Better to ride an ass that carries me than a horse that throws me. Donkey exhibition at the Egyptian Collection in Berlin

In 1417, the Mallorcan priest Anselm Turmeda wrote Disputa de l’ase (“The Dispute of the Donkey”), in which a donkey and a monk debate whether humans are superior to animals. The monk wins the argument with the claim that God chose to incarnate as a human, not an animal.

Despite the pious argument, the work was put on index by the Spanish Inquisition in 1583, probably due to a lack of humor. And Father Anselm himself seems to be bluffing here, since he had already gone to Tunis a few years earlier to convert to Islam under the name of Abdallah at-Tarjuman, or Abdallah the Interpreter – and Islam obviously does not consider this argument well-founded.

Nevertheless, the donkey could have retorted that even if God did not take on its image, at least in His most glorious images of His becoming man, at the birth of Christ and at His entry into Jerusalem, one of its kind is always present.

The current exhibition Einfach unentbehrlich. Der Esel in der antiken Welt (Simply indispensable. The donkey in the ancient world), also reveals that the donkey was also present when man became a man. Or at least when civilization was founded. In Egypt, the donkey was domesticated as early as the 4th millennium BC (for comparison: the horse only two thousand years later, while the camel three thousand years later). A patient, persistent and unpretentions load-bearer, it was considered the only vehicle of land transport of the time. From the lone donkey with which the farmer carried the grain to thresh, to the donkey caravans consisting of hundreds of animals with which the merchants transported the luxury goods of Egypt to Mesopotamia through the Sinai Peninsula and brought back the rare minerals of the Afghan mountains – one could say that the path of world trade ran on the backs of donkeys – they were used and depicted in countless formations.

Perhaps the oldest depiction of the donkey from the predynastic period, the 4th millennium BC

An equally early depiction of a make-up palette from around 3200-3000 BC

A large harvest scene from a tomb at Saqqara, ca. 2400 BC

You shall not muzzle a donkey while threshing

A joy donkey in a camp scene, ca. 1220 BC

A strange transport: baby gazelles in a box on the back of a donkey

The donkey is a calm, patient and reliable animal. They were often used alongside horse-drawn carriages or horse caravans, because they had a calming effect on the horses. At the same time, they are very autonomous, or as their owners would say, stubborn. Even if incited, they do not get into situations that they do not fully understand. This is why they have such a bad press. In Egyptian paintings, which faithfully depict everyday details, we can see people trying to persuade donkeys with a stick, but also, which is much more effective, by stroking their chin or ears, or leading their foal in front of them.

“A donkey is not more stubborn than a horse. It simply gives you more time to think about what you did wrong.”

This duality is also evident in its symbolic use. The god Seth, the murderer of Osiris, is often depicted with a donkey's head, since his home – the desert and savannah, which is also the home of wild donkeys – simultaneously threatens and protects the fertile Nile Valley. Some of the guardians and protective spirits in afterlife also have donkey's head. And since the Sun is carried back to the East by a donkey, they often depicted it on the lower, flat part of scarab-shaped Sun amulets.

The god Seth is second from the left on a Theban astronomic ceiling from around 1280 BC

Horus, the vengeful son of Osiris, depicted as a falcon, attack Seth, depicted in the form of a donkey. 332-313 BC

Two donkeys, symbols of the past and future day, with the symbol of life between them, hold the horizon under the Sun represented by a scarab

One of the trials in the Book of the Dead is the encounter with the Ass-Eater

A common curse formula used against grave robbers in Egyptian tombs is “may the donkey fuck his wife”. Sometimes this was also depicted in plastic form.

In Mesopotamia, the donkey was sometimes used in the same way as the Jews used the scapegoat, on which they loaded the sins of the people and drove it out into the wilderness. The “scapedonkey” also carried far away the diseases and troubles that afflicted the community. This is depicted in a widespread carving type, on which the fever demon Lamaštu is carried away by a donkey on a boat.

The press of the donkey went really wrong in Roman times, when, forgetting its positive symbolic qualities, they focused mainly on its stubbornness, which was considered stupidity. We see this in Apuleius’ Golden Ass, and in the Roman-era Egyptian statuette that closes this exhibition, where an orator is depicted with a donkey’s head, an obvious reference to his intellectual abilities.

The image of the donkey as one of man’s oldest, most loyal and humble companions will be a thing of the past, along with Egyptian art. It is fortunate that the guardian of the past, the museum, reminds us of this image with a large number of objects that we cannot otherwise see in the permanent exhibition.

Mañana de lunes en Farafra / Monday morning in Farafra

Al oeste desde el oasis de Farafra solo hay arena, el Gran Mar de Arena libio. Y hay que adentrarse mucho en él, sin caminos ni indicaciones, para encontrar alguna señal humana. La primera población dentro de Libia adopta la forma de un gran desafío a la naturaleza (perdido de antemano) en el oasis artificial  de Kufra, vivo gracias a los depósitos de agua fósil que han empezado a bombearse de una manera desmesurada. Los beduinos y los tuaregs llevan grabado en el alma que «La gente pasa, el desierto permanece». Farafra, en cambio, existe desde antiguo, siempre adaptándose a las condiciones precarias del oasis.

To the west of the oasis of Farafra there is only sand. The Great Sand Sea of Libya. And you have to delve very far into it, without roads or post-signs, to find some traces of human life. The first settlement in Libya is a challenge to nature, lost from the first moment. It is the artificial oasis of Kufra, which lives thanks to the fossil water deposits they are exploiting in a disproportionate way. The Bedouins and Tuaregs know well: “People go, the desert remains.” But Farafra has existed since ancient times, always adapting to the precarious conditions of the oasis.

Hoy en Farafra la vida no es cómoda. En los últimos años, la gente que visita el Desierto Blanco ha dado algún impulso a los comercios locales, la población ha crecido un poco, el lunes a las 9 de la mañana se parece bastante a un lunes a las 9 de la mañana. Farafra asiste hoy a su conversión en suburbio. Otro suburbio.

Life in Farafra is not easy today. In recent years, the people visiting the White Desert has given a boost to local business, the population has grown a bit, a Monday at 9 am looks rather like a Monday at 9 am. Farafra is gradually being converted into a suburb. Another suburb.

«Estoy convencido de que el futuro está perdido en algún lugar en los basureros del
pasado no histórico; se encuentra en los periódicos atrasados, en los vacuos
anuncios de las películas de ciencia-ficción, en el falso espejo de nuestros
sueños rechazados. El tiempo convierte las metáforas en cosas, y
las apila en cámaras frías, o las coloca en los patios de
recreo celestiales de los suburbios»

“I am convinced that the future is lost
somewhere in the dumps of the non-historical
past; it is in yesterday’s newspapers, in the jejune
advertisements of science-fiction movies, in the false mirror
of our rejected dreams. Time turns metaphors into things, and stacks
them up in cold rooms, or places them in the celestial playgrounds of the suburbs.”

Robert Smithson, A tour of the monuments of Passaic, New Jersey (1967)
Un recorrido por los monumentos de Passaic, Nueva Jersey, Barcelona: G. Gili, 2006, 25-26

Exodus

Jews and Christians alike celebrate in these days the Exodus from Egypt through the Red Sea to the East. In the opposite direction from the sea, in the Western Desert, at the edge of al-Kharga oasis and only 1.5 km from the Temple of Hibis, the only Persian sanctuary preserved in Egypt, lays one of the oldest Christian cemeteries, Bagawat.


The remains of the great cemetery of Bagawat lay in eight groups of graves on the hill of Guebel el-Teir. It has been in use probably since the 3rd century A.D., but it started to really grow when a Nestorian Christian community settled near the al-Kharga oasis. And there are still building remains from the 8th century..


It seems that Nestorius (386-451), condemned as a heretic and deposed from his office as a Patriarch of Constantinople by the Council of Ephesus in 431, ended here his hectic life. During an incursion of the Blemmyes he was taken prisoner, and he probably did not survive it. He is very likely to be buried here in Bagawat.


No wonder that Nestorius did not survive the invasion. Of the Blemmyes and other fearsomse tribes in this part of Africa Pliny writes like this:

Some have placed in the middle of uninhabited territory to the Atlanteans, and with it the egipanes, half beasts, the Blemmyes, ganfasantes, satyrs and himantópodas. Atlantis, if we believe what they say, are a degeneration of human customs. In fact, between them there is the use of names and simultaneously view, with terrible imprecations, sunrise and sunset, as something harmful to themselves and their fields, and during sleep do not have the same visions that other mortals. The dig troglodyte caves, these are their houses, eat snake meat and use a whistle, not the voice, to that extent lack the ability to communicate with words. The Garamantians, devoid of marriage, living without fixed rules for women. The Augila worship only the infernal spirits. The ganfasantes, naked and unaware of the war, have no dealings with any stranger. It is said that the lack Blemmyes head and their mouths and eyes fixed on the chest. Satyrs have no human habit, apart from the figure of a man. The appearance of egipanes is as usually painted, the himantópodas are kind of lame whose gait is crawling. The farusios before Persians, are said to be the companions of Hercules on his way to the Hesperides. And with respect to Africa do not occur to me more things worth mentioning (Pliny, Natural History, 5, 44-46)

In Bagawat two funerary chapels show inside the frescos which once decorated their majority. The white plaster decorations once covering the mud bricks are already completely lost. One of the two chapels is called after its vault paintings precisely the Chapel of Exodus, or nowadays often Passover Chapel. There are relatively few explicitly Christian symbols around the cemetery, apart from the Ankh cross, soon adopted bz the Copts as well.

Move the mouse over the images for a smaller view, and click on them forr a larger one.
The first pictures represent the Temple of Hibis, while those below
some frescoes of “the Chapel of the Peace”