The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

by Toby Wilkinson

  If the infantry formed the backbone of the Egyptian army, the charioteers were the shock troops. The introduction of the horse and chariot from western Asia at the beginning of the New Kingdom revolutionized warfare in the ancient world, and gave Egypt a highly effective force for use against massed infantry. Each chariot had a two-man crew, comprising a warrior armed with a bow and arrow and a driver-cum-shield-bearer. The chariot’s lightweight construction and rear-mounted wheels gave maximum speed and maneuverability, perfect for “softening up” the enemy before a frontal assault, and for harrying defeated forces, to turn a retreat into a rout. The last word in modern weaponry, the chariot was also the ultimate status symbol for the Egyptian elite—even if, like so many other innovations, it had been brought to the Nile Valley by foreigners. Yet the Egyptians of the Eighteenth Dynasty turned this technological triumph against its own inventors, using chariot forces to conquer and overwhelm province after province throughout the Near East. Without the chariot, it is doubtful that Egypt would ever have succeeded in forging an empire.

  Chariots, like soft beds on campaign, were the preserve of the officer class. For an ordinary soldier to aspire to such luxuries, he first had to serve his time at the bottom of the hierarchy and work his way up through the ranks. The army certainly offered a passport to prestige and power for determined and ambitious men. Nobody illustrates this better than Horemheb. From a provincial background in Middle Egypt, his glittering military career took him not just to the top of the army but to the very pinnacle of the Egyptian state. Born in the reign of Amenhotep III, Horemheb’s early career under Akhenaten is shrouded in mystery—he had no wish in later life to be associated with the royal revolutionary—but there are tantalizing clues that his aptitude and skill had already been recognized with promotion to high office. In the hills of Akhetaten, an unfinished tomb was inscribed for a king’s scribe and general named Paatenemheb. Since many ambitious individuals changed their names under Akhenaten’s regime to eliminate references to the old gods, it is quite possible that Paatenemheb (“the Aten [is] in festival”) and Horemheb (“Horus [is] in festival”) are one and the same man. Horemheb may have become “Paatenemheb” during Akhenaten’s reign and then reverted to “Horemheb” after Akhenaten’s death. Certainly, by the time Tutankhamun succeeded to the throne in 1332, Horemheb had come to prominence as commander in chief of the young king’s army, a “general of generals.”

  A Nubian prisoner with a rope around his neck WERNER FORMAN ARCHIVE

  Horemheb’s magnificent private tomb at Saqqara is decorated with lavish scenes showing his activities as great overseer of the army. Vignettes of life in a military encampment show messenger boys running at the double as they carry instructions from tent to tent. Elsewhere, Horemheb receives the supplications of emissaries from hungry foreign lands as they plead for clemency and prostrate themselves “seven times on the belly and seven times on the back.” More unsettling still are the scenes of prisoners of war from Horemheb’s campaigns in the Near East and Nubia, row upon row of captives lined up before the commander in chief to await their fate. With wooden manacles on their wrists and ropes around their necks, Asiatic prisoners are paraded, pushed, and cajoled by Egyptian soldiers. As a standard part of military policy, entire families of men, women, and children were transported to Egypt as hostages, to ensure the good conduct of their countrymen back home. Even more humiliating treatment was reserved for the Nubian citizens of “vile Kush,” ancient Egypt’s favorite whipping boy. The Kushite chief was forced to prostrate himself before Horemheb while armed Egyptian soldiers harrassed and assaulted his men, beating them with sticks and punching them on the jaw in acts of deliberate humiliation. All the while, with customary military efficiency, army scribes recorded every detail.

  This ruthlessness found favor beyond the ranks of the army. In pharaonic Egypt, such qualities also provided the perfect springboard for a career in the civil service. Like many senior officers, Horemheb was able to combine both military and civilian roles. At the same time as commanding Tutankhamun’s armed forces, he also acted as lord protector to the young king. As “king’s deputy in the entire land,” “who repeats the king’s words to his entourage,” Horemheb exercised huge influence over the direction of government policy, and from his office at Memphis he must have been one of the chief architects of the return to orthodoxy. Indeed, the inscriptions in his private tomb conspicuously omit references to Tutankhamun by name, a not-so-coded acknowledgment that the general, not the boy king, called the shots. As the power behind the throne, the commander in chief was already steering Egypt toward military rule as a way of restoring order. As his titles proclaimed, Horemheb was indeed “the two eyes of the king in leading the Two Lands and establishing the laws of the Two Banks.” He would not have to wait long to make the ultimate transformation from king’s deputy to the top job itself.

  MILITARY DISCIPLINE

  AT THE MOMENT OF TUTANKHAMUN’S UNTIMELY DEATH IN 1322, Horemheb was in the field in distant Syria, leading Egyptian troops in an unsuccessful campaign to recapture the rebellious city of Kadesh and pry it free from Hittite control. The nature of his involvement in the murky events that ensued—Ankhesenamun’s plea to the Hittite king to send her a husband, the murder of Prince Zannanza en route to Egypt, and the accession of the old retainer Ay as pharaoh—remains shrouded in obscurity. Perhaps that was Horemheb’s intention. Even if his hopes of election were temporarily thwarted by Ay’s intervention, he knew that the new king was an old man with little time left. After a career spent building his power base and biding his time, Horemheb could certainly wait another few years before claiming his prize.

  His eventual accession as lord of the Two Lands, after Ay’s brief reign of four years (1322–1319), might have seemed inevitable. After all, Horemheb had been designated as Tutankhamun’s heir and was merely fulfilling his destiny. That, no doubt, was the spin the royal propagandists put on the general’s elevation. In reality, the appropriation of the throne by a commoner with no royal connections represented a complete break with tradition and threatened to undermine the very foundations of a hereditary monarchy. For all intents and purposes, Horemheb’s accession was a military coup. He was a skilled enough tactician to realize the dangers, and clearly understood that he would need both to legitimize his own kingship and to put the institution as a whole on a new footing in order to secure his throne. Even with the army behind him, a new program for Egypt would require all his strategic skills.

  The first step—as always—was to obtain divine sanction for his regime. This Horemheb achieved by the brilliant but simple expedient of timing his coronation to coincide with the annual Opet Festival at Thebes. As he emerged from the sanctuary of Luxor Temple, both newly crowned and infused with godlike powers through his communion with Amun-Ra, how could anyone doubt or challenge his right to rule? Once securely established on the throne of Horus, the king set his theologians to work to devise a plausible background story that would explain the rise of an army general to the kingship. The result was as ingenious a piece of sophistry as ever flowed from the pen of an ancient Egyptian scribe. The tale told how Horemheb had been marked out from childhood by his local god, Horus of Herakleopolis, who acted as father to him, protecting him until the time came:

  A generation and another came and went [and still his father kept him safe], for he knew the day when he would retire to hand him his kingship.1

  According to this explanation, Horemheb’s long career in the military and civilian services was all part of the divine plan. Eventually, when the moment was right (in fact, when the opportunity arose), Horus promoted his chosen candidate and handed him over to the safekeeping of Amun-Ra. A boy from the provinces thus became the lord of the Two Lands.

  If both the occasion and the setting for Horemheb’s coronation harked back to the glorious reign of Amenhotep III, that was entirely deliberate. Part of Horemheb’s program of legitimation involved airbrushing the intervening reigns from history
, so that he could present himself as the first rightful pharaoh since Egypt’s “dazzling orb.” To this end, Akhenaten’s temples at Gempaaten were systematically dismantled, their blocks used as fill for Horemheb’s own constructions. On his orders, teams of workmen descended upon Akhetaten to expunge all traces of the heretic king. Statues of Akhenaten and Nefertiti were torn down, smashed, and tossed into a heap outside the Great Aten Temple. Also in line for official persecution were Tutankhamun and Ay. The boy king’s inscriptions and monuments were recarved with Horemheb’s names and titles, so that he could take sole credit for the return to orthodoxy (for which he had, in any case, been largely responsible). As for Ay, the old retainer who had kept Horemheb from the throne, his memory was treated even more harshly. His tomb in the Valley of the Kings and his public monuments were desecrated to extinguish all hopes of immortality. At the end of a lifelong rivalry, Horemheb had the last laugh.

  Restoring the temples, reinstating their offerings, and restaffing them “with lay priests and lector priests from the pick of the infantry”2 were all essential tasks for setting the country back on a traditional path. But Horemheb’s counterrevolutionary agenda went far beyond the religious domain. Like other kings since the dawn of history, he had announced his program in the Horus name he adopted at his accession, “mighty bull, whose counsels are penetrating.” The emphasis on law as well as order was intentional. Building on his experience of “establishing the laws of the Two Banks” under Tutankhamun, Horemheb now promulgated a series of major legislative reforms, published in the form of an edict. One of the most extensive surviving examples of pharaonic law-making, it was designed both to counteract abuses of power by agents of the state and to reinforce the security of Horemheb’s own regime. While the preamble is couched in the usual lofty phraseology—“His Majesty determined … to drive out chaos and destroy falsehood”3—the detailed measures that follow are wholly pragmatic. They paint a picture of a ruler steeped in military discipline and determined to run Egypt along similar lines. Four of the ten clauses set down new penalties for misuse of authority by agents of the palace. Anyone found guilty of requisitioning boats or workers designated for state projects could expect to receive the harshest of punishments: exile to the desolate border fortress of Tjaru, and facial mutilation. Government employees caught with their noses in the trough could expect to lose them. Also subject to the full force of the law were corrupt palace employees. Fraudulently assessing taxes, collecting too much fodder (thus impoverishing the population at large), or extracting punitive amounts of provisions from local mayors during royal progresses would no longer be tolerated. Nor were members of the armed forces exempt from the same rules. Any soldier found guilty of stealing a hide—even to supplement his basic kit—would be punished severely with one hundred blows and five open wounds, in addition to the confiscation of the stolen items.

  Having dealt with official corruption, Horemheb next turned his legislative attention to the law courts. Purging the judiciary has always been a favorite tactic of despots (especially those with a military background), and Horemheb was no exception. He appointed a raft of new judges, men who would be “attentive to the words of the court and the laws of the judgment hall.”4 He further decreed that local officials found guilty of perverting the course of justice would be sentenced to death, adding, “My Majesty has done this to advance the laws of Egypt.”5 And, of course, the king’s word was the law. The final group of measures in Horemheb’s edict are perhaps the most telling, dealing as they do with his own personal security. One clause laid down new restrictions on the activities and movements of employees of the royal harem, always a locus for dissent and possible sedition. The tenth and final clause was even more blatant, decreeing enhanced rewards for members of the king’s bodyguard:

  It will be like a holiday for them—every man seated with a share of every good thing … applauded for all [his] good deeds … [rewards] thrown to them from the window and summoning every man by his [own] name.6

  Royal bodyguards would henceforth receive additional rewards from the king’s personal property even while they continued to draw regular rations from the state treasury. The quid pro quo was a new protocol for the innermost chambers of the palace, to ensure that everyone knew and kept his place. Horemheb was not going to take any chances with his own safety. As one who had lived by the sword, he had no intention of dying by it. As the edict made crystal clear, he was “a brave and vigilant ruler.”7

  PASSING THE BATON

  BY SUCH MEASURES, HOREMHEB SUCCEEDED IN ESTABLISHING THE authority and legitimacy of his reign, and bringing military discipline to bear on a country weakened by three decades of political upheaval and uncertainty. There was only one fly in the ointment: his lack of an heir. Without children of his own, Horemheb could not risk a disputed succession undoing his hard-won reforms. His solution mirrored his own rise to power. Looking among his closest followers, he identified an ideal successor from the ranks of the army. Paramessu was an army man through and through. The son of a battalion commander, he had started his career as a simple soldier, and had then won an officer’s commission and subsequent promotions to fortress commander, aide-de-camp to the king, and finally general. He was a man in the same mold as Horemheb, someone who shared the same background and the same fundamental outlook. Even better, he already had a son, and a grandson was on the way—the perfect ingredients for a new military dynasty. Horemheb proceeded to give Paramessu a series of high civilian offices to prepare him for the eventual succession, appointing him king’s deputy and vizier. At the same time, Paramessu had to relinquish his military titles while Horemheb remained in charge of the army. It would have been unwise to hand over such a powerful institution to a subordinate, however trusted. Yet by conferring the titles “king’s son” and “hereditary prince” on Paramessu, the pharaoh was clearly signaling his resolve to hand over the kingship itself, in due course. As Horemheb’s reign neared its close, his chosen heir changed his name to “Ramessu beloved of Amun” and began to write his name in a royal cartouche. The stage was set for the rise of the Ramessides.

  While Horemheb may have promoted the new dynasty, its first member had no doubts that he, not his patron, was the real founder. To signal this new beginning, Ramessu—better known as Ramesses I (1292–1290)—deliberately chose his throne name to echo that of Ahmose, founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty. Where Ahmose had been Nebpehtyra, “Ra is lord of strength,” Ramesses styled himself Menpehtyra, “Ra is enduring in strength.” Yet Ramesses was not to endure in strength for very long. Already an old man at his accession, he entrusted much of the day-to-day running of the country to his son Seti. It was a wise decision. Within eighteen months of coming to the throne, Ramesses was dead. The new king, Seti I (1290–1279), was a vigorous and energetic man, tall and athletic with a distinguished countenance—high cheekbones and the characteristic aquiline nose of the Ramesside males. Horemheb’s law code had successfully bolstered royal authority and rooted out corruption, so Seti could now set about restoring Egypt’s fortunes, at home and abroad.

  The mummy of Seti I G. ELLIOT SMITH, THE ROYAL MUMMIES

  Prosperity and security had always been demonstrated through state construction projects, and for the next decade the country echoed to the sound of masons’ chisels and the shouts of builders, as Seti commissioned an astonishing series of new monuments at important sites throughout Egypt. Not since the days of Amenhotep III had government architects and artists been kept so busy. Seti’s grandest project was a fabulous new temple at Abdju, ancient cradle of kingship and cult center of Osiris. The temple was designed to a bold new plan, and was equally radical in its dedication. At the back of a columned hall fronted by two great courts, there lay not one sanctuary but seven. Each of Egypt’s chief deities had a place in this national pantheon: the holy family of Horus, Isis, and Osiris; the solar gods Amun-Ra and Ra-Horakhty; Ptah, the god of Memphis and of craftsmen; and, finally, predictably, Seti himself. A further suite of
side rooms provided space for the cults of the Memphite funerary gods Nefertem and Ptah-Sokar, so they wouldn’t feel excluded. This bringing together of the greatest deities in the land under one roof, to honor Seti with their presence, was part of a conscious effort to establish the theological credentials of the new Ramesside Dynasty.

  The theme of dynastic legitimacy was reinforced in a long corridor that led southward from the columned hall. Its exquisite relief decoration showed Seti’s eldest son, Prince Ramesses, reading a papyrus inscribed with the names of sixty-seven royal predecessors, stretching all the way back to Menes, legendary founder of the Egyptian state. The Abdju king list drew upon ancient temple archives, but its primary purpose was religious rather than historical. Designed to stress the unbroken succession of rightful monarchs from the beginning of the First Dynasty down to Seti I and his son, it included the ephemeral kings of the First Intermediate Period but conspicuously omitted the hated Hyksos, the dubious Hatshepsut, the heretic Akhenaten, and his three tainted successors. In the context of a royal ancestor cult, such controversial forebears were best forgotten.