At Karnak, Seti’s multi-pillared hall was still under construction when Ramesses attained the throne. He would later use the southern walls of the hall to celebrate his military victories and his cartouche was carved repetitively into the forest of great columns. To reinforce a none too subtle message, I was to adorn the pillars with many images of Ramesses making offerings to Amun-Re.
Since the dawn of time, Thebes had been the cult centre of Amum though, until the growth of pharaonic power in the Seventeenth era, the temple remained a small, simple affair. Dynamic expansion only began with the accession of the Taosid kings in the Eighteenth era. Today, the temple complex at Karnak or Ipet-Sut, was a city within a city, hosting three separate but interconnected areas; the Temples of Amun-Re, Mut and Khonsu.
The expansion of the temple had a long but vibrant history. Amenhotep I restored the central temple and added an exquisite barque sanctuary of alabaster, a pair of obelisks, two pylons and completed his works by erecting a masonry enclosure wall around the temple. His son, Tuthmosis II, raised up a pylon and two more obelisks outside the festival courtyard.
Queen Hatshepsut installed another pair of obelisks, a red sandstone shrine room flanked by two larger electrum tipped obelisks, a Temple to the Goddess Mut and an eighth pylon against which still stand colossi of the queen, Tuthmosis II and Amenhotep II. Ramesses, many years later, observed in a cynical comment, the only reason Hatshepsut has gone to the trouble and expense of creating these additions was to buy the approval of the gods for her usurpation the throne. I dared not smile at this slightly hypocritical observation.
Tuthmosis III stamped his authority on the temple by building the great festival hall at the southern end of the original courtyard. Adding further proof of his dislike of his step-mother, he demolished her shrine room and replaced it with one of his own design. Then he raised up another pylon and in front of it caused another pair of obelisks to be erected. His final addition was two finely carved pillars, one featuring a raised relief of a papyrus plant, the other the lotus, the heraldic plants of the Upper and Lower kingdoms.
Amenhotep III, the Pharaoh Ramesses most admired and desired to out build, tore down the pylon built by Tuthmosis, removed the obelisks and caused the construction of an enormous pylon behind what is now Seti’s pillared hall, along the north to south axis leading to the Temple of Mut. He also added hundreds of lion headed sphinxes dedicated to Sekhmet.
His son, Akhenaten, beginning his iconoclastic worship of Aten, built his temple to the solar disc but, as can be imagined, this monument was destroyed with great fervour by Horemheb. Ramesses told me Horemheb almost made a party of the demolition, cheered on by the newly restored priesthood of Amun. Horemheb went further by building a slightly grander pylon in front of the pillared hall.
On the south-eastern side of the main temple is the Ptah Temple of Tuthmosis III, a cult temple built by Amenhotep III, a tabernacle jointly built by Hatshepsut and Tuthmosis III featuring the tallest obelisk, the treasury of Tuthmosis I and a cult temple to Amenhotep II.
To this dazzling parade of pharaonic piety, I added an avenue of crouching ram sphinxes, each with the head of the king and a number of colossi including one massive figure standing outside the pillared hall with the image of his daughter, Princess Bintanta, nestled against his leg. His final monument, and perhaps one of the finest, is the temple dedicated to Re-Harakhty built to the east of the main temple. Lest any forget who commissioned this temple, I was commanded to erect at its entrance two colossi of the king in the image of Osiris. The sculptor has expertly captured Ramesses’ smile, the smile I was to become very familiar with in our long association.
Once the great pillared hall and the Re-Harakhty temple were completed there was little more to achieve at Karnak other than to reinforce the image of the king, a task Ramesses kept embellishing as his reign matured. I dwell on these matters to show how each king strove to out-do his predecessors by subtly using the temple complex as a site to evidence the modesty of their personal piety.
Luxor Temple presented Ramesses with a much larger opportunity to display his own humble devotions to the gods. This temple, the secondary seat of worship of the Theban trilogy, was very much the creation of Amenhotep III. I am convinced Ramesses saw his legacy as a challenge to be bested. Amenhotep built a substantial yet finely wrought extension with a pillared festival courtyard and colonnade of robust pillars topped with heavy lintels and roofing beams. He re-designed the barque sanctuary, shrine rooms and offertory chambers, in fact, almost the entire western devotional end of the temple was the result of his endeavours. In all, Amenhotep caused over 144 pillars of various sizes and styles to be erected throughout the courtyards and temple precincts. I often reflect that his architect would have been a man with whom I could spend many interesting hours discussing our discipline.
Despite the lengthy meeting with Nebwenenef, I was still at a loss as how best I should embellish the Luxor temple. It is one thing for the king to command, in a moment of religious ecstasy, the building of a temple but quite another thing to translate a few words into mortar and stone. I wandered around both temples and thought deeply about the message of the lion hunt. Ramesses admired courage, he saw himself as fearless and expected those around him to demonstrate their own fortitude. I could present myself to the pharaoh on bended knee and beg for guidance or go, upright, with a design of my choice in hand.
After a final inspection of Amenhotep’s work, I traversed the river and spent a day in his funerary temple, assessing its grandeur. Returning to my office, I took stylus and papyrus in hand and began to rough out my ideas, allowing my imagination free rein. Across the top of my drafting table I pinned a note with the words ‘massive, heavy, enduring’ inked upon it. I had also written ‘self-important’ but erased those words lest another observe my irreverence. A week later, tired and still with ink-stained fingers, I arranged to meet the king. I strode into the audience chamber, placed a roll of papyrus in his hands and said, managing to keep my voice steady. “Ramesses, this is what your commission at Luxor should look like.”
He unfurled the roll, glanced at the drawings then looked up at me, his face expressionless, his eyes locked on mine.
“Have I forgotten some meeting where we consulted on my wishes for the temple?”
“No, Master, we had no such meeting”
“Did I exchange correspondence with you on this matter?”
“No, Master, there was no correspondence.” I felt a bead of perspiration trickling down my neck.
“Do you understand it is customary for a servant to consult his Master on matters of importance?”
“Of course, Master”
“Do you know it is also customary for the royal architect to consult with his king when he contemplates building a temple in honour of the gods?”
The moment of truth was cast before me.
“I remember your telling me of your father’s remarks on this subject. It is the role of the pharaoh to conceive ideas and others to execute the work. I have listened to you closely, sought to determine your desire and then translate those desires into plans. If I have misunderstood your intentions, you may feed me to the crocodiles or cast my body into a pit of scorpions. However, I believe I have captured your aspirations and all I ask is for you to study the results of my interpretation.”
He burst into laughter. “Do I detect a tremble in your knee, O fearless builder, and a quaver in your voice? Sit down, Sennefer and forgive my laughter, it was in no way meant to be hurtful. You face me with the same courage you faced the lion and of this I am glad. Now, give me a moment whilst I view your feeble endeavours.”He studied the drawings, asked a few questions impassively and then rolled the papyrus up, handing it back to me.
“Sennefer, you have anticipated my thoughts exactly but by what process I do not know. I find no fault with your concepts. You may also remember our first meeting? I said I hoped we would make an excellent team as we worked together. What you have shown
here in these plans vindicates my opinion of you and your talents. Go forth, young man and build. One small matter, however. Perhaps, periodically, during the construction, you might knock on my door and find it within your heart to spend a few of your precious minutes discussing your work with your king as he labours to pay for your extravagance?” More laughter escaped his lips in which I joined.
What I had designed was a statement of Ramesside power in stone and totally representative of the man himself. Later, when defining in detail and erring on the side of conservatism, the king intervened and instructed me to always make it larger and more grandiose.
To provide the keynote, I designed a mighty pylon with vast walls which Ramesses employed to memorialise the epic of the Qadesh battle. Four towering flag staves are embedded in niches cut into the pylons, each flying royal pennants. Two soaring granite obelisks flank the opening into the new courtyard. Beside each obelisk, I erected two gigantic seated statues of the king. Another four colossi of Ramesses stand guardian against the pylon walls.
The inner courtyard, surrounded by a high limestone wall, is lined with a double row of papyrus bud pillars, eighty in number, surmounted by inscribed lintels and roof beams. Between each set of pillars is placed a statue of the king and at the gateway to the processional way that leads into the Amenhotep court I positioned, on each side of the entrance, enthroned colossi of Ramesses. Carved against the leg of one of these seated images is the figure of Queen Nefertari. Every pillar is deeply inscribed with images of the king and texts depict him making offerings to the gods of the kingdom.
Each of the thirty two statues of the king in the courtyard have him standing, with his left leg thrust forward, kilted, his torso and arms muscular, wearing the different crowns used to identify him as pharaoh - the white crown of Upper Egypt with the uraeus, the red crown of Lower Egypt, the double crown of the united kingdom, the blue kepresh crown and the nemes headdress with the symbols of Wadjet and Nekhbet. On every image, he wears the beard, the further symbol of pharaonic status. The faces of Ramesses are finely carved, his eyes clear and steadfast, his nose firm and straight and his sensuous lips chiselled with a slight smile. In his hands he holds, variously, a mace, crook, staff or the royal flail.
The work at Karnak and Luxor took years to complete and the king relished inspecting progress when he was in Thebes. As each year passed and the pillars, pylons and statues rose up, his pleasure increased. None who saw the monuments could fail to be impressed with the grandeur of the buildings and the overwhelming regal power they project.
Just his presence filled me with the inspiration to build on an immense scale. His images are all larger than life and his name and deeds are inscribed on every square cubit. None can question his devotion to our gods as there was no deity in the cosmology he did not portray himself with in his quest to magnify their importance. His own importance, as the earthly embodiment of divine authority, was not neglected.
The monument Ramesses commissioned at Luxor effectively doubled the size of the temple and it is easy to distinguish the original structure commissioned by Amenhotep and the Ramesside edifice. The former, whilst it speaks boldly of the divinity of Amenhotep, is overwhelmingly a centre of veneration to Amun-Re. The works of Ramesses speak volumes about the adoration of the king and the god as a meeting of equals. At the time I was building the new additions, I secretly thought Ramesses was over-reaching and vainglorious though years later I must concede the veracity of the union between the mortal person of the king and the gods he immortalised in stone.
When I think back to the days when Ramesses declared his divinity and his mission, I can almost believe my own path in life as his builder was also touched by the gods.
Chapter 5 - THE SENIOR DIRECTOR
Present day - Egypt
I worked out the six month notice period required by my American employer, then joined the BEAS as its Chief Engineering Director. Just prior to my taking up the position, the other directors had concluded negotiations defining the parameters of the Kings Valley project with the Council of Egyptian Antiquities and its ebullient Director of Operations, Professor Abdullah Dief. The final requirement was the appointment of a Project Manager and my acceptance of the engineering directorship allowed the project to move from negotiation to field work.
Dief, in his late forties, was a graduate of both Cairo and Cambridge Universities and a skilled political animal, a necessity in the Byzantine politics of Egypt. He joined the Council as a young archaeologist, although it was his close acquaintance with the current President, whom he had befriended whilst studying at Cairo University, which accelerated his career.
He was remarkably astute in his relations with the international media and quick to exploit every new discovery in Egypt. Many accused him of showmanship, though the flair he exhibited in front of the cameras was balanced by his dedication to protecting his country’s heritage. His ability to wrest funds out of a government already financially over-committed to the economic development of the country was legendary.
Dief had stage-managed several media coups in his efforts to bolster his country’s tourism industry. His most spectacular ruse was the dramatic lifting of the sarcophagus lid of Queen Karomana. The grave site of the wife of a minor First Dynasty king was discovered at Abydos. Dief already knew there was nothing within the sarcophagus before staging the theatrical unveiling in an event which P. T. Barnum would have savoured. Later, when criticised by a colleague he responded, tongue in cheek, “Who was to know if the gods had replaced the queen’s mummy in her coffin?”
Just before I left London, my father said he would arrange a meeting with Abdullah as it was essential I understood the Egyptian side of Egyptology. “Dief’s responsibilities are almost overwhelming. We forget just how far the Egyptians have come in managing the legacy of their past. What has been lost in all the hoopla of tombs and tourists is the growing pressure on the system supporting it. Since the late eighties there has been a virtual explosion of interest in the Ancient World fuelled by the insatiable demand for television documentaries and tourist destinations.”He laughed. “Wait until we meet him in Cairo and let him explain the dilemma as he is on the receiving end of all the problems associated with modern archaeology. There are times I suspect many Egyptians would like to be shot of the tourist trade.”
“I am not that surprised. I found, when working in Saudi Arabia, most Saudis felt the same about the dubious benefits of sitting on a huge pool of oil. They liked the fruits of wealth but the sometimes suffocating burden of what the wealth brought with it caused a lot of heartache.”
A month later Dad flew down from London and I joined him in Cairo to meet Abdullah and Yousef al Badawi, Director of Conservation at the Council. Yousef, formerly a field man, had grown pudgy from too many hours at his desk but had, in no way, lost his dedication to his task. We met on a Friday, the Islamic day of rest, when we would not be disturbed by people or phone calls. Over lunch, my father asked them to explain the problem from their perspective. Yousef led off.
“To be frank we are swamped with the scientific side of Egyptology as archaeological missions have become complex affairs of many years duration. We need field work but the burdens it places on our shoulders gets heavier by the year. The days when explorers used dynamite to blast open tombs and employed huge gangs of labourers to carelessly move hundreds of tonnes of what was regarded as worthless overburden have gone the way of the dinosaurs. Belzoni’s famous battering ram, a device he used to knock down a tomb wall, was symptomatic of the crude methods of the past. You won’t find any battering rams in Egypt now.”
“Monuments exposed to the elements continued to erode and decay. Stealing of ancient stones for modern house building remains unchecked throughout the country, despite the imposition of heavy fines on those caught. The Police patrol remote ancient sites in an attempt to thwart casual theft and there are regular sweeps through the bazaars in an effort to stop the illicit sale of antiquities but we can only
minimise an activity which is older than the pyramids. We are confronted by projects having to wait in the ‘too hard’ basket - projects requiring the right technology, money and specialists. Running hand in hand with this is the insidious damage caused by the capillary action of the chemically polluted waters of the Nile.”
Abdullah added. “Nor can we stop our expanding population spreading itself over areas once the sites of ancient towns, graveyards and monuments. The rapid expansion of Alexandria and the intense agriculture of the Delta present their own problems. So many of the ancient sites, Per Wadjet, Hut Heri Ib, Per Bastet, Dja-net, Per-banebjedet, Per Sopdu, to name a few, have been pillaged for their stone or are now so deeply buried under centuries of alluvial soil, urban sprawl or farmland as to be virtually irrecoverable.”
It is common knowledge that tourists are surprised to find the backyard fences of Cairo’s outer suburbs almost at the foot of the Great Pyramids and sugar cane fields touching the boundaries of Theban mortuary temples.
Yousef grimaced. “Even though I am a Muslim, it offends my sense of history that there is an Islamic mosque right in the middle of the Amun Temple at Luxor. When I suggested to the Minister of Religious Affairs we should relocate the mosque to a more appropriate area, he just about accused me of being an infidel. The mosque remains untouched.”
My father interjected. “At least Egypt doesn’t suffer the destructive elements of cyclical climatic changes, civil and foreign wars. It is free of the ravages of rapacious rulers willing to sell off a nation’s inheritance for their personnel benefit or to finance their disputes.”
Yousef said. “A story for you, Dennis. It is recorded amongst the blood-thirstiness of the Greek rulers who seized control of Egypt after Emperor Alexander’s death, Ptolemy I acquired the warrior’s body and brought it to Alexandria preserved in honey and used it to strengthen his claim to royal authority. If the story is true, finding Alexander’s grave would be the coup of the century, though the chance of locating the tomb under suburbia is minimal. Finding my desk top is sometimes just as difficult. I am anchored to it by the struggle of keeping control over a staff split into competitive departments with the internecine wars and political intrigues at which we Egyptian bureaucrats excel. If you think the Ptolemies knew how to feud with each other, come to a meeting of Governors to see some real blood sport. A Roman gladiator could take lessons.”
The Golden Falcon Page 6