Think Like an Egyptian (18 page)

Boats, like today, were named. “The Wild Bull,” “The Northern,” and “Arising in Memphis” were successive boats of the Nile battle fleet of Thebes in which an officer, Ahmose of El-Kab, served during the war against the Hyksos. ”Strong of Prow Is Amun” was the grand state barge that conveyed the statue of the god Amun on feast days.

The hieroglyph for “boat” indicates the normal method for steering. At the stern stood a long pole lashed to a vertical post, with a tiller at the top and a broad rudder at the bottom. By rotating the pole and the rudder the ship was steered. Larger boats were provided with a pair of poles, one on either side of the stern. The hieroglyph also shows the sail up, filled with the wind that generally blows from the north. In this version it acted as a determinative in the word
(
nti
) (
khenti
), meaning “to travel south,” even when the journey was on foot or when the movement was the passage of the north wind itself. When the Egyptian army crossed Syria in the 18th Dynasty and came to the Euphrates, which contrary to the Nile flows southward, they described the river as “flowing downstream in an upstream direction.” To the Egyptians the direction upstream was evidently the natural “front” of the country so that the word for traveling south was really “to advance.” West meant right (see no. 35, “West”), east meant left, and the northern marshy part of the country was the “rear,”
p
ww
(
pehwy
). This word was the same as that for the rump of an animal and (as a feminine noun) for “rectum.” There is a good case for drawing maps of ancient Egypt with north at the bottom.

Another version of the hieroglyph,
, dispenses with the mast, which could be lowered to lie flat on the deck. This version serves as the normal determinative for a range of words for “boat” and for related activities, such as “to sail,” and more particularly “to sail (or rather drift) downstream,”
di
(
khedi
), with the implication that this was often done with the mast down to take advantage of the northward current. By this word the Egyptians expressed the more general sense of traveling northward, not necessarily by the river. The same sign inverted is a vivid determinative for the verb
pnc
(
pena
), “to overturn.”

 

 

 

 

The hieroglyph depicts the sail of a boat filled with wind. It acts as the determinative for the noun “sail.” It is also the principal sign used to write the word “wind,” and many passages of text show that the same word, identically spelled, means “breath,” from the mouth and from the nose. The “sweet breath of life” was the gift of kings and gods. Its opposite, “the breath of an outside god or death,” is mentioned in a medical papyrus as a cause of sickness.

The sign is the common determinative for words for particular kinds of wind, among which are four named after the cardinal points: “north wind,” “east wind,” “west wind,” and “south wind.” In Egypt, the wind can blow bitterly cold from the north, and stiflingly hot from the south, in both cases whipping up dust storms. The steady cooling breeze from the north tempers the heat of the summer and early autumn. The “sweet breath of the north wind” was requested in prayers for the afterlife. Ancient Egyptian houses were sometimes designed to take the greatest advantage of this breeze, either through a north-facing portico that looked out to a garden or by means of a roof ventilator above a bedroom that funneled the northerly breeze down onto the sleeping occupant below.

 

 

 

 

Boats were the vehicles of the gods. They were by far the largest manufactured objects and suggested movement on a far grander, cosmic scale than, say, chariots. The Egyptians envisaged the sun as a voyager across the sky. In a boat with an upward-curving prow and sickle-shaped stern, they depicted the sun-god standing within a central canopy with a curved roof supported on slender posts shaped like papyrus plants. For the special moments of sunrise and sunset, artists depicted two versions of the barque, each with distinctive additional symbols. At night, and towed by ropes, this barque continued its journey through the cavernous dangers of the Otherworld (see no. 47).