Think Like an Egyptian (16 page)

A man could sink a fortune into his tomb. He could insist on carved stone rather than on painted bricks, requiring years of part-time labor by skilled sculptors, probably loaned from the court circles. He would need at least one statue for himself, perhaps several, and one for his wife. If his burial place was in Upper Egypt, where the desert rose in a cliff or a steep slope, he could have the whole edifice carved out of the rock and then decorated. Many tombs remained unfinished by the time death intervened.

A tomb did more than proclaim a successful life. It was the center of a parallel household; a spiritual household that depended in part on the support and services of the living. In death an Egyptian became a minor god, requiring regular offerings of food, the performance of templelike rituals, and the observance of festivals. All of this was paid for by setting up, through deeds of conveyance or agreements with the king, what we now see as a charitable foundation. Income from land was secured, and paid to priests to perform regular services. Ideally priests would be members of the family, under the leadership of the eldest son, who would be guaranteed an income for life as a “mortuary priest.” Some landowners seem to have tied up a large part of their estates in this way, so securing it for their descendants.

Thoughtful Egyptians recognized the vanity involved in building lasting monuments. A poem in praise of being a scribe contrasts the longevity of a wise man’s reputation with the decay of grand tombs:

Their portals and mansions have crumbled, their mortuary priests have gone; their tombstones are covered with dirt, their graves are forgotten. Their name is pronounced through their writings that they made while they were yet alive.

 

 

 

 

Imagine that you are an ancient Egyptian on your way to visit Memphis, the original capital of your country. As you approach your journey’s end you see, on the distant low desert horizon to the west, the pale triangular profiles of pyramids. By the end of the era of royal pyramid building around 1700 BC, some 15 pyramids would have been conspicuous up to the north of Memphis, and another 15 to the south, over a combined distance of some 35 kilometers, with isolated outliers even farther to the south. If you had a little learning, you might know the names of some of the royal owners: King Sneferu of good repute; cruel and impious King Khufu, who had built the largest pyramid of all (the Great Pyramid); perhaps Djoser, a king of a very distant time indeed (his was the Step Pyramid); and even Userkaf and his twin brothers whose mother, according to legend, had been the wife of a priest of the sun-god and his father the sun-god Ra himself. You might even know the names of some of the pyramids: “Sneferu Endures” or “The Perfection of Pepi is Established,”
(
Pepy men-nefer
) (the abbreviated version of this one has given us the name Memphis).

Egyptians, curious about their past, visited old monuments. One of the sons of Rameses II, Khaemwese, the high priest of the god Ptah of Memphis, even supervised restorations of several of the pyramids that were now a thousand years old. If, out of interest and respect, you crossed the fields from Memphis and climbed the desert to visit one of the pyramids, you would find yourself faced not only with the towering mass of the pyramid itself, but with a veritable “city” around its base. In a prominent position stood the decorated stone temple where, generations after the king had died, priests were still paid to offer food and drink to his spirit and to look after the ritual equipment kept in storerooms. Over the adjacent ground spread networks of tombs for those who had served the king. They, too, had left means to pay for the upkeep of their cult. Gradually, of course, the cults slipped into oblivion, but for a time people would come and go, or dwell among the tombs in mud-brick shanties. Some visitors were drawn to leave their own memorials, in the form of graffiti. One scribe, on visiting the temple for King Sneferu’s pyramid, remarked that “he found it like heaven within when the sun-god is rising in it,” despite its small size and lack of decoration.

It is still not clear why Egyptians chose to build monuments in a pyramid shape. The first (belonging to King Djoser of the 3rd Dynasty, c. 2660 BC) was stepped and unpointed. Where masonry at the bottom has fallen away you can see that, to begin with, Djoser’s tomb had been covered with a single flat-topped platform of stone that may have simply marked the location and provided a place for offerings but might also have represented a place of resurrection (see no. 34, “Mound”). Before the king died, his architect, growing more confident with experience, aimed for much greater height and achieved it by building what was, in effect, a series of six platforms, one on top of the other. This is the most direct explanation, but particular images might also have been in his mind, such as a giant staircase to the heavens.

Later pyramids were smooth with pointed peaks. Centuries after Djoser, ancient Egyptians would have connected the idea of a pyramid with the rising sun and with a sacred standing stone at the city of Heliopolis, a center of the cult of the sun-god Ra. The name of this stone,
benben,
gave rise to a word for the pointed stone at the very top of pyramids,
benbent.
Earlier pyramids were uninscribed, but in the Middle Kingdom the sides of the pointed capstone were carved with short prayers to the rising sun.

Despite its singular shape and power as a religious image, the pyramid had ceased by the New Kingdom to mark the royal tomb. Kings now chose instead to be buried in discrete underground chambers in the Valley of Kings at Thebes, their cult separately situated in a temple of conventional design.

 

 

 

 

The bodies of the dead rapidly decompose. Cremation or excarnation (exposing the corpse until only clean bones remain, widely practiced, for example, in Neolithic Europe) deals with decomposition directly; burial in the ground hides it from view. The ancient Egyptians, like their ancient African neighbors and prehistoric predecessors, chose burial. In the dry warm desert, burial quickly brings decomposition to a halt and natural mummification takes place, leaving a shriveled but recognizable version of the original person; but many Egyptian cemeteries, especially those in the delta, were in relatively damp soil and bodies must have been reduced to skeletons, the bones turning soft, within a few years.

The Egyptians wrote long religious texts about the dead. Some passages sought to ensure that the dead remained in possession of the principal parts of their body. One means was by associating each body part with a god. So Chapter 42 of the Book of the Dead states: “My hair is Nun, my face is Ra, my eyes are Hathor ... my feet are Ptah, my toes are living falcons. There is no member of mine devoid of a god. Thoth is the protection of all my flesh.” As the cult of Osiris expanded late in the Old Kingdom, the ideal shape for the dead was that of Osiris, back and legs in a stiff straight line and the whole body tightly swathed in linen, except for the hands, which remained free to grasp certain symbols.

The Egyptians developed a process of artificial mummification to preserve body tissue and key organs (the brain was not considered important and was removed in pieces through the nasal cavity). The powdered mineral natron (see no. 3, “Grain”) was heaped over the body to dry the tissue; a similar substance can be made by mixing cooking salt with bicarbonate of soda. If a piece of meat is buried in it for some days, it becomes dry and hard, and shrivels. The Egyptians disguised the shriveling of the body by extensively wrapping it in linen strips. Organs (liver, stomach, intestines, lungs, and heart) were removed through an incision in the side of the body, desiccated and wrapped separately. The organs were then buried in a set of four special “canopic” jars, with the exception of the heart, which ideally was returned to the body cavity. The whole process, if properly carried out, involved purification ceremonies, the application of coats of resin to the body, and finally, possibly at the time of interment, the “Opening of the Mouth” ritual, by which the mummified body was made ready to receive prayers and offerings. According to one text of the New Kingdom, 70 days was the proper duration for all of this.

Mummification was a skilled and time-consuming process that many could not afford. The burials of poorer people were less protected from processes of decay, so that archaeologists find it difficult to be sure to what extent such bodies were mummified at all and so cannot tell what proportion of the population was mummified after death. The early history of mummification is also not well documented, and the various stages in the process might not have developed at the same time. King Djer of the 1st Dynasty had his limbs wrapped in linen, but the first evidence for the removal of organs for separate preservation is the presence, four centuries later, of special “canopic” containers in the tomb of Queen Hetep-heres. The use of natron, however, is perhaps older than the 1st Dynasty.

Ironically, by burying valuables in tombs, the Egyptians greatly increased the risk of disturbance of the dead. A papyrus confession of robbers on trial in the 16th year of Rameses IX (1110 BC) reports how, equipped with heavy bronze chisels and lamps, the thieves broke into the burial chamber of King Sebekemsaf II and his Queen Nubkhaas, whose tomb had remained undisturbed for nearly five centuries. “The noble mummy of this king was entirely covered with gold and his coffins were adorned with gold and silver, inside and out, and inlaid with all kinds of precious stones.” Having stripped off everything of value, they set fire to the coffins and the bodies inside. The gold totalled 160
deben,
a weight equivalent to 14.56 kilograms. It represented the value of, say, a herd of 250 cattle according to ancient Egyptian prices, and so offered the allure of transforming a poor man’s life (see no. 87, “Gold”).