Coming of Age in Ancient
by Daniel Kolos, MA,
Current affiliations: Benben Books, Benben Publications
Introduction
Coming-of-Age
‘rites of passage’[1] are
apparent in the ancient world. Although
there is a growing body of literature on gender roles and sexuality in
Pharaonic culture, very little has been written on ancient Egyptian rites of
passage for puberty.[2] It is the purpose of this essay to present a
theory and to set up a methodological framework within which to begin a
systematic study.
Theoretical setting
I
propose that the major common denominator in the Coming-of-Age rite of passage
is to face and survive a life-and-death situation. The environment that would provide adolescents
with such a situation would be military training and service as well as forced
labor. The exemptions would be
apprenticeship in the trades. Performing
as entertainers in various itinerant troupes or phyles attached to temples
would provide the necessary environment for girls where they would become
pregnant, have a safe place to come to term and hope to survive
childbirth. Celibacy would serve as the
exemption. Because the attrition rate of
this proposed rite of passage was known and, at the same time, was socially
unbearable and unacceptable, ancient Egyptian society was faced with a
psychological state of conflict that had to be resolved..
This
paper proposes the theory of liminality in the Coming-of-Age rites of passage
as the social/cultural vehicle to resolve that conflict.
Liminality (from the Latin word līmen,
or "threshold") is the condition of the second stage of a ritual,
especially a rite of passage[3]
that involves the following three sets of changes to the social status of their
participants. [4]
1, Separation
The first or preparatory stage is to separate the
participants from the rest of their social group.
2.
Liminality
The second stage is a period during which the
participant has lost social status, functions in a limbo, lacks the usual
social contacts and lives in a specially constructed group.
3.
Reincorporation
The third stage is a post-liminal period during
which one's new social status is confirmed.
Liminality as a social phenomenon has been used in
the study of ancient society elsewhere.[5]
The New Kingdom story of Horus and Seth provides us with a mythological model from which we
can extract the mechanics of the
male Coming-of-Age rite of passage. I am
using Miriam Lichtheim’s translations. The story sets up a liminal space by
creating a court of justice. This court
is an extra-social space removed from the everyday realities of life. All the participants have entered this
liminal space and the consequent story exhibits at lest fifteen characteristics,
or activities, which supply us with the methodology within the liminal stage of
the rite of passage.
These
mechanics consist of:
1.
Physical maturity
Horus
appears as a “youth with strong limbs”
2.
Making a claim
Horus
enters liminal space when he “claims the office of his father, Osiris.”[6]
3. Meeting a challenger
Seth,
his uncle, plays the role of the challenger when he declares, “Let him be sent
outside with me and I shall let you see my hand prevailing over his
hand….”
4. Preparing for and fighting contests
A
series of contests follow that measure strength. Some of the contests require preparation
and/or include the potential for death.
5. Duration of the Coming-of-Age process
Banebdjede
asks, “What shall we do about these two people, who for eighty years now have
been before the tribunal?” His words
imply the contests take a long time.
6. Distracting the challenger
The
Goddess Neith tries to buy off Seth so that Horus would be exempted from the
challenge. She writes, “Double Seth’s
possessions. Give him Anat and Astarte,
your two daughters. And place Horus on
the seat of his father!”
7. Age requirements
We
know Horus is a youth because Pre-Harakhti, calls him a “youngster, ‘aDd’ whose
breath smells bad.” In turn, Atum calls both Horus and Seth as “these two
youths,” also using the word ‘aDd’.
8. Change of
Identity
There
are several ways that identity can change:
physical, psychological and symbolic.
Some of the changes of identity in the Story of Horus and Seth happen
when
a. Horus received an insult. Pre-Harakhty told him, “You are feeble in
body and this office is too big for you….”
b. when the White Crown was placed on his head
and removed again
c. when Horus willingly changed into a
hippopotamus
d. when
e. after Horus cult off his mother’shead, Seth
blinded him, thus changing his identity until Hathor healed Horus’ eyes
9. Separation from the Mother
At
the end of the Hippopotamus fight, when it becomes obvious that
10.
Establishing dominance
One
contest is totally different from all the others. The two youths try to outwit one
another. It includes a homosexual
attempt by Seth, where Seth declares to the Ennead, “I worked Horus as a
woman,” and a revenge by Horus.
11. Proof of semen production
In
the course of this contest of dominance, both contenders prove that they
produce semen.
12. Winning the
contest
Several
of the contests produce a conclusive win for Horus. Horus even complains to Neith, “…a thousand
times now I have been in the right against him day after day…. I have contended
with him in the hall ‘Way-of-Truth’,” and in three other halls, and “I was
found right against him.”[7]
13. Acknowledgement
A
public declaration of the winner in the Horus and Seth story ends with the
father, Osiris, declaring his son, Horus, his legitimate heir.
14. Public humiliation of the loser
Seth
is brought as a bound prisoner, a game that was played by post-pubescent boys
throughout
15. Attainment of claim
Isis
closes the ceremony by confirming Horus’s new identity as heir of his father Osiris
and king of
These
fifteen characteristics and activities in the Story of Horyus and Seth form a
blueprint of a male Coming-of-Age rite of passage. I propose a methodology to use these
mechanics to test the evidence, which will be presented elsewhere.
Three
contexts exist where young boys would have spent their adolescence: the army, labor troupes, and the trades.
In spite of fighting numerous wars and leaving behind
stele and reports of military campaigns and quarry expeditions, the ancient
Egyptians did not mention their casualties!
Although there is a statistical necessity for a fairly high death rate
at war and in forced labor, to the best of my knowledge we only have two
examples from ancient Egypt that soldiers and laborers died,.
Mentuhotpe
II seems to be the only king who had buried soldiers during his reign: these were covered in sand, they were neither
eviscerated for embalming, nor mummified.[9] And Nakht, a young weaver from Deir el
Medina, was buried with his lungs coated with
Whereas I have proposed that the trades provide the exceptions to military or
labor service, a closer look at the Satire on the Trades reveals these
exercises as part of a contest and leaves no doubt that the purpose of these
stories is to show that scribal students are the ultimate winners who do not
have to face a life-and-death choice.
The
most surprising aspect of the male Coming-of-Age rite of passage is that it
does not seem to include sexual encounters with females! I propose that sexuality only becomes an
issue once a young man has survived his rites of passage and is reintegrated
into his household and village society: he begins the process of ‘establishing
a household,’ the ancient Egyptian euphemism for marriage. That is also likely the point at which the
* * *
The Female Coming-of-Age rites of passage
It
is far more difficult and rather more sensitive to define the female
Coming-of-Age rites of passage. This
paper proposes that:
1.
Separation occurs at the time of the first menses: young girls would
leave their families and villages.
2.
Entering liminality: Joining an itinerant troupe of entertainers or a
permanent group of the same attached to a temple, a necropolis, a nobleman’s
household or the royal palace, depending upon their social status.
3. Challenge:
primarily, to become pregnant, and secondly, to have a supportive environment
within which to give birth and survive childbirth.
4. One aspect of
Training: The girls would learn either a musical instrument or a form of dance
5. Performance:
They would provide entertainment at specific rituals and religious festivals.
6. Achieving primary goal: The last ritual at any festival would be the
attempt at impregnation
7. A second aspect of Training: They would learn midwifery
8. Winning: They would ”win the contest” if they survived
their first childbirth, having a healthy infant to show for it;
9. The new mother then would be reintegrated into her
family and household setting and become eligible for marriage.
Evidence
is plentiful from mythological and literary stories, tomb and temple inscriptions,
banqueting scenes, love and harpers’ songs, ostraca and papyrus paintings.
Mythological Setting
The
deities associated with the rites of passage of post-pubescent girls:
1. Hathor was the goddess of every aspect of
sexuality, whether pleasure, reproduction, entertainment, healing or
childbearing.
2. Bes, the dwarf god, was intimately associated
with entertainment, sexuality and childbirth.
He “played a part on the two most important occasions in a woman’s
life,”[11]
conception and childbirth. Also present
with Bes or Hathor were musicians playing the angular harp, lyre, oboe and
tambourine. Lise Manniche remarks, “We
may perhaps deduce that (these instruments) could not be played unless a sexual
purpose was intended, be it procreation or rebirth.”[12]
3. Hapy was involved with fertility. A Middle Kingdom Hymn to Hapy, in a passage
pertaining to fertility, includes singers and dancers and intimates that they
are going to get pregnant.[13]
4. The Westcar Papyrus story of the birth of
three children introduces five other deities, Isis, Nephthys, Meshkenet, Heqat
and Khnum. They change their appearance
to those of four dancing girls or entertainers (Khener) with Khnum acting the
role of their porter. They go directly
to the birthing room and tell Rawoser, the husband, “Let us see her. We understand childbirth.”[14]
This
“Story of Wonder” is one certain evidence that under the apparent frivolity of
entertainment, these troupes of female musicians were also trained
midwives. Their decorated hips and
perfumed wigs were a cover for other useful skills and that these young girls
may have performed valuable service to the villages they visited, other than
performing ritual entertainment or to take the minds of scribal students off
their work. They remained socially useful in their separation. Suzanne Onestine, in her recent publication
on the Shemayt, holds that these groups of women benefited the state and their
children learned loyalty to the state.[15]
Male and female adolescents in an
economic context
Dr.
Robins noted the economic content of late period marriage contracts and that
one of the obvious advantages of a report from the time of Thutmose III was
that wealth was being kept within the family.[16] Since the Egyptian economy functioned on the
basis of a household, the wealth of a household was directly proportional to
the number of people able to work the land.[17]
Although
Robins and others assume that the “risk of death to women in childbirth” was
taken within marriage,[18]
it is my contention that such a household economy could not afford to take the
chance that a new wife would die in her very first birthing
experience. The Coming-of-Age rite of passage, therefore,
is a social construct to remove a high-occurrence, terrible form of death from
society. Young girls went through their life-and-death struggle, their
first-time giving birth, anonymously, far removed from their families, whether
noble or commoner, rich or poor. If they
died, they were buried in anonymity.
Manniche
wrote that “a section of the (
Reinterpreted
in the light of the Coming-of-Age theory, we find these burials in a context
that works: these were likely the
singers and musicians who were assigned to perform at the numerous funerary
banquets and festivals held at Abydos; that they became pregnant in the
process, as they were hoping to do; and that they died in the process of
childbirth anonymously.
Even the Turin Erotic Papyrus can be interpreted as
evidence of this coming-of-age process.
The normal course of a festival has not changed much over the
millennia: gathering, feast,
entertainment, inebriation, sexuality, sleep and hangover. I would argue that most festivals were held
within a sacred context and each stage may have been a ritual. The sexual stage was the one where the
inebriated female musicians and dancers attempted to become pregnant as part of
their Coming-of-Age rite of passage.
These
girls would find a new social identity for themselves once they had given birth
and survived. For most that identity was
marriage. Nicole Hansen, at the ARCE
Annual Meeting in 2005, and Prof. John Gee in a public lecture[20]
have given examples they believe are marriage ceremonies or celebrations. The theory of liminality requires a
ceremonial reintegration of the individual within society, and such examples
may be interpreted to be the last part of the Coming-of-Age process, possibly
for both boys and girls.
Problems
What happened to the children
these females produced during their time as entertainers? What happens with those who are barren? Who were the impregnators? I have purposely left out the matter of
circumcision both for boys and girls, each of which have been dealt with by
others
The
interpretive theory as presented here is not all-inclusive. There is more, a wealth of detail that will
eventually fill a book. But I must end
with a caveat. Not all occurrences of
sistra and menat necklaces lead to a
free-for-all sexual melee. Not every
soldier was a ‘teenager’ going through his Coming-of-Age rite of passage. There were adult women who served Hathor and
there were professional soldiers who were educated in both the arts of the
scribe as well as in the martial arts.
Further reinterpretation of the known evidence will have to answer the
many other questions that remain.
* I am indebted to Dr. Lyn Green for numerous references in journals and books not ordinarily available to me in the Benben Books library.
[1] The
term was first used by van Gennep, A. (1960).
The rites of passage. (M. B. Vizedom
& G. B. Caffee, Trans.)
[2] Rosalind
M. Janssen and Jac J. Janssen, Growing up
in ancient
[3] van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage. (M. B. Vizedom & G. B. Caffee, Trans.)
[4]Turner, Victor W. “Betwixt and between: The liminal period in
rites de passage.” In Symposium on new approaches
to the study of religion: Proceedings of the 1964 Annual Spring Meeting of the
American Ethnological Society, edited by J. Helm, 4-20.
[5]
Cantarella, Eva. Pandora’s
Daughters: The Role and Status of Women
in Greek and Roman Antiquity. Translated
by Maureen B. Fand.
[6] Miriam
Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature,
vol. II,
[7] Papyrus Chester Beatty I, Recto, sheet 14
[8] A.D.
Toouny and Dr. Steffen Wenig, Sport in
Ancient
[9] H.E.
Winlock, The Slain Soldiers of
Neb-hepet-Re’ Mentu-hotpe. New Yorkm 1945: Publication of the Metropolitan
[10] http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/abstract/117/5/461
[11] Lise
Manniche, Music and Musicians in Ancient
[12] Ibid. p. 118
[13] Lichtheim, Vol. I, p. 208
[14] Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol. 1 (Berkeley, U of Cal Press, 1975) p. 220
[15] “The role of the Chantress in Ancient Egypt,” in British Archaeological Reports: International Series 1401, Oford, 2005: Archaeopress, p. 32
[16] Robins, p. 58
[17] Mark Lehner
[18] Ibid, p. 61, 64
[19] Music, pp. 124/25
[20] At the
2005 SSEA Symposium at