To glorify his home area in the Delta, Rameses constructed an impressive new capital at Pi-Rameses, close to the earlier Avaris. Inscriptions tell how it was endowed with fishponds and granaries. Boats arrived daily with fresh supplies so that no one went hungry. Although inland, it could be reached by river channels. The openness to the north allowed foreign craftsmen to settle—an excavated workshop where chariots were made was operated by Hittites. A temple to the Syrian goddess Astarte was to be found alongside those to the traditional gods Amun, Seth, and Ra. It is possible that the Israelites were among the migrant workers attracted by the building programme here and at a neighbouring ‘store-city’ ‘Pithom’. Stories about their fate (probably not far from similar exploited migrant workers today) and their subsequent ‘release’ or return to mainland Asia probably form the basis of the biblical accounts of the Exodus. (The word ‘Israel’ is recorded only once in Egyptian inscriptions as the name of a tribe from Canaan that was destroyed in a punitive raid in the reign of Rameses’ successor Merenptah.)
It was at Pi-Rameses that Rameses had his main palace. As the king neared the thirtieth year of his reign he built a massive set of Jubilee Halls for the ceremony of sed, the celebration of thirty years of power. Naturally Rameses could not neglect planning for his death, and he followed the tradition of building a great royal tomb, perhaps the most opulent of them all, in the Valley of the Kings. As a more visible memorial he constructed a vast mortuary temple, the Rameseum, on the west bank of the Nile at Thebes. Its granaries alone were so huge that 3,400 families could have been fed for a year from their contents. A more tender side to this flamboyant king can be found in the beautifully decorated tomb he created for Nefertari (see below, p. 91).
The excavators at Pi-Rameses have established that the waterways were also designed to act as a protective shield and that there were at least three barracks to house soldiers. Despite the public grandeur and outward confidence of the reign there were already signs that the state was becoming more defensive. The stalemate with the Hittites must have been a shock. One small but fascinating detail is that Rameses carved the royal cartouche that bore his name very deeply in the stone as if he were afraid it would be obliterated. After the death of Rameses external pressures on Egypt grew. The Sahara continued to become drier, encouraging the raids of land-hungry nomads on the wealth of the valley. For the first time in Egyptian history Libyans from the west organized themselves into sophisticated raiding forces, outwitting the Egyptian defences. These Libyan attacks may have been in collaboration with the so-called Sea Peoples, or simply part of a Mediterraneanwide disruption of which these ‘Peoples’ were one manifestation (see p. 36 above).
Rameses’ long reign, sixty-seven years, saw him father an enormous number of children, many of whom predeceased him. His eldest surviving son, Merenptah, succeeded him successfully but there were then so many competing sons and grandsons that stability was lost. In the next dynasty, the Twentieth, only one able
King, Rameses III (?.1184-1153 Bc) stands out. He carried out a series of brilliant victories against the intruders, adapting traditional strategies to fight the crowded troop ships threatening the coast. He found the energy to build some fine monuments, including a massive temple at Medinet Habu near Thebes, where his defeat of the Sea Peoples was trumpeted in a final swansong of Egyptian glory.
Nothing, however, could hide the reality, that his kingdom was crumbling. Continuous militarization was draining resources. The destruction of the Sea Peoples broke up traditional trade routes. Rameses attempted to boost his position by seeking the support of the priesthood. He made immense benefactions to the temple, above all that of Amun at Thebes. Perhaps 15 per cent of available land was made over so that eventually the temples controlled a third of all cultivable land in Egypt. This was counter-productive in that the land was lost to the crown as a source to tax. By the end of Rameses’ reign there were growing signs of internal unrest with the atmosphere of insecurity heightened by the raids from Libya. An assassination attempt was hatched within the royal harem, while, in a rare bureaucratic breakdown, grain rations failed to arrive for the craftsmen working on the royal tombs. In retaliation the workmen organized the first recorded strike in history. As royal authority diminished the tombs they had built in earlier centuries were being looted and in about 1100 the workers’ village at Deir el-Medina (see below p. 82) was abandoned.
The last nine kings of the Twentieth Dynasty all took the name Rameses, as if they hoped it would prove a lucky token against further decay, but they could do little to stop the decline. Part of the problem was that many were already elderly when they came to the throne. Their reigns proved too short and their energies too diminished for them to enforce their power. The average Twentieth Dynasty reign lasted under twelve years, compared to an average of nearly twenty years in the Eighteenth Dynasty. The resources available to the kings were also contracting. The gold mines of Nubia were exhausted by the end of the New Kingdom. Rich areas such as the Fayum, a cultivated part of Egypt since the Middle Kingdom, gradually became indefensible against the Libyans. As central government faltered under ageing kings with diminishing resources, the empire disintegrated. The Asian empire was lost by the time of Rameses VI (1143-1136 Bc). The population of Nubia fell as gold mining ceased there and its provincial administration withdrew at the end of the Twentieth Dynasty. By 1060 Egypt had withdrawn into its original valley boundaries.
A vivid picture of the collapse of society within Egypt comes from records of tomb robberies. Such robberies had always taken place, but now their scale seems to have increased dramatically. It was the impoverished inhabitants of western Thebes who were the most prominent in siphoning off grain supplies from the temples and robbing tombs of their furniture. Even royal tombs were not immune, a sure sign that respect for authority was crumbling. A stone mason, Amun-panufer, confessed to stealing all the gems in the coffins of a king and queen from the Seventeenth Dynasty, burning the coffins and distributing all the grave goods among his accomplices. Lists of goods recovered by officials include gold and silver alongside linen,
Vases of oil, wood, copper, and bronze. Corruption spread. Officials in charge of transporting grain were siphoning off supplies as they stopped along the river. Nubian troops brought up to help deal with the problem joined in despoiling tombs and monuments. In a desperate, but successful, attempt to preserve the bodies of the kings, their mummies, among them that of the great Rameses II, were collected from their original tombs and gathered in a new hiding place in the hills behind Deir el-Bahri, where they lay undiscovered until the nineteenth century.
A lament from an earlier banquet song catches the mood of the last years of the New Kingdom:
Those gods who existed aforetime, who rest in their pyramids, and the noble blessed dead likewise, the builders of the chapels; their places are no more, like those who never were. None returns from there to tell us of their condition, to tell their state, to reassure us, until we attain the place where they have gone. (Translation: R. Parkinson)
This was a devastating moment for a society that prided itself so much on its good order and respect for the past. Despite moments of national revival, the Egyptian state was never again to enjoy such power and sustained prosperity as it had in the New Kingdom.
World History
