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By Ahmed Maged First Published: October 3, 2008
CAIRO: The ancient Egyptian custom of offering a virgin as a sacrifice to the river Nile every year to instigate a flood is a big historical error, Egyptology researcher Bassam El Shammaa told Daily News Egypt.
“The myth of Arous El Nil (Bride of the Nile) has tarnished the image of ancient Egyptians who by nature hated violence and were only content to see blood at the altar,” El Shammaa said.
According to some versions of history, this Egyptian custom was practiced until the Islamic conquest of Egypt when Caliph Omar Ibn El Khattab banned the pagan ritual.
According to Egyptian historian Al Maqrizi (1364-1442) in his “El Khutat El Maqrizia” (The Maqrizian Plans), when the Arab armies led by commander Amr Ibn El Aas entered Egypt, Egypt’s Copts requested to uphold the annual ritual prior to the time of the flood.
When Ibn El Aas referred the request to the Caliph, the latter sent a letter to Al Mokawkas, the last Coptic governor of Egypt, and asked him to throw the letter in the Nile instead.
Containing words of supplication to God to bring about the flood, the letter’s benediction was said to have caused the Nile to increase its volume overnight to 16 cubits, a miracle that persuaded Egyptians to renounce the ancient custom, claimed Al Maqrizi.
El Shammaa, however, doubts the authenticity of this story.
“That the Copts had approached Ibn El Aas to ask him to sacrifice a bride isn’t in line with Christian belief which bans all such pagan customs. How many Egyptians were found mummified after Christianity spread in Egypt? None,” he argued.
Observing the details of the account, El Shammaa notes the contradiction between the fact that the Copts had explained to Ibn El Aas that each year Egyptians sacrifice a slave and the fact that this slave is taken by force from her parents and thrown into the Nile at a specific location in the river.
“Since when do slaves have parents?” he asks. “The Nile location referred to is none other than the Island of Phaela, the only Coptic site on the Nile with a church and the closest point to the Nile’s First Cataract, which made the island ideal for measuring the water level.
“With a Coptic church on it, the island could not have been a scene for such a sacrifice because Christians shunned all pagan practices. The Caliph Omar Ibn El Khattab responding by asking Al Mokawkas to throw the letter as a gift to Nile also contradicts the behavior of a conservative Muslim ruler.
“Besides it’s illogical for the Nile to rise to 16 cubits overnight. The process takes a much longer time.”
According to El Shammaa, there isn’t a morsel of evidence in ancient Egyptian records to suggest that people sacrificed a virgin.
Pling, the Greek historian, explained that the ancient Egyptians offered crocodiles wrapped in colorful attire to the Nile.
A papyrus known by the name of ‘Anastasia’ embodied the holy songs that were chanted to the Nile prior to the flooding, says Al Shammaa.
It said: “Blessed flooding, to you we offer sacrifices like buffalo, oxen and birds, to you we offer the gazelles that were hunted at the mountainside, for you we set fires and burn incense.”
“There is no mention whatsoever of a virgin or any human sacrifice, which should encourage research on where that myth began,” he continued.
The myth, however, has its sources, he explained.
The first is the Greek historian Plutarch who first invented it. Repeated by many Greeks, it told the story of a king known as Egyptos who offered his daughter as a sacrifice to the Nile to avoid the gods’ wrath.
After he did that he committed suicide by throwing himself in after her. Since then, Plutarch said, the Egyptians began to sacrifice a virgin every year.
El Shammaa says that there was no Egyptian king called Egyptos, adding that this is a mythical character with no basis in reality.
There is also evidence that the tourists who came to Egypt in the 17th and 18th centuries witnessed celebrations during the flooding of the Nile where a clay bride was offered to the river.
When they inquired about it, they were told that Egyptians had replaced the real virgin with a clay model.
“The myth must have spread this way to attract tourists,” says El Shammaa.
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^ Indeed not only is there no documented historical evidence for it in ancient Egyptian records, but there is no archaeological or anthropological evidence of it either. In fact, as the article states, it goes against everything we know about ancient Egyptian religious customs.
The only evidence of human sacrifice we have from the ancient Egyptians comes from the archaic and predynastic periods where enemies were ritually sacrificed to the king or servants were sacrificed to accompany the king in the afterlife. Other than that, there is nothing about 'virgin' women being sacrificed to the Nile or any citizens being sacrificed to any god for that matter.
Posts: 26285 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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quote:According to El Shammaa, there isn’t a morsel of evidence in ancient Egyptian records to suggest that people sacrificed a virgin.
Utterance #155 seems to suggest human scrafice. This does presuppose that a person can't live in the Eye of Horus and that they were induced to this position from outside influences.
93a. To say: Osiris N., take to thyself the damsel who is in the eye of Horus; open thy mouth with her.
93b. To say four times: For N., a lifting up of the offering, four times. Two jars of wine of Buto.
I believe the Eye of Horus was the source of the inundation which tosses on the horizon.
There are no other references to human sacrafice in the PT and it's unlikely egyptologists believe that this is one. Though egyptologists do believe that utt's 273/4 are about canibalism, I don't.
Utterance 155 appears to me to be a very old one (~3000 BC) and 273/ 4 is pretty late (~2500 BC).
-------------------- Men fear the pyramid, time fears man. Posts: 393 | From: NW Indiana, US of A | Registered: Aug 2006
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^^ I remember Cameroonian Egyptologist Oscar Pfouma (1993) claiming that the ritual of the sacrifice of the mysterious Tekenu character was actually that of an Albinos, relying on Diodorus Siculus's comment about earlier Kemetians sacrificing men with Typhon (Seth~Sutekh)'s color (i.e redheads) as well as similar rituals from Inner Africa, the Bambara case coming to mind.
The first story mentioned in the thread also reminds me of a study by a Ftrench Africanist going by the name of Roger Brand (1990) reporting, among the Wemenu of Southern Benin, the case of a 8 years old boy who was unusually sexually hyperactive, and that was told by a Bokonon (diviner) to sacrificed to the Weme river via drowning.
This interpretation was criticized by Togolese Fa diviner Basile Goudabla Kligueh who specified that this kind of practice was common in the area, but misunderstood by Brand. The drowning processus was only ritual, the body of the boy being replaced by a statuette or an animal. His family would have actually have been considered as having been drowned and being dead by his family, although he would from an Eurocentric standpoint still be alive but under another name and another personality and life.
Seems that a similar misunderstanding of African customs by Europeans occured despite a 2000 years hiatus.
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^ The question is has such a ritual substitute always been or was there a time when they really sacrificed people? I'm not implying they did, but for example in the case of ancient Egypt, the retainers and servants of the dead pharaoh were sacrificed to accompany him into the afterlife. This took place during the predynastic period, but during dynastic Egypt the servants were replaced with small statuetes and other wooden effigies we now know as ushabtis.
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The Nile bride sacrifice is not inherently unlikely (except for the claim that it carried on as late as the advent of Islam.) Other cultures came to believe that human sacrifices were necessary in order to ensure continuity in the seasons and the rising of the sun etc. Inca child-sacrifice spirings to mind. However as I say the lack of ancient evidence for this particular practice in Egypt tends to suggest that it is a mere myth.
It's surprising how widely accepted the story seems to be among Egyptians. It suits the Muslims to portray the conqueror-Caliph as a civilizing influence who abolished a barbaric pagan practice. However as noted when the Caliph arrived (in the Seventh century) the Egyptians had all been Christians for three or four centuries at least, living under the rule of Christian Byzantine emperors who would presumably not have allowed such pagan customs to continue, even in symbolic form.
The Bride of the Nile myth evidently inspired a real annual festival in post-dynastic Egypt, even though it was probably the result of a fake tradition. There is also an Egyptian film inspired by the myth...
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