The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

by Toby Wilkinson

  But the plotters had made a fatal error. With so many people involved, it was virtually certain that someone would blab. Before the plans could be carried through to their fateful conclusion, the authorities were alerted and the conspirators arrested. As the details of the plot became clear, so did the extreme level of the threat to national security. Fearing the repercussions of a full, open trial (with himself as the final court of appeal), the king opted instead for a special tribunal. He appointed a group of twelve trusted officials to investigate, pass judgment, and impose an appropriate sentence. Carefully chosen agents of the state—representing the court, the military, and the civil service—would be judge, jury, and executioner. Ramesses III’s only involvement was to give the tribunal carte blanche in dealing with the plotters: “May all that they have done be upon their own heads.”18

  With such a remit, the outcome was never in doubt. In a series of three prosecutions, thirty-eight individuals were tried and found guilty. The ringleaders were allowed to take their own lives. Some were forced to commit suicide inside the courtroom, while others, including Prince Pentaweret, were granted the questionable privilege of doing so outside. All those convicted of treason were further condemned to a second death: their names were hacked out of their monuments and changed in the official court proceedings to deny them a good memory. Hence the commander of Nubian troops Khaemwaset (“arisen in Thebes”) became Binemwaset (“evil in Thebes”), Meryra (“beloved of Ra”) became Mesedsura (“Ra hates him”), and Paraherwenemef (“Ra is at his right hand”) became Parakamenef (“Ra blinds him”). Minor conspirators escaped the death penalty but suffered dreadful mutilations, their noses and ears being cut off to identify them as convicted criminals forever after. As a warning to the population at large, even those who had not been directly involved in the plot but had merely kept silent were punished. Turning a deaf ear to sedition was tantamount to treason.

  Finally, to wipe away all evidence of the conspiracy and the tribunal established to investigate it, a prosecution was brought against three of the judges and two officers of the court. On trumped-up charges, they were accused of improper liaison with the plotters. One judge was found innocent. The other two were condemned to mutilation but—conveniently for the state—committed suicide before the sentence could be carried out. With the tribunal report signed off, the authorities hoped that the whole sorry episode could be safely consigned to history.

  Except, of course, that it couldn’t. It had revealed serious divisions between the ruling dynasty and members of the government, between different factions of the royal family, between the blithe optimism of those in power and the deep malaise in the country at large. The signs could not have been more ominous for the future of Ramesside Egypt.

  Whether from wounds inflicted by assailants or from natural causes, Ramesses III died in 1156, a matter of months after the plot was uncovered. His death marked not just the demise of Egypt’s last great pharaoh, but the end of the country’s confidence in its own destiny. The unwritten contract between rulers and ruled, an arrangement that had secured Egyptian civilization since the dawn of history, was unraveling. So too, before long, would the very fabric of the state.

  CHAPTER 18

  DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD

  SWEAT AND TEARS

  FOR THE AVERAGE ANCIENT EGYPTIAN, ONLY TWO THINGS IN LIFE WERE certain: death and taxes. From a baby’s first breath, the twin specters of dying and destitution haunted every waking moment. Infant mortality was shockingly high, and of those who made it through the perils of childhood, few could look forward to a life span of much more than thirty-five years. It was not just the combination of poverty and a poor diet that reduced life expectancy. In the unsanitary conditions of Egyptian towns and villages, waterborne and infectious diseases were rife. Bilharzia, hepatitis, guinea worm, and amebic dysentery were inescapable features of everyday life. Those who were not carried off by such unpleasant conditions were often left disfigured or disabled. Visual impairment, caused by illness or injury, was particularly common: “The village was full of the bleary-eyed, the one-eyed, and the blind, with inflamed and festering eyelids, of all ages.”1

  As if the afflictions of disease and premature decease were not bad enough, economic circumstances and the structure of the Egyptian state conspired to keep most ordinary people in a state of permanent penury. Even in a good year, the average farm yield amounted to little more than a subsistence income. If a peasant could have kept the entire crop for his own family, he might just have made a tolerable living. However, since in theory the whole of Egypt belonged to the crown, there were taxes due to the authorities for the privilege of farming the pharaoh’s land. Like other governments throughout history, ancient Egypt’s rulers were particularly adept at collecting these dues, employing a network of local agents to prevent evasion. Moreover, in a pre-monetary economy, the taxes were levied in the form of a share of each farm’s agricultural produce, and this had to be handed over, come feast or famine. Defaulters could expect to be thrown in prison—a deeply unwelcome prospect that most did their utmost to avoid. As a result, “peasant families always wavered between abject poverty and utter destitution.”2 As in Robin Hood’s England, the only escape from overbearing taxation was to abandon the fields completely and go on the run, living as an outlaw on the margins of society. As the New Kingdom progressed, an increasing number of people took this desperate step.

  The hard life of a peasant is documented in unusual detail in a papyrus from the late Twentieth Dynasty. The text tells the story of a man named Wermai who fled from his village in Upper Egypt to the great oasis of the Western Desert (modern Dakhla) to seek a better life. Instead, he found himself in even worse circumstances, subject to an uncaring and unscrupulous mayor who had the power to make his people’s lives a misery. Not only did the local authorities extract taxation with all their customary ruthlessness, but they feathered their own nests by deliberately reducing the rations doled out to the already hard-pressed peasantry. As a result, the people went hungry while the local bureaucrats prospered.

  Despised by the literate elite, Egypt’s great mass of agricultural workers were put upon and exploited, yet their unremitting and ill-rewarded labor lay at the base of the country’s prosperity. In a very real sense, the sweat of their brows built pharaonic civilization, not that the pharaohs or their advisers seemed either to notice or to care.

  Perhaps the most burdensome and loathed of all forms of taxation was the corvée, a tax paid through labor, on demand, by every able-bodied male in the land (and not officially abolished in Egypt until A.D. 1889). The only workers exempt from the corvée were those employed by temples that had been granted immunity from the call-up by royal decree. From the earliest history of the Egyptian state, it was the corvée that provided the labor force required for massive government projects, from the quarrying of stone to the building of pyramids and temples. Conscription into the corvée was organized along military lines and, like other forms of taxation, was carried out by local officials, village and town elders acting on the orders of their regional and national superiors. The recruiting sergeants usually came calling at times of the year when the agricultural economy could manage without a large proportion of the workforce—during the inundation, when the fields were flooded, or in the growing season, when fewer workers were needed on the land.

  The draft was indiscriminate and often unfair. Many who were ineligible for duty were nevertheless pressed into service despite their protestations. There was no right of appeal. Fathers found themselves assigned to labor gangs as substitutes for their indigent sons. As peasants were pulled from fields and villages throughout the country, they found themselves locked into a state-run system from which there was little or no chance of escape. Collective punishment was meted out to deserters, with their entire families being held hostage by the authorities against the deserters’ eventual return. For deserters who returned or were tracked down, the punishment was a life sentence in a labor gang.r />
  Life on corvée duty was hard and unremitting. Under ancient Egyptian law, serious criminals could be sentenced to hard labor, or even banished to the garrison of Kush to work in the appalling conditions of the Nubian gold mines. For ordinary law-abiding subjects, the prospect of forced labor was scarcely less dreadful. Workers were given few freedoms and no luxuries, while rations were at the subsistence level. Only at the end of their period of service could the men return home, assuming they had survived disease and injury. Unfortunately the standards of health and safety on government projects were abysmally poor, and the casualty rate correspondingly high.

  The dangers of the corvée were brought into particularly sharp focus in 1153, early in the reign of Ramesses IV, during an expedition to the quarries of the Wadi Hammamat. Just five months after his accession to the throne, Ramesses decided to revive quarrying activity after a forty-year lull. To prepare the ground, he first sent a 408-strong mission to reconnoiter the area and make arrangements at the quarry site for the resumption of large-scale work. After further visits by various bureaucrats over the following months, everything was finally declared ready. So, in the third year of Ramesses IV’s reign, there set out from Thebes a great expedition, the likes of which Egypt had not witnessed for more than seven hundred years. In an indication of its national importance, the mission was led by the most powerful figure in Thebes, the high priest of Amun, Ramessesnakht. Assisting him were officials both civilian and military. The vizier, an overseer of the treasury, the chief tax officer, the mayor of Thebes, and two royal butlers were joined by a lieutenant general of the army, for this was a combined operation. Under their joint control marched a vast conscript army, comprising two thousand civilian workers, eight hundred foreign mercenaries, and five thousand ordinary soldiers. The use of the army for civil projects during the winter months was a pragmatic policy. It kept the soldiers busy and under the watchful eye of the king’s advisers at a time when campaigning was undesirable (because of the rainy season in the Near East) and when they might otherwise have been idle. The Ramesside pharaohs appreciated the coercive power of a large standing army but were also wise enough to recognize the political dangers of a military force with too much time on its hands.

  Quarrying stone was essentially a hard, manual task, so Ramesses IV’s expedition included only a small contingent of skilled workers (just four sculptors and two draftsmen) to supervise the work. By contrast, there were fifty policemen and a deputy chief of police to keep the workers in line and prevent desertion. Once at the quarry face, the men toiled and sweated at their backbreaking work, for long days on end. Their meager rations, brought by oxcart from the Nile Valley, consisted largely of the basics—bread and beer, enlivened by the occasional sweet cake or portion of meat. Natural cisterns hollowed out of the rock were designed to trap rainwater for drinking, but in the parched landscape of the Eastern Desert rain was always in short supply, even in winter. Back in the days of Ramesses II, gold mining expeditions would routinely lose half of their workforce and half their transport donkeys from thirst. Seti I had taken measures to reduce this startling loss of life by ordering wells to be dug in the Eastern Desert, but the incidence of death on corvée missions remained stubbornly high. Hence, the great commemorative inscription carved to record Ramesses IV’s Wadi Hammamat expedition ends with a blunt statistic. After listing the nine thousand or so members who made it back alive, it adds, almost as an afterthought, “and those who are dead and omitted from this list: nine hundred men.” The statistic is chilling. An average workman on state corvée labor had a one in ten chance of dying. Such a loss was considered neither disastrous nor unusual.

  In ancient Egypt, life was cheap.

  DOWNWARD SPIRAL

  UNWELCOME AS IT MAY HAVE BEEN, FORCED LABOR WAS, IN THEORY, part of the contract between the Egyptian people and their rulers. In return for his subjects’ daily toil, the king guaranteed the eternal order of the cosmos, appeasing the gods and ensuring Egypt’s continued prosperity. Even in the minds of the hard-pressed and downtrodden peasantry, it could just about be defended as a worthwhile exchange. Except that, after the death of Ramesses III, the country’s rulers signally failed to keep their side of the bargain. Following the turmoil surrounding his father’s demise, Ramesses IV looked forward to better times: “[Since] Egypt has come into his lifetime, a joyful period has come about for Egypt.”3 As a further sign of his hopes for renewed glory, he modeled his royal titles closely on those of his illustrious forebear Ramesses II, and even planned to outdo the mighty Ozymandias in longevity. On a stela dedicated at Abdju in the fourth year of his reign, Ramesses IV instructed the gods: “Double for me the extended life span and the great reign of King Usermaatra-setepenra [Ramesses II], the great god.”4

  Next to a long life span, every pharaoh’s wish was for his heirs to succeed him in an unbroken line. In Ramesses IV’s case this desire was made even more acute by bitter experience. Mindful of the harem plot that had so nearly deprived him of the kingship, he hectored Egypt’s chief deities, asking—nay, telling—them, “Confer my great office on my heirs; behold, the disaffected are the abomination of your majesties!”5 If he, Ramesses, carried out his duty to beautify the gods’ temples and increase their offerings, then they should deliver the quid pro quo and grant his requests.

  But the gods were no longer listening.

  To mark his accession, Ramesses IV had authorized a handout of silver to the workmen of the royal tomb, to win their goodwill and ensure conscientious work on his sepulchre. He had also doubled the workforce from 60 to 120 for good measure. Yet his tomb was, in the end, rather small and poorly finished. Despite his wish for glory and his penchant for ambitious projects, none of the king’s temple buildings was ever completed. Egypt’s economy was faltering, its government ossifying. There was neither the means nor the will, it seemed, to sustain the level of patronage that had characterized the golden age of the New Kingdom. And so much for a long reign: Ramesses IV had asked the gods for 134 years on the throne; fate allotted him just six (1156–1150).

  Where Ramesses IV had struggled to keep up the appearance of royal authority, his successors gave up all pretense. While they all took the name Ramesses (so great was its prestige), none of them showed the same determination, resolve, or leadership as their two famous namesakes. Egypt was fortunate not to face another mass invasion on the scale of the Sea Peoples’ attack under Ramesses III, but its borders were far from secure against hostile incursions. Even though there was no longer a superpower in the Near East against which Egypt needed to defend its interests, as it had when facing the Hittites under Ramesses II, there were threats, nonetheless, to Egypt’s imperial possessions. Yet none of Ramesses IV’s successors was able or willing to give proper attention to the country’s foreign or security interests, so preoccupied was the administration with the deteriorating situation at home.

  The brief five-year reign of Ramesses V (1150–1145) revealed the depths to which the country had sunk. The pharaoh’s accession and coronation ceremonies had barely been completed before the government uncovered a serious corruption scandal. It transpired that, for nearly a decade, a ship’s captain named Khnumnakht had been busy appropriating for his own profit substantial quantities of grain destined for the temple of Khnum at Abu. After collecting the grain from one of the temple’s estates in the delta, it was Khnumnakht’s job to take it hundreds of miles upstream to the temple granaries on Egypt’s southern border. In fact, during the course of the long voyage, aided and abetted by various farmers, scribes, and inspectors, and encouraged by a corrupt priest, he siphoned off a significant proportion of each delivery. By the time he was found out, more than five thousand sacks of barley had been stolen.

  The investigation into Khnumnakht’s crimes soon revealed the true extent of corruption among the Abu priesthood. One of the priests had not only stolen equipment from the temple treasury, but he had also rustled calves of the sacred Merwer (also known as Mnevis) bull, believed to
be an embodiment of the sun god Ra. This was not merely theft; it was sacrilege. Hundreds of miles from the royal residence at Per-Ramesses, and far from the gaze of government officials, state employees in distant parts of the realm had decided to put their hands into the till, confident that their misdemeanors would go undetected. It was the ultimate indictment of the pharaonic administration, by now so paralyzed that not even its own officials afforded it any respect. Central control over the entire Nile Valley, assisted by reliable and swift communication, had been the sine qua non of the Egyptian state. With local communities now effectively doing their own thing, the prospects for national cohesion looked increasingly grim.

  Shaken by such a serious breakdown in economic and political control, Ramesses V determined to restore some measure of order. As earlier pharaohs had recognized, a proper census of national wealth was a prerequisite for effective government, so Ramesses commissioned a survey of landholdings in a ninety-five-mile stretch of Middle Egypt, paying particular attention to grain production and tax collection. The result was a papyrus register some thirty-three feet long, an impressive document indeed. But its royal author, like his administration, was in failing health, and he succumbed to smallpox before the survey’s findings could be implemented. In a further sign of government weakness, his pockmarked mummy lay unburied for a year while a modest tomb was hurriedly prepared to receive it. Ramesses V’s intended sepulchre had been summarily usurped by his successor. In uncertain times, it was every man for himself.

  By now, the situation at Thebes was deteriorating fast. Soaring grain prices reflected the weakness of the economy and the failure of the government to guarantee wages. Contemporary accounts hint at hunger, even starvation, as the peasantry bore the full brunt of the hard times. Hyenas were spotted in the Theban hills, scenting death in the villages below. With tax revenues falling and the court unable to pay for new royal monuments, Ramesses VI (1145–1137) took drastic steps to economize. On the west bank, he halved the workforce of tomb builders to sixty men; on the east bank, at Ipetsut, he simply recarved the additions built by Ramesses IV, to claim them as his own.