* Though nineteenth-century historians named it after a mythic king, Minos, there is no evidence of a monarchy and its ‘throne room’ may have been a council chamber or a temple for rituals. Cretans may have worshipped goddesses portrayed on their frescoes. Some suggest these were female rulers, but there’s no evidence either way. Their language has still not been deciphered.
* If the Egyptians did not grasp the dangers of incestuous marriage, they did produce guides to medicine and gynaecology, written on papyrus, which together with other papyri reveal how much they knew – and how little. Illness was caused by demons and bad spirits that were cured by both magic and treatment. Doctors, often also priests, were specialized, ranging from ‘Physician of the Eyes’ to ‘Shepherd of the Anus’; Djoser had Hesy-Ra, a ‘Chief of Dentists and Doctors’, in 2700 BC, and there was a chief female doctor Peseshet in 2400. Babies were delivered with the mothers in a kneeling position, supervised by female midwives. Their physicians believed channels led from the heart to the rest of the body. Pain was treated with opium, burns with aloe, epilepsy with camphor; wounds were bound with bandages. Tests for pregnancy used female urine on barley and emmer seeds; if they grew the woman was pregnant; if it was barley, it would be a boy, if emmer a girl. Fertility was tested with an onion in the vagina; if the woman’s breath smelled in the morning, she was fertile. Other measures are more sensible: if the perineum was ‘very swollen due to childbirth you should prepare for her: oil to be soaked into vagina’. Contraceptives for females included pessaries of sour milk, honey, natron or acacia gum, the latter a known spermicide. Crocodile dung would have acted as an indirect contraceptive. After rape: ‘Instructions for a woman suffering in her vagina and limbs having been beaten … You should prepare for her: oil to be eaten until she is well.’
* The titles reveal the complexity of the court – Royal Seal Bearer, Gentleman of the Bedchamber, Fan Bearer of the Lord of Two Lands – but security was vitaclass="underline" Master of the Secrets was ‘Eyes of the King’. The royal bodyguards were made up of Nubian but also Mycenaeans from the Aegean. The police were often Nubian.
* The definition of life after death had changed since the days of Sneferu. Then, only kings had been worthy of afterlife; now high officials too inscribed their tombs with the sacred texts to achieve divinity and resurrection. The new royal family promoted the cult of Osiris, god of earth and the lord of the underworld, who oversaw the rebirth after death assisted by Ra and Horus, the two gods of the sky. The Egyptians embraced different concepts of the soul of the dead: the ba existed in parallel to the individual, but in death by day travelled with the sun and by night rejoined the mummified body with Osiris. The ka was a deathless spirit that needed food to survive and allowed the dead to travel to the underworld for judgement by Osiris, a terrifying voyage that, according to the so-called Coffin Texts, led them to the Field of Offering. There they faced fearsome alternatives between eternal life and damnation to hell where they had to eat excrement and drink urine. But if chosen, they entered a paradisiacal world. All of this depended on the survival of the mummy in the grave: just in case, Egyptians were now buried with a shabti, a burial figurine, to serve as a substitute in case the mummy was destroyed, so the ba could return every night.
* On the base of one of the three pairs of obelisks, which Senenmut chose and transported from Aswan, she inscribed her rationale for accession: ‘I have done this with a love for my father Amun … I call this to the attention of people who live in the future who shall consider this monument that I made for my father … He [Amun] will say, “How like her it is, loyal to her father!” For I am his daughter.’ No daughter has ever loved a father so splendidly. But her masterpiece was Dkjeser Djeseru, Holy of Holies, her mortuary temple, a complex of terraces cut into the rock face.
* It is rare to hear the actual voice of a pharaoh. Amenhotep II witheringly mocked the louche entourage of his Nubian viceroy: ‘You, in faraway Nubia, a charioteering hero who brought booty from every foreign country, are now master of a wife from Babylon, a servant girl from Byblos [Lebanon], a young girl from Alalakh, a hag from Arapkha. These Syrians are worthless – what are they good for?’ When the viceroy was too trusting of his Nubian subjects, he was told: ‘Don’t trust the Nubians, beware their people and witchcraft. Beware that servant whom you’ve promoted …’
* Some 380 letters discovered in the House of the Pharaonic Correspondence in the city of Akhetaten reveal the fascinating correspondence, written in Babylonian in cuneiform, with the powers of west Asia. The Great Kings of the time gloried in their membership of the club of world arbiters – rather like today’s G7 – who called each other ‘brother’. Like today, all were very touchy about their status. Egypt and Hatti were the leading powers.
Houses of Hattusa and Rameses
SUN MANIA: NEFERTITI AND THE KING OF HATTI
The new pharaoh, Amenhotep IV, had a strange slit-eyed, angular face with an elongated head and extended torso with androgynous breasts, a potbelly and short legs – or at least was shown this way. Nefertiti, who may have been his first cousin, Tiye’s niece, appeared as his equal everywhere – even in an inscription of her killing foreign prisoners on the royal barge. Nefertiti’s beauty was striking, but here too there was a kink: her statues suggest an elongated skull. Did this new fashion in royal statues express Amenhotep’s divinity or was he presenting his bizarre looks as evidence of divinity?
The cone-headed pharaoh was absorbed by religious matters, as Egyptian power in Syria was being challenged by a rising empire: an aggressive and gifted warrior, Suppiluliuma, was the king of Hatti, whose people were superb charioteers descended from Aryan invaders and who now ruled from the Aegean to the Euphrates. Suppiluliuma, scion of the greatest dynasty of the time, that ruled for almost 500 years, had crushed Greek kingdoms in the west; now he tested Egyptian power by taking Kadesh in northern Syria.
The pharaoh failed to get Kadesh back, but the wars had unleashed hordes of Habiru* – brigands – who attacked Egyptian allies in Canaan. ‘I’m at war … Send archers!’ begged Abdi-Heba, king of a small beleaguered fortress. ‘If no archers, the king will have no lands.’ The fortress was Jerusalem, making its first appearance in history.
As the Hattians advanced into Canaan and the Habiru marauded, Amenhotep IV launched a religious revolution. He embraced one sun god, Aten, and changed his own name to Akhenaten – Effective for Aten; Nefertiti became Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti – Beauteous are the Joys of Aten (and everyone else had to change their names from Amun to Akhen too). Then he founded a new capital, Akhetaten – Horizon of Aten – between Memphis, the ancient capital, and Thebes.* The new theology, known sinisterly as the Teaching, downgraded not just Amun but all the other gods popular with the elite and the people, to elevate one god, an idea that may have influenced the writers of the Bible and the religions to come. Even the word ‘gods’ was changed to its singular form. The divine partnership of Akhenaten and Nefertiti had a cosy intimacy to it: illuminated and joined by the rays of the divine sun, they appeared in engravings with three children on their laps. It was the first appearance of a nuclear family as a political–religious statement.