Chapter 5: The Temple of Isis

The Temple of Isis at Busiris was a large complex in the centre of the town. It could not compare in scale or grandeur to the one endowed by Queen Cleopatra at Philae, in the far south of the country but it was loved by the local citizens as the centre in their nome for the worship of the goddess.

Nofret knew the temple at Philae well. It was not far from where she had grown up in Elephantine and where she had been first initiated into the secrets of the goddess. That initiation had helped her to understand how Isis that had saved the God of the Underworld, Osiris, and championed her son Horus in banishing Osiris’s evil brother Seth.

Then her father had gained favour with the Nomarch and they had become part of his entourage here in Lower Egypt. Busiris was greener than the land surrounding Elephantine. Sometimes she missed the sharp, arid, rockiness of the lands of the south and the swirling waters of the First Cataract but now Busiris was her home.

Although it was smaller than the temple at Philae, the Busiris temple was well supported by the wealthy of the area. The annual festival and procession for the goddess was as grand as any celebration of Isis anywhere. The temple followed the same plan as that at Philae. Its hypostyle hall was dark and mysterious, its central court ringed by fine columns and brightly painted wall decorations. Beyond these though was the temple’s sanctuary, the holy of holies, only open to the priestesses and handmaidens of the goddess.

Nofret was standing in the sanctuary, in front of the statue of Isis and the ship in which the statue was processed each year at her festival. Inscriptions on the walls proclaimed the greatness of Isis and listed her many attributes but were barely visible in the gloom of the sanctuary. Even if they had been fully lit, the inscriptions would have meant little to Nofret. She knew little of the sacred hieroglyphic script. Much of her schooling had been in Greek, the language spoken in the court since Egypt’s conquest by Alexander the Great and the everyday Egyptian script, now termed hieratic, bore little resemblance to the hieroglyphs used in the past. To her, the inscriptions on the walls of the temple made the mysteries of the goddess even more ethereal.

Ahmose had followed her, dog-like, through the streets of Busiris until he stood in the temple’s courtyard within the second pylon. He was surrounded by the priestesses that he had looked on lustfully before. Now he was cowed, they emboldened, as they gripped his arms. Pushed to his knees, he was urged forward into the sanctuary.

Only once he was within the innermost part of the temple was he permitted to lift his head. There stood the great statue of Isis, sat on her throne, an ankh – the symbol of life – in one hand, her head topped by a vulture headdress and two sinuous cow’s horns with the sun’s disk between them.

Although the sanctuary was dark a shaft of life shone down from the roof onto the sun disk, glinting with gold. Beside the statue, Nofret stood offering incense to a burner that filled the room with scented smoke. As she stretched out one hand to add more incense to the burner the light caught the bright yellow gold of the ring that had enslaved Ahmose and he bowed his head in acknowledgement of its power.

On either side of Isis statue two naked men stood, their wrists bound above their heads. Their bodies were criss-crossed with the scarlet wheals of beatings. One, Ahmose recognised at once as the son of the Nomarch. The second bore the look of a high-born young man from foreign lands in the north; Peleset or Isriar, Ahmose thought. His skin, where the whip had not cut it, was soft; his hair was dressed in the manner of someone from beyond the Two Lands. The two seemed exhausted, pulled between the pain of their beatings and some sort of ecstatic delight in their situation. They groaned but with a soft, desperate tone that was driven more by desire than agony. Nofret had enjoyed the attentions of them both; Ankhu, son of the Nomarch and Ba’al Haddu, prince of Peleset, but still she had appetite for more.

Nofret turned to confront Ahmose, gesturing toward him with the finger that carried the ring from which her hypnotic power seemed to spiral out. “Kneel for Isis and obey the will of she who serves her.” Then, calling on the god of fertility, so often portrayed with a phallus of extraordinary proportions, she said, “You will show how you compare to Min.”