There can be no doubt that the great kings of the Ramessid Period were immensely powerful rulers. Even Rameses XI was obviously still able to mobilize an army that was strong enough to repel his opponent’s troops all the way back to Nubia. And yet it is undeniable that royal prestige had gradually eroded in the course of the 19th and 20th Dynasties. As we have seen, political and economic developments, which had led to the breakdown of the central government and the concentration of ever more power in the hands of the high priests of Amun, greatly contributed to this erosion. On the other hand, these developments may themselves be seen as the result, or at least the symptoms, of a much more fundamental change. At the root of this change is yet again the Amarna Period.
Akhenaten had tried to remake society and had failed, even though he had initially enjoyed the support of the army. What was worse, however, is that in the eyes of all but a few of the Amarna elite he had actually wrecked society. We have already seen how burial customs after the Amarna Period reflect a totally different attitude towards the king, as a reaction against the way Akhenaten had tried to monopolize the funerary beliefs of his subjects. This monopoly was not limited to life in the hereafter, however, but also deeply affected life on earth. Traditionally, access to the god’s cult image in the temple was restricted to the king and the professional priesthood representing him; for the vast majority of the population the only means of getting in contact with the gods of their home town, without the intervention of the state or the official temple cult, was during regularly held processions, when the images of the gods were carried from one temple to another on the occasion of a religious festival. These festivals, which were quite frequent, were public holidays, and they played an enormously important part in people’s religious and social lives. Most Egyptians had a strong emotional bond with their native town and its god, the 'city-god’, to whom they showed a life-long loyalty. The city-god was also the god of the local necropolis, the ‘lord of the burial’ who granted ‘a goodly burial after old age’ to his loyal servants.
Akhenaten had not only banned all gods other than the Aten and abolished the daily rituals in their temples, but with them he had also put an end to the festivals with their processions, and in doing so he had undermined the social identity of his subjects. Instead, he had claimed all devotion and loyalty for himself and the prosperity of the country and the happiness of its inhabitants depended on him alone. He was the ‘city-god’ not just of Akhetaten, but of the whole country, and his daily chariot ride along the royal road at Amarna replaced the divine processions. The history of the i8th Dynasty before the Amarna Period had seen a clear development towards a more personal relationship between the various deities and their worshippers. This development came to a sudden halt when Akhenaten proclaimed a god who could only be worshipped by his son, the king, whereas all individual, personal devotion had to be diverted to the king himself. This total usurpation of personal piety had seriously compromised the credibility of the dogma of divine kingship.
In the period after Amarna, the balance between god and king underwent a dramatic change. The king lost for good the central position he had occupied in the lives of his subjects; instead, the god now acquired many traditional aspects of kingship. In the traditional representative theocracy, the gods embodied the cosmic order that they had created at the beginning of time, while the king, as their intermediary, represented the gods upon earth, maintained cosmic order by means of the temple ritual, and carried out their will by his government. Only very rarely did the gods reveal themselves directly.
And, when they did, they did so to the king.
After the Amarna Period, the problem of the unity and plurality of the gods, which Akhenaten had tried to solve by denying the existence of all but one sole god, was solved in a different way: Amun-Ra became the universal, transcendent god, who existed far away, independent of his creation; the other gods and goddesses were aspects of him, they were his immanent manifestations. This situation is elegantly expressed in a collection of hymns to Amun (preserved in a papyrus now in Leiden), according to which Amun ‘began manifesting himself when nothing existed, yet the world was not empty of him in the beginning’. This universal god was now the true king, and, although the pharaoh’s traditional titles—which were rooted in mythology and express his divinity—did not change, he had in actual fact become more human than ever before in the history of Egypt. The fact that Ay, Horemheb, Rameses I, and even Sety I had all been commoners before they mounted the throne may have had something to do with the speed with which this change took place. The representative theocracy had become a direct theocracy: no longer was the king the god’s divine representative upon earth who carried out his will; rather, the god revealed his will directly to every human being and intervened directly in the events of everyday life and in the course of history.
The new transcendent god had at the same time become a personal god whose will determined the fate of the country and of the individual. Texts express this by bridging the gap between the opposites of being far away and yet nearby: ‘Far away he is as one who sees, near he is as one who hears.’ Amun-Ra looked down upon his worshippers from afar, but at the same time he was near because he heard their prayers and revealed himself in their lives by the manifestation of his will, by his divine intervention.
This new form of religious experience, usually called ‘personal piety’, was wholly characteristic of the Ramessid Period, although its beginnings, suppressed by Akhenaten, went back to the mid-i8th Dynasty. Penitential psalms, inscribed on votive stelae and ostraca by literate members of the ordinary population, were one form in which this piety was expressed. When an individual had commited a sin, divine intervention could mean divine retribution, particularly when this sin had gone undetected and unpunished by a human court of justice. These penitential hymns attributed illness (often blindness, although this word is probably used in a metaphorical sense) to the state of being guilty of a hidden sin, which once revealed in the text on a votive stele was no longer hidden, so that god would ‘return’ to his worshipper and make him ‘see’ again. It was not only the individuals who could sin, but also the country as a whole. In a text of this type inscribed on a Theban tomb wall (TT 139) at the end of the Amarna Period, Amun is begged to return, and in Tutankhamun’s Restoration Stele the gods are also said to have abandoned Egypt.
Another type of votive stele demonstrates that God was also thought to be able to intervene positively in the life of his worshipper—for example, by saving him from a crocodile or making him survive the sting of a scorpion or the bite of a snake. Many gods received specially made stelae or other objects as a thanksgiving for saving their worshippers; there is even a special god Shed, whose name means ‘saviour’, and who, probably not by chance, appears for the first time at Amarna, possibly in spite of official repression. Some people even went one step further and put their whole lives in the hands of their personal patron god or goddess, even to the extent of assigning all their possessions to his or her temple.
Even the king might appeal to his god in his hour of need. When all seemed lost and Rameses II was about to be captured or even killed by his Hittite enemies at the Battle of Qadesh, he called out to his god Amun, and the arrival of the king’s support force at the critical moment was interpreted as proof of the god’s personal intervention. This shows clearly that the king no longer represented god on earth, but was subordinate to him; just like all other human beings, he was subject to the will of god, even though in traditional mythological terms he was still viewed as the divine pharaoh and on his monuments this aspect would continue to be emphasized. Clearly the divide between theological dogma and everyday reality had widened considerably.
Once it had been recognized that god’s will was the governing factor in everything that happened, it became mandatory to know his will in advance. Oracles, which had originally been consulted only by the king, perhaps as early as the Old BCingdom (and which had during the i8th Dynasty been used to seek the god’s approval of a king’s accession or a major trade or military expedition), began to be used in the Ramessid Period to consult the god on all sorts of affairs in the lives of ordinary human beings. Priests would carry the portable bark with the god’s image in procession out of the temple and a piece of papyrus or an ostracon bearing a written question would be laid before him; the god would then indicate his approval or disapproval by making the priests move slightly forwards or backwards or by some other motion of the bark. Appointments, disputes over property, accusations of crimes, and later even questions seeking the god’s reassurance that one would safely live on in the hereafter, were thus subjected to the god’s will.
All of these developments further minimalized the role of the king as god’s representative on earth; the king was no longer a god, but god himself had become king. Once Amun had been recognized as the true king, the political power of the earthly rulers coirld be reduced to a minimum and transferred to Amun’s priesthood. The mummies of their royal ancestors were no longer considered the erstwhile incarnations of god on earth, and so, with few scruples, their tombs could be robbed and their bodies unwrapped.
World History
