Skip to main content

A Glorious Menagerie sacred worlds. Thus arranged, the sequence of images in Part I, ‘Animals in Association with Man’, offers an astonishingly realistic record of the Nile region from ancient times. The fabled ‘land of papyrus’ – a marshy hinterland of lakes and swamps, dangerous, mysterious yet revered as a place of birth and rebirth, ‘the image of the world’s very origins’ – no longer exists, lost to desertification and urban development, except in the images painted and carved by the ancient Egyptians in their tombs. Early pre-Dynastic potsherds show the Nile valley rich in game – gazelle, ibex, hare; later bas-reliefs and wall paintings trace with cartoon-strip clarity farming and stockbreeding as well as hunting and fishing. We see farmers of the Old and Middle Kingdoms domesticating cattle, dogs, asses and pigs (force-fed hyenas and antelopes didn’t catch on). Horses, imported from Asia in the seventeenth century BC, were not ridden but harnessed in pairs to chariots carrying driver and archer. Dogs, cats, monkeys, baboons were immortalized as faithful companions in the afterlife. (Camels and water buffalo arrived only with the Arab conquest in the seventh century AD.) No Edenic pastoral where lion lies down with lamb, this paradise is life itself with all its dramas: a calf snatched by the cowherd from a crocodile’s jaws, tongue stuck out in terror, head turned back to its fearful mother; a flurry of wildfowl flushed from a papyrus thicket in a hunt; villagers harvesting figs while baboons on the branches above plunder the fruit. The images are so vivid, so real, it’s hard to hold on to the dual narrative, the funerary context: ‘Ploughing and harvesting in the afterlife’, the caption to Fig. 54 insists, and ‘Symbolic hunting expedition in the marshes’ (Fig. 115). In Part II, ‘The Sacred World’, the pantheon of gods and goddesses, magic, myths and legends attest to the seething world of the Egyptian imagination – the shapeshifting gods in wondrous combinations of human, animal and monstrous hybrid, balancing the sun between their ears or horns, and/or the rearing cobra, crowns of the two kingdoms and all manner of other carefully coded headgear. How to 23

A Glorious Menagerie interpret scenes so resistant to definition yet so vivid, so imbued with conviction? In prehistoric times, Germond hypothesizes, Egyptians viewed animals – lion, crocodile, hippopotamus – as frightening manifestations of the uncontrollable forces governing their world. Later, in more settled times, they added human attributes to their gods but ‘any tendency to favour only the human form of any given divinity, at the expense of the original animal form, would have been fundamentally at odds with the basic tenets of Egyptian thinking’. Hence the fusion of both in their pantheon, and the dual role . . . It’s a theory: take it or leave it. Sacred animals are a rich source of confusion. ‘The distinction between animal god and sacred animal is not a neat and orderly one,’ Germond warns. Ritual burial of individual animals had taken place from early times, as the living ba (essence) of a god, though this was not the same as animal worship. Greeks and Romans, whose deities (usually) took human form, were bemused by the Egyptians’ veneration of animals – Greek to Egyptian in a fourth-century BC Athenian play: I couldn’t bring myself to make an alliance with you; neither our manners nor our customs agree . . . You worship the cow, whereas I sacrifice it to the gods. You hold the eel as a great divinity, we regard it as by far the greatest delicacy . . . If you see a cat in any trouble, you cry, but I am perfectly happy to kill and skin it . . . But Greeks after Alexander did adopt the cult of the sacred Apis bull, chosen by priests for its special markings, stabled in Memphis and buried in a huge stone coffin in Saqqara. Colossal stone statues of this figure, worshipped by Egyptians as Osiris/Apis and by Greeks and Romans in Alexandria as Serapis, testify to its awesome potency. Ptolemaic incomers also favoured the popular cat cult around Bastet, the purring homely alter ego of the fearsome lioness-headed goddess Sekhmet who symbolized the sun’s merciless heat when the Nile’s 24

Page Text

A Glorious Menagerie sacred worlds. Thus arranged, the sequence of images in Part I, ‘Animals in Association with Man’, offers an astonishingly realistic record of the Nile region from ancient times.

The fabled ‘land of papyrus’ – a marshy hinterland of lakes and swamps, dangerous, mysterious yet revered as a place of birth and rebirth, ‘the image of the world’s very origins’ – no longer exists, lost to desertification and urban development, except in the images painted and carved by the ancient Egyptians in their tombs. Early pre-Dynastic potsherds show the Nile valley rich in game – gazelle, ibex, hare; later bas-reliefs and wall paintings trace with cartoon-strip clarity farming and stockbreeding as well as hunting and fishing. We see farmers of the Old and Middle Kingdoms domesticating cattle, dogs, asses and pigs (force-fed hyenas and antelopes didn’t catch on). Horses, imported from Asia in the seventeenth century BC, were not ridden but harnessed in pairs to chariots carrying driver and archer. Dogs, cats, monkeys, baboons were immortalized as faithful companions in the afterlife. (Camels and water buffalo arrived only with the Arab conquest in the seventh century AD.)

No Edenic pastoral where lion lies down with lamb, this paradise is life itself with all its dramas: a calf snatched by the cowherd from a crocodile’s jaws, tongue stuck out in terror, head turned back to its fearful mother; a flurry of wildfowl flushed from a papyrus thicket in a hunt; villagers harvesting figs while baboons on the branches above plunder the fruit. The images are so vivid, so real, it’s hard to hold on to the dual narrative, the funerary context: ‘Ploughing and harvesting in the afterlife’, the caption to Fig. 54 insists, and ‘Symbolic hunting expedition in the marshes’ (Fig. 115).

In Part II, ‘The Sacred World’, the pantheon of gods and goddesses, magic, myths and legends attest to the seething world of the Egyptian imagination – the shapeshifting gods in wondrous combinations of human, animal and monstrous hybrid, balancing the sun between their ears or horns, and/or the rearing cobra, crowns of the two kingdoms and all manner of other carefully coded headgear. How to

23

My Bookmarks

Skip to main content