Up to this point our discussion has been dominated by the political, military, and economic vicissitudes of Egypt from the beginning of the Saite period to the Macedonian conquest. Although it is impossible to deny the vigour and skill with which the Egyptians met these challenges, our survey might easily create the impression of a nation subjected for generations to considerable discontinuity. When, however, we turn to cultural phenomena, a very different picture emerges. The Visual arts are paradigmatic. While, on the one hand, they show a determination to draw on the traditions of the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms, as well as the Kushite Period, they display anything but the arid archaism of which they are still too often accused. On the contrary, the assertion of continuity with older tradition is combined with the exercise of considerable invention and originality both in materials and iconography, producing some of the most remarkable sculpture in the entire pharaonic corpus. For other spheres of cultural activity there is sometimes an unnerving lacuna in extant material—there are, for example, no literary texts securely dated to this period. For all that, close analysis of such evidence as we do possess confirms that Egyptian society and civilization as a whole were characterized by the same traits as the visual arts. We routinely encounter features with which the student of earlier periods will be completely familiar.
Mortuary contexts continue to reveal the intense importance of family ties, sometimes in a spectacular form: the tomb of the vizier Bakenrenef at Saqqara of the reign of Psamtek I appears to have been used for the burial of members of the family for the best part of 300 years, and the tomb of Petosiris at Tuna el-Gebel contained burials of five generations of his family running from the 30th Dynasty into the Ptolemaic Period. Non-mortuary epigraphy points in the same direction: the Wadi Hammamat inscription of Khnumibra shows a comparable awareness of family lineage in the 27th Dynasty, purporting to record his genealogy for over twenty generations as far back as the 19th Dynasty, though we must be cautious about the historical precision of this document. Such material also demonstrates the continued importance of continuity of office within the family: Petosiris’ family occupied the office of High Priest of Thoth at Hermopolis over five generations, whilst Khnumibra’s ancestors are alleged to have had something approaching a stranglehold over the offices of vizier and overseer of works for centuries.
Local loyalties are, if anything, even stronger than of old: Udjahorresnet insisted at the beginning of the 27th Dynasty on the sterling service that he had done for his native city, while the fourth-century inscription of Somtutefnakht, set up in the temple of Harsaphes in his home town of Herakleopolis Magna, indicates that such service was transmuted into devotion to the local god, an easy and natural formulation that was commonplace at this time. Such devotion to local gods is easily paralleled earlier, but its prominence in the Late Period is very marked, originating, no doubt, in the political fragmentation that was endemic after the collapse of the New Kingdom. A corollary of this situation is the marked tendency for the main focus of personal devotion to become the main city deity, who thus acquires the omnipotence and omniscience of the traditional great gods of the pantheon. This phenomenon generated, in turn, an intense sense of the imminence of the divine presence, which is probably a major factor in the development of animal cults, one of the distinctive religious features of the Late Period. Devotion to this immediately present deity was naturally accompanied by a powerful conviction of the dependence of man on divine favour, which is frequently expressed in sculpture through statues of individuals supporting and offering images of their local god.
Biographical inscriptions further reveal that the factors leading to success in life were perceived in essentially traditional terms: royal favour was still regarded as a prerequisite of success; it was also considered essential to lead one’s life on the basis of maat, the order of the universe, both physical and moral, which came into existence at the creation of the world and is definitive—that is, incapable of improvement. Living in accordance with maat is described in the tomb of Petosiris as ‘The Way of Life’, and a frequently mentioned stimulus to follow this path is divine influence operating on the heart of the individual—that is, on the source of his moral being. Once again, this concept is not difficult to parallel earlier (for example, the old concept of the netjer imy. k, ‘the god who is in you’), but it is much more systematically developed in the texts of the Late Period. To follow ‘The Way of Life’ under the guidance of god brought success in this world and also beyond the grave, where yet another sanction lay in wait. The day of judgement in the Hall of the Two Truths was set for all, and no distinction was made between rich and poor. However, this strong conviction that justice would ultimately be done did not prevent the expression of a carpe diem philosophy, revealing that the Egyptians had lost little of their love of life, and it is not surprising to find the appearance of the occasional protest at the unfairness of an early death that has prevented the enjoyment of all that life has to offer. Here again, however, we are not confronted with a complete novelty; for the fragility of Egyptian certainties about life after death is eloquently expressed in such earlier texts as the Song of the Blind Harper and chapter 175 of the Book of the Dead. As for the principles of the mortuary cult, they remained the same in the Late Period, if less elaborately developed in practice, and old convictions such as the benefits to be gained by the recitation of formulas and the performance of funerary rituals retained much of their strength.
Plan of the tomb of Mentuemhat. It shows the arrangement of the structures below ground-level, which are entered by a descending passage to the east. This gives access via two columned halls to a great sun-court excavated in the rock but open to the sky which is flanked by chapels to north and south. This leads to another open court giving on to the subterranean part of the tomb which ends with the sarcophagus chamber at the extreme west of the installation. The walls were richly decorated with relief which shows a mixture of traditional elements, from such sites as the tombs of Menna and Rekhmira and the Deir el-Bahri complex, as well as contemporary features
The concept of the prerequisites of the afterlife presented a somewhat contradictory picture, but again it was a question of working with and developing older ideas. Much effort was again spent by those who could afford it on the production of tombs, some of which are spectacular instances of conspicuous display. The mortuary complex of Mentuemhat at Thebes is the most impressive non-royal site in that or any area, and many a New Kingdom vizier would have envied the tomb constructed for Bakenrenef looking out over the valley from the east escarpment at Saqqara.
In the Saite Period, particular ingenuity was expended on building unrobbable tombs that were filled solid with sand after interment, and had precisely the desired effect, but grave goods were no longer as plentiful or as rich as they had been in the New Kingdom, even though gold or gilt-silver masks and jewellery could still be buried with the deceased. This paucity of grave goods means that vaults are small— often little larger than the sarcophagi themselves. As far as low-status burials are concerned, we are better informed for this period than most others, particularly at Saqqara, where excavations have revealed bodies with little or no mummification interred in the poorest of coffins, frequently no more elaborate than palm-leaf mats, and deposited in a pit in the sand distinguished above ground, if at all, by nothing more than a simple marker to guide the poor attentions of a relative anxious to perform whatever minimal service could be afforded for the deceased. All this chimes well enough with indications from earlier periods to prove that at this level too the Late Period was continuing the ancient ways.
Biographical inscriptions reveal yet another shift of emphasis in the clear narrowing of the gap between the pharaoh and his subjects, and this is echoed by the ease with which non-royal persons were able to requisition ancient royal funerary literature: in several Saite tombs at Saqqara (including those of the vizier Bakenrenef, the commander of the royal fleet Tjanenhebu and the physician Psamtek), the Pyramid Texts were employed, and fourth-century coffins also exemplified this development. The tomb of Petosiris shows a parallel phenomenon in that Petosiris himself claims at one point in his biographical inscription to have performed the old royal foundation ritual of stretching the cord. In all this, however, we are again not confronted with something totally new, given that the 12th Dynasty, for example, already provides ample demonstration of a willingness to concede the humanity of the supposed god-king. It is all too easy to ignore the fact that in every period of Egyptian history the relationship between the ideology of kingship and the practicalities of life was ultimately defined by historical experience, and the narrowing of the gap in these late sources reflects nothing less than the realities of the distribution of power in Late Period Egypt.
To conclude: the three centuries preceding the invasion of Egypt by Alexander the Great (332-323 bc) were centuries of no mean achievement. Although the country was twice subjected to Persian domination, it still succeeded in maintaining its independence for long periods against powerful enemies, and made a major impact on the course of the interminable Near Eastern power struggle as well as reasserting its interests on the Upper Nile. In the Saite Period several factors interacted to create the basis for success. In the first place, a family of rulers appeared who were both ideologically acceptable, politically streetwise, and militarily highly astute.
However, the Saites were also lucky in that for most of the dynasty the dynamics of imperialism in the Near East ran very much in their favour. Empires expand as long as their institutional stmctures and the will of their leaders can support such expansion. When the Assyrians and Chaldaeans attempted to incorporate Egypt into their empires, they were both operating at the outer limits of their capacity.
Even a slight deterioration within their territory inevitably meant a diminution of resources that could be brought to bear against Egypt, to the extent that effective action and control became quite impossible. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Assyrian rule was intermittent and very low key, whilst all the Chaldaeans could achieve was to threaten, invade, and withdraw.
The danger posed by the Persians was of a different order, since they possessed much greater assets in wealth and manpower, and initially a much more vigorous impetus to conquest derived ultimately from Cyrus. However able a pharaoh might be, if the Persians operated at the peak of their potential, the land of Egypt must fall. Yet the laws of grand strategy were the same for the Persians as their predecessors, and the marginal geographical position of Egypt in relation to the Achaemenid empire meant that it would inevitably be difficult to maintain permanent control and that the potential for successful revolt would always be there.
Against this background, the panorama presented by the fifth and fourth centuries bc of oscillation between rebellion, independence, and occupation becomes immediately intelligible. Yet none of this furious endeavour leads to any abatement in the vitality of Egyptian cultural life. Certainly we suffer badly from the severe loss of the art, architecture, and literary work of these years, but more than enough survives to reveal a society that was powerfully aware of its past while exploring new ways or, at least, insisting on finding its own points of cultural emphasis. Wherever we look, we are confronted by a powerful current of continuity united with a vital evolutionary dynamic that provides the obvious underpinning for and explanation of the very considerable achievements of the age of the Ptolemies that followed.
World History
