Ceremony and Religion in Egyptian Kingship

 

 

The New Kingdom continued to develop the process by which political reality and necessity was totally intermeshed with the ideological symbolism and attendant rituals that maintained divine kingship.  In Egypt ironically, as more political reality developed and the political implementation system established more bureaucracy and institutions of practical power, so did the ability of ideology (myth and ritual) to adapt to underpin the evolving system.  Shows the strength of a flexible ands strong ideology in a society that was essentially stable.

 

                                                           Architecture of Royal Power

 

1.  In the New Kingdom, the symbolism of Royal power was expressed in two contrasting but ultimately complementary ways, combining to glorify the living king as opposed to the mortuary architecture of dead kings and divinities. 

 

First, temples increased in size, became surrounded with great fortified walls on which were carved the feats and divine relationships of the king and were placed in the center of the settlements rather than being awesome presences at the peripheries as in earlier times.  This at the same time proclaimed the power of the institution of kingship more than the earlier pattern while simultaneously maintaining its mysterious unapproachable nature.

 

2.  Second, this emphasis of royal power was accompanied by ritual.  Processional rituals through the streets and along ceremonial roads replaced the more hidden rituals of the temples.  Power ritual became revealed not hidden, as it had been earlier.

 

i.e. Processions of the royal boat of Amun became the centerpiece of the design of new temples with processional ways leading from the sanctums and resting places for the boat along the route.  Thius brought ideology into a public, participatory context.

 

3.  Thus the two poles of Egyptian royal ideology - on one hand distant, powerful and eternal, on the other hand participatory, communal and festive, combined in the New Kingdom to modify the ideology of divine kingship and to take it to a new peak of power.

 

                                                      Functions of the Temples and their Ritual

 

A.  Economic (see subsequent lecture for details).

 

1.  The temple was at once a religious institution sheltering the statue of the god, and a practical economic and political institution.

 

2.  On the economic level the priests were also bureaucrats who managed the economy of Egypt under the distant supervision of the vizier and king.  Thus large estates were owned, grain collected and surpluses stores, trading conducted both near and far and overall supervision of rural agriculture, mining and exchange coordinated.

 

B.  Monarchy and the Cult of Amun

 

1.  The temples as political institutions served to cloak the institution of divine monarchy (and thus the person of any specific king, whatever his personal characteristics) with the aura of timeless myth, supernatural sanction, and permanence.  The attendant architectural organization and attendant rituals were manifestations of these features.

 

2.  In the New Kingdom with its imperial expansions, individual kings became visible leaders of armies rather than remote divinities of earlier times.  To fit this more personalized image with an equally imminent divinity the royal integration with Ra the Sun God as a depersonalized distant force of cosmic power was changed to Amun-Ra - a human formed god with whom the god could be seen as partner and counterpart and equal in the evolving reality of ideological symbolism.  

 

3.  This association with Amun enabled kings to transcend the inconsistency of historical events by being the representatives of an unchanging institution - a single line of kings descended from the gods (who were the original rulers of Egypt) - human history was fitted into the single formula of kingship no matter how much transformation was necessary - it must be consistent with an ancient established pattern.

 

                                                   Thebes: The ceremonial City

 

1.  Thebes was the place where the cult of royal rituals of divinity was centered.  Its temples represented a huge stage on which the play of royalty was conducted.  It was a sacred city for the royal cult while administrative institutions were centered in Memphis.  The ancestors of the 18th Dynasty king’s came from Thebes and their Theban God Amun-Ra, (or simply Amun), was the divine center of ritual.  Thebes became identified with the historic/mythic “primeval mound” of creation.  

 

2.  The heart of the city was the Temple of Amun. (400 x 400m).  The older Middle Kingdom City was leveled to make way for the temple complex and new residential areas built elsewhere (these are now under water level).  This more organic spread of city is typical of New Kingdom and contrasts with the imposed/planned character of Middle Kingdom practice.

 

3.  The temple of Amun grew through successive 18th Dynasty reigns.  The temple was built around the home/shrine of the portable boat that carried the statue of Amun when it was processed around Karnak.  It also contained a huge “hypostyle” hall - mimicked in stone the poles and awnings of a tent shrine of mythic times (see earlier lecture).  The temple also identified the king with the life-renewing ritual of Osiris-Horus by portraying him as Osiris at the place of his sed-festival and storing his statues in various parts of the building.

 

4.  Temple grounds contained the royal palace, which housed the king on his visits and where he made his appearances to the populace at the “window of appearances.”

 

5.  The procession of Amun involved the transport of the royal boat with its statue.  During this period the statue (thus Amun himself) spoke to the kings or performed miracles that showed the divine support of the king and justified his utterances, policies and position.  This manifestation of the cult through ritual involved public ideological support of the king.

 

6.  Various processional ways linked the Temple of Amun with that of Mut his consort and that of Khonsu his son.   Procession ways were paved with stones, intersected by rest stations and lined by statues. Many festivals included such parades and sometimes the king himself.

 

7.  Festival of Opet was the most important festival.  This festival involved the sacred union of the king with the god Amun.   The core of the festival was an unusually long process from Karnak to the Luxor Temple (3 kms.) either by land or later by river.  The public could present petitions to the gods or the king during this process so it was a very important participatory festival.  In the Opet festival the king entered the innermost shrine and transformed into his ka - the royal life-force that was passed eternally through the divine renewal to each successive king, linking them all with their most distant divine kingly ancestors in an unending divine line of supernatural force.   This ceremony could legitimate even a usurper (like Horemheb) who through participating with Amun in the Opet ceremony could become divine and legitimate.  Thus ritual and belief could transcend human events and smooth out disruption in the tradition of sacred kingship.

 

                                                            Theban City of the Dead

 

1.  The New Kingdom kings built their tombs in the Valley of the Kings on the west bank of the Nile in rock cut galleries, leaving behind the traditional burial places near Memphis.  They also rejected the traditional form of the sun cult (the pyramid - a huge symbolic image) and dedicated their mortuary cults to Amun.  These were temples where the king after death became a form of the god Amun and statues of both, often merged, were kept there as centers of the cults with their large priesthood/ bureaucrat staff.  Thus, the temple of Hapshepsut and the Ramesseum at Dier el Bahari (Rameses II), and the Medinet Habu temple (Rameses III) and others.

 

2.  The mortuary temples also became sites for processions and rituals.  The Festival of the Valley involved the divine images being taken from the Karnak temples across the river to the western mortuary temples and back.  Another - the Festival of Amun of Opet linked the Luxor temple with its western counterparts.  Together these sacred traverses formed a rectangle within which was the Estate of Amun - marked by sacred boundaries and procession ways.   The processional ways bound together the otherwise disparate scatter of religious and ceremonial structures in a sacred landscape.

 

3.  The mortuary temples were also centers of ceremonial in the festivals that incorporated the processions.  Each had a small palace for the king that incorporated a window balcony where the public could see the king and he could bestow rewards on honored individuals.

 

4.  Also the Sed Festival architecture of Amenhotep III at West Thebes near the mortuary temples incorporated new elements of the territorial segment of the festival by creating a huge water-filled basin along which the king and the barge that carried the statue of Amun could process and he could be seen as one with the god at the place of Amun.

 

 

 

Summary

 

The integration of the king and temple cult of Amun enveloped the person of the king in an elaborate symbolic cocoon that blurred the distinction between the heavenly and earthly aspects of the god and the past and present manifestations of kingship.  It allowed the pragmatic institutions of government to be sanctioned and mystified by theology and ceremonial.