The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

by Toby Wilkinson

  So great was the material wealth of the Amun priesthood, especially in Thebes, that the Libyan ruling class used every means at their disposal to secure lucrative temple posts. Wives and daughters played a particularly prominent role, helping to secure their clan’s economic and political power by putting themselves forward for prestigious positions in the priestly hierarchy. Within a few generations, the office of “god’s wife of Amun” came to eclipse even the high priesthood itself.

  Although the post-Ramesside rulers of Thebes styled themselves high priests of Amun and claimed to take their orders from the supreme deity, the real basis for their political authority was naked force. The power of the army, not divine sanction, underpinned their regime. Herihor and his successors were experienced enough tacticians to realize that coercive power was the most effective tool of government. So, right from the start, they set about reinforcing their military dictatorship with the architecture of oppression, a string of fortified installations throughout Upper Egypt. The initial links in this chain were five forts in the northern stretch of the Nile Valley—forts that, ironically, had been built by the Ramesside pharaohs to keep the Libyans out of Egypt. By the end of Ramesses XI’s reign, these forts had fallen into Libyan hands, to be used as a springboard for the takeover of the whole country. They enabled Egypt’s new strongmen to monitor Nile traffic and crush any local insurrections quickly and ruthlessly. Little wonder that the rule of the generals was established with little resistance before the last Ramesses was even cold in his grave.

  Chief among the northern forts was Tawedjay (modern el-Hiba), which commanded the east bank of the Nile just south of the entrance to the Fayum. This marked the northern border of the Theban realm and was the principal residence of the army commanders–cum–high priests. It is telling that, from Paiankh onward, the generals who ruled Thebes visited the great city only on high days and holidays, preferring the security of their northern bunker to their city palace surrounded by native settlements. Perhaps they realized just how unpopular their rule was with the traditionally minded population of the south.

  The simmering tensions in Upper Egypt exploded early on, at a moment of weakness for the military regime. When Pinedjem I elevated himself to the kingship, he appointed his eldest son, Masaharta, to succeed him as high priest of Amun. For someone with such an overtly Libyan name to stand at the head of the Amun priesthood must have been an affront to many Egyptians, but they had no choice. However, when Masaharta died suddenly in office in 1044, the Theban populace saw its chance and erupted in revolt. Masaharta’s successor, his younger brother Djedkhonsuiuefankh, was forced from office after the briefest of tenures. (To the skeptically minded, his rapid fall from grace would have proved the unreliability of divine oracles. Despite bearing a name that meant “Khonsu said he will live,” Djedkhonsuiuefankh had his fate sealed by rather more human forces.)

  For a moment, it looked as if Upper Egypt might reassert its independence, but the army commanders were not going to give up without a fight. From the safety of Tawedjay, Pinedjem immediately proclaimed his third son, Menkheperra, high priest and sent him southward “in bravery and strength to pacify the land and subdue its foe.”5 With the full backing of the army, Menkheperra quelled the uprising and reasserted his family’s authority over Thebes. The ringleaders of the rebellion were rounded up and banished to the Western Desert oases, their death sentences commuted to internal exile, perhaps to avoid stoking further resentment among the local population. Only after an interval of some years, with the flames of resistance well and truly smothered, were the exiles allowed back. However, Menkheperra retained the right to execute any future plotters who threatened his own life.

  To drive the message home, he ordered a new series of fortresses to be built much closer to Thebes, at strategic locations on the east and west banks. Like the Norman castles of England, the Libyan strongholds dominated the Nile Valley, a daily reminder to the natives that they were now a subject people in their own land. Throughout the length and breadth of the country, civilian settlements, too, were fortified. The Egyptians were surrounding themselves with high walls to shut out an increasingly frightening and unfamiliar world.

  A REPUTATION IN RUINS

  IN THE DYING DAYS OF RAMESSES XI’S REIGN, THE GENERAL PAIANKH had posed in one of his letters home a heavily loaded rhetorical question: “Of whom is Pharaoh still the superior?”6 Its answer lay in its very asking. At that very moment, royal power was ebbing away fast, and the age-old pattern of pharaonic government was about to be radically rewritten. The formal division of Egypt between a line of kings at Djanet and their close relatives (the army commanders and high priests of Amun at Thebes) only served to tarnish still further the reputation of the Egyptian monarchy.

  Furthermore, Paiankh’s protracted war against the viceroy of Kush, Panehsy, signally failed to reestablish Egyptian control of Nubia. With access to the all-important gold mines and the sub-Saharan trade routes lost, Egypt’s economy faltered. The loss of the Near Eastern colonies dealt pharaonic prestige another severe blow, reducing the state’s revenues from Mediterranean commerce. Even if Herihor and Nesbanebdjedet had been able to mobilize the nation’s manpower and resources as in former times, the state’s much-reduced coffers would simply not have supported ambitious building projects. It was all the northern kings could do to demolish the monuments of Per-Ramesses and use the secondhand stone to construct their ceremonial capital. Most of them did not even bother to record their achievements at Thebes, as all their New Kingdom predecessors had done.

  Herihor’s military regime could have tried to win back some international prestige by going on campaign, in traditional pharaonic fashion. But Nubia was too distant and dangerous, and the Near East was separated from Thebes by the northern kingdom. More to the point, the army authorities and garrisons were preoccupied with internal security, which left them little opportunity or appetite for foreign adventures.

  Nothing better illustrates the precipitous decline of Egypt’s international reputation than the Report of Wenamun, a text written in the early years of Herihor’s rule. Whether fact or fiction, it takes Egypt’s sharply reduced status on the world stage as a leitmotif, at times seeming to revel in the country’s embarrassment at the hands of its erstwhile vassals. According to the Report, Wenamun, an elder of the portal of Ipetsut, was sent by Herihor in 1065 to Kebny to bring back a consignment of cedar for the barque shrine of Amun-Ra. The hills of Lebanon had been Egypt’s principal source of cedar for two millennia, and a state-sponsored expedition to Kebny was nothing unusual. After stopping off at Djanet to pay his respects to King Nesbanebdjedet and his queen, Tentamun, Wenamun eventually set sail for Kebny, hugging the coastline as countless expeditions had done over the centuries. But no sooner had he dropped anchor in the harbor of Dor, a port in southern Palestine, than he was robbed by his own crew. Wenamun’s pleas to the ruler of Dor for compensation fell on deaf ears, and the hapless envoy spent nine days marooned in the harbor before setting sail again. Arriving at Tyre, Wenamun resorted to theft himself, stealing from a ship belonging to the local Tjeker inhabitants (the very same Tjeker who, with the other Sea Peoples, had invaded Egypt a century earlier, in the reign of Ramesses III). After fleeing at dawn to avoid detection and reprisals, Wenamun eventually arrived at his destination, Kebny—only to be refused entry to the harbor by the local ruler. In the changed circumstances of the eleventh century, an Egyptian envoy without documents or gifts could be shown the door just like any other unwelcome visitor. It was a severe embarrassment, both for Wenamun and for his masters back home. He had to wait nearly a month for payment to be sent from Egypt, all the while enduring the taunts of the ruler of Kebny. Eventually, Wenamun received the consignment of timber, narrowly escaped arrest for theft (the Tjeker having caught up with him), and fled once again, this time to Cyprus, where the locals welcomed him by threatening to kill him. At that point, the Report breaks off, but the tenor is clear.

  In the far-off days
of the Twelfth Dynasty, another great literary classic, The Tale of Sinuhe, had also taken as its theme an Egyptian abroad. The contrast between Sinuhe’s fate and Wenamun’s could not be greater. While the former had radiated Egyptian power to his Palestinian hosts, the tables were now well and truly turned. How the mighty had fallen.

  A final humiliation awaited Egypt in its dealings with its former imperial possessions in the Near East. If a fragmentary relief of King Siamun (970–950) from Djanet can be taken at face value, this Libyan ruler launched a raid against southern Palestine, perhaps capturing the important town of Gezer. But rather than annexing it to Egypt or giving its treasures to the temple of Amun, as any self-respecting pharaoh would have done in former times, Siamun seems to have used the booty to buy the favors of the local superpower. According to the biblical First Book of Kings, the spoils of Gezer were handed over, together with the pharaoh’s own daughter, to Solomon of Israel.7

  In the prosecution of New Kingdom diplomacy, the pharaoh had frequently taken other kings’ daughters in marriage to cement strategic alliances, but he would never have agreed to an Egyptian princess being used in this way. Now, in the tenth century, Egypt had to face the uncomfortable truth—a house divided, it was no longer a force to be reckoned with, merely another bit player in the febrile world of Near Eastern power politics. Egypt’s star had waned, its reputation was in tatters, and there seemed little prospect of a return to the might and majesty of the New Kingdom.

  Yet, at least one Libyan ruler had other ideas.

  CHAPTER 20

  A TARNISHED THRONE

  JERUSALEM THE GOLDEN

  THE SEPARATION OF THE TWO LANDS INTO THEIR CONSTITUENT PARTS might have been the new political reality, but it was anathema to traditional Egyptian ideology, which emphasized the unifying role of the king and cast division as the triumph of chaos. As the Hyksos had shown five centuries earlier, the sheer weight and antiquity of pharaonic beliefs had a tendency to win in the end. And, as the Libyan elite became more entrenched, more secure in its exercise of power, a curious thing happened. In certain important aspects, it started to go native.

  It was at Thebes, heartland of pharaonic orthodoxy, that the first signs of a return to the old ways manifested themselves. After the “reign” of Pinedjem I (1063–1033), subsequent high priests eschewed royal titles, dating their monuments instead to the reigns of the kings at Djanet. Not that men such as Menkheperra, Nesbanebdjedet II, and Pinedjem II were any less authoritarian or ruthless than their predecessors, but they were willing to recognize the supreme authority of a single monarch. This was an important, if subtle, change in the prevailing philosophy. It reopened the possibility of political reunification at some point in the future.

  That moment came in the middle of the tenth century. Near the close of the reign of Pasebakhaenniut II (960–950), control of Thebes had been delegated to a charismatic and ambitious Libyan chieftain from Bast, a man named Shoshenq. As “great chief of chiefs,” he seems to have been the most forceful personality in court circles. Moreover, by marrying his son to Pasebakhaenniut’s eldest daughter, Shoshenq reinforced his connections with the royal family. His calculations paid off. After Pasebakhaenniut’s death, Shoshenq was ideally placed to take the throne. The chieftain’s accession marked not just the beginning of a new dynasty (reckoned as the Twenty-second), but the start of a new era.

  From the outset, Shoshenq I (945–925) moved to centralize power, reestablish the king’s political authority, and return Egypt to a traditional (New Kingdom) form of government. In a break with recent practice, oracles were no longer used as a regular instrument of government policy. The king’s word had always been the law, and Shoshenq felt perfectly able to make up his own mind without Amun’s help. Only in far-off Nubia, in the great temple of Amun-Ra at Napata, did the institution of the divine oracle survive in its fullest form (with long-term consequences for the history of the Nile Valley).

  Despite his overtly Libyan name and background, Shoshenq I was still the unchallenged ruler of all Egypt. Moreover, he had a practical method of imposing his will over the traditionally minded south, and reining in the recent tendency toward Theban independence. By appointing his own son as high priest of Amun and army commander, he ensured Upper Egypt’s absolute loyalty. Other members of the royal family and supporters of the dynasty were similarly appointed to important posts throughout the country, and local bigwigs were encouraged to marry into the royal house to cement their loyalty. When the third prophet of Amun married Shoshenq’s daughter, the king knew he had the Theban priesthood well and truly in his pocket. It was just like the old days.

  To demonstrate his newfound supremacy, Shoshenq consulted the archives and turned his attention to the activities traditionally expected of an Egyptian king. He ordered quarries to be reopened and sat down with his architects to plan ambitious building projects. While ordering further removals of New Kingdom pharaohs from their tombs in the Valley of the Kings, he nonetheless took pains to portray himself as a pious ruler and actively sought opportunities to make benefactions to Egypt’s great temples. For the first time in more than a century, fine reliefs were carved on temple walls to record the monarch’s achievements—even if the monarch in question was unashamed of his Libyan ancestry. But for all the piety and propaganda, the art and architecture, Shoshenq knew that there was still one element missing. In days of yore, no pharaoh worthy of the title would have sat idly by as Egypt’s power and influence declined on the world stage. All the great rulers of the New Kingdom had been warrior kings, ready at a moment’s notice to defend Egypt’s interests and extend its borders. It was time for such action again. Time to reawaken the country’s long-dormant imperialist foreign policy. Time to show the rest of the Near East that Egypt was still in the game.

  A border incident in 925 provided the perfect excuse. With a mighty army of Libyan warriors, supplemented—in time-honored fashion—by Nubian mercenaries, Shoshenq marched out from his delta capital to reassert Egyptian authority. According to the biblical sources,1 there was murky power politics at play, too, with Egypt stirring up trouble among the Near Eastern powers and acquiescing in, if not actively encouraging, the breakup of Solomon’s once mighty kingdom of Israel into two mutually hostile territories. Whatever the precise context, after crushing the Semitic tribesmen who had infiltrated Egypt in the area of the Bitter Lakes, Shoshenq’s forces headed straight for Gaza, the traditional staging post for campaigns against the wider Near East. Having captured the city, the king divided his army into four divisions (with distant echoes of Ramesses II’s four divisions at Kadesh). He sent one strike force southeast into the Negev Desert to seize the strategically important fortress of Sharuhen. Another column headed due east toward the settlements of Beersheba and Arad, while a third contingent swept northeast toward Hebron and the fortified hill towns of Judah. The main army, led by the king himself, continued north along the coast road before turning inland to attack Judah from the north.

  According to the biblical chroniclers, Shoshenq “took the fortified cities of Judah and came as far as Jerusalem.”2 Curiously, the Judaean capital is conspicuously absent from the roll call of conquests that Shoshenq had carved on the walls of Ipetsut to commemorate his campaign, but it is possible that he accepted its protection money without storming the walls. The city’s lament—that “he took away the treasures of the house of the Lord and the treasures of the king’s house; he took away everything”3—may indeed be a true reflection of events.

  With Judah thoroughly subjugated, the Egyptian army continued its devastating progress through the Near East. Next in its sights was the rump kingdom of Israel, with its new capital at Shechem—the site of a famous victory by Senusret III nearly a millennium earlier. Other localities, too, echoed down the centuries as the Egyptians took Beth-Shan (one of Ramesses II’s strategic bases), Taanach, and finally Megiddo, scene of Thutmose III’s great victory of 1458. Determined to secure his place in history and prove himself the equal
of the great Eighteenth Dynasty warrior pharaohs, Shoshenq ordered a commemorative inscription to be erected inside the fortress of Megiddo. Having thus secured an overwhelming victory, he led his army southward again, via Aruna and Yehem to Gaza, the border crossing at Raphia (modern Rafah), the Ways of Horus, and home. Once safely back in Egypt, Shoshenq fulfilled the expectations of tradition by commissioning a mighty new extension to the temple at Ipetsut, its monumental gateway decorated with scenes of his military triumph. The king is shown smiting his Asiatic enemies while the supreme god Amun and the personification of victorious Thebes look on approvingly.