When papyrus, a tall African grass, was chopped, pounded, drenched and laid out to dry in the sun it was found to make paper, but this was discovered only when the desert tribes started to move towards the Nile as the rains began to fail.
As we have seen, 7,000 years ago the Saharan desert was full of wildlife and had a good sufficiency of water. The Nile was a swamp, a place to be avoided. Then the weather changed and the desert dwellers found the river their salvation. The life-giving river became the inspiration for an entire mythology.
The mythology could be written down on papyrus, this miracle plant they had found growing along the banks of the river. And the stories, these earliest stories, were full of the fears of the desert dweller – the fear of drowning, the fear of being overwhelmed by this watery force of nature.
In the earliest Egyptian stories, it is the tears of Isis for her husband Osiris which form the flood that gives life to the Nile. Osiris was the wise ruler of mythological ancient Egypt and Isis was his twin sister and wife. Together they formed a perfect pair. They had a perfect son, too, called Horus.
But they also had a perfectly nasty brother, Set or Seth. Set is depicted as the god of the desert and sand storms. He undoubtedly represents the new river dwellers’ distaste for and rejection of the harsh place that the desert had become. The newly recognised bounty of the river was represented by the ‘good’ gods – Isis and Osiris and Horus. We may note the curious way that Set is depicted, with the oversized ears of a fennec fox and the snout of an aardvark – both of them desert/savannah dwellers at that time. Later, and in keeping with the main mode of desert travel, Set is represented as a donkey.
Bad boy Set was jealous of all the love and attention his brother was getting as Lord and Ruler of the new and prosperous river kingdom of Egypt. Out in the badlands, out in the desert, he started to plot his revenge. One of the things these new river dwellers had done was, when someone died, to use a box as a coffin and dig tombs instead of the caves and stones they had employed in the desert. Indeed, the river folk seemed to have become rather too obsessed with death. Set had his plan.
In what was probably the earliest version of the Cinderella ‘if the shoe fits’ story, Set attended a party of the gods with a huge lead coffin. Gods are eccentric like that. He asked everyone to lie down in it and test it for size. The winner would get a nice new metal coffin all ready for when he shuffled off his (im)mortal coil (unlike most gods, Egyptian gods can die). In some versions the lead coffin is simply a stone sarcophagus lined with lead, perhaps to make it air-, and water-, tight.
Naturally, Set had taken his brother’s measurements secretly and made the coffin himself out in the desert where he lived all alone. He was pleasantly surprised when the urbane guests agreed readily to his game of taking turns to lie down in a sarcophagus trimmed with lead, to see who the coffin most closely fitted. When Osiris lay in it, jealous Set conspiring with the Queen of Ethiopia (almost certainly an ancient coded reference to Ethiopia being the source of the flood) slammed the lid shut, rushed with it past the astonished guests and dropped it in the Nile.
Could ancient Egyptians swim? We know that early explorers remarked on the incredible swimming ability of Nubians, inhabitants of much of the territory of the southern end of ancient Egypt, so it seems almost certain that the ancients could swim. There are pools in palace ruins that were probably used for swimming and there are plenty of tomb-wall illustrations of people swimming. Desert-dwelling Set surely feared the water more than Osiris or Isis did.
Even if Osiris could swim, he wasn’t Houdini; so, trapped in his lead coffin, he drowned. Isis found him, but very carelessly left the coffin in marshland (strangely prefiguring the Moses story). What was she thinking? Set, like the Bedouin who would replace him, was always hanging around the water margins waiting to strike at hapless settled folk.
So, while she was away, Set, out hunting, found the coffin. Using his best sword he prised open the lid. And being something of a psychopath, and no doubt aware of the god’s regenerative powers, he dismembered the body into fourteen parts.
Dim but faithful Isis returned to the scene of carnage. It was essential that Osiris, like some early-day Captain Marvel, be reassembled so he could live again – in the underworld. Traipsing about, tears falling in grief, Isis found thirteen of the fourteen bloody body parts. She wept for forty days and nights looking for the fourteenth – which was, of course, Osiris’ penis.
And the Nile flooded. From all the tears.
Meanwhile it wasn’t surprising that teary Isis hadn’t found the missing penis since it had been eaten by a hungry Oxyrhynchus fish. It seems likely that the desert town of Oxyrhynchus that borders the Nile is named after the fish; strangely, it is also the place where thousands of pieces of papyrus have been found buried under the sand. This preserved them perfectly and much of our knowledge of ancient Egypt, including versions of this myth, comes from this desiccated papyrus.
Pretty unlucky, eh? Having your tool eaten by a fish, not to mention being split into fourteen bits. But, this being the world of the gods, Isis, after fashioning a golden replacement phallus, managed to sing Osiris back to life so that he could have a proper burial. He was still dead, though. However, he was able to command a top post in the underworld, eventually becoming its king.
And this is the place whence the Nile flowed.
As a curious endnote it is related in the Targum (an Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Bible) that Joseph was buried in the Nile and his coffin was rediscovered by Moses lying on marshy ground. Though no dismemberment was involved it provides a strange echo of Isis finding the coffin of Osiris.
3 • Homosexual love on the ancient Nile
Where one spends the night is more important than where one spends the day. Nubian proverb
The ancient Egyptian god Set or Seth was the bad guy. Not just a fox and a donkey, but also sometimes portrayed as a scorpion and a pig – unclean beasts. And not content with killing his good brother, Set embarked on a career as a would-be rapist, trying to violate both Isis and Horus, though Horus did manage to tear one of his testicles off.
Unlike the rather straight versions of our origins depicted in the great monotheisms, ancient Egypt’s was distinctly racy. In possibly the first literary representation of anal sex, Set forces Horus to have homosexual relations with him. To nullify the indignity of this rape Horus gets his revenge by getting Seth to eat a sperm-impregnated lettuce (one that Horus wiped his own sperm upon).
Given that Set represented much of what was condemned, it is not surprising that religious texts of the Old Kingdom (the Third to the Sixth Dynasties around 4,100–4,600 years ago) regard homosexual sex as an unlawful way of slaking one’s sexual appetites. Things did not change much in the ensuing thousand years leading to the New Kingdom period (the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Dynasty around 3100–3600 BC): when relating the bad things a man has not done (as a way of appearing good in the eyes of the gods), a chapter of The Book of the Dead (a collection of Egyptian funerary texts) has the recital ‘and I have not had relations with a man, nor practised self-abuse in any of the sacred places’. It’s a pretty novel idea. Imagine Christian prayers including an injunction not to masturbate while up at the altar.
In the Coffin Texts (which pre-date The Book of the Dead) we learn: ‘Atum has no power over the deceased, rather, the deceased impregnates his buttocks.’ In the legends of Horus, sex with another man is seen as one man achieving superiority over another, not as an act of love – the same morality can be found today in prison in the US. The active partner could even take pride in the act, whereas the passive partner whose ‘buttocks were impregnated’ was regarded as shamed and disgraced. The determining factor was not homosexual activity, which was considered morally neutral, but the fact of the seed of another man entering his body. Hence Horus getting revenge by sneakily getting his sperm into Set’s body – albeit from the other end.
In ancient Egyptian texts the sperm, in homosexual act
ivity, is considered a kind of venom or poison to the violated one. Mythological homosexual rapes are alluded to in magic spells designed to protect against poisonous animal bites. Set, out on another criminal spree, male-rapes the goddess Anat (who conveniently, or maybe perversely, chooses to appear in male form). This little episode is used in a spell that protects against scorpion bites.
In an ancient Memphite hymn it is related that the brother gods Shu and Tefnut were deeply fearful of the paedophilic emisions of their father Atum – one of the most important gods. It was Atum who would lift the dead pharaoh from his tomb and up to the stars. So despite the injunctions against homosexuality it seems the gods are doing it, and throwing incest into the equation of shame too.
An Old Kingdom literary text illustrates, without pictures, corruption and decline with a tale of homosexual relations between King Nefekare and the general Sisenet. Interestingly, there is almost no pictorial representation of unusual sexual practices, apart from a series of obscene sketches by artists and artisans, perhaps for humorous purposes, on the walls of several New Kingdom (the period from the sixteenth to eleventh century BC – it contains the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties) Theban tombs. The ancient Egyptians, despite their rude tales, were not pornographically inclined.
They were also tolerant of unusual living arrangements. The tomb of the ‘two friends’, which dates from the Fifth Dynasty, around 2500 BC, is considered to be evidence that a gay relationship was sanctioned at the highest level, because both men, Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep (try repeating those names quickly), were members of the innermost circle of the Pharaoh. The men were courtiers with the job title ‘overseers of manicurists of the Great House’, which some conservative theorists see as further evidence of their sexual orientation. Yep – the King’s manicurist was a queer. That two friends should share the same tomb could, on the other hand, just be a sign of a non-neurotic society accepting and honouring two good pals.
Most of the evidence suggests that, in keeping with the utter disdain Set is held in, the only behaviour that was censured was male rape and the casual contact with hemti-tjay, or, literally, rent boys. Paedophilia, too, was scorned, and in this shame-based society the worst crime of all was fomenting scandal and offence through sexual acts carried out in public. We’re back to those temple tosspots again. That ancient Egyptians had to be cautioned so strongly against doing it in public suggests that they had a bit of a thing about open-air sex. Dogging in the desert perhaps.
On lesbianism the ancient Egyptians remain quiet. There is one sentence in The Book of the Dead where a deceased woman recites her virtues, one being ‘I did not couple with a masculine woman’, but that still leaves the field fairly wide open.
4 • The Pyramids and the mysterious Menes
The dog of the family of a seer is considered a seer. Egyptian proverb
The Pyramids stand on a bluff that overlooks Cairo. From the car park in front of the Great Pyramid you mentally gird yourself against the onslaught of papyrus and postcard sellers (even with the new ‘security’ fence encircling the Pyramids, there are still plenty of hawkers and pedlars). As you lock your car or climb from the sweaty microbus you are drawn not so much to the incredible size and lumpy majesty of the Pyramids themselves as to the incredible prospect of a town out of control, threatening to climb up the bluff and overwhelm even this greatest of monuments: the Pyramid of Cheops, the last surviving of the seven ancient wonders of the world, built, it is reckoned, in the Fourth Dynasty around 4,500 years ago.
Now look back, if you will, at Cairo, with its layered smog, honking madness, simmering heat haze over tottering dead-eyed slum blocks (they have windows but no glass). These blocks, red and grey, built from grey concrete beams infilled with the laziest of red-brick curtain walling (lean against one of those walls and it’ll collapse like a curtain, or so I always think), are built on prime farmland, illegally, because people are flooding into Cairo in a way that, before, only the Nile did.
Where these huddled masses swarm was, until the first Aswan dam, a series of highly fertile flood basins which filled up every summer as the Nile flooded. They then gradually subsided into paddy fields of rice and wheat. In fact only the rising bluff, known as the Giza Plateau, or previously the Libyan Hills, which signals the start of the Sahara Desert, stood in the way of an endless spreading of the Nile’s summer inundation.
Which is one reason why the Pyramids were built here. It is the first solid ground high up when you travel from the Nile in Cairo to the Sahara. About twenty miles east, in the opposite direction, is another bluff – the Moqattam Hills, where much of the original stone covering of the Pyramids was quarried.
The Nile was how they moved the stone. Think about it – you have no wheeled vehicles (chariots did not appear until the Middle Kingdom, roughly 2000–1600 BC, the Eleventh to Thirteenth Dynasties, introduced, it is thought, by the Hyksos, west Asian invaders of Egypt) and you need hundreds of stone blocks a day shifted from one side of the river to another.
You use the flood. Not only is there now a hugely widened river, you also have lots of basins and canals to extend the reach of the Nile even further. The stone can be lifted on to rafts of papyrus and floated across to the western side where it is needed. And, since the flood happens during the hottest period when no work is being done, you have a workforce available to help during the manoeuvre.
And for exotic granites, porphyries and basalts coming from Upper Egypt, the barges can also use the Nile to descend the river and then the floodwaters to get close to the Pyramids.
There is no question in my mind that the Pyramids and the Sphinx are an idealised artificial rendition of the desert home of the first Egyptians. They are rather like the lifelike pirate ship in Las Vegas, there to remind you of something alien and different but still somehow compelling and essential. It is as if the first Egyptians were saying, Now we have quit the desert we must not forget where we came from.
Herodotus states that the first Pharaoh, known as Menes in later accounts though no contemporary record of this name exists, built the city of Memphis, the first capital of ancient Egypt, after he had united the kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt. He chose Memphis (only a few kilometres south of modern Cairo), situated just below the delta where the Nile split into two main channels, because this was the start of Upper Egypt (Lower Egypt being the fertile regions of the delta to the north).
The fertile regions of the delta. Or were they, at that time? Menes, Herodotus tells us, drained the marshy regions of the Nile to create the terrain for Memphis. He did so by building the first dam on the River Nile. It was the marshy regions that had kept early Egyptians in the desert in the first place. The desert at this time, as we have seen, was perfectly capable of supporting life and not the barren waste it gradually became. So it is quite likely that Menes and his people chose Memphis because, though marshy, it was a lot less boggy than the delta of 5,000 years ago. It was the closest inhabitable spot to the Mediterranean sea.
And even then it wasn’t that habitable. Menes still needed to build a dam, or dams, to divert the river. The standard reason given is that he wanted to build on the western side of the Nile, but in those days the Nile’s path ran right under the Libyan Hills. Handy for delivering stone but inconvenient as a place to build lower down. So Menes supposedly diverted the Nile higher up at Kosheish a dozen miles upstream – that is, south – of Memphis. This dam was made of cut stone, we are told, and was fify feet high and 1,500 feet wide.
The only way such a small dam could have worked against the immense power of the Nile would have been if the river had already split into several streams, and Menes’ dam was simply a way of diverting one stream into another. In all likelihood the Nile at that stage was already splitting into branches; Menes merely postponed such development until the delta. On the reclaimed land he built Memphis.
Where is Memphis now? Under the new path of the Nile? Destroyed to build later versions of Cairo? Subsumed unde
r the silt of ages? Perhaps a little of all of these three. As the Old Kingdom capital perhaps it wasn’t anything like as huge as that of the New Kingdom – Thebes, now present-day Luxor (whose name comes from the Arabic for ‘the palaces’ – Al-Uxor).
We know that up until the high dam in Aswan was constructed – when the silt was much reduced in quantity (the first Aswan dam in 1902 let through the flood specifically to avoid the problem of silt retention) – the Nile valley increased five inches every hundred years. So a little over four feet every thousand years – so twenty feet have been added since Memphis was built 5,000 years ago. Whatever remains of the city will have to be dug out of ground that will become instantly waterlogged, requiring, as much archaeology in the delta also does, constant and costly pumping operations.
How would Menes have diverted the Nile with no heavy diggers and pumps? Willcocks gives us a clue when he speaks of the corvée, the indentured nineteenth-century labour force of fellahin, peasants of the delta, forced by the ruler of Egypt to dig canals and build levees against the flood. He observed thousands of men working with their bare hands and transporting mud on their backs. If they had tools they worked more efficiently, to be sure, but the lack of tools did not deter them from extremes of effort, often under the lash of harsh overseers. Willcocks also speaks of hundreds of men filling a channel through the use of the shadouf, the traditional method of shifting water into a higher ditch. The shadouf is really a bucket on a long lever; weighted at one end, it is swung into the lower stream and dumps water into the higher. Willcocks writes, ‘They lifted water with over a hundred shadoofs working side by side. Each shadoof had four men, who worked incessantly night and day in rotation so that the shadoof never stopped for a minute. In addition to this each shadoof had four boys who worked by rotation . . . helping the weight as the bucket ascended . . . The life and animation of the scene I have never seen surpassed; while the resulting stream of water could not have been lifted by the largest portable engine.’ There are parts of Egypt where things have not changed since pharaonic times. We can assume that the ability to work in unison in vast numbers, seen as late as the nineteenth century, was very similar to that which enabled men like Menes, thousands of years ago, to change a river’s course and, of course, build the Pyramids.
Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River Page 9