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1 Propaganda and Performance at the Dawn of the State ellen f. morris According to pharaonic ideology, the maintenance of cosmic, political, and natural order was unthinkable without the king, who served as the crucial lynchpin that held together not only Upper and Lower Egypt, but also the disparate worlds of gods and men. Because of his efforts, society functioned smoothly and the Nile floods brought forth abundance. This ideology, held as gospel for millennia, was concocted. The king had no supernatural power to influence the Nile’s flood and the institution of divine kingship was made to be able to function with only a child or a senile old man at its helm. This chapter focuses on five foundational tenets of pharaonic ideology, observable in the earliest monuments of protodynastic kings, and examines how these tenets were transformed into accepted truths via the power of repeated theatrical performance. Careful choreography and stagecraft drew upon scent, pose, metaphor, abject foils, and numerous other ploys to naturalize a political order that had nothing natural about it. Some of these tactics were abandoned after they had served their purpose or began to inspire negative backlash, while others survived to be drawn upon by Augustus and his successors. By the end of an extended Nile Valley cruise, it is common for tourists to express the sentiment that they don’t care if they never see another Egyptian temple. From Aswan to Alexandria, the traveler encounters innumerable representations of Pharaoh in the largely homogenous (mostly) New Kingdom and Ptolemaic temples they are ushered through. They see statues that may vary a bit in posture (seated versus standing, primarily) or 34 Ellen F. Morris size (some were particularly large!), and reliefs that may differ slightly in subject matter (the king may be smiting a group of foreigners or he may be standing on a chariot and shooting into a tangled mass of them. Likewise, he may be offering before a deity, embracing a deity, or performing a ritual in divine company). In essence, however, in the temples that the tourist has toured, two primary messages have been driven home ad nauseum. The king is the aggressive defender of his people, and the king is the only mortal who is on the same plane with the divinities and who may enter into relations of reciprocity and affection with them. Egyptologists see nuances that travelers might not. Notions of kingship clearly fluctuated according to periods and personalities. The pyramids at Giza and the colossal statues of Amenhotep III and Rameses II, for example, occupy one end of the pendulum of royal deification and aggrandizement, while kings who reigned in and around Egypt’s Intermediate Periods and purportedly authored pensive ruminations expressing vulnerability and even loneliness sit at the other. Further, some kings are known to us as specific personalities given their excitement at the prospect of viewing a pygmy (Pepy II), their unusually big ears (Senusret III: “the better to hear you with”), their propensity to boast about feats of physical prowess in unusual ways (Amenhotep II), or their love of horses (Piankh). It is the humanness and individuality of various rulers that breathes life into Egyptian history and provides the pleasure in studying it. Even the most casual of those weary tourists that daily board their planes homeward, however, have passively grasped the foundational tenets of pharaonic kingship—so assiduously did the Egyptians curate them over millennia. It is the purpose of this chapter to address the foundation, dissemination, and eventual naturalization of these tenets. The notion that pharaoh was absolutely essential to the proper functioning of Egypt’s religious, military, and administrative endeavors existed from its “conception in the egg” in protodynastic times to its slow death under the absentee pharaohs of the Roman period. As it was not uncommon for pharaohs to ascend the throne as “nestlings” or to rule despite crippling disease or extreme old age, this illusion was vulnerable to an easy unmasking . Clearly, the state could function perfectly well with only the pretence of an authority figure at its apex. Further, even in those rare periods when Egypt was politically fragmented, the sun continued to rise and set, and the Nile flooded its banks and fertilized the soil. The question is: how did a small, newly powerful group at the dawn of the state convince the recently Propaganda and Performance at the Dawn of the State 35 conquered population of the Nile Valley that the unapproachable stranger king they promoted was...

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