Egypt

The sole record in the Society’s archives bearing on Egypt as a subject is a 1950 article by H. G. Quaritch Wales, which treats Egyptian cultural elements not as a civilisation in their own right but as a source of specific traits—most notably the Horus emblem and associated sun-worship—allegedly transmitted to Java through Sabaean intermediaries [1, pp. 36–37]. The article is an early instalment of the broader diffusionist programme that Wales later developed in his monograph The Making of Greater India [1, p. 36].

The Horus Emblem and Solar Cult in Java

Wales’s central argument rests on the identification of a composite motif—the sun-eye, naga (serpent), and wings—as a Javanese descendant of the Horus symbol of Edfu in Egypt [1, p. 38]. The kala-head, a conventionalised mask decorating temple doorways, had already tended to become rounded in Central Javanese times, with the makara (mythical sea-creature) replaced by naga; in later periods the disc-like mask and snakes were joined by a pair of wings, and the kala-head was reduced to a single eye [1, p. 38]. At Chandi Sawentar the wings are placed “almost surreptitiously” beside the naga balustrades, while in the early mosque of Sendang Duhur they spread boldly from the gate sides, indicating a progressive reassertion of the solar cult after centuries of Hindu repression [1, p. 38].

Walter Aichele, working independently and almost simultaneously with Stutterheim, reached similar conclusions regarding the gunungan—the mountain-shaped piece shown at the beginning of Javanese shadow plays—and identified the two quadrupeds at the foot of the World Tree as “the bull of the east mountain” and “the lion of the west mountain” of Egyptian mythology, concluding that Egyptian rather than Assyrian or Babylonian conceptions best explain the motif [1, pp. 38–39].

The Sabaean Vector and Continental Absence

Wales proposed that Sabaean traders, who according to Hitti’s History of the Arabs monopolised Indian Ocean trade during the last millennium and a quarter before the era, carried a small number of Egyptian traits into Java [1, p. 37]. Stutterheim had earlier suggested that the Sabaeans brought from Egypt the Horus emblem and other cultural elements, and had identified signs on Barabudur, Sewu, and other Central Javanese temples as resembling Sabaean script, predating the Indian-based Javanese writing system [1, pp. 36–37].

A critical element of Wales’s argument is the categorical absence of comparable sun-worship or kala-head modification in any continental Greater Indian civilisation or among non-Indianised continental South-east Asian peoples [1, pp. 39–40]. This absence, he maintains, is decisive against an overland megalithic transmission route and supports the hypothesis of a maritime Sabaean vector [1, p. 39]. He further reinterprets the Dong-So’n bronze drums, previously taken by Mlle. Colani as evidence of solar worship, as depicting the Pole Star with the plane of the dead circulating around it, consistent with Assyrio-Babylonian planetary cosmology rather than a solar cult [1, pp. 41–42].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on Egypt is confined to this single article, which represents the high-water mark of the diffusionist school in South-east Asian studies just before the discipline’s post-war turn toward indigenous development models [1]. Wales’s categorical statements and his reliance on typological comparison of motifs rather than independent verification of transmission routes mark the piece as a product of that earlier paradigm. The critical responses of W. W. Rassers (1931) and K. A. H. Hidding (1931), which challenged the diffusionist interpretation from a non-diffusionist standpoint, are referenced but not reproduced; Wales promised to address them in full in his forthcoming monograph [1, p. 39]. The record thus documents a moment of methodological transition rather than a sustained institutional engagement with Egypt as a subject.

MBRAS Sources

• H.G.Q. Wales (1950). The Savaeans and possible Egyptian influences in Indonesia. JMBRAS 23(3): 36–42

References

1. H.G.Q. Wales (1950). The Savaeans and possible Egyptian influences in Indonesia JMBRAS 23(3): 36–42.