Think Like an Egyptian (6 page)

The winged god Horus, shaped like a falcon, was associated with sunrise and solar light. He was one of the first gods depicted in hieroglyphic art (in the 1st Dynasty, c. 2900 BC), a falcon in a boat borne aloft on a pair of wings. A winged disc was often carved above temple gateways. When his name was combined with “horizon” into “Horus of the horizon” (Horakhty), he was the recipient of prayers, addressed directly to the visible morning sun from the top of a platform in an open-air sanctuary. To reinforce the solar aspect, the name of the sun-god Ra was often added to create the compound name Ra-Horakhty. So central was this image to the Egyptians that even Akhenaten retained it in his new fundamental faith and “Ra-Horus of the horizon” remained an epithet of the Aten.

The hieroglyph “horizon” also refers to the place of sunset, and more widely the rim of the sky and the abode of the gods. It gave rise to the word “horizon dwellers,” an evocative term for the inhabitants of a land to the south that was so far distant as to have no proper name (in modern terms probably central Sudan). As a striking visual image for a radiant, powerful point in the landscape, “horizon” became a metaphor for a grand and special building, sometimes expanded to “horizon of eternity” where the thought was perhaps that the gleaming presence of the sun would remain forever fixed. A temple, a royal palace, the tomb of the king, an important cemetery: all could be called a “horizon (of eternity).” The most memorable example lies in the name that King Akhenaten gave to his new city dedicated to the worship of the sun’s disc, namely Akhetaten, “the horizon of the disc” (or Aten). This is the modern archaeological site of Tell el-Amarna, which does indeed nestle in front of a horizon of high desert, cut by deep valleys, to the east. Some see in this a literal echo of the shape of the sign.

 

 

 

 

The word “to appear” is represented by a hieroglyph that shows the moment of sunrise—a half-visible gleaming disc. The word had a strong sense of occasion. Gods and kings “appeared”; one of the standard titles of the king was “lord of appearances.” During his first invasion of Palestine, in about 1460 BC, Tuthmosis III avoided his enemies (a coalition of Palestinian and Syrian city-states), took his army through a narrow defile, and overwhelmed them with a surprise attack. The decisive moment came just prior to the attack itself, with the “appearance of the king at dawn” clad in his shining armor. Sources likened the king in his moment of “appearance” to a warlike falcon-god Menthu. A commemorative text in the chapel built by the young Amenhetep II beside the Great Sphinx describes the king practicing his martial skills in the desert near Giza: “His majesty appeared on the chariot like Menthu in his might. He drew his bow while holding four arrows together in his fist” and aimed his arrows to pass straight through a sheet of bronze.

A king’s “appearance” was sometimes a carefully managed ceremony. Palaces, which were sometimes attached to temples, were often built with a “window of appearance.” A well-preserved window pierces the side wall of the monumental outer court of the temple of Rameses III at Medinet Habu. On the inside stood a platform, reached by stairs, on which the king, perhaps with members of his family, would stand. This raised him well above the level of the courtyard outside where members of the court gathered. Leaning across a patterned cushion laid on the window-sill the king would announce the promotion of one of his followers, or hand out costly gifts as rewards. Several examples of this ceremony occur in scenes of court life depicted in the tombs of Akhenaten’s officials at Tell el-Amarna. Short hieroglyphic texts quote the words of soldiers and servants as they admire the recipient’s good fortune: “For whom is this shouting being made, my boy?” cries one. “The shouting is being made for ... Ay and Tiyi (his wife): they have become people of gold,” comes the answer. King Horemheb, an ex-general, more prosaically used his “window of appearance” as a means of rewarding the detachment of soldiers currently on bodyguard duty.

 

 

 

 

The richness and variety of life in the Nile Valley depends on an abundance of water, provided by the river. The depiction of water is simple enough, a stack of three zigzag lines. On their own these lines write the word “water,” and they can be added as a determinative to related words, such as “wave,” “sweat,” and “to drink.” Zigzags placed vertically are used in another hieroglyph
to represent an enclosed body of water and write the word for “lake” or “pool.” On a much larger scale, artists used the convention of zigzag lines to decorate the outlines of ornamental pools painted, for example, on the floors of Akhenaten’s palaces at Tell el-Amarna.

The flow of the Nile has now been regulated by a series of dams, but for an ancient Egyptian the most arresting image of water was the Nile in flood, the annual inundation. The immense length of the Nile meant that, even when the Egyptians occupied the northern parts of what is now Sudan, it still entered their world broad and swollen with water and greatly varying in volume from one part of the year to another. Only since the 19th century have we understood that the variation is due to the monsoon rains of the Ethiopian highlands, which supply much of the water to one of the two main tributaries of the Nile, the so-called Blue Nile. The floodwaters, building up slowly but steadily, would reach Egypt in July and then continue northward until dispersing into the Mediterranean. At their peak in September during a “normal” year they filled the vertical riverbanks as high as seven or eight meters in the south, and then spread across the fields as far as the desert, flowing all the time, a slowly swirling unstoppable force. Towns and villages were turned into islands, their occupants anxiously considering what steps to take if the flood became unusually high. Farmers worked to benefit their land by directing some of the flow to irrigation basins.

Since at least as early as the 1st Dynasty (c. 3000 BC), Egyptians measured the maximum height of the inundation each year, either by taking readings from a graduated marker or by carving each year’s height into a conveniently located stone. The main reason for doing this was probably to seek reassurance, for too low or too high a flood level brought dangers of famine or destruction. Famine meant not only hunger but social disorder, as the author of a hymn to the inundation wrote. If the inundation fails, “a year’s supply of food is lost. The rich man looks concerned, everyone is seen with weapons, friend does not attend to friend.”

One set of measurements to have survived from ancient times might have induced panic. They are carved on boulders at Semna in modern Sudan, 350 kilometers south of Aswan, and record water levels of between four and nine meters above those of modern experience over a period of a century at the end of the Middle Kingdom. We can only guess at the massive destruction of property and loss of life from floods of such magnitude.

Although the Nile was a visible and unpredictable power, the Egyptians gave it a benign spiritual identity. The Nile’s god was Haapy, a corpulent male figure whose obesity expressed abundance. Images show him bearing fish and water plants, and colored him blue or green, and zigzags of water often cover his body. Worship of Haapy differed from the worship of other standard deities, who were usually rooted in one place. His annual feast was at the time of the inundation, but as the wording of the hymn of praise sung to him acknowledges: “No one knows the place he’s in; his cavern is not found in books. He has no shrines, no portions [offerings], no service of his choice.”

In Akhenaten’s hymn to the Aten, the inundation becomes an instrument of the sun-god’s power: “You make the inundation from the underworld. You bring it to [the place] you wish in order to cause the subjects to live.” Similarly, the Aten is praised for the falling of rain which, as part of a more generous view of the world outside Egypt’s border, benefits foreign lands: “You have granted an inundation in heaven, that it might descend for them (the people of distant lands) and make torrents upon the mountains, like the great sea, to soak their fields.”

 

From classical Greece to the Renaissance the widespread view in Europe and the Middle East was that all matter was a mixture of four primary substances: fire, air, water, and earth. This was the basis of alchemy. The Egyptians displayed little or no interest in thinking of physical matter in this way. Water was taken for granted. Yet water did have a profound, spiritual role. In Egyptian theology, Nun was the name given to the “primeval waters” or “chaos.” It was the source of existence, and from it emerged the sun-god Ra and other divine beings, including Shu, the god of light. Nun became a metaphor for waters in the cavernous “underworld” origin of the Nile. The Nile’s inundation was a manifestation of Nun, as was the underground water that filled up domestic wells. The Egyptians took pleasure in creating artificial pools containing fish, fowl, and lotus plants, and imagined them existing in the afterlife. In an artificial lake measuring two kilometers by one kilometer dug in the reign of Amenhetep III as a place for the celebration of his jubilee festival (see no. 95, “Festival”), it was said that, “Nun is happy in its lake at every season.”

Nun was made up of four primary properties of nonexistence described by words that are hard to translate meaningfully, but we guess at terms such as “infinity, nothingness, nowhere, and darkness” or “endlessness, watery chaos, darkness, and hiddenness.” Each of these properties had a male and female counterpart, creating a set of eight properties believed to be the basis of all existence. Today we can do little more than recognize the ancient Egyptians” attempt at a profound understanding of where energy and visible forms come from, couched as they were in a style of expression that has left no residual tradition we can latch on to. Behind the rather concrete descriptions and visualizations of existence that so mark ancient Egyptian culture, and which often come across to us as somewhat naïve, were minds that wrestled with complex philosophical questions.