The royal ancestors

Mthough in reality Egyptian civilization was ruled kings of many houses and families, Egyptian ngship ideology made use of a particular fiction ¦ the form of the ‘royal ancestors’. This represented kind of monarchical family line reaching back hrough the ages and linking the living king with :is deceased ‘forebears’. This does not mean that

Direct lineage was implied - in fact the official genealogies omit unorthodox or aberrant rulers such as Hatshepsut or Akhenaten. However there was a kind of continuum between the living king, his ‘forebears’ and, ultimately, the gods who ruled as kings at the beginning of the world.

Some kings of the past were particularly venerated. Senwosret III of the 12th dynasty, for example, was remembered for his subjugation of the region to the south of Egypt and was honoured by a small temple built by Tuthmosis HI some 400 years later at el-Lessiya in Nubia. Yet less illustrious rulers were also absorbed into the ancestral tradition upon their deaths, and most were chronicled in the king-lists inscribed in temples such as that of Sethos I at Abydos, where the cartouches of past rulers received veneration and offerings. Representations at a number of sites show that the ancestors also played an important role in various royal and religious rituals. Scenes carved under Ramesses II and Ramesses III showing the harvest festival of the god Min, for example, show statues of the royal ancestors being carried before the king. The statues, which are named in these New Kingdom scenes, include Menes, the legendary first king of the united Egypt. The oldest evidence for the royal ancestors preserve no names and shows simply the

(Above) Ka figure of King Ay. The royalka seems to have incorporated the royal ancestors, as well as the ka of the living king, and as such represented one aspect of the divinity of the deceased king. 18th dynasty. Tomb of Ay, western Valley of the Kings, western Thebes.

(Above right) Engaged pillar statues of Hatshepsut as Osiris. 18th dynasty. Temple of Hatshepsut, Deir el-Bahri, western Thebes.

Idea of a collective group of undifferentiated but deified ancestors, d'he royal ancestors were depicted as divine beings of a high order, and the deceased king was elevated in joining their ranks.

A particular aspect of the royal ancestors may be seen in the ka of the king. While the Egyptian word ka is usually translated as ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ in general usage, the royal ka was more than just an individual spiritual ‘double’. Lanny Bell, who has made detailed studies of the nature of the royal ka, has shown that it embraced the royal ancestors as well as the living king and was central to the Egyptians’ concept of kingly accession. As Bell has written, the aspect of divinity attained by the living Egyptian king occurred only when he became one with the royal ka at the climax of the coronation ceremony. The royal ka was, in this sense, the symbolic and spiritual point of interface between the king and his deified ancestors.