To add to the 50 arouras (13.5 ha, 33 acres) of land he inherited from his mother Nebsenet under the terms of her will, Metjen was liberally rewarded for his loyal service with further, substantial grants of land and provisions from the state. In addition, an extensive estate was established to provide income in perpetuity for his mortuary cult. Perhaps the gift from the state of which he was proudest, however, was his house. Metjen’s description conjures up the image of an ideal home, with all the features a person of wealth and status would have expected: ‘An estate 200 cubits (105 m, 343 ft) long by 200 cubits wide, with a wall equipped and set with good wood, a very big pool made in it, and planted with figs and grapes.’ The Delta had been the centre of Egyptian wine-making since at least the 1st Dynasty, and Metjen was clearly an enthusiastic grower since, in addition to the vines planted around his house, he also had a separate, walled vineyard. Metjen thus lived out the remainder of his days in considerable comfort, surrounded by the luxuries that were the reward, not of birth, but of merit.
PART 2
The Pyramid Age
Old Kingdom
The pyramids are the quintessential symbols of ancient Egyptian civilization. Their antiquity, monumentality, perfection and mystery sum up all those things about pharaonic culture that have enthralled the western mind since Napoleon’s expedition at the end of the eighteenth century. The Great Pyramid of Khufu (no. 10) and its two companions at Giza are the best known, and together constitute the only surviving wonder of the ancient world. But the vast necropolis of Memphis, ancient Egypt’s traditional capital, is littered with pyramids stretching over a distance of 33 km (21 miles), from Abu Rawash in the north to Dahshur in the south. The era that saw the construction of these extraordinary buildings is known to Egyptologists as the Old Kingdom. It is the first great period of strong, centralized rule, when the state used its new-found wealth in tandem with its absolute political and economic control to promote its own pre-eminence. If the government’s motive for pyramid-building is clear enough, what did the population at large gain from the enterprise?
The answer goes to the heart of the Egyptian world-view, and the contract between the ruler and those he ruled. Under this contract, the people were expected to give a percentage of their agricultural production in tax; the state used some of this to fund itself and its grandiose projects, but stored the rest in granaries, as ‘buffer stocks’ to alleviate the effects of famine in lean years. The people gave their labour on a seasonal basis to state projects; in return they received permission to farm their land – which in theory belonged to the king – the rest of the year, and rations from the state while they were engaged on government work. By means of these reciprocal arrangements, the Egyptians were able to build vast monuments like the pyramids. At the same time, it can be said that the pyramids built Egypt: as a structured, organized and highly efficient command economy. However, the administrative effort and expenditure of resources required for truly massive pyramids could not be sustained over the long term; after the 4th Dynasty, royal funerary monuments returned to a more modest scale, as illustrated by the pyramids of Unas (no. 16) and Pepi II (no. 20).
If royal tombs dominated cultural expression in the Old Kingdom, the royal family held an equally central place in the power-politics of the period. The lavish tomb equipment given to the king’s mother Hetepheres (no. 9) by her son Khufu remains one of the finest collections of grave goods ever found in Egypt, and illustrates the artistic patronage exercised by the monarch’s inner circle. Despite the increasing professionalization of the administration, which allowed talented individuals like Weni (no. 18) to rise in the hierarchy, most of the really senior positions of authority were still held by the king’s male relatives. Men such as Hemiunu in the 4th Dynasty (no. 11), Ptahshepses in the 5th (no. 13) and Mereruka in the 6th (no. 17) all owed their influence to their royal connections. The king’s patronage could bring not only power and wealth but also the privilege of a tomb in the court necropolis at Saqqara (the burial-ground for the capital city of Memphis). In a society as concerned with mortuary provision as it was with status, it was hardly surprising that the construction of one’s tomb should have been regarded as a key indicator of success. High officials like Metjetji (no. 15) displayed their exalted rank and worldly wealth by means of large and elaborately decorated tomb-chapels. Even lesser members of the royal court, such as the dwarf Perniankhu (no. 12), were able to secure a burial close to their monarch’s own funerary monument; they hoped, by this means, to continue receiving royal favour for eternity.
The scenes and texts in the private tombs of the Old Kingdom provide valuable insights into many aspects of contemporary culture, from craftsmanship to farming practices, from the structure of the administration to the lifestyle of the elite. The location of tombs, too, points to an important development in ancient Egyptian society. As the Pyramid Age progressed, an increasing number of high officials opted to be buried, not in the great court cemetery of Memphis, but in their own home regions. The rise of local identity went hand-in-hand with an upsurge in provincial autonomy, particularly in the 6th Dynasty as the central government began to devolve more power to the regions. For a dignitary like Pepiankh (no. 14), there was no doubt that his status derived from his seniority in his home town, even if he expressed it through the usual plethora of courtly epithets and titles. One locality with an especially strong sense of its own identity was Elephantine (ancient Abu). The reasons for this were partly geographical – the town was 800 km (500 miles) by river from the capital and royal residence at Memphis – and partly cultural, the inhabitants of the First Cataract region tending to look as much towards Nubia as towards Egypt. Indeed, the local officials of Abu were valuable to the central government for their knowledge and understanding of Nubia, a land which supplied the court with a range of exotic and prestigious products, from ebony to panther-skins. In the 6th Dynasty, individuals such as Harkhuf (no. 19) and Heqaib (no. 21) grew rich and famous as a result of distinguished government service in the foreign lands beyond Egypt’s southern border.
Just as the centralization of power characterized the apogee of pyramid-building in the 4th Dynasty, so the process of decentralization marked the decline of royal authority towards the end of the Old Kingdom. In the end, the decentralizing forces inherent within Egyptian society proved uncontainable, exacerbated by dynastic squabbles and conflicts over the succession in the wake of Pepi II’s extraordinarily long reign. Royal authority faded as regional autonomy grew in strength, ushering in a period of political fragmentation that was to have a profound and long-lasting effect on Egyptian society and the Egyptian psyche.
9 | Hetepheres
M
OTHER OF
K
ING
K
HUFU
The equipment from the tomb of Hetepheres is one of the treasures of Cairo’s Egyptian Museum. In its purity and elegance of design, exemplary craftsmanship and sumptuous materials, it encapsulates the self-confidence and restrained opulence of the Pyramid Age. But what about the woman for whom it was made? Who was Hetepheres and what would her life have been like?
The bare facts of her background are clear enough. She was the wife of a king (Sneferu), the mother of a king (Khufu) and very probably the daughter of a king too (Huni). Indeed, her status derived entirely from her relationships with the men in her family. The Egyptian language had no word for ‘queen’, only terms for ‘king’s wife’ or ‘king’s mother’. Nevertheless, as the powerful mother of an all-powerful king, Hetepheres would have been by far the most influential woman, and probably one of the most influential people of either sex, at Khufu’s court. The titles on her carrying-chair, in gold hieroglyphs inlaid on ebony panels, suggest as much: Mother of the Dual King, Follower of Horus, Director of the Ruler, the Gracious One, whose every utterance is done for her. The third of these epithets is particularly telling, for it suggests that Khufu, like so many despotic rulers through history, took orders from only one person, and that was his mother.
Although Hetepheres lived during one of the greatest periods of ancient Egyptian civilization, witnessing at first hand the construction of the first true pyramids – from Meidum and Dahshur under her father and husband to the Great Pyramid at Giza under her son – surprisingly little is known about her life. However, thanks to her remarkable burial goods, rather more can be said about her lifestyle, and by extension, that of the Old Kingdom nobility in general. Mention has already been made of her carrying-chair, and this seems to have been a favoured method of transport for high-status individuals of the time – impressive, perhaps, but not particularly comfortable. The occupant would have sat on the wooden seat board (perhaps softened by a cushion) with their knees drawn up against their chest. In Hetepheres’ case, the spectacle would have been made more dazzling by the lavish use of gold on her carrying-chair.
The impression of a peripatetic existence, moving from one royal residence to another, is reinforced by the other items in her tomb equipment. These included a bed with a separate canopy, two low chairs, and several jewelry boxes. The furniture, though embellished with feet in the shape of lions’ paws and decorated with inlays and gold foil, was relatively simple, lightweight and highly portable. It would have been easily dismantled and re-erected as Hetepheres and her entourage travelled around the country. In keeping with such a mobile lifestyle, a woman’s wealth was carried largely on or about her person. A representation of Hetepheres on her carrying-chair shows her wearing no fewer than fourteen bracelets on her right arm. These she kept in a specially made jewelry box, itself covered in gold leaf inside and out, which could accommodate twenty bracelets in two rows of ten. The bracelets themselves were of exceptional quality, and would have outshone anything worn by her contemporaries both in terms of their design and their materials. They were made from silver, at a time when it was far more precious than gold (Egypt had gold in abundance, whereas silver had to be imported from overseas); each bracelet was decorated with four stylized butterflies inlaid in turquoise, lapis lazuli and carnelian, separated by small carnelian discs. Similar animal and floral elements featured in the decoration of her furniture, while the footboard of the bed carried a feather pattern in faience.
The overall impression given by Hetepheres’ belongings is of luxury and magnificence appropriate to a king’s mother. As she travelled around in her carrying-chair, holding a lotus flower to her nose, her multiple silver bracelets glinting in the sun, she must have been a dazzling sight, even in a country and at a time when the greatest monument the world had ever seen was rising slowly on the Giza plateau.
10 | Khufu
L
ORD OF THE
G
REAT
P
YRAMID
‘Man fears time, but Time fears the pyramids.’ The well-known Arab proverb sums up the feelings of awe and wonder that visitors of countless generations have experienced when looking up at the pyramids of Giza and especially the most magnificent of the three, the Great Pyramid of Khufu. Icon of ancient Egyptian civilization, the Great Pyramid is both age-old and timeless. Its stupendous size and phenomenal precision are bewildering. The statistics of its construction are familiar, but bear repeating. The monument contains about 2,300,000 blocks of limestone, meaning that the builders would have had to set one block in place every two or three minutes during a ten-hour day, working seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year for the duration of Khufu’s reign. The Grand Gallery is a breathtaking architectural achievement, its corbelled roof rising to a height of 8.74 m (26 ft). Shafts leading from the burial chamber and a second chamber (probably intended to house the king’s ka-statue) extend in a straight line through the solid masonry to the outer edge of the pyramid, and are perfectly aligned to the constellation Orion and the circumpolar stars. The pyramid itself has a base length of 230.33 m (756 ft), and would originally have risen to a height of 146.59 m (481 ft), yet its orientation is only one-twentieth of a degree (3’6” to be precise) off true north. If the architectural achievement is staggering, so too are the logistics. The administrative and organizational effort required to realize such an enormous building project must have tested the Egyptian state to an unprecedented degree; indeed, it has been said that, while the Egyptians built the pyramids, the pyramids also built Egypt.
Much has been written about the Great Pyramid, yet surprisingly little is known about the man for whom it was built, King Khufu. His name, in full, was Khnum-khufui, ‘Khnum, he protects me’, suggesting a special affinity with the creator-god Khnum who, according to Egyptian religion, fashioned men on his potter’s wheel. Khufu certainly seems to have grown up with a sense of his own, god-given status. His taste for gargantuan monuments did not, however, come out of the blue. His father Sneferu had inaugurated the era of colossal pyramid construction, and Khufu would have grown up seeing two huge pyramids rise above the sands of Dahshur. He succeeded his father when still a relatively young man, since he is known to have reigned for at least twenty-four years and probably achieved nearer thirty. Khufu’s senior wife, ‘great of sceptre’, was Meritites, but he had at least one other consort. His eldest son and heir was Kawab, but he apparently predeceased his father, so instead the throne passed next to another son Djedefra and then to his younger brother Khafra. Khufu’s remaining sons included princes named Khufukhaf, Minkhaf, Hordjedef, Bauefra and Babaef. With the notable exception of the king’s mother, Hetepheres (no. 9), it seems to have been quite a male-dominated royal family. Many of Khufu’s relatives were buried in mastabas (tombs with a bench-like, rectangular superstructure) in the extensive eastern cemetery laid out adjacent to the Great Pyramid. In death, as in life, the king intended to be surrounded by his inner circle.
To supply the mammoth building project taking shape on the Giza plateau, a huge limestone quarry was opened up nearby, and expeditions were sent by Khufu to secure smaller quantities of costlier stone from sites the length and breadth of Egypt: diorite from the southern Libyan desert near Toshka, calcite from Hatnub in Middle Egypt, turquoise from the Wadi Maghara in southwestern Sinai. In retrospect, it looks as if the entire economic and bureaucratic machinery of the state was directed to a single purpose: the construction of a monument to kingship, a ‘resurrection machine’ on an unprecedented scale. So, too, it must have appeared to Egyptians of Khufu’s own time and to the generations who came after. The Great Pyramid gave its royal builder the posthumous reputation, perhaps richly deserved, of a megalomaniac tyrant. A series of stories composed several centuries later, at the end of the Middle Kingdom, cast him in a poor light, especially by comparison with his father Sneferu. In one of the so-called Tales of Wonder, set in Khufu’s reign, the court is visited by a magician who is reputed to be able to reattach a severed head. Intrigued, Khufu orders him to demonstrate his powers on a human prisoner, but the magician manages to persuade the king to use a goose instead, deploring that such a thing should be done to one of ‘god’s cattle’.
By the fourth century BC, Khufu’s reputation had reached an all-time low. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote: ‘Kheops [i.e. Khufu] brought the country into all kinds of misery. He closed the temples, forbade his subjects to offer sacrifices, and compelled them without exception to labour upon his works… The Egyptians can hardly bring themselves to mention… Kheops…, so great is their hatred.’ In a civilization accustomed to – indeed, predicated upon – large-scale royal building projects, it seems that the biggest monument of all aroused more revulsion than wonder, and seemed somehow to overstep the normal standards of decency and decorum.
Another, more recent dictator, Napoleon Bonaparte, is reputed to have addressed his troops, camped on the Giza plateau, with the words: ‘Soldiers of France, forty centuries gaze down upon you.’ It is a delicious irony that the only known three-dimensional image of Khufu, builder of Egypt’s greatest monument, is a tiny, ivory statuette, scarcely bigger than a man’s thumb, measuring just 7.6 cm (3 in) in height. Though the Great Pyramid itself looks likely to survive another four millennia, the vagaries of archaeological survival have certainly cut its original owner down to size.
11 | Hemiunu
O
VERSEER OF
W
ORKS
The Great Pyramid erected at Giza for King Khufu was not only the tallest building the world had ever seen (or would see for another 4,400 years); it was also the biggest construction project and the most complex feat of administration ever undertaken in ancient Egypt, a civilization characterized by grand monuments and an all-encompassing bureaucracy. The sheer logistics of the operation – provisioning and organizing the workforce, housed in its own ‘pyramid city’; quarrying and transporting the stone; building and maintaining the ramps; marshalling the surveyors, architects and supervisors – were as impressive a feat as the pyramid itself. Yet in charge of the whole building site was one man: his name was Hemiunu.
In the early 4th Dynasty, nearly all senior officials were members of the royal family and Hemiunu was no exception. He was probably the son of Prince Nefermaat, and hence the grandson of Sneferu and nephew of Khufu. His position at court would certainly have opened up opportunities for rapid advancement, but Hemiunu must have possessed innate ability as well, for his rise through the ranks of the administration was impressive. His promotion is reflected in his tomb, which began as a substantial enough monument next to the Great Pyramid but was considerably enlarged to keep pace with Hemiunu’s status. One of its reliefs shows him in his prime, his facial features suggesting a combination of self-confidence and determination: aquiline nose, rounded chin and strong jaw.
