LEGENDS ABOUT THE NILE

The Nile River valley has produced a large number of legends that are held by the peoples living along its banks of as well as many others. Some legends were invented to explain things that were unknown, whereas others were invented to help build public support for imperial expansion. Ancient Egypt was a mystery before the second half of the 19th century, and this helped perpetuate legends. Because of the large number of legends about the Nile and the peoples and cultures found along its banks, this essay will begin in Egypt and proceed up the river to its sources.

Many early European Christian pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land also visited Egypt, and for them the pyramids of Giza were the grain silos of Joseph in the Old Testament. This was one among many legends that grew out of ancient Egypt. Others were that the pyramids and the major monuments were built by Hebrew slaves at the time of Moses. These legends are easy to understand but are not based on any investigation but on summary conclusions based on ignorance. In the early Islamic period, it was thought the pyramids of Giza were great storehouses of wealth. The ‘Abbasid Caliph Ma’amun (ruled 813–833 CE) had an entrance dug into the side of the Pyramid of Cheops because of the legend it harbored great treasure; none was found. In more recent times, the pyramids—in particular, the three on the Giza plateau—have been linked to belief in extraterrestrial life forms because the structures were built at a time when the Egyptians seemed not to have the technology to build them. Believers argue that the perfect alignment of the pyramids along the four principal directions, their neat lines, and their astronomical alignments meant no human from so early a period in time could have built them. This belief ignores the long history of royal tombs before the pyramid period and instead picks up the idea that elements of Egyptian cosmology and astronomy are events the human eye cannot see. In popular American culture, the film Stargate (1994) and the subsequent TV series of the same name (1997–2007) perpetuated the legend of ancient astronauts.

The need to “prove” the Bible caused the birth of biblical archaeology, but the archaeological proof of the Hebrew sojourn in Egypt has yet to be discovered. Nonetheless, Hollywood has played a role in keeping the legends alive. In 1954, the film The Valley of the Kings was released by MGM Studios. Filmed in Egypt, it starred popular Hollywood actors of the time, including Eleanor Parker and Robert Taylor, and Egyptian actors Samia Gamal and Rushdi Abaza. It told the story of an archaeologist’s daughter (Eleanor Parker) attempting to find the tomb of Joseph in Egypt with the help of another archaeologist (Robert Taylor). They placed Joseph in the 18th Dynasty (1550–1295 BCE). Hollywood has made several movies about Moses, including the animated The Prince of Egypt (1998) and the longtime favorite "The Ten Commandments" (1956). Still, as of today, no archaeological evidence has supported the biblical tale of Exodus. Believed by many Jews, Christians, and Muslims to be totally true, their only “proof” is divine scripture.

Perhaps the most enduring of the legends is that of a living mummy and the curse of the pharaoh. Both are supposedly deadly to archaeologists who disturb the dead. Tales of living mummies began in the New Kingdom period (1550–1070 BCE) when the story of “Santi-Khamose and the Magician” (also called “Khaemwaset and the Mummies”) was popular. In the story, Prince Santi-Khamose or Khaemwaset wants to find the Scroll of Thoth, which has been buried in the tomb of another prince, Neferkaptah. When Santi-Khamose discovers the tomb, he disturbs the mummies of Neferkaptah and his wife and children. He plays a series of board games with Neferkaptah and eventually wins all of the games and the scroll. However, once he has the scroll, the mummy of Neferkaptah warns him that it will only bring him disaster. Santi-Khamose returns to Memphis but becomes involved with a woman who demands his wealth and that of all of his family in return for sexual favors. To fulfill his needs, he kills his brother, nephews, and nieces but is discovered. He confesses all to the pharaoh, who tells him the scroll is the cause of his troubles and to return it to the tomb, which he does. As he exits the tomb, a severe sandstorm covers the entrance for all time. Such tales from ancient Egypt were partially preserved in the books of Herodotus and in "One Thousand and One Arabian Nights".

In the 19th century, fiction novels of travel and horror became popular, and Egypt’s mysterious ruins and strange artifacts produced many new twists on these old stories. Among the first was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote "The Ring of Thoth" (1890) about a mummy that is brought to life. In the early 20th century, the West was struck with “Egyptomania,” especially after the tomb of Tutankhamun was discovered in 1922. Soon tales of a curse on the tomb began to circulate, fueled by the deaths over the next eight years of 11 people who were at the opening, including the expedition’s leader, Howard Carter, and the financer, Lord Carnarvon, both in 1923. Mummies also began to be portrayed in film, and in 1932 perhaps the best of the mummy movies was made, "The Mummy", starring Boris Karloff as the mummy of Imhotep. Boris Karloff’s Imhotep is a tragic figure, and audiences feel sympathy for him; however, in later mummy films, the mummy now called Kharis becomes a monster whose only purpose is to kill. In the 1999 remake of "The Mummy", Imhotep is returned but portrayed as generally evil instead of being a sympathetic figure. The plot concerns the death of the pharaoh, who is killed by his fiancé Ankh-Su-Namun, who is in love with the priest Imhotep. In the 1932 film, the female lead has the same name, Ankh Es-en-Amon. In both versions, the inspiration for the female character comes from the name of Tutankhamun’s wife, Ankh Es-en-Amen.

In the Byzantine and Christian period, stories of the holy family’s flight to Egypt were important for the Copts, and locations of places where they stopped to rest or live were identified. In Matariyyah, a neighborhood in Cairo’s Heliopolis, the Virgin’s Tree stands. According to the legend, the tree is where the holy family stopped to rest and the Virgin fed the infant Jesus. The tree is a sycamore, a tree sacred to several female goddesses in ancient Egypt. The tree afforded the holy family security from bandits by opening its bark to protect them. Since the fourth century CE, the site has attracted large numbers of pilgrims who chip off bits of bark and bring back pieces of the balsam that grows in the spring at the foot of the tree used to make holy oil to anoint priests. Cairo’s southern neighborhood of Ma‘adi has a site where the holy family first reached the Nile and stayed in a house, which is now a church. However, because Alexandria had a large Jewish community, it is thought the family went to live in Alexandria and did not stay in the Roman fort of Babylon (from the original Pi-Hapi-n-On or the home of the god Hapi, the god of the Nile). Little is said about their stay in Egypt in the New Testament, so it is not known where they went or lived. This has given Christians license to create legends about it. Another church in Coptic Cairo (inside the walls of the Roman fort) is identified as the place where they hid in a cave, the Church of Abu Sarga or St. Sergius. Even Muslim Egyptians are proud of their country’s role in saving the holy family, and many houses have written above the door the Koranic passage about the flight to Egypt, “Enter her [Egypt] twice safe.”

Tales of ancient Egyptian expeditions deep into Africa inspired both fiction writers and explorers. Legends of still existing Egyptian civilizations in a lost oasis or in a lost city in the jungle inspired British writer Henry Rider Haggard in the late 19th century to write two of the most widely read boys’ adventure books ever: "King Solomon’s Mines" (1885) and She (first published as a series between 1886 and 1887). Both books are among the highest-selling boys’ adventure books with more than 100 million copies sold in 44 languages. Films have also been made of both stories and the subsequent adventure called Ayesha was serialized in a journal between 1904 and 1905. The main character of "King Solomon’s Mines", Alan Quartermain, served as the model for Indiana Jones. In a subsequent novel called Alan Quartermain, the plot involves his expedition’s journey to the land of the white-skinned Zu-Vendi, who seem to be of Egyptian origin.

Nineteenth-century explorers and imperial agents found it impossible to believe that the Bantu Africans were capable of civilization without outside help. Arab influence along the coast and up the Nile were evident to them, but pre-Arab penetration into the heart of Africa could only be by the “advanced” Egyptians or Phoenicians in the pay of King Solomon, who was said to have owned mines in Africa. In Haggard’s book, the more advanced civilizations were the result of foreign colonies among the Bantu—Phoenician in "King Solomon’s Mines and Arab in She". The 1995 Hollywood film Congo also built on the legend that King Solomon owned a diamond mine in the Virunga region near the split in the drainage basins between the Nile and Congo Rivers. The Egyptian penetration of central Africa in ancient times was first presented for the origin of the Tutsi by John Hanning Speke. His supposition was backed up by the local tale that the Tutsis came from the north; using his power of observation, Speke noted Tutsis were taller and lighter skinned than the Bantu Hutu and therefore must have been of Caucasian (ancient Egyptian) origin. This legend, produced by a European, was carried by other European explorers and Christian missionaries and led to the eventual modern ethnic division of the Tutsi and Hutu into the states of Rwanda and Burundi. Everyone ignored the economic side of the division between Tutsi (cattle owner) and Hutu (farmer) and the fact it was possible to move from one “ethnicity”—in reality one economic class—to the other because economic circumstances and that Tutsi women married Hutu men and their children were Hutu. Tutsi and Hutu speak the same language as well, making the differences between them difficult to define.

Other African populations are seen as connected to ancient Egypt, some by their own tales of origin or by Europeans. The Dogon of Mali have a similar regard for the rise of Sirius or the Dog Star as the ancient Egyptians, and this has fueled speculation of a connection. The Dogon do not claim Egyptian or extraterrestrial origin, but certain other people in Africa such as the Yoruba of Nigeria do claim Arab or Egyptian origins with elaborate epic tales of the journey from Egypt to their current home.

Islam added important legends to the large corpus of tales about the Nile. One maintains that some of the ancient Egyptian practices from their festival of Opet are found in the Upper Egyptian city of Luxor. Opet celebrated the rebirth of the pharaoh, and at Thebes (modern Luxor) statues of the gods Amun, Mut, and Khonsu were taken in decorated barges from their precinct in Thebes to Karnak and back again. During the festival, people cross-dressed and behaved wantonly. Today, for a five-day period in Luxor culminating on the 15th of Sha‘aban (the month before Ramadan), people celebrate a mawlid (birthday) of the Muslim saint who converted Luxor to Islam: Shaykh Yusuf ibn Muhammad Abu Hajjaj al-Balawi. Abu Hajjaj lived from 1134 to 1207 CE, long after the area had converted to Islam, but nonetheless his legend says that when he arrived Luxor was ruled by a pagan queen. She was a fierce amazon-like figure, but Abu Hajjaj defeated her in battle; she then submitted to Islam and eventually married him. His mosque sits in the middle of the Luxor temple, and each year the local people cross-dress and carry a decorated boat around the temple to celebrate Islam’s paramount position. The symbolism has changed from pre-Islamic to Islamic; for example, the boat now represents one of the means of transportation that pilgrims to Mecca used to take from Red Sea ports, and supposedly Abu Hajjaj organized such fleets to take pilgrims to Mecca. Nonetheless the mawlid of Abu Hajjaj connects contemporary practice to ancient practice in Luxor. The celebration has become so well known that the ministry of tourism puts on a re-creation of it for tourists every November 4.

For the people of Luxor and surrounding villages, the ruins exercise a great deal of power, and stories have grown up around them. In ancient times, the Colossi of Memnon were so named because the northern statue of Amenotep III sang at sunrise. The sound of it reminded the Greeks of the song of greeting that Memnon sang for his mother, Eos, the goddess of the dawn. When visiting the site in 199 CE, Roman Emperor Septimus Severus repaired the statues and the singing stopped. Some of the ruins such as Madinat al-Habu are used in local practices of magic. It once had a small lake where children could be taken at night to complete the preparation of charms for them to wear and to protect them against the evil eye. The Temple of Mut has a statue of the goddess Sekhmet that had to be removed because local villagers thought it brought evil to them. They tried to damage it to keep it from being able to “work” its magic; because of that, the ministry in charge of the site removed it to prevent further damage.

Several legends grew up around General Charles Gordon and the Mahdi in Sudan. Because the Mahdi died only a few months after Gordon was killed, the fates of the two men were linked. The Mahdi had ordered Gordon to be taken alive, but in the heat of the battle Gordon was killed. For the Victorian British, his death had to be heroic. Gordon was pictured in the British press as stepping forward at the top of the stairs of the governor’s house in Khartoum armed only with a walking stick. As Gordon began to move forward, the legend says the Sudanese began to walk back down the steps until a warrior killed him with a spear. Gordon’s head was brought to the Mahdi, who was reportedly horrified by it and refused to look at it. Another such story says that Khalifah ‘Abdallah al-Ta‘aishi held his forces in Omdurman to attack the British at Kerreri Hills, where a dream foretold of a British defeat. Historians have speculated that had the Sudanese forces attacked in force much earlier while the British were farther down the river, the British may not have won.

Many of Ethiopia’s legends are related to the claim of Solomonic descent of Ethiopian kings (and the Coptic faith) through the child born of the Queen of Sheba, wealth she brought in spices, incense, and precious stones helped spark the legends of King Solomon’s mines somewhere in Central Africa. According to Ethiopians, Makada bore Solomon a son, Menelik I, who returned to Ethiopia with the original Ark of the Covenant, which had been stolen from the temple in Jerusalem. The ark was housed on an island in Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile, before being taken to the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in the city of Aksum, where it is believed to be today.

The site is so holy that the general public is not allowed to approach the building. Only anointed priests can approach and enter the building, and even fewer are allowed to actually see the ark. Christianity came early to Ethiopia, and the Ethiopian king converted the same year as Constantine, the first Roman emperor to accept Christianity, according to Ethiopian history. With the arrival of Islam, Christian kingdoms of Sudan and Ethiopia were cut off from the rest of the Christian world, but a vague knowledge of their existence began the legends of Prester John, the good Christian king in Africa or Asia. Prester John was seen to be a descendant of one of the magi who ruled over a Nestorian Christian land surrounded by Muslims and pagans. Thought to be in India, eventually, Western Christians came to see the Ethiopian king as Prester John, especially after the Portuguese were able to explore the Indian Ocean.

The last legends this essay addresses are those of cannibals in Africa. Several Bantu peoples in South Sudan had reputations for cannibalism such as the Mangubetu and the Azande, who were also called the Niam Niam by 19th-century explorers. Niam Niam (or Nyam Nyam) is the Dinka word for the Azande and is supposed to indicate the sound they make while eating human flesh. As with most 19th-century tales of African people, there is little hard evidence to support claims of cannibalism, although currently the Mangubetu believe their ancestors were cannibals. It seems that even if they ate human flesh on occasion, it was a rare occurrence and only in the aftermath of the Swahili slave raids in the 1880s that caused great disruption economically and politically. British explorer James Jameson, a member of one of Henry Morton Stanley’s expeditions, bought an 11-year-old girl and gave her to the Azande to watch how they dissected and cooked a human. He fully documented the event in a series of detailed drawings. Stanley was furious when told of this, but by the time he was informed Jameson had already died of a fever. Victorian accounts of African brutality were often to cover up their own brutal behavior and present to European readers the superiority of Europeans over non-European peoples.

Legends often are more enduring than reality. Legends that have grown up along the Nile remain current and continue to inspire writers and filmmakers. Authors such as Christian Jacq continue to find something new to say about ancient Egypt. Films about mummies are also still being made. Written in French, Jacq’s books have been translated into numerous languages and are often best-seller lists. Legends that purport Arab or Egyptian penetration into the African interior also inspire authors and film writers and still find an eager audience even when such legends have proven to be false. An example of the popularity of these stories is the 1995 film Congo based on the 1980 novel of the same name by Michael Crichton.

By John A. Shoup in "The Nile - An Encyclopedia of Geography, History, and Culture", ABC-CLIO, LLC, USA, 2017, excerpts pp. 28-33. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.