Egyptian Staff

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Tale of Ipuwer: The Tale of Ipuwer (ca. 1650-1550 B.C.E.), which laments the chaos that has engulfed Egypt, claims: “The river is blood. If one drinks of it, one rejects it and thirsts for water… Foreign tribes have come to Egypt” (2:10, 3:1). [12] As in the biblical text, the Egyptian story describes a bloody Nile and a defeat at the hand of foreigners. [13] Here again a knowledge of Egyptian priestly praxis is informative. Many iconographic depictions of staffs in the form of serpents exist in Egypt: People Carrying Serpent Staffs

In the relief shown in the gallery, which is on the wall of the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut at Luxor, there are two images of Wadjet: one of her as the Uraeus with her head through an ankh and another where she precedes a Horus hawk wearing the pschent, representing the pharaoh whom she protects.The word pharaoh ultimately derives from the Egyptian compound pr ꜥꜣ, * /ˌpaɾuwˈʕaʀ/ "great house", written with the two biliteral hieroglyphs pr "house" and ꜥꜣ "column", here meaning "great" or "high". It was the title of the royal palace and was used only in larger phrases such as smr pr-ꜥꜣ "Courtier of the High House", with specific reference to the buildings of the court or palace. [13] From the Twelfth Dynasty onward, the word appears in a wish formula "Great House, May it Live, Prosper, and be in Health", but again only with reference to the royal palace and not a person. Pyramid Texts (ca. 2400 BCE): “(King) Unas is one who eats men and lives on the gods… Unas eats their ḥeka, swallows their spirits” (spell 273). [26] Informing the aforementioned Egyptian texts, and thus also the biblical story, is the color of the water when it turns to blood. In Egyptian, the word “blood” (i.e., dšr) also means “red.” In Egyptian ritual practice, red is the color of Apep, the serpent of chaos, and it serves as a synonym for “evil.” As such, it plays a key role in the ritual of execration, in which priests drowned, stabbed, crushed, burned, dismembered, buried, or otherwise destroyed red pots or red human figurines as proxies for Egypt’s enemies. Thus, the biblical account also evokes Egyptian execration. The white crown of Upper Egypt, the Hedjet, was worn in the Predynastic Period by Scorpion II, and, later, by Narmer. She was associated with the land and depicted as a snake-headed woman or a snake—usually an Egyptian cobra, a venomous snake common to the region; sometimes she was depicted as a woman with two snake heads and, at other times, a snake with a woman's head. Her oracle was in the renowned temple in Per-Wadjet that was dedicated to her worship and gave the city its name. This oracle may have been the source for the oracular tradition that spread to Greece from Egypt. [9]

From left to right: Set, Horus and Anubis holding in their right hand a Was sceptre and in their left hand an a nkh cross. B) The Sceptre of Ptah You have come to the right place: as enthusiasts of ancient Egypt, we'll answer all these questions! This last fact naturally begs the question of whether it is accurate to label the actions of these figures “magical.” The answer to this question is both yes and no. Yes, in that lector-priests performed numerous spells and rituals that evoked the illocutionary power of ḥkꜣ ( ḥeka), a cosmic force perceived as efficacious, capable of manipulating reality in this world and the next. [6] Yet, no, because Ḥeka also was a deity in his own right, and so invoking his power also constitutes a form of prayer (Fig. 2).Because of his knowledge of sacred lore, only the lector-priest could serve in temples and officiate in ceremonies for the dead. Some appear to have served the village community as well, composing spells and making medicines. See Serge Sauneron, The Priests of Ancient Egypt. David Lorton transl. (Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University, 2000), pp. 61-64, 108, 158, 163-164. For a collection of learned spells, see J. F. Burghouts, Ancient Egyptian Magical Texts (Nisaba, 9; E. J. Leiden: Brill, 1978). On the duties of the lector-priest, see Emily Teeter, Religion and Ritual in Ancient Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 16-38. Strong's Hebrew Concordance - 6547. Paroh". Bible Hub. Archived from the original on 2022-10-18 . Retrieved 2022-10-20. Another scepter associated with the king is the was-sceptre. [26] This is a long staff mounted with an animal head. The earliest known depictions of the was-scepter date to the First Dynasty. The was-scepter is shown in the hands of both kings and deities.

Moreover, priests believed that ḥeka could protect them from poisonous snakes and other natural dangers, as the Coffin Texts make clear: “The serpent is in my hand and cannot bite me” (spell 885). [23] A visual depiction of this appears on a number of cippi that depict the so-called “Horus of the Crocodiles,” such as the aforementioned Metternich stele, in which the young god Horus stands upon crocodiles while holding a variety of noxious animals by their tails, including serpents, thus sympathetically conferring protection on the stele’s owner from snake bites and other forces of chaos (Fig. 12). Grabbing the Serpent by the Tail Esther 5:2 Greco-Roman world [ edit ] Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi installing the Sengol sceptre in the new Indian ParliamentA priestly ritual in which one item was placed atop another, a rite that Egyptologists have labeled “superpositioning” [30] elucidates another element of Exodus. Known primarily from royal iconographic materials, the image positions a human over an animal, an animal over another animal, or a human over another human. In each case, the ritual sympathetically conveyed control over the subjugated object. Of special interest are cases in which one serpent was poised atop or striking another serpent. Such depictions specifically functioned to transform one’s opponents into one’s allies.