Within these physical horizons, we can consider the sight lines and access to sacred spaces for some of the few places where Petrie recorded specific finds in 1889, starting with the western town, in the street of houses nearest to the monumental Valley Temple for King Senusret II. The ground immediately south of this street had been too heavily eroded to preserve any traces of building, so we do not know
Whether the preserved doors faced other houses or backed onto an open space looking down to the Valley Temple moorings. When the cult flourished, unevenly over the century following the death of Senusret II, this corner of the site could have been one of its busiest points, with arrivals and departures of senior officials on state barges as well as cargo boats laden with material for the economy of the cult. At some point in 1850-1750 Bc, a shallow hole was cut in the floor of one room, and someone deposited a remarkable set of ritual items: a pair of beautifully carved ivory hand clappers, made to accompany a chant, along with an extraordinary wooden figurine with a naked female human body, thick-maned lion head, and lion tail, the human arms to the sides, palms inward, and the human feet turned outward, on short pegs for fixing to a base or other object. Lion heads are found for male and female images of those protecting mother and child, notably the male and female forms of Aha/Bes (Figure 2.18a). Another extraordinary find was made in the adjacent room, which might have been in either the same or the next house at the time of the deposits: a starched linen mask painted with the features of a lion, the only mask for the living that has survived from ancient Egypt (Figure 2.18b). Petrie recorded a doorway between the two houses at this point, as if the original plan had been adapted to join one house (7 x 15m) to another (9 x 15 meters), to form one unit of relatively large size within the range of housing at Lahun (smallest 7 x 7 meter, largest the palatial mansions 40 x 60 meters). An adult man or woman living here might have worn the mask and struck the clappers in rituals of birth performed here and/or elsewhere across the town. Someone in the house(s) would inhabit a structure already imbued with the sacredness that is felt in the protection of birth and infancy. It might be more than an accident of survival that these four items were found in the street nearest the Valley Temple: more than half the town inhabitants were named after King Senusret II, perhaps implying widespread personal resonance for the power of his presence and cult. Perhaps, then, the place of the largest quantities of offerings to him might have been the magnet for other senses of the sacred. The street might have been most appropriate for the practitioners of rituals of the human life cycle as well as those on the temple staff rota (for the wide spread of the rota, see Chapter 3, section “Staff in Offering-Spaces'!
World History
