Friday Photo: Catfish flopping around market

Today’s Friday Photo comes from a baladi market in Maadi. (Baladi is a term we use to mean kind of really local.)

It’s a catfish. A huge one. A live one, hence the blurry photo – it was flipping and flopping around in the guy’s hands as he happily posed for the photo.

The photo was taken by Amira Hanafi, a Chicago-based artist who’s in Cairo working on a project about people’s visceral responses to the city. I was privileged to go on a walk around the Maadi area with her, as part of the project.

We wandered and wondered our way through a whole slice of Cairo life, from the posh to the… well, baladi. We were shooting the breeze, talking about everything from the health benefits of gargir, to women’s shoes (don’t ask!), to trash and its relationship with fuul vendors.

And we also shot this catfish!

On catfish and body parts

(Or: The legend of Osiris and Isis)

There’s an interesting ancient Egyptian legend that features a catfish in a starring role. Here’s an abridged version of the legend of Osiris:

Many years ago, there was a very good man called Osiris, who taught the Egyptians about agriculture. Everyone loved him, and his wife and sister, Isis. (Yep, that’s one woman.) But everyone hated his brother Seth, who was a nasty piece of work. Seth was also married to his sister, Nephthys. That’s how they rolled in ancient times.

Seth decided to do his brother in. So he hosted a wonderful party. At the end of it, he unveiled a beautiful carved box, and announced that anyone who could fit inside it, could keep it. Osiris, not being the smartest tool in the box, jumped into the box. And whadda ya know – Seth had carved it to fit him perfectly. Seth slammed the lid shut, and cast it into the Nile.

Then cackled, evilly.

Isis and Nephthys weren’t too impressed at their brother’s behaviour, and set off to find Osiris. They searched high and low, and eventually salvaged the box from under a tree in what is now Lebanon. But Seth learned of this, and flew into a rage. This time, he chopped Osiris’s body into little pieces, and again scattered them in the Nile.

And cackled, evilly.

One of those pieces was eaten by – you guessed it – a catfish. Now, depending on which version of the myth you believe, it was either Osiris’s backbone, or… his penis! (In the interests of a good story, we’re going to go with the catfish-ate-god’s-penis version.)

Either way, Isis and Nephthys were even less impressed this time round. They transformed themselves into falcons, and flew off to search for Osiris’s body parts.

They assembled them at a holy place called Abydos and, with the help of the jackal-headed God of mummification, Anubis, brought Osiris back to life.

He was re-animated for long enough to conceive a child with Isis. (Which is no mean feat, if you are missing a penis. Rumour has it that she fashioned a new – and improved – one from clay.)

Osiris then went on to take his place as God of the underworld. Isis bore and raised her child, Horus, in secret. (Horus is the falcon-headed God of the sky, which just goes to show what a combination of inbreeding and procreation with a clay penis can do to the gene pool.)

Once Horus was old enough, he gathered a great army that met Seth’s army for their final battle at a place called Edfu.

Horus and Seth met in hand-to-hand combat in the middle of the battle. Horus cut off one of Seth’s testicles, and Seth responded by plucking out one of Horus’s eyes. But eventually Horus triumphed, and killed his evil uncle, before going on to become the first Pharaoh of Egypt.

THE END.

Note: This is one of the prime myths of ancient Egypt. There are loads of versions of it, and I make no claims to be an Egyptologist. But I’m sure the events really took place just as described.