Free Think Like an Egyptian by Barry Kemp Page B

city of Baset in the Nile Delta, and the cat goddess was known simply as “She of Baset” (thus, Bastet). Her festival became a major event, attracting (according to Herodotus) several hundred thousand people. Beside the city there developed a huge cemetery for cats, which had been bred, killed, and carefully mummified as an expression of piety.

30.
    FIRE
     
     
     
     
    When archaeologists excavate an ancient settlement in Egypt, they work through layer after layer of earthy debris to expose the foundations of ancient buildings. Much of the debris is brick rubble but also common is ash from fires. In their houses and places of work fires were never far from ancient Egyptians. The quantities of ash are sometimes surprising. Part of an unusually well-preserved building at Elephantine was used as a dump for ash from a bakery, and this, mixed with earth, had built up to a depth of three meters.
    The sign for fire shows either a point of glowing fire ending in a tail of smoke or flame rising from a pottery bowl. Excavations at the city of Tell el-Amarna have revealed that kilns for pottery, for making glazed objects, and for small-scale metal working, as well as ubiquitous ovens for cooking and baking bread, were dispersed throughout the housing neighborhoods. Tending fires and obtaining combustible materials must have been a constant chore, and breathing smoky air a regular hazard. Although Egypt is generally a hot country, winter days and especially nights can be quite cold, especially for people living near the desert. A common feature in the central living room of Amarna houses is a broad and shallow pottery bowl, filled with ash and charcoal, set in the floor, often next to a low brick bench. This served as the domestic hearth around which people could gather. In smaller houses the soot-blackened fragments fallen from the mud-plastered ceilings suggest that many poorer people spent part of their indoor lives in smoky atmospheres, too.
    With ovens, kilns, and small open fires everywhere, lighting a new one was straightforward. Otherwise, Egyptians used a simple friction device, a vertical spindle rotated quickly back and forth in a hollow in a flat piece of wood filled with kindling. A wooden bow with its string looped once around the spindle greatly increased the speed of rotation.
    There were times when fires spread out of control. Egyptian settlements contained wood, straw (a common component of mud-bricks), oil, cloth, and other inflammable materials. There are some archaeological mounds where large parts have been baked to a red color through conflagration. This can extend downward for several meters into the underlying rubble and earth of previous periods, implying that the heat of the fire set off a slow-burning underground fire that would have rendered part of the town uninhabitable for some time. Whether, in individual cases, the cause was accidental or arose from local disturbances is impossible to tell.
    The Egyptians believed that the hazardous potential of fire was used by the gods: the sun, and the cobras that were often carved alongside it, gave off fire. Lakes of fire were one of the threats in the Otherworld. Yet the nature of fire, which other cultures have seen as a fundamental element, seems to have excited little or no curiosity among the Egyptians. It had no equivalent to Nun, the primeval waters, in their thinking about the nature and origin of the material universe.

31.
    WICK
     
     
     
     
    The standard Egyptian lamp was of the simplest design, a wick lying in a small, shallow bowl. The wick consisted of a narrow strip of old linen twisted from both ends until it naturally doubled back and spiraled upon itself. The word for “wick” used such a twist as its hieroglyphic determinative sign.
    Lamps were not only useful in the house and temple and palace, they were essential for men working underground. In ancient Egypt this mostly meant the making (and also the subsequent robbing) of tombs. The