The Nile

by Toby Wilkinson

  By the time the day of departure dawned, all was ready. As marshals cleared the way, Nitiqret went in procession from the king’s private apartments to the harbourside to embark on her voyage of destiny. Sixteen days later, the flotilla arrived safely at Thebes, to be met by throngs of people, shouting and clamouring for a glimpse of the princess. Nitiqret was taken immediately to the great temple of Karnak where she was formally welcomed by an oracle of the god Amun-Ra. She was then introduced to the incumbent God’s Wife of Amun, Shepenwepet, and her heir apparent, Amenirdis, and was formally adopted by them both as their eventual successor, in the presence of “all the god’s servants, priests and adherents of the temple.”48 Just to be certain, a record of the contract was made in writing. Crucially, it signed over to Nitiqret all the property of the God’s Wife of Amun “both rural and urban.”49 Although Nitiqret did not expect to become God’s Wife for many decades, her eventual inheritance—and with it the new dynasty’s control of Thebes—had been duly secured by both religious and legal authority.

  The prominence of women in the religious life at Karnak was mirrored by the ancillary buildings of the complex itself. South of the main temple of Amun-Ra, a second major shrine was dedicated to his divine consort, Mut. It is surrounded by a high enclosure wall, and in ancient times it contained hundreds of statues of the goddess Mut, represented as a lioness. Today, they are among the most familiar ancient Egyptian statues in museums the world over. They were installed by Amenhotep III, perhaps as an offering against plague, and some have suggested that there were originally 720 statues, two for each day of the year (one for each day, one for each night). But even that abundance of sculpture pales into insignificance compared with the avenue that leads on southwards from the Mut complex to Luxor Temple. This processional way, used during the annual Festival of the Sanctuary, was once lined with stone sphinxes at sixteen-foot intervals: a total of over a thousand statues.

  For centuries covered in sand and debris or buried under roads and buildings, the avenue of sphinxes is once again being revealed in all its ancient glory. Starting at its southern end, in front of Luxor Temple, the avenue is being painstakingly cleared all the way to Karnak, in one of the biggest restoration projects ever undertaken by Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities. (Until the 2011 revolution, this ministry was the fourth largest recipient of Egyptian government expenditure, after the armed forces, the police and the social security ministry; it was also one of the largest generators of income.) It is an epic undertaking, and the cost has been staggering: over six hundred million Egyptian pounds to date, including compensation for those forcibly evicted from their homes and businesses, and a hefty payment to the army, the main contractor. Roads have had to be diverted, gas and water mains relaid, buildings that lay in the way compulsorily purchased and demolished. A mosque sitting alongside the avenue could not so easily be cleared away, so it has had to be underpinned. The result, if it is ever finished (work has stalled since the revolution), will be a spectacular recreation of Luxor’s ancient glory, and a fabulous new addition to the tourist itinerary—even if countless lives and livelihoods have been disrupted in the process. It is, in every way, a project worthy of the pharaohs.

  The religious buildings of Luxor together comprise one of the greatest treasurehouses of ancient Egyptian art and sculpture. In earlier times, artefacts were shipped off to adorn the palaces and museums of Egypt’s foreign rulers—in Rome, Constantinople, Paris and London, and of course Cairo. But in the more enlightened times of the 1960s, it was decided that Luxor should have its own Museum of Art, where masterpieces from Karnak and Luxor temples could be displayed in their home city. It makes a fitting final stop on any tour of the east bank, located at the river’s edge midway between the two great temples. Designed by an Egyptian, Mahmud El Hakim, the museum makes a striking addition to Luxor’s distinguished architectural history. The main edifice is a simple rectangle. On the Nile side, a porch with a sun-screen as high as the whole building runs along the entire façade. Between the building and the corniche, a garden with trees and flowers provides the setting for colossal statues and blocks of relief decoration. Inside, all lighting is artificial, and objects are carefully arranged along a processional route, in the best ancient tradition. (By contrast, the time taken to build the museum and install the objects, eleven years, was characteristic of modern Egypt. The pharaohs would have done it much quicker.)

  Like the temple of Karnak, Luxor Museum faces the Nile: the thread that divides yet unites the two halves of ancient Thebes. Standing in the museum’s grassy grounds in the late afternoon, with the sun setting over the Theban Hills, thoughts naturally turn to the west bank of the Nile. There, in the realm of the dead, the monuments are, if anything, even more spectacular; and the stories of those who built them, plundered them, rediscovered and excavated them, every bit as extraordinary.

  I … who have come to Thebes, and who have seen with my eyes the work of these tombs of astounding horror, have spent a delightful day.1

  —PHILASTRIOS THE ALEXANDRIAN

  When, in the late sixteenth century, a European traveller first sailed up the Nile and landed on the west bank opposite Luxor, the contrast between the past and present could not have been more stark. Though blessed with a wide floodplain and fertile soils, the area was virtually uninhabited. The local population was as impoverished as it was small, reflecting Upper Egypt’s political insignificance and its remoteness from the great mercantile cities of the north.

  Yet, in the midst of this poverty and destitution, spectacular monuments from Egypt’s pharaonic past stood proudly in the landscape. Indeed, nowhere else in the entire Nile Valley—perhaps nowhere else in the world—boasts such a concentration of spectacular ancient buildings as the plain and hills of western Thebes. Dating from the New Kingdom, the golden age of pharaonic power, the temples and tombs speak of might and majesty, of a time when Egypt’s treasury overflowed with gold from conquered Nubia and tribute from the Near East.

  The great edifices created by kings, queens and courtiers to preserve their bodies and their memories for eternity have shaped the west bank of Thebes in countless ways. For over four thousand years, people from far and wide have come to this special place to build, visit, wonder, plunder, excavate and restore. All have left their mark.

  AT THE HEIGHT of their power, the kings and queens of ancient Egypt chose Thebes, the religious capital of the country, as the location for their grandest monuments. But, while the east bank of the Nile—modern Luxor—was the main population centre, the setting for Luxor and Karnak temples, and the location for lively festivals, the west bank—where the sun sets behind the Theban Hills—was the realm of the dead, a fitting location for tombs and mortuary cults. Even today, when the money brought by mass-market tourism is driving unprecedented development throughout the Luxor region, this distinction between east and west lingers on. Directly opposite the centre of Luxor with its traffic and tourists, the ferry-dock on the west bank still presents age-old scenes of Egyptian village life: women returning from a shopping trip to Luxor with baskets balanced on their heads; children playing in the dusty streets; chickens, sheep and goats travelling to or from market; scavenging dogs. As recently as the 1990s, the whole of the west bank was like this: quieter, slower, less developed than its counterpart across the river. But the construction of a new bridge to the south of Luxor has opened up western Thebes to tourist coaches and all the associated development: budget hotels, questionable restaurants, shopping malls filled with Chinese-made souvenirs.

  Away from the modern roadside excrescences, however, something of the spirit of western Thebes lingers on. The ancient monuments are still the stars of the show, their royal and noble builders the animating spirits of the place. For most visitors, the complex history of pharaonic activity can be boiled down to just four towering figures: Hatshepsut, whose dramatic terraced temple charms and awes in equal measure; Amenhotep III, whose towering colossi are the first great “sight” on every tour
ist itinerary; Tutankhamun, whose tiny, second-rate tomb in the Valley of the Kings yielded the greatest archaeological treasure ever discovered; and Ramesses II, whose massive mortuary temple is perhaps the most romantic Egyptian ruin, and whose matrimonial devotion produced the incomparable tomb of Nefertari in the Valley of the Queens. Every tour guide has their own entertaining if not entirely accurate stories of these pharaonic A-listers; every guide book offers potted accounts of “the female pharaoh,” “Egypt’s Louis XIV,” “the boy-king,” and “Ozymandias.” But other, less well-known figures have had equally important roles in shaping the history and geography of western Thebes. Their lives and achievements also echo among the shimmering hills and dust-dry valleys.

  Thebes’ glory was not pre-ordained. For the first millennium of pharaonic history, including the great flowering of court culture during the Pyramid Age, Thebes was a quiet provincial backwater, scarcely registering on the national scene. Its mayors and local officials were insignificant characters in the drama of the Egyptian state. Its temples and shrines were equally nondescript, small buildings of mud brick, perhaps enlivened with the (very) occasional stone lintel or door-jamb. Its tombs were small and unspectacular, unworthy of comparison with the fabulously decorated sepulchres of Giza and Saqqara. In short, Thebes was nothing, its people nobodies. It took a national crisis—the collapse of the state at the end of the Pyramid Age and the ensuing civil war—to bring Thebes to the fore. In one of the cruellest ironies of Egyptian history, the man responsible is today one of Egypt’s most forgotten rulers.

  The king in question was Intef II, who reigned for half a century at the end of the third millennium BC. The reason for his relative obscurity lies in his provincial power-base: he did not, at least at the start of his reign, rule over all Egypt. Indeed, when Intef II was born, his grandfather, Intef the Great, was no more than a provincial governor, administering Thebes and its hinterland as a loyal servant of the king. But four thousand years ago, as today, the Thebans were an independent-minded people, distinctly sceptical about power exercised at a distance by a remote ruler in a northern capital. While professing loyalty to his sovereign, Intef the Great publicly challenged royal authority by styling himself Great Overlord of Upper Egypt—a dignity in the sole gift of the king. It was the start of a dream of Theban expansion that would determine the fate not only of the Intef family and their home town, but of the whole of Egypt.

  Intef the Great’s son and namesake went one stage further, adopting kingly titles and seizing control of the desert routes behind western Thebes. These two acts effectively fired the starting pistol for a civil war that pitted north against south for the next eighty-five years. For much of that time, Intef II was the leader of the Theban rebels. He prosecuted the war against the north with a relentless intensity, his charisma and leadership inspiring fanatical loyalty among his closest lieutenants. Although he, and they, portrayed the conflict as a war of unification and a fight for the soul of Egypt, it was, in reality, little more than a power-grab by an ambitious provincial family with the resources to raise a private army. But military might, as Egyptian rulers over the centuries have well understood, conferred a distinct advantage. Intef II first secured his southern flank, by neutralising opposition in the southernmost provinces of Egypt. Then he consolidated his power-base by annexing the three neighbouring provinces. Only when he was certain of his military advantage did he take the fight to the enemy, attacking the key religious centre of Abydos. Although some of his gains were temporarily reversed, Intef II succeeded in laying the foundations for an eventual Theban victory, and for the reunification of the country under Theban control.

  Having thus elevated his home town from obscure provincial backwater to aspiring national capital, Intef II proceeded to endow the landscape of Thebes with monuments befitting its new-found status. On the east bank, he inaugurated construction at the site of Karnak, founding what would become Egypt’s greatest temple. On the west bank, hitherto the site for a few nondescript private tombs, Intef built himself a sepulchre of royal pretensions. Behind a pillared façade, cut into the slope of the hill, a long transverse hall gave access to a deep corridor which led to the burial shaft. Outside, in the open courtyard in front of the tomb, a magnificent stone stela with finely carved scenes and texts announced Intef II’s royal titles and his kingly piety. The stela’s hymn to Ra and Hathor—sun-god and mother-goddess, twin protectors of the monarch—is as moving a piece of religious writing as ever flowed from the pen of an ancient Egyptian, hinting at a human frailty lying behind the visage of a great war leader.

  But perhaps just as revealing about Intef II is a second stela, also erected in the funerary chapel of his Theban tomb. It shows the mighty soldier-king accompanied by his most trusted and trusting followers—not his human lieutenants but his hunting dogs. They carry Berber names, hinting at broader horizons of imagination beyond the Nile Valley, and the dogs’ names themselves provide an insight into the character of their human master. The lead dog, with a sleek frame and elongated muzzle, was called “Gazelle,” named no doubt for its swiftness. But the king’s three other canine companions bore surprisingly mundane, familiar monikers: “Hound,” “Kettle,” and “Blackie.” Perhaps in these pet names we see a certain no-nonsense attitude—a trait that would serve Intef II and his Theban successors well.

  If Intef II laid the foundations for Theban prominence at the end of the third millennium BC, then two other remarkable men in the following two millennia were responsible, respectively, for creating, then defending, the city’s greatness. Both lived extraordinary lives in tumultuous times. The first, Senenmut, who lived in the middle of the second millennium BC, was not Theban by birth, although he came from the nearby town of Armant, only a few miles to the south. But, named after the Theban goddess Mut, he reflected the cultural and political dominance of Thebes and it was in the great city that Senenmut’s career was forged. He, in turn, helped to transform western Thebes into a setting for the greatest architectural achievements of the age.

  Though Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt was an absolute monarchy, the royal court nonetheless offered prospects of advancement for men of humble origins who displayed exceptional talents. Senenmut was one such individual. His chosen career was in government administration, and like many of his time he found employment in the sprawling bureaucracy that supervised the huge estates belonging to the temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak. It was a steady job, but certainly not the passport to great wealth; when Senenmut’s father died, he received only the simplest of burials, without any grave goods. By contrast, when Senenmut’s mother died some years later, her funerary equipment (provided by Senenmut) included a gilded mummy mask and a heart scarab of serpentine set in gold.

  The explanation for this sudden increase in Senenmut’s wealth lay in the rise to power of the dominant figure of the early Eighteenth Dynasty, the female pharaoh Hatshepsut (1473–1458 BC). For a woman to rule Egypt was not unprecedented, but it was certainly highly irregular, and it ran counter to the fundamental ideology of Egyptian divine kingship. Hatshepsut was not only a woman in a man’s world, she was a woman on a man’s throne. She needed to surround herself with men of talent and ability, men moreover who owed their position to her and her alone. Senenmut was one such; his naming after a female goddess had proved prescient. Whether Hatshepsut admired him solely for his administrative abilities, or whether there was some deeper attraction as contemporary rumours insinuated, she promoted him to his most lucrative offices and he became her most influential courtier. He tutored her daughter and controlled access to her royal audience chamber. He managed her personal estates and held high office in her Treasury. But Senenmut’s greatest achievements, and his most enduring legacy, were accomplished in his roles as chief architect and Overseer of All the King’s Works. As he noted himself, “It was … Senenmut who conducted all the works of the king in Karnak, in Armant and Deir el-Bahri; and of Amun in the temple of Mut, in Ishry and in Luxor Temple …”2

 
The most significant royal building project was Hatshepsut’s “holy of holies,” her mortuary temple in western Thebes. Located next to an earlier temple built by Intef II’s grandson, the setting was no doubt intended to associate Hatshepsut with the origins of Theban greatness. Senenmut’s design echoed the earlier building, while taking it to new heights, both literally and metaphorically. His building for Hatshepsut is arranged as a series of three huge terraces, set against the cliff face. Originally, the temple was approached via a causeway, more than half a mile long, flanked for its final five hundred yards by more than a hundred sphinxes. Behind the pillared façades of each terrace, delicately carved and painted scenes record key episodes from Hatshepsut’s life, real or imagined: her divine birth; her election as heir apparent; her coronation; the transport of her obelisks to Karnak; and, perhaps most famously, the expedition she sent in 1463 BC to the fabled land of Punt to bring back incense trees. The vivid details of the African landscape and the obese queen of Punt have made this tableau one of the best-known in Egyptian art.

  As chief architect, Senenmut ensured that he too featured in the temple’s decoration, to guarantee his own immortality. Representations of him appear in niches on the temple’s upper terrace and in the Punt reliefs. He also had himself depicted, kneeling and worshipping, in the most sacred part of the temple, concealed behind the open doors of the small shrine in the upper sanctuary. This was a daring breach of protocol, verging on the sacrilegious, but Senenmut’s unique position, in the construction project and at court, allowed him to get away with it. He also built himself a tomb next to the temple: although its entrance was outside the sacred enclosure, its burial chamber lay right underneath the temple’s outer court. Like those closest to power throughout history, Senenmut’s ambition—and self-aggrandisement—knew no bounds.