Think Like an Egyptian (14 page)

 

 

 

 

The standard Egyptian lamp was of the simplest design, a wick lying in a small, shallow bowl. The wick consisted of a narrow strip of old linen twisted from both ends until it naturally doubled back and spiraled upon itself. The word for “wick” used such a twist as its hieroglyphic determinative sign.

Lamps were not only useful in the house and temple and palace, they were essential for men working underground. In ancient Egypt this mostly meant the making (and also the subsequent robbing) of tombs. The men who cut and decorated the tombs in the Valley of Kings lived in a special village now known as Deir el-Medina in western Thebes. Their lives are documented in remarkable detail on thousands of texts written on pieces of broken pottery or limestone. Some of the texts refer to the lighting materials of the workmen. We learn that wicks were greased with animal fat or soaked in oil (probably sesame oil) in a central depot, hundreds at a time. Bundles of wicks were then parsimoniously handed out to the workmen on the understanding that only a certain number would be used each day, often 32 divided into two sets of 16, probably representing a morning and an afternoon shift. One means of reducing the smoke from an oil lamp is to add salt. Egyptians might have done this as the tombs and their paintings are not disfigured with smoke. One could also coat a wick with incense, and Egyptians lit these in their homes as well as in their temples.

 

 

 

 

The excavated remains of early towns show them to have been small, irregular in plan, and often surrounded by a thick, curving wall that presumably suggested the hieroglyph for a town should be a circle. In the sign the dense network of narrow city streets is reduced to two crossing at right angles. On its own it spells the word “city,”
n
wt
(
niwet
)
,
which from the New Kingdom onward could mean simply Thebes, reflecting Thebes’s status as Egypt’s ceremonial center and capital of the south. The hieroglyph also acted as the determinative for “village,” and for the names of individual towns, as in Abydos,
3b
w
(Abdju); and the proper name of Thebes,
W3st
(Waset). Revealingly it was also used in the writing of the common word for “Egypt,”
Kmt
(
Kemet
), implying that the Egyptians regarded their country as fully urbanized, as if one large city. The “city of eternity” was, of course, the cemetery.

The local city attracted loyalty among its menfolk. A man boasted of being “beloved of his city.” On his last journey to the grave he “came from his city,” and his “city god” held a special place in his affections. The places so called were usually quite small, more like our villages in size. Prior to the New Kingdom they also had little in the way of distinctive public architecture, their modest shrines and official residences made of mud-bricks and set along narrow, cramped streets. The appearance of cities changed in the New Kingdom, when they were freed from the constraints of surrounding walls. They began to spread over larger areas and were, visually and institutionally, taken over by temples, now mostly built of stone and on a large scale. Sacred routes were laid out for temple processions, introducing public spaces and a greater sense of community-wide celebration.

Egyptian cities were still a long way from their modern counterparts. We are used to districts, which serve different purposes—residential, manufacturing, shopping, banking, and so on. The largest excavated area of an ancient Egyptian city at Akhenaten’s capital at Tell el-Amarna shows little sign of this. Most of the royal buildings lay together in the center. Otherwise, houses of the rich and the poor clustered together into neighborhoods that appear to have been, to some extent, self-sufficient. The city was like a string of adjoining villages.

 

 

 

 

In the premodern world, towns and cities were often surrounded by a stout wall, sometimes encouraging a neat rectangular layout of streets within. City walls defended the inhabitants, they marked a clear boundary between where you and your neighbors lived and the more uncertain world outside, and they enabled a check to be kept on who entered and left. For the first half of its history (prior to the New Kingdom), the towns of ancient Egypt were enclosed, either with curving or straight-sided walls. This was useful when local warfare broke out, though it also led to an arms race that had produced wheeled siege towers by the end of the 3rd millennium BC, one of them depicted in a tomb painting of the period.

By creating a safe zone inside, walls become a symbol of protection. A myth recorded on the walls of the temple of Edfu imagined that, in a primeval age, the sacred sites of Egypt were the places where the forces of evil in the form of serpents had been defeated by companies of divine beings. According to this myth, temples were then built with a large enclosure wall to protect the sacred area from evils. During the second half of ancient Egyptian history, the enclosure walls around the larger temples resembled fortresses, with towers projecting from the wall faces, and battlements along the top (the temple of Medinet Habu is the best surviving example). The military style was continued on the decorated walls of the temple itself, where large-scale scenes showed the Pharaoh battling his enemies. It was on such temple walls, at Thebes and the Egyptian colonial city of Napata in Sudan, that around 1420 BC King Amenhetep II hung the bodies and severed hands of seven slain princes on his return from warfare in Syria. A model of the enclosure wall around the temple of the god Ptah of Memphis has a human ear carved at the top of each tower, and an accompanying text proclaims that this is “the place where prayer is heard.” The pious citizen excluded from the temple and stationed outside its ramparts still hoped that his prayers would make their way through and be heard by the god hidden away inside.

Over the same period the walling of towns died away, as far as we can see from the record of excavation, even though Egypt was increasingly exposed to invasion. We have a detailed record of one invasion, by an army led by the Sudanese King Piankhy, around 734 BC. At the city of Hermopolis, “an embankment was made to enclose the wall. A siege tower was set up to elevate the archers as they shot, and the slingers as they hurled stones and killed people there each day.” Inside the wall lay the palace and women’s quarters of the local prince, and his stables. Piankhy, pointedly ignoring the women after the city’s surrender, visits the stables and declares that the prince’s worst crime was to let the horses go hungry.