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There were three new arrivals today: Vintage Alexandria: Photographs of the City, 1860-1960, Michael Haag, Paris Along the Nile: Architecture in Cairo from the Belle Epoque, Cynthia Myntti, and Behind Closed Eyes: Dreams and Nightmares in Ancient Egypt, Kasia Maria Szpakowska. The first two are the last of a set of books I purchased from The Book Depository — mostly "coffee-table"-esque books, which include the one I'm also reviewing in this post.

The latter, by Kasia Szpakowska, is actually a "rental", in the sense that I just checked it out of my local library. It's been a difficult book to track down: I first found reference to it, and read bits of it, while researching at the State Library of Victoria. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts (and the better efforts of some friends), I've not been able to find a reasonably priced copy — reasonable in the sense of not requiring I pawn a kidney.

Likewise difficult to find has been Lisa Giddy's Egyptian Oases, but I will prevail!

This is more of a "popular history" book, rather akin to a coffee table book rather than the "popular" sense of Barbara Mertz's Red Land, Black Land or Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs. However, that's not to say that the book is totally without historical merit. There is a bibliography ‐ of sorts; it sees rather stunted — but most of the works are in French. This is to be expected, however, as this is the translation of a work originally published in French: Un voyage en Egypte au temps de derniers rois, or, A voyage to Egypt at the time of the Last Kings.

I personally feel that the French title is much more poetic: "cruising" has a certain modern meaning that I feel isn't quite suited to this sense, and while the book certainly covers the trips down the Nile in dahabeah, it isn't the only topic of discussion.

It's a rather whirl-wind tour of Egypt in the early 1900s: we have Thomas Cook's burgeoning empire of world travel and pre-packaged "adventure" (as adventurous as reading about it from your arm-chair — from your Baedecker), the last gasp of colonial Egypt under British rule, as well as the indications of what is to come in the post-colonial era, coupled with gorgeous prose and even more beautiful photographs.

Google provided this review (in French) of the original work; it has some clips and photographs from the book, which, while not being my favourites, certainly show of some of the beautiful snap-shots.

There are a variety of interesting factoids, however, and a lot of scene-setting that, while not necessarily useful for my research project, can at least get tucked away in the back of my head to be recalled at the appropriate time.

One of the first books I read about Egypt, and one of the ones I found the most difficult to finish. Even now, when comparing the book to others on religion that I've read, such as Rosalie David's Religion and magic in Ancient Egypt, and Stephen Quirke's Ancient Egyptian religion, I find that this text is slightly lacking; it jumps around all over the place, introducing deities of a variety of eras and regions in seemingly no logical order — the chapter headings include such terms as the "early period", "the New Kingdom", "of the Early Period and of the New Kingdom'", and then finally the "Late Period", "Hellenistic" and "European".

This, however, is not a fault of the author or indeed, even of the translator. The confusion itself stems from the fact, an oft-repeated one, that Egyptian religion was itself confusing and difficult to properly classify and describe in a coherent, cohesive manner.

Looking back at the text now, with another two years worth of research under my belt, I find that it is much easier to understand, much easier to follow. Just as I found it easier to know exactly what authors were referring to when they mentioned stories and literature in an off-hand way, after having slogged through The Literature of Ancient Egypt, I now find the off-hand references and comments that underpin Erman's work to be informative rather than infuriating.

The chapter titled "Magic" starts with a fascinating paragraph:

Magic is a barbarous offshoot of religion, and is an attempt to influence the powers that preside over the destiny of mankind. It is not difficult to see how the belief in such a possibility could arise. On one occasion it appears that a prayer has been heard by the deity, on another it is apparently ignored; thus the idea naturally arises that the words which the prayer was uttered on the first occasion mus have been specially acceptable to the god.

The rest of the chapter is filled with Erman's own, clouded opinion of magic:

[...] by the side of the noble plant of religion there flourishes this fantastic weed of magic. With nations of limited understanding it completely stifles religion and there ensues a barbarism, where the magical fetish is the supreme object, and where the sorcerer with his hocus-pocus takes the place of the priest.

Erman is thus prejudiced by his own beliefs. He personally feels that magic is a useless thing. In contrast to religion, which has a "noble" purpose, magic is the selfish desire to modify one's world without the assistance of the divine.

I think Barbara Mertz best summed this up in her own book, "Red Land, Black Land", which has an extremely insightful section on magic and religion. It certainly changed the way I thought about it, and it certainly changed the way I read other people's thoughts about it:

The sophisticated reader may think he accepts man’s faith in magic. He probably does not. This is one of the great problems facing historians, archaeologists, and ethnologists—the difficulty of really accepting a theorem which is, we like to think, so alien to our own point of view. Of course, it is impossible to get inside another man or woman’s skin and think the way they do. When we interpret a culture as different from our own as that of ancient Egypt, we are translating. We cannot even break down the facets of culture into chapters suitable for a book without violating the essential unity of the lives of these other people; and everything we say about them is said in our words, each of which has a backlog of associations and meanings which are not those of the culture in question. We cannot solve this problem, we can only remember, constantly, that we are translating, and that something is always lost in translation.
I have accused my sophisticated reader of not really believing that which he thinks he does believe. I will prove my point by citing an example.

There once appeared, in a learned Egyptological journal, an article by a learned Egyptologist on the harem conspiracy under Ramses III of the Nineteenth Dynasty. The plot itself was the sort of thing one expects from an irregular institution like a harem: one of the ladies had decided that her son ought to be the next king instead of the legitimate heir. In order to insure this desirable goal it was necessary for the old king, Ramses III, to be sent to join his father the Sun somewhat ahead of schedule. The lady succeeded in interesting a number of important officials in her project, but it failed in at least one of its aims. Owing to the ambiguity of the official record, we do not know whether Ramses III actually was murdered by the conspirators or not; but the legitimate crown prince, later Ramses IV, discovered the plot in time to save his throne and his own neck. The plotters were tried and executed, except for a few who were only deprived of their ears and noses, and a few others—perhaps the most highly placed—who were "allowed" to commit suicide.

One passage in the text is particularly interesting. In order to seize power and reach the inner precincts of the palace, the conspirators had made writings 'for enchanting and for confusing…and [they] began to make people of wax so that they could be taken inside" (the palace or the harem itself).

The most reasonable interpretation of this passage is that the plotters used magic. The waxen images are magicians' props, known from all over the world. The written spells controlled the will of the loyal guards and courtiers who protected the king.

This is the accepted explanation. However, the author of the article I mentioned does not believe that the plotters used magic at all. His counterarguments deal with the passage I have quoted, and necessitate new and hitherto unknown translations of such words as "enchanting" and "gods." Egyptian is a good language for this sort of argument, because its vocabulary is still not completely fixed; new meanings do turn up, now and then, for known words. As for the significant phrase “made out of wax,” the author wants to make it a figure of speech, not a figure of magic. Anyone who has ever studied a foreign language has probably noticed the infuriating propensity of prepositions in other tongues to mean almost anything. The preposition we translate "out of" can, by some stretching, be made to mean "into"! Things which are made "into wax" are made malleable, susceptible to influence.

These arguments are plausible, although the figure of speech is an English idiom rather than one the Egyptians would have used. But the philologist who tampers with established vocabulary must have motives purer than Caesar’s wife. He cannot invent new meanings in order to support a preconceived theory. The author of the article states his theory quite candidly: "The conspirators were in too risky a situation to entrust the outcome of their plot to magical procedures."

The reader can see, I am sure, the point of this discussion. The author of the article on the harem conspiracy does not "believe" that the Egyptians believed in magic. He "knows" that they did; Egyptian culture is full of examples. But when he comes right down to a specific case, one in which he would certainly not have trusted to magic, he wants to give his friends the Egyptians credit for an equally practical (another loaded word) approach.

I have gone into this at some length, not to pick the bones of Scholar X, but to show that if he can commit such a basic blunder, the rest of us had better beware of complacency. Of course, it was in just such a risky situation that the Egyptians would have used magic.

Magic was not a game, or the last resort of the incompetent. It was a tool—possibly the most important tool of all.

The emphasis in this quote is mine. I think it adequately and expertly sums up what Erman's problem is: he thinks magic is a cheap, abhorrent, prone to failure — any of these things, or perhaps all of these things — and thus cannot objectively talk about it without feeling the need to justify it, and himself, before doing so. He creates an artificial dichotomy between magic and religion, implying that the former grew out of the latter, then later, grew to eclipse it:

Here, we have further proof that at this period of the New Kingdom superstition grew and flourished; it is no wonder that eventually everything in Egypt was overshadowed by its luxuriant growth.

This is certainly a failing. Egyptian religion, culture, history, science, art, and, yes, magic, needs to be treated in a "holistic" manner. Each influenced the other. Each was intricately involved in the growth of the other; without religion, there would be no magic, but indeed, without magic, there would be no religion. Likewise, without religion, Egyptian culture would be nothing like what we think we know of it now.

That isn't to say that Erman's book isn't interesting. It gives a unique perspective on Egyptian culture and religion: the perspective of people who lived in the early 20th century, the Egyptologists who formed the basis of modern Egyptology and archaeology. However, the works themselves, as seminal and important as they once were, should be treated with some caution — the same caution that any modern text should be treated with, be it an untested or unverified report, or something lauded by all.

Erman adequately describes the state of modern Egyptology by quoting Asclepius:

But even the mystics could not deceive themselves into thinking that any power in the world could re-establish the supremacy of these gods. They knew that they were the last of the pagans, and also that sacred Egypt itself, the copy of the heavens . . . the temple of the assembled universe, henceforth belonged to the Christians.

It is not without sympathy that we read the mournful prophecy which echoes down to us from among their company. A time will come when it will appear as though it were for naught that the Egyptians piously and sedulously worshipped the godhead . . . for the godhead will return from earth to heaven, and Egypt will be left desolate, and the land which was the abode of religion will no longer shelter the gods . . . Oh Egypt, Egypt, of thy religion only fables will survive, which will appear incredible to later races, and words only will remain upon the stones which record thy pious deeds.

Yes, only fables survive. But which fable to believe?

Despite the rather damp premise ("Ha ha"), this book was an extremely fascinating and fast-paced read. So many books about history could descend into "And in eighteen-sixty-one so and so did such and such, while in eighteen-sixty-two, so and so did something else". While there are sections of the book that purely deal with dates and events, these are merely the framework for a much larger, much more fleshed out story of Egypt's recent past.

The recent social revolution within Egypt has certainly brought it back to the fore-front of people's minds. Today, when one imagines Cairo, one imagines slums, poverty, the Pyramids, and thousands of years of history. It's easy to think, "Oh, how far they have fallen", but this work really defines that descent as not so much a fall, but vaguely sauntering downwards. Over centuries, Egypt has flourished, and then diminished, and then flourished again, only to diminish further. The history of Ancient Egypt itself is again defined by periods of intense, heightened activity, followed by periods of rapid social decay.

Apparently prophesied by the sage Neferty, the ancient literature describes the "future" of the nation:

Behold, nobles no longer guide this land,
And what is done is such as should not be done.
The day dawns amidst falsehood,
And the land is totally ravaged.
Not a trace remains—not even a fingernail—due to its (evil) fate.

It's ironic how these ancient words of "prophecy" (though apparently written after the events described) are fulfilled in Egypt's recent history. Trevor Mostyn sets the scene of Egypt in the late 1800s, a nation where nobles control the fates of many, where there is prosperity and success, though at the cost of the lives and wellbeing of those fellah.

The scene, however, is not the drawing point of this book. From the pages leap figures out of history: Isma'il Pasha, whose despotic and crazed attempts to reproduce in Egypt the "heights" of European society lasted for a few decades before descending into the "Age of Revolution", is certainly the biggest figure of them all, but by no means the most interesting. Eugenie, Empress of France, is a formidable figure in the early decades, as is Queen Victoria (who refused to attend the opening of the Suez), but later, familiar names such as T. E. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh (both of them), Trollope.

"The Age of Hedonism" is certainly an apt subtitle: the figures described are notable more for their pleasures and the lengths with which they went in pursuit of them than any military, political or financial conquests that they might have made. It's easy to categorise the early, non-European figures as "cruel", "brutal", or even "barbaric", but later depictions of Europeans — English, French, Italian — demonstrate a trend of barbarism which resulted in what could adequately be described as "The Age of Revolution".

From beneath the heel of the British colonial rule, from beneath the heel of the Ottoman Empire, the heel of French colonialism and the conquests of the Bonapartes, to the financiers that ultimately controlled all of them, Egypt revolted and emerged as the nation that it was until recently; from the "Age of Revolution", like so many Arab nations in recent history, came the "Age of Despotism".

However, as Trevor Mostyn so excellently explains, history has a way of repeating itself: from oppression comes revolution, and the Arab Spring certainly mimicks the earlier revolutions of Egypt — those that succeeded, and those that did not.

While it might be nice to bemoan the loss of such a great nation — to bemoan the loss of the great architecture, art and society — it is easier to focus on what is left behind: an amazing country that has seen huge growth in recent decades, whose past stretches from the shady depths of antiquity through until today. Let's hope that its future is as fascinating as its past.

A new arrival, and a review!

Review:

The book starts with an interesting premise: disregard everything we know about Egypt, as it has been derived from modern and recent Egyptological study. Instead, consider Egypt as it was perceived in the past: to the Greeks, via Herodotus, the Romans, via their love of pyramids and obelisks (especially the Pyramid of Cestius), the Arabs, through the secret lore of "alchemy" as dictated by Hermes Trismegistus, through to the more recent Romantics, Theosophists, Victorian Spiritualists (such as Madame Blavatsky and "Isis Unveiled").

At the core of this "secret lore" is the concept of the Hermetic: from Hermes Trismegistus we get this term. It might be more commonly used to denote something that is air-tight ("hermetically sealed"), but its original uses as an adjective suggest esoterica, the occult, and alchemy. A conflation of the Egyptian Thoth and the Greek Hermes, this "historical figure" was both a god and the "founder" of hermetism. For some, he was revered as the teacher of Jesus, the one who provided him with the capacity to perform miracles.

From a fundamentalist view-point, this very concept seems extremely strange. Biblically, Jesus derived power from God. Why, then, would he require tutelage from a strange figure? Indeed, one that would not really come of age until several centuries after the apparent death of Christ. The motivation behind all of these, and later claims, with different prophets and religious figures, seems to be the intent to justify the study of alchemy, magic and the occult within a Christian sense.

Erik Hornung's book is vast for being such a slender tome — a little over 200 pages. It covers thousands of years of history and esoterica, hardly ever judging (apart from pointing out the inconsistencies within Afrocentrism, and occasionally lambasting the vast quantity of Budge reprints), but always providing a fascinating insight.

The connections drawn between the so called "esoteric" Egypt and the history of Western esoterica are occasionally hazy, but this is simply a side-effect of the hazy nature of esoterica, rather than symptomatic of doubt in regards to these connections. It is a short book, and while it provides an interesting bibliography, it's not possible to spend more than a few sentences on some sections.

This, I found slightly disappointing. Some of the most interesting comments are relegated to, at best, a paragraph of explanation. The barest details are not expounded upon with specific citations in the bibliography, but to a wide group of texts in a variety of languages. Unfortunately, the cited works are equally shared between English, French, and German. It seems to be one of the main curses of Egyptology: the need to speak three major languages, plus read Egyptian, dashes of Greek and Latin.

Hornung's prose, however, is engaging. One Amazon.com reviewer considered the work difficult to follow. I had no such trouble, managing to finish it through about four one-hour sessions. I'm having more difficulty finishing Vivian's Western Desert than this, as, while it has very light prose, it is extremely dense. However, I've a history with this genre, though from a fictional stand-point: Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco, is very similar in its treatise sections on esoterica, though certainly its intent and execution are vastly different.

There are a number of interesting quotes and comments I feel I could use. I will eventually get around to typing them up, rereading the sections that I found interesting, as well as using them as a jumping-point to discover more fun and interesting facts!

For instance, I'd love to find a copy of Helen Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled, discussed several times in this work, and also in Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. After all, as is often quoted by theosophists, occultists and by Blavatsky herself, Isis is:

"I am that which is. I am all that is, that was, and will be. No mortal man has lifted my veil."

My new arrival is Vintage Egypt: Cruising the Nile in the Golden Age of Travel, by Alain Blottiere. For being a paperback "coffee table"-esque book, it is extremely dense with photographs that, on first skim, are utterly gorgeous and totally inspiring.

Current Mood: tired

While I'm reading books, I have a tendency to dog-ear the pages that have interesting facts on them. If I have a pencil with me, I usually put a little star next to the paragraph (or paragraphs) that I think are relevant, with the intent on typing up the quote at a later date. I've been dog-earing pages in a variety of books for a long time, but I've only gotten around to typing up the quotes from a couple of titles.

( Here are the quotations... )

All the typing errors are my own!

Current Mood: cold

Alphabetically seems to be the best place to start in my list: the first book listed was one of the first books that I bought, but one of the ones that I've only completely read recently. Bangles references aside, the book is quite good. It would certainly come under the heading of a "popular history": it has a "note on sources" and an index, but no bibliography or reference works cited directly. However, this is a minor shortcoming, although citations for specific sections would be extremely useful for further research.

Presented as a book in 100 "chapters", where each chapter discusses a specific hieroglyph in its ideographical sense, it is an interesting introduction to the lives of the ancient Egyptians. It covers history, society, and religion. As a number of authors that I've recently read have put it, people seem to think that the Egyptians were obsessed with death: they weren't. That so much of the corpus of Egyptology is about death ("The Book of the Dead", the Valley of the (dead) Kings, the Tombs, the Pyramids) is not the reflections of a society obsessed with death, but simply that historical record is never an objective viewpoint. I'm sure that if the internet were the only thing to survive in our modern age, there would be an overwhelming perception that we were, and are, completely obsessed with sex and pornography.

Barry Kemp does not become weighed down by any of this. Each hieroglyph is given at least a page, while some of the complex concepts are given four or more. There is no easily discerned order to these hieroglyphs. Kemp states that he has attempted to emulate the ancient scholar Amenemope in ordering by association, starting with things in the visible world and then moving out from there.

As such, an animal theme could be perceived starting from number 19, the bull. It's shortly followed by the pig and the seth-animal. Following this is the symbol for the colour red -- a flamingo -- and then a sparrow. The next in line is good, which, at least from the table of contents, seems totally out of context. When examining sparrow, however, one discovers that it was often used to write 'good', 'small', 'empty', 'narrow', 'to be ill', and so on.

Serpents are followed by houses: did they build houses to escape the dangers of serpents? The text itself gives an interesting example of where snakes themselves (in the form of clay uraei) were used as charms against evil. From the house, we move to furnishings and then, with a quick detour for the cat, perhaps found indoors as a pet, onto fire and wick. These lead to city and wall, and those in turn to mound, west, and cemetery.

Each chapter provides an interesting look into that part of Egyptian life. Each chapter is discrete, though some, such as 'sparrow' (bad) and good (heart and windpipe), are related and are best read in that order. The book ends by slowly approaching the divine: balance and cloth are followed by purity (the word for priest being the similar to the word for pure), which is followed by divinity, sacred and festival. Statue would seem out of place until one considers statues of the gods. Wonder ties in with offering place, which likewise ties in with the concept of divine protection. Finally, we come to wedjat, they eye of well-being:

The hieroglyph depicts the eye of Horus (draw as a human eye) adorned by the plumage that grows below the eye of a falcon. It writes the word wedjat, which is derived from a common word, 'to be whole', 'sound' or 'prosperous'. The symbol promoted wellbeing in ancient Egypt, for the living and the dead. The shape was a popular amulet made in faience (the Egyptian blue-glazed compound) or stone, and strung on necklaces or placed among the spread of amulets wrapped into mummies.

Certainly a recognisable symbol to many people, it seems an adequate place to leave this post. However, after discussing the mathematical significance of the eye of Horus, Kemp then goes to say:

We might imagine that, viewed in this way, the idea of wholeness would be best served if all the fractions when added together came to one. But their total is actually ⁶³/₆₄. Egyptian thinking, which now seems so innocent to us, celebrated the world in all its incompleteness and inexplicable variety.

I think this paragraph adequately sums up the general feel I have achieved after two years of on-and-off research: Egyptian life -- culture, history, religion -- was extremely complex and, in a lot of instances, contradictory. In religion, Seth is a god of desert, chaos and storms. He kills his brother and dismembers the body, leave the parts scattered across Egypt, and then attempts to usurp his nephew's authority. Defeated, he does not become an enemy or a devil, but stands at the helm of Ra's sun barque and defeats the serpent Apep during the nightly crossing of the Otherworld.

These two seemingly contradictory roles are, by some authors I have read, described as one god taking on the roles of another, or even in some cases a form of syncretism with foreign gods. Regardless of the apparently conflicting roles of both offender and defender, however, Seth was later worshipped to the point of becoming the primary god of the 19th dynasty, and from whom Seti I took his nomen.

Thinking in contradictions is certainly difficult, but it would seem to be better not to take that stand-point. They are not contradictions, but merely different facets of an immensely complex universe. Esoteric doctrine of "many ways" seems relevant, especially considering my most recent purchase has been The Secret Lore of Egypt, by Erik Hornung.

This list contains most of the books that I have on Ancient Egypt. Some of them I've read completely, some of them I've read multiple times, while others I'm in the middle of reading or haven't yet started. It's my intent to read all of them at least once before September 1st, 2011.

In order to collate my thoughts, I'm going to write a short review of each book. I'm going to include quotes from some books (some copious amounts of quotes, but hopefully the copyright police won't came after me!) as well as notes of interesting comments and thoughts.

Hopefully, by the end of it all, I'll have enough concrete knowledge to finish my project! Or at least, not feel totally humiliated by my complete lack of knowledge on all things Egyptian.

Legend: In progress Read Unread/Reference