137 Intricate detail showing Egyptian officials in the presence of the pharaoh, from the tomb chapel of the vizier Horemheb. Saqqara. Painted limestone. 18th Dynasty.
‘She Who is Facing Her Lord’: The Tombs and Temples of Thebes |
Tombs decorated according to archetypes from the Old Kingdom continued to proliferate throughout the 2nd millennium BC. At Saqqara in particular, officials’ tombs along the desert edge from Meidum to Giza, among the pyramids and causeways of their kings, developed as a hive of extraordinary complexity and artistic elaboration for century upon century. In the northern and central reaches of the Nile Valley, using the superior local limestone, the tradition of decorating tomb chapels with low relief and fine sculpture often still attained the marvellous artistic success of the 3rd millennium [137]. Certainly no art from Egypt at any time is more elegant and refined than reliefs in the finest tombs at Saqqara dating to the late 18th and early 19th Dynasties – in general terms, from the late reign of Amenhotep III until the early decades of Ramesses II, c. 1350 to c. 1250 BC. At this time, the soft plastic forms of human bodies and the intricate details of their elegant clothes and extravagant wigs bear witness to Egypt’s confidence as a cultural and economic authority [138]. Elsewhere, art of the highest quality graces contemporary foundations from Egyptian Nubia to Abydos (see p. 17).
137 Intricate detail showing Egyptian officials in the presence of the pharaoh, from the tomb chapel of the vizier Horemheb. Saqqara. Painted limestone. 18th Dynasty.
138 Dyad of the king’s treasurer Maya and his wife Meryt, from a shrine in their tomb chapel. Saqqara. Limestone. 1.58 m (5 ft 2 in.) high. 18th Dynasty.
Sadly the intervening millennia and the sprawl of Cairo have all but obliterated the temples, palaces and settlements corresponding to Saqqara and Memphis so, in order to appreciate how officials’ tombs were arranged in relation to the entirety of a great city, we must turn to the example of New Kingdom Thebes. Here in the south, the poor-quality local limestone – friable and flinty, prone to fracturing, and punctuated by bands of unstable ‘Esna shale’ – mitigates against relief work, though tombs such as that of Ramose vividly demonstrate the artists’ ability to overcome such difficulties when tasked to do so [72]. Typically, however, Theban artists preferred painting on a dry plaster base and so created masterpieces of the ancient world, such as the exemplary tombs of Sennefer, Nebamun and Sennedjem. Of course, fine painting may be seen throughout Egypt during the 2nd millennium, including well-known cemeteries from Aswan to Meir, Beni Hassan and Meidum, but the profusion and elegance of the New Kingdom tombs at Thebes reflect the city’s importance after the reign of Montuhotep II. During this age, literate and theologically astute artists and their patrons developed specific interpretations of ancient themes, and the ruling men and women of Thebes were literally drawn into the age-old beliefs.
139 Scene from the burial chamber of Irynefer, showing the deceased embarking on the Sun’s procession through the world (cf. [57]). Deir el-Medina, West Thebes. Plastered and painted limestone. 19th Dynasty.
140 Scene from the tomb chapel of Irynefer, showing the deceased drinking from a pool of water beneath the shade of a burgeoning palm tree. Note how the tree grows from the bottom of the composition, whereas the man is located on the parallel edge of the pool as a baseline so as not to appear in the water.
First, the ancient spiritual order is proclaimed repeatedly in scenes showing the world laid out before the king. In this life, officials kiss the ground where he walks in procession, and the different peoples of the earth pay homage and make offerings, while the tomb-owner stands beside him. Meanwhile, on nearby walls Osiris receives the deceased into the next life – sometimes literally, sometimes through the symbolism of sailing to Abydos or more obscure mythological imagery. Next, as we have seen, the world is also laid out before the tomb-owner, who gathers in the harvest of an abundant estate along with the acclamation of his peers and the king’s praise. The tomb-owner makes offerings out of his bounty to deceased relatives, who in turn greet him on his arrival in Osiris’ kingdom. Ubiquitous boat scenes relate the gods’ festivals to the funerals of mortals and the Sun’s procession and, of course, the Elysian fowling goes on forever (see p. 124). Irynefer, a man from Deir el-Medina, standing in the Sun’s boat beside a heron (which represents the soul of the Sun, and whose name sounds similar to benben) proclaims the twin miracles of Creation – that anything exists at all, and that what exists is ordered and comprehensible [139].
In this spiritual context, Irynefer’s garden pool [140] is a paradise of rest and refreshment, thankfulness and relief, a theme picked up in an older poem:
Today death seems to me like a whiff of myrrh;
like sitting beneath the sail on a windy day.
Today death seems to me like a whiff of lotus;
like sitting on the shore of intoxication.
Today death seems to me like a trodden-down path;
like when the man returns from a journey to their home.
Today death seems to me like a clearing sky;
like when a man grasps what he did not know.
Sennefer and his wife [141], standing under a canopy of grapevines painted across the undulating ceiling of their rock-cut chapel, also look forward to a shady eternal summer from ‘the shore of intoxication’ but they are being purified with water, like the statues of gods in their shrines [98]. Sennefer’s bulbous ceiling is bursting with charm as well as meaning – and it is such a distinctive artistic achievement that aficionados still travel the world to see the so-called ‘Grapes Tomb’ in Thebes.
On the other hand, amid this fruitful vision of eternity the songs of the ‘unseeing harper’ are a familiar counterpoint in New Kingdom tombs [142]. As though singing in Sinatra’s ‘wee small hours’, he laments the fleeting moments of life because ‘no-one remains in the land of Egypt’. The haunts of Imhotep and Ptahhatp, he sings, have gone forever, so place your trust not in men’s words but in your heart.
141 Scene from the burial chamber of Sennefer, showing the purification of offering-cult statues for the deceased and his wife Meryt (cf. [98]). Plastered and painted limestone. 18th Dynasty.
The West of Thebes
Throughout the New Kingdom, Thebes was also being developed as the principal royal cemetery, utilizing the desert wadi we call the Valley of the Kings, where the Sun sets behind the Theban hills. Working drawings indicate that each royal tomb was intended as a monumental sketch of the descent of the Sun (Ra) into the earth (Geb), and successive chambers mark the hours of the night, adapting themes already developed in Old Kingdom pyramids [144]. The earliest tombs here date from the reign of Thutmose III, unless a tomb winding through the cliffs between the Valley and Deir el-Medina, in its original form, might have been the tomb of his grandfather, Thutmose I. The younger Thutmose’s tomb stands at the end of a rock-cut staircase, high in cliffs beneath a natural pyramid at the head of the Valley. From this moment on, the traditional use of pyramids for royal burials is to be replaced by a huge, integrated project to construct a single royal burial complex behind the hills, with a mortuary temple for nearly every king at the edge of the floodplain in front (see [150]).
142 Detail showing the unseeing harper, from the tomb chapel of Nakht. West Thebes. Plastered and painted limestone. 18th Dynasty.
143 General view of the burial chamber in the tomb of king Thutmose III, with the king’s sarcophagus in the foreground and scenes of the Sun’s circuit of the night on the walls. Valley of the Kings, West Thebes. 18th Dynasty.
144 Detail from a wall in the burial chamber of Thutmose III, showing the goddess Isis in the form of a sycomore-fig tree suckling the king (cf. [165]). The king’s late father stands behind him. Plastered and painted limestone.
Thutmose III’s tomb descends steeply from a discreet entrance in a natural rock-chimney until it reaches a rock-cut vertical ‘well’ – perhaps simply a safeguard against flash flooding – beyond which stairs enter a chamber painted with the personifications of more than 700 words for gods and shrines, towns and roads, fields and crops, the essential fabric of human communities. Immediately below here is the burial chamber, painted with the unfolding narrative of the Sun’s journey through night – his allies battling every malevolent agent who tries to interrupt the rhythm of the universe and provoke not death, but Nothing [143]. A pivotal moment in this tableau is the fifth hour of the night when ‘Creation’ in the form of a scarab beetle erupts through the artists’ registers and emerges as the Risen Earth at the grave of Osiris. The ancient name for all the decoration in the Valley is Amduat, ‘where there is adoration’, and in this chamber the physical remains of Thutmose III lay in a nest of coffins inscribed with his name and a speech by Geb, who says ‘this son of mine is the king, whom I have given purity in the earth and transfiguration in the sky’ (see p. 37).
Later in its history, tombs in the Valley doubled in size in terms of the number of chambers and grew ever larger in terms of dimensions, but the essential character of the decoration did not change [145]. Simple painting was often replaced with vividly painted reliefs and, though the number of masons and artists also doubled, by now they were so painstaking and ambitious – and work had to be fudged with plaster in the poor stone – that the decoration was rarely complete at the time of the king’s death, which is why the Valley provides some of the best evidence for ancient working techniques.
145 Graphic presentation of decoration in the descending corridors and chambers of the tomb of king Sety I in the Valley of the Kings, from the original account of its discovery in 1817 by Giovanni Battista Belzoni.
Temples and festivals
As in the earliest times, the New Kingdom pharaoh was the focus of social organization and religious observance as much as he was the centre of government. His procession from temple to temple to celebrate festivals remained the basis for structuring the calendar, and ongoing belief in his supernatural nature is illustrated by a larger than life-size stela erected for Thutmose III in the temple of the god Montu at Armant. Here a narrator offers ‘a collection of instances of might and success performed by this very god … over and above the instances of action his person has made at any moment because, if they were related individually, they would be too numerous to put in writing’. First, we are told the king overpowers the mineral world because ‘he shoots at bars of copper, all wood having split like papyrus. Afterwards his person placed an example of that in the estate of Amun, a target of wrought copper three-fingers thick with his arrow in it’. Next he slays the mightiest of animals – lions, elephants, even a rhinoceros. After shooting wild bulls at dawn, ‘breakfast-time came and their tails were at his backside’. Finally we learn how Thutmose set out from Memphis to defeat a coalition of every human opponent at the Battle of Megiddo in Palestine about 1458 BC. Whichever audience the stela and the copper target were intended for, the narrator adds, ‘I tell you what he does without lying, without exaggerating’. Such continuity in religious belief and practice, harnessed to renovation or rebuilding, is exemplified by the way the White Chapel was moved round and reused at Karnak more than once before it was deemed redundant and broken up to become a rubble in-fill (see p. 27). However, as was the case with burial in the Valley of the Kings, the temples of the gods took on a new scale from the reign of Thutmose III, who began to fashion Thebes as the ‘Heliopolis of Upper Egypt’. A granite stela from a temple of Ptah at Karnak gives an insight into Thutmose’s intentions:
Now, my person found this very chapel built of bricks, and the poles and its wooden doors fallen to decay. My person commanded stretching the string once again on this very chapel, which is now built in perfect, hard limestone with the walls round it in brick, worked sufficiently hardwearing for all time. My person has put doors in place for it in the finest, straightest cedar, plated with Asian copper. In effect a brand new chapel for Ptah in the name of my person.
Such new foundations grew bigger through time because the mathematics they embody required them to grow exponentially along the main axis, or be demolished and built from ‘square one’ when the scale of development became impractical (see pp. 45–46). So for the architectural landscape of ancient Egypt as we see it today, the reign of Thutmose III was a watershed, though a distinctive new feature of these massive temples, the twin-towered pylon gateway, is first recorded even earlier in the reign of his grandfather, Thutmose I. The difference between the massive New Kingdom temples and those of earlier periods has been characterized as a shift from a natural, accretive development at each site to a consistent, formal plan. Undoubtedly New Kingdom pharaohs often cleared away existing structures – even those of their immediate predecessors – to allow for new building, but for that very reason we have limited information about the forms of most temples before then, apart from the pyramids themselves.
146 Standing behind the mud-brick ruins of a later town, the temple of the goddess Renenutet at Medinet Maadi is probably the best-preserved stone-built temple from the Middle Kingdom.
In some instances, as described by Thutmose III above, the king is not reinventing a temple so much as switching perishable materials for stone. No doubt, in some temples the original ‘nucleus’ might have been preserved in perishable materials and only subsequent buildings removed to accommodate new development. However, stone temples conforming to New Kingdom architectural practice have survived from earlier periods at places such as Medinet Maadi [146]. None the less, most of the pharaonic temples as they appear today have their origins in the reign of Thutmose III, at least insofar as he established a formal template that was embodied in later temples, whether by extending or replacing the New Kingdom foundations.
At Thebes the whole city was shaped by the festival routes along which statues of Amun-Ra would process. Hence Thebes ‘proper’ is bounded north and south by his great temples at Karnak and Luxor, and its central stone avenue is a causeway between them, running parallel to the river. Of course, the architectural form of both temples – and any others directly associated with them – is dictated by the requirements of processions: each has a central axis formed with gateways and ramps, which lead straight into the offering chapel, as discussed in Part 1 [147]. In fact, Karnak as laid out by Thutmose III has a second axis because two principal festival routes meet here.
147 The first entrance pylon beside the principal quay of the great temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak, which stands on the sphinx-lined route of the Perfect Festival of the Valley. The pylon and modern crane in the background mark the route of the Harim-festival procession to Luxor Temple.
148 Decoration on the wall of a Sun-court showing a Harim-festival scene, with priests collecting and distributing offerings. Luxor Temple. Limestone. 19th Dynasty.
The first route is that of the Harim (Opet) festival, lasting a week or more during akhet, the Inundation season, when brightly painted statues of Amun-Ra, Ptah and the other gods of Karnak ‘sailed upstream’ (by river or being carried along the causeway) to ‘greet’ the statue of Amun-Ra of Luxor [148]. There, the king kept a night of vigil beside the shrine, where Amun-Ra spoke to him ‘in the way a father talks to his son’. Indeed, most of what we know about this divine relationship is based on relief scenes in and around the central shrine, which illustrate the king’s life from conception (arising in sex between Amun-Ra and the queen) to enthronement. Next day the king returned to his officials, who acclaimed his physical union with Amun-Ra, and during the subsequent festivities cakes and alcoholic drinks were distributed to crowds, while folk vied to set a question before the gods’ statues in the hope of an oracular response. Accordingly the essential theme of the decoration of Luxor Temple away from the shrine is the sequence of episodes in the festival itself.
Back at his Karnak shrine, Amun-Ra looked directly west across the Nile to Kheftethirnebes, ‘she who is facing her Lord’ – the name of a distinctive natural eruption of hills along the western horizon. At the heart of these hills the tombs of ancient kings were clustered round Deir el-Bahri, and in the desert behind Kheftethirnebes lay the new royal cemetery in the Valley of the Kings. The counterpoint to the Harim-festival was the Perfect Festival of the Valley: once a year, during shemu, the dry season, processional statues left Karnak and ‘sailed’ west to Deir el-Bahri and the mortuary temples of New Kingdom pharaohs, to spend dark nights in the shrines of kings who had gone before and celebrate the incarnation of Amun-Ra in his son’s mortal body. Accordingly the ramps of the temples at Deir el-Bahri align with the east–west axis of Karnak, and the route was furnished on both sides of the river with a sphinx-lined causeway as well as processional shrines in the manner of the White Chapel. However, over the centuries many of these chapels became temples in their own right. For example, one in the floodplain in front of Deir el-Bahri became the mortuary temple of Sety I [149]. The pioneering Egyptologist Amelia Edwards visited this temple in 1874 and found that ‘it is, at least in part, distinctly a memorable edifice as the Medici Chapel at Florence or the Superga at Turin’. Sety began this temple in tandem with the extraordinary hypostyle hall at Karnak – furnished with 134 columns, those flanking the main axis reaching 21 metres (69 feet) high – as well as the masterpiece of a temple at Abydos. To take another example, at the southern end of the procession, at modern Medinet Habu, Thutmose III and his co-regent, Hatshepsut, developed new temples in place of a Middle Kingdom chapel upon ‘the mound of Djeme’, which the statue of Amun-Ra from Luxor Temple otherwise visited weekly. Several mortuary temples were subsequently developed alongside this site until eventually Ramesses III (c. 1187–c. 1156 BC) incorporated the whole area into his own mortuary temple [150]. A network of canals connected all these west-bank temples and chapels together, just as the Old Kingdom royal pyramids had once been mooring points for boats. An inscription of Amenhotep III explains how his mortuary temple ‘takes the bow-rope of the Valley and the stern-rope of the Delta’ as ‘a resting place for the lord of the gods in his Valley-festival’.
149 General view across the ruinous Sun-court in the temple of Sety I, built on the site of a processional shrine along the route of the Valley-festival. Gurna, West Thebes. 19th Dynasty.
150 Aerial view of the complex surrounding the central stone-built mortuary temple of king Ramesses III, which incorporates earlier temples as well as a palace, administrative offices, housing and storehouses. Medinet Habu, West Thebes. 20th Dynasty.
151 Scene of Sety I going to war in his chariot, from the exterior decoration of the great temple of Amun-Ra (cf. [213]). Karnak, near Thebes. Limestone. 19th Dynasty.
Whereas the Harim-festival celebrates the king’s divine conception and descent, the Valley-festival highlights each king’s mortality, so specific events from his life may exemplify his vocation and his intimacy with the Creator, including inscriptions concerning an expedition to the exotic land of Punt as we shall see below (see p. 207). Most famously, at the start of the 19th Dynasty Sety I and then Ramesses II led Egypt against the empire of Hatti. The war was conducted far from Egypt, mostly in the area round Qadesh in modern Syria, but is memorialized in the kings’ mortuary temples as well as temples at Karnak, Luxor, Abydos and other places, where scenes of ancient, contemplative rituals complement scenes of conflict and brutality we can but wish had been confined to the first age of history [151].
At Karnak a stela of Thutmose III talks about the relationship without which none of this monumental festivity would happen [152]. The scene at the top shows the king offering to Amun-Ra, supported by Kheftethirnebes depicted as a goddess. The god states what he intends shall be the outcome of Thutmose’s reign: ‘I will perform a miracle for you,’ he says, ‘I will put your power and might over every highland, put your power and fear of you in every lowland, and dread of you at the corners of the sky.’ In the present context, the most telling remark is his final one:
You have erected my sanctuary in the work of eternity, made longer and broader than anything which existed before. The gate named ‘Menkheperra is very, very great’ – its perfection graces the estate of Amun. Your legacy is greater than that of any king who has come into being and, though I commanded that it be done, still I am satisfied because of it.
Immediately behind this stela was the chapel where offerings were placed before the principal statue of the god, while the other end of the processional route facing the statue is Kheftethirnebes – the Theban hills – where offerings were laid before the stelae and statues of the innumerable dead. Accordingly, officials vied to build tombs overlooking the Valley-festival route: the oldest overlook Deir el-Bahri itself, the most impressive look down from the slopes of Khokha and Asasif, while others spread along the hillsides, northeast along Dra Abu el-Naga or south along Sheikh Abd el-Qurneh.
152 Top of the so-called ‘Poetical Stela’ of Thutmose III, from the great temple of Amun-Ra. On either side, offering to the plumed figure of Amun-Ra, the king is shown with Kheftethirnebes behind him. Karnak, near Thebes. Granite. 1.7 m (5 ft 7 in.) high. 18th Dynasty.
153 Scene with preserved colour from a chapel at Karnak, showing multiple images of Alexander the Great in the presence of Amun-Ra. Painted limestone. 18th Dynasty, reworked in the 4th century BC.
The decoration of temples
By comparison with the pyramid complexes of earlier kings (see Chapter 3), a different kind of temple is associated with the New Kingdom. At the heart of the temples of gods and of mortuary temples alike is not a pyramid or an obelisk, but a small, dark offering chapel and shrine. The surviving foundations may seem as bleak and austere as they are overwhelmingly massive, but in places the decoration is still sufficiently well preserved to indicate that almost every detail might have been coloured originally [153]. Indeed, reconstructions suggest the temples would have had a garish impact on the surrounding landscape. In addition to brightly coloured reliefs, gold and inlays highlighted scenes that would have been almost painful to look at under the daytime Sun. Pairs of stone obelisks typically flanked the pylon gateway, each made from a single piece of stone stretching to the sky to catch the Sun-rays in a gold-covered pyramidion (or benbent) [154]. In archetypal scenes on the exterior walls, the temple is characterized as a dynamic place because of the king’s activities – above all the king leading the festival processions and overthrowing enemies in the wider world beyond.
Through the main gate of the mud-brick enclosure wall a pavement leads to the stone temple itself, entered through the twin-towered pylon [155], behind which one or more enclosed courtyards stand open to the Sun but for a colonnade round the perimeter. Monumental statues of the king may flank the doorways, sometimes with their eyes fixed as though on the horizon, sometimes angled down awaiting a visitor’s approach. Consequently, entering these temples even today you are immediately conscious of the massive presence ahead. Passing through the courtyards and entering the hypostyle hall, you experience the phased shift from intense sunlight to darkness: the hall is roofed so light can only enter through the door or through a clerestory – more than 20 metres (66 feet) above visitors at Karnak – while the columns create a massive stone ‘marsh’. Indeed, the column-capitals are formed as the flowers or umbels of marsh plants, and the bottoms of both columns and walls are typically decorated in relief with marsh plants or scenes of the districts of Egypt offering their agricultural bounty (see p. 222). The roof, the rising floor and encroaching walls are entirely intrusive so walking through the temple from the pylon to the chapel you must climb the Risen Earth, passing through a monumental ‘marsh’ to ascend the mound where the god’s image stands hidden in a bolted shrine.
154 The well-preserved pylon of Luxor Temple, showing the original locations of colossal statues of the pharaoh and one of a pair of obelisks, with four niches for wooden flag-poles apparent in the façade. Limestone. About 65 m (215 ft) wide, which is the same size as the nearest pylon at Karnak. 19th Dynasty.
155 Reconstruction of the pylon entrance to the mortuary temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu (see [150]). 20th Dynasty.
156 The ceiling of an offering shrine decorated with a vivid blue sky and a sequence of crowned, flying vultures denoting the goddess Nekhbet, carrying fans as symbols of a festival procession and cartouches as symbols of the Sun’s circuit. Medinet Habu, West Thebes. Painted limestone. 20th Dynasty.
Unsurprisingly, the principal decoration of the columns and walls occupies a central band, neither high nor low, and is divided into horizontal registers of information, usually showing scenes of the rituals that take place in the darkened areas, though the king may be the only priest visible. Hieroglyphic texts reproduce the gods’ words to the king as they hand him the symbols of authority. A ceiling of stars seems endless except where the procession of the Sun marks the axis to the shrine as a sequence of winged discs or as a golden disc moving through the body of the sky goddess, Nut [156]. Following this axis with the help of a lamp, the visitor arrives at the chapel of the god’s shrine or nearby discovers other chapels, perhaps housing the processional boat of the god or a life-size statue of the king and god [157], such as Sobk-Ra and Amenhotep III at the beginning of this book. Paradoxically, therefore, the entrance of the temple is its most massive aspect, whereas the extraordinary heart of darkness is small, still and confined. On the other hand, viewed from within, the movement away from the god’s shrine is an atomic eruption out of singularity, silence and darkness, which expands to form the world outside.
157 Statue of Horemheb kneeling to make offerings before Atum. From a cache of statues beneath Luxor Temple. Diorite. 1.91 m (6 ft 3 in.) high. 18th Dynasty.
The arrangements of scenes in temple decoration also reveal areas of specific activity in ways scholars are becoming increasingly aware of. For example, columns displaying different titles and regalia for the king may mark his actual progress in procession through different episodes of a ritual. To take another example, a frieze showing lapwings with human arms nesting in bowls may be read by rebus as the phrase ‘all the people are adoring’, and columns marked with this group perhaps indicate areas of access during festivals for persons other than priests. Such ‘hieroglyphic’ meanings may occur even where they are not conspicuous: as we have seen, the stars on the ceilings effectively repeat the word for ‘adoration’. To take another example, almost without exception the ancient ‘smiting scene’ [155, 158] decorates the twin towers of the pylon gateway, behind which the Sun may rise (or set, if the pylon is on the west of the Nile) so the temple ‘resembles the horizon formed from the sky when the Sun is rising there’, in the words of an inscription of Amenhotep III. The Egyptologist José-Ramón Pérez-Accino has suggested that the smiting scene here sets up a pun based on the homophony (common sound) of two Egyptian phrases – for ‘punishing the earth’ and for ‘dawn’. Of course, the significance of the Sun rising between the towers of a temple is perfectly comprehensible, as is royal authority expressed in the utter overthrow of enemies. However, the ‘hieroglyphic’ identification of the images together in the most massive decorative space on the outside of the temple adds layers of possible interpretation, whereby the king’s authority becomes part of the created order – his temporal authority re-created in the fabric of each day, his activities unbounded and defining like the Sun’s, and so on.
158 Scene of Sety I being handed enemies to ‘smite’ by Amun-Ra, from the exterior decoration of the great temple of Amun-Ra. Karnak, near Thebes. Limestone. 19th Dynasty.
King and queen
As a final note, a significant aspect of monumental art at Thebes during the New Kingdom, especially during the 18th Dynasty, is that the king is often accompanied on his throne. In an offering chapel he may be enthroned with a god, of course, but elsewhere in the statues or reliefs of temples he will often have a mortal companion, and this earthly peer is usually one of the royal women [163]. Typically she is the King’s Great Wife [159] but not unusually may be his mother or a daughter. By contrast, men – royal or otherwise – are mostly absent from his company until the 19th Dynasty (see p. 229). The relevance of royal women is apparent in other ways, as at Abu Simbel [160] where there are temples dedicated to the worship of Ra-Horakhty in the form of Ramesses II and the goddess Hathor in the form of the King’s Great Wife, Nefertiry.
159 Archive photo displaying the astonishingly large coffin of Ahmose-Nefertiry, Great Wife of king Ahmose II. West Thebes. Plastered and painted cedar wood and cartonnage. 3.78 m (12 ft 5 in.) high. 18th Dynasty.
160 Aerial view of the reconstructed temples of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel in Wawat, Nubia. 19th Dynasty.
Of course, royal women had been prominent in the pyramid complexes of Old and Middle Kingdom pharaohs and, during the Middle Kingdom, Sobknefru became king alongside her father, though for reasons unknown to us. Nonetheless, the queens’ status at the beginning of the New Kingdom is exceptional [161], and reached its apogee in the career of Hatshepsut (c. 1475–c. 1458 BC), the daughter of Thutmose I, who then became King’s Great Wife of her half-brother, Thutmose II. However, after the latter died and was succeeded by his son, Thutmose III, Hatshepsut did not step aside and instead became co-regent as ‘king’ in her own right. We do not know specifically why she became king, though we can understand her accession in the context of the exceptional significance of queens at this time, and appreciate that she did not simply steal the throne – in fact, she had no independent reign at all. More to the point for present purposes, Hatshepsut essentially acted as would be expected of any king, not least in being a prodigious builder of temples [162].
161 Statue of a king’s wife wearing a headdress in the form of a vulture (cf. [156]). Perhaps originally from a dyad also showing the king. Asasif, West Thebes. Limestone. 28 cm (11 in.) high. 18th Dynasty.
162 Reconstructed statue of Hatshepsut as pharaoh in the iconic form of a sphinx, shown with a lion’s mane. From her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri, West Thebes. Plastered and painted limestone. 1.07 m (3 ft 6 in.) long. 18th Dynasty.
163 Colossal dyad of Amenhotep III and his Great Wife Tiy with three daughters depicted alongside their legs. Medinet Habu, West Thebes. Painted limestone. 7 m (23 ft) high. 18th Dynasty.
164 Detail from a wall in the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut, showing houses raised on stilts along the shore of the Red Sea or a river in Punt. Deir el-Bahri, West Thebes. Painted limestone. 18th Dynasty.
The temple most often associated with her, though completed by Thutmose III after she died, literally took the place of earlier structures at Deir el-Bahri. Its ‘stacked’ terraces rising under the hills emulate the tomb of Montuhotep II alongside, though Hatshepsut’s own burial lay behind the hills in the Valley of the Kings. A pair of chapels, one for the goddess Hathor nursing the infant king, another for Anubis and other gods of burial, flanks the principal Sun-court of the temple, while at the top of the temple the central shrine for Amun-Ra is flanked by a pair of chapels for the dead king and the risen Sun. The most famous scenes in the temple – showing a celebrated expedition to the mystical land of Punt [164] – are the decorative counterpart of scenes in which Hatshepsut is fathered by Amun-Ra and guided by him to her enthronement (see p. 197). Subsequently, an oracle of Amun-Ra obliges his royal child in the presence of the entire palace to ‘seek out the paths to Punt’ and ‘guide an expedition on water and on land to bring wonders from God’s Land to the very god who created its perfection’. In other words, Hatshepsut is seen to be born to commission a voyage of discovery to the end of the earth. The inscriptions disclose that the expedition was also a survey, which recorded specimens of the different species of fish it encountered at sea. After the ships returned, the records were set in stone, just as later Thutmose III had botanical specimens his army encountered on military expeditions inscribed on the walls of a chapel at Karnak. One scene shows the Egyptian captain camped on a beach, where he is greeted by Parohu, the chief of Punt. Although Parohu demands to know how Egyptians could have reached such far distant shores, the exchanges are friendly and the Puntites first ‘give praise for the lord of the gods, Amun-Ra’ before loading the Egyptian ships with tribute to the brim. Evidently a pharaoh’s god-given authority did reach the ends of the earth.
Masterpiece
Limestone chapel, Deir el-Bahri
165 Detail from the statue of king Amenhotep II, showing the king suckling from the goddess Hathor in the form of a cow. Deir el-Bahri, West Thebes. Painted sandstone. 18th Dynasty.
This limestone chapel, decorated with brightly painted low relief, is the stone cladding from a rock-cut chapel in the hills at Deir el-Bahri – part of a temple built by Thutmose III above the better-known temples of Montuhotep II and Hatshepsut. The sandstone statue of Hathor in the form of a cow – as long as the chapel is tall (2.2 metres or 7 feet) – was added by his son and successor, Amenhotep II (c. 1426–c. 1400 BC). (When discovered in 1905 the statue filled the middle of the chapel and it has been shifted forward only for museum display purposes, as the slot in the pavement indicates.) The cow’s horns seem to frame an elaborate headdress made up of the king’s uraeus-cobra, the Sun-disc and the twin plumes of Amun-Ra. In front of her, Amenhotep is shown in the gesture of greeting, so in a sense this is a double statue of both king and god awaiting offerings, though the adult king is also shown as a diminutive figure under the god’s care. Then on the left side, where the statue could hardly be viewed originally, the king is also shown as an infant, naked and suckling at the udder [165].
The decoration of the walls is equally as abstract and wonderfully illuminating. The tops of the walls are decorated with a stylized frieze of knotted plants, known by its Egyptian name as a kheker-frieze, which represents the marshy columns of a temple and is commonly used to indicate a sacred location in two-dimensional art. The starry ceiling is also that of a temple, shaped here as the vault of the sky. On the side walls, the king (Thutmose, in this case) is seen entering with his Great Wife, Merytra (on one wall) or his daughters (on the other). In front of them, beside the statue on each side, is an illustration of the chapel itself, including the cow and the twin figures of the king. At the far end, beyond where the statue stood, the king is shown on both walls adoring Hathor ‘five times’, and she is described on either side as patron of Thebes (city of Amun) and of Heliopolis (city of Ra). Finally, on the back wall the king is seen offering incense and water to Amun-Ra, seated in his shrine at Karnak.
In other words, the decoration of the chapel exhibits layers of meaning, or – if we prefer – illustrates a sequence of transitions during the ritual that took place here. First, the king and royal women enter the chapel, where they make offerings before a statue of the king as a divine child with a divine mother. Hence the king is both the officiant and the subject of the ritual, and so indeed are his female relatives – whether or not we understand the mortal women to be identified with Hathor. Literally beyond this simple illustration of what we could have seen had we been here for the ritual, another scene summarizes the meaning of what is taking place: the king adoring the goddess. However, the whole scene is then presented as a reflection – or another aspect – of the king’s offering to Amun-Ra, on the opposite bank of the River Nile.
166 Offering shrine of king Thutmose III from his mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri. Painted limestone. 2.2 m (7 ft 2½ in.) high. 18th Dynasty.
Although comparable statues of Hathor and the king have been discovered at Saqqara and elsewhere, the goddess was specially venerated at Deir el-Bahri, and there were various other chapels for her in the immediate vicinity, including the one in Hatshepsut’s temple. Interestingly, in illustrations in Theban tombs, even on coffins, the image of a cow emerging between marsh plants, just as this statue shows, seems to be a motif representing Deir el-Bahri itself or more generally the view of the Theban hills – Kheftethirnebes, ‘she who is facing her Lord’. On a stela in Karnak directly facing this chapel, Thutmose III again stated his intentions: ‘My person desired to make a commitment for my father Amun-Ra in Karnak, erecting a sanctuary and consecrating the horizon, renovating for him [the view of] Kheftethirnebes, which since the first age has been the intention of my father, Amun-Ra, lord of the thrones of the Twin Lands.’ The ‘Twin Lands’, of course, are the banks of the Nile, east and west, the rising and setting Sun, life and afterlife (see pp. 214–15).
Masterpiece
Gold mask of Tutankhamun
167 Gold funerary mask from the burial of king Tutankhamun. Valley of the Kings, West Thebes. 0.54 m (1 ft 3 in.) high. 18th Dynasty.
The tomb of Tutankhamun (c. 1332–c. 1323 BC) is the most famous discovery in Egyptian archaeology, and the only intact burial so far recovered from the Valley of the Kings. His iconic gold mask was found where it had last been placed on his embalmed face – the last layer of a cocoon wrapping his mortal remains. Indeed, the king’s subterranean burial chamber as found was filled by four gilded wooden shrines, one inside another, enclosing a granite sarcophagus and three nested coffins within – the last coffin and lid made of inlaid 22-carat gold [168]. Gold strips, inlaid with hieroglyphs of coloured glass and semi-precious stones, laid on the king’s mummy identify him with Osiris, while a pair of burnished gold hands clasp the dead king’s crook and flail.
The face is a single sheet of gold, burnished to a remarkably uniform consistency, with chasing for details such as the headband, eyes, neck and especially the precisely defined lips, characteristic of the late 18th Dynasty. The headdress was possibly hammered on a mould, with pleats added to retain a blue glass inlay and create the characteristic stripes of a nemes headcloth and its knotted tail. The collar consists of at least two soldered sheets of burnished gold inlaid with blue glass, carnelian, feldspar and lapis lazuli. These three principal elements of the mask were joined with tiny gold rivets, while the king’s ears, the inlaid cobra and vulture on his brow and his false beard were cast separately in gold and attached with either solder or rivets. The combination of the vulture and cobra on the king’s brow in place of the single uraeus-cobra seems to be a specifically funerary image. The fine collar beneath the beard is a separate gold sheet inlaid with carnelian, lapis lazuli and faience. The beard itself is inlaid with blue faience, lapis lazuli is used for the brows and eyeliner, and the eyes have been formed from quartz with obsidian pupils. Red paint laid behind the king’s eyes adds a texture of life. The whole is so expertly made that the mask measures 54 by 39 centimetres (21 by 15 inches), and 49 centimetres (19 inches) from front to back, but weighs little more than 10 kilograms (22½ pounds).
Of course, the most startling aspect of the mask is its flawless beauty, which is consistent with the meaning of the mask according to the text pressed into the collar. This is a speech often used on funerary masks and coffins, taken from the so-called Egyptian Book of the Dead (see p. 262):
Greetings, O, perfect of sight, possessor of light-rays, whom Ptah-Sokar has completed, whom Anubis has exalted, to whom Thoth has given the distinctions of one perfect of sight, which are as the gods, and your western eye is the evening-boat and your eastern eye the morning-boat. Your eyebrows are as the Nine. Your forehead is as Anubis. The back of your head is as Horus. Your braiding is as Ptah-Sokar.
Here the deceased’s face is a microcosm, whose featured pairs embody the balance of sunrise and sunset, life and death. Ptah-Sokar is a god of Creation and death, Anubis of burial, while Thoth signifies esoteric wisdom and the moon – the light in the darkness. The eyebrows arch over the eyes just as the Nine – the first gods – preside over a Creation in which time passes, and birth and death are the lot of everyone. The face is turned towards death but the risen king, Horus, follows just as surely as the back of the head follows the front of the head under the coiffed hair. Most strikingly, the Egyptian phrase ‘perfect of sight’ introduces the deliberate ambiguity of a face that is physically perfect (to behold) and spiritually perfect (of vision), thereby evoking the enlightened condition of the afterlife. Once again, the ancient Egyptian portrait of the deceased is not an idealized portrait of the person but an evocation of their spiritual eminence in death. The phrase ‘possessor of light-rays’ – meaning, of course, the Sun – is embodied in the unchanging gold of the mask, latent within the eternal darkness of earthly burial.
168 Sketch of the nest of shrines that surrounded the king’s sarcophagus and coffins, made by the tomb’s discoverer, Howard Carter. Note the oars laid along one edge of the burial chamber.
169 Three-quarter view of [167].
Outside the nest of shrines that finally enclosed his interment, the departing priests laid a row of oars to signify the spiritual journeys awaiting the dead and new-born king [cf. 19, 139].
