The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt Page 11

  The result was a new class of professional bureaucrats, men who achieved power as much by their own abilities as by their royal connections. At the same time, the administration expanded to reflect increased job specialization. Whereas it might have worked for a prince to hold a diverse portfolio of responsibilities, connected only by the fact of his royal blood, a full-time, professional administrator could scarcely be expected to excel at a dozen different roles simultaneously. From now on, career officials, not royal relatives, would be the backbone of the ancient Egyptian government machine. And without the aura or status of royalty, they would have much more to prove.

  An expanded professional bureaucracy composed largely of commoners, and the establishment of a new necropolis in which they could build their eternal resting places without reference to—and without being overshadowed by—the king’s pyramid: these interlinked developments set the scene for the defining monuments of the later Old Kingdom—the tombs of the courtiers. For the first time in Egyptian history, they allow us to enter the world of the king’s subjects—with often surprising results.

  KEEPING UP APPEARANCES

  ABOVE ALL, THE PRIVATE TOMBS OF THE FIFTH AND SIXTH DYNASTIES (2450–2175) are extraordinary works of art. The sophistication of their painted reliefs testifies to the skills of ancient Egyptian craftsmen, skills that had been honed over many generations in the royal cemeteries of Dahshur and Giza. With space to build larger monuments and ambitious peers to impress, the high officials of the later Old Kingdom took the business of tomb construction and decoration very seriously. It swiftly became a competitive activity, and a bureaucrat would wait as long as he dared before commencing work on his monument, hoping for one final promotion that would enable him to lord it over his contemporaries (and their descendants) in appropriately grand architectural fashion. Officials lavished particular attention on their tomb chapels, the public rooms or suites of rooms aboveground where family members and other visitors would come after the owner’s death to present offerings to his statue. By contrast, the burial chamber itself, belowground and out of sight, rarely received more than the most cursory decoration. “If you’ve got it, flaunt it” would certainly have struck a chord with the ancient Egyptians.

  A statue of Mereruka emerges from its niche to receive offerings from visitors to his tomb. WERNER FORMAN ARCHIVE

  As for the decoration, certain themes were de rigueur. Although an elaborate tomb was an essential piece of one-upmanship in the competitive world of the Old Kingdom civil service, its more fundamental purpose—to protect and nurture the undying spirit of the deceased for all eternity—could neither be forgotten nor neglected. So the most important tomb scenes were those that depicted the manufacture and presentation of offerings, ranging from the basics of life (bread and beer) to the finer accoutrements of privilege, such as furniture, jewelry, and wine. Incidentally, such scenes provide a wealth of information about the techniques of agriculture, craft production, and food preparation, but recording daily life was not their primary purpose. Rather, they were an artistic insurance policy: according to Egyptian beliefs, if the actual grave goods buried with the body were ever exhausted or destroyed, the scenes would come to life in the tomb and ensure a continuous supply of every requirement by magical means. The lines of painted offering bearers, marching incessantly toward the false door that communicated with the burial chamber below, would similarly become animated by magic and never fail to deliver their bounty to the tomb owner.

  Given the twofold purpose of a tomb chapel—to proclaim the owner’s status and guarantee him a comfortable afterlife—it is not surprising that the decoration presents a highly idealized view of life in ancient Egypt. The sculptors and painters were required to depict things not as they really were but as the client wished them to be. Decoration was designed, above all, to reinforce the established social order. For example, while the owner stands tall, dominating every scene, his servants—and, indeed, his wife and children—are more often shown as diminutive figures, sometimes barely reaching his knees. This principle of hierarchical scaling, so strange to modern eyes, perfectly reflects the Egyptians’ obsession with rank. Another feature of tomb decoration is its deliberate timelessness. There is little or no sense of narrative progression. Scenes appear as if suspended in space and time. The key moments in the owner’s life, such as his childhood, marriage, and promotion to high office, are conspicuous by their absence, for to have included them in the decoration would have perpetuated them for eternity. Only the endpoint—the peak of achievement, wealth, and status—was deemed appropriate to immortalize in art.

  Although tomb scenes may not be reliable evidence for the realities of daily life, they do allow us to enter into the fantasies of the ancient Egyptian elite. The pleasures of the idle rich are meticulously recorded: hunting in the desert, fishing and fowling in the marshes, and a range of indoor pursuits. Mereruka, a vizier of the early Sixth Dynasty, is shown painting and playing board games. In another scene, members of his household staff prepare his bed, arranging the mattress, headrest, and canopy; Mereruka then relaxes on his four-poster while his wife entertains him by playing the harp. When, from time to time, he had to bestir himself and actually do some work, he could at least enjoy traveling from place to place in the comfort of a shaded palanquin, borne on the shoulders of servants. Such activities were, of course, a world away from the harsh realities of life in rural Egypt (ancient and modern). The bureaucrats of the later Old Kingdom may have been commoners, but once they had climbed the greasy pole of career advancement, they were more than content to shut themselves off from the rest of the population and wallow in pampered luxury—or at least the promise of it after death. Very occasionally, a glimpse of the world beyond the silken veil is allowed to intrude, but only to emphasize a point. In Mereruka’s tomb, his life of leisure is contrasted with the brutal punishment meted out to tax defaulters over whom he exercised authority. An unpleasant fate indeed awaited the head man of a village found in arrears. After being frog-marched to the local tax office, he could expect to be lashed naked to a whipping post and flogged with wooden sticks, while scribes stood by recording the offense and the punishment. Away from the cloistered lives of the hunting and fishing set, life was mean and miserable.

  Nowhere is this disparity better illustrated than in matters of health. The upper echelons of society were able to call upon the services of doctors, dentists, and other medical specialists. In their tombs, the elite are always depicted in vigorous good health, the men fit and virile, the women nubile and graceful. By contrast, skeletons and mummified remains—as well as the occasional tomb scene—confirm that the peasantry suffered from a range of debilitating and painful diseases, many of them still prevalent in Egypt today. Schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease transmitted by water snails in canals, ditches, and stagnant pools, caused blood in the urine, sometimes leading to anemia, and must have been a common cause of ill health and early death. Tuberculosis seems to have been prevalent, often leading to deformation of the spine (Pott’s disease), and similar symptoms were no doubt a common result of unremittingly hard physical labor. Tumors, too, are attested on Old Kingdom skeletons, while three depictions in contemporary tombs may represent individuals suffering from hernias. Apart from adding a little color to scenes of peasants at work, disease, deformity, dirt, and dissent had no place in the artisocratic ideal of the ruling elite.

  The impression of a governing class badly out of touch with the rest of the population is only reinforced when we look at the jobs of these tomb owners. To be sure, some of them, such as Mereruka and his predecessor Kagemni, were viziers and held important government offices. But others seem to have had little or no administrative responsibility, instead deriving their exalted status purely from their proximity to the king. Irukaptah, the head of palace butchers, undoubtedly had a central part to play in the provisioning of the royal court, but the splendor of his tomb at Saqqara (complete with scenes of butchery) suggests that the king care
d rather more about what he ate for dinner than about how his ministries were run. In a similar vein, the twin brothers Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep, joint heads of palace manicurists, were rewarded for their devoted attention to the royal fingernails with a beautifully decorated tomb. The vizier Khentika owed his promotion not to his experience of sound administration but to his varied roles in the king’s personal service, which included controller of the robing room, overseer of clothes, administrator of every kilt, chief of secrets of the bathroom, and even overseer of the king’s breakfast. At an effete royal court steeped in pampered privilege, the most sumptuous of all Fifth Dynasty tombs at Saqqara was built not for a chancellor or overseer of works but for the head of palace hairdressers. Ty’s magnificent edifice comprises a vast open courtyard with pillars forming a shady portico on all four sides, a long corridor leading to a further two rooms, and a separate chamber to house his statue. He demonstrates the extent to which royal favor was still the main passport to wealth and status. The administration had indeed been opened up to commoners, but old habits died hard.

  This age-old method of advancement is exemplified in the career of Ptahshepses (circa 2400), owner of the largest known Fifth Dynasty private tomb in all Egypt. The major turning point in his career was his second marriage, when he took the hand of the king’s own daughter. Becoming a royal son-in-law gained Ptahshepses access to the innermost circle at court. His newfound status prompted a major enlargement of his funerary monument, including the addition of a grand columned entrance. But such dizzying success came at a price. He seems to have been forced to disinherit his eldest son, born of an earlier marriage, in favor of the children from his second, royal marriage. Loyalty to the monarch counted for more than loyalty to one’s own family.

  The reforms of the early Fifth Dynasty, which had been designed to distance the royal family from the business of government, unintentionally resulted in an overstaffed, overpaid, and overbearing bureaucracy. By the middle of the dynasty, government jobs—and the highfalutin titles that went with them—had multiplied to such an extent that a special system of ranking titles was introduced, to help distinguish between different degrees of privilege. But the growing influence of high officials had begun to threaten the king’s monopoly on power and could not be allowed to continue unchecked. Toward the end of the dynasty (circa 2350), the monarchy implemented a major reorganization of the administration, to reduce the number of bureaucrats and curb their powers. A central plank of these reforms was the delegation of responsibilities to officials based in the provinces. While the intention was to restrict the influence of the ambitious men at court, the unintended consequence was a weakening of central government itself, with far-reaching and long-lasting repercussions for the stability of the Egyptian state. Officialdom, once given a taste of power, would not be easily muted. The bureaucrats whose careers defined the later Old Kingdom would, in the end, be responsible for its demise.

  TEMPLES AND TEXTS

  WHILE THE RULING CLASS WAS LEAVING ITS MARK IN A SERIES OF LAVISHLY decorated tombs, the kings of the Fifth Dynasty (2450–2325) concerned themselves with their own architectural legacy: pyramids and sun temples. Userkaf’s five successors paid homage to the sun god Ra in their names (Sahura, Neferirkara, Shepseskara, Neferefra, and Niuserra) and erected their pyramids at Abusir, in the vicinity of Userkaf’s sun temple. While nowhere near as large or as solidly built as Fourth Dynasty pyramids, these Fifth Dynasty counterparts were beautifully and extensively decorated in keeping with the fashion of the time. Sahura’s pyramid complex alone contained an estimated twelve thousand square yards of relief carving. The decoration included several new genres, such as scenes of gods presenting foreign captives to the king, or a goddess suckling the monarch. The sophisticated taste of the court is also evident in the deliberate and careful use of contrasting types of stone: Sahura’s valley temple had a dado and columns of red granite (the latter shaped like palm fronds), a floor of black basalt, and upper walls of fine white limestone, while the roof was painted dark blue with golden stars, to resemble the night sky. The covered causeway leading up the escarpment was decorated with reliefs along its whole length, and further decoration covered the walls of the mortuary temple next to the pyramid proper. The whole effect must have been spellbinding.

  The mortuary temple was not merely the inner sanctum of the whole complex; it also housed the king’s statue, which was the focus of cult activity during his reign and—he hoped—for eternity. (Needless to say, every monarch was to be frustrated in this hope, and few cults were maintained for more than a few generations after their founders’ deaths.) Remarkably, archives of papyrus documents have survived from two mortuary temples at Abusir, the temples attached to the pyramids of Neferirkara and Neferefra, and they give unrivaled information about the day-to-day operation of a royal funerary cult in the Old Kingdom. They reveal a system obsessed with bookkeeping, but a mind-set that was more concerned with processes and protocols than standards.

  The personnel of Neferirkara’s temple served on a monthly rota, and at the beginning of each thirty-day period the members of staff coming on duty were required to carry out a thorough inspection of the temple and its contents. The building itself was examined for damage, and each piece of furniture or equipment was checked against a detailed inventory, arranged systematically by material, shape, and size. One sheet of papyrus lists items made from stone and flint. Under the heading “crystalline stone,” subheading “bowls,” category “white,” an inspector has noted “various repairs to rim and base, and to sides.” A blade of flint is recorded as having “chips missing, having been dropped,” while a small silver offering table was found in an equally parlous state, “badly split; loose joints; corroded.” The fact that these inspections took place just fifty years after Neferirkara’s death shows how quickly items of temple equipment could become damaged. Apparently, regular inspection and recording was more important than actually looking after the items in question. Style over substance, impression over action—an all-too-common phenomenon in societies hamstrung by bureaucracy.

  Deliveries of foodstuffs and other supplies were also meticulously recorded, but here again there were systemic failures that even the most assiduous record keeping could not mask. Among the commodities due each day at Neferirkara’s sun temple were fourteen consignments of special bread. During one year, none arrived on the first day of the month, none on the second, and none on the third or fourth, until on the fifth day of the month seventy batches were delivered in one go. The next six days’ supplies failed to materialize at all and seem to have been written off. By contrast, the next eleven days’ deliveries were received on time. Apparently even a society as structured and prescribed as ancient Egypt could not ensure the regular delivery of the most basic commodities being transported from one royal foundation to another. It is a surprising revelation, at odds with the outward impression of a well-ordered, confident, and efficient civilization. Perhaps the Old Kingdom governmental machine was not as robust as its monuments liked to suggest, even in times of peace and plenty, let alone in the face of serious political or economic turbulence. Those who dared to look beyond their own rhetoric might have seen that the seeds of collapse had not only been sown, they were already germinating.

  Not that Unas, the last king of the Fifth Dynasty (2350–2325), was outwardly concerned with such problems. He was far too busy reinventing traditions, adding new and innovative elements to the already weighty edifice of royal ideology. Like Userkaf before him, he chose a site for his pyramid at one corner of Netjerikhet’s Step Pyramid enclosure. And it was not only the pyramid’s location that announced Unas as a renaissance ruler. The most radical innovation was reserved for the chambers underneath the monument. Eschewing the stark simplicity of earlier undecorated walls, Unas commissioned an altogether more elaborate resting place for his afterlife. His coffin was painted black to symbolize the earth, while the ceiling of the burial chamber was studded with golden stars against a
dark blue background to mimic the night sky. Around the sarcophagus, the walls of the burial chamber were lined with white alabaster, grooved and painted to resemble an enclosure made from a wooden frame and reed matting, representing the type of primitive shrine that the ancient Egyptians believed had existed at the dawn of creation. The whole ensemble was designed to be nothing less than a microcosm of the universe.

  The greatest novelty of all was the decoration on the walls of the burial chamber and anteroom—column after column of texts, painted blue to recall the watery abyss of the underworld. The so-called Pyramid Texts constitute the earliest surviving body of religious literature from ancient Egypt, and the only large corpus of inscriptions from the Old Kingdom. They are a motley collection of prayers, spells, and hymns, all designed to assist the king in his afterlife journey into the cosmic realm to join the indestructible circumpolar stars. The language and imagery of some utterances suggest that they date back many centuries, perhaps even to the dawn of Egyptian history. Others were surely composed anew at the end of the Fifth Dynasty.

  Spells, incantations, and prayers must have played a part at all royal funerals and in all royal mortuary cults. Yet the idea of inscribing them permanently on the walls of the king’s tomb, to serve for eternity, was an innovation of Unas’s reign. They were not simply carved, willy-nilly, on any available surface. Rather, the careful disposition of texts on different walls was designed to reinforce the symbolic geography of the pyramid itself. Texts explicitly concerned with the underworld were concentrated in the burial chamber, while the antechamber was identified as the horizon, the place of rebirth where the king might rise into the heavens. In this way, hieroglyphs and architecture complemented and strengthened each other, enhancing the magical power that was designed to guarantee Unas’s resurrection.