The gradual intrusion of the ordinary people into the world of the Great Ones begins, tentatively, in the Fourth Dynasty, increases in the Fifth, and becomes characteristic of the Sixth. It coincides with other, perhaps more significant, and doubtless related, changes in the nature of Egyptian beliefs, in the monarchy, and in monumental architecture.
Some authorities have proposed that the early royal religion in Egypt, up to and including the Third Dynasty, was linked with the stars.4 The evidence, either way, is slender but certainly the Pyramid Texts, assuming these to be more ancient than the time in which they were first inscribed on the walls of the Sixth Dynasty pyramids, seem to identify the divine king as a star and it is amongst the stars, or even beyond them, that he seeks his eternal habitation.
The stars are valuable instruments for measurement and the Egyptian engineers and architects of even the earliest periods seem to have been capable of making complex and sophisticated empirical observations which they used to align their buildings. The precision with which the monumental buildings of the Early Dynastic period and the early Old Kingdom are aligned is legendary; that precision was achieved by careful alignments on selected stars and the skillful use of water channels, the consequence of the careful observation of the behaviour and properties of water which large-scale irrigation projects and techniques had made familiar. With the advent of the Fourth Dynasty, however, the sun cult, the prerogative of the hierophants of Heliopolis, began to rise above the other cults of national or royal status. As a general principle gods and their adherents dislike, and energetically resist, change: sensibly so, since an enthusiasm for change amongst their followers seldom bodes well for divinities. Similarly, the priesthoods which purport to serve the gods represent a substantial investment, often built up over many generations. They always formed one of the most powerful corporations in ancient society, hierarchic and carefully institutionalized. They were ready to use every device to maintain their power and influence.
They were not always successful, however. In Sumer the temple corporations were evidently the repositories of state and economic power in the late fourth and early third millennia. Their influence was reduced and, in part at least, replaced by the secular power of the war-band leaders who gradually institutionalized their positions and eventually became kings. The royal power, and the court which surrounded the kings was more open, more accessible to ambitious outsiders than the temple priesthoods which were, by definition, arcane and exclusive.
In Egypt the neat equation of king and god relieved much of this potential area of antagonism. Even so it is possible to detect, in the early centuries, several shifts in the nature of the cults which were practiced in the Valley and in their relative influence. Once the unification was adopted as state policy, national cults began to emerge, gradually to rise above the local cults which had kept the loyalty of the ordinary folk over the millennia. The decline in the star cults associated with the king, the reduction in the status of Ptah, the corresponding rise of Re in Heliopolis, and the inversion of the role of Set with his consequent presentation as a malignant influence, who once was the god of a large proportion of the Valley dwellers, all demonstrate the way that, even in Egypt, the political influence of temple cults was employed to satisfy the need for power.
After the death of the last ruler of the Fourth Dynasty, King Shepseskaf, the dynasty changed again, though there was still probably some familial connection with the previous line. Now, however, the cult of Re emerged supreme: the king is hailed as ‘son of Re’; whereas he was the great god immanent, he is now merely a divine son, content to carry out quite menial tasks in the service of his father, who sails supreme above the Egyptians’ world.
The king whose name heads the Fifth Dynasty is Userkaf; it is probable that he married a senior royal daughter, perhaps the sister of Shepseskaf. Userkaf may also have been a member of a branch of the royal family, though not the ruling one; there was a story that the dynasty descended from the daughter of King Djedefre5 or from the mysterious Bafre. He was followed by Sahure and Neferirkare. Their commitment to the sun cult was strong; according to legend all three were brothers, all fathered on their mother by Re. The influence of the priests of the sun cult, centred at Heliopolis, now became dominant; their propaganda becomes pervasive and very effective.
The Fifth Dynasty, like those that had gone before it, had a distinctive style of royal funerary monument: the sun temple, built close to the Nile and notable for a proud-standing obelisk in the temple court which was part of the complex. Beside the temple, in several cases, a stone solar barque was built, recalling the boats which had been lain beside the dead king, in various forms, since the First Dynasty. International contact was now widespread. Even distant islands in the Aegean such as Cythera received evidence of the Egyptian king’s existence, in this case a small marble cup inscribed with the name of Userkaf’s temple.6
World History
