By the middle of the 18th Dynasty, Thebes had become a major religious centre with a full range of temples and shrines dedicated not only to Amen and his family but to a whole host of lesser deities. On the western bank of the Nile, opposite Thebes, were the mortuary temples of the kings, the tombs of the élite citizens and, hidden away in the Valley of the Kings, the tombs of the pharaohs themselves. All New Kingdom monarchs showed their extreme devotion to Amen by trying to outdo their predecessors in embellishing the Karnak complex itself, and a considerable amount of Egypt's new-found foreign wealth was diverted towards the Great Temple of Amen so that it grew physically, becoming an economic force in its own right and employing an increasingly large staff to carry out the cult ceremonies and administer the god's extensive portfolio. Theban state religion was now organized on a far more professional basis and the hitherto private deity started to make a series of well-organized public parades through the streets, a tradition which allowed the people to enjoy a day's holiday while subtly underlining the magnificence and omnipresence of the god and his priesthood.
By the middle of the New Kingdom, the religious foundations controlled an estimated one-third of the cultivated land and employed approximately twenty per cent of the population. Amen himself owned not only temples but major secular investments such as fields, ships, mines, quarries, villages and even prisoners of war who had been donated by the grateful monarchy. The income from these assets, together with the routine daily offerings of thousands of loaves of bread and hundreds of jugs of beer plus costlier foodstuffs including wine and meat, was collected by Amen's earthly representatives and was used to pay the temple employees. Surpluses were stored in vast mud-brick warehouses kept safe within the temple walls. Within a very short time the Amen temple at Karnak was second only to the throne itself as a centre of economic and political influence in Egypt.
Perhaps it is modern cynicism which prompts present-day historians to question why the 18th Dynasty monarchs should have deliberately chosen to raise the cult of Amen to state god status, thereby creating an immensely wealthy and semi-independent priesthood capable of posing a threat to the throne. The simple answer, that the kings felt a strong devotion to their patron deity, may well be the true one. However, it is tempting to see the rise of Amen as a more calculated gesture, perhaps aimed at reducing the influence of the northern-based cult of Re. Promoting a new Egyptian state god, one who had demonstrated his powers by granting victory in battle, may have been a shrewd move aimed at unifying a demoralized country recovering from the ignominy of foreign rule. It would certainly have helped the position of the new pharaoh who, as chief priest of all the gods, and indeed as the very son of Amen, had the power to interpret the god's wishes as he saw fit. Hatchepsut herself was to make great use of her filial relationship with Amen, continually stressing the doctrine of the divine birth of kings to support her claim to the throne. However, this mutual dependency could prove to be a two-edged sword. Any public failure by the new god, such as a refusal to grant further victories to the Egyptian army, could be taken as a direct sign that the king himself was failing to perform his duties correctly, and a powerful and wealthy priesthood could ultimately bring about the fall of a weak or inefficient king.
By the late 18th Dynasty, the monarchy was starting to feel itself challenged by the power and ever-increasing wealth of the cult of Amen. Amenhotep II, Tuthmosis IV and Amenhotep III all appointed their own loyal followers to the position of High Priest in an attempt to maintain a degree of royal control over the priesthood, while Amenhotep III also started to pay more attention to the other gods of the Egyptian pantheon, partially reverting back to Old Kingdom theology by re-allying the monarchy with the sun god, Re of Heliopolis. His son, Amenhotep IV (now known as the heretic King Akhenaten, ‘Serviceable to the Aten’), took this policy to extremes by completely rejecting the traditional polytheistic religion and imposing a new monotheistic cult based on the worship of the sun disc, or Aten, on his people. This radical change, which included the establishment of a new capital in the desert of Middle Egypt, was too extreme for the conservative Egyptians, and far too much of a threat to the power of Amen. It was doomed to failure. By Year 3 of his successor's reign, the old gods, including Amen, had been reinstated and the new king had changed his name from Tutankhaten, ‘Living Image of the Aten’, to Tutankhamen, ‘Living Image of Amen’.
... all the wealth that goes into Thebes of Egypt, where treasures in greatest store are laid up in men's houses. Thebes, which is the city of an hundred gates and from each issue forth to do battle two hundred doughty warriors with horses and chariots.17
The early 18th Dynasty rulers broke with tradition when they established their capital at their home-city of Thebes. Thebes, or Thebai, is the Greek name for the southern city which the Egyptians officially knew as Waset but which they referred to simply as ‘The City’ (literally Niwt), and which modern Egyptians now call Luxor. The new capital lay on the east bank of the Nile in the 4th Upper Egyptian province, close enough to both Nubia and the Eastern Desert to be able to benefit from the lucrative trade routes, and far enough away from the northern capital Memphis to have always maintained semi-independent status. Thebes had been an unimportant provincial town throughout the Old Kingdom, and it was not until the civil unrest of the First Intermediate Period that the local Theban rulers started to gain in power and influence. By the time of Ahmose, Thebes had expanded to become an extensive city, and the Theban necropolis on the west bank of the Nile had become the main burial ground for the pharaohs, their families and the higher-ranking court officials. During the 18th Dynasty, however, the old city mound was completely flattened to allow the redevelopment of the Karnak temple, and the residential area was rebuilt on relatively low-lying ground which now lies below the water-table and which is consequently lost from the archaeological record.
Living conditions within Thebes must have been, for all but the most wealthy, somewhat unpleasant during the hot summer months. There was a permanent shortage of building land, made much worse by the extension of the Karnak and Luxor temples, and there was no formal planning policy so that, as the city expanded, the houses were packed more and more closely together, blocking the light from the crowded and twisting streets. The lack of any form of official sanitation combined with the habit of keeping animals within the home to create an undesirable, vermin-ridden environment that must have been highly unhealthy for the unfortunate citizens. However, although many were forced by the nature of their employment to live in the overcrowded towns and cities, Egypt was still a predominantly rural country and the majority of Egyptians lived relatively healthy lives working as peasant farmers in small and politically insignificant agricultural communities. Throughout the New Kingdom it was fashionable to despise city life as a necessary evil while rural life strongly – romanticized – was considered to be ideal. Just as modern city dwellers dream of owning a cottage in the country, so Egyptian officials yearned for a spacious single-storey villa set in its own grounds away from the bustle, noise and smells of the city. For the higher echelons of society, this dream could become a reality which would continue into the Afterlife; their heaven took the form of the ‘Field of Reeds’, an idyllic rural retreat where noblemen, their wives and daughters would spend eternity supervising the labours of others less fortunate than themselves.
Thebes did, however, boast one example of a well-planned community. The workmen's village of Deir el-Medina, simply ‘the Village’ to its inhabitants, was founded by Amenhotep I and largely built by Tuthmosis I in order to provide a convenient base for those employed in the cutting and decoration of the royal tombs in the nearby Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens. Situated on the West Bank, opposite Thebes and over a mile away from the River Nile, the Village was of necessity built of a combination of stone and mud-brick. For this reason the Village has survived where others, built entirely of mud-brick, have crumbled to dust, and is now able to provide us with a vivid insight into the
daily lives of a specialized section of Egypt's middle and working classes. Deir el-Medina experienced over four hundred years of continuous occupation by not only the workmen and their supervisors but their families, dependants, pets and those providing ancillary services such as potters, priests and laundry workers. By the 19th Dynasty up to seventy families – about three hundred people – lived in the modest rectangular houses which had been laid out with all the precision of a modern American city, within a defining wall. Beyond the wall there was a cemetery, a collection of chapels for private worship, and possibly a subsidiary village intended to house the lowest-ranking servants and serfs. Every month a gang of male workers would leave the Village and head for the Valley of the Kings, where they lodged in temporary accommodation for up to twenty-seven working days. Back at the Village, daily life continued as in any normal Egyptian town or city for as long as the king was able to provide the rations which served as wages. During the 18th Dynasty, a period of economic strength and efficient administration, the workmen's Village functioned well.
Although Thebes may be regarded as the new state capital, and certainly as the new religious capital, the idea of the single predominant city was now of far less importance than it had been during the Old Kingdom when Egypt had been ruled from the northern city of Memphis. Memphis was at that time not only the largest Egyptian city, it was the site of the main royal residence and the administrative centre, and nearby were both the royal burial grounds and the major cult centre of Re. In many ways her geographical position made Memphis a far more suitable capital city than Thebes. Situated at the crossroads between the two traditional regions of Upper (Southern) and Lower (Northern, or Delta) Egypt, Memphis enjoyed excellent communications with both north and south. Although an inland city, Memphis, on the River Nile, was the site of the royal dockyards, and the city flourished as a marine trading centre. Furthermore, Memphis made an ideal base for the army. Following the southern campaigns of Tuthmosis I, Nubia, although given to frequent rebellions, could offer no real threat to the might of Egypt. The real danger was perceived as coming from the Levant, where semi-independent city-states were starting to unite under the banners of the powerful rulers of Kadesh, Mitanni and the Hittites. We know that Tuthmosis I built a large palace/barrack at Memphis, and it seems likely that throughout the 18th Dynasty the state bureaucracy was still controlled to a large extent from that city. Unfortunately, little of ancient Memphis has survived to be excavated.
Just as the 18th Dynasty rulers refused to commit themselves to a single capital city, they did not restrict themselves to one principal palace. Instead they adopted a mobile court, perhaps inspired by their experiences of military campaigns, and toured the country with a small entourage, travelling by river to inspect and impose control on the various regions and staying in short-term palaces known as the ‘Mooring Places of Pharaoh’, which were often little more than elaborate rest-houses situated at strategic points along the Nile. The journey from Memphis to Thebes would have been a slow one of perhaps two to three weeks and it made sense that the less mobile members of the royal household, including the majority of the women, their children and their retinues, were maintained in permanent harem-palaces away from the main royal residences. By the 19th Dynasty the country had become even more de-centralized. The official capital was by then Pa-Ramesses in the Delta but the largest centre of population was still Memphis, while Thebes remained both the main cult centre and the burial place of kings.
The Mooring Places should be considered as palaces in the sense that they provided a home for the king and his retinue, but they should not be imagined as the ancient equivalent of Buckingham Palace or Versailles. The idea of the settled palace, or indeed the settled upper-class household, is a relatively modern one. In fourteenth-century England, for example, even a gentleman of relatively modest means might be the lord of several manors, all of which he needed to oversee in person, while a great lord would own many estates throughout the land. When such a landowner moved from one estate to another he was accompanied by his household (family, dependants and servants), his furniture, plate and clothing, all travelling through the countryside in a style intended to impress his wealth and dignity on the less fortunate locals. A move every two to three weeks would not have been seen as excessive, and it was not until the end of the fourteenth century that the great households became relatively static, moving perhaps two or three times a year.18
The palaces scattered along the Nile were never intended to act as impressive stone testimonies to the glories of a particular king's reign; instead they were constructed quickly and relatively cheaply from mud-brick wherever and whenever required. The use of mud-brick meant that the palaces could be designed on the spot to fit the exact requirements of their occupants, unlike the more or less standard plans used for the stone-built temples and tombs. However, the use of mud-brick also meant that the palaces were vulnerable to decay, and we now have few surviving palace buildings. The royal progression from palace to palace ensured that the authority of the king became a reality to those in even the most distant provinces and, at a more practical level, may well have been an efficient cost-cutting exercise. Although each Mooring Place was provided with its own farm and granary this did not necessarily provide enough food for a visit, and it was often necessary to make the local mayor responsible for provisioning the royal household. Local officials presumably came to dread the news of an impending royal visit.19 A 19th Dynasty scribal exercise gives some indication of the preparations considered necessary to welcome a pharaoh:
Get on with having everything ready for pharaoh's [arrival]… have made ready 100 ring stands for bouquets of flowers… 1,000 loaves of fine flour… Cakes, 100 baskets… Dried meat, 100 baskets… Milk, 60 measures… Grapes, 50 sacks… 20
By the end of Ahmose's reign the Egyptian economy was booming. Egypt was naturally a very wealthy country and once unity and central control had been re-established it was possible to co-ordinate the management of her ample natural resources, taxing the primary producers – the peasants and their landlords – to support the bureaucratic and priestly superstructure and storing up surpluses to provide against harsher times. The Greek historian Herodotus commented admiringly:
In no other country do they gather their seed with so little labour. They have no need to break up the ground with the plough, nor to use the hoe, nor indeed to do any of the hard work which the rest of mankind finds necessary if they are to get a crop. Instead the farmer simply waits until the river has, of its own volition, spread itself over the fields and withdrawn again to its bed, and then he sows his plot of land…21
While the farmer's life was almost certainly somewhat harder than the idyllic existence outlined by Herodotus, it is clear that the peasant labour force, without undue exertion, was well able to support Egypt's population of approximately 3,000,000 during the early New Kingdom. During the period of inundation when the land was flooded and all routine agricultural work ceased, they provided an unemployed workforce available to work on major state projects such as the building of royal monuments. The knowledge that the state and temple warehouses were brimming with grain must have been intensely reassuring to the 18th Dynasty monarchs who knew that repeated famine, just like freak floods, could bring about a quick change of dynasty.
Away from the immediate Nile Valley, Egypt was rich in building stone, both the softer limestone and sandstone and harder, more exotic, stones such as granite, which was quarried at the First Cataract, quartzite, which came from the Gebel Ahmar near modern Cairo, basalt from the Wadi Hammamat in the Eastern Desert and alabaster from Hatnub, Middle Egypt. Although there were no precious gems, the semi-precious amethyst, carnelian and jasper could all be found within Egypt's borders, there was gold in the Eastern Desert and Sinai was mined for both copper and turquoise. The only valuable commodities which were missing were silver and wood; these could be imported from the Aegean and from the Near East as and when needed.
Egypt's ne
wly re-imposed control over Nubia led to increased supplies of gold and highly desirable exotica such as ivory, baboons, pygmies, ostrich eggs and feathers. This in turn provided surplus items for barter with Egypt's Mediterranean neighbours; diplomatic and trading links had been established with Mitanni, Babylon, Assyria, the Hittite Empire and the Greek islands, and Egypt was able to supply gold, grain and linen, receiving silver, wood, copper, oil and wine in return. As the Egyptian sphere of influence slowly expanded throughout the Near East, the treasury coffers opened wide to receive a steadily increasing stream of tribute from client states which, together with the trade surplus, internal taxation and the plunder seized from those unwise enough to resist Egypt's advances, made Egypt the most wealthy and influential country in the Mediterranean world. By the time of Amenhotep III, almost one century after Hatchepsut's reign, an envious King Tushrata of Mitanni was appealing to his fellow monarch: ‘So let my brother send me gold in very great quantity without measure. For in my brother's land gold is as plentiful as dust.’22
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