by Bruce Feiler
“Does that mean you can’t relate to ancient Egyptians?”
“Physically I do. I was brought up in this country. I drank its waters, I saw its fields. But I don’t relate to the ancient people in their way of thinking, because my religion is totally different. They used to worship many gods. They worshiped the sun, because it’s powerful. They worshiped the water, because it gave them irrigation. They worshiped the crocodile, because it was strong. They looked at nature and took their religious views from it. Now we don’t do that. We’re Christian or Muslim, and in neither do we take our religious views from nature.”
“So where do you take them from?”
“We have the Bible and the Koran,” he said. “We take guidance from God.”
After the tour we boarded a bus and headed to the boat for lunch. Ever since the advent of leisure travel in the nineteenth century, the Nile has been a popular destination. Baedeker published its first guidebook to Egypt in 1878. Its eighth edition, published in 1929, touted the salutary effects of the dry winter climate. “Phthisis (if not too far advanced), asthma, chronic bronchitis, rheumatoid arthritis, gout, Bright’s disease, and other diseases of the kidneys are some of the most important ailments that are at least alleviated by a visit to Egypt. Invalids should remember that a stay of a few weeks only is not sufficient and should remain from the beginning of November to the middle of April.”
Today almost three hundred cruise ships are licensed to take tourists along the 150-mile stretch between Luxor and Aswan, the Champs-Élysées of the ancient world. Since these vessels don’t need to be seaworthy, they’re not exactly enormous cruise liners à la The Love Boat. Instead they’re closer to luxury barges with several floors of cabins, ornate rooms for dining and dancing, and a deck for indulging the antipsoriatic qualities of the sun. Our boat, the Royal Rhapsody, had a particularly impressive array of charms, including chandeliers that swayed as we ate, an in-house video system that favored Disney’s 101 Dalmatians, and towels folded every night on the beds in the shape of mountains, rivers, even crocodiles.
But for all the luxury, there was something surreal about the experience. Just going ashore was something of an enterprise. The crew lowered a touring boat onto the water, lowered a gangplank onto that, then lowered a ladder to the start of the plank. A dozen or so passengers would wobble down to their places, followed by a half-dozen guards dressed in galabiyah robes carrying AK-47s, several supervisors dressed in coat and tie, and a porter wearing a tuxedo and balancing a silver tray with tiny glasses of lemonade covered in plastic wrap. The atmosphere was somewhere between Agatha Christie and Mad Max.
Later, when I ventured south of the Aswan Dam and joined an even larger boat, designed to replicate a Mississippi River paddleboat, that had only eight people on board, the experience was even more post-apocalyptic. If the world ends, this is how it will happen: six nationalities dressed in vermilion and white-lace Egyptian robes and assorted unflattering headgear—cardboard fezzes, red-and-white-checked kaf-fiyeh—eating London broil, French onion soup, and baked Alaska, followed by dancing in a blue-and-orange flashing disco as the bartender, naked except for a grass skirt and African mask, gyrates with drunk passengers to tomba chants, French chansons, and, how could it be otherwise, Celine Dion singing “My Heart Will Go On,” the theme song from Titanic. If Burton and Livingstone had expected this when they uncovered the source of the Nile in the late nineteenth century they might have decided to stay at home and read a good book. As one Londoner on board said:“There is no end to the humiliation of tourists on holiday.”
Given this atmosphere, the most delightful part of the trip upriver was sitting on the deck, watching the banks of the Nile. The absence of development was striking, especially compared to Cairo. Ninety-five percent of Egyptians live on only 5 percent of the land, and most of those live in Lower Egypt. Upper Egypt, by contrast, which earned its name because it’s“up river,” is an agricultural backwater. In the course of several days, I could count on one hand the number of buildings I saw higher than one story. The number of crops was greater: corn, sugar-cane, sesame, dates, figs, pomegranates, pistachios, bananas, mangoes, garlic, and onions. The proximity of Egypt to the Promised Land was most evident in the vegetation, including the acacia tree, which the Bible says was used to make the ark; the Ziziphus Spina Christi, which was used to make Christ’s crown of thorns; and the carob, also called St. John’s bread.
I was sitting on the deck at the end of the first day when Basem appeared and asked if he could sit down next to me. Though he was fasting during daylight hours in honor of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, he didn’t seem to lose energy as the day went along. If anything, he seemed to welcome the opportunity, even at this late hour, to engage in an impromptu tutorial.
What was even more remarkable about Basem was his knowledge of the ancient Near East. He was like a younger Egyptian version of Avner, only neater and in linen pants. I mentioned that I could detect echoes of Canaan, and more of Mesopotamia, in what we had already seen, and asked how much contact ancient Egypt had with its neighbors. “It depends on which millennium you’re talking about,” he said.
Though settlements existed in the Nile Valley as early as the Neolithic Age, around 6000 B.C.E., Egyptian history is said to begin around 3100 B.C.E., when the quasi-historical ruler Menes first unified Upper and Lower Egypt and began the dynastic tradition that dominated the country for the next three thousand years. Under the pharaonic code, the king was not merely the political leader, he was the embodiment of the gods; to rebel against him was to reject divine order. During the Old Kingdom, which began around 2686 B.C.E., the pharaohs leveraged their power, along with that of the Nile, to create unprecedented technological advances and perhaps the most unified culture in the Fertile Crescent, with myths, religious practices, and elaborate monuments. It was during this period that the pyramids of Giza redefined the relationship between the earth and sky. Unlike the Tower of Babel, here some men, at least, could climb to heaven.
During this period, there was little struggle between Egypt and its counterparts in Mesopotamia, since both civilizations were still being established. “Egyptians were lucky,” Basem noted. “The Nile gave them easy communication and helped unify them.” By contrast, the Tigris and Euphrates were harder to control. Since they’re not surrounded by desert, the two rivers could support more people, which meant cities developed at a faster rate. Eventually those cities started to fight one another. “They were older than we were, but we lasted longer,” he said. “Why? Because they clashed more than us. They had the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Assyrians, and each one wanted control. Here, Upper or Lower Egypt always dominated the other; it was never a prolonged struggle.”
Though some early pharaohs traded with Canaan, it was not until the Middle Kingdom (2050–1786 B.C.E.) that Egypt began exerting a stronger hand in these areas. During this period, which corresponds to the time of the patriarchs, Assyria, to the north, was still the greater influence in Canaan. Egypt, though, because of its regular floods, would have been an easy place to escape to during a drought, as both Abraham and Jacob do. A more intriguing period in Egyptian history followed, a sort of Dark Ages, during which the country was overtaken by a mysterious sect of outsiders called the Hyksos. Many believe this time corresponded to the period when Joseph and his brothers came to Egypt. The Hyksos, who were probably Canaanites fleeing hardship, controlled the country for about 150 years beginning in the eighteenth century B.C.E. and, if nothing else, awakened the giant within Egypt. Once the foreigners had been expelled, the newly emboldened pharaohs of the New Kingdom (1570–1070 B.C.E.) began an aggressive military surge into Canaan and Assyria, all the way to the banks of the Euphrates.
“First the pharaohs built fortresses in the Sinai,” Basem said. “Then, for the first time, they conscripted people into the army. Finally they went out to see if any other people were stronger than they were. From that day, every Egyptian king for six hundred years was leaving
the country, exploiting other people, trying to conquer them. In the beginning it was for safety, then it was for wealth. Ultimately it was for power. That’s when the struggle with Mesopotamia began.”
That rivalry, of course—the cold war of antiquity—provided the backdrop for the Pentateuch. And I was beginning to realize that if I hoped to understand the Bible I had to take what I learned about Mesopotamia and balance it with similar information about Egypt. Genesis: the gift of the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Nile.
• • •
After Basem left I sat for a while and watched the sun set over the river. It was a vivid scene, made even more poignant by our gradual drift upstream. First the sun was yellow, then orange, then red. The sky turned deeper shades of lavender. At the outset the air was brilliantly clear, a significant break from the haze of midday. Feluccas, narrow fishing boats with crisp, white triangular sails, dotted the water. Boys stood inside them fishing for Nile perch, a process that involved taking a broom and beating the water in back of the boat, then scurrying to the front, where the frightened fish flee, and dropping a net into their path. Bait and switch never seemed so cruelly effective.
On the shore, meanwhile, smoke billowed up from a brush fire. A few bushes lined the edge of the water, followed by a grassy plain and a strip of date palms tilting like pinwheels on a stick, first green, then gold, depending on the light. The call to prayer came, but without visible buildings or minarets, it seemed as if the mud itself was making the cry. As we continued our steady glide upriver, the boat began to feel as if it might be floating back in time: Kurtz, Lord Jim, Livingstone. Not just temples, maybe the river, too, was a pyramid to the past.
After a while I began to realize that, compared to the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile was having a much more visceral effect on me. It’s as if the current was dragging me through a series of mental images, like frames in a filmstrip. On the one hand, each image took me further back in history, from Burton, to Napoleon, to Cleopatra, to Rameses. On the other hand, each memory took me further back into my own imagination, into some shifting realm of fantasies about the unknown, and anxieties about strangers and strangeness.
For me, being on the Nile was a bit like being in a bad night of sleep, with my mind ricocheting through a series of associations before it landed, inevitably, on some truth I didn’t want to face: as much as I romanticized this place, I also feared it. Part of this feeling was self-induced drama, brought on by a combination of little sleep and a few yellowed paperbacks I brought along about the exotic, if deadly, Nile expeditions of the nineteenth century. Part of it, though, was the water. As safe and anchored as I felt on the land I’d been seeing across the Middle East, I felt uncomfortable on the water. Sand can be touched, laid on, held; water can only be grasped at, passed through. As a matter of pure geography, I prefer the land. I’m clearly not alone in this feeling. If anything, I suspect it’s one reason so many Near Eastern origin stories, including the one in Genesis, begin with land emerging out of watery chaos. Water is turbulent and alien in these formulations; land is safe and secure.
This hints at a deeper reason behind my anxiety: an aversion to the Nile itself. This feeling, I was beginning to see, like many I unknowingly carried around within me, stems largely from the Bible, and the deep cultural prejudices I inherited from it as a child. The Nile may have given rise to the greatest civilization of antiquity, but that civilization, in turn, almost annihilated the Israelites. In my mind, Egypt was the adversary, the aggressor, the other. And before I could embrace—or even appreciate—this part of the Bible, I first had to overcome any latent hostility to Egypt.
After a while the sun slid behind the trees. As richly as the sky had been illuminated, suddenly it began to fade. A breeze appeared, like a warning. The pastels dimmed and saddened a bit. A cottony beard of fog sprouted on the water. It was as if the Nile was cocooning for the night, protecting itself. When your god is the sun, you are bathed in godliness for half of every day. When it goes away, you’re left with emptiness and dread.
The next day we traveled a few miles inland to visit the Valley of the Kings, which, after the pyramids, is probably the most famous cemetery in the world. Located in the hills on the west bank of the Nile so that buried pharaohs would have first dibs on the rising sun, the necropolis is an underground network of dozens of tombs housing the kings and their families. The area is shaped like a human hand, with fingers reaching away from the Nile into the Theban hills. Thebes was the capital of unified Egypt for much of the New Kingdom, and thus the place most pharaohs wanted to be buried. As a result, tombs were dug so closely together that builders of one crypt would often stumble upon another and have to reroute their corridor, like ants in a colony.
One reason for this congestion was the strict mythology that surrounded death. After the pharaohs died, their souls were believed to survive in order to commune with Amen-Re, the sun god, and Osiris, the god of the underworld. The deceased’s soul passed into a hall of truth, where Osiris held court, judging the king’s life. To pass into the afterlife, the deceased’s body also needed to exist, which inspired the most famous preservation technique in history, mummification. According to one estimate, Egyptians mummified more than one hundred million people. The technique involved removing the brain through the nostrils, extracting the organs, then filling the cavity with burnished myrrh. The cadaver was then soaked in salt—seventy days for the pharaoh, forty days for noblemen—painted, and wrapped in linen. According to Herodotus, the wives of men of rank, as well as “any of the more beautiful women,” were not embalmed immediately. “This is done to prevent indignities from being done to them. It is said that once a case of this kind occurred.”
Entering the tombs today is like entering someone else’s death wish. Each of the corridors, a narrower, creepier version of an airport jetway, is decorated over every inch of every wall and ceiling with elaborate paintings describing the pharaoh’s journey through the underworld. Every night, Amen-Re boards a barque, descends into the underground, and voyages through the hours of the night, before rising again at dawn. The deceased pharaoh follows a similar path. He passes twelve gates, each guarded by a god, before having his heart weighed against the Feather of Truth. If deemed guilty, the pharaoh’s heart is consumed by a crocodile-headed god; if deemed innocent, the pharaoh is resurrected, like Amen-Re. The collective versions of this story are called The Book of the Dead.
“As you see, it’s the perfect book,” Basem said inside the tomb of Seti I. “On one wall is the text, on the other the pictures. It even begins with a cover photo, an oversized picture of the pharaoh.”
Actually it’s more like a scroll, and after hours wandering from tomb to tomb, looking at painting after painting in a Freudian display of nocturnal intrigue, I began to realize that nighttime was perhaps even more important than daytime in the Egyptian imagination. This would help explain the fascination with prophecy, magic, and life after death. This would help explain the importance of dreams. And most of all, this would help explain the story of Joseph.
By all accounts, the tale of Joseph, which picks up after the rape of Dinah and occupies the last thirteen chapters of Genesis, is the most unified story in the Hebrew Bible, a novella of perfect proportions. As scholar Nahum Sarna has written:“There is an unparalleled continuity of narrative set forth with the consummate skill of a master story-teller who employs to the full the novelistic techniques of character delineation, psychological treatment, the play upon the emotions and the cultivation of suspense.” By equal consensus, the story owes a clear debt to the darker dimensions of Egyptian life.
Joseph is the eleventh of Jacob’s twelve sons, and the first by his favorite wife, Rachel. At seventeen, Joseph tends flocks in central Canaan with his brothers, and brings bad reports of them to his father. Because Joseph is the child of his father’s old age, the text says, Jacob favors Joseph and gives him what some translations call an “ornamented tunic,” and others a “coat of many colors”
(the exact meaning is unclear). This gesture infuriates his brothers. Joseph then riles them further by relating two dreams in which his brothers, represented first by wheat, then by stars, bow down to him. “Do you mean to reign over us?” they ask. In retaliation, the brothers decide to slay him.
One day Joseph follows his brothers to the town of Dothan, north of Shechem in the Galilee, and they announce, “Here comes that dreamer! Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits, and we can say, ‘A savage beast devoured him.’ We shall see what comes of his dreams.” At the last minute, Reuben, Leah’s oldest son, intervenes. “Shed no blood!” Reuben declares. “Cast Joseph into the pit out in the wilderness, but do not touch him yourselves.” At that moment a caravan of Ishmaelites, or Midianites, a people from across the Jordan descended from the brothers’ great-uncle Ishmael, pass by bearing goods for Egypt. Judah, another of Leah’s sons, announces: “What do we gain by killing our brother and covering up his blood? Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites.” After all, Joseph is our brother, Judah says, “our own flesh.” The brothers agree, and they sell Joseph to the tribe for twenty shekels, an amount consistent with contemporaneous accounts of foreigners being sold into Egypt. The brothers then take Joseph’s coat, dip it into blood from a slaughtered kid, and have it carried to their father. “Please examine this,” they say. Jacob recognizes the coat and wails, “My son’s tunic! A savage beast devoured him!” He rends his clothes, puts sackcloth on his loins, and mourns for many days. His children try to comfort him, but Jacob refuses.
Joseph, meanwhile, arrives in Egypt and is sold as a servant to the house of Potiphor, a courtier of the pharaoh and his chief steward. God stays with Joseph during this time, the text says, and Joseph rises to become head of the household. Described as being “well built and handsome,” Joseph rejects repeated advances from Potiphor’s wife. One day she grabs him by the coat and says, “Lie with me!” But in an echo of the story of his brothers, he leaves his coat behind and flees. She takes the coat and says to her husband, “The Hebrew slave whom you brought into our house came to dally with me; but when I screamed at the top of my voice, he left his coat with me and fled outside.”