In the countryside, archaeology cannot yet fill in the picture of fauna and flora for each period. The idyll depicted for the afterlife in offering chapels is the result of careful selection, which either conjures threats only in order to overcome them or omits unpleasant features altogether. The presence of biting insects and flies is missing in these chapel scenes, along with common Saharan river enemies such as scorpions and venomous snakes; these have to be sought in the writings for health, in jewelry, or in the iconography of deities. Many chapel scenes show a crocodile lurking near herdsmen and animals as they ford a waterway. Here, the scene of threat becomes a guarantee of life, through a protective gesture against the crocodile, and hieroglyphic inscriptions spelling out terms of protection (Dominicus 1994) (Figure 6.1).
In ancient town life, questions of health become visible in material strategies to promote hygiene. In the nineteenth-century BC new town at Lahun, main streets had central drainage channels, but no other clear system for removing waste. For domestic hygiene at fourteenth-century BC Akhetaten, richer houses had latrines with seat rims of wood or stone (Crocker 1985, 61-62). Bathrooms had no visible sign of special protection in the form of images, as might have been appropriate at purity-dirt boundaries; if daily hygiene was accompanied by ritual words or gestures of protection, these do not materialize in the sites. Both sites include prominent facilities for washing, in part perhaps ensured for ritual cleanliness (Chapter 3).
Figure 6.1 Men in a boat make a protective gesture against the crocodile at the ford, as a calf turns back to the cow at the front of their herd. Limestone wall relief in a chapel over the tomb of the high official Ankhmahor, cemeteries of Mennefer, about 2350 BC. Drawing © Wolfram Grajetzki after J. Capart, Une rue de tombeaux a Saqqarah 2. Vromant, Brussels, pl.28.
Urbanization creates particular and continual, uphill struggles to sustain health. At Lahun, the schematic excavation report refers to rat holes blocked in every room, and heaps of discarded pottery outside the house of the mayor yielded perhaps the only rattrap so far identified from Egypt (Drummond, Janssen, and Janssen 1990). Rats are often held responsible for spreading disease in human settlements, and from the mid-second millennium, writings refer to a disease called that of the Asiatics, sometimes identified as plague (Goedicke 1984). Perhaps not coincidentally, then, by the mid-second millennium BC, the cat was introduced into domestic life. at the divine level, the cat provided an image of triumph over evil in the name of the creator sun-god as the great tomcat, depicted knifing the chaos-serpent 'aapep (Leitz 1994, 99-101). Other domesticated animals might have brought more problems into the town: pigs at Akhetaten, sheep and goats at Abu, and possibly cattle and donkeys would all add to the waste, if not on a modern scale, still enough to threaten human health.
World History
