Egypt still retains its pagan past?

By Kesava Menon

KOM OMBO (UPPER EGYPT), MARCH 16. A wide embankment with steps leading down to a river and a hoary old temple on a knoll behind. When viewed from the water the scene is almost identical to a typical place of pilgrimage on the banks of the great rivers of India. The river is the Nile and the temple is supposedly not in use any more but the ambience it radiates suggests that Ancient Egypt is not as dead as history texts declare it is.

It hardly matters that the embankment has been built to provide a berth for the cruise boats that ply the Nile or that the make- shift market that stretches back from it caters to the needs of tourists rather than pilgrims. In the brisk cool of the morning as Ra (the Sun God) rises from behind the temple at Kom Ombo it is very easy to imagine the sights and sounds of the faithful completing their ablutions before ascending the steps for their worship. The temple has an East-West alignment. With a broad courtyard fronting a colonnaded portico, pillared halls within the main enclosure leading on to sanctum sanctorums the temple is, from a Hindu perspective, just as it should be.

There is even a small pond in the front courtyard reminiscent of the pools for sacred fish that are to be found in some South Indian temples. A smaller pavilion outside the main temple complex serves as a shrine for a venerated animal god. This being Africa, the pond and the shrine are dedicated to the crocodile god Sobek and not to Matsya or Nandi but the similarities in setting are so close that the difference in particulars hardly matters.

Like the temples in another continent, this ancient shrine contains halls set aside for the administrative affairs of the temple, for storing instruments used in ritual and chambers used for the mixing of aromatic herbs and medicines. This was once a place of healing to which the ill would be brought for the ministrations of skilled physicians and surgeons and the blessings of the gods. It was also a shrine that collected revenue from the countryside and the Nilometre (an ingenious structure to measure the annual flooding of the Nile) testifies to the more profane role the temple played in the life of the people.

The Kom Ombo temple like others in the deeper recesses of Upper (i.e. southern) Egyptthose at Esna and Philae for instance is relatively new. Only about two thousand years old. These are also not truly Egyptian since the structures that presently exist were put up by the Ptolemaic (Mecedonian) Pharaohs or Roman emperors on sites sanctified by the true Egyptian monarchs of earlier dynasties. But, unlike the mammoth grandiose temple complexes built at Luxor and Karnak by the mighty warrior kings of the 18th and 19th dynasties these later temples are more intimate. As one recent visitor put it the temples at Luxor/Karnak celebrate the Pharaohs more than the gods while these relatively smaller shrines retain their essence as places for worship.

In the vicinity of Kom Ombo where the Nile flows through placid farmlands and the marks of later civilisations appear ephemeral, it seems but natural to think that Egypt is still a pagan land. In times past, there were Gods and Goddesses of the East Bank and the West, Vulture Gods, Cattle Gods, Falcon Gods and above all else the river and the sun and the fertile earth. Religion was more intimately attuned to the preservation of fertility in man and the soil and the abstractions of metaphysics was left to the learned in distant metropolises. This was a religion of charms and amulets and of invoking the help of the Gods in managing the mundane matters of life.

Not all of the old ways of life have disappeared despite two thousand years of monotheism and thirteen centuries of proscription of idol worship.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : International
Previous : Keith Vaz's difficulties deepen
Next     : Pak. backtracks on curbing militants