From Slave to Pharaoh: The Black Experience of Ancient Egypt

14. Thebes under the Twenty-fifth Dynasty

14 THEBES UNDER THE TWENTY-FIFTH DYNASTY 117 he city that bene~ted most from the Sudanese occupation of the lower Nile was understandably the city of Amun himself, Thebes.1 The “southern city,” as it was known in a jargon fashioned in the Memphite-dominated north, had suffered a dramatic and damaging drop in population and diminution in spacial extent at the close of the Twentieth Dynasty, when the royal administration severed all ties with the city. Magnates and bureaucrats whose presence and lifestyle in Thebes were underwritten by the court had no further purpose in remaining in the city and therefore no per diem allowance, and their villas were suddenly abandoned. The new regime, centered upon the person of H
erih
or, a military adventurer who had conned his way to the position of sole responsibility in the Thebaid, chose to construe local administration as identical to the running of his own large, private estate. Pharaoh took no further interest in Thebes as the place to deposit booty, honor Amun, and glorify his own exploits and stopped underwriting the cost of new additions, reliefs, and statuary in the temples, and most certainly H
erih
or and his kin were not interested in doing it for him! The result for the modern historian is the prospect of a 360-year period (c. 1070–710 b.c.) when the timid, single-column texts in the Theban temples attest to nothing more than the repair of a gate or wall for which, we are safe in assuming , monies had to be scrounged from the bottom of the company coffers. Commoners’ hovels began to encroach on the sacred courts, and sturdy walls were required to keep them out. Thebes’s status changed dramatically with the coming of the Nubians. Protégés of Amun, they transformed the southern city into a royal city once again. Though he was buried in his native Napata, Piankhy introduced his own commemorative cult in Thebes, where his portable barque shrine was still carried in procession ~fty years after his death. Sabaco and Shebitku did much more. The former added a treasury on the northern T side of Karnak’s Temple of Amun, a sure sign of an increase in the divine income. He also constructed a “Mansion of Gold” in the same area for the manufacture of cult images and temple paraphernalia.2 The same king began the refurbishing of structures fallen into dilapidation: Thutmosis IV’s golden porch before the fourth pylon,3 the margins of the Karnak sacred lake,4 the pylons at Luxor5 and Medinet Habu.6 Shebitku renovated and added a forecourt to the small temple of Osiris-Lord-of-Eternity, in the “Great Mound of Wēse” northeast of the main Temple of Amun.7 Already under Sabaco the policy had been set of reconstructing gates and temenos walls, rather than demolishing existing structures and building anew. If any new shrines were to be constructed, they were con~ned to the periphery of and the approaches to standing temples.8 Sabaco had established the precedent: after the conquest he had given commands to the “superintendent of construction in Upper and Lower Egypt . . . Padinh
or . . . to build enclosure-walls around the temples of Upper and Lower Egypt in order that priests and servants might perform service for them and that the gods might come into their shrines.”9 Taharqa followed suit: “He made it as his monument for his fathers the gods, the lords of the Mound of Djēme,10 renewing the enclosure wall which his fathers, the ancestors, had made for the gods, the lords of the Mound of Djēme, and surrounding their temple with a brick wall of good and enduring workmanship. For His Majesty had found (it) fallen to ruin, crisscrossed with paths in the holy place on its north side. He sancti~ed the holy cella for her master.”11 The “Mound of Djēme” was the sacred area of the community of Djēme, which had grown up around Medinet Habu, the mortuary temple of Ramesses III (twelfth century b.c.). This essentially was the center of population on the west bank in the Late Period. Here the Twenty-~fth Dynasty enlarged the original temple of Hatshepsut and Thutmosis III, and here the Divine Worshipers built their mortuary chapels. What was to be the ~nal glorious restoration of Karnak dates from Taharqa’s...