Note: In 1988, Naguib Mahfouz was WINNER of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
“From the remotest past, it has been decreed that humans shall spend their lives on earth. All the while, there would go with them…a record of all their acts and desires, embodied on their naked forms. Finally, there would be held a detailed dialogue that would end with a decisive word. This, then, is that trial, convened after the passage of the allotted span of time..”–Osiris, at the celestial trial of Egypt’s kings by the Immortals.
Twenty-five years after Nobel Prize-winner Naguib Mahfouz wrote this novel, it has been released in English by the University of Cairo Press. An unusual book, it is more a catalog of all the rulers of Egypt since the First Kingdom than a novel in the traditional sense. Each ruler has been summoned to appear for his own trial at the celestial Hall of Justice, where Osiris reposes on his golden throne, with Isis and Horus flanking him. Each ruler must present his own case, after which the 
gods and the other Immortals deliberate and assign him to the place where he will spend his afterlife–Paradise, the Inferno, or the Place of Insignificance, between the two, neither Heaven nor Hell. Thoth, Scribe of the Gods, sits at Osiris’s feet, recording the proceedings in the Book of All.
The first trial is for King Menes, the mightiest monarch of the First Dynasty, who subdued Libya, joined Lower Egypt to South Egypt, altered the course of the Nile, and built the city of Memphis on new land. As he presents his case, his judges counter his positive presentation with other facts that have been ignored. One hundred thousand Libyans died, and two hundred thousand Egyptians from the North and South Kingdoms died. The peasants did not benefit much from his changes. As the various kings present their cases, it is Isis who is usually the peacemaker, offering reasons to justify the kings’ actions so that some may sit with the Immortals.
In short sections averaging between two and five pages, the rulers are presented chronologically in a catalog from the earliest of Egyptian history through the trial of Anwar Sadat. As the rulers move forward chronologically, the reader perceives subtle changes–from the early kings, who are are fierce warriors and builders, to later kings who begin to show more sympathetic treatment of their subjects. At the halfway point in the novel, Thoth 
announces that the Egypt of the gods, pyramids, and temples has come to an end, and Egypt is ruled henceforth by non-Egyptians. Persian kings seize the throne. Christianity arrives in Egypt during the Roman Empire, and sectarian battles eventually take place between the Egyptian church and that of Byzantium. Islam also sweeps the country.
Eventually, the chronology reaches the twentieth century, with Egypt’s colonial rule by the British, and finally, the administrations of Gamal Abdel Nasser and Muhammad Anwar al-Sadat. Nasser comes under particularly hostile argument during his trial by the Immortals: “You were heedless of liberty and human rights…Few have performed so many services to their country as you have for yours, or brought down so many evils upon it….” At Sadat’s trial, one former ruler among the Immortals accuses him: “You wanted democratic rule in which the leaders have dictatorial authority.”
More a catalog than a novel, Before the Throne provides fascinating research information, but there are no dates included, and most of the kings and rulers are people with whom western readers will be unfamiliar. Mahfouz’s very short summaries 
of these rulers make the rulers difficult to distinguish from each other, and the threads uniting the earliest Kingdoms of Egyptian history–the time of the pyramids–with modern times are not strong enough to sustain a sense of thematic development.
Ultimately, Mahfouz tells his audience the lessons he wants them to glean from the novel. Osiris announces, “Thus has the life of Egypt passed before you in all its joys and sorrows…from the time that Menes brought forth her unity, until she regained her independence at the hand of al-Sadat.” Giving each of the Immortals an opportunity to speak, Mahfouz then presents a list of lessons and reminders for the country: Akhenaten, for example, advises the Egyptians “to hold to the worship of the One God.” Menes admonishes them to “Be zealous for the unity of the land and the people, for disaster only comes when this unity is ruptured.” Khufu declares that “Egypt must believe in labor.” Anwat Sadat adds that the goal should be “civilization and peace.” And Isis, at the close of the novel, implores the Divinity “to invest the folk of Egypt with the wisdom and the power to remain for all time a lighthouse of right guidance, and of beauty.”
Notes: The photo of Naguib Mahfouz appears on Al Ahram Weekly On-line, February, 15, 2006.
In the drawing at the bottom of the review, King Menes (Narmer) wears the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt: www.artyfactory.com
Other works by Naguib Mahfouz: AKHENATEN, THE DAY THE LEADER WAS KILLED, KARNAK CAFE, THE MIRAGE, MORNING AND EVENING TALK, CAIRO MODERN
