Beauty of Re

by Mark Gajewski

  All of them bowed to Thut and I respectfully.

  From discussions I’d had with Thut, I knew Rekhmire was a good vizier, very proud of his accomplishments, though a little boastful. “Do you know what a vizier does, Majesty?” he asked conversationally.

  “I should hope so,” I replied. “I’ve been instructing the king’s sons and daughters, and the hostages the king has brought back from foreign lands, for decades, about every aspect of and position in my husband’s bureaucracy. Tell me if I’ve been instructing them correctly about you.” I recited the charge the king gave every time he appointed a new vizier. “You must judge impartially between the pauper and the wealthy. You must rescue the weakling from the bully. You must ward off the rage of the bad–tempered. You must repress the acts of the covetous. You must cool down the temper of the infuriated. You must wipe away tears by satisfying need. You must appoint the son and heir to the position of the father. You must give bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, meat, beer and clothing to him who has none. You must succor the old man by giving him your staff, and cause old women to say ‘what a gracious act.’”

  “That is quite accurate,” Rekhmire said.

  “I’m glad your position does not belong to me, Vizier,” I said. “It sounds exhausting.”

  Rekhmire laughed. “And now, my tomb.”

  Thut and I followed him inside, trailed by his family. The shaded tomb was considerably cooler than the sun–drenched area beside its entrance, though, from the times I’d spent inspecting Thut’s tomb during its construction, I knew it would become much hotter the farther we penetrated the mountain.

  “As you can see, Majesties,” Rekhmire told us as we pressed after him, “my tomb consists of a court, a transverse hall, and a very long passage, more than eighty feet in length, with a niche at the end. The ceiling is ten feet high at the entrance and slopes upward and is twenty–six feet high at the far end, giving me a vast amount of wall space – more than three thousand square feet. The scenes rendered by my craftsmen are numerous and of the highest quality. The transverse hall illustrates personal and business matters, and contains lengthy texts describing my vizierial duties. The passage contains scenes of crafts, daily life, funeral banquets, and burial rituals.”

  Several of Rekhmire’s sons held up bowls of oil with burning wicks to illuminate the walls of the transverse hall for us. The scenes were, as Rekhmire had boasted, both spectacular and all–encompassing. The right half illustrated his duties. Scenes of business in the audience hall. Tax collectors receiving gold rings, cattle, monkeys, grain, honey, pigeons, cloth, and beads. Tax dodgers led by armed guards carrying heavy sticks. Tax deliveries being made from the middle region of Kemet. Rekhmire inspecting rations and furniture being delivered to the temple of Amun, including statues of Thut carved from wood and stone – one showed ducks hanging from his arm, one held an offering slab, and on one he rested his feet on a kneeling Nubian. Thirty different kinds of temple furnishings were pictured, including shields, spears, quivers, necklaces, axes and pots. Another section of the wall showed Rekhmire receiving tribute from Punt and Keftiuh and Nubia, with the inscription “every land is subject to His Majesty.” Another wall showed men pressing grapes, gathering birds and fish, cleaning them and preserving them in jars. There were hunting scenes: panic–stricken ostriches, gazelle, and antelope trying to flee Rekhmire’s spears and arrows; a hyena attempting to pull an arrow from its chest with its teeth; blood spurting from a wounded gazelle; small mammals trying to hide beneath desert shrubs; a hunting ground encircled by a fence of braided rope; a great pile of dead game being tallied by a scribe.

  We moved to the passageway. The right hand wall showed Rekhmire’s activities as vizier and mayor, and various stages of a funerary ritual. The left wall illustrated the workshops and activities he supervised at Amun’s temple: provisioning storerooms; men blowing smoke into a cylindrical beehive and removing honeycombs and packing them in jars; inventorying piles of ostrich feathers, skin shields, elephant tusks, baskets of grapes, and sacks of nuts. In one scene a man struggled to carry a large jug of wine. Piles of metal were shown before the Double Treasury of Gold and Silver, waiting to be stored inside. There were scenes showing the activities of daily life: bead makers, leather workers, carpenters, metal workers, jewelry makers, stone masons, sculptors working on both small and colossal statues for the temple. There were even men making mud bricks and erecting a temple, some of the men captives from Nubia and Setjet. Another wall detailed funeral ceremonies: the procession to the tomb and food offerings and purification rituals, watched over variously by the Mistress of the West, Osiris, and Anubis. The left wall showed ships mooring at Waset, Rekhmire being welcomed home by his family, several funerary banquets – one for the family’s women, the other for its men, the women in tight–fitting robes, elaborately coifed and bejeweled. At a banquet musicians played; butchers prepared meat for a meal. There was a statue of Rekhmire in a shrine on a boat being towed across water. There was a picture of a pond lined with date and dom palms and sycamore figs, surrounded by a terraced garden, a water carrier in its midst irrigating trees.

  “The gods will surely not forget what I have done in life,” Rekhmire said at the conclusion of our visit.

  I expected that was true.

  We reboarded Thut’s chariot after our visit concluded, and I drove us to Djeser Akhet – “Amun is Holy of the Horizon” – Thut’s temple of millions of years. It was nestled between those of Mentuhotep and Hatshepsut in the desert, against the base of the western cliffs. We’d been there together many times – Djeser Akhet had replaced Djeser Djeseru as the focus of the Beautiful Feast of the Valley years earlier. Leaving our chariot behind once again, we approached the temple on foot on the processional way. It passed through a half–mile long lush well–watered garden, interspersed with many shade trees. The temple itself rose in two terraces from the west end of the garden, like Hatshepsut’s. Thut’s temple was farther west than hers against the cliffs, and higher, having been built on a platform of fill. Hatshepsut’s complex to the right was shielded from our view by the high wall that surrounded its garden, but Mentuhotep’s to our left was not.

  “That’s where we fell in love, when we were fifteen years old,” Thut said, pointing to it.

  “Confessed it out loud for the first time, you mean,” I answered. “We always knew how we felt about each other.”

  Thut squeezed my hand tight. “You’re right, Mery. I don’t remember a time I didn’t love you.”

  The processional way was crowded with priests bearing offerings to be made in the sanctuary later in the day, and the garden with gardeners working amidst the plants. I saw priests on the terraces and ramps too, and pilgrims, no doubt bound for Hathor’s shrine, a cave that had been carved into the cliff at the rear of the temple. Inside the cave was a wooden statue of Hathor in the guise of a cow, with a statue of Thut standing under it. He and Meryetre–Hatshepsut were depicted on the cave’s walls, with Amenhotep painted below an image of Hathor, suckling at her udder.

  We climbed the first ramp, crossed the terrace with its many colossal statues of Thut – everyone fell to their knees at our passing, of course – then ascended the second ramp to the upper terrace. Unlike Djeser Djeseru’s uncovered upper court, Thut’s terrace held a great basilica, the second in the land after Brilliant of Monuments in Ipet–Isut, built on a similar pattern. We went inside. It was darkened, hushed, much cooler than the terrace. The roof over the central section was supported by a double row of twelve 32–sided columns, and the roofs to either side by 76 sixteen–sided columns standing nearly 19 feet tall. Those columns represented plants growing in the primordial marsh at the creation of the world. The central part of the roof was higher than the two sides, creating clerestory windows in the gaps. They provided a dim light.

  We inspected the brightly painted walls, decorated with three themes – offering rituals, the royal cult – Thut’s coronation, his purification, Thut embracin
g various gods – and the Beautiful Feast of the Valley. In the spaces between the columns and in niches in the walls were countless statues of Thut. We spent some time looking around the barque hall and offering room and sanctuary, then went outside.

  “I wish that woman’s temple didn’t exist,” Thut complained, pointing towards Djeser Djeseru. “It’s in the prime location in the bay of the cliffs. It will always overshadow mine and Mentuhotep’s.”

  Perversely, Thut’s comment pleased me. Djeser Djeseru had always been, to me, the most beautiful building in the world. Then I stepped to the edge of the terrace overlooking it and gasped. I hadn’t visited Djeser Djeseru since Iset had, in Thut’s name, ordered the erasure of Hatshepsut and Nefer from everything in the Two Lands. I could see its garden now that we were higher than the surrounding wall. I hadn’t anticipated its total annihilation.

  There was no sign of life. The ground within the walls was covered with windblown sand, what had once been a colorful sanctuary alive with birdsong was now brown and desolate. The channels that had carried water from the river were bone dry, the pools depressions full of sand. What had been the processional way lay hidden under sand, the sphinxes with Hatshepsut’s head lying smashed alongside, no longer recognizable. Near the base of the first ramp I saw a grove of barren tree trunks lifting spindly leafless branches, almost like the bones of skeletons, to the sky.

  “The incense trees we brought from Punt,” I whispered. I was glad Nefer wasn’t with us; tears trickled down my cheeks. I brushed them away so Thut wouldn’t see. I’d gone through so much to keep those trees alive on the ocean voyage and see them safely to Waset; I cursed Iset for killing them. I wished I really did have the power to cast magic spells, as she had credited me with so often. Had I that power, I would have made her pay for what she’d done here.

  My eyes traveled up the first ramp. The colossal red granite sphinxes with Hatshepsut’s face had been thrown from the terrace and lay smashed at its base. “I assume the walls behind the colonnades have been altered,” I said in a clipped voice.

  “That woman’s images have been recarved as my father’s and grandfather’s.”

  “And Nefer’s?”

  “They now represent Sitiah.” Thut sensed my disapproval. “I had to do it, Mery. I know you don’t like it. If that woman hadn’t usurped my throne none of this would have been necessary.”

  “If she hadn’t, this temple wouldn’t even have existed!” I said, sweeping my arms over the devastation. “But it does, and it was once so beautiful, and now its gone. A victim of your mother’s hatred for Hatshepsut. And because Iset couldn’t overcome Hatshepsut in life, she took it out on Nefer. And you were her tool.”

  “So, after all these years Mery, you take Neferure’s side against me?” Thut’s displeasure was evident.

  “Of course not, Thut. I chose you, didn’t I? And because I did, Nefer’s barely spoken to me in the last sixteen years! Its just that when I see this unnecessary destruction it makes me angry. It makes me wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t talked Nefer out of challenging you for your throne when she had the chance. What if she’d rallied the priests and bureaucrats behind her, maybe bought an army and fought for the throne? She might have ruled Kemet and prevented this destruction. Or she might have split the land in two, with two kings. Or you might have defeated her, and executed her, and then what would my life have been?”

  “Its no use speculating,” Thut said. “What has been, has been, and no one can ever change it.”

  “I know. It’s just that the actuality of what’s been done is so much worse than simply knowing it has been.”

  I could see that the shrines to Anubis and Hathor had been destroyed, their columns thrown down, their walls defaced. Fires had been set on some of the large statues to disintegrate the stone. The pairs of kneeling colossal statues, and the twenty–four twice life–sized painted limestone statues of Hatshepsut in the guise of Osiris on the upper terrace, were all gone. Large chunks of rock from the cliffs above had fallen and smashed much of the terrace; walls showed evidence of chisel marks wielded at Thut’s command. I wondered if the boulders had fallen naturally, or whether they had been forced.

  Saddened, I turned and looked over the river valley. I recalled the night Senenmut had showed Nefer and me the model for Djeser Djeseru, the foundation ceremony, Hori aligning the temple to the stars. I looked in the direction of Qurna, towards Hori’s tomb. He’d been such a good friend to Nefer and me. I remembered standing on the upper terrace at Djeser Djeseru during the first Beautiful Feast of the Valley, how green the gardens had been, how bright the statues, how white the walls and columns and ramps. I remembered its magnificence. But now it was half–buried in sand and someday would disappear beneath it, and no one would remember that Hatshepsut and Nefer had lived.

  1429 BC

  Regnal Year 51 – Thutmose III

  Beketamun tugged on my sleeve. “Where do you suppose those tribute–bearers are from, Lady Mery?”

  I was seated with Thut and his wives and concubines and the rest of his children beneath a linen canopy where the processional way to Amun’s temple at Ipet–Isut intersected the processional way to Ipet–resyt. To our right was the western section of the processional way and the stone quay where the king’s boat was docked, and the per’aa and the river. To our left were the pylons and temples and obelisks of Ipet–Isut. Behind and before us were gardens, bisected by the dusty road. Every important official from the length and breadth of Kemet was gathered to the east and west of Thut’s pavilion. The garden– and sphinx–lined processional way from Ipet–resyt, up which the tribute was being carried, was packed as far as I could see on both sides with temple staff and priests and farmers and craftsmen and fishermen and all the rest who lived in Waset and the nearby valley. Today was a holiday and one of the most important state events of the year – Thut’s vassals had come to Waset from throughout his empire to present him with the annual tribute that was his due.

  Beketamun was one of Amenhotep’s half–brothers, just three years younger. Next to him squirmed Beketamun’s older brother, Siamun; had he been born a year earlier he would have been Thut’s heir instead of Amenhotep. A comely young serving girl in an opaque pale blue skirt leaned forward and filled Siamun’s cup with wine; I did not miss his hand lightly stroking her leg. She giggled. All of Thut’s sons were, it seemed, lusty boys, enamored of girls whether they be daughters of courtiers or servants; get the three together, leave them to their own devices, and with their boundless energy and active imaginations they could be holy terrors. Thut had purposefully asked me to sit with them today and keep them under control. I was one of the few in his harem who could – probably because I’d been just as unruly at their age.

  I studied the approaching emissaries and the double line of heavily–burdened porters that were just behind them. “The first group is from Punt, Beketamun.”

  “Where you went?”

  “A very long time ago. When I was only six years older than you.”

  Beketamun nudged Siamun and said something in a low voice, then pointed to a group of dark–eyed girls in the crowd who were staring at them and whispering to each other. Siamun laughed. I stole a glance at Thut. He was smiling broadly, chatting with Amenhotep, who was seated on the throne next to his. Both wore the Double Crown; only a week ago Thut had elevated his sixteen year–old son to the co–regency. I thought it ironic that Thut, who had begun his reign sharing his throne, would end it the same way.

  Amenhotep was already a head taller than his father or anyone else in Thut’s court, strong, athletically gifted. Two years ago, using the bow he’d named “Smiter of the Wretches,” he’d outshot Thut for the first time, driving his arrow a finger length farther through a copper target. Thut had laughed it off, expressing pride in his son, but I thought it was the first time he’d glimpsed his own mortality. It had, I believed, set off a chain of events that had eventually prompted him to name his son to the throne.
I’d taught Amenhotep to drive a chariot on his tenth birthday, and his brothers on theirs; he now drove far faster and more recklessly than I ever had. A born horseman, he trained his mounts and Thut’s and mine. He could outrow and outrun anyone, and claimed to be able to outdrink all comers too, though he never made such a boast in Thut’s hearing. Like his father, Amenhotep’s passion was hunting, and his bravery knew no limits; he’d gone so far as to track lions to their desert lairs on foot. He’d spent a great deal of time the past five years training with the army and had, like Thut, earned the respect of its soldiers. I had no doubt he would be a successful warrior and leader when the time came. Unlike his father, however, Amenhotep had developed a streak of brutality, one he often exhibited while hunting or fighting. And also unlike his father, he was no intellectual. He was naturally smart, but refused to apply himself to his studies. So Thut and I spent much time overseeing the education of the boys Amenhotep would call on to be his advisors when he took the throne, for we recognized that upon them would depend to some extent the continuation and future success of Thut’s empire.

  Thut particularly enjoyed this annual event, not so much because it swelled his coffers, but because it was a visible sign of all he’d accomplished in his fifty–one years on the throne. At age sixty I’d begun to slow down slightly – as had Sitiah and Meryetre–Hatshepsut and Nebtu and Nefer, all almost as old as me – but Thut had not. He was still a man of action, restless, constantly driving his chariot or riding his horse on the plains around Waset, hunting in the desert and marshes, questioning farmers as they worked in their fields, reading texts on botany and history and religion until late into the night. Most recently he’d designed new gold vessels for use in Amun’s temple; so magnificent were the designs that the craftsman who executed them had portrayed the creation of the vessels on the wall of his own tomb in the hills overlooking the west bank. Thut had even depicted them in a relief on a wall in Ipet–Isut.