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ONE

The Way It Was

“If you could only imagine how beautiful it was.How can I tell you…?” OS

It is said that the Nile resembles a lotus plant, with its roots buried deep in the African continent and its flower opening into the broad delta far to the north. If you look at a map, it is very easy to make that small leap into symbolism. The ancients would have seen that and more, because for them the lotus had layers of meaning beyond simply its beautiful form. Modern culture is not always comfortable with blurring the lines between what we call “reality” and wishful thinking. But if you were living in the Egypt of 1300 BC, everything was more than it appeared. Every place you set your foot was filled with the energy of the neteru, the gods.

That was then, you could say, but even today there are signs of the old gods lingering among the ruined temples and shrines that lie along the river’s banks. When you leave the cities and go out into the countryside, if you know how to listen and observe, you find echoes of that distant past in the villages, though less and less now. Newer forms of religious devotions may have swept away the old, but the folk practices speak of an elder time – like women still leaving offerings before images of the goddess Hathor, praying for a son, and married couples reverently touching an ancient statue of Sekhmet for help with infertility.

Omm Sety knew only too well how the past can haunt the present.

Sometime in the early 1970s Omm Sety and I were sitting together in the small cafeteria near the Sety Temple when a group of French tourists arrived, filling all the empty tables. Someone turned on a cassette recorder and we heard the famous Franco-Egyptian singer Dalida crooning a melancholy Gypsy song in which a girl asks a handsome man,

And you, beautiful Gypsy prince –

From what country do you come?

and he replies sadly,

I come from a homeland

That does not exist anymore.

I translated the French words for Omm Sety and she fell into one of those long spells of silence with which I was already familiar. I let her have her reverie. After a while she said in a distant, dreamy voice, “And me, I come from a homeland that is living in my heart – now, and as it was before.” She finished in a whisper, “If you could only imagine how beautiful it was. How can I tell you…?”

1300 BC

What was it like, this homeland of her heart? This was the Black Land, whose people greeted the sun each day with gratitude and prayers under the watchful gaze of the gods. The dark soil beneath their feet was rich and fertile because each year the river god Hapi brought them the Inundation; and at night when they cast their eyes upward they saw the body of the sky goddess, Nut, arched against the canopy of the heavens. Each night she swallowed the sun and gave it forth again by day.

Theirs was a world of beauty and symmetry, gods and magic. Chief among the gods was Amun of Thebes, who contained within himself aspects of all the other neteru.

No people loved earthly life more, yet death was not to be feared. They knew that eternal life awaited them in the land of the West, which they called Amenti. If they feared anything, it was the moment when the acts of their hearts would be weighed before the Lord Osiris in the hall of judgment, and all secrets would be known.

In this blessed world the highest duty of its king was to preserve the perfectly balanced Order-of-Things set into place in the beginning by the unknowable One-Beyond-All, the giver of life. To violate this trust was to invite Chaos to the Black Land. And so the people looked to their king to protect them from the terrors of Chaos, and they did their part by observing the daily rituals and offerings that told the gods all was well in the Black Land.

But all had not always been well. Fifty years before this time, a new kind of king had come to the throne in Thebes – a religious visionary with his own concept of the Order-of-Things, and a zealous devotion to a single, exclusive god: the Aten, the Disc-of-the-Sun. In a stunning decree he abolished the worship of the old gods. There would be no more Amun, no Lord Osiris to judge the deeds of the heart, no compassionate Lady Isis, no Horus to battle evil, no Hathor to protect women and children. No god but the Aten, remote and unknowable.

The Amun priesthood and temples held vast estates, with huge bureaucracies to run them. Now the temples were closed and their revenues used to pay for construction of the king’s splendid new city of the sun, Akhetaten.* Everything was suddenly in disarray. Corruption among public servants grew rampant. Abroad, Egypt’s far-flung empire fell prey to enemies because of the king’s inattention. He was not a warrior like some of the great kings before him, he was a poet who seemed to spend much of his time in ecstatic contemplation of his unique god.

The king was Akhenaten; his queen was Nefertiti. Later pages will speak more about this complex man and his reign, and about the mysterious, powerful Nefertiti. After he died, his successors referred to him only as the criminal or the heretic, and they lost no time undoing the effects of his religious revolution.

Into this moment in Egypt’s history came a king named Sety, a brilliant man of restless energy. His cartouche name was Men-Maat-Ra, meaning Enduring-is-the-Truth-of-Ra. By nature and by heritage he was a military man, following in the steps of his father, Ramesses I, and before that, the kingship of the admirable general, Horemheb. Sety’s reign had one overarching theme: to put right what had been disturbed, by securing the outposts of empire and restoring equilibrium to Egyptian life at home. He understood very well the psychological necessity of religious tradition in the lives of his people, and so he sponsored magnificent additions to Amun’s great temple at Thebes, and built other striking monuments and temples, all to give honor to the old gods. The most beautiful of these would be in Abydos – and for good reason.

Abydos

When Omm Sety tried to explain to the incredulous clerk at the Cairo train station that Abydos was the most important place in Egypt, it was a true statement – except that it was a few thousand years late.

No one really knows when this piece of fertile land at the desert’s edge became the spiritual heart of ancient Egypt. To someone living in those times it seemed as if it had always been so. Lying on the western side of the Nile 90 miles north of Luxor (ancient Thebes), Abydos is held within the curved embrace of a high limestone mountain. Its two jutting projections still bear the old names Lord of Offerings and Lady of Life. Since pre-dynastic times there had been burials here, and by the earliest dynasties kings and nobles were building their tombs and monuments in the shadow of the holy mountain. Why did they choose this place over other sacred locations in Egypt? It may have been because of the deep notch in the mountain’s silhouette – Pega, the gateway to the West, the land of the dead. But more than anything, they chose Abydos because the tomb of their savior-god Osiris was here.

Every Egyptian child knew the story: Osiris had once lived on earth as a man, born of Earth and Sky. He brought civilization to the people of the Nile and taught them agriculture, writing, the great laws of life and the worship of the gods. He was their beloved king and he was everything that was good and compassionate, as was his beautiful sister-wife Isis, mistress of healing and magic. There was another sister, the protective goddess Nephthys.

But in the Black Land such goodness could not exist without the challenge of the forces of darkness. Osiris had a brother, Set, who out of anger and jealousy arranged to have him killed on the banks of the Nile at Abydos. His body was cut up into many parts and strewn over the length of the land, and the triumphant Set took his brother’s throne. Meanwhile, the grieving Isis was working a great magic to bring her husband back to life. Yet even with the most powerful magic Osiris could only stay on earth long enough for his son Horus to be conceived. With the final death of his body, Osiris went on to become lord of the Underworld and judge of souls, but his essence would be held within his tomb at Abydos (one version of the story says that only the head of Osiris was entombed there). Horus-the-Son was to live forever to avenge his father’s death and continue the battle against Set’s forces of chaos.

This allegory of good and evil, death and resurrection and the salvation of souls was carried deep in the psyche of the Egyptian people. Every year, pilgrims from every part of Egypt streamed into Abydos for the Feast of Osiris to witness a sacred seven-day mystery pageant, a re-enactment of the life, death and resurrection of the god. It climaxed with a great battle between Horus and Set, which Horus always won, to the wild cheers of those who participated and watched.

At the end of the pageant, as Omm Sety described it, there was loud rejoicing, with songs of triumph. “The actual death and resurrection of Osiris took place inside,” she explained from her own remembrance, “and only the priests and priestesses were present. The part of Osiris was never played by a person, but a life-sized wooden statue. Then the god was carried outside, upright, as a living god rather than as a dead mummy. There came the words, Osiris, our hope, Osiris, Osiris! as the people greeted their risen god.”

The parts of the other gods were played by priests and priestesses specially trained for their privileged roles in the mystery play. A priestess playing Isis, for instance, might apprentice for years to perfect the gestures and song of the Lament for Osiris, in which she grieves for her murdered husband and entreats him to return to her. With her in grief is her faithful sister Nephthys, and together they cry out for Osiris to return.

Each year began with this highly ritualized celebration of the mystery of the Holy Family of Egypt, and each year Osiris died and rose again as a promise to all who witnessed that they too could overcome death and be as gods.

A pilgrimage to Abydos was a chance to present one’s soul to Osiris and be washed clean again. If you had the good fortune to die at that moment, you were doubly blessed. People left instructions in their wills that their hearts were to be buried at Abydos, and if that were not possible then a stone monument, a cenotaph, would be erected instead. Down through the ages, the sacred burial grounds of Abydos became filled with cenotaphs of kings and nobles and ordinary people wishing for an eternity with their beloved god.

It was natural that Sety would want to add to the monuments in such a holy place, especially after the years of Akhenaten’s great heresy. Whenever Sety was not occupied on the eastern frontiers, he visited his new temple to oversee its progress. Nearby, he erected a small palace retreat for himself, which he named Heartsease, a poignant choice for someone whose personal life had seen its full measure of heartache and betrayal.

He was a man of greatness and valor, but he was also a man of sorrows whose rash heart led him one fateful day to disturb the Order-of-Things – not in the grave manner of the Heretic, but a disturbance nonetheless. He knew that for the sin of entering into a forbidden love he had brought down upon himself the punishment of the gods.

Sety’s sin is not to be found in history books, it probably never will – but it plays an important part in our story, for it was the cause of his 3300-year search for a young temple priestess named Bentreshyt, and for atonement in the holy city of Abydos.

This is a story about Egypt – about a particular moment in its long history, and how that moment cast its shadow forward across time.*

*modern Tell el-Amarna

*Note: Throughout the book, Omm Sety’s quoted words are taken from conversations I and others had with her, from her personal notes and diaries, and from articles she wrote.