My goal was a modest pink-stuccoed building stuck between a multilayer concrete overpass and the expanse of Tahrir Square. Into this museum every day thousands of people would come to see 165,000 statues, figurines, sarcophagi, and mummies. Tourism in 2009 provided employment for up to 12 percent of the Egyptian workforce, but the Egyptian Museum has always been more than a moneymaker. It is a monument to Egyptian identity. On its front wall is another symbol—a long list of the dynasties that had ruled Egypt, as if to say to Egyptians:
You have always been ruled by kings.
In revolutionary Egypt in 2011 it was the one place where autocrats—though of the dead and mummified kind—were still in vogue.
Instead of elaborate traps and curses to ward off intruders, the mummies had a guardian in the form of Tariq el-Awadi, the museum’s director. I found him in his office in the museum basement. His desk was surrounded by a collection of ornate gilded clocks, each showing a different time. I had come to ask him about history. “Egyptians are divorced from their past,” Awadi said. “They are made to feel that they have nothing in common with it.” The school curriculum, he explained, divided history into eras: pharaonic, Coptic, Islamic. It was the Islamic era that received most attention. But Awadi thought that learning more about previous eras could help Egyptians become more united as a people. A Muslim himself, he felt that the country’s ancient past was a heritage that both Christians and Muslims shared: “Our country is a cohesive society, although it has more than one religion; customs, language, even certain religious traditions are the same for all Egyptians, and different from the Arabs.” But for many decades, Egyptians had been told that they were Arabs. And so, as Awadi said, “Egyptians are asking, ‘Who am I? Am I Arab or Egyptian?’”
After I saw Awadi I walked through the halls of the museum, looking at toys and models of ships and
ushabti
(funerary) figurines that might have been made yesterday, so perfectly were they preserved. It gave me a strange feeling—as though the veil of time had somehow grown thin, and the mummified pharaohs might really step through it and come alive in the modern day. Certainly the Egyptians had expected that their bodies might come alive again, something that most other ancient peoples did not foresee. For example, when Gilgamesh the king in the Iraqi epic descends beneath the earth to search for his dead friend Enkidu, he meets shades, not people of flesh. “Enkidu,” as he says, “has turned to clay!”
The people of the Nile Valley, however, were surrounded by a sand that was a hundred times drier than the Iraqi desert—so dry that even pieces of paper buried in it for two thousand years have been discovered with writing on them still legible. Ancient Egyptians buried their dead in this sand, and even without the process that was later devised of removing the body’s organs and stuffing the corpse with
natrun
salt to preserve it, the corpses were often naturally mummified by the sand’s dryness and heat. Dug up years later, they would still have been recognizable. It was possible to imagine the soul (the
ka
) reentering them and bringing them back to life. An Egyptian inscription from the twenty-fourth century
BC
declares, “Let them who are in their graves, arise; let them undo their bandages. Shake off the sand from thy face” (here appearing to address the dead themselves), “raise thyself up on thy left side, support thyself on thy right side.”
If the pharaohs really did come back to life today, rising from their gilt sarcophagi, they would find their country changed beyond recognition. Only in the countryside might they see familiar sights: families washing themselves and their pots and pans in the Nile, green palm trees and heaps of threshed wheat punctuating the fields, water buffalo wandering beside streams. Otherwise they would be amazed at the choking fumes and teeming apartment buildings of Cairo, now one of the world’s biggest cities; at the population of Egypt, more than twenty times now than in antiquity; at the fact that the nation, once the breadbasket of the Roman empire, now imports 40 percent of its food. And they would discover that their religion of animal-headed deities, which once held so powerful a grip on Egyptian society, was gone.
Or not quite gone, as it turned out. I had an appointment in a hotel by Tahrir Square with a couple who called themselves Osirites—modern-day Egyptian worshipers of the old Egyptian god Osiris. The husband, Hamdi (not his real name), looked just like the statue of an ancient Egyptian scribe, thickset and jovial. Bottles of Saqqara beer, named after the oldest pyramids, were brought to our table. Past the chintz sofas and glazed windows the river Nile flowed by, brown and ageless. According to Egyptian myth, Osiris, the god of the underworld, had floated down the river in a coffin after being tricked by his wicked brother, Seth. His sister, Isis, rescued him, but Seth found him again and chopped him into pieces. Isis found all the pieces except her brother’s penis, which she rebuilt for him out of gold. Then she magically revived him. He became the god of resurrection—and was thought to control the ebb and flood of the Nile, themselves symbols of death and rebirth.
Osiris, Isis, and Seth—and other Egyptian gods such as Amun—were just one single deity, the Osirite couple told me. It was wrong, they added, to speak of the ancient Egyptians as polytheists or
kuffar,
as some Muslims did. They had given the world most of its contemporary religious ideas, including the word
amen
.
“When others say ‘Amen,’ I say ‘Amun’!” declared Hamdi.
“We invented the Sabbath,” his wife added. “And the psalms of David: they were written by the pharaoh Akhenaten. Look at the hymns he wrote to Aten, and you’ll see they are the same as the psalms.”
She told me about a modern Egyptian festival that could be traced to an ancient one. Two thousand years ago it was referred to as “Osiris coming to the moon”; now it is called Shamm al-Nessim, but it is still celebrated at the spring equinox. “There is a special holiness to the day. It is the only day when everything stops.” There was no other festival in modern Egypt celebrated by both Christians and Muslims. “People eat green things, and fish and lettuce, and sit on the grass, and paint the eggs they eat.” (There is an Egyptian specialty that they eat on Shamm al-Nessim:
fiseekh
, a kind of preserved fish that academics say dates back millennia. I tasted it once and found it shockingly pungent. But some Egyptians love it.) This old Egyptian feast was the origin of Easter, she insisted.
With deep nationalist pride, she listed the many and widespread religious customs and ideas that had originated in ancient Egypt: the customs of pilgrimage and prayer, fasting, the concept of the Messiah, Christmas trees and the name of Christmas, the lighting of candles in churches, and more. “The Egyptian flag is fourteen thousand years old,” said Hamdi. “Red, white, and black have always represented national pride. And the eagle at its center is the sign of Horus.” I could see that this couple, too, were looking for an identity that would be the property of all Egyptians. While I found it hard to imagine that there would be many people joining them in the cult of Osiris, their final declaration was boldly given: “The Egyptian religion is returning!” A year later, when the Muslim Brotherhood were running Egypt, I met this couple again, but they spoke differently and more cautiously. They were interested in the culture of ancient Egypt, they said, not the religion.
Still, they were right that the ancient Egyptians had an influence on later religions. Not only did the Egyptians pioneer belief in the resurrection of the body, but the pharaoh Akhenaten, father of Tutankhamun, was the first known monotheist in history. He abolished all gods except his beloved Aten, the sun god, and built epicene statues symbolizing the union of masculine and feminine. A hymn to Aten survives, written perhaps by the pharaoh himself: “The earth brightens when thou arisest in the eastern horizon and shine forth as Aten in the daytime. . . . How manifold are thy works! They are hidden from the sight of men, O sole God, like unto whom there is no other!” Jews, who lived in Egypt, share some of their customs with the pharaohs: the avoidance of pork and catfish was practiced by both Jews and Egyptians, as was male circumcision. Compared with the number of ancient traditions I found alive and well in Iraq, though, I noted few in Egypt. The country had no community like the Mandaeans or the Zoroastrians that kept pre-Christian traditions continuously into the modern era. And Egypt’s folk customs, though many and colorful, are mostly medieval. I found only three that date back to pharaonic times.
One is the custom by which the Egyptians mark death. At the medieval cemetery of Cairo, a collection of miniature mansions is assembled in silent array along straight, empty dirt roads near the al-Azhar mosque. Although these mansions are actually lived in for much of the year by squatters, they are built above graves and exist for a particularly Egyptian custom: forty days after a relative’s death, and on the death’s every anniversary, many Egyptian families gather at these little mansions to eat a meal there. In the same way, their ancestors came to eat by the graves of their loved ones, offering food to their spirits. A doctor I met told me how in the south of Egypt, the ancient custom of hiring mourners for funerals continued, and, that for a week after a death, the bereaved family would shelter and feed visitors. The same doctor had once come across mourners who improvised chants while he was carrying out a surgical operation. They stood, dressed predominantly in black mourning costume, around the operating table and improvised a dirge for the occasion, since they refused to accept that the patient might survive. “Oh, you poor woman whose flesh was cut while you were still alive!”
Another, less attractive custom definitely dates back to pharaonic times. The Egyptians “practice circumcision for the purpose of cleanliness,” wrote Herodotus, and a papyrus from the second century
BC
shows that it was performed on girls as well as boys. It still is. A UN-backed survey in 2008 shockingly found that over 90 percent of Egyptian women surveyed had undergone the procedure—though it is uncommon among better-educated Egyptians. Also known as female genital mutilation, it involves slicing off the clitoris and sometimes also the labia with a knife. It was banned by the Mubarak government in 2007 after a girl died during the surgery. Although its origin is not Islamic (it is practiced by some Christians as well as Muslims) this ugliest of all ancient Egyptian customs has survived better than any other, and—unlike those other customs—attracts support and not hostility from Muslim fundamentalists.
Yet another sign of ancient Egypt stares most visitors in the face at some point or other. Hanging from many car mirrors in Cairo is the blue-colored “Hand of Fatima,” which today is believed to ward off the evil eye, the envy people attract through their good fortune. The “Hand of Horus” in ancient times, often made of blue lapis lazuli, served the same purpose. In the nineteenth century, Egyptians went to all kinds of lengths to avoid the evil eye—dressing up boys as girls, staining the faces of beautiful girls to conceal their looks, and giving themselves unpleasant-sounding names such as “Ugly” or “The Little Bird” or “The Donkey.”
Very few Egyptians read any deeper significance into these customs, any more than most English people think of the god Tiu when they touch wood for luck. Both Christian and Muslim religious hierarchies, however, want their followers to abandon these traditions. In particular, Salafi Islam condemns them. In 2012 a Muslim fundamentalist politician, Murgan al-Gohary, called for the Sphinx and pyramids to be destroyed. Salafi groups in Egypt boycott the Shamm al-Nessim celebration and have called for it to be suppressed.
Pharaoh,
too, remains a dirty word for Islamists. When in 2011 the Muslim Brotherhood wanted to promote a new constitution on which there was to be a yes-or-no vote, it devised the slogan “Vote no, get pharaoh!”
—————
EGYPT’S ORIGINAL RELIGION
was weakened by centuries of foreign rule over Egypt—by Persians, Greeks, and Romans—starting in the fourth century
BC
. Even Cleopatra was of Greek and Persian descent, though her family tried to adopt Egyptian customs (one of the less savory of these being the tradition that pharaohs married their sisters; Cleopatra was descended from several generations of incestuous marriages). The native Egyptians came to be given their own special label, to distinguish them from the Greek settlers who owned most of the land and ran the administration. They were called Aiguptioi—from which the words “Egypt” and “Copt” are both derived. By the third century
AD
a Christian preacher could claim that the old religion was dominated by Greeks, and that Christianity was the religion of the Copts.
Roman rule, introduced after Cleopatra’s death, did not displace the Greeks, but it did lead to the abolition of the role of the pharaoh—which in turn undermined the temples, which had depended on financial support from the pharaohs and had played a significant role in keeping the old culture alive. In the second century
AD
, we see an example of traditions dying out in the report of a guild of hieroglyph carvers at the city of Oxyrhynchus: they numbered only five, the guild reported, and had no apprentices to carry on the profession.
The temples survived several centuries of Roman rule, though their power was reduced. But in the fourth century the Roman Empire adopted Christianity and made strenuous efforts to suppress the old religion. Many Egyptians enthusiastically joined in, attacking pagan philosophers and obliterating the gods’ faces on murals in their temples so that their magical power would be annulled. In the narrow confines of Egypt’s Nile Valley there is no record of any non-Christian community surviving at the time of the Muslim conquest. Even the ancient Egyptian language was flooded with new words brought by Christianity: a Greek word for “soul,”
psyche,
replaced the
ka
of the pharaohs.