Joseph and His Brothers, page 76
the Delta and agreed with the Egyptians in nothing, either in worship of the gods or anything else. They loved, so they said in their petition, to eat the flesh of cows and wanted the freedom to eat the flesh of cows just as Libyans did, of whose race they were. But Amun replied, instructing them that the flesh of cows was out of the question, for Egypt is the land that the Nile makes fertile, upriver and down, and all who live on this side of Elephantine and drink from the river are Egyptians.
So said Amun, and the priests of Sopdu, their lord, raised their long-fingernailed hands in an attempt to make the Ishmaelites understand the arrogance of it. Why this side of Yeb and the first cataract? they asked sardonically. Because Thebes lay just this side of it? Behold that god's generosity of heart! If Sopd, their lord, here in the lower North, in the first and real land of Egypt, were to declare that everyone is Egyptian who drinks from its waters, that would, to be sure, be true generosity and magnanimity of heart. But when Amun—a god who, to put it cautiously, stood under the suspicion of being of Nubian origin and initially a god of the miserable land of Kush, and who had been able to gain popular primacy only by arbitrarily equating himself with Atum-Re—when Amun said it, one could not take that generosity of heart at full value or confuse it in any way with true magnanimity. . . .
In short, the jealousy and pique aroused in the prophets of Sopd by changing times and the ascendancy of the South was patently clear, and the Ishmaelites, the old man at their head, respected such sensitivities and showed their approval as good businessmen by augmenting their offering with several loaves of bread and jugs of beer in a demonstration of the due esteem in which they held Sopd, the slighted god, before then proceeding to Per-Bastet, which lay close by.
The City of Cats
Here there was such a pungent odor of catnip that it almost turned the stomach of any stranger unaccustomed to it. For it is a smell that disgusts every creature except the holy animal of Bastet, the cat, which is renowned for its voracious love for it. Countless specimens
of these animals were kept in Bastet's holy of holies, the great core of the city—black, white, and tabby, they prowled with the silent resolve of their charming kind along its walls and between their devotees' feet in its courtyards. And people coaxed them with this foul herb. But since cats were kept everywhere, in every home in Per-Bastet, the odor of valerian was so intense that it pervaded everything, flavoring the food and clinging to garments for so long that even on arrival in On and Mempi, travelers would be singled out and people would laugh at them and say, "Obviously you've come from Per-Bastet."
Such laughter, by the way, was directed not only at the smell, but also at the city of cats itself and the amusing things associated with it. For Per-Bastet, in contrast to Per-Sopd, which it also far surpassed in size and population, was a city famed for its humor and merriment, despite the fact that it lay in the heart of the ancient Delta— merriment that was in fact ancient and crude and at the mere thought of which all Egypt was seized with laughter. Unlike the house of Sopd, the city was home to a universally recognized festival, for which, or so its inhabitants boasted, "millions" (that is, tens of thousands at least) of people traveled downriver, by land or water, everyone already in high spirits, because women in particular—all of them carrying loud rattles—were supposed to behave wantonly, shouting out ancient crude profanities from the decks of their boats and making obscene gestures at each town as they passed. But the men were very merry as well, they whistled, sang, and clapped; and all those who journeyed to Per-Bastet gathered there in a great throng, camping in tents for a three-day festival—with sacrifices, dances, and masquerades, with a market fair, thumping drums, storytellers, jugglers, snake charmers, and more wine than was drunk in Per-Bastet all the rest of the year, until, so it was said, the crowd was so caught up in a mood both ancient and primitive that some people even scourged themselves with whips or rather, more painfully still, with a kind of spiny club, to the accompaniment of a universal clamor that was an integral part of the old Feast of Bastet and, indeed, was the very thing that evoked laugher at the mere thought of it—for the sound was like screeching cats being visited by tomcats at night.
Boasting of the profitable crowds they entertained once a year, the inhabitants told the strangers about this annual interruption of their normally peaceful lives. The old man regretted that business
had prevented him from arriving in time for the festival, which was held at a different season of the year. His young slave Usarsiph listened to these descriptions with apparently respectful eyes, nodding politely and remembering Jacob. He also thought of him and of his forefathers' God who had no temple as he gazed down from a higher spot in the city to the sacred peninsula that lay at its heart below, embraced by the arms of two tree-shaded streams, and to the goddess's residence, its main building surrounded by high walls and hidden within a grove of old sycamores. Resting amid pylons laden with images, courtyards covered with awnings, and colorful arcades whose columns imitated open and closed buds of papyrus, the temple opened toward the east and the stone-paved avenue that had also brought him here along with the Ishmaelites. And he thought of Jacob again when he actually strolled among its columns and gazed at the dark red and sky blue engraved reliefs decorating its walls: Pharaoh burning incense before the cat goddess, while beneath miraculously clear-cut inscriptions made up of birds, eyes, arrows, beetles, and mouths, stood reddish brown divinities—all wearing tails and loincloths and adorned with sparkling bracelets and collar necklaces, with tall crowns on their animal heads and the ring-and-cross, the symbol of life, in their hands—who reached out in friendship to touch their earthly son on the shoulder.
Joseph, a tiny figure among giants, looked up at them all with young but tranquil eyes, for he was a young man confronting the power of age. But an awareness that he stood in marked contrast with it not only because of his years, but also in a larger sense, stiffened his back before its oppressive weight, and when he thought of the primitive screeching with which those who gathered for the feast filled the courts of Bastet by night, he could only shrug.
The Lessons of On
How well we know the road along which the lad who had been carried off was now led! Down or up, however you wish to take it or put it. For just as so many things here conspired to confuse him, so, too, this "up" and "down" was confusing. Seen from his homeland, he, just as Abram before him, thought of it as "going down" to Egypt, but within Egypt you went "up," that is, against the current,
which flowed from the south, so that once inside the country, by going southward you no longer "went down" but "up." The confusion seemed deliberate, like the game where you're blindfolded and spun around a few times, so that your head is whirling and you can't tell forward from backward. And even time itself—that is, seasons and the calendar—was not as it should be down here either.
This was the twenty-eighth year of Pharaoh's reign and, as we would put it, the middle of December. The people of Keme said that it was the "first month of the flood," which they called Thoth, as Joseph learned to his delight—or Djehuti, as they pronounced the name of this monkey and friend of the moon. But this dating did not match natural circumstances—the current year almost always conflicted with reality, for it was in flux and only from time to time, at vast intervals, did its New Year's Day once again coincide with the actual, real New Year, when the Dog Star appeared once again in the morning sky and the waters began to rise. The general state of things, however, was a muddled mismatch between the calendar year and the ebb and flow of nature, just as now there could be no question of this being the onset of the flood—at the moment the river had receded so greatly that it was almost confined to its old bed. The land had reemerged, seed had been repeatedly sown, the crop was growing—for the Ishmaelites' downward journey had been so sluggish that half a year had passed since the summer solstice when Joseph had gone down into the pit.
And so, somewhat confused in matters of time and space, he moved from station to station—and what stations were those? We know them well, since circumstances dictate them. For those who led him, the Ishmaelites, took their time now, too, as was their habit, did not worry about time at all, but paid attention only to holding sluggishly to their goal more or less, and, upon leaving Per-Bastet, headed southward with Joseph along one branch of the river toward the point where it joined the main current at the apex of the Delta's triangle. And thus they came to golden On, set at that apex, a most strange city, the largest Joseph had thus far seen—the House of the Sun, made chiefly of gold, or so it seemed to his dazzled eyes. But from there they would one day set out for ancient Mempi, or Menfe as some called it, the former city of kings, where the dead had no need of a watery journey across the river, for the city already lay on its western banks. That much they knew about Mempi even now.
From there, however, they planned to leave land behind them and charter a boat to take them upriver to No-Amun, Pharaoh's city. That was the plan as conceived by the old man, whose counsel determined everything, and following it, they strode on for now, stopping to haggle along the banks of the Yeor, which here was called the Hapi, its brownish waters now returned to its bed with only a few ponds still left stranded here and there in the fields, which were beginning to turn green as far as fertile soil extended between desert and desert.
Where its banks were steep, men stood beside low-walled wells, lifting fecund water from the river in leather bags attached to a sweep counterweighted with a ball of clay and pouring it into troughs that drained into the ditches below, so that they might have grain when Pharaoh's scribes came to collect it. For this was Egypt's house of bondage, of which Jacob disapproved, and the scribes who collected the grain were accompanied by Nubian bailiffs who bore bundled rods of palm.
The Ishmaelites did business in these peasant villages, trading lamps and resins for necklaces, headrests, and the linen that the farmers' wives wove from the flax of the field and then turned over to tax gatherers—they talked with the people and saw the land of Egypt. Joseph saw it, too, and as they traded and bargained he breathed in its strangely potent vital air, for its beliefs, customs, and usages were almost as pungent as its spices; but one ought not to conclude that everything his mind and senses sampled there was completely new, wild, and strange. As a land between lands, a land of passage, his fatherland—that is, if one wishes to regard the region of the Jordan and its mountains along with the hill country where he grew up as a unified fatherland—was influenced just as much by Egyptian customs and civilization from the south as by the hegemony of Babylon to its east; Pharaoh's campaigns had passed through it, leaving behind garrisons, viceroys, edifices. Joseph had seen Egyptians and their garb; the sight of an Egyptian temple was nothing strange; and all in all he was a child not only of his mountains, but also of a large geographical entity, the Mediterranean Orient, where nothing could seem to him totally mad and unfamiliar. He was, moreover, a child of his time, that now-submerged time in which he moved and into which we have descended, just as Ishtar went down to her son. Together with space, time created a unity and
commonality in both the outward aspect and the mind-set of that world. The truly new thing about it that Joseph perceived on his journey was surely this: that he and his kind were not alone in the world, not utterly exceptional, that a great deal of his forefathers' pondering and brooding, their earnest speculations, their constant alertness to God's presence, did not make them so very different, singling them out for preference, as much as this was part of a time and a place, a common realm—aside, of course, from significant differences in the blessing this bestowed and their own aptitude for making use of it.
When Abram, for instance, had held such long and urgent discussions with Malkizedek about the extent to which there might be some unity between his own Adon and El-Elyon, the Shekemite Baal of the Covenant, it had been a conversation very common to its time and world, both in terms of the problem itself and the significance attached to it with such openly expressed emotion. So then, at the very time of Joseph's arrival in Egypt, the priests of On, the city of Atum-Re-Horakhte, the Lord of the Sun, had canonized the relationship between their holy bull, Merwer, and the Dweller upon the Horizon in the dogma of "living repetition"—a formula in which the ideas of identity and simultaneity were both paid equal due, which was why it had given rise to lively discussions all through Egypt and had even made a great impression on the royal court. Everyone was talking about it, from commonfolk to nobility, and the Ishmaelites could not trade five debens of labdanum for beer or a good cowhide of the same value without their trading partner's introducing and framing the conversation with something about the new definition of the relationship between Merwer and Atum-Re and wanting to know what sort of impression it had made on these foreigners—and he could count on their interest if not their approval, for although they came from faraway, this was still the same region, and above all the same time that was common to them all and allowed them to take in such news with a certain amount of excitement.
This then was On, the House of the Sun, that is, the house of him who is Kheper in the morning. Re at noon, and Atum in the evening, who opens his eyes and there is light, who closes his eyes and there is darkness—of him who had named his name to Eset, his daughter. On, which had stood on this site in Egypt for thousands of
years, lay on the Ishmaelites' route toward the south, lay bathed in the glittering rays of the four-sided tip of the huge, brightly polished granite obelisk set on projecting foundations and crowning the great temple of the sun, where lotus-wreathed wine jugs, cakes, bowls of honey, birds, and every fruit of the field covered Re-Horakhte's alabaster table and his attendants, wearing stiffly starched aprons and panther skins—still with the tail—across their backs, burned incense before Merwer, the Great Bull, the living repetition of the god, with a neck of brass just behind his lyre-shaped horns and powerful dangling testicles. It was indeed a city unlike any Joseph had ever seen before, different not only from other cities of the world, but also from those of Egypt, and even its temple, beside which lay the Ship of the Sun, its high flanks made of gilded bricks, was different in ground plan and appearance from all other Egyptian temples. The whole city gUttered and sparkled with the gold of the sun, so much so that it left its inhabitants with inflamed, tearing eyes, while strangers usually pulled their hoods and cloaks over their heads to avoid its radiance. The encircling wall had a roof of gold and was studded with phallic sun-lances whose tips sent golden rays darting and flashing in all directions; the city was filled with golden animals, monuments to the sun in the shape of lions, sphinxes, rams, bulls, eagles, falcons, and kestrels; each of its buildings made of Nile brick, even the poorest of them, shone with a gilt symbol of the sun—a winged disk, a spiked wheel or a wagon, an eye, an ax or a scarab— plus a golden ball or apple on its roof; and as if that were not enough, the same held true for the villages surrounding On, where every residence, warehouse, or granary likewise bore such an emblem—a copper shield, a spiral serpent, a golden shepherd's crook, or a goblet—that glistened with reflected sunlight. For this was the domain of the sun and the precinct of blinking eyes.
Millennial On was a city whose outward appearance made all eyes blink. But it was also a city whose inner nature and spirit did the same. Ancient wise precepts had their home here, and even a stranger could sense them—absorbing them through his pores, as people say. These were precepts that dealt with measurement, with the structure of bodies conceived exactly and purely within three-dimensional space and with the planes that define them, set them off from one another by equal angles, their edges abutting precisely and meeting in a point that has no further extension and occupies no
space—and all such holy matters. This passion for pure, conceptual geometry, this interest in theoretical space, which had its home in On and set that ancient city apart, was apparently bound up in its local cult of worshiping the daystar and was evidenced even in its formal arrangement. For located at the tip of the triangular region where the arms of the river parted to empty into the sea, its very buildings and streets formed another equilateral triangle, whose apex (at least theoretically and for the most part actually) coincided with that of the Delta; and from that apex there towered up from the massive rhombus of fiery granite foundations, the four-sided obelisk whose planes as they merged toward the top were covered with gold that flashed with the first rays received from the sun each morning— all of this surrounded by a stone wall that formed the culmination of vast temple precincts extending well out into the triangular city.
Here, just outside the gate to the temple, which was hung with banners and led to passageways adorned with the most delightful paintings depicting the events and gifts of all three seasons, there was an open area planted with trees, where the Ishmaelites would spend almost the entire day; for this was the place where people—blinking residents of On and strangers alike—met and bartered. And the servants of the god likewise came out to the market—eyes watering from too much staring into the sun, shaved heads glistening, bodies clad in the short apron and sacerdotal sash of ages long past—and mixed with the people, for they had nothing against a conversation with anyone who wished to ask them about their wisdom. To that task, it appeared, they were as good as exhorted from on high and could hardly wait to be asked to testify on behalf of their venerable cult and their temple's ancient tradition of scientific wisdom. Our old man, Joseph's master, made use of this unspoken but clearly imparted permission and frequently spoke with these scholars of the sun while Joseph hstened.
