Out of the Black Land (51 page)

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This is only a partial list of the gods worshipped in Ancient Egypt. A full list can be found in any study of ancient Egyptian religion, though you must retain an open mind about how popular they were and where they originated.

I favour the accretion theory—that they were all local gods who remained known because they were written down, and remained in worship because they had temples which were perpetually endowed with taxes and staffed by priests and priestesses who were useful to their supporters, by being also doctors and scribes. There are a lot of other theories.

A survey of the number of religious beliefs which the average Egyptian could hold simultaneously will explain how King Akhnaten was able to grab hold of one aspect of Amen-Re and turn it into a solar cult with himself at the head of it.

It also explains why this was so desperately unpopular that no one mentioned his name for the next thousand years without calling him ‘The Traitor’ or ‘The Villain..

Akhnaten had tried to steal their gods and their afterlife from the common people, and this was unforgivable.

On Egyptian Customs

Herodotus—my favourite ancient historian—was wandering around Egypt in about 450
BC
and had this to say about Egypt, in Book 2 of
The Histories:
(translation Aubrey de Selincourt)

I travelled to Memphis, Thebes and Heliopolis…and about Egypt I shall have a great deal more to relate because of the number of remarkable things which the country contains…

Not only is the Egyptian climate peculiar to that country, and the Nile different in behaviour from all other rivers, but the Egyptians themselves in their manners and customs seem to have reversed the ordinary practices of mankind. For instance, women attend market and are employed in trade, while men stay at home and do the weaving. In weaving the normal way is to work the threads of the weft upwards, but the Egyptians work them downwards.

Men in Egypt carry loads on their heads, and women on their shoulders; women pass water standing up, men sitting down. To ease themselves they go indoors, but eat outside in the streets, on the theory that what is unseemly but necessary should be done in private, and what is not unseemly should be done openly.

No woman holds priestly office…Elsewhere priests grow their hair long, in Egypt they shave their heads. In other nations people…mark mourning by cutting their hair, but the Egyptians mark a death by letting hair grow on head and chin.

Other men live on barley, but…in Egypt they make bread from spelt (wheat). Dough they knead with their feet, but clay with their hands.

They practice circumcision…Men in Egypt have two garments, women only one. The ordinary practice at sea is to fasten the sheets to ring-bolts fitted outboard; the Egyptians fit them inboard.

In writing or calculating instead of going, like the Greeks, from left to right, the Egyptians go from right to left and obstinately maintain that theirs is the dextrous method, ours being left-handed and awkward. They have two sorts of writing, the sacred and the common. They are religious to excess…

They wear linen clothes which they make a special point of continually washing. They bathe in cold water twice a day…they never eat cows, for they are sacred [to Hathor]… this is the reason why no Egyptian, man or woman, will kiss a Greek, or use a Greek knife, spit or cauldron, or even eat the flesh of a bull known to be clean, if it has been cut with a Greek knife.

I always felt that there was a sense of personal affront in his account of the Egyptians’ refusal to kiss Greeks, but otherwise the Father of History is pretty much spot on about Egypt.

Herodotus was an excellent observer, and many of the things he said, which have been discounted for centuries, turn out to be true.

Consider, for example, the recent discoveries of ancient graves in Northern Kazakhstan—made by the Centre for the Study of Eurasian Nomads—in which several women were buried with well-used weapons made to fit their hands, and some men were buried with cooking pots and children. They are quite likely to be Herodotus’ Amazons and he may have been right all along.

One can see from the tomb paintings that he was right about the way people carried loads; we know that each house of any pretension contained a lavatory, so they would have gone inside to excrete. I have myself seen present-day women pee quite respectably while standing up—so that too is possible. I have no information about men, however, because no Ancient Egyptian drew this act (possibly because it was ‘unseemly’).

Herodotus is right about barley being food for animals and wheat for humans, about kneading with the feet, and about men weaving—for the
Satire of Trades
is clear on this point.

As he was also correct about linen clothes, about circumcision and about writing, I am assuming that he was right about women attending market and trading; though all modern commentators reject this out of hand based on observations of both Copts and Arabs in present-day Egypt. Although even in modern Egypt, I might add, the people in any given souk are mostly women, though few of the traders are.

Herodotus was accurate about the process of mummification; but he was wrong about no women being priests. There have been many priestly offices held by women, including, for instance, the Chantress (Singer) of Amen at Thebes, who was ruler of her own kingdom at some times.

Based on similar ancient practice in other nearby lands, I have assumed that the priests of Isis were women, and that there were sacred prostitutes in the temple of Hathor. I might be wrong; but see my previous comments on the state of Egyptology. I am more likely to trust ancient practice in other places than a modern interpreter drawing parallels from their own entirely different culture, race and religion.

Sexuality & Marriage

There are few references to sexual sins in the confessions. One is required to say ‘I lay with no woman when she was a child’; and in one of the
Maxims of Ptah-Hotep
he tells his son not to ‘lie with a boy-priest (or boy-lover) because to satisfy his heart one must do such things as are not done.’ But the latter can be read as requiring his son not to get involved with the dangerous cult of Astarte, which could lose him his testicles.

Sodomy is depicted in paintings as something which occasionally happens at feasts and in the fields. So is ordinary sex. I am not even talking about the
Turin Erotic Papyrus
, where the ‘raise high the roofbeams’ massive phallus of the bald man would have qualified him for a great future in porn movies, out-doing Long Dong Silver of recent fame.

Before they married, Egyptians seem to have been able to mate as they liked, and this is borne out by shocked comments from all the ancient visitors. They were already shocked by the way the Egyptian women could go where they liked and lie with whoever they fancied. There is a considerable body of erotic verse by women, and I cannot dismiss all of it (as one writer has done) by assuming it was written by wishful-thinking men. It has a strong female feel to it; unlike, say,
The Wife’s Lament
in Anglo Saxon which was almost certainly written by a man. It is more like the verses of the troubarits in Provencal.

The only absolute duty one had in ancient Egypt was to marry and beget. After marriage both parties were supposed to be faithful to each other. No one has found a marriage ceremony, which in most cultures is a transference of property from father to husband; but the woman seems to have left her own home to live in her husband’s house.

Commonly she would have had a pre-nuptial agreement on which she could sue if the marriage broke down. Egyptian women had rights to two thirds of their property, a right to divorce, a right to own and run her own business and to will her property to whomever she pleased. She did not belong either to her husband or her father, but to herself; and what else can one require of a sensible system? No other ancient woman, except perhaps in Troy, had such freedom.

Burial Customs

One of the multitudinous problems which confronted me when considering the reign of Akhnaten was, if we have a king who believes in the ‘unknowable immortal’ Aten—who denies the worship of, and actively suppresses the worship of all other gods—what are we to make of the fact that all the royal personages buried during his reign, even at Amarna, were mummified in the usual way and laid in painted tombs with their furniture to await the afterlife?

The worship of the Aten precludes any other gods and also precludes an afterlife, because all that the spirit can hope for is union with godhead after a brief flirtation with reincarnation. That means no judgment, no weighing of the heart, no confession, no magic, and indeed, no Osiris, no Isis, and no Field of Reeds.

There are no intact royal burials from Akhnaten’s time, but we have the mummy of his brother Smenkhare who was certainly embalmed in the proper way. The burials of his father, his mother, his daughter and the officials from this time—though sacked by Horemheb and relocated and robbed—appear to have been done in the time-honoured fashion. Akhnaten may have modified the ritual and omitted portraits of the gods, but the bodies were still preserved as usual.

My friend Mark Deasey mentioned that in the North of England people who have been converted to Methodism for four generations still bury their dead by Quaker rites; and in Afro-American ritual, traces can be found of the African customs, remembered from the time before slavery. I suggest that burial is the most traditional of all rites, the one where most old religion and superstition attaches, because doing it wrongly may mean that the dead come back and tell you about it.

That means, logically, that the temples of Isis and Osiris must have remained and that the large funeral industry must have continued during the time of Akhnaten.

Watchers

I have translated these as Watchers, rather than Guardians, and they were the world’s first police force. They were responsible for the maintenance of public order; for the care of the vital dykes, walls and canals; and for any other duties, like guarding tombs and settling domestic disputes. They reported to the Mayor or Headman of the village, who in turn reported to a District Court, which reported to the Nomarch and thence, if it was a really hairy issue, to the Pharaoh’s judges.

In this it is remarkably similar to the Chinese system of District Magistrates who had their own staff for investigation, who reported to a District Court and thence to the Emperor’s High Court.

The Watchers, as an institution, lasted into Roman rule.

Nomes

These were the equivalent of states and everyone disagrees about how many there were. There were probably forty-two, although by Strabo’s time there seem to have been twenty-seven. My favourite source, Herodotus, writes of Nomes but does not say how many there were, which would indicate that he didn’t know. I find it hard to believe that he didn’t ask. He does say that the Labyrinth of Government contained twelve halls so there may have been twelve major divisions and sub-nomes as well.

Each Nome had its ruler, or Nomarch, who was usually the biggest landholder. All land in Egypt belonged to the king however; ever since the Age of Chaos when a number of warring Nomarchs reduced Egypt to ruin. After that, no man could own any land—but was allotted it by the king, who owned everything; although this modified freehold could be given, sold or willed.

Every Nome also had its attendant god. For instance, the Nome of Uast—which is Thebes—had, as its capital, Thebes (or Uast); its symbol, the Ram; and its God, Amen-Re.

The Nome of Set had as its capital, Shas-hetep; its symbol, the Black Dog; and its God, Khnem (Amen the father, a phallus).

A full list can be found in Strabo, though he is late; or Pliny, who is later. In the 18th Dynasty, there appear to have been ten Nomes in Upper Egypt, ten in the Delta, and seven in the Heptanomis in Nubia.

Tax & Labour Systems

All land belonged to the Pharaoh; the land title system was a lesser form of freehold (see above); and taxes were assessed on variable factors—the rise of the Nile flood, the fertility of a given field, and the previous history of the land.

The harvest was assessed by inspectors, the seed allotted on that basis, and the farmer left to get on with it. When the grain was harvested the tax was collected. If the farmer had not worked diligently, he owed labour to the state; unless he had a good reason—which included death of a son or parent and climatic factors.