Although the Egyptians created some of the most magnificent architecture that the world has seen, like the Sumerians they never lost their respect for their earliest form of structure, the simple mud and reed hut which, in various forms, was the original shrine, temple, palace, or family house. Throughout their history they venerated in particular the national shrines of Upper and Lower Egypt, which appear to have been made of reeds. The pavilion of the great Heb-Sed festival, the jubilee in which the youth and potency of the king were renewed, was also a simple wooden or reed structure. In this aspect such structures closely parallel the reed shrines of the Sumerian divinities. Enki, for example, is frequently portrayed sitting in his reed house, and when he sought to save man from Enlil’s wrath at the time of the Flood he whispered his message not directly to Ziusudra, the king who was the prototype of Noah, but to the walls of that king’s reed house in Shuruppak.41 Perhaps it is not surprising that two river peoples should make use in their earliest days of the material that was most readily to their hands: but the symbolic significance of the primitive reed hut was patently strong and highly emotive for both of them, a coincidence less easy to explain without the possibility of the religious identification pursued by both peoples having originated in the same place. Even in their latest temples, immense edifices built entirely in stone, colossal and portentous, the Egyptians recreated the reed shrine in monumental stone as the holiest place in the temple, often locating it deep in the darkened interior where it could be reached only by the highest ranks of the priesthood and the king himself.
World History
