The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

by Toby Wilkinson

  Thutmose IV reaped the benefits of peace with Mittani, dedicating his reign to internal affairs instead of foreign campaigns. Diplomacy likewise replaced military action as the main instrument of overseas policy. The administration of Nubia was reformed, with the appointment of a viceroy of all Egyptian-controlled lands. Looking to the northern part of his empire, Thutmose IV cemented the alliance with Mittani by taking a Mittanian princess as his wife. Just two generations earlier, his forebear and namesake Thutmose III had fought Mittani for supremacy in the Near East. Now the erstwhile foes were united in marriage. With peaceful conditions restored, trade could flourish once more between the great powers, and caravans of luxury goods traveled by land and sea across the eastern Mediterranean, Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia. With an almost inexhaustible supply of gold (every ruler’s favorite commodity), Egypt benefited most from this upsurge in commerce, exchanging its mineral wealth for metals, timber, precious stones, and other royal desiderata. Another peace dividend from the alliance with Mittani was a rash of new construction projects the length and breadth of Egypt and Nubia. On each monument the king’s fascination with solar symbolism loomed large, presaging a new direction in royal ideology.

  A country secure in its borders and at peace with its neighbors, and a monarchy resplendent as never before—the scene was set for an aggrandizement of kingship beyond anything Egypt had seen since the days of the Great Pyramid.

  CHAPTER 13

  GOLDEN AGE

  BLAZE HIS NAME ABROAD

  ALL EGYPTIAN KINGS HAD A TALENT FOR SELF-PROMOTION; IT WENT with the job. For the ninth ruler of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Amenhotep III (1390–1353), it must have been particularly difficult to restrain the bombastic urgings of monarchy. Descendant of conquerors and heir to a sun-blessed throne, Amenhotep had the added good fortune to inherit from his father, Thutmose IV, a nation of unprecedented wealth and unaccustomed stability. Egypt’s domination of the Near East had reached its apogee. Peaceful relations had been established and cemented with the other great powers, Babylonia, Assyria, and Mittani—even the infamously belligerent Hittites were prepared to observe the Pax Aegyptica, for the moment at least. For his reign of nearly four decades, Amenhotep III would have the rare privilege of being the only ruler of his entire dynasty not to wage a single military campaign in western Asia. Instead, his period of rule was characterized by an upsurge in the arts of peacetime, and by the promulgation of a personality cult of bewildering intensity.

  Amenhotep started early. A mere child at his accession, his first taste of royal celebrity came after just two years on the throne in 1389. In what was probably a set-piece encounter rather than a spontaneous act of bravery, the king took part in a hunt of wild bulls at Shetep (modern Wadi Natrun), west of Memphis. A large glazed scarab (the ancient Egyptian equivalent of a commemorative coin) was issued by the court to mark the occasion. Distributed throughout Egypt and its conquered territories, it served to trumpet the young king’s achievement to his contemporaries, and record it for posterity:

  A wonder that happened to His Majesty. One came to His Majesty saying, “There are wild bulls in the desert in the region of Shetep.” His Majesty sailed downstream … making good time, arriving in peace at the region of Shetep in the morning. His Majesty appeared in his chariot with his entire army behind him.… Then His Majesty ordered a ditch to be dug to enclose these wild bulls, and His Majesty went forth against all these wild bulls. The number thereof: 170 wild bulls. The number the king took in hunting on this [first] day: 56 wild bulls. His Majesty waited four days to give his horses a rest. His Majesty appeared in the chariot [again]. The number of wild bulls he took in hunting: 40 wild bulls. Total number of wild bulls [killed]: 96.1

  The repetitious phraseology protests too much. Even for a young king on the cusp of adolescence, it was surely not a difficult task, aided by “his entire army,” to slaughter a herd of bulls corralled inside a ditch with no means of escape. But this announcement set the pattern for the reign as a whole. Amenhotep was acting out the primary, most ancient duty of kingship: to uphold order by defeating chaos in all its guises. Another commemorative scarab, issed in the tenth year of his reign, records the total number of lions shot by the king in his first decade on the throne (110, to be precise).

  But, after this youthful predilection for blood sports to prove his virility, a change seems to have come over the king as he entered adulthood. The next special issue scarab, dated a year later, celebrates not a hunt but a construction project, specifically the excavation of a lake for the king’s great wife, Tiye. This was no mere ornamental pond but a rowing lake measuring more than a mile long and nearly a quarter of a mile wide (thirty-seven hundred by seven hundred cubits). To mark the lake’s formal opening, the king duly had himself rowed up and down in the royal barge, prophetically named The Dazzling Orb. Both in the nature of the project itself and in the manner of its inauguration, Amenhotep had found his true calling. From now on, for the rest of his reign, the country would reverberate to the sound of workmen digging, hammering, chiseling, and building. Amenhotep III would be Egypt’s greatest royal builder since the foundation of the kingdom fifteen hundred years earlier, acting out his fantasy of building monuments “whose like never existed before, since the primeval time of the Two Lands.”2 In another aspect of his wish fulfillment, these same monuments would play host to spectacular festivals and unrivaled pageantry, all focused on the person of the king.

  Inscriptions in two of Egypt’s biggest limestone quarries show that construction was already under way at the very beginning of Amenhotep III’s reign; the reopening of these quarries was his first recorded act. The pace of building accelerated during his second and third decades on the throne, eventually reaching a fever pitch. From the delta to Nubia, there was scarcely a temple in the land where Amenhotep did not leave his mark. At Saqqara he commissioned the first tomb chapel and burial for the Apis, a sacred bull believed to be the incarnation of the Memphite creator god Ptah. On the island of Abu, he oversaw the construction of a new shrine dedicated to another creator deity, Khnum.

  The chief beneficiary of royal largesse, however, was the creator par excellence, the sun god Ra. In a brilliantly calculated program, Amenhotep and his theologians systematically reinterpreted each national cult to emphasize its connections with solar beliefs. Hence, to the temple of Thoth in Khmun, Amenhotep added colossal statues of baboons, animals sacred to Thoth but also revered as the heralds of the sun god because of their habit of shrieking at dawn. At Sumenu (modern el-Rizeiqat), near Thebes, the local crocodile god Sobek was rebranded as the hybrid deity Sobek-Ra and honored with a new temple adorned with monumental sculpture. Wherever he built, Amenhotep took pains to associate himself with solar deities, using epithets such as “heir of Ra” and “Ra’s chosen one,” for the king wished to be seen as the embodiment of solar energy in all its manifestations. He was the maker and sustainer of life; the bringer of fertility and fecundity; and the fierce “eye of Ra” that, when appeased, turned its ferocity on Egypt’s enemies, defending created order. Sophisticated theology was being harnessed to the yoke of divine kingship as never before.

  One site, above all others, felt the full energy of Amenhotep’s building program. From the moment of his accession, the king adopted the epithet “ruler of Thebes,” and he soon set out to prove it in deeds as well as words. During his reign, the city dedicated to Amun-Ra, already the focus of royal construction projects from the beginning of the Eighteenth Dynasty, was transformed into Homer’s legendary “hundred-gated Thebes,” with a forest of massive temple gateways punctuating the landscape on both sides of the river. At Ipetsut, the epicenter of the Amun cult, Amenhotep ordered the construction of a new monumental entrance for the entire complex, at the same time adding a further gateway on the temple’s southern axis that led to the temple of the goddess Mut. Here the king beautified and adorned the buildings with a vast array of fine stone sculpture, including more than seven hundred statues of Sekhme
t (two for every day of the year), a lioness deity associated with the fiery “eye of Ra.” In the northern part of the Ipetsut enclosure, Amenhotep presided over the rebuilding of an earlier temple to Montu, the son of Amun and Mut, and the construction of a new temple to Maat, goddess of truth and justice. Every edifice was further enhanced with prodigious quantities of the finest sculpture. Indeed, more statues survive of Amenhotep III than of any previous king of Egypt, a testament to the feverish activity of the royal workshops throughout his reign.

  Amenhotep’s constructions at Ipetsut were but a sideshow, however, compared to his principal project at Thebes, a mortuary temple on the west bank of the Nile. Begun early in his reign and greatly enlarged in subsequent building phases, it was destined to become the largest royal temple in the history of ancient Egypt. Today, little remains beyond the bases of columns. Such a vast monument was too tempting a source of building material for later kings, but in its time it dwarfed even the great temple of Amun-Ra at Ipetsut. Covering an area of ninety-three acres, the complex was unprecedented in scale and magnificence, bursting at the seams with colossal sculpture. Statues of Amenhotep III as the god Osiris, more than twenty-six feet tall, stood between the columns of one court. Another part of the temple was dominated by a seated pair statue of the king and his great wife, Tiye, at twenty-three feet high the largest dyad ever carved in Egypt; fragments of two even larger colossi were found nearby. The temple’s northern gateway was flanked by a pair of striding figures of the king carved from granite, while processional avenues were lined with enormous sphinxes and jackals. These ceremonial paths linked the temple’s three enormous courts, each of which had its own monumental gateway guarded by yet more colossal seated statues of the king. The easternmost pair of statues still stand more than sixty feet tall, flanked by diminutive statues of Amenhotep’s mother, wife, and daughter, and are visible for miles around. (Today they are known as the Colossi of Memnon.) Their sheer immensity, looming over every man, woman, and child in western Thebes, led them to be considered deities in their own right, living images of the king as “ruler of rulers.” They certainly conveyed Amenhotep’s overwhelming authority, and must have evoked a mixture of awe and fear in every observer.

  Amenhotep’s supersize colossi imparted a subtler message, too. After being partially submerged in the floodwaters of the Nile for several months each year, they would emerge again as symbols of rebirth, underlining the principal rejuvenating purpose of Amenhotep’s mortuary temple, his “mansion of millions of years.” In a similar vein, many of the statues of deities set up in the temple’s courts were carved from granodiorite, the stone’s black color symbolic of rebirth. Statues of the king, on the other hand, were more often carved in red granite or golden quartzite, the solar colors emphasizing Amenhotep’s close connection with the sun god. The twin themes of creation and rebirth echoed from every corner of the vast complex, proclaiming the king as the essential pivot of the cosmos.

  Amenhotep’s royal career had thus far delivered a remarkable boost to the institution of kingship and to the status of its current holder. Much more was to come.

  DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS

  WHILE THE RULER OF RULERS WAS BUSY IN THEBES RAISING THE monarchy and himself to new heights, his emissaries ensured that his fame and fortune were recognized far and wide. Traveling throughout the Near East and the eastern Mediterranean, Amenhotep’s envoys guaranteed Egypt’s continued presence at the top table, negotiating treaties and securing favorable trading agreements to maintain their master’s imperial aspirations. The most remarkable aspect of Amenhotep’s foreign policy is suggested by a series of place-names inscribed on statue bases from his mortuary temple. The hieroglyphic writing system struggled to cope with foreign words, and the tortured combinations of signs seem impenetrable at first: i-am-ny-sha, ka-t-u-na-y, ka-in-yu-sh, m-u-k-i-n-u. On closer analysis, they turn out to be a comprehensive list of the most important sites in the Greek world of the fourteenth century B.C.: Amnisos, Kydonia, Knossos, and Mycenae. Also listed are Phaistos, Lyktos, Nauplion, Boeotian Thebes, the island of Kythera, and perhaps even Ilios, Homer’s Troy. The order of the place-names suggests the itinerary of a diplomatic mission sent by Amenhotep III to the leading city-states of the Minoan and Mycenaean worlds. He would have had good reason for such a charm offensive: Mycenaean trade networks provided Egypt with supplies of precious cobalt, which was used as a dark blue dye in its glassmaking industry. Lead used to make opaque and white glass came from the Laurion peninsula of Greece, within Mycenae’s own hinterland. Despite Egypt’s instinctive xenophobia, it could not afford to ignore an emerging economic force in the distant Aegean.

  Closer to home, diplomacy was an essential tool for maintaining Egypt’s imperial conquests in the Near East. Thanks to a remarkable discovery made in A.D. 1887, the relations among Egypt, its vassals, and the other great powers of the day have been revealed in all their internecine complexity. The Amarna Letters are an archive of official correspondence found among the ruins of the “house of correspondence of the pharaoh” (the secretariat of the ancient Egyptian foreign ministry). The 380 surviving documents are in the form of baked clay tablets. They are written in the cuneiform (wedge-shaped) script of Mesopotamia, and in the Babylonian language of Bronze Age diplomacy. Many date to the latter years of Amenhotep III’s reign and were sent by vassal princes to the Egyptian pharaoh, whom they addressed with suitable obeisance as “my sun, my lord.” Unlike conquered Nubia, where centrally appointed bureaucrats imposed royal authority along Egyptian lines, Egypt’s subject territories in the Near East were allowed to retain their own administrative arrangements and their own indigenous rulers, provided they swore oaths of allegiance to the pharaoh and delivered their annual tribute on time. Yet the indignity of being subject to a foreign power clearly riled, and the vassals seem to have spent much of their time plotting and counterplotting as they attempted to play Egypt off against the other great powers, not least Mittani and the Hittites.

  The Amarna Letters reveal a highly volatile state of affairs, with bitter rivalries and almost continuous small-scale conflict erupting between the various city-states. Among the more troublesome vassal princes in Palestine were Milkilu of Gezer, Biridiya of Megiddo, and Abdi-Heba of Jerusalem. Generally, Egypt was content not to involve itself in such local disputes, except when its economic interests were threatened. Farther north, however, the problems were altogether more serious, since they had the potential to disrupt the balance of power between Egypt and the Hittites. A quarter of all the Amarna Letters are from a single vassal, Rib-Adda of Kebny, whose city had enjoyed a special relationship with Egypt for more than a thousand years. Rib-Adda was becoming increasingly suspicious of the neighboring state of Amurru, with its ambitious ruler Abdi-Ashirta. Rib-Adda’s fears were well founded. Unchecked, Amurru moved to capture the Egyptian garrison town and administrative capital at Sumur (modern al-Hamidiyah) and virtually besieged Kebny. This turmoil gave the Hittites the excuse they had been waiting for to intervene, and Amurru was lost to Egyptian control. It was a salutory lesson in how minor disputes could escalate rapidly to Egypt’s detriment.

  Where Thutmose III or Amenhotep II would not have hesitated to intervene militarily, Amenhotep III followed a very different policy. His main objective was to exploit his overseas possessions economically and control them politically with the minimum commitment of Egyptian forces. To this end, garrisons were stationed in the most important ports along the coast—Gaza, Jaffa, Ullaza, and Sumur—and at two strategic locations inland, Beth-Shan, at the eastern end of the Jezreel Valley, and Kumidi, in the Beqa Valley. Fortified grain depots along the coast could be called upon as supply centers in case of military action. Egyptian administrative headquarters with resident governors at Gaza, Kumidi, and Sumur completed the network of colonial rule. In general, the system proved highly effective, and the loyalty of vassal princes was further cemented by regular gifts of precious baubles from the Egyptian royal workshops. (The conferment of im
perial knighthoods on Indian princes by the British raj is an instructive modern parallel.)

  When it came to maintaining amicable relations with the other great powers, however, something more than trinkets was required. In the eyes of his subjects, the pharaoh may have been master of the universe, but in reality he had to share the world stage with six other Near Eastern leaders. In Mesopotamia there were the kings of Babylonia (southern Iraq), Assyria (the upper Tigris Valley), and Mittani (northern Iraq and northern Syria); in Anatolia, the kings of the Hittites (central Turkey) and Arzawa (southwestern Turkey); and in the eastern Mediterranean, the ruler of Alashiya (Cyprus). The members of this elite club called one another “brother,” and were not averse to displays of pique or petulance if they failed to get their own way. Among the Amarna Letters, the three dozen or so missives from the great powers to Amenhotep III are largely concerned with the usual diplomatic niceties: the exchange of greetings, polite inquiries after the king’s health, and the presentation of gifts. The beginning of a letter from King Tushratta of Mittani gives the general flavor: