Wang Huan: The Plague and Plague Narrative of Ancient Egypt

Author: Wang Huan

Source: Guangming Daily (March 21, 2022, 14th edition)

Edwin Smith Papyrus (Source: Civilization Magazine WeChat public account)

As a fierce infectious disease, the plague is one of the major disasters that plague human society. Ancient Egypt, one of the birthplaces of human civilization, was also plagued by plague. The more explicit record of the plague phenomenon in ancient Egypt comes from the medical papyrus literature, most of which are found in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the range of the dynasty is concentrated in the 20th millennium BC, and some of the papyrus bases may have originated in the 3rd millennium BC or even earlier. Although some texts indicate that the document existed during the reign of a king of the Old Kingdom, it is possible that it was only a pretense of later scribes to create authority, which is a common phenomenon in the literature traditions of many ancient civilizations.

Medical papyrus involves a fairly wide range of medical practices in ancient Egypt and can be divided into two categories: one is what early Egyptologists called "scientific" medical knowledge, which mainly refers to the examination, diagnosis, treatment and prognosis of specific diseases, recording hundreds of drug prescriptions; the other is papyrus containing the use of spells to treat diseases, often classified as magical literature, which some scholars regard as the dross of ancient Egyptian civilization. But egyptologists today have realized that a combination of these two types of literature, as well as types of documents such as religion, mythology, and epistles, must be used to more fully and accurately understand the internal logic of ancient Egyptian medical thought and practice.

Take Edwin Smith Papyrus, for example, which contains eight mantras to ward off the plague, reflecting the Egyptian understanding of the causes of the plague and its cure around 1600 B.C. In these spells, the plague is often thought to have been brought by the souls of evil gods, demons, people, or animals. Among them, the goddess Seyhemet is the god of war, destruction, and plague, and she or her messengers often bring plague. In addition to supernatural forces that can bring plague, life in nature can also act as a carrier of disease, such as flies. The third vector that could bring about the plague was the "evil wind", which shows that the ancient Egyptians had a certain degree of understanding that the plague could spread through the air. For different causes of plague, the mantra gives the corresponding method of eradication. For the plague brought by the gods, it is also necessary for the gods to take them away, so many incantations are prayers to the gods such as Sehemet. At the same time, other protective deities will appear in the spell, side with the victim and help protect them from the plague. For plagues brought about by life in nature (such as flies, etc.), the spell requires that it be cleaned from many places such as indoor food, beds, etc. For plagues spread by "evil winds", the caster must ritualize the ability to communicate with supernatural forces. The corresponding spell requires the "passerby" to simply "pass" the house to avoid introducing the plague indoors. Although this is a spell of a witchcraft nature, cutting off the route of transmission and isolating the causative factors is the most traditional and basic effective way for human beings to deal with plague for thousands of years.

Ancient Egyptian papyrus referred to plague in the form of describing the symptoms and proposing response plans, so it could not be associated with a specific plague event. With the help of historical documents and archaeological materials, some scholars tend to believe that a plague may have occurred during the reign of Amenhotep III of the 18th Dynasty of the New Kingdom (c. 1390-1352 BC). During this period, Egypt's influence in the eastern Mediterranean world reached its peak. During his 38-year reign, Amenhotep III left a large historical record, including more than 200 commemorative scarabs alone, with inscriptions on which the themes of the marriage of kings and queens, cattle hunting, and the construction of artificial lakes. He also built a large funeral temple and more than 250 personal statues that have survived to this day, the "Memnon Colossus" is the most famous of them. Surprisingly, the historical record of his 12th to 20th years on the throne is blank. In sharp contrast, the statues of Seyhemet, the goddess of war and plague, proliferated during this period, with more than 700 extant, far more than the statues of the king himself. The goddess who brought the plague was worshipped out of the logic that since he could not conquer her, he wanted to ally with her and use her power to protect himself. Considering the ancient monarchs' habit of announcing good news and hiding their sorrows, the eight years of silence in the historical record of Ammonhotep III may have been caused by the plague. In the second half of his reign, it is not known whether the plague continued to occur from time to time. In addition, during the reign of his son Ehnathon (c. 1352-1336 BC), he received a reply from the King of Babylon, in which he mentioned that one of Ehenatun's father's concubines had died of the plague. Another letter from the then king of Alashya (present-day Cyprus) to the king of Egypt (possibly Ekhnatun) stated that the god of plague had killed all their coppersmiths. Such diplomatic letters indicate from the side the possibility that the plague of the Amenhotep III and Ehnathon periods occurred and spread in Egypt and the surrounding region.

Ekhnatun was a famous "heretical pharaoh" in Egyptian history, who launched a religious reform to depose the traditional Egyptian gods worship and the sun disc god Atun. Traditional analysis of the causes of the reforms has focused on the conflict between royal and theocracy in this period. If the effects of the plague are taken into account, the reform may have been a different story: in order to escape the plague-stricken Thebes, Echnathon had to move the capital to a virgin land unaffected by the plague, the city of Amarna in Central Egypt. At the same time, since the original gods could not save the country from the plague, the king needed to abandon the old gods and establish a new worship in the new capital, which was the Reformation of the Amal's time. After the failure of this reform, traditional religions were restored, and subsequent Egyptian historical documents adopted a "disreputable" and deliberately forgotten record of Ehnatun and several subsequent short-reigning pharaohs, counting the reign of the kings in this period into the reign of neighboring orthodox pharaohs, until modern archaeological excavations of the city of Amarna were carried out to bring the reform to light. Thus, the "plague theory" provides a different path to explain the drastic social changes in Egypt during this period than the "theocratic conflict theory".

More than a thousand years later, the Macedonian-Greeks established the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt, and the native Egyptian priest Manetow was ordered by King Ptolemaic to write the History of Egypt in Greek. The manuscript no longer exists, and some fragments are preserved in the works of other classical writers, such as the 1st-century Jewish historian Josephus's Refutation of Appian. The fragment of this edition, in a historical account of the new kingdom of Egypt, records a plague that occurred in the time of Amunhotep III: the king was guilty of the removal of lepers, and the lepers elected a priest (named "Moses") to make a law for them that did not respect the egyptian gods and sacred animals, contrary to the Egyptian religion, and invited the Hyksos who had invaded Egypt to return from Asia and rule Egypt with the lepers, and Amenhotep III retreated to the southern region of Nubia; 13 years later, The king returned with his grandson Ramses and expelled the lepers from Egypt from the Hyksos alliance. The story of Moses leading his men to establish a new religious law and leave Egypt, as recorded by the Roman historian Tacitus and other ancient writers, is, though different in detail, similar in basic narrative mode to Manetto's. This model inherits the practice of erasing Amarnathon and his subsequent brief reigning monarchs from historical memory, and assigns the 13 years of Echnathon's Reformation to his father, Amunhotep III. But even so, the specific plot clearly corresponds to the time of Amarna rather than the time of Amenhotep III: the Egyptian priest Moses led the lepers and The Hyksos to occupy Egypt for 13 years, which is basically the same as the length of time that Akhnathon actually dominated the Reformation; the new religion created by Moses for his followers is everywhere contrary to the traditional religion of Egypt, which is similar to the new religion of Echnathon; at the same time, Amenhotep III and his grandson Ramses, who returned to Egypt from Nubia, Hinting at the return of Egypt's orthodox religion and image of rulers – the long-dead Amenhotep III represents the orthodox rulers of the past, while Ramses is the name of a series of orthodox monarchs whose next dynasty is prominent after "13 years". Two glorious orthodox eras, followed by a chaotic "13 years" led by lepers and foreign invaders, were dealt with in Manetto's account as the eventual expulsion from Egypt.

In the view of the "cultural memory" theory, the painful "traumatic" eras of ancient Egyptian history, including foreign invasions and the abandonment of traditional religions in Ekhnatun, will be deliberately forgotten, forming an "encrypted" memory that is easily associated with other unpleasant events. In the Hellenistic era, population mobility increased significantly, and in the context of increasingly close ethnic exchanges, the monotheistic beliefs of the Jews were very different from the polytheistic religions of the contemporaries, and the political and economic power of the Jewish community was rising, often causing jealousy and hostility from other ethnic groups around it, even in Egypt. Thus, the plague events that began during the time of Amunhotep III, although "suppressed" for a long time, were never really forgotten, and took on a new form in the cultural memory of the Hellenistic era: leprosy-infected people, invaders from Asia, the "heretical pharaoh" Akhnatun who did not respect the traditional gods, and the early aversion to the Jews in the Hellenistic era, all of which were mixed into a time-space staggered record of Maneto's pen, and paraphrased by classical writers such as Josephus. It became an abuse that associated Moses in Judaism with Echnathon or his followers, and was one of the most important evidences for Freud and others to argue that Judaism originated as a religion in ancient Egypt.

Similar to today' situation, the plague simultaneously affected many aspects of society, which offered us a special possibility for understanding the series of far-reaching events that took place in Egypt and abroad during Amarna's time, so much so that the account of this possibility itself became a narrative tradition involving the origins of Judaism: Moses led a group of plague-stricken people closely related to a tyranny and reformation that lasted about 13 years in the history of the new kingdom of ancient Egypt. In this sense, the record of plague in ancient Egypt was not only a medical history, but also an important part of cultural history.

The author, Wang Huan, is an associate professor at the Institute of Global Civilization History, Shanghai University of Chinese

Editor: Xiang Yu

Proofreader: Water Life

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