The Two Brothers (Egyptian myth)

Author: Traditional

Time Period: 5000 BCE–2500 BCE

Country or Culture: Egypt

Genre: Myth

PLOT SUMMARY

A pair of brothers lives in ancient Egypt. The elder, Anpu, has a wife and farm. Bata, the younger, lives with his brother as a farmhand. Strong and handsome, Bata has special powers, including the ability to communicate with animals.

One day, as Bata is retrieving a supply of seeds for planting, Anpu’s wife attempts to seduce him. Bata spurns her advances and resumes his chores. When Anpu returns home, his wife, fearing Bata has revealed her lust, claims Bata tried to rape her. Enraged, Anpu lies in wait to kill his brother. A cow warns Bata of the ambush, and he runs away. Anpu pursues him. Bata prays to the gods, and his prayers are answered: a river full of crocodiles springs up between the brothers. From the far side of the reptile-infested waterway, Bata denies accusations of sexual assault and tells his brother what really happened. To prove his sincerity, Bata slices off his own genitals and flings them into the water, where fish eat them.

Bata vows to live in a far-off valley, where he will place his soul at the top of a tree. If anything happens to Bata’s soul, Anpu will know: his beer will begin foaming. Bata then gives instructions for how to revive his soul, and leaves. Sad to lose his brother, Anpu returns home, kills his treacherous wife, and feeds her body to animals.

For a time, Bata lives and toils in a valley beside the sea. Sympathetic to his solitude, the gods create a beautiful but unscrupulous woman as mate for him. Bata loves her and tells her all his secrets, but emasculated, he cannot satisfy her sexually. While he works, she idles. As she is strolling by the sea, a wave surges and sweeps away a lock of her hair. The curl is carried to the shore of the pharaoh’s lands. Enamored of the hair’s alluring scent, the pharaoh sends soldiers to find the owner of the hair. They locate the woman and bring her back to the pharaoh, who falls in love and makes her a princess. To eliminate all traces of her former life, she soon demands that the tree where Bata’s soul resides be cut down. The pharaoh so orders, and when the tree falls, Bata dies.

Meanwhile, back on the farm, Anpu’s beer suddenly foams; he knows something dire has happened to his little brother. Anpu immediately leaves for his brother’s home, finds Bata dead, and begins searching for his soul. Anpu finally finds the soul after three years of searching and, following Bata’s earlier instructions, resurrects his brother. Bata transforms himself into a bull, and Anpu rides him to see the pharaoh.

Amazed at the talking bull, the pharaoh honors Bata with gifts. Bata’s former wife, however, still wishes her husband dead, and persuades the pharaoh to kill the bull. The pharaoh does as the evil princess demands, and Bata is sacrificed. Drops of Bata’s blood grow into huge trees by the pharaoh’s palace, and the spirit of Bata speaks from them. The vicious princess then demands the trees be made into furniture. The smitten pharaoh cannot refuse the request and commands the tasks to be performed. While laborers chop down the trees, a chip bearing the essence of Bata flies into the mouth of the princess and impregnates her. Nine months later, a son is born. The joyous pharaoh makes him heir to the kingdom.

In time, the pharaoh dies, and his son, the reincarnated Bata, becomes ruler. He has the princess put to death, and makes Anpu heir. The new Bata rules for thirty years. When he dies, Anpu become pharaoh.

SIGNIFICANCE

One of the world’s oldest written myths, “The Two Brothers,” was recorded on a papyrus and a copy is kept in the British Museum in London, England. The papyrus dates from about 1200 BCE, during the reign of pharaoh Seti II (ca. 1200–1194) in the latter part of Egypt’s Nineteenth Dynasty. However, it is believed that the story was composed many centuries earlier and transmitted orally over generations.

The principal characters of “The Two Brothers,” Anpu and Bata, are both based on deities from the populous Egyptian pantheon. Anpu (whom the Greeks called Anubis) was originally a principal god from early Egyptian mythology. Jackal-headed Anubis was associated from the first dynasties throughout Egypt with the land of the dead, officiating at embalming ceremonies and guiding the deceased toward judgment in the underworld. Bata was likewise based on an earlier deity, one of the oldest in Egypt: Hathor, a cow-headed fertility goddess. Hathor originally represented the Egyptian concept of the universe, since the stars were symbolized as a splash of cow’s milk, from which is derived the name of the Milky Way galaxy.

By the time the tale of the two brothers was transcribed in the Nineteenth Dynasty, the Egyptian gods, to become more accessible to believers, had lost some otherworldly aspects, though they retained certain divine characteristics. Anpu, in human guise, is still linked to death: he is solely responsible for bringing his deceased brother back to life. In the meantime, Bata has been transformed over time from a female cow to a male bull. His self-castration, however, renders him incapable of fatherhood by traditional means, and he must resort to magic to reproduce.

The women in the story—Anpu’s unfaithful wife and Bata’s vindictive, god-created mate—are never named, a fact that indicates the subservient role of females in ancient Egypt. While feminine deities were common in Egyptian mythology, in real life few women ruled throughout the country’s long dynastic history; convention demanded they wear beards to conceal their gender. Though the female characters in “The Two Brothers” are anonymous, they are nonetheless memorable as prototypes of the malevolent seductress who uses sex to gain advantage. Directly or indirectly, the conniving women of the tale have inspired countless stories in world literature. Malevolent females are central to the accounts of Potiphar’s wife and Salome in the Bible, the demon Lilith in Hebrew literature, the ancient Greek Siren Calypso, the mermaids of the medieval Nibelungenlied (ca. 1200; English translation, 1848), the banshees of Irish lore, and even more modern creations such as the femme fatale.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hollis, Susan Tower. The Ancient Egyptian Tale of Two Brothers: A Mythological, Religious, Literary and Historico-Political Study. Oakville: Bannerstone, 2008. Print.

Lichtheim, Miriam. Ancient Egyptian Literature, Volume II: The New Kingdom. Berkeley: U of California P, 2006. Print.

Loprieno, Antonio, ed. Ancient Egyptian Literature: History and Forms. Boston: Brill Academic, 1996. Print.

Maspero, Gaston, and Hasan M. El-Shamy, ed. Popular Stories of Ancient Egypt. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. Print.

Pinch, Geraldine. Handbook of Egyptian Mythology. Santa Barbara : ABC-CLIO, 2002. Print.

Shah, Indries. “Anpu and Bata.” World Tales: The Extraordinary Coincidence of Stories Told in All Times, in All Places. New York: Harcourt, 1979. 86–92. Print.

Simpson, William Kelly, ed. The Literature of Ancient Egypt: An Anthology of Stories, Instructions, Stelae, Autobiographies, and Poetry. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003. Print.