Sexuality in Ancient Egypt

Life in Ancient Egypt

Text Excerpts with no intention to infringing on any of the copyright of original authors. Articles written by Caroline Seawright, Alissa Lyon, Daniel Kolos and Richard Sullivan

Sexuality in ancient Egypt was open, untainted by guilt. Sex was an important part of life - from birth to death and rebirth. Singles and married couples made love. The gods themselves were earthy enough to copulate. The Egyptians even believed in sex in the afterlife. Sex was not taboo. Even the Egyptian religion was filled with tales of adultery, incest, homosexuality and masturbation ... with hints of necrophilia! Masculinity and femininity itself were strongly linked with the ability to conceive and bear children.

...Revel in pleasure while your life endures and deck your head with myrrh. Be richly clad in white and perfumed linen; like the gods anointed be; and never weary grow

In eager quest of what your heart desires - Do as it prompts you...

MARIAGE

To the ancient Egyptians, the most attractive women tended to be the fertile ones.

A woman who had children was seen to be more fortunate than ones without. Taking after Isis, the mother goddess of Horus, Egyptian women strove to be intelligent, wise, mystical and mothers. Where her twin sister Nephthys was barren, Isis was fertile.

In the Egyptian community, men had to prove their masculinity by fathering children, while the women had to be able to bear these sons and daughters. Being a mother meant being able to keep her marriage secure and to gain a better position in society.

But an Egyptian family was not just a status symbol - the Egyptians loved their children and were not afraid to show it. But there were some advice to parents, written by scribes:

Do not prefer one of your children above the others; after all, you never know which one of them will be kind to you. 

Adultery in Egypt was wrong. Women got the worst punishment for adultery - a man might just be forced into a divorce, but a woman could conceivably be killed for that crime. In the Tale of Two Brothers, the adulterous wife was found out, murdered and her body was thrown to the dogs.

Unmarried women, on the other hand, seem to be free to choose partners as they so desire, and enjoy their love life to its fullest.

Itinerant Performers and 'Prostitutes'

The Egyptian sacred 'prostitute' (who was probably a highly regarded as a member of Egyptian society because of her association with different gods or goddesses (such as Bes and Hathor), rather than the street walker that the modern mind imagines) advertised herself through her clothing and make up. Some of these women wore blue faience beaded fishnet dresses. They painted their lips red, and tattooed themselves on the breasts or thighs and even went around totally nude. There is no evidence that these women were paid for these fertility-related acts, so some believe that word 'prostitute' is probably an incorrect term for these women. In fact, the Victorian era theory that these women were prostitutes is not backed up by evidence at all. All archaeological evidence for women with such tattoos shows them to have been New Kingdom female musicians or dancers.

Another idea pointed out by Daniel Kolos, an Egyptologist academically trained at the University of Toronto, is that this premarital sexual activity might be a prerequisite for marriage. One of the theories that disassociate these women from being prostitutes is that their sexual activity could be part of a "coming-of-age ritual", just as circumcision was one for males. With Egypt's heavy emphasis on fertility as the defining nature of a man or a woman, this idea is a highly likely probability.

Other theories could be that the young virgin girls joined itinerant performing groups - dancers, singers and the like - and during their time with these groups they experienced their first sexual encounters. If a girl became pregnant, she would probably leave the troupe to head home to her family with proof of her fertility. (Motherhood was venerated, giving a woman a much higher status in society, so pregnancy was something to be proud of in ancient Egypt.)

These travelling groups of women were strongly linked with midwifery and childbirth-related deities. The goddesses Isis, Nephthys, Meskhenet and Heqet disguised themselves as itinerant performers, travelling with the god Khnum as their porter. Carrying the sistrum and Mena instruments - instruments with sexual overtones - they showed it to Rawoser, the expectant father. Knowing that his wife, Raddjedet, was having a very difficult labor, he told these women - the disguised goddesses - about his wife's troubles, and at their offer of help, he let them in to see her.

These women do not seem to be pay-for-sex prostitutes; instead they seem to be a link with the divine, a helper of expectant mothers and singers, dancers and musicians. This is not to say that there were no pay-for-sex prostitutes in ancient Egypt, it it just that there is little evidence of this found. Considering Egypt's very different image of sexuality, the modern concept of both sexuality and prostitution do not fit this ancient society. Women operated under a totally different cultural imperative than women today, thus ancient Egyptian sexuality must be looked at without modern prejudices. It seems that these female performers, these 'prostitutes', were treated with courtesy and respect, and there seemed to be a well-established link between these travelling performers and fertility, childbirth, religion and magic.

Contraception

The Egyptians had their own ways and means of getting around the fact that sex produced children. They had both contraceptives and abortions; mostly these were prescriptions that were filled with unpleasant ingredients such as crocodile dung. Here is one of the nicer ones:

Prescription to make a woman cease to become pregnant for one, two or three years: Grind together finely a measure of acacia dates with some honey. Moisten seed-wool with the mixture and insert it in the vagina. 

Incest

From the close family relationships in Egyptian mythology and the fact that Egyptians seemed to have no taboo against incest, many have concluded that incest was rife in ancient Egypt.

There were probably some brother and sister marriages, but more likely than not, the siblings in question would have been half-brothers and half-sisters. The problem arises from the limited Egyptian terms of kinship, which are very confusing. A 'father' could refer to the actual father, the grandfather or male ancestors, while 'mother' could be the same, but for the females of the family. 'Sister' could mean the royal family, on the other hand did have more incestuous marriages. One theory is that the royal blood ran through the females, not the males, and so to become pharaoh a man had to marry a royal princess (who would be his sister or half-sister). This is known as the Heiress Princess theory, which is now largely discredited.

Another explanation for these marriages is that:

The prevalence of brother-sister marriages within the New Kingdom royal family, a custom in obvious contrast to contemporary non-royal marriage patterns, appears to have been an attempt to reinforce the links between the royal family and the gods who themselves frequently indulged in brother-sister unions. 

THE GODS AND SEX

Hathor and Ra

Baba a pre-dynasty baboon god, taunted Ra who stood for Set becoming ruler rather than Horus, "Your shrine is empty!" With that, Ra stormed off to be alone - presumably this is a story about a solar eclipse - and refused to join the other gods. Realizing that they'd gone too far, the others sent Baba away, but still Ra refused to stop sulking. Finally, Hathor decided on a plan. She went into Ra's presence and stood before him and started to dance and strip, revealing her nakedness and lewdly showing him her private parts. The dance caused Ra to laugh, forget his hurt feelings and he once again rejoined the gods.

Nut and Geb

Nut, the goddess of the night sky, and her brother Geb, the god of the earth, were originally thought to be in a constant state of lovemaking. Ra grew angry with his grandchildren, and commanded their father Shu to separate the two lovers. The god of the air took his place, and trampled on the ithyphallic Geb, and lifted Nut high into the air. Nut was found to be pregnant, and was then cursed by Ra - she would never be able to bear her children on any month of the 360-day year. Thoth managed to win a game against Khonsu, god of the moon, and used some of the light of the moon to create five extra days (making the year 365 days). During those days Nut gave birth to her five children - Isis, Osiris, Nephthys, Set and Horus the Elder (not to be confused with Horus, the child of Isis and Osiris).

Nephthys and Osiris

Some tales of sex and the Egyptian gods is on the seamier side - one of the reasons given as to why Set and Osiris hate each other was because of Nephthys, Set's sister-wife. She was barren (she represented the desert, as did Set), and she hit on the plan of disguising herself as Isis and seducing Osiris. Getting Osiris drunk, Nephthys took Osiris to her bed, and the two had drunken sex together. Osiris dropped his garland of melilot flowers in the act of passion. Set found the adulterous goddess and the flowers, and knowing whom the flowers belonged to, he began to plan Osiris' death. The child of this union was thought to be Anubis, god of mummification.

Now as the overflowing of the Nile are sometimes very great, and extend to the boundaries of the land, this gave rise to the story of the secret intercourse between Osiris and Nephthys, as the natural consequence of so great an inundation would be the springing up of plants in those parts of the country which were formerly barren. 

Isis and Osiris

After his first attempt, Set managed to kill Osiris again and cut up his body into numerous parts. These parts Set spread all over Egypt. Isis, Nephthys and Anubis searched Egypt, and managed to retrieve all of the pieces of the body, except one - Osiris' phallus. Set had dropped the penis into the Nile (making it fertile), where it was eaten by a fish. The god and goddesses pieced Osiris together and created the first mummy. Using her magic, Isis fashioned a replacement for Osiris' missing part, either out of clay, wood or gold, and attached this to her dead husband's body. Through magical spells, life was breathed back into Osiris' body (though some dispute this and believe that Osiris was dead at the time)... The goddess managed to share a time of passion with her husband who impregnating her with their child, Horus. Osiris then passed into the afterlife, becoming god of the dead. This part of the mythos borders on necrophilia!

Hapi

The Egyptian god if the Nile, Hapi, was a masculine deity, given female properties because of the fertility of the Nile River. Without the Nile, there would be no Egypt. Due to the duality of Egyptian thought, there were two Hapi gods - one of Upper Egypt wearing the water lily (lotus) on his head, and one of Lower Egypt wearing papyrus. He was usually depicted as a blue or green colored man with a protruding belly, carrying libation jugs. He also has full breasts, indicating his ability to nourish Egypt. Despite being a hermaphrodite god, both the northern and southern versions of Hapi were given wives - Nekhbet in Upper Egypt and Wadjet in Lower Egypt.

Min

Lettuce was thought to be the favorite food of the fertility god, Min. He was depicted as a god with an erect penis, wearing a feathered crown and carrying a flail. Lettuce was his sacred plant, and an aphrodisiac to the ancient Egyptians - this particular species of lettuce was tall, straight and secreted a milky substance when pressed!

Another aphrodisiac was the onion. They were forbidden to the priests who had vowed celibacy, for fear that their passion might take over, and that they might desecrate themselves!

Fennel, ginger, pomegranates, coriander in wine and radishes mixed with honey were thought to have aphrodisiac qualities, too.

The water lily was also a symbol of sexuality, as well as immortality and health. It was possibly even a narcotic that the Egyptians used, but it was more likely to be a sexual stimulant.

Some of the more unusual aphrodisiacs included pearls dissolved in a cup of wine, baboon feeces added to aphrodisiac ointments!

Artwork

The Turin Erotic Papyrus contains various pictures of sexual activity, perhaps focused on Ramses II and his many wives. It has been theorized that, more likely, it is just the fantasies of an ancient Egyptian who happened to sketch them out on papyrus, or an artwork poking fun at the sexual side of the Egyptian lifestyle. Most of the positions drawn on this papyrus seem to be rather uncomfortable!

The most erotically graphic - some would say pornographic - work of Egyptian art is the so-called Turin Erotic Papyrus (Papyrus 55001), now in the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy. Painted in the Ramesside period (1292-1075 BC), the severely damaged papyrus has not been treated well by time and the elements. It consists of a continuous series of vignettes drawn on a papyrus scroll about 8.5 feet long and 10 inches high. The first third of the scroll (reading from right to left) shows animals and birds carrying out various human tasks. The rest consists of explicit depictions of sexual acts ...

Yet the vignettes' artistic merit is high, indicating that the papyrus had an elite owner and audience. The draftsmanship is of good quality, and the 12 erotic vignettes are carefully designed both as an entire structure and as separate.

Another sexual sketch - this time graffiti - from ancient Egypt shows a woman with a pharaoh's crown, maybe Hatshepsut (1473-1458 BC) engaging in sex with a male that many presume to be Senmut. This sketch has caused many people to believe that Hatshepsut and her favorite courtier were lovers.

From various sources, it seems that the Egyptian preferred method of intercourse were face-to-face or from behind.

References in writing to sexual intercourse between men are as rare as those to sexual intercourse between men and women; the absence of references in writing to sexual intercourse between women reflects the general male bias of the written record. Homosexual intercourse between a king and his general is implied in the fragmentary 'Tale of Neferkara and Sasenet', in the description of secret nocturnal visits by the king to the general, detected by the hero of the tale; although the tale is damaged, it reads as if the nocturnal visits are considered illicit. 

After Life

The Egyptians thought of their afterlives as more of a continuation of life on earth (albeit a better life). This being the case, the Egyptians believed in sex life after death!

Egyptian men had false penises attached to their mummies while Egyptian women had artificial nipples attached. Both would become fully functional in the afterlife, where they were free to engage in sexual intercourse, if they so desired.

There were even fertility dolls in many graves - women with wide, childbearing hips that were often carrying children in their arms. Other fertility dolls, known as paddle dolls, don't have any legs, and their bodies end in very wide pubic area, with tiny heads and arms.

These dolls show that the Egyptians believed that fertility and sex were interlinked, though the ancient Egyptians quite clearly enjoyed sex in its own right!

Is Nefertiti behind the wall?

Archeologists hoping King Tut’s tomb holds answer to 3,345-year-old secret

Experts in Egypt are '90 per cent positive' that there is a room hidden just beyond Tut's burial grounds. And some are convinced Nefertiti is in it...

When Nicholas Reeves announced in August 2015 that he’d found the tomb of the ancient Egyptian Queen Nefertiti concealed behind a wall in the burial chamber of King Tut, it seemed like another outlandish theory from another Egyptologist hoping to make his mark. After all, Nefertiti has been dead for 3,345 years, and no one has found her final resting place in that time. How could it be hiding in plain sight, just inches from a place frequented by tens of thousands of tourists and archeologists for nearly 100 years?

King Tut tomb in Luxor

But in the past few months, skepticism has been transformed into excitement as evidence for Reeves’s theory has mounted. On Saturday, after two days conducting radar scans of Tutankhamun’s millennia-old tomb, Egypt’s Antiquities Minister Mamdouh Eldamaty announced he was “90 per cent positive” that another room is hidden just beyond the burial chamber’s north wall.

Anything could be inside the sealed-off room in Egypt’s sun-baked Valley of Kings. But if it really holds Nefertiti’s remains, as Reeves proposes, it would be “one of the most important finds of the century” Eldamaty said at a news conference.

Standing inside Tut’s tomb, Eldamaty explained that a wall painted with scenes from the boy king’s burial ceremony is made of two different materials, indicating that there is likely an empty space behind it. Scans also revealed empty space behind another of the chamber’s walls.

The imaging was conducted by Japanese radar specialist Hirokatsu Watanabe, National Geographic reported. Pushing a radar machine on a metal trolley rigged to look like a high-tech lawn mower, he slowly inched along the walls of the hot and airless chamber while journalists and antiquities experts watched in breathless silence.

The radar scans have been sent to Japan for further study; the results of Japanese investigators’ evaluation should be announced in a month, according to Reuters. If their analysis confirms Eldamaty’s belief, researchers will develop a plan to figure out what’s inside the hidden room — and how to get it out.

“Everything is adding up,” Reeves told National Geographic.

“The tomb is not giving up its secrets easily,” he continued. “But it is giving them up, bit by bit. It’s another result. And nothing is contradicting the basic direction of the theory.”

 

Mysterious Queen Nefertiti

Reeves’s theory, which is convoluted even by Egyptology’s cryptic standards, goes like this: Nefertiti, the first wife and co-regent of the Egyptian king Akhenaten, took power after the king died. First as Nefertutaten, then using the man’s name Smenkhkare to garner greater legitimacy, she ruled until her own death, when she was given a pharaoh’s burial in a tomb of her own. When her stepson and successor Tutankhamun (believed to be the son of Akhenaten and one of his sister’s) died at age 19 after just nine years of rule, no tomb was prepared for him. Instead, Tut was hurriedly buried in an ante-chamber to Nefertiti’s tomb, and Nefertiti — a controversial queen who some at the time may have wished to forget — was left to languish behind a blocked-off wall.

Reeves acknowledges that it’s an eyebrow-raising proposal, one that challenges a lot of accepted thinking about Egypt’s tumultuous Amarna period, when Nefertiti and Tut both lived. For one thing, most scholars believe that the short-lived Smenkhkare was a king in his own right, not just an alias of Nefertiti. For another, it turns gender norms from the time on their head.

“There’s a lot of ‘I think’ in this article, I’m afraid,” he told the New Yorker in August.

But, Reeves argues, evidence for his theory is all over King Tut’s tomb. Not just in the hints of a hidden chamber — which Reeves first noticed by examining high resolution images published online by the Spanish foundation Factum Arte earlier this year — but in the art and architecture of the tomb itself.

Tutankhamun’s tomb is smaller and more modestly decorated than other royal tombs from the time. Even its discoverer, Howard Carter, commented on the un-kingly arrangement in his journals in the 1920s:

“The unfamiliar plan of (the) tomb repeatedly caused us to ask ourselves in our perplexity whether it was really a tomb or a Royal Cache?” Carter wrote.

Carter didn’t recognize the tomb as a king’s because it was really for a queen, Reeves says. The illustration on the tomb’s north wall — the one that purportedly conceals the hidden room — may bolster his claim.

Reeves says that the painting, long thought to show a young King Ay (Tut’s successor) performing a funerary ritual for an elderly-looking Tutankhamun, actually shows Tut performing the ritual for Nefertiti. The older figure shares several important features with the famous Nefertiti bust at the Egypt Museum in Berlin, he wrote in his paper published in August: they have the same long straight nose, rounded chin and deep groove at the corners of their mouths. The younger figure, meanwhile, seems to resemble contemporary images of Tut with its plump, boyish face and soft double chin.

Given the chaotic politics of the Amarna period, Reeves’s unorthodox version of events is not entirely inconceivable. Along with Akhenaten, Nefertiti led a religious revolution that turned Egypt into a monotheocracy devoted to worship of Aten, the sun god — a movement known as the “Atenist heresy.”

But Tut — who was originally named Tutankaten (“living image of Aten”) — reversed the change, restoring the god Amun to primacy and switching his name to Tutankhamun (“living image of Amun”). In those circumstances, it’s possible that those who buried Tut might have aimed to conceal evidence of Nefertiti’s reign and the “Atenist heresy” at the same time.

Speaking to Reuters on Saturday, Reeves cautioned that excavators must proceed carefully, lest they damage the contents of a chamber that has been hermetically sealed for thousands of years.

“The key is to excavate slowly and carefully, and record well,” he said. “The fact is this isn’t a race. All archaeologies are disruption. We can’t go back and redo it, so we have to do it well in the first place.”

Meanwhile, Egyptians antiquities and tourism officials are watching with bated breath. In a country plagued by bouts of violence and an economy wracked by upheaval, the announcement of the “most important find of the century” would be a much-needed boon to tourism.

According to the New York Times, 12,000 people used to line up daily to see the ancient city of Luxor, across the Nile from the Valley of Kings. In 2012, a year after the revolution that ousted former president Hosni Mubarak, that number dropped to just 300. Tourists were just beginning to inch back to normal when a Russian airliner crashed in the Sinai Peninsula last month, prompting several countries to impose travel restrictions to Egypt and plunging the future of Egyptian tourism back into uncertainty.

“If we discover something, it will turn the world inside out,” Mustafa Waziry, the director of antiquities of Luxor, told the Times. “And they will come.”

Akhenaten: mad, bad, or brilliant?

He fathered Tutankhamun, married Nefertiti, and was one of the most original thinkers of his era. Then why is the pharaoh Akhenaten often dismissed as a madman?

Akhenaten

Almost 200 miles south of Cairo, in the heart of Middle Egypt, the archaeological site of Amarna occupies a great bay of desert beside the River Nile. To the uninformed eye, this semicircle of barren land, bound by the east bank of the river and enormous limestone cliffs, looks like nothing much: a vast, stricken dust bowl, approximately seven miles long and three miles wide, scattered with sandy hillocks. But 33 centuries ago, this spot was home to tens of thousands of ancient Egyptians, brought there by the will of a single man: the pharaoh Akhenaten.

Rebel, tyrant, and prophet of arguably the world’s earliest monotheistic religion, Akhenaten has been called history’s first individual. His impact upon ancient Egyptian customs and beliefs stretching back for centuries was so alarming that, in the generations following his death in 1336 BC, he was branded a heretic. Official king lists omitted his name.

For my money, this makes him the most fascinating and controversial figure in Egyptian history. And that’s before you consider his marriage to Nefertiti, known as the Mona Lisa of antiquity thanks to her austerely beautiful painted limestone bust discovered in a sculptor’s workshop at Amarna and now in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, or the likelihood that he fathered Tutankhamun, the most famous pharaoh of them all. If I were in charge of the British Museum, I would commission an exhibition about Akhenaten in a trice.

Akhenaten was not supposed to become pharaoh. The son of Amenhotep III, who dominated the first half of the 14th century BC, ruling over a court of unprecedented luxury and magnificence that placed great emphasis on solar theology, Prince Amenhotep, as he was then called, was younger brother to the crown Prince Thutmose. Following Thutmose’s unexpected death, though, he became the heir apparent – and when his father died in 1353 BC, he took the throne as Amenhotep IV. Almost immediately, his waywardness began to assert itself. He commissioned monumental buildings for the historic religious centre of Karnak in Thebes.

Amarna 

Yet rather than honor Amun, the god associated with the site, his temples were orientated towards the east, facing in the direction of the sunrise, and dedicated to a new form of the sun-god, known officially by the not-so-catchy formula of “The living one, Ra-Horus of the horizon who rejoices in the horizon in his identity of light which is in the sun disc.” Before long this was shortened to “the Aten”, the Egyptian word for “the sun disc”, and the king had changed his name from Amenhotep (“Amun is content”) to Akhenaten (“effective for the Aten”).

A number of colossal sandstone statues of the king carved for the temples of the Aten at Karnak, where they were attached to pillars in colonnades lining grand open courts, attest to the drastic convulsions coursing through Egyptian society at this time. One of them can be seen in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum, which I visited while making the BBC documentary series Treasures of Ancient Egypt. The sculpture is like nothing seen before in the long history of ancient Egyptian art.

The pose and attributes are fairly standard. Akhenaten appears front-on. His crossed arms brandish a crook and a flail – royal insignia like his double crown, distinctive headdress, and short kilt. Yet the distortions of his physiognomy are bizarre beyond belief. His face appears stretched, with high cheekbones and an elongated nose leading down to a pointy chin. His unusually plump lips echo the womanly sensuousness of his broad hips, as well as an unflattering potbelly that sags over his waistband.

To modern eyes, the treatment of the figure appears expressionistic and grotesque. Is this a realistic portrait of a ruler wracked with disease? Or a new vision of kingship scorched free of visual clichés? Moreover, what kind of person would commission something as dark and startling as this: a visionary, or a madman?

Temple of "Aten"

“Views of Akhenaten have oscillated between both extremes,” says the Egyptologist Anna Stevens. “The ancient Egyptians excised his reign from their own history. But modern history has been kinder to him: we perhaps value individualism more – and of course we are not directly affected by his actions.”

“Without the basis for proper diagnosis, the charge of madness is best avoided,” says Barry Kemp, emeritus professor of Egyptology at Cambridge University, and author of The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. “But clearly Akhenaten had an original mind. He developed a vision of how God should be honoured, and had the determination and means to turn that vision into reality.” Akhenaten’s vision was extreme: by worshipping a single god, the solar orb, he was razing the Egyptian pantheon. Eventually he would ban the traditional gods altogether, making redundant up to 2,000 time-honoured deities. In the fifth year of his reign, around the time that he changed his name, Akhenaten decided to build a new royal capital – somewhere free of existing religious associations. The site he chose, at modern-day Amarna, was called Akhetaten, or “Horizon of the Aten” – perhaps because the shape of the cliffs to the east formed the hieroglyph for “horizon”.

Construction was rapid and after just two years, the ruling family took up residence to the north of the city in a palace linked to the rest of Akhetaten by a long “Royal Road”. Akhenaten rode along this route in his chariot every day, mirroring the progress of the Aten through the heavens in order to emphasize his proximity to the new godhead.

One God "Aten"

“It was a fresh start,” says Stevens, assistant director of the Amarna Project, which is excavating Akhenaten’s city. “Ostensibly it was about building a new cult home for the Aten on virgin land – this is what Akhenaten tells us in the inscriptions on the boundary stelae [inscribed stone slabs] around Amarna’s perimeter. But we can guess that there were other motivations, such as a desire to surround himself with loyal officials and create distance from those who offered opposition.” One way of demonstrating that Akhetaten represented a clean break with the past was by sponsoring radically new forms of architecture. “Egyptian temples were traditionally closed affairs,” explains Stevens. “Once you entered the inner part of the complex, the floor level gradually rose, and the roof dropped. Lighting was restricted to a few small windows and lamps. The solar cult brought with it open-air sanctuaries – a form used long before Akhenaten’s reign, but now translated to a much grander scale. Akhenaten’s temples incorporated vast open-air courts with offering tables and unroofed shrines. The cult image, of course, was no longer a statue hidden deep in the sanctuary, but the Aten above.”

Throughout Amarna, buildings were decorated with a new and immediately recognizable representation of the Aten: a simple disc emanating rays that culminated in tiny human hands. It is tempting to imagine these solar hands scooping up all the food and incense left out as offerings to the sun: the largest temple precinct in the city, the Great Aten Temple, contained more than 1,700 stone and mud-brick offering tables and benches built for just this purpose.

The strange new visual formula for the Aten wasn’t the only artistic innovation under Akhenaten. Over the years, Amarna has yielded a number of limestone reliefs presenting intimate scenes of the royal family enjoying domestic bliss – forerunners of Christian paintings of the Holy Family, or even of modern paparazzi photographs of celebrities. There is a famous example in Berlin. Akhenaten can be seen cradling one of his daughters as if he is about to kiss her. Opposite him is Nefertiti, whose lap supports a second daughter who is pointing at her sister. A third child, no bigger than a baby, plays with the serpent pendant adorning her mother’s distinctive flat-topped headdress. Above them the Aten beams down its many-handed benefaction.

Compared with earlier Egyptian art, which to the untutored eye can seem like an unending frieze of stiff figures seen in profile, here we have something charming, spontaneous, and full of life. Previously, Egyptian artists had depicted children adopting a distinctive pose, with a finger held against their lips – but here, the royal offspring behave more naturally. Wriggly and curious, they point and turn their heads in an irrepressible fashion – just like real children. While a lot of ancient Egyptian art has a static, monumental quality, as though self-consciously designed to last for eternity, this scene offers a transitory impression of royal family life. It feels as though we have stumbled into this particular room of the palace. The baby’s eye has been drawn to her mother’s glinting jewelry, but in a second or two her gaze will flick elsewhere, and the poses of the other protagonists will change.

Tutankhamun 

Why did Akhenaten wish to promote exciting new art like this? In part because he wanted to reinforce his solar cult: these scenes emphasized his role, as well as that of his wife, as intermediary between the Aten and the people. Perhaps this is also why one of his palaces at Amarna was designed with a special balcony known as the “window of appearances”: millennia before our Royal Family would stand on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, Akhenaten displayed himself above his courtiers, to whom he dispensed gifts such as leather gloves, gold collars and signet rings.

Recent discoveries at Amarna, though, suggest that Akhenaten’s cult of the Aten was not as successful as he might have hoped. Anna Stevens has excavated the cemetery where the workers who erected Akhenaten’s palaces and temples were interred in shallow graves. “For most people,” she says, “life was tough – with hard labor and a basic diet” – the antithesis of the relaxed family scene depicted on the relief in Berlin. More than two thirds of these workers were dead before they were 35 years old.

Nefertiti

Moreover, Stevens noticed a surprising absence among the grave goods buried in the cemetery. There were lots of amulets and votive objects depicting popular minor deities – including faience (glazed earthenware figures) of the bandy-legged dwarf god Bes, who offered protection during childbirth, and had been worshipped for centuries. “But there is not a single representation of the sun disc at this cemetery, nor mention of Akhenaten on finger rings or scarabs or anything,” she says. “This was life continuing as normal.”

Without the support of the people, there was nobody to uphold Akhenaten’s one-man revolution when he died after 17 years on the throne. Even Akhenaten himself appears to have had doubts on his deathbed: his tomb contained “shabti” figurines that were heresy for Atenism. Four years later, when his young son Tutankhamun became king in 1332 BC, the forces of conservatism won out. Tutankhamun issued a decree lamenting the ruinous state of the country’s temples: “Their shrines had fallen into decay, having become mounds thick with weeds. The land was in distress; the gods were ignoring this land.” Akhetaten – at its zenith, home to up to 50,000 people – was abandoned, as the court returned to the traditional capital of Memphis. Old religious customs were restored. Akhenaten was effectively written out of history.

For ancient Egyptians, Akhenaten was a madman, a megalomaniac, a dreamer and a despot. But he was also a brave reformer who single-handedly set about dismantling Egypt’s traditions in order to construct something new. Ultimately, though, his vision burned too brightly.

“Atenism offered little to people who wanted the comfort of a god who could be approached by anyone, even in their own home,” says Barry Kemp. “Akhenaten’s message was just too austere to gather widespread support.” Just imagine, though, what would have happened if his new religion had caught on: perhaps today we would mention Atenism in the same breath as other great monotheistic faiths such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

Credits: Alastair Sooke from the Daily Telegraph

Ramses III King of Egypt

Ramses III King of Egypt

King of Egypt

Ramses III, Ramses also spelled Ramesses or Rameses (died 1156 bce, Thebes, Egypt), king of ancient Egypt (reigned 1187–56 bce) who defended his country against foreign invasion in three great wars, thus ensuring tranquility during much of his reign. In his final years, however, he faced internal disturbances, and he was ultimately killed in an attempted coup d’état.

Son of Setnakht (reigned 1190–87 bce), founder of the 20th dynasty (1190–1075 bce), Ramses found Egypt upon his accession only recently recovered from the unsettled political conditions that had plagued the land at the end of the previous dynasty. In the fifth year of his reign, a coalition of Libyan tribes invaded the western Nile River delta on the pretext that the pharaoh had interfered in their chief’s succession. The Libyans had in fact encroached upon Egyptian lands, a perennial problem during the 19th and 20th dynasties, and were soundly defeated in a battle in the western delta.

After two years of peace, another, more dangerous coalition, the Sea People, a conglomeration of migrating peoples from Asia Minor and the Mediterranean islands who had previously destroyed the powerful Hittite empire in Asia Minor and devastated Syria, advanced against Egypt by land and by sea. Ramses’ land army checked the enemy’s advance in southernmost Palestine, and the hostile ships were trapped after being lured into the waterways of the delta. Egypt averted conquest by the northerners, but two of the invading peoples settled on the coast of Palestine, between Gaza and Mount Carmel. The attempted invasion ended Egyptian pretensions to a Syro-Palestinian hegemony.

War battles bas-relief

Two more years of peace ensued, but in Ramses’ 11th year a new coalition of Libyan tribes infiltrated the western delta. Compelled to wage yet another war, he defeated the Libyans after capturing their chief. After this final conflict, Ramses was able to finish his great funerary temple, palace, and town complex at Madīnat Habu, in western Thebes. He also built additions to Karnak, the great Theban temple complex, and encouraged trade and industry, dispatching a seaborne trading expedition to Punt, a land on the Somali coast of Africa, and exploiting the copper mines at Sinai and probably also the gold mines of Nubba, Egypt’s province to the south.

After a prosperous middle reign, administrative difficulties and conspiracy troubled Ramses’ last years. About year 28 of the king’s reign, the vizier of Lower Egypt was ousted because of corruption. A year later the workers employed on the royal tombs at Thebes went on strike because of delay in the delivery of their monthly rations. Only the intervention of the Upper Egyptian vizier, who had assumed responsibility for the whole country, ended the work stoppage.

Toward the end of Ramses’ reign, one of his secondary wives, seeking to place her son on the throne, plotted to assassinate the king. Written sources show that the coup failed and that the conspirators were successfully brought to trial. However, it remained unclear from the documents whether Ramses had survived the assassination attempt.

Captured war enemies

The King’s mummy displayed no obvious wounds, and questions about his fate were left open to speculation for many years. In 2012 researchers announced that a CT scan had revealed a deep knife wound in the mummy’s throat, indicating that Ramses was indeed murdered by the conspirators. He died at Thebes in the 32nd year of his reign and was succeeded by the crown prince Ramses IV.

Extracts from encyclopaedia Britanica

Nefertiti

Nefertiti Biography

An Egyptian queen renowned for her beauty, Nefertiti ruled alongside her husband, Pharaoh Akhenaten, during the mid-1300s B.C.

Queen Nefertiti

Synopsis

Nefertiti, whose name means "a beautiful woman has come," was the queen of Egypt and wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten during the 14th century B.C. She and her husband established the cult of Aten, the sun god, and promoted Egyptian artwork that was radically different from its predecessors. A bust of Nefertiti is one of the most iconic symbols of Egypt.

Mysterious Origins

Little is known about the origins of Nefertiti, but her legacy of beauty and power continue to intrigue scholars today. Her name is Egyptian and means "a beautiful woman has come." Some evidence suggests that she hailed from the town Akhmim and is the daughter or niece of a high official named Ay. Other theories have suggested that she was born in a foreign country, possibly Syria.

The exact date when Nefertiti married Amenhotep III's son, the future pharaoh Amenhotep IV, is unknown. It is believed she was 15 when they wed, which may have been before Akhenaten assumed the throne. They apparently ruled together from 1353 to 1336 B.C. and had six daughters, with speculation that they may have also had a son. Their daughter Ankhesenamun would eventually marry her half brother Tutankhamun, the future ruler of Egypt. Artwork from the day depicts the couple and their daughters in an unusually naturalistic and individualistic style, more so than from earlier eras. The king and his head queen seem to be inseparable in reliefs, often shown riding in chariots together and even kissing in public. It has been stated that the couple may have had a genuine romantic connection, a dynamic not generally seen in depictions of ancient pharaohs.

Worship of the Sun God

Nefertiti and the pharaoh took an active role in establishing the Aten cult, a religious mythology which defined Aten, the sun, as the most important god and the only one worthy of worship in Egypt's polytheistic canon. Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten (also seen as "Akenhaten" in some references) to honor the deity. It is believed that the king and queen were priests and that it was only through them that ordinary citizens could obtain access to Aten. Nefertiti changed her name to Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti, meaning "beautiful are the beauties of Aten, a beautiful woman has come," as a show of her absolutism for the new religion. The royal family resided in a constructed city called Akhetaton—in what is now known as el-Amarna—meant to honor their god. There were several open-air temples in the city, and at the center stood the palace.

Nefertiti was perhaps one of the most powerful women ever to have ruled. Her husband went to great lengths to display her as an equal. In several reliefs she is shown wearing the crown of a pharaoh or smiting her enemies in battle. But despite this great power, Nefertiti disappears from all depictions after 12 years. The reason for her disappearance is unknown. Some scholars believe she died, while others speculate she was elevated to the status of co-regent—equal in power to the pharaoh—and began to dress herself as a man. Other theories suggest she became known as Pharaoh Smenkhkare, ruling Egypt after her husband’s death or that she was exiled when the worship of the deity Amen-Ra came back into vogue.

Nefertiti Revealed?

In August 2015, American archaeologist Nicholas Reeves made a discovery that could reveal the mysteries of Nefertiti once and for all. While studying scans made of Tutankhamun's tomb, he noticed some wall markings that could indicate a hidden doorway. This fact and other structural anomalies suggest that there could be another chamber there, and Reeves has proposed that it could be the long-missing tomb of Nefertiti. If this proves true, it would be an astounding archaeological discovery and the most significant since Howard Carter's 1922 uncovering of Tutankhamun.

Credit / BIO magazine