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Cambridge Ancient History - VOL. II - THE EGYPTIAN AND HITTITE EMPIRES TO 1OOO BC. CHAPTER III THE FOUNDATION AND EXPANSION OF THE EGYPTIAN EMPIRE
I. INTERNAL CONDITIONS
AND ADMINISTRATION
IN spite of the
strategic isolation and seeming safety of the Nile valley from foreign attack,
the country is nevertheless vulnerable on both north and south. Since their
occupation of Egypt the British have been called upon to meet dangerous
assaults from both directions: from the south at the hands of the Mahdist fanatics; and from the north in the Turkish attack
on the Suez Canal during the Great War. These modern experiences of the British
in Egypt illustrate very strikingly the ancient situation at the beginning of
the New Kingdom or Empire. The Middle Kingdom had fallen to the Hyksos, the
Asiatic invaders whom the Egyptians neither forgave nor forgot. What little is
known of this mysterious enemy has been recorded, and with their expulsion by
Ahmose (Aahmes) Egyptian history enters upon a new
stage.
No sooner had Ahmose
(1580—1557 c. BC) freed the country from the Hyksos pressure on the northern
frontiers than he, likewise, was obliged to turn his attention to the south.
The long period of disorganization following the Middle Kingdom had given the
Nubians an opportunity to revolt which they did not fail to improve, Ahmose
invaded the country and how far he penetrated we do not know, but he evidently
met with no serious resistance in the recovery of the old territory between the
first and second cataracts. He was no sooner well out of the country, however,
than his inveterate rivals in Egypt south of el-Kab,
who had troubled him during the Hyksos war, again rose against him.
Totally defeated in a
battle on the Nile, they rose yet again, and Ahmose was obliged to quell one
more rebellion before he was left in undisputed possession of the throne.
The leader of the noble
family of el-Kab, Ahmose son of Ebana,
who continued faithful to the king, was rewarded for his valor in these actions
by the gift of five slaves and five stat (nearly three-and-a-half acres) of land at el-Kab,
presented to him by his sovereign. It was in this way that the new Pharaoh bound
his supporters to his cause. He did not stop, however, with land, slaves and
gold, but in some cases even granted to the local princes, the few surviving
descendants of the feudal lords of the Middle Kingdom, high and royal titles
like first king’s son, which while perhaps conveying few or no prerogatives,
satisfied the vanity of old and illustrious families, like that of el-Kab, which deserved well at his hands.
There seem to have been
but few of the local nobles who thus supported Ahmose and gained his favor. The
larger number opposed both him and the Hyksos and perished in the struggle. As
their more fortunate rivals were now nothing more than administrative, military
or court officials, the feudal lords thus practically disappeared. The lands
which formed their hereditary possessions were confiscated and passed to the
crown, where they permanently remained. There was one notable exception: the
house of el-Kab, to which the Theban dynasty owed so
much, was allowed to retain its lands, and, two generations after the expulsion
of the Hyksos, the head of the house appears as lord, not only of el-Kab but also of Esneh and all the
intervening territory. Besides this he was given administrative charge, though
not hereditary possession, of the lands of the south from the vicinity of
Thebes (Per-Hathor) to el-Kab.
This exception serves but to accentuate more sharply the total extinction of
the landed nobility, which had so largely formed the substance of the
governmental organization under the Middle Kingdom. We do indeed find a handful
of barons still bearing their old feudal titles, but they resided at Thebes and
were buried there. All Egypt thus became the personal estate of the Pharaoh,
just as it did after the destruction of the Mamelukes by Mohammed Ali early in the nineteenth century. It is this state of affairs
which in Hebrew tradition was represented as the direct result of Joseph’s
sagacity.
The course of events,
which culminated in the expulsion of the Hyksos, determined for Ahmose the form
which the new" state was to assume. He was now at the head of a strong
army effectively organized and welded together by long campaigns and sieges
protracted through years, during which he had been both general in the field
and head of the state. The character of the government followed automatically
out of these conditions. Egypt became a military state. The long war with the Hyksos
had now educated the Egyptian as a soldier, the large army or Ahmose had spent
years in Asia, and had even been for a longer or shorter period among the rich
cities of Syria. Having thoroughly learned war, and having perceived the
enormous wealth to be gained by it in Asia, the whole land was roused and
stirred with a lust of conquest, which was not
quenched for two centuries. The wealth, the rewards and the promotion open to
the professional soldier were a constant incentive to a military career, and
the middle classes, usually so unwarlike, now entered the ranks with ardor.
Among the survivors of the noble class the profession of arms became the most
attractive of all careers. In the auto-biographies which they have left in
their tombs at Thebes they narrate with the greatest satisfaction the campaigns
which they went through at the Pharaoh’s side, and the honors which he bestowed
upon them. Many a campaign, all record of which would have been irretrievably
lost, has thus come to our knowledge through one of these military biographies,
like that of Ahmose, son of Ebana, whom we have
already named. The sons of the Pharaoh, who in the Old Kingdom held
administrative offices, were now generals in the army.
For the next century and
a half, therefore, the story of the achievements of the army will be the story
of Egypt, for the army had now become the dominant force and the chief motive
power in the new state. In organization it quite surpassed the militia of the
old days, if for no other reason than that it was now a standing army. It was
organized into two grand divisions, one in the Delta and the other in the upper
country. In Syria it had learned tactics and proper strategic disposition of
forces, the earliest of which we know anything in history. We shall now find
partition of an army into divisions, we shall hear of wings and center, we
shall even trace a flank movement and define battle-lines. All this is
fundamentally different from the disorganized plundering expeditions naively
reported as wars by the monuments of the older periods. The troops were armed
as of old with bow and spear, and the infantry was made up of spearmen and
archers, While the archers of the Middle Kingdom often carried their arrows
loose in the hand, the quiver had now been introduced from Asia. It was thus
the easier for them, to learn archery 'fire' by alleys, and the dreaded archers
of Egypt now gained a reputation which persisted, and which made them feared
even in classic times. But more than this, the Hyksos having brought the horse
into Egypt, the Egyptian armies now for the first time possessed a large
proportion of chariotry. Cavalry in the modern sense
of the term was not employed. The deft craftsmen of Egypt soon mastered the art
of chariot-making, while the stables of the Pharaoh contained thousands of the
best horses to be had in Asia. In accordance with the spirit of the time, the
Pharaoh was accompanied on all public appearances by a body-guard of elite
troops and a group of his favorite military officers. With such force at his
back, the man who expelled the Hyksos was thoroughly master of the situation.
It is evidently in large
measure to him that we owe the reconstruction of the state which was now
emerging from the turmoils of two centuries of
internal disorder and foreign invasion. This new state is revealed to us more
clearly than that of any other period of Egyptian history under native
dynasties, and while we recognize many elements surviving from earlier times,
we discern also much that is new. The supreme position occupied by the Pharaoh
meant a very active participation in the affairs of government. He was
accustomed every morning to meet the vizier, still the mainspring of the
administration, to consult with him on all the interests of the country and all
the current business which necessarily came under his eye. Immediately
thereafter he held a conference with the chief treasurer. These two men controlled
the chief departments of government: the treasury and the judiciary. The
Pharaoh's office, in which they made their daily reports to him, was the
central organ of the whole government where all its lines converged. Even in
the limited number of state or administrative documents preserved to us, we
discern the vast array of detailed questions in practical administration which
the busy monarch decided. The internal administration required frequent
journeys to examine new buildings and check all sorts of official abuses. The
official cults in the great temples, too, demanded more and more of the
monarch's time and attention's the rituals in the vast state temples increased
m complexity with the development of the elaborate state religion. These journeys
were in addition to his many enterprises abroad and often required his personal
leadership. Besides frequent campaigns in Nubia and Asia, he visited the
quarries and mines in the desert or inspected the desert routes, seeking
suitable locations for wells and stations. In these circumstances the burden
inevitably exceeded the powers of one man, even with the assistance of his
vizier. Early in the XVIIIth Dynasty, therefore, the
increasing business of government constrained the Pharaoh to appoint two viziers,
one residing at Thebes, for the administration of the south, from the cataract
as far as the nome of Siut;
while the other, who had charge of all the region north of the latter point,
lived at Heliopolis.
For administrative
purposes the territory of Egypt was divided into irregular districts, of which
there were at least twenty-seven between Siut and the
cataract. The country as a whole must have been divided into over twice that
number. In the old towns the head of government still bore the feudal title count but this now indicated solely
administrative duties and might better be translated “mayor” or governor. There
was a town-ruler also in each of the smaller towns, but elsewhere there were
only recorders and scribes, with one of their number at their head. As we shall
see, these men served both as the administrators, chiefly in a fiscal capacity,
and also as the Judicial officials within their districts.
The great object of
government was to make the country economically strong and productive. To secure
this end, its lands, now chiefly owned by the crown, were worked by the king's
serfs, controlled by his officials, or entrusted by him as permanent and
indivisible fiefs to his favorite nobles, his partisans and relatives.
Divisible parcels might also be held by tenants of the untitled classes. Both
classes or holdings might be transferred by will or sale in much the same way
as if the holder actually owned the land. For purposes of taxation all lands
and other property of the crown, except that held by the temples, were recorded
In the tax-registers of the White House, as the treasury was still called. On
the basis of these, taxes were assessed. They were still collected in kind:
cattle, grain, wine, oil, honey, textiles, and the like. Besides the cattle-yards,
the granary was the chief sub-department of the White House, and there were
innumerable other magazines for the storage of its receipts. All the products
which filled these repositories were termed “labour”,
the word employed in ancient Egypt as we use taxes. If we may accept Hebrew
tradition as transmitted in the story of Joseph such taxes comprised one-fifth
of the produce of the land.
Unlike early Greece and
Rome, which for centuries possessed no organization of state officials for
gathering taxes, the Egyptian state from the days of the Old Kingdom had
organized its local officials chiefly for that purpose. Their collection and
their payment from the various magazines to pay government debts demanded a
host of scribes and subordinates, now more numerous than ever before in the
history of the country. The chief treasurer at their head was under the
authority of the vizier, to whom the former made a report every morning, after
which he received permission to open the offices and magazines for the day’s
business. The collection of a second class of revenue, that paid by the local
officials themselves as a tax upon their offices, was exclusively in the hands
of the viziers. This tax on the officials consisted chiefly of gold, silver,
gram, cattle and linen. Unfortunately our sources do not permit the calculation
of even the approximate total of this tax, but the officials under the
jurisdiction of the southern vizier paid him annually at least some 220,000
grains of gold, nine gold necklaces, over 16,000 grams of silver, some forty
chests and other measures of linen, one hundred and six cattle of all ages and
some grain. These figures however are short by probably at least twenty per
cent, of the real total. As the king presumably received a similar amount from
the northern vizier’s collections, this tax on the officials formed a stately
sum in the annual revenues. But we can form no estimate of the total of all the
revenues.
Of the royal income from
all sources in the XVIIIth Dynasty the southern
vizier had general charge. The amount of all taxes to be levied and the
distribution of the revenue when collected were determined in his office, where
a balance-sheet was constantly kept. In order to control both income and
outgoings, a monthly fiscal report was made to him by all local officials, and
thus the southern vizier was able to furnish the king from month to month with
a full statement of prospective resources in the royal treasury. The taxes were
so dependent, as they still are, upon the height of the inundation and the
consequent prospects of a plentiful or scanty harvest, that the level of the
rising river was also reported to him. As the income of the crown was,
henceforth, largely augmented by foreign tribute, this was also received by the
southern vizier and by him communicated to the king. The great vizier, Rekh-mire, depicts himself in the gorgeous reliefs in his
tomb receiving both the tribute of the Asiatic vassal-princes and that of the
Nubian chiefs.
In the administration of
justice the southern vizier played even a greater role than in the treasury.
Here he was supreme. The magnates of the “Southern Tens”, as they were called,
once possessed of important judicial functions, and “the six great houses”, or
courts of justice, of which the vizier was chief, had lost their power or
disappeared. Meanwhile, the officers of administration were incidentally the
dispensers of justice. They constantly served in a judicial capacity. Although
there was no class of judges with exclusively legal duties, every man of
important administrative rank was thoroughly versed in the law and must be
ready at any moment to serve as judge. The vizier was no exception. All
petitioners for legal redress applied first to him in his audience hall; if
possible in person, but in any case in writing. For this purpose he held a
daily audience or “sitting” as the Egyptian called it. Every morning "the
people crowded into the hull of the vizier, where the ushers and bailiffs
jostled them into line that they might be heard, in order of arrival, one after
another”. In cases concerning land located in Thebes he was obliged by law to
render a decision in three days, but if the land lay in the 'South or North' he
required two months. Such cases demanded rapid and convenient access to the
archives. They were therefore all filed in his offices. No one might make a
will without filing it in the vizier's hall. Copies of all nome archives, boundary records and all contracts were deposited with him or with
his colleague in the north. Every petitioner to the king wan obliged to hand in
his petition in writing at the same office.
Besides the vizier’s
hall, also called the great council, there were local courts throughout the
land, not primarily of a legal character, being, as we have already explained,
merely file body of administrative officiate in each district, who were
correspondently empowered to try cases. They were the “great men of the town”
or “the local council”, and acted as the local representatives of the great
council. The number of these local courts is entirely uncertain, but the most
important two known were at Thebes and Memphis. At Thebes its composition
varied from day to day; in cases of a delicate nature, where the members of the
royal house were implicated, it was appointed by the vizier; and in case of
conspiracy against the ruler, the monarch himself commissioned them, with
instructions to determine who were the guilty, and with power to execute the
sentence. All courts were largely made up of priests. They did not, however,
enjoy the best reputation among the people, who bewailed the hapless plight of
the one who stands alone before the court when he is a poor man and his
opponent is rich, while the court oppresses him (saying), “Silver and gold, for
the scribes! Clothing for the servants!” For of course the bribe of the rich
was often stronger than the justice of the poor man’s cause.
The law to which the
poor appealed had long since been recorded in writing, and much of it was
undoubtedly very old. The vizier was obliged to keep it constantly before him,
contained in forty rolls (four decalogues) which were
laid out before his daïs at all his public sessions, where they were doubtless accessible to all.
Unfortunately this code has perished, but of its justice we can have no doubt,
for apparently already in the Middle Kingdom the vizier had been admonished by
the Pharaoh: Forget not to judge justice. It is an abomination of the god to
show partiality … Behold the dread of a prince is that he does justice ... As
for him who shall do justice before all the people, it is the vizier”. Even
conspirators against the king's life were not summarily put to death, but were
handed over to a legally constituted court to be duly tried, and condemned only
when found guilty. The great world of the Nile-dwellers under the Empire was
therefore not at the mercy of arbitrary whim on the part of either king or
court, but was governed by a large body of long respected law, embodying
principles of justice and humanity.
The motive power behind
the organization and administration of Egypt was the southern vizier. We recall
that he went in every morning and took council with the Pharaoh on the affairs
of the country; and the only other check upon his untrammeled control of the
state was a law constraining him to report the condition of his administration
to the chief treasurer. His office was the means of communication with the
local authorities, who reported to him in writing on the first day of each
season, that is, three times a year. It is in his office then that we discern
the complete centralization of government in practically all its functions. He
was minister of war for both army and navy, and he had legal control of the
temples throughout the country, so that he was minister of ecclesiastical
affairs. Besides his treasury responsibilities, he had economic oversight of
many important resources of the country; for no timber could be cut without his
permission, and the administration of irrigation and water supply was under his
charge. In order to establish the calendar for state business, the rising of
Sirius was reported to him. He exercised advisory functions in all the offices
of the state; so long as his office was undivided with a vizier of the north he
was grand steward of all Egypt. He was a veritable Joseph, and it must have
been this office which the Hebrew narrator had in mind as that to which Joseph
was appointed. He was regarded by the people as their great protector, and no
higher praise could be proffered to Ammon when addressed by a worshipper than
to call him the poor man’s vizier who does not accept the bribe of the guilty.
His appointment was of such importance that it was made by the king himself,
and the instructions given him by the monarch on that occasion were not such as
we should expect from the lips of an oriental conqueror three thousand five
hundred years ago. They display a spirit of kindness and humanity and exhibit
an appreciation of statecraft surprising in an age so remote. Such was the government
of the imperial age in Egypt.
In society the
disappearance of the landed nobility, and the administration of the local
districts by an army of petty functionaries of the crown, opened the way more
fully than in the Middle Kingdom for numerous official careers among the middle
class. These opportunities must have worked a gradual change in their
condition. One such official relates his obscure origin thus: “Ye shall talk of
it, one to another, and the old men shall teach it to the youth. I was one whose
family was poor and whose town was small, but the Lord of Two Lands [the king]
recognized me; I was accounted great in his heart, the king in the splendor of
his palace saw me. He exalted me more than the courtiers, introducing me among
the princes of the palace”. Such possibilities of promotion and royal favor
awaited success in local administration; for in some local office the career of
this unknown official in the small town must have begum Thus there grew up a
new official class its lower ranks drawn from the old middle class, while on
the other hand in its upper strata were the relatives and dependents of the old
landed nobility, by whom the higher and more important local offices were
administered. Here the official class gradually merged into the large circle of
royal favorites who filled the great offices of the central government or
commanded the Pharaoh's forces on his campaigns. As there was no longer a
feudal nobility, the great government officials and military commanders became
the nobles of the Empire, or the New Kingdom, as it is otherwise called.
The old middle class of merchants, skilled craftsmen and artists also still
survived and continued to replenish the lower ranks of the official class.
Below these were the masses who worked the fields and estates, the serfs of the
Pharaoh. They formed so large a portion of the inhabitants that the Hebrew
scribe, evidently writing from the outside, knew only this class of society
beside the priests. These lower strata passed away and left little or no trace,
but the official class was now able to erect tombs and mortuary stelae in such surprising numbers that they furnish us with
a vast mass of materials for reconstructing the life and customs of the time.
An official who took the
census in the XVIIIth Dynasty divided the people into
soldiers, priests, royal serfs and all the craftsmen, and this classification
is corroborated by all that we know of the time; although we must understand
that all callings of the free middle class are here included among the
soldiers. The soldiers in the standing army had therefore now also become a
social class. The free middle class, liable to military service, were called
citizens of the army, a term already known in the Middle Kingdom, but now very
common; so that liability to military service became the significant
designation of this class of society. Politically the soldier’s influence grew
with every reign and he soon became the natural support of the Pharaoh in the
execution of numerous civil commissions where formerly the soldier had never
been employed.
Side by side with the
soldier appeared another new and powerful influence, the ancient institution of
the priesthood. As a natural consequence of the great wealth of the temples
under the Empire, the priesthood became a profession, no longer merely an
incidental office held by a layman, as in the Old and Middle Kingdoms. As the
priests increased in numbers they gained more and more political power; while
the growing wealth of the temples demanded for its proper administration a
veritable army of temple officials of all sorts, who were unknown in the old
days of simplicity. Probably one-fourth of all the persons buried in the great
and sacred cemetery of Abydos at this period were priests. Priestly communities
had thus grown up. All these priestly bodies were now united in a new
sacerdotal organization embracing the whole land. The head of the state temple
at Thebes, the High Priest of Ammon, was the supreme head of this greater body
also, and his power was thereby increased far beyond that of his older rivals
at Heliopolis and Memphis. Thus priests, soldiers and officials now stood
together as three great social classes.
The state religion
maintained by the priesthood was in its outward observances richer and more elaborate
than Egypt had ever seen before. The days of the old simplicity were forever
past. The wealth gained by foreign conquest enabled the Pharaohs henceforth to
endow the temples with such riches as no sanctuary of the old days had ever
possessed. The temples grew into vast and gorgeous palaces, each with its
community of priests, and the high priest of such a community in the larger centers
was a veritable sacerdotal prince, wielding considerable political power. The
high priest's wife at Thebes was called the chief concubine of the god, whose
real consort was no less a person than the queen herself, who was therefore
known as the “Divine Consort”. In the gorgeous ritual which now prevailed, her
part was to lead the singing of the women who participated in the service. She
possessed also a fortune, which belonged to the temple endowment, and for this
reason it was desirable that the queen should hold the office in order to
retain this fortune in the royal house.
The supremacy of Ammon
now followed the triumph of a noble of Thebes as it had not done in the Middle
Kingdom. Although the rise of a Theban family had then given him some
distinction, it was not until now that he became the great god of the state.
His essential character and individuality had already been obscured by the
solar theology of the Middle Kingdom, when he had become Ammon-Re, and, with
some attributes borrowed from his ithyphallic neighbor, Min of Coptos, he now rose to a unique and supreme position of
unprecedented splendor. He was popular with the people, too, and, as a Moslem
says, Inshallah ('If Allah will'), so the Egyptian now added to all his promises “If Ammon
spare my life”. They called him the vizier of the poor, the people carried to
him their wants and wishes, and their hopes for future prosperity were
implicitly staked upon his favor. But the fusion of the old gods had not
deprived Ammon alone of his individuality, for in the general flux almost any
god might possess the qualities and functions of the others, although the dominant
position was still occupied by the Sun-god.
The tendencies already
plainly observable in the Middle Kingdom had shaped the mortuary beliefs of the
Empire. The magical formulae by which the dead were to triumph in the Hereafter
became more and more numerous, so that it was no longer possible to record them
on the inside of the coffin, but they must be written on papyrus and the roll
placed in the tomb.
A highly variable
selection of the most important of these texts formed what we now call “The
Book of the Dead”. It was dominated throughout by magic; by this all-powerful
means a dead man might effect all that he desired.
The luxurious lords of the Empire no longer looked forward with pleasure to the
prospect of ploughing, sowing and reaping m the happy
fields of Yarn. To escape such peasant labor a statuette bearing the implements
of labor in the held and inscribed with a potent charm was placed in the tomb.
It insured to the deceased immunity from such toil, which would always be
performed by this miniature representative of the deceased whenever the call to
the fields was heard. Such “ushabtis” or
“respondents” as they were termed, were now placed in the necropolis by scores
and hundreds.
This magical means of
obtaining material good was now unfortunately transferred also to the world of
ethical values in order to secure exemption from the consequences of an evil
life. A sacred beetle or scarabaeus was cut from
stone and inscribed with a charm, beginning with the significant words, “O my
heart, rise not up against me as a witness”. So powerful was this cunning
invention when laid upon the breast of the mummy under the wrappings, that when
the guilty soul stood in the judgment-hall in the awful presence of Osiris, the
accusing voice of the heart was silenced and the great god did not perceive the
evil of which it would testify. Likewise the rolls of the Book of the Dead
containing, besides all the other charms, also the scene of judgment, and
especially the welcome verdict of acquittal, were now sold by the priestly
scribes to anyone with the means to buy. The fortunate purchaser’s name was
then inserted in the blanks left for this purpose throughout the document; thus
securing for him the certainty of such a verdict, before it was known whose
name should be so inserted. The invention of these devices by the priests, in
the effort to stifle the admonishing voice within, was undoubtedly subversive
of moral progress. The moral aspirations which had come into the religion of
Egypt through the Solar theology, and had been greatly quickened by the Osirian myth, were now choked and poisoned by the assurance
that, however vicious a man's life, exculpation in the hereafter could be
purchased at any time from the priests. The priestly literature on the
Hereafter, produced probably for no other purpose than for gain, continued to
grow. We have a “Book of What is in the Nether World” describing the twelve
caverns, or hours of the night through which the Sun passed beneath the earth,
and a “Book of the Portals”, treating of the gates and strongholds between
these caverns. Although these edifying compositions never gained the wide
circulation enjoyed by the Book of the Dead, the former of the two was engraved
in the tombs of the XIXth and XXth Dynasty kings at Thebes, showing that these grotesque creations of the
perverted priestly imagination finally gamed the credence of the highest
circles.
The cemetery graphically
illustrates these developments in Egyptian religion. As before, the tomb of the
noble consisted of chambers hewn in the face of the cliff, and in accordance
with the prevailing tendency its interior walls were painted with imaginary
scenes from the next world and with mortuary and religious texts, many of them
of a magical character. At the same time the tomb has also become more of a
personal monument to the deceased; and the walls of the chapel bear many scenes
from his life, especially from ins official career, including particularly all
honors received from the king. Thus the chits opposite Thebes, honey-combed as
they are with the tombs of the lords of the Empire, contain whole chapters of
the life and history of the period, with which we shall now deal. In a solitary
valley, the “Valley of the Kings’ Tombs” behind these cliffs the kings
excavated their own tombs in the limestone walls and the pyramid was no longer
employed. Deep galleries were driven into the cliffs, and passing from hall to
hall, they terminated many hundreds of feet from the entrance in a large
chamber, where the body of the king was laid in a huge stone sarcophagus. It is
possible that the whole excavation was intended to represent the passages of
the Nether World along which the sun passed in his nightly journey.
On the plain east of
this valley of tombs (the western plain of Thebes), just as the pyramid temple
was built on the east side of the pyramid, arose the splendid mortuary temples
of the emperors, of which we shall later have occasion to say more. But these
elaborate mortuary customs were now no longer confined to the Pharaoh and his
nobles; the necessity for such equipment in preparation for the hereafter was
now felt by all classes. The manufacture of such materials, resulting from the
gradual extension of these customs, had become an industry; the embalmers,
undertakers and manufacturers of coffins and tomb furniture occupied a quarter
at Thebes, forming almost a guild by themselves, as they did in later Greek
times. The middle class were now frequently able to excavate and decorate a
tomb; but when too poor for this luxury, they rented a place for their dead in
great common tombs maintained by the priests, and here the embalmed body was
deposited in a chamber where the mummies piled, up like faggots, but
nevertheless received the benefit of the ritual maintained, for all in common.
II. THE EXPANSION OF THE EMPIRE TO THE DEATH OF HATSHEPSUT
As Ahmose I gradually
gained leisure from his arduous wars, the new state and the new conditions
slowly emerged. None of his buildings and few of his monuments have survived.
His greatest work remains the XVIIIth Dynasty itself,
for whose brilliant career his own achievements had laid so firm a foundation.
Notwithstanding his reign of at least twenty-two years, Ahmose must have died
young (1557 BC) for his mother was still living in the tenth year of his son
and successor, Amenhotep I. By him he was buried in the old XIth Dynasty cemetery at the north end of the western Theban plain. The jewellery of his mother, stolen from her neighboring tomb
at a remote date, was found by Mariette concealed in the vicinity; and it,
together with the body of Ahmose I, is now preserved in the Museum at Cairo.
Affairs in Africa were
not long to withhold the sovereigns of the new dynasty from the great
achievements which awaited them. Nubia had so long been without a strong arm
from the north that Amenhotep I, Ahmose’s successor,
was obliged to invade the country in force. He penetrated to the Middle Kingdom
frontier at the second cataract and, having thoroughly defeated the most
powerful chief, placed northern Nubia under the administration of the mayor or
governor of the old city of Nekhen (Hieraconpolis), which now became the northern limit of a
southern administrative district, including all the territory on the south of
it, controlled by Egypt, at least as far as northern Nubia, or Wawat, From this time the new governor was able to go north
with the tribute of the country regularly every year.
There was similar
trouble in the western Delta where the long period of weakness and
disorganization accompanying the rule of the Hyksos had given the Libyans the
opportunity, which they had always seized, of pushing in and occupying the rich
Delta lands. Though our only source does not mention any such invasion, it is
evident that Amenhotep I’s war with the Libyans at this particular time can be
explained in no other way. Finding their aggressions too threatening to be
longer ignored, the Pharaoh now drove them back and invaded their country.
Having thus relieved his frontiers and secured Nubia, Amenhotep was at liberty
to turn his arms toward Asia, Unfortunately we have no records of his Syrian
war, but he seems to have penetrated far to the north, even to the Euphrates;
for he accomplished enough to enable his successor to boast of ruling as far as
that river before the latter had himself undertaken any Asiatic conquests. The
architect who erected his Theban buildings, all of which have perished,
narrates the king's death at Thebes, after a reign of at least ten years.
There is some doubt
whether Amenhotep I left a son entitled to the throne. His successor, Thutmose
I, was the son of a woman whose birth and family are of doubtful connection,
and her great son evidently gained the kingship by his marriage with a princess
of the old line, named Ahmose, through whom he could assert a valid claim to
the throne. This occurred about January 1540 or 1535 BC. Thutmose I at once
gave his attention to Nubia, which he reorganized by withdrawing it from the
control of the mayor of Nekhen and placing it under
the administration of a viceroy with the title: “Governor of the South
Countries, King’s-Son of Kush”, although he was not necessarily a member of the
royal household or of royal birth. The jurisdiction of the new viceroy extended
to the fourth cataract, and it was the region between this southern limit and
the first cataract which was known as Kush. There was still no great or
dominant kingdom in Kush, nor in lower Nubia, but the country was under the
rule of powerful chiefs, each controlling a limited territory. It was
impossible to suppress these native rulers at once and nearly two hundred years
after this we still find the chiefs of Kush and a chief of Wawat as far north as Ibrim.
In the time of Thutmose
I the southern half of the new province was far from being sufficiently
pacified, and the king went south early in his second year, personally to
oversee the task of more thorough subjugation. Leaving the first cataract in
February or March, by early April Thutmose had reached Tangur,
about seventy-five miles above the second cataract. Having beaten the
barbarians in a decisive battle, he pushed on through the exceedingly difficult
country of the second and third cataracts—where his scribes and officers have
left a trail of names and titles scratched on the rocks. At the island of Tombos he emerged upon the rich and fertile Dongola province of today. Here he erected a fortress, of
which some remains still survive, and garrisoned it with troops from the army
of conquest, who were to guard the new territory stretching two hundred and
fifty miles around the great bend of the Nile from the third to the foot of the
fourth cataract. In August of the same year, five months after he had passed Tangur on the way up, he erected five tablets of victory
beside Tombos, on which he boasts of ruling from his
new southern frontier to the Euphrates on the north, a statement to which, his
own achievements in Asia did not yet entitle him. He then began a leisurely
return, the slowness of which we can only explain by supposing that he devoted
much time to the reorganization and thorough pacification of the country on his
way; for he did not reach the first cataract until some seven months after he
bad erected his monuments of victory at Tombos. With
the body of the Nubian chief hanging head downward at the bow of his royal
barge, the king passed through the canal at the first cataract and sailed
triumphantly northward to Thebes.
The Pharaoh was now able
to give his attention to a similar task at the other extremity of his realm, in
Asia. Evidently the conquests of Amenhotep I, which had enabled Thutmose I to
claim the Euphrates as his northern boundary, had not been sufficient to ensure
to the Pharaoh’s treasury the regular tribute which he was now enjoying from
Nubia, but the conditions in Syria were very favorable for a long continuance
of Egyptian supremacy. The geography of the country along the eastern end of
the Mediterranean is not such as to permit the gradual amalgamation of small
and petty states into one great nation, as had already taken place in the
valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates. From north to south, roughly parallel
with the four hundred miles of eastern Mediterranean coast, the region is
traversed by rugged mountain ranges, in two main ridges, known as the Lebanon
and Anti-Lebanon in the north. In the south Lebanon, the western ridge, with
some interruptions, drops finally into the bare and forbidding hills of Judah,
which merge then into the desert of Sinai south of Palestine. South of the
plain of Megiddo, it throws off the transverse ridge of Carmel, which drops
like a Gothic buttress, abruptly to the sea. Anti-Lebanon, the eastern ridge,
not beginning as far north as Lebanon, shifts somewhat farther eastward in its
southern course, interrupted here and there, especially near Damascus, and
spreading on the east of the Dead Sea in the mountains of Moab, its southern
flanks are likewise lost in the sandy plateau of northern Arabia. Between the
two Lebanons, in the fertile valley traversed by the
river Orontes, lies the only extensive region in Syria not cut up by hills and
mountains, where a strong kingdom might develop .
The coast is completely
isolated from the interior by the ridge of Lebanon, along whose western slopes
a people might rise to wealth and power only by man tune expansion. On the
other hand, in the south, Palestine, with its harbourless coast and its large tracts of desolate limestone hills, hardly furnished the
economic basis for the development of a strong nation. Palestine is, moreover,
badly cut up, both by the transverse ridge of Carmel and by the deep cleft in
which he the Jordan and the Dead Sea. Along almost its entire eastern frontier,
Syria-Palestine merges into the northern extension of the Arabian desert, save
in the extreme north, where the valley of the Orontes and that of the Euphrates
almost blend, just as they part, the one to seek the Mediterranean by the Gulf
of Alexandretta (Issus), while the other tarns away toward Babylon and the
Persian Gulf, Syria-Palestine is thus a narrow strip some four hundred miles
long and only eighty to a hundred miles wide, hemmed in by the sea on the west
and the desert on the east. The long corridor thus formed between desert and
sea is the narrow bridge joining Asia and Africa, and the nations distributed
along it were inevitably involved in the great rivalry between the leading
powers of the two continents as they struggled for supremacy in the earnest
imperial rivalries which the inter-continental dominion of the Hyksos had
provoked.
The Semitic population
which the ancient Pharaohs of the Old Kingdom had found in this region had
doubtless been augmented by additional migrations of the nomads from the grassy
fringes of the desert. In the north these people were Amorites and,
subsequently, Aramaeans, while in the south they may
be most conveniently designated as Canaanites. In general these people showed
little genius for government, and were totally without any motives for consolidation.
Divided by the physical conformation of the country, they were organized into
numerous city-kingdoms, or petty principalities, each consisting of a city,
with the surrounding fields and outlying villages, all under the rule of a
local dynast, who lived and ruled in the city. Each city had not only its own
kinglet, but also its own god, a local Baal or “lord”, with whom was often associated a Baalath or “lady”, a goddess like
that of Byblus. These miniature kingdoms were
embroiled in frequent wars with one another, each dynast endeavoring to unseat
his neighbor and absorb his territory and revenues. Exceeding all the others in
size was the kingdom of Kadesh, probably the surviving nucleus of Hyksos power.
It had developed in the only place where the conditions permitted such an
expansion, occupying a very advantageous position on the Orontes. It thus
commanded the road northward through inner Syria, the route of commerce from
Egypt and the south, which, following the Orontes, diverged thence to the
Euphrates, to cross to Assyria, or descend the Euphrates to Babylon. Being
likewise at the north end of both Lebanons, Kadesh
commanded also the road from the interior seaward through the Eleutherus valley to the Phoenician harbors, especially Arvad and Simyra. We now discern
it for two generations, struggling desperately to maintain its independence,
and only crushed at last by twenty years of warfare under Thutmose III.
Some of these kingdoms
of the interior possessed a high degree of civilization. The craftsmen of Syria
learned the arts and crafts from the far older civilization on the Nile.
Babylonian caravans and trade had brought in cuneiform writing, which was in
common use throughout Syria and far across the Hittite world of Asia Minor;
while intrusive elements of culture from the Hittite peoples, as well as from
the remarkable civilization of Crete and the Aegean were imparting additional
diversity to the composite civilization of this inter-continental region. Like
the rest of Asia, the peoples of this region knew more of the art of war than
the Egyptians, and in this particular they had, during Hyksos supremacy, taught
he Egyptians much.
The Semites were
inveterate traders, and an animated commerce was passing from town to town,
where the market-place was a busy scene of traffic as it is today. On the
scanty western slopes of the Lebanon, Semites had by this time long gained a
footing on the coast, to become the Phoenicians of historic times. The earliest
known reference to them is in the Old Kingdom, where the Egyptians already had
dealings with them. The Phoenicians, although hardly as yet a great maritime
power a position more probably held by the Cretans—at least participated in the
sea-trade. They entered the Nile mouths, and, sailing up the great river,
moored at Thebes and trafficked in its extensive bazaars. Here they perfected
their knowledge of the practical arts, learning especially how to cast hollow
bronzes, and the new art of making glass vessels which arose in Egypt in the XVIIIth Dynasty. Creeping westward along the coast of Asia
Minor they gradually gained Rhodes and the islands of the Aegean; the date is
disputed, though it may be as early as 1200 BC. In many a favorable harbor they
eventually established their colonies. Their manufactories multiplied; and
everywhere throughout the regions which they reached, their wares were
prominent in the markets. As their wealth increased, every harbor along the
Phoenician coast was the seat of a rich and flourishing city, among which Tyre,
Sidon, Beirut, Byblos, Arvad and, the northernmost Smyrna
were the greatest, each being the seat of a wealthy dynasty. Thus it was that
in the Homeric poems the Phoenician merchant and his wares were proverbial: the
commercial and maritime activity of the Phoenicians, as it had been at the rise
of the Egyptian Empire, thereafter increased greatly when relieved of all
competition by the fall of that Empire and the collapse of Cretan power.
The civilization which
the Egyptians found in the northern Mediterranean was Cretan. The sea-people
who appear with Mycenaean vessels as gifts and tribute for the Pharaoh in this
age, are termed by the Egyptian monuments men of Keftiu,
and so regular was the traffic of the Phoenician fleets with these people that
the Phoenician craft plying on these voyages were known as “Keftiu ships”. All this northern region was known to the Egyptians as “the Isles of
the Sea” for, having at first no acquaintance with the interior of Asia Minor,
they supposed it to be but island coasts, like those of the Aegean. In northern
Syria, on the upper reaches of the Euphrates, the world, as conceived by the
Egyptians, ended m the marshes in which they thought the Euphrates had its
rise, and these again were encircled by the Great Circle, the ocean, which was
the end of all.
The northern
Mediterranean world, apart from the Phoenicians, and practically all the great
peninsula of Asia Minor were non-Semitic. In the great bend of the Euphrates
where it sweeps westward toward Syria there was another non-Semitic intrusion.
A group of warriors of Iran had by 1500 BC pushed westward to the upper
Euphrates. In the great western bend of the river they established an Aryan
dynasty ruling the kingdom of Mitanni.
Their influence and language extended westward to Tunip in the Orontes valley and eastward to Nineveh. They formed a powerful and
cultivated state, which, planted thus on the road leading westward from Babylon
along the Euphrates, effectively cut off the latter from her profitable western
trade, and doubtless had much to do with the decline in which Babylon, under
her foreign Kassite dynasty, now found herself.
Assyria was as yet but a relatively feeble city-Kingdom, whose coming struggle
with Babylon only rendered the Pharaohs less liable to interference from the
east, in the realization of their plans of conquest in Asia. Everything thus
conspired to favor the permanence of Egyptian power there.
Seemingly without
serious opposition, Thutmose I reached the region of Naharin, or the land of
the rivers as the name signifies, which was the Egyptian designation of the
country of Mitanni, as contrasted with its people. The ensuing battle resulted
in a great slaughter of the Asiatics, followed by the
capture of a large number of prisoners. Unfortunately for our knowledge of
Thutmose I’s campaigns in Asia, we are dependent entirely upon the scanty
autobiographies of the two Ahmoses of el-Kab, which offer us little more than the bald fact of the
first campaign, and do not recount any other. Somewhere along the Euphrates at
its nearest approach to the Mediterranean, Thutmose now erected a stone
boundary-tablet, marking the northern and, at this point, the eastern limit of
his Syrian possessions. He had made good the boast so proudly recorded possibly
only a year before, on the tablet marking the other extreme frontier of his
empire at the third cataract of the, Nile. Henceforth he was even less measured
in his claims, for he later boasted to the priests of Abydos, “I made the boundary of Egypt as far as the
circuit of the sun, I made strong those who had been in fear, I expelled evil
from them, I made Egypt to become the sovereign and every land her serfs”—words
in which it is evident we must see a reference to Egypt’s deliverance from
humiliation under Hyksos rule and her ensuing supremacy in Asia.
How much Thutmose I may
have been able to accomplish in organizing his conquests in Asia we do not yet
know. He seems to have been able to retire from his Asiatic war without anxiety
and devote himself to the regeneration of Egypt. He was thus able to begin the
restoration of the temples so neglected since the time of the Hyksos. The
modest old temple of the Middle Kingdom monarchs at Thebes was no longer in
keeping with the Pharaoh’s increasing wealth and pomp. His chief architect, Ineni, was therefore commissioned to erect two massive
pylons, or towered gateways, in front of the old Ammon-temple, and between
these a covered hall, with the roof supported upon large cedar columns, brought
of course, like the splendid electron-tipped flag staves of cedar at the temple
front, from the new possessions in the Lebanon. The huge door was likewise of
Asiatic bronze, with the image of the god upon it, inlaid with gold. He
likewise restored the revered temple of Osiris at Abydos, equipping it with
rich ceremonial implements and furniture of silver and gold, with magnificent
images of the gods, such as it had doubtless lost in Hyksos days. Admonished by
his advancing years, he also endowed it with an income for the offering of
mortuary oblations to himself, giving the priests instructions regarding the
preservation of his name and memory,
Thutmose I was now an
old man and the claim to the throne which he had thus far successfully
maintained may have been weakened by the death of his queen, Ahmose, to whom it
is probable his only valid claim to the crown was due. She was the descendant
and representative of the old Theban princes who had fought and expelled the Hyksos,
and there was “a strong-party” who regarded the blood of this line as alone
entitled to royal honors. All her children had died save one daughter, Makere-Hatshepsut, who was thus the only child of the old
line, and so strong was the party of legitimacy, that they had forced the king,
years before, at about the middle of his reign, to proclaim her his successor,
in spite of the disinclination general throughout Egyptian history to submit to
the rule of a queen. The close of the reign of Thutmose I is involved in deep
obscurity, and there is no reconstruction without its difficulties. The traces
left on temple walls by family dissensions are not likely to be sufficiently
conclusive to enable us to follow the complicated struggle with entire
certainty three thousand five hundred years later. The current verdict of
historians has long been that Thutmose II, a feeble and diseased son of the old
Pharaoh, followed at once upon his father's demise. His brief reign is of such
slight consequence, however, that its exact place in the transition from
Thutmose I to Hatshepsut and Thutmose III is not of great importance.
Hatshepsut’s partisans
were not able to crown their favorite without a difficult struggle with a third
Thutmose. He was the son of an obscure concubine named. Isis, and there is some
uncertainty whether the first or the second Thutmose was his father. It is
probable that he married Hatshepsut, thus gaining a valid title to the throne.
Placed in the Karnack temple as a priest of low rank, he had ere long won the
priesthood to his support. By a dramatic coup d'etat which was at first completely successful,
on the third of May, in the year 1501 BC, the young Thutmose III suddenly
stepped from the duties of an obscure prophet of Ammon into the palace of the
Pharaohs. On his earliest monuments he made no reference to any co-regency of
Hatshepsut, his queen, in the royal titulary preceding the dedication. Indeed he allowed her no more honorable title than “great”
or “chief royal wife”. But the party of legitimacy was not to be so easily put
off. Before long the queen's partisans had become so strong that the king was
seriously hampered, and eventually even thrust into the background. Hatshepsut
thus became king, an enormity with which the state fiction of the Pharaoh's
origin could not be harmonized. She was called 'the female Horus! The word
majesty was given a feminine ending (as in Egyptian it agrees with the sex of
the ruler), and the conventions of the court were all warped and distorted to
suit the rule of a woman.
The queen now entered
upon an aggressive career: she is the first great woman in history of whom we
are informed. Her father's architect, Ineni, thus
defines the position of the two: after a brief reference to Thutmose III as
“the ruler upon the throne of him who begat him”, he says: “His sister, the
Divine Consort, Hatshepsut, administered the affairs of the Two Lands by her
designs; Egypt was made to labor with bowed head for her, the excellent seed of
the god, who came forth from him”. Her partisans had now installed themselves
in the most powerful offices. Closest to the queen’s person stood one, Sennemut, who deeply ingratiated himself in her favor. He
had been the tutor of Thutmose III as a child, and he was now entrusted with
the education of the queen’s little daughter Nefrure.
His brother Senmen likewise supported Hatshepsut's
cause. The most powerful of her coterie however
was Hapuseneb, who as both vizier and high priest of Ammon,
united in his person all the power of the administrative government with that
of the strong priestly party. The aged Ineni was
succeeded as “overseer of the gold and silver treasury” by a noble named Thutiy, while one Nehsi was chief
treasurer and colleague of Hapuseneb. The whole
machinery of the state was thus in the hands of these partisans of the queen.
It is needless to say that the careers and probably the lives of these men were
identified with the fortunes of Hatshepsut; they therefore took good care that
her position should be maintained. In every way they were at great pains to
show that the queen had been destined for the throne by the gods from the
beginning. In her temple at Der el-Bahri, where work
was now actively resumed, they had sculptured on the walls a long series of
reliefs depicting the birth of the queen. Here all the details of the old state
fiction that the sovereign should be the bodily son of the Sun-god were
elaborately pictured. The artist who did the work followed the current
tradition so closely that the new-born child appears as a boy showing how the
introduction of a woman into the situation was wrenching the inherited forms.
With such devices as these and many others, it was sought to overcome the
prejudice against a queen upon the throne of the Pharaohs.
Confident in her
Imperial wealth, Hatshepsut’s first enterprise was the building of her
magnificent temple against the western cliffs at Thebes. The building was in
design quite unlike the great temples of the age. It betrays the influence of
the more modest terraced temple tomb of the XIth Dynasty rulers immediately south of Hatshepsut's new building, in a series of
three terraces it rose from the plain to the level of an elevated court,
flanked by the plastic russet cliffs, into which the holy of holies was cut. In
front of the terraces were ranged rhythmic piers and colonnades, which, when
seen from a distance, to this day exhibit a fine sense of proportion and of
proper grouping, quite disproving the common assertion that the Greeks
were the first to understand the art of distributing external colonnades, and
that the Egyptians practiced the employment of the column only in interiors.
The queen found especial pleasure in the design of this temple. She saw in it a
paradise of Ammon and conceived its terraces as the myrrh-terraces of Punt, the
original home of the gods. She refers in one of her Inscriptions to the fact
that Amon had desired her “to establish for him a
Punt in his house”, but to carry out the design fully it was further necessary
to plant the terraces with myrrh trees from Punt and to send an expedition
thither to bring them.
Foreign traffic had
suffered severely during the long rule of the Hycsos.
Indeed, as far back as anyone could remember in Hatshepsut’s day, even the
myrrh necessary for the incense in the temple service had been passed from hand
to hand by overland traffic until it reached Egypt. With propitiatory offerings
to the divinities of the air to ensure a fair wind, the five vessels of the
expedition to Punt set sail early m the ninth year of the queen's reign. The
route was down the Nile and through the Middle Kingdom canal leading from the
eastern Delta through the Wadi Tumilat,
and connecting the Nile with the Red Sea. They arrived at Punt in safety and
the Egyptian commander pitched his tent on the shore, where he was received
with friendliness by Perchu, the chief of Punt, followed
by his absurdly corpulent wife and three children. Besides plentiful gifts with
which to traffic with these Puntites, the Egyptians
brought with them a statue group of stone showing Queen Hatshepsut with her
protector Ammon standing beside her. This group was set up in Punt and must be
standing there somewhere near the sea at the present day.
Hatshepsut’s records
tell us that her fleet was laden very heavily with marvels of the country of
Punt; all goodly fragrant woods of God’s land, heaps of myrrh-resin, of fresh
myrrh-trees, with ebony and pure ivory, with green gold of Emu, with
cinnamon-wood, with incense, eye-cosmetic, with baboons, monkeys, dogs, with
skins of the southern panther, with natives and their children. After a safe
return voyage the fleet finally moored again at the docks of Thebes. Probably
the Thebans had never before been diverted by such a sight as now greeted them,
when the motley array of Puntites and the strange
products of their far-off country passed through the streets to the queen's
palace, where the Egyptian commander presented them to her majesty. The queen
immediately offered a generous portion of them to Ammon, together with the
impost of Nubia, with which Punt was always classed. Besides thirty-one living
myrrh-trees, she presented to the gods, electrum, eye-paint, throw-sticks of
the Puntites, ebony, ivory, shells, a live southern
panther, which had been especially caught for her majesty, many panther skins
and three thousand three hundred small cattle. Huge piles of myrrh of twice a
man’s stature were measured in grain-measures under the oversight of the
queen's favorite, Thutiy, and large rings of
commercial gold were weighed in tall balances ten feet high. After formally
announcing to Ammon the success of the expedition which his oracle had called
forth, Hatshepsut then summoned the court, giving to her favorite Sennemut, and the chief treasurer, Nehsi,
who had dispatched the expedition, places of honor at her feet, while she told
the nobles the result of her great venture. She proudly added: “I have made for
him a Punt in his garden, just as he commanded me....It is large enough for him
to walk abroad in it”. Later she had all the incidents of the remarkable
expedition recorded in relief on the wall of her Der el-Bahri temple once appropriated by Thutmose II for the record of his brief Asiatic
campaign, where they still form one of the great beauties of her temple. All
her chief favorites found place among the scenes, Sennemut was even allowed to depict himself on one of the walls praying to Hathor for the queen, an unparalleled honor.
This unique temple was
in its function the culmination of a new development in the arrangement and
architecture of the royal tomb and its chapel or temple. Perhaps because they
had other uses for their resources, perhaps because they recognized the
futility of so vast a tomb, which yet failed to preserve from violation the
body of the builder, the Pharaohs had gradually abandoned the construction of
tomb pyramids. Probably for purposes of safety Thutmose I had taken the radical
step of separating his tomb from the mortuary chapel before it. The latter was
still left upon the plain at the foot of the western hills, but the royal
sepulcher chamber, with the passage leading to it, was hewn into the rocky wall
of a wild and desolate valley, now known as the 'Valley of the Kings' Tombs ,
lying behind the western cliffs, some two miles in a direct line from the
river, and accessible only by a long detour northward, involving nearly twice
that distance. It is evident that the exact spot where the king's body was
entombed was intended to be kept secret, that all possibility of robbing the
royal burial might be precluded. Thutmose's architect, Ineni,
says that he “superintended the excavation of the clit-tomb of his majesty
alone, no one seeing and no one hearing”. Hatshepsut likewise chose a remote
and secret spot for her tomb high up on the face of a dangerous cliff behind
the Valley of the Kings’ Tombs, where it has only recently been discovered; but
this she abandoned in favor of a tomb in the valley with her father. The new
arrangement was such that the royal sepulcher was still behind the chapel or
temple, which thus continued to be on the east of the tomb as before, although
the two were now separated by the intervening cliffs. The valley rapidly filled
with the vast tomb excavations of Thutmose I’s successors. It continued to be
the cemetery of the XVIIIth—XXth Dynasties, and over sixty royal tombs of the Empire were excavated there.
Sixteen now accessible form one of the wonders which attract the Nile tourists
to Thebes, and Strabo speaks of forty which were worthy to lie visited in his
time. Hatshepsut’s terraced sanctuary was therefore her mortuary temple,
dedicated also to her father. As the tombs multiplied in the valley behind,
there rose upon the plain before it temple after temple endowed for the
mortuary service of the departed gods, the emperors who had once ruled Egypt.
They were also sacred to Ammon as the state god; but they bore euphemistic
names significant of their mortuary function. For example, the temple of
Thutmose III was called “Gift of Life”, Hatshepsut's architect, Hapuseneb, who was also her vizier, likewise excavated her
tomb in the desolate valley, the second royal sepulcher to be excavated there.
Besides her Der el-Bahri temple and her adjacent tomb, the queen employed her
evidently growing wealth, also in the restoration of the old temples, which,
although two generations had elapsed, had not even yet recovered from the neglect
which they had suffered under the Hycsos. She
recorded her good work upon a rock temple of Pakht at Beni-Hasan, saying, “I have restored that which was
ruins, I have raised up that which was unfinished since the Asiatics were in the midst of Avaris of the Northland, and the
barbarians in the midst of them, overthrowing that which had been made while
they ruled in ignorance of Re”. At the same time, in celebration of her royal
jubilee she made preparation for the erection of the obelisks, which were the
customary memorial of such jubilees. Her Invariable favorite, Sennemut, levied the necessary forced labor and began work
early in February of the queen's fifteenth year. By early August, exactly six
months later, he had freed the huge blocks from the quarry, was able to employ
the high water, then rapidly approaching, to float them, and towed them to
Thebes before the inundation had again fallen. The queen then chose an
extraordinary location for her obelisks, namely, that colonnaded hall of the
Karnack temple erected by her father, where her husband Thutmose III had been
named king by oracle of Ammon; although this involved serious architectural
changes and even necessitated permanently unroofing the hall. They were richly overlaid with electrum, the work on which was done
for the queen by Thutiy. She avers that she measured
out the precious metal by the peck, like sacks of grain, and she is supported
in this extraordinary statement by Thutiy, who states
that by royal command he piled up in the festival hall of the palace no less
than nearly twelve bushels of electrum. These obelisks were the tallest shafts
ever erected in Egypt up to that time, being ninety-seven-and-a-half feet high
and weighing nearly three hundred and fifty tons each. One of them still stands,
an object of daily admiration among the modern visitors at Thebes. It is
possible that the queen also set up two more pairs of obelisks, making six in
all.
A relief in the Wadi Maghara in Sinai, whither
the tireless queen had sent a mining expedition to resume the work there which
had been interrupted by the Hyksos invasion, reveals her operations among the
copper mines, in the same year that saw her Karnak obelisks finished. This work in Sinai continued in her name until the twentieth
year of her reign. Sometime between this date and the close of the year
twenty-one, when we find Thutmose III ruling alone, the great queen must have
died.
Great though she was,
her rule was a distinct misfortune, falling, as it did, at a time when Egypt’s
power in Asia had not yet been seriously tested, and Syria was only to ready to
revolt. Considering the age in which she
lived, we must not too much blame Thutmose III for his treatment of the
departed queen. Around her obelisks in her father's hall at Karnack he had now
a masonry sheathing built, covering her name and the record of her erection of
them on the base. Everywhere he had her name erased and in her splendid
terraced temple on all the walls both her figure and her name have been hacked
out. Her partisans must have met short shrift. In the relief-scenes in the
same temple, where Sennemut and Nehsi and Thuyti has been so proud to appear, their names
and their figures were ruthlessly
chiseled away. The statues and tombs of all the queen’s supporters were treated
similarly. And these mutilated monuments stand to this day, grim witnesses of
the great king’s vengeance. But in her splendid temple her fame still lives,
and the masonry around her Karnack obelisks has fallen down, exposing their
gigantic shaft to proclaim to the modern world the greatness of Hatshepsut
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