The Nile

by Toby Wilkinson

  If the city wall of Elkab demonstrates the strength of mud brick, its durability as a building material is exemplified by a monument on the opposite bank of the Nile, at the ancient site of Nekhen. Here, too, most of the traces of a once glorious past have vanished. The only testaments to the site’s ancient significance are a few decorated rock-cut tombs in the escarpment and a huge mud-brick edifice on the plain. In the case of Nekhen, the edifice is not a city wall but a towering enclosure. It, too, is one of the great unsung wonders of the ancient world. Known colloquially as the “Fort,” it measures 221 by 188 feet and its buttressed walls reach thirty feet high. Most remarkable of all is its early date: as much time separates its construction from the wall of Elkab as separates the wall of Elkab from today. The Fort was built circa 2700 BC in the reign of King Khasekhemwy, making it the oldest freestanding mud-brick building in the world. Its purpose remains mysterious. The best guess is that it was built for the celebration of the king’s cult—some fragments of decorated stone from the Fort’s entrance gateway show the king engaged in ceremonial activity—both during his lifetime and after his death. Its particular location acknowledged the fact that Nekhen had been one of the earliest centres of Egyptian kingship.

  Some miles to the west of the Fort, down a remote desert wadi, lies a site of special significance in the development of Egyptian civilisation: the earliest royal burial ground in the Nile Valley. Site HK6, as archaeologists call it, was established around 3800 BC—over a thousand years before the Fort—as a cemetery for the rulers of Nekhen. Grave goods included statues of the rulers themselves (the beginning of a long tradition of royal sculpture), and wild beasts sacrificed to accompany the deceased into the next world (the earliest evidence for sacred animals). The tombs themselves were marked on the surface by pillared halls of timber and matting, enclosed within reed walls. It was a reminder, deep in the desert, that life and rebirth depended on the fruits of the Nile.

  This connection between the afterlife and the river was made more explicit in a slightly later royal tomb, Tomb 100, dug into the low desert nearer the Fort. Now lost, but known from black-and-white photographs taken at the time of its discovery in the early twentieth century, Tomb 100 is better known as the “Painted Tomb.” Dating from about 3400 BC, one of its inside walls was plastered and painted with scenes of a royal river pageant. Surrounding the main procession of boats are other references to royal power, including captive animals and the ruler smiting his enemies. This last motif was to endure as the defining image of kingship for the next three millennia. The Painted Tomb is the earliest decorated tomb ever discovered in Egypt; in its conception and its decoration it marks the beginning of one of the quintessential traditions of pharaonic civilisation. No wonder that the ancient Egyptians themselves, when considering their origins, considered the southern Nile Valley in general, and Nekhen in particular, as the crucible of civilisation, the place where Egypt began.

  A postscript to the story of mud, straw and origins is prompted by the site of Adaima, just a few miles north of the Painted Tomb and the Fort. Unlike Elkab and Nekhen with their monumental mud-brick constructions, Adaima has absolutely nothing for the visitor to see. The remains here are entirely subterranean, revealed by the archaeologist’s trowel and brush just a few centimetres under the desert surface. Spread over a vast area of nearly a hundred acres, the thinnest of deposits has yielded evidence for an extensive settlement and its associated cemetery, dating back to the middle of the fourth millennium BC. The dwellings were made of wood and straw, post-and-matting structures that gradually became larger and more sturdy over the passing centuries. But at no time did the inhabitants of Adaima turn to mud brick. In their burials, too, they showed a preference for plant materials, with a simple mat providing the only protection and the only equipment for many interments. A few children were buried in pots, a few adults in leather bags or unfired clay coffins, but wood and straw were the predominant materials, in life and in death.

  So ancient was the tradition of using plant materials that it became a hallowed archetype, used in the construction of sacred buildings even after mud brick had become popular. The earliest temple in Egypt, which was built at Nekhen, just a few hundred yards away from the Painted Tomb, and at about the same time, was thus created from tree trunks, mats and wicker-work fences. According to modern reconstructions, it looked nothing like the classic Egyptian temple of later periods. Instead of a rectangular building with gateways and courts, it consisted instead of a rough oval enclosure with a smoothed mud floor, a wooden flagpole at one end and a crude post-and-matting building at the other. In this way it encapsulated in its very architecture connotations of antiquity and the river’s bounty.

  ELKAB, with its great city wall, and Nekhen, site of Egypt’s first temple, declined in importance because of the rise of two other regional centres. Edfu to the south and Esna to the north, both founded in pharaonic times, became the dominant settlements of southern Upper Egypt in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, a status which they retain to this day. Edfu and Esna are also, not coincidentally, famous for their great, late temples—the final flowerings of Egyptian religion at a time when the Nile Valley was already ruled by foreigners. For two thousand years, the stories of each town and its temple have been closely intertwined, and never more so than today.

  Until about 1860, most of the temple of Horus at Edfu was buried under sand. Only the tops of the pylons were visible and there were sixty-four houses on the temple roof. Gustave Flaubert, a visitor to Egypt in 1849, accused the local inhabitants of using the temple as a public latrine. It fell to another Frenchman, Auguste Mariette, the first Director of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, to excavate Edfu from the accumulations of centuries and reveal the temple in its full glory. Its almost pristine state of preservation impressed Victorian visitors, just as it does today. As Amelia Edwards put it, “So perfect, so solid, so splendid is the whole structure; so simple in unity of plan; so complex in ornament; so majestic in completeness, that one feels as if it solved the whole problem of religious architecture.”7

  Construction of the temple began on 23 August 237 BC under Ptolemy III. The plan, to build one of the grandest edifices in the history of ancient Egyptian religion in the deep south of the Nile Valley, was no accident. Conscious of its renown as the birthplace of pharaonic civilisation, and proud of its long tradition of supplying kings to the Egyptian throne, Upper Egypt was a hotbed of nationalism during the reigns of the Greek-speaking Ptolemies. Nothing was better calculated to appease native Egyptian sentiment than a very public act of piety towards their old gods. Building and beautifying temples had been one of the primary duties of kingship since the dawn of Egyptian history, and the Ptolemies were at pains to be seen as legitimate pharaohs by their restive Egyptian subjects. The temple of Edfu, with its dedication to Horus—patron deity of ancient Nekhen and god of kingship—did not disappoint. When it was finally consecrated in 70 BC, a few months before the birth of Cleopatra, it was as spectacular as any monument erected by the pharaohs.

  With its massive pylon gateways and expansive columned halls, it managed to combine Egyptian and Hellenistic forms in a unified whole, achieving the harmony of cultural traditions that successive generations of Greek pharaohs had struggled to create. In a nod to Greek learning, the temple included a “laboratory” inscribed with prescriptions for making sacred oils and unguents. Wholly Egyptian, however, was the “Nile chamber,” where sacred water brought from the river was poured into a basin for use in religious rituals. Texts on the temple walls explained how the temple stood upon the very spot where the primeval mound had emerged from the waters of chaos at the time of creation. And thousands of ritual scenes showed the king—Greek in culture and background but attired as a pharaoh—presenting offerings to the traditional gods of Egypt.

  The ecstatic crowds who witnessed the dedication of Edfu temple were not, however, included in its cult activities. As Amelia Edwards noted, “an Egyptian Temple was not a place for pu
blic worship. It was a treasure-house, a sacristy, a royal oratory, a place of preparation, of consecration, of sacerdotal privacy. To the rest of the community, all that took place within those massy walls was enveloped in mystery.”8 The exception to this rule, and perhaps the most interesting of the many festivals celebrated at Edfu, was the Sacred Marriage. Celebrated each year in the run-up to the inundation, this involved the ceremonial transport of a statue of Hathor by barge from Dendera to be reunited with her consort, Horus of Edfu. The whole festival lasted a month, beginning at the full moon when the cult image of Hathor left Dendera, bound for Edfu. En route, the barge called at Thebes and Nekhen so that Hathor could “visit” other important temples and their resident deities. The flotilla arrived at Edfu at the new moon, staying for two weeks until the following full moon when Hathor’s statue was taken back to her boat—amid much rejoicing—for the journey home to Dendera.

  Today, the river and its traffic remain central to the life and prosperity of Edfu. In place of religious barges come tourist cruisers. The destination remains the same: the temple of Horus. Following this well-sailed path, we moor up at the quayside of Edfu next to a two-masted felucca. It is laden with rocks, yet scarcely draws any water thanks to its exceptionally broad beam. Men are hoisting massive chunks of stone on to their shoulders and walking along a narrow plank from boat to shore, then up a steep rocky bank to dump the stone into a waiting lorry. It is backbreaking work, carried out barefoot, in the full glare of the sun, and a reminder of the way the temples of ancient Egypt were built, with human toil and sweat.

  Alongside the stone-barge, the scene on the riverbank perfectly captures the juxtaposition of ancient and modern so characteristic of this part of Egypt: men in the river, washing themselves and their horses; waiting caleches; and a single motorised vehicle (the stone lorry). A fisherman comes alongside our boat, rowing with two planks of wood (functioning as bladeless oars), extracting his modest catch from his net. He holds up a grotesquely bloated puffer-fish as a trophy—poisonous to eat but often seen in Egyptian houses stuffed and hung on a wall as decoration. He hands over a few edible fish in exchange for a few pounds from one of the crew, before rowing off again. After this age-old exchange, modernity intrudes: an air-conditioned coach appears from nowhere to whisk us in comfort to the temple. As we drive through the city at high speed, scattering donkey-carts and caleches before us, we pass townspeople going about their business: young women in colourful scarves, older women swathed in black, walking in pairs; men sitting outside cafés, smoking; people queueing at the government bread stores; small stalls selling brightly coloured, embroidered dresses. When we return to our boat two-and-a-half hours later, the stone carriers are still hard at work. It will probably take the two men all day to unload the ship’s cargo.

  A subsequent visit to Edfu temple, at the end of 2012, requires a different method of approach. Following the Arab Spring and the precipitous decline in tourists to the Nile Valley, the caleche-drivers of Edfu have formed themselves into a militant trade union, determined and desperate to preserve their livelihoods in the face of dwindling customers. Their chosen technique is to insist that all tourists disembarking at the river quay should travel to the temple by caleche. Any bus or taxi that tries to follow the same route risks being pelted with stones and barred from entry into the temple compound. The tactic has certainly drawn attention to the drivers’ plight (and that of their fellow workers in the tourist industry), but has largely failed to drum up business. Western insurance companies refuse to insure their clients for travel by caleche—so fierce is the drivers’ reputation—so most tourists approach Edfu by road, breaking the ancient bond between Nile and temple. The same Upper Egyptian rebelliousness that Edfu was built to appease has come back to haunt town and temple more than two thousand years later.

  The caleche-drivers of Edfu excepted, Upper Egyptians are generally content with their lot; but it was not always so. Under Roman rule, the Nile Valley was a sorry place for its native inhabitants. Treated as aliens in their own land, in the cities they were denied citizenship and in the countryside they suffered crippling levels of taxation. The tax on Egypt’s agricultural produce supplied a third of Rome’s annual grain consumption. To facilitate this economic exploitation, the Romans stationed a massive military force at key sites throughout the Nile Valley. The soldiers’ duties inclued guarding the hated tax collectors, protecting the grain ships bound for Rome, and stamping out dissent among the native population—many of whom fled their villages to live as outlaws on the margins of society.

  The place in Upper Egypt where the Roman presence was trumpeted most loudly was Esna. It was frequented by Roman soldiers on leave from their garrisons in the Eastern Desert, and its temple, though dedicated to the Egyptian creator-god Khnum, was designed as a piece of Roman propaganda. The original temple had been founded by Ptolemy VI, but it was the Roman emperors who set about carving their names on every available surface. The façade names Claudius, Nero, Vespasian and Domitian; the columns of the hypostyle hall record the activities of Trajan, Hadrian and Antoninus Pius; and the rear wall bears inscriptions of Septimius Severus and his wife Julia, Caracalla, Geta, Philip I and Decius. Elsewhere, the names of Marcus Aurelius and Commodus appear, and a further relief shows Titus in the traditional smiting pose of an Egyptian pharaoh. Altogether, Esna memorialises nearly three centuries of Roman rule in the Nile Valley, a roll call of Egypt’s suppression by a foreign power. In one of the cruellest ironies, a column in the middle of the hypostyle hall shows Hadrian presenting a chaplet to Khnum. This rite, which involved the king offering a crown to the god in return for divine protection, dated back to the days of the pharaohs. But at Esna the crown is a Roman-style laurel wreath, and is offered together with a baton, signifying the emperor’s military might.

  Like all settlements in Upper Egypt, the town of Esna owes its existence to the Nile. In pharaonic times, the Nile perch (Lates) was worshipped locally, alongside Khnum, giving Esna its classical name of Latopolis (“perch city”). The quayside at Esna was a thriving commercial hub, and the stone quay, built under Marcus Aurelius, would have accommodated grain-ships bound for Rome. It was reinforced as late as the nineteenth century AD with blocks from Contralatopolis on the other side of the Nile. Contemporary Esna is still a town of merchants, and a centre of the weaving trade.

  Tourism is also important, and there are ambitious plans to exploit Esna’s potential yet further. The authorities’ vision is to turn back time and restore Esna to its former glory by reuniting the quayside with the temple. This is no easy task. Until the mid nineteenth century, the temple was buried “in the accumulated rubbish of a score of centuries”9 and the interior, “choken to within a few feet of the capitals of the columns,”10 was used as a cotton store. It was only excavated in 1842 to provide a safe underground magazine for gunpowder, but the temple still lies a long way below street level, surrounded on all sides by the sprawling modern town. In order to clear the entire route from the temple to the river, the Ministry of Antiquities intends to demolish an entire street of shops. The demolition will threaten a rare medieval mosque. (Its minaret is already leaning at a precarious angle; with nothing being done to shore it up, it will surely collapse in the near future.) As a sweetener, the authorities are also planning to install a mains sewerage system—the giant concrete sections of pipe are lined up along the corniche. To ready the temple for its new starring role, workmen are painstakingly cleaning centuries of soot and dirt from the reliefs to expose the vivid colours. Once the whole project is finished, the temple will be a wondrous sight, directly accessible to cruise ships from the quayside, and no doubt swamped with tourists. Cleaner, more accessible, but busier and less romantic.

  Future visitors to Esna may enjoy an uninterrupted walk from quayside to temple, but they will still have to get through the Esna Barrage before continuing their cruise to Luxor. Built in traditional sandstone from Gebel el-Silsila by Egyptian navvies overseen by English engineers,
the barrage was completed in 1906. It was one of the last old-style barrages across the Nile, designed to regulate the river’s flow (while letting silt pass through) and expand irrigation. It remains a spectacular and elegant feat of engineering. The same cannot, alas, be said for its modern counterpart, half a mile further north, designed for electricity generation and built from ugly concrete.

  Waiting to get through the Esna Barrage is a characteristically Egyptian experience. Boats jostle for position, trying to get ahead of each other in the queue. Every boat is given a specified place, but wads of baksheesh also have something to do with who goes first. Our dahabiya is overtaken by several large cruise ships while we circle, like an airliner in a holding pattern, waiting for our turn. After three-and-a-half hours hanging back, we get the all-clear to pass through the narrow channel in the old barrage. The stone structure is redundant, its sluices all open, but its status as an historic monument has saved it from demolition.

  Getting through the old barrage is only stage one. Once safely through the narrow passage and out into the pool between the two barrages, we are forced to wait again until called forwards into the lock. Scarf sellers come alongside in small wooden boats and throw their wares up on to our deck, hoping for a sale. Eventually, we enter the lock with our two tugs, the lock doors close, and the water level starts to fall rapidly. The tug to our stern is moored by rope to the side of the lock, and one of the tug-boys lets the rope out as the water level falls. But halfway down, the rope snags around the eye on the tug’s foredeck, and the tug is left dangling by a single rope as the water falls away beneath it. The strain is too much and the thick nylon rope snaps under the tug’s weight with a loud crack. The tug falls back down to the water surface and there is much loud shouting and cursing from the captain. The deck-hand looks dejected—he is not having a good day. Once the water level in the lock has fallen twenty-five to thirty feet, the downstream doors open and we are soon on our way northwards again. The whole business has taken nearly four hours: frustrating for Western tourists, but of no consequence to the local Egyptians. Time here in the deep south passes at the pace of the river’s flow, gentle and unhurried; if Allah wills it, it will happen, if He doesn’t, it won’t; what cannot be accomplished today can always wait until tomorrow; and what’s the hurry, anyway?