Читать книгу A Physician on the Nile - ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī - Страница 8

This book is a report on Egypt, written there in 600/1204 by ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī for the Abbasid caliph in Iraq, and entitled in the original, Kitāb al-Ifādah wa-l-iʿtibār fī l-umūr al-mushāhadah wa-l-ḥawādith al-muʿāyanah bi-arḍ Miṣr (The Book of Edification and Admonition: Things Eye-Witnessed and Events Personally Observed in the Land of Egypt²). It begins as a descriptive geography but goes much further and becomes—as a contemporary biographer of the author put it—“a book that stupefies the intellect,”³ that is, “a book that blows the mind.”

The book is divided into two parts. The first, the “Edification,” covers general topography, then proceeds to plants, trees, and animals. It then turns into a pioneering work of Egyptology. Among his other credentials, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf was a physician; this inspired and informed his observations, both anatomical and esthetic, on pharaonic sculpture, mummies, and other antiquities. He looked hard at things, and didnʼt mind getting his hands dirty: in order to correct a possible error in an anatomical work by Galen, for example, he studied two thousand human jawbones in a necropolis. He was also an early and ardent champion of archeological conservation who accused monument robbers of “the heights of avarice and the depths of rascality” (§1.4.39). The long chapter on antiquities is followed by a shorter one on contemporary buildings and boats, then a chapter on food, including a detailed but easy-to-follow recipe for a sultanic picnic pie (try it at home, if you have a large enough oven: it contains not a mere four-and-twenty blackbirds, but no fewer than ninety fowl of various sorts, plus the odd three or four sheep).

All edifying indeed. But then comes the “mind-blowing” Part Two, the “Admonition”—a horrifying account of the famine and plague that afflicted Egypt in 597–98/1200–2. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf was a clinical spectator and a ruthless reporter, and he knew that his first-hand depictions of starvation and cannibalism, of a society in moral free fall, “gave the truest information and made the most striking impression” (§0.2). Here he is, for example, observing the remains of famine victims heaped up in a hollow known as “Pharaohʼs Pickle Bowl” (§2.3.33):

And when we looked down into [it] . . . we saw the skulls—white, black, dark brown, stacked on top of each other in layers. So numerous were they, and piled so high, that they had completely hidden all the other bones and might have been heads without bodies. To an onlooker, they resembled a newly cut crop of watermelons, heaped together at the harvest. I saw them again, some days later, when the sun had scorched the flesh off them and they had turned white; this time, they seemed to me like ostrich eggs piled up.

Once seen, not easily forgotten—like the skulls in The Killing Fields.