Bata

The first thing that saves him is a cow. Bata is driving the herd home at dusk, loaded with fodder, when the lead animal steps into the stable, turns, and tells him plainly that his elder brother is standing behind the door with a spear. The second cow says the same. He looks down, and under the door he can see a pair of feet.

That scene comes from a single roll of papyrus written in hieratic around 1200 BC by a scribe called Ennana, in the last years of the Nineteenth Dynasty. It was bought by the British Museum in 1857 from Elizabeth d’Orbiney, whose name it still carries, and no other copy of the story has ever been found. Everything the tale says about Bata rests on those nineteen columns.

They begin with a household that works. Anubis, the elder brother, has a house and a wife. Bata, the younger, has neither, and lives with them much as a son would. He ploughs, reaps, makes the clothes and takes the cattle out each morning, and the cattle tell him where the grass is good. He listens, goes where they say, and the herd grows fat and calves well. The text remarks, almost in passing, that the strength of a god was in him.

It is the strength that causes the trouble. Sent back to the house for seed in the middle of ploughing, Bata finds his brother’s wife braiding her hair. He shoulders five sacks of grain. She notices, and suggests they spend an hour in bed. He turns on her, the tale says, like a leopard: she has been a mother to him and his brother a father, and he will not hear it again. Nor will he tell anyone. She does the telling herself. By evening she has smeared herself with fat and grease to look beaten, and when Anubis comes in to a dark house she gives him the story reversed.

So the spear, and the feet under the door. Bata drops his load and runs, with his brother behind him, and calls on the sun god Pre-Harakhti to judge between the guilty and the innocent. The god puts a stretch of water between them and fills it with crocodiles. The two men stand on opposite banks all night. At sunrise Bata tells his side across the water, and to seal the oath he takes a reed knife, cuts off his own phallus and throws it in. A catfish swallows it. Anubis weeps on the far bank and cannot cross.

Bata then announces what he will do with what is left of his life. He will go to the Valley of the Pine, a place the Egyptians associated with the Lebanese coast, and set his heart on top of the blossom of the pine tree. If the tree is ever cut down he will die, and Anubis will know it because the beer in his hand will foam over. Anubis must then come and look for the heart, however long it takes, and put it in a bowl of cool water. Anubis goes home, kills his wife and throws her body to the dogs.

In the valley Bata hunts and builds himself a house. The gods of the Ennead pass by, pity his solitude, and have Khnum shape a woman for him, more beautiful than any in the land. The Seven Hathors come to look at her and say with one voice that she will die by the knife. Bata tells her never to walk outside in case the sea should take her, and then tells her where his heart is. She walks outside. The sea comes rolling after her, and the pine tree catches a lock of her hair for it. The lock drifts to Egypt and comes to rest where Pharaoh’s washermen work, and its scent gets into the royal linen until the chief washerman is being scolded daily for perfuming the king’s clothes. He finds the hair. The scribes pronounce it the hair of a daughter of the sun god. Pharaoh sends soldiers, whom Bata kills, and then more soldiers along with a woman carrying jewellery, which works.

Installed as the king’s favourite, she asks for one thing: have the pine cut down. The tree falls and Bata drops dead in the same instant. Far away, a jug of beer foams in Anubis’s hand and his wine turns sour. He takes his staff and sandals and goes. He finds his brother lying dead on his bed, and spends three years searching under the pine. In the fourth year he picks up a fruit, and it is the heart. He sets it in cool water. Through the night it drinks, the body shudders, and when Bata swallows the water with the heart in it he is himself again.

He does not go back quietly. He becomes a great bull in every beautiful colour and has Anubis ride him to the palace, where the court rejoices and pays the elder brother his weight in silver and gold. In the kitchen the bull speaks to the lady: I am Bata, and I am still alive. She coaxes Pharaoh into an oath and asks for the bull’s liver. As it is slaughtered it shakes its neck, and two drops of blood fall beside the doorposts of the great gate. By morning two tall persea trees stand there. One of them speaks to her too. She has them cut down for furniture and stands watching the carpenters, and a splinter flies into her mouth. She swallows it and conceives.

The child is Bata. Pharaoh loves the boy, makes him Viceroy of Kush and then crown prince, and in due course flies up to heaven. The new king’s first act is to summon his officials and have the whole affair heard, and the woman is judged before them. The Hathors had already said how that would go. He reigns thirty years, and Anubis follows him on the throne.

Behind the folktale hero stands a real, minor god. Bata was lord of Saka, a town in the seventeenth nome of Upper Egypt, the district whose chief god was Anubis, which is why the tale makes the two of them brothers. Earlier images give him as a ram and later ones as a bull, and a death god written Bt in Old Kingdom tombs at Saqqara is probably the same figure. He was never a national deity. A Ptolemaic temple handbook, the Papyrus Jumilhac, shows what became of him locally: there Bata is simply a name of Seth, who takes the shape of a bull and is caught, bound and gelded by Anubis. The brothers of the tale have become enemies, and the wound Bata gave himself is now a punishment.

His gifts in the story all come from the same root. He is hard to kill because his life is not kept where a spear can reach it, and each time he is destroyed something of him, a heart, two drops of blood, a chip of wood, is enough to begin again. The limits are just as clear. He cannot keep a secret from a wife. He dies the moment the tree falls, whatever his strength. And alone he stays dead: without a brother willing to search for more than three years, the heart would still be lying under a pine in a valley by the sea.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Bata in Egyptian mythology?

Bata is an Egyptian god of the town of Saka in the seventeenth nome of Upper Egypt, shown first as a ram and later as a bull. He is best known as the younger brother in the Tale of Two Brothers, where Anubis is his elder brother. In that story Bata is falsely accused, killed more than once, and finally becomes king of Egypt.

What happens in the Tale of Two Brothers?

The wife of Anubis tries to seduce Bata, is refused, and accuses him instead, so Anubis tries to kill him. Bata proves his innocence, goes to the Valley of the Pine and hides his heart on a pine tree, but his own wife has the tree cut down for Pharaoh and he dies. Anubis revives him, and Bata returns as a bull, then as two persea trees, and is finally reborn as the queen’s son. He becomes king and reigns for thirty years.

Where did Bata hide his heart?

Bata placed his heart on top of the blossom of a pine tree in the Valley of the Pine. When the tree was cut down he died at once. His brother Anubis searched for the heart for three years, found it in the fourth year in the form of a fruit, and revived Bata by placing it in a bowl of cool water.

Where does the story of Bata come from?

The story of Bata survives in one manuscript, the Papyrus D’Orbiney, written in hieratic around 1200 BC by a scribe named Ennana. The British Museum bought it in 1857 from Elizabeth d’Orbiney. No other copy of the Tale of Two Brothers is known.

Is Bata the same as Seth?

In the Tale of Two Brothers Bata is his own figure and the loyal brother of Anubis. A much later text, the Ptolemaic Papyrus Jumilhac, treats Bata as a name of Seth, who turns into a bull and is bound and gelded by Anubis. The two texts give opposite pictures of the same local god of Saka.

Related Entries

Anubis, Ra, Khnum, Hathor, Set, Osiris, Apis, Joseph (Old Testament)