Published in The Ley Hunter Journal (Winter 1995/96, TLH 124: 2-6). "Secrets of the Nile" In conversation with Paul Devereux, Egyptologist Anthony Donohue gives exclusive news of his astounding discoveries of gigantic rock images at temple sites throughout Egypt PD: In the winter of 1990-91 you noted a 'statue group' hundreds of feet tall based on an eroded rock column in the cliff face behind the New Kingdom (c. 1570-1070 BC) temple of Hatshepsut in Deir el-Bahri, in the Theban mountain massif containing the Valley of the Kings on the western side of the Nile, opposite present-day Luxor (the ancient Thebes). These rock-face features are possibly natural simulacra, or perhaps suggestive shapes enhanced by human art in pre-dynastic times, or even earlier. Can you tell us in simple terms something about this site, and your discovery? AD: Well, Deir el-Bahri takes its name from a Coptic monastery that once stood on the site. It is a dramatic embayment in the Eastern Hills that bore the Nile at Thebes, facing the great temples of Karnak and Luxor across the river, and is the focus of a sacred enclave bounded towards the west and south-west by the Valleys of the Kings and the Queens and by a line of old tombs and mortuary temples towards the east. Though there are indications that it is a very ancient religious centre, today it is dominated by the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut (who reigned approximately between 1471 and 1458 BC). This is one of the most outstanding architectural masterpieces to have survived from Dynastic Egypt, and takes the form of a series of ascending terraces built against the mountainside to give access to a cave sanctuary. But what no one has noticed before is that the temple as a whole (and therefore any monuments that preceded it on the site) is actually built into a rock feature rising hundreds of feet to the full height of the cliffs, that takes the form of a serpent rearing behind an anthropomorph which displays the divine or kingly wig and beard. This is in fact a common motif in pharaonic art, and would have been readily recognised as expressing the protection, or rather generation, by deity of a ruler cast in divine mode. PD: What is the symbolic significance of these images? AD: Within the context of Deir el-Bahri, and Thebes as a whole, recognition of the colossus restores to an established pattern of mythically conceived, and ritually enacted, topographical relationships their symbolic focus. The Western Mountain at Thebes was the time-hallowed resting place, and seat of regeneration, for the honoured dead, and above all for Middle and New Kingdom royalty. In this function it appears to have been experienced in essentially feminine terms, at once sacred to and an expression of the goddess Hathor or her local synonym, the ophidian goddess Meresger. Burial and regeneration in the west were therefore seen as union with the rebirth from the divine feminine, in its complementary roles of spouse and mother. For this there is good documentary evidence, as there is for a masculine image of the eastern bank of the Nile at Thebes, where in the great temple-complex of Amun at Karnak daily renewal of solar energy was the subject of elaborate ceremonial. (Interestingly, there are indicators that at Karnak Amun was the theological successor to an original 'bull-deity', Montu, just as Hathor herself was most often represented in Egyptian art generally in the form of a cow, or of a woman with bovine attributes.) The picture that emerges is one of an intricate network of ritual locations, patterned on the daily course of the sun, whereby renewal of the pharaoh, and of the cosmos he was believed to sustain, was reflected in, and effected by, the symbolic interaction of masculine potency from the east with the receptive and generative femininity of the west. The colossus at Deir el-Bahri appears thus as a nodal point in this intense drama (incidentally making sense of the form and positioning of the temples that lie around it), where the divine essence of the mountain reveals itself as both cultural icon and inherent quality of the living landscape. In more general terms, however, the presence of such simulacra at the major religious sites in Egypt has wider implications. In line with the traditional theological analysis of pharaonic religion, early dynastic references to members of the pantheon, whilst at least in part seen to be centred on a group of 'festishes', have been essentially interpreted in terms of a potentially reconstructable mythology, or at most from a sociological (even at times, a quasi-historical) point of view. Recognition of natural or humanly modified images at key-locations, appropriate to the deities who were venerated there in historical times, ties such 'floating' theology to specific expressions of the environment. At the same time, growing awareness of a continuity of occupation in Egypt since the Palaeolithic, and of the dynamics involved in developmental progress towards a centralised, literate society in short a final rejection of the view that pharaonic civilisation somehow emerged fully formed at the beginning of the dynastic period encourages one to ask whether it may realistically be expected that such patterns of symbolic landscape had their roots in a considerably more remote antiquity, with all the implications that has in terms of archaeological and ethnographic perceptions elsewhere. The enquiry is very much in its infancy, but I personally suspect that it can. PD: How did you come across these simulacra? AD: I had been interested for a long time in the way that Egyptian temples themselves operated as microcosms, and there is a vast amount of evidence, textual and lithographic, that the Egyptians experienced both their natural and manmade environment as a continuous dynamic, expressed in rich, subtle symbolism. In the last five years I have had the opportunity to visit a number of essential sites in Egypt to specifically examine the natural setting in which the temples lay. PD: Now that in itself is something that is rarely done, isn't it? Most people look at the temple to the exclusion of its environmental setting. AD: Which is why no one has really thought about it in general terms before, though there are several examples that have been recognised previously of rock features simulating images familiar in Egyptian religious art. Some of them are known to be referred to in hieroglyphic inscriptions but on the whole they have not been sought or recognised I think because people have looked at Egyptian architecture as self-sufficient. Something that was built rather than something that is part of the whole environment. PD: So this dynamic existing between temples and their natural environment has been noted on and off previously, but its significance hasn't really been taken on board? AD: It has not been taken on board. It seems to me that the parallel is rather like the study of Egyptian language: literary criticism at any sophisticated level came a long time after grammatical analysis, and in the same way the Egyptian temples have been regarded as a source for texts, religious scenes, from which theology and ritual can be reconstructed, or they are regarded as buildings that have an architectural history. But they are considered on the whole discretely not as functioning parts of the environment. PD: So the fact that some (and perhaps the oldest) temples virtually arose out of the landscape is not being clearly seen in Egyptology? AD: It would appear not yet. But such micro-environmental analysis is itself, of course, a relatively recent development in historical geography generally. PD: Yet in some ways it is so very obvious. Why do you think no one has really registered these topographical simulacra and the symbiotic relationship between temple and place? I mean, can a younger generation of researchers see certain things that were invisible to an older generation working within a different mental framework? AD: Yes I think only a small proportion of Egyptologists would be centrally concerned with Egyptian religion and of them perhaps only a few in the way religious structures operated. So, previously, it was not 'in the air'. PD: OK. So the Deir el-Bahri rock-face simulacra was the first observation that you made. Have you gone on to see other examples anywhere else in Egypt that sort of helps to buttress this initial observation? AD: Well, as I mentioned, several others had already been noticed in passing, even in some cases to the extent that they are referred to in Egyptian texts. The surviving evidence for such clearly documented simulacra has been noted as a comment on the texts themselves but no effort has been put into looking at the phenomena of simulacrum as such. With the combination of a religious structure (basically a rock temple or something of the sort) associated with a rock feature and the appropriate theology both of which are present at Deir el-Bahri it becomes possible using the same two criteria to discover similar sites in Egypt elsewhere. PD: So you are not just looking at interestingly-shaped rocks you are combining a given rock with the presence of a temple that actually relates to the image-bearing rock itself, and you are relating that in turn to the specific local mythology from whatever textual documentation that is available AD: Exactly. One cannot always, or indeed usually, expect there to be almost representational evidence of any individual simulacrum. For instance, even the Great Sphinx at Giza is only known to be depicted on a small group of stelae of much later date than that at which the Sphinx is thought to have received its present form; and these were found they could easily not have been in the immediate vicinity of the Sphinx itself. PD: I believe you have gone on to locate quite a number of these simulacrum-temple-mythic sites through Egypt. Now, we cannot here go through all the sites that you have discovered because all that work is pending publication, but could you give us a preview of one of them? In the folder you brought with you, for example, I saw the photo [Figure 1] of a particularly stunning simulacrum of an anthropomorphic face in a rock outcrop. Could you tell us a little about this? AD: This is in the Eastern Desert (between the Nile and the Red Sea) in a place called the Wady Miah. The principle thing to be observed here today is a rock-cut temple [Figure 2]. This is dedicated to the god Min whose worship was particular to the Eastern Desert; indeed he seems to be a personalised expression of the Red Sea hills themselves. There were many much smaller sites in the Eastern Desert often no more than rock shelters and caves dedicated to Min, and he was succeeded in the classical period in a titular way by Pan. References to the adoration of Pan in the Eastern Desert abound. The Romans recognised Min in Pan or Pan in Min. However, there are also pre-dynastic and early historic graffiti in the vicinity of this particular temple, one of which is the earliest known representation of Min in human form, which shows that this particular group of rocks into which the temple is cut was thought to be sacred, a place of access to Min, even at the beginning of Egyptian history. PD: We have this other picture [Figure 3] showing a French archaeologist reclining against the entrance to this temple, and we can see behind him to the right the rocky face of Min from another angle to that in Figure 1. The archaeologist is seemingly unaware of the presence of this simulacrum AD: It is ironic that seems to be so, because this man has shown a very acute awareness of such features in general and so the principle has clearly not escaped him just this particular example! PD: If we look at this simulacrum [Figure 1] it is very dramatic and it has even got a round eye perfectly located. Do you think this is fortuitous weathering or do you suspect that this may be actually artifactually created? AD: Well I think as a group these Egyptian simulacra range from purely natural forms on the one hand to the (highly modified) Sphinx at Giza on the other. Without absolute technical survey it would be very difficult to establish the extent to which some of them have been specifically modified, but in this case it does rather look as though the eye has been heightened by a drill hole. PD: Well, it is certainly a very dramatic example of old Pan himself, staring out of the rock. We will not go into the other sites you've uncovered in any detail, but could you just tell us some of the other locations that you have been exploring? AD: In Middle Egypt a previously known example is at a place called Teheneh el-Gebal. Now 'Taheneh' itself means the forehead, although in general it is thought to be an Egyptian word merely for a crag or prominent rock. In this case, though, it does indeed seem to refer to an actual forehead, as the site is dominated by such a feature. There is documentary and iconographic evidence of a falcon or falcons above the cliffs at Abydos, where the Kings of the first dynasties were buried. Another example seems to be present at El Kab, reproducing the vulture in whose form the local goddess was recognised and so on. PD: So it is building up into quite a list of places! AD: There seem to be about a dozen reasonably well-substantiated examples now. PD: That is most exciting. You said that some of these had been noted almost virtually in passing earlier, two or three of them, and we can also note that other people have noted similar topographical simulacra Vincent Scully comes to mind with the Greek temples aligning to cleft peaks, and so on. But all too often the trail seems to go cold quickly after someone has made one of these observations no one seems to have picked up on it. How do you feel your observations will be received nowadays? Do you think for instance that the advent of so-called 'cognitive archaeology', in which some researchers are trying to look at the mental interactive relationship with landscape by earlier peoples, might make it easier for people today to see the significance of your findings? AD: Well there certainly seems to be an atmosphere of receptivity now. Egyptological colleagues and their counterparts in European archaeology with whom I have discussed these matters seem to have no problem at all. PD: That is very good. Very heartening. Finally, how do you see our understanding of the dynamic of these things developing? I mean, did some pre-dynastic Egyptian wander along, suddenly see a rock that looked like a serpent or a bird or a craggy face and build as it were a mythology around that feature? Or did the feature fortuitously conform to a pre-existing mythology? Or, again, did they have a mythology in their back pocket, so to speak, and deliberately go out and find features that fitted in with that, perhaps helping some suggestive feature along a little if it didn't quite fit the bill? What I'm to say is, did the land speak to the ancient Egyptian mind, helping to actually form mythologies, or did the people mentally project what they wanted to see into the forms of the landscape? Or do you think that perhaps it was a mixture of both? AD: Perhaps a not consciously differentiated amalgam, at least 'originally'? This is an enquiry in which findings in other culture areas may well be helpful. At present, however, it seems possible only to say that pre-dynastic Egyptians, if none earlier, recognised spiritual symbols in the landscape. PD: Very carefully put! Anthony Donohue, thank you very much indeed. |
