 |
| More echoes of ancient Egypt in Australia's inhospitable heart |
As I continue my fiction writing
on the road, I find more echoes of ancient Egypt in the heart of Australia’s
outback.
No, these mounds are not
pyramids. They are actually mullock heaps left by opal miners and their digging, as if an army of berserk moles have gone to work on the outback... over 250,000 claims
at last count.
In search of the precious stone, miners labour in the dust and heat of one of the most inhospitable places on earth.
In search of the precious stone, miners labour in the dust and heat of one of the most inhospitable places on earth.
Perhaps only the ancient
Egyptians digging for turquoise in the shimmer of the Sinai had it as tough, as
my alternative archaeological hero Anson muses in one of his blogs…
Chapter 28
‘The Other Egypt’ – Anson Hunter’s blog
WE TRAVELLED back to Abu
Simbel airport in the mini bus, gazing out at the blinding waste of the desert
that stretched away on either side. I found myself thinking of the goddess who
regarded Nubia and all foreign lands as her property, Hathor.
From time immemorial Egyptians
had penetrated the desert in search of her sacred stone, turquoise,
particularly in the Sinai where mining expeditions built a distant shrine at
Serabit el-Khadim, dedicated to the
patron goddess of miners and quarrymen. The turquoise droplets must have seemed
like a mockery of moisture to the ancient criminals and captives of war who dug
the nodules out of fissures of sandstone in the desert. These same men prayed
for the protection of Hathor, ‘Mistress of Turquoise’, ‘She who shows her
loveliness when the rock is split’.
Would the goddess have
cared that they gave their sweat and lives to mine her precious stones, so that
rich ladies in Egypt, her devotees, could grace their necks with sumptuous
broad collars of turquoise, their arms with turquoise bracelets, their fingers
with rings inlaid with turquoise? Did the captives, dazed with thirst and heat,
ever raise their eyes from their work in the mining camps to the turquoise sky
and rock-strewn horizon and imagine that perhaps they glimpsed Hathor
overlooking them from the dazzle? Did they picture her as an ardent young woman
under a sycamore tree, or in the form of a lioness of the desert,
Sekhmet-Hathor? Perhaps I am in an apocalyptic mood, but as I travel through
Egypt with this group I am thinking more and more about the story of Hathor.
Hathor-Sekhmet was the goddess with two faces, one, Hathor, the Sweet One,
goddess of sexual love, joy, music and intoxication, the other, Hathor-Sekhmet,
the terrible lioness of annihilation, sent by Ra to destroy humankind, when he
uttered his smiting execration to punish them for their rebelliousness.
In her marauding stage
they called her The Confused One in the
Night.
Were there times when
Hathor slipped from one state to another? One phase, goddess of love, shining
in her beauty, and the next a wild and dreadful lioness of destruction. What
would it have been like to come across Hathor, the young woman, and not know
that she hid another side?
For those with a
mythological bent, I am uploading a piece of speculation about what it might
have been like to run into this volatile and apocalyptic female entity and
share her company, unawares…
