Photo: Christian Leitz
Inscriptions from Kom Ombo, a temple for the crocodile god
Hieroglyphs representing Egyptian gods on temple walls show an intimate knowledge of wild animals' behaviour and ecology.
This is according to Christian Leitz, Professor of Egyptology at the University of Tübingen, who has just presented his research to a group of scholars at the Carsten Niebuhr Institute, University of Copenhagen. The inscriptions can unlock secrets about Egyptian mythology, cosmology, and how they perceived the world.
Sacred carvings on the walls of the temples from the Greco-Roman period (330 BC-200 AD) in Edfu, Dendera and Kom Ombo, show lion-headed gods. Inscribed for ritual, religious purposes, they inadvertently include detailed zoological information.
See Christian's interpretation of the carvings on this slideshow (in German)
The hieroglyphs, describing lion behaviour for example, are not for the squeamish: Lions, sleepless at night and red-eyed, live off blood, »defying all fear of death«.
Christian Leitz explained to this University Post reporter that the inscriptions are purely religious texts with a purely mythological content.
»But the information therein can be used in a wider variety of contexts, for example in work for a dictionary of the Ancient Egyptian language«, he said.
Of particular significance are a flock of lion goddesses each with different names designating types of behaviour.
»All the names together describe the natural behaviour of the lions, and if you fit all the descriptions together, you have a complete lion,« he explains.
Hierarchies of lion-headed gods connect up with deep interpretations of the Egyptian calendar.
There is no extant Egyptian compendium of zoology. This is unlike contemporary Greece, which could refer to texts with zoological studies by thinkers like Aristotle and Pliny.
»We don’t know whether they were aware of Aristotle and Pliny, but I suggest that this type of text were just not part of Egyptian culture,« Christian Leitz speculates.
The exception to this is the so-called Brooklyn Papyrus, a text on how to treat snake bites written 380-343 BC.
In Kom Ombo, the main god of the temple was Sobek, a crocodile, who uses his tail as »the policeman that interrogates with the whip«, the animal with the »sharp corner teeth«.
The crocodile »dominates the fish«, and »searches through the bodies of his enemies«. Some of many indirect descriptions that reveal intimate knowledge of wild crocodile behaviour.
Discussed among the scholars present at the Carsten Niebuhr Institute was a piece of wildlife interpretation, that would have been vital to the Egyptians river-based civilisation: Did the Egyptians believe that they could actually use the nesting behaviour of the Nile crocodiles to predict the annual flood?
Either way, in the words of Christian Leitz, «all of this information about the nature of the crocodile and the lion comes from intense and close observation of the animals, how they eat and how they hunt«.
Christian Leitz of the University of Tübingen, was invited by the research project Canon and Identity Formation in the Earliest Literate Societies at the Institute of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen.
There are between 30,000 and 50,000 animals at the Faculty of Health Sciences, all used for experiments. Our Danish colleagues in the Universitetsavisen were given an exclusive tour of the facilities
Gallery: February Orientation Meeting
Gallery: Department of Experimental Medicine
Gallery: War of the Wardrobes, the new international students
Gallery: New international students at Science
Gallery: Exam day at Biology
Gallery: Quantum Optics Laboratory
Gallery: Lego model of Hadron Collider's Atlas detector
Gallery: Your typical day. The graphs
Gallery: Copenhagen Competition Finals
Gallery: Intercultural Christmas at LIFE
Gallery: Commemoration 2011
Gallery: War of the Wardrobes from Wageningen, Holland
War of the Wardrobes: Faculty of Law
Gallery: The dancing cleaning staff
Gallery: Culture Night 2011
Gallery: Tree planting ceremony for environmentalist
Gallery: DHL ceremony 2011
Gallery: Æbelholt skeletons 1
Gallery: Æbelholt skeletons 2
War of the Wardrobes: CBS New international students are our troops, defending Copenhagen's honour against a US challenge. See them square up in our fashion contest War of the Wardrobes
Write us an e-mail: uni-avis@adm.ku.dk
Copyright 2009 © Universitetsavisen.ku.dk