Driving north out of the historic town of Orchha in the morning, I spotted a roadside tea shop and, near it, this barber who had hung a large mirror to a tree, facing the road. It was a common enough scene: Tens of thousands of independent, casual tea shops serve travelers on India’s highways and byways; outdoor barbers are less common, as they tend to work more often near marketplaces. As my wife and friends got tea, I stayed around chatting with the barber and his customer, showing them a few images on my camera, and then leaving them to their conversation and work. To make this image, I looked to the mirror for a secondary plane of activity, a kind of second narrative, to add depth and complexity. I took variations of this image from different positions, using different lens focal lengths as I tried to harmonize the primary and secondary scenes, looking for a moment when both the barber and the mirror offered elements that added to an overall narrative. For me, the mirror was not just a photographer’s challenge. It was also a way to suggest subtly that despite my many months spent all around India over the past two decades, both on assignment and visiting my in-laws’ family, I am forever looking from the outside in, working to distinguish one plane of experience and meaning from another.
]]>This year the story was translated for the 300th time since it was first published in French as Le Petit Prince in 1943. The North African languages it appears in include the darija (colloquial Arabic) dialects of Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria, as well as the Algerian Kabyle and Tuareg Tamasheq languages. In the last decade alone, there have been two different translations into Tamazight, the language of the Moroccan Amazighs, or Berbers, one in 2005 using the indigenous Tifinagh script and the other transliterated into Latin letters in 2007 with the title Amnukal Meiyn.
New adaptations for the stage and screen are still frequent, some 75 years after the book appeared. An animated movie version won a 2015 Cesár, the French equivalent of an Oscar.
Saint-Exupéry, known to his friends as “Saint Ex,” did not come upon those desert images solely from his own imagination. Between 1926 and 1929, he flew single-engine, two-seater planes on various North African legs of the 2,900-kilometer mail route linking Dakar, Senegal, to Toulouse in southern France. Based for years in small coastal posts along the way, he flew over and lived among many earthly manifestations of the images for which The Little Prince is famous. So impressed by what he saw, some 15 years later he recalled them when he sat down to write and illustrate his book.
Readers bring their own interpretations to The Little Prince. This is especially true for Moroccans, who see much of their homeland in the book. Not just that sand and those stars, but that landscape viewed through the lens of a downed aviator awestruck at the sight of an uncommonly dressed stranger.
“Don’t forget that its story was inspired or perhaps even narrated to the author by a nomad whom he had met during his desert voyages,” says Larbi Moumouch, a Moroccan cultural activist and one of its two translators into Tamazight. Although it is unlikely that a Tuareg literally dictated the little prince’s story to Saint Ex, many teachers and parents in Morocco read the book to children, just as they do in countries around the world. But Moumouch believes that Amazigh children are the ones who find themselves closest to home in its pages.
“Yes, the story itself may be universal, but one thing is sure: We Amazigh feel closest to its plot,” says the translator, noting that he and his people have heard such tales in their own homes, told by their own grandfathers. “The plot has many similarities to our Amazigh oral tales. And the word I used to translate ‘little prince’—amnukal—has an exact meaning that corresponds to a tribal chieftain.”
As The Little Prince’s aviator-narrator, a stand-in for Saint Ex himself, writes of his friend’s many questions upon their first meeting: “The first time he saw my plane, he asked, ‘Did you come in that thing? How? Did you fall from the sky?’ ‘Yes,’ I said modestly. ‘How funny,’ he answered. ‘You couldn’t have come from very far then.’” For the planet-hopping prince, just as for the Moors, a broken-down plane was as unimpressive a means of transport as the slowest camel.
It is a fennec fox, not a camel, that Moumouch points to as the quintessential Amazigh symbol of the desert. He notes that the kind of circular, paradoxical conversation that the fox has with the prince—it complains that he hunts chickens while men hunt him, and says that one can see only with the heart, not with the eyes—is typical of the Amazigh style of storytelling.
Lahbib Fouad, who translated The Little Prince using Tifinagh script, agrees. The fact that the little visitor speaks “sometimes with a snake, a fox, a flower, a star [and] a volcano … coincides perfectly with the mythology and the cosmogony of the Amazigh,” he said when the book was published as Ageldun Amezzan.
Ghita El Khayat, a widely published Moroccan ethnopsychiatrist and anthropologist, has her own perspective on the marocanité, or “Morocco-ness,” of The Little Prince. As the founder of Editions Aïni Bennaï, one of Morocco’s leading publishers, she has brought out both its modern standard (classical) Arabic and its Moroccan darija translations.
“I consider it the most important book to be translated into dialectical Arabic, a book of special note because such a story is a gift from mother to child and should be read in what I call the ‘milk language,’” El Khayat says. Yet it is telling that her financial backers wanted it to be published first in classical Arabic. “Even for those who say they believe in its value for children, many wanted it to be written in the language of formal discourse, as if delivered to and for adults,” she explains.
“In fact, I would have preferred it to be translated in my own mother tongue, the darija of Rabat,” she continues, “a language spoken only in the city of my birth, with as many Spanish as French loan words, rather than in a national darija that smooths away all of our particular vernaculars.”
A mail pilot’s forced desert landing could also be either smooth or rough, depending on—as the little prince often said—“On ne sait jamais,” (“one never knows”), until it is perhaps too late. Or in the words of Saint Ex, “The miracle of flight is that it merges man directly into the heart of mystery.” But to penetrate that mystery, one first had to survive the nosedive. As Saint Ex wrote in his memoirs:
"I fell for the desert the minute I saw it, and I saw it almost as soon as I got my pilot’s wings…. The nomads will defend until death their great warehouse of sand as if it were a treasure of gold dust. And we, my comrades and I, also loved the desert because it was there that we lived the best years of our lives."
The pilot’s first professional job was flying over the Sahara in a Breguet 14 biplane with an open cockpit and top speed of 130 kilometers per hour. Most of the time he was accompanied by a Tuareg assistant carrying a sword who would serve as bodyguard if they ever came down in the sparsely inhabited mountains.
France then was still extending its colonial power throughout North Africa and meeting the resistance of Berber and Tuareg leaders in Morocco, Niger and Algeria. News of these rebellions filtered into English in the 1924 novel Beau Geste about the French Foreign Legion’s desert warfare. In this historical setting, The Little Prince might be read as a pacific counter-narrative to such stories of battle and bloodshed.
For two years in the late 1920s, Saint Ex made the desert his home, posted variously at Port Etienne (now Nouadibou) in Mauritania, and Villa Cisneros (today’s Dakhla) and Cape Juby (now Tarfaya) in southern Morocco where he served as station chief for 18 months.
He returned to Morocco in the early 1930s, reconnoitering a direct air route to Timbuktu in Mali and flying the night legs of the Casablanca-Port Etienne line. The pencil sketches he made while waiting for dinner at the Petit Poucet restaurant after touching down in Casablanca still hang on its walls.
In the outstations, Saint Ex wrote that he felt “like a prisoner of the sands, going from stockade to stockade without ever once venturing into the zone of silence … this isolation provoked a strange feeling. I still know this feeling. The three years I spent in the desert taught it to me.”
Saint Ex’s first crash experience came in 1926 on his very first flight across the desert while a passenger en route to his posting in Río de Oro, west of Villa Cisneros. No one was hurt, and a support plane landed safely at the site to take aboard the pilot. Saint Ex was assigned to stay behind to guard the wreck until relief could arrive. “Only two nights previously I was eating dinner in a restaurant in Toulouse,” Saint Ex wrote in his memoirs.
"But what I felt here nonetheless was immense pride. For the first time since birth my life belonged to me…. The sand sea was captivating. No doubt it was full of mystery and danger. Its silence came not from emptiness but rather intrigue, from the imminence of adventure. Night approached. Something slowly being revealed bewitched me—the love of the Sahara, like love itself."
In the book, Saint Ex’s narrator agrees when the little prince says that silence is beautiful. “It’s true,” he says, “I’ve always loved the desert. One can sit atop a dune, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, but something still stirs and glitters in the void.” Among the many oddballs the prince meets in his intergalactic travels is a geographer, bound to his atlas-piled desk waiting for a real adventurer to tell him where to find the oceans and deserts. “One requires an explorer to furnish proofs,” the geographer says. “It is very rarely that an ocean empties itself of water.”
Saint Ex must have been remembering the times he walked across the bleached oyster shells strewn about what had once been the Sahara’s prehistoric inland sea.
Two days before New Year’s Eve in 1935, Saint Ex was attempting to set a new Paris-to-Saigon airspeed record when he crashed again, this time in Egypt’s Wadi Natrun. This experience likely impressed on him the idea of the prince as a sort of lifesaver. After four days, nearing death and fighting thirst-induced hallucinations, he and his copilot were rescued by a lone Bedouin.
“Tayara [airplane] boum boum!” was all he could say through parched lips. After taking a sip from a proffered goatskin but still delirious, he wrote a note for the Bedouin to take to the mine he had flown over just before crashing: “We ask that you come by car or boat as soon as possible.”
This was only the first of the day’s surreal moments. The rescue vehicle ran out of petrol not far from the Great Pyramid, where the Khufu solar ship would be found buried in sand 20 years later. When Saint Ex telephoned the French Embassy from the Mena House Hotel at Giza, the secretary warned the ambassador to discount the incoming call because it had been dialed from a bar after midnight. The Little Prince begins with a similar scene:
I had an accident with my plane in the Desert of Sahara six years ago. Something was broken in my engine … I had scarcely enough drinking water to last a week…. The first night, then, I went to sleep on the sand, a thousand miles from any human habitation. I was more isolated than a shipwrecked sailor on a raft in the middle of the ocean.
Saint Ex had been based near the Banc d’Arguin on the coast of Mauritania, and the nearby site of the famous shipwreck depicted in the Louvre’s painting “The Raft of the Medusa” by Théodore Géricault was certainly known to him. He would have dipped low over those very waters many times while flying the mail south to Dakar.
It was his third crash, while flying reconnaissance over the Mediterranean in July 1944, near the end of World War ii, that proved fatal. No cause was ever determined, but he perished in the same way he lived the best moments of his life—although he always said he preferred sand over sea. (Once after takeoff from a coastal airstrip, engine trouble forced him to fly dangerously low over the water. His passenger later reported that instead of looking at the control panel, Saint Ex had pulled out a sketchpad and was drawing the two of them as deep-sea divers.) At least, as he explained later, when you crash on sand you never run the risk of drowning. Any Tuareg of the desert, or even a little visitor from a waterless asteroid, would understand that perfectly well.
For more than a thousand years, performers, listeners and scholars have recognized tarab as one of the most important esthetics in Arab music.
It has no English equivalent, explains A.J. Racy, author of Making Music in the Arab World: The Culture and Artistry of Tarab. It is a term full of subtlety and layered meanings, both historical and regional. At its heart, tarab is about musical affect and relationship: a deep emotional response by a listener that leads to a feeling of connection between listener and performer. In this way, he says, tarab evokes “intense emotions, exaltation, a sense of yearning or absorption, feeling of timeless- ness, elation or rapturous delight.” In short, “ecstasy.”
Tarab appears to have come into use first in reference to early Arabic poetry recita- tion. After the seventh century ce, it came to be associated also with recitation of the Qur’an, which today endures as a highly popular virtuosic vocal art form. Music historian George Sawa notes more than 500 mentions of tarab in the Book of Songs, produced in Baghdad in the 11th century, including instances where listeners wept, laughed, danced and tore their clothing.
Far more recently, for decades during the mid-20th century across the Arab world, listeners would gather around radios on the first Thursday of each month to tune into live radio broadcasts of concerts by Um Kulthum, the famous Egyptian vocalist and mutriba—“one who elicits tarab.” Those lucky enough to be inside the Cairo concert hall often wept openly, shouted and begged her to repeat verses.
The tools of tarab are, of course, musical instruments, from the simplicity of the human voice and percussive hand clapping to hand drums, end-blown woodwinds and stringed instruments that are both plucked and bowed.
As Islam spread west and east, both instruments and musical ideas flowed along trade routes, and they were assimilated, adapted and often locally renamed. Even though the term “tarab” is used primarily in the Arab world, similar concepts are present from Morocco and Spain in the west to Malaysia in the east, and from Kazakhstan in the north to Somalia in the south. Notably these include haal in Persian music and duende in Spanish music.
Europe encountered Arab music through many routes, but perhaps most impor-tantly through the legacy of Ziryab, a ninth-century Baghdad émigré in al-An- dalus, now southern Spain. Arriving in Córdoba in 821 ce, he helped spark a flowering of music that today echoes in a Moroccan music style that some call Tarab Andalusi. Currently linguists dispute whether or not “tarab” is the root word for “troubadour.”
Beginning in the 1800s, Arab musicians assimilated Western instruments—primarily fretless, tonally versatile violins, violas, cellos and basses. It did not fundamentally affect the esthetic of tarab, and the best Arab and Arab-influenced musical performances, then as now, almost regardless of region or genre, remained nearly always highly inter- active events.
A resurgence of Arab music occurred in the early 20th century with independence. The advent of mass media and recording technology— including the flowering of now-classic Egyptian musical films—brought up the question, still argued, of whether or not a recording can elicit genuine tarab.
Today, as satellite and digital media allow the music from Arab and neighboring cultures to flow around the world at an unprecedented pace, tarab remains like a heartbeat, in the words of Syrian master musician Muhammad Qadri Dalal, “the connection between performers and audiences.”
To request a free 9”x12” wall calendar, email aramcoworld@aramcoservices.com, subject line “Calendar”. Be sure to include your full, correct postal mailing address. Calendars are available while our supply lasts. Requests from the USA will be sent by first class mail; all other requests will be sent by airmail. Multiple copy requests (i.e., for a group of classrooms, etc.): Tell us how you plan to use them, and we will be pleased to send them to you, as long as our supply holds out.
When Cosmopolitan uk erroneously asserted in September last year that the us National Aeronautics and Space Administration (nasa) had updated the Western zodiac to correct for 3,000 years of shifts in star positions, astrology fans went pretty much supernova on social media. According to the report, nasa shifted the dates of the 12 signs forward by almost a month and inserted the ancient, nearly forgotten 13th sign of the serpent handler Ophiuchus in between Scorpius and Sagittarius. In reality, nasa used observation and calculation to account for the nearly infinitesimal annual shifting of our planet’s axis known technically as the precession of the equinoxes. The changes meant that for an estimated four out of five people, the sign toward which the sun was pointing at their birth was not the one they thought; rather, it was the previous one—except for Sagittarians, many of whom became Ophiucans. (This writer is now an ex-Pisces Aquarian.) Since popular astrology assigns personality traits to those born under each sign, and it predicts their future in daily, weekly and monthly horoscopes, nasa’s science felt like cosmic chaos.
In a statement on its Tumblr website, nasa asserted that it was not trying to change the popular zodiac. Rather it was showing what it might look like if science and mathematics were rigorously applied. This ignited further debate about the differences between astronomy based on observable phenomena and astrology based on a mixture of observation and cultural mythology. As clear as this difference might seem, learning that one’s birth sign might be different was (and remains) unsettling to many people. The science may argue it is irrelevant, but zodiac signs have shaped the thinking and even identities of people in many lands for thousands of years.
Here are 12 reasons why the zodiac’s unique mix of myth and facts really does matter.
What nasa failed to clarify was the extent to which the 12-sign zodiac is an essential part of the historical development of the science of astronomy. Western astronomers used the zodiac to measure celestial positions up until the Renaissance, when scientists adopted the equatorial coordinate system, which measures positions of celestial bodies by right ascension and declination and moving beyond the zodiac’s ecliptic-based celestial longitude and celestial latitude.
To explain: The ecliptic is the imagined track across the sky that traces the sun’s apparent course through the heavens during the year. Of course, that’s just how it seems from an earthly perspective. Here is what happens, in the words of EarthSky.org, website of the award-winning radio series EarthSky:
As the Earth orbits the sun, the sun appears to pass in front of different constellations. Much like the moon appears in a slightly different place in the sky each night, the location of the sun relative to distant background stars drifts in an easterly direction from day to day. It’s not that the sun is actually moving. The motion is entirely an illusion caused by the Earth’s own motion around our star.
Sky gazers noticed this relationship between the sun and the stars from the most ancient times, and many world cultures developed zodiacs based on constellations, often with pictures of people and animals as human minds seem to instinctively “connect the dots” to tease out meaning in the patterns of the stars. The constellations of the zodiac thus are some of the earliest used markers for sailors and travelers. Even today both amateur and some professional sky-watchers rely on these constellations and others to help locate planets, comets and other celestial events.
The imagery of the zodiac still appears frequently in popular astronomy and science education materials, such as the “Star Finder,” a foldup paper star locator on the nasa website that prominently features a circle of zodiac symbols.
That chart includes Ophiuchus, which astronomers have long known crosses the ecliptic just like the other 12 zodiac constellations. But Ophiuchus, as a sign, was dropped all the way back in Babylonian times because, scholars say, it is the most “squeezed” of the zodiacal constellations, and to better align the zodiac with the 12-month Babylonian solar calendar, it was the easiest constellation to drop.
The 12-sign zodiac is a significant cultural artifact. Each sign represents a 30-degree swath of the heavens. Because these signs are visual images, often with mythological stories underlying them, painters, engravers and other artists over the centuries have rendered them in art.
Much of the art surrounding the Western zodiac is based on another artifact of culture: Classical Greek mythology. For example, the bull Taurus is associated with the tale of mythical hero Theseus, king of Athens, and his slaying of the dreaded half-man, half-bull Minotaur. The twins Gemini recall the story of brothers Castor and Pollux, who joined Jason and the Argonauts in their quest for the Golden Fleece. The only inanimate object in the zodiac, the golden scales of Libra, is linked to the Greek underworld’s lesser goddess of justice, Dike, and it dominates the sky during the autumn equinox, when day and night are of equal length—in balance.
The development of the Greek zodiac shows us how early astronomy and astrology were joined at the hip. Many early astronomers were also astrologers—and none proved as influential as the second-century Greek polymath Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria. Known also for his mathematical and astronomical opus the Almagest (or Syntaxis Mathematica), which inspired many early Arab and European scientists, his most widely read book is his astrological work, the Tetrabiblos (Four Books). In fact, Ptolemy’s astrological writings were so highly regarded that they were taught in European universities well into the 17th century.
The Tetrabiblos laid the foundation for the Western astrological tradition. Ptolemy rationalized the planets, houses and signs of the Hellenistic zodiac and defined their functions in a way that has changed little to the present day.
The Greek zodiac signs can be traced back to the Sumerians, who built the world’s first known civilization between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in present-day Iraq. From the Sumerians, the evolving idea of a zodiac passed to the Akkadians, and then on to the Assyrians and, a bit later, to the Babylonians—all before it came to the Greeks. The zodiac achieved the form we know today under the Babylonians in the first millennium bce, and its origins in the region, explains Lorenzo Verderame, Assyriologist at Sapienza Università di Roma, can be traced back to the third millennium bce.
How did the Sumerians develop their zodiac signs? Did they invent them or did they, too, borrow them from still older sources? The answer is probably a bit of both. Certain examples of proto-zodiacal artwork, like the Bull and the Lion, are believed by some scholars to have come from Elam, a rival civilization to the east. Others propose that the zodiac, or at least part of it, had its origins in the early astronomy of Armenia, northwest of Mesopotamia, around 3000 bce. Ruins at the northwestern Armenian town of Metsamor, the site of a trading civilization, include three observatory platforms with engravings that suggest “zodiacal creatures,” some of which may have influenced the Babylonians.
We do know that about 1000 bce, Mesopotamian astronomers produced a star catalogue known as MUL.APIN (The Plough), named for its opening words. Essentially an astronomical textbook, it contains all 12 constellations of the Babylonian zodiac, along with many others. The oldest known copy of this compilation, inscribed in cuneiform on a pair of baked mud tablets, dates to the seventh century bce.
Other experts are convinced that some zodiac figures are even older than Elam or Metsamor. Recent studies of the Paleolithic cave paintings of bulls, horses and other animals at Lascaux, France, suggest the backgrounds of certain paintings may incorporate prehistoric star charts. If so, this puts the origin of some zodiac figures, especially Taurus, back some 10,000 to as much as 40,000 years.
The Babylonian zodiac passed to the Greek-speaking world through the two Greek successor states of the empire built by Alexander the Great: the Seleucid empire of Mesopotamia and the Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt, based in Alexandria.
This was the “Hellenistic” period, from 323 to 31 bce, and it gives us the first surviving pictures of the Mesopotamian constellations: the Seleucid Zodiac from Mesopotamia itself and the Dendera Zodiac from Egypt. These two zodiacs, both part of a pictographic tradition, show the 12 zodiac figures plus four other animals in the zodiac style: crow, serpent, eagle and southern fish.
The Seleucid Zodiac was a set of 12 clay tablets displaying the zodiacal signs for astrological use. Examples of three of the tablets survive from the last few centuries bce: Taurus with the Pleiades, Leo with Corvus the Crow standing on Hydra the Water Snake, and Virgo with her ear of corn.
The Zodiac of Dendera, from Egypt in the first century bce, is “the only complete map that we have of an ancient sky,” says John H. Rogers of the British Astronomical Association. Preserved for us in a bas-relief on the ceiling of the Hathor Temple at Dendera, Egypt, this zodiac shows the classical zodiac surrounded by popular Egyptian constellations for the rest of the sky. Some of the zodiac figures have Greco-Roman names, and others have Egyptian names. The shapes of the figures, although produced during Egypt’s Ptolemaic era that almost universally favored Greco-Roman styles, are actually almost identical to the Mesopotamian Seleucid Zodiac and also to various Babylonian boundary-stone pictographs from the second millennium bce. Thus the Zodiac of Dendera, despite its Egyptian venue, “seems to be a complete copy of the Mesopotamian zodiac,” Rogers says.
Outside the Greek sphere, zodiac calendars were rather commonplace in the Near East from the third century bce to the second century of our era, particularly among Nabataean Arabs and Aramaic-speaking peoples, including Assyrians and Hebrews.
In early Islamic history, the constellations of the Arab zodiac bore names translated from Greek or Aramaic, but Ahmed al-Jallad, a professor at Leiden University, explains that the ancient Arabian zodiac has roots extending back to Babylonia. Most knowledge of the Babylonian tradition, however, appears to have been lost by the time of the Classical Islamic period in the Middle Ages. For example, the 10th-century astronomer al-Sufi believed the pre-Islamic Arabs were entirely unaware of the zodiac.
Al-Jallad, however, studied the notoriously difficult Safaitic inscriptions—Bedouin graffiti carved on rocks in the basalt deserts of Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia—and identified all 12 zodiacal constellations, all traceable back to Babylonia. Al-Jallad showed that early Arabs did know about the zodiac, and that they had closer cultural ties with the civilizations of the Fertile Crescent than previously assumed. And the inscriptions he found were similar to those on tens of thousands of rocks amid the lava flows of present-day southern Syria, northeastern Jordan and adjoining areas of northern Saudi Arabia.
The mazzaloth (“constellations”), or Hebrew zodiac, took its form between the Hellenistic and Islamic eras, and it shows a mix of influences, primarily from the Greek and Mesopotamian traditions. Its 12 representations match up with the Babylonian/Greek version in symbolism, starting point and sequence. Archeologist Rachel Hachlili, who has studied zodiac mosaics found on the floors of synagogues built in the fourth to sixth centuries, says these zodiacs, with their symbolic figures, served the local community as popular calendars that helped people remember the timing of seasonal events and rituals.
Dating to 1500 bce or even earlier, the Hindu zodiac, too, shows Greek influences, but according to American historian of science David Pingree and others, some aspects are indigenous. The Vedas, the scriptures of Hinduism and India’s oldest literature, refer to the science Jyotisha, which involves tracking and predicting the movements of celestial bodies for time keeping.
Jyotisha came to encompass Hindu astrology as well, which developed through contact with Greek learning, centuries after Alexander the Great’s military campaign in northwestern India in the fourth century bce. Science historian Michio Yano describes India’s absorption of the Greek system from the second to fifth centuries of our era as “the Sanskritization of Greek astrology.” India absorbed Greek astronomical science as well, including some elements that predated even Ptolemy.
Though written and vocalized in Sanskrit, they represent pictorial images associated with the Greek zodiac. For example, dhanu (“bow”) corresponds to Sagittarius the Archer, and kumbha (“water pitcher”) corresponds to Aquarius the Water Bearer. Where they differ most profoundly, however, is in their fundamental celestial referents: The Greek system uses the tropical zodiac, in which the motion of planets is measured against the position of the Sun on the spring equinox; the Hindu system, much like the Babylonian, uses the more stable sidereal zodiac, in which the stars are regarded as a fixed background against which the motion of planets is measured. The sidereal system thus adjusts for the slight wobble of the Earth’s axis, and its measurements are more accurate over centuries.
It was in about the second century that the Hindu sidereal zodiac began diverging from the Greek tropical zodiac, at the time India was absorbing Greek astronomical and astrological knowledge. Today Hindu astrology (sometimes called Vedic astrology) is alive and well, and advanced degrees in the discipline are still offered by some Indian universities.
Sheng xiao (“birth likeness”) is the name of the Chinese zodiac, popular also in Japan, Korea and Vietnam. It dates to the fourth century bce and shows a few similarities to the Greek and Babylonian zodiacs. This has led scholars to explore the possibility of cultural transmission from Babylonia to China. (Because the Babylonian system is much older than the Chinese, the experts don’t believe the transmission was the other way around, from China to Babylonia.) Similarities include the use of 12 signs represented by animals. (Only the Dragon is mythical; the rest are real.)
At the same time, China’s zodiac is unique because it covers 12 years rather than 12 months. The zodiac covers a 12-year span because of the special place that the planet Jupiter held among early Chinese astronomers, who called Jupiter the “Year Star” (“Sui-xing”). In about 2000 bce, it was Chinese astronomers who first confirmed that Jupiter takes 12 Earth years, or one “Jupiter Year,” to orbit the Sun. By the fourth century bce, the Chinese divided the sky into 12 zodiacal regions, with Jupiter passing through one region each year.
In Chinese astrology, a zodiac sign is based on a lunar calendar and is determined by the year of birth. For example, someone born between February 7, 2008, and January 25, 2009, was born in the Year of the Rat. According to this system, the year begins under the influence of a zodiac sign, and depending on the characteristics of that sign, the fate written in the stars is the same for all born during that whole year. (Popular reputations of rats notwithstanding, people born under the Rat are said to be charming, intelligent, outgoing and hardworking.)
An ideal time for knowledge-sharing on zodiacs and similar topics between Mesopotamia and China took place during the centuries of the Silk Roads, the intercontinental trade network across Central Asia that came into its own in the final decades of the second century bce. From the Chinese side, the Silk Road was encouraged by Emperor Wu, who ruled the Western Han Dynasty. Wu dispatched a special envoy, Zhang Qian, to the countries to the west. Zhang visited the kingdoms of Fergana, Sogdiana and Bactria (formerly the post-Alexandrian Greco-Bactrian Kingdom) and gathered information about the Indus River Valley of North India and the Parthian Empire. His reports encouraged China to continue its outreach in the West. Eventually the Silk Road stretched all the way to Rome, enabling Romans to buy silks and spices from China in exchange for Roman glass beads and other wares.
Two important examples of zodiacs dating from the seventh to the 13th centuries appear in northwestern China: the Xuanhua Tombs of Hebei Province and the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang in Gansu Province. Diana Y. Chou, associate curator of East Asian Art at the San Diego Museum of Art, studied them.
In mural paintings on the ceilings of the Xuanhua Tombs are Babylonian/Greek zodiacs that date to the 12th century. The zodiac symbols on these “celestial ceilings” are accompanied by traditional Chinese star representations, and according to Chou, they constitute “perhaps the earliest known complete zodiac in Chinese art.”
The Mogao Caves, not far from a Silk Road outpost near the Gobi Desert, were dug in the fourth century by Buddhist monks for the purpose of meditation. Created over the course of a millennium, the caves today number about 1,000, and many feature painted murals that are some of the finest of their kind in China.
In Cave 61, there appears a Buddha Tejaprabha (“Buddha of the Blazing Lights”) and, in the background, the Chinese 28 astrological stars together with Babylonian astrological signs.
Although images of the Babylonian zodiac came to China in the forms of diagrams, sketches, personal accessories, vessels and other items, and even considering Chinese astrologers were doubtless familiar with the Babylonian zodiac, scholars today believe that Chinese astrology was largely immune to outside influence. Yet the similarities are too intriguing to ignore. For example, both Western and Chinese zodiac signs are ruled by elements. The Western zodiac divides its signs according to the four classical Greek elements of fire, earth, air and water, and the Chinese zodiac divides is signs into five elements of fire, earth, water, wood and metal. There are also some similarities in the roles the zodiacs play in developing personal astrology charts.
Western scholars long asserted that these and other commonalities demonstrated Babylonian/Greek influence in Chinese astrology, but 21st-century scholars, led by David Pankenier, maintain Chinese astrology remained “essentially impervious to external influences.”
Coincidence or influence? That’s a subject for future scholars.
I have … a firm basis on which to assign a grammar and a dictionary for these inscriptions used on a large number of monuments and whose interpretation will shed so much light on the history of Egypt,” Champollion informed his astonished audience.
Among those seated was Champollion’s chief rival and former collaborator, English physician and polymath Thomas Young. Since parting company in 1815, Young and Champollion had engaged in a contentious race to unlock the tantalizing secrets of the hieroglyphs.
Yet the two linguists were competing in a race that had already been run by medieval Arab scholars and scientists. While Champollion’s discoveries were groundbreaking at the Académie, previous European scholars were familiar with a 10th-century Arabic work attributed to an alchemist and historian from what is now Iraq, Ibn Wahshiyya al-Nabati, titled Kitab Shauq al-Mustaham fi Ma‘irfat Rumuz al-Aqlam (Ancient Alphabets and Hieroglyphic Characters Explained). In it, he exhorted, “Learn then, O reader! The secrets, mysteries and treasures of the hieroglyphics, not to be found and not to be discovered anywhere else … now lo! These treasures are laid open for thy enjoyment.”
Egyptologist Okasha El-Daly of the Institute of Archaeology at University College London (ucl) points out that Joseph Hammer, an Austrian scholar who in 1806 translated Ibn Wahshiyya into English and published his work in London, mentioned in his introduction that French savants “were aware of the existence of Arabic manuscripts on the subject of decipherment.” Champollion’s own teacher, Baron Silvestre de Sacy, was a famed professor of Arabic who produced several Arabic grammars and was among the earliest French scholars to attempt to translate the hieroglyphs. While Ibn Wahshiyya’s work was familiar to de Sacy, who reprinted an edition in 1810, it is uncertain if its contents were known to his famous student. However, as El-Daly points out: “In his own letters to his brother, Champollion complained about the pain of having to learn Arabic so he must have thought it was of value in his research.”
Though pharaonic Egypt is one of history’s most enduringly popular periods among scholars, study of medieval Arabic texts concerning what we now call “Egyptology”—including the hieroglyphs—remains sparse. This attracted El-Daly’s curiosity.
“I read at a very young school age an encyclopedic work known as Khitat of the medieval Egyptian author al-Maqrizi, who died in 1440 ce, in which he displayed a great deal of interest and knowledge of ancient Egypt. Yet when I started my formal Egyptology studies at Cairo University in 1975, I didn’t see any reference to medieval Arabic sources,” El-Daly says, “and I began to make my own inquiries.” His pursuit of early Arabic texts on Egyptian history—in both public and private collections, over two decades and across several continents—culminated in his 2005 discourse, Egyptology: The Missing Millennium: Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings, published by ucl Press.
El-Daly’s research raises intriguing questions: Were 19th-century Western scholars indeed the first to unveil the “secrets” of the hieroglyphs, and to what extent were hieroglyphs already known to their medieval Arab counterparts?
The earliest hieroglyphs, dating to the end of the fourth millennium bce, appear on pottery and ivory plaques from tombs. The last known inscriptions date from 394 ce, at the Temple of Isis on the island of Philae in southern Egypt. “But the glory of hieroglyphs,” observed the late Michael Rice, author of Egypt’s Legacy: The Archetypes of Western Civilization: 3000 to 30 bce, evolved during the Old Kingdom (2686–2181 bce), achieving their highest level of development in the Middle Kingdom (2055–1650 bce). This was a monumental age when the walls of Egypt’s palaces, temples and tombs were awash in hieroglyphs rendered in the vibrant colors of the natural world: Nile blue, palm-frond green and the dusk-reddened sky of the western desert, where mummified pharaohs awaited their journeys into the afterlife.
“The beauty of the colouring of these intaglios no one can describe,” observed Florence Nightingale on her visit to the richly decorated tomb of Seti i in 1850. “How anyone who has time and liberty, and has once begun the study of hieroglyphics, can leave it til he has made out every symbol … I cannot conceive.”
Historians and philosophers of the Classical Era were among the first to take up the challenge, including first-century-bce historian Diodorus Siculus. According to Maurice Pope, author of The Story of Decipherment: From Egyptian Hieroglyphic to Linear B, Diodorus was among the first “to suggest the ideographic nature of the hieroglyphs.” Diodorus’s supposition that hieroglyphs do “not work by putting syllables together … but by drawing objects whose metaphorical meaning is impressed in the memory” was also suggested four centuries later by Egyptian-born Roman philosopher Plotinus, who marveled especially at the creativity and efficiency of Egyptian scribes:
[T]he wise men of Egypt … did not go through the whole business of letters, words, and sentences. Instead, in their sacred writings they drew signs, a separate sign for each idea, so as to express its whole meaning at once.
By this time, there were fewer and fewer native-born Egyptians who could read the hieroglyphs. As Egypt became increasingly Romanized after the fall of Cleopatra in the first century bce, hieroglyphs were gradually replaced by the Roman alphabet.
Still, what Plotinus and his classical predecessors did not grasp was that hieroglyphics are more than simple ideograms, that is, pictures representing concepts or ideas, much as a circle with a red bar across a smoldering cigarette indicates “No Smoking.” Rather, they build their meanings off three elements: logograms, representing words; phonograms, representing sounds or groups of sounds; and determinatives, marks or images placed at the end of a word to clarify its meaning.
The key to Champollion’s understanding was his knowledge of Coptic, which is the linguistic descendent of the spoken Egyptian of the pharaonic era. Coptic uses Greek letters together with a handful of colloquial, or demotic, characters. Associating spoken Coptic with the written hieroglyphic script gave him his missing link. This was how Champollion deciphered the now-famous Rosetta Stone, a fragment of a second-century-bce stele inscribed with a royal decree issued by Ptolemy v. The inscribed decree was written in each of hieroglyphic, Demotic (Coptic’s grammatical cousin) and Greek. Champollion’s breakthrough came by comparing the scripts and realizing that the hieroglyphs were phonetic.
Yet it was not long after Muslim expansion into Egypt in the seventh century that Muslim scholars began connecting many of these same dots. Like most first-time visitors, the Muslims were intrigued with what they saw before them.
“They wandered around, looking at the Pyramids, looking at the monuments, looking inside the beautifully decorated tombs, and if you are a scholarly person, you must have wondered, ‘How did they build them, what was their function?’” says El-Daly.
They also could not help but be intrigued by the hieroglyphs, and they speculated on their meanings. By inference, the first known Muslim scholar to pry into their mysteries was late eighth- and early ninth-century alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan. Although nothing of his work on hieroglyphs is known to survive, we know of his interest through other, later alchemists who refer to it. Among them was his contemporary, Egyptian-born Dhul-Nun al-Misri. Al-Misri directed those interested in learning more about ancient alphabets to Ibn Hayyan’s book Solution of Secrets and Key of Treasures.
El-Daly notes another early scholar, Ayub ibn Maslama, also had “knowledge of deciphering the letters of the hieroglyphs.” This we know, he explains, through the writings of the 12th-century geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, who had a deep interest in Egypt. Al-Idrisi recorded in his book Secrets of the Pyramids that during a visit in 831 to Egypt by Abbasid Caliph al-Mamun, Ibn Maslama “translated for Al-Ma’moun what was written on the Pyramids, the two obelisks of Heliopolis, a stela found in a village stable near Memphis, another stela from Memphis itself, [as well as writings found] in Bu Sir and Sammanud. Everything he translated is in a book called al-Tilasmat al-Kahiniya (Priestly Talismans).”
Sadly this last book, like Ibn Hayyan’s, is now lost. Yet texts attributed to al-Misri have survived, and they offer unique, insider perspectives on the composition of the hieroglyphs. A contemporary of Ibn Maslama, al-Misri spent most of his life living in or beside one of the temples at Akhmim in Upper Egypt, El-Daly points out. There, surrounded by hieroglyphs and Coptic-speaking priests, he would have been perfectly positioned to learn “the language of the walls of the temple, i.e., hieroglyphs,” El-Daly says.
This is more than pure speculation, he adds, because al-Misri himself indicated as much in his attributed al-Qasida fi al-San‘ah al-Karimah (Poem on the Noble Craft), in which he stated he was a student of the priests and was aware of the knowledge they possessed, still visible on the walls of temples. He also recorded that he made a connection between the spoken Coptic of his day and the ancient Egyptian language, and recognized that the hieroglyphs had phonetic value—the same connection Champollion would make 10 centuries later. He left behind a record of his research, Kitab Hall al-Rumuz (Book of Deciphering Symbols). Tellingly, al-Misri’s book included a table of Arabic letters and their Coptic equivalents, which proved a valuable resource for later medieval Muslim scholars who sought to translate the hieroglyphs.
It was no coincidence that these scholars practiced alchemy, which at that time constituted a broad field of pursuits. “Egypt was the epicenter of ancient wisdom, magic, alchemy, mysterious scripts and astrology,” notes Isabel Toral-Niehoff, a scholar of Arabic Occult Sciences at Germany’s University of Göttingen. “Whoever was interested in magic, astrology, mysterious alphabets, etc., in medieval Islam came automatically in contact with aegyptiaca or pseudo-aegyptiaca. This connection, harmonized with the popular perception of Egypt as the epitome of miracles, … inspired the everyday experience of inhabitants and visitors of Egypt.”
Foremost among these visitors was Ibn Wahshiyya al-Nabati. Born in the ninth century in Qusayn, near Kufa (now in Iraq), he was interested also in medicine, toxicology and agriculture.
His most important contribution is what El-Daly identifies as his tables of determinatives, the essential symbols that “determined” the meaning of words. For example, in an ancient Egyptian group of letters “p + r + t” can mean the infinitive of the verb “to go,” the winter season or the word for “fruit” or “seed”— depending on its accompanying determinative sign. If the scribe meant to communicate walking, running or movement, he added the determinative symbol of a pair of walking legs at the end of the word prt. A sun disc (a dot inside a circle) indicated the season, while a pellet symbol (a small circle) identified the agricultural product. Thus, without an understanding of the role of determinatives, Egyptian hieroglyphs remain hopelessly muddled. Ibn Wahshiyya’s achievement rested in pulling all these threads together, distinguishing between hieroglyphic symbols that were phonetic and those that pictographically served as determinatives.
El-Daly himself was uncertain about Ibn Wahshiyya’s claims until he compared the alchemist’s tables of determinatives to those in “Gardiner’s Sign List,” the modern, standard guide to interpreting the hieroglyphs, published in 1927 by renowned Egyptologist Sir Alain Gardiner.
“In every case I compared them, they were exactly the same,” said El-Daly.
However, Ibn Wahshiyya was not entirely consistent with his phonetic transliteration of the hieroglyphs into Arabic. Hence some scholars, Toral-Niehoff among them, remain skeptical about just how much Ibn Wahshiya actually understood from what he was looking at. She contends this is because Ibn Wahshiyya never mentioned a connection between the language of the hieroglyphs and Coptic. This, in her view, led to many errors.
“Even though the signs of [his] list are actual hieroglyphs, the values of the Arabic letters bear no relationship to the actual phonetic values of the hieroglyphs depicted,” she asserts.
Yet El-Daly defends Ibn Wahshiyya’s work by pointing out that like any language, hieroglyphic symbols changed over time. Those seen by the medieval alchemist during his sojourn in Egypt were likely from the Greco-Roman period, El-Daly says, and differed from earlier hieroglyphs. He also stresses that the number of hieroglyphs Ibn Wahshiyya correctly translated is not the issue: What matters is that he realized the hieroglyphs were phonetic and that determinatives governed their meaning. Considering that none of this began to dawn upon European scholars until the mid-17th century, El-Daly thinks Ibn Wahshiyya deserves more than passing credit for working out as many symbols as he did.
“Do you know how many letters Champollion started with? Three letters. So, good for Ibn Wahshiyya, who had at least nine right,” remarks El-Daly.
Later, Ibn Wahshiyya had his own followers. The 13th-century alchemist Abu al-Qasim al-Iraqi produced Kitab al-Aqalim al-Sab’ah (Book of the Seven Climes), a visually striking manuscript that includes the phonetic values of hieroglyphs (not always correctly) as well as colorful, at times fanciful, illustrations that combine hieroglyphs, Arabic and alchemical symbols.
In one such rendering, al-Iraqi apparently copied a now-missing stela dedicated to the 12th Dynasty (early second millennium bce) pharaoh Amenemhat ii. The top line of the illustration, written in Arabic, credits the content of the page to the “hidden book” of the mythological Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes of Triple Wisdom). Hermes was an amalgam of the Egyptian god Thoth and the Greek deity Hermes who, as a messenger of the gods, was associated with communication and the written word. Medieval Muslim alchemists equated him with the prophet Idris mentioned in the Qur’an (and in the Bible as Enoch), and they respected him as not only the first alchemist, but also the originator of the hieroglyphs as well as a source of ancient, hidden wisdom.
However, the copy of the Amenemhat stela reveals the limits of al-Iraqi’s knowledge as well as his drive to align them with his own alchemist’s agenda. He correctly places Amenemhat’s name in a cartouche, an oval surrounding a grouping of hieroglyphs that indicates a royal name. Yet he mistakes a geometric oval for a bain-marie (essentially a double boiler); and he interprets what was likely a falcon representing the god Horus as a “raven of intense blackness,” the alchemist’s symbol for iron and lead. These and other haphazard readings demonstrate that while medieval Muslim scholars were on track in their technical understanding of how the hieroglyphs worked, they were still often inaccurate in setting out their meanings.
Nonetheless, the trails they blazed were picked up by Renaissance European scholars who believed that Arabic manuscripts on Egypt might offer clues to deciphering hieroglyphs. Among the most influential was a 17th-century German Jesuit priest, Athanasius Kircher. In his seminal work, Lingua Aegyptiaca Restituta (The Egyptian Language Restored), published in 1643, Kircher correctly hypothesized that the hieroglyphs recorded an earlier stage of Coptic and that the signs had phonetic values. His sources included Coptic grammars, translated from Arabic and Coptic-Arabic vocabularies brought back from the Middle East by contemporary Italian travelers. By El-Daly’s estimation, Kircher had access to some 40 medieval Arabic texts on ancient Egyptian culture, including Ibn Wahshiyya’s. Though the Jesuit only got one hieroglyph right, his contribution, too, pointed subsequent scholars in the right direction.
“Only with the work of Athanasius Kircher, in the mid-17th century, did scholars begin to think that hieroglyphs could represent sounds as well as ideas,” writes Brown University Egyptologist James P. Allen in Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs. “It was not until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, in 1799, that scholars were able make practical use of Kircher’s ideas.”
While some believe El-Daly overstates the importance of medieval Muslim scholarship on the hieroglyphs, and they are thus doubtful of its Egyptological value, El-Daly himself says that he never set out to unseat Champollion or credit medieval Muslim scholars with as deep an understanding of the hieroglyphs as the French savant or his successors. He merely wished to add to the conversation “over a thousand years of Arabic scholarship and inquiry” that modern Egyptology has largely overlooked.
At dusk, the women of Sokomuhugo Street in Stone Town are finishing setting up their charcoal stoves to make fresh batches of buttery, flaky chapati for those who gather after evening prayer. Draped casually over their heads and around their hips are matching, intricately patterned fabrics, each further distinguished, along the bottom of each cloth, by its own Swahili proverb. They are wearing kanga, one of the most ubiquitous and popular fabrics in all of East Africa.
Multifunctional, vibrantly colorful and affordable, kanga permeates the fashion landscape, especially on the semi-autonomous, predominantly Muslim island of Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania, where it is said to have originated. From sun-drenched rural fishing villages to the city streets of Stone Town, a historical district in Zanzibar City, Zanzibar’s capital, women and girls do more than merely wear the kanga: They weave it into daily life, from birth to death and in between, as East Africa’s original “social media,” worn and traded both for the dazzle of the designs and for the surprise of the messages.
By definition, a kanga is a rectangle of cotton cloth comprised of a mji, or central design motif; a pindo, or patterned border; and a jina, or “name,” which is a Swahili proverb, aphorism or contemporary statement, usually printed in black bold capital letters against a white background along the edge between the motif and border. Kanga are machine-printed and sold in 1½ x 1-meter pairs. Women usually cut and separate the pair at the center, hemming the edges, and then they wear one piece as a head covering or shawl while the other cloth is wrapped around the waist.
Wrapped up in the kanga is also the history of Zanzibar itself. As far back as the first century ce, Yemeni and Persian traders used monsoon winds to sail the Indian Ocean. By the 12th century, trading posts, villages and mosques became well established both on the islands as well as along the coast from as far north as Mogadishu, now in Somalia, to as far south as Kilwa, now in Tanzania. When the Portuguese arrived in the early 1500s, they forced colonial rule and influenced trade in the region for more than 200 years. Among their legacies: a colorful square kerchief, known as leso.
As Zanzibar grew, hundreds of lateen-sailed dhows connected it with the African coast, Arabia, India, Persia and China. Traders brought iron, sugar and cloth; they left with shells, cloves, coconuts, ivory—and slaves. In 1698 Saif bin Sultan, the Imam of Oman, defeated the Portuguese in Mombasa, Kenya, and established an Omani stronghold on the coast. By the 1830s, Omani Sultan Said bin Sultan had established Stone Town, Zanzibar, as the official seat of Omani power.
The sultans of Oman ruled in the region for more than two centuries, creating a complex and highly stratified social system, with positions signified in part by clothing. Legend has it that women who sought to elevate their status abandoned plain black cotton kaniki cloth in favor of looks that would distinguish themselves as both upwardly mobile and free. (Slavery ended in Zanzibar in 1897.) They purchased leso in lengths of six meters, and then cut the six into two lengths of three, breaking them down further into three square shapes of 3 x 2 meters. These squares were then mixed-and-matched and stitched together to form unique designs. Although this new style was also called leso, the most common cloth for it by that time was white calico from India.
Zanzibar fashion designer Farouque Abdela believes it likely that women who liked this new “linked leso” began using the larger bolts of calico as a base for woodblock-printed patterns made with indigo, henna and other tree dyes. Colorful and affordable, the style caught on. One of its more popular border patterns, white spots on a dark background, resembled the plumage of the noisy, sociable guinea fowl called kanga.
Thus kanga, hand-printed on Indian calico, became popular within an increasingly cosmopolitan social scene, as Stone Town became one of the wealthiest cities in all of East Africa. Its docks attracted ships from as far away as the newly independent United States, which in 1837 established a consulate in the region and, by the 1850s, had largely replaced Indian calico with unbleached American cotton referred to as merikani cloth. All the while, kanga continued to gain momentum among Zanzibari women establishing themselves in higher social strata.
By the 1860s, the demand for kanga had grown all along the coast, from Lamu in Kenya to Madagascar. Early designs were inspired by nature, fertility symbols, geometric lines and shapes, as well as fruits and animals. Designs also incorporated cultural influences from the Rajasthani resist-dye technique called bandhani to Omani stripes to the Persian and Kashmiri teardrop-shaped boteh, and to Bantu-inspired motifs like the Siwa horn and the cashew nut. Still, some kanga have retained what became traditional, original color schemes: The kanga ya kisutu, or wedding kanga, for example, has been printed in red, black and white for more than 150 years.
Although women created the first kanga patterns and designs, it didn’t take long before male traders commanded both production and trade. This roughly coincided with the Industrial Revolution, which radically shifted modes of textile production worldwide, and in the early 1900s kanga designers began exporting their designs to India and Europe for mass production, taking advantage of advances in both weaving and printing technologies. Abdela believes that the first machine-printed kanga actually came out of Germany, thanks to Emily Ruete, who was born in Zanzibar as Sayyida Salme, the youngest of Sultan Said bin Sultan’s 36 children. Princess Salme fell in love with her neighbor, Rudolph Heinrich Ruete, a German merchant, and accompanied him to Hamburg, where she lived out her days. Others, he admits, believe the first mass-produced kanga came from England, or perhaps India.
The text messages on kanga began to appear in the early 1900s. Kaderdina Hajee “Abdulla” Essak of Mombasa, Kenya, started the trend when his wife encouraged him to distinguish the kanga he designed by adding a clever inscription. The text, first written in Swahili with Arabic script, added another layer of interest to the kanga, and it was not long until textile merchants followed Abdulla’s lead with their own sayings. When political power shifted from Omani to British administrative rule in the early 20th century, the script switched as well, as the British demanded the use of Roman letters. In the long run, this proved popular, as it wasn’t common for those in lower social strata to read and write their Swahili in Arabic script, and merchants were often asked to read the kanga out loud to help women select the best message.
According to Fatma Soud Nassor, professor of Swahili language and literature at the State University of Zanzibar, kanga messages speak to Swahili joy, love and sorrow. Messages today often derive from Swahili methali (proverbs), mafumbo (ambiguous meanings) and misemo (popular sayings) inspired by folklore, riddles, children’s songs and quotes from the Qur’an as well as popular culture. Still others come out of song lyrics from the coast’s unique Taarab style of music, inspired by Egyptian, Indian and Yemeni rhythms. Rooted in the long history of cultural exchange between Zanzibar and Egypt, it is said to have began in the early 1900s when Sultan Barghash ibn Said invited an Egyptian ensemble to play at the palace in Zanzibar. Male musicians singing in Arabic dominated the form until the 1920s, when the talented and fearless Siti Binti Saad rose up from an impoverished childhood to stun audiences with her Swahili lyrics that ventured into social issues of class, domestic violence and women’s rights.
Mariam Hamdani, director of the Tausi Women’s Taarab group in Zanzibar, carries on Siti Binti Saad’s spirit, and now, as she has reached 70 years old, her kanga collection is a chronicle of her life as a journalist, cultural activist and women’s advocate. Hamdani remembers as a child in the 1950s purchasing kanga with her mother at Darajani Market, where the limited supply meant having to gather around a merchant displaying a sample and submitting a name to a list in the hope of securing one of the limited editions. Today Hamdani treasures hundreds of neatly folded kanga pairs in her closet, each marking a memory or moment, from weddings to funerals, political victories to tender personal experiences.
Some of her kanga carry Taarab songs, like “Mpenzi Nipepe” (“Lover, Cool Me Down”): “Mpenzi nipepee / Nina usingizi nataka kulala / Mpenzi nipoze kwa yako hisani / Na unibembeze niwe na furahani” (“Lover, cool me down / I’m tired and I want to sleep / Lover, heal me with your kindness / And soothe me so I can rejoice”).
Others in her collection feature older designs, styles and names, and some have even become classics, making their way back to the market due to enduring popularity—for example, the kanga ya mkeka (kanga of the woven mat) features bold red, black and white stripes that resemble a traditional mat. The border boasts fat red and black droplets that are echoed as a pair dropped inside a large circle and placed in the kanga’s center. This kanga, printed using 100 percent soft cotton, might be valued for its quality and design alone, but a sharp message takes its intrigue to another level: “Nashangaa kunichukia nimpata kwa juhudi zangu” (“I’m surprised you’re angry with me; I’ve gotten this using my own efforts”).
Pointing to a green and orange kanga with two doves perched on branches facing each other, Hamdani explains that “you can tell from its pattern and its quality, this is a much older design, like this other one here.” Carefully unfolding the kanga, Hamdani says, “This one, this one is also very old. Kanga ya ndege wawili, the kanga of the two birds. Ah! I remember this one from a long time ago. It’s very old, but it’s a design back again on the market. This one will never go out of fashion.” A dizzying mix of polka dots, hearts and flowers that has not changed since its original print, the “Two Birds” kanga carries a tender message of love and guards against jealousy: “Wawili wakipendena adui hana nafasi” (“If two people love one another, enemies don’t have a chance”).
In Hamdani’s collection, threads from the Arab world, too, are woven into her kanga designs. Kanga ya marashi (rosewater kanga) features the symbol of a rosewater sprinkler, which was used to waft aromas of pressed rose oil as far back as the 10th century, and later wove its way from Yemen and Oman to Zanzibar. This particular kanga, in red and white, features a message warning against street gossip that threatens the love between two people: “Wapenzi Hawagombani, pasi na fitina mtaani” (“It’s not the lovers who quarrel, it’s all that street gossip and negativity”). In this context, the rosewater image speaks to the notion it can help heal a lover’s quarrel.
Hamdani also cherishes a red and yellow kanga whose Swahili is in Arabic script. It, too, warns against street gossip: “Sitomwacha mume wangu kwa mngo’ngo mtaani” (“I won’t leave my man for all that street gossip”).
More simply, an Omani kanga with a floral design states, in Arabic, “ward salalah” (“Rose of Salalah”).
And then there’s the love kanga with three simple words written in Arabic: “Layla wa Majnun” (“Layla and Majnun”), which refers to the classic 10th-century love story by poet Nizami Ganjavi.
While Hamdani says she no longer wears kanga in the traditional fashion—as both a head covering and wrapped around the waist—she stills wears kanga every day at home, and she follows the tradition of wearing kanga to weddings, funerals and special events. She says that what women throughout Zanzibar and the coast have in common is that whether they live in cosmopolitan Stone Town or in small coastal fishing villages like Bwejuu, they cherish their kanga collections and use the kanga on a daily basis, one way or another.
In the small fishing village of Bwejuu, along Zanzibar’s east coast, elder Mwanahamisi, known as “Bi. Kibao,” asserts that “a Zanzibari woman is not a woman without her kanga.” She goes on to explain, “We wear kanga to cover our hair and around our hips from the time we are small children until the time we die.” Bi. Kibao insists that she loves her kanga for their patterns and designs and doesn’t pay much attention to kanga sayings.
Hidaya, a teacher in Bwejuu and mother of four, agrees. “Many of us choose the kanga because we love their colors and designs. We don’t care too much about the message. Maybe that’s something the younger women are concerned with, but we don’t have time to worry about the message. We love kanga because it is our traditional dress, and as Muslim women, we respect our culture by covering our hair when we’re out.”
Mohammed Abdallah Moody, a kanga merchant in his 40s, chuckles when he hears that women claim they don’t pay attention to kanga sayings. With hundreds of kanga messages memorized, Moody insists “the kanga is the message.” He supports the common knowledge that Zanzibari women, steeped in gendered traditions of respectability, purchase, wear and exchange the kanga as a unique form of silent communication to relay messages that would not otherwise be socially acceptable.
“When women and even men come to me to purchase a kanga,” he says, “the first thing they look at is the message. Even if the kanga has a nice design, they may not buy it if the message isn’t right. When someone receives a kanga wrapped as a gift, what is the first thing they do when they open it? They read the message! If an elder can’t read the message, the first thing she’ll do is call someone over to read the message aloud.
“The message is everything. It has the power to increase the love and ease the pain of a broken heart. The message can ignite and provoke or soothe and heal.”
Moody sells his kanga in the textile market on the same street as the shop and showroom of Chavda Textiles, Zanzibar’s largest and oldest kanga dealership, shop and showroom. In the back office crammed with bits of old patterns and hand-drawn design boards, 24-year-old kanga designer Sabrina Ally sits with Chavda’s owners to sketch designs and compose sayings that will appeal to Chavda’s diverse market. Ally, who has worked with Chavda for three years and has designed some of the most popular kanga on the market right now, agrees that a powerful message is crucial to the overall success of the kanga.
“It really hurts my brain to come up with these sayings! My designs have been copied by other kanga dealerships,” Ally says proudly. “For example, I’m the one who wrote the kanga that says, ‘Huna presha, huna sukari, roho mbaya inakukondesha.’” (“You don’t have pressure, or diabetes, your bad spirit has made you skinny.”)
“These days in Zanzibar, there are many different kinds of people, and diversity brings differences of opinion that can sometimes lead to arguments, such as arguments about jealousy. So women these days love the kanga designs that can be exchanged to wake someone up, to surprise them and make them think.”
The kanga, when exchanged or worn for an intended audience, has the power to mediate conflict. Recently Ally composed the popular phrase, “Mimi ni mwangana sina muda wa kugombana” (“I am a peacemaker; I don’t have time to fight”). This came to her, she says, while she was at home thinking about the way Zanzibari women tend to handle discord. She explains, “Women usually have their fights, but they fight in secret. They don’t want others to know that there’s any issue or concern. Whether it’s about a man or a misunderstanding at work, women use kanga to make sure their position is heard while still maintaining their integrity and self-respect.” There is even a phrase for this, she adds: “Kupiga kanga” means “to hit the kanga,” by answering one kanga with another, communicating messages back and forth until the conflict is played out.
It’s all good business, too. Chavda Textiles often provides wholesale kanga to other kanga dealers for about 4,400 shillings, or about us $2.20 each. The firm sends up to 30 new designs to its factory in Mumbai each month and, at any given time, a kanga seller stocks 50 new designs and 50 designs from the past and an assortment of messages from blessings, prayers and wishes to the bolder ones. Governments, politicians and even nongovernmental organizations have also used the kanga as a messaging platform as far back as World War ii, when a commemorative kanga featuring industrial machines and boats proclaimed: “Ahsante bwana Churchill” (“Thanks Boss [Winston] Churchill”).
In contrast with Zanzibar, where women prefer very thin, light cotton kanga with Swahili proverbs, riddles and sayings, on the Tanzanian mainland women prefer kanga nztio, which is produced with heavier cotton featuring darker, deeper colors and messages related to faith and religion. On Uhuru Street in Tanzania’s former capital, Dar Es Salaam, kanga dealerships with names like Morogoro, Nida, Urafiki and Karibu Textiles all sell out of their showrooms the heavy kanga pairs for 7,000 shillings a pair, or about us $3.50. Fadhilia, a kanga seller on Uhuru Street, insists that “men and women both love to buy kanga. There’s not a man in Tanzania who has not purchased a kanga for his mother, grandmother or wife at least once in his life.”
Back in her office in the Swahili department at the State University of Zanzibar, professor Fatma Soud Nassor tears up as she recalls the day her mother passed away. “You know, we use the kanga to pray. For my mother’s funeral, her sisters looked through her collection to select a kanga to wash and wrap her body for burial…. I cried a lot to see my mother in this kanga because on it was written, ‘Nimerhidikwa na hali yangu’ [(‘I’ve been satisfied with my situation’)]. When I passed her body, what I saw was the name of her kanga, and it carried a huge and meaningful message to me, and so I wept.”
From the shores of history, echoing desires, dreams, worries, obsessions and passions of the Swahili coast, the kanga call out. From the newborn wrapped in kanga wisdom in her mother’s arms, to an anxious bride receiving her bridal kanga from her husband’s family, to an elder who rests in peace wrapped in kanga, its meaning and messages hazife—will not die.