Twenty-second Dynasty
Not long after 950 BC the Pharaonic sway passed into the hands of a
family of alien race. Their earliest rulers styled themselves 'chiefs of the
Meshwesh', often abbreviated into 'chiefs of the Ma', but sometimes
paraphrased as 'chiefs of foreigners'. They were evidently closely related
to those Libyans whom Merenptah and Ramesses III had repelled with
such difficulty. But they are not to be regarded as fresh invaders. The most
plausible theory is that they were the descendants of captured prisoners or
voluntary settlers who, like the Sherden, had been granted land of their
own on condition of their obligation to military service. Be this as it may,
they had waxed so numerous and so important that they were able to take
over the government with the minimum of friction. Like the Hyksos before
them, they were anxious to pose as true-born Egyptians through retaining
on their heads the feather which had always been characteristic of their
appearance. But their foreign origin was also betrayed by such barbarous
names as Shoshenk, Osorkon, and Takelot, to mention only those born by
actual kings. These three names were known to Manetho as members of
his TWENTY-SECOND DYNASTY, this containing six more kings
unnamed and yielding according to Africanus a total of 120 years.
Egyptologists, on the other hand, have found it necessary to distinguish no
less than five Shoshenks, four Osorkons, and three Takelots. The entire
period is one of great obscurity and we must here, as elsewhere, content
ourselves with selecting for description the most outstanding personalities
and episodes. By way of generalization it may be said that the character of
these later dynasties remained closely similar to that of Dyn. XXI. The
main capital was in the north, either at Tanis or at Bubastis. At Thebes,
the high-priests still exercised undisputed religious authority. Relations
between the two halves of the country continued to vacillate between
friendship and enmity. It was an age of rebellion and confusion for which
the historian has but scanty sources, in spite of the valuable material
forthcoming from a stupendous discovery now to be described.
In 1850 Auguste Mariette, a young man none too well placed to secure his
future as an Egyptologist, found the long-sought opportunity in a mission
to Cairo to purchase Coptic manuscripts for the French Government. The
inevitable delays and obstacles encountered on his arrival had the
compensating advantage of making possible a flying visit to the pyramids
and tombs of Saqqara . A limestone head emerging from the desert
recalled to his mind not only some sphinxes that he had seen at
Alexandria, but also a passage of Strabo speaking of the sand-covered
sphinxes which led to the temple of the Apis. Convinced that he was on
the track of the famous Memphite Serapeum, Mariette was quite content to
forget about his Coptic commission and, hiring thirty native workmen, set
about uncovering the avenue pointing in the direction of some high
mounds. The avenue proved to be of great length and months passed
before he found himself in a chapel erected by the Pharaoh Nekhtharehbe
(Nectanebus II). This, however, was obviously not the goal aimed at, but
the interest excited by Mariette's undertaking had caused a large new
credit to be voted to him. It was November 1851, more than a year after
his leaving France, before Mariette entered the vast subterranean structure
where the Apis bulls were buried. Huge Sarcophagi had contained the
mummies of no less than sixty-four bulls, the earliest dating from the reign
of Amenophis III and the latest extending down to the very threshold of the
Christian era. Thousands of stele and other objects attested the devotion
of priests or other worshippers, and many of the inscriptions being dated
the great discovery proved to be of inestimable chronological importance.
The Apis bull was during its lifetime a sort of emanation of the Memphite
god Ptah, but having connections also with Osiris and the falcon god
Harakhti. On its death and replacement by another living animal it was
buried with pomp as the Osiris-Apis, a name equating it with the Serapis
whom the Ptolemies adopted as their principal divinity. Unhappily the
very magnitude of the find proved a disadvantage. The haste with which
so many objects had to be removed and shipped to France prevented the
proper observations and copies being made, and neither the expert
knowledge nor the money needed was available for the full publication of
which Mariette dreamed but was never able to undertake. To G. Maspero
and E. Chassinat belongs the credit of having done so much to remedy this
situation, each in his own way. Plans are on foot to make accessible to
scholars the vast accumulations still existing in the Louvre. However, it
cannot be denied that a large part of the scientific value of Mariette's
wonderful discovery is irretrievably lost.
Strangely enough not a single inscription of Dyn. XXI was found in the
Serapeum, but the material bearing upon Dyn. XXII and others later is all
the richer. Prominent among this material is the stele of one Harpson who
traces his descent through sixteen generations to a Libyan forebear of
unknown date named Buyuwawa. Harpson was alive and flourishing
towards the end of the long reign of Shoshenk IV and though he himself
claims to have been no more than a prophet of Neith he counted among his
ancestors four consecutive kings, each said to be the son of his
predecessor, the earliest of whom was Shoshenk I, the founder of Dyn.
XXII and by far the most important member of his clan. He is first heard
of in a long inscription found at Abydos while he was still no more than
'great chief of the Meshwesh, prince of princes'. His father Nemrat, son of
the lady Mehetemwaskhe--both mentioned by Harpson--had died and
Shoshenk had appealed to the reigning king to permit the establishment at
Abydos of a great funerary cult in his honor. Both the king and 'the great
god' (doubtless Amun) had replied favorably. There can be but little doubt
that the Pharaoh in question was the last Psusennes, it being known that
Shoshenk's son and successor Osorkon I took to wife that monarch's
daughter Ma'kare'. There is a strong probability that the transition from
Dyn. XXI to Dyn. XXII passed off peacefully, though a stele from the
oasis of Dakhla dated in Shoshenk's fifth year speaks of warfare and
turmoil as having prevailed in that remote province. Several sons of the
new ruler are known an d he seems to have assigned to them such
positions as would be most likely to secure the permanence of his regime.
The stele of Harpson appears to represent Kar'oma' as Shoshenk's wife
and the mother of Osorkon I, but she is elsewhere described as an 'Adorer
of the God', a title believed to exclude any matrimonial relationship. At
all events Osorkon I was a son of his predecessor. A lengthy inscription
discovered at Ihnasya el-Medina, the Heracleopolis so prominent in the
First Intermediate Period, is of interest for several reasons. Together with
other texts it acquaints us with a second Nemrat who was not only 'head of
the entire army', and a 'great chief of foreigners', but also one of those
princely persons who were pleased to claim descent from the
Ramessides. His mother Penreshnas was herself daughter of a 'great chief
of foreign lands'. This Nemrat came to his father Shoshenk and reported
that the temple of the Heracleopolitan god Arsaphes had been bereft of the
customary revenue of bulls needed for the many sacrifices to be made in
all the months of the year. He himself was ready to contribute no less than
sixty bulls, but the towns, villages, and officials of the nome would have
to supply the rest. A long list was appended, and the king issued a decree
ordering this to be acted upon, incidentally congratulating Nemrat on a
beneficence equal to his own. What was the reason for this special favor
accorded to Heracleopolis? No certain answer can be given, but it is
significant that most of Harpson's ancestors, both male and female, had
held priesthoods in that city, and that nearly 300 years later governors of
the Thebaid were apt to be chosen form among its inhabitants. A third
Nemrat who was a son of Osorkon II bore the title 'commander of the
army of Ha-Ninsu' (Heracleopolis) and the same designation occurs with
Bekenptah, a brother of the high-priest Osorkon under Shoshenk III. Can it
be that the Meshwesh who now arose to royal power had previously been
settled in that neighborhood, on the direct route through the oases from
their original Libyan home? Manetho speaks of Dyn. XXII as Bubastite
and of Dyn. XXIII as Tanite, and there is good evidence connecting their
kings with those flourishing towns of the eastern Delta. Nevertheless the
suggestions above made deserves serious consideration. A third son of
Shoshenk I was Iuput, whom he appointed to be high-priest of Amen-Re'
at Karnak, thus breaking with the tradition of heredity previously
observed for that post. This was a particularly wise move, bringing that
all-important office under the close control of the sovereign, and the same
policy seems to have been pursued for several generations to come. That
the position was fraught with danger is clear from the retention of the title
'great commander of the army'. The high-priests were not merely priests,
they were also military men. The outstanding achievement of Iuput, or
perhaps we should rather say of his father, was the erection of an entrance
into the precincts of the main temple of Karnak continuing westwards the
south wall of the vast Hypostyle Hall. The Bubastite Portal, as it is
generally called, was squeezed in between the Second Pylon and a small
temple of Ramesses III standing in the way of a huge first court which
Shoshenk undoubtedly planned front he start, but which he did not live to
accomplish. A rock-inscription at Silsila West records the opening of a
new quarry to supply the sandstone for this projected court and pylon. The
inscription is dated in Shoshenk's twenty-first year, his last according to
Manetho, but it is difficult to believe that the first step, namely, the
building of the portal, had not long since been taken. The decoration of its
walls illustrates the event to which Shoshenk I , the Biblical Shishak,
owes a unique celebrity.
A full half-century earlier Joab, in command of King David's forces, had
devastated Edom and put its entire male population to the sword. Hadad,
a child of the Edomite royal family, had escaped to Egypt and as he grew
up found favor with the Pharaoh, who gave him to wife the sister of
Tahpenes his queen. Later, Hadad returned to his own country against
Pharaoh's will, and became a life-long enemy of Solomon (I Kings xi. 14
ff.). A somewhat similar incident arose when, after Solomon's death,
Jeroboam, an upstart pretender to his throne, fled to Egypt under Shishak
(I Kings XI. 40) only to return later as king of the ten tribes. Rehoboam,
Solomon's son, had to content himself with kingship over Judah.
Meanwhile, however, relations between Egypt and the Israelite royal
house had drawn closer. To quote the actual words of the Hebrew analyst:
'And Solomon made affinity with Pharaoh king of Egypt, and took
Pharaoh's daughter and brought her into the city of David'. All these
statements read like authentic history, but no confirmation is obtainable
from the Egyptian side, and chronological uncertainties, though confined
within fairly narrow limits, are sufficient to render it doubtful which
particular Pharaohs were in question. Also the name Tahpenes is
unidentifiable in the hieroglyphs. But we have not long to wait for a
genuine synchronism: 'And it came to pass in the fifth year of king
Rehoboam, that Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem. He took
away the treasures of the house of the Lord and the treasures of the king's
house; he even took away all'. The probable date is about 930 BC The
chronicler was evidently less troubled by the desecration of the holy city
than by the loss of the gold shields made by Solomon, which had to be
replaced by others of brass. No mention of either Gezer or Jerusalem is
made in the surviving names accompanying the great scene of the
Bubastite Portal. These names are presented in the traditional fashion with
which we became acquainted in connection with the conquests of
Tuthmosis III, namely, attached to the busts of prisoners whom the gigantic
figure of Pharaoh leads forward for presentation to his father Amen-Re'.
The enumeration is disappointing. Of the 150 and more places named only
a few are well enough preserved to suggest definite routes and these skirt
around the hill-country of Samaria without reaching the center of the
Israelite kingdom. Nor is there any hint that they ever touched Judah at all.
There are, however, some indications of a raid into Edomite territory. The
long-accepted belief that a 'field of Abraham' was to be read in the list is
now rejected. However, the discovery at Megiddo of a fragment
mentioning Shoshenk leaves no doubt as to the reality of his campaign,
though it remains wholly obscure whether it was an attempt to receive
ancient glories, whether it was designed for the support of Jeroboam, or
whether it was a mere plundering raid. That both Shoshenk and his
successor Osorkon I renewed the secular friendship of Egypt with the
princes of Byblos is confirmed by the presence of statues of them there,
probably gifts sent by those Pharaohs themselves.
Little is known about the first Osorkon and his successor the first Takelot
except that the former reigned at least thirty-six years and the latter
possibly as much as twenty-three. The obscurities of Egyptian history now
deepen to such an extent that only rarely can a glimpse of the sequence of
events be caught. The reason is that the center of activity had shifted to the
Delta, from the wet soil of which only few monuments have been
recovered. Thebes, though still full if its own importance, had politically
speaking become a backwater. Little beyond self-adulation and barren
genealogies is to be gained from the verbose inscriptions on the many
statues of Theban worthies emanating from the great find at Karnak
alluded to above. For the regnal years of the Dyns. XXII and XXIII
Pharaohs of the Nile levels recorded on the quay in front of the temple are
of considerable value. In Middle Egypt, not far north of Oxyrhynchos, a
fortress with a temple in which Shoshenk I and Osorkon I had a hand
seems to have served as a sort of boundary or barrier between north and
south. This already mentioned site of El-Hiba had as its divinity the
ram-headed "Amun-of-the-Crag' also described with the picturesque
epithet 'Amun great-of-roarings'. It is only in the reign of Osorkon II that a
glimmer of light begins to emerge from the darkness. No attempt will here
be made to discuss the succession of Theban high-priests all apparently
struggling to assert their independence of their liege-lords at Tanis. At
Tanis, Montet discovered the tomb of Osorkon II, despoiled of its riches
by robbers, side by side with the sarcophagus of a high-priest of
Amen-Re' Harnakhti who appears to have been his son. At Bubastis,
Naville had fifty years earlier unearthed a great granite gateway decorated
with invaluable reliefs depicting episodes of the important, but still highly
problematic, royal Sed-festival. This had been celebrated in Osorkon II's
twenty-second year, when he took the opportunity of decreeing exclusion
from all other services of the harem-women of the temple of Amen-Re' as
well as of other temples in his two cities. The brief, but important ,
inscription ends:
Lo, His Majesty sought for a great benefaction unto his father Amen'Re'
when he proclaimed the first Sed-festival for his son who rests upon his
throne, that he might proclaim for him many great ones in Thebes, the
lady of the Nine Bows. Said by the King in front of his father Amun: 'I
have exempted Thebes in her height and her breath, being pure and
garnished for her lord, there being no interference with her by the
inspectors of the king's house, and her people being exempted for all
eternity in the great name of the goodly god.'
This can only be interpreted as an admission of the independence of
Thebes, whether as the recognition of a fait accompli or because Osorkon
found it political to make this concession.
After Shoshenk I the next four kings had contributed but little to the
decoration of the Bubastite Portal at Karnak, and the high-priest Osorkon,
the son of Takelot II, was not the man to leave unoccupied blank walls
offering so clear an invitation. His actions and policy are recorded in no
less than seventy-seven immensely tall columns of hieroglyphs disposed
in two separate inscriptions. Though handicapped by gaps in the text no
less than by gaps in our philological knowledge, R. Caminos, working
upon the copies provided by the Oriental Institute of the University of
Chicago, has extracted as much of the historical gist as is humanly
possible. Osorkon's story begins in the eleventh year of his father's reign.
He was then living at El-Hiba, according to his own account free from any
ambition. As governor of Upper Egypt he was soon, however, called upon
to quell a rebellion which had broken out at Thebes. On the way there he
halted at Khmun (Hermopolis Magna), paid homage to its god Thoth, and
caused some damaged sanctuaries to be restored. On arrival at the
southern capital, he was welcomed with joy by the whole city, and
particularly by the priesthood. There he soon restored order, burning with
fire the guilty ones who were brought to him. The children of former
magnates were reinstalled in their fathers' offices and five decrees were
issued benefiting the various temples of Karnak in different ways. To the
modern reader some of the good deeds of which Osorkon speaks must
seem extraordinarily trivial. For example, the gift of oil for a great lamp
to burn in the sanctuary of Amen-Re', and the provision of one goose daily
to each of two other temples, that of Mont and that of Amenope, making
730 geese in the course of the year. All this was done 'on behalf of the
life, the prosperity, and the health' of his father Takelot. In the recital of
year 12, Osorkon excels himself in his euphemistic exuberance, dragging
in all the principal deities of the Pantheon in order to illustrate his
wisdom and virtue. Perhaps there was a temporary lull in the antagonism
between north and south. It is said that Osorkon visited Thebes three times
in a year, bringing ships laden with festal offerings. But in year 15 there
arose new convulsions in which he 'did not weary of fighting in their
midst even as Horus following his father; years elapsed in which one
preyed upon another unimpeded'. At last, however, he had to admit that he
knew no way of healing the state of the land except by conciliation. To
this view his followers gladly assented and a great expedition to Thebes
was fitted out, numberless ships bringing offerings of all kinds to
Amen-Re'. Osorkon's speech to the god seems to have included
reproaches that he had unduly favored the rebels, but this was not taken
amiss, and agreement was easily reached. There follows a brief reference
to further trouble when Osorkon found himself without a friend, but this
was overcome by fresh oblations to the deity. The wall of Bubastite
Portal on which the foregoing narrative stands afforded no room for the
remainder of Osorkon's career, and he preferred to devote the
considerable space which was left to a long enumeration of the gifts made
by him down to King Shoshenk III's twenty-ninth year. Nor was this the
end of him, for another inscription describes him as high-priest again
visiting Thebes together with his brother Bekenptah, after they had
overthrown their enemies who stood in their way. By then he must have
been well on in his seventies.
The importance of Osorkon's very lengthy autobiographical text lies less
in the personality of its central figure than in the picture which it presents
of an Egypt torn by dissension and seeking to maintain the sovereignty of
the rulers in the north. This state of affairs may have continued right down
to the end of the dynasty. It is desirable to point out how one-sided is the
account given by our Osorkon. He usually presents himself as the
high-priest of Amen-Re', but what reality can be attached to such a title
when born by a prince who often resided at El-Hiba and whose visits to
Thebes were only occasional? Meanwhile the daily ritual at Karnak
would have had to be carried on, and it seems unlikely that there was not
always a high-priest in residence, even if he had to retire when faced by
superior claims or superior force. This has indeed been conjectured for a
certain Harsiese who appears, like our Osorkon, to have held the position
under Shoshenk III. But there had already been another high-priest
Harsiese, successor in that capacity of his father Shoshenk, a son of
Osorkon I. Here we encounter one of the principal difficulties confronting
study of the period, the recurrence over and over again of the same names
in both parts of the country. This applies even to the royal Prenomen, no
less than eight kings using that which long before had been employed by
Ramesses IV, namely, Usima're'-setpenamun. The problems are most
baffling, nor can they be tackled with much profit until the scattered and
fragmentary inscriptions have been collected anew, accurately copied,
and properly edited. Even then it is extremely doubtful whether a coherent
account will emerge. Meanwhile we must be contented with isolated
facts, such for example as Montet's finding at Tanis the remains of Takelot
II lying in a usurped sarcophagus of the Middle Kingdom and
accompanied by his canopic jars and ushabti-figures. Towards the end of
the dynasty the Serapeum material begins to be of real assistance, the
inscriptions mentioning the dates of birth and death of several Apis bulls,
together with the length of their lives. On that account, for instance, it has
been calculated that Shoshenk III reigned no less than fifty-two years and
was succeeded by a king named ('The Cat'). Throughout the entire dynasty
the reigns are unexpectedly long, a fact which appears to contradict our
earlier generalization that in Egypt length of reign usually spells a
prevailing prosperity. Manetho gives Dyn. XXII only 120 years, but the
accepted chronology finds itself compelled to legislate for fully two
centuries, namely from 950 to 730 BC.
|