Egypt, New Kingdom

What being conquered taught them

Drafted from (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2000)formation

For about a century before 1550, the northern half of Egypt was ruled by foreigners.

The Hyksos — the Egyptian phrase means rulers of foreign lands — were a Levantine dynasty established in the delta at Avaris, and while they held it the Egyptian line at Thebes was one power among several, with a Nubian kingdom at Kerma to its south and the Hyksos to its north. There is a surviving letter from a Hyksos king to the ruler of Kush proposing a joint attack on Thebes, intercepted in the desert. Egypt in the Second Intermediate Period was a middle power being squeezed.

Ahmose expelled them around 1550 and took Avaris. What matters is what the experience produced, because the New Kingdom is Egypt behaving differently from the Egypt of the previous fifteen hundred years.

It kept a permanent army. It campaigned outside Egypt continuously rather than occasionally, and it did not stop at the traditional frontiers: Nubia was annexed and administered directly under a viceroy — the King's Son of Kush — as far as the fourth cataract, and the Levant was held through vassal rulers whose sons were taken to Egypt and educated there.

And the technology came from the people who had held the delta. The horse and the light chariot, the composite bow, improved bronze-working and body armour are all Hyksos-period introductions, and the army that conquered the Levant used all of them.

That is the shape of the whole period, and it is a shape that recurs: a state is conquered, absorbs what conquered it, and turns outward with the conqueror's equipment. This is the earliest clear instance of it anywhere.

A Punt in his house

Drafted from Breasted, A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest (1905)expansion

Hatshepsut reigned as king for about twenty-two years, with the full titulary and shown in the reliefs in male dress and a false beard. The expansion she is remembered for was not a campaign. It was a shopping voyage, and she had it carved on the walls of her funerary temple in more detail than most pharaohs gave their wars.

Why she wanted the trees

The temple at Deir el-Bahri was designed in terraces, and she conceived those terraces as the myrrh-terraces of Punt — the land at the southern end of the Red Sea that Egyptian tradition held to be the original home of the gods. One of her inscriptions says that Amun had desired her to establish for him a Punt in his house.

To do that literally, she needed living myrrh trees, and nobody had ever brought any back. Egyptian expeditions had gone to Punt since the Old Kingdom, but none had been equipped to carry trees. For as long as anyone could remember, even the myrrh burned as incense in the temple service had reached Egypt hand to hand overland, foreign traffic having suffered badly under the Hyksos.

So the authority for the voyage was made divine. Standing before the shrine, the queen received an oracle from the god himself: that the ways to Punt should be searched out, that the highways to the myrrh-terraces should be penetrated. It is a glorious region of God's-Land, the god says, it is indeed my place of delight.

The far side

The fleet carried goods for barter and a great stone statue of the queen, to be set up in Punt — if it survives there, the remotest monument any Egyptian ruler ever erected.

They arrived safely. The commander pitched his tent on the shore and was met by Perehu, the chief of Punt, with his conspicuously fat wife and their three children, whom the Egyptian artists drew exactly as they saw them. It had been so long since Egyptians had come that way that the reliefs put an astonished question in the Puntites' mouths:

Why have ye come hither unto this land, which the people know not? Did ye descend upon the roads of heaven, or did ye sail upon the waters, upon the sea of God's-Land?

Then trade, and the ships drawn up to the beach with the gang-planks out, loading until they were down to the marks: fragrant woods, heaps of myrrh resin, fresh myrrh trees, ebony, ivory, gold, cinnamon wood, incense, eye-paint, baboons, monkeys, dogs, panther skins — and natives with their children. The inscription's own summary is the usual formula and for once may be close to true: never was the like of this brought for any king who has been since the beginning.

What came up the river

The fleet moored at Thebes and the cargo went through the streets to the palace, Puntites walking with it, which the Thebans had almost certainly never seen before.

The queen gave a share straight to Amun: thirty-one living myrrh trees, electrum, eye-paint, Puntite throw-sticks, ebony, ivory, a live panther caught specially for her, panther skins, and three thousand three hundred head of small cattle. Piles of myrrh twice the height of a man were measured out in grain-measures under her favourite Thutiy, and rings of gold weighed in balances ten feet tall.

This is a different kind of reach from the one the next reign is famous for. Thutmose III would extend Egypt by seventeen campaigns and a permanent garrison system. Hatshepsut extended it by sending ships further than anyone living had sent them, to buy trees, in order that a building in Thebes could be a piece of the country the gods came from.

Both are the same state at the same strength, doing the only two things a state that strong can do with the surplus.

Seventeen campaigns

Drafted from (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2000)expansion

Thutmose III came to sole rule in about 1457 BC, after twenty-two years in which his stepmother reigned as king. Hatshepsut is one of the very few women anywhere in the period who held a sovereign office rather than exercising power beside one, and the attempt to erase her from the monuments began decades after her death rather than immediately, which argues against the old story of a resentful stepson.

His first campaign as sole king is the turning point. A coalition of Canaanite rulers had assembled at Megiddo; Thutmose brought the army up through a narrow pass his officers had advised against, came out unopposed in front of the enemy camp, and won the field — and then lost the city for seven months because his troops stopped to plunder.

The Annals cut on the walls at Karnak afterwards are compiled from the army's own day-books, and they are the first battle in history described in tactical detail by participants: the route, the council of war, the dispositions, the count of what was taken.

Sixteen more campaigns followed in twenty years, reaching the Euphrates. What they produced was not annexation. The Levant became an Egyptian sphere held through local rulers who kept their thrones, paid tribute, and sent their sons to be raised at the Egyptian court — a system of hostage-education that produced vassals who had grown up in Egypt. Nubia was different and was governed directly, under a viceroy, as far as the fourth cataract, because Nubia had gold.

That is the empire at its greatest extent and it is the arrangement the next two chapters are about: how it was administered, and what its own correspondence shows it looked like from the inside.

The only way to know God

Drafted from Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization (2018)peak

Amenhotep IV came to the throne around 1353, ruling normally for a few years under the old gods, and then did something no Egyptian king had done in three thousand years of a religion that absorbed new gods constantly and discarded almost none. He tried to throw the others out.

The break

He renamed himself Akhenaten — roughly, "effective for the Aten" — and declared the sun disc itself, the Aten, not merely the greatest of the gods but in time the only one that mattered. In his fifth year he founded a new capital on virgin desert halfway between Memphis and Thebes, Akhetaten, the Horizon of the Aten, and moved his court there. Boundary stelae cut into the cliffs around the site record the founding decree in his own words and fix the city's limits, though the injunction against crossing them was against extending the territory, not against the king ever leaving it himself; his own planned tomb lay outside the boundary he had sworn to.

Then the campaign against Amun began in earnest. Temples to the old gods were closed and their income redirected. Work crews were sent out across Egypt with chisels to cut Amun's name out of inscriptions wherever it appeared — including inside the names of earlier kings, including his own father's, Amenhotep, which carries Amun in it. A religion that had spent three thousand years adding gods without ever needing to subtract one was, for the first time, being edited by force.

What the king alone could see

The theology that went with the new capital was not simply Aten-worship in place of Amun-worship. It changed who could reach a god at all.

The Aten was not shown as a figure with a human or animal head, the way every other Egyptian god had always been shown. It was shown as a disc, its rays ending in hands, and the hands reached down to exactly two people: the king and, standing beside him in relief after relief, his queen Nefertiti. The Great Hymn to the Aten, composed for the new cult and inscribed in a courtier's tomb at Amarna, describes a single creator god who made everything that exists and is known to no one except through the king:

When you set in western lightland, Earth is in darkness as if in death... Every lion comes from its den, All the serpents bite; Darkness hovers, earth is silent, As their maker rests in lightland.

You are in my heart, There is no other who knows you, Only your son.

That last line is the political content of the theology, not an afterthought to it. Ordinary Egyptians had always been able to approach minor gods, local shrines, the dead, through their own priests and their own offerings. Under Atenism the only channel to the one god that mattered ran through Akhenaten and Nefertiti personally. A revolution that looked, on the surface, like an argument about how many gods there were was also, underneath, an argument about who was licensed to speak to any of them — and the answer it gave was one family.

The institution that did not accept it

Akhenaten died around 1336, after about seventeen years. What followed took less than a decade to undo almost everything he had built.

His eventual successor, a child named Tutankhaten, changed his own name to Tutankhamun — restoring Amun to the throne the way it had been erased from the walls — and issued a decree, cut into stone stelae at Karnak, describing what the king had inherited in language that does not read like propaganda so much as an accountant's despair:

The temples of the gods and goddesses from Elephantine down to the marshes of the Delta had gone to pieces. Their shrines had become desolate, had become mounds overgrown with weeds... The land was topsy-turvy and the gods turned their backs upon this land.

Crews spent years re-cutting Amun's name into every surface Akhenaten's own crews had cut it out of. Akhetaten was abandoned; within a generation Horemheb was dismantling its buildings and using the blocks as rubble fill inside the pylons of temples to the god they had been built to replace. When Seti I had the king list of Egypt's rightful rulers carved at Abydos a few decades later, it jumps straight from Akhenaten's father to Horemheb. Akhenaten, Tutankhamun, and the kings between them are not omitted by accident. They are omitted on purpose, by a state that had decided the interruption should not have officially happened at all.

What the reign actually proves

The empire's material strength was never in question while any of this was happening — the army, the tribute, the Nubian gold all kept arriving throughout Akhenaten's reign, which is exactly why the episode is worth separating from a story about weakness. This was a fight over authority at the height of the state's power, not a symptom of its decline.

A king had claimed sole access to ultimate religious truth and tried to make that claim permanent by rewriting the built environment of the whole country. The religious establishment he had dispossessed did not have an army of its own, did not stage a battle, and did not need either one: it waited, and when the throne passed to men willing to reverse the decree, the reversal was total enough that later Egyptians were meant to believe the argument had never happened. The same shape recurs wherever a ruler asserts final religious authority over an institution built to outlast individual rulers — the claim can win completely for a reign and still lose completely within a generation, because the apparatus for reversing it was never destroyed, only overruled for as long as one family held the throne.

A machine for moving grain

Drafted from Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization (2018)aside?What aside means

Described in the ordinary categories — a standing army, a land tax, hereditary kingship, divine sanction — Egypt sounds like everywhere else, and the ordinariness is misleading, because the way those things were done here has few parallels anywhere.

The state was not primarily a tax collector in the sense a later empire is. It was a redistributive apparatus: grain and goods came in to central and temple granaries and went out again as rations, and for most of Egyptian history there was no coinage at all. People were paid in bread and beer, measured in standardised loaves and jars. Kemp's book is largely about that machinery and about the mentality that ran it, which is a subject a political narrative cannot reach.

Two consequences are worth stating.

The first is that the temples were not separate from the state. A New Kingdom temple was a landholding corporation with estates, herds, ships, workshops, granaries and a staff, and the largest of them — Amun at Karnak — held a share of Egypt's cultivated land that grew steadily across the period. The kings endowed them out of conquest, which converted a military success into a permanent transfer, and by the end of the New Kingdom the priesthood of Amun was a political power the crown could not remove. The state lived on a land tax, and a great deal of the land was not the king's.

The second is Deir el-Medina. The workmen who cut and decorated the royal tombs lived in a purpose-built village in the desert, were paid by the state in grain, and were unusually literate — and they left thousands of ostraca: work rosters, absence records with reasons, letters, laundry lists, lawsuits, love poems, a dream book. It is the best-documented working community in the ancient world by a wide margin.

Among the records is a strike. In the twenty-ninth year of Ramesses III the rations were late, and the workmen walked off the job, sat down behind the mortuary temple of Thutmose III, and refused to work until they were paid. It is the first recorded labour strike in history, and it is the fiscal history of the late New Kingdom told from the bottom: the machine described above had stopped delivering.

The letters

Drafted from (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2000)aside?What aside means

The Amarna archive is about three hundred and fifty clay tablets found at Akhetaten, the short-lived capital Akhenaten built and abandoned. They are diplomatic correspondence of the fourteenth century BC, written in Akkadian — the international language of the period, native to none of the main correspondents — between the Egyptian court and the courts of Babylon, Assyria, Mitanni, Hatti and Cyprus, plus the Egyptian vassal rulers of the Levant.

The great kings address each other as brothers and behave accordingly. They negotiate dynastic marriages, exchange gifts on a scale that functions as trade, complain that the gold sent was of poor quality or the messenger detained too long, and enquire after each other's health with formulaic warmth. There is a recognised protocol, a shared language of equality among a small set of powers, and a clear distinction between those powers and the vassals, whose letters beg rather than negotiate.

It is a functioning international system, documented from inside, a thousand years before the Achaemenids and two and a half before Rome and Parthia. The nearest later parallel is the Chanyuan treaty between the Liao and the Song in 1005, which also required two states to describe each other as equals and also produced a stable frontier.

The system ended with the Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BC, and Egypt's own imperial phase ended with it.

Kadesh, and the treaty

Drafted from (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2000)peak

In about 1274 BC Ramesses II marched north to take Kadesh on the Orontes from the Hittites, was fed false intelligence by two captured Bedouin, and led his leading division into a position where the Hittite chariotry could hit his second division on the march. It very nearly destroyed the Egyptian army.

He got out of it, and then had the episode carved on temple walls across Egypt in a version where he personally rallied the army and won — the Poem and the Bulletin, illustrated with reliefs, repeated at Abydos, Karnak, Luxor, Abu Simbel and the Ramesseum. It is the most extensively publicised battle of the ancient world and it was, at best, a draw; the Hittites kept Kadesh.

The battle is the famous half of it. The treaty is the half that changed anything.

Fifteen years later Ramesses II and Hattusili III signed a mutual peace, non-aggression and extradition agreement. Both texts survive: the Egyptian version cut on temple walls at Karnak, the Hittite version on a cuneiform tablet excavated at Hattusa. They are not identical — each side's copy says the other side sued for peace — and they are recognisably the same document, sworn before the gods of both countries, with clauses on mutual defence, the return of fugitives, and the succession.

It is the oldest international peace treaty whose text is known from both parties, and a copy hangs at the United Nations headquarters in New York. It held for the rest of both kingdoms' existence, was reinforced by a marriage, and ended six centuries in which the Levant was the thing the great powers fought over.

Put that beside the Amarna correspondence and the two make one argument. The Late Bronze Age Near East ran a genuine international system — a small set of powers who called each other brother, married each other's daughters, corresponded in a language native to almost none of them, and could sign and keep a treaty. The next comparable arrangement anywhere is Rome and Persia, and that is fifteen hundred years later.

Nine kings named Ramesses

Drafted from Breasted, A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest (1905)contraction

Ramesses III beat off the invasions that ended the Bronze Age, and then was almost murdered by his own household. What the trial records show about the state that survived is worse than the invasion was.

The conspiracy

It was organised from inside the harem, on behalf of a prince called Pentaweret, and the list of people involved is the point.

A chamberlain named Pebekkamen began by procuring wax figures of gods and men, believing they would let him get messages past the harem guard. He and a royal butler then recruited ten harem officials, four more royal butlers, an overseer of the treasury, a general named Peyes, three royal scribes, and assorted subordinates. Six wives of the officers of the harem gate came in, and proved useful for passing messages out to relatives. One woman inside smuggled a letter to her brother, who commanded the archers in Nubia, and brought him in too.

Almost every one of these people was in the pharaoh's personal service. The plan was to kill him and raise a revolt outside the palace at the same moment.

It was discovered, and the old king — shaken, and possibly hurt in the attempt — appointed a special court. His commission to it is a remarkable document from a man who had just been the intended victim:

As for the words which the people have spoken, I know them not. Go ye and examine them... Give heed and have a care lest ye execute punishment upon anyone unjustly.

He closes by placing himself among the just kings who are before Osiris, god of the dead, which Breasted reads as a man who did not expect to see the verdicts. He was right. He died before the trials ended, twenty days after the twenty-day jubilee feast of his thirty-second year.

Who was left to try them

The court was fourteen officials, seven of them royal butlers — and among those were a Libyan, a Lycian, a Syrian named Maharbaal, and another foreigner probably from Asia Minor. In his extremity the pharaoh was relying on the purchased loyalty of foreign servants, because they were the only people in the palace not already implicated.

It did not hold even so. Some of the accused women, led by the general Peyes, worked on the bailiffs guarding them until the bailiffs took them to the houses of two of the judges, who received them and drank with them. Those two judges, the bailiffs, and a third judge who turned out to be innocent were put on trial themselves. The innocent man was acquitted; the rest had their ears and noses cut off, and one of them killed himself immediately afterwards.

Thirty-two people were convicted in the end, Pentaweret and Peyes among them, and were permitted to take their own lives.

The long slide

After Ramesses III came, in Breasted's phrase, a long line of nine weaklings all bearing the great name Ramesses.

Ramesses IV's first act was to compile, for burial with his father, an enormous inventory of everything Ramesses III had given the temples. His own recorded bargain with Amun is a promise of more benefactions in four years than Ramesses II had managed in sixty-seven. He went himself to the Wadi Hammamat quarries and then sent an expedition of over nine thousand men, supported by pack trains and ten carts each drawn by six yoke of oxen; nine hundred of them died of heat and exposure, a tenth of the force. What the stone was for is not known. The only substantial building he left is a continuation of work his father had started. After him the Sinai mines stopped being worked, and the last royal name found there is his.

The rest go past almost without content. A collateral branch supplanted the son of Ramesses V. The seventh and eighth Ramesses cut tombs in the Valley of the Kings and left nothing else.

The priest at full height

While six of these kings succeeded each other, the high priesthood of Amun passed once, from father to son.

Ramesnakht held it under Ramesses III and IV; his son Amenhotep held it under Ramesses IX. In the king's tenth year Amenhotep was summoned to the great forecourt at Karnak and presented, before his own political supporters, with gold and silver vessels, decorations and precious ointments — and told that revenues formerly paid to the pharaoh would now be collected directly by the scribes of the temple. Breasted notes that the king's words of praise are pitched so that one cannot tell whether they are spoken by a sovereign to a subject or the other way round.

Amenhotep recorded the occasion twice on the temple wall, with a relief each time. And in those reliefs he had himself carved at the same heroic stature as the king.

That had never been done. From the beginning of Egypt, an official before the pharaoh was drawn as a pygmy beside a towering figure; the convention was the whole grammar of Egyptian art. A high priest quietly drew himself the same size, and nobody stopped him — which is a more exact measure of where power had gone than any document could give, because it was carved into the wall of the god's own temple and left standing.

What was left when the system stopped

Drafted from (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2000)end

Around 1200 BC the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean came apart. Hatti ended; Ugarit was burned and not reoccupied; Mycenaean Greece collapsed; the Levantine cities were destroyed or diminished; the international system the Amarna letters and the Hittite treaty describe stopped existing.

Egypt survived it, and was the only great power that did. Ramesses III beat a combined land and sea invasion in the delta in about 1177 and recorded it at Medinet Habu in reliefs showing a naval battle in the Nile mouths — the first depiction of a sea fight in Egyptian art.

Surviving cost more than the record admits. Within a generation the state could not pay the tomb workers on time, which produced the strike at Deir el-Medina; the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings were being robbed systematically, and the investigations survive as court papyri naming officials; grain prices in the surviving accounts rise steeply. Nubia slipped away and the Levantine possessions were gone.

The document that closes the period is the Report of Wenamun, an Egyptian official sent to Byblos around 1075 to buy cedar for the barque of Amun — told in full next.

There is no agent to name for the ending. The last Ramesside king was one of two powers in Egypt, with the high priest of Amun holding the south, and the country divided without a battle.

Egypt continued for another thousand years as a place worth conquering. Assyria took it in 671; the Achaemenids annexed it, lost it for sixty years, and reconquered it seven years before Alexander landed; then came three centuries of Macedonian kings, and then Rome. It never again appears as one of the powers doing the conquering.

The prince in the window

Drafted from Breasted, A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest (1912)afterlife

Around 1075, a temple official named Wenamun was sent from Thebes to Byblos to buy cedar for the ceremonial barge of Amun. He wrote a report of the journey, and it is the single most useful document about what had happened to Egypt, because it is an account of an Egyptian official discovering it.

He was robbed at Dor on the way out. He had given away his letters of credit before he left. He arrived at Byblos with a portable image of the god and no money, and the prince of the city, Zakar-Baal, refused to see him for twenty-nine days.

The interview

When he was finally admitted, he found the prince sitting in an upper room with his back to a window and the waves of the sea breaking on the shore behind him.

The questions came fast. How long since you left Egypt? Where is the letter of Amun that should be in your hand? Where is the letter of the High Priest? You gave them away? Then where is the ship you were given, and its crew — did he not hand you over to that captain to have you killed and thrown into the sea?

Wenamun said there were Egyptian ships and Egyptian crews. The prince answered that there were twenty ships in his own harbour doing business with the man in question, and ten thousand at Sidon trading with another, and Wenamun records his own reply exactly: then I was silent in that great hour.

The account books

Asked what he had come for, Wenamun said timber for the barge of Amun — thy father did it, and thou wilt also do it.

Zakar-Baal had the journals of his fathers brought in and read out. They recorded a thousand deben of silver received. Then he made the point of the whole episode:

If the ruler of Egypt were the owner of my property and I were also his servant, he would not send silver and gold, saying, "Do the commandment of Amon." It was not the payment of tribute which they exacted of my father. As for me, I am myself neither thy servant, nor am I the servant of him who sent thee.

And then, with the forest behind the city: if I cry out to the Lebanon, the heavens open and the logs lie here upon the shore of the sea.

What Wenamun had left

He had no army behind him, no letters, no money and no cargo. What he had was an argument, and he made it: the sea belongs to Amun and Lebanon belongs to Amun, and the god is the lord of life and health, which the former kings' silver was never able to buy.

Zakar-Baal grants him something — he is a courteous man in his way, and he concedes that craftsmanship and teaching had reached Byblos from Egypt. But he makes the concession as a compliment to a foreign country, not as an acknowledgement of a superior, and he wants payment in advance.

Two hundred years

Four centuries earlier, the princes of Byblos wrote to the Egyptian court in terms of abject dependence, begging for troops and complaining that they would be lost without them. Rib-Addi of Byblos sent dozens of such letters to Amarna, and they survive.

The man in the window is his successor in the same city. He keeps ledgers of what Egypt used to pay, produces them to settle an argument, and tells an Egyptian envoy to his face that he is nobody's servant.

That is the end of the New Kingdom, described from outside by the person it happened to, and it did not need a battle.

What happened to the account itself

The report survives in exactly one copy, damaged, found at al-Hibeh in the 1890s and bought for a museum in Moscow, where it still is. Whether Wenamun wrote what actually happened to him or a later scribe composed a story around a real man's disgrace is argued and probably cannot be settled; the language is Late Egyptian, of the kind used for narrative rather than administration, and it reads more like a story told about a man than a memorandum he filed.

Whichever it is, only the one papyrus was ever found, and even that one breaks off before the end. Wenamun's own account of how he got home, if he did, is lost along with the last lines of the page it was written on — an appropriately unfinished ending for a report about an empire that had stopped being able to finish its own business.