Journey through ancient Egypt

Dr Gabrielle Jamela Hosein

I’M WRITING this week from Cairo where I’ve spent the past days learning about ancient Egypt. It’s been a study tour of temples and tombs, Pharaohs and hieroglyphics from more than 4,000 years ago. Egyptians are very proud of the history of what they consider the world’s oldest civilisation which stretched beyond Egypt’s current borders in all directions.

That history has been made part of national identity, and symbols from ancient Egypt, such as lotus flower and papyrus designs on building facades, are embedded everywhere. Schoolchildren go on field trips to these sites, learning early so much of what the world should also know.

What stood out is how much history is valued, not just because it fuels a tourist economy nor simply because it’s so inescapable across a landscape scattered with monuments, each with its specificity.

One temple could be to goddesses Isis and Hathor, another could be to the gods Sobek and Horus, the first represented as an alligator and the other as falcon. In Edfu, unlike elsewhere, there are images of women giving birth sitting on a birthing stool, one nursing a baby, and instruments including forceps for birth, like a medical textbook carved in stone.

Despite each site’s differences, consistent symbols appear throughout such as the sun for the god Ra, the ankh for life and Egypt, and animals such as vultures, beetles and snakes. Commonly, there are combinations of these, such as at the temple in Kom Ombo, which has a falcon-headed crocodile with a serpent head as a tail. All show power.

It’s impossible to not be overwhelmed. Every single surface of every tomb or temple, from ceilings to walls, pillars, doorways and obelisks use repeated symbols to tell stories, honour gods and goddesses, name rulers and their lineages, specify rites and rituals, highlight defeated enemies, and mark passage through the afterlife. They were all originally in vibrant colours of reds, yellows, browns, whites and blues, some of which you can still see today.

One can observe thousands of years of constant architectural innovation, as Pharaohs added to older sites or as problems were solved during construction at others.

Artisans mixed colours which were then painted sometimes more than one hundred metres down the tunnel to a tomb. You can still see those colours today. The scale, skill and detail are hypnotising, which almost seems intended.

We no longer build for thousands of years into the future. We certainly do not construct by hand anything the equivalent of the tombs in the Valleys of the Kings or Queens. I do not think we have made anything as intricate, monumental and mesmerising like this since.

Some temples took up to 400 years to complete, boggling the mind about how consistency in design, materials and ambition was maintained. Unexpectedly, I learned that workers were not only slaves, and when their payment in food was late, under Ramses III, they went on the first recorded strike.

Walking alongside walls of hieroglyphics, I could sometimes press my fingers against the alphabet markings, marvelling that across thousands of years, there was once a human hand exactly where mine was, touching the same etchings, whether made in marble, limestone, granite or sandstone. Time seems to collapse when you are touching where another was chiselling or painting in the Old Kingdom so long ago.

At the Cairo Museum, there’s a section of floor from the Pharaoh Akhenaten’s house, and to stand inches from it is to feel close in space to a figure so removed by time and status that it’s nearly unimaginable.

It was hard to think that so much was under sand 40 feet high or under the regularly flooding waters of the Nile, was lived in by locals who punched holes in the stone to support houses and stables, was defaced by Muslims and Christians or was robbed again and again between then and now. These are ancient, but living history up to the present is marked on their state of preservation and ruin.

I kept wondering why we teach in schools about Greeks and Romans, but not about the Egyptians, wondering if its bias against African history or our unreflective identification with Western self-centredness, which makes ancient Europe seem more like our own genealogy.

I was also reminded how little we treat our own history as worth preserving so that those who come after could wander in our midst, imagining our lives in their minds, regardless of how long we have been gone.

Diary of a mothering worker

Entry 488

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