THe House of Life E-Book

ALAN H. GARDINER

• Herausgeber: Harmakis Edizioni
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

House of Life: an institution little known in culture current of those interested in ancient Egypt. Yet, as we will see, was a foundation of extreme importance for the elaboration of various facets of the religious and magical culture of Egypt. According to existing documents, THe House of Life already exists in the Old Kingdom in the 6th dynasty and lasts until the end of the Pharaonic civilization. The available sources are not very talkative about what was done in this laboratory and this is also understandable given its nature. The activities of THe House of Life were varied. Theurgy was about i more secret and refined rituals that had to make the processes of the macrocosm functioned smoothly and extended theirs beneficial influence in society. The communion of the sovereign with the solar entities, as an intermediary of them, was the subject of rites and appropriate ceremonies. The defense of the King from enemies follows the same technique used against Ra and del Evil Apophis: in the "Book to Bring Down Apophis" are described by thread and by sign the ways of making images of the Evil One and the related deprecatory formulas. The staff of THe House of Life also practiced natural magic intended to assist people in the various vicissitudes of life. Yes presumes that the consecration of amulets and magical texts also condoms took place in this place.

Leseprobe

ALAN H. GARDINER

THE HOUSE OF LIFE

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ISBN: 9788831427203

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THE HOUSE OF LIFE

IN preparing my edition of the papyrus generally known as the Golenischeff Glossary I have had occasion to look into the evidence for the ‘House of Life’. That institution is vaguely familiar to Egyptologists as the place where scribes were employed or trained, but the general works barely mention it,1and singularly little attention appears to have been paid to the subject. My own investigations have brought to light nothing startlingly new, but it will be useful to possess a collection of the evidence upon which conclusions must necessarily be based. There are doubtless some examples that I have overlooked, but what-ever deficiencies might have been found have been lessened by the help of several friends.2

The Berlin dictionary (I, 515) contents itself with the ambiguous definition Haus der Schriftgelehrten and omits the most important reference of all, that to the well-known naophorous statue of the ‘chief physician Udjeharresnet’ in the Vatican, recently re-edited with an admirable commentary by G. Posener in La premiere domination perse en Egypte, pp. 1 ff. The passage relating to the (op. cit., 21) needs so much more discussion than most of our other material that I begin with it, in spite of its late date. After that I shall revert to a chronological order.

(1) Only the essential phrases will be given in hieroglyphic here, since the text can be studied in Posener’s book, or in Schafer’s article (see below). The translation runs: ‘His Majesty King Darius commanded me to return to Egypt ………… in order to restore the department(s) of the House(s) of Life ........ after (they had fallen into) decay. The foreigners carried me from land to land and delivered me back into Egypt according as the Lord of the Two Lands had commanded. I did as His Majesty had commanded me; I furnished them with all their staffs3 consisting of persons of rank, not a poor man’s son among them. I placed them in the charge of every learned man4 [in order to teach them?] all their crafts. His Majesty commanded them to be given all (manner of) good things in order that they might exercise all their craft(s). I equipped them with all their ability5 and all their apparatus which was on record in accordance with their former condition. . This His Majesty did because he knew the virtue of this art to revive all that are sick and to commemoratefo r ever the name(s)o f all the gods, their temples, their offerings and the conduct of their festivals.’

The crux of the passage lies in the plural pronoun of and to solve this problem it looks as though we should have to know what stood in the lacuna after . There Schafer (ZAS 37, p. 74, n. 1) assumed the name of a second building co-ordinated with , and as the first element in the name of that building he took the second of . Posener rightly rejects this view, pointing out that the spelling is common. In pre-Ptolemaict imes it is perhapsa little less commont han , but many exampleso ccur and are logically quite in order, since the first of is the word for ‘house’ to be read phonetically pr, whereas the second is determinative of the entire compound as in , , .

What is absolutely decisive in favour of Posener’s view is that concludes a line, and among the many texts on this carefully executed statue there is not a single example of a word divided between two lines. Posener, following up the idea expressedi n the title to Schafer’s article Die Wiedereinrichtungein er Arzteschule inSais restores ‘of Sais’ in the lacuna. This did not agree with the traces that I had seen to the right of the break6 whilst making a collation many years ago, but as my own indica-tions were not quite in accord with what is visible on the rather indistinct photograph published in Bessarione, iv (1898), Pls. 3-4, I applied to Pater A. Pohl to help me with a collation. He, in company with Pater Dyson and Professor Tulli, the Director of the Egyptian Gallery of the Vatican, has taken great pains to gratify my wish, and I express to the three scholars my most cordial thanks. The adjoining cut (fig. 1) shows what is still visible, and Pater A L Pohl adds the valuable comments that (1) the missing top sign cannot have been higher than (2) the next sign is not merely a horizontal FIG. 1. one, but points upwards,( 3) the third sign is horizontal,a nd (4) what is seen centrally below this is almost certainly part of a hieroglyph, not merely the edge of the break.

Fig. 1

Studying these facts with care, I am convinced that the last two signs are , for if the reader will examine the published photograph of ‘lato destro’ he will there find clear examples of showing that the point of the arrow is a simple horizontal stroke, and the spacing of beneath it agrees perfectly with the traces in the lacuna. For the preceding signs I very hesitatingly suggest . The phrase may well be con-strueda s a plural ‘the department(s) of the House(s) of Life dealing with medicine’, lit. ‘of acting7a s a physician’, on the same principlea s when the Egyptianw writes for ‘ye shall speak with your mouth(s)’; the alternative would for him, no doubt, have implied that each person had several mouths.8 Similarly, each House of Life will have possessed only one medical department.

I submit this solution not as by any means certain, but as the best available in the circumstances.I f it is correct,Udjeharresnet’s missionw ill have been to restoret he medical departments, not in Sais alone,but throughout the whole of Egypt. The expression ‘department of the House of Life’ occurs only here, and seems to require the further definition which, if my restoration be accepted, it actually receives. Some such definition is all the more likely since Udjeharresnet, not being a first prophet of Neith or of some other god, but only a ‘chief physician’, courtier, and high official, can hardly be supposed to have possessed the qualifications to reform the ‘Houses of Life’ as a whole. Still, the latter portion of the passage quoted suggests doubts. The words ‘revive all that are sick’ point unmistakably to the art of medicine, and it is Schafer’s merit first to have translated correctly. But how can the commemoration of the names of the gods and so forth be linked up with a mere medical department?

It thus looks as if Udjeharresnet did, after all, reform the Houses of Life in their entirety, although his first sentence refers only to the medical departments. In support of this my ultimate, if very tentative, conclusion I would point to the remarkable iteration of the word ‘all’; would the writer have spoken of ‘all their staffs’, ‘all their crafts’, ‘all their talent’, ‘all their apparatus’, ‘all the gods’, unless he had meant a wholesale restoration of the institutions called by the name ‘House of Life’? Supplementing what the writer says by the knowledge that the Houses of Life were centres of the scribes’ profession, we thus find in the final sentence a fairly comprehensive statement of the activities there pursued. It is in the that medical and religious books were written and there it was that all questions relating to such learned matters were settled.