Pharaohs

PHARAOHS

THE RULERS OF ANCIENT EGYPT FOR OVER 3000 YEARS

PHARAOHS

THE RULERS OF ANCIENT EGYPT FOR OVER 3000 YEARS

PHYLLIS G. JESTICE

This digital edition first published in 2024

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ISBN: 978-1-83886-477-4

Editor: Michael Spilling

Designer: Andrew Easton

Picture researcher: Terry Forshaw

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1  Dawn of the God-Kings

Chapter 2  Royal Decline & Recovery

Chapter 3  Reimagining Egypt in a Wider World

Chapter 4  The Age of Egyptian Empire

Chapter 5  Decline or Transformation?

Chapter 6  The End of Independent Egypt

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

INDEX

INTRODUCTION: THE AGE OF PHARAOHS

For more than 3,000 years, ancient Egypt was ruled and shaped by its kings. About 170 of these monarchs are known today. They were mostly men but count a few women in their ranks. The majority were native Egyptians, but sometimes foreign dynasties took the throne and with it the ceremonial traditions that surrounded the person of ‘pharaoh’ – a term that means ‘the palace’ but gradually came to refer to the monarch.

In life, pharaohs were avatars of Horus, but upon death were regarded as a form of the god Osiris, first king of Egypt and god of the dead. This Twentieth Dynasty relief from Thebes depicts Osiris holding the crook and flail of kingship.

A gold bracelet from the tomb of Amenemope, Twenty-first Dynasty (Tanis 993–984 BC). On the rear are cartouches bearing the royal names of the king’s predecessor Psusennes I. Amenemope’s tomb is notable for being one of only two entirely intact royal burials.

The Tutankhamun exhibition in Bratislava, Slovakia, on 14 December 2014. The designers of this international tour caught well the appearance of the tomb when it was first opened and the jumble of objects that confronted Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon.

Whether Egyptian or outlander, whether male or female, all were able to tap into the great resources and wealth of Egypt to an extraordinary degree, leaving behind monuments and tomb treasures (those not pilfered by ancient grave robbers) that still inspire awe today. Perhaps no rulers in world history have been so much the personification and focal point of their state, or have controlled the resources of their land as much as the pharaohs did.

But what were these pharaohs? Were they unrestrained despots who forced their subjects to serve them and let their people starve while they themselves were buried with tonnes of gold? Or did their subjects gladly perform the labour that created pyramids, temples and tombs, believing that their service promoted the right order of things and assured their own prosperity and blissful afterlife? The truth of the matter was certainly somewhere between these two extremes. As we will see, some of Egypt’s kings did have a reputation for harshness in their own lifetimes, but others were renowned for their kindness and sense of justice. Similarly, while some of the compulsory labour that constructed edifices such as the pyramids was likely voluntary – workers were provided with food and most of the work would have been done at times when the Nile’s annual inundation made farming impossible – others resented it, as can be seen from the draconian punishments meted out to shirkers.

It is all too easy to regard the history of the Egyptian monarchy as a monolith, an institution stubbornly unchanging and unchangeable even as the world beyond Egypt’s borders was transformed. While the ideology of kingship was remarkably conservative, however, pharaohs over time naturally responded to both internal and external change. After all, pharaonic Egypt spans an immense period, from the unification of Egypt sometime around 3000 BC to the death of the last rulers of an independent Egypt, Cleopatra VII and her son Ptolemy XV (Caesarion), in 30 BC. Ancient authors already recognized that pharaohs did not all share a common bloodline, dividing Egypt’s history into 30 ‘dynasties’ (and acknowledging that sometimes even the members of the same dynasty were not related to each other). In the 19th century, scholars marked broad changes in Egyptian society by dividing ancient Egyptian history into Old, Middle and New Kingdoms, with ‘intermediate’ periods of disunification between them. We now also recognize a Third Intermediate Period, Late Period and Ptolemaic period. This book will for the most part follow those traditional divides, and uses the chronology favoured by The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, edited by Ian Shaw.

The English Egyptologist Howard Carter (1873–1939) examining King Tutankhamun’s inner coffin with an unnamed Egyptian assistant, shortly after the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb on 4 November, 1922.

DECODING ANCIENT EGYPT

Despite the efforts of archaeologists, historians, philologists and even forensic scientists for nearly two centuries, there are still many gaps in what we know about the rulers of ancient Egypt. Some are known only by name. For others, a tomb, sometimes staggeringly impressive, is the sole clue to the role they held in life. With every archaeological dig, the possibility exists that a new piece will be added to the puzzle. But without a doubt, the most important advance in our knowledge came with Jean-François Champollion’s decipherment of hieroglyphs, the ancient Egyptian writing system, in the 1820s. Surviving literature, accounts, even trial transcripts that survived on fragile papyrus thanks to the desert conditions of Upper Egypt started bringing this long-dead era to life. The walls of temples and tombs added immensely to our understanding of pharaohs and other important people, thanks to the millennia-long habit of inscribing boastful autobiographies on any available flat surface. Such accounts need to be read with a critical eye, but are extremely valuable relics of the past.

HOW WE KNOW

The Egyptians themselves preserved the memory of their kings for thousands of years. We have several ‘king lists’ – names of rulers in chronological order, sometimes with notes about significant events of their reigns. The oldest is the Palermo Stone, part of a Fifth Dynasty basalt stela carved in c.2400 BC. Piecing together its fragments, now spread among several museums (the largest in the Palermo Archeological Museum), it tells of a mythic past when the gods ruled directly, eventually passing the throne to a human, and carries the list up to the time it was carved. The two other most important king lists are the Turin Canon and Manetho’s history of Egypt, the Aegyptiaca. The Turin Canon is a papyrus, written in hieratic, compiled in the reign of Rameses II. Regarded as the most reliable king list, it was badly damaged when it was shipped to Turin, and some of the names cannot be deciphered. The much later Egyptian scribe Manetho used these sources or other temple king lists when he wrote his major history of dynastic Egypt in the 3rd century BC. Unfortunately, Manetho’s work too only exists in a fragmentary state, largely in the form of long extracts quoted by later Greek and Roman writers. The loss is particularly regrettable, because Manetho had access to priestly archives, as did the Greek Herodotus, who devoted a whole book of his Histories to Egypt.

Dr Myriam Krutzsch, papyrus restorer of the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, checks the position of fragments of the Turin King List. Her work and that of other papyrologists has played a vital role in reconstructing the history of ancient Egypt.

MORE THAN MERE MORTALS

Again and again, such wall carvings show us pharaoh, larger than mere mortals, equal in size and able to stand face to face with the great gods of Egypt. Statues, sometimes massive, help drive home the message that the kings of Egypt were more than mere mortals. They were in fact gods, or at least semi-deities in the process of reaching full divine status.

Sir Flinders Petrie (1853–1942) and his wife Hilda Urlin excavated many of Egypt’s most important archaeological sites, setting a new standard for archaeology with his careful and painstaking methods. He developed a system for determining the age of a site based on the styles of pottery found.

Pharaoh’s godhood was a key concept of royal power. From the beginning of the First Dynasty (c.3000–2890 BC) or even before, the living king was identified as the god Horus, son of Osiris, the deity who first ruled Egypt. He then attained ‘great god’ status upon death, when he became Osiris. Simultaneously, from an early era, kings began to assert that they were sons of the sun god Ra, and several went so far as to assert that Ra assumed human form to beget the future ruler with the queen. Did that mean that kings believed themselves to be gods? Rulers certainly knew they were mortal, and examination of their mummified remains has painted a bleak picture of heart disease, arthritis and tooth abscesses. A few pharaohs declared themselves to be full gods even in life, such as Rameses II, who was even depicted worshipping himself. Evidence points, though, to a belief that their human nature was blended with a divine one. Kings used the title neter nefer to show their divine status; while neter signifies a deity, nefer (‘good’) adds a human element, lessening the divine status somewhat. They were major gods only after they died, and their successors and subjects frequently invoked them in prayer. The Middle Kingdom Tale of Sinuhe, which opens with a king’s death, describes it as mounting to heaven and union with the sun.

The god Horus in the form of a hawk, from the temple of Luxor. Horus, most often shown in human form with a hawk’s head, was the chief protective deity for living pharaohs.

It was their living status as a junior god that made it possible for pharaohs to serve as essential mediators between humans and gods, making the king both a god and a servant of the gods. Enemies of pharaoh were thus enemies of the gods. As the Loyalist Teaching proclaims, it is the duty of all to serve and praise the king, who sees all and illuminates Egypt more than the sun, providing sustenance and plenty.

CORONATION CEREMONIES

The great gods, the true rulers of Egypt, accepted the king as their legitimate representative with the coronation ritual. Our best sources for this event are inscriptions of Hatshepsut and Horemheb; since Hatshepsut was a woman and Horemheb a military commander of non-royal blood, both had a particular need to stress their legitimacy. The ceremony included a symbolic recreation of the union of Upper and Lower Egypt, a circuit of the walls, and solemn purification, upon which the gods of Egypt (with priests as their proxies) saluted the new king and welcomed him into the sacred circle. The new ruler was invested with the crowns of Egypt and regalia by priests who were probably enacting the parts of the deities Nekhen and Pe, the guardians of Upper and Lower Egypt. The Roman mystic Publius Nigidius Figulus, who saw a coronation in the 1st century BC, adds that the new king entered an inner sanctum, where he swore an oath to protect Egypt’s land and water.

Ptolemy VI Philometer being crowned as pharaoh by the protective goddesses of Lower (left side of image) and Upper (right side) Egypt, each wearing the distinctive crown of her region. Ptolemy in the centre wears the double crown of both Upper and Lower Egypt. From the Ptolemaic temple at Edfu.

KINGS’ TITLES WERE BESTOWED DURING THE CORONATION. FOR ANCIENT EGYPTIANS, THE ROYAL NAME WAS MORE LIKE A SENTENCE THAT REVEALED MUCH ABOUT THE MONARCH’S POLITICAL GOALS AND WORLDVIEW.

The regalia were laden with heavy ritual significance. The crowns, which were themselves regarded as deities, emphasized the unifying role of kingship. A king could don either the high white helmet-crown of Upper Egypt (the hedjet), the basket-shaped crown of Lower Egypt (the deshret) or the double crown that combined the two (the pschent). The Blue Crown (the khepresh) came to mark the pharaoh as the war leader in the New Kingdom, while for less formal occasions the ruler’s head was covered with the nemes, a striped linen headcloth that only a king could wear. Crowns and nemes alike were adorned with the uraeus, the goddesses Wadjet and Nekhbet (patrons of Lower and Upper Egypt) in the forms of a cobra and a vulture, the cobra with hood raised, threatening Egypt’s enemies. For formal audiences, the pharaoh bore a crook and flail, representing the ruler’s duty to care for and protect his people. Egyptian men were clean-shaven, but believed that the gods wore beards, so the regalia also included a false beard made of gold and semi-precious stones.

Amenhotep III, wearing the Blue Crown, which was especially associated with rulers of the New Kingdom in times of war.

The complex titles of a king were also bestowed during the coronation. Modern scholars usually just call pharaohs by their birth name, such as Amenhotep, Rameses or Sety. For ancient Egyptians, however, the royal name was more like a sentence that revealed much about the monarch’s political goals and worldview. The so-called ‘five-fold titulary’, which was fully developed by the Fifth Dynasty (2494–2345 BC), also served as an ideological statement, as three of the titles stressed the ruler’s role as a god, while two emphasized the union of Upper and Lower Egypt. First came the birth name, always accompanied by the title ‘son of Ra’. The earliest additional title was the Horus name, which first appeared in the so-called Dynasty 0 (c.3200–3000 BC). The nebty name, ‘he of the two ladies’, placed the ruler under the protection of the goddesses Wadjet and Nekhbet of Upper and Lower Egypt. Fourth was the Horus of Gold name, which perhaps refers to Horus in his incarnation as a sun god. Finally came the nesu-bit throne name, always preceded by the phrase ‘he who belongs to the sedge and the bee’, the symbols of Upper and Lower Egypt. The last title also alludes to the king’s unique blending of divine and mortal, since nesu refers to the unchanging divine king, while bit describes the current, ephemeral ruler. The new monarch would send a proclamation of his royal titles to officials through Egypt, who would then renew their oaths of office.

Cartouche of Sety I. The king (and very rarely a queen consort) was marked as unique in inscriptions by having his name enclosed in an oblong knotted rope that represents infinity. The presence of cartouches, named after the distinctive ammunition cases of French troops, was the key to deciphering hieroglyphs.

Queen Hatshepsut, depicted here as a male pharaoh, engaging in the run that was part of the sed festival’s rituals. A scene from Hatshepsut’s reconstructed Red Chapel, Karnak.

THE CONCEPT OF MAAT

A king’s duty can be summed up as the need to uphold maat, which can be translated as cosmic order, truth and justice. As the Egyptians understood the world, maat was under constant threat from the forces of chaos (isfet). Yet if Egypt and its people were to prosper, maat must be preserved. Order meant unity, and only a king could keep Egypt unified. The preservation of maat also carried a sometimes-heavy burden of protection, so an important royal function was to defeat Egypt’s enemies, whether on the battlefield or symbolically. Few kings missed the opportunity to portray themselves smiting Egypt’s enemies with a mace, whether they had ever led a military expedition or not. Enforcing laws, controlling the greed of court officials, overseeing irrigation networks and maintaining the food supply were all royal duties subsumed under the principle of maat.

Egyptian priests maintained a facade of continuity by depicting Roman emperors as traditional pharaohs. Here Emperor Trajan makes an offering to the goddess Hathor, who is nursing her son Ihy. From the temple of Hathor at Dendera.

At least as important as administrative and military