Omm Sety's Living Egypt: Surviving Folkways from Pharaonic Times

Edited by Nicole Hansen, with a foreword by Kent Weeks and an introduction by Walter Fairservis, this amazing "lost" manuscript by the equally amazing Omm Sety will soon be published. Read on to learn more:

The unorthodox personal life of the late Omm Sety earned her the rather unflattering appellation "British Eccentric" in Who Was Who in Egyptology while her scholarly work, including her soon to be published Omm Sety's Living Egypt: Surviving Folkways from Pharaonic Times, has garnered her much respect. Omm Sety's life was full of such paradoxes. Born Dorothy Eady in 1904, she fell down a flight of stairs at the age of three. After this incident, and perhaps as a result of it, she began to believe she had a past life in ancient Egypt during which she had an affair with the pharaoh Sety I, who continued to visit her in this life. Longing to go to Egypt, in 1933 she married an Egyptian who had been studying in London, and moved permanently to Egypt, acquiring Egyptian citizenship. She soon gave birth to a son, whom she named Sety, hence her name Omm Sety, and was divorced in 1936, promptly moving to the village of Nazlet al-Samaan at the foot of the pyramids. She spent over three decades working for the Egyptian Antiquities Service, first in Cairo (for Selim Hassan and then Ahmed Fakhry) and from 1956 at Abydos, her home in her previous life, until the mandatory retirement age of 65 in 1969, when she was asked by the late archaeologist Walter Fairservis to write an ethnoarchaeological manuscript.

Fairservis worked for many years in Pakistan and Afghanistan exploring the origins of Harappan civilization before excavating in Egypt in the late 1960s at predynastic Hierakonpolis, where he soon recognized the need for ethnoarchaeological work in Egypt. He asked Egyptologists John Wilson (the former director of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago), Klaus Baer (also of the Oriental Institute) and Kent Weeks (of the American University in Cairo) for advice on who they would recommend who could combine an ability to record the modern life and also deal with the ancient. Unanimously, they suggested Omm Sety as the only living person who could combine expert knowledge of ancient Egypt with in-depth knowledge of modern Egypt. She was asked to write the manuscript to be published by Glyphdoctors, on the condition that she could do so while remaining at Abydos.

Fairservis left the topics to be covered to Omm Sety, and she worked without his input for five years on the manuscript. She submitted a series of reports that comprise nearly 400 double-spaced typed pages. The reports are a comprehensive look at Egyptian folklife, covering nearly 100 specific topics that fall into the broad categories of agriculture, beliefs and practices concerning animals, food, games, life cycle rituals, social customs, magic, folk medicine, urban legends, language, and beliefs and practices of Egyptians concerning the monuments. In each report, she discussed pertinent evidence from both ancient and modern Egypt.

Omm Sety's previous writings have been the subject of controversy. Rumors have circulated that she did ghost writing for other Egyptians because of their limited English, and I have been able to identify at least three such books and about half a dozen articles that based on a stylistic analysis, were almost certainly written by Omm Sety. But I would argue that it was not necessarily a case of Omm Sety helping out her Egyptian colleagues, but rather as a woman without a degree working as a "draftsman" for the Egyptian Antiquities Service, it would have been difficult if not impossible for her to have published scholarly works under her own name, and that those whose names appeared on her books and articles were doing her a service by giving her a way, albeit anonymously, of putting her ideas in print. In her early years, she wrote for the Egyptian Gazette, and after her death, two books on Abydos appeared in her name. To date, most of Omm Sety's publications (in her name or others') have been popular in nature. With these obstacles to publication that Omm Sety had faced previously in mind, Fairservis intended from the beginning that the commissioned manuscript would be published in her name.

It would be easy to dismiss her interest in "survivals" of ancient Egyptian culture in modern Egypt simply an outgrowth of her personal belief in being a reincarnated ancient Egyptian, and she once said simply that the modern folklore reminded her of the past, but I believe Selim Hassan's influence may have played a more critical role in developing her interest in "survivals" than has been recognized.

On 11 March 1936, Selim Hassan gave a lecture in Arabic entitled "Ancient Egyptian Customs Surviving until Now in Modern Egypt," later published, around the time Omm Sety began to work for Hassan and study Egyptology with him. In an era when Egypt was struggling for independence from British rule, Hassan argued that present-day Egyptians, particularly the peasants, were the direct descendants of their pharaonic ancestors, and that foreign rulers of Egypt had not diluted their pharaonic bloodline. He compared changes in religion and language in Egypt to the shell of an egg, simply overlaying, not destroying, earlier beliefs and practices. Omm Sety was a fervent Egyptian nationalist, and her patriotic feelings toward her adopted country probably motivated her search for continuities in its culture.

Hassan also seems to have influenced the content of Omm Sety's work. Some information is almost identical to that found in Hassan's article, and she sometimes cited information and ideas as his. He dictated his excavation notes to Omm Sety, and he may very well have discussed "survivals" with her, on which she took notes. Hassan's mother was one of her most important informants, and Omm Sety had accumulated a stack of notes she had taken from her conversations with her about traditions of her native Delta home.

Omm Sety's acceptance of, and often personal belief in the folk beliefs and practices of her Egyptian neighbors was paramount in her ability to collect folkloric data. She not only lived among the peasants, but as one of them. The relationship between informants in anthropological studies and the researches interviewing them is often an uneasy one and they often are reluctant to share information that they feel the researcher might consider improper behavior or even might want to eradicate. In contrast, Omm Sety as a researcher had more in common with the average informant than the average researcher, not only believing in the efficacy of validity of Egyptian folk practices, but even employed them on herself. For example, in a chapter on honey in ancient and modern Egypt she wrote of several folk treatments she had tried: "A fellah of Mitrahine recommended a dessert-spoon full of honey, to be slowly sipped before rising in the morning, ans a remedy for violent 'morning sickness' during pregnancy. It was completely effective. On an occasion when I clumsily spilled boiling melted butter all over my foot, which was badly scalded, the same man quickly smeared the injury with honey, and wrapped the foot in a towel. Twelve hours later the pain had completely subsided, and on removing the towel the foot was found to be unblistered, and only slightly pink in colour. By the following morning all trace of the injury had vanished."

Indeed, Omm Sety's methodology could be characterized as participant-observation. This is reflected in a letter she wrote on 18 April 1970 to John Dorman, then head of the American Research Center in Egypt: "I've been helping my neighbours get the wheat harvest in, working the norag [a threshing device pulled by cattle driven by a man seated behind them], and singing the song in praise of the cow's rear end." In her chapter on survivals in agriculture, she quotes the song mentioned in the letter: "I am here and you are there. O beautiful backside, who bought you? Turn your backside and show me from whence do you know how to work so well." She went on to explain that "the backsides referred to are those of the cattle, it being the most prominent part of the animal's anatomy in the sight of the man who is driving it." She also provided a description of the functioning of the norag.

Unlike for most researchers, for Omm Sety participant observation was not simply a technique to learn about Egyptian culture, but a way of life, and one which she practiced for decades longer than the average anthropologist. The relish with which she engaged in participant observation is expressed in the same letter quoted above: "I'm off to visit some very chatty friends of mine, so picture me sitting in the dust with a lot of other old crones, drinking tea or helba [fenugreek] and collecting information (and a few fleas!) in the Cause of Science, and incidentally having a wonderful time."

In spite of her faith in the folk beliefs and practices of the Egyptians, Omm Sety was careful not to make unsupportable assertions in her writing, also due to the training in scholarly methods she had received from Hassan. As Fairservis pointed out, she never allowed her reincarnation beliefs interfere with her work, or used them as a source of data.

Throughout her work, a pattern emerges in her approach to each individual topic. After presenting a item of folklore, she sought to explain its origin. Often, this may lie in the ancient past, or in a misunderstanding of natural processes. Generally, it is only in cases where she could not identify an ancient origin or rationale that Omm Sety suggested the supernatural may be possible.

Indeed, Omm Sety and her unpublished manuscript were well-respected by the greatest Egyptologists of her day. After reading the material she had submitted by early 1972, John Wilson wrote of her, "She is a responsible scholar (or should be treated as such) and her text should be treated with respect."

Upon reading the entire manuscript in the mid-1980s, Klaus Baer wrote "The tidbits recorded in these chapters are in most cases new to me (and I probably have greater contact with rural Egypt than most Egyptologists). The make fascinating reading, and in some cases raise questions that could be quite interesting to an Egyptologist. The primary significance of the data, however, is to the anthropologist and ethnographer. Apart from the book's potential value for scholarship...the chapters read very easily, and the bits of information could well be fascinating to the general reader."

Michael Hoffman, who worked with Fairservis at Hierakonpolis, also thought the book should be published, "as it contains useful ethnographic information related in an entertaining and witty manner. I view the work as one of general humanistic and cultural interest to the student of Egypt and the Middle East rather than a technical cultural anthropological treatise. Nevertheless, it can be a valuable addition to the literature if properly edited."

This lack of editing seems to have remained the major stumbling block to the work's publication to date. Omm Sety had no desire to edit it before she died in 1981, and Fairservis did little more than group the short articles into larger subject areas and write an introduction.

As my own research involved connections between ancient and modern Egypt, I was curious about the contents of the manuscript. Kent Weeks suggested to me it might contain pertinent information, and he put me in touch with Fairservis' widow Jano. Upon obtaining a copy, I realized that if it were published, Omm Sety's manuscript would be one that the general public interested in learning about ancient or modern Egypt would enjoy. However, the manuscript is also of value to the ethnographer and the Egyptologist. I expressed my ideas to Jano, and she agreed to give me the manuscript to edit for publication. In addition to grouping her short reports together into chapters so that the book flows smoothly, I intend to annotate it with references that make both the relationship and relevance of Omm Sety's work to the fields of Egyptology and anthropology clearer and stronger, while making it a useful sourcebook for those investigating the wide range of topics covered.

Truly Omm Sety's life work, this book will be published in 2007 by Glyphdoctors. To learn when it is available, join our mailing list. Enrollees in our upcoming Egyptian Folklore course will get a sneak preview of the manuscript before it is published, so consider enrolling today.

In the meantime, you might want to learn more about Omm Sety by purchasing her biography by Jonathan Cott Search for Omm Sety (Order now: ) or gain new insights into her life in the new book about her by Hanny el Zeini and Catherine Dees, based on her personal diaries and audio recordings made by el Zeini, Omm Sety's Egypt (Order now: )

(The above essay is an abridged version of a longer essay published as: Nicole B. Hansen. 2002. "The Omm Sety Manuscript as an Ethnoarchaeological Source." In Moving Matters, Ethnoarchaeology in the Near East: Proceedings of the International Seminar Held at Cairo, 7-10 December 1998, edited by Willeke Z. Wendrich and Gerrit van der Kooij, 251–261, CNWS Publications 111. Leiden: Research School of Asian, African, and Amerindian Studies (CNWS), Universiteit Leiden.)