Careful excavation of settlements has revealed how animals could share living space with humans, breaking down our division between rural farming environment and urban life in at least some townscapes (see section “Were All Creatures
Held Sacred at Abu?”). Yet cemetery patterns show only occasional burials of animals among humans, confirming written evidence for a strong distinction between remetj, “people,” and other creatures. Rare exceptions to this pattern include the sarcophagus of a cat and mummified bodies of dogs. In cemeteries associated with kingship, mummified bodies of monkeys and even a gazelle are recorded. The practice of assigning personal names to individuals may also help to reveal lines of demarcation between some creatures and others. In addition to humans and deities (netjeru), personal names are found for dogs and, more rarely, cattle; a few instances are found where a cat is named, but the name is always cat. This written evidence for naming practice does not map neatly onto the range of pictorial evidence for pets; anonymous monkeys as well as named dogs are found from third-and second-millennium depictions (Figure 2.3).
For the king, there are also depictions of accompanying lion, with name. However, the king seems to be a separate category of being: from 3000 to 1100 bc, burials of kings are out of all proportion to others, and second-millennium BC word lists separate nesyu, “kings,” from netjeru, “deities,” and remetj, “people” (Gardiner 1947). These and other writings divide people into three groups, apparently on the principle of concentric circles around the king: an innermost circle of bodyguard and closest courtiers is called the henmemet, written with sun disk and rays, and so often translated sun people; the middle circle, still close to the king, is p'at, often translated nobility or elite; and the rest of humanity is rekhyt, often translated populace. Animals and plants are absent from this section of word lists, but the prominence of animals and birds in the iconography of deities warns us against assuming the separation of human from animal, just on the basis of that one genre of writing.
From about 1950 bc, one funerary composition on the divine personification, Grain, categorizes living beings according to their sustenance or place of sustenance. The words are set in the mouth of Shu, the divine force of the light and air between sun and created world:
Falcons live on birds,
Jackals on trails,
Swine on rocky ground,
Hippopotami on marshes, people on Grain,
Crocodiles on fish,
Fish on the waters, that are from the Nile Flood,
As commanded by Atum.
I lead them, I cause them to live by this my mouth,
(being) the Life that is in their nostrils.
I cause to live the geese and snakes who are on the back of Geb (the earth),
For I am indeed the Life under Nut (the sky).
(from Coffin Text 80, Bickel 1994, 132-133)
Here, people are anchored in agriculture, depending on the grain from which the staples bread and beer are produced. A desert nomad woman or a Nile fisherman
Figure 2.3 Limestone sarcophagus for a cat named Tamiyt, inscribed with the same words used to obtain eternal life for humans, commissioned by the high priest of ptah Djehutymes, son of King Amenhotep III, about 1375 bc. Drawing © Wolfram Grajetzki.
Might foreground other features. The poem does not set out to categorize all being, but rather, it offers analogies between different species and their sources of food, all circling around the floodplain at the center of the world of this poet. All depend on a divine life principle that supports all beings under the sky and over the earth.
World History
