In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

8 Egyptian Kingship during the Old Kingdom miroslav bárta If you doubt our might, look at our buildings. —Ryszard Kapuściński, Imperium Introduction In my view, this brief statement relating to the inscription left behind by Timur over one of the gates of Samarkand is one of the most suitable metaphors that can be successfully applied to the Old Kingdom state, society , and royal landscape. It refers both to the city’s monuments themselves and to the way the city managed to manifest its superiority over the surrounding political landscape (Smith 2003:271ff.). Looking at Old Kingdom history through the prism of the 21st century and from a distance of more than 4,000 years, one is very much tempted to look at the ancient Egyptian society of the day as a quite stable system with a preset hierarchical structure and predefined mode of rule and government , lacking any substantial development in terms of status, structure, and competence. After all, pyramids were built during the whole period and the ideology of the pharaoh preserved its formal features almost intact. But is this really so? Do we have the means to identify some significant and potentially meaningful development within the spheres of royal ideol- 258 Miroslav Bárta ogy, kingship display, the administration of the state, and the society itself? After all, each of these aspects is essential for a proper assessment of Old Kingdom kingship. In this chapter I shall show that these aspects were very closely related and never ceased to interact. Simultaneously, it will be shown that the notion of kingship developed in a rather dynamic way and amply reflected changes within society. Contrary to some recent attempts to define kingship through the king himself (Silverman 1995), the present study focuses on kingship as reflected through royal tombs—icons of ancient Egyptian kingship—the wealth of preserved title strings of high officials of the state, wealthy non-royal tombs of high officials who were essential in the perpetuation and upkeep of kingship , and the mechanism of interaction between the king and his officials and specifically how this relationship can be observed in terms of social status display. It will be shown that both the residential and provincial elites were essential for maintaining the idea of the kingship (for a similar approach , see Garcia Moreno in this volume and compare also the study by Pongratz-Leisten on the same issue in Assyria). As indicated by Baines and Yoffee (1998:212–14), order, legitimacy, and wealth are best suited to characterize the major trends in the development of ancient Egyptian society dominated by the notion of kingship. In their formulation, “order exploits wealth for legitimacy” (1998:235). Ancient Egyptian kingship stands, for understandable reasons, at the center of Egyptological research since the early 1920s when the famous tomb of the king “Tut” was brought to light (Engnell 1943, Frankfort 1948, and most recently Brisch 2008). Henri Frankfort’s fundamental study was aimed at tracing the political and economic functions of kingship in the ancient Near East and Egypt and it became a milestone in the study of the subject. Today, however, we know more about various aspects of archaic states and different institutionalized forms of kingship in cultures across the ancient world. Therefore a more systematized approach may be used in dealing with different aspects of kingship in the context of similar cultures. In addition, today’s Egyptology does not need to dwell only on official sources and state propaganda and thus a more “profane” approach may be worth pursuing. To begin with, the most prominent roles of ancient Egyptian kingship and the king, similar to, for instance the Maya and Zapotec civilizations, may be schematically characterized as follows (Marcus 1992, Baines 1995:13–19): Egyptian Kingship during the Old Kingdom 259 1. to reinforce the preordained world and cosmic order, 2. to link the ruling king to royal ancestors and divine beings, 3. to legitimize the right to rule with deeds appropriate to royalty. Simultaneously, based on the official written and iconographic sources pertaining to the definition of Old Kingdom kingship, it can be claimed that the ancient Egyptian king was considered to be: 1. a godly creature begotten by the god (Ra), 2. guarantor and keeper of order and the country’s unity and prosperity , i.e., of the natural cycle in nature and the world order which came into being as a consequence of the act of creation, 3. mediator between the ordinary mortal people...

Share