Tiny foreskins in little muslin bags
Is superstition alive and well? Jenny Jobbins has been looking at how families mark the birth of a child
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This Ancient Egyptian amulet (top), designed to protect a newborn's life and future prosperity, is still being pinned today to new mothers' and babies' clothing on the seventh day of the child's birth; a temple relief of a childbirth depicts the gods assisting a delivering mother
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The American University in Cairo (AUC) Press has treated us to a new edition of Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, the classic by E W Lane which, as AUC Associate Professor Dr Jason Thompson pointed out at a recent lecture on the new publication given at the American Research Center in Egypt, has been continuously in print for 160 years. Lane's depiction of Egyptians is a classic: notwithstanding criticism by anti-Orientalists, Manners and Customs has been described as the "most perfect portrait of a people" of all time. You love it or you hate it, but what makes us go on reading it? Should we be upping the anti? Or is Lane's work still relevant today?
Lane paints as perfect a picture as one can find of upper class and merchant society in Mohamed Ali's Cairo. Yet he only described what he saw, and was thus forced to omit a great many social customs. By assuming a Turkish identity -- Mansur Effendi -- so he could infiltrate the company of his subjects, and because of his upbringing as an English gentleman, Lane was barred from socialising with half of the population. The women he met were few. Indeed, the only respectable woman he is known to have addressed, Thompson says, was the mother of a friend, who spoke to him while hiding herself behind a pillar. Lane's sister Sophia Lane Poole filled in some of the gaps, but her contacts were mostly limited to members of a certain class.
Winifred Blackman, a British medical doctor who lived in Egypt almost 100 years after Lane, produced another classic, The Fellaheen of Upper Egypt. Her book is rather more basic than Lane's. Blackman lived among the people in the area near Beni Suef, and her intimacy with local women and their health and social issues allowed her to record a way of life which, in the 1920s, had probably changed little for centuries. Blackman recognised that this society was about to undergo a transition into the modern era. Soon doctors would be working alongside the traditional daya (midwife), and sick men and women would seek help from a clinic rather than a herbalist. Like Lane, Blackman was intrigued by what she saw, and she made detailed notes.
How much has changed? Most aspects of Lane's work provide a good, and fascinating, historical reference. Blackman's village life, however, is still recognisable 75 years on.
Nevertheless, if Lane had been able to access harim life he would have found many "manners and customs" which women still take as a matter of course today. Most of these customs are followed with a spirit of fun, although an element of superstition may lurk underneath. Customs surrounding the milestones of life -- childbirth, puberty, marriage and death -- abound in every society. In Egypt there may be better documentation from ancient times than in other societies: that is what gives them an added fascination.
In Western Europe, the corn dolly is a remnant of the Celtic ritual of the annual sacrifice of a redheaded boy at harvest time to ensure next year's crop. Native Americans mark the rites of passage with affiliation to a totem. The Chinese burn paper offerings to assure the wealth of their relatives in the next world. The offering might be a model of a Mercedes, but this custom, like the others, dates back millennia. In Egypt we have records on tomb and temple walls to show just how old some of these customs are.
Some years ago, a young mother in a village on the West Bank near Luxor presented me with one of her most precious possessions. It was a tiny muslin bag sewn with white thread, not much to look at, and with a pungent, herbal smell. The little pouch contained a coin, grains of grass, wheat and herbs -- and her new baby's foreskin. She asked me to keep it safe. Her friends, she said, hid similar pouches in a bank or some other place where riches surrounding it would ensure prosperity for the child. She thought my house would be as good a place as any.
I hope I haven't let her down. The pouch is still safe in my house, although she could have done better in the riches department. Blackman describes the muslin bag, but I was a little surprised when a Cairene friend told me her mother had made something similar with herbs and grains. "Is the foreskin in the bag?" I asked. "Urrgh!" she said. "But we both wore one round our necks, the baby and I."
My friend also had a string of seven beans. "Seven beads of porphyry" was offered, with a prayer, to Isis by a new mother from time immemorial. My friend's beans were strung around the neck of a clay jug -- a jar with a little spout, in this case; a girl has a jar without a spout. In Upper Egypt I was given a boy's jar and a girl's jar, and they take pride of place on a shelf.
Blackman tells us that in the villages she visited a baby boy's hair was left uncut until he was two or three years old, and then all was cut but a single strand. The cut tresses were shaped into a ball with clay, and this was placed under the threshold of the house. Blackman has a photograph of similar balls of clay and hair found at archaeological excavations: I showed the picture to some of my West Bank friends, and asked if they knew what they were. "Ya salaam," they said. "That's what a mother does when her son has his first haircut." They were astonished when I mentioned that the balls in the photograph were thousands of years old.
The sobou' (seventh day) ceremony is one of the most popular Egyptian childbirth traditions, and anyone who doesn't believe the custom can possibly be ancient has only to visit the Temple of Hatchepsut at Deir Al-Bahari on Luxor's West Bank to see the events at the Queen's birth immortalised for all time. On the temple wall Anubis rolls the sieve, and his participation is significant. How far the sieve rolls predicts the length of the child's life, and since Anubis is the god of the Underworld, only he can predetermine how long Hatchepsut will live.
Almost every birth in Egypt today is followed after a week by a sobou', when the family visits the new baby. In the traditional ritual, he or she is given a first bath, while family members (probably partially deafening the baby and inuring him or her to noise for life) beat mortars and pestles, saucepans, dustbin lids and anything else that makes a racket. This clears evil spirits out of the way (remember the christening of Sleeping Beauty?), and after this the sieve is rolled. A special hot beverage, moghat, is served. Made from a powdered herbal fibre, it is very thick and sugary, heavy with ghee and sesame -- a traditional brew which could date from ancient times.
Some of these affairs are at least as splendid as those that must have accompanied the ceremony for Hatchepsut -- or Sleeping Beauty, for that matter. Well-heeled parents sometimes hire a function room in a five-star hotel, where trestle tables groan with delicacies for the guests, who bring gifts for the new baby -- gold or silver trinkets, money or something more practical. Even McDonald's may be used as a venue. Less well-off families hold simpler affairs for family and friends. But whether the party is held in a smart location or at home, and whether the baby is one week old or older, it is considered unlucky not a throw a sobou'.
In Upper Egypt, a new mother hides a knife under her pillow in case a demon attempts to enter her room and harm her baby. In Suez a mother cuts out a paper doll and pierces it with pins, uttering as she does so the names of perceived enemies, and the words, "This is in the eye of so-and-so."
Mothers believe that the soul of a twin might leave the child's body when he or she is asleep and enter the body of a cat: this is one of the reasons why many people avoid harming cats. They know you can stop your twin's souls from wandering at night by nourishing it on camel's milk. This superstition surely originated in Arabia, given that camels were unknown in Ancient Egypt. It is because of its long and rich cultural history that Egypt has been blessed with such an abundance of manners, customs -- and superstitions.
