The Mother's Brother in Ancient EgyptAuthor(s): Edmund LeachSource: RAIN, No. 15 (Aug., 1976), pp. 19-21Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and IrelandStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3032614Accessed: 28/05/2010 18:35

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men listed in lines 5-6 obviously acted as witnesses of the transaction. Nonethe- less, the text is not a legal contract in our sense, as the witnesses did not sign the document. It is rather a private notice for Penpyom, the buyer of the jar of fat. If in the future there were any question- ing of the validity of the transaction he would be able to quote in court the exact 'price', that is, the commodities he delivered to Hay, as well as the names of the persons who could bear witness to it.

As regards the prices themselves, the jar mentioned here (called 3cc) is obvi- ously a very large one, since we know from other texts that the price of fat was not especially high, while 31 dbn is quite a large amount of 'money', equivalent to the value of a good donkey and considerably more than that of an ordinary coffln or bed. No written record would have been made for a small quan- tity of fat. The price, however, was not abnormal. We happen to possess four other mentions of similar jars of fat, all of which cost 30 dbn. It is a matter of chance that in this case the price was 1 dbn more, due to the 'prices' of the bronze wash-basin and the other vessel (also certainly of bronze). Each object was valued individually, and it had to be accepted as an item in the deal by the other party. Seller and buyer were more interested in the commodities than in their rather abstract prices. In this instance the value of the objects offered and accepted in exchange for the jar of fat could be established fairly exactly: the bronze vessels had only to be weighed, their weight being the same as their price. In other instances the price of commodities were more or less traditional, as in the case of basketry, mentioned above. The main factor in the transaction was that both seller and buyer wanted these particular objects, and valuing them was only a way of ensuring that the exchange did not bring excessive gain to one of them.

This means that the seller of the fat in our example, although he received 31 dbn instead of the usual 30, cannot be said to have made a 'profit'; at least, that would not be the Egyptian view. In general, it appears that 'profit' in our sense played hardly any part in these transactions - unless one understands by 'profit' the fact that both parties acquired objects they wanted to possess. Usually it was almost imposs- ible to establish a precise value. Even in our example the 'prices' of the vessels are not very accurate, for it seems unlikely that they weighed exactly 19 and 12 dbn respectively. Fractions of dbn were obviously disregarded. And what could have been the exact value of a coffin in a society where the time needed to make it could not be measured more than very roughly and had hardly any value at all, while the raw material was in many instances almost valueless and in others provided by the government? Tradition and the craftsman's pride in his product were therefore what governed the generally accepted prices.

I have dwelt on this point at some length because it illustrates so well the

attitude not only of the inhabitants of this particular village, but certainly of ancient Egypt as a whole, in economic matters. For the majority of the popula- tion the economy was one of subsistence, and villages provided themselves with almost all they needed for their daily life. In such circumstances there is generally little room for a 'market' in the economic sense, and 'making a profit' was not the driving force of the economy.

However, the settlement of the necropolis workmen constitutes a special case, as its inhabitants did not produce their own food. They belonged entirely to the 'redistribution' sphere, in which the king (the state) collected a portion of the country's products in order to redis- tribute them among his direct servants. Most of these were state officials, priests, soldiers etc., but they also included the builders of the pyramids in the Old Kingdom and the necropolis workmen discussed here. As yet, little is known of the details of the system, and the only element in it from which our documen- tation is fairly abundant is Deir el- Medfna. On the one hand, the community was exceptional as compared with the majority of the population, while on the other hand, the large number of documents found there gives us a fairly clear picture of the way in which the Egyptians thought about economic matters. J. J. Janssen

References

Cernk, J. 1951, Catalogue des ostraca hiera- tiques non-litteraires de Deir el-M,dineh 5. Cairo: I.F.A.O. = I.F.A.O., Documents de fouilles 7.

&ernk, J. 1973, A Community of Workmen at Thebes in the Ramesside Period. Cairo: I.F.A.O. = I.F.A.O., Bibl. d'Etude 50.

Crawford, D. 1971, Kerkeosiris: an Egyptian Village in the Ptolemaic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. = Cambridge Classical Studies.

General Bibliography For the remains of Deir el-Medina see the excavation report by Bernard Bruyere, Rapport sur les fouilles de Deir el Medineh (1934-1 935) 3, Le village, les d&harges publiques, la station de repos du col de la Vallee desRois (Fouilles de l'I.F.A.O. 16 Cairo 1939).

General books on the economy of ancient Egypt are as yet very rare. The most important is the recent study by Wolfgang Helck, Wirtschaftsgeschichte des alten Agypten im 3. und 2. Jahrtausend vor Chr. (Handbuch der Orientalistik 1.1.5, Leiden: Brill 1975). For a quite different approach see J. J. Janssen, 'Prolegomena to the Study of Egypt's Economic History during the New Kingdom', Studien zur altigyptischen Kultur 3 (1975) 127-85.

The economy of the village and in parti- cular the prices of commodities have been studied by the present author in Commodity Prices from the Ramessid Period. An Economic Study of the Village of Necropolis Workmen at Thebes (Leiden: Brill 1975).

Translations of economic texts from the New Kingdom as a whole are given by Wolf- gang Helck in the series Materialien zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Neuen Reiches (6 vols., Akademie der Wiss. und der Litera- tur., Abh. der Geistes- und Sozialwiss. K1. 1960. 10-11, 1962. 2-3, 1964. 4, 1969. 4, 13, Wiesbaden: Steiner 1961-9, Indices by Inge Hofmann, 1970).

Translations of texts from Deir el-Medlna, mostly about legal matters, but including sale transactions and similar material, may be found in Schafik Allam, Hieratische Ostraka und Papyri aus der Ramessidenzeit (Tubingen: published by the author 1973).

he Mother's Brother

n Ancent Egypt God, the Mother of God God the Father 3 n

(God, the Mother of God) r God the Son )g but also daughter, sister (God the Father) ) r+ of God)

- (God the Son)

Figre 1

I As Professor Baines has made clear in his Introduction, I am the Joker in this pack. It is clearly foolhardy for a social anthropologist to venture into territory governed by such specialised erudition. By virtue of bibliographic advice which I received from Professor Baines and from Professor J. Gwyn Griffiths my ignorance of the immediately relevant literature is not quite as profound as it might other- wise have been but, even so, whatever I may think I know about Ancient Egypt- ian history and mythology I have learnt only by absorption from second and third hand sources. Moreover, since the profes- sional experts do not agree among them- selves, the anthropologist, as commenta-

tor, is in a difficult position. After some unsuccessful experimentation in more conventional modes of scholarly presen- tation I have decided to present my argument with the absolute minimum of direct reference to egyptological sources and commentaries. However, at the end of this paper I have appended a short list of fairly recent sources all of which are lavishly equipped with schol- arly footnotes. This should provide my critics with all the technical ammunition they may need to take my argument to pieces.

II Fig. 1 illustrates, in schematic form, a general theological proposition which

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provided an important area of controv- ersy during the early centuries of Christ- ianity. The same proposition is implicit in a variety of well known non-Christian mythological systems including those relating to giva, Aiyanar and Parvati in India and Osiris, Horus and Isis in Ancient Egypt. If total Deity is con- ceived of as a bisexual triad - God the Father, God the Son, and God the 'Mother of God' - but the theology insists that God the Father and God the Son have been consubstantial-coeternal from the beginning, then the system by which God the Father 'begets' God the Son through the body of the Mother of God replicates itself indefinitely, so that the Mother of God is also the Spouse of God, the Sister of God, and even the Daughter of God.

In Ancient Egypt the institution of Divine Kingship associated with 'posi- tional succession' - the system whereby a holder of office becomes absorbed in that office' - gave manifest expression to just such a mythology. The legitimacy of the reigning king depended upon the principle that he was both the living 'son' of his dead predecessor and also the immediate divine reincarnation of his dead predecessor. Correspondingly, the Queen Mother, i.e. the principal widow of the former king, was simultaneously both the 'mother' of the reigning king and his 'wife'.

At certain stages during the course of its long but erratic development, the mythology of Osiris, Horus and Isis 'mapped' this relationship between religious ideology and real life politics very closely. The reigning King was Horus, the deceased King was Osiris, the Queen Mother was Isis. But since Osiris and Horus are two persons but one god, (in that living Horus in due course becomes dead Osiris) the half-sister principal Queen of the living King was also, like the Queen Mother, potential Isis.

III We need not concern ourselves here with all the ramifying elaborations of the Osiris-Horus-Isis mythology but certain details which are implicit in the genea- logical schema shown in Fig. 2 are very

I~ m I I

C/) -

The dead i

HORLJS (structural opposition: The living I structural alliance)

King

Figure 2

relevant. The sibling-spouse pair Osiris/ Isis is matched by another sibling-spouse pair Seth/Nephthys and all four characters are immediate siblings to one another. Nephthys is a consistently shad- owy character who is, in some respects,

a double of Isis. By contrast, Seth on the one hand and Osiris-Horus on the other are consistently polarised. In the best known story Seth is the murderer of Osiris.

At an abstract level of exegesis many of the associated stories make consistent sense if the dyad Osiris-Horus is treated as a symbol for 'legitimate order' and Seth as a symbol for 'illegitimate confusion'. From another point of view, Horus is Lord of the living here-and-now as compared with Osiris as Lord of the underworld Land of the Dead. In that context Seth becomes the storm on the horizon, the Lord of the ambiguous area betwixt and between.

But in this paper I am specially con- cerned with a particular portion of this mythology which first appears, much garbled, in lines 7-18 of the Shabaka stone in the British Museum. The stone itself dates only from the 8th Century B.C. but the text may belong to the Old Kingdom.

In this story Horus and Seth have quarrelled over the succession. The Court of the Nine Gods (the Ennead) under the presidency of Geb, the All Father, first settles the quarrel by making Horus King of Lower Egypt and Seth King of Upper Egypt and dividing the two lands. Then the judgement is revised and the whole inheritance is given to Horus. Later the text refers to the 'house of Ptah', 'that means Horus and Seth, pacified and united. They fraternised so as to cease quarrelling . . .'

In its original context at Memphis the story had political implications, for Memphis, which is specified as a Royal City, stood on the boundary between Upper and Lower Egypt. But even in much later times the King carried the double title. He was not just 'Horus' but 'Horus and Seth'.

The older interpretations of this text in terms of conjectural history are uncon- vincing but this much at least is certain. There was a very ancient tradition of a quarrel between Seth and Horus over the issue of succession. In this ancient tradi- tion the final ruling of the Ennead in favour of Horus resulted in fraternisation between Horus and Seth.

Taking all the stories together the mythology as a whole fits tolerably well with the following rather mundane explanation. If Osiris is to Seth as Order is to Confusion then the death of a reign- ing King is appropriately represented as 'the murder of Osiris by Seth'. The interregnum period before the new regime became fully established would then be a period of struggle between legitimate order and illegitimate confu- sion, that is 'a struggle between Horus and Seth'. The establishment of the new regime would be 'the triumph of Horus over Seth and the binding of Seth in chains'. But in that case why should Horus and Seth finally be seen as allies and close friends?

IV Many tales concerning the conflicts between Seth on the one hand and Osiris and Horus on the other have survived

from various periods in Egyptian history but mostly in fragmentary form. The particular story that I shall now discuss is nearly complete. It is a seemingly secular document written in hieratic script and dating from the Ramessid period (i.e. New Kingdom 1150 B.C. or later). The Document, which is known as Papyrus Chester Beatty I, was first published in 1931 with an English trans- lation by Sir Alan Gardiner. There have been subsequent translations in German, French and English and several com- mentaries. The general 'plot' of the story is an elaboration of the motif of the Shabaka Stone text which I have outlined above. Osiris is already dead though he continues to exist off stage as King of the Underworld. Horus and Seth are contending for the succession. The arbiters of the matter are again the Ennead, here under the chairmanship of the sun-god Re-Atum. The contestants plead for justice before the Court, but details of the pleadings are interspersed with details of the individual contests between Horus and Seth who repeatedly 'agree to have a battle' rather in the manner of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The contests take a variety of forms; most of them involve trickery; there are marked elements of scatological obscenity. In each of the individual contests Horus is the victor, but then the battle starts up again. The violence is extreme; at one point in imitation of an ancient story concerning a struggle between a Falcon (Horus) and a Bull (Seth), Horus tears off Seth's testicles and Seth tears out Horus' eyes; yet there is something artificial about the struggle, as if neither protagonist was altogether serious. Indeed several of the contests have precisely the characteristics of ritualised farce which anthropologists have long recognised as the hallmarks of a joking relationship:

For example:

1. Seth challenges Horus to a rowing match, but says that the boats must be of stone. Horus cheats by making an ordinary boat and pretending that it conforms to the rules. Seth then arrives with his stone boat which sinks. Seth then turns himself into a hippopotamus and attacks Horus in his boat. Horus arms himself with his spear and is about to kill off Seth but desists at the request of the gods.

2. Seth pretends to Horus that all the hostilities are over so the pair sleep together as friends. Seth then makes a homosexual attack on Horus. Horus manages to preserve his virginity by catching Seth's semen in his hand. He shows the semen to Isis (?? a complex suggestion of incestuous intent). Isis cuts off Horus' contaminated hand which falls into an irrigation ditch. Then, in collusion with Horus, Isis plans reprisals. She masturbates Horus and spreads Horus' semen on the lettuces which constitute Seth's food. Seth eats the lettuces and becomes pregnant with Horus' semen. Seth summons Horus to the Court of the Gods where he declares thlat he .

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has demonstrated his dominance over Horus by treating him 'as a man treats a woman'. Horus denies the accusation. Thoth, as Clerk of the Court, calls upon Seth's semen to declare its whereabouts. Seth's semen answers from the ditch. Thoth then makes a similar call to Horus' semen and, after some argument, a golden disc (the moon) bursts from Seth's shoulder. Thoth promptly appropriates the symbol as his own, but Horus is declared the winner of that particular round of the ongoing battle. However, at the end of the day there is a sort of anticlimax. On the instruction of the President of the Court Isis brings in Seth manacled 'as a prisoner'. 'Said Atum to him: Why do you not allow yourselves to be judged, but usurp for yourself the office of Horus? Said Seth to him: On the contrary my good Lord. Let Horus, son of Isis, be summoned and be awarded the office of his father Osiris'.

So it is Seth rather than Atum who is the King-maker!

V As can be seen from Fig. 2 Seth's am- biguous kin relationship to Horus is, among other things, that of mother's brother and at several points in our text he is so described. On the basis of this reference to the 'avunculate', some egyptologists have suggested that the stories of the conflict between Seth and Horus represent some kind of hangover from matriarchy or at least from matri- lineal succession (e.g. Kohler (1972) p. 19, footnote 1, and Clark (1959). The latter flatly asserts that 'the crux of the matter is that The Great Quarrel is a clash between two systems of inheri- tance'). It seems unlikely that any properly qualified social anthropologist would now want to interpret the evidence in this way; the whole ideology in terms of which the stories are couched appears to be unambiguously patrilineal. Admittedly the avunculate is still a source of anthropological controversy but to me it suggests institutions of privileged familiarity and joking relationship rather than matrfliny (cf. Radcliffe-Brown (1952)).

In the technical jargon of social anthropology a 'joking relationship' is one in which the structurally implied obligations existing between two members of a system are self-contradictory. For example it may be that because two individuals A and B are members of opposed groups there is a structural expectation that they will show hostility towards one another, but because they are members of allied groups they have an obligation to be friendly towards one another. Or again because A and B are of different generations, B being senior to A, A should show respect for B, but because B must be contrasted with some other senior individual C, the convention becomes inverted and A is expected to show exaggerated disrespect for B. The outcome of such contradictions is that violent aggressive behaviour towards equals or extreme insulting behaviour towards seniors is interpreted as a

demonstration of friendship and social solidarity!

The anthropological literature on 'joking relationships' is very large, and relationships of this kind are not con- fined to any one type of society or to any one type of relationship; but many of the textbook examples relate to societies in which the 'joking' is between brothers-in-law or between mother's brother and sister's son and the envelop- ing society is one in which rules of patrilineal succession apply.

The question thus arises whether the author of P. Chester Beatty I might not have been familiar with a real life social institution involving 'joking" behaviour of this general type. In that case the implications of the repetitive contests between Seth and Horus would be somewhat different from what they have hitherto been taken to be by orthodox egyptologists.

This suggestion cannot be advanced with any great confidence, because when the principle of positional succession is applied to the kinship conformations indicated in the schema of Figs 1 and 2, the individual relationships become highly ambiguous. Depending upon which position is given weight the relationship between Seth and Horus can be either mother's brother to sister's son or father's brother to brother's son or elder brother to younger brother. The Egyptian term sn can carry any of these meanings (cf. Kohler 1972), so that exact relation- ships can be defilned with certainty only when there is some further factor to limit the field of choice. In P. Chester Beatty I itself, the reader is offered the alternative of viewing Horus as Seth's sister's son or as-his younger brother.

VI Although the theme of P. Chester Beatty I derives from Ancient Egyptian mythology, the style of the document is not serious. It reads as if it were an Egyptian Iliad edited by an Egyptian Aristophanes. The gods of the Ennead are slightly comic characters who exhibit marked personal prejudice. The President of the Court (Re-Atum) is sulky and ineffective but on the side of Seth. Thoth, who is master of ceremonies and clerk of the Court, is all for law and order and consistently on the side of Horus. Most of the other named characters keep changing sides. Even Isis who, as mother/wife of Horus/ Osiris, is usually on the side of Horus, is persuaded at one critical point that her sisterly duty to her brother Seth is greater than her duty to a 'stranger' (i.e. to Osiris/Horus considered as affines). In other words the theme of ambiguity of obligation and especially of the ambiguity of kinship obligatio.n is recurrent through- out the whole story and is not confined to the particular case of Horus versus Seth.

Since P. Chester Beatty I reads as if it were a tale told to amuse a secular audience, one must suppose that the author had in mind an audience who would recognise the jokes. This suggests that in his representation of ambiguous kinship behaviour he was drawing on real life experience.

My egyptological acquaintances in fact tell me that there is no known evidence that Egyptian social customs either during the New Kingdom or at any other date expressed social solidarity by means of the paradoxical behaviours which anthropologists categorise as privileged familiarity and joking rela- tionship, but perhaps they might look again at the data. It seems to me that the story known as the Tale of the Two Brothers, part of which contains a motif very similar to that of the Biblical story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, might be a good place to start. Edmund Leach

1. For elaboration of the concept of positional succession see especially Cunnison (1959), index references to 'succession, positional' and 'perpetual kinship'. Cunnison summarises the Luapula institution thus: (p. 98) 'individuals (may be considered) not as persons but as the holders of names, positions and offices. Each man has a name. On his death the name subsists as an attribute or possession of the lineage. After a while the lineage finds a member to succeed to the name. The member is then the embodiment of two positions and holds two names, his own original one and the one he inherits. Of these the inherited overrides the original name and position, because it is either of a senior generation, or else it is senior in the same generation ( a senior never succeeds a junior). Children in these terms are children of a position rather than an individual . .. the successor becomes a husband to the wife and a father to the children of the deceased . . . the successor adopts the persona of his dead kinsman'.

The titles and mythological identifications associated with the Egyptian kingship were transmitted from office holder to office holder in a manner very similar to this.

References Clark, R. T. Rundle, 1959, Myth and Symbol

in A ncient Egypt, London: Thames and Hudson.

Cunnison, Ian, 1959, The Luapula Peoples of Northern Rhodesia, Manchester: Manchester U.P.

Gardiner, Alan H., 1931, The Library of A Chester Beatty: Description of a hieratic papyrus ... (The Chester Beatty Papyri No. 1), Privately printed, London: Oxford University Press.

Griffiths, J. Gwyn, 1960, The Conflict of Horus and Seth from Egyptian and Cla.ssical Sources, Liverpool U.P. = Liverpool mono- graphs in Archaeology and Oriental Studies.

Griffiths, J. Gwyn, 1966, The Origins of Osiris, Berlin: Hessling = Munchner Agyptologische Studien 9.

Jacobsohn, H., 1939 (reprinted 1955), Die dogmatische Stellung des Kbnigs in der Theologie der alten Agypter. Gluckstadt, etc.: Augustin. = Agyptologische For- schungen 8.

Kohler, U., 1972, Einige Uberlegungen zu den verwandschaftlichen Beziehungen zwischen Horus und Seth im Pap. Chester Beatty No. 1. Gottinger Miszellen. G6ttingen. 1:17-20.

Otto, E., 1969, Legitimation des Herrschens im pharaonischen Agypten. Saeculum. Freiburg - Munchen. 20:385411.

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 1952, Structure and function in primitive society. Essays and addresses. London: Cohen and West.

Sinmpson, W. K. (ed.), 1973, The literature of ancient Egypt, 2nd ed. New Haven-London: Yale U.P.

Spiegel, J., 1937, Die Erzahlung vom Streite des Horus und Seth in Pap. Beatty 1 als Literaturwerk. Gluckstadt, etc.: Augustin. = Leipziger Agyptologische Studien 9.

te Velde, H., 196 7, Seth, god of confusion. Leiden: Brill. = Probleme der Agyptologie 6.

Wente, E. F., 1973, The contendings of Horus and Seth [translation of P. Chester Beatty I], in Simpson (1973: 108-26).

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