* The abundance of the monuments of Marîtsakro found at
Sheikh Abd el-Gurneh, inclines me to believe that her
sanctuary was situated in the neighbourhood of the temple of
Uazmosû, but there was also on the top of the hill another
sanctuary which would equally satisfy the name Ta-tahnît.
Its chapel was situated at the foot of the hill of Sheikh Abd el-Qurneh, but its sacred serpents crawled and wriggled through the necropolis, working miracles and effecting the cure of the most dangerous maladies. The faithful were accustomed to dedicate to them, in payment of their vows, stelas, or slabs of roughly hewn stone, with inscriptions which witnessed to a deep gratitude. “Hearken! I, from the time of my appearance on earth, I was a ‘Servant of the True Place,’ Nofirâbû, a stupid ignorant person, who knew not good from evil, and I committed sin against The Summit. She punished me, and I was in her hand day and night. I lay groaning on my couch like a woman in childbed, and I made supplication to the air, but it did not come to me, for I was hunted down by The Summit of the West, the brave one among all the gods and all the goddesses of the city; so I would say to all the miserable sinners among the people of the necropolis: ‘Give heed to The Summit, for there is a lion in The Summit, and she strikes as strikes a spell-casting Lion, and she pursues him who sins against her! ‘I invoked then my mistress, and I felt that she flew to me like a pleasant breeze; she placed herself upon me, and this made me recognise her hand, and appeased she returned to me, and she delivered me from suffering, for she is my life, The Summit of the West, when she is appeased, and she ought to be invoked!’” There were many sinners, we may believe, among that ignorant and superstitious population, but the governors of Thebes did not put their confidence in the local deities alone to keep them within bounds, and to prevent their evil deeds; commissioners, with the help of a detachment of Mazaîû, were an additional means of conducting them into the right way. They had, in this respect, a hard work to accomplish, for every day brought with it its contingent of crimes, which they had to follow up, and secure the punishment of the authors. Nsisûamon came to inform them that the workman Nakhtummaût and his companions had stolen into his house, and robbed him of three large loaves, eight cakes, and some pastry; they had also drunk a jar of beer, and poured out from pure malice the oil which they could not carry away with them. Panîbi had met the wife of a comrade alone near an out-of-the-way tomb, and had taken advantage of her notwithstanding her cries; this, moreover, was not the first offence of the culprit, for several young girls had previously been victims of his brutality, and had not ventured up to this time to complain of him on account of the terror with which he inspired the neighbourhood. Crimes against the dead were always common; every penniless fellow knew what quantities of gold and jewels had been entombed with the departed, and these treasures, scattered around them at only a few feet from the surface of the ground, presented to them a constant temptation to which they often succumbed. Some were not disposed to have accomplices, while others associated together, and, having purchased at a serious cost the connivance of the custodians, set boldly to work on tombs both recent and ancient. Not content with stealing the funerary furniture, which they disposed of to the undertakers, they stripped the mummies also, and smashed the bodies in their efforts to secure the jewels; then, putting the remains together again, they rearranged the mummies afresh so cleverly that they can no longer be distinguished by their outward appearance from the originals, and the first wrappings must be removed before the fraud can be discovered. From time to time one of these rogues would allow himself to be taken for the purpose of denouncing his comrades, and avenging himself for the injustice of which he was the victim in the division of the spoil; he was laid hold of by the Mazaîû, and brought before the tribunal of justice. The lands situated on the left bank of the Nile belonged partly to the king and partly to the god Amon, and any infraction of the law in regard to the necropolis was almost certain to come within the jurisdiction of one or other of them. The commission appointed, therefore, to determine the damage done in any case, included in many instances the high priest or his delegates, as well as the officers of the Pharaoh. The office of this commission was to examine into the state of the tombs, to interrogate the witnesses and the accused, applying the torture if necessary: when they had got at the facts, the tribunal of the notables condemned to impalement some half a dozen of the poor wretches, and caused some score of others to be whipped.* But, when two or three months had elapsed, the remembrance of the punishment began to die away, and the depredations began afresh. The low rate of wages occasioned, at fixed periods, outbursts of discontent and trouble which ended in actual disturbances. The rations allowed to each workman, and given to him at the beginning of each month, would possibly have been sufficient for himself and his family, but, owing to the usual lack of foresight in the Egyptian, they were often consumed long before the time fixed, and the pinch soon began to be felt. The workmen, demoralised by their involuntary abstinence, were not slow to turn to the overseer; “We are perishing of hunger, and there are still eighteen days before the next month.” The latter was prodigal of fair speeches, but as his words were rarely accompanied by deeds, the workmen would not listen to him; they stopped work, left the workshop in turbulent crowds, ran with noisy demonstrations to some public place to hold a meeting—perhaps the nearest monument, at the gate of the temple of Thûtmosis III.,** behind the chapel of Mînephtah,*** or in the court of that of Seti I.
* This is how I translate a fairly common expression, which
means literally, “to be put on the wood.” Spiegelberg sees in
this only a method of administering torture.
** Perhaps the chapel of Uazmôsû, or possibly the free space
before the temple of Deîr el-Baharî.
*** The site of this chapel was discovered by Prof. Petrie
in the spring of 1896. It had previously been supposed to be
a temple of Amenôthes III.
Their overseers followed them; the police commissioners of the locality, the Mazaîû, and the scribes mingled with them and addressed themselves to some of the leaders with whom they might be acquainted. But these would not at first give them a hearing. “We will not return,” they would say to the peacemakers; “make it clear to your superiors down below there.” It must have been manifest that from their point of view their complaints were well founded, and the official, who afterwards gave an account of the affair to the authorities, was persuaded of this. “We went to hear them, and they spoke true words to us.” For the most part these strikes had no other consequence than a prolonged stoppage of work, until the distribution of rations at the beginning of the next month gave the malcontents courage to return to their tasks. Attempts were made to prevent the recurrence of these troubles by changing the method and time of payments. These were reduced to an interval of fifteen days, and at length, indeed, to one of eight. The result was very much the same as before: the workman, paid more frequently, did not on that account become more prudent, and the hours of labour lost did not decrease. The individual man, if he had had nobody to consider but himself, might have put up with the hardships of his situation, but there were almost always wife and children or sisters concerned, who clamoured for bread in their hunger, and all the while the storehouses of the temples or those of the state close by were filled to overflowing with durrah, barley, and wheat.*
* Khonsu, for example, excites his comrades to pillage the
storehouses of the gate.
The temptation to break open the doors and to help themselves in the present necessity must have been keenly felt. Some bold spirits among the strikers, having set out together, scaled the two or three boundary walls by which the granaries were protected, but having reached this position their hearts, failed them, and they contented themselves with sending to the chief custodian an eloquent pleader, to lay before him their very humble request: “We are come, urged by famine, urged by thirst, having no more linen, no more oil, no more fish, no more vegetables. Send to Pharaoh, our master, send to the king, our lord, that he may provide us with the necessaries of life.” If one of them, with less self-restraint, was so carried away as to let drop an oath, which was a capital offence, saying, “By Amon! by the sovereign, whose anger is death!” if he asked to be taken before a magistrate in order that he might reiterate there his complaint, the others interceded for him, and begged that he might escape the punishment fixed by the law for blasphemy; the scribe, good fellow as he was, closed his ears to the oath, and, if it were in his power, made a beginning of satisfying their demands by drawing upon the excess of past months to such an extent as would pacify them for some days, and by paying them a supplemental wage in the name of the Pharaoh. They cried out loudly: “Shall there not be served out to us corn in excess of that which has been distributed to us; if not we will not stir from this spot?”
At length the end of the month arrived, and they all appeared together before the magistrates, when they said: “Let the scribe, Khâmoîsît, who is accountable, be sent for!” He was thereupon brought before the notables of the town, and they said to him: “See to the corn which thou hast received, and give some of it to the people of the necropolis.” Pmontunîboîsît was then sent for, and “rations of wheat were given to us daily.” Famine was not caused only by the thriftlessness of the multitude: administrators of all ranks did not hesitate to appropriate, each one according to his position, a portion of the means entrusted to them for the maintenance of their subordinates, and the latter often received only instalments of what was due to them. The culprits often escaped from their difficulties by either laying hold of half a dozen of their brawling victims, or by yielding to them a proportion of their ill-gotten gains, before a rumour of the outbreak could reach head-quarters. It happened from time to time, however, when the complaints against them were either too serious or too frequent, that they were deprived of their functions, cited before the tribunals, and condemned. What took place at Thebes was repeated with some variations in each of the other large cities. Corruption, theft, and extortion had prevailed among the officials from time immemorial, and the most active kings alone were able to repress these abuses, or confine them within narrow limits; as soon as discipline became relaxed, however, they began to appear again, and we have no more convincing proof of the state of decadence into which Thebes had fallen towards the middle of the XXth dynasty, than the audacity of the crimes committed in the necropolis during the reigns of the successors of Ramses III.
The priesthood of Amon alone displayed any vigour and enjoyed any prosperity in the general decline. After the victory of the god over the heretic kings no one dared to dispute his supremacy, and the Ramessides displayed a devout humility before him and his ministers. Henceforward he became united to Râ in a definite manner, and his authority not only extended over the whole of the land of Egypt, but over all the countries also which were brought within her influence; so that while Pharaoh continued to be the greatest of kings, Pharaoh’s god held a position of undivided supremacy among the deities. He was the chief of the two Bnneads, the Heliopolitan and the Hermopolitan, and displayed for the latter a special affection; for the vague character of its eight secondary deities only served to accentuate the position of the ninth and principal divinity with whose primacy that of Amon was identified. It was more easy to attribute to Amon the entire work of creation when Shû, Sibû, Osiris, and Sit had been excluded—the deities whom the theologians of Heliopolis had been accustomed to associate with the demiurge; and in the hymns which they sang at his solemn festivals they did not hesitate to ascribe to him all the acts which the priests of former times had assigned to the Ennead collectively. “He made earth, silver, gold,—the true lapis at his good pleasure.—He brought forth the herbs for the cattle, the plants upon which men live.—He made to live the fish of the river,—the birds which hover in the air,—giving air to those which are in the egg.—He animates the insects,—he makes to live the small birds, the reptiles, and the gnats as well.—He provides food for the rat in his hole,—supports the bird upon the branch.—May he be blessed for all this, he who is alone, but with many hands.” “Men spring from his two eyes,” and quickly do they lose their breath while acclaiming him—Egyptians and Libyans, Negroes and Asiatics: “Hail to thee!” they all say; “praise to thee because thou dwellest amongst us!—Obeisances before thee because thou createst us!”—“Thou art blessed by every living thing,—thou hast worshippers in every place,—in the highest of the heavens, in all the breadth of the earth,—in the depths of the seas.—The gods bow before thy Majesty,—magnifying the souls which form them,—rejoicing at meeting those who have begotten them,—they say to thee: ‘Go in peace,—father of the fathers of all the gods,—who suspended the heaven, levelled the earth;—creator of beings, maker of things,—sovereign king, chief of the gods,—we adore thy souls, because thou hast made us,—we lavish offerings upon thee, because thou hast given us birth,—we shower benedictions upon thee, because thou dwellest among us.’” We have here the same ideas as those which predominate in the hymns addressed to Atonû,* and in the prayers directed to Phtah, the Nile, Shû, and the Sun-god of Heliopolis at the same period.
* Breasted points out the decisive influence exercised by
the solar hymns of Amenôthes IV. on the development of the
solar ideas contained in the hymns to Amon put forth or re-
edited in the XXIIIrd dynasty.
The idea of a single god, lord and maker of all things, continued to prevail more and more throughout Egypt—not, indeed, among the lower classes who persisted in the worship of their genii and their animals, but among the royal family, the priests, the nobles, and people of culture. The latter believed that the Sun-god had at length absorbed all the various beings who had been manifested in the feudal divinities: these, in fact, had surrendered their original characteristics in order to become forms of the Sun, Amon as well as the others—and the new belief displayed itself in magnifying the solar deity, but the solar deity united with the Theban Amon, that is, Amon-Râ. The omnipotence of this one god did not, however, exclude a belief in the existence of his compeers; the theologians thought all the while that the beings to whom ancient generations had accorded a complete independence in respect of their rivals were nothing more than emanations from one supreme being. If local pride forced them to apply to this single deity the designation customarily used in their city—Phtah at Memphis, Anhûri-Shû at Thinis, Khnûmû in the neighbourhood of the first cataract—they were quite willing to allow, at the same time, that these appellations were but various masks for one face. Phtah, Hâpi, Khnûmû, Râ,—all the gods, in fact,—were blended with each other, and formed but one deity—a unique existence, multiple in his names, and mighty according to the importance of the city in which he was worshipped. Hence Amon, lord of the capital and patron of the dynasty, having more partisans, enjoyed more respect, and, in a word, felt himself possessed of more claims to be the sole god of Egypt than his brethren, who could not claim so many worshippers. He did not at the outset arrogate to himself the same empire over the dead as he exercised over the living; he had delegated his functions in this respect to a goddess, Marîtsakro, for whom the poorer inhabitants of the left bank entertained a persistent devotion. She was a kind of Isis or hospitable Hathor, whose subjects in the other world adapted themselves to the nebulous and dreary existence provided for their disembodied “doubles.” The Osirian and solar doctrines were afterwards blended together in this local mythology, and from the XIth dynasty onwards the Theban nobility had adopted, along with the ceremonies in use in the Memphite period, the Heliopolitan beliefs concerning the wanderings of the soul in the west, its embarkation on the solar ship, and its resting-places in the fields of Ialû. The rock-tombs of the XVIIIth dynasty demonstrate that the Thebans had then no different concept of their life beyond the world from that entertained by the inhabitants of the most ancient cities: they ascribed to that existence the same inconsistent medley of contradictory ideas, from which each one might select what pleased him best—either repose in a well-provisioned tomb, or a dwelling close to Osiris in the middle of a calm and agreeable paradise, or voyages with Râ around the world.*