This translation is dedicated to Mariangela Lanfranchi.
Notes
1 Interview with Naguib Mahfouz, Maadi, Cairo, February 13, 2006.
2 In English, The American University in Cairo Press published Voices from the Other World: Ancient Egyptian Tales by Naguib Mahfouz, translated by Raymond Stock in 2002, published in paperback by Vintage Anchor in New York, 2004. Khufu’s Wisdom, translated by Raymond Stock; Rhadopis of Nubia, translated by Anthony Calderbank, and Thebes at War, translated by Humphrey Davies, in 2003. Vintage Anchor in New York published them all in paperback in 2005, and in 2007, Alfred A. Knopf in New York brought them out as well in an omnibus edition in the Everyman’s Library series entitled Three Novels of Ancient Egypt, introduced by Nadine Gordimer.
3 The Cairo Trilogy was published in Arabic in 1956–67. The American University in Cairo Press published Palace Walk, translated by William Maynard Hutchins and Olive E. Kenny, in 1989; Palace of Desire, translated by William M. Hutchins, Lorne M. Kenny, and Olive E. Kenny, in 1991, and Sugar Street, translated by William M. Hutchins and Angele Botros Samaan, in 1992. They published both Cairo Modern, translated by William M. Hutchins, in 2008, and Khan al-Khalili, translated by Roger Allen, in 2008. There has long been controversy over which of the latter two was actually published first, marking the change from Mahfouz’s ‘historical’ phase to his ‘realist’ one.
4 Interview with Naguib Mahfouz, Maadi, December 18, 1996.
5 The description of the ba is from David P. Silverman, Eckley Brinton Coxe, Jr., Professor and Curator of Egyptology at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, reading a draft of this passage from an earlier work — the wording is largely his.
6 Richard B. Parkinson, The Tale of Sinuhe and other Ancient Egyptian Poems, 1940–1640 BC (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998; first published 1997), 152.
Lucian, Vol. VII, translated by M.D. MacLeod (London: William Heinemann Ltd., and Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1961), 3.
John Rodenbeck, “Literary Alexandria,” in The Massachusetts Review, special Egypt issue guest-edited by Raymond Stock (Amherst: Winter 2002, 542; article, 524–72.
Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 218.
Fu’ad Dawwarah, Najib Mahfuz: Min al-qawmiya ila al-‘alamiya (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-‘Amma al-Misriya li-l-Kitab, 1989), 197. Here Mahfouz says that he stopped going to the theater altogether after he began to experience hearing trouble during a performance of Alfred Farag’s play Hallaq Baghdad (The Barber of Baghdad) in 1964.
7 Roger Allen, An Introduction to Arabic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 111–12.
8 Ibid., 161–62.
For text, see John Richard Stephens, Into the Mummy’s Tomb (New York: Berkley Books, 2001), pp. 137–78. This story may be the inspiration for the recent Hollywood films starring Ben Stiller, A Night in the Museum (1 and 2). Though Mahfouz could not recall it when asked, he acknowledged having read a great deal of Haggard’s fiction in Arabic translation, which “filled up the bookstores” in his youth. (Raymond Stock, A Mummy Awakens: The Pharaonic Fiction of Naguib Mahfouz, PhD dissertation, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, 2008, 42, n. 80, and 142–43.)
9 Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: In Search of a Man Caught between East and West (London: Vintage, 2006), 290.
10 Interview with Naguib Mahfouz, Maadi, February 13, 2002. Herman Te Velde, Seth, God of Confusion (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1967), Chapter Two, 85 (the standard reference work on Seth), and David P. Silverman in the article, “Divinity and Deities in Ancient Egypt,” Religion in Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths and Personal Practice, ed. Byron E. Shafer, authors John Baines, Leonard H. Lesko and David P. Silverman (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 44. However, J. Gwynn Griffiths in his “Osiris” entry in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, ed. Donald B. Redford (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2001), Vol. 2, 615–19, places Osiris’s origins in Upper Egypt, as most early images of the god depict him wearing the White Crown of the southern kingdom, though this seems a minority view.
11 Bojana Mojsov, Osiris: Death and Afterlife of a God (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 33.
For Seth’s prominence in the development of this concept in monotheistic religion, Peter Stanford, The Deviclass="underline" A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 20–23. See more on the sinister aspect of Seth in Marc Étienne, Heka: Magie et envoutement dans l’Égypte ancienne (Paris: Reunions des Musées Nationaux, 2000), 22–39.
12 J. Gwynn Griffiths, entry “Osiris,” Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, notes that, “Although the Pyramid Texts [afterlife texts found in pyramids of the Fifth Dynasty] do not provide a consecutive account of the Osiris myth, they abundantly supply in scattered allusions the principal details about his fate and especially his relationship with the deceased pharaoh,’ who is identified with him in the underworld.”
H. Te Velde, Seth, God of Confusion, Chapter Three, 6.
13 Vincent Arieh Tobin, Theological Principles of Egyptian Religion, foreword by Roland G. Bonnel (New York, Bern, Frankfurt am Main, Paris: Routledge Curzon, 2005), 22, notes that the myth was apparently only recorded in full form by the Greek biographer Plutarch, (46?–120?), probably with a Greek narrative and philosophical bias.
14 Richard H. Wilkinson, Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 148, describes Isis’ iconography, and says, “through her great power Isis was able to function as the protector and sustainer of the deceased in the afterlife.” This statement largely explains the role that Mahfouz assigns to the goddess in Before the Throne.
General description of Osiris Court trial scene in B. Mojsov, Osiris, xi. Osiris Court in the Book of the Dead, see Goelet, 101–35. For a harrowing account of the ordeal before the scales of Ma’at, see Dimitri Meeks and Christine Favard-Meeks, Daily Life of the Egyptian Gods, translated from French by G.M. Goshgarian (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 142–50. For finds at Bahariya, see Zahi Hawass, The Valley of the Golden Mummies (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2000), and his article, “The Legend of the Pharaoh’s Lost Tomb: A Tale from the Valley of the Golden Mummies,” in The Massachusetts Review (Winter 2002), special Egypt issue, 475–88. Also, Raymond Stock, “Discovering Mummies,” Egypt To day, July 1999, 64–69. For Osiris in other texts of the afterlife, see Bojana Mojsov, “The Ancient Egyptian Underworld in the Tomb of Sety I: Sacred Books of Eternal Life,” in The Massachusetts Review, 489–506, and in Osiris, 58, 83–93. James P. Allen relates the origin and meaning of “hieroglyphs” in Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, eleventh printing, 2007; first published 2000), noting the term is derived on the Greek for “sacred carvings,” 2.