The Fellahin of Upper Egypt:
A Review

May 21, 2006

In my blog for May 14 I mention my curiosity about life in all these tiny villages in Upper Egypt. On Friday I had yet another occasion to think about this topic as we made the same 10 hour train ride.. this time returning to Cairo. Again the palm trees and brick houses and canals endlessly trolled past the windows. This time I spent a fair amount of time reading an anthropological study by Winifred S. Blackman.. originally published in 1927 and entitled The Fellahin of Upper Egypt. "Fellahin" is the Egyptian word for peasant.. and the landscape between Luxor and Cairo is Upper Egypt (especially as Blackman includes the Fayum in her study). I hoped the book would illuminate what was directly outside my window.

Blackman's work even makes reference to my window gazing:

The villages of Egypt, as seen from the railway-carriage or from points of vantage in the cultivation, present a most picturesque appearance. They are generally surrounded with palm-groves, often very extensive, while palm-trees also grow actually among the houses, affording a welcome shelter from the heat. These palm-girt villages are dotted about all over the cultivation. [26]

That description could be matched by the omnipresent view:

I would venture, though, that the level of "picturesque" scenes has diminished as the towns and cities have exploded in size and garbage piles up along canals.

Her book is organized according to the divisions one might expect from an anthropological study. Its interest is clearly drawn to the structural makeup of life.. and this means special attention to the rituals and beliefs connected to life's stages. Chapter titles include: Personal Decoration and Ornament, Marriage and Divorce, Fertility Rites, Death and Funerary Ceremonies, Agriculture and Harvest Rites, etc.. I sometimes found that these large topics interfered with what was most delightful about Blackman's writing: her ability to narrate stories about daily life drawn directly from her extensive time in Upper Egypt. In fact as important as birth, death, fertility, and the harvest are, I wished for simply a sense of what a normal day in a village felt like.

Blackman hits her stride as she describes events that happened to her:

The first year that I lived in an Egyptian village I fell ill two or three times with fever. The villagers had never come into close contact before with any Englishwoman, and so every article of my dress was noticed and commented on, as well as my eyes, the colour of my cheeks, and so on. When riding through the village many kindly and complimentary remarks were made: "See, she has the eyes of a cat" —a great compliment, the minds of the villagers— "How beautiful is the colour of her cheeks!" etc. When I fell ill the second time my attendant, a most faithful and devoted man, was convinced that it was entirely due to some one having cast the evil eye upon me. He therefore harangued the villagers, and told them that they were, of course, quite right to admire me, and that all they said was true, but that in future such remarks were not to be made without one at least of the protecting phrases mentioned above [used to protect from the evil eye]. The consequence was that the next time I went out riding I was followed by a whole concourse of people, men, women, and children, all ejaculating as I passed, "Ma sha Allah, ma sha Allah; Salla 'a 'n-Nebi, salla 'a 'n-Nebi," as fast as they could speak. [220-1]

That delightful and simple story comes in the chapter on "Superstitions".. and obviously it deals with ways to avert the evil eye. The book is also filled with her own photographs.. which naturally is a soft spot for this amateur blogger, as she seems to have actively tried to document the life that was going on around her.

In her preface to the work Blackman almost seems to apologize for her personal tone:

When my work is more nearly complete my intention is to produce a large an strictly scientific volume on the beliefs and practices and the social and industrial life of the modern Egyptians. [9]

One wonders what this would mean.. and I suppose if I had a better feeling for the timeline of anthropological studies I could take a strong guess. I can't help but think that this "strictly scientific volume" would contain less in the way of personal stories and colorful anecdotes.. and I am against anything in any discipline that cuts down on anecdotes. In fact I wish Blackman would have gone further in this respect and really narrated the story of her time in Egypt.. letting us meet her informants and get a feel for the landscape.. and even what she ate.. all informed of course by systematic anthropological studies, which is the expertise (combined with her language skills) that will separate her account from that of a tourist.

For my current project, this book is surprisingly helpful. I can immediately see parallels between the peasants reverence for ruins from the ancient past and the descriptions collected by al-Maqrizi in his Khitat.

Great efficacy is attached to the Pyramids, and childless women will repair to one of them and walk around it seven times, believing that this perambulation will assist them to become mothers. Women sometimes beg to be allowed to remove small portions of the decorated walls in ancient tomb-chapels to assure their bearing children. It appears that ancient things in Egypt are credited with great potency in this respect... [99]

And there are further interesting comments about Coptic priests with mysterious books that show treasures buried in the area. Several times the sources quoted by al-Maqrizi make reference to Coptic books and the stories they contain about the pyramids. From the stories collected by Blackman it is clear that the goal should not be to theorize about the source of these details in ancient sources.. but to rather think more about popular local stories that have been elevated into written historical texts.