Although the living king’s godliness in life was stressed to varying degrees in different reigns, his role as an intermediary between humanity and the gods was always of paramount importance. The king was a god himself; he was the son of various deities; he was beloved by them, and he was their clear choice as ruler upon earth. Because of these various attributes, in combination with his unique position as a god who had been born a man and who inhabited the perceivable world, he served as the most fitting link between humankind and the divinities that were relied upon to bring blessings to those that inhabited the Nile Valley. In this respect, the king was ‘‘lord of performing rituals’’ (nb irt-ht), the high priest in every state temple, and the sole actor depicted on temple walls - offering to the gods, performing sacred rites, and officiating at state festivals. Whether this role fell naturally to the king, or whether it was in fact a more cynical appropriation of religious power, is debated (Baines 1995a: 12-13; Kemp 1995: 36). Certainly it is notable that mere mortals were not allowed to portray the king or gods on their private monuments until the Middle Kingdom, and it was not until the New Kingdom that the practice became even somewhat common (Silverman 1995: 83; Baines 1995b: 114-5). Interestingly, when such rules were relaxed dramatically after the Amarna heresy ‘‘popular piety’’ becomes everywhere evident.
While it appears that many of the king’s primary duties were religious in nature, judging from the preponderance of such activities in royal annals (Wilkinson 2000; Altenmuller and Moussa 1991), there were, of course, issues of practicality. The king could not be everywhere at once, and so the many ritually activated statues and images infused with his ka that resided in temples must have been relied upon to solicit the gods’ goodwill locally in his stead. Indeed, in the New Kingdom, at least, royal statues sometimes bore inscriptions in which the king offered to serve as an intermediary to his subjects at large (Wildung 1977a: 13; Pinch 1993: 357), and already in the Middle Kingdom, Senwosret Ill’s oversized ears may have offered the same service without texts needing to be carved. Otherwise, the king was forced to deputize his roles in daily cult and subsidiary festivals to high priests and to royal sealbearers, such as Ikhernofret, who ‘‘acted as ‘his beloved son’ for Osiris, Foremost-of-the-Westerners’’ (Lichtheim 1975: 124) or the high priest under Seti I at Abydos, who announced to the deity: ‘‘It is the king who has ordered me to see the god’’ (Traunecker 2002: 153).
For much of Egyptian history, the king was the only individual allowed to found temples, commission divine statues, or to make donations to state temples (aside from donations pertinent to the erection of private funerary cults). Further, many of the king’s gifts to the gods likely stemmed from gifts offered first to the king (Kemp 1995: 34-5). By inserting himself between god and man in such a fashion, the king rendered himself ideologically indispensable; though in practice his mass delegation of authority rendered his physical self dispensable just so long as his ka-infused images and priestly deputies performed properly. In return for large scale donations, such as are attested in the Palermo Stone and Papyrus Harris I, the temples utilized their walls and cultic performances to promote the message that the good works performed by the king on behalf of the gods were directly responsible for the health and happiness of the nation.
Just as the nobles presented the king with gifts and received in return ‘‘boons’’ in the form of quarried architectural elements, prize mortuary real estate, or otherwise unobtainable items, so the king offered gifts to the gods and received in return blessings and success in battle. A portion of the booty reaped from battles that occasionally had been explicitly commanded or authorized by a deity would then be returned to the gods in the form of further temple donations, perpetuating a theoretically endless cycle of reciprocity. According to the ideology encapsulated in the all-too-familiar smiting scene, the king was also the sole representative of his people when it came to war. Whether a particular king accompanied his troops into battle or not depended on a great variety of variables (the king’s age and proclivities, the might of the enemy, the norms of the day), but even when he did not, it was common for him to claim credit for commanding that the battle happen. Success in war was proof of his own ‘‘strong arm’’ and of the love held for him by the most martial of gods. When he marched, at least in the Nineteenth
Dynasty, Amun, Ptah, Re, and Seth marched with him, incarnate in their respective troop detachments.
While kings usurped the credit for the outcome of battles, engagement was dangerous. The axe-wounds suffered by King Seqenenre-Tao attest to this fact, and it is perhaps doubtful that a king of a securely united Upper and Lower Egypt ever would have participated in hand-to-hand combat, the bluster of Sinuhe’s encomiums and Ramesses Il’s war records aside. Kings were too imbued with symbolism to be placed at high risk, and - with the possible exception of those rulers that had received military training prior to their enthronement - battles were too important to leave to kings. Thus, in the vast majority of instances, generals functioned as the anonymous high priests of war, while all victories were officially ascribed to the might of the ‘‘lord of all foreign countries’’ (nb hAs(w)tnb(w)t).
Just as battle was too dangerous for most kings to participate in directly, there is also remarkably little evidence for kings deciding legal matters - despite the fact that the king was the ‘‘lord of truth’’ and that Re had placed him ‘‘upon the land of the living, for ever and ever, to judge men and satisfy the gods’’ (Grandet 2002: 118). With the exception of King Solomon, few judges escape the reality that in the most contentious of cases a judgement in favor of one party angers the other. Thus, there may have been a very conscious attempt to shield the king from being placed in a position so apt to garner ill-will. As Thutmose III explained the function of the vizier, ‘‘he is the copper that shields the gold of his master’s house’’ (Lichtheim 1976: 22). Indeed, even in the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant, set during the rather anomalous First Intermediate Period, the king was only called upon to decide a case after eight appeals had already been entertained. At that point, once the case had been summarized for him in writing, the king’s response to the presiding official’s enquiry was: ‘‘Judge yourself’’ (Parkinson 1997: 75). In clear-cut cases of regicide and attempted regicide, still the living king did not serve as judge. Indeed, the only venue in which it was evidently deemed safe for the monarch to render judgement was the afterlife. From this untouchable realm, the king as Osiris punished living individuals for the violation of tombs and condemned departed evildoers to die a second death.
In as much as the king was evoked whenever oaths were taken, however, he acted as witness to nearly every matter of legal import that took place within Egypt. In court cases, those testifying took the ‘‘oath of the lord’’ in which the penalty for perjury was acknowledged and the Pharaoh’s name was evoked (sometimes together with Amun) as the highest authority a person could swear by. The king not only safeguarded truth by supernaturally overseeing the honesty of oath-takers, but he was also popularly credited with giving the law, perhaps due to his power to issue edicts, exemptions, and the occasional general guideline.
By virtue of having appointed his vizier, seal-bearers, and all major state and provincial officials, the king administrated his realm by proxy, and the highest judges judged in his name. Just as not all monarchs were equally inhibited by the ritual restrictions of their office, however, some seem to have played an unusually active role in state affairs. We have, on occasion, letters purportedly composed by the king that show a great deal of active interest in internal and international affairs (e. g., Wente 1990: 18-21, 24-8; Moran 1992: 1-3, 10-11, 101, 366; Bryce 1998: 310-14).
Further, many inscriptions demonstrate that the king routinely met with his counsellors and sought their opinion on matters such as whether to erect an obelisk or which path to take en route to war. Indeed, at least one Old Kingdom official whose advice the king sought found fit to brag of this in his tomb (e. g., Strudwick 2005: 277), and a First Intermediate Period king humbly imparted the advice to his heir that ‘‘a king who has courtiers is not ignorant’’ (Lichtheim 1975: 105). That the court did not automatically rubber stamp the king’s decisions is clear from the KOnigsnovelle genre of royal inscriptions (Loprieno 1996: 277-95). While the point of such compositions was often to showcase the wisdom of the king as set against the miserable foil of his cowardly advisors, the form nonetheless indicates that some room for disagreement and discussion existed in affairs of state. Certainly, in the Contendings of Horus and Seth, the royal drama made cosmic, the sun-god’s orders were not always followed, and the assembly was an arena for debate and dissention. Such a tradition of active cabinet conversation, of course, helped enable the country to function effectively in the absence of a wise or mature Pharaoh.
World History
