A person blessed to accompany Ra on his daily voyage across the blue vault of heaven, and assuming they weren’t instantly reduced to ashes by intimate proximity to his blistering majesty and were of a botanical frame of mind, might liken Egypt to a lotus flower.
Sprouting in Nubia’s impoverished soil, the Nile’s graceful, green stem winds north between forbidding wastes for hundreds of miles before blossoming into a broad, fertile delta on the shores of the Great Green sea. To those privileged to dwell therein, the favored country between was Kemet, “The Black Land”, a term of endearment recognizing both its rich black soil and the healthy balance sheets it typically produced.
Just once along the Nile’s journey, and while still a very long march from the sea, that wondrous tendril of life and industry sends forth a single, vast leaf that unfurls into the Western Desert’s bleak heart farther than a swift camel can plod in a day and a night. In dimmest antiquity, the reptile-rich salient known as Ta’ sy-Sobek – the Land of the Lake of Sobek, in homage to Egypt’s perilous crocodile god – was little more than a glorified oasis, a sweltering natural sink into which pooled such Nile waters as survived the long westerly seep beneath the sands. That was before an ambitious partnership of high-minded elites bethought itself to conscript entire divisions of low-cost laborers to dig a colossal ditch connecting Ta’ sy-Sobek directly with the Nile’s invigorating flood, a stroke of conceptual, organizational and profitable genius that transformed a compact district of mild prosperity into an enormous region embracing some of Egypt’s most valuable and fecund real estate.
Each year at Inundation, stone-lined canals bore sy-Sobek’s life-giving waters far into the arid hinterland, and carried regular bumper-crops of wheat, barley, flax, and fruits and vegetables of all kinds back to the lake for transshipment to hungry markets near and far. Great quantities and varieties of fish inhabited the vast lagoon, and once the better part of Sobek’s inconvenient physical manifestations had been rounded up and sacrificed to his greater glory, casting nets into sy-Sobek was as safe as it was lucrative. “Shai-nefer Sobek”, the inhabitants called themselves, the Lucky of Sobek, and never tired of congratulating themselves on their good fortune. At the extreme western tip of that bountiful leaf, perched precariously between green plenty and parched desolation, hunched the decidedly unfortunate village of Bibleb-Akhet.
The view from “Bibleb’s Horizon” was somewhat less grand than that suggested by its name. Its western horizon encompassed only desert, the “Red Land”, and not a majestic desert of shifting dunes and laden caravans and powerful spirits, but a depressing wilderness of sharp stones and burning salt pans and hostile demons. To the east, at once depriving and sparing the village the constant prospect of that tantalizing paradise so near at hand, rose a long, low fold of earth gently wandering north and south that bore little resemblance to teeth and was known locally as Ibhi Wadjet – “Wadjet’s Teeth” – Wadjet being the ancient patron goddess of Lower Egypt often depicted in the form of a serpent, and her presumed teeth represented by a crumbly scattering of squat honey-hued boulders haphazardly strewn across the rise’s not particularly snake-like crest.
Flanked by forbidding wastes on one side and an unlovely natural fence on the other, Bibleb-Akhet’s some 200 souls occupied a miserable ribbon of thirsty disappointment perhaps a quarter-mile wide and characterized by blighted earth, scorching winds and pointed isolation. To the happy multitudes native to Ta’ sy-Sobek’s far-western reaches, Bibleb-Akhet was “Dung-Town”, a sadly fitting appellation since, perchance observed from Ra’s speeding chariot, its few dozen mud dwellings looked like nothing so much as a jackal’s latrine. Its residents, by predictable extension, were generally, and without the softening influence of jest, referred to as Dung-Eaters, which was patently unfair, because although the self-described Children of Bibleb stooped to dine upon a great many things not typical of better-supplied tables, so also the Kher-Bibleb retained sufficient pride and means enough to avoid that basest of fare when there was even a small chance of being observed eating it.
In essence and in fact, the citizens of Bibleb-Akhet were a people apart, which is a surprisingly difficult thing to be. Whether by commerce, or romantic blending, or common cause, or mere curiosity, it is the natural tendency among human populations to mingle. People like to belong, and they like everyone else to belong alongside them. Indeed, Egypt had no shortage poor villages strewn along its vast periphery that managed to find acceptance within the larger polity, and any number of stubbornly dissimilar tribes and sects and insular factions that nonetheless enjoyed public tolerance and respect. Even determinedly anti-social classes like thieves and murderers, and roundly unpopular ones like foreign exiles and damaged slaves, could expect a secure, if humble, seat at Pharoah’s unifying table. But not the Children of Bibleb, a de facto banishment made even more remarkable by the fact that the unhappy citizens of Bibleb-Akhet were in most ways indistinguishable from those who shunned them. They wore clothing identical to – if shabbier than – those of their disdainful neighbors, spoke no language other than Egyptian, were steeped in the country’s customs and lore, and had inhabited their disagreeable acreage for time out of mind. Yet, in the national consciousness, and to a somewhat lesser extent their own, they remained little better than strangers in a familiar land, refugees in their own country, a tainted people unfit for better station.
Just as the exalted may discern things not plain to lesser creatures, so those of more humble perspective may more easily recognize the profane truths lying beneath their betters’ elevated horizons. If the mighty, for example, will confidently predict the gross market value of a season’s yield of swine manure, so the meek will contrive a dozen practical uses for it. Alas, were the tendencies of those dwelling in high branches toward detached abstraction confined solely to the collection and sale of pig excrement, life among the roots would smell a good deal sweeter. As it is, the loftiest – subject to the same base passions and corporeal frailties that govern the low – forever strive to order heaven and earth to suit their own interests and appetites, a process by which even small differences in stature often foster wide practical disparities.
On the eighth day of Drought, in the sixth year of the blessed reign of Pharoah Amenhotep III, Great Spear and Shield of the Two Lands, the parched and impoverished gods of Libya gathered together their collective resentments, simmering jealousies and sulky indignations into a towering fit of pique and sent it spinning across the sands against their age-old adversaries, the smugly superior gods of the Nile. When the powerful start throwing punches, of course, the blows inevitably fall most heavily on those least able to absorb them, and while Egypt’s sacred menagerie relaxed at ease, secure behind massive stone walls and attended by the soothing devotions of priestly armies, the long-suffering faithful of Bibleb-Akhet sat ignorant and helpless on the edge of ruin, oblivious to the divine tantrum howling down upon them.
