Naguib Mahfouz: Three Novels of Ancient Egypt

‘What matters in the historical novel is not the telling of great historical events, but the poet's awakening of people who figure in those events. What matters is that we should re-experience the social and human motives which led men to think, feel and act just as they did in historical realities.’ [1] Georg Lukäcs, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, Merlin Press, 1962.

Naguib Mahfouz adds another dimension to what matters. Reading back through his work written over seventy-six years and coming to this trilogy of earliest published novels brings the relevance of re-experience of Pharaonic times to our own. The historical novel is not a mummy brought to light; in Mahfouz's hands it is alive in ourselves, our twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in the complex motivations with which we tackle the undreamt-of transformation of means and accompanying aleatory forces let loose upon us. Although these three fictions were written before the Second World War, before the atom bomb, there is a prescience — in the characters, not authorial statement — of what was to come. A prescience that the writer was going to explore in relation to the historical periods he himself would live through, in the forty novels which followed.

Milan Kundera has spoken for Mahfouz and all fiction writers, saying the novelist doesn't give answers, he asks questions. The very title of the first work in Mahfouz's trilogy, Khufu's Wisdom, looks like a statement but it isn't, it's a question probed absorbingly, rousingly, in the book. The Fourth-Dynasty Pharaoh, ageing Khufu, is in the first pages reclining on a gilded couch as he gazes into the distance at the thousands of labourers and slaves preparing the desert plateau for the pyramid he is building for his tomb, ‘eternal abode'. Hubris surely never matched. His glance sometimes turns to his other provision for immortality: his sons. And in those two images Mahfouz has already conceived the theme of his novel, the power of pride against the values perhaps to be defined as wisdom. King of all Egypt, North and South, Khufu extols the virtue of power. Of the enemies whom he has conquered, he declares: ‘…what cut out their tongues, and what chopped off their hands… was nothing but power… And what made my word the law of the land… made it a sacred duty to obey me? Was it not power that did all this?’ His architect of the pyramid, Mirabu, adds: ‘And divinity, my lord.’ The gods are always claimed for one's side. If the Egyptians both thanked and blamed them for everything, in our new millennium warring powers each justify themselves with the claim, God is on their side.

Mahfouz even in his early work never created a two-dimensional symbol. For Khufu, contemplating the toilers at his pyramid site, there's an ‘inner whispering’ — ‘Was it right for so many worthy souls to be expended for the sake of his personal exaltation?’ He brushes away this self-accusation and accepts a princely son's arrangement for an entertainment he's told includes a surprise to please him.

There is that intermediary between divine and earthly powers, the sorcerer — representative of the other, anti-divinity, the devil? The surprise is Djedi, sorcerer ‘who knows the secrets of life and death'. After watching a feat of hypnotism, Khufu asks: ‘Can you tell me if one of my seed is destined to sit on the throne of Egypt's kings?’ The sorcerer pronounces: ‘Sire, after you, no one from your seed shall sit upon the throne of Egypt.’ Pharaoh Khufu is sophisticatedly sceptical: ‘simply tell me: do you know whom the gods have reserved to succeed them on the throne of Egypt?’ He is told this is an infant newly born that morning, son of the high priest of the Temple of Ra. Grown Prince Khafra, heir of the Pharaoh's seed, is aghast. But there's a glimpse of Khufu's wisdom, if rationalism is wisdom: ‘If Fate really was as people say… the nobility of man would be debased… No, Fate is a false belief to which the strong are not fashioned to submit.’ Khufu calls upon his entourage to accompany him so that he himself ‘may look upon this tiny offspring of the Fates'.

Swiftly takes off a narrative of epic and intimacy where Mahfouz makes of a youthful writer's tendency to melodrama, a genuine drama. The high priest Monra has told his wife that their infant son is divinely chosen to rule as successor to the god Ra-Atum. The wife's attendant, Sarga, overhears and flees to warn Pharaoh Khufu of the threat. Monra fears this means his divinely appointed son therefore will be killed. He hides mother and new-born with the attendant Zaya on a wagon loaded with wheat, for escape. On the way to the home of the high priest, Khufu's entourage encounters Sarga in flight from pursuit by Monra's men; so Khufu learns the facts of the sorcerer's malediction and in reward orders her to be escorted to her father's home.

When Khufu arrives to look upon the threat to his lineage he subjects the high priest to a cross-examination worthy of a formidable lawyer in court. ‘You are… advanced in both knowledge and in wisdom… tell me: why do the gods enthrone the pharaohs over Egypt?’ ‘They select them from among their [the pharaohs'] sons, endowing them with their divine spirit to make the nation prosper.’ ‘Thus, can you tell me what Pharaoh must do regarding his throne?’ ‘He must carry out his obligations, claim his proper rights.'

Monra knows what he's been led to admit. There follows a scene of horror raising the moral doubt, intellectual powerlessness that makes such over-the-top scenes undeniably credible in Mahfouz's early work. Obey the god Ra or the secular power Khufu? There comes to Monra ‘a fiendish idea of which a priest ought to be totally innocent'. He takes Khufu to a room where another of his wife's handmaidens has given birth to a boy, implying this is his son in the care of a nurse. With the twists of desperate human cunning Mahfouz knows so instinctively, the situation is raised another decibel.

Monra is expected to eliminate his issue. ‘Sire, I have no weapon with which to kill.’ Khafra, Pharaoh's seed, shoves his dagger into Monra's hand. In revulsion against himself the high priest thrusts it into his own heart. Khafra with a cold will (to remind oneself of, much later) has no hesitation in ensuring the succession. He beheads the infant and the woman.

There is another encounter, on the journey back to Pharaoh's palace, another terrified woman, apparently pursued by a Bedouin band. Once more compassionate, Khufu orders that the poor creature with her baby be taken to safety — she says she was on her way to join her husband, a worker on the pyramid construction. Mahfouz like a master detective-fiction writer, lets us in on something vitally portentous his central character, Khufu, does not know; and that would change the entire narrative if he did. The woman is Zaya. She has saved the baby from a Bedouin attack on the wheat wagon.

Mahfouz's marvellous evocation, with the mid-twentieth-century setting of his Cairo trilogy, [2] Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street, trans. William Maynard Hutchins, Olive E. Kenny, Lome M. Kenny and Angele Botros Samaan, Everyman's Library, 2001. of the depth of the relationship between rich and aristocratic family men and courtesans, pimps, concurrent with lineal negotiations with marriage brokers, exemplifies an ignored class interdependency. His socialist convictions that were to oppose, in all his work, the posit that class values, which regard the lives of the ‘common people’ as less representative of the grand complex mystery the writer deciphers in human existence, begins in this other, early trilogy. The encounter with Zaya moves his story from those who believe themselves to be the representatives of the gods, to the crowd-scene protagonists in life. The servant Zaya's desolation when she learns her husband has died under the brutal conditions of pyramid labour, and the pragmatic courage of her subsequent life devotedly caring for baby Djedef, whom she must present as her own son, opens a whole society both coexistent with and completely remote from the awareness of the Pharaoh, whose desire for immortality has brought it about. The families of his pyramid workers have made in the wretched quarter granted them outside the mammoth worksite Pharaoh gazed on, ‘a burgeoning, low-priced bazaar'. There Djedef grows to manhood.