Pharaonic Egypt  Household utensils and materials Reed Basket Please note: Some utensils and material are still used today in the same form as in ancient time. Examples are: the reed basket, the reed bag (offa), the reed brush and the ropes     Homes which have become little more than sleeping and leisure facilities in our times, used to be bustling centres of economic activity under the supervision of the mistress of the house. Food, clothing and many simple utensils were made there, often from basic raw materials. Thus, the flax plant had to be turned into fibre, spun into thread, woven into cloth which could be sewn into clothes; grain had to be ground, sieved, made into dough and baked into bread; barley brewed into beer.     In cities there were small manufacturing plants belonging to aristocrats using the same technologies to supply the needs of the wealthier part of the population, but most households were quite self-sufficient as far as basic needs were concerned (cf. the looms in the house of Djehutinefer).     Mending even small and cheap items was of great importance. In a society where energy and transportation were relatively expensive and manpower cheap, investing time in repairs made good economic sense.     The use unearthed utensils were put to is not always evident: a certain plate may have held food, a drill may have been used for making fire or some basket may have served for storing grain. The illustrations on this page are therefore exemplary of technologies rather than utensils proven to have been used for the purposes described in the accompanying text.
	Cutting and piercing     Tools for cutting and cleaving are among the most ancient implements invented by mankind. If at first they were only used for butchering animals, they became more varied as people began to make clothes, build accommodations and accumulate possessions.     The pace of change was slow. During much of Egypt's ancient history knives continued to be made of stone just as they had in pre-historic times; even after metallurgy had been invented and mastered. It was only during the Roman Period that flint blades disappeared completely and were replaced by iron knives even among the general populace.     In households knives were used for cutting foodstuffs, for carving wood and bone, probably for trimming hair, though they had special razors for shaving. They were also employed in situations where we would use scissors. Papyrus and cloth were torn apart or cut with simple blades until Roman times, when the use of shears with blades connected by an iron spring and the later scissors the blades of which were riveted together at a central fulcrum point, became more widespread.     Axes, hatchets rather with short wooden handles, were occasionally used for cleaving, but their heads were made of stone which splintered easily, and later of copper or bronze which grew dull rapidly. Only in the Late Period did they become more useful with the introduction of iron.     Occasionally things had to be stitched together and awls were used to make holes through materials too tough to be pierced with needles.     To many tradesmen their home was also their workshop where they kept and used their tools. Carpenters had quite an array of cutting and drilling implements: Saws, adzes, drills, chisels and the like. Butchers needed knives and cleavers, and every peasant had to keep a sickle for harvesting his corn and a hackle for dressing the flax.
	Smoothing and sharpening     Cutting tools are only as good as their edge. Stone knives and axes were generally not ground but knapped. Resharpening consisted in hitting the blade near its cutting edge flaking off small slivers of stone and leaving behind a razor-sharp ridge.     Metal blades were sharpened by wetting them with a smooth stone, dents were removed by hammering. The edges of the tools were hardened by annealing - heating the tools and letting them cool slowly - and hammering.
	Storing and transporting     Egyptians did not have many possessions, but the few they did have, had to be stored when not in use. Baskets made from reeds growing near-by were cheap and sturdy. Wooden boxes fashioned by professional carpenters were better at keeping mice and rats out, but were also more expensive, while only the richest could afford chests made of alabaster.      Foodstuffs were stored in pots, bags and baskets. These often had handles or the like by which they could be suspended, to prevent rodents from getting at the food. Produce grown in the vegetable garden was gathered in bags which were easy to carry.     Water was poured into heavy earthen containers which had to be carried from the well into the house. Distances to wells were typically short, as groundwater was easily accessible. At times goat skins were also used for transporting water, though probably not in the house as they were awkward to handle.     Other beverages, such as beer, wine or milk were stored in pottery vessels as well. These unglazed wares were quite porous and the moisture seeping out evaporated, cooling the remaining contents. This was desirable with drinking water, but less so with wine. In the Late Period the inside of wine vessels was therfore often coated with resins or wax to prevent seepage. The neck of the amphora was sealed with a stopper of mud to prevent evaporation and further fermentation.
	Preparing and serving food and drink     The preparation and serving of food required quite a few utensils, most of them made of burned clay. Pots, pans, cups, dishes, bottles and the like had to be acquired from professional potters as a normal household would have been highly unlikely to have the necessary kiln, nor the householders the skills for producing even simple Nile ware.    A major task of the housewife or one of her servants was bread making, a back-breaking process of separating the grain from the chaff in a stone or clay mortar, grinding the corn on a hand mill, sieving it, kneading the dough and baking it in the oven which was outside in a yard or on the roof. Whether bread moulds were used at home or only in bakeries is uncertain, but most people would probably have baked simple pitta-like bread, shaped like a thin, flat disk, which is easily prepared and baked in a few minutes.     Food was cooked in earthen vessels, metal being too costly for most. It was served on pottery dishes which were at times decorated, dishes of faience, stone, copper or bronze were used by the wealthy. Plates and spoons have also been found, but it is unknown whether they were used for eating rather than for preparing the food before Roman times.     Traditionally, people in North Africa and the Middle East have eaten from a shared dish placed on the floor using bread to scoop up the food. Ancient Egyptians quite possibly had similar table manners.     Some other kitchen utensils were bottles, jugs, knives, ladles, mills, sieves, and strainers.
	Making fire     Fire was made by rubbing two pieces of wood together, one piece held stationary on the ground, the other twirled between the hands. The resulting friction heated the soft lower fire stick enough to light inflammable kindling.     This whole process was made much easier by the use of the fire drill, a wooden bow the string of which was wound tightly around a spike. With a hollowed out drill cap made of stone or a nut shell the spike was pressed against the fire stick and rotated by moving the bow back and forth.     Petrie was the first to discover how the ancient Egyptians had made fire when he found Middle Kingdom bow drills and fire-sticks at Kahun. This firemaking method seems to date to the Old Kingdom at least.     While Egypt had quite a large number of trees which could be used for fire wood, they probably rarely cut down whole trees for the purpose, as this involved hard work, made more difficult by the kind of axes they had. As women were the ones responsible for cooking, they must have relied on gathering dead branches and other, at times less savoury fuel like dried dung, to keep their fires going. Charcoal, an excellent and expensive fuel, was probably rarely used for cooking.
	Tying things together: string, ropes, cords     With technologies such as buttons, clasps, nails, nuts and bolts or glue not yet invented or unavailable to ordinary householders, things which had to be connected were often tied together. Heads of hatchets were inserted into notches carved in the handle and tied to it with leather strips. Handles for flint knives were made by wrapping the blunt end of the blade with some string. The cut of robes was loose and they were held close to the body with cords. Loin cloths were tied around the waist.     Other things have not changed that much: just as we still do, they hung up things on cords, tied their (seldom worn) shoes with laces, strung beads on strings and tied them around their wrists, hung amulets around their necks, wrapped possessions in a piece of cloth and tied it into a bundle, and ran running cords through the hem of woollen bags so they could be pulled shut.     The raw materials for these strings and cords were animal and plant fibres, rawhide, and leather. Fibres were spun into threads, some as fine as a third of a millimetre, and two or more strands were twisted into string. Flax, palm fibre, rush, papyrus, and various grasses were used for coarse ropes. Two-strand ropes were sometimes doubled and redoubled, resulting in thick ropes of eight strands. For making nets they had netting needles [26], made of wood, bronze or any other suitable material.     Wide network was made of this rope to enclose jars ; a ring passed round the lower end of the jar, the net covered the sides, and joined into a handle of rope at the top. Rings of rush rope are found, probably for carrying jars on the head.     Small, flat, square baskets of rope were made, about 6 or 7 inches in height and width. And a band, probably for going round the back of a man in palm climbing, is formed of 14 fine ropes parallel, interwoven with strips of linen cloth, and ending in two thick loops for attaching the rope.     Baskets were also made of palm leaf; both of the modern round type with palm rope handles, and of the flat, square form ; the latter is most thoughtfully designed, with a wooden bottom bar, woven rope corners, six fine ropes up the sides to distribute the pressure, retained in place by a cross rope, and ending in a twisted rope handle, the top edge having a fine rope binding. W.M.F. Petrie Kahun, Gurob and Hawara, p.28     Linen sewing thread was often made of two S-spun threads Z-plyed together, but three thread yarns are also known. Threads could be as fine as one fiftieth of a millimetre, the coarse yarns were somewhat thicker than half a millimetre. They generally chose a thread as fine as the threads of the cloth they were sewing and also matched the colour.     Leather was cut into thin strips and sometimes pleated into cords. Being more expensive, it was used less often than plant fibres.
	Making clothes     Much of the cloth used in ancient Egypt was made of flax and woven by the families of peasants. It was cut with knives, scissors coming into use under the Romans, and sewn with needles made at first from bone, later from bronze and iron. The finest of these needles were about one millimetre thick. On has to admire their ability to create eyes in such thin workpieces. For coarser work they used wooden bodkins. Leather was first pierced with awls, before it was stitched together.      Wool was also, more rarely, spun, but knitting was apparently unknown. Coloured wool was at times interwoven with linen; or the linen fabric was embroidered with it.
	Cleaning     Egyptian houses were built of sun-dried mud bricks at times white-washed and the floors were stamped earth. The floor of the outdoor kitchen too was simply the ground baked stone hard by the sun. Unless it was raining, which happened only rarely, these floors were easy to keep clean by sweeping. Like most ancient Egyptian tools, these brushes did not have long handles which would have rendered their use less irksome, and required bending low when employing them.     In the absence of kitchen sinks and running water dishes and clothes were probably taken to the river or a near-by canal for washing, or rinsed by pouring some water over them.     Already in ancient times there were house-proud women who put their less fastidious peers to shame. The following passage from a Ptolemaic papyrus is somewhat fragmentary, but one gets quite a good idea what the priest and his good wife had to put up with: The pastophore said to his wife: "Beware of this woman! She is sort of a refined person." [/// ///] the pastophore. She saw how dirty the house was. She took off her clothes. She girded herself with a [///]. [//////] wash (?) it. She filled a vessel with water. She put (it) down in the place of cleaning. She hung up the copper vessels. She put (them) [/// ///] hot water. She said to the wife of the pastophore: "Go [/// ///]!" She [///] (and) she washed [/// ///]. Saqqara Demotic Papyri I after a transliteration and German translation on the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae website
	Grooming     Most Egyptians had little time and less means to waste on elaborate grooming. Some water laboriously drawn from a well and carried in heavy earthen pots had to do in most cases, sometimes in conjunction with a little salt, natron or possibly a paste containing natron, potash or clay, and used as cleaning agent. Pieces of cloth similar to modern terrycloth with loops capable of absorbing large amounts of water and which were possibly used as towels have been found in a mass grave of soldiers at Deir el Bahri, dating to the late First Intermediate Period.      A great many could not afford a mirror and a razor and had to get a shave from someone else or go without. If they had some oil or grease for their skin they kept it in little pottery vessels or shells and not in expensive stone jars. Their wives did not own tweezers to pluck out body hair, scent in little glass bottles to perfume themselves, or ornate combs and hair-pins to stick in their hair.     The scribe who composed the Satire of the Trades and who could probably afford quite a few of these luxuries, mocked the poor who could not: .... the smith ..... stinks more than fish roe. the potter ..... grubs in the mud more than a pig ..... His clothes are stiff with clay The [stoker (?)], his fingers are foul, their smell is that of corpses M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol. 1, p.188

Copt Against Copt

By: A. Dirlik

Part One.

Once upon several thousands of years ago, the fertile lands of the Nile Valley helped forge the ethos of a people who came to be known as Egyptians, the inhabitants of the flats of Egypt. These people tilled a narrow strip of land on either side of the river which carried silt from as far as Ethiopia and Uganda along the Blue Nile and the White Nile, 6.650 kilometers south of the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. We owe it to Ancient Greece to have named the country Land of Egypt. Greece’s most famous historian, Herodotus (484-425 BC), wrote that Egypt was a gift of the Nile: Η Αιγυπτος ειναι το δωρο του Νειλου. He referred to this slice of geography as Aegyptos, Egypt, and to its people as κοπτης, Copts.

Some derive the word Copt from the verb κοπτω, to cut, to circumcise. Today’s Copts were amongst the rare Christians who did practise circumcision which they inherited from Pharaoh times and from the initiation rites of the Hamitic People, the descendants of the Biblical Ham, from which they are said to have originated. A more probable etymology would be HET-KA-PTAH, the place where the protection of the god PTAH manifested itself, in the first Capital City of the Early Dynastic Period, Memphis, thirty one centuries before our era. HET-KA-PTAH, Copt.

La fuite en Egypte

The Hebrews, in their Scriptures,  referred to the inhabitants of the Land of Khemet, the fertile black soil, as MISRAIM, two thousand years ago. In more recent time, those who dwelt in the Arabian Peninsula referred to Egypt as MISR. In 640 AD, Arabs invaded the Nile delta under the standard of one ‘Amr ibn al-‘Aas from the Hijaz and wrested the land and its people from Byzantine rule. Ironically, the inhabitants of Egypt who, in their past histories, resisted foreign intervention, welcomed this time their Arab conquerors: they had been liberated from the throes of the Greek, first Alexander-the-Great who landed in the Delta in 330 BC, then his lieutenant, Ptolemy, whose dynasty, at the death of Alexander, lasted 275 years, till 30 BC, finally, by the bondage which the Christian Byzantine Empire imposed on its people. This was the longest foreign occupation of their land. To put it simply, Romans and Achaemenids had left no significant trace of their thrust into Egypt, in 525, 343 and 30 BC as the Greeks would.

Majestic Nile Photo M.Sharobim

When the Roman Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, in 313 AD, which legalized Christianity in the realm, he also envisaged moving his capital to Byzantium, on the Bosphorus. Nova Roma was renamed Constantinople after his death. It also became the Seat of the Patriarch of Constantinople, head of all Oriental Churches. Byzantium, as the Eastern Roman Empire came to be known, inherited the Land of Egypt. Egyptians had already adopted Christianity as early as 42 AD, making their Church amongst the oldest among Christians.  The Patriarch of Alexandria, as senior most patriarch in Christendom, had traditionally been the one who fixed the date of Easter Day. The Copts had retained the Julian Calendar which started August 29^th. NI-YAROUOU is not to be confused with NORUZ, the first day of Spring for the Persians. The Coptic New Year celebrated the flooding of the Nile and a virgin was, customarily, offered alive to the waters to insure that the fields of the land be flooded during the following yearly cycle. The celebration of ‘Arusat al-Bahr is held till this day when all Egyptians buy candy dolls in memory of this important festival of renewal.

It is during the Council of Nicea, 325 AD, that the rift between the Coptic Church and the rest of Christendom came to the open: the Copts upheld that Jesus retained his human as well as his divine nature during his lifetime and until his crucifixion. Patriarch Athanasius was banished to Trier, in Germany. His Church was considered heretic and was, consequently, persecuted. Years later, at the Council of Constantinople in 553 AD, Emperor Justinian who reigned between 527-565 AD, and built Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, decreed that nothing could be done in Church matters which was contrary to the ruler’s will. As a result, the heavy handedness of the Byzantine Church, also known as the Greek Orthodox Church, was made felt throughout the entire Orient.

Coptic Cross

Egyptians had, also, resisted efforts by their rulers to spread the Greek language in their country and they succeeded in retaining the popular language of Pharaonic times, the Demotic Language, for their daily use. One will recall that the Rosetta Stone which was discovered, in 1799, during Napoleon’s Expedition to Egypt, and had an inscription written in Greek, in Hieroglyphic and in Demotic, assisted archeologists to decipher the languages of Ancient Egyptians. The stone carried the seal of Ptolemy V and was dated 195 BC. The deciphering of the stone allowed Jean François Champollion, after 1822, to unlock the secrets of Pharaonic times. And later, the study of the religious ritual of the Copts, chanted in Demotic speech, assisted the scholars in understanding how the languages of the Egyptians were pronounced. 

Returning to our story, meanwhile, it is claimed that the Prophet of Islam, who was also husband to Mariam-the-Copt, urged ‘Amr, one amongst the Sahaba, his Companions, and one who became a brilliant general soon after, to show compassion towards the People of Egypt. ‘Amr abolished the heavy taxes which the Byzantine levied on the Copts and replaced them by the Jiziyah which the conquered People of the Book, Christians, Jews and Sabeans, had to pay to the Muslim Treasury, the Bayt al-Maal. The Jiziyah allowed non-Muslims which Muslims referred to as Dhimmis,  to continue to practice their religion. Payment of the Jiziyah exempted from military service. Only free adults were to bare this fiscal burden. Slaves, women, children, old and sick people, monks and hermits, and the poor were spared its payment. It became therefore understandable that the illiterate Fallah, the peasant who stood at the bottom of the social ladder and whom the Coptic clergy did not reach in his field be inclined to convert to the new faith. Converts to Islam, the neophytes, were known as Mawali. They became the clients to prominent Arabs, borrowed their Arabic name and enjoyed their protection. They were, by the same token, socially elevated in rank. This process precipitated change and disruptions in Egyptian society as Arabization went hand in hand with Islamization. 

Sunset on Nile Photo M. Sharobim 

Upon the death of the Prophet Muhammad, in 632, the power struggle amongst his closest associates eventually led to the capital of the new State being moved from Madina, in Arabia, to Damascus, in Syria. It shall be recalled that the Umayyad dynasty (661-730) had helped consolidate its hold on Syria and on Egypt after the Battle of Yarmuk, in Syria, which weakened the Byzantine, in 636 AD, and allowed them to be defeated, once again, at the battles of Nikiou and of Heliopolis in 640 AD on Egyptian soil. The fall of the Fortress of Babylon, near where Fustat, to mean the encampment, caused the Arab capital of Egypt to replace the capital-city of Alexandria which had also fallen to the invading Arabs. The conquest of Misr was complete. Arab historiography noted that the letter which the Prophet had sent to Heraclius of Byzantium inviting him to convert to Islam had not been heeded by that emperor and that his downfall was, consequently, predicted.

One will have to wait until the collapse of the Umayyads, in 750 AD, when the centre of gravity of the Muslim Empire shifted away from Damascus to Baghdad to realize what was to occur in Egypt, a land where the Copts remained autonomous although ruled by Arabs. During centuries of Arab rule, the Patriarch of Alexandria led his flock according to the teachings of the Apostle Marc, patron of Egypt. And the Demotic language lingered as the language of administration. Yet, converts to Islam, the Mawalis, were steadily growing in number in spite of the fact that, under Umayyad rule, non-Arabs were being prevented from serving the Muslim State. East of the Tigris River, the Mawalis eventually brought the Abbasids to power and new rulers in Baghdad, having dislodged the Umayyads of Damascus, sent governors to run Egypt’s affairs. The policy of excluding Mawalis, wherever they were, from political and social privileges was naturally ended. Islam and the Arabic language spread from Iraq to the lands that stretched as far as the Atlantic Ocean and North Africa, reached Northern Sudan and the borders of Persia. In Egypt proper, Muslim Copts were growing in number at the expense of Christian Copts. What now distinguished the two groups was Faith and the adopted Names of the neophytes, the new converts. At the same time, the Demotic language was giving way to the Arabic language. In the second part of our story, it shall be argued that the Islamization of Egypt will have pitted Muslim Copt and Christian Copt against one another although much, in fact, ought to have brought them together. But then, is this not the story we often hear of cousins fighting over the same inheritance?

Copt against Copt.

Part two. 

It is remarkable that, during the Greek occupation of Egypt which lasted 971 years - if we date it to the landing of Alexander, in 330 BC, until the defeat of the Byzantines at the hand of the Arabs, in 641 AD - Egypt and the Egyptians did not surrender either to the language of the foreigner from not too far away or to his interpretation of Christianity. It is also remarkable that, after 641 AD, Muslim rulers governed, uninterrupted, the Nile Valley up till today. The centuries’ old Demotic language which Egyptians communicated with since Menes united Upper and Lower Egypt and wore the White and Red Crown, around thirty one centuries ago, was being replaced by Arabic. This shift from one civilization to another is unprecedented if one realizes that what nurtured the successful resistance of Egypt to change of faith, character and identity, during 971 years, became gradually eroded for the sake and the benefit of what is loosely referred to as Islamic Civilization after 641 AD.

Alexander, the young Macedonian general who was known in Egypt as AMUN’s Horns, the same Dhu’l Qarnayn of the Qur’an, consulted the Oracle of Siwa, in the Western Desert: he was assured that he would rule the world. Alexander left for the Indus River and his lieutenant in Egypt, one Ptolemy, governed from the city which bore the general’s name. The dynasty of Ptolemy lasted 330 years during which period the famous Library and the Lighthouse became wonders of their time. Alexandria also grew into an important centre for Hellenism in philosophy and law, in the arts and in architecture, and greatly contributed to the worldview which the Ancient Greeks helped propagate. Egypt had become the granary of an expanding Roman Empire and merchants, in Alexandria, grew rich and powerful as a result. The Ptolemys desperately attempted to ingratiate themselves to the indigenous people they ruled. They failed while, in Greece itself, fascination for things Pharaonic were rampant: Egyptian Thebes inspired Sophocles in his tragedies; the myth of Oedipus appears to have been related historically to the story of Akhenaton; and, in Greek Cosmogony, one Aegyptus was revered who descended of the Heifer Maiden and the River-God Nile. And, last but not least, the myth of Christ might have been inspired by the tale of Osiris.

 

Julius Caesar defeated Cleopatra VII on the battlefield and in love, in 30 AD, and Egypt fell to the Roman Empire. Constantine, who reigned from 306-337 BC and adopted Christianity as his State Religion, moved the seat of his power from Rome to Byzantium, on the Bosphorus, near the Straits of Dardanelles, the nexus between two continents. Nota Bene: the symbol of the city had been for millennia a Crescent and a Star long before the Ottoman Turks used that very symbol on their standards. Nova Roma was renamed after Constantine upon his death. His successor, Justinian who reigned from 518-527 AD, stood on the cusp between Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Come Helena, mother of Constantine. She claimed to have found the True Cross in Golgotha, during her trip to Jerusalem. In Egypt, she commandeered the Monastery of Saint-Catherine to be built in Sinai near where it is claimed Moses received the Tables of the Law. Catherine was an Egyptian Martyr whom Greek Hagiology recuperated. Byzantine occupation, not unlike that of the Ptolemys, was not welcome to Egyptians. The Patriarch of Alexandria, leader of the Coptic Church, remained the head of Coptic resistance. When the Arabs raided the Nile Delta, Copts made their victories possible by opening their gates, in betrayal, to ‘Amr and his cavalcade of Bedouins.

It will be recalled that the Umayyads in Damascus were replaced by the ‘Abbassids of Baghdad in 750 AD. The Mawalis of Iraq and Persia, the new converts to Islam helped the ‘Abbassids  dislodge the Umayyads and revert the previous policy of excluding the Mawali from office. The Abbassids rewarded lavishly those who had brought them the Caliphate. In Egypt, Christian Copts converted, in droves, to the new religion in order to receive the same benefits as other Mawali. In the meantime, the Mongols prepared to sack Baghdad and Berbers from North Africa, the Fatimids, invaded Egypt from the West in 909 AD. The Fatimid Shi’ah dynasty which lasted till 1171 AD and built al-Qahira, Cairo, the Victorious, their capital, created an important centre of Arabic and Islamic learning and culture, in and around the Madrasah of al-Azhar which they founded to spread their ideology. The country prospered under their governance. Amongst the many mosques they built, one was erected within the precincts of the Monastery of Saint-Catherine, in Sinai, next to the Chapel of the Burning Bush. It is interesting to note that this mosque was never used because its Qibla, mistakenly, did not point in the direction of Makkah. After Shi’ism was defeated and the land reverted to Sunnism, the reputation of Cairo as the hub of Islamic Civilization grew worldwide. Cairo was referred to as the city of One Thousand Minarets. Next to each minaret, one could find a school or a library. The arts and crafts which were designed in Umayyad Syria and Spain and in ‘Abbasid Mesopotamia found yet another abode in Egypt.

When Salah ed-Din al-Ayyubi, Saladin, dislodged this new seat of Shi’ism and settled, in turn in Cairo, in 1171 AD, the Kurdish general who had wrested Jerusalem from the Crusaders, pursued the task of investing in Egypt’s Islamization and Arabization. The Ayyubids endowed al-Qahirah with many public and private structures until they were dislodged in their turn, in 1250 AD, by their own mercenaries, a slave-warrior class of Kipchak Turks and of Circassians from the Caucasus Mountains. The Mamluks, as they came to be called, were not Arabic-speaking as much as the Ayyubids had been before them yet they funded the on-going Arab revival in Cairo. In 1517 AD,  the Ottoman Turks were the last to conquer Egypt for themselves and incorporated this land to their far extending empire. The Ottoman Sultan, not an Arab from the Prophet’s House of Quraysh, nevertheless claimed the Caliphate, the highest office in Islam. The Ottomans respected the Arab and Islamic character of al-Qahirah and contributed towards its endowment in mosques and madrasahs, hospitals, water fountains and public baths, markets and palaces and gardens.

That is until the Ottoman governor in Cairo, Muhammad Ali Basha, declared his independence from his suzerain in Istambul in 1807 AD. Muhammad ‘Ali abolished the Jiziyah imposed of Christian Copts. He also invited them to share in the modernization of Egypt and they responded favourably. The dynasty of Muhammd ‘Ali was ended when a military junta of Muslim Copts usurped power in 1952 and decreed Egypt to be a Republic. They were the first Egyptians to rule since Alexander ended the Pharaonic era. The years of Monarchy had, meanwhile, been golden years for Christian Copts who took heartily to Western education and the liberal professions. Patriarch Kirilos IV was a great reformer who understood the value of learning for his flock. By that time, Christian Copts were now entirely Arabized to the extent that they adopted Arabic names and ought to have shared fully in the revival that lie ahead. But this was not to happen.

The Nile at Aswan - Photo M. Sharobim

A word about names. Early on, one should be reminded, the neophyte, the new convert, was expected to borrow a Muslim name. For a long time, Arabic name and Muslim faith went hand in hand. This changed when invaders from the East, essentially Mongol and Turkic, converted to Islam yet retained their Central Asian names. Gengiz, Orhan, Taymur, Babur or Humayun are today considered Muslim names. Not so Ramsis, Sesostris or Isis, either in Egypt or elsewhere. Furthermore, any early Muslim Copt would not name himself Mustafa al-Qibti, as did the Abbassid governor to Egypt, in 840 AD, whose name was ‘Ali ibn Yehiya al-Armani, the Armenian. The Pharaonic nature of Egypt forced the earliest converts to Islam amongst the Copts to want to turn their backs on what made Egypt the way it was, a land where the imprint of AMON was paramount. Fabrication of genealogies become important in such circumstances. And, as long as his new master questioned his motives and his sincerity, the neophyte tried harder to further distance himself from who he originally was. So one may adopt the name Muhammad Hijazi and wish to link with the Hijaz, in Arabia, along the Red Sea Coast, to further dissimulate his immediate roots. Antipathy, also, grew on the part of Muslim Copts for Christian Copts as the Muslims felt strong ties with the flourishing civilization of their Ummah, the Community of Believers.

Egyptian customs and mores, and Folklore, Superstitions, the Cult of Saints and the Visit of the Dead, more often than not, cross the religious divide and, indeed, blur differences between Muslims and Christians for the sake of their similarities. Both Christian and Muslim Copts also inherited great piety from their Pharaonic ancestry. Further indications are that, whatever their religious practice, they both belong to the same black soil, Khemet. Many learned Egyptians acknowledge that fact. One note of interest is that, in the villages of Upper Egypt, one would know one was in a Coptic Christian neighbourhood at the sight of swine foraging for food on the unpaved and dusty roads of the Balad. In olden days, no mosques were raised in rural communities to indicate that Islam was here predominant. Coptic churches, with their dovecot shape, were also absent in the countryside. Such are the observations of the keen eye of the anthropologist. They do not account for the history of the past sixteen centuries during which an Egyptian brand of Islamic behaviour was being forged by circumstances which drew Muslim Copts away from Christian Copts and forced the minority to entrench itself in attitudes that would insure its survival.

Nile view, Photo M. Sharobim

When the country and its Muslims reverted to Sunni Islam, after the fall of the Fatimids, Shafi’i Law was adopted and its Shari’ah became much stricter towards the Dhimmis, those who had not converted, Christian Copts that is. Documentary evidence found that the 11^th century Gueniza papers written in Hebrew and buried in the Jewish quarter of Old Cairo, near the Mosque of ‘Amr, attest that the burden of the Jiziyah was heaviest on the Egyptian poor. It should be seen as the primary cause for the rapid shrinking of the Dhimmi population in Egypt, after the Fatimids. That is until 1807 AD when Muhammad ‘Ali Basha wrested power from the Ottomans. Christian Copts were constantly being oppressed or ridiculed. ‘Admah Zarqa’, Blue Bone, is still used till this day in a defamatory sense to refer to Christian Copts. The origin of this epithet is not known to me. Their rights, as People of the Book, had been withering away as a result of the growing urge for Muslim Copts to justify their legitimacy. And so it is that Christian Copts ferociously cling to their identity, be it in terms of their faith and religious practices or to the pre-Christian Pharaonic past they identify with. Many Muslim Copts, on the other hand, have tagged Egypt’s past as Jahiliyyah, belonging to the Age of Ignorance which preceded Coranic Revelation.

In 1954, 20^th Century Fox released in Cinemascope the epic film, ‘Sinuhe the Egyptian’. Edmund Purdom played the role of the physician who would have practiced during the 18^th Dynasty of Akhenaton, in the fourteen century BC. The movie translated on the screen the magnificent novel by the same title by Mika Waltari (1908-1978). The magician of words and images which Waltari was had conveyed to our age a period of greatness in the saga of mankind. Already, ever since Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832) and Gaston Maspero (1846-1916), the wonders of Pharaonic Egypt were put on display for us all to enjoy and reflect upon. In Egypt, Senuhi, Sinuhe is a name Christian Copts use till this day. The precious Coptic Museum, near the Church of Mar-i-Girgis, in what used to be Fustat and is now Old Cairo, indicated how the tradition of Saint Marc, who brought Christianity to Egypt and who lies buried in Alexandria, had made the link between Christian and pre-Christian creeds possible and desirable. One simply has to compare and contrast portraiture and the graphic arts to grasp that possibility. Christian Copts would therefore embark head on into modernity by way of education which provided them with contemporary knowledge as when they bridged from Pharaonic times to Christianity. Soon after 1882 AD, under British occupation, they seemed, for a while at least, to get ahead of Muslim Copts. The members of what is today referred to as the Lonely Minority found in discrimination towards them the necessary drive to excel against all odds. Muslim Copts barely took notice.

True, Christian Copts were often favoured by Muhammad ‘Ali and his descendants. When the British occupied Egypt, in 1882 AD, many were drawn close to the Infidel Occupier. Their use of names like Victor, Edward or White attests to that. The rise of Egyptian Nationalism, however, saw Muslim and Christian Copts march side by side when a prominent Christian Copt, Makram ‘Ebeid (1879-1961), joined forces with the Wafd Party of Sa’d Zaghlul and rose to become the Secretary-General of that party from 1936 till 1941. But, the honeymoon between Muslim and Christian Copts was not to last. In 1952, Gamal ‘abd al-Nasir ought to have instituted the Secular State in the footsteps of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Such a state is, in fact, the only logical and equitable solution to Egyptian communal dislocation. He did not. Moreover, he unfairly lumped Christian Copt and Foreign Resident together during his years of witch-hunt. Nasir’s successors have not proven wiser nor statesmanlike. And, now that the Muslim Brothers are in power and intend, at some point, to enhance the Islamic character of society, any application of Shari’ah Law which re-instates Dhimmah and Jiziyah is bound to exacerbate relations between Christian and Muslim in Egypt. The Muslim Brothers are much more responsible than the Salafis are in their considerations for Christian Copts. They are bound, unfortunately, by an ideology which, however liberal and fair, ought to put growing pressure on this significant and, after all, indigenous minority, thus either forcing them to convert further to Islam, to emigrate abroad or, worse still, to retrench in their ghettos and continue to have dark dreams. In the meantime, many Christian Copts are bound to sulk until some cataclysm that was sent by the Goddess HATOR come to alleviate their conundrum. That is not what one would have expected from two communities, heirs to the oldest civilization in human history, that daily quench their thirst in the waters of the Nile.

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Published with the consent of the author. 

Papyrus

    A large part of life in Lower Egypt was based on the papyrus plant: It was used to make mats, sandals, rafts, and writing material; it fuelled fires, was eaten and its flowers collected and offered to the gods.

Papyrus gatherers: From left to right: uprooting the papyrus stalks in crocodile infested marshes, bundling them and carrying them off.  Tomb of TY

    Small wonder that it served as a symbol for Lower Egypt where large tracts of land were covered by it, and that its king wore a crown seemingly fashioned from it. The goddess Uto had a papyrus sceptre, as did, beginning from the Old Kingdom, Hathor and Bastet. Hapi, the Nile god, was depicted wearing a papyrus plant on his head.

    In the arts the papyrus symbolised the world which had emerged from the primordial waters and in architecture papyriform pillars bore the roofs of the temples, part of the daily reenactment of creation supporting the heavens.

    Since, man has succeeded in taming the river, destroyed the reed's habitat and caused it to become extinct in Egypt. It has been reintroduced on a small scale in the late 20th century to satisfy demands made by Western tourists.

    The numbers of the people gathering reeds in ancient times were apparently large enough for the author of the Satire of the Trades to include them in his list of unenviable occupations:

The reed-cutter goes downstream to the Delta to fetch himself arrows. He must work excessively in his activity. When the gnats sting him and the sand fleas bite him as well, then he is judged.   The Instructions of Dua-Khety

Food

    The lower part of the plant, immersed in water, was soft and less suited for manufacturing writing material than the tough upper part. It was not wasted though as it could be cooked and eaten:

... they pull up from the fens the papyrus which grows every year, and the upper parts of it they cut off and turn to other uses, but that which is left below for about a cubit in length they eat or sell: and those who desire to have the papyrus at its very best bake it in an oven heated red-hot, and then eat it.   Herodotus, Histories, Vol. 2

Woven artefacts

    According to the Harris papyrus Ramses III gave to the Amen priests
Papyrus sandals: 

for the 20 day Usermare-Meriamon-L.P.H.-Making-Festive-Thebes-for-Amon celebrations; and seven centuries later seemingly not much had changed where priestly footwear was concerned, as Herodotus reports that:
... the priests wear garments of linen only and sandals of papyrus, and any other garment they may not take nor other sandals ...

    Ropes, bags, baskets, and mattings were made from papyrus as well as from other materials.

Rafts and boats

    The first river craft made in Egypt were seemingly papyrus rafts. Reeds were tied together into bundles, from which boat-like rafts were built. Wooden boats were expensive: the raw material was of low quality and in short supply, and carpentry a specialized trade. For the ordinary Delta dweller who needed to get around in a region where roads were few and unbridged canals and river arms many, the advantages a boat had over a raft were offset by the easy availability of the papyrus and the small construction costs.

Models of papyrus fishing boats

Source: P. Montet - La vie quotidienne en Egypte

    In boat and ship construction papyrus (and probably other reeds as well) played a small part as caulking material, and ropes and sails were at times made of it:
... they cut pieces of wood about two cubits in length and arrange them like bricks, fastening the boat together by running a great number of long bolts through the two-cubits pieces; and when they have thus fastened the boat together, they lay cross-pieces over the top, using no ribs for the sides; and within they caulk the seams with papyrus. They make one steering-oar for it, which is passed through the bottom of the boat; and they have a mast of acacia and sails of papyrus.   Herodotus, Histories, Vol. 2

Flowers

    Flowers of many kinds and in many different forms of arrangement were used for decorations. The Harris papyrus records the large quantities of flowers, among them papyrus, offered:

Blossoms of the impost flowers: sunshades 
Blossoms: tall bouquets 
Blossoms of the impost flowers: "garden fragrance" 
Isi-plant: measures
Flowers: garlands 
Flowers: strings 
Blue flowers: ropes 
Flowers for the hand 
Flowers: measures 
Lotus flowers for the hand 
Lotus flowers: bouquets 
Lotus flowers for the hand 
Papyrus flowers: bouquets 
Papyrus: [stems] 


    The lotus, in fact a water lily, which rose first from the primeval waters of Nun, may have been more impressive, but the amounts of papyrus flowers, symbols of triumph and joy, which were offered to the gods and the dead, were significant as well. Bundles of papyrus umbels were shaken in honour of Hathor and their rustling noise may have inspired the use of the sistrum during the goddess's worship.

    The temples were universes in miniature, and pools were excavated in their gardens and many of the most important plants were grown beside them:

I made for thee groves and arbors containing date trees; lakes supplied with lotus flowers, papyrus flowers, isi flowers, the flowers of every land, dedmet flowers, myrrh, and sweet and fragrant woods for thy beautiful face.
Offerings of Ramses III to the Heliopolitan Re temple.  Harris Papyrus

Incense

    The tough outer layer covering the soft pith used for paper production, was not discarded. Most incense used in temples was imported from Punt, the aromatic gum of the Boswellia sacra and wood from fragrant trees. But seemingly the lowly reed was also burned as sweat of the gods falling to the ground.

Papyrus [rind] of the house of incense:
Papyrus [rind] worked into incense: various measures: 

Writing material

    As a writing material papyrus was used since the late fourth millennium BCE. It was produced in sheets by laying lengths of wet papyrus pith side by side, adding a second layer at a right angle on top, and fusing the pith by applying pressure. The product was then smoothed by rubbing it with a stone, shell or the like. The sheets were stuck together with starch-based glues to form scrolls. Pliny the Elder described its manufacture in his Natural History. The strips he refers to were strips of the plant's pith.

Paper of whatever grade is fabricated on a board moistened with water from the Nile: the muddy liquid serves as the bonding force. First there is spread flat on the board a layer consisting of strips of papyrus running vertically, as long as possible, with their ends squared off. After that a cross layer completes the construction. Then it is pressed in presses, and the sheets thus formed are dried in the sun and joined one to another, (working) in declining order of excellence down to the poorest. There are never more than twenty sheets in a roll.

    Good writing papyrus was not cheap and rarely served every-day purposes.

To the scribe Nefer-hotep in l.p.h, in the favour of the noble god, Amen-Re, King of Gods, who makes you happy every day.
Further: If you have not written on the papyrus roll, send it to me. I am eager for it. See, I have found this bookroll in the possession of this man! Or else write to me about what you are going to do.
Fare you well in the presence of Amen.  Deir el Medina, 20th dynasty


    Sometimes old writing was washed off or otherwise obliterated and the papyrus re-used. Both sides of the papyrus were generally written on.

    From the early second millennium on papyrus was exported, at first to the Levant: among the goods Wenamen received from Egypt to barter with were 500 rolls of papyrus. Papyrus reached Greece late in the first half of the first millennium BCE. By the first century CE the use of papyrus paper was common throughout the Mediterranean area.

Cartonnage mask of Tuyu, 18th dynasty

    During the New Kingdom cartonnage funerary masks became popular. They were made of several layers of - often used - papyrus scrolls or fabric which were stuck together with plaster and painted.

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Egyptian Beer for the Living, the Dead ... and the Gods

by: Horst Dornbusch on 02-28-2005

Next time you are in New York City, make it a point to visit the Metropolitan Museum and have a BeerAdvocate moment. In a museum!? Yes, go to the Egyptian section and snoop around the many tombs and mummies and search for the neat stuff retrieved from the tomb of Meketre. This fellow was a high administrator, a sort of chancellor and prime minister of the warrior King Mentuhotep II of the 11th dynasty. Mentuhotep II ruled the land of the Nile for half a century, from roughly 2050 to 2000 B.C. For a depiction of the king's likeness, see this image and this one.

When Meketre died (around 1975 B.C.), he was mummified and put to rest in a tomb in western Thebes, opposite present-day Luxor. Fortunate for us, his contemporaries placed a large collection of miniature carved wooden figures in his tomb. These toy figures represented Egyptians at work. There was a carpentry shop, an abattoir, a granary, a kitchen, a couple of river boats, and ... a brewery. Because the inner chamber of Meketre's tomb was untouched when it was discovered by Herbert E. Winlock on March 17, 1920, the workshop models give us an intimate three-dimensional view of how Egyptians lived.

The Egyptians did not invent beer. Rather they had learned the art of brewing from the world's first known brewers, the Sumerians, Babylonian, and Assyrians further to the East in what is now Iraq. The Egyptians, however, left us with the best documentation of ancient brewing practices. Most of the many depictions of Egyptian brewing that have come down to us are murals in vaults, pyramids, and sacrificial chambers. These attest to the importance and high esteem in which the art of beer-making was held in Egyptian society. Yet the find in Meketre's tomb probably ranks among the best preserved and most instructive.

The brewery model in the Metropolitan Museum apparently dates from around 2009 to 1998 B.C. A card at the exhibition in the Museum explains what is going on in the brewery: "The overseer with a baton sits inside the door. In the brewery two women grind flour, which another man works into dough. After a second man treads the dough into mash in a tall vat, it is put into tall crocks to ferment. After fermentation, it is poured off into round jugs with black clay stoppers." See the Museum's website for more.

In ancient Egypt, beer was a regular part of the daily life of every Egyptian, from the highest to the lowest. It was the coinage of power and social cohesion, connected to both the gods and the state. In Egyptian culture, all power derived from the sun. The falcon-headed god of the sun, Re, was regarded as the source of all life and sustenance. He was also considered the inventor of beer. Re and his wife Nut, the goddess of the stars, were the progenitors of the pharaohs and of all the lesser gods in the beyond. Their favorite daughter was Hathor, a pretty and alluring creature, with whom Re, her father, fell madly in love. Incest was not a taboo in Egypt and it was customary for a pharaoh's children to marry each other. Re called Hathor his "eye," and she used to please him by disrobing in from of him. When Hathor drank beer, she turned into the goddess of love, lust, joy, singing, dancing, and laughter. Together, Re and his daughter Hathor had a son, Ihi, who became the god of music.

Hathor was a friend of the dead whom she accompanied on their journey to the beyond. Her sacred tree was the sycamore under whose shady canopy lovers would meet to share a crock of beer. Her brew was an aphrodisiac, often flavored with mandrake (Mandragora officinarum), a plant with a parsnip-like brown root, whose bark contains an alkaloid that has a narcotic effect.

In Egypt, Beer is a Meal with Heavenly Connections
In Egypt, beer was regarded as food. In fact, the old Egyptian hieroglyph for "meal" was a compound of those for "bread" and "beer". This "bread-beer meal" plus a few onions and some dried fish was the standard diet of the common people along the Nile at the time. Beer came in eight different types in Egypt. Most were made from barley, some from emmer, and many were flavored with ginger or honey. The best beers were brewed to a color as red as human blood. The Egyptians distinguished between the different beers by their alcoholic strength and dominant flavor.

None other than the god of the dead, Osiris, was hailed as the guardian of beer, because to him grain - both emmer and barley - were sacred. The Egyptians believed that grain had sprung spontaneously from Osiris' mummy, as a gift to mankind and as a symbol of life after death. This was sufficient justification for the god-like pharaohs to turn brewing into a state monopoly and strictly license brewing rights to entrepreneurs and priests. Many temples eventually opened their own breweries and pubs, all in the service of the gods. The port of Pelusium at the mouth of the Nile became a large brewing center, and trading in beer became big business.

Beer in Egyptian society beer was the sacrificial drink of choice in the temples of Hathor. During a five-week long feast in her honor, the priestesses and temple maidens gave banquets for the worshippers, during which they performed erotic dances. Each dancer, dressed only in a string around her waist, as unclad as Hathor had shown herself to her father, would move her hips enticingly before the guests. Hollow pearls, filled with pebbles and suspended from the dancer's waist band, would amplify the arousing rhythm of the erotic spectacle. As the alcohol took over, Hathor's beer would put the imbibers in direct contact with the world beyond. It created the link between the heavens and the earth and allowed the temple visitors to partake in the mystery of life and death. Fittingly, the dead, too, were supplied with crocks of beer in their catacombs so that they would not be thirsty on their trip to the realm where Hathor and Osiris were waiting for them ... with a crock of beer, of course.

It was common etiquette for a worshipper to drink until intoxicated. A wealthy Egyptian rarely would leave home without being accompanied by two slaves and a hammock. So if he got too inebriated to walk home after a night in a tavern or at a beer banquet, he could sleep off his delirium in a prone position while being carried home.

Egyptians used beer as a currency to pay slaves, tradesmen, priests, and public officials alike, which means that every Egyptian was entitled to a certain amount of daily beer. This quantity was strictly regulated, even at the highest level. A queen was entitled to 10 loaves of bread and two crocks of beer a day. This allotment must have been of tremendous importance, because it was usually guaranteed to her by her pharaoh-husband as part of her marriage contract. A princess also got 10 loaves, but she had to wash them down with only one crock of free beer a day. An officer of the guard, on the other hand, who might be called upon to defend both the queen and the princess, fared better than either: He got 20 loaves and two crocks. Even the daily ration of the slaves who built the pyramids, as well as the pay of all low-level officials, included two to three loaves of bred and two crocks of brew, and it was not up to the master's whim whether or not a slave got his beer: The nectar of the gods was even a slave's entitlement.

Beer and Taxes
Beer became so popular in ancient Egypt that no ruler dared to put a tax on it ¾ that is, until the middle of the last century B.C., after the pharaohs had long disappeared and Egypt had become a Greek province. Every government in the world nowadays has an alcohol tax ... but it was a voluptuous and ruthless Greek Queen of the Nile, Cleopatra (69-30 B.C.) ¾ member of the Ptolemy clan and seductress of Roman generals ¾ who first came up with the idea.

Alexander the Great had conquered Egypt in 332 B.C. and founded Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile the same year. In 321 B.C., two years after Alexander's death in Babylon, one of his generals, Ptolemy Soter, took over Egypt as the Greek governor. Soter, however, was not content with being just a remote administrator of a Greek province. He had more ambitious plans. He soon established his own dynasty in Egypt, as the legal successors to the indigenous pharaohs. In 304 B.C., he made Alexandria his capital, from where the Ptolemy clan was to rule the land of the Nile, not as a Greek colony but in its own right, for almost three centuries, until Egypt fell to the Romans in a melodramatic final act in 30 B.C.

In the meantime, in the wake of Alexander's almost perpetual warfare, Greece was left exhausted and gradually lost its grip over the conquests Alexander had made. Maintaining preeminence in the Mediterranean world gradually became harder for Greece for another reason: Rome was emerging as a serious rival. This meant that the Ptolemy clan, happily ensconced in Alexandria, could not necessarily count on Greek might to keep them in power in Egypt. To ensure the survival of their clan, therefore, the Ptolemy clan became, one can argue, more "Egyptified" than Egypt became Hellenized. In most respects, the Ptolemy clan dropped its Greek ways and adopted the indigenous mores of their new land. The clan even adopted the old pharaoh custom of incestuous progeniture by marrying brothers to sisters.

Brewing in Egypt was still going strong when the Greeks arrived there. The Greeks were no beer drinkers. They favored wine. However, the strength of the Egyptian brew industry as well as the Ptolemy clan's assimilation to Egyptian customs, are probably the key reasons why beer survived the Greek conquest along the Nile. It is true that wine was known and consumed in Egypt, but it was mostly an upper-crust beverage. Beer, on the other hand, remained the people's drink. Its production continued unabated under Greek rule and, by all accounts, the beer must have tasted pretty good. As we learn from the Bibliotheca historica, a 40-volume history of the world, written by the Sicilian (and obviously wine drinking) historian Diodorus Siculus (circa 90-21 B.C.): "They make a drink from barley in Egypt, which is called zytum, and it compares not unfavorably in pleasantness of color and taste to wine."

With the rise of Rome, in the last two centuries B.C., the Greek Ptolemy clan's hold on fertile Egypt and its wealth could not remain unchallenged. The inevitable show-down over Egypt started indirectly, with a few seemingly unrelated events in Rome and Alexandria. It was around 50 B.C., when Rome's most powerful generals, Gaius Julius Caesar and Cneius Pompey, Caesar's son-in-law (married to Caesar's daughter Julia), were locked in a mortal fight for control of the Roman Empire. At the same time, back in Alexandria, the Ptolemean queen of Egypt, Cleopatra, was busy in a struggle of her own for the throne, which was coveted by Ptolemy XIII, her brother and husband (yes, he was both, in old pharaohnic fashion!). Cleopatra had married him after her first husband, Ptolemy XII, also a brother of hers, had accidentally drowned.

In the eventful year of 47 B.C., the Roman and the Egyptian internal power struggles became hopelessly intertwined in a cataclysmic international affair, when Cleopatra obtained Caesar's political help, became his mistress, triumphed over her brother, and moved to Rome ¾ pregnant with Caesar's son, whom she bore in Rome that year and called Caesarion.

A year later, it was Caesar's turn to settle his score with Pompey. He defeated his rival (and daughter's husband) at the Battle of Pharsalus in Thessaly, after which Pompey, improbably, fled to Cleopatra's Alexandria! There, Cleopatra showed her gratitude to her Roman lover for having saved her throne. She made short shrift of Pompey by having him murdered as he stepped ashore. To clean things up, she then had her husband/brother murdered as well. This paved the way for her undisputed rule in Egypt, under Roman protection. It also ensured, so she hoped, that her son Caesarion would some day succeed her to the throne, as Ptolemy XIV.

But the plans of mice and ... queens! By 44 B.C., the seemingly invincible Julius Caesar, ruler of the Roman universe, found himself dead as a doornail from a bad case of assassination by his erstwhile buddy Brutus. Following Caesar's untimely demise, the rivalries in Rome flared up again ¾ this time between Marc Anthony, Caesar's immediate successor, and Octavius, Caesar's grandnephew and designated heir. Cleopatra was now in a genuine quandary: With her Roman lover and protector gone, her own hold on power in the balance, and her son's prospects as future King of the Nile in jeopardy, she needed a new benefactor ¾ but, fatefully, at that moment her luck ran out. She bet her political future, and her body, on the wrong horse.

The impervious Octavius, soon to be called Emperor Augustus, quickly ousted his challenger, Marc Anthony, and firmly took over the reigns in Rome. Marc Anthony, not reading the signs of the time, thought he was not finished yet. Remembering the good services Cleopatra had once rendered unto Caesar, he headed for Egypt and took up residence in Cleopatra's palace in Alexandria. There, although a married man, he soon became Caesar's successor, not in the hall of Roman power as he had hoped, but in the chambers of the queen's passions. He became Cleopatra's new and acknowledged lover and her unacknowledged hope for the continuance of the Ptolemy dynasty. Using her army by land, her navy by sea, and her body by night, our darling Cleo now alternately fought against Rome and made love to its erstwhile commander-in-chief. Satisfying her steamy lust for power and the powerful ¾ after she had given Caesar a son ¾ she now gave Caesar's aspiring successor to the job of ruler of Rome, the adulterous Marc Anthony, a pair of twins.

While she parted her sheets for her desires, she also drained her kingdom of its wealth to finance her wars. When her coffers would yield no more, she resorted to the ultimate insult: She slapped a tax on beer, the people's drink ¾ ostensibly to curb public drunkenness, but in reality to build more naval galleys! Thus, the licentious queen is credited with the dubious achievement of having invented not only the alcohol tax, but also its most perennial and insincere excuse. To beer lovers, her beer tax and not her affairs (of state and passion) are her most enduring legacy. Darling Cleo's invention set a trend that has survived the rise and fall of many a civilization. It has known no national boundaries, no cultural barriers, no limits of time. The beer tax is still with us today, in just about any country of the globe. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!

For the beer-tax crime, however, it seems that fate was quick to mete out just retribution. The now powerful Octavius went after the lusty lovers and decimated their forces in the Battle of Actium, in 30 B.C. For the beer-tax Queen of the Nile and her Roman beau, the jig was finally up. They committed suicide together, and Octavius put Caesarion, Caesar's and Cleopatra's putative, now 17-year old, son to death.

With this convoluted plot, the line of the Ptolemies and of Greek rule over Egypt came to an end. As the might of Rome settled upon its new colony, the fertile flood lands of the Nile were being converted primarily into a granary for the new mother country. The Romans had no taste for beer, so the grain that was once transformed into the brews of the Nile was now transformed into the breads of the Tiber. As a result, quality brewing in the Old World, long the domain of the people of the Middle East, was sent on a path of decline.

Egypt remained under Roman influence until the so-called Arabic conquest, which was completed by 642 A.D., at which point Egypt became an integral part of the Moslem world. Egyptian brewing, or what was left of it, fell victim to the abstemious zeal of this new religion. As the wave of Islam engulfed the Middle East, the Koran became law, and the Koran says that holy warriors shall practice sobriety. Thus, the brewers of the Nile were forced to exit history for good ¾ ousted by war, taxes and temperance. Only a few mute miniature figures, discovered in the tomb of a 4,000-year old corpse and now on display some 4,000 miles from the Nile, speak volumes of these brewers' former greatness.

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