Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (14 page)

Contrary to the practice in later, more sexist civilisations, Egyptian men were taught from an early age to respect women. The mores of the time strongly inclined everyone to a sexual temperance restricted to marital cohabitation. Despite, or maybe because of, the respect they earned from men, more sexual restraint was expected of women than of men. The reason was simple: the age-old concern about the legitimacy or otherwise of the progeny.

The Nile’s flood was a flood of tears. Professional weepers were employed at religious ceremonies to cry copiously, cry me a river indeed. These women (of varying ages – crying being a skill not reserved solely for the young), who assumed the roles of the female deities Isis and her sister Nephthys in religious ceremonies, were required to be sexually abstinent for certain periods.

It was even tougher being a female temple servant – one of the ‘gods’ wives’. A lifelong preservation of virginity was required of them. Almost
certainly the austere practices of Christian monasticism, which arose in the Egyptian desert while the old religions faded away, were influenced by this requirement for sexual abstinence. The priests of Apis in Memphis were also denied any form of sexual relations.

For the rest of the populace things were not too restrictive. Young men could marry at thirteen. Teenage sex was OK, as long as it was within marriage. There was no civil or religious ceremony – the only contracts drawn up concerned property rights in the case of death and divorce, and sometimes these were drafted long after the marriage had started.

The goal of marriage was producing children. For the blight of infertility various treatments were available, some aphrodisiacal. Lettuce was highly thought of in this regard, which adds another spin to Set munching on the sperm-impregnated salad he was handed by Horus. Another plant supposedly guaranteed to aid procreation is known to us only by its unpronounceable name
mnhp
; this was depicted with a hieroglyphic ending with the unmistakable image of a phallus.

For those who were not trying to produce babies, and were perhaps even cavorting illegally in public places, there were some widely known methods for avoiding conception. An unusual though popular prophylactic was dung. One recipe recommended inserting into the vagina, before sex, a compote of crocodile dung, honey and/or resin. Another suggests inserting the tips of acacia twigs (which contain gum arabic), dates and honey. Try fighting your way through that lot. One imagines that the prophylaxis lies more in the obstruction to entry than in the spermicidal qualities of the medicine.

The numerous mummies of mothers and children interred together indicate the risks of childbirth. Those that survived were breastfed until the age of three. Mothers’ milk was in high demand – not just for its intended purpose, but also as a cure for colds, diseases of the eye, eczema, burns and even bed wetting. Though it is hard to see how milk could benefit people other than babies, the suggestive list of things it could cure seems taken from the ailments it prevents or inhibits in the young. In other words the ancient Egyptians had observed the benefits to the young immune system conferred by human milk, benefits that modern science is only now confirming.

What else was going on along that great river 4,500 years or more ago? Much that was passed on to later religions, as we have seen. Boys
were circumcised, though late, about their twelfth birthday. A scene at Saqqara depicts a priest squatting in front of a boy about to perform the act using a piece of flint, the traditional tool – no doubt a remnant of their desert-dwelling days. And, like the ceramic knives used by today’s surgeons, nothing cuts cleaner than a sharp piece of stone.

It is interesting to note that circumcision was the norm but not universal for Egyptian men until uncircumcised Libyans began to mingle with the populace. Only then does circumcision become a necessity for religious purity. Almost certainly the borrowing of circumcision by the other Semitic religions, and its similar justification as a means of delineating the
other
, started with the influence of ancient Egypt.

All Egyptians were prohibited from having sex on those days when, according to the religious calendar, the gods were themselves so engaged. This was fewer than fifty days a year – the gods only getting to do it about once a week, maybe on Saturday night.

As we have hinted, in ancient Egyptian marriages the woman was considered the equal of the man. This is highly unusual, taking a global historical perspective, and a sign, surely, of the sophistication of the culture. As the Nile explorer Richard Burton (not the one married to Cleopatra – Liz Taylor – but the other one) remarked, ‘the sign of an advanced culture is simple: the relative equality of men and women’. Four thousand years ago on the banks of the Nile there were even marriages where the status of the woman was quite clearly higher than that of her spouse. One account records a wealthy woman marrying a younger common soldier. Another woman marrying first a scribe and then an artisan.

Higher up the social scale incestuous marriages designed to protect dynasties were common. Keep it in the family in every sense. Ramses II married three of his daughters. Mythology supported the concept of incest, with Osiris marrying his sister Isis, and Set, despite his predatory predilections, marrying his sister Nephthys. However, it’s important to realise that incest wasn’t as common in ancient Egypt as was once thought. On legal documents concerning marriage a man and a woman may be referred to as ‘brother and sister’, and this has led to confusion. In such an instance this is a legal formula indicating they are both equal in the marriage, not that they are siblings.

But it is a strong indication of the relative fairness of this ancient marriage institution that the parties are referred to as brother and sister and not as master and servant as they were in the West until recently.
Prenuptial agreements have even been discovered from the Ptolemaic period, often putting a time limit into a marriage contract by which point, if the parties weren’t happy, it could be dissolved. In one papyrus record it was stated that a gooseherd had a nine-month clause inserted, after which his wife would receive a special payment, perhaps for becoming pregnant.

Divorce, like marriage, was neither a civil nor a religious matter; it was, rather sensibly, personal. Foreshadowing modern times, many women were better off financially after divorce and many men reduced in circumstances. The causes of divorce were age old and familiar: infidelity, infertility, incompatibility or simply the desire to enter into marriage with another person. Though there was complete freedom to divorce, those that did so without substantive cause met with considerable social condemnation. From the evidence available, however, the majority of Egyptian marriages were long lasting.

7
•
Enter Moses and the red plague

The god of old women is ‘old women’
. Nubian proverb

These gentle Nile dwellers, with their equal marriages and their tendency to perform obscene acts in sacred places, were also the enemy – when seen from another perspective, that of the ancient dwellers of Israel. The Nile dwellers, the Egyptians, are the enslavers of the Israelites, and yet in this cauldron of oppression the Mosaic religion comes into existence. So, in a sense, the enemy were also the cause of enlightenment and ultimately of freedom.

The Egyptian can be distinguished from other African religions by its movement towards the light. Instead of focusing on snake and crocodile worship (though these did feature as aspects of the central deity), the ancient Egyptian religion took a step towards the abstract by worshipping light: the life-giving sun itself. Whereas the worship of dangerous animals seems motivated by fear, the worship of the sun appears to be driven by gratitude and by a better scientific understanding of the wellsprings of life.

But it is Moses and his laws that take us to the next step in the evolution of our conception of a deity. Moses is the first figure to announce
that God is abstract, that there will be no graven images made of him. He goes up the mountain and comes back laden with stone tablets on which are inscribed the laws of the new religion. (Many now think the tablets were actually of clay, which for the cuneiform lingua franca of the time would have been the usual method of recording words.)

But Moses didn’t reformulate the ancient religion of the Jews in isolation; he also lived a life inextricably linked with the Nile.

Josephus, the Jewish historian writing in
AD
94, claimed that the name Moses was derived from the ancient Egyptian and, later, Coptic language:
mo
meaning ‘water’, and
uses
meaning ‘saved from’. So Moses, saved from death by being cast in a basket on the Nile, is in effect saved by the river itself (probably because of its uniquely irresistible blend of kitsch and entertainment, a rather effective tableau of this event is enacted complete with a baby doll in a basket at the Nileside theme park in Cairo – the redoubtable Dr Ragab’s Pharaonic Village which I have already mentioned).

As the Nile was, effectively, the source of all water in Egypt we can see that Moses, who was saved from the water, is nominally an offspring of the river. The cause of his ‘rebirth’ via the river was, we learn in the Book of Exodus, that the Pharaoh of the time had decreed that all children under a certain age who were of Hebrew origin should be drowned in the Nile. Certainly it would be a quick and obvious way to despatch a large number of unwanted toddlers. (Later, a superstition grew up that anyone who drowned in the Nile would return as a ghost to haunt the living. Perhaps it was the result of so much judicial murder. By the time Caesar won the battle of the Nile in 47
BC
, when he installed Cleopatra as queen, the river was no longer a place to have people killed; when he eliminated an opponent he was careful the victim was not drowned or seen as drowned in case he acquired ghostly status among the populace.)

Moses, we know, however, owed his life to the Nile because his mother, Jochebed, constructed a basket of reeds waterproofed with pitch and cleverly sent him downstream to land where the Pharaoh’s daughter was bathing. Miriam, Moses’ sister, asked the smitten daughter of the Pharaoh if she needed a skilled nurse to bring up the child. The answer being yes, Jochebed was introduced as the ideal nurse. So Moses, from being on the Pharaoh’s hit list, gets to be brought up by his own mother in the luxurious high-status environment of the royal court.
Result!
one is tempted to shout. By cheating the Nile of his death
he doesn’t just cling on to life, he is rewarded by becoming a prince.

Earlier in the Bible, in Genesis, Moses is spoken of as being of the second generation of Israelites born in Egypt, descended from Jacob, who had entered Egypt because of a drought in the land of Canaan. One of Moses’ ancestors was Joseph, the eleventh of Jacob’s twelve sons, he of the coat of many colours, who had risen to become the Pharaoh’s right hand because of his ability to interpret dreams. With this background of the royal involvement of the Jews, the stratagem of placing Moses in the royal fold does not seem so unlikely.

However, living as an impostor had its effect on Moses and he became acutely sensitive to the plight of the Jews – who were treated, then, as second-class citizens in Egypt. In one case Moses was so angered by an Egyptian who had beaten a Jew that he killed the Egyptian and then hid the body (thus breaking one of his later commandments). When word got out Moses fled into the Sinai Desert and hid as a shepherd. Here he lived for forty years until God sent him a sign: the burning bush at the foot of Mount Sinai (which can still be seen growing in the delightful grounds of the Christian monastery there today, though, in the absence of any prophets, steadfastly refusing to reignite). Having got Moses’ attention via the flaming foliage, God commanded him to deliver the Hebrews from their bondage in Egypt.

Ask and ye shall receive. But when Moses asked, the Pharaoh refused. After all, this was a useful workforce he would be losing. Moses asked God for help and God didn’t muck around: he sent a plague of blood – turning the waters of the Nile into blood just to scare the Pharaoh. The exact phrasing is useful because it gives an indication of what the ‘plague of blood’ might really have been. Moses relates that God has told him to do the following: ‘With this staff strike the water of the Nile and it will be changed into blood. The fish in the Nile will die, and the river will stink and thus the Egyptians will not be able to drink its water’ (Exodus 7: 17–18).

Pharaoh wouldn’t agree to Moses’ demands so the prophet Aaron, with his staff and under his brother Moses’ guidance, struck the Nile and turned it into a river of blood. Sure enough the river could not be used as water, the fish died and all was calamity. The blood plague on the river lasted for seven days.

Coincidentally the Ipuwer Papyrus from the Eighteenth Dynasty (1550–1300
BC
) – Tutankhamen was an Eighteenth Dynasty king – contains some striking parallels to this period of the plagues of Egypt,
especially the plague of blood. In the papyrus it states: ‘plague is throughout the land. Blood is everywhere. The river is blood. People shrink from tasting.’ This is one of the few cases where one tradition corroborates the experience of the other.

The papyrus also states that this was a time of upheavals, of servants revolting against their masters. It is not hard to see a parallel with the Hebraic text. Given the needs of oral storytelling and the mythologising required to turn the no doubt confusing events in Egypt into a viral narrative capable of surviving centuries of repetition, it seems perfectly plausible that these events really did occur. Trying to prove that the plagues really happened is usually a nice exercise in creative thinking, yet recent scientific evidence rather suggests that the story is grounded in truth. So if Egypt did suffer ten plagues, what is the first, the blood-red river?

Some have suggested an algal bloom, something similar to the Red Tide of algae seen in the Gulf of Mexico. While the parallels between a harmful algal bloom and a ‘blood river’ are compelling – both of them lower oxygen levels so that fish and plants die – there may be another explanation. Just as the Nile becomes red with silt when the Blue Nile joins the White Nile in the Sudan, so, in the days before any dams were built, an excessive Nile inundation would have seen a blood-red tide sweeping downstream. That the plague of blood lasted only seven days is suggestive of such a one-off flood. The stench left behind after floods have receded – leaving fish stranded and river mud everywhere – also corresponds with the stench reported in the biblical account.