The zenith of the New Kingdom was achieved in the long reign of Amenhotep III (1390-1352 Bc). Up to now the kings had always kept some distance from the gods but Amenhotep saw himself already as divine. Some reliefs show him making offerings to himself! He identified with ‘the radiant solar disc’ and so put in place the identification of the ruler and the sun god that was to mark an important shift in royal ideology. His building programme was the most ambitious and ostentatious so far known and the king delighted in magnificent jubilee festivals, even going so far as to dig out enormous harbours alongside the Nile in which he and his chief wife Tiye could display themselves to their subjects from the water.
One of the offshoots of this strategy was a series of statues, from different phases of Amenhotep Ill’s life, that are among the most remarkable creations of Egyptian art. On the west bank, the Colossi, two vast statues of the king, a total of 720 tonnes in weight, still sit before what was originally his expansive mortuary temple, though this is now largely disintegrated. The most magnificent of his surviving buildings are the temples to Amun and the ‘mother goddess’ Mut at Thebes. Thebes was sacred as the base from which the kings of the Eleventh and Twelfth Dynasty and later the Eighteenth Dynasty had unified Egypt and Amun was sustained as its protective god. He was an unseen god of the air (the word Amun means ‘the hidden one’), though in his ‘animal’ form he was portrayed as a human being.
As early as the Middle Kingdom, Amun had been syncretized with the traditional sun god Ra to form a composite god Amun-Ra and the relationship was emphasized even further by Amenhotep III. At the start of Amenhotep’s reign the major temple to Amun was at Karnak where a complex of buildings for his cult had been developed by the early New Kingdom rulers (including Hatshepsut). Now Amun was credited with the victories of the New Kingdom, and the exploits of the warrior kings were proclaimed in reliefs on a new massive temple that Amenhotep III built on an almost virgin site at Luxor, 3 kilometres south of Karnak. The colonnade of sphinxes connecting the two is even now being excavated.
The temples of Luxor and Karnak were built as residences of the gods with all the exclusivity that that implied. They were approached by long avenues, lined in the case of Amun by ram-headed sphinxes. (The ram was the sacred animal of Amun.) Their entrances were guarded by pylons, massive stone gateways, and through them was a series of courts and colonnades which led to the sanctuary of the god. Amen-hotep added a ‘solar’ court to his temples to Amun, a colonnaded space left open to the sun, in recognition of the greater role Ra was to play within the worship of Amun. Further inside the temple complex the courts were roofed. As the holy
Of holies was approached through anterooms, ceilings became lower and the floors higher to represent the original mound from which creation was believed to have emerged. The light was also restricted so that when the sanctuary was reached the cult statue of the god stood almost in darkness. (On Egyptian temples start with Richard Wilkinson, The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt, London and New York, 2000.)
In theory the king was the only person of sufficient divinity to be able to undertake the rituals involved in feeding and sustaining the ka of the god. In his absence select priests were allowed in to act as his representatives. To purify themselves for entry, they and the vessels they used were ritually washed in the sacred pool that was an important feature of each temple. Then they would make a dignified approach to the sanctuary, breaking the door seals that protected the god each night. Each day the statue was anointed and clothed in fresh linen and the prescribed prayers recited before it.
The only chance the public had to participate in the temple rituals of Thebes was at the great festivity of Opet that took place each year at that joyful time when the Nile floods reappeared in the valley. This festival linked the new temple of Amen-hotep III with that at Karnak. The statue of Amun, clothed in gold and jewels, was taken from its sanctuary at Karnak, mounted on a sacred barque, and carried to the side of the Nile. It was then sailed down to visit the temple of Amun at Luxor. Along the bank of the Nile the spectators danced and sang, waved standards, or prostrated themselves before the passing god.
The temples were not simply religious institutions in the modern sense of the word. They were an integral part of the administration of the state. The High Priest of Amun at Thebes might be a priest who had been promoted, but he could also have been picked from the senior courtiers or army generals. Among his responsibilities were the granaries, the artisans working on the royal tombs, and public works in general. The temples enjoyed vast wealth, much of it from endowments made by the king, probably in the expectation that a proportion of the resulting produce would be paid back to the state. An estimate of the land belonging to the temple of Amun at Karnak alone in the late New Kingdom is 2,400 square kilometres, almost a quarter of the total cultivated land of Egypt. A labour force of over 80,000 is recorded. The temples of Amun at Thebes had a total income of nearly two million sacks of grain a year.
World History
