Also by Guy de la Bédoyère

Samian Ware

Finds of Roman Britain

Buildings of Roman Britain

Towns of Roman Britain

Roman Villas and the Countryside

The Writings of John Evelyn

The Diary of John Evelyn

Particular Friends: The Correspondence of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn

Hadrian’s Wall: A History and Guide

The Golden Age of Roman Britain

The First Polio Vaccine

The Discovery of Penicillin

The First Computers

Battles over Britain: The Archaeology of the Air War

Voices of Imperial Rome

Pottery in Roman Britain

Aviation Archaeology in Britain

Companion to Roman Britain

Eagles over Britannia: The Roman Army in Britain

The Home Front

Gods with Thunderbolts: Religion in Roman Britain

Defying Rome: The Rebels of Roman Britain

Roman Britain: A New History

The Letters of Samuel Pepys

The Romans for Dummies

Cities of Roman Italy

The Real Lives of Roman Britain

Praetorian: The Rise and Fall of Rome’s Imperial Bodyguard

Domina: The Women who Made Imperial Rome

Gladius: Living, Fighting, and Dying in the Roman Army

PHARAOHS OF THE SUN

How Egypt’s Despots and Dreamers drove the Rise and Fall of Tutankhamun’s Dynasty

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE

LITTLE, BROWN

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Little, Brown

Copyright © Guy de la Bédoyère 2022

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-4087-1423-2

Little, Brown

An imprint of

Little, Brown Book Group

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK Company

www.hachette.co.uk

www.littlebrown.co.uk

This book is dedicated to my grandchildren Nell, Willow, Rufus, James, and Oliver

I will speak to you, all people:

I have been rewarded with gold seven times before the entire land,

And also with male and female slaves

I have been endowed with many fields

The name of a brave man is in what he has done.

I conveyed the Dual King, Thutmose I,

As he sailed south to Khent-hen-nefer

To crush rebellion throughout the lands

And to drive off intrusion from the desert regions

I showed valour in his presence at the cataract.

From the tomb biography of
Ahmes-Ibana, soldier and
naval commander

CONTENTS

Maps and plans

Foreword

1 Egypt in the 18th Dynasty

2 Twilight of the Hyksos c. 1555–1550 BC

3 The Dawn of the New Kingdom c. 1550–1525 BC: Ahmose I

4 Mother and Son c. 1525–1504 BC: Ahmose-Nefertari and Amenhotep I

5 First of the Thutmosids c. 1504–1492 BC: Thutmose I

6 Brother and Sister c. 1492–1479 BC: Thutmose II and Hatshepsut

7 King of Egypt, Daughter of Amun c. 1479–1458 BC: Hatshepsut

8 Warrior King c. 1479–1425 BC: Thutmose III

9 The Archer King c. 1425–1400 BC: Amenhotep II

10 The Sphinx’s Chosen One c. 1400–1390 BC: Thutmose IV

11 The First Family c. 1390–1352 BC: Amenhotep III and Tiye

12 The Great Living Aten c. 1352–1341 BC: Akhenaten and Nefertiti’s High Summer

13 Latter Days at Amarna c. 1341–1336 BC: Akhenaten, Smenkhkare and Neferneferuaten

14 The Strange Case of the Tomb known as KV55

15 The King whose Name the Whole World knows c. 1336–1327 BC: Tutankhamun

16 The Widowed Queen and the God’s Father c. 1327–1323 BC: Ankhesenamun and the Reign of Ay

17 The Enlightened Despot c. 1323–1295 BC: Horemheb

Epilogue

Appendices

1. Pronouncing Transliterated Egyptian

2. Timeline of Events

3. List of 18th Dynasty Kings

4. Manetho’s 18th Dynasty

5. List of Principal Personalities

6. Glossary of Places

7. Glossary of Terms

Notes

Abbreviations

Further Reading

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Index

MAPS AND PLANS

FOREWORD

In 1972, like thousands of others at the time, I queued for several hours to see the Tutankhamun Exhibition at the British Museum in London. The experience of seeing the displays was overwhelming and unforgettable, even life changing. Tutankhamun was one of the last, and most obscure, kings of Egypt’s 18th Dynasty (c. 1550–1295 BC). In November 1922, when Tutankhamun’s tomb was discovered, he became a household name and has remained so ever since. Many of his predecessors were far more illustrious or notorious than him, including Hatshepsut and Akhenaten. Some, like Thutmose III, were the most powerful kings of their era.

Another half-century has passed since 1972 and I still have some of the books and souvenirs acquired at the time, the first part of a still-growing personal Egyptology library. Countless weekends were spent in the Egyptian galleries at the British Museum. At Durham University I studied Egyptology as part of my first degree.

Modern tourism in Egypt was well established by the 1970s but nothing like the colossal industry it became before fears of instability in the Middle East crushed it almost out of existence. In 1983 I made my first trip to the Nile Valley. It was still possible to wander easily among the monuments on the West and East Banks at Luxor (Thebes) without seeing many other people. I was filled with wonder, most by the arduous walk in the baking late summer heat from the Temple of Hatshepsut and up over the hills across to the Valley of the Kings. Several other visits to Egypt followed. It was also my good fortune to visit major exhibitions of material from Tutankhamun’s tomb and the Amarna era in Los Angeles and Denver. For nine years I worked as a teacher and took trips to Berlin where one of the annual pleasures was introducing students to Akhenaten through the magnificent Amarna collection at the Egyptian Museum there. Some of those students said in later years that seeing the bust of Nefertiti had been the most memorable experience of their historical studies.

There can be no other ancient civilization that is so instantly recognizable to modern eyes as that of the Egyptians. Stories about Egypt and antiquities trickled into Europe for centuries, especially once Octavian (afterwards Augustus) seized Egypt in 30 BC for the Roman Empire. The popes in Rome recovered buried statues and obelisks brought there by the Roman emperors.

Awareness of Egypt’s exotic past and landscape spread gradually among the cognoscenti of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it was Napoleon’s Expedition to Egypt that had a truly dramatic impact. By publishing magnificent illustrations of the monuments, many since damaged or destroyed, the French explorers caused a worldwide sensation. In 1799 they found the Rosetta Stone which would change everything by revealing a path to deciphering hieroglyphs. Travelling to the Nile Valley soon became a more common pastime, at first only for the privileged rich and daring, reviving a tradition that had existed as far back as the fifth century BC when the Greek historian Herodotus visited an ancient Egypt already well into decline.

As Egypt opened up in the 1800s, explorers and excavators sailed up the Nile. They were fascinated by the monuments, strange gods and stranger customs, the gold and the cryptic language, just as visiting Roman senators had been in their time. Once the hieroglyphs had begun to give up their secrets, Egypt’s history began to emerge back into the light along with the discovery and clearance of ever more monuments. European museums were the first to start packing their galleries with astonishing finds and works of art. Many major museums in the world have outstanding collections of 18th Dynasty relics, but the most important of all is in Cairo. No one who visits any one of these or is lucky enough to explore Egypt can fail to be staggered by the vastness of the sculpture, the beauty of the hieroglyphs and the sheer mystery of this remarkable and unique civilization.

The enthusiastic amassing of museum collections in the nineteenth century and later could be just as easily seen as the despoliation of ancient Egypt. Many archaeologically valuable sites and locations were destroyed in the search for exciting pieces. Some places were excavated with care, but the standard of recording varied wildly. A great deal of ransacking, especially of tombs, went on in the hunt for valuable artefacts to sell to the antiquities market. It cut both ways. The results included sensational discoveries, like the first cache of royal mummies found in 1881, and drawings or paintings made of reliefs and carvings that no longer exist, at least in legible form.

Since the ancient Egyptians spent a great deal of time despoiling one another and anyone else within their reach it is hard to be too judgemental. At least nowadays the buildings and artefacts housed in museums are safer than they have ever been. The greatest threat a pharaoh’s burial and monuments faced was from his successors rather than nineteenth-century collectors, and the same applied to almost any private burial or possessions.

In the meantime, the work inspired ever more assiduous searches, the sand and rock being swept aside in the relentless hunt for the literal crock of gold. The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb is unlikely ever to be matched, let alone exceeded. In recent decades work has been more concerned with long-term projects, such as restoring Hatshepsut’s memorial-mortuary temple, mapping and recording Akhenaten’s city at Tell el-Amarna, together with workers’ villages and cemeteries, and the reconstruction of his reliefs from the blocks used as filling in later pylons at Karnak. The new National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo is the latest great initiative. In April 2021 it was the destination of the Pharaohs’ Golden Parade when the royal mummies, including some of the most important 18th Dynasty rulers, were moved there and watched by the world.

Ever since the unravelling of the Egyptian language, the 18th Dynasty has gradually been restored as a historical era like no other. For all that, Egypt remains strangely impenetrable. The modern name of the country comes from the classical Aegyptos, itself a Greek rendition of Egyptian words that sounded something like Hewetka-Ptah.¹ This meant ‘Mansion of the Spirit of Ptah’, the city of Memphis, rather than the country itself with which the name came to be synonymous. Among the names the Egyptians applied to their country were Kemet, ‘The Black Land’, a reference to the Nile silt, and Tameri, ‘The Beloved Cultivated Land’.² The Hittites called Egypt Mizri, a word of uncertain origin but which might be derived from an Egyptian word that meant something like a ‘walled-in place of treasure’.³ It survives today as Misr, the modern Arabic name for Egypt.

The ancient Egyptians have a unique capacity to confront us with our own mortality. It is impossible to look at the photographs taken in Tutankhamun’s tomb when it was discovered and not be transfixed by the thought that the boxes, chairs, chariots, vases, statues and all the rest had already been precariously balanced in position for a thousand years when Alexander the Great invaded Egypt in 332 BC. The everyday paraphernalia of a young and fabulously wealthy king is the evidence for a whole life lived thirty-three centuries ago from birth through childhood and into young adulthood and death piled chaotically into a very small tomb. The glitter has always overwhelmed those lucky enough to see his celebrated solid gold mask and coffins, but the ephemera has more power to humble us: the reed that Tutankhamun cut one day to serve as a stick, or the golden throne battered by his impatient infant feet.

The images of Howard Carter and his assistants carrying each piece out back into the Egyptian sun leaves one with the thought of being in the tomb when it was closed and seeing the last people leaving, among them surely Tutankhamun’s queen Ankhesenamun, before they disappeared into history. Soon afterwards there were disturbances when the tomb was robbed twice and then total darkness and silence for an eternity until Carter broke through the blocking, pointed his light in, and gasped. He described what he saw with words that had not come into use until thousands of years had passed after the tomb was sealed. At that moment Carter met the 18th Dynasty head-on and even briefly breathed its air as he gazed in bewilderment at the scene of glistening clutter that met his eyes, with no idea yet of the wonders waiting beyond the blocked wall to the burial chamber. In between that moment and Tutankhamun’s burial lay a trackless, 160-odd generations-worth of billions of human beings, almost all of whom have been vaporized without trace.

The abundant evidence for lives led thousands of years ago, ranging from everyday items that look as if they were last used yesterday to the desiccated bodies of their owners, is spellbinding. The Egyptians’ tireless efforts to commemorate and preserve their love of life and their landscape in their tombs is a powerful reminder of the short time we have available to share these pleasures ourselves. Add on the passage of vast tracts of time and the enticing mystery that envelops ancient Egypt, and it is easy to see why the modern world is addicted to the subject in all its manifestations.

Throughout its history, but especially so in the 18th Dynasty, the whole teetering Egyptian edifice was built on the systematic exploitation of its people, its neighbours and the resources the state could lay its hands on in an endless cycle of greedy imperialist wars and tribute demands. Wealth and labour were poured into the hands of the king and his family, his acolytes, and the state cults. They were used on colossal building projects and tombs that formed an integral part of the ever more extravagant myth of the king’s semi-divine status and entitlement, backed up by a self-serving aristocracy that managed the administration of the state and religion. This was all applied to keep the population under control, suffused with the opiate of cult and ritual that dominated Egyptian society.

Egyptian society was controlled by a collective cultural conspiracy, locked in a timeless and reassuring recycling of custom, characterized by oppression and exploitation. There is no point in judging a Bronze Age state by modern standards. The inequality was normal for the period and taken for granted as such across the region. Monarchical power was absolute. Opposition and protest were virtually non-existent because that way of life was accepted as the price of security and stability. The difference is that in Egypt enough evidence exists for us to be able to see this happening in a chronological and historical framework at an early stage in the development of the modern nation. Egypt represents the supreme form of the Bronze Age absolutist state, and thus a vital stage in the process of political development and consciousness.

Some of the 18th Dynasty’s rulers have attracted endless attention, in particular Hatshepsut, and Akhenaten and his queen Nefertiti. This can marginalize the wider historical context in which they ruled, as well as their predecessors and successors, the nobility and the general population. They deserve more than simply being preambles or epilogues to the biographical works of a very few favourite rulers. These men and women of the 18th Dynasty deserve in every way to be seen alongside those of other important historical periods. In their lives we can see all the dynamics that drive history from ambition, greed, temptation and radical ideas to creativity, self-destruction and a craving for immortality. This was set against a backdrop of one of the most sensational landscapes in the world.

The miracle of Egypt is that we have learned so much about a civilization from thousands of years ago. Yet at the same time the subject remains tantalizing and obscure, especially to the uninitiated. In this book I have tried wherever possible to focus on what we do know and to be frank about the nature of the evidence, laboriously pursuing and scouring the prime Egyptian sources wherever it was possible to do so. This is a subject where something purporting to be historical fact often turns out to be based on one translation of an ambiguous and obscure term or very partial interpretation. References to the detailed evidence that lies behind the main text have been placed in the extended endnotes which contain full details for those readers who wish to follow them up. Egyptian terms, usually in transliterated form, are also to be found mainly in the endnotes and appendices.

The structure of this book is broadly chronological by reign. This is a conventional approach for which I make no apology. The Egyptians defined and measured their history in terms of their kings, and it is the best means of understanding the surviving evidence and identifying change and continuity. The dates given in this book are approximations. There is no consensus about the absolute dates for most of ancient Egyptian history and nor will there ever be. The reasons for this are explained fully in Chapter 1. Likewise, there is no agreement about or consistency in the spellings of proper names and place names. I have tried to use forms that appear most often in the existing literature.

The nature of the evidence, as so often with the ancient world, means that speculating to some extent is unavoidable but relying on it is a particular issue with Egypt. I hope I have kept mine to a minimum. Too much speculation interweaved among, and even overwhelming, the evidence has an unfortunate habit of being unintentionally read, and treated, as fact even by those responsible for it.

I have utilized examples from other historical settings to help amplify and emphasize certain points, particularly dynastic aspects of England in the 1400s when another extended royal family exerted itself to maintain a hold on power, dissolving into civil war. Although the contexts may appear to be very different from Egypt, and indeed were in important respects, there is value in trying to draw Egypt more closely into more general historical themes, rather than invariably focusing on Egypt’s peculiarities. Power, ambition, and self-interest and their consequences are always defining features of the human experience.

Guy de la Bédoyère, Welby, Lincolnshire 2022

1

EGYPT IN THE 18TH DYNASTY

. . . The gates of monarchs Are arch’d so high that giants may jet through And keep their impious turbans on without Good morrow to the sun.¹

William Shakespeare

The events and history described in this book took place for the most part in ancient Egypt and beyond its borders to the north in the Near East or Western Asia and to the south in Nubia (Sudan). The timescale runs from the middle of the sixteenth century BC to the early thirteenth century BC, straddling the middle of ancient Egypt’s dynastic historical era of almost three thousand years. Literacy made Egypt one of the first nations with the ability to record its history permanently. The Egyptians were fully aware of this. A wisdom text from not long after the period covered by this book said, ‘Man decays, his corpse is dust. All his family have perished. But a book makes him remembered through the mouth of its reciter.’²

The deeds and conceits of the kings and queens, and the elite, who presided over this remarkable nation were recounted and celebrated across Egypt’s monuments and on papyri. As history this astonishing archive leaves much to be desired and needs to be understood in the context of a completely different perception of the past. That record is nonetheless without parallel for the period and provides us with our first opportunity to witness in detail an early civilization at the height of its power.

Egypt’s famously unique geography has always made it a two-dimensional country. The vast bulk of human settlement in pharaonic times was stretched out along the Nile Valley and across the Delta. The oases of the Western Desert accounted for most of what habitable land remained. For the most part the Egyptians were engaged in sophisticated farming on the fertile land of crown, temple, and private estates saturated annually by the Nile’s inundation. Quarrying and mining took place in scattered locations in the Eastern Desert across which trade routes led to the Red Sea. In the broader context of human activity in the area even the grand antiquity of ancient Egypt accounts for only a tiny proportion. Tool-using peoples were present in the region as much as 400,000 years ago, and it is certain that human beings had been there for at least as long again before that after the first made their way north out of east Africa.

Within Egypt two of the most important places were the administrative capital Memphis in northern Egypt (close to modern Cairo), and to the south the religious capital at Thebes, on part of which the modern city of Luxor stands. Memphis and Thebes were the cities’ much later Greek names. In ancient Egyptian times they were referred to in various ways, explained later. During the 18th Dynasty, the first of the so-called New Kingdom, the kings spent much of their time at Memphis. The city’s profile has suffered in modern times because thanks to the shifting of the Nile almost nothing visible survives there today, apart from the pyramids, tombs and other religious structures of the nearby necropolis at Saqqara. Thebes is a different matter. On the east bank of the Nile the vast ruins of the temple complexes of Karnak and Luxor are among the most impressive ancient buildings of all time and in any place. Across the Nile on the west bank are the remains of the mortuary temples and royal and private graves. Much of what is visible today is of 19th Dynasty and later dates, but a significant proportion belongs to the 18th Dynasty.

The 18th Dynasty and the rest of the New Kingdom owed a great deal to the four centuries of the Middle Kingdom (c. 2055–1650 BC), despite an intervening era of instability known today as the Second Intermediate Period (see under The Evidence below). During the Middle Kingdom, Egyptian society and culture developed ideas about kingship, bureaucracy and government, monumental architecture, an awareness of the outside world in the form of trade and technical innovations, and a more sophisticated identity and sense of self. The Teaching of Ptahhotep, for example, is a 12th Dynasty philosophical work concerned with how old age brings weakness and decay but also how wisdom only comes with age.³ It was one of many old writings known and studied in the New Kingdom.

Under the 18th Dynasty kings Egypt’s territorial ambitions were directed mainly to the north into Syria and Nubia to the south. Both places became major sources of wealth and resources, including manpower seized in war or levied as tribute. Egypt was one of several significant Bronze Age states in the region. Others included the Hittites from Hatti in what is now Turkey, Mitanni in Syria, Minoan Crete, and Mycenaean Greece. These nations were all ruled by versions of despotic monarchies. There was no sense of personal autonomy or self-determination, and no means of expressing or coordinating dissent. Political representation for the population lay centuries in the future, and then only in other emergent nations.

By the middle of the second millennium BC all these places exhibited growing signs of sophistication and had advanced skills in literacy and technology. The copper alloy known usually now as bronze was the basis of weaponry and tools. Iron was scarcely known in Egypt and elsewhere other than from meteorites. This explains why an Egyptian word which seems to have been used to refer to iron, biw, was phonetically virtually identical to the word for heaven. Iron did not become more widely available in Egypt until c. 500 BC and did not become an everyday metal until the Ptolemaic and Roman periods.

The Egyptians had mastered their use of the Nile as a highway and could sail further afield in the Red Sea. The cul-de-sac of the eastern Mediterranean provided an extensive three-sided coastline which guided an endless procession of merchant vessels whose crews risked being wrecked on the rocky coasts that separated the ports. Their voyages through what the Egyptians knew as the ‘Great Green’, personified as a fertility deity, meant a continuous process of disseminating news, ideas, innovations and skills throughout the region.⁴

For the most part the fate of each nation relied on the personal qualities and prestige of individual rulers. We are most familiar with Egypt. No official records of contemporary rulers of Mycenaean Greece or Minoan Crete survive, or their deeds. Only the folk memories of the Trojan War in Homer’s poetry and other myths tell us anything ‘historical’ about that era, though the results of archaeology are compatible with the Homeric image of chieftain-based city states either in alliance or at war with each other. The picture is a little fuller for the Western Asiatic states, with written evidence for some regimes, such as the Hittites, and their activities.

The evolving states had bureaucrats who compiled and managed archives, which in Egypt included laws recorded on the ‘40 skins’ (leather rolls).⁵ Egypt had been one of those first nations to lead the field over a thousand years before but was no longer exceptional. Collectively these states were laying the foundations for the ways modern governments operate, communicate, manage resources and control their populations. Apart from Egypt, the sequence of rulers, events and history are often lost, leaving us with merely the relics of their citadels and graves, serving at best as only glimpses into their society. The remains of imported goods found in Egypt, the adoption of innovations like chariots, Egyptian exports and surviving diplomatic correspondence prove that Egypt was a dominant and advanced player in the Bronze Age world.

WHY THE 18TH DYNASTY?

The 18th Dynasty lasted about 265 years from approximately 1550 BC to 1295 BC. This was roughly midway between the age of the pyramids and the end of Egypt as an independent country in 30 BC when it was absorbed into the Roman Empire. The 18th Dynasty was the latest manifestation of native royal power in Egypt which already stretched back well over fifteen centuries and is known to us as the first phase of the New Kingdom.

The history of the 18th Dynasty serves as an allegory of unrestrained ambition and greed for all times. A combination of factors brought into being a line of kings who presided over what became temporarily the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the region. Regardless of their individual abilities or lack of, they gradually discovered the extent to which they could indulge themselves by exploiting a population contained within a despotic system designed to ensure continuity and control. This propelled Egypt towards domination of the Near East, a position it had reached by the mid-fifteenth century BC. With that went so many other characteristics of an imperialist state: violence, the systematic extraction of resources and manufactured goods from conquered or vassal states, slavery, and a self-glorifying ideology based on the idea of a divinely backed monarchy. However, it also brought stability.

During this time Egyptian culture reached full maturity, benefiting from the evolution of skills and crafts to an exceptionally high standard. Egyptian society was capable of fielding major armies, working gold and silver into fabulous works of art, fashioning vast stone obelisks and monumental statues, and building gigantic temples. Literacy was well established in a minority of the population made up mainly of the elite classes which included the priesthood and professional scribes, and specialized artisans. Literacy was integral to the development of a sophisticated bureaucracy that governed the country and managed all these projects.

Much of this effort was expended on conspicuous waste, apart from creating an illusion of permanence. State vanity building projects were designed to glorify and perpetuate the regime as part of that mirage. The justification that drove this was immersed in a powerful and intoxicating religious ideology of the king as a living god. His living career and his journey to an ecstatic afterlife required an unmatched level of devotion and commitment. The king ruled as the sun god falcon Horus. At his death he became Osiris, Horus’ father who had been killed by his brother Seth and was brought back to life by his wife Isis, mother of Horus, and was succeeded by his son, the new Horus. The cycle was perpetual.

This way of life held Egypt together, bonding Egyptian society together in a shared ideology of existence in this life and the next. The system created livelihoods for the wider population through the trickle-down distribution of food and other goods necessary for subsistence, gifts of livestock and land and sometimes more valuable items by the king and the elite. For most of the time the celebrated fertility of the Nile Valley, thanks to the annual flood, guaranteed an unusually reliable source of food. Similarly, the power of the Egyptian state in the 18th Dynasty protected the people from the threat of foreign invasions, which became a serious issue in later times.

The system was founded on a narcotic sense of timeless stability, oppressive conservatism and total dependence on the state. The great monuments and the all-encompassing framework of religion existed primarily to serve the self-interest of the king and the elite by reinforcing control and acquiescence, even if the consequence was also to create security and dispel fear of chaos.

The idea of investing Egypt’s wealth in technological and social development for the greater good did not exist. When innovations emerged, usually from abroad, they were used only to benefit the interests of those in power, for example in the form of advanced military technology or luxury items. Wealth served to enrich the king and his family, and through gifts and endowments also the state cults and the elite. This was normal for a Bronze Age nation, but the scale on which it took place in Egypt’s 18th Dynasty was unprecedented. Nothing was spent on public entertainment or associated facilities, apart from showcase religious processions, the promenading of the king in his chariot and the triumphal display of captives and their executed leaders. Music and hunting existed as leisure pursuits but were mainly the preserve of the elite who left a rich record of their lives compared to the vast bulk of the rest of the population. They are largely undetectable now apart from the monuments on which they laboured and occasional discoveries of their modest graves.

Trade today is a means by which the surplus production of a nation’s economy is exchanged through international markets. In antiquity the movement of goods was as likely to be determined by a nation’s ability to extort goods by force. Egyptian products of the 18th Dynasty could and did turn up elsewhere, for example in Cyprus, Rhodes, Crete, and Greece. In general, the movement of goods was more in Egypt’s favour, at her behest, and with coercion. The appearance of Cretan-style bull-leaping frescoes in an early 18th Dynasty palace in the Delta, and a temple to the cult of the Syrian goddess Astarte at Memphis, shows that the influences were not all one way.

Egypt under the 18th Dynasty operated an international state protection racket. Minor city states sometimes actively welcomed the insulation Egypt offered them against their stronger neighbours. The army played the most important role in turning Egypt into an imperialist predatory state. The legitimization of the 18th Dynasty was founded on the achievements of its first king, Ahmose I, who used the army to expel the Asiatic Hyksos kings from the Delta region and thereby reunified the nation. His successors followed his lead, seeking opportunities to invade Egypt’s neighbours to the north and south. Thereafter, apart from the occasional insurrection after the death of a pharaoh, the mere threat of an Egyptian invasion was normally enough to keep Egypt’s neighbours meekly handing over tribute. Eventually the rise of new nations, such as the Hittites, introduced fresh tensions towards the end of the 18th Dynasty. One of New Kingdom Egypt’s weaknesses was the failure to create a colonial administration to govern its possessions, but this reflected the country’s relatively primitive development as an imperialist state.

The king posed as the bastion between the people and the forces of chaos which the Egyptians dreaded. Everything was invested in his ability to maintain order under the auspices of the gods, enshrined in the goddess Maat (who personified the primeval state of Truth and Harmony), a concept deliberately fostered to maintain control and suppress dissent. The same principle lies behind every state and is fundamental to the contract between the ruling government and the people. Enriching the state cults that presided over keeping the wider population in order allowed the king to develop the myth of his status as a protective superman. As the nation’s wealth and power grew during the 18th Dynasty the inherent weakness of Egyptian absolutism became clear. The kings ruled unchecked. They could indulge themselves on an unprecedented scale. Consanguineous marriages were sometimes used as a mechanism of holding on to power within the dynasty. This was particularly conspicuous earlier in the dynasty, but circumstantial evidence suggests the royal circle later in the 18th Dynasty included individuals appointed to high office who were also blood relatives of the kings. This helped ring-fence the crown with loyalists, as well as diminish the chance of factions emerging.⁶

There was no professional judiciary or independent legal system. Legal cases were heard in a type of regional court known as the kenbet. These courts were not made up of professional magistrates (who did not exist in Egypt), but, rather, the governor of the area concerned together with senior priests and other officials who of course owed their positions to the king. Their seniority was treated as a qualification to hear cases. There was no government assembly of any sort.

Egypt’s glory days of the 18th Dynasty were built on a hierarchy with gold-bedecked kings at the top and the broken bodies of labourers, including children and prisoners of war, at the bottom. These kings presided over a population most of whom died before their thirties from disease or other hazards. They were often youthful themselves. The 18th Dynasty rulers mostly succeeded to the throne as children or very young adults. It is quite a comment on the system that by and large it withstood such a hazard. The implications and dangers of being ruled by juveniles, especially those brought up in a culture built on posturing and violence, were considerable and are better attested in the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages. There was little opportunity to assess an Egyptian king’s ability to rule. Each had grown up within the confines of a royal household that jealously guarded its prerogatives and imbued him (or her) with a sense of unconditional entitlement. At best, Egypt could hope the young king would be guided by advisers, including his mother, and experienced ministers. At worst, the country was vulnerable to being subjected to the passions and obsessions of adolescent whims, flattered by lackeys in search of position and profit. Few kings lived to their fifties.

The dramatic evidence from workers’ cemeteries at Akhenaten’s city of Amarna paints a picture of a largely young workforce afflicted by disease, skeletal fractures, other injuries and premature death. These impoverished and illiterate people were a world apart from the extravagance of the upper classes, whom they lived alongside. This was the first great historical era of conspicuous and staggering inequality, with the gap between the rich and the rest widening rapidly.

Such woes were omitted from the idealized depictions of everyday life in Egypt found in private tombs, our main source for everyday life. There is, however, the exceptional evidence of the tomb of the sculptor Ipuy at Deir el-Medina (TT217) with its paintings of workers in action around 1300 BC, including among other detail an image of one man apparently having a dislocated shoulder set by a colleague.⁷ The Edwin Smith papyrus from the Old Kingdom, with its itemized guidance for the examination, diagnosis and treatment of injuries, shows that the Egyptian medical profession was quite familiar from early on with the physical consequences of dangerous hard work.⁸ This went hand in hand with knowledge of disease and treatments.⁹ However, downtrodden labourers at Amarna seem to have benefited little, if at all, from such skills.

Injuries added to conditions typical of any pre-modern society such as blindness, dental problems, arthritis, tuberculosis and other diseases. References to these are also unusual. An exception was the priest Ruma who served in the temple to the Syrian goddess Astarte at Memphis, itself an unusual example of Egypt adopting an interest in a foreign cult. Ruma was shown with an atrophied right leg and a so-called ‘equine’ deformity of the foot, a characteristic of poliomyelitis.¹⁰

Bronze Age warfare meant extreme face-to-face violence and brutality meted out to the losers. At Horemheb’s Saqqara tomb, constructed while he was a general under Tutankhamun, an Egyptian soldier is shown casually smashing his fist into a Nubian prisoner’s jaw while others in manacles are dragged before the king.¹¹ Such scenes and others formed part of a cycle of triumphant iconography that commemorated the humiliation and degradation of Egypt’s helpless and broken foes who had been subdued by the king. None of this made Egypt necessarily any different from other Bronze Age states at the time or since, but Egypt’s dominance during the New Kingdom meant it was in a stronger position to inflict brutality than suffer from it.

Complex rituals, especially for death and burial, were engaged in and at vast expense, especially by the elite. They were conducted against a backdrop of institutionalized and casual theft operated on a grand scale. The larceny which characterized Egypt’s relations with its neighbours was endemic within the country. An industry of tomb robbing was at work, made viable by a largely undetectable web of complicity involved in dispersing the goods stolen from tombs, especially portable metal items that could be melted down and untraceable oils or unguents. The thieves were prepared to risk being interrogated with beatings, and the prospect of having their limbs amputated or being executed, confident there was an excellent chance they would escape punishment thanks to their friends in high places.¹²

Meanwhile, kings usurped or demolished the mortuary temples and monuments of their predecessors or even sometimes helped themselves to the contents of their tombs. Each king depicted the past as a prelude to his own blaze across the firmament. The posthumous prospects of his predecessors were not a priority. The reasons for this are complex. Usurpations to a modern eye look aggressive and acquisitive. Sometimes that was true, especially where there was a desire to suppress the memory of a previous ruler such as Hatshepsut. However, in Egypt notions of individuality were more fluid, especially in a royal context. The king’s public image was also a conflation of his own identity and achievements with those of his predecessors, thereby creating a more imposing and cumulative manifestation of power renewed with each reign. Usurpation of a predecessor’s monuments to help achieve that was part of the tradition of blurring change and continuity.

The king went to war to glorify and enrich himself in the name of Amun, the king of Egypt’s gods with unmatched powers as a creator and solar deity and whose name meant ‘secret’ or ‘hidden’. The ultimate exponent was the 19th Dynasty king Ramesses II for whom the whole of Egypt’s history was merely a canvas on which to portray himself, but the pioneers were the warrior rulers of the 18th Dynasty such as Thutmose III. There was a remorseless inevitability about what happened towards the 18th Dynasty’s end. By the first half of the fourteenth century BC Egypt was under the rule of the otiose Amenhotep III and his queen Tiye who lived in unmatched luxury, spending astronomical sums on extravagant monuments to themselves. They were followed by their religious revolutionary and narcissistic son Akhenaten whose reign turned Egypt upside down.

Monarchs, especially such luminously powerful and wealthy ones as these, have always attracted opportunists like leeches. A continuous parade of parasitic chancers sought position and fortune for themselves and their families. Their principal outlet was the competitive building of their own prodigy houses, tombs and mortuary chapels. These were designed to impress the king and rival courtiers with flair, novelty and extravagance deployed in traditional contexts.¹³

Through their private monuments these officials displayed their status and achievements, each claiming to be the sole focus of the king’s admiration and appreciative beneficence. These were the literal and natural expression of a culture completely absorbed by the need to invest in an afterlife. The prodigy tombs and chapels were also the principal Egyptian permanent manifestation of temporal status, just as great houses or similar forms of competitive conspicuous consumption are found in the history of other cultures. The wealthiest imitated the 18th Dynasty kings by having separate memorial chapels and burial chambers. Just as important was the visibility of the work in progress that made such projects considerable matters of note. After the great man’s death, the chapel served to perpetuate his reputation or, ironically, acted as a handy target if he had fallen into disgrace in some way.

Some of these overmighty courtiers gambled everything to rise to extraordinary heights and then just as quickly disappeared having been overtaken by events, their greed and misjudgement, and the scheming of their rivals. The nature of their fall is usually obscured by time, but their elaborate tombs and chapels were often abandoned and unused, their walls desecrated, and their mummies and reputations thrown to the winds.

THE EVIDENCE

Egypt provides just enough historical evidence to form a true chronological outline. Recreating that has been a triumph of research. However, the nature of the evidence is often tenuous and cryptic with the result that modern histories of ancient Egypt frequently veer towards the suppositious and sometimes overwhelmingly so (see Chapter 13 especially). The position is, however, considerably better than it is for contemporary societies and regimes.

By classical times the historical information available in Egypt to Greek writers like Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus was confused and patchy. Herodotus said he was dependent on what the Egyptians and their priests told him, much of which was manifestly spurious (to us at least, if not always to him).¹⁴ The ‘history’ the priests had at their disposal consisted largely of myth and anecdote, but they may also have been enjoying themselves at Herodotus’ expense. Had regnal coinage existed in Egypt in the 18th Dynasty our knowledge of rulers and lengths of reigns would be transformed. But coinage was not invented until the seventh century BC in Lydia and in Egypt did not come into regular use until the Ptolemaic pharaohs.

Manetho, an Egyptian priest of the third century BC, wrote down in Greek a chronology of Egyptian rulers based on a series of dynasties, but provided little supplementary information. This has formed the structure of Egyptian history ever since but just like Herodotus, Manetho had garbled information to hand that he did not fully understand. Moreover, his original text only survives in extracts by later ancient authors.¹⁵ Some of the kings he listed are recognizable, but many are not. Even more confusingly, his account does not always correspond with surviving king lists the Egyptians had compiled long before. The ‘Palermo’ Stone is the name given to fragments of a royal annals of kings and major events from the 1st to the 5th Dynasties, though its original findspot is unknown. The damaged and incomplete Turin Canon papyrus appears to be a private checklist of kings compiled in the late 19th or 20th Dynasties from official records and includes many obscure or ephemeral rulers. King lists found at Abydos running up to the 19th Dynasty frequently do not correspond with Manetho, as well as omitting ‘undesirables’ like Hatshepsut and Akhenaten who may have spectral presences in Manetho.¹⁶ Manetho supplied lengths for reigns but did not take account of overlapping dynasties and possible co-regencies, having no real idea about exactly when these kings had ruled.

Manetho’s system is the basis of grouping of dynasties into the ‘Old Kingdom’, ‘Middle Kingdom’, ‘New Kingdom’ and the ‘Late Period’, each separated by episodes of disorder and political confusion known today in a rather utilitarian way as the ‘First, Second, and Third Intermediate Periods’ (see Appendix 2 for a breakdown of these periods and approximate dates, and Appendix 4 for Manetho’s 18th Dynasty). To these have now been added the ‘Predynastic’ era at the beginning, and at the end Manetho’s own time as the ‘Ptolemaic’ period when Egypt was ruled by the descendants of Alexander the Great’s general Ptolemy (Ptolemy I Soter of Egypt, 305–282 BC). The Ptolemies were followed by the Roman imperial era which brought ancient Egypt to an end and eventually saw the wholesale displacement of Egyptian religion by Christianity.

Individual Egyptian rulers were keen to record their own accomplishments. Kamose, whose exploits helped bring an end to the Hyksos era and laid the way open for the 18th Dynasty, erected stelae at Karnak which described his war against the Hyksos and his victory. Other inscriptions on, for example, temple walls were used to celebrate a king’s achievements.

A royal stela was a stone plaque, usually with a curved top which framed a panel containing a relief showing the king and suitable gods together with their names and honorific slogans, and the year of the reign. This preceded a more discursive and often lengthy text which explained in variable detail whatever was being commemorated. Stelae were posted at suitable locations, erected in temples, or carved into living rock.¹⁷ Their size depended on whose name they were in, and their purpose. They and other inscriptions were unlikely to have much direct impact on the wider population who might have had little or no access to them and could not read them anyway. Stelae were often buried, reused for their stone, or smashed in the course of time.

Stelae served as a symbolic means of consolidating official history. A typical royal example might recount a military expedition in an extravagantly complimentary way, for example likening the king to ‘a young panther’, occasionally with useful but more often opaque detail. Others were erected by prominent individuals, for example the Egyptian viceroys of Kush (Nubia), but these similarly were designed to publicize their personal achievements in the service of the king and their loyalty to the state. They lack any objectivity and almost invariably obscure the role or contribution of anyone else. References to Egyptian losses or mistakes are virtually non-existent on any stela. Nonetheless, such records contain references to specific events about which we would otherwise know nothing.

Dismissing these records as propaganda is too simplistic and is based on seeing Egypt from a modern perspective, though there are similarities to the publicity produced by some modern totalitarian regimes. The Egyptians invariably reimagined the specific events of their own times within what they regarded as perpetual and essential truths. One of those was that the divinely backed king was always victorious, that Egypt was superior to anywhere else and had been preordained to be so. Consequently the ‘facts’, or what passed for them, were adapted into semi-mythologized accounts that also served as ritualized and reassuring confirmations of those ‘truths’.

Much of what we know (or think we know) about the events of individual reigns comes from a small number of sources, often found by chance. Ahmes, son of Ibana (hereafter Ahmes-Ibana), was, or so he claimed, a brilliantly successful soldier under Ahmose I, Amenhotep I, and Thutmose I. His military exploits were detailed in a career inscription on the walls of his tomb at El Kab.¹⁸ He had an acute sense of being at the centre of events, and a similar notion of his own importance in the eyes of his king. Without Ahmes-Ibana’s tomb texts we would know virtually nothing about the military history of those three kings and in particular the fall of the Hyksos capital Avaris (Hutwaret) to Ahmose I.¹⁹ That momentous event set Egypt on the path to reunification and established the 18th Dynasty.

Ineni the architect served under several of the earlier 18th Dynasty kings. He proudly described on the walls of his tomb at Western Thebes (TT81) the great building projects he claimed to have been responsible for. Such men were primarily concerned to record their own masterful achievements as well as their loyalty to the king but their accounts are still priceless. Their accounts are typically obsequious and packed with references to their outstanding fulfilment of duty, and the gifts showered on them by the grateful king. It is precisely the comparative absence of such individual narrative career biographies for the reigns of, for example, Amenhotep III, Akhenaten and Tutankhamun that means we know less about the sequence of events later in the 18th Dynasty. There are plenty of other examples of senior officials or soldiers, but none of them left anything like Ineni or Ahmes’ accounts, or at least that have been found.

Men such as Ahmes-Ibana and Ineni were all success stories, or so they would have us believe, and are in that respect alone obviously self-selecting. As sources, their biographies are simultaneously invaluable and unsatisfactory. The dangers include taking these half tales masquerading as truth at face value, mistaking rhetorical claims for literal accounts, or selectively accepting or rejecting the content to suit preconceptions. They were also compiled potentially many years after the events they described, perhaps even sometimes by descendants, making it possible and even likely that there were errors in detail and sequencing. Similar problems apply to the artistic depictions of kings in action or at war, or portrayals of everyday life. The cinematic format of paintings and reliefs relied on idealized images, not realism. A scene of a gigantic king firing arrows from his chariot at his diminutive and traditional enemies as he ran over them was an allegory of his and Egypt’s position in the universe, even if in some cases it purported to record an actual event. Consequently, the image was easily usurped by one or more of his successors, just as any verbal account might be. Whittling away the puff to reveal the truth, if there was any, is often impossible.

Such pitfalls imperil the study of all historical periods, but Egypt has been unusually badly affected, as the late Egyptologist William Murnane observed:

One of the more vexing problems Egyptologists face is the interpretation of what we are pleased to call historical records. Since most of these texts are public statements, ‘published’ on tomb- and temple walls for a variety of commemorative or propagandistic reasons, they are generally assumed to be tendentious − but paradoxically, Egyptologists go on taking them at their face value as raw materials for history.²⁰

The same considerations apply to Egypt’s neighbours whose accounts are equally susceptible to be accepted at face value today.²¹ Many current controversies in Egyptology have been going round in circles for over a century.²² The reason is simple: the evidence does not exist to resolve them. Another scholar has said, ‘the materials for ancient history often do not permit us the luxury of deciding what we must believe, but only what it seems reasonable to believe’.²³

History as a discipline begins when disagreements start about what took place at a given time. This usually commences when the events are still happening, leaving even contemporaries confused by what was going on around them, especially in an era of disorder. This is true of all periods, but in Egyptology there is a particular love of foundering on minutiae in an endless quest to unravel a definitive narrative when no such thing existed even at the time. The belief is that the tantalizing truth is anxiously waiting to be released from anonymous mummies and illegible or cryptic inscriptions by bombarding them with hypotheses. The latter part of Akhenaten’s reign and its immediate aftermath is the best example. The arguments over reconciling the apparent identity of certain royal mummies with various and often conflicting scientific evidence for their ages at death and other physiological data for sequencing and relationships have also proved to be equally inconclusive and interminable.²⁴ This would never normally be possible for any other ancient line of rulers (for example, not a single Roman emperor’s body is known) and the effect in Egypt’s case has been only to muddy the waters more than it clears them.

If historical nihilism ever existed in Egypt, it had no voice.²⁵ Nor did any Egyptian independent historian emerge in later generations to compose a revisionist account of past events like Hatshepsut’s rule or Akhenaten’s revolution, even if the authoritative records to do so had ever existed which they probably did not. We are left instead mainly with occasional official or private references to contemporary events. Records such as Kamose’s stelae are easily dismissed as unreliable in some way, but this overlooks how bias serves as a defining characteristic of the era. Their bombastic conceits tell us a great deal about how Egyptian kings and their supporters saw themselves and wished to be seen. This is even the case if it is obvious that the contents of these texts are flagrantly one-sided and exaggerated. The Egyptian king, like every other ruler of his era, had no choice. Presenting himself as all-powerful and successful was essential to his prestige and continued tenure.

Military scribes are attested recording events, but their accounts do not generally survive. The text as written on a temple wall, stela, or scarab is very unlikely to be identical to the original version. The reliance on stock phraseology and the aesthetic arrangement of hieroglyphs is apparent from extant inscriptions. The potential for changes, mistakes, or invention, and at the very least the blurring of specific detail beneath clichés and repetition, is obvious. Some include stock passages that were based on earlier texts. Second-rate carving on the inscriptions, compromised by circumstances and poor rock, especially in tombs, as well as disintegrating plaster and partial loss of painted texts, creates endless difficulties of interpretation.²⁶ Many texts are incomplete thanks to damage incurred over the enormous length of time involved.

There are also surviving contemporary diplomatic letters in cuneiform, a method of writing commonly used by some of Egypt’s Western Asiatic neighbours. However, it is not even possible always to identify the correspondents, including the Egyptian king being written to. The best-known are the Amarna Letters which provide a fascinating archive recording correspondence of the courts of Amenhotep III and Akhenaten with various foreign powers in Western Asia. The Amarna Letters represent only a tiny part of what must have existed, limiting their wider relevance. The contents are also notoriously undated, cryptic and written in languages few can read today, resulting in dependence on translations and all their vagaries.

DATES

The given chronological dates for ancient Egypt today vary wildly, depending on the book or article being read. As one review has put it, ‘the variables in the evidence far outweigh the facts’.²⁷ Nonetheless it has been possible to draw up a relative chronology of the kings and some of the major events, even if these vary depending on the assessment of the length of reigns.

The only contemporary dating information normally available comes from inscriptions on temple walls or stelae, and notes (known as dockets) on stone, papyri, or pottery sherds. These referred only to a king’s regnal year, counted from accession, and sometimes might have involved parallel sequences if there was a co-regency (see Appendix 7 for regnal years). They do not supply absolute dates that can be tied to our calendar. Complications arise if the text is partially illegible, incomplete, or contradicts another. There was no continuous system of numbering years. When a new king came to the throne the count started again with his 1st regnal year. The highest known regnal year serves only as a terminus post quem (‘time after which’) for the death of a king, not the maximum length of the reign. Although this is an elementary archaeological concept, in Egyptology the highest known regnal year is often treated as evidence for the end of a reign or soon after. The discovery of a single new inscription on something as mundane as a potsherd or a quarry face can have a dramatic impact on the known length of a reign.

The only reliable way of pinpointing an historical event would be the ancient record of a solar eclipse in Egypt, tied by some piece of written evidence to a specific regnal year of a pharaoh. The absolute dates of past solar eclipses and their paths of totality are easily calculated. There were several major eclipse events during the period covered by this book, including partial and annular eclipses. A total solar eclipse passed across Thebes on 1 June 1478 BC. Another crossed a wide swathe of central Egypt, including the site of Akhenaten’s new city at Akhet-aten (Tell el-Amarna), on 14 May 1338 BC.²⁸ These indisputable events must have been occasions of enormous significance but there is no known Egyptian reference to either. Many attempts have been made by Egyptologists also to use Egyptian lunar dates, and to tie to Egyptian chronology what seem to be references to eclipses in other sources, such as Hittite texts for the eclipse of 24 June 1312 BC and the Bible, for example Joshua 10.13 and the eclipse in Canaan of 30 October 1207 BC.²⁹

The subject of eclipses as a basis for establishing absolute historical dates is really beyond the scope of this book but there are some important considerations. No ancient Egyptian record of a solar eclipse exists, even though Diodorus Siculus reported that the Egyptians were able to predict solar and lunar eclipses based on past observations.³⁰ The only known pre-Islamic record of a solar eclipse visible in Egypt is of the event on 10 March AD 601.³¹ Non-Egyptian ancient sources like the Hittites tend to refer to such astronomical events with euphemistic or allegorical terminology (if at all), making it difficult to know even if an eclipse is involved, quite apart from when, exactly where, or whether it was partial, annual, or total. This usually means more than one eclipse is a possibility, making a firm link to modern computed eclipse events in antiquity very difficult.

Ancient records of eclipses are unreliable for another obvious but usually overlooked reason. In the past the idea of associating an eclipse with a major event was an attractive prospect even if the two had not actually coincided, and so was exaggerating the eclipse. The eclipse of 30 April AD 59 was described as total in Rome by the Roman historian Cassius Dio to emphasize the importance of the omen after the murder of Nero’s mother Agrippina, but in fact was only partial in the city. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mentions a solar eclipse on 2 August 1135, describing it as a portent of the death of Henry I of England on 1 December 1135. The eclipse occurred on 2 August 1133 and appears to have been placed in 1135 in the Chronicle either by mistake or for the sake of a better story.³² These discrepancies are only apparent because the absolute chronology in both cases is known. It is obvious that even if an ancient source did refer to an eclipse, any coincidence with an important event might be false or manipulated, making conclusions about the actual date of the event wrong.

There are very few other ways of estimating absolute dates in Egyptian history. The Egyptians were fully aware that the solar year lasts 365¼ days.³³ However, they operated a civil calendar that ran only for 365 days, made up of twelve 30-day months and five intercalary days added at the end to make up the difference. The months were grouped into three seasons of four months: flood, growth and low water.³⁴

The civil calendar system began in or around 2781 BC. It was marked by the Egyptian New Year’s Day on what we call 19 July. This was the day when the star Sirius was first observed in the dawn sky rising at the same time as the sun (the ‘heliacal rising of Sirius’), a phenomenon that appeared just a few days before the annual inundation of the Nile every year. Thanks to the civil calendar’s annual shortfall of a quarter of a day ‘dark consequences’ ensued.³⁵ After four years of being in alignment, the civil calendar moved a day ahead of the solar year for the next four years. After forty years the civil calendar was ten days ahead for four years. After 400 years it was 100 days ahead. Of course, Sirius was still rising at the same point in the solar year as it ever had, and still does, but by then it appeared to an Egyptian that the heliacal rising (and the imminent Nile flood) was occurring 100 days after the civil calendar’s New Year’s Day.

It took 1,460 solar years (4 × 365) after 2781 BC for the civil calendar to fall back into alignment with the solar calendar which it did for four years between c. 1321 and 1318 BC before drifting once more.³⁶ The alignment returned in AD 139–42 during the reign of the emperor Antoninus Pius (AD 138–61), by which time Egypt had been a Roman province for 168 years. This was treated as so important that it was marked by a special issue of coins at Alexandria for the beginning and end of the four years concerned.³⁷ A century later a Roman writer called Censorinus recorded the occasion, specifying the exact year.³⁸ The phenomenon was known as the Sothic Cycle and as the celestial apocatastasis (‘the return of the stars to their original position’), though in fact it was the civil calendar which had temporarily returned to its original position. The AD 139 event is the key absolute date which allows us to count back to 1321 BC and 2781 BC.

The relevance of this engaging example of Egyptian madness is that some records survive of the civil calendar date on which the heliacal rising of Sirius was observed. By calibrating these records with the point in the Sothic Cycle it is possible to estimate an absolute date. One such observation was apparently made during the reign of Amenhotep I in the early 18th Dynasty on the 9th day of the 3rd month of the season of low water in his 9th regnal year appearing as an incidental calendar reference written on the verso of the Ebers medical papyrus.³⁹ The date of the heliacal rising was thus 309 days into the civil calendar, which means that by then 1,236 (4 × 309) years had elapsed since 2781 BC, making the year c. 1541 BC. However, we do not know which of the four possible years the same observation could have been made, so we can only say that the potential range was 1544–1538 BC. That would place Amenhotep I’s accession to 1553–1547 BC, but of course other estimates of the absolute dates exist.⁴⁰

Thanks to Sirius’s own movements in the heavens, and the place in Egypt where the observation was made (not always specified), the heliacal observations can at best get us only to within about two to three decades of the true date. This is better than nothing and it does mean that our dates for Amenhotep I are probably not much more than thirty years in either direction from the truth. From that we can estimate the dates for his successors but there is great uncertainty about how long many of the reigns were, or the incidence of possible co-regencies, increasing the margin of error. Much scholarly positioning on the subject has appeared over the years but pursuing the topic in search of further precision is futile.⁴¹ For this reason the dates given for Amenhotep I in this book match one of the currently used chronologies but strictly on the understanding it is only an approximation.

Much of Egypt’s history cannot be linked to dates of any other civilization of the period because no other contemporary societies’ records can be tied to absolute dates either.⁴² The only time we have any sense of parallel but undated chronologies is when, for example, diplomatic correspondence makes a reference in one letter to a named ruler of Egypt, and a king of Babylon or Mitanni, but such instances are rare. What matters most, then, is Egypt’s relative chronology: the sequence and lengths of reigns, and when events took place during them.⁴³ Nonetheless, the Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder, writing in the AD 70s, referred to Ramesses II ‘who ruled at the time of the capture of Troy’.⁴⁴ He had no idea about the dates involved but the Trojan War, or at least the context in which the myth was set, is today usually associated on an archaeological basis with roughly around the time Ramesses is believed to have ruled in the thirteenth century BC. It is not until 664 BC, when Egypt’s history can be tied to firm classical sources which are fixed to absolute dates, that precision is possible.

Other archaeological methods of absolute dating, for example radiocarbon dating, are generally less precise than the methods outlined above. For example, radiocarbon dating only provides a statistical probability of an organic item belonging within a range of dates which need calibrating against tree-ring data. However, there has been some success recently in dating organic items found in Egyptian tombs such as seeds which have tended broadly to confirm the approximate chronologies already used.⁴⁵

NAMES

Modern Egyptology throws up endless variant spellings and names forms, the most obvious of which are Thutmose/Tuthmosis (‘Thoth is born’) and Amenhotep/Amenophis (‘Amun is satisfied’). These examples are partly attributable to the survival of the names into Greek versions (here the second version given). They differ from transliteration of the hieroglyphs, themselves subject to variations even for the same ruler, and are used for convenience today. They bear little resemblance to their original forms. For example, Thutmose is sometimes pronounced from hieroglyphs by Egyptologists as Djehutymes but was possibly vocalized by the Egyptians as Tahati’missaw though even that is uncertain. The same problem afflicts the records of lesser individuals. Djehuty was a senior official under Hatshepsut. He is to be found today in books called either Djehuty or Thutiye. To the uninitiated it is easy to assume two quite different people are involved.

We blithely use the royal birth names of pharaohs, qualified by our addition of numerals in the manner of medieval monarchs, such as Thutmose III, because it suits us to do so. The Egyptians never differentiated their rulers by number. Although the birth name was prominently displayed it was usually depicted alongside the king’s regnal (throne) name in a pair of cartouches. The other three names held by a king were not contained in cartouches and did not usually appear on monuments. In Amenhotep III’s case we read his throne name as Nebmaatre (‘The Lord of Truth is Re’). The throne name (sometimes called the prenomen) was also the name by which the king was generally known outside Egypt. When references turn up, for example on the cuneiform diplomatic correspondence found at Amarna, they can give us an alternative idea of the pronunciation, at least as the words sounded to foreigners. Nebmaatre was written by Asiatics as Nibmuwareya (or variants of).⁴⁶

Variant spellings complicate even the use of indexes when researching a topic in various articles and books. To some extent this is unavoidable, and sometimes the only means of distinguishing two contemporary individuals of either sex who shared the same name. The lack of consistency is often infuriating. The best example is Ahmose or Ahmes (‘Moon Born’), a very common name for both men and women. Its pronunciation was probably more like y-‘hames.⁴⁷ Many members of the 18th Dynasty were called Ahmose, sometimes helpfully provided with a second part of the name like the queen Ahmose-Nefertari, while commoners might distinguish themselves by referring to their fathers, Ahmes-Ibana being a good example. In one recent work summarizing the members of the royal families the only resort was to allocate some letters such as ‘Ahmes B’, the queen and mother of Hatshepsut.⁴⁸

These inconsistencies in modern works, avoidable or otherwise, are matched by almost every other aspect of Egyptian history and culture. During the research for this book, it frequently turned out that what appeared to be two different pieces of evidence were the same one, the confusion created by variant spellings and translations, variant place names, and alternative chronologies. This is made more complicated by using different referencing systems, and there being no established series of core source material in bilingual texts as there is in Greek and Roman for the classical world.⁴⁹

THE EGYPTIAN LANGUAGE

The sensational unravelling of the tortuous Egyptian language is an extraordinary story. It is our portal into ancient Egypt in all its manifestations and the single greatest source of revelations about its history and society. The result has been the ability to read the career inscription of the old soldier Ahmes-Ibana, the conceits of Hatshepsut, a grumpy letter from Amenhotep II, and of course above all some of the revelations about the extraordinary reign of Akhenaten. Nonetheless, the obscure meanings and colloquialisms of Egyptian, together with completely different forms of expression, mean that while the language has brought us immeasurably closer to the Egyptians, it has simultaneously shown us how far apart we are from them.

Hieroglyphs were pictograms used to represent whole words, individual sounds and syllables. Some words that we rely on, such as forms that indicate tense in verbs, did not exist and neither did punctuation. Hieroglyphs could be written in any direction. There was a handwritten form known now as hieratic, used for papyri or dockets on pottery sherds or on a tomb wall, and a much later and even more abbreviated form called demotic. Literacy was greatly admired in Egyptian culture, but proficiency varied among the literate, depending on an individual’s training and personal or professional needs. This impacted on what was written down and how, contributing to problems understanding texts.

Pioneering modern introductions to Egyptian are available today but these are primarily pathways to familiarizing oneself with basic elements of the language.⁵⁰ They are successful and imaginative approaches, but function very much in terms of conventional ‘accepted’ translations of stock formulae and phrases.

To make Egyptian more coherent (and convenient to typeset), a modern convention is to transliterate the hieroglyphs into letters that are easier for us to reproduce. Since some of the sounds, insofar as we understand them, are not normal for English or other European languages this has meant introducing additional symbols and letters. These are listed in Appendix 1. In this book the transliterated font has been used to show these words, but most are consigned to the appendices and notes.

There has not been a human being on Earth who would recognize ancient Egyptian as it was heard, or could speak it as it was uttered, for over 1,600 years. In the late fourth century AD the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus published a translation in Greek of the texts on one of the obelisks in Rome made in the time of Augustus 350 years earlier by a Greek called Hermapion. Ammianus also made some basic comments on hieroglyphs and how they differed from the alphabetic letters the Greeks and Romans were familiar with.⁵¹ Before long even that knowledge had faded.

Despite the ingenious decipherment pioneered by Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832), and the work done since, knowledge of the ancient Egyptian language remains incomplete. For all their beauty and elaborate design, hieroglyphs were not a comprehensive written form of Egyptian, at least not in a way we can now fully understand. Alan Gardiner described ‘the absence of vocalization’ in hieroglyphics as having irritating consequences. This was a marvellous understatement, yet he was only referring in that instance to the impossibility of transcribing proper names.⁵²

Some words are still not fully understood, and many can be translated in several different ways. The grammar remains afflicted by ambiguities. The multiple possible meanings of hieroglyphs and absence of other important features such as tense and mood in the written language mean we will always be distanced from it. This is especially likely when faced with an unusual text that does not contain the usual stock phraseology. The study of the language is a specialized pursuit and many Egyptologists have only a passing familiarity with it.

Had it not been for the survival of some ancient Egyptian words into Coptic, used in early Christian Egypt, we would be even worse off. The first scholars of Egyptian unravelled what words the hieroglyphs represented by comparing the Egyptian symbols with the Greek translation of the same text on the Rosetta Stone, which dates to 196 BC. Words that had recognizably survived into Coptic provided clues to meaning and pronunciation. Coptic uses letters based on the Greek language with the addition of signs from demotic and derived many of its words from late Egyptian. The creation of Egyptian vocabularies and grammars in modern times is a startling achievement, but it would be a mistake to assume this means scholars are always capable of identifying exact meanings. Moreover, the Rosetta Stone used a late form of Egyptian, differing in many ways from the so-called Middle Egyptian in use in the 18th Dynasty. By the time of Egyptian’s last manifestation in Coptic, Middle Egyptian was as remote as early Anglo-Saxon English is to us.

James Breasted described ‘how helpless our incomplete knowledge of the Egyptian dictionary leaves us as soon as we pass from the conventional language of the few classes of monument familiar to us, to some untrodden path’.⁵³ Although he wrote that in 1906, his essential point holds true to this day. Alan Gardiner added in 1938, ‘the uncertainties of Egyptian translation are indeed deplorable’.⁵⁴ Both observations are still valid today as salutary warnings to Egyptologists trying to reconstruct precise family relationships or sequences of events from texts that include obscure phrases or vocabulary.

Hieroglyphs are much closer to certain early modern forms of shorthand in the way sounds and words are represented, haphazard and varied types of abbreviation, omission of vowels and a reliance on context to resolve ambiguities in use of signs which include symbols and simplified pictograms. Shorthand exists today in several different types, but it is rarely used now and thus less familiar than it once was. The English diarist Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) used a system called Thomas Shelton’s Tachygraphy which the present author is fluent in. The similarities to hieroglyphic expression are striking, and especially with transliterating what is, by definition, an incomplete representation of the spoken language.

When using shorthand, the omissions and ambiguities do not trouble the composer, but for anyone else trying to read the text back, problems often arise. Written Egyptian, like shorthand, is prone to selective and inconsistent abbreviation, potentially confusing to anyone other than the person who composed the text. This is especially true where the medium, such as a scarab, is small and where the text is also poorly executed. Add on the distance of thousands of years and trying to read a remote and obsolete ancient language and the danger of assuming a reading is correct becomes obvious.

Another issue is the need to introduce elements to make good the normal omissions, or unintelligible signs, and thereby create a comprehensible translation. This sometimes results in assuming these additions to be as valid as the direct translation of the signs that do exist. Time after time it turned out while writing this book that a translation, however well intentioned, had been based to some extent on restored texts where whole words or even phrases have been supplied by the translator or transcriber to make good gaps. Obviously, this is often unavoidable, but it does mean the translations are not what they sometimes appear to be. Just to compound the problems, many Egyptian texts are damaged and incomplete, some only existing now in old drawings or photographs. Much surviving written Egyptian was formal and formulaic. It rarely veered into the vernacular or served as an authentic written form of everyday spoken Egyptian. Only in the Amarna period during Akhenaten’s reign did this become more common, even in official texts, reflecting the more intensely personal characteristics and realism of art under his regime.

Egyptian words could be written in various ways, using different hieroglyphs to represent the same sounds. The phonetic results were thus identical or similar, but the appearance of the written forms in hieroglyphs could be noticeably different. The same sequence of hieroglyphs may represent both the phonetic sounds of a single word, or individual words in a phrase, depending on the context.

Just as with forms of modern shorthand, Egyptian words were normally represented by signs that represented only their consonants. The same symbol or symbols might also be used to represent other words which happened to have the same consonants but different meanings. The use of determinative signs alongside phonetic signs sometimes clarifies the meaning in Egyptian, but not always. The ‘determinative’ was a sign that confirmed the meaning of a series of phonetic signs, for example a pictogram of a horse after the letters of the word for a horse (ssmt). A determinative could be used on its own either to indicate that same word, or to serve in another way as a quite different phonetic value. It could also be omitted, or another determinative substituted.⁵⁵ The governing principle seems to have been either the space available or individual taste on the part of a person whom we might regard as the equivalent of a typographical compositor. Word order was complicated by something now called ‘honorific transposition’. For example, the name of a god normally took precedence even if it formed the later part of a king’s name. Tutankhamun, for example, was written Amun-Tut-Ankh.⁵⁶

Understanding of the language is now sufficiently advanced that for the most part translations provide us with plausible versions of the original meaning. But the ambiguities and obscurities remain. Consequently, translations of the same original text often vary considerably. Elementary scrutiny of many translations reveals them to be pastiches of a text probably correct in terms of the general meaning, but which could easily have been translated several different ways. There are countless examples of translations of rare or even unique specific terms in Egyptian that are suppositious, sometimes with optimistic significance then being attached to the translation which often ends up being treated as definitive. This is less of a problem with standard texts like dedication stelae or religious texts where the content was matched by many similar examples.

Despite these problems, for the most part texts can now be translated with a good degree of relative accuracy. ‘Relative’ here means compared to other far better understood ancient languages like Greek and Latin where most of the enduring problems with Egyptian do not exist. Apart from standard brief notices like dockets and dates, successfully translating Egyptian is most likely with longer texts where the context is clear and helps to unravel difficult phrases and terms. More challenging are colloquialisms (which might easily be overlooked now and taken literally), obscure or anachronistic references, epithets or titles found in isolation, and especially when any of these have few or no parallels. Many of the ‘rules’ of Egyptian grammar are modern conventions, devised to make sense of a language that will never now be fully understood.

KINGS AND QUEENS

The words for kings and queens are particularly good examples of the distance between the way we express these concepts and the ways the Egyptians did. For example, in transliteration ḥmt-nsw was ‘king’s wife’ or ‘royal wife’ and variations such as ḥmt-nsw-wrt, ‘great royal wife’. We often substitute words like ‘queen’ but a more literal translation from Egyptian would require a descriptive phrase in English. The word for a king that appears here (nsw or nesu) means ‘he of the (sedge) plant’, a symbol of divine royal power. Appropriately it was represented by a hieroglyph in the form of that plant.⁵⁷ Thus, what we would call a ‘queen’ was in Egyptian represented by words that meant ‘woman/wife of he of the sedge plant’. The term did not have to mean a conjugal relationship, a crucially important distinction from today and often leading to unwarranted and over-literal interpretations. By the late 18th Dynasty, the eldest daughter could serve her father as great royal wife, fulfilling the role in a formal and symbolic way.⁵⁸

There were other ways of indicating a queen was meant, for example the addition of a determinative hieroglyphic sign showing a woman wearing a diadem and holding a flower, or another for the uraeus symbol of monarchy. Incorporated in a royal cartouche that contained the signs for her name, this made it clear the individual was a queen but a queen-consort in our terms. In this respect the Egyptian queen served less as a separate royal identity and more a widening of the concept of kingship as a ‘male-female composite’.⁵⁹ This makes it much easier to understand why the position of queen could be filled by the king’s mother, his daughter, or his wife. It shows similarly how a queen, such as Hatshepsut, could reverse the process and try to create the same composite when declaring herself king (see Chapter 7).⁶⁰

The word for king, nsw, is of very obscure origin and symbolism. It is now understood to be a reference to the spiritual institution of kingship, and was usually paired with another word, bity (shown as a bee), which meant the living king ruling in the temporal or mortal sphere. However, the sedge plant was formerly believed to be symbolic of Upper Egypt (the Nile Valley), and the bee of Lower Egypt (the Delta), confusing the symbolic concepts of kingship with the geographical zones of the country. This arose from the Greek text on the Rosetta Stone which used words that can mean higher and lower land or spiritual and mortal concepts, leading to the ambiguous former English translation ‘King of Upper and Lower Egypt’. Nowadays nsw-bity is usually translated as ‘Dual King’, meaning king in the divine and temporal senses. This is explained in more detail in Appendix 7. Of course, the geographical distinction between the Nile Valley and the Delta remains, not least because the Egyptians recognized them to be quite different by using the red crown of Lower Egypt and the white crown of Upper Egypt, combined in a double crown to symbolize the unified nation.⁶¹

There were many other words or terms related to what we would call a king, but which translate more literally as ‘majesty’, ‘the perfect god’ or ‘Lord of the Two Lands’. These have been placed in Appendix 7 with their transliterated equivalents. Some of these terms could be and were feminized when appropriate with the simple addition of the letter ‘t’. For example, ‘Lord’ which in Egyptian is neb became nebet, meaning ‘Lady’ or, perhaps better in an Egyptian context, ‘she-Lord’, though it is also to be found translated as ‘Mistress’.⁶²

Today the word ‘pharaoh’ is often used for an Egyptian king. In the Old Kingdom the word for pharaoh, made up of the signs for a house and a column (pr-‘ɜ), meant literally ‘Great House’. It was used as we use the word ‘palace’, for example to refer to where an official worked. By the late 18th Dynasty, the term was a synonym for the ruler, used in a letter from a steward in Memphis to Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten), in this instance ‘Lord Pharaoh, may he live, be prosperous, and be healthy’ (the latter exhortations often abbreviated to l.p.h. by Egyptologists).⁶³

All these terms were conventionally male because the positions were usually held by men, and that is why we translate them as ‘king’. Our word ‘king’ is, however, matched by our word ‘queen’, applied when a woman is either the consort of a king or rules in her own right. With no such word for a female ruler in Egypt the closest was a feminized version of the word usually translated as ‘sovereign’ (see Appendix 7). This still meant that on those occasions when a woman did assume supreme power, she had no choice but to adopt the terminology of a male ruler, even if it was sometimes feminized.

The word for mother (mwt) was the sign for a vulture feminized with the letter ‘t’. Combined with the word for king it became ‘mother of the king’. Of course, the vulture headdress was worn by Egyptian queens and women who ruled as kings and was the symbol also of Mut, the mother goddess and consort of Amun, whose name was the same as that for a mother.

A term such as ‘son’ or ‘father’ served equally well in Egyptian to describe more distant or even only symbolic connections. In the absence of any specific words for grandson, ‘son’ might also mean ‘grandson’ or even descendant, or an honorific statement of proximity and intimacy.⁶⁴ The same applies to ‘daughter’, ‘brother’, ‘sister’, ‘father’ and other similar terms for which the Egyptians also had no alternatives like ‘grandfather’, ‘uncle’, ‘cousin’, or other extended family relationships. Formulae were sometimes used. By multiplying the determinative ‘f’ in the word for father two generations or more could be indicated, but even this could be symbolic rather than exact. This makes unravelling connections within royal families difficult since it is often impossible to know what the relationship was, because the Egyptians did not always make such precise distinctions.

OFFICIALDOM

Egypt’s administration on one hand can be seen as a well-organized structure of departments or ministries that took care of everything from construction to mining, administering royal estates, managing the royal household, and taking care of regional and local government. On the other, the glitterati of the 18th Dynasty court circle and the bureaucracy enjoyed an array of elaborate, often ambiguous and overlapping, titles and responsibilities that defy precise understanding today. Many held several posts. The system was riven with nepotism and jobs were often handed down in families, rather than competed for, as was normal for the ancient world. This problem is made worse by the inconsistency in the way Egyptologists refer to these positions. There was, however, the so-called Onomasticon of Amenope. This work of instruction, of which several examples are known, was compiled at some point in the 20th to 22nd Dynasties and was based on older traditions. It is divided into categories of various aspects of Egyptian life, including sections on occupations, towns, buildings and classes of food. The text provided a detailed breakdown of what the jobs involved were called, and thus served as a sort of handbook.⁶⁵ These sections provide important evidence for how Egyptian society operated and was structured, and the terminology employed.

The most senior position was that of vizier. The English word ‘vizier’ derives from an Arabic word wazīr via Turkish which meant viceroy, but was probably ultimately derived from wazara, ‘to bear a burden’, or in other words something akin to the bearing of the obligations and duties on behalf of the monarch. Its closest equivalent now is ‘chief minister’ or ‘prime minister’ though by the middle of the 18th Dynasty there were two ‘viziers’, one in the north and one in the south, which helped cope with Egypt’s geography. The vizier represented royal authority in his area and presided over a hierarchy of other officials and scribes who dealt with taxes, administering the goods and products which needed processing and storing.⁶⁶

The memorial chapel of the vizier Rekhmire (temp. Thutmose III) (TT100) contains a description of the duties and rituals involved. He described himself as second only to the king. This reflected the way Rekhmire’s home would have exhibited the same information about his status.⁶⁷ Like all such men, Rekhmire was also keen to include references to how ‘greatly loved’ and ‘greatly respected’ he was, as well as being the beneficiary of royal favour.⁶⁸ The vizier basked in an array of supplementary honours and titles listed in Rekhmire’s career autobiography.⁶⁹ The chapel’s main purpose was to record and advertise his status in life. It was an extravagant facility that can only have been paid for out of the profits of high office, whether legitimate or otherwise.

Rekhmire featured a speech by the king in his chapel that made much of how difficult the job was. Thutmose III exhorted the vizier to be restrained, conscientious, to follow the letter of the law, and even not to be over-zealous in a way that would impoverish people.⁷⁰ Rekhmire’s tomb texts explained how such a vizier sat in a chair with a cushion upon a dais with the ‘40 skins’ law code laid out before him, named after the skins on which it had been written. Other officials were arranged around him in two rows according to precedence. These men reported the current state of their individual spheres, such as frontier fortresses and income and expenditure. The assembly included scribes to record the proceedings. In his turn the vizier would proceed to report to the king via the chief treasurer. Petitioners were brought in to make their cases.

Rekhmire’s uncle had held the vizierate before him. These men, some of whom undoubtedly had blood connections to the royal family, owed their advance to the king and were often able to rely on their positions becoming effectively hereditary, ensuring their families’ prominence in future generations. Despite his importance and claimed popularity, the state of the memorial chapel and the desecration of his images show that Rekhmire fell from grace at some point. The fate of his three sons who were thereby denied the chance to succeed their father is unknown.⁷¹ Rekhmire is only one of several 18th Dynasty officials believed to have been summarily deposed after falling from favour.

In Egyptian the word for a vizier was pronounced something like ‘Tat(y)’.⁷² The hieroglyph was an image of a nestling duckling, its literal meaning, but it had the same phonetic value as the first part of the word used for a vizier, along with the additional ‘t’. In Egyptian it was possible to drop the additional t and provide only the duckling sign, and still mean ‘vizier’ with the understanding being reliant on the context. The explanation comes from the fact that the phonetic value of the duckling sign resembled the word for a curtain, used as the determinative sign in some references to a vizier instead. The vizier was thus ‘he of the curtain’, perhaps an allusion to what he sat behind while waiting to receive other officials.

The English word ‘viceroy’ is now normally applied to the ‘King’s Son of Kush’ and variants.⁷³ This powerful position was conferred on the man placed in charge of Nubia on behalf of the Egyptian king. By calling the incumbent a son of the king, the status was emphasized but this was not a reference to any blood relationship. This kind of terminology can be confusing to the modern mind, leading to some literal (and naïve) inferences, especially on the basis of a shared and very common name.⁷⁴ Similar problems arise with other honorific titles like ‘God’s Father’ where the god involved was the king. The term could be used for what we would call the king’s father-in-law.

Another recurrent example is ‘mayor’, normally elaborated in English to ‘mayor of Thebes’. The Egyptian word denoted ‘foremost’ or someone who took precedence over others, perhaps ‘the one in charge’. Other possible meanings include ‘prince’ and ‘governor’. Together with a determinative the word was qualified. For example, a figure of a seated man might be used to indicate he was a man whose role placed him above others. The obvious problem with the possible translations is that they all have quite different and more precise meanings in English, whereas the Egyptian was an all-purpose term.⁷⁵

The official usually described today as a ‘chamberlain’ supervised royal domains. He also acted on the personal authority of the king. There were several words or phrases for this position. One meant something like ‘the first man under the king’. Another meant ‘he who is front of [others?]’. The fact that multiple English words are used sometimes adds to the confusion. The titles ‘chancellor’, ‘treasurer’, and the most literal ‘royal seal-bearer (or wearer)’, all appear in modern books. The term was made up of the words for the kingship in the mortal sphere and a cylinder seal on a necklace. The combined meaning seems to be ‘the bearer/wearer of the royal precious seal’, hence the various English options which all amount to the same thing: this official was a royal treasurer whose office was symbolized by possession of the royal seal.

The use of words ‘Steward’, ‘Overseer’, ‘Chief’, ‘Superintendent’ and even ‘General’ in English translations of Egyptian look like several distinct supervisory posts. They are good examples of how various terms have been used to translate what is largely the same phrase in Egyptian, often including archaisms drawn incongruously from the vocabulary of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English estate management, reflecting the time at which Egyptian dictionaries were being compiled. The Egyptian term (imy-r) for all these positions was a colloquial phrase that meant something like ‘he who is in the mouth [of those under him]’. The Egyptian phonetic version of the term was more usually represented only by the determinative for an ox tongue which had the same phonetic value as the individual alphabetic signs.⁷⁶ ‘Overseer’ would, for example, never now be used to describe a modern supervisory job but has a resilient presence in contemporary translations of Egyptian. It is also translated as ‘master’, as in the title Master of Horse.⁷⁷ The consequence is that this one term ends up now being translated into various words implying several different jobs existed when the Egyptians were referring to only one type of supervisory role.⁷⁸

Another word, using the sceptre determinative sign, meant ‘he who was in control/charge’. It served a similar purpose but is also translated in various ways, for example ‘leader’.⁷⁹ Just to complicate the matter further, the sign for the sky could be used for ‘chief’ or ‘commander’, indicating someone literally above others. It could be used interchangeably with imy-r, even by the same person to refer to the same position.⁸⁰

These titles were often clarified with a descriptive specification of office.⁸¹ There was, for example, the Overseer of the Army, normally translated as General, or even Great Overseer of the Army, perhaps what we might call Commander of the Armed Forces.⁸² The Overseer of the King’s House resembled the modern British office of Master of the Household of the Sovereign. Another good example is the Overseer of Works on the two great obelisks Amenhotep, who worked for Hatshepsut (also sometimes translated as her Chief Steward).⁸³ At the same time he held other positions which were similarly explained with their own specifications of office.

There are no agreed conventions for translating these posts in Egyptology. This can be confusing when consulting two different books, obscuring how two individuals had held the same position. This is of additional significance if the two are thought to have been related because of the habit of treating such posts as hereditary.⁸⁴

Quite what any of these officials really did in these jobs in Egypt, apart from profiting out of them, is another issue altogether (see Chapter 11 for Amenhotep III’s father-in-law Yuya and his astonishing array of honours). Some of these positions were largely honorific conceits that granted status, influence and wealth, while all the work was carried out by underlings about whom we know little. Men like Rekhmire, or Setau who was Overseer of the Workhouse of Amun at Karnak some time between Amenhotep II and his grandson Amenhotep III, dressed in a manner that befitted their stations. Setau, for example, was portrayed wearing a full-length kilt under a tunic, and a complex double-tiered wig that amounted to a headdress of rank.⁸⁵ Rekhmire’s memorial chapel described an elaborate ceremonial audience with him as the vizier, but this mainly consisted of him being reported to rather than Rekhmire doing anything substantive. The occasion was clearly the apex of a system that involved an array of lower tiers of officials operating at a local level, mainly exacting (or extorting) taxes and tribute, distributing funds and settling disputes over land, all conducted with untold quantities of record-keeping. Many of these individuals enforced their prerogative in ways that were based on precedent, frequently involving abuse of privilege. Surviving correspondence suggests the men involved took every opportunity to flaunt their status by berating their underlings with pompous admonishments and warnings.⁸⁶

The overlapping spheres made for jealousy, rivalry, and factionalism – thereby diverting energy into feuding which might otherwise have been used to challenge the ruler, particularly later in a reign. Such jockeying for position and the ear of the monarch or leader is routinely attested in places as divergent in time and place as the Tudor court in England and Germany’s Third Reich. It can be an effective way to rule. This also suggests posts were invented as rewards rather than out of any substantive need for another bureaucrat.

Egypt’s officialdom was also obviously open to corruption. Holding such a position could be very profitable for the incumbent and his family. Some jobs were undoubtedly obtained with bribes. There is little direct evidence for this, though complicity on the part of senior officials in tomb robbing is one area that is recorded (see the Epilogue). Examples from other periods show that the most profitable offices were sought by any means. The Roman emperor Claudius’s wife Messalina notoriously presided over the blatant selling of positions and privileges under her husband’s nose.⁸⁷ In the English Tudor court royal patronage included the distribution of profitable monopolies and these were routinely squabbled over by jealous members of the aristocracy.

These are only some of the issues affecting our understanding of ancient Egypt. There is no doubt that we are at a greater distance from understanding the Egyptian world than we are from, say, the Greeks and Romans, in almost every way. This is an essential ingredient in our appreciation of Egypt’s fundamental uniqueness, a phenomenon that was no less evident to other contemporary ancient societies.⁸⁸ Yet, one of the most gratifying experiences of exploring the ancient Egyptians’ culture and history is the endless opportunity to discover their humanity. They were prey to the same temptations, ambitions and flaws, even if they sometimes found different ways to deal with and express them.