Text: Northern Autumn
Edited by Beiqiu
In ancient Egyptian life, hedgehogs, like many other desert and swamp animals, occupied a special place. The hedgehog's natural defenses were also appreciated by the ancient Egyptians, and their body parts, especially their hard spines, were used as ingredients in medical prescriptions. A special phenomenon occurred in the Old Kingdom. A palm-sized model ship with a hedgehog head has been found throughout Egypt.
1. The hedgehog of ancient Egypt
From the earliest days of settlement, puffer fish has existed alongside the ancient Egyptians. Hedgehog bones have been found in garbage at the earliest Neolithic sites in Merim Debeni-Salame in the Western Delta region, as well as in Nabuta Praia and Birkisiba in southern Egypt.
Now two species of hedgehogs have been found in Egypt, Hermitchnos and Narcissus. Among them are five species of hedgehogs, one is the so-called "long-eared hedgehog" and the other is the desert hedgehog. The distinction between Hermitchnos and Narcissus is impossible on the basis of the extant ancient evidence, and the ancient Egyptians may not have done so.
However, Evans notes that in modern Egyptian landscapes, long-eared hedgehogs are more common, typically found in "densely vegetated areas around human settlements, while desert hedgehogs prefer dry environments." ”
It is known that hedgehogs played a major role in the diet of the ancient Egyptians. The earliest artificiality of hedgehogs came from the Church of Mae Zhen in Saqqara. This dates back to the Fourth Dynasty of Ancient Egypt, and it appears in a set of registers containing desert animals, before Umeda was a hunter.
Between 3900 and 3200 B.C., it was identified as a four-legged hedgehog, a small, spiny creature. In tombs of the late 3rd century BC, there are signs of its capture alive. However, they do not appear in the extant scenes of piles of sacrifices, nor in the table books of the tombs of the Old Kingdom.
Often depicted as a wild habitat, hedgehogs are also described as part of a desert hunting landscape, and ancient Egyptian artists distinguished a wide variety of spiky animals, such as hedgehogs and porcupines.
In one of the relief areas of the Penuka tomb in Saqqara, a porcupine appeared, and they distinguished the animal from the hedgehog by the general length of the feathers, much longer, with spines on the head and a thorn on the tail, as well as the rounded features of its face and nose. In contrast to the Old Kingdom, hedgehog sculptures in Middle-earth contain only a few examples, in which hedgehogs are described as defensive locations.
In the first millennium BC, from the late period to the Greco-Roman period, the hedgehog's small, incredible vessel was especially popular on all four legs.
2. The status of hedgehogs in ancient Egypt
The hedgehog is also the source of the ingredients in the prescription of the drug, and in some places contains ritual elements, although none of the papers on which these remedies are recorded predate the second intermediate period. However, in ancient Egyptian thought, the natural world was intrinsically linked to the divine world. The most powerful manifestation of this belief is that the ancient Egyptian gods were in the form of animals.
In the mythological records of ancient Egypt, gods and goddesses could take different animal manifestations. Thoth, for example, can appear as a baboon, a falcon, or a cat. So they will have a sense of awe for hedgehogs.
The Arab sheikhs believed that Abasseh might have been the nocturnal companion of the sun god Re-Khorlahti, and that the hedgehog's nocturnal behavior strengthened the connection between the two. If that's the case, it seems to be a local tradition in the Bahariya Oasis. But later references to the gods may have been in the form of an animal tree cavern, or they could have been representations of Arden or Osiris-Atul, representing a mummy-type hedgehog with a solar disk.
Given the geographical specificity of these representations, and the fact that they were confined to later periods, it is not possible to confidently associate these sacred associations with hedgerow-related religious practices in the 3rd millennium BC.
In general, the ancient Egyptians believed that animal behavior was directly related to the mythology of the gods. A well-known example is that the beetle pushes a dung ball to position itself on the basis of the sun, which the ancient Egyptians associated with the daily passage and regeneration of the sun and associated with the god Kehri.
Honan and Steherin propose that while it is difficult to prove that the connection existed in the 3rd millennium BC, the hedgehog may have been a symbol of rebirth for the owners of amulets and scarab beetles. More precisely, during this period, the defensive behavior of the hedgehog seems to have been the main source of inspiration for the hedgehog's performance.
When attacked, the hedgehog will first prick its spikes and then roll into the ball in a high-speed retreat manner, exposing the mass of spikes to the predator, allowing it to hold out for several hours. Hedgehogs in the wild are resistant to snake venom, scorpion stings, wasp stings, and other poisonous substances.
Hedgehogs are also known to seek out the toxic secretions of other creatures, causing them to produce large amounts of foamy saliva, which they then use to smear their own spines, an act known as "self-anorexia", although this particular behavior has not yet been shown in ancient Egyptian art.
In ancient Egyptian art, hedgehogs are also rarely depicted as hunters. For example, in the tomb of Ptahhotep of the Fifth Dynasty of Saqara, there is a locust or locust that bites on the chin. Because hedgehogs are primarily nocturnal animals, Evans suggests that the scene may depict a hedgehog hunting at dusk or at night, a situation that may have been observed by ancient Egyptian artists.
It should also be noted that in captivity and in the wild, including those that inhabit arid regions such as Africa, hedgehogs are able to swim short distances, or float in the water on their backs while curling into a ball. It was also possible that the ancient Egyptians observed this behavior in the wild, but it could not be proven.
Some ancient Mediterranean and northwestern African traditions about hedgehogs may have originated in Egypt. In northwestern Africa, though, hedgehogs are the raw material for many of Berber tribes' ailments, from stomach problems to evil eyes, and in particular, hedgehog thorns are burned and mixed with other substances to treat hair loss. Finally, in the recent history of Egypt, there are several medical methods proposed by Rushdie, many of which provide for the use of the gallbladder and limbs in prevention and treatment.
3. Explanation of peremptory practices
Much has been studied on the demanding behavior of the ancient Egyptians, and in the earliest periods of Egyptian history, the ancient Egyptian practice of offering small inscribed and uninscribed objects, including stone tablets, and simulating humans, other living beings, animals, and inanimate objects, in temples in the earliest periods of Egyptian history was confirmed by chance, and was active in temple shrines at the end of the 3rd century BC.
The temples excavated in the city of elephants, Hierakonpolis, Abydos, and Saqara, tell Ibrahim Awad, and tell Faqa that all of them attest to a rich set of goals within most of the known range of early Egyptian settlements. They are mainly made of mud, limestone, bone, and ivory, as well as hard and semi-precious stones.
During the Old Kingdom, most of the declared objects from temple sites were not recorded, so the motives for providing a particular object were often not documented; The object of the declaration related to hedgehogs is no exception.
Although in temple sites in Egypt in the 3rd millennium BCE, the range of confirmed vowel objects is similar, including differences in thorn-headed boats, ship-bow boats, ship-bow boats, and how they were made, featuring materials of local origin, strongly suggesting local production of these objects. Target items in many temples are regularly collected and placed in secondary sediments.
At the end of the 3rd century BC, and especially compared to the 2nd-1st centuries BC, religious objects and wall reliefs in temple sites overlapped with those that occurred in the context of non-royal families and funerals.
However, in the late Old Kingdom, the thorny fish-head ship was one such example of overlapping. They appear both in the reliefs of the funerary churches decorated in the Mephita necropolis and in temple sites throughout Egypt. This overlap is not sufficient in itself to explain the meaning and function of the bow ship, nor to link the two aspects of representation.
The symbolic objects of expression of these sites vary by their association with the imagery and mythological role of specific gods found elsewhere, and most of the examples of animal forms in the Old Kingdom cannot be directly linked to the natural behavior of animals.
Nonetheless, a pluralistic approach that takes into account images and material culture from temples as a whole, funeral and semi-family (or industrial) contexts, may shed light on the meaning, which is attributed to the ecological connection with them both in the whole and in relief.
Fourth, the goal of the fish-headed snake boat
Comparing selective examples of pufferfish head boat objectsFrom elephant herds in southern Egypt, to Giza in the Moffitt region, to Ibrahim Awad in the delta region, it is clear that all of them share the same original features, even if they are incomplete and damaged.
The head of the hedgehog is depicted on the head with a nose slightly tilted upwards. The thorns have not been carved or painted on anything found so far, but they are also representative of the many living hedgehogs found in ancient kingdom tombs.
Some of the living objects have structural features that imitate real ships: beams and basic balustrades on the "deck" are sometimes indicated, and the most obvious examples of these features appear in the example of Ibrahim Awad, who is told.
Also, in this example, a shallow hole in the middle of a beam may have been used to pull up a mast, although one would think that the depression would be deeper, and the damage to the surface might be a plausible explanation.
However, this example can be compared with the central part of the fragment of a model ship found at Dahshur, in which a single-rod mast hole is clearly present. The image of the owner of the grave and its crew sailing on such a vessel is further confirmed by the image of the owner of the tomb and its crew in the Old State Funeral Art Museum. It should be emphasized that against the background of private funerals, a similar hedgehog has never been found.
Attempts were made to connect the manufacture and dedication of the "pig-headed boat" to historical events within the ancient kingdom, some interpretive questions were encountered.
In Elephants: The Increase in State-Sponsored Expeditions to Nubia. The process of collecting and redepositing into secondary sediments makes it difficult to more precisely determine their manufacture, ritual use, and primitive deposition around the temple.
The dates presented in most of the examples are between the fourth and sixth generations, and thus largely overlap with the fact that the bow ship also appears in funeral art and rock carvings. This may mean a common origin of the meaning of the "thorn boat" in the life and religion of the ancient Egyptians. There is no reason to exclude the importance of these sound objects in private religious ceremonies, both before and after this extended from the funeral sphere to this realm.
In other words, it is likely that the first production of pointed-headed ship sound objects predates their representation on the walls of the Memphis stone tombs. From the Fourth Dynasty onwards, as Kramler had pointed out that in other zoomorphic statues of elephant deposits, a long period of manufacture could be established, extending from 1 to 6 generations, and she speculated that this could also be applicable to the manufacture of similar figures at other early temple sites in Egypt.