Think Like an Egyptian (20 page)

 

 

 

 

Before the completion of the high dam at Aswan in 1970, each year was marked by the rise of Nile waters in the late summer and the inundation of the floodplain (see no. 8, “Water”), an event celebrated in the pre-Islamic calendar as the new year. It roughly coincided with the yearly reappearance just before dawn of a particularly bright star, Sirius. The ancient Egyptians divided the ensuing year into three seasons—the “inundation,” “growing,” and “fallow”—each four months long. Each month was exactly 30 days long, leaving 5 days over in the year. They called this interval “the five days extra to the year” and celebrated it with feast days (see no. 95, “Festival”). Yet a year of 365 days is slightly too short to keep pace with the movement of the earth, which we now compensate for with the addition of an extra day in every fourth year. Very slowly the administrative year of precisely 365 days, because it lacked a leap year, fell behind the natural year, passing through a cycle of divergence and then convergence over the course of 1,460 years. The Egyptians recognized and took account of this shifting calendar. Around 1864 BC a priest noted the coming feast of the first rising of Sirius, which marked the beginning of the agricultural year. He dated it by reference to the administrative calendar which, by this time, had fallen significantly out of step with the agricultural year, despite the retention of the old names for the seasons. The precise date of his note is the 16th day of the fourth month of the growing season (in the seventh year of the reign of King Senusret III), revealing a discrepancy of 226 days between the natural and administrative calendars. From this piece of information we can calculate the date in terms of our own Christian-era dating.

Scribes followed the progress of the calendar and knew the date of the current day by keeping daily journals of work done. The hieroglyph for “year” depicts a notched central rib from a palm leaf, with a curving top. Mostly the hieroglyphic form simplifies the notches into a single marker, thus
. No example of such a tally has been found, but it would have been a simple means of keeping account of the days that had passed since the beginning of the year for the majority of the population who were not scribes.

 

 

 

 

The hieroglyph shows the crescent moon or a combination of the faintly visible full disc of the moon and its illuminated crescent. The Egyptians followed the moon’s course carefully, creating a separate monthly calendar to regulate temple festivals and giving to each of its 30 days a separate name. Each of the lunar months also had its own name. The monthly cycle began the day after the moon showed no illuminated segment of itself. The first and thinnest crescent heralded the second day, known as “new crescent day,” the last day was known as “the procession of Min,” a god of fertility whose home was the city of Coptos.

The moon was a divine being, Iah. For a while “Iah” was popular in personal names among the Egyptian people, and the first king of the 18th Dynasty (and thus of the New Kingdom) was named Iahmes or Ahmes (“The moon is born”). Although there are no known temples dedicated to the god Iah, the moon was featured above the heads of two major gods, though it is debatable whether either can be properly called a moon-god. One was Khensu, a god of Thebes (and the son of Amun-Ra). As a Ptolemaic text puts it: “[Khensu] is conceived on the first day of the lunar month, is born on the second day, and grows old after the fifteenth day.” The other was Thoth, normally shown as an ibis or a baboon, and patron of learning and languages. Neither god, nor any other manifestation of the moon, is the subject of surviving myths, however, and we can deduce that the moon held a relatively minor place in Egyptian thinking.

 

 

 

 

Egyptian numerals were a little like Roman numerals, using different signs for units up to nine, for tens, hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, hundred thousands, and finally millions (although practical calculations hardly ever ventured into multiples at the higher end of the scale). The word for “million,”
(
heh
), is a hieroglyph of a squatting man raising his arms in an expansive gesture and bearing on his head, or in each hand, a notched palm-rib, the symbol for “year.” The word stood for an inordinately large number, made even more emphatic by repetition, “millions upon millions.” It particularly referred to years and came to mean “eternity.” The man became Heh, the spirit of eternity.

The Egyptians tended to use the term when referring to a king’s eternal power. Eternity stretched into the future, an endless repetition of the prosperous years that they liked to think was the norm. They did recognize, however, that calamities could strike their country. In one tale a learned man, Neferti, is summoned to entertain the king (Sneferu, of the 4th Dynasty) and offers him the choice of hearing about the past or the future. When the king chooses the latter, Neferti describes a time of calamity, in which society has collapsed and all the normal marks of civilized behavior have been turned on their head. A strong king will then restore order. The tale was written five centuries after King Sneferu’s death, and the time of healing was in fact taking place. It is one of a number of texts that suggest a historic time was viewed as an alternation between times of order and disorder.

Egyptians also recognized the eternity of the divine world, found in the Otherworld. In one myth the goddess of the sky, Nut, becomes a cow, the stars spread across her belly. When Nut begins to tremble on account of her great height above the earth, the sun-god Ra creates eight “eternity” gods whose upraised arms will support her and thus the weight of the sky, acknowledging its eternal nature. The Otherworld’s darker forces were also blessed with eternal life. Serpents forever bite their own tails, their long bodies curving round to form a circle, symbolizing endless time.

The Egyptians believed that eternal existence after death was available to all, and that the chances of achieving it were increased by knowing what to say at the appropriate time. The Book of the Dead was a particularly popular source of words of power. In Chapter 42 a dead person states: “I am yesterday; one who views a million years; my name is one who passes on the paths of those who are in charge of destinies. I am the lord of eternity.”

 

 

 

 

The sign for primeval time was chosen because of its phonetic similarity to a word for bread. It shows a flat round loaf,
p3t
(
pat
), pinched on the upper surface and used particularly in temple offerings. The primeval age was a remote past time, when the gods had ruled the world, prior to the well-documented reigns of Egyptian kings. The longest record of kings that has survived, written on a papyrus around 1250 BC in the time of Rameses II, contained at least 250 names of kings and the exact length of their reign, interspersed with summaries of how long a particular group of kings had occupied the throne. Despite several missing sections in the document, we know it covers approximately 2,000 years, from the reign of the first king of the 1st Dynasty, Menes, to that of Rameses II. (The period was somewhat too long since no reduction was made when reigns and even whole dynasties overlapped in time.) It also records the enormously long reigns of the gods, including Osiris, Horus, and Seth. Between the gods and the time of Menes came two groups of lesser beings, the “spirits” (see no. 53) and the “followers of Horus” (see no. 60, “To follow”).