted with barley seeds. Their germination simulated the hoped-for resurrection of the body. Several of these frames were buried with kings, one of them Tutankhamun, in the Valley of Kings at Thebes.

The Egyptians also imagined an island or mound at the beginning of time, rising from a primeval expanse of lifeless waters (see no. 8, “Water”), on which life made its first appearance, in the form of vegetation. This image was adapted for the cult of Osiris and became another metaphor of resurrection (see no. 34, “Mound”).

Death was the precursor to further life. The spirit (see no. 73) lived on—people hoped after death to “repeat life,” and a “lord of life” was a term for one’s coffin or sarcophagus. This was not the life of reincarnation, however. It was an existence spent partly around the tomb and partly in the kingdom of Osiris. The dead remained invisible to the living; but the living could communicate with the dead, by writing letters and leaving these at the tomb.

 

 

 

 

The Egyptians found one source of life in the power of the sun, even though its scorching heat—separately identified as the eye of the sun—was to be feared. As far back as the 5th Dynasty, King Neuserra (c. 2430 BC) had built a temple to the sun-god Ra not far from his pyramid. Its walls were decorated with detailed and brightly colored scenes celebrating the rich and varied plant and animal life of the three seasons of the Egyptian year.

The greatest exponent of the belief that the sun gave life to the natural world, as well as to humans, was King Akhenaten, who reigned for 17 years (1352-1336 BC) at the height of Egypt’s imperial period, the New Kingdom. Using the great power and wealth at his disposal, he attempted to reduce the religion of his country, as he saw it, to its basic premise—what mattered most was life, and this came only from a force that emanated from the daytime sun (the Egyptian name for which was Aten), originally a manifestation of Ra, the sun-god. All else in the spiritual realm was either irrelevant or blasphemous. He failed, seemingly on account of his intolerance toward other traditional cults that offered more complex and varied spiritual experiences.

Akhenaten’s image of the Aten, as carved on every temple wall built at his command, is the circular disc of the sun from which splay numerous long thin rays, each one ending in a hand elegantly profiled in a gesture of reaching out. Aten has the status of an Egyptian king. Its titles, like the king’s, are written inside two cartouches (see no. 55), and from its disc emerges a cobra, one of the symbols of Egyptian royal power. It selects the royal family for unique treatment; in temple reliefs, where the rays touch Akhenaten and his queen, Nefertiti, the rays offer the hieroglyph for “life,” which they do nowhere else. Yet the universalism of the Aten’s power to create was stated clearly: “You made the earth as you wished, you alone; all peoples, herds, and flocks ... the lands of Syria and Kush, the land of Egypt.” The Aten’s power extended to the creation of the languages and skin colors of foreign peoples.

Akhenaten’s simple vision of the sun temporarily replaced an older, more complex view. Egyptian religion had always held the sun as supreme power, but this idea was developed further by Egyptian priests. They imagined the sun in a splendid boat (see no. 45, “Sacred barque”), accompanied by other divine beings who aided its journey across the sky. In pictures designed for tombs they had developed in great detail a hidden region of the night through which the sun had to pass, beset with dangers from grotesque demons (see no. 47, “Otherworld”). Transformed into an abstract concept of power rather than something defined by direct observation, the sun’s identity was merged with that of the supreme god of the city of Thebes, Amun, whose normal image was that of a man wearing a tall plumed crown. Amun became interchangeably Amun-Ra, “king of the gods,” yet still the recipient of hymns to the visible sun. It was this loss of the sun’s unique character, and assumption of human identity, which prompted Akhenaten to react as he did and to turn to a simpler, truer faith.

 

 

 

 

The Egyptians gave particular importance to the position and the moment of the sun’s first appearance at dawn when, in an often clear sky, a sudden point of intense light rolls swiftly upward and expands into a full incandescent orb. Despite the fact that for the people of the Nile Delta the horizon was a flat expanse of green fields, marsh, and trees, the image chosen to capture the essence of sunrise was a fragment of the eastern desert plateau broken by a valley. The hieroglyph marks the word “horizon,”
3
t
(
akhet
), which has both literal and metaphorical meanings.