170 Statue of the Sun-god based on the form of king Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten), from the great temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak. Sandstone. 4 m (13 ft) high. 18th Dynasty.
‘You Create the World as You Will in Your Uniqueness’: Two More Studies in Change |
No other chapter in the story of Egyptian art has been discussed as much as the Amarna Period (c. 1360–c. 1330 BC), at the end of the 18th Dynasty; and towering over any discussion is this startling, sinister image of king Akhenaten – looking as if it had been carved by Jacob Epstein for some Modernist reimagining of pharaonic Egypt [170]. Rather, we should say this image of the Creator because the statue is explicitly named as Ra-Horakhty, the ancient god of Heliopolis, or more specifically ‘Ra-Horakhty exalted in the horizon in his identity as the energy (Shu) which is from the Sun’. However, as is typical of the period, the god’s name has been written in pairs of name rings or cartouches, ordinarily used for kings’ names. So this image of divinity takes as its starting point the mortal form of Akhenaten and the physical characteristics of a woman who has given birth (prominent breasts, engorged thighs, flaccid belly and distended navel), along with exaggerated sense-organs. Not least, there is also a pair of hands grasping the king’s crook and flail in the emphatic manner of Osiris to complement the crown that once stood on the statue’s head. In other words, the composition begins in the realm of the mortal and royal but reaches to the unworldly and supernatural, becoming reminiscent of Hermann Hesse’s description of the mystical Max Demian:
In fact I saw – I thought I saw or felt – that it was not even a man’s face, but something rather different. There was almost something there of a woman’s face, and in particular this face seemed to me, for an instant, neither adult nor childlike, neither old nor young, but somehow a thousand years old, somehow timeless, marked by spans of time unlike those we live. Animals could look like this, or trees or stars … I do not know what he was like, but he was different – unimaginably different – from all of us.
170 Statue of the Sun-god based on the form of king Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten), from the great temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak. Sandstone. 4 m (13 ft) high. 18th Dynasty.
In fact, the sandstone colossus was one of a series erected in a new Sun-court on the east side of Karnak, whereas a more traditional image of the king employed in a Theban colonnade would have taken the form of Osiris, king of the west. The hermaphrodite character of this statue may well reference the prominence of the King’s Great Wife at this time, and in a chapel of the new Sun-court Akhenaten’s Great Wife, Nefertiti, was shown as the officiant instead of the king, while the Harim-festival avenue was provided with sphinxes alternately wearing the faces of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. Indeed, according to a fragment of a festival scene now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the gods’ statues was carried in procession in a wooden shrine decorated with a scene of Nefertiti smiting enemies [171] – the definitive image of a king.
The so-called Amarna Period centres on Amenhotep IV, who early in his reign changed his name to Akhenaten, which means ‘enlightened spirit of the Sun’. During the 20th century his reign was often presented as a singular event – a turning point not just in Egypt’s history but in human history – by interpreters as diverse as Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Philip Glass and Naguib Mahfouz. In art, his reign might have begun ‘a quest for naturalism and realism’, in the words of the Swiss Egyptologist, Robert Hari. Doubtless, the distinctive art of the period has helped characterize both king and reign as peculiar, and Akhenaten’s bizarre reputation may well be overstated as a result. A discussion of the history of the period – still more its modern reverberations – lies beyond the scope of this book, but for present purposes we have to recognize that the Amarna Period is first and foremost a matter of art history. Questions, such as whether Akhenaten was physically deformed, or a heretic, or whether his Great Wife became king after him, are much debated but, in the end, depend upon close interpretations of sacred art, taken from the temples and tombs of the ruling group after the usual pharaonic fashion.
171 Talatat showing a festival boat, with a central cabin and forward a decorated shrine. Presumably from Amarna. Painted limestone. 0.54 m (1 ft 9 in.) wide. 18th Dynasty.
172 View across an open Sun-court towards the hypostyle hall and shrine area of the smaller temple at Akhetaten, showing in the foreground the reconstructed platform of an open-air altar surrounded by bases for smaller offering tables.
Nonetheless, from the perspective of art history there is much that is new. First is the fact that Amenhotep IV founded a new city at Akhetaten (‘the Sun’s horizon’) – including temples and palaces, festival avenues, highways, government offices, farms and factories, and sprawling suburbs – in the middle of the country, near the modern town of el-Amarna from which the era takes its name [172]. In itself establishing a city was nothing new – the history of Egypt is punctuated with new royal cities from Memphis in the earliest days, through such foundations as Itjtawy, Per-Ramesses, Tanis and eventually Alexandria. Akhenaten himself founded another city at Sesebi in Nubia. Rather, the unusual aspect of Akhetaten is that the place was soon abandoned, probably within a decade of Akhenaten’s death, and since the 1880s has offered a unique opportunity to deconstruct an entire ancient city consigned to the sands almost in its original form.
Then there is a subtle but crucial difference – the use of smaller stone blocks. Much of the art that survives from Akhenaten’s reign, whether at Thebes or Amarna, is associated specifically with his ‘tail festivals’. Often the extent of a pharaoh’s monumental building does not correlate simply with the length of his reign, but with the number of ‘tail festivals’ he celebrated. Of course, there may well be a direct correlation between the number of ‘tail festivals’ and the reign length but most pharaohs only celebrated the first festival after three decades on the throne, whereas Akhenaten began to do so in a three-year cycle from his accession. Moreover, kings who were building or adding to temples for such festivals typically made liberal use of monuments from earlier kings and other places, whereas Akhenaten’s artists, as we shall see, were more or less obliged to craft their monuments from scratch. Hence, in order to work sufficiently quickly, his builders employed smaller-than-usual stone blocks known to Egyptology as talatat [171] – a word whose origin is uncertain but has become assimilated to the modern Arabic word for ‘three’, as though perhaps each block measured just three palm-widths. In any event, Akhenaten’s monuments take on a distinctive appearance because of this reduced medium. In turn, talatat-buildings were ideal to demolish and use as in-fill for the monuments of later kings, so individual talatat have been recovered in large quantities as rubble, especially at Karnak, thereby providing an exceptional number of examples of art from the Amarna Period to add to the remains of Akhetaten.
173 Head of a colossal statue from a series in a Sun-court of the mortuary temple of king Amenhotep III. The pronounced stylization of eyes, nose and mouth prefigure the surrealism of pharaonic iconography early in the reign of his son. West Thebes. Quartzite. 1.17 m (3 ft 10 in.) high. 18th Dynasty.
Exaggerated claims about the novelty of the Amarna Period abound. For example, the standard assumption that ‘a revision of the written script to more closely reflect the spoken language of the time’ is unfounded because, apart from a small handful of new writing conventions, there is nothing in the language of Akhenaten’s monuments that cannot be found in the monuments of Thutmose III or even earlier kings. The distinguished curator W. Stevenson Smith noted that ‘[even] at the most revolutionary point in the early part of the reign of Akhenaten the instinct to formalize kept naturalistic impulses within bounds which are basically Egyptian’. Inevitably there is a degree of continuity between art in the Amarna Period and those periods that preceded and followed, including aspects that seem to be innovations simply because they pass from the subtle to the flagrant at this time. For example, the apparent ‘feminization’ of images of kings throughout the whole of the 18th Dynasty – developments such as increasingly slender limbs, raised buttocks and long legs – is a subjective topic long debated among scholars. Even the startling, almost bestial style of the colossi is prefigured in earlier work especially by Akhenaten’s father, Amenhotep III [173], while some of the novel conventions of ‘Amarna’ art, such as allowing an area of colour to flow into another using fine overlapping lines, appear in the tombs of Amenhotep III’s officials. In the Theban tomb of Ramose [174] we can almost discern the moment of the ‘shift’, when the exemplary, traditional decoration of its magnificent hypostyle hall was eventually completed in the new ‘Amarna style’. Indeed (as described in Chapter 4), the sculptor Bak, who served Akhenaten, was the son of Men, who served Amenhotep III, so we need not suppose that we are suddenly looking at a new breed of artists (see pp. 65–66). In an area of Akhetaten populated mainly by the king’s artists, at the house of a sculptor named Thutmose, the famous painted ‘bust’ of Nefertiti came to light – a form so determinedly figurative and human it is still hailed today as a model of female beauty [175].
174 The artists’ draft of a single scene in the tomb of Ramose in the so-called ‘Amarna style’, showing Egyptian officials and foreign dignitaries gathered in the presence of the royal family. West Thebes. Painted limestone. 18th Dynasty.
175 The celebrated ‘bust’ of Akhenaten’s principal wife, Nefertiti, discovered in an artists’ workshop at Akhetaten. Plastered and painted limestone, with inlaid rock crystal. 0.5 m (1 ft 7½ in.) high. 18th Dynasty.
Revolution or reformation?
To judge from the cursory treatment of its other features, the head of Nefertiti was actually a model for copying her face during the production of other artworks. Its elegance indicates that the most excessive abstractions in Amarna art were not universally applied in the period but were reserved for specific contexts, especially temples. In fact, Akhenaten’s inscriptions reveal his commitment to discerning the most appropriate ways of acknowledging and representing the Creator, in words as well as plastic arts. Among versions of a famous Hymn to the Sun inscribed in the tombs of his ruling officials, the key sentiment may be the line, ‘for you are my desire, and there is no other who comprehends you apart from your son’. Only the king can truly make sense of his divine father, the Creator. Accordingly, in the iconography of household shrines as well as in tombs, the king and the royal women take the place of traditional images of the ‘many’ gods. This is the real discrepancy between art of the Amarna Period and what came before and after: that traditional images of gods and kings together have been rejected in favour of images based on the royal family alone. Perhaps there is an analogy here with the effect of the Protestant Reformation on European art. Akhenaten’s commitment involved eliminating whatever was perceived (by him?) as specious, deceptive or redundant in traditional art. Two traditional images of divinity seem to have been especially decried: first, Amun, a name meaning ‘the hidden one’, whose name and image were often removed from existing monuments; secondly, the image of the dead king, Osiris, and the iconography of death and the afterlife. Instead Akhenaten’s artists preferred the manifest brilliance of the sunshine as the embodiment of Ra-Horakhty, his rays reaching down to press life on the king and his female family, with no other gods appearing as intermediaries either in worship or in iconography.
Scenes from the Amarna Period also adopt a distinctive, distorted form for the human body, analogous to the hermaphrodite body-shape of the colossi. This form was not drawn using a traditional eighteen-row grid but using a twenty-row grid, with two rows apparently simply inserted above the waistline to provide for the elongation of the upper torso and (often) the face, while the legs become proportionately shorter though drawn the same length as previously. In addition, the small of the back was raised with the upper torso, and accordingly moved up from the tops of the legs to generate a distended backside. With engorged buttocks, thighs and bellies, these canonical human figures have straightforward similarities with more traditional figures personifying the fecundity of the Nile, typically used to decorate the lower reaches of ‘marshy’ temple walls and columns [176]. In such fecundity figures too, broad hips and flabby stomachs foster the impression of squat legs, and there is exaggerated emphasis on the pendulous bellies and breasts of ostensibly male figures. The abundance of Creation, not to mention the singularity of the Creator, is the principal topic in Akhenaten’s Hymn to the Sun, summarized in this verse: ‘How numerous are your achievements, which are hidden from sight, O, sole god, there being no other of the same form, for you create the World as you will in your uniqueness.’
176 Personifications of the Nile Valley (left) and a temple estate presenting their produce as offerings at the ‘Red Chapel’ of the female king Hatshepsut. From the temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak, near Thebes. 18th Dynasty.
177 The lunette of a boundary stela at Amarna, showing the royal family standing alone at an offering table beneath the Sun’s rays. This stela stood at the southern edge of the city, so the family face north. Limestone. 2.0 m (6 ft 6½ in.) wide. 18th Dynasty.
The Amarna boundary stelae
An instructive instance of the new conventions may be found on the fifteen boundary stelae known to delimit the site at el-Amarna [177]. Since the earliest kings, the stela had been a standard vehicle for presenting monumental royal inscriptions. The developed form typically in use during the New Kingdom is exemplified here by a limestone stela of Amenhotep III, originally from his mortuary temple at Thebes and carved with a detailed low relief, standing more than 2 metres (6½ feet) high [178]. At the top centre, the Sun describes an arc from horizon to horizon, identified by the hieroglyph 
‘sky’ arched over as a canopy. Of course, the Sun is provided with wings partly to illustrate his motion but also because he is explicitly identified as the falcon, Horus. Textbooks call the area defined by the Sun’s arc ‘the lunette’; this is the area where the king stands offering to the gods as a link between heaven and earth (see p. 17). Beneath the lunette, a rectangle represents the earth itself, where the king’s temporal activities are usually described in words (cf. [152]). In this example, there is a balanced pictorial scene instead, showing the king twice in his chariot, with Nubian captives and a statement of the subjugation of Kush at right, then beaten Syrians and a statement of the subjugation of Naharin (the lands of the kingdom of Mitanni) at left. At the base of everything is the lapwing-frieze for the phrase ‘all the people are adoring’ (see p. 204), and the stark summary that ‘every lowland, every highland, all the people, all the aristocracy, and Naharin, impotent Kush, the Palestine hills and the Palestine plains are beneath the steps of this perfect god, like the Sun, for all time’. The layout of a standard royal stela may be compared, for instance, to El Greco’s wall-painting The Burial of the Count of Orgaz [179] in the Church of Santo Tomé in Toledo: at top centre, Christ presides over the heavens above and the mortal community of Toledo below, while the intercession of the Virgin, John the Baptist and the blessed dead within a ‘lunette’ connects the two realms.
178 Stela of king Amenhotep III shown offering to Amun-Ra, originally from his mortuary temple but reused by king Merenptah of the next dynasty. West Thebes. Limestone. 2.07 m (6 ft 9½ in.) high. 18th Dynasty.
179 El Entierro del Conde de Orgaz by El Greco, painted from 1586 to 1588. Toledo, Spain. Oil on canvas. 4.8 m (15 ft 9 in.) high.
However, compared to Amenhotep’s stela, a (literally) different perspective may be found on the Amarna boundary stelae. In the lunettes of stelae at the northern and southern corners the royal family is turned to face into the city, while on those stelae along the edges of the city they are shown twice in a mirror image. In keeping with the ‘fecund’ characteristics of the Amarna human form, there is obvious transparency in the king’s kilt so the fold following the line of his ‘near’ leg is extended to define his genital area, while the queen’s gown simply gapes to expose her genitals and a fold under her belly indicative of childbirth. Beside the stelae were statues of the king and queen and two daughters, who are offering either a miniature obelisk or a stela inscribed with the names of Ra-Horakhty, Akhenaten and Nefertiti. On traditional royal stelae the winged Sun is shown as though in profile, with the uraeus curled down one side or down both sides when there are balanced scenes, as in the stela of Amenhotep III. Hence the Sun is above, the earth below, and the king and gods are between them. Here, however, the Sun has no wings and its uraeus is turned towards anyone approaching the stela, as though the Sun were facing them in the distance, and the royal family were preceding them. Since ancient times, of course, the dead king had been Khentyimentu ‘he who is ahead of the westerners’ (see p. 149), whereas here the living king is shown ahead of those facing the rising Sun. In a context where once kings offered to gods or family members offered to the deceased, instead the royal family stands alone before the altar as creatures of the earth, weighed down by the gravity of flesh, their faces caressed by the invisible fingers of the Creator. Indeed, sometimes, instead of the traditional altar piled with offerings, we find only words – the first few words of the boundary inscription, naming the Creator.
While the image of the royal family standing alone in front of the altar may be an innovation in art, in reality it was a most ancient ceremony, enacted every day in the presence of the Sun. At Akhetaten the principal temples fused the formality of New Kingdom temple architecture with the architectural pattern of the Old Kingdom pyramid complexes and Sun-temples, in which the heart of the temple was not a hidden chapel but a single, massive obelisk (see p. 55). Rather than innovation, this may seem a conservative – even reactionary – development compared with the temples at Thebes, for example, where obelisks were typically erected in pairs on either side of the pylon gateway (see p. 202). However, there are no surviving remains of the New Kingdom temple of Ra-Horakhty at Heliopolis, which undoubtedly still existed on the site of its Old Kingdom forebear and might well have provided the model for the temples at Akhetaten (see p. 53). Moreover, at Karnak, Akhenaten’s grandfather Thutmose IV (c. 1400–c. 1390 BC) erected an obelisk originally prepared by Thutmose III, and its inscription states that he was erecting ‘a single obelisk’, as though perhaps introducing an aspect of the traditional Sun-temple to the fabric of Amun-Ra’s principal temple. In other words, the novelty of religious practice at Amarna may be more apparent than real – a misapprehension arising from the assumption that Thebes presents the preferred model for temples in the New Kingdom, compounded by the novelty of seeing the royal family at the altar, free for once from any artistic interpretation of the scene in terms of ‘other’ gods.
The tombs at Akhetaten
The genuine innovation of Akhetaten as a royal city lies in the removal of the royal tomb from the Valley of the Kings to a site nearby, where the Sun rises out of a wadi in the eastern cliffs. The prospect here is fascinating, analogous to the site of the oldest royal cemetery at Abydos – an utterly barren desert where a southern stretch of the cliffs runs down to cross a northern stretch, and the wadi concealed behind them twists eastwards towards the horizon. At the end of this wadi is the tomb of the royal family all together, decorated in relief with more effort and across more surfaces than had previously been attempted within a royal burial. Here, instead of scenes taken from traditional mythologies, the royal family is presented as the embodiment of the gods and their own lives become the organic mythology. Accordingly the artists are tasked to introduce a temporal aspect and, most evocatively, emotions run high at the death of a beloved daughter, Meketaten. For once, an Egyptian artist is required to bring ‘the moment’ into the formality of a tomb, and is heart-wrenchingly up to the task.
Here too, in the desert, away from the wadi but overlooking the plain of the city, are the cemeteries of the ruling group, some of whom had already prepared tombs at Saqqara or Thebes. The tomb of the high priest of the Sun, Meryra, has a traditional layout: a four-columned hall carved from the cliffs as though it were the hypostyle hall of a temple, with a massive statue of the tomb-owner in the chapel beyond. So too the tomb of the vizier Ay (who later became king himself) has a hypostyle hall designed with no less than twenty-four papyrus-shaped columns, though few have been completed. In each instance, the tomb-owner is shown in the doorway praising the morning Sun, while inside are analogous scenes of children capering at the morning appearance of the king. All the tombs are decorated with scenes of other formal appearances, when people gather in the presence of the king and queen or run beside them in procession. Where once the Sun’s boat was seen to journey through the heavens, now the king and queen ride in chariots along festival avenues. Where once Osiris welcomed the deceased into adoration, now king and queen dispense collars of threaded gold out of their own beneficence.
Like the artists of the Reformation, the artists of the Amarna Period wrestled with ‘more authentic’ ways of revealing Truth in art. Their inspiration was the supposed past but the resultant imagery might have distanced the pharaoh from the expectations of his followers (it is hard to say ‘his people’ in a context where so much of the evidence is restricted to the ‘few’). Perhaps the familiar, evocative and accessible in sacred art were abandoned in favour of the distant, precise and intellectual. In such an exercise, the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater is too real. Traditionally Egyptians had turned for spiritual comfort and inspiration to age-old images from mythology and now they were offered only the present – the royal family – as their inspiration in this life and the next.
So it was that the specific style associated with Akhenaten was abandoned shortly into the reign of his son and successor, Tutankhamun. In fact, images late in Akhenaten’s own reign seem less extreme in their abstraction than the colossi from Karnak, perhaps in part because later examples are mostly from domestic shrines rather than the now-completed temples. Further variations on human figures and the artists’ grid were devised in the latter part of his reign, and emphasis on ‘supernatural’ aspects gradually reduced. As Stevenson Smith noted, because ‘the innovators of the Amarna Period had left intact the foundations of Egyptian art’ an immediate return to former conventions was straightforward. For example, if we analyse the statue of Ay – its traditional block form, the finely braided wig – there is little to distinguish the details in the art of high officials of Amenhotep III or Ramesses II, on either side of the Amarna Period [181]. Traditional funerary gods have returned to the inscriptions. However, the use of specific moments in formal art continued so, whereas Thutmose III offered written accounts of the Battle of Megiddo, Ramesses II uses images of the Battle of Qadesh in his temples as ‘real’ instances of the archetypal smiting scene [180]. Suddenly the graphic slaughter is as brutal and frightening as Picasso’s Guernica. However, it is Ramesses’ sons, as the generals on the battlefield, who now come to the fore in such scenes, not his daughters, though the latter still appear in certain ritual scenes. Without doubt, discussions about Akhenaten will go on for many years but, to return to the beginning, we must never forget that the images on which we base historical conclusions are first and foremost sacred art, and what has ever challenged the human intellect so much as the correct expression of the ineffable and transcendent?
180 Men and horses fallen along a stretch of the River Orontes during the Battle of Qadesh, shown on a wall of the northern temple of Ramesses II at Abydos. 19th Dynasty.
Masterpiece
Gold throne of Tutankhamun
The gold throne of Tutankhamun is one of a half-dozen chairs found in his burial, in this case made of wood overlaid with gold and silver, and inlaid with the same materials as his funerary mask (see pp. 212–15). The heads of lions at the arms descend to clawed feet, while the side panels are decorated with winged uraeus-cobras gesturing protection over the king’s names. On the sloping back of his throne, the king is reclining beneath the Sun – whose rays reach out in the ‘Amarna style’ – on a chair with a footstool, and, indeed, a stool was found on the seat of this throne. On either side of this scene are the stylized columns of a temple or a palace, with a frieze of uraeus-cobras, such as would be found above a shrine (see p. 16). Though the setting is entirely formal and abstract, the King’s Great Wife, Ankhesenamun, is anointing him with oil, and we find here perhaps the most tender example of the apparent informality of the royal family characteristic of art during the Amarna Period.
Such informality may seem novel, though such tenderness is implied more formally in the scenes of many couples (see [71, 108]). More to the point, informality may well appear in earlier times, if only in different artistic media. For example, a limestone stela in the Cairo Museum shows king Ahmose II (c. 1539–c. 1514 BC), founder of Tutankhamun’s dynasty, offering to his deceased grandmother, Tetishery. This much is entirely conventional, but the text is less so, and begins with the king relaxing, painting in words the scene on Tutankhamun’s throne: ‘Now his person happened to be relaxing in the throne-room … The one speaks before his partner, asking what is best for those who have passed on.’ His wife responds with all the seeming concern of a loving partner: ‘To what purpose are you bringing this up? Why has this matter been spoken? What has come to your mind?’
This is as close as we may find to a written description of the domestic circumstances of a pharaoh and his wife, as they consider what is appropriate for the offering cult of a distinguished family member. In this case, the outcome would be the pyramid built for Tetishery at Abydos, along with the tomb chapel in which the stela itself was found in 1903. So, in a formal, pharaonic context, this is hardly a glimpse of an unguarded moment but rather a scene presented with considerable artifice as a statement of something sacred. Likewise, the scene of Tutankhamun and his young queen is novel only insofar as it is a new way of saying old and very important things.
The only populous nation that shared a land border with ancient Egypt was the land we call Nubia. From the earliest historic times, the peoples of Nubia had various indigenous languages, systems of government, and religious practices distinct from those of Egypt, and we can probably identify the same clear distinction in pre-dynastic burial practices. On the other hand, Egyptians and Nubians were already travelling across the border at Aswan or through the deserts in pre-dynastic times, so rock art and monuments found in Wawat – the area of Nubia adjoining Egypt – carry familiar images from early Egyptian royal art, including kings, boats and bound enemies [183]. Egyptians remained active in Nubia throughout the dynastic period, not least quarrying local stone such as diorite for monuments. However, from the beginning of the New Kingdom in the late 1500s BC, the Nubian lands of Wawat and populous Kush were systematically brought under Egyptian control during a century-long military campaign, which ended in the reign of Thutmose III. An official titled the ‘King’s Son of Kush’ was created with equivalent authority to the twin viziers of the Nile Valley and the Delta – second in authority only to the pharaoh. Any analysis of New Kingdom government must recognize the temples as a principal tool of administration (see p. 72), and this fact must also be considered when we appraise the magnificent New Kingdom temples in Nubia, at places such as Abu Simbel, Sulb, Sesebi and Gebel Barkal. They represent more than the imposition of Egyptian values and religious practices – they are a statement of Nubian lands assimilated to Egypt. By the end of the New Kingdom the paraphernalia of pharaonic rule was long established in Wawat and Kush, and all the evidence we have about government, religion and even burial practice at this time is effectively Egyptian.
Conversely, the decisive moment marking the end of the New Kingdom was the loss of control of Nubia at the end of the 20th Dynasty, and this was the result of a civil war. The trigger might have been no more than rivalry and uncertainty at the very top, perhaps because two competing lines during the 21st Dynasty were descended from two daughters of Ramesses XI (c. 1099–c. 1069 BC). Also at this time the royal cemetery was moved from Thebes to Tanis, a splendid new city in the far north – though, like Thebes, a site devoted to Amun-Ra. Since 1940 Pierre Montet and others have uncovered at Tanis a sequence of intact royal tombs where the magnificence of the burial goods is the equal of the Valley of the Kings [184, 185], and the city’s monuments illustrate something other than decline, at least in this part of Egypt, amid whatever change and uncertainty affected the nation.
183 Decoration on the outside of an incense burner, showing an Egyptian pharaoh in one boat, flanked by a boat with an animal image and a temple banner and another with a bound prisoner. From a cemetery in Qustul, Wawat. Limestone. 9 cm (3½ in.) high. Presumably 1st or 2nd Dynasty.
184 Detail showing the falcon-headed face and chased decoration of the inner coffin of a king identified as Shoshenq II. Tanis. Beaten silver. 1.9 m (6 ft 3 in.) long. 22nd Dynasty.
185 Finely detailed pendant representing king Osorkon II as the newborn Osiris, protected on either side by Isis and Horus. Tanis. Gold and lapis lazuli. 9 cm (3½ in.) high. 22nd Dynasty.
Whatever the situation in Egypt, the Nubian lands of Wawat and Kush were certainly lost from Egyptian rule by this time and, as summarized by John Taylor of the British Museum, the ‘three centuries which followed the collapse of Egyptian authority constitute one of the most obscure phases of Nubian history. Written sources are non-existent and the attribution of archaeological material to this period is a matter for debate’. In other words, explanations for the loss of Egyptian control in Nubia based on, for example, nationalism are speculation, and a simpler alternative may be the same dynastic dispute that ended the 20th Dynasty and divided the 21st Dynasty. Be that as it may, during the 8th century BC, as kingship in Egypt grew ever more divided between competing lines of the ruling family, a single, powerful line of kings emerged from Kush to dominate Egypt so effectively that they are conventionally listed as the 25th Dynasty of Egyptian kings. Although they did not rule Egypt as such, in c. 728 BC one of their line, Piye, launched a military invasion to force Egypt’s leaders to concede Kushite supremacy.
Understanding the emergence of the 25th Dynasty is not easy, but the principal archaeological sites and the handful of inscribed texts that survive are associated both with traditional pharaonic art and with sites founded under Egyptian rule, such as Semna in Wawat and especially Napata in Kush. Historically, Napata was an Egyptian fortress, founded together with its sacred precinct at Gebel Barkal during the original New Kingdom military occupation. The ongoing association between the Kushite kings and all things pharaonic is no coincidence, and the resemblances are not simply apparent. For example, Piye (c. 747–c. 715 BC) was buried at Kurru in Kush beneath a pyramid, embalmed in Egyptian fashion, though his burial chamber was also furnished with a rock-cut bench to support a wooden bed, following indigenous burial practice. The pyramid of the mighty Taharqa (c. 690–664 BC) at Nuri included many traditional Egyptian burial features, such as a splendid collection of more than one thousand shabty figures (see pp. 270–71). The pyramids themselves are relatively small and consequently steep-sided, less like the royal pyramids of earlier ages and more like those of private tombs during the New Kingdom [186]. Nonetheless, Taharqa’s ruinous sandstone tumulus measures 52 metres (170 feet) along the base of each side, with a projected original height of at least 39.5 metres (130 feet), and consists of a true pyramid enclosed within a later pyramid, recalling the oldest tombs at Abydos and Saqqara. In fact, the design of Taharqa’s descending staircase and columned subterranean burial chamber has been compared to both the tombs of the 1st Dynasty kings and a New Kingdom subterranean temple at Abydos, known today as the Osireion. Interestingly, several members of the 25th Dynasty royal family were actually buried at Abydos, and provided with a standard Egyptian offering cult.
186 Pyramid 1 at Kurru, conventionally dated to the 4th century BC, illustrates the ongoing use of pharaonic models in the royal cemeteries of Kush for centuries after the passing of the 25th Dynasty.
187 Scene above a doorway in the tomb of the steward of the God’s Wife of Amun Pabasa, identifying the traditional festivals of Thebes with the Sun’s journey through the night sky. Asasif, West Thebes. Painted limestone. 26th Dynasty.
Masterpiece
Sphinx of Amenhotep III from Sulb, Nubia
188 Statue of king Amenhotep III shown as a lion. Probably from Sulb in Nubia, but later reused at Gebel Barkal. Granite. 2.16 m (7 ft 3 in.) long. 18th Dynasty.
This is one of a pair of red granite statues of Amenhotep III, originally named in the brief text on the breast, but shown as a life-size recumbent lion. As a lion the statue is perfectly naturalistic, lying with his paws crossed, his huge rump reclining so far that the rear paw emerges beneath him, the tail curling round his rump along the statue base. The mass of the beast is worked with a mix of deft, uncomplicated modelling in the musculature and fine details in the fur of the chest, shoulders and back. The ribs raised along his neck and flank are full of potential and power, and compellingly tactile. His raised head has powerful jaws and a solid muzzle, with eyes hollowed for inlay so they would have seemed especially alert. Presumably these statues, from the king’s temple at Sulb in Nubia, were designed to flank a doorway, which is why the head is turned towards the approach, whereas a traditional sphinx would be posed frontally to oversee a processional pavement. Like the royal falcon, the recumbent lion embodies the king’s immense power and lethal intent, even in repose (see pp. 34–35).
In contrast to the naturalism of the modelling, the abstraction of the composition arises in the statue’s identification with a king, and perhaps the stylization of the mane as a circle with radiating striations, as though it were the disc of the Sun. An inscription near Aswan describes the same king’s attack on a Nubian enemy, ‘Ikhny, the boaster, in the midst of his army, but he did not recognize the lion in front of him.’ The lion, of course, was king Amenhotep. The statue might have been subsequently adapted for Akhenaten, but Tutankhamun rededicated it for his grandfather by adding the inscription on the base. Eventually the statue, along with several sphinxes and other monuments from Sulb, seems to have been removed by the 25th Dynasty king Piye (c. 747–c. 715 BC) to the precinct of Amun-Ra at Gebel Barkal in Kush, which was a pharaonic foundation dating back to the reign of Thutmose III. During the 3rd century BC the names of yet another king, Amanislo of Meroë (who appears as the king of Ethiopia in Verdi’s opera Aida), were added to the base inscription and the forepaws. In modern times, the lions seem to have been discovered still flanking the processional gateway into Piye’s palace beside the great temple at Gebel Barkal, from where they were removed by Lord Prudhoe in 1835.
Masterpiece
Statues of Taharqa at Kawa, Nubia
189 Sphinx of king Taharqa from the temple of Amun-Ra at Kawa. Granite. 0.73 m (2 ft 5 in.) long. 25th Dynasty.
190 Statue of Amun-Ra in the form of a ram protecting king Taharqa, from a processional colonnade. Kawa. Granite. 1.63 m (5 ft 4 in.) long. 25th Dynasty.
191 One of a group of sphinxes representing king Amenemhat III, then inscribed by several later kings. Discovered at Tanis but originally from elsewhere. Granite. 2.36 m (7 ft 9 in.) long. 12th Dynasty.
Taharqa ‘king of Cush’ is mentioned as such in the Bible (2 Kings 19:9), but here is shown as a traditional Egyptian sphinx. His human face wears the traditional nemes headcloth of a pharaoh and twin uraeus-cobras, perhaps to symbolize his kingship in two nations. Taharqa constructed several processional colonnades and courts for Amun-Ra at Karnak and at Gebel Barkal, but this sphinx is from a temple he dedicated to Amun-Ra at Kawa in Kush. His temple replaced an earlier 25th Dynasty temple, which in turn stood beside an even earlier temple built by Tutankhamun. Taharqa also furnished it with a processional pavement from the Nile flanked by statues of Amun-Ra as a massive ram tending the king, emulating the processional approach to Karnak. Inside the temple, however, his sculptors – like those of Akhenaten in an earlier age – found their inspiration and their models in the decoration of Old Kingdom pyramids at Abusir and Saqqara. Not least, a scene on the pylon at Kawa showing Taharqa as a sphinx trampling Libyans was first used in a Sun-court in the mortuary temple of Sahura in the 5th Dynasty, then copied in the pyramid complex of Pepy II in the 6th Dynasty, and finally copied for Taharqa, still retaining the names of a Libyan king’s wife and sons – Khuwetyotes, Weni and Wesa – more than 1,700 years after they lived. Likewise, on the sphinx shown here, the shape of the mane may be compared to the ‘Prudhoe lions’ [188], which were visible at Gebel Barkal in Taharqa’s time, while the pattern of the mane clearly imitates the much larger 12th Dynasty sphinx of Amenemhat III, then standing at Tanis in the Nile Delta [191].
So, the kings from Kush, a land assimilated for centuries to pharaonic ways, maintained pharaonic rule and pharaonic religious beliefs, and in architecture and art drew inspiration from every era that had gone before in Egypt. A deep ‘fleshy’ furrow from the nose to the side of the mouth – often termed ‘the Kushite fold’ – and prominent lips are among specific features often considered to be a naturalistic aspect of 25th Dynasty art, arguably based on a distinct physiognomy discernible in the Nubian ruling group. Maybe so, but the preponderance of evidence indicates that the Kushite kings were looking to traditional art – even the primeval past, discernible at Abydos and Saqqara – to pinpoint the correct expression of their authority, and the face they chose to show was ‘pharaonic’.
The kings’ men and women
For sixty years, Piye and his successors remained more powerful within Egypt than any of Egypt’s own rulers. They added to the great temples of Egypt, and their officials were buried there in traditional fashion. Statues of the officials, many of them from an ancient cache unearthed at Karnak in 1904, have characteristically heavy bodies with short, stout legs, perhaps deliberately rejecting the more slender forms of the late New Kingdom and harking back to the pronounced authority of canonical forms from the early Old Kingdom [192]. It was at this time that artists adapted the grid system to use twenty-one lines to the top of the eye (see p. 114), and adjusted the placement of specific anatomical features, such as buttocks and nipples, slightly downwards to enhance this ‘stockiness’. However, the artists may recall specific details from any and every period in history, for example copying heavily braided wigs from the late Old Kingdom or the post-Amarna period, or the almond-shaped eyes of the anonymous official above, which are reminiscent of the Amarna Period itself. The officials’ tombs at Saqqara freely adapt Old Kingdom scenes and texts from the ancient cemeteries round and about, while tombs at Thebes for obvious reasons copy scenes from local tombs and temples, mostly dating to the Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom [187]. Even in the subterranean chambers of the venerable Step Pyramid, there are stelae with twenty-one-line grids traced on them, presumably by artists of this period who were studying them. Nonetheless, far from derivative or reactionary, sculpture of the period is ‘technically superb’, to quote the Egyptologist Jaromír Málek, producing works in which ‘qualities of maturity and experience are valued more highly than youth and promise’.
192 Statue of an anonymous official, originally shown offering to a god, exemplifying the almond-shaped eyes and ‘fold’ along the nose and mouth characteristic of the Third Intermediate Period. Karnak, near Thebes. Greywacke. 37 cm (2 ft 2½ in.) high.
193 Sphinx showing the God’s Wife Shepenwepet II making an offering to Amun-Ra (see [190]). Karnak, near Thebes. Granite. 0.83 m (2 ft 8½ in.) long. 25th Dynasty.
For the kings, sustaining their pharaonic heritage was not a matter to pursue far from Egypt. For example, they vied with the other rulers of Egypt to have their daughters adopted into the entourage of the God’s Wife of Amun, a priestess of utmost authority. Such authority is obvious in the statue of Taharqa’s sister, the God’s Wife Shepenwepet II, represented both as a priestess offering a ram-headed jar and as a royal sphinx [193]. Indeed, Shepenwepet, like other God’s Wives, was eventually buried in the grand old pharaonic complex at Medinet Habu. Probably from the entourage of one of the God’s Wives comes the statue of Iriketakana [194], which, according to Cyril Aldred, ‘is in the more realistic and even brutal style of the dynasty’. More recently Robert Morkot, a historian of both Egypt and Nubia, has suggested Iriketakana’s corpulent form may rather be a means to express his status as a royal eunuch, an observation that may temper the word ‘realistic’ as well as ‘brutal’.
195 Statue of the God’s Wife Karomama, originally shaking a pair of sistra (rattles), presumably in front of the image of a god now lost. Probably Karnak, near Thebes. Bronze, inlaid with gold and silver. 0.59 m (1 ft 11 in.) high. 22nd Dynasty.
196 Bronze figure of an anonymous pharaoh offering Truth to the image of a god now lost (cf. [6]). Kawa. 16 cm (6 in.) high. 25th Dynasty.
Bronze-working, working either from sheet metal or by casting, was a medium employed with increased frequency and delicacy in the early 1st millennium BC. An exceptionally fine example is the bronze statue of Karomama, God’s Wife of Amun and daughter of Osorkon II (c. 875–c. 835 BC), which was once entirely covered with gold leaf and exhibits the slender human form characteristic of the late New Kingdom, though this is now the 22nd Dynasty [195]. The treatment of her dress is especially effective, adding the fine details of birds’ wings, symbolizing a goddess, to what would appear to be the sheer fabric on her lower torso. However, the dress at her shoulders is heavily pleated and billows about her arms, constrained only by the weight of her collar inlaid with silver and electrum. From Kawa a collection of bronze figures of 25th Dynasty kings, probably originally elements fitted to processional boats or religious standards, also conforms to traditional archetypes. For example, the king is shown kneeling before a shrine or offering the figure of Truth, in the manner of Sety I at Abydos (see p. 17) [196]. On the other hand, these particular bronzes exhibit features distinctive of Kushite kings, such as the twin uraeus-cobras or the ram’s-head collar worn as an emblem of Amun-Ra.
197 Stela presumably from a cemetery in the kingdom of Meroë. The figure conforms to a later Meroitic archetype but ultimately his staff, hand-held strap, Sun disc and two-dimensional pose derive from Egyptian funerary stelae. Sandstone. 0.55 m (1 ft 9½ in.) high. Perhaps 2nd or 1st century BC.
Historically Taharqa’s reign was entirely overshadowed by the aggressive expansion of Assyria into Levantine coastal areas once dominated by Egypt, until a devastating invasion of Egypt herself in 664 BC drove Taharqa into Nubia, where he was to die. Nonetheless, Assyrian domination of Egypt was short-lived, and a sequence of massive tombs at Thebes for officials in the next generation belies any suggestion that Egypt was left in dire straits (see p. 235). Moreover, Taharqa’s descendants also kept the traditions of pharaonic rule alive in Kush and, further south, Meroë for another 1,000 years. The tomb decoration of his successor, Tanwetamani (664–657 BC), and the kings who followed remained traditionally Egyptian, even drawing on the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts, though kings at Kush no longer had obvious access to the monuments of Egypt. Pyramid burials were still used by this royal line until the middle of the 4th century AD, so just as the twin cobras of Taharqa had once stood for two nations under a single pharaoh, now the two kingdoms of Egypt and Kush flourished with distinct but essentially pharaonic identities [197].
Masterpiece
Seated statue of the chief steward Harwa
Harwa was chief steward for Amenirdis I, God’s Wife of Amun and daughter of the early Kushite king Kashta. His tomb at Thebes is the first in the sequence of massive tombs of the 25th and 26th Dynasties – perhaps the largest non-royal tombs ever built in Egypt – at Asasif, a prime location adjoining the Valley-festival route where it reaches Deir el-Bahri. However, the granite statue shown here is from Karnak, one of a group showing Harwa in various poses at various ages, after the fashion of the statues of Amenhotep, son of Hapu (see pp. 64–65). This is the most conspicuously corpulent of the group, with huge sagging breasts and flesh as soft and ill defined in the hard stone as we saw in the limestone bust of Ankhhaf (see pp. 170–71). Harwa’s pose is ostensibly relaxed, though the arrangement of his knees, held apart, recalls the ancient scribal pose of an official, and is consistent with the written scroll obviously stretched across his kilt (cf. [104]). His shaved head is indicative of a priest, while its disproportionate size adds the suggestion that he is not simply older but wiser as a result. So, though the composition may not be so obviously intimidating as a king represented as a lion, nonetheless in Harwa we see a quiet, contemplative man who is now at rest precisely because he brings to bear a massive presence and enormous authority.
198 Statue of the chief steward Harwa (cf. [38]). Karnak, near Thebes. Schist. 25th Dynasty.
