Hence, in its ambition and grandeur, the reign of Khasekhemwy foreshadows the Pyramid Age. His political achievements re-established the internal stability and prosperity needed for the great cultural achievements of his successors.
5 | Djoser
B
UILDER OF THE
S
TEP
P
YRAMID
Pyramids are the quintessential, iconic monuments of ancient Egypt. In their architectural sophistication, and the extraordinary organizational and logistical achievement they represent, they underline the age in which they were built as the first, great period of Egyptian civilization, when the resources of the country were harnessed and directed, as never before, towards state construction projects. In the annals of ancient Egypt, a special place is reserved, therefore, for the king whose reign witnessed the inauguration of this tradition of monumental stone architecture. Attested on contemporary monuments only by his Horus-name Netjerikhet – ‘(Horus is) the most divine (member) of the corporation (of gods)’ – he is better known by the name that appears in later sources, Djoser (‘holy’).
Djoser was a member of the same royal family as his immediate predecessor, Khasekhemwy (no. 4). The latter’s wife and the mother of his children, Nimaathap, was known in the reign of Djoser as ‘the king’s mother’. No inscription explicitly states that Djoser was Khasekhemwy’s son, but the circumstantial evidence makes it very likely. Where Djoser did make a break with previous royal tradition was in the geographical focus of his activities – his surviving buildings are concentrated in the north rather than in the south of the country – and in the location and design of his mortuary complex. The Step Pyramid dominates modern accounts of Djoser’s reign as it does the Saqqara plateau where it was built. It represented a turning-point: in architecture, being the first monument in Egypt to be finished entirely in dressed limestone; in construction techniques, giving engineers the opportunity to begin exploiting the full potential of stone as a building material; and in organization, necessitating and prompting the development of systematic regional government and a professional bureaucracy.
The rise of an official class, represented in large-scale statuary, is a key characteristic of Djoser’s reign. The leading men of his court are the earliest group of high-ranking dignitaries whose identities are known. Besides the king’s chief minister Imhotep (no. 7), there were the district administrators, Ankh and Sepa, who also held a number of important priestly offices between them; the Controller of the Royal Barque (the king’s state boat), Ankhwa; the chief dentist, Hesira (no. 6); and Khabausokar, the controller of the royal workshops in which the statues of all these individuals were made. His artisans also created representations of Djoser’s female relatives: his wife Hetephernebty (who may also have been a daughter of the previous king Khasekhemwy), known by the sobriquet ‘she who sees Horus (i.e. the king)’; his daughter, Intkaes, and another princess, ‘the king’s daughter of his body’, Redji, whose face shows clear similarities with relief representations of Djoser. The fine, seated basalt figure of Redji is the earliest surviving example of a statue depicting a named, female member of the Egyptian royal family.
The only surviving three-dimensional sculpture of the king himself is a seated, life-size statue from the serdab (statue chamber) of his pyramid, showing him as he wished to be remembered: dressed in the long, tight-fitting robe associated with the sed-festival; wearing the royal nemes headdress over a heavy wig; his face characterized by prominent, all-hearing ears; high cheekbones, thick lips and a wide mouth giving him a look of grim determination.
Djoser’s reign witnessed an upsurge in creativity which extended to royal iconography. Statue bases from the Step Pyramid complex show the heads of Asiatics and Libyans, the traditional enemies of Egypt; by having himself depicted standing on his foes, Djoser showed that he was performing the primary duty of the Egyptian king – to defend the country – and made a powerful point to other would-be opponents. The innovative architecture of the Step Pyramid complex put particular emphasis on royal ideology, by providing eternal settings for important royal rituals. The great court in front of the pyramid formed a backdrop for the king’s formal appearances and an arena for the ceremony of ‘encompassing the field’, where he strode around symbolic territorial markers to reassert his claim to Egypt. To the south of the pyramid, a separate court was designed as an eternal stage-set for the sed-festival (royal jubilee), at which the king would receive the homage of people and gods before being crowned again to mark the rejuvenation of his reign. Djoser’s sed-festival was probably the occasion which prompted the construction of a shrine to the ennead (group of nine gods) at Heliopolis (ancient Iunu). The king’s patronage of this site reflected the growing importance of its local cult, that of the sun-god Ra, and its associated priesthood.
Aside from construction projects at Saqqara and Heliopolis, Djoser also sent mining expeditions to the Wadi Maghara in southwestern Sinai, to bring back precious turquoise and perhaps copper for the royal workshops. At Beit Khallaf in Upper Egypt, the largest private tombs yet seen were built during his reign; one of them may have been the funerary monument of his own mother, Nimaathap. Other than these isolated glimpses, the events of Djoser’s reign are attested only from much later inscriptions, such as the Famine Stela carved in the reign of Ptolemy V. At a remove of 2,500 years, it can scarcely be used as a reliable source, but it does demonstrate the longevity of Djoser’s memory.
More than a millennium after his death, the Ramesside court compiled the king list known as the Turin Canon, dividing the rulers of Egypt into major historical groupings. When the scribe came to the name of Djoser, he changed the ink in his pen and wrote in red rather than the usual black. He was in no doubt that the accession of Djoser marked the beginning of a new era: the age of the pyramids.
6 | Hesira
C
HIEF DENTIST AT THE COURT OF
D
JOSER
Health care, at least for the governing elite, was surprisingly advanced in ancient Egypt, and was developed at an early period. A medical treatment manual addressing a wide variety of conditions is thought to date back to the Old Kingdom; while Merka, a high official at the end of the 1st Dynasty, held the title of ‘scorpion doctor’, among many others. Medical knowledge seems to have been acquired in the course of more general scholarship, and healthcare practitioners were seldom narrow specialists; rather, they exercised their skills as part of a portfolio of activities, in keeping with the broadly based nature of ancient Egyptian authority. A good example is Hesira, an official at the court of King Djoser and the first recorded dentist in history.
Hesira – also known by the short form of his name, Hesi – was not merely a dentist: he was Chief of Dentists, suggesting an already established profession. He was a member of the king’s inner circle and owed his seniority, not so much to his knowledge of dentistry, as to his literacy: at a time when the scribal class (from which the bureaucracy was drawn) was still small, Hesira was Master of the Royal Scribes, and hence one of the leading administrators in government. To be a scribe was to have access to the levers of power. Little wonder, then, that Hesira always had himself depicted with his insignia of office, the scribal equipment of ink-palette, pen-holder and pigment bag. Within the administration, one of his major duties was overseeing the recruitment of corvée labour for state construction projects, in his capacity as ‘greatest of tens of Upper Egypt’.
A feature of ancient Egypt throughout its history was the combination of civil and religious office in a single individual. Hesira was no exception. Although a man of essentially secular learning, he none the less held posts in the priesthoods of three important early cults: the fertility god Min; the lioness-goddess Mehit; and the falcon-god of Pe (Buto, modern Tell el-Fara‘in), Horus the Harpooner. This last office brought Hesira the added honour of being a Great One of Pe.
Of course, having achieved status and wealth, he did what any Egyptian would have done in a similar position: he commissioned a large and splendid tomb to guarantee his affluence throughout eternity. Hesira’s tomb was built to the north of his monarch’s Step Pyramid complex. It was decorated with wall paintings of funerary equipment – vases, chests and board games – and eleven recessed niches, each of which originally held an intricately sculpted wooden panel. Six of these panels have survived, and are among the finest reliefs from ancient Egypt in any medium; the modelling of anatomical details is especially notable. The panels show Hesira, surrounded by texts giving his titles and epithets, at various stages of his life. Even as a young man, he wore a rather sullen expression with a downturned mouth and narrow eyes. As an older man, his face was creased and wrinkled, but maintained the same sour look. He was evidently a follower of the latest court fashions, which included sporting a thin moustache and wearing a short, round wig with straight locks. Particularly characteristic of the Egyptian ruling class is his strong, aquiline nose. Finally, Hesira had a distinctly raised chin, suggesting a certain arrogance: although he lived more than 4,500 years ago, Djoser’s chief dentist and master of the royal scribes seems to have displayed the attitude of senior bureaucrats throughout history.
7 | Imhotep
A
RCHITECT AND SAGE WHO BECAME A GOD
The radical idea of taking the single-stepped royal tomb of the 1st and 2nd Dynasties and transforming it into a far more imposing structure, by placing one step on top of another, and so upwards to the apex – in short, the concept of the pyramid – was a defining moment in the long course of pharaonic civilization. Tradition has ascribed this remarkable innovation to an individual who has been called ‘the greatest intellect of the Early Dynastic Period’ and who was to become synonymous with knowledge, both practical and magical. His name echoes down the forty-six centuries since his architectural creation first took shape on the Saqqara plateau, and has come to stand in popular culture for ancient Egypt itself: Imhotep.
Given the early period at which he lived and worked, it is not surprising that the contemporary evidence for Imhotep is rather meagre. Indeed, he is named only twice in 3rd Dynasty contexts: once on a statue base of King Djoser from the Step Pyramid complex, and again in a graffito on the enclosure wall of the pyramid complex of Djoser’s successor, Sekhemkhet. None the less, these two attestations tell us a great deal about Imhotep’s position at court and his career. The statue base of Djoser which names Imhotep was originally set up in a small room on the south side of the entrance colonnade leading to the Great Court of the Step Pyramid complex. It would thus have been passed by all those entering or leaving the monument. This very public location, combined with the naming of a private individual on the base of a royal statue, demonstrates Imhotep’s pre-eminent rank at Djoser’s court. The statue base gives his titles as Royal Seal-Bearer, First Under the King, Ruler of the Great Estate, member of the elite, Greatest of Seers, and Overseer of Sculptors and Painters; with the possible exception of the last title, there is nothing explicit to link him with the design or construction of the king’s funerary monument. But who else, except the architect and inspiration behind the Step Pyramid, would have been given such a prominent place in its final set-up? The graffito from the principal monument of the next reign suggests that Imhotep’s skills as an architect were prized by Djoser’s successor, too; and that the great man, late in life, had a hand in designing Egypt’s second pyramid, thus developing the tradition that he himself had started.
According to much later sources, Imhotep’s wife was called Renpetnefret, his mother Khereduankh and his father Kanefer. In the absence of further 3rd Dynasty texts there is no way of verifying this information; but the suggestion that Kanefer was himself a Superintendent of Royal Works certainly makes sense, as it explains how a man such as Imhotep could have become so well acquainted with the architectural, technological and organizational aspects of major construction projects. These skills were stretched to the limit in creating an entirely novel monument for Djoser. The world’s first large-scale stone building involved, among other things, the quarrying, transportation, setting, dressing and decorating of nearly a million tons of limestone: an unprecedented feat of engineering and logistics.
It is little wonder, therefore, that, after his death at the end of the 3rd Dynasty, a host of myths and legends grew up around the great Imhotep. Wisdom literature was ascribed to him: one of the Songs of the Harper contained the lines: ‘I have heard the sayings of Imhotep… which we quoted in proverbs so much.’ By the 18th Dynasty, Imhotep had become the focus of popular veneration; libations were offered to him, and he was regarded as the patron of scribes. In the Late Period, with tourists visiting the Step Pyramid in greater numbers, Imhotep’s reputation grew, and he was recognized as the son of the god Ptah; indeed he was himself deified as a god of writing, architecture, wisdom and medicine. In the 30th Dynasty, the cult of Imhotep was one of the most important in the Memphite area, receiving royal patronage. The last native-born ruler of Egypt, Nakhthorheb (no. 95), called himself ‘beloved of Imhotep son of Ptah’, while the king’s subjects worshipped Imhotep as ‘the august god who gives life to the people’. In common with other popular deities, he was seen as a healer, and it was in this context that he subsequently became closely identified with the Greek god of medicine, Asklepius.
The cult of Imhotep reached its apogee under the Ptolemies. The main centres of worship and pilgrimage were the temple of Ptah at Memphis and the Asklepion at Saqqara (believed to be Imhotep’s burial-place), but other shrines were built throughout the country, for example at Deir el-Medina in western Thebes, at Heliopolis and at Xoïs in the north-central Delta. A Ptolemaic stela, purporting to date to the reign of Djoser, was carved on the island of Sehel in the First Cataract; it told of how the king consulted Imhotep over how best to bring to an end seven years of famine. Nearby, on the island of Philae, Ptolemy V built a small temple to Imhotep from where his cult spread southwards into Nubia, even as far as Meroë. At Edfu, an inscription credited Imhotep with inventing the principles of temple architecture, thus remembering the origins of his fame. At the various shrines dedicated to Imhotep, devotees paid for images of the sage to be presented as votive offerings; almost 400 bronze statues are known, mostly from Memphis and Saqqara. They depicted him as a scribe, with an unrolled papyrus; as a priest, with a long apron; or as the son of Ptah, wearing a skull-cap.
As a god of healing and medicine, Imhotep continued to be venerated into the Roman Period; in the temple of Dendera, he was credited with arcane knowledge of astronomy and astrology. Thus began the final, bizarre chapter in the posthumous life of the 3rd Dynasty official. He became a figure in popular romances, while an Arabic text of the tenth century AD mentioned him as an alchemist. Magician, healer, sage, scribe: the many incarnations in which Imhotep was venerated all reflect the monumental achievement of the Step Pyramid complex which changed Egypt and the ancient Egyptians forever. It is indeed fitting that the reputation of the man who created the defining symbol of Egyptian civilization should have survived longer than that of any other of his countrymen.
8 | Metjen
C
AREER CIVIL SERVANT
In the 3rd Dynasty, perhaps for the first time, it became possible for individuals of humble origins to rise by their own talents through the ranks of the administration to the highest echelons of government. The opening up of the bureaucracy to men of non-royal background was probably an inevitable result of the greater professionalization required for pyramid-building. It also had the effect, naturally, of widening the pool of talent available to the king in the allocation of important responsibilities. Metjen, a career civil servant whose life spanned virtually the entire 3rd Dynasty, exemplified this new meritocracy.
Metjen’s tomb at Saqqara contains the earliest extensive autobiographical inscription from ancient Egypt. It charts his career from its unspectacular beginning to its impressive conclusion. Given the Lower Egyptian geographical focus of his career, it seems likely that Metjen was born somewhere in the Delta. His father Inpuemankh was a judge and scribe, so Metjen would have been brought up to read and write, a prerequisite for government office. His first job was as a scribe, too, with responsibility for a storehouse of provisions and its contents: in other words, a small cog in the great machine of the Egyptian redistributive economy.
His aptitude for accountancy must have come to the attention of his superiors in the central government, for he was duly promoted to be Under Field-Judge – responsible for determining field boundaries, a crucial role in an agricultural economy – and local governor of Xoïs, a town in the north-central Delta which may have been Metjen’s birthplace. A further promotion, to Judge of All Land Disputes, followed, his first government-level post. From there, his talents swiftly brought him new and greater responsibilities, including overseeing the national flax-harvest, a key crop, essential for the manufacture of linen.
At the height of his career, Metjen returned to his background of local government, as regional administrator, on behalf of the king, in a host of Delta nomes (provinces). At one time or another, he controlled the 2nd (Letopolite), 5th (Saite), 6th (Xoite), 7th (Harpoon) and 16th (Mendesian) nomes of Lower Egypt, comprising a great swathe of the northern Delta; he was also Palace-Ruler (administrator appointed by the king) of two townships, and the governor of a fortress. Outside the Delta, he administered ‘the cow stronghold’, perhaps one of the western oases, and held the associated positions of Desert Governor and Master of the Hunt. In the eastern Fayum, he was a district administrator and ‘ruler of the palace towns of the southern lake’, in other words the pleasure-palaces established by Egyptian kings on the shores of Lake Fayum. A slight anomaly, given the Lower Egyptian focus of his other responsibilities, was the post of administrator, nomarch (provincial governor) and Overseer of Commissions in the 17th (Jackal) nome of Upper Egypt.
