The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

by Toby Wilkinson

  A view of the workmen’s village WERNER FORMAN ARCHIVE

  As part of his wider program of religious remodeling, Amenhotep I implemented just such a radical redesign. From now on, the royal mortuary complex would be split into two distinct elements. A mortuary temple, sited prominently on the plain, would stand as the monarch’s permanent memorial and would act as a public focus for the royal cult. Quite separate, hidden away in the cliffs of western Thebes, a royal tomb cut deep into the rock would provide a secure resting place for eternity, without any outward sign to attract unwanted attention. To ensure complete secrecy for the royal burial, it would be necessary not only to conceal the tomb but also to isolate its builders from the rest of the population. The solution was to establish a workmen’s village, hidden away in a remote valley in the Theban hills, where those employed on the royal tomb, together with their wives and children, could live in splendid isolation. The secrets of their sensitive work would remain safe. The Place of Truth was duly founded, with Amenhotep I and Ahmose-Nefertari as its royal patrons, and the community remained in use, fulfilling its original purpose, for five centuries. Today it is the single most important source of evidence for daily life in the New Kingdom.

  As for Amenhotep I’s own tomb, its whereabouts remain a mystery, despite more than a century of archaeological investigation. In contrast to his successors’ sepulchres, which have become modern tourist traps, Amenhotep’s dwelling place for eternity lies undisturbed. In this, as in the rest of his program for the Egyptian monarchy, his wish was fulfilled.

  CHAPTER 11

  PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES

  FIRESTORM OVER NUBIA

  A PARADOX LAY AT THE HEART OF EGYPT’S NEW KINGDOM RENAISSANCE. The country’s restoration to its former glory had been led by the institution of hereditary monarchy, yet this very system suffered from fundamental weaknesses. For two successive generations, the throne had passed to minors. Although this gave the female members of the royal family an unprecedented opportunity to exercise leadership, having the sacred office of kingship held by a child, dependent on others for direction, was not exactly in accordance with the Egyptian ideal, nor was it a recipe for strong government. Worse still, the inbreeding favored by the Theban rulers of the late Seventeenth and early Eighteenth dynasties had narrowed the gene pool to a dangerous degree. Amenhotep I and his sister-wife were themselves the offspring of a brother-sister marriage, as were their parents. With only two great-grandparents between them, it is perhaps not surprising that Amenhotep I and his queen were unable to have children. Indeed, it is remarkable that they were not afflicted by more serious congenital conditions.

  Monarchy is nothing without an assured succession, and the lack of an heir risked undoing all the hard-won achievements of Amenhotep and his dynasty. What the king lacked in fertility he more than made up for in strategic ability. Recognizing the imperative of a legitimate successor, he took the unusual decision late in his reign to adopt one of his most trusted and talented lieutenants, a man named Thutmose, as heir apparent. Thutmose’s origins are shrouded in obscurity—the new king hardly wished to publicize his unorthodox path to power—but his selection was inspired. Though already in middle age, and unlikely to enjoy a long reign, he possessed apparently inexhaustable energy and determination. He had a bold vision for Egypt’s destiny, one that involved not merely cementing the victories of Kamose and Ahmose but actively extending the nation’s borders to forge an Egyptian empire. Under the Thutmoside Dynasty, Egypt would be transformed, at home and abroad, into the most powerful and glittering civilization of the ancient world.

  Thutmose I (1493–1481) was the first king for three generations to come to the throne as an adult. He was in a position to begin his program of government straightaway, but only after he had countered any possible rumblings against his claim to the kingship. The continued presence of the royal matriarch, Ahmose-Nefertari, gave his reign a much-needed stamp of legitimacy, but Thutmose decided to take more public steps to underline his right to rule. His first act as king was to issue a decree announcing his coronation and his formal adoption of royal titles—two ceremonies that confirmed a king in power and conferred upon him divine authority. He sent the decree to his viceroy in Nubia, Turi, with express instructions to erect monumental copies in the major centers of Egyptian control—Aswan, Kubban, and Wadi Halfa. The memory of rebellion against King Ahmose was still raw, and Thutmose was determined to browbeat his Nubian subjects into submission from the very start. For the lands south of the first cataract, Thutmose’s coronation decree was both a warning and a promise. Within twelve months, Nubia would reel from the most concerted and devastating campaign of conquest ever launched by Egypt.

  “Enraged like a panther,” Thutmose declared his aim “to destroy unrest throughout the foreign lands, to subdue the rebels of the desert region.”1 The firestorm over Nubia raged for most of his second year on the throne (1492). The rulers of the Middle Kingdom had been content to pursue a defensive strategy, guarding Egyptian interests in Wawat against the threat from the kingdom of Kush through a mixture of economic engagement and political appeasement. The disastrous results of this policy had been visited upon Egypt when the country was at its weakest. Thutmose I was not about to repeat the same mistake. For him, the only long-term guarantee of Egyptian security was the annihilation of the Kushite threat.

  From the forward base on Shaat Island, Thutmose ordered a flotilla of ships to be dragged overland around the dangerous rapids of the third cataract, ready for an all-out assault on Kerma, capital of the Kushite Kingdom. The onslaught that followed was unyielding and terrifying in its ferocity. Kerma was sacked and burned, its temple desecrated. The victorious Thutmose set out cross-country with a detachment of his army and a large entourage of officials. Rather than following the river, they took instead the desert route from Kerma to the distant reaches of the Nile beyond the fourth cataract. This had both a practical logic and a symbolic purpose. It achieved the objective of extending Egyptian authority farther than ever before without the need to conquer all the intervening Kushite-controlled territory along the river.

  The king and his followers halted at a great quartz rock (modern Hagar el-Merwa, near Kurgus) that rose up from the desert plain next to the Nile. A prominent marker in the landscape, visible for miles around, it was also of great spiritual significance to the local population and was covered in religious carvings. Thutmose ordered a victory inscription to be carved over these native scribblings, obliterating them with a bald statement of pharaonic power that proclaimed the boundaries of his new empire. The inscription also recorded the presence, at this most symbolically charged of occasions, of Thutmose’s daughter Hatshepsut. For Thutmose, extending the boundaries of Egypt was not just a personal priority but the destiny of his new dynasty. It was an injunction the impressionable young princess would not forget.

  Returning to Kerma, the king looked upon the devastation that his army had wrought and, true to form, resolved to memorialize the crushing victory in yet another monumental inscription. (The power of the written word to render permanent a desired state of affairs lay at the heart of Egyptian belief and practice.) Carved into the side of an imposing, sloping rock just outside the city limits, near modern Tombos, the text gives an extensive commentary on the Nubian campaign. Its bloodcurdling tone surpasses even the ancient Egyptians’ accustomed rhetoric, painting a lurid picture of the carnage visited upon the unfortunate inhabitants of Kerma:

  There is not a single one of them left.

  The Nubian bowmen have fallen to the slaughter,

  and are laid low throughout their lands.

  Their entrails drench their valleys;

  gore from their mouths pours down in torrents.

  Carrion eaters swarm down upon them,

  and the birds carry their trophies away to another place.2

  In the same breath, the inscription extols (righteous) warfare and pumps up Thutmose I as a glory-seeking conqueror who is ready to roam
the earth, taking on all comers: “He trod [the earth’s] end in might and victory seeking a fight, but he found no one who would stand up to him.”3 The Tombos text, which describes foreigners as “god’s abomination,” strikes a particularly uncompromising tone of exultant cruelty and rampant militarism.

  Before leaving Nubia, the king ordered a series of fortified towns to be established throughout the conquered territories, to give the Egyptians a permanent foothold in Kush and to deter future rebellions. One of these forts was called, with typical bombast, “no one dares confront him among all the nine bows [the traditional enemies of Egypt].” To facilitate Nubia’s administration, it was divided into five districts, each controlled by a governor sworn in fealty to the Egyptian king. In a further measure intended to inculcate loyalty, the sons of Nubian chiefs were forcibly taken to Egypt, to be “educated” at court alongside their masters, in the hope that they would learn Egyptian customs and an Egyptian worldview. They also served as convenient hostages against possible insurrection by their relatives back home in Nubia.

  An altogether more gruesome deportation awaited the defeated ruler of Kerma. If the Egyptian sources are to be believed, he was felled in battle by Thutmose I himself. If so, it was a mercifully quick death. On the Egyptians’ triumphant journey home, the enemy’s corpse was strung up at the bow of Thutmose’s flagship, Falcon. There it hung, putrefying and flyblown, a gruesome mascot of the king’s victory and a dire warning to any other would-be foes. Once back in Egypt, the conqueror thanked the gods for his victory by dedicating a stela at the sacred site of Abdju. At the end of the usual pious formulae, the king reverted to type, reveling in his subjugation of foreign peoples: “I made Egypt the chief, and the whole earth her servants.”4

  Thutmose’s empire building had now taken on a religious zeal.

  WIDER STILL AND WIDER

  CONQUERING NUBIA, A NATURAL EXTENSION OF THE EGYPTIAN NILE Valley and a land easily accessible by boat, was one thing. Extending Egypt’s boundaries into Asia, with its multitude of city-states and unfamiliar terrain, was quite another. Yet no sooner had Thutmose finished celebrating bringing Kush to heel than he was busying himself with plans for an equally ambitious foray into the Near East, “to wash his heart [that is, slake his desire] throughout the foreign lands.”5 This time, however, the king’s main aim seems to have been a short-term propaganda coup rather than all-out military supremacy. The Egyptian garrisons at Sharuhen and Gaza, established by his predecessors, seemed sufficient to prevent another Hyksos-style invasion by hostile Asiatics. Egyptian economic interests continued to be centered on the entrepôt of Kebny, from which the royal court could obtain all the exotica it desired: timber, aromatic oils, tin, and silver. But this was not enough for Thutmose, scourge of Nubia. He craved international recognition for Egypt as a great power, on a par with the other emergent empires of the Near East. And he knew that the quickest way to win such status was a massive show of force right under the noses of his rivals.

  There may also have been a longer-term strategic motive for an armed foray into Asia. Thutmose’s predecessors of the late Middle Kingdom had failed to recognize the threat posed by the Hyksos until it was too late. He was determined not to repeat their mistake. His envoys and spies would have told him that in northern Mesopotamia, far beyond the borders of Egypt, another potentially hostile power was growing in strength. The Kingdom of Mittani had been forged from a collection of smaller states by a force of Indo-European–speaking warriors. As well as their strange tongue (reflected in the names of their kings, and some of their gods), they had brought with them from the steppes of Central Asia the horse-drawn chariot and a class of elite charioteers called the maryannu. With this highly effective new weaponry, Mittani had grown strong enough in the time of Ahmose to invade Anatolia and inflict a heavy defeat on the Hittite Kingdom. By the reign of Amenhotep I, Mittani had driven the Hittites out of northern Syria, upsetting the delicate political balance in the Near East. Mittani was on the march, sweeping all before it. It seemed only a matter of time before it encroached upon the Egyptian sphere of interest. Faced with such a prospect, Thutmose determined that a preemptive strike was the wisest policy—better safe than sorry.

  So, in the fourth year of his reign, he set out for the kingdom of Mittani, known by the Egyptians as Naharin, “the two rivers”—in other words, Mesopotamia. Details of the expedition are sketchy, but it seems likely that to avoid a lengthy and protracted campaign through Palestine, Thutmose opted instead for an amphibious operation, sailing up the coast of the eastern Mediterranean and landing his forces in the friendly harbor of Kebny. From there, it would have been a much shorter overland march into northern Syria and to the banks of the upper Euphrates. Beyond the mighty river lay Mittani proper.

  Local intelligence sources confirmed Thutmose’s worst fears: Mittani was indeed planning an attack on Syria-Palestine, directly threatening Egypt’s economic interests. The king lost no time in engaging the enemy and “made great carnage among them,”6 capturing some of their prized horses and chariots. To rub salt into Mittani’s wounds, Thutmose did what might, by now, have been expected of him: he had a great commemorative inscription carved on the banks of the Euphrates, to mark the ultima Thule of his new empire. From the borders of Mesopotamia, in the north, to the fourth cataract, in the south, Egypt’s power had never been so widely felt.

  Honor satisfied, the Egyptian army turned for home. All-out conquest of Mittani had never been in the cards, for Egypt had no strategic interest in controlling a land so far from home. But Thutmose had succeeded in firing a warning shot across Mittani’s bows and neutralizing its immediate threat. He had also demonstrated Egypt’s new superpower status on the world stage, both to Mittani and to its nervous neighbors. Yet rather than heading straight back to Egypt with his victorious forces, Thutmose decided to indulge in a classic display of triumphalist hauteur. Halting his homeward march in the land of Niye, in the valley of the river Orontes (modern Asi), he proceeded to hunt the herds of Syrian elephants that roamed the area. This extraordinary act was no doubt carefully calculated. On a symbolic level, it drew on the ancient ideology of kingship, establishing an explicit parallel between the defeat of Egypt’s enemies and the subjugation of untamed nature. Thutmose the military leader was consciously promoting himself as Thutmose the cosmic avenger. On a more practical level, it must have reinforced the news that by now was spreading throughout the Near East—that a great king had arisen in Egypt who showed as much machismo in his peacetime pursuits as he did on the battlefield.

  HER FATHER’S DAUGHTER

  WHEN THUTMOSE I DIED IN 1481 AFTER A REIGN OF JUST A DOZEN years, he left as his legacy an Egyptian empire whose boundaries stretched from Syria to sub-Saharan Africa. The great kings of the Near East—the rulers of Babylonia, Assyria, Mittani, and the Hittites—recognized their Egyptian brother as a full member of their select club. Yet this newly won authority was both superficial and vulnerable. At Kerma the local people had rebuilt their town and temple, reaffirming their indigenous traditions in defiance of their Egyptian overlords. As soon as news of Thutmose’s death reached upper Nubia, the Kushites revolted, hoping to regain some of the autonomy that their nemesis had so barbarously crushed. Foremost among the rebels were the surviving sons of the very king of Kush whom Thutmose had slain and so gruesomely hung from the prow of his flagship. Revenge was sweet indeed. The Kushite forces attacked the fortresses built by Thutmose, killed their Egyptian garrisons, plundered their cattle, and for a time seemed to threaten Egyptian rule over Nubia. But they had reckoned without the determination of Thutmose’s young successor and namesake, who showed himself every inch his father’s son. Ordering an immediate military response to the uprising, Thutmose II (1481–1479) commanded that every Nubian male should be put to the sword, save just one of the Kushite princes who would be brought back to Egypt for “education” in time-honored fashion.

  In his ruthless determination to defend his father’s achievements, Thut
mose II was no doubt supported by his half sister and consort, Hatshepsut. Living up to her name (which means “foremost of noblewomen”), Hatshepsut was not merely the king’s great wife. As daughter of Thutmose I by his chief consort, Hatshepsut clearly regarded herself as having a stronger claim to the throne than her husband, whose mother had merely been a secondary wife. So, when Hatshepsut ’s young husband succumbed to ill health after only three years on the throne, she seized her chance. No longer content to stand on the sidelines, she set her sights firmly on gaining the top job. As for Ahmose before her, kingship would be the focus of her ambition, Thebes her stage. Just as her father had extended the borders of Egypt, so Hatshepsut would push the boundaries of royal ideology further than ever before.

  Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh WERNER FORMAN ARCHIVE

  For a woman to hold the reins of power in ancient Egypt was not unprecedented. At the end of the Twelfth Dynasty, a female king, Sobekneferu, had briefly occupied the throne. More recently, during the upheavals and reconstruction of the late Seventeenth and early Eighteenth dynasties, three successive generations of royal women, Tetisheri, Ahhotep, and Ahmose-Nefertari, had exercised great influence over the affairs of state. On the face of it, Hatshepsut was merely following in this tradition when she ruled as regent for Thutmose II’s infant son, her stepson, Thutmose III. As a contemporary inscription makes clear, there was a different tone to Hatshepsut’s authority from the very start. After her husband’s death,