The Third Dynasty is notable for the appearance of ‘new men’, powerful figures who owed their position less to the status of their birth than to the favour of the king. Imhotep himself may have been one of these; another was Khabausoker, the owner of a handsome mastaba at Saqqara14 in which he is commemorated with his wife. He is a slightly mysterious figure and was associated with the cult of Anubis; he wears a ceremonial collar which depicts stylized hounds. His association with Anubis led to the fanciful suggestion that he was a sort of ‘death priest’, who announced to the king the extent of his reign, after which he would be sacrificed.15 This was at a time when the myth of the ritual death of the king of Egypt gained a degree of acceptance. There is no evidence whatsoever for the practice ever having been current, certainly not in historic times.
Of the works of art of the Third Dynasty, apart from those associated with Netjerykhet himself, those left by another of his contemporaries and high officers, Hesy-re, are amongst the most notable.16 A series of panels carved in relief in sycamore survive from his tomb at Saqqara. The reliefs have a spare austerity, proportion, and balance which is startling; they forcibly suggest the splendour in which the lives of such officials were passed. Though when they were new they would have been vividly coloured they also suggest dramatically the quality of taste which, even at this early time, marked the perceptions of cultivated Egyptians. Hesy-re’s career is of interest in that he is identified as a physician, an honourable vocation in early Egypt, specifically as a dentist. Dentistry was practised extensively by the ancients and evidence from the Arabian Gulf (actually from Bahrain) in the centuries after Hesy-re’s time also shows considerable application of dental care, at least to the extent of extracting carious teeth.17 The extraction was probably effected by the technique of ‘elevating’ the tooth, working it loose with metal probes. Though the method must have been scarcely agreeable the short-term discomfort would have been well worth enduring for the relief of the toothache.
The Sumerians, with their considerable reliance on the date as an item of diet, suffered piteously from the toothache. In witness of this, they even personified toothache and made it an object of their poetry. Not so the practical
Figure 1.3 The Third Dynasty saw the increasing importance of high officials who were not members of the royal family. One of these ‘New Men’ was Khabausoker, a contemporary of King Netjerykhet and of Imhotep, the builder of the Step Pyramid. Khabausoker was High Priest of Ptah and holder of various other great offices under the king. He wears a curious collar which appears to be associated with the cult of the canine divinity, Anubis.
Source: M. Murray, Saqqara Mastabas I (1905), pl. I. Reproduced by permission of University College London.
Egyptians; their answer to toothache, like that of the Dilmunites of Bahrain, was extraction. In respect of dental care, at least, life in third-millennium Egypt and even in the distant Gulf at the same time must have been preferable to life in late Victorian England where itinerant toothpullers exercised their calling with none of the care or professional concern which the biography of Hesy-re, for one, suggests was demanded in Egypt.
Figure 7.4 Hesy-Re was Vizier to King Nerjerykher and also a renowned physician and dentist. His tomb was decorated with some exceptionally fine carvings, of which this portrait of the Minister was part.
Source: The Cairo Museum. Photograph John G. Ross.
World History
