Think Like an Egyptian (19 page)

No temple seems to have been complete without at least one scaled-down boat fit for the temple gods. A god’s statue sat in a central cabin, sometimes half hidden behind a veil of linen. Overlaid with gold leaf and provided with decorative additions, these godly vehicles were carried on the shoulders of priests in religious processions. They were the work of master craftsmen. One such man, a chief of goldsmiths of the reign of Rameses II named Nakht-djehuty, “obeyed the call” to make portable barques for various gods, perhaps as many as 26. Another craftsman, the shipbuilder Iuna of the reign of Tuthmosis IV, built barques for 14 deities. One of the barques, for Osiris, had its own name, Neshmet, and was repeatedly remade or replaced. It was carried across the desert at Abydos and was the ritual centrepiece, where priests repelled the enemies of Osiris. The most elaborate was the barque named Henu, fitted at the prow with a fan of projecting wooden stays displaying animal, fish, and bird heads, the preserve of the god Sokar of Memphis. This was dragged or carried around the walls of the city on his feast days.

Temple processions, on religious feast days or public celebrations, followed a route outside the temple enclosure, which would have been paved and flanked with sphinxes. The Festival of Opet at Thebes saw the portable barques of the three gods, Amun, Mut, and Khensu, carried to the river’s edge from their home in Karnak temple and then loaded onto a huge boat, also gilded and decorated. This was towed by the citizens of Thebes for the short distance to Luxor temple, where the portable barques were unloaded and carried into the temple for the culminating ceremonies that spiritually renewed the reigning king. On a smaller scale, the villagers of Deir el-Medina, workmen for the neighboring necropolis, carried a barque containing an unshrouded statue of their founder, King Amenhetep I, around the outside of the village walls. Villagers presented the statue with petitions that the king would supposedly answer by movements of the barque as it rested on the shoulders of the bearers, or even by a speech read out by an attendant scribe (see no. 97, “Wonder”).

 

 

 

 

A flat line with downward-pointing peaks at either end conveys the arching nature of the sky. More detailed hieroglyphic drawings include stars (as here); the Egyptians conceived of the sky as it appears at night. The dark starry sky was the background against which the sun-god and his attendants journeyed (see no. 47, “Otherworld”). To this extent, “sky” deserves the translation “heaven.” It was not, however, the kingdom of Osiris or a paradise for the dead, the Egyptians holding in their minds several parallel visions of the afterlife and abode of the gods.

An elongated version of the hieroglyph was carved above scenes on temple walls, symbolizing the proximity that temples had to heaven. The dark blue night sky with a pattern of yellow stars was the common design for ceilings above sacred spaces—the rooms in temples and the burial chambers of kings. In the burial chambers the hieroglyph was sometimes transformed into the goddess Nut, the downward-pointing ends of the sign becoming her arms and legs as she arched herself across the sky. The Egyptians also believed that the sky rested upon four “supports” that held it aloft, each one a pole, V shaped at the top.

Night was a fearful time: “Earth is in darkness as if in death. One sleeps in chambers, heads covered. One eye does not see another. Were they robbed of their goods, that are under their heads, people would not notice it. Every lion comes from its den. All the serpents bite.” It was a time for robbery, assault and assassination. In a fictional account of King Amenemhat’s life, he describes his fated murder: “It was after supper, night had come. I was taking an hour of rest, lying on my bed, for I was weary. As my heart began to follow sleep, weapons for my protection were turned against me.... No one is strong at night; no one can fight alone.”

 

 

 

 

A whole religious mythology developed around the disappearance of the sun during the night, when Egyptians believed it traveled back from west to east through a realm called Duat, or Dat, which can be translated as “Otherworld.” Duat was considered a real place alongside heaven, earth, water, and mountains. Its hieroglyph shows a star (see no. 48) set within a circle that presumably expresses the entire realm of the night sky.

Egyptians regarded Duat as an opaque medium in which the sun passed overhead unseen from earth. One myth suggested that the slim naked goddess, Nut, who arched over the earth and on whose body the stars were fixed, swallowed the sun as it was setting. It then passed through her body to be born again the following morning. Within this opaque tunnel was the world of gates and gatekeepers, winding waterways sometimes of fire, enemies in torment, serpents, and caverns—these details were further elaborated over the centuries. The dead accessed Duat through “the secret portals of the west.”

Maps of Duat were painted in the rock tombs of the Valley of Kings. They have various titles, “Book of What Is in the Duat,” “Book of Gates,” “Book of Caverns,” “Book of Breathing.” Their contents overlap and their deeper significance is often hard to fathom. Part of the ancient interest lay in filling out the imaginary details of the place and its occupants. From the prominence given to these depictions and the care devoted to their details, we can judge them as serious intellectual speculations of the priestly elite. The journeys through Duat suggest a belief in constant cycles of resurrection and possibly an attempt to define the turmoil that seems always to lie beneath the visible world, Duat being a place of enemies who had to be subdued by the sun-god.

 

 

 

 

The Egyptian night sky is an astronomer’s dream. In the clear air, even when there is no moon, it is so brightly lit with stars that one can dimly make out tracks in the desert. Yet although the ancient Egyptians have a reputation for being good astronomers, their interest was not primarily in mapping the heavens. Instead, they preferred to map the invented Otherworld, and stars were worked into patterns to aid the measurement of time or in a manner that was not primarily observational. They named certain constellations and bright stars—for example, Orion—the northern circumpolar stars, and the bright star Sirius (
Spdt[Sepdet],
who was also the goddess Sepdet, “mistress of the New Year”). It is generally accepted that the pyramids of the Old Kingdom were aligned to the north using the positions of a pair of faint stars, then the closest to the north point of the heavens (the position now occupied by the Pole Star). The hieroglyph of a five-pointed star surrounding a tiny circle, which is its point of light, writes the word for “star.”

In paintings and texts, stars were the fixed background across which the sun and moon journeyed. Nonetheless, the Egyptians measured the passage of time during the night by the rising and setting of stars. Using pictorial tables (“star clocks”) and a simple sighting instrument, they were able to divide the night into 12 equal periods. The word for these periods,
wnwt
(
wenut
), in effect “hour,” regularly has the star hieroglyph as its determinative, often accompanied by the sign of the sun’s disc standing for “day” or simply “time.” It belongs to a family of similarly written words that include “the one who is on the hour,” thus “star watcher,” or “hour watcher,” the nearest Egyptian word to “astronomer”; a word meaning “priesthood,” or “staff” or “workers” more generally; and another with the meaning “duty” or “service.” The star clocks were similar to the zodiac, although they recognized 36 rather than 12 divisions of the night sky. The Egyptians, however, did not develop astrology. The zodiac comes from Babylonia and was taken up only under the Greek-speaking successors of Alexander the Great. Modern visitors to the temple at Dendera, built at this time, can see an Egyptian version of the zodiac on the temple ceiling, but it does not represent something rooted in Egypt’s ancient past.

By the New Kingdom the hours of the day were being measured as well, either by a shadow clock or by a water clock (clepsydra), a basin with internal graduations from which water slowly trickled. The Egyptians did not add the hours of the day and night together to create a single 24-hour series, so they needed tables to list the unequal division of hours of day and night through the year, month by month. During the first month of the year, for example, the day had 16 hours and the night 8.

The measurement of hourly time helped regulate temple ritual, but it seems not to have mattered to people generally. Texts about daily life make no use of time subdivided into “hours.” Nor do the various transcripts of court cases. People high and low probably lived according to their self-regulating body clocks.