38 Granite statue of Amenhotep, son of Hapu, with his arms in a gesture of greeting. He wears a traditional wig, and signs of old age are apparent in his face. From the temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak, near Luxor. 1.2 m (4 ft) high. 18th Dynasty.
Amenhotep, son of Hapu, was the most distinguished man of his age, recognized in his lifetime as the king’s most effective and reliable official. In the context of this book we may best appreciate him in his office as ‘chief of all the king’s works’ for Amenhotep III, a role to which he was appointed at the height of his powers after service as a scribe, a priest and a community leader. As we evaluate the monuments of Amenhotep III, we have here the official who – his statues assert – was ultimately responsible for ensuring that they ‘came into being according to the will ’ of his namesake, the king. The stature of Amenhotep, son of Hapu, among his fellow Egyptians is shown in the marvellous statues of him [38, 39], mostly from the temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak, but especially in the reputation he held for centuries after his death as someone of exceptional understanding, even able to cure sickness in response to prayers. The statues seem to show him at different points of his career, and specific details include clothing and wigs characteristic of the end of the 18th Dynasty. Hence he is shown up to date, as a man of his time. Yet the basic form of each of his statues is based on a different Old Kingdom model from 1,000 years or more earlier, as though he were not only appropriating ancient archetypes but also knew all about them. Indeed, the temples and cemeteries of Abydos and Saqqara and other such places must have been familiar to the great man, because he did not obtain his models in galleries, museums or public spaces.
38 Granite statue of Amenhotep, son of Hapu, with his arms in a gesture of greeting. He wears a traditional wig, and signs of old age are apparent in his face. From the temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak, near Luxor. 1.2 m (4 ft) high. 18th Dynasty.
39 Diorite statue of Amenhotep, son of Hapu, seated as a scribe. He wears a wig characteristic of his time, and indications of corpulence are visible in his torso. From the temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak, near Luxor. 1.3 m (4 ft 3 in.) high. 18th Dynasty.
If we presuppose a modern interpretation of the artist as a creative individual, we may object that Amenhotep, son of Hapu, was more bureaucrat than artist, even though his funerary inscriptions mention specific monuments and statues for which he was responsible. In which case, we simply turn to his contemporaries, a father and son named Men and Bak, who have left a joint funerary inscription on an outcrop at Aswan in the far south of Egypt, beside the quarries for the black and red granite used in some of their artworks [40]. Men is shown at an altar in front of a colossal seated statue of Amenhotep III on the right, while Bak stands in front of a figure of the next king, Akhenaten. Bak is also offering at a great altar so, by analogy with his father’s scene, the royal figure is not Akhenaten himself but a monument, perhaps one of the great boundary stelae at Amarna (see p. 223). The so-called ‘Amarna style’, which became an important revision of the usual royal style during Akhenaten’s reign, has been used here for Bak’s scene but not Men’s. In other words, father and son are shown in the one composition working with two different art styles, and this may be, as close as we are likely to discover, a first-hand record of a couple of ancient Egyptian artists at work at one moment in history. It is impossible to point to any particular monument and say Men made this or Bak made that – however tempting it may be to attribute, say, the ‘Colossi of Memnon’ to Men (see p. 47). Still, we do know who the two men were and what they did for a living, and we can surmise that Men’s boss was Amenhotep, son of Hapu. These are only three men, but many other names could be added to the roll-call of pharaonic artists and their supervisors from almost every era of pharaonic history, from the venerable Imhotep of the 3rd Dynasty down to Senusheri, who erected monumental statues in the temple at Coptos for Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–246 BC).
Even the happy outcome of linking an artist to a specific artwork is not always beyond our ken. For example, at the beginning of the 18th Dynasty, a scribe and official at Karnak named Ineni set up an inscription in his tomb at Thebes, in which he recorded the time he spent directing the masons and artists who carved and decorated a distinctive chapel using the finest native calcite from Hatnub (‘the golden mansion’), ‘and all the craftsmanship was under my attention’. The chapel he is talking about was commissioned by Amenhotep I (c. 1514–c. 1493 BC) to house the holiest shrine of Amun-Ra at Karnak, and may still be seen nearby today [41]. Moreover, possibly the first of the towering pylon gateways characteristic of later temples was built at Karnak for king Thutmose I (c. 1493–c. 1481 BC) – with a pair of magnificent granite obelisks in front of it – and this work was also supervised by Ineni. The pylon and one of the obelisks are still standing. On top of all this, Ineni built king Thutmose’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings, ‘alone, none seeing, none hearing’.
40 Rock inscription showing Men (right) and Bak (left) offering in front of monuments of their respective kings. Aswan. 18th Dynasty.
41 The calcite shrine of Amenhotep I built under the direction of Ineni. From the temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak, near Luxor. 4.5 m (15 ft) high. 18th Dynasty.
So the artists of ancient Egypt are not so anonymous as may be expected after thousands of years. In fact, if we wish to study village life in pharaonic times, it turns out that the best-known communities are actually communities of artists. Every bit of evidence indicates that artists were highly respected and well supported by the nation through the provisions of the king and his highest officials; they are well known precisely because so much attention was paid to them and so much material provision made in support of their activities. Of course, all this support and provision was thoroughly recorded, so official documents can be added to the archaeology of their artworks, homes and workplaces. Despite the popular impression of slavery in ancient Egypt, with pyramids piled up at the tip of the lash, in recent years we have learned how well looked after were the builders of even the grandest of the pyramids, as demonstrated by the towns they settled at the Heit el-Ghurob at Giza and not least by their own well-appointed tombs.
Back in the 20th century, it used to be customary to discuss the development of Egyptian art in evolutionary terms, as though watching our simple ancestors trying to make sense of what art may be, and what can be done with it. In the new millennium we may be increasingly inclined to view the extraordinary transformation of the human landscape wrought by monumental art and architecture in terms of technological innovation, since the flavour of today is that each generation discovers new technological mindscapes. In that case, why not look for change and innovation in every generation of the ancient world too, and recognize the building of ever bigger and more sophisticated monuments as an end in itself? In truth, perhaps we ought to see more clearly how the advances of art in pharaonic Egypt are based upon social innovation. The eruption of monumental art in this culture during the early 3rd millennium BC was based upon professional specialization, as men were encouraged and supported to hone skills as painters, masons, sculptors, plasterers and so on. In turn, specialization depended on the emergence of the institution of kingship – in historical terms as much as mythology. Art in ancient Egypt – like the other extraordinary new technology, writing – evolved from the same nucleus as the king.
Working for the temples
Monumental art also needed the Nile Inundation. By virtue of the Inundation, Egypt was an exceptionally fruitful land, with a thriving agricultural economy common to all districts. The farmers grew a rich variety of produce, often obtaining multiple crops in any given year. As well as bringing water, the Inundation could be relied on to replenish the soil annually and cleanse the accumulation of salts, thereby eliminating the necessity to leave land fallow and rendering the vagaries of rainfall of little concern to Egyptian farmers, apart from the occasional destructive storm. Equally the Nile was a reliable highway connecting, at all times of the year, the various communities of Egypt, which seem far flung on a modern map but were rarely more than a few kilometres from the river [42]. The Inundation even brought desert areas, including building sites on the desert edge, within easy reach of boats for several months of every year. The constant flow of water northwards into the Mediterranean Sea is complemented by a constant, strong, south-moving wind, so travel on the Nile in either direction is usually straightforward for experienced pilots. Consequently quartzite from Gebel el-Ahmar, finest limestone from Tura, calcite from Hatnub, finest sandstone from Silsila, granite from Aswan or diorite from Toshka could be moved throughout the length of Egypt on barges, to supplement the basic limestone and sandstone bedrock of the Nile.
42 Scenes of commercial traffic from the tomb chapel of the governor Pahery. Painted limestone relief. El-Kab. 18th Dynasty.
Because the Nile was a reliable highway for the exchange of people and goods, the larger towns were obvious focuses of economic and administrative activity for the smaller communities of each district, and typically also the religious heart of each district. Of course, the exceptionally dense settlement round Memphis indicates that this was an extended focus of activity for the nation as a whole, but away from Memphis and the large towns, settlements might dwindle to no more than a cluster of farms. Nonetheless, efficiently exploiting the Inundation for agriculture required collaborative efforts to construct the banks, dykes and canals necessary to move huge volumes of water to wherever they were needed and hold them there. In other words, efficient farming in ancient Egypt was beyond the capability of farmers acting individually and, already during pre-dynastic times, patterns of activity had been established involving organization on a community-wide basis, and centred on the towns. So, in effect, governing Egypt as a nation meant unifying the activities of Memphis and the larger towns, and the farmers who depended upon them – a cohesive process facilitated by the presence of a single common language, Ancient Egyptian. The priorities of government were those of the farmers, whose success was the foundation of the economy, and in turn their agricultural production was taxed in kind and made available to be redistributed in line with the hierarchies of authority (the more responsibilities you had within an institution, the more you received from it).
For example, each temple was endowed by the king with agricultural land from which to apportion offerings and also feed its staff and dependent communities, including those who built, decorated and maintained the fabric of the temple buildings. In addition to the offerings and legacies of private individuals, such temple endowments were often greatly supplemented by revenues obtained from foreign trade or tribute, and at times even military conquest by the king. As a result, temples actually became the principal administrative and economic institutions of Egypt certainly from the New Kingdom onwards, by which time we have detailed information. In this way the specialization of time and skills, and the organization of labour, required for monumental art became possible, and with it the building of monuments in the temples of every principal community. For earlier periods, the same detail in the documentary evidence does not exist but the sheer size of pyramid complexes is an obvious indication that they were institutions on a national scale, employing many thousands of people at any one time. They employed people, of course, to maintain and support those who operated the temple complexes, though the numbers directly involved in the original construction must have been many thousands at times. One authority, Dieter Arnold, has estimated that up to 4,800 people were employed on the building site itself during construction of the pyramid complex of Amenemhat III (c. 1805–c. 1760 BC) at Dahshur.
In this regard, the three (or more) pyramids of Snofru highlight two important points (see pp. 54–56). First, a pyramid, like a cathedral, was a place in which to bury a king but not necessarily a tomb (in the end Snofru could only have been buried in one of them). In our own culture, we recognize that Westminster Abbey is really a church and El Escorial a palace, college and monastery, though they are both appropriate places to bury monarchs. In the case of a pyramid complex, the concept of the Risen Earth undoubtedly lends itself to royal burial beneath the mastaba or pyramid but it does not require a burial. Which leads to the second point: the ‘mortuary temples’ of the early kings at Abydos or the Sun-temples of the 5th Dynasty at Abu Ghurob are not burial places either but they are products of the building process associated with royal tomb complexes. Indeed, we may surmise from the singular example of Snofru’s pyramids that, during the earliest days of the pharaohs, there was always a royal complex being built somewhere, and possibly more than one, with huge implications for employment, taxation, and every aspect of the government of the land.
To turn this idea round, the temples of ancient Egypt, however huge and well provisioned, were not places of congregation; once built, they were places for offerings, where only a handful of priests might be required at any time. Nonetheless, a pharaonic temple has to be understood as a busy institution with a central core devoted to worship but a much larger area, physically and organizationally, devoted to other activities, including palace communities, as we have seen, but also the housing, factories and stores required by priests, masons, potters and numerous others. For example, the settlements at the Heit el-Ghurob were part of the operational fabric of the royal pyramid complexes at Giza – both while the pyramids were being built and afterwards, when they were in use as temples. Enormous areas of the grand temples of the New Kingdom and the Greco-Roman Period fit the same description, as operational complements to the sacred buildings. Book-keeping accounts that happen to have survived from temples at Abusir in the 5th Dynasty dovetail straightforwardly with comparable documents from the 13th Dynasty and the New Kingdom at Thebes to reveal patterns of behaviour consistent across more than a millennium among the temple staffs and dependent communities, which included full-time priests, part-time priests, craftsmen, scribes, watchmen, dish-washers, lamp-carriers, labourers, fishermen, traders and so on. According to these accounts, the daily offerings required in temples were held in the central stores and granaries of different temples, where teams of scribes – many of whom doubled as priests – kept tabs on what needed to go where, made sure each shrine was provided with offerings as and when required, and maintained inventories of whatever was still in store. So the business of a temple in one sense was to make offerings, but in another sense it was to build and constantly maintain the monumental infrastructure for these offerings.
Hence, the archaeological remains of temple granaries, as much as the written accounts noted above, indicate beyond doubt that many temples were so well furnished they could provide for dependent communities of many thousands of people. The pyramid town at the Heit el-Ghurob is in the desert, so the people who lived and worked there could not have grown their own crops, even if they were obliged to do so. However, the nearby temples at Abu Ghurob were able to provide their communities with more than 100,000 individual rations every year, according to the temple accounts. The villagers simply received food and other requirements as ‘gifts’ from the temples, with bread, beer and meat most apparent in the archaeological remains. The distinguished archaeologist Barry Kemp has calculated that, 1,000 years later, the granaries of the mortuary temple of Ramesses II – the so-called ‘Ramesseum’ at Thebes – once filled could have fed at least 3,000 ‘average’ families for a year without being replenished, while the festivals of the gods accelerated the outlay for local communities and expanded to include ‘festal’ beer, fruit cakes and other luxury ‘gifts’.
Another document, the ‘Great Harris Papyrus’ from the 20th Dynasty, addresses the same matter from a different perspective. This document – the only one of its kind to have survived – was compiled shortly after the king’s death as a summary statement of the numbers of men whose service was reassigned to various temples during the reign of Ramesses III (c. 1187–c. 1156 BC). The numbers involved are so enormous that for a long time scholars assumed the scroll contained a statement of all the men in Egypt whose service was available to all the temples during the king’s reign. In fact, only a small number of temples is listed. For example, the productive activity of 86,486 men and herdsmen, with the use of several ships, was turned over to the estates of Amun-Ra during Ramesses’ reign, with another 13,000 for the estates of Ra-Horakhty, 3,000 for the estates of Ptah, and so on. Of these, however, more than 62,000 were assigned to the king’s newly founded mortuary temple at Medinet Habu (see p. 199), and at least four other new temples are mentioned among a couple of dozen building projects. The figures can be understood in one of two ways: either these are the numbers of workmen who were resettled in order to build the new temples and the king’s other new projects, in which case the average number of men available to each project was at least 3,500 (compare the figure of 4,800 men on p. 70); or else, given that ‘herdsmen’ and ‘ships’ are specified, they are the numbers of farmers whose production was being taxed and redistributed specifically to support the new building projects. If the latter interpretation is correct, then the men in question will not have moved from their own land, and might not even have noticed a meaningful difference in their lives. In either scenario, many might have been transferred from older temples that were now built or redundant, such ‘transfers’ presumably being routine during each new reign. Nonetheless, assuming many of these men were the heads of extended families and adding in the numbers of family members, it is clear how vast numbers of Egyptians – hundreds of thousands at least in a population of a few million – were immediately caught up in the constant commitment to building temples, whether paying taxes to them or actually working on them. As a final note, however, more often than not the families involved were specifically placed under the jurisdiction of the palace or local officials, which is to say that temples might tax or employ them but temples did not have unchecked authority to control their lives.
Masterpiece
The offering shrine of Ptahshepses
43 Architrave and offering panel in the form of a niched wall from the tomb chapel of Ptahshepses. Painted limestone relief. Architrave 4.17 m (13 ft 8 in.) wide; panel 2.8 m (9 ft 2 in.) high. 5th Dynasty.
For much of the 5th Dynasty Ptahshepses was high priest of the god Ptah at Memphis. His tomb, at nearby Saqqara, was almost the archetype of a pharaonic official’s tomb, a subject to which we will return in Chapter 9. Though measuring nearly 40 by 30 metres (120 by 100 feet) in plan, with an original height of at least 3.5 metres (11 feet) but probably significantly more, his mastaba was nevertheless a solid tumulus with almost no internal structure. Its mud-brick façade had the familiar niched appearance of early royal monuments, but otherwise the only external features were two brief statements of his titles and name, plus the architrave over a door. The text on the architrave is a request for offerings, and the door led into a single offering chapel built into the mass at the southeast corner of the tumulus. Nearby, but not accessible from the chapel, was a single vertical shaft, which actually dropped vertically through the roof of the mastaba into the subterranean chamber where Ptahshepses was finally interred.
As visitors passed through the door into the offering chapel, they would be directly facing the so-called ‘false door’, red-painted (to simulate granite, perhaps?) with blue hieroglyphs (to simulate faience inlay, perhaps?). Such a massive, decorated feature is obviously intended as a point of contact for the living and the dead, where offerings may be left but through which none may pass. Scholars regularly use the term ‘false door’ to describe any similar feature in an offering chapel, though clearly this example emulates a wall niche, not a door, and is ‘impenetrable’ even in a symbolic sense. Across the surface the hieroglyphic text recounts for the visitor who is making the offerings (at least, if they have brought a lamp) a life lived forty-five centuries ago, and built upon proximity and service to the pharaoh. As such, this is one of the earliest recorded biographies of an individual anywhere in the world.
Ptahshepses was born in the reign of Menkaura (see pp. 58–61), educated in the royal palace, and another king (probably Userkaf) later ‘gave him the king’s eldest daughter, Maatkha, as his wife because his person [the pharaoh] wanted her to be with him more than any man’. Ptahshepses devoted his professional life to following the king by boat or on land in all the king’s festival appearances, while acting as ‘the keeper of secrets for all the work his person wants doing’. As a result, ‘whenever his person praises him on a matter, his person has let him kiss his foot, for his person does not let him kiss the ground’. Consequently Ptahshepses’ false door is also a statement of pharaonic values hammered into the face of the rock, and his mastaba thus becomes a record of the advance of civilization and the king’s authority across the world.
As high priest of Ptah, Ptahshepses bears the titles ‘prophet of Ptah in all his places’, ‘prophet of Hathor in the same places’ and ‘prophet of Truth in the same places’. He was also ‘greatest of directors of craftsmen’, a title common to every high priest of Ptah, which implies the ‘flow’ of creativity from the Creator through the high priest to the working craftsmen. A modern, sceptical audience may assume a priest’s association with crafts is a polite conceit, but other titles indicate that his priestly duties also extended to the king’s valley temple and three of the Sun-temples at Abu Ghurob (whose names are given as ‘Hieraconpolis of the Sun’, ‘Where the Will of the Sun Gathers’, and ‘The Consideration of the Sun’). These are among the handful of major monuments of the 5th Dynasty, so Ptahshepses was directly responsible for what are now huge archaeological sites. As such, he stands in the same relationship to the monuments of his age as does Amenhotep, son of Hapu, much later (see pp. 64–65). Whether Ptahshepses was responsible for building them or simply served among them as a priest is probably a moot point, given the expected relationship between priests and the foundation of temples. However, his professional concern was to realize the interests of his king, and the final statement of his biography insists that it is Ptahshepses ‘who inspires all craftsmen before the king’.
44 Detail of the inscription in [43] naming the Sun-temples and other shrines in which Ptahshepses served.
