The conflict may have saved face for Ramesses XI, but it was a disaster for Thebes. The depletion of the local garrisons and the conscription of men of fighting age led to a security vacuum across the city. Widespread looting of temples and tombs broke out and went unchecked for months. The tomb of Ramesses VI was targeted for a second time and its sarcophagus attacked. Worse still, as Panehsy’s army retreated, it carried out a scorched-earth policy, ravaging monuments in an orgy of destruction. When the dust finally settled, the pharaoh visited Thebes—in a rare outing from his delta residence—to see for himself the extent of the damage. It was a deeply depressing sight. Not since the dark days of the country’s first civil war, a thousand years earlier, had so much devastation been inflicted by fellow Egyptians.
In a vain attempt to turn back the clock and start afresh, Ramesses declared the beginning of a new era. The nineteenth year of his reign was to be known instead as the first year of the renaissance, and subsequent years would follow the new nomenclature. But nobody was fooled, least of all Paiankh—for he, not Ramesses, was the undoubted victor against Panehsy. To prove the point, Paiankh took over the viceroy’s titles and dignities, followed by those of the high priest as well. General, overseer of granaries, and high priest of Amun—military, economic, and religious authority were now combined in one person. The “restoration” of pharaonic authority in Thebes had in fact been just another military putsch—except that Paiankh had learned from history. While the viceroy had enjoyed only a brief period of absolute power, Paiankh’s regime would be designed to stand the test of time.
An army man through and through, brusque, determined, and ruthlessly efficient, Paiankh ruled Thebes with a rod of iron. He took pains to build a network of influential supporters, surrounding himself with men and women of ability. One such was his wife Nodjmet, a woman of considerable resolve and personal authority. Paiankh’s first policy, after imposing martial law in Thebes, was to lead his army into Nubia in pursuit of the renegade Panehsy. Only by securing its southern flank against a repeat attack could the new military junta achieve lasting security. While Paiankh was on maneuvers in Nubia, he left the running of Thebes in his wife’s capable hands. The two corresponded regularly, keeping each other informed about major developments. One particular exchange of letters underlines the dark side of military rule. In Paiankh’s absence, unease about the regime was growing in Thebes, and Nodjmet wrote to her husband to report on seditious statements made by two policemen. Even the forces of law and order were beginning to mutter against the junta. Paiankh’s reply was unequivocal and chilling:
Have these two policemen brought to my house and get to the bottom of their words in short order. Then have them killed and thrown into the water by night.10
Interrogation followed by “disappearance”—the classic fate of dissidents under a military regime.
Political assassinations were not the only murky activities sponsored by Paiankh in his bid to retain power. In another letter from the Nubian front, he ordered two of his Theban henchmen, Butehamun and Kar, to perform an unnamed “task on which you have never before embarked.”11 The euphemistic phraseology was carefully chosen, for the task in question was nothing less than state-sponsored tomb robbery. The war against Panehsy showed no signs of a swift resolution, and Paiankh badly needed funds to finance his military operations and shore up his regime at home. The Theban hills offered a ready treasure trove of gold and silver, buried in the tombs of Egypt’s kings, queens, and high officials. So Paiankh’s men set out on a deliberate policy of breaking and entering, channeling the proceeds of their crime back to the government coffers. As they roamed the west bank in search of tomb entrances, they marked what they found for systematic future clearance. Butehamun alone left more than 130 graffiti, identifying the repositories of wealth amassed by generations of pious Thebans. Having survived Libyan attack, opportunistic robbery, and civil war, the remaining intact tombs of the New Kingdom pharaohs were now ruthlessly exploited by the rulers themselves. A final taboo had been broken.
After a decade of rule, the junta faced its sternest test when Paiankh died unexpectedly. His sons were too young to take over, and the prospect of an interregnum was deeply unwelcome for a regime that had not yet consolidated its grip on power. So, postponing a dynastic succession in favor of a stopgap solution, Paiankh’s supporters moved swiftly and stabilized the situation by choosing another army general, Herihor, as interim leader. He was an inspired choice. A mature and capable leader in Paiankh’s mold, Herihor came from the same officer class. He was as vigorous in his private life as he was in military matters, fathering nineteen sons.
Yet none of them was to succeed him. Paiankh’s widow saw to that. In a brilliantly calculated move, Nodjmet immediately took Herihor as her new husband, at a stroke bolstering his position and retaining her influence over the eventual succession.
That succession left no room for the Ramesside royal family. While Herihor strengthened the rule of the generals in Upper Egypt, another army man, the king’s son-in-law Nesbanebdjedet, took effective power in the north of the country. Egypt was now a nation of two halves, each ruled by a military elite. Though Herihor and Nesbanebdjedet paid lip service to the continued reign of Ramesses XI, there was no denying where real power lay. Isolated and a virtual prisoner in his own royal residence, the last of the Ramessides had seen pharaonic authority slip from his grasp, through a combination of poor decisions and benign neglect. The same army that had brought the Nineteenth and Twentieth dynasties to power was presiding over the country’s formal division. Military might had proved a double-edged sword indeed.
As Ramesses XI lay on his deathbed in 1069, after thirty years on the throne, the Nile itself seemed to signal the end of an era. The great river’s Pelusiac Branch, on which Per-Ramesses had been founded two centuries earlier, had been silting up for some time. By the end of Ramesses XI’s reign, the main channel was so clogged with sediment that ships were no longer able to use the city’s harbors. It was a fitting metaphor for the regime’s own sclerosis. Starved of commerce and communication, the traders, scribes, and bureaucrats abandoned Per-Ramesses in favor of a new site, Djanet (modern San el-Hagar), some twelve miles to the north. As the old king’s funeral cortège wound its way from the royal palace of Per-Ramesses, followed by a clutch of old retainers, the Ramesside Dynasty and its seat of government died together.
WHEN THE LAST OF THE RAMESSIDES PASSED AWAY IN 1069, little mourned and largely irrelevant, Egypt entered a period of profound change. The death of Ramesses XI was the stimulus for two strongmen, one in the delta and one in Upper Egypt, to assume royal titles and attributes, and to divide and rule the country between them. Whether the formal bifurcation of the Two Lands represented an outright rejection of the pharaonic ideal of national unity, or merely a return to a more natural state of affairs, it ushered in a long-lasting era of political fragmentation, of a kind not seen for a thousand years.
The Egyptians soon discovered that decentralization and regional autonomy could prove a mixed blessing. In the days of old, the consequences of a weak government might have been purely internal. In the first millennium, however, Egypt was surrounded by envious foreign powers, vastly more powerful than in earlier centuries. From the eleventh to the fourth centuries, Egypt’s strategic weakness led to repeated invasions. First Libyans, then Assyrians, Kushites, Babylonians, Persians, and finally Macedonians fought over the Nile Valley’s agricultural and mineral wealth. Foreign immigrants and nonnative rulers wrought significant changes to Egypt’s political organization, society, and culture, transforming pharaonic civilization forever. At the same time, ancient Egyptian religion, the last bastion of traditional culture, sealed itself off from outside influences and became ever more inward-looking. In the face of younger, more dynamic civilizations, Egypt’s introspection led in the end to atrophy and extinction.
Part V charts the final tumultuous millennium of ancient Egyptian history, from the Libyan takeover to the Roman
conquest. The first three centuries of post-Ramesside rule were relatively peaceful, with collateral branches of a Libyan royal family managing to maintain an uneasy balance of power. But the return of Egypt’s old enemy, the kingdom of Kush, in 728 smashed the status quo, and for the next four hundred years the Nile Valley was racked by division, conflict, and foreign occupation. Four successive Assyrian invasions in the space of three decades culminated in the sack of Thebes, delivering a bitter blow to Egypt’s national pride. Amid the chaos, a dynasty from Sais maneuvered its way to power, throwing off the Assyrian yoke and repulsing attempted invasions by Babylonia, before finally succumbing to the Persians. Egypt lost its crown to a resurgent Mesopotamia, and never again regained its former supremacy in the Near East.
The ever present Persian threat hung like a dark cloud over the last native dynasties, whose members squabbled over the remains of Egypt, behaving like fractious warlords instead of mighty pharaohs. Alexander the Great’s arrival in 332 seemed to offer deliverance, and his brief sojourn in the Nile Valley had as profound an effect on Egypt as it did on the man himself. His successors, the Ptolemies, tried to recapture the glories of the past, albeit with a distinctly Greek flavor. But their constant feuding, coupled with their neglect of Upper Egypt—the crucible of pharaonic civilization—led to political instability, a long-running southern insurgency, and terminal decline. The last act of Egypt’s great drama was played out in the streets of Alexandria with a cast of characters as famous as any: Caesar, Mark Antony, and Cleopatra. With her death, in 30, Egypt became a Roman imperial possession and its three-thousand-year-old pharaonic tradition came to an end.
CHAPTER 19
A HOUSE DIVIDED
THE ENEMY WITHIN
PHARAONIC PROPAGANDA MUST SOMETIMES HAVE RUNG RATHER HOLLOW, even for a population fed an incessant and unvarying diet of government spin. By the time of Ramesses XI’s death in 1069, Egypt’s kings had been boasting of their famous victories against Libyan invaders for the best part of a century and a half. Back in 1208, Merenptah had ordered a great commemorative inscription to be set up in the temple of Amun-Ra at Ipetsut, recounting his crushing defeat of one such incursion led by the Libyan chief Mery. Just three years later, the Libyans had returned. Another military victory and another commemorative inscription had duly followed, but the pharaoh’s efforts had bought Egypt barely two decades of peace and security. And what Merenptah’s publicists had failed to mention was that the government had been forced to install a defensive garrison in the southern oasis to prevent infiltration from the desert—and that the very soldiers manning the defenses were themselves Libyan mercenaries! Poachers turned gamekeepers.
Under Ramesses III, the battles against the Libyans in 1182 and 1176 had been nowhere near as conclusive as the official propaganda had suggested. Behind all the triumphalism, the authorities had felt it necessary to fortify temples on the west bank of the Nile, including the king’s own Mansion of Millions of Years, with its valuable treasuries and granaries. Despite the Egyptians’ best endeavors, the Libyans who had been repelled from the western delta had simply turned southward to infiltrate the Nile Valley in Upper Egypt. The frequent attacks on Thebes during the later Ramesside Period showed the Libyans’ determination and persistence. Ramesses III had also boasted of forcing thousands of Libyan prisoners to “cross the river, bringing them to Egypt,” where they were settled in fortified camps (“strongholds of the victorious king”),1 branded with the pharaoh’s name, and forcibly acculturated: “He makes their speech disappear and changes their tongues, so that they set out on a path they have not gone down before.”2 Yet the integration had often been only superficial, and sizeable concentrations of Libyans around the entrance to the Fayum and along the edges of the western delta had resolutely hung on to their ethnic identity, forming distinctive communities within the local Egyptian population. By the reign of Ramesses V, a land survey of Middle Egypt noted a substantial proportion of people with foreign names. The Libyans were by now well ensconced. A generation later, a boisterous community that had settled in the central delta near the town of Per-hebit (modern Behbeit el-Hagar) was causing the Egyptian authorities particular concern. During the course of the Ramesside Period, Egypt had unintentionally become a country of two cultures, in which a large ethnic minority made its presence increasingly felt.
Of all the country’s institutions, the army had felt the impact of Libyan immigration most acutely. The Egyptian military had a long and proud tradition of employing foreign mercenaries, and had therefore proved a natural, and popular, career choice for many Libyan settlers. Whether manning remote desert garrisons or fighting on campaign, Libyan soldiers had served their adopted country with loyalty and distinction throughout the second half of the Twentieth Dynasty. Moreover, some of the more ambitious Libyan soldiers had been able to secure themselves positions of considerable influence at the heart of Egyptian government. Two such individuals were Paiankh and Herihor, the military strongmen who headed the Theban junta in the dying days of Ramesses XI’s reign.
By 1069, Libyans in Egypt had not only achieved high office, they stood ready to assume the government itself. With the death of Ramesses XI, and just two centuries after suffering its first Libyan raids, the Nile Valley passed into foreign control—not by invasion or armed conflict but through the discipline and determination of an enemy within. For the first time in Egyptian history, the underdogs had become overlords.
For the next four hundred years, Egypt was dominated by Libyan power brokers, a dramatic twist of fate that had a profound effect on every aspect of society. Although the earliest of these alien rulers, men such as Herihor and Nesbanebdjedet, sported traditionally pious Egyptian names (with their references to Horus and the ram god of Djedet), such outward trappings of pharaonic decorum were an illusion. Beneath a thin veil of tradition, non-Egyptian features flourished. In the predominantly Libyan areas of the delta, local dignitaries openly wore traditional Libyan feather decorations in their hair as a proud marker of their ethnic origin, and Libyan chiefly titles made a comeback. Once the Libyan generals had gained power after the death of Ramesses XI, their kinsmen had even less cause to integrate with the host population, and within a few generations many families reverted to giving their children unashamedly Libyan names that were strange-sounding to the Egyptians, names such as Osorkon, Shoshenq, Iuput, Nimlot, and Takelot. With such a strong sense of their own identity, generations of inhabitants of the western delta regarded themselves as Libyans, not Egyptians—a phenomenon still prevalent enough to be remarked upon by the Greek historian Herodotus five centuries later.
Together with the appearance of Libyan names in official inscriptions, the Egyptian language began to show other signs of the foreigners’ influence. Ever since the Middle Kingdom, written Egyptian carved into temple walls in finely executed hieroglyphs had preserved the classic form of the language. Vernacular spoken Egyptian, by contrast, had diverged a long way from this “pure” written form, to the point where the two versions were practically different dialects. While this posed no problem for native Egyptian scribes schooled in the classical script, it must have been a considerable impediment to the Libyan bureaucrats and priests who now ran the country. For them, mastering one form of Egyptian was quite enough. As a result, official inscriptions of the Libyan Period show a marked preference for spoken forms, workaday grammar, and simple vocabulary, in contrast to the more refined formulations of the ruling class.
Language and its precise use had always been of special significance to the Egyptian monarchy, since the choice of royal names and epithets expressed the underlying theology of kingship and set the pattern for a reign. But all this was alien to the Libyan rulers. They adopted the trappings of Egyptian royalty without, perhaps, properly understanding the trappings’ nuanced symbolism. Royal titles were simply recycled from one reign to another, repeated ad nauseam. The ancient designation “dual king” lost its sacred exclusivity and became just another handle. In their cho
ice of royal names, too, the kings of the Twenty-first Dynasty seemed to be trying too hard, sporting bizarre and convoluted formulations such as Pasebakhaenniut, “the star rises over the city.” Such clumsy attempts at authenticity fooled nobody.
Indeed, the Libyan elite showed their true colors in their obsession with family trees. The recitation of long genealogies is a feature of oral tradition in nonliterate seminomadic societies, and the Libyans of the late second millennium B.C. were no exception. Even after they had gained a written language from their Egyptian hosts, they lost none of their penchant for celebrating long lines of ancestors. For example, one priest from Iunu had a monument carved with the names of thirteen generations of his forebears, stretching back three centuries, despite the fact that the family had been settled in the same Egyptian city and had held the same office for eleven of those generations.
Another carryover from the Libyans’ nomadic past was their relative lack of interest in death and the afterlife. Their animal herding ancestors had been used to burying their dead where and when they fell, with little preparation and less fuss. Ancient Egypt, by contrast, had always been punctilious about mortuary provision. Yet the country’s new Libyan rulers stayed true to their own cultural instincts and showed a casualness in their approach to the next world that must have been truly shocking to their Egyptian hosts. Individual burials were eschewed as a waste of resources in favor of communal family vaults with little decoration. Even the Libyan pharaohs were content to be buried cheek by jowl with their relatives, in modest stone-built tombs cobbled together from whatever blocks came to hand. Funerary equipment was often recycled from nearby burials, as if equipping the deceased for eternity were a chore, to be accomplished as speedily and cheaply as possible. The construction of splendid royal sepulchres in the Valley of the Kings, and equally magnificent mortuary temples on the Theban plain, came to an abrupt halt, never to be resumed. Tombs lost their special role as a meeting place for the living and the dead, the mortal and the divine. They were now little more than holes in the ground for bodies.
The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt Page 41
