In addition to consulting deities on festival procession days, other forms of divination may have been practiced. A unique papyrus of 1250 BC, from the village of artists at Waset (Deir al-Madina), contains evidence for a variety of techniques (Demichelis 2002). The warnings come from the creator sun-god Ra himself, while the person conducting the good process (shemu nefer) is identified with Thoth, lord of knowledge and script. This person is appropriately identified as the knower of things and is to be purified with incense, natron, and an unidentified substance called dja'a. One technique involves pebbles, perhaps drawn in lots, as attested for the procession oracles, but there is also divination from liquid in bowls, not otherwise found in Egyptian writings (3000-525 Bc). Remarkable schematic images accompany interpretations of patterns formed by moringa oil when dropped in water, with such warnings as “if you see this image on a day of conflict, it is bad for you, do not go beyond words!”
Before 1500 BC, there are no certain written records of consulting divine forces for help in, or information on, the future. However, Sylvie Donnat has proposed to interpret as divination the 15 surviving letters to the dead, the majority from 2200 to 2000 Bc, with particular attention to the five written on pottery bowls (Donnat 2002). Pouring water is a ritual act at the core of offering to the dead; at Waset (1300-1100 Bc), when artists are absent from work on the tomb of the king to “pour water for the transfigured dead (akh),” and first-millennium BC offerers to the dead are called water paurers. In scenes of offering for a good afterlife, precisely the same type of wide, fairly shallow bowl appears for use in libations. At Waset (1300-1100 Bc), a particular type of stela shows the recipient seated on a formal chair and identified in hieroglyphic inscription as “excellent transfigured one of Ra” (Demaree 1983). Here, communication might happen within the home, as the architecture of houses shows, with closed-platform altars and false-daar motifs in the village of artists; the Teaching of Any also urges offerings to be made to parents in the home (Weiss 2009). Evidently, the location of contact with the dead might vary. From 1300 to 1100 BC, there are the sculptures known in Egyptology as ancestor busts, small rounded blocks of stone, faience, or wood, with tops carved or formed as a head of a man or woman, more rarely a couple, addressing deceased parents and, through them, the line of ancestors to Shu and Tefnet at the beginning of creation (Chapter 2). The combination of parents and ancestors may be a particularly ancient Egyptian form to more widely attested phenomena of ancestor cults; to call it ancestor cult may be to overlook the immediate tie to the biological parents. Within the same frame, the early letters to the dead address the very recently deceased; they appeal for help in daily problems of well-being (domestic conflict) and health (Wente 1990). Comparing the oil-inwater bowls of the papyrus from Deir al-Madina, first-millennium BC divination bowls in west Asia, and recent west African examples, Donnat raises the possibility that the bowls were used to communicate with the dead, perhaps on the very day of the funeral.
World History
