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.In the hunt the Badarians used the boomerang, and theirracial traits suggest Frobenius' Great Eritrean zone.Cattle andsheep, as though deified, were sometimes given ceremonial burial,and human remains faced west, not east, toward the land of thesetting, not the rising, sun.No bones of the pig have been dis-covered among their remains, and this may signal the commence-ment of a tradition of abstention from the flesh of swine.An asso-ciation of the pig with some despised alien or socially inferiorgroup, or with a mythology of the underworld, would suffice to ac- THRESHOLDS OF THE NEOLI THI C 423count for such an avoidance which, in any case, cannot possiblyhave been rationalized, in the usual modernist way, as a pro-phylaxis against a possible case of trichinosis.The boar's tooth,as we have just seen, was a fetish of the Merimde of the Delta,while, in contrast, the sacred beasts of the Badarians of the UpperNile were the bull and ram.A second high neolithic stratum overlies the Badariao theAmratian, where five new types of pottery appear, decorated withfigures and geometrical designs that do not have the elegance,formal beauty, or mathematical regularity of those of Mesopo-tamia, but on the other hand are extremely interesting for theirobvious derivation from the Capsian art style of North Africa andEastern Spain.The human forms, furthermore, show that the man-ner of dress had not changed.The men still wore decorated penissheaths and were otherwise stark naked, with grass sandals andwith feathers in their hair.The women wore linen aprons, andfrequently shaved their heads to wear wigs.The physical type wasabout that of the Capsians: 5 feet 3 inches tall, slender, slightlybuilt, with a long, small skull, small features, and straight hair.The bodies were tattooed.Figures of clay and ivory; copper, some-times used now for small tools; papyrus-bundle boats; a number oftypes of arrowhead, and many elegant stone blades characterizethe assemblage.Imports of malachite from Sinai, gold from Nubia,coniferous wood from Syria, and obsidian from Armenia and theAegean speak for a development of trade while in the graves wefind that dogs were buried with their masters (perhaps as guidesto the land of the dead), as well as statuettes of women andservants.38But then, abruptly, something new in the Delta: hieroglyphicwriting, the calendar, the mythology of the sun-god Horus andresurrected god Osiris, trading fleets sailing the seas to Crete,Syria, and Palestine, flying the signal flags of their nomes, theharpoon flag and the fish flag! There is an elegance in the artsand life style of pre-dynastic and dynastic Egypt completely differentfrom those of the mythogenetic zone of Southwest Asia.Further-more, in Egypt the new arts were applied to life in new ways.The mythology was adjusted to a geography in which the fertility 424 PRI MI TI VE MYTHOLOGYof the earth sprang from the Nile, not from the clouds; and to aprotected land a grandiose oasis unified and held in form withcomparative ease, in contrast to the motherland of SouthwestAsia, where city was to battle city and then empire empire formillenniums.But a complete contrast in style does not rule outin any way our recognition of the impact of a new idea, derivedby diffusion from an alien land.Nor is the diffusion random; itis selective.The wheel appeared in Sumer about 3200 B.c., but notin Egypt until fourteen hundred years later.For the Nile suppliedthe best possible transportation; and it was not until the light warchariot, maneuverable in battle and drawn by steeds, had beeninvented that the wheel recommended itself as a valuable addi-tion to the culture of the Pharaohs.The date of the introductionof writing, the calendar, and their associated arts to Egypt wasc.2800 B.C.that of the wheel, c.1800 B.c.The basic myth of dynastic Egypt was that of the death andresurrection of Osiris, the good king, "fair of face," who was bornto the earth-god Geb and sky-goddess Nut.He was born togetherwith his sister-wife, the goddess Isis, during the sacred intervalof those five supplementary days that fell between one Egyptiancalendric year of 360 days and the next.* He and his sister werethe first to plant wheat and barley, to gather fruit from trees, andto cultivate the vine, and before their time the races of the worldhad been savage cannibals.But Osiris's evil brother, Set, whosesister-wife was the goddess Nephthys, was mortally jealous bothof his virtue and of his fame, and so, stealthily taking the measureof his good brother's body, he caused a beautifully decoratedsarcophagus to be fashioned and on a certain occasion in thepalace, when all were drinking and making merry, had it broughtinto the room and jestingly promised to give it to the one whomit should fit exactly.All tried, but, like the glass slipper of Cin-derella, it fitted but one; and when Osiris, the last, laid himselfwithin it, immediately a company of seventy-two conspiratorswith whom Set had contrived his plot dashed forward, nailed thelid upon the sarcophagus, soldered it with molten lead, and flungit into the Nile, down which it floated to the sea.* Cf.supra, p.147. THRESHOLDS OF THE NEOLI THI C 425Isis, overwhelmed with grief, sheared off her locks, donnedmourning, and searched in vain, up and down the Nile; but thecoffer had been carried by the tide to the coast of Phoenicia,where, at Byblos, it was cast ashore.A tamarisk immediatelygrew up around it, enclosing the precious object in its trunk, andthe aroma of this tree then was so glorious that the local kingand queen, Melqart and Astarte who were, of course, a divineking and queen themselves, the local representatives, in fact, ofthe common mythology of Damuzi and Inanna, Tammuz andIshtar, Adonis and Aphrodite, Osiris and Isis discovering andadmiring its beauty, had the tree felled and fashioned into a pillarof their palace
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