5 • The Nile pump
When the marsh dries, the smell gets worse. Sudanese proverb
That Menes went to so much trouble was no more mysterious than the Pyramids themselves. But it becomes more understandable when we consider that the ancient Egyptians had already learnt to control the Nile through the use of Lake Moeris, what is now known as Lake Qarun in the Fayoum oasis.
Lake Qarun, when you turn off the highway from Fayoum, looks like the sea. There are big waves lapping the shore and fishermen standing up to their waists throwing nets.
But the lake is dying, or at least getting saltier by the year. This can be directly related to the damming of the Nile at Aswan. In 1902 when the first dam was built using William Willcocks’ plans the Nile was tamed. With the high dam in 1970 the Nile was neutered. The salinity began its increase around the beginning of the twentieth century due to the reduction in the yearly flush of the inundation. With a flood of reduced impact the canals that ran from the Nile to Lake Qarun were no longer filled at the same rate. The lake began to grow more saline. By the time of the second dam no water was getting into the lake. Its fate was sealed when the fertilisers used around the lake began to re-enter the water as run-off – the need for fertiliser being a direct result of the end of basin irrigation, which relied on Nile silt, and the beginning of dammed perennial irrigation when fertiliser was added to the constant water source.
That Lake Qarun, or Moeris, waxed and waned in size I discovered for myself when I visited Qasr el-Sagha with my good friend the explorer Tahir Shah. Qasr el-Sagha is an Old Kingdom temple (though often confusingly listed as New Kingdom) which stands a good mile or more from the modern edge of Lake Qarun. It is surrounded by gritty, almost sandless desert. Behind it rise layers of escarpment that contain the caves of later Christian hermits and monks. Why build here unless the lake lapped this far inland?
We know that the shore had receded massively by later Ptolemaic times because of the abandoned city of Dimeh which lies much closer to the lake’s edge, a few miles from Qasr el-Sagha. Dimeh is filled with broken Roman pottery, and the walls are mud brick. Three thousand years earlier the builders of Qasr el-Sagha used massive masonry blocks cut unevenly yet fitting together perfectly – the same construction technique can be seen in the walls of Cuzco in Peru and in the Sphinx temple in Giza.
My own interest in Qasr el-Sagha was not only because of its situation at the edge of the original Nile reservoir. It also derived from its connection to both Schweinfurth and Willcocks – men whose combined knowledge of the Nile is probably unsurpassed. They were friends and, when in Cairo, used to walk out together around Wadi Digla, a place now favoured by mountain-bikers and hikers. Schweinfurth had been second fiddle on the expedition made by Gerhard Rohlfs in 1873 across the Sahara. I had replicated this journey in 2010, finding that Schweinfurth had exaggerated the difficulties of the terrain. Strangely this made me feel more not less sympathy for him; when an expedition has been paid for by the public one feels duty bound to make it sound heroic. What was indeed heroic was his later journey into the heart of Africa to the fabled land of Bongo, where he meticulously recorded the habits of the cannibal Azande people. But more of this later.
Schweinfurth had been the original discoverer of the mysterious Qasr el-Sagha, which consists of a large inner room with what look like seven bays for statues. There are also several mysterious rooms which can be entered only through a hole near the floor the size of a large cat-flap. But what Schweinfurth and all subsequent archaeologists have missed, though I am sure Willcocks didn’t, was that Qasr el-Sagha is an oracle temple – similar to that found in Siwa where Alexander the Great went to discover the cause of the Nile’s flood (and to find out whether he would rule the world, if the geographer Strabo’s account is to be believed). At Siwa, where Schweinfurth ended up after his desert journey, is the oracle of Ammon. It sits on top of a fifty-foot-high rock plug and is a rudely made series of rooms, interesting mainly because of their connection to antiquity, but also because they reveal the simple cunning in the practice of oracular arts. High up in the walls there are holes, there by design. Alongside the wall runs a narrow room or corridor from which one could overhear what was said within the room. Or perhaps one could intone a prophecy from within the corridor and the words would emerge as if magically spoken. If the walls were hung with tapestries or wooden panels, as they would have been, the communicating holes would be hidden, operating like a ship’s secret telegraph system.
The same set-up is visible at Qasr el-Sagha, and was pointed out to me by Justin Majzub: a secret corridor running within the outer wall with a small hole at one end in the entrance wall of the temple. The entrance to the secret corridor is easy to miss – it’s a slim door in the outer wall – and was no doubt concealed in earlier times, as the listening or speaking hole in the grander main entrance would have been.
What is remarkable is not that Schweinfurth missed the similarity but that not a single archaeological description of Qasr el-Sagha refers to its obvious oracle function. One can safely assume that its position was connected somehow to the function of Lake Qarun/Moeris as the regulating reservoir of the Nile. One may speculate that the oracle might furnish advance information on the extent of the flood and how large a supply might be caught within the ambit of the lake. Such information would be of crucial use. Perhaps the rate at which the lake filled would have some bearing on the size of the flood; perhaps other key indicators were used rather as today commodity speculators use complicated cross-indicators of weather and natural disasters to compute the future price of a trade.
The entrance to Lake Moeris was a diversionary canal known for centuries as Joseph’s Canal. Willcocks, the ever present water engineer of the Nile, suggested that a close reading of Genesis indicates that Joseph controlled Lake Moeris at a crucial stage in biblical history.
That the original dams remain is not in question – vast dam-like edifices of cut stone lie by the Pyramid of Hawara (where the Egyptologist Flinders Petrie also unearthed a papyrus roll that comprised books one and two of Homer’s Iliad). Joseph’s Canal still passes within thirty yards of the Pyramid, and due to increased winter river levels floods the Pyramid entrance.
But control of Lake Moeris pre-dates Joseph by hundreds of years. When the system eventually decayed, perhaps during one of the many periods of unrest between dynasties, the Fayoum oasis blossomed in the old lake bed. The lake shrank to its old size; we know this because of prehistoric stone tools found all around its current edge. Yet further up, much further, near Qasr el-Sagha we find the remains of Nile shellfish – a sure sign that the lake’s size has not been constant. On the far side the land is mainly low except where it rises on the bluff at the artist colony of Tunis. This low land – all prime agricultural acreage – would have been under water for half the year as the lake operated as a giant regulator for the ebb and flow of the Nile.
With such control of the Nile the delta could have been better irrigated throughout the year. The Nile – according to records stretching back over a thousand years – never has two low floods one after another. If one year is low the next will always be normal or high. The idea that low floods in succession cause famines cannot be supported; just as in Ethiopia and the Sudan in the present era, famine is the result of a natural disaster magnified greatly by political inaction or unrest. So, it seems, with the lake operating as a reservoir protecting against the possibility of a low flood, Egypt was the first country in the world to wrest control of its own food supply from the lap of the gods.
At night the sun sets across the sea-like extent of Lake Qarun and you see the tail lights of fishermen returning home, two-up on cheap Chinese-made motorbikes. They have been beating the water all day just as their ancestors did for 5,000 or more years. Now that there is no more flood to recharge the lake with fresh water, it is gradually turning to salt. There is even some talk of stocking it with sea bass and bream. But not much serious talk. In a few years the lake wi
ll be too saline for any kind of edible fish. In fact it will resemble the vast lakes around Siwa. The two ancient oracles are now silent and facing the lapping sound of dead waters.
6 • Sex lives and crumbling papyrus
If one speaks about everything the heart remains empty.
Ethiopian proverb
In this biography of the Red Nile we must not shrink from revealing all. The silent desert culture that gave way to the prolific riverine one is, thanks to the drawings of the Turin Erotic Papyrus (dubbed the ‘world’s earliest men’s mag’ with pictures of different sexual positions), and from the evidence of ancient lyric poetry, one where a great deal can be known about the intimate life of ordinary people.
In the myth Isis was grovelling around in the marsh searching for her husband’s penis. In reality, it seems that, in sexual matters, the ancient Egyptian woman dominated the male, was rather exacting and certainly not weak willed.
Contrary to the practice in later, more sexist civilisations, Egyptian men were taught from an early age to respect women. The mores of the time strongly inclined everyone to a sexual temperance restricted to marital cohabitation. Despite, or maybe because of, the respect they earned from men, more sexual restraint was expected of women than of men. The reason was simple: the age-old concern about the legitimacy or otherwise of the progeny.
The Nile’s flood was a flood of tears. Professional weepers were employed at religious ceremonies to cry copiously, cry me a river indeed. These women (of varying ages – crying being a skill not reserved solely for the young), who assumed the roles of the female deities Isis and her sister Nephthys in religious ceremonies, were required to be sexually abstinent for certain periods.
It was even tougher being a female temple servant – one of the ‘gods’ wives’. A lifelong preservation of virginity was required of them. Almost certainly the austere practices of Christian monasticism, which arose in the Egyptian desert while the old religions faded away, were influenced by this requirement for sexual abstinence. The priests of Apis in Memphis were also denied any form of sexual relations.
For the rest of the populace things were not too restrictive. Young men could marry at thirteen. Teenage sex was OK, as long as it was within marriage. There was no civil or religious ceremony – the only contracts drawn up concerned property rights in the case of death and divorce, and sometimes these were drafted long after the marriage had started.
The goal of marriage was producing children. For the blight of infertility various treatments were available, some aphrodisiacal. Lettuce was highly thought of in this regard, which adds another spin to Set munching on the sperm-impregnated salad he was handed by Horus. Another plant supposedly guaranteed to aid procreation is known to us only by its unpronounceable name mnhp; this was depicted with a hieroglyphic ending with the unmistakable image of a phallus.
For those who were not trying to produce babies, and were perhaps even cavorting illegally in public places, there were some widely known methods for avoiding conception. An unusual though popular prophylactic was dung. One recipe recommended inserting into the vagina, before sex, a compote of crocodile dung, honey and/or resin. Another suggests inserting the tips of acacia twigs (which contain gum arabic), dates and honey. Try fighting your way through that lot. One imagines that the prophylaxis lies more in the obstruction to entry than in the spermicidal qualities of the medicine.
The numerous mummies of mothers and children interred together indicate the risks of childbirth. Those that survived were breastfed until the age of three. Mothers’ milk was in high demand – not just for its intended purpose, but also as a cure for colds, diseases of the eye, eczema, burns and even bed wetting. Though it is hard to see how milk could benefit people other than babies, the suggestive list of things it could cure seems taken from the ailments it prevents or inhibits in the young. In other words the ancient Egyptians had observed the benefits to the young immune system conferred by human milk, benefits that modern science is only now confirming.
What else was going on along that great river 4,500 years or more ago? Much that was passed on to later religions, as we have seen. Boys were circumcised, though late, about their twelfth birthday. A scene at Saqqara depicts a priest squatting in front of a boy about to perform the act using a piece of flint, the traditional tool – no doubt a remnant of their desert-dwelling days. And, like the ceramic knives used by today’s surgeons, nothing cuts cleaner than a sharp piece of stone.
It is interesting to note that circumcision was the norm but not universal for Egyptian men until uncircumcised Libyans began to mingle with the populace. Only then does circumcision become a necessity for religious purity. Almost certainly the borrowing of circumcision by the other Semitic religions, and its similar justification as a means of delineating the other, started with the influence of ancient Egypt.
All Egyptians were prohibited from having sex on those days when, according to the religious calendar, the gods were themselves so engaged. This was fewer than fifty days a year – the gods only getting to do it about once a week, maybe on Saturday night.
As we have hinted, in ancient Egyptian marriages the woman was considered the equal of the man. This is highly unusual, taking a global historical perspective, and a sign, surely, of the sophistication of the culture. As the Nile explorer Richard Burton (not the one married to Cleopatra – Liz Taylor – but the other one) remarked, ‘the sign of an advanced culture is simple: the relative equality of men and women’. Four thousand years ago on the banks of the Nile there were even marriages where the status of the woman was quite clearly higher than that of her spouse. One account records a wealthy woman marrying a younger common soldier. Another woman marrying first a scribe and then an artisan.
Higher up the social scale incestuous marriages designed to protect dynasties were common. Keep it in the family in every sense. Ramses II married three of his daughters. Mythology supported the concept of incest, with Osiris marrying his sister Isis, and Set, despite his predatory predilections, marrying his sister Nephthys. However, it’s important to realise that incest wasn’t as common in ancient Egypt as was once thought. On legal documents concerning marriage a man and a woman may be referred to as ‘brother and sister’, and this has led to confusion. In such an instance this is a legal formula indicating they are both equal in the marriage, not that they are siblings.
But it is a strong indication of the relative fairness of this ancient marriage institution that the parties are referred to as brother and sister and not as master and servant as they were in the West until recently. Prenuptial agreements have even been discovered from the Ptolemaic period, often putting a time limit into a marriage contract by which point, if the parties weren’t happy, it could be dissolved. In one papyrus record it was stated that a gooseherd had a nine-month clause inserted, after which his wife would receive a special payment, perhaps for becoming pregnant.
Divorce, like marriage, was neither a civil nor a religious matter; it was, rather sensibly, personal. Foreshadowing modern times, many women were better off financially after divorce and many men reduced in circumstances. The causes of divorce were age old and familiar: infidelity, infertility, incompatibility or simply the desire to enter into marriage with another person. Though there was complete freedom to divorce, those that did so without substantive cause met with considerable social condemnation. From the evidence available, however, the majority of Egyptian marriages were long lasting.
7 • Enter Moses and the red plague
The god of old women is ‘old women’. Nubian proverb
These gentle Nile dwellers, with their equal marriages and their tendency to perform obscene acts in sacred places, were also the enemy – when seen from another perspective, that of the ancient dwellers of Israel. The Nile dwellers, the Egyptians, are the enslavers of the Israelites, and yet in this cauldron of oppression the Mosaic religion comes into existence. So, in a sense, the enemy were also the cause of enlightenment and ultimately of f
reedom.
The Egyptian can be distinguished from other African religions by its movement towards the light. Instead of focusing on snake and crocodile worship (though these did feature as aspects of the central deity), the ancient Egyptian religion took a step towards the abstract by worshipping light: the life-giving sun itself. Whereas the worship of dangerous animals seems motivated by fear, the worship of the sun appears to be driven by gratitude and by a better scientific understanding of the wellsprings of life.
But it is Moses and his laws that take us to the next step in the evolution of our conception of a deity. Moses is the first figure to announce that God is abstract, that there will be no graven images made of him. He goes up the mountain and comes back laden with stone tablets on which are inscribed the laws of the new religion. (Many now think the tablets were actually of clay, which for the cuneiform lingua franca of the time would have been the usual method of recording words.)
But Moses didn’t reformulate the ancient religion of the Jews in isolation; he also lived a life inextricably linked with the Nile.
Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River Page 10