The Sacred Scarab (15 page)

Nefert
Wife of Paneb, mother of Mut, Ramose and Kha, and sister of Sheri and Kia. She plays the lute and is head of the dance and music troupe.

Sheri
One of Nefert’s widowed sisters, and a musician in the troupe. She has a particularly loving nature.

Kia
The second of Nefert’s widowed sisters, also a musician living with the troupe. She is slightly more cold and distant than Sheri, but is hardworking and practical.

Ramose
Eldest son of Nefert and Paneb, aged five. Mut’s brother.

Kha
Younger son of Nefert and Paneb, aged two. Mut’s brother.

Menna
Hopi’s tutor, and a priest of Serqet in the town of Waset. (A priest of Serqet was someone who treated snake bites and scorpion stings.)

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Other Characters in This Story

Sinuhe
(You say ‘Sin-oo-ay’) A peasant farmer who works on a small section of land not far from Waset. He is the cousin of Paneb.

Abana
The new chief tax collector for the region surrounding Waset. A ruthless and dishonest man who enjoys entertainment and throwing big parties.

Weni
The chief embalmer at the embalmers’ workshops in Waset. His official title is ‘Overseer of the Mysteries’.

Hetep
The lector priest attached to the embalmers’ workshops in Waset.

Meryt-Amun
A trader who lives in Waset, on the same street as Isis and Hopi.

Yuya
One of Meryt-Amun’s daughters.

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FASCINATING FACT FILE ABOUT ANCIENT EGYPT

The World of Isis and Hopi

The stories of Isis and Hopi are based in ancient Egypt over 3,000 years ago, during a time known as the New Kingdom. They happen around 1200–1150BC, in the last great period of Egyptian history. This is about a thousand years after the Old Kingdom, when the pyramids were built. Waset, the town in which Isis and Hopi live, had recently been the capital of Egypt, with an enormous temple complex dedicated to the god Amun. By 1200BC, the capital had been moved further north again, but Waset was still very important. Kings were still buried in the Valley of the Kings on the west bank, and the priests of Amun were rich and powerful. Today, Waset is known as Luxor; in books about ancient Egypt, it is often referred to by the Greek name of Thebes.

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A Little Bit about Sacred Scarabs

Scarabs are also known as ‘dung beetles’ because of what they eat – animal dung. Disgusting? The ancient Egyptians didn’t think so. In fact, they thought that some scarabs were so special they were sacred. They were particularly interested in a type of scarab that rolls dung into balls. Lots of scarabs do this, but one kind was common in ancient Egypt. It’s now known by its scientific name,
Scarabaeus sacer
, which means ‘sacred scarab’ in Latin.

The ancient Egyptians believed the sacred scarab was magical because it could create itself out of nothing – well, out of a ball of dung. But they weren’t
quite
right. They noticed that the sacred scarab makes dung balls and buries them underground; they noticed that new life (baby scarabs) would appear out of the ground later. But what they didn’t realise is that the female scarab lays eggs inside the dung balls, and that this is where the new life comes from.

The ancient Egyptian scarab god, Khepri, was the god of the rising sun. If you look at a picture of a scarab rolling a ball of dung along, it’s easy to understand why – a dung ball looks perfectly round, just like the sun. The Egyptians imagined that a giant scarab pushed the sun up over the horizon each morning. A new day was another form of rebirth, making the scarab doubly magical.

Because of the scarab’s links with new life and rebirth, Egyptians believed that scarab amulets had strong protective powers. Many people wore them to ward off evil or sickness. Most scarab amulets were quite small; many were made from the glazed ceramic substance called faience. But some scarabs had a special function – for example, heart scarabs. These were usually larger than the amulets worn every day, and were made of stone. Heart scarabs were supposed to have a gold casing, too, like the one in the story, but most people couldn’t afford that. They were for placing over the heart of a dead person, and they often had a verse from the
Book of the Dead
written on the flat side underneath. The
Book of the Dead
said that heart scarabs should be made out of a particular stone called
nemehef
, which may be green jasper, although no one is totally sure. In practice, a variety of stones were used, including serpentine and obsidian.

Scarabs, like most beetles, have wings – they can fly. Occasionally, scarabs were shown with their wings outstretched. Winged scarab amulets, like heart scarabs, were usually made to be placed in people’s tombs.

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Making Mummies

‘Embalming’ is just another way of saying ‘making a mummy’. Both these terms mean trying to preserve a body so that it doesn’t rot when a person dies. Ancient Egyptians mummified dead people because they believed that they would need their bodies in the Next World. They are famous for their embalming techniques, but actually it was an expensive process; most ordinary people couldn’t afford to have it done. So the majority of the mummies that have survived to this day are the bodies of important people, like kings, queens and wealthy officials.

The most elaborate embalming method took about seventy days. First, the embalmers washed and shaved the body. Egyptians didn’t think the brain was very useful, so they removed it with a hook pushed up through the nose and threw it away. Next, they made a slit in the side of the body and removed most of the organs – the lungs, liver, stomach and intestines. These were dried out separately and placed in four jars (canopic jars). The heart was thought to be the most vital organ of all, so it was always left inside the body.

To dry the body out, the embalmers used special salt called natron, which is found in large quantities in the dried-out lakes far to the north of Waset. The body was covered and stuffed with the salt, then left for about 30–40 days. When the natron was removed, the body was ready at last to be anointed with oils and resins, stuffed with more natron and linen, and wrapped tightly in linen bandages. Bandaging the body was a big job. It could take about two weeks to do it properly, and the embalmers inserted amulets in between the strips of linen to protect the body in the Next World. The heart scarab amulet was the most important one.

Once it was fully wrapped, the body was ready to have a mask fitted over the face. Then it was placed in a coffin for the funeral, which involved many spells and rituals to ensure that the person would make it safely to the Next World. Inside their tombs, the richest people had a stone coffin called a sarcophagus, into which the wooden coffin was placed.

For poorer people, there were cheaper mummification options. One was quite gruesome: the embalmers injected lots of cedar oil into the body, stopped up all the obvious openings, then waited for the oil to dissolve the internal organs. The stoppers were then removed and the sludge was allowed to flow out. After that, the body could be dried out further with natron. The cheapest option of all was to leave the body intact, but to dry it out as much as possible with natron before preparing it for burial.

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Farming Life

Farming life in ancient Egypt revolved around the flooding of the River Nile, which happened every year in the season of
akhet
or flood,
beginning in June and ending in October. Everyone waited anxiously for the waters to rise – the higher the better, because then more land could be farmed. For peasant farmers, the flood provided a time of rest – unless they were summoned by the king to work on one of his building projects! Slowly, the waters receded, leaving behind a layer of rich black silt, ideal for growing crops. In October, when the fields were dry enough to plough again, the season of
peret
began – the season of ‘emergence’, when farmers sowed their seeds and watched the first shoots poke their heads through the rich earth. By the month of February, the crops began to ripen and the third and final season began – the season of
shemu
, or harvest.

It was very important for the ancient Egyptians to have a large harvest of grain – bread made from emmer wheat was their staple food, and beer made from barley was their main drink. There was only one grain harvest, so they had to grow enough to last all year. Much of the land was owned by the king, or by wealthy temples and high officials, who all had peasants to work the land for them. It’s thought that these peasants were not allowed to move or find other work, even if the land itself changed hands. But there were some independent farmers, too, who had to pay the king a portion of their crops in taxes. In this story, Sinuhe and Paneb’s family have farmed a small portion of land for generations, so they feel it is ‘theirs’, but the king could no doubt claim it if he wanted to, and they still have to pay the heavy taxes.

The farming life was hard. Farmers not only had to deal with mice and rats, but also occasional swarms of locusts, which could devour an entire crop in minutes. It was also true that there were dishonest tax collectors who took more of the crop than they were supposed to.

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Famous Festivals

The ancient Egyptians loved parties and celebrations, and there were festivals all year round, too. Most of them were in honour of a god or goddess, or to mark an important event in the calendar, such as the harvest or the new year. Some festivals happened all over the country, whereas others were based in a particular town.

In Waset, there were two major festivals every year: the Festival of Opet, and the Beautiful Festival of the Valley, which is the one described in this book. Both festivals revolved around the great temples of Ipet-Isut (now known as Karnak), home to the great god Amun, his consort Mut and her adopted son Khonsu, the moon god.

The Festival of Opet was a fertility festival that took place during
akhet
, the season of the flood, when there wasn’t much farming work to do and everyone could join in the fun. By the later part of the New Kingdom, the festivities lasted for weeks. They began with a grand procession of statues of the gods from the temples of Ipet-Isut down to the River Nile, where
barques
would carry them upstream to another big temple called Ipet-Resyt, in the town of Waset itself (this is now called Luxor Temple). After many secret fertility rituals inside the temple, the gods were carried back to Ipet-Isut again. Of course, they were followed by singers, dancers and musicians, priests and nobles, and throngs of happy people.

The Beautiful Festival of the Valley celebrated the reunion of the living with the dead. Like the Festival of Opet, it started at the temples of Ipet-Isut, and again the gods were carried out on the shoulders of priests. But this time, they were taken over the River Nile to the mortuary temples on the west bank. While the king and priests observed rituals inside the temples themselves, anybody who had a family tomb in the area would visit it to make offerings to their ancestors. Everyone wore garlands of fresh flowers to encourage the dead to communicate with the living. People brought a feast of food and wine to the little tomb-chapels, and stayed up all night celebrating.