Think Like an Egyptian by Barry Kemp Read Free Book Online

included in their tombs long texts expressing their fidelity.
    When royal power grew weak, local governors were the ones who stood to gain most, and sometimes they even seized by force the nomes and cities of their neighbors. Ankhtyfy, a governor to the south of Thebes during a time of civil war (c. 2150 BC, early in the 1st Intermediate Period), seized the nome of his neighbor at Edfu but then faced attacks from Thebes, his own northern neighbor, whose ruling family went on to take over the whole country and become the next line of kings.
    When during the four centuries of the Late Period (8th-4th centuries BC) the country had to accept long periods of foreign rule, it was the local governors who acted as a bridge, choosing to serve the alien rulers and so maintain order and prosperity in their area. In his annals of conquest the Assyrian king Assurbanipal lists the names of 20 of them, the last being a man well known from his statues and from his huge tomb at Luxor, Menthuemhat, the mayor of Thebes. Menthuemhat lived on through further changes of rule and became a major organizer of temple repairs. The priest of Sais, Udjahor-resenet, who worked closely with the Persian conquerors to secure benefits to his own temple in the 6th century BC, is another example.
    How should we judge such men? Behavior of this kind attracts liberal criticism in the modern world: we might expect true patriots to fight the foreign occupier. Some Egyptians, especially those who lived in the south of the country, did draw the line between themselves and foreigners, and rose in revolt on several occasions in the last centuries of Egyptian civilization. By this time, however, the resident population of Egypt included a large element of “foreigners” who probably had limited regard for traditional Egyptian culture. It might have seemed more sensible to men like Menthuemhat and Udjahor-resenet to cooperate with their foreign masters in order to preserve what remained of the old culture.

14.
    STELA (STANDING BLOCK OR SLAB OF STONE)
     
     
     
     
    The sign depicts a round-topped slab of stone on a narrow pedestal. Egyptians loved to commemorate their lives for posterity, and stelae were used to record particular acts of piety or the history of one’s life or one’s outstanding personal qualities, and to list the offerings that one hoped to receive for ever more. We know the names and careers of ancient Egyptians mainly from the many thousands of stelae that have survived.
    Stelae were also used to mark boundaries. Ownership of agricultural land was the basis of power and wealth in ancient Egypt. Egyptians were precise about their territory, and the boundaries of fields, cities, and provinces were often permanently delineated. One of the provincial governors, Khnumhetep II of the 12th Dynasty, recorded in his tomb at Beni Hasan how the king confirmed his governorship of the area, “having established for me a southern boundary stela and having set up a northern one like heaven, and having divided the Nile down its middle.” This was part of a wider scheme of King Amenemhat II’s to reestablish “whatever he found in disarray and [return] whatever a city had taken from its neighbor, causing city to know its boundary with city [so that] their boundary stelae were established like heaven and their river frontage known according to what was in the writings.”
    The only boundary stelae to have survived in Egypt are carved into the cliffs on both sides of the Nile around King Akhenaten’s new city of Tell el-Amarna. They are inscribed with a sacred oath declaring that the city will never extend beyond their limits. So important were the stelae to Akhenaten that a year after the first set was carved a second set was added, and then two years after this the king visited them, in his chariot, to repeat the oath.
    It became the duty of kings to “enlarge the boundaries of Egypt” through conquest. Around 1862 BC King Senusret III set up a boundary