Archive for the ‘Ancient Egypt’ Category
By: The Scribe on October, 2007
The Eye of Horus is a symbol from ancient Egypt, typically associated with protection and royal power from the Egyptian deities Ra and Horus. The Egyptian word for the symbol was ‘wadjet’, which sprung from its early associations with one of Egypt’s earliest deities, Wadjet. Over time, Wadjet the goddess was assimilated into the personas of other Egyptian goddesses, including Hathor, Bast, and Mut.
As Wadjet’s symbol, the Eye was said to see everything – which may be where the first concept of a supernatural ‘all-seeing eye’ arose – however, as Wadjet’s importance in the Egyptian pantheon diminished, the Eye began to be frequently represented as a trait of the goddess
Hathor.
In Egyptian mythology, Hathor was the wife of the god Ra, and became the mother of the god Horus. As the story goes, one of Horus’ eyes was damaged when he fought with his uncle Set, who had murdered the god Osiris and tried to seize the Egyptian throne. As a result, Horus’ eye, its injury, and eventual restoration caused the Eye of Horus symbol to become an important image in representing the concept of renewal and rebirth after death.
Horus himself was an Egyptian sky god, depicted most often as a falcon. The Eye of Horus is thus shaped much like a peregrine falcon’s eye and markings, including a ‘teardrop’ mark that is often found under the bird’s eye. Since the ancient Egyptians believed that the Eye of Horus was powerful enough to assist an individual in his rebirth after death, amulets and images of the Eye were often included in burial wrappings – in fact, an Eye of Horus was found under the twelfth layer of wrappings on the mummy of King Tutankhamun.
In ancient Egyptian mathematics during the Old Kingdom, the Eye of Horus could also represent a rounded off number one, but would later shift in meaning as the Egyptians developed a higher understanding of complex math.
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By: The Scribe on September, 2007
For anyone who is even vaguely familiar with Egyptian hieroglyphs, it’s fairly clear to see that the writing process in ancient Egypt was a little more laborious and involved than the effort it takes to write down words today using the
Latin alphabet. In fact, writing with hieroglyphs was such a time-consuming process that even the ancient Egyptians got tired of how long it took to get a short note down… and much in the same way that a person today might take notes using standard shorthand notation, ancient Egypt had its own “short-hand” form of hieroglyphs! This was known as the
hieratic script.
The hieratic writing system was developed alongside the hieroglyphic system, essentially for the purpose of allowing scribes to write information down quickly, without resorting to the laborious process of writing and drawing hieroglyphs. It is important to note, however, that hieratic is not a derivative of hieroglyphic writing – they were simply scripts developed in parallel, each for their own specific purpose.
The earliest appearance of hieratic came around 3200 BC, and was used for a variety of purposes: legal texts, personal letters, administrative documents, historical accounts, literary writings, medical texts, mathematical theorem, and also religious documents. In fact, when the usage of the more popularly known hieroglyphs and the lesser known hieratic scripts are compared – it isn’t hard to see that hieratic was actually a far more important type of writing than hieroglyphs, since hieratic was used on a daily basis for everyday living.
Hieratic was also the first writing system that students would learn when they entered into an educational program in ancient Egypt, and there are plenty of surviving examples of students’ practice texts from thousands of years ago. It was typically written with ink and a reed brush onto papyrus, stone, wood, or shards of ostraca. On occasion, hieratic would be used to write a religious text onto the linens of someone being mummified.
Unlike hieroglyphs, hieratic was always written from right to left in horizontal lines, both so that the scribe’s hand would not smudge what he had just written, as well as to increase writing speed. However, even with the hieratic serving as a shorthand form of writing, there were two variations on the script – a relaxed, businesslike form that was used for administrative documents, and an uncial bookhand-form that was used for more important literary, religious, or scientific texts. Comparatively, it would be like English writers using cursive writing for important documents, and using printed letters for everything else.
In addition, personal letters had their own form of shorthand hieratic, using a highly cursive and stylized version of the script – in these texts, there are plenty of abbreviated words and phrases, which is not unusual to find in any modern language today! By 200 AD, hieratic had been demoted to use primarily for religious texts, with a new non-hieroglyphic form of writing called demotic taking its place.
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By: The Scribe on September, 2007
As they excavated a burial chamber in Luxor, the group of archaeologists who worked there hoped with all their might that they would discover a new mummy inside this tomb. When they finally made it inside the chamber, they found seven coffins, which they hoped would contain the carefully wrapped mummies of Egypt’s royal queens, or perhaps even the mother of Tutankhamun himself!
In a public display that seems to characterize today’s Egyptian finds, both researchers and local/international media were invited to watch the opening of the last coffin as it sat in its chamber, only a few steps away from Tutankhamun’s own ancient tomb. With bated breath, the archaeologists opened the final coffin, and found…
flowers?
Indeed, instead of simply finding a body wrapped in its burial shroud, the coffin contained a perfectly preserved garland of flowers, estimated to be at least 3,000 years old. According to some of the team who had worked on excavating the tomb, the find was better than a mummy – after all, there is absolutely nothing like it in any museum in the world.
While there are plenty of drawings of flowers on Egyptian artifacts and documents, nothing like the garland has ever been found, not to mention that no one had ever even considered something so fragile would survive for three thousand years. Looking back at Egyptian art, it isn’t too difficult to see that there are many images of members of the Egyptian royal family wearing garlands of flowers, many of which were entwined with strips of gold, around their shoulders – and that they wore these golden garlands both in life and death.
At only five meters away from the tomb of Tutankhamun, there are still plenty of theories as to whom it was that this new tomb belonged. However for now, this ancient flowery necklace is enough to keep researchers busy, as they continue to draw links between what was depicted in Egyptian art and the Egyptians’ real-life ancient practices.
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Tomorrow: Ancient beehives
By: The Scribe on August, 2007
Appearing most often in burial scenes, the tekenu was a mysterious figure that shows up on tomb paintings and funerary texts – though who he is or why he appears remains unknown. The tekenu seems to be the figure or shape of a man, and is shrouded in either a bag, animal hides, or a sack that is placed on its own sledge in the midst of a funeral procession.
One theory suggests that this shrouded figure was actually a sack of spare body parts left over from the mummification process, since it was pulled alongside the canopic jars and sarcophagus containing the mummified corpse. If this is the case, the images of the tekenu where he has a face must mean that there was a mask or a false head placed at the “neck” of the sack, causing the tekenu to appear as if it was a real person. It may have also simply served as an image of the deceased individual himself.
Other suggestions have been made that try to link the tekenu to possible human sacrifice in ancient Egyptian history. One oft-cited piece of evidence for this comes from an inscription found on the Tomb of Rekhmire, which reads: “Causing to come to the god Re as a resting tekenu to calm the lake of Khepri.” The thought is that this may be a remnant from a time when humans were killed and thrown into a lake to appease certain gods – however, there is no additional evidence for this, nor for the tekenu ever having been a human sacrifice.
In fact, in the Tomb of Mentuherkhepshef (try saying that five times fast) from the 18th dynasty, there is a man lying on a sledge, just like the tekenu, but unshrouded. In another scene from the Tomb of Rekhmire, the tekenu is removed from his sledge and placed on a chair inside a tomb, placed with its head poking out of the bag. In the scene following this, the same man is sitting upright on the chair, wearing a shroud wrap but also clearly supposed to be alive.
Egyptologist Greg Reeder has interpreted this series of images as finally revealing who and what the tekenu was. Reeder’s theory is that this was a Sem priest who initially went into a trance at the beginning of the funeral procession, playing the role of a shaman who “visited the deceased in the otherworld… as the tekenu he is transported to the tomb wrapped in a shroud to help facilitate his ‘death’ so that he can be transported to the other world”.*
The priest’s visit to the spirit world was supposed to give him powers that subsequently enabled him to perform the traditional ‘Opening of the Mouth’ ceremony that was held during all burial rituals. Essentially, the role of tekenu was then to go through a state of metamorphosis from the tekenu to Sem – a transition from death to life.
Of course, there are currently no other texts that might support this interpretation… but this is the most plausible theory thus far.
*Greg Reeder, “A Rite of Passage: The Enigmatic Tekenu in Ancient Egyptian Funerary Ritual”, KMT: A Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt 5 (1994).
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