TWO
FORTY CENTURIES
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TWO |
The French painter Antoine-Jean Gros knew exactly which side his baguette was buttered on. Trained in the studio of Jacques-Louis David (the painter par excellence of the French Revolution and its aftermath, and himself a canny politician), Gros befriended the future empress Josephine de Beauharnais and earned Napoleon’s trust as a painter loyal to the French army.1 His monumental paintings of Napoleon’s military exploits won acclaim at the biennial Salons held in Paris during the years when Napoleon was consolidating his power, initially as First Consul and from 1804 as self-proclaimed emperor. At a time when state sponsorship and oversight of the arts meant that large-scale projects had to function as propaganda, Gros managed to exercise his considerable artistic talent in the genre of history painting, even if his subject matter inevitably portrayed Napoleon in a sympathetic – or sycophantic – light.
Completed in 1810 and displayed in the palace of Versailles, Gros’ oil painting The Battle of the Pyramids is one of his smaller works, at almost 4 metres long. It was popular enough to be engraved for sale as prints. The canvas typifies the aggrandizing visual narratives of Napoleon’s 1798 campaign in the Middle East, a campaign that had ended in defeat a decade earlier, but which lived on in the French national imagination. At the time he had set out on the expedition, Napoleon Bonaparte was an ambitious young general, steeped in accounts of ancient history, such as the career of Alexander the Great, but equally familiar with current thinking in civil engineering and military strategy. For some time engineers had reasoned that it would be possible to dig a shorter seafaring route through the Suez isthmus, just east of the Sinai peninsula, and thus join the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Such a shipping route would cut weeks off the journey from Europe to the Indian Ocean and allow France to challenge Britain’s lucrative colonization of the Indian subcontinent. Napoleon sailed from France on 19 May 1798, with 35,000 soldiers and 167 specialists known as the savants, or scholars: engineers, chemists, mineralogists, botanists, zoologists and draughtsmen, including the artist, author, diplomat and sometime spy Vivant-Dominique Denon, who would prove pivotal in bringing the antiquities of Egypt to much greater attention in Europe. Denon was also pivotal in Gros’ career: once they were back in Paris, Napoleon made Denon director of the art museum in the Louvre.2 This also gave Denon the task of organizing the Salons and encouraging French artists to create paintings suited to the new age of empire, which increasingly meant showing Napoleon’s kinder, gentler side.
Antoine-Jean Gros, The Battle of the Pyramids, 1810, oil on canvas.
In 1801 French troops abandoned Egypt after a series of defeats on land and sea, routed by Britain’s navy and Ottoman forces; since Napoleon’s fleet had been destroyed, British ships transported the 19,000 surviving French troops home. Napoleon himself had returned to France already in 1799, to stage a coup d’état, but he preferred to be commemorated in paint as caretaker of his troops and of the nation, more an inspiring hero than a marauding crusader. That is the guise in which Gros portrays him in The Battle of the Pyramids, a painting that does not try accurately to depict this opening battle of July 1798 but instead combines historical reality (portraits of Napoleon and his officers) with the allegorical motifs of conquest and clemency: a fallen black soldier, understood at the time as Ethiopian, lies dead, while two men representing Arab and Turkish soldiers beg Napoleon for mercy. Napoleon’s declamatory arm gesture aligns him with the grandeur of the pyramids and marks the moment before the battle when he addressed his troops, allegedly urging them on with the words, ‘Soldiers, from these monuments forty centuries of history look down on you!’ It was quite a gauntlet to throw down to his men, especially given that they were wearing wool uniforms under the sweltering Egyptian sun and facing severe shortages of food and water. They managed a decisive victory nonetheless, forcing the forces of Egypt’s Mamluk rulers to withdraw and regroup. This auspicious opening of the campaign made it a perfect subject for Gros, even though everyone visiting the Salon in 1810 knew the victory had been short-lived.
Dominique Vivant Denon, drawings based on temple scenes at Philae, Egypt, c. 1802.
Why did Napoleon think the pyramids represented 4,000 years of history? A more accurate estimate would be 4,500 years, as it turns out, but his round-number ‘guesstimate’ was not far off. What did an educated European like Napoleon know about the ancient Egyptian past in 1798, and how does anyone calculate the years and epochs of ‘history’, anyway? As we saw in Chapter One, ideas about ancient Egypt have always changed depending on which people, in which time period, have a vested interest in its culture, from ancient Rome, to medieval Cairo, to early 1900s Vienna. In this chapter, we step back to consider how the chronology of ancient Egyptian history has been pieced together over time, including some of the debates it has inspired. Given the pressure Napoleon’s soldiers were already under, perhaps it is just as well their leader failed to realize that more than forty centuries had gone into the making of Egyptian history before his hero, Alexander the Great, had even been born.
The survey of ancient Egypt outlined in this chapter, from prehistory to the seventh century AD, presents evidence currently available from the work of archaeologists and Egyptologists. It is a conventional academic history, a best guess at asserting what happened and when. There are other ways of telling the history of ancient Egypt, in what are often described as ‘alternative’ approaches. Some people believe that ancient Egypt was settled by survivors from the lost utopia of Atlantis described by Plato, or that the pyramids were built with help from extraterrestrial life. But there have been other histories within what we would consider rational scientific approaches, as well: in seventeenth-century Europe several scholars, including Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton and, most influentially, Archbishop James Ussher, used year-spans given in the Bible to calculate that God had created the world in 4004 BC. Even in the twentieth century some fundamentalist Christians still accepted that the world was only a few millennia old, not the billions of years demonstrated by the work of geologists and palaeontologists over the course of the nineteenth century. During the 1925 Scopes Trial in Tennessee, for instance, leading American politician and anti-evolution campaigner William Jennings Bryan consulted Ussher’s chronology to argue that the biblical flood occurred only in 2348 BC, an argument for which he was lampooned in the press, but which reflected sincerely held beliefs.
If Napoleon did think the pyramids had been built forty centuries before 1798, his rhetoric made use of what Europeans then knew about ancient history. At this time European scholars relied on the accounts of the few travellers who had visited Egypt, plus translations from Arabic authors and ancient Greek and Roman writers. The three pyramids at Giza inspired a lengthy discussion in the Greek traveller Herodotus, whose work had been well known in Europe since the Renaissance. Herodotus visited Egypt in the fifth century BC, speaking to Egyptian priests – or, through translators, other local residents – for information about the country’s history and monuments.3 Much of what Herodotus reported would later be confirmed by Egyptologists, such as the names of the kings who built the pyramids – Cheops (Khufu, in Egyptian), Chephren (Khafre) and Mycerinos (Menkaure) – and the fact that the structures have no subterranean chambers. Until copies of Herodotus were rediscovered in fifteenth-century Italy and translated into Latin, however, Europeans associated the pyramids with the Old Testament story of Joseph. Sold by his jealous brothers into slavery in Egypt, Joseph became the Egyptian pharaoh’s most trusted adviser, thanks to his intelligence and God’s favour. According to the Book of Genesis, Joseph predicted a period of low Nile floods and convinced the Egyptians to stockpile enough grain to ward off famine. In medieval Europe the giant stone structures said to stand in the desert outside Cairo were thus known as Joseph’s granaries and represented as barnlike structures in the thirteenth-century calfskin map of the world preserved in Hereford Cathedral.4 Surely structures so ancient and so monumental must refer to biblical events?
In the medieval Arab world the pyramids of Giza made similarly grand impressions on writers like Abd el-Latif al-Baghdadi, a thirteenth-century author who explored and measured the Giza pyramids, commented on their alignment with each other and the close fit of their masonry blocks, and weighed up arguments for their age, concluding that they pre-dated the great flood that both the Quran and the Bible record. Al-Baghdadi had the advantage of being on the ground in Egypt, where it was obvious to him that the pyramids were tombs (for revered prophets, he thought) situated within a vast cemetery. He also knew that they had been a focus of pilgrimage for millennia, and al-Baghdadi took them as clear indications of the ‘noble intellects’ of the ancient people who had built them.5 Arabic scholars of the thirteenth century were better informed than their European counterparts about ancient Egyptian history – yet today it is Herodotus, not al-Baghdadi, who is quoted in every survey of Egyptian civilization, or name-checked in television documentaries. It is worth remembering that the weight we give to different sources of evidence does not necessarily correspond to the innate value of that evidence. Instead, cultural bias creeps into research that academics, like all scientists, have been eager to present as objective, fair and balanced. No research takes place in a vacuum, however; every scholar writes at a certain historical juncture, using the sources available at the time.
During the reign of Napoleon, a French translation of al- Baghdadi’s work was published by the leading specialist in Arabic and other ‘Oriental’ languages (as they were known), Antoine Silvestre de Sacy. Herodotus, however, already had the upper hand; his much older work, composed in Greek, was considered to be more European and hence more reliable (or at least, more quotable) a source than the more recent Arabic writings of al-Baghdadi. As the powerful nation states of western Europe eyed up the financial and military benefits they stood to gain in North Africa and the Middle East, the ‘Oriental’ populations who lived there became more detached – in European eyes – from the ancient past of the region, whose roots in the biblical and Classical worlds seemed to make it European by default. Such Orientalism, as literary critic Edward Said dubbed it in his 1978 book of the same name, allowed the West to imagine an East ripe for the picking.6 What was at stake in the Battle of the Pyramids was a land grab, to be sure. But the work of Napoleon’s savants, and the early Egyptologists who followed them, sought to grab intellectual territory, too: the pyramids, and all they represented about an ancient Egypt where Europe’s own glorious roots might lie.
Detail from the Mappa Mundi, Hereford Cathedral – with the crossing of the Red Sea at top left and the Nile to the right.
In the nineteenth century, Europeans often used the word ‘Oriental’ to refer to anyone living between Morocco and Turkey, in a great sweep around the southern and eastern Mediterranean. These societies were backwards and underdeveloped in comparison to European culture, ran the argument, and historians of the time characterized different civilizations as if they were living organisms, with a moment of birth, growth and inevitable death. This ‘rise and fall’ motif unhelpfully still informs the way we speak about history today.
As a better understanding of ancient Egyptian history emerged over the course of the nineteenth century, the idea of a ‘rise and fall’ was built into the structure of its chronology. Eras of the most extensive royal power were dubbed the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms (see the Chronology at the start of this book), while the centuries in between became known as Intermediate Periods, as if time were simply ticking along until something interesting happened. To historians of the nineteenth century, steeped in the idea of a nation state with a stable population bounded by territory, only ‘native’ rule was legitimate in a sovereign country. Hence the conventional narrative of Egyptian history charts a long decline beginning in the eighth century BC, when rulers from the kingdom of Kush, in what is now Sudan, conquered Egypt after a series of skirmishes with Assyrian forces from present-day Iraq. For the next three hundred years or so, Egypt was governed successively by the Kushite kings, the Assyrian Empire and the Persian Empire (based in modern Iran), with interludes when kings who identified themselves as Egyptian reasserted control. By 332 BC, when Napoleon’s hero Alexander the Great was stepping up his campaign against Persia, Egypt was a satellite of Persia with little or no central government of its own. Many Egyptians seem to have welcomed Alexander and the Macedonian Greek rulers who followed him, turning the country into a Hellenistic kingdom until the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC ceded it to Roman rule.
From this period of so-called ‘decline’, however, came the source that modern historians relied on for the framework of ancient Egyptian chronology still used today, with its division into 31 (now usually shortened to 30) dynasties of human kings: the Aegyptiaca, or Egyptian Matters, a history of Egypt written by an Egyptian priest named Manetho in the early third century BC.7 Like many Egyptians of his status at that time, Manetho was fluent in both Egyptian and Greek, the language in which he wrote his history. He lived during the reigns of Egypt’s new family of Macedonian kings, Ptolemy I Soter (who had been a childhood companion and colleague of Alexander) and his son Ptolemy II Philadelphus. Although no complete text of Manetho’s history survives, it was quoted extensively in other Greek and Latin histories. These excerpts tell us that Manetho was a priest in major Egyptian temples at Heliopolis, near Cairo, and at Sebennytos in the Delta. He was familiar not only with Egyptian religion and literature, but with Greek mythology and Greek writers like Herodotus, whose own history writing provided a model for Manetho. Being a priest gave Manetho access to temple records, from inscribed walls and stelae (upright stone slabs) to libraries full of papyrus scrolls dating back generations, if not centuries. Here, Manetho wrote, were the sacred books and records he translated to narrate the succession of Egyptian kings from a long-distant period of rule by gods and demigods to the Persian kings who immediately preceded Alexander’s conquest, and whose reigns Manetho counted as the 31st Dynasty, a tactic scholars have since abandoned.
Based on his research into temple records, Manetho assigned a certain number of years of rule to each king he named, tallying the total years for each dynasty as he went along. Counting by reign lengths was the standard way of marking time in ancient Egypt and in many other past cultures. Rather than starting from a fixed date – the Exodus, the birth of Christ, the hejira – as the Jewish, Christian and Muslim calendars do, ancient Egyptian calendars started fresh with each new king. Instead of writing 2016, for instance, an ancient Egyptian priest would record the 65th year of Queen Elizabeth II, counting from her ascension. To have a longer perspective, it was important to keep track of kings’ reign lengths in their order of rule.8 These king lists survive on papyrus and in stone inscriptions, such as the list carved on a temple wall at the sacred city of Abydos in southern Egypt. In a neatly ruled grid, carefully spaced equidistant from each other, oval rings (called cartouches) encircle the name of each ruler. In addition to papyrus documents, inscriptions like these are the kinds of sources Manetho had access to in writing his history. The artistry and scale of the Abydos king list, which filled an entire corridor in the temple, are a sign not only of its usefulness as a historical record, but, and even more so, of its importance in forming and maintaining social memory in ancient Egypt: social forgetting, too, since it left out rulers later deemed heretical, such as Hatshepsut, a queen who ruled as if she were a king in her own right. The months, if not years, it took to design, carve and paint such lists, which existed in temples up and down the country, reinforced the unity of Egypt for everyone involved, from the priests and sculptors to the temple bakers and cleaners.
Seti I and his son, the future Ramses II, with a list of Egyptian kings, Abydos, Egypt, c. 1275 BC.
Communal acts of commemoration help societies create and recreate themselves across generations, and in a society like ancient Egypt, which maintained a stable, core identity for several millennia, the celebration of kingship in art, myth and ritual helped make that possible. Even Egypt’s ‘foreign’ kings, like the Ptolemies under whom Manetho lived, contributed to this coherent historical narrative by styling themselves as Egyptian pharaohs when the situation warranted. Rather than a ‘decline’, these centuries that saw Egypt enmeshed ever more closely with neighbouring cultures could instead be seen as an era of transformation and creative hybridity.
Nor was cross-cultural contact anything new: no culture exists in isolation. Historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tended to think in terms of ‘types’ or ‘races’ of peoples who developed in bounded geographic locations and displayed certain character traits: the cool and calculating East Asian, the despotic Oriental, the rational European and the primitive African or Aboriginal. Although these essentialist categories have long been debunked, their stereotypes lurk just under the surface of contemporary society, and the idea that a group ‘belongs’ to one, delimited territory, has proved difficult to shake. The movement of people, raw materials and finished products is as old as human society itself. Arguably, contact and exchange made civilization happen, if by ‘civilization’ we mean the development of larger-scale settlements, more complex technologies and more stratified social structures. What ‘civilization’ should not imply, however, is a superior way of living: every society on any scale, and whether settled, nomadic or a bit of both, has its own intricate ways of doing and being. Those same historians who assumed that there were ‘types’ of people also assumed that there was a sliding scale of cultural development, from the primitive (literally, the first or earliest human cultures) to the most ‘civilized’ or ‘advanced’ societies of the modern age. However, social evolutionism like this was problematic: ‘primitive’ stood both for a chronologically early stage of human development and for contemporary human groups considered to be ‘backwards’ in comparison to the Western specialists who studied them. In the rise and fall approach to history, some cultures seemed never to get off the ground, or to have almost nothing in common with the cultures that came after them, in the same territory. How to reconcile a ‘civilized’ society with its ‘primitive’ origins challenged modern and ancient historians alike.
At the other end of the timeline from the eras of Kushite, Persian and Ptolemaic rule stands a period that Egyptologists today refer to as the Predynastic: before the invention of writing, and before the dynasties of human kings named in Manetho’s Aegyptiaca. Manetho himself dealt with this distant past in a way that was typical for ancient Egyptian and Greek writers: he attributed thousands of years after the world’s creation to the rule of gods and demigods. Without written records to the contrary, who could argue? Besides which, gods and demigods were appropriate forebears for the lines of kings that followed.
In the late nineteenth century archaeologists took up the challenge of how to identify, assign dates to and interpret the prehistoric sites they began to find in Egypt. Research on this era continues to be an important and evolving focus of archaeology in Egypt today.9 Cemeteries preserved in the desert fringes, either side of the fertile Nile flood plain, have been the primary sources of information about the early agricultural and pastoral societies that occupied the Nile Delta, the Fayum depression and the Valley between around 5000 and 3000 BC. During this period, which corresponds to the Neolithic (stone age) and Chalcolithic (copperstone age), the Egyptian landscape supported more grassland, but over time a desert climate prevailed, encouraging groups of people to settle closer to the flood plain, although some will still have moved from place to place with herds of grazing animals.
The prolific British archaeologist W. M. Flinders Petrie conducted one of the first major excavations of a Predynastic cemetery, found in 1894 near the site of Naqada in southern Egypt. Bodies were buried on their sides, knees bent, and were often wrapped in basketry mats and sometimes resin-soaked linen textiles, too. Their graves included items such as stone and pottery vessels, stone palettes for grinding cosmetic pigment, carnelian and quartz beads, flint and obsidian tools, and minerals like galena and malachite. Many of these objects are evidence of wide-ranging trade connections (obsidian from Ethiopia, mineral ores from the neighbouring mountain ranges and Sinai, shells from the Red Sea) and technological mastery, for instance in textile and pottery production. The distribution of objects in burials suggests social differentiation in terms of who was buried with certain object types or treatments of the body. At the site of Hierakonpolis, for instance, archaeologists recently discovered the body of a woman whose limbs had been wrapped in the fragrant bark of the Boswellia tree, better known as frankincense and probably imported from Somalia or Ethiopia.10 The Nile was essential not only for its annual flood, which deposited rich silt for agriculture, but as a means of transport. From around 3500 BC decorated pottery began to appear in graves, often adorned with pictures of many-oared boats. Some scholars have suggested that the figures or symbols depicted on these boats – here, birds near one end and humans above (perhaps inside?) two central cabins – represent deities, which might link these Predynastic pots to Egyptian myths in which gods and kings sail through a celestial version of the Nile. But whether we can project later religious ideas backwards in time is open to question. Myths and other cultural forms from the historic era can suggest possible interpretations, but there is no single, secure answer about what these objects meant to their ancient makers.
Painted pottery jar from Egypt, c. 3400 BC.
In studying Predynastic Egypt scholars also look forward in time, as the very name ‘Predynastic’ indicates: it anticipates the Dynastic period, which starts with Manetho’s 1st Dynasty and marks a point at which the Nile Valley and Delta became united under a single king. Since the 1980s scholars have also added a stage in between called the ‘Protodynastic’, or Dynasty 0. During this period of state formation, a shared organizational structure emerged, coordinating large-scale temples, extensive trade links and centralized resources. These new, early kings and their supporters formed an influential upper stratum of society and accordingly needed forms of art, architecture and personal adornment to help set themselves apart and maintain the upper hand. Within only one or two generations, it seems, the first king of the first recorded dynasty – Manetho called him Menes, scholars today think he was Narmer – flipped a cultural switch: the older forms of pottery decoration and palette carving disappeared, and in their place came monumental mud-brick tombs, the invention of hieroglyphic writing and a fresh artistic style that would be recognizable for millennia to come. Most of the kings of Manetho’s first two dynasties were buried in vast, mound-like, mud-brick complexes in the southern city of Abydos, but by the 3rd Dynasty these mounds gave way to pyramids, a form that could only be fit for a king.
The first Egyptian pyramids were not the famous trio at Giza, towards which Napoleon gestures in Gros’ Battle of the Pyramids. Instead, the more humble origins of the pyramid form, and the many ways in which it was later deployed, chart a timeline of Egyptian culture more complex than any ‘rise and fall’ narrative could suggest.11
The three Giza pyramids, which date from the 4th Dynasty of the Old Kingdom, are justly famous for their immense size and because they look like pyramids: four straight, triangular sides leaning in from a square base. Of the dozens of royal pyramids that once dotted the Nile Valley, most had a similar form but have rarely survived to their full height, especially where fine-quality stone casing the exterior was taken for reuse, or where hastier construction methods proved less impervious to time. The first pyramids were not ‘true’ pyramids at all but tiered layers, such as the Step Pyramid of king Djoser at Saqqara. Constructed during his long reign in the 3rd Dynasty, Djoser’s pyramid was remembered in later Egyptian history as an innovation by the priest Imhotep, a historical figure who was worshipped as a demigod after his death. Revered for his wisdom and, in particular, his medical skill, the link between Imhotep and the Step Pyramid suggests that this monument endured in Egypt’s cultural memory: in the Late Period, local people made new burials within the vicinity, and artists closely studied the statue of Djoser walled up in a chapel against one side of the massive structure, seeking inspiration for how to represent some of Egypt’s last indigenous kings.12 A pyramid did not need to be ‘true’ to matter, in other words.
The straight-sided pyramid shape did seem to hold a particular significance in the Old Kingdom, for it represented rays of light emanating from the sun at a time when sun worship became an especially prominent feature of Egyptian religion. Kings of the 4th Dynasty were the first to be called ‘the son of Re’, the sun-god, in addition to ‘the Horus’, as earlier kings like Djoser were known. Horus and Re were both gods associated with falcons, but they had a different mythology and lineage, and perhaps originated in different parts of the country. Horus was the avenging son of the mythical god-king Osiris, who had been murdered by his brother Seth, while Re was the embodiment of the sun itself. In later mythology Re would become a counterpart of Osiris, the former dominating the heavens, the latter the earth where the dead were buried. There is little hint of this mythology in the Old Kingdom, however; all we can say with confidence is that kings of this period paid increasing attention to monumentalizing the solar cult and emphasizing their own close relationship with the gods.
Nineteenth-century photograph of the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, Egypt, c. 2650 BC.
Building a pyramid took manpower, a strong communal identity and an efficient bureaucracy. As a result, only kings with stable reigns were likely to attempt it, and at times when the state was less centralized – the ‘Intermediate Periods’ in ancient Egyptian chronology – royal ambition set its sights lower. During the 12th and 13th dynasties of the Middle Kingdom, however, kings once again turned to the pyramid for their burial complexes. At sites around the Fayum, where some of these rulers were remembered for centuries afterwards, pyramids and sculpture-filled temples for the royal mortuary cult echoed the features and forms of earlier, Old Kingdom monuments.13 Such studied repetition remained a feature of Egyptian art and architecture, since evoking the past in this self-conscious way reinforced a sense of unbroken authority and cultural continuity in the memory of the Egyptian people.
One reason for the Middle Kingdom’s prosperity was the increasingly interconnected Mediterranean world of the Middle Bronze Age. Egypt benefited from trade and migration in every direction, a phenomenon that led to the formation of a competing power base in the Delta, where a series of rulers with non-Egyptian names – they seem to have originated in the western Levant – stepped in to fill a power vacuum at the end of the Middle Kingdom. Later histories remembered the reign of these Hyksos rulers (from the Egyptian for ‘foreign kings’) as a terrible upheaval; Manetho described it as a time when the gods punished Egypt. Societies collectively remember ruptures in their social fabric, as well as past glories, and the theme of a ‘foreign’ threat overcome by ‘native’ heroism resonated throughout Egyptian history – and with modern history writers, too.
Facts and fictions are difficult to untangle for this Second Intermediate Period, but leaders from the south of the country gained the upper hand through a series of battles. Around 1500 BC one of the southern leaders, a man named Ahmose from the town of Thebes (known today as Luxor), dealt a final defeat to the Hyksos rulers in the north and reunited the Delta and the Valley. This marked the start of the New Kingdom: the era most familiar to us today, thanks to famous rulers like Hatshepsut, Akhenaten, Tutankhamun and Ramses II ‘the Great’, and the fortuitous survival of their tombs and temples. Instead of pyramids, kings of this era secreted their burials underground in the Valley of the Kings, but the pyramid remained a meaningful form in Egyptian art and architecture. The tops of obelisks – tall, slender monoliths carved by royal order – preserved the familiar pyramid.14 Throughout the New Kingdom rulers erected pairs of obelisks outside temple gateways. These were engineering feats: hewn from a single piece of stone, obelisks might be 30 to 40 metres long and weigh hundreds of tons. Most were made of red granite from the southern quarries at Aswan, so they had to be sailed down the Nile then erected on site: a potent visual manifestation not only of royal power, but of divine power as well. On a smaller scale, some nonroyal individuals adopted the pyramid as a tomb marker, building metre-high mini-pyramids with sides that sloped at a steeper angle than the more familiar, squat pyramid shape atop obelisks, or at Giza. Single blocks of stone carved into a pyramid shape (often known as pyramidions in Egyptology) also served a devotional purpose, inscribed by priests and officials to record their prayers to the gods. In the 19th Dynasty a scribe named Ramose, who helped oversee work on tombs in the Valley of the Kings, had a pyramidion carved with images of himself on two sides and of two falcon gods (including Re-Horakhty, god of the evening horizon) on the others. Use of the pyramid form in a non-royal context appears to have become an acceptable way for men like Ramose to participate in the flourishing solar religion of the period.
As we saw above, after the end of the New Kingdom around 1000 BC, a weaker central state marked the Third and final ‘Intermediate Period’ of ancient Egyptian history. At times rival kings governed the north and south of the country, and the powerful High Priests of Amun, the god of Thebes (Luxor), established their own family line as royal rulers, numbered the 21st Dynasty. Manetho’s 25th Dynasty, composed of kings from Kush in modern Sudan, straddles the Third Intermediate Period and the ensuing Late Period.15 The kingdom of Kush had a long history of its own and extensive links with Egypt through trade, migration and cultural exchange. The kings of Kush annexed Egypt around 750 BC after defeating the Assyrian forces that had been making inroads from the north. The Kushite kings already used Egyptianinspired art and architecture for their own performances of power in Sudan, where their burials were marked by steep-sided pyramids at Nuri and el-Kurru, just below (that is, north of) the fourth cataract of the Nile, near the ancient city of Napata. Although some of the pyramids are only around 10 metres high, the largest are up to 30 metres, and the number of pyramids clustered together over time – several dozen for kings and queens at Nuri – make these cemeteries an impressive site. Numbered as the 25th Dynasty, five kings from Napata ruled Egypt for a century, before a fresh incursion from Assyria installed a new dynasty of Egyptian rulers and pushed the last king, Tantamani, back to Sudanese lands. But the pyramid remained a symbol of royal power in Sudan for centuries, reminding us that no single society or geographic location has a monopoly on cultural forms. Several centuries later, from around 300 BC to the fourth century AD, the centre of power in this region shifted further south to the city of Meroë, where it flourished as a gateway to trade with central, southern and eastern Africa. The kingdom of Meroë appears in several histories by Greek and Latin authors, who credit it with resisting attacks from Alexander the Great (which never happened) and the Roman Empire (which did). Its wealthy rulers could have been buried in any style they chose – and again they chose pyramids, rising from square bases at a 70-degree angle, with chapels built against one side.
A limestone ‘pyramidion’ from the top of the tomb of Ramose, a scribe, at Deir el-Medina, Egypt, c. 1250 BC.
Three thousand years separate the Step Pyramid of king Djoser and the last pyramid at Meroë, demonstrating not only the long time span of history in the Nile Valley, but the diversity of forms, influences and meanings that go into making any symbol, and any society, work. The pyramid form made the leap to Rome when the politician Gaius Cestius – influenced by Rome’s recent conquest of Egypt – commissioned a Meroitic-like pyramid as his tomb around 15 BC.16 It stands 36 metres high and was one of several pyramid-shaped monuments created around the same time. Such steep-sided pyramids became the norm in Western representations of all pyramids until the Napoleonic expedition. Thought to have associations with Freemasonry, the symbol of an all-knowing eye at the top of a pyramid has been the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States since 1782, and has appeared on the back of one-dollar bills since the 1930s. Thirteen courses of stone in the American pyramid represent the thirteen original states, while Latin mottoes emphasize divine approval for the new country. More than anything, the pyramid stands for the strength and durability the United States hoped to achieve – the same strength Napoleon hoped would inspire his troops, or shame them should they fail to meet his empire-building ambitions.
Throughout this book, the transformation of ancient Egyptian civilization into different, sometimes competing, cultural memories is as important as timelines or maps. The pyramid has been a useful way to trace changes through the ancient history of Egypt, much as the figure of Thoth, in Chapter One, let us trace changes from Egypt’s late antique history to the present day. Not only were forms of art and architecture, or gods and myths, vehicles for transmitting ideas about ancient Egypt to other cultures. So too were historical figures from the past, whose sometimes hazy biographies, or own self-mythologizing, made them ripe for later eras to reinterpret.
Having started this chapter with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, we end it with Napoleon as well – and with the ancient hero he took as his model, Alexander the Great. Left to their own devices, the savants who accompanied the expedition set out to study the flora and fauna, geological resources, and art, crafts and architecture they had been tasked with recording. Under the leadership of Denon – later head of the Louvre and supporter of Gros – mapping, measuring and drawing ancient monuments and artefacts became a crucial part of their mission. Even though French troops had to surrender to the British all the antiquities they had collected, before returning home in defeat, the savants were allowed to keep their copious notes and drawings. Once back in Paris, they undertook a vast engraving and publishing project that culminated in more than twenty volumes published as the Description de l’Égypte, which appeared in stages between 1809 and 1829. Divided into three parts (modern state, natural history and antiquities), the Description made the results of the French expedition available to anyone with access to a learned library, or with the considerable financial resource to purchase a set, perhaps complete with a custom-made cabinet in an Egyptian-themed style. Yet the Description did something else as well: it imagined a modern and an ancient geography of Egypt ordered by European principles, analysed by European methods and subject to European control, which increasingly became a reality as the country’s governor, Mohamed Ali, invited closer economic involvement.
In his own abortive quest for an empire in the Middle East, Napoleon could readily tap into the theme of the all-conquering Greek – that is, European – hero, Alexander the Great. At the beginning of his exhaustive campaign against the Persian Empire, Alexander led his troops into Egypt against little resistance. The Egyptian population seemed happy to lose their Persian overlords; and priests at the ancient city of Memphis, near the Giza pyramids, crowned him as a new pharaoh. For the frontispiece to the first volume of the Description, designers used the iconography of Alexander to praise Napoleon. Rather than represent Napoleon directly – only his monogram appears, topped by an imperial crown in the bottom page border – the artists depicted a heroically nude soldier urging on his chariot, at the top of the page. The names of French battle victories line each side of the border; behind the chariot, the Muses of ancient Greece symbolize the return of the arts to Egypt, or specifically – since they are next to Pompey’s Pillar – Alexandria. The centre of the frontispiece is a Nilotic flight of fancy, gathering statues, sphinxes, obelisks and a classical column (Pompey’s Pillar) in the foreground, while other temples and obelisks snake away up the river to the distant desert hills. Although it relates to geographic reality in that the foreground represents northern sites (like Giza) and the background the southern reaches of the Nile (Karnak on the left, Medinet Habu on the right, Philae in the distance), this is a landscape that feels like a pastiche and is empty of human presence, making it all the easier for Western viewers to place themselves within it or project their own ideas onto the scene. To the right, just behind Pompey’s Pillar, the edge of a pyramid seems to hide in its own shadow – as if it knew what was coming and would rather have been someplace else.
The recto (back) of the Great Seal of the United States of America, adopted in 1782 after a design by William Barton.
Frontispiece to the first volume of the Description de l’Égypte (1809).
