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FASCINATING FACT FILE ABOUT ANCIENT EGYPT

The World of Isis and Hopi

The stories of Isis and Hopi are based in ancient Egypt over 3,000 years ago, during a time known as the New Kingdom. They happen around 1200–1150BC, in the last great period of Egyptian history. This is about a thousand years after the Old Kingdom, when the pyramids were built. Waset, the town in which Isis and Hopi live, had recently been the capital of Egypt, with an enormous temple complex dedicated to the god Amun. By 1200BC, the capital had been moved further north again, but Waset was still very important. Kings were still buried in the Valley of the Kings on the west bank, and the priests of Amun were rich and powerful. Today, Waset is known as Luxor; in books about ancient Egypt, it is often referred to by the Greek name of Thebes.

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A Little Bit about Horned Vipers

The snake that Hopi finds in this book is a desert horned viper, also called the Sahara horned viper. These snakes have a sandy-coloured body with brown blotches, a wide, triangular head, and two big scales that stick up behind the eyes to create ‘horns’.

Horned vipers are desert snakes. They tend to live in dry river beds and among sand and rocks. They are usually nocturnal – in other words, they are active and do their hunting at night. During the day, they bury themselves in sand or hide somewhere shady, though they are sometimes seen basking in the sun. They move by ‘sidewinding’, which means pressing part of their body down while throwing another part sideways and forwards. This leaves an unmistakable track in soft sand.

As venomous snakes go, horned vipers are not very aggressive – but when they strike, they strike fast. Hopi’s viper would have had no problem catching a rat in the hold! The bite of a horned viper is dangerous, but it does not often kill people.

When it is cornered, a horned viper sometimes curls into C-shaped coils and rubs its scales together as a warning. This makes a rasping, hissing sound. What’s interesting is that the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for a horned viper is also the letter ‘f’. People now think that this might be because of the sound the snake makes with its coils: fffff.

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Boats and the River Nile

The ancient Egyptians didn’t bother building lots of roads, because the River Nile was like a big highway running from one end of Egypt to the other. Away from the Nile, there was only desert, where no one wanted to go. Because the Nile flooded every year, covering the fields, roads close to the river got washed away. So to travel up and down the length of Egypt, people used boats.

The Nile flows from south to north, emptying out into the Mediterranean Sea. Luckily, the wind in Egypt usually blows in the opposite direction, from north to south. So to travel north, boats could go with the current, often with the help of oars. To travel south, boats had sails to catch the wind and carry them against the current. Because of this, the hieroglyph that meant ‘travel north’ was a picture of a boat without a sail, and the hieroglyph for ‘travel south’ was a picture of a boat with a sail.

For pottering around close to home, fishing or hunting in the marshes, people made little boats out of papyrus reeds bundled together. By the New Kingdom, some of these would have been made of wood instead.

For religious ceremonies and to carry the king, there were elegant, brightly painted boats that we now call barques. These were slender boats with a beautifully carved prow. The Egyptians believed that the sun god Re sailed across the sky in a barque every day. Wealthy people, like Hat-Neb in the story, might own pleasure boats built of wood. Like barques, these would have been brightly painted, with a cabin to keep the owner sheltered from the sun.

There were big rowing boats to carry cargoes, and massive barges to carry very heavy loads, like blocks of stone. These barges were so large that they had to be towed by smaller boats, like the one in the story.

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Egypt’s Temples

Temples were central to religion in ancient Egypt. They were built for the glory of the gods and king, and only priests and priestesses could enter the inner areas. Ordinary people had to stay outside, but they could still make offerings and pray to the gods, using the priests and scribes attached to the temples as go-betweens.

There were two main kinds of temple – cult temples and mortuary temples. Cult temples were for the worship of a particular god, like Sobek or Amun. The temple being built in the book is a cult temple dedicated to the god Horus, in a place that is now called Edfu. The ancient name for the temple site was Djeba, and there was a temple there from Old Kingdom times. Kings in the New Kingdom added to this temple to make it more impressive, but it’s difficult to say exactly how much. This is because from 237BC onwards, the Ptolomies (Greek invaders) built a big new temple on the same site. You can still visit this temple today.

Mortuary temples were for the worship of a dead king. For this reason, they were usually built on the west bank – the Kingdom of the Dead – not too far from the tombs where the kings were buried.

Both cult and mortuary temples were huge, amazing buildings. Many of them have survived, and you can still see the massive walls, columns and statues, and the hieroglyphs that were carved everywhere. It’s a little bit harder to imagine the bright colours that the temples were painted in.

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The Sea People

The crew of Hat-Neb’s boat are ‘Sea People’ who have settled in Egypt. No one is really sure who these people were or where they came from, but they gave some of the New Kingdom kings a lot of bother. Waves of Sea People attacked Egypt along the north coast during the reign of the great king Ramesses II (who reigned from approximately 1279–1212BC), but Ramesses defeated them, taking many captives. Later, these captives formed part of the Egyptian army and helped to fight other enemies, so some of the Sea People would have made Egypt their home.

About a century later, during the reign of Ramesses III (approximately 1186–1154BC), there was another wave of Sea People attacks. Again, the Egyptians defeated and killed many of them. But there would have been captives, too, who settled in Egypt.

In this story, I have put together their knowledge of boats and the role that they played as mercenaries, and imagined that some of them would have hired themselves out as guards and sailors on the Nile.