CHAPTER VIIGETTING TO HEAVEN

Itis not my intention to attempt to discuss the equipment of Tutankhamen’s tomb. Readers of the daily papers and the illustrated weeklies will already be aware of the vast quantity of furniture and of the fact that even those who were already familiar with the superb design and workmanship displayed in the objects from such tombs as those of Thothmes IV, Yuaa and Tuaa, and Akhenaton were amazed at the new revelation of Egyptian craftsmanship revealed in scores of the things found in Tutankhamen’s tomb, the throne, a superb work of art, the no less wonderful chariots, chairs, couches, statues, sandals, textiles and jewellery, and above all the impressive canopy or shrine. Archæologists familiar with all the marvels of Egyptian art, now treasured in the museums scattered throughout the world, have exhausted their vocabularies of wonder and admiration in attempting to depict the splendours of Tutankhamen’stomb. The outstanding feature of the discovery is, in fact, the recovery of so vast a collection of superb works of art and the new revelation it affords of the dazzling brilliance of Egyptian civilization thirty centuries ago.

But in this book I am concerned more especially with the cultural significance of the funerary equipment.

In the first place the objects found in the tomb belong to two distinct categories, those which were used by the deceased when alive, and others specially made for funerary purposes. This distinction seems to be brought out most clearly in the comparison of the chariots in the vestibule and in the burial chamber respectively.

I do not propose to enter into any further discussion of the contents of the wonderful shrine or canopy which is to be investigated next winter, nor to attempt to anticipate the result of the examination of the so-called “canopic” chest, which is said to be a unique example of the sculptor’s art. The experience gained in investigating the contents of such chests in other tombs gives one confidence in assuming that the heart of Tutankhamen will not be found in it, as so many writers imagine,but that its four compartments will contain respectively the liver, lungs, stomach and intestines of Tutankhamen, his “heart and reins” being left in his body.

From the cultural point of view the most interesting articles of furniture found in Tutankhamen’s tomb are the three lofty couches fashioned in grotesque shapes to represent conventionalized animals, cow, lion, and hippopotamus respectively. Although such couches are thoroughly Egyptian in design and are familiar in pictures from Egypt and the Soudan, they have never been seen before. They are worth discussing in some detail, because they express the concreteness and naïvety of Egyptian belief mentioned in the last chapter in a way that brings home to us the essential distinction of the religion of the ancient dwellers in the Nile Valley.

The problem of getting to heaven after death was approached by the Egyptian theologian as though it were essentially a physical proposition. How was the dweller upon earth to reach the world in the sky? What vehicle could he employ to reach the celestial realms? Speaking recently of Christian Englishmen in the twentieth century, Dean Inge is reported to have said that “a topographical heaven, soimpossible scientifically, was so difficult to dispense with as an aid to the imagination.” But to the ancient Egyptian belief in such a topographical heaven was a cardinal article of faith, and the geography of the Elysian fields and the details of the path leading to it were mapped out with all the meticulous precision of a modern guide-book. The dead man was often provided with a chart to find his way along the path that teemed with difficulties and dangers.

But although there were scores of different devices for securing a safe transit to the celestial regions, there was one vehicle which from the very beginning of Egyptian history enjoyed a special reputation as the appropriate means of protecting the dead and conferring life and immortality upon him by conveying him to the other world. The Celestial Cow Hathor not only conferred life upon mortals by giving them birth: she also sustained them throughout life by giving them the divine milk, and at death she conveyed them to the sky.

In the famous inscription upon the walls of the tomb of Seti I, to certain passages of which I referred in the last chapter, there is a remarkable story of the function of the Divine Cow Hathor or Nut as a means ofraising the dead king to the sky to reach the home of the gods. After being rejuvenated by the goddess the king became oppressed with the boredom of life upon earth amongst his tiresome subjects, who had shown their disloyalty to him by referring to his old age and failing powers. So he decided to leave the earth and proceed to the sky. Hence he mounted upon the back of the cow and got to heaven, where he assumed his godhead by becoming identified with the sun.

This function of the cow in acting as a vehicle to convey the mummy to its celestial home is one which was repeatedly depicted in the ancient Egyptian monuments. But the cow’s solicitude for the welfare of the dead was frequently shown in other ways. A favouritemotiffor the Egyptian sculptor was the representation of the Divine Cow, Hathor, protecting the dead king or permitting him to obtain an elixir of life by drinking milk from her udder. In his bookEgyptian Art(1913) the late Sir Gaston Maspero devotes to this subject a whole chapter (XI) illustrated with six beautiful photographic plates of such cow-statues ranging from the time of Amenhotep II (1440b.c.) to more than a thousand years later. But we know that the protectivefunction of the Cow Hathor was portrayed in other ways as early as the time of the Pyramid-builders (for example, the beautiful slate statuettes found by Professor Reisner in the Pyramid Temple of Mykerinus of the fourth dynasty, about 2800b.c.), and the still earlier representation of her upon the slate palette of King Narmer of the first dynasty, about 3400b.c.For several reasons this palette is a historical document of unique importance. Engraved upon it is the earliest example ofwriting that has come down from antiquity: but it is of interest in connexion with the discussion in this chapter. For at the upper corners of the palette the cow-headed Hathor is depicted and as a further protection the king wears upon his belt four cows’ heads (Fig. 18) in place of the cowrie amulets of more primitive peoples.

Fig. 17.—Cow carrying a dead man to heaven.

The Celestial Cow, Hathor, was a divinity of the dead, for she was the Giver of Life who was supposed to be able to prolong existence beyond the grave, and as she was also identifiedwith the sky she became the appropriate vehicle to convey the dead to the celestial regions where the sun-god dwelt.

Fig. 18.Narmer’s belt with four Hathor cows’ heads,circa3400b.c.

The most bizarre objects found in the vestibule of Tutankhamen’s tomb are the three ceremonial couches, one representing the Celestial Cow, Hathor, the second the same goddess in her lioness form, or more probably her son and representative Horus in the form of a lion, and the third Tauert, the hippopotamus goddess, who was the divine midwife.

In the numerous accounts of these remarkable monstrosities that have appeared, I have not seen any attempt to explain their significance. Although such grotesque examples of mortuary furniture have never been seen before, the bas-reliefs upon the walls of tombs in Egypt and Ethiopia, and the pictures illustrating the Book of the Dead inscribed on papyri, have made us familiar with them. Moreover, the chapters of the Book of the Dead relating to “the raising of the funeral bed” leave no doubt as to the ritual significance of these couches.

The sides of the Hathor couch are grotesque models of the Divine Cow, the earliest of the Great Mothers who were believed to have bestowed life and prosperity on mankind. Itmay seem strange that the artists of Tutankhamen’s time should have perpetrated such a monstrosity as this Hathor couch. When religious motives impelled the designers to fashion a piece of furniture in imitation of so uncouchlike a creature as a cow, the artist was set a task which was almost impossible of realization unless he sacrificed his artistic ideals. There can be no doubt that in this case he escaped the dilemma by repressing his æsthetic feelings and abandoning himself whole-heartedly to the task of devising a model which was almost wholly religious in conception.

To understand why the cow, of all creatures, should have been selected for this purpose, we must remember the relentless logic and persistency that inspired all the preparations of the tomb and its furniture. The mummification of the body and the elaborate arrangements for protecting it and ministering to its wants were due to the belief that the continuance of the deceased’s existence had been secured by these preparations. But to make doubly certain, no device that would contribute to the attainment of this aim was neglected. Inscriptions were made on the walls of the tomb, on the sarcophagus and coffins, and on papyri to ensure the identification of the deceased king with Osiris, so that he might be made to share the god’s fate. A figure of Osiris was made, as I have explained elsewhere (p. 61), out of the sacred barley, every grain of which was regarded as a model of the life-giving Great Mother, and as such a supply of vital essence to maintain the deceased’s existence. From time to time dramatic ceremonies were held at the tomb (or in the temple associated with it in far-off Thebes) to reanimate the dead and help him to persist.

Fig. 19.—Pictures of three couches represented on the walls of the tomb of Seti I, from Belzoni’s sketches.

For, once the ancient Egyptians had persuaded themselves that they could work out their own salvation, and that the kingdom of heaven could be attained by certain physical and magical procedures, they spared no pains to pursue this train of thought and action with tiresome persistence to the most surprising ends.

The Great Mother was originally nothing more than the personification of an amulet, like a cowrie shell or a grain of barley, that was supposed to be able to exert the essentially maternal function of life-giving. Then, when cattle were domesticated and mankind discovered for the first time that cow’s milk could be used for feeding human children, people were profoundly impressed with thisrevelation of the cow’s kinship with the human family. They regarded her as the foster-mother, and then as the actual mother of mankind, and identified her with the Great Mother Hathor, whose earliest form was (even sixty centuries ago) that of a Divine Cow. But if the Great Mother was at one and the same time a cowrie, a grain of barley, and a cow, she was also identified with the moon, which in a very special sense was supposed to control the life-giving powers of womenkind.

Hence the belief developed that if the Great Giver of Life and Immortality was both a cow and the moon, she was the appropriate vehicle to convey the dead king to the celestial realms in the sky. And so, as the nursery rhyme puts it, “the cow jumped over the moon.” That the cow represented in the couch is a symbol of the sky is shown by the stars on the under surface of the body. The height of the couches also was an additional indication of their identification with the sky. In all periods of Egyptian history painters and writers were fond of depicting this episode of the conveyance of the dead king to heaven on the cow’s back. This incident is shown and explained in the inscriptions on the walls of Seti I’s tomb, to which I have already referred(p. 95). But in later times it became common to represent the Divine Cow (or its lioness surrogate) conveying the dead man or his actual mummy to the sky, and in pictures of funerals to find the mummy borne on just such couches as have actually been found in the tomb of Tutankhamen. The object of the cow-shaped couch was to ensure by magical means this translation of the deceased to heaven. The story of the Destruction of Mankind gives the Egyptian’s own interpretation of the incident. The influence of this Egyptian conception of animal “vehicles” for gods spread far and wide throughout the world in ancient times, for if such a creature could convey the dead king to the celestial regions and confer upon him the means of attaining immortality, which was the distinctive attribute of divinity, such an animal vehicle was an appropriate symbol and pictorial determinative of a god. The identification of the Great Mother with the cow was the beginning of the social system known as totemism.

The explanation of the lioness form of the Great Mother is also given in the inscription in Seti I’s tomb. When the goddess was called upon to rejuvenate the ageing king, theonly elixir of life known in her pharmacopœia was human blood. Hence, she was driven to the necessity of slaying a human being, and her murderous action was compared to that of a man-slaying lioness, with which she was identified. But as the lioness was a particularly appropriate form to symbolize the Great Mother’s ability to protect the mummy from the perils that lurked in the pathway to the other world, it became an even more favourite form of the funerary vehicle than the gentle cow. At any rate, in the pictures of funerary couches the lioness form is much commoner than the cow-form. The same grotesque form of the lion has survived in modern heraldry.

But other ideas found expression in the lion-symbolism. For example, on some of the beautiful pieces of furniture found in Tutankhamen’s tomb the king himself is represented as a human-headed lion trampling on his foes, and many of his predecessors before him, Thothmes IV for example, were similarly represented. Even as far back as the time of the Pyramids was not Mykerinus (2800b.c.) represented as a human-headed lion in the gigantic Sphinx at the Giza Pyramids?

This representation of the king as a lion,which typifies his identification with Horus, is inspired by another chain of ideas. Although at the time of Tutankhamen, and in fact throughout the whole history of Egypt in dynastic times the sun-god was dominant in Egypt and Horus himself was a sun-god, the rôle that he took as the guardian of the dead was inspired by the more ancient Osirian faith. It was the living king Horus who was responsible for tending the dead king Osiris; and it was believed that the continued existence of the god (the dead king Osiris) was wholly dependent upon the services rendered by Horus. Thus it was Horus who performed the divine function of conferring immortality upon Osiris, and also upon the dead king Tutankhamen, who was identified with Osiris. Presumably the act of being borne upon the lion-couch was symbolically equivalent to being put into the care of Horus, not the Horus represented upon the furniture in the tomb, the lion-avatar of Tutankhamen who tramples his enemies under foot, but the son of Osiris, who holds out the promise of conferring upon the dead king the boons that he is credited with having given to Osiris—eternal life and protection. The confusion between these two aspects of Horus is brought out very clearlyin a very interesting picture recently discovered by Professor George A. Reisner (and reproduced inThe Illustrated London News, 10th February 1923, p. 204), engraven upon a monument in the Soudan several centuries later than the time of Tutankhamen. The lion-couch is represented supporting the mummy of King Ergamenes, whose head is portrayed in the form of the falcon of Horus. Above the mummy is the star-spangled sky, below which is seen the sun’s disc emitting five streams of life-giving emanations to the dead king. In the Book of the Dead Chapter LXXVIII is called that “whereby one assumeth the form of the Sacred Falcon” and the deceased is represented as saying “I display myself as the Sacred Falcon whom Horus hath invested with his soul for taking possession of his inheritance from Osiris” (Renouf). The possibility suggests itself whether the lion-couch was intended to symbolize, as the cow-couch unquestionably was, the transference of the dead king to the sky to be united with the sun and identified with the solar deity Re. If so, perhaps the five streams of V-shaped emanations pointing to the disc were meant to represent the sun drawing the mummy, the dead Horus, to the sky.

In his monograph of theTomb of AmenemhētDr Alan Gardiner reproduces a text (Plate XXX A) including a pictorial arrangement of hieroglyphs in the form of stars above the mummy borne on the lion-couch, which he translates as a statement that the dead man “wishes to be placed among the stars in the firmament” (p. 119).

The same design occurs in the pictures illustrating the Book of the Dead. The funerary couch is usually represented in the lion-form, the cow- and hippopotamus-varieties being much less frequently adopted.

In the pictures of funerals it is not uncommon to see the mummy borne upon a lion-shaped couch placed within the funerary canopy or shrine (as in the first of the pictures from the Book of the Dead, Fig. 20). Good examples are given by Dr Alan Gardiner and Mrs de Garis Davies inThe Tomb of Amenemhēt(1915), Plates XII and XXIV, of the reign of Thothmes III, a century before Tutankhamen. No doubt this is due partly to the significance attached to the conception of Horus as the guardian of Osiris, but also possibly to the idea that Horus fought the enemies of Re and was the best protector of the deified dead.

Fig. 20.—Three vignettes from different papyri of the Book of the Dead, representing the lion-couch bearing the mummy within its canopy, a mummy lying on its funerary couch with three solar emanations coming down from the sky, and a third where the bird-soul is bringing to the mummy the symbol of eternity.

But underlying the whole of the lion-symbolism are two fundamental ideas which gave meaning to it. In the very ancient story of the Destruction of Mankind, which in a relatively modern and much distorted form was inscribed upon the walls of the tombs of several of Tutankhamen’s successors, the goddess Hathor (the Divine Cow) is reported to have made a human sacrifice in order to obtain the blood wherewith to rejuvenate the senile king (in the story Re, the king upon earth who had not yet been elevated on the cow’s back to the sky to become the sun-god). Hence she acquired the reputation as a slayer of men and was identified with a lioness, and called Sekhmet, the Destroyer. Thus the lioness and the cow were both forms assumed by the Great Mother Hathor. But in the development of the myth of the Destruction of Mankind the god Horus takes the place of his mother Hathor, and the bull and the lion take the place formerly occupied by the cow and the lioness. In the case of the funerary couches the Cow of Hathor is found alongside the lion of Horus, but occasionally one finds in late tombs the mummy represented as being conveyed to the celestial realms by a bull instead of the more usual cow. A goodexample of this is to be seen in the Museum of the Society of Antiquaries in Edinburgh.

The third couch is modelled in the form of a grotesque caricature of a hippopotamus, Tauert, another representative of the Great Mother Hathor. But her special duty was to act as a midwife at the births of gods and kings. In pictures she is often associated with the Hathor Cow at the door of the tomb in the Mountain of the West; and presumably her function was to preside at the rebirth of the dead king by which a new lease of life beyond the grave was conferred upon him.

If it seems far-fetched to regard the hippopotamus couch as symbolizing rebirth, it should not be overlooked that in the so-called “Birth Terrace” of the temple at Deir el Bahari[3]lion-headed couches are represented in the birth scene of Queen Hatshepsut. As I have pointed out already all three animals, cow, lioness, and female hippopotamus, represent primarily different forms of the same goddess Hathor.

Fig. 21.—Scene from The Book of the Dead (Papyrus of Ani) in which the three givers of divinity are seen, the cow at the entrance to the tomb, the hippopotamus with her, and Horus on guard.

The Egyptian custom of making these grotesque animal-shaped couches to symbolizethe transference of the dead to the celestial regions and the conferring of immortality and deification upon them exerted far-reaching and manifold effects as it was diffused abroad among other peoples. I shall mention three examples of these diverse influences. The belief implied in such symbolism that a king borne by such an animal vehicle was transformed into a god led to the use of such designs in the representations of gods. Hence it became common in Syria and Mesopotamia, in Greece and India, and far away in outlying parts of the worldwhere the influence of these civilizations played some part, directly or indirectly, to find gods and goddesses represented on animal vehicles, such as the bull or cow, the lion or lioness, or some fantastic composite monster, dragon or makara. The whole conception of animal vehicles, which plays such a large part in the religious symbolism of India, Eastern Asia and Central America, is a purely Egyptian fancy that finds such grotesque expression in Tutankhamen’s funerary couches, no less than in the borrowed symbolism that was spread abroad from Egypt to Asia and America.

Fig. 22.—The goddess Astarte borne on her lioness, symbolizing the attainment of immortality, which was the distinctive attribute of a deity.

Another expression of the essential meaning of these couches was the belief that the placing of the corpse or mummy on a raised stage was magically efficacious in transferring the deceased to the sky-world. The use of such raised platforms is practised over a very wide geographical area, and for the reasons given in my pamphletThe Migrations of Early Culture(1915). There can be no doubt that it gives expression to the same belief as the lofty and uncouth funerary beds in Tutankhamen’s tomb have forced upon our attention.

Another wave of diffusion of culture is represented in the adoption by European furniture-makers of the Egyptian method of designing legs for chairs, beds and couches. In Egypt itself such a practice can be traced back to the first dynasty 3400 or moreb.c.But the lion paws were adopted in Europe as a design for legs of chairs, etc. almost as soon as the Egyptian craft of carpentering and joinery was introduced. Long after the Queen Anne period Chippendale introduced the Chinese variant, the dragon’s feet grasping the moon-pearl symbol. But as I explained inThe Evolution of the Dragon(1919) thedragon is really a blending of Horus’s falcon (eagle) and lion into one composite beast.

Thus the study of these couches has revealed the development in Egypt of a very peculiar but distinctive series of symbolic expressions, each of which is so arbitrary and unexpected that one is able to recognize it and refer it to its true source, in whatever part of the world and at whatever historical period it manifests itself. Hence we are able to use the evidence provided by these three distinct aspects of one essential idea to demonstrate different waves of cultural diffusion which spread from Egypt throughout the world both in ancient and modern times.

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