The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt Read online

Perhaps the most intriguing question surrounding Khufu’s monumental construction project related to its purpose. What inspired such a feat of architecture, engineering, and sheer administrative effort? Why would ten thousand men toil for twenty years to build an artificial mountain of stone? The easy answer, favored by Egyptologists, cites the ideology of divine kingship—the notion that the monarch was the sole arbiter between the people and the gods, the defender of created order and the guarantor of Egypt’s continued stability and prosperity. In such a system, the population would surely have labored willingly on a vast royal project in order to honor and maintain the covenant between them and their ruler. Perhaps. But even if pyramid building was a form of social security, providing employment for a large proportion of the population, especially during the months of the inundation when the fields were underwater; even if the workers were reasonably well housed and fed, not the slaves of popular myth; even if the overseers impressed upon their recruits the noble nature of the task at hand—the fact remains that the conditions were uncomfortable (at best) and the work compulsory. When royal officials came to a village to draft its men for state service, there is unlikely to have been much rejoicing. Workers sustained frequent injuries on the Giza plateau, their skeletons showing evidence of broken bones, severe lower back stress, and painful arthritic joints. Accidents must have been frequent, often resulting in fatalities. The official record is predictably silent about how many died building the Great Pyramid.

  So, if the pyramid was not exactly a national project in which the whole country could take part and feel pride, what was it? The uncomfortable answer is that it was the ultimate projection of absolute power. Despots throughout history have been attracted to colossal buildings, from Nicolae Ceaus¸escu’s Palace of the People in Bucharest to tin-pot dictator Félix Houphouët-Boigny’s vast (and ridiculous) basilica in the jungles of Ivory Coast. The Great Pyramid of Khufu is merely the most audacious and enduring of such folies de grandeur. Little wonder that its royal builder gained a posthumous reputation as a megalomaniac tyrant with scant regard for human life. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fourth century B.C., declared that Khufu “brought the country into all sorts of misery. He closed all the temples, then, not content with excluding his subjects from the practice of their religion, compelled them without exception to labour as slaves for his own advantage.” Herodotus added that “the Egyptians can hardly bring themselves to mention [him], so great is their hatred.”2 The symbolism of the Great Pyramid has not been lost on more recent dictators. After his invasion of Egypt in A.D. 1798, Napoléon Bonaparte made straight for Giza and camped his soldiers at the foot of the plateau, before rallying them with the words “Soldiers of France, forty centuries gaze down upon you.”

  The Great Pyramid is not only the epitome of monumentality and indestructibility. What makes it unique are its unparalleled accuracy and complexity. Its precise orientation to true north has already been commented upon. Most extraordinary of all are the narrow shafts that lead upward and outward from the burial chamber (and the chamber below it), through the solid masonry, to the outer edge of the pyramid, stopping just short of the world beyond. Erroneously dubbed air shafts, they had a purpose that was altogether loftier and more transcendent, for they pointed to the stars—more specifically to the culminations of Sirius (the dog star), a star in the constellation Orion, and two of the circumpolar stars that rotate around the celestial north pole. The ancient Egyptians were accomplished astronomers, and stars played an important part in state religion, especially in beliefs about the king’s afterlife. The circumpolar stars were a particular source of fascination. They alone remained permanently visible in the night sky, never setting, and were thus the perfect metaphor for the king’s eternal destiny—a place in the great cosmic order of the universe that would endure forever. Khufu’s pyramid was nothing less than a way of uniting heaven and earth for the everlasting well-being of the king.

  SON OF THE SUN

  THE PYRAMIDS OF GIZA ARE AN APPROPRIATE SYMBOL OF ANCIENT Egyptian society in the Fourth Dynasty (2575–2450). Just as the tombs of courtiers and workmen clustered around the king’s own funerary monument (or as close as the tomb’s owner’s status allowed), so the country at large showed a similar dependence on royal power. Members of the ruling class chose to have themselves depicted as lowly scribes, emphasizing their service to the king. Autobiographical inscriptions written on tomb walls further reinforced this culture of servitude. It is no coincidence that one of the longest lasting of all ancient Egyptian funerary formulae first appeared in the early Fourth Dynasty. Written in tomb chapels, on offering tables, and later on coffins, it expressed the notion that all provisions for the tomb and the owner’s mortuary cult depended upon royal largesse, constituting “an offering which the king gives.” The elevation of the king found further expression in the appearance and growing popularity of personal names where the name of a god was replaced with the name of the reigning monarch. Children given names such as Khufu-khaf, “Khufu, he appears,” might well have grown up wondering if there was any practical difference between the king and the sun god. The conscious modeling of the royal mortuary temple on the shrines of the gods further blurred the distinction.

  This profound change in the relationship between the king and his subjects reflected an aggrandizement of monarchy that is seen not just at Giza, the epicenter of royal authority, but in the furthest reaches of the Egyptian realm. Inscriptions among the inhospitable mountains of Sinai, to the northeast, and on an isolated rocky outcrop in the southwestern desert bear witness to the state-sponsored expeditions sent by Khufu and his successors to the remotest corners of Egypt. The purpose of the expeditions was to bring back precious stones for the royal workshops, materials that could be transformed into statues, jewelry, and other costly objects to project and enhance the king’s authority. The opulence—even decadence—of Khufu’s court is most evident in two tombs excavated close to the Great Pyramid. One belonged to a dwarf called Perniankhu, whose job was to entertain the king and members of the royal family, perhaps by dancing and singing—the ancient Egyptian equivalent of a medieval court jester. We may imagine the scenes of feasting and revelry that took place in the royal palace, while the king’s subjects bedded down in their cramped barracks at the end of yet another day of toil on the Giza plateau.

  The second tomb contained equipment prepared for the king’s own mother, and it provides revealing insights into the lifestyle of Fourth Dynasty royalty. Hetepheres was the wife of one great pyramid builder (Sneferu), the mother of another, and very probably a king’s daughter to boot. As befitted her exalted status, she lived a life of luxury and ease, borne from place to place in a gilded carrying chair with ebony panels. Its gold inlaid hieroglyphs spelled out her many titles: mother of the dual king; follower of Horus; director of the ruler; the gracious one, whose every utterance is done for her. If these epithets are to be believed, it seems that Khufu took orders from only one person, and that was his mother. The impression of a peripatetic royal family, moving from one palace to another, is reinforced by the other items in He-tepheres’s tomb equipment, which included a bed with a separate canopy and two low chairs. The furniture was lightweight and highly portable, easily dismantled and reerected. Its simplicity and elegance of design, combining exemplary craftsmanship and sumptuous materials, encapsulates the self-confidence and restrained opulence of the Fourth Dynasty. Hetepheres’s most treasured possessions were her jewelry boxes, one of which was specially designed to hold twenty silver bracelets. A figure of the queen on her carrying chair shows her wearing fourteen of these bracelets at once, all along her right arm. At this period of Egyptian history, silver (which had to be imported from distant lands) was much more valuable than gold, and the bracelets were further enhanced by inlaid decoration in turquoise, lapis lazuli, and carnelian. All in all, Hetepheres must have presented a dazzling spectacle of an African queen, appropriate for the mother of an all-powerful king.

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nbsp; But even Khufu could not defy mortality. Around 2525 he died, and was buried with proper pomp and solemnity in his Great Pyramid, the funeral ceremonies presided over by his son and heir, Djedefra. The new king seems not to have inherited his father’s penchant for lavish monuments; he built a much smaller pyramid in an entirely new site on the northernmost edge of the great Memphite necropolis. Perhaps he realized he could not compete at Giza. A more symbolic reason for the novel choice of location was that it faced the town of Iunu, principal cult center of the sun god Ra. Djedefra was clearly fascinated by the solar deity, and the sun’s life-giving brilliance presented an eminently suitable metaphor for an omnipotent, resplendent monarchy. Djedefra decided to harness this symbolism, to forge a bond between king and god that would achieve, in theological terms, what his father had achieved through monumental architecture. Djedefra’s very name, meaning “Ra, he speaks,” was a public statement of the sun god’s supreme authority. The king went further, adding a new title to the royal collection by calling himself “son of Ra.” It was a decisive break with earlier tradition, which had emphasized the primacy of the celestial falcon god Horus, and it underlined the Fourth Dynasty’s independence from the past, their determination to establish a new model for kingship. Under royal patronage, the cult of Ra rapidly became the most powerful in the land, and the god himself rose to a position of unassailability in the Egyptian pantheon.

  The twin strands of Fourth Dynasty royal ideology—pyramid building on a massive scale and a close association with the sun god—came together in the reign of Djedefra’s successor and younger brother, Khafra (beginning circa 2500). For his funerary monument he returned to Giza, siting his pyramid next to Khufu’s, but he cleverly chose a slightly more elevated spot. This meant that, even though the pyramid was not quite as high as its neighbor (474 feet as opposed to 482 feet), it appeared bigger—an inspired combination of deference and self-assertion. An impressive causeway led down the plateau to the valley temple, which was sheathed in polished slabs of red granite, a stone with strong solar connotations. Around the temple’s inner hall, which was paved with dazzling white calcite (symbolic of purification), stood twenty-three life-size statues of Khafra. They showed the king enthroned in majesty with the falcon god and traditional patron of kingship, Horus, perched behind his head, offering him protection. Each statue was carved from a single block of gneiss, a spectacular banded black-and-white stone brought hundreds of miles from a remote quarry in the Western Desert. The total effect, enhanced by carefully controlled light levels, must have been mesmerizing. Had there ever been a more imposing representation of kingship? But Khafra had not finished. His coup de grâce was to order the transformation of an imposing knoll of rock that rose from the ground next to his valley temple. Under the masons’ chisels, it was transmogrified into a giant recumbent lion, its human head bearing a royal countenance. The Great Sphinx symbolized nothing less than Khafra’s unification with the sun god. Guardian of the Giza necropolis, it reoriented the whole site around Khafra’s own monument. Khufu’s second son had not only trumped the Great Pyramid; he had effectively appropriated it as well.

  Three generations of huge investment—human, material, and administrative—in pyramid building transformed Egypt but proved an unsustainable drain on its resources. Khafra’s successor, Menkaura, was the last king to build a pyramid at Giza, and it was on a much reduced scale, reaching only 216 feet in height and only one-tenth of the volume of the Great Pyramid. The architects tried hard to compensate with an extravagant use of red granite, brought by barge all the way from the first cataract region, and by an enlarged pyramid temple, where Menkaura’s funerary cult continued to be celebrated for centuries after his death. But the era of massive pyramids was over. Later kings would have to find new ways of projecting their power.

  An Arabic proverb states “man fears time, but time fears the pyramids.” The Great Pyramid was perhaps the most ambitious construction project of the ancient world. Its royal builder bestrode his era like a colossus. Yet—in one of the greatest ironies of archaeology—the only certain image of Khufu to have survived from his own time is a tiny thumb-size statuette of ivory. Discovered in the ruins of the temple at Abdju, it measures just three inches high. The regalia of kingship are clear enough in the statuette—the king is shown enthroned, wearing the red crown and holding the royal flail—but the scale is diminutive. An autocrat during his lifetime and a tyrant in later tradition, history has finally cut Khufu down to size.

  CHAPTER 5

  ETERNITY ASSURED

  THEM AND US

  IN ONE VERY CRUCIAL SENSE, THE APPARENT STABILITY OF THE PYRAMID Age was an illusion. Behind the veil of glorious majesty, there were ripples of dissent within the royal family. In response to a series of dynastic crises at the height of the Fourth Dynasty (hushed up, but no less real for that), the rulers of the later Old Kingdom took conscious steps to regain control of the succession. These steps, in turn, laid the foundations for a very different style of monarchy—and a different model of society—in the three centuries after the masons’ chisels fell silent at Giza.

  Given that ancient Egyptian kings were invariably polygamous, it is not altogether surprising that sons born of different wives (and the wives themselves) should have jostled for influence and power. Factional quarrels are never explicitly mentioned in the written record—these quarrels hardly supported the picture of a serene and unchallengeable monarchy that the kings wished to present—but they can be guessed at from tantalizing clues: fleeting reigns in the midst of apparent dynastic stability (like Khafra’s ephemeral successor, whose name is not even preserved), and sudden, unexplained departures in royal policy, such as the relocation of the royal burial ground from Giza to Saqqara at the end of the Fourth Dynasty.

  After the lackluster reign of Menkaura’s successor, Shepseskaf—notable only for his singular funerary monument that, in a radical departure from recent tradition, was shaped like a giant sarcophagus instead of a pyramid—a new dynasty, the Fifth (2450–2325), came to power in the person of King Userkaf. From the outset, he was eager to make a fresh start, presenting himself as the founder of a new age, a new model of government, and a new concept of kingship. The first and most public statement of his intent was his choice of tomb. Ignoring Shepseskaf’s bizarre innovation, he reverted to the traditional pyramid model. What’s more significant, however, is that he chose to build it at the corner of Netjerikhet’s great Step Pyramid enclosure, by now a venerable two-hundred-year-old monument. He was thus explicitly associating himself with one of the great kings of the past. Just as the reign of Netjerikhet had marked a new beginning, so, too, would the reign of Userkaf.

  But whereas Netjerikhet’s massive pyramid—and those of his Fourth Dynasty successors—had projected an uncompromising image of the king’s political power, Userkaf chose a different path, emphasizing instead the sacred character of his office. While his pyramid was a rather small affair (at only 161 feet in height, it was the smallest royal pyramid to date), far greater resources were devoted to a monument quite separate and distinct from the king’s tomb. This was a sun temple, built at the site of Abusir, midway between Saqqara and Giza. It was an innovation as bold and epoch-making, in its own way, as the Step Pyramid. Comprising a walled stone enclosure with a symbolic mound at its center, Userkaf’s monument—called Nekhen-Ra, “Ra’s stronghold”—was designed, above all, to underline the king’s unique relationship with the sun god. Sacrifices were made in its open court, under the rays of the sun, and consecrated to Ra upon an altar in front of the mound. If contemporary hieroglyphic representations are to be believed, the mound may even have been topped with a wooden perch, for the convenience of the sun god in his falcon form. As befitted a monument dedicated to the preeminent deity, the sun temple was endowed with its own land and personnel, and was at least as important an institution as the royal pyramid. Indeed, supplies destined for the king’s mortuary temple were often delivered via the sun temple, which acted
as a sacred filter, giving the goods used in the celebration of the king’s own cult an extra, divine stamp of approval.

  The sun temples built by Userkaf and his Fifth Dynasty successors were a bold attempt to rebrand Egyptian kingship. No longer able to bear the economic burden of colossal pyramids, the monarchy had to find a new way of projecting itself and underlining its position at the apex of ancient Egyptian society. It did so by removing the king even further from the mortal sphere, linking him more closely than ever with the realm of the divine. In the first three dynasties, royal ideology had stressed the king’s position as the earthly incarnation of the ancient sky god Horus. In the Fourth Dynasty, Djedefra had taken the step of calling himself “son of Ra,” adding the sun god to the web of royal associations. Building upon these developments, Userkaf gave concrete expression to his relationship with the solar deity, and he would be remembered in later folk tradition as the very offspring of Ra—subtle theology in place of naked displays of power. Psychology had replaced tyranny as the favored tool of royal propaganda.

  The deliberate distancing of the king from his subjects took other forms, too. While the tombs of bureaucrats had clustered tightly around the Fourth Dynasty pyramids at Giza—proximity to the royal monument reflecting rank at court—in the Fifth Dynasty a marked separation was enforced between the divine king and mere mortals. Royalty and the common people would be carefully demarcated in death as well as in life. A necropolis for high-ranking officials was established at Saqqara (less prominent individuals had to make do with a tomb at Giza, now abandoned as the main center of royal activity), but the royal pyramid kept its distance, moving even farther away, to Abusir, under Userkaf’s successors. Nor were the officials themselves as closely connected to the royal family as they had been in times past. From the dawn of Egyptian history until the late Fourth Dynasty, the highest offices of state had been reserved for the king’s relatives. Without exception, every vizier from the reign of Sneferu to the reign of Menkaura had been a royal prince, and most of the overseers of works as well. In a dramatic and far-reaching departure, Userkaf opened up the top jobs in the administration to men of nonroyal birth. The motives for such a radical shift of policy seem to have been both ideological and pragmatic. It allowed the king and his family to rise above the nitty-gritty of government. Just as important, by removing political power from the hands of (often quarrelsome) princes, Userkaf no doubt hoped to avoid the internal wranglings that so often threatened the stability of the monarchy.