The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

by Toby Wilkinson

  Despite being gods on earth and the sole path to salvation, the royal family nonetheless had to look far afield for unquestioned loyalty.

  The final public appearance of Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and all six princesses was a magnificent durbar held in 1342, in the twelfth year of the king’s reign. Seated together under a sun shade (for a long, hot spectacle in the open air, comfort came before dogma—for the royal family, at least), they watched as lines of foreign dignitaries paraded before them with exotic gifts, symbolizing the king’s sunlike dominion over all lands. As the official record of the event put it,

  Appearance of the dual king Neferkheperura-sole-one-of-Ra and the king’s great wife, Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti, upon the great palanquin of electrum to receive the tribute of Syria and Kush, the west and the east, every foreign land assembled on one occasion, even the islands in the midst of the sea, presenting tribute to the king.15

  Not that every foreign ruler was impressed with this characteristic display of Egyptian one-upmanship. In a strongly worded letter to Akhe-naten, King Asshuruballit of Assyria complained, “Why should [my] messengers be made to stay constantly out in the sun and die in the sun?”16 How ungrateful of the Assyrian ambassador to resent such unstinting exposure to the Aten’s life-giving rays.…

  THE END OF THE LINE

  DIVINE FAVOR HAD ITS LIMITS. THE DELEGATES HAD BARELY LEFT Akhetaten before tragedy struck the royal family. Akhenaten’s second daughter, Meketaten, died at the tender age of seven, followed not long afterward by the king’s beloved mother, Tiye. Both were interred, as Akhenaten had decreed, in the royal tomb carved into the hillside in a lonely desert valley on the eastern horizon, eight miles beyond the city. Graphic scenes of mourning capture the mood of the grief-stricken relatives.

  A mother’s tears for her dead child are the final image we have of Nefertiti at Akhetaten, for she disappears from the record immediately afterward. Perhaps the same calamity that had carried off her mother-in-law and daughter took her as well. Or perhaps the intimations of mortality that now descended upon Akhenaten prompted a radical reevaluation of his wife’s status. It may be no coincidence that Nefertiti’s disappearance was soon followed by the appointment of a (human) co-regent, to reign alongside Akhenaten. The name of this new co-ruler was none other than Neferneferuaten, the first element in Nefertiti’s titulary. The queen, it seems, had become king. Who better, who more reliable, to carry on Akhenaten’s revolution than its co-instigator and co-beneficiary?

  Akhenaten died after the autumn grape harvest of 1336, in the seventeenth year of his reign. He was laid to rest in the royal tomb, accompanied by revealing grave goods. It is unsurprising, perhaps, that his chosen heirloom was a one-thousand-year-old stone bowl inscribed for Khafra, the builder of the Great Sphinx (mother of all solar monuments). Less predictable were the shabti figurines inscribed for Akhe-naten himself, to serve him in the model of an afterlife that his religion fiercely eschewed. Even religious fanatics, it seems, are prone to deathbed doubts. Akhenaten’s body was placed in a stone sarcophagus protected at its four corners not by the four funerary goddesses but by figures of his beloved Nefertiti.

  His wife would indeed guard his body, but not his legacy. Graffiti in a Theban tomb, dated to the third year of Neferneferuaten, seem to indicate the beginnings of a rapprochement with the old Amun priesthood—perhaps even the reopening of a temple to Amun in the god’s old heartland. Before Akhenaten’s body was even cold in its grave, his exclusive cult of the dazzling Aten had begun to fade.

  The death of Akhenaten plunged the court and the country into turmoil. Those who owed everything to his patronage—men such as Meryra and Mahu—must have wished devoutly for his revolution, or at least his regime, to continue. Others, including members of the powerful Amun priesthood, who had patiently bided their time while his zealotry ran its course, saw the chance for a return to the old orthodoxy. The royal family, too, seems to have been riven by doubt. An ephemeral ruler named Smenkhkara—perhaps a son of Akhenaten’s of whom we are otherwise unaware; more likely Nefertiti in her third incarnation, as sole king—claimed the throne for the briefest of periods (1333–1332), supported by Meritaten, now elevated to the role of king’s great wife. But reactionary forces were growing in strength and looked to the coming generation for a suitable candidate, someone with the legitimacy of royal blood but young enough to do their bidding. Shielded from public gaze for most of his life, Akhenaten’s nine-year-old son by a minor wife seemed ideal. His (hastily arranged?) marriage to Nefertiti’s “heir,” her third daughter, Ankhesenpaaten, only strengthened his claim. Courtiers, priests, and the influential army officers all agreed—it had to be the boy. His name: Tutankhaten, “the living image of the Aten.”

  Within months, the powers behind the throne of the new child pharaoh had set Egypt on the path back to tradition. Under their careful guidance, the king agreed to change his name, thus publically renouncing the Aten in favor of Amun. History had come full circle. Tut-ankhaten thus became Tutankhamun; his wife Ankhesenpaaten became Ankhesenamun (“she lives for Amun”). Next, a great restoration decree was issued in the king’s name—though its wording has his mentors’ fingerprints all over it—from the traditional capital of Memphis. It excoriated Akhenaten’s policies, without mentioning the disgraced ruler by name:

  When His Majesty became king, the temples of the gods and goddesses from Abu to the delta marshes … had fallen into ruin. Their shrines had fallen into decay, having become mounds thick with weeds.… The land was in distress; the gods had abandoned this land. If armies were sent to the Near East to widen the borders of Egypt, they had no success. If one made supplication to a god for protection, he did not come at all.17

  The language of the decree made pointed reference to the “gods” in the plural, and the new king’s actions matched his words. Immediate measures included the restoration of the temples, paying special attention to the cult centers of Amun-Ra; the reinstatement of their priesthoods; and the dedication of new cult statues (paid for by the royal treasury), all so that Tutankhamun could be said to have “rebuilt what was ruined … and driven away chaos throughout the Two Lands.”18 The court’s abandonment of Akhetaten and the return to Thebes set the seal on the return of the ancien régime. To mark this complete break with his father’s vision, the boy king, like other reunifiers before him, took the highly symbolic epithet “repeater of births.” His reign would not be a re-creation like Akhenaten’s but a renaissance.

  So much early promise, so cruelly cut short. Before he was even out of his teens, Tutankhamun followed his father to the grave in 1322. Perhaps he had secretly harbored designs to restore Akhenaten’s reputation, once he’d reached his majority and could rule by himself. Perhaps the real powers in the land were afraid of just such an outcome, and took desperate steps to prevent it. Or perhaps the boy king, physically never very strong, simply met the same fate as most of his subjects: an early death from natural causes. His child bride had tried to perpetuate the royal line, but her tender age and the narrow gene pool of a brother-sister marriage had resulted in miscarriage. Two stillborn daughters were lovingly mummified and interred beside their father in his hastily prepared tomb in the Valley of the Kings, to await their rediscovery—together with the rest of Tutankhamun’s burial treasure—3,244 years later.

  Tutankhamun’s grieving widow knew the dreadful fate that the courtiers had in store for her. She was the last surviving descendant of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, of Amenhotep III and his ancestors. She held the keys to the throne of Egypt. In a final, desperate act, she wrote an extraordinary begging letter to the king of the Hittites. She pleaded with him to send one of his sons to Egypt, to marry her and rule beside her. She explained, “Never shall I take a servant of mine and make him my husband!”19 The Hittite king was astonished, telling his courtiers, “Nothing like this has ever happened to me in my entire life!”20 Eventually, he relented and sent a prince southward, bound for Memphis. But Prince Zannanza never arrived, h
aving died—or having been murdered—en route. Ankhesenamun’s worst nightmare came to pass, and she had to endure a forced marriage to a superannuated courtier, a man old enough to be her grandfather, with his eyes on the throne. Her duty done, she too disappeared from the scene, fate unknown.

  So died the Thutmoside royal line, one of the most glorious dynasties ever to rule Egypt, progenitor of great conquerors and dazzling rulers. The glory days of Amenhotep III seemed but a distant memory. Defeated abroad and dejected at home, what Egypt needed to restore its confidence and luster—although its long-suffering populace might have disagreed—was decisive leadership. As it happened, there was one institution in the country and one man at its head who could provide just that.

  I MMORTALIZED BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY’S POEM “OZYMANDIAS,” the fallen colossus of Ramesses II in his mortuary temple at western Thebes has come to symbolize the transience of power. Perhaps no other monument better evokes the rise and fall of a great civilization. At once awesome and pathetic, the fallen statue encapsulates the might and majesty of pharaonic Egypt but also its impotence in the face of long-term historic forces. The broader Ramesside Period (the Nineteenth and Twentieth dynasties) likewise holds a mirror to Egyptian civilization, reflecting both its boldness and its inherent weaknesses.

  One institution dominates the story of Ramesside Egypt: the army. For a period of two centuries, the influence of the generals was felt, for good and ill, in every aspect of domestic and foreign policy. Military efficiency may have provided an effective short-term solution in times of dynastic turmoil, but over the course of several generations the militarization of politics merely entrenched the power of the army and weakened civil society, with damaging unforeseen consequences. The country’s permanent state of readiness for war with the Near East encouraged the development of a new capital in the delta, and this emphasis on Lower Egypt gave the region a political importance that it was to retain for the rest of pharaonic history. At the same time, the progressive alienation of Upper Egypt from the heart of decision-making stoked up fires of resentment that posed a long-term threat to the very cohesion of the state. Above all, war was costly. Ramesside Egypt’s interminable battles exhausted both the economy and the government machine. Like the victors in later world wars, Egypt ended up paying a high price.

  At the outset of the Ramesside Period, the country was brimming with confidence and imperial ambitions. By its close, the land of the pharaohs had entered a slow but inexorable decline. Part IV charts this crucial turning point in the history of ancient Egypt. In the aftermath of Akhenaten’s failed revolution, it took an army officer, Horemheb, to restore order and self-confidence to a shattered realm. His adoption of a fellow general as his heir maintained the influence of the army, and the early Ramessides did not disappoint, showing an inexhaustible determination to regain Egypt’s empire. The confrontation between Egypt and its archrival, the Hittite Kingdom, culminated in the famous Battle of Kadesh, an epic if indecisive encounter that eventually paved the way for the first comprehensive peace treaty in world history. Yet Egypt’s security was soon threatened by new invaders. Ramesses III, often dubbed “the last great pharaoh,” sealed his reputation as victor against the Libyans and the Sea Peoples, but subsequently fell victim to a palace conspiracy. It was the harbinger of things to come.

  In the end, internal rather than external factors undermined the pharaonic state. A loss of royal prestige, spiraling food prices, strikes, uncontrolled immigration, widespread corruption, a breakdown in law and order—by the time the eleventh Ramesses came to the throne, Egypt was on its knees. Beleaguered and isolated in his delta residence, the pharaoh did what every Ramesside had done at such times, and appealed to the army for assistance. The result was brutally effective, but not in the way Ramesses XI had hoped. The impotent king was sidelined as an irrelevance, and order was restored by separate military juntas in the north and south of the country. The long-cherished ideal of a unified state ruled by a single divine king was rudely cast aside in the name of control. The rescue of Ramesside Egypt was also its death knell.

  CHAPTER 15

  MARTIAL LAW

  A SOLDIER’S LIFE

  EGYPT’S BURGEONING INVOLVEMENT IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS, FROM THE expulsion and pursuit of the Hyksos under Ahmose to the creation of an empire under Thutmose III, had a profound effect on the country at large and the way it was governed. Greater exposure to alien peoples and cultures led to the adoption of exotic ideas and customs in many areas of life, from art and architecture to state and private religion. In keeping with the martial spirit of the age, the iconography of monarchy became strongly militarized, the king appearing on temple reliefs as a great and mighty war leader, and this was reflected in the militarization of society as a whole. The New Kingdom was the age of the soldier, and from humble beginnings the Egyptian army swiftly established itself as one of the most influential groups in society.

  For the campaigns of the Old and Middle kingdoms, Egypt’s rulers had depended upon conscript armies, raised from the general population on an ad hoc basis and bolstered by mercenaries, often recruited from Nubia. While such a system was adequate for launching sporadic raids to defend Egyptian interests or open up trade routes, it was entirely ill-suited to the demands of an empire. The conquest and annexation of large tracts of foreign territory required permanent garrisons to enforce Egyptian control, backed up by the threat of overwhelming force in case of insurrection. Only a permanent standing army could deliver such a policy. Hence, at the beginning of the New Kingdom, military organization was put on a professional basis, and a full-time army was created for the first time in Egyptian history. By the reign of Akhenaten (1353–1336), the influence of the army was felt throughout the corridors of power. Many of the king’s closest followers combined military and civilian office, and these links no doubt served to keep a powerful bloc loyal to the sovereign.

  A reorganization of the armed forces in the late Eighteenth Dynasty divided them into two distinct corps, infantry and chariotry. Egypt also had a strong naval tradition (used to great effect in the battles against the Hyksos), but the interdependence of land-based and river-borne fighting was reflected in the interchangeability of military personnel, with men and officers alike alternating between army and navy postings. A major naval base was located at the port of the capital city, Memphis. Another, at the site of the former Hyksos capital, Hutwaret, went under the suitably appropriate name of Perunefer (“bon voyage”). Military garrisons were probably stationed in provincial centers throughout the country for rapid deployment in emergency situations, while a large garrison of reservists just outside Memphis was no doubt a powerful deterrent against would-be insurgents within the Egyptian population.

  The principal tactical unit of the infantry was a platoon of fifty men, under a platoon commander, the lowest rank of officer. Each platoon was subdivided into five squads of ten men, each with its own designated squad leader. This arrangement fostered teamwork and a strong esprit de corps, essential to the success of any army. Four or five platoons made up a company, which had its own quartermaster and adjutant and was commanded by a standard-bearer. For operational purposes, several companies could be combined to form a battalion, its precise strength depending on requirements. Major military campaigns saw the consolidation of battalions into regiments or divisions, each under the command of a general and named after one of Egypt’s state gods. The chariotry likewise was organized into groups of fifty, and was dominated by officers (like the cavalry in the armies of late-nineteenth-century imperial Europe).

  Life as an infantryman in the pharaoh’s army might have provided opportunities for adventure and advancement, but it was not a bed of roses. Even for those who joined up voluntarily—as opposed to being conscripted—the training was harsh, and was characterized by indiscriminate beatings. Although there was a specialist cadre of “military scribes” (desk officers) responsible for keeping records and allocating provisions, rations in the field were meag
er in the extreme, and soldiers were expected to supplement their bread and water by foraging and stealing—little wonder that at the Battle of Megiddo the Egyptian forces were more concerned with pillaging the enemy’s possessions than with capturing the town. Many of the soldiers may not have had a square meal in weeks. Nor could an infantryman opt to leave such a life of privation, other than through death in service or promotion. A deserter knew that his relatives were liable for imprisonment until he rejoined his unit. If the treatment meted out to Egyptian recruits was bad, the lot of foreign prisoners of war forcibly conscripted into the army was even worse. They could expect to be branded and registered, and even circumcised to “Egyptianize” them. Only if they survived a lifetime of active service could they look forward to an honorable retirement, cultivating a plot of land allocated to them by the state.

  When an Egyptian army marched to war—at a pace of about fifteen miles a day—the basic kit of a soldier comprised a pack, clothing, sandals, and a staff or cudgel for personal protection. More sophisticated weaponry was issued only when the army was ready to engage the enemy. (This was still the era of set-piece battles.) As the weapons were brought on, the shoes came off. Egyptian soldiers fought barefoot. Likewise, body armor was virtually nonexistent, as it impeded movement on the battlefield. Apart from a shield and perhaps a quilted leather jerkin, the infantryman had to rely on his own wits and strength to protect himself. For firepower over long distances, bows and arrows were the weapon of choice. Simple bows came in different sizes, small ones for short-range attack and longbows for use by massed stationary units of archers. Composite bows, a technological innovation of the early New Kingdom, provided even greater penetrating power, and were favored by the officers. Different types of arrows were chosen according to the type of injury the archer wished to inflict: pointed or barbed arrowheads for deep flesh wounds, flat-tipped versions for stunning the enemy. Other long-distance weapons included slings, spears, and javelins. For hand-to-hand combat, clubs and fighting rods were both cheap to produce and brutally effective, delivering crushing blows sufficient to fell even an armored opponent. Battle-axes were good for hacking down enemy forces, scimitars for slashing and slicing. As a weapon of last resort, the short-bladed dagger was invaluable, but also served a more grisly purpose. After each engagement, an Egyptian army counted the enemy dead by severing a hand (or, for an uncircumcised enemy, the penis) from each slain opponent. In a scene from the late Eighteenth Dynasty, a group of victorious Egyptian soldiers is shown leaving the battlefield, three enemy hands skewered on each of their spears.