Limadha faqad horus 'ainah (Why did Horus lose his Eye? A New Reading of Egyptian Thought), Mervat Abdel-Nasser Cairo: Sharqiyat, 2005. pp140 Mervat Abdel-Nasser, the author of this stimulating book and a professor of psychology at King's College, London, has written a poetic introduction to her book, in which she identifies herself to the reader. In a two-page preface entitled, "Personal Identification," Abdel-Nasser writes that "she ...is a small stone lost one day / from her mother in Saqqara, / carried by the wind / and settled on the bottom of the Nile. / Many years later, the stone was picked up by a pigeon / with the eyes of a hawk, / which took it to / western lands." Later, the stone turns into a woman, "a modern Cleopatra / who adores words, decision-making, / and the company of books. / She keeps a small statute of Thoth, / who knows the secret / of her taming of time." This is all quite confusing, of course, until the reader realises that the book is meant to be a kind of "love story" of Egyptian civilisation, mixing elements from the country's long history with the author's experience and supported by elements taken from contemporary culture. Thus, in the book's 12 chapters, Abdel-Nasser includes three dedicated to the philosophy of place, three to the philosophy of laughter, three to medicine, and three to the philosophy of language, all parts, she says, of that civilisation. Extracts from the work of distinguished poets writing in 'ammiyya, the Egyptian dialect of Arabic, are interspersed in the text, with quotations from Ahmed Fouad Negm and Salah Jahin underlining the book's love of Egypt and its history. Abdel-Nasser explains early on in the book that her aim has been to demonstrate how alienated modern Egyptians are from Ancient Egyptian civilisation, the Egyptian public rarely visiting heritage sites, for example, and not feeling connected to them. This lack of interest is perhaps explained by religion, by the role of foreign occupation in the formation of modern culture, and by the effect of modern ideologies, she says. For example, Abdel-Nasser comments that while Egypt "owes a lot to European occupation, because it led to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and the decipherment of hieroglyphics," people cannot be expected to be "grateful" to their previous occupiers. Perhaps as a way of avoiding this dilemma, today's Egyptians "value ignorance of the past as an aspect of national identity, as if one cannot be truly nationalist unless one ignores the history of the Ancient Egyptians. Since Egypt's foreign occupiers were interested in this material, we should now ignore it." Be this as it may, Abdel-Nasser's general aim in this book is to suggest ways in which Egypt's modern inhabitants might feel more connected with this past. In her first chapter, for example, "Philosophy of Place," she traces the resemblance between Shakespeare's play Hamlet and the Ancient Egyptian story of the god Horus, usually shown as having a human body and the head of a hawk. This story tells of the revenge taken by Horus against his uncle Seth, who had killed his father Osiris, losing an eye in the struggle and resorting to Thoth, god of wisdom, to replace it. The story bears some resemblance to the revenge motif in Hamlet, and it resembles, too, the plot of the highly successful 1994 Disney film The Lion King, in which Simba, the lion's son, is the equivalent of Horus, and whose uncle Scar has killed his father, the lion king of the title. "This film uses the same symbols as the Egyptian mythology," Abdel-Nasser writes, "employing animal figures to convey meanings that are hard to convey in words." For example, she continues, the character of Rifiki in The Lion King, equivalent to Thoth in the Ancient Egyptian story, is played by a baboon in the film, the same animal as the Ancient Egyptian god. Furthermore, the baboon was not by any means a haphazard symbol, since it signifies the Ancient Egyptian's observations of the baboon, which makes a certain call at dawn, as if calling up the sunrise." In her second chapter, "The Invention of the Country and the Egyptianisation of the World," Abdel-Nasser looks at themes of Egyptian identity. Main references here are to two books by author Michael Rice, Egypt's Making: The Origins of Ancient Egypt 5000-2000 BC and Egypt's Legacy: The Archetypes of Western Civilization 3000 to 30 B.C., both published in 2003 . In Rice's view, the secret of Ancient Egyptian civilisation was the ability of the country's people "to overcome" their own fragility and short lives by inventing a rich mythology and philosophy. Animal symbols of various forms express this psychology and thought of the Ancient Egyptians, and Abdel-Nasser also discusses the phenomenon of "duality" in such thought: the god symbolising the River Nile, for example, is pictured as a man with female breasts and as an Egyptian symbol of the unification of man and woman. It is a pity that many of these fascinating themes are only touched on in Abdel-Nasser's book. The book's next chapter, "Philosophy of Laughter: Children of Laughter and Tears," is also a disappointment in that the author does not go into nearly enough detail in her treatment of jokes and humour in Ancient Egypt. This chapter would have been one of the most interesting in the book had she done so, since humour, laughter and joking of various forms are also all components of modern Egyptian identity, and it would have been fascinating to draw connections. Abdel-Nasser begins by quoting lines from the poet Salah Jahin, "The most beautiful part is love / and some tiny heap of laughter and satire," and the author notes that in Ancient Egyptian mythology when the god Re laughed, the air which came out of his mouth separated the goddess of the sky, Nut, from the god of the earth, Geb, giving rise to the grief of separation. Laughter thus became tears, falling as rain, and from this rain sprang human beings, the children of the sky, of tears and of laughter. "Does this story," Abdel-Nasser asks, "help to explain why today we call ourselves welad nukta, witty people," since we are, according to the Ancient Egyptians, all ultimately the children of laughter? "Is this why we consider Salah Jahin to be so very Egyptian, comedy being the true source of wisdom?" If Abdel-Nasser skates a little too swiftly over these fascinating themes, the reader may find some consolation in her next chapter, "Philosophy of Language: the Language of the Birds." Here, she mixes personal experience with references to the symbol of birds in Ancient Egypt, where they played a central role. Returning to her home in London after a stay in Egypt, the author tells us, she found that her "Egyptian Castle," as English friends call it, had apparently been broken into in her absence, but that the would-be thieves had not taken anything. Abdel-Nasser retraced the path that the intruders had taken through her house, only to find, on entering her bedroom, that they had in fact been a small bird, which had died trying to find a way out of the house and through its closed windows. Astonishingly, the bird was wrapped in a shroud, having fallen onto a scarf decorated with Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and symbols of Ancient Egypt. For the Ancient Egyptians, a dead bird was a symbol of pessimism, a kind of negation of the knowledge of the land and the sky that birds represented for them, since birds alone could fly from earth to sky. Abdel-Nasser uses this experience as a way of introducing meditations on the use made of birds by the Ancient Egyptians in hieroglyphs and elsewhere, discussing, for example, a drawing on the walls of the temple of Abydos that shows the goddess Isis in the form of a bird flying over the corpse of Osiris, god of the dead, apparently hoping to revive him and bring him back to life. While Abdel-Nasser's style of presentation and the limitations of her discussion will not please all readers, the book has the great virtue of bringing home the marvelous achievements and sophisticated thought of the Ancient Egyptians to those who do not have the time or the inclination to go through huge, dull books on Ancient Egyptian dynasties and myth. Its simple style and its connection of Ancient Egyptian myth to modern cultural life will make many readers curious to learn more about this great period in Egypt's history. To many modern Egyptians, Ancient Egypt is a thoroughly dusty affair, lying in the desert or at the temples of Luxor and Aswan but hardly a source of contemporary interest. One does not spend the weekend at the Egyptian Museum or at Saqqara. Yet, perhaps as a result of reading Abdel-Nasser's book attitudes may change, for she shows how our ancient history is involved in contemporary life, not only in Egypt, but also in the world as a whole. She recounts, for example, the charming Ancient Egyptian story of the lotus, the Pharoah's favorite flower. The Ancient Egyptian god Nefertem, god of the sunrise and son of a marriage between Ptah (creativity) and Sekhmet (destiny), was born with a crown of lotus flowers on his head, the lotus serving as a symbol of human creativity and procreation, and as such it was used extensively on temple walls, pillars and statues. Abdel-Nasser tells us in her chapter "The Story of a Flower" that for her sister's wedding she arranged for the bride's procession to start from the Nile in a boat decorated with flowers, including the lotus. And Abdel-Nasser is not the only one to have been fascinated by this flower and its meanings: during the European Renaissance in Italy, for example, artists used the flower as a symbol of the birth of Christ, it being brought, in the form of a prophecy, by the Archangel Gabriel to the Blessed Virgin, and there is a well-known painting by the later Mexican artist Diego Rivera (1886-1957) that depicts a woman holding a basket full of lotus flowers, her body mingling with those of the flowers she holds. Despite some shortcomings, this book stimulates the reader's appetite for similar studies, which constitute a kind of writing that is at present very rare in Arabic. By Rania Khallaf
