Daily and princely life was equally resplendent with lotuses, both white and blue. The garden pond of the granary scribe Nebamun supported fish and geese as well as floating lotuses, while King Thutmose III included double- and triple-flowering Nymphaea among the botanical curiosities of his famous ‘Botanical Garden’ at Karnak, a carved relief created in the fifteenth century BCE that celebrated the exotic plants and animals brought back from his campaigns in Syria and Palestine. Thutmose’s vizier Rekhmire placed a lotus pool at the heart of his orchard; and at Deir el-Medina on the Nile’s west bank at Luxor, the sculptor Ipuy filled the water tank beside his shrine with white and blue lotuses, shown flowering together in the morning before the white flowers closed for the day, beside clumps of papyrus and shade-giving fruit trees. Lotus buds similarly adorn the capitals to the shrine’s entrance columns, an early example of flowers turned into stone.
Lotus flowers were also an essential feature of Egyptian entertaining. Servants washed the feet and hands of each arriving guest, anointing their heads with oil and giving each one a lotus flower to hold and enjoy, as well as offering them lotus necklaces and garlands, or a single lotus flower for the head. Supplies were constantly replenished from the garden, and fresh flowers kept in jars of water until required.
Such carefully recorded details come from tomb paintings; sometimes the lotuses are blue, suggesting morning entertainments, and sometimes white. Although the night-flowering white lotus was generally used to decorate drinking vessels and the day-flowering blue lotus preferred for ritualistic use, the distinction was not absolute. In tomb paintings of Prince Tehuti-hetep’s daughters at El-Bersheh, for instance, one daughter wears a crown of white lotuses and another a crown of blue. The long-stemmed lotus flower each daughter holds to her face is clearly the sharp-petalled blue lotus of ritual, leading some ethno-botanists to give it a shamanistic power akin to the water lily of the Maya, Nymphaea ampla. This seems unlikely, however, as no alkaloids have been identified in analyses performed on the blue lotus. But while not chemically defined as a hallucinogenic, the blue lotus contains flavonoids in concentrations similar to those found in Ginkgo biloba, a plant used in Chinese medicine for thousands of years to ward off old age, improve mental alertness and enhance sexual potency. Sniffed or added to wine, the blue lotus would undoubtedly have increased the pleasures of life for the Egyptian elite, even if its precise effect remains uncertain.
MIDWAY THROUGH THE first millennium BCE, the story of the lotus in Egypt becomes confused by the arrival of the true lotus of the East, Nelumbo nucifera, also known as the sacred lotus, and – to the ancient Greeks and Romans – as the Egyptian bean. Credit for its introduction usually goes to the Persians, who may have brought it with them when they conquered Egypt in 525 BCE. Nearly a century later, the Greek historian Herodotus described both sorts of ‘lotus’ growing in the marshes of Egypt. The first were the indigenous water lilies, ‘which grow in great abundance when the river is full and floods the neighbouring flats’. The people would dry the harvested plants in the sun, then pick out from each blossom a fruiting head resembling a poppy’s, which they would grind and bake into loaves. The roots were also edible, according to Herodotus, round and sweet-tasting, ‘about as big as an apple’. He then sketched a second sort of lotus found in the Nile: ‘This resembles a rose, and its fruit is formed on a separate stalk from that which bears the blossom, and has very much the look of a wasps’ comb. The fruit contains a number of seeds, about the size of an olive-stone, which are good to eat either fresh or dried.’
Herodotus could not have seen the sacred lotus for himself, as the fruit develops from the flower, not alongside it. But Alexander the Great would certainly have encountered it on his conquest of Egypt when he founded his great city of Alexandria in the fourth century BCE. It made such a strong impression on him that after he had continued his victorious journey eastwards across Syria, Mesopotamia and the great Persian Empire, up the Hindu Kush and into the Indus Valley of the Punjab, the presence of crocodiles in the River Jelum and of ‘Egyptian beans’ in the River Chenab disoriented him completely. According to Strabo, the great geographer of the ancient world, ‘he thought he had discovered the sources of the Nile, and was about to equip a fleet with the intention of sailing by this river to Egypt; but he found out shortly afterwards that his design could not be accomplished, “for in midway were vast rivers, fearful waters, and first the ocean”.’
4. The curious seed-head of water lilies (Nymphaea) and the eastern lotus (Nelumbo nucifera), from Joseph Gaertner, De fructibus et seminibus plantarum (Stuttgart, 1788).
Theophrastus, father of botany to the ancient Greeks and inheritor of the mantle of Alexander’s tutor Aristotle, made no such mistake in his meticulous accounts of both sorts of lotus, which he included in the ancient world’s oldest surviving treatise on plants. Taking the Indian lotus first, he followed Herodotus in calling it the Egyptian bean and located it primarily in the marshes and lakes of Lower Egypt. His descriptions show the botanist at work. ‘Thick as a man’s finger’, he recorded, the longest stalks were four cubits in length (roughly two metres) and resembled a pliant reed without joints; each contained distinct tubes ‘like a honey-comb’, holding aloft the fruiting head ‘like a round wasps’ nest’, with up to thirty ‘beans’ protruding from individual cells. The flower was twice as large as a poppy’s ‘and the colour is like a rose, of a deep shade; the “head” is above the water. Large leaves grow at the side of each plant, equal in size to a Thessalian hat.’
Clearly established by this time as an economic staple, the Indian lotus was harvested for its roots, which the people of the marshes ate raw, boiled and roasted. While it grew mostly of its own accord, it was also sown in prepared bean fields, ‘and if the plant once takes hold it is permanent. For the root is strong and not unlike that of reeds, except that it is prickly on the surface. Wherefore the crocodile avoids it, lest it may strike his eye on it, since he has not sharp sight.’ Theophrastus reported that this lotus grew also in Syria and parts of Cilicia (the coastal stretch of south-eastern Turkey), where its fruit was unable to ripen, and also in a small lake in central Macedonia, where it ripened to perfection.
Theophrastus then went on to describe the Nile water lily, which he called ‘lotos’ and which he located primarily in the Nile flood plains of Lower Egypt. Its stalk and leaves he likened to those of the Egyptian bean, although smaller and slimmer, but his description of the flowers is a curious amalgam of white and blue lotuses, as if his informants had ascribed the day-blooming habits of Nymphaea caerulea to the white flowers of N. lotus:
The flower is white, resembling in the narrowness of its petals those of the lily, but there are many petals growing close one upon another. When the sun sets, these close and cover up the “head,” but with sunrise they open and appear above the water. This the plant does until the “head” is matured and the flowers have fallen off . . . In the Euphrates they say that the “head” and the flowers sink and go under water in the evening till midnight, and sink to a considerable depth; for one can not even reach them by plunging one’s hand in; and that after this, when dawn comes round, they rise and go on rising towards day-break, being visible above the water when the sun appears; and that then the plant opens its flower, and, after it is open, it still rises; and that it is a considerable part which projects above the water.
Despite linking the flower’s habits to the sun, Theophrastus stops short of drawing any religious or mythical parallels, concentrating instead on the water lily’s contribution to the Egyptian diet. After harvesting, he explained, the heads were left to decay in heaps by the water, the fruit removed and dried, then pounded to make a kind of bread. The round roots called ‘korsion’ were also edible – either raw or (better) boiled or roasted, when the white insides turned the colour of egg yolk and were ‘sweet to taste’.
Rome’s renowned natural philosopher Pliny the Elder gets his facts even more muddled when compiling his great encycloped
ia of Natural History in the first century CE, as if he had made notes from Theophrastus and was then unable to recall which lotus he was actually de scribing. To his description of a marsh-dwelling lotus he added the ‘singular fact’ – from hearsay – that ‘when the sun sets, these poppy-heads shut and cover themselves in the leaves, and at sun-rise they open again; an alternation which continues until the fruit is perfectly ripe, and the flower, which is white, falls off’. Such sensitivity to the sun was even more marked in the Euphrates lotus, he claimed, describing it almost as a separate species; and in a later book dealing with leguminous plants, he transferred the crocodile-repelling prickles of Theophrastus’ Egyptian bean from the roots to the stalk.
Despite the confusion in the texts, it is clear what was happening on the ground. Of the two different sorts of ‘lotus’ growing in Egypt by Roman times, it was the eastern import, Nelumbo nucifera, that had gained the ascendancy and travelled northwards across the Mediterranean, literally into gardens as well as metaphorically as a signifier of Egyptian exotica. The Roman garden writer Columella, who was roughly a contemporary of Pliny, recommended that farmers should plant thickets of Egyptian bean in the middle of their duck ponds – not as an ornament, but rather to shade the ducks. They should nonetheless keep the outer edges of their ponds plant-free so that on sunny days ‘the water fowl may vie with one another to see which swims the fastest’.
In two famous Roman mosaics portraying exotic scenes from the Nile – the Nile mosaic of Palestrina (ancient Praeneste) and the floor mosaic from the House of the Faun in Pompeii – the sacred lotus of the East has again usurped Egypt’s true native water lilies. In both mosaics, the lotus flowers, buds, seed-heads and leaves are faithfully and similarly reproduced, suggesting that they may have been executed by itinerant craftsmen from the same workshop, who surely saw the original plants for themselves. The Palestrina mosaic almost certainly came first, created between 120 and 110 BCE for an underground grotto-nymphaeum. Lotuses are especially evident in the party scenes taking place in a lattice-work pergola curved like a vault and overgrown with vines. Beyond the pergola, two large crocodiles and a hippopotamus lurk among the reeds.
No people appear in the floor mosaic of a Nile scene created c.90 BCE at Pompeii’s luxurious House of the Faun, but there is abundant wildlife: a crocodile, a snake, a hippopotamus, a sharp-nosed mongoose, plus assorted ducks and small birds. The sacred lotus is beautifully portrayed in all stages of flowering and fruiting and a fat frog sits on two water-lily leaves, suggesting that Egypt’s native ‘lotus’ was not entirely absent. The smooth-edged leaves indicate that this was the blue rather than the white water lily, but the lack of a flower makes identification uncertain.
UNTIL A RESURGENCE of interest in Egypt’s ancient civilization, encouraged by Napoleon Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century, the water-lily lotuses of the Nile slipped quietly out of view. Native to northern and tropical Africa and unable to survive outdoors in more northerly climates, they were not intrinsically different from European water lilies. It is only natural, therefore, that Nelumbo nucifera proved the hardier survivor in the European imagination, as travellers’ tales and herbarium specimens began to inflame the curiosity of early plantsmen and scholars such as Carolus Clusius, the great sixteenth-century Flemish botanist and one-time gardener to the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian II.
In Britain, the strange fruits of the true pink lotus from the East caught the eye of royal apothecary John Parkinson in his herbal of 1640, Theatrum Botanicum, dedicated to King Charles I. After first dismissing the presentation of the ‘Egyptian bean’ by the Italian botanist Matthiolus as ‘moulded from his owne imagination’, Parkinson recounted Clusius’s careful description in his ‘booke of exotickes or strange things’. The fruit, presumably dried, had been brought to Amsterdam by Dutch mariners; its origin was unknown although it was later established to have come from the island of Java in the East Indies. Clearly conversant with earlier descriptions by Theophrastus and Herodotus, Clusius had nonetheless observed the fruit for himself, commenting that it resembled ‘a very large Poppy head, cut off at the toppe: and consisted of a rough or wrinckled skinny substance; of a brownish colour somewhat light, whose circumference at the top was nine inches, and growing lesser and lesser by degrees, unto the stalkes’. The fruit had twenty-four holes or cells, added Parkinson, ‘placed in a certaine order, like unto the combe of waspes’, each containing one nut, which he compared to an acorn.
Parkinson then included eyewitness accounts: the first from two good friends, the Huguenot Dr Daniel Heringhooke and Dr William Parkins, who had seen a book of Javanese plants sent over to Holland from the Dutch factory there by ‘a certain Dr Justus Heurnius, physician and divine’. The book was kept under glass at Leiden’s University Library, open at the lotus page, where you could read that it grew in ‘Moorish places, and by river banckes: the leaves are wondrous great and like unto those of the Water Lilly, and so is the flower also of a very strong smell like unto the oyl of Aneseedes’. Parkinson’s second eyewitness account came from Purchas his Pilgrimes, a collection of travel stories put together by the English traveller Samuel Purchas, in a report by the English merchant Mr William Finch or Fincham, who had seen lotuses growing in a great lake to the north-west of Fetipore (Fatehpur Sikri), near Agra in northern India.
Parkinson reported that the pink lotus had not been seen growing in Egypt ‘for many ages past’, although he thought optimistically that industrious and knowledgeable men might still find it growing there. By the time Napoleon Bonaparte mounted his Egyptian campaign in 1798, trailing a second army of scientists, scholars and artists (including Henri-Joseph Redouté, younger brother of the more famous flower painter, Pierre-Joseph), the sacred lotus had quite disappeared, its tender roots eventually unable to withstand the Nile’s cycles of drought and flooding. At least Napoleon’s scientists correctly identified its homeland as Asia, not Africa, and were able to examine the flowers and leaves of specimens brought back from the East Indies by the French naturalist Jacques-Julien Labillardière and a drawing executed in China that included the roots.
Napoleon’s scientists found the indigenous water-lily lotuses still flourishing in the rivers, ditches and canals of Lower Egypt, and their cooked roots on sale in the markets of Damietta. The blue water lily in fact received its Latin name of Nymphaea caerulea only in 1803 from a member of Napoleon’s expedition, the French naturalist M. J. C. L. Savigny; it makes a fine appearance in Pierre-Joseph Redouté’s Choix des Plus Belles Fleurs, a work of images without supporting text, which he undertook late in life when he was short of funds.
Both Nelumbo and Nymphaea lotuses play starring roles in Robert John Thornton’s grandiose Temple of Flora, whose pompous, sugary text gleefully recounts that while Napoleon listened to Savigny expounding on sacred water lilies, the British fleet was annihilating the French at the Battle of the Nile. As stage-managed by Thornton himself, the Temple of Flora’s illustration of the eastern lotus (by artist Peter Henderson) makes botanical nonsense, marrying its pink flower to the yellow of a North American variety and laying claim to varieties in all three primary colours: ‘an azure blue, or blushing red, or pale yellow . . . and also of a dazzling white, all which majestically (different from our humble aquatics), rise with their foliage above the surface of the flood, and present their luxuriant leaves to the vaulted heavens’. He was a little more accurate with the blue lotus, which he planted in the Nile against a backdrop of Aboukir, where the Battle of the Nile was waged, but here, too, he was using flowers to recast history in a patriotic glow. For all his posturing ambition, the enterprise was a financial disaster, which even a botanical lottery of the original artworks could not salvage, and he was ‘ever afterwards a beggared man’.
5. Brahama, the Hindu god of creation, emerges from a lotus flower emanating from the navel of Vishnu, the Vedic Supreme Being; massaging Vishnu’s legs and feet is his consort Lakshmi.
THE T
RUE STORY of the sacred lotus, Nelumbo nucifera, resides not in the overheated brains of men like Robert John Thornton but far away to the east, in the Indus Valley of the Punjab, which Alexander the Great mistakenly yet prophetically linked to ancient Egypt. Now considered a native of much of eastern and south-eastern Asia, northern Australia and the Volga River delta at the Caspian Sea,2 the genus Nelumbo is thought to have originated in India, and in China where its cultivation has a long history. Reports suggest that it was widely grown along China’s two longest rivers, the Chang Jiang and the Huanghe, before 7000 BCE, and Neolithic sites in China have yielded carbonized lotus seeds that are 5,000 years old.
But the flower’s mythological power belongs originally to India, where it developed in ways strikingly similar to the blue Nile lotus of ancient Egypt. This eastern lotus, too, was present at the very beginning of creation in the ancient canonical texts of Hinduism, the Veda, which some scholars date back as far as 1400 BCE. One set of texts, the Taittiriya Brahmana, links the lotus to Brahma, part of the trinity of Hindu gods concerned with creation (Brahma), preservation (Vishnu) and destruction (Shiva). Desiring to bring forth the universe from the cosmic waters, Brahma willed a lotus leaf to emerge from the ocean, which unfurled a thousand-petalled lotus of pure gold, radiant as the sun, and a portal to the very nucleus of the universe. In some versions of the creation story, the lotus opened to reveal Brahma himself; in others, Brahma is born from a lotus that emerges from the navel of Vishnu.
Seven Flowers Page 2
