by Michael Wood
FOUR
EGYPT
THE HABIT OF CIVILIZATION
IN THE VALLEY of the nile, the ancient Egyptians created one of the earliest, most magnificent and long-lasting of the world’s civilizations. The images of the ‘great tradition’ of Pharaonic Egypt are so familiar to us today – pyramids, obelisks, sphinxes, hieroglyphs and so on – that it is easy to forget the immense vistas of time which separate us from them: time which also constitutes Egyptian history, a history as rich and interesting as the Age of the Pharaohs. There were nearly a thousand years of Greek, Roman and Byzantine rule in Egypt and over 1,300 years have passed since the coming of Islam. The ‘break’ with the ancient world (if for a moment we may speak in such simplistic terms) occurred a long time ago. And it is there that we begin our story, at the point of the break: at the beginning of the end, with an account of Egypt written in Greek by a native priest called Manetho.
THE END OF A TRADITION
Alexander the Great’s conquest of Egypt in 332 BC marks a truly profound caesura in its history. We say this with hindsight, of course. There had been such breaks before; in the 108-year rule of the Hyksos for example in the seventeenth century BC. More recently Assyrians and Persians had held sway. But none had disrupted the extraordinary continuity of institutions and customs; what one modern scholar in a memorable phrase called Egypt’s ‘airless immobility.’ But Alexander’s triumph would be far more threatening to the old country, exposing its introverted ways of seeing to the dynamic culture of international Hellenism, to new ways of construing nature, society and politics. Never again would a native Pharaoh rule the ‘two lands’, after three thousand years of recorded history. As we see it now it was indeed the beginning of the end of an old Egyptian world which had shown such amazing resilience, in ideology, in religious belief, and in institutions, for so long. Nearly a thousand years of rule by Greeks and Romans would see the transformation of the native culture, the end of the old state structures, its priesthood, its writing system, its language, its cults, the gods themselves. But despite this, such times of crisis in history open up new directions, new possibilities, and the Hellenistic age would see the transmission of Egypt’s legacy through the ancient world as the Greeks went native in ‘the land of ancient wisdom.’
Not long after the Greek conquest, an ethnological literature began to emerge, mostly written by Greeks living in Egypt, but also by travellers, aimed at a Greek reading public who had been fascinated by things Egyptian since the famous travel book by Herodotus in the fifth century BC. The Greeks believed Egypt to be the place where religious cult was first organized on earth, a land of inconceivable antiquity. We can get a sense of how they looked up to the older culture in the words which Plato puts into the mouth of an Egyptian priest: ‘O Solon, you Greeks are never anything but children; there is not an old man among you.’ Their insatiable curiosity for Egypt is brought out in the story Heliodorus tells of an Egyptian priest visiting Delphi surrounded by a crowd of Greeks ‘plying me with all kinds of questions. How do we worship our country’s gods? Why do we worship animals? What do our different cults mean? How were the pyramids built? What about the underground labyrinths? In short, on every aspect of our customs, for there is nothing a Greek likes better than listening to tales about Egypt.’
Much of the new literature after Alexander’s day was based for the first time on first-hand testimony from Egyptian priests: we might compare this with those British scholars in India of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who first elucidated Hindu ritual and Sanskrit texts with the help of Brahmins. Under the Greek ruler Ptolemy II (282–246 BC) a programme was begun to translate Egyptian (and Jewish and Babylonian) books into Greek, and it was in his day, probably soon after 280 BC, that an Egyptian priest called Manetho wrote his Aegyptiaka (Matters of Egypt) which, as it turned out, would be one of the key documents in the modern reconstruction of ancient Egyptian history.
Manetho may have been born when Alexander was still alive. He came from Sebennytus in the Delta, which is now a small country town off the Damietta branch of the Nile, surrounded by palm groves and cotton fields. Close by was a great temple to Isis, the ‘Compassionate Mother’, which was beautifully embellished in Manetho’s day by Ptolemy II. (Now ruined, its sacred tank is still visited by women to pray for children.) If we try to imagine ourselves back in the Egypt of Manetho’s day, the first thing to strike us would have been an overwhelming sense of living in an old country, and in a holy land. The Delta was full of ancient towns, some still inhabited today. Twenty miles to the south-west of Sebennytos was the great cult centre of Amun Re, now called Tanta, where even today more than a million people go to the Delta festivals of Seyed el Bedawi at the vernal equinox and at the summer solstice during the rising of the Nile. Then fakirs and dervishes perform before rapt crowds, serpent swallowers and snake charmers ply their trade, and musicians and poets give impassioned recitals of religious and folk stories. A little further to the south-east, at Bubastis, was the biggest popular festival in the Hellenistic age, where according to Herodotus, 700,000 people descended each year for a riotous religious carnival. All the way up the Nile from the Delta to Thebes in Upper Egypt, and even beyond, the journey was marked by similar cult centres of great antiquity, many of which were rebuilt under the Greek dynasty who could easily identify the native gods with their own. There was Min at Akhmim (Pan), Hathor at Denderah (Aphrodite), Horus at Edfu (Apollo); there were the great gods at Thebes, which the Greeks called Diospolis (literally ‘God town’) and the shrines which studded the river bank past Esna and Kom Ombo as far as the first cataract and the baking orange cliffs of Nubia. Only perhaps in India, on the Ganges or the Cauvery, could one find something of a similar sensibility today: a holy land with a sacred geography where every day’s journey is marked by great temples and pilgrimage places.
Manetho became a priest at Heliopolis, the greatest priestly centre in lower Egypt, near today’s Cairo. We know that he wrote books on Egyptian religion; a description of the main festivals; a study of ancient ritual; a short text on the making of Kyphi, an ancient concoction which was used in incense and medicine; and a treatise on theories of Nature. He was no great thinker; the significance of his work is that he wrote in Greek. He was probably the first Egyptian to write about his country for foreigners. That he wrote when he did is no coincidence. He was clearly not setting out to satisfy colonial curiosity, or the demands of tourism. Rather, he was making accessible local ideologies, beliefs and history to the Greek rulers of Egypt in their own language, trying in the process to convince them of the value of traditional Egyptian culture. We know for example that he criticized the ‘ignorance’ of Herodotus on Egyptian history, whom he saw as dealing in tourist guide fictions. Manetho was also perhaps consciously moving his own priestly class into the bilingual world of Hellenism: a strategy of survival which has its parallels elsewhere in this book, in Muslim India, Mongol China, and Spanish Central America. Notorious for their resistance to any foreign customs, the Egyptian ‘Brahmins’ now had to move with the times or perish.
Manetho’s work divided Egyptian history into thirty dynasties, stretching back nearly three thousand years before his own time, to a founder with the enigmatic name of Menes, which may mean ‘the accomplisher’ or ‘the bringer together’. Menes, it was believed, had united the two lands of Upper and Lower Egypt and formed a single unified state. Manetho was able to give the exact length of his reign and those of his seven successors in the first dynasty. As an Egyptian speaker, versed in hieroglyphic writing, Manetho still had access to the priestly traditions at important temples like Heliopolis. Such shrines each had their library room, the ‘House of Life,’ an example of which survives in the Ptolemaic temple at Edfu, with the catalogue of its sacred books still engraved on its walls. From these books Manetho provided details of Egyptian religious traditions and ritual. Other sources provided him with his chronological framework. Still surviving fragments such as the Turin Papyrus and
the Palermo Stone show that in his day records existed not only from as far back as Menes, but of the kings of the separate kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt even before the unification.
Egypt’s unique geography has shaped the character of its people and their civilization till today. Only the modern damming of the River Nile at Aswan threatens to disrupt its extraordinary continuity of ecology and culture.
Manetho’s text has not survived: we know it through extensive quotations of it by Roman historians and Church Fathers in the first millennium AD. The framework of Egyptian history it offered though, influenced subsequent historiography down to the Arab period. It was as we see it now, a bridge to a future world, the world which succeeded the ancients. For the great tradition of Egypt, unlike those of India and China, did not survive into the modern world, but lost its identity, submerged in the great changes which swept the Near East between Hellenism and Islam. The Greeks were the last to see it as it was, and though Manetho could not know it, his work was a requiem for a world which, even as he wrote, had almost passed.
BEGINNINGS
‘The Egyptian Nile,’ said the great Arab traveller Ibn Battuta, ‘surpasses all the rivers of the world in sweetness of taste, in length of course and utility. No other river in the world can show such a continuous series of towns and villages along its banks, nor a basin so intensely cultivated.’ The civilization of Egypt, like those of Iraq, India and China, drew its life from a river. Like the Ganges in India, the Nile was worshipped as a divine force itself; as the giver of life. There are liturgies to the river from the second millenium BC; Byzantine Christian hymns; a Syriac prayer from the twelfth century AD. The Coptic feast of St Michael still marks the rising of the river on 17 June each year, on the ‘Night of the Drop’ which, tradition says, falls from heaven to begin the rise: a tear of Isis according to the ancients. Though these age-old customs are breaking down today, responses and blessings are still performed, too, in traditional Muslim households: ‘May Allah pour the Nile abundantly over the whole land.’ This then was a river like no other, and it made a country like no other; running for six hundred miles between dunes and cliffs, the narrow ribbon of blue water and green fields on average only six miles wide. Egypt’s geography shaped the very character of its civilization and its people. Where the spirit of Iraq was pessimistic, here when the Nile flooded each year, as the ancients said, ‘the fields laugh, men’s faces light up and God rejoices in his heart.’ From the life-renewing soil left by the inundation, the Egyptians drew a cheerful confidence in humanity, in the permanence and stability of things. In striking contrast to ancient Mesopotamia, theirs was always an optimistic civilization.
Strong natural frontiers; a rich agricultural soil produced by the annual flooding; tremendous mineral resources in stone and precious metals: all this was the very opposite of early Iraq. It generated a magical self-confidence and a unique cultural purity for over three thousand years of Egyptian history. Modern archaeology has pushed back the horizons of Egypt’s prehistory and shown that many of its later traits can be found in the deep past of farming in the Nile valley. Farming villages appear in the flood plain in the sixth millennium BC, cultivating wheat and barley and domesticating sheep and goats. During the next two millennia we see the gradual formation of several tiny kingdoms along the valley, and in the Delta, the two regions which still present the fundamental divide in Egyptian history, culture and geography. After 4000 BC there is a substantial increase in population and size of settlements; developed crafts and technological skills are in evidence, working in stone, bronze, copper, slate. The first small towns, walled in mudbrick, appear by 3500 BC, with the rich tombs of local dynasties. Our evidence from the Delta is scanty. Most of the early sites in that area are deep in silt, so we have to rely on a group of sites from Upper Egypt to conjecture what happened next.
In the mid-fourth millennium BC, Upper Egypt seems to have been divided between three kingdoms, centring on Nekhen (Hierakonpolis), Nagada and This. Very likely they were rivals. Hierakonpolis was the cult centre of the hawk god Horus, and Nagada of the god Seth. One of the great mythological themes in Egyptian religion was the conflict of Horus and Seth, the sons of Osiris, the king of the dead. Many scholars now believe these myths dimly reflect a real struggle between the two kingdoms which preceded the conquest of the Delta by the ‘Horus Kings’.
HIERAKONPOLIS: THE BEGINNINGS OF EGYPTIAN HISTORY
Central to all these questions, indeed to the whole story of the uniting of Egypt, are the remarkable excavations which took place at Hierakonpolis in 1897–8. Today it is an obscure little village fifty miles upstream from Luxor; its name Kom el-Ahmar, ‘the red mound.’ Here was the centre of the prehistoric tribal kingdom of Nekhen, the shrine of a local divinity called Horus, the hawk. Hence its Greek name, which literally means ‘hawk town.’ In 1897 two British archaeologists, James Quibell and F.W. Green, came here looking for the origins of Egypt, at a time when the archaeologists of the European colonial powers were uncovering imperial origins elsewhere, at Mycenae, Boghaz Köy, Babylon, Nineveh and Assur. Hierakonpolis had been an insignificant place in later Pharaonic Egypt: there were fragmentary remains of a New Kingdom town here with mudbrick walls. But Quibell and Green were looking for clues from earlier still. For Egyptian royal tradition always insisted that this place had been the cult centre of the kings who united Egypt; indeed right till the end of Pharaonic Egypt its name would still retain an honorific precedence among the royal titles. In a field beyond the village, they made a thrilling discovery. Underneath the later Horus temple they found a heap of ceremonial palettes, ivories and maceheads from the ritual stores of Egypt’s first kings, kings with totemic names like Cobra, Catfish, Scorpion, Hawk; kings who inhabited a glittering, barbaric world very different from that of the historical pharaohs.
Among the finds was perhaps the most significant single object ever dug up in Egypt: a slab of black slate two feet long, cut with scenes commemorating the deeds of a king called Narmer. Central to the palette is an image clearly meant to convey the conquest of the Delta by a king of Upper Egypt; indeed perhaps it is the very moment of Narmer’s triumph. Wearing the crown of Upper Egypt, he dashes out the brains of the captive King of the Delta, symbolized by a papyrus clump. Headless enemies lie in rows before the standards of Horus the hawk. On a stone macehead, the same king Narmer is shown receiving an important female personage from the North. This may possibly represent a royal marriage, legitimizing his new position in the Delta. Other palettes showed the destruction of hostile towns by armed gods of Upper Egypt, symbolized by their totems, the lion, the scorpion, and the hawk. On a great ceremonial macehead a king called Scorpion cuts an irrigation ditch with a mattock, one of the primal acts of kingship; around him standards depicting Seth and the phallic god Min are associated with the hawk standard of Horus. In some sense then, the archaeologists had found a ritual deposit of some of the earliest kings of Egypt, possibly even of the unifier himself. But was Narmer the same ruler as the shadowy Menes?
A year later Green returned to make another intriguing find in the same area. He uncovered the remains of a large circular mound of clean white sand about 150 feet across and 8 feet high, enclosed by a sloping sandstone revetment. There were signs of a walkway leading to some central feature. Green thought the dating was late prehistoric, perhaps even before the first kings of dynastic Egypt. He interpreted the mound as being a symbolic representation of the mound of creation itself; the first island which had risen out of the seas of chaos at the beginning of time and on which the first life had landed, the hawk: this he argued was the ritual centre of the Horus kings who had founded Egypt.
Since his day, parallels have been discovered for such manmade cult representations of the primordial place, in Teotihuacan in Mexico, at Cuzco in Peru, and especially at Eridu in Iraq, which enjoyed comparable symbolic status in Sumerian religion and royal mythology. As we have seen, a natural island at the confluence of the Ganges and Jumna rivers w
as the focus of similar beliefs in ancient India. We are dealing with a universal myth. And in fact when an American expedition re-excavated the site at Kom el-Ahmar in 1967, they were able to identify all the features Green found, and to add the crucial detail which was missing. In the centre of the mound had been a small hut-shrine of reed and mud, surrounded by a reed fence, a kind of structure which can be seen everywhere in the Upper Egyptian countryside still today. Inside, no doubt, had been the cult statue of the divine hawk, and various objects, some of which perhaps had been the ceremonial palettes and maceheads found in 1897. Here then was the symbolic centre of the Horus kingship of Nekhen which preceded the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. The mystery of Menes, though, was and is still unsolved. Whether the king on the Narmer palette is the same man we cannot still be certain. The find of jar sealings at Abydos coupling the two names was once thought to have proved their identities beyond doubt but this may not be the case. Narmer indeed may have been Menes’ predecessor by a generation or two. The enigmatic names of the pre-Dynastic beings on the Palermo Stone – Seka, Khaya, Neheb, Mekh and the rest, are still a mystery too. But we now know a lot more about the prehistory of Egypt’s first towns, where some of these kings may have ruled. The settlement at Hierakonpolis has been traced back to 4500 BC; those at Nagada and Abydos to 4000 BC (the former was an important town from 3500 BC). This suggests a whole prehistory is still waiting to be recovered for the centuries preceding the triumph of Menes, the unifying of Egypt around 3100 BC. The ultimate success of the First Dynasty kings after Menes may have been, as Manetho painted it, the victory of a family from Abydos. But they never forgot their debt to their shadowy predecessors from Hierakonpolis, whose archaic mound shrine was kept unaltered well into the Pyramid Age. Theirs was the story of local kings, clans and lineages, local gods, cults and totems being transformed into national ideologies. Out of such prehistoric tribal struggles, the ‘great tradition’ emerged: the first true state in the world. The ideological basis of prehistoric kingship, its symbols and myths, proved uniquely long-lasting, indeed it lay at the heart of Egyptian civilization. The divine Kingship of Horus would survive for as long as ancient Egypt itself.