Dear all,
My new article on the origin of the decoration on amulets from Egypts' Bahariya Oasis has just been published online!
You can read it here; I hope you will enjoy it! It is just a preliminary train of thought which I will elaborate on in a full article; let me know what you think of it! Comments and suggestions are very welcome!
Very best wishes
Sigrid
Replies
hi Sigrid
Thanx for your reply, it is indeed clearer to me now after your correction.
Best wishes
Dear Ayis,
Thank you for this interesting vision! I feel it is always a good thing to study a certain situation from various points of view in order to see if we have been looking at it the wrong way. However, for the Bahariya-amulets I fear we will need to look at the evidence.
If indeed the Bahariya-amulets were once at the origin of the zar-amulets, and as such widely spread through the country, we should encounter at least some amulets that come from outside Bahariya. All known Bahariya-amulets however, are from the oasis. None of them is from the Nile Valley itself, or even from the other oases. In Siwa they do not occur either. Since the oasis is the smallest body when compared to the entire Nile Valley, logic would dictate there would have to be amulets from the Nile Valley as well.
Secondly, the production of these Bahariya-amulets is established with certainty to have been only carried out by the two Christian silversmiths living in the oasis. There are no amulets predating their arrival (in the early 1920's) and no amulets after one of them died and the other one moved to Cairo (in the 1960's). There are many zar-amulets predating the 1920's, found from Nubia to Cairo. This is also a reason why I personally do not believe the Bahariya-amulets are at the core of the zar: evidence from the zar is older by some two decennia and much more widespread. If the Bahariya-amulets were at the beginning of this, it should be the other way around.
There is also no evidence of comparable amulets from the coptic community in the Nile Valley. Interestingly enough, it would seem these two silversmiths created a version of their own making in a remote secluded arear, and thus set us thinking for many decennia afterwards. :) Why only copy the illustrations from Coptic charms and not the text? Were they illiterate? Why the limitations in iconography, whereas Coptic charms contain many varieties? The next step in the research will be to study the Coptic angle deeper, and I enjoy sharing thoughts about it with you!
Very best wishes
Sigrid
Very interesting, thank you.
Can i suggest that the problem of the origin could be solved the opposite way.
Nile valley being the geographical, cultural and civilizationnal center of the region (between red sea and cyrenaica), the western oases are in the peryphery.
Everyone knows that peripheral regions are quite conservative towards the trends that evolve in the center but they always preserv habits and trends that have disappeared in the center decades ago
Can i suggest that these amulets are actually at the origin of the zar amulets and they were once widespread across the country but eventually disappeared under the pressure of much more powerful amulets, or at least they were considered as such, namely: Islamic texts and zar afrocult, both being contemporary since it is during islamic egypt that slave trade reached a peak and hence the import of east african animist cults or at least its revivification after the coptic christian era.
We can imagine that the nile valley under the islamization abandonned these in profit of new (less showy and more orthodox, hiding the anthropomorphic designs at the backside) amulets that bear at one side islamic texts and on the other some zar figures, while bahariyya kept the tradition alive while maintaining a much more coherent coptic society until the bedouin migrations occured heading westwards towards north africa. Eventually they embraced Islam (forcibly? through mixing?) while keeping this amulet as a heirloom of their ancient beliefs. With the slight difference that through the ages it lost its intrinsic magical dimension but at the same time it did not reach the level of a complete adornment otherwise it should have been made out of silver, wich is not the case!!
One more thing is to search for teh berber links that could have tied bahariya to its neighbour Siwa:
I don' remember the book but i must have red somewhere that a medieval arab traveller heard berber language in Farafra wich is waay further towards the south east from Siwa....
Thank you for this interesting insight on egyptian jewelry
Cheers