Think Like an Egyptian (27 page)

The discovery of wooden penis models at Hathor’s shrine at western Thebes is testimony to her role as a patroness of procreation and childbirth. As the “goddess of love, of singing, of dance, and the sistrum,” she was equated with a release and freedom similar to goddesses in other societies. She made drunkenness from beer acceptable (see no. 18, “Beer jug”). The Greeks equated her with Aphrodite.

Her cult was not exclusively female. Men as well as women recorded their piety at Hathor shrines, mostly on small stone memorial stelae, and, at her shrine at western Thebes, in pictures painted on linen tunics that had been left behind. What made the cult of Hathor special was that it emphasized a worship of feminine values in a society that normally gave priority to men.

Egyptian pictures on temple walls and on commemorative stelae portrayed her cult as dignified, but the tinkling sound of the shaken sistrum is likely to have encouraged Egyptians who associated her with beer drinking and procreation to abandon the restraint that was so urged upon them by the manuals of ethical instruction.

 

 

 

 

In Egyptian mythology and tales, animals were sometimes imbued with human characteristics or made the object of human comparison. In the Tale of Two Brothers (c. 1200 BC), the younger brother is warned by talking cows that his vengeful elder brother is waiting behind the door to kill him. This tendency had a humorous side. A few papyri and scribal practice pieces on flakes of limestone from the New Kingdom take standard scenes from tombs and temples and, in wordless storybook form, replace the human figures with animals, rather like modern cartoons. A mouse Pharaoh in a chariot attacks a fortress defended by cat soldiers, while a troupe of musicians is made up of a donkey, lion, crocodile, and monkey.

It was in baboons that the Egyptians found the closest parallel to human behavior. Baboons were not native to Egypt, but a tame population was maintained through importation. Pictures show them brought to the Pharaoh’s court as a tribute by foreign peoples of the southern region. They appear in tomb pictures assisting men picking figs, or held on leads by men in scenes of village markets, as if they were policing them. In one case a baboon grabs a running man—is he a thief?—by the leg. Statuettes of baboons (and monkeys, too) depicted them performing human activities: playing musical instruments, grooming hair, practicing acrobatics, and driving a chariot.

Baboons were not just play creatures to be satirized; they also, paradoxically, were representatives of the god of wisdom and language, Thoth. Scribes venerated Thoth as a baboon, and in the last centuries of Egyptian culture, when the cult of animals became widespread, sacred baboons became oracles. How they delivered their answers to the questions put to them by priests is not recorded. Perhaps the skill of the priests lay in their ability to interpret the baboon’s caperings and chatterings.

 

 

 

 

The hieroglyph depicts the ear either of a cow or a donkey and is the determinative for the verb “to hear,”
s
m (sedjem),
as well as for the word for a human ear. A word for a servant is one who “hears the voice” (of his master). The choice of an animal rather than a human ear is an example of the idiosyncratic nature of hieroglyphic script, and it did not trouble the Egyptians, even when the words applied to the gods: “Amun, lend your ear to the lonely in court. He is poor; he is not rich,” says one prayer included in a scribe’s practice book. Statues of gods and kings in temples, and even the heavy stone frames of temple gateways, had the capacity to “hear prayers.” A way to encourage this was simply to carve one or more ears on a little stone tablet, perhaps adding the name of the god and one’s own name, and leaving it with the priests. In these cases, however, the ears are human. One man paid for a statue of himself holding a model of the battlemented wall of the temple of Ptah at Memphis with a human ear carved at the top of each of its towers.

When imagining the sounds that the ancient Egyptians would have heard, we must forget machine and traffic noise, and the low background hum that accompanies modern life. Sounds of nature predominated, from areas of vegetation largely untouched by human development—thickets of trees and marshland supporting a diversity and abundance of birds whose noise filled the air, especially at sunrise and sunset. The human population was, by modern standards, very small, rising from around one million in the 1st Dynasty to perhaps three million at the time of the Roman conquest. The towns were not much more than villages, places of narrow streets, and sound-absorbing mud-brick walls. Donkeys brayed by day, and dogs, sometimes in semi-wild packs, barked at night.

Crowds of people were rarely large. Sometimes their noise was that of celebration and release, with perhaps the banging of tambourines and drums. Sometimes there was the wail of mourning women at the time of a funeral. Occasionally there was the cry of protest. Records have survived of demonstrations at western Thebes by state workmen who, when their ration payments failed to appear, stopped work and marched to the nearest temples that housed their supplies, but fewer than 100 people are likely to have been involved. Other records from the same place document domestic disputes that might have brought the whole village of around 70 families out into the streets, which were so narrow that few people could walk along them side by side. The loudest of human sounds, the roar and cries of armed men clashing, came only during the short periods of civil war and when foreign armies invaded during the last centuries of Egyptian history.

Despite the relative quiet of their lives, the Egyptians still distinguished “silence” with a word of its own. Silence was a characteristic of cemeteries in the desert, known as “the land which loves silence.” The desert cliffs of western Thebes shielded an area of steep-sided valleys where, in the New Kingdom, kings were buried in decorated chambers reached by long corridors cut into the rock, the whole of which is called in modern times the Valley of Kings. It was presided over by a cobra-goddess whose name was simply “She who loves silence.” Egyptian books of instruction in good conduct express an admiration for the man with an economy of words, the “silent man.” Through silence came an inner strength and authority.

 

 

 

 

In contrast to the sign for “ear,” the Egyptian hieroglyph for “mouth” is the human mouth, and serves commonly to write the words for “utterance,” “speech,” and “language.” The speaking of Egyptian language was the clearest mark of Egyptianness. In Palestine, the exiled fugitive courtier Sinuhe was comforted by the prince who befriends him with the words, “You will be happy with me; you will hear the speech of Egypt.” That sound is, however, lost to us now. The hieroglyphic script wrote mainly consonants and strongly emphasized vowels and does not reveal enough information for a working reconstruction of the sounds of the language. A handful of Egyptian words turn up in the cuneiform script of the ancient Near East (in the Amarna Letters; see no. 56, “Palace”), which acts as a guide to pronunciation. These words hint at how wide the gap had become between ancient Egyptian spelling and speech. For example, the name of the eldest daughter of King Akhenaten is written in hieroglyphs as if it were pronounced Meritaten. According to a cuneiform tablet, however, it was pronounced Mayati. A fragment of a cuneiform vocabulary used for teaching the Egyptian language to a Syrian shows that the common Egyptian word for a unit of weight of metal, which we transcribe as
deben,
sounded to a foreigner as
ti-ib-nu
, and the word for an offering table, transcribed as
hetep,
sounded like
ha-du-pu.
One reason for the gap between spelling and pronunciation is that the Egyptian language evolved over the centuries but the Egyptians preferred to keep older spellings of words. It is possible that there were regional dialects, too, with different pronunciations: one school text records that the confused babblings of an unsatisfactory colleague were “like the talk of a man of the Delta with a man of Elephantine.”

As time passed, more and more emigrants and expatriates from other countries made Egypt their home. Some came because they wanted a better life; many were brought in as captives. In the Late Period they came as part of the new ruling elites of Egypt’s conquerors. Egypt must have gradually become a country of many spoken languages. Under the rule of the Persian kings (525-404 BC), Egyptian gave way to Aramaic as the language of government. In the last centuries the state language became Greek. It was said of Queen Cleopatra VII (the last and most famous queen of that name) that she was the first of her ruling house to learn Egyptian. Spoken Egyptian may have come to sound traditional, a mark of provincialism. In the country areas it nonetheless survived into the Middle Ages, alongside Arabic, and, written in Greek letters, retains a place in the indigenous Coptic Christian Church of Egypt.