Today is Sham al-Nassim, the ancient Egyptian spring holiday
celebrated on the Monday following Coptic Easter Sunday. It is not a
Christian holiday; its origins are said to be with the Ancient Egyptian
Shemu or spring holiday, later in the Christian period localized around
Easter; Muslims celebrate equally with Christians and, until their
exodus in the Nasser era, Egyptian Jews also participated. Like Nowruz in the Irano-Turkic worlds, it's an opportunity to cerebrate the arrival of spring.
It's usually
said that only two Egyptian holidays date back to the days of the
pharaohs: Sham al-Nassim and Wafa' al-Nil in mid-August, which marks
the Nile flood (though the Aswan High Dam ended the annual inundation in
the 1960s.) Both, like so much of Egyptian history, center on the Nile.
On Sham al-Nassim Egyptians picnic on the river, stroll in parks,
gardens, or the zoo, and eat seasonal foods: a dried salty fish called
fassikh, green onions,
lettuce,
tirmis
(lupinis), and (a borrowing from Easter? Or vice-versa?) they dye
colored eggs. (See the photos below.) Even the foods may be ancient.
Supposedly Plutarch somewhere wrote that the Ancient Egyptians had a
spring holiday involving dried fish, lettuce, and onions, but I've never
found a citation to confirm that story, beloved of Egyptian websites,
even government ones.
Even the name is interesting. In Arabic
sham al-nassim means "smelling the breezes," a delightful description of a spring day on the river. But if it is truly a descendant of
Shemu, that
Ancient Egyptian word meant "harvest." In Ancient Egypt, the harvest
was not in the fall as in most agricultural societies; it was in spring
and summer, before the Nile rises in August.
Shemu is presumably the origin of the Coptic word for "summer,"
Shom, and despite the appropriate "smelling the breezes" meaning in Arabic, likely the origin of the
Sham part of
Sham al-Nassim. This should of course in no way deter anyone from using the day to smell the breezes.
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