The surviving descriptions of the coronation ceremonies of the king of Egypt come from times later than the period with which this book is principally concerned, but it is likely that, even in the earliest times, he was required to play through numerous complex rituals designed to signify his assumption of the sovereignty over Egypt and all its attributes. At one point he ran a course around what was in effect a microcosm of Egypt, an area marked out in the temple court where the ceremony took place; he also enacted all the roles involved in his assumption of the kingship of the Two Lands, playing one part in the north of the complex, one in the south. The coronation formula was expressed in highly poetic terms: ‘The Rising of the King of Upper Egypt, the Rising of the King of Lower Egypt, the Union of the Two Lands, the Procession around the Wall’.3 From this it is clear that the king is visualized as the sun or, perhaps more likely in the earliest times, a star.
The coronation of a king of Egypt would, in many particulars, have been very much like those which have marked the induction of kings in many societies across the world and in many times. However, since no earlier kings are known than Egypt’s it must be assumed that such rituals were invented for or by them. Two are perhaps the most familiar and symbolic of all: the crowning and the enthronement.
The importance of the two crowns in Egypt was very great. They were particularly vital expressions of the Two Lands which each symbolized. When first one and then the other was placed on the king’s head, that part of his being from which issued the divine commands or, as the Egyptians put it, ‘Authoritative Utterance’, it was something more than simple symbolism.
The king was always crowned twice, on each occasion in the national shrine relating to the particular kingdom, either of the south or the north, of Upper or of Lower Egypt. The shrines were immensely ancient, descending certainly from remote predynastic times. Then they were presumably magical places in which the chieftains who preceded the kings invoked the power of the hidden gods. The shrines were called, respectively, per-nesu, the shrine of Lower Egypt, and per-ur, that of Upper Egypt. They survived throughout Egyptian history and were always incorporated into the structure of stone-built temples, where they usually became the holy heart of the temple itself. The shrine of Upper Egypt appears to be animal in shape and inspiration.
The solemn appearance of the king on public occasions was identified with the first glorious manifestation of sunrise; the concept of the sun in splendour is thus, in another conceit of remarkable poetic insight, associated with the rising of the king. The same word is used to describe both sunrise and the king’s appearance: the verb is written in the form of a hieroglyph which denotes the sun rising over the Primeval Hill or the Divine Emerging Island in which the first acts of creation took place. The king is thus identified with the very beginning of creation, graphically as well as verbally and philosophically.
The act of ‘appearance’ of the king is perhaps the most important ritual in the coronation ceremonies. He appeared before the kingdoms’ protective divinities and the representatives of the lands of Egypt, wearing his crowns, the two individual crowns of north and south and the combined crown, the pschent, which he wore as Dual King. The importance of crown-wearing is not peculiar to the kings of Egypt. Early English kings held crown-wearings where they appeared at different parts of their kingdom, wearing the crown to assert their sovereignty and ensure the loyalty and obedience of their people.
At the coronation, after the appearance and the crowning, an act of profound magical importance was the enthronement. The throne was described as the ‘mother of the king’; it was, probably later, personified as the goddess Isis, sister and wife of Osiris. By possessing the Queen the king’s title to the Two Lands was made absolute. As he mounted the seven steps to the throne, constructed in the form of a hieroglyph which again denoted the
Primeval Hill and took his seat on it he became, as it were, infused with the Kingship, from contact with powers with which the throne was charged. The power of the throne still persists in Africa, in, for example, the stool of
Figure 5.1 The duality of the King of Egypt is succinctly expressed in this sealing from the First Dynasty of the king simultaneously enthroned as King of Upper and of Lower Egypt, his regalia identical except for the two crowns. The king is attended in each manifestation by the god Wepwawet, striding on his standard before the king; the king’s placenta is prominent before the figure of the god.
Source: from W. M.F. Petrie, Royal Tombs vol. II pl. XV.108. Reproduced by courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society.
The Asantahene, the king of the Ashanti people. Whilst the Asantahene rarely if ever sits on the stool it is the most sacred piece of the royal equipment for it contains the ‘soul’ of the entire people. Again, even the sovereigns of England, generally speaking not a very magically endowed class, these crowned seated above a magically charged stone.
The coronation of the king of Egypt marked, on each occasion, a new beginning. Time was itself renewed; the Egyptians counted time from the coronation of each king, to the infinite confusion of later generations of historians. In Egypt, as interestingly enough it was in Mesopotamia, the coronation was postponed until a new cycle of nature began. Charming ancient ceremonies took place at the coronation, such as the releasing of flocks of birds into the air, which carried the happy news of the king’s accession to all the creatures of the earth, who thus could share in the universal renewal of life.
One of the greatest occasions for the fusing of solemn ritual, magic, pageantry and the drama into one splendid unity was the Heb-Sed, the jubilee which the kings celebrated every thirty years, sometimes more frequently. The origins of the Heb-Sed are lost; some commentators have seen the ceremony as a play-acting substitute for the ritual sacrifice of the king which they believed took place when his physical powers began to wane. Whether or not this is the case (and there is no actual evidence) it would seem that the king at the Heb-Sed underwent a ritual ‘death’ and then was resurrected, once more youthful and recharged and so capable of guiding anew the destiny of Egypt. He was recrowned in both kingships, sitting under a canopy, on a dais attended by priests representing the mythical supporters of the king in the process of unification. Thus the courts of the Step Pyramid provided King Netjerykhet of the Third Dynasty with the ground for these ceremonies in the Afterlife and doubtless the same sort of layout served later kings.
In all the most important ceremonies the king was attended by other officiants whose roles seem to descend from very distant times. One was called ‘The Herdsman of Nekhen’, evidently recalling some significant involvement of cattle people, no doubt originating further south and linking the newly crowned king both with cattle and with Hierakonpolis. The king of Egypt was often described as a herdsman, his people ‘the cattle of god’.
The momentous event of the first appearance of the Dual King coincided with a time of extraordinary change, of social and political upheaval and rapid advances in several of the principal lands of the ancient Near East, on the edge of what once used to be called the Fertile Crescent. Other than in Egypt, nowhere was the change more profound than in Sumer. There is however an important difference between the two peoples: the Sumerians never really achieved nationhood in the sense that the Egyptian kings strove from the outset to impose on the twin kingdoms.
The Mesopotamians were earnest in the recording of long lists of their kings, organized into city dynasties. They did not set them in a strict chronological sequence, or rather the sequence which they employed is misleading since many of the reigns they record as following one upon the other were in fact overlapping and coterminous.
The Egyptians attempted to keep records of the principal events of each reign, the clearly mythical often shading into the possibly real. They had no concept of chronology; though they were careful recorders of events on which their several calendars might be based and though they kept records in the temples far back, recording, for example, levels of the inundation, each new reign saw time begin again and all dates were reckoned in regnal years. Much of the information which underlies what is known of the earliest kings, other than the vital, if often only too sparse information provided by archaeology, derives from the records which were set down in the temples at various times throughout the history of Egypt. Some of these, though inevitably fragmentary, were first written down as early as the third millennium, whilst monumental ‘King Lists’ were set up in the temples of the New Kingdom, in the last quarter of the second millennium in particular.