Think Like an Egyptian (22 page)

King Akhenaten introduced a monotheistic version of state religion, based around the worship of the power of the sun, the Aten. Should we count him an intellectual king inspired by a genuine religious vision, or a tyrant who used religion to increase his own power at the expense of the rich and powerful priesthoods of Egypt, especially that of Amun-Ra of Thebes? The surviving evidence does not tell us. We do not know how large a following his beliefs attracted. After his death his family was ousted by military men from the north and the traditional cults were reestablished. He was branded “that criminal of Akhetaten,” and his new city of Tell el-Amarna was abandoned once the court returned to the old capital city of Memphis.

King Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid, was portrayed in one story as cruel. Having seen a magician reunite the severed head and body of a goose and bring it back to life, Khufu asks for a demonstration on a prisoner. The magician refuses and rebukes the king. Khufu’s ill-repute survived for centuries. When the Greek traveler Herodotus visited Egypt 2,000 years later, he, too, was told unflattering stories about Khufu.

Statues can help to form our ideas of Egyptian kings. One of Rameses II (in Turin) shows a benign figure that matches his reputation, while statues of Kings Senusret III and Amenemhat III of the 12th Dynasty are sometimes glowering, sometimes care-worn. These statues either convey an impression of brutal power or the loneliness and burden of responsibility of supreme office. Some of the predecessors of these kings had expressed the latter sentiment. “I gave to the beggar, I raised the orphan, I gave success to the poor as to the wealthy. But he who ate my food raised opposition; he to whom I gave my trust used it to plot” are words put into the mouth of the assassinated Amenemhat I in a treatise addressed to his son and heir, King Senusret I. “Beware of being surrounded by the servants of the enemy. Caution prolongs life,” wrote another king to his son at the time of civil war in the 1st Intermediate Period.

 

 

 

 

The hieroglyph shows a doubled loop of rope, the ends bound tightly around one part of the loop, then spreading out to form a straight line. It is a modification of a sign which shows a circle of rope with the ends unfixed that depicts the concept of a bounded space (thus
n
or
shen
) and is used as the determinative of the words “to encircle” and “circuit” (derived from the same root), referring to the whole world upon which the sun shone. An Egyptian king’s aspiration to rule the whole world was said to be over the “circuit of the sun-disc.” It became a symbol for “eternity” (the Shen symbol), presumably because the firmly bound loop contained no visible end.

The cartouche version of the sign appeared early in Egyptian history as a frame to pick out the name of the king, written inside the loop. The circular shape had to be elongated to accommodate the necessary line of hieroglyphs. The rope metaphorically contained and controlled the king’s territorial realm, perhaps in the way that the wooden beams of a ship were held in place by complex rope lashings (see no. 43, “Boat traveling upstream”).

At their coronation, Egyptian kings were given more than one name. By the beginning of the Middle Kingdom the full set numbered five. The first three, which did not use the cartouche, named the king as a manifestation of the god Horus and of the royal protective cobra and vulture goddesses, Wadjit and Nekhbet, who stood for Lower and Upper Egypt, respectively. “Horus” was the oldest name and had appeared by the time writing began in Egypt just before 3000 BC. A fourth name, written for the first time inside a cartouche, was added at the beginning of the Old Kingdom, and the fifth name, also in a cartouche, appeared intermittently in the later Old Kingdom before becoming obligatory.

The modern practice is to refer to kings by their fifth name (that is, the second of their cartouche names). This was frequently a pious statement about the gods: Amenemhat (“Amun at the forefront”), Djehutymes (or Tuthmosis, “Thoth has been born”), Amenhetep (“Amun is satisfied”). They sometimes became family traditions. The 12th Dynasty comprised three kings Senusret (“Man of the cobra-goddess”) and four kings Amenemhat. The 20th Dynasty produced an unbroken sequence of kings Rameses (“Ra has been born”), in the modern numbering sequence from III to XI. Later came royal families from outside, introducing kings with foreign names: the Libyans Osorkon and Takeloth, the Nubians Taharka and Shabaka, and the Persian Darijava(1)ush, whom the Greeks knew as Darius. Modern Egyptology has failed to find a consensus on spelling many of the kings” names, so that Djehutymes also appears as Thothmes or Tuthmosis, and Amenhetep as Amenophis.

Contemporary texts, however, more often referred to kings by their first cartouche name (the fourth of the full sequence of names). This was composed at the time of coronation, and for a long time was unique to an individual king. First cartouche names make a respectful statement about the sun-god Ra and his spirits (kas): Khakaura (“The kas of Ra have appeared,” for Senusret III); Nebmaatra (“The lord of truth is Ra,” for Amenhetep III); Usermaatra (“Powerful of truth is Ra,” for Rameses II). The practice of composing a new first cartouche continued with foreign kings, who kept their own foreign names for their second cartouche. After the Persian king Cambyses had conquered Egypt in 525 BC, a leading Egyptian priest named Udjahor-resenet tells us that he composed for him his first cartouche, Mesutira (“Offspring of Ra”), which was in full traditional Egyptian style. The last known cartouche is a conversion into hieroglyphs of the Latin name of the Roman emperor Maximinus Daia, who reigned between AD 305 and 313 and was one of the last major supporters of paganism before the Roman Empire became officially Christian.

The naming process of a new king signaled the start of a new era throughout the country. All texts, from those to be carved on temple walls to legal documents and letters on papyrus, would need immediately to include the new cartouches, and the calendar began again with “year 1.” In an account of her coronation, the father of the usurping Queen Hatshepsut is said to have “commanded that the lector-priests be brought in to proclaim her official names ... and to set them on every construction and every seal (ready) for the coronation.” At the same time it was decreed that, “as for anyone who shall hear the name of Her Majesty spoken, he shall come immediately to tell the king.” This cannot mean that people were forbidden from mentioning the name of the reigning king. Rameses II, for example, was known to his subjects familiarly as Sesi. Most likely it refers to disrespectful or even treasonable mentions. This created, of course, an opportunity for maliciousness. The chief workman of Deir el-Medina, named Hay, was accused by some of his workers of uttering a curse against the reigning king, Seti II. He brought it before an unofficial court at which point the men withdrew the accusation, receiving “100 severe blows of the stick” each for trying to cause trouble.

 

 

 

 

The hieroglyph shows a building of matting on wooden frames, with a row of loose plant fronds along the top. It writes the standard word for “palace.” The sign derives from a time before the 1st Dynasty when, either in reality or in the imagination of Egyptians of later times (see no. 10, “Papyrus column”), palaces were built with these materials. In dynastic times, palaces were normally built from the same perishable sun-dried mud-bricks as were the houses of Pharaohs” subjects. They were not monuments built for eternity and few examples have survived, most from the New Kingdom. At any one time there were probably a host of them scattered across the country providing accommodation for the king throughout his realm. They ranged from single buildings—like grander versions of the houses of high officials—to sprawling complexes, the best-known example being the palace-town of King Amenhetep III at Malkata, western Thebes, which covered an area of at least 16 hectares (see no. 95, “Festival”).

Palaces had to be designed to proclaim the dignity of kingship and to safeguard it from dangers by setting up barriers, most simply through progressions of halls of columns leading to a throne room. Another way of maintaining a distance between the king and his subjects was through the use of a “window of appearance” (see no. 7, “To appear”), through which the king would hand down rewards to chosen followers. Palaces had distinctive internal decoration that set them apart from even the houses of the very rich and powerful. Walls, ceilings, and sometimes the floors of palaces were brightly painted, often with scenes from nature, which must have helped to relieve the formality of life at court.

Contemporaries wrote in praise that the new palace of Rameses II in the delta was “radiant with halls of lapis lazuli and turquoise.” Although precious stones might have been used, much of the effect was created by means of glazed tiles. Sections of an elaborate throne dais made from turquoise-colored tiles have been found on the site. The glazed treads of the palace’s steps were decorated with figures of Egypt’s enemies, and the balustrades ended with statues of lions in the act of devouring foreign captives. Sinuhe, a returned exile forgiven for an assumed act of treachery, describes being called back for a royal audience:

All ends well. The princesses are brought in and sing a hymn of praise to the king, their father, and work into it a plea for forgiveness. The king obliges and gives Sinuhe a place at court, with a pension. “I left the audience hall, the princesses giving me their hands.”