If the Libyans’ attitude toward death had an impact on pharaonic culture, their favored model of government had an equally powerful effect on the course of Egyptian history. In their homeland of coastal Cyrenaica, the Libyans had organized themselves along tribal lines, with fairly loose power structures based on family groups, reinforced by marriage ties and feudal allegiances. It was a world away from the strongly centralized absolute monarchy of the Nile Valley. Even before the end of the New Kingdom, Ramesses XI’s Libyan generals had shown their disdain for a unified state, with Paiankh and Herihor happily ruling the south while Nesbanebdjedet governed the north of the country.
The administrative division of Egypt into two halves had been a feature of pharaonic government from earliest times, but always with a single king to bind “the Two Lands” together. Once Ramesses XI was dead and gone, his Libyan successors saw no need to maintain this tradition. For them, having two kings ruling concurrently over different parts of the country was not anathema but entirely normal, not anarchy but sensible decentralization. In any case, marriages and alliances maintained the bonds of loyalty between the two branches of the ruling house and served to prevent breakaway dynasties. Yet the subsequent delegation of unprecedented powers to kings’ sons—many of whom were put in charge of major cities—and other aspects of Libyan feudalism inevitably weakened the power of the central government and the monarchy, with inevitable long-term consequences.
But all that was in the future. For now, with the last of the Ramesside pharaohs safely interred in the Valley of the Kings, his Libyan successors could count themselves well pleased. One of them was undisputed master of Upper Egypt; the other was lord of the delta. Egypt had entered a new era of foreign domination.
A TALE OF TWO CITIES
ALTHOUGH THE HISTORY OF THE LATE TWENTIETH DYNASTY—THE paralysis and eventual extinction of the New Kingdom—is written in the monuments and machinations of Thebes, the principal seat of government and the main royal residence always remained in the north of the country. Memphis had been the capital of Egypt since the dawn of history, and it retained its role as the headquarters of the national administration right through the Ramesside Period. Thebes may have taken on the mantle of the nation’s religious capital, but it was at Memphis that royal decrees were issued, officials appointed, and kings crowned. As for the principal residence of the pharaoh, Per-Ramesses had served that role ever since its founding under Ramesses II. The delta, not the Nile Valley, was the senior political partner in the union of Upper and Lower Egypt. For this reason, when control was formally divided between Herihor and Nesbanebdjedet after the death of Ramesses XI, it was the northern ruler, Nesbanebdjedet (1069–1045), who claimed the first prize, the kingship, while his brother-in-law had to play second fiddle as mere army commander and high priest of Amun. In this way, a convenient fiction of political unity was maintained, even if the reality was a partnership of two quasi-independent kingdoms linked only by ties of marriage.
The division of Egypt into two parallel states was the defining feature of Libyan rule. Each half of the country had its own system of government, its own administration, and its own ceremonial capital. No longer a mere theological conceit, the idea of the Two Lands was now a practical reality.
The delta had borne the brunt of Libyan settlement in the dying days of the New Kingdom, and it was here that the new political order was most keenly felt. The inaccessible marshlands and winding waterways had always favored political fragmentation, and in the heyday of Libyan domination, the delta divided readily into a patchwork of competing centers. Each was ruled by a chief of the Ma or a chief of the Libu (the two main Libyan tribes settled in Egypt), who owed theoretical allegiance to the main royal line. In practice, though, the “king” was only first among equals. Even so, the monarchs based at Djanet (classical Tanis) were conscious enough of their theoretical preeminence to embark upon a grand project worthy of their pharaonic status—the transformation of their royal residence into a ceremonial capital every bit as grand as Thebes.
From humble beginnings as a replacement for Per-Ramesses, Djanet grew rapidly under the patronage of the northern kings into the greatest city in the delta. It was sited on one of the main Nile branches, in an area as favorable for trade as it was for fishing and fowling. To create space for residential quarters and public buildings, the first priority was to raise the banks of the main river and reclaim the land on either side. Only then could construction start in earnest.
If Djanet were to be a northern counterpart to Thebes, it needed an equally magnificent ceremonial centerpiece, a grand temple to the state god Amun-Ra. Unfortunately, many of Egypt’s major quarries were under Theban control, and the northern kings’ economic power was severely circumscribed. A full-scale royal building project such as might have been undertaken in the glorious days of the New Kingdom was no longer a practical proposition. Instead, Nesbanebdjedet and his two successors Amenemnisu (1045–1040) and Pasebakhaenniut I (1040–985) adopted an altogether simpler expedient, recycling monuments and building materials from nearby Per-Ramesses and other delta sites. The once glittering Ramesside residence was systematically stripped of its stone as obelisks, statues, and building blocks were torn down to be dragged the twelve miles to Djanet and reerected. Often the northern kings did not even bother to reinscribe the plundered monuments—a further sign that they paid only lip service to the age-old traditions of Egyptian monarchy.
On top of a large, sandy hill, where a cemetery for the local rural poor had grown up in the Ramesside Period, Pasebakhaenniut I erected the centerpiece of his “northern Thebes,” a suite of temples to the Theban triad of Amun-Ra, Mut, and Khonsu. To underline the sanctity of the complex, he had it surrounded by a great brick wall (in ancient Egyptian, “sacred” and “set apart” were the same word) and he designated one area of the temple precinct as the royal necropolis of his dynasty. Just as Thebes had been rendered sacred by the combination of divine temples and kingly tombs, so, too, would Djanet. By New Kingdom architectural standards, the Libyan royal sepulchres at Djanet were deeply unimpressive—small, irregular chambers built from rough-hewn reused blocks, with little ornament or decoration. But what Pasebakhaenniut’s burial lacked in grandeur, it more than made up for in wealth. Within a great granite chest—pilfered, with no little irony, from the Theban tomb of Merenptah, scourge of the Libyans—the king’s mummy lay on a silver sheet inside a silver coffin, its face covered with a mask of beaten gold. Around the body lay other costly treasures—inlaid bracelets and pectorals, a chunky necklace of lapis lazuli beads, silver and gold bowls, and a gold scepter. Even the king’s fingers and toes were sheathed individually in gold leaf.
Wendjebaendjedet’s cup of gold and electrum WERNER FORMAN ARCHIVE
Yet this gilded opulence was not used to set the king apart from his subjects, as it would have been in earlier periods. An equally sumptuous set of equipment was provided for the man who shared Pasebakhaenniut’s final resting place. In another sign of the times (and of the feudalism of Libyan rule), this man was not even a royal prince but merely one of the king’s chief courtiers. Wendjebaendjedet was a general and army leader, like many of his ilk, and held temple office at Djanet as high steward of Khonsu. In this capacity he may have functioned as the king’s deputy in the daily temple rites. But there was no sense of second best in his burial. The amount of gold placed around his body demonstrated his exalted status. There were several magnificent golden cups, including one in the shape of a flower with alternating petals of gold and electrum; a heart scarab on a gold chain; gold pectorals; gold statuettes of deities; a remarkable figurine of the god Ptah, fashioned from lapis lazuli, nestling in a gold shrine; and a series of gold rings, one of them pilfered from the tomb of Ramesses IX.
This last object gives a clue as to the source of such great wealth. The kings of Djanet and their loyal lieutenants derived their grave goods—and the rest of their city—not from trade or conquest but from recycling and outright robb
ery. To understand the full extent to which the Egyptian monarchy had debased itself, we must turn our gaze southward, to Thebes.
While the delta had concentrations of Libyan settlers and exhibited a tendency toward decentralization, Upper Egypt presented a very different picture. The Nile Valley was ethnically much more homogeneous, with native Egyptians forming the overwhelming majority of the population, and the geography of the valley lent itself to political cohesion. Thebes remained the largest and most important city; whoever ruled Thebes ruled the valley. So, for Upper Egypt in general, the collapse of the New Kingdom state brought not local autonomy but another long spell of Theban domination.
Despite its thoroughly Egyptian character, Thebes had also fallen under Libyan influence during the “renaissance era” of Ramesses XI’s reign, due to the presence of Libyan soldiers in the uppermost echelons of the Egyptian army. And, as we have seen, it was under the military junta headed by Paiankh that the state-sponsored theft of valuables from the royal tombs had begun. While campaigning in Nubia, Paiankh had sent one letter to Thebes ordering the scribe of the necropolis, Butehamun, and his assistant Kar to “uncover a tomb amongst the tombs of the ancestors and preserve its seal until I return.”3 The general’s instructions to his henchmen marked the beginning of a deliberate policy to strip royal tombs of their gold, to finance the war against Panehsy and to fund Paiankh’s wider ambitions. The fact that all this was going on under the ancien régime shows where power really lay. Once Ramesses XI was safely dead, the New Kingdom monarchy consigned to history, and the military rulers of Thebes de facto kings of Upper Egypt, the systematic dismantling of the royal necropolis could be openly pursued as official government policy.
At first, the main targets for the robbers were the tombs of the Seventeenth Dynasty, the burials of royal relatives in the Valley of the Queens, and the kings’ mortuary temples at the edge of the cultivation. Then, on the pretext of safeguarding the integrity of all royal tombs, the authorities switched their focus to the Valley of the Kings itself. In the fourth year of Herihor’s rule (1066), Butehamun received an order to carry out “work” in the tomb of Horemheb. It was the beginning of the end for the royal necropolis. Over the next decade, the tombs of the New Kingdom pharaohs were emptied one by one. The workmen who carried out the task even seem to have had a map of the valley (surely provided by the authorities) to assist the clearance. Their main objective was to expropriate the large quantities of gold and other valuables buried in the Theban hills. These were swiftly removed to the state treasury, leaving only the mummies—rudely unwrapped in the search for hidden jewels—to be taken to Butehamun’s imposing office at Medinet Habu for processing and rewrapping. Little wonder that Butehamun was proud to call himself, without a hint of irony, “overseer of the treasuries of the kings.” So rife was tomb robbery in the Theban necropolis at this time that private individuals designed their interments with an obsessive emphasis on inaccessibility, to make the robbers’ job as hard as possible.
Besides larceny, Butehamun’s exploratory work in the Valley of the Kings had a second aim—to identify a permanent repository for the royal corpses that had been so rudely removed from their resting places. The tomb of Amenhotep II (next to the tomb of Horemheb) was eventually identified as an ideal location. One fateful day around 1050, the sacred remains of Egypt’s divine kings were unceremoniously gathered up and shoved higgedly-piggedly into one of the tomb’s chambers. In the process, the great Amenhotep III ended up in a coffin inscribed for Ramesses III, with an ill-fitting lid made for Seti II. Merenptah came to rest in the coffin of Sethnakht, while his own sarcophagus made its way north to Djanet to serve the burial of Egypt’s new Libyan ruler (Pasebakhaenniut I). In this unholy mess, the dignified Thutmose IV lay cheek by jowl with the child king Siptah, the military tough guy Sethnakht with the smallpox-ridden Ramesses V. It was a desecration of everything that ancient Egypt had hallowed. An even more illustrious gathering of royal ancestors—including the victors against the Hyksos, Ahhotep and Ahmose; the founders of the workmen’s village, Ahmose Nefertari and Amenhotep I; and the greatest of all the warrior pharaohs, Thutmose III, Seti I, Ramesses II, and Ramesses III—were bundled into a secondary cache in the tomb of a Seventeenth Dynasty queen, there to await a more secure, permanent resting place.
The result of all this robbery, officially represented as restoration, was to give the army commanders and high priests of Amun who ruled Thebes wealth beyond their wildest dreams. Some of the plunder found its way north to their nominal suzerains at Djanet, there to be buried alongside Pasebakhaenniut I and his loyal lieutenant Wendjebaendjedet. (Indeed, the favored chief courtier who ended up with so much gold may have been the king’s agent in Thebes, charged with overseeing the clearance of the royal tombs on behalf of his master.) However, for every gold ring or pectoral transported downstream to the northern capital, a great deal more stayed behind in Thebes, to bolster the economic and political fortunes of the southern rulers. Both Herihor (1069–1063) and his successor as high priest Pinedjem I (1063–1033) felt secure enough of their position to claim royal titles, in a direct challenge to their overlords at Djanet. While Herihor seems to have balked at outright confrontation, restricting his claim to the inner parts of the Ipetsut temple, Pinedjem showed no such reticence. Official inscriptions from the second and third decades of his rule were dated to the years of his independent “reign,” with scarcely a mention of the kings in Djanet. For his burial in the hills of Thebes, he reused coffins from the tomb of Thutmose I, to add a little Eighteenth Dynasty luster to his own monarchical pretensions.
If the institution of kingship had survived the end of Ramesside rule, it had done so only by cannibalizing the past.
GOD’S WILL
APPROPRIATING THE WEALTH AND TRAPPINGS OF MONARCHY MIGHT have been straightforward enough, but buying legitimacy was not so easy. Until the very end of the New Kingdom, the Egyptians had viewed Libyans and all foreigners with customary disdain. For the effortlessly superior natives of the Nile Valley, these hirsute, feather-wearing tribespeople from beyond the Sahara were, at best, mercenaries, and at worst, vile barbarians. Less than a generation later, the same Libyans could scarcely expect to be accepted as legitimate rulers of Egypt, even if they now held all the levers of power.
The solution to the Libyans’ dilemma lay, as always, in the subtle application of theology. It was no accident that, at Djanet and Thebes, temples were placed at the symbolic heart of Libyan rule. The great temple of Amun-Ra at Ipetsut had been the religious epicenter of the New Kingdom monarchy. By replicating the temple in the northern capital of Djanet, Nesbanebdjedet and his successors were pursuing a very deliberate agenda, an attempt to gain divine sanction for their alien regime by placing the supreme god at the apex of society. Conveniently, they could present their policy as a continuation of Ramesses XI’s “renaissance,” taking Egypt back to its pristine state at the dawn of time when the gods ruled on earth. But in practice, it represented a decisive break with New Kingdom modes of rule. Supreme political authority was now explicitly vested in Amun-Ra himself. In temples and on papyri, the god’s name was written in a royal cartouche. One document said that Amun-Ra was “dual king; king of the gods; lord of heaven, earth, the waters, and the mountains.”4 On temple reliefs, Amun was sometimes shown in place of the sovereign, offering to himself or other deities, and he was widely addressed as the true king of Egypt. Nesbanebdjedet’s ephemeral successor Amenemnisu went one step further, announcing in his very name that “Amun is king.” It was an extraordinary claim.
If the god was monarch, then the king was effectively reduced to the status of his first servant. In Djanet, Pasebakhaenniut I adopted the moniker “high priest of Amun” as one of his royal titles, even enclosing it within a cartouche as an alternative to his throne name. In Thebes, his half brother Menkheperra (1033–990) was high priest of Amun, even if his real power came from the sword rather than the censer. This theocratic form of government effectively so
lved two problems at once. It made it theologically possible to have more than one mortal “ruler” at any one time, since Amun was the only true king. And it helped make Libyan rule more palatable for the native population, especially in Thebes and Upper Egypt, where pious Egyptians still dominated.
In reality, the theocracy was a convenient sleight of hand, a fig leaf to cover the embarrassing reality of a fractured monarchy. But it was important to maintain the fiction, so oracles became a regular instrument of government policy. In both Djanet and Thebes, the god Amun held audiences and issued decrees, like any human monarch. In the southern capital, this trend culminated in the establishment of a regular ceremony, the Beautiful Festival of the Divine Audience, at which the oracle of Amun pronounced on various matters of state. Of course, the people who benefited most from this new type of administration, besides the Libyan rulers themselves, were the priests who staffed and interpreted the oracles. Living in considerable luxury within the sacred precinct of Ipetsut, they helped themselves while serving their divine master.
Their devotion to mammon as much as to god bubbled to the surface in particularly striking form during the pontificate of Pinedjem II (985–960). An acrimonious dispute broke out at Ipetsut between the two classes of priest—the “god’s servants” and the “pure ones”—over access to the temple revenues. The god’s servants, as the senior of the two cadres, jealously guarded their special access to the inner sanctum, the holy of holies, which was barred to ordinary mortals. This privilege brought with it access to the offerings of food, drink, and other commodities that were placed before the cult statue of Amun during the daily temple office. Once the god had “finished” with them, these offerings were routinely gathered up and redistributed to the god’s servants, a nice little bonus. By contrast, pure ones were not allowed into the sanctuary; instead they were employed to carry out ancillary tasks in the outer parts of the temple. One such task involved carrying the barque shrine of Amun when it left the sanctuary to take part in processions, both within the temple enclosure and beyond the walls, through the streets of Thebes. In former times, this portering role would have gone unremarked. But now, with divine oracles taking center stage in the affairs of state, the subtle movements of Amun’s barque shrine, as it was borne through the city, were imbued with enormous significance. A sudden lunge, a fleeting tilt—these could be interpreted as indications of god’s will, with repercussions for the priesthood, the Theban realm, and the whole of Egypt. The lowly porters recognized that the destiny of the entire nation rested, quite literally, on their shoulders, and they were not slow in turning this influence to their economic advantage. Their demand for a larger slice of the cake brought them into direct conflict with the god’s servants. A new political reality had intruded upon ancient privileges.
The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt Page 42
