On the ancient Egyptian "desert" as god's land"

The ancient Egyptians distinguished the Nile valley ( kmt, tA, tAwy, idbwy ) and the lands outside it («Desert», xAst ) as quite different realms of divine nearness. To prove this, the author scrutinizes two types of statements in the inscriptions of Egyptian expeditions to the Desert: (a) the «appeals to the living» and «threat-formulae», (b) the narrative passages about spontaneous religious experiences. For the time of the First Intermediate Period and Middle Kingdom the texts of the a-type are found at Wady Hammamat, Hatnub, Wady el-Hudy, Wady el-Hol, Mersa Gawasis and in Sinai, those of the b-type - at Wady Hammamat and in Sinai. A peculiarity of the «desert» «appeals» and «threat-formulae» is that the divine retribution they promise is stated to overtake the traveller within quite a short time-span: it comes down mostly to the success of the traveller’ mission, his safe return back home and vice versa, while, for instance, special mentions of a post-mortem vengeance are rare. Thus the divine retribution in the Desert was usually said to come much quicker than that in the Valley. The possible reasons for this may be that the maintenance of Justice within Egypt was deemed first and foremost the king’s prerogative, and that in the populous Valley an individual usually could not qualify for god’s special attention to his humble person. Meanwhile far away in the Desert, the king’s power felt much weaker, and amidst its boundless open spaces a traveller felt himself open to gods’ view as if on the palm of their hand. Therefore in the Desert the gods were believed to be ready to reattribute a traveller’s deeds immediately. On the other hand, since missions in the Desert were the Egyptians’ riskiest and most arduous experiences (with death therein dooming the deceased to eternal deprivations in the Beyond), it is a small wonder that the very simple promise of a safe return therefrom back home seemed to be a motivation more effective than mentions of some benefits or disasters possible after that. Unique is the point of departure of the b-texts, starting with making offerings to gods of the Desert by the head of an expedition. This stands in striking contrast to the Valley, where the communication line from man to god was always through the king and the priests as his representatives. As a result, what happened to the expedition after the traveller’s the ritual was considered as divine response to it, i.e. as a kind of man-god temporal relationship arisen on the traveller’s initiative and request. The absence of the b-texts in Hatnub is worth noting: expeditions thereto - because of its nearness to the Valley - usually did not need making offerings on their own to gods in the Desert. Judging by the texts discussed, the ideas of special man-god nearness in the Desert finally developed in the First Intermediate Period.