‘When the Spirit Moved Them’: the Ituri ‘Dancers of God’ (Part 2)

By Joann Fletcher

Following the Ituri group’s visit to Britain where they were viewed as novelties only ‘discovered’ by the modern West in 1873, Harrison claimed that their written history dated back to the Greeks who had first coined the term ‘Pygmaioi’, Πυγμαῖοι [1]. First mentioned in the C.8th BC by Greek poet Homer who refers to ‘Pygmaian men’ at ‘constant war’ with heron-like cranes, Greek historian Herodotus c.450 BC described an expedition to the far south of Africa attacked by “little men”, while Aristotle also spoke of cranes migrating “to the marshlands south of Egypt where the Nile has its source. And it is here that they are said to fight with the pygmies”. Roman author Pliny likewise referred to this crane-hunting “nation of Pygmies, which dwells among the marshes in which the river Nile takes its rise” [2], such colorful tales also inspiring artistic scenes of ‘Pygmaian’ figures so closely associated with the Nile they were by then regarded as “the guardians of its headwaters” [3].

Then once the Romans seized Egypt in 30 BC, they began to portray the Egyptians themselves as ‘pygmies’, literally reducing those they had conquered by showing them “naked and largely defenseless, depicted with the physiognomy of dwarfs” [4]. Indeed, ‘dwarfs’ and ‘pygmies’ are often conflated by modern writers, although medical expertise clearly differentiates between “pygmies, i.e. the normally small races of men from the interior of Africa, and dwarfs, which are pathological cases” of those born with achondroplasia [5].

With both regarded as special beings in ancient Egypt where “short stature was…. a divine mark” [6], the Egyptians likewise used separate terms, with ‘nemi’ - dwarf - describing those who held high office at the Egyptian court from c.2500 BC onwards. The protective household god Bes was also portrayed as an achondroplastic dwarf, with his amulets worn both in life and in death, when their “resemblance to newborns helped facilitate resurrection” [7] within funeral dances.

Yet the ‘deneg’ [8] from Central Africa was held in even higher esteem. As early as the Pyramid Age c.2400 BC when Egypt’s sun god reigned supreme, King Djedkara had received a ‘deneg’ dancer whose impact was so profound three subsequent kings aspired to emulate him. For each declared that “I am that deneg of the dances of god” [9] in their ‘Pyramid Texts’, the world’s oldest collection of religious writings carved inside their pyramid tombs.

As for the ‘god’s dance’ staged within the privacy of the temples’ sacred precincts, this was “only performed, in fact, upon the infrequent occasions when a pygmy [deneg] could be procured to do it” [10]. So small models could be substituted, an ivory example c.1900 BC comprising miniature male figures with knees flexed mid-dance; as one claps a rhythm, his three companions raise their arms while their feet are slotted into the model’s base into which strings once spun the figures when pulled. Usually dismissed as a ‘toy’, the model came from the tomb of a young woman whose other possessions related to goddess Hathor, daughter of the sun god whom she both protected and entertained. So the model was most likely a ritual automaton. Operated “by a priest in the immediate presence of a cult image”, its dancing was believed to “reenergize the supreme deity [the sun], and by so doing guarantee the continued functioning of the cosmos” [11].

With the sun also central to royal jubilee festivals of rejuvenation, temple scenes of King Amenhotep III’s jubilee c.1360 BC featured a dancing deneg while those of later king Osorkon II c.860 BC included three such deneg figures; each held a long stave identifying them as ‘men of authority’, while their shared title ‘temple guard’ acknowledged their additional martial prowess. With claims that “certainly they were not Egyptians but belonged to a southern race” [12], so too visitors to C.2nd BC King Ptolemy VI (great-great-grandfather of Cleopatra), an accompanying inscription stating that they “come to him, bringing their tribute to his treasury” and again referring to them as small figures “of the southern lands” [12].

With these ‘southern lands’ the place where the sun’s heat was greatest, the Egyptians also referred to part of this mysterious region as ‘Akhtiu’, ‘Land of the Horizon Dwellers’ and ‘Land of Spirits’ [13]. Everything within it was believed to share the same divine power, from the gold the Egyptians acquired from Sudanese Nubia (‘Gold Land’) to the leopard skins, elephant tusks and the inhabitants themselves, all making up precious cargoes arriving north on the Nile into Egypt’s most southern city Aswan.

And here in the cliffs above Aswan, an extraordinary inscription was carved across the façade of the tomb of Egypt’s southern governor Harkhuf. As veteran of four journeys south into the far reaches of Sudan [14] from where he then travelled west into the ‘Land of the Horizon Dwellers’, Harkhuf had made three expeditions to acquire ivory and animal skins for his king Mernere. Then making his final journey for next king Pepi II, Harkhuf had written to tell Pepi he was also bringing back a deneg, which he had either acquired through trade intermediaries in central Africa or from the southern reaches of the Nile where they were still seen in the early C.20th [15].

It is King Pepi’s reply, the only complete royal letter dating from the Pyramid Age, which Harkhuf inscribed verbatim on his tomb walls: “….You said in your letter that you were bringing back all sorts of presents, important and beautiful, which goddess Hathor gave…. You also say in your letter that you will bring back a deneg (for) the dances of god, coming from the Land of the Horizon Dwellers…. So come north to the palace. Leave (everything) and bring with you the deneg which you have brought from the Land of the Horizon Dwellers…” Pepi even told Harkhuf to “set trusted men about him on both sides of the boat and take care that he does not fall in the water” and “If he lies down to sleep during the night, have trusted men to sleep beside him… go and check him, ten times each night. Because My Majesty wishes to see this deneg more than any tribute from any foreign land” [16].

Now although such royal instructions are usually described as the need to guard a “wild and fierce creature continually seeking to escape” [17], they are better understood alongside Harrison’s account of his own group; travelling on donkeys out of their shaded homeland into direct sun, “always going off to sleep” and taking “several tumbles in consequence” [18], this echoes King Pepi’s own fear that the deneg might fall into the river. Similarly the king’s impatience to see the deneg was not simply the whim of some capricious old tyrant as might be assumed either. For Pepi wrote his letter when aged around 7, the reaction of Egypt’s child monarch to another of similar stature in some ways little different to that of the Yorkshire children of Brandesburton over 4,000 years later.

About the author

Professor Joann Fletcher - is based in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York. She is also Lead Ambassador for the Egypt Exploration Society, patron of Barnsley Museums and Heritage Trust, and has been researching aspects of Scarborough Museums’ collection for over 20 years.

References

1. Modern western account in Schweinfurth, G. (1873), Heart of Africa, London; Greek & Roman references in Dasen, V. (2013), Dwarfs in Ancient Egypt and Greece, Oxford, p.163-246; Ovadiah, A. & Mucznik, S. (2017), Myth and Reality in the Battle between the Pygmies and the Cranes in the Greek and Roman Worlds, Gerión 35 (1), p.151-166.

2. Homer’s Iliad 3.1-7; Herodotus Histories II.32-33; Aristotle Historia Animalium 8.12, 892.12; Pliny’s Natural History 6.35.6 & 7.23-7.30.

3. McDaniel, W. (1932), A Fresco Picturing Pygmies. American Journal of Archaeology 36 (3), p.262.

4. Swetnam-Burland, M. (2009), Egypt Embodied: the Vatican Nile, American Journal of Archaeology 113 (3), p.445; see also McDaniel 1932, p.260–271; Dasen (2013), p.150 and Pygmies in the Roman Empire (arcgis.com)

5. Dawson W. (1938), Pygmies and Dwarfs in Ancient Egypt, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 24 (2), p.185; Dawson (1927), Pygmies, Dwarfs and Hunchbacks in Ancient Egypt, Annals of Medical History IX (4), p.315; Smith, G.E. (1905), Notes on African Pygmies, The Lancet 166 (4276), “most writers fail to draw a proper distinction between dwarfs and pygmies”, p.426.

6. Dasen (2013), p.29; contra mistaken claims that “Egyptians for thousands of years held a bias against supposed ‘Pygmies’- people of naturally short stature who were inundated with a plethora of harmful stereotypes that served to dehumanize them and place them as closer to animals and monkeys than as humans”, Pygmies in the Roman Empire (arcgis.com)

7. ‘Resurrection’ in Gillam, R. (2005), Performance and Drama in Ancient Egypt, London, p.113; funeral dances in Digital Giza | Nunetjer (Nunetjer) (harvard.edu) and Dasen (2013), p.152; for Bes see van Oppen de Ruiter. B. (2020), Lovely Ugly Bes! Animalistic Aspects in Ancient Egyptian Popular Religion, Arts 9 (51) doi:10.3390/arts9020051

8. Dawson (1938), p.186; Dasen (2013), p.27-28 points out ‘deneg’ likely connected to African terms denk, dinka, dinki etc. referring to those of short stature.

9. Pyramid Texts Utterance 517, R. Faulkner (1969), The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, Oxford, p.191; see also El-Aguizy O. (1987), Dwarfs and Pygmies in Ancient Egypt, Annales du Service des Antiquités de l'Egypte 71, the dances “related some way or another to the sun-god, either because they were performed in front of this god, or because the pygmy was considered a representation of the sun”, p.60

10. Dawson (1938), p.189.

11. Reeves, N. (2015), A Rare Mechanical Figure from Ancient Egypt, Metropolitan Museum Journal 50, p.49; Figurine of a Pygmy Dance Leader | Middle Kingdom | The Metropolitan Museum of Art (metmuseum.org); see also Saleh, M. & Sourouzian, H. (1987), The Cairo Museum: Official Catalogue, Mainz, No.90, ‘a cult object’.

12. Naville, E. (1892), The Festival-Hall of Osorkon II in the Great temple of Bubastis (1887-1889), London, p.31, pl.XX.5; “clearly not achondroplastic dwarfs” Dawson (1938), p.316, fig.12; Amenhotep III’s unpublished scene at Soleb in Dasen (2013), p.43; Karnak scenes of Ptolemy VI in Naville (1892), p.31; Dasen (2013), p.28.

13. ‘Akhtiu’ as western rather than eastern horizon in Cooper, J. (2012), Reconsidering the Location of Yam, Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 48, p.17; ‘Land of Spirits’ in Hayes (1958), p.222.

14. Specifically from ‘the land of Yam’ in southern Sudan, “a rather large, indefinite area” in Cooper (2012), p.17; “Pygmies of equatorial Africa were famed as dancers and imported via the lands of Yam (Sudan?)”, van Oppen de Ruiter (2020), p.8

15. Crazzolara, P. (1933), Pygmies on the Bahr el Ghazal, Sudan Notes & Records 16, p.85-88; Smith (1905), “some of the pygmy people now live in close the proximity to the sources of the Nile and… their domain probably extended over a much wider area in former times [making] it highly probable that at various times the ancient dwellers on the banks of that river may have heard, or perhaps even seen, some of these little people in the course of their numerous expeditions”; likely “that Pygmies once lived in the swamps of the White Nile, where they might have been directly or indirectly in contact with Egyptians, Greeks and Romans” Dasen (2013), p.177 & 27.

16. Based on translations in Dawson (1938), p.185; Lichtheim, M. (1973), Ancient Egyptian Literature I, Berkely, p.26-27; Wente, E. (1990), Letters from Ancient Egypt, Atlanta, p.20-21, etc.

17. Dawson (1927), p.143; Dasen 2013, “he might try to escape and was regarded as wild”, p.26; Leipe, J. (2001), Ancient Life: Temple Dancers, Archaeology Odyssey 4 (5), Biblical Archaeology Society Ancient Life: Temple Dancers · The BAS Library “no more than a strange, cute, wild animal that might try to escape”.

18. Harrison, J. (1905), Life among the Pygmies of the Ituri Forest, London, p.23; “they cannot stand the sun”, Harrison’s Diary VI, 15.3.05.