Ancient Egyptian treatment of the body suggests a general concern to keep the human being whole as a separate unit. Here, the contrast with other periods and practices can clarify what is distinctive here. In some earlier burials of 40003000 BC, sometimes, body parts are absent, replaced with animal body parts or pottery vases (Wengrow 2006, 118). In perhaps the most striking example, the place of the head is taken by an ostrich egg, finely incised with animal figures. Substitution of nonhuman material for body parts in burial was never common, and it may not occur after 3000 Bc. For Egypt 3000-525 Bc, although patterns of burial do vary greatly (Chapter 7), the body seems mostly an ideal unit to be preserved whole. Some slight confirmation comes from the written evidence: in one literary composition, known from a single papyrus of about 1550 BC, a wise man objects when a king wishes to experiment on a living man, being held in captivity, “not to people!” (Papyrus Westcar, Lichtheim 1973, 219). At the other end of the time range, in the late first millennium BC, another attitude to the human body may be at work, when cremation was introduced into Egypt by settlers from Greece. As with the predynastic Egyptian evidence, the difference with ancient Egyptian practice may be significant, indicating for the periods between prehistory and Hellenism an extreme anxiety to preserve the whole physical body (Figure 2.4).
Certain bodily conditions, including contagious diseases, would have brought tangible or visible impact on the lives of others and their response. For ancient Egypt, there is a range of limited evidence for different social treatment of individuals with such conditions (Fischer-Elfert 2005). From 1500 to 525 BC survive a great number of votive stelae from offering places, small inscribed stones with depictions of one or more individuals, offerings, and deities. Out of perhaps over a thousand, a single votive stela of 1350 BC shows a regular offering scene, only that here the
Figure 2.4 Ostrich egg, incised with drawing of two deer and lain in place of the head, in tomb 1480, Naqada: from the 1894-1895 excavations directed by W. Petrie, now Ashmolean Museum 1895.990. Drawing © Wolfram Grajetzki.
Principal figure is a man with one shriveled leg, supporting himself on a walking stick. His condition has been identified by modern medics as symptom of polio, and his stela seems to imply that his condition was no bar to integration into society (Figure 2.5).
Conditions such as epilepsy could present other challenges to social order on another unpredictable timescale. From written sources, Hans-Werner Fischer-Elfert has identified a case where seizures apparently prevent a man from helping to carry an image in procession at festivals (at Waset, 1250 Bc); he has to be excluded from this important communal activity, but seems not to suffer any other negative effect in social life. Besides congenital conditions (where physical capability is different from birth), Fischer-Elfert considers the effect of bodily change during adult life, where a person would no longer be able to perform their social tasks, either
Figure 2.5 Limestone stela from Akhetaten, with depiction of a man named Reme, with leg shriveled, perhaps by polio, at a table of offerings, together with two companions identified in the inscriptions as his wife Timia and “her son" ptahemheb. About 1350 bc. Now in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. Drawing © Wolfram Grajetzki.
Temporarily or permanently and either by physical inability, as in ageing or injury, or by cultural prohibition. If visible wholeness was required to enter the most sacred spaces, someone with symptoms of skin loss or change might be forced from office. A literary letter (from Hiba, 900-700 Bc) describes the repeated expulsion of a man who served in a local temple; from his lament, his exile to desert oases, and his extreme emphasis on wishing good health for the friend or patron receiving the letter, the man might be a temple staff member forced from office after developing a contagious skin condition such as leprosy. The literary sources help to raise questions for archaeological recording on future excavation of cemeteries, our most direct physical encounter with past lives.
World History
