Stargate the Movie meta: Sha'uri, heroine of Abydos

Sha’uri of Abydos. Sha’re. Two names, one amazing woman.

I originally wanted to make this post about both Sha’uri and Sha’re; that is, to trace her heroism and courage not only in the movie, but in the three episodes of SG-1 in which we meet her: COTG, Secrets, and Forever in a Day. But this analysis of Sha’uri of the movie turned out to be so long that I thought it best to save the Sha’re meta for a different time.

In our first glimpses of her, she is one among many Nagadans: the woman who first proffers Daniel a bowl of water outside the mines and later smiles at the boys’ antics as they snatch Daniel’s used handkerchief out of his pocket. She and Daniel make eye-contact once or twice, and she is serving Kasuf when Daniel first tries to draw in the sand and the team discovers that writing is forbidden on Abydos, but that is all.

We first truly meet her when she is ushered into Daniel’s room, robed and veiled. Daniel, still pulling on his socks after his impromptu beauty parlor session, thinks she is one of the crowd, come to brush his hair or possibly polish his glasses. When she nervously begins to remove her robes, Daniel stares at her, open-mouthed, for a long moment before he recovers enough to scramble to her feet and stop her. He pulls her robes back onto her shoulders and ushers her firmly towards the entrance to the room…

Only to discover that Kasuf is standing nearby. At the sight of the two of them – fully dressed – standing in the cloth-hung doorway, Kasuf asks a question, Sha’uri answers, and Kasuf goes down on his knees, clearly afraid. Daniel, still unable to comprehend the people of Abydos, hastily pantomimes his pleasure by putting his arm around Sha’uri and smiling and nodding. Kasuf is satisfied, if still a bit confused, and Daniel and Sha’uri return to the center of the room.

Daniel sits Sha’uri down and crouches down in front of her, trying to introduce himself. “Daniel,” he says, pointing at himself.

Confused, Sha’uri points herself and repeats, “Daniel.”

“No, no,” Daniel tries again. He points at his chest more emphatically, hiding the Eye of Ra for good measure. “Daniel. I’m Daniel.”

Sha’uri hesitates, then, with a shy, shaky smile, points at herself and says, “Sha’uri.”

With that first hurdle of communication past, Daniel tries to indicate that they’d come from the pyramid with the Stargate, by drawing it in the sand. Sha’uri immediately turns her head away – an obedient girl, refusing to look at the forbidden writing. Daniel glances up and sees her reaction.

“It’s okay,” he tells her. “Never mind.” He rises to his feet. “It’s okay,” he repeats, then sighs before moving to the doorway and peering outside.

It is at that moment, as Daniel’s back is to her, that Sha’uri dares to perform an act of unbelievable courage: she reaches down, smooths out the bottom of Daniel’s impromptu pyramid, and begins to draw in the sand herself.

Consider what that moment means to Sha’uri. She is part of a society that has been repressed and enslaved for ten thousand years. In all that time, reading and writing have been completely forbidden. Unchanging, stagnant, bound to the rules by an alien parasite… What chance does a society like that have to produce a rebel, a free-thinker?

And yet that is exactly what Sha’uri was. It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing, either, prompted by her guarded admiration for Daniel. Who is Daniel to her, at this point? This strange man with whom she cannot communicate; the man who, from her perspective, has rejected her hand in marriage, even if he has chosen to allow Kasuf to think he was satisfied; the man that, to the best of her knowledge, is actually the representative of Ra, and might only be testing her to see if she will obey the tenets of her master.

No, Sha’uri’s rebellion had to take place long before that, because she recognizes Earth’s point of origin, which means she has actively explored before she even met Daniel. No one on Abydos ever went near the catacombs with their forbidden drawings on the wall; their passage is blocked with stone when Sha’uri first leads Daniel there, and Skaara, Jack, and the others only find Daniel and Sha’uri because they followed the mastadge that tracked Daniel’s scent. Sha’uri’s quiet rebellion is, in fact, absolutely and wholly unique.

So we have Sha’uri, drawing Earth’s point of origin in the sand. Daniel turns to look at her and stares at her sketch.

“Earth?” he asks, unbelieving.

Sha’uri, of course, still does not understand him, and can only stare back. He tries to ask her if she’s seen it before. He points to his eyes, to the symbol on the ground, and Sha’uri finally points to her own eyes and nods.

“Show me,” Daniel urges, and he holds out his hand.

Hesitant, tremulous, Sha’uri takes his hand and allows him to pull her to her feet.

Daniel removes tumbled rubble before he can follow Sha’uri’s lead to the hidden tunnels in the catacombs, where the symbol for Earth is clearly visible. There are other symbols there, as well; herioglyphs that Daniel can recognize, and he begins to scan them, muttering aloud to himself as he goes…

And Sha’uri makes another connection, as she questions his pronounciation, which has drifted over the millennia until her language is not quite the same as the Ancient Egyptian that Daniel can speak. Daniel, astonished, points to a symbol on the wall, and pronounces it as he would; Sha’uri corrects him, using the vowelization of her people. Sha’uri has, at the very least, an understanding that symbol = sound, which is the basic fundamental grasp of a person’s ability to read. For the rest of the night, Daniel plays willing student to her eager teachings, and by the time Jack and the others find them, Daniel is able to communicate.

Imagine a world – one through the quantum mirror, if you will – where Daniel and Sha’uri do not make this monumental breakthrough. It’s easy, really; the mirror universe of TBFTGOG, or the one of POV, had no Daniel Jackson to encourage Sha’uri to dare to rebel. And while we don’t know the fate of Abydos in those universes, we certainly know the eventual fate of Earth.

So now Daniel is able to give Jack proper intelligence about Ra and the danger the alien poses to Earth. Jack orders them back to the pyramid and the Stargate, and Sha’uri watches as they leave, with Daniel turning twice to look back at her as he walks away – the man who, according to her understanding, has rejected her as his wife.

We next meet Sha’uri when disaster has struck Nagada; less than half a dozen shots from the two death gliders are enough to instill utter despair and complete panic. Skaara, who followed Jack and Daniel to the pyramid and witnessed their capture, finds Sha’uri – herself bleeding from a head wound – cleaning the face of an injured child.

“Sha’uri,” Skaara stammers, “what happened here?”

“Ra punished us,” Sha’uri answers flatly.

“Why?” Skaara asks, bewildered.

Sha’uri only asks in return, “What happened to Daniel?” And again, as Skaara doesn’t speak “What happened to Daniel?” (It is, for the record, pronounced “Danyer” here.)

Skaara’s face is her answer, and as he swallows hard and walks away, Sha’uri is finally reduced to tears.

Sha’uri, at this point, admires and respects Daniel. Perhaps there is an element of hero-worship, too. But this isn’t love; don’t forget that, from her perspective, Daniel has refused to be her husband. I would suggest that her grief was for the man who helped teach her the secrets of the past: the secrets that Ra had denied her people for all those millennia. Her initiative to rebel – by teaching others what Daniel had taught her – lends credence to that theory. This isn’t the despair of a woman who has lost her love; this is the angered resolve of a woman who has been shown a glimpse of a heritage that her people have lost, and that she is determined to reclaim.

We see that determination when Skaara and his boys track her down in the catacombs, where she is poring over the drawings that Daniel has read for her. When Skaara tries to tell her that Ra has called an assembly – an execution – Sha’uri’s words to her younger brother and his friends are intense, sharp, and undeniable.

“Skaara. Nabeh. I want you to listen. We can’t let this happen. I want you to know what Daniel told me, about where we came from and why we can no longer live as slaves.”

Consider, again, that Sha’uri thinks that Daniel is either dead, or about to die. She is not going to let this newly-discovered legacy slip through her fingers. When we see her and Skaara again, they are standing among the assembled people of Nagada, supposedly ready to witness an execution – but, in fact, determined to stop it. They have the soldiers’ weapons ready to serve as a diversion; they have robes to throw over the men’s uniforms, to help them hide among the populace; they have mastadges ready to help them flee.

The rescue succeeds, at least partially; Freeman dies in the confusion, but Kawalsky, Ferretti, Jack, and Daniel make it to safety. The little rebel group eventually manage to gather together in a cave. It is here, finally, that Daniel discovers, from a stray remark from Nabeh, that Sha’uri is actually supposed to be his wife.

In the following scene, we see the first return of Sha’uri’s nervousness since she took Daniel’s hand to lead him to the catacombs. As long as the subject was knowledge and the power it grants, Sha’uri has been sure, confident, and willing to take the most outrageous risks; when it comes to Daniel’s affections, though, she is convinced that he finds her undesirable. Daniel’s kiss is enough to tell her otherwise, and from that moment onward, all of Sha’uri’s focus is wholly on the rebellion that will lead her people to freedom from Ra.

It is Shau’ri’s lead that Skaara is following the next morning, when he boldly draws on the wall for the first time in his life – and Daniel recognizes the three moons of Abydos as the symbol of origin that they need to get home. It is her lead, again, that Skaara follows when he shouts at his father that they will no longer live as slaves, and Daniel shows Kasuf that the “gods” they worship are merely men under their Horus guard helmets.

Sha’uri joins the group that goes to the pyramid in disguise – the only woman to do so. She tries to wield Daniel’s pistol in his defense; her failure to succeed in killing with a completely foreign weapon, when even the concept of using a weapon is likely unfamiliar to her, takes nothing away from the courage that led her to try. And when the victory over Ra is complete, and the fireball of his destruction still hangs in the skies, a fully-confident Sha’uri has no hesitation in kissing Daniel in full sight of her entire people.

It is that first courageous step of Sha’uri’s – the willingness to seek out the forbidden writings, the daring to draw in the sand for Daniel, and to take his hand and show him where she saw that symbol herself – that truly starts the rebellion of the people of Abydos against Ra. And without that, Daniel would have been a single man against Ra’s might when he tried to stop Jack, Kawalsky, and Freeman from being executed, and they all would have died. Even if they might have somehow escaped, and even retrieved the bomb, what would have happened? Without the people’s active rebellion, Ra would have never been angered enough to leave the planet; and while the ticking bomb would probably have taken Ra with it when it went off in the pyramid, Jack, Daniel, and the others would have died, too. Even if the Stargate itself had been unaffected by the blast, Ra had seemed quite confident that the raw ore would, indeed, combust; and that means that Nagada, which was in relatively easy walking distance from the pyramid, would have been destroyed as well.

paian's beautifully eloquent icon – the one I’ve used to make this post – speaks nothing less than the truth. A single finger tracing an ancient symbol in the sand was the start of the Abydos Rebellion, which led an entire people to freedom and destroyed Ra, the Supreme System Lord. I’ve often said that I wish that Sha’re and Daniel could have their happy ending, but it wasn’t only for Daniel’s sake. I certainly love Sha’re for what she means to Daniel, but most of all, I love Sha’re for herself.