Another aspect of ancient expression that might shed light on concepts of the individual is burial inscriptions. In Egypt such inscriptions are very old. In the earliest periods it seems that only the king of Egypt could hope for an afterlife, but an individual bureaucrat might partake of that afterlife as a member of the king’s court through royal favor and especially the right to be buried near the grave of the king
One had served. Obviously the individual was proud of such distinction, but his eternal role relied entirely on the way he fit into the Egyptian corporate state.
Change took place in this aspect in the First Intermediate Period when the Old Kingdom’s apparently permanent power was broken, perhaps because of agricultural failures and political dissolution. What this meant for the afterlife was first that the leaders ofindividual regions began to write inscriptions that praised their own care for their people; they also built tombs which rivaled those of the kings, if not in size at least in concept. Later wealthy persons bought less grandiose tombs which nonetheless used old texts to assure their continued existence in the West, where the dead lived on. To call this a democratization of death is an exaggeration since there was no indication that everyone could participate, but it is known that relatively humble persons in the New Kingdom could hope for tombs, especially if they were skilled artisans working on the kings’ graves.
The themes of such texts are the accomplishments of the person and one’s worthiness to be granted an afterlife. In the Middle Kingdom, bureaucrats referred to the motif of the weighing of hearts, where the goddess Justice would help the god of scribes see if the individual’s heart, meaning not the emotional center but the moral center of the person, could be judged to be equal to justice. The balance was always shown in favor of the deceased, of course. It has been argued that this sense of sin and consequent forgiveness defines individuals (Wolf 1936: 19).
Among the striking personalities revealed in the epitaphs is the incomparable Ankhtifi, who ruled an upper Egyptian county in the First Intermediate Period, 2150-2000 BCE. On his tomb he wrote of his achievements in difficult times, guiding his local government when others would not take the responsibility:
I found the Temple of Khuu {= the county of Edfu] inundated like marshland, abandoned by him who belonged to it, in the grip of a rebel, under the control of a wretch.
I made a man embrace the slayer of his father, the slayer of his brother, so as to reestablish the Horus-Throne county. No power in whom there is a heat of [strife] will be accepted, now that all manner of evil, whose doing people hate, has been suppressed.
I was the vanguard of men, the rearguard of men, one who finds counsel where needed.
A leader of the land through active conduct, strong in speech, collected in thought, on the day the three counties were joined.
I was the champion who has no peer,
Who spoke out when the nobles were silent,
On the day fear was cast and Upper Egypt was silent...
I was the vanguard of men, the rearguard of men, for my like has not been, will not be, my like was not born, will not be born.
I have surpassed the deeds of my forebears, and my successors will not reach me in anything I have done for the next million years.
(Lichtheim 1988: 25-6)
A million years is by any reckoning a very long time. This effluence of individual vanity may derive from the decay of the royal order of the Old Kingdom; people needed suddenly to exert themselves as individuals and to assert their own powers to avoid famine and military catastrophe (J. Assmann 2002: 94 ).
These and similar exertions, including inscriptions commissioned by women for their dead husbands, have been termed ‘‘an advance in the display of selfhood’’ (Lichtheim 1988: 37-8.) This advance was underlined recently when it was discovered that Ankhtifi’s tomb was itself a pyramid, and so he was exercising the right to a royal burial though he was not himself king (Radford 2002). Ankhtifi’s texts and earlier ones presented the Egyptian, at least the elite Egyptian with access to writing, as the creator of his own moral values (Lichtheim 1997: 18). This self-confidence in the face of adversity is also seen in much later Egyptian autobiographical texts (Otto 1954: 121,124).
The female ruler of Egypt Hatshepsut (1473-1458 bce) is another figure of distinction in that she was one of few women to rule Egypt and had herself depicted with a beard. But she was usually careful to adhere to the old norms even though, or perhaps because she was a woman (Seipel 1977; Robbins 1993: 45-52). Senenmut, one of her courtiers, however, was not afraid to bend cliches. He had himself depicted as protector of the princess Nefrure, combining a pose of himself as a seated scribe with that of a nursing woman (Waraksa 2002). Senenmut also claimed to be ‘‘a great one of the great ones in the whole land’’ and ‘‘a leader of the leaders at the summit of the officials.’’ He seems to have had more power than any non-royal ever, though he did not hold the highest titles and was not a royal scribe. He also stressed his own low birth and consequent rise - an aspect he was apparently the first person in Egyptian history to emphasize (Meyer 1982: 188, 281, 287, 293).
In the latest periods of Ancient Egypt we even see that the individual might boast that he undermined the power of the reigning king with the guidance of the gods and turned instead to support the Persian conqueror: ‘‘When you [the god] turned your back on Egypt, you put love of me in the heart of Asia’s ruler [the Persian king], His courtiers praised the god for me’’ (Lichtheim 1980: 42). Here the connection to the king of Egypt appears definitively broken.
By no means so numerous or so culturally important were the funerary inscriptions from Mesopotamia; none of them were really epitaphs summarizing a well-lived life. They appeared first perhaps as early as the 1800s or as late as the 1300s. A set of them implored auditors not to damage the tomb (Bottero 1982). By the 1100s we find in the West Semitic languages several commemorative inscriptions of petty kings which recounted their deeds and sometimes asked their heirs to continue the homage paid them in life and curse any who might disturb their building works or their tombs. The most extensive memorial inscription like this came from northern Mesopotamia presumably near the grave of the mother of the last independent king of Mesopotamia, Nabonidus, who reigned from 555 to 539 bce (Oppenheim 1969b: 560-2). The mother, Adad-guppi, boasted of her long and pious life and asked the god to punish her son if he should stray from right. The text runs:
My eyesight was good (to the end of my life), my hearing excellent, my hands and feet were sound, my words well chosen, food and drink agreed with me, my health was fine,
And my mind happy. I saw my great-great-grandchildren, up to the fourth generation, in good health and (thus) had my fill of old age.
Let me entrust to you, Moon-god, my lord, my son Nabonidus, king of Babylon (since) you have looked upon me with favor and have given me (such) a long life; he should not sin against you as long as he lives. Assign to him the favorable protective spirits whom you have assigned to me and who have made me reach ripe old age. Do not forgive him his trespassing and sins against your great godhead, may he (always) be in awe of your great godhead. (Oppenheim 1969b: 561)
Clearly the son, or his scribes, remembered the mother as an amazing old battleaxe, an individual of unique experience and personality. From the Hittite area too we have a small collection of memorial inscriptions that appear to show that there was concern for the memory of the achievements of the individual (Bonatz 2000).
We conclude that the exceptional people who could afford inscriptions on or near tombs took pains in several periods to distinguish themselves from others. They were proud of their achievements and wanted them remembered, especially if they were not independent rulers of their countries.
The connection of the individual with sin and a close relationship even with the high gods can be traced in the self-conscious names catalogued by A. L. Oppenheim from Mesopotamian sources. The trajectory may be from a sunny self-assurance seen in earlier names like Siu-Sin ‘‘He of the Moon-God’’ to a more conflicted but perhaps more personal dependence on higher powers. Oppenheim found the names first in the Old Babylonian period from Iran on the periphery of Mesopotamia (2004-1595 bce), but they then became common in the heartland in the Middle Babylonian period (1400s-1155 bce). Oppenheim felt these names showed what he called an interiority that had not been there earlier, that people felt themselves to have problems that gods could and might solve. Among the names are Usuh-bilti-Marduk ‘‘O divine Marduk, remove my burden,’’ Bel-hiti-ul-ldi ‘‘Lord, I do not know my sin,’’ and Nabii-itti-ldi-llik ‘‘Nabu walks with the alone one’’ (Oppenheim 1936). This last is particularly striking as testimony that people felt themselves to be in fact alone, although it might also refer to an only child. Personal names were given by parents, and they may say little about the ideas of the people bearing them, and yet these may show a slow transformation in the history of the Mesopotamian individual.
World History
