Seasonality and the Name of the Nile

Abstract

of ancient Egypt. The surviving records written as well as representational fairly pulsate with the insistences of time; yet the Egyptological literature offers an unbalanced treatment of the subject. Aside from a sizable bibliography on calendrical/chronological issues and on grammatical temporality all quite important, to be surecomparatively little attention has been accorded to the economic and social aspects of time in the daily lives of Egyptians, certainly nothing to rival the amount of ink and paper that has been expended on the Egyptian concept of eternity.1 The stress on eternity is not without some irony in the sense that the subject has more to do with timelessness; but even that topic has value beyond its broader philosophical implications in that it helps us to understand what it was about experienced time the Egyptians sought to escape, namely time's monstrous offspring, change. Timelessness, moreover, includes basic ideas and modes of discourse about time, else we would be unable to talk about it, much less conceive of it. This view smacks of a truism, of course, but that fact makes it all the more surprising that scholars have allowed the seemingly interminable discussions of eternity (including the host of artful translations of the basic Egyptian words for eternity) to dominate the ways in which we approach temporal issues. The consideration of the socio-economic aspects of time alluded to earlier requires prior attention to some general features of Egyptian temporal perception. Among these would be such topics as the definition of event; the location of events in time, event relationships; interval; sequence; duration; periodicity and the like. The present essay, part of a more extensive examination of time in ancient Egypt,2 will be limited to a particular aspect of periodicity, namely seasonality. By periodicity, I mean regularly recurring events, phenomena, or circumstances. Implicit as well is the notion that such recurrences are, to one degree or another, significant, for they help to understand the phenomenal world. In the last section of this paper, I will make some observations on the name of the most reliably recurrent natural phenomenon, the Nile.3 Some caveats are in order at the outset. For one