As with almost everything about the way Ancient Egyptians saw the world their deities were not one note entities, even though we try and put them in little boxes when we talk about them today. So Ptah is not just the “creator as craftsman” that I discussed in my last article on him. That was his primary role, but he also had other roles and associations with other deities.
One of the epithets of Ptah is mesedjer-sedjem which means “the ear that hears” – this refers to Ptah’s role as a hearer of prayers from the ordinary person. Many votive stelae dedicated to Ptah in this role have been found, in his temple at Memphis or Deir el Medina as well as other places. They generally depict ears to show that he is listening. One example includes a text from a man called Neferabu who has sworn a false oath in the name of Ptah and is now blind, and the text begs Ptah in his role as “the ear that hears” to forgive him. Also in this role Ptah is found depicted inside chapels that we call hearing ear chapels. Egyptian temples were not open to the public in the way that a church or mosque are and the further into an Egyptian temple you go the more restricted access is, until the inner sanctuary where only the Pharaoh or High Priest can go. So these hearing ear chapels were built on the periphery of the temple where more people had access, and they could go there to leave their prayers for the god inside. Quite often Ptah was depicted in these chapels even if he didn’t have a sanctuary inside the temple proper – he was the hearer of prayers and would help sort things out for you!
Stela of Ptah with Ears
As an important deity connected with the state religion Ptah might also be seen as one of the rulers of said state. After the gods made the world (however it was whomever it was did it) the Egyptians thought that various of the gods ruled as kings. Some have stories (like Shu or Osiris), others are just referenced. Ptah is one of the latter – in the Memphite Theology he is referred to as the ruler of a unified Egypt, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, and his name appears first at the head of the Turin King List. But there are no stories. This might just be because none survive – there are surprisingly few mythological narratives that survive from Pharaonic Egypt, most are bits and pieces and fragments that we can see match with a later source (like Plutarch retelling the myth of the death of Osiris). Or maybe he was conceptually king, because he’s a universal creator and an important god in the pantheon, but no-one really thought he was an actual king like the current ruler was king.
And of course as with many Egyptian deities Ptah was worshipped as part of a “family” grouping. The primary triad he is part of is referred to as the Memphite Triad and it was one of the most important ones in Egyptian religion. It consisted of Ptah and his consort Sekhmet, and had Nefertem as their child. The development of the triad didn’t happen all at once – Ptah and Sekhmet were associated and worshipped as a duo before Nefertem was added to make a full triad in the New Kingdom. I put “family” in scare quotes, because the family relationships between Egyptian deities in a triad shouldn’t be treated like a genealogical puzzle – the relationships aren’t necessarily exclusive nor commutative, a god doesn’t necessarily have a consistent pair of parents across all places and all times and nor a consistent consort etc. So Ptah’s “son” Nefertem in the Memphite triad is actually not referred to as his son (tho he is Sekhmet’s son), but in other times and places Imhotep may be referred to as the son of Ptah (with no link to Sekhmet). And the Syrian goddess Astarte is sometimes assimilated into the Egyptian pantheon as Ptah’s daughter (or as Re’s daughter in other contexts).
And not all triads are families anyway. Ptah is also grouped together with Amun and Re, and it seems clear this isn’t intended as a family. This grouping is partly a way of representing “all the important gods”. It’s also part of a strand of Egyptian thought that arises in the New Kingdom that seeks to bring together the various gods and mythologies into a unified scheme which centres the god Amun. So this triad can be seen as three different facets of Amun – Re is his face, Ptah is his body and Amun is his own hidden nature.
There are also other ways that Ptah is associated with other deities. A general rule within the Egyptian thinking about divine beings is that they can overlap, merge or separate at various different points in time (or even different places). Ptah is no exception – whilst he’s venerated as himself on his own from the Early Dynastic Period through to the Roman Period he’s also merged with other deities to form composite deities who can also be quite prominent.
One of these composites is Ptah-Sokar-Osiris, whose statues turn up in non-royal funerary contexts (particularly in the Late Period and afterwards). He represents the whole cycle of life – creation (Ptah), death (Sokar) and rebirth (Osiris). The composite deity is attested from at least the Middle Kingdom, even though the statues aren’t common until the Late Period. He did not spring into existence in a single step – the two Memphite gods Ptah and Sokar merged quite a lot earlier, based on similarities in location, role and associations with minerals. At a later date (but still before the time of the Pyramid Texts) the god Sokar merged with Osiris. By the Middle Kingdom these two composites, Ptah-Sokar and Sokar-Osiris, had merged with each other leading to the worship of the composite called Ptah-Sokar-Osiris.
Ptah and Tatenen became associated as the composite deity Ptah-Tatenen from the reign of Ramesses II. They are linked together in three different ways – firstly both are Memphite deities (and Ptah did subsume several other Memphite deities, like the Apis Bull, over time). The pair can also be seen as the creator and the substance that he creates with – either Ptah as sculptor and Tatenen as the earth he uses, or Ptah as creator and Tatenen as the primeval mound which is the first created land. And lastly Ptah himself is associated with the mineral components of the earth, whilst Tatenen is also an earth god.
The deity Ptah, the deity Pataikos and dwarves are all associated with each other in Ancient Egyptian iconography and thought – the composite deity Ptah-Pataikos is represented as a dwarf in Egyptian art and dwarves are often shown working as craftsmen in Old Kingdom tomb reliefs. Although I can’t disentangle which came first (the association with each other, or with craftsmen) it seems clear that the association of all three with craftsmen is the link that holds them together.
And last, but not least, in his role as a universal creator god Ptah is associated with the waters which existed before creation – personified by the pair of deities Nun and Naunet. As Ptah-Nun he is called the “Father who begot Atum”, and as Ptah-Naunet he is called the “Mother who begot Atum” – inserting him at the very beginning of the Heliopolitan creation myth.
I feel a bit like with this article I’ve come full circle to the beginning of the first in this series on Ptah – he’s everywhere and everywhen, with seemingly a finger in every important pie of Ancient Egyptian religious thought.
Resources used:
Allen, James P. 2014. Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs. Cambridge Univ. Press. Assmann, Jan. 2003. The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs. Translated by Andrew Jenkins. Harvard Univ. Press. David, Rosalie. 2002. Religion and Magic in Ancient Egypt. Penguin Books. Fisher, Marjorie M. 2012. ‘Abu Simbel’. In Ancient Nubia: African Kingdoms on the Nile, edited by Marjorie M. Fisher, Peter Lacovara, Salima Ikram, and Sue D’Auria. American Univ. in Cairo Press. Fletcher, Joann. 2016. The Story of Egypt. Hodder. Gahlin, Lucia. 2010. ‘Creation Myths’. In The Egyptian World, edited by Toby Wilkinson. Routledge. Griffin, Kenneth. 2021. ‘Introduction and the Great Triads’. Presented at the Egypt Centre Swansea Short Course on ‘Gods, Goddesses, and Demons of Ancient Egypt’, July 18. Hart, George. 1990. Egyptian Myths. British Museum Press. ———. 2005. The Routledge Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses. Routledge. Hornung, Erik. 1982. Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many. Translated by John Baines. Cornell University Press. Kemp, Barry J. 2006. Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization. 2nd ed. London ; New York: Routledge.Malek, Jaromir. 2003. ‘The Old Kingdom’. In The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, edited by Ian Shaw Oxford University Press. Mertz, Barbara. 2008. Red Land, Black Land: Daily Life in Ancient Egypt. William Morrow. Shaw, Garry J. 2014. The Egyptian Myths: A Guide to the Ancient Gods and Legends. Thames & Hudson. Shaw, Ian, and Paul T. Nicholson. 2008. The British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt. British Museum. The British Museum Book of Ancient Egypt. 2007. British Museum. Tyldesley, Joyce. 2010. Myths & Legends of Ancient Egypt. Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books. Wilkinson, Richard H. 1994. Reading Egyptian Art: A Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Egyptian Painting and Sculpture. Thames and Hudson. ———. 2000. The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt. Thames & Hudson. ———. 2003. The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt. Thames & Hudson.
Last time I talked about the deity Ptah I talked about the way he looks, and where and when we find him. The sort of things you’d find in a “Spotter’s Guide to Egyptian Deities”. But today I’m going to talk about what the point of Ptah was, his main role in the ancient Egyptian system of thought. Ptah was a maker of things – both in terms of crafts and in terms of the whole world.
Throughout most of Pharaonic Egyptian history, from at least the Old Kingdom, Ptah was seen as both the patron deity of craftsmen and as a universal creator deity. Ptah’s original role was as the patron deity of crafts and craftsmen. He was associated with the mineral aspects of the world – the stone, the metal ores – and was seen as a metalworker. He was thus the patron of those who created metal objects, as well as those who created using metal objects. And this role became expanded to covering all the crafts, which he was said to have created. The places associated with Ptah (in particular Memphis from very early on and Deir el-Medina in the New Kingdom) were centres of crafts and production for the royal court and funerary complexes. The titles of his High Priest reflect this – one of these titles was wer kherep hemw which means “Supreme Leader of Craftsmen” (or “Greatest of Those who Supervise the Craftsmen”).
This initial association with crafts then expanded into a more general role in creation. The imagery used to describe Ptah’s creative powers is full of references to his origins as a craftsman. For instance he’s described as the craftsman who crafts kings – he moulds the body of the deceased and newly divine Ramesses II from electrum, copper and iron, a reference to his particular association with metalworkers. He’s described as crafting bodies for the gods to inhabit – in the same way as human craftsmen would make the cult statues for the temples. As an aside, this also leads to him being credited with “inventing” one of the key funerary rituals, the Opening of the Mouth ceremony. These bodies of the gods (statues) need to have their mouths ritually opened (with an instrument reminiscent of a craftsman’s chisel) before the ka of the god can enter and live in the statue. This ritual is then recapitulated on the mummy or coffin of the deceased as part of the funerary rites, opening the mouth so the deceased will live in the afterlife. But back to the main point – even the way in which he creates the universe uses this same language of crafts: he is referred to as the sculptor of the world, or as having smelted the world.
Statue of Ptah
And this genesis as a craftsman fundamentally shapes the sort of creator deity that Ptah is. Creation narratives come in multiple flavours – the world might be created by the substance of the deity becoming the the world, or perhaps that deity makes it like you’d make a pot, or procreation is involved i.e. the world is birthed by the deities. The better known Egyptian creation myth (the Heliopolitan one, where Atum “gives birth” to Shu and Tefnut to start the whole thing off) is a procreative myth, in contrast to the Christian myth where God brings the world into being by commanding it (which is a making myth – he’s not quite a potter, but the potter works on his orders!). But the Heliopolitan creation myth is not the only Ancient Egyptian creation myth. There are broadly speaking three different creation narratives with three different focuses – once upon a time Egyptologists would think of these as competing traditions, but that’s now a rather outdated view (tho our names for the myths still reflect that idea). The Hermopolitan myth is interested in how the universe went from non-being to being and what there was before there was anything. The Heliopolitan myth is interested in how, given we have a universe in existence, it formed into the world around us complete with all its parts including human society. And the Memphite Theology (which tells us about Ptah’s creative power) is interested in the mechanics of creation itself.
Although all three are told in terms of narratives (this god, that god, doing those things, sometimes to each other) under the hood they’re actually really rather abstract, the various deities are personifications of forces and aspects of the world (like Shu is the air etc). And that is definitely the case for Ptah in the Memphite Theology – he is the personification of the transformation of an idea or concept into a real physical object, he is the creator as a craftsman. And like the Christian God (tho in actuality the linkage will be the other way round) he is creator as commander – Ptah thinks, and speaks, and it is so. In the Memphite Theology he is said to create the world via the thoughts he forms in his heart and the words he forms on his tongue. This is a part of Egyptian ideas about the power of language, particularly the written word – words can shape reality. Ptah is also said to have created the hieroglyphs as he created the objects – the thing and its written form in one moment of creation – and the hieroglyphic script was called “the god’s speech” in Ancient Egyptian.
In the Memphite Theology Ptah was positioned as the ultimate source of creation. But this was not the only tradition involving Ptah as this craftsman creator of the universe. During the New Kingdom there was an effort to merge the various Egyptian conceptions of creation into one coherent whole with Amun as the primary creator. As part of this the deity Ptah was no longer seen as a creator in his own right instead he was seen to be the means by which Amun created the universe. Amun “spoke in silence” to kick off the creative process, but this speech operated via Ptah. Garry Shaw (in his book on Egyptian Myths) uses the metaphor of commissioning a sculpture (or other piece of craft), which I rather like. Amun is the commissioner – without him there would be no creation, but he does not make it himself nor is he the material from which the sculpture takes shape. Ptah is the craftsman, who moulds the raw material but does so only by the request of the commissioner. And finally Atum and/or Tatenen are the raw material from which the creation is actually made – by themselves they cannot transform into the sculpture but it takes shape from their substance.
But the Ancient Egyptians rarely seem to’ve had only one explanation or understanding of any given phenomena (over time, or even simultaneously). And so it’s possible to overstate the idea that Ptah’s creative abilities operate via a crafting model – the ways that he is merged into broader Egyptian ideas about creation often have some flavour of procreation to them, particularly when he is being positioned as the ultimate creator. For instance one of his epithets translates as the “father of the gods, from whom all life emerged”. And in the Memphite Theology as Ptah-Nun he is referred to as the “father who begot Atum” and as Ptah-Naunet the “mother who bore Atum” – positioning him as the father & mother of the sun and creation itself. Ptah is also sometimes shown in art creating an egg on a potter’s wheel, and in a very late myth (dating to the Graeco-Roman period) he’s said to have fertilised this egg he created with his seed and thus created the Hermopolitan Ogdoad (whom he then goes on to bring together into Amun).
Procreation needs both male and female, and the Egyptians square this circle for the Hermopolitan Ogdoad by having female counterparts for each of the male deities/forces (e.g. the waters are Nun and Naunet). But for Ptah they chose another solution – he combines both male and female within himself. This concept is seen in references to Ptah in multiple periods of Egyptian history, both early and late. In this context he was referred to as “the Ancient One” and this is how he is associated with both Nun and Naunet – he is also seen as self-creating (by begetting himself).
Allen, James P. 2014. Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs. Cambridge Univ. Press. Assmann, Jan. 2003. The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs. Translated by Andrew Jenkins. Harvard Univ. Press. ———. 2014. Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt. Translated by David Lorton. Abridged and updated by the author, repr. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press. Boonstra, Stephanie. 2020. ‘A Memphite Amulet Workshop in Leicester’. Presented at the EES Virtual Study Day ‘Collections from Home: Museum Favourites’, June 13. David, Rosalie. 2002. Religion and Magic in Ancient Egypt. Penguin Books. Fletcher, Joann. 2016. The Story of Egypt. Hodder. Gahlin, Lucia. 2010. ‘Creation Myths’. In The Egyptian World, edited by Toby Wilkinson. Routledge Griffin, Kenneth. 2021. ‘Introduction and the Great Triads’. Presented at the Egypt Centre Swansea Short Course on ‘Gods, Goddesses, and Demons of Ancient Egypt’, July 18. Hart, George. 1990. Egyptian Myths. The Legendary Past. British Museum Press. ———. 2005. The Routledge Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses. 2nd ed. Routledge Dictionaries. Routledge. Hornung, Erik. 1982. Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many. Translated by John Baines. Cornell University Press. Kemp, Barry J. 2006. Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization. Routledge. Martin, Geoffrey Thorndike. 1993. Hidden Tombs of Memphis: New Discoveries from the Time of Tutankhamun and Ramesses the Great. New aspects of antiquity. Thames and Hudson. Mertz, Barbara. 2008. Red Land, Black Land: Daily Life in Ancient Egypt. William Morrow. Shaw, Garry J. 2014. The Egyptian Myths: A Guide to the Ancient Gods and Legends. Thames & Hudson. Shaw, Ian, and Paul T. Nicholson. 2008. The British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt. British Museum. Teeter, Emily. 2010. ‘Temple Cults’. In The Egyptian World, edited by Toby Wilkinson. Routledge. The British Museum Book of Ancient Egypt. 2007. British Museum. Tyldesley, Joyce. 2010. Myths & Legends of Ancient Egypt. Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books. Wilkinson, Richard H. 1994. Reading Egyptian Art: A Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Egyptian Painting and Sculpture. Thames and Hudson. ———. 2000. The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt. Thames & Hudson. ———. 2003. The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt. Thames & Hudson. Wilkinson, Toby A. H. 2001. Early Dynastic Egypt. Routledge. ———. 2010. The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt: The History of a Civilisation from 3000 BC to Cleopatra. Bloomsbury.
Ptah is one of the more important gods of the Egyptian pantheon through the whole of Egyptian history, and his name and image are all over the place in the monuments and texts. Yet somehow he’s not one of the gods that we (amateurs, at least) talk about much – he doesn’t have good stories (like Osiris), he’s not associated with heresy and controversy (like the Aten), he’s just there. He’s attested very early in Egyptian history – he is drawn on a bowl dating to the First Dynasty, probably the reign of Den. Unusually for such an early object this bowl has a secure provenance (tomb 231 at Taharkan, excavated by Petrie) and the drawing of the deity not only has the right iconography for Ptah but is labelled with his name in hieroglyphs. As this appears to be a fully developed depiction of Ptah it seems probable that he was worshipped back into Predynastic times.
There are some suggestions that his ultimate origins may lie in cultures to the west of Egypt, but there is little evidence for this. What there is mostly hinges round the fact that the name “Ptah” does not have any secure etymology within the Egyptian language and was not written with the determinative or emblem of a deity until the New Kingdom. However it may be that it is cognate with words that mean “to sculpt” and was based on a root for those words which had gone extinct by later periods, and I am inclined to agree with those that see this as a more plausible explanation. It relates to his identity as a god of craftsmen (which was probably his first role), and as he is such an early deity it would also make sense that his name reflects ancient forms of the language.
During the course of Pharaonic Egyptian history the iconography of the god Ptah changes very little. He is generally represented as a human man (sometimes with blue skin) wrapped up in a tight-fitting garment or mummy wrappings and standing on a plinth. He wears a skull cap like Old Kingdom craftsmen do (often blue in colour) and has a straight beard (added during the Middle Kingdom as the only significant change in iconography). He often wears a heavy broad collar necklace with a counterpoise at the back, and if he doesn’t then he still has a feature that looks like the counterpoise – a tassel from the neckline of his garment. His hands emerge from his wrappings and hold a sceptre topped with the was, ankh and djed hieroglyphs (meaning “power, life, stability”). I’ve illustrated this article with the fabulous statue of Ptah that was found in Tutankhamun’s tomb which has these features.
Statue of Ptah
You’ll’ve noticed that unlike many of the Egyptian deities the iconography of Ptah has no animal elements, no matter the period of Egyptian history. However there is nonetheless a sacred animal associated with this god – a singular bull, the Apis bull, who was regarded as the ba or physical manifestation of the god.
By the Old Kingdom it is clear that Ptah was regarded as a creator deity as well as the god of craftsmen, however he doesn’t show up very much in the Pyramid Texts – in fact he’s almost an aside. Some of the books I’ve looked at suggest that this is because of rivalry between the priesthood of Ptah in Memphis and the priesthood of Re in Heliopolis (who were heavily involved in the funerary cult of the king). But I think this idea of the priests of the various cults being in opposition to each other is fairly old-fashioned, the Egyptians didn’t actually seem to view their gods like we view football teams! So instead I think it’s more likely to be some combination of Ptah not rising to national prominence till later on, or that he simply wasn’t very much involved in the funerary sphere at this point in time.
In the Middle Kingdom Ptah also shows up in the Coffin Texts as a creator deity – crafting the gods, ripening vegetation, and creating the sun – but he really rises to prominence in the New Kingdom. This can be seen by the proliferation of temples dedicated to him (particularly in Nubia during Ramesses II’s reign) and by his worship alongside the extremely important deities Amun and Re in a triad (thus he must be on a par with them). He retains this importance through the rest of Pharaonic Egyptian history and into the Roman Period. In the Ptolemaic Period and the Roman Period the Greeks & Romans tended to equate the Egyptian gods with their own, to bring the two cultures of ruling elite and local peasantry closer together – so during this time Ptah is first associated with the Greek smith god Hephaestus and later the Roman smith god Vulcan. Perhaps oddly, despite this importance very few amulets depicting him have survived – even from periods where large numbers of amulets survive of other gods. Those that have been found are generally plaques dating to the 26th Dynasty with Ptah flanked by the other members of his triad (Sekhmet and Nefertem), and appear to’ve been used in a living context rather than a funerary one.
Ptah was worshipped in many places across Egypt and into Nubia (when it was under Egyptian control), and many temples had a sanctuary dedicated to him. His primary cult centre was at Memphis, where he had been worshipped since at least the Early Dynastic Period if not before. Several of his epithets – like “Lord of Ankh-Tawy” or “South of His Wall (res-ineb-ef)” – reference Memphis, and his largest temple complex was in that city. In fact the modern English name of the country of Egypt ultimately derives from the name of Ptah’s Memphite temple – hwt-ka-ptah (house of the ka of Ptah) became pronounced as “Αίγυπτος” (Aigyptos) in Greek, and then misapplied to the whole country. Sadly not much is known of the temple (or the whole city of Memphis) because people still live in the region and the archaeology is underneath the modern city. The parts of the temple that remain mostly date to Ramesses II’s reign in the New Kingdom, but there is evidence of earlier structures including re-used blocks in that Ramesside temple. The first temple may’ve been built at the time of the unification of Egypt in the reign of Narmer (but the only evidence of that is a reference in the work of the ancient historian Manetho, who wrote c.3000 years after Narmer’s reign). And at its height the complex may’ve rivalled Karnak Temple in size (although I’m not sure what the actual evidence for this is, if nothing much survives!). In another parallel with Karnak and Amun, there was more than one temple dedicated to Ptah in his city of Memphis – for instance there was another one built next to the palace of Merenptah (Ramesses II’s successor).
And speaking of Karnak, Ptah also had a sanctuary in that temple complex). This dates back to at least the Middle Kingdom, and there is also other evidence of Ptah at Karnak dating to that period. Fragments of stone columns which were originally in the first court of Karnak have been found, showing Senwosret I worshipping gods including Ptah. The sanctuary of Ptah was rebuilt by Thutmose III after it had fallen into disrepair – or so he says, but this is also a common trope in Ancient Egyptian kingly rhetoric. Every king is responsible for maintaining maat in the world, and how better to demonstrate that than to do a bit of work on a temple and then write a grand announcement of how you found it in ruins and restored it to its full glory?
Deir el-Medina was another site where Ptah was particularly venerated – not surprisingly as like Memphis this was a place where craftsmen lived and worked. So the patron deity of craftsmen was also the patron deity of the village. More generally Ptah was particularly important during the New Kingdom, and so many temples were built dedicated at least in part to him in contexts outside those where craftsmen were working. For instance several temples in Nubia were dedicated in part to Ptah – in this context it’s due to his associations with Amun. Many of these temples were built during the reign of Ramesses II – not just the famous one at Abu Simbel but also including temples at Gerf Hussein and el-Derr . As a prominent state deity Ptah also has a presence in temples like that of Seti I at Abydos and Ramesses II’s mortuary temple (the Ramesseum).
Allen, James P. 2014. Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs. Cambridge Univ. Press. Blyth, Elizabeth. 2006. Karnak: Evolution of a Temple. Routledge. Boonstra, Stephanie. 2020. ‘A Memphite Amulet Workshop in Leicester’. Presented at the EES Virtual Study Day ‘Collections from Home: Museum Favourites’, June 13. Bryan, Betsy M. 2003. ‘The 18th Dynasty Before the Amarna Period’. In The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, edited by Ian Shaw, Oxford University Press. David, Rosalie. 2002. Religion and Magic in Ancient Egypt. Penguin Books. Fisher, Marjorie M. 2012a. ‘Abu Simbel’. In Ancient Nubia: African Kingdoms on the Nile, edited by Marjorie M. Fisher, Peter Lacovara, Salima Ikram, and Sue D’Auria. American Univ. in Cairo Press. ———. 2012b. ‘Derr’. In Ancient Nubia: African Kingdoms on the Nile, edited by Marjorie M. Fisher, Peter Lacovara, Salima Ikram, and Sue D’Auria. American Univ. in Cairo Press. ———. 2012c. ‘Gerf Hussein’. In Ancient Nubia: African Kingdoms on the Nile, edited by Marjorie M. Fisher, Peter Lacovara, Salima Ikram, and Sue D’Auria. American Univ. in Cairo Press. ———. 2012d. ‘The Art and Architecture of Nubia During the New Kingdom’. In Ancient Nubia: African Kingdoms on the Nile, edited by Marjorie M. Fisher, Peter Lacovara, Salima Ikram, and Sue D’Auria. American Univ. in Cairo Press. Fletcher, Joann. 2016. The Story of Egypt. Hodder. Gahlin, Lucia. 2010. ‘Creation Myths’. In The Egyptian World, edited by Toby Wilkinson. Routledge. Griffin, Kenneth. 2021a. ‘The East Bank Temples (Karnak and Luxor Temple)’. Presented at the Egypt Centre Swansea Short Course on ‘Thebes: The City of 100 Gates’, March 28. ———. 2021b. ‘Introduction and the Great Triads’. Presented at the Egypt Centre Swansea Short Course on ‘Gods, Goddesses, and Demons of Ancient Egypt’, July 18. Hart, George. 1990. Egyptian Myths. The Legendary Past. British Museum Press. ———. 2005. The Routledge Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses. 2nd ed. Routledge Dictionaries. Routledge. Hawass, Zahi. 2012. ‘Saving Nubia’s Legacy’. In Ancient Nubia: African Kingdoms on the Nile, edited by Marjorie M. Fisher, Peter Lacovara, Salima Ikram, and Sue D’Auria. American Univ. in Cairo Press. Hornung, Erik. 1982. Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many. Translated by John Baines. Cornell University Press. Leblanc, Christian. 2011. ‘The Ramesseum: The Temple of Rameses II’. In Valley of the Kings: The Tombs and the Funerary Temples of Thebes West, edited by Kent R Weeks. White Star Publishers. Martin, Geoffrey Thorndike. 1993. Hidden Tombs of Memphis: New Discoveries from the Time of Tutankhamun and Ramesses the Great. New aspects of antiquity. Thames and Hudson. Mertz, Barbara. 2008. Red Land, Black Land: Daily Life in Ancient Egypt. William Morrow. Shaw, Garry J. 2014. The Egyptian Myths: A Guide to the Ancient Gods and Legends. Thames & Hudson. Shaw, Ian, and Paul T. Nicholson. 2008. The British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt. British Museum. Snape, S. R. 2014. The Complete Cities of Ancient Egypt. Thames & Hudson. The British Museum Book of Ancient Egypt. 2007. British Museum. Tyldesley, Joyce. 2010. Myths & Legends of Ancient Egypt. Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books. Wilkinson, Richard H. 1994. Reading Egyptian Art: A Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Egyptian Painting and Sculpture. Thames and Hudson. ———. 2000. The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt. Thames & Hudson. ———. 2003. The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt. Thames & Hudson. Wilkinson, Toby A. H. 2001. Early Dynastic Egypt. Routledge.Wilkinson, Toby A. H. 2010. The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt: The History of a Civilisation from 3000 BC to Cleopatra. Bloomsbury.
One doesn’t normally think of beetles and gods in the same thought, or at least I don’t at any rate. Well I suppose, there is that famous (and perhaps apocryphal) quip of Haldane’s about God’s inordinate fondness for beetles. But a beetle as a manifestation of a god, or an integral part of the correct functioning of the cosmos, or a symbol of the beginning of the universe, no that doesn’t spring easily to my mind. But if I was an Ancient Egyptian that would make perfect sense to me. The Egyptians had observed young scarab beetles emerging from balls of dung, and as far as they could tell this was spontaneous generation of beetles (obviously we now know that a female scarab had laid an egg in there first, but that bit the Egyptians didn’t see). So as a result they thought of the scarab as being associated with creation, and specifically with self-creation. And this then generated a comparison with their god Atum – Atum who emerged from the primordial mound at the beginning of creation, like a scarab beetle emerges from its dung. And yes, that does mean that there is a direct comparison between a ball of dung and the land we live on but it doesn’t seem that that was an important part of the analogy (or then again maybe it was, dung is a good fertiliser after all and the fertility of the land they lived on was essential to them).
And that’s not all that was compared to a ball of dung. Another thing that scarab beetles do, as well as emerge from dung, is push dung balls across the ground (in search of a safe place to eat it). And that made the Ancient Egyptians think of the sun – how does it move across the sky? One of their answers was that it was in a boat, that floated on the waters of Nun that were held back by the sky goddess Nut. But another of their answers was that it was pushed across the sky by the god Khepri in the form of a scarab beetle. So Khepri is another god who is associated with this beetle – he’s a solar god, and more specifically the god of the sun rising on the eastern horizon. There is one pretty big difference between reality and iconography in this case – real scarab beetles stand up on their forelegs and push their dung ball along backwards using their back legs. However Khepri pushes the sun moving forwards and using his forelegs. I find this quite intriguing and wonder if it’s related to how one of the bad things that one didn’t want to happen in the afterlife was to walk upside down on one’s hands – perhaps it was considered an ill-advised way to portray a sun god? Or maybe it was just considered more aesthetically pleasing? I find it a bit unlikely it was just random chance, the Egyptians seem to’ve been keen observers of nature so I’m sure they wouldn’t’ve just got it wrong!
Khepri’s iconography is all about the beetle as well. As with many Egyptian gods he had three main forms – a person, a person with animal attributes, and an animal. Khepri is therefore sometimes shown as a man with a beetle headdress, as a man with a whole beetle as his head, and as a scarab beetle. The beetle is often blue, like in the necklace I’m using to illustrate this article. The real beetle, unsurprisingly, is not blue – it’s black – so this colour was chosen for its symbolism, and was intended to emphasise the link between the beetle and the heavens. Some exceptions to this colour choice are in funerary texts, where the beetle is its natural black – perhaps because black signifies fertility and rebirth?
Scarabs on a Pectoral from Tutankhamun’s Tomb
The link between Khepri and the scarab beetle goes much deeper than his iconographic representation. The original name of Khepri was kheprer, which is quite literally the word for the scarab beetle in Ancient Egyptian – so he’s not just represented by a beetle, he is a beetle. It is also linked to the verb kheper, which means “to develop” or “to come into being,” and you can see how this links the concepts of creation (and the rising sun) even more deeply into the nature of the beetle and the god Khepri as well as linking them both again to that initial moment of creation and the emergence of Atum from the primeval waters. It’s also another illustration of something I mentioned when I was talking about Khonsu – the names of the cosmological gods in Egyptian generally aren’t the names of the cosmological entities that they represent. Nothing of the sun about the name Khepri, instead it’s all about the beetle and the metaphysical ideas.
There are also tweaks to the representation of the scarab and Khepri that link them with other gods and other ideas within Egyptian cosmology. For instance Khepri could be shown as a scarab beetle in a boat being held up by the god Nun which is then a recapitulation of creation with the solar creator god rising up from the primeval waters. And also one of the other ways that the sun is supposed to travel across the sky – in a boat, floating on the waters of Nun which are held back above us by the goddess Nut as the sky. There are also scarab beetles with wings and the feet and tail of a bird – normally a falcon or a vulture, the former linking perhaps to Re-Horakhty (another solar god). And there are also ram-headed scarab beetles which represent Atum-Khepri – the solar creator god in multiple aspects, and also a symbol of the rising and setting sun together. And of course as a solar god Khepri was also considered a manifestation of Re, and sometimes he’s associated so closely with Re that it’s Re who’s said to be a scarab beetle pushing the sun in the morning with no explicit mention of Khepri.
And in something that starts to feel a little like a pattern – the solar associated scarab beetle can also be associated with the moon (c.f. Shu and Tefnut), and be depicted pushing the moon in front of it in a visually and conceptually analogous fashion to pushing the sun. There’s also a pectoral from the tomb of Tutankhamun (not the one I’ve got as my illustration) which has a winged scarab beetle holding up the boat of the lunar eye, above which is the usual moon symbol of the full moon sitting in a crescent moon. And this imagery may be associated with one of the moon gods – Iah.
As I’ve alluded to a couple of times already, scarabs beetles show up in funerary contexts. Sometimes this may be linked to something about the person – for instance because one of Tutankhamun’s names is Nebkheperure (with the “kheper” in the middle written with a beetle) the scarab beetle is used as a visual pun on his jewellery and other funerary goods. But more generally there were strong links in Ancient Egyptian thought between their creation stories and their ideas about the afterlife – linking the moment of first creation with the rebirth and renewal to come after death. Thus imagery associated with creation often shows up in funerary contexts. Rather more specifically for the scarab beetle, in his role as the pusher of the sun across the sky Khepri was thought to be swallowed by Nut each night along with the sun and reborn again in the morning. This idea that he was constantly reborn mean that he was also directly associated with resurrection. And in this sort of context he might be explicitly linked with Osiris, symbolically linking the solar realm with the netherworld. For instance in the Late Period tomb of Petosiris there is a depiction of Khepri wearing Osiris’s atef crown, and there are other depictions elsewhere of Osiris with a scarab beetle for a head with the atef crown on top.
Much later authors like Plutarch (2nd Century CE) and Horapollo (5th Century CE if he existed) take the association of scarab beetle imagery and the funerary context much much further. They say that the tunnels of Old Kingdom mastabas were built to resemble the tunnels of the scarab beetle, and that mummified bodies are wrapped to mimic scarab beetle pupae. This is dubious at best – there’s no evidence at all that this was a part of Pharaonic Egyptian thought so it’s almost certainly a flight of fancy on the part of some Roman or Greek. But it entertained me enough to tell you about it, despite its lack of foundation in fact!
So in summary, if you were an Ancient Egyptian when you saw a scarab beetle you wouldn’t just think “oh look, a beetle pushing some dung around” – you’d think of the sun, of the beginnings of the world and of life after death. A pretty weighty load for a beetle to push around.
Resources Used:
Boonstra, Stephanie. 2019. “Reconstructing the Mid-Second Millennium BCE Using Scarab Amulets.” Spring Lodge Centre, Witham, Essex, November 3. Write up on Other People’s Tales. David, Rosalie. 2002. Religion and Magic in Ancient Egypt. Penguin Books. Hornung, Erik. 1982. Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many. Translated by John Baines. Cornell University Press. Kemp, Barry J. 2006. Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization. Routledge. Mertz, Barbara. 2008. Red Land, Black Land: Daily Life in Ancient Egypt. William Morrow. Robins, Gay. 2010. “Art.” In The Egyptian World, edited by Toby Wilkinson. Routledge. Shaw, Garry J. 2014. The Egyptian Myths: A Guide to the Ancient Gods and Legends. Thames & Hudson. Shaw, Ian, and Paul T. Nicholson. 2008. The British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt. British Museum. Taylor, John H. 2010a. “Life and Afterlife in the Ancient Egyptian Cosmos.” In Journey Through the Afterlife: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead., edited by John H. Taylor. British Museum Press. ———. 2010b. “The Perfect Afterlife.” In Journey Through the Afterlife: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead., edited by John H. Taylor. British Museum Press. Tyldesley, Joyce. 2010. Myths & Legends of Ancient Egypt. Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books. Wilkinson, Richard H. 1994. Reading Egyptian Art: A Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Egyptian Painting and Sculpture. Thames and Hudson. ———. 2003. The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt. Thames & Hudson.
Sobek, or Sebek (or even Suchos if you insist on being Greek about it), is closely associated with the crocodile. Of the books I read only two gave me a meaning for the name, but they did provide me with three different possibilities between them! One possibility is that the name just means crocodile – despite there also being another completely different word for crocodile (meseh). Another possibility ties Sobek into the Osiris story – his name may derive from a word meaning “he who unites” which would be referring to the limbs of Osiris. And the third possibility is that it derives from s-bꜣk, which means “he who impregnates”. This last meaning ties in quite well with various of the epithets of Sobek (from the Pyramid Texts and other sources) which portray a violent and sexual deity – things like “pointed of teeth,” “who lives on robbery,” “who impregnates females,” “who takes women from their husbands whenever he wishes according to his desires”.
Depictions of him in animal form are of a crocodile who is often seated on a shrine, and in his animal-headed form he’s a man with a crocodile head who may wear a tripartite wig, as in my photo of a statue now in the Ashmolean Museum (and one of my favourite objects in their collection). His headdress, when he wears one, is a horned sun-disc with two upright feathers – these might be green in colour, as he’s referred to in the Pyramid Texts as “green of plume/plumage/feathers”.
Sobek
The Egyptians liked to group their deities into groups of three that we call triads, which are normally a god, his female consort and their male offspring. Sobek is no exception to this, and he’s a member of several triads in different parts of Egypt. His membership of these doesn’t seem to have much basis in mythology (in fact there are no surviving stories about him from Pharaonic Egypt) but is rather an organisational feature of how the Egyptians thought of their gods. At Kom Ombo his consort is Hathor, and their son is Khonsu, whereas at Medinet Maadi he is linked with Renenutet and Horus is their son. And he’s also known as the son of Neith, but her consort isn’t clear (sometimes he’s Seth but not always).
As I’ve already mentioned above one of Sobek’s cult centres was at Kom Ombo, which was called Pa-Sebek in Ancient Egypt – the Domain of Sobek. The surviving temple at the site is Ptolemaic, as is so often the case, but there are indications that there were earlier temples – New Kingdom period and possibly before. Sobek shared the surviving temple with Horus the Elder. I don’t mean this in the normal sense where a large Egyptian temple has shrines to several different gods, instead it has two parallel main axes running from east to west – the doors are set next to each other in the temple walls, the shrines that are the focal point of the temple sit side-by-side at the end of these axes. The southern of these is dedicated to Sobek and the northern one is dedicated to Horus the Elder.
Another very important cult centre for Sobek was at Medinet el-Faiyum, at the ancient town of Shedyet (later called Crocodilopolis by the Greeks). The earliest temple remains surviving here date to the reign of Amenemhat III back in the Middle Kingdom, and this temple was later rebuilt by Ramesses II. It was a cult centre for him long before this, however – the Pyramid Texts refer to Sobek as “of Shedyet” so by the Fifth Dynasty he’s associated with the town. And even earlier – perhaps even as far back as the time of Narmer, though the evidence is fairly circumstantial hinging around a seal impression from the time of Narmer and some correlations with later texts and structures. There’s also a truly fantastical story told by Diodorus Siculus (in the 1st Century BCE) which tells how the cult of Sobek was started in Shedyet by Menes out of gratitude to a crocodile which had saved him from a pack of wild dogs. Prior to this altruistic crocodile stepping in to save a king crocodiles were only thought of as disgusting and man-eaters. Clearly fiction, but perhaps a tiny kernel of truth – the cult maybe did start around the time of the unification of Egypt, and during prehistoric times there don’t seem to’ve been any positive associations with the crocodile.
As well as these two major cult centres Sobek had several other temples throughout Egypt, including at Gebelein and Gebel el-Silsila, Medinet Maadi (in conjunction with Renenutet) and Sumenu. Each of these temples probably would’ve had a pool (or perhaps the sacred lake itself) where the crocodiles sacred to Sobek were kept and these were subsequently mummified after their deaths. There are two sorts of sacred animal in Ancient Egypt, and these mummified crocodiles cover both options. Many are votive offerings, bred specifically for the purpose and killed before they got very big. Others were avatars of the god who lived out a long life before finally being given a ceremonial burial.
The seal impression from the time of Narmer I mentioned above suggests that Sobek may’ve been worshipped at least as early as that, however that is not definitive (there is a crocodile and a shrine, but nothing explicitly labelling it as Sobek). By the time of Khasekhemwy at the end of the Second Dynasty there is stronger evidence that a cult of Sobek was in operation – two stone vessels have been found (one in Khasekhemwy’s tomb and one in the Step Pyramid complex built by his successor) that have the title ḥm sbk on them. This title is a priestly one that translates as Servant of Sobek. And the cult continues into the Old Kingdom as indicated by his presence in the Pyramid Texts. It rose to particular prominence in the later Middle Kingdom – which can be seen from the number of rulers with his name as part of their own, mostly Sobekhoteps in the 13th Dynasty. And as with many deities he gradually became assimilated with Amun – helped by the solar associations of crocodiles whose emergence from the waters each morning to bask in the sun was seen as a sign of veneration of the sun. This partly manifests in the formation of the merged deity Sobek-Re (as Re is also assimilating with Amun). By the Ptolemaic Period this solar association is so strong that Sobek is thought of as an equivalent to the Greek sun god Helios. He’s also associated with the horizon – as Lord of Bakhu, which was a mythological mountain at the horizon where Sobek was believed to have a temple made out of carnelian.
As well as his solar associations Sobek is also (and perhaps more logically!) a god of the river environment. He was a water deity, and the Nile was supposed to come from his sweat. And as a crocodile might lurk in the marshes and riverbanks to ambush the unwary, these regions too were under the authority of Sobek. In this context it’s not surprising to find that he was also a fertility deity – one of the things the Pyramid Texts says about him is that he makes green the fields and riverbanks. He’s also, as I discussed at the beginning, involved with fertility in a different way – the epithets of Sobek in the Pyramid Texts are a very crocodilian aspect of fertility, I think: ambush and rape, rather than love or even lust.
Sobek is also seen as upholding law and order – a text on the walls of Kom Ombo refers to Sobek as a sa-per who smites rebels. Sa-per was a title given to officials who had some aspect of what we’d now think of as the functions of a police force – during the Old Kingdom they were responsible for arresting and punishing tax evaders but again the imagery of Sobek suggests a much less bureaucratic sort of involvement with law & order.
Taken together these aspects of fertility, power and order make him a good symbol of the king’s might and potency. But there is a crocodilian flavour to these concepts – this is a forceful fertility of impregnation (not of the motherhood of Hathor), this is the king who smites his enemies with the mace on every temple gateway, and executioner who deals out punishment for crimes. The king to be feared, and to be wary of offending.
Resources Used:
Bresciani, Edda. 2005. “Sobek, Lord of the Land of the Lake.” In Divine Creatures: Animal Mummies in Ancient Egypt, edited by Salima Ikram, translated by C. Rossi. American University in Cairo Press. David, Rosalie. 2002. Religion and Magic in Ancient Egypt. Penguin Books. Fletcher, Joann. 2016. The Story of Egypt. Hodder. Oppenheim, Adela, Dorothea Arnold, Dieter Arnold, and Kei Yamamoto, eds. 2015. Ancient Egypt Transformed: The Middle Kingdom. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Patch, Diana Craig. 2011. “From Land to Landscape.” In Dawn of Egyptian Art, edited by Diana Craig Patch. Metropolitan Museum of Art ; Distributed by Yale University Press. Romer, John. 2016. From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom. A History of Ancient Egypt 2. Penguin. Shaw, Ian, and Paul T. Nicholson. 2008. The British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt. British Museum. Teeter, Emily. 2011. Religion and Ritual in Ancient Egypt.Cambridge University Press. Wilkinson, Richard H. 1994. Reading Egyptian Art: A Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Egyptian Painting and Sculpture. Thames and Hudson. ———. 2000. The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt. Thames & Hudson. ———. 2003. The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt. Thames & Hudson. Wilkinson, Toby A. H. 2001. Early Dynastic Egypt. Routledge.
Our knowledge of anything at all from the earliest periods of Egyptian history is pretty fragmentary and pieced together like a jigsaw (with most of the pieces missing). But by the chance vagaries of what has survived and been rediscovered the kings of the 1st Dynasty are actually pretty securely ordered and named. The consensus is that the eight kings were: Narmer, Aha (also known as Hor-Aha), Djer, Djet, Den, Anedjib, Semerkhet and Qaa. In addition in the version of this list found as a seal impression in Den’s tomb was the King’s Mother Merneith – so who was she, and how come she’s ended up in such a high status position?
The name Merneith means “beloved of Neith” – that’s generally how it’s spelt in English but there are another couple of forms you might see: Mer(t)neith (because the word mer should have a feminine -t ending even though it’s not written with one) and Meryetneith A (the A reflects the fact that there’s another later Meryetneith). The name of the goddess Neith was a frequent component of the names of elite women of the 1st Dynasty royal court – other examples are Neithhotep (probable wife of Narmer and mother of Aha) and Herneith (probable wife of Djet), as well as many women in subsidiary burials around the tombs of the 1st Dynasty kings. Merneith’s known titles were King’s Mother (which is self-explanatory, and in Egyptian is mwt-nsw) and Foremost of Women (which is a standard queen’s title in the 1st Dynasty, ḫnty).
As with all people from the deep past our knowledge of her relationships is pretty slim – to continue my metaphor it’s pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle with almost all of the pieces missing. It’s pretty certain that the King she was Mother of was Den, number five in our list of eight 1st Dynasty kings. Some of the evidence includes large numbers of seal impressions naming Den which were found in her tomb and a partial name of Den’s mother on the Palermo Stone (a fragment of the annals of the Egyptian kings dating to the 5th Dynasty and recording years back to the 1st Dynasty) is consistent with how her name is written.
As well as objects and seal impressions naming Den two other kings are named in Merneith’s tomb – Djer and Djet – implying some kind of relationship to them. Given she’s the mother of Den, it seems plausible that she was therefore the wife of Djet, Den’s immediate predecessor as inheritance of the throne in Ancient Egypt is ideologically focused on a father to son transition (recapitulating the (eventual) succession of Horus to Osiris’s throne with each generation of kings). There is no direct evidence of her relationship with the other king, Djer – it could be something as general as being a high status member of the court, or it could be that she has objects with his name on because she was his (presumed) son’s wife. Or possibly she was his daughter – as I said, there’s no direct evidence for this, but it certainly wouldn’t be unusual for a royal woman to be daughter, wife and mother of three generations of kings in Ancient Egypt.
Fragment of a Vessel with the Name of Merneith on the Broken Part to the Right
Outside of Abydos Merneith is pretty ephemeral, if that evidence was all we had to go on then she’d be a small footnote. But she’s pretty solidly established as a real historical person from evidence at Abydos, which includes her own tomb. She was buried in the Early Dynastic Period cemetery at Abydos called Umm el-Qa’ab and her tomb is designated Tomb Y by the archaeologists who’ve excavated it. Initially it was thought to be the tomb of a king. It has features like those of the 1st Dynasty kings – including the size and layout as well as the position in this cemetery. There are two large stelae outside bearing her name, as there are for the kings. Merneith, as with most of the 1st Dynasty kings, also had a large funerary enclosure situated nearer to the cultivated zone – the purpose of these is unclear. There is also possibly a second tomb for her at Saqqara – but the identification of Mastaba S3503 as her tomb is not secure and may be the tomb of a high official associated with her time period (in fact there’s significant disagreement as to whether 1st Dynasty kings did have secondary tombs at Saqqara or not).
And this/these tomb(s) and the funerary enclosure also have a surrounding ring of subsidiary burials – a common feature of the kingly tombs of this dynasty. These were probably sacrificed retainers, forming the entourage of the main tomb owner in the afterlife – some examples have the same roof covering the main grave and the subsidiary ones, which makes it clear that everyone was buried in one go. What’s not entirely clear is whether these people were executed or committed suicide (although this may be a moot point, as the individuals concerned probably didn’t have much choice in their selection even if they handled their deaths themselves). This idea of taking your court or servants with you when you die is pretty shocking to modern eyes, but it’s not actually that unusual – examples come from widely separated places and times, for instance a burial of a nomad leader and 5 of his women from the 1st Century CE at Tillya Tepe (in modern Afghanistan) or of a king and four Furen (meaning “wife” or “lady”) and seven servants from the 2nd Century BCE in the kingdom of Nanyue (in the south of modern China).
But “not unusual” doesn’t mean anyone was likely to be totally blasé about it, and that (as well as taking it with them when they went) is probably part of the point. That amount of death, of willing (as far as one can tell) sacrifice, of expenditure of resources (they had their own coffins, that’s a lot of wood in a country where wood is scarce) – that would make a statement about the power of the king, both the deceased one and his successor, that you would not forget in a hurry. The individuals who died were quite high status, and so those of the elite who watched at the funerary rituals would know their survival rested in the hands of the king. Those who buried the bodies and dug the graves would carry back to their communities along the Nile an over-awed impression of a king who ruled over life and death. It’s also a very useful way to “clean house” at a difficult time for any hereditary power structure. Which is a particularly gruesome example of the Ancient Egyptians combining practicality with display and concern for their afterlife. The transition from old king to new king must’ve been particularly fraught at a time when the idea of a king of united Egypt was still pretty new. And as I said when I was talking about Shu – the mythology of Ancient Egypt is anxious about these transition points. Having the threats amongst the elite – the other sons, the uncles, and so on – accompany the deceased king on his journey to the afterlife would help ensure a smooth transition.
The evidence from the tomb at Abydos makes it clear that this woman Merneith was almost, but not quite a king. For instance whilst there are those two impressive stelae with her name on outside her tomb, the name itself is not written within a serekh as that of a king would be. Her tomb(s) and funerary enclosure are surrounded by secondary burials, which is again a sign of high almost kingly status – but not as many and not as high status individuals, so she’s not as high status as her near contemporaries the other kings buried in this cemetery. And she gets missed out of later king lists, like that from the tomb of Qaa.
Almost, but not quite a king – so what was she? Her probable husband Djet, Den’s predecessor as king, doesn’t seem to’ve reigned all that long. Although I’ll caveat this immediately by noting that Toby Wilkinson glosses this “short” reign as being “probably less than 20 years” and Kara Cooney suggests a reign of 10 years, so clearly we mustn’t over-interpret short! One piece of evidence for this is the career of a high official called Amka (traced through seal impressions with his name and titles on) which begins in the reign of Djer (Djet’s predecessor), and ends early in the reign of Den. So Djet’s reign was short enough to fit into the latter part of the working life of Amka, after he reached a fairly senior status. This short reign, and Merneith being almost a king, means that it seems most plausible that Merneith ruled as regent for her son Den who was presumably too young to rule himself when Djet died.
You’d think this would be a dangerously unstable situation, just ripe for an internal or external strongman to take advantage of and put himself on the throne – but this doesn’t seem to’ve been the case. If there were wobbles, they’ve left no trace. The geography of the Nile Valley made external threats to stability like a foreign warlord sweeping in to kill a mother & child and seize the throne much less likely – Egypt was relatively isolated at this time and had defined natural boundaries that would provide an obstacle. Not like the situation in Mesopotamia, for instance. So external threats were less of a problem than one might think – and internal ones could be partially neutralised by choosing those to accompany the deceased king to the afterlife with care. Whilst Djet, Den’s predecessor, had fewer retainers buried with him than his own predecessor did it was still over 300 people and those that were chosen included more men, and men with higher status titles too.
There were, as well, ideological and mythological justifications for women protecting the rights of their sons from the dangers of their uncles – that’s the fundamental basis of the Osiris mythology after all. Of course saying this could be putting the cart before the horse, as the Early Dynastic Egyptians haven’t left us any mythological texts so it could be that the mythology grows up after and around this regency – certainly Osiris doesn’t appear in Egyptian culture till much later. But nonetheless if you don’t have to worry about external threats, it is a politically stable solution – unlike one of the boy’s uncles Merneith only had power in the child’s name and so had nothing to gain by murdering him and taking the throne herself. So she was a safe focal point for anyone who wanted to maintain the established order of things. Which is a very Egyptian thing to want to do – change for the sake of change was not part of their attitude to the world, maintenance of ma’at would mean ensuring there was a smooth transition to the new king. And if his mother as a regent was the price of that then so be it.
And it worked, as far as we can tell. Even the relatively small number of retainers buried with Merneith tends to suggest stability – no need for a big display of power when dear old Mum died, it was clear who was in charge and that he was staying there.
This makes Merneith the first woman who we are fairly certain held the reins of power in Ancient Egypt. Reigning in her son’s name, true, but reigning nonetheless – and recognised as holding this status by her contemporaries, as seen in her kingly tomb and Den’s seal that lists her with the kings. She might not quite be the actual first woman – there is a tantalising hint Neithhotep before her may’ve held power in some sense, as there are clay seals with her name written within a serekh (with Neith on top instead of Horus, tho). But there’s no evidence what this actually meant in practice at the time, so Merneith is our known first. And sadly, written back out of history by her descendants fairly quickly as is often the way with women in history – by only a very few generations later in the reign of Qaa she’s not mentioned in the list of kings, demoted back to the status of any other mother of a king.
Resources used:
Bard, Kathryn A. 2003. “The Emergence of the Egyptian State.” In The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, edited by Ian Shaw. Oxford University Press. Cooney, Kara. 2018. When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt. National Geographic. Criscenzo-Laycock, Gina. 2019. “Before Egypt.” Exhibition, Victoria Gallery and Museum, Liverpool. Dodson, Aidan. 2016. The Royal Tombs of Ancient Egypt. Pen & Sword Archaeology. Dodson, Aidan, and Dyan Hilton. 2004. The Complete Royal Families of Ancient Egypt. Thames & Hudson. Fletcher, Joann. 2016. The Story of Egypt. Hodder. Li, Linna. 2012. “Archaeological Discoveries of the Nanyue Kingdom.” In The Search for Immortality: Tomb Treasures of Han China, edited by James C. S. Lin.Yale University Press. Lin, James C. S., ed. 2012. “Tomb of the King of Nanyue.” In The Search for Immortality: Tomb Treasures of Han China. Yale University Press. O’Connor, David B. 2009. Abydos: Egypt’s First Pharaohs and the Cult of Osiris. New Aspects of Antiquity. Thames & Hudson. Romer, John. 2013. From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid. A History of Ancient Egypt 1. Penguin. Schiltz, Véronique. 2011. “Tillya Tepe, the Hill of Gold: A Nomad Necropolis.” In Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World, edited by Fredrik Hiebert and Pierre Cambon. British Museum Press. Shaw, Ian, and Paul T. Nicholson. 2008. The British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt. British Museum. Wilkinson, Toby A. H. 2001. Early Dynastic Egypt. Routledge. Wilkinson, Toby A. H. 2007. Lives of the Ancient Egyptians. Thames & Hudson.
One of the sites on the standard tourist itinerary is the temple at Dendera – it’s near modern Qena, a bit under 100km north of Luxor on a large bend on the river Nile. When I’ve visited we’ve done it on the way back to our Luxor hotel from Abydos. Dendera isn’t the original Egyptian name of the site, it’s derived from later Greek names (Tantere and Tentyris) – the Egyptians called the town Iunet. It’s positioned near the entrance to the Wadi Hammamat, which was an important route to the Red Sea as well as providing resources itself (including all the siltstone that Predynastic palettes were made from). As a result it was a strategically important place, and was the capital of the sixth Upper Egyptian Nome (nomes were administrative districts). Unsurprisingly, therefore, there are indications that the site was occupied from early on – the necropolis has graves at least as far back as the Early Dynastic Period.
It’s not clear when the temple complex at Dendera was first built, but there is evidence that there was a temple there during the time of Pepi I and that this may’ve been an older temple which was rebuilt during the reign of Khufu. After this there is definitely a chapel dating to the Middle Kingdom (dedicated to Montuhotep II, now in the Cairo Museum). And there is quite a bit of evidence to show that New Kingdom kings built and extended the temples at the site. The surviving temple, the one you’ve been to see if you’ve been to the site, primarily dates to the Ptolemaic Period. One reason archaeological evidence preceding this is slim is that it appears when the current structure was built the site was flattened and it’s built directly on top of the remains from the Old Kingdom. The first surviving structure at the site dates to the reign of Nectanebo I (the founder of the 30th Dynasty in the Late Period, the last native dynasty of Egyptian kings). But most of what you see is Ptolemaic or Roman. The earliest Ptolemaic cartouche in the main temple is that of Ptolemy XII Auletes (Cleopatra VII’s father, really very late, tho see below when I come back to empty cartouches at the site), and Kent Weeks suggests that most of the building work for the Ptolemaic parts of the temples took place in the reign of Cleopatra VII.
The temple was first visited by Europeans quite early in the Western “rediscovery” of Egypt. The first European to write about it was Peter Lucas who visited in 1716 CE. And the site was also one of the places that Napoleon’s great expedition in 1798 visited – they removed the Dendera Zodiac from a roof chapel and sent it to the Louvre (replacing it with a copy that has been painted black to resemble the surroundings).
Like any large Egyptian temple there are several structures on the site which are part of the temple complex as a whole, and the surviving ones are only some of those that once stood there. The primary dedication of the complex is the triad of Horus, Hathor and Ihy. The surviving main temple at the site is the one dedicated to Hathor, but there would once have been two more – the others dedicated to Horus and to Ihy (and this was Ihy’s main cult centre). Dendera is the principle cult centre of Hathor, and has been since at least the Old Kingdom. As well as the temple here there is also a burial ground for cows, the sacred animal of Hathor. The local form of Hathor is closely associated with Nut – emphasising her roles as a sky goddess and a daughter of Re. She is also a goddess with strong links to the west and the dead.
As I said, there are many structures on the site not just the main temple. These include a couple of mammisis, a sanatorium, a temple of Isis and even a Coptic church! The main temple lies on a north-south orientation and most of the other structures are at right angles to this with their entrances to the east. This is actually quite an unusual orientation, and has to do with the direction the Nile is flowing in this part of Egypt. Despite our labelling the axes according to the cardinal directions, from an Ancient Egyptian perspective it was often the case that these were relative to the flow of the Nile rather than the true cardinal directions. So temples were often situated with their main axis at right angles to the Nile, which is notionally an east/west axis (as the Nile flows from south to north). But at Dendera there is a great bend in the Nile, and it’s actually flowing to the east at this point – hence a temple pointing towards the Nile is oriented from north to south in terms of cardinal directions but is still symbolically facing east towards the Nile.
The whole thing is surrounded by a mudbrick enclosure wall, built with a technique called “pan bedding” – this produces a wavy profile to the wall, as there are alternating areas of convex and concave courses of bricks. This does have practical implications (it may improve stability on ground that expanded and contracted as the waters of the Nile rose & fell with the inundation), but in typical Egyptian fashion they may also have had a symbolic meaning. The wavy profile may symbolise the waters of Nun – the boundary wall is thus holding chaos back from the sacred ground of the temple (which is thus the domain of order or ma’at). There are a couple of gateways in the wall, one in the north (the primary gate) and one at the southern end of the east wall. The main gateway is actually rather smaller and less imposing than is the case for other temples. It’s not the typical huge pylon, but instead a structure called a “propylon gateway” and it was built during the reigns of the Roman Emperors Domitian and Trajan. Outside this gate are some other Roman structures – chapels of a type we call kiosks. And within the mudbrick enclosure wall there is also an inner wall – this was built in stone but was never finished.
As well as buildings within the walls there are also a couple of water-related features. Unlike the one at the Precinct of Mut at Karnak this is a typical example – it is rectangular in shape. At the corners were flights of stairs descending into the water, down which the priests would walk to purify themselves. There are also wells on the site, one of which may be a nilometer used to measure the annual inundation.
To the west of the main temple between the gateway and the outer hypostyle hall of the main temple are four buildings. Two of these are mammisis – mammisi is a word that was coined by Jean-François Champollion (as a new word in the Coptic language). It means “birth-place” or “birth-house” and it used for a particular type of building found associated with several Egyptian temples dating from the Late Period through to the Roman Period. The two at Dendera pretty much cover the date range. The older one was built during the reign of Nectanebo I and the other was built by the Emperor Augustus and decorated by Trajan. As is typical they are both small temples placed at right angles to the main temple. The decorations within focus on the marriage (in this case of Hathor) and the birth of Ihy (the child of the triad) and the Pharaoh. The decoration in the Roman mammisi is particularly fine. One of the most famous scenes is of Ihy being formed on the potter’s wheel, and there are also scenes of other deities praising Ihy. The texts include hymns to all three members of the triad. And in keeping with the theme of birth the god Bes (a patron of childbirth) is depicted around the tops of the columns.
The temples were the site of “mystery plays” (so-called by analogy to medieval European mystery plays, I think, rather than being an Egyptian term). The play had 13 acts, with 2 intervals, and re-enacted the birth of Ihy and of the Pharaoh – symbolically linking them together and ensuring the continued existence of the royal line. Although not quite the same idea there are resonances between these plays and the reliefs from the New Kingdom that depict the parentage of the king as being the god Amun impregnating his human mother. Both link the king’s birth explicitly with the gods, even though the link is different in each case.
The other ancient Egyptian building in this group i that’s still on the site is a sanatorium – the chapel dedicated to Montuhotep II that I mentioned above isn’t on the site any more. The sanatorium is where pilgrims to the site would’ve stayed and was also for their healing. It is possible it was a place where they slept in order to receive healing dreams (an “incubation chamber”), but it’s more likely that the primary function was as a centre for cippus healing (where water would be poured over a stela called a cippus depicting Horus and covered in spells, and the now magical water was ingested by the ill person). The presence of a sanatorium at this temple may be because Hathor has healing associations (in one myth she restores the sight of Horus after Seth put his eye out), but they were also more generally attached to temples regardless of dedication from the Late Period onward. Although, having said that – this one is the only one that is known to’ve been built for this purpose, at other sites the evidence is less clear cut.
And finally, nestled between the mammisis, is a Coptic church which was built in the 5th Century CE. This seems a little incongruous but it’s something that often happens – a lot of Ancient Egyptian temples have Coptic churches or monasteries built in or next to the ancient structure. This isn’t restricted to Christian buildings, for instance there’s a mosque inside Luxor Temple. Sacred sites seem to hang on to their sacredness even as the religion around them changes.
Unlike Christian churches, temples in Ancient Egypt were not places where the general public could go inside and worship. And so there had to be more accessible structures for personal petitions to the gods. On the outside of the southern wall of the main temple there is a false door which is shaped like a Hathor sistrum which once had a wooden canopy. This is a place where those who could not enter the temple itself could leave their offerings and make their prayers. Inside the temple, in a chapel that backs onto this false door there is a niche that matches up with the outer structure, which once contained a statue of the goddess.
As a tourist visitor to the temple one is also taken to this wall, but not to leave one’s prayers for Hathor. Instead what we look at is the large relief on the western end of the wall that shows Cleopatra VII (“the” Cleopatra) and her son by Julius Caesar, Caesarion, standing and making offerings to the gods. A part of Cleopatra’s campaign to promote Caesarion as the heir to her throne. Whilst with hindsight we know it was doomed, she must’ve been hoping that with Rome as her ally (and her Roman son lined up to take the throne) there might be a new period of stability for Egypt. The Ptolemaic Period in general, and particularly towards the end of it, was a time of great political instability with multiple civil wars and a high turnover of rulers. You can maybe see signs of that elsewhere in the decoration of Dendera Temple as well – there are reliefs where the cartouches are empty and the name of the king hasn’t been filled in, and some just contain the word per-aa (Pharaoh). One possible explanation is that as the king kept changing the people carving the reliefs didn’t have time (or want to commit) to carve a name in them. But I’ve also heard an alternative explanation that it’s more about symbolising eternal kingship rather than one particular king, and I’m not sure if there’s convincing evidence to determine which is the case.
The rest of the decorative scheme of the outer side of the walls of the main temple focuses on scenes of the king laying out the temple, placing the first stones (symbolically one assumes!) and dedicating the temple to Hathor. There are similar scenes in other more public spaces of the temple, including the outer and inner hypostyle halls (see below) – this tells us something about how the kings (mostly Roman Emperors) who commissioned this decoration wanted to be seen. Not as much emphasis on warmongering as earlier kings (perhaps a little close to the bone in a country they conquered?), and more on building houses for the gods.
Immediately behind the main temple is a structure called the Iseum – it’s a temple dedicated to Isis and build by the Emperor Augustus re-using stones from earlier structures on the site. The axis of this temple is unusual – it’s split with the main part of the temple facing towards the east like all the other subsidiary temples on the site, but then the sanctuary faces north towards the sanctuary of Hathor in the main temple. Once there was a statue of Osiris supported by Isis & Nephthys in the sanctuary.
Temple of Dendera
Entering the temple proper (finally!) the facade that greets you consists of six columns joined by a half-height wall between them and a central doorway that leads into the temple. This part of the temple, and the outer hypostyle hall behind it, was built after Cleopatra’s time – in the 1st Century CE, at the orders of the Emperor Tiberius. There’s a Greek inscription above the door that tells us this, saying that the temple is “for the Emperor Tiberius Caesar, the new Augustus, son of the divine Augustus […]”. The columns in this area are all topped with four heads of Hathor arranged to make a cube. These heads are themselves topped with a naos-shaped sistrum. The heads were pretty much all deliberately damaged in antiquity. Hathoric columns are not unique to this Roman structure at Dendera – there are examples seen from the Middle Kingdom onward at a variety of different sites. This is just the most well known example.
Inside the outer hypostyle hall is a spectacular ceiling – it still retains a lot of its colour, and has recently been cleaned, so it looks pretty impressive. It’s decorated with a chart of the sky, mixing newer ideas about the stars brought in by the Greeks and Romans with traditional Egyptian ideas about the sun’s journey. For instance there are signs of the zodiac that came, ultimately, from the Babylonians mixed in with images of Nut swallowing the sun so that she can give birth to it again which is a very old Egyptian belief. The walls include the decorative motifs I talked about above – the king (or rather, Emperor in this case) laying out, building and dedicating the temple. There are also scenes of the purification of the king.
Moving further into the temple you come to the inner hypostyle hall. This room is called the Hall of Appearances, and is where the statue of the goddess was brought to appear at the beginning of rituals and processions. The hall has 6 columns, and the walls are decorated once again with depictions of the king participating in the building of the temple. There are six small rooms opening off the hall, 3 on the east side and 3 on the west. One of the eastern ones we call a “perfume laboratory” as the reliefs have to do with the making of perfume and show the king offering incense – this also has representations of the god Shezmu, originally the god of wine & oil presses but by the Ptolemaic Period known as the Provider of Perfumes for the gods. In another room on the east the king offers food to the goddess. And on the western side there is a room where the king offers silver, and another where he pours libations of water. The rearmost room on each side is a treasury. An opening to the east allows offerings to be brought in, and to the west another opening leads to a well. The area as a whole appears to be for the preparation of offerings and the storage of items needed for the daily ritual at the temple.
Continuing deeper into the temple you come to a room called the Hall of Offerings, to the sides of this room are the stairs to the roof. This hall was the area where sacrifices were dedicated to the deities of the temple, and the scenes on the walls show the king making these offerings . From each side of this room are stairs leading to the roof. The room after this is called the Hall of the Ennead (the name for “group of nine gods”) which is immediately outside the inner sanctuary – here the statues of other deities assembled before joining processions. Amongst the various deities represented in the temple at Dendera were Shezmu (who I just mentioned), Shepet (a form of Taweret, in the Roman mammisi), the Heliopolitan Bull Mnevis and the lion god Mahes. To the left and right are chambers that sorted the clothing and other accessories of these gods – the western room is a linen chamber, and the eastern room is a treasury. If you go through this treasury you come to a courtyard with a set of stairs at the end leading up to a room called the wabet or “Pure Chapel”. In this room ceremonies of offering to Hathor are performed, and these are shown on the walls of the courtyard (along with scenes of processions of deities from Upper & Lower Egypt).
The sanctuary itself is now empty, but it would once have held a shrine containing the statue of the goddess Hathor and her ceremonial barque in which she would travel during processions. These items are depicted on the decoration of the sanctuary. Surrounding this room were 11 chapels dedicated to the other deities who were associated with Hathor at this site. These included deified forms of two of Hathor’s chief attributes – her sistrum and the menat necklace.
Underneath the main temple and within its walls there are crypts, which were used to store cult objects used in the temple. I remember when I visited the temple I’d assumed that this usually invisible and functional space would also be plain – but that is not the Egyptian way, the walls of the underground one I went into are decorated with reliefs that depict the items that were once stored there. This includes a ba statue of Hathor which was once used in processions, such as one at New Year. In this procession the statue was taken out to visit various parts of the temple, including a chapel for Nut and a chapel on the roof where the ba statue was placed overnight. In the morning with the first sunrise of the New Year the statue was bathed in sunlight, which was seen to infuse it with new life for the new year. The staircases on which the procession travelled were decorated with representations of the procession itself – participated in by gods & kings for eternity. On the western staircase the procession carved into the walls leads up to the roof, and in the eastern one the procession goes down into the temple once more.
This was not the only chapel on the roof of the temple at Dendera – there were also others, including two symbolic mortuary chapels for Osiris. These were mirrored with one suite on the east and one on the west of the roof. The roof of one of these was the famous Zodiac ceiling which is now in the Louvre as I mentioned above. The zodiac design itself is primarily a Babylonian zodiac, and is not the same as earlier Egyptian depictions of the heavens (such as those in tombs in the Valley of the Kings). Having said that, it’s not purely a foreign import, elements of Egyptian ideas are incorporated – just like the outer hypostyle hall ceiling combines both ideas of the heavens. Nonetheless even the idea that the stars can influence human destiny wasn’t part of the Ancient Egyptian mindset until the Ptolemaic Period – presumably imported from the Greek culture of the new rulers – previously unlucky and lucky days were based on mythology and the timing of festivals. The date that this zodiac depicts isn’t clear, as it’s difficult to be sure how to match the Egyptian constellations and planet names to our own. However one suggestion is that it may’ve originally represented the conception date for Caesarion, but was later altered to a significant date in the Emperor Augustus’s life. I don’t think that’s widely accepted, however.
There are other more typically Ancient Egyptian elements to the decorative scheme of these chapels. These include figures of Nut (so a more typically Egyptian sky than the Babylonian zodiac) and scenes depicting elements from the mythology of Osiris. This includes the conception of Horus, with Isis as a falcon hovering over the phallus of the mummified body of her dead brother-husband Osiris in order to receive his seed. An inscription also details the annual ceremonial burial of a corn mummy made of soil and grains of barley mixed together. This would then sprout, symbolising the rebirth of Osiris.
Another chapel is one of the earlier structures of the temple – at the southwestern corner of the roof is a kiosk with 12 Hathor-headed columns surrounding it which once supported a wooden roof. This has cartouches of Ptolemy XII on it. And demonstrating that the roof continued to be important ceremonial space the roof of the outer hypostyle hall (the newest part of the temple proper) was used by pilgrims in antiquity who waited there for signs & miracles from Hathor herself.
And also on the roof are waterspouts. Even though it doesn’t rain often in Ancient Egypt, when it does it can be as substantial rainstorms – so the flat roofs of temples need some sort of drainage. The spouts at Dendera (as at some other temples) have lion heads decorating them. These are thus symbolically protective as well as functional pieces of architecture. And as well as these protective associations they are also harnessed to generate water imbued with magic powers – in a vertical line on the wall directly below the waterspout are written magical texts. In the Egyptian belief system the written word itself had power, and pouring water over words (like with the cippi I mentioned above) would transfer this power into the water.
So here ends our tour of the temple complex at Dendera – it’s a delight to see, as it’s so well preserved. But equally it’s so well preserved because it’s so new, relatively speaking – although a lot is Ptolemaic, it’s late Ptolemaic and a lot is also Roman.
There was an exhibition at the British Museum a few years ago, called Living with Gods, which had as its premise that religion is one of the fundamental parts of what it means to be human. While I had my quibbles with the exhibition that’s an idea that’s always fascinated me – if it’s that fundamental, what does it do for us? I think one of the “whys” of religion is explaining the world around us – making sense of the complicated environment we live in and providing the narratives that help us know how to deal with what life flings at us. Of course this is less important in the modern world, where our knowledge of how the world works is based on science and there is less space for the gods and stories to exist in. But for the Egyptians it was a part of their worldview, and many of their gods are fundamental forces of nature personified in order to make sense of them.
The god Shu is one of these: he is a god of air and of sunlight. He’s specifically the dry air, with his sister Tefnut representing moisture – understandable in Egypt with their arid climate to have your air deity separate from your moisture deity, it would be a bit different here in Britain! As befits the god of air, his ba (the way he is manifest in the world) is the wind. It’s important to note that he is the atmosphere – this is not like the Greek gods who control a specific force of nature, the Egyptian gods are those forces in nature. In part of the Coffin Texts Shu says “I am Shu … my clothing is the air … my skin is the pressure of the wind,” and an Egyptian would’ve felt the wind on their face as being Shu brushing against them.
He’s usually represented as a man wearing a plumed headdress – a single ostrich feather (which is actually the same as Maat’s headdress). This headdress is also a hieroglyph which has the phonetic value shut and is used to write the name of Shu. His name probably means “he who rises up” or “emptiness” (or “void”), and may derive from the verb šwj which means “to be empty”. He may also be depicted as a lion – there’s a shrine from the 30th Dynasty which would once have held a cult statue of Shu as a lion. On the back of the inside of the shrine is an image of this statue, a seated lion, and a description of it – it would’ve been rather splendid, made of silver covered with gold and about a foot high!
Shu is also associated with one of the Egyptian ideas of eternal time – the endlessly repeating cycles of time, which they called neheh. The other sort of eternal time is djet – time at a standstill, the sorts of things that remain perpetually the same like mummies or stone buildings. That sort of time was represented by Tefnut. Shu was particularly associated with the cycle of birth, death and rebirth of successive kings. This is linked to the idea that as the air he fills the cosmos with breath and life, which I discuss more below.
There doesn’t seem to’ve been a cult for Shu before the New Kingdom. This doesn’t mean he wasn’t a god before then, far from it – he’s mentioned in both the Pyramid Texts and the Coffin Texts so he was a feature in Egyptian religious thought back to at least the Old Kingdom. In the Pyramid Texts the deceased king is to be purified in the lakes of Shu (probably mists) and will climb up to heaven on the bones of Shu (presumably the clouds). There are also spells that detail the creation of Shu (which I’ll come back to shortly). And in the Coffin Texts there is a suite of 6 spells (no.s 75-80) that are sometimes called the Litany of Shu (by us, not the Ancient Egyptians I think). These spells associate Shu with life and express the hope that he will be able to breathe that life into the dead, as well as detailing Shu’s creation.
His rise to greater prominence in the New Kingdom is probably due to his association with sunlight – the sun became an increasingly important part of Egyptian religion during that period, culminating in Akhenaten’s sweeping changes. And in fact the cult of Shu was one of those which wasn’t suppressed during that period – his solar associations were enough to let him be assimilated into the ideology of Atenism, and he was believed to live in the sun-disc itself. Early on in Akhenaten’s reign Shu was even a part of the names & titles of the Aten – the second cartouche of the Aten in this early titulary included “in his name of light [shu] which is in the Aten”, this was later replaced with a word for light which had no associations with non-Aten gods.
Shu was also seen as having powers that renewed the cosmos – linked to his role as the god of air, in which he was seen as filling the universe with the breath of life, and hopefully the dead too as mentioned in the Coffin Texts. Egyptian gods were, as I said, manifestations of cosmic phenomena but that didn’t mean they were remote from individual people – they also were seen as touching individual lives (in at least some periods of Egyptian history). So Shu was not just bringing life to the whole cosmos, he was also present at every birth and in every human breath. He was also credited with healing powers, that gave him a place in everyday religion in later periods of Pharaonic Egypt as the subject of prayers and spells for protection and he was also conjured to defeat demons. Shu and the stories of his creation also show up in texts dating to the Late Period and Ptolemaic Period, and there are also some amulets of Shu from later periods (tho 3D representations of him are rare).
Shu was one of the deities in the Heliopolitan Ennead – “ennead” is just fancy word for “group of 9” (and is a direct translation of the Egyptian term into Greek). This group is the nine gods or goddesses involved in the Heliopolitan creation myth which stresses the central importance of the sun. I’ve retold the story previously on this blog, it’s the creation myth that begins with the formless waters of chaos out of which the first land rises, on which is sat the first god: Atum. Atum then creates his children, either by masturbating or by sneezing, and these two children are Shu (air) and Tefnut (moisture). In later texts the two methods of procreation are linked – Atum is said to’ve ejaculated into his own mouth and the twins are born from there. The creation by spitting or sneezing involves some Ancient Egyptian wordplay – Shu’s name sounds a lot like the word for sneeze, and “Tef” translates as “spit”.
One god, giving birth to two child-gods – sounds quite straightforward really. But it’s actually not quite that linear or simple. In Spell 80 of the Coffin Texts (part of the Litany of Shu) Atum has a conversation with Nun (the waters of chaos) before creation begins and in that conversation we learn that his children are the attributes that give him life. They already exist before they are born and the birth is better seen as a separation from Atum rather than an act of creation. Shu is the life that makes Atum’s heart beat and his mind function – taking him from a state like death to a state like a coma. Tefnut (here referred to as Maat) is the breath that Atum inhales to wake to full consciousness. It is only after this awakening that creation begins – and it begins with Shu expanding within his father Atum to create a void filled with air and now, finally Atum can self-create the cosmos from and within his body. So you can see that Shu is pretty integral to the whole process – he and his sister aren’t “just” the first created beings, but an important part of the process of creation itself.
Once separate from Atum, Shu and Tefnut are not yet properly alive as independent beings. At this point they lack one of the crucial parts of a person – they have no ka. So Atum must pass on his ka to them, and now they are complete. And at this moment time begins – as I said above that Shu and Tefnut are two forms of eternal time, which now exist in the cosmos.
Shu & Tefnut then become a couple, and have children of their own – Geb (earth) and Nut (sky). And in their turn Geb and Nut grow up and have their own children – these are the stars in the sky and Nut swallows them, much to Geb’s fury. Nut then stretches herself as far from Geb as she can get, trying to escape his wrath. Shu sees this, and steps between his children to prevent Geb from hurting Nut. Not all versions of the story have the same explanation for the separation, that’s the more common explanation but another version is that Shu disapproved of Geb & Nut’s love for each other so forced them apart. And a third one is that initially Geb and Nut lay so close together that Nut could not give birth and so Shu had to force them apart before her children could be born. This scene of Shu separating Nut from Geb is one of the key parts of Shu’s iconography. Quite often when you see it there are other little gods depicted helping Shu – these are the Heh gods, there are eight of them (two for each of Nut’s limbs). It seems that Shu got weary of holding up the sky on his own, and created these gods to help him.
Shu Separating Nut and Geb
And so here we have a narrative that explains the basic layout of the world: the earth is at the bottom and the sky at the top, separated by the air. Every morning the stars vanish (are swallowed) and the sun rises (is given birth to) and then at night the stars are given birth to and the sun is swallowed. The world we live in and the days of our lives, in one story.
This is not the only explanatory mythology involving Shu (and Tefnut). There’s a winter solstice myth (I think primarily known from the Graeco-Roman period) which has several incarnations with different participants but the same overall narrative arc. In the myth a solar associated goddess goes to the south, to Nubia, normally in a rage or out of annoyance at something. A male deity (sometimes her partner) then follows her and persuades her to return. So this is a narrative about the sun getting lower and lower in the southern sky before the solstice and then beginning to return afterwards. Generally the goddess is one of those associated with the Eye of Re, one of whom is Tefnut. And when the story is about Tefnut, it is often Shu who follows her and gets her to return to Egypt.
Shu has other associations outside his explanatory mythology. He’s not actually one of the solar deities, but as he’s the god of sunlight as well as air he has a strong association with solar deities such as Re (and the Aten, as mentioned above). As part of this he is one of the protectors of Re during his journey through the underworld overnight, helping to fight off the snake Apophis, after which he seals the entrance to the underworld after Re has emerged as the young sun at the end of the night. And later on he becomes even more intimately connected with Re. Over time Atum and Re began to merge and their mythologies and attributes overlapped more and more, so in later mythology the children Atum became known as the Eyes of Re (throughout Egyptian mythology the goddess called the Eye of Re was regarded as the daughter of Re). So Shu as one of the eyes is an exception to the general femininity of the Eye of Re but he’s still a child of Re (Atum). In this role Shu and Tefnut took on the form of lions, and were worshipped in these forms at sites in the Delta. Somewhat oddly to our modern Western need to put things in neat little boxes another part of the merging between Re and Atum is a story about the Eye of Atum, in which she rescues the children of Atum who have become separated from him. So clearly in this case the Eye of Re/Atum is not either of Shu or Tefnut.
The mythology of Shu is also part of the narrative of kingship in Ancient Egypt. Part of the Heliopolitan Creation myth is the setting up of the social order of Ancient Egypt – so once you have the ground and air and whatnot it moves on to kings who rule over the whole of the population. This initial line of kings are the male gods of the Ennead, starting with Atum (or Re, depending how linked they are at the time of telling the myth) and moving on down in the line of succession to Horus (via that unpleasantness with Seth). And after Horus the kings are human, but nonetheless still divine by their association with this unbroken line and by each king being an incarnation of Horus. One result of this is a high degree of incestuous royal marriages at various points in Egyptian history – like Ahmose I and his sister-wife Ahmose-Nefertari – this set the royal family apart from the rest of the population (who didn’t tend to practice incestuous marriages) and linked them to the gods.
So after Re (Atum) retires to the heavens his son Shu takes over as king. He’s positioned in the mythology as ruling well, and doing the things a good king should (building monuments and cities, maintaining maat etc.) The fly in the ointment is his son Geb who repeatedly rebels – in some variants this is due to his rage at Shu separating him from his sister-wife Nut. Eventually Shu, like his father, retires to the heavens leaving Geb to become ruler. There are a couple of different explanations given for this abdication – one is that he has become weak and tired, and so stepped aside to let his fitter son rule, perhaps after being overwhelmed by the forces of Apophis. Another story is that Geb overthrew him in one of his rebellions and forced him to retire (and one variant of that story has Geb seizing and by implication raping his mother Tefnut as part of his revenge).
An interesting aspect of this part of the mythology is what it tells us about Egyptian kingship. The official story of kingship in Egypt is a seamless transition from father to son, each following in their turn for an unbroken line from Horus himself down to whoever the current Pharaoh is. Obviously we know this isn’t true – we can point to specific examples where this doesn’t happen – but the narrative that’s presented is of smooth and orderly transitions of power. And yet the myths tell us a different story – a story of anxiety about the fitness of the king to rule, and a sense of the fragility of the state at the moment when power is transferred from one ruler to the next.
So far we’ve been building up a pretty coherent picture of Shu as a deity. He’s a god of air, and helps explain things about the air. He’s a god of sunlight (which given the Egyptian climate feels like an obvious association with air) and he helps explain things about sunlight (like the solstice). His sister Tefnut is his counterpart – goddess of moisture, and also associated with the sun as an Eye of Re. He’s a part of establishing the pattern of kingship for eternity. Ok there’s that oddity where Shu & Tefnut both are and are not the Eye of Atum or Re depending on the precise myth, but in general it’s a pretty cohesive story. But Egyptian culture did not share our obsession with neat Linnaean boxes filled with segregated categories of things. So because of Shu’s solar associations, Tefnut was linked to the moon (despite being a part of the sun). And Shu himself was often associated with lunar deities like Thoth or Khonsu – perhaps because his air carries moonlight much as it carries sunlight, or perhaps because Tefnut is often associated with the moon (yes, rather circular!). As so often, we need to embrace the power of “and” when thinking about Egyptian religion.
And that theme continues when we look at some of the other associations that Shu has. Egyptian gods themselves did not remain in neat little boxes – I’ve talked about that before, one example is Taweret who has multiple names or is it that she’s multiple goddesses? Another example is the merging of Sekhmet and Mut in some times and places, or the fact that the deity called the Eye of Re might be any one of a number of goddesses depending on context. And Shu has his own mergings. One of these is late on in the Ancient Egyptian period: he merges with Arensnuphis who is a Meroitic deity first attested in the late 3rd Century BCE (Meroë was the culture which lived in Nubia during this period). The cult of Shu-Arensnuphis is not only found in northern Nubia but also in southern Egypt. A little earlier (in the Late Period) and much further north (in the Delta) Shu merged with Onuris, god of war and hunting. This was because Onuris and his consort Mehit were one of the other possible pairs of protagonists in the winter solstice myth I talked about earlier in this article.
Shu is also an example of the ambiguity that often shows up in Egyptian gods – they’re not neatly divided into the “good gods” and the “bad gods.” Shu is associated with Bes in some instances – a protective role – along with his other benign associations, but he’s also described as an executioner at the head of a group of torturers in the underworld (Wilkinson 2003). In this he shows similarities with other lunar associated deities – Khonsu is a bloodthirsty god in the Pyramid Texts, as is Thoth (Tyldesley 2010).
But really a lot of this stuff is details – most importantly, Shu was the atmosphere, the air that they breathed and their understanding of a fundamental part of the cosmos.
Resources used:
Allen, James P. 2014. Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs. 3rd ed. Cambridge Univ. Press. David, Rosalie. 2002. Religion and Magic in Ancient Egypt. Penguin Books. Goddio, Franck, and Aurélia Masson-Berghoff, eds. 2016. Sunken Cities: Egypt’s Lost Worlds. Thames & Hudson. Hornung, Erik. 1982. Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many. Translated by John Baines. Cornell University Press. Shaw, Garry J. 2014. The Egyptian Myths: A Guide to the Ancient Gods and Legends. Thames & Hudson. Shaw, Ian, and Paul T. Nicholson. 2008. The British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt. British Museum. Tyldesley, Joyce. 2010. Myths & Legends of Ancient Egypt. Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books. Wilkinson, Richard H. 1994. Reading Egyptian Art: A Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Egyptian Painting and Sculpture. Thames and Hudson. ———. 2003. The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt. Thames & Hudson.
Egyptian history is traditionally divided up following the scheme of dynasties that a 3rd Century BCE historian called Manetho used, and over the top of that modern Egyptologists have grouped those dynasties into Kingdoms and intermediate periods. This is a pretty useful thing to do – it makes it easier to talk and think about the 3,000 and more years of history. But it’s also a little dangerous – it leads one to ignore other ways to divide up the history of Egypt. I’ve talked about Khasekhemwy before – we put him as the last king of the Second Dynasty and yet there are indications that he may’ve been a re-unifier of Egypt, which to my mind might make him better thought of as the beginning of the Old Kingdom rather than the end of the Early Dynastic Period. And today I thought I’d talk about another of these inflection points in Egyptian history that aren’t reflected in the traditional divisions: the reign of Senwosret III.
Senwosret III was the fifth ruler of the 12th Dynasty of the Middle Kingdom – essentially slap bang in the middle of this period, neither at the beginning nor the end his dynasty let alone his Kingdom. He ruled for around four decades in the 19th Century BCE and he was the successor to Senwosret II, and was succeeded in his turn by Amenemhat III. You might see his birth name spelt in several different ways in books: Senwosret (which I’m using as it’s the one I’m most familiar with), Senusret or Sesostris (this last is considered rather old-fashioned now). His throne name, which the Egyptians would’ve used to refer to him was Khakaura. The remaining names of his five-fold titulary are his Horus name nṯr-ḫprw “Horus, divine of form”, his nebty name nṯri-mswt, “The Two Ladies, divine of birth” and his Golden Horus name ḫpr, “The Golden Horus has been created”.
We know the names of several members of Senwosret III’s family, mostly the women and mostly from their burials. Well, I say “know” but of course this is really one of those logic puzzles – there’s a list of women who have particular titles relating them to “the King” and a list of burial places, and we use those to make educated guesses about which king they were daughter of etc. And the men are pretty much entirely missing – not necessarily because they didn’t exist, but more because in this period royal sons were not often represented in art or in texts unless they had some other reason (like being a priest of a relevant temple) to be mentioned.
Senwosret III’s parents can be reasonably confidently assigned as Senwosret II and his wife (Khnemetneferhedjet) Weret I (the I is used to distinguish her from her daughter-in-law of the same name). You’ll notice I put the first bit of her name in brackets – it’s an interesting name and a rather confusing one. Khnemetneferhedjet literally translates as “united with the white crown”, it was a personal name in the 12th Dynasty and was also a title that was held by queens from the 12th Dynasty to the early 18th Dynasty. It’s not clear how one can tell if it’s a name or a title – not just to me as a reader of the secondary literature, but also to Egyptologists reading the inscriptions and texts themselves. In fact the books I read disagreed as to whether this particular woman was called Khnemetneferhedjet Weret or just Weret, so I’ve put it in brackets!
There are several known wives of Senwosret III – again mostly known from their place of burial (his pyramid complex, with a couple of exceptions), and their titles. When I was writing about Amenemhat III I said Senwosret III had three wives – but actually there are 5 (one of whom we have no name for). Two were his sisters: daughters of Senwosret II who had both the title King’s Daughter and King’s Wife – these were Sithathoriunet and the unnamed woman. There is also (Khnemetneferhedjet) Weret II (not to be confused with her mother-in-law), whose titles are King’s Wife and Great of Sceptre (which is another queenly title of the period). Another had the United with the White Crown title that I discussed above (she was called Neferhenut). And last, and very very definitely not least, was Mertseger. She is the first recorded queen to hold the title King’s Great Wife, and the first to have her name written in a cartouche – whilst these honorifics would become commonplace in the New Kingdom their use here is a departure from the previous norm and an indication of her status.
We can also list the names (or partial names) of several daughters (or potential daughters) of Senwosret III (tho not, I think, assign mothers to them) all of whom were buried in his pyramid complex: Khnmet[…], Menet, Mereret B, Senebsenbetes, Sit[…] A, and Sithathor A. Sons are elusive – none are directly attested (as I discussed above this was not unusual). And as I mentioned when writing about his probable son Amenemhat III even this relationship is only assumed due to the succession and the long co-regency which carries with it an assumption of a completely normal (i.e. father to son) succession.
As I said at the outset of this article, change is my theme for this look at the reign of Senwosret III – I’ve already mentioned the new title and cartouche for one of his queens, which surely indicates some shift in the status or ideas about royal women during this period. This is only one of a wide range of changes – during his reign and those to either side of him the material culture of Egypt undergoes notable changes in many ways. There are no texts that explain these changes (the Egyptians didn’t generally write down such meta-information) but it seems reasonable to assume that the change of material culture reflects an underlying alteration in the beliefs and practices of the Egyptian people.
Senwosret III
A striking example of these changes is in the art style. I had already talked about this a bit in the Amenemhat III post, where I put the fuzzy line of this change in Senwosret II’s reign, but I think on further reading it should be seen as part of Senwosret III’s reign. In statuary from earlier in the Middle Kingdom it’s a very idealised (and youthful) face that we’re shown, but Senwosret III’s statuary has more naturalistic and more mature facial features (whilst still having a very idealised and youthful body) and this style continues into his son’s reign and beyond. There have been a few suggestions for what this change means or represents. Some authors suggest that this is a new “realistic” style and that the statues represent the actual true-to-life features of the king. Other authors interpret it as bearing a message – that the features do not represent the real face of the king but are chosen to convey specific concepts e.g. the prominent eyes of Senwosret III signify vigilance. Overlapping with this is the idea that the faces are carved to represent the “inner man” – the king’s character not the king’s appearance. Yet other authors, like Dorothea Arnold, mix these ideas together – she sees the statues of this period as being recognisable images of the king in question which were also constructed to fit the ideology of the time. I’m inclined to follow this last idea. Just having it be straight realism feels too much like back-porting our own ideas about what art “should be” onto the Egyptians. And having it be solely conceptual messaging feels too abstract (but having said that, I also don’t believe Akhenaten looked like his statuary, so I’m clearly open to that idea in other cases!). But whatever the specific messaging or interpretation we see in these statues, it’s clear that ideas about how to represent a king change in middle of the Middle Kingdom and thus presumably their underlying idea of kingship itself.
This is not the only change that happens in the art and artifacts produced in the mid-12th Dynasty, tho it’s the only one I intend to go into in depth. I’ve previously discussed how tomb models fall out of use during Senwosret III’s reign, and along with this the jewellery buried with royal women changes in style and type. There also seems to be an interesting conceptual change in the way that the burial chambers under a pyramid were thought of – in the earlier Middle Kingdom they seem to’ve been thought of as pockets in solid bedrock (with the filling up of the passageways after burial returning them to solidity). But from Senwosret II onward there’s a change and the chambers are organised as spaces that one can move through and between. Also in the funerary context there’s an increase in the number of stelae and statues placed near sacred sites and processional ways such as those at Abydos and Elephantine.
Along with these changes in funerary goods and ideas the tombs of the provincial governors, the Nomarchs, start to disappear from the provinces and the elite are more often buried in close proximity to the king. This is one indication of a great change in the bureaucratic organisation of the Egyptian state during the reign of Senwosret III. Prior to Senwosret III the regions of Egypt were governed by powerful Nomarchs each of whom ruled over a Nome or district. During the late Old Kingdom more and more power had devolved to these regional governors, and this destabilised the central authority of the kings of Egypt. This wasn’t the entire reason that the Old Kingdom collapsed, but it was one of the factors – and you see it reflected in the tombs of First Intermediate Period rulers like Ankhtifi. But during the reign of Senwosret III this changes – the power of the provincial elite is reduced. Instead power was concentrated in a small handful of officials – headed by three viziers who reported directly to the king. These viziers each had a large region under their supervision – one administered Lower Egypt, one Upper Egypt and the last looked after Elephantine and Lower Nubia. Some authors see this as a conscious decision by Senwosret III to break the power of the Nomarchs, but most interpretations are that it was a side-effect of a process of centralisation that had been begun earlier in the 12th Dynasty during the reign of Senwosret I. Instead of a removal of power from any individual it’s more that by the reign of Senwosret III the titles are vanishing as Nomarchs died and their sons did not inherit.
Changes in bureaucracy inevitably lead to other changes in society as the centres of power shift. One such change may’ve lead to the flowering of craftsmanship that is seen in this period – the centralisation of power meant that the elite were then all in one place, and so the craftsmen who made elite items and the traders who brought them from outside Egypt also moved to this centre of power. And once all in one place the opportunities for collaboration and competition would be much greater. Also probably connected with the power shift from the provinces to the court was an organisational shift in the military of Egypt. In the First Intermediate Period and the early Middle Kingdom the army was primarily built up from the militia of each Nome, but as bureaucratic authority became centralised so did military authority. In the later Middle Kingdom from the reign of Senwosret III onward the army developed into a larger and national standing army.
And Senwosret III put this army to use serving his new expansionist policy – he undertook campaigns in Nubia in Year 8, Year 10 and Year 16 and reversed the northward movement of the southern border of Egypt that had taken place in the previous two reigns. He established his border at Semna (south of the Second Cataract), established and/or renovated a series of forts between Buhen and Semna in order to control this territory. He also enlarged a canal built by Pepi I which ran from Elephantine to the south, bypassing the first cataract) and improving communication and movement between core Egyptian territory and the newly conquered regions of Lower Nubia.
His boundary stela at Semna makes it clear that he regarded this land as completely under his authority. It states that no Nubians must cross this boundary by water or by land, whether in a ship or with their herds unless they are coming to one of his fortresses to trade. Of course the lands to the south of Egypt had been exploited by Egyptian rulers for a long time, but the Middle Kingdom was the first time they had been incorporated properly into the lands over which the king ruled. The fortresses that lined the river projected this power to the inhabitants, much like Norman castles in newly conquered Anglo-Saxon England. They did serve a practical purpose as well as this symbolic one – and not just the obvious military one of providing barracks for troops to control the river. They also provided storage space for trade goods, and places for the authorised trade between Nubians and Egypt to take place. So perhaps rather than an analogy to Norman castles we’d do better to think of Hadrian’s Wall – not a barrier but a place where trade and movement was controlled.
It wasn’t just Nubia that Senwosret III projected his power towards – he also flexed his muscles at the lands to the north east. Execration texts found in the fortress of Mirgissa in Nubia (and other places) dating to Senwosret III’s reign make it clear that Egyptian xenophobia was alive and well in this period – and directed at all outsiders. Among the cities and peoples named as abomination are several of the Nubian peoples, and also cities in the Levant such as Sekmem, Ashkelon, Byblos and Jerusalem. But there’s less evidence for campaigns into that part of the world, and no evidence of any long term control. Really we just have evidence of one campaign into Palestine in Senwosret III’s whole reign – personally led by the king himself it succeeded in capturing the town of Sekmem (identified with Shechem in the Mount Ephraim region).
Unsurprisingly, given the campaigns I’ve just discussed, one of the buildings we know that Senwosret III built was a temple to the Theban war god Montu at Medamud. This is also an example of continuity between Senwosret III and the earlier kings of the Middle Kingdom, which is a counterpoint to the picture we’ve been building up of his reign being a time of change.
After his death Senwosret III was one of those kings whose cult lasted for centuries, like Menkaure, Montuhotep II or Ahmose I. His pyramid complex at Dahshur shows signs of having been maintained through the Second Intermediate Period and we can tell from graffiti at the complex that some parts were still visited until at least the reign of Ramesses II. His funerary monument at Abydos also shows signs of his cult persisting for a couple of hundred years. He also gradually became regarded as the archetypal Egyptian king and was referred to as “High Sesostris”, with many stories about him by the time of Herodotus. But this was not entirely on his own merits – instead it was down to increasing conflation of his reign and deeds with those of other kings. Fairly early on he got confused with Senwosret I and Senwosret II, and by the Classical Period he was possibly also confused with Ramesses II to some degree.
Whilst his later reputation wasn’t entirely his own his reign was still a pivotal moment in the Middle Kingdom, and I’ve discussed some examples of the things that changed during his time on the throne. But change for change’s sake isn’t really an Egyptian thing to do – they were more apt to stress continuity and maintenance of the established order of the universe. And Senwosret III seems to’ve been a typical Egyptian monarch in this regard. There are several architectural and design choices in his pyramid complex at Dahshur that look back to older kings – not his immediate Middle Kingdom predecessors but the architecture of the Step Pyramid or other Old Kingdom pyramids. And his other funerary monument is at Abydos, near the Early Dynastic cemeteries there and the first royal monument since those days. So he seems to’ve been positioning himself as the heir to these illustrious ancestors. And some of the other aspects of his reign fit into that narrative too – he’s centralising administrative power in the king as it was in the old days, he’s projecting the power of Egypt out into the world and returning her neighbours to their proper subservient role. Perhaps this is an indication that the power of the king had been faltering, and Senwosret III was re-asserting his power and constructing an image of a resurgent & rejuvenated kingship. And under the cover of restoration, changes are made.
Resources Used:
Arnold, Dieter. 2002. The Pyramid Complex of Senwosret III at Dahshur: Architectural Studies. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Arnold, Dorothea. 2015. “Pharaoh: Power and Performance.” In Ancient Egypt Transformed: The Middle Kingdom, edited by Adela Oppenheim, Dorothea Arnold, Dieter Arnold, and Kei Yamamoto. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dodson, Aidan. 2020. “Sethy I – King of Egypt.” Talk given to the EEG on June 7 2020, see my write-up. Dodson, Aidan, and Dyan Hilton. 2004. The Complete Royal Families of Ancient Egypt. Thames & Hudson. Fletcher, Joann. 2016. The Story of Egypt. Hodder. Grajetzki, Wolfram. 2003. Burial Customs in Ancient Egypt: Life in Death for Rich and Poor. Duckworth Egyptology. ———. 2015. “Middle Kingdom History: An Overview.” In Ancient Egypt Transformed: The Middle Kingdom, edited by Adela Oppenheim, Dorothea Arnold, Dieter Arnold, and Kei Yamamoto. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Kamrin, Janice. 2015. “The Decoration of Elite Tombs: Connecting the Living and the Dead.” In Ancient Egypt Transformed: The Middle Kingdom, edited by Adela Oppenheim, Dorothea Arnold, Dieter Arnold, and Kei Yamamoto. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Lehner, Mark. 2008. The Complete Pyramids. Thames and Hudson. Lundström, Peter. “Names of the Pharaohs.” Accessed November 25, 2020. https://pharaoh.se/. Oppenheim, Adela. 2015. “Introduction: What Was the Middle Kingdom?” In Ancient Egypt Transformed: The Middle Kingdom, edited by Adela Oppenheim, Dorothea Arnold, Dieter Arnold, and Kei Yamamoto. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Oppenheim, Adela, Dorothea Arnold, Dieter Arnold, and Kei Yamamoto, eds. 2015. Ancient Egypt Transformed: The Middle Kingdom. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Quirke, Stephen. 2015. “Understanding Death: A Journey Between Worlds.” In Ancient Egypt Transformed: The Middle Kingdom, edited by Adela Oppenheim, Dorothea Arnold, Dieter Arnold, and Kei Yamamoto. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Shaw, Ian, and Paul T. Nicholson. 2008. The British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt. British Museum. Verner, Miroslav. 2003. The Pyramids: Their Archaeology and History. Translated by Steven Rendall. Atlantic Books. Wilkinson, Toby A. H. 2010. The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt: The History of a Civilisation from 3000 BC to Cleopatra. Bloomsbury.
Significant numbers of people in the modern world never seriously worry about where their next meal is coming from. I myself am one of those people – even when getting grocery shopping delivered was difficult at the peak of lockdown in the UK earlier this year I was mostly concerned about whether I would get the food I wanted or not, I was confident I would be able to get something to cook & eat. And that position of privilege can make it hard to get oneself into the mindset of a pre-modern population (or that of the many people less fortunate than me even in my own country) – where if the harvest failed too often (perhaps even just once) then people were going to struggle to find enough to eat. Where the poorer portions of society might well routinely restrict what they ate, not out of fear of “getting fat” but because there was only so much food to last until the crops ripened. But it’s something that’s worth keeping in mind when thinking about the Ancient Egyptians – it helps make sense of some of the differences between their worldview and ours. Like the way that among the various metaphysical elements of their thoughts about life after death there are also solidly pragmatic concerns about ensuring that the deceased has food security in the afterlife (with a definite sub-text that this was one of the ways that the afterlife was going to be better than this life). I’ve talked about some examples of this before in the blog – like shabtis as servants to do the necessary agricultural work, or the Offering Formula to guarantee food offerings would continue to be received for eternity. And the objects I’m talking about today are a part of this mindset.
The early Middle Kingdom sees a flowering of three dimensional representations of activities involved in food production, like the one pictured where cattle are being tended to in a stable. Previously these daily life scenes had been carved or painted on the walls of the tomb, but during the First Intermediate Period there was a shift in focus from decorating the tomb to decorating the coffin. This left less space for showing food production and so models are provided for the deceased instead. These changes accompanied a change in the the overall idea of the afterlife – the rise in prominence of Osiris, and the idea that even commoners would go to some other place after death like the Field of Reeds. And they may also be a reaction to changes in the environment around them, both natural and political – the Old Kingdom had fizzled out amongst many problems, one of which appears to’ve been a series of famines that the central authority didn’t deal with terribly effectively. And then the First Intermediate Period was a time of conflict – taken together food security and a sense of certainty in the afterlife must’ve seemed even more important than it previously had been.
Model Cattle Stable
These tomb models don’t just appear suddenly from out of nowhere, of course, they evolve from earlier use of models in tombs. This appears to begin around the same time as the unification of Egypt, so some 1000 years before the Middle Kingdom. During the late Predynastic Period and the Early Dynastic Period there are some cases of replacement of large scale or expensive tomb goods with models. For instance some burials had full scale boats, but others had model ones. And one burial even had a full scale granary but several had model ones. During the Old Kingdom this practice was extended to smaller objects – for instance they might have model storage vessels or model tools. And in the later Old Kingdom limestone statues of servants also begin to show up – at first solely concerned with food production but then later expanding their repertoire of occupations to include other necessities of life.
It’s during the First Intermediate Period and early Middle Kingdom that the tomb models really come into their own. In contrast to the Old Kingdom servant statues these models are made of painted wood – which makes them much more perishable, even in the typically dry climate of Upper Egypt, so we’re lucky as many have survived as have! A typical elite burial of the period includes a set of these models, but the number and choice of scenes varies between tombs – presumably determined by the status of the deceased, the region and the exact time period. The most common are boats and models to do with food production – but other craft activities are depicted as well. The general idea is to provide all the industry required for a comfortable (food secure!) afterlife.
Boats are a little bit of a different category so I’m only going to touch on them briefly here. They have a more explicitly religious character: as the Osiris cult rose in prominence his primary cult centre at Abydos became a place of pilgrimage, and model boats in tombs from the First Intermediate Period onward generally symbolise eternal participation in pilgrimage to Abydos.
Other than boats the most common models are scenes of butchery, granaries, scenes of baking, scenes of brewing, and pairs of female servants carrying food offerings. As you can see this covers the first 3 or 4 of the standard offerings mentioned in the Offering Formula – bread, beer, ox and fowl (only present if that’s what the servants are carrying). So by including these models you are going to be well supplied in the afterlife.
Tomb models of this type (other than boats) have this period where they flourish, but then they rather abruptly die out in the reign of Senwosret III. His reign, as part of the 12th Dynasty, marks an inflection point in the history of Egyptian culture. Although we tend to think (primarily because of the influence of the 3rd Century BCE historian Manetho) of the Middle Kingdom as a single unit, subdivided into 3 dynasties, there’s also an argument to be made that it should be divided into two at the reign of Senwosret III. The early Middle Kingdom is closer to the First Intermediate Period in culture than to the later Middle Kingdom (and things like burial customs don’t seem to change when Montuhotep II reunites the country). Then Senwosret III oversees significant changes to the art style, religious ideas and political organisation of the country and the later Middle Kingdom begins – and the necessity for (or desire for) dioramic models in tombs is one of the things that changes.
But why use models? It seems perhaps a little childish to the modern eye – there’s something of the doll’s house to them, a toy for a child to play with. And it’s true that it can be hard to identify which objects from Ancient Egypt are toys and which are models with religious or magical significance (and sometimes the answer may be “both”!). The context of the find can give clues (if it’s known), for instance models such as these ones I’m talking about are found in the graves of adults so we probably need to put aside assumptions about childishness and look for other explanations. The key to understanding this are the Ancient Egyptian beliefs about the reality of symbols in a magical sense – the written or spoken name of thing, a painting or carving of a thing, or a model of a thing are magically the same as the thing itself. So if you have written on your tomb walls your request for bread and beer, then in the afterlife you will magically have bread and beer. If you have carved scenes with loaves of bread and jars of beer, then you will magically have bread and beer in your afterlife. And if you have a model granary, a model bakery and a model brewery, then in the afterlife they will magically exist and produce an endless supply of bread and beer.
So these models are in a magical sense the real things they represent. And this then answers the question of “why models?” – models are more practical than the object they represent. In much earlier times kings were buried with the actual objects – including servants in some cases – but this is expensive in terms of resources (even leaving aside the ethics of killing your bread bakers!!), and in terms of the space required inside the tomb complex. Models are a cheaper and more efficient way of taking it with you when you went. They’re also much less attractive to tomb robbers – yes, magically this stable in the photo is real and has real cows in it, but in this world you can’t eat the beef they magically produce!
The models are, of course, fascinating to anyone who’s interested in learning about Ancient Egyptian culture. They give us the obvious information about how bread was made, beer was brewed and so on. And also things like how Egyptian buildings were laid out, even the very fact they kept their cattle in stables! As well as these insights into material culture they also reinforce other evidence about what the Egyptians saw as the key necessities of life (like their emphasis on food security in the afterlife), and even give us information as to how their art style worked by letting us compare two dimensional and three dimensional representations of the same activities. A proper treasure trove despite not having the glitter of gold!
Resources used:
Ardagh, Philip. 1999. The Hieroglyphs Handbook: Teach Yourself Ancient Egyptian. Faber and Faber. Assmann, Jan. 2003. The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs. Translated by Andrew Jenkins. Harvard Univ. Press. David, Rosalie. 2002. Religion and Magic in Ancient Egypt. Penguin Books. Grajetzki, Wolfram. 2003. Burial Customs in Ancient Egypt: Life in Death for Rich and Poor. Duckworth Egyptology. Mertz, Barbara. 2008. Red Land, Black Land: Daily Life in Ancient Egypt. William Morrow. Oppenheim, Adela, Dorothea Arnold, Dieter Arnold, and Kei Yamamoto, eds. 2015. Ancient Egypt Transformed: The Middle Kingdom. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Quirke, Stephen. 2015. “Understantding Death: A Journey Between Worlds.” In Ancient Egypt Transformed: The Middle Kingdom, edited by Adela Oppenheim, Dorothea Arnold, Dieter Arnold, and Kei Yamamoto. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Shaw, Ian, and Paul T. Nicholson. 2008. The British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt. British Museum. Wilkinson, Toby A. H. 2010. The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt: The History of a Civilisation from 3000 BC to Cleopatra. Bloomsbury. Yamamoto, Kei. 2015. “Comprehending Life: Community, Environment, and the Supernatural.” In Ancient Egypt Transformed: The Middle Kingdom, edited by Adela Oppenheim, Dorothea Arnold, Dieter Arnold, and Kei Yamamoto. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Tales from the Two Lands 