'pite the human-divine duality inherent in the.---..cn of most Egyptian pharaohs there were -'¦• linces when living kings do seem to have been hired fully divine within their own lifetimes. > was not the result of arbitrary theological or .'! decree, however, and it seems clear that such usually ‘earned’ their immortality through and successful reigns. The clearest evidence ¦¦ 'his comes from the New Kingdom; although the •t details of the situation are not always clear, living deification of Amenophis III and : le. sses II are relatively well attested. In the case -menophis III;' we find that towards the end of - reign this king began the increasing solarization ilgypfs major cults and of his own kingship.
¦ irding to the reconstruction of events by mond Johnson and others, at the time of his Sed ;'.ee celebrated in the 30th year of his reign the y declared himself deified and merged with the
Solar disk as the Aten or as Re-I lorakhty. From this time we find the king taking divine prerogatives in his representations such as those showing him with the curved beard of the gods, with the horns of Amun and wearing the lunar crescent and sun disk or presenting an offering before a statue of himself. Even here, however, the evidence of royal deification may not be what it appears on the surface. Betsy Bryan has pointed out that Amenophis may not have intended by his own deification to have transcended kingship on earth permanently and that the cultic and political uses of a divine ruler could have been limited to prescribed occasions such as the king’s Sed festival.
Representations of living deified kings in the presence of deities show a level of equality which transcends that found in normal scenes of the king among the gods. In the inner shrine of the great rock-cut temple of Abu Simbel, for example, the deified Ramesses II had four statues cut to repre-
Between Gods and Men
The sanctuary of the mortuary temple of Ramesses Hat Abu Simbel holds seated statues of the gods Ptah, Amun, Ramesses and Re-Horakhty. Here, the figure of the king represents not only the god Osiris, but also Ramesses himself as god. 19th dynasty
Akhenaten and his family present offerings to the Aten. The nature of Akhenaten s place in his own religion is not fully understood, but it seems that he and his family may have played some kind of divine role before his subjects. Limestone balustrade from el-Amarna. Egyptian Museum, Cairo.
Sent Ptah, Re-I lorakhty, Amun-Re and himself, seated side by side, d'hat the king is not simply depicted in the company of the gods is clear as the figures are shown as incontrovertible equals. It has even been suggested that in this group the king might be represented as an embodiment or manifestation of all these national gods. We can only be sure that in some circumstances the living Egyptian king could be declared divine in a manner which transcended the aspect of divinity which was taken on at the coronation. Whether this deification of the living monarch equalled that accorded deceased kings in permanency or in degree we may never know.
The nature of Akhenaten is also of particular interest in regard to the question of monarchical divinity but is difficult to ascertain. While some scholars have seen this king as taking the role of
Divine son of the god Aten, others have seen h a member of a kind of divine triad which included his queen Nefertiti. More recently, a nu. of Egyptologists have pointed out what appt be associations with traditional Egyptian theology even within the Amarna Period. ?. Cruz-Uribe has shown that just as Amenopr may have been equated with the Aten, an' queen Tiye with Hathor, complex parallels may been promulgated which suggested the equati the living Akhenaten with the god Shu, Khepr other solar deities, Nefertiti with Tefnut, and sibly, a royal daughter with the goddess Maat.
(Right) Statue of a statue of Amenophis HI displays the king as a god and, on its rear face, the image of the human king prostate before the god Amun. Luxor Museum.
Divine Royal 5 tatues
Stela of Seti-er-neheh shows the god Amun-Re (top left) before Ptah and a statue of the divine Ramesses II, ‘Montu of the Two Lands’. From Horbeit. 19th dynasty. Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum, Hildesheim.
Statues of Egyptian kings functioned as integral parts of divine cults, often serving as intermediaries between the people and the gods within or at the entrances to temples and also - especially in later New Kingdom times - sometimes being regarded as divine themselves. Statues such as the titanic figure of Ramesses II set up in western Thebes - which was the subject of Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias’ - were given special names, could own land, had their own attendant priesthoods, and were venerated as gods in their own right. A group of artifacts known as the Horbeit
Stelae throw particular light on this phenomenon. The stelae, which were found in the eastern Delta near the modern Qantir, come from the region of Ramesses II’s chief Delta residence and attest to the presence of a cult of several colossal statues of the king in that area. One of these stelae (that of Seti-er-neheh) depicts a statue of the deified Ramesses II along with the great gods Amun and Ptah in a manner which makes the importance of the statue unmistakable. Another stela (that of the military commander Mose) depicts Ramesses II in a unique manner. In its lower register the stela shows a colossal seated statue of Ramesses next to a smaller figure of the king (which is apparently intended as a divine manifestation of the statue) giving gifts to Mose. The statue and its manifestation both share the same name and show the divine nature of the deified king’s image.
Of great interest for our understanding of lent Egyptian theology are scenes which have survived to us of kings presenting sacrifices to deified statues of themselves. An example is found in the representation of Amenophis III offering to an image of himself in his temple at Soleb. Such depictions are based on the concept of dual (earthly and heavenly) roles played by the gods themselves. Beginning in the Old Kingdom we find evidence for the idea of deities being manifest both in the heavens or ‘beyond’ and in the physical sphere on earth, just as the living king was himself a manifestation of the earthly Horus as opposed to the god Horus in the heavens. Thus, a king deified in his own lifetime - within the physical sphere - could sacrifice to his own self as a deity in the spiritual sphere.
World History
