In comparison with the special amulet forms attested for some periods in burials of young women, the puberty of young men seems less visible in the cemetery and settlement record, either of artifact form or of marked spaces or times of practice. If practiced, male rites seem less material. Clues may be found instead in some unusual depictions and suggestive phrases in writings. An offering-chapel block from about 2400 BC shows among athletic wrestling and acrobatic dances by boys and girls a man wearing a lion mask and holding a unique staff with hand-shaped end uppermost. The lion mask evokes the Aha/Bes images associated with childbirth. Perhaps the core concern of that motif is not, after all, specifically birth, but the points of transition in life: at birth, from inside to outside the body of the mother, and at puberty, from boy to man. An Egyptian term equivalent to life phase is kheper, “transformation”; in Nile-Sahara context, an immediate example or model would be the snake shedding its skin, a motif found in other writings (Figure 2.11).
For the boy, both birth and puberty involve a cut, and ritualized cutting may also be central to Aha/Bes and other figures otherwise associated with birth. Passages in life descriptions, healing manuscripts, and mortuary rituals refer to tying the headband in relation to youth; possibly, this alludes to rites of circumcision or to a band worn to mark the young man at or immediately after circumcision. The sidelock of hair that marked childhood is directly linked to knotting and tying in a composition known from two coffins of about 1850 BC and then numerous later papyri (Cojfin Text 640 = Book of the Dead chapter 50, Quirke 2013):
A knot is tied behind me, in the sky, of the earth, by Ra,
On the day of fastening the knot against the inert forces at the feet,
On that day of cutting the side-lock (of hair).
In the following lines, Ra is followed by the embodiment of disorder, Seth, and the sky goddess, Nut, in tying the knot. The passage was to be recited to enable the deceased to win eternal life, and the wording may have been adapted to that
Figure 2.11 Depiction of man wearing a lion mask, tomb-chapel wall block, 2400 Bc, probably from cemetery of Inebhedj (Saqqara), now British Museum. Drawing © Wolfram Grajetzki.
Context, the funeral and then the cult of the dead. However, it may still preserve a kernel or echo from otherwise lost rites marking life changes in the male body.
Throughout the questions of gendered life difference, in the bodily distinction of times, the written and visual record may give more clues than answers. Yet these can help to focus research attention on the wider material and archaeological record of distribution of materials, as evidence for their social use.
Living human geography: case-studies Sacredness around the human—visible and invisible
Religious landscapes are not immediately transparent surfaces. Sacredness of space might be private or, in some circumstances, deliberately concealed. The invisible sacred space is well documented from more recent histories. In seventeenth to eighteenth-century Ireland and Scotland, British law permitted only Anglican Christianity, and Catholic services had to be held in secret at rural Mass stones or Mass rocks. Some would be identifiable archaeologically, but in many cases, oral tradition becomes the only guide to past treatment of a location as sacred, as at Derrynagalliagh:
Fragments of a small cross, now placed against a ditch, traditionally indicate the location. Local people say the residents of Bethlehem and Doonis, etc., in Co Westmeath crossed the Inny estuary of Lough Ree by boat to attend Mass at this site. (Http://www. longfordgenealogy. com/history/h2.html Consulted 3.12.2011, cf. Te Brake 2011, 236-237)
Ethnographic accounts of ritual have similarly served as warnings of how much in a human performance cannot survive in an archaeological record (Insoll 2004). Such descriptions indicate the need for caution in reading any past landscape as sacred or not.
Few Egyptian landscapes have been explored archaeologically to an extent that would allow us to reconstruct a life pattern in a particular place. How did people in their place experience the hours from waking to sleep on any particular day? Three archaeological case-studies show the range of evidence available for answering these questions.
Case Study 1. A desert-edge shrine near Eadari One rural shrine is located on the desert edge of fields near Badari, below the high desert cliffs. Here, 1920s teams uncovered remains of a temple dated around 1600-1500 Bc, over traces of an earlier temple on a different alignment, perhaps 2200-1800 BC, in turn built on top of fourth - to third-millennium settlement debris (Brunton 1927, 18-21, pl.7 spur 3, pl.22-23). Farther south, the expedition documented dozens of 2200-1500 BC burials (Brunton 1930). There is no record of any contemporary houses of valley dwellers who might have built and used the temple; future archaeological work might help to fill this gap. In the meantime, the burials and temple remains at least allow a material glimpse of life in this particular landscape at specific times (Figure 2.12).
Around 1550 BC, kings from Waset were fighting to expel their rivals from Hutwaret/Tell el-Daba in the north. The temple built in that century had an enclosure wall 30 meters east to west and 17 meters north to south and some 1.7 meters thick. Like its predecessor, the temple had walls of mud mixed with sand and some white stones and floors of mud-plastered brick; there was no sign that stone blocks had been used at any point. The entrance may have been from the west side, and a corridor ran around the shrine area, where the main focus of cult seems to have changed; the earlier temple had a single shrine, whereas later there was a double shrine. The excavation director Guy Brunton speculated that a local cult for a force of disorder—the regional ferryman god Nemty or the more famous Seth—had been twinned after 1600 BC with a balancing cult of Horus, god of order. This is certainly one possible interpretation, as twinning for balance in temple architecture is found for the voracious god Sobek, depicted as a crocodile (Nubyt/Kom Ombo and Shedyt/Madinat al-Fayoum). Modern perennial irrigation and canal extensions have transformed farming life, including the exact location of the edge of the fields and the extent of any marsh pools. When the temple stood, it may have overlooked pools teeming with bird and fish life, in landscapes long since drained for agriculture. There would still have been larger, more dangerous animals in the river and its marshy desert-edge backwaters. In the nineteenth century AD, crocodiles were still being hunted in Egypt, but the more powerful and violent creature would have been the hippopotamus, still a bigger killer in Africa than either lion or crocodile. A votive stela from the main town of the province, just to the south, shows the mayor of Tjebu Hatiay adoring Seth in the form of a hippopotamus in the marshes (Figure 2.13).
Figure 2.12 Plan of the desert-edge temple near the modern village Badari, north of ancient Tjebu (Qau); a structure with thicker walls was built perhaps by 1500 bc over an earlier shrine of different alignment (Brunton 1930). © petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL.
Figure 2.13 Limestone stela depicting the regional governor Hatiay in adoration of Seth, depicted as a hippopotamus, found in the cemeteries at the regional town Tjebu (Qau), now Egyptian Museum Cairo JE47637 (Brunton 1930). © petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL.
The main second temple finds were small glazed objects of varying forms: faience tubes and disks, a rounded shell type perhaps derived Irom the earlier cowry girdles, blue glass disk bead, and a glazed steatite scarab with stylized motif, possibly floral (Brunton 1930, pl.11, pl.19 no.54). Beside these, Brunton recorded two amulet types: (1) a crowned standing goddess or queen, with one arm to breast, and (2) the mixed form of the childbirth protectress variously called Ipy, Beret, and Taweret, a hippopotamus body standing upright on slender lion hind legs, with crocodile-like tail along the back. The presence of blue - and green-glazed goddess and childbirth amulets and the absence of other colors among the beads seem significant. Blue - and green-glazed materials predominate at shrines to Hathor, goddess of fertility and sensuality (Pinch 1993). The Badari temple material is too scant to identify the shrine as to a goddess, though the dual shrine layout would not exclude the possibility: at Qift, the main temple has a double axis, with one sanctuary for Min, god of male potency, complemented by a second for Isis, the healing goddess. If this was a shrine to another divine force, it might still have attracted those who needed to invoke protective powers for pregnancy or birth.
World History
