Friday, December 30, 2022

Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson on Human Sacrifice and Ancient Egypt

  

human sacrifice

 

There is no certain evidence of the practice of human sacrifice in Egypt from the Old Kingdom (2686-2181 BC) onwards, although the practice is known from Kerma in Nubia at a time roughly contemporary with the Second Intermediate Period (1650-1550 BC).

 

In the Protodynastic and early Dynastic period (c. 3200-2685 BC), there may be archaeological indications of the funerary sacrifice of servants. It has been argued that the apparent shared roof covering many ‘subsidiary burials’ surrounding the tombs of certain 1st-Dynasry rulers at Abydos and Saqqara (3100-2890 BC) is an indication that large numbers of royal retainers were killed simultaneously in order to accompany the pharaoh into the afterlife. The practice would no doubt later have been superseded by the more widespread use of representation of servants at work (in the form of wall decoration and three-dimensional models) and the eventual provision of Sharti figures, whose role appears to have been to undertake agricultural work on behalf of the deceased.

 

From the late Predynastic period onwards, votive objects and temple walls were frequently decorated with scenes of the king smiting his enemies while gripping them by their hair, but these acts of ritual execution are usually depicted in the context of warfare. The actual sacrifice of prisoners at temples—as opposed to the depiction of foreigners as bound captives—is attested by textual evidence from the reign of Amenhotep II (1427-1400 BC). He claims to have executed seven Syrian princes in the temple of Amun at Karnak, displaying the bodies of six of them on its walls, and hanging the body of the seventh on the walls of Napata.

 

The tale of the 4th-Dynasty ruler Khufu (2589-2566 BC) and the magician Djedi, composed in the Middle Kingdom (2055-1650 BC) and preserved on Papyrus Westcar (Berlin) provides a good illustration of the Egyptians’ apparent abhorrence of human sacrifice. Khufu is portrayed as a stereotypical tyrant who asks for a prisoner to be decapitated so that Djedi can demonstrate his magical ability to restore severed heads, but, according to the story, the magician insists that the demonstration be made on a goose rather than a human.

 

It is also worth noting that the Pyramid Texts include possible references to cannibalism in the form of the so-called ‘cannibal hymn’ (Utterances 273-4), which describes the king ‘eating the magic’ and ‘swallowing the spirits’ of the gods. However, it is difficult to know in this instance whether the concept of the king eating the gods was purely metaphorical or based on some early sacrificial act. (Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson, The Dictionary of Ancient Egypt [New York: Henry N. Abrams, Inc., 1995], 134)