What Makes Civilization Page 12

  Among the technologies absorbed by Egypt from western Asia in the centuries preceding political unification we find new modes of farming (plough agriculture, dairy production, viticulture), commercial techniques (use of cylinder seals to mark royal produce), dietary practices, and forms of cuisine (notably the centralized production of leavened bread and beer). Less tangible imports are suggested by the appearance of monsters from the Mesopotamian bestiary on some of Egypt’s earliest royal monuments, including the famous cosmetic palette of King Narmer (c.3100 BC), where a pair of serpent-necked lions frames the depression used for grinding pigments. As David O’Connor (2002) suggests, the minerals ground on ceremonial cosmetic palettes may have been used in the consecration of cult statues. Further traces of Mesopotamian influence have long been noted in the forms taken by Egypt’s earliest examples of monumental architecture. Made of mud-brick rather than stone, they comprised massive rectangular tombs and enclosures for the performance of the king’s mortuary cult. During the First Dynasty (c.2900-2800 BC)these imposing structures appear in varying combinations at important administrative centres throughout the country, with notable concentrations at Abydos (in the south) and Saqqara (in the north). All share a distinctive type of facade, formed by regularly spaced sequences of alternating niches and buttresses. The same variegated facades ornamented the exterior walls of early temples in Mesopotamia, where their use in demarcating sacred buildings can be traced back at least to the fifth millennium BC.

  On early Egyptian tombs, external recesses in the brickwork were brightly painted with mesmerizing depictions of hanging textiles, giving an illusion of permeability to a monument that was, in reality, solid and impermeable. Once endowed with material offerings, which filled the internal chambers of the tomb and surrounded the mummified body and its cult statues, the entire structure was permanently sealed and rendered inaccessible to human visitors. The presence of surface images that imply the opposite becomes less enigmatic when we realize that the painted niches formed a backdrop for the performance of sacrifices, which involved the burning of substances (incense and select animal parts) that gave off copious amounts of smoke. Entangled within the patterned exterior of the tomb, mingling with and animating its decorated surface, the movement of these intangible fumes blurred the boundaries separating the outside from the inside, and those without from the hungry recipients within. The overall point becomes clearer still when we note that, by Old Kingdom times, these elaborate ‘false doors’ had migrated to the internal chambers of the tomb (by this time built of stone rather than mud-brick), marking out the point of ritual communion where the living made offerings to the deceased.

  Given the existence of other similarities between the ritual treatment of cult statues in Egypt and Mesopotamia, it is not inconceivable that certain core ideas and practices relating to their use passed between these areas during the later part of the fourth millennium BC. The selective nature of such adoptions—tin-bronze, olive cultivation, wheeled vehicles, and the rearing of woolly sheep were among the technologies initially rejected—indicates that the process of borrowing was strongly directed by the internal requirements of emergent elites within Egypt itself. Moreover, all that was borrowed was transformed in the process, such that (from a technical point of view) the resemblances between Egypt and Mesopotamia always appear imprecise. Their specific ways of preparing fields, baking bread, brewing beer, marking commodities, forming and laying mud-bricks, and nourishing the gods are indirect reflections of one another, characterized by both underlying similarities (common principles) and subtle differences of execution.

  With the consolidation of the dynastic realm, around 3000 BC, the Egyptian court—with its capital at Memphis, near modern Cairo—set about redefining its interactions with the outside world. An open frontier was established to the gold mines of the Nubian Desert, and a rival polity in the vicinity of Qustul was eliminated in the process. Movement was restricted along the land route to Asia, and the mineral resources of the Sinai Peninsula were brought under royal control. The court also sought to monopolize maritime traffic in the eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea through a variety of cultural strategies, which targeted both foreign and domestic audiences. They included the pursuit of diplomatic relations with foreign chiefs; the foundation of temples for the Egyptian goddess Hathor in distant locations such as Byblos (and perhaps also Punt); and the theatrical ‘staging’ of long-distance trade in locally significant ceremonies, which I discuss further below.

  By the Fourth Dynasty, the focus of royal building projects had shifted decisively to the low desert around the capital at Memphis. At Saqqara, Dahshur, Abu Rawash, and on the Giza Plateau, monumental pyramids and adjoining temples were built in quick succession to house the royal mortuary cults. The design of these precocious structures was grounded in architectural innovations of the preceding dynasty, which saw the first use of stone on a monumental scale, most strikingly in the step pyramids of Djoser and his successors. In addition to vast quantities of limestone, quarried from mines along the margins of the floodplain, the construction of pyramids and their associated temples required the use of exotic materials such as pink granite (from Aswan), gneiss (from the Western Desert), and large quantities of cedar (imported by ship from Lebanon). High quality foreign timber was used for both tomb and temple fittings, and also for the ceremonial barges buried alongside the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza, which have antecedents extending back to the First Dynasty near the earlier royal cemetery at Abydos.

  Royal mortuary cults were endowed with agricultural estates that continued to function long after the completion of the tomb and its associated structures. The official function of these land allotments was to supply ongoing offerings for the statue cult of the tomb-owner. As well as livestock and farming equipment, each such estate comprised teams of dependent labourers, craft specialists, priests, and scribes. While many of these endowments were under the control of the royal family, others were granted to private individuals distributed throughout the country. In this way, spaces occupied by the royal and elite dead gradually became the foundation of an extensive administrative network, which increasingly dominated the productive economy of the living.

  The growth of royal funerary cults also gave rise to a new form of urban life, entirely without parallel in Mesopotamia. ‘Pyramid towns’, as they have come to be known, were centrally administered settlements of considerable scale, established adjacent to the royal tombs and mortuary temples they served, and after which they were named. The layout of one such town on the Giza Plateau, associated with the great pyramids of the Fourth Dynasty, has been reconstructed in some detail. Its high boundary walls surround a rigidly orthogonal street-plan. Central facilities were present for administration, food production (beer brewing and baking), sleeping, and other mundane activities. Such a totalizing scheme for communal life was not designed to foster the growth of a permanent population. It was geared, rather, towards the rapid socialization of incoming groups, who took up residence there for part of the year to provide skilled labour for monumental construction projects, or to otherwise serve the royal cult. These specialized groups are often referred to by the Greek term phyle (‘brotherhood’), which connotes both their restricted membership and their adoption of corporate male identities, loosely modelled on the organization of ships’ crews. As with most such experiments in social engineering, the institutional ideal of the pyramid town was quickly undermined by the complexities of social life. Within a few generations, new neighbourhoods sprang up along their intended perimeter walls. This twofold pattern of urban growth—centrally planned spaces giving way to less formally organized, but more durable communities—repeated itself throughout the history of dynastic Egypt.

  Making the Body Politic

  Like his Mesopotamian counterparts, the Egyptian king was entrusted with the task of securing a flow of life and blessings between heaven and earth. He did this, not by building houses for the gods, but by shaping his own body i
nto a sacred vessel from which food offerings flowed upwards towards them, but also back down towards the dead in their tombs. Both types of feeding, the feeding of the gods and of the dead, were achieved through the ritual medium of cult statues, installed within temples and tombs.

  Depictions in the tombs of Old Kingdom officials demonstrate the special relationship that existed in Egypt between cult statues and the ritually transfigured bodies of the elite dead, a relationship which finds no ready parallel in Mesopotamia. In these carved and painted scenes, the movement of the statue by sledge and boat across the Nile is closely modelled on the ritual procession of the corpse towards the tomb. In reciprocal fashion, the dead body was subject to various treatments that rendered it statue-like. Before interment it was purged of polluting substances (viscera and bodily fluids), restored through an infusion of spices and aromatic oils (juniper and cedar), and then desiccated in a bath of natron (‘divine salt’). Its orifices sealed with wax, the washed corpse was then wrapped in strips of linen, smeared with gum or plaster so that they stuck to the skin. Finally the body, now coated from head to toe, was carefully modelled and painted with features that evoked the appearance of the deceased in life, and also that of his cult statues, installed nearby within the offering chamber of the tomb. The equivalence of statue and body was confirmed by the performance of an Opening of the Mouth ritual upon the anthropomorphic coffin that contained the mummified corpse, during which its painted lips were touched with a sculptor’s tool.

  The statue’s journey to the tomb was accompanied by the burning of incense, carried by an attendant in a small cup. Purification was necessary because the foods offered to the cult statue were not ordinary goods. As confirmed by the standard offering formula inscribed within the tomb chapel (which begins: ‘An offering which the king gives to Osiris’) they were the residues of sacrifices performed by the king for the gods, who had already partaken of their share. Their ingestion by the dead was therefore an act of communion, which required the establishment of a pure environment around the statue. The offering formula was inscribed next to an image of the deceased seated at a table heaped with bread, portions of meat, and other offerings, enumerated by the thousand (the ‘small change’ of divine favour). Inscriptions accompanying the offering scene list special roles possessed by the tomb-owner during life, ordered by rank. Among the most prestigious we find titles relating to the personal regime of the king—in particular, the ritual management of substances emitted by the royal body (hair, nails) and of artefacts in contact with its skin (wigs, cosmetics, jewellery, clothing).

  As Wolfgang Helck (1954) noted long ago, elite funerary biographies affirm the unique status of the king’s body as an earthly container and conduit of sacred power. This status is already clearly apparent on the earliest royal monuments, dating to the end of the fourth millennium BC. All are ceremonial editions of portable instruments, used since Neolithic times for the ritual care and protection of the body: stone palettes for the grinding of pigments and medicines, combs for grooming and fastening the hair, and also weapons such as knives and maces. Together they form a ritual kit for the manipulation of fluids that entered and left the body by rubbing, ingestion, or the opening of the skin. These actions of containment and release are dramatized in their surface imagery. Carved in high relief (a technique later reserved for temple walls) they depict in miniature a world of chaotic forces located on the margins of the Nile alluvium. The king appears in this world as a dominant force, taking the guise of lethally dangerous animals that guard its frontiers.

  In later periods, the representation of the royal body as co-extensive with the margins of the cosmos was carried over and extended on the monumental walls of temples serving the royal funerary cult. Valley temples, located close to the floodplain, were attached to royal pyramid tombs by monumental stone causeways. The mummified body and cult statues of the king travelled along these ceremonial routes on their respective journeys to the burial chamber, and to the mortuary chapel where the offering cult was established. The decorative programme of the funerary temples and causeway translated this movement into a grandiose statement of the king’s magnetic force, which gathers the resources of the royal domain towards his body, prior to its entry to the tomb. Gifts of agricultural produce arrive from estates across the country, which are represented as subordinate ‘bodies’ of land, their personified forms marching along the walls of the temple, offerings in hand. The procession of the royal body to the tomb also causes materials to arrive from spaces beyond the alluvium. Non-Egyptians appear in these scenes as carriers of tribute, or as human tribute in the form of slaves, compelled towards the royal figure. We see the arrival of incense from Punt together with myrrh seedlings, which the king cultivates in Egyptian soil, a theme represented in the Old Kingdom temple of Sahure at Abusir, and repeated centuries later in the New Kingdom temple of Queen Hatshupsut, at Deir el-Bahri. Precious oils and exotic animals are brought to him in homage on sailing ships from Byblos; and human captives approach from Nubia and Libya, bound and led by the gods of Egypt.

  In celebrating the king’s superhuman capacity to draw in and consume precious resources, the external decorative programme of the funerary complex forms our clearest thematic counterpart to the temple-building activities of Mesopotamian kings. These scenes, and the activities they framed, formed a prelude to more restricted rituals that accompanied the movement of the royal body into the pyramid tomb. There the person of the king entered a new phase of transformation, intended to grant him the full characteristics of a god, and to secure his successful departure from the mortal world. Magical incantations (known as ‘Pyramid Texts’), inscribed on the walls of royal burial chambers during the later part of the Old Kingdom, preserve commentaries that accompanied the ritual preparation of the body for its onward journey. The rituals themselves, which were most likely carried out elsewhere, culminated in the body’s consecration and ritual ‘opening’ for the receipt of offerings. Reference is made to the burning of incense, described as the ‘sweat’ and ‘odour of the gods’, which drives out the offensive stench of the rotting corpse. The fragrant smoke also forms a channel of communication between heaven and earth. Under tangled cover of its rising folds, the king is able to transcend the distance between the divine and human spheres:

  The fire is laid, the fire shines;

  The incense is laid on the fire, the incense shines.

  Your perfume comes to me, O Incense;

  May my perfume come to you, O Incense.

  Your perfume comes to me, you gods;

  May my perfume come to you, you gods.

  May I be with you, you gods;

  May you be with me, you gods.

  And shortly after:

  … Here comes the climber, here comes the climber!

  Here comes he who flew up, here comes he who flew up!

  I ascend upon the thighs of Isis,

  I climb upon the thighs of Nephtys,

  My father Atum seizes my hand for me,

  And he assigns me to those excellent and wise gods,

  The Imperishable Stars.

  (After Nielsen 1986)

  Another series of utterances, inscribed within the pyramid of Unas, characterizes the transfiguration of the king in a different way. In order to join the company of the gods, he must first overcome his dependence on their offerings, and regain control of his own food supply. He does this by an act of cannibalism, literally eating his way out of the earthly realm and back to a condition of wholeness that evokes the primeval unity of the cosmos. What the king devours along the way are the bodies of the gods themselves, and the magical substances they contain:

  They have seen Unas, risen, empowered,

  As a god living on his fathers, feeding on his mothers.

  It is Unas who is the Lord of Offerings, who ties the rope,

  And provides his own offering meal himself.

  Unas it is who eats people, who lives on gods.

  It is Unas who eats
their magic, who swallows their souls.

  He is replete. Their magic is in his belly.

  Unas has swallowed the perception of every god.

  Eternity is the lifespan of Unas; the end of time is his end.

  (Excerpt from ‘The Cannibal Hymn’; after Eyre 2002)

  The king does not consume the other gods directly, but in a series of stages, and via the intermediary figure of a sacrificial animal. The object of sacrifice, called Bull of the Sky, appears early on in the ritual sequence, and is initially anything but a victim. Identified with the king, he roams among the gods as a victorious conqueror, feeding on their magic and taking it into his own belly. It is the king himself who then lassoes, hobbles, and weakens the bull. There follows a series of spells that euphorize the activities of killing, butchery, and consumption. Gods swiftly arrive on the scene to assist in decapitating the bull, removing its innards, and building a hearth on which its dismembered parts are cooked in cauldrons.

  Here—just as in the culmination of Gudea’s temple hymn—we find an inversion of the canonical procedures by which kings prepared food for the gods. The lighting of braziers and the roasting of offerings, whose rising fumes express the distance between heaven and earth, is notable now by its absence. Instead the sacrificial meat of the bull is boiled in a closed cauldron, which seals and contains its juices, marking the king’s return to the family of the gods, whose female members emerge to stir the stew in the pot. His ascendance to a state of divinity is finally affirmed by a denial of exchange in the treatment of the sacrificial meal. The king consumes the bull in its entirety, leaving nothing aside; not even the bones or poisonous gall bladder, so that there is nothing to be shared out. With this last act of self-fashioning, he leaves behind him the society of mortals—the world of exchanges, mixtures, and borrowings—and ascends to the enduring stars.