[ formerly theology filter ] A vignette of sorts

[kiya]

The Woburn Public Library didn't have much of anything that was useful as a reference, but I didn't want to head back immediately after going through the catalog and the shelves, so I picked up an old (1928, I think) general history of Egypt and flipped through it for about an hour.

I'm going to try to paint a picture here of the structure of ancient Egypt; it's research-based, but probably not accurate in all particulars. It may also get a little poetic; my evocative language often does.



Start with the Nile; everything in Egypt starts with the Nile. The river flows through everything, bringing with it the yearly bounty of fertile earth, dividing east from west, connecting the south and the north. It is a highway, and one clogged with boats -- most of them small and woven from the reeds along the bank, but with the occasional barge, yacht, or other boat constructed mostly from imported wood (for the trees here are twisted and small, not useful for making large planks).



The land is one that is sharp with divisions. There is the black land, the fertile ground, and the desert: duality. There is the soft, marshy land of the delta and the dryer thin strip of land along the river extending south: duality. There is the arch of heaven curled over the land: duality. Day turns into night turns into day; time cycles. The river swallows the land, then recedes, leaving fertile land behind that is, in its season, swallowed by desert which is in turn driven back by the river.



These divisions, these cycles, produce a land which is rich. Wheat, barley, flax, onions, and lettuces all grow in the rich earth left by the Nile. Fruit trees grow in clusters here and there and are cultivated in the lands of the wealthy. The sun bakes bricks to build with in quantity. Flowers and other plants produce a tremendous proliferation of scents, making this land the perfume capital of the ancient world. The wealthy hunt and catch waterfowl to supplement their tables; the poor fish. The desert is filled with gems and metals which are ground up for cosmetics, to colour the paints that cover monuments, to make jewelry.



People gather in this wealth and share it and celebrate it. Most work in the rich fields, men, women, and children at harvest-time, the women at home most of the rest of the time making bread and beer. There are craftsmen -- potters, basket-makers, jewelers, perfume-makers. There are laborers and foremen, often clustered together near construction sites. The nobility have estates with private shrines, gardens, musicians, pets; some will grow vines and make wine. The temples are the centers of these cities, built of stone and brick, with their central portions the private estates of the gods, and outer courtyards where people will come and pray, sacred nooks where they sleep to gain prophetic dreams, places of education, places where the priests are trained as doctors, statues and obelisks that are the focus of prayer, some of them marked with graffiti: "I was here. I came to see the god. Now I return home to tell my family about it."



When great festivals come, the Nile is clogged with boats: people from the length and the breadth of the river will paddle to the greatest festivals, to see the processionals of the gods, to drink and celebrate Their bounty. Many of those festivals are during the flood season, when the fields are under water, so many travel, some in reed boats, some on wooden ones, where they may dance and invite people in the towns they pass to come join them, to go and see the gods. Only the largest cities have these great festivals: the festival of Bast in what we call Bubastis is one of them. Sometimes the gods of one city will come out onto a barge and sail along the Nile, accumulating worshippers as They go, to pay calls on others: Het-heru visits Her husband, Heru of Edfu, this way. There will be sacrifices in the temples, from out of the temple herds or gifts from out of the herds of the mighty: with those sacrifices the gods are fed, and then the people are fed of the meat and other offerings.



When they have celebrated, the people return home, to their private shrines or the semi-public ones dotted about their cities. They make offerings to the glorified dead and to the gods. They have their domestic disputes, some of which involve the courts. They get married, which is another excuse for celebration; they get divorced (which is often a domestic dispute that involves the courts).



The gods are private creatures; very few enter the inner rooms of their personal estates. At the same time, the purity priests are drawn from among the people, and serve only a quarter of the year; the rest of the time they are out among the folk in the city, perhaps working other jobs, perhaps sharing their knowledge of the inner workings of the houses of the gods. The gods also will make appearances at times, winding through the city on the shoulders of priests and giving oracles, appearing in dreams, praised in the daily actions of the people: what woman painting her face does not celebrate Hetharu's beauty? What potter's hands are not also the hands of Khnum? What perfume is not the memory of the scent of a god walking?



Such are the cities of Egypt. The towns, they will not have great temples, if they have a noble house at all perhaps it is only one, but they are still only a breath along the river away from the houses of the gods.

What got me thinking about this was wanting to write something fairly similar, talking about climate and mindset. And what got me on that was a note in that old book that is not actually in that, another duality:

The river current flows steadily northward.

The wind blows steadily southward.

The thing about this land is that it is intensely generous -- a wealth of foodstuffs from the rich soil, a wide variety of plant and animal life, gems and precious metals from the protective embrace of the desert, easy travel through the centre of the terrain that is Egypt. It is also tremendously demanding and strict -- bringing forth that abundance is effort-intensive, labor-intensive, going too far outside the bounds will lose one in the desert (and it is possible, so I understand, to see the line between the Red Land and the Black, to stand with one foot in each domain, the land fed by the Nile, the land that will never feed anything but the wind).

There are roots of philosophy in here: the interplay of dualisms is constant in the landscape, and their dance is an intense, vibrant whole; the concept of a philosophical structure of complete abundance so long as orderly behaviour is maintained. That's what that land demands.

The flood replenished the people who lived there rose and brought with it plague as the waters steamed into the parched earth; dua Sekhmet.

Twin pillars of mercy and severity, yezida mentioned.

Comments

[queenofhalves]

i'm really glad you're starting this project. :>

[kiya]

Religion geeks unite? :}

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

I was a tourist in Egypt for two weeks in October 1990. (It was great - Iraq had been invaded a few months previously and heaps of tourists, particularly rich American tourists, were staying away. So we had virtually no queues during high tourist season. On the downside, my gastrointestinal system didn't cope at all.)

I was certainly struck by the boundary between the land along the Nile where things could grow, and the desert beyond. And the harshness of the sun, particularly in the desert. So black: black fertile soil, shade, and night, is attractive and welcoming, rather than, say, evil and dangerous. On the other hand, it was clear that Egyptians had a very strong relationship with the sun, but I couldn't tell if was worshipful, or merely something so powerful it automatically commanded respect.

The other things that really struck me about Egypt are more modern and not potentially relevant to Kemetic theology (third-world country full of wealthy first-world tourists, and the roles of men and women.)