by Michael Wood
FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD TO ISLAM
We now come to one of the most difficult of historical questions: not simply why do civilizations decline and fall, but what is it that causes a complete shift in their way of seeing? How are we to account for a change as apparently cataclysmic as that from Pharaonic Egypt to Islam? It is perhaps the key question of Egyptian history. In the last century BC and the first AD, in the great cultural zone of the Hellenistic world, which extended as far as India, there was a tremendous stirring-up of religious ideas which would eventually undermine all the old orders in those lands, the heartland of civilization. The revolutionary ideals of the Axis Age now came home to roost. The old gods were fading away, in the Nile Valley, in the Fertile Crescent, in Iraq and in Arabia. New spiritual movements rose up everywhere, monotheistic, polytheistic, mystical, transcendent. New gods appeared, and strange sects: sacrificial, ecstatic, and mystery cults. The old sacred languages in their cumbersome scripts (cuneiform, hieroglyphic) are replaced by the flexible demotic linguae francae of Greek and Aramaic. Great cosmopolitan cities such as Alexandria and Antioch became centres of religious speculation and of mass cults for the urban poor. In Alexandria there was even a Buddhist community, and sects of ‘Gymnosophist’ dropouts who lived semi-naked, bathing in the Nile and practising asceticism like Hindu Brahmins. On the one hand there was a rise in irrationalism and mystery cults, and on the other a search for ‘gnosis’, interior knowledge, as opposed to ritual-based religion. In recent years Gnosticism has come to be seen as a universal religious phenomenon which virtually constitutes another world religion.
We can trace the spread of these ideas of a personal path to salvation through the Qumran community’s Dead Sea Scrolls, through early Christianity, to the Mandaeans of Iraq and the Manichaeans, whose Iranian brand of Gnosticism arose in the third century AD. But Egypt was the hotbed of religious syncretism. It is as if the breakdown of their old religious system under the impact of Hellenistic culture and spirituality was so traumatic as to throw up dozens of different sects expressing all these various strands of Near Eastern thought. The remarkable ‘Gnostic Gospels’ found at Nag Hammadi near Abydos for example represent an entire alternative reading to early Christianity, with quite different ideas about the nature of God, the role of women in the church, and what would become a fundamental point of issue in the early church, the question of damnation and eternal punishment.
From the existence of this bewildering mix of faiths between the first century BC and the third AD we can draw certain obvious conclusions. The old Bronze Age polity was finally breaking down. As Carl Jung wrote of the antecedents of the Hitler era (when even before the First World War he saw symptoms of ‘mental change’) there was a sense that the old ‘metaphysical authority set above this world’, was disappearing: ‘the first smell of burning was in the air.’ One of the most dramatic indicators of this psychological strife was the withering away of the confident outlook of traditional Egyptian civilization. And in particular, as Christianity gained more and more converts among the alienated urban masses in Alexandria and the towns of the Nile Valley, there arose a wholly new feeling in Egyptian culture, nothing less than a rejection of the material world: monasticism. In late Roman Egypt, an upheaval began as momentous as any political revolution. A change occurred in the psyche of Near Eastern culture which has helped shape the Western mind ever since: all along the Nile valley, tens of thousands of people took up the monastic life. There are distant echoes of our own time here; of self-sufficient communes dropping out of society, and of the widespread feeling that civilization itself had failed. ‘Better cities may arise one day’, said the Egyptian philosopher Plotinus. ‘Our children, though conceived in a sinful age, may build better than their fathers.’ And so the old fabric of pagan culture, the stable cosmos which had sustained Egyptians for so long, was eroded by Christianity, with its appeal not to a great earthly ruler but to a distant high God. ‘This was a time,’ said Epictetus, ‘when we realized how insecure the human condition is.’
THE END OF EGYPTIAN PAGANISM
In the old towns along the Nile valley the ancient paganism survived right through the Christian era. From the Greek conquest indeed, it took nearly a thousand years for it to break down: an amazing testimony to its resilience. Egypt was perhaps three-quarters Christian by the end of the sixth century AD, the eve of the Islamic conquest. But almost up till that time paganism was still on an organized basis with temple worship, nearly two centuries after edicts from Rome banned the old religion.
Akhmim in middle Egypt was, and still is, a famous textile town. Fragments of its cloths from the late Roman period suggest a rich mixed culture with their Greek, Egyptian and Christian themes. When the Greek traveller Herodotus visited Akhmim back in the fifth century BC he had reported that this was the one city in Egypt whose inhabitants favoured Greek customs. And this was still true right up to the end of the Roman Empire and even until the Islamic conquest. The town had a number of pagan temples, including one to the Greek god Perseus. But its most famous temple was to the ancient phallic god, Min, whom the Greeks identified as Pan. Only finally completed by Trajan in 115 AD, it was described as a wonder of the world by medieval Arab travellers. In 1183 Ibn Jubayr thought it ‘the most remarkable temple in the world,’ and gives a lavish account of its extraordinary decoration, with painted and carved ceilings, forty huge columns with ornate capitals, and dimensions of about 370 by 250 feet. The demolition of this and other temples of Akhmim began during the fourteenth century, though the ruins of a Roman temple founded by Trajan in the second century were still visible in the nineteenth century. Now in a new excavation remains of the Min temple are emerging from deep below the streets ‘east of the city and below its walls’ just as Ibn Jubayr says. In 1989 two colossal statues of daughters of Rameses II were uncovered, suggesting the temple as it survived into Islamic times was largely from the Eighteenth Dynasty.
In the fifth century AD, Upper Egypt was famous for its Greek-speaking literary figures like Olympiodorus of Thebes, who travelled as far as Ethiopia and the Black Sea with a faithful parrot who spoke Attic Greek ‘and could pronounce his master’s name!’ In Akhmim was a circle of pagan poets who travelled widely in the Eastern Empire. Among them was Nonnos, who wrote an enormous epic poem in Greek, running to 48 books, as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, on the subject of Dionysus, the pre-eminent pagan god of late antiquity, the god of frenzy and intoxication. Such figures help us identify the intellectual and psychological changes happening in Egypt before Islam. Out of this world have come the recent Upper Egyptian papyrus finds, of alchemical, magical and astrological texts, of occult and pagan philosophy. In this cultural milieu the alchemist Zosimus of Panopolis had worked, mingling Platonism and Gnosticism with Judaism and ‘oriental wisdom’. This too is the world in which Horapollon, a distinguished late fifth-century pagan, could still attempt to write a treatise on the interpretation of hieroglyphic signs. Horapollon’s father Asclepiades had produced a literary history of the early traditions of Egypt stretching back over 30,000 years! No wonder then that the temple of Min survived long after the Emperor Theodosius’ edict against the pagans.
Most of the well-to-do landowners around Akhmim were still Greek-speaking pagans in the fifth century; in fact there are cases in the neighbourhood of town councillors who went back to paganism having been converted to Christianity. This is the background to the situation that arose in the early fifth century, when the militant Christian abbot, Shenuda of the White Monastery, which still stands over the river from Akhmim, launched night raids with fanatical monks to beat up neighbouring pagan landowners outside the town. Finally the monks attacked the temple of Min itself, stealing a statue of Min and some sacred books. But the standing of the pagan priests in the community was still great enough for them to take Shenuda to court and sue him for his vandalism. Elsewhere in Upper Egypt the culture of Hellenism survived into the sixth century. In Nubia the temples of Philae for ex
ample were not closed until the reign of Justinian (527–65) when they were taken over for Christian services. By then their pagan priests were illiterate and impoverished; knowledge of the hieroglyphs long reduced to mere magical mumbo-jumbo. Up till the second century AD towns like Akhmim and Oxyrhynchus had still employed traditional stone-cutters to do monumental glyphs. But that century was the dividing line. Afterwards knowledge of the old writing was reduced to a small élite. The last inscriptions come from the fourth century and are largely gibberish. When Horapollon wrote his treatise on hieroglyphs not long before 500 AD, he no longer knew what they meant. Soon enough, this son of the pagan author of a ‘Harmony of all theologies’ converted to Christianity. It was a sign of the times.
In the sixth century, all over Egypt the temples were vandalized before conversion into churches. At Abydos, Christian fanatics chiselled away with careful malice at those intimate gestures which had connected ancient men and women with their old gods. At Luxor, a Coptic church was built inside the sanctum of the great temple of Amenophis III; at Medinet Habu the wall carvings were hacked away, obliterating the face of Isis and the phallus of Min. A revolution of the mind was now taking place: a movement from the worship of many gods to that of a single God. Out of this crisis emerged Islam: the final stage of the transformation of the religion of Abraham through the Jews and Christians to the last great world religion proclaimed by the prophet Mohammed, realigning Egypt to her age-old connections to the east across the Red Sea.
ISLAMIC EGYPT
In 641 AD, after a thousand years of Greek and Roman rule, Egypt fell to Muslim Arabs bearing the new faith of the prophet Mohammed. But life in Edfu went on apparently unmarked by these shifts in regime. Until 700 AD the bureaucracy worked in Greek, as it had for centuries. Only gradually did the change become apparent, as the cultural life of Egypt after so long looking towards the Mediterranean turned again to the Fertile Crescent.
In Edfu, as throughout the Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds, the Christians and the Muslims were the inheritors of the ancients. And the effects of that tremendous revolution at the end of the late antique world still shape our lives today. One of the last Greek religious papyri from late seventh-century Egypt sets the seal on that revolution. For it gives in Greek the words which are central to the creed of every Muslim, ‘In the name of God the merciful and the compassionate, there is one God and one God alone,’ and it continues, in Greek, Mahmet Apostolos Theou, ‘Mohammed is the apostle of God.’ With that to all intents and purposes the world of Isis, Hathor and Aphrodite had passed.
The change to Islam though would take many centuries. A census from around 700 showed the countryside was still entirely Christian: ‘10,000 villages with five million souls.’ Mass conversions began in the eighth century after a long series of rebellions and harsh repression by the Muslim rulers, revolts largely inspired by excessive taxation rather than by religious or communal strife. But Islam only became the majority religion in the tenth century. Today the Christian Copts, though reviving in numbers, are less than ten per cent of the population.
The pre-Christian pagan culture survives today only in folk custom, though out in the countryside, especially in Upper Egypt, the deeper layers of the past are still visible. In mid-March, for example, on the full moon which heralds the onset of the heat of summer, a great festival takes place which still preserves some unmistakable traces of the popular culture of ancient Egypt.
At this time tens of thousands of people come in from the countryside to descend on the little town of Luxor for their great annual festival. Up here people still celebrate the ancient feast days: the Spring Festival, the rising of the Nile and especially the forty days of mourning for the dead which are still observed, as they were in Pharaonic times. Indeed there are many local festivals still to be seen deep in the countryside which are the descendants of ancient cults to holy men and women, to ancient shrines, to trees, snakes and goddesses, now Islamicized and Christianized. But this is the biggest. It is a festival for a Muslim saint, Abul Haggag, but it takes place at a mosque inside one of the great pagan temples of ancient Egypt; a mosque whose ancient stonework stands perched amid fourteenth-century BC columns on top of twenty feet of accumulated debris. The Coptic Christians also take part, for they too once had a church inside the temple; indeed the Muslim saint’s wife was a Copt, and traditionally Coptic women have always sung the saint’s lament.
Abul Haggag died in the eleventh century, at the point when Islam was becoming the dominant religion in Upper Egypt. His tomb inside the mosque has been a place of pilgrimage ever since. On the steps, souvenir sellers offer incense, beads, holy charms, and incantation sheets. On the walls as you go in are palm prints in the blood of women devotees, a custom since the Upper Paleolithic period. As everywhere, orthodoxy may demand one thing, but what the people do is another matter and in the worship of sheikhs and saints, the ordinary people, the fellahin, fill the void between their daily hopes and fears and that distant high God. After the songs and prayers round the tomb the night is passed in passionate celebration with the traditional music and songs of Upper Egypt. The two lands of Upper and Lower Egypt were united by Menes the Hawk King five thousand years ago, yet all those long years of union have not completely concealed the join. Even today they are still two lands, each with its own character, customs and traditions, and a man from Cairo or the Delta would feel a stranger here tonight. Indeed perhaps Haggag’s festival is as near as we can get today to the ancient celebrations for the renewal of life each year with the resurrection of Osiris.
Next day the festival reaches its climax. The living descendants of the saint lead a huge procession around the ancient temple and its mosque, bearing representations of the coffins of Haggag and his sons. Behind them comes Luxor’s guild of ferrymen with their ceremonial boats. They are carried on trucks these days, but nonetheless the ferrymen are discharging their traditional duty, just as their ancestors did thousands of years ago, when around the streets of ancient Luxor they bore the boat of the Sun-God Amun. The day ends not in solemnity, but in carnival with drinking, dancing and sexual licence: un-Islamic perhaps, but true to the spirit of the ancestors. Indeed it strongly recalls Herodotus’ account of the joyful and licentious festival for the goddess Bastet in the fifth century BC. ‘When the Egyptians travel to it, they do so like this: men and women sail together and in each boat there are many persons of both sexes. Some of the women make a noise with rattles, and some of the men play pipes for the whole journey, while the others sing and clap their hands. If they pass a town on the way they stop, and some of the women land and shout and mock the women of the place, while others dance and lift up their skirts. They do this at every town along the river, and when they arrive they consume more wine than in the whole of the rest of the year. Locals say as many as 700,000 men and women, besides children, make the annual pilgrimage.’ And so it is today.
Meanwhile across the river, in the green fields below the western cliffs, is the land of the dead. The great mortuary temple of Rameses III at Medinet Habu lies still partly encumbered with the mudbrick ruins of the Coptic Christian village which was cleared from its rubble-choked courtyards in the nineteenth century. Outside its gate is a small sacred tank, still full of water. Here childless Christian and Muslim women come in secret to pray for children, at the behest of the female spirit mediums who still exist in popular religion. All this they did in ancient times. As a great modern Greek poet from Egypt, Constantine Cavafy, wrote:
That we’ve broken their statues,
that we’ve driven them out of their temples,
doesn’t mean at all that the gods are dead.
CAIRO: THE ISLAMIC LEGACY
The ancient legacy also survived in the city. Cairo, ‘the mother of cities,’ as Ibn Battuta said, ‘its numberless buildings peerless in their beauty and splendour. A meeting place of travellers, shelter of the strong and weak whose throngs of people surge like the sea.’ Cairo was founded in the tenth cen
tury in sight of the ancient capital Memphis and the pyramids of Giza and Saqqara. By then the capital of Menes, ‘white-walled Memphis’, was a mere fable, ‘the city of Pharaoh with seventy gates and walls of iron and copper,’ as Ibn al-Fakih wrote at that time; a poor Christian village nestling on its ruins. Soon enough its very name would be forgotten. Over the river, Cairo would become the cultural capital of Arab Islam. Escaping the fury of the Mongol attack of 1258, Cairo and Egypt continued to be the guardian of the rich legacy of classical Arab civilization up to the Ottoman conquest of 1517. The Arab world by then perhaps was no longer the cultural powerhouse of Islam – that honour fell to Persia and to Turkey – but Egypt had become the centre of the Arab world, and so would remain.
And in Cairo even today, in its mosques and universities, we can still find living links with the world of the pharaohs: for medieval Islamic Cairo was a civilization conservative in character, with a strong moral tone, like its ancient predecessor. This was not a culture of the brilliant ecumenical cast of tenth-century Baghdad; nor did it aspire to the mystical synthesis of East and West attempted in Persia. It was rooted, earthy and sensible as it had been in the past: devoted to preserving, elaborating and explaining the legacy, but also, and most importantly, expounding the religious texts, the Koran, the hadith (traditions) and the law. In the Al Azhar, the leading teaching mosque of Islam, older than Oxford or the Sorbonne, learning is still the study of the sacred texts, binding the land together as it did in ancient Egypt, still trying to maintain the difficult balance between the secular and the spiritual, between religion and the state in fundamentalist times. Indeed even the physical aspect of medieval Cairo recalls its pharaonic predecessor: with its gigantic royal mosques, its enormous domed Islamic mortuary temples, its cities of the dead, its scribal and religious schools, its myriad neighbourhood prayer halls. The western side of the Nile may no longer be the land of the dead, but this huge-scale sacred architecture is fulfilling the same function as it did of old. (In fact the descendant of the temple lands, the religious waqfs, or endowments, totalling one-twelfth of the cultivated land, were only nationalized by President Nasser in the 1950s.) This then was a civilization which, for all the apparently cataclysmic breaks in its history, not only preserved the essential attributes of civilized life, but also continued to do things in the way its ancestors did. And perhaps these two ideas, inseparably bound up with each other, are a clue to the nature of civilization itself.