Festivals
Many other visual expressions of royal power existed. The king wore crowns and had scepters and other regalia that were reserved for his office, and he participated in public festivals that reaffirmed his special status. The latter were ephemeral events whose format we can only vaguely reconstruct from depictions and later sources. One ceremony that seems to have been important from the Predynastic period on, and that continued to be practiced into the Greek period, was called sed in ancient Egyptian. Held occasionally in a king’s life – in later periods only after 30 years of rule – it reasserted his powers. Wrapped in a special cloak, he appeared on a podium with the two thrones of Upper and Lower Egypt, while statues of the gods were placed nearby (Figure 2.4). During this celebration of his dual kingship he made a ceremonial run around boundary stones to reconfirm his territorial claims. Some of the earliest depictions of kings show them participating in the sed‐festival, which seems to have become more important over time. The 3rd‐dynasty step pyramid of Djoser contained a special sed‐court to renew the king’s reign into eternity, and in the 14th century King Amenhotep III built a massive complex to celebrate sed‐festivals (see Chapter 8).
Figure 2.4 One of the earliest statues in the round of a king of Egypt is this small ivory one, 8.8 cm high. It shows an unidentified ruler, probably of the 1st dynasty, wearing the white crown of Upper Egypt and wrapped in a cloak that kings wore during the sed‐festival. The stoop of his shoulders suggests that he was old when the image was carved. British Museum, London EA37996.
Source: Werner Forman / Art Resource
Royal annals and year names
Festivals of this type were considered to be so important that they were recorded in what we call royal annals. From the 1st dynasty on, the Egyptians designated years by identifying a special accomplishment that had happened, using very terse language, such as “Halting at Herakleopolis and the lake of the temple of Herishef.” This had a purely practical side: administrators attached labels inscribed with such designations to goods to make clear the date of their delivery. But the labels also intimate to us what the Egyptians considered to be important royal acts. The authors of the now fragmentary Palermo Stone collected these data to provide a record of the first three dynasties. The events commemorated included cultic acts, such as the creation of a temple or a divine statue and visits to shrines in various towns. Very common was a biennial “following of Horus,” probably a royal tour through the country to interact with the population and judge disputes. Military campaigns, so common in the depictions of the late Predynastic period, are rarely mentioned.
Gods and cults
The king’s position in society was grounded in Egyptian views about the world of the gods. It is difficult, if not impossible, for us to understand how ancient Egyptians perceived gods and related to them. It is clear, however, that their attitudes differed from those of believers in Abrahamic religions, not only because the Egyptian pantheon knew numerous deities rather than one god. Egyptian gods were natural forces and could be terrifying characters that needed to be appeased. Families and communities had their preferred deities, and often selected those for reasons that escape us. In our study of Egyptian religion we have to remember that the abundant remains involving gods and goddesses available to us are almost exclusively from the official sphere and set up on behalf of the court. Personal religious feelings are nearly never accessible to us.
The king’s duties included the support of the cults and temples, and his powers derived partly from his identification with the god Horus. In order for these concepts to work on a countrywide level, there had to exist a view of the gods that was valid throughout Egypt. Most gods had a strong connection to one specific town that in historical periods often housed their main temple. It is certain that many associations went back to prehistoric times, and scholars assume that almost all cults were originally local. But in the Early Dynastic Period there existed a unified Egyptian pantheon. Some scholars argue that the unification of Egypt led to an ideological merging of local systems, while others think that already in Predynastic times the regional pantheons fitted within a system that transcended political boundaries.
The art and texts of the Early Dynastic Period refer to gods attested throughout Egyptian history, although it is unlikely that they had the same definition as in later times when the evidence is clearer. We encounter Horus and Seth, connected to kingship, the cow‐goddess Hathor (whose name means “Estate of Horus”), the fertility god Min, and other gods much better known later on. The annals report that the king visited their shrines or dedicated statues to them, and some archaeological remains of early temples exist. There must have been official ideas about their relationships and areas of competence that differed from Predynastic times, and officially sponsored gods gradually displaced local ones.
The newly established court formulated countrywide ways to express concepts such as temple, divine statue, etc. Whereas previously local traditions and preferences existed, the imposition of a union on the country led to common norms, at least in the official sphere. The later official Egyptian temple contained a limited set of small roofed rooms to house the divine statue, which one reached by crossing one or more courtyards, some open, others with columns that supported a roof. In Egyptian prehistory there was no uniform style of temple, however, and cults could focus on an earthen mound or a stone boulder, for example. The new form thus had to supplant existing customs.
Similarly, official Egyptian statuary – not well documented in the Early Dynastic Period but abundant in the Old Kingdom – followed strict rules of representation of the body that regulated the relative size of body parts, the position of the arms, and so on. In Predynastic times different conventions existed, which needed to be eliminated to make place for a common style. An example of an earlier tradition is a set of colossal statues of the god Min, excavated at his cult center Coptos. They show a style of human representation that is very unlike the dynastic one. They are gigantic (13.5 feet or 4.1 meters high), have unusual proportions, and contain inscribed signs that do not resemble those appearing elsewhere (Figure 2.5). When complete they probably showed the god as bald and with a pointed beard. By the 2nd dynasty the new state had refashioned the image of Min to fit the common standards of divine representation. In general it instituted an official culture that