Communicating with other worlds might extend to the imagery of sleep. The papyri of the accountant in the village of artists (see earlier section “Who Owned Healing Papyri?”) include the only known book of dream interpretations. In this manual, interpretations may work by analogy, similar sounds in words, or associations of ideas. Rare second-millennium BC incantations against bad dreams are known, sometimes with instruction for recital over clay figurines of rearing cobras, as known from late second-millennium BC sites (Szpakowska 2003a). The dream might be spontaneous, but there is limited evidence for the practice of incubation or sleeping in a sacred place in order to obtain a dream that might then need to be interpreted. From the family of the book-owning accountant, one man declares on a votive stela to Mut “I have spent the night in your forecourt.” Induced dreams may also have been part of the process involving the letters to the dead; Merirtyfy states that he slept in order to see his dead wife (Vernus 1986). According to one intriguing written record from the village of artists, the draftsman Merysekhmet may have spent time in his chapel there, before his deity, as part of a healing process after he fell sick; centuries later, as in ancient Greek practice, patients would rest or sleep in sacred precincts to obtain dreams (Fischer-Elfert 2011).
Practices of communicating with divine forces may also leave material traces other than writing. Earlier archaeologists sometimes confidently identified obscure items in burial equipment as toys or material for games. Fourth-millennium BC
Figure 6.9 Divination equipment, game set, or both? Ivory rods and ball, from a burial in the cemeteries of Semenuhor, (Kafr Turki), about 3000 bc, now Petrie Museum UC15485. F. Petrie, Tarkhan I and Memphis V. British School of Archaeology in Egypt, London, pl.12.
Balls and square-section rods might be reconstructed as miniature croquet sets, in keeping with the social and cultural background of early twentieth-century excavation directors (Petrie 1896). While they might well have served as pieces for some less European-looking game, they might also be considered instead as divining materials. around 3000 bc, one burial at Semenuhor/Kafr Turki was provided with two sets of bone rods, one with a square section and one with a circular section (Petrie 1913, pl.12); these could be good materials for a game, as well as for divining. Perhaps it is unrealistic to try disentangling the two spheres of intricate games and divination practices (Flanagan 2009, 67-69). All games of chance automatically invoke destiny and may lead to, or emerge out of, techniques for consulting materially the powers that may reveal or control aspects of life. In an illustration for one of the most widely copied compositions for obtaining eternal life, from 1300 bc onward, the deceased man and woman are at a table playing the board game named in Egyptian senet (Piccione 1994). As in Persian, Arab world, and European imagery of chess, games both of skill and chance may simultaneously evoke idylls of leisure and the forces of destiny, where life and afterlife are indivisible (Figure 6.9)
World History
