Think Like an Egyptian (8 page)

 

 

 

 

The Egyptians were attracted to paired concepts and designs expressing harmony through balanced equivalents. Around the geographic division of Upper and Lower Egypt, they developed a range of paired symbols; in one the papyrus (standing for Lower Egypt) was matched either with a different kind of tall reedy plant or with the lotus (standing for Upper Egypt). Whether this reflected the natural distribution of these plants we have no way of knowing, for both papyrus and lotus long ago ceased to exist as common elements of Egypt’s natural flora.

Beyond the rather artificial association with Upper Egypt, the lotus had a religious significance as a symbol of rebirth. Of the two plant varieties, the blue lotus (
Nymphaea cerulea,
as distinct from the white lotus,
Nymphaea albicans
) opens its flowers shortly after dawn and closes them later in the morning. This natural cycle was seen as a symbol of sunrise and of rebirth after death, two processes of transformation that the Egyptians were constantly and irresistibly drawn to. In a text found in Old Kingdom pyramids, the deceased king is said to shine “as the lotus at the nostril of Ra, when he appears daily on the horizon,” while a later text in the Book of the Dead contains a spell for “transforming oneself into a lotus” in the afterlife.

The blue lotus, which botanists will tell you is actually a member of the lily family, has a strong and attractive smell, and was cultivated in ponds and picked for the pleasure its fragrance gave. Inhaling the scent of a lotus flower became a common image of sensual pleasure and was associated with alcoholic intoxication. A man tired of life converses with his soul by means of a poem: “Death is before me today like the fragrance of lotus, like sitting on the shore of drunkenness.” We know from scientific investigation that the blossoms and roots of the blue lotus contain narcotic substances which are soluble in alcohol. It has become an attractive modern idea—although it remains hard to prove—that the Egyptians knew and exploited this property by adding the squeezed juice from the flowers to bowls of wine.

 

 

 

 

The date-palm tree, a cliché of Egypt today, has almost become a modern hieroglyph. Surprisingly, the ancient Egyptian word for a palm tree with its own determinative,
is rare in Egyptian texts. The species that seems to have represented “treeness” above all others was the sycomore fig (
Ficus sycomorus
), in Egyptian,
nht
(
nehet
); it is not to be confused with the European sycamore, which is a different species. Its erect trunk and massive lateral branches gave the hieroglyph its distinctive shape and created a natural sacred space, shady and cool. We know from tomb paintings that sitting in its shade was considered one of the delights of life after death. It was home to a goddess, whose name was either simply that of the tree itself (Nehet) or Hathor. She was a kindly goddess often approachable in places of natural spiritual presence. One of her titles was “mistress of the sycomore,” and she was especially symbolic of one particular tree, “the southern sycomore,” which grew at Memphis. Rameses II, as part of his huge building program, had a small temple dedicated to “Hathor, mistress of the southern sycomore” constructed there. The name of a famous literary hero from ancient Egypt, Sinuhe, is literally
Sa-nehet
, “son of the sycomore goddess.”

Although tree plantations or natural woodlands are not referred to in ancient Egyptian texts, and are not represented by their own hieroglyph, trees nonetheless grew widely. An Old Kingdom official called Weni, for example, built a transport barge, 60 cubits long and 30 wide (approximately 30 × 15 meters), completed in 17 days from acacia wood at a location beside the desert in Upper Egypt. Presumably the wood came from natural stands of acacia close to the Nile. From boats to statues and shrines, to common roofing poles and material for fires, wood had abundant uses and does not seem to have been in short supply, nor was local wood expensive to buy. A few surviving records price a log of sycomore wood at around the same cost as a pair of woven sandals.

The ancient Egyptian choice of quality wood was the stately cedar (
Cedrus libani
), which grew more widely than it does now in Syria and Lebanon. The word for cedar had its own sign, a log stripped of its branches,
Cedar was needed for temple flagpoles and the masts of boats, and the trunks of the living cedar tree (like those of pine and fir) exuded a resin that was thought essential to the process of mummification, perhaps because of its strong perfume.

To secure the supply of wood the Egyptians supported a flourishing seaport, Byblos, on the Lebanese coast. Following the loss of their empire in Palestine and Syria, at the very end of the New Kingdom, a story was written about an employee of the temple of Amun-Ra at Thebes, named Wenamun, who set out on a long journey of misadventures from Thebes to Byblos to buy new timber for the great river barge of Amun-Ra. The climax is a conversation between him and the prince of Byblos, who provides a remarkable summary of Egypt’s changed position in the world. Having once been the source of craftsmanship and learning, Egypt, he says, must now take its place as a lesser country and pay for the resources it needs like anyone else. Wenamun, humiliatingly without money or official papers, has to send home for replacements, but as the timbers lie on the beach a pirate fleet enters the harbor and he has to flee. The end of the story has not survived.

 

 

 

 

As Egyptian culture flourished, the people brought the alluvial land under their control by subdividing and naming the landscape. As far as we can tell, all the cultivable land of Egypt was subject to legal ownership. Indeed, transfers of ownership and resulting disputes represented a major part of ancient Egyptian legal practice. One such case ran for a whole century, ending late in the reign of Rameses II (c. 1220 BC), in the course of which official land records had been falsified. The victor, a temple treasury-scribe called Mes, was so pleased with the outcome that he had the entire history of the dispute carved on the stone walls of his tomb at Sakkara.

One basic unit of land was the
sp3t
(
sepat
), a small province or district, which is normally translated using a Greek term, “nome.” Upper Egypt was divided into 22 nomes, running in a continuous sequence along the Nile Valley northward from Elephantine, and varying between 10 and 65 kilometers in length. Lower Egypt had 20 nomes (beginning with the nome of Memphis), spread across the delta in a patchwork probably shaped, in part, by the winding natural watercourses. Each nome had its own name and symbol. The sign for the 15th nome of Upper Egypt was the hare,
for example. Egyptians included basic facts of provincial geography in the decoration of temples, listing the nomes, their leading deities, and the length of the river in each. The eighth nome of Upper Egypt, for example, is given a river length that, in modern measurements, amounts to 10.5 kilometers. This information helps us reconstruct the ancient geography of Egypt.