Immersed in Abydos

Hieroglyph photo by Esther Fürstenberg  

Imagine me with hands on hips striking a sassy pose.

I just don’t get it.

So many theater historians are still hanging on to the idea that the first “real” theater happened in Greece at around 500 BCE. They are such snobs.

Leave it to this actor-turned-academic to say HOLD ON A MINUTE. How can any thinking person believe it took humans that long to create theater? Seriously.

To be fair, many older examples of theater do occasionally make brief appearances in textbooks, but they almost always include a disclaimer. This isn’t “real” theater. It’s more like religious ceremony or ritual. It’s just storytelling. Blah, blah, blah.

My response is: show me how religious ceremony is not theatrical! Show me how storytelling is anti-theater!

I promise I will exercise a little restraint and not let loose with my full rant here, or in my upcoming OER (Open Educational Resource) textbook, but this is totally ridiculous.

The funniest part to me is these same textbooks often start off with a catchy few paragraphs defining theater as simply requiring one performer and one audience member. That is true of ALL the ancient theatrical practices—including those in non-Western parts of the world—that they usually dismiss in the next few chapters until we get to the pinnacle of ancient theatre . . . the birth of the art form . . . wait for it . . . the Ancient Greeks.

Puleeeease.

Let me take you to Ancient Egypt to throw a little fly in the ointment . . . or the amber . . . whatever.

Imagine you are a priest in Ancient Egypt in 1840 BCE. It is springtime, and the Nile is flowing again with precious water for the growth of crops to sustain your community. Today is the beginning of a very special festival. It will last weeks. And you are central to the production. Everything must be perfect, if you are to keep the gods happy and chaos at bay.

A new barque (boat) has been built to house the sacred statue of Osiris, and you have just finished adorning it. It is dazzling—covered with bronze, gold, silver, and lapis lazuli. You can smell the precious cedar wood that has been used in its construction.

The public only glimpses this statue of their god once a year when elite religious leaders like you take it on a journey from Osiris’s temple to his tomb in the desert and back again.

Along the way, women and young girls will dance and play tambourines accompanied by musicians playing string and wind instruments. A good portion of the procession will take place floating down the Nile, and it will stop at regular intervals for performances of key scenes in the story of Osiris, Isis, Horus, and Set. This year, you will play the coveted role of Osiris himself. Members of the community will take part as extras in the crowd scenes.

Your entire society is organized around these stories, and now is your chance to bring them to life through performances that are open to all. This festival educates the populace and gives them a chance to show their reverence for the gods that control their universe. Once it is all over, the statue of Osiris will be hidden away again, only available to your pharaoh, you, and other members of the religious cult that maintain it.

The performance festival described above took place in Abydos, which was a religious center of ancient Egypt. We now call this production the Abydos Passion Play. Archeologists have documented performances of the Abydos Passion Play as far back as 2500 BCE in ancient Egypt, but the tales were likely told by storytellers and dancers even earlier.

Watch this video for a short overview and some visual representations of the festival.

We know these performances happened, because there is evidence in pictures and writing on stones, including what we might think of today as stage directions on a famous stele (flat stone) that described the associated duties of Ikhernofert, who was a priest, party planner for the festival, and an actor in performances.

The Abydos passion play was a highly ritualized theatrical reenactment of the story of Osiris, who was a central character in the origin stories of ancient Egypt. By 3000 BCE, Egyptians had in place very detailed stories as part of their cultural and religious beliefs. These narratives were told through reenactments, storytelling, music, and dance.

The Abydos passion play happened annually for a very long time, so there is additional evidence in writings of the Greek historian Herodotus 1400 years later. Herodotus visited Egypt and described a very similar event with numerous community members (aka extras) enacting battles that were part of the story. He was afraid that people were killed in the reenactment, it was so realistic. Egyptians told him that no one actually died.

So let’s see . . . we have a gripping plot, costumes, set pieces, actors, musicians, an audience.

This. Is. Theater.

The fact that the story moves down the Nile and across the desert makes it a pretty awesome example of early immersive theater.

And don’t even get me started with storytelling.

In ancient times, storytelling was reserved for special members of a community. The storyteller was even seen as a type of shaman in many clans. The skills they developed were not easy. First of all, one storyteller played all the characters in the story and differentiated them with alterations to their voice and movement. They also used tunes, rhythm, and other devices to remember very long, epic stories that had become part of the collective histories of a society over time. They were walking, talking libraries before the written word was developed, and they kept a vast amount of information in their brains. Their stories were the foundation of the identity of their communities. The communal nature of storytelling also strengthened social bonds and solidified populations.

Tales like Gilgamesh, Anansi the Spider, The Maya Hero Twins (Hunahpu and Xbalanque), The Odyssey, The Bhagavad Gita and so many more were memorized and told in episodes. No opportunity for binge watching here. You had to show up at the communal fire the following night to get the next chapter. All-star storytellers also managed to improv additions to the traditional stories that would relate to events happening in their community at a certain time. They enhanced the repertoire in real time.

Scholars wonder if the eventual creation of written language had an arthritic effect on storytelling. When stories were shared orally, the teller could mold and change them to incorporate new and important information. Once a story was written down, it became permanent and less likely to change.

I’ll defer to a smart student question now:

But how do we PROVE when theater began?

We can’t definitively answer this question. Maybe someday we will . . . if we come up with the technology for time travel (oh, please let me still be alive when we do!).

What we can do is make some solid guesses and continue to collect evidence.

Theatre Histories: An Introduction, edited by Tobin Nellhaus provides a very helpful timeline of ancient performances in its 3^rd edition. Here are a few dates pulled from that list:

c. 3000 BCE Performance Festivals in Mesoamerica

c. 2055 BCE Abydos Passion Play in Egypt

c. 1000 BCE Hopi Performances in North America

c. 1000 BCE Celtic Rituals and Bardic Festivals in Europe

c. 800 BCE Homer and Bardic Performance in Greece

534 BCE Early form of Greek Tragedy Performed by Thespis in Greece

c. 400 BCE Mahabharata and Ramayana Sanskrit Epics in India

Performance festivals were happening in Mesoamerica as early as 3000 BCE. They were outside near giant pyramids and incorporated beautiful floral adornments, colorful costumes, exotic animals, sports, and even a princely dance performed by their leader. Hopi performances in North America and Celtic ritual performances in Europe date back to 1000 BCE. There is also evidence that courtly performances with singing and dancing were present during the Zhou Dynasty in China at around this same time. All of these happened LONG before the supposed “birth of theater” with Greek tragedies in 534 BCE.

Greek theater is almost last on the timeline of ancient theater and performance above. So why do theater history teachers everywhere avoid the rich theatrical history before the Greeks?

Part of the issue may be classification. Some theater scholars may be considering a very narrow (and Western) definition of the word theater. That is unfortunate and it leaves out a lot of interesting performances.

History is messy. Theater is a term that is intertwined with ritual and storytelling in such a way that it’s nearly impossible to view them separately. In the past, some historiographers (people who write about history) attempted to draw a direct line in time from ritual to storytelling to theater, but this is misleading. They are related and did not happen one after the other. It would be a nice and neat description, but it’s not anchored in the evidence.

Maybe we’re going about this all wrong. What would happen if we looked at a different set of questions to find more meaningful answers?

What elements make up the event?

Who participated?

Who benefited?

Who was left out?

Why was it important?

I think I will better serve my students if we search for answers to these questions instead of chasing perfectly exclusive definitions of theater. Maybe I’ll be really rebellious and ask students what they think after looking at evidence. Whoa.