69 | Yupa
S
UCCESSFUL SECOND
-
GENERATION IMMIGRANT
Yupa was born under Seti I, but his career was contained within the long reign of Ramesses II. Like his father Urhiya (no. 68) before him, Yupa decided to join the army as the best path to prominence. As a second-generation immigrant, he had the considerable advantage that his family was already fully integrated into Egyptian society, and reasonably affluent. His father’s influence no doubt helped his career progression, but he still had to start at the bottom and work his way up. Hence, at the time of the Battle of Kadesh, in Ramesses II’s fifth year, the teenaged Yupa was a trainee stable-master in the King’s Great Stable, one of forty young recruits charged with various lowly jobs. His particular task was the production of a fixed quota of 2,000 bricks. It was hardly exciting or challenging work, but a necessary training for the rigours and discipline of army life that lay ahead. And it had its compensations: the camaraderie among the recruits led to the formation of life-long friendships, especially for a popular figure like Yupa. Decades later, he would be mentioned on the stelae of totally unrelated contemporaries, perhaps friends from his army days.
He served in the army for twenty-five years before following in his father’s footsteps and entering civilian service, first as High Steward of the king and then as Steward of the Ramesseum. However, in Yupa’s case, this was not the pinnacle of his achievements. In his mid-sixties, he was given the honorific but highly prestigious role of royal jubilee-herald. In this capacity, he was responsible for organizing the formal proclamation throughout Egypt of the king’s ninth to fourteenth jubilee festivals. The fact that the previous holders of the post had been the king’s favourite son, Khaemwaset (no. 72), and the Vizier Khay shows the esteem in which Yupa was held at court.
He was able to commission a kneeling statue of himself and a fine sarcophagus, and even had himself immortalized in an inscription inside the temple of Montu at Armant. Like all good Egyptians, he left behind descendants to honour his memory. But none was to equal his own success. Despite his foreign name and background, Yupa’s career was characterized by ambition, hard work, family influence and royal patronage: a quintessentially Egyptian combination.
70 | Ramesses II
T
HE GREATEST OF ALL PHARAOHS
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
The fallen colossus which inspired Shelley’s famous poem stands to this day in the Ramesseum, the Theban mortuary temple of Ramesses II (Ozymandias is a Greek corruption of his Egyptian throne-name, Usermaatra). The mighty who ruled Egypt in subsequent generations might well have despaired, for Ramesses built more temples and erected more colossal statues of himself than any other pharaoh, before or after. He seemingly left his mark at every major site the length and breadth of Egypt and Nubia. Determined to ensure that his name could not be removed or his monuments usurped by his successors, he had his cartouches carved unusually deeply into the stone. Ramesses II – ‘the Great’ as he is often called – is thus the most ubiquitous and the most recognizable royal builder on the modern tourist itinerary.
In keeping with his unparalleled architectural legacy, Ramesses bestrode his own age like a colossus. He fathered more children than any of his royal predecessors or successors: as many as fifty sons and fifty-three daughters. It is therefore a fair bet that most of the native-born pharaohs who ruled Egypt after Ramesses were his descendants, by one route or another. For his sons, he built the largest tomb in the Valley of the Kings, possibly the largest in the whole of Egypt; it is still under excavation, and the number of its chambers has already surpassed 150 with more being discovered every year. Ramesses commissioned temples on an equally lavish scale. In Nubia alone, he built at Beit el-Wali, Gerf Hussein, Wadi es-Sebua, Derr and Napata. In Egypt, his construction projects were concentrated in the three great cities of the age: the dynastic capital of Per-Ramesses (modern Qantir), the traditional capital of Memphis and the religious capital, Thebes. The Theban monuments have survived the best, and none is more impressive than the Ramesseum. Inscriptions in the sandstone quarries at Gebel el-Silsila record that 3,000 quarrymen were employed in supplying stone for this project alone. It was designed to perpetuate the name and cult of Ramesses for eternity, as expressed in its official name, The Mansion of Millions of Years of Ramesses in the Domain of Amun United-with-Thebes. The Ramesseum was an ingenious blend of traditional and innovative features, a masterpiece of logistics and ambition. As such, it was the perfect embodiment of its creator.
Ramesses was born during the reign of Horemheb, before his grandfather Paramessu (Ramesses I) had been designated as heir. The family’s swift rise from provincial obscurity to the throne of Egypt had a profound effect on the young Ramesses’ upbringing. At the age of thirteen or fourteen, he accompanied his father Seti I on campaign for the first time. Ramesses had already been granted the titular rank of Commander-in-Chief, and he seems to have relished army life. He rode out again at his father’s side a year or two later, to confront Egypt’s most feared enemy, the Hittites. It was the beginning of an involvement that would characterize Ramesses’ entire reign.
When he reached adulthood, at the age of sixteen, he was granted his own household, complete with concubines, to join his two existing wives, Nefertari and Isetnofret. As time went by, Ramesses was entrusted with more and more of the affairs of state such as supervising quarrying work at Aswan, and overseeing the construction of the grand hypostyle hall at Karnak. Aged twenty-two, Ramesses led his first military campaign, putting down a minor rebellion in Nubia. Following in the family tradition, he took along with him two of his own young sons, Amenhir-wenemef and Khaemwaset (no. 72). Then, in his mid-twenties, Ramesses became sole monarch on the death of his father. One of the longest and most magnificent reigns of Egyptian history had started in earnest.
To confirm his accession, Ramesses participated in the Opet Festival in the first year of his reign, rejuvenating himself through close association with the god Amun. True to his instincts as a prodigious builder, Ramesses ordered that construction should start on a grand addition to Luxor Temple (the setting for the Opet Festival), and that work on his father’s temple at Abydos should begin again after years of neglect. To tighten his grip on the influential Theban priesthood, Ramesses appointed a new High Priest of Amun, Nebwenenef. Within a year, he had signalled that he was indisputably in charge.
Foreign affairs then took centre stage, as Ramesses launched a campaign to restore Egyptian control over the province of Amurru. This was a mere prelude, however. In the fifth year of his reign, he decided to win back all the conquests his father had made, even if it meant confrontation with the powerful Hittite army. Ramesses led from the front, riding in his chariot at the head of his four divisions as they left Per-Ramesses, bound for the fortified city of Kadesh. A gifted tactician, he took the precaution of sending a support force up the Mediterranean coast to rendezvous with the main army at Kadesh. Within a month of leaving Egypt, 2,000 men were making camp on a ridge to the south of the city. They faced a Hittite force nearly twice as numerous. Without warning, the Hittite chariotry attacked one of the Egyptian divisions as it made for camp, scattering the infantry. Ramesses found himself isolated except for his personal bodyguard and shield-bearer, surrounded on all sides by the enemy, with the Egyptians in panic. In an impressive display of decisive action under fire, he rallied his troops to defend themselves, just long enough to allow the support force – which had arrived from the coast in the nick of time – to engage the Hittites and save the Egyptians from utter annihilation.
Through his own leadership, Ramesses had prevented a crushing defeat. Although the Battle of Kadesh was, in reality, a stalemate, the king presented it as a famous victory, not least because of the part he had played in the turn of events. He had scenes and accounts of the battle included in the decoration of all his major building projects. Further Syrian campaigns would follow, three and five years later, but none would equal the Battle of Kadesh for sheer drama.
The long-term consequence of Kadesh was a remarkable peace treaty with the Hittites. It was an inspired piece of diplomatic compromise. It secured continued Egyptian access to eastern Mediterranean ports, and free passage as far north as Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra), in exchange for Egypt ceding control of the province of Amurru to the Hit-tites. Both sides signed up to a mutual non-aggression pact and defensive alliance, recognizing each other’s laws of legitimate succession, and entering into an unprecedented extradition agreement. To seal the agreement, senior members of the Egyptian and Hittite royal families exchanged letters of friendship.
On the domestic stage, Ramesses vigorously promoted a personality cult, through which he took the deification of kingship to new heights. This trend reached its apogee in the temples at Abu Simbel, inaugurated by the king and his chief wife, Nefertari, in the twenty-fourth year of his reign. The main temple was precisely oriented so that, at sunrise on 22 February and 22 October (one of which is assumed to have been Ramesses’ birthday), the sun entered the sanctuary and illuminated the figures of three of the four gods worshipped there: Amun, Ra and Ramesses himself (Ptah, as a god of the underworld, remained in the shadows). The king evidently felt he could get away with more in Nubia than he could in Egypt proper; his temple at Aksha was explicitly dedicated to ‘Ramesses, the Great God, Lord of Nubia’.
But Ramesses’ thoughts were not fixed entirely on himself. His beloved wife, Nefertari (‘the beautiful companion’), ‘for whose sake the very sun does shine’, had been his constant companion since before his sole reign. Even for a man with as many wives as Ramesses, he must have been grief-stricken when Nefertari died, shortly after the official opening of Abu Simbel. The funeral ceremonies over, Isetnofret was promoted to the position of King’s Great Wife, the second of eight women to hold this rank during Ramesses’ sixty-seven-year reign. Marriage was, of course, a useful tool in the diplomatic armoury, and Ramesses carried out protracted negotiations to secure himself a Hittite bride. After a year of discussions, a Hittite princess set out from the citadel of Hattusas (modern Boghazköy) and arrived at Per-Ramesses to be received by the king in his palace and given an Egyptian name, Maathorneferura. Her dowry included gold, silver, bronze, slaves, horses, cattle, goats, and rams. She joined a cosmopolitan harem which included Babylonian and Syrian women, reflecting the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural nature of Ramesses’ court. Some time later, Ramesses welcomed an even more distinguished visitor from Hatti, in the person of the Hittite crown prince, Hishmi-Sharruna. Ramesses’ suggestion of a visit from the Hittite king met with a cool response, but it is possible that a high-level summit meeting between the two greatest leaders of the Near East did in fact take place on neutral territory. It would have been an extraordinary encounter.
The second half of Ramesses’ reign seems to have been dominated, above all else, by frequent jubilees. The first took place in his thirtieth year, in the Festival Hall at Per-Ramesses. This was followed by further celebrations at periodic intervals of every two or three years, until the thirteenth jubilee (there may have been a fourteenth). If the country was exhausted by so much festivity in honour of the king, Ramesses himself revelled in it. When he died at the age of ninety-two, the expression on his face was one of pride, dignity and contentment. He must have been confident that his magnificent reign would never be eclipsed. He was truly a ‘king of kings’.
71 | Raia
A
MUSICIAN FROM
M
EMPHIS
The music of ancient Egypt is lost forever. Without musical notation (at least until the Ptolemaic period), the songs and tunes that played such a large part in Egyptian life, in private and public spheres, in secular and religious celebrations, can never be recovered. Some of the instruments survive but we can only guess at the melodies and harmonies they produced. However, there is no doubting the centrality of music and musicians in pharaonic culture. In his life and death, Raia offers us a glimpse of that vanished world of sound.
Raia was Chief of Singers in the temple of Ptah at Memphis in the reign of Ramesses II. Although his title referred only to singing, he was an all-round musician and his official duties included playing the harp before statues of Ptah and Hathor Lady of the Sycamore. Raia directed the temple’s all-male choir; several of its members, such as Ray, Neferp-tah and Ptahhotep, were probably close friends.
Raia’s wife Mutemwia shared his musical interests. She was a Chantress of Amun, a role which involved singing and probably playing a musical instrument in the daily service of the god. At their home in Memphis, Raia and Mutemwia and their daughter enjoyed a life of simple domesticity. They shared their house with Mutemwia’s unmarried sisters Iuy and Kuyu, while a pet monkey completed the household. Raia and his wife got on well with their neighbours, Paser the builder and his brother Tjuneroy, the overseer of works. Indeed, it was probably through these friends’ influence at court that Raia was able to build for himself a tomb-chapel in the prestigious necropolis of Saqqara.
Lacking great means, Raia’s funerary monument was a tiny affair. It was marked above ground by a small brick pyramid, resting on a slab of limestone which formed the roof of the tomb-chapel. This room was so small that a visitor could only just stand up in it. Raia made all the necessary provisions for his afterlife, appointing a lector-priest called Shedamun to look after his mortuary cult, but there was hardly any space for the priest to perform his duties!
Despite the modesty of his tomb, Raia’s popularity among his family, friends and colleagues was amply demonstrated at his funeral. His mummy was borne to the tomb on a catafalque drawn by oxen. It was received at the tomb entrance by a priest wearing a mask of the god Anubis, before being lowered into the burial-chamber. (Later, Mutemwia would be interred beside her husband, so that they might spend eternity together.) His widow threw dust over her head in the traditional sign of grief, accompanied by other female mourners, some of them perhaps hired for the occasion. Most fitting of all, the surviving members of Raia’s temple choir gave their much-loved director a musical send-off, singing him to the grave.
72 | Khaemwaset
T
HE FIRST EGYPTOLOGIST
The pyramids of the Memphite necropolis were already over a thousand years old at height of the New Kingdom. How did the Egyptians of that ‘golden age’ regard their own past and its striking architectural remains? An answer is to be found in the life of Khaemwaset, the fourth son of Ramesses II.
Born early in his father’s co-regency with Seti I, Khaemwaset was groomed from an early age for his royal destiny and received the full training appropriate for a king’s son. At the age of just five, he had his first taste of military action when he accompanied his father and elder brother Amenhirwenem on a campaign to crush a minor rebellion in Lower Nubia. Both boys rode in their own war chariots, albeit driven by experienced officers. In his early twenties, Khaemwaset was given religious responsibility as sem-priest of Ptah, deputy and assistant to the High Priest in the national capital’s main temple. For Khaemwaset, this appointment may have felt like a homecoming. His mother, the King’s Great Wife Isetnofret, had spent time in the region of Memphis, and the prince himself may have been born there. Certainly, the capital and its ancient necropolis were to occupy and fascinate Khaemwaset for the rest of his life.
One of his first official duties was to participate in the burial of the Apis bull in the sixteenth year of his father’s reign. Khaemwaset contributed objects for the tomb and must have been deeply affected by the ceremony with its combination of powerful symbolism and great antiquity. When he found himself directing the funeral rites for the next Apis fourteen years later, having succeeded as High Priest of Ptah, Khaemwaset decided to make the occasion grander still and leave his mark for posterity at the same time. To replace the earlier, single interments, he therefore inaugurated a vast underground gallery at Saqqara; opening off the gallery, a new burial-chamber would be carved for each successive Apis burial. On the surface, the cult of the Apis was honoured in a new temple, which also served as the final resting-place for each bull’s mummified body on the day before its burial. In the temple’s dedicatory inscription, Khaemwaset made his bid for immortality, addressing future generations thus:
