Crook and Flail

Also Known As: Egyptian heka or hekat, the crook; nekhakha or nekhekh, the flail, entered in the excavation records by its Latin name, flagellum
Region/Culture: North Africa
Mythos: Egyptian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: Carried together, usually crossed high on the chest, the pair marks its bearer as the rightful holder of royal power, whether that bearer is a living king, a dead one, or a god.
Role in Mythos: They are the fixed attributes of Osiris, and the emblems a king takes up to declare that he rules as Osiris ruled.
Relation to Humans: Most Egyptians met them at a distance, in the hands of a king in his jubilee robe or a god painted on a tomb wall, though a crook on its own was plain enough as a mark of authority that high officials carried one. In the end the flail came down to everybody, because once every dead person counted as an Osiris, every dead person could be shown holding it.

Strip the gold off one of them and you are holding a stick for moving animals.

That is the whole of the crook. A shaft with a hook bent over at the top, cut down to a length a man can carry folded against his chest, the shape any herdsman in the world would know by touch in the dark. The Egyptians called it the heka. Its logic is not subtle and it was never meant to be: the one who holds the hooked stick is the one who gathers the flock, turns it, keeps it off the crop and out of the river, and a country that fed itself off a narrow green strip liked its rulers described that way. The crook did not stay royal, either. Gods took it up, Osiris above all, but also the moon god Khonsu, and Anubis, and the child Horus in his Greek dress as Harpocrates. High officials carried one without the flail at all, and it still read as power.

The other object is where the trouble starts. It is a handle with a squared collar above the grip, and from that collar hang three strands, each threaded with flattened cones, cylindrical balls and small drop-shaped weights. On the Narmer Palette, at the very beginning of Egyptian kingship, it already looks like this, and it kept looking like this for three thousand years afterwards, which is an extraordinary run for an object nobody can identify. At a glance it resembles a fly swat. Held in the king’s right hand and shaken, the beaded strands would knock together with a dry clicking rattle, more percussion than punishment.

Nobody is sure what it is.

Three readings compete. The oldest and most repeated says it is a herdsman’s whip, which pairs tidily with the crook and is probably why it survives. A second notices that the object’s outline is close to the hieroglyph used for birth, and reads it as a fertility sign rather than a tool of discipline. The third belongs to Percy Newberry, who published it in 1929 in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology after handling the real objects from Tutankhamun’s tomb, and who came away convinced that they could not have worked as a flail or a whip at all. The mechanics are wrong. Newberry pointed instead to the ladanisterion, an implement Cretan shepherds still used in the nineteenth century, a flail-like rake dragged across rock rose bushes to gather labdanum, the sticky aromatic resin the leaves exude, collected by men whose flocks were browsing the same scrub. It is an elegant argument and it has never quite been proved. Labdanum does not turn up among the resins and gums the surviving Egyptian perfume recipes actually call for, and a Cretan tool of the 1800s is a long way to reach for a sign already fixed on a palette from around 3100 BCE.

The pair belonged to Osiris before it belonged to anyone, or at least the tradition says so. The flail seems to have come to him from Anedjti, sometimes spelled Andjety, the divine power of the ninth nome of Lower Egypt, one of those older local gods whose cults Osiris absorbed on his way to becoming the ruler of the dead for the entire country. Look at any image of him and the arrangement is the same: a body wrapped like a mummy with only the head and the hands free, the plumed atef crown above, the skin sometimes painted green for the growing things he answers for, and the two objects held out from the linen, one in each fist. He is the most thoroughly bound figure in Egyptian art and the only parts of him left loose are the parts holding the emblems of rule.

That arrangement travelled downwards over about two thousand years. In the Old Kingdom the dead king was Osiris and his living successor was Horus, so the crook and flail passed at the funeral along with everything else. By the time of the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead, every dead person was an Osiris, and the flail that had marked the god became the property of anyone whose family could pay for a decent burial.

The objects themselves survive, which is rare for anything this symbolic. In the Treasury of Tutankhamun’s tomb, Howard Carter opened a small wooden box that held earrings, a mirror case cut in the shape of an ankh, a bead-work girdle, and, lying in among the jewellery, two hekat sceptres and two nekhekh flagella. They are in Cairo now under the accession numbers JE 61760, 61761, 61763 and 61764. Carter measured them: the sceptres at 43 and 43.5 centimetres, one flail at 43, the other at only 33.5, small enough that it has often been taken for something the king was given as a boy. The prenomen and nomen are cut into the gold ferrule at the butt of each. Alfred Lucas, the chemist on the excavation, wrote out what they were made of in his flat inventory hand: gold foil and dark blue glass over a core probably of copper or bronze, the pendants of gilded wood and thin gold, the cones and beads of gold, carnelian, and blue and green glass. He noticed something no photograph shows. The gold had been burnished after it was laid down, so tiny particles of it had been dragged onto the glass, where they sit like the flecks of pyrites in lapis lazuli. He cleaned them with warm water and ammonia. The blue has faded since.

What the pair confers is legitimacy, and only that. Neither object does anything. There is no myth in which the crook works a miracle or the flail strikes an enemy down, no story of either being stolen, broken or reforged, which is unusual for divine equipment and tells you plainly what class of thing they belong to. They are declarations. Their limits follow from that: an emblem is only worth what the people looking at it agree it is worth, and these two were shared out so widely, to gods, to kings, to officials, to the ordinary dead, that by the end they marked less a person than a condition. The crook says its holder gathers. The flail, after all this time, still says something we cannot read.

Frequently Asked Questions

What do the crook and flail symbolise in ancient Egypt?

Together they mark legitimate rule. The crook, called the heka, is a herdsman’s hooked staff and casts the ruler as the shepherd who gathers and guides his people. The flail, called the nekhakha, is far less certain in meaning, and the neat modern gloss that it stands for discipline or the fertility of the land is a convenience rather than a settled reading.

Who holds the crook and flail?

Osiris above all, in almost every image of him, with the two objects held out from his mummy wrappings while he wears the plumed atef crown. Egyptian kings carried them to show they ruled as Osiris ruled. The crook alone also appears in the hands of Khonsu, Anubis and Harpocrates, and high officials could carry one as a plain mark of authority.

What is the Egyptian flail actually for?

No one knows. Tradition calls it a herdsman’s whip, some read its outline as the hieroglyph for birth, and in 1929 the Egyptologist Percy Newberry argued in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology that the surviving examples are mechanically incapable of working as a whip and are more likely tools for gathering labdanum resin, like the ladanisterion used by Cretan shepherds. The question is still open.

Do any real crooks and flails survive?

Yes. Howard Carter found two hekat sceptres and two nekhekh flagella packed into a small box in the Treasury of Tutankhamun’s tomb, alongside earrings and a mirror case. They are in Cairo as JE 61760, 61761, 61763 and 61764, measuring between 33.5 and 43.5 centimetres, built of gold foil and dark blue glass over a core of copper or bronze, with the king’s names cut into the gold collar at the end of each.

Why does Osiris carry the crook and flail?

They appear to have reached him from Anedjti, an older god of the ninth nome of Lower Egypt whose cult Osiris absorbed. Once they were his, they became the standard sign of rule over the dead, and as Egyptian funerary belief widened over the centuries, the flail passed from the god to the dead king and eventually to every ordinary person buried as an Osiris.