Think Like an Egyptian (7 page)

 

 

 

 

Saturated once a year by the flooding of the Nile, the soil of the flat land supported rich plant life, both wild and cultivated. The sign used in writing the word for field or country
s
t
(
sekhet
), in contrast to the word
“town” or “city”—shows stylized reeds growing from the flat soil base. In modern Egypt the pressure of a rapidly growing population and an international, competitive economy have made land an expensive commodity, and wherever reclamation is feasible it is undertaken, currently on schemes that reach far into the desert. It was different in ancient times. Land was relatively cheap, and agricultural abundance seems to have come easily. We will never know for sure, but it is very likely that farmed land did not cover anywhere near the whole floor of the valley and delta. Consequently, the “countryside” was a mixture of farmland and places where natural vegetation grew tall and lush, usually in waterlogged or swampy ground. Here the goddess of the marsh (Sekhet, who took her name from the word for countryside,
s
t
) could be encountered. A man who spent his days working in the countryside, as peasant or fisherman or fowler, was a “countryman” or “landsman,”
s
ty
(
sekhty
), characterized in one literary tale as innocent, eloquent, and representative of the oppressed common man.

The educated elite had a romantic view of the countryside. Part of the charm of Egyptian art arises from the scenes of peaceful country life recorded on the walls of tomb chapels. Peasants plough the fields and harvest the crops, while above them short lines of hieroglyphs record snatches of their calls to each other. Women gleaners squabble. In towering papyrus thickets the lordly owner of the tomb hunts birds and spears fish, accompanied by his family. In reality, as archaeological excavation reveals, most Egyptians lived in small and huddled mud-brick towns, and men of any standing must have spent part of their lives in offices. The art of tomb walls represents the escape to the countryside that the affluent scribal class yearned for, and that a few accomplished through owning country estates and villas. Presumably the peasants who did all the work saw things differently, but they have left no voice of their own.

 

 

 

 

Wilderness wetlands barely survive now in Egypt, but in the past they were a distinctive feature of the landscape, although not large enough to support a human population with a special way of life, such as the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq. The dominant plant species was the papyrus (
Cyperus papyrus
), which had become almost extinct in Egypt by the 20th century AD (though it has been reintroduced to serve tourism). It grew greater than human height, it had a tough fibrous stem with a triangular section, and it supported a flowering head of numerous filaments. The stem when thinly sliced provided the raw material for an early equivalent of paper, “papyrus” (see no. 84).

For some of the vast tracts of papyrus marshlands, the Egyptians used words that took a special determinative, a picture of a papyrus clump,
These marshes were found mostly in the delta, to such an extent that the papyrus plant served as the symbol for this part of Egypt. The teeming wildlife and the impenetrability of the tall dense vegetation gave a sense of spiritual presence to the delta marshes. Egyptians imagined a mythical haven, Chemnis, to exist there, supposedly located near the city of Buto in the northwestern delta. The myth concerned the murderous quarrel within the family of the god Osiris, between his son Horus and his rival Seth, over the inheritance of the kingship of Egypt. On Chemnis the infant Horus was suckled and protected from Seth by a goddess—who was sometimes named Isis and sometimes Hathor—in the form of a cow. The Greek traveler Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BC, says that he saw Chemnis in a lake beside the temple at Buto. He was told that it was a “floating island,” but adds skeptically, “I never saw it move, and it did not actually look as if it were floating,” perhaps because it bore a large temple and numerous date-palms and other trees.

The Egyptians believed that the roots of their culture were to be found within the marshlands. The Egyptian architectural style might be said to reflect materials of marshland origins, although whether this is historically true or not is now hard for us to tell. Some carved pictures from the early dynasties show houses, shrines, and perhaps palaces built from reeds, even though excavations show that the common building material by this time was mud-brick. Later, Egyptians used stone building materials but would carve designs in the stone to resemble the reed buildings of their mythical home in the marshlands. The whole papyrus plant, either in bud or with its flowering spray stylized into a bell-like profile, provided the design for an architectural column in which the shaft retained the three slightly convex faces of the natural stem.

The defining moment in the history of Egyptian architecture came with the creation of Egypt’s first monumental building in stone, the stepped pyramid of King Djoser of the 3rd Dynasty (c. 2660 BC), which was surrounded by a complex of shrines and palaces. The surfaces of many of the buildings were carved to represent walls made of reeds, their corners protected by projecting rounded bundles, and their roofs supported (unrealistically) by a single reed stem. The designs had bold yet graceful outlines and harmonious proportions. In later centuries the Egyptians, although never saying so explicitly, identified the architect as Imhetep, a leading figure at Djoser’s court. He was eventually deified as a god of wisdom and healing.