Carolyn Graves-Brown - Daemons and Spirits in Ancient Egypt

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DAEMONS & SPIRITS

IN

ANCIENT EGYPT

LIVES AND BELIEFS OF THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS

Series Editor

C. Graves-Brown

Egypt Centre, Swansea University

Editorial Board

Dr Emily Teeter

The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago

Dr Campbell Price

Curator of Egypt and Sudan, Manchester Museum,

The University of Manchester

LIVES AND BELIEFS OF THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS

DAEMONS & SPIRITS

IN

ANCIENT EGYPT

CAROLYN GRAVES-BROWN

Carolyn Graves-Brown, 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owners written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78683-288-7

eISBN: 978-1-78683-290-0

The right of Carolyn Graves-Brown to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: First century AD, painted and inscribed wooden funerary stela.
Collection The Egypt Centre, Swansea University.

Dedicated to those yonder.
Know you are loved, know you are valued.

Predynastic	55003100 BC
Early Dynastic	31002686 BC
Old Kingdom	26862181 BC
First Intermediate Period	21812055 BC
Middle Kingdom	20551650 BC
Second Intermediate Period	16501550 BC
New Kingdom	15501069 BC
Third Intermediate Period	1069747 BC
Late Period	747332 BC
Ptolemaic Period	33230 BC
Roman Period	30 BCAD 395

S EVERAL PEOPLE have been invaluable in producing this volume. Firstly, those patient individuals who have helped edit deserve a special mention. These include my husband, Paul Graves-Brown. Ken Griffin, a long-standing supporter of the Egypt Centre and lecturer at Swansea University was also roped in. My work colleagues all deserve a mention for their patience, and especially Wendy Goodridge, a curator at the Egypt Centre. I also owe a special debt of gratitude to the University of Waless anonymous reviewers. Finally, without the publisher and its commissioning editor Sarah Lewis, this volume would certainly not exist!

T HIS BOOK IS ABOUT the weird and wonderful lesser-known spirit entities of ancient Egypt, daemons, the mysterious and often fantastical creatures of the Egyptian Otherworld and the closely related spirits of the dead. While several publications deal with major gods, few discuss lesser-known entities, such as daemons like Bes or She Who Embraces, and those that exist are largely intended for scholars of Egyptology. This volume is illustrated with artefacts from the collection of the Egypt Centre at Swansea University and is intended for both academic Egyptologists and the wider public.

Writing the volume was not without problems. Naturally, the ancient Egyptians did not classify their world as we would today, so spirits of the dead, living people able to commune with spirits, and even cult objects were considered very similar. They were all liminal beings, those who were between states or locations, as well as sometime inhabitants of the Duat or Otherworld. The word daemon is used here to reinforce the point that the group is not quite the same as those entities classified as demons today. However, many others use the term demon, lesser god, or genie.

The first chapter explores classifications in more detail, including the once common realm of both daemons and spirits of the dead, the Duat. In summary, daemons and spirits of the dead were active beings, liminal, divine, lesser than the great gods, did not have cult centres and could be either malevolent or benevolent. However, ancient Egyptian states of being were fluid with, for example, entities fluctuating between classification as greater gods or as humans with special powers.

The Egypt Centre opened in 1998 as a museum of around 5,000 largely Egyptian antiquities and is part of Swansea University. One might say that this book is an exercise in object-centred learning in that it is based on the museums collection. This has advantages and disadvantages. Because this volume is bounded by the artefacts in the Egypt Centre it can never be an exhaustive study and it is biased towards certain perspectives. For example, several daemons decorate the Twenty-first Dynasty coffin (accessioned as W1982) belonging to the centre. Had the centre contained, say, a Middle Kingdom coffin, the volume would depict a quite different set of daemons. On the positive side, this approach allows exploration of many objects until now unknown in Egyptological circles.

Unfortunately, the biographies of the artefacts are incomplete. It has not always been possible to trace provenance, though it is indicated where known.

Some artefacts which form the basis of the collection were held in the university as early as the 1950s. Previous professors, notably Professor George Kerferd, collected classical artefacts and some replicas which he donated to the university. However, the bulk of the artefacts now housed in the Egypt Centre came to Swansea in 1971 from that part of the Wellcome Collection that had been housed in the Petrie Museum. Post 1971, a few artefacts were donated by private donors. The coffin, (accession number W1982), which features heavily in chapters five and six, came to Swansea in 1981 from the Royal Exeter Memorial Museum, and a group of artefacts was loaned to us by Woking College, Surrey in 2012. The Bes bell (p. 53) is from this loan. The apotropaic wand was loaned by the British Museum in 2005.

In the text I have referred to artefacts by museum accession numbers. Most have the prefix W, which my predecessor, Kate Bosse-Griffiths, used to show that they belonged to the Wellcome Museum in Swansea, as the universitys collection was then called. Others, for which I was unable to find a clear connection with the Wellcome collection when first recording the artefacts on a computer catalogue, are labelled EC for Egypt Centre. While subsequent research showed some of them to have been part of the Wellcome collection, the numbers were not changed. One or two with other prefixes relate to individual donors, for example, WK for Woking College.

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