Amazing continuities by the banks of the Nile
William Dalrymple
THE PHARAOH'S SHADOW by Anthony Sattin Gollancz, £20, pp. 234 Afew years ago, Anthony Sattin was heading on donkey-back for an obscure Pharaonic tomb cut in a cliff-face high above the Nile. Turning a corner, he sud- denly found his way blocked by two burly Egyptians. He could not visit the tomb now, the men insisted. Behind them, he saw the reason for the obstruction. Through the portal of the tomb, Sattin caught a glimpse of a woman rolling around the floor. In an effort to conceive, she was shrieking out prayers and invoca- tions to the ancient Pharaonic gods.
This chance discovery of the survival of the Pharaonic deities in an ostensibly mod- ern Islamic society set Sattin off on an investigation that grew increasingly obses- sional during the period he lived in Egypt. Gradually, over a period of years, he amassed evidence. It was not just in folk fertility rituals that there survived memo- ries of centuries-old Pharaonic practices: the words of popular funeral laments, it turned out, contained phrases that were to be found in the hieroglyphs of the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts; in the melodies of Coptic chants the hymns once sung to Isis and Horns lived on; in the writing of letters to the dead, in the spells of Egyptian sor- cerers, the icons of the monks, the incanta- tions of snake-hunters, the rituals of the village exorcists — in all these things lay evidence that the Pharaonic past was still alive in the traditions and superstitions of the fellahin of Egypt.
To some extent this is hardly surprising. As with the Eastern Mediterranean con- quests of the Greeks and the Romans, the Arab occupation of the Byzantine Levant in the 6th century involved more the impo- sition of a new elite and a new language than any wholesale change of population. Then, as before, the Egyptian fellahin con- tinued to plough the fields, the Nile rose and fell, the seasons changed, and the annual cycle of rituals and festivals contin- ued to be celebrated. Sultans might be assassinated, whole dynasties disappear into the desert, the bulk of the population convert to Islam; but in the fields by the Nile the rural traditions continued, and were passed on. What is much more sur- prising, perhaps, considering the amount that has been written about Egypt over the years, is the fact that Anthony Sattin is the first researcher systematically to catalogue these Pharaonic survivals. It is a major topic, which touches on disciplines as diverse as sociology, art history, hymnogra- phy and Egyptology, yet Sattin manages to turn what could be a dull academic treatise into a gripping quest that captures the reader on the first page and does not release him until the final paragraph. We follow him as he bribes his way into moon- lit temples in an attempt to surprise women praying to the Pharaonic gods; as he tracks down snake-hunters in their reptilian lairs; even as he travels from the deserts of Luxor as far as the damp streets of Liver- pool in search of long-lost manuscripts.
What ultimately sustains and animates this fascinating and brilliant book is Sattin's boundless love for Egypt and his wonderful ability to convey his enthusiasm for even the most obscure details of the folk religion of Upper Egypt from herbal vaginal sup- positories of Pharaonic inspiration to Dionysian rituals involving naked boys and pieces of string. In this sense, his book is a rarity among modern travel books: a gen- `Well, have we got everything? Maps, tickets, passports, vitriol?' uine labour of love. He really is going in search of answers to questions that keep him awake at night, not merely scratching his head for an idea with which he can extract a large advance from his publisher.
The best moments in the book come when Sattin is at his most awed and excited by Egypt's almost inconceivable continuities: I was in one of those places and experiencing one of those moments when religions merge. In the name of Allah and his Prophet Muhammad, in the name of the Father and His Son Jesus, in the name of the great divin- ity, of Amun, Mut and Khonsu, the Trinity of Thebes, prayers had been offered here, bread broken, flowers and images brought, animals slaughtered and the sick carried in the hope of a cure, for as long as we humans have recorded our actions.... Throughout the mil- lennia, whatever the creed, Egyptians had held onto the belief that they could call upon the spirits of dead Holy Men to improve their lives on earth.
At times, Sattin's enthusiasms are in dan- ger of getting the better of him, and there are moments when his narrative slides towards melodrama: 'Why did I feel I was being drawn into it? Why me? Why now?' Moreover, he is not always sufficiently rig- orous in distinguishing genuine Pharaonic survivals from practices that might have other, more plausible origins. At one point he appears to be suggesting that the asceti- cism of the Coptic monks was derived from some obscure ancient Egyptian hermits when a far more likely source is the desert traditions of the Essenes and the pre- Christian Jewish ascetics of the John the Baptist stamp. Equally, his suggestion that the tradition of Islamic tomb-building (something that is of course specifically forbidden in the Koran) had its origins in the ancient Egyptian cult of the dead ignores the fact that many pre-Islamic societies had tomb building traditions of their own, and that the earliest Islamic tombs are found not in Egypt but in Central Asia. Yet these are small quibbles. This is a marvellous book, and one that any living travel writer would have been proud to write.
It is also an extremely timely book. It is clear throughout the narrative that both the Egyptian government and the country's burgeoning Islamist movement look on ancient folk traditions — and even the great moulids (Egyptian Sufi festi- vals) to which hundreds of thousands are drawn every year — as essentially un- Islamic, backward and embarrassing. Since the Nile no longer floods, due to the Aswan dam, a hundred festivals celebrating the ancient but now disrupted seasonal cycle are seen as increasingly irrelevant, and practices that have survived perhaps 5,000 years look likely to die out. Tragical- ly, The Pharaoh's Shadow may soon be more relevant as a guide to dead rituals than living ones. In the meantime, it stands as one of the most fascinating and remark- able travel writing debuts to be published for many years.
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