Art and texts throughout the pharaonic period continued to maintain the Predynastic and Early Dynastic tension between recording and commemorating, which might be characterized as the distinction between, on the one hand, the utilitarian labels attached to grave goods, and, on the other hand, such ceremonial votive items as palettes and maceheads, described above. We know that the prupose of the early funerary labels was to use history as a means of dating particular things, and that the purpose of such mobUiary art as the palettes and Maceheads—as well as of stelae and temple reliefs in the pharaonic period—was not to record historical events but primarily to use them as a means of commemorating universal acts undertaken by specific rulers or by royal officials.
In the mortuary temple of Rameses III at Medinet Habu there is a scene in which the Libyan chieftain Meshesher is brought into the presence of the king. This is obviously intended to be a record of the surrender of a particularly important foreign individual, whose personal humiliation encapsulates the defeat of his people, but to the left-hand side we can also see the careful assembling and counting of a pile of Libyans’ hands—this alerts us to one of the ways in which the scene differs from a more modern Western historical tableau. It is part of a relief in a mortuary temple and as such it is fulfilling the king’s piety to the gods. Just as private individuals in the New Kingdom inscribed ‘autobiographical’ texts on the walls of their tomb chapels to remind the gods of their piety and beneficence, so the reliefs in royal mortuary temples were intended to symbolize a kind of accounting procedure, a visual quantification of the success achieved by the king both for and through the gods.
’The Egyptian sense of history is one in which rituals and real events are inseparable—the vocabulary of Egyptian art and text very often makes no real distinction between the real and the ideal. Thus the events of history and myth were all regarded as part of a process of assessment, whereby the king demonstrated that he was preserving Maat, or harmony, on behalf of the deities. Even when an Egyptian monument appears to be simply commemorating a specific event in history, it is often interpreting that event as an act that is simultaneously mythological, ritualistic, and economic.
World History
