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picture of a papyrus clump,These marshes were found mostly in the delta, to such an extent that the papyrus plant served as the symbol for this part of Egypt. The teeming wildlife and the impenetrability of the tall dense vegetation gave a sense of spiritual presence to the delta marshes. Egyptians imagined a mythical haven, Chemnis, to exist there, supposedly located near the city of Buto in the northwestern delta. The myth concerned the murderous quarrel within the family of the god Osiris, between his son Horus and his rival Seth, over the inheritance of the kingship of Egypt. On Chemnis the infant Horus was suckled and protected from Seth by a goddess—who was sometimes named Isis and sometimes Hathor—in the form of a cow. The Greek traveler Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BC, says that he saw Chemnis in a lake beside the temple at Buto. He was told that it was a “floating island,” but adds skeptically, “I never saw it move, and it did not actually look as if it were floating,” perhaps because it bore a large temple and numerous date-palms and other trees.
    The Egyptians believed that the roots of their culture were to be found within the marshlands. The Egyptian architectural style might be said to reflect materials of marshland origins, although whether this is historically true or not is now hard for us to tell. Some carved pictures from the early dynasties show houses, shrines, and perhaps palaces built from reeds, even though excavations show that the common building material by this time was mud-brick. Later, Egyptians used stone building materials but would carve designs in the stone to resemble the reed buildings of their mythical home in the marshlands. The whole papyrus plant, either in bud or with its flowering spray stylized into a bell-like profile, provided the design for an architectural column in which the shaft retained the three slightly convex faces of the natural stem.
    The defining moment in the history of Egyptian architecture came with the creation of Egypt’s first monumental building in stone, the stepped pyramid of King Djoser of the 3rd Dynasty (c. 2660 BC), which was surrounded by a complex of shrines and palaces. The surfaces of many of the buildings were carved to represent walls made of reeds, their corners protected by projecting rounded bundles, and their roofs supported (unrealistically) by a single reed stem. The designs had bold yet graceful outlines and harmonious proportions. In later centuries the Egyptians, although never saying so explicitly, identified the architect as Imhetep, a leading figure at Djoser’s court. He was eventually deified as a god of wisdom and healing.

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    The Egyptians were attracted to paired concepts and designs expressing harmony through balanced equivalents. Around the geographic division of Upper and Lower Egypt, they developed a range of paired symbols; in one the papyrus (standing for Lower Egypt) was matched either with a different kind of tall reedy plant or with the lotus (standing for Upper Egypt). Whether this reflected the natural distribution of these plants we have no way of knowing, for both papyrus and lotus long ago ceased to exist as common elements of Egypt’s natural flora.
    Beyond the rather artificial association with Upper Egypt, the lotus had a religious significance as a symbol of rebirth. Of the two plant varieties, the blue lotus ( Nymphaea cerulea, as distinct from the white lotus, Nymphaea albicans ) opens its flowers shortly after dawn and closes them later in the morning. This natural cycle was seen as a symbol of sunrise and of rebirth after death, two processes of transformation that the Egyptians were constantly and irresistibly drawn to. In a text found in Old Kingdom pyramids, the deceased king is said to shine “as the lotus at the nostril of Ra, when he appears daily on the horizon,” while a later text in the Book of the Dead contains a spell for “transforming oneself into a