1A Divine Conception
His eyes roam over the contents of the bedchamber, illuminated by moonlight through a window high in one wall. In a corner of the room, an inlaid wooden box on tall legs holds the wig of closely plaited human hair that the royal woman wore earlier in the day; it rests beside other, equally elaborate coiffures. In another corner, wooden stands support large jars, their whitewashed surfaces highlighting blue painted garlands of lotus buds encircling the vessels. Through a curtain of gauzy linen draped over a gilded canopy near the middle of the room, he glimpses Mutemwia, a sheer linen sheet barely concealing the queen’s form nestled on an ebony bed, its four supports shaped like the legs and paws of a lion.
Mutemwia stirs, lifting her head from the gilded wooden support positioned next to the mattress. A sliver of light illuminates a flock of pigeons flying above her, the painter having captured the moment their pale blue outstretched wings overlapped. Pulling back the curtain, Mutemwia sees her husband, Prince Thutmose. An all-pervasive aroma of myrrh and incense, the odors of the land of the gods, overpowers her senses. Now fully awake, Mutemwia realizes that the figure standing before her is not her husband or any man. This is Amun-Re, king of the gods.
Shedding his outward form of Prince Thutmose, the god moves toward the queen, gold skin shining as though casting its own light. What the queen sees is a figure that seems to have walked off the walls of the temples she frequents. Amun-Re wears a white, pleated kilt, its straight hem falling to his knees. A cuirass covers his chest, its overlapping pieces of turquoise, lapis lazuli, and carnelian set in gold frames shaped like the feathers of a divine falcon. The brilliant red and blues of the god’s armor match the jeweled bands of his broad collar and bracelets on his wrists. A deep blue lapis lazuli beard juts from his chin, its prominence balanced by a crown topped with two tall ostrich plumes.
Mutemwia rejoices in the perfection of the gold-skinned god, love courses through her limbs, and the god’s aroma inundates the entire palace. Suddenly, the walls of the chamber no longer exist as two goddesses lift Mutemwia and Amun-Re above the earthly realm and set them upon the firmament of heaven. Amun-Re raises an ankh, the symbol of life, up to the queen’s nose and reveals to her the purpose of his nocturnal visit: “Amunhotep, ruler of Waset, is the name of this child that I have placed in your womb. He shall rule as a mighty king over this entire land! My power be to him! My strength be to him!”1 The third Egyptian king to bear the name Amunhotep, “Amun is content,” had just been conceived.
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LUXOR, EGYPT
Through the Airbus A220’s small windows we see the rays of the setting sun transform the Nile into a ribbon of light. Our EgyptAir flight is making its descent into Luxor International Airport, after a three-hundred-mile flight south from Cairo. Soon the aircraft, bearing the sleek falcon-headed logo of the god Horus on its stabilizer, will taxi along the runway at the desert edge. The bustling modern city of Luxor is the latest in a line of urban incarnations that have existed in roughly this same location for over four and a half millennia. Called Waset by the ancient Egyptians and Thebes by the Greeks, this was one of the greatest cities of the ancient world, a status appropriate to the meaning of its Egyptian name: She Who Holds Dominion.
The Nile divided Waset into eastern and western halves, and seen from above, some of the city’s ancient monuments are still easily recognizable. The houses and palaces of ancient Waset, built predominantly of mud brick, are, for the most part, buried beneath modern buildings, streets, and fields, thousands of years of history resting unseen below the feet of Luxor’s inhabitants. But the great stone temples still stand, many battered, some nearly as complete as when they were first erected, gloriously defying the omnivorous fangs of time.
Within one of those temples, today given the name Luxor, like its eponymous city, King Amunhotep III recorded how his mother, Queen Mutemwia, was impregnated by the god Amun-Re. The conception of Amunhotep III, Akhenaten’s father, is an appropriate starting point for the lives of both Akhenaten and Nefertiti. The mythical presentation of this event says much about the divinity of the king, the role of royal women, and Amun-Re’s position at the pinnacle of the pantheon.
The city’s modern airport lies northeast of the ancient settlement, near dry, desert canyons through which caravans once passed. We exit the arrival hall and meet Abdu Abdullah Hassan, one of our oldest friends, whose expertise in the logistics of archaeological expeditions has been essential to our work for decades. This is the start of the winter portion of our field season, a roughly monthlong period in which we and our colleagues will record ancient rock art and inscriptions, some nearly six thousand years old, excavate desert settlements constructed a comparatively recent fifteen hundred years ago, and record ancient caravan routes.
We load our baggage into one of our old Series III Land Rovers, and soon we are driving along a road heading roughly west, toward the Nile, as the afterglow recedes and true night begins. Just before reaching the river, we turn south and pass several long and broad excavations exposing considerable remains of an ancient processional route, paved with large stone blocks and lined on each side by seemingly endless rows of sphinxes that linked Karnak Temple to the north with Luxor Temple in the south.
The monumental entrance of Luxor Temple is a prominent element of the skyline. The two towers of the pylon gateway rise nearly eighty feet, providing a stony backdrop to colossal statues, themselves forty feet from sole to crown. At night, a spotlight illuminates a single obelisk in front of the eastern tower of the pylon, a monolith eighty-two feet tall. The hieroglyphs are so crisply carved into the granite that in the artificial light they look as if they were cut by laser rather than bronze chisels. Since 1831, this obelisk has been a widow, its mate now the centerpiece of the Place de la Concorde in Paris, proclaiming—like many of its fellows, from Istanbul to New York—the glories of ancient Egypt to lands far beyond the knowledge of the pharaohs.
A walk through Luxor Temple is a journey back in time in more ways than one. To the temple’s ancient founders, this sacred building was Ipat-resyt, “the Southern Private Quarters,” which was also the companion of a northern Ipat in Iunu, the city of the sun god Re (now part of modern-day Cairo). The sphinxes of the processional avenue connecting Karnak Temple (ancient Ipet-sout, “Choice of Places”) with Luxor Temple are a bit younger than 400 BCE. The pylon façade of Ipat-resyt and the temple’s first open court were erected approximately nine centuries earlier than those long lines of sphinxes. We walk across the court toward the south end of the column and statue-edged space, where two additional seated colossi of the long-lived pharaoh Ramesses II rear up on either side of the damaged, once soaring, and still imposing portal to a long hall.
Amunhotep III began construction on this, the Colonnade Hall, near the end of his reign but did not live to see its walls fully decorated, a task mostly completed by his grandson Tutankhamun. Carved along the walls are priests carrying on their shoulders the gilded and bejeweled boats of the gods; lines of soldiers hauling on great ropes, singing hymns in praise of the king as they tow the great riverine barges of the gods; women performing acrobatic dances, butchers rushing to and fro with their offerings, and priestly assistants pouring libations of wine, the makings for endless divine repasts. In the relative silence of the temple on this cool winter night, the sounds of the raucous celebrations seem almost audible, the ancient hymns just at the edge of one’s hearing.
The Colonnade Hall leads south to another open court lined with dozens of elegant columns, in the form of papyrus bundles, which enhance the court’s spacious proportions. The name of one king is now visible everywhere: Amunhotep III. The grandeur of the Colonnade Hall and the wide court then give way to the smaller courts and rooms that form the inner portion of the temple. What was once a door leading to the rear portion of the temple was closed by a curved niche when the Romans incorporated the temple into a fortress, transforming the room into an imperial shrine. Roman emperors were now kings of Egypt, but Luxor Temple remained, as it had for over fifteen centuries, the place where rituals confirmed a pharaoh’s status as son of Amun.
We pass through a narrow opening cut relatively recently into the niche that once held the standards of the legions. In front of us is the central bark shrine of Amun, the place where the statue of the god in its ceremonial boat would rest and the focus of constant offerings of giant bouquets, wine and water, vegetables of every variety, and the choicest cuts of meat. Instead of continuing through the bark shrine, we walk through a doorway to the left, take another left turn, and enter the goal of our visit to the temple, the room in which Amunhotep III recorded his own divine conception.
Originally, the shallow raised-relief decoration was painted in brilliant blues and bright yellows, deep reds and greens, all set against a light bluish gray background. Those colors have all but disappeared, but the reliefs still reveal a scene-by-scene exposition of Amunhotep’s divine heritage. In the middle of the wall, at nearly eye level, is the pivotal moment when Amun impregnates the queen, as the hieroglyphs say: “The majesty of this god did everything which he pleased with her.”2
Between the hieroglyphic captions is a large carving of Amun and Mutemwia on the night of the conception. Held aloft by two goddesses, the god and queen face one another, sitting upon a thin rectangle. This is not a piece of furniture or indeed any physical object, but a hieroglyph that writes the word “heaven,” a simple shape that catapults the encounter into a celestial sphere.
The only overt expression of intimacy between the god and the queen is that they hold hands, Amun’s fingers just touching Mutemwia’s upturned palm. But an ancient Egyptian would have noted the erotic overtones of Amun’s legs overlapping those of Mutemwia, how she cups the god’s elbow with her free hand, and how he holds to her nose the hieroglyph for “life,” the ankh sign. In combination with the explicit description in the hieroglyphic text, the sexual nature of the scene is obvious.
The caption states that the bedchamber in which we are to imagine the king’s divine conception taking place is located inside the palace, although where in Egypt that might be is left unsaid. Pharaohs possessed multiple palaces, their stays dictated by the demands of state and religion. The night upon which Prince Thutmose, later to become the fourth king of that name, conceived his heir was only documented after Amunhotep III became king. We can merely guess, then, about the timing of the night in question or the location of the royal bedchamber. If Mutemwia traveled with her husband on his hunting and sporting trips in the north, they could have spent their nights at a small palace nestled near the pyramids of Giza (ancient Rosetau), or in the larger palace at Men-nefer (Greek Memphis) ten miles distant. Three hundred miles to the south, Waset boasted several palaces, royal residences occupied during the annual festivals of Amun’s journeys between the city’s temples.
The conception of Amunhotep III: Mutemwia and Amun are lifted into heaven by two goddesses. (Drawing of a scene in the divine birth chamber, Luxor Temple)
Thutmose IV and Mutemwia might instead have conceived the future Amunhotep III in another palace located sixty miles south of modern-day Cairo, in a fertile basin known as the Fayum, where a branch of the Nile feeds a large lake. The Fayum was a favorite royal hunting ground, and a palace graced the idyllic countryside. Merwer, named for the “great canal” near which it lay, was specifically a residence for female members of the royal family. Women and palaces immediately conjure the harem, the forbidden area of the Ottoman palace where wives and consorts were strictly secluded, eunuchs their intermediaries to the outside world. Unfortunately, despite abundant evidence that Egypt had no such institution—including the absence of eunuchs as a court rank or professional group—the term is often applied to ancient Egypt, distorting our understanding of what it meant to be a pharaoh or a queen.
Rather than a place for the sexual control of royal women, the palace at Merwer was indicative of those women’s economic power. The queen owned vast estates and oversaw an administration, land holdings, and numerous employees. During the lifetime of Thutmose IV, Mutemwia was not the chief queen, in ancient Egyptian “the king’s great wife,” and that title would be bestowed upon her only retrospectively by her son, Amunhotep III.
Standing within the chamber of the divine birth at Luxor Temple, we see Mutemwia, swept up into the company of gods and goddesses. After Amun-Re impregnates her, he consults with the ram-headed god Khnum, who carries out the physical act of creation. Khnum fashions the newly conceived Amunhotep III with the aid of the potter’s wheel, a lump of clay becoming the future king, more perfect even than all the gods.
As Khnum sits at his wheel, we see the results of his labor: two identical boys, their youth marked by their nudity and their hairstyle—each has a single braided lock of hair. One is the physical body of the child who will become Amunhotep III, while the other is the future king’s ka-spirit. The ka-spirit is one of several components of an individual that transcended the corporeal world. Ka is written in hieroglyphs with a pair of arms opened as if about to embrace, and the spiritual force of the ka was believed to be transmitted from father to child. The king possessed a special ka-spirit, a soul that was the essence of kingship, bestowed by the god Amun himself.
Khnum intones over the images of the young king and his ka-spirit the majestic fate of the future Amunhotep III: “You will be the king of the Black Land, ruler of the Red Land!”3 The Black Land, kemet, was an ancient name for Nilotic Egypt, the strip of rich black soil deposited on the banks of the Nile during the annual flood. The Red Land, desheret, encompassed the high desert plateau east and west of the river, through which the Nile Valley was cut. The desolate stretches of sand and rock were to some extent natural barriers protecting the Nile Valley. Just as importantly, they were the sources of Egypt’s vast mineral wealth and regions of busy trade routes. The Black Land made Egypt abound in food, but the Red Land made it rich in gold, stones, ostrich feathers, leopard skins, incense, and a myriad of other goods. Khnum’s pronouncement predicts Amunhotep’s reign over a land well fed and replete with splendid monuments, a land at peace in its verdant heaven on earth, and in control of its desert territories.
Then it is time for Thoth, the ibis-headed god of writing, to announce Amun’s satisfaction with Queen Mutemwia, whose womb now holds the future king of Egypt. The temple reliefs show the queen’s changed body: Mutemwia’s belly swells, ever so slightly, with child. This is one of only a handful of depictions of normal human pregnancy from three thousand years of ancient Egyptian art. For the birth itself, Mutemwia sits enthroned, surrounded by more than two dozen deities. Goddesses grasp her outstretched arms, a clue that Mutemwia is not simply sitting but giving birth. In actuality, the queen, like most ancient Egyptian women, probably would have squatted atop four decorated bricks as she delivered her son.
After the successful birth, the prince is presented to Amun, who reaches out to embrace his son. The arms of Amun mimic the arms of the hieroglyph ka, and indeed, just behind the infant Amunhotep is his own ka-spirit, his twin, held in the arms of falcon-headed Horus, the divine template for the pharaoh on earth. Each boy sucks his index finger (rather than his thumb), a habit apparently so common among Egyptian youngsters that it early became a defining aspect of the hieroglyph for “child.”
The twin children are here a visual conceit, signaling Amunhotep’s possession of the royal ka-spirit. At this moment the child and his ka have already become one, destined to rule over Egypt, as Amun proclaims:
My son of my body, my beloved, Nebmaatre, whom I made as one flesh with me in the palace! I have given to you all life and dominion, with the result that you have (already) appeared in glory as king of Upper and Lower Egypt upon the throne of Horus. May your heart be joyous, together with (that of) your ka-spirit, like Re!4
The text makes clear that the king, here called by his coronation name Nebmaatre, is one flesh with the god, literally Amun’s earthly incarnation. The sacred and sexual union of Amun and the queen has implanted in her womb both that physical form of Egypt’s next ruler and the very spirit of kingship, his ka. The texts tell us that Amunhotep, possessed of the royal ka, “will rule all that the sun disk encircles,” a common phrase in royal texts that describes the king as master of everything within the circuit of the sun.5 Here, the ancient Egyptians employed the customary word for sun disk: aten. By the time the royal ka passed from Amunhotep III to his own son, Amunhotep IV, aten became more than just the disk of the sun, but Aten, the unique god, father and mother of all creation. Soon after that passing on of the royal ka, Aten would eclipse all the other gods of Egypt.
Standing in the divine birth room in Luxor Temple, we see laid out before us the theological underpinning of kingship in Egypt. As the physical mediator between this world and the divine realm, the king possessed a status unique among all people. He was the son of the god Amun, destined to rule Egypt and—at least in theory—every land touched by the rays of the sun. The record of Amunhotep III’s conception and birth was not unique to him, far from it. Image by image, word for word—replacing only the names—Amunhotep III copied the divine birth treatise from Hatshepsut, a queen who ruled as pharaoh. While these scenes and texts were preserved for the first time during Hatshepsut’s reign, the concepts behind them likely were not of her invention either but extended back at least six centuries.
After thirty years on the throne, Amunhotep III built upon his divine ancestry to begin a personal transformation from the son of the sun god to the embodiment of the sun god on earth. The king was not alone in this journey: at his side was the king’s great wife, Tiye, a woman who was central to all aspects of her husband’s reign. She was the mother of the next king, Amunhotep IV, and before her husband’s death, she became a reigning goddess.
2An Angry Goddess
A group of a dozen marines run from a low mud-brick building toward the Nile, an officer racing ahead and urging tumbling acrobats and lute-tuning musicians out of the way. Behind them, staggering forward, another group of soldiers half carry and half drag an enormous length of rope, nearly half a cubit in thickness. The officer in charge, palm rib baton raised, shouts that one of the ropes of the god’s barge, “Amun Mighty of Prow,” has broken, and a replacement is urgently required. Upsetting a few wine amphorae—spilling the contents of one onto an altar piled high with all manner of food—the soldiers rush on.
A trumpeter sounds several short and long blasts, transferring the orders of the nearby officer to long lines of soldiers and sailors hauling on massive ropes connected to the gold-plated and jewel-encrusted barges of the gods Amun, Mut, and Khonsu. Tugboats assist the boats as they sail against the current. That morning, a complex choreography had taken Amun’s barge out of Amunhotep III’s newly decorated pylon at Ipet-sout, then south to meet the bark of Khonsu, on to the complex of Mut to welcome her to the procession, and then off to the south. Along the way, the divine boats pass riverbanks thronged with the citizens of Waset attired in their finest clothes and jewelry.
At Ipat-resyt, they dock, and priests begin the nerve-racking and time-consuming process of taking from their decks miniature versions of those very barges. Then the trumpeter advances to meet the line of priests carrying on their shoulders the portable boats of Amun, Mut, Khonsu, and indeed the king himself. The musician sounds the notes of the royal entry—the king of the gods is coming. The procession passes the acrobats, women leaping backward onto handstands before vaulting back onto their feet, while lute-playing musicians accompany a singing group of clapping priests and sistrum-jingling priestesses.
The crowd grows silent after another signal from the king’s trumpeter, the procession pauses, and all attend to the words of the temple chorus. The first song rings out, an ancient hymn, parts of which were first sung a millennium earlier: “O Amun, Lord of the Thrones of the Two Lands, may you live forever! A drinking place is hewn out, the sky is folded back to the south; a drinking place is hewn out, the sky is folded back to the north.”1 A cheer erupts, drowning out the final line of the song. This is the sign for the multitude of worshippers to begin imbibing wine and beer, until they become so intoxicated that their drinking places resemble heaven itself.
After another sounding of the trumpet, the procession nears the mud-brick outer court of the unfinished temple of Ipat-resyt. This time the chorus turns directly toward the bark of Amun, moving in close, and singing the final words of the song: “It is Horus, strong of arm, who conveys the god with her, the good lady of the god. For the king has Hathor already done the best of good things.”2
At that last line, not a few couples evoke that amorous conclusion to the song, leading up to their own best things with prolonged kisses. Amunhotep, in the role of the powerful Horus, will achieve his own perfection with Hathor, embodied in his great royal wife Tiye. And as the god Amun unites with his divine consort Mut, their human worshippers will eat, drink, and make love during the nights of the festival. When it is all over, Egypt and the entire world is reborn.
Copyright © 2022 by John Coleman Darnell and Colleen Darnell
