As her life drew to a close, Dorothy prepared her own tomb in her back garden: with its brick underground chamber, cement lining and concrete slab roof, it was a characteristically eccentric blend of ancient and modern Egyptian. But, when the time came, in April 1981, the local health department understandably insisted on a more regular interment, and Dorothy was buried in an unmarked grave on the edge of the local Coptic cemetery—overlooking the processional way that in ancient times witnessed the annual Mysteries of Osiris.
There is a postscript to the story of Umm Sety and her reverence for the ancient rites of Abydos. Although she has been dead for over thirty years, her beliefs live on, as I discovered on a visit to the temple of Seti I on 12 December 2012 (12/12/12), a date of apparent significance to various esoteric New Age cults. As soon as our coach arrived in front of the temple, we knew we were not the first visitors to Abydos that day: there was another minibus parked up, and its occupants were not difficult to spot in and around the temple. With their long hair (men and women alike), flowing tie-dyed clothing and expression of beatific satisfaction, they stood out from the usual tourists. Inside the seven-fold sanctuary of the temple, several of the group had made a beeline for the shrine of Seti I, and were chanting quietly in front of a relief of the king, eyes closed in mystical reverence. Others had gone behind to visit the Osireion—but on finding it rather less spiritually uplifting, had retreated back into the temple’s shady chambers.
As twelve noon approached (12:00 on 12/12/12) the atmosphere inside the sanctuary suddenly changed: not from any divine intervention—at least, none that I could observe—but from the tension and increasing levels of discomfiture among the temple guards. The reason was all too plain to see in the innermost chamber of the Osiris suite. There, oblivious to onlookers, the entire party of New Age worshippers stood in a circle, taking it in turns—on the orders of their American group leader—to move into a beam of sunlight filtering down from a small gap in the roof. With arms upraised and eyes closed in spiritual concentration, each person stood in the light for only a matter of seconds. It was over almost before it had begun, but it was clearly what each had come for, why each had made this pilgrimage to a temple in the remoteness of rural Upper Egypt. As Umm Sety put it, “For those who love her, Abydos still has a mysterious life.”17
But here I am entering on the anomalies and contradictions of Egypt, which would fill volumes.1
—ISAMBARD KINGDOM BRUNEL
The Nile Valley north of Abydos is today something of a backwater. Largely rural and impoverished, and scarcely visited by tourists, its very designation, “Middle Egypt,” conveys its relative political and cultural insignificance compared with Luxor to the south and Cairo to the north.
The landscape along the river is quite different, too—softer, more expansive, with an “open, placid beauty.”2 The Nile flows sluggishly through a wide floodplain, its broad channel abraded with islands in the stream. Only at Asyut do the cliffs on both banks swing towards the river, constricting the valley at a natural pinch-point. From ancient times, Asyut has been a strategic location for the control of Nile traffic, reflected in the town’s name, which means “guardian.” Beyond Asyut, the hills of the eastern and western escarpments recede once more into the distance and take on a more weathered, time-worn appearance. The towns of Middle Egypt are sleepier, too, less cosmopolitan and more old-fashioned than elsewhere in the country: Asyut with its camel-market, Mallawi with its back-street artisans. Even in the university city of Minya, the Egypt of pyramids and package holidays, of mass-market tourism and a rush towards modernity, can seem a world away.
Yet there is more to this quiet stretch of fertile floodplain than meets the eye. Middle Egypt has, over the millennia, been the site of profound developments in psychology and society, developments that have shaped the course of Egyptian—and, on occasions, human—history. Since before the dawn of civilisation, this unassuming part of the Nile Valley has been a crucible of religious thought.
THERE WERE no buses for where I wanted to go; not even a service taxi. (In Egypt, these resourceful forms of transport fill a handy niche between state-run buses and taxis for private hire. They are typically rickety minibuses that wait at bus stations and in town squares for a full load of passengers and luggage before heading off to their pre-advertised destination. Depending on the popularity of the destination and the time of day, the wait can be anything from a few minutes to an hour or more.) I had just spent a fitful night in the centre of Asyut at the Hotel Zimzam, an undistinguished establishment by any standards and a fleapit in every sense of the word. As I weighed up my options, it became clear that I would have to bite the bullet and fork out for a private taxi—it was simply too far to walk. I was an impoverished student on a pilgrimage through the sites of ancient Egypt, and having got this far (Asyut is never going to be on anyone’s list of “must-see” destinations) I was determined to achieve my goal. So I hailed a taxi and, in my broken Arabic, explained my unlikely destination.
About an hour later, having crossed over the Nile to the east bank and navigated a series of increasingly rural tracks, the incredulous taxi driver left me at the edge of a tiny, dusty village. He clearly thought the heat had affected my senses. But I could not have been more excited. Nobody much was about—the few inhabitants were either in the fields or shut up in their houses—so off I marched, through the village to an area of wasteground, hard up against the edge of the high desert. I thought I recognised the setting from some old black-and-white photographs taken in the 1930s by the archaeologists who had worked here. Within minutes, my excitement turned to elation when, scanning my eyes across the desert surface, I caught sight of a small irregular shard of pottery, lying on the ground. I picked it up and there it was: across its blackened surface, a faint ripple pattern, its undulations catching the sunlight. This was what I had come for—a piece of “ripple burnished pottery”; and not just any pottery, but the pottery made by the Nile Valley’s first farmers. The shard in my hand was nearly seven thousand years old. I had made it to the site of Mostagedda, heartland of the Badarian culture.
When those 1930s archaeologists came to this part of Middle Egypt, the prehistory of Egypt only extended as far back as the early fourth millennium BC, thanks to Petrie’s discoveries in the cemeteries of Nagada. But this new generation of excavators succeeded in pushing back the origins of Egyptian culture by another five or more centuries. On the low desert, they uncovered a series of settlements and cemeteries that bore witness to a culture even earlier than that of Nagada. They called it the Badarian, after the village of el-Badari, a few miles south of Mostagedda. Mostagedda itself yielded further remains of the same period, as did a clutch of other sites in the vicinity. (Altogether, some forty settlement sites have been found in a twenty-mile stretch of the Nile Valley south of Asyut.) The Badarian culture is now dated to the second half of the fifth millennium BC, its typical clusters of round houses representing the first settled communities along the Egyptian Nile. And you can see why they chose places like Mostagedda: high enough above the floodplain to escape the inundation, but close enough to farm the land; within easy reach of the eastern plateau, now desert, but then a savannah with herds of wild game; and well-connected, via the tracks that lead eastwards over the cliffs, to the minerals of the Eastern Desert and the marine resources of the Red Sea coast.
Settled in their farmsteads (for part of the year, at least), they were able to devote some of their time to arts and crafts, perfecting their distinctive eggshell-thin handmade pottery with its ripple-burnished decoration. This was no mere utilitarian ware, but beautiful to look at as well. (In a remarkable example of continuity, the red and black pottery pioneered by the Badarians in the fifth millennium BC was still being made in the Asyut area in the late nineteenth century AD.) The Badarians’ aesthetic sense also found expression in jewellery, small items of metalwork (they were the first Egyptians to use copper, brought from as far away as the Sinai), and vases, some carved fr
om hippopotamus tusks.
Even more remarkable, however, than the Badarians’ settlements and objects of daily use were their cemeteries and grave goods. To the archaeologists’ surprise, they found that nearly every Badarian burial was laid out in the same fashion: with the body curled up in the foetal position, its head towards the south, facing west. Such care and uniformity seemed to speak of an underlying set of shared beliefs. A few graves contained not just everyday items but also magical, mystical artefacts: small female figurines, formed in pottery or carved from hippo ivory. These rare objects always emphasise the breasts and pubic area, so it is not unreasonable to label them “fertility figurines.” They are the earliest examples of a class of object which remained a constant feature of private worship throughout ancient Egyptian history, and they reflect the overriding concerns of ordinary peasants in a pre-modern society: fertility, childbirth, and the survival of the next generation. Carefully laid-out burials and fertility figurines: as one Egyptologist has put it, with the Badarian culture “we unexpectedly plunge straight into a symbolic universe of incredible richness.”3 Put more simply, the Badarians invented religion.
The grave goods dug from the sand in places like Mostagedda provide, for the first time, evidence of a belief in an afterlife. The grave itself seems to have been regarded as a symbolic womb, a place of rebirth. Fertility figurines provided additional magic assistance in the quest for rejuvenation. And the objects the dead took with them were intended to serve them, practically or magically, in the next life. These objects include model clay boats, to help the dead navigate the journey into the hereafter. It is in Badarian graves that we find the first explicit link between the river and the afterlife. The Badarians’ beliefs, expressed for the first time in material form, were the seed from which all of ancient Egyptian religion ultimately sprang, the origins of a remarkable five-thousand-year tradition.
The resulting edifice of belief and ritual, with its myriad gods and goddesses, developed gradually over the centuries, absorbing new influences and nuances, but remaining, essentially, highly conservative. Many of the same deities worshipped at the dawn of Egyptian history, in 3000 BC, were still being venerated under Cleopatra. Ancient Egyptian religion, forged in the crucible of social change at the end of the Stone Age, was still going strong in the early years of Christianity.
What is particularly remarkable about this longevity is that it was achieved without a single, guiding text. One might expect the so-called “religions of the book” (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) to prove relatively immutable, prescribed as they are by an unchanging and unchangeable script. Egyptian religion, on the other hand, was a creation of society, reflecting the values, hopes and fears of the Egyptian people and, more especially, of their rulers. It says much about the unchanging rhythm of life in the Nile Valley, dictated by the annual regime of the river itself, that the resulting belief system remained so stable for so long. Indeed, even today, life in the villages of Middle Egypt—in places like el-Badari and Mostagedda—has remained remarkably unaltered since the days of those first farmers, nearly seven thousand years ago. The concerns of peasant families still revolve around questions of fertility and childbirth, of ensuring a good harvest and of the survival of the next generation.
There was, however, one notable hiatus in this picture of an unchanging, eternal system of faith, a hiatus so disruptive and shocking that succeeding generations of Egyptians tried to purge it from their collective memory; a hiatus that created, almost overnight, not only a new religion but a new capital city and a new aesthetic in Egyptian art. And this revolution had its epicentre just thirty miles north of the Badarian cemeteries, at a similarly remote spot on the east bank of the Middle Egyptian Nile. It is often said that there is only one real individual in the whole history of ancient Egyptian religion. The individual in question is the pharaoh Akhenaten (1353–1336 BC), also known as “the heretic king,” and the place indelibly associated with his social and religious experiment is the site of Amarna.
Today, the desert road that runs along the east bank of the Nile carries traffic from Cairo more or less directly to Amarna. But the more rewarding, certainly the more romantic way to approach the most infamous location in ancient Egyptian history is from the Nile. Boats moor up at the small village of et-Till, from where it is only a short walk to the archaeological site. It is not hard to see why this particular location would have appealed to a religious revolutionary in search of a blank canvas, a new beginning. For a start, the landscape here is especially imposing. The limestone cliffs of the eastern escarpment recede from the river bank, to create a natural amphitheatre of low desert some seven miles long and three miles wide. The hills that surround the site afford protection—both physical and symbolic—and give it an atmosphere of seclusion, appropriate for a theologically driven regime. (It is no coincidence that the ancient Egyptian word for “holy” meant, at its root, “set apart.”) On a more practical note, Amarna is roughly halfway between the ancient cities of Thebes and Memphis (Luxor and Cairo), so a convenient spot from which to govern Egypt. And the site is located opposite a broad swathe of fertile floodplain on the west bank, with sufficient agricultural potential to feed a large urban population. From a religious point of view, Amarna was also ideal. It was virgin territory, uninhabited, unclaimed and therefore untainted by any other deity. And the very topography of the site seemed to enhance its special status, the shape of the eastern cliffs resembling the hieroglyphic sign for “horizon”—the place where the sun rose every day to bring new life to the world.
In a text composed to commemorate Akhenaten’s “discovery” of Amarna, the king claimed to have been led there by divine inspiration; it was god, not the king, who chose it. In either case, it was the perfect setting for what Akhenaten had in mind. At the start of his reign, the king (then known as Amenhotep IV) had taken the decision to elevate one of Egypt’s many deities above all the others, and make the visible orb of the sun, called the Aten, the focus of his personal religious programme. Outside the eastern wall of Karnak Temple (i.e., facing the rising sun), in the sacred city of Thebes, he had commissioned no fewer than eight new monuments to the Aten. The largest—a monumental edifice of pillared courtyards, open to the sky—was named, prophetically, Gem-pa-Aten, “the Aten is found.” Though merely developing an ideology that had already gained ground during his father’s reign, the new king was, in effect, announcing a radical departure. The Aten swiftly became the sole object of royal veneration.
In the fifth year of his reign, the king decided to change his name to reflect his devotion. Out went Amenhotep (“Amun is content”), with its reference to the god of Karnak, to be replaced by Akhenaten (“effective for the Aten”). At the same time, the king decided that his bold vision could not adequately be realised at Thebes, among the relics of the old religion. What he needed was a new, virgin site, one that would belong to the Aten alone. Amarna fitted the bill perfectly.
In the late spring of 1349 BC, Akhenaten paid his first official visit to the site. In a piece of pure theatre, he appeared before his assembled courtiers in a chariot plated with electrum, shining in the sunlight. As the sun-god on earth, he issued a royal decree establishing the new home for his heavenly co-regent, the Aten, and hallowed it with a spectacular offering. The entire site, Akhenaten declared, would be a monument to his god, and would be named accordingly: Akhetaten, “horizon of the Aten.” Exactly one year later, on the first anniversary of the dedication, the king returned to inspect progress. Once again, he rode out at sunrise on a golden chariot, made another offering to the Aten and swore an oath that Akhetaten and everything in it would belong “to the Aten and no other, for ever.”4
The job of the royal planners and architects was to design a sacred landscape that would do justice to this religious motivation. The result was a layout that deliberately mirrored the passage of the sun’s orb across the sky, an earthly reflection of the underlying rhythm of Akhenaten’s universe. To this end, a series of
grand ceremonial buildings was laid out along a “royal road,” a wide boulevard that ran parallel to the river from the king’s private residence at the northern edge of the plain to his office and state apartments further south. The king’s daily chariot ride up and down the royal road at the start and end of each day not only symbolised his close association with the sun-disc; it also provided the people of Akhetaten with a regular piece of ceremonial, something to take the place of the religious festivals of yore. By elevating the Aten as the sole focus of official religion, Akhenaten’s purpose, it seems, was to cut a swathe through the theological accumulations of earlier centuries and purify Egyptian religion, taking it back to the mythical pristine state it had enjoyed at the time of creation. The irony was that in order to refine Egyptian religion, Akhenaten had to destroy it.
One of the starkest breaks with tradition was the promulgation of a prescriptive text, the “Teaching,” which set out the parameters of Akhenaten’s new faith. The best known element of the Teaching is the so-called Great Hymn to the Aten. More than three thousand years after it was composed, probably by the king himself, it still ranks as one of the masterpieces of religious poetry:
You shine forth in beauty on the horizon of heaven,
O living Aten, the creator of life!
When you rise on the eastern horizon,
You fill every land with your beauty.
Beautiful, great, dazzling,
High over every land,
Your rays encompass the lands
To the limit of all that you have made …
The earth is bright when you rise on the horizon,
And shine as Aten of the daytime.
You dispel the darkness
When you send out your rays.
The Two Lands are in festival …
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