Perhaps a more immediate literary example of a trial involving Egypt’s former rulers is Sir H. Rider Haggard’s “Smith and the Pharaohs.” In this story, an English archaeologist, accidentally locked in the Egyptian Museum overnight, finds himself witness to a ghostly assembly of the kings and queens whose bodies and belongings are housed in the building. After overhearing them gossip about the performance and relative qualities of their respective predecessors and successors, he finds himself brought before them for formal judgment as a despoiler of the royal dead.
And yet another contemporaneous precedent — which Mahfouz may well have read — is George Sylvester Viereck’s eccentric 1937 biography of Wilhelm II, The Kaiser on Trial, apparently ghost-written by “Essad Bey,” a Jewish-cum-Muslim writer (later “Kurban Said,” born Lev Nussimbaum in Baku). Essad Bey was a popular novelist and nonfiction author based in both Weimar and Nazi Germany who was also widely read in the rest of Europe, the U.S., Central Asia, and the Middle East. He died in Italy in service to the Axis in 1942. Tom Reiss, Essad Bey’s own biographer, sketches the essential details of this oddly path-breaking book:
The Kaiser on Trial
is a bizarre historical pastiche written in the form of courtroom testimony. It is ostensibly the trial of the Kaiser for war crimes in front of a tribune of historical figures, both dead and living. It is also a reflection on the first years of the twentieth century and the events that ended the [sic] Europe’s old empires in a vast spectacle of mass killing and destruction. George Bernard Shaw praised it as an effective “new method in the writing of history,” providing “a mine of information … both dramatic and judicious.”
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Mahfouz also had more occult sources of inspiration — and even wrote a kind of prototype of Before the Throne in the form of a long (49 pp.) short story, “The Seventh Heaven” (“al-Sama’ al-sabi’a”) in 1979. In “The Seventh Heaven,” a series of famous figures, ranging from Pharaoh Akhenaten (1353–1336 BC), Saad Zaghlul, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924), Gamal Abdel-Nasser (1918–1970), and others, face brief afterlife trials conducted by a former Egyptian high priest from ancient Thebes, in their quest to reach the highest (seventh) level of Paradise. Strikingly, in this work influenced by the writings of the Egyptian spiritualist, Ra’uf Sadiq ’Ubayd,9 no one — not even Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin — suffers eternal damnation, only brief spells of penance back on earth. Hitler himself returns as a petty crime capo in a Cairene alley. (For this and other tales of the uncanny by Mahfouz, see his collection, The Seventh Heaven: Stories of the Supernatural, translated by Raymond Stock, American University in Cairo Press, 2005; Anchor Books paperback, 2006.) Many of the Egyptian characters make their afterlife encores in Before the Throne.
And in Before the Throne, more striking than even the glittering visual splendor of the supernatural backdrop is Mahfouz’s choice of the Osiris Court as the vehicle for delivering his own historical judgments. God of the afterlife and chief of the tribunal that judges the souls of the deceased, Osiris is one of ancient Egypt’s oldest known deities, his roots sunken and decayed in the mud and clay of the northeastern Delta. An ancient folk belief held that he was an actual — and prodigious — king in Predynastic times (a view still debated by Egyptologists), but the first known image of him dates to the Fifth Dynasty, one of many minor deities grouped around the king, “with a curled beard and divine wig in the manner of traditional ancestral figures.”11 In the Old Kingdom, he was associated with the royal dead only, mainly in the great necropolis of Abydos in Upper Egypt, though gradually, his popularity grew. His nemesis was Seth, who eventually became an Egyptian prototype of Satan, the Evil One. In one of Pharaonic Egypt’s most famous myths, Seth twice attacks Osiris, the second time cutting him up into sixteen pieces and throwing them into the Nile. All the pieces are recovered by his sister — wife, the goddess Isis, except one — his penis.12 That critical lacuna aside, one should note that, to the ancient Egyptians, “the dying of Osiris does not seem to be a wrong thing,” as Herman Te Velde says, “for death is ‘the night of going forth to life.’ ”
Crucial to Before the Throne is the role Osiris plays in the passage of the dead into the next world — or into nonexistence. In the ancient myth,13 Osiris, in the shape of a man wrapped in mummy bandages, bearing the symbols of royal power (the elaborately plumed atef crown on his head, a false beard on his chin, the crook and flail in his hands crossed over his chest), presided. Meanwhile the jackal-headed god of embalming, Anubis, introduced the deceased and weighed his or her heart on a great double-scale against a feather representing Ma‘at, the principle of divine order and justice. If the defendant had committed no grave sins on earth, the heart would balance with the feather — and the deceased would be pronounced “true of voice” (a concept that resonates strongly in Mahfouz’s work) and given the magic spells necessary to enter the underworld, Duat.
But if there was no balance with the feather, the heart was fed to “the devourer,” Ammit, a terrifying female beast with the head of a crocodile, the body of a lion, and the hind legs of a hippo. As all of this transpired, the ibis-headed Thoth, god of writing and magic, supervised and recorded the judgments and reported them to Osiris. (Another representation of Thoth, a baboon, sat atop the scale.) Meanwhile Isis (a radiantly beautiful woman with either a throne — which was her emblem — or a solar disk and horns upon her head),14 her son, the falcon-headed Horus (who introduced and pleaded for each defendant), and other deities looked on.
The Osiris Court, carved and painted in tombs, and depicted on papyrus in the Book of the Dead, is the most vivid and enduring image from old Egyptian beliefs regarding the fate of the individual after death. It has even been found, crudely but beautifully displayed, on the gilded cartonnage covering the chests of Roman-era mummies excavated by Zahi Hawass at the Bahariya Oasis in 1999 (and later). The artisans who made them came from a society that had already forgotten most of the other elements of ancient Egyptian religion — including, apparently, even the knowledge of how to correctly write the sacred (hieroglyphic) script.
Perhaps further proof of the Osiris Court’s persistently haunting imagery is that Mahfouz, who had set aside Pharaonic Egypt as a central setting or theme in his fiction for nearly forty years, then seized upon it as the framework for one of his strangest and most explicitly ideological books. In Before the Throne, subtitled Dialogs with Egypt’s Great from Menes to Anwar Sadat, Mahfouz dramatically presents his views on many of Egypt’s political bosses from the First Dynasty to the current military regime. And he does so by putting words in their mouths as they defend their own days in power before the tribunal of Osiris. In Before the Throne, those whom Mahfouz sees as the greatest leaders of ancient Egyptian civilization, under the aegis of the ancient Egyptian lord of the dead, judge those who followed them, from the unification of the Two Lands through late antiquity and the Middle Ages, right to his own times. This continuum of Egyptian history showcases his essentialist vision of a sort of eternal Egyptian ka (the living person’s undying double who, in the afterlife, receives mortuary offerings for the deceased, thus ensuring their immortality).15