The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

by Toby Wilkinson

  For me all goes well. For you may all go well.… For your household, for your wives, for your sons, for your nobles, for your warriors, for your horses, for your chariots, and in your country may all go very well.3

  But there is also another common theme, one that reflects Egypt’s reputation for fabulous wealth. Again, Tushratta sums it up nicely:

  May my brother send me unworked gold in very great quantities … and much more gold than he sent to my father. In my brother’s country gold is as plentiful as dirt.4

  Gold was the preferred currency of diplomatic exchange, and abundant supplies from the mines of Nubia gave Egypt unique leverage among the great powers. Little wonder that an insurrection by the people of the gold mining region of Nubia in the thirtieth year of Amenhotep III’s reign was brutally suppressed. Without gold, Egypt was nothing.

  In return for regular shipments of gold, Amenhotep III sought to extract the ultimate prize from his fellow leaders: their daughters as diplomatic brides. Early in his reign, the young king succeeded in winning the hand of a Mittanian princess, and a commemorative scarab from 1381 records the arrival of Princess Gilukhepa with her retinue of 317 female attendants, aptly and succinctly described as “marvels.”5 Twenty-five years later, the pharaoh sought another Mittanian princess for his harem, both to cement his friendship with the new Mittanian king and also, one presumes, because Gilukhepa had lost her virgin bloom. The negotiations over this second diplomatic marriage were delicate and detailed, involving much reciprocal gift giving. Eventually, King Tushratta sent his daughter Tadukhepa with an appropriate entourage of 270 women and 30 men, and an enormous dowry including forty-four pounds of gold, together with another thirteen pounds of gold as a personal gift for Amenhotep himself.6 Coals to Newcastle, one might have thought, but the pharaoh was evidently impressed with the gesture, and the entente cordiale was duly secured.

  The Babylonians drove a harder bargain altogether. Amenhotep had already taken one Babylonian princess as a bride early in his reign, but when he tried the same trick with the new king of Babylonia, Kadashman-Enlil I, he met unexpected resistance. Kadashman-Enlil complained that nobody had set eyes on his sister since she had entered Amenhotep’s harem more than a decade earlier, and he was reluctant to condemn one of his own daughters to the same fate. To make matters worse, he had not been invited to Amenhotep’s recent “great festival.” Furthermore, he doubted that foreign brides were being treated in the manner to which they had been born:

  My daughters who are married to neighbouring kings, if my messengers go there they speak with them, they send me a greeting gift. But the one with you is impoverished.7

  As a final insult, Kadashman-Enlil’s request for a reciprocal arrangement, whereby he would marry an Egyptian princess, was rebuffed in no uncertain terms. Amenhotep replied haughtily that no daughter of an Egyptian king had ever married a foreigner, and he had no intention of breaking with tradition just to please the king of Babylonia. Altogether, the omens for a second Babylonian marriage did not look good. In the end, Egyptian gold seems to have won the day, and Amenhotep got his girl. The Amarna Letters contain one further discussion of marriage, a discussion between the pharaoh and the splendidly named King Tarkhundaradu of Arzawa, but here the record is silent as to the eventual outcome of negotiations. It is safe, however, to assume they were successful. Amenhotep III was not a man to take no for an answer.

  GLORY TO THE NEWBORN KING

  AS THE PHARAOH APPROACHED HIS FIRST JUBILEE, AFTER THIRTY years on the throne, his program of self-aggrandizement entered a new phase. Since the dawn of history, the culmination of a king’s jubilee celebrations had been marked by the sed festival, an ancient rite that symbolized the ruler’s rejuvenation and the renewal of his contract with the gods. In Amenhotep’s mind, this matter of rejuvenation loomed especially large, and he determined to address it more thoroughly than any of his predecessors. Not for him a mere one-off festival, but instead, true to character, a monumental edifice and a program of royal sculpture to guarantee his rebirth for all eternity. The site he chose for his latest massive building project lay on the east bank of the Nile, three miles south of Ipetsut, directly opposite his mortuary temple. Today it lies at the center of the modern city of Luxor. At the start of Amenhotep’s reign, it was almost a virgin site, graced only by a small shrine from the time of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III, built as a “southern residence” for Amun-Ra of Ipetsut. Under royal instructions, Amenhotep’s builders lost no time in rebuilding his predecessors’ little monument, adding a vast open court, surrounded by a double row of columns shaped like bundles of papyrus. This “solar court” reflected the king’s growing emphasis on sun worship—for which an open, unroofed space was far more appropriate than a traditional enclosed sanctuary—and he instructed his architects to add a similar feature to nearly all his temples the length and breadth of Egypt. The solar court’s realization at Luxor ranks as one of the most beautiful and impressive of all ancient Egyptian temples. And that was exactly what the king intended:

  Its walls are of electrum, its furnishings of silver; all its gates are decorated on their thresholds. Its pylon rises up toward heaven; its flagstaffs are in the stars. When the people see it, they will give praise to His Majesty.8

  In front of the sun court, an even more impressive edifice started to take shape, a gigantic colonnade hall with columns reaching more than sixty feet into the air, embellished (as always) with six colossal striding statues of the king. Such architectural wonders were entirely for effect, and they worked magnificently. But the real theological significance of Luxor lay out of sight, in the rear parts of the temple.

  Perhaps the most important room in the entire complex is a small chamber, tucked away behind a small barque shrine, next to the offering room. On its western wall, a delicate relief shows two goddesses gently supporting the figures of a woman and a man. They are Amenhotep III’s parents, Mutemwia and Thutmose IV. Or rather Mutemwia and someone disguised as Thutmose IV, that someone being the god Amun-Ra, as the accompanying text makes clear. The inscription does not shy away from describing, in unexpectedly graphic terms, the god’s purpose in sneaking into the queen’s bedchamber, and her enthusiastic response to his overtures:

  She awoke because of the god’s scent and cried out with pleasure before His Majesty.… She rejoiced at the sight of his beauty, and love of him suffused her body.9

  By now in a state of ecstasy, Mutemwia swooned over the god, exclaiming “How great is your power! … Your sweet fragrance stiffens all my limbs.”10 The sexual metaphor was fully intended. After the impregnation came the annunciation:

  Amenhotep-ruler-of-Thebes is the name of this child that I have placed in your womb.… He shall exercise potent kingship in this entire land.… He shall rule the Two Lands like Ra forever.11

  The purpose of this elaborate scene, and of the fictionalized events it relates, was of course to perpetuate the myth of the king’s divine birth, something Egyptian monarchs had been claiming to a greater or lesser extent for centuries. Earlier in the Eighteenth Dynasty, in her Holy of Holies at Deir el-Bahri, Hatshepsut had been content to aver her divine birth while drawing a discreet veil over the practicalities. Amenhotep III (or his theologians) showed no such reticence, positively luxuriating in the intimate details of Amun-Ra’s encounter with the queen. Perhaps that was to be expected of a monarch with countless foreign “marvels” tucked away in his harem, and who numbered among his homegrown concubines a woman with the nickname “she whose nights on the town are numerous.”

  Having asserted the monarch’s divine origins, Luxor Temple made another bold contribution to the ideology of kingship. Indeed, the temple’s most remarkable secret is its true purpose. Unlike almost every other temple in Egypt, it was not principally the cult center of a deity at all. Its role as Amun-Ra’s southern residence was secondary, an acceptable cover story rather than the deeper truth. The key to understanding the temple’s extraordinary part in the mythology of Egyptian ki
ngship lies in the reliefs that decorate Amenhotep’s monumental colonnade. They record the most important celebration to take part at Luxor, the annual Festival of Opet. Each year, the cult images of Amun-Ra, Mut, and Khonsu (and perhaps of the king, too) were taken in their barque shrines from Ipetsut to Luxor in a great procession, either by land or by river. As the statues were paraded through the streets on the shoulders of priests, the population thronged to catch a glimpse of these sacred objects and to receive their blessing. The Opet Festival was an occasion for much jubilation and feasting, and a welcome break from the daily grind. But like everything else in ancient Egypt, it was designed not for the people but for the king. Once safely inside the precinct of Luxor Temple, the cult images were taken from their barque shrines and installed in their new quarters. Then the king entered the sanctuary to commune in private with the image of Amun-Ra.

  After a time, he emerged into the hall of appearance, to receive the acclaim of priests and courtiers gathered together for the occasion. (Special hieroglyphs at the base of columns directed the “common people” to the sanctioned viewing places.) His transformation was clear for all to see (and one assumes nobody would have dared to remark on the emperor’s new clothes). Through his communion with the king of the gods, the monarch himself had been visibly rejuvenated, his divinity recharged. He had become the living son of Amun-Ra.

  The key to the whole ceremony was the royal ka, the divine essence that passed, unseen, into the mortal body of each successive monarch and made him godlike. It was as inventive a piece of theology as the ancient Egyptians ever devised, for it explained and reconciled the apparent contradiction that a king could be both mortal and divine. The Opet Festival allowed the king to unite with the royal ka, to become “foremost of all the living kas,” a god incarnate. Luxor Temple, then, was a temple to the royal ka, the mystery at the heart of divine kingship.

  Statue of the rejuvenated Amenhotep III (detail) WERNER FORMAN ARCHIVE

  True to form, Amenhotep commissioned a magnificent piece of sculpture to immortalize this remarkable transformation wrought by the Opet Festival. The statue of the rejuvenated Amenhotep III is one of the all-time masterpieces of ancient Egyptian art. Life-size, it shows the king striding powerfully forward, his taut, muscular torso and limbs the epitome of youthful manliness. Most remarkable is the treatment of his face. With immense, oversize almond-shaped eyes, enlarged lips, small stub nose, and high cheekbones, its neotonous features convey a deliberate impression of exaggerated juvenility. The statue shows the king quite literally rejuvenated, his age reduced back to child-hood through the magical power of the Opet rites. And the symbolism of the statue goes much further. Its very material conveys the king’s close relationship with the sun god, for it is fashioned from a deep purplish-red quartzite, the stone known to the ancient Egyptians as biat (“wondrous”). Originally, gilded decoration would have been applied to the collar, bracelets, sandals, and crown, making the statue shine like the sun in the daylight of the open court. Close inspection at the back of the statue reveals a feather pattern on the king’s buttocks, to indicate that he has been partially transformed into a celestial falcon. To reinforce the solar associations still further, the king’s kilt is decorated with rearing cobras, each with a solar orb on its head. Amenhotep himself wears the double crown, and stands on a sledge, both motifs emblematic of the creator god, Atum. Through this rich combination of visual metaphors and references, the statue declares that Amenhotep III is reborn, undying, assimilated with Ra and Atum, a god-king for all eternity. The inscription down the back pillar goes further, naming the king as “foremost of all the living kas” and the “dazzling orb of all lands.”

  The deliberate and systematic enhancement of royal power had reached its zenith. No longer the mere “son of Ra,” the king had become consubstantial with the sun, the creator god who illuminates and brings life to the world. His transformation was complete.

  EGYPT’S DAZZLING ORB

  THE DEIFICATION OF AMENHOTEP III IN HIS OWN LIFETIME, INTIMATELY connected with the celebration of his first jubilee in 1361, broke new ground for the Egyptian monarchy. Earlier kings had certainly come close to claiming divinity, depicting themselves with godlike attributes, but a distinction (albeit a subtle one) had always been maintained between the king as the earthly incarnation of Horus, and Horus himself; between the “chosen one of Ra,” and Ra, who did the choosing; between the monarch as netjer nefer (“perfected” or “junior god”), and the real thing. No king before Amenhotep III had dared to state, quite so openly and unequivocally, his outright mutation into the creator deity. The final step in this process can be traced most clearly in distant Nubia, at the southernmost extremity of Eighteenth Dynasty power. One of Amenhotep’s many building projects involved the foundation of a new temple inside the fortress of Khaemmaat (modern Soleb), an installation designed to protect Egyptian-controlled Nubia against the hostile lands beyond. In keeping with the king’s solar ambitions, the temple was built on the west bank of the Nile, facing the rising sun. Originally the temple was a small barque shrine for the king’s personal protector, Amun, but it was subsequently enlarged by the addition of two solar courts and a colonnaded hall filled with sculpture. At the same time, coinciding with Amenhotep’s thirtieth year on the throne, the temple’s dedication was changed to honor “Amun-Ra of Ipetsut residing in the fortress of Khaemmaat” and “Nebmaatra [Amenhotep III’s throne name], lord of Nubia.” The king of the gods (Amun-Ra) and the god-king (Amenhotep III) made the perfect pairing.

  Reliefs in the temple of Khaemmaat also record details of the king’s first jubilee. The ancient rites of the sed festival, with their emphasis on renewal and rejuvenation, held a special appeal for Amenhotep, and he seems to have begun preparations for his own ceremonies years ahead of time. The addition of solar courts to all his major temples in Egypt and Nubia seems to have been undertaken in anticipation of his jubilee, presaging the king’s full and final assimilation with the sun god. When it came to preparing for the festival itself, no stone was left unturned to ensure it would surpass all previous celebrations. Scholars were set to work, consulting “the writings of old,”12 to discover how the sed festival had been staged in centuries past. Among their discoveries was a fifteen-hundred-year-old palette, dating to the very beginning of Egyptian history, which was decorated with an abbreviated scene of jubilee rites. Its meager, but hallowed, information was added to the dossier.

  Since Thebes was the focus of Amenhotep’s symbolic world, the epicenter of his theological experiments, it was only fitting that the sacred city should also be the stage for his jubilee rites. Never one to do things by halves, the king ordered the construction of an entire new ceremonial city. The chosen location was on the west bank of the Nile, south of his mortuary temple and facing the place of his rebirth, Luxor Temple. In its first phase (it would be extended yet further for the king’s second and third jubilees), the modestly named “Palace of the Dazzling Orb and the House of Rejoicing” (modern Malkata) extended over a distance of nearly a mile. It included an administrative district with spacious villas for the courtiers, a secondary palace, perhaps for Tiye and her household, and the principal royal residence. Its opulently furnished audience chambers had floors covered with richly colored textiles, and ceilings decorated with exotic Minoan motifs. The king’s bedchamber had flying vultures painted on the ceiling, interpersed with Amenhotep’s royal names and titles. Elegant ointment jars and perfume bottles, exquisitely crafted from multicolored glass, stood on tables veneered with ebony and overlaid with gold. Intricate glass vessels were so popular with the king and his consort that a dedicated factory was established alongside the palace to keep pace with demand. Amenhotep’s patronage of glassmaking has been compared with Louis XIV’s support for Sèvres porcelain—not the only point of similarity between the two sun-kings.

  Amenhotep’s ceremonial city and mortuary temple were connected by a raised causeway that continued southward for a further mile and a
half, terminating at a lonely spot in the desert (modern Kom el-Samak). Here, in accordance with ancient custom, the king appeared enthroned on a raised dais with twin staircases, symbolizing his dominion over Upper and Lower Egypt. Yet more unfinished royal monuments lay beyond, deep in the Theban hills. Quite what Amenhotep had in mind we can only speculate about. The imagination of the king and his advisers seems to have known no bounds.

  The “dazzling orb of all lands” planned one final coup de théâtre to set the seal on his great festival of kingship. A ceremonial city and a fantasy palace in a sacred landscape were not quite sufficient for the ultimate jubilee. Amenhotep cast his mind back twenty years to the rowing lake he had presented as a gift to his wife Tiye, and an idea formed in his mind. For a construction project equaling anything he had attempted to date—and that was saying something—the king ordered the excavation of two vast artificial harbors, one on either side of the Nile. Each measured nearly half a mile long by a quarter of a mile wide. The stupendous quantities of earth excavated from the western harbor were spread out over the surrounding plain to form an artificial platform for the construction of the jubilee city. Today, the western harbor (Birket Habu) survives as a depression delineated by a series of spoil dumps, its huge dimensions only appreciable from the air. The eastern harbor has disappeared altogether under the sprawling modern city of Luxor, but it was clearly discernible when Napoléon visited Egypt. He would surely have approved of its original purpose. Amenhotep’s vision was to provide the most spectacular setting imaginable for the jubilee’s central ceremony.

  On the morning of the main celebrations, the courtiers, high officials, royal acquaintances, and other dignitaries were ushered into the palace. There, the king showered them with gifts of gold necklaces, golden ornaments in the shapes of ducks and fish (both potent symbols of fertility), and, as a special jubilee decoration, ribbons of green linen. The guests shared in a great breakfast banquet with their sovereign before being directed to leave the palace and proceed to the artificial harbors. Then, in a spectacular set-piece display of royal power and divine kingship, Amenhotep III and Tiye appeared at the waterside, decked from head to foot in gold, dazzling like the sun itself. At the eastern harbor, they boarded a replica of the sun god’s morning barque. The waiting courtiers picked up the prow ropes and pulled the ship gently along, acting out the daily miracle by which the sun god was towed into the heavens at dawn. The scene then shifted to the western harbor, where king and consort appeared once again, but this time in a replica of the sun god’s evening barque. Dignitaries grasped the tow ropes, and the scene was repeated, symbolizing the sun god’s descent into the underworld at dusk. Well might the master of ceremonies later boast that “generations of people since the time of the ancestors had not celebrated such jubilee rites.”13