For the Living and the Dead: The Funerary Laments of Upper Egypt, Ancient and Modern 9781848850507, 9789774163753

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Elizabeth Wickett has worked in the Middle East and North Africa for more than twenty-five years in academic research, anthropological film and development. She studied with Dell Hymes at the University of Pennsylvania and has lectured widely on Upper Egyptian folk genres and performance. She produced and directed the successful documentary, For Those Who Sail to Heaven, highlighting the legacy of ancient festival tradition in Luxor.

For the Living and the Dead The Funerary Laments of Upper Egypt, Ancient and Modern

Elizabeth Wickett

Published in 2010 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © 2010 Elizabeth Wickett The right of Elizabeth Wickett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978 1 84885 050 7 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt Ltd from camera-ready copy edited and supplied by the author

To the women of Upper Egypt whose poetry inspired me to write this book

Contents List of Illustrations  ix Acknowledgements  xiii Preface  xv Part I The Ethnography of Lament: An Introduction to the cidid



1. ‘They go down barefoot like us, the women scorned’: The Laments of Kom Lolah

3

2. Strange Contexts: The Laments of Luxor and Edfu

23

3. Life in the Women’s Domain

51

4. Contemporary Lament Performance: The Funeral and the Mourning

67

Part II How Laments Acquire Meaning

5. The Hermeneutics of Lament: Signs, Symbols and Referents

79

6. The Performance of Emotion: Rhetoric, Authenticity and the Boundaries of Grief

99

7. The Contemporary Laments: Concordance and Thematic Analysis

121

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Part III The Cosmology of the Afterlife

8. Ancient Egyptian Lamentation: Kinesics, Performance and the Semiotics of Gesture 145 9. The Pyramid Texts: Orality, Structure and Cosmology

171

10. Cosmologies of Lament: From Ancient to Modern

183

11. Towards a Cosmology of the Afterlife: Continuities and Transformations

231



Appendices  243



Notes  277

Bibliography  289  Index  301 

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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Illustrations 1. View of Medinat Habu temple from Habu Hotel 2. View of the Coptic ruins of Medinat Habu 3. Portrait of the lamenter, Tariyya 4. Women in the village of al-Kom 5. Portrait of Qomiyya 6. The shrine of Abu’l Hajjaj in Luxor, viewed from the Nile 7. Jamal Zaki al-Din al-Hajaji with the epic poet and singer, c Awad’ullah cAbd al-Jalil 8. Luxor town 9. In the interior of the cOmda’s house, Karnak 10. High walls in the village of al-cAiyaiyša 11. Portrait of the lamenter, Balabil 12. Portrait of my colleague, Zakariyya 13. The landscape of al-Hajis al-Bahri 14. Women of al-Hajis al-Bahri 15. Hamida and her friend, dressed to go out 16. Hamida pumping water 17. Wrapped mast pole of Abu cEla’. Kom Lolah 18. Women collecting water, Kom Lolah 19. Barque of the gods on its pedestal. Medinat Habu temple 20. Medinat Habu temple viewed from Hamida’s house 21. Portrait of the lamenter, Šargawiyya 22. The lamenter, Balabil, 1987 23. Sailing boats on the Nile 24. Pilgrimage paintings which include the icon of the lion. Gurna 25. Mourners in the tomb of Racmoza. al-cAsasiif, Gurna 26. Lamenters in funerary boats crossing to the West Bank, from the Tomb of Neferhotep. XVIIIth Dynasty, al-cAsasiif, Gurna (Source: The Tomb of Neferhotep at Thebes by Norman de Garis

4 5 7 9 13 24 25 30 35 37 39 45 47 50 51 54 55 57 60 79 103 116 128 140 145 146

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Davies, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1933: 121; 122–27) 27. Lamenters on funerary boats, from the Tomb of Neferhotep (Source: Davies 1933) 28. A troupe of female musicians goes out to meet Neferhotep. Depiction of a funerary dance from the Tomb of Neferhotep with women performers beating round and rectangularframed drums (tar) as in the contemporary manaha (Source: Davies 1933) 29. Lamenters depicted in Old Kingdom paintings (Source: Les Pleureuses dans l’Égypte Ancienne by Marcelle Werbrouck, Bruxelles: Fondation de la Reine Elisabeth, 1938: 144–49) 30. Lamenters depicted in New Kingdom paintings (Source: Werbrouck 1938) 31. Lamenters depicted with hair unplaited and lamenters wearing costumes which expose their breasts (Source: Werbrouck 1938: Fig. 99: 101, 102) 32. Lamenters shown squatting on the ground. Ritualised gestures of mourning show tears visible on the face (Werbrouck 1938: Fig. 148) 33. Dancers in the Mastaba of Kagemni. Saqqara 34. The ‘bird lady’ from al-Mamoriyya. Pre-Dynastic Naqada IIa period, ca 3500–3400 BC, terracotta (Source: Brooklyn Museum, NY 07.447 505, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund) 35. Ideograms of lamenter/weepers (Source: E.A. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary, Dover Publications 1978 [1920], vol. 1: 26) 36. The goddess Isis as a bird. Isis envelops the deceased in her expanse of wings 37. Ideograms of mehi, the ‘drowned man’ (Source: Budge 1920 [1978], vol. 1: 317) 38. Pyramid Text from the Tomb of Teti, Saqqara 39. Final stanzas of the Cannibal hymn. Extracted from the Pyramid Texts (cf Kurt Sethe; University of Chicago digital reproductions) illustrating the nature of end-rhyme and variants. N.B. the lines: a,b,c are different variants of the same text as found in two different pyramids: W (the Pyramid of Wenas/Unas) and T (the Pyramid of Teti) (Source: Kurt Sethe, Altaegyptischen Pyramidtexte 1908–22, vols. 1–2)

146 146

147

148 148

149

156 157

158

161 167 172 173

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

46. 47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

Domed shrine of a local sheikh The Set animal The saluki kills the gazelle. VIth Dynasty The jackal‑headed god Anubis preparing the corpse. In a doctor‑like pose, the god performs the mummification of the deceased on a lion‑headed bed under a decorated canopy (Source: Tomb of Sennedjem, Deir al‑Medina, West Bank, Luxor, XIXth Dynasty from photograph purchased from Lehnert and Landrock, 1981, unattributed) Ancient Egyptian model of a ka house. The clay model shows the staircase leading up to the place of winnowing (Source: Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto) Palm frond insignia on painted pre-Dynastic clay pots. The lower pot depicts vessels acting as funerary barques (Source: Naqada and Ballas by W.M. Flinders Petrie and J.E. Quibell, London: BSAE and the British School, 1896, Plate LXVI, Q414) A high pigeon tower. Upper Egypt Men holding staves, Hierakonopolis. Pre-Dynastic wall painting of men standing holding crooked staves from a prehistoric tomb (Source: Hierakonopolis I by J.E. Quibell and Green, London: Bernard Quaritch, 1900, Plate LXXIX) Tomb depicted as a domed hut of reeds. From a sketch on Naqada pots, pre-Dynastic period (Source: Naqada and Ballas by Petrie and Quibell, 1896, Plate XXX, 36a) Men winnowing in the Tomb of Sennedjem. Deir al-Medina, West Bank, Luxor, XIXth Dynasty (Source: Photograph of the tomb of Sennedjem purchased by the author from Lehnert and Landrock, 1981, unattributed) Reed coffin wrapping. From a pre-Dynastic period grave at Tarkhan (Source: Tarkhan I and Memphis V by Flinders Petrie, Wainwright and Gardiner, 1913, Plate XXV) majur (pottery) coffins. Dating from the pre-Dynastic period to the IIIrd Dynasty (Source: Tombs of the Egyptian IIIrd Dynasty at Reqaqnah and Beit Khallaf by John Garstang, London: Archibald Constable, 1904, R 87: 27) sagifa roofing over a grave. From the Pre-Dynastic period at Tarkhan, 50 km south of Cairo (Source: Tarkhan II by W.M. Flinders Petrie, British School of Archaeology in Egypt, 1914, Plate XI)

xi

180 185 187 188

197

200

207 210

212

214

215

215

219

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53. Sculpture of embracing couple known as symplegma. From the early Ptolemaic period 305–30 BC (Source: Brooklyn Museum, NY 58.13 Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund) 54. The goddess Nut bending over the deceased 55. Wooden model of a woman ‘servant’ carrying birds and a basket on her head. From the Middle Kingdom rock tombs of Bani Hasan (Source: Burial Customs of Ancient Egypt by John Garstang London: Archibald Constable, 1907, Fig. 98) 56. Painting in the Tomb of Menna (Source: Tomb of Menna, Gurna, from photograph purchased from Lehnert and Landrock, 1981, unattributed) 57. Soul houses made of clay left at a sheikh’s tomb. Gurna ca 1909 (Source: Gurneh by W.M. Flinders Petrie, BSAE, Bernard Quaritch, 1909, Plate LIII) 58. A model boat found in the Tomb of Tutankhamun. XVIIIth Dynasty, Thebes (Source: Postcard purchased in Luxor, 1981) 59. Women crying in front of the house of the deceased, Luxor 1914. (‘Femmes pleurant devant la maison de la morte’) attributed to Herbert Miller (Source: Louqsor Sans Le Pharaons by Georges Legrain, Bruxelles: Vromant, 1914) (Unless otherwise stated, all photographs are by the author.)

220

221 225

227

228

229

238

contemporary lament performance

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Acknowledgements I could not have written this book without the help of numerous friends and colleagues. I began the study of laments as a student of colloquial Arabic, setting out to collect women’s poetry in Upper Egypt. In Luxor, I met Jamal Zaki al-Din al-Hajaji, without whom I could not have recorded the laments, and came in contact with folklorist Susan Slyomovics whose ideas on the meaning of epic poetry and performance challenged me and encouraged me to develop a deeper understanding of Egyptian folklore. My initial work on the laments led to an invitation from Professor Dan Ben-Amos to join the Department of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania in 1983. I am especially grateful to Dan for encouraging me to pursue a PhD and for the invaluable funding support I received from the University. With the help of a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, I was able to return to Egypt and complete my field work in Egypt in 1986–7. To Professors Roger Allen, Dell Hymes, Margaret Mills and Katharine Young I owe many thanks for their assistance in honing the shape and content of the dissertation on which this book is based. I embarked along many research paths before undertaking this analysis of the laments but none prepared me for the encyclopaedic nature of the lament repertoire and the extraordinary wealth of ideas and people I would meet on the journey to unravel their meaning. I must acknowledge my profound debt to my teachers at Cairo University, Professor cAbdelhamid Yunis and Dr. Sulieman al-cAttar who introduced me to the analysis of Egyptian folklore and to the poets and performers who taught me the language of poetry through performance, the epic poet, cAwad’ullah cAbd al-Jalil, and the men and women of Kom Lolah and Gurna who allowed themselves to be recorded. I would like to thank cAbdelrahman al-cAbnoudi for suggesting that I pursue the study of laments and all my colleagues and friends who helped me in the interpretation of the texts, in particular Yahia alTahir cAbdulla, Nabil Nacoum, cAdly Rizqallah, Sonallah Ibrahim and c Abdelhamid Hawass. I am particularly indebted to Ann Macy Roth and to James P. Allen for steering me through the maze of ancient Egyptian funerary texts while in Cairo. I also owe tremendous gratitude also to Egyptologists, Edwin Brock, Peter Dorman, Michael Jones, Peter Piccioni,

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Christian Guksch and Heike Guksch for their help in unravelling recondite puns and double meanings in texts which would otherwise have remained obscure. The affinities between the ancient and contemporary conceptions about death and the afterlife proposed in this study are my own, but their amplifications and clarifications were invaluable in helping me to trace historical referents and to develop the framework for analysing the cosmology of the cidid. I would also like to thank the Association Égyptologique Reine Élisabeth for allowing me to reproduce illustrations from Marcelle Werbrouck’s Les Pleureuses dans l’Égypte Ancienne, and the Brooklyn Museum for providing me with photographs of two artefacts in their collections, the ‘Bird Lady’ and the symplegma. I would also, of course, like to thank the many friends who made this study possible, Laura Gifford who hosted me so generously in Philadelphia, Annette Costanzi in Cairo who acted in loco parentis while I worked in Luxor, cAmm Sobhi and family at the Habu hotel, and Ibrahim Sulieman and the Inspectorate of Antiquities in Luxor for their continual assistance in enabling me to conduct my research. Finally, I would like to thank my son, Adam, for his enduring support and patience despite interminable stints of field work and my husband, Stephen Brichieri-Colombi, without whose support and instigation this book would not have been written.

PREFACE

xv

Preface I went to Luxor initially in a quest to understand the poetry of laments, a genre called cidid. With this aim in mind, I recorded lamentation not at funerals, which were considered private, but with professional and semiprofessional lamenters in what might be called ‘simulated natural context’. These laments, nevertheless, constitute a body of authentic texts. They reveal the nature of lament and the role of ritual lamenters in the highly emotive context of death and personal loss. Jamal Zaki al-Din al-Hajaji, a local folklorist, helped me find and record Luxor lamenters. In exchange, I accorded him access to the cloistered world of women from which he was naturally excluded. There was no dictionary of Sa cidi dialect. Without Jamal as my interlocutor and interpreter, my quest into the meaning of words would have reached an impasse. Once transcribed, the lament texts proved to be highly esoteric. I was unfamiliar with Upper Egyptian dialect and the style and language of laments and so solicited help from friends and colleagues. They also found interpretation difficult. I was forced back to the field and there began the process of interpretation and translation. Local women lamenters participated in the unravelling of these cryptic texts but only to a limited degree. They were often as unfamiliar with the meaning of the archaic koiné of lament as many men. They were also fearful of the implications of deciphering or discussing laments outside the context of performance. As an outsider studying an insider’s tradition, I approached the problem of meaning in the laments from the vantage point of belief in the nature of death and the vision of the afterlife. I delved into women’s interpretations of the text over a six-year period. As a foreign woman who could not be a participant in a participatory tradition, I realised that I was not entitled to ask many questions or receive many answers. I now interpret the women’s ambiguous responses and reticence to comment on the intrinsic meaning of the texts, not as proof of ignorance, but as evidence of a whole set of assumptions and understandings they did not wish to impart to me or could not articulate. The nature of a taboo is that it is not to be broken. To place the performance of laments in the domain of public discourse would have constituted a severe breach of this proscription and one not easily condoned.

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I am very fortunate to have been able to record these laments in the 1980s. Women in Luxor have always confined their interaction with foreigners to the private sphere. They are more acutely aware than men that Western cultural mores and attitudes differ radically from their own and are less inclined to divulge their innermost interpretations of events in the world to Western women like myself. I feel privileged to have received so much guidance and help in my field work from both men and women on the East and West Banks of Luxor. I hope, therefore, that my revelations about lament and lamenters in the public domain will not do disservice to any of the several women who spent long hours of their time helping me to record and understand the cidid. Women in Upper Egypt tend to refrain from disclosures or any form of notoriety in the public sphere. I hope that this work will honour these Luxor women and invoke national pride in the consummate poetic skill of women who have conserved and embellished their oral tradition, the subject of my analysis. The book is structured in three parts: Part I of the book deals with my experiences searching out noted lamenters and recording laments in and around Luxor; Part II, the analysis of lament symbols and referents, the performers and the performance of lament, and the concordance of lament themes; Part III, ancient Egyptian lamentation: the iconographic tradition, ancient funerary texts and laments, performance modes and the cosmology of the afterlife: how the unbroken oral tradition of women’s lamentation at funerals has allowed the tradition of lamentation to flourish in Upper Egypt despite the lapse of millennia, and how ancient funerary beliefs and practices have been translated into conceptions of death and the afterlife in the contemporary lament tradition. I have learnt that to interpret any cultural phenomenon in Egypt, particularly one such as funerary lament, with an elaborate textual and iconographic history exceeding five millennia, knowledge of the ancient religious and cultural heritage is vital. To study this socio-cultural continuum, therefore, in my analysis I adopt a two-pronged style of analysis: diachronic (with reference to the ancient precursors of lament from ancient Egypt) and synchronic, based on Dell Hymes’ precept of structural analysis, the study of co-variation in form and meaning (1981). The anthropologist, Christian Guksch, suggested that a synthesis of elements across two distinct comparative frameworks, otherwise separated by temporal and cultural barriers, might reveal affinities via the mapping of one upon the other. This seemed appropriate for the study of Egyptian lamentation in its historical context. Many studies and analyses of funerary texts were available as models including Zandee’s Death as an Enemy (1960), a text-based concordance of themes compiled from ancient Egyptian funerary literature and, using this approach, I was able construct a concordance of contemporary lament themes. In keeping with Todorov’s observation that concordances may be used ‘to establish extra-textual relationships’ not, as he put it, ‘semantic

PREFACE

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equivalences’ (1982: 107), I was initially interested in the variants and interrelations not the equivalences. However, as Victor Turner noted, if one looks at symbols holistically ‘in terms of the classifications that structure the semantics of the whole … then each of the senses allocated to them appears as the exemplification of a single principle’ (1969: 41–2). The pattern of themes and motifs which emerged in the concordance pointed to a bounded ‘topography’ of meaning which gained in significance when each individual theme or motif was interpreted in the context of a whole. The concordance was the device which illuminated the nature of this whole. I then proceeded to analyse ancient Egyptian iconography and laments, applying the same techniques of literary and linguistic analysis to an understanding of the structure and themes of the ancient texts as to the contemporary, to see how they might reveal aspects of performance and theme. I explored ancient Egyptian funeral liturgies and incantations for correlated themes and discovered the Pyramid Texts (from the VIth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom ca 2400–2300 BC) and then the Coffin Texts (funerary inscriptions written on coffin lids from the First Intermediate period through to the Middle Kingdom ca 2040–1650 BC onwards) as well as, to a lesser degree, the Book of the Dead (1600–1070 BC). This approach facilitated analysis of the historic continuum of funerary lament and performance from which a synthetic and holistic view could be derived. The Egyptologist, James P. Allen, had used the technique of synthesis to simplify and define the world view or cosmology of the afterlife expressed in the Pyramid Texts (1989). I applied this to the concordance themes and from the compendium of diverse metaphors and concepts, was able to piece together a cohesive but multi-faceted conception and landscape of the afterlife as evinced in the laments. It is extraordinary that the lamenters’ vision of the afterlife and conceptions of the nature of death and the tomb, the journey to the afterlife and the state of soul after death as expressed albeit obliquely in the laments, parallels in many significant ways those enunciated in the Pyramid Texts. From my understanding of women’s conceptions of their role in lament performance, I believe that laments and the performance of lamentation are still linked to belief in the eternal vitality of the spirit and potentiality for resurrection of the soul after death in Upper Egypt. The ancient creation myth recorded verbatim by Herodotus in which the primeval mound, Egypt, rises from the waters of chaos, emerges as one of the most striking leitmotifs of lament despite the fact that the Nile inundation has ceased. Many of the artefacts alluded to symbolically in the laments replicate objects found in graves from the earliest periods of Egyptian history. Ancient ritual practices described in the laments and once performed for the benefit of the soul in the afterlife are now archaic but, as symbolic acts, they survive in the metaphoric domain of lament.

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The conduit for these ideas has been the nature of the oral tradition and its capacity to transcend and absorb fundamental changes in language and religious thought over many periods of Egyptian history. For women in Upper Egypt, lamentation has always been a social and familial obligation. It is because of their sense of obligation and the continual performance of funerary lamentation by women over millennia that these laments survive today.

‘THEY GO DOWN BAREFOOT LIKE US, THE WOMEN SCORNED’

Part I

The Ethnography of Lament An Introduction to the cidid

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‘THEY GO DOWN BAREFOOT LIKE US, THE WOMEN SCORNED’

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1

‘They go down barefoot like us, the women scorned’ The Laments of Kom Lolah

I went to Luxor for the first time in 1971. That morning, I saw three women streak across an expanse of green by Karnak temple towards a small mud-plastered house. Like a coven of ravens, their robes billowing out like wings, the old women descended on their prey. The death cry had gone up and they had been cursorily summoned. The men in the taxi beside me stiffened as they watched them sweep across and converge on the solitary mudbrick house. What was it that called women to lament? Despite the blazing heat of August, I crossed the Nile and climbed on a donkey, riding off with some trepidation to the Valley of the Kings. Climbing to the top of the escarpment and then inching slowly along it, I was able to peer down on the mudbrick enclaves flanked by palms and mint-green fields, the settlement of Gurna, hamlets perched between the tombs, and beyond the donkeys and passersby, the mortuary temples and palaces. Marooned in a vast expanse of khaki-coloured sand, this was the ancient Egyptian domain of the dead, inhabited now by the living. I manoeuvred my way down this perilous, almost vertical slope to the resplendent temple of Hatshepsut, the Egyptian queen who reigned in the guise of a king, led by Mohammed who had worked as an extra in the filming of The Ten Commandments. Nestled deep in the curvature of the rock, the terraces of this golden temple, lit by the early morning sun, radiated a luminous and mysterious aura. Later on, I watched as a group of women, their heads erect, laden with fruit, vegetables and cloth, swept majestically down the Corniche, their long black veils ballooning out behind them. I was struck by the dignity of these women as they retorted to the taunts hurled at them by the young men in jallabiyyas and sloping turbans dawdling by the ferry. I wondered how they lived their lives in this necropolis of kings and ancient artisans at the ends of what was once the inhabited world.

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1. View of Medinat Habu temple from Habu Hotel

Luxor 1979 Almost ten years later, my private life in disarray, I bundled up my babe-inarms, and at Ramses station, boarded the night train that would shudder and squeal its way down to Luxor. For twelve hours, my nine-month-old son, Adam, and I cuddled for safety as the train bounced and rolled in the slow shunt from station to station. Arriving just after dawn, I crossed the Nile by ferry and installed myself and Adam in a tiny hotel overlooking the temple of Medinat Habu, affectionately known as al-madina. This was the beginning of my long quest for the poetry called cidid. Judging from the barrel vaults, skeletal staircases, domes and jagged turrets of mud that enclosed the temple grounds like a crater’s rim, this had once been a thriving settlement. To those of Kom Lolah (as the hamlet was known), the temple was their precinct. The temple belonged to them, not to the Antiquities Organization who had placed a crude slab of mud brick across its main entrance to seal off passage in and out. Women from the village would still enter at dusk to visit the sacred springs, each covered with a small edifice, and wash in the resurgent underground waters deemed to bring fertility. The once resplendent Birket Habu, which like the temple retained its ancient Egyptian name, was fed by these waters and was now a stagnant lagoon. Painted an audacious eggshell blue against the Evil Eye, our hotel room had two iron cots separated by a rickety table. Its front terrace, blistering hot in the winter sunshine but cool and serene at night, overlooked the lotus columns of Medinat Habu temple while a second balcony at the back of the room gazed out over misty green fields. Apart from the vicious barking of wild dogs that would erupt in the night, Kom Lolah was peaceful.

‘THEY GO DOWN BAREFOOT LIKE US, THE WOMEN SCORNED’

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2. View of the Coptic ruins of Medinat Habu

Before launching on my journey, I had seen the elegiac film by the Egyptian filmmaker, Shady cAbdelsalam, The Night of Counting the Years, which was shot in nearby Gurna. I had seen the ‘actresses’, the women of Gurna, moving stealthily through the tombs they still inhabited. Shady had re-enacted the nineteenth-century procession in which the bodies of kings, the famous cache of mummies stolen from the tombs by grave robbers, were disinterred and transported to the river, accompanied by lamenting women. I had assumed that these women were feigning lament but could not be sure. Then, as I watched the children cavort and dart between the dunes and troughs of the Gurna tombs known as al-cAsasiif, I wondered if they still had access to the tombs below. They knew more of the ground’s secrets than they would ever reveal. A new village at al-Tarif was being built, designed to lure the locals away from their troglodyte residences but, at that point, had few residents. The new settlement was far from tourist haunts and would provide no opportunity for livelihood. I had studied Arabic at Cairo University for two years. cAbdelrahman c al- Abnoudi, a prominent Egyptian poet of the colloquial language who was a student there told me, ‘If you are interested in colloquial poetry, you should study the cidid, the funerary laments of Upper Egypt. The women who sing them are true poets.’ I had read a few published collections of cidid but many of these texts seemed, at times, to glorify life rather than mourn death. Others seemed to conjure up images that evoked no sensations of death, no hysterical tears. I decided that I would ask women outright if they would sing laments for me. ‘Why didn’t I study joyful things?’ I was asked, ‘Why this morbid interest in forbidden words?’ I was puzzled. I explained that I was interested in the poetry of the laments, not the performance. I wanted

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to record laments outside funerals, a sort of ‘simulated’ mourning that would not induce people to tears. I should not attend funerals to study c idid, the women insisted. As far as they were concerned, that would be pure charlatanism. I asked about the laments on my first meeting with Tariyya. Standing clutching the black silk scarves edged in livid pink and lime green spangles she had made, she asked if I would buy one. I said I would and we chatted. ‘Could you tell me about the laments?’ I asked. There was no sign of the adverse reaction I had feared. Instead she sighed and said, ‘Why not come to my house?’

The Laments of Tariyya Tariyya was a widow and, in effect, professional lamenter. Wizened by rheumatism, she would sit alone in her dark mudbrick house for long hours, with little to eat or drink apart from what she could procure from her generous neighbours. She would teach me about lament. Unlike other women, she had seemed sympathetic to my request. Perhaps as a professional, she understood my interest in her craft. Calling her friends and neighbours to this event, in due course a bevy of sharp-tongued women arrived, cackling and shrieking. For the first little while, I was only vaguely aware that I was the target of their mockery. Tariyya began to sing the first lament in full soprano voice as if it were an aria. I wondered if I had confused this genre with another but at this moment, the others grew silent, their eyes glued to the ground, rapt in the contemplation of distant memories. They began to wrap and rewrap their all-enveloping black veils, refusing to sit on the mastabas or wooden dikka benches, preferring the camber of the earth itself, as they said: ‘From dust to dust’. She began with a eulogy to ‘the men who had gone’, perhaps her own husband, brother or father.1 Where is the path which will bring you back again?

The image as it came to mind was arresting. Tariyya spies them in the brilliant light, their turbans glowing: From the mountain gleaming, the white of their turbans from the mountain gleams white, They go down barefoot like us, the women scorned… They appear … and the white of their turbans from the mountain is gleaming We can see them… They go down barefoot like us, the women scorned

The elegant men are buried barefoot and so had become like the poor lamenters who follow after them but are never honoured. Only the mad

‘THEY GO DOWN BAREFOOT LIKE US, THE WOMEN SCORNED’

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3. Portrait of the lamenter,Tariyya

mendicant sheikhs who roamed the West Bank lanes in naked destitution demeaned themselves in this way. I shall not forget you … I swear by my Lord, Neither shall I forget him nor I forget you When I sleep the sleep of truth, you with me… Forget me not… Neither shall I forget you nor you forget me When we sleep the sleep of truth, my beloved

Then the urge to evoke his resurrection, his ‘standing up’: You in the full sleeve, why stand up! Go home, you in your elegant sleeve! How tragic that the earth has absorbed him in You in the full sleeves, why stand up! Go home, you with your elegant sleeves! How tragic that he’s been absorbed in wild thyme

As a widow who laments at funerals in order to receive gifts of tea and sugar, Tariyya knew too well the ignominy associated with her profession: She is the one, if I were to swear, she is the one I loved most, I am the one shamed, the one ignorant

Tariyya chides the dead girl for letting her veil slip from her head: Pull it up and let it drape, you who wear the velvet, the velvet sleeve… Pull it up and let it drape Let your bracelets be seen underneath

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Wrap the trailing veil, young girl, the edge of your veil is trailing, the edge of your veil is trailing I am suffering in the knowledge of your youth and poise… Olive-green, you in your velvet, your olive-green velvet You have washed what should be washed. Now go home to my house Crimson in your velvet, your red velvet You have washed what should be washed You will go home tomorrow

On being washed, the young girl is dressed in sumptuous velvet for the grave. Only later did I discover why. A young girl (even a child) who dies a virgin is described as an carusa or ‘bride’, someone who would be traditionally garbed in a narrow-waisted and bouffant-skirted dress of patterned velvet. Just as there were laments for ‘the young girl’, there were laments for the young child: O for the children … the children … for the children Neither the chink of silversmiths nor the blacksmith’s chime did they hear You with beautiful eyes, child, you with beautiful eyes Like a gazelle hunted down in the peak of heat Like a gazelle hunted down in the pillared sanctuary

Children on the West Bank of Luxor would wear oversize and outlandish peaked caps patched together from bits of cotton. With a brim to shield the face from the harsh and blistering sun, this tarbush was not a posh effendi’s cap but one usually worn at a rakish angle: In the tarbush, child, you in the tarbush Sweetness was given to you. Of life? There was none. Favour me, O Eye, if I begged you, would you favour me? When I ask for tears, give them to me Flatter me, if I were to say, O Eye, flatter me When I ask for tears, may they grace my eye And we placed him there, we came to the sand and we placed him there Is this world a mirage or have we seen it?

Tariyya addresses the Eye (al-cain) just as in the prelude to Egyptian ballads or mawawil.2 The eye is both the source of tears and the arbiter of fate. The eye brings tears and catharsis. She pauses and then breaks the rhythm with a spoken chant for ‘the mother and father’. ‘For the beloved, the heart is eternal,’ she exclaims, and then she sings:

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They have been abandoned – my mother and father, On the mound, they have been abandoned The boats came, they unfurled their sails and embarked They have been taken, my mother and father, to the mound have been taken The boats came, they unfurled their sails and descended within

What was the ‘mound’? Al-Kom (meaning ‘the mound’) was the name of a nearby village that actually crowned an ancient mound. In this lament, it seemed as though the grave were afloat on the ‘sea’ of the Nile. The boatmen would come and unfurl their sails, carrying them across the waters to the mound. There they would disembark and enter. Was this the archaic flood, an anachronistic reference to the time when the Nile’s inundation would submerge the banks and mounds were the only refuge? I imagined the Nile in flood in al-Jazira, the West Bank village situated at the river’s edge. People had told me how they used to be stranded there for several months of the year, plying backwards and forwards by boat. Laments for the young man came next in the sequence: He said, The stalk of grain has plaited early They bore them along like sheaves before our eyes… By night, their camel-driver plaited the ropes by night And carried them along on ropes before {the Eye 3 {our eyes With the elegant one, the musk is placed with the elegant one So that he may be washed in a pure wash…

4. Women in the village of Al-Kom

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With the handsome one, their lovely musk is placed with the handsome one So that he may be washed clean…

The person must be buried in a state of ritual purity and physically cleansed. ‘The stalk of grain which plaited early’ was a symbol of immature youth, like the budding ear of corn or ‘sombul ’, the grains harvested or plucked before maturity. Tariyya added, You who unplait their hair, you rogue, you who unplait their hair How could you leave and abandon them? How could you leave and abandon them?

I was puzzled by the accusatory tone of this lament. I learned later that this outburst was levied at the perpetrator of death in Islamic mythology, the archangel cAzra’il, known as malak al-mut, ‘the angel of death’. As the inexorable agent of destruction, he is believed to hunt down his victims and in piercing their scalps with his crossbow, figuratively ‘unplait’ their hair. Tariyya describes the tomb. It is a prison: They crafted the locks of iron, locked them in and crafted the locks of iron They cannot see the sun, whether present or absent… With brass he locked them in and crafted the locks of brass They cannot see the sun like other people

The ribald spirit of this unruly band of women then began to assert itself and the laments began to take the form of dialogues. Mimicking the laments for ‘the father’ (in this case, the husband, not the patriarch), they giggled: You who go down in sirwal, you who ‘take down’ your sirwal [shirred trousers] You who go down in sirwal to the grave Your soul is dear to me, Are there women who walk behind you? Your soul is dear to me, Are there women walking after you?

And then on a more sobering note: You who descend to the tomb in sirwal Your soul is dear to me, are there children who come after you? He has a companion, this man who walks down the path has a companion He is alone on the path and his frame is delicate

The word she uses for tomb is al-gama, the place for ‘going up’ or resurrection. The dead man is accompanied by a ‘companion’. Could this

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be a guiding spirit? In which case, whom? With my hands, I shall gather up the thorns with my hands And smooth the path for your coming back to me Smooth the path for your coming back to me

When the person wishes to return, he will be unimpeded by thorns on the path. With my veil, I shall gather thorns with my veil And smooth the path for your coming back again Smooth the path for your coming back again In black, I mourn for you wrapped in my black veil I perform laments for you and for the others I must sing Some laments for you and for the others I must sing Kohl black, I mourn for you in my kohl black veil Some laments for you and others for the one entering Some laments for you and others for the woman entering

Tariyya addresses ‘the woman entering’. As I learnt later, when there is a wajib (literally ‘duty’, as amongst women in Luxor, the word for funeral is seldom uttered) it is incumbent on every woman to come to the funeral on hearing the cry. When each arrives, the gathered throng announces her arrival with a lament and she becomes integrated immediately into the collective mourning. And then at this point, the scene changes and one brazen woman takes the opportunity to remonstrate against the government’s decision to raise the price of a sack of flour. From the strident tones she adopted, I assumed then that she was satirising the laments and my wish to hear and record them, but the next day, she came to me privately urging me to erase the recording. She was terrified that she might be brought before the police as a dissident and punished. I assured her that no one would know the names of those present or what had been said. I learnt that day that lament was also a vehicle for complaint and social protest. The session with Tariyya ended abruptly. I was not sure what I had witnessed. Had I seen a true performance of lamentation? Despite the unexpected injection of irony, the women had adopted what appeared to be standard lament postures. They had wrapped their faces in their diaphanous black veils, pressed their hands to their temples and had rocked slowly from side to side to the pulse of the laments. The women were clearly accustomed to such sessions and shared the knowledge of how laments should be performed. Although this was an unorthodox session, laments for a foreigner performed outside a funeral, it was my baptism of fire.

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The Laments of Qomiyya I was then introduced to Qomiyya, Hamida’s mother. The village of Kom Lolah was tiny, a web of interlocking lanes and high walled, dark mudbrick houses, some with mastabas on which old men would sit, and others in which the thresholds protruded into the lanes. But along the meandering path I would walk every day past the majestic temple and its original entrance, now bricked up and plastered, a reminder of the seamless form of the original settlement, there were few houses. The Queen’s Hotel was one of these mudbrick buildings which faced the temple and it was inevitable that sooner or later I would meet the smiling and ebullient Hajj Ali, its owner. The previous moonless night, as I stood gazing at the stars from the balcony of the hotel I could feel the ground reverberate from a sudden shock. A rare power cut had plunged the whole village into inky blackness and by a quirk of fate, Hajj Ali had been walking briskly down the path when a huge cobra reared up in front of him. With a decisive crack of his staff, he had bludgeoned the snake to death with a single blow. Today its carcass was still splayed across the dusty path and as the village women chatted to each other as they passed through the narrow lanes, I could hear the tale of his freak brush with death rippling through the hamlet. That morning I saw him standing at his front door. To make conversation I remarked that I had seen the mangled cobra on the path. Naturally, he engaged me in conversation and invited me to tea. The topic soon switched to lament and I told him of my desire to record lament poetry. ‘You have chosen something very difficult. The laments are amazing but the women may not agree to perform for you,’ he chuckled. He clearly wanted to help me. He then suggested I should meet Qomiyya. In his view, she was one of the most poignant lamenters in the village. We knocked on the door in front of the imposing house and were waved into the dark interior. A wraith of a woman, babe in arms, came towards us. This was Qomiyya. Asking her about laments, at first she demurred, ‘This is what I do now, I carry the baby. I have no other role.’ Then steering herself down carefully onto the ground, she folded her legs and sat pieta-like with the young child across her lap. Qomiyya’s first husband had died six months after his conscription into the korbaj, or indentured labour camps. He had been frail. She had married again and this husband also died very shortly afterwards. As a result, she had managed her life largely alone. On this particular day, she was disheartened because, as she said, ‘her body had become old’, perhaps sensing and fearing her imminent death. Throughout her life, Qomiyya had acquired the reputation of a lamenter and a seer. Although she had never been to school, I learned that she was esteemed not only for her intelligence but her ability to diagnose and treat psychological and physical ailments. To me, she appeared to emanate wisdom and quiet dignity.

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5. Portrait of Qomiyya

Like Tariyya, she seemed to understand my interest in the poetry of laments. Hajj Ali vanished as she suddenly began to intone: O the bindings round my head, why not come, come back; my father, you were the bindings round my head, It is you who gave me strength against my family

The dark melodies intensified into the rasping monotone of lament. The bindings round my crown, why not come! Come back! You were the bindings round my crown, It is you who gave me strength against my family

Qomiyya then made a formal introduction. ‘That is for the father. They say this for him, for our father, when he dies’. She continued: A black cloak round my head, would that my father were a black cloak round my head I seek counsel from my father The counsel of brothers is harsh

The all-enveloping black silk veil worn by all married women on the West Bank is called a futa. I had noticed that women in al-Bacyarat also wore a constricting scarf knotted tightly around the temples in order to conceal their hair.

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Over my back, would that my father were a black cloak over my back I seek counsel from my father The counsel of brothers is bitter

Like the folds of her garment, his counsel would shield her from the calumny of brothers: He was the pillar of our house and he has been razed Tell me to whose house has he been dragged? Razed, he was the pillar of our house and the pillar has been razed Tell me in whose house has he been dragged to? Tell me in whose house has he been raised? A courtyard round, my father’s house is wide and a courtyard round The clamour has died down but is my father’s sin still known?

Many old houses in Upper Egypt had a fragment of fractured column as their threshold stone, some said to guard against the incursion of evil spirits. In Rumana’s house in Kom Lolah, we had to cross a pocked column of ancient stone to gain entry. Qomiyya’s had none. The Habu temple itself was festooned with two large lotus columns at the portals. Was Qomiyya singing about the collapse or theft of a pillar like this? She adds a final verse: In whose house has he been raised? My father’s house is wide with a courtyard round Tell us, in whose house has he been raised? Tell us, in whose house has he been raised?

Qomiyya describes the interior of the grave as if it were a house and yet uses a strange word, guša, possibly derived from a Coptic word meaning ‘evil intent, slander’ to describe the clamorous aftermath of her father’s death. In Egypt, tombs are built underground so to encase the body in a rounded open space rather than the dank earth. This kind of tomb was euphemistically called a fosqiyya, a word meaning both ‘tomb’ and ‘fountain’, as if to suggest that the tomb was, in a figurative sense, a subterranean spring. A strident voice bellowed from the courtyard: ‘Cease this ugly talk’. Qomiyya ignored the protestations for a while but, after several outbursts, retreated suddenly into whispers, articulating the words without melody. O my lion! I went to the tombs and cried out, O my lion! He said to me, Return home, the lion’s bones have rotted O Sheddad! I went to the tombs and cried, O great warrior! He said to me, Return home, the lion’s bones have softened

Sheddad is a hero of the Arabic epic, sirat cAntar ibn Šiddad, and thus a great warrior. Like him, her husband/father was a ‘lion’, a pillar of strength, but human frailty caused the lion’s bones to rot and grow soft.

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O gravedigger, widen the grave circle, I pray you And let the mourner berate the passerby Let the mourner berate the passerby

The appeal to the gravedigger appears to be for clemency. The tomb must be widened so that her father is not cramped in the narrow space. But who is the passerby? Does she mean the spirit of the departed soul? Place the cloak, place the cloak beneath him: When the Bedouin wander by, may they call out to him He descends from his mount to drink the purest water His mount is chaste and her master elegant From the brimming bowl, his mount drinks from the brimming bowl She is chaste and her master handsome From the earthenware bowl, his mount drinks from the earthenware bowl She is chaste and her master noble…

His spirit should drink from the water brimming over from the earthenware bowls left at the grave. I had seen such pots placed by the graves of oasis dwellers in Dakhla far away in the Western desert, but not in Luxor. How it stung me with grief, the hurling of the javelin When he laid you in the tomb, O elegant one How it stung me, the hurling of the staff When he laid you in the tomb, O Kulayb

Kulayb was also a famous warrior from the Arabian epic tradition, yet like a javelin or staff, he was thrust into to the ground. Wrap your turban, father, it is so elegant! : I wrapped it but the whirling dust snatched it from me 4 Wrap up your turban, father, it is such a fine weave! : I wrapped it but the whirling dust snatched it away again Wrap up your dashing turban, you young blade! : I wrapped it but the whirling dust and wind snatched it from me O my cousins, count up your turbans! One great turban is missing from you

Responding to the lamenter, the man replies. His turban, an essential piece of attire for a Muslim man on the West Bank, has been transformed into a winding sheet. In the metaphorical domain of the laments, the wrapping and texture of the turban embodies the character of the Upper Egyptian man, elegant and dashing.

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Over you has been heaped sand and white dust One rich in virtue has been lowered down barefoot Over him is piled sand and cockroaches: One of great riches has been lowered down barefoot They lowered him down barefoot…

‘Well,’ she quips, ‘Would he be wearing shoes?’ After a pause, Qomiyya explains: ‘These are for the noble young man. There are words for the father, for the brother, the blood brother, for everyone.’ So I asked for laments for il-ah aššagigi, ‘the blood brother’, as Tariyya had mentioned this category to me. O brother, my blood brother, like the buttons on my dress, The cone of brown sugar, which quenches my desire O brother, my blood brother, like the buttons on the dress A cone of brown sugar to quench my desire

The affection expressed in this lament for a blood brother is poignant. He is a contemporary and an intimate friend, in youth, a girl’s sole male companion. Qomiyya then shifts to ‘the mother’: Mother, beloved mother, pigeon from the niche, She gropes around to find it, tucked in her full sleeve Pigeon from the water scoop, my beloved mother, pigeon from the scoop, She gropes around to find it … in her sleeve concealed

‘When my mother would come home, there would be, for example, a pigeon, a pair of pigeons under her arm, madsus, tucked away.’ She gestures with her arms. Qomiyya’s living room was alive with the cooing of pigeons. I looked up and could spy the triangular nooks in the wall where the birds would nestle, occasionally diving down to retrieve the odd crumb from the expanse of mud floor. With the hair on her head my mother swathes me round How she fears for me from the calumnies of the crowd How she fears for me from the calumnies of the crowd With her head veil, my beloved mother swathes me with her veil How she fears for me from her brothers and sisters How she fears for me from her brothers and sisters

The swathing of the head is emblematic of the mother’s protective love. She guards her daughter against calumny and attack. She starts in again: Tell me, how much did it cost? I said, Your scarf is beautiful. How much did it cost? : I would have told you but the sand wafted over suddenly : I would have told you but the sand wafted over suddenly

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This dialogue takes place between the lamenter and the departed soul in the desert sands. Qomiyya repeats the last line as a cadence. How much did you pay for it? Your scarf is beautiful. How much did you pay for it : I would have told you but the sand wafted over me

‘For the young man’ she said: Red silk, the draw-string on his sirwal is red silk The garb of handsome youth gives them elegance The drawstring on his sirwal is silk damask, : I was going to speak … but the sand wafted over me Red silk, the drawstring on his sirwal is red silk, The garb of the handsome youth is elegant The garb of the handsome youth is elegant Wrap up your turban, you handsome young blade : I would have wrapped it tight but it was snatched by the whirling dust : I would have wrapped it tight but it was snatched away by the whirling dust

A line from the previous lament comes back like a refrain, linking the two images, the turban and the red drawstring, together. By celebrating the grandeur of their garments, in this case, a silk damask or red silk drawstring for the man’s shirred trousers, the young man is duly honoured. Qomiyya continues: ‘For a young woman who has left behind her children, we say…’: Mother of velvet, your olive-green velvet Why not wear your velvet when coming to my house You in your velvet, your pink velvet Leave your velvet until you come to spend the night

In Kom Lolah, I had seen women wearing appliqué velvet dresses, olive-green and red, but these were always young brides. Perhaps this was the implication here: the woman had died very young. The Iraqi goose has alighted in the clover To whom has she abandoned her brood? The Iraqi goose has alighted in the fenugreek She’s abandoned her brood and is cackling

The goose is ‘cackling’ like the migratory bird which flies north from the Upper Nile and lands in Egypt during a particular season of the year, perhaps, the lamenter suggests, from guilt at having abandoned her chicks. This woman, too, has died and callously abandoned her young.

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The sighting of ‘the Iraqi goose’ or al-wizz al-ciraqi in the Egyptian epic sirat bani hilal which augurs the death of the hero, cAmar al-Hafaji, is reconjured here. The hair of the damsel lies unplaited on the bed of palm fronds The camels bolted when doused in the washing The hair of the damsel has been unplaited on the palm fronds The camels bolted the instant they were doused

I was told later that in certain places, the dead person is carried across the desert by camel to the tomb site. This lament depicts the washing of the body while it lies on a bed of palm fronds strung across the camel’s back. Qomiyya continues: What is wrong? You who lie awake throughout the night like the moon You who lie awake throughout the night – I want you to wake What is wrong? You who lie awake into the night garbed in your necklaces You who lie awake throughout the night – I want you to arise

She pleads for the person who appears ‘awake’ to rise up from the bier, and then sings a lament for ‘the drowned’, al-gargan. Stretch out your arms, O angel Gabriel And pull out the drowned Stretch out your arms, Omnipotent One And wrap them round the drowned Stretch out your hand, O angel Gabriel And wrap it round the drowned

In this lament, Qomiyya imputes the ability to save and pull up the drowned to the angel Gabriel. As she explains: ‘He drowns … then because Jibrin [the angel Gabriel] is a Lord, with his power, he will pull them out from underneath and bring them up.’ He is a liar who said there is no fate, only chaos It is written and can be seen by all the people He is a liar who said that fate may be reversed It is written and those who die are seen by everyone

I knew the Arabic proverb: ‘Whatever is written on the forehead can be seen by the Eye.’ In this philosophical lament ‘to fate’, she seems to indicate that not only is one’s fate inscribed on the forehead of every human being, the fate of human beings is pre-ordained and there is no possibility of reversal. She then qualifies this: ‘He has drowned. Won’t everyone see him? They’ll look and see him.’ Then, as if to catalogue the laments, she announces the next category: ‘These are the laments for scorpion sting.’

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You who died of a scorpion sting still perspire Like lentils on the fire which boil dry… Bring the donkey and saddle up the woollen blanket [birda]: The exorciser of stings lives in the town of Jirja Bring the donkey and saddle up the burlap [tilles] The exorciser of stings lives in the town of Birdes’

Jirja and Birdes are small towns in the vicinity of Abydos, and thus far away. They are paired in the end-rhymes with the names of two types of hand-woven blankets: birda and tilles. I asked Qomiyya if she would explain these words to me but instead she repeats those same verses again, and adds, ‘The moment it stung him he died right away from a heart attack.’ The laments continue: How it pierced me, the scorpion in the mud brick He lunged out at me the moment I touched it How it pierced me, the scorpion in the brick mould He lunged out and I was stung

Unlike the others, the laments for the one pierced by the scorpions’ tail are like pithy narratives. They evoke sudden shock and horror at the moment of striking. Moreover, it seems as if the wounded person speaks as he watches the scorpion lunge out from behind the cache of bricks and wooden moulds. If we had known you would come and go to see us We would have sealed off the doors with mud plaster If we had known you would go and not return, We would have sealed off the door ‘you who follow after’ If we had known you would go and not come back We would have sealed off the doors, ‘you who shall return back’

The soul spirit of the deceased: al-mutab c, ‘he who follows after’ or ‘you who shall turn back’ is addressed indirectly and cryptically in this lament. Upper Egyptians expect the soul to ascend from the crypt on feast days when offerings are presented. Was Qomiyya referring to this event? What’s wrong? She asks you, Why do you come so speedily? : I fear you will die a death no one heeds What’s wrong? She asks you, Why do you come so hastily? : I fear you will die a death which is terrifying

Qomiyya explains this dialogue between the lamenter and the stricken soul, saying: ‘I am afraid for him of death!’ But then she changes tack. ‘There are also laments for the head of the household, the man who has passed away. These laments are painful words for those who live in those

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far-away places. These next are for the al-garib, the stranger, these words I am telling you…’ Girl in the Delta, rein in your dog The bier of the unknown man is processing down your lane Girl in the Delta, rein in your dogs The bier of the unknown man is processing by your door Girl in the Delta, you with the funerary cakes stuffed up your sleeve Please dole them out? The stranger’s tomb is by your side Girl in the Delta, the funerary cakes stuffed up your sleeves Why not dole them out? The stranger’s tomb is at your side

The Delta was far away, almost 600 kilometres distant, and a foreign and culturally distinct place. The woman who died there a ‘stranger’, a foreigner, was the one to be mourned. Qomiyya remonstrates against these ignorant girls in the Delta… I wish foreign places had never been When the earth quaked, their walls collapsed… I wish foreign places had never existed When the earth quaked, their walls tumbled… Roll your handkerchief, wrap it round Sprinkle perfume on it, elegant one Wrap it round The people at the graves do not proclaim the mourning Nor do they pull down the lock of hair to the eyebrow… They do not proclaim her worth, the people at the graves, They do not proclaim her worth Nor do they wrap up the elegant one in twice-folded cloth… They do not proclaim her virtues, the people at the graves, They do not proclaim her virtues Nor do they wrap the elegant one in twice-folded cloths Nor do they wrap the elegant one in twice-folded cloths

On many occasions, Qomiyya repeats the last line of the couplet again like a cadence, as if to break the monotony of the two-line couplets. In this diatribe against the northerners, Qomiyya impugns them for not observing the mourning to the letter, not wrapping the corpse in a particular ritually correct way nor lamenting the deceased as required by enumerating her good qualities. I then asked if there were any laments for the young child. ‘This is for the child’, she said. Sir, you who walk your baby camels in the heat of day Would that we had given birth to a child like the full moon

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Sir, you who walk your baby camels … Lead them forward! Would that we had given birth to a child who had been born and who had lived

The baby camels would carry the bier of the infant child to the tomb in the desert. There was also a lament for a woman murdered: What’s wrong? Why are you gushing dark clotted blood? Your pure white Indian scarf is stained What’s wrong? Why are you gushing dark dregs of blood? It has stained your scarves and tarnished your radiance

Such a graphic depiction of murder was shocking to me and yet realistic. There was a lull and after musing for a few seconds, she erupted again into lament though this time as a rhymed recitative: You who go off to the bath, O handsome one They have doused the bath in sweet perfume You who go off to the bath, what beauty The bath is doused in embalming spice [fayih]

I wondered: was the ‘bath’ the washing place, or the tomb itself? You who are off to the ‘baths’ in such haste The sky window in the ‘baths’ is cracked You who dash off to the ‘baths’ in such a rush The sky window in the ‘baths’ is destroyed

At that point, her daughter stormed up to us angrily and disrupted the recording. My session with Qomiyya was over. We left quietly.

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STRANGE CONTEXTS

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Strange Contexts

The Laments of Luxor and Edfu Inside, my beloved mother, rise up with us inside And I shall intone for you the secret whatever it may be



(Nafisa)

Interpreting these half-sung and sometimes half-spoken laments in Sa cidi Arabic was difficult. The endless cycle of looped rhymes and heterophonies, muffled sounds and truncated words, made the words hard to understand. I needed a collaborator who knew the dialect and could help me to ‘hear’ the words and transcribe them. And then one day in Luxor, as I was walking past the illuminated Marlboro stand spilling over onto the street, sandwiched between the Nubian cafe and tubs of dried karkade (hibiscus leaves) and duskycoloured peanuts, a man introduced himself. ‘I remember you,’ he said. ‘You came here one evening in 1971 and bought a package of cigarettes from me.’ I had been there ten years before on holiday from Libya and at the time I did smoke, but remembering me after an absence of ten years seemed unlikely. However, I did remember the electric green walls and fulminating neon lights of the restaurant opposite so it was not beyond the realms of possibility. I had been accosted by Jamal Zaki al-Din al-Hajaji, a folklorist by avocation and engineer by trade. He had transcribed 110 tapes of the sirat bani hilal epic sung by the Edfu poet, cAwad’ullah cAbd al-Jelil, for his cousin, a prominent Egyptian folklorist from Luxor and so was well schooled in the art of transcription. When he heard of my project, he offered to transcribe the lament tapes for me. I asked him what he would charge. He said ‘Nothing’. He avowed that he would do this for love of the cidid. This seemed overly generous so I offered him partnership in this project. He accepted. He would retain copies of the laments and publish them in Arabic if he could. He would start work with my tape of the laments from Kom Lolah. From that day onwards, Jamal would sit in his shop, ear pressed to the tape recorder and transcribe. Locals and the odd tourist would filter in through the door, demanding the honey-flavoured tobacco called

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6. The shrine of Abu’l Hajjaj in Luxor, viewed from the Nile

mu cassal and interrupt his train of thought, but he was totally absorbed in his task. Jamal did not speak much English. The language of laments was strange and bewildering to me even though I could speak Cairean Arabic. There was no dictionary. I would learn Sa cidi dialect through the laments. With Jamal’s help, I roamed Luxor and the East Bank of the Nile in my quest for lamenters. Behind the main street of Luxor, emptied of people in the white-hot, sallow sunshine, was a rabbit warren of tiny dark alleys and tall houses flanked by pillars, peeling facades and inviolate grate windows, another world beyond the pale of tourist Luxor: the pseudo-Pharaonic railway station built by the British and the dusty main street. One morning, at Jamal’s insistence, I was taken to a yellow-walled Luxor house with its pillared entrance inspired, perhaps, by the lotustopped columns of Luxor temple. Two women greeted us, smiled and ushered me into the interior. A small funeral was in progress. Women were sitting on the ground, their eyes wet and their handkerchiefs soaked but the laments had ceased for the time being. There was an interregnum. The mood of sobriety turned to ebullient curiosity in my presence. ‘Where was I from? Where was my husband?’ In a few brief minutes, I had become the focus of attention, the funeral forgotten. They chuckled and gossiped while I sat silently, not wishing to intervene. The abrupt change of mood seemed to them entirely natural. I had come at the wrong time, it appeared, and so arranged to come back later. Laments were to be sung at scheduled times of the day, not on an impromptu basis.

STRANGE CONTEXTS

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7. Jamal Zaki al-Din al-Hajaji with the epic poet and singer, cAwad’ullah cAbd al-Jalil

The Laments of Tayha Another day, I was invited by a local entrepreneur to come to his house. On this occasion, I would meet Tayha, her name meaning ‘the one who wanders lost’, and I wondered if this name was given to her because of her association with lament. We arrived before Tayha and her friends, so I was to wait for them in the parlour. When they arrived and sat down beside me on the floor, Tayha withdrew seven seashells from her pocket and intimated to me that I should hold them. As she had asked, I took them, not comprehending why, and then fingered them gingerly, letting them collide with each other naturally across the palm of my hand. ‘Would it be possible to record some lamentations?’ I asked tentatively. She scrutinised the shells in my hand as they churned in my grasp and then nodded. Tayha’s eyes were faintly red and blotchy. Perhaps she had come that instant from a funeral since she was already in a state of distress. After a short moment of reflection, Tayha begins to lament, choosing to sing laments for ‘the stranger’, he who dies in foreign lands: How the earth quaked (when) its walls collapsed... Did not exist, I wish foreign countries did not exist How the [earth quaked (when) its walls collapsed]

She lops off the end of the second line, or so it seems. And then, she

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murmurs under her breath, ‘May the blessing of God be upon you’, an epithet which urges sympathy for the deceased and, almost immediately, starts up again: Leaning over, the young girl on the bed is leaning over A palm frond, anchored to the clover What’s wrong? Young girl, why do you toss and turn, what’s wrong? How the mattress and the bed have been…

Leaving this verse trailing unfinished, she lunges into the next, What’s wrong? Young girl, why do you toss and turn, what’s wrong? How the mattress and the bed have been… Did not exist, I wish foreign countries did not exist How the earth quaked (when) its walls…

Death is like a tumultuous earthquake and the person is churning in pain, seemingly tormented. But then she is cut off by her fellow lamenter who up to now has been silent. She interjects a new opening phrase but repeats Tayha’s refrain as a cadence: Your sleeve, girl from the Delta, the funerary cakes up your sleeve Why not dole them out? The stranger’s tomb is at your side Your sleeves, girl from the Delta, the funerary cakes up your sleeves Why not dole them out? The stranger’s tomb is by your side Did not exist, I wish foreign countries did not exist How the earth quaked when the walls collapsed

This lament recalls the lament I had heard first from Qomiyya, a reprimand to the Delta girl seemingly unfamiliar with the funerary customs of Upper Egyptians. Tayha and her fellow mourner sing these as if they were a round. Tayha leads but then chops off the ends of phrases, prompting new verses as if to propel the pulse of the laments along: Trailing, young girl, the edge of your veil is trailing You have our sympathy as one of your stature… Trailing down, young girl, the edge of your head veil is trailing down You have our sympathy as one of your stature…

She does not complete the line this time, perhaps in anticipation of interruption by her partner, and instead, devises a dialogue addressing the young girl: It has fallen, young girl, why, your head veil has fallen! : You must clutch onto it for me, my body has grown cold

The inadvertent slipping of the girl’s head veil lays her head bare. This

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shames her in the public eye, even in death. The lamenter must become the protector of her pudeur. At this point, Tayha’s co-lamenter ‘steals the floor’ by interjecting her own lament. (I had learnt from Jamal that the main lamenter is called ‘the one who begins’ or ‘badaya’, and the respondent, ‘illi betrudd caleha’, ‘the one who replies’, but had not seen this interaction of the badaya – in this case, Tayha – and ‘illi betrudd caleha’ so closely before. These women were clearly accustomed to ceding the floor, one to the other, using the technique they illustrated in this session.) This woman pursues the same lament theme but engages the young girl further in conversation: Gone, young girl, why, your head veil has gone! : You who clutch onto it, my body has collapsed My shoulder ... Hold her upright! She is slumped over my shoulder How tightly they wrapped her in Indian silk My shoulders ... Hold her upright! She lies slumped over on my shoulders How tightly they wrapped her in the purest silk Sprinkled...

But then Tayha interjects authoritatively: ‘Enough! Enough of this ... so that we can lament someone else...’ and after a few moments of informal chat, she pauses and then with heightened concentration and veiled eyes, begins to chant the laments for ‘the drowned’: The Nile is high, granaries upon granaries And no sympathetic heart to pull out the suffering one Waves, the Nile is high, waves of foam upon foam And no sympathetic heart to pull out the drowned

In these laments, granaries emerge from the Nile, conventionally called ‘the sea’ in Arabic (ilbahr). I was puzzled but assumed that she meant that the subterranean realm of the sea was replete with nourishment for the afterlife. The foamy waves suggest an allusion to the inundation in the days before the Aswan dam, in which the drowned man is submerged but not saved: Fishes, he has been entrusted to the whale and fishes He has been entrusted to you, O caster of nets Minnows, he has been entrusted to you, the whale and the minnows He has been entrusted to you, O hurler of hooks

The person has been ‘entrusted’ to the largest and smallest of species in the sea: the whale and the minnow, by the ‘caster of nets’ and ‘hurler of hooks’. This must be an allusion to cAzra’il, the ‘angel of death’: In their hands above the ‘seas’, their turbans unrolled in their hands

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Truly, why not call out to them and let them come to him swimming I have seen them above the ‘seas’, their white stoles I have seen them Why not call out to them and let them save the swimmer? Poor man, he has been entrusted to him, the hurler of hooks And no sympathetic heart to pull out the drowned Black, the sea is high and its foam is black How it pressed against the soul in...

And she presses ahead with a different lament... Jet black, the sea is high and its foam jet black How it pressed against the soul of the drowned

The vision is stark: the drowned men are the swimmers, emerging from the waters with their turbans unloosed and waving. Their turbans have become their shrouds. The men seem to have survived but have not been saved. Are they dead or alive? They are submerged in the black siltladen foam of the inundation and I am reminded of the viscose and dark embalming resin. Mast pole, who decreed that he be placed on the mast pole? I am staring with my eye at my beloved who has drowned A tree, who decreed that he be placed on the tree? I am staring with my eye at the one who has drowned Cross over to them, who decreed, child, that you (go) to them? I cry out to the swimmer that once was one of them Mast pole, who decreed that he be placed on the mast pole? I see with my eye, the beloved who has drowned

The drowned person has been placed on a mast of a boat and by extension, a tree on which the drowned can be ‘seen’. The images of the mast pole and the tree emerging from the waters are suddenly baffling. Could she mean the metaphoric ‘tree of life’? The vision is one of swimmers whose souls are resurrected in death and incarnated in a mast pole or tree. Then again, there is a pause and then Tayha begins to sing laments for ‘he who dies without heirs’: Let him weep for his own state, the man with no heirs, let him weep for his own state Let him weep for the absence of children by his side For himself, the man with no heirs, let him weep for himself Let him weep for the absence of children at his side In a black cloak they wrapped the man with no heirs, they wrapped him in a black cloak

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Never will the clan return to inquire after him Woollen rug, the man of few heirs, they wrapped him inside a woollen rug Never will the clan return to revive his memory… Wrapped in rope, I wish there had been a boy wrapped in rope… Who would clutch the branch of palm and say the litanies A demented one, I wish they could have had even a demented child… Who would clutch the branch of palm when it leans Himself, man with no heirs, let him weep for himself Let him weep for the absence of children at his side His own state, man with no heirs, let him weep for his own state Let him weep for the absence of children by his side

Since no children survive him, the poor man must weep for himself. If only there had been a single son, even a demented one, to clutch a palm frond and recite prayers at the grave… The thread, why build it up and stretch along the marking thread? Man with no heirs, why build for him a house? Why could he not roost like the dove from the field?

Why construct a ‘house’, that is, a tomb to reside in, the lamenter asks. He has no heirs to share the family crypt with him: For the man of few heirs, why build for him a mansion? Why could he not nest like the migratory dove? House, for the man of few heirs, why build for him a house? Why could he not roost like the dove on the wall? His name, the name of the great man they inscribed on his shroud If he had had children, they would have called out to him by name In his shroud, man of few heirs, they placed him in his shroud If he had had children, they would have called to him in front of him

His name has been ‘written’ on his shroud but it will fade from memory. After this extraordinary day of laments, it took me time to ponder the meaning of these images and their meaning. The laments touched on broad metaphysical themes and conjured up a vision of the afterlife that I had never imagined. And then one day, Jamal escorted me to another lamenter he much admired called Zeinab. She had sung laments at his mother’s funeral and he had listened to her lamentations from the interior of his own home. Jamal had talked to her already. He had persuaded her to lament by requesting that she lament his dead mother, as she had done at her funeral, so that he could preserve the laments on tape for posterity.

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8. Luxor Town

The Laments of Zeinab Squatting on the ground with a soaked handkerchief to swab the tears, her face half-draped in her veil, Zeinab began to chant and rock back and forth to the laments’ leaden rhythm. At the sound of the lament, a few old crones in the household appeared and immediately shrouding their eyes in head cloths, crouched down on the floor beside Zeinab. They, too, began to sing, clearly familiar with the words, reinforcing the melodic line in the interstices between the beginning and end of a verse. As the badaya or ra’isa, the leader, Zeinab’s role was to weave a skein of laments at a funeral, spontaneously introducing new themes and inviting all mourners to participate in a collective and shared expression of sorrow. On this occasion, the laments flowed forth without pause, a dual tone continuum of uninflected sound, until her voice became hoarse and she was compelled to ‘speak’ the words in a kind of recitative. The laments were a re-enactment of the laments composed for Jamal’s mother. This strategy provided the lamentation with a proper raison d’ètre and would not offend the dead or the living. It was Jamal’s custom to convene a nightly salon of local intellectuals on the threshold of his shop and the verge of the corner café frequented by Nubians and other regulars. Like his many customers, I also became a habituée, engaging the locals in discussions of lament and what they might mean while drinking a succession of cups of tea, yansoon (from anise) and karkade. The men who congregated at Jamal’s shop to drink tea seemed heartily in favour of my project. They never tried to invoke religious arguments against lament, calling it haram, that is, forbidden in Islam, or attempting

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to deny the existence of the cidid. This was in stark contrast to the attitude of some men I had met on the West Bank, who were well aware that their mothers were profoundly committed to the performance of lamentation but condemned the practice outright. These Luxor men were supportive of my lament project and wished to facilitate the recordings the best way they could. Finding venues for recording laments was problematic, however. One night, a Luxor headmaster arranged to record laments in the elementary school playground with a renowned lamenter. The woman, called Afkar (meaning ‘Thoughts’), appeared smiling and gracious, even flattered to be invited to perform, though from her rather dusty black dress and threadbare veil, I could see that she was extremely poor. She was a professional and would be paid for her labour. Spying the hand microphone on its small stand, Afkar immediately seized it and clasping it to her throat like a film star, stood to face the empty playground. To the assembled audience of three, she started to intone the laments she knew and – unlike the whimpered recordings of some lamenters, fearful of discovery – as she sang, her voice exploded into an operatic tremolo. Her laments were hauntingly beautiful and her musical performance quite startling because of its intensity. The pride she evinced in her own performance was clear. In the women’s domain, she had attained the status of a professional and this accomplishment had accorded her not only prestige but monetary gain. She was a widow, forced into this role by penury but, in her case, lamentation had afforded her a vocation she espoused without shame. As our research gained fame within the streets of Luxor, more and more men began to come forward, proposing lamenters for recording from their own villages. I was intent on seeing if the laments recorded in the rural East Bank environment were the same or different from those recorded on the West Bank since the dialects of Sa cidi Arabic were substantially different. The men who offered to record were not anxious that I come to their houses, however. The presence of a foreigner might create a furore and interfere with the recording. Instead, they would record laments on their own taperecorders in the privacy of their own homes. Tape recording of local singers at weddings had already become a fine honoured tradition. Upper Egyptian men disliked and felt alienated from Cairo radio and preferred to listen to their own homebred musical genres and performers. When musicians of repute like Abarim performed in open-air concerts, people would place tape recorders wrapped in homesewn khaki casings at strategic points on the stage in order to record the events for posterity. The lament recording project would become an extension of this same local initiative: I would give these men blank tapes, they would record the lamenters’ repertoires and then return the tapes to me often with the request for a copy, which I quickly provided. Unlike the group recording sessions I had witnessed, these home-

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recorded laments were performed by an anonymous lamenter alone. The quality was not optimal – in some cases, almost inaudible – but these laments exuded a haunting intimacy and as I had hoped, revealed elaborate poetic imagery, so expanding my understanding of the repertoire of lament and its metaphoric domain. I cast the net wide during this period and pursued lamenters in both East and West Bank villages of Luxor. Women had to be located and communications conducted by word of mouth from man to woman: only their wives knew who were the best lamenters and it was a matter of negotiation and luck if I were able to find them. Most of my recording sessions with Luxor lamenters had to be arranged, negotiated and attuned to Jamal’s schedule, but on one particular day, out of the blue, a young woman presented herself to me at my tiny hotel on the main railway station street. I had never met her before. I was totally unprepared when she appeared but on her arrival, I sped down the rambling stairs to meet her and led her up to my cramped hotel room. The room was sparsely furnished and boasted a single bed pressed against the wall, a table with my suitcase on it, and one chair. The lamenter would have to sit on the bed. On entering, the woman manoeuvred her way to the bed and sat down, her body rigid, her face pallid and her eyes firmly fixed to the ground. Her name was Fathiyya and, as I learnt later, she was the daughter of a professional lamenter. In her terror, she could hardly articulate her reason for coming but assumed that I knew why and muttered the word: cidid. I scrambled to find a blank tape and set up the mike on the wobbly chair. Without a word of greeting, she shuddered and began to sing. A litany of almost unintelligible laments emanated from her lips, chanted in a deep unvarying monotone. I had managed to press the recording button but was concerned. Why was she so terrified? Perhaps she had been coerced into coming by a male relative. She was a professional and therefore, someone who lived by lamenting. Was she frightened of the consequences of lamenting without a deceased? This seemed the most plausible explanation: women believed that repercussions from lamenting without a deceased could cause illness or calamity. Moreover, women lamenting became sad and would weep and become emotionally distraught just because I wanted to record laments. As the observer of a phenomenon I could not feel deeply, I was emotionally detached from the event, but I was causing anguish to some women. I was forced to question the ethics of my own research and methodology. Some women received me in their houses gladly and appeared to welcome the chance to lament with resignation and even longing. Others feared the psychological transformation it required, and the induced state of sadness to follow. I resolved from that day onwards only to record someone who was willing to do so. And then one moonless night, Jamal (who was not inclined to close his shop before midnight) announced that he had arranged for us to

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meet some other lamenters in the town. Leading me down a dark and untrammelled path beyond the railway track, Jamal took a short few steps and then nipped abruptly into a dark, mud-plastered and corrugated iron lean-to. After the usual greetings, I could discern two young women sitting alone in the half-light of the candlelit room. Where were the old men who would normally sit on the bench outside and monitor comings and goings? From the absence of any man in this forlorn backstreet, the tawdry décor and the crumpled beds, I concluded that this was a house of ill-repute. This was a clandestine meeting and one in which our presence would remain undetected. I was directed to set up my microphone on a rickety wooden tabliyya. It seemed clear from the outset that this was a contract engagement. The women had been informed by someone that they should lament into a microphone and this they were ready to do. They sang in strained whispers, their voices quivering. They were clearly not proficient lamenters: they were too young. I had no eye contact with the women, nor they with me. The candle sputtered as they intoned what I recognised as laments but their voices were so inaudible I was scarcely able to discern a single word. I was expected to reward the women at the end for their trouble, which I did. These women needed money and I had engaged their services. Contemplating the event afterwards, and the silent murmurings of these lamenters, I wondered if they might have wished to evade any charges from neighbours that they had lamented ‘without a funeral’. I surmised that I had witnessed the ignominy endured by two poor women who practised lamentation and prostitution in order to live. In the public eye, the two professions were intrinsically linked. Those who could compose laments and command a funeral were highly regarded in the private world of women. The women who would perform the role of naddabat, on the other hand, the professional mourners who would rip their clothing in the funerary processions and pour dust on their hair, occupied the lowest rung on the social ladder of lamenters. They were the poorest of the poor, widows – perhaps orphans – in a society without a welfare system to enable them to live independently of their families, women without education and status and no skill in composing laments. The scourge of poverty had forced them to become either hired mourners, or prostitutes, or both. I next received a gift of lament transcripts from an anonymous collector via Jamal. This man had captured the lyrics of live lament in a notebook by eavesdropping on funerals and straining to catch the words of laments filtering in from the interiors of houses by standing at open windows. He had wanted to publish them himself but, as Jamal told me, on hearing of my project he had offered his handwritten texts to me, since he thought, ‘they would be assured of publication’. Many of these laments were similar to others recorded in the Luxor area and therefore, part of the conventional corpus. Up to that point,

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I had not been able to evaluate the impact of individual creativity on lament performance and composition since I had not been invited to any funerals. Women had told me that on the death of one’s beloved, particularly the husband – focal point of their existence and source of livelihood and prestige – women, and especially more creative women, would compose their own laments. This corpus of lament confirmed the existence of a core lament repertoire for Luxor. But did every village on the East and the West Bank claim to have its own laments? The anonymous recordings indicated that variation in the lament corpus was widespread. I needed to continue to explore the villages around Luxor to investigate. My quest took me to Nagada, the Coptic village on the West Bank opposite Qus, about twenty kilometres north of Luxor, to Qomula on the West Bank and to Armant, twenty kilometres south. However, I realised that the one place I had not plumbed for laments was Karnak, site of the huge temple complex. That day, Jamal was elsewhere, and Adam, now one-and-a-half years old, was with me. I decided it might be worth going there and just asking if someone knew laments and would be willing to record them.

The Laments of Karnak The streets were deserted when I arrived by hantour (horse-drawn carriage) so I asked a few shopkeepers and was directed to the house of the comda or mayor of Karnak. Knocking gingerly on the vast wooden door of this high walled, mudbrick house, I waited. I did not know the family but would brazenly introduce myself. When the young girls who peered out at us from the cavernous door saw a blonde child and a foreign woman, the latch was instantly raised. Adam and I were ushered into the courtyard and soon surrounded by a bevy of women. There were ten of them all together, the daughters, the mother and the young girls who might have been maids, no men, only a young boy. This elite family lived in a huge mudbrick mansion with a central courtyard, clearly the centre of family life. For the first time in Luxor, I saw how tall hulks of mud could be shaped into mammoth cupboards, with little holes punctured in the top to allow for ventilation and was quite amazed at the versatility of mud for furniture making. Adam was immediately the focus of attention and the young girls in their orange and yellow smocks snatched him up, bantering away and then plumping him down on the ground. We chatted and talked: Why was I in Luxor? Where did I live in Cairo? and so on, until I broached the subject of laments. The comda’s wife seemed a canny and intelligent woman though not formally educated. She smiled but resisted. Her husband had died but she would not speak of laments. She told me that she had felt laments welling up inside her at his death but that that moment had passed. It would

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9. In the interior of the comda’s house, Karnak

never be repeated. Instead, she proposed, the village nurse, Anisa, would lament for me. I asked if I could take some photographs and she agreed. Her eldest daughter, who had become used to a life within these high mudbrick walls, stared at the camera with a wistful gaze redolent of distant dreams. Then, led by the young son, I strode off to Anisa’s house. The young girls were not allowed to leave the sanctuary of the house to accompany me. Anisa did not smile when she saw me and heard my request. She was a poor widow and I could see that she was compelled to serve others. I was embarrassed. This was not what I had intended or hoped for but it was difficult for her to ignore the request of the comda’s wife’s. However, as the word was circulated, other women came out of their houses of their own volition and gathered on the open ground to the left of Anisa’s modest dwelling, forming a semi-circle. Stretching their legs out and curling them round, they crouched forward and began to bind and rebind their faces and heads with their veils, as if to obscure their vision and obliterate their sense of time and place. I managed to set up the microphone stand on the uneven, khakicoloured dust. While I was doing this, I watched as the women began to rock back and forth, chatting quietly and impatiently twisting their scarves, bracing themselves to converse with the dead. As Anisa started to lament in her husky, gravelly monotone, I could feel a sense of expectancy move through the crowd. Squatting on the ground, she, too, began to sway to the slow pulse of the laments. She would utter the first syllable of a phrase and immediately her companions would pick up the thread and join in the lugubrious chant, sometimes varying the

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tempo or singing a slight variant on the musical phrase. It seemed an almost a trance-inducing process. I strained to catch the words but was unable to differentiate them from the flow of incoherent sound. At the cadences, the women, her respondents would suck in their breath, cluck softly and then wipe away the tears streaming down their cheeks. Some were moved to weep, others to contemplation of an inward sorrow and as the laments became more vigorous and the timbre of their voices swelled, the women became more and more engrossed in the performance, retreating more and more into the dark sanctuary of their veils. These women formed a body of practitioners who would sing laments at Karnak funerals. On that afternoon, they had participated in an expression of collective sorrow. It seemed clear: women trained in the art of lament could sing and become emotionally engaged in the performance of lamentation without a funeral. The very ritual of lament could induce women to weep. Was this an expression of the collective sorrow felt by women and accrued over a lifetime of pain? Or a behavioural skill acquired through the act of performance?

The Laments of Balabil in al-cAiyaiyša Few foreigners had done research along the East Bank of the Nile, where some ‘villages’ comprised sprawling settlements of up to 40,000 people, due to the complications of access. But one day, I had the good fortune to be invited to one such village, al-cAiyaiyša, on the East Bank near Luxor, not far from the mediaeval town of Qus or the temple of Hathor at Dendera. A geographer working on a schistosomiasis research project there took me with him and I was introduced to the local intelligentsia. As a foreign woman accompanying a team of male experts, at the beginning I was merely a curiosity. Strolling through the village with the English teacher, the group’s translator, I was able to engage in snippets of conversation with the various women who peered out at us as we plied the lanes. However, their reaction to my quest for laments was polite but negative. I could not record laments in their village. We spent the day drifting through the dusty streets. And then, after wandering around the town in an entourage of scientists, I was introduced to two important local characters, the school teachers, Mahmud and Zakariyya. Finally, as a gesture of hospitality, some women agreed to sit together on the ground, off the main square, and ‘speak’ the words of lament aloud for me to write down. Separating the sounds from the performance of lament would not be sacrilege. As each woman proffered a lament, Mahmud (who had volunteered to help me) would scribble down the rhyming verses in a notebook. I prayed that these frail flakes of paper would not be lost or vanish from my pockets before I could decipher the words and attempt to understand them.

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10. High walls in the village of al-cAiyaiyša

These verses, like the other laments, took the standard form of rhyming couplets. They included powerful images and were totally different from any laments I had recorded to date. One lament for ‘the mother’, for example, depicted a woman bearing a woven basket on her head, a familiar scene in an Upper Egyptian village: You who wield the woven basket on your crown You are the moon who illuminated your house and its residents

I tried to imagine some linkage between the image of the woman wielding a basket on her head and the full moon, and was suddenly struck by its resemblance to the image of the lambent moon nestled between the horns of the cow in depictions of the goddesses Hathor and Isis. The image may only been intended to describe her beauty and radiance (the phrase, ‘like the moon’ being a usual compliment paid to any beautiful woman) but when I asked what was meant in this context, I got no satisfactory answers. A few weeks later, I plucked up enough courage to venture out to the same village with Adam, still a babe-in-arms, but no male consort. Not many years before, in the Nasserite and post-Nasserite period, Egyptians had been interrogated after encounters with a foreigner. I hoped that this would not happen to anyone I met but assumed that since the foreign team had been working there, the inhabitants of al-cAiyaiyša were accustomed to foreign faces.

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The village stretched between the canal and the open Nile, but life was lived behind high mudbrick walls of which nothing could be seen from the lanes. I wanted to find Zakariyya, one of the teachers who had understood my quest and was determined to help me with the laments. Fortunately, he was there and he suggested that we walk over to a friend’s house. The men were ensconced in the dark cool depths of the house just inside the door. While he lingered with the men, I stayed back by the light and was greeted at the front door by a woman whose face was smeared with mud. I was mesmerised. It had dried on her dark countenance in pale blotches like a grotesque spirit mask. Unperturbed, she gazed fixedly ahead, as if she were not daubed in this bizarre maquillage, and grasped my hand in greeting. I realised only later that she had probably come from a funeral. A few minutes later, after quaffing down a cup of very strong sweet tea, we left and with a firm and confident step, Zakariyya strode off ahead of me, leading me around the perimeter of the village between high fields of lush golden wheat, until we broached the high impermeable walls of the small and isolated Coptic quarter. I noticed that the low, roughly hewn doors of the houses were daubed with blue crosses. I had a bizarre feeling that I had seen these doors in the film, The Ten Commandments. Had that scene been filmed here? A wizened, nearly blind woman in black squatted on the ground in the dust just in front of me, spinning wool with her distaff. She looked up at me when Zakariyya greeted her, her eyes glazed by cataracts. Nearby, the silhouette of a man pitted in the recesses of a dark, mud-walled room, hurtled his spindle backwards and forward in the dim light, her cousin, the village weaver. ‘Balabil, ya halti, kifik?’ (How are you, my auntie, Balabil?) Her name meant ‘Nightingales’. This woman was a lively and irreverent wit, not the lugubrious practitioner of the art of lament I was expecting. In no time, she had made him laugh and begun to tease me mercilessly. He asked her if she would allow me to record some laments and after more banter she agreed. She would accompany us to his guesthouse, the mandara. It was empty, and so a perfect recording lair. The conversation between them was animated though I could not catch the drift of their casual banter. Zakariyya told me later that he had managed to convince her to perform on the grounds that ‘I was one of hers’, that is, a fellow Christian. Mahmud, his colleague, soon joined us. As a professional lamenter, Balabil would lament, as she would conventionally, with her ‘respondent’, c Aliya. This woman was briskly summoned and together they squatted down on the mud floor, claiming that this was where they felt most comfortable. I perched myself on the wooden dikka to be able to monitor the recording needle and at the same time, cuddle my young son.

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11. Portrait of the lamenter, Balabil

The two women conversed for a while then became silent. And suddenly it started. In one convulsive breath, they began: O succulent stalk of sugarcane, may the name of God be upon you, succulent stalk of sugarcane Oozing with sap and the pride of the gardener

Adam reacted to the discordant and disconcerting sounds with an instinctive scream. I tried to comfort him. Pure, the handkerchief of the elegant youth is pure silk Place it inside and let it not be taken from him Pure silk, the handkerchief of the elegant youth is pure silk Place it inside and let it not be taken from him

Balabil had adopted the posture of lament, swaying back and forth, clutching at her handkerchief while singing in a quavering, plangent voice. The men, meanwhile, were silent observers, feeling, as they told me afterwards, privileged for the first time to be able to listen to funerary lamentation as, like all men, they were not permitted to enter the women’s funerary tent. They listened carefully to discern the words as Balabil and c Aliya wove their contrapuntal laments, the interface of two voices creating a sense of both unison and discord. Balabil then began to develop a long narrative thread, seemingly to describe the search for the young man’s departed soul: I peered over my wall and I was accosted by the cry, I peered over my wall Do not wander lost, my brother, come to my house Why I peered over my roof and was accosted by the cry, I peered over my roof

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Do not wander lost, my brother, come home to my house

The resonance created by the two slightly divergent and overlapping lament voices was mesmerising. cAliya would wait for her to begin a lament and then ‘reply’ to her, sometimes diverging from the main melody and dropping to a deep bass note at the cadence: Neighbour, peer over, you with one maternal uncle, neighbour, peer over How my brother’s turban has given light to my roof Neighbour, look over, you with only one maternal uncle, neighbour, look over How my brother’s turban has illuminated my courtyard O my sister! See what the men have become – See their great stature! Like camels who shrugged off their riding saddles Never did they make known how they suffered in fatherhood Their great stature! See the men, how they’ve been levelled to the ground Like camels who shrugged off their riding saddles Never did they make known how they suffered in fatherhood

After a short while, Zakariyya got up and sealed the crude wooden shutters in a deliberate effort to block the offending sound from escaping. The lamenters continued: How they raised up the cry! shrieks of weeping by night, for the men, they raised up the shrieks of weeping by night I was invaded by grief and riders on horseback The cry went up! shrieks of weeping by day, for the men, shrieks of weeping They invaded me on stony ground on the backs of camels

In a single verse, Balabil was able to encapsulate three images, the sound of weeping accosting the listener, the feeling of being invaded by anguish and the fact of the men traversing the stony ground en route to the tombs by camelback. Truly, for the great man, let my eyes weep He was so young, weep for him, the ailing one Why, speak out, you women and wish him twice blessing…

Balabil ended this cycle of laments with a cadential line, Do not wander lost, my brother…

…the very lament she began with. But then changing tack, she launches what seems to be a vitriolic attack against the dead person: Truly, you have no right to leave, young man, truly you have no right to leave

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Nor have you the right to tears or lament Truly, you have no right to depart, young man, you have no right to depart Nor do you have the right to tears or lamentation…

She berates him for stealing away her widow’s nights of loneliness… Son of my mother, how did it happen to him, my brother, son of my mother, what curse has struck him? You have deprived me of my nights of loneliness Son of my father, how did it happen to him, my brother, son of my father? You have deprived me of my nights in the West, my brother

Fusing her voice to his, she then imagines that she becomes him: Sheets to sleep in, bring me sheets to sleep in I shall wrap myself safe from the excretions of existence Sheets for the bed, why he said, Bring me sheets for the bed I shall wrap myself safe from the worms and deadly vipers

Women without men are powerless and Balabil notes that ‘half the town’, men of his clan, have now gone: O girl without men, O (my) people Half the town would sit in company with us Without men we have been, do not doubt me, without men we have been Half the men in the town wore our turbans Why, the men were so young And death has not spared one...

This next lament appears to be spontaneously improvised as it erupts, seemingly impromptu: I stopped with my water pots, the cry went up and I stopped with my water pots The voice of the great man in the West in my nights I stopped with my water pot, the cry went up and I stopped with my water pot: The voice of the great man in the mosque lingers outside Why I filled for him the earthen pot, he said to me, ‘Wash for me’ and I filled the earthenware pot The man who was to be washed, what has happened? He has ascended and not returned…

Balabil was a Coptic Christian. However, Zakariyya told me that she was invited to perform lament at Muslim funerals as well. I wondered

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how the laments varied one from the other, if at all. In her next lament, the man speaks: My clothes are clean but wash my neck scarf for me…

But then she pauses... In the ‘sea’ and his neck scarf has slipped off Enamoured of the world, he suddenly vanished from it His neck scarf has fallen off, he went up facing East and his neck scarf has fallen off Enamoured of the world, he has suddenly been made to suffer In the ‘sea’, throw it in, his scarf. Throw it into the ‘sea’ Leave the fish to nibble at its fringes…

Balabil reveals a remarkable ability to conjure up and elaborate an entire scene through lament. Moreover, as she laments, she introduces more and more new themes: The hide of a camel, for the sake of the men, I shall garb myself in the hide of a camel The wearing of brilliants does not honour the men The hide of a donkey, for the sake of the men, I shall garb myself in the hide of a donkey The wearing of brilliants does not honour great men Reluctantly, I shall go to the cattar but reluctantly, I shall not buy brilliants and will mourn for the world…

Balabil will wrap her body in camel and donkey skin in mourning and renounce the wearing of brilliants for the sake of the dear departed. She then asks the person to come back: Rise up on your couches, my beloved, rise up on your couches : I am in pain and long to complain to you of it May your shadow rise up amongst us, my beloved, may your shadow rise up amongst us : I am in pain and long to tell you of it… Why your gown has been cut, truly my beloved, your gown has been cut : Protect the nape of my neck from the gossip of others

When one’s gown is ‘cut’, Egyptians say, one’s die is cast. Then, changing tack, Balabil sings a lament for the mother conceived of as a reed pipe, a young mare and one still garbed in her gold earrings: O beautiful mother, the most beautiful of her year The reed pipe the elegant man would lift and fondle

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O beautiful mother, the most beautiful of her season The reed pipe the elegant one would caress A young woman on the couch is lunching, The young mare, anchored in the fenugreek A young woman on the couch is reclining The young mare, anchored in the clover Why do you toss and turn? What’s wrong, young one, why do you toss and turn? Could the mattress and couch not hold you? The young girl’s earrings have been fashioned for her in the pillared sanctuary Why not add more gold? Her dress is beautiful The young girl’s earrings have been beaten out in the sanctuary Why not add more gold? Her dress is lovely…

Balabil then laments fate and the machinations of fate, personified as the Eye, against which, she suggests, there is no recourse: By her side, I left the road and walked by her side What could I do against the Eye and her fate? In coarse sand, I left the road and walked in coarse sand What could I do against fate and what is written? On stony ground, I left the road in great distress What could I do against the Eye and what is written? I protested, my beloved, about what has happened, I protested, my beloved They unfolded the paper and said, The rest of life is yours… The Achilles tendon came to me, when they doled out the lots, the Achilles tendon came to me When I protested, they said, On paper it is written I protested, dear beloved, about has happened, I protested, my beloved They unfolded the paper and said, The balance of life shall be mine There was a throng of them with me, my dear ones, there were so many with me Seized by a gust of breeze, that day they vanished A throng of them, my dear ones, there was a throng Seized by a gust of breeze, that day they left…

And then, as instructed by Zakariyya and Mahmud, this lament for a woman murdered:

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By the tap, the mother of the young child lies by the water tap Murdered, young one, for no sins of your own My beloved, since the day you disappeared, my beloved Sleep has not graced our beds The ones who loved me, since the day you disappeared, the ones who loved me Sleep has not graced our couches That high star, there is my witness, that high star there If it were but a dream in the night, may it come to me The two white stars are my witness, those two white stars If this were but a dream in the night, I would that no grief could come to me While I lie in bed, I count star upon star I fear from the reaper of miracles … and from calamity Stars, while I lie in bed, I count star upon star I fear from the reaper of grapes … and from calamities

The ‘angel of death’ is the cruel reaper… It moved Eastwards, the hamlet where the beloved lived was here but has moved Eastward I shall walk behind you and unsheathe my sword Wiped out by his dogs, the hamlet where the beloved lived was wiped out by his dogs Who will show me the path to his door?

She walks in the funerary procession with a sword of iron. The perpetrator of this catastrophe is likened to a wild dog or a taloned animal who has wreaked havoc, causing the dead person to move to a new ‘hamlet’ to the East. Is this the direction imagined as the place of resurrection after death? By this point, the lamentation has risen to an overwhelming pitch. Raucous children and curious onlookers crush in on us and Zakariyya becomes concerned and embarrassed. He suggests that we move to the hema of the Copts where we would be ‘free from detection’, and so we do. After winding our way through the back lanes, we arrive at an open mudbrick anteroom propped up by two pillars. This is the place of worship for Copts in the village: there is no church, and a priest comes from another village only to administer rites of marriage and death. In the solitude of the hema, Zakariyya presses Balabil to sing more laments, but, increasingly anxious that she might not be paid for her endeavours, Balabil begins to press for immediate gratification. Zakariyya stands firm: he will not pay until she has ‘filled an entire tape with lament’.

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12. Portrait of my colleague, Zakariyya

Although he claims everything has been agreed before we started, she is still worried. The session eventually disintegrates into bedlam and we are forced to abandon any further recording. The two teachers then declare themselves the only legitimate transcribers of these tapes. Mahmud says that an independent village like al-cAiyaiyša in Upper Egypt has its own peculiarities of dialect and, since these laments have been sung in this village, the two of them request that I come here and sit with them, listen to the tapes, stop, start, rewind and, of course, query the meaning of every word I do not understand as they painstakingly transcribe the tapes. They do not speak English: the entire interpretation process will be conducted in Arabic. I agree and the following week, the sessions begin. Only much later do I find out that Zakariya had told Balabil that I wanted to record lament in order to mourn the death of ‘my mythical brother’. They knew that there could be no laments without a deceased and so they had concocted one. I had many encounters with Balabil in the following weeks. Her laments were amongst the most powerful and most lyrical I ever recorded. And in the interests of recording the lament repertoire of this village for posterity, Zakariyya suggested a new and clever research tactic: he would request each of his primary school students to elicit cidid from their mothers and write them down for ‘homework’. This he did, and as with the selfrecorded tapes, the students were able to provide us with even more texts and variants of this prolific but clandestine poetry composed by women and known locally as cidid. The project was gaining momentum. After this venture outside the bounds of Luxor, I decided that it was important to determine the extent of the Luxor repertoire. Did the laments sung vary greatly between areas of Upper Egypt or was there a relatively consistent repertoire?

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The epic poet, cAwad’ullah cAbd al-Jalil, lived near Edfu, almost one hundred kilometres south of Luxor. He was a friend, and so one day in an effort to address this quandary, I went off with Jamal by Peugeot taxi to visit him.

The Laments of Nafisa The barrel-vaulted domes of the houses in the village of al-Hajis al-Bahri were set deep into the caverns of rock beyond the pale of civilisation, the railway line. On that blazing hot day, we found ourselves alone. The men looked stern and stood in a huddle. Finally, they agreed that an emissary should be sent to the group of women sitting in the interior of the mudbrick house opposite to ask them if they would be willing to oblige. The message came back. The women would agree to record laments but on condition that the laments be spoken, not sung. I would be sent off into the dark and vaulted interior alone, while Jamal would drink tea with the men. The darkness and cool of the house under its barrel-vaulted domes was a shock. I was blinded for a few moments on entering and it was almost impossible to discern the faces of the women until a few moments had passed and I had become accustomed to the half light. The women of the household greeted me with unusual reserve. There was no small talk. I began to feel guilty: I might once again have asked these women to recite poetry that would induce sorrow and distress. Nafisa, mistress of the house, a strong and powerful young woman clad in a gaudy orange dress, invited me to sit down. I set up my microphone and then almost immediately she started to intone the laments in a straightforward voice but with the pulse and rhythm of a disciplined recitative. As she repeated the rhyming couplets in the murky light, her voice almost entirely devoid of emotion, the group of women who had gathered behind her at the distant doorway gradually became visible. Not wishing to interrupt, they chimed in only occasionally with additional variants on a theme, equally sombre in their task and obviously committed to a formal and unemotional performance. Having translated many of the tapes already by this time, I could understand the words of Nafisa’s lament but almost all of the verses were unknown to me. This was a different repertoire. One lament invites the dead person to a ritual bath on the banks of the Nile: On the riverbank, they rigged up the bath on the river bank There is a loofah and soap, come and be scrubbed

Another conjures up the sad image of a woman sprawled out on a bier, her beautiful hair fanning out behind her like a bird’s plumage or a shawl’s fringe:

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13. The landscape of al-Hajis al-Bahri

In front of me, she unplaited her hair for she is standing in front of me Hair like soft plumage or my shawl’s fringe dangling…

Several laments address the soul as if he or she were still conscious of heat and sensation and could hear the lamenter. This lament, for example, speaks to ‘the mother’ in ‘her house’ of desert sand: In the peak of the heat, I came asking for you at your house in the peak of the heat But I found for your house only sand and pebbles In the heat of noon, I came asking for you at your house in the heat of noon But I found for your house a heap of soft pebbles

And as Nafisa continues to incant this litany of couplets, her voice becomes a gravelly whisper and I begin to feel an unwilling witness to performance. The images are haunting: In the lantern, her son sees a vision in the lantern’s flame My mother – a caravanserai from the inns of Qus In the candle, her son sees her vision in the candle flame My mother – a caravanserai from the inns of Esna

These laments invoke images of the living as well as the dead. The mother has created a haven for the son like the mediaeval khans or caravanserais of the market towns of Qus and Esna, in which he can find respite. These place names, unchanged from their roots in the ancient Egyptian language, seem to create a pivot or anchor, in the form of end-rhymes, around which the rhythm and fabric of the laments are composed.

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There is a brief pause for contemplation and shuffling of legs on the dikka. No-one speaks but the atmosphere seems heavy with memories of those lamented and funerals past. Nafisa who leads the group is unflinching and continues to stare straight ahead, almost in a trance. After a brief moment of respite, she slowly begins to incant more laments into the microphone. These are for the person who dies from scorpion sting: The scorpion, weep for the one who has been ‘eaten’ by the scorpion He demands water but cannot drink The worm, weep for the one who has been eaten by the worm He demands water but his throat is choked The wooden mould, mother, strike the scorpion with this wooden mould : It pierced me in one fleeting stroke With a brick, mother, strike the scorpion with this brick : It accosted me with one fatal blow

These allusions are to a bricklayer and a brickmaker. Memories of a man in Qomiyya’s house flash through my mind, the only time I had seen someone who had been stung by a scorpion. This man did survive despite taking an overly strong dose of opium that induced an almost fatal heart attack. Here, in the ochre-coloured desert sand near Aswan, where there are few trees, and the high mud houses stand in the lee of impenetrable rock, the peril of death from scorpion sting must be much greater than in Luxor. These laments relive the moment of piercing that induced the pain and create the sense of imminent tragedy. Nafisa then pleads for the return of ‘the mother’ to the realm of the living, alluding to the mysteries of lament to me, the uninitiated: Inside, my beloved mother, rise up with us inside And I shall intone for you the secret, whatever it may be The larder, my beloved mother, rise up with us inside the larder And I shall intone for you the words, hidden and known

The laments were hidden words, like spells, empowered words... She follows me, I walked along and my mother follows behind me In fear that gusts of wind might envelop me in dust With the ‘plumage’ of the eye, my mother wraps me round, with the ‘plumage’ of the eye In fear of the words that strangers may utter The hair of her head, my beloved mother wraps me with the hair of her head In fear of the words that family might utter She guards my innocence, my beloved mother, and should I go outside, she guards my innocence

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In fear of the winds that might blind me

Even after death the mother remains a vigilant protector of her daughter’s virtue. Facing south, my beloved mother is a garden in a courtyard facing south I shall harvest the grapes and garner them in my lap Within me, my mother is a garden in the courtyard within me I shall harvest the grapes and garner them in my sleeves

The mother, alive or dead, plays a sentient role in the lamenter’s existence: she is still the garden and source of ‘grapes’, namely, fertility and bounty. Nafisa then changes tack and begins laments ‘for the death of a great man’. For a widow whose husband is gone, the future spells loneliness and material and spiritual deprivation: He left me and they took my sword And those who come after me will never know my craving Great man, when you are anxious for the grave, great man Take with you a bed with its side planks of lemon Darling child, when you are anxious for the grave, darling child Take with you a bed with its side planks of grape wood

She urges that his ‘bed’ of earth be lined with regenerative woods such as those from the lemon tree or the grapevine. Or perhaps she means a coffin? Coffins were only used in Coptic burials I was told. Nafisa then, like Tayha, resurrects the image of crossing the seas in death: Asleep, father of the children, let him not fall asleep Let him cross over the ‘seas’ and come to them swimming Drowsy, father of the children, let him not be drowsy Let him cross over the ‘seas’ and come to them swimming You have suffered, father of the children, your children remain But a flood has descended and swallowed them up

This time, she alludes to the ‘seas’ plural (buhur) so not the Nile. What is meant here? Was this flood she refers to caused by a surfeit of tears, or does she mean the inundation? Nafisa clearly moved, swiftly leaves the room. Interpreting this as my signal to leave, I pack up my tape recorder and emerge blinking from the dark cavern into the dazzling glare of the sun. Jamal is waiting there and we move away quickly, thanking everyone for their help. That day I had been privy to another extraordinary recitation of laments, this time min ger nagma – ‘without melody’. This research venture had opened up a new repertoire and a new understanding of laments: these

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14. Women of al-Hajis al-Bahri

were ‘secret words’ known only to women, empowered through melody when sung at funerals, disempowered when spoken. Jamal undertook to transcribe these tapes over a period of eight months. It was not an easy task, since in some instances the lexicon was obscure even to native speakers. Jamal would quiz his clientele for knowledge of the word (an experience which inspired him to begin compilation of his own dictionary of Sa cidi dialect) while I would search for the meaning of these words in mediaeval Arabic dictionaries. Some words could be traced to early Arabic sources whereas others were peculiar to the Sa cidi vernacular. Though previously published texts of cidid by Maspero (1914), Salih (1971) and Hifni (1983) were invaluable sources for the testing of transcription accuracy and contrastive analysis of content, the more complex process of interpreting the meaning of laments could only begin when the connotations of words had been narrowed down. After a year of reading and listening to the transcribed texts, I had become well acquainted with literal interpretations of the laments. Jamal had helped me understand the meaning of the words but there seemed to be much more to understand. I realised then that men could scrutinise and interpret the texts but never be composers of lament. They were not permitted to be present in women’s funerary tents and so could not know the basis on which laments were composed and performed. Women were the sole performers of lament and the only ones with access to that secret world. Men lacked insider knowledge. And so, at that point, I decided to go back to the West Bank of Luxor to live there near Hamida. I needed to interact with the women who performed the laments and learn what these women perceived the laments to mean. That was the challenge.

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3

Life in the Women’s Domain

I saw a diviner divining with a rod Not one soul said to me that from death one returns I met a diviner divining fate in the sand Not one soul said to me that from death I shall return



(Umm Salih)

I moved back to the Habu Hotel where I had lived before and became ensconced once again in the rural life of Kom Lolah on the West Bank of the Nile. Hamida’s house was one of the largest in the village. It boasted an impenetrable facade of mudbrick and with only two red shuttered windows on the top floor and a single wooden door, it looked like a fortress. Unlike many of the other houses in the village, Hamida’s had no rounded stone or fragment of pillar on its threshold. From the laments I had learnt that the threshold, al-cataba, was a liminal space. The ancient stone would lend a modicum of protection against unwanted spirits and interlopers. Hers was only a wooden frame.

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Hamida and her children lived there with her mother. When I first met her, she had only two children, cAtef and Zeinab. But after a considerable gap, suddenly there came Mohamed and then only nine months afterwards, the twins, Asma and Ayman, followed two years later by Mamduh. With the twins arriving unexpectedly, she was forced to feed three of them from her breast in sequence. Her husband lived in Cairo, working first as a sufragi (butler) for foreigners in the rich suburb of Macadi and then in the tea room for an oil company. Most men in Kom Lolah tended to migrate to Cairo if they could not find jobs either with the Antiquities Organization or in tourism. He would come home only for the feasts and otherwise send money for their upkeep every month. Hamida became my constant companion and wherever she went, I would accompany her. In her elegant jubba and her voluminous black veil piled high on her head, Hamida would place her hand on my shoulder to steady her gait and we would set off on the dusty paths by the sugarcane fields through the cluster of houses at al-cEzbah to visit friends living there, or walk up to the ancient village of al-Kom. Situated high on a mound, by the shrine of Sheikh Ahmad Abu Zacluk and the shade of the zisyphus tree, was the local cemetery where Hamida would come on feast days to pay respects to her dead ancestors. I had arrived in winter. The damp penetrating mist of the winter dawn was bitter so I clad myself in layer upon layer of Delta-style jallabiyyas. Though they were perceived by Hamida as fellahi (that is, in the style of peasant farmers) and therefore, outmoded, they concealed my body contours, as tradition dictated, and helped to keep me warm. While the women of Kom Lolah would shroud their austere black gowns and wrap their heads in tiers of black veils, I would drape black silk scarves fringed in gold brilliants loosely round my neck but did not cover my head or hair. Despite its proximity to the tourist havens, in those days the village of Kom Lolah was relatively isolated from outside influence. As Hamida would say, ‘The tourists are on our doorstep but we have no truck with them.’ Every morning, shivering in the morning sunlight, Zeinab, Hamida’s eldest girl, and a few of her neighbours’ children would graze their sheep and goats on the slope of the ruined temple mound. Crouching together, they would gossip and dream as they watched the sheep drift up and down the scrub. It was a time to see, and be seen, by prospective suitors, but also the time for some discreet foraging of their own. The ground was littered with potsherds and hope prevailed that beneath the heaped shards, an ancient bauble or scarab might emerge. I once was presented with a blue faience figure by Qomiyya, Hamida’s mother. It was small and pocked as if with age. Was it real? Many years earlier I had visited the local factory in the nearby hamlet of Gurna where blue clay beads and modern imitation shawabtis (funerary statuettes)were

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being made using moulds and techniques not dissimilar to the ancient. It was impossible to tell the outward form by the naked eye as the most recent shard was indistinguishable from a 2,000 year-old facsimile. Hamida’s mother had come originally from the enclave of squatted tombs at Qurnit Mar cei. She had designed and built their towering mansion of mud brick at Kom Lolah on the land her family had owned. Its modest blue door opened into a dark, cavernous entrance room with triangular pigeon niches carved high into the mud walls. There we would lounge, stretched on the hard wooden kanabas to the unceasing cooing of doves. Since the torrential rains, the sagifa, a ceiling of palm logs and reeds plastered with mud, had begun to peel and a major restoration would be required. The most beautiful part of the house, however, was the open courtyard at the end of this long room where a solitary but stately palm tree still stood, its roots squirming and swelling amidst the roosters’ constant foragings. Behind the tree was the wall and straight ahead, the animals’ domain, mudbrick rooms for the chickens and ducks, a place to tether the sheep and a few shady nooks for the geese under the lee of the palm. There was also a large grass-laden shelter for Hamida’s beloved jamusa or buffalo. To buy her first, a major investment, Hamida had had to sell her precious gold earrings. It was a simple choice: the female buffalo would reproduce and bear young, the children could drink fresh milk and eat fresh buffalo cheese, and in the succulent ghee, pigeons could be fried. Though earrings were a clear mark of wealth and dowry, for Hamida they were no longer needed. To the right of the courtyard was the clay oven where the caiš šamsi (the sun-leavened bread, literally ‘sun life’) would be baked every few days from their own wheat harvest. The quality of this bread with its qarun or ‘horned’ appendages was a source of pride to every woman and a symbol of their superior local produce. Cheap white American wheat flour had appeared on the market but was perceived as poor quality and therefore, unsuitable for the families’ principal staple, bread. On the oven itself, a round mudbrick structure with a mouth, a protruding piece of clay like a tiny lingam, had been integrated into the structure. When I asked what it was, she said drily, ‘We take after the Pharaohs’. She would take the end of the kneaded dough, wrap it into a coil, and place it inside: ‘For the oven,’ she explained. In its depiction on funerary scenes, it is clear that ancient Egyptian bread was rolled and pummelled into a variety of shapes, oval, triangular and round. One of the most prominent features was the splashing of yellow around the corners in carefully delineated half-crescents. Could these also have been called ‘horns’? Some Egyptologists had found that bread had actually been made in a cow’s image, so the analogy would fit. When Hamida made bread, she would take an acacia thorn and carve three carefully rounded incisions into the discs of dough before placing them in the sun to rise. I was intrigued to see that they replicated the

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16. Hamida pumping water

pattern of incisions on the offering bread sketched on tomb walls. She called these half-moon corners ‘horns’ and in the leavening, those little corners would expand into these distinctive horn-like protrusions on each loaf. Ancient Egyptian bread was usually marked with four symmetrical strokes on each loaf. Hamida decorated hers with only three. When I asked her why three, she said, ‘Only Christians make the bread in the shape of four horns like the Coptic cross. Everyone else makes it with three.’ But this shape was not unknown. One day, Zeinab made me a ta cwiza (or amulet) by wrapping two pieces of thin wood with blue thread into a shape not unlike a Coptic cross. She said it was for good luck. The nasrani (as the Coptic Christians were called) were embraced within the wider community but lived in their own enclave called cEzbet al-Qamamsa (literally ‘The Farmstead of the Deacons’), most likely the place the Coptic clergy had once lived. The women’s monastery of Deir al-Muharrib, ‘Convent of the Warrior Saint’, a vestige of the Coptic monastic settlement, marooned in the desert, also remained, still visible from Medinat Habu temple, site of the Coptic town of Djemé that grew up around it in the early Christian period. We walked to their hamlet one day across the searing hot sands. Hamida greeted the family sitting outside and we were invited to go inside. Two old crones, swathed in black, sat against a crude table. Like their Muslim counterparts, Coptic women also garbed themselves in black, perhaps in

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17. Wrapped mast pole of Abu cEla’

this case, widows’ weeds. We entered rather awkwardly but when they recognised Hamida, they smiled and welcomed us with quiet dignity. It was clear that they were even poorer than their counterparts in Kom Lolah and their faces bespoke a life of resignation and despair. We had a brief conversation and then perhaps sensing that we were intruding without cause, we left. The residents of Medinat Habu were not overtly religious. There was a small mosque where men met for prayers and a shrine to the local sheikh on the edge of the temple wall: no domed tomb; only a smoothly plastered floor, several clay pots filled with water, and a pole wrapped in cloth behind a low mudbrick wall. When I asked about this place, I was told that it was the shrine of Abu cEla’, a local sheikh or holy man. He would have his Great Night or lela once a year when local male devotees would perform the hadra, in Sufi tradition, the whirling into trance to achieve transcendence and the ecstatic feeling of oneness with God. For Hamida and her neighbours, Medinat Habu temple and the ruins of the Coptic town, a massive crown of mudbrick worn down by rain and erosion, formed their lawn and their boardwalk. Once Hamida had taken me to the temple of Medinat Habu as dusk was falling. ‘Dip in your hands and let the water wash between your thighs,’ she instructed me. I did as I was told, recoiling from the stench.

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Engravings of the hermaphrodite but pendulous-breasted God of the Nile stared out at us as we groped down the dark corridor. Many women had daubed themselves with these waters before me. The water issuing from under the ground was the most sacred. This was water that could induce fertility. I wondered if they had later been able to conceive. Below the now sloping mudbrick wall was al-half, the expanse of barren scrub and wild grasses encroached upon by ‘wolves’ (dib) in winter, the place of sleeping dogs, excrement, the skin of slaughtered animals and other detritus. In this settlement on the brink of the desert, there was no running water and no latrine. In keeping with cultural tradition, calls of nature were to be answered discreetly and invisibly, in the shadow of night. Children were deemed free of these constraints and toddled around diaperless in the courtyard, but women were compelled to abide by the dawn and dusk regimen regardless of circumstances. This situation did not endure once piped water supply was installed in Kom Lolah. When I came back to Luxor after one trip away, I found that Hamida had constructed an enormous brick room in the middle of her central courtyard. She said that it would be a toilet ‘for people like me’ and the girls of the family. Hamida wanted privacy for the three female members of the household, especially since her eldest daughter had reached puberty. The four boys, including the obstreperous Mohammed, would be banned from entering ‘female’ space. They would have to go outside. The brick room would also be the girls’ bathing room. Bathing was a weekly ritual and every Friday, one by one, the children would stand stark naked in the aluminium tišt to be scrubbed and soaped from head to toe in the open air. Since running water at my hotel was intermittent and almost always freezing, I would delight in taking baths in the winter sun by the palm tree like Hamida and the children. Water would be heated on al-kanun, the mudbrick hearth, the front door would be shut to the outside world and the children banished, and I would bathe gazing into the cloudless sky. It was astonishing how absolute privacy could be achieved in the sanctuary of Hamida’s house despite the lack of curtains or interior walls. In the 1980s, sleeping arrangements in Hamida’s house varied according to the season. Hamida and her six children would sleep upstairs on the second floor under the stars in summer but in winter would pile into a windowless snug. Sprawled out on the dikkas bought through a rotating credit scheme called al-jama ciyya arranged with her friends (the only way Hamida would have accrued enough money to buy them), the children would sleep ranged in a row from the smallest to the largest, fully clothed. Hamida would crawl in beside them, wrapping her face in black gauze to deter the flies, and submerge herself in a thick birda, a hand-loomed black and white striped blanket woven from the wool of her own sheep in the pit loom of the local Coptic weaver.

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18. Women collecting water, Kom Lolah

A woman would be called by the name of her first-born son and thus, Hamida was known as Umm cAtef or ‘Mother of cAtef ’. (cAtef was the name given in ancient Egypt to the crown of Upper Egypt, I realised much later.) cAtef was her son’s nickname: his real name was Ahmed. I was Umm Adam, ‘Mother of Adam’ and the irony of this name did not escape the residents of Kom Lolah. When I announced Adam’s name, for some it was as if the creation of mankind was revisited. ‘Adam was the first man!’ they would say triumphantly. In Arabic, the word for human being is bani adam or ‘son of Adam’ and we would be pelted by choruses of ‘izzayyik y’umm adam!’ ‘How are you, Umm Adam?’ as we walked down the street, and from women, ‘Well, now you have Adam, when will you have Hawa?’ (the Arabic name for Eve) or ‘Adma’, his feminine counterpart. We had gained fame through a name. But despite their friendliness, when my mission became known, most women were not enthusiastic about my decision to record and study the laments. One day, in fact, even Hamida asked me to clutch a collection of tiny pebbles, just as Tayha had done. Withdrawing them carefully from her bosom as if a cherished possession and tossing them casually in her hand, she proffered them to me. ‘We do this to know if the person is true and to be trusted,’ she revealed later. Death and the afterlife were not subjects to be toyed with and laments were regarded almost as taboo. I decided then that I would study other performance genres in order to be able to place the cidid in a comparative cultural and linguistic context. I also needed to illustrate to people that I was interested in all facets of the celebration of life and rites of passage, not only death. I resolved to record wedding and circumcision songs, madh (praise poetry performed for sheikhs and pilgrims to Mecca) and to film the

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dazzling pilgrimage paintings on the facades of houses, celebrating the return of the annual pilgrims to Mecca or hujaj. Adam was a wonderful child, willing to be paraded around the temples and tombs of Luxor in a pushchair, even in the searing heat of summer, but in order to be able to move around with a camera on the West Bank, I was compelled to engage a ‘pusher’, a strong and willing young lad from the village called Hassan who would propel Adam’s baby stroller along the battered pavements of Gurna’s houses, temples and tombs. I filmed young women in their tight-waisted velvet dresses, red on black, green on black, against the backdrop of gaily painted figures: aerobatic stick-dancers in yellow jallabiyyas, lions, brilliant suns with needle-like rays beaming down on the sacred Kacaba of Mecca, and many other scenes, sacred and profane. One painting was particularly mysterious to me: a camel bearing a litter. It remained a mystery until one day I witnessed an impromptu procession on the road near Gurna. Preceded by the sound of flutes, a camel with a litter draped in eggshell-blue satin and embroidered with Arabic calligraphy suddenly sauntered into view, led by musicians playing trumpet-like zummara, their cheeks bulging. People told me that this was a ‘nadr’, the present of a tomb cover in gratitude for a vow made to the sheikh of Gurna, Sheikh Tayyib. His intervention had helped a man to recover from illness. As the palanquin pitched forward, the throng of chanting men seemed to swell. It seemed that for every heavenly intervention mediated through the sheikh, the beneficiary was duty-bound to reciprocate and pay tribute to the intercessor. This canopied litter was the painting that appeared on house facades as tabut al-nabi (‘the tomb or ark of the Prophet’), an illustration of the canopy previously carried on camelback from Cairo to Mecca in the Middle Ages, the original mahmal al-nabi. Here on the West Bank, it had its own modern counterpart, the canopy for the sheikh. That year in Luxor I witnessed a series of fantastic events: the mulid and procession of the sacred boats of Sidi Abu’l Hajjaj, the patron sheikh of Luxor, whose domed shrine is perched above the Luxor temple complex. The original town of Luxor had once been enclosed within this precinct, then called the al-birba or ‘ruins’ by the locals (an old Coptic word) and included the temple, a Coptic monastery, four Coptic churches and an early Fatimid-style mosque: successive layers of sacred space, placed one upon the other. On the day of the great procession, when I was present to witness it by sheer accident, first came the shrines, draped in appliqué and borne on camelback, and then the succession of chaotic floats manned by the guilds including the plumbers’ cart and its transvestite ‘bride’ and her groom. Behind them surged the boats of the sheikh, festooned with red, white and green pennants and astride them, gaggles of children dressed in their brightest, most festive clothes. While the drummer on camelback cracked out a determined pulse on his kettledrum, the crowds rushed forward in

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a clamour to clutch the ropes pulling the boats, I later learnt that this was ‘for baraka’. It was a stunning display. Whilst living on the West Bank, I would sometimes take time off from field work to visit the Nobles’ tombs near Gurna, particularly those which depicted lamentation scenes in the most graphic and sensitive artistic detail, and on occasion, would relate aspects of my findings to Hamida. She had never seen them. Neither she nor her friends had ever been to any antiquities’ sites other than the temple of Medinat Habu, so one day, I asked her if she would like to come with me. She said that she would. We found a bewildered local taxi driver and made the grand tour, starting from the Tombs of the Nobles to the caverns and pyramidions of Deir al-Medina, just a short distance from her house. On such occasions, Hamida would regale herself in her heavy black jubba and mount her full head veil over her head and shoulders, her most formal gear, as if she were going to an important funeral. The tomb guards were bemused: Who was she and where was she going? These tombs of the ‘far cana’ (Pharaohs) were for tourists and she was evidently no tourist. To behave like a tourist for a local woman was unorthodox and fitted no known category. The male guards were sometimes unduly rude to their own people, women in particular. The answer to her request for entry was no. For Hamida to be told she could not enter a place within her own village precinct was not a novel experience. Still, she stood her ground. Women in the village would visit the temple of Medinat Habu at dusk but those were discreet visits. Women’s behaviour was expected to conform to certain norms. In the end, because I was there and brandished my ticket, she was allowed in with hers. Had I not been there, I suspect she might not have been permitted entry. In the gaudily painted Gurna tombs, resplendent with nubile dancers and musicians at the funerary feast, Hamida was astonished at what she could see, yet she could also feel deep empathy with the funerary scenes. To her, the sketches and paintings from five thousand years before were familiar and recognisable. The arc of the lamenter’s arms inclining towards heaven and the tear-daubed cheeks of the mourners were weighted with grief. When confronted by the scene of the funerary feast in the tomb of Nacht, the cone of perfumed wax melting on the head of a young girl struck a resonant chord. Hamida said that this custom had been observed when she was still a child: to place a cone of scented wax on her head would ‘make the bride smell sweeter’. I had been to the wedding of a Luxor girl on the subahiyya (‘the morning after’ celebration) to mark the festivities of the duhla or ‘entry’. For propriety’s sake, the hymen of the timorous bride would be conventionally broken by an elderly aunt. It was neither an act of passion nor of love. When the bride bled, her virginity would be authenticated and the marriage would then be said to have been consummated. The bride and groom would spend the night beside each other in the room

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19. Barque of the gods on its pedestal

and the following day, the two families would celebrate the morning-after feast. That day, I had seen the dazed and unemotional expression on the would-be bride’s face. She seemed numbed, almost shocked. Enthroned doll-like in a chair, her eyes glazed open like saucers, I passed her and stared. She did not flinch or blink but remained frozen, inanimate. I had seen the same muted, blank expression in Libya once. Surrounded by veiled crones who were in charge of orchestrating the pageant there, the bride, who was garbed in a midnight blue velvet kaftan, sat transfixed, seemingly in a trance. I wondered if she could speak. No one queried her silent mien. It was as if she had been allowed to sever all ties to the harsh world and reflect upon her dreams. Having seen one set of tombs, Hamida, her friend Nacama and I then set off to see more. The following week, we crossed the Nile and climbed on a hantour heading for Karnak. The two women stood agog at the peristyle hall and expanse of ruins. The sacred lake had filled with water and looked sacrosanct and tranquil and as we perused the pool, Hamida said, ‘Had I known this was here, I would have brought some bottles so I could bring home some of this sacred water.’ Water is usually brought home by pilgrims to Mecca from the well of Zimzim, but in Egypt, the power of ancient sites, especially water, is legendary. According to nineteenth-century legend, golden-prowed vessels were once seen sailing across this lake under the full moon. As one early Egyptologist suggested, these might have been phantom vessels, spiritual incarnations of the sacred barques of the gods Amun, Mut and Knonsu emerging in procession, a re-enactment of the fabled Opet feast.

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From the time of Queen Hatshepsut, the three boats of the gods would be regaled with canopies to conceal the ‘holy of holies’ and carried from Karnak along the Avenue of Sphinxes to Luxor temple for a royal ritual of renewal. From there, they would sail back on the waters of the inundation to Karnak. The contemporary procession of the barques of Sidi Abu’l Hajjaj, known as the dora or ‘going round’, exhibits many of the same features as the ancient but has been transformed into a ritual circuit of the Luxor temple precinct only. The antiquities surrounded the village and people of Medinat Habu but were not part of their domestic landscape. The women of Kom Lolah were cultivators and animal breeders, and obligations to crops, animals and food production consumed their daily life. As part of my quest to understand the laments and the images they invoked, I would accompany Hamida everywhere. She owned several plots of land in three different areas of the village. In one, she would plant wheat or onions and garlic for the household; in another, seasonal vegetables like aubergines and in a third, the field known as al-Zugariyya, she would grow barsim for animal fodder. Once the heat had subsided after lunch, we would go off to the clover fields or as she called it, ilhašiš (the ‘grasses’). Hamida would walk in a majestic stride, bolt upright from years of carrying bales of grass on her head and as she walked, she would recount stories and anecdotes about people in the village. Once, for example, it was rumoured that a local man found an earthenware pot in the dead of night. It contained ancient gold coins. Others less fortunate had pursued their relentless digging at the desert’s edge year upon year, inspired by such a dream and the prospect of reversing a life of hardship in one fell stroke. Some near neighbours found an ancient sculpture, it was whispered. The poor lived and died in the forlorn hope of finding such a treasure trove but only a few were that lucky. I would be left to sit languidly by the dirbaz, a thin strip of solid ground between the irrigated basins, while Hamida and her friend would hunch over the fields with their scythes, slashing at the roots and gossiping intently. On the few occasions I tried to assist, Hamida would chide me: I had not cut deeply enough into the stalk – barsim is a regenerative crop and I might have imperilled its regrowth by cutting too high up the stem. Inevitably, encounters with farmers cutting their own clover would turn into hilarious verbal duels. The young men would hurl loud sardonic comments at us across the green expanse, even wild proposals of marriage, and I often bore the brunt of these jokes as the foreigner, the lone woman. Luxor had acquired an international notoriety for the predilection of village men to marry middle-aged foreign women, and this might have egged them on. One young Luxor man once showed me an entire sheaf of letters he had been sent by young foreign women after they had returned from holiday. They were almost all love letters.

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Without eyeing the men, Hamida would pepper her retorts with sarcasm and a prayer against life’s vicissitudes. Then squatting on their haunches, scythe in hand, she and Nacama, if she had accompanied her, would cut the barsim until a large rectangular patch had been shaved to the bare roots. My only useful function was to help Hamida brandish the roll of heavy grasses and mount it on her head. She would then march stalwartly home, her friend Nacama by her side, clasping the towering bundle from above with her hand. As she rounded the corner and the tantalising scent of fresh clover wafted ever nearer, the animals closeted inside would whinny and baa until the door burst open and Hamida could toss the succulent fodder at their feet. When the irrigation gates were opened and water started to pump down the canals, then she had another onerous task: to stand in the fields, guiding the water’s flow, opening and closing the narrow bunds of earth with her toes while a neighbour managed the pump operation. Hamida’s life was an endless succession of tasks, and already her children had been assigned responsibilities for food preparation and animal tending. But the leisure times she would enjoy most were our after-lunch visitations. Reciprocal exchange formed the basis for social harmony and good relations with neighbours and kin, and so every time we went to call on friends, we would take something with us: rich biscuits, a bag of sugar for a recently widowed friend, or a pair of pigeons for a family which had just celebrated the circumcision of a son. Once, at a wedding, amidst the clamour and festivities, I noticed that gifts for the bride and groom were being recorded by name and sum by a scribe who was seated at the door with a large book. Hamida told me that when time came for a return contribution, the gift could then be matched without controversy or rancour. Still I was an alien in this women’s milieu. I lacked any of the skills that would have made me esteemed as a woman in rural society. I had no detailed understanding of how to bake aiš šamsi; I could not slaughter pigeons correctly and stuff them with green rice; I had no knowledge of how to monitor irrigation, nor did I know how to maintain livestock. I was a social anomaly. In the afternoons after lunch sometimes, the neighbourhood women would trickle in: ‘kay gayla, kayy a cmal ’ (literally, ‘What are you saying?’ ‘How are you doing?’), and sometimes to Hamida, the more sombre, ‘ya rubb yistihalak ilhal’, ‘May God ease your burden, my sister’, and the front door would be pressed shut. It was time for the joza. The twigs to make charcoal, and honey-soaked tobacco would appear, and secreted from prying eyes, the makeshift water pipe would be passed in concentrated silence from woman to woman. Squatting on the ground, backs propped against the wall and puffing intently on their hubblybubblys, the women would interrogate me mercilessly: ‘Why was I here?’ ‘Where was my husband?’ ‘Where did I live?’ I would attempt to answer as best I could, but to them I was an enigma. My refusal to smoke the

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pipe was attacked as antisocial but I somehow managed to fend off their accusations. There was a price to pay for becoming accepted within the women’s world. I could no longer enter the public sphere alone. Luxor town was a male domain and to go there independently would not be acceptable while in Hamida’s charge. Up to that point, I had maintained a dual personality, straddling the boundaries of village and town, male and female, but now that Hamida had begun to assume the role of surrogate mother, it seemed as though I was to be accounted for at all times. If I went to the hotel, it was to sleep or change my clothes. I was expected to return to the household before going elsewhere. We had bonded together. If I wanted to go to Luxor, Hamida would accompany me. cAdila! ‘May you cross safely to the other side!’ her neighbours would call out as we strode across the sand to take the shared taxi and ferry. En route to Luxor, we would always walk by Medinat Habu, striving to avoid the scavenging dogs that seemed to guard the byways to the mosque and the fields. Qomiyya in her laments had conjured up images of fine white sand, swirling up to envelop the grave. Kom Lolah was on the edge of the desert and those vicious black curs that seemed to live on a diet of dust would lounge in the lee of the temple, almost invisible by day and yet assume the ferocity of rabid dogs by night. No one would touch them or approach them. As the jackal-headed god Anubis was for the dead, they were the protectors of the temple and a feature of the landscape, like the mudbrick houses and the tall dense sugarcane fields. Once, when I was there, a woman escaped and took refuge in the sugarcane from her husband and family. It was a sanctuary for women who had no other place. She was able to survive unseen for several days before they caught her and forced her back. Hamida was a particularly strong woman, determined and capable. On discovering that her husband had secretly married a Cairo woman, Hamida asked her family and his brothers to convene a family tribunal: she wanted to request their permission to divorce. But despite her protestations and the humiliation she would have to bear as the former of two wives, she soon realised that she was locked into a marriage between cousins that could never be dissolved. They refused her as she saw it, ‘the dignity of divorce’, something which, in her eyes, was a basic human right that she had been denied. Mansour, her husband, was a sincere man and like many other men from the West Bank, had gone off to Cairo, leaving her to manage the house and till the land. He would send her a packet of money every month, a resource without which she could not survive. Ironically, his annual visits would often culminate in Hamida becoming pregnant. Their last two children, girls, born in successive years, were now scrambling about the mud floors. After an eight-year gap, Hamida had produced five children in seven years, a huge financial and social burden to be managed by her alone.

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In the village, Hamida was surrounded on all sides by her cousins. One of them, the elderly Yamna, lived with her husband by the small stone temple of al-cajouz, ‘the old man’, just around the corner. Not heralded as a tourist site, this ancient structure had become absorbed into the seamless facade of the village landscape and was invisible and unmarked. The first day we went to pay a call, a camel was pawing the ground outside the entrance to Yamna’s unassuming mudbrick enclosure, perhaps their own. Her husband was a farmer but also a clever raconteur. They had no children and had had to suffer the poverty and loneliness that childlessness in Upper Egyptian society brings. When, some years later, I was making a film about how women would protect their food against rats, including scenes with Hamida making bread, I filmed an interview with al-Sudani, Yamna’s husband. He had laughing eyes and a winning grin. He told the simple tale of how he had sold a calf and wrapped the money up in a handkerchief. Wanting to secrete the money from his wife, he plunged the roll deep into his mudbrick hideaway. But when he went to extract his cache, he found that his money had been eaten by rats. On screen, he mimes this story, how he unrolled his handkerchief and then cursed the rats, saying, ‘Why don’t you go and eat the rich man’s money and leave mine alone!’ When Cairo TV acquired the film, this scene was cut because of an offensive fly hovering near his face. To me, his commentary encapsulated the view of local people struggling just to survive on few resources. However, to my dismay, the marvel of his wry and comic tale had been expunged by the time of broadcast. He died a few years later at a ripe old age and was much mourned. Hamida told me that she would sometimes sing laments to herself while baking bread or sifting the grain. She spoke one for me: In the crook of the door, they told her to remain in the crook of the door So they could send her nourishment and a couple of dresses…

Interpreting the words of the laments on the first hearing was still difficult however, and I had to ask her to unravel the meaning. This was a lament for the surviving spirit in the tomb or perhaps the house for the first three days after death. During that time, this soul might linger in liminal space, by the threshold. Food and clothing would be dispatched to her in the tomb, so that she would want for nothing. I asked her about al-rub caiyya (which meant, literally, ‘the fortieth one’) and the meaning of Nafisa’s lament: Costly, and of little fortune, O sacrificial sheep They have fettered your bonds and I can see you with my eye Costly and of little fortune, O sheep of suffering They have fettered your bonds and I can see you with my eye

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She told me that this new-born lamb would be nurtured for forty days after the death and then killed for the fortieth day feast, the pivotal day on which, it was believed, the soul would leave this world and descend into the ground. Another lament echoed this: I was going to say I would bring guests to your side The bridal gifts are with me and your luncheon of rub caiyya

This lament was for the ‘bride’, the young woman who dies before consummation of marriage. As my teacher and guide, Hamida knew what to explain and sensed what I wanted to know very quickly. But she did not like me to write things down in front of her. It was an affront. Like ninety per cent of rural women in Upper Egypt at that time, she was not literate and had never had the opportunity to go to school. Clearly intelligent, she was embarrassed to be seen as ‘ignorant’, unlettered, in front of me, her ‘student’. Though I gave Hamida some brief classes in literacy, she was not able to concentrate fully on the act of writing with pen and paper. Her children were to become the first literate generation in her family. I was forced, therefore, to hone my own memory skills, as I presumed she had done throughout her life. I had to retain every new observation, new word or revelation in my mind until returning to the room at night. To do this, I would number them mentally in sequence and in the evening, would try to write them down. In the meantime, my alignment with Hamida was interpreted by other village women as a slight to them, and as a result, my casual relations with some of them had become slightly strained. One of them was the mother of Hassan, a shrewd and forthright woman whose husband had been one of the fortunate few to find work with the Antiquities Organization in the distant Dakhla oasis. Berating me for my neglect, she entertained me one day over tea and we chatted. As the sun spilled across the floor into her dark tomb-like room, she extracted a dress from under the rolls of her blanket. This was an unusual black dress, embroidered with purple and bronze triangles, prim white buttons and a tarnished ribbon of coins across the midriff marked with the Arabic year, 1256, perhaps the dowry gift of its former owner. She encouraged me to buy this robe and in doing so, support her and her family. After a short negotiation, I agreed. When I returned to Luxor later that year, I learnt that her husband had succumbed to a chest infection in the cold oasis winter and been brought back dead. She had become a widow and Hassan, the eldest, would have to leave his part-time job of baby pusher to become the major breadwinner in a brick factory. He was still only a child but without his income, she could not survive. The first funeral I was aware of in the village took place seemingly in silence. A wooden tabliyya was set with fresh buffalo cheese, tomatoes, fried potatoes and stuffed pigeon, and fresh rounds of bread had been baked for the occasion. It was only when the small wooden table was hoisted up

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and spirited off on the head of one of the girls that I understood that it, too, was a gift. Women said it was the custom for each house in turn, day by day, to bring food to the sahib ilmayyit (the household where the person had died) and the culinary reputation of the cook would be under scrutiny. And despite my interest in lamentation, the message I received was clear: this was a funeral to which I would not be invited.

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4

Contemporary Lament Performance The Funeral and the Mourning



Turn her round, O mašta, turn her round, you who turn her round Say the name of God over these young ones you’ve stripped naked Make us spin round, O mašta, make us spin round Say the name of God over these young ones, you stripped us naked



(Zeinab)

Hamida would vanish abruptly in the afternoon to attend funerals when a death was announced and Adam and I would be compelled to while away hours at home with the children. I felt deliberately excluded though I could do nothing. I realise now that Adam might actually have been the reason. Women with young children were not to be included. Young women should not be exposed to the threat of mušahara, pollution emanating from encounters with death. It might threaten their ability to conceive or affect the flow of their breast milk. The usual duration of a funeral was seven days. Lamentations would take place every day and then on the fifteenth and the fortieth days as well as the year anniversary of the death. As a result, much of Hamida’s free time (and that of every other woman in the village) was spent at funerals. Women would compute and mark these days rigorously in their mental calendars, reminding each other of the obligation to attend. If the dead person were from their own village, the presence of all village women would be required at the lament sessions, twice daily. If the person were a notable of the region, Hamida, along with convoys of others, would make their way by public transport to the far corners of the West Bank to sing laments. One day, a little girl who had been my friend in the village died. The cry went up in the village and the women dutifully appeared at her tiny house. This time, I wanted to attend the funeral as a genuine mourner. I asked Hamida if I could go with her. She reluctantly consented. At the moment of entering the dark mudbrick house, Hamida linked her hands together and placing them on the top of her voluminous black futa, addressed Fatna by name: ‘ismullah calik ya fatina’ ‘May God have mercy

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on you, O Fatna’. I followed on by her side awkwardly. All the women in the village knew I was studying laments and eyed me cautiously. The room was dark. Fatna’s mother knelt on the ground by the still body of the child. Hamida stooped down and clasped her on the head as in the laying on of hands, ‘This is the will of God’ (‘amr ‘allah) she said and told me to say the same. Outside the aunts and friends of the family had begun to leap backwards and forwards in an elegiac dance they called nadb, chanting laments, while others clustered on the ground and intoned the same solemn verses. Inside the house, the body was washed while a man squatted outside and fashioned the shroud with three knots. As other women arrived at the funeral, they would also call out to Fatma. The funerary procession departed for the cemetery in the sole company of the men. The spirit was believed to go with the body to the tomb, return to the house for three days, linger amongst the living during the period of mourning (forty days) and then depart forever. The women were compelled to stay at home. They would visit the soul later at the grave, kneeling, talking and singing laments once the men had left. Lamentations would continue after the funeral according to a specific calendar of days. Pitched beside the gaudy red, white and green appliqué of the men’s funerary tent was the women’s makeshift khaki tent, the place for the bakwa al-subh (the ‘morning weeping’) and bakwa al-casr (the ‘afternoon weeping’) which were observed according to prescribed timings. In the funerary ritual, the person who has died is never mentioned by name. He or she is the al-marhum or al-marhuma, ‘the one to whom mercy is given’. During the laments, women will shroud their eyes with handkerchiefs to absorb their tears: Let it soak into the handkerchief, tear of my eye, let it soak into my handkerchief For the ‘leaning fortress’ that should be placed upright

The bereaved woman may also rake her face with streaks of mud and expose her hair, though this is mostly associated with the naddabat or hired mourners. One day in Luxor, I saw a coffin arrive by train. From the imposing portal of the railway station, I watched as crowds of mourners suddenly surged onto the street, crying and colliding, obscured by the swirlings of dust as they shrieked past. The bier was being spirited down the street in a frenzy of emotion, accompanied by naddabat, their clothes ripped and hanging from their bodies like rags and their hair unplaited and tangled like Medusa’s. Conversely, women also perform what is called zagarit at funerals, vibrating their tongues backwards and forwards to create a shrill and electrifying cry of joy, the sort of cry one might expect to hear at weddings, or the birth feasts of sheikhs or saints known as mulid (pl. muwalid). In the nineteenth century, Edward Lane noted in his ethnography of

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Cairo that the funeral of a devout sheikh differed from the ordinary in that ‘the women, instead of wailing, rend the air with shrill and quavering cries of joy called zaghareet’ (1973: 294). I had heard zagarit at the tomb shrine of Luxor’s patron sheikh, Sidi Abu’l Hajjaj on the occasion of his mulid. As they emerged from the tomb, black-garbed women sang madh, praise songs conventionally sung for sheikhs and to accompany the pilgrims to Mecca. I later learnt that these women were Copts. As with other folk traditions of Upper Egypt including the laments, the expressive culture of Muslims and Copts converged in the mutual and inclusive celebration of saints and sheikhs. But one educated woman from Luxor who lived on the West Bank told me that she was shocked to see women ululating at funerals. ‘Why did they trill with their tongues as if they were at a wedding?’ she asked. This was one of the questions I needed to answer. Only once did I accompany Hamida to visit Qomiyya’s grave and on that occasion, Hamida spoke to her dear mother as if she were present. It is believed, moreover, that on the ‘anniversary’ of the death (al-hul ), the soul of the person will return to communicate with the living. As a Nubian woman healer, Radiyya, told me: ‘We are accompanied in life by our soul doubles or guardian angels who move silently and invisibly behind us.’ The separation of the soul from its doppelganger, or ‘souldouble’, takes place at death. If a person trips and tumbles on the ground, it is customary to say, ismullah calik wi cala uhtik ahsan minnik (‘May the name of God be upon you and upon your sister [who is] better than you’). This will ward off incursions of djinn, those spirits of light who inhabit this space between heaven and hell in the present world. One year when I was living in Luxor, Hamida announced that Holy Saturday (sabt al-nur: ‘Saturday of Light’) the Saturday before Coptic Easter, was a feast that had been traditionally celebrated on the West Bank by Copts and Muslims alike. On this day, the soul would rise up from the grave and women in the village would make special kohl for the eyes in preparation for their tomb visitations. That day, Hamida made mud c arusas shaped like crude donkeys out of dung and plastered these on the wall, spiked with broken eggshell. These sculptures would act as talismans against the Evil Eye and mishaps during the coming year. Despite my reluctance, I agreed to smear the inside of my eyelid with Hamida’s handmade kohl using a feather kohlstick, as instructed, blinking wildly. Copts would visit Muslim saints’ shrines and vice versa, according to the reputation of the saint or sheikh to exert particular powers or heal certain maladies, in the belief that these feasts were celebrations of God’s strength, and women would call on each other to congregate and arrange to visit the dead, saying prayers and making offerings. During that year, I came and went and when I returned to Luxor after several weeks’ absence, I discovered that Hamida’s brother-in-law had died. The first thing I had to do was to pay my condolences. When I entered, I could hardly recognise Rumana, her sister. Her face was chalky

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white and her waist bound with a thick rope,1 just as in the lament I had recorded earlier: Tell her to wrap round the twisted ropes To ease the pain of separation, sister, what did you do?

Her eyes appeared glazed and did not engage when they met mine. She sat silent and immobile, her face devoid of expression and camouflaged by a film of streaky white dust. She was a pale apparition of her former self. I came to understand the connotations of the word for funeral, wajib or ‘duty’. Though some women would fast for the first three days of the funeral, the family of the bereaved would be obliged to feed the multitudes of relatives who come to mourn. A funeral in Upper Egypt was the prime occasion at which the stature and wealth of the family would be on display. Professional and experienced lamenters would be procured to guarantee ‘a hot funeral’ (jinaza hamiya) even though it might place severe strain on most family finances. Lavish and generous expenditure was the way a family’s name and reputation was maintained and enhanced in the community. The badayas (‘those who begin’) are amongst the most gifted composers and performers of lament. They receive remuneration for lamenting and may or may not be poor, while the naddabat or hired mourners, engaged to wail and lament at big prestigious funerals are usually amongst the most indigent in the community. Unless supported by their offspring, they must beg from their neighbours for food or earn a living through lamentation. In 1980, before meeting Hamida, I witnessed women in a funeral near Medinat Habu, chanting as they walked and thrusting their wooden staves into the air. Decades earlier, it seems, women had carried swords and weapons made of iron to guard against mušahara, the invasion of djinn which might occur during contact with dead spirits, but this custom has been abandoned. Sorrow could still be expiated in many forms and once I saw a bereaved mother who had lost her only son in a drowning accident pirouetting in grief alone outside her house, her face caked with dust. She was performing the dance known as al-manaha or al-hajl, (‘the leaping’), I was told. Flailing her arms against heaven, she raised one leg and then the other in a gentle leaping movement. At a funeral, the woman called al-manaha (or al-manahiyya) would normally clasp her tar, a broad, shallow drum, and lead this funerary rite, singing ‘ cAliyya … cAliyya, habu, habu’, as if literally, ‘On me … on me…’. This lament for ‘the stranger’, buried away from home, emphasises the fact that no tar is beaten for him nor have women observed the mourning: Encased in the clay, the stranger in open desert: they have encased him in the clay For him no shallow drum is beaten, nor have they unplaited their hair

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The meaning of the word habu could not be literally explained to me though according to one woman, the refrain means ‘May the dust come over me’.2 In mourning, women are required to conform to certain rules of decorum. These include removing all jewellery and refraining from changing their clothes as this lament illustrates: They told her to strip off her arm bracelets For her lion who would caress her They told her to break her glass bangles For her lion who would fold her in his arms

Professor cAbd al-Hamid Yunis, the prominent Egyptian scholar and folklorist, said that during the 1930s and 1940s it had been de rigueur for the aristocracy in Cairo to engage professional mourners to lament with the family for the entire forty-day mourning period. Though this tradition has lapsed, one Cairean woman told me that she had gone off to a family funeral in Middle Egypt in Minia and to her surprise, on crossing the threshold, she was greeted by a wave of vociferous lament. A clutch of women, robed in black, had been assembled on the floor and engaged to perform laments for the family. She was astonished by the adherence to what she perceived as an archaic custom in her family home and later asked her cousins why they had done this. She was told, ‘We assumed that you wanted us to honour the dead in the proper way.’ This woman from Cairo had perceived the tradition of lamentation to be as foreign to her life experience as I had. The authenticity of emotion, and the gap between the ritual performance of lamentation by the entourage of professional lamenters and the heartfelt grief of the bereaved, is difficult for an outsider to gauge. The histrionic display is an essential element of lament performance. As well as lamenting the dead, at each funeral the performers ‘lament their own’. As each of these widows struggles to maintain an existence without income or welfare services, by their own admission, their lives are interred in grief. As Tariyya told me: We unplait our hair because our dead are dear to us. We unplait our hair and put mud on our faces because they are dear to us. Separation is painful. We go barefoot and leap in the air … we must go barefoot … because our Lord loved them and took them from us. But we sit and rail against it. We reject it…

Tariyya contends that women go barefoot from sorrow while other women say that the bereaved go barefoot in deference to the souls ‘under the earth’ who might suffer from the pressure of their feet above them. The earth is the place of departed souls and sanctuary of the powerful djinn, known to intervene in the affairs of the living. ‘The Lord loved them and took them’ is the euphemism sometimes used by women to

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describe death. It acknowledges formal submission to God’s will and is intended to dispel the rancour of death. Lamentation constitutes protest against God’s will and that is why it is considered haram. In modern life, unplaiting the hair goes contrary to women’s conceptions of pudeur. It is not customary for women and young girls to leave their hair unplaited, even after a bath. Children braid their wet hair into two tight plaits, and as they grow older, loosen it only in mourning or on their own death bier, as Nafisa said: Standing in front of me she unplaited her hair, standing in front of me, Her hair like soft plumage or my shawl’s fringe dangling

The unplaiting of the hair by lamenters and the bereaved at a funeral reflects a desire to emulate the deceased, to take her place and empathise with her fate. I let down my hair to you, go, O time, I let down my hair to you And whatever you may do, whatever may come to me, I accept

Some laments recreate the scene of the washing and at the same time, describe ritual acts: She said to the Byzantine gypsy who dressed our hair: Why is my forelock dangling down on my eyes? You said to the Aleppan tinker who dressed our hair: Why is my forelock dangling down on my cheek?

The lamenter alludes to the drawing down of a lock of hair onto the forehead before burial by the gypsy or tinker charged with washing and dressing the dead. At one funeral, a close friend recounted to me, a woman ripped her dress from top to bottom, intentionally exposing herself to ‘shame’. To do this is an act of defiance. The woman is flouting propriety: the female body is to be exposed only to the ‘bridegroom’, her husband. While inordinate grief may persuade a woman to defy convention and enter an ‘other-worldly’ state in which unruly behaviour and social concerns become unimportant, women attending funerals sometimes find themselves caught up in the maelstrom of emotions. On visiting women in their houses, I would notice occasionally that their clothes were soaked in dust. Later on, Hamida would reveal that they had been to a funeral and it had been a frenetic and highly emotional one. Once, en route to a distant funeral in a neighbouring village, Hamida borrowed a friend’s shoes and expensive cashmere futa (a long, black overdress) for the event, in order to be impeccably dressed. It seemed incongruous to me that she should wear her most expensive and elegant clothes to a funeral, yet to Hamida, the wearing of the futa was emblematic of her identity and socio-economic status. Men are also compelled to attend funerals but their role differs. The

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men and women of the bereaved family receive condolences separately and adjourn to their respective and distinct funerary tents. In the 1980s in urban complexes like Luxor, a flamboyant tent of variegated red, white and green appliqué (also used for weddings and festive occasions) would be erected for the men almost immediately after the death. Guests and mourners could be sequestered within the richly textured walls but only a humble khaki lining would be perceptible to the outside world. Having shed their turbans, the men would drape their unfolded muslin šaš across their shoulders and sit silently and contemplatively in the place of mourning, rising only to greet friends who would come to pay condolences. At the funeral, a local sheikh would be invited to chant suras from the Qur’an through loudspeakers, and the men would sip bitter coffee or engage in muffled conversation. As a public sign of mourning, they were also obliged to refrain from shaving for a period of forty days. The women, on the other hand would squat outside in a modest lean-to constructed of a few poles and dun-coloured cloth, a shabby counterpart to the men’s elegant edifice. In the fifth century BC, according to Herodotus, men and women observed virtually the same mourning rituals: When a distinguished man dies, all the women of the household plaster their heads and faces with mud, then, leaving the body indoors, perambulate the town with the dead man’s female relatives, their dresses fastened with a girdle and beat their bared breasts. The men for their part follow the same procedure. (Book II, LXXXV, trans. de Selincourt 1954: 161)

This lament recorded for the man who has died without heirs indicates that within living memory, boys also wore rope girdles: Wrapped in rope, I wish there had been a boy wrapped in rope Who would clutch the branch of palm and say the litanies

Gestures of mourning relate to culturally determined perceptions of beauty and dignity. Women would shave their scalp in mourning though this is now rare. As a woman’s beauty is believed to be revealed in the texture and radiance of her hair, the cutting of her tresses is a violent and self-destructive act. For an Upper Egyptian man, the elegance of his person is embodied in the wrappings of his turban: Three folds, you who wrap your turban in three folds What a handsome councillor you were when you inclined your head!

The discarding of the turban and the exposure of the head is a mark of humility and self-deprecation. The dead wear no turban as they ‘ascend the staircase’: On the stairs, they hurled their turbans onto the stairs Why, they hurled their turbans away! Lord, wish them safe passage!

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For the bereaved, the trappings of mourning mark a rupture with the everyday world of human interaction and signal entry into a metaphysical realm in which the physical body is transformed. These also reflect the desire of the widow to emulate the deceased on its subterranean journey. Her face is to be coated with mud and body doused with dust and she should set her body down on the hard earth or reed mat, as one woman told me, ‘to feel the earth beneath’. In Arabic, the earth is designated as feminine (al-‘ard) and in the belief system espoused by agricultural communities in Upper Egypt, the earth is the source of fecundity. The annual inundation that used to revitalise the fertility of the soil has now ceased but the inherently regenerative capabilities of the earth are still revered. A famous spiritual healer from al-Kom once evinced her belief in the curative properties of the earth in the amulet and spell she prescribed to heal a woman who had come to her for help. The hijab was to be made of tin and contain camphor, and should be placed in the earth to allow, as she described it, the subterranean ‘flow of water to catalyse the spell’ and permit healing. The earth and the underground currents flowing through it were to constitute the sources of regenerative life. A glance at Egyptian history reveals that the earth has long been associated with rituals of mourning. In the last century, slabs of mud were glued to the walls of houses by the bereaved as if to transform the house into a subterranean tomb and, in so doing, express solidarity with the deceased. Moreover, sheets dyed with nila (indigo) a plant associated with death and fertility, were also draped over the walls. Edward Lane describes how not only the walls could be smeared with indigo, but the entire wardrobes, and hands and arms of the bereaved could be coloured with this penetrating, purple dye (Lane 1973 [1860]: 527). This habit may only have been introduced in the mediaeval period, according to Lucas (1962). Indigo (Indigofera argentea) is indigenous to Upper Egypt and yet an XVIIIth Dynasty funerary textile, seemingly dyed with indigo may, in fact, have been dyed by the juice of the sunt berry, a much more common plant, Acacia nilotica (ibid). Real indigo is no longer used in mourning, though Hamida showed me wild flowers which women boil up to produce the inky soup used to dye the underclothes and dresses of widows (and the bereaved) the deep blue-black hue of mourning. Balabil exposed the prevalence of this practice in her lament suggesting that men’s turbans were also dyed with indigo: The day they brought them there, came the indigo-dyed turbans The naked one was washed while the shallow drum was beating

When a woman becomes the eldest in the family, she is entitled to attend funerals on behalf of the family unit. Until then, her experience of lamentation and lament composition is highly circumscribed. According to Hamida, laments are ‘learnt’ at funerals. On occasions when women from one hamlet meet women from another to mourn the dead, new laments are assimilated to the repertoire. Women in other villages sing

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their laments slightly differently but the images converge. They are mutually intelligible. How do women learn laments? I asked one woman. She replied: kutr al-huzn y callim al-buka: ‘A surfeit of sadness teaches one how to weep.’ To the same question, another replied with a proverb: jat al-hazina tifrah ma litlahaš matrah: ‘The sad woman came to rejoice. There was for her no place.’ A third snickered and retorted: cidid … it callimna al-cidid fimadrasit al-buka: ‘Laments? … We learned laments in the “school” of weeping!’

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THE HERMENEUTICS OF LAMENT

Part II

How Laments Acquire Meaning

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5

The Hermeneutics of Lament Signs, Symbols and Referents

20. Medinat Habu temple viewed from Hamida’s house

Hamida had welcomed me into her domain. However, it was clear that as a foreign and literate woman, I was more like a man. As an outsider to women’s culture and practice, trying to observe the boundaries of propriety and behaviour, I found it more difficult to address women on the subject of laments than men. In Luxor, men felt an obligation to respond when a question was posed by a foreigner like me, but women did not. Women did not like to discuss the laments or respond to questions about them perhaps because of the deep sadness triggered by even the mention of the word cidid or, more likely, the taboo against lamenting without a deceased. Many months later, I was still perplexed by the cryptic nature of many of the texts and their ambivalence. After repeated rebuffs, I finally felt able to broach the subject of certain words and the meaning with Hamida.

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When I explained my predicament to her, Hamida’s response was direct: ‘Well, if you want to know, why don’t you just ask?’ as if all her previous reluctance to address the questions surrounding the cidid had been erased. I realised then that women’s reluctance to discuss the lament texts may have stemmed not from the inability to do so (as some male informants and scholars had suggested) but from the difficulty of disentangling and explaining the wealth of meaning to someone alien to the culture and unfamiliar with the beliefs on which it was predicated. It was, nevertheless, very difficult for her and her mother, a well-known lamenter, to pinpoint the meaning of a single word enmeshed in a string of words. As I would read the words of one lament aloud, Hamida would then respond with another, synonymous with the one I had proposed or a variant of it. This was the mode of corroboration. She was also doctrinaire in declaring a particular lament ‘wrong’ (da galat) if it did not conform to her version of it. The laments were tight cohesive units of verse in couplet form, with potential for individual variation. I learnt how end-rhyme variants could be shuffled and variations created. These variants could be shuffled during performance and variations on a text consciously created. Though improvisation was reputed to take place in the heat of a funeral, I learnt that variants must conform to clearly established patterns if they were to be deemed ‘correct’ (sahh). Back in Cairo, I started to plumb other sources to find comparative texts and seek out what other scholars had written about the laments and funerary beliefs of Upper Egyptians. As I discovered, the oral performance of lament in Egypt and Luxor especially, had been documented as early as the nineteenth century. La Description de l’Égypte, the compendium of reports (1813–26) written by the savants sent by Napoleon Bonaparte to study the culture and antiquities of Egypt, featured descriptions of musical performance and transcriptions of funerary laments. And in the wake of the publication by Sir Gardiner Wilkinson of The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians in 1847, compiled from analysis of Egyptian tomb iconography and hieroglyphic texts, Edward Lane published its counterpart, The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1860) noting the tradition of funerary lamentation in Cairo. French Egyptologists, Georges Legrain (1912; 1945) and Gaston Maspero (1914) of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, then resident in Luxor, also published short fragments of lament texts in French as part of larger works incorporating all genres of Luxor folklore, and then in 1925, Paul Kahle, Arabic linguist and ethnographer, published texts of the lamentations that he had recorded in Luxor and the Delta.1 The first Egyptian scholar to undertake a study of funerary mores and beliefs in his own Delta village was anthropologist, Mohamed Galal. A student of Marcel Mauss, he published his extensive monograph on funerary practice and belief in French in 1938. In 1966, the Egyptian folklorist, Rushdi Salih published a small collection of funerary laments

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in his tome which encompassed the gamut of folk genres in al-Adab alŠa cabi (1966; 1971) or ‘Folklore’,2 and then in 1983, the literary scholar, c Abd al-Rahim Hifni produced his book entitled al-Marathi al-Ša cabiyya (1983) or ‘Folk Laments’. This analysed the recorded repertoire of a single lamenter and compared contemporary laments with the elegiac poetry known as ritha’, composed by women poets in pre-Islamic Arabia (1985: 65).3 A systematic study of Egyptian lamentation remained to be done. As I discovered in my initial recording with Qomiyya, and as Galal had identified in his field study decades before,4 funerary laments were defined and categorised by the kinship status and persona of the person who had died.

The Dramatis Personae of Lament The ‘dramatis personae’ of people to be mourned included ‘the mother’ (il’umm), ‘the husband’ or ‘father’, both described as ‘the father’(il’ab), ‘the brother’ (il’ah) or ‘blood brother’(il’ah iššagigi), ‘the young man’ (iššabb), often called ‘the bridegroom’(il caris), ‘the young woman’ (iššabba), more commonly referred to as ‘the bride’ (il carusa), the ‘venerable old man’ (irrajil kabir fissinn), ‘the man without heirs’ (galil ilhalifa) euphemistically called ‘the one of few heirs’, and the childless ‘woman without heirs’ (galilt ilhalifa) (‘she of few heirs’).5 Particular laments were also sung for those who die a violent or unconventional death. These constitute separate categories and include ‘the one who suffered death by fire’ (mayyit nar), ‘the drowned’ (ilgargan), ‘the one who suffered death from scorpion sting’ (mayyit il cagrab) and ‘the one who dies a stranger’ (ilgarib), unheralded and unmourned in a foreign land. In order to be able to characterise each persona I decided to define the semantic domain or realm of metaphors assigned to each, analysing the mythical, qua‑social person or archetype through its frame of representation and where relevant, parallel images from Arabic folklore and Egyptian mythology. The Husband/Father 6 In Qomiyya’s laments for the father, the patriarch is a wali (religious leader), a shield protecting women and a supporting ‘brace’. As she acknowledges, however, he is also the ‘binding’ around the head (casab), which restricts and restrains. He is ‘a leaning fortress’, an image of strength, as well as a woman’s source of wealth and social legitimacy. In some lament repertoires, the procreative role of the father is accentuated: he is the source of nourishment, ‘the grains of wheat’ (ilgalla), ‘the red (or ripened) wheat’ (ilgamh il’ahmar) and as husband, the source of sexual pleasure. He is ‘the protruding mound’ and ‘the high river bank’ (iljisr il cali) which ‘will not be immersed’ in the waves of inundation,

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symbols emphasising his nascent fertility in death and his sexual role. He is also the ‘pillar’ (camud) even ‘pillar of marble’ which has fallen and must be raised up, and in some laments, the phallic‑shaped ‘pigeon tower’ (borj): O high pigeon tower on the oasis track, When it toppled, the pigeons fanned out and were gone O high pigeon tower on the path to Quseir When it toppled, the pigeons fanned out in the night

In this lament, the pigeon tower has collapsed, causing the pigeons to flee, and in consequence, the fecundity of the family has been destroyed. In its permutations, the image of the collapsing pillar or tower can also be transposed and the father conjured up as ‘a pillar of Mecca’ or resplendent ‘mosque pillar’, a member of the religious establishment. He is like a ‘pennant’ waving above an Islamic shrine and yet celebrated as a source of sensual pleasure: ‘a delicacy’ and the ‘coffee in the pot’. In Luxor, as coffee is rarely drunk, this image evokes connotations of an exotic and luxurious treat. In other laments, the imminent resurrection of the father is encapsulated in the image of the collapsed pillar, first dragged away and then restored to the vertical: Razed, he was the pillar of our house and the pillar has been razed Why not tell us, in whose house has it been dragged? Why not tell us, in whose house has it been raised?

The deceased in this context is not only raised up, but he is raised up ‘high’ to a heavenly garden: They raised it high, the archangel of heaven built it up and raised it high For there, there is a garden and a source of water beside him

Like the sheikh entombed in a high domed shrine, presiding over his precinct and the community, this man’s stature is enhanced through entombment in a high place. The archangel of heaven has raised him to this height to honour his deeds and in heaven, he is ensconced in a garden near to a source of water. When the word jinena is invoked in the lament context, a series of puns are intended, I was told, since the word, janna (heaven) in Arabic emanates from the same root as jinena (garden) and simultaneously suggests its corollary, mijanna (cemetery).7 The placement of water at the tomb is a common motif throughout the laments and a custom observed by tombs in the Dakhla oasis, for example. Pilgrims to Mecca from Upper Egypt bring back vials of this water of eternal life from the holy well of Zimzim in Saudi Arabia to wash the dead. This custom is alluded to in one lament while others describe actual burial in a well. In another, the faithful wife brings water to the grave of her husband, refilling the earthenware pot from which the soul

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will drink but at the same time, stresses that she herself is the source of ‘water’: the fluid that engenders life. A woman shows her respect for her dead husband by addressing him as abuya (‘my father’). The husband/ father in Upper Egyptian society is seen to perform an array of familial and social duties: to insure and protect the honour of the family, to guard women and to conceive children. In the context of the laments, the procreative and patriarchal roles fulfilled by the father/husband are equally significant. In the laments for the father, metaphorical emphasis is also placed on the elegance and purity of the men’s robes. Wrapped in the ‘white stoles’ that become shrouds and armed with weapons for the journey, the men prepare to cross the Nile from Luxor to the West: I recognise the men at the ferry in Qus They are dressed in white stoles, brandishing swords Esna, I recognise the men at the ferry in Esna They are dressed in white stoles and resplendent

And another: The ship of men, ahoy! She is coming... Slicing through the water with sails unfurled Look, the men have embarked in the houseboat on the Nile Leaving the women abandoned on the shore 8

This lament presents the ethereal vision of the men sailing off to the West, the traditional necropolis and domain of the dead in ancient Egypt, while the widowed and bereaved are left abandoned on the shore. The living inhabited only the East Bank in ancient times. Now, graveyards stretch along the edges of cultivated land on both sides of the Nile but the laments preserve the notion that the West is the domain to which the dead must journey. Weapons and accoutrements similarly mark the status of the man as a warrior and also embody the physical person of the deceased. ‘He’ is both the javelin and the staff that has been ‘hurled’ into the grave: How it anguished me, the hurling of the javelin When he laid you in the tomb, elegant one How it stung me, the hurling of the staff When he laid you in the tomb, O Kulayb

He has been ‘hurled’ by ‘the one with claws’ or the agent of death and likened to the fabled hero, Kulayb of the Arabian epic, al‑Zir Salim.9 In other occurrences of the same motif, a pronged javelin (mizrag), like a winnowing fork, is hurled against heaven by the ‘elegant one returning to his quarter’. The ‘javelin’ (mizraq) and pointed spear, along with the staff and the sword, are also weapons wielded in the last century by women in

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funerary processions as a gesture of rebellion and protest against death so these laments evoke multiple meanings. Other laments attest to the placement of a hennaed or fortified staff, of a stalk of regenerative fruitwood next to the deceased, perhaps as protection for the journey to the afterlife. The perception remains that such staves from living trees embody life and while in Luxor, I saw young men cut leafy branches and wave them joyously in street processions accompanying pilgrims setting off to Mecca, and in celebrations of the birth feast of a sheikh, or mulid. The rituals of the living appear to be replicated symbolically and metaphorically as rituals for the dead. In this case, they evoke the hope for regeneration of life: A stalk of pomegranate, I swear by a lawyer, they have (with them) a stalk of pomegranate Where have you gone my beloved, to build your house The tips of the quarterstaves, to look more elegant, he hennaed the tips of the quarterstaves {Wrapped in amulets by the nape of the elegant one {Wrapped in iron wire

Henna and the wrapping of iron or amulets round the staff will empower it further. In other laments which invoke the same heroic language of Arabic epic, the deceased is addressed as a ‘lion’ who shall succour and protect women through the span of his ‘wings’: Unfurl your wings over the house, O lion and cast your shadow Give succour to the women, you who pray, you who sanctify

Another lament for ‘the father’ fuses these two images of lion and arms together, addressing the ‘leonine, muscular and elephantine’ arms which are suspended over the threshold. They are urged to guard the house in the absence of the husband/father. According to the laments, the husband/father should embrace his wife in his leonine arms or wrap his arms round her like an all-enveloping cloak. He is likened to Sheddad, hero of the Arabian folk epic, sirat cAntar: Where shall I find you, (my) lion, that you may succour me? For fear beasts from the wilderness may snatch me away… O my lion! I went to the tombs and cried out, O my lion! He said to me, Return home, the lions’ bones have rotted O protector! I went to the tombs and cried, O Sheddad! He said to me, Return home, the lions’ bones have softened

In the latter lament, the harsh reality of the tomb becomes paramount. The lamenter induces pathos for the deceased by revealing that the father is aware that his role as protector has ended. As a dutiful husband, the husband should protect his wife’s virtue, even from the grave.

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You who wear ‘gazali’, the stripes on the width He has gone to protect us and to protect our virtue

The Mother With the ‘plumage’ of the eye, my beloved mother wraps me round, with her ‘eyelashes’ For fear of the words strangers may utter My beloved mother wraps me with the hair of her head For fear of the words the family may utter

The mother ‘wraps’ her daughter with the ‘plumage’ or feathers (riš ) of her eye, a poetic contraction of rimš: eyelashes. She follows me, I walk along and my mother follows behind me For fear gusts of wind may envelop me in dust

Moreover, the mother is mourned not only as former protectress but also the source of fecundity within the family. Even in death, she stalks her daughter, and within the voluminous folds of her gown, away from the envious eyes of others, she conceals hidden treasures: My beloved mother, the pigeon from the niche [ilbinni] She gropes around to find it, tucked in her full sleeve The pigeon from the clay jug, my beloved mother, the pigeon from the water scoop [ilgaddus] She gropes around to find it: in her sleeve it is concealed

Most West Bank households breed pigeons in wall niches but a gaddus is a uterine‑shaped clay pot used in water scoops known as šaduf or caud, which lift water from the canal into the cultivated fields. Domestic pigeons are bred and housed in these same pots. As ‘the lady in velvet’ (sitt ilgatifa), even in death the mother is described as wearing richly textured garments of shimmering red and green velvet, colours traditionally associated with fertility and amuletic power, and worn by young brides: Lady in velvet, your crimson red velvet Why not leave your velvet till your coming tomorrow Lady in velvet, your olive-green velvet Why not leave your velvet till your coming to my house Lady in velvet, your iridescent velvet Why not leave your velvet till your coming, don’t delay

Of the spectrum of roles conferred upon her, the mother is undisputed mistress of the house and the one entitled to open and pour out the rich buffalo ghee:

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My eye is upon her, in her own house she was supreme She would open up the clay jugs and pour out the ghee10

In the laments, not only is she dressed in velvet but doused in lavish scent: The fragrance of civet and liqueur exudes from her velvet Why not go and then come back, you who gave life to this house? Perfumes, the scent from her velvet was civet and perfumes Go and come back, you who gave life to this great house

She is also decked in amulet-like jewels: A tree by the wall, truly, my beloved (is) a tree by the wall Cast shade, fan breezes and spread shadow on my house By the stairs, truly, the beloved (is) a tree by the stairs Why, cast shade, fan breezes and blossom with grapes A tree by the staircases, truly, the beloved (is) a tree by the staircases Why, cast shade, fan breezes and blossom with pomegranates

Whereas man is the straight stalk, the mother is like a fruit tree that creates shade, fans a life-giving breeze and brings forth lemons, grapes and pomegranates, fruits of immortality. She is ‘a south facing garden’ with ‘grapes garnered in her lap’, in this way a source of fertility. She is both ‘mistress of the house’ and its ‘bridle’ (izzimama); she wears midar c or gold bracelets as armour, and in one case, brandishes a rolling pin. As ‘Sheikha of the Arabs’, she is beloved and respected, ‘custodian of the oven and hearth’ and source of food and succour: a refuge or caravanserai. She is the ‘rib’ of the household, the ‘money purse’ and yet the ‘reed pipe’ her husband would fondle and caress. She is ‘a young mare anchored in a field of fenugreek’, like a palm frond, symbol of energy and strength. She is a ‘Byzantine or Indian hen’, both exotic strains of fowl with bright plumage, and a ‘cone of brown sugar’ that a young child would suck. She is a migratory bird, ‘an Iraqi goose’ (ilwizz il ciragi) or mugrabiyya, literally, a ‘Moroccan’: like the goose that abandons its young and flies away, she, too, has abandoned her children. As a reflection of social norms and how they inveigh against women, the laments also describe the ignominy that ensues when a woman’s scarf is unwound and her unplaited hair exposed. In death, not only is she stripped of clothing and accoutrements, she is deprived of her dignity.

The Young Man (also known as The Bridegroom) Strolling, crowds of young men are strolling down the paths And we have uprooted a clump of green grass With lively young men the pathways are teeming And we have uprooted a clump of melokhia11

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And with lively young men the pathways are crammed And we have uprooted a clump of lemon grass

The ‘young man’ who dies in his prime is described as a living, ‘green’ stalk, plucked before his time. Men on the desert-like West Bank carry tall staves when walking on the paths as protection against snakes and wild dogs. This may be a stalk of pomegranate (a potentially regenerative type of fruitwood), henna, wormwood or artemesia, a root associated with healing in Upper Egypt. As a living stalk from the tree of life, it may be planted again though he may not return: A stalk of wormwood, O staff of the elegant one is a stalk of wormwood He set it up at his mother’s and his absence grew long

The theme of regeneration proliferates. In another lament, the young man’s vest is imagined as decorated with fruit, apparently to engender renewal of life for eternity: You who wear a vest of carob and limes Has it come to be your turn, you, the handsome one? You who wear a vest and upon it are grapes Has it come to be your turn, you who are so well dressed?

He is also compared to a curved and supple stalk of bamboo: O curved stalk of bamboo, what a handsome staff! What a long neck and drowsy eyes

His nascent fertility or sexual potency is to be consummated in the grave. Consistent with the Islamic conception of paradise as a place where female houris (or beautiful nymphs) minister to men’s sexual needs, sexual initiation is imagined to occur after death: In earrings, there came houris from heaven, dressed in earrings Why not get up, you (who lie there) so forlorn, are you not a man? In gold/feathers, there came houris of heaven wearing gold/feathers Why not get up, you (who lie there) so forlorn, are you not a bridegroom?

The groom is robed in his bridal finery but seemingly left without the regalia of a wedding procession: In the heart of the tombs was a bridegroom in his kaftan Who will light the candle? : I will light it for him In a pure, white stole, in the heart of the tombs, a bridegroom in a pure, white stole O who will conduct him to the consummation feast?

The lamenter asks, ‘Who will conduct him to the issubahiyya?’, the feast

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which takes place after the successful consummation. Whereas only Copts dress an unmarried young man and woman in bridal finery for the grave,12 in their laments, both Muslims and Copts anticipate consummation of a wedding in death: They set sail in their boats on the ‘seas’ Why not cajole the captain with eloquent words, lads? Truly, the men have {unfurled their umbrellas {unwrapped their turbans, Call out to the captain to let them off! Whoever is hosting the wedding, invite them!

The Young Woman (also called The Bride) The blood of the bride is redder than the pomegranate In his delight, drops were sprinkled on the kaftan The blood of the bride is redder than the grape In his delight, drops were sprinkled on the whirling dust

The laments do not describe the consummation of marriage by men alone. In the domain of the afterlife, the wedding of the groom to the nymphs or houris of heaven is complemented by the wedding of the virgin bride to an unknown and shadowy groom, in one instance, the rapacious agent of death who spills the blood of the ruptured hymen on the ‘whirling dust of the grave’. For the bride, the act of ‘sailing’ to the tombs implies a covert and sexual rite of passage: Red, in the heart of the tombs, there is a boat with a crimson sail They are still crossing over, those with golden hair With a silken sail, in the heart of the tombs, there is a boat with a silken sail They are still crossing over, those with kohl‑black hair Twin sails, in the heart of the tombs is a boat with twin sails They are still crossing over, those with hair like manes

A crimson sail, fluttering in the breeze, is suggestive of the hanging of the blood-spattered cloth outside the bridal chamber. For the virgin ‘bride’ (in the laments, any unmarried girl of any age), consummation also takes place in death. While the groom is encouraged to stand up and ‘be like a man’ when confronted by the provocative houris, the bride is supine and asked to bring with her a red silk bridal gown for her wedding, one of the many garments she might have prepared for her trousseau in life: When you are anxious for the grave, turtledove Take with you a wedding gown of red silk When you are anxious for the grave and a mere child Take with you a gown of silk which will not dissolve

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One lamenter suggests that the bride’s ‘wedding’ has been consummated before she could fashion her white wedding shift (rumi). She is daubed in her henna and wears the striped bracelets, previously made of glass, now sculpted in plastic, once worn by all young girls in Upper Egypt as a symbol of virginity: Little one, she departed daubed in her henna: O my sister... She had not yet fashioned the shift for her wedding nights Little one in her striped bangles, she left in her striped bangles She had not yet fashioned the shift for her wedding nights Truly the little one in her bracelets, she has gone in her bracelets She had not yet fashioned the shift for her wedding nights

The following despondent lament evokes the palpable contrast between the aridity of the tomb landscape and the regenerative waters of a sea (perhaps the Nile) where the girl was to be washed: Our sympathies, truly in the graves there is neither henna nor our sympathies Nor a sea beside me in which the lovely one could bathe

The ritual feasting for the bride’s nuptials in death as in life takes place in the guest room or mandara. There, along with the spirit of the departed, the guests partake of the funerary feast: Food for the young girl has been placed in the mandara Oozing with ghee, those present give thanks Food for the young girl in the mandara is redolent with aromas Oozing with ghee and laced with hot pepper Food for the young girl has been placed in the mandara Oozing with ghee and those present give thanks

Some laments for the ‘bride and groom’ further amplify this inversion of marriage in death. The bath where the bride and groom were washed before their wedding has been transformed into a washing bier. Moreover, the sky window (taga) of the ‘bath’ (in this case, possibly the tomb?) has been cracked: You who go off to the baths, such a beauty They have doused the bath with embalming spice [fayih] You who dash off to the baths in such haste The sky window in the ‘baths’ is cracked

The domed halo of palm fronds under which the bride and groom would sit majestically during the wedding, in the context of the laments, has become a funerary bower under which the bridegroom, who is fully clothed, is ‘asleep’. In the laments, ‘sleep’ euphemistically denotes death:

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His palm fronds are drooping in the open air over nakedness, O Lord Her bridegroom (lies) beneath them sleeping Wilting, the palm fronds at the gate of the bridal bower are wilting Her bridegroom (lies) beneath them in a drowsy sleep Shrivelled, the palm fronds of the bridal bower are shrivelled Her bridegroom beneath them is fully clothed

This series of laments which revolves around the image of a desiccated bower of palm fronds, normally a symbol of the celebration of life but in this case, death, illustrates how lament imagery exploits the simultaneously multivalent images of marriage and death to engender sadness and evoke tears amongst the mourners.

The Blood Brother Lamenters differentiate between laments for the il’ah, a brother of the same parentage and il’ah iššagigi, the blood brother, a consanguineous blood relation born of a different mother or father. In some laments, the physical and emotional intimacy of the relationship of a woman to her brother appears paramount: the brother is mourned as ‘the buttons on my dress’ and ‘a cone of brown sugar’.13 Elsewhere, a harsher image of the brother emerges. He has constrained her behaviour and insulted her but to avoid any indiscretion, the lamenter substitutes another word to fit the end rhyme: cayig (elegant) instead of hayig (passionate):14 A wild camel, my ‘husband’ makes me ride a wild camel And my brother says the female sex is ‘elegant’/passionate A high camel, my ‘husband’ makes me ride a high camel And my brother treads on my toes

The Child In the metonymic realm of laments, delicate and beautifully fashioned accoutrements embody the young child: Truly, children are the bracelets on our hands And kohl sticks of silver for our eyes Truly, children are the rings on my fingers And kohl sticks of silver for my kohl pot

Children are their most highly prized possessions, like silver artefacts. They are also ‘stalks of sugarcane’, hearts of palm or fruit, apricots hurled on the embankment by a canal, or innocent animals like ‘a gazelle hunted down in the heat of day’.

The Elderly An old and venerable sheikh who commands exceptional respect and

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has pleased his wife in life is mourned as her ambergris (cambar) her aphrodisiac: O great man with the towering horse Ambergris of my youth, my beloved

In the subsequent laments, the mourner stresses the grandeur and luxuriance of his cabaya. O you whose long cloak [ cabaya] drapes down to the heel He who wears it is great, and empowers the Eye O you whose long cloak laps down to the ankles He who wears it is great and empowers the heart

These mujammalat extol the elegance of the deceased and are intended to make him feel secure and happy in death. The stress is on physical beauty, not moral virtue. Other laments are seen as designed to fulfil other functions: to facilitate the person’s journey to the afterlife, to mourn his passing, incite tears and bemoan the hand of fate.

Other Categories The following lament types are not kinship-based but refer to people who die outside the idealised social frame of the family unit or suffer a particularly cruel or unnatural death. As discrete categories of lament, they incorporate specific metaphoric fields, images and symbols suggestive of their fate. The Woman Without Heirs A woman without offspring is urged to find a companion in the afterlife. She should not be shamed because of her state of being: the spectre of barrenness that hangs over the heads of women without children in life, sometimes precipitating divorce, is visible even in death: You who ‘say the name of God’ upon her, you who take her down You with no male heirs, do not shame her Say the name of God over her, you, her household, you who take her down Woman with no male heirs, do not insult her Woman with no male heirs, do not insult her Demented one, I wish she had had a boy, even a demented one Who would go down with her into the grave full of earth Who would go down with her into the grave full of earth

The greatest ignominy for a woman is not to have produced any heirs, and most importantly, a male heir.

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The Man Without Heirs The man who dies without heirs dies in solitude. As no progeny survive him, the poor man must weep for himself. He is socially as well as literally ‘naked’: he must be wrapped in heavy cloaks in the grave to compensate for the lack of human succour he will receive at death. One lamenter wishes that there could be a boy who would bind his waist after death in a girdle of half or rough alfa grass, clutch a palm frond and recite the customary litany of prayers at the grave during the funeral, his hands clasped behind the back, but there is none. Other laments invoke the theme of constructing a ‘house’ (by implication, a tomb) by drawing out a thread to demarcate the space but there are no heirs to inhabit a family tomb or fosgiyya, if one were to be built. Moreover, the funerary rituals cannot be properly observed: there is no one to fill the earthenware jug by the grave and remove the reed matting of the bereaved: An earthenware jar, remove the rush matting and roll away the earthenware jar He has no son to receive condolences from the people Earthenware jug, remove the rush matting and roll away the earthenware jug He has no son to receive the condolences outside

Lamenters ask why the deceased could not be like the errant dove from the pigeon cote (or the field) which flies off briefly but returns to its perch, a simile which appears in a Sumerian lament fragment: The pure Inanna set up a lament for its people... I will make the people of this city flee like the – bird from its tree15

A final lament for ‘the man without heirs’ refers to the writing of the deceased person’s name on the shroud; in lieu of calling out his name (which would normally be done by his offspring) there is silence: His name, the name of the great man they put it on his shroud If he had had children, they would have called out to him by name

The Stranger (or ‘one who dies away from home’) The non-observance of duties at the grave of the deceased presents a danger. In the Luxor area, many men migrate to Cairo, the Delta, the oases and the Gulf in search of work. The burial of a family member ‘far away’ (for instance, in the Delta or ‘in the north’) and so far from the protective rites of the family means that the soul of the deceased will languish, unnourished and unappeased. The poor person is admonished for not dying in his own town or ‘valley’: When you were in your own town, why, O stranger, did you not die in your own town?

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They would have mourned you there with honour, your loved ones and your family Why, O stranger, did you not die in your own valley? They would have mourned you with honour, your loved ones and your family

The Drowned In the laments for the drowned, pleas for resurrection and rescue by a divine intermediary predominate. The archangel Gabriel is urged to pull up the drowned person or propel him by waterwheels that can scoop up water from the depths of the Nile. The white ‘scarves’ and turbans of the drowned are imagined to rise up from the ‘sea’ at the first cataract at Shellal near Aswan and the flag of a drowned man appears in a mast pole rising above the water. ‘Granaries’ also are seen to emerge from the ‘seas’ as a vision. These provide nourishment while the Nile is black and foamy, rich in life-giving silt. It is the time of the inundation. The drowned reside in ‘houses’ in the subterranean ‘seas’ and are not, therefore, deprived of tombs: They built them a place, truly, for the drowned, they built a place Wait for the boats to take the elegant ones down Descend in them, so many men, descend in them! The power of men lies within, in their mastabas [tombs] Descend and may they be inundated, take your men, descend and may they be inundated So many men, the unfortunates, shall be empowered

Captured by the mysterious ‘caster of nets’ or ‘hurler of hooks’ (the manifestations of cAzra’il, the Angel of Death, in other laments), the drowned are entrusted to the minnow and the whale. There is an apprehension that fish may nibble away at their clothing. As if to compensate for the lack of washing and redressing of the deceased for burial, one poor man is mourned as having been buried in his ‘suit’. The watery depths are like a ‘foreign’ land: O train, you with brass wheels, speed ahead, train Bring back the drowned from the lands of strangers

The train, the mode of transport which conveys people in Upper Egypt up and down the Nile valley, can bring back the soul from strange and foreign domains.

Those Who Suffered Death by Scorpion Sting Some laments create the sensations experienced by the person who has suffered this fate: when the scorpion strikes within a pile of mud bricks, the person perspires until death like a pot of lentils. Others describe its shape:

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A scorpion from the dung, my sister … it stung you, a scorpion from the dung A powerful scorpion, protruding necklace in open desert

Such a sting may only be treated by a spiritual healer. Consequently, the sufferer should be taken to the exorciser of scorpion sting and judge of the dead in the nether world: Exorcise it from the earth! You say to us, exorcise it from the earth The exorciser from our town could find no justice in us Exorcise it from the nether world! Why not bring an exorciser from the nether world? The exorciser from our town could find no justice in us

The Dramatis Personae of Lament: Signs, Symbols and Referents To summarise, therefore, each persona in the cidid would seem to be mourned within the familiar constellation of social and kinship roles in Upper Egypt. Each is an abstraction, an archetype that conforms to conventionalised notions of gender roles, social hierarchies and status, with little scope for personalisation. All husbands/fathers who die are mourned as ‘the father’ and a mother as ‘the mother’. Those who die without heirs risk being deprived of the life-force which guarantees the survival of their name and memory. Because of the collective performance tradition, we can conclude that the persona of an individual is recognised by the group as a whole. It is a social construct designed to reaffirm and idealise the person in his or her public role and sanction, in a collective sense, the symbols by which this person shall be mourned by the local community. The qualities of the person praised in a particular category are seldom character traits. Rather, they reflect culturally ingrained and engendered notions of beauty and elegance derived mainly from the ecological and natural surround. This set of personas with its cluster of tropes and images, functions as a systemising matrix, therefore, setting the rules for variation and establishing the mechanism by which the motifs of lament can be developed and expanded within pre‑defined semiotic parameters. In the cidid, certain symbolic messages about the afterlife appear to be repeated for the sake of the deceased in a restricted form of variation. The laments are shaped into bundles of rhyming couplets and as several scholars have observed, the couplet form lends itself to particular exploitation of content and meaning by the performer or composer as it facilitates variation and transformation (Fox 1974; Bricker 1974). The very structure of the cidid also encapsulates the essence of lament. Through the device of antithesis the lamenter accentuates the ambiguities surrounding death, and the psychological dilemma created by loss as in this example:

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Truly, you have no right to leave, young man, truly you have no right to leave Nor have you the right to tears or lament Truly, you have no right to depart, young man, you have no right to depart Nor do you have the right to tears or lamentation

The lamenter chastises the young man and threatens to deprive him of lamentation, ironically at the same moment, bemoaning his passing. The binary form facilitates contrast and the juxtaposition of opposites; consequently, an image of immortality and resurrection, ‘a palm frond moored in the clover’, may be counterpoised against an image of stark realism, for example, ‘a young woman lying motionless on the bed’. The juxtaposition creates an ambivalence which engenders pathos and highlights the futility of human belief in the resurrection of life. Less explicit modes of contrast such as synthetic or synonymous parallelism permit the construction of a structurally more fluid series of oppositions, rhetorical strategies which succeed in reiterating the innate belief in the capacity of the deceased to survive the tribulations of death while at the same time, engaging the sympathies of the mourners. The lamenter may use a form of elegiac repetition to shift from a sentiment of hope and the possibility of redemption to a note of resignation. For example, in this lament, the dead person ‘has been’ healed, ‘should’ be healed and yet the lamenter pleads, ‘Would there were a healer!’ (with the non-italicised words, spoken, not sung): O healer, like a physician at the grave, O healer They brought you the ailing one and the pain disappeared Heal them, like a physician at the grave, heal them! The ailing women came to you and the pain is with them As I berate them, O tomb, I berate you too Would that there were within you a physician who could heal! O young one! O my brother! Truly I berate you, O tomb, I berate you Would that there were within you a physician who could heal For you, my father!

Careful sequencing of lament is also part of the poet’s strategy. In this instance, the lamenter then chooses to sing a lament which seems to signify belief in revivification of the person buried deep in the earth: Cascading pomegranates, under the ‘bed’ cascade the pomegranates Above the bed tosses and turns the elegant one Cascading lemons, under the ‘bed’ cascade the lemons Above the bed tosses and turns the handsome one … for you, my father!

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In this subterranean landscape where fertile forces – the seeds of lemons, pomegranates and grapes – cascade ‘under the bed’, the person tosses and turns in a perpetual state of wakefulness and potency despite death. The soul after death may speak entirely in the first person (and in this case, the lamenter forges a quatrain comprised of two very similar couplets, one with a singular end-rhyme, the second with the plural): Pull me up! Why I said, Pull me up! I said, Pull me up! I have been submerged in the inundated plot Pull me up, I said, Pull me up! I said. Pull me up! I have been submerged in the inundated plots

Extended metaphor or allegory also accentuates and highlights the antithesis of life in death. By weaving long strings of lament designed to create the illusion of a narrative, the lamenter amplifies the vision of an idyllic scene. Realisation of the actuality of death is staved off until the poignant finale. The gazelle hunt allegory exemplifies this technique: A doe gazelle among gazelles strolls along Gleefully the hunter has feasted Grazing the scrub grass, a doe gazelle among gazelles grazes the scrub grass When the hunter hunts her down, he yields nothing When the hunter hunts her down, he yields nothing Ease them down, lead gazelle, ease them down Why, to the ‘seas’ of the Nile lead them down Edge them down gently, lead gazelle, edge them down gently To the ‘seas’ of the Nile, take them down Ease them down, lead gazelle, ease them down Do not let those saluki hounds ravage them To the seas of the Nile, lead them down From on high, the mountain gazelle came down from on high O indigo day there was the Bishari And they saw her, the mountain gazelle wandered off and they saw her They separated her from the rest, the saluki hounds, and hunted her down She peered out from the highest point, the mountain gazelle peered out from the highest point They separated her from the rest but with difficulty They separated her from the rest but with difficulty From the highest (peak), the mountain gazelle came down from the highest (peak) Behind her, a Bishari, curled behind his shield

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From the crook in the rock, the mountain gazelle came down from a crook in the rock Behind her, a Bishari, in the shoes with curled up toes From the open plain, the mountain gazelles came down from the open plain Behind them, a Bishari, in his round sirwal You with your head bared, mountain gazelle, you with head bared An archer from the mountain peak spied you And must have pierced you in the shoulder O you with your hair unplaited, mountain gazelle, you with your hair unplaited An archer from the mountain peak spied you And must have pierced you in the back

The hunter in this saga, a Bishari nomad, native of the expanse of desert between the Red Sea and Aswan, crouches behind his shield in his full sirwal, the shirred Turkish trousers he is accustomed to wearing. Dressed in his distinctive leather sandals with curled up toes, he stalks the gazelles that manoeuvre in and out of the treacherous rocks. In this lament, the angel of death is personified as the hunter, furtive and deadly in his aim. In an analogous lament sung by a different lamenter, ‘the gazelle’, this time the young woman, is to be led down to seek succour in the Nile where she will be enveloped in its waters: Grazes on bracken, a doe gazelle among gazelles grazes on bracken When the hunter hunts her down, he yields nothing Ascends the alfa grass, Woe is me! A doe gazelle among gazelles ascends the alfa grass When the hunter hunts her down, it is by the order of the Lord Strolls along, a doe gazelle among gazelles strolls along When he hunts her down, he has not eaten since the day before Woe is me, how he has feasted!

Both these hunting dramas reveal the lamenters’ consummate skill and prolific imagination. Lamenters compose these litanies spontaneously, engaging the mourners in the immediacy of the event and through their compositions, impel the bereaved to lament the innocent victims, trapped and murdered by the voracious ‘hunter’.

Conclusion As these analyses show, women learn the structure and form of laments at funerals and then compose variants within a semantic field of metaphors and symbols pertinent to the person being mourned and the circumstances of death. The end-rhyme pairings aid memorisation and facilitate variation.

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When the women who attend funerals shuffle and reshuffle the images and epithets to create new nuances and new couplets, the laments become infused with new meaning. At the same time, the emotional power of these ‘texts’ accrues in performance over many funerals. As Steven Feld has argued with respect to Kaluli sung-weeping (1982), it is through the reiteration of laments in performance that nostalgic memories of loved ones, lost and mourned, erupt in the hearing and culminate in tears.

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The Performance of Emotion

Rhetoric, Authenticity and the Boundaries of Grief For the men, O lamenter, weep for the men! And whatever may be said for them shall be in their honour For the great men, O lamenter, weep for the great men! And whatever may be said for them brings them honour



(Balabil)

At the beginning of my research, I stressed to women that I was interested in the poetry of the laments and wanted the laments to be deliberately divorced from the context of performance. But then on witnessing my first lament performance, I became fascinated by the dynamic of interaction and fluency of communication between the main lamenters and the mourners, and realised that it was important to analyse these performance codes in order to understand the meaning of the laments. One of the most perturbing questions I was to confront was the apparent disparity between emotion and text in lament performance. The cidid revolve around certain themes and are restricted in form and content, though improvisation may be tolerated within certain bounds. The texts are restrained in their emotionality and yet the emotions of loss and pain, choked back during the lamentation, erupt after one or two lines of utterance and are volubly expressed. Where does the locus of emotion lie: in the remembrances of funerals past, or in the actuality of performance? The laments are divided into distinct sub-genres. Laments known as nadb extol the elegance and beauty of the deceased and are also known as mujammalat: ‘compliments’. They form part of the eulogistic and ritual tradition of lamentation. Others are for the self. While the task of the semi-professional mourner or badaya is to induce tears in the assembled throng of relatives and friends, the public forum of a funeral is also acknowledged to be a legitimate setting for the expiation of personal grief, centring around the suffering and tribulations of the mourners in general: widowhood, poverty and loneliness. In commenting on the laments, the contemplative lamenter, Balabil, said to me: ‘Write them down, my sister, write them down ... these

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laments, so bitter … so bitter, that wrench apart my insides’. Despite her role as a professional lamenter and therefore, one to whom sentiments may be presumed to be ‘for sale’, her deep-seated grief about the message of laments was unequivocal.

Authenticity and Emotion in Lament

O my son … the hired mourner is not like the bereaved mourner … other discoursers speak and no one cries, but you speak and weeping is heard on every side (said à propos of rhetoric and rhetoreticians by Umar ibn Dharr in kitab al-qussas w’al-mudhakkirin in Ibn al-Jawzi 1973: 149.)

Upper Egyptians differentiate between the histrionic display of grief by a professional wailer (naddaba) and the sincere expression of emotion and lament by the bereaved. Lila Abu Lughod noted that conventionality of expression in the discourse of mourning has been associated in the West with artifice or lack of authenticity since the ritualised nature of performance is accompanied by sudden and abrupt transformations of mood,1 and in the eighteenth century La Description de l’Égypte, this sentiment is clearly enunciated: [The hired mourners] shout out but the greatest number of them seem to ape the pain that they imitate, however. Their cries, although very strict and very piercing, have a tone too sustained and too assured to express the anguish of pain. Their movements are too decided and deliberate to announce the abatement of sadness. In a word, they seem to mock the dead and those who pay them, in that they do not seem to cry… (de Chabrol 1813–26: 715–16)2

The French scholars were unaware of the distinction between hired mourners (naddabat) and the lead lamenter or ‘one who begins’ in the funerary ritual. It is acknowledged that amongst those women who are compelled to work as hired mourners, the question of emotion is not relevant. They live in abject poverty and as they attest, it is their own sorrow and bitter fate that abets their frenzy and causes them to rail against heaven. Women in Luxor say that they have espoused lament as the medium for the communication and alleviation of sorrow. As a kind of feminine discourse, lament creates an environment for the enactment of emotions of sorrow, anger and loss, and empowers women to display those sentiments. In the interaction between the principal lamenter, her respondent, the bereaved and the consoling chorus, emotion is incarnated and released in the meshing of voices. To the performers, the experience of grief is incarnated in the act of performance itself. Mourning also involves the rigorous enactment of particular behaviours. For the bereaved, ‘performance’ is to emulate the dead in material fashion:

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mourners fast and become physically immobilised, their bodies are caked with dust and they cease to engage in social interaction with others. Grief is audible and identified with two kinds of sounds: sirah, high-pitched shrieks (uttered at the announcement of death) and the chanting of lament punctuated by high-pitched cries and weeping for the deceased. The dialogic relationship in Egypt between discourse ‘about emotion’ and the language and experience of emotion is highlighted by Abu Lughod (1989) in her study of discourses of lament and emotion amongst the Awlad cAli of the Northern Mediterranean coast. She observes that emotion is stratified and removed from the domain of discourse about emotion, contending that women express and discuss grief without reference to emotions, in the absence of what she terms ‘a psychological language’. Moreover, women are not accustomed to reflecting on what they feel; rather, emotions are socially constituted and ‘directed towards others’ (ibid). Helen Watson, who recorded and translated the stories of women residents of the City of the Dead in Cairo observed that women narrators would adopt different personae in telling their stories or the names of their characters (1992). The fact that women seem to objectify themselves, create new characters, mask their identities and distance emotion from themselves, suggests a parallel with the cidid which may illuminate some of the most fundamental notions about the phenomenology of emotion in women’s culture. Benedicte Grima Johnson (1990: 35) analysed how emotions of grief defined as gham are constructed in Pakistani Pakhtun society. She interprets gham as an ‘emotion word’ that conveys sentiments of sadness and loss but is also ‘a cultural, learned, performed phenomenon’. This non-ethnocentric approach to emotion presents a paradigm for exploring the nature of cidid in performance. Laments are not natural discourse. It is impossible for an outsider to know or gauge another person’s true emotional response as differentiated from the outward and visible signs of ‘performance’. However, by analysing ‘emotion words’ I was able to find a catalogue of allusions to emotion that helped reveal the lamenters’ state of mind. This lament: ‘My soul is broken and attuned to suffering...’ would seem to refer to suffering as a constant state of being. Others include frequent allusions to the Eye/eye (il cain) as both arbiter of fate and the source of tears. For example, Tariyya asks the eye to humour her and grant her tears, while cAliya bids the eye to weep, to help the lamenter and also urges others ‘to weep on the seas’. Tears are pledged to the eye in response to the decrees of fate: ‘Whatever you may ask for, we will give you tears’. These tears flow in honour of the deceased as in this lament ‘The soaking of the handkerchief is for the leaning fortress which must be uprighted/seen’, but the emphasis is on the manifestation of tears, not the sorrow: ‘I soaked through the handkerchief’ and ‘my eye wept’. Balabil conjures up an impassioned scene by intensifying the description

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of the moment when the shrieks of weeping (gawir) ‘come to her on stony ground’, simultaneously invading her with anxiety (haraja). She asks: ‘Let my eyes weep’ and then denies that she feels any emotion: ‘I have not come angry [za calana] nor distraught [magbuna]’. At a later stage, though, she reveals that her ‘soul is suffering’, ‘tried ’ and ‘accustomed to anxieties and calumnies’. In an apparent reversal, though, as if candid disclosure of true emotion to invoke maternal sympathy, she also tries to cajole her mother to return by describing her pain directly: ‘I am in pain and long to tell you of it’. In absolute contrast, the lamenter from al-Bayadiyya announces: ‘My gown on my body ripped open on top of me’, as if grief has propelled her to commit an act she is not conscious of, nor responsible for. Grief is also a physical force that gnaws into the body: ‘You are a maggot in my bone, you that have dimmed my eye and blinded my sight’. The lamenter from IDDabcaiyya includes only one self-conscious reference to emotion in her lament which is prefaced by the distancing conditional: ‘If I were to weep and say … O apple of my eye, how he made me groan and weep’, an indication of the suppression of her emotion. Elsewhere, sorrow is sometimes expressed by promising a gesture of empathy for the deceased: ‘I shall lay down my reed matting and sleep in its shade’. Šargawiyya and Zeinab invoke the device of inverted perspective twice as if to feel or emulate the suffering of the deceased: ‘Go ahead, prop me up, my body cannot move/has grown cold’; ‘My beloved, hold me up! My balance has gone/my body paralysed’. Šargawiyya feels the earth around her: ‘My red [hennaed?] fringe is drenched in earth’ and later adds as a response, ‘They propped me up but my body went cold ’. She also confesses ‘O how my heart ached when the palm frond flew away’ and promises the deceased: ‘If you were to come to us at home, I would weep’. In the most explicitly emotive of the performed lamentations, Tariyya harps on the physical sensation of grief: ‘How [the death] pierced me to the quick like red-hot pokers’ and ‘burned me in my heart ’. She declares that ‘the complaint will blind her eyes’, the pain of suffering ‘hurt her and invaded her heart’ and implores the eye for tears. In her capacity as a professional mourner, she wishes that the camel driver (who bears the body to the tombs) could be ‘hired in her place’ as the pain is too great for her to endure, even as a lamenter. Moreover, Zeinab accuses the deceased: ‘You stripped us naked’. Grief at the death was so overwhelming that the lamenters were forced to shame themselves by ripping their clothes. Moreover, in grief: ‘Your son for you has ripped open his sleeves/both sleeves’ and ‘the kohl-coloured or dyed cloth’ revealing that violent manifestations of sorrow at death are not only reserved for women, despite the conventions of behaviour.3 In her laments for the husband/father, she also complains that ‘she has a pain and wishes to tell him of it’. Despite the emotional potency of these images, these references

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21. Portrait of the lamenter, Šargawiyya

are relatively isolated. Few references to emotional states can be found in the laments, either ascribed to the lamenter or to the feelings of the deceased after death. Those which can be found revolve around physical manifestations of grief rather than psychological expression, or are found mainly in the laments recorded with professional lamenters entrusted with the task of animating the performance of grief by the group. Close scrutiny of the emotive language in the laments reveals that three mechanisms are invoked to reduce the emotionality of the most emotive language: antithesis or a negative to deny expression of feeling, i.e., ‘I have not come angry’, the conditional mode: ‘If I were to weep...’ to effect distance and, to a lesser degree, inversion of perspective, where the lamenter adopts the deceased’s point of view, feigning incomprehension of the death or the occasion of mourning: What is wrong? Why do you roll your eyes to the roof of the wall? Is it I who have had the medicine and been mourned?

By framing of an expression of sorrow or promise of tears behind a lamination of conditionality or denial, the expression of grief becomes more oblique. Invocations to weep are also strangely mechanistic: Flatter me, if I were to say to you, O eye, flatter me When I ask for tears, may they be given to me

Tears are not within psychological control but a mystical or divine outpouring of fluid: they do not come spontaneously or from sheer volition. It is the eye that weeps, not the self (innifs). The ‘self ’ is rarely invoked though the suffering endures within.

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The ‘Construction’ of Emotion Charles Briggs has suggested that the word, sana, glossed as ‘poverty’, ‘distress’ or ‘sadness’, but also the word used to mean lament amongst the Warao of Venezuela, is a mode of ‘self-expression’ though the self in question, he suggests, is a ‘rhetorical construction’ composed of multiple identities (1993). When lamenters address each other in mourning sessions, a form of dialogical interaction is created between co-performers (ibid). This dialogic and multiple voicing technique is also visible in the c idid. In her lament with the respondent, cAliya, Balabil invokes the voice of lamenter, bereaved and the deceased through a see-saw of shifting perspectives, varying the focus from ‘I’, the lamenter as in: ‘I peered over my wall and was accosted by the cry...’ to ‘I’, the bereaved: One to speak other than me, I shall bring to you a woman to speak other than me To compose poetry for you, hero of my greatness

… to ‘I’, the deceased: Creepy crawly things … who put me in? In the grave, there are creepy crawly things… Sheets for the bed … Why he said, Bring me sheets for the bed I shall wrap myself safe from the worms and deadly vipers

She also shifts spatial perspectives for the lamenters to create a heightened sense of realism, moving from inside the grave: Cast a glance at the grave and see, cast a glance and see In the heart of the tombs, my trousers are soaked . . .

… to the family house: Neighbour, look over, you with one maternal uncle, neighbour, look over, How my brother’s turban has given light to my roof

… to the procession to the tombs: They raised them up, the shrieks of weeping in the West, O our men, they raised them up, the shrieks of weeping in the West, They came to me on stony ground {brandishing staves {wielding battle staves

Catherine Lutz and Lila Abu Lughod have suggested that emotion language is used in social situations where solidarity is being ‘encouraged, challenged or negotiated’ (1990) and it is clear that solidarities are being forged in the interactive process of cidid via these rhetorical constructions. However, despite the interactional nature of lament performance, and the fact that the solidarity of the women’s group may be constantly negotiated and reinforced, the metaphorical character of Upper Egyptian lament

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may effectively restrain the mourners from overuse of bathetic or directly emotive language. The preface or ‘apology’ for lament which is often sung at the beginning of a lamentation session (an illustration of the ambivalence between official and unofficial attitudes to lament) is evidence of this. The lamenter from al-Bayadiyya, for example, justifies her desire to lament in an invocation to God: Before I speak, I ask forgiveness from God, before I speak It is death which is upon us but separation endures All must die, God is everlasting and all must die Guests in the world, we have filled our houses Everlasting is God, everything comes from God We are guests in the world but it is painful to be cut off So I intone the laments and ask forgiveness from God before I intone the laments Death is upon us but separation is hard

In this oblique way, she begs forgiveness. Lament is regarded as heretical in the socio-religious climate of orthodox revivalism, but the tension that surrounds the proscription and the practice defines the ethos of lament: it constitutes a protest against fate and divine will, and as such signals women’s rebellion against such proscriptions. As early as the Old Testament, condemnation of lament was entrenched in Judeo-Semitic thought: Ezekiel 24:16 states: ‘Yet neither shalt thou mourn nor weep, neither shall thy tears run down…’. The desire to constrain emotional response appears to have been motivated by obedience to God, as elucidated in the Lamentations of Jeremiah: ‘For thus saith the Lord, Enter not into the house of mourning, neither go to lament nor bemoan them: for I have taken away my peace from this people’ (verse 16:5). Yet looking at this type of antithetical utterance from a literary perspective recalls the Greek lament tradition (Alexiou 1974) and the desire of poets to invert meanings in order to stress their literal opposites.4 Evidence of an early use of antithesis in lament is found in the ancient Sumerian text from the description of Dilmun, land of immortality: The wailing priests walk not around about him The singer utters no wail By the side of the city, He utters no lament (Kramer 1981: 145)

This is a recurrent feature of the cidid. The lamenter’s decision to suppress emotions or to stress the antithesis of actual feeling succeeds in evoking even greater pathos for the deceased. Emotion in the cidid is not generated by singing the laments alone. It is shaped by the performance, led by ‘the one who begins’ and ‘the one

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who responds’. The introductory couplet acts as a separator of discourses and constitutes an apology for what is to come or, in some cases, a spoken but laudatory prelude. At the conclusion of a set of laments, the shift of tone into informal conversation signals the breach and descent from the elevated discourse of lament into the realm of the mundane. Orchestrated by the interaction between the badaya and her respondent and the creation of a heterophonous convergence of voices, the experience of shared sorrow is created. For example, in certain instances, the badaya and respondent may sing different lines simultaneously: They raised them up, the shrieks of weeping in the West, O our men, They raised them up, the shrieks of weeping in the West, They came to me on stony ground {brandishing staves [sahibin šiwab] {wielding battle staves [maskin ihrab]

… but their voices still merge at the cadences in a single, sustained sound, ‘aaa’. At this point, the monologic voice of the main lamenter fuses with its counterpart to create unison. The dialogic laments that are formed and become committed to memory act as repositories of emotion, latent in expression and designed to erupt in the telling. The laments are emotionally-charged ritual texts that embody symbolic messages about the afterlife. The emotional power of the texts is not embedded in the lines themselves; rather, it is acquired in the context of performance, through reiteration, over many lament sessions. As I observed, women approach lamentation sessions with resignation and the mere utterance of a few syllables of grief-imbued text induces almost spontaneous tears. In the few moments before recording the laments in Karnak, for example, I could see how local women seemed to be bracing themselves for a draining of emotional energy and perhaps, a lapse into despair. With the badaya acting as the proponent of lament and orchestrator of interaction, the women were seemingly aware that they would be inveigled into tears, even against their will. Moreover, when I arrived at a funeral in Luxor during the intervals between lament sessions, women were able to chat about events of the town and engage freely in conversation, as if the realm of lament was deliberately divorced from that of everyday social interaction. It was as if grief is to be channelled, given voice and expiated through lament. During lamentation, tears are regarded as the appropriate manifestation of sadness. When they erupt at the end of a couplet, they create momentum and propel the lamentation forward. And on occasion, in the desire to provoke emotion in the bereaved who may be less inclined to unleash tears, perhaps less practised in lament, an onion can be brought to provoke a flood of cathartic tears.5 The artificially induced but socially appropriate expressions of feeling are not less well regarded than natural outpourings of grief. Tears are not deemed to be shed merely from sadness. As the

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laments reveal, copious weeping is considered culturally desirable for the easing of sorrow and the honouring of the deceased in the grave. One famous lamenter, I was told, was reputed to be able to ‘make a stone weep’,6 an expression which suggests that tears do not always flow freely, even to women well-versed in the art of mourning. Caraveli-Chaves has described the Greek tradition of lament performance as a fusion of elements which carry symbolic associations and trigger pain so facilitating creation of an ‘extraordinary emotional context’ (1986: 176). In Upper Egypt, for whom do women weep? Men, cynical of the authenticity of the practice of lament, say they weep not for the deceased but for themselves. In weaving the chain of intercorrespondences between text and lamenter, women may lament for themselves and their own as they grieve for the person who has died. However, this intertwining of persons and the rhetorical construction of the lament is what creates the shared experience of grief and accords it its power.

Gender, Pollution, Fertility and Power Engendered traditions may vary in response to socio-historic events and changes in ideology in Upper Egypt are no exception. Women are now the prime lamenters in Upper Egypt and men are not privy to lamentation sessions, but in the fifth century BC, according to Herodotus, mourning behaviours now practised exclusively by women – the smearing of the face with mud, the tying of the waist with rope girdles and perambulation of the town – were performed equally by men and women (trans. de Selincourt 1954: 160). Definitions of purity and impurity or pollution do not follow strict gender divisions, however. In Upper Egypt, both sexes are considered ‘impure’ after sexual intercourse until the ritual washing restores purity but women are by nature inherently impure because they experience menstruation and may be tainted by the pollution known as mušahara (from the Arabic šahr meaning ‘moon’.) To avoid the stigma of pollution during the holy month of Ramadan, one Muslim woman told me that she and her friends would take birth control pills during the fasting period to stave off menstruation and in this way, avoid the state of pollution that would link them, by association, with those ignominious few who did not fast. In Greek society, according to Dubisch (1986a), a woman’s body symbolises family integrity, a consequence of the belief that pollution may enter through orifices in the female body. In Luxor, the belief is not dissimilar. Mušahara may afflict child-bearing or lactating women if they come in contact with recently bereaved widows, menstruating women or women who have just left a funeral. According to some, it may also strike and pollute women who are not circumcised, such that a girl who refrains from being circumcised is branded a threat to the female community.7

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Widows are required to live in exclusion, and in the 1970s in Egyptian Nubia (which stretches south of Aswan up to the Sudanese border), widows were required to live in isolation and sit on reed mats, immobile, for the duration of the forty-day mourning. In Luxor, the physical isolation and the deliberate self-abasement of bereavement was also observed. A widow was expected to remain in her same (polluted) clothes for the entire forty days though by the 1980s in Luxor, the period of immobility was eased to fifteen days. In phenomenological terms, death is linked to issues of fertility. In Mary Douglas’ formulation (1961), the danger from menstrual blood stems from the belief that this blood represents that of ‘a person who never was’, a soul without a body. In the Egyptian cosmological system, a similar conception exists. This blood, along with any part of the human body (hair or nails, for example), is believed to contain ruh, soul or life force. The link between pollution from menstrual blood and the dead is the latent energy of the life force, and hair and nail clippings are carefully stored in niches in brick walls to avoid bewitching. A bereaved woman, in communication with the soul of the deceased which is acknowledged to hover around the domain of the living until the fortieth day, may be confronted with, and sometimes possessed by, an equally dangerous, ‘living’ spirit. Older women, particularly those who are post-menopausal, may see themselves as the designated lamenters within Upper Egyptian society because of the relationship between lamentation and fertility. The dangers courted by a woman beyond child-bearing years crossing the threshold of death, ‘as a mediator or intercessor between the living and the dead’ (Tolbert 1989) are reduced since the traversing of domains is no longer a threat. An older woman is particularly empowered to cross the threshold by virtue of her sexual maturity and experience of childbirth. The belief that the power to conceive may arise from contact with dead or mummified flesh constitutes yet another link between fertility and death. In one ancient Egyptian tomb on the West Bank of Luxor, a mummified foetus of a baby lies encased in glass. According to the tomb guards, local women come to touch this case or walk over the object seven times in order to be able to conceive. The dangers to fertility from mušahara may stem from the intangibles that resist human control: the lunar cycle of menstrual flow, and mysteries of fertility and conception according to Janice Boddy (1989). These constitute what Douglas (1966) describes as an ambiguous zone, a potential source of danger to women wishing to conceive, even when the pollution cast on a woman by another is inadvertent. In this sense, such pollution resembles the destructive power of the Evil Eye, in the Egyptian belief system a concept which holds that a stray, yearning glance cast on one person by another with ‘an Evil Eye’ may precipitate illness and destruction. The colour black in Luxor is also associated with fertility, loss of virginity, social status and finally, bereavement. In the 1980s, on formal

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occasions  – including trips to Luxor and funerals  – a married middleaged woman would don a heavy black cotton robe (jubba) over her dark patterned house dress, wrapping her long black silk head veil with a purple stripe (futa) over her tight head scarf (mandil) and sheer black veil (tarha). Young brides on the West Bank, on the other hand, would wear ostentatious colours of velvet, yellow, red and green for the first stages of marriage, then, after childbirth, don the more austere black dress associated with women who had given birth. A bereaved widow was expected to wear black dresses in the interior of the house as a sign of mourning and respect for her husband; she was also required to dye her underwear and all her clothes with a powerful black dye, so as to swathe herself inside and out in the colour of mourning.8 The embodiment of fertility, death and omens of evil in the colour black seemed to reflect and refract an uneasy ambiguity. I never attempted to wear the elaborate futa but did wear the black silk head veil, embellished with brilliants, as a neck scarf. Once, while wearing a black velvet overdress in Luxor that I had purchased in Cairo, I was asked, ‘Why are you wearing black? Are you sad like us?’ I had thought it would be appropriate to my status as a married woman but in this case, I was wrong: it was associated with a state of mourning. A young girl’s modesty is similarly measured by her acts of concealment and dress code. In Luxor, where display of the female body is strictly limited and a woman’s body is regarded as a symbol of a family’s moral probity, a young girl’s modesty is esteemed and highly guarded (Boddy 1989: 111). The fierce protection of a young girls’ chastity in Upper Egypt is evinced by an early preoccupation with the separation of the sexes before puberty and the obligatory covering of the hair with a scarf from the age of five or six. In Egypt, as in Sudan, a woman’s hair is considered one of the most sensuous and provocative features of her appearance. Bourdieu’s metaphor of ‘transcription’ (1977), which emphasises the incising and underscoring of cultural values and notions onto the body space, has powerful resonance in Upper Egypt. In Luxor, cultural transcriptions on the female body begin with the wrapping of the hair from the earliest age and culminate in the clandestine operation of female genital excision. In Upper Egypt this operation is performed on young girls swiftly and covertly with the complicity of mothers and is motivated by several factors: prevailing notions of social morality, fear of women’s unbridled sexuality and a conviction amongst women that a truncated clitoris is aesthetically desirable.9 In fact, the major intent of this operation is the regulation of what is considered to be unconstrained and dangerous female libido. Unlike the Sudanese practice, which heralds this event with celebration, this operation is neither celebrated nor alluded to publicly within a Luxor family. It is out of tune with the notion of celebration underscoring most Upper Egyptian cultural expression. Unlike weddings (farah, pl. afrah) the corresponding circumcision feasts for boys (tuhur ) and birth feasts (issibuc ), all of which celebrate aspects of fertility and life and are highly festive occasions, this

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painful and clandestine act is perceived as a moral duty. While a young boy undergoing circumcision becomes an caris or ‘bridegroom’, a young girl ‘is made pure and clean’. The Egyptian ethnographer, Ammar (1954) quotes a theory elaborated by Meinhardus (1970: 321) and suggests that at the root of the practice is a belief in the sexual ambiguities of the human body and inherently hermaphrodite human soul, a theory I found to be supported by the imagery of folk songs performed by women at the male circumcision or ‘wedding’ ceremony. The excision of the clitoris entails removal of the ‘male cockscomb’, while in male circumcision the muzayyin or barber cuts the ‘female’ prepuce from the penis, so allowing its ‘maleness’ to become pre-eminent. After circumcision, both male and female children are potentially fertile. Should either die before marriage, it is believed that each will consummate a ‘wedding’ in death. The concept of wedding in death appears in the folk traditions of Romania and China and thus is not peculiar to Egypt. Symbols of defloration and death become conflated in China and consequently, the boundaries between death, parting and the loss of virginity become blurred. One Chinese lament invokes the image of the smashing of an egg as evocative of the death of innocence and yet a prescient reminder of the gravity of the occasion of marriage. Furthermore, on their wedding day, Chinese girls wear the garment they will be buried in (Martin 1988). The Romans similarly prevailed upon their brides to wear white at weddings, perhaps as a mark of their imminent defloration or because white was a sober reminder of the colour of the bride’s shroud – in both cases, the colour white signalling a ‘death’. Wedding laments are performed in China (Martin 1988), Greece (Herzfeld 1986) and Finno-Ugric and Karelian culture (Pentikainen 1978; Tolbert 1987), amongst the Staroveri of North-Western Siberia (Pentikainen 1990), the Paraiyar in Tamil society (Trawick 1989) and Romania (Kligman 1988), but not in Upper Egypt. In those societies, the rites of wedding and death are engaged in formal but complementary tension. The defloration of the bride is a rupture and a death in the same way that the departure of the bride from the family house is a prolonged absence, akin to death. In Egypt, a wedding is not a death but death may entail a wedding. In Romania, the bride is to consummate a holy wedding with Jesus in heaven (Kligman 1988) while the Coptic lamenter from Luxor first deplores the fact that there has been no wedding and then imagines a mystical ceremony by moonlight:10 The deacon, while I was passing by the priest with the deacon, They did not celebrate his wedding ‘coronation’ nor did I see him In the middle of the night, I conjure up the ceremony and it is the middle of the night There is an Alexandrian candle and priests: there are two

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It is moonlight, I conjure up the wedding ceremony and it is moonlight There is an Alexandrian candle and priests: there are ten

Both the Romanian and Egyptian Coptic laments cast the wedding in death in an ecclesiastical light and whereas in Luxor, ca 1950, such a wedding was accomplished by a procession accompanied by a band of mournful trumpets known as ilhazina, in the Romanian case, the wedding of the dead is observed with great sorrow as a purely symbolic gesture (Kligman 1988: 230). There is an element of fear at the root of the Romanian belief, moreover. According to informants, unless a symbolic wedding is performed during the funeral, it is believed that the person will return in search of a mate to fulfil his or her social destiny and unrealised sexual desires (ibid: 216). In Upper Egypt, the belief in marriage to the houris is related to the concept of heaven in the Qu’ran, but may more generally be attributed to the fact that death is conceived of as a re-birth, a potentially fertile destiny rather than a state of closure or non-being. The characterisation by Bloch and Parry of mortuary ritual in Madagascar as a scene of unbridled sexuality – the triad of ‘flesh, decomposition and women’ in opposition to what they describe as ‘true, ancestral fertility’, a mystical process, symbolised by the tomb and ‘male’ bones’ – seems a far cry from Egyptian funerary performance (1982: 19–21). In the cidid, the sexual potency attributed to men after death is evident in the use of symbols of male fertility and in the descriptions of men as ‘bridegrooms’ when confronted by the nubile and audacious houris of heaven. There is considerable silence, however, surrounding the sexual behaviour of women beyond the grave. Young virgins, the so-called ‘brides’, must succumb to a rapacious male spirit. In fact, the few laments which focus on the act of consummation after death exemplify the ‘untamed natural sexuality’ of men, not women, as Bloch and Parry have proposed. The traditional association of women with sexuality and men with fertility as exemplified by the Bloch and Parry analogy is a patent example of what Emily Martin in her study of Chinese wedding and funerary laments describes as a ‘one-sided perception of gender perspective’ (1988). The differing attitudes of men and women become evident in their expressive traditions (ibid: 164) particularly in a community where formal separation of the sexes at rites of passage is the norm. Women do mourn the loss of their sexual partners in the laments, but far from the ears of men. While walking across the desert from a visit to the Coptic women’s monastery known as Deir al-Muharrib one day, a friend – aware of my interest in lamentation – picked up a long, phallicshaped flint and began to intone a lament for the strength and beauty of a man’s sexual organ, but with sarcasm and humour. From the nature of the lament she sang, and although she was mimicking the genre, it was clear that laments mourning the loss of sexual pleasure and glorifying male sexuality are not only composed but performed.11 The social taboo against

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discussion of sexuality in public and in mixed groups mitigates against any reference to sexuality other than in single-sex congregations, but in the female domain of the cidid, all kinship members, even the elderly man (characterised as ‘the aphrodisiac of the woman’s youth’: ya cambar ijjid can) are traditionally mourned as sexually potent and fertile, regardless of age. At one large funeral, I heard a woman say to a man her age, šidd hilak ya camm (‘Pull yourself together, my uncle’) which signalled to me the fact that women in Upper Egypt are expected to be more resilient bearers of grief than men. It is believed that men may not be able to deal with the strain of emotion and histrionic expression and so mark death in a separate space, with public rituals that preclude emotional display and speech. Women, on the other hand, perform their clandestine laments in a private and intimate space in which emotional display is paramount and sung expression is vital.

The Boundaries of Grief In the lament tradition, there is perceived to be a balance between a general proscription of bathos and the requirement that professional lamenters render the metaphorical lament texts in a highly emotional fashion. The degree of sorrow a woman is expected to exhibit at a funeral is measured by her identity and personal situation: is she bereaved or a hired mourner? Is she a widow who has become a bona fide professional lamenter? Within the ritual framework of lament performance, the boundaries for the expression of grief are also defined. Lamentation is designed as a platform for the expiation of grief; the person should be duly mourned on the days elected for lamentation. Widows are expected to remain in a state of grief but for others, a reluctance to move beyond grief may cause psychological unbalance. According to the folk conception of mental health, the qarin/a (soul double) may begin to threaten the wellbeing of the person if a death is not mourned properly. In the words of a Nubian woman healer in Cairo, the over-dominant qarin/a will have to be ‘summoned’, incarnated in a piece of wood and ‘burnt’ through magical conjuring and fumigation by incense if the destructive influence of this malevolent ‘spirit’ on the psyche is to be contained. In the Egyptian conception, sadness must be allowed to rage and then subside. At the funeral of the deaf and dumb girl I was allowed to attend, I suddenly found myself weeping unconstrainedly. While scanning my face carefully for any sign of play-acting (they knew my interest in lament), the women who clustered near me, cautioned: ‘That’s enough! Don’t cry too much. It is enough. The girl was handicapped and her mother is still young. She may have more children. Don’t cry too much.’ I was not to become too emotionally involved or too visibly grieved by the death of a young girl, but should reserve copious tears, they said, for a great man. However, in the case of the bereaved mother who wrapped her head with

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a fillet, poured the white dust of the ground on her face and began to leap up and down in the open desert in the slow dance of grief, the social constraints which govern the expressions of sorrow were perceived to be justifiably broken. She was said to be exonerated of clamouring against fate and God’s will because of the severity of her pain. Women’s cultural and ritual practices to expiate grief lie outside the bounds of Islamic or Christian propriety. The politics of emotion are complex and, to a certain extent, convoluted within the social fabric of community life. The management of grief through lamentation has eluded total proscription by both Islam and Coptic Christianity despite its designation as haram (‘forbidden’) in Islam and its absolute condemnation by the Church. Lamentation has continued to be performed in the houses of many families on the West Bank of Luxor even though men declare that they have imposed a ban on its practice. Where a ban has been decreed and upheld, an uneasy quiet attends those funerals as women come together in silence, separately from men, deprived of a role to perform. In face of these tensions, two distinctly engendered institutions of mourning have continued to exist, one for men and one for women, one sanctioned by the official religions, the other not. Lamentation is a transgressive act; however, like other counter-orthodoxies  – in particular, the practice of female genital excision, condemned recently by the Mufti of Al-Azhar as un-Islamic and by the government as illegal, but still widely practised throughout Upper Egypt  – it is tolerated within the ambit of popular tradition.

Private Manifestations of Grief Despite the collectivised ritual of lamentation performed within the women’s domain in Upper Egypt, it is also true that individual women may observe mourning in unorthodox and unsanctioned ways. I had gone with Hamida to pay condolences to a woman, Moza, whose husband had died only two weeks previously. We found her squatting on the ground beside the fire, almost in total darkness. She spoke as if intoning a recitative: I have not moved from here since he died, They bring me food and I sit here…

On entering, Hamida made the appropriate greetings and then suddenly began to utter her own litany of grief. Speaking of herself in the third person but then shifting to the first, she chanted in a monotone: Hamida šaifa ilmarar; kullu cala rasi ana Hamida has seen bitterness; everything weighs on my head

Moza intoned in turn the circumstances of her husband’s death: I gave him clean bedding and something to drink.

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I fulfilled all his wants and then he died. What more could I have done for him? And then there was the money he owed here and there...12

Hamida had brought with her a kilo of sugar and in return was given gurus (funerary breads) and buffalo cheese to take home. The ritualised monologues of grief seemed to act as a responsory, as if in a litany, one lamenter replying to the other’s enunciation of suffering. She asked Moza if she had been to the cemetery yet. It was after the fifteenth day and she was able to leave the house but Moza replied no, she had not: she had pledged not to go until the forty-first day since her deceased husband ‘might assault her’. Her sense of intimidation from her dead husband was perplexing. I sensed she was afraid he would think she had not mourned his death with due honour. In revenge, he might cause her harm. She had, perhaps, been afraid of him in life and was waiting for his ultimate departure from this world on the fortieth day, the day on which the spirit is finally relegated to the new abode. Until then, she intimated, his spirit might still be present near the grave, ‘waiting to confront her’. Moza swayed back and forth a little and sang a few lines of a lament for herself. She would not go to the tomb until after the fortieth day since the women would cry and it would be difficult for her to keep her composure. In Moza’s case, she did not look forward to the performance of lamentations for catharsis or appeasement of her sorrow. Instead, she chose to avoid these events and remain apart from friends and family. Moza’s daughter then brought in her new baby, swaddled in cloth, and said that as yet she had no name. The sibu c, or seventh day feast, at which a child is duly named, had not yet been celebrated due to the circumstances of mourning. Hamida cautioned her that she should name the child in any case, despite the mourning, since otherwise the soul of the baby girl could be in jeopardy. ‘It might wander forever lost in the graveyard if she were to die without a name,’ Hamida told me later. I realised then that a name was still conceived of as a vital component of a person’s being in the spirit world, in addition to ilqarin/a (the ‘soul-double’), also known as iluht (the ‘sister’) or ilmutab c (‘the one who follows after’), and irruh (the ‘life-force’). With a name, it seemed, a soul could be remembered for eternity. In the light of Moza’s recitation and her wish to avoid the pain of lament, it would appear that women’s personal attitudes to performance and emotion in death rituals may differ profoundly from one to the other. Moza perceived no route for the less histrionic expression of pain and grief. Lamenters, on the other hand, appear to perceive no other vehicle for the expression of sorrow and grief. When I went to see Balabil in her village in 1987, she was still sitting on the ground with her spindle, by then, half-blind. She came as she said from al cAraba al‑madfuna, town of Sitt (Lady) Dimiana. This is how she told me her life story:

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I was the manaha who would hold the drum. I would beat the drum, And they would wash and say laments until the seventh day For a young man. They have not stopped doing it. Until today, this very hour, it is done. For the young man in the prime of youth, they say: The day they brought them there came the indigo-dyed turbans The naked one was washed while the shallow drum was beating The day they disappeared, the white turbans vanished The naked one was washed while the shallow drum was in your hand There is a lament for every person, is there not, my dear? Write them down, my sister, Write them down… these bitter words… I used to hold the shallow drum and say these things, There were many words to be said... I was the one who would hold the drum and sing: c aliyya wi caliyya w . . . caliyya When you hold the tar [the shallow drum] and they wash the dead person, it is horrible. My husband died in the year of the malaria.13 He left me with my five children. My son whom I brought up, married off and educated, took his wife and left, my dearest, for Cairo. He stayed there and built a house on top of the tombs. I now get seven pounds pension a month, so I beg from the Muslims, my sister… When I used to spin wool before, I could live. And now I have nothing. There is nothing. I can’t plait the strands of wool. I don’t need anything, daughter of my father’s sister They have forgotten me, my dearest My brothers died a long time ago All comes from Him.

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22. The lamenter, Balabil, 1987

And my father, all of them, Even my daughter took leave from me…

‘Where did she go?’ I asked uncomprehendingly. To the cemetery in Hegaza She was uprooted just like that, Snatched away... Many words, my sister, many words… They never leave my head for one instant, my sister...

(I suddenly felt tears welling up in my eyes.) Do not cry. I weep for my son in Cairo, my sister. But now I live through the grace of the Lord. All comes from Him, my dear… These bitter words, my sister, Bitter, my sister, bitter, my sister, bitter my sister All comes from Him…14 These words that wrench apart my insides… You should have written them down. You should have written them down.

Balabil could not see my tape recorder and admonished me for not taking down her laments. What was extraordinary was that even her chiding refrain had taken on the rhythm and reverberating tone of lament. Another professional lamenter whom I knew well also had a tale to tell. Tariyya had been a daya (village midwife) and a mašta (maidservant)

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on the occasion of weddings, as well as a lamenter. Her husband and halfbrothers had died. That particular day in July, I came to her and found her alone in her simple mudbrick house. My mother brought me up, breast‑fed me and gave me food, along with the buffalo and my brothers. My mother died and my father married another woman. My two brothers died. Our Lord took them. Then, Sheikha of the Arabs, my father’s wife died. I was left. She had three children from my father And so my husband and I brought them up. Afterwards, I had a boy. He grew up and I married him off... But his father died soon afterwards, just after he got married. My son’s wife and I are estranged. I had three half‑brothers from my father’s wife. One ‘loved our Lord’ [passed away] and then another, And the third lives in Cairo. I told this brother, ‘Build me a house. This house I live in is my father’s house. Either take this one, or that one as there are two’. I went to the office and bought the land from the government. My son said, ‘Sheikhit il cArab [My dear woman] I’ll take both houses for myself…’ We argued and now they want to build a new house here and knock this one down. I live alone, my knee is bad and no one comes to see me. I just stay here weeping… Not a single one, Of all the ones I love, not one is left... Only those who left me and went away, Neither do they come to visit me, Lay eyes on me, Nor come to see me Not one... And there were three. And now that I have rheumatism, I stay alone. I eat by myself and drink by myself. People give me fifty piastres, a pound, or I ‘borrow’ dough and make my own bread. All those I have loved have passed on. Only

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the Lord … the Lord is everything. Truly, ya Sheikha, I think about this and go to a funeral and weep. It’s the end. I am by myself now.

And then suddenly she intones a softly spoken lament for the little girl who had died in the village, as if lamenting at her own funeral... I wish, little girl, that you were in my place To fold my gown over me To throw your veil over me Why couldn’t she elude fate, this little girl? Let her pull me away and dress me in her sirwal!

I asked her whether the mourners repeat the same laments at a funeral or whether they compose different words. Tariyya said, ‘Everyone will say her own words. Whatever is on her lips, she will say.15 For Fatna, the carusa or bride, we say: Nymphs of heaven, you have met her They stirred up the henna and have hennaed her O mašta [maidservant] step on the bridal shift Take money for your wedding services and stand her up I used to be the mašta. When a young girl got married, the mašta would dress her, put on her makeup and make her look beautiful. When her husband would come to pick her up for the procession, I would say, ‘Hand over the tašlima’ or ‘tip’. That is what a mašta would do. We would put a trail of dangling bells on her hair so that she would tinkle when she walked. The lament about stepping on the bride’s gown is what I used to do before leaving… I delivered Fatna, the young girl who died. I was the daya (midwife) here and so was present at all the births. My grandmother had been a midwife and I used to go with her and watch what she did. Now the doctor does that. We would take the umbilical cord, wrap it up and take it to those who work on the land. They would plant it and bring us the wheat grown in this plot. We would gather up the stalks, cook them with an onion and have them for lunch … those of us who were present at the birth…

The image of the sambul (or sabal) or ‘plaited heads of wheat’ to symbolise the young man who has died in his prime suddenly became clear. The burying of the umbilical cord in a field of wheat epitomised the symbiosis of birth and death. From this plot of earth, the kernels of wheat would be brought back to the maidservants who had presided over rites of passage such as birth, marriage and death in the village, and consumed.16 After a long period of silence, she pronounced her final lament for herself, speaking in a slow recitative:

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I married off my son in the prime of his youth They brought him to a hut of reeds and he was blocked from view I married off my son in the prime of his working life They brought him to a hut of reeds and he rejected me I placed my fate in the niche of the mosque We cried out to him – the wretched man would not listen I placed my fate in the niche of the diwan We cried out to him – the wretched man was angry I plucked out my ‘core’ 17 Made from it a torch… And from my sex, the wick… I have for these daughters of other women no value I have no luck

This woman had framed her entire life history and her fate as a lament. As revealed here in both instances, emotions which dwell on feelings of loss and self are to be articulated in the culturally-appropriate forum of lament, not in the free flow of conversation where such revelations become inappropriate. For women in Upper Egypt, the socially sanctioned mode for the expiation and manifestation of grief is lamentation. Emotional undercurrents of sorrow and anguish may be experienced and left unvoiced until the occasion of a funeral. In the Egyptian case, it is not only ‘the cosmological construction of death’ that becomes visible when death is discussed and lamented (Seremetakis 1991: 225). It is the construction of emotion through performance.18

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7

The Contemporary Laments

Concordance and Thematic Analysis In 1987 I returned to Egypt determined to explore the broader meaning of lament symbolism and metaphor. Inspired by my discussions with Susan Slyomovics who said that she ‘heard’ the words differently from our mutual transcriber Jamal, and hoping that this exercise might enable me to catch nuances of meaning my male transcribers had not grasped,1 I listened to the laments again and again, but still could not find a way to penetrate the labyrinth of symbol and motifs to make sense of the whole.2 Back in Cairo after a stint in the field, I discovered that ethnoarchaeologists, exponents of the New Archaeology, had been experimenting with a variety of innovative methodologies for the comparative analysis of ideas and artefacts across time frames. The analysis of contemporary modes of production and manufacture of artefacts, for example, as a way of arriving at an understanding of ancient material culture was one of the most intriguing as it inverted time perspectives. From my colleague, the ethno-archaeologist Christian Guksch, I learnt of a new methodology devised to compare and synthesise groups of elements otherwise separated by time and cultural origin. The idea was to map two distinct sets of data one upon the other to see what affinities might emerge. I decided to look at earlier Egyptian funerary spells for clues and discovered Zandee’s analysis (1960) in which he examines a range of different spells and defines a series of thirteen recurring themes, amongst them ‘Death as destruction’ and ‘The state of being bound and imprisoned’. Zandee had created a list of thematic categories which proved inappropriate for my purposes but his aim: to distil a set of individual themes from a group of diverse ancient Egyptian funerary texts, had been inspiring. I realised that I could emulate his methodology and synthesise the laments by theme, so creating a concordance of contemporary Upper Egyptian lament themes for possible comparison with the ancient.

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The Contemporary Lament Themes I Death as a destructive force II Omens of death III The agent of death IV The purification of the deceased V The washing VI The turban VII Wrappings VIII The shroud IX Description of the state of death X The deceased in the grave XI The deceased after death XII The deceased in nature XIII The passage to the afterlife XIV Stairs/ladder XV Directionality XVI The deceased crosses waters XVII Abandonment XVIII The deceased is asked to return XIX The deceased returns/ will return XX The deceased as a bird XXI Resurrection XXII Funerary customs XXIII Dialogue XXIV The tomb XXV The healing of the deceased XXVI Wedding in death XXVII The protection of the dead XXVIII The hair XXIX The deceased wears ritually coloured garments XXX The deceased wears elegant clothes XXXI Accoutrements of the deceased XXXII Tears XXXIII The stature of the deceased XXXIV Laments for the reassurance of the deceased XXXV Sacrifice XXXVI Offerings XXXVII The nourishment of the deceased XXXVIII The protection of the living by the deceased XXXIX Communication between the living and the dead XL Laments against fate XLI Laments for the self/complaint XLII Shame XLIII Grief and suffering

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The Concordance of Lament Themes For each thematic category, I have collated and described the range of metaphors and motifs in each. (N.B. Appendix C comprises the detailed Concordance of Contemporary Lament Themes by motif and lamenter.) I Death as a Destructive Force The moment of death is ‘an indigo day’. The snatching of the soul takes place as a ‘gust of wind or whirling dust’ (dust spirals are traditionally identified with the djinn) which snuffs out the fire and light of life. In the laments, death is likened to a natural disaster, an earthquake during which the walls of the house collapse, or a violent wind. It is a miasma or cloud surging onto the horizon, obscuring vision and sucking up its victim. The extended family has been destroyed and the house containing the sources of life – the pointed-tipped clay water jar and source of water (bet izzir), and the oven (furn), the source of bread – collapses as a result of these cataclysmic upheavals. II Omens of Death and Reactions to Death in Nature by Animate and Inanimate Objects In an injection of pathetic fallacy, the guest room (like a member of the bereaved family) wails and groans, the ‘valley’ where the deceased is buried ‘quakes’, and a wild, gypsy dog rips the clothes of the lamenter in an apparently unpremeditated attack. Birds appear to feel sympathy with the bereaved, shrieking and crying, both to augur death and to lament the departure of the soul. The raven ‘of misfortune’ cries out and death ensues; elsewhere, bird cries protest the ascent of the soul to heaven on the washing bier. In other laments, inanimate objects react to the predicament of the deceased: the house is encouraged to clasp the wings and veil of its ‘mistress’ while the prayer beads round the hands of the person are asked to protect him. The sun rises and ‘warms’ the sentient person lodged in the earth. III The Agent of Death The agent or angel of death is male and variously known as ‘the hunter’, ‘the archer’, ‘the ‘reaper’, reaper of grapes or cultivator, ‘the servant of iniquity’, the ‘leaper’ and also by the more obsequious term, ‘gentleman’ (from the Turkish bey). He is a shadowy, sometimes equestrian figure whose advent seems to augur death and misfortune. In the allegory of the hunt, the ‘gazelle’ is pursued by the ‘hunter’, accompanied by his saluki hounds and armed with a crossbow or lasso, arrows or fire. In the desert wilderness, the ‘hunter’ stalks and wounds his prey with the skill and stealth of a Bishari nomad who then feasts on his kill. An allusion to feathers suggests that the agent of death may also be conceived of as a bird of prey 3 but, in this corpus, that motif is rare. Certain laments refer to the snatching of the deceased by a creature with ‘claws’ (kilab/kaluba), a hawk or canine predator. As the saluki hounds

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also stalk the deceased, they are the atavistic embodiment of this evil, inhuman force. In Islamic mythology, the ‘angel of death’ (malak ilmut) or cAzra’il is one of the four ‘arch‑saints’, specifically invoked to empower protective spells (Galal 1938: 136). Consequently, it might be expected that the activities of this sanctified being could be both malevolent and benevolent, yet this is not the case. Laments by both Copts and Muslims condemn him. cAzra’il robs the body of the soul by piercing it with an arrow from his crossbow, an action transformed into the euphemistic ‘parting’ or ‘unplaiting’ of the hair, or stalking of the person as a ‘gazelle’. This ‘angel of death’ is rude, evil, cannibalistic, envious and shamelessly rapacious, as the lament for the virgin bride suggests. In his form as ‘the leaper’ (ilhadi), the ‘angel of death’ is identified with a creature that leaps into the air like the manaha, the lamenter who leads the funerary dance, beating her drum and hurling dust on her head. He is also the envious ‘reaper’ or gardener’ (holi/hawwal) who covets the succulent young stalk of sugarcane, plucking it from the living root. He is the harvester of grapes but also the wreaker of calamity even though death may be one’s destiny. He or it (in one lament, the creature is not personified) also seizes his victims ‘with a gust of breeze’ as if he were an ethereal spirit, powered by a ruthless force. IV The Purification of the Deceased The purification of the body is achieved not only by washing with musk and soap in the waters of the Nile, but also by censing and the dousing of the deceased in scent, embalming herbs (fayih) or myrtle (marsin). The hennaing of the body, a ritual of purification usually performed for the bride and her female relatives at weddings, is particularly reiterated in laments for the ‘bride and groom’ (cf XXVI Wedding in Death), an allusion that may not be purely metaphorical since this ritual was actually performed for the deceased until recently in Upper Egypt4 and in Nubia (Kennedy 1978: 227). V The Washing The many laments concerned with washing are sung as ritual accompaniment to the cleansing of the body before the ceremonial wrapping of the shroud. In one lament, the soul is expected to leave the body and ascend, and in another, the birds sitting above the bier on a tree berate the washer. Again, in another, the neck slumps and then is set straight, perhaps to promote the likelihood of resurrection. Balabil describes ‘how the shallow drum (tar) beats’ as the mourners leap in a circle during the washing ritual, and one woman stretched on the bier ‘complains’ that she does not want to be deprived of her jewellery or further stripped and humiliated. The washing is also described as metaphoric immersion in rejuvenating Nile waters. In one case, the deceased is urged to avoid being pierced by the nails that protrude from the wooden bier. Others describe how ritual washing should take place in a special plot: the narrow strip of land by the

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Nile (hamad) or by the ‘mouth’ of the door (cataba): the threshold where both good and evil spirits enter. Another reflects on the fact that there is no ‘sea’ in which the dead girl can be washed. VI The Turban The turban exemplifies the Upper Egyptian man, his elegance and his dignity; its removal or unwinding, his consummate loss of stature and his demise. In the laments that incarnate a vision of the moment of death, the man’s turban is ripped off by a strong unruly force, the desert wind, or ‘the whirling dust of the grave’. In others, the unfurling of the turban suggests the sailing to the afterlife. The wrapping of a man’s turban is a sartorial aesthetic, highly perfected in male society in Upper Egypt and, while some laments emphasise its tiered style, others stress its illuminating whiteness. Men should take a white scarf (šaš) to the grave and one man would appear to be buried with his turban, a tradition actually practised in Egypt in the nineteenth century (cf Edward Lane (1973 [1860]) and so, perhaps, an archaism. Its slippage, however, is compared to the tightening of a noose around the neck and recalls the image of the hunter who ‘lassoes’ his victims. VII Wrappings The person should be buried with the necessary accoutrements. Emphasis in the laments on the elegance and costliness of the material as well as the tightness of the wrappings appears to accord status to the deceased and ensure symbolic protection to the body. In the laments, the way in which a woman wraps her head even in death is perceived as either elevating or demeaning to her social status. In one lament, the woman’s head veil (tarha) has fallen or is trailing and her head ignominiously exposed. Perhaps for symbolic reasons, another woman’s head shawl is described as fringed. One woman is wrapped tight in silk while another is in need of winding sheets for protection. In one lament, there are no longer any wrappings round the body and instead, a headscarf is placed with the shroud in the grave. In another, a cloak (cabaya) is to be placed under a man, apparently in lieu of a shroud. In another, the person’s ‘white stole’ (euphemism for a shroud), has fallen off as he ‘ascended’. In Upper Egypt, men and women wrap their heads and cover their bodies to insulate themselves against heat and dust, and to observe decorum. This custom appears to be replicated in death. VIII The Shroud In contemporary Muslim burial practice, a shroud is sewn for the deceased at the time of death and placed over the body where it is tied in three knots (cf VII The Wrappings) but in the laments, shrouds become ‘clothes’. As in life, these are fashioned by ‘tailors’, usually gypsies (halab) in Luxor, members of tribes who work in socially demeaning trades and live on the margins of habitable land by the desert. In the laments, these people take

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on the ritually impure task of washing the dead and cutting out the shroud. As with the ‘wrappings’, the burial covering is euphemistically referred to variously as a ‘suit’, a striped vest (saderi) – an article of clothing worn by most village men – a ‘gown’ or a head stole. The usual Arabic word for shroud (kafan) appears only twice in the entire lament corpus and is replaced conventionally by the words for sheet (milaya), cloth (gumaš) or stole (šahi). IX Description of the State of Death Some laments describe the state of the dead as a sleep, but as a wakeless sleep. It is also the state of immobility, inertia and dissolution. The suffering of the person is a prevalent theme: the man, in particular, is in a state of emotional turmoil: he is ‘ailing’, ‘weeping’, ‘angry’, ‘distressed’, ‘discontent’, or in a state of ‘absentia’. A transformation has taken place and the person now requires a change of clothes. Death again precipitates the destruction of the extended family (ilbet) and the ‘house’ and is the ultimate ‘departure’. X The Deceased in the Grave In the laments, the deceased is imagined as placed in the earth on a ‘bed’ or ‘mattress’. Entombment does not take place directly on the earth in modern Egyptian tombs and so the ‘shelf ’ on which he or she is placed may be the metaphorical ‘bed’. In one lamenter’s words, this is ‘ilgama’ (the ‘place of resurrection’). The ‘ailing one’ who tosses and turns on the ‘bed’ is in agony. The young ‘bride’ should adjust her pillow and go to sleep. The ‘bed’ is also a potentially fecund place in which pomegranates, lemons and grapes cascade deep in the earth. The ‘bed’ is furnished with ‘side planks’ of lemon wood and wood of grapevines, either as a lining or a coffin. There are many allusions to the fertility of the earth, to herbs and to the verdant foliage above the grave. In one vision of the deceased in the grave, the person lies on a ‘mattress’ (farš) in the shade of mulberry and pomegranate trees whereas elsewhere, the deceased, a mere ‘guest’ in the tomb, is positioned under a palm tree. Fecundity emanates from the presence of the deceased: a mother has garnered grapes on her lap for her eternal repose, while fruit trees sprout spontaneously over the tracks of the camel that bears the bier of the person to the tomb. A more pragmatic lamenter speculates about the depth of the sand and the earth above the tomb in which cockroaches roam, yet another envisages the deceased placed beside a mythical ‘stream’ near the waterwheels of heaven. Deep in the earth, the same coursing stream of water that percolates through the soil and irrigates the land, flows through the heart of the tombs. Some men are buried in graves (fosgiyya, pl. fosagi) with underground chambers and courtyards in which a mudbrick wall is placed. This word also means ‘fountain’ and implicitly, a source of water. Elsewhere, the deceased is absorbed in the earth ‘like water’. He goes barefoot, despite his

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riches and grandeur, is laid prostrate and then lowered into the ground. XI The Deceased after Death The metaphysical domain into which the deceased enters after death is described through various metaphors in the laments. The soul sits beside a staircase, ready to mount and winnow grain, or is seen in a ‘threshing field’. He is ‘tied up’ or ‘bound’ or by contrast, seen to be ‘tossing and turning’ on the bed. The surrounding landscape is also that of ‘a valley’, a ‘faraway land’ or a ‘hamlet’. One woman has gone to stay at ‘her uncle’s’ and other young men are imagined as ‘fighting with sticks or poles’ as if in a traditional mulid stick-fighting contest. After death, the deceased may take the form of a shadow or a cloud but not a threatening spectre. After this transformation, the person in the afterlife is the ‘one who follows after’ (ilmutab c) or the ‘one who shall turn back’ (ilmuhawwid ).5 (N.B. This category should be interpreted in conjunction with XIX The Deceased Returns, XXI Resurrection, and XXIV The Tomb.) XII The Deceased and Nature The deceased is represented in metonymic images from the natural world, many of which derive from the agricultural environment in which people live and are reminiscent of metaphors we find in other genres of Sa cidi sung poetry, particularly wedding songs. The images chosen are explicitly male or female, particularly when they embody a sexual connotation. In the laments, for example, the young man is a ‘bough of a tree’ or a ‘succulent stalk of sugarcane’ while his ‘stalk of wormwood, pomegranate or henna wood’ is a symbol of his youth and virility. The young bridegroom is a stalk of sugarcane, an image replicated in the ‘wedding’ (but actually circumcision) song sung for a young boy at his ‘farah’: ‘the stalk of sugarcane needs watering, my boy’ (gasab ya gasab, ilgasab c ayza mayya ya wad) while the bride’s virtue is similarly compared to a ‘pomegranate or grape’ that bleeds dark red juice.6 Mothers are fecund trees which blossom and bear fruit such as lemons and pomegranates. The father, however, is incarnated in a tree of an intrinsically different type: a frail, dying sesaban, a tree of limited life span, doomed to wither. Other male images (which predominate in this repertoire) include a plaited stalk of wheat at the peak of ripeness (sambul or sabul ), a stalk of bamboo, grains of wheat, a clump of living grass or Jew’s mallow (milohiyya) and an uprooted palm set into verdant fields of clover, safflower, fenugreek or lemon grass. Death, in consequence, is the uprooting (gatf ) of the grass or the severing of the palm or wheat from the stalk. Some images such as that of the child as an unripe date or a palm frond ‘tethered’ or anchored in the fenugreek or clover are undifferentiated by gender.

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23. Sailing boats on the Nile

XIII The Passage to the Afterlife The deceased is encouraged over and over again to go peacefully and safely to the afterlife. In the meantime, lamenters hurl weapons ‘against heaven’ while the bier is being processed. In one lament, the soul on the ‘roof ’ should hurl his own javelins, and is armed to guard against the encroachment of fiends and evil spirits, while some young men are described as engaged in combat and ritual jousting as if battling alien forces in the grave. The path described is tortuous and winding and there are waterways in the tomb on which to sail. Brides sail on ‘barques’ which are biers transformed into boats, their hair streaming out behind them, while men embark from the quay, draped in white stoles. In one lament, the lead gazelle is asked to lead the deceased ‘down’ to the subterranean waters of the Nile. Various modes of conveyance are described: the dead may be taken by elegant carriage, camel, boat or ferry to their ultimate destination in the afterlife. One man has a guide who becomes ‘lost’ in the granaries of the afterlife while others have a ship’s captain or omniscient guide to conduct them across the ‘seas’ or down to the fields below. To celebrate the consummation of death, the bride and groom appear to take part in a ‘wedding procession’ (zaffa). According to Rushdi Salih, until the 1950s a mock wedding procession for the deceased bride and groom was acted out, with the accompaniment of a small band to ‘celebrate’ the imminent marriage of youth in heaven (1971: 268) and so this lament describes an archaic ritual. (See also XVI). XIV Stairs/Ladder The deceased is urged to ascend either on a ladder (which may become a boat) or by climbing a staircase to the afterlife. The soul must carry his ladder to the place of ascension or alternatively, should climb the stairs and ‘winnow grain’ as if he has entered a granary in the afterlife. The deceased in other laments is also poised ‘by the staircase’, as if to ascend,

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or asleep on the stairs, and encouraged to rise up while in some cases, the soul has already gone up or ‘risen’. XV Directionality There are conflicting notions of where the deceased goes to in the afterlife. Though Copts and Muslims differ in terms of which direction the head should be placed in the tomb, these differences are not reflected in the laments. East is the direction to which the deceased ascends, from which the deceased departs and from which the ‘bride’ comes. Yet the ‘hamlet’ where the deceased dwell may be either East or West. The question is unresolved. Movement in relation to the cardinal points in everyday life in Luxor is embedded in the expressions people use: mišarrig (going East) and migarrib (going West) in Sa cidi dialect. This same notion of directionality also appears in the laments, as if the person were moving as in life, in a particular direction. However, the serial nature of these laments (i.e., one couplet indicating East, and the next, West) suggests that East and West are complementary polarities. XVI The Deceased Crosses Waters The embarkation for the afterlife takes place from the quay, the ferry, the mound, the ladder to the boat, and from the brink of the Nile. The deceased crosses the waters, propelled by a hot or Easterly wind or by a ferryman, in a variety of crafts: simple boats (marakib), a raft of reeds (giyasa), a ferry boat (rafas) or boat with a cabin (dahabiyya). According to the laments, the dead should unfurl metaphorical ‘sails’: winding sheets, long tresses of hair, wings, women’s all‑encompassing veils (ginc) and red and white sun umbrellas or turbans (šamaš) (cf Dozy 1968 [1881]: 110) to propel themselves to their imminent ‘wedding’. In some cases, the deceased is said to descend to the depths of the ‘sea’ and in others, the soul crosses a mythical Nile. The destination is unknown, and sometimes the crafts go adrift. In the case of young brides, the crossing over takes place ‘in the heart of the tombs’ and a fantastic ship with crimson, silken and double sails takes them to the grave. In other instances, the deceased must ‘swim’ across the seas of the inundation, or like a gazelle, be led down to the Nile in order to be immersed in its waters. XVII Abandonment The deceased is charged with abandonment, though conversely, in one lament, the departed soul berates the lamenter for abandoning him. Women feel ‘abandoned on the shore’ by the person ‘crossing water’ and they are unable to persuade the captain of the ship to take them on board. Children are abandoned by their parents, and those left behind are ‘orphans’, symbolically bereft of everything but dried dates and lemons for sustenance.

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XVIII The Deceased Is Asked to Return A conventional lament formula is invoked to persuade the deceased to return. In some instances, to appease the dear departed soul who is suffering unduly, the lamenter suggests that he or she should return, especially if the treatment in the afterlife is unduly harsh. In another case, the lamenter urges the soul not to wander lost but to come home, even though he may now assume the form of a shadow (dull ). One lamenter invokes different configurations of stars as her witness, and urges the return of the person in a dream: in the realm of dreams where a sheikh or holy man may appear to devotees as a divine ‘sign’, the return of the deceased in spirit form is possible too. The invocation to return is often couched in prosaic terms: the soul should not delay coming (as if he were merely late in returning home after work) and in some cases, is lured back: he should return to see what gratification is forthcoming. Another stresses that if she asked for the deceased to return, he would come, as if to confirm the strong bonds that have linked them together in life. Thus, the invocation to return is a way of assuring the deceased of the lamenter’s concern for his or her welfare, and an enunciation of the desire to see the person again. XIX Deceased Returns/ Will Return This theme is highly elaborated in the laments and the texts reveal that the return of the deceased is not only possible but imminent. In these manifestations, the person may take on different forms, a reincarnation: a man garbed in turban and clasping his staff, or a phantasm, a luminous cloud (gema) or a shadow (hiyal; dull). Another image of the deceased after death is that of a ‘wanderer’, emerging from between ‘the thorns in the wall’. One lamenter honours the deceased by pledging to smooth the ground of thorns and pave the way for his imminent return. The soul may of his own volition ‘blow away the piled earth’ and re‑emerge. The lamenter also entices the person to return, promising to welcome him by bringing traditional sweet syrup for him to quaff down, as if in a celebration. It is acknowledged that much effort is normally undertaken to dissuade the soul of the departed to return to the land of the living except on specific days and for specific feasts, so these attempts by the lamenters to lure back the dead through lamentation may be mere politeness. In Coptic tradition, the spirit (irruh) is encouraged to leave his home on the third day after the funeral, the day on which fumigation with incense takes place and a priest says prayers for the dear departed. In all cases, however, the laments function to assure the deceased that his or her absence is genuinely mourned and that return to the living is not beyond the bounds of possibility. Visions of the deceased returning to life reveal the person engaged in various, ritualistic acts. Despite the state of death, he may be perched high on the roof, ready to ‘ascend’ to the stars, engaged in the act of

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hurling a javelin or a threshing fork (mizraga) against invisible enemies, or winnowing grain in his threshing fields. The designation of the deceased as ‘the son of a winnower’ in one text and the description of the deceased winnowing in another, suggests that the act of winnowing is an activity designed to regenerate life. Both those who have drowned, and others who have not, are implored to cross the seas ‘swimming’. References to ‘swimmers’ often are not explicitly contextualised so there is ambiguity as to whether the deceased being mourned has actually suffered death by drowning or is lamented as if ‘drowned’. XX The Deceased as a Bird The image of the deceased as a migratory bird is invoked by several lamenters as a metaphor for the soul after death. Both the father and the mother are likened to the Iraqi goose (ilwizz il ciragi), a migratory bird who flies away for the winter, abandoning its offspring, and a Moroccan __ (m. ilmagrabi, f. ilmugrabiyya); perhaps also a bird? The Iraqi goose is seldom spotted now and it appears to have achieved mythical status as illustrated by allusions to it in Upper Egyptian folklore.7 Whilst in flight, these birds alight on verdant pastures of ‘herbs’, ‘clover’ ‘fenugreek’ or ‘grass pea’ or may descend to drink from Tunis (the capital of Tunisia), characterised as ‘the green and fertile’, also an epithet from the sirat bani hilal Egyptian epic. XXI Resurrection Resurrection in the sense of ‘becoming alive again’ is also an implicit theme in the laments; tali c (meaning to ‘go up’ or ‘ascend’) is the verb used to signify the departure and destiny of the deceased. A symbolic raising-up may take place: a cushion being turned from left to right, or the righting of a drooping bough or a fallen pillar to the vertical. The deceased also rises, either by rolling to the side or standing up and discarding the reed mat on which he is buried. One utterance describes how the ‘pillar of marble’ is razed but then resurrected in another town, a hope for resurrection articulated in the laments as a fait accompli. The deceased is also placed in symbolically regenerative environments: the ‘bed’ of the deceased is to be lined in lemon, pomegranate and grape wood, and under the bed of the ‘ailing one’ (the poor soul), these fruits ‘cascade’ in the soil. The earth is the regenerative agent that appears to contain the source of life. In West Bank Luxor speech, the earth is designated as feminine and anthropomorphised via the suffix ‘an/ana’, normally used with adjectives describing human emotions and states. When leaving for the fields in order to irrigate their land, women say al-ard catšana (‘the earth is thirsty’) and innaharda hanisgi il’ard (‘Today, we will give water to the earth’) in the same way as a mother will try to slake her child’s thirst on hearing the child cry: isgini! ‘Give me water to drink’. When the earth is irrigated in the laments, it

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is also anthropomorphised: in the laments where the child is mourned as a soaked fijla (radish) or mišmiša (apricot), the soil becomes rawiyana (‘irrigated’). XXII Funerary Customs The laments suggest that women must observe rites of mourning to the letter. The behaviours described appear to be self-referential, perhaps because they are sung in conjunction with enactment of certain rituals. The lamenters urge the mourners to wrap their waist with ropes. In some laments, men and women rip their garments from grief, though one woman attributes the violence of the act to assault by a ‘gypsy dog’. The unplaiting of the hair is also a sign of mourning: the mane of hair is imagined to be a sail, and the deceased’s woman’s hair is ‘unplaited’ by the crossbow wielded by the ‘agent of death’. In grief, women eschew the wearing of spangles and gold bracelets; these, and the red‑striped bracelets worn by young girls, must not be worn in mourning, whereas the young person lying on the bier should expose her protective bracelets to view. One lamenter pledges that she will wear skins of camels and donkeys for the deceased. Though there are instances in which the deceased has been stripped of her accoutrements, these may only refer to the moment of ritual washing before the replacement of the jewellery. Other rarely practised duties of the bereaved mourners are also described: the custom of sleeping by the tomb on a reed mat and the bringing of water to the tombs to replenish the water in the bowl placed there. While some women appear to pluck clumps of grass and milohiyya from the ground in the course of the procession, others plant herbs on the grave and distribute henna and myrtle to the mourners at the graveside. The actual performance of lamentation is alluded to continuously in the laments, both in order to observe proper funerary practice and to stimulate participation in the collective act by both mourners and the bereaved. One woman admits that they perform lament to satisfy personal need and be faithful to funerary custom, whereas others say that laments are sung for the deceased and the destinies of the lamenters. Some query as to whether wailing women follow behind in the funerary procession. Since this custom has been proscribed in certain villages, it is clearly an issue surrounded by controversy. In the context of some laments, women still do follow the corpse, however, bearing staves and swords in the funerary procession. The wielding of protective staves by mourners in these processions complements the bearing of swords and pronged javelins by the young man to the grave. Here again, the living emulate the passage of the soul in the afterlife. The role of the death crier in disseminating the news of the death is also elaborated in these laments. They record the reverberating sensation and emotional shock one experiences on hearing the news that someone has died. A death crier is called to cry out to the unknown souls buried

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in the desert valley ‘by name’, seemingly to reassure them that they are remembered. The almost obsolete tradition of the manaha is briefly described in the context of the washing, as is the custom of leaving the bracelets on the deceased. Perfume flasks are smashed in the purification ritual and at the grave men clasp hands and intone prayers for the deceased. This is an exclusively male ritual alluded to in several laments. The other funerary practice mentioned in this context is a vision of ‘the return’ as an invocation. Men ‘put on their turbans’ and form a circle as if performing the zikr at a Sufi hadra normally enacted at a mulid (‘birth feast’) of a sheikh. XXIII Dialogue Many laments take the form of dialogues and in these verbal exchanges, the couplets, turn-taking structure and dialogic nature of lament are deftly and fully exploited by the lamenters. The mourner questions the poor soul who responds, and vice versa and in some cases, he/she may castigate the mourner for her neglect. Some dialogues replicate the frivolous conversations of the living: one woman admires the shawl (in actuality, the shroud worn by the poor woman) and enquires as to its price, while others create greater pathos, for example, the lament in which the stricken child asks whom he should call father. Some of the dead query why they are dressed in certain robes and request the mourners to help them. In response, one poor woman is reassured by the lamenter that she will receive clothes and a letter from the domain of the living for her needs while conversely, in another, the dead person assures the lamenter that she will send a messenger back to the bereaved. In this complex of interchanges which reassure the deceased of the ability of the living to communicate with the nether world, the interlocking of two disparate worlds, that of the living and the dead, seems to become truly palpable through the medium of lamentation. XXIV The Tomb The tomb in the laments assumes many architectonic and metaphorical forms. The tomb is foremost, a house (bet) or mansion (dar), sometimes shaded by palms or doum, ringed round with a fence of bracken and thorns like an enclosure (zariba) for animals or a traditional Bedouin encampment; in one lament it is guarded by a slave or ‘a Nubian who carves wood’. In another the tomb is perceived as a domestic space where a woman pledges to build brick hearths (kawanin), perhaps to convert the tomb definitively into a home. The laments suggest that the tomb should be constructed of expensive ‘imported’ Delta or Cairene burnt bricks with a small, upper room (ruga). Inside, there are references to an upper ventilation window or ‘sky window’ that is ‘cracked’ or oriented to the West where both the light and

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the ‘guest’ may ‘peer in’. The grave is ‘narrow’ with stairs or provided with a metaphorical ladder and, in some instances, conceived of as a sanctuary (hilwa) or place of solitude like an ascetic’s cell, holy place or hema (not in this case ‘tent’, the more usual meaning). Some names for ‘tomb’ derive from the root dar, which means ‘circular’ or ‘round’; dayir, duwar, dora possibly to denote the ringed structure of brickwork placed above the tomb typical of graves on the West Bank of Luxor; or a circular platform (dast) described in some laments as a dais ‘with a circle’, with a ‘nail’ or a ‘cover’ (dast abu halaga/abu mismar/ gatayya). A tomb may also be fosgiyya, a ‘fountain’, an underground tomb with courtyard, leading to narrow compartments within, possibly what Qomiyya describes as her father’s house: ‘wide with a courtyard round’. The tomb is also portrayed as a prison sealed with locks of iron and brass, in which, ironically, the guard is a rich man. By translating the bondage of the deceased into an image of social and financial oppression, these lamenters depart from the mythical domain of the other laments and invoke, for the first time, images of stark realism. One lamenter describes the tombs as ‘clefts in the wall’, as if they were embedded in the escarpment that runs along the Nile valley, another as a mound of white pebbles, strewn on the grave by male mourners (a tradition known from Nubia), while a ‘bride’ or young girl is said to live in a tomb made from a ‘clay jar’ (jurra). In addition, in another lament, the proper tomb for a ‘bride’ is to be roofed with matting as in a sagifa, or with palms as in a ‘bridal bower’ (manasa). The metaphysical conception of the nature of the tomb differs widely but the prevailing vision of the tomb is of a place in which the earth is submerged in water or inundated. It is a well (bir) and the person planted in it immersed in ‘wet soil’: the inundated earth oozes moisture. In this earth, the deceased is ‘drowned’ and ‘washed’ in the water. In one lament, the sirwal (trousers) of the lamenter and the deceased become soaked in the tomb and in another lament, the tomb is a bath (hammam) for the ‘bride’ in which she must be ritually washed before consummation of her wedding in death. The source of this efflux is said to be Shellal, the first cataract of the Nile in Aswan. The tears of the lamenters flow into ‘seas’ in which the tombs or ‘houses’ are placed, as if there were a conceptual link between tears and the inundation which generates life. The tomb is also a ‘mound’ (kom), an earthen structure from which the deceased may ‘set sail’. Young girls sail in their barques along the waterways of the tombs and in other laments, the tomb is the sea in which the deceased is inundated with water emanating from the source of eternal life, the well of Zimzim (in Saudi Arabia) or propelled by the subterranean waterwheels of ‘heaven’. In some laments, the man himself becomes the ‘mound’ that emerges from the waters of the inundation and metaphors reveal the underlying sexual connotations of these images. The tomb is also conceived of as a garden supervised by an archangel,

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in which there are pomegranates, lemons and grapes. In the garden of heaven, which resembles the garden of Eden (the words for heaven’ (janna) and ‘garden’ (jinena) are derived in Arabic from the same root), fruit trees proliferate. A field of green herbs and foliage may sprout above the tomb, or the tomb itself may be a verdant plot of ‘clover, safflower and sweet pea’. XXV The Healing of the Deceased In the laments, the deceased, who is ‘ailing’, is to be treated by a hakim or traditional physician, duktur (a modern doctor), tabib: a healer, but also in Egyptian folklore, the ineluctable messenger of fate, or finally, the hawi: snake charmer and exorciser of snake bite and venom, especially in the case of scorpion bite. The deceased is deprived of the healer and so is suffering either because the problems of transport and distance are too great, or because the healer lives in the ‘nether world’. In some laments, the ‘healer’ or physician is present in the ‘house’, that is, the tomb, or ‘down the lane’. In others, the deceased is healed in the grave or a folk healer should be sent to heal the lamenters. Some mournfully assert that the earth does not heal, however. The search for medicine, the panacea for what ails the deceased, also preoccupies the lamenters. In one instance, the medicine for the cure lies in Sham, modern Syria, once the exotic land of spices, or in Shellal, the mythological source of the Nile. In another, the donkey driver in the tombs has medicine to heal the deceased. The lamenter is willing to exchange or barter whatever is required in order to secure this medicine, but the difficulties appear insurmountable. XXVI Wedding in Death A consummation of ‘marriage’ on the ritual plane is believed to take place in death for the young girl, ‘the bride’ (known as il carusa) and the young man, the ‘bridegroom’ (il caris) who died before being married in life. For the ‘groom’, all the stages of the process from courtship to engagement and nuptials are described as if this marriage were ordained by the family and enacted according to tradition. As custom dictates, the young man asks his mother to arrange for his engagement to an ideal spouse (his maternal or paternal cousin) or alternatively, to a beautiful woman with long, dark hair who has caught his eye. In the laments, the bride and groom traverse the town while the mother of the bride kneads the dough for the ‘feast cakes’ and prepares the scented herbs. While some men are invited to set sail to a mythical wedding in the afterlife, the ‘groom’ is adjured in other laments to stand up and ‘act like a man’ when he is received by the lascivious and gold‑clad houris of heaven. Elsewhere in the corpus, a bridegroom in his caftan celebrates issubahiyya (the feast for the consummation of marriage) in the ‘heart of the tombs’, but his bride is not named and he is seemingly alone. Consummation or sexual initiation is also implicit in the journey

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undertaken by the young girls who, with ‘hair like manes’, are conveyed to their destination on ships, propelled by ‘crimson’ and ‘silken sails’. In this context, the ‘sail’ which billows in the breeze is also the white cloth, spattered with the blood from the ritual breaking of the hymen. In this instance, there are no agents of defilement, but in other allegorical scenes the agent of death is a rapacious but anonymous figure. The red blood that flows darker than the juices of the ‘pomegranate’ or ‘grape’ (fruits which symbolise the womb) drips ‘from joy onto the shift of the elated groom’.8 In the moments prior to the burial and ‘wedding’, the bride is censed and hennaed, strewn with herbs9 and in one case, dressed in a crimson silk wedding gown, which should be resilient and ‘not dissolve’. In another, she wears ‘kohl‑coloured’ garments of mourning but is daubed with rouge. She leaves for the grave ‘in her henna’ and is garbed in her traditional coloured bangles, formerly made of glass, bracelets symbolically ‘broken’ at the moment of defloration. The bridegroom, similarly, is ‘fully dressed’ or regaled in a caftan. In certain laments, the bride is attended by a mašta, a professional maidservant who in previous epochs would be employed to dress the bride and plait her hair. She adjusts the pillows on which the bride reclines and an ‘entertainer’ – who must be paid for his services – presides over the wedding. Even the bridal nugut (‘cash presents’) exchanged between families are offered in this illusory wedding feast. In some laments, however, the illusion is cracked and the bridal bower of palm fronds ‘withers’ and ‘collapses’. The henna for the bride and groom ‘grows cold’ and must be ‘poured out’. In one lament sequence, a mystical wedding is described in which the traditional Coptic ceremony is performed at midnight by candlelight, with priests as celebrants but in most other contexts, the consummation of the wedding of young girls is not a sanctioned marriage but a dark and lascivious deed perpetrated by an unknown oppressor. XXVII The Protection of the Dead The deceased derives protection in death by wearing symbolic clothing. The laments stress the common garb of the Egyptian fellah (farmer), namely, the saderi (striped vest) worn normally underneath a jallabiyya (long robe). The description of the stripes running both the length and width of the vest suggests that they perform a protective and symbolic function. The stripes should be aligned properly and the gazali silk, ‘striped on the width’ should endow the deceased with protection just as he once protected the virtue of his bereaved wife. According to one lamenter, the salt and pepper beard of the deceased is also prophylactic though the tattoo which protected him in life offers no protection in death. Other accoutrements similarly protect the deceased: the prayer beads, wound around the staff ritually placed in the grave, and the flywhisk in the hand of the ‘effendi’ who rides his elegant carriage. The smashing of perfume vials at the threshold of the house of the

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deceased also has a prophylactic function. Like the smashing of a pottery vessel at the threshold of the bride’s house (before the consummation of marriage) and at the sibu c (seven‑day naming ceremony) for a newborn baby boy, the act seems designed to ward off the invasion of evil spirits. The cracking of water vessels or perfume vials for the deceased as described in the laments is also noted in Greek tradition (Alexiou 1974). XXVIII The Hair Hair is believed to be one of the most beautiful attributes of Egyptian women yet one not publicly visible in Upper Egypt. The crassness of the grave-digger who would place long hair or a hennaed fringe in the dust is roundly criticised. The hair of the deceased is unplaited and hanging down, ‘parted’ by the rude archer with his crossbow. The tradition of unravelling the deceased woman’s plaits is complemented by the mourners who also unplait their hair and fling dust on their heads, emulating the dead. Some rituals are de rigueur: for example, the pulling down of the forelock of the young woman onto her face. One lamenter stresses that she unwinds her long tresses of hair to ‘fate’ and ‘time’, as if to acknowledge their tyranny over human beings. XXIX The Deceased Wears Ritually Coloured Garments The preponderance of crimson, pink and zeti (olive‑green) velvet dresses for women (colours which are normally worn only by brides) and male garments dyed the colour of kohli, in this case either dark blue or dyed with indigo,10 hints at the symbolic importance of these colours and dyes. Velvet imported from Saudi Arabia used to be the preferred fabric for the outer dresses worn by younger newly-married women on feast days in the 1980s, and this would have been the most expensive and most beautiful fabric for women to wear to the grave. In one variant, the woman wears ‘iridescent’ velvet, and in another, lustrous silk. Similarly, the red silk cord or drawstring of the young man’s sirwal is lavish and elegant while the physician’s cuffs appear to be ritually dyed (first red, then white), and a lady’s earrings are described as green, coral (red) and pearl (luminous white). Though kohli is a common colour, the stress on kohl and carob (harub) – both deep blue-black dyes – as well as nila (indigo), may stem from the prophylactic and natural properties of these plants. The deceased male wears labani or labini, part of a play on words on the root, laban. The word labani denotes the colour pale blue, a common colour for a man’s jallabiyya (from laban ‘milk’) while burial in resin (liban) and frankincense – herbs traditionally associated with mortuary practice – suggest the dyeing of cloth to funereal black. XXX The Deceased Wears Elegant Clothes Whereas most men in Upper Egypt wear long cotton robes known as jallabiyyas, in the laments, the man’s garments are particularly elegant,

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and cut from rich fabrics: chintz, velvet and Indian silk. The man’s sleeves are fashioned wide, a sign of sartorial elegance in Upper Egypt, though in some laments, the man wears a ‘suit’, a garment worn only rarely by professionals, or a caftan. Most importantly, the man’s head is wrapped in an immaculate white stole (šahiyya) or head shawl (šamla), euphemisms for the shroud. XXXI Accoutrements of the Deceased Men brandish a staff, javelin or quarterstaff in their journey to the afterlife. They may abandon their weapons at home, ‘at their mother’s (house)’ or on the couch, as if they intended to return. Women wear simulated armour consisting of bracelets as if the passage is hazardous, but also pectorals and earrings. One woman, emulating the men, carries a ‘sturdy rolling pin’ as her weapon while another has wrapped her hands around a staff, apparently by her side. The staves the men carry are carved from fruit wood, stalks of pomegranate, wormwood, henna or grape, and in some cases, symbolise the young man whose youth was broken off. For added potency, some of the wooden staves are embellished with iron wire or dipped in henna, just as some earrings are studded with magic markings. The accoutrements that accompany the elegant man (for example, his handkerchief, turban or drawstring) are as lavish as his costume, though the men who are buried in their sirwal leave in a humiliated state. Jewels are a major item in the list of funerary accoutrements. Women are to be buried with their jewels: their gold gleams in the sun’s rays and one ‘bride’ is to be ‘stood up’ and adorned with necklaces of carbuncles and corals. In one lament, the girls’ earrings are placed in the clay pot, perhaps her burial place; in another, she has lost an earring as if distraught and dishevelled. In yet another, the young girl is divested of her gold necklace and pectoral but retains her earrings. The striped glass or plastic bangles worn by the virgin bride remain with her, in one lament, as in life before marriage, though in another, the girl’s silver has gone to the jeweller to be sold. As women in Luxor do not wear coral or carbunclestudded earrings any more (though men carry staves as weapons), these accoutrements and jewels appear designed to empower and protect the deceased en route to the afterlife and beyond. XXXII Tears The lamenters ask for tears to be able to ‘honour’ the deceased, and urge others to weep as well. In one lament, someone is urged to weep on the ‘seas’ (perhaps the ‘seas’ of passage along which the deceased passes) and in another, the tears should inundate an island ‘on which there is no Nile’. These tears form a wave or flood ‘swallowing up’ the children ‘drowned’ in it and, in another lament, both the stars, the constellation of the Pleiades and the earth ‘weep’, an allusion to the oozing of the inundated earth during the Nile flood.

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XXXIII Stature of the Deceased Men are praised in the laments for greatness, elegance, eloquence, wisdom and brilliance while women are noted for their great stature, affection and beauty. The lamenter demeans herself in the laments: she is ignorant in comparison to the deceased and literate man. As a woman, she is duty bound to lament him and, if the men were to return, the women would be honoured. XXXIV Laments for the Reassurance of the Deceased Heartfelt invocations, and the artifice of dialogue created between the lamenter and deceased, enhance the ability of the mourners to soothe the still-sentient person through lament. Lamenters make concrete pledges of solidarity, for instance, someone to remain by the metaphorical quay (that is, at the grave); another to sleep on a reed mat there, a custom still observed by Copts in Upper Egypt in emulation of this burial tradition. As the lament reiterates, the person should be buried in a basket (made of reeds) in the granary or on the threshing floor of the tomb. One lamenter promises to wipe the faces of the entombed, and plant henna by the quay. She also asserts that she will defend the person against oppressors, intruders or malevolent spirits by remaining poised on the ladder to the afterlife, armed with potent iron weapons. She even offers to swim to bring back the man, the ‘source of her empowering’. At the same time, the lamenter assures the deceased that tears and mourning will be accorded to him and promises that she will take responsibility for the orphans. Despite his suffering, the lamenters encourage the soul to be patient. XXXV Sacrifice For the funerary feast at the conclusion of the mourning period, a forty‑day-old female lamb is slaughtered for the woman who has died, and the male haruf for the man. The sheep’s gender and the fact that it should be ‘forty days old’ (the period during which the spirit has been separated from the body) suggest that it is intended as a surrogate for the dead person. The sheep ‘of suffering’ is fettered (just as it would be in the days preceding the cAid al-Kabir, the major Muslim feast in which a sheep is first fattened and then slaughtered) and the lamenter explains that the wellbeing of the deceased and herself derives from the expiatory sacrifice of the funerary lamb. XXXVI Offerings A small number of offerings are alluded to in diverse laments. One is the traditional present from one woman to another, a brace of pigeons and small basket of flour, customarily given on the occasion of birth, wedding or circumcision. Another is from the lamenter to the bereaved: a platter of food and incense to appease or cajole their maternal/paternal ‘uncle’ or ‘good man’, perhaps the departed soul. In one lament, a tray bearing

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grapes, lemons and meat is prepared for the feast though, as these fruits represent the food of immortality, the offering may be more for the soul of the deceased than the bereaved. XXXVII The Nourishment of the Deceased At the funerary feast (cf XXXV Sacrifice), the soul is nourished just as the mourners are fed. In addition to the sheep, feast foods such as ‘meat in the son’s sleeve’ and food laced with ghee and hot pepper are also considered proper offerings for the funerary feast. In some laments, the nourishment of the living stems directly from the deceased, described metaphorically as the ‘red (or ripened) wheat, nourishment for the guests’. The deceased is encouraged to pour water and quench the thirst of the dead man from the water jugs placed beside the tomb. The elegant ‘stallion’ should drink from ‘the brimming waters’ by his tomb. XXXVIII The Protection of the Living by the Deceased The responsibility of the deceased husband to protect the members of his family remains after death. The ‘leonine, elephantine or muscular arms’ of the man should remain above the threshold after death to embrace the household and the dead. He should protect his widow from incursions by wild beasts, though as one lamenter notes, the man’s power has become diminished: he is physically incapacitated in death. The ‘lion’ epithet is applied to valiant heroes of the contemporary Egyptian epic, sirat bani hilal, Abu Zeid al-Hilali, as well as the older alZir Salim, and the very popular figure of a prancing lion is traditionally incorporated into the landscape of motifs painted on the walls of pilgrims’ houses on the West Bank of Luxor, after the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.

24. Pilgrimage paintings which include the icon of the lion

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The inclusion of the lion in the laments fuses the notion of heroism and grandeur with the lingering image of the husband/father, the vigilant protector, even after death. XXXIX Communication Between the Living and the Dead The deceased may send a ‘messenger’ with a communication to the bereaved. Moreover, the deceased is assured that ‘letters’, missives, ‘nourishment’ and ‘clothing’ will be sent on to the grave to sustain the person’s contact with the living world. To guard against the entry of undesirable spirits, however, the soul, like the lamenter, should sit in the corner or crook of the tomb door. XL Laments Against Fate Fate is perceived to be an ineluctable force by both Copts and Muslims, even though some lamenters protest against it. Fate is doled out like a morsel of meat at a feast where each person receives his lot. It is merely luck that forges one’s destiny. Whereas some lamenters query fate, most ask to be indulged and guided by fate to their ultimate destination. Both divination and prophylactics to stave off death are futile: fate is the arbiter of human destiny. However some women bewail their own fate as lamenters of the dead: they go ‘barefoot and are scorned’ and one woman urges that the laments be sung for the destiny of the living, as well as the well‑being of the dead. The ‘Eye’, that is, a personification of envy like the ‘Evil Eye’, is synonymous with fate and exemplifies the power that can usurp life. Lamenters must bow down to this supernatural power and to the ineluctable forces of fate and time. XLI Laments for the Self/ Complaints In the course of lamenting, lamenters frequently bemoan their own fate, their oppression as widows and their ‘ignorance’ or lack of schooling. In some laments, they adopt the role of the soul in the tomb. At the same time, they berate themselves and the deceased for their predicament, comparing death to an illegal divorce or abandonment. They also reproach the deceased: the men have acted irresponsibly and abandoned women; in others, the husband is urged to stop dallying and return. ‘Had men been for sale, they would have bought more’, two lamenters observe, as if to reverse the prevalent social order in which girls alone demand a bride price. One woman states that she is lonelier than the deceased. Fear of the scorn levied at widows prompts these laments for the self, though the lamenter states that she fears repercussions from the deceased himself. This genre of laments incorporates protests against the existential dilemma of all human beings, for example, ‘how can death happen?’; ‘is the world a mirage?’; or, ‘have we seen the real world?’ Protest against the

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actuality of death is often so marked that some lamenters threaten to dig up the grave as a sign of their rejection of it. XLII Shame Bereaved women fear for the dignity and reputation of the dead as much as they fear for their own reputation. Should their head veils droop, women may suffer humiliation even after death. Men, despite their great ‘stature’, are placed barefoot in the ground. Death itself is a humiliation. A woman’s body is stripped bare and exposed to strangers in violation of all socio‑cultural protocols. Just as the professional lamenter fears chastisement at the hands of men who do not respect their honour, the deceased may also be subjected to calumny and scorn. The lamenters identify with the vulnerability of the deceased and offer consolation. XLIII Grief and Suffering The grief described in lamentation is a palpable, blinding grief that invades the senses abruptly, like the encroachment of marauders or men on horseback. Analogous to the practice of cauterisation of wounds, the invasion of grief is like the scorching of the heart with a red-hot poker or ‘the ripping apart’ of the innards. Tears of grief are blinding and the eyes need a salve, in some cases, zinc or an ancient potion (šešni) to soothe them. Suffering overwhelms women when a man departs, a ‘pigeon tower’ topples over, or a ‘river bank’ is inundated. Grief deprives one of sleep. In one lament, the deceased becomes her deceased mother and takes on her burden, in a reversal, asking her to drink from ‘her bitters’. Despite the wealth of anthropological literature that asserts that emotions are socially and culturally constructed, from the wealth of emotions enumerated and repeated in the laments, it would appear that the apprehension of grief expressed here is rooted in the universal human experience of grief at loss.

Conclusion In the main, the deceased is represented in metonymic images, some from the natural world, some from the socially constituted world. The themes are highly varied in scope and in many instances, embrace a wide range of motifs. In their permutations, the laments via their thematic constructs reveal the expansiveness of the lamenters’ imagination as well as fragmented conceptions about the afterlife and the experience of death. Without the synthesising device of this concordance, my attempts to interpret motifs to reveal the conceptual schema of the whole would have failed. With the concordance, it became possible to examine the themes individually and collectively as a multi‑faceted, yet coherent, matrix of beliefs. This I do in subsequent chapters.

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The Cosmology of the Afterlife

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8

Ancient Egyptian Lamentation

Kinesics, Performance and the Semiotics of Gesture

25. Mourners in the tomb of Racmoza

Paintings of lamenters engaged in the act of lamentation are a particular feature of the New Kingdom tombs in the Theban necropolis at Gurna (ca 1,546–1,237 BC).1 Lamenters are shown in conventional poses on the walls of tombs, either standing, kneeling or crouched, with arms poised overhead. As with the provision of schwaptis, or miniaturised statuary in the grave, Egyptologists argue that these iconographic depictions were intended to act as a perpetual source of consolation to the deceased for eternity. One of the most beautiful and evocative of these representations of lamentation is in the tomb of the XVIIIth Dynasty noble, Ra cmoza. There, female mourners, with their hair unplaited and arms uplifted, pursue the funerary bier, weeping visible tears and chanting lamentations. In the tomb of Neferhotep, another Theban tomb of the same period, ritual mourners or in the contemporary context, naddabat, wail and hurl dust on their heads following behind the two main lamenters.

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26. Lamenters in funerary boats crossing to the West Bank, from the Tomb of Neferhotep

27. Lamenters on funerary boats, from the tomb of Neferhotep

28. A troupe of female musicians goes out to meet Neferhotep

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The Egyptologist, Norman de Garis Davies, describes the scene as follows: ‘The women who personate the sisters of Osiris (Isis and Nephthys) precede and follow the bark, and female mourners wail and fling dust on their heads… The chief male mourners cower in the dust crying, ‘My shepherd is taken from me He has abandoned his servant’ (Davies 1933: Plate XLI)

Davies re-constructs the lament text and translates it, noting that the widow’s lament is placed first: I am thy wife, Meryet-Re c O great one, do not abandon me [for] thy nature is kind. O kind father. Such is my distance from thee [that while] he is like [the god] Re c… I walk alone with the singers. Lo, I am behind thee [but] thou who didst love to talk with me art silent and speakest not.

The officiating lector says: I make incense and libation to thy ka [soul], O Osiris, the chief scribe of Amun, Neferhotep.

The mourning women say: Praise, praise! Safe! Safe! Safe!

29. Lamenters depicted in Old Kingdom paintings

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30. Lamenters depicted in New Kingdom paintings

31. Lamenters depicted with hair unplaited and lamenters wearing costumes which expose their breasts

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32. Lamenters shown squatting on the ground

Wail untiringly. Oh the loss! The good shepherd goes to the land of eternity. The multitude of men is taken from thee [for] thou art in the land which loveth solitude. He who loved to stretch the legs in walking is confined, fettered, walledin. He who was rich in fine linen and loved clothes lies in the cast-off garments of yesterday. (Davies 1933: 42)2

The husband is addressed both as ‘great’ and the ‘father’, as in the contemporary persona of ‘the husband/father’ or patriarch. Moreover, it is noteworthy that the mourning women start with highly formulaic cries (which resemble ritual wailing or sirah) and progress to more poetic laments, different in tone from the more intimate and mildly admonishing lament by Meryet-Re c who urges Neferhotep not to abandon her. The mourners who stand in the stern of the funerary barge play the parts of the imaginary figures of the sisters, Isis and Nephthys. In other words, this is a pageant acted out by lamenters impersonating the two ancient Egyptian female goddesses. Davies also observes that women ‘feign to pour dust on their heads’ and that some of the women in the procession are bare-breasted, while others go ‘half-naked’. These laments in translation raise many questions about the connotations of representation and codes of lament performance in ancient Egyptian iconography. The Belgian Egyptologist, Werbrouck, in her

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comprehensive study of lament imagery, demonstrated that lamenters from the Old Kingdom to the New are depicted in a constellation of poses: standing, kneeling or crouched, their arms gently crooked above their heads, their heads thrown back or sunken onto their chins, and their faces sketched with expressions of anguish (1938). These poses comprised a repertoire of conventions of representation. The depiction of lamentation on tomb walls in Thebes was not done for nobles and kings. These paintings were done exclusively for lesser officials. In the private tombs of Kiki and Kheruef at ilcAsasiif, for example, lamenters were painted in a naturalistic style with large tears daubed on their cheeks and in the Nobles Tombs,3 the tomb of the Governor of Thebes, Rekh-mi-Re c, lamenters were depicted banging yellow shells together as they walked in front of the bier. Werbrouck argued that lamentation was not only a ritual of mourning rigorously performed at burial; it was engraved on the walls of the tomb so that the ka (soul or life-force) of the deceased could derive a continuous state of wellbeing from the lamenters’ presence for eternity (1938: 144). Moreover, it was given particular prominence. Almost without exception, it was the first of the funerary scenes to be sketched and completed by the artist in a tomb. As Davies may have done earlier, Werbrouck interpreted some postures of lament in light of contemporary lament ritual. The ‘hand on the mouth’ pose she saw as evidence that the mourners were ululating or performing zagarit (as they would today at weddings and sheikhs’ festivals) and a hand gesture as indicative of a woman ‘giving rhythm’ or gesticulating to the communal throng as if she, like a contemporary badaya, were directing the assembled group of mourners (1938: 39, 46). As an ethnographer, I was intrigued by the comparisons being drawn by Egyptologists between ancient and modern tradition. I felt compelled to go back and examine the wealth of the ancient Egyptian iconographic and literary lament tradition in greater detail. In doing this, I discovered scripts for the performance of lamentation from the so-called Late Period or approximately fourth century BC.

Lamentation Scripts: The Songs of Isis and Nephthys and Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys In the first, The Festival Songs of Isis and Nephthys (literally, the ‘Stanzas of the Festival of the Two Kites’ from the Bremner Rhind papyrus)4 ‘ritual’ laments were to be performed by two women playing the roles of Isis and Nephthys in the context of celebrations at the commemorative festival of Osiris rather than at funerals. The preface defines the accoutrements and requirements for performance: And there shall be brought in [two] women pure of body and virgin, with the hair of their bodies removed, their heads adorned with wigs, […] tambourines in their hands and their names inscribed on their

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arms, to wit, Isis and Nephthys They mourn for [thee] in dishevelment, the hair of their heads disordered (Trans. Faulkner 1936: 122, 129)5

In addition to ritual shaving, the women had to be equipped with a tar (a shallow drum, translated in the script as ‘tambourine’), were required to be virgins as if to be offerings in a sacrifice to a deity, and to unplait their hair, perhaps as a ritual gesture of submission. The second of these papyri, the Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys: a recitation of blessings made by the Two Sisters, found in Thebes on the West Bank of Luxor, was written in hieratic (a cursive version of hieroglyphics) and appended to a papyrus of the Book of the Dead.6 It addresses a woman called Tentruty or Teret and, unlike the former, was probably designed as a script for funerary lamentation. According to the text, it was ‘to be repeated twice a day for the dead’. Just as explicit directions for lament performance are cited in the preface of the first text, the ‘stage directions’ for a successful lamentation session were similarly written here. Despite the different functions of these texts, the instructions are not dissimilar. These laments are to be recited by: two women with beautiful bodies, on whose arms should be written the names of Isis and Nephthys and in whose hands should be placed jars of water in the right and offering loaves in their left (Faulkner 1934: 341)

These women need not be virgins but should be physically beautiful; they clutch jars of water and offer loaves in their hands during the lamentations. A crude sketch of the two women inserted at the bottom of the manuscript dramatises the scene. The names of the two famous goddesses attributed with the creation of lamentation were to be inscribed on their arms and, unlike the first, the two women were not obliged to obscure their hair with wigs. These texts reveal how the lamentation was conceived of as a ‘reenactment’. The interlocking voices and style of communication established between the two lamenters reinforces the idea of lament as a mutually constructed performance by two women, the impersonators of Isis and Nephthys, engaged in a kind of interactive dialogue. Moreover, the overwhelming theme of both texts is the invocation to return: the lamenters desire to ‘see the deceased with the eye’ and stress their sisterly bond with the deceased. The lamenters weep self-consciously, the deceased is urged to ‘rise up’ and the ‘Two Sisters’ pledge their wish to be with the deceased forever. These are themes we recognise from the contemporary laments and in these two bizarre ‘performances’ we are presented with a model of lament that is strangely ritualised but yet familiar. The function of the Lamentations text is explicitly described. The laments were to:

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bless his ba (the personality of the deceased, depicted as a humanheaded bird or migratory stork) steady his body, exalt his ka (the lifeforce which survives after death), to give breath to the nose of him who lacks breath, to soothe the heart of Isis and Nephthys, and to give life-stability-dominion to the Osiris deceased.

As set out in this lucid preface, the laments were to perform a multiplicity of functions for the deceased and the living: to give blessing, praise and palpable breath to the deceased. The laments were to create wellbeing and ‘to soothe the wrath’.7 The stage directions in this papyrus conclude with the coda: ‘It benefits the doer as well as the gods’, a sentiment subtly reflected in cAliya’s lament and at the heart of all modern lament performance, ‘For our destinies and our fates…’. In the Osirian rites performed for the god ­– ‘in every place of Osiris at every feast of his’ – rather than at funerals, lamentation was specifically intended to be the ‘re-enactment performed by Isis over the recumbent body of the dead Osiris’ (Lichtheim III 1980: 116). This Late Period lament illustrates how the etiological myth of Isis lamenting her husband’s death, first documented in the much more ancient Pyramid Texts, a compendium of funerary texts and liturgies dating from the Old Kingdom, had not been forgotten even in the late Ptolemaic period, millennia later. We can assume that these texts were scripts of previous performances as well as ritual texts to be sung for the person in the afterlife by other mourners, or even, as was believed, by the lamenters depicted on tomb walls. These two contrasting texts reveal the powerful influence of the Osiris myth and ritual on the performance of lamentation. They also emphasise the importance of the antiphonal style of performance and how, by that epoch, the behavioural rendering of lamentation by women had become institutionalised. The performance of lamentations in each ritual was to be acted out by two selected actresses according to a list of instructions. To ensure precise replication, the length of each lament and the voicing of each were also set out. In the Songs, ‘Isis’, the main lamenter, leads, initiating every verse, while the impersonator of Nephthys performs the role of drone or respondent, never introducing a new verse. In the Lamentations, on the other hand,8 both lamenters introduce their own laments and invocations, as well as accompanying each other in a structured way. For example, the preface (verses 1.10–verse 3.12) is sung as a duet by both women, verse 3.13–3.16 is a 4-line solo by Isis and 3.17–3.22 is a duet.9 At line 3.23, the performance is interrupted by a ritual (what Faulkner describes as ‘an unspecified rite of protective magic’) and then the lament proceeds, alternating between duets and solos performed by both singers in what appears to be antiphonal performance. In her analysis of lamenters’ postures, Werbrouck opined that one woman ‘supplied the rhythm and metre to the chorus of laments’, suggesting that the lead role of the pleureuse or badaya, ‘the one who begins’

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in modern terminology, could be discerned in these lament depictions. Her counterpart in these Late Period Lamentations would have been the Isis figure. Moreover, Werbrouck claimed, the groups of three or four women, perhaps the semi-professional lamenters accompanying the badaya, possibly acting as the chorus, appeared skilled in the performance of laments and were depicted as distinctly different from the ‘relatives of the bereaved’ (ibid: 46). By the Ptolemaic period, according to these transcripts, the chorus was comprised of one person only, ‘the Sister of Isis’ (actually, her sisterin-law, Nephthys). These two lament performances (the Songs and the Lamentations) were specific to different performance contexts, but the roles of the two women were complementary. In the particular case of the Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys, the script was adapted to ‘the funerary service of a private person, an adaptation made possible by the traditional association of every dead person with the god Osiris’ (Lichtheim 1980 III: 116). A certain amount of improvisation within the bounds of the script would perhaps have been permitted and what is unusual here is that this lament was written for a woman, and attached to a copy of the Book of the Dead. In the Lamentations, the plaintive tone and sentiment of the ancient laments becomes clear as well as the voicing and structure: Isis speaks, she says: Come to your house, come to your house, You of On, come to your house, [On – ancient city of Heliopolis] Your foes are not O good musician, come to your house Behold me, I am your beloved sister, You shall not part from me O good youth, come to your house Long, long have I not seen you My heart mourns you, my eyes seek you, I search for you to see you… (Lichtheim 1980: 116–21)

After seven such stanzas, ‘Nephthys speaks, she says…’ picking up and reiterating the lines uttered earlier by ‘Isis’: O good king, come to your house, Please your heart, your foes are not…

The Two Sisters exhort the soul to return in a refrain familiar from the modern laments: ‘Come to your house’ and emphasise the intimacy of the family connection: Isis says: Come to your sister…

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Come to your wife… Come to your housemistress… I am your sister by your mother…

Nephthys, who was identified in the mythology as wife of Set, brother of Osiris, echoes her, ‘I am your beloved sister…’. The verses start as triplets and are followed by pairs of doublets structured as 4-line stanzas by Lichtheim, each consisting of two couplets, a symmetrical pattern broken occasionally, as here: While I can see I call to you Weeping to the height of heaven! But you do not hear my voice, Though I am your sister whom you loved on earth You loved none but me, the sister, the sister!

From the reiterative and dialogic nature of these laments, it can be argued that these laments were performed antiphonally. ‘The one who begins’ initiates the lament (in this case, the woman playing Isis) while ‘the one who responds’ (the actress enacting the part of Nephthys) either sings along in unison or introduces her own refrain verse. In modern lament performance, we know that both types of interaction between lamenter, respondent and chorus take place. We may conclude therefore, on the basis of the preface, the ‘stage directions’ and the antiphonal structure of the Lamentations, that as late as the fourth century BC the Egyptians conceived of ritual lamentation as a mimetic performance, to be conducted formally by at least two women. Its subsequent ascription to the Book of the Dead suggests, moreover, that it was considered appropriate as a model for lamentation in general, and a guide to rules of performance. The lamentation ‘scripts’ or more accurately, ‘transcripts’ of actual performed lament, were written in the cursive form of hieroglyphics known as hieratic, the language conventionally used for literary texts. Few examples survive of spoken language from ancient Egypt, and what does survive provides little inkling as to how these strokes of hieratic or hieroglyphic signs might have been pronounced. However, in this case of these scripts, it would seem that both the form and text of the lamentation have been elaborately and painstakingly documented in an attempt to preserve the performance scenario and ensure the efficacy of lamentation in future.

The Semiotics of Gesture Lament postures may also have been as integral to performance as text to melody. As shown so clearly and succinctly by Werbrouck (1938) the sheer conventionality of the representations painted on tomb walls suggests that these conventionalised postures may have been signs or ‘sign-vehicles’10

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that is, meta-signals or images of grief, as vital to performance as the slow and hypnotic manoeuvring of the body round and round to the pulse of the laments. The multivalent nature of signs in the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic system, and the use of ‘stick-men’ or other illustrative sketches (essentially, logograms or ideograms), to inflect the meanings of words or to denote what they depict11 suggests that there was some relationship between posture and sign. For example, the angle of the arms in some poses corresponds to the ideogram of ‘pleading and complaint’ (ibid: 146) and in some representations, the lamenters’ fists are clenched as in the hieroglyph of exclamation that denotes paradoxically both ‘jubilation’, ‘invocation’ and ‘mourning’ (Gardiner 1958: A28). The lifting of the arms above the head might also have had a literal function: to incarnate the protection and re-invigoration of the ka after death, since the hieroglyphic sign for ka is a pair of uplifted arms.12 In the Songs of Isis and Nephthys, for example, the lamenter sings: Mine arms are extended to greet thee, Mine arms are upraised … are upraised to protect thee

In a similar vein, the modern lamenter, Balabil, sings: By the life in my arms, I shall bring you nourishment

while raising her crooked arms over her head. Though perhaps only trying to emphasise the intensity of her emotions by physical gesture, through this unusual epithet, she may have also been trying to invoke ritual protection of the soul for eternity. Moreover, the hieroglyphic sign (or so-called ‘determinative’) denoting a woman mourner also varied, possibly to show a variety of allusive qualities or characteristics. The designation seems to centre on the metaphoric comparison of the lamenter to a predatory bird, a kite. This image derives from the myth of the origins of lament first documented in the Pyramid Texts. In this the goddess Isis transforms herself into the form of a kite fluttering over the recumbent body of her husband Osiris, an act of lamentation which prompted his resurrection in death and permitted her to be impregnated with his seed: On finding the dead body of her brother Osiris, she hovered above/ over it in the form of a bird uttering wailing cries of grief, making air by the beating of her wings and sending forth light from the sheen of her feathers, and at length she roused the dead to life by her words of power… She made to rise up the inert members of him whose heart was at rest. She drew from him his essence and made there from him an heir.13

The original text stresses that Isis was ‘possessor of the word’14 and that she uttered the words she knew with correct pronunciation, ‘halting

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33. Dancers in the Mastaba of Kagemni

not in her speech’. The act of lamentation embraced not only words and wailing but also the frenzied flapping of the wings, to stimulate the flow of life-giving breeze and the creation of light. Most critically, by this act, the goddess revived life from his languid body and succeeded in conceiving Horus, her son. The myth’s emphasis on the regeneration of Osiris by Isis, the magician goddess, in the guise of a black cawing bird, stresses the implicitly sexual nature of the act of lamenting and may account for the custom of baring the breasts and rending the garments, as seen in ancient iconography. Wreszinski, in his Atlas zur altägyptischen Kulturgesichte describes a funerary dance performed by ‘naked women with tambours and bent knees’ (Wilkinson 1847: Pl. 419) while in other tombs, dancers are frequently shown leaping or gyrating in snakelike movements at the joyous, funerary banquet as in the Mastaba of Kagemni, VIth Dynasty, Saqqara, above. The erotic and offertory nature of funerary ritual and bodily display in Egypt has been highlighted over a span of several millennia by ancient tomb painters, ethnographers and historians such as Herodotus and Diodorus, and the nineteenth century savants of the Napoleonic expedition, authors of La Description de l’Égypte. Women danced around round the sacred barge at funerals, naked or dressed in cloaks open at the front, to the accompaniment of music, according to Lexova, ‘to chase away the demons by their complete or partial nudity’ (1935: 12). In contemporary Egypt, ana caret caleh (‘I stripped naked for him’) implies the ultimate act of appeasement by a woman for a man15 and is used to indicate a woman’s submission and humiliation. The tradition of ripping open one’s clothing in the funerary ritual is waning but is still practised by bereaved widows in particular: ‘as I pass in the procession, I rip open my clothes’ sings one lamenter. Other texts pivot around the idea that, as the dead person has been stripped naked to be washed, the lamenters rip their clothes in grief.

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34. The ‘bird lady’ from al-Mamoriyya

According to informants, this act is regarded as a legitimate expression of the grief experienced in the loss of one’s sexual partner and indicative of the desperate longing to be reunited with the deceased, despite the risk, if performed in a public space, that the perpetrator might be shamed. The ancient Egyptian iconographic tradition thrived on the potentiality of signs and determinatives to create and define meanings (often double meanings) in a text. In this instance, three hieroglyphic signs cement the link between the images of water, vessels brimming with water and sexual imagery. The word for ‘female pudenda; female; woman’ and also ‘pool, lake, or sheet of water’ is represented by a horizontal, half cowry-shaped crescent16 along with more elaborate, half-moon shaped vessels with ‘teeth’ or stripes, and a bowl full to the brim with liquid.17 Icons depicting the names of the three goddesses, Isis, Nephthys and Nut, also include bowl-like images. Isis, the primary lamenter, is depicted as a vulture with a seat or throne on her head and an overturned basket or earthenware bowl (majur)18 while Nephthys is depicted with a distinguishing headdress shaped like the base of a house, supporting what might be a concave earthenware pot (the symbol has never been conclusively defined). Moreover, in multiple other representations in the earliest texts, the image of a pot representing ‘vase, vessel and what is fluid’19 and an overturned majur accompany the name of the sky goddess Nut,20 and are emblematic of her fecundity. Two strands of representation are evinced in the ancient imagery, one mythic and the other naturalistic. In the famous terracotta statue of the ‘bird lady’ from the pre-Dynastic Nagada II period, found in al-

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Mamoriyya at Edfu near el-Kab, and dated to 3650–3300 BC, a mourning woman moulded with the head of a bird appears to lament, her arms outstretched in anguish. This links the human image of the lamenter to the mythological conception of Isis as a kite. In the Pyramid Texts, written down one thousand years after the Mamoriyya sculpture and from which the etiological myth of lament derives, the goddess Isis is depicted as a kite, and Isis and Nephthys together as predatory birds: kites, vultures or waterfowl (an image which conventionally denotes flying). However, within the same compendium, other humanistic determinatives were also used to denote lamenting women. One such word was tcher-ti, written with the stick figure meaning ‘pray, worship, entreat, praise’ and translated as ‘ancestress, vulture, falcon’. Tcher could also mean, ‘border, boundary, limit’ or ‘at the limits of the earth’ in ancient Egyptian. Through extrapolation, it can be concluded that the lamenter was a liminal figure who straddled the metaphysical boundary of life and death. Tcher was later transposed into Coptic as djera and has been retained in Sa cidi Arabic is jar/jara (from Coptic) denoting ‘one on the perimeter’ or a ‘neighbour’.21 The female aspect of lament is also visible in other images such as that of a woman bending from the waist, her hair unplaited and brushed over her head.22 This sign is adjoined conceptually and figuratively to words meaning weeping: aakb ‘weep or grieve’ or akeb denoting both ‘the Nile’ and ‘to wail, lament, cry, weep and tear the hair out in grief ’ as well as ‘to bow’.23 ‘Wailing woman’ (aakbit) is the embodiment of this image24 found also in the Pyramid Texts and also shows a woman sitting with her hair unplaited, flowing out behind her, or bending over with her hair bowed down.25

35. Ideograms of lamenters/weepers

This is the phonetic inverse of the Arabic verb beka from which the words used to designate lamentation in Sa cidi dialect (buka) and the lamenter (bakiyya) both derive and so, a form of metathesis, characteristic of Upper Egyptian dialect in general. The Egyptologist Zandee concluded that ‘wailing women’ were also intended to act as ‘guards’26 for the soul en route to the afterlife because of the determinative used to gloss the meaning of the word. In ancient Egyptian, the word denoting ‘to let the hair hang down in mourning’ (nwn) also meant ‘the women acting as “the souls of Buto” in the domain of the dead) perform nwn for you with their hair’ (Kenney 2008), a

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derivation which suggests that through the act of unplaiting their hair, the lamenters disassociate themselves from the sentient world in order to communicate with spirits in the afterlife.27 She notes also that this same ritual appears later in funerary scenes as a mourning dance performed by women with dishevelled hair flung forwards over their heads.28 The contemporary lamenter, cAliya, suggests that she lets down her hair as a gesture of surrender to forces beyond her control: O time, I bowed down my head to you, And whatever you may do to me, I accept I let down my hair to you, O time, I let down my hair to you, And whatever you may do, all that comes to me, I accept

From these ancient images, three universal characteristics of lament performance emerge as primary: the first, that grief is to be expressed through weeping ‘tears’; secondly, when women mourn, it is customary for them to unplait their hair and thirdly, that bowing and offering up the hair in grief is a gesture of obeisance, perhaps intended to appease the deceased after death. This array of mythical and naturalistic representations of lamenters and lamentation exemplifies the way in which the ancient Egyptians conceived of lament as a ritual re-enactment.

Lamentation: The Mythological Heritage The contemporary lamenter also resembles an ancient goddess in particular contexts. Balabil, for example, intimates that her offerings to the deceased are obliquely sexual: and thus, that she may provide a source of nourishment: My earthenware pot is full, they are coming back to take me and my earthenware pot is full Nourishment I bear, only let there be a law, men My pot is full to brimming, they are coming back to take me, my pot full to brimming Nourishment I bear, only let there be a law, my family My pot is on my head, they are coming back to take me, my pot is on my head Nourishment I bear, only the law is harsh

In one lament, she bears a basket on her head, in another, an earthenware pot (manšal), an image known to be a metaphor for the womb. She is clearly afraid of rape by unknown spirits yet recognises that ‘the law’ is ineffectual. Yet later in the lament, she lures the soul back with promises of sexual favours: At the peak of the heat he passes by my house, at the peak of the heat Why not stay a while … my water is good

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He passes by my house in the blazing heat Why not stay a while … my water is sweet…

In this way, Balabil aligns herself in lament with Qomiyya, another accomplished lamenter, who describes how the faithful wife brings water to the grave, refilling the earthenware pot from which the soul will drink. She is the source of water for her husband, the fluid to engender life: He leaves his mount to drink from the purest one She is chaste and her master elegant From the brimming (one) his mount drinks from the brimming one… She is chaste and her master handsome From the earthenware bowl, his mount drinks from the earthenware bowl From the earthenware bowl … she is chaste and her master noble She is chaste and her master noble From the filled (one) his mount drinks from the filled (one) She is chaste and her master great She is chaste and her master is great

Another lament by Šargawiyya describes the elevated terrain of the tomb in heaven and conveys a similar message: He raised it high, the guardian of heaven built it and raised it high There is a garden there and the source of water is beside him There is a garden there and the source of water is beside him He went to the archangel (where) there is a garden and I went to him For I am a garden and the source of water is within me

In the laments, the lamenter reveals her commitment to reawakening of the deceased’s soul to eternal life via these enduring images of female fertility. She is the Isis to his Osiris, metaphorically embodying the coremyth which establishes lamentation as the creative force in the fecundation of Isis by the deceased soul (Osiris). Like the goddess Nut, she offers solace and life-giving fluids to the deceased. The motif of a ‘woman as a bird’ is rare in contemporary Egyptian funerary lament though the sound of lament is linked metaphorically to bird song as it is in other cultural environments.29 In Egyptian folk literature, however, the theme lingers on. A heroine is garbed in a magic robe of feathers, as in The Thousand and One Nights and in the folk epic sirat sef ibn yazin. In that tale, the heroine dons a mutalism dress (literally, one ‘empowered with talismanic spells’) and so is able to fly. She then swoops down to the ground, snatches her child up and, like the archetypal mother goddess Isis who clasped her son Horus to her chest, proceeds to breast‑feed her child, in that tale, called ‘Egypt’. By transforming herself into a bird, she has saved her son and nourished him. She then absconds with ‘him’ in flight, enclosing her ‘son’ in a silken belt.

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36. The goddess Isis as a bird

The Egyptian folklorist, Sacd al‑Khadim, delved into the mythological affinity of women to birds and discovered from historical records that dresses called al-tiyyab al-ramšana (‘feathered dresses’) from riš (feathers) and al-tiyyab al-miganaha ‘dresses with wings’ (n.d. 43) were designed to emphasise the linkage between sleeves and feathers in rural Egypt. Feathers were deliberately marked on cloth and village shawls worn in the countryside during the Islamic period in Egypt, as if to embody the mythological link between women and birds through costume. It is possible that these garments were worn by principal lamenters, or by all women, to link themselves to the mystical avian world, perhaps to empower themselves for the intonation of lament or for some other unspecified, ritual purpose. In the laments, a woman’s futa or gina c, the long, all-enveloping veils which billow out like sails implicitly become ‘wings’ but only when they are to be seized and clasped by the house, to prevent her from leaving.30 The implication is that she may have become bird-like after death. Her ‘veil’ or mugan caha becomes like flowing ‘wings’ (mijanaha in Sa cidi dialect) through the slight shift in consonants, a technique for creating a tension of juxtaposed meanings known in Arabic as jinas or paronomasia. These words (which appear in successive couplets) are phonetically close to the ancient Egyptian words for wrappings, an indication perhaps, that the two concepts and words might once have been an ancient end-rhyme pairing in an earlier lament couplet.

The Ancient Egyptian Laments In addition to the laments for Neferhotep written down in the New Kingdom, a small corpus of lament fragments, sung mainly by women but occasionally by men, were also discovered to have been recorded on ancient tomb walls. Inscribed over a time span of over 2,500 years in Old

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Kingdom tombs at Saqqara and Giza between ca 2,589–2,269 BC, at El Kab near Edfu during the Middle (ca 2040–1640 BC) and New Kingdom (ca 1570–1070 BC) and much later Late Period tombs (ca 751 BC–27 AD) at Thebes, now Gurna, on the West Bank of Luxor, these laments were gathered together in a publication by the Egyptologist, Lüddeckens (1943) who translated them from hieroglyphics into German.31 Elliptical and exhortative, these fragments are presented as transcripts or stylistic recreations of actual lamentation performed by the bereaved. As a result, they resemble the contemporary cidid in many important ways. To be able to compare this small repertoire of laments with the contemporary, I have selected those laments which include suggestive metaphor and symbol as well as allusions to performance and cosmology and from these, created a second, parallel concordance of lament. (The Detailed Concordance of Ancient Lament Themes can be found in Appendix B).

The Ancient Egyptian Laments: A Thematic Analysis It is significant that 26 of the 43 thematic categories devised for the modern laments are replicated in the concordance of ancient lament themes. In both the ancient and modern laments, it is clear that death is a destructive force, and the purifications performed for the deceased are directed towards the life‑force or ka of the person, the aspect of the soul believed to survive in symbiotic union with the body after death. With respect to the passage to the afterlife, the ancient lamenter states that she wishes to accompany the deceased on his journey and he should go in peace. He goes to the West and, in one case, journeys over water. The lamenter protests her abandonment by the deceased, and asks him to return, sentiments reiterated in many contemporary laments. In another text, the deceased is asserted to be ‘alive’ and said to ‘drink in the place beyond’. In the ancient laments, the lamenters’ main motive would appear to be communication with the dead. Moreover, the deceased is expected to be conscious of what is being said. The mourners wish the soul safe passage on the journey to the afterlife just as they lament his passing to the world beyond. Their bewilderment at the havoc caused by death also provokes the lamenters to reflect on their own quandary. Unlike more formal, ritual texts, the laments, particularly those sung by women,32 express profound grief as well as ideas about the afterlife. The following two antithetical and parallel phrases: You have not come dead. You have come alive (Middle Kingdom, Thebes #12)

plead for the resurrection of the deceased and yet as a trope, appear designed to evoke pathos in the mourners. The fragmented cries to the deceased, however, seem unpremeditated:

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O my beloved master, O my beloved father, O my master, take me to you (from the VIth Dynasty tomb at Giza #1)

and suggest a sudden outpouring of grief. Some of the earliest texts focus on the shrieks and cries which are traditionally performed by women in modern times on the discovery of a death: ‘O my father, O my father’ from a VIth Dynasty Giza tomb, (like the Arabic ‘y’abui … y’abui’) and ‘Wail, Wail’ (Thebes #59b), similar in sentiment to the cry: ‘ya weli, ya weli’ ‘O my disaster, O my disaster’. Women distinguish this genre of lament (sirah or ritual wailing) from the c idid or poetic laments. The laments are performed formally by women together while sirah are a conventional response to the death cry going up. In the ancient laments, each text is ‘framed’ by a phrase which defines the identity of the person singing, male or female, a relative, a lamenter, presumably professional, or a priest officiating at the funerary ritual. The laments themselves are written as captions, as if these words have been snatched from their mouths as the bereaved stand to mourn or walk along beside the bier. The Egyptologist, Roland Enmarch, has noted that the most sombre laments of the bereaved are performed at the threshold of the house or the embalming hall while the laments intoned during the funerary procession are of a different order, reflecting a more hopeful transition into the new life.33 It is not clear if these representations are intended to simulate an actual funerary ritual, or like the written spells inscribed on tombs and coffin lids and the exhortative poses of lamenters engaged in the act of lamentation, to revivify the deceased by virtue of their power and presence for eternity. In any case, the importance given to the texts by their inclusion on the walls highlights the integral place of lamentation in the funerary ritual. The following frames or preludes to lamentation were inscribed on tomb walls and listed in the collection by Lüddeckens: Words by the lamenter on the ground (#84, #51) Words to be said (#20b, #66) Words to be said by lector priests (#20a) Words to be said to calves (that pull the bier) (#27, #38, #73) Words to be said by people (#70) The brother of the deceased says (#34) His sister says (#16, #32, #46) The girl who has no mother says (#51) Sons following the lamenters say (#40) Lamenting women say (#42) The priests say (in this case, a more formal prayer than a lament) (# 35) Words to be said by people (#14) who pull the bier (#54)

Some are sung by the bereaved relatives, others by lamenters as the

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funerary bier is processed or borne on a ship to burial in the West. Others are, as the instructions read, ‘to be sung at the Opening of the Mouth Ceremony’ (e.g. Neferhotep #49), a ritual that involved placement of an iron implement into the mouth of the standing mummy to symbolise the opening of the mouth and therefore, the resuscitation of ‘breath’, symptomatic of the revivification of the spirit. In addition, the context of performance may be described: The voice of a woman on the ground is … she says… My heart cries, cries You reach the cemetery in haste Wail! Wail! Wail for me! Wail for me! Destroyed is my house in a single blink of the eye I am like a young fallen calf at evening that has no path to take (Late Period, Thebes #84)

The simulated realism of this and other vivid and emotional excerpts (XIXth Dynasty, Saqqara #74, #75, #79 plus Thebes #55, 56 and 59b)34 is striking and evokes true pathos. The lamenter is prostrate on the ground and as in modern laments, laments her fate. The destruction of the ‘house’ in the broader sense of household and ancestral line is a shared theme common to both ancient and modern laments, though the metaphoric designation of the bereaved (or the lamenter) as a helpless, ‘fallen calf ’ is not found in the contemporary lament repertoire. As the framings emphasise, the lament is to be performed orally. Moreover, the lamenters use specific rhetorical devices to accentuate the poignancy of the lament and its communicative purpose: Am I not calling? I am passing by the house of... Will you spend your time in the distance? A messenger comes to give news to the deceased So will you not then strike one of us who brings you news about them? One could tell this to the messenger that he … Then you would not know the dead Your story will be communicated to him (XIXth Dynasty, Saqqara #75)

This lamenter uses interrogative and negative interrogative modes of speech to emulate dialogue with an apparently still cognisant deceased. Her lament betrays a querulous tone possibly intended to provoke the deceased to react and communicate with ‘the messenger’, a spiritual intermediary or emissary from the dead who might bring news to the living of his wellbeing in the world beyond. While some mourners bear the deceased to the West, another one queries, ‘Where have I, the lamenter, come?’ (Middle Kingdom, Thebes

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#18) as if a temporary and involuntary loss of consciousness of the sentient world has overwhelmed the lamenter, leaving her dazed. In certain key expressions, the leitmotifs of lament, ancient and modern, would seem to fuse together: Do not abandon me. Do not abandon me (Thebes #55) My beloved master, my beloved father, take me with you (VIth Dynasty, Giza #1)

And in the wishing of safe passage to the deceased: Be safe and sound. Be safe and sound In peace … in peace… (Tutmosis III, Thebes #19)

As in the modern laments, each phrase is repeated twice for sonorous effect, possibly to signal the multiple meanings of the root: šarm/šalm (cf Budge 1920; 1970). In the ancient Egyptian language, the word conveyed the notions of ‘greeting, to offer salutations, to salaam’ from which the cognates: salam/salama in Arabic and shalom in Hebrew would appear to derive. Structural forms such as triplets also occur as a form of incremental repetition, as in contemporary oral performance: You that are beloved (who would) talk to me You are silent You reply not (New Kingdom, Neferhotep, Thebes #48)

or within a quatrain (aaba), comprising a triplet plus invocation: His daughter says: Praise to you Praise to you, my father, Praise to you!

The professional lamenters try to create empathy with the deceased: I am here sitting in your place but I do not hear your voice (New Kingdom, Neferhotep,Thebes, #47)

Other laments emanate from the bereaved relatives, not the professional mourners: His daughter Baba, she says … ‘Where are you going, my father?’ (New Kingdom, El Kab, #16)

Both men’s and women’s laments are quoted, an aspect of the ancient texts which demonstrates the fact that in previous epochs laments were performed by both sexes, and there is no apparent differentiation in the laments: ‘the sons who precede the bier say ‘Come to me, my father’ (New Kingdom, Thebes #40) and the lamenting women behind entreating him: ‘Come to me … come to me’ (New Kingdom, Thebes #42).

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The lamenters proclaim their desire to be with the deceased and urge his return. This is a rhetorical strategy that creates pathos and provides an inkling of the relationship believed to exist between lamenter and deceased during the funerary ritual. Other stylistic features of the ancient laments also are discernible: the creation of dialogue and the conventions of multiple voicing and shifting perspectives. Without knowledge of the degree to which these texts are reconstructions of orally performed laments, it is not possible to assert the laments’ actual ‘orality’. But because of evidence which shows that women used more colloquial language in their laments, gleaned from close linguistic examination of the ancient lament texts (Sweeney 2001), it is possible to assert their oral texture. Lament performance was rooted, then as now, in the oral tradition and these mere fragments serve to reveal the continuity of these ancient performance conventions. The intimate nature of the dialogue between mourner and deceased is also clearly paramount. Only a few metaphoric invocations occur. Allusions to the deceased going to the ‘place of many granaries’ and to ‘the mound or mountain in the West’ are suggestive of the contemporary, though the tomb is also formulaically described as the ‘place of eternity’ (ibid) where the ‘tears of the fields flow’. In other laments from the famous tomb of Mereruka at Saqqara, the land of the dead is described in less euphemistic terms: it is ‘the earth’. In other laments from later epochs, it is ‘a barren place’, a ‘place of stones’ and a place of ‘no light’. The tomb is a place of ‘granaries’ and of nourishment, and yet it is also a desiccated landscape in which the person is buried, a more naturalistic description of the expanses of desert which surround the Nile valley. An element of realism has been injected, perhaps an inevitable consequence of the juxtaposition of the physical reality of the tomb and the ideology of the afterlife, a perception that women in ancient times as principal and professional mourners would have perceived first hand. Royal personages in the Old Kingdom were buried under pyramids, domed mounds and in circular graves. These structures embodied the mythic notion that the male deceased was also an Osiris, an incarnation of the ‘appearing mound’ within which he would be succoured and resurrected. Excavations of the mudbrick tombs of the workers at Giza in 1992 revealed that ordinary people also emulated royal burial practice. The workers, too, placed the deceased under domed rooves into deep circular pits (three types of vaulted mounds were found) and in the case of one administrator, a barrel-vaulted dome. In other words, the concept of the grave as a mound was adopted by the hoi polloi as early as the IVth and Vth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom, and modelled in the architectural forms of their tombs.35 The mound image also occurs in Tariyya’s lament evoking scenes analogous to images of life in the time of inundation:

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My mother and father … they’ve have been left sitting on the mound … they’ve been left sitting, They’ve found boats, unfurled their sails and embarked My mother and father … they’ve have been left sitting on the mound … they’ve been left sitting there They’ve found boats, unfurled their sails and descended within

In Šargawiyya’s lament, composed as a triplet (abb), the person is buried in a mound-like structure (kom): Gather it round, you who wear the silk embroidered gown, gather it round you I am going to the mound and the upturned earth I’ll scoop away I am going to the mound and the upturned earth I’ll scoop away

In another lament by Afkar, the deceased is ‘drowned’ and begs the lamenter to help pull her up from the slender strip of land by the field on which people would walk between the irrigated basins: Pull me up, I said, Pull me up…You pull with me I have been drowned on the (inundated) path36

Synchronous with this image are the hieroglyphs from the Pyramid Texts denoting ‘drowned’.37 These show the deceased as drowned in a variety of configurations: either lying on a bed, above a canal, or what looks like a basin of water.

37. Ideograms of mehi, the ‘drowned man’

In this brief review, it is clear that the thematic parallels and overlap between ancient and modern illuminate understanding not only of the modern lament cosmology but of ancient perceptions of death: the ambivalence of attitudes to death, the inherent pessimism and the role of lamenters to rail against death and vent the sorrow of the bereaved. These laments are set in artists’ recreations of funerary scenes, so the reality of death is in these incidences, inescapable. Despite the existence of a relatively sanguine and highly elaborated conception of the afterlife in the funerary liturgies, we must conclude, in the end, that the vision of the lamenter remains a mournful one.

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Orality and the Ancient Egyptian Letters to the Dead The spoken ‘word’ in ancient Egypt was believed to be inherently powerful as an exudation of breath, and ‘oral’ performance of a written text in ancient Egypt was designed to empower the ‘word’. Paradoxically though, a formal written mode was frequently employed by the living to communicate with the dead in ancient Egypt, the so-called ‘letters to the dead’. In several of these letters, often left at the tomb site, the expression, ‘This is an oral reminder…’ appears, as does the formula: ‘It is more beneficial for the one who does it than for the one for whom it is done’ (Simpson 1966: 42), a dictum that appears in the Late Period Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys, from ca fourth century BC. As noted earlier, its contemporary corollary, ‘For our destinies and for us, our fates’ is a phrase taken from cAliya’s introductory lament which reveals the same understanding: lamentation is intended to benefit both the living and the dead. The tradition of sending letters to the dead in ancient Egypt originated in the Old Kingdom and continued on through the Middle Kingdom to the New Kingdom. Written on papyrus, ostraca and paper, these ancient letters were clearly intended to convey important messages that might not otherwise be effectively transmitted orally. These were pleas from the living for intercession by the deceased in cases of litigation between heirs, or requests for justice to be accorded to the living. The following complaint illustrates this: He (the deceased) has not given anything to my daughter who makes funerary offerings to the spirit in return for watching over the earthly survivor (Gardiner and Sethe 1923: 5)

The plaintiff argues that the daughter’s pleas have been ignored despite the fact that offerings had been made to engender help for the living from the dead. Egyptologists Gardiner and Sethe in their reading of the Pyramid Texts, state that it was believed that ‘dead parents would, and did, normally afford protection to their surviving children’ (ibid: 11) and in this prayer/incantation from an XVIIIth dynasty tomb in Thebes, the nature of the power believed to be exerted by the dead over the living is again clearly stated: May he [the deceased] behold his house of the living so as to make protection for his children every day and for ever and ever (ibid)

In the same letter as the ‘oral reminder’, the living are entreated to read the funerary texts and ‘by the magic of the words, the breath of the mouth which does not make tired, supply the shadowy dead with food, unguents and clothing,38 an aspect of funerary observance still embedded in the cosmology and alluded to in Umm Salih’s lament: And they told her to remain in the crook of the door And they would send her some nourishment along with the letter

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They told her to remain in her despair And they would send her some nourishment along with her clothing39

In a letter from the settlement of Deir al-Medina near Medinat Habu, written in the XIXth Dynasty a man writes to someone he believes to be an intermediary between the living and the dead, introducing his companion and complaining that he has attempted to communicate to find out how he is faring, but as yet no messages have been forthcoming: I am sending him [the person who has died] to you … Now as for one like you, being in the place of mysteries and hiding, he sends out his voice, but you do not send me either good or bad [messages]40

Another XIXth Dynasty letter is written by the widower seemingly to chastise his dead wife, Ankwry, for wreaking vengeance on him from beyond the grave: What have I done against you wrongfully for you to get this evil disposition in which you are? (Meskill 2004: 82)

The tradition of sending letters to the dead has not been totally abandoned in Cairo. In the hopes of gaining intercession to heal a physical complaint or removal of a malicious spell, the faithful in Cairo still dispatch letters to the mediaeval Sheikh al-Imam Shaf cei who is believed to intercede on behalf of the living, by slipping them under the iron balastrade of his mediaeval tomb.41 Nowadays in Luxor, letters for the living are often dictated to literate shopkeepers by those who do not read and write, but no vestige of the tradition of writing to the dead remains. However, the fact that the dead were to be empowered through lament, as was believed by the ancients – the aeration created by the winnower’s fan in the threshing field, the beating of the wings of the kite‑lamenter, Isis over the recumbent body of her husband, Osiris, and ‘the breath of the mouth which does not make tired’ – marks orality as the leitmotif of lament performance.

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9

The Pyramid Texts

Orality, Structure and Cosmology The Pyramid Texts are an ancient compendium of funerary spells which may have been transcriptions of actual liturgical performances and thus, orally performed. These are of particular interest in that they illustrate not only distinctive performance features but structural forms and styles. The aim of this analysis is to expose the aspects of the ancient which parallel contemporary lament verse forms and composition, without resorting to direct linguistic comparisons1 and at the same time, to reverse the process and suggest interpretations of stylistic features of the ancient texts through comparison with the contemporary. In one famous extract from these incantations, the Cannibal Hymn, for example, the Egyptologist Faulkner states that the opening phrase of the line or stanza appears to be repeated, perhaps as a form of incremental repetition (1924: 101).2 This we can represent as the form, ABA. In a lament by Šargawiyya from Karnak, the opening line also takes the form ABA. It compares the death of the patriarch husband to the collapse of a high pigeon tower and subsequent flight of the pigeons, source of fertility and nourishment. Quseir is a town on the Red Sea in Upper Egypt. To create assonance, the lamenter rhymes Quseir with leil (meaning night) and wah (oasis) with rah (gone): Quseir, O high pigeon tower on the way to Quseir When it toppled, pigeons fanned out in the night (leil) The oasis (wah), O high pigeon tower on the oasis track (wah) When it toppled, the pigeons fanned out and were gone (rah)

In this lament, the first word of the tri-partite line (A), Quseir, in the first verse is repeated as in ABA. In the second, the word wah introduces and concludes the first line of the second. Each introduces the verse and is repeated at the end, as in the Cannibal Hymn. In antiphonal performance today, the first word of the laments (A) also performs a specific function: it identifies the lament to be sung and

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38. Pyramid Text from the tomb of Teti, Saqqara

therefore, acts as a ‘cue’. By singing this word and pausing, the main lamenter, ‘the one who begins’, is able to ‘cue’ the lament chorus. Should another lamenter wish to interrupt and introduce her own variant as one of a long string of improvised variations on a single theme, she will similarly use the same ‘cue’ mechanism to ensure that the chorus will join in and sing the same lament with her. The initial ‘cue’ is repeated at the end of the first line, possibly to provide a stalling mechanism for the ‘one who begins’ (who is thinking of the next lament to introduce) and to create a phonic reprise, paving the way for the end-rhyme and cadence. [N.B. The underlining highlights the end rhyme words and illustrates how the cue (A) then becomes the reprise.] In the following lament, which depicts the hunting down of the deceased, a gazelle, by the agent of death (in this case, envisaged as a hunter) the cue (A) is a phrase, repeated in its entirety: Grazes on bracken (tir c ilhiš), a doe gazelle among gazelles grazes on bracken (tir c ilhiš) When the hunter hunts her down, he yields nothing (mabiyiddiš) Ascends the alfa grass (tali c ilhalf ), woe is me! A doe gazelle among gazelles ascends the alfa grass (tali c ilhalf ) When the hunter hunted her down by the order of the Lord (bi’amr irrubb)

Note that the laments are not always end-rhymed as in verse 1 (hiš / diš) but may end in assonant phrases of parallel stress as in this lament (i.e., tali c ilhalf / b’amr irrubb). The Cannibal hymn (Pyr 273 & 274)3 is performed in couplets according to Faulkner and, moreover, the last four couplets of the Cannibal hymn ‘appear to be end‑rhymed’ while ‘the first two [lines] end in the syllable ‘d‑n’, the last two on ‘w‑r’ and the lines appear to scan’ (1924: 101).

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39. Final stanzas of the Cannibal hymn

Hieroglyphic texts are comprised of pictograms which have phonetic value and which together constitute words or ‘phrases’. In the various versions of the Cannibal Hymn recorded in different tombs, slightly varying clusters of these hieroglyphic texts appear. The texts are not identical. Some transcriptions show differing opening syllables only, while others differ more substantially. By virtue of the diligence shown by the early transcriber and translator of the Pyramid Texts, Kurt Sethe, who juxtaposed the lines, it is possible to perceive the differences in these texts. For our purposes, we can call these ‘oral variants’. When compared, two features become visible. First, new words (consisting of one or two hieroglyphs) have been added, seemingly to extend the length of a phrase and secondly, in some texts, one sentence is singular while the other is plural. In line 392d from the Cannibal Hymn (not illustrated), moreover, two hieroglyphic figures are reversed, possibly to create assonance and metathesis (a feature of modern Sa cidi dialect). Other stylistic traits, particularly the use of paronomasia (that is, punning or word play accomplished by the shift of one phoneme or morpheme), familiar from contemporary epic, wedding songs, marriage and circumcision songs, also appear to be found in the ancient texts. What is important here is that these types of variants are a recognised feature of contemporary laments.

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In the cidid, all laments are composed of end-rhyming or assonant, almost rhyming couplets. Rhyming couplets are rare in the Pyramid Texts, but parallelism and the couplet form were relatively common to all ancient Egyptian narrative and hymns, texts that may be presumed to have been performed orally. According to John Foster, the literary scholar, certain ancient Egyptian literary texts also show clear evidence not only of parallelism and bonding of lines into pairs, but of conceptual bonding, what he calls the two-line ‘thought couplet’ (1975). Such couplets are not end‑rhymed but consist of a ‘one or two element first line’, a ‘caesura’ (or pause) and a ‘single element, second line’. Repetition may occur, he says, ‘within a single line of the couplet, or between the halves of the couplet’, as in the two laments above (ibid). Incremental variation is another stylistic trait of ancient hymns such as the ‘Hymn to the Inundation’, for example. The couplets are unrhymed but pivot around a system of stresses and cadences (as do the cidid when performed) rather than a particular system of metre or scansion, so allowing more flexibility in performance (ibid).4 The Litany of Offerings, also a part of the Pyramid Texts’ corpus, is a further example of an ancient text with a high degree of incremental variation, constructed around end-rhyme and punning. Composed as a set of couplets extending for 63 lines (l. 108–71), this litany is highly structured (perhaps to facilitate easy memorisation?) and comprises a series of verses in which the deceased king is urged to take with him a collection of ritual objects e.g., ‘Take with you … x’ (x being the object in question). The first half of the first line is addressed to the deceased while the second part of the line features the name of an offering (Mercer 1952: 44).5 In this regard, it resembles several contemporary laments for the young girl or ‘bride’ where she is cautioned to take with her a robe of especially resilient cloth for her ‘wedding’ in the afterlife: When you are intent on the grave, turtledove Take with you your wedding gown6 of red silk When you are intent on the grave though a mere child Take your wedding gown of silk that will not dissolve When you are intent on the grave though just a girl Take your wedding gown of silk that will not fade…

The underlining highlights the incremental variations in each line. Devices such as incremental repetition are also apparent in other Pyramid Texts. Pyr 217, for example, pivots around five verses of four lines each. The first verse is repeated, a triplet is inserted in the middle and the first verse repeated again to create a cadence, a structure built on an axis of variation of two’s and three’s, the matrix of improvisation found in the modern cidid.7 In Pyr 1280a–1281b, the same type of incremental repetition within a verse is visible:

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The (h3t )8 bird comes, the kite comes, they are Isis and Nephthys They are come in search of their brother, Osiris [They are come]9 in search of their brother, N [meaning the deceased] Thou who art [here], thou who art [there], weep for thy brother Isis weep for thy brother Nephthys, weep for thy brother Isis sits her hands upon her head

The short triplet-like prelude to the second four-line verse takes the form of AAB based, as are the other verses, on the improvisational matrix of 2 + 1. In both the first and second verses, the first line consists of three elements, (A) and (B), unfolding through incremental progression to (C): ‘the lamenters, one in the guise of an unknown bird and the other, a kite, are Isis and Nephthys’. In the second verse, the same symmetrical expansion of the idea is developed over two lines, with a shift from the third (‘they’) to the second person: ‘You (Isis) and you (Nephthys) should weep’. The second two lines are identical, apart from the final end-syllables or end-rhyme that concludes with the name of the deceased ‘Osiris’. As is clear, even in translation, this highly restricted, incremental form of variation creates a sonorous and pulse-like rhythm. Even more persuasive evidence of a close affinity in performance style between the Pyramid Texts and the contemporary laments is revealed in the technique of ‘shifting voice’, i.e., the device in which the lamenter transforms herself into the ‘I’ of the deceased’ as well as the ‘I’ of the bereaved. In his analysis of the placement of the Pyramid Texts within the royal mortuary tombs, the Egyptologist, Harold M. Hays, has recently suggested that the words inscribed on the walls closest to the sarcophagus were invocations to the deceased made in the second person and the first. This stylistic feature is also visible in the live performance of laments by Balabil and cAliya, cited below. As a professional badaya, Balabil’s role is to help the mourners to expiate their grief. To inspire the mourners and the bereaved to weep, she urges them to chant with her as she assumes the roles of deceased, bereaved and mourner, so integrating the experience and sorrow of the inner self, bereaved and the deceased into the performance of lament.10 The laments consist of a solo first phrase, the cue (A) followed by the jointly sung phrase (B) the second epithet, and a reiteration of the first (A). This strategy permits the lead-in and response characteristic of antiphonal singing and permits the creative interpolation of variants into a string of laments on a single theme by the respondent or the badaya herself. Variations, in this case, are accomplished by subtle morphological or syntactic shifts of the end-rhymed word or when the respondent, cAliya sings divergent words. Key: [= triplet; {=melodically divergent lines ending in cadence;

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{{different words sung by respondent}}; …= delayed cadence.] O you whose youth has been ‘broken off’ Like the purest date from the date palms of the West Great, O young one, you whose youth was great, Like the purest date from the date palms of the wilderness Pure, the handkerchief of the elegant youth is pure silk Place it inside and let it not be taken from him Pure silk, the handkerchief of the elegant youth is pure silk Place it inside and let it not be taken from him And you, succulent stalk of sugar cane, {May God protect you}, succulent stalk of sugar cane {May the name of God be upon you} Oozing with sap and the pride of the gardener Prime sugar cane, May God protect you {prime sugar cane {of the season Oozing with sap and the envy of the reaper {I peered over my wall and I was accosted by the cry, I peered over my wall {Do not wander lost, my brother, come to my house {Why I peered over my roof and was accosted by the cry, I peered over my roof {Do not wander lost, my brother, come home to my house With a staff, if he were to knock for me at the door with his staff I would go down to him from the roof in a flash With a quarterstaff, if he were to knock for me at the door with a quarterstaff I would go down to him from the roof in a dash With a wedding ring, if he were to knock for me on the door with a wedding ring I would greet him as my desires compel me to My twice‑felt greetings! Go in peace, men, my twice-felt greetings! When they come and are seen by my eye May they go in peace! Safe passage, men! May they go in peace! How their turbans have filled our narrow quarter Neighbour, peer over, you with one maternal uncle, neighbour, peer over How my brother’s turban has given light to my roof Neighbour, look over, you with only one maternal uncle, neighbour, look over

THE PYRAMID TEXTS

How my brother’s turban has illuminated my courtyard O my sister… What the men have become –‑ see their great stature [Like camels who shrugged off their riding saddles [Never did they make known how they suffered in fatherhood …fatherhood [Their great stature, see the men, how they’ve been levelled to the ground [Like camels who shrugged off their riding saddles [Never did they make known how they suffered in fatherhood [How they raised them up the shrieks of weeping in the night, O our men, they raised up the shrieks of weeping in the nights [{{I was invaded by grief}} and riders on horseback {{They came to me on stony ground}} They raised them up, the shrieks of weeping in the day, O our men, they raised them up, the shrieks of weeping in the day They came to me on stony ground on the backs of camels They raised them up, the shrieks of weeping in the night, O our men, they raised them up, the shrieks of weeping in the night I was invaded by grief and riders on horseback They raised them up, the shrieks of weeping in the West, O our men, they raised them up, the shrieks of weeping in the West They came to me on stony ground {{brandishing staves} {{wielding battle staves}} The shrieks and weeping, O our men, they raised them up, the shrieks and weeping They came to me on stony ground in their sirwal [Truly, for the great man, let my eyes weep [He was so young, weep for him, the ailing one [Why, speak out, you women and wish him twice blessing’ Why weep for him, people, truly he was great weep for him, people Why, speak out, you women and cry, On my head I swear he was great …great I have not come as his equal, my great brother, I have not come as his equal It was known how he suffered before he spoke of it I have not come by his side, my great brother, I have not come by his side It was known how he suffered before he spoke of it I have not come angry, my great brother, I have not come angry

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{It was known how you suffered} – I will not wound you with calumny {By the arms of your brother} [I have not come distraught, my great brother, I have not come distraught [By the life in my arms, I shall bring you nourishment [sobs] 60 [By the life in my arms, I shall bring you more nourishment {I peered over my wall and was accosted by the cry, my brother, I peered over my wall, Do not wander lost, my brother, come to my house {Why, I peered over my roof and was accosted by the cry, (as) I peered over my roof {Do not wander lost, my brother, come home to my house …house

Balabil uses a form of incremental repetition to build sequences of lament and interpolates two pairs of triplets to break the pattern, one of the form (ABC) in l. 48–50: Truly, for the great man, let my eyes weep (A) He was so young, weep for him, the ailing one (B) Why, speak out, you women and wish him twice blessing (C)

… and another of the form (ABB), in this case, to create greater assonance (l. 59–61): I have not come distraught, my great brother, I have not come distraught (A) By the life in my arms, I shall bring you nourishment (sobs) (B) By the life in my arms, I shall bring you more nourishment (B)

The modern laments can be seen to provide strong clues as to the mode of performance of the ancient texts, therefore. Balabil’s laments reveal how the cidid are composed: chains of epithets woven around themes in incremental permutations of the two-line ‘thought’ couplet, such that each line of the couplet is a counterpoise to the other. The first line introduces the image and the second transposes it either into antithesis, or invokes the emotions of the lamenter towards the deceased. Moreover, at transitional points, it is also evident that a skilful badaya like Balabil is free to create a cadence at will by adding a third line or phrase, or repeating the second. Balabil’s laments are suffused with sensory detail – what the ‘eye’ sees and how the eye weeps. Similar to what Lauri Honko calls the ‘I-thou’ form of address from Balto-Finnic laments, in the Egyptian laments, the dialogue of the badaya with the respondent would seem to oscillate back and forth in a zigzag modulation. The ‘I’ mode interior monologues may reflect the sentiments of the deceased from within the tomb or express the lamenter’s personal sorrow. The ‘thou’ mode, on the other hand aims to engage directly with both the deceased and the respondent. This

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artful strategy of alternating voices almost like a stream of consciousness technique seems to be the key to creating pathos and sympathy for the person mourned. The two women rock back and forth, lamenting in tandem, and though on occasion the respondent sings a distinct counterpoint to the main melody, they create the illusion of dialogue. The badaya may trill and ululate as a way of varying the melody and pulse of the laments, but at the same time, the respondent is free to interpolate her own rhythmic or contrapuntal variation on the line, to break the unison. She overlaps her voice in mid-sentence onto the voice of the badaya whose role it is to lead and weave the skein of laments. The phenomenon of antiphonal performance, therefore, not only emulates the turn-taking of dialogue, but like the rhetorical device of self ‘question and answer’ on the political podium, creates a more impassioned rendering of the words. cAliya initiates a verse only occasionally in this session11 but her voice overlays a new rhythm, melody and sequence of sounds on the main musical phrase which produces a sense of overlapping layers of sound, as in a canon. cAliya also occasionally sings a different set of words and deliberately delays the cadence. Hers is a dissonant and heterophonic voice that merges with the badaya only at the cadences. The aim is not unison but divergence. The question remains, therefore, were the Pyramid Texts, like the ancient lament fragments, transcripts of oral utterances that varied in performance depending on the inclinations and creativity of the performer? The divergences of one text from the other are slight. From what may be discerned in the hieroglyphic texts, and the determination that these incantations were written down from ‘semi-cursive’ (that is, partially hand-written) papyrus scrolls, it may be argued that at least some sections of the ancient Pyramid Texts were intended to have been performed orally. By contrast, the later funerary texts in the Book of the Dead, in particular, are more elaborate and complex, more literary in style, and comprised of long difficult sentences without any formal or discernible structure. These bear little resemblance to oral texts. It is the structural form of the Pyramid Texts, the tendency towards incremental repetition and variation, and the oral quality of the ancient liturgies and hymns, which confirms their intrinsic affinity to oral performance. James P. Allen has noted that the grammar of the Pyramid Texts resembles a stage of language that disappeared from secular inscriptions fifty years earlier, and that some texts reflect burial practices older than the IVth Dynasty, for example, burials ‘in earthen graves beneath tombs built of mud-bricks’ rather than stone pyramids (2005: 4). The ‘survival’ of these archaic references in the later texts reveals the ancient Egyptian penchant for preservation of ancient conceptions and rituals despite the adoption of new ideas and new funerary practices. Fayza Haikal has argued that certain semantic continuities of belief and folk practice have been retained amongst the folk in Egypt despite the cultural, religious and

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linguistic transitions which have taken place over the last two millennia (2007). In the case of the laments, I would argue that it is the vehicle of oral performance which has permitted the women who sing the laments to transcend the changes in language, religious thought and ideology which have taken place over millennia and mould them into their current form. Hieroglyphic determinatives provide a way to understanding ancient Egyptian ideas of the afterlife and to modelling conceptual parallels. The hieroglyphic representation of the ‘tomb’ in the Pyramid Texts, for example, is evidence of semiotic and semantic continuities from the ancient to the contemporary. The word for ‘tomb’ or grave is usually accompanied by a determinative, a graphic image, whose function was to clarify the intended meaning. In these ancient texts, this was either: • a pyramid or a pyramidion (a thinner and smaller pyramid icon) poised on a flat base12 • a mound circumscribed by a protective embankment on which a rectangular box is placed13 • a flat-topped mound14 identical to the standard hieroglyph of the flat topped granary15 (the only difference being the pointed tips of the base), or • a mound on an earthen floor or boat-like base.16 Another variant from the Pyramid of Pepy II shows the image of a tomb as a domed shrine, a traditional symbol of Upper Egypt17 reinforcing the notion of the domed sphere of heaven as a motif incarnated in tomb architecture of the Old Kingdom and visualised in the determinative for granary. From the earliest times in ancient Egypt, therefore, a tomb has been associated with a mound, a granary, and placement in a watery space (so necessitating a boat). From the replication of the form and its fusion in two ideograms, it is clear that hieroglyphic determinatives as visualisations of mythic notions provide a way of understanding the evolution and convergence of ideas about ancient and contemporary Egyptian cosmology.

40. Domed shrine of a local sheikh

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The Cosmology of the Pyramid Texts The obscure funerary liturgies and incantations known as the Pyramid Texts, intended to be recited and performed for kings, encompass a set of beliefs and vision of the afterlife or cosmology which remained at the crux of ancient Egyptian religious and cosmological thought for millennia. Most recently, they have been the focus of analysis by many Egyptologists including James P. Allen (1989). Allen chronicles the series of events experienced by the deceased in sequence and then synthesises the ancient Egyptians’ earliest conceptions of death and the afterlife. He concludes that the sky was conceived of as a ‘domain of stars and the circumpolar stars’ to which the deceased ascends as a star (1989).18 The deceased king ferries across it ‘on the reed‑floats of the sky’ or flies in the air ‘as a goose or heron’ to reach it. In his critical assessment, the world is believed to be ‘bounded above and below by the surface of an infinite ocean within which it floats’ and on its shores are marshlands (the ‘Field or Marsh of Reeds’ and the ‘Field of Offerings’), mythical agricultural domains in the sky as on earth, ‘with canals and lakes, bordered perhaps by desert’. This expanse of cosmos is ‘circumscribed by a dark, fathomless celestial ocean’. Allen calls this ‘the nether sky’ since the hieroglyph for sky used in this text is depicted as inverted.19 In ancient Egyptian mythology, and as seen in the Pyramid Texts, the sky goddess, Nut, whose inverted body is conventionally depicted on coffin lids and vaults suspended horizontally over the recumbent king, is a personification of these ‘great floodwaters’. Within her body, the soul is transformed into a star. She is ‘a cosmic, amniotic sac from which the king would be born each day’... ‘a place of rest, green with fields’ … ‘the place in which the king like the sun and other celestial beings would undergo the final transformation from the inertness of death and night to ‘a luminous, divine spirit’ known in ancient Egyptian as an akh (ibid: 17–20). Many metaphors and images link the watery domain of the celestial expanses with the underworld. The male deceased must undergo a series of metaphysical transformations during the passage to the afterlife in order to fly to heaven as a bird and then become an eternal divine spirit. Alternatively, he may ferry over the waters on a reed‑float, ascend on a ladder or be transfigured into a star. After the journey, the deceased (and in the Pyramid Texts, the royal monarch is exclusively male) is succoured within the eternal embrace of the goddess Nut and reborn throughout eternity by her life-giving fluids. His purification in the waters appears to be a prelude to resurrection: The deceased is come forth today at the head of the inundation of the flood (Pyr 317)

This may be a reference to the source of the Nile which rose from the primeval waters at the first cataract at Shellal (Pyr 1551a, 1557b). There, it was believed ‘the water just emerging from Nun, the name for the

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primeval ocean still existing below the earth, was the purest’ (Frankfort 1948: 112). Moreover, the king is described as: the appearing (mound) of the earth in the midst of the sea whose hand the inhabitants of the earth have not grasped (Pyr 102 a&b)

This image epitomises the moment of Egypt’s creation when earth emerged and rose up above the primeval floodwaters. In the fifth century BC, Herodotus wrote down the mythic tale as it was told to him in Egypt: From the primeval waters emerged the black earth or dam and the god Min (or Menes) called this Egypt after the ancient Egyptian word for this rich silt, k-m-t.

This myth became immortalised in the Pyramids, which were constructed as incarnations of the primeval mound and designed to provide the deceased king with a guarantee of eternal resurrection (Spencer 1982: 150). Other variants of this myth exist. Even before the Osiris cult had been established, the creator god Atum was described as ‘the drowned one’ (Rundle‑Clark 1959: 90) while in the Pyramid Texts, the deceased king and subsequently all deceased, male or female, are to become ‘the god Osiris’ and are symbolically ‘drowned’ (Pyr 24d, 615d, 766d). Osiris was believed to embody the source of the inundation: You have your water, you have your flood, the fluid which issued from the god, the exudation which issued from Osiris (Pyr 436)

Much later, the resurrected Osiris came to personify the inundation and his image on tomb walls was deliberately painted blue to indicate he had been ‘drowned’ (Cerny 1952: 85). In fact, so enduring was this idea in Egyptian culture that not only were the drowned imagined to be ‘divine beings’ in the ancient Dynastic period (ca 2500 BC), it was believed that all would become gods in death up to the Ptolemaic and Graeco-Roman eras (ca 200 BC–400 AD). The Greek traveller and chronicler, Pausanias, who visited Egypt, ca 200 AD, noted that the celebration of the inundation was linked to the festival of mourning for Osiris and timed to the rising of the Nile called ‘The Night of the Teardrop’, so as to commemorate ‘the tears of Isis’ (Lüddeckens 1943: 39). The lamentation or ‘tears of Isis’ and the efflux of Osiris had coalesced into one gigantic cosmic metaphor, associated with the annual Nile flood, symbolising the fertilisation of the land and the resurrection of life, a conception which was retained in Arabic as lelit innukta (‘the night of tears’) and at the crux of lament mythology.

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10

Cosmologies of Lament From Ancient to Modern

The contemporary laments feature a synchronous array of images and themes analogous to ancient cosmological themes. Many references revolve around the image of a bird and bird song, obliquely suggesting the transformation of the soul into that form, and the tomb both as an inundated plot and celestial garden. In addition to the pre-eminent themes of inundation and ‘the return’ and the crossing of water as a stage on the voyage to the afterlife, images of the embankments and mounds seem to exert particular resonance and are significant to an understanding of the contemporary vision of the afterlife and fate of the deceased after death. A tendency to preserve and revere archaic funerary texts and ideas is well documented in ancient Egypt. The Pyramid Texts were reiterated for millennia after the Old Kingdom despite changes in religious cosmology and theological thought. Moreover, ordinary folk, inspired by the Pyramid Texts, from the First Intermediate Period onwards began to inscribe coffins with texts formerly chanted for kings at their own non-royal burials, to protect their dead against the dangers of the netherworld. ‘Like the king, the common man (and woman) now desired to rise up to the sky and to join the gods’ (Lichtheim 1975: 131). While some of the Coffin Texts are direct borrowings from the Pyramid Texts, the bulk of them are new. Lichtheim concludes that ‘the Coffin Texts are far less coherent than the Pyramid Texts for they lack a unifying point of view’ but ‘show the human imagination at its most abstruse’. The composition and creation of new ‘texts’, oral and written, was both sanctioned and encouraged. In the following analysis, by juxtaposing ancient and contemporary texts, I highlight the correspondences, iconotropic parallels and divergences that emerge with respect to the cosmology of the afterlife.

I Death as a Destructive Force and IX Description of the State of Death ‘The house was destroyed in a single blink of the eye’ says one ancient lament from Thebes (#84). The modern lamenters concur: the event is sharp and devastating: ‘How the earth quaked when the walls collapsed’

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and ‘destroyed their houses’ says Tayha. In this case, the house collapses on the death of the patriarch of their household and clan. In ancient Egypt, the state of death was euphemistically compared to a ‘sleep’. The Egyptian Osiris, god of death and resurrection, was ‘the one who went away’, ‘who fell asleep or was ‘weary’ or ‘sad’ (Rundle‑Clark 1959: 128). He was also the great inert One ‘who had lost the ability to know’. To be ‘dead’ was to be motionless, stiff, bound in fetters (like mummy wrappings) tied up like an animal that may not run away. Rising is undoing the bonds of death (Zandee 1960: 1–12). In the modern laments, death is similarly ‘an absence’, ‘a sleep’, ‘imprisonment’, a state of illness and immobility. The deceased is the sheep to be slaughtered in sacrifice or a ‘horse tethered to the stake’. Visibility and the function of the eyes to ‘see’ beyond the grave are also important concepts in the laments and recall the ancient: ‘The deceased is seen’ (Thebes #19) ‘and will see the lamenters’ (Thebes #43). In the ancient conception, death was a figurative prison (Zandee 1960: 21) inhabited by ‘those whose chapel locks are secured with bronze’ as the inscription in the Papyrus of Ilmouthes confirms.1 Tariyya, the lamenter from Kom Lolah, envisaged the same: They crafted locks of iron, locked them in, they crafted locks of iron They do not see the sun, whether present or absent Brass, he locked them with locks of brass They do not see the sun like other people

In the laments, absent from the ancient, death is a physical rupture, analogous to divorce: ‘You were divorced from him without a lawyer … without a paper’ says Afkar. Death has separated her from her husband, in the same way as an illegal or pre-emptive divorce.To a widow, the death of a husband means material and spiritual impoverishment: ‘We take our well‑being from the men’ says the lamenter from al-Bayadiyya. ‘When my husband died, my capital diminished … my rule of life faded’. If death was ‘sleep’, then in the ancient conception, resurrection was wakefulness: Stand up, you of the pillars. Be a spirit so that the wakeful ones may be awake and that the sleepers may sleep (C TI #104).2

And in an ancient text from Edfu, like those of a pair of protective lions, the man’s arms are encouraged to awake: Thy two arms, thy sons, the pair of lions which embrace the body of their sire, awake in peace (Piankoff 1984: 47)

This resonates with contemporary laments exhorting the man to raise up his leonine arms and protect the living, while Qomiyya’s lament for the young girl mourns that she is ‘sleepless late into the night and will not wake’. In the contemporary as in the ancient conception, all deceased spirits enter the realm of the afterlife where they become inert, ‘asleep’ and

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yet dormant in the tomb. And as in the ancient spells, the dead are urged to ‘Awake, Rise up, Stand up!’

III The Agent of Death In the laments, there is continual reference to an ambiguous and unnamed ‘agent of death’ who ‘plucks’ or ‘pierces’ the living; with ‘claws’ like a rapacious dog. Just as Balabil described the death of the young girl in 1987: illi qutafha gatafan: ‘ he who uprooted her, snatched her away’) in ancient Egypt, the dead were believed to be ‘snatched away’3 by a wpwty (a messenger) or agent of death ‘who comes and fetches man’ (Zandee 1960: 202–3). In an ancient letter to the dead, the bereaved envisages the moment of death as a visitation by the ‘messenger’: The messenger ... came to the couch when I was sitting at thy head … The messenger of Behezti came4 (Gardiner and Sethe 1928: 11)

The mythological antecedent to the agent of death may have been the ancient Egyptian god Set, the god of vengeance and chaos. Often depicted as a saluki or wild dog, Set is also incarnated in hieroglyphs with the headdress of a dog and as an aggressive warrior, attacking with shield and stick.5 Set fought and killed his brother and rival god Osiris, who later came to epitomise resurrection of the dead: It is said in the ancient legends of the Egyptian gods that Set, evil opponent of Osiris and his brother, and notably the god of chaos and dissent, waylaid Osiris when he was hunting in the desert and slew him (Mercer 1952: 495).

In this battle between the forces of good and evil, Osiris was killed ‘in the land of gazelles’ according to the Pyramid Texts (see Pyr 478 in te Velde 1977: 111), the desert, the place of wild dogs and hunters, a mythic tale transposed in the contemporary laments into an allegory of pursuit and murder. This is a uniquely Egyptian tale but the same image is invoked in an ancient Sumerian lamentation over the destruction of Ur: Like a gazelle in a trap, they [the people of Ur] bit the dust I, Shulgi, trapped them [the enemy] like a gazelle in the thicket (Kramer 1981: 295)

41. The Set animal

In the Old Kingdom mastaba of Mereruka, the pageant of the gazelle slain by the salukis is graphically represented on several walls and may also be considered an allegory on death and the human condition which has been retained in the lament repertoire. Images of the god Set linked the force of death and chaos to that of ‘earthquake … desert wind, dryness and death’. He was the personification

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of blind force and unregulated violence in a cosmic sense (Rundle‑Clark 1959: 115) an idea visible in the Pyramid Texts. There, death was perceived as a cosmic rupture or an event to which the earth and nature would react violently (Pyr 1120–1; 1149–50): The sky thunders and the earth quakes when the king ascends (Allen 1990: 168)

As seen earlier, this is replicated in the modern lament texts almost verbatim. The pervasive hunting motif occurs in ancient Egyptian texts mainly as an allegory of the punishments or dangers incurred in the realm of the dead and as such, constitutes a departure from the contemporary notion. ‘The deceased may be caught like an animal in hunting’: A net is spread between heaven and earth so that it may catch the souls of people who fly about like birds or who may be ‘on their way from earth to heaven’ (Zandee 1960: 227).

There is no semantic correlative to this allegorical notion except in relation to the contemporary laments for the drowned where ‘the caster of nets’ (rami iššabbaka) and ‘the hurler of hooks’ (rami issinnar) lurk in wait for their prey. In the ancient Egyptian conception, the dead were ‘caught with a lasso’ according to Zandee (ibid) and this image reverberates in the cidid: the archer ‘pierces’ with his crossbow and ‘lassoes with his noose’. Moreover, the white scarf with which the man’s turban is rolled is sometimes reconfigured as a noose. And as if to embody an invocation to resurrection, this turban or scarf may be unfurled like a sail or hurled to the ground, as if these gestures could release the bonds of death. In these allegories of the hunt, the lamenter urges that the deceased seek succour in the Nile where they will be enveloped in its waters. The swift saluki hounds serve as accomplices, isolating the prey for the kill. The body of the deceased should be wrested away from the saluki hounds, lest they ravage him and absorb his power, as in the story of the mythical body of Osiris recovered from the god Set. In the contemporary laments, the agent of death is shadowy, amorphous and versatile. He is conjured as a ‘hunter’, an ‘archer’, ‘leaper’ and ‘wild dog’. He is engendered as male and frequently described as an archer who pierces his victim with a crossbow (qawwas); he may or may not consume his prey and exhibit canine or ornithological traits. In this way, he recalls some of the most ancient representations of battle in Egyptian history. The Egyptologist Hornung describes the scene on the obverse of the famous pre-Dynastic ‘Battlefield Palette’ in emotional and graphic detail: Naked and without weapons, the subjugated party, in human form, is an image of utter defenselessness. The victors to whom the defeated surrender helplessly are shown as animal powers: lions, birds of prey, and standards mounted by birds. (1983: 104)

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42. The saluki kills the gazelle

The divine powers were conjured as animals and believed to be predatory by nature. In the stories of the ancient Egyptian gods, the goddess Isis herself assumes the form of a kite at the moment of impregnation by Osiris; the mother goddess of Thebes, Mut, the so-called ‘consort’ of the king, is embodied in the hieroglyph of a vulture, an eater of carrion; Horus, son of Isis, and the local god of Thebes/Armant, Montu, are similarly depicted as falcon and hawk respectively. It is conceivable that the incarnations of these ancient gods were at the root of this depiction of the agent of death as a bird with swooping ‘claws’ and ‘feathers’. Anubis, the jackal‑headed god who presided over the embalming of bodies, was also a carrion-eater; as such, the gods were perceived to be able to sustain their life-force by consuming the dead for eternity. c Abdel Rahim Hifni, the Egyptian lament scholar, has suggested that the image of the deceased as a beautiful gazelle was a purely aesthetic representation of beauty. However, it is clear from analysis of the hunt sequences that the pursuit of a gazelle by a predatory hunter or saluki is a mythopoeic allegory of death of great antiquity. No other animals are pursued in the hunt by the angel of death, and Mercer cites the fact that ‘the form of a gazelle was worshipped’ as if the animal were divine (1952: 495). The pageant of Osiris’s death in which Set waylaid Osiris when he was hunting in the desert and killed him may be at the mythic core of this Egyptian allegory. Qus (kus in ancient Egyptian, literally, the ‘place of embalming’, a name the town still retains) was ‘the place the deceased Osiris was purified’ according to Mercer (1952: 145). It was mentioned verbatim in the Pyramid Texts. This town may have acquired connotations as a place

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43. The jackal-headed god Anubis preparing the corpse

of purification through mortuary rites over the centuries, as the lamenter Balabil from the nearby East Bank village of al-cAiyaiyša, illustrates: O Qus, I shall not come to you, I swear by my right hand, Qus, I shall not come to you No more shall I buy cloth from you

Qus is now a major town, yet in the laments, it retains its ancient connotations.6

IV The Purification of the Deceased Purification of the deceased with incense was a feature of the Old Kingdom funerary ritual laments: For the ka, incense, water and all good things (Saqqara #62); The oil of libation is purified…

This is still practised in the time of the Coffin Texts [CT]: Your head is censed with sweet-smelling incense (CT II #530).

Censing, hennaing, and the placement of embalming spice like fayih or myrtle in the tomb are also a feature of the contemporary laments: The fragrance of civet and liqueur exudes from her velvet and For the young girls … he brought the incense and split the henna into two…

as well as … You who go off to the (nuptial) ‘bath’, so handsome They have doused the bath with perfume

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You who go off to the ‘bath’, such a beauty They have doused the bath with embalming spice

The smashing of perfume vials at the threshold of the tomb of the deceased is also alluded to in the laments: Lovely girl, as I was passing by the door of the lovely young girl We found the vials of scent cracked and smashed The sweet darling, as I was passing by the door of the darling child Why, we found the vials of scent where they had been hurled and left Why, we found the vials of scent where they had been hurled and left

Fragments of alabaster and diorite vessels (which may have contained perfumes) were found seemingly ‘deliberately broken’ and secreted at the entrance to early Dynastic tombs at Helwan7 and at the entrance to the VIth Dynasty tomb of Pepy II at Saqqara on whose walls Pyramid Texts were inscribed.8 From the text, it would appear that this archaic ritual is still practised or at least, remembered.

VII Wrappings The head cloth was also a garment singled out in the Coffin Texts for ritual efficacy. A person described as ‘wearing the head cloth’ (CT II #375) would become an incarnation of the goddess Neith, a divinity revered in a pre‑Dynastic death cult about whom little is known, though her symbols appear in clay seals dating from the Ist Dynasty in Abydos. Its modern analogue in contemporary laments would be al-tarha, the veil wrapped round a woman’s head in life and an image constantly reiterated in the funerary context. Descriptions oscillate between those of a woman whose head veil is trailing or has ‘fallen off’ and should be put right, and dialogues in which the soul urges the bereaved to set it straight: Wrap the trailing veil, young girl, the edge of your veil is trailing Your youth and poise have made me suffer

And in another lament: It has fallen, young girl, why your head veil has fallen! : Why it is for you to clutch onto it! My body has grown cold…

The wearing of a modern head cloth is a symbol of social propriety but also may once have been indicative of protective powers: I am covered with the ‘kny’ garment (CT I #114; CT II #535)

The ‘kny’ garment (the name is written phonetically) is very similar in form if not meaning to the head veil called gin c, the all‑encompassing garment worn by women in parts of Upper Egypt. This veil is alluded to frequently in the laments along with the long shawls and scarves (e.g.,

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iššahi; iššamaš) wrapped by men and worn as head turbans. The lamenter Šargawiyya envisages women garbed in their head veils (hulalihum and miganchum) standing at the quay, waiting for the ‘skipper’ of the ferry to the afterlife. She urges the house, which is personified, to clasp the women’s veils and ‘wings’ (in Arabic, migan chum and majanahhum): You, her house, clasp onto her flowing veils! Swear by your mistress and let her remain Her flowing ‘wings’ you, her house! Clasp onto her flowing ‘wings’! Swear by your mistress and bring her back…

While on the funeral bier, the women unfurl their veils like ‘sails’… On the quay, they furnished her with a bed of flowing veils Why not cry out to the skipper to let them off? Their flowing veils, on the quay, they ‘unfurled’ their flowing head veils Why not cry out to the skipper to let them off?

Ritually decorated clothing such as, for example, cloth with fringe assumes significance in the Coffin Texts: I have donned the fringed cloak as Rec in the sky (CT II #467); and She of the fringed cloth (CT II #627).

Some of the earliest funerary garments and shrouds found in preDynastic tombs dating from the early Badarian period at Mostagedda and the Ist Dynasty at Tarkhan were decorated with fringe (Petrie and Mackay 1915: 9 in Barber 1991). While only sporadic and obscure references to the ‘fringed cloak’ appear in the contemporary lament repertoire, the fringed cloak in the Graeco-Roman or Ptolemaic period (ca 323–30 BC) was regarded as ‘the typical costume of Isis in cult representations’ (Dunand 1973: 21). The contemporary lamenter’s concern shifts to more mundane issues such as cost and payment, though her tone is ironic: How much was your shawl? It’s beautiful, tell me, how much did you pay? Don’t delay, how many gold coins did you pay? : I had it fringed for a riyyal

The coins are an archaism but it is clear that the shawl has been fringed at great expense. As a result, it endows the wearer with elegance and may bestow ritual protection. The man’s striped vest (saderi/saderiyya) is also a protective garment. In one lament, the tailor (in effect, the shroud-maker) is requested to craft the man’s funerary vest to his exact girth and align the stripes properly: In the early evening he passed by the ‘tailor’ in early evening O ‘tailor’, make his striped vest straight and even

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In the middle of the night, he went down to the ‘tailor’ in the middle of the night O ‘tailor’, make his striped vest fit perfectly

Another merely emphasises the stripes on what has now become an imaginary funerary garment: The stripe, you with the vest [y’abu saderi] one stripe against the other How tragic that your youth in the earth has been placed The stripe, you with the vest, stripe against stripe How tragic that your youths in the earth have been placed

The stress in the laments on the wrapping of a man in striped gazali cloth suggests that it is also protective and therefore, similar to the notion prevalent in ancient Egypt that the horizontal gold and black stripes painted on coffin lids would guard the mummy (Davies 1933). As such, on the semiotic level, it is another example of syncretism: the transposition of an ancient funerary design feature, the placement of stripes on a coffin, once infused with meaning in the funerary context, onto a familiar article of clothing for the same prophylactic purpose.

XXIX/XXX The Deceased Wears Ritually Coloured/Elegant Garments In the Dynastic period, unguents such as frankincense (liban) were used to produce ointments for mummy wrappings, and for the purposes of the funerary ritual, each male corpse was envisaged as an Osiris, ‘mummiform and swathed in the customary bandages’ (David 1981: 63). In the laments, the man (and sometimes the woman) is said to be wrapped or ritually bound in garments soaked in dark harub (carob), nila (indigo) or kohl‑coloured dyes, as if in imitation of embalming resin. Embalming with bitumen is only attested from the later period of Egyptian history and most mummies discovered and examined have been found to be wrapped in dark resins and oils.9 These allusions may, therefore, be to the most ancient rituals of embalming and thus, an archaism as well as the iconotropic correlative to mummification. Young women, particularly the unmarried, are mourned as wearing the ritually empowering colours of red, pink or olive-green in a litanylike and serial reiteration. This style of iteration invites comparison with funerary rituals performed for an image of the ancient Egyptian monarch at Abydos in 1300 BC: Arrayed first in the white cloth, the image was purified with natron. The green cloth was then presented and another purification took place and finally, a red cloth was presented, followed by yet another purification. (David 1981: 60)

The cloths are arrayed on the king with accompanying spells, the green typifying his regeneration:

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‘He becomes young again like fresh plants’ … while red is identified with the goddess Edjo, ‘red, being the colour of flame’ from ‘The Spell for the Green Cloth’ and ‘Spell for Arraying with the Red Cloth’ (ibid: 67–8).

A precursor to the red and green pairings occurs in the much earlier Pyramid Texts at the tomb of Unas. ‘A band of red/green linen’ is to be wound around part of the man as he crosses the waters by ferryboat42 and in the Coffin Texts (CT II #627), a young woman is described as ‘she of red and green herbs’. The colour green is ‘appropriate to the greening, prospering state of the revived dead’ (Hornung 1990: 165) while the red hue may derive from henna, first attested in funerary ritual on corpses found at Hierakonopolis ca 3500 BC, and denote the colour of blood. The pre-Dynastic custom of hennaing of the dead was still practised as a ritual in the village of al-Qilh al-Qibli on the West Bank near Edfu in the 1980s,11 so the image in the lament may refer either to the actual custom or to its once symbolic function. In the later Pharaonic dynasties (ca 1080–332 BC) and the GraecoRoman period, a minor transformation took place. These colours were adopted as mourning garb. The ‘girls of Shishou’ went to funerals in red and green robes and the widow of Petosiris in Ashmoneim wore a green cloak ‘in mourning’ (Werbrouck 1938: 131). These colours were to be worn by the bereaved, not the deceased, perhaps in emulation of them and to signal hope for their revival. The metaphoric domain of the laments has retained the earliest notion of green and red funerary wrappings, reinforced with copious allusions to herbs and henna (the symbolic herb which originates as green powder but dyes objects red) and in the process, has transformed the nature of the shroud from a dour and simple linen into embroidered velvet and silk. It was customary in ancient Egyptian burials for girdles studded with red gems, jasper or carnelian, and belts with buckles of this potentised stone to be placed on a body to guard the pelvis. In the pre-Dynastic period, beads of carnelian were found buried with the person in the grave and in the New Kingdom, a ritual buckle known as the ‘girdle of Isis’ and fashioned of red jasper or carnelian, was believed to exert a protective function over the wearer: Saith Osiris Ani, triumphant: ‘The blood of Isis, the charms of Isis, the power of Isis are a protection unto me, the chief, and they crush that which I abhor’ (this chapter should be said over a buckle of red jasper) (from the Papyrus of Ani, CT I. Budge 1934: 358)

The contemporary laments suggest a modern correlative: the ‘elegant youth’ tries to wrap a red silk rope (dikka) or drawstring to bind his sirwal, not dissimilar to the ‘sash of red linen’ found in Coffin Text #149, but the sand has choked him:

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Red silk, the drawstring on his sirwal is red silk, The garb of the handsome youth gives them elegance The drawstring of the sirwal is silk Damask : I was going to speak … but the sand suddenly drifted over me

The luminosity of the dead person’s clothing was also vital to the transformation of his soul in ancient Egypt. The akh or incandescent aspect of the soul after death would survive dead and become luminous like an angel of light. Consequently, a ‘shining’ cloth was presented to the deceased in Abydos ‘that [he might] shine in it’. The deceased would become a god or divine spirit through death and he would absorb all the qualities pertaining to the cloth’ (David 1981: 67). In the contemporary laments, the white turban of the man ‘glints’ in the sun and ‘illuminates’ the courtyard while the velvet of the woman’s dress is said to be silk lamé, embroidered with silver, or ‘iridescent’, perhaps for the same reason. Other laments highlight the ritual wrappings of the lamenter rather than the dead: The skin of a camel … for the sake of the men, I shall dress in the skin of a camel The wearing of brilliants [haraz] does not honour men’s valour… The skin of a donkey, for the sake of the men, I shall dress in the skin of a donkey The wearing of brilliants does not honour the great men

Balabil’s desire to denounce the frivolities of the world and emulate the deceased in the grave by donning the skin of animals reflects a custom alluded to in the Arabian epic of al‑Zir Salim (which dates from the Middle Ages) and one performed in Egypt until the last century. At least two millennia earlier, the wearing of animal skins as a gesture of mourning was described in the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh. The hero declares: And I myself after thou [art buried] will cause my body to wear long hair I will clothe myself with the skin of a lion and will roam over the desert (Tablet VIII.7 from Heidel 1970)

There is prior evidence of ancient burials wrapped in hides in pre‑Dynastic burials in Hierakonopolis and in Nagada12 but not in mourning. The wearing of skins, nevertheless, was part of the royal jubilee or Sed Festival ritual performed by the king in the early Dynastic period at Saqqara to engender rebirth of his regal power. During this rite, the king would perform the symbolic act of ‘rebirth’ by curling up in an animal skin, as if a foetus in the womb, to engender his own re‑birth. This animal skin was called by different names formed from the word ‘to be born’ and became assimilated in the language as designating ‘the place of becoming … of transformations, of the renewal of life’. Because

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of its association with the transformation of a human being from life to death and rebirth, this ritual of symbolic passage through an animal skin was frequently represented in the Theban tombs. People believed that ‘the deceased for whom this rite is performed [would] be reborn automatically’ (Lamy 1981: 86). Balabil avows that she has adopted this ascetic garb as a gesture of mourning, but in light of its ancient meaning in funerary ritual, and her role as lamenter, it is also possible to infer that in the context of laments, this referent may embody memories of the ancient Egyptian ritual of rebirth, albeit obliquely.

XIII The Passage to the Afterlife and the Winding Path In the ancient context, death meant entrance into the world of peregrinating spirits down a ‘winding path’. In the New Kingdom papyrus known as the ‘Wisdom of Ani’, the realm of the dead is ‘a place to which one goes but from where no one ever returns’ (Zandee 1960: 2), a fear echoed in this lament: The path to the tombs is tortuous and winding Whoever goes down it is banned from return

In the Pyramid Texts, the path involved navigation of ‘the winding watercourse’ (Pyr 802 a&b) or the ‘winding canal in the East’ (Pyr 1162) a conception that may have sprung from belief in the subterranean design of the tomb of the god, Osiris: In earlier times, Osiris was worshipped in tombs inside a tumulus in the midst of a grove. There were chambers in these mounds, reached by ‘a winding passage’, which was earthbound (Rundle‑Clark 1959: 108)

The winding course was still associated with the traversing of ‘celestial’ water later on in the Coffin Texts: ‘You shall cross the sky: those in the winding waterway shall worship you (CT I #18); and ‘the ferryman of the [winding] waterway shall betake you’ (CT III #987). c Aliya from the village of al-cAiyaiyša adopts the first person in her lament and as the voice of the deceased, pleads also to be ‘ferried over’: Go and ferry me over, my brother, go and ferry me over O who will take me there, who will ferry me over?

The path to the tombs is perilous and Tariyya offers to clear the thorns along the path: With my hands, I am gathering up the thorns with my hands I am making smooth the path for your coming back to me

In the Coffin Texts (echoing the Pyramid Texts), the person lying in the ground asks for a path to the verdant expanse to be prepared for him: You shall prepare a path for me to [the garden] … you shall plant trees

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in this garden of mine in the plot of the Field of Offerings (CT  #II 696)

This text prefigures the pledge by the lamenters to plant henna and wild thyme ‘along their wall’ to encourage the return of the deceased: I shall plant wild thyme for you along my wall, For the mourning and your coming to my house

Contemporary tombs in the City of the Dead in Cairo are frequently planted with trees in the courtyard but in Luxor, spiky aloe is more common. The path to the afterlife is fraught with difficulties so a spirit guide is sometimes required. In one lament, the guide to the granaries loses his way and is unable to lead the deceased to a safe haven. In another, the deceased is led down by the seer from the Oasis (al-wah) or the ancient Upper Egyptian towns of Akhmim and Esna: In fragrant herbs, to their glory the men descended into fragrant herbs May he descend and may he lead them, the seer from the Oasis... The clover, to their glory, they descended into the clover, His companions, he led them down, the seer of Akhmim/Esna

Both figures remain ambiguous though this ‘Knowing One’ is a healer or intercessor who, through spirit possession, is capable of healing the sick, or like the famous sheikh, Imam Shaf cei in Cairo, is revered as a mediator between the dead and the living (cf XXV The Healing of the Deceased). Semantic continuities are also suggested as in these laments sung to succour the deceased during the passage to the afterlife. Balabil and cAliya greet the deceased and wish for his safe passage back again: My twice‑felt greetings [salameni] go in peace, men [salamten] My twice‑felt greetings, When they come and are seen by my eye May they go in peace! [salamithum] Safe passage, men! [salamten] May they go in peace! How their turbans have filled our narrow quarter

In an apparent echo of the Pyramid Text 676, and the Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys, these lines pivot around the Semitic verbal root (s‑l‑m), so emphasising the relationship between the word for ‘greetings’ and the notion of peaceful journey (salama meaning ‘safety’): ‘Greeting’, says Isis. ‘In peace’, says Nephthys, when they see their brother in the festival of Atum [the ancient Egyptian creator god] (Pyr 676).

Invocations to deceased to travel ‘in peace’ and to be ‘safe and sound’ based on this same Semitic root also occur in the ancient laments from

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Thebes (#19) and Saqqara (#8), prompting the theory that these particular contemporary texts may be derived directly from the ancient, and that the s-l-m end-rhyme variants may have constituted the core of an ancient lament couplet.

XIV Stairs/Ladder In the Pyramid Texts, the king was to ‘lift [him]self to the sky in company with the stars which are in the sky’ (Faulkner 1966: 154). The king was ‘the god [who] has become a star’ (Pyr 141a) and in order to reach the abode of the stars for posterity, the deceased king would ‘climb to the sky on a ladder’ (Pyr 365a; 304; 305; 468; 469). According to James P. Allen, the deceased king was either supplied with a ladder or a ‘pre-existing ladder opened up for the king as a means of ascent’ (1990: 169). The shape of the Stepped Pyramid at Saqqara from the Old Kingdom and the structure of the great Pyramid itself embody this notion and recent excavations in pre-Dynastic mastabas at Helwan and at the pre-Dynastic site of Hierakanopolis show that ‘the staircase’ for the ascent of the soul was a fundamental feature of the tomb’s subterranean structure. Ascent via a ladder or stairs was also reiterated in the Coffin Texts; for example, the deceased was to ascend via ‘the lashing together’ of a ladder to the sky where there were fields of doum palm: ‘A fair path has been made for me to those two fields of … the doum palm’ (CT I #269i). An allusion to a celestial ladder is also found in the later Book of the Dead: ‘I have raised a ladder in order to see the gods’ (Spell 149). Further evidence of continuity is found in the fact that miniature ladders were found buried in tombs in Akhmim in Upper Egypt as late as the Graeco‑Roman period (ca 323 BC–395 AD). In the contemporary laments, the spirit guide who ‘leads’ the person to eternal repose becomes lost in the granaries of the afterlife and the soul must mount the stairs to reach them and winnow grain: The guide wandered lost in them … in our granaries, the guide wandered lost The one who can mount the stairs should do the winnowing

The winnowing of grain was conventionally done in the field, as illustrated in the Tomb of Menna, and yet, in the miniature ka houses designed to provide refuge for the enduring life-force after death and placed in Old Kingdom tombs, a staircase provided access to the roof where grain would be stored and could be winnowed. Some laments suggest that the soul must carry his own ladder: The narrow space … You who carry the ladder {to the narrow space {to the barge… {on your left hand side We have faith in you, O my lion! Do not be long!

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44. Ancient Egyptian model of a ka house

Weapons, I wish I could be on the ladder with {two weapons {weapons of iron I shall be vigilant over the lion of men who has departed

The lamenter wishes to guard the ascending spirit from evil forces with ‘weapons’ empowered with iron. Her husband, her ‘lion’, is compelled to carry the ladder to the ‘narrow space’ from which to ascend, either astride a barge, or within the tomb itself, pivoting in some variants around the assonantal pair: sallum (boat) and sallim (ladder). In some parts of Egypt, the šahad (tomb marker) placed over tombs assumes the shape of a stepped staircase; though recently razed to the ground, a stepped staircase of mud brick once marked the place in Kom Lolah from which death announcements would be made, as if to mark the point of the souls’ ascent to heaven. As I learnt, on the West Bank of Luxor, the day on which the soul of the deceased finally departs from the abode of the living is called ittiluc (‘the ascent’) and is believed to occur three days after death. Amongst the gamut of words used to denote the tomb or place of burial, the most frequently cited in the laments is ilgama (literally, ‘the place from which one stands up’) conceptually akin to ‘a place of resurrection’. The person is believed to ascend, but to no named abode. The soul may ascend to the roof ‘when the stars are drifting by’, as if he were going to climb up to them; in others, he merely goes up to ‘a high place’ or sleeps on the stairs. Balabil, the accomplished Coptic lamenter, invokes unnamed constellations of red and white stars, calling them ‘her witness’ and expressing concern about the fate of the deceased: That high star is my witness, that high star there And if it were only a dream in the night, may I be graced with it The two white stars are my witness, those two white stars … those two red stars…

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If it were only a dream in the night, may no grief come to me While I lie in bed, I count star upon star, I am afraid of the reaper of miracles and calamity Stars, while I lie in bed, I count star upon star, I am afraid of the reaper of grapes and calamities

In the folk belief system, according to Luxor and Nubian healers and sheikhs, to know one’s destiny is to know one’s ‘star’ (nijm). ‘The predynastic Egyptians believed that the stars of heaven governed the destinies of men’ declared Budge (1972: 240). In this respect, the current concept of destiny is linked to the stars as indelibly as in the ancient: a famous healer in Bay carat still prescribes remedies for certain maladies, stipulating that the required concoction be left under the open night sky in order to gain potency from starlight.

XV Directionality In the Pyramid Texts and the subsequent Coffin Texts, the fate of the dead is analogous to the cyclical path taken by the sun from its rebirth in the East to its setting in the Western horizon: ‘You shall go up upon the great West side of the sky and go down upon the great East side’ (CT I #18). But the directionality of burial was not so consistent; though royal burials took place in necropoli on the West Bank of the Nile, burials in the preDynastic tombs at Helwan and the Middle Kingdom tombs at Bani Hasan were entombed on the East Bank. In the modern laments, the deceased heads in a variety of directions. Most lamenters sing that that the deceased departs Eastward or ‘rises to the East’ and in Bani Hasan the dead were buried unmummified in folds of linen cloth on their left side facing East (Garstang 1907: 57). However, one lamenter from the East Bank village of al-Bayadiyya states that the ship ‘goes West’, the ancient place of the dead at Thebes while another queries: ‘Is it East or West?’ as if confused, and in a third, the ‘bride’ ‘departs to the North’ wearing jewellery: You who are northward bound wearing a pectoral Your house is destroyed; the house of the youth is full to brimming You who are northward bound wearing a gold necklace Your house is destroyed; the house of the youth is lovely

While there is no evidence of ancient belief in the solar cycle in the modern lament corpus, this oppositional polarity may be a rhetorical strategy designed to characterise the state of psychological disorientation that occurs in bereavement. Ancient cemeteries were situated on the adjacent expanse of desert on both East and West Banks, so as not to disrupt cultivation on the fertile banks of the Nile.

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XXI Resurrection Ancient conceptions of resurrection necessarily involved the physical displacement of the body to the vertical. In the words of an Old Kingdom (VIth Dynasty) letter to the dead, the dead person is urged to: ‘Raise thyself up, thou hast devastated thy house’ (Gardiner and Sethe 1928: 1). Coffin Text I #330 reveals the same motif: ‘My shape is raised up’. Depicting mummies in an upright position in the tomb was an iconographic convention in ancient Egypt. It was a way of symbolising and embodying resurrection. The movement of the deceased on the metaphysical or actual ‘bed’ was also associated with resurrection as evinced in the Pyramid Texts 487, 1747 and 1748: Rise up on your left side, put yourself on your right side

And in the Coffin Text I 219: I am raised up from upon my left side. I am placed upon my right side

In this last example, the perspective has shifted. The deceased himself ‘speaks’ as if to be performing the action and Zandee notes that the turning of the corpse from one side to the other side signifies ‘awakening, resurrection’ (1960: 82). The laments portray revivification in a similar vein but in the appropriate social context: the mašta or maidservant is instructed to turn the pillow to the right and left: Left, O maid-servant, turn the cushion to the left Why not leave the bride to recline and sleep? How young she is and for her the night is long Right, O maid-servant, turn the cushion to the right Why not leave the bride to recline and curl up? How young she is and for her the night is long.

XVI The Deceased Crosses Waters Crossing by boats is an equally significant element in both ancient and modern cosmologies. In the Pyramid Texts, the king is to be ‘ferried’ to the afterlife: The two reed‑floats of the sky are set in place for Re c that he [the deceased king] may cross on them to the horizon (Pyr 263; 264–6)

In the contemporary laments, the souls are urged to embark on a reed float (giyasa), a ferry (rifas), a sailing ship (markab bi gil c) or a boat with a cabin (dahabiyya). The variety of references to the act of sailing over, above and below the earth is proof that the crossing of waters is still believed to be an essential facet of the journey to the afterlife. One informant in Upper Egypt ca 1938 said that the dead were compelled to ‘cross the sea of fire in special reed floats, buoyed up by

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pots and strung together’ (Hornell 1938:146). The ‘sea of fire’ does not appear in modern laments, yet the modern boats navigate through the same mythological landscape, sailing through the tombs and descending on waterways to a sanctuary in the ‘seas’: How we built houses on the seas, how we built houses Let us inquire about him from the captain who passes by How we built sanctuaries on the seas, how we built sanctuaries Let us inquire about him from the captain who appears

This concept appears to derive from the earliest epoch of Egyptian history: the pre-Dynastic Amratian and Naqada periods. Naqada is a hamlet situated approximately fifteen kilometres from Luxor on the West Bank, and in the funerary cache excavated there almost one hundred years ago, pottery vessels were found depicting ships which ‘carry the dead to a burial on the edge of the desert on the waterways of the beyond’ (Hornung 1990: 165). These seagoing vessels are propelled by oars, and seem to be sailing into the limbo between sky and desert with a single palm frond placed on the prow.

45. Palm frond insignia on painted pre-Dynastic clay pots

This journey across desert and water is re-enacted in the contemporary lament for the young girls who traverse ‘the heart of the tombs in their sailing ships’: Red, in the heart of the tombs is a boat with a crimson sail They are still crossing over, those with golden hair With a silken sail, in the heart of the tombs is a boat with a silken sail, They’re still crossing over, those with {kohl‑black hair {hair like manes

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When asked the meaning of this lament, Hamida said that the wooden wheelbarrow‑like carriage (called ilhasaniyya) that is used on the West Bank to bear the dead person to the cemetery was conceived of as a ‘boat’. This conveyance has thus become an allegorical replica of the preDynastic ship that the ancients believed would bear the deceased to the desert tombs along mythical waterways. The earliest Egyptian creation myth concerns the emergence of the primeval mound rising from the inundation. In its modern form, the lamenter Tariyya conjures up an image of the departed souls sitting on a mound which protrudes above the waters of the inundation, and to which they have just ‘sailed’ by boat. Their tomb is a mound surrounded by rising waters: They have been left, my mother and father are sitting on the mound where they have been left They found boats, unfurled their sails and embarked They have been taken, my mother and father to the mound have been taken They found boats, unfurled their sails and descended within

In the metaphoric domain of the laments, the ‘unfurling’ of their shrouds has created the sails to propel them to the mound in which they are buried. In another variant, the lamenter from al-Bayadiyya sings of her mother and father, who unwind their shrouds and let loose their hair and are propelled by sail to the ‘nether sea’ into which they are urged to disembark: In a boat they set sail, my mother and father, in a boat they set sail They descended to the depths of the sea and disembarked They unfurled their ‘sheets’ my mother and father, in a boat they unfurled their winding sheets, Why, call out to the captain to let them disembark! They unwrapped their hair, my mother and father, they unwrapped their hair Why, call out to the captain and let them off! That dire day he led them down: no one could trace them

According to Umm Seti who lived near Abydos temple until the 1980s, the fellahin living in the vicinity would fashion an carusa or human-shaped doll from the clay at the beginning of the inundation, as an offering to the rising waters.13 The impact of the inundation waters against the mud would signify the ‘marriage’ of the earth and the waters and thus, the fecundisation of nature. The laments for the ‘father’ in which he is described as ‘the protruding mound’ and ‘source of ‘pleasure’ to the lamenter reinforce this same mythic motif. The lamenter, Balabil, wishes that the souls in death may be immersed

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in the inundation, in a well or in the place believed at the time of the Pyramid Texts to be the mythical source of the Nile, the first cataract at Shellal at Aswan: Descend and let them be inundated, take your men, descend and let them be inundated So many men, the unfortunates, are being empowered there Descend to the well, so many men, may you descend to the well So many men, poor unfortunates, are known of Descend to Shellal, so many men of your men, let them descend to Shellal And see the turbans which then appear

In her conception, the inundation will revivify them and the memory of Shellal survives as a blessed place where these men can be ‘empowered’ and may be ‘seen’.

XX The Deceased as a Bird In the ancient cosmology of death and the afterlife, several corporeal manifestations of the soul in the afterlife, including that of a bird, would enable it to migrate and receive offerings, as this XVIIIth Dynasty spell from a ‘letter to the dead’ reveals: Thou shalt change into a living soul and surely have power to obtain bread and water and air. Thou shalt take shape as a heron or swallow, as a falcon or bittern, whatever thou pleasest. Thou shalt cross in the ferryboat and shall not turn back. Thou shalt sail on the waters of the flood and thy life shall start afresh (trans. Sethe 1930: 113–15)

Palettes shaped like birds in flight were found in the earliest tomb artefacts, evidence Hornung interpreted as the Egyptians ‘desire for freedom of movement in the beyond, the soul’s undisturbed flight to the heavens’ (1990). The Pyramid Texts encapsulated the ancient belief succinctly: ‘The deceased flies to heaven like a bird’ (Pyr 302). As a ba bird, the soul would have access to nourishment, water and air. Pyr 250 describes the transformation: His two wings are grown as a falcon; his ‘ba’ [soul] has brought him here; his magic power has equipped him

In another verse, the ‘ba’ souls appear like swallows that take flight and then light on a mythical island: The big island in the midst of the Field of Offering on which the swallow‑gods are caused to alight (Pyr 1216a–c)

The symbolic correlation between tears and irrigation of the fields is expressed in this lament from al-cAiyaiyša: the tomb is an ‘island’, inundated with tears, an image consistent with the idea that the lamenter’s tears flow into the mythical underground ‘seas’ through which the deceased travels:

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I wept a great deal and then more again And shall irrigate the island on which there is no Nile I wept… Weep more indeed! And shall irrigate the island until it is {protected {soaked 14

The ancient Egyptian soul/person was believed to be a complex entity of many living parts. Despite death and the transmutation of the body into an immobile corpse, the person was still equipped with the life-force (ka), a link to the living, while the ba, the individual personality of the deceased, defined by Zandee as ‘the power of the human soul incarnated in a bird’, was said to be able to ‘move freely to fetch food for man’ (1960: 176). In the Book of the Dead, the text reads, ‘The ba now sees its corpse. It rests upon its mummy’.15 The ba also had sexual power and as a bird, could perch upon its corpse. Another aspect of the soul, the shadow, (in ancient Egyptian: šw.t) on the other hand, was like the ba: ‘it is that which intercepts the light and may haunt man’ (Zabkar 1968). Of interest to this study is the fact that the dead one was called mt, a cognate of mayyit (meaning ‘dead’ in Arabic) and a word semantically related to the name of the goddess Mut, one time consort and ‘wife’ of the god Amun in Karnak. As an amorphous and occasionally violent mother goddess,16 depicted with a vulture ideogram or ‘determinative’, Mut was the focus of a mortuary cult. The transformation of these souls into bird-form follows several phases. After being nourished, they are energised by the glinting sun like Isis in the core rejuvenation myth: after they come to eat vegetables and green stuff in Egypt, they flutter under the rays of heaven and thus their shapes become bird‑like (Frankfort 1933: 73)

The Egyptologist Frankfort explains the conundrum: The Egyptians … saw manifestations of the dead in birdlike apparitions with thin, piping voices, fluttering through the air near their former haunts; the dead merely acquired bird‑like characteristics: they did not ‘become’ birds (1949: 73).

The disappearance and return of migratory birds to the ancient Egyptians was symptomatic of the fact that the dead were only temporarily deprived of life before commencing a new life again (Hornung 1990: 165). Metaphors linking the soul to a migratory bird also appear in the contemporary laments. The person is imagined as a stork, an Iraqi goose (wizz al-ciragi) which migrates to the Upper Nile regions annually, a ‘Moroccan’ – mugrabi (m), mugrabiyya (f ) – species unknown, or a bird which lights on green fields or on an island amidst the waters of the inundation. This migratory bird ‘wanders down from the desert/

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mountains’, props up her leg in a crop of grass pea like a heron, or ‘descends’ from Tunis al-hadra (Tunis the fertile) in order to drink. Hence, one contemporary notion is of a verdant celestial field as conceptualised in the Egyptian epic, in the image of Tunis. In the Late Period, the representation of the ba bird in Egyptian iconography changed from that of a migratory stork (jabiru, in ancient Egyptian) to that of a human‑headed bird, a transformation that could be interpreted as greater humanisation of the ba concept. These humanheaded birds are described in a text on the cosmological ceiling at the cenotaph of Seti I in Abydos as follows: These birds have faces like men but their nature is that of birds. One of them speaks to the other with words of weeping (Frankfort 1948: 97)

In the laments, emotional affinities would seem to exist between the souls of the dead and birds and they communicate in the same ‘language’: Truly, the darling child, how the sparrow berates him: Sitting on the branch of the tree, weeping and talking Truly the darling child, how the turtledove berates him Sitting on the branch of the tree weeping

In the Byzantine lament tradition, the song of birds is also envisaged as weeping: A black bird was sitting on the fortress of Berati It sang sad dirges and spoke with human voice (Giankas 37.1–2 in Alexiou 1974)

In both instances, the bird appears to represent both the lamenter who weeps and the transformed soul of the deceased. In one Luxor lament, the sparrow and turtledove ‘twitter’ in sympathy when they see the girls’ hair streaming over the bier: The morning dawned and the turtledove twittered Young woman, your hair on the wooden bier is hurled The morning dawned and the sparrow twittered Young woman, your hair on the wooden bier is {gleaming {pointing East

Elsewhere in the corpus, an Iraqi goose cackles and a raven, kite and owl scream raucously at the ascent of the soul: A raven cawed after him, when he went up, a raven cawed after him An ill-fated ascent, the ascent of the elegant one The owl hooted after him, when he went up, the owl hooted after him How ill-fated, the departure of the men

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The kite shrieked after him, he went up and the kite shrieked after him At the departure of the men … how long it endured

This is replicated in this Coffin Text spell which describes the reactions of the ornithological world to death in a similarly onomatopoeic way: The falcon has screamed, the goose has cackled for you, the two kites who are Isis and Nephthys scream for you, striking for you on two gongs (CT I #24)

Other laments attribute wings to the dead person rather than bird-like characteristics per se. In one, the father is a ‘lion’ who is urged to spread his wings or leonine arms over the household. In this way, he becomes an embodiment of the ancient Egyptian falcon god, Horus. Depicted as a gigantic set of wings, this image became an insignia of protection painted on lintels and above the thresholds of Egyptian tombs in Roman times. In the cosmological system of the ancient Egyptians, the ka was a symbol of divine patrimony and ancestry depicted in several iconographic shapes but, most frequently, as two arms suspended in the air and conjoined, without a body. The father incarnates this image. Ironically, but perhaps logically, in the male New Kingdom tombs of the Theban necropolis, the wing motif remains but the gender roles are reversed: the voluptuous sky goddess Nut is suspended over the deceased king, enclosing him in her embrace, and at the four corners of Tutankhamun’s tomb, beautiful golden figures of Isis and Nephthys stand sentinel, enveloping the ancient sarcophagi with their long wings.17

XXIV The Tomb Representations of the tomb are diffuse and varied. According to many contemporary laments, the deceased is believed to reside in a ‘house’ and be supplied with food and drink for his/her repose. The ancient Egyptians also conceived of the tomb as a house.18 ‘I have built my house’ is the text of one funerary spell (Morenz, 1962: 259). ‘I have a built a house … [there in Punt] on the hillside where my mother [the goddess Hathor] resides beneath her sycamores’ (Rundle‑Clark 1959: 88) is another, similarly evoking the image of a sanctuary/residence deliberately built for eternal repose. In the 1980s, a traditional mudbrick house on the West Bank of Luxor would have had an imposing and impenetrable two-story facade with a massive door. One would enter the main room by crossing the threshold (ilcataba), often marked by a pocked and hieroglyphic-inscribed stone, and the back of the house at the rear of the courtyard would have housed the traditional animal enclosure or zariba where the goats, sheep, chickens, ducks, geese, donkeys and buffalo would live. The tomb in the cidid exhibits many architectural features of this traditional house – the courtyard, the living room and the zariba – yet on the symbolic plane, the tomb becomes a metaphorical garden and a

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granary. The metaphysical granary was also conceived of as the body of the Goddess Nut. The text of Pyr 435 reads, ‘I am Nut, the granary’ and in the earliest conception, the tomb was a place of nurture and latent fecundity made possible by her presence. Since food was required to nourish the dead person, granaries would be needed. In the mythical conception, all dead were to be mourned as Osiris, as this original text shows: The grain of wheat appearing inert when planted in the ground is Osiris in the tomb. The grain which germinates and produces the head of wheat from which will come the bread and nourishment of man is the god who under the sweet influence of the two Shentyt [?], comes to life again (Mariette 1869: 22).

In the modern laments, not only is the man mourned as the ‘grain’ or multiple grains of wheat (in Arabic, galla), or the plaited stalk (sunbul), almost exactly as above: ‘the head of wheat from which will come the bread and nourishment of man’, but is also is imagined to be dormant like a seed in the tomb. At the sibuc or ‘seventh day naming ceremony’ after the birth of a child, it was customary in Upper Egypt during the last century to plant grains in a seed bed and water them until the fortieth day when they would be brought forward as a symbol of the child’s vitality. This conception and image is, therefore, of great antiquity and embedded in folk practice. The deceased is also the high pigeon tower, source of fertiliser and thus, fecundity in the household: O high pigeon tower on the oasis track When it toppled, the pigeons fanned out and were gone

He is also the pillar of the household and the ‘river bank that will not be razed’ in the rising waters of the inundation: They trod on it, O my river bank, who soaked his trousers? Even if it came, the engulfing Nile, he would not feel it His clothing, O my river bank, who let the water soak his trousers? Even if it came, the engulfing Nile, it would not raze him

The lamenter Balabil finds her trousers ‘to be soaked in the tomb’, an allusion which is initially bewildering but entirely comprehensible when it is understood that the tomb is ‘a watery place’ and that this theme is central to the mythology.19 Enquire, say the stones, girl, glance around and enquire, In the heart of the tombs, my trousers are soaked

The inundation is the source of regenerative power: Let the Nile in flood with its foam wash over you I shall swim and fetch you … you who have given us strength

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46. A high pigeon tower

Let the Nile with its double foam wash over you I shall swim and fetch you, you who have empowered the eye

In the ancient laments, the waters of the inundation became ‘the tears of the field’. This image is reconfigured into the ‘tears of the sky’ and the field in this lament by Afkar: My heart, whoever said, my brother, how my heart melts How the Pleiades weep and the beloved at my side How the Pleiades weep and the beloved beside me My innards, whoever could say, my brother, how my innards melt How the wet earth weeps and the stars along with me How the wet earth weeps and the stars along with me

The constellation of the Pleiades was associated in ancient times with the seven goddesses of fate, also called the seven Hathors, arbiters of destiny. This lament attributes the flow of tears to the earth and the inundation via a pun on the word: tariyya to mean both ‘wet soil’ and ‘the Pleiades’. As the lamenter weeps, the synchronous weeping of the stars, the Pleiades, and the earth takes place, as if in collective sympathy for the deceased submerged in its rejuvenating waters. In ancient Egyptian cosmology, the appellation ‘drowned’ was applied to all who had entered the afterlife, since the primeval ocean, Nun, was believed to be the cosmological realm of the dead (Zandee 1960: 237) and in the set of ancient spells known as the Book of Gates, the deceased were described as swimmers ‘drowned’ in tears: O drowned ones who are in the water

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Swimmers who are in the stream (Zandee 1960: 236)

This image also recurs in the laments, though mainly for the drowned: Cross over to them … Who decreed, my child, that you should cross over? I am calling out to the swimmer who was once part of their clan

Balabil and cAliya urge that the mourners weep ‘on the seas’ (buhur), and in another lament, not explicitly for the drowned, the ‘bride of the sea’ travels through subterranean waters within the earth itself as if via a ‘nether sea’: O bride of the ‘sea’, you now live in upturned earth

The image of Min, the primeval mound, emerging from the inundation, also appears in the laments in the form of the resilient mud embankment or pillar which is knocked down but raised up in a place unknown to the lamenter: He was the pillar of our house and the pillar has been razed Tell us, to whose house have they dragged it? Razed, he was the pillar of our house and the pillar has been razed Why not tell us? In whose house has it been raised? Why not tell us? In whose house has it been raised?

These images also evoke memories of the rituals of Osiris, the ancient god of resurrection and rebirth, practised to assert his mythological resurrection to life. During the king’s royal jubilee or Heb Sed festival in ancient Egypt, a fetish object known as the ‘Djed’ pillar, daubed with facial markings and topped with feathered headdress to show its anthropomorphic character, was ritually raised from the horizontal to the vertical to celebrate the resurrection of the god from death to eternal life (Rundle-Clark 1959: 235). This pillar became the embodiment of stability in a process propelled by lamentation, according to Egyptologist, Rosalie David: mourning accompanied the ritual erection of the Djed pillar to assist Osiris in his struggle against death. It was hoped to please him and so to win his favour for deceased relatives and friends of the mourners; the lamentations would also bring about a good harvest and a high Nile (1981: 125).

The father is also mourned as if he were a sail flying from a ‘mast pole’ (sari) in this lament for the drowned: Mast pole… Who decreed that he be placed on the mast pole? I am looking with my eye at the beloved who has drowned A tree … Who decreed that he be placed on the tree? I am looking with my eye at the one who has drowned

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And in this: Your house is wide and your gate tall, O how we regret you have become without mast pole 20

Pyramid Texts 1216 a–e suggest a possible interpretation of this image: There is an island in the midst of the Marsh of Offerings … Herein is the tree of life (Mercer 1952)

The mast pole/tree in Tayha’s lament is like the ‘tree of life’ in which the drowned man is embodied and resurrected. This was an image first discovered on the pre-Dynastic pots from Naqada and Ballas ca 4,000 BC (Petrie and Quibell 1896) and in the Pyramid Texts, this is the island to which the deceased god swims and where the soul birds land in the afterlife. As the Egyptologist Hornung explained, a mast pole, wrapped in cloth, was the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol meaning ‘a divine place’ i.e., a place of the divine spirit or nedjer (1983). By Graeco-Roman times, the word had come to mean ‘(a person) is buried here’ (ibid), in other words, the transformation had taken place, and in current folk perception, a mast pole is considered by local devotees to be the repository of the spirit of a holy man or Sufi ‘sheikh’. Though the wrapped mast which stood in the walled shrine of the local sheikh, Abu cEla’ in Kom Lolah, has since been removed, many flags fly from these masts during sheikh’s mulids or birth feasts, and according to McPherson, who studied sheikh’s festivals throughout Egypt, on the occasion of his birth feast the sheikh was said to ‘inhabit’ his pole (1943). The octogenarian, al-Hajj cAbdulla, an esteemed member of the Luxor marakabiyya (the families who pulled the sacred boats of Sidi Abu’l Hajjaj, the patron sheikh of Luxor, during his annual mulid ) announced in 1984 that he was the one who would climb up the mast pole or sari and plant a pennant at the top every year,21 and in a documentary film shot in 1925 by photographer Harry Burton on the first 35mm camera, the sari is clearly visible.22 McPherson noted the Sufi’s use of the word, ‘sir’ to denote the ‘spirit’ or ‘innermost soul’ of the sheikh in his mast pole23 though its phonological resemblance to the Egyptian word for Osiris (w-sir) is noteworthy in view of the apparent fusion of ancient Egyptian and Sufi notions. At the same shrine in Luxor, the name, bab issirr, meaning either ‘secret door’ or more appropriately perhaps, ‘spirit door’ (written phonetically, bab issir) is given to the small mediaeval portal through which, al-Hajj cAbdulla reported, ‘the four celestial saints’ (ilaqtab) would enter and leave the tomb of the sheikh.24 The image of the mast pole, therefore, is one that has retained many of its ancient symbolic connotations. We may conclude, therefore, that in the context of laments for the drowned, the deceased is described as a resurrected and divine soul, so retaining its ancient identification with the eternal Osiris on the more

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recondite mythic level. Though the concrete referents: the inundation and the flow of life-giving silt, ceased to exist in 1968 with the erection of the Aswan dam, these images have survived in the context of lament and in the conceptual schema and cosmology of the afterlife. The Tomb is also conceived of as a garden endowed with shade and abundant water: the deceased may be succoured under the shade of palms, mulberry or pomegranate trees and placed close to the water‑wheels of Zimzim (in Saudi Arabia), water jars or other perennial sources. In the illustrated Book of the Dead written on the XIXth Dynasty ‘Papyrus of Ani’, the resurrected soul, whose name is Ani, is depicted as lying by a pool in the shade of palms. He brandishes his staff while the sources of water and fruit are by his side. The spell reads as follows: A man holding a sail in his left hand, Ani standing with a staff in his left hand; Ani and his wife each holding the emblem of air [an unfurled sail] in the left hand and drinking water with the right from a pool on the borders of which are palm trees, laden with fruit (Spell 311–14)

Ani clasps his staff for protection just as the Pharaoh Ramses IVth was shown standing under the curved dome of his shrine in Thebes and as illustrated in the painting from the pre-Dynastic tomb in Hierakonopolis. Accoutrements such as wooden staves were typically planted in these early graves (Petrie and Quibell 1896). During the early Dynastic period, a leather-bound staff like one still carried these days in Upper Egypt, was found buried with the deceased in a tomb at Naqada. The contemporary laments reflect these continuities of belief.

47. Men holding staves, Hierakonopolis

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Even now, a staff (šub/šuba) is carried by every man on the West Bank of Luxor to ward off snakes and wild dogs. The laments, perhaps to mirror life in death, also describe the ‘father’ equipped with a staff, either made of fruitwood typically endowed with the seeds of immortality, or wrapped in leather for protection. In a few though, the walking stick is left ‘at his mother’s’ for posterity, an image that would seem to negate the concept of the ancient and suggest that in the afterlife, it is no longer needed. Water may also be placed by the tomb though in some laments the harsh reality of the scene intervenes: in the grave there is actually no sea and no water source: Our sympathies, truly in the graves, there is neither henna nor our sympathies Nor a sea beside me in which the lovely one could bathe

The incoherence and bewilderment of a dead soul unable to quench his thirst is captured in this ancient text: I am thirsty although there is water beside me. I do not know the place I am since I have come to this valley (Morenz 1962: 245)

The contemporary laments similarly invoke the suggestive word, valley (wadi) meaning both the depression in a desert through which rain water flows and may cause flooding, and the Nile valley: Call out to them, death crier, call out to them, call out Their names wander lost in the valley

Despite occasional lapses into apprehension of what appears as the stark reality of death, in the cidid, most lamenters choose to describe the tomb as an idyllic and verdant place, replete with clover, sweet pea and safflower: A young woman by the bed is still reclining A palm frond tethered in the clover A young woman by the bed is still groaning A palm frond tethered in the safflower

A rib of palm in Middle Egyptian was the icon or determinative designating ‘young’ as in ‘young man’25 while the ideogram of a stick-form man, bent over a cane, meant old26 and crooked over a ‘notched’ stick, denoted ‘the waters of eternity’. Tariyya’s lament: My beloved parents, by the Prophet, I swear they were the most loved If they were to grow old,27 they would walk crooked over canes

conjures up the same image of an old man and, as with the palm rib, reflects the same metonymic and symbolic meanings. What is remarkable here is that the semiotics of representation of youth and old age have not changed dramatically over several millennia.

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The gardens in the ancient conception of the afterlife were often replete with fruit trees: pomegranates, lemons, apples and grapes and flanked by date and doum palms as in the papyrus of Ani. The laments also feature these trees: A date palm, her house is high and in it is a date palm The tomb has a doum palm … and is ringed with palm fronds

The palm is an ancient symbol of eternal life. A palm frond emerging from a mound-shaped reed hut believed to be an early representation of a tomb can be seen on pre-Dynastic Naqada pots:

48. Tomb depicted as a domed hut of reeds

In Upper Egypt, bodies were – and still are – placed in plots of hot, shadeless, infertile ground beyond the pale of the Nile valley, so the image is evocative of a fertile environment affording shade and tranquillity. In a similar Coffin Text, one spell reads: ‘two doum palms are the “guardians” of the deceased’ (CT I #206). In the cidid, the doum palm remains a symbol of fertility in the mythical landscape of the afterlife, and the mother, an incarnation of fertility: My beloved mother is a tree by the stairs Why, cast shade, fan breezes and blossom {with lemons {with grapes {with pomegranates

Sometimes, a goddess and possible cult figure is depicted emerging from the trunk of a tree. In both Theban tombs of Neferhotep and Pannhesi, a tree goddess appears who ‘offers the deceased food and cool water, and her branches shade not only the deceased but also his “birdformed” ba as they drink’ (Hornung 1990: 65). Tree goddesses were instrumental to the creation of a vision of succour in the afterlife. In one case, the goddess Isis emanates from the trunk of a tree, offering her breast to the king Tutmosis III, and in another, ‘Menkhperre [the king] suckles

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his mother Isis’ (Hornung 1990: 62). This image has been domesticated in the contemporary daughter’s lament: the mother’s breast, imagined as a cone of brown sugar, was a source of comfort and nourishment which is now gone: Mother, my beloved mother, the buttons on my gown The cone of brown sugar with which I quenched my desire

A further XIXth dynasty wall painting (ca 1400–70 BC) shows the mother goddess sitting in the top of a sacred tree pouring out the water of life. What is interesting is the topographical vision of the nether sea: The tree stands on a mountain top, the inside of which is filled with the water to the depth28

Another image from the Book of the Dead (Chap. 63a) confirms the presence of subterranean water. In this, the mother goddess Isis gives the water of life to the soul while the tree itself grows out from the depth of the water symbolised by the ideogram of water (wavy lines) in a flat square.29 Tombs were fertile spaces with shady trees, a water source, and even a threshing floor as the tomb builders reveal in this Coffin Text: digging a pond, planting zizyphus trees (in Arabic, nabq), building a tomb, the tomb builders announce: ‘I make coolness for them on the threshing floor’ (CT I #115).

Visions of the afterlife in the contemporary laments also include visions of the deceased ‘coming from the threshing fields’ as if reincarnated in the afterlife, performing his daily tasks: In the tent by his threshing fields, my eye is upon him in the tent by the threshing fields (He is) the red wheat that wields nourishment Coming from the fields, Woe is me! My eyes upon him coming from the fields (He is) the ripened wheat, nourishment for the guests

Laments like these represent in a sense, the ‘verbalisation’ of the vision of the afterlife, the transformation from the visual and the pictorial to the spoken word, empowered with the force of a spell. The XIXth Dynasty paintings on the tomb of Sennedjem at Deir al-Medina incarnate this scene. In Sa cidi Arabic, the word šuna means both ‘threshing-floor’ and ‘granary’. Over a hundred years ago, Egyptologists excavated a place of the same name in the Ist Dynasty tombs of Narmer, Kha-sekhem and KhaSekhemui at Hierakonopolis (in ancient Egyptian transliteration written as shuneh) which was apparently designed to contain fodder for domestic animals (Quibell and Green 1902).

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49. Men winnowing in the Tomb of Sennedjem

A lament recorded anonymously in al-cAiyaiyša also places a granary in the funerary context, concluding with the end-rhyme word, iššuna, adopted unchanged from Egyptian into Sa cidi dialect and perhaps the ancient linguistic pivot around which the couplet was composed: Bring your deceased in a woven basket from the threshing fields/ granary30

Burial in a large woven basket or reed mat was one of the most ancient forms of burial in Egypt. Woven basketry coffins, as well as carved wooden cradles, form part of the funerary artefacts from the early Dynastic cemetery of Tarkhan (some of which are displayed in the British Museum gallery of pre-Dynastic and early Dynastic Nubian and Egyptian artefacts) and in pre-Dynastic burials at al-Mahasna near Abydos in Upper Egypt. Bodies have also been found wrapped in a reed mat around which were placed a few personal belongings: a necklace, bangles, hunting implements and pots containing food and drink (cf Ayrton and Loat 1911). A reed mat was also used as an apparent ‘sleeping mat’ (Petrie, Wainwright and Gardiner 1913) and in excavations at el-Amrah and Abydos ca 1899–1901, bodies wrapped in reed or grass mats were found placed in recesses in the rock (Petrie and Quibell 1896). In the modern laments, the belief in the efficacy of reed matting to engender resurrection has not disappeared: I appealed to the stranger: he unrolled his reed mat and slept I appealed to my ‘father’: he rolled up his reed mat and stood

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50. Reed coffin wrapping

51. majur (pottery) coffins

Coptic tradition, as noted earlier, dictates that the bereaved should take up position beside the dead and lie by the grave on a reed mat. In this spell-like lament, the soul is apparently persuaded to abandon his reed matting in the tomb and rise up.31 Some of the earliest pre-Dynastic burials also took place in majur: inverted clay vessels (Van der Brink 1986: 51), a word known in Coptic and retained in Sa cidi colloquial with the same meaning. These hemispheric pottery coffins were also used for burial at al-Kab in the Royal Tombs of the earliest dynasties (Flinders-Petrie, 1901) and this type of burial was practised from the late pre-Dynastic era until the IIIrd Dynasty at Reqeqnah also (Garstang 1904). A child in a pottery coffin was also found in the al-Mahasna tombs dating from the latter stages of the pre-Dynastic era (Ayrton and Loat 1911b) and two laments show that this notion is not archaic, the first by Qomiyya in a lament for a young girl:

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The earrings of the young girl in the earthenware pot [majur] have been placed…

It is not clear whether the pot was merely to hold the earrings or whether the girl too is buried in it, but in the second, the jurra (a clay water vessel that also retains its Coptic name) becomes the burial repository of a young pregnant girl: O bride with your kohled eyes and cashmere Bride of calamity, you now dwell in upturned earth Kohled in red, you with the bulging stomach, kohled in red 32 Bride of calamity, you now dwell in the clay jar

This lament recorded anonymously by one sole lamenter conveys the suspicion that this ‘bride of calamity’ daubed in red (perhaps blood?) was a very young girl, pregnant out of wedlock or perhaps victim of an ‘honour killing’? It is not clear and the suspicions unconfirmed. Her burial in a clay jar would indicate her very young age. In addition to this archaic grave structure, coffin graves ‘lined with boards at sides and ends’ have also been found at the pre-Dynastic grave site at Tarkhan.33 This lament seems to be describing a very similar type of boarded coffin made of ‘sideplanks’, possibly still used in burials or a relic of an archaic ritual: Elegant one, when you are anxious for the grave, O elegant one Take with you a bed and one whose sideplanks are firm… {whose sideplanks are of lemon wood {whose sideplanks are of grape wood

The architecture of tombs described in the laments emerges as a major theme from this encyclopaedic set of motifs and symbols evocative of preDynastic burial practices. The mound shape is one of the most ancient. Ist Dynasty royal burials were placed in tombs roofed in mudbrick barrel vaults representing ‘the dome of heaven’. This shape was emulated by the pyramid builders. Until the Old Kingdom tombs of the pyramid builders were found, Egyptologists had been convinced that hoi polloi would not have been permitted to emulate the nobles but, despite their social class, any male worker who died was also deemed to be ‘an Osiris’ and entombed within a domed structure. This domed shape, known from hieroglyphic representations and replicated in Coptic burials all over Upper Egypt, is also found in shrines erected for the veneration of Coptic saints and Muslim sheikhs throughout Egypt, though it only appears in the laments as a mythical structure. One lamenter, for example describes the ‘mansion’ (dar) that has been built round the grave as a raised platform: The raised platform/mound [iddast] you have built around the grave my raised platform

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Tell them it is forbidden. Do not bury the great man

This may refer to a style of burial in which the person is entombed within a kind of mastaba (mudbrick platform) as in the Old Kingdom tombs at Saqqara, or a raised mound. Some pre-Dynastic tombs were furnished with a mudbrick platform for the deceased ‘to sleep on’, and houses excavated in nearby Deir al-Medina (beside Medinat Habu) dating from the XVIIIth Dynasty have revealed that such platforms or mastabas were in use then as beds, just as they were in the 1980s in Luxor. Many Luxor laments depict a person recumbent on a ‘bed’ (sarir) propped up by pillows and the fact that burial once took place in pre-Dynastic tombs on a platform or raised superstructure suggests a possible reiteration of the same idea.34 The contemporary headrest is a pillow, often moved from left to right to make the ‘sleeper’ more comfortable. In pre-Dynastic tombs, so-called ‘pillows’, actually head-rests made of wood, square and angular, ox-rib shaped, as well as one in the form of a crouching hare, have been found in Middle Egypt and Thebes dating from 2800 BC,35 placed under the head. In the modern laments, this headrest becomes a more domestic pillow (mahadda) and thus, an imaginary accoutrement of the grave. Another distinguishing feature of an early mastaba at Saqqara was the ‘sky-window’ described as ‘a narrow channel from the tomb below up to the chapel [which would] enable the soul to pass’ (cf Quibell).36 In other early tombs discovered in Upper Egypt in Deshasheh and Tarkhan,37 the aperture that would permit the soul to peregrinate outside the tomb after death took a different form (ibid: 9). In one, a shaft had been cut in the rock from the burial shaft to the chapel and in others, reeds were placed in the corners of graves to allow the soul to pass in and out, using the hollow stems as conduits (Petrie, Wainwright and Gardiner 1913). The contemporary correlative is the taqa or small window strategically placed high up in a mudbrick house to provide ventilation. In the laments, the spirit is imagined to migrate in and out to communicate with the living just like the ancient ka. However, in one case, an ounce of pragmatism has been added as one lamenter notes: Earth from the tombs trickles in through the sky-window [taqa]

The implication is that the person has been submersed in earth and is unlikely to migrate from it. In an ambiguous allusion to the same phenomenon, the sky window of what is euphemistically called a ‘bath’ is the tomb, is cracked and broken: You who dash off to the baths in such haste The sky window in the baths is {cracked... {destroyed

And in another, such a window is imagined to be the one from which the dead person can peer out:

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How did you, you who built the beautiful grave, how did you arrange things (so well)? From the window facing West {he can see his guest… {he can see the light

Pre-Dynastic and early Dynastic tombs were often constructed of bricks and wood. At the Mahasna site near Abydos, excavators found subterranean chambers constructed of bricks lined in wood (Ayrton and Loat 1911b) and in Helwan near Cairo, tomb chambers lined in mudbrick. The implied need to import high quality bricks from Cairo or the Delta to construct the tomb, in keeping with the status of the deceased, appears in a lament from Karnak: Cairene, truly the graves are made of Cairene bricks/Delta bricks When they placed you in them, you, the apple of my eye

The contemporary tomb is also likened to a house and its structure described in architectural terms as if it were a house. A mud-plastered reed ceiling or a porticoed balcony with a roof for shade, usually attached to the front of a modern mudbrick house, is known as a sagifa. In one lament, the lamenter queries the absence of the sagifa from the tomb: You who built it (the tomb), where is the mud-plastered sagifa you built for her? See to the ‘bride’ and those she has invited You who built it, where is the mud-plastered reed roofed dwelling you built for her? Carry off the ‘bride’ and the daughters of my father’s brother

The architectural features of the tomb in the cidid are symbolic; they are not constructed in reality, but again, the design of construction can be traced back to pre-Dynastic funerary practice. Luxor archaeologists found tombs ‘roofed from boughs from which the bark had been removed and reeds smeared with mud plaster’ (Ayrton and Loat 1911). Tombs roofed with sagifa have been discovered in pre-Dynastic burials in Upper Egypt and the Egyptian Delta ca 4,000–3,000 BC (Emery 1961: 139; van der Brink 1986) and the tradition has also been observed in previously unexcavated XVIIIth Dynasty tombs in Thebes (ca 1550–1305 BC).38 The Egyptologist, Emery, surmised that the burial would have been placed on a reed mat under an empty space, roofed with sticks and rush matting ‘because that structure might have resembled the dwelling of the owner in life’ (1963: 139). Some archaeologists have proposed that the earliest forms of ritual sanctuary were domed structures constructed of rolled reeds intended to guarantee that the deceased was buried in the holiest of holies for eternity. With this image as with many others, the contemporary structure (the sagifa) retains the form and meaning of the ancient. Its inclusion in the laments creates double resonance: it is the verbal embodiment of a pre-

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Dynastic cosmological idea and, at the same time, a familiar artefact transposed into the metaphorical vision of the afterlife. Ancient tomb enclosures were also surrounded by what appears to have been a wattle fence: a ‘partition of twigs made into a wattle work’, like the enclosure made of wood or thorns nowadays known as a zariba. It is similarly invoked in certain laments as a protection for the tomb: With wooden stalks, my mother’s house has been ringed round with wooden stalks/thorns … and fenced in round the perimeter…

This fence provides symbolic protection for the tomb just as a modern fence of thorns would provide protection for a West Bank family living on the edge of the desert escarpment.

52. sagifa roofing over a grave

XXVI Wedding In Death The theme of ‘wedding in death’ evinced in the modern laments has had a succession of precursors. In the so‑called ‘Gerzean’ boats, painted on pots in ochre and dating from the pre‑Dynastic period, two naked bodies can be distinguished on the prow. These figures represent divine marriage or wedding in death. Approximately two millennia later in Ptolemaic times (ca 323–30 BC), naked intertwining figurines of men and women (known as symplegma in Greek) were similarly placed in the tomb as amulets, to secure resurrection through the consummation of marriage in death.39 Scenes of wedding in death, real or mythological, were also depicted in Roman age tomb art in which the mystic union or ‘marriage’ of the saviour gods such as Dionysus would take place with the deceased (Toynbee 1971: 39). However, the earliest funerary texts to allude to a prayer for consummation of the sexual act in the afterlife are the Pyramid Texts 123 a–c (Mercer). In this translation by Faulkner (1938) the suggestion is clear: The king has copulated with Mowet [possibly the pre‑Dynastic mother goddess, Mut, designated by the sign of a vulture and the word from

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53. Sculpture of embracing couple known as symplegma

which the Arabic word: mut meaning death may derive]40 The king has kissed Shuset [meaning unknown] The king has joined with Nekhebut [possibly Nekhbet, a pre-dynastic and rather nebulous goddess figure depicted as a falcon from the ancient settlement of Hierakonopolis representing ‘the personification of fecundity’ (Mercer 1952: 77)41 or the goddess Nut herself ] The king has copulated with the Beauteous One

The context of these is deliberately ambiguous perhaps since the preceding spells allude to provision of food and drink. Thus, the women quench his ‘thirst’ and satiate his ‘hunger’. Yet this would have been external to what Egyptologist Jan Assmann described as ‘the mythological placement’ of the deceased in the womb of Nut, the heaven and body of the stars. Nut, the sky goddess was to say: I have spread myself over thee. I have born thee again as a god42

Each day, the deceased was to be born from her womb like the sun, and therefore, the placement of the body of the deceased king in a coffin constituted the regressus ad uterum into ‘the body of the sky and the mother‑goddess’ (Assmann 1990: 139).

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54. The goddess Nut bending over the deceased

Rebirth would ‘take place within the mother’s womb, inside the coffin and sky’ and entombment of the body in this mythological coffin would enable the person to be reborn every day in the daily cycle of birth and death of the sun through its trajectory through the sky (Assmann 1990: 140). ‘Wedding in death’, by comparison, it is believed, also takes place in the tomb and is equally intrinsic to the cosmology. When excavating tombs at Gurna, the Egyptologist Flinders Petrie observed that the bed or couch for the deceased was designed to accommodate a partner (Petrie 1909: 12),43 and as elaborated in the contemporary laments, it is assumed that wedding in death is the ultimate fate of all unmarried, young people. In fact, the fusion of the ‘wedding in death’ motif with the Islamic belief in the houris of heaven has created a variety of conceptual formulations. The ‘bridegroom’, when confronted by the houris of heaven wearing earrings, must stand up and ‘respond like a man’. According to the belief system, young men who have not consummated marriage in this life (as well as those who have) will find partners in the afterlife. It is the tradition amongst both Muslims and Copts that no man may be buried beside a woman who is not his wife. Moreover, men and women are traditionally separated in their placement in the tomb as if to avoid unlawful sexual encounters between contiguous spirits. Balabil, one of the few Coptic lamenters, speaks in the voice of the bridegroom, concerned at the absence of a church ceremony, and conjures up a tragic scene of marriage by moonlight as if in the realm of the dead:

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I will go to his home, I will go to the priest at his home They did not celebrate my ‘coronation’ [kelil], nor did I see him…

In some laments, the transposition of the world of the living to the world of the dead occurs: the bride is urged to be chosen from the groom’s appropriate kin group, ideally, the maternal or paternal cousin, while in the case of the young man, his encounter with the gorgeous houris of heaven appears a utopian dream. In stark contrast, the virgin bride is violated against her will by the rapacious agent of death: The blood of the bride is redder than the pomegranate In delight, drops were sprinkled on her kaftan The blood of the bride is redder than the grape When drops were sprinkled on the whirling dust… So beautiful her earrings against the unblemished cheek The young virgin so pure, by the ‘leaper’ was taken

The unwilling bride is supine and decked out in her wedding dress under a bridal bower of palm fronds, desiccated and wilting. The fashioning of a funerary bower from palm fronds above the grave is depicted in drawings in the New Kingdom tomb of Neferhotep on the West Bank of Luxor, (Werbrouck 1938: 33) and derives from the pre‑Dynastic period. From its architectural description and the accoutrements she bears with her, it is clear that the ritual is to take place in the same type of transmuted bridal chamber.

XXXVI Offerings and Accoutrements Ancient Egyptian burial tradition necessitated an array of paraphernalia be buried with the dead to provide the essentials of life for the next world, a tradition that survived for over five millennia: From the fifth millennium BC to the Christian era (ca 3000 BC–400 AD) … evidence asserts that bodies were prepared and dressed, buried with personal ornaments, toilet requisites, weapons or tools and always with large numbers of pots and dishes containing food and drink (Frankfort 1948: 90).

The laments for the young ‘bride’ for example, stress that she should be adorned in bracelets, necklaces and engraved pectorals to protect her on the journey to the afterlife: Elegant silversmith, go down into {Qus {Esna {Aswan Purchase some bracelets and {make markings with a pin {engrave the gold necklace {engrave marks on the pectoral

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Ancient engravers who burnished and worked the gold leaf of Egyptian coffin lids made markings on them as protection for the deceased, according to Davies (1933). This lament for the bride indicates that the engraver should perform a similar task for the bride. In Old Kingdom tombs in Deshasheh and Tarkhan, offerings of clothing were ‘made up’ and placed in the tomb44 reminiscent of the following segments of laments: Take the clothes wrapped in a bundle, when you are intent on leaving, take the clothes wrapped in a bundle… and In the crook of the door, tell her to stay in the crook of the door I shall send to her nourishment and the folded clothes [tabig ittiyyab]

In the early to mid-twentieth century, the carrying of a flywhisk was the mark of an effendi or gentleman in Upper Egypt, while in the ancient Pharaonic period, such an accoutrement was a symbol of kingship and authority. Along with the crook and the staff, the flywhisk was an artefact commonly buried in the tomb with the deceased king. The wielding of swords, a flail and even a flywhisk, the latter two markers of kingship in ancient Egypt, are still symbolic of male power and prestige in the laments, even in oblique form: O carriage driver, turn the horse around, bring him here I recognise the gentleman from the flywhisk he wields

Robert Graves described the practice of transposing symbolic objects from their ancient context to a modern one as iconotropy (1962). The fact that the lament depicts the gentleman holding the flywhisk while in his funerary carriage suggests that this object has retained ritual connotations after death and is carried to the grave as a symbol of his authority. Only the context has changed. In the Old Kingdom tombs of Ballana and Qustul in Old Nubia (a repository of Nubian ‘C’ group culture now submerged by the Aswan dam), a flywhisk was found that had been left ‘to ward off evil spirits’ (Emery 1962). As confirmed in an inscription in the tomb of Tutankhamun on the artefact itself, the flywhisk was a ‘protector’, and in this famous tomb, Howard Carter found several flywhisks ‘resembling modern Egyptian flywhisks’, hanging down at the sides of chariot horses, beside elaborately decorated walking sticks with gold leaf and metal bindings (Carter and Mace 1923: 164). The placement of the flywhisk beside the staff is also significant. In the Bani Hasan tombs, the statues of a man clasping his staff may have been intended for the habitation of the ka or life force (Garstang 1907: 31, 138) but the sticks were designed as instruments of self-defence. The staves borne by the elegant youth to the grave: ‘wrapped with iron wire’ or ‘amulets’ or impregnated with ‘henna’ would seem to have been derived from the same ancient tradition. The stalks that men carry are

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cut from holy and empowered woods – wormwood, pomegranate, henna and grape, the fruit trees identified in the ‘Jumiliac papyrus’ with the vital fluids of the resurrected Osiris: ‘These are the divine humours which have sprouted into fruit trees’. In the early pre-Dynastic period, the worship of a living tree was transferred to the worship of a pole or a branch cut from the tree, in certain cases, pomegranate wood (Murray 1932: 312) and as cited earlier, in modern sheikhs’ festivals and for departing pilgrims, youths rip branches from living trees, hoist them in the air and dance fervently to mark their joy at the sheikh’s rebirth into renewed life. Fruitwood ‘of which the seed is in itself ’ has always been associated in the Judeo‑Christian tradition with spontaneous regeneration: And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed and the fruit tree yielding fruit whose seed is in itself. (Genesis 1:11)

In the laments and in the funerary imagery of the Dynastic period, the pomegranate represents the vulva. Its placement in the tomb symbolises a prayer for rebirth and regeneration. Actual pomegranate fruits were found in New Kingdom tombs, now prominently displayed in the British Museum;45 symbolic pomegranates fashioned from ivory and stained red are on view in the Cairo Museum (Exhibit 154) and polished and fully rounded silver pomegranates were found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. It was apparently not necessary to bury an actual pomegranate with the deceased. A model sufficed. A facsimile in symbolic form was potent and could wield the magic. Some of the most fascinating arrays of symbolic artefacts were found in the Middle Kingdom tombs at Bani Hasan (ca 2040–1650 BC) in Middle Egypt. These consisted conventionally of miniaturised symbolic objects: wooden kohl‑boxes and kohl sticks (used to daub kohl on the eyes), winnowing fans, statues of girls carrying baskets on their heads and holding pigeons, models of rowing boats and boats with cabins accompanied by rowers and singers, and finally, granaries, pomegranates and green glazed beads (Garstang 1902). Egyptologists have suggested that these artefacts and models of people engaged in ritual activities and frozen in conventional postures were included in the tomb cache for the express purpose of re-enacting ritual. The wooden figurine of the woman, for example, with a brace of birds and basket was clearly intended to incarnate the perpetual provision of offerings to the deceased according to Garstang (1907: 61, 87, 95), This embodied act of offering is incarnated in the laments in the form of empowered words: With a brace of pigeons, I shall go to my father’s brother with a brace of pigeons So that he will speak to me gentle words

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With a half- measure of flour, I shall go to my father’s brother with a ‘nuss’ of flour So that he will speak to me lovely words 55. Wooden model of a woman ‘servant’ carrying birds and a basket on her head

With the appropriate presents of pigeons for food and flour for bread, the lamenter hopes to gain clemency from the deceased, who, in this case, is a significant authority figure, namely the paternal uncle. This lament shows that there is an element of mutual exchange being negotiated between the living and dead: the living make offerings to the deceased and in return, the dead are encouraged to intervene positively in the lives of the living.

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The word for bread in Egyptian Arabic, caiš, means life. In addition to being the proverbial ‘staff of life’, the designation of bread as ‘life’ is significant in that bread is the principal food of the living and the dead. At funerals (as at celebratory feasts such as al- caid in Arabic), women prepare special small round cakes rubbed in sugar known as kahk to be consumed by the bereaved but also as an offering to the person who has died; kahk is also prepared on major feast days as an offering to the soul of the deceased at the tombs and these cakes are distributed to the poor at the grave. Bread also can represent the corpus vivendi, the living body of a person in traditional spells and rituals. In a spell prescribed by a local healer on the West Bank as a cure, the soft heart of a piece of bread known as libba was placed in a bowl to represent a child suffering from an attack perpetrated by spirits emanating from under the ground, an incursion known as ilwaga c (‘the fall’). The bread was to be soaked in a herbal bath with dates under the stars, and the child then washed in the juice. The bread, in this case, was an offering but also a host, a surrogate and latent source of healing. In cases of marital separation or divorce, such a rupture may also be signified by the symbolic ripping of a loaf of bread into two parts. This again indicates the living corporality of bread and its sacred character. Bread, even crumbs, should not touch the floor, as this is considered sacrilege. In a contemporary lament for the young girl who dies a virgin or ‘the bride’, the mother kneads the dough for feast cakes as if it were a festive occasion. In actuality, the situation is reversed: the kahk or gurus (pastry ‘rounds’) are to be doled out at the grave and the lamenter has ‘kneaded’ their emotions from the whirling dust nearby: To one like him, mother of your only male child, what have you done to him? You kneaded the dough of his kahk Why did you not invite him? And to him, mother of your only male child, what have you done to him? You kneaded the dough of his feast cakes Why did you not invite him? Today, mother of the groom, what have you done to him today? You ‘kneaded’ our sympathies from the whirling dust of the mound

Coffin Text #26 attests to the antiquity of the tradition of offering ‘loaves’ to the soul as it wends its way up and down the waterways of the afterlife, reassuring the deceased that these loaves and round cakes (like gurus) will be provided: They will come bearing the loaves of the gods and they will make loaves for you when going downstream and round cakes when going upstream.

In the tomb of Ramses IV, wall paintings show that a round, yellow cake

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was placed on a table along with an ibriq or water vessel with a distinctive protruding spout. Finger biscuits or fayiš, another traditional form of offering prepared for contemporary funerals and as offerings to the dead are similarly dyed yellow with kurkom (turmeric), and this same spouted vessel of white unbaked clay, found in pre-Dynastic graves at Reqeqnah and Bet Khallaf in Upper Egypt46 is still broken on the threshold in Luxor at celebrations of a boy’s circumcision. Offerings in the ancient context were to nurture and appease the deceased spirit in all its permutations and in one XVIIIth Dynasty tomb, offerings were made not only to the dead man or his ka (as was usual) but to his name, his ka, his altar, his tomb, fate, his lifetime, to several ancient Egyptian gods who are now longer worshipped, and to his ba, his akh, his body, his shadow (khaibit)47 and ‘all his forms’ (te Velde 1977: 105). These ‘forms’ were all considered to be animate parts of his being, and consequently, all could benefit from offerings. The variety of funerary foods provided to the deceased in ancient Egyptian tombs is well documented, but in an Archaic Period tomb from the early Ist and IInd Dynasties in Saqqara, the provision of food for the dead was not merely symbolic: a sumptuous banquet of foods including fruits and condiments was laid out and placed to the East of the reclining person, as if he were an invalid. This consisted of ‘a plate of barley porridge, a loaf of bread, cooked fish, pigeon stew, cooked quail, two cooked kidneys, ribs and leg of beef, stewed fruit, zisiphus berries, small cakes sweetened with honey, small jars containing cheese and wine in a large jar, with each of the dishes served on a clay, alabaster or diorite dish’ (Emery 1962: 4).48

56. Painting in the Tomb of Menna

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This type of extravagant burial feast would seem to be the ideal to which the lamenter Zeinab aspires: The food for the young girl has been placed in the guest room Oozing with ghee and those present give thanks The food for the young girl in the guest room is aromatic Oozing with ghee and laced with hot pepper

Aliya’s lament reflects the same occasion and spirit:

c

Her son wept and said, My beloved The luncheon is prepared for the guests with me Her son wept and said, My beloved The luncheon is prepared for the guests in the sanctuary [hema] 49

Nourishment of the ka would be guaranteed for eternity by placing doll’s-house-like model granaries (replete with wooden models of workers) directly on the sarcophagi. Ka houses were included in the tomb paraphernalia for the soul to reside in, and model boats were also placed on the tomb to help the deceased perform pilgrimage rituals after death At a sheikh’s tomb near Gurna in 1909, Flinders Petrie photographed the same ritual offering and wrote as the photo’s caption: Soul-houses placed by the tomb of a holy man. Jars of water are put for his refreshment and soul-houses for his soul

This is concrete evidence of the continuity of certain funerary practices and traditions on the West Bank of Luxor, site of ancient tombs and mortuary temples of kings and queens from the pre-Dynastic era into the New Kingdom and Graeco-Roman period. It also signals a possible mirroring of archaic practices in lament symbolism.

57. Soul houses made of clay left at a sheikh’s tomb

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58. A model boat found in the Tomb of Tutankhamun

Allusions in the laments to offerings to the dead, icons of fertility and nourishment, the architectural features of the tomb and domestic paraphernalia to be taken to the grave would seem to invoke the same symbolic system as that manifest in ancient grave goods, therefore. The invocation of these ritual objects is designed to empower the laments. A boat is no longer physically placed in the tomb to propel the deceased to the afterlife, but a lament is sung to propel the deceased metaphysically in the hasaniyya boat to the tomb. A stalk of pomegranate wood is no longer physically placed in the tomb but the identification of the deceased with a stalk of pomegranate wood embodies and re-engenders the hope for resurrection of the life-force (once the ka) and thus, the survival of the person’s living descendants.

XXXVIII Protection of the Living by the Deceased In an XVIIIth Dynasty Theban tomb (ca 1550–1305 BC), the following text is written: May he behold his house of the living so as to make protection for his children every day and for ever and ever (Gardiner and Sethe 1928: 11)

This is an explicit request for intercession. Yet sometimes, a desire to complain to the deceased is the motive for a dispatch to the other world: He has not given anything to my daughter who makes funerary offerings to the spirit in return for watching over the earthly survivor (from the ‘Hu’ bowl, Gardiner 1928: 5)

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The notion that the dead person should show his gratitude to the living by bestowing wellbeing and good fortune on them is clearly ingrained in the rigorous Egyptian code of funerary observances. In many of the contemporary laments, the responsibility of the absent soul to embrace and protect the living appears to be a primary concern of the mourners: the husband/father is ‘the lion’ and his arms are leviathan: ‘elephantine’, ‘leonine’ and ‘muscular’, so that he may propel himself across the seas or guard the threshold. Like the ka symbol in ancient hieroglyphics in which two arms are linked in an upright position, his arms are placed above the door to protect his survivors. The significance of the lion may have some ancient antecedents: in the iconographic tradition of funerary paintings, lions, crocodiles, snakes and gazelles were among those animals depicted most frequently. According to Hornung, animals able to survive in the wilderness were those associated with life in the beyond: in particular, the lion, ibex and gazelle (1990: 165). The ibex is now virtually extinct and not named but the lion survives in contemporary folk iconography as a popular motif in pilgrimage paintings in Gurna and al-Bacyarat on the West Bank of Luxor.50

The synthesis of themes In the lament corpus, the cosmic ‘topography of the afterlife’ is in some important facets, similar to that of the Pyramid Texts. The deceased may ferry or sail across the ‘celestial’ or subterranean waters (buhur) and in this way, contemporary conceptions parallel the ‘nether sea’ concept from the Pyramid Texts. The earth in the tombs is watered by an underground source, not unlike the ocean of water which lies beneath the earth or ‘nether sky’, as depicted in Allen’s ideogram. The story of the primeval myth of creation, in which the ithyphallic god Min emerges as the primeval mound from the waters of chaos, is also retained in the modern laments: the allegorical rising of the mud embankment and protruding mound which ‘will not be razed in the rising flood’ are potent symbols of the male deceased. There is only one direct reference to the actual season of inundation (the Coptic word, iddamira) in which the deceased is ‘drowned’ but its ‘double thick foam’ should flow over and swathe the person. The deceased is seen to be resurrected from the seas and at the source of the primeval inundation, Shellal, when he appears, waving his turban scarf. This inundation, hence, is a mythical one and the tomb, like its ancient counterpart, is a place of consummation and renewal.

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11

Towards a Cosmology of the Afterlife Continuities and Transformations

Fragments of beliefs about the destiny of the soul after death were recorded by Edward Lane in the nineteenth century in Cairo and by the anthropologist John Kennedy in the 1970s in Egyptian Nubia, south of Luxor. Otherwise, there is little ethnographic documentation of prevailing ideas in the contemporary period. In the Nubian conception, the hovering soul at death was released to begin the journey to the tree in the sky or the bir (‘well’) (Kennedy 1978: 231) which suggests both a notion of a celestial tree of life, a feature of the ancient Heliopolitan sky religion of Egypt, and the idea of burial in subterranean water. Whether the passage to the afterlife was ascending or descending remains ambiguous. As Van Gennep observed and Huntingdon and Metcalf reiterated (1991: 32) funerary symbolism in many parts of the world has been dominated by the imagery of water journeys and ‘island‑like afterworlds’. The traversing by the dead of dark sinuous paths is also imagined as a rite of passage in many diverse funerary traditions.1 However, because of the access we now have to Egyptian historical record both through tomb inscriptions and, in this case, funerary texts such as the Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts and the Late Period papyri, the cosmology of the afterlife as perceived by the ancients, and the sequence of experiences undergone by the deceased after death, are now known in their conception even if their meaning in some cases remains obscure and controversial. The cosmology of the Pyramid Texts, despite its obscurantist nature, defines the trajectory of the king after death to his destiny as a star. The degree to which ordinary people appropriated these ideas is not known but graphic evidence from tomb architecture and material culture from non-royal tombs has provided us with a framework for understanding some of the most ancient and recondite conceptions of the afterlife in ancient Egypt. Edward Lane, who based his ethnography on observations in Cairo, not Upper Egypt, described a belief in the hovering nature of souls which, after death, would be transformed into ‘white birds’ who would remain either ‘near the throne of God’ or by graves for seven days afterwards. The deceased would then repose ‘with Adam in the lowest heaven’ or descend

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to ‘the well of Zimzim’ (the source of the waters of eternal life at Mecca); alternatively, according to others, he or she would attain ‘an unknown destination’ (Lane 1973: 526). Folklorist Rushdi Salih collected and published some Egyptian lamentations, but he was notably reluctant to confront the issue of ‘survivals’. He regarded these as ‘against the evolution of culture’ (1971: 268) and so eschewed the study of belief systems. Salih argued that there was no visible proof of a coherent belief system or cosmology of death and the afterlife. He did acknowledge popular belief in the role of cAzra’il, the angel of death, who would pursue and capture his victims, and described two funerary customs: the tradition of processing the young girl or ‘bride’ to the grave in the company of a wedding band, and that of sending clothes and other artefacts with the deceased to the grave, but without commentary (1971: 264, 268). He noted the custom of refraining from naming the deceased directly and the ritual of drinking coffee in the funerary tent to absorb the person’s ‘soul’ (ruh) or life-force but, in the end, maintained that there was no rationale for these acts. In his view, these rituals were somehow random and distinct from beliefs in the fate of the soul after death. In contrast, the anthropologist Mohamed Galal recorded beliefs relating to death and the afterlife as part of the ethnographic study of his own Delta village (1938). He noted that the disembodied soul was believed to ‘ascend’ at death (from the verb, tali c), as in the contemporary laments, and then return to its place behind the left ear where it would remain until two hours after the burial ‘to hear the lamentations in its honour’. This might perhaps explain why the lamenter engages in dialogue with the deceased. Galal also noted belief in the transmigratory nature of the soul and its reappearance in the sentient world as an insect or a scarab beetle, an image well documented in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. In his village, people attested to beliefs in the visitation of the souls of sheikhs or holy men to the living, especially through the agency of dreams (1938: 224). Places of the dead, he surmised, were held in awe since the dead were capable of wielding supernatural influence on the living. Illness and death would strike because of infringements against the spirit world of which the soul of the deceased became a part. If spirits were not properly honoured after death, they might inflict disease and calamity. Galal concluded that the crux of the funerary tradition rested in Egyptians’ intrinsic belief in resurrection and their belief in the power of the dead to affect the living (ibid: 264). The mystifying and often seemingly contradictory assortment of activities to be performed by the deceased in the afterlife, or alluded to in symbolic form in the laments, suggests a cosmological underpinning. The deceased is not subjected to a particular sequence of events in the afterlife: the chronology of stages or activities the soul must undergo after death appears random. However, the allusions in the contemporary

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laments to a series of experiences the soul must undergo at death and the semiotic equivalences they invoke, suggest significant parallels with their precursors. Jan Assmann has argued with respect to the cosmology of the ancient Pyramid Texts that this world of endless, representational and conceptual possibilities for the solar cycle was inherently logical since all contemplations of change, renewal, rebirth and eternal life were paired with a corresponding world of mythical precedents and realities (1990: 155). In other words, the transformations of season, night and day were matched to mythological correspondences and the fluctuations of nature, the ebb and flow of the inundation, even the harvesting of crops, were interpreted as signs of divine processes within the universe. This matrix of correspondences is mirrored in the semiotic world of the laments. The following concepts emerge as significant. The multifarious and symbolic nature of the tomb shows that it is a place of sanctuary, fertility, resurrection, a residence, a garden shrouded with fruit trees or palms, a well, a sea or an inundated plot. Before interment in the grave, the deceased is washed and placed on a ‘bed’, a reed mat, basket or mattress in the tomb (in some laments described as ilgama, ‘the place of resurrection’). The tomb is a place from which the soul literally, ‘ascends’: tali c. This ascent is accomplished either by walking or via a ladder or staircase. From this place, he or she departs on a ship to travel across water to the domain of the afterlife. The deceased may winnow grain after his ascent and be armed with weapons (swords, staves, javelins, quarter staves or rolling pins), in most cases made of fruit wood or a mystically regenerative species of wood like wormwood or henna. Subsequently the soul may become a bird-like apparition and cross the ‘celestial’ waters in a barque, a reed float or by swimming, or as suggested in other laments, ‘descend’ to the subterranean waters or ‘seas’ (buhur) by ferry or a sailing boat. The word buhur (seas), however, is confusing in that bahr (sea) more usually designates the Nile; the plural, ilbuhur would indicate a different set of bodies of water. When death from drowning occurs, in the mythical sphere, the deceased emerges from it resurrected, either as a mast pole or as an apparition, waving his turban scarf, at the site of the first cataract, Shellal. The tomb may be a place of deep water: a ‘well’ (bir) or a field or bank subject to inundation. There is only one direct reference to the season of inundation (the Coptic word, iddamira) in which the deceased is ‘drowned’ and yet the ‘foam’ of the inundation, the colour of dark silt and, by metaphoric extension, embalming resin, should ‘flow over’ the person to revive him. Hence, this inundation is a mythical one.

Towards a Cosmology of Lament The leitmotifs of lament, when juxtaposed with ancient Egyptian cosmological themes and conceptions, reveal a startling synchrony. As texts

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with simultaneously ancient and contemporary meaning, the meaning of the cidid as a corpus seems to stretch beyond mere referential and literal boundaries of interpretation to a mythopoeic level of significance. In cosmological terms, whereas the deceased king in the Pyramid Texts became a god in the form of an akh, the soul in the laments is believed to be succoured for eternity in the embrace of the inundated earth after a dangerous journey through perilous and winding passages. In the laments, the deceased does ascend a ladder and may or may not become a star. A few ambiguous allusions to the soul ‘rising’ like stars into the sky can be found, but these imply only that the deceased is absorbed in the heavens. The ancient written spells for the deceased referred to the person as ‘the ‘anonymous (soul) who is like Osiris’; that is to say, all males and females, were to become embodiments of Osiris by virtue of their very placement in the grave. In this formulation, the personality, gender and identity of the person was given no importance. Similarly, in the contemporary laments, by erasing all mention of the identity of the person who died and mourning him or her as a generic persona, the soul becomes, in many ways, anonymous, and the husband/father in particular, by virtue of metaphoric allusions to the rising mound, a Min, and from association with grains of wheat, an Osiris. The cosmic topography of the afterlife is also, in many important elements, similar to that of the Pyramid Texts. The deceased may ferry or sail across the celestial and/or subterranean waters (buhur) in some kind of barque. This is startling since it suggests that the Pyramid Texts’ concept of the ‘nether sea’ has been retained in the modern conception along with that of the ‘celestial sea’. The earth in the tombs is watered by an underground source not unlike the ocean of water which lies beneath the earth or ‘nether sky’, and embodied in the Egyptian ideogram of the inverted sky. The Nile may be one ‘sea’ but there are multiple bodies of subterranean water. Links to the ancient cosmological schema are reinforced by the fact that in at least one lament, resurrection takes place at the first cataract at Shellal from which, it was believed, the primeval inundation emerged and the Nile flows. The emergence of the ithyphallic god Min from the waters of chaos, so forming the primeval mound, is another leitmotif. The male deceased is the pillar, the mud embankment or protruding mound which ‘will not be razed in the rising flood’. The tomb in this mythical context is the place of consummation and renewal. The deceased are capable of fecundation in death through the power of the laments to awake the deceased to renewed potency. After death, the belief in the capacity of the soul to return, to listen to the laments and communicate with the living in the shape of a migratory bird, a luminous cloud, a lurking shadow or an apparition, with the potentiality to exert benevolent or malevolent influence on the living is also synchronous with the ancient and at the core of the lament cosmology.

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It is striking that in Upper Egypt where discussion of religious dogma and practice is so pervasive that the modern laments contain no reference to either Islamic or Christian theological ideas. They seldom invoke the name of God (apart from apologia or ‘absolution’ texts in which the lamenters ask forgiveness from God for their transgressions) and there is no allusion to heaven or hell. The conceptual framework of the laments, moreover, does not appear to be linked to any formal, religious belief system, though a consensus and accord between Copts and Muslims clearly does exist. Women in Upper Egypt who have been the tradition bearers and performers of funerary ritual for millennia, have not had the luxury of formal education and, therefore, remained outside the domain of literacy and religious instruction. They have no idea that such antecedents to their laments exist in the Pyramids or other documented form. They have learned their laments, as they say, ‘in the school of weeping’. From this comparative study, we can see the capacity of the human imagination to retain concepts about the fate of human beings, their mortality and the cosmos over many millennia. Over time, some have been transformed but others are still deeply entrenched in the cosmology of death and the afterlife. Some rituals practised in the nineteenth century are now archaic and have entered the metaphoric domain of the laments. Others reflect ancient conceptions and rituals noted as practised in the Graeco-Roman period. Nevertheless, many of the oldest conceptions, some of which date from the pre-Dynastic era of burial practice and the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts, have been retained, perhaps because they are the most fundamental to the Egyptian conception of death and the afterlife. It is the oral performance of laments that has permitted those ideas and traditions to be transmuted, transmitted and reconstrued in a comprehensible fashion. Women have remained outside the mainstream of religious orthodoxy for hundreds if not thousands of years, and there have been, until relatively recently, no opponents from the religious establishment to influence the trajectory or continuity of the tradition. As such, the laments bear witness to religious ideas and practices some of which were current in Upper Egypt over four thousand years ago and which are again being challenged and rejected by the religious orthodoxy.

The Social History of Lament Theological tradition in Egypt has patently undergone many fluctuations over the last five millennia of Egyptian history. In the most recent past, the advent of Islam in 622 AD fundamentally altered the pattern of religious history and theology, and resulted in the conversions of many Coptic Christians to Islam. Nevertheless, large towns in Upper Egypt – including Luxor, which was a secluded Coptic monastery – remained Coptic strongholds until the Middle Ages, even though Fatimid armies were ensconced in the region near Qus for over four hundred years.2

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From the earliest epochs of pre‑Dynastic and Dynastic history of Egypt, evidence of a less unified and monolithic religious tradition has emerged from examination of tomb iconography as more and more sites are plumbed for artefacts and texts. Throughout this time, the relationship between folk conceptions and the dominant theological ideas of a given period have remained obscure. The performance of funerary laments in contemporary Egypt, a tradition we know to have been ensconced in the mainstream of religious practice from the early Dynastic era, must now be construed as a folk tradition, embedded in women’s cultural practice; one that is external to, and has been in constant tension with the orthodox religions, Islam and Coptic Christianity, for at least two millennia. Herodotus confirms the perpetuity of performance traditions in his description of mourning in the Hellenistic period. The tradition was then subjected to attacks by the clergy and the political regime throughout the Christian era and, in 1419 AD, many centuries after the advent of Islam, the Prefect of Cairo prohibited women from performing funerary lamentations, punishing them in accordance with the Prophet’s dictum in the Hadith: ‘The mourner and those who surround her – to hell’ (cAbd al‑Raziq 1973: 86). The author notes, however, that these orders did not last long, as they were forgotten and people again began to celebrate funerals with hired mourners.3 Though there are copious funerary texts which survive in museums from the Dynastic period of Egyptian history, Coptic Christianity developed a theology vehemently antagonistic to what the church regarded as Egypt’s heathen past. The Egyptologist Zandee argues, when comparing the relative notions of the afterlife, that Coptic funerary liturgies and texts were more distinctly influenced by Hellenistic and Judeo‑Christian tradition than by ancient Egyptian notions (1960: 310). His evidence lies in the fact that the clergy of the orthodox Coptic church was bitterly opposed to all things Pharaonic and that over the course of several centuries, the Church hierarchy sanctioned the destruction of all vestiges of the ancient iconography. If incontrovertible textual proof is sought to establish the relationship between ancient and modern cosmological systems of death and the afterlife, then it must be asked, why did the Coptic Church not have more influence in countering ancient practices? One explanation might be that in the relationship of people to their living environment, oral tradition and material culture is intrinsic. People have lived in the precinct of Luxor town from the New Kingdom onwards, more or less continuously for a period of over four millennia. During that time, the gift of literacy would have been accorded only to a few male ascetics and academics. It is to be expected that oral tradition would have reigned supreme amongst women and within the women’s community. Moreover, it is highly likely that there were, as today, notable disparities between religious orthodoxy and folk practice, particularly in the sphere of women’s expressive traditions.

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The folk tradition is a potent survivor of the many ideological shifts in the political and theological system that has shaped ancient Egyptian religious ideas. According to women in Luxor, the performance of laments has persisted over the centuries, despite perennial criticism by the two orthodox religions, because laments must be performed for the benefit of the commonweal, that is, the living and the dead. The rigorous nature of this performance has apparently not lessened over time since women in Luxor are adamant that the cidid must be sung, despite a growing desire amongst more conservative Muslim leaders that the practice should be abolished. Rigorous adherence to the custom of lamentation in Upper Egypt until the present era, in contrast to Cairo (where the practice is now rare) is due perhaps to its relative isolation from urban centres and incursion of new ideas until the latter part of the twentieth century. Mass immigration of Upper Egyptian labour to Saudi Arabia, Libya and the Gulf in the 1980s, and the recent development of mass communications across Egypt have brought Sa cidi men into contact with more proscriptive interpretations of Islam and Islamic practice. In particular, encounters with the Wahabi interpretations of Islam have altered their own perceptions of cultural traditions and funerary observances. In Saudi Arabia, visitation to the grave is not practised and there is no elaborated notion of funerary ritual. Following the return of these emigrés, the issue of what is and what is not ‘Islamic’ has developed into a vitriolic subject for public debate. By 1987, the divergent paths of doctrinaire Islam and long-standing cultural tradition were becoming clear in Luxor where I soon became aware of the intense social conflicts which had erupted between men and women on the subject of lament performance. Pursuing this issue in an attempt to understand the women’s perspective, when I met with Šargawiyya, a lamenter from Karnak, I asked her whether lamentation was forbidden. She said, ‘Some people say, wahašni ilmayyit (“we miss the dead person”) at the cAid al-Kabir when a visitation to the graves is duly made, but others say, this is forbidden in Islam.’ According to her, the leaping dance known as the manah, performed by women at funerals, was obsolete in Karnak: ‘The last was for Jamal cAbd al-Nasser.’ ‘Why do you sing cidid?’ I then asked. ‘To release sorrow and anger,’ she replied. In the tiny community of Kom Lolah, and in Luxor in the 1980s, women participated very little in the formal discourse of Islam, Qu’ranic recitation or the Hadith. If they were part of a rich family, they might be flown to Mecca on the occasion of the Hajj, or in their dotage become devoted practitioners. Otherwise, in terms of daily life and traditional sensibilities, Islam and lament were mutually exclusive. On several instances, I asked women to lament; if they had prayed that day, they would refuse. As Tariyya told me, ‘When we pray, we will not lament.’ Women would pray in the seclusion of their own homes. The small mudbrick mosque in Kom Lolah was a male preserve. The zawiya or retreat

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in the village was used for the hadra and therefore, was also exclusively for men.4 Women would pray astride their wooden dikkas alone, or as Hamida would do, kneel in closed rooms on unrolled mats three times a day, as was their duty. During the late 1980s, as the photograph below by Legrain shows, women would sit outside the house in which the funeral was taking place while men would observe the appropriate Islamic observance. The traditional separation of the two domains of mourning into men and women’s tents lent itself to a potential compromise between the observance of social commitments in the private sphere and the public demonstration of Islamic practice.

59. Women crying in front of the house of the deceased, Luxor 1914

Lamentation for the dead, as a social and familial obligation, is not easily banned in a rural community. The tradition is deeply rooted in women’s cultural mores and beliefs about family wellbeing, deriving from a mutually beneficial, symbiotic and harmonious relationship of the living to the dead. In the 1980s, women were reticent about the customs they performed, poised in a precarious balance between modernity and the ancient knowledge they possessed. Their daughters, the vanguard of the new generation, would go to school in uniform, a drab khaki or blue voluminous gown, their heads veiled in pristine white, not black like their mothers. In the 1980s these muhajabat (those wearing hijab) were not regarded as in any way morally or intellectually superior within the community because they were endowed with literacy, but the cultural gulf between them and their traditional mothers had already started to expand. By 2007, even small girls were attending the Qu’ranic school known as the madrasa after regular classes, and learning to recite the Qu’ran by heart. How and why ancient traditions such as lamentation should retain a grip on the conceptual frameworks of Egyptian society has been variously

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articulated by Egyptian scholars. A prominent Egyptian woman activist and historian, Nicmat Ahmad Fu’ad, suggested that ever since the Dynastic period in Egypt when only those who could afford to be properly embalmed were believed to have eternal life, poorer women have buried their dead in permeable and unpretentious clay coffins, knowing that their loved ones would not survive for eternity. Since that period, she has speculated that women’s expressions of sorrow for the dead have proliferated, and that laments have been sung with even greater fervour than before since now there is no longer a vestige of hope in the prospect of life after death. Although this view would seem to be contradicted, in part, by allusions to resurrection in the contemporary lament repertoires, it is counterbalanced by the evident ambivalence and pathos of the laments.

Conclusion From my analysis of the laments, I conclude that funeral mores in Upper Egypt are based on a belief system which perceives the relationship between the dead and the living to be intrinsic to the survival of the family unit. The conceptual underpinnings of the cosmology of life after death are seldom verbalised, especially in interactions with foreigners who are presumed to adhere to a less fervent and more ‘rational’ belief system than the Egyptian.5 Nevertheless, these ideas are enmeshed in inclusive cultural practices such as mourning the dead, mutually observed celebrations of mulid festivals, visitations to the dead on the major festivals of the Coptic and Islamic year, and other funerary customs and behaviours enunciated in the laments which form the basis of this synthetic analysis. The lack of palpable distinctions in the spirit of lament between Coptic and Muslim lamenters’ repertoires points to an inclusive and vital oral tradition of lamentation in Upper Egypt that exists in conjunction with both orthodoxies yet is spurned by both. Lamentation is at the core of social, cultural and religious customs performed for the dead in Upper Egypt. In the laments, the ritual and conventionalised nature of the texts becomes apparent when it is clear that each deceased soul is conceived of as an idealised persona, not an individual. Although the only persona mourned in the ancient Pyramid Texts was the king, in later non-royal funerals, the dead person, male or female, was also deemed to be an incarnation of Osiris. Ordinary folk in ancient Egypt adopted this strategy as a way of idealising all souls (the male, in particular) and propelling them into a state of resurrection in death. The organisation of contemporary laments into generic categories for the purposes of idealising and mourning the deceased can be seen as a strategic extension and amplification of the ancient concept into gendered and kinship identities (otherwise missing from the original) perhaps in the aim of composing more appropriate and therefore, more effective laments to accompany the soul to the grave. In the prevailing climate of Islamic revivalism and movement for social change, propelled by politically motivated and ultra-orthodox religious

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movements in Egypt, there is a new dynamic set in motion to weed out practices seen as archaic and non-Islamic. Funerary lamentation is increasingly disparaged. As the physical environment of Upper Egypt changes, as communications improve and as women develop greater access to literacy in village communities, attitudes to lament as an oral performance tradition will inevitably be influenced. As part of this process, the cosmology and belief system will also undergo transformation and the performance of lament will be subjected to even more vehement critique. Women, nevertheless, perceive that it is their social duty is to sustain the life and wellbeing of their society. It is their deeply ingrained cultural belief in the efficacy of laments for the living and the dead that has propelled the tradition forward. As Hamida told me, ‘There will always be lamentation.’ What remains of the ancient liturgies and spells now are the laments, distillations over time of ancient fragments of Egyptian thought, communicated, as before, through the potency of oral tradition. In the ancient funerary spells, ‘Words to be recited’ were specific words of power. Like the ancient spells, the laments are still treated as sacred, empowered words which afford communication with the dead. The lamenter has a profound duty: to sing these words when a person dies and in so doing assure the wellbeing of that soul in the afterlife for posterity. Whereas the Egyptian poet, Salah Jahin, asserted before his death that the cidid are like still life images, designed to reanimate the memory of the deceased, I suggest that the symbols in the cidid function as elements in a semiotic system, derived from a complex cosmology of the afterlife. According to this belief system, the deceased retains the potentiality for rejuvenation in the tomb. The living soul/person is both an inert body and an itinerant, sentient soul, who needs nourishment in perpetua and rises to communicate with the living after death. Variants and permutations of the ancient cosmological conception of the afterlife proliferate in the concordance, evidence of the expansiveness of the lamenter’s imagination and the potential for variation. Nevertheless, the images remain enclosed within the semiotic boundaries established by the cosmology. Through the couplet form and context of lamentation, images of resurrection become transmuted into motifs of tragedy. Despite their psychological function to induce tears, the laments retain their primary ritual purpose. The perceptions of the afterlife evident in the lament texts reveal strong influence from the most elemental and ancient of cosmological precepts, those described in the funerary texts and liturgies of the Old Kingdom, the Pyramid Texts. Many of these primary texts, beliefs and symbols were adopted by commoners and purveyed through the mechanism of the Coffin Texts. Some were retained as late as the Graeco‑Roman period, moreover. Their longevity bears witness to their power. In the mythopoeic universe of the laments, the most fundamental philosophical concepts of death and the afterlife, known from the earliest funerary texts and pre-

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Dynastic artefacts, are complementarily present. The oral tradition has been the vehicle for the purveyance of these ideas, in the same way that the antiphonal performance tradition and its array of gestures have been retained from mythological roots of performance first documented in the pre-Dynastic period and Old Kingdom.. Prior to constructing a concordance of themes, my attempts to interpret random motifs without a synthesising principle failed to reveal evidence of the conceptual schema of the whole. Allusions in the laments to ideas such as the potentiality of the deceased to attain salvation in inundated earth, and the traversing of waters, both in heaven and under the earth – concepts which appear to derive from the earliest Pyramid Text cosmology of the afterlife – might have been regarded as purely metaphorical rather than mythopoeic or indicative of a cosmology. Through the heuristic of the concordances and parallel investigation of ancient and modern sources, it became possible to synthesise the motifs and interpret the cosmology of the laments as a multi‑faceted yet coherent matrix of beliefs influenced to a large part by ancient conceptions. Some transformations and re‑interpretations of ancient motifs are clearly visible in the modern texts, but these may be seen as changing responses to perceptions of propriety and honour in Luxor society, still plausible within the larger expanse of the cosmology and repertoire, but not contradictory. Their mode of performance and women’s adherence to tradition hold the key to the laments’ longevity. The laments operate on the symbolic plane as a recondite and private discourse of the living with the dead. Direct verbal evidence is lacking but from the semantic cohesion of variants and the integrated nature of the repertoires, it is clear that women in Upper Egypt share a consensus on the meaning of lament and the nature of its symbolic universe. Through the evocative chaining of laments and dynamics of oral performance, the monologic text of lament becomes dialogic: the lamenters address each other as they address the deceased and implicitly, loved ones not named, so engendering a process of composition and re-invocation in which images known from previous funerals become imbued with pathos and new meaning, and the cidid acquire significance for those who mourn.

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APPENDIX A

Appendix A Comparative Index of Lament Themes

The table below shows the reference number of the 43 themes that I identified in the contemporary laments, together with the subject of the theme. Column A shows 26 of these themes that also occurred in the ancient laments; and Column B, 27 of these themes that I include when examining cosmologies in transition, using as ancient sources not only the laments, but also the Pyramid Texts and others.

No.

Theme

A

B

I

Death as a destructive force

*

*

II

Omens of death

III

The agent of death

IV

The purification of the deceased

V

The washing

VI

The turban

VII

Wrappings

*

VIII

The shroud

*

IX

Description of the state of death

*

X

The deceased in the grave

*

XI

The deceased after death

XII

The deceased in nature

XIII

The passage to the afterlife and the winding path

XIV

Stairs/ladder

XV

Directionality

*

*

XVI

The deceased crosses waters

*

*

XVII

Abandonment

*

XVIII

The deceased is asked to return

*

XIX

The deceased returns/will return

*

* *

*

*

* *

* *

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XX

The deceased as a bird

XXI

Resurrection

*

* *

XXII

Funerary customs

*

*

XXIII

Dialogue

XXIV

The tomb

*

*

XXV

The healing of the deceased

*

XXVI

Wedding in death

*

XXVII

The protection of the dead

XXVIII

The hair

*

XXIX

The deceased wears ritually coloured garments

*

XXX

The deceased wears elegant clothes

*

XXXI

Accoutrements of the deceased

*

XXXII

Tears

*

XXXIII

The stature of the deceased

*

XXXIV

Laments for the reassurance of the deceased

*

XXXV

Sacrifice

*

XXXVI

Offerings and accoutrements

*

*

XXXVII

The nourishment of the deceased

*

*

XXXVIII

The protection of the living by the deceased

*

*

XXXIX

Communication between the living and the dead

*

*

XL

Laments against fate

XLI

Laments for the self/complaint

XLII

Shame

XLIII

Grief and suffering

*

*

*

* * *

APPENDIX B

245

Appendix B Detailed Concordance of Ancient Lament Themes

The numbers appended to each fragment are the numbers devised by Lüddeckens in his ordering and chronological listing of the lament fragments (1943). The tomb source and place of origin of the lament is attached in parentheses. I Death as a Destructive Force The house was destroyed in a single blink of the eye (Late Period, Thebes #84) IV The Purification of the Deceased Incense and water and all good things for the ka of the deceased (Seti I, XIXth Dynasty, Saqqara #62) IX Description of the State of Death The mother, the protector of the daughter, is sleeping (New Kingdom, Neferhotep, Thebes #51) The eyes, ears and body of the deceased are said to function (El Kab) X The Deceased in the Grave The deceased is on a mound/mountain (Old Kingdom, VIth Dynasty, Mereruka, Saqqara #7); The mountain of the West is open The deceased went into ground and ‘…the flame is with [him]’ (Middle Kingdom, El Kab #13) XIII The Passage to the Afterlife The lamenter wishes to go with deceased (Old Kingdom, Giza #1). Invocations to deceased to be ‘safe and sound’ (Old Kingdom, Vth Dynasty, Saqqara #8; Tutmosis III, Thebes #19) and to travel ‘in peace’ (Tutmosis III, Thebes #19) Lamenter urges that they escort the coffin through the people (Old Kingdom, Deir al-Gebrawi #11) Daughter asks ‘To whom shall I go, my father?’ (New Kingdom, El Kab, #16) Cows are urged to pull harder and harder (New Kingdom, Thebes #31) Lamenter goes in front of the bier; her daughter praises her father (New Kingdom, Thebes #32)

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XV Directionality Lamenters urge that the deceased go to the West: ‘the land of the justified’ (Middle Kingdom, Thebes #12) XVI The Deceased Crosses Waters Lamenters on the boat to the West say they ‘reach the waters, the rope is ripped off and they are driven off from their destination’ (New Kingdom, Neferhotep, Thebes #45, 49) ‘Sailors’ who row the boat to the West are urged to slow down (ibid) XVII Abandonment The shepherd has abandoned his servant (New Kingdom, Neferhotep, Thebes #50; XIXth–XXth Dynasty, Deir al-Medinah #79) The deceased is urged not to abandon the bereaved (New Kingdom, Thebes #55) XVIII The Deceased is Asked to Return Sons/women of the deceased urge the ‘father’ to come back (New Kingdom, Thebes, Gurna #40, 42) XIX The Deceased Returns/Will Return The deceased is seen (Tutmosis III, Thebes #19) and will see the lamenters (New Kingdom, Thebes, Gurna #43) XXI Resurrection The deceased goes alive, not dead (Middle Kingdom, Thebes #12) The lamenters hope for a sweet breeze amongst the praiseworthy in the land of the living (New Kingdom, Thebes #30b&c) The deceased drinks in the land of the dead (Late Period, Thebes #83) XXII Funerary Customs (Invocation to Lament) The lamenters urge others to lament (New Kingdom, Neferhotep, Thebes #49, 56) The lamenters are barefoot with staves (New Kingdom, Thebes, #59) The lamenters state that they are mourning (Ramses II, Saqqara #74; New Kingdom, Thebes #59b) XIV The Tomb The deceased lives in the earth (VIth Dynasty, Mereruka, Saqqara #7) The deceased is on a mound/mountain (VIth Dynasty, Mereruka, Saqqara #7); ‘the mountain of the West is open’ The deceased went into ground and … the flame is with [him] (New Kingdom, Thebes #13) The ‘tears of the field’ (i.e. the inundation?) flow over the deceased (New Kingdom, El Kab #17) The deceased go to the house of eternity (Tutmosis III, Thebes #19) The deceased is ‘hurried to the place of many granaries’ (Ramses II, Thebes #64) There is no water in the land of eternity (Ramses II, Thebes #64) and it is a land of shadow (Ramses II, Thebes #65) The land of the dead is a barren place (Late Period, Thebes #83)

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247

The deceased is pulled on his way by calves that bring him to the place of stones where the dead are (XIXth Dynasty, Saqqara #73) XXV The Healing of the Deceased Lamenter urges the jackal-headed god, Anubis, to effect the transformation of the deceased (VIth Dynasty, Mereruka, Saqqara #7) XXVII The Protection of the Dead Lamenter utters spells against evil spirits (New Kingdom, Thebes #33) XXXI Accoutrements of the Deceased The deceased is buried with objects (New Kingdom, Thebes #19) The deceased is clothed in ‘the cast off garments of yesterday’ (New Kingdom, Neferhotep, Thebes #49) XXXII Tears The ‘tears of the field’ (i.e. the inundation?) flow over the deceased (New Kingdom, El Kab #17) XXXIII The Stature of the Deceased The lamenter is beloved (Ramses II, Thebes, Gurna #68; XIXth Dynasty? Saqqara #72) XXXIV Laments for the Reassurance of the Deceased The lamenter urges deceased not to let his heart flag (New Kingdom, Thebes #31) XXXV Sacrifice/Nourishment of the Deceased Offerings of cattle and poultry are made to the ka of the deceased (VIth Dynasty, Mereruka, Saqqara #7) XXXVI Offerings For the ka: ‘incense, water and all good things’ (Seti I, Saqqara #62) The oil of libation is purified Offerings of cattle and poultry are made to the ka of the deceased (VIth Dynasty, Mereruka, Saqqara #7) XXXVIII The Protection of the Living by the Deceased The deceased is asked to protect the lamenter (New Kingdom, El Kab #17) XXXIX Communication Between the Living and the Dead A messenger is sent to whom news may be communicated (Ramses II, Saqqara #75) XLI Laments for the Self/Complaint The lamenter asks, ‘Where have I, the lamenter, come?’ (Middle Kingdom, Thebes #18)

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XLIII Grief and Suffering ‘Her heart cries’ (Late Period, Thebes #84) ‘She does not hear thy voice’ (New Kingdom, Neferhotep, Thebes #47) Laments for the Husband/Father The deceased is named as ‘father, beloved father’ (VIth Dynasty, Mereruka, Saqqara #7) The deceased husband is ‘beloved father’ (New Kingdom, Neferhotep, Thebes #46) The deceased is named as ‘the great shepherd’ (New Kingdom, Thebes #55) Laments for the Sister Lamenter addresses the sister and asks, ‘Where is she?’ (Middle Kingdom, Thebes #18) The Performance of Laments (Words to be spoken): A rhythm is given to soldiers (to beat time) through their cries (Thebes #20a) The Kinesics of Lament The lamenter raises her arms in lament (New Kingdom, Neferhotep, Thebes #51) The Function of Laments Laments benefit the deceased i.e., ‘The trickles of song they sing to your ka [lifeforce] promise you well’ (New Kingdom, Thebes #20a) The deceased is urged to hear the laments: ‘May you hear the songs of the _____ and the laments that…’ (New Kingdom, Thebes #20a)

APPENDIX C

249

Appendix C Detailed Concordance of Contemporary Lament Themes and Personae

Key to abbreviations of lamenters’ names in the concordance: A Al Bal B D F N Qom S Tar T US Zen IlcAiy Anon Lux Anon IlHozam AF

Afkar, Karnak, East Bank Aliya, al-cAiyaiyša, East Bank Balabil, al-cAiyaiyša Anonymous lamenter from the village of al-Bayadiyya, East Bank, Luxor Anonymous lamenter from the village of IDDabcaiyya, West Bank, Luxor Fathiyya (Luxor town) Nafisa, al-Howi, Edfu, East Bank Qomiyya, Kom Lolah, al-Bcayarat, West Bank Šargawiyya, Karnak, East Bank Tariyya, Kom Lolah al-Bcayarat, West Bank Tayha et al, Luxor Umm Salih, Luxor Zeinab, Luxor Anonymous from al-cAiyaiyša Anonymous from Luxor town Anonymous from al-Hozam c Amm Fahri (‘Uncle’ Fakhry), male reciter from al-cAiyaiyša c

Lament Themes I Death as a Destructive Force Death is an earthquake (T 1–4, 11–12, 17–18, 21–22) The house is destroyed by the fall and the cloud [gamama] (Qom 119–122) Children have been swallowed in a flood [sel] (N 89–90) Death is the destruction of the house (Tar II 11–12; Bal II 409–412; Tar 93–96; US 99–104; US 185–188; A 155) The house with the clay water jar/oven is rent apart (N 95–98) From death one does not return (US 13–16)

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FOR THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

II Omens of Death and Reactions to Death in Nature by Animate and Inanimate Objects The raven of ill‑intent [inniyya] shrieked and death ensued (B I 183–184) The raven of misfortune [inneb] shrieked and death ensued (D I 143–146) The guest room wailed and groaned at moment of death (Bal II 434–437) The ‘valley’ quaked at the death (B I 103–112) A flock of ‘birds’/‘solitary bird’ shrieked when man ascended (B II 115–118) The angel Gabriel/a solitary raven/owl and kite shrieked after the ‘ascension’ (B I 103–114) Sparrows weep/twitter above the bier in protest (IlcAiy Anon) The house should clasp wings/veils of mistress (S 51–54) Prayer beads should watch over his hands (S 331–337) A gypsy dog rips the clothes of the lamenter (A 45–49) The sun rises over child at dawn and peak of day to warm her (Bal II 424–427); the deceased is warmed in the sun (Al 186–189) III The Agent of Death Death is a ‘hunter’ (Al 210–211) A child is like a gazelle and ‘hunted down’ (Tar 69–72) The deceased is a doe gazelle stalked by a Bishari hunter hidden behind his curved shield/who wears shoes with curled toes/full sirwal (B II 14–44); accompanied by saluki hounds (B II 23–32) The deceased is a gazelle, lit by a burning lantern, pursued by a ‘hunter’ (Zen 97– 102) The gazelle is struck by an arrow from a crossbow and lassoed by a cord/noose (Zen 101–107) The ‘hunter’ feasts on the gazelle (B II 15); the ‘hunter’ hunts down and feasts on the gazelle (D II 1–14) The ‘hunter’ is accompanied by saluki hounds which may ravage the gazelle (B II 23–32); lead gazelle is impetuous (Bal IV 61–64; 127; 136–139) The ‘archer’ [gawwas] spies the gazelle (Bal IV 57–60; 124–127) The ‘archer’ outside will strike girls with his arrow (‘feathers’)/fire (Bal IV 132–135) The ‘archer’ pierces the bared head of the gazelle (B II 39–44) The deceased with head bared and hair unplaited is hit by the ‘archer’ (B II 39–44); who fired an arrow and is rude (US 5–8) The ‘archer of misfortune’/‘servant of iniquity’ has a horse in the lane/courtyard and will not come in (US 85–90) The ‘archer’ is sent to unplait the hair (Zen 172–173) The gentleman [be] unplaits hair of deceased and abandons them (Tar 127–132) The lamenter fears the reaper [holi] of miracles/grapes and calamity as she counts stars (Bal III 391–394) Young man is the envy of the reaper/overseer of the garden [holi/hawwal] (Bal I 11–12) The beloved are snatched from village by claws or dogs [kilab] (Bal II 397–398); kaluba is the agent of death or the warrior, Kulayb (Qom 161–163) The ‘leaper’ [ilhadi] takes the virgin (S 68); the ‘leaper’ takes the deceased (B II 107–114) The agent of death (the bridegroom?) seizes the virtue of the bride, dripping blood on his kaftan (US 45–48)

APPENDIX C

251

‘He’ (the ‘agent of death’) ‘took’ them with a gust of breeze (Bal III 27–30) IV The Purification of the Deceased The bathing of deceased is at the river/the mouth of door, with soap, loofah and incense (N 1–4) The young girl has gone to the bath, doused in perfume/embalming spice/too quickly (Qom 214–221) The deceased is washed in musk and soap (Tar 123–126) A murderer is cleansed by water running from the tap (Bal II 379–380) The deceased is purified with incense and scent (A 58–61); with incense, henna, scented herbs, myrtle (D II 23–34) The woman’s velvet is scented with civet [zabad], liqueur and perfume (Zen 108– 113) Perfume vials are broken open for the deceased (A 149–150) The deceased should take handkerchief daubed with perfume (Qom 176–177; 185– 189) The deceased are hennaed (D II 58–64; Al 164–165; Zen 178–181) V The Washing The deceased is washed in musk and soap (Tar 123–126) The deceased is washed, turned around and the name of God is invoked (S 87–90) The washer should count rings while washing the deceased (S 91–94) The lamenter addresses ‘Hu’ [= the Lord], in fear that the deceased may be summoned by the washer of the dead (D I 155–160) Lamenter does ‘washing’ at the behest of the deceased (Bal II 234–239) The ‘bride’ is washed (Zen 182–183) The neck slumps and is set straight (S 174–177); the body slumps and is rescued (S 239–243) during the washing While bathing in the heat, the ‘soul’ ascended from her (Bal II 306–309; Bal IV 25–28; 37–40) A sparrow/turtledove weeps/complains during the washing (IlcAiy Anon) The washing bier is wooden with nails (S 147–150); the deceased should avoid them (S 234–238) The deceased is too long for the bier (S 151–155) Young girls will wash the bride (Zen 182–183) There is no ‘sea’ beside the girl in which to wash her (Zen 148–149) The washing of the deceased is in a small, open strip [hamad] by the Nile (Al 208– 211) A shallow drum [tar] beats during the washing (Bal IV 101–104) The deceased does not want to be stripped of clothes and ankle bracelets (Bal IV 77–80); earrings (Qom 127–1298) The deceased offers to wash ‘clothes’ herself (Bal IV 81–84) The deceased is shamed in his nakedness (A 74–77) Death strips one bare (A 168–171) VI The Turban A turban is like a noose on the path to death (D I 151–154) The wrapping of the turban is tight like a noose (B I 148–150) The neighbour should see how the turban illuminated the house (Bal I 27–30)

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FOR THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

The white of the men’s turbans gleams from the mountain (Tar 11–14) The deceased wears a white stole/turban (Zen 30–33); the deceased should take a white scarf for a turban (Qom 98–99) The turban is wrapped elegantly in three folds (B I 144–150) The deceased hurled their turbans on the ‘stairs’ when on a sailing craft (B I 151– 154) The turban is ripped off by the wind (Qom 100–102); the whirling dust (Qom 222–227) The turban equals the great man (Qom 228–229) VII Wrappings The woman’s silk veil is trailing (T 23–26; 27–30); Tar 107–110; A 18–21; Zen 84–87) The deceased is wrapped tight in silk (T 31–34) The deceased needs wrapping sheets for protection (Bal II 184–187) The girl, daubed in henna, left without ‘cutting out her sheet’ (Bal II 485–488) The town of Qus is a source of ‘clothing’ (shroud) (Bal II 192–195) The white stole fell off when he ascended (Bal II 90–93; 240–243; Bal III 51–54) One stole is left hanging on the line while the other was worn to the grave (Bal II 505–508) The shawl is fringed (S 218–223) A cloak should be placed under the deceased (Qom 40–44) The mother wears wrappings (Zen 533–538) The lamenter wears skins of animals for the deceased (Bal II 248–251) VIII The Shroud The ‘tailor’ should make the striped vest straight/fit well (D I 124) The gypsy who lives on barren ground makes clothing (D I 125–130) The deceased wears a suit with a beautiful seam (D I 131–132) The deceased’s ‘gown’ has been cut (Bal II 271) The deceased should wear scarves [šišan] (Qom 198–199) The deceased should call out to buy stoles [šišan]) for a shroud (B I 94–95); from an itinerant merchant (D II 99–102) A gypsy ‘tailor’ sews in desert areas (B I 179–182) The deceased wears a pure white Indian scarf, ruined by blood (Qom 200–203) The tailor’s work is rejected (Bal IV 16) The elegant man is measured on his sleeves for his gown [tob] (Zen 302–305) IX Description of the State of Death Death is the destruction of the house (Bal II 409–412; Tar 93–96; T 1–2; 11–12; US 185–188) Death is the ultimate ‘departure’ (Bal 403–404) Death is incarceration in the tomb with locks of iron and brass (Tar 133–136) The day of death is an ‘indigo’ day (D I 13–16); (D II 15–16) Death is like a gust of breeze which snatches away (Bal III 27–30) At death, the whirling dust [il cajaj] came (Bal III 95–96); the turban was snatched by the whirling dust [il cajaj wirrih] (Qom 100–102); the young men are seized by the wafting breeze [nasim irrih] (Bal II 358–361)

APPENDIX C

253

Death snuffs out the fire of life (A 102); the ‘lantern’ of the deceased was lit (D II 11) The deceased says his desire to live is gone (Bal II 94–97) The deceased regrets his life (B I 68–69) The deceased is urged to take change of clothing for ‘transformed’ state (Bal 399– 404) The deceased is urged not to live far away (D I 17–19) The deceased is asleep (S 39–42; 230–233; 258–261; US 71–74; US 149–152); under stairs (Zen 321–324); dissolved (US 150); asleep/drowsing (Zen 49–52) Death is a state of being cold and immobile (S 95–98; US 75–78; Zen 84–87) The deceased is urged not to be drowsy or fall asleep (Zen 263–267) Lamenter wishes deceased were reclining or asleep (Zen 363–364); the deceased ‘drops’ her eyes (Zen 188–193); the deceased is lying on bed, unable to see/an orphan (Bal IV 65–68) The deceased is sleepless late into night but will not awake (Qom 123–126) The deceased is a ‘shadow’ who is outside/inside (Zen 440–443); who watches over us (US 195–198) The deceased is a shadow [hayba] (US 197); a cloud [gema] a luminous cloud [gema itluh] (Bal III 109–112) The deceased is ailing (Tar II 19–20) The deceased is weeping/angry (A 125–128; 133–136) The deceased is delayed (Qom 204–207); delaying (Tar 157) The deceased is setting sail in boat (B I 9–16) The deceased is ‘becoming absent’ (B I 128–129); absent (Tar 157; Zen 273) The deceased man bears a heavy burden (S 34–38) The deceased left/has gone (S 110–113) The deceased ascended running/in distress/discontent (D II 58–64) The deceased woman is divorced without a paper/a lawyer (A 27–30; Zen 293– 296) X The Deceased in the Grave The deceased is on ‘bed’ (of earth) under which cascade pomegranates, lemons and grapes (D II 93–98) The deceased tosses and turns on ‘bed’ (Bal II 297–300; Bal IV 11–14; 17–20; D II 93–98; 117; T 7–10) The deceased is leaning/groaning (Zen 80–83) The deceased is on ‘bed’ with firm side planks of lemon/grape wood (N 79–84) The deceased is on mattress under mulberry/pomegranate trees (D I 133–136) The deceased is a guest in the tomb under the shade of palm (B II 89–92) The deceased descends into fragrant herbs/fenugreek/grass pea/clover (D I 191– 198) Under the tracks of the deceased’s camel sprout lemons, apples (D I 187–190) The deceased ‘mother’ has garnered in grapes and embalming scent (Bal III 131– 132) The deceased is absorbed in grave like water in earth (D II 18) The deceased descends to ‘place of resurrection’ [ilgama] (Tar 15–19) The deceased is in sand (Tar 81–82); deceased lies under sand with cockroaches (Qom 230–233); deceased is in earth (Al 156–159) The deceased is by stream beside the subterranean ‘waterwheels of heaven’ above or below (B II 93–98)

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The deceased is locked in by the custodian of the garden (Bal 80–89) The deceased should hover/circle in cask/shadow [habiya] (D I 101) The deceased ‘bride’ should adjust the pillow, lean back and sleep (B II 65–70) Men, despite their grandeur, are levelled to the ground (Bal 31–37) Men of great riches are lowered down barefoot (Qom 230–233); men go down barefoot (Tar 11–14) XI The Deceased After Death The deceased rocks back and forth (S 196–200) The deceased tosses and turns on ‘bed’ (Bal II 297–300; Bal IV 11–14; 17–20; D II 93–98; 117; T 7–10) The deceased rides over bridge (and is judged?) (D II 19–22) The deceased has ascended by the stairs (Zen 356–360) The deceased should (mount) the stairs and winnow grain (D II 103–106) The deceased is in the threshing fields winnowing (D II 111–116) The deceased is tied in bindings (Zen 313–316) The deceased has gone to the lights (Bal IV 14) The deceased is in a faraway land (Zen 483–490) The deceased is in a hamlet somewhere (S 270–274) Death is like entering a valley (B I 103–112) The deceased is at her uncle’s (A 70–73) The deceased young men are photographed and fight with sticks/poles (Bal IV 5–10) The deceased is a spirit ‘who follows after’, who ‘shall turn back’ (Qom 150–155) XII The Deceased in Nature The deceased (f.) is an apricot on earthen dam during irrigation or inundation (A 97– 101); a radish of the ‘cultivator’ inundated on the dam [marwiyya; rawiyana]/ soaked [dublana] (F) The blood of the bride is redder than the grape/pomegranate (US 45–48) The deceased (m.) is the leaning bough of a tree to be raised up/seen (A 137–140) A youth carries a stalk of wormwood/pomegranate/henna (D II 69–74); a stalk of wormwood/pomegranate (B II 7–10); a stalk of grapewood/pomegranate (D I 161–164) The deceased (m.) is placed in the shade of mulberry and pomegranate (D I 133– 136) The deceased (m.) is grain(s) of wheat [galla] (A 9–10); a plaited stalk of wheat in granaries (B I 58–61); wheat in ripeness (B I 56–57); a stalk of grain plaited early (Tar 115–18); a stalk of bamboo [‘ud ilgana] neither twisted nor bent (Al 9–12); a curved stalk of bamboo [guwwasa]/staff [šuba/ zana] (Zen 93–96) Young man is succulent stalk of sugarcane, oozing with sap (Bal I 9–12) Young man is pure date from date palms of West/wilderness (Bal I 1 4); young girl is date (Bal IV 69–72) Young men are like dates, neither ripened nor darkened (Bal IV 1–2) Breath-giving dates are poured on mound for mother (US 251–254); dates are fed to orphans (US 282–285); uncle’s pockets are full of dates/lemons (Zen 279– 283) The deceased is a palm frond (S 140–141); in clover/safflower (T 5–6; US 95–98); in fenugreek/clover/safflower (Zen 79–83); set upright (S 144–146); frond stripped naked from palm (US 221–228; Zen 435)

APPENDIX C

255

Lamenter plants palms to give breath to child (US 255–258) Death of youth is like ‘uprooting’ of grass/milohiyya/lemon grass (Zen 420–425); child is like heart of fruit (US 356–359) The deceased is absorbed in earth like wild thyme (Tar 35–38); on the tomb is lemon grass (S 313) The deceased mother has garnered grapes and embalming scent (Bal III 131–132) The mother is a fruit-giving tree which blossoms with grapes and pomegranates, burgeons with lemons (Bal III 87–94) The father is a frail spindly tree [sesaban] (S 201–208) Where the beloved’s camel walks, lemons/apples sprout (US 366–369) XIII Passage to the Afterlife/The Winding Path Men are urged to go in peace/safety and be seen by the eye (Bal I 23–26; D II 119–123) The deceased passes and hurls a javelin against heaven (B I 151–156) The lamenter asks, ‘Where is the path to the deceased?’ (Tar 3–6); The lamenter should pursue the deceased and bring him back (S 135–139) The deceased is in procession (B I 74–75); deceased should walk down lane (Tar 170–173); deceased passes down narrow lane (S 24–27) in the heat of noon (Bal III 301–308); deceased walks on path alone (Tar 21–22) The deceased process through the streets (Bal II 98–101) The deceased should process down lane and make others envious (Tar 170–173) The path to tombs became dark (Zen 217–220); the path is winding/tortuous/ marbled/white–washed (US 155–162); from which no one returns (IlcAiy Anon) The deceased moves Eastward and the lamenter walks behind with sword (Bal II 395–396) The bride and groom pass over the bridge of judgment (D II 19–22) The deceased (gazelle) is led down by the lead gazelle to the seas of the Nile (B II 19–25) The deceased is led down to the ‘seas’ by captain (Al 129–132) The deceased is led down on an indigo-black day (D I 13–16; B II 27; D II 15–16) The deceased is led down by the ‘Knowing One’ [habir] of the Oasis/Aswan/Esna/ Akhmim (D I 191–198; S 59–62) Men embark from ferry in white stoles with swords (Zen 386–391) The deceased’s guide is ‘lost’ within the granaries [jurun] (D II 103–106) Young girls with long hair sail on barques through the tombs (US 314–317) with red/silk sails and hair like manes (Zen 150–155) The bier is carried to grave (Al 63–66) The deceased is on his carriage, bearing a flywhisk (Zen 45–48) Lamenter expects the canopied litter [mahmal] to take her with him (Bal III 19–21) The deceased passes with a palm frond (Bal III 301–303) The deceased goes with a companion (Tar 154–155) The deceased is taken by camel (S 70); with hair unplaited (Bal IV 120–123) The bride and groom should circuit the town in a wedding procession (Zen 73–76) The deceased are swept up by the wafting breeze (Bal 358–361) XIV Stairs/Ladder The deceased carries ladder [daraja] to narrow space [iddayyig]/barge [butti] to left (S 312–318); where lamenter would defend deceased with two weapons (S 319);

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of iron (S 321–325) The neighbour (f.) is on a high perch/ladder [sallum]/boat (A 50–53; US 328–331); a ladder [sillim] sailing craft [sallum] (B I 153–154) The deceased should climb stairs [sillim] and winnow grain from granaries (D II 103–106) The deceased is by the stairs (Zen 356–358) The deceased is ‘asleep’ on stairs and has/has not righted or risen up (N 91–94; S 39–42; Bal IV 97–100); children are asleep under stairs (Zen 321–324) The tree of the deceased mother is by the stairs (Bal III 91–93) XV Directionality The ‘bride’ comes from above/from the East, her neck damp with sweat (N 11–14) The white stole slips off and the deceased rises to the East (Bal II 90–93; 240–243; Bal III 51–53) Lamenter follows deceased to East (Bal II 94–97) The ‘hamlet’ (of the dead) has moved Eastwards and lamenter goes behind with drawn sword (Bal III 395–396); the lamenter queries ‘where is the hamlet, to the East or West?’ (S 278; Zen 217–220) The deceased left bearing East (Zen 293–296); query: ‘where is the deceased, above or below?’ (Zen 350) The deceased is Eastward and Westward bound (A 27–30); deceased goes East (S 135–139); deceased goes West (S 466); ship goes West (B I 13–15) Sky window in tomb faces West (S 178–183) Bride goes North wearing jewellery (US 99–104) Mother is in garden facing South (N 55–56) XVI The Deceased Crosses Waters The deceased embarked on raft [giyasa]/ferry [rifas]/boat [dahabiyya] and abandoned lamenter (D I 41–44; 65–70) The deceased is on a high perch/ladder/ boat [sallum] (US 328–331); a ladder [sillim], sailing craft [sallum] (B II 151–154; A 50–53) The deceased sails to the depths of the sea (D I 61–64) Mother and father embark in boats to the ‘depths’ of sea (B I 96–102) Mother and father embark from mound on sailing boats (Tar 89–92) Lamenter urges skipper to let them off (S 56–58; 118–121; B I 17–25); to take her with them (B I 9–16) The deceased unfurls sails/umbrellas (turbans)/red and white umbrellas (D I 71–76); white umbrellas/sheets (B I 20–25) The deceased unfurls sheets/hair (B I 97–100); unfurls wings/veils (S 57–8; 118– 121) The deceased wear stoles and carry swords at the ferry (Zen 387–392) The deceased sets sail in boats with hot/East wind (B I 9–15) The deceased men should be invited to the ‘wedding’ (B I 9–25) The deceased is at the quay (Bal III 63) for ferry (S 55–58) The deceased is borne to the quay (Zen 342–346) The lamenter (as deceased) wishes to be ‘ferried’ over (Al 106–116) The boats set sail for an unknown port (S 114–117) The ship of men is coming with sails unfurled (Lux Anon) The craft went adrift and women are left abandoned (S 281–285) The lead gazelle should lead the deceased to the waters of Nile (B II 6–9)

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The deceased is urged to cross the ‘seas’ swimming (Zen 264–267; N 85–88); in the sea of inundation [damira] (Zen 378–380) Young girls cross over in boats with silken/crimson/double sails to tombs (Zen 150– 155; US 314–317) XVII Abandonment The lamenter pleads not to be abandoned by the deceased on boats (D I 33–40) The lamenter pleads not to be abandoned to other men (Al 47–50) The lamenter is abandoned to her brother (Al 39–42) to a girl (Al 91–94) to her mother’s brother (Al 95–98) The deceased is abandoned/the lamenter is abandoned (B II 11–13); women are abandoned on shore by men who left in a dahabiyya (Lux Anon) The lamenter is abandoned by her mother and father and urges them to persuade the captain of ship to take her along (Tar 83–86); daughters are abandoned (Al 198–199) The deceased is an orphan who leaves behind orphans (US 207–216); orphans are abandoned (Zen 332–341) The deceased leaves behind girls (Al 149–150; Bal IV 13–16) The orphans receive dried dates (Tar 174–177); dates and lemons (Zen 279–283) The deceased’s mother abandoned her house (S 49) The deceased left before finishing what was needed (S 357–359) XVIII The Deceased is Asked to Return The deceased is asked to return (A 1–4; Bal III 73–80; D II 119–123); to sit with lamenter again (A 42–45; Tar 156–157) and not to wander lost (Bal II 13–18; 62–65) The lamenter asks mother to return as ‘shadow’ [dull] (Bal III 75); inside/in sanctuary (Bal III 73–80); to quarters/mastabas (Bal IV 116–119) and not to be afraid to see her loved ones The lamenter urges deceased to return if ill-treated (Tar 55–60) The lamenter asks deceased to come if he is suffering (Tar 55–60); and complain to her (Tar 65–66) The lamenter hears cry and asks deceased to return (Bal II 13–16; 62–65) The lamenter remains at ‘mouth’ of door to prevent crossing by ‘stranger’ who knocks on door to be re-admitted (Bal III 362–367) The lamenter invokes high star/white stars/red stars as witness to pray for his ‘return’ in a dream (Bal II 387–390; Bal III 220–225) The deceased is asked to re-appear to see how he will be repaid (B I 126–131) The deceased is urged to stop delaying and come back (Tar 20–21) The lamenter says if she were to ask the deceased to return, he would come (D I 85–92) XIX The Deceased Returns/Will Return The lamenter pledges to smooth the path of thorns with her hands/veil for the return (Tar 158–163) The deceased should return and blow away the piled earth (D I 20–24); the deceased will return (D I 81–90) The deceased will return and lamenter will make coffee and bring syrups/fenugreek (Zen 381–386)

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The deceased will not return by the stairs (Zen 356–360) The lamenter will meet the deceased on return (S 28–33; 34–38) The lamenter will see the deceased on return (Zen 44–447) The deceased will return as a ‘wanderer’ who peers between thorns in the wall (S 291– 295); the deceased should come to open space on roof (S 296–298) The lamenter sees vision of deceased returning with his staff (D I 147–150); lamenter has vision of absent ones (Al 119–120) The lamenter sees the deceased returning in white turbans (Tar 11–14); deceased return in turbans and form circle (S 296–298) The deceased returns and ‘stands’ by door (Bal IV 128–131) The deceased returns and hurls javelin to heights/roof/against pillar (B I 155–162) The mother returns and the lamenter addresses her shadow (Bal II 273–277) The deceased returns as luminous cloud [gema itluh] (Bal III 109–112) The shadow [hiyal] of the deceased is inside/outside the house (Zen 440–453) The deceased goes to open space when stars are rising (S 296–302); moon is high (S 306–311) The deceased returns as ‘son of the winnower’ on the roof/pillar/high perch (D I 7–12); The deceased is winnowing after climbing stairs (D II 103–106) The deceased is in the tent by his threshing fields (D II 111–115) If the deceased knocks on the door with his staff/quarterstaff/ring, the lamenter will come (Bal I 17–22) If the deceased returned, the lamenter would greet him (S 28–33; S 165–166) If the lamenter met the deceased in a high mountain, she would ask him to come (S 34–38) If the deceased returned, they should come in and be honoured (S 1–7) The deceased were ‘invited’ but did not return (Tar 7–10) The deceased will not return after death (US 13–16) The deceased is asked to cross the ‘sea’ and return swimming (N 85–88; Al 103– 105) The deceased should cross the ‘seas’ swimming (Zen 264) The ‘drowned’ should cross the ‘seas’ swimming (T 98–101) The ‘drowned’ should be rescued by drowsy, sleepy ‘custodian of the sea’ (Zen 236– 239) XX The Deceased as a Bird The deceased (m.) is migratory bird [magrabi] with twig/cigarette [?] in mouth (B I 76–83); who alights to drink from Tunis (B I 80–83) The deceased mother/father is an ‘Iraqi goose’ who alights in the clover/fenugreek/ grass pea (Qom 111–114; Zen 255–260); has abandoned his/her brood (B I 62–67) A turtledove twitters on branch above the bier, berating the washer (IlcAiy Anon) The turtledove remains in the house after the deceased has gone (IlcAiy Anon) A deceased woman is a migratory bird [mugrabiyya] who alights on the grass pea (Bal IV 53–56) The heirless man is not like the roving dove that flies off and returns to his dovecote (i.e., like other ‘souls’) (Bal IV 405–408; T 164–170) XXI Resurrection The deceased is leaning bough/fortress to be righted (A 137–140; Al 53–56; 125–

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128; Tar 87–88) The deceased is placed in a basket from the threshing field/granary (Lux Anon) The deceased is asked to ‘stand up’ for the destinies of the survivors (Al 45–50); deceased is urged to stand up and return with the lamenters (US 193–196) The mother is urged to ‘stand up’ inside (Tar 51–54) The deceased is urged to rise up (D I 17–24; Bal II 266–269) The deceased is urged to rise up from couches/shadow (Bal II 266–269; Bal IV 89– 92) The deceased is urged after death to stand up and promenade in houses in various dresses (Bal II 489–496; Bal IV 41–46) The deceased father rolls up reed mat and stands (US 273–277) The deceased is ‘standing’ with hair unplaited (N 5) The ‘pillar of marble’ (the father) is raised up in ‘another town’ after being razed (Bal II 469–472; Qom 20–24; 27–29) The scarf of the deceased has fallen as he has risen (Bal II 90–93) The deceased goes to place of ‘ascension’ [gama] in his sirwal (Tar 15–19) The bed of the deceased is made of lemon/pomegranate/grape wood (N 77–84) Cascading pomegranates/lemon/grapes roll under bed of the ‘ailing one’ (D II 93– 98) The cushion of the deceased is turned from left to right (A 66–69; B II 65–70; Zen 156–161) The deceased should be on the roof when the stars are rising (as if to rise with them) (S 296–303) XXII Funerary Customs Gypsy dog rips open lamenter’s clothes (A 45–49) The sight of the deceased naked made lamenters tear their gowns (Zen 162–165) The lamenter declares she has ripped her clothes for the men (D I 93–94); son rips sleeves/dark blue cloth for mother (Zen 467–472) On hearing the cry, the robe of the lamenter was torn (B I 29–32) The cry went up and mourners/riders came bearing staves (Bal I 38–47) Lamenter finds ripped velvet and fringe (B I 167–170) Mourners/lamenter should wear rope girdles (D I 107–110; 119–120) Lamenter wishes child would stand beside the deceased wrapped in rope (T 156– 159) Mourners urged to wrap themselves in ropes for the ‘lion’ (D I 119–120) Camels pull the bier and ropes are plaited (Tar 117–122) The hair of the deceased is unplaited ‘like the shawl’s fringe dangling’ (N 5–6) Women unplait their hair for the men who abandoned them (Tar 127–132); lamenters will wear skins of camels/donkeys, not spangles to honour the men (Bal II 248–251) Spangles are not bought during mourning (Bal II 252–257); lamenter should strip off gold bracelets/glass bangles for ‘lion’ (US 199–202) The lamenter will sleep on reed mat in shade of house (N 61–62); on quay (Zen 341– 348) like deceased; lamenter brings water to tombs (US 115–118); lamenter fills earthenware jar with water (Bal II 234–238) A funeral requires an earthenware jar and rush matting (A 194–197) The deceased descends to praise but do (wailing) women follow behind? (Al 83–85); lamenter queries whether women follow deceased in procession (Tar 17–19) The death crier announces death (US 137–140)

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The lamenter urge a call to the death crier in towns of the gypsies/North (B I 171– 174) Death cry causes lamenter to halt with her pots and hear his voice (Bal II 230–233); death cry goes up (Bal I 38–47) Cries of weeping are heard day and night in the West/in the souk (Bal III 33–46) Death crier should come from faraway places on fringe of desert where gypsies live (B I 171–174); announces death (US 137–140) Death crier should utter names of the unknown buried there (B I 172–175); wandering in the valley (B II 103–106) Leaper (‘angel of death’) accompanies soul of deceased (B II 107–114) Men wear indigo–dyed turbans and a shallow drum [tar] beats during the washing (Bal IV 101–104) The ‘bride’ is placed in metal washtub (N 15–18) In funeral of a stranger, no drum is beaten nor hair unplaited (B I 175–178) The deceased urges mourners to weep (Bal II 98–105) Lamenter pledges to bring another to sing laments for him (Bal 106–109); lamenter describes weeping for deceased (Qom 103–106) Lamenter suggests camel driver be ‘hired’ to sing laments instead of her (Tar 119– 122) Laments are sung for deceased from personal need and for woman entering funeral (Tar 164–169) Laments should be sung for deceased (Bal II 102–109) Laments are sung for deceased and for destinies of lamenters (Al 1–4) Deceased is urged to let her bracelets be seen from underneath the velvet (Tar 103– 106) Lamenter plants wild thyme in mourning and for the return (S 286–290); lamenters uproot grass/milohiyya for the youth (Zen 144–147) Henna/myrtle is apportioned at tombs to young men (Zen 144–147) Mourners bear staves [šiwab] and battle staves [ihrab] in funerary procession (Bal III 33–46); lamenter bears sword (Bal II 395–396) Perfume vials are smashed at funeral (A 149–153) The lamenter will intone secret/hidden and known words for deceased (N 45–48) Tents are erected for deceased (N 95–98; Tar 22–23) Men clasp hands and intone for deceased (S 218–223; 321–325) Men put on turbans and form a circle (S 296–298) XXIII Dialogue The lamenter asks to whom deceased has entrusted his daughters (Al 198–199); child asks whom he should call Papa (Zen 328–331) The grave speaks to the deceased about the incongruity of her silk in the earth (B II 83–88) A mourner speaks to deceased while bier is moving (Bal II 124–125) Worms engage in dialogue about deceased (Tar 97–102; D II 79–83) The lamenter engages in discourse with death (S 106–109); lamenter asks deceased about cost of fringed shawl (S 218–222; Qom 86–90); deceased asks why she is dressed in a robe (Bal IV 106–109); deceased ‘bride’ asks mašta to get her clothes (Zen 174–177) The lamenter (as deceased) asks water-carrier to quench her thirst (D I 115–118); lamenter asks deceased to stay in the crook of the door and they will send nourishment/clothes/a letter (US 189–192)

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The lamenter asks mother what she did at the time of ascent of the soul (Zen 118– 121); lamenter speaks to mother on deathbed (Zen 118–128) The lamenter asks deceased why he has not wrapped his turban (Qom 222–227) The lamenter tells deceased woman her veil has slipped (US 75–78; S 95–98; 250– 253) The lamenter asks deceased to send messenger to the living (Qom 208–213) The lamenter asks hunter about his gazelle trophy (Zen 97–102) The lamenter addresses guest room [mandara] (S 19–23) The deceased asks lamenter to be with her and right her neck (Bal IV 73–76; Qom 194–197) XXIV The Tomb The deceased lives in a ‘house’ [bet] (D I 159–162; US 149–154); with a courtyard (Qom 25–29); fosgiyya (Tar II) The tomb is a ‘house’ which has vanished from memory/consciousness (Zen 213– 216); where is the tomb? (Zen 73–76) The lamenter is banned from the ‘house’ (Zen 506–513) The tomb is a ‘house’ (US 149–155) with date palms (N 59–62) The tomb is shaded by palm (B II 89–92) The tomb has a doum palm/palm tree/ringed with thorns, stalks, palm fronds, safflower/guarded by slave/ringed with bracken, with a courtyard (Zen 539– 546) The tomb is a circle of stones [dora] (Bal II 438–443); a circular place [dayir/ duwar] (US 115–117); duwar (Zen 454); dayir/duwar (Qom 34–39) There is a mansion [dar]/raised dais [dast] built encircling the grave (D I 165–168) The tomb is raised up by the archangel of heaven (S 326–328) There is a circular dais [dast abu halaga] with nail/cover [abu mismar/gitayya] over the tomb (D I 173–176) The tomb is roofed with matting [sagifa] (D II 35–41) The tomb is made of Egyptian/Delta/Cairean bricks (S 184–189); with clay (S 190); a small upper room is in front [ruga] (S 192) The tomb is narrow (S 312) and has stairs; a stairs/ladder is on the barge (S 315); the stairs/ladder is to the left (S 317) The bride lives in a clay jar [jurra] (B II 74; Tar II 1–4) The tomb is a place of solitude/sanctuary [hilwa] (Zen 456–459); sanctuary of pillars [hema] (Tar 38–41; Bal II 501–504) The deceased is urged to bring white scarves and build a sanctuary of pillars as tomb (Tar 38–41) The tomb is wide with a round courtyard (Qom 25–29); the gravedigger should widen it (Qom 34–39) The grave is watery (A 85–88) The tomb is a ‘well’ [bir] (A 87; S 122–123) The tomb is a ‘well’ with grass (A 160–163) The tomb is the wet soil to wash [migasil] the bride and groom (A 164–167) The tomb is a ‘sea’ [bahr] (Bal III 57) where fish nibble at the stole (Bal III 55–58) in which the deceased is ‘inundated’ (drowned?) (Bal III 59–60) Tombs are houses [biyut]/sanctuaries [hiyam] built in the ‘seas’ (Al 129–132); The deceased (m.) is ‘planted’ in the ‘seas’ (S 201–204); in a garden (S 205); at the summit (S 207) The deceased is on an island and he must cross the ‘seas’ swimming (Zen 261–267)

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At death, the Pleiades/the earth [ittariyya]/the stars ‘weep’ (A 104–109) Tears flow to the ‘seas’ along which the deceased passes in a bier (Al 137–140) The young girls sail on barques [marakib] to the tombs with crimson/silk/double sails (i.e., the tombs have waterways) (Zen 150–155) There are waterwheels in heaven (B II 93 98) The fire of life is snuffed out by the waters of eternal life (the well of Zimzim)/the waterwheels of heaven (A 102–103) The waterwheel in heaven is propelled by calves for the deceased (N 39–42) The lamenter soaked her sirwal in the watery grave (Bal II 76–79) The men’s trousers are soaked in the rising inundation (S 15–18) The deceased is ‘drowned’ in an inundated plot (A 110–113) The deceased is (‘my’) ‘embankment’ [jisrina] which is not razed in the rising water (S 15–18); the high river bank [jisr ‘ali] is not razed in the rising water (US 259–262); the lamenter treads on the high river bank and measures its height (US 259–262) The foam of the inundation should immerse the deceased (S 343–348) The deceased is ‘washed’ in the fallow land between Nile and fields (Al 208–209) The ‘drowned’ are inundated; they descend to a ‘well’ [bir] (Bal III 139–142) The deceased’s source of the Nile is at Shellal, the first cataract (Bal III 143–144) The deceased is asleep on a ‘bed’ under stairs (S 39–42) The deceased is placed on a bed of earth under which cascade pomegranates/lemons/ grapes (D II 93–98) The tomb is a garden where there is an archangel (S 329–330); where there are pomegranates, lemons, apples and grapes (Bal II 80–89; Bal III 11–18) The tomb is a garden with a water source (S 326–328); the lamenter is a source of water (Bal III 305–308) The deceased discards handkerchiefs for fruit in garden (S 209–217) The tomb of the mother is a house where grapes are hurled/gathered (US 135–136) The tomb is a ‘place of resurrection’ [gama] (Al 83–86) The tomb is a ‘bath’ [hammam] doused with perfume and the ‘sky window’ is cracked (Qom 214–221) The tomb has a sky window and earth trickles in/the tomb faces West (US 119–122); to see the ‘guest’ and the light (S 178–183) The tomb has a window; there is sand and a cockroach (S 167–170) in a mound of earth (S 169–173) The tomb is visited (by deceased?) (B II 59–62) The tomb is clover (S 59); sweet pea (S 61); clover/safflower (US 95–98) In tombs, the deceased’s companions divide up the myrtle/henna (Zen 144–147) The tomb is a mound [kom] (S 71–76; Zen 452); breath-giving dates are poured on the mound (for woman who died in childbirth) (US 251–254) The deceased is a protruding mound of sand [tagit irrimal/tagit mit cali], source of pleasure (D I 169–172) The grave is topped by a house or raised dais [dast] (D I 165–168); the tomb is high (S 326) The deceased is buried under stone/sand/a mound of white pebbles [hasa] (Bal I 444–447) The deceased is housed under a mound of pebbles (N 19–22); a heaping of earth on the grave (S 161); the deceased is placed under a mound (S 169–173) Palm fronds are placed over the grave like funerary pavilions (B II 53–62) The bridal palm pavilion is wilting/desiccated (Zen 49–54) Lamenters pledge to build hearths on the grave (D I 17–24)

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The mother and father unfurl sails and embark from mound on sailing boats ‘within’ (Tar 89–92) A porter has earthenware pots in desert and deceased should pour water from them (Bal III 313–316) No henna tree or ‘sea’ exists by the tombs in the desert (Zen 148–149) The tomb is a locked place with a rich man as owner (S 110–113) The tomb means incarceration with locks of iron and brass (Tar 133–136) The tomb is a cleft in the wall (Zen 549–552) The young men are like unripe dates sealed in the tomb (Bal IV 1–2) XXV The Healing of the Deceased There is a healer in the grave (A 156–159); there is a physician in the house/lane (Zen 194–202) The deceased asks to be taken by donkey to the physician (Zen 209–212) A physician should examine the deceased (US 294–297; 302–309) The deceased would have told the physician how her stomach hurt (Bal I 4 85–88) The deceased died in pain without a physician (Tar II 13–16) The healer heals the ‘ailing’ deceased and should heal the lamenters (D II 84–90) The lamenter needs a healer to be sent from the deceased (A 156–159) The exorciser of scorpion bite should come from the town of Birdes/Jirja (Qom 142– 145); from the earth [ittina]/the nether world [iddunya] (Bal III 200–203) The earth does not heal (US 286–289) The lamenter berates the grave for having no healer (D II 89–92) The lamenter queries if she has medicine for the deceased (Zen 188–193) The lamenter can find no medicine for the deceased (A 160–163) Medicine for the deceased is in ‘Sham’/‘Shellal’ and the lamenter will bargain for it (US 310–313; Zen 203–208) The donkey driver in the tombs has medicine to heal the deceased (US 290–299) XXVI Wedding in Death The bridegroom asks for his bride since the bridal gifts [nugut] were costly (Zen 77–78) The bridegroom seeks to be married to his maternal/maternal cousin/a girl/with long/kohl-black hair (D II 44–57) The young girl is the ‘bride of the sea’/of ‘calamity’ (D I 53–56) The bride and groom should have a procession (Zen 73–76) The deceased sets sail to a wedding in heaven (B I 9–25) The men unfurl their sails on the sea: they should be invited to the wedding (D I 71–72) The mother invites the guests to the ‘wedding’ (US 53–56) The brides sail through the tombs on sailing barques (US 314–317; Zen 150–155) The bride and groom pass over trestle bridge on a horse-drawn carriage (D II 19– 22) The bridegroom is delivered to the houris [‘nymphs of heaven’] (D II 23–24) The bridegroom [?] brought the incense and apportioned the henna (D II 23–28) The mother should pound the scented herbs/myrtle for the ‘bride’ and watch the hennaing (D II 29–34) The mother kneads the dough of the feast cakes for the ‘wedding’ (Zen 55–60) The bride is hennaed in heaven (Tar II 29–32); the bridegroom is hennaed in heaven

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by the nymphs/houris (A 125–128; D II 28; 58–64) The mašta was sent for by the girl’s uncles/father and the ‘archer’ to unplait her hair/ to henna the bride and fashion her robe (Zen 166–173) The mašta turns the pillow to the left/right for the bride (B II 65–70; Zen 156– 163) The mašta receives money for dressing the bride (Tar II 33–34) The deceased should reward the entertainer at the ‘wedding’ (Zen 67–72) The groom wants his bride/wedding lanterns and a water pipe (Zen 129–136) The bridal gifts are miserly (A 129–132); there are few gifts because the mother is miserly (Zen 61–66) The deceased were invited to a ‘wedding’ and did not return (Tar 7–10) The houris of heaven undo their wraps for the bridegroom and consummation takes place in heaven (B II 99–102) The houris wear earrings/gold (Zen 137–141) and the groom must respond like a man (Zen 142–143) The bridegroom will celebrate the feast of consummation in the tombs (A 118– 124) There is a wedding celebration at midnight with Alexandrian candle and priests in moonlight (Bal III 184–187) The blood of the bride is redder than the pomegranate/grape (US 47–50) The henna for the bride and groom is poured out (Zen 178–181; US 61–64; D I 57–60); the henna has grown cold (Zen 61–66) The bride and groom’s bower of palm fronds is destroyed (US 33–36); leaning over/ wilting (US 49–52); desiccated (Zen 49–54) The bride is housed in a tomb roofed in matting ((D II 35–41) The wedding rituals were not properly celebrated (Bal III 176–183) The deceased is not ‘invited’ to the wedding (Zen 55–58) The bride is gone, wearing her bracelets/coloured bangles of virginity (Al 182–185) The bride has changed her trousseau early (N 15–18) The bride wears kohl, kohl-coloured wrappings and rouge (B II 71–74; D I 55) The bride should take her clothes in a bundle/by her side (D II 42–47) The bride wears a silken/crimson suit of Indian silk (B II 75–86) The bridegroom is fully dressed (Zen 54) The bride and groom are washed in the wet soil of the grave (A 164–167) The bride lives in the upturned earth/in a clay pot (B II 71–74) The bride is a stalk amidst the clover (D I 47) XXVII The Protection of the Dead The deceased wears striped vest (A 141–144; D I 1–4; D II 117–118) Perfume bottles are smashed at threshold (A 149–153) Striped vest must be straight (D I 121–124) The deceased’s beard is striped for protection (N 65–68) Tattoo did not protect girl in life (T 19–20) The hand of the deceased woman is wound around a staff/quarterstaff (Zen 499– 502) The deceased addresses the gypsy coiffeuse [mugassis] asking why the forelock is dangling down on her eyes/cheek (Lux Anon) XXVIII Hair The deceased’s hair should be taken out of the dust (A 145–148); the earth (A 172–

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173) The lamenter’s hair is let down as an offering to time (Al 21–22) The red fringe of hair is drenched in earth/sand (S 122–125) The hair is unplaited and resembles ‘plumage’/a shawl’s fringe dangling (N 5–6) The hair is parted (N 13–14) The hair of the ‘gazelle’ is unplaited by the archer’s crossbow (B II 42–44) The hair of the girl is unplaited on the bier (Qom 115–118) XXIX The Deceased Wears Ritually Coloured Garments The deceased woman wears crimson and olive-green velvet (A 54–57; Tar 111–114); olive-green and pink velvet (Qom 107–110); elegant woman wears crimson/ olive-green/iridescent velvet (US 332–339) The deceased (m.) has kohl-coloured robe (B I 70–73; D I 103–106); kohl-coloured [navy-blue]; carob-dyed garments (S 24–27); the ‘bride’ wears kohl-coloured garments (B II 71–74) Men in mourning wear turbans dyed with indigo (Bal IV 101–104) The deceased (m.) wears pale blue/resin–colored [labani] or milky-white/frankincensecoloured [labini] garments (B I 121–125) The deceased wears a red silk/damask drawstring on his sirwal (Qom 91–97) The earrings of the lady are green/coral/pearl (S 264–269) The physician wears red/white cuffs (US 302–305) The deceased woman wears velvet (B I 167–170; Tar 103–106) The deceased woman wears crimson/olive-green velvet (A 54–57); and iridescent velvet (US 332–339) The deceased woman wears silk, embroidered with silver/lamé (S 71–76) The deceased woman’s velvet is ripped (B I 169–170) The bride wears a silken suit/of crimson/Indian silk (US 65–70) The garments of the great man are elegant (D I 95–98) The deceased wears a wide, elegant sleeve (Tar 34–37) The deceased is dressed in a handsome suit (Zen 426–431) The ‘bridegroom’ wears a caftan/pure white stole/head shawl (A 118–122) XXX The Deceased Wears Elegant Clothes The deceased woman wears a print shawl/chintz (S 196–200) The deceased woman wears velvet (B I 167–170; Tar 103–106) The deceased woman wears crimson/olive-green velvet (A 54–57); iridescent velvet (US 332–339) The deceased woman wears silk, embroidered with silver/lamé (S 71–76) The deceased woman’s velvet is ripped (B I 167–170) The bride wears a silken suit/of crimson/Indian silk (US 65–70) The garments of the great man are elegant (D I 95–98) The deceased wears a wide, elegant sleeve (Tar 35–38) The deceased wears a red silk/damask drawstring on his sirwal (Qom 91–97) The deceased is dressed in a handsome suit (Zen 426–431) The ‘bridegroom’ wears a kaftan/pure white stole/head shawl (A 118–124) XXXI Accoutrements of the Deceased The deceased (m.) has left behind his hennaed/wrapped staff (B II 1–6); hennaed the tips of quarterstaff (D II 75–78)

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The deceased leaves staff behind on couch/lap of mourner (A 133–136) his staff is wrapped with iron wire/amulets by his neck (D II 75–78) The staff of the elegant man is a stalk of wormwood/pomegranate, left at his mother’s (B II 7–10); of wormwood/pomegranate/henna (D II 69–74) The deceased carries a stalk of pomegranate/grape wood to the grave (D I 161–164) The deceased effendi carries a flywhisk [manasa] in his carriage (Zen 47–48); the deceased punts with a quarterstaff (B I 89–93) The deceased is the staff/javelin/warrior, who is hurled to the ground (Qom 161– 163) The drawstring of the elegant man’s sirwal is red/damask silk (Qom 92–95) The young man’s handkerchief is of pure silk (Bal I 5–8; Bal II 110–113) The elder woman has a sturdy rolling pin for her staff (B I 136–139); wraps her hands around staff/quarterstaff (Zen 499–502) The young woman has a perfumed handkerchief wrapped round (Qom 185–189) The young girl’s earrings of gold are beaten out in the sun (Bal II 301–305; Bal IV 33–36; S 81–86) The ‘lady of earrings’ has earrings with red/green stones and pearls (S 264–269) The bride should be ‘stood up’ and adorned with earrings, coral/carbuncle necklaces (US 91–94; 318–323) The woman should wear a pectoral/gold necklace (US 99–104) The deceased should purchase bracelets/pectoral from silversmith in Qus/Esna who engraves them with marks (US 105–114) The earrings of the young girl have been placed in a clay pot (Qom 129); the earrings of the young girl are beautiful against her cheek (S 67–70); the young girl’s earrings are at her mother’s (S 77–80); one of the young girl’s earrings has fallen (S 39–42) The young girl’s neck is divested of gold necklace/pectoral (S 63–66); but she wears earrings (S 67–68; 76–80) The young girl wears her striped bangles (S 242–243); bangles/bracelets (Al 182– 185); her silver/rings are with trader (D I 137–142) XXXII Tears The lamenter urges others to weep tears and lament (Al 35–38) The tears of the mourners should inundate the island (AF) The daughter should weep on the ‘seas’ (Al 137–140; 202–205) The eye is asked to bring tears (Al 5–8; 23–28; 51–56; 125–128; 135–136; 206–207; 212–3); to honour the great man (Bal II 48–52); to give men greatness (Bal II 98–105) The lamenter weeps from sympathy for the deceased for previous favours (Al 71– 74) The lamenter asks for tears to grace the eye (Tar 77–80) The Pleiades and the earth weep along with the stars (A 104–109) XXXIII The Stature of the Deceased The man is young and elegant (S 230–233) Lamenter notes the greatness of the deceased (Bal III 145–148; N 75–76) The great man [rajil] was possessor of the word and wisdom (Bal II 440–443) The man was good with an affectionate heart (Al 99–102) The lion (husband) was eloquent (Zen 306–312); lamenter admires the brain and

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eloquence of deceased (S 349–354); one great man was like the whole town (S 224–229) The male deceased is greater than the ignorant lamenter (Bal I 322–323) The lamenter demeans herself for the male deceased (Bal I 53–61) The deceased should not receive tears and mourning as his right (Bal 114–117) The deceased are of great value and honour the living in returning (S 1–7) Lamenter wishes the power of the men may be strengthened (Bal III 59–60) Laments enhance the greatness of the men (Bal II 102–105) The lamenter pledges not to forget deceased (Tar 30–33) The lamenter will swim to bring him who empowers the eye (S 343–348) The deceased woman is of great stature (S 46–48; US 79–80); a source of great affection (Zen 514–532) The deceased woman enhanced the beauty of youth (US 81–84) The deceased woman’s neck and stole are equal to her great stature (Zen 460–463) Girls are neither cheap nor wonderful: their fire was lit by bullets (A 62–65) The rich man is lowered down barefoot (Qom 230–233) Half of the town wore the family’s turbans (Zen 397–400) XXXIV Laments for the Reassurance of the Deceased The lamenter will unroll reed mat and sleep/plant quay with henna (Zen 342–345) The lamenter says the deceased are present with her (Al 15–18) The lamenter offers to wipe faces of deceased with cloth to remove crawling insects in the grave (Bal II 72–75) The lamenter pledges to defend deceased against oppressors (Al 151–155) The deceased should stay in the crook of the door (A 13–17); (Al 75–82; US 189– 192) The lamenter will swim to bring Him who empowers her/the eye (S 343–348); lamenter will bring the men and ‘the possessor of the word’ (Bal III 63–64) The lamenter wishes to be on the ladder with weapons (S 319–320); on an iron ladder (S 321–322) The lamenter will look after the orphan and the deceased (Tar 178–181) The deceased should be redeemed by brother (Bal IV 49–52) The deceased has a right to leave and a right to tears/mourning (Bal II 114–117) The deceased is urged to be patient (Al 14–15) XXXV Sacrifice The sheep of suffering/sacrifice is unfettered and seen by the eye (N 7–10) The wellbeing of the lamenter and the deceased comes from the sacrifice of the lamb (B I 142–143) The luncheon feast is a forty-day-old female lamb (US 57–60) XXXVI Offerings The lamenter offers to placate her ‘uncles’ with a brace of pigeons and flour (Al 160–163) The lamenter will take offerings of pigeons and flour to ‘good man’ so that he will comfort her (DI 111–114) The lamenter has a platter and incense on her head (US 41–44) The lamenters bring a tray with grapes/lemons/meat for feast (Zen 268–273)

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XXXVII The Nourishment of the Deceased The lamenter pledges nourishment (Bal 59–61; A 13–17; Al 75–78; US 189–192; D I 99–102) The lamenter needs the nourishment of the deceased (A 11–12) The lamenter urges the sacrifice of the lamb for the ‘guests’ and herself (B I 140– 143) The deceased is the ‘red’ wheat, nourishment of the guests (D II 111–114) The funerary feast is the luncheon for guests (B I 132–135; Zen 473–476) The luncheon for the deceased is under the earthenware pot (IlcAiy Anon) The luncheon feast is forty-day-old lamb (US 57–60); the food has ghee and hot pepper (Zen 493–496) The deceased mother has lunch with the lamenter (Bal II 278–281) The lamenter assures the deceased that her ‘food’ offerings (and sexual potency) are with her but she asks for respect from men (Bal II 66–71; Bal III 5–10) The son has meat in his sleeves for his mother (Zen 477–482) The lamenter is a garden with a water source (S 330); the lamenter’s water is sweet (Bal III 305–308) The deceased is urged to drink from water jugs that she should pour from (Bal III 313–316) The ‘mount’ of the deceased drinks from the pure, brimming water by the grave (Qom 45–54) XXXVIII Protection of the Living by the Deceased The leonine arms of the man are above the door for ever (A 5–8; Zen 373); the elephantine/white/muscular arms of the man are ‘swimming’ in the sea of inundation (Zen 375–380); the arms of the lion above the door should be left to protect the lamenter (D I 29–32); the wings of the lion should be spread over the door (Lux Anon) The father as lion should protect the widow from invasion by beasts from the wilderness (D I 25–28) The lamenter addresses the deceased as a lion in the tombs: he replies he is decomposing (Tar 22–25) The deceased is remembered as protective of lamenter’s welfare (A 35–38) Men are praised for their protection in life (D I 77–80) XXXIX Communication Between the Living and the Dead The deceased should send a messenger (Al 151–155; Qom 208–213) The lamenter says the deceased should sit in the crook of the door and will receive nourishment, a letter and clothing from her (US 189–192; Al 75–82) XL Laments Against Fate The lamenter invokes the eye (fate) (Al 5–7) The lamenter protests against fate but fate prevails (Bal II 338–353; Bal III 206–215); lamenter protests at her fate (Tar II 39–42) Fate ordains events and cannot be reversed (Qom 136–137) Fate is revealed by slave’s divination (S 99–105; Zen 244–249) Fate overtook the amulet’s power (US 9–20) Fate ‘took’ the deceased (S 43–45) Fate is irrevocable (Qom 138–139)

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The lamenter asks fate to take her beyond where mother will greet her (Bal II 282– 288) The lamenter asks fate to show her the way to the deceased’s house (Zen 223–226) The lamenter asks diviner to tell the future but fate is written on the forehead (Zen 250–254) Divining for the deceased is futile (A 70–73) The lamenter protests when she receives the Achilles tendon (Bal II 344–353) The lamenter is told the person had his time (Bal II 364–67) The lamenter yields to time (Al 19–22) The mother of young girls was struck by fate (Zen 88–92) The lamenter counts the stars and is in fear of the ‘reaper of grapes’ and calamity (Bal II 391–394) The lamenter queries fate (Zen 240–243) Lamenter asks fate to show her the way (Zen 223–226) Lamenter asks death not to take away loved ones (S 106–109) The lamenter laments her fate: she is scorned and barefoot like the dead (Tar 11– 14) The lamenter has bowed down to time and fate (Al 19–22); one’s fate must be accepted (Zen 250–254) Laments are performed for the lamenters’ destinies (Al 1–4; 206–207) XLI Laments for the Self /Complaint Laments for self (A 9–12; Zen 436–439; Tar 137–141; Tar II 23–26) Lament for the oppression of women (Tar II 43–46) The lamenter is ignorant (Tar 44–46) The lamenter is the deceased in the grave (A 22–26) Lamenter emulates deceased and wants her mother to close her eyes and drink from her bitters (Zen 122–128) Lamenter as deceased asks the water bearer to quench her thirst (D I 109–112) Lamenter feels a pain and berates the deceased (Bal II 266–269; Zen 350–355) The lamenter complains to the deceased (Zen 321–327); the lamenter complains no one will tell her now to bend her head on entering (US 141–144); the children should be castigated for leaving (Zen 321–322) The lamenter wishes the children were ‘above’ the mound (Zen 452) The father, (the ‘lion’) abandoned his children (S 317); the ‘lion’ should not go (US 185–188) The men should not have left before finishing their tasks (S 355–359) The deceased is divorced from her husband without a paper (Zen 293–296) The women’s boat sank and the women are abandoned on the shore (S 281–285) Lamenter asks who ordained this death (T 114–115); lamenter queries death (D I 3–6) Lamenter asks how death could happen (Zen 114–117) Lamenter asks God for forgiveness (Tar II 27–28; Al 57–60) The deceased is asked to stop prolonging his absence (Tar 156–157); not to go far away (D I 33–40) The deceased has taken from the lamenter her nights of loneliness in the West (Bal II 118–123); the women were left without men (Bal II 222–229) The lamenter pledges to go to the grave and dig it up (S 71–76; Bal II 438–443; Bal III 145–148; Qom 63–67) The lamenter rejects shroud (Bal IV 15–16)

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The lamenter would not have let the deceased go and is afraid the deceased will die speedily (Qom 150–159) The lamenter would have stopped the deceased from ascending (US 1–4) The ‘suit’ [of clothes] complains the master’s absence is long (US 233–238) The lamenter is deceived: the world is a mirage (Tar 81–2; Al 61–62; 180–181)) The lamenter says if men were for sale, they would have bought them (Zen 393– 396); the lamenter wishes men were for sale (A 78–81) The lamenter is banned from going to deceased’s ‘house’ (Zen 506–513) The lamenter fears she will be insulted after death of deceased (Bal III 23–26); the lamenter fears scorn from deceased (US 197–198) The deceased’s servant should send expenses/clothing to the living (US 203–206) XLII Shame Men, great in stature, are levelled to the ground (Bal I 31–37) The lamenter is shamed (A 74–77) The lamenter fears humiliation from men (Bal II 66–71) The lamenter fears shame for the deceased (Al 151–153) The deceased goes down barefoot like women (the lamenters) who are scorned (Tar 11–14) The lamenter consoles the deceased to save her from humiliation (A 174–178; D I 5–6) The young girl’s hair is unplaited; she is unveiled (Zen 297–301) The deceased woman’s head veil falls off (S 249–252; Zen 84–87; T 23–30) Death strips one bare and humiliates (A 168–171) XLIII Grief and Suffering Grief made lamenter groan/choke (D II 65–68) Shrieks go up and lamenters feel invaded by grief/men with staves/on horseback (Bal I 38–47; Bal III (1–4) The lamenter grieves for young one (S 140–146) The lamenter does not sleep since the ‘vanishing’ of the deceased (Bal II 383–386) Women suffered after pigeon tower collapsed (S 12–14) Suffering comes after the toppling of the riverbank (father) (S 12–14) The lamenter suffers because of gravedigger and her threshold is her father’s brother’s (S 126–131) Lament for personal grief (Al 29–34; 199–201) Lament for grief (Bal I 48–52; Al 200–201) Lament for grief at men’s death that scorched her heart like a red-hot poker (Tar 26–29; 67–68) Grief tears innards apart (Al 117–118) Lament for suffering (Tar 55–60; 137–141; Bal II 413–416) Suffering comes from time and hearts without affection (Al 145–148) Grief is a blinding force (B I 34–37; Al 170–171) Medicaments are needed for eye to heal the blindness (B I 38–47) The day of parting was painful (B I 131) Young people are made to suffer (B I 171–174) The lamenter feels she is in the grave like the deceased (A 22–26) The lamenter emulates deceased and wants her mother to close her eyes and drink from her bitters (Zen (122–128)

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The Concordance of Lament Personae, XLIV-LII XLIV The Husband/Father The father is the patriarch of the family and begetter (Qom 1–4); the source of strength (Qom 6; 10–14) The father is a support (Tar 1–2; Qom 5–14) The father is a tight head binding (Qom 10–14); a protective, black cloak (Qom 15–19); on the face (IlcAiy Anon); and source of advice (Bal III 47–50); the protective arms above the door (Zen 372–380; A 5–8) The father is a sword/sirwal/wealth (N 69–74) The father is a leaning fortress to be uprighted (Al 53–56; 125–128; Tar 87–88) The father is a pennant/mosque pillar/pillar of Mecca (B I 48–55); a pillar razed/ raised up (Qom 20–24; 27–29) a pillar of marble, razed and raised up (Bal II 469–472); a protruding mound, source of pleasure (D I 169–172); a high pillar in the diwan/courtyard which is cracked (US 245–250; S 31–33); a high river bank/pigeon tower which will not be immersed nor toppled (US 259–262); a high river bank flooded by the Nile but not razed (S 15–18) At the father’s death, the pillars of the house collapsed/fell over (Zen 365–368) The father is coffee/a resplendent pillar (B I 52–55) The father conveys happiness/healing (Qom 1–4) The father is a lion (S 312–320; US 185–188; the lion is the lover (US 199–202; Zen 306–316; Tar 22–25; Qom 30–33); the lion protects/succours lamenters from beasts of the wilderness (D I 25–32); a camel (A 73–74); a brave warrior like Sheddad in tombs (Tar 22–25; Qom 30–33) The men bore their burdens (B I 26–29) The men cast off their riding saddles like camels (Bal I 31–37) The father is a pigeon tower which collapsed at his death and the pigeons left (S 8–14); the father is a pigeon tower which toppled (US 263–266) The father is a frail tree, planted in the ‘seas’ which toppled (S 201–204); with leaves ‘like beards’ (S 205–208) The father built a pigeon tower by the threshing fields, like a horse tethered to the stake (D II 107–110) The father is a horse and a fortress (Tar 87–88); the rider of a chaste mount (f.) (Qom 45–54) The husband/father makes the lamenter ride a wild/high/bucking camel (D I 181– 186) The father has a lovely moustache and good brain (S 349–354) The father is the ‘red’ (ripe) wheat in the threshing fields, nourishment of the guests (D II 111–114) The father wears a long cloak [cabaya] down to the ankles (US 241–244) XLV The Mother The mother is a south-facing garden; the lamenter garners grapes in her lap and sleeves (N 55–58; US 131–6); mother is garden and the father is its cultivator (cf Kahle) The mother garnered in the grapes and is accompanied by embalming scent (Bal III 131–132); the mother has grapes in her ‘house’ (US 131–136) The mother wears coloured velvet, scented with civet/perfume/liqueur (Zen 108– 113)

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The mother wears gold/arm bracelets (Bal II 280–281) The mother is mistress of the house (S 49–54); ‘sheikha of the Arabs’ (Zen 460–463); ‘bridle’/custodian of the family presiding over the children (Zen 464–468) The mother is the most loved (Qom 78–85) The mother gave life to the house (Zen 113) The mother is a money purse (Zen 529) The mother is a cone of brown sugar (US 163–166) The mother is a reed pipe caressed by the ‘elegant one’ (Bal II 289–292) The mother is envisioned in a flame like a caravanserai from Qus/Esna (N 27–30) The mother is seen between hearth and oven (US 167–170) The mother is ‘present’ at the head/umbilical cord/leg of lamenter (Zen 122–128) The mother is urged to return and lamenter intones secret words (N 43–46) The mother rides a high perch/ladder and should rise up (US 328–331) The mother has flowing veils/wings that the house should clutch onto (S 49–52) The mother follows the lamenter and swathes her with the ‘plumage’ of the eye/hair/ veil, as a protection from gossip (Bal II 314–319; Qom 72–77; N 47–52; Bal 272–273) The mother guards innocence of daughter and protects against the blinding wind (N 53–54) The mother secretes pigeons in her sleeve from the water scoop/niche (Qom 68–71) The mother is the ‘rib’ (Bal III 81–84); mistress of the oven (Bal III 85) The mother carries a basket on her head and has illuminated her house like the moon (IlcAiy Anon) The mother is a Byzantine/Indian hen (US 324–327) The mother is a young mare fettered in the fenugreek/clover (Bal II 293–296) The mother is a tree by the wall/ over hearth/by stairs/which casts shade, fans breezes and brings forth fruit (Bal III 87–94); the beloved mother is under the lemon tree/doum palm/on the fallow strip between Nile and the irrigated plot (US 171–178) The mother’s buttons were mother of pearl/gold/corals (Bal III 119–126) The mother is like the buttons of the lamenter’s gown (US 163–166); the buttons of the gown radiate affection (A 31–34) The mother’s gown was the lamenter’s gown (Bal III 113–117) Luncheon with the mother is a pleasure (Bal II 278–281) The departure of the mother created shadows and darkness in the house (N 23–26) The mother is veiled on entering her ‘house’ (Bal III 97–100) The mother lives far away (Zen 483–490) XLVI The Young Man The elegant man has a staff dyed with henna (B II 1–6) His staff is of wormwood/pomegranate (B II 7–10) His staff is wormwood/pomegranate/henna (D II 69–74); and is left at his mother’s (B II 7–10) The young man is a curved stalk of bamboo (Zen 93–96) The young man is a stalk of sugarcane (S 196–200) The young men are clustered in the tombs (Zen 144–147) Young men are like clumps of grass, milohiyya/wild thyme (Zen 420–425) The young man wears a suit in the sea, which the fish will nibble at (US 229–238)

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XLVII The Young Woman The young woman is a minaret of Esna/Aswan (S 63–66); with a long neck (S 174– 177) The young woman is a mare, fettered/moored in the fenugreek/clover (Bal II 293– 296); a palm frond anchored in the clover/safflower (US 95–98); a palm frond (T 5–6); in the fenugreek (Zen 79–83) The young girl’s red fringe is drenched in earth (S 132–134) The young girl went to the ‘baths’ too quickly (Qom 214–221) The young woman has washed her washing and should go home (Tar 111–114) The young girls are inflamed by tears/bullets (US 360–363) XLVIII The Bridegroom The bridegroom is asked what will make him happy (Zen 129–136) The bridegroom gazes at the nymphs of heaven (B II 99–102) The bridegroom must act like a man (Zen 137–143) The bridegroom is under a palm bower sleeping/drowsing (US 49–52) The bridegroom is fully dressed; the bridegroom wears a caftan/a pure white stole [šahiyya])/a head shawl [šamla] (A 118–122) The bridegroom will celebrate the feast of consummation in the tombs (A 118– 124) XLIX The Bride The bride is dressed in black, in lace, in rouge (D I 49–56) The bride is ‘kohled’ and wears kohl-coloured garments; the bride wears rouge, is pregnant and lives in a clay jar (B II 66–73) The young girl wears a bridal dress (B II 74–80) The bride takes with her a gown of red/insoluble/Indian silk that will not fade (US 65–70) The bride in the chintz gown is topsy turvy when she enters the sanctuary of pillars/ place of solitude (Bal II 501–504) The bride leaves with her henna (Bal II 485–486; Al 164–165); but has not cut out the shifts for her wedding night (Al 172–175); she wears bangles/bracelets (Al 182–185) The mašta does vigil with bride who has gone to sleep (US 71–74) The mašta turns the bride to the left and right on her pillows (B II 65–70; Zen 156–161; A 66–69) The bride is to be hennaed (Al 164) but the henna is poured out (D 57–58; Zen 178–181) The bride is ‘bride of the sea’ (D I 54); ‘bride of calamity’ (D I 56) The bride comes from above/the East with nape of neck damp from sweat/desire (N 11–14) The blood of the bride is redder than the pomegranate/grape (US 45–48) The bride leaves her trousseau behind (US 123–126) The bride in the earth is a stalk of clover (D I 47) The bride lives in the sand/upturned earth (D I 53–56) The bride comes from faraway lands (US 37–40) The bride has not realised her aspirations (Al 176–179) The bride is a glowing lantern (US 37–40)

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L The Brother/Blood Brother The blood brother is a cone of brown sugar/like the buttons on the lamenter’s dress (Qom 55–58) The blood brother was taken away (Bal II 122–123) The deceased was to the blacksmith like his blood brother (A 82–84) The brother treads on the toes of the lamenter (D I 185–186) The brother says the female sex are passionate (D I 183–184) LI The Child A child is like flowered chintz; a stalk of sugarcane (S 196–198) A child is like melted/swallowed sugar (US 217–220; Zen 325–327); like pure silver dangling from the hair (US 340–345); the ring of youth (US 344–347); value measured in weight of silver (US 348–351); like the heart of scented/ripe fruit (US 352–355) Children are like the bracelets on the hands/like silver kohl sticks for the eyes (US 352–355) A child is a palm frond flying by/set upright (S 140–146; Bal III 301–304; US 221–228) A child is the heart of the palm without its fronds (Zen 432–435) A child is an apricot hurled on the dam and abandoned (A 97–101) A child is like a gazelle hunted down in the heat of day/sanctuary (Tar 69–72) The child in the hooded cap was sweet (Tar 73–76) No chink of blacksmiths was heard for the children (Tar 61–64) The orphan child is snatched away (N 75–76) LII Laments on Kinship Cousins bicker with each other (A 114–117) The men comprise the town (Bal II 222–229) The lamenter wishes the paternal uncle would be far away (Zen 274–278) LIII Laments for the Elderly Parents when they are old are crooked over canes (Tar 47–50) An old man has a salt and pepper beard that protects him (N 65–68) The great man is the ambergris [cambar] of the woman’s youth (Lux Anon) LIV The Woman Without Heirs The deceased wishes for a companion to the childless woman (A 179–181) Lamenter urges that no shame should come to woman without children (A 174– 178) LV The Man Without Heirs The heirless man wears a woollen cloak; he will not be remembered (A 182–185; 192–197) The heirless man is naked in his shawl/Indian shawl (Tar II 7–10) No one is left to ask after the man without heirs (A 192–195) The heirless man is urged to weep for himself (T 146–149; 160–163) The black wrappings shall protect the heirless man as no heirs inquire after him (T 150–155)

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The gravedigger pulls the thread to lay out the construction of the tomb (T 164) The heirless man builds a house like a dovecote where migratory doves live (T 164– 170) The deceased is building a house but has no heirs; the deceased is not like the roving dove who flies off but returns (Bal II 405–408; T 164–170) No boy wrapped in rope walks beside the heirless man; not even a demented child is there with a palm frond to recite the litanies (T 156–159) The earthenware jar is rolled along and rush matting is removed since there is no heir to hold the funeral (A 194–197) The name of deceased is written on the shroud but no heirs call his name (T 171– 174) LVI The Stranger The deceased’s tomb in a strange place is trampled by buffalo and cows (A 89–92) The stranger is urged to offer cakes at the tomb and rein in her dogs (A 93–96; Qom 164–171) The girl in the Delta should dole out funerary cakes for the stranger (T 13–14; Qom 169–171; US 25–28) People in the tombs in the North do not pull down the lock of hair to the eyebrow nor wrap the dead in twice-folded cloth (Qom 178–184) The person in the desert is buried but no funerary customs are performed (B I 175– 178) The woman who dies a stranger is rebuked for not dying in her ‘town’ or ‘valley’ (Bal I 477–480; B I 185) The stranger dies in a valley (B I 185–6) The beloved died in the countries of strangers (A 154–155) The lamenter wishes foreign places did not exist (Qom 172–175; A 154–155; T 1–4; 11–12; 17–18) The train should bring back the deceased from faraway countries (US 29–32) LVII The Drowned The drowned are in granaries in the sea with waves of high foam (T 90–93) The sea is ‘black’ with the foam (of inundation) (T 104–107) The drowned man drinks from black silted mud (Zen 227–230) The drowned wave white scarves above their necks (T 98–101) The scarf is thrown in the ‘sea’ where fish nibble at it (Bal II 244–245); suit is hurled in the ‘sea’ (US 229–232) The drowned are entrusted to the minnows/whales and ‘the caster of nets’, ‘the hurler of hooks’ (Zen 231–235; T 94–97; 102–103) The drowned should descend to the source of the Nile/Shellal and see the turbans there (Bal III 139–144) The drowned man is placed on a mast pole/tree (T 108–111) and the lamenter’s eye sees him (T 112–115) A child is asked to rescue the ‘swimmer’ (T 112–113) The drowned should be rescued by the Angel Gabriel/the omnipotent [jubran] (Qom 130–135); ‘custodian of the sea’ [gafir ilbahr] (Zen 236–239) The drowned have houses in the ‘seas’ where boats pass by (Bal III 133–136) The drowned who die as strangers should be rescued by the iron wheels (of a train) (US 21–24)

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LVIII Those Who Suffered Death by Fire Death by fire (Al 133–134) LIX Those Who Suffered Death by Scorpion Sting The deceased describes scorpion bite as fleeting and fatal (N 31–38) Death is speedy and terrifying (Qom 156–159) The lamenter relives the moment of the scorpion striking from the mud bricks (Qom 146–149) The deceased should be taken to the exorciser of scorpion bites in far away towns of Birdes/Jirja (Qom 142–145) The exorcist of scorpions should be conjured from the earth/from the nether world (Bal III 200–203); the one who passes judgment on the living is an exorcist (Bal III 200–203) The scorpion is like a protruding necklace from the steppe (Bal III 204–205) Death from scorpion bite makes man perspire (Qom 140) The deceased cannot drink after scorpion bite (N 31–38) The lamenter stresses how she would have sealed off doors to prevent the scorpion entering (Qom 150–155)

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Notes Part I Chapter 1 1



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Copies of the laments may be heard on application to the British Sound Archive, The British Library, African ethnographic and video collection; Northern Africa section, Archive # C39. The prelude is: ya lel, ya caini ya lel: ‘O night, O Eye, O night’. The bracket ({) denotes simultaneous double meanings. The colon (:) indicates the first person response of the deceased in the lament.

Chapter 4

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Francoise Dunand, the French Egyptologist (1973) discovered bodies bound in rope in Christian graves in the Western oases, so this allusion may indicate an attempt by the bereaved to emulate the state of the dead. Other theories suggest that the refrain invokes memories of the ancient healer, ‘Amenhotep son of Hapu’ (1390–53 BC) whose funerary temple was situated next to that of king Tutmosis II by the settlement of Kom Lolah, not far from that of Amenhotep III (1390–53 BC) which he constructed in the temple of Medinat Habu. There is evidence that his cult was revived in 1075–950 BC and in the Ptolemaic period, more than one thousand years later, he was deified as a god of healing and physician, associated with Asclepius, the Greek god of healing and an active cult developed around his shrine (see Britannica Concise Encyclopaedia 2009, Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, 6 March 2009). The fact that the temple is named Habu and the sacred lake in the Medinat Habu complex is still called Birket Habu suggests that his name resonates even now in that precinct.

Part II Chapter 5

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As a linguist, Kahle’s main interest was in folk parlance. Consequently, in Die Totenklagen im Heutigen Ægypten (Gottingen: 1925), Paul Kahle organised the laments in his collection according to the regional dialects of the Delta and Luxor and what he called, the ‘folk speech’ of the fellahin or farmers.

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These compendia were fascinating sources of parallel texts, invaluable for understanding the broader cosmology of lament. Characterised by marked differences in structure, texture, register and performance context, this much more literary mode of expression, ritha’ was, most significantly, a genre of elegy delivered orally but not sung, and composed by men as well as women. The elegies by the renowned poetess, Al-Khansa’, for her brother have been particularly lauded as fine literary compositions. Mohamed Galal, ‘Essai d’observations sur les rites funéraires en Égypte actuelle, relevées dans certaines regions campagnardes’ in Revue des Études Islamiques II (1938): 131–299. These categorisations conform to the lament categories elicited from the sole lamenter as cited by cAbd al-Rahim Hifni in al-Marathi al-Ša cbiyya (‘Popular Laments’) (Cairo: Egyptian Book Organization, 1983). The complement of lament motifs, comprised in each set of laments are enumerated in the following concordance themes: For the husband/father, XLIV; For the mother, XLV; For the young man, XLVI; For the young woman, XLVII; For the ‘bridegroom’, XLVIII; For the ‘bride’, XLIX; For the brother/ blood brother, L; For the child, LI; For the elderly, LIX. The schoolteacher colleague and friend, Zakariyya from al-cAiyaiyša, brought this interpretation to my attention during his transcriptions of Balabil’s laments. This and other laments described in the Concordance as Luxor Anonymous (Lux Anon) were comprised in the set of laments transcribed verbatim from funerals and given to me ‘for eventual publication’ by Jamal Zaki el Din alHajaji. This was suggested to me by folklorist and professor at Cairo University, Suleiman Il‑cAttar. This lament ‘caini caleha fibetha rayyis;tiftah jurar issamn wi tilayyis’ (Lux Anon) contained the confusing archaism: layyis. Barthélemy, in Dictionnaire Arabe‑Francais (1935), glosses layyis as either, ‘enduire d’un crépi’ (stuff with a piece of rough material) ‘crépir à la chaux’ (stuff with chalk) or ‘murer sa porte’ (‘fill in or block up the door’) though Jamal Zaki informed me that layyis meant ‘to pour’. A leafy green plant known as Jew’s mallow. Oral communication, Jamal Zaki al‑Din al‑Hajaji. In his analyses of Egyptian folklore and others including ‘The Traditional Structure of Sentiments in Mahfouz’ trilogy: A Behaviorist Text Analysis’ in al-Arabiyya: Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic 9, nos. 1–2 (1976): 53– 74, Professor Hasan al‑Shami described the brother‑sister relationship in Egypt as intrinsically intimate. The image of the ‘cone of brown sugar’ conveys explicit sexual connotations according to Egyptian novelists, Nabil Nacoum and Yahya al‑Tahir. Oral communication, Yahya al‑Tahir. Alexander Heidel, The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970): 27.

Chapter 6

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From the unpublished paper by Lila Abu Lughod, ‘The Wedding that became a Funeral: Bedouin Discourses on Death’ presented at the Conference on the Anthropology of Lament in Austin, Texas, 1989, subsequently revised and

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published as ‘Islam and Gendered Discourses of Death’ in the International Journal of Middle East Studies 25 (1993): 187–205. Richard Huntingdon and Peter Metcalf in Celebrations of Death: the Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) argue that the analysis of emotion and symbolic behaviour in mortuary ritual, in a given society, must remain particularised and its significance measured against the spatial and temporal constraints of the fieldwork situation. Furthermore, they warn of the dangers inherent in generalising about the relation of ritual to emotion in a society from evidence accrued in a highly localised, field study. In the case of Abu Lughod and the fact that this study was conducted in an extended fieldwork situation over more than four years, misinterpretation would seem less likely. 2 Translated from French by the author. 3 On certain emotionally wrought occasions, it is possible for men to indulge in the histrionics of lament though it has only been witnessed by the author on one occasion. At a village in the north Giza Governorate, when my friend suddenly fell and broke her leg, a nearby farmer suddenly erupted in volleys of laments and sobbing, as if he were at a funeral. He performed these volubly, in the manner of women, even emulating the flailing of arms. 4 Margaret Alexiou in The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), quotes Herakleitos as the inspiration for this convention: ‘the unity of opposites and the opposition of unities find perfect expression in antithetical clauses where words and phrases opposite in meaning but similar in sound are juxtaposed’ (1974: 153). For the Greeks, she argues, form was the most important factor and as a result, clarity of thought was ‘frequently sacrificed’. 5 Oral communication, Hamida Abu’l Majd, Luxor. Such ‘artifice’ is regarded as a mechanistic medium to an end. The same strategy is alluded to in the Akan dirge tradition by J.H. Nketia in Funerary Dirges of the Akan People (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969) and in The Wedding of the Dead (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) by Gail Kligman in the case of Romanian lamentation. 6 Oral communication, Hasan al-Shami. 7 In the film, Moussem zari ca il binaat (The season of planting the girls) directed by Viola Shafik and produced by UNICEF (1999) on the issue of female circumcision or as it is now more commonly called, female genital mutilation. 8 According to Hamida, the root once used for dyeing was like indigo. The dyeing was performed at home though, whereas nowadays, women take their clothes to a professional dyer in Luxor. 9 Oral communication from my friend and mentor, Umm Hassan. 10 The Byzantine tradition incarnated a very similar vision in Greece: ‘First came a large number of deacons and ministers, all advancing in order and with wax candles in their hands. It was rather like a mystic procession, with the sound of the chanting ringing forth in one voice from one end to the other’ (Migne 46.993B in Alexiou 1974). 11 This was confirmed to me by my collaborator, Jamal Zaki al-Din al-Hajaji. 12 Dell Hymes theory of the Ethnography of Speaking and ethnopoetics was based on the premise that in oral speech performances, professional story tellers recount their tales using an internally consistent structure of bundles of lines, often aligned to a two/three axis (doublets and triplets) or as four line ‘stanza’. By analysing and ‘lining out’ these performances graphically, the narrative logic and

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structure of the oral performance can be analysed and the thematic development of the story revealed. In the case of Balabil and Tariyya, formidable performers and composers of laments, I have ‘lined out’ those sections of their interviews where they break into performance to reveal the way in which they use repetition and structured pauses to create a more poetic and dramatic style of diction. The malaria epidemic took place in 1947. Her refrain in Arabic is ‘murr ya hayyi ... murr ya hayyi ... murr ya hayyi ... kullu minnu...’ The comparative features of other genres sung by women and the laments were discussed by the author in an unpublished paper presented to the Middle East Studies Association meetings, December 1991 in Washington, D.C., entitled, ‘“Whatever is on her lips, she may say”: the cultural pragmatics of Sa cidi women’s song’, in Arabic: ‘kulli wahda hatgul gulitha, illi bitkun fi hašimha hatgul’. At the birth feast or sibu c, celebrated on the seventh day after a child is born and the day on which he or she will be named, the newborn child, along with tiny wheat grains, is bounced up and down in a sieve by the daya or midwife, as if to be symbolically ‘winnowed’. This appears to be a gesture designed to propel the life force of the new‑born babe and the seeds of wheat into the trajectory of life and growth. A precursor of this custom is visible in a scene from the birth room of the temple of Hatshepsut at Deir El Bahri on the West Bank of Luxor and when viewed in the context of funerary laments which describe the deceased as a ‘winnower’, the multivalent meaning of this symbol and ritual of revivification becomes clear. She is referring to the removal of her clitoris in the rite known as female circumcision. I am indebted to Katharine Young for the perceptive questions and comments that have contributed to the development of this chapter.

Chapter 7

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The novelist Yahya al‑Tahir cAbdulla, a native of Karnak, at my requests had re-transcribed the laments again for me in 1981. My transcripts and his varied little from those produced by the accomplished transcriber, Jamal Zaki al-Din al-Hajaji. My colleague, the Finnish folklorist, Juha Pentikainen had shown in ‘Oral Repertoire and World View’, Folklore Fellow Communications 219 (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1978), that a conception of the afterlife or ‘cosmology’ could be gleaned from the analysis of folk repertoires. I concluded, however, that in the case of the Egyptian laments and their diversity of motifs and themes, the mere analysis of repertoires was insufficient to reveal their intrinsic meaning. This aspect was noted previously by the Egyptian folklorist, Rushdi Salih in alAdab al-Ša cbi (‘Folklore’) 3rd edn (Cairo: al-Nahda al-Masriyya, 1971): 262. Oral communication, cAmm cAbdu, bawwab (doorkeeper) in Heliopolis, Cairo and a native of the village of al-Kilh-al-Qibli on the West Bank of the Nile near Edfu. These epithets are consistent with those mentioned by Kriss to designate the soul double or qarina in the folk phenomenology of the soul, in Rudolf Kriss and Hubert Kriss-Heinrich, Volksglaube im bereich des Islam (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassovitz, 1966).

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These metaphors appear in a version of the seduction of Yunis by cAziza in a story from the Egyptian epic, sirat bani hilal as sung by cAwad ‘ullah cAbd al-Jelil in Luxor in 1981: ‘Aziza cries out, ‘0 Yunis, Fate has thrust me upon you, Come closer to me, 0 Yunis, And give shape to my ripe pomegranates ... select from my ripening lemons’. No informant was able to describe it in detail. By contrast, in the Byzantine laments, ‘imminent sexual fulfillment is suddenly denied by death’: ‘I, Leonto, died a maiden like a young flower; when it bursts its bud and first shows its petals (Alexiou 1974: 196). Alexiou maintains that ‘the ritual function of the death and marriage imagery and the simulation wedding/ funeral is, in essence, one of appeasement. By creating the illusion that those who die unmarried have married in the next world, the grief of the mourner is allayed and the wrath of the dead averted’ (1974: 230). Kligman similarly indicates in her analysis of the Romanian pageant of marriage in death for a young girl, that such display is similarly motivated by a desire to avert the return of the young maidens from the spirit world to pursue their quests for a husband. In the Egyptian laments, this sentiment does not appear. Alexiou lists copious references in ancient Greek literature to the strewing of the body with herbs, including in Plutarch, Pliny and Aristotle, and the festooning with garlands, vine, olive and laurel (1974: 206). A pun is created in the laments which revolves around the word for indigo (nila) and munayyila, which means both ‘dyed with indigo’ and colloquially, ‘dreadful’ or ‘disastrous’.

Part III Chapter 8

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Scholars are divided as to whether to adopt the notation defining dates in terms of the Christian calendar: BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini), or the notation: BCE (Before Common Era). I have chosen for clarity of understanding to adopt the less ambiguous BC/AD notation. These sentences are extracted from the longer series of texts. The tombs of the Nobles at Thebes comprise: Menna, Nacht, Horemheb, NebAmon, Ipoki, Amenununa, Userhat and Neferhotep. British Museum artefact #10188. Faulkner is quoting from the translation by Marcelle Werbrouck, Les Pleureuses dans l’ Égypte Ancienne (Bruxelles: Fondation de la Reine Élisabeth, 1938). A third papyrus of the Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys was published by Professor Fayza Haikal in 1970, Two Hieratic Funerary Papyri of Nesmin (Bruxelles: Fondation Égyptienne, 1970). Margaret Alexiou in her accomplished study of Greek lament coined this phrase to describe what she saw as the motivation at the heart of Byzantine lament (1974: 124). I am indebted to Professor David Silverman, Curator of the Egyptian Department of the University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, for his assistance in analysing these scripts from the original hieratic text and helping me understand these different styles of performance.

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The voicing continues as follows: Verse 3.24–6.23 (a new duet); Verse 6.23– 6.26 (four line duet); Verse 6.27 (Isis one line solo); Verse 7.24–8.2 (duet); Verse 8.3–8.20 (solo); Verse 8.21–9.8 (duet); Verse 9.9– end (five solo lines by Isis). A term coined by Greg Urban (1986) to denote a ritualised dialogue form that may act as a vehicle for linguistic and social solidarity. Determinatives were used ‘to clarify the sense of a word in a particular context’ and ‘of no phonetic value’ (Silverman 1997: 234). Trans. Faulkner 1936 (1: 26–28). From the Paris stele of Pyramid Text 630 published by Chabas in the Revue Archaéologique (1867) in the translation by E.A. Wallis Budge, From Fetish to God, 1934: 201. I have selected in this instance, and in every subsequent quotation, the translation of the Pyramid Texts I found most comprehensible in English. Many versions of the Pyramid Texts now exist in translation and are of varying degrees of intelligibility to the lay person. The analogue in the contemporary laments would seem to be the epithet, sahbit ilkilma (literally, ‘possessor of the word’) as quoted by Balabil as a descriptor of the lamenter herself. This was explained to me by a middle-class Cairene woman, who attempted to analyse the phenomenon of ripping open the garments and exposing the breasts, as a marker of grief. She proposed this proverbial saying as an example of a physical offering which, in her opinion, represented the ultimate submission of a woman to a man at a time of desperation. She thought that the two contexts were not dissimilar. E.A. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary (London: Dover Press 2003 [1920]): cviii and cxxvi. Ibid: cxxvi. Ibid: cxxxi. Ibid: cxliii. Pyramid Texts found in the Tombs of Pepy I #168); Pepy II #72 and #951, and Pepy I and Meri-Ra #659 at Saqqara among others; ibid: 350. Pyramid Texts #313; # 448 from the Pyramid of Unas, and Pyr #539 from Meren-ka in Saqqara, ibid., pp. 909b; 910ab. Ibid: ciii. Ibid: 94. Budge also suggests in A Hieroglyphic Vocabulary to the Theban Recension of the Book of the Dead, London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner and Co., 1911, that the word, akab, represents both the great celestial ocean and the god who presided over it as well as over water and flood, so the continuity of the concept and its phonetic form from the Old to the New Kingdom can be established. The inverted majur (bowl) with four strands of hair flying out as well as the three locks of hair glyph form part of a longer hieroglyph meaning ‘to weep, to grieve’, aakb, from the Pyramid Texts found in the Tomb of Pepy I, 106 and Pepy II, 869 from Gaston Maspero, Les Inscriptions des Pyramides de Saqqarah (Paris, 1894) and Kurt Sethe, Die Altagyptischen Pyramidtexte nach den Papierabdrucken und Photographien des Berliner Museums (Leipzig: 1908–1910). Images reproduced from E.A. Wallis Budge, An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary (Dover Publications, 1978 [John Murray 1920]), vol. I: 26. The woman squatting with her hair streaming out behind her, the woman bending over with her hair streaming out behind her, and the three individual locks of hair are sourced from ‘wailing woman’, aakbit (ibid). The three locks of hair glyph is also found in the hieroglyphs for ‘wailings, mourning, mourners’, aakbiu, and in the

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hieroglyphs: akeb/akbit/Akbit, a weeping goddess (ibid: 94). In both cases, the logogram is configured with the determinative of a man sitting with his hand on his mouth (= ‘I speak’) (ibid: 26a). The icons indicating ‘a man’ or ‘a woman’ performer (the woman depicted as sitting motionless on the ground) in ancient Egyptian sa-t, a word still used in modern Arabic (sitt) indicates that laments could be sung by either. 26 In ancient Egyptian, wrŠ.w. 27 When questioned, an Egyptian folklorist asserted to me that lamenters let down their hair so that the spirits may ‘climb up’. 28 From Lesley Kinney, ‘The (w)nwn funerary dance in the Old Kingdom and its relationship to the dance of the mww’ in ‘Abstracts of Papers’, the Tenth International Congress of Egyptologists, University of the Aegean, Rhodes, 22– 29 May 2008. 29 In his work with the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, Steven Feld in Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics and Song in Kaluli Expression (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982) determined that lamentation could be described as ‘sung-texted weeping’ and noted its association with the sound of the turtledove, as in some Egyptian laments. 30 The idea that binds the two words together could be very ancient. As the couplet is sung, the two words appear to fuse together in meaning because of the slight shift in consonants, a kind of word play popular in Upper Egypt known as jinas or paronomasia. As the soul that became a bird, the deceased would be expected to acquire metaphorical wings after death. 31 I am indebted to Egyptologists, Professors James P. Allen, Ann Macy Roth, Michael Jones, Peter Dorman, Peter Piccioni, Edwin Brock and Heike Guksch who have guided me through the many obscurities in the texts. 32 The Egyptologist, Deborah Sweeney, in Walking Alone Forever, Following You: Gender and Mourners’ Laments from Ancient Egypt (Leiden: Styx /Koninklijke Brill NV, 2001), has analysed these and other ancient Egyptian lament texts from the point of view of gender and language, and concluded that women’s laments were ‘more emotional’ than men’s but also that women used more non-literary phraseology characteristic of the colloquial language, in their lamentations than men. 33 From Roland Enmarch, ‘The language of grief: reflections on the laments of Isis and Nephthys in some mortuary liturgies attested in the Coffin Texts’ in ‘Abstracts of Papers’, Tenth International Congress of Egyptologists,University of the Aegean, Rhodes, 22–29 May 2008. 34 New Kingdom Tomb of Haremhab. 35 Oral communication, Dr Zahi Hawass. 36 In Arabic, the word lijja. 37 In ancient Egyptian, mehi; mehi is often found with the ideogram for ‘captured’, ‘in possession of ’ or ‘a prisoner of ’ and the ideogram for water, as in the accompanying illustrations. 38 From Henri Sottas, La Preservation de la Propriété Funéraire dans l’Ancienne Egypte, Paris, 1913, quoted by Alexandre Piankoff, The Litany of Re (Paris: Bollingen Series, Egyptian Texts and Representations) 40: 4. 39 This lament is reiterated almost verbatim by cAliya. 40 Wente 1990: 216/7 in Meskill 2004: 82 . 41 Sociologist Sayyid cAwes, Min milamih al-mugtamc al-masri ilmucassar zahirit irsal al-rasa’il ila darih al-Imam al-Šaf cei (‘From Observations on Contemporary 25

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Egyptian Society: The Phenomenon of Sending Letters to the Tomb of alImam Šafcei’) (translation: Cairo: Dar Mutabc al-Ša cb, 1965). cAwes studied the contemporary letters sent to the mediaeval sheikh, al‑Imam Shafcei, in his mausoleum in Cairo in the 1950s. Al‑Imam was believed to be a sheikh who in death could act as an intercessor with God to procure justice and the return of stolen property (ibid: 73–78). As in the ancient letters to the dead, these letters were important missives dealing with legal complaints and injustice, subjects requiring the facility of intercession the dead were believed to possess. More recently, on my last visit in February 2009, I spied a tiny missive sitting on the canopy covering the sheikh’s tomb, and a woman sitting on the carpets in the women’s section of the shrine, writing on a crumpled and obviously used scrap of paper. She told me that she had come from Tanta to request that Imam alShafcei remove the magic spell which had been cast on her daughter causing her to ‘feel pain in her breasts’. When she finished writing, she said that she would slip this paper under the grate in hopes that the Imam could intercede on her daughter’s behalf and grant her respite from this affliction.

Chapter 9

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It would have been useful for this study if I could have ascertained the sounds of the words of the original laments but phonetic transcription of texts is rarely provided for the non-specialist. Moreover, the vowelling of these consonant clusters is not known. Only when a reader is conversant with hieroglyphic conventions can the sound patterns be discerned. Not competent to analyse either hieroglyphics or the various languages of Old, Middle and Late Egyptian, I have been, therefore, dependent on the accuracy of translations done by Egyptologist colleagues who worked from the original texts. By furnishing phonetic transcriptions of the hieroglyphic texts (in many cases), the late Professor R.O. Faulkner, the Egyptologist who translated both the Pyramid Texts and in particular, ‘The Cannibal Hymn from the Pyramid Texts’ in Journal of Egyptian Archeology 10 (1924): 97–103 and the Coffin Texts, The Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts (Vols. I, II and III respectively) (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1973, 1977, 1978), helped me to detect and analyse these oral features. The annotation ‘Pyr +number’ is the short form I have adopted to designate an individual Pyramid Text . Paul Kahle argued in 1925 that the cidid were composed in the basit metre but this seems unlikely since the lamenter as composer and performer is able to shift stresses within the line, and thus elongate or shorten the vowels according to the melodic phrase and the pulse of the laments. Mercer also observed that some ancient Egyptian hymns and particular segments of the Pyramid Texts exhibit structural form: incremental repetition, synonymous parallelism, doubling or repetition and the pairings of lines, variation in endrhyme and use of couplets and triplets in Literary Criticism of the Pyramid Texts (London: Luzac & Co., 1956). In Arabic, jilwa. As Dell Hymes revealed in his analysis of oral narrative in In Vain I Tried to Tell You (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), the determining axis of variation and thus, the structure of a tale, reveals its inherent logic and conceptual form.

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The type of bird is not known from the text. The brackets [] are found in the original translation by Mercer and indicate additions to the text. These ‘shifters’ are also found in the ancient laments and feature clearly in sections of the Pyramid Texts as well as in the funerary texts recorded by Jaroslav Cerny in Deir al-Medina, the hamlet close to the temple of Medinat Habu and the village of Kom Lolah, ‘A Community of Workmen at Thebes in the Ramesside Period’ (Le Caire: Bibliothèque d’Études 50 [1973]: 6). Clearly, it is an aspect of ancient performance that has survived to the present with the function of creating pathos in the bereaved. I had imagined the respondent, cAliya to be less capable of composing and charting the flow of laments in funerals but discovered on another occasion that she was independently knowledgeable of hundreds of other laments. In this session, she had performed the role of ‘respondent’ as a way of acknowledging the prowess and superior rank of her partner, the accomplished lamenter, Balabil. Budge 1920: cxxviii; 192b. Pyr 208 from the Pyramid of Unas and Pyr 174 from the Pyramid of Pepy I (ibid: cxxviii, 15). This image suggests the existence of a mound within an embanked space and with a primitive structure on top. Pyr 164, 174 and 268 from the Pyramid of Teti, or Pyr 427 from the Pyramid of Pepy I. Budge 1920: cxxiv, as in the word (šuna) which appears in the much later Theban Recension of the Book of the Dead (see Budge 1911) with the same meaning. From the tombs of Pepy I, Meri-en-Ra and Pepy II as recorded by Budge (1920) and originally illustrated by Kurt Sethe in Altaegyptischen Pyramidtexte (Leipzig: 1908–22), vols. 1–2. Pyr 806 (ibid: 457a). There are several variants of the shrine ideogram including a simple domed house with two flag poles at each end. This is concretised, for example, in the tomb of Teti where the ceiling above the sarcophagus is pointed like a pyramid and the ‘sky’ is painted blue and arrayed with gold stars. Pyr 1446a.

Chapter 10

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From the translation of the Papyrus New York Metropolitan Museum of Art 35.9.21.7 1–4; Goyon, Papyrus d’Ilmouthes, p. 33 by Jan Assmann in Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, translated from the German by David Lorton (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005): 118. The annotation CT is used to designate a Coffin Text. Like ‘a robber who snatches a child’ in Sir Alan Gardiner and Kurt Sethe in Egyptian Letters to the Dead mainly from the Old and Middle Kingdoms (London, 1928: 2. Extracted from a Letter to the Dead found from the Old Kingdom (VIth Dynasty) ca 2,300–2,150 BC. See Budge 1920: civ. Qus is mentioned in the oldest Pyramid Texts compendium at the tomb of Unas in a transition text marking the passage of the soul through the Akhet region: ‘Unas has released his outflow to earth in Qus’ (Translation of Pyr 169 in James P. Allen, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Text (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature,

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2005): 43–4. Oral Communication, Professor Christiana Koehler in her lecture on ‘Recent Excavations in the Early Dynastic Cemetery at Helwan’, the NetherlandsFlemish Institute, Cairo, 12 February 2009. Jéquier in Le Monument Funéraire du Pepi II (Le Caire: 1936–41), alluded to by I.E.S. Edwards in The Pyramids of Egypt (London: Penguin, 1988 [1947]): 164. Oral communication, Professor Salima Ikram, Cairo, March 2009. Pyramid Text 467 quoted in James P. Allen 2005: 161. Oral communication, cAmm cAbdu, a native of this Upper Egyptian village and doorkeeper working in Heliopolis in Cairo, 1980–83. W.M. Flinders Petrie in Naqada 29I563, S.D. 32 and Diospolis p. 34 S.D. 30 in W.M. Flinders Petrie and J.E. Quibell, Naqada and Ballas (London: Egyptian Research Account (ERA) and British School of Archaeology in Egypt, 1896). Umm Seti was a famous British Egyptologist who lived many years in the village of al‑cAraba al‑Madfuna near the temple of Abydos. I consulted her on several occasions during the period of 1981–1983 on the subject of traditions of the ancient Egyptians, manifest in contemporary practice and this was one of the examples she gave. Via a pun in the end-rhyme damiyana, and ‘protected’, the soul is drenched in the flood and at the same time, protected. Zandee in Death as an Enemy According to Ancient Egyptian Conceptions (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1960). Oral communication, Professor Betsy Bryan in a lecture at the American Research Centre in Egypt (March 2009). Professor Bryan recently revealed, as a result of recent excavations and statuary found in situ, that Mut was depicted as a lion-headed goddess, sometimes as a cat, and believed to be related to the lion-headed goddess, Sekhmet and the cat goddess, Bastet. So‑called riši or ‘feather’ coffins (i.e. coffins painted with figures of the two lamenting goddesses) also became very popular in the Dynastic period, in A.J. Spencer, Death in Ancient Egypt (London: Penguin, 1982): 151. Some rock‑cut tombs of the IInd dynasty in ancient Egypt were ‘adapted to serve as the deceased’s house even to the extent of having a toilet’ in Henri Frankfort, Ancient Egyptian Religion: an Interpretation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948): 92. This is not peculiar to Egypt though, as the same phenomenon is evinced in the cemetery of the Old Believers (Staroveri) in Ust‑Tsilma, North‑Western Siberia (cf the video, To Live in Silence Like Water, Pentikainen and Wickett 1990). This visual study documents the wedding and funerary laments of the Old Believers of this region and was edited by the author. My enquiry as to the nature of the tomb was prompted by my thesis advisor, Professor Margaret Mills. When reviewing my text, she asked why the lamenter’s trousers would be soaked and I was obliged to conceive of an explanation. This evolved into the realisation of how the cosmology underpinned lament meaning. From the collection published by Rushdi Salih 1971: 270. The mast pole of Abu’l Hajjaj had been taken down by the Antiquities Department before I met al-Hajj cAbdulla but it remained indelibly printed on his consciousness that this was his ritual role to perform. His camera not only recorded the treasures of Tutankhamun’s tomb but also the 1925 mulid celebrations as performed before the excavation of Luxor temple.

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His footage constitutes a valuable testament to the legacy of ancient traditions and folk performance, therefore. Noted at the mulid of Abu al- cEla, Bab al-Luk, Cairo, and also in Luxor by J.W. McPherson, Moulids of Egypt (Cairo: Nile Press, 1943). Oral communication, al-Hajj cAbdulla, 1986. In this respect, this portal was not unlike a ‘soul door’ in ancient Egyptian tombs, the ingress and egress of the migratory soul. This was used particularly with the word rnpj in James P Allen, Middle Egyptian: an Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 434. From Alan Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar, 3rd edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1957): xcviii. A more literal translation of the past tense conditional could be ‘if they grew old’. From Wirth P.L .165 Fig. 5 quoted in Lechler, ‘The tree of life in Indo-European and Islamic cultures’, Fig. 35 and p. 409. Ibid: 409. In Arabic transliteration: hat rahilak figuffit iššuna. The Egyptologists excavating the tombs found that the hasira in the tomb was woven in the exact pattern of reed mats produced locally in that year, in W.M. Flinders Petrie, Tarkhan II (London: 1914). In Arabic: mikahla hamra. See Petrie 1914; and Petrie et al. Otherwise, the concept of dast (literally, ‘place of honour, seat of honour’) is not easily glossed. These are on display in the British Museum. W.M. Flinders Petrie, Funerary Furniture of Egypt (1937). Ibid. Oral communication in a lecture by Nigel Strudwick at the Netherlands Institute, Cairo, March 1990. I am grateful to Professor William Peck of the Detroit Institute of Arts for directing me to the phenomenon of the symplegma for interpretation of the ‘Wedding in death’ theme. James P. Allen argues that this represents the literal personification of moisture, rather than the goddess herself: i.e., ‘Unas has mated with moisture’ (2005: 28). A vulture goddess, tutelary goddess of Upper Egypt, ibid: 437. Cf Lexikon der Ägyptologie IV; 1975–86 in Lexikon der Ægyptologie (I–VI) Wiesbaden, 1978: 268ff. The bed featured a double pillow with only one figure lying upon it in W.M. Flinders Petrie, Gurneh (London: Bernard Quaritch 1909): 12. In Deshasheh, white dresses were placed at the side of the body and in Tarkhan, large plain wrappers and lengths of linen were placed in coffins in Petrie 1901: 16, 31–2. Museum display, Artefact # BM 35962‑35965. John Garstang, Tombs of the Egyptian 3rd Dynasty at Reqaqnah and Bet Khallaf (London: Archibald Constable and Co, 1904). Khaibit is also found with the same meaning in the Theban Recension of the Book of the Dead; see Budge, E.A. Wallis, A Hieroglyphic Vocabulary to the Theban Recession of the Book of the Dead (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co.

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1911): 220. Tomb 3035 was equipped also with false door: a ‘niche where visitors to the tomb placed their offerings to the dead’ and the superstructure was barrelvaulted, like present-day Nubian houses in Walter B. Emery, The Royal Tombs of Ballana and Qustul of the Archaic Period (Leiden: Nederlands Institut voor Het Nabije Oosten, 1962). 49 In the village of al-cAiyaiyša, as described in Part I, Chapter 2, the hema was the religious sanctuary of the Coptic community: an open-air roofed space supported by pillars, not a tent (its traditional meaning). The structure did not resemble a conventional church, bore no crosses and there was no priest in the village. In the laments sing by cAliya, hema (pl. hiyam) was the word used to describe the abode on the ‘seas’ (buhur) where the deceased would dwell, a metaphorical sanctuary. hema was also the term by which ancient Bedouin stone sanctuaries in the Arabian peninsula were known (Robertson-Smith). It seems to have retained the meaning of sanctuary in actuality and in the context of laments. 50 Clusters of motifs ranging from pomegranate trees to lions and the sun emerging from the holy Kacaba at Mecca are sketched on the exterior to celebrate the return of the hajj or hajja to Luxor from pilgrimage to Mecca, and to herald his or her achievement, wealth and eminence. 48

Chapter 11

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In Karelia, for example, the deceased is similarly believed to traverse water and travel down a winding path in Lauri Honko, ‘Balto-Finnic Lament Poetry’ in Studia Fennica 17 (1974): 143–202. In the eleventh century, after the advent of Sidi Abu’l Hajjaj al-Uqsori from Iraq in the fourteenth century, a minaret was built, until recently believed to be Fatimid, and then a mosque within the ruins of an earlier Coptic church and Luxor temple, dedicated to Sidi Abu’l Hajjaj. The entire town of Luxor was contained within the precinct of the Luxor temple until 1943 when the Antiquities Department decided to move the population from the site of the temple to surrounding area. My collaborator, Jamal Zaki al-Din al Hajaji and his brother, al-Nubi are members of the Hajajiyya clan, descendants of Luxor’s famous sheikh. The original text in French reads as follows: ‘les ordonnances ne duraient qu’un temps puis qu’elles tombaient dans l’oubli et les gens recommencaient à célébrer les funérailles avec les pleureuses à gage’. Members of Sufi sects perform whirling in remembrance (dhikr) of God to achieve a state of oneness or union at weekly meetings known as hadra. Oral communication, Fayza Haikal, Professor of Egyptology, American University of Cairo, 1990.

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INDEX

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Index Abu’l Hajjaj, Sidi  24, 58, 61, 69, 209, 286, 288 Abu Lughod, Lila  100, 101, 104, 278 al-cAbnoudi, cAbdelrahman  5 al-cAiyaiyša  36, 37, 45, 188, 194, 202, 214 al-cAsasiif  5, 150 al-Bayadiyya  102, 105, 184, 198, 201 al-Bacyarat  13, 230, 249 al-Hajaji, Jamal Zaki al-Din  23, 24, 25, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 46, 49, 50, 121, 278–80, 288 al-Khadim, Sacd  161 al-Imam Shaf cei  169, 195, 283 al-Shami, Hasan  278 Alexiou, Margaret  105, 137, 204, 279, 281 Allen, James P.  xvii, 179, 181, 196, 283, 285, 287 Anubis, ancient Egyptian god  63, 187, 188, 247 Archangel  82, 135, 160, 261, 262 c Awes, Sayyid  283 c Azra’il/angel of death  10, 27, 44, 93, 97, 123–4, 187, 232, 260 ba  152, 202, 204 badaya/ ‘the one who begins’  27, 30, 70, 99, 106, 150, 152, 153, 175, 178, 179 Balabil  (See Lamenters) bier  18, 20, 21, 46, 68, 72, 89, 123–6, 128, 132, 145, 150, 163–5, 190, 204 wheel-barrow/hasaniyya/‘boat’ 201, 229 Bloch, Maurice and J. Parry  111

Boddy, Janice  108–9 Book of the Dead, ancient Egyptian  xvii, 151, 153, 154, 179, 196, 203, 210, 213, 282, 285 Bourdieu, Pierre  109 Briggs, Charles  104 Caraveli/Caraveli-Chaves, Anna  107 Cerny, Jaroslav  182, 285 circumcision female  109–10, 279–80 male  57, 62, 109–10, 127, 140, 173, 227 Coffin Texts, ancient Egyptian  xvii, 183, 188–90, 192, 194, 196, 198, 231, 240, 283, 284 communication between the living and the dead XXXIX  141 Concordances ancient Egyptian laments  162, 245–8 comparative index of lament themes  243–4 contemporary laments  249–76 theory of  xvi, xvii, 121, 240, 241 consummation of marriage  65, 87, 111, 128, 134–7, 219, 230 (See Wedding in death XXVI) context of recording  xv, xvii, 23–50, 57 Copt/Coptic  34, 38, 42, 44, 55, 56, 69, 110–11, 141, 197, 236, 287, 288 funerary customs  49, 129, 130, 139, 221, 233, 235 lamentation  111, 124, 236 lexicon  14, 58, 158, 216, 230 rituals  54, 88, 136, 215, 216, 239

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cosmology of the afterlife  143–230, 231–41 Pyramid Texts 171, 181–2 David, Rosalie  191, 193, 208 Davies, Norman de Garis  147, 149–50, 191, 223 death (See Lament themes I, II, IX) as destruction  10, 121, 164, I as divorce  141, 184 description of  126, IX Deir al-Madina  59, 169, 213–4, 217, 246 Description de l’Ēgypte  80, 100, 156 Diodorus  156 Djed pillar  208 Djemé (Medinat Habu)  54 Douglas, Mary  108 Dubisch, Jill  108 Dunand, Francoise  190, 277 Egyptian Antiquities Service  80 Emery, W.B.  218, 223, 227, 287 emotion, performance of  99–107 authenticity  71, 99–107 construction of  104–7, 119 ethnoarchaeology  121 ethnopoetics  279 Eye, the Evil  4, 69, 108, 141 Faulkner, R.O.  151, 171–2, 196, 219, 281–2, 284 Feld, Steven  98, 283 fertility  49, 56, 74, 82, 85, 87, 107–9, 111, 126, 160, 171, 212, 229, 233 folklore  80–1, 131, 135, 278, 280 methodology 33, 121 Sa cidi/Upper Egyptian  xv, 23–4, 31, 50, 127, 129, 158, 161, 173, 213–5, 237, 280 Foster, John  174 Frankfort, Henri  182, 203–4, 222, 286 Fu’ad, Nicmat Ahmad  239

Gabriel, the archangel  18, 93, 250, 275 Galal, Mohamed  80, 81, 124, 232, 278 Gardiner, Sir Alan  155, 229, 287 and K. Sethe  168, 185, 199, 229, 285 Garstang, John  198, 215, 223–4, 287 gender  94, 107, 111, 127, 139, 186, 205, 278, 283 differentiation  94, 127, 139 ideological construction of  107–11 roles  94 Gilgamesh, epic of  193–4, 278 Graves, Robert  223 Guksch, Christian  xvi, 121 Guksch, Heike  283 Haikal, Fayza  179, 281, 288 hajl  70 Hathor, ancient Egyptian goddess  36–7, 205, 207 Hawass, Zahi  283 healing  74, 87, XXV, 135, 195, 226, 247, 263 Herodotus  xvii, 73, 107, 156, 182, 236 Herzfeld, Michael  110 Hifni, cAbdelrahim  50, 81, 187, 278 Hornell, James  200 Hornung, Eric  186, 192, 200, 202, 204, 209, 212–3, 230 Horus, Egyptian god  156, 160, 187, 205 houris of heaven  87–8, 111–12, 135, 221, 222 (See Wedding in death XXVI) Huntingdon, Richard and Peter Metcalf  231, 278 Hymes, Dell  xvi, 279, 284 iconography, tomb  xvii, 80, 149, 150, 156, 204, 230, 236 iconotropy  224 IDDabcaiyya  102 ideogram  155, 158, 167, 180 improvisation  80, 99, 153, 175

INDEX

indigo  74, 96, 115, 123, 137, 191, 279, 281 Intermediate Period, First  xvii, 183 inundation  xvii, 9, 27, 49, 61, 74, 81, 94, 129, 134, 166, 174, 181–3, 201–2, 204, 206–8, 210, 230, 233–4, 247 irruh/soul/life-force  69, 94, 114, 150, 152, 187, 203, 229, 232, 248, Isis, ancient Egyptian goddess  37, 155–6, 158, 160, 168–9, 182 and Nephthys 147, 149, 152–4, 175 Lamentations/Songs of Isis and Nephthys 150–4 Jahin, Salah  240 jewellery  71, 132, 198 Johnson, Benedicte Grima  101 Jones, Michael  283 ka house  196, 197, 228 Kahle, Paul  80, 271, 277, 284 Karnak  34–6, 60–1, 106, 171, 203, 218, 237, 249, 280 Kennedy, John  124, 231 kinesics  143–70, 248 postures of lament 11, 150, 152 semiotics of gesture 154–9 kinship  91, 94, 112, 239, 274 typology 81 Kligman, Gail  110, 111, 279 Kom Lolah  3, 4, 12, 14, 17, 23, 51–3, 55–7, 61, 63, 184, 197, 209, 237, 249, 277, 284 Kramer, Samuel  105, 185 Kriss, R. and H. Kriss-Heinrich  280 lament apologia for  105–6, 235 as autobiography  115–9 composition  34, 74, 94–8, 171–80, 183, 241 function  91, 130, 151–2, 240, 24 leitmotifs  xvii, 165, 169, 233–4 performers  (See Lamenters) social history  235–8



303

structure  xvii, 94, 97, 133, 152–4, 174, 179, 277, 279–80, 284 styles  xv, 151–2, 171, 175, 179, 191, 279–81 Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys  150– 154 Lamenters Afkar  31, 167, 184, 207, 249 cAliya  38, 39-40, 101, 104, 152, 159, 168, 175, 179, 194–5, 208, 228, 249, 283–4, 288 al-Bayadiyya  102, 105, 184, 198, 201, 249 Balabil  36, 38–45, 74, 99, 101, 104, 114, 116, 124, 155, 159-60, 175, 178, 185, 188, 193–5, 197, 201, 206, 208, 221, 249, 278–9, 282 IDDabcaiyya  102, 249 Nafisa  23, 46–9, 64, 72, 249 Qomiyya 12–21, 26, 48, 52, 63, 69, 81, 134, 160, 184, 215, 249 Šargawiyya  102–3, 160, 167, 171, 190, 237, 249 Tariyya  6–8, 10–11, 13, 16, 71, 101–2, 116, 118, 166, 184, 194, 201, 211, 237, 249 Tayha  25–8, 49, 57, 184, 209, 249 Umm Salih  51, 168, 249 Zeinab  29–30, 67, 102, 228, 249 Lament themes (in alphabetical order) Abandonment  XVII, 129–30, 243, 246 Accoutrements of the deceased  83, 86, 89, 122, XXXI, 125, 132, 136, 138, 150, 210, 222–9, 244, 247, 265–6 Agent of death/angel of death  III, 123–4 Communication between the living and the dead  XXXIX, 237 Death as a destructive force  I, 123 Deceased after death  XI, 127 —as a bird  XX, 131, 202–5 —crosses waters  XVI, 129, 199–202 —in nature  XII, 127 —in the grave  X, 126

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—is asked to return  XVIII, 130 —returns/will return  XIX, 130 —wears elegant clothes  XXX, 137–8 —wears ritually coloured garments  XXIX, 137, 191–4 Description of the state of death  IX, 126 Dialogue  XXIII, 133 Directionality  XV, 129 Funerary customs  XXII, 132–3 Grief and suffering  XLIII, 142 Hair  XXVIII, 137 Healing of the deceased  XXV, 135 Laments against fate  XL, 141 Laments for the reassurance of the deceased  XXIV, 139 Laments for the self/ complaint  XLI, 141 Nourishment of the deceased XXXVII  140 Offerings  XXXVI, 139 Omens of death  II, 123 Passage to the afterlife  XIII, 128, 194–6 Protection of the dead  XXVII, 136 Protection of the living by the deceased  XXXVIII, 140, 229–30 Purification of the deceased  IV, 124, 188–9 Resurrection  XXI, 131, 199 Sacrifice  XXXV, 139 Shame  XLII, 142 Shroud  VIII, 125–6 Stairs/ladder  XIV, 128, 196–8 Stature of the deceased  XXXIII, 139 Tears  XXXII, 138–9 Tomb  XXIV, 133–5; 203–19 Turban  VI, 125 Washing  V, 124 Wedding in death  XXVI, 135–6; 219–22 Wrappings  VII, 125, 189–91 Lament traditions Byzantine  204, 279, 281 Chinese  110, 111 Finno-Ugric  110 Greek  105, 107, 110, 137, 219, 277, 279, 281

Kaluli  98, 283 Karelian  110 Paraiyar  110 Roman  (See Graeco-Roman) Romanian  110 Staroveri  110 Warao  104 Lane, Edward  68, 74, 80, 125, 231–2 Late Period  150, 152–3, 162, 164, 168, 204, 231, 245–6, 248 Legrain, Georges  80, 231 letters to the dead  168–9 Lexova, Irene  156 Lichtheim, Miriam  152, 154, 183 Lucas, Arthur  74 Lüddeckens, Erich  162–3, 182, 245 Lutz, Catherine  104 Medinat Habu  4, 54–5, 59, 61, 63, 70, 79, 169, 217, 277, 284 ‘man without heirs’  (See Personae) manaha  70, 115, 124, 133 Mariette, Auguste  206 Martin, Emily  110–11 Maspero, Gaston  50, 80, 282 mast pole/sari  28, 93, 208–9, 233, 286 Meinhardus, Otto  110 Menna, the tomb of  196, 227, 281 menstruation  107 Mercer, Samuel  174, 185, 187, 209, 219–20, 284 messenger  133, 135, 141, 164, 185, 247, 261 methodology Dell Hymes  xvi, 279, 284 diachronic  xvi ethnoarchaeology  121 synchronic  xvi Middle Kingdom  xvii, 162, 165, 168, 198, 224, 228, 245–8, 285 Mills, Margaret  286 Min, ancient Egyptian god  182, 230, 234 Morenz, Siegfried  205 mound  129, 134, 166, 182 ancient Egyptian creation myth  xvii, 208, 234 primeval  182, 201, 230, 234, 245–6, 254

INDEX



tomb  9, 52, 134, 166–7, 180, 194, 201, 212, 216–7, 226 mujammalat (‘compliments’)  91, 99 mušahara  67, 70, 107, 108 Mut, ancient Egyptian goddess  60, 187, 203, 219, 286 myth  xvii, 10, 24, 81, 124, 135, 152, 154, 158–9, 161, 167, 180–2, 185–7, 200–3, 206, 208, 210, 212, 216, 219–21, 233 creation of Egypt  182, 230, 234 origins of lament  152, 155–7, 160, 241 nadb/naddaba  33, 70, 100, 145, 68, 99 nadr/ex-voto  58 Nafisa (See Lamenters) Nagada/Naqada  34, 157, 193, 200, 209, 210, 212 Nacoum, Nabil  278 Neferhotep, tomb of  145–7, 149, 161, 164, 165, 212, 222, 245–8, 281 Neith, ancient Egyptian goddess  189 New Kingdom  145, 148, 161–2, 165–6, 168, 192, 194, 205, 222, 224, 229, 236, 245, 248, 282–3 Nubia, Egyptian  108, 231 Nubian  69, 112, 198 Nun, the primeval ocean  181–2, 207 Nut, ancient Egyptian goddess  157, 160, 181, 205–6, 220, 221 oasis/al-wah  15, 65, 82, 171, 195, 206 Offerings (See Lament theme XXXVI) Old Kingdom  xvii, 147, 150, 166, 168, 180, 183, 185, 188, 196, 199, 216, 217, 223, 235, 240–1, 245, 282, 285 orality  166, 168–9, 171 Osiris, ancient Egyptian god  147, 150, 152–6, 160, 169, 175, 182, 184, 185–7, 191–2, 194, 206, 208–10, 216, 224, 234, 239 Passage to the afterlife  (See Lament theme XIII) patriarch/al  10, 81, 83, 149, 171, 184

305

Pausanias  182 Peck, William  287 Pentikainen, Juha  11, 280, 286 performance of lament  xv–xviii, 5, 11, 31, 34, 36, 46, 57, 71, 80, 94, 98, 132, 154, 159, 162, 164–6, 168–9, 171, 174–5, 178–80, 235–7, 240–1, 248, 277, 279, 281, 286 ancient Egyptian 150–4, 284 and emotion 99–119 antiphonal 152, 154, 171, 175, 179, 241 dialogic 104, 106, 133, 154, 241 timbre and melody 36, 40, 50, 175, 179, 284 Personae of lament  81–94, 149, 234, 239, 249, 271 blood brother  L, 16, 81, 90, 278 ‘bride’  XLIX, 8, 17, 59, 60, 62, 65, 81, 85, 88, 89, 109–10, 118, 124, 126–9, 134–8, 141, 174, 198–9, 208, 216, 218, 221–3, 226, 232, 278 ‘bridegroom’  XLVIII, 72, 81, 86, 87, 90, 110–11, 127, 135–6, 221, 278 brother  L, 6, 13–14, 16, 39–41, 81, 90, 104, 115–17, 176–8, 194, 207, 218, 273–4, 278, 288 child  LI, 8, 21, 90, 114, 127, 160, 206, 208, 215, 226, 274, 280 drowned  LVII, 18, 27–8, 81, 93, 131, 134, 138, 167, 182, 186, 207–10, 230, 233 elderly  LIII, 274 husband/father  LXIV, 6, 8–10, 13–16, 40–1, 49, 81–4, 94–5, 102, 127, 131, 141, 147, 149, 163, 165, 167, 177, 201, 205, 208, 211, 214, 225, 230, 234, 245–6, 248, 271, 278 ‘man without heirs’  LIV, 28–9, 73, 81, 91, 94, 168, 274–5 mother  XLV, 8, 9, 16–17, 23, 37, 42–4, 47–9, 81, 85–90, 160, 167, 187, 201, 203, 205, 212– 13, 219, 221, 226, 278 ‘scorpion bite, laments for those who die from’  LIX, 19, 48, 81,

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93–4, 135, 263, 276 sister  89, 94 ‘stranger’ (who dies in foreign lands)  LVI, 20, 25–6, 48, 70, 81, 92–3, 275 ‘woman without heirs’  LV, 274, 278 young man  XLVI, 9, 1–7, 39–41, 81, 86–8, 95, 115, 118–19, 127, 132, 135–8, 211, 222, 272, 278 young woman  XLVII, 17, 32, 43, 65, 81, 88, 95, 97, 137, 192, 204, 211, 272–3, 278 Piankoff, Alexandre  184, 283 pilgrimage  58, 140, 228, 230, 288 pollution  67, 107–8 potency  87, 96, 102, 111, 138, 198, 234, 240 pre-Dynastic period  157, 186, 190, 192, 196, 198, 200, 209–12, 214–18, 224, 227, 229, 235, 241 proscription  xv, 105, 112–13 protection  51, 84, 87, 109, XXXVII, XXVIII, 125, 136 –7, 140–1, 155, 168, 190, 192, 205, 210–11, 219, 223, 229–30, 247 Ptolemaic  152–3, 182, 190, 219, 277 purification  IV, 124, 133, 162, 181, 188, 191, 243, 245, 251 Pyramid Texts  xvii, 152, 155, 158, 167, 168, 171–83, 185–7, 192, 194–9, 202, 209, 219, 230–1, 233–5, 239–41, 243, 282, 284–5 Pyramids  166, 179, 180, 182, 216, 235 Giza  162–3, 165–6, 245, 279 Saqqara  156, 162, 164, 166, 172, 188–9, 193, 196, 217, 227, 245–8, 282

qarin/a/soul double  69, 112, 114, 280 Qus  34, 36, 47, 83, 187–8, 222, 236, 285 Racmoza, tomb of  145 resurrection  xvii, 7, 10, 44, 82, 93, 95, 122, 124, 126–7, XXI, 131–2, 155,

181–6, 197, 199–208, 214, 219, 229, 232–3, 239–40, 244, 246, 253, 258–9, 262 ritha’   81, 277 Roman  110–11, 205, 219, 279, 281 Roth, Ann Macy  283 Rundle-Clark, R.T.  208 Sa cidi/Upper Egyptian dialect  xv, 23–4, 31, 50, 127, 129, 158, 161, 173, 213–15, 237, 280 sailing  ix, 60, 83, 88, 125, 128, 199–200, 233, 252, 256, 263 Salih, Rushdi  50, 80, 128, 232, 280, 286 scorpion (See Personae) Sed/Heb Sed festival  193, 208 semiotic  94, 180, 191, 212, 233, 240 semiotics of gesture/‘sign-vehicles’  145, 154–9 Sennedjem, tomb of  213–14 Seremetakis, Nadia  119 Set, ancient Egyptian god  154, 185–7 Sexuality 109–12 Shellal (first cataract at Aswan)  93, 134–5, 181, 202, 230, 233–4 shroud  28–9, 68, 83, 92, 110, 122, VIII, 124–6, 133, 138, 190, 192, 201, 243 sibuc/birth feast  109, 114, 137, 206 sign 79, 94–8, 101, 109, 132, 138, 142, 154–5, 157–8, 219, 233 Simpson, W. Kelly  168 sirat bani hilal  18, 23, 131, 140, 280 sirat sef ibn yazin  160 sister  16, 40, 62, 69, 99, 114–16, 147, 149, 151–4, 163, 177, 248, 278 Slyomovics, Susan  121 soul/irruh  108, 114, 130, 232 phenomenology  101, 108, 280 transformation  32, 94, 100, 126, 181, 192–4, 202–4, 209, 213, 231, 233, 240–1, 247 soul bird  209 soul double  69, 277, 280 soul house  228-9 Spencer, A.J.  182, 286 staircase  4, 73, 86, XIV, 127–9, 196–7, 233

INDEX

307

Stepped Pyramid  196 ‘stranger’ (who dies in foreign lands) (See Personae) Strudwick, Nigel  287 Sumerian  92, 105, 185, 193 ‘sung-texted weeping’ (Feld)  283 symbol/s  79–99, 94–8, 106–11, 118, 121, 125, 127, 131, 136–8, 157, 162, 164, 180, 182, 189, 192–4, 199, 202, 205–6, 209, 212–13, 216, 218–19, 223–7, 229–31, 233, 240–1 symplegma  219–20, 287

85, 87, 108–9, 113, 131, 134, 140, 151, 162, 192, 197–8, 200–1, 205, 211, 219, 222, 226, 229–30, 249, 280–1 Wilkinson, Sir Gardiner  80, 156 winding path  194, XIII, 243, 255, 288 winnowing  83, 131, 196, 214, 224, 254 ‘woman without heirs’ (See Personae) woods, fruit  49, 84, 87, 126–7, 138, 211, 216, 224, 229, 233, 253, 254, 266, 272

tambourine/tar  70, 150–1, 156 Tariyya  (See Lamenters) Tayha  (See Lamenters) te Velde, H.  185, 227 Todorov, Tzvetan  xvi Tolbert, Elizabeth  108, 100 Theban  145, 194, 205, 212, 229, 282 tombs  146, 150–1 Thebes  162–4 Turner, Victor  xvi

Young, Katharine  280 young man  (See Personae) young woman  (See Personae) Yunis, cAbdelhamid  71

Umm Salih (See Lamenters) Umm Seti  201, 286 van Gennep  231 variation  xvi, 34, 80, 94, 97, 172, 174–5, 179, 240, 284 couplets  20, 37, 46–7, 80, 94, 98, 106, 129, 133, 154, 161, 172, 174, 178, 196, 214, 240, 283–4 triplets  154, 165, 167, 174–5, 178, 279, 284 wajib  11, 70 Watson, Helen  101 Wedding in death  188–9, 110–11, XXVI, 124, 128–9, 134–6, 174, 219–22, 232, 244, 279, 281, 287 Werbrouck, Marcelle  149–50, 152–4, 192, 222, 281 West Bank, Luxor  xvi, 7–9, 13, 15, 31–2, 34, 50–1, 58–9, 63, 67, 69,

Zandee, J.  xvi, 121, 158, 184–6, 194, 199, 203, 207–8, 236, 286, 300 Zeinab  (See Lamenters)

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