At settlement sites of the period 2000-1700 Bc, burials of infants of less than two years old have been found in houses, the bodies placed in regular boxes rather than specially made coffins and accompanied by small items such as beads, amulets (including seal-amulets), or pottery, sometimes a small vessel with spout for feeding a baby. No ancient writing provides comment on the reasons for burying infants within a house; from archaeological finds in other ancient societies, the practice may reflect a need either to keep family members within the house, for their protection, or to keep them content, for the peace of the family (Scott 1999; for attitudes to the dead, see further Chapter 7). The burials do not reveal whether the society drew the line around human life at conception or birth. In one house on Abu island, at the border of Egypt with Nubia, at levels dated 1950-1900 BC, the body of a baby six to twelve months old was found buried beside the platform for grinding flour (Pilgrim 1996, 34-36, House 25a, see section Houses at Abu 1800 Bc). In depictions, grinding is shown done by women, and the burial place for the child may have been chosen for the link between the women, their work, and the child, for protection for the living or dead, or mutual. This speculation may provide questions for future researchers into infant burial practice and location. Any link may have been indirect or general, as the burial seems to have taken place when that house was already abandoned. Infant burial within houses seems a recurrent feature in second-millennium BC settlements in Egypt. According to carefully documented excavations, sometimes these house burials occurred while the house was in use, sometimes an abandoned house became burial places for infants, as in the case of the Abu house (Pilgrim 1996, 36 n.84).
Attitudes to the period between conception and birth are also difficult to identify from other parts of the archaeological, including the written, record. Burials of fetuses in the tomb of King Tutankhamun indicate reverence, but as with the body of King Saptah, bodies physically connected with kingship may have been given different treatment. The Egyptologist Dimitri Meeks has identified the ancient Egyptian word bes as a term for the infant from before to just after birth. In the first millennium BC, the word became the regular name for a particular divine force, with leonine face, identified in earlier depictions as Aha, “fighter" Depictions of Aha/Bes in two and three dimensions present a body either lionlike or human and, where human, with long limbs or with dwarf proportions. The form/force may be female but is most often male, with lion tail, sometimes disproportionately long. From depictions over amulets, seals, and furniture, at least some sectors of society
Figure 2.8 (Cant'd ) Egyptian Museum Cairo, E. Naville, Deir el-Eahri I, Egypt
Exploration Fund, London, 1895; (b) group of ivory hairpins among other items of cosmetic equipment placed in the burial of the lady of the house Seneb, about 1850 BC, cemeteries near modern Beni Hasan, Garstang 1907, 113-114; (c) scene depicting a woman arranging the hair of a woman, painted on the wooden coffin, from cemeteries of Inerty (at modern Gebelein), about 2000 BC, now Egyptian Museum Berlin,
G. Steindorff, OrabfUnde II. Das Grab des Sebek-o, ein Grabfund aus Gebelein,
W. Spemann, Berlin 1902, pl.5.
Figure 2.9 The hippopotamus-lion image variously named Reret, Ipy or Taweret, here in northern sky constellations, painted on the ceiling of the burial chamber of King Sety I, Valley of the Kings, Waset, about 1285 bc. © Gianluca Miniaci.
Would have been permeated by this motif of the infant and perhaps particularly the infant dead at or shortly after birth—perhaps the majority of births in any land of high infant mortality. Alongside, a second figure is equally prominent: a hippopotamus standing on hind legs, belly protruding as in pregnancy, often with lionlike legs and ears and crocodile-like back ridge. Earlier inscriptions name the figure Ipet or Ipy, sometimes reret, “the Sow,” while later she can be named Weret or Taweret, “the great one.” Her image dominates part of the northern sky constellations, in depictions from the fifteenth-century BC onward, as if protection of the infant shared the same struggle as all material existence. Together, Aha/Bes and Ipy/Taweret dominate the iconography of birth and bodily protection in second-and first-millennium BC Egypt (Figure 2.9).
World History
