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Section 6.3: The New Kingdom of Egypt, Part 3 (Akhenaten to Ramses II)

In the last lecture we ended by looking at the reign of Akhenaten and the reforms he enacted in

Egyptian religion, with special focus on the impact the aten cult may have had on Hebrew

monotheism. But we didn’t ask a central question: why did Akhenaten effect these changes?

Clearly, he was attempting to diminish the power that the Amun Priesthood exerted within Egypt

and reduce its access to financial resources. That was most likely driven by the pharaoh’s interest

in asserting a stronger personal control over Egypt, as is visible in the people he chose for

leadership positions in his new religion. Most were from the lower classes and were honored to

have been elevated by the king to such high standing in society. They boast of this in inscriptions

on the walls of their tombs.

But that raises another, even more difficult question: how did Akhenaten effect such dramatic

changes? Even with all the power a pharaoh had, he would have needed some sort of ally in his

war on the well-established Amun Priesthood. And there is really only one possible candidate for

that co-conspirator, the only other major power in Egypt at that time, the army. We know next to

nothing about what generals and soldiers were doing during this period, but it’s hard to imagine

they would have sat back and passively watched such a radical revolution unfold. But it’s equally

hard to image the leaders of the the army working with such an outlandish figure as Akhenaten.

Still, we must remember that, as odd as Akhenaten might seem to us, his misshaped image and

weird behavior may not have appeared all that strange to Egyptians in the day. Nor was he the

pacifist some modern historians make him out to be. He went on at least one campaign —

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granted, a minor one to Nubia — and his reliefs at El-Amarna depict soldiers. There is even one

piece of art showing Nefertiti holding the decapitated head of an enemy.

Akhenaten appears to have died peacefully of natural causes — there is some evidence, however,

of a plague striking Egypt around this time — and was originally buried no doubt somewhere in

the vicinity of Akhetaten. His body was later moved to the Valley of the Kings. The site of his

original tomb is unknown.

He was succeeded by a mysterious figure named Smenkhare, who first appears in the historical

record about two years before the end of Akhenaten’s reign.

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About that same time a curious thing happens. Nefertiti disappears from the records at Amarna.

One theory is that, after having failed to provide a male heir, Akhenaten pushed her aside for the

son of a secondary wife, Smenkhare who marries one of Akhenaten’s daughters by Nefertiti to

seal his claim on the throne, a pattern seen often in ancient Egyptian history. But that’s only way

to read the evidence, and there are problems with seeing things that way. The sudden dismissal

of a figure so prominent as Nefertiti who was part of the royal family — the god’s family! —

seems out of line with other, well-attested patterns of behavior. This has led some scholars to

make a startling suggestion: Smenkhare was Nefertiti! As Hatshepsut had done a century before,

she took on male attributes. She’d already been seen wearing crowns normally reserved only for

male kings. This way, she could carry on Akhenaten’s religion after his death. It’s an outlandish

theory first proposed in the 1990’s after which it fell out of favor but is now making a comeback.

In any case, Smenkhare, whoever they were, did not last long on the throne, only two years.

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They were succeeded by one of the most famous people in history, “King Tut” whose full name

was Tutankhamun though he was called Tutankh(u)aten at the time of his accession. In his day,

Tut was a weak and insignificant ruler because he had come to the throne as a nine-year-old

child and died at nineteen. At the time of his death he was still being groomed for kingship and

never had the chance to play any real role in governing Egypt.

He married one of Akhenaten’s daughters, Ankhesenpaaten (later Ankhesenamun), no doubt, to

secure his place on the throne because he was the son of one of Akhenaten’s secondary wives,

not Nefertiti.

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During his short reign, the Egyptian government began rolling back Akhenaten’s reforms. The

center of political life was returned to Memphis. Thebes, the home of the Amun cult, became

again the thriving religious capital it had been before the rise of the aten cult.

The right to sell copies of The Book of the Dead, a major industry for the Amun priesthood, was

restored.

And at some point after he was made king, Tutankhaten changed his name to Tutankhamun, the

name by which we know him, in deference to traditional beliefs, now newly revived.The reasons

for Tut’s death have been much debated. It’s always tempting to look for some sort of fatal

genetic defect in a person whose family has been inbreeding for as long as his, but there’s little

evidence to support that.

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Scans of his mummy show that he suffered a serious fracture in his thigh at some point before he

died. That alone could have killed him. Broken bones often became infected in antiquity and

caused septicemia (blood poisoning). His mummy also shows another peculiarity. The left side

of the chest is badly damaged which may explain why his tomb had no canopic jar to hold his

heart. The organ was too badly damaged to preserve. Why? Some historians theorize that he was

killed in an accident in which one side of his body was crushed by a chariot, a not unlikely

scenario if he were preparing to go on campaign. Otherwise, the body is so badly damaged it’s

impossible to make definitive conclusions about the cause of death. For one, the preparations of

his mummy were clearly made in haste. He was put in his coffin even before the oils used to

soak the wrappings had dried and, being very volatile, they caught fire and would have burned

the body entirely if there had been more oxygen in the coffin. For another, when his tomb was

discovered, the body was not treated with care and much damage was done. The tomb itself,

however, not the mummy, is the real treasure archaeologically.

It was discovered and opened by an American archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922, while he

was working in the Valley of the Kings (on the west side of the Nile across from Thebes).

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Many pharaohs of the New Kingdom were buried there among the desert escarpments and

rugged cliffs of its dry gulches.

Tut’s tomb is the one lucky site to have avoided the greedy hordes of looters in antiquity who

broke into the tombs and stole the grave goods of all other kings. One reason is that its entrance

was hidden by the camp site of later workers excavating the tomb of Ramses VI.

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There is also evidence that changes in weather in the century following Tut’s death created

violent rainstorms which flooded the valley and left behind sediment that hardened and made

access to the entrance very difficult. Indeed, Carter had to chisel his way through concrete-like

accretions in the tunnel leading down to the doorway.

When he finally reached the doors to the tomb itself, Carter found them still sealed exactly as

they had been by Egyptian priests three millennia earlier. Actually, it’s the way the tomb had

been not sealed but resealed after robbers were caught in the act of plundering the site.

In the inner chambers, Carter found further evidence that the king’s burial was as yet

undisturbed, door blockings stamped with images of a protective spirit in jackal form.

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The tomb itself proved to be very small by pharaonic standards, a moderate four-room apartment

(with no elevator) …

… but crammed with goods made of precious metals and exotic wood, much of it thrown around

in haphazard heaps, no doubt, the work of the robbers who had broken in and were searching for

the most expensive items.

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Inside a series of elegant, gold-encrusted coffins Carter found Tut’s mummified body …

… covered with solid gold death mask. Egyptians believed that the gods had skin made of gold,

so it was only natural to provide a new god his proper sheathing.

Cleaned up, Tut’s death-mask became one of the most famous discoveries in archaeological

history. Can you see the mix of gender characteristics in the facial features? The full lips but

strong jaw? The soft cheeks and long neck against the regalia of male power? If you look

closely, it’s even possible to see the lines where a new face was welded onto the head. If this

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striking work of beauty was a rush job, what must the mask of a real pharaoh like Ramses II have

looked like?

With Tut’s death, only one adult male of the royal line was left alive to rule, Ay the brother of

Tiye. He was by then a very old man, probably in his eighties. His demise represented the end of

a royal line that stretched back as far as Tuthmosis I, perhaps even Ahmose. It was the end of the

Eighteenth Dynasty and opened the way for a new line of kings, the Nineteenth Dynasty

dominated by a family from northern Egypt in the delta, whose rulers were named Ramses and

Seti. Ay was not of royal blood but had served a series of kings from Amenhotep III to Tut —

wouldn’t his autobiography make great reading? — no doubt, helping to construct and then

deconstruct Akhenaten’s program of religious reform. He was, no doubt, the power behind the

throne when Tut was king.

It is also at this time that a queen of Egypt wrote to the Hittite king Suppiluliumas, asking for

him to send her a son to be her husband. The best bet is it was Ankhesenamun trying to avoid

marriage to her elderly relative Ay. As we saw, it didn’t work. The Hittite son was killed before

ever reaching his queen, which is last word we hear of her, and the genetic line of the Eighteenth

Dynasty.

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Horemheb assumed the throne upon Ay’s death and began a long interregnum between

dynasties, an age of so-called “restoration” during which Egypt was steered back toward

traditional religion and government, and militaristic aggression abroad. As Tuthmosis III had,

Horemheb portrayed himself as both general and gentleman, conqueror and scribe, announcing

his victories in hieroglyphs he claims he could read.

He began a campaign of systematically erasing all memory of Akhenaten and his radical reforms

from every monument and record in Egypt, what one scholars calls “psychological warfare on

the Amarna kings.” With this followed the destruction of the artwork associated with the last few

kings, as evidenced by statues like these Osirid representations of the heretic pharaoh left

shattered in the sand after Horemheb’s goons had done their work. This damnatio memoriae

(eradication from memory) included Tut, Ay and all who had lived the Amarna lifestyle.

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Bypassing all the atenists, Horemheb casts himself in his records as the direct heir of Amenhotep

III. One document speaks of the fifty-ninth year of his reign. He ruled thirty at most. All the

same, there’s evidence he inhabited Akhetaten for at least some of his “interregency.” Horemheb

embodies the transition from the Amarna age to what followed.

Before moving on, let’s take a moment to reflect on that period, a phase of history which later

generations of Egyptians deemed an era not worth remembering. Their assault on its legacy, its

art and architecture, has ironically given us some of the best archaeology in all of ancient history.

Comparisons to Pompeii, the Roman city destroyed and preserved for all too non-human reasons,

are not unwarranted.

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In the ruins of Akhetaten, we can see how Egyptians built and decorated their houses, planned

cities, lived their lives. But how typical is this city of the average Egyptian’s modus vivendi. It

was constructed in less than decade, in a strange new place chosen for the very reason it was

strange and new, to serve a radical vision of the world. How much does it reflect Egypt at large,

or just its own society?

Egyptian did not return to what it was before Akhenaten’s reforms. The cult of the aten was not

eradicated, just reduced in status. Egyptian artists in particular learned lessons from their Amarna

experience and show it in their ability to execute new levels of realism. Gods changed too. From

insane numbers inhabiting an incomprehensible pantheon, their numbers began to focus on a

chosen few. After Akhenaten, a new “trinity of creation” emerges, composed of Ra, Amun and

Ptah (a deity of darkness from the delta), a trio seen to govern all being. Gods could now inhabit

each other, absorb and represent other divinities without destroying them or even denying their

existence. Such a concept would have been inconceivable before Akhenaten. Even the army

joined in this new view of heaven. Its divisions were now named for gods — Ra, Ptah, Amun —

one army made of many gods, just like the re-envisioned pantheon. Is this another example of the

fallout from Akhenaten’s alliance with military leadership?

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And then it all changed again, different colors, different shapes, a new world, a new dynasty

inaugurating a period of refurbishment, a return to the traditional Egyptian values of dominating

foreigners and asserting Egypt’s might abroad. This Nineteenth Dynasty began with the

accession of another general after Horemheb died. For some reason, Horemheb was unable to

assert his family line as dynastic. That new general-king was named Ramses, not the famous one

— that’s Ramses II — but his grandfather. He reigned all of two years but achieved what

Horemheb couldn’t. He put his son on the throne after him.

Seti I became the first true king of the Nineteenth Dynasty. He did that by reconsolidating power

in the hands of the king, not through creating a new religion but by making his family the focus

of power in Egypt. His son Ramses would reap the benefits of that firm hand.

The king list in the temple at Abydos, the most important piece of art from Seti I’s reign, is a

retrospective of Egyptian history leading up to his rule. As we noted earlier in the course, it’s one

of the most significant chronologies preserved. For us, it’s essential to the understanding of early

Egyptian history. To him, it was a way of saying he was part of that long tradition, a typical sign

of the paranoia seen so often in newcomers. It screams “There’s nothing new about me!,” when

exactly the opposite is true. This king list ends with seventeen cartouches of Seti himself,

representing the number of years he reigned, a reflection of a new type of dating based on the

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annual “rebirth” of the king. We’ll see this again later in other periods. It provides historians with

invaluable insight into the development and evolution of a period.

Seti is also known to have restored buildings which Akhenaten had effaced during his reforms.

In addition, he campaigned with great vigor in the Syro-Palestinian area.

His mortuary temple is relatively well-preserved, …

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… as is his tomb in the Valley of the Kings, one of the better ones there. On top of all of this, we

have his mummy, showing he was about five-and-a-half feet tall and had pierced ears.

But perhaps his greatest achievement was to continue the tradition of the royal line inaugurated

by his father Ramses I, and pass on the throne to his young son, Ramses II who would become

one of the most famous pharaohs in history, a king deserving of the title “Ramses the Great.”

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According to his own records, Ramses was an aggressive campaigner, although that may not

have been as true as he would have liked us to believe. His real skill was propaganda, and given

his long reign, he had quite a bit of time to exercise it. That means he hear a lot about him in

Egyptian records, but how much of that is truth and how much royal braggadocio is hard to say.

When it all comes down to it, some would argue that, despite his long life and the many

inscriptions and artworks he left behind, we actually know very little about him, especially in the

last few decades of his reign.

The images we have of Ramses begin in his early childhood …

… and go through his youth, as shown here where he stands next to his father Seti on the Abydos

king list discussed earlier, …

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… and into his early adulthood. It was during this time of life, his twenties and thirties, that he

began asserting his military might in the lands around Egypt, mainly the Syro-Palestinian area.

But that drive to fight wilted almost as fast as it bloomed. There are all but no records of

campaigns in the last decades of his long sixty-five years on the throne.

The drive that stayed with him all his life was to construct architectural projects on a grand scale.

He built many temples — and appropriated more by carving his own name in place of the name

of the original builder —

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… and moved the capital of Egypt to his family’s home turf in the delta, ironically near the site

of the Hyksos capital of Avaris. There he oversaw the construction of new city named in his

honor, Pi-Ramesse (“the House of Ramses”). After its discovery near the modern site of Tell ed-

Dab’a, excavations have continued there since the 1980’s. The location perhaps had more than

just symbolic value to Ramses and his clan. The choice may have been strategic. Situated as the

city was near Egypt’s northern border, it would have provided quick and ready access to

information about movements and uprisings in the Syro-Palestinian area. Building a new capital

also recalls Akhetaten, Akhenaten’s city, with which Pi-Ramesse has more than one point of

comparison. Ramses boasts, for instance, that “everyone comes to live in my city, the sun rises

and sets in my city.” Clearly, not everything about the aten cult died with its king. But unlike

Akhetaten, Pi-Ramesse remained an important metropolis. That is, until the Nile changed the

course of its flow and bypassed the city. Even then, as in so many Mesopotamian riverine

settlements, its citizens just up and moved to a new site on the new banks of the river and built a

capital city at Tanis. They even reused many of the stones that had been employed in the

construction of Pi-Ramesse. Thus, the old city was reborn in a new form. So Horus, so Osiris.

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But far in the south of Egypt by its border with Nubia at a site called Abu Simbel between the

first and second cataract, …

Ramses had a temple built to himself between the twenty-fourth and thirty-first years of his

reign. It is renowned for its four seated colossi carved out of the very cliff face itself, a way of

branding the king’s own image on the land. This bold declaration of geographic domination is a

type of propaganda as old as Naram-Sin. We’ll see the Neo-Assyrians of the next millennium use

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it too. There is no more blatant way to claim ownership of the world than to remake it into your

own reflection.

Others besides the king are recognized at the site, for instance, his wife Nefertari who stands

between his legs — that is hierarchical perspective on steroids! — though she was allowed her

own smaller temple around the corner. The sort of collaborative partnership that Akhenaten and

Nefertiti shared did, it seems, die at Amarna.

E6-

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The temple itself is carved deep into the native rock, creating a series of chambers that celebrate

Ramses, …

… in particular, his purported victory at the Battle of Qadesh. A long hallway flanked with

Osirid statues of the king lead into ea chamber with statues of the gods Amun-Re, Ptah, Re-

Horakhte and, of course, the deified Ramses himself. Twice a year in antiquity, the sun’s rays

reached all the way down the hallway and illuminated these statues, except for Ptah’s, the god of

darkness. The celebrations held at those times of year must have been impressive. Note also the

focus on solar deity Ra (or Re). Some lessons of the Amarna Age lived on.

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But we can no longer see that effect. In the 1960’s Egypt built a massive dam in this area to store

the floodwaters of the Nile so they could be allocated more effectively throughout the year. This

Aswan Dam created a huge lake that flooded the site of Abu Simbel.

To save this monument, the whole temple complex was cut from the rock and moved to a higher

location, but its position relative to the sun had to be changed, spoiling the lighting effect. Now

all the statues are in the dark with Ptah.

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Another important building constructed during Ramses’ reign is his mortuary temple, the so-

called Ramesseum. It’s located on the west bank of the Nile across from Thebes. During the

Roman period, it was known as the “tomb of Ozymandias,” a corruption of “User-maat-re,”

Ramses’ prenomen. The name Ozymandias later became famous in modern times when the poet

Percy Bysshe Shelley used it in a sonnet he published in 1817-18, which goes:

I’m fairly certain Ramses would be displeased to know his name has become synonymous with

the vanity of power and glory. He worked awfully hard to ensure the opposite.

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell

that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

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The Ramesseum is another architectural marvel. It’s laid out in an east-west direction so that

twice a year the sun directly strikes the statue of the deified Ramses. It has a hypostyle hall and

two large courtyards, …

… and a sacred boat room, along with a library, storerooms and workshops. It’s as fully

functional as any medieval monastery, only here the god is Ramses.

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As he had at Abu Simbel, Ramses decorated with the walls of the Ramesseum with an illustrated

narrative of the Battle of Qadesh, detailing the terrain around the fortified city, the calm courage

of Ramses himself during the combat. He is shown both seated and riding in a chariot as he

shoots arrows at the enemy and saves the day single-handed. But this was in many ways the last

hurrah for Egyptian military might abroad. From here on, control of the Syro-Palestinian area

would slowly slip from Egyptian hands. The New Kingdom was now looking into the sunset.

In conclusion, the most distinctive feature of this age was not its grand personalities like

Akhenaten or Ramses, but the rise of a standing army. That allowed Egypt to assert its authority

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over foreign lands, though never actual control, nothing like Rome and its provinces. That

characteristic disinterest in the world around them meant the Egyptians left behind little of their

culture or language in the places their armies marched through. People in the Syro-Palestinian

area were never encouraged to learn how to write hieroglyphics or worship Osiris. And all

evidence points to the fact they never did. They continued to pray as they always had and use

local scripts. The converse was at least partially true in Nubia where there was no local script.

There we find many hieroglyphic inscriptions.

What the Egyptians sought from their campaigns was not power or control but resources and

those materials they wanted or needed: copper and turquoise from the Sinai Peninsula, purple-

dyed cloth from Syria, olive oil and wine from anywhere. What they really sought was cheap

access to the huge marketplace that was the eastern Mediterranean seaboard. Despite Ramses’

claims, they weren’t conquerors, not even terrorists.

They were marauding tourist hordes who cared little for the lands they visited and much for the

souvenirs they brought home, and all the better if the bric-a-brac sported Egyptian themes, but

who really cared if the local who made it had ever seen an actual lotus blossom or had any

understanding of what it meant in Egyptian art? One document dating to the reign of Amenhotep

III says it all. It discusses the larger world around Egypt, listing sites in western Asia and Greece,

and gets everything in the wrong place.

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If there were Egyptian cults celebrated in the Syro-Palestinian area during the New Kingdom,

none survived its collapse. An atef crown with the feathers of Amun may adorn the heads of later

Ammonite kings but they probably had no idea what it represented to an Egyptian, only that it

was associated with traditional power. There’s no clear evidence they even knew it was

Egyptian. One important artifact, however, did come from Egypt and make a lasting contribution

to the Syrian life in that day and later the entire world, the alphabet, which was developed out of

from hieroglyphic symbols, but curiously not those that were used during New Kingdom but the

Middle Kingdom. Hieroglyphics may have inspired its creation, but the alphabet itself never took

hold in ancient Egypt. Eventually it would spread to the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans

and ultimately the modern world, making it a grudging bequest of literacy to all posterity, a gift

with no gift tag saying “With love from Egypt.” All in all, Semitic peoples from the Syro-

Palestinian area thrived much better in Egypt than Egyptians did abroad. Toward the end of the

New Kingdom, men with Semitic names served as judges in Egypt. Semitic loanwords entered

the Egyptian language. Semitic cults took root in the delta. What Egypt was to Nubia as an

influencer and foreign power, Semitic culture was to Egypt which would never see again the sort

of independence from outside forces it had in Ramses’ day. The sun was rising on a new and

dismal day, the so-called Late Period.