On the archaeological evidence carefully recorded at Abu, the streets and rooms of houses at Abu teemed with animal as well as human life, in a way that would abolish our difference between rural and urban living. It remains an open question how the town dwellers regarded the lives of the goats or sheep in their houses, especially in this region. In the hieroglyphic script, the Egyptian word for dignity or perhaps aura (shefyt) was written with the image of a ram. It is not clear precisely how this quality of dignity came to be associated with the ram. Within the overall mainly agricultural economy, the pastoral lifestyle of shepherds was always a significant complement to floodplain farming. Whatever the reasoning, the ram was used in formal art from the third to first millennia BC to depict several prominent gods. Most frequent in the surviving sources, from 1500 bc onward, a ram with horns curled to cheek appears as a form of the god Amun, whose cult center was at Waset, later also at major centers in Lower Egypt (for this form of ram head adorning the boat of Amun, see Figure 4.7). More anciently, a ram with horns extended horizontally is used to depict the gods Heryshef, with cult centered on Hutnennesut (Figure 3.10), and Khnum, with cult centers across Upper Egypt at Shenakhen, Shas-hotep, and Abu.
At later times, under Achaemenid domination (525-404 Bc), local reverence for sacred qualities in the ram led to conflict between Egyptians and a Jewish community at Abu, over the sacrifice of lambs for the Jewish Passover festival (Joisten-Pruschke 2008). Abu was home at this time to a Jewish community connected with the Achaemenid Iranian garrison stationed at the frontier town. Such communities and conflicts may not have arisen in this form earlier, as the Achaemenid conquest of Egypt placed the country and its people in entirely new conditions; for the first time, the ancient Egyptian view of the world was only one of many, even at the official level. Unprecedented combinations of peoples and approaches may have generated tensions not experienced in earlier times. Moreover, on the ancient Egyptian side, the specific cause of tension stemmed from the reverence for animals by species, a phenomenon not attested before 700 BC. Modern eyes may too quickly misread the objection to animal sacrifice as a desire to protect animals. In fact, meat continued to be included in ancient Egyptian offerings alongside plant-based offerings and hymns. As noted in the preceding section (The separateness of the human in Egypt 3000-525 Bc), X-rays of (undated) mummified cat bodies have revealed that many had been killed; evidently, some rites or offerings required the animal body in a form made immortal, not the present living but transient. Yet the later communal conflicts around rituals of sacrifice remind us to question the ways humans related to the presence of animals in the earlier periods too. These relations involve the animals in the wild, often hunted, and those at home—as source of food, protectors, or, in the case of dogs, monkeys, and cats, as luxury pets.
Case Study 3. Sacredness in more urban landscapes: Lahun 1800 bc A third archaeological fragment set from a total human geography can be assembled at the early second-millennium BC site of Lahun, farther north, at the edge of Fayoum. Here, in just ten weeks of ad 1889, a digging team cleared a planned rectilinear
Town that flourished in 1875-1750 Bc. The southwest enclosure wall of the town is close to the Valley Temple of the cult complex, including the pyramid for King Senusret II. The ancient names for these places seem to have been Sekhem-Senusret, “Senusret is Mighty!,” for the pyramid complex and Hetep-Senusret, “Senusret is at Peace!,” for the town alongside (Horvath 2009). There is no inscrip-tional evidence for the precise date of the town foundation, but plausibly, it dates to the short reign of Senusret II or just after, between 1900 and 1875 BC. In the immediate vicinity, and across the fields on the outcrop of desert and rock at Haraga, stretch the cemeteries of the period. Little of the original temple reliefs survive, for the pictorial record, but the excavaters harvested papyrus fragments from across the town site, providing an unparalleled written record of more varied activities in life, including scraps of temple ritual, several larger fragments of literary papyri, the earliest mathematical and healing treatises, dozens of personal or official letters, and a great quantity of accountancy fragments. In contrast to the more meticulous excavation of Abu, the relatively rapid clearance of Lahun did not give time for recording much of the detail in finds across the site, and there are only a dozen photographs; nearly all the bricks of the buildings were recycled in the next few decades, but new ground survey and ceramic analysis would help to fill gaps in our knowledge of the site. At present, the combination of finds, 1889 town plan, and the landscape itself can provide some idea of sacredness as experienced and expressed anciently in this more urbanized landscape at the meeting of fields and desert.
The main town is built as a roughly 250 x 250 meter square, or 500 x 500 ancient Egyptian cubits, with an adjacent series of streets forming a veritable second town on the west. A thick, so probably originally high, mudbrick wall separated the main from the west town. Overall population has been estimated between 3,000 and 10,000, depending on unknown factors: the size of households in the larger houses, the number of houses with a second story of living quarters, and the number of houses lost in the eroded area nearest the fields. By far the largest houses are nine palatial mansions, some 60 x 40 meters, located along the north side of the town. Farthest from water supply, this sector would also have been upwind of the rest of society, including the highest area, thanks to the dominant north wind of the Nile Valley. Within the town perimeter walls, the ground slopes dramatically from the north desert edge toward the fields on the south side. A steep escarpment runs west to east near the northwest corner; this was cut back beneath the westernmost and highest of the nine mansions, around a low-lying square, the only more open ground within the town. At the center of one side of this square stood a structure with double-column porch, corridor, and chambers, on a plan of unidentified function—interpreted by some archaeologists as a temple for the town but possibly an administrative point of control or issue of resources. The large house overlooking the square occupies the most favorable position in the town; in a planned town of the same period at Abydos South, the northwest large house is identified on sealings as the House of the Mayor, and this seems a plausible function for the Lahun mansion in the same position (Wegner 2010, Figure 2.17).
Over the uneven terrain of the town, the physical access to the outside and the visual horizon of each town quarter would have made for rather different living
Exploring Religion in Ancient Egypt North
Figure 2.17 The late Middle Kingdom town near modern al-Lahun, as recorded by W. petrie in 1889. W. Petrie, Jllahun, Kahun, Gurob, David Nutt, London, 1891, pl.14.
Experiences. From the time of its construction, the pyramid over the burial place of Senusret II would have been the visual focus, but in fact, it would have been out of sight for anyone standing at ground level (and perhaps even from the roof level) within the western town and west side of the main town. Walking the space today, the pyramid is invisible from the houses on the slope from the westernmost wall; this may have been true, even allowing for higher ancient ground levels. From the northern mansions, the view of the pyramid would have been blocked by the House of the Mayor on the escarpment. There might have been only two points from which the whole townscape could have been seen, as well as the pyramid complex: the roof of the Valley Temple south of the main town and the roof of the House of the Mayor.
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