MYTHS & LEGENDS of ANCIENT EGYPT Joyce Tyldesley ALLEN LANE an imprint of PENGUIN BOOKS PARTICULAR BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Oces: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England www.penguin.com First published 2010 Copyright © Joyce Tyldesley, 2010 The moral right of the author has been asserted All rights reserved Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-141-96376-1 For Philippa Anne Snape, who has always wanted a book of her own CONTENTS List of Illustrations Map of Egypt INTRODUCTION Denitions and sources Egypt’s gods The Egyptian world Dating dynastic Egypt I CREATION 1 Sunrise: the Nine Gods of Heliopolis The mound of creation Atum: lord of totality The divine twins Geb and Nut: earth and sky 2 Alternative Creations The eight gods of Hermopolis Ptah of Memphis Khnum of Elephantine Min of Koptos 3 Sunset Aspects of Re The voyages of Re The sun and the snakes The shipwrecked sailor II DESTRUCTION 4 The Death of Osiris The Osiris myth Cemetery dogs King of the dead The story of Sinuhe 5 The Contendings of Horus and Seth A dysfunctional family Horus of Hierakonpolis Seth: the Red One 6 At the End of Time Journey to the afterlife The court of the two truths The tale of Si-Osiri The end of all things III THE GREAT GODDESSES 7 The Golden One She of the Two Faces The daughter of Re Sekhmet and the destruction of mankind The doomed prince Bastet of Bubastis 8 Isis: Great of Magic Wife of Osiris Sister of Nephthys and Seth Mother of Horus Queen of heaven 9 Warriors and Wise Women The cobra goddesses Neith Mut Anath and Astarte IV HEROES AND VILLAINS 10 Divine Kings Papyrus Westcar Divine births Egypt’s last kings The Amarna Age 11 Tales of Gods and Men The herdsman and the goddess The tale of the eloquent peasant The tale of the two brothers The tale of truth and falsehood The voyage of wenamun 12 A Developing Mythology Imhotep and Amenhotep Son of Hapu Tuthmosis III and General Djehuty The pyramid builders The extraordinary King Rhampsinitus Prince Khaemwaset Cleopatra and her snake Postscript Dramatis Personae Chronological Table Acknowledgements and Permissions Notes Bibliography and Further Reading Index LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS All photographs are copyright © Steven Snape 1 The Red Land, the Black Land and the River Nile 2 The Red (Northern) Pyramid of Snefru at Dahshur 3 Funerary texts from Sakkara 4 Atum and the God’s Wife of Amen Shepenwepet (Medinet Habu) 5 Nut depicted on the painted inside of a con lid (British Museum, London) 6 The earth god Geb (Valley of the Kings) 7 Senwosret I oers to the ithyphallic form of Amen at Karnak (White Chapel, Karnak) 8 Nectanebo I oers Maat to Thoth (Cairo Museum) 9 The creator Ptah (British Museum, London) 10 The solar deity Re-Horakhty (British Museum, London) 11 The solar boat of Re (British Museum, London) 12 The Souls of Pe and Dep pull the solar boat of Re (Temple of Ramesses II, Abydos) 13 Osiris (Cairo Museum) 14 The jackal-headed god Anubis (Cairo Museum) 15 Seth (Memphis) 16 Horus drives his harpoon into Seth (Edfu temple) 17 The eye of Horus 18 King Menkaure, Hathor and a local goddess (Cairo Museum) 19 Sekhmet (Luxor Museum) 20 Hathor (British Museum, London) 21 A traditional Egyptian Isis (illustration by E. Harold Jones, published in Theodore Davis (1908), The Tomb of Siptah, London) 22 Isis in the form of a kite (Garstang Museum of Archaeology, Liverpool University) 23 The crocodile-headed Sobek (Kom Ombo temple) 24 The dwarf Bes (Garstang Museum of Archaeology, Liverpool University) 25 The Female pharaoh Hatshepsut (Red Chapel, Karnak) INTRODUCTION The work of the god is a joke to the heart of the fool. The life of a fool is a burden to the god himself … Fate does not look ahead, retaliation does not come wrongfully. Great is the counsel of the god in putting one thing after another. The fate and the fortune that come, it is the god who sends them.1 Ancient Egypt supplies some startling statistics: 3,000 years of dynastic rule by at least 300 heroic kings who recognized, at a conservative estimate, some 1,500 deities. This immense time span saw the development of a complex and frequently contradictory mythology peopled by a vast and ever-increasing pantheon, whose myriad members changed name, appearance and character with startling regularity, frequently splitting into dierent components or fusing to form a deity more powerful than the sum of his or her parts. Their stories, the science and history of their age, entertain while providing explanations for the mysteries of creation, existence and death that challenge every community. In so doing they provide a glimpse into the thoughts and fears of the ancient mind. It would be a mistake to see the dierent explanations for specic phenomena – the many colourful creation myths, for example – as rival mythologies. Rivalry could never be an issue in a land with no single, correct answer to the mysteries of life. Either/or logic is a relatively modern convention developed by the Greeks; the Egyptians, happily logic-free, had no diculty in accepting the contradictions, inconsistencies and multiple interpretations within their stories, just as children today see little problem in accepting the parallel stories of Santa Claus and Baby Jesus as the raison d’être for Christmas. Their myths were not designed to be analysed, compared and contrasted by scholars; they were simply accepted as valid attempts to interpret the inexplicable for dierent people at dierent times and in dierent places. Each individual tale carried its own internal logic, and that was all that was needed. However, if we look closely enough we can identify one constant theme – the desire to justify and reinforce the divine rule of the king – underpinning and unifying the diverse tales. DEFINITIONS AND SOURCES Myth, like logic, is a word derived from the Greek world. The Egyptians had no equivalent word or concept, and they did not feel the need to separate their thoughts into ‘fact’ and ‘ction’. Nor, for that matter, did they have words for ‘religion’ or ‘philosophy’. We therefore cannot rely on the Egyptians to dene our area of study for us. I have chosen to dene a myth as ‘a traditional story set in the past, with a supernatural element, which is used to explain or justify the otherwise inexplicable’. I dene a legend as simply ‘a traditional, unveriable story set in the past, concerning people or places that were, or were believed to be, real’. A purist might argue that these denitions are far too general, embracing as they do such diverse genres as fairy stories and royal propaganda. However, in the context of ancient Egypt, where there are no fairies and few heroes other than the divinely inspired king, a more restrictive denition seems unnecessarily exclusive. As Egypt has left us far more myths than legends, the rst three sections of this book will be dedicated to myths, while the nal section has both myths and legends. Tomb and temple walls, statues, papyri and amulets make it clear that Egypt recognized many gods, demi-gods and supernatural beings. Yet few well-developed tales about these beings survive. We have no complete, or even partially complete, contemporary book of Egyptian myths. That book, if it ever existed (and this seems highly unlikely – Egyptian theology had no central dogma and no single book of divine revelation), was lost when the libraries attached to the great temples were destroyed in the turmoil that accompanied Egypt’s compulsory conversion from paganism to Christianity in AD 391. Our canon of myths must therefore be constructed using a variety of sources that yield oblique references to myths, rather than the myths themselves. This is neither unusual nor unexpected: no ancient civilization has provided a full written record. However, the archaeological bias that has seen the preservation of many of Egypt’s desert graves but the almost complete loss of her mud-brick domestic architecture means that our evidence will always veer towards the mythology of death. More particularly, it will veer towards the mythology of death accepted by those wealthy enough to invest in a decorated tomb. With this caveat in mind, mythic elements and abstract concepts can be deduced from stone architecture and architectural fragments, and picked out from the writings and illustrations preserved on temple and tomb walls.