Think Like an Egyptian (29 page)

Medical remedies were drawn from a wide range of substances, from the herbal to the unlikely, and are easily ridiculed today; for example: “nother [remedy] to cause a child to void an accumulation of urine in his belly: an old book, boiled in oil; his belly is anointed [with it] to regulate his voiding.” Yet the increasing acceptance in modern medicine of the power of placebos, which can prompt the body to produce its own remedies, might suggest that the strange concoctions and dramatic utterances had the same effect and hence were sometimes effective.

 

 

 

 

The sign is a pair of human arms, from extended fingers to shoulders, bent at the elbows to point upward. It is used to write the word “ka,” the best translation of which is “spirit” (but different from no. 53), as compared to the Egyptian word “ba,” which can be translated as “soul.”

The ancient Egyptians believed their conscious self to be not a single being but to have multiple roles and manifestations to which they gave separate names. A prayer in a tomb illustrates the different elements Egyptians believed made up their being. Amenemhat, a scribe, prays that all these parts of himself will live on in the afterlife : his ka, the memorial tablet at his tomb (through which his name would be kept alive), his ba, his destiny his life, his “illumination,” his body, his shadow, his place of origin, his upbringing, his personal creator-god (Khnum), “all his modes of being,” each and every one of them described as a “god.” That a person’s whole being should be seen as having so many components shows an awareness of the complexity of personal existence. It is naturally rooted in Egyptian culture and language that we do not share, but our ideas about existence today are still based upon belief rather than upon scientific demonstration, and remain scarcely less mysterious now than in ancient Egyptian times. Theologians pondered over the ka, its power and origin. Where did it come from? Was it indivisible?

The ka is one of the most frequently encountered signs on monuments and was an important manifestation of the self. Prayers written in tomb chapels or on tombstones—which often list the food offerings to be made to a buried Egyptian and specify on which feast days they were to be presented—are addressed not directly to the deceased, but to his or her ka. Close to where the ka was named there was normally a prominent image of the deceased, either a picture or a statue, on which the person making the offering could focus attention.

The ka had an existence separate from the bodily self. Egyptians spoke of a person traveling to or even in the company of his ka at their death. Among the deities who protected the dead were the four sons of Horus, and one of them, Imset, could bring your ka to you. Sometimes an important person—occasionally a high official but mostly kings—was said to have several kas. A temple could be said to possess a ka, a not unreasonable quality to apply to a building of such large somber architecture: the idea that quiet, enclosed spaces are home to a presiding spirit, the
genius loci
of the Roman world, seems to be a deep-seated one.

The presence of the dead could seem very real in ancient Egypt. It was a common experience to enter a chapel in a cemetery and face a statue of the deceased, or sometimes a place, marked by a slot or hole at eye level, where you knew that a statue had been hidden in a sealed and darkened chamber for protection. In more modest circumstances many must have stood or knelt in front of nothing more than a tiny niche containing a crudely carved or painted flake of stone, and murmured a simple formulaic prayer for offerings while setting down a jug of beer and a loaf of bread for the benefit of the ka of a deceased relative or friend. Indeed, in the tomb prayers, the deceased sometimes entreated passersby to enter and recite the offering prayer, promising good fortune in return. For those who could afford it, a ka priest, ideally the eldest son, was paid to carry out the rite; a charitable foundation would be set up for this purpose. People left letters to the dead at tombs, asking for help with family and personal problems.

The kas of the gods were created by an ultimate creator-god. Indeed, like important people, each deity could have several kas. In some texts the sun-god Ra is credited with 14, each with its own name. Some of the temples at Thebes, for a long time Egypt’s ceremonial center, existed to celebrate the divinity of the Pharaoh. One set of scenes, well preserved in the temples of Amenhetep III at Luxor and in the mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari, portrays the Pharaoh’s divine conception, and depict the way the body and the ka of the king came into existence together. The ram-headed creator-god Khnum fashions the twin persons of the future king—his real self and his ka—on a potter’s wheel. In subsequent scenes the Pharaoh’s body and ka, identified by the ka sign above his head, are received by other gods. The temple of Luxor appears to have been designed around an annual Festival of Opet during which the king renewed his divinity through a mystic union between himself and his ka, the latter represented by a separate statue carried in a boat-shaped shrine. At the culmination of the festival the king emerged as foremost of all “the living kas,” a collective term for the unbroken line of past kings. The legitimacy of his rule was in this way placed beyond doubt.

Away from tombs and temples the word “ka” developed a wider usage in the everyday world. In the New Kingdom, the same pious prayers addressed to an Egyptian’s ka appeared on the doorframes of houses. Made from carved and painted limestone, these were intended to last beyond the lifetime of the owner. His ka then became a guardian spirit for his descendants. When corresponding by letter, an Egyptian might politely address or refer to the ka of the recipient to preserve a respectful distance between the two parties. A modern polite translation of “by the ka of Pharaoh” might be “by the good grace of Pharaoh.” By the first millennium BC the term had become simply a synonym for a person’s name when it was “called out” or “remembered” in a religious context.

When, in the profane setting of a banquet scene in a tomb, a servant encourages a woman to drink wine to excess with the words “for your ka,” we seem to have traveled even further, to the colorful phrases of toasts, where exact meaning is lost. In another form of extravagant speech, the oath, an Egyptian could swear “by the ka of” one of the gods, as when a scribe declares of a piece of his own writing: “As the ka of Thoth endures, I did it all by myself.” It is impossible to know if this embellishment impressed readers or listeners more than if he had simply sworn in the name of the god directly.

A striking use of the word is to be found in a tale of shipwreck where the surviving sailor is cast up on the shore of a fertile island whose only inhabitant, a giant and kindly serpent, reveals that the place is only an “island of the ka”—a modern equivalent would be “island of the imagination” or perhaps “magic island.”

 

 

 

 

The Egyptian word for “soul,” “ba,” is denoted by a human-headed bird. The soul was conceived as a living force and often imagined in prayers at the tomb as several different birds in flight (see no. 77, “To come into existence”). The hieroglyph’s human head suggests that this aspect of the inner self most closely resembled the outward, physical person.

The ba was to be nurtured by its owner during a lifetime. “The wise feeds his ba with what endures [that is, wisdom], so that it is happy with him on earth,” said the sage Ptahhetep. “A man should do what profits his ba,” a wise king counseled his son Merikara. The ba’s future existence was tied to the place and style of life of its owner: “So also the ba goes to the place it knows, and strays not from its former path.” The lesson presumably was that the future life of one’s soul was determined by the life one had lived on earth. The loss of one’s ba represented unconsciousness. Sinuhe, the exile pardoned by his king, reacts to his first royal audience: “I was like a man seized by darkness. My ba had gone, my limbs trembled; my heart was not in my body; I did not know life from death.”

One of the most remarkable texts to have survived from ancient Egypt is a dialogue between a man and his soul, written during the Middle Kingdom. The man feels alienated within a friendless, selfish society and longs for the happy release of death. His ba has no sympathy and urges the man to make the best of being alive, contrasting this with the bleakness of death, when the man “will not rise up to see the sun” but will be reduced in time to a status in the afterlife similar to that of poor people who died in the open on the riverbank. In the end the man praises death with such sweet poetry that his ba feels soothed and promises to remain with him after death when they will both dwell together. For a person to experience the afterlife, the ba was essential, as expressed in this prayer for the dead: “Come forth as a living ba, see the sun-disc at dawn, come and go in the sacred cemetery without one’s ba being held back from the necropolis.”

Several of the more powerful gods, such as Ra and Shu, had a soul like the human ba, referred to in a prayer for a commoner: “May your ba alight in heaven behind the ba of Ra; may your shadow walk upon earth.” Gods could actually possess multiple souls. A hymn to Khnum describes him as the ba, or “manifestation,” of several of the great gods, of Ra, Shu, Osiris, and Geb. Certain places of ancient sanctity had “souls”: the cities of Heliopolis and Hermopolis, each centers of religious learning; Pe (Buto in the western delta); and Nekhen (Hierakonpolis in Upper Egypt), which had been prominent before the beginning of the dynasties.

“Ba” used in the plural developed a special meaning; it implied the “manifestation” of a god or of the king, which induced a surge of terror in a guilty person. A woman of Deir el-Medina, accused of having stolen a chisel, swears an oath of denial, invoking the god Amun and the king “whose manifestation [or ”souls“] is worse than death.” She was accused by another woman, who had spontaneously suffered her own “manifestation of god,” evidently a pang of guilt. On other occasions a transgression against a god brought about a wish to atone. A workman named Huy had falsely sworn an oath in the name of the god Thoth in connection with an accusation leveled against him. When Huy subsequently encountered the god’s “manifestation,” he confessed and recorded the moment on a carved stone probably set up in one of the village chapels.

 

 

 

 

Although the Egyptians made no connection between the heart and blood, they linked the heart and the pulse and developed a series of diagnoses for heart conditions. One of the medical papyri summarizes the medical knowledge: