EGYPT - IN THE BEGINNING

Within their rich body of myth and legend, the Egyptians believed that ‘in the beginning’ was complete darkness, a darkness made up of the infinite, formless waters from which the very first mound of earth appeared.

Yet creation was no unique event; it reoccurred every single year when the world was created anew from the annual Nile flood, when ‘the whole country is converted into a sea’, as one ancient eyewitness claimed.

Believed to originate in a cavern in the furthest reaches of southern Egypt, the floodwaters’ arrival was heralded by the rising of the Morning Star (Sirius), which the Egyptians identified as the glittering goddess Sothis, ‘the most beautiful of all, at the start of a happy year’.

As the Nile’s welcome waters began to rise and spill out across the land, they literally brought life, ‘hugging the fields, so each is reborn’. As ‘the meadows laugh when the riverbanks are flooded’, it was said that ‘the whole land leaps for joy!’ as people threw flowers, offerings and even themselves into the waters.

Just as the rhythms of the river dictated the pace of life as its levels rose and fell each year, so its annual cycle formed a structured calendar of three seasons – the inundation (akhet), followed by spring planting (peret) and summer harvest (shemu). Each year the receding waters would reveal a revitalised land filled with the promise of new life, a layer of rich black wet silt, sparkling in the sunshine, within which bountiful harvests could grow. In fact, the silt was such a stark contrast with the sterile sands of the surrounding deserts that Egypt was very clearly a land of two parts, a dual landscape of Red Land, Black Land: deshret and kemet.

Since this phenomenon was witnessed along the whole length of the river’s course as it flowed its 750 miles from south to north, each separate region of Egypt had its own explanation of these annual events, explanations that took the form of creation sagas in which their own local deity took the starring role.

In Memphis, creation was regarded as the handiwork of Ptah, who had combined masculine and feminine elements within the primeval waters to emerge as the risen land itself. Then, having simply thought the world into being, Ptah, ‘the Father of the gods’ as well as the ‘Mother who gave birth to all the gods’, summoned up all living things by simply speaking their names, in the earliest known version of the familiar refrain ‘In the Beginning was the Word’.

At nearby Sais, a more exuberant variation on this ‘word of God’ scenario involved the thunderous laughter of Neith ‘the Terrifying One’, the armed creator goddess who alone gave birth to the sun. And as one who could be both ‘the male who acts the female, the female who acts the male’, she could at any time make the sky crash down and destroy all she had made, personifying the two extremes of life and death, inherent in the floodwaters and within the sun itself.

Further south, at Hermopolis, it was claimed that life had been created by a cooperative of eight deities, ‘the fathers and mothers who were before the original gods’. Taking the form of pairs of male frogs and female snakes, the first creatures seen to emerge from the receding floodwaters, their combined energy was believed to have first sparked life into being, creating the primeval mound, an ‘island of flame’, from which the sun first burst forth.

But the key creation myth centred on Heliopolis, ‘Sun City’, where the supreme deity was the sun, ‘the mother and father of all’ and the ‘great He-She’. As the great fiery orb rose up from the primeval mound to create the first spectacular sunrise, its daily journey across the sky thereafter was the constant cycle of renewal that formed the rhythm of an entire culture. For as day followed night followed day, so too did life and death and new life, two states of existence regarded as an eternal continuum – to live was to die, but then to be born again.

And with solar power having initiated this perpetual motion of the universe, it was a process personified by Maat, daughter of the sun. Responsible for everything her single solar parent had created, Maat, the cosmic caretaker, maintained the new universe in perfect balance, with everything countered by its opposite in repeated sets of dualities – day and night, light and dark, fertile and sterile, order and chaos, life and death – each two halves of the same state, and neither able to exist without the other. It was an essential equilibrium obeyed by all, from the living to the dead, and to the very gods themselves, all of whom must ‘live by Maat’.

Yet Maat was not an only child. For within a vast body of myth developed over centuries, the androgynous sun produced a plethora of daughters, from the cow goddess Hathor to the lioness Sekhmet and Tefnut, goddess of moisture. Brought forth with her twin brother, Shu, god of the air, the sibling deities were commonly believed to have been brought forth through a sudden expression of body fluid, by ‘sneezing out Shu and spitting out Tefnut’; although an alternative version suggested they had been ejaculated into existence via ‘the hand of God’.

In turn, male Shu and female Tefnut produced twin children of their own: the laid-back green earth god Geb, usually depicted lying down, and the shimmering sky goddess Nut, arching over him to form the heavens, a celestial powerhouse who physically supported the universe and protected all below her.

Known as ‘the great one who bore the gods’, Nut’s onerous duties also involved daily childbirth, as each day at dawn she gave birth to the sun: a tricky task, given that the sun was technically her grandparent, but not a problem within Egypt’s all-encompassing belief system, which evolved sufficiently over time to synthesise, and indeed rationalise, the most unlikely of divine genealogies.

Nut and Geb were the parents of four more offspring, twin couples Isis and Osiris, Seth and Nephthys. And it was their inter-family feuding that first brought death into the solar saga.

According to myth, Isis and her younger brother Osiris were Egypt’s first rulers, joint monarchs presiding over a golden age, until their jealous brother Seth seized power by drowning Osiris, dismembering him and scattering his body parts throughout the Nile Valley.

But Seth’s triumph was short-lived. Having first mourned for Osiris, literally crying him a river – her tears caused the Nile’s first flood – Isis recovered Osiris’s body, which she then reassembled, wrapping the parts together to create the first mummy. Then, using her great magic, she resurrected both his soul and his reproductive powers to conceive their son Horus.

Truly ‘more clever than a million gods’ and ‘craftier than a million men’, Isis raised her son in secret to avenge his father and take on his uncle Seth in a series of violent struggles. For Isis was her son’s protector, ‘more effective than millions of soldiers’, whose ability to both nurture and attack was typical of the way the Egyptians never assumed that male and female must necessarily equate simply with the concepts of active and passive.

And while Osiris, his father Geb and fellow deities like fertility god Min were usually portrayed as static and inert, with only their prominent reproductive organ betraying any sign of life, their female counterparts were often seen to be initiating action, from Nut, the ‘Great Striding Goddess, sowing precious stones as stars’ to her dynamic daughter Isis who, by gradually absorbing the powers of her fellow goddesses, eventually became Egypt’s most powerful deity, striding out across the Mediterranean to be worshipped for centuries across three continents.

As the perfectly mummified Osiris took his place as King of the Underworld, bound up tightly in his wrappings to be ‘everlasting in perfect condition’, he passed, like a parcel, into the permanent care of ‘Mighty Isis who protected her brother’, and joined him in the night sky; Osiris as the constellation of Orion, guarded by Isis, who absorbed the star qualities of Sothis (Sirius), herald of the Nile flood.

Yet Isis was also present in the land of the living, to protect and guide their son Horus, who had succeeded his father to take the throne of Egypt. Horus came to symbolise the divine nature of kingship, with every subsequent human monarch named ‘the Living Horus’, and then at death, transformed into ‘an Osiris’, their souls absorbed into an accumulating underworld power base, reinvigorated each night by the nocturnal visit of the omnipresent sun god.

Although this father-son relationship between Osiris and Horus was the model by which the Egyptians interpreted the transition between monarchs, it was also a three-way relationship, since kingship was very much ‘a composite of male and female elements’: Isis, whose very name means ‘throne’, was the vital presence linking the generations together. She was the daughter, sister, wife and mother, whose familial relationships were the foundation of royal continuity.

And this cuts to the very heart of an ancient culture in which female and male, mother and father, sister and brother, daughter and son, were all essential halves of a complete whole. So the modern tendency to focus on the masculine can only ever see half the story. Certainly the Egyptians used the term ‘people’, featuring both a male and female hieroglyphic determinative sign, while their use of the phrase ‘women and men’ was similarly balanced with ‘mother and father’.

This same notion extended to monarchy’s mythical origins, with Isis and Osiris both appearing as rulers in the official king lists, to be succeeded by their son Horns, and then the ‘Followers of Horus’, the demi-gods, who represented the souls of long-forgotten human monarchs.

For gods and royals dominated the Egyptian worldview, and indeed their history, with humans themselves often something of an afterthought, believed to have been created in a range of different and highly inventive ways.

In the south of Egypt, where the goddess Satet and her ramheaded consort Khnum were believed to regulate the flow of the Nile from their subterranean cave, Khnum was credited with making every human on his potter’s wheel. At Sais, it was the goddess Neith who invented birth and is described as ‘moulding beings’, while at Heliopolis, the androgynous sun, ‘Creator of all who makes them live’, was ‘the beneficent mother of gods and humans’. Mortals were sometimes dubbed ‘the cattle of god’, although one version of events employed wordplay to claim that they came forth when the sun god wept, the tears (remyt) falling to earth as people (remet). And certainly the sun god had plenty of reason to weep, for almost as soon as humans appeared on earth they began to cause trouble.

Deciding to punish them, the sun summoned the gods together and asked which of them would best perform the required cull; their unanimous choice fell on yet another of the sun god’s daughters. Known as ‘the Eye of the Sun’, this was the cow-like goddess Hathor, the ‘Golden One’, who wore the sun as a crown and personified love and care for the living and the dead. Yet when roused, she instantly transformed into the lioness Sekhmet, ‘the Powerful One’, who brought death to all enemies of her sole, solar parent.

And as this uncontrollable force was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world, the treacherous humans ran for their lives and tried to hide in the desert. But the gleeful goddess hunted them down – ‘the Eye appears against you, she devours you, she punishes you’, wading through their blood to visibly transform into the ‘Lady of Bright Red Linen’ in her gore-soaked robes.

Her killing spree was only halted when the sun saw the human suffering and relented, devising a plan in which beer was mixed with red ochre and poured out upon the sands. The goddess, assuming it was yet more human blood, gulped it down and was soon too drunk to move, forgetting where she was, and even what she was supposed to be doing, as she fell soundly asleep.

On waking, she was once more gentle Hathor, but imbued with both the powers of primeval Tefnut, goddess of moisture, and the astral goddess Sothis, a supercharged deity whose return to Egypt heralded ‘both the coming of the floodwaters and the rejuvenation of the world’.

With the reinvigorated goddess resuming her place as supreme protector of the sun, the remaining humans, spared their fate, returned home to Egypt too, celebrating their deliverance with what would become an annual beer festival, where general inebriation was accompanied by music and dancing to soothe all anger away.

Yet the notion that humans had hidden from the goddess at the desert fringes before migrating back to the Nile Valley does contain a tiny fragment of historical truth, for amidst this mysterious haze of mythic beginnings, it is becoming increasingly clear that key aspects of the Egyptians’ true origins did lie far beyond the familiar world of the Nile Valley.

But not in the mystical realm of the gods – in the very heart of the prehistoric Sahara Desert.

Written by Joann Fletcher in "The Story of Egypt - The Civilization That Shaped The World", Pegasus Books, New York, 2016, chapter One. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.