Think Like an Egyptian by Barry Kemp Read Free Book Online Page A

stela beside the river in Nubia, 350 kilometers to the south of the Egyptian frontier at Aswan, at a place called Semna. It stated: “Any son of mine who maintains this boundary that My Majesty has made, he is a son of mine who was born to My Majesty ... He who shall abandon it and not fight for it is indeed no son of mine.” The king set up a statue of himself at the boundary, ”that you might be inspired by it and fight on its behalf.” Three centuries later, in the New Kingdom, the southern boundary stood at more than twice the distance to the south, the result of the renewed Egyptian policy of aggression. On an isolated rock near Kurgus in what is now Sudan, King Tuthmosis I had a scene and a text carved to act as his boundary marker. Tuthmosis III subsequently added a similar one. Yet the Egyptian empire, especially in Palestine and Syria, remained fragile, and the Egyptians often found themselves fighting over territory across which many of their predecessors had already marched.

15.
    PLOUGH
     
     
     
     
    The plough was a Near Eastern invention of the prehistoric periods and is one of the very few truly labor-saving devices that the Egyptians adopted. The wealth and success of ancient Egypt depended to a large extent on the cereal agriculture of the Nile floodplain. The fertile soil and the annual autumn flooding of the land, and its careful management by means of earthen banks and drainage ditches, gave the expectation of abundant harvests. In modern times the damming of the river has allowed farming around the year. Neither the land nor the farmer gets a natural break—whereas in ancient times farming ran through a single annual cycle that began with the inundation, followed by ploughing, planting, and growing, and ending with the harvest and a lengthy period when the land rested. It is now assumed that it was at this relatively slack time that kings would send out demands for extra labor for great building projects, especially the dragging of stone for pyramids.
    One Egyptian concept of the afterlife gave it an agricultural setting, the Field of Iaru, with dead members of the official class facing an eternity of agricultural labor—something that they would have ardently sought to avoid in life. The tomb of the craftsman Sennedjem (c. 1250 BC), for example, shows both him and his wife (in immaculate white garments) ploughing and harvesting. Sennedjem lived at a time when ideas on the relationship between earthly existence and eternity were changing. In earlier periods, the art on tomb walls celebrated the life of landed gentry, set ambiguously in time, implying that this was also the life to come. There was little room left for pictures of gods or halls of judgment. By Sennedjem’s time, however, gods had largely crowded out the scenes of eternity as one long holiday. For the next thousand years, until ancient Egyptian culture faded away, tomb art avoided images of earthly pleasures and sought instead to safeguard the dead against unpredictable spiritual forces. Household or personal goods were no longer buried in the tomb. What remained were amulets and a copy of the Book of the Dead—a set of 189 spells or chapters written on a continuous roll of papyrus, a license to an eternal place among the gods and demons of the afterlife.
    Even in earlier periods, however, behind the cheerful materialism of the tomb scenes, there lay a fear of labor conscription. The king and the various departments of his administration had the right to command people to carry out work such as soldiering or building a pyramid. Egyptians feared that conscription might reappear in the afterlife. Chapter 6 of the Book of the Dead is a spell first encountered around 2000 BC and was in use to the end of Egyptian civilization. It was a spell of substitution. When called upon to do so, a manufactured figurine would stand in for the deceased person when the summons for conscription arrived. Who, in the next world, would issue that summons