From Slave to Pharaoh: The Black Experience of Ancient Egypt

10. The Twenty-fourth Dynasty

10 THE TWENTY-FOURTH DYNASTY 80 efnakhte died very shortly after Piankhy retired, but not before dedicating a parcel of land within his domains to Neit of Saïs.1 Apart from legends surrounding his name in later times,2 this is the last we hear of this interesting renegade-founder. He was already middle-aged. Two of his grown sons had been lost in the war against Piankhy; a third lived to succeed him. BOCCHORIS “THE CONTEMPTIBLE” As far as we know, Piankhy did not contest the accession of Tefnakhte’s son Bakenrenef, who is better known to us under the Hellenized form of his prenomen, Bocchoris (Wah
kare).3 Tefnakhte’s son has cut a remarkable ~gure in later legend. Why this should be is not altogether clear. It is true that certain legendary ~gures of heroic stature in Egyptian history tended to attract unto themselves “_oating” motifs of folkloric composition . But Bocchoris was no heroic ~gure. Nor, with one exception, is he the focus of “_oating” folklore. We are left wondering whether there was, in fact, some truth in what classical sources say of the man. First, it was asserted that he was physically ugly and temperamentally mean. “After the kings mentioned above (Cheops, Chephren and Mycerinus) Bocchoris succeeded to the throne, a man who was altogether contemptible in appearance but in sagacity far surpassed all former kings. . . . He was very weak in body and . . . by disposition the most avaricious of all their kings.”4 The oxymoronic effect of this description is not unknown elsewhere in Egyptian literature and conjures up the Egyptian appreciation of the “grotesque.”5 Wise men often sustained physical in~rmity.6 A type of royal likeness in vogue in the second half of the eighth century b.c. and the ~rst half of the seventh presents a stocky and prognathous individual who, across the generations of ~ckle and vacillatT ing public taste, might be deemed ugly,7 but admittedly we have no evidence that Bocchoris’s sculptors portrayed him in this fashion. Second, and bruited more widely, was Bocchoris’s reputation for wisdom .8 Diodorus re_ects a Hellenic classi~cation of seven lawgivers of ancient Egypt, of whom Bocchoris was the fourth: A fourth lawgiver, they say, was the king Bocchoris, a wise sort of man and conspicuous for his craftiness. He drew up all the regulations which governed the kings and gave precision to the laws on contracts; and so wise was he in his judicial decisions that many of his judgements are remembered for their excellence even to our day.9 . . . Their laws governing contracts they attribute to Bocchoris. These prescribe that men who had borrowed money without signing a bond, if they denied the indebtedness might take an oath to that effect and be cleared of the obligation . . . and whoever lent money along with a written bond was forbidden to do more than double the principal from the interest. In the case of debtors the lawgiver ruled that the repayment of loans could be exacted only from a man’s estate, and under no condition did he allow the debtor’s person to be subject to seizure.10 The alleged innovations thus break down into four: 1. A law regulating kingship 2. Discharge of obligation on oath alone 3. Limitation on interest rates 4. Prevention of borrowing on debtor’s person11 Opinions have varied as to whether we should accept this tradition,12 and it is true that in Egypto-Hellenic historiography tragic heroes who (are perceived to) end a line tend to be remembered for their wisdom.13 The economic woes that must have attended the weakening and dissolution of the regime of the Twenty-second Dynasty in the earlier eighth century must have given rise to speculation and created fertile ground for the loan shark.14 And it may well be that laws regulating lending in favor of the borrower were required more than ever in the ~nal quarter of that century . A similar case can be made for the historicity of a “law on kingship.” As we have seen, the declining Libyan power had created a vacuum in which several parochial kingships of “human creation”15 had thrived, and these, along with the ranking system of township rulers in the Piankhy stela, betoken a complex protocol that must have fostered a hamstringing 81 THE TWENTY-FOURTH DYNASTY decentralization of political power. It is altogether...