A Review of Part One of Egypt Revealed, A Symposium

A Review of Part One of Egypt Revealed, A Symposium
Held October 23 - 24, 1999 at the Chicago Field Museum

by Denise Thomas (Vireo) for Issue 3 of Cup of Wonder

I attended the Egypt Revealed Symposium in October last year(1999). I’d never been to anything like this before and I was very excited, both about the program and about seeing Chicago. (My previous encounters with that city had been driving through it, and staying in an airport hotel for a conference.)

Naturally, I was sick with a cold the day we left, and that put a damper on the weekend for me. Nonetheless, I was very pleasantly impressed by the city and want to return someday, with time and funds sufficient to enjoy more of it.

The symposium was jointly sponsored by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, and Seven Wonders Travel, and was moderated by Jeff Leach, publisher and editor-in-chief of Scientific American Discovering Archaeology magazine. The lecturers were:

~Dr. Zahi Hawass, Director General of the Giza Pyramids and of Saqqarah. We’ve seen him on television and he is currently excavating around the 3^rd pyramid. He was involved in the Sphinx Conservation Project, which was recently completed. Dr. Hawass lectures extensively, and we may also know him from his debates with ‘alternative’ Egyptologists. Two of his books, The Secret of the Sphinx: Restoration Past and Present, and Silent Images: Women in Pharonic Egypt, were on sale and naturally, I bought them both . . .

~Dr. Kent Weeks, Director of the Theban Mapping Project, and Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo. While working on this project, he discovered KV5, tombs of the sons of Ramses II, the largest tombs yet found in Egypt. His and his wife Susan’s book, The Lost Tomb was on sale, but I didn’t buy a copy.

~Dr. Mark Lehner, Director of the Giza Plateau Mapping Project and President of AERA, Inc., which sponsors the project conducting excavations of Old Kingdom settlements near the Sphinx and Pyramids. Dr. Lehner didn’t have a book for sale! But, The Complete Pyramids: Solving the Ancient Mysteries, is by him.

~Dr. Robert Ritner, Associate Professor of Egyptology in the Oriental Institute, and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization at the University of Chicago. Previously he was an Assistant Professor of Egyptology at Yale University. His book, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice won the Heyman prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication by Yale University. I did buy a copy of this book, of course.

Dr. Ritner was the real reason I decided to attend this event. The original brochure used terms sure to catch me; ‘words’, ‘magick’, ‘literature’, and the like.

Saturday’s program began with some introductions of audience guests who were supposed to be there--and a couple actually were--including an Egyptian newspaper editor and a Councillor General of the country. The Director of the Oriental Institute (Gene was all I caught) spoke, as did the owner of Seven Wonders Travel. I expected that there would be a listing somewhere of all these people, and didn’t mind that I didn’t immediately catch their names. Alas, there was no listing of guests.

Dr. Hawass was the first lecturer Saturday morning. He and Dr. Lehner are working at the Giza pyramids, and Dr. Hawass is overseeing the management of various ancient sites around the country. I had some difficulty understanding the Dr., though his accent is not that ‘thick’, he does speak rapidly and he was trying to give a lot of information in his presentation. From my very sketchy notes, I see that the gangs of workers who built the pyramids and other monuments, left ‘graffiti’, wrote their name, such as ‘Friends of Khufu’, ‘Drunkards of Khufu’ (see below in notes from Dr. Leyner’s presentation), and the like, in the structures. Dr. Hawass has been looking for the settlements of the workers who would have been employed to build these structures, and he and Dr. Leyner have been working together on this. I’ve also written in my notes: ‘20,000 to build the pyramids?’ ‘1 million total in AE at the time,’ ‘workers had compressed vertebra,’ and ‘only workers ate pork.’ From this I surmise that Dr. Hawass believes as few as 20,000 workers could have been employed at any one time to construct one or more of the Giza pyramids, that there were only one million people in the nation at the time, that the work was just as hard as one would think, judging from the condition of the spinal columns in the mummies of those folks, and that they ate well, if fatty food, which I would think would be good for hard working people.

I have only a few things scribbled down from Sunday: a large number of Sekhmet statues have been uncovered in the so-called ‘Golden Mummy’ site that was recently discovered (the famous donkey stepping in a hole). There are coffins that look like pottery jars, and other, more ‘coffin-like’ coffins made of pottery clay. Figurines of professional mourners. And my last note from Dr. Hawass’ presentation simply says, "huge statue 20 miles away in remains of temple." I wish I knew what statue, but I think it must, too, be Sekhmet.

Dr. Robert Ritner’s presentation "Death on Swift Wings" was the one I was anxious to hear. He seeks to gain insight into how the ancient Egyptians viewed their own texts, culture, etc. by studying the texts we have.

The ‘mummy’s curse’ and those old movies/stories do have a inspiration in AE writing. But the line ‘death on swift wings’ does not appear on the magickal bricks that were in the tomb of Tutankhamun, despite the popularity of that perception. He did mention that unlike in most known tombs, there were 5 such bricks in Tutankhamun’s tomb, rather than 4, but he did not elaborate on this. This 5^th brick had a hole in the middle of it, into which fitted a length of papyrus scroll. But the ‘curses’ put on tomb raiders and thieves were usually found, not on royal tombs, but on those belonging to private citizens. Such curses promised that thieves and others responsible for the desecrations of the tomb would see ghosts, or be eaten by crocodiles or hippopotami.

Of course, the famous ‘haunted mummy’ which supposedly was on the Titanic when it sank, is really only the lid of the mummy case, and has never left museum in the UK wherein it is housed.

But there is a walking mummy story from AE! Although, technically, the mummy is a ghost, or several ghosts. It is the Story of Nefrekepta. The 4^th son of Ramses II, a high or Sekem priest of Ptah in Memphis, is somehow involved in this piece of literature from the New Kingdom. Power and a secret text and the failure to listen to the warnings of those who have already suffered because of their own thirst for power, mysterious and magickal deeds, and a lost family of souls, are all involved . . . at one point, in his dealings with a malevolent spirit, the original seeker is said to ‘not know where he is’, during a sexual encounter with the form the spirit has taken on. This is similar to magickal working (see below) use against others.

The other matter from Saturday in my notes is the fact that scrying was done with water and oil in a specific scrying bowl which had the sun boat and various Ntr inscribed inside it on the bottom.

On Sunday Dr. Ritner talked about spells (briefly mentioning spells 133 - 134, power over water and earth; 148 and 190, necromancy to discover events in the Court of the underworld), especially the ‘love spells’ that have been found, and their similarity to the forms of defensive magick practiced against the enemies of Egypt. The pierced statuette of a woman from the Graeco-Roman period, found in a pot with a lead sheet inscribed with such pronouncements as ‘let her not know where she is’ and the like, is disturbing . . . but the love spoken of here is strictly sexual and the statements are mirrored in the story of Nefrekepta, only he is the one who knows not where he is . . . these are, as Dr. Ritner points out, spells of control, which is why they are virtually identical to those used against enemies and prisoners.

One photo Dr. Ritner showed us was of a figurine with the usual bound arms, and a hole through it apparently for threading, so to be worn as a pendant or amulet or such like. I had a discussion with another attendee in during lunch regarding this figurine. She seemed of the opinion that it was not something related to the spells of control or of the subjugation of enemies, but simply a Goddess figurine . . . and that the design was actually just a matter of the carving, to compact the image, rather than symbolic of binding.

Some other such magickal procedures used against the enemies of Egypt include: the images of other peoples on the instep of Pharaoh’s sandals, on the lintel stops of doors (which portray human figures, arms tied behind their backs at the elbows, and with the posts of the doors digging into their backs’), the images on footstools, on tiles, on ink pots (so that the scribe and Pharaoh himself could stab the enemy with every dip of a pen), and the carved images of the heads of enemies under the sill of the Window of Appearance, so Pharaoh could stand upon the heads of enemies. (In conversation with another attendee at lunch, we agreed that more than likely Pharaoh stood upon a sill lined with the real heads of defeated foes sometime in the past of ancient Egypt . . . .)

Other ways to deal with troublesome rival kings or other enemies, are to inscribe their names on pots and then smash them, or make clay representations of their food and destroy it or feed their effigies to ghosts. Dr. Ritner related a story of a ‘Nubian’ being sacrificed in order to make an angry ghost--the best kind to feed images of one’s enemies to, it seems. This form of cursing was also done by private citizens.

Finally, I have scribbled down, that the best way to break romances, is to associate the person, the man one wishes to be rid of with Set . . . but why isn’t in my notes . . . although, depending upon the time and location of this particular spell, it isn’t a mystery.

"Bakers, Brewers, and Builders at the Pyramids" Dr. Mark Lehner works with Dr. Hawass these days, and was a most interesting speaker. The ‘red graffiti’ spoken of earlier gives an indication of how the people built the pyramids (and probably every other large structure?). In the Old Kingdom, the entire crew of workers were divided into gangs, the gangs into phyle (za), signified by a hieroglyph depicting many loops of rope. The gangs had names, such as ‘The Friends of Khufu,’ ‘The Drunkards of Khufu’ (drunkards here meaning drunk on spirit not alcohol). Lehner speculates that there may have been initiation rites when one entered a particular phyle of a gang.

In the Middle Kingdom, the gang names had town names incorporated into them.

Other notes: wabet is a mortuary workshop, produced offerings and tomb furniture. Dr. Lehner then embarked on a tale of the excavating of what seem to be bakeries. Apparently AE bread molds were conical, setting into depressions in the ground around which the baking fires were laid. He and his crew did an ‘experiment’ for the National Geographic Society to see if they could make bread as the ancients had. Details are available in video and in an issue of National Geographic. They discovered they weren’t as good at it as the AE people had been . . . .

He made the statement that this work was not really the work they were supposed to be doing--I can’t remember his exact phrase, but the impression I got was that it wasn’t as important as looking for and discovering the villages, the ‘important’ structures, etc.

Dr. Kent Weeks is the head of the Theban Mapping Project, a massive undertaking. My notes include: ‘Thebes/Luxor, most villages were of mud brick now under 6 foot of silt from the flooding of the Nile’ (when it used to flood). ‘500,000 years of human occupation’, and most ominously, ‘agricultural production has declined since the building of the Aswan Dam, even with fertilizers being used to try to replace the natural fertility formerly spread by the innundation. Modern agriculture and irrigation procedures raise the ground water and undermine temple foundations’, and more dire stuff.

Some of those dire things are Dr. Hawass’ report that the Cairo sewage system leaks, and the salts that leach into the earth also damage archaeological sites. He also feels that the tourist traffic is more of a detriment to the sites than airborne pollution, both in terms of traffic and emissions of buses, and human beings breathing in the temples, pyramids, etc. Dr. Lehner reminds us that the delta is ‘an eroding coastal plain.’

The History and Exploration of Thebes will be available shortly, at least the first volume of it, in elephant folios and CD’s of maps and diagrams and text, etc. Sounds yummy!

A few other thoughts; first, I wondered why these Egyptologists used the Greek names of Ntr when they spoke of Their statues, etc. I found this very odd. But I feel that archaeology is a discipline which changes glacially slow, and that the physical findings are the most important thing to a lot of archaeologists; not what they may mean, not necessarily the people who left the constructions and contents behind. During Dr. Hawass’ Sunday presentation it really struck me that the point seemed to be finding things, and it wasn’t as important what was found as that they had found it. Very strange feeling for me; I am interested in how people lived, how they did things, what they thought. Knowing this helps me to understand the ancient Egyptians’ relationship with Ntr, and to deduce how I should approach and work with Ntr.

This is another reason I found Dr. Ritner’s presentation the most interesting; magick concerns human beings and our attempts to influence the physical world by the force of will and by our relationship with beings and powers beyond the everyday. And, too, he deals with the texts, the small artifacts, and not the stone structures per se, of AE, which makes the ideas more human, less distant and unfathomable.

Books mentioned and more information

~Hawas, Zahi. The Secrets of the Sphinx: Restoration Past and Present. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1998. Two books in one; one side is in English, the other in Arabic (?).

~___________ . Silent Images: Women in Pharaonic Egypt. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1998.

~Lehner, Mark. The Complete Pyramids: Solving the Ancient Mysteries. London: Thames and Hudson, 1997.

~Ritner, Robert. The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997 (3^rd printing with minor corrections). The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization No. 54.

~Weeks, Kent. The Lost Tomb. William Morrow and Company, 1998.

~Theban Mapping Project http://www.thebanmappingproject.com/