Aman-nooti
The aman-nooti, 'water masters' or angels of the Nile, are the benevolent spirits believed to inhabit and guard the river along the Nubian reach. Their name couples the Nobiin word aman, 'water,' with the local Arabic gloss malaikat al-bahr, and their cult belongs above all to the ritual world of women, who address them in matters of childbirth, fertility, marriage and sickness. Offerings of sweetened bread, rice-milk, henna, perfume and incense are cast into the current, and forty days after a birth the newborn is carried to the bank and washed in the river to secure the angels' blessing. Fadwa El Guindi, drawing on fieldwork among the Egyptian Nubians in the 1960s, treated the angels as the organizing theme of a whole complex of river ritual that survived successive conversions to Christianity and Islam. The angels stand in explicit opposition to the malevolent water beings, the dogri, so that the Nile is imagined as populated by both guardian and predatory powers.
Domains
- rivers and water
- fertility
- protection
Powers
- blesses infants presented at the riverbank
- grants fertility, health and good fortune to those who make river offerings
- guards the reaches of the Nile
Epithets
- malaikat al-bahr
Relations
- enemy: Dogri
- enemy: Aman Doger
- ally: al-Khidr