Leopard priest

Priest wearing leopard skin, New Kingdom, 19th–20th Dynasty, c. 1200BC. Tomb of Nakhtamon (TT335), Deir el-Medina...

The earliest depiction of a priest wearing leopard skin can be found on the Narmer Palette, dated to c. 3100BC...

Leopard skins were worn by Sem-priests during the "Opening of the Mouth" ceremony, a crucial ritual that enabled the deceased to live, eat, and breathe in the afterlife...

A mural depicts King Ay (right) wearing a leopard skin, performing the "Opening of the Mouth" ceremony on Tutankhamun (left) depicted as Osiris. Tomb of Tutankhamun (KV62), Valley of the Kings, West Thebes...

This makes me wonder what is exactly depicted on the Narmer Palette. But that is another story, for another time...

In ancient Egyptian religion, leopard skin was linked to rebirth, transformation, and the afterlife. The skin was believed to act as a magical guardian, protecting the body against the fragmentation of death, allowing the deceased to be reborn...

Pyramid texts describe the king wrapping himself in a leopard skin to travel with the sun god Ra, emerging rejuvenated and "reborn" at dawn...

"...[King] will live with his ka, his leopard-skin on him, his staff in his arm, his baton in his hand..."

Now here is an interesting question: Why was leopard linked with rebirth? Leopards never lived in Egypt and leopard skins were imported into Egypt from down south, Nubia and Sudan...

So why leopard? I am boring myself at this stage repeating the same thing over and over and over again...But I think it is because of animal calendar markers. Check this out:

In Ancient Egypt, rebirth was directly linked with water and terrestrial and celestial Nile. I talked about it in my post Nut...

Ra-Horakhty (Ra as Horus) in his Solar Barque, traversing the horizon on a Heavenly Nile, during the day (the time when we can see the world) from east, dawn (left eye) to west, dusk (right eye)...

Ankh, symbol for life and eternal life was also directly linked with water. 

Ankh symbolises union of father sky and mother earth...

Ankh was known as the Knot of Isis...

Ankh was also called the Key of Life...

Ankh was also known as the Key of the Nile...

Ankh Symbolises union of father sky and mother earth...

In Sumerian: Father sky (An) + Mother earth (Ki) = Life (AnKi) = Ankh? 

I talked about this in my posts Riddle, Square and compasses, An-Ki Ankh, Living nature

Sumerians in Egypt? Check this out:

Rediscovery of, now buried, branch of the river Nile that once flowed right next to 31 pyramids, including Giza ones...

And my articles Giza lioness and Sphinx about why the pyramids were built on the  Giza plateau. Spoiler: cause sphinx was already there...

Ankh was known as "the Knot of Isis"...

Interesting...This knot? Like Inanna's knont? A relief from the ancient Egyptian Temple of Hatshepsut. It shows a platter with food arranged to look like a duck by making an ankh knot using lotus, the symbol of the Nile flood without which there will be no food in Egypt...

Ankh was also called the Key of Life...

In Egypt, like everywhere else, drinking water is the key of life. Hence Ankh as symbol for water...

Sycamore tree goddess, Hathor, Isis, Nut, all goddess of flood, pouring water which is depicted with ankh (life) symbols inside it...Tomb, Siwa Oasis, 400-600 BC. Egypt...

I talked about this in my post Sycamore tree goddess...

Ankh was also known as the Key of the Nile...

It is the Nile river flood that makes life in Egypt possible. Hence the sacred knot = Ankh = Nile flood = Life

Ankh = Life = Water...

Papyrus - Lotus Ankh. The Nile water level starts to rise when the Papyrus flowers and peaks when the lotus flowers...

I talked about this in my post "Crux Ansata"...

Ok, what does any of this have to do with leopards?

The mating season of African leopards in Nubia and Sudan peaks in Apr/May, at the beginning of the rainy season in Nubia and Sudan...

And the birthing season peaks in Jul/Aug, the peak of the rain season in Nubia and Sudan...

Climate Nubia/Sudan

African leopards are typically silent, solitary, and elusive, but become exceptionally loud, vocal, and aggressive during mating season. Not something you would miss easily...

So, I could bet that, leopard soon became the animal calendar marker for the rain season in Nubia and Sudan.  And it is this rain that revives the dead parched land and causes its rebirth...

I already talked about plant calendar markers linked to the rain season in Nubia in my post Meroitic language, where I analysied very interesting offering tables (altars) from the Ptolemaic Period, 306–30 BC. Like this one frome Northern Upper Egypt, Dendera, currently in the Met Museum, New York...

I also talked about animal calendar markers linked to the rain season in Sudan in my post Sacred Ibis, in which I analysed this fresco from the Temple of Isis at Pompeii, built at the beginning of the 1st c. BC. Currently in the Archaeological Museum in Naples...And the reason why ibis was a sacred bird in Ancient Egypt...

Now I can hear you all ask: What does this have to do with Egypt?

Guess when the rain season started in Green Sahara? You can read more about this here...

You can see that the rain season started in May/Jun and peaked in Jul/Aug/Sep...

Today, the similar rain pattern is still found in Nubia and Sudan, and more importantly in the Ethiopian highlands. It is the monsoon rain that falls in the Ethiopian highlands that feeds the river Nile...

Causing the water level to rise in May/Jun and causing the annual flood in Jul/Aug/Sep...

Annual flood which causes the (annual) rebirth of Egypt...I talked about this in my post Min, the Egyptian god of fertility and his link to the source of the river Nile...

Pleased to meet you. Actually very very pleased to meet you, as you can clearly see. The name is Min. I am Ancient Egyptian god of fertility, but you have probably already guessed that from my main "attribute"...

Is this why leopards were linked to resurrection? Because their breeding season overlapped with the old Green Sahara wet monsoon season?

BTW, the reason why I suspected that leopard from the Egyptian mythology could have originally been linked to rain (water, flowing water), is because leopard has been linked to rain (water, flowing water) in Eurasia too...

Article, The oldest narative scene with symbolic analysis of this 11,000 years old relief from Anatolian Neolithic, where leopard was used as an animal calendar marker for the cool wet season...

Great example of related animal calendar markers used together. Tepe Hissar, Iran, Neolithic.

Mating Ibex (Oct/Nov, start of winter) followed by Mating Leopard (Jan/Feb, start of spring). Both winter and spring are rainy seasons...

Symbolically, semen turns to rain which turns into flowing water...

I talk about this in my post A vessel from Tepe Hissar...

And it is because of that link to rain (water, flowing water) that leopard was also linked to resurrection (rebirth) of nature. I talked about it in my post Mosaic floor from Sulcis, Sardinia where I analyis this amazing mosaic which depicts leopards drinking from a krater for mixing wine and water with a grapevine growing from the krater...And I talk about the link between leopards and Dionysus, the god of death and rebirth of Nature...

To read more about ancient animal and plant calendar markers, which are at the root of all our mythologies, start here…Then check my twitter threads I still didn't convert to blog post...I am way way behind...

Sacred Ibis

Sacred Ibis - Fresco from the Temple of Isis at Pompeii, built at the beginning of the 1st c. BC. Currently in the Archaeological Museum in Naples...

Is the Sacred Ibis holding ripe grain in its beak? Why?

Animal calendar markers to the rescue...I know, again, boring...

For some reason Ancient Egyptians worshiped this bird and even depicted God Thoth as an Ibis...Why? 

Animal calendar markers...Oh shut up...All you see are animal calendar markers everywhere! No one else does! 

Well, maybe today that is true...But in the past others did too:

In the 1891 "Living animals of the world vol 2" we can read:

The naturalist Brehm says on this subject [why Ibis was sacred]:

"When the Nile, after being at its lowest ebb, rose again, and the water assumed a red tinge, then the ibis appeared in the land of the Pharaohs..."

"...as a sure guarantee that the stream, the giver and preserver of life, which the people in their profound reverence raised to the rank of a god, would once again empty the well-spring of plenty over the thirsty land..."

"...The servant and messenger of an all-bounteous Deity commanded of a necessity a reverence of a poetic and distinguished character, by reason of its importance: he too must be a god."

See 🙂 deified animal calendar markers...

But animal calendar marker for what time of the year? If we look at the available data for the nesting season of African Sacred Ibises, we can see that depending on the area, nesting takes place between Mar and Aug...

The naturalist Brehm says that Sacred Ibis arrived just after Nile reached its lowest level and started to rise again...So if we want to determine when ibises used to arrive to Egypt, lets have a look at the Nile water level chart...

As you can see the Nile starts to rise in Apr/May...Is this the time of the year that the Sacred Ibis is an animal calendar marker for? I think so. In another book, 1829 "Cassell's book of birds" we can read this:

"...According to our own observations, this species is now but rarely seen in Egypt, and was never met with by us below eighteen degrees north latitude; it, however, occurs regularly in South Nubia and the Soudan, where it arrives at the beginning of the rainy season..."

And this is the climate chart for Kharoum, capital of Sudan. You can see that the rain season starts in Apr/May...Very cool, right?

So if Sacred Ibis was indeed a deified animal calendar marker for Apr/May, why was the Sacred Ibis from the temple of Isis in Pompeii with a ripe grain in its beak?

Because grain harvest time in the Nile River Valley starts in Apr/May...

Soooo...Kudos to naturalist Brehm, whoever he was, for being on the right track...

One more interesting thing that Brehm said:

"When the Nile, after being at its lowest ebb, rose again, and the water assumed a red tinge..."

I talked about Red Nile in my post "White calf"...

And one more interesting thing. Apart from dressing up as an Ibis, Thoth also liked dressing up as a Baboon...Why? Remember my posts about Tefnut?

Tefnut was the deity of moisture in Ancient Egypt. One day, she got pissed off 🙂 with Egyptians for taking the piss 🙂 and not giving her enough kudos, and pissed off 🙂 to Nubia...

Sun god Ra, Tefnut's father, missed his daughter and so he sent Thoth (god of wisdom) as his emissary to ask her to return home.

For some weird reason, Thoth, disguised himself as a baboon (!!!) and went looking for Tefnut (???)

To understand why Thoth disguised himself as a baboon, and why Tefnut followed Thoth back to Egypt, you need to know that "Tefnut" (moisture) was married to her twin brother "Shu" (wind), and that together they mean "wet wind" = eastern monsoon...I talked about this first in my post "Menat"...

And baboons peak mating season is at the beginning of the monsoon season in East Africa...Which starts in Mar/Apr/May. And it is this monsoon that feeds the Nile flood...I talked about this in my post "Baboon"...

Oh and guess what? Thoth, our Ibis/Baboon cross dresser was also identified with Shu, the monsoon wind...And when depicted as Shu, Thoth was just like Shu depicted carrying ostrich feathers on his head. Why?

Well ostrich mating season begins in Mar/Apr and ends in Aut/Sep. During that time male ostriches become aggressive, fight with each other for harems and make loud booming mating sounds...While the Nile is rising...

Soooo....Hope this was interesting...At least a bit...I promise my next post is not going to be about animal calendar markers...🙂

That's it. To read more about ancient animal and plant calendar markers, start here…Then check my twitter threads I still didn't convert to blog post...I am way way behind...

Drinking from the Nile

An Ancient Egyptian wall painting depicting a man kneeling under a date palm tree full of ripe fruits, and (seemingly) drinking water (from a river?)...

The tree is Zaghloul, or red dates palm, with fruits with a deep red to burgundy skin – resemble giant red grapes. They are native to Egypt and are synonymous with Egyptian autumn...

The harvest season for Zaghloul dates starts in September...

Just before that, while the date trees are still laden with fruit, Nile flood peaks...

I talk about Nile Flood mythology in many of my posts...

I talk about another tree calendar marker for Nile Flood, Sycamore fig, in my post "Sycamore tree goddess"

That's it. To read more about ancient animal and plant calendar markers, start here…Then check my twitter threads I still didn't convert to blog post...I am way way behind...

Crux Ansata

5th-century relief featuring the Coptic "crux ansata" (Christianised ankh), from a 5th Century AD Coptic Church. 

According to Socrates of Constantinople (380 – 439 AD), when Christians were dismantling Alexandria's greatest temple, the Serapeum, in 391 AD, they noticed cross-like signs inscribed on the stone blocks. Pagans who were present said the sign meant "life to come", an indication that the sign Socrates referred to was the ankh; Christians claimed the sign was their own, indicating that they could easily regard the ankh as a Crux Ansata.

This is Crux Ansata:

The explanation that the Ankh symbol meant "life to come" is very interesting indeed. Here is why:

In my 2018 post "Square and compasses" and in my 2019 posts "Etemenanki" and "An-Ki-Ankh" discussed the origin of the Ankh symbol. 

And I proposed that the ankh symbol came from Mesopotamia where it originally looked like this:

A hand (of god, the great architect) holding measuring line (for measuring domed sky, An) and measuring rod (for measuring flat earth, Ki). 

Basically, primitive Square and Compasses...

There is actually Serbian saying "Pomoću štapa i kanapa" (Using stick and rope) meaning "in the old primitive way"...

This symbol, meaning An (Sky) - Ki (earth) eventually became Ankh...

In these old posts I also wrote that: 

Early examples of the ankh sign date to the First Dynasty (c. 30th to 29th century BC). There is little agreement on what physical object the sign originally represented. Most scholars believe the sign is a knot formed of a flexible material such as cloth or reeds or rope... The below stone ankh was actually made to resemble ankh made from reeds.

This ankh is made by bending one piece of reed into a loop, and then tying it to a handle created from  another piece of reed bent to form T shape. Like this:

Here is one I made today :)

What does the intercourse between the Father Sky and Mother Earth produce? Life. Living nature including us humans...Life is materialised divine, (sky) god who became (earth) matter...

So An+Ki = Father+Mother = Life... 

What did the intercourse between God (Father Sky) and Mary (basically symbolical replacement for Mother Earth) produce? Christ who is God who became Man. God materialised. So based on the above analogy, Christ is just a symbol. Symbol of life itself. 

I wrote about Christ as Life in my post "Living nature", but I will repeat it here...

 

If Christ is life, living nature, then his immaculate conception and virgin birth become easy to understand...

If Christ is life, living nature, then his death and resurrection become easy to understand...

If Christ is life, living nature, and we are part of life, living nature, then we are Christ. We truly live and move and have our being in Christ...This too then becomes easy to understand...

If Christ is life, living nature, then god who became matter is easy to understand too...

If Christ is life, living nature, then we are all Christ, we are all god. Just like the mystics the world over have been teaching for millennia...

Apparently this is too "Pagan" for "Christians" and too "Christian" for "Pagans"...So everyone gets offended...

This is Christ on the cross from "Plaque from the Maskell ivories", AD 420-30, Rome 

This is also crux ansata, Ankh, AnKi, life...

On the original Coptic relief, the priest (saint?) is using ankh to point at the green plants, symbol of life. Which can't grow without (rain, flood) water...It is (rain, flood) water that makes life possible. It is the (rain, flood) water that contains the essence of life...

I recently wrote an article "Sycamore tree goddess" in which I talked about the link between ankh (life) and (Nile flood) water (the source of life) in Egypt...

Which is why (rain, flood) water is holy. Cause, despite all our accomplishments, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains (floods)...

This link between the Nile flood, life and Ankh is symbolically depicted through this, most likely the oldest, the original Egyptian Ankh: A hand holding a knot made from Papyrus (flowers during and therefore marks the beginning of the the Nile flood) and Lotus (flowers during and therefore marks the peak of the Nile flood). I talked about this first in my post "Goddess on a horse"...

Which is why this is super interesting: A relief from the ancient Egyptian Temple of Hatshepsut. It shows a platter with food arranged to look like a duck by making an (ankh) knot using lotus, the symbol of the Nile flood without which there will be no food in Egypt...

I talked about the blue lotus as the plant calendar marker for the Nile Flood in many of posts. For instance "Lotus and papyrus" in which I explain why the Egyptian god Hapi, who was the god of the annual flooding of the Nile in ancient Egyptian religion, was associated with papyrus and lotus flowers, and is often depicted as twins, tying papyrus and lotus flowers together...

And my post "Beautiful boy", about Nefertem, the Egyptian Beautiful Boy, originally a lotus flower at the creation of the world, who had arisen from the primal waters...Nefertem emerging from the lotus blossom, from the tomb of Tutankhamun...

PS: Now I understand why the Innana knot, the symbol of fertility and plenty, made from reeds and directly linked to the annual Tigris and Euphrates flood...Will write more about this soon...

BTW, I already talked about some other aspects of the Inanna cult found in Egypt in my post "Inanna in Egypt"... 

That's it. If you are interested in reading more about ancient animal and plant calendar markers, which are at the root of all our mythologies, start here…Then check my twitter threads I still didn't convert to blog post...I am way way behind...