Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Insinger.
We know, and the experience of the past is continually reiterating the lesson, that the most careful precautions and the most conscientious observation of customs were not sufficient to perpetuate the worship of ancestors. The day was bound to come when not only the descendants of Khnûmhotpû, but a crowd of curious or indifferent strangers, would visit his tomb: he desired that they should know his genealogy, his private and public virtues, his famous deeds, his court titles and dignities, the extent of his wealth; and in order that no detail should be omitted, he relates all that he did, or he gives the representation of it upon the wall. In a long account of two hundred and twenty-two lines, he gives a résumé of his family history, introducing extracts from his archives, to show the favours received by his ancestors from the hands of their sovereigns. Amoni and Khîti, who were, it appears, the warriors of their race, have everywhere recounted the episodes of their military career, the movements of their troops, their hand-to-hand fights, and the fortresses to which they laid siege. These scions of the house of the Gazelle and of the Hare, who shared with Pharaoh himself the possession of the soil of Egypt, were no mere princely ciphers: they had a tenacious spirit, a warlike disposition, an insatiable desire for enlarging their borders, together with sufficient ability to realize their aims by court intrigues or advantageous marriage alliances. We can easily picture from their history what Egyptian feudalism really was, what were its component elements, what were the resources it had at its disposal, and we may well be astonished when we consider the power and tact which the Pharaohs must have displayed in keeping such vassals in check during two centuries.
Amenemhâît I. had abandoned Thebes as a residence in favour of Heracleopolis and Memphis, and had made it over to some personage who probably belonged to the royal household. The nome of Ûisît had relapsed into the condition of a simple fief, and if we are as yet unable to establish the series of the princes who there succeeded each other contemporaneously with the Pharaohs, we at least know that all those whose names have come down to us played an important part in the history of their times. Montûnsîsû, whose stele was engraved in the XXIVth year of Amenemhâît I., and who died in the joint reign of this Pharaoh and his son Usirtasen I., had taken his share in most of the wars conducted against neighbouring peoples,—the Anîtiû of Nubia, the Monîtû of Sinai, and the “Lords of the Sands:” he had dismantled their cities and razed their fortresses. The principality retained no doubt the same boundaries which it had acquired under the first Antûfs, but Thebes itself grew daily larger, and gained in importance in proportion as its frontiers extended southward. It had become, after the conquests of Usirtasen III., the very centre of the Egyptian world—a centre from which the power of the Pharaoh could equally well extend in a northerly direction towards the Sinaitic Peninsula and Libya, or towards the Red Sea and the “humiliated Kûsh” in the south. The influence of its lords increased accordingly: under Amenemhâît III. and Amenemhâît IV. they were perhaps the most powerful of the great vassals, and when the crown slipped from the grasp of the XIIth dynasty, it fell into the hands of one of these feudatories. It is not known how the transition was brought about which transferred the sovereignty from the elder to the younger branch of the family of Amenemhâît I. When Amenemhâît IV. died, his nearest heir was a woman, his sister Sovkûnofriûrî: she retained the supreme authority for not quite four years,* and then resigned her position to a certain Sovkhotpû.**
* She reigned exactly three years, ten months, and eighteen
days, according to the fragments of the “Royal Canon of
Turin” (Lepsius, Auswahl der wichtigten Urkunden, pl. v.
col. vii. 1. 2).
** Sovkhotpû Khûtoûirî, according to the present published
versions of the Turin Papyrus, an identification which led
Lieblein (Recherches sur la Chronologie Égyptienne, pp. 102,
103) and Wiedemann to reject the generally accepted
assumption that this first king of the XIIIth dynasty was
Sovkhotpû Sakhemkhûtoûirî. Still, the way in which the
monuments of Sovkhotpû Sakhemkhûtoûirî and his papyri are
intermingled with the monuments of Amenemhâît III. at Semneh
and in the Fayûm, show that it is difficult to separate him
from this monarch. Moreover, an examination of the original
Turin Papyrus shows that there is a tear before the word
Khûtoûirî on the first cartouche, no indication of which
appears in the facsimile, but which has, none the less,
slightly damaged the initial solar disk and removed almost
the whole of one sign. We are, therefore, inclined to
believe that Sakhemkhûtoûirî was written instead of
Khûtoûirî, and that, therefore, all the authorities are in
the right, from their different points of view, and that the
founder of the XIIIth dynasty was a Sakhemkhûtoûirî I.,
while the Savkhotpû Sakhemkhûtoûirî, who occupies the
fifteenth place in the dynasty, was a Sakhemkhûtoûirî II.
Drawn by Boudier, from a chromolithograph in Lepsius,
Denkm., i. pl. 61. The first tomb on the left, of which the
portico is shown, is that of Khnûmhotpû II.
Was there a revolution in the palace, or a popular rising, or a civil war? Did the queen become the wife of the new sovereign, and thus bring about the change without a struggle? Sovkhotpû was probably lord of Ûisît, and the dynasty which he founded is given by the native historians as of Theban origin. His accession entailed no change in the Egyptian constitution; it merely consolidated the Theban supremacy, and gave it a recognized position. Thebes became henceforth the head of the entire country: doubtless the kings did not at once forsake Heracleopolis and the Fayûm, but they made merely passing visits to these royal residences at considerable intervals, and after a few generations even these were given up. Most of these sovereigns resided and built their Pyramids at Thebes, and the administration of the kingdom became centralized there. The actual capital of a king was determined not so much by the locality from whence he ruled, as by the place where he reposed after death. Thebes was the virtual capital of Egypt from the moment that its masters fixed on it as their burying-place.