Pharaoh: Religious Politics
If pharaoh, embodiment of a god and originator of life’s order, falls, all collapses. Disintegration of central government after the Old Kingdom led to complete governance by local leaders who took on roles similar to a pharaoh’s. With the reestablishment of a central government for the whole country, local centers retained some religious power, and eternal afterlife extended to include high government officials as well as pharaoh and his family. With the collapse of the Middle Kingdom and the first successful foreign invasion, Egyptians invigorated their loyalty to local deities, especially in Upper Egypt, and, with the establishment of the New Kingdom, returned Egyptian religion to its last zenith of political dominance. In the New Kingdom, eternal afterlife extended to every caste of society though happiness and grandeur remained a luxury for the rich. This encouraged closer religious following by individuals as a whole and the continued expansion of temple complexes along the Nile.Much of the king’s power stemmed from his ancestral connection with the gods. The New Kingdom especially emphasized the divine conception of pharaoh. The official process of divine conception began with a council of the major gods to determine the necessary character of the new king. Amun proceeded to rape the queen while Khnum, the creator of mankind, created the soul. Several goddesses acted as midwives to nurse the baby who became pharaoh. Old Kingdom pharaohs concentrated the most power of any time and were actually seen as a gods by the masses; these later adaptations to pharaonic ceremony, however, resulted from a net loss in the king’s power. Pharaoh, meaning “great house,” originally derived from the Egyptian word for palace but widespread use is found from the eighteenth dynasty on. The Egyptian term for gods is “herdsman of mankind” while the word for man means “cattle of the gods.” Pharaoh, an intermediary between these two, offered the security of a stable home to man and the praise and worship of a priest to the gods. For these reasons the religious prevalence of Egyptian life infected even their term for king.
While the king was divine by birth, the coronation ceremony elevated the king to the status of a god by absorbing the royal ka, a divine soul. To visualize these facts, early pyramids represented the physical body of the king which were intended to last forever. Another technique used specific names of the kings themselves to emphasize divine heritage. Amenhotep III used connections with Amun and Re to enforce his rule.
Once definitively divine, the pharaohs controlled the distribution of wealth and the level of prestige to bestow upon favored gods. Thebes rose to prominence at the end of the First Intermediate Period around 2100 BC from the favoritism Theban-pharaohs placed with Amun, a lesser god who quickly spread kingdom-wide and was solidly installed by the twelfth dynasty. The gods showed favor back by blessing the king’s reign and ensuring an ally in the afterlife.
The idea that the dead continued to exist and needed to be supplied with food and drink turned funerary rites into ceremonial banquets. Sacrifices to both gods and kings called for a meal to be served to the statues of the represented entity. Cults of kings dated in each dynasty mark the importance that worship and offering provided sustenance for the dead. While living, pharaoh acted as Horus then went on to assume the position of Osiris as King of the Dead. His son, the new pharaoh, would become the new Horus and repeat the cycle. Osiris, god of the underworld, eventually absorbed king cults since pharaoh became Osiris in the afterlife.
Wealth regulation kept social structure largely intact since distribution of taxes, almost entirely consistent of grain, ensured loyalty retention of the masses to the god-king. Pharaohs granted lands and herds to temples of important gods. Warrior gods received grants before and after battles while fertility gods retained focus at pivotal agricultural times. Despite these dedications, funerary monuments remained the largest industry of the Old Kingdom, and pharaoh gained loyalty by providing tombs for his workers.
Maintaining widespread worker support limited pharaohs after the early pyramid age. Funerary monuments, mastabas, low, flat, brick tomb structures, and pyramids, declined in size while associated temples grew larger and absorbed more land. As time progressed and Egypt continued to prosper, it looked externally for sources of income, largely Nubia to the south and Syria to the northeast. This outward focus kept the populous wealthy while exerting internal frustrations outward, transforming Egypt into an empire.
Change is part of human society. Pharaoh’s power waxed and waned until its final collapse in the Late Period. Egyptian life, for all its resilience, changed as well. Old Kingdom religion restricted blessings in the afterlife to pharaoh and his immediate family. By the Middle Kingdom eternal life could be achieved by or rewarded to the upper class; burial rites evolved into a privilege, “a boon which the king gives.” At the closing of the New Kingdom, any citizen wealthy enough to purchase the Book of the Dead to aid in navigating the netherworld, Duat, could live in the world of the gods.
Just as the Egyptian concept of “heaven” became inclusive, literature and art, which was strictest in the Old Kingdom, loosened over time. Time loosened the safeguards of social change, and in the pharaohs’ closing millennium, tomb paintings worshipped gods to safeguard the eternal soul. Religion no longer sought to paint a life of ease even for kings. Funerary texts aid in recording these transitions. From 3000 BC to 2000 BC the only text to guard and guide the deceased was carved into the tomb walls. Pyramid Texts covered all the possibilities and treated every god as friend and enemy. With the expansion of burial rites, coffin texts rose in popularity. From 1500 BC through the end of Egyptian devoutness nearly two thousand years later, the Book of the Dead, elaborately detailed scrolls, accompanied the body into the tomb. The scrolls contained spells to call gods to assist, quiet the heart from revealing its sins in the final judgment, and give food for the soul as it existed in the other realm.1 That is not to say that everyone entered the world of the gods. The poor, unable to afford any writings at all, remained doomed unless attached to a wealthy patron and buried near his grave. Some wealthy members were expected to fall short in the final judgment and cease to exist.
Pharaohs retained power throughout these shifts with gaps never exceeding 250 years. After the First Intermediary Period, Theban kings gained power via religious support and named officials to power with loyalty to Thebes in distant towns once reunited with Upper Egypt. Amenemhat I stabilized the Middle Kingdom and brought it to maturity by maximizing the government’s centralization around pharaoh’s center in religious spheres in accordance with Ma’at.
Development and Modifications of Afterlife Beliefs
Afterlife from the Old Kingdom onward required sustenance of the spirit and preservation of the body. Pre-dynastic rulers were believed to function in their tombs for eternity, and third dynasty kings went to live in the sky with Osiris forever after judgment via the weighing of their heart.2 Like Osiris, Pharaoh underwent his resurrection in the darkness and silence of his tomb. His body was fitted back together and reanimated by Nut, and he would then leave the tomb by a ladder, in falcon form, or take hold of Nut’s hand and ascend into the sky.3 The king was expected to aid Re in his daily journey and defeat Apophis in the underworld. However, with the expansion of burial beliefs, focus shifted away from aiding the gods’ duty of maintaining the world’s order toward self-service and pleasure. The end result was that, from the Late Period onward, people lost confidence in eternal life because of its purposeless since no real status changes occurred from their physical life, just prolonged existence. With these changes, the Egyptian Late Period holds aspects of individual sin, humility, and awareness of divine mercy.
With the shift in religious interpretations, favored gods rose and ebbed. While in the Old Kingdom Re and Osiris both served as gods of the dead, Re increased in official and cult literature. By the second millennium BC, reference was regularly made to Re, not Osiris, as father of Horus and the king despite the mythology placing Osiris in that position. This change may have occurred because Osiris became accessible to commoners as his realm of the dead opened to them, and Amun became increasingly associated with Re. Continuing this trend, as native pharaohs lost control of Egyptian land, dynastic affinities to gods other than Amun and Re became more common as revealed by kings’ names of the Third Intermediate Period; other gods became readily associated with dynastic families such as the early Ramesside Era’s Set. Dynasty of Ramesses did not reject the sun god. In fact, Ramesses means “Re is enduring in strength.” Nonetheless, “the epithets 'son of Isis' or 'son of Bastet' frequently appeared in royal names during the later Third Intermediate Period, in or following the nomen or 'son of Re' cartouche. The pattern of use of these epithets suggests that they may have indicated dynastic affiliation, at least during the portion of the Third Intermediate Period when the Twenty-second and Twenty-third Dynasties coexisted.” Bastet, popular during the Later Intermediate Period’s animal cult worship, is the root of such pharaoh’s names as Pedubast and Iuput. Each pharaoh usually remained dedicated to his chosen god throughout his reign. Under Ramesses III, Amun clearly represented the wealthiest cult, though classic gods such at Ptah and Atum faired well. The only notable god whose favor fell sharply after the New Kingdom was Set because of his mythological opposition to Horus and, thus, the pharaoh.
The priesthood was normally named by close association with the throne. One of the alternative translations of Hem Neteru, “priest,” is “friend of the king,” which links both the religious office of pharaoh to religion as well as emphasizes the king’s power in selecting those that ran the temple. However, religion restricted the potential for alternative families to be accepted by commoners because of the lack of their divine heritage. The Hyksos, the first foreign rulers in Egypt, claimed to be step-sons of Re in order to affirm their rule’s legitimacy. This strategy became more evident with the collapse of Egyptian self-rule as Persian, Greek, and Roman rulers controlled Egypt for over a millennium, resulting in the fall of pharaoh.
Ineffectiveness of pharaohs during the Ramesside Era caused permanent loss of Syrian and Canaanite influences as the high priest of Amun in Thebes eroded royal authority. By 1100 BC, Ramesses XI held little real power because of a combination of the high priests, a series of Libyan invasions, and prolonged drought and famine. Civil war erupted in Thebes between the army and a besieged high priest in Amun’s temple. The general retreated south into Nubia, and Ramesses XI lost access to the gold mines of Central Africa. This resulted in a split in Egyptian lands and ended the New Kingdom. When Kush invaded Egypt, its rulers and officials adopted names from the Old Kingdom and awarded archaic titles simply for antiquity. Even with these attempts at returning Egypt to its past glory, Kushite rule was not popular. Egypt consistently resented foreign rule and constantly rebelled against its “oppressors.” While most nations quickly succumb to oppression by conquerors, Egypt successfully rebelled against Persia. A later Egyptian rebellion lasted over a century against the Roman Empire. Conversely, internal rule by native pharaohs rarely incited rebellion.
By the eighteenth dynasty viziers controlled everything since the expansion of the empire required an enlarged bureaucracy with two viziers, further reducing the powers of pharaoh. Imposters to the throne, usually at the beginning of a new dynasty, had to prove their ancestry to the Egyptian gods to justify claims to the throne. Logic and religious verbiage needed merely to convince the illiterate masses, but the arguments not have to be coherent with past records. Herodotus wisely recognized that Egyptians will serve whoever can justify himself as pharaoh. Divine birth, although invented in the Old Kingdom to cement justification of pharaonic rule, became widely used by New Kingdom pharaohs. Divine intervention, the gods’ placement a non-familial male on the throne, established claims of usurper pharaohs to explain dynastic changes. Alternatively, to gain legitimacy, Libyan rulers of the Third Intermediate Period vested the powers of kingship in Amun-Re himself, thus making the king his first servant, not his son. The high priest in Thebes adopted kingly titles soon after and seceded.
An excellent case study and the most obvious example of pharaoh’s power over his religion’s will and influence is that of Amenhotep IV, also known as Akhenaten, of the Eighteenth Dynasty. Amenhotep IV in the eighteenth dynasty attempted to create a new religion and subvert much of the power that the temples had accumulated back to the pharaoh via the establishment of Aten as the supreme deity. Aten had long been recognized as the name for the evening body of the sun, but Akhenaten made it first a prominent god and then the only god that could be legally worshipped. Purification of Egyptian religion for Aten was undergone by proscription of the “ritual murder” of other deities, especially Amun. This persecution of other gods gives the most conclusive evidence of Aten’s monotheism.
This restructuring of religion affected every aspect of society. Akhenaten constructed a new capital city, art forms changed drastically, and several temples were destroyed, an unprecedented move. The Egyptians believed that all deities possessed two names: one for every day use and a true name, the “Ren.” If the Ren was obliterated, the soul died, killing the god. While the gods’ true names were only known to high priests because of the responsibility of and ability to control the gods’ powers, complete annihilation of the name irrevocably destroyed the god eternally.
Art forms changed as well. Instead of depicting the royal family as the perfection of humanity, Akhenaten’s family is known for the decrepit appearance portrayed in sculpture. This alteration changed post-Amarna period art as well; while pharaohs retained an ideal form, many exhibited enlarged abdomens revealing their excessive wealth and power . Ultimately, Akhenaten’s plans backfired with strong backlash occurring after his death. The temples, especially Amun-Re’s, accelerated their accumulation of power and land, further undermining pharaoh’s control.
Tutankhamun, Akehnaten’s son, renounced Aten for Amun and destroyed Aten’s temples and city. The next pharaoh, Horemheb, further restored Egypt to its religious polytheism. He also tried to destroy all evidence of Akhenaten’s name, thereby destroying the god in his eternal resting place. From the time of his death onward, Akhenaten is referred to only as “the Enemy” in all Egyptian records.
Around this time in the mid-eighteenth dynasty, Amun-Re became “king of gods,” “the creator,” and “the sole one.”5 After Akhenaten, the later eighteenth dynasty stationed in Thebes brought Amun-Re to prominence with the elaborate expansion of the temple in Karnak. Thus, after the Amarna period, Amun-Re became extremely powerful as pharaohs gave more and more land and power to restore the damage Akhenaten had done. All temples, especially Amun-Re’s, accelerated their accumulation of power and land, further undermining the pharaohs. This escalation occurred at such a rate that by the end of the New Kingdom empire, priests owed the king, as a manifestation of god, their submission. Priests had become as powerful as kings. Shortly thereafter in the Third Intermediate Period, the High Priest of Amun-Re in Thebes robbed Akhenaton’s grave in the Valley of Kings, demolishing most of the remaining evidence of the heretic.
Though the eighteenth dynasty represented the high water mark of the New Kingdom, the nineteenth dynasty by and large transformed Egyptian religion into a competing force against invading peoples by individualizing it to the worshipper. This individualism allowed Egypt to be transformed into a series of interconnected cults with worshippers shared between the gods. New Kingdom religion captured emotion within religious celebration, adding a new element that stood until Christian times.
While Egyptian religion continued to develop throughout its practice, change usually crept so slow that differences can only be distinguished by different dynasties often several centuries apart. Akhenaten’s experiment is notable for its uniqueness. The resulting consequences of his enforcement sped many of the later changes in the religion, mostly centered around the rise of Amun-Re as the most powerful deity, eventually the equivalent to Zeus.
__
Agatha Tyche
Fall of Pharaonic Power
The Kingdom of Kush on Egypt’s southern border invaded the country in the Third Intermediate Period and resolved to restore the historic form of religion and culture. Kushites relied on military might and moral absolutism to restore their corrupted subjects. Restoration included temple repairs and a return to archaic ritual techniques and ancient writing styles.4 Kush rule even reestablished Memphis as the capital to harken back to Old Kingdom rule before the dominance of Thebes.The priesthood was normally named by close association with the throne. One of the alternative translations of Hem Neteru, “priest,” is “friend of the king,” which links both the religious office of pharaoh to religion as well as emphasizes the king’s power in selecting those that ran the temple. However, religion restricted the potential for alternative families to be accepted by commoners because of the lack of their divine heritage. The Hyksos, the first foreign rulers in Egypt, claimed to be step-sons of Re in order to affirm their rule’s legitimacy. This strategy became more evident with the collapse of Egyptian self-rule as Persian, Greek, and Roman rulers controlled Egypt for over a millennium, resulting in the fall of pharaoh.
Ineffectiveness of pharaohs during the Ramesside Era caused permanent loss of Syrian and Canaanite influences as the high priest of Amun in Thebes eroded royal authority. By 1100 BC, Ramesses XI held little real power because of a combination of the high priests, a series of Libyan invasions, and prolonged drought and famine. Civil war erupted in Thebes between the army and a besieged high priest in Amun’s temple. The general retreated south into Nubia, and Ramesses XI lost access to the gold mines of Central Africa. This resulted in a split in Egyptian lands and ended the New Kingdom. When Kush invaded Egypt, its rulers and officials adopted names from the Old Kingdom and awarded archaic titles simply for antiquity. Even with these attempts at returning Egypt to its past glory, Kushite rule was not popular. Egypt consistently resented foreign rule and constantly rebelled against its “oppressors.” While most nations quickly succumb to oppression by conquerors, Egypt successfully rebelled against Persia. A later Egyptian rebellion lasted over a century against the Roman Empire. Conversely, internal rule by native pharaohs rarely incited rebellion.
By the eighteenth dynasty viziers controlled everything since the expansion of the empire required an enlarged bureaucracy with two viziers, further reducing the powers of pharaoh. Imposters to the throne, usually at the beginning of a new dynasty, had to prove their ancestry to the Egyptian gods to justify claims to the throne. Logic and religious verbiage needed merely to convince the illiterate masses, but the arguments not have to be coherent with past records. Herodotus wisely recognized that Egyptians will serve whoever can justify himself as pharaoh. Divine birth, although invented in the Old Kingdom to cement justification of pharaonic rule, became widely used by New Kingdom pharaohs. Divine intervention, the gods’ placement a non-familial male on the throne, established claims of usurper pharaohs to explain dynastic changes. Alternatively, to gain legitimacy, Libyan rulers of the Third Intermediate Period vested the powers of kingship in Amun-Re himself, thus making the king his first servant, not his son. The high priest in Thebes adopted kingly titles soon after and seceded.
Pharaonic Influence
Once a pharaoh had justified his claims to the throne, he functioned as high priest to every god. Service in the temple was supposed to dominate a pharaoh’s daily tasks, but few pharaohs are known to have fulfilled that obligation, delegating worship to high priests. The formalized worship service would run as follows: “The king came in procession to the House of Re and entered the temple with loud acclaim, the chief lector praising the god and repelling those hostile to the king. The rite of the temple was performed, and the vestment was fastened on, and the king was purified with incense and cool water.” Over time, a small number of non-pharaohs, such as Imhotep, a sixth dynasty medicine man, and Amenhotep of Hapi, an eighteenth dynasty vizier, came to be worshipped as gods. None of these cults ever achieved large followings.An excellent case study and the most obvious example of pharaoh’s power over his religion’s will and influence is that of Amenhotep IV, also known as Akhenaten, of the Eighteenth Dynasty. Amenhotep IV in the eighteenth dynasty attempted to create a new religion and subvert much of the power that the temples had accumulated back to the pharaoh via the establishment of Aten as the supreme deity. Aten had long been recognized as the name for the evening body of the sun, but Akhenaten made it first a prominent god and then the only god that could be legally worshipped. Purification of Egyptian religion for Aten was undergone by proscription of the “ritual murder” of other deities, especially Amun. This persecution of other gods gives the most conclusive evidence of Aten’s monotheism.
This restructuring of religion affected every aspect of society. Akhenaten constructed a new capital city, art forms changed drastically, and several temples were destroyed, an unprecedented move. The Egyptians believed that all deities possessed two names: one for every day use and a true name, the “Ren.” If the Ren was obliterated, the soul died, killing the god. While the gods’ true names were only known to high priests because of the responsibility of and ability to control the gods’ powers, complete annihilation of the name irrevocably destroyed the god eternally.
Art forms changed as well. Instead of depicting the royal family as the perfection of humanity, Akhenaten’s family is known for the decrepit appearance portrayed in sculpture. This alteration changed post-Amarna period art as well; while pharaohs retained an ideal form, many exhibited enlarged abdomens revealing their excessive wealth and power . Ultimately, Akhenaten’s plans backfired with strong backlash occurring after his death. The temples, especially Amun-Re’s, accelerated their accumulation of power and land, further undermining pharaoh’s control.
Tutankhamun, Akehnaten’s son, renounced Aten for Amun and destroyed Aten’s temples and city. The next pharaoh, Horemheb, further restored Egypt to its religious polytheism. He also tried to destroy all evidence of Akhenaten’s name, thereby destroying the god in his eternal resting place. From the time of his death onward, Akhenaten is referred to only as “the Enemy” in all Egyptian records.
Around this time in the mid-eighteenth dynasty, Amun-Re became “king of gods,” “the creator,” and “the sole one.”5 After Akhenaten, the later eighteenth dynasty stationed in Thebes brought Amun-Re to prominence with the elaborate expansion of the temple in Karnak. Thus, after the Amarna period, Amun-Re became extremely powerful as pharaohs gave more and more land and power to restore the damage Akhenaten had done. All temples, especially Amun-Re’s, accelerated their accumulation of power and land, further undermining the pharaohs. This escalation occurred at such a rate that by the end of the New Kingdom empire, priests owed the king, as a manifestation of god, their submission. Priests had become as powerful as kings. Shortly thereafter in the Third Intermediate Period, the High Priest of Amun-Re in Thebes robbed Akhenaton’s grave in the Valley of Kings, demolishing most of the remaining evidence of the heretic.
Though the eighteenth dynasty represented the high water mark of the New Kingdom, the nineteenth dynasty by and large transformed Egyptian religion into a competing force against invading peoples by individualizing it to the worshipper. This individualism allowed Egypt to be transformed into a series of interconnected cults with worshippers shared between the gods. New Kingdom religion captured emotion within religious celebration, adding a new element that stood until Christian times.
While Egyptian religion continued to develop throughout its practice, change usually crept so slow that differences can only be distinguished by different dynasties often several centuries apart. Akhenaten’s experiment is notable for its uniqueness. The resulting consequences of his enforcement sped many of the later changes in the religion, mostly centered around the rise of Amun-Re as the most powerful deity, eventually the equivalent to Zeus.
1 The Book of Coming Forth by Day or the Book of the Dead is a scroll filled with the secrets for guidance through the underworld Duat. The scrolls provided the dead navigator with maps, passwords, spells to summon minor gods for assistance, and other magical instructions to aid the dead on their journey to the afterlife. The Book of the Dead gains widespread use in the New Kingdom which continues into the Roman era. Largely available to the wealthiest classes, cheaper, less effective scrolls have been found buried with the lower classes because the hope for eternal life it provided.
2 The actual location of Osiris’s world is debated since the Egyptian texts change over time. Old Kingdom texts hold to the deceased kings going to the North sky to dwell with the ikhemu seku, “imperishable ones.” New Kingdom texts involve a more intimate relationship with Nut, the sky goddess, who’s body is the entrance to the underworld on the western horizon.
3 Nut is involved in the afterlife because her body led to the heavens. As the sky, the goddess is associated with rebirth because of sunrise represents life on the eastern horizon and death because of sunset represents death on the western horizon leading to the underworld.
4 The Third Intermediate Period Kushite writing so perfectly held to Old Kingdom spelling and grammar that Egyptologists initially thought many of the tablets dated back to the Old Kingdom. The resolution came about only with recognition of anachronistic dates and references.
5 Egyptians held vowels sacred and never wrote them in hieroglyphs; thus, Egyptologists are unaware of how Egyptian actually sounded. More importantly, the lack of vowels gives several alternative spellings of names because of the omitted letters in the original texts. The spelling of Amun-Re in this paper is taken from the most common form of the name.
Agatha Tyche
