Daughters of Isis - Joyce Tyldesley

by Daughters of Isis- Women of Ancient Egypt (epub)

  We do not know how Hatchepsut’s long rule ended, although it seems likely that she died a natural death aged between fifty-two and seventy-two in her twenty-second regnal year. There is certainly no evidence to suggest that she was either murdered or in any way deposed by her co-ruler. Signs of her reign were destroyed after her death when an attempt was made to efface both her name and her memory, one of the worst punishments that could be inflicted on a dead pharaoh. Her portraits and cartouches were defaced and her monuments were either destroyed or re-named. This was, however, by no means an attempt at complete obliteration, and the destruction seems to have been conducted in a rather haphazard way. Hatchepsut’s name was omitted from all the king lists, which record the

  Fig. 37 Hatchepsut (now erased) with Tuthmosis I

  simple succession of Tuthmosis I, II and III, and only Manetho preserved the memory of a female ruler named Amensis or Amense as his fifth sovereign of the 18th Dynasty.

  Queen Nefertiti – 18th Dynasty

  Fig. 38 Cartouche of Queen Nefertiti

  As my heart rejoices in the Great Royal Wife and her children, and old age be granted to the Great Royal Wife Neferneruaten-Nefertiti, living forever in these millions of years, she being in the care of the pharaoh. And old age be granted to the Princess Meretaten and the Princess Meketaten, her children, they being in the care of their mother the Queen.

  Amarna Boundary Stela

  Nefertiti is the one queen of Egypt whose appearance is familiar to us today, thanks to the fortuitous preservation of the carved and painted head which now has pride of place in the Berlin Museum. We can therefore see that, as her name ‘A Beautiful Woman has Come’ implies, she was a strikingly attractive lady with a calm and slightly ironic smile. It is tempting to imagine that Nefertiti is perhaps having a private laugh at the attempts still being made by egyptologists to gain a sensible understanding of her confused life and even more enigmatic death.

  Nefertiti rose from obscure origins to become the chief wife of the 18th Dynasty Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, the fifth king to succeed Hatchepsut. Given the 18th Dynasty fondness for incestuous royal marriages it is likely, but not proven, that she would have belonged to a minor branch of the royal family. The rule of the new king began in a conventional enough manner with Amenhotep succeeding his father to the throne in about 1358 BC, and we have enough surviving portraits of the new king and queen to see that they behaved very much in traditional royal style with Nefertiti acting as a passive support to her husband. However, a short time into his reign Amenhotep appears to have undergone a dramatic and sudden religious conversion which led him to completely reject the well-established gods of his country in favour of an obscure monotheistic religion requiring worship of the power of the sun, or the Aten. Amenhotep was not a man to do things by halves and, although the concept of one god who was the sole creator of all things must have been very strange to his fellow Egyptians who were used to worshipping a multitude of deities with different attributes, soon his entire court was also venerating the Aten. The king himself stressed his conversion by changing his throne name to Akhenaten, ‘Spirit of the Aten’, and it is under this name that he has become infamous as Egypt’s first and last ‘heretic’ king.

  We have no idea of the part that Nefertiti played in her husband’s dramatic change of faith. However we do know that she accepted the new state religion with all the zeal of a recent convert; not only did she expand her name to the rather cumbersome Neferneruaten-Nefertiti – literally ‘Beautiful are the Beauties of the Aten, A Beautiful Woman has Come’ – but she was seen to participate enthusiastically in the new religious ceremonies, taking a highly prominent role which a less unconventional queen might more properly have left to her husband. Indeed, as the cult of the Aten developed, the royal couple themselves became gradually more and more involved not just as worshippers but as objects of worship, until all three received the regular prayers of the faithful with the king and queen continuing to acknowledge the superior power of the Aten. The ambitious building of a new capital city, Akhetaten or ‘Horizon of the Aten’ (present-day Amarna), sited well away from the cult centres of Amen and the other displaced deities, reinforced the dominance of the new religion and reduced the power of the old established priesthoods which were based in the traditionally important cities.

  At this time there was a striking change in the type of clothing worn around the court. In all previous phases of Egyptian history there had been a clear distinction between the garments worn by men and those worn by women. However, during the Amarna period there was a curious blending of styles with both Akhenaten and his queen adopting long unisex pleated gowns. If contemporary illustrations are to be believed, Nefertiti occasionally wore hers completely unfastened to display all her womanly charms. The more fashionable ladies of the court completed their toilette by donning short masculine-style wigs based on the curly haircuts worn by Nubian soldiers. This change in fashion was accompanied by a radically different approach to art, with the rigid conventions of the preceding centuries being discarded in favour of a more free and easy naturalistic style. Informal Amarna scenes of the royal couple relaxing as they play with their little daughters in the palace gardens are some of the most charming vignettes of Egyptian daily life to have survived the ravages of time.

  There was a definite blurring of sexual identities in this new-style artwork. The convention of portraying women with lighter skin was dropped, and the formal regal pose of the king, which showed a most powerful and masculine aspect intended to strike fear into the hearts of his enemies and inspire the confidence of his people, was abandoned. Many of the statues of Akhenaten depict him as sporting the traditional accessories of kingship, the crook and flail, crown and beard, but he is portrayed as a virtual hermaphrodite, with a curiously feminine face, well-developed breasts and what appear to be good child-bearing hips. Why the king should have allowed himself to be immortalized in a way that seems perversely calculated to strike fear into the hearts of his people while inspiring his enemies is not clear. It may be that this was actually how the poor man looked, in which case he must

  Fig. 39 Queen Nefertiti

  have been suffering from some medical disorder, although it is worth remembering that he did father six daughters with Nefertiti, and she was by no means the only woman to bear his children. It has been suggested that at least some of the more sexually ambivalent statues actually represent Nefertiti in the role of the goddess Tefnut, although this would not quite explain why she was carrying the royal regalia and, indeed, why there should be so many statues of the queen and so few of the king. It may even be that Akhenaten was attempting, under the influence of his new religion, to deliberately and symbolically depict in himself both masculine and feminine aspects of nature. The mummified body of Akhenaten, which could go a long way towards answering some of these fascinating questions, has never been properly identified and would appear to have been destroyed.

  Nefertiti was clearly a woman to be reckoned with in matters of state and religion. Queens and dowager queens had always played an important part in royal life and were often included on monuments supporting their husband or son, but Nefertiti was accorded a far higher profile than her predecessors, being depicted at all times by the side of her husband and taking an active role in proceedings rather than simply looking on. She gradually grew in status until she was regularly shown wearing a monarch’s blue crown and performing tasks normally reserved for the king, and she was even illustrated in the ritual act of smiting the foes of Egypt, a traditional male role hitherto exclusively reserved for the pharaoh. To all intents and purposes it would appear that Nefertiti was regarded as co-regent with her husband, although this was never formally announced. The reasons behind her rise to prominence are unknown. Was she a scheming woman able to impose her will on her husband? Or did her unique role owe more to the change of religious thought which perceived her as a parallel to Tefnut, the wife and daughter of the sun god?

  Although the
life of Nefertiti presents us with some intriguing problems, it is with her death that we meet the true enigma. The last clear view that we have of the queen is of her weeping over the lifeless body of her thirteen-year-old daughter, Meketaten, who died in childbirth in Year 14 of her father’s reign. After this family tragedy Nefertiti fades out of the picture. The obvious inference is that she died at this time and was buried in the

  Fig. 40 Cartouche of Smenkhare

  normal manner, although it is surprising that Amarna does not furnish any reference to her demise as we would expect her obviously doting husband to be devastated by such a loss. Nefertiti’s mummified body has never been recovered. Alternatively, she may have continued her life as before, retiring from prominence at the death of her husband a few years later. A third, and slightly less plausible explanation, is that she somehow fell from grace and retired to live out the remainder of her life in relative seclusion. However, archaeologists do not necessarily favour the obvious solutions to their problems, and the far more dramatic suggestion has been made that Nefertiti may, from this point onwards, have become officially known as Akhenaten’s co-ruler, the enigmatic Prince Smenkhare.

  There is some evidence that towards the end of his life Akhenaten followed royal tradition and took as his co-regent his heir, Smenkhare. The identity of this shadowy young man is obscure, although he may have been either the king’s younger brother or his son by his favourite secondary wife, the Lady Kiya. The identification of Smenkhare with Nefertiti is based on the fact that he appears for the first time in the archaeological record at precisely the moment that Nefertiti disappears. If Akhenaten had wished to make his wife co-ruler would he have considered it necessary to ‘convert’ her into a man first? There is the dubious parallel of Hatchepsut assuming male attire as pharaoh, although this was a symbolic transvestism and there is no evidence that Hatchepsut wanted to be regarded as anything other than a woman. The actual evidence relating to Smenkhare is both scanty and ambiguous, although it does appear that a person of that name did exist. A damaged illustration once believed to represent Smenkhare and Akhenaten relaxing together is now widely accepted as showing Nefertiti with her husband, the artistic conventions of the time making the precise identification of the genders difficult. Smenkhare did not follow Akhenaten to the throne and so may be presumed to have died before his mentor. The body of a royal young man of this period, which was recovered encased in a coffin originally intended for a high-born woman, has been tentatively identified as that of Smenkhare, although as it has suffered from both desecration and unbelievably bad excavation, this is now unprovable. As with many aspects of egyptology, the theory that Queen Nefertiti may have become Prince Smenkhare is one which waxes and wanes in popularity as new shreds of evidence come to light.

  Queen Twosret – 19th Dynasty

  Fig. 41 Cartouche of Queen Twosret

  The final female king known to have taken the throne of Egypt, 250 years after the reign of Hatchepsut, was Queen Twosret, who took full advantage of a period of near-anarchy at the end of the 19th Dynasty to seize power for herself. The 19th Dynasty had started well as a time of relatively stable and effective rule following the religious disruptions at the end of the 18th Dynasty, and had flourished during the prosperous and well-documented reign of Ramesses II when the completion of great monuments and the success of extensive foreign campaigns had confirmed the presence of maat throughout the land. Following the deaths of Ramesses and his son and successor Merenptah, law and order disintegrated and there was a confusing succession of brief and badly attested pharaohs. Contemporary documents use standard phrases to record a time of turbulence and unrest and there are vague allusions to a war although this may simply be a reference to the internal conflicts. Trouble in the Theban necropolis – a standard indication of weak rule – was endemic at this time, with bribery, theft, and even murder rife among the chief workmen. Unfortunately, this period of disruption, which provided the typical conditions necessary for the emergence of a female ruler, has left few royal documents, and we are left with tantalizing glimpses of palace plots and intrigues which we may never be able to fully understand.

  Merenptah was almost certainly succeeded on the throne by his son Seti II. Seti ruled for only six years and died in middle age to be succeeded in turn by his young son Ramesses Siptah who also ruled for only six years, for some unknown reason changing his name to Merenptah Siptah part way through his reign. Although Siptah was Seti’s son and principal heir his mother was not the ‘King’s Great Wife’ Twosret but a relatively unimportant secondary wife named Sutailja who appears to have been of Syrian origin. Twosret was therefore the new king’s stepmother. There is no evidence that Twosret herself ever bore a child, and it certainly seems inconceivable that she would have tolerated Siptah taking the throne had she a rival son of her own. The origins of Queen Twosret are somewhat obscure; she did not bear the title of ‘King’s Daughter’ and was possibly not of royal blood. In her tomb she is accorded the title ‘Mistress of all the Land’, a courtesy which she would have received as the consort of Seti II.

  As might be expected from a young boy, Siptah was a weak and ineffectual monarch who left few monuments and who was soon forgotten after his early death. His weakness may have had a purely physical cause as examination of his preserved mummy, which has one distorted foot and an atrophied lower leg, suggests that he suffered from either a club foot or, more likely, the after-effects of childhood polio. Throughout his short reign Siptah was guided, or controlled, by his forceful stepmother, who gradually took over the role of consort and joint ruler. Whether Twosret actually married her young stepson in order to increase her power by becoming queen-regent is not clear; paintings in her tomb show her standing behind Siptah in a typical wifely posture as he offers a dedication to the earth god, Geb. Siptah’s name has, however, been erased from the tomb and that of Seti II substituted, and it would appear that, after the death of Siptah, Twosret preferred to be associated with the memory of her prestigious first husband rather than her less than impressive stepson.

  There was another dominant character playing an active part in the struggle for power at this time. The ‘Great Chancellor of the Whole Land’, Bay was a shadowy figure with an Asiatic name whose unique title emphasized his great influence over the boy-king. He was depicted standing behind his ruler’s throne in an unusually important position for a non-royal person, and was even allowed the high honour of a tomb built near to that of his master in the Valley of the Kings. The epithet ‘Who Establishes the King on his Father’s Throne’, attributed to Bay in two inscriptions, hints at Bay’s role in maintaining the young king in his somewhat precarious position of authority while resisting the growing ambitions of the queen. It would appear that Bay ultimately failed in his mission to restrict Twosret’s power, as he faded mysteriously out of the political scene during Siptah’s fourth year of rule.

  Following Siptah’s untimely death a wave of civil unrest swept through the country. With no obvious male successor to the throne, Twosret was able to take full advantage of the chaos to extend her rule as co-regent and hold on to the crown, reinforcing her claim by adopting the full titulary of a male King of Upper and Lower Egypt. It is clear that she did achieve her ultimate ambition and reign alone for a brief period; she counted the years of Siptah’s co-regency together with hers while distinguishing the rule of her husband, Seti II. Twosret’s highest preserved year date is Year 8, while Manetho records that a ‘King Thuoris, who in Homer is called Polybus, husband of Alcandara, and in whose time Troy was taken’ ruled for seven years at the end of the 19th Dynasty. As Siptah ruled for at least six years, Twosret may have enjoyed a solo reign of less than two years. There is very little archaeological evidence for her brief rule, although her name has been found as far afield as the Nile Delta, the turquoise mines in Sinai, and even Palestine. Her major monuments are her tomb and a funerary temple which she started to build to the south of the Ramesseum but which was never completed. The
end of Twosret’s reign is shrouded in mystery, and we do not know whether she was deposed or indeed whether she died a natural death. She was succeeded by the obscure pharaoh Sethnakht, the founder of the 20th Dynasty.

  Twosret was clearly a forceful woman with a driving personal ambition which allowed her to rise from relatively humble origins to the highest position in the land, despite the considerable handicap of her sex. Perhaps the best indication of her character is given by a consideration of her decorated tomb, which the Theban workmen began to prepare in the Valley of the Kings either at the end of Seti’s reign or at the start of Siptah’s rule, an unprecedented honour for a queen who should have expected to be interred in the neighbouring Valley of the Queens. The tomb was initially a relatively modest construction, but as Twosret gained in power she gradually extended and improved her tomb, until at the height of her power it had truly become a resting place fit for a king. The building work was never completed, but it is clear that the various building phases correspond closely to the various stages of Twosret’s political life. Unfortunately Twosret was not able to enjoy the luxury of lying in her tomb undisturbed; her successor Sethnakht usurped the tomb and attempted to efface both her name and her image from its walls. We do not know what happened to her body, although a mummy in Cairo Museum has been attributed to Queen Twosret.