Until the later nineteenth century, all these temples were torsos, broken up and fallen, just smashed up carvings and fat pointless pillars, scattered in the Upper Nile Valley. ‘There is always some temple buried to its shoulders in the sand, partially visible, like an old dug-up skeleton,’ Flaubert wrote. The great delineator of wrecked Egyptian sites, David Roberts, loved the ruination and in 1840 he said they seemed to him much more beautiful half-buried and bruised. They reminded him of Piranesi etchings of the Forum in Rome.
I saw what he meant when I came across a ruin in the middle of nowhere — a brilliant image, the lovely carving fallen and forgotten in the desert, a much more dramatic subject than a rebuilt temple teeming with hot-faced and complaining tourists. Flaubert took a delight in reporting how dilapidated the temples were, because he was not in search of ruins, he much preferred the oddities of the Nile journey, and dallying with dancing girls and prostitutes. Twenty-seven years after Flaubert visited, another traveler reported that the 2000-year-old Temple of Edfu was being dug out and had begun to look like its old self, as in the festival days of Edfu’s greatness, celebrating the enactment of Horus avenging his father Osiris by stabbing hippo-bodied Seth.
In a new interpretation of these images, Horus is seen by some astronomers as the representation of a failed star in our solar system. The Egyptians had seen this so-called brown dwarf in the skies at its perihelion, or visible swing of its orbit, spinning round our sun beyond the known planets. This massive phantom star, out there unseen in the wilderness of space, crucially controlling our own planet, is only one aspect of the Dark Star Theory.
The Greeks learned how to make columns by studying the symmetry of Egyptian pillars like these at Edfu. If a temple is buried deeply enough and the soil is dry and no archeologist or treasure hunter disturbs it, there is a sort of preservation in that very neglect. The Temple of Horus looks whole, cathedral-like in the way the pillars soar, some friezes still retaining the red flesh tones on human figures and bluebirds and green snakes coiled on the upper walls. At the main gateway the upright falcon Horus, its eyes the sun and moon, stands sentinel, its halo the disk of the sun god.
Some images were defaced. In the past, tourists broke off pieces of Egyptian sculpture to keep as souvenirs — Twain describes an American chipping off a chunk of the Sphinx. But in Edfu, defaced was an exact word: it told perfectly what had happened to the depictions of these soldiers and workers and striding women on the walls. It was so consistent and stylistically similar as to seem like a sort of negative sculpture, the art of obliteration. As striking as the images of gods and humans and animals on this temple — and it was a theme throughout — was the vandalism: defaced human heads, scratched-out hands and feet, chopped off legs, hacked off bodies, everything representing flesh was chipped away, even the heads and hooves of animals. Headdresses, the hats, the cloaks, the costumes were left, so that in a particularly pretty sculpture of an elaborately dressed prince, all the finery would be intact but the face would be scooped out and the hands scraped off.
‘Done by early Christians,’ was the usual explanation. But Muslims deplore human images, and so it might have been the effect of fanatic Islam. But the Muslim Egyptologists denied that, and insisted that the Christians — and especially Christians from Ethiopia — were to blame for these amazingly methodical defacings.
‘Maybe not out of anger,’ Fawzi, one Egyptologist, said. ‘Maybe because the Christians had been persecuted. Maybe to obliterate pre-Christian history.’
But he admitted that no one knew. What fascinated me was the care that the defacers had taken. They had not wrecked the temple or gone at the wall with sledgehammers. They had poked away at these carvings with care bordering on respect, and you had to conclude that they could not have done any of this in this way, removing little, leaving so much, if they had not felt a certain terror.
But now no one knows, and as with the Napoleonic graffiti, which has acquired significance over the years, the defacings are as fascinating as the finished sculptures, giving the figures the weirdness and mystery of a mutilated corpse at a crime scene.
Syrians, Asians, and Nubians were pointed out on the temple walls, and while the Egyptologist was explaining their features and their characteristic clothes, some of the cruise passengers were becoming impatient, jostling in the little cluster of concentrating and querulous tourists to ask a supplementary question: ‘Which Ptolemy was that?’
At last when Fawzi was done, the question came: ‘What about the Jews?’
It so happened, Fawzi said, that for the length and breadth of the Nile Valley, from the Delta south to Upper Egypt and into the dark pyramids and temples of Nubia, there was no mention of the Jews, nothing of Israelites, and even when captives were shown, their religion was not indicated; they were merely a mass of undifferentiated pagan prisoners. There are pot-bellied hippos, and bat-eared jackals, there are plump-lipped Nubians, and Asiatics squinting across the millennia, but there are no Jews. And there are whole dynasties of pharaohs depicted, but not even the faintest trace of Moses on an Egyptian wall.
So he said. But there was a group of people whose generic name, ‘Other siders,’ or ‘Crossers over,’ occurred now and then on Egyptian tombs and temples and in papyrus scrolls. The pharaonic word for these people was Apiru or Habiru, and was derived from an Aramaic word, ‘Ibri’, which meant ‘one from the other side.’ It is not a great phonetic leap from Habiru or Ibri to Hebrew, a crudely descriptive name (like ‘wetback’ for Mexican), for people who had crossed the water, in this case the Red Sea. And the word for Hebrew, in Hebrew, is Ivri.
Some of these migrants (‘Habiru, in cuneiform sources’) found employment doing the heavy lifting on building projects in the eastern Delta. The Egyptologist K. A. Kitchen described them in his life of Rameses II, as ‘displaced, rootless people who drifted or were drafted into various callings … Lumped in with the Apiru generally were doubtless those who in the Bible appear as the Hebrews, and specifically the clan-groups of Israel.’ Those people had been resident in the eastern Delta since the time of Jacob and Joseph, when their forefathers fled to Egypt to escape famine.
That I found out later. While I listened to Fawzi’s explanation, someone saying, ‘I guess it’s all a riddle,’ a woman approached me and hit me on the arm.
‘Hey, that’s a dandy idea!’ She was from Texas. I had seen her on the boat, looking unsteady. She had a new hip. New hips are common on cruise ships and among cruise passengers chit-chat about hip surgery is frequently audible.
‘What is?’ I said.
‘Little old notebook to write stuff on.’
I shut my notebook and held it like a sandwich.
‘Little old pen.’
I had been doodling, a hieroglyphic, a squatting man in a stool-shaped hat, one knee up, both his arms crooked and raised above his head in a gesture of amazement, as though saying, ‘This is incredible!’ This lovely compact and comic image was the hieroglyphic for ‘one million.’
The woman punched my arm again as a sort of compliment and when she moved off, favoring one leg, I wrote, Hey, that’s a dandy idea …
Some aspects of the touristy Nile cannot have changed much in a hundred years. There are no taxis in Edfu, only pony carts and they clashed and competed for customers, the drivers yelling, flailing their whips, maneuvering their carts, scraping their wheels, and there was something ancient, perhaps timeless, in the way a driver — my Mustafa, say — turned, as the pony trotted towards the temple, and demanded more money, double the price in fact, whining, ‘Food for my babies! Food for my horse! Give me, bleeeez!’