On the basis of Ryholt’s reconstruction of the Turin Canon, we can now identify 15 names of kings (Dynasty 16 of Manetho) as the predecessors of the kings of the 17th Dynasty Five of them occur in contemporary sources and these indicate that the centre of their power was in Upper Egypt. We cannot be certain that they all ruled from Thebes, and some may have been local rulers in important towns such as Abydos, Elkab, and Edfu. King Wepwawetemsaf, not listed in the Turin Canon, who left his modest stele at Abydos, may have been one of these local kings; the stele shows him offering to Wepwawet, the local deity after whom he was named. The style of its writing, design, and royal regalia place it in a line of development between the i3th-and 17th-Dynasty royal stelae.
King lykhemefert Neferhotep, who definitely ruled from Thebes, left behind a much more impressive stele, on which he describes himself as a victorious king, beloved of his army, one who nourishes his town, who defeats rebels, who reconciles rebellious foreign lands. Neferhotep is shown protected by the gods Amun and Montu and by a goddess personifying the city of Thebes itself. She appears armed with a scimitar, bow, and arrows. The language of the formal eulogy is familiar from earlier hymns composed for kings but also for nomarchs, great warlords who, in the First Intermediate Period, ruled like local kings. The stele was set up, like those of Kamose, to celebrate a precise event, which may have been the raising of a blockade of Thebes. We do not know if Neferhotep fought the Flyksos, their Egyptian vassals, or rival local rulers, but the Canadian Egyptologist Donald Redford has noted a destruction layer after the I3th-Dynasty level in part of the town underlying East Karnak. Neferhotep’s name is known also from contemporary monuments at Elkab and Gebelein. In such uncertain times, the king’s role as army commander becomes more and more prominent and so enshrined in the royal litanies. The ideology as well as some of the phraseology survives into the i8th Dynasty.
Kings may fail but the officials who served them had their own monuments, and from the genealogies recorded there a relative chronology has been built up. Son often followed father into royal service, and kings took wives from the great official families, so that a network of interdependence gradually bound the king to the home towns of his officials, at Elkab and Edfu as well as at Thebes. Genealogical evidence suggests that only three generations separated the abandonment of Itjtawy from the reign of King Nebererau I, sixth king of the 17th Dynasty, and that the transition from the 13th - to the i6th-Dynasty group of kings went officially unremarked by the officials who served them.
We know a great deal more about the nine kings assigned (after Ryholt) to the 17th Dynasty, but so far only two are known to have been related to each other: the brothers Nubkheperra Intef VI and Sekhemra Intef VII. It is possible but not certain that their father was Sobekemsaf I. Their names do not occur in the Turin Canon, the relevant section having been cut away in antiquity, but they occur on other king-lists from Thebes; royal stelae have survived from reuse in later building, and excavations have produced rich objects from their burials. The bodies of Seqenenra Taa (c.1560 bc) and his wife Ahhotep, and possibly his mother Queen Tetisheri, were found in the Deir el-Bahri cache of royal mummies, and most curious of all, we have a tomb-robbers’ description of the burial of King Sobekemsaf II and his wife, still intact over 600 years later in the 20th Dynasty. Kings’ names also occur in private tombs, and objects. These Theban kings are thought to have ruled at the same time as the Hyksos 15th Dynasty, but there is no fixed point for dating the beginning of the 17th Dynasty, only the end being marked by the death of Kamose at an unknown point in or after his third regnal year. The fortunes of the kings seem to have fluctuated: Nubkheperra Intef is mentioned on over twenty contemporary monuments, whereas Intef VII is known only from his coffin, now in the Louvre.
The continuing military ethos of the time is illustrated by the popularity of military titles such as ‘commander of the crew of the ruler’ and ‘commander of the town regiment’. They show a defensive grouping of military resources around the king and confirm the importance of local militias based on towns. Instability remained characteristic of Upper Egypt for the rest of the Second Intermediate Period.
Rahotep, first king of the 17th Dynasty, boasts of restorations in temples at Abydos and Koptos, while an inscription of Sobekemsaf II shows that he sent a quarrying expedition of 130 men to the Wadi Hammamat. These quarries, however, were well within Theban territory, and the numbers of quarry-workers involved do not compare with the thousands of men sent to the wadi in the 12th Dynasty. Nevertheless, confidence was growing and both the territory and the activities of the king were expanding. Sobekemsaf s expedition has a distinctly ad hoc air: only one man holds the appropriate title of‘overseer of works’.
While the rest have honorific titles or offices connected with provisioning. The scribe does not observe the strict hierarchy of status in his listing, and uses a mixture of hieroglyphic and hieratic signs. It appears that traditional skills and protocols were having to be relearnt after a decisive breakdown. At the Gebel Zeit galena mines, overlooking the Red Sea, two modest stelae were found recording expeditions in the reigns of Nubkheperra Intef VII and Swaserenra Bebiankh of Dynasty 16, the latter previously hardly known beyond his listing in the Turin Canon. Large numbers of pan-grave sherds were also found there, suggesting another purpose for which the Theban kings may have used Nubian mercenaries.
Thebes was cut off from contact with Lower Egypt and denied access to the centres of scribal learning at Memphis. Such centres, with their archives, were not destroyed and may even have flourished under the Hyksos, but the Thebans would have been unable to consult them, thus perhaps necessitating the creation of a new compilation of texts needed for the all-important funerary rituals. One of the first collections of spells that we know as the Book of the Dead dates to the i6th Dynasty and comes from a coffin of Queen Mentuhotep, wife of King Djehuty. The funerary culture of Thebes also evolved in other ways, in response to an impoverishment of resources. Large rectangular coffins made of cedarwood were replaced with roughly shaped anthropoid coffins of sycamore painted in a feather pattern, but in so crude and idiosyncratic a style that no one is exactly like any other. This feature betrays a lack of training in the erstwhile rigid conventions of funerary art, which were perhaps also less in demand. However, a few coffins demonstrate that in some Theban workshops the tradition of Middle Kingdom coffin making survived well into the i8th Dynasty.
The location of five of the royal tombs of the 17th Dynasty, those of Nubkheperra Intef VI, Sekhemra Intef, Sobekemsaf II, Seqenenra Taa, and Kamose, is described in the Abbott Papyrus, which contains the record of a judicial enquiry into tomb robbery by the mayor of Thebes in the 20th Dynasty. In 1923 Herbert Winlock set out to relocate the tombs using the itinerary of the inspectors given in the papyrus. He was also inspired by the fact that many objects from royal burials of the same date had appeared for sale from illicit excavations in the 1820s and 1859-60. The robbers of the 20th Dynasty described how they found the burial of Sobekemsaf II;
He was equipped with a sword and there was a... set of amulets and ornaments of gold at his throat; his crown and diadems of gold were on his head and the. . . mummy of the king was overlaid with gold throughout. His coffins were wrought with gold and silver within and without and inlaid with every splendid costly stone ... we stole the furniture which we found with them, consisting of vases of gold, silver and bronze.
These kings and their officials spent their increasing wealth at the end of the dynasty on the objects in their tombs rather than on the tomb structures themselves. Decorated tombs are rare; instead, earlier tombs were often taken over and reused. To understand where the wealth was coming from we need to look to the south, to Elephantine, to the forts guarding the second Nile cataract, and finally to Kerma, capital city of the King of Kush, over 800 km. south of Thebes.
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