The City of Refuge: Book 1 of The Memphis Cycle

by Diana Wilder

  He is considered by many to be the first monotheist in recorded history; during his reign the worship of the Egyptian pantheon, with the exception of the solar deities, was proscribed, and the worship of the disk of the sun, with Akhenaten as its divine representative on earth, became the state religion to the exclusion of all other concerns, including international politics. By the end of Akhenaten's reign Egypt had lost almost all the territory it had won during the XVIIIth dynasty.

  Anyone researching Akhenaten and his times will quickly discover that the vast majority of books on Akhenaten and the aftermath of his reign are seriously warped by the nature of the axe that their writers happened to be grinding at the moment of composition. The researcher will be assailed by theories as plentiful, as bewildering, and about as valuable as a tangle of mushrooms sprung out of the soil after a heavy rain.

  On one hand we are told that Akhenaten was a Christ-like figure who had caught a glimpse of the True God and was murdered and then publicly anathematized for having the courage to follow that glimpse. On the other hand, we learn that he was a deformed monomaniac with a father fixation and delusions of grandeur.

  He is also presented as a frail dreamer, easily persuaded by his beautiful foreign wife and his masterful foreign mother to follow in the ways of their exotic religion. But it is obvious from her body, which is in the Cairo Museum, that the great queen Tiy was Egyptian born and bred, and there are strong indications that Nefertiti was the same.

  Some of the theories do have the redeeming feature of being very amusing. Some intense but well-meaning students of the period, operating from a medical frame of reference, have resorted to the laughable extreme of performing a hypothetical autopsy on one of his statues in an attempt to find an explanation for Akhenaten's actions. A serious writer trying to fight his way through such a snarl of conflicting information must be prepared for the vigorous application of his own common-sense and knowledge of human nature. It is not a task for the lazy, indecisive or humorless.

  My own view of Akhenaten should be apparent from this story. The series of devastating personal blows that he appears to have suffered within a short period of time toward the end of his reign is sufficient explanation for me of dreaminess or isolationism in his character or his foreign policy.

  The aftermath of his 'heresy' is also not difficult for me to comprehend. A review of the religious literature that has survived from ancient Egypt shows a searching for a First Cause, an awareness of personal unworthiness, and a need for, and granting of, forgiveness by the Deity, followed by an amendment of the supplicant's errors. Even as the great Hymn to the Aten is offered as an example of the majesty and beauty of Akhenaten's religion, some point out that nowhere in any of the Atenist literature is there ever a mention of a god who heals the afflicted and forgives the penitent, attributes of both Amun and Ptah, two of Egypt's greatest gods. Time and again, the writings that the great cults produced in the post-Akhet-Aten period stress what are the proper beliefs, somewhat in the manner of a Sunday School teacher drumming the short version of the Catechism into his student's heads.

  The controversy surrounding Akhenaten is not limited to his personal attributes and the nature of his religious convictions. The circumstances surrounding the end of his reign and the fate met by his successors is also hotly debated, and has given rise to a number of sensational-type novels. Was he murdered? Who succeeded him? Was Smenkhara a man, or was he really Nefertiti acting as regent? Who was the queen who wrote to Shupilluliumash of the Hittites asking for the hand of his son? Was it Ankhesenamun, daughter of Akhenaten, and Tutankhamun's widow, or was it Nefertiti (writing, if such is the case, at a rather ripe age)? Was Tutankhamun murdered, as the hole in his skull seems to suggest? (Current science indicates that he was not.) Or was the royal family decimated by decades of inbreeding and, perhaps, a debilitating disease like malaria? Who was Ay? Tiy's brother? And how did Horemheb come to power?

  Dynastic endings throughout history have generally been attended by violence, and I have chosen to use this premise in my story, but I have departed from popular modes of thought in assigning blame for the violence.

  General Horemheb is usually selected as the villain of the piece, the vicious soldier who murdered Tutankhamun, Ankhesenamun, Smenkhara, the Hittite prince, and, sometimes, Nefertiti and Akhenaten. Interesting, certainly, and definitely dramatic, sounding, for those of us old enough to remember them, an echo of the Vietnam war era's general mistrust of anyone in the military. But I personally find a blustering, overbearing soldier, which Horemheb historically does not appear to have been, a less convincing villain than a smooth-tongued, calculating courtier with high connections and higher ambitions. For that reason, and since I don't like to slander the dead, I invented a fictitious pharaoh, Huy, and inserted his brief reign between those of Tutankhamun and Ay. In view of the thoroughness with which the Egyptians were able to eradicate the memories of Akhenaten and Hatshepsut for several millennia, it is quite possible that such a pharaoh existed.

  All the characters in The City of Refuge are my own invention with the exception of Seti, Horemheb, Prince Thutmose, General Ramesses, Nakht, and Ay, but I took considerable liberties with what we know of these characters and their antecedents. As an example, one of Seti's grandmothers was described as a 'Singer of Ra'. I expanded on this and made him the grandson of the High Priest of Ra at Iunu (Heliopolis) through his mother.

  While Akhenaten's death probably led to the fall of many of his closest associates, I have found nothing at all to indicate Nakht's ultimate fate. Akhenaten had a brother, Thutmose, who was High Priest of Ptah at Memphis. Everything I have been able to discover about this man indicates that he was Amenhotep III's original Crown Prince and predeceased his father by some years, leaving Akhenaten to inherit.

  Theomorphic names, which are names compounded with a god's name, were very common in Egypt. At the time of the Atenist heresy, Akhenaten required that the 'Amun' in any theomorphic name be changed to 'Aten'. This was also done, though not as consistently, with names compounded with the names of other major gods in the Egyptian pantheon. After his death the names reverted back to their original forms, and any names compounded with 'Aten' were also changed. Thus, Neb-Aten (Aten is lord) would have become Neb-Amun, Tutankhaten (The living image of the Aten) became Tutankhamun, and Pa-Aten-em-heb (Aten at the feast) became, possibly, Horemheb.

  All of this is complicated by the gaps in our understanding of the ancient Egyptian language. I have seen several excellent novels that have, somewhere within them, the statement by the author that he or she has used the 'genuine' Egyptian names for (take your pick) gods names, kings' names, place names, defying modern practice, which obscures the truth. The problem is that 'the truth' is impossible to establish.

  Of all the dead languages we know, with the possible exception of Etruscan, Ancient Egyptian is perhaps the most defunct. No one has spoken it for two millennia, at least. Scholars are still arguing about how it would have been pronounced. Coptic Egyptian, the language spoken in Egypt after the advent of Christianity, has shed some light, but it is the Egyptian language at its stage of development two thousand years beyond the golden age of Pharaonic Egypt. The difficulties with this state of affairs can perhaps be illustrated by Caedmon's Hymn, written around the 7th Century A.D, 1,300 years before our era, a lesser distance in time than that which lies between Coptic Egyptian and ancient Egyptian. It is in English, and the first four lines are as follows:

  Nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes uard

  metudæs maecti end his modgidanc

  uerc uuldurfadur sue he uundra gihuaes

  eci dryctin or astelidæ

  Those four lines in a modern translation read this way:

  Now let me praise the keeper of Heaven's kingdom,

  the might of the Creator, and his thought,

  the work of the Father of glory, how each of wonders

  the Eternal Lord established in the beginning.

  If you listen to a
recording of the hymn, you can pick out some words: 'uerk', for example, is definitely 'work', and hefaenricaes uard sounds like 'heaven's riches' ward (or keeper).

  In addition to the question of idiomatic changes, scholars trying to decipher the verbal language using hieroglyphs and hieratic (handwritten) texts are hindered by the fact that the written words are composed only of consonants. Roman letters have been assigned to hieroglyphic symbols, but that is imprecise at best. Standard practice among Egyptologists is to assign the letter 'e' when there is any doubt of the vowel properly put in a spot, but this is an arbitrary rule of thumb.

  Obviously, there is room for a lot of variation, and you'll certainly find it. The characters spelling Akhenaten's name have been variously written as 'Akhenaten', 'Akhnaten', or 'Ikhnaton'. Nefertiti has been written as 'Nofretete', 'Iyneferti' or 'Astnofret'. I chose the spellings and pronunciations that were comfortable for me.

  Some people dislike the Hellenistic names given to places and people (Amenophis, Hermopolis). I have used the ancient names when possible: Khemnu instead of Hermopolis, for example (though some scholars feel it should be pronounced 'Khmun'). I have kept Memphis instead of 'Men-Nefer' and Thebes instead of 'Waset', because of their powerful historical associations. 'Hundred-gated Thebes' of Memnon...the fall of Memphis under the onslaught of Cambyses' armies, bringing with it the demise of dynastic Egypt... Besides, if I apply the latitude given to someone putting in vowels where none are known, and ignore the customary 'E', I have, variously, 'Waset', 'Wosat' 'Woosit', 'Wesit', 'Weesut' or 'Wusot'. They all look bad.

  I take seriously a storyteller's duty to tell stories and not to give his readers a headache. Peppering a fast-moving story with names and concepts that are unfamiliar enough to wrench their thoughts from the story and are not, in themselves, essential to the flow of the narration, is a bad idea. A 'go forth and read' admonishment (rather like this one) is better.

  I had to make some decisions concerning the mode of address for various characters. While we do know the full titulary that would be applied to Pharaoh, we do not know how he was addressed by his courtiers, or in what way they referred to him when they were not in his presence. People being people throughout time, I have chosen to adopt the old European terms 'Your Majesty' and 'Sire'.

  Another problem involves the titles for high-ranking ecclesiastics. I chose to have the High Priest of any cult referred to as 'His Holiness', much as one would refer to the Pope or the Dalai Lama. His second would be 'His Grace', much as one might address the Archbishop of Canterbury. 'His Reverence' is a very adaptable term for any priest, as is 'My Father'.

  I have followed my own judgment in the question of place names in The City of Refuge. As previously stated, I used whatever names were most familiar: Memphis instead of Mennefer, and Thebes instead of Waset. When the Egyptian names were less ponderous and the other names were unfamiliar, I used the Egyptian names: Khemnu rather than Hermopolis. And when I had need of a city that was a major trading port along the Nile (Sumneh) I invented the city and its name.

  Akhenaten named his capitol city 'Akhet-Aten', which literally means 'Horizon of the Aten'. It is not too farfetched to suppose that he based the name on the appearance of the cliffs rising to the northeast of the city. 'Amarna', the name many people use for the site, is a bastardization of two separate place names.

  I have based my description of the city of Akhet-Aten upon verbal descriptions of its buildings, and upon the reconstructions found in W. Stevenson Smith's excellent book, The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt (part of The Penguin History of Art), which has a long and fascinating chapter on Akhet-Aten. I have tried to be accurate about various features of the city, but I did depart from the actual layout of the city in several places.

  What I have described as the 'window of appearances' was contained in a sort of pedestrian walkway that crossed what we now call the 'Royal Road', joining the east and west wings of the main palace. There is some doubt that it was actually used for this purpose. Because of plot considerations, I chose to ignore these reservations. I added a pair of bronze-clad timber doors to an open palace courtyard in order to provide a means for Nebamun to outwit Seti and Khonsu.

  In his book Pharaoh's People, T. G. H. James gives a long description of Nakht's house, of which a good deal of its interior decoration has survived to the present. I based my description of the layout of that house as well as that of the city of Akhet-Aten on plans included in Smith's book. I have based the plan of Nakht’s tomb on that of Tutankhamun, which was probably excavated for a non-royal person. Ay's tomb in Thebes, which some think was originally intended to be Tutankhamun's, is now ruined. One of the tombs in the Valley of the King is described as having no decoration left intact; I have used this tomb as Huy's.

  While the temple of the Aten constructed at Karnak by Akhenaten was burned to the ground, this was not done at Akhet-Aten. In fact, although many of the buildings in the city were razed, Akhet-Aten itself was relatively untouched for an ancient site. Despite my determination to keep the supposedly factual parts of this story as close to historical truth as possible, I could not resist the temptation to have Lord Nebamun order the city's destruction by fire and use the conflagration to further his own ends.

  Finally, while a goodly amount of research went into the writing of The City of Refuge, the primary aim of the story was to entertain. I hope it achieved its purpose, and I thank you for giving me the chance.

  A Word From The Author

  Thank you for reading this book. If you enjoyed it, would you be willing to write a review?

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  My website is at www.dianawilderauthor.com, if you would like to see my other stories, read more about The Memphis Cycle, or just enjoy yourself.

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  Please read on for a preview of Mourningtide:

  PREVIEW OF MOURNINGTIDE

  Mourningtide is the sequel to The City Of Refuge, set before Pharaoh's Son. It tells the story of the death of Nakhtamun, who figures in A Killing Among The Dead, and sets the stage for young Ramses' family.

  In these chapters, Nakhtamun, co-regent with his father, Seti, is in Palestine, where he has gone to work out in his own mind the meaning of kingship. He meets his fate, and the story tells of his father's season of grief – his Mourningtide.

  MOURNINGTIDE

  Seti’s reign has brought Egypt to a renaissance and regained for the land the prestige and power that were lost in the disasters of the past. The power is needed: the world is in the grip of change, tribesmen are moving across the face of the land, coming to the outskirts of civilization, looking for land and plunder.

  During this time of strife, Seti’s eldest son and heir is killed through a tragic mistake. Word is sent to Seti, but it does not reach him. He returns to the devastating reality of the loss. His son is already sealed in his tomb, and the King of Egypt, always under the gaze of his subjects, has no way to come to terms with this death.

  Following the counsel of an old friend, Seti steps out of his world and leaves it behind as completely as a man boarding a ship that will take him to another land. He comes to a small village of craftsmen in the wake of an attack by marauding invaders, admits that he has seen some service in the armies of Egypt, and accepts their invitation to remain with them and help them learn to fight.

  In the course of that short summer the greatest general of that century, welcomed into the village, teaches them the art of battle, and in doing so he regains his peace, finds love again, and learns that a king is also a man.

  CHAPTER I:
Canaan Reign Of Seti I, Year 3

  The rider drew rein at the crest of the hill and frowned down at the encampment below him. The early morning stillness magnified the neighing of horses, laughter, the throb of a drum, the clang of metal. He sat forward on his saddle pad. He could catch the spicy scent or grilling fish overlying the tang of cooking fires—and could he smell hot gruel?

  Motion to the left—one of the large tents collapsing in a billow of stripes. He grimaced. Breaking camp. It was a good thing he had not spared his horse after receiving his general's summons. A hot breakfast would sit well after two days of cold porridge and onions.

  A line of chariots was moving toward the gateway, the lead team, with gold-mounted harness, driven by a taller man wearing a gold circlet. The messenger grimaced again. He was just in time to make his report to Pharaoh's eldest son Nakhtamun—The Co-Regent—trying his strength in the field for the first time while his warrior father traveled to Nubia. The rider nudged his mount forward toward the gate guards.

  ** ** **

  Nakhtamun smoothed the reins and looped them through the chariot's rail. The sun's warmth on his shoulders provided a pleasant counterpoint to the brisk wind blowing down from the highlands. He frowned toward the west, narrowing his eyes in the light. “All right, then, General,” he told the man beside him. “We can send point patrols north, since you say we will be seeing some movement in the hills now we're approaching Megiddo...” He nodded to the distant bulk of a structure just visible to the northeast. “That looks promising,” he said. “A good size, I'd think. What of it?”