E
XPLORER OF DISTANT LANDS
Egypt’s oldest narrative of foreign travel is inscribed on the façade of a rock-cut tomb, high in the cliffs overlooking the Nile at Aswan. The tomb’s owner, Harkhuf, ranks as one of the greatest explorers of the ancient world.
Like most high-ranking officials in the Old Kingdom, he bore a string of titles denoting his status in court circles. He was also Governor of Upper Egypt and ‘of all mountain-lands belonging to the southern region’. However, his substantive office was that of Chief of Scouts, which gave him responsibility for maintaining security on Egypt’s southern border, and for ensuring that the peoples of Nubia and beyond delivered a steady supply of exotic products – whether as trade or tribute – to the royal treasury. In Harkhuf’s own words, he was the person ‘who brings the produce of all foreign lands to his lord’.
It was on just such a mission to secure trade routes and bring back prestige commodities that Harkhuf undertook his first expedition to the distant land of Yam. Beyond the limits of Egypt’s control, though still within its sphere of influence, Yam lay in present-day Sudan, perhaps along the Shendi reach of the Upper Nile. On the orders of the king, Merenra, Harkhuf and his father left on their 1,000-mile return trip, returning again just seven months later, laden with exotic goods for their sovereign.
Such was the success of this endeavour that Harkhuf was sent to Yam a second time, on this occasion as expedition leader in his own right. He left from Elephantine (ancient Abu) on the road leading due south, but the interest on this journey lay in the political geography of Lower Nubia that Harkhuf made a point of noting on his return trip: ‘I came down through the region of the house of the chief of Satju and Irtjet, I explored those foreign lands. I have not found it done by any companion and chief of scouts who went to Yam previously.’ In particular, the enumeration of districts within the territory of Irtjet constitutes our best evidence for the administration of Lower Nubia at this period. Indeed, it is possible that on this second journey, the trip to Yam, ostensibly to bring back produce, was in fact a pretext: the real purpose may have been to gather intelligence about the state of Lower Nubia. For many centuries, the peoples of the Upper Nile Valley had been subject to Egyptian control; but they were now showing signs of wishing to reassert their political autonomy. The coalescence of districts into larger territorial units was a warning sign that Egypt could not afford to ignore, and accurate information about the level of the threat was vital. Harkhuf returned to Egypt, mission accomplished, after eight months away.
Perhaps in response to the new political realities in Lower Nubia, Harkhuf’s third expedition to Yam followed a different route. He left the Nile Valley in the district of This (ancient Tjeni, near modern Girga), and took the Oasis Road which led via the Kharga Oasis through the eastern Sahara to the Darfur region of Sudan. This route is still used by camel-trains today, and is called in Arabic the Darb el-Arba‘in, ‘the road of 40 (days)’. In order to reach Yam, Harkhuf must have left the road at some point, turning eastwards back towards the Nile. However, when he arrived at his destination, Harkhuf met with an unexpected turn of events, again the result of a changing political situation. The ruler of Yam, with whom Harkhuf wished to trade, had left his own country to wage a military campaign against the Tjemeh of southeastern Libya. Evidently Yam, too, was concerned to defend itself against possible adversaries. Undeterred by this complication, Harkhuf set out immediately in pursuit of the ruler of Yam, following him to Tjemeh-land. The two men met and concluded their negotiations to mutual satisfaction. For his part, Harkhuf proudly set out on his journey back to Egypt with a caravan of 300 donkeys, laden with all the most valuable products of Africa: incense, ebony, precious oil, throwsticks, panther-skins and elephant tusks.
With Lower Nubian chiefs now openly flouting Egyptian supremacy, Harkhuf might have expected a difficult return trip. He was not wrong. Travelling as before along the Nile Valley, he discovered that the chief of Satju and Irtjet had added the whole of Wawat (Nubia north of the Second Cataract) to his growing lands. This enlarged state saw itself as the equal of Egypt, and the chief was not about to allow such a rich booty as Harkhuf’s to pass unhindered through his territory. Only the presence of an armed escort provided by the ruler of Yam won the day for Harkhuf. Having negotiated safe passage, he hurried home to Egypt. We can imagine his relief when, as he neared the royal residence at Memphis, he was welcomed by a convoy of ships laden with supplies of food and drink: not only the staples of bread and beer, but cakes and wine as well.
After three expeditions to Yam on the orders of Merenra, Harkhuf now found himself answerable to a new sovereign, in the form of the boy-king Pepi II. In the young monarch’s first year on the throne, Harkhuf departed on his fourth and final journey to Yam. He does not record the route he took, but we may assume that he carefully avoided passing through the restive statelets of Lower Nubia, opting instead for the safer Oasis Road. On arrival in Yam, he sent a dispatch to Pepi saying that he was returning with ‘all kinds of great and beautiful gifts’. Pre-eminent among them was ‘a pygmy of the god’s dances from the land of the horizon-dwellers’, in other words from the ends of the earth. Harkhuf compared his prize to the pygmy brought from Punt in the reign of the 5th Dynasty king Isesi, but noted that never before had a pygmy been brought back to Egypt from Yam. In reply, the king sent Harkhuf a letter full of excitement and anticipation, urging him to ‘Come north to the residence at once! Hurry and bring with you this pygmy… to delight the heart of King Neferkara [the throne-name of Pepi II].’
Receiving this personal correspondence from the king was the high-point of Harkhuf’s career. He had the complete text of the royal letter inscribed on the façade of his tomb, in pride of place next to the account of his four epic expeditions. For the old explorer, the eagerness of a six-year-old monarch eclipsed all the wonders of Africa.
20 | Pepi II
E
GYPT
’
S LONGEST
-
REIGNING KING
A magnificent alabaster statue, now in Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, shows a tiny royal figure, wearing the nemes headdress of kingship, sitting on his mother’s lap. The composition is striking for, although the child is represented as a miniature adult, to conform to the decorum of monarchy, his scale and posture emphasize his infancy and vulnerability. The boy king in question is Neferkara Pepi II, fourth ruler of the 6th Dynasty. According to later historians, notably Herodotus, Pepi II came to the throne at the age of six and, since he lived to be 100, reigned for longer than any other monarch in Egyptian history.
Of this unusually long reign, surprisingly little is known, with the exception of the king’s early years. Pepi succeeded his elder brother Merenra, who seems to have died unexpectedly early. Because the new king was still only a child, power was exercised on his behalf by his mother, Ankhenesmerira (who may have commissioned the aforementioned statue to underline her relationship to the monarch), aided by her brother Djau, who had been appointed southern vizier by Pepi I. Egyptian artists were evidently rather unused to expressing the concept of a child king, and the results, produced for Pepi II, are unusual experiments in royal iconography. For example, a statue from Pepi II’s pyramid complex shows him as a naked child, squatting with his hands on his knees, yet wearing the royal uraeus (cobra) on his brow.
The most famous event from the first decade of Pepi’s reign is the journey made by Harkhuf (no. 19) to Yam which brought back a dancing pygmy as a trophy for the young king. As soon as Pepi heard about the pygmy, he was unable to contain his excitement and wrote to Harkhuf, urging him to take great care of his precious charge: ‘When he goes down with you into the ship, get worthy men to be around him on deck, lest he fall into the water! When he lies down at night, get worthy men to lie around him in his tent. Inspect ten times at night! My Person desires to see this pygmy more than the gifts of the Sinai and of Punt!’ The combination of childlike enthusiasm and royal authority has made this one of the most memorable extracts from the ancient Egyptian textual record.
Despite his lengthy reign, Pepi II did not depart from the standard 6th Dynasty model in planning his pyramid complex at south Saqqara. The main monument was 150 cubits (78.6 m, 258 ft) square at its base and 100 cubits (52.4 m, 172 ft) high. Appropriately for a king whose extraordinary longevity must have seemed to many of his countrymen more like immortality, the pyramid was named ‘Neferkara is established and living’. It was inscribed inside with extracts from the Pyramid Texts, while much of the decoration of the pyramid temple was slavishly copied from the 5th Dynasty complex of Sahura at Abusir. It is as if artistic creativity had stalled, symptom of a wider malaise in the country at large, which would lead to the breakdown of royal authority and of a dominant court culture after Pepi’s death. Outside the Nile Valley, too, conditions were worsening. In Nubia, the coalition of states reported by Harkhuf began to grow more powerful and threaten Egyptian dominance. One of Pepi’s senior officials, the Chancellor Mehu, was killed by hostile locals while on an expedition to Nubia, and his body had to be retrieved by his son Sabni in the course of a difficult mission.
Back in the capital, however, Pepi seems to have enjoyed a relatively peaceful reign, surrounded by his growing family. He had at least four wives, including two half-sisters Neith and Iput, his niece Ankhesenpepi, and another woman, perhaps a distant cousin, Wedjebten. All were granted their own burials around the king’s pyramid. The burial-chamber of Neith’s pyramid was decorated with Pyramid Texts, for the first time in a non-kingly context. The distinctions between royal and non-royal burial customs and funerary beliefs had already begun to blur, presaging the full-scale ‘democratization of the afterlife’ of the ensuing First Intermediate Period.
Pepi’s great age at his death – he saw ten viziers come and go – caused major problems for the succession: he had outlived so many of his heirs that the royal family struggled to find a single candidate who could command widespread support. A son named Nemtiemsaf II, mentioned as crown prince on a stela from Neith’s pyramid complex, emerged as the next king, but did not last long. He was followed by a series of equally ephemeral rulers as Egypt headed towards political fragmentation. As for Pepi’s posthumous reputation, history was decidedly unkind. A folklore story, perhaps composed in the late Middle Kingdom and popular for many centuries, told of a homosexual relationship between a king Neferkara and his general Sasenet. The tale presents the king’s behaviour in a salacious and unfavourable light:
‘Then he noticed the Person of the Dual King Neferkara going out at night… Then he threw a brick and kicked [the wall], so that a ladder was let down for him. Then he ascended… Now after His Person had done what he desired with him [Sasenet], he returned to the palace…’
It was an ignominious fate for the last significant ruler of the Pyramid Age.
21 | Pepinakht-Heqaib
L
OCAL HERO
Like his predecessor Harkhuf (no. 19), Pepinakht, the Chief of Scouts in the latter part of Pepi II’s reign, also undertook several challenging expeditions to foreign lands. However, for Pepinakht (‘Pepi is victorious’), named in honour of his monarch, fame was to result in more than a mere rock-cut tomb in the cliffs above Aswan.
As nomarch (provincial governor) of the southernmost province of Egypt, in charge of expeditions to Lower Nubia and the security of Egypt’s Nubian frontier, Pepinakht’s loyalty to the crown was rewarded during his career with the sobriquet Heqaib, ‘ruler of the heart’, and with appointments to the mortuary cults of Pepi II and his two predecessors. But Pepinakht’s real skill lay in the twin arms of foreign policy: trade and war. In his own words, it was he ‘who brings the produce of foreign lands to his lord’ and he ‘who casts the terror of Horus into foreign lands’.
Since the beginning of Pepi II’s reign Lower Nubia had continued to coalesce politically and now posed a real threat to Egypt. Hence, Pepinakht’s first royal mission was to deliver a military blow that would reassert Egyptian hegemony – ‘to hack up Wawat and Irtjet’. His own account conveys the essence of the bloody encounter in stark and uncompromising fashion:
‘I acted to the satisfaction of my lord. I slew a large number of them… I brought a large number of them to the Residence as captives, while I was at the head of numerous, strong and bold troops. My lord trusted me fully in every mission on which he sent me.’
Despite Pepinakht’s confidence in his own abilities, the confederacy of Wawat, Irtjet and Satju – later to flower culturally as the so-called C-Group – was not going to be defeated so easily. A second mission ‘to pacify these lands’ was required a few years later, and this time Pepinakht took out an insurance policy against any future insurgency. In addition to the long-horned and short-horned cattle which he conveyed to the royal residence as campaign booty, he also brought human trophies: the sons of the rebellious rulers. This was standard Egyptian practice, and it accomplished two key objectives at once. Not only were the young princes hostages at the Egyptian court, guaranteeing the obedience of their relatives back in Nubia, it was also the hope and intention that they would become culturally Egyptianized through growing up at court with young Egyptian princes. Hence, when they eventually succeeded to their Nubian lands, they might prove more loyal than their fathers. As Pepinakht immodestly remarks of his achievements: ‘I performed the tasks of Headman of the South through my excellent vigilance in doing my lord’s wish.’
Having shown his skill and fortitude in difficult circumstances, Pepinakht was duly sent on a far more dangerous and complex mission. The scenario is worthy of a spy novel, and it sheds a fascinating light on the unpleasant realities of Egyptian foreign policy at the end of the Old Kingdom. Some years earlier, another overseer of scouts and ship’s captain named Anankhet had travelled to the Lebanese coast to build a ship for a voyage to the fabled land of Punt (modern Sudan or Eritrea). While engaged in this task, he and the company of soldiers with him had been ambushed and killed by a group of ‘sand-dwellers’, those persistent troublemakers on Egypt’s northeastern border who had been the target of at least five campaigns earlier in the 6th Dynasty (see Weni, no. 18). For an Egyptian, not to receive a proper burial at home was an appalling prospect, since it spelled utter oblivion. For the Egyptian authorities, to lose an important official to insurgents and not to recover his body was an unbearable injury to national pride. So Pepinakht, the seasoned operator in foreign conflict zones, was sent by the king to retrieve and repatriate Anankhet’s body. That Pepinakht accomplished his mission successfully, driving the rebels to flight and killing some of them in the process, says much about his personal qualities. It also helps to explain his later reputation as a local hero.
Pepinakht was succeeded as Overseer of Scouts by his son Sabni, whose own mission to Wawat was to bring back a pair of obelisks for the temple of Ra at Heliopolis. This was, however, one of the last gasps of royal power, not only in Lower Nubia but also in Egypt itself. For the death of Pepi II was followed by a succession of ephemeral reigns, a weakening of royal authority and the eventual collapse of the Old Kingdom state. But for Pepinakht, the future was altogether brighter. His remarkable career had won him fame in his local community, and his memory continued to be revered long after his death. A shrine was built on the island of Elephantine (ancient Abu), dedicated to ‘Heqaib’, where worshippers came and prayed to their hero to intercede on their behalf with the divine powers. The cult of Heqaib grew in popularity and, for generations, visitors to the sanctuary left votive objects and statues as tokens of their belief in his supernatural powers. During the First Intermediate Period and early Middle Kingdom, the cult was even patronized by several kings, in an extraordinary reversal of the usual pattern of Egyptian religion.
Today, more than 4,000 years after his life and death, Heqaib’s shrine has been excavated and once again receives a steady stream of visitors who come to pay tribute to the place and the man who inspired it.
PART 3
Civil War and Restoration
First Intermediate Period and Middle Kingdom
Following the collapse of central authority at the end of the Old Kingdom, Egypt fragmented along traditional territorial lines. The eventual successors of Pepi II saw the extent of their authority reduced to the Delta and northern Nile Valley, while other, local potentates governed their own home regions in Upper Egypt. Prominent among the latter were Ankhtifi (no. 23), who controlled the three southernmost provinces, and his great rival, the ruler of Thebes. As the various would-be monarchs jostled for power, certain localities and routes of communication became strategically important, notably the desert tracks behind Thebes. Recent discoveries of inscriptions carved here by a local official named Tjauti (no. 22) have greatly expanded our picture of geo-political relations during the First Intermediate Period, as the era following the Old Kingdom is termed.
