Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River

by Twigger, Robert

  Does Khaneferre appear as a significant builder to corroborate the ‘great works’ referred to in Exodus? Yes, there are several colossal black granite statues of Khaneferre found at Tanis in the eastern Nile delta. If we accept that the chronology has some flexibility in it – which we must, given that the periods between the established rules of Pharaohs can never be known with pinpoint accuracy – then it looks as if the exodus occurred during the Thirteenth Dynasty (roughly 1800 BC to 1650 BC) rule of Pharaoh Khaneferre.

  Supporting this is the first mention, anywhere, of the name Israel – on a stele inscribed by Mineptah, the son of Ramses II. On it occurs the phrase ‘Israel is laid waste, his seed is not.’ The other nations listed as subdued by the Pharaohs include Gezer, Canaan and Hurru (Palestine). Now if the Israelites had fled in the reign of his father – and were almost certainly still wandering – why would they be listed as a nation subdued? They would not even exist as a nation. Ramses II is the Nineteenth Dynasty (1300 BC to 1185 BC); if we have a much earlier exodus it makes sense that the Israelites would be a recognisable nation by this time, and so worthy of a mention.

  But the Jewish historians say more about Moses. Both Artapanus and the later Josephus speak of Moses leading an expedition against the people of Kush – the Ethiopians – who inhabit the region beyond the second cataract, the area that became Nubia. There is one reference to a Thirteenth Dynasty Egyptian military operation in Upper Nubia, on a stele in the British Museum. The cartouche on the stele is none other than that of Khaneferre.

  One final piece seems to tie this story together. The area of Upper Nubia invaded would have centred on the town of Kerma in present-day Sudan. A hundred years ago, on the island of Agro, just south of Kerma, there was found a headless lifesize statue of a pharaoh – identified from the inscription on the statue as Khaneferre, the Pharaoh who refused to free the Jews and suffered the mighty flood of the Nile as his punishment.

  10 • A Starving interlude

  The madman says, ‘Everything is mine!’ Ethiopian proverb

  ‘From flood to famine’ is a common mythological trope. We have already seen how the Famine Stele, set symbolically midstream in the Nile, spoke of seven years when the flood failed to come and the people starved: ‘grain was scant, kernels were dried up, every man robbed his twin’. The Book of Genesis, too, provides us with several stories of famine in Egypt. Indeed it has become a country associated with famine, or the idea of it, until the building of the two great dams on the Nile at Aswan. One wonders, though, if famine was as frequent as the proponents of that dam suggest. Visiting in 1840 James Augustus St John remarks, ‘these fearful visitations are, perhaps, less frequent in Egypt than in any other country’. Certainly the great European famine of 1315–17, with many stricken areas not recovering until 1322, was as grave as anything experienced in Egypt. And there were more English famines in 1351 and 1369.

  The Famine Stele is somewhat lacking in detail, the misery of the Egyptians stated rather than shown. One needs to go forward in history to the Islamic period to get a more substantial view of what might occur in a famine. Leaving for a moment the ancient period for AD 1032–6, there was a great famine in Egypt initiated perhaps by a failure of the flood, but exacerbated by Berber attacks on the canal system and the greed of Egypt’s Turkish rulers. Things became so bad that a small measure of wheat fetched two gold dinars (when the Sultan Saladin died he bequeathed only one gold dinar and a few pieces of silver in his will), and in modern currency this would be several hundred pounds sterling. When all the usual items had been consumed, the starving people turned to eating the flesh of rats, dogs, the bodies of the newly deceased. The dogs that remained, driven insane with hunger, broke into town houses and devoured children before their parents’ eyes, parents too weak to defend their offspring. Twenty houses of the highest quality in Cairo, valued at over 20,000 dinars, were sold for a small quantity of bread. A contemporary observer, Ben Aljouzi, relates that a lady of great wealth and distinction, taking four great handfuls of jewels with her, went out into the street and exclaimed, ‘Who will give me corn for these gems?’ No one attended to her cries, so in despair she threw them down saying, ‘Since you cannot aid me in my distress, what use are you?’ And there the jewels lay since no person cared to stir and get them, so afflicted were they with hunger. In AD 1296, there was a famine in which the usual recourse of eating dogs and dead bodies was adopted before things grew even more desperate. The governor of Cairo, wandering around in a state of hunger, came across three ruffians seated around the body of a small child they were seasoning with salt, fresh chopped onion and vinegar. (Where did they get that onion?) On being apprehended they confessed that they had been ‘subsisting on the flesh of infants’ for many weeks, eating a child a day. They were executed and their bodies hung on the city gate at Zawiet; but, during the night, they were taken down and eaten by the famished people, all turned, at last, to cannibalism.

  11 • The Red Pharaoh

  A mad person is clever inside. Sudanese proverb

  The spectre of cannibalism recedes as we flash backwards again in time, though not place, to the Seventeenth Dynasty (roughly 1580–1550 BC) of ancient Egypt. Like H. G. Wells’ Time Traveller we return to a place utterly changed. Moses has left, Tutankhamen is in the wings, but the man of the moment is Pharaoh Seqenenre Tao II. He is truly the Red Pharaoh, as he is the only one we know for sure met a truly bloody end.

  His mummy is one of the very few with healed fighting wounds. Unlike, say, the recovered skeletons of crusader kings, which are racked with healed and half-healed injuries, the mummies of most Pharaohs indicate a life without injury.

  The injured mummy of Seqenenre Tao II therefore provides a unique insight into the warring world of ancient Egypt – or, rather, into the odd moments when war occurred in a culture defined more by stability and continuity than by bellicose change.

  As a study of war effects, Tao’s wounds provide plenty to analyse. Unlike the superficial trauma suffered by Tutankhamen’s mummy, Seqenenre’s wounds (breaks to skull and jaw) were obviously fatal, so the results are less speculative and more illuminating.

  One problem of Egyptology, the mentionable unmentionable problem, is that there isn’t enough evidence to say what really happened. Of course one can speculate, and Egyptologists have been speculating for a century or more, examining the contents of tombs and translating wall engravings and papyrus and ostraka (pottery and stone fragments with writing), but there are grave problems when one goes beyond the grave, so to speak, and attempts to describe with any semblance of accuracy the details of ancient Egypt. Why so? Because, quite simply, this was not a people who set any store by realistic reportage for the sake of it. Everything carved in stone had a symbolic or religious meaning that far outweighed its practical everyday meaning or significance. In wall paintings that describe ‘everyday life’ we see many things, but not a single picture of men building pyramids. In friezes that show war, the king is depicted as killing an entire army. Despite a wish to credit the ancient Egyptians with magical skills beyond even those possessed by shamans and wonder workers of any age, it is simply not possible to believe that this is an accurate representation of what happened. Not only is it slightly inaccurate, a king who defeats an army singlehandedly has no connection with reality at all. But still, even the most egregious liar or fantasist provides clues. If we look at the lovely painted casket depicting Tutankhamen crushing the Assyrians, we can be reasonably sure that that is what a chariot looked like (the young King is riding on one), that a war horse had an armoured coat, probably of copper scales, and that if war was conducted from chariots bows and arrows were used and we can see what they looked like. We can get a picture of the people, the clothes they wore, the weapons they used, but we cannot get a picture of the reality of any situation described. The trivial is apparent but the meaning of the whole eludes us. How much did religion intrude into daily life? How big were the wars described? And, most of all, what was unde
rstood literally and what was understood metaphorically?

  Take the much repeated imagery of the Pharaoh smiting his enemies – indeed, smiting seems to be the fate for pretty much anyone with the temerity to oppose him. In the smiting pictures the Pharaoh is drawn large and the smitten small. Yet can we believe that a king would actually go round, hippo-hide whip in hand, smiting all day long? Surely the first luxury of kingship is to employ your own smiter?

  Of course once one doubts the literal significance of such imagery the whole field is wide open. One route is to use what we know about symbolism and mysticism from other fields to unlock the mysteries of ancient Egypt. It’s a perilous path, especially for the academic.

  Dr Garry Shaw takes another route. In his 2008 work on royal authority in Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty, he is forced to conclude, after marshalling all the evidence, that one can say very little for certain about the Pharaohs:

  . . . it is clear that a true detailed ‘history’ of the Pharaoh’s role as an individual in government cannot be written for this period. Any scholar who states that a certain event occurred, or that ‘the king did x’ is making assumptions about the evidence. There is no unbiased view of this evidence, no objective commentator from whom a view of the system from the outside can be gleaned. The evidence is a closed system, coherent within itself, but which does not translate into historical reality as there is no way to know whether the presentation can be trusted. Others may be correct in saying that the king could do as he liked, but the evidence from Egypt cannot be used to prove this assertion.

  There is a welcome humility in such conclusions, since for too long assertions about life in ancient Egypt have been made on the basis of too little evidence.

  Shaw does, however, admit that some conclusions can be drawn, for example when analysing the physical remains of kings preserved as mummies. Just as a CSI team can draw a great many conclusions from a corpse, the well-preserved remains of kings is one of the surer prizes of Egyptology.

  Let’s return briefly, though, to what we can know of the lives of kings. For one thing it is unlikely that they fought at the head of their army. Tutankhamen, who died at the age of nineteen, is depicted routing an army, yet it is unlikely that such a willowy young man would have been given command of an entire battle.

  But not all mummies were wimps! There is one that has always been held up as a possible example of kingly battling, and that is the remains of the Seventeenth Dynasty Pharaoh Seqenenre Tao II. This mummy, with its attendant head injuries, has long been thought to be the body of a king killed fighting alongside his troops. But is that really the case? Garry Shaw, in the manner of a forensic detective, set out to discover the truth behind the mysterious corpse of the Red Pharaoh.

  Before we follow his investigation it is worth seeing what we know about war in the time of the first nation to be established on the Nile. Indeed Egypt was the first nation anywhere, so war of a new kind was being pioneered – not war between tribes but war waged by a unified nation on whatever loose affiliation of tribes, city states and groups faced it.

  We know, too, that somewhat ignominiously Pharaoh’s army transported itself by donkey. Not horse and certainly not camel. Donkey bridles and saddles have been found from the earliest Egyptian eras, but camels are not depicted or even mentioned until the Persian invasions of the fifth century BC. Naturally there were horses as well as donkeys, but the donkey, with its staying power and ability to function in a dry climate, would have been the backbone of the army when it came to transporting baggage and personal effects.

  We know that soldiers on campaign lived in tents erected with earthworks for protection. The king’s tent, we can assume, stood in the centre of the camp with a shrine to Amun, the chief New Kingdom god. It is from the name Amun that the prayer-ending ‘amen’ originated, almost certainly entering ancient Hebrew and then Arabic and Greek. The accommodation was not bad on military expeditions that sought to defend the Nile against attack, or even push the borders further north. An officer’s tent might have two or more rooms and a folding camp bed and folding stool, not unlike the kind of campaign furniture still in use today.

  A man who had served as a soldier might be eligible for a land grant. A veteran who distinguished himself in battle might be awarded medals: a golden lion seems obvious, but there was also the order of the golden fly – what might that have rewarded? Sticking to one’s target and refusing to be swatted? Khety, a scribe writing in the New Kingdom, painted an unpleasant and therefore temptingly realistic picture of life in the army. He described rounds of brutal training, constant quarrels in camp, drunkenness, gambling, physical disablement after battle, hunger, thirst, and . . . flies. Perhaps the golden fly went to the man who could ignore them the longest.

  Though Egyptian swords have been recovered, with copper and bronze blades and sometimes a hilt made of gold, it is almost certain that the main weapons in those days would be clubs, lances and bows and arrows. Just as most men who died in medieval battles suffered broken limbs, a sword, with its propensity to stick in body fat, is not the most efficient of killing weapons in a chaotic battle. Something that will knock men down and keep them down is far faster; a cudgel or mace is the preferred weapon, and if men can be levelled from a distance by using spears or arrows, so much the better.

  Soldiers would march with all their gear up to a dozen miles a day over desert terrain. Discipline appeared to be good since precise tactical manoeuvres were used in battle, using trumpets to signal the command. But was the king there directing the battle from the front? Let us return to Pharaoh Seqenenre to find out.

  His mummy was recovered, probably in its original coffin, in 1881 from Deir el-Bahri, a complex of mortuary temples on the west bank of the Nile near modern-day Luxor. In 1997 this was the spot where fifty-eight tourists and four Egyptians were murdered by Islamic jihadists, turning the area once again into a place of death.

  But in 1881 tourism was still in its infancy and Egyptology hardly developed at all. The mummies were discovered by the grave-robbing Abd al-Russul family who started their career burrowing out from their houses in Qurna to find them. Two of the family, brothers, confessed under torture to what they had found. The mummies were then removed to Cairo. It was Gaston Maspero, the great French archaeologist, who pursued the al-Russul brothers, though one imagines the torture was something the local police added on their own. Maspero, who had wanted to study dance originally only for his father to forbid it, unwrapped Seqenenre’s mummy in June 1886. It must have been boiling hot at that time, so the fact that the mummy was rotting and giving off a foul odour would have made the task still less agreeable. The outer shroud was greasy to the touch and odoriferous and was stuck to the skin beneath. Maspero immediately noticed three injuries to the King’s head (there are in fact five). These were surrounded by whitish material presumed to be leaking brain matter. The injuries were first a large wound above the right eyebrow; secondly a mace or battle-axe blow to the left cheek that had broken the bottom jaw; and thirdly a wound, hidden by the King’s hair to some extent, at the top of the head in the form of a slit – made, it was surmised, by an axe. From this slit brains had leaked.

  Maspero’s report indicates that Seqenenre’s ears had disappeared, that his mouth was full of healthy teeth between which the tongue had been gripped. He surmises that decomposition had begun even before the embalmers began their work. The mummification process was also irregular and hastily done. No natron (a natural form of soda ash used for making soap, as an antiseptic and for preserving mummies) had been used; only fragments of spicy wood had been sprinkled over the body. The brain had not been removed. The mummy shrouds were penetrated by beetles and worms, with beetle larvae shells in the King’s hair. Maspero guessed Seqenenre to have been about forty when he died and that he had shaved on the day of his death.

  Later investigators noted there were no injuries to the arms or any other part of the body. For Garry Shaw this became an important clue. The massacres o
f the Tutsi by the Hutu in 1994 have left forensic anthropologists with much grisly evidence of the kind of injuries sustained in battles involving primitive weapons – typically clubs made from iron bars and wood and machetes. In other words, very similar to the weapons of the Egyptian battlefield of 3,000 years ago. Those same bodies that floated out into Lake Victoria from the Nile-source Kagera river bore similar injuries to those killed thousands of years earlier in battles at the other end of the Nile, just as it reached the sea, as if that seed of destruction had taken all of ‘civilisation’s’ time on the planet to reach its furthest extent.

  From the evidence of modern machete and club attacks we can surmise that in any form of open combat it is almost impossible to receive blows to the head without also receiving injuries to the arms and the body. And multiple blows to the head always involve arm injuries as the victim tries to protect himself – and has the time to do so between the individual, but not immediately fatal, attacks. This suggested to Shaw that the King had not been killed on the battlefield. He had no other injuries apart from the well-aimed and precise ones to his head.