Think Like an Egyptian (13 page)

 

 

 

 

The hieroglyph depicts a single door leaf with its characteristic wooden strengthening bars on the inside surface. Egyptian doors were always relatively tall and narrow, rotating on a lower wooden pivot set into a pivot block in the floor of the doorway, and kept vertical by an upper pivot held within a simple casing in the lintel. House doors were normally a single leaf, but in grander settings—the front door of a rich man’s house or the main entrance to a temple—they came as pairs.

Doors allowed for privacy and helped to keep out bad weather. To look after the main door to a large property a doorkeeper was hired. Although the title was lowly, it was still one a man could use as a mark of status. Doors secured storerooms against theft. Instead of locks, Egyptians had only simple sliding carved wooden bolts. They sought security by winding string either between the ends of a bolt across a double-leaf door or, when the door was of a single leaf, between a bolt and a peg fixed to the door jamb. A mud sealing was then applied over the string, stamped with a distinctive design from a personal seal (see no. 83, “Cylinder seal”). The security of storerooms could be monitored and written about in reports. Transferred to the full daily temple order of service, the unsealing and opening of the doors of the various shrines became a significant act of ritual.

At a deeper religious level, doors were also seen as a means of access and closure. With their surrounding portals they marked stages on a journey through the imagined realm of the Otherworld. The dead faced a sequence of 21 doors manned by doorkeepers who had to be addressed by their correct names before they would grant admission: “Make way for me, for I know you, I know your name, and I know the name of the god who guards you.” A set of 12 similar portals, one for each hour, marked stages of the sun’s perilous journey through the imagined realm of the night, painted in great detail in the tombs in the Valley of Kings at Thebes.

 

 

 

 

Modern furniture—from chairs and tables to sinks with draining boards—tends to be high off the ground, so we rarely need to flex the lower body. We do not squat or sit flat on the floor a great deal, and often find the positions uncomfortable. For traditional societies like ancient Egypt, ground-based living was the norm. The Egyptians did make elegant wooden furniture: stools, seats, small tables, and beds. Many examples are known from excavations or from ancient tomb pictures. A few were made to fold up for easy transportation. The bed of Queen Hetep-heres—mother of Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid (c. 2589-2566 BC)—is a marvel of ingenuity and craftsmanship in the metal cladding of its pivoting joints. For any given household, however, items of wooden furniture were probably few in number and marked the status of the owner. In pictures of banquets, for example, the host and his wife sit side by side on chairs, but the guests often squat on mats on the floor, even ladies clad in the fashionable costume of the times. The hieroglyph for mat depicts a complete and almost square mat woven from plant materials. Another version of a mat is contained in the hieroglyph for “offering place” (see no. 98).

The association between status and being seated was not consistent. There was a tradition, much older than furniture, which linked being seated on a mat with the exercise of authority, and especially the giving of judgment. We read of “scribes of the mat” and even of a “council of the mat,” but most notably it is upon mats that many of the gods would be sitting when the dead reached the halls of judgment: “I am there with Osiris, and my mat is his mat among the Elders,” states Chapter 124 of the Book of the Dead.

 

 

 

 

During the New Kingdom (1550-1070 BC) it was fashionable to include a picture of a cat in domestic scenes of husband and wife painted in tomb chapels. The cat is beneath the wife’s chair, although in one tomb (of the sculptor Ipuy at Deir el-Medina) the husband also has a kitten on his lap. The cats are well observed. They gnaw bones, devour fish, spit at a goose. One is tied by a ribbon to the chair leg, another wears a bead necklace and earrings. They accompany the family on hunting parties in the marshes as if they are full members of the family. They are clearly pets, but did the Egyptians give them names? The sources are silent, but this might just be because cats belonged mainly to women, and most of our sources were compiled by men. The men were happy to give names to their dogs, and many examples are known. King Wahankh Intef of the 11 th Dynasty even included named dogs on his tombstone.

There is one telling exception. A small limestone sarcophagus was commissioned by a crown prince of the 18th Dynasty, Thutmose. It was intended to contain a mummified cat named Tamyt, which means simply “female cat.” The sarcophagus carries standard religious texts, and they treat Tamyt as if she had been fully human, becoming Osiris on her death and joining the imperishable stars of heaven. It is tempting to see this as an ultimate expression of pet love; yet the completeness of Tamyt’s transformation into a spiritual being might be a sign that she was actually a sacred animal.

The wild hunting instinct in cats gave them a place in the Egyptian pantheon, and this was especially so in the New Kingdom and later. Male cats, sometimes armed with a knife, appear as demons in the Otherworld, helping to kill the serpent foe of the sun-god. More people worshipped a female cat, however, incorporating images connected with a fierce lioness-goddess, Sekhmet. The cult of a cat goddess was associated with the sun-god Ra, with childbearing and with protection. The cult developed especially strongly at the city of Baset in the Nile Delta, and the cat goddess was known simply as “She of Baset” (thus, Bastet). Her festival became a major event, attracting (according to Herodotus) several hundred thousand people. Beside the city there developed a huge cemetery for cats, which had been bred, killed, and carefully mummified as an expression of piety.

 

 

 

 

When archaeologists excavate an ancient settlement in Egypt, they work through layer after layer of earthy debris to expose the foundations of ancient buildings. Much of the debris is brick rubble but also common is ash from fires. In their houses and places of work fires were never far from ancient Egyptians. The quantities of ash are sometimes surprising. Part of an unusually well-preserved building at Elephantine was used as a dump for ash from a bakery, and this, mixed with earth, had built up to a depth of three meters.

The sign for fire shows either a point of glowing fire ending in a tail of smoke or flame rising from a pottery bowl. Excavations at the city of Tell el-Amarna have revealed that kilns for pottery, for making glazed objects, and for small-scale metal working, as well as ubiquitous ovens for cooking and baking bread, were dispersed throughout the housing neighborhoods. Tending fires and obtaining combustible materials must have been a constant chore, and breathing smoky air a regular hazard. Although Egypt is generally a hot country, winter days and especially nights can be quite cold, especially for people living near the desert. A common feature in the central living room of Amarna houses is a broad and shallow pottery bowl, filled with ash and charcoal, set in the floor, often next to a low brick bench. This served as the domestic hearth around which people could gather. In smaller houses the soot-blackened fragments fallen from the mud-plastered ceilings suggest that many poorer people spent part of their indoor lives in smoky atmospheres, too.

With ovens, kilns, and small open fires everywhere, lighting a new one was straightforward. Otherwise, Egyptians used a simple friction device, a vertical spindle rotated quickly back and forth in a hollow in a flat piece of wood filled with kindling. A wooden bow with its string looped once around the spindle greatly increased the speed of rotation.

There were times when fires spread out of control. Egyptian settlements contained wood, straw (a common component of mud-bricks), oil, cloth, and other inflammable materials. There are some archaeological mounds where large parts have been baked to a red color through conflagration. This can extend downward for several meters into the underlying rubble and earth of previous periods, implying that the heat of the fire set off a slow-burning underground fire that would have rendered part of the town uninhabitable for some time. Whether, in individual cases, the cause was accidental or arose from local disturbances is impossible to tell.

The Egyptians believed that the hazardous potential of fire was used by the gods: the sun, and the cobras that were often carved alongside it, gave off fire. Lakes of fire were one of the threats in the Otherworld. Yet the nature of fire, which other cultures have seen as a fundamental element, seems to have excited little or no curiosity among the Egyptians. It had no equivalent to Nun, the primeval waters, in their thinking about the nature and origin of the material universe.