There is no apparent reason why Egypt should not have arisen refulgent from the minor brushfires set by the Amarna heresy, as it had been re-born out of the greater conflagrations of the first two Intermediate Periods. To the men and women who lived out their lives under the first kings of the Nineteenth Dynasty, this resurgence was probably taken for granted. Yet to some, the greatness of Egypt is gone.
Greatness is a hard word to define. But whether Egyptian achievements are defined in terms of the rampantly successful imperialism of Thutmose III or the defiant spiritual challenges of the First Intermediate Period, the fable-making iconoclasm of Akhenaton or the more than oriental splendor of his father’s court, in almost every sense, Egyptian culture had passed its high point. Except for short periods of domestic calm under a strong pharaoh, the internal picture is one of slow but unmistakable decay. Abroad, the attempts of the Nineteenth Dynasty kings to regain the lost empire of Egypt fell short of Thutmose III’s achievements, and their descendants were unable to hold even what they had gained. There is a brief efflorescence of art, incorporating the best of the Amarna techniques, which produced some beautiful statues and reliefs, but it did not last. It is a melancholy task to view the decline of a culture so bright and attractive as that of Egypt, but it would be futile to try to paint the dying organism in the colors of life. So let us take up the story where we left it after the tragedy of Amarna was ended.
Ay, the old councilor who took Tutankhamon’s crown and perhaps his widow as well, did not live to enjoy his dubiously acquired gains for long. After his death there was no man in Egypt who could put forth even a faintly legitimate claim to the throne of the Two Lands. Contemporary inscriptions tell us that the internal affairs of Egypt were not flourishing. Egypt needed a strong hand to put down domestic disorder and civil strife, and a strong hand was just what she got. Ay’s successor was a military man named Harmhab, who had served under Tutankhamon. It is rather pitiful to see how few genuine converts the creed of Aton could claim. It was in truth the personal faith of the king and his family; many of Akhenaton’s leading adherents turned their coats with shameful haste after he died. Or perhaps they had only pretended to believe.
Tutankhamon had claimed the honor of reestablishing orthodoxy and repairing the temples ravaged by Akhenaton’s decrees, and Ay had been an eager servant of Amon, but neither of them was as zealous as Harmhab. He added greatly to the Amon temple at Karnak, using the blocks of Akhenaton’s dismantled Aton temple to hold up his pylons. As a high-ranking official of Tutankhamon he had already had built for himself a very elegant tomb at Sakkara, near the capital of Memphis, but after his accession to the throne he excavated another in the Valley of the Kings. He also took over a number of the monuments that had been erected by Tutankhamon, replacing that rulers’s name with his own. This wasn’t an uncommon practice, but Harmhab’s motive was, in part at least, political. The Amarna kings were to be eliminated from history. In the great king list of Seti I, Harmhab’s second successor, Akhenaton, Smenkhkare, Tutankhamon, and Ay do not appear. Harmhab added their years of reign to his own.
By what right Harmhab claimed the throne of Horus we may never know. Amon, of course, hailed him as his son, and some scholars think he established his legitimacy by marrying a sister of Nefertiti’s who had survived the anti-Amarna reaction. It is difficult to see what good this could have done the general. Nefertiti was only a member of the royal house by marriage, and her sister could not by any stretch of the imagination be considered a royal heiress, even if such a concept existed. One wonders what had happened to Akhenaton’s daughters. The three oldest may have been dead by the time Harmhab claimed the throne, but what about the younger girls? Were they disregarded, as members of a tainted family, or did they too die before their time, possibly during a plague? It could be that Ay and Harmhab struck a deal in order to avoid a possible, damaging struggle for power; the older man got first crack at the throne, naming Harmhab as his successor.
Though he had led military campaigns in Syria and Nubia under Tutankhamon, Harmhab had little opportunity for warfare after he assumed the throne. The confusion within Egypt occupied him throughout much of his reign, and he seems to have dealt with it ably. A stela at Karnak mentions a number of abuses he had to correct: illegal taxation, extortion, theft, and fraud. He had no surviving son, so when he died he passed the kingdom on to an old buddy, another general named Ramses. With this king the Nineteenth Dynasty properly begins.
Ramses I was an old man when he came to the throne, and he only held it for a year or two. However, his son, Seti I, was a man in the prime of life, with a son of his own; and he proved to be a vigorous, energetic ruler. He must be given credit for a number of more or less laudable deeds: he built largely and with taste, he kept internal affairs under control, and he made the first serious attempt to reconquer the lost Asiatic empire of Egypt. His campaigns were successful but limited; he seems to have realized that it would take more than Egypt had then to offer to regain all the territory Thutmose III had held. He commemorated his victories by a series of very handsome, delicately carved reliefs on the walls of the great temple of Karnak. As they stand today, the outlines of the reliefs set off by brilliant sunlight and sharp shadows, they are among the most beautiful of all Egyptian relief carving. However, to many of us, Seti is chiefly memorable for a somewhat dubious attribute: he possesses (or should one say possessed?) the handsomest mummy ever to come out of an Egyptian tomb.
Egyptian mummies in general are not precisely beautiful, so to call Seti’s the best may seem a doubtful compliment. But it is more than the best of a bad lot; it is a positively good-looking mummy, the features being those of a man of truly kingly appearance and noble looks, with the relaxed aspect of a man asleep.
Seti’s elegant mummy was not found in his tomb; like so many other royal mummies it had to undergo repeated transfers for the sake of safety. But the tomb was worthy of its occupant. Its total length is about three hundred feet—not including a mysterious tunnel leading down from the floor of the burial chamber. It has not yet been completely explored. The walls of corridors and chambers are adorned with attractive painted reliefs of the king and the gods, many of which still retain their original color. These traces of paint have always given me a queer sense of the insubstantiality of time. Three thousand years have passed since the hands of the artist completed the laying on of orange and white, blue and gold; yet still the colors remain, frail shells of actuality.
Seti was responsible for another tourist attraction, this one at Abydos, which is well worth a visit (if you can get there; Abydos is in Middle Egypt, and security is very tight). The Abydos temple is a beauty, with reliefs of very fine quality. Being in Abydos, it could only be dedicated to Osiris, which suggests a pleasing irony: the sanctuary to the murdered god built and dedicated by the namesake of his murderer! Seti was named after Set the Enemy, and he paid his tutelary deity cautious honor. Whether he remembered the postulated Set movement of the remote Second Dynasty, or had any desire to imitate it is highly doubtful; it was as much ancient history for him as it is for us. But if he did know about the event, it would have warned him against any attempt to give Set more than his due. At Abydos where, of all places on earth, Set’s name would be de trop, the king substituted the hieroglyphic image of Osiris for the figure of Set that formed part of his own name. This was a solution which only a theologian or an Egyptian could regard as sensible.
I used to wonder, when I listened to the tales of my acquaintances who had been fortunate enough to travel in Egypt, at the animosity they displayed toward Ramses II. I knew nothing particularly favorable about the gentleman then, but I was unaware of any deed of his which might have prompted the snarl of contempt with which his name was mentioned. Now that I have visited Egypt myself I can understand the reaction; I too snarl. One gets so tired of Ramses; his face, his figure, and/or his name are plastered over half the wall surfaces still standing in Egypt—at least it seems that way. Egyptian sculpture during his reign was beginning to decline from the high standards of his father, and the statues of Ramses which so weary the eye are often stubby and unattractive. But worst of all is the sheer number of them, which is surpassed only by the number of his cartouches. You can’t miss them; they are cut inches deep into walls and columns. One is entitled to suspect that Ramses, who had replaced the names of some of his predecessors with his own, was making sure nobody was going to scratch his off.
He was the son of Seti I and he was the pharaoh who made the name of Ramses practically a synonym for Egyptian kingship. He had some help in this from a later Ramses, the third in number, but the chief responsibility rests with him. Next to that of Tutankhamon, his name is better known to the public than that of any other Egyptian king, and Ramses II’s fame was created by the liberal use of a well-known principle of modern advertising—repetition. How well he deserved the reputation he built for himself may be seen by one striking incident of his career, and the expert use he made of it in order to build the desired image.
His father, Seti, had begun the reconquest of Egypt’s Asiatic empire. Just how far the older man got we aren’t certain, but he had evidently regained control of Palestine and parts of southern Syria. Ramses burned to surpass his father; he wanted to be a warrior. His first campaign was a tentative push into Palestine, in his fourth year. In the following year he was ready for a more ambitious project.
His goal was a famous city indeed. Thutmose III had captured it twice, though not without difficulty. It had been the home of Thutmose’s most trying adversary, and it was still an important city; its name was Kadesh. Part of the city’s strategic strength lay in its position, near the mouth of the valley between the Lebanons, through which a northbound army would normally pass. Kadesh was a mighty fortress, and it was defended by a mighty army, for Ramses’ opponents were none other than the Hittites. Shubilulliuma, who had outfoxed himself only once in the matter of Tutankhamon’s widow, was long dead, but his grandson, Muwatallis, still felt that the Hittites had a claim on the city-states of north Syria. Conflict with the Hittites was inevitable to any Egyptian army bent on expansion during these years, just as a collision with Mitanni had been inevitable for Thutmose III. Hatti had replaced Mitanni as the most important power of the area; of the two, the Hittites were probably far more formidable.
At this period the Egyptian army was an impressive institution, professional in character, well trained, and well equipped. In one important particular it had altered since the heyday of Thutmose III: more and more of the troops were non-Egyptians, mercenaries or conquered enemies forced to serve under the banners of Egypt. Ramses’ army was divided into four sections, each named after one of the great gods of Egypt—Amon and Re, Ptah of Memphis, and Sutekh, who was a Semitic deity related to—of all people—Set.
A month after the army left Egypt, Ramses found himself standing on a hill about fifteen miles from Kadesh. No doubt he stood dramatically on the top and shaded his eyes with his hand, straining to see the dim towers and formidable walls in the distance. The strength of the army at his back, and his own stunning self-confidence, left him in no doubt of the eventual outcome. He set out for Kadesh early the next morning, hoping to get the business settled before dark.
Ramses commanded the division of Amon, which he led down the steep slopes to the ford of the Orontes—the first spot at which an army might cross that river. As he was preparing for the crossing, a pair of wandering Bedouins was scooped up by Egyptian scouts and brought to the king. They proclaimed themselves Hittite deserters who were anxious to fight on the right side—the Egyptian side—and they volunteered the welcome news that the Hittites were not at Kadesh at all. They were in Aleppo, far to the north. Ramses’ reception of this cheering information was no doubt conditioned by the fact that it was just what he wanted to hear. He pushed on toward the city, leaving the three divisions of Ptah, Sutekh, and Re far behind and, in his zeal, even outstripping the division of Amon. When he set up his camp on the west of the city he was accompanied only by his bodyguard.
Then it happened that two more Asiatics were captured by the Egyptians; and the story they told did not exactly jibe with the first report of the two Bedouins. The Hittites, as a matter of fact, were not in Aleppo. They were on the other side of the city of Kadesh, and they had not been idle while Ramses was trying to outrun his own army.
Even Ramses the Complacent must have lost his breath for a few minutes when he heard that news. His reaction was typical; he called his commanders in and told them what fools they were. He then did something practical, but a little too late, sending messengers speeding south to summon the division of Ptah. The division of Amon had caught up with its complacent leader, and Ramses knew that the division of Re was not far behind. This latter division was actually closer than he knew.
Back at the Hittite camp, matters had been progessing well—from the Hittite point of view. Muwatallis, the Hittite king, was a strategist so superior to Ramses that his talents are obvious even in the Egyptian version of the story, which was not designed to glorify the enemy. Or maybe the strategist was one of his generals. The king would get the credit in any case.
He had, to begin with, completely fooled Ramses with his carefully planted “deserters” and their implausible story. (The nameless Bedouins were patriots of a high caliber; they were risking their necks, in case the Egyptians did not believe their story, and I personally hope they slipped away from their guards in the confusion that was to come.) Then, as Ramses proceeded blithely along the plain on the west side of Kadesh, Muwatallis led his army south on the east side of the city, unseen by the Egyptians; crossed the ford; and smashed into the division of Re before its commanders so much as dreamed that there was a Hittite within fifty miles of the place.
Ramses, stamping and swearing, was not aware of this latest disaster until the fugitives from the broken and demoralized division of Re burst into his camp and on through it, carry ing with them the bewildered division of Amon. The pursuing Hittites were not far behind. They surrounded the camp; and there was Ramses, all alone except for the Hittites.
He says he was all alone, and even allowing for poetic license the statement is probably not too inaccurate. A few officers—the remains of the house hold troops—were not much against 2,500 chariots filled with ferocious Hittite soldiers. According to Ramses, however, he had no support at all. “There was no captain with me, no charioteer, no soldier of the army, no shield-bearer; my infantry and chariotry melted away before them, not one of them stood firm to fight.”
So the king addressed himself to Amon:
Have I done anything without thee, do I not walk and halt at thy biddings? What careth thy heart, O Amon, for these Asiatics, so vile and so ignorant of maat?
After working himself up to the proper pitch of religious fervor, Ramses hurled himself upon the enemy. He routed them single-handedly, driving them into the river. It seems that we must credit Ramses II with one virtue: he did not lack courage. He was also a magnificent liar, but then that was expected of him; even if the king had ordered his scribes to write down a tale of stupidity and defeat, his horrified courtiers would have carried him quietly away and then made sure the conventional eulogy was carved on the walls of his temple. We know that Ramses survived the battle, got back to Egypt, and ruled for many more years. What saved him was the arrival of unexpected aid.
The divisions of Re and Amon were in headlong flight to the north; the division of Sutekh was far in the rear, near the ford, and in fact, it never saw fighting at all. The division of Ptah was his best hope, but with the scanty resources at his command in the camp he could not expect to hold out until that division came up. But there were other troops, not part of the regular army, on the way. We do not know exactly where they came from, for they are called only “the Nearen from the land of Amurru.” These troops fell upon the Hittites from the rear, and with their help the king managed to hold the field until the rays of the declining sun caught the tips of the golden standards of the division of Ptah, toiling along the dusty road toward the succor of its king.
Nightfall ended the fighting but brought no decision as to victory. The enemy withdrew to the city, leaving Ramses in possession of the bloody field; the straggling soldiers of the divisions of Amon and Re crept shamefacedly back to the king they had deserted. Ramses says the Hittites then sued for peace, which he magnanimously granted.
At this point we are faced with a major problem in historiography. In other words, how much of this can we reasonably swallow? We have seen how varied and how remarkable are the sources from which a student of history may derive the information he uses to make up a consistent story of what happened in the past. When written records are few the historian uses other materials, which require complicated analyses. But even when an event is well documented, even when we have a written, pseudohistorical account, we must still evaluate the reliability of the source. Many questions must be asked. Is the tale written by an eyewitness or does the author rely on secondhand information? If the former, was he a good observer? If the latter, has he examined his witnesses and tried to test their eyesight and credibility? What is the bias of the author either for or against the people he is writing about? Even if he professes to be moved solely by a desire to record the “truth,” is he sufficiently detached from the scene and the players of the drama to write about them dispassionately? Does he have a conscious or unconscious purpose—vilification or glorification of a man or a belief, self-aggrandizement, propaganda? In some cases we must pry into the entire life history of a chronicler or writer of history in order to discover his prejudices and the bearing they may have on his interpretation of the events of the time.
Our task of evaluating the written records of ancient Egypt is relatively easy, since we can start with the assumption that every scribe had an ax or two to grind. The annals of the various kings are not a factual record of events; they are intended to glorify the kings, on earth and in the Hereafter. Hence we can and must take every statement made in such annals with a good-size chunk of salt. We cannot even be sure that Thutmose III was all that good. We think he—and when I say “he” I mean, of course, the scribe who composed the inscriptions under the king’s watchful eye—we think Thutmose III was fairly accurate. We can check some of his accounts through other sources, and his story has a certain indefinable, but significant, air of verisimilitude. Ramses II’s version of the Battle of Kadesh is transparently, naively eulogistic, and what actually happened was so bad that even the Egyptian scribe could not conceal all the disasters nor all his king’s stupidity.
Since we know that the purpose of the narrative was the glorification of the king, we can assume with some confidence that any anti-Ramses or anti-Egyptian remarks are probably correct. Thus, when interpreting the battle inscription, we state that Ramses outstripped the rest of his army; he credulously accepted the story of the two patriotic Bedouins; the division of Re was caught unaware and was annihilated; the majority of the forces encamped with the king were swept away in the rout. We can also state that Ramses survived the battle and got home. Egyptologists generally concede Ramses’ personal valor, while condemning him as a poor strategist and a poorer general, but we cannot even be sure about that. Ramses might have spent the battle hours hiding under a baggage cart while some unnamed (and short-lived) hero of Egypt rallied the meager forces in the camp and held them until help arrived. Let no one believe that I am misled by personal animus against a man who has been a mummy for several thousand years. I am perfectly willing to concede that Ramses may have been an Achilles in battle. Achilles was none too bright either. All I am saying is that we will never know for certain.
We do know that the Battle of Kadesh did not have the result which the Egyptians claimed—results that would be hard to believe in any case, just on the basis of the situation that prevailed at the end of the first day of battle. The Egyptian army had been badly demoralized, one-quarter of its strength annihilated at the very beginning of hostilities. The Hittites had certainly suffered severely during the afternoon, but they withdrew to the city in good order and their leader was not killed (the Egyptians would have gloated over his demise if it had occurred, and given Ramses the credit). It is inconceivable that they would have tamely surrendered after such an inconclusive “defeat” as the Egyptian records claim was inflicted.
Fortunately we do not have to rely on logic to prove that the Egyptians lost that fight. By one of those almost miraculous coincidences that do occur, we have at our disposal the Hittite version of the same battle, from the royal archives of the capital of Boghazkoi. According to it, Ramses was defeated and had to retreat, losing much of the territory his father had held.
Of course the same criteria apply to the Hittite records as to the Egyptian; the kings of Hatti were no more averse to flattery than were their royal counterparts to the south. But the Hittites continued to hold Kadesh and certain other cities formerly controlled by Egypt. The final conclusion to the rivalry of Hittites and Egyptians was not a resounding defeat for either side. In year twenty-one of Ramses II a treaty of peace was concluded between the two powers—the first international treaty of which we have record. And to make the wonder more complete, we have both versions, Hittite and Egyptian. The Egyptian copy of the treaty survives from the walls of Karnak and the Ramesseum, and the Hittite copy on two clay tablets from Boghazkoi. The latter was probably an archival version of the original, which was supposed to have been inscribed on plates of silver.
In their essential provisions the two texts are strikingly similar, which indicates that they really were parallel versions of the same agreement. They begin with a reference to former treaties, none of which is definitely known. Then the two monarchs mutually renounce any attempts at future invasion and swear perpetual peace. The treaty establishes a defensive alliance, which holds both in case of external invasion or internal rebellion. It also provides for the mutual extradition of refugees. The Egyptian version reads as follows:
If a man flee from the land of Egypt—or two, or three—and they come to the Great Prince of Hatti, the Great Prince of Hatti shall lay hold of them, and he shall cause that they be brought back to Ramses the great ruler of Egypt. But, as for the man who should be brought to the great ruler of Egypt, do not cause that his crime be raised against him; do not cause that his house or his wives or his children be destroyed; do not cause that he be slain, do not cause that injury be done to his eyes, to his ears, to his mouth, or to his legs.
The same provisions hold in the case of fugitives from Hatti who escape to Egypt. The striking aspect of this section is not the notion of extradition, nor the unmistakable ring of the lawyers’ phraseology, but the humanitarianism enjoined upon the two kings. It seems quite inexplicable unless we assume some mutually accepted moral or legal code of—not so much justice as mercy, for the malefactor’s crime is to be forgiven him.
The two treaties are almost exact parallels, but not quite exact. The Egyptians felt it incumbent upon them to add a prologue explaining that the treaty was granted by merciful Ramses after the Hittite king came crawling and begging for peace. No comment.
Some years later, the alliance was cemented by a royal marriage, and Ramses’ version of this diplomatic stroke is equally—I almost said characteristically—egomaniacal. The Hittites are described as “coming with fearful steps, bearing all their possessions as tribute to the fame of His Majesty. His eldest daughter comes before, in order to satisfy the heart of the Lord of the Two Lands.”
Ramses evidently could not recognize an inconsistency if it walked up and bit him. He implies that the poor Hittite princess was thrust into the ravening jaws of the dragon Ramses by her trembling father; but elsewhere he exchanges the role of dragon for that of a chivalrous prince, who rushes out at the head of a well-equipped escort to meet his promised bride with all honor. The tale concludes in the second, fairy-tale strain: “She was beautiful in the eyes of His Majesty, and he loved her more than anything!”
It is a shame to dim the glow of this pretty story, which would make a standard diplomatic marriage into a case of love at first sight; but, of course, the version we have is another of the standard court fictions. The Hittite princess—poor girl—was raised to the rank of chief royal wife, but her throne was uncomfortably crowded. The women’s quarters were a standard architectural element of all Egyptian palaces; but it is probable that few kings of Egypt had harem quarters covering as many acres as did Ramses. We do not know exactly how many wives he had. Most of them were not wives, strictly speaking, but occupied a position analogous to that of legal concubine. A higher rank in the harem was held by the king’s wives, who were not so numerous as the concubines. We usually translate “king’s wife” as “queen,” but the woman who really held the place of royal consort was the “king’s great wife.” Sometimes this lady was a lowly commoner; sometimes she was the king’s half-sister or his full sister. Brother-sister marriages were common in the royal house of Egypt, although the practice was rare among humbler folk. The king was a law unto himself, in marriage as in other matters, and we have a few cases of father-daughter marriages; at least the evidence is hard to interpret in any other way.
Ramses II was one of the kings who apparently married some of his own children. It is possible that he had forgotten momentarily that he was related to them; the total sum of his offspring exceeded 150, and no man can be expected to keep that many little faces clearly in mind. Because of paternal pride—or some other reason—Ramses liked to show off his children, and if you visit the temple of Luxor at Thebes you can see a long line of them carved on the wall, all in a row like so many upright sardines.
The Luxor temple, begun by Amenhotep III, was only one of the many monuments dedicated by Ramses to the greater glory of Ramses. He added a forecourt, a huge pylon, and massive statues to the front of the temple. In order to achieve this noble end, he spared none of the works of his ancestors, razing the temples and pyramids of past ages in order to obtain handy precut building blocks. At this time the royal capital was in the Delta region, which has not been so methodically excavated as has Upper Egypt; hence Ramses’ most famous temples are in the southern part of Egypt, and they include some of the standard tourist attractions. He was responsible for finishing the great Hypostyle Hall of Karnak, the most spectacular section of that crowded and complex temple. The vast trunklike columns are staggering in their size and number, and no traveler comes away from Egypt without a photograph of a row of them, with a handy guide posed against one to give some idea of relative dimensions. Ramses’ mortuary temple, across the river from Karnak, is called the Ramesseum, and it too is on the list of Things to See while in Luxor. The best known of all his monuments is the rock-cut temple of Abu Simbel in Nubia, with its four colossal statues of the king. A second, smaller temple at the same site was dedicated to Nefertari, one of Ramses’ principal and most favored queens.
These temples were the most conspicuous of the Egyptian antiquities threatened by the building of the High Dam at Aswan in the 1960s. The old dam had left the island of Philae under water for part of the year. The new one would cover it entirely and inundate a huge area of lower Nubia, with its temples, ancient sites, and villages. The Egyptian government called on the international community for help, and the response was immediate. For almost twenty years expeditions worked in the area, in a frantic attempt to excavate and record as many sites as possible before the deluge. Some of the smaller temples were moved to safer locations. The biggest problem was what to do with Abu Simbel. It was not a freestanding temple, like the others; its chambers and halls were cut into the solid rock of the cliff.
The problem was certainly one of the most fantastically difficult ever faced by a team of archaeologists and engineers, and some of the solutions proposed were even more fantastic. The simplest suggestion was to build a dam around the temples and install a pumping station to take care of seepage and overflow. But if the pumps had failed, for any reason, the temples would have been flooded in no time. So this scheme had to be abandoned.
The most intriguing suggestion was one proposed by Italian engineers—to cut both temples free of the cliff into which they had been carved, and lift them up above the water level by means of hydraulic jacks. Concrete blocks would be inserted underneath as the temples slowly rose. Impossible as this plan sounds, it was approved by an international committee of experienced engineers, but it too had to be given up because of the prohibitive cost. The estimate was $85 million. It doesn’t sound like much compared to the cost of modern wars, but it was a lot of money back then.
The plan that was eventually carried out was to carve the temples up into thirty-ton blocks and move them. They stand today atop the cliffs, two hundred feet above their original location, where they attract as many tourists as they always did. The blocks were stuck back together with one of the new synthetic glues.
Undoubtedly this was a monumental achievement and a magnificent testimonial to international cooperation, but there were a few cynics who wondered whether it was worth the effort. I have already made a number of rude, possibly unfair, remarks about Ramses II, so I will refrain from criticizing his temples, and I would be the first to admit that seeing Abu Simbel, especially at night, is a memorable experience.
Ramses does have one spectacular artistic achievement to his credit—the exquisitely painted tomb of his queen Nefertari. In its present state it is a tribute not only to Ramses but also to the efforts of a modern team of restorers, who spent years repairing the badly damaged walls. In her white pleated robe, her face exquisitely made up, the queen pays homage to various gods who will guide her through the perils of the Afterlife. One can only hope that the astronomical entrance fee and the detetermination of the Egyptian government to limit access will prevent future deterioration.
Ramses’ own tomb, in the Valley of the Kings, is in poor condition, and most of the decoration is missing. However, a few years ago an American archaeologist, Kent Weeks, made a discovery that electrified not only the world of Egyptology but the world media. The tomb of the sons of Ramses II is the largest ever found in Egypt—well over a hundred rooms so far, and still counting. It’s even more of a mess than that of Ramses himself, and the work of excavation has been unbelievably difficult.
Ramses probably gave up the ghost with the satisfying feeling that he had done the best he could. Lots of statues, lots of temples. In other matters he was no less diligent. There would be no dangerous uncertainty about a male heir to the throne; Ramses had supplied Egypt almost as abundantly with sons as with statues. He reigned for sixty-seven years and was over ninety when he died—a ripe old age indeed, considering the state of ancient medical knowledge, but then Egypt has a notoriously healthy climate, and clean living tells in the end. A goodly number of crown princes abandoned hope and died while Ramses flourished; it’s easy to understand why he was driven to burying them in a group grave. He was succeeded by his thirteenth son, Merneptah, who was himself well past middle age when he gained the long-awaited crown. The poor man deserved a peaceful reign after waiting so long for it, but it was his unhappy fate to meet the greatest challenge Egypt had had to face since the days of the Hyksos.
The man who climbed the steps to the throne of Horus was no muscular warrior-king. He had occupied his throne only five years when he received word which must have hastened the loss of his remaining hairs.
For almost two hundred years the military ambitions of Egypt had been directed toward Syria and the east. Since Ahmose pursued the fleeing Hyksos invaders into Palestine, this area had provided the greatest challenges and the most pressing dangers to Egypt. There were always battles in Nubia to the south, and with the Libyans, west of the Delta; but these were lesser enemies than the great confederations of Syrian princes and the eastern empires of Mitanni and Hatti.
Now the status quo was changing, and drastically. A new wind was blowing against the isolated green island of Egypt, a wind cold and sharp with northern ferocity. The immediate threat to Egypt, the news of which reached the elderly king in March of his fifth year, came from the desert regions west of the Delta, which were occupied by various Libyan tribes. Maraye, king of the Libyans, led not only his fighting men but all the peoples of his tribe, women and children, with their cattle and house hold equipment, in a vast migration. Yet the threat of the Libyans was not new. What was new, and disturbing, was the presence of alien peoples among the military allies of Maraye. They have strange names: the Akawasha and the Luca, the Tursha and the Sheklesh. Perhaps the names will not sound so strange if we give the now commonly accepted equivalent: the Achaeans and the Lycians, the Tyrsenoi and the Sicilians.
The Egyptian records call these tribes “peoples of the sea.” We know them from Greece and also from Italy, if the Tyrsenoi are in actuality the ancestors of the Etruscans. How they came to be allies of a Libyan chieftain is a mystery, but it seems that there was ferment and unrest and a great movement of peoples throughout Asia Minor and the Mediterranean. The ancient empire of the Hittites was rocking on its foundations; Merneptah had sent grain to that country in order to relieve a severe famine. With a little ingenuity, we can trace most of the “peoples of the sea” to homelands in Asia Minor. The Tyrsenoi had lived in Lydia before they emigrated, and the Achaeans may have inhabited the Mycenaean colony at Miletus just south of Lydia.
If the famine and the general brouhaha that can be read in the Hittite records of this period affected the whole area of Asia Minor, the “peoples of the sea” may have been forced to migrate by hunger, or by pressure from other tribes to their rear. What ever their motive, they and the Libyans posed a formidable threat to Egypt, and Merneptah, in his extremity, sought advice from the gods.
They were reassuring. Ptah himself appeared to the king in a dream and offered him a sword. Merneptah, on this symbolic advice, sent out the army. We cannot condemn him for not taking part himself, for he was probably too old and possibly too fat for such exercise. But victory, in the orthodox view, was a gift of the gods who employed men and weapons as their tools, so Merneptah’s “pull” with divinity very properly received credit for the Egyptian success. Over six thousand of the enemy were slain, and nine thousand were taken prisoner.
Merneptah commemorated his victory in writing, upon a wall at Karnak. He also caused a stela to be carved—on the back of a stela of Amenhotep III, but he was not about to apologize for a minor usurpation of that sort after the outstanding example his father had given him. The inscription on this stela is one of the best known texts in Egyptology, and for a rather unusual reason. It gives the standard shouts of praises for the warrior-king, ending with a long list of conquered towns and tribes. The style of this hymn of victory is reminiscent of modern football reporting, which seems to have an unwritten rule against the use of the word defeated. Southern Cal smashes or flattens, or walks over, or edges an opponent; Merneptah plundered, and laid waste, and destroyed. Among the variegated verb forms we find the following phrase: “Israel is desolated, and has no seed.”
Naturally, this stela is called the “Israel stela,” and the reader can understand why it is so widely known. This is the one and only mention of the Israelites in all the Egyptian inscriptions we possess. And, of course, it provides a terminal point to the vexed question of the Exodus, which we glanced at earlier and then put off for future consideration.
The wicked pharaoh of the Exodus has long been sought by biblical scholars, and formerly Merneptah was a leading contender for the job. Proponents of the theory were confounded when Merneptah’s mummy was found, resting in peace though in poverty, in 1898; they had expected that his body would long since have dissolved in the waters of the Red Sea. The mummy is irrelevant to the problem, really; the thing that eliminates Merneptah as the pharaoh of the Exodus is this very stela, which demonstrates that Israel was a recognized entity by the time of Ramses II’s son. It is interesting to note, however, that the determinative of the word is not the sign for city or country, but for people—a tribe, rather than a state.
Who then was the pharaoh of the Exodus? Or was there a pharaoh of the Exodus? Was there, in fact, an Exodus at all?
A popular compromise answer holds that there was no single, massive exodus as described in the Old Testament. Asiatic peoples were continually wandering in and out of Egypt, as visitors or traders or conquered slaves, according to the vicissitudes of the Egyptian empire in Asia. A group of the people whose descendants formed part of the kingdom of Israel may have entered Egypt with the Hyksos; another group may have been led in chains behind the victorious chariot of Thutmose III; one group was active in the deserts of Palestine during the reign of Akhenaton, if the Habiru who devastated the southern half of Egypt’s empire at that time have any connection with the Hebrews. Or none of the above may be true. The biblical narrative specifically mentions the treasure cities of Pithom and Ramses, which implies that some of the Hebrews dragged stones under Merneptah’s father. However, there is the possibility that the names of the cities were added by a later compiler of the original tale, for the name of Ramses early came to loom large in the minds of men who thought of Egypt. As you can see, the problem is not simple, and the solutions to it are strongly influenced by the prejudices of the theorists. The archaeological evidence is equally conflicted. I don’t intend to go into details, since the subject is really outside the mainstream of our symposium.
Gallant (or lucky) old Merneptah, who was not the pharaoh of the Exodus, had a few years left to him after the battle with the Libyans and the Sea Peoples, and he spent them emulating his father; he tore down as many monuments as he could get at and built himself some memorials. Since he did not reign as long as Ramses II, he was unable to wreak so much havoc, though he did manage to dismantle the superb mortuary temple of Amenhotep III. When he died, a time of anarchy ensued, as Egyptologists like to say. It ensues, henceforth, with depressing frequency.
During this particular ensual, Seti II, Merneptah’s son, succeeded him. But he wasn’t the only king of Egypt at that time. A fellow named Amenmesse also occupied the throne. Did he control only Upper Egypt, with Seti II ruling in the north? Or did he snatch the throne away from Seti for three years, or five, or six? His mother was apparently a queen, but his father is unknown. Merneptah, Seti II? Take your pick. Seti II eventually ended up having sole control, and proceeded to replace Amenmesse’s name with his own wherever possible. Seti in turn was succeeded by a youth named Siptah, who was probably his son, but maybe Amenmesse’s. Siptah’s mother has an unusual name—Sitailja, or Shoteraja—certainly non-Egyptian, possibly Canaanite. He was only about eighteen when he died, after a reign of six years. His mummy has a severe deformity of the left foot, probably the result of polio.
Obviously a twelve-year-old king required a regent. Since his mother was almost certainly a concubine or lesser wife, the logical candidate, in accordance with tradition, was the chief wife of Seti II, Tausert.
Here’s where the sense of déjà vu all over again begins. In addition to the female regent we have a mysterious character named Bay, who held the title of chancellor. His name suggests that he was Syrian, possibly related to Siptah’s mother; his exalted position (for he was granted the high privilege of a tomb in the Royal Valley) has prompted the same sort of rumors that gathered around Hatshepsut and Senenmut. After Siptah’s death Tausert proclaimed herself king, as Hatshepsut had done before her, assuming kingly titles. We have no depictions of her in male attire and form, but that could be because only a few monuments of hers have survived.
Not very exciting, is it? Yet there is material for a thrilling historical novel here, and hints of dark events, murder, betrayal, and conspiracy. Bay’s influence did not endure; a recently discovered inscription calls him the great enemy, and proclaims that the king has had him killed. One would love to know why Siptah (or someone else in power) took this step. Chancellor Bay would make a splendid eminence grise, like Cardinals Mazarin and Richelieu three thousand years later and, like them, the lover of the queen regent. Or was he a hated rival of the lady, who finally became powerful enough to order his execution? It’s pure fiction. The players in this drama are two-dimensional; we don’t know much about them, except for the fact that they all, including Tausert, had rather nice tombs in the Valley of the Kings. There is another tomb in the valley connected with Tausert and her husband, Seti II; the so-called Gold Tomb, though small in size and obviously not of royal dimensions, contained a cache of jewelry that was one of the most impressive found up to that time.
Among the loot was a pair of very small silver gloves, with a number of rings inside the fingers. Nothing organic had survived. It may well be that the theory suggested by one scholar is correct: that the burial was that of a small prince or princess, and that when the modern excavator cleaned out the silver gloves he threw away the rotted flesh and bone of a royal child.
Tausert’s successor was Setnakhte, a man of unknown antecedents, who took over her elegant tomb in the Valley of the Kings and was buried there after a reign of only a few years. Like Hatshepsut’s, Tausert’s mummy is missing, unless one of the unidentified females in the royal cache is hers.
Setnakhte is considered the founder of a new dynasty—the Twentieth—but his chief claim to fame is that he fathered Ramses III.
The name had already become one to reckon with, and Ramses III’s aping of his predecessor was certainly deliberate; it is too exact and too consistent to be otherwise. Ramses III built grandly and without undue modesty. His most famous monument is his mortuary temple, which today bulks large upon the West Bank of the Nile across from Luxor, not far from the mortuary temple of his idol, Ramses II. Medinet Habu is the name given to the temple of the third Ramses; it has been studied with more intense concentration than has any other Egyptian temple. The Oriental Institute has been copying texts and excavating in and around the temple for more than thirty years. The results fill several immense volumes, each about half as tall as I am, and they may truthfully be said to be as precise and accurate as any product of modern archaeological methods can be. If you visit Medinet Habu—which you certainly will do if you go to Luxor, since it is part of the standard tour—you will be struck by the yards and yards of inscriptions. I have a personal interest in these texts because I spent one semester translating some of them, and I contemplated the inscribed walls with loathing. The laudatory texts are as turgid and repetitive and pompous as the architecture. Once again—compare it with Deir el Bahri.
Medinet Habu was more than a temple. The king had a palace here, one of a number that he maintained, with the usual offices and servants’ quarters. Ramses entertained his harem in the gate house, and the reliefs that survive here are chastely indicative of the purpose of the structure. In defense of the adverb, let me add that the Egyptians saw nothing shocking about nudity; climate and common sense alike decreed relatively few garments in informal situations.
The Medinet Habu reliefs and inscriptions tell of more serious matters than dalliance with the girls of the harem. When Merneptah crushed the Sea Peoples and the Libyans, he may have believed that he had settled one problem for good and all. But he had only encountered the first wave of the great migrations, or Völkerwanderungen, which marked the first millennium before the Christian Era, and revamped the political map of much of the Middle East. The Sea Peoples and the Libyans were on the march once more; the old tribes who had harassed Merneptah had acquired fresh allies. Some of the new names may be identified; the Danu are possibly the Danaoi of the Iliad, and the Peleset are surely the Philistines, who settled along the coast of Palestine and irritated the Israelites in succeeding years. These people were not so much an army as a swarm of army ants, a vast column of warriors, oxen, children, wagons, and baggage carts which swept like a scourge through the eastern lands. They dealt the Hittites their death blow and came down on Egypt by sea and by land.
Ramses III defeated them in ferocious fighting on land and water. In three separate engagements he took care of the Libyans and the Sea Peoples, which makes his military accomplishments much more impressive than those of Ramses II. But there was one important difference. Ramses II was fighting at Kadesh, in what might be called a war of aggression hundreds of miles from Egypt. The men who fought under Ramses III had their backs to the wall, and they fought with the knowledge that defeat meant slavery or annihilation. The Egyptian empire was dead. Later there would be attempts to resurrect it, just as there would be imitations of other elements of past glory. But the ka of Thutmose III, safely settled in the Land of the Westerners, was not reembodied in Egypt.
The end of the Twentieth Dynasty is a sad spectacle. Almost every document that survives from this time, beginning with the last years of Ramses III, tells the same tale of corruption and abuse, a deadly rot that invaded every cell of the body politic. The death of Ramses III is an example; it does not seem appropriate to call it a “good” example. He was probably murdered by members of his own house hold in a case involving the blackest treachery, witchcraft, and subornation. The conspirators were headed by a queen named Ti, who wanted to see her son upon the throne of Egypt. The true heir, Ramses IV to be, did not succeed in saving his father’s life—was it, one wonders cynically, his primary aim?—but he defended his own rights with a vigor which he displayed in no other activity during his brief reign. The queen, her son the pretender, and certain harem officials were seized and condemned to trial.
During the hearings the ghastly tale of black magic emerged. One of the criminals began to make humans of wax, inscribed, so that they might be taken in by the inspector of the harem. To what purpose? one wonders. Were the waxen images used as they have been used in Europe an witchcraft? Such a doll could be identified with a particular individual by means of fingernail clippings, hair, or the like kneaded into the wax; torments worked upon the image inflicted corresponding injuries upon the victim’s body. The use of these “humans of wax” or clay is very, very old, but it is impossible to be sure that this is how they were used by the Egyptians. There is a suggestion that one of the figures may have been that of Ramses III, animated by means of a magical roll and thus a puppet in the hands of the conspirators. Though we do not fully understand the means, the deadly purpose of the magic is clear enough. To make matters worse, some of the judges fell under the influence of two of the accused criminals, consorting and carousing with them while the trial was under way. All the criminals died. The lesser were executed, but those of higher rank were accorded the privilege of supervised suicide.
We are told of only one other attempt at assassination, that of Amenemhat III back in the Twelfth Dynasty, but one can’t help suspecting that this sort of thing happened every now and then. If successful, the usurper would piously proclaim himself the chosen of Amon and bury his victim with suitable ceremony. If unsuccessful, why talk about anything so distasteful, so threatening to maat? The only reason why we know so much about this one is due to an accident of survival—a record of the court proceedings—or perhaps it’s only part of the proceedings. There is no mention of witnesses, no questioning of the accused by the judges, only a methodical list of the condemned and their punishments.
Up to this time the priesthoods had done well for themselves. A document called the Papyrus Harris, written at the end of the reign of Ramses III, lists the extent of the temple property. We are not sure whether the fantastic figures indicated only the gifts of Ramses to the gods, or the total amounts, including his donations; but in either case the holdings of the ecclesiastical foundations must have been enormous. Estimates range from 2 percent of the people of Egypt and 15 percent of the land, to 20 percent of the people and almost one-third of the total acreage. The figures would not be so formidable if the wealth had been equally divided; Egypt had so many gods and so many temples that the grand total would have been safely fragmented. But the great gods of Egypt held the lion’s share of the wealth, and the greatest of them all, Amon-Re of Thebes, was mightiest in temporal terms as well. One scholar has estimated that Amon alone owned one-fifteenth of the population and one-eleventh of the land.
The last kings of the Twentieth Dynasty are a dreary roll of Ramses—eight more of them. The events of their reigns are equally dreary. Asia, as a field of conquest, was closed to Egypt, and Ramses VI was the last king to work the mines in Sinai. At home, the stain of decay spread and deepened. The necropolis workers of Thebes, the men who built and maintained the tombs on the West Bank, went on strike on numerous occasions, demanding the pay that was overdue them. Each time the responsible officials met them with soothing words and promises that were never, or inadequately, fulfilled.
The priests were no less venal than their counterparts in the civil bureaucracy. Indeed, the distinction between civil and religious functions was far from sharp, and a man might hold offices in the temple and in the court simultaneously. But if he had to choose between the two, the ser vice of the gods was preferable. As far back as the Eighteenth Dynasty the convenient omniscience of historians allowed us to utter dire predictions of the danger of the trend that Papyrus Harris illustrates so vividly. We were able to view the generosity of Thutmose III and his successors to their patron god as a portent because we knew what was going to happen. It has been suggested that there was an element of political expediency in Akhenaton’s religious experiment, if not in Akhenaton himself. However, this interpretation necessitates the assumption that someone possessed a remarkable degree of insight into a situation that had not, at that time, taken on the shape it was to assume later, and which was probably never defined in such clear-cut terms. The conception of church and state as separate, rival entities was antithetical to the Egyptian worldview.
What ever the causes of the heresy, the results did not weaken Amon but gave him renewed strength. With the progressive debility of the state, and the succession of feeble pharaohs clinging to the name of Ramses as to a talisman, the power of Amon continued to wax.
The last Ramses, number eleven, marks the end of the Twentieth Dynasty. Egypt was in bad shape by then, impoverished and torn by what was essentially civil war. It ended with the country again divided, Ramses XI being allowed to retain the titles of king and control of the north, while the high priest of Amon controlled the south. By this time even Amon-Re must have been feeling the pinch. Presumably the temples still owned a great portion of the country, but no longer did tribute from abroad enrich the gods. However, there was one source of wealth available to the man who ruled at Thebes—the tombs in the Valley of the Kings.
Tomb robberies, which had never been completely suppressed, increased as the necropolis workers increasingly suffered from nonpayment of wages and official corruption. They knew where the loot was buried, and they may have figured it was of more use to them than to the silent dead. At first the authorities tried to carry out regular inspections and repair the damage they found. It was extensive; in some cases even the bodies had been dismembered and left scattered on the floors of the burial chambers. Eventually the priests decided they were fighting a losing battle. The only sure way of protecting what was left of the royal dead was to collect them and tuck them away in secret hiding places.
An honorable, pious enterprise, to be sure. Or was it?
Well, partly. The ruined bodies were rewrapped and relabeled, but it now seems clear that anything of value left on or with the mummy was recycled by the emissaries of the high priests. Two of them, scribes of the tomb named Djehutymose and his son, Butehamon, have achieved belated and somewhat dubious fame among Egyptologists. Their names appear all over the cliffs of the West Bank, noting the presence of the tombs they had located—and emptied. A series of letters between the High Priest Piankh and these two men makes their activities clear. The process went on for years, and by the time it was finished the tombs in the Valley of the Kings had been cleared of their former occupants and what had remained of their possessions—all except one. The location of Tutankhamon’s tomb had been forgotten by the end of the Twentieth Dynasty. The mere fact that its contents survived is proof of that.
The gold in the other tombs, even the gilding on the coffins, went into the coffers of the high priests. Stripped of their valuables and in some cases mislabeled, the pathetic remains of the royal mummies found final resting places where they lay undisturbed for three thousand years.
Even before this time the office of high priest of Amon had become hereditary, like the kingship. The High Priest Amenhotep had been preceded in the office by his brother and his father, and he had shown signs of increasing presumption by having himself carved on a temple wall the same size as the pharaoh whom he faced. This would have been inconceivable in earlier times. He had to appeal to Ramses XI, however, when the viceroy of Nubia, Panehsy by name, marched north with an army and actually beseiged the high priest at Medinet Habu, the mortuary temple of Ramses III, which had formidable walls. The royal army, led by a general named Piankh, eventually met and overcame Panehsy’s army, which retreated to Nubia. Not too surprisingly, General Piankh seems to have settled down at Thebes, where he eventually took the additional office of high priest of Amon.
His successor in both high offices was a figure of some stature. Here the presumed conflict between church and state is seen in its true light; Herihor was church and state in one person. As a soldier and viceroy of Nubia he commanded a large and effective army. The high priesthood was probably a prize of his prowess rather than the source of it. When he added the title of high priest to those of his military rank, he had more prestige than any man in Egypt except the pharaoh, and more real power than any man, including the pharaoh. It was only a matter of time before he would adjust the fiction to suit the fact and climb into the throne from behind.
The reliefs on the walls of the Khonsu temple at Karnak tell the tale with an ironic clarity that needs no words. In the outer courts the high priest usurps the functions of the king and makes offerings in his own person; inside the temple, the latest part to be built, he assumes the crown and the cartouche. So pass the Ramessids—unwept and unhonored, perhaps, but not unsung, thanks to the strenuous efforts of the second and third bearers of that now diminished name.