Читать книгу Treasury of Egyptian Mythology: Classic Stories of Gods, Goddesses, Monsters & Mortals - Christina Balit - Страница 12
ОглавлениеAset: Aset loved lotuses, the symbol of Upper Egypt. Usir loved papyrus reeds, the symbol of Lower Egypt, especially where the Nile flows into the sea. Together they made the perfect ruling couple for all Egypt.
ASET (ISIS)
Devoted Wife and Mother
The god Set was so envious of his brother Usir that he committed a dastardly act. He nailed Usir into a box and threw it into the Nile River.
“Ahiii,” screamed Aset. She ran along the shore, arms outstretched futilely. She must catch up, she must pull the box to safety. She imagined her husband trapped inside, panicked. She ran.
But the current raced north, carrying her husband inexorably toward the sea. And the wind blew south, impeding Aset’s every step. She ran hard, seeing the white-foamed swirl of the swift and wild river. She ran harder, hearing nothing but the shriek of the wind rasping her ears raw. The box was already out of sight! Aset had to run yet faster. That was her husband—the love of her life!
Aset ran all that day, all that night, all the next day. Her feet bled. Her legs ached. When she arrived at the seashore, she raced back and forth, calling out over the green and blue and purple waters, calling, calling. She rent her hair. She grabbed a clamshell and shaved off her eyebrows. She beat her chest.
The world spun around this goddess, this woman in love, bereft and alone, who had no choice but to prostrate herself on the beach and wait for the dizziness to pass and hope against hope that her husband had managed to get out of the box before he suffocated.
The Kenaani’s land became known as Phoenicia. It spread between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. The people were known for sea trading and purple dye made from murex snails. But we know them most for their abjad, a writing system with letters that represented consonant sounds. The Greeks borrowed this abjad and added letters for vowels. The Etruscans then borrowed it, then the Romans, each making changes—hence our alphabet.
A tablet showing the Phoenician alphabet
Meanwhile the box that held Usir had washed out to the middle of the vast Mediterranean Sea and floated in that wadj wer—that great green—aimlessly, a rudderless, sail-less skiff, until the currents eventually carried it toward shore again. But not back to the mouth of the Nile where miserable Aset lay crying, no. The box settled far to the east, near the city of Kubna in the land of the Kenaani.
The coast there was thick with strong reeds that reached out. Like tentacles, they slipped around and over and under each other and pulled the box in, wrapping themselves about it over and over, caressingly. Somehow one reed pushed against another so insistently that the two reeds merged, and then another merged with them, and soon the mass of reeds was a single shrub engulfing the box. And then the shrub grew.
This sort of magic doesn’t happen every day—and magic it surely was. For inside that box lay the corpse of the god Usir, who had known how to bring fertility to the earth, who could make anything grow. So perhaps that very power had transferred from the god to the box as he gave his last breath. Who can know such a thing? Yet that shrub grew faster than any shrub had ever grown before, and became a massive cedar tree, 130 feet tall, studded with cones. Hoopoe birds came in droves to give themselves sand baths under the tree and to nest among its silver-green needle-like leaves.
The mighty cedar could be seen from afar, but it could be smelled even before it was seen, for it gave off a spicy, alluring aroma. Soon the king himself noticed the tree, and he called his queen to his side to inhale its essence. She swooned at the cedar perfume. After all, she was late in her pregnancy and she was given to swooning.
There was no question about it: The tree was majestic, it must grace the king’s palace. It took a troop of workers to cut through the base and haul the tree to the palace, where it became a beautiful column that all could admire. And they did. The column made them feel a certain peace; it offered a sense of assurance that all would be well with the world. It was almost godly in that way. Yet still, no one guessed that inside the trunk nestled the box that held Usir.
The gigantic cedar that held Usir’s trunk was one of many colossal trees in that land. They could live thousands of years. But this tree was doomed.
Grief-stricken Aset somehow sensed the birds knew best. She followed their calls to the palace of Kubna, where her husband Usir was hidden within the cedar column.
Back on the shore of Egypt, the goddess Aset lay desperate. Moons had passed and still she remained immobile. But now she was woken from her grief-stricken stupor by the insistent calls bu bu bu, and again bu bu bu, all around her bu bu bu. She sat up, agog at the flock of hoopoes with their colorful crests, strutting in profusion. These were the birds who had nested in the cedar the king had cut down; they were mourning its loss. They had flown all this way searching for a substitute tree when they’d spotted Aset, and instinctively they were drawn to her, instinctively they understood her grief matched theirs.
The birds called bu bu bu and Aset stood. Bu bu bu. The birds took to the air and circled above her. Aset followed, and the procession moved east, a wavering line along the sands, a spiraling in the heavens.
Aset sensed an urgency in the birds and hope swelled her heart. These birds were leading her to Usir. What else could this mean? With each day her hopes grew till her heart was ready to shred.
There, at long last, was the splendid palace of Kubna. Aset wandered, sure the box would be just past that wall, just ’round that corner, just under that eave. But the box was nowhere!
Without warning, without preamble, reason finally coated Aset’s tongue with a bitter salt: Usir was dead. Whether she found the box or not, he was dead. It was almost as though he was nearby, with his spirit telling her that, forcing her to understand.
Aset found a large, smooth, warm rock in the courtyard. She sat and wept. But these were tears of acceptance and exhaustion. It was over. At last.
So she thought.
But inside the Kubna palace the royal handmaidens whispered. A morose stranger sat in the courtyard. She was thin as a wind-whipped pine, but still one could see a beauty in those cheekbones, that long neck, those cupped hands. The royal handmaidens peeked out at her, wary at first, but then, gradually, worried for her. Grief weighed on the stranger so heavily, it hurt them to watch. This woman was broken. They approached on quiet feet.
Aset turned and saw their frightened faces and her wounded heart opened. After all, her grief was due to no fault of theirs. She smiled through tears and patted the empty spot on the rock beside her. These handmaidens were hardly older than girls, innocent and fresh. She plaited their hair and exhaled perfume onto their golden skin, and when they asked what had happened to her, she talked sweetly of nothing. Deities knew that humans weren’t good at discussions about death.
The afternoon passed and one by one the maidens left. Aset folded one hand inside the other and sat. She wasn’t waiting. There was nothing to wait for. She was resting.
Soon those maidens reappeared and took Aset by both hands and led her to their queen, recommending her sincerely.
The queen paused, a finger pressed to her cheek. “You’re not like what the girls said. Not at all.”
Aset didn’t speak. She wasn’t even sure why she was still standing there. She might as well leave.
“You’re older than my usual handmaidens. But I sense your true value.”
Aset jerked to attention. She looked closely at this queen now, at the tired eyes, the flushed cheeks. Did she really know she was in the presence of a goddess?
“I sense the good in you. You can help me in the way I most need help.” The queen bid Aset to follow her into another chamber—an infant’s chamber. The queen picked up her newborn son and placed him in Aset’s arms. “You’re his new
