Nineteenth
Dynasty
After the recovery from the religious revolution,
Egypt was a changed world. It is not easy to define the
exact nature of the changes, since there are many
exceptions. Yet, it is impossible not to notice the
marked deterioration of the art, the literature, and
indeed the general culture of the people. The language
which they wrote approximates more closely to the
vernacular and incorporates many foreign words. The
copies of ancient texts are incredibly careless, as if
the scribes utterly failed to understand their meaning.
At Thebes the tombs no longer display the bright and
happy scenes of everyday life which characterized Dyn.
XVIII, but concentrate rather upon the perils to be
faced in the hereafter. The judgment of the heart before Osiris is a favorite theme, and the
Book of Gates illustrates the obstacles to be encountered
during the nightly journey through the Netherworld. The
less frequent remains from Memphis
show reliefs of only slightly greater elegance. The
temples elsewhere depict upon their walls many vivid
representations of warfare, but the workmanship is
relatively coarse and the explanatory legends are often
more adulatory that informative. In spite of all, Egypt
still presents an aspect of wonderful grandeur, which the
greater abundance of this period's monuments makes better
known to the present-day tourist than the far finer
products of earlier times.
Two statues found at Karnak
in 1913, taken in conjunction with the famous stela of
the year 400 discovered at Tanis fifty years earlier,
prove the founder of the NINETEENTH DYNASTY to have been
a man from the north-eastern corner of the
Delta whom Haremhab raised to the
end exalted rank of vizier. Pra'messe, as he was called
until he dropped the definite article at the beginning of
his name to become the king known to us as Ramesses I, was of relatively
humble origin, his father Set I having been a simple
'captain of troops'. We can well imagine Haremhab as
having wished to choose his main colleague from within
his own military caste. The statues, practically
duplicates of one another, portray Pra'messe as a royal
scribe squatting upon his haunches in the approved manner
of his kind. The half-opened papyrus on his lap
enumerates the various high offices to which his lord had
raised him. Besides the vizierate these include the
positions of superintendent of horses,
fortress-commander, superintendent of the river-mouths,
commander of the army of the Lord of the Two Lands, not
to mention several priestly titles. Most significant of
all is his claim to have been 'deputy of the King in
Upper and Lower Egypt', as Haremhab had been before him.
Pra'messe was an old man when he ascended the throne. He
was not destined to enjoy the royal power for long.
Manetho, as quoted by Josephus, allows him only one year
and four months of reign, a span not necessarily
contradicted by the dating in year 2 on the sole dated
monument which we possess, a stela from Wady Halfa now in
the Louvre. Even this appears to have been erected by his
son and successor Seti (Sethos I),
who set up in the same place a stela almost identical in
tenor and dated in year 1 of his own reign. These two
documents record the establishment at Buhen (Wady Halfa)
of a temple and new offerings to Min-Amun,
for whose cult prophets, lector-priests, and ordinary
priests were appointed, together with male and female
slaves form 'the captures made by His Majesty'. These
last words need not be taken too seriously in view of the
shortness of the reign, and indeed peace may at this time
have been firmly established in Nubia, where Pesiur, the
King's Son of Cush of Haremhab's reign, was possibly
still in office. Ramesses I's
monuments in other parts are very scanty. A few reliefs
bearing his name on and near the Second Pylon at Karnak suggest that he either
initiated or acquiesced in the stupendous change there
from Haremhab's open court with a central double line of
giant columns like that at Luxor
to the great Hypostyle Hall
which is among the chief surviving wonders of Pharaonic
Egypt. His own tomb in the Valley of the Tombs of the
Kings was planned to rival in size that of his
predecessor, and only stopped short, doubtless owing to
his death, at the chamber below the second flight of
stairs, where his sarcophagus may still be seen. His
coffin and mummy suffered a fate not unlike that which
befell the mummies of other kings. From his own tomb they
were transported first to that of Sethos I, and from
there to the great cache at Der el-Bahri.
The great ruler who occupied the throne for the next
fifteen or more years was colored with true affection and
loyalty towards his father. But obedient devotion has its
limits, and in the important funerary sanctuary which
Sethos I built for himself at Kurna, the northern-most of
the line of temples fringing the western desert at
Thebes, he could spare only a few rooms to Ramesses I. At Abydos, however, he appended to his
own great temple a small chapel with beautifully painted
reliefs and a fine stela in which he extolled the virtues
of his progenitor. Yet for all the recognition which
Sethos was prepared to pay his father , he was not averse
to regarding himself as the inaugurator of a new period.
This he showed by means of the phrase 'Repetition of
Births' appended to dating of his first and second regnal
years, and by inserting the corresponding epithet in his
Two-Ladies name and sometimes in his Horus-name, as had
been done by Ammenemes I at the
beginning of Dyn. XII. But there may have been an
additional reason for this. If the calculations of the
astronomical chronologies are sound, a new Sothic period
began about 1317 BC, a very short time before Sethos I
came to the throne. Now the Alexandrian mathematician
Theon, referring to the Sothic period, speaks of it as
the era 'from Menophres', and this royal name has been
interrupted by Struve, followed by Sethe, to be a
slightly corrupted form of the epithet Mry-n-Pth 'Beloved
of Ptah' which normally stands at
the beginning of Sethos's second cartouche. This clever
conjecture may or may not be right.
As a stranger from the extreme north and with no royal
lineage behind him, Sethos ran a serious risk of being
viewed as an upstart. The gods of the land had by no
means completely recovered from the injuries inflicted
upon them by the partisans of Akhenaten.
Here Sethos found an opportunity of winning popularity;
doubtless it was with this in view that he set about
restoring the mutilated inscriptions of his predecessors.
But his cleverest move consisted in founding a temple
whose magnificence should vie with that of the very
greatest fans of the capital cities. Abydos,
the reputed home of Osiris, had
always been a favorite site for the building activities
of the Pharaohs, but to none of Sethos's predecessors had
it occurred to honor the place on such a scale as he
devised. His temple, together with the mysterious
memorial at the back of it, remains to this day a place
of pilgrimage which no enterprising sightseer would
willingly miss. The reliefs of the walls, in many cases
still retaining the brilliance of their original colors,
display a delicacy and a perfection of craftsmanship
surprising on the threshold of a period of undisputed
decadence. The inherited name of SetI 'the Sethian'
attests a devotion to the very god who had been the
murderer of the venerated numen loci. All the more
necessary was it for him to placate Osiris,
or rather his powerful priesthood. Despite Sethos I's lavish expenditure on
his great monument the architects whom he employed did
not care to give Seth a place among its divine occupants,
and even in their writing of the monarch's name the
figure of Osiris was prudently
used in place of the grotesque animalic image of his
mortal enemy. By way of compensation, however, Osiris was
not permitted to be exclusively worshipped here at Seth's
expense. The temple was conceived of as a national
shrine. Beside Osiris, chapels were set apart for his
wife Isis and for his son Horus, these three constituting
the age-old triad of Abydos. But
neighboring their chapels are others of equal size and
importance dedicated to the three chief gods of the
capital cities, to Amun of Thebes,
to Ptah of Memphis,
and to Re'-Harakhti of Heliopolis. Nor was Sethos I the
man to dissociate himself from this noble company. It was
to his own cult that he caused to be consecrated the
seventh and southernmost chapel. To modern minds this
action might well seem intolerably presumptuous, but not
so to an Egyptian Pharaoh. Was he not from time
immemorial a great god, if not the greatest of all? How
should he not possess a memorial in the holiest place of
the Two Lands? And lastly, we must never forget that
early religion universally took for granted the principle
do ut des. All the gods would have languished, and
rightly, had not the Pharaoh's self-interest demanded the
steadfast maintenance of their cults.
The foundation or even the re-dedication of a temple
was by no means complete when the actual building was
ended. Priests of different grades had to be appointed,
menial servants found, to discharge the ordinary duties
of maintenance and commissariat and large tracts of land
set apart to supply the revenues required for the upkeep.
In return for this, a royal charter was usually issued to
define the rights of the sacred establishment and its
employees. Passing reference has been made to the decrees
from the end of the Old Kingdom which protected the
temple of Min at Coptos form
outside interference. Good fortune has preserved for us
the charter or part of the charter granted by Sethos to
his great new sanctuary at Abydos.
This, strange to say, is inscribed on a high rock at
Nauri a short distance to the north of the Third
Cataract.
It must suffice here to mention a few of the ways in
which the privileges of the temple staff might be
infringed. These men might be seized personally, moved
from district to district, commandeered for ploughing or
reaping, prevented from fishing or fowling, have their
cattle stolen, and so forth. Also any official who did
not exact justice from the offenders was himself to be
severely punished. Paragraph after paragraph deals with
such matters, but it has to be confessed that the entire
decree is very carelessly drafted, and leaves the
impression rather of artificial legalistic from that of
precise legal enactment.
Among the dependents of the Abydos temple mentioned in
the Nauri text are the gold-washers who were employed at
the mines in the neighborhood of the
Red Sea. Their task was to effect
the extraction of the precious metal by washing away the
lighter substances in the pulverized stone. The hard lot
of the actual miners is described in a passage quoted by
Diodorus Siculus from the geographer Agatharchides. It
was important that these poor wretches should reach the
scene of their labors without perishing on the way. In a
long inscription of year 9 engraved on the wall of a
small temple in the Wady Abbad some 35 miles east of
Edfu, Sethos describes the measures he has taken to
remedy their situation. A brief extract will illustrate
the style an substance of the narration:
He stopped on the way to take counsel with his heart,
and said: How miserable is a road without water! how
shall travelers fare? Surely their throats will be
parched. What will slake their thirst? The homeland is
far away, the desert wide. Woe to him, a man thirsty in
the wilderness! Come now, I will take thought for their
welfare and make for them the means of preserving them
alive, so that they may bless my name in years to come,
and that future generations may boast of me for my
energy, inasmuch as I am one compassionate and regardful
of travelers.
Sethos then recounts the digging of a well and the
founding of a settlement in this locality. Another
inscription in the speos warns later rulers and their
subjects not to steal the gold which was to be delivered
to the Abydos temple, and ends
with a curse:
As to whosoever shall ignore this decree, Osiris will pursue him, and Isis his wife, and Horus his children; and the Great
ones, the lords of the Sacred Land, will make their
reckoning with him.
Among her northerly neighbors Egypt's prestige had
fallen to a very low level, a situation which Sethos at
once set to work to repair. The warlike scenes depicted
upon the exterior north wall of the great Hypostyle Hall of Karnak combine with conventional
illustrations of the king's personal prowess much
information of a genuine historical character. These
reliefs are no great works of art, despite the prancing
steeds of Pharaoh's chariot and the agonized contortions
of his victims. But surely unique must be the picture of
Sethos on foot, with two Syrian prisoners tucked under
each arm. There are two series of scenes, both converging
towards a central doorway near which Amun stands to
welcome the returning conqueror and to witness the
doubtless merely symbolic battering to death of the
vanquished chieftains. The lesser captives who follow in
long lines were destined to become slaves in the
workshops of the temple of Karnak.
On the eastern side the lowest register shows the
military road along which Sethos's army had to pass
before he could reach his main objectives in northern
Syria. The starting-point, as with Tuthmosis III and
others, was the fortress of Tjel, the Latin Sile or
Selle, close to the modern El-Kantara so well known to
our own soldiers in the two world wars. From there the
way led across the waterless desert of the
Sinai peninsula beyond a small
canal now replaced by that of Suez. The reliefs display
in correct order the many small fortified stations built
to protect the indispensable wells, and these together
with a town with lost name which is evidently Raphia, 110
miles form Tjel, constitute the earliest equivalent of a
map that the ancient world has to show. Twenty miles
further on, described as 'town of Canaan', is the
Philistine Gaza a short distance within the Palestine
border. Before arriving there Sethos had been compelled
to inflict a great slaughter on the rebellious nomads of
the Shosu who barred the way. It is difficult to say how
far the campaign of year 1 extended since the top
register on the east half of the wall is lost. But it
certainly reached as far as the Lebanon, where the native
princes are seen felling the cedars or pines needed for
the sacred bark and flagstaffs of the Theban Amun. What
the accompanying hieroglyphic legend describes as 'ascent
which Pharaoh made to destroy the land of Kadesh and the
land of the Amor' probably belongs to a later year. The
Kadesh here mentioned is naturally the all-important city
on the Orontes, while the land of Amor is the adjacent
north Syrian region extending to the Mediterranean coast.
Of the two remaining registers in the western half-wall
that in the middle records a battle against the Libyans,
of whom but little has been heard since the beginning of
Dyn. XII. The lowest register shows Sethos at grips with
the Hittites, the strength of whose empire had been
steadily growing in the hands of Suppiluliumas's son
Mursilis II. Naturally the reliefs display Sethos as the
victor. Stele from Kadesh itself and from Tell esh-Shihab
in the Hauran bear Sethos's name, but are of far less
importance than the two inscriptions of his reign found
at Beisan, the Beth-shean of the Old Testament, some 15
miles south of the Sea of Galilee and only 4 to the west
of the Jordan. Here since the time of Tuthmosis III a
fortress of considerable size had housed the Egyptian
garrison, and within its chapel had stood the stele which
told of Sethos's exploits in the neighborhood. One of
them which is nearly illegible, but has been skillfully
deciphered by Grdseloff, deals with the 'Apiru-people
discussed above. The other, which is well preserved,
narrates as follows:
Year 1, third month of Summer, day 2...on this day
they came to tell His Majesty that the vile enemy who was
in the town of Hamath had gathered unto himself many
people and had captured the town of Bethshael, and had
joined with the inhabitants of Pehel and did not allow
the prince of Rehob to go forth. Thereupon, His Majesty
sent the first army of Amun 'Powerful of Bows' to the
town of Hamath, the first army of Pre' 'Manifold of
Bravery' to the town of Bethshael, and the first army of
Sutekh 'Victorious of Bows' to the town of Yeno'am. Then
there happened the space of one day and they were fallen
through the might of His Majesty, the King of Upper and
Lower Egypt, Menma're', the Son of Re', SetI-merenptah,
given life.
All the places here named have been identified with
some probability, none of them at any great distance from
Beisan; the capture of Yeno'am had been depicted in the Karnak reliefs. No more in the way
of commentary is needed than to draw attention to the
three army corps named after the gods of Thebes,
Heliopolis, and the later Pi-Ra'messe respectively. These
we shall find reappearing in the Kadesh campaign of Ramesses II, and they seem to
imply the presence of really strong forces in the
Palestinian area. Perhaps in the quarter of a century
from the beginning of Dyn. XIX, Egypt possessed as much
of an Asiatic empire as at any other period in her
history. Nevertheless, the main administration probably
lay in the hands of the local princes, and apart from the
commanders of garrison the Egyptian officials claimed no
more authoritative title than that of 'king's envoy to
every foreign country'. In Nubia, on the other hand, real
governors were the King's Son of Cush and his two
lieutenants, though here too Sethos had to take military
action against a remote tribe in the fourth and eighth
years of his reign.
Apart from the temples of Kurna and Abydos already mentioned and the
work on the great Hypostyle Hall
at Karnak Sethos
I's buildings are relatively unimportant. On the
other hand, the sepulcher which he caused to be excavated
for himself in the Biban el-Moluk is the most imposing of
the entire necropolis. It is over 300 feet long and
decorated from the very entrance with admirably executed
and brilliantly colored reliefs equaling in quality those
found in the great monument at Abydos.
The fine alabaster sarcophagus is now the treasured
possession of the Soane Museum in London. It had early
been robbed of its occupant, whose mummy ultimately found
its way to the cache at Der el-Bahri. Sethos was a man of
only moderate height, but the well-preserved head, with
heavy jaw and a wide and strong chin, is cast in a
markedly different mound from that of the Dyn. XVIII
kings.
If the greatness of an Egyptian Pharaoh be measured by
the size and number of the monuments remaining to
perpetuate his memory, Sethos's son and successor Ramesses II would have to be
pronounced equal, or even the superior, of the proudest
pyramid-builders. The great Hypostyle
Hall at Karnak is his main
achievement, and on the west bank at Thebes his funerary
temple known as the Ramesseum still retains a large part
of its original grandeur. At Abydos
his temple stands, as a not unworthy second, side by side
with that of his father, which he finished. The edifices
at Memphis have been largely
demolished later by thieves greedy for suitable building
stone, but portions of great statues of Ramesses II
attest the former presence of a vast temple of his.
Moreover, this is referred to in a well-known stela
preserved in the Nubian temple of Abu Simbel, where
Ramesses acknowledges the blessings conferred upon him by
the Memphite god Ptah. The
remains at Tanis will be spoke of later. It is in Nubia,
however, that his craze for self-advertisement is most
conspicuous. Omitting the names of four important
sanctuaries which under any other king could not be
passed over in silence, we cannot refrain from voicing
our wonder at the amazing temple at Abu Simbel with its
four colossal seated statues of Ramesses fronting the
river. Yet in spite of all this monumental ardor, Ramesses II's stature has
undeniably suffered reduction as the result of the last
half-century's philological research. Previously the
nickname Sese, given him in some later literary texts,
had persuaded Maspero that he was none other than the
conqueror Sesostris so widely celebrated in the classical
authors. We now know that this half-mythical personage
had arisen from the combination of two separate kings of
Dyn. XII. The less enviable claim to have been the
Pharaoh of the Oppression survives in the works of the
ablest conservative scholars only in a greatly modified
form, while a by no means negligible minority of
historians are profoundly skeptical of the entire Exodus
story. Lastly Ramesses II's glamour as a triumphant
conqueror has been much dimmed by evidence from the
Boghazkoy records. None the less the events of his
sixty-seven years of reign are better known and present
more of interest than those of any other equal span of
Egyptian history.
For the beginning of the reign, the main source is an
inscription of great length known to Egyptologists by the
name Inscription dedicatoire given to it by G. Maspero,
its first translator. This occupies an entire wall in the
temple of Sethos I at Abydos and is the main boastful
account of Ramesses's virtue in completing his father's
splendid sanctuary. The space devoted to factual
narrative is small, but an important passage describes
Ramesses's promotion in early youth to the position of
crown prince and subsequently his association with Sethos
upon the throne:
The Universal Lord himself magnified me whilst I was a
child until I became ruler. He gave me the land whilst I
was in the egg, the great ones smelling the earth before
my face. Then I was inducted as eldest son to be
Hereditary Prince upon the throne of Geb (the earth-god)
and I reported the state of the Two Lands as captain of
the infantry and the chariotry. Then when my father
appeared in glory before the people, I being a babe in
his lap, he said concerning me: 'Crown him as king that I
may see his beauty whilst I am alive.' And he called to
the chamberlains to fasten the crowns upon my forehead.
'Give him the Great One (the uraeus-serpent) upon his
head' said he concerning me whilst he was on earth.
The accuracy of this statement has been challenged,
but wrongly, since scenes at Karnak
and at Kurna confirm Ramesses's co-regency with his
father. Probably, however, he was less young when the
co-regency began than this passage suggests, because
there is evidence that he accompanied Sethos on his
military campaigns while he was still only the
heir-apparent, and further because the passage just
translated goes on to say that Sethos equipped him with a
female household and a king's harem 'like to the
beautiful ones of the palace'. He must have been at least
fifteen years old at the time, and in guessing at the
length of the co-regency, we must remember the Ramesses
had still a reign of little less than seventy years ahead
of him, for he undoubtedly counted his first year from
his accession after Sethos's death. The Abydos inscription also gives us
some information concerning his first actions after the
accession. Like Haremhab, he had come to Thebes to take
part in Amun's great feast of Ope, when the god was
carried in state in his ceremonial boat from Karnak to Luxor.
The festivities over, he set forth by river to his new
Delta capital, stopping at Abydos on the way to do
reverence to Osiris Onnophris and
to give orders for the continuation of the work on
Sethos's temple. This visit gave him the opportunity to
appoint as new high-priest of Onuris at Thinis, of Hathor at Dendera,
and also at some places farther south. This preferment is
proudly recounted by Nebunenef, the priest in question,
in his tomb at Thebes. Proceeding on his way northwards
Ramesses arrived at 'the strong place Pi-Ra'messe,
Great-of-Victories', thenceforth to be, with Memphis as an alternative, the main
royal residence in the north throughout Dyns. XIX and XX.
It is agreed that this town, the Biblical Ramesses, was
situated on the same site as the great Hyksos stronghold of Avaris and
that its principal god was Sutekh, as the name of Seth
was by this time mostly pronounced. P. Montet and the
present writer have strongly maintained that this was
none other than the great city which was later called
Dja'ne, Greek Tanis, the Zoan of the Bible. No one who
has visited the site or read about its monuments in books
can have failed to be impressed by the multitude of the
remains dating from the reign of Ramesses
II. On the other hand , some 11 miles to the south,
at Khat'ana-Kantir, portions of a fine palace of Ramesses
II, adorned with splendid faience tiles, have staked out
a rival claim to be the true Pi-Ra'messe 'the House of
Ra'messe', and among other scholars Labib Habachi has
been particularly active and successful in finding stele
and other evidence from the same neighborhood which might
swing the pendulum in that direction. According to this
theory, the monuments of Ramesses II at Tanis were
transported there by the kings of Dyn. XXI, who are known
to have chosen that city as their capital. The debate
continues, and cannot be regarded as finally settled
either the one way or the other.
Continuation
of 19th Dynasty
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