Читать книгу A History of Ancient Egypt - Marc Van De Mieroop - Страница 28

The prestige of antiquity especially applied to the office of kingship. All the kings of Egypt were part of a lengthy sequence of universal rulers that went back to the start of history and even before. The Egyptians expressed this concept clearly in what we call king lists, a set of documents from the entirety of Egyptian history, which did not all have the same function in antiquity. The group of documents that survived is small and includes mostly fragmentary records. More material is bound to appear; very recently a scholar recognized a piece of a list written in Demotic during the late Ptolemaic Period in a collection of papyrus scraps.

Around 1290, King Sety I of the 19th dynasty had himself depicted with crown prince Rameses, to become Rameses II, on the walls of the temple at Abydos (Figure 9.1). The scene shows them giving offerings to a long line of 75 predecessors, each one represented by a cartouche, arranged in correct chronological order. The list is not complete, but edits history to remove discredited rulers, such as the foreign Hyksos and four or five kings of the 18th dynasty, which had ended in Sety’s youth. The 18th‐dynasty rulers omitted were Queen Hatshepsut, whose joint reign with Thutmose III was anathema to the idea of exclusive rule, and the kings associated with the so‐called Amarna revolution. A list comparable to Sety’s, now damaged, stood in Rameses II’s temple at Abydos (Figure 1.7), and a somewhat earlier representation at Karnak shows King Thutmose III making offerings to the statues of 61 predecessors, not in chronological order.

Figure 1.7 This image shows a detail of a fragmentary king list carved on a slab of limestone that was found in the temple of Rameses II at Abydos. The preserved part of the list, 135 cm high and 370 cm long, contains 34 royal names in cartouches. The upper row lists rulers of the First Intermediate Period; the lower row kings of the 18th and early 19th dynasties, omitting Queen Hatshepsut and the Amarna kings. British Museum, London EA 117.

Source: Werner Forman / Art Resource, NY

Non‐royal people could also honor past kings. In his tomb decoration at Saqqara, an official of Rameses II depicted the cartouches of 57 kings from the first to the 19th dynasty in correct order, but for the inversion of the 11th and 12th dynasties. A tomb in Thebes shows the priest Amenmose making offerings to the statues of 12 kings, including all those then considered legitimate kings of the 18th dynasty (as well as the queen of the dynasty’s founder) and one of the Middle Kingdom. These lists are all evidence of a cult for royal ancestors, and they show knowledge of the names of past rulers and their correct sequence, although there was no attempt to depict them all.

Sety’s list at Abydos starts with Menes, then considered the original unifier of Egypt, but kingship did not begin with Menes in Egyptian opinion. The Palermo Stone, a monument whose fragments are spread over several museums, lists predecessors of the kings of unified Egypt: first men wearing a crown later associated with Lower Egypt, then men wearing a crown later associated with Upper Egypt. For what we call the historical period, the stone provides year‐by‐year annals, giving rulers’ names and short entries on a special event for each year, as well as a measurement of the Nile’s inundation height that year. The list ends in the 5th dynasty, which may have been when the stone was carved, although some scholars suggest that it dates much later.

The two longest and most complete king lists from Egypt take the concept of kingship even further back in time. The Turin King List and Manetho’s History of Egypt start their lists with gods, who ruled for thousands of years. The sequence they provide reflects ideas of creation and the struggles between Horus and Seth that appear in other sources. After the great gods came lesser gods and assorted creatures, such as spirits, until Menes emerged as the first historic ruler. These lists thus assert that kingship arose at the time of creation.

Both the Turin King List and Manetho’s History of Egypt attempt to give a full chronicle of Egyptian kingship including the names of all rulers and the length of their reigns. The list now in the museum of Turin, Italy, is a lengthy papyrus from the 13th century BC, which scholars often call the Turin Royal Canon. It allegedly was complete when discovered in the early 19th century, but is now in many pieces. It lists some 300 names of kings, from Menes to the end of the 17th dynasty, sometimes giving the time they ruled to the day. The list does not sanitize history and includes the despised Hyksos kings. At times it sums up, for example, 955 years and 10 days from Menes to the end of the 8th dynasty, which shows a concern to subdivide the long sequence of rulers.

The idea of subdivision is fully developed in the final, and today most influential, king list of Egypt. In the 3rd century BC, an Egyptian priest, Manetho, wrote a history of his country in the Greek language, the Aegyptiaca or History of Egypt (see Chapter 13). Preserved only in quotations and paraphrases of later authors, it attempted to account for Egypt’s history with a king list into which Manetho inserted narratives. The latter often recall earlier stories about Egyptian rulers and show that Manetho had access to writings now lost. The long king list was a massive reconstruction of the names of rulers and the length of their reigns. For periods when power in Egypt was centralized, Manetho lists individual royal names; when it was diffuse, he regularly mentions only the number of kings, their capital, and the total number of years they ruled. His list includes all rulers from Menes to the last king, whom Alexander defeated in 332 BC, the Persian Darius III Codoman.