Min

Long before the first pyramid rose, Min was already ancient. His home was Koptos, a town on the great bend of the Nile where the river swings closest to the Red Sea, and there, in 1894, the English archaeologist Flinders Petrie uncovered three colossal limestone statues of the god, each around four metres tall, carved in the late predynastic age around 3300 BCE. They are among the oldest large sculptures ever found in Egypt: stark, mummified figures with the god's erect member and his mysterious emblem, their legs and torsos incised with sawfish, shells, and strange beasts of the Red Sea hills. Even then, before a single hieroglyph had been written, Min was the patron of the desert roads that began at Koptos, and the shells carved on his body were the calling cards of the caravans he protected.

In art Min is unmistakable. He stands mummy-wrapped from neck to ankle, his skin often painted black as the fertile Nile silt, his head crowned with two tall plumes that stream behind him like banners. His right arm is raised, brandishing the flail, a herdsman's whip that became the badge of his authority, while his other hand grasps his erect phallus, the blunt and unashamed sign of his power. The Egyptians saw nothing shameful in this. Min was the generative force of the world, the principle by which fields sprouted, herds multiplied, and the royal line renewed itself. His hymns call him the impregnator, he who raises his arm, the beautiful of face, foremost of Koptos. On his standards the priests carried the Min emblem, a bar flanked by two cone-shaped knobs, a fetish so old that even the Egyptians forgot what it had first been.

Koptos stood at the head of the Wadi Hammamat, the dry river valley that cut through the eastern desert to the gold mines and grey stone quarries of the hills and on to the Red Sea coast. Every expedition that marched into that furnace - soldiers, quarrymen, gold-seekers, and the ships' crews bound for Punt, the fabled incense land of Africa - prayed first to Min and carved his name on the wadi walls. The inscriptions of the Old and Middle Kingdoms call him foremost of the highlands and lord of the foreign lands, the god who brought the traveller home. Old Kingdom kings posted royal decrees at his temple, the Coptos Decrees, carved in stone, protecting his priests and his estates from taxes and forced labour, for the god of the desert road was too useful to offend.

At harvest time the whole country kept the Feast of Min, the Going Forth of the god, and the reliefs carved in the temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu, the great mortuary temple on the west bank of Thebes, show the ceremony in full. Priests carried the god's statue out on poles beneath a canopy, before him walked his sacred white bull, and great bundles of lettuce, the tall cos lettuce whose milky sap the Egyptians held to be the god's own magic of generation. Then the king stepped into the field with a sickle and cut the first sheaf of emmer wheat, offering it to his royal mother, so that the fertility of the land and the potency of the throne were bound together in a single act. In his deepest nature Min was Kamutef, the bull of his mother, the god who fathers himself, and so the kings fused him with Amun, whose temple at Luxor existed to renew the divine power of generation. Min-Amun, the Egyptians called him: two gods and one inexhaustible virility.

The Greeks who settled in Egypt looked at Min and saw their own goat-god of wild fertility, Pan, and they renamed his second city, Akhmim, Panopolis, the city of Pan, a name it carried for a thousand years. Under the Ptolemies, the Greek kings who followed Alexander, and under the Romans after them, his temple at Koptos still stood and his priests still carried the plumes, until Christianity closed the sanctuaries and the caravans found new roads. Then came the second burial. When nineteenth-century excavators brought his statues to light, a prudish age was scandalised; museum labels coughed and looked away, and some collections simply locked the god of fertility in the basement. The three colossi from Koptos, five thousand years old, now stand in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, as erect and unembarrassed as the day they were carved. Min has outlasted his prudes.