And when Emperor Justinian’s soldiers demolished the sanctuary of Isis on the island of Philae in the Nile, and built the very Catholic church of Saint Stephen on the ruins, Isis’s pilgrims continued paying homage to their errant goddess at the Christian altar.
SAD KING
According to Herodotus, Pharaoh Sesostris III dominated all of Europe and Asia. He rewarded valiant peoples by bestowing on them a penis as their emblem, and humiliated cowardly ones by engraving a vulva on their stellae. As if that weren’t enough, he tread on the bodies of his own children to save himself from the fire set by his brother, who kindly wished to roast him alive.
All this seems incredible, and it is. But several facts are indisputable: this pharaoh extended the network of irrigation canals and turned deserts into gardens. When he conquered Nubia he enlarged the empire beyond the second cataract of the Nile. The kingdom of Egypt had never been so vigorous or so envied.
However, the statues of Sesostris III are the only ones to show a somber face, anguished eyes, puckered lips. The other pharaohs immortalized by imperial sculptors watch us serenely from a state of celestial peace.
Eternal life was a privilege of the pharaohs. Perhaps that privilege could also be a curse.
ORIGIN OF THE HEN
Pharaoh Tuthmosis was returning from Syria after completing one of the crushing campaigns that extended his power and glory from the Nile Delta to the Euphrates River.
As was the custom, the body of the vanquished king hung upside down on the prow of the flagship, and the entire fleet was filled with tributes and offerings.
Among the gifts was a female bird never before seen, fat and ugly. The giver had delivered the unpresentable present himself: “Yes, yes,” he confessed, eyes on the floor. “This bird is not beautiful. It does not sing. It has a blunt beak, a silly crest, and stupid eyes. And its wings of sad feathers have forgotten how to fly.”
Then he swallowed. And he added, “But it sires a child a day.” He opened a box where seven eggs lay. “Here are last week’s children.”
The eggs were submerged in boiling water.
The pharaoh tasted them, peeled and dressed with a pinch of salt.
The bird traveled in his chambers, lying by his side.
HATSHEPUT
“Her splendor and her form were divine; she was a maiden beautiful and blooming.”
Thus was the modest self-portrait of Hatsheput, the eldest daughter of Tuthmosis. When the warrior daughter of a warrior came to occupy his throne, she decided to call herself “king” and not “queen.” Queens were the women of kings, but Hatsheput was unique, the daughter of the sun, the greatest of the great.
This pharaoh with tits used a man’s helmet and mantle, wore a stage-prop beard, and gave Egypt twenty years of prosperity and glory.
The little nephew she raised, who learned from her the arts of war and good government, wiped out all memory of her. He ordered the usurper of male power erased from the list of pharaohs, her name and image removed from paintings and stellae, and the statues she had erected to her own glory demolished.
But a few statues and inscriptions escaped the purge, and thanks to that oversight we now know there was once a female pharaoh disguised as a man, a mortal who did not want to die, one who announced: “My falcon rises high above the kingly banner into all eternity.”
Thirty-four hundred years later, her tomb was found. Empty.
THE OTHER PYRAMID
The construction of a pyramid could take more than a century. Brick by brick, day after day, thousands upon thousands of men worked to erect the immense resting place where each pharaoh would spend eternity surrounded by the treasures of his funerary array.
Egyptian society not only built pyramids, it was one.
At the base lay the landless peasant. During the flooding of the Nile he built temples, raised dikes, dug canals. And when the waters returned to their channel, he worked the lands of others.
Four thousand years ago, the scribe Dua-Khety portrayed him:
The farmer wears his yoke.
His shoulders sag under the weight.
On his neck he has a festering sore.
In the morning, he waters leeks.
In the evening, he waters coriander.
At midday, he waters palm trees.
Sometimes he sinks down and dies.
No funerary monuments for him. Naked he lived and in death, dirt was his home. He was laid out by the roadside in the desert with the reed mat on which he had slept and the clay jug from which he had drunk.
In his fist they placed a few grains of wheat, in case he felt like eating.
GOD OF WAR
Face on or in profile, one-eyed Odin inspired fear. The divinity of war’s glory, father of massacres, lord of evildoers and the hanged, was the godliest god of the Vikings.
His two trusted ravens, Hugin and Munin, were his master spies. Every morning they took off from their perch on his shoulders and flew over the world. At dusk they returned to tell him all they had seen and heard.
The Valkyries, angels of death, also flew for him. They circled battlefields and chose the best soldiers from among the cadavers and recruited them for the army of ghosts Odin commanded on high.
On earth, Odin offered fabulous booty to the princes he protected, and he armed them with invisible shields and invincible swords. But when he decided he wanted them at his side in heaven he would send them to their deaths.
Though he had a fleet of a thousand ships and galloped on eight-legged horses, Odin preferred to stay put. This prophet of the wars of our times fought from afar. His magic lance, grandmother of the remote-controlled missile, flew from the sky and found its way straight to the enemy’s breast.
THEATER OF WAR
Japan’s Prince Yamato Takeru, born a couple of millennia ago, child number eighty of the emperor, began his career by chopping his twin brother into little pieces for being late to the family supper.
He then annihilated the rebellious peasants of the island of Kyûshû. Dressed as a woman, coiffed and made up as a woman, he seduced the leaders of the uprising and at a party his sword split them open like melons. Elsewhere he attacked other poor wretches who dared to challenge the imperial order, and by making hamburger of them he pacified the enemy, as was said then, as is said now.
His most famous exploit put an end to the infamous renown of a bandit who wreaked havoc in the province of Izumo. Prince Yamato offered him pardon and peace, and the troublemaker responded with an invitation to ride with him through his domain. Yamato brought along a wooden sword in a luxurious scabbard, a sheathed sham. At noon, the prince and the bandit cooled off in a river. While the other swam, Yamato switched swords. He slipped the wooden one in the bandit’s scabbard, keeping the bandit’s metal blade for himself.