Death, Power, and Apotheosis in Ancient Egypt: The Old and Middle Kingdoms

By Julia Troche

Death, Power, and Apotheosis in Ancient Egypt uniquely considers how power was constructed, maintained, and challenged in ancient Egypt through mortuary culture and apotheosis, or how certain dead in ancient Egypt became gods. Rather than focus on the imagined afterlife and its preparation, Julia Troche provides a novel treatment of mortuary culture exploring how the dead were mobilized to negotiate social, religious, and political capital in ancient Egypt before the New Kingdom.

Troche explores the perceived agency of esteemed dead in ancient Egyptian social, political, and religious life during the Old and Middle Kingdoms (c. 2700–1650 BCE) by utilizing a wide range of evidence, from epigraphic and literary sources to visual and material artifacts. As a result, Death, Power, and Apotheosis in Ancient Egypt is an important contribution to current scholarship in its collection and presentation of data, the framework it establishes for identifying distinguished and deified dead, and its novel argumentation, which adds to the larger academic conversation about power negotiation and the perceived agency of the dead in ancient Egypt.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781501760167

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DEATH, POWER, AND APOTHEOSIS IN ANCIENT EGYPT

THE OLD AND MIDDLE KINGDOMS

JULIA TROCHE

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

PARTONE: DEATH ANDPOWER

1. Mortuary Culture

2.Akhu—The Effective Dead

3. Power and Egyptian Kingship

PARTTWO: APOTHEOSIS

4. Markers of Distinguished and Deified Status

5. Distinguished Dead

6. Apotheosis in the Old Kingdom

7. Apotheosis in the Middle Kingdom

Conclusion

References

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am humbled and grateful for the privilege afforded to me to study ancient Egypt and publish this book. This book originated in research that was supported by numerous Brown University internal funding awards but first and foremost by Jim Allen—my adviser, committee chair, and cheerleader—and by the Brown University Department of Egyptology and Assyriology community at large, including my other committee members (Laurel Bestock and Liz Frood), innumerable graduate student accomplices, every member of the faculty, visiting scholars, and the always generous administrative team, Clare Benson and Catherine Hanni. Even after I graduated from the program, John Steele and Matthew Rutz continued their support by welcoming me back to the department for research visits, including a remote summer in residence during the COVID-19 pandemic so that I could finish this book on time. During one of these visits, Jen Thum was a daily writing partner whose conversations were always stimulating.

This work was also supported by the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at University of California, Los Angeles, where I first learned ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs as an undergraduate student, but where I also taught as a lecturer from 2016 to 2017. At UCLA I received incredible encouragement at all stages of my career from Jacco Dieleman, Willeke Wendrich, and Kara Cooney, who also gave me critical feedback on my proposal, and from an incredible community of colleagues and doctoral students (who are too numerous to name but who know who they are) with whom our many conversations contributed to the intellectual processing of the ideas in this book.

Missouri State University, and specifically department head Kathleen Kennedy and dean Victor Matthews, supported this project with encouragement and two summer research fellowships. Glena Admire ensured every administrative need was met, and then some. Monthly faculty writing retreats with an awesome interdisciplinary group of colleagues helped keep me on track. My book proposal benefited directly from the generosity of Bart Brinkman, Etta Madden, and Leslie Baynes, for which I am eternally appreciative. Hours were spent with Michelle Morgan and Jacynda Ammons as writing partners and champions.

Bethany Wasik and the editorial team at Cornell University Press guided me through this adventure with compassion, encouragement, and precision. I could not have hoped for a better editor. I am very appreciative of and fortunate to have had critical and thoughtful reviews from the Cornell faculty board, the editorial board, an anonymous reviewer, and Juan Carlos Moreno García, whose feedback went above and beyond what was expected. These reviews made my work that much stronger, but any errors or inconsistencies remain my own.

My greatest support, though, has always come from my family. My mom, Patricia, has been a constant, eternal source of encouragement and love. My big brother, Ray, has always inspired me and, along with his wife, Amanda, and their daughter, Willow, brought much joy and laughter to my life as I wrote this book. Tito Perez and Susan Campbell always reminded me to not lose sight of the forest for the trees. The Brinkman family celebrated every step of this journey with me. This book would not have been written without Phoebe’s companionship. Finally, the sine qua non of this project has been the complete and unwavering support of my husband and partner, Bryan Brinkman, who not only indexed this book for me but whose intellect and scholarship inspires me every day.

ABBREVIATIONS

Archaeological Site Identification and Museum Accession Numbers

Introduction

Standing on the island of Elephantine, ancient Abu, near Egypt’s traditional southern border, is an ancient Egyptian temple dedicated to Heqaib (figure 1). One of his followers, a man named Sarenput, commissioned its construction around 1950 BCE. The entire monument is covered in images and texts venerating the divine Heqaib.

On the outer face of the back wall, where passersby would see it, Sarenput instructs Heqaib to See with your own face, that which I have done for you. May a god act for the one who acted for him. May you make my years last upon earth, and cause that my voice be made true in the necropolis. This prayer is clearly directed at Heqaib, who is described as a god, and whose perceived powers enable him to affect someone’s life and afterlife. Heqaib, though, was once just a man.

Heqaib was a local official of Elephantine who lived during Egypt’s Old Kingdom, about 2200 BCE, some 250 years before Sarenput erected this shrine. How did this mere mortal man become a god? How did he acquire claims of divinity that were normally exclusively held by the ancient Egyptian king? Only the king was supposed to wield power over life and the afterlife, but a close examination of this period illuminates additional men who, upon death, were similarly deified. Why, and how, did this deification occur, and what were the political, social, and religious impacts of these possibly subversive acts? These are some of the questions that drive this book.

Figure 1. Large, rectangular ruins of an Egyptian shrine dedicated to a local official and covered in images and texts.

FIGURE 1. Sanctuary of Heqaib on Elephantine. DAI photo archive number D-DAI-KAI-ELE-46-JS-07774. Photo by J. Sigl. © DAI Cairo.

Broadly, this book explores the perceived agency of the dead in ancient Egyptian social, political, and religious life, during the Old through Middle Kingdoms (c. 2700–1650 BCE). In particular, it investigates the phenomenon of apotheosis—the process through which one becomes deified—and the articulation of certain dead as elevated in status vis-à-vis networks of power. Scholarship on the dead in ancient Egypt has primarily focused on the preparations of death and the supernatural afterlife—for example, the construction of a tomb, mummification, funerary rituals, and so on—where engagement with the dead is often confined to ancestor worship. This is so prevalent as a basic assumption within the field, that more productive lenses of analysis, such as the social or political impacts of the dead, are often ignored.¹ This volume explores and uncovers ancient Egypt’s investment in three distinct, yet interdependent, historical areas during the third millennium BCE: (1) death, and imagined life after death; (2) power, via public displays of social capital for eternity; and (3) apotheosis, specifically the processes of deification of certain dead.

Death

The ancient Egyptian worldview included the lived reality of everyday experiences on earth, and the imagined, supernatural afterlife (the divine Hereafter) comprising the gods, dead, and other supernatural entities. Death was only the beginning; it was a transformation of form that did not negate the dead’s ability to interact with the living. In many ways, death freed the individual from the physical constraints of the human body. The dead in ancient Egypt remained actors whose social capital—that is, their worth and influence—could be effectively exploited within the social, religious, and political networks of the living. Being buried near the king’s pyramid was an expression of an individual’s worth through physical association. A priest commissioning a larger shrine for a local god’s cult would place the priest within a favorable religious and social position. Renovating and keeping tidy the tomb of a once powerful ancestor could help to solidify a descendant’s political influence within his town. These presentations of capital could be orchestrated before death, such as the arrangement of one’s tomb near an important monument or at a particularly visible spot within the local landscape. Other expressions, though, were made posthumously, by descendants or other interested parties. In either case, these expressions of the dead’s social, religious, and/or political capital could have profound historical impacts.

Power

Arguably, the most powerful individual in ancient Egypt was the king. But the king’s power was the result of negotiations that occurred between the king and the other the social actors of Egypt: the Egyptian people, the gods, and the dead. The latter two (the gods and the dead), despite lacking corporeal or physical agency, were nevertheless perceived to possess real influence in the world of the living. One of the ways in which the king asserted his power was in his role as guarantor of mortuary benefaction—that is, he helped to ensure people’s admittance into the divine Hereafter. In order to enter the divine Hereafter, the recently deceased had to pass judgment before Osiris. Due to the king’s unique relationship with the gods, he was able to put in a good word on someone’s behalf. Not only could the king influence this admittance, but it was only through association with him that the dead could enjoy the fullest privileges of the afterlife. The acceptance by the Egyptian people of the king’s knowledge of funerary spells and his exclusive access to the gods allowed him to wield immense power. Thus, this power was a direct negotiation with and dependent on the people of Egypt. Indeed, Leslie Ann Warden has noted that power cannot be simplified to a top-down pyramid model. Rather, complex processes of state and local administration, kinship ties, and patronage created webs of power (2015, 24–25). What happened, however, when these webs of power were redefined, and the dead were mobilized in an effort to undermine established royal authority?

Apotheosis

Near the end of the Old Kingdom, certain types of dead began to receive greater status and perceived influence. I have subdivided the dead into four main groups:

The dead who did not pass the judgment before Osiris, and who therefore possess no perceived agency.

The average dead, who passed this judgment and thus retained perceived social influence. They were known as akh (pl. akhu) in ancient Egyptian (lit., effective ones).

The distinguished dead, who are marked as distinct from the average dead and are revered but not deified.

The deified dead, who are in an exceptional group and underwent apotheosis to become gods.

The esteemed dead is a term I use to refer to both groups 3 and 4 (the distinguished and deified dead)—as a group of above-average dead.

The distinguished dead were distinct from average dead in that they were called on by the living to help ensure their admittance to the divine Hereafter—a duty once exclusively performed by the king. Other dead were celebrated so much that they were elevated to the status of gods through a process called apotheosis. These deified dead were also called on for assistance, an act that was once exclusive to the king and the traditional gods of Egypt, but they did not replace the king as the ideological benefactor of Egypt. Instead, the deified dead provided communities with an alternative means of ensuring access to the gods and to the divine Hereafter. In this way, royal power was essentially subverted by these esteemed dead.

Egypt in the Third Millennium BCE

In the following chapters, I assert that the dead were initially mobilized, near the end of the Old Kingdom, as a direct means of subverting royal power in ancient Egypt. Confronting this potential threat to power, the new kings of the Middle Kingdom coopted cults to distinguished and deified dead, enveloping them into official royal building campaigns as a way of appropriating their influence. To appreciate the nuances of this assertion, it is first necessary to be intimately familiar with the historical narratives and historiographical challenges of this transitional period in which the dead were first mobilized—that is, the end of the Old Kingdom through the beginning of the Middle Kingdom, or the third millennium BCE (see table 1).²

Publications that consider the mobilization of the dead often focus on later periods or are concerned with what tombs tell us about the tomb owners’ lives. For example, Nicola Harrington’s 2013 Living with the Dead: Ancestor Worship and Mortuary Ritual in Ancient Egypt leans significantly toward the more robust New Kingdom and later evidence. Janet Richards’s 2005 Society and Death in Ancient Egypt: Mortuary Landscapes of the Middle Kingdom uses funerary evidence as a way to access the predeath lives of Abydene tomb inhabitants. This book does neither. Instead of studying the practices of internment or what these practices say about the people that performed them, this book examines the imagined, but effective, role of the dead in their form as deceased spirits and gods in Egyptian society.

My discussion of the posthumous role of the dead within networks of power begins with the Old Kingdom, as it was during this period that the Egyptian state was conclusively unified, and networks of power well established. The Old Kingdom traditionally includes the Third to Eighth Dynasties. By the Seventh/Eighth Dynasty,³ however, Egypt was no longer successfully ruled by a single king and was politically fragmented. For these reasons, I refer in the following chapters to the Seventh/Eighth Dynasty as part of the First Intermediate Period.⁴

The First Intermediate Period is typically described as the Ninth and Tenth Dynasties, and the first half of the Eleventh Dynasty, during which Egypt was decentralized, as no single ruler was able to claim the title of kingship. Greater artistic freedom and variation suggest that the centralized workshops of the Old Kingdom (i.e., royal workshops) were no longer able to patrol decorum at the regional level. Thus, while this period lacked strong centralized leadership, it was not a period of reversion nor was it a cultural dark age. In the Eleventh Dynasty, a strong Theban dynasty, whose founder was Intef, rose in influence. The sixth of these Theban kings, Nebhepetre Montuhotep II, was able to re-unify Egypt, ushering in the Middle Kingdom. The Middle Kingdom included the latter half of the Eleventh Dynasty and the two subsequent dynasties, Twelfth and Thirteenth.

After another period of decentralization, known as the Second Intermediate Period, characterized by foreign control of northern Egypt by the Hyksos, another Theban family reunited Egypt, and the Eighteenth Dynasty marks the beginning of the New Kingdom. Fundamental philosophical shifts in Egyptian kingship, display, and expressions of religious piety occurred during the New Kingdom, which makes the end of the Middle Kingdom a natural research boundary for many Egyptological studies. Therefore, this book is concerned with how the dead were mobilized during the Old through Middle Kingdoms.

Cults to esteemed dead did not emerge in isolation and first occurred during a time of major political and cultural transition at the end of the Old Kingdom. During this period, the king’s power (fully discussed in chapter 3) was tied to his funerary function. Indeed, the largest monuments in Egypt were the tombs of these kings—pyramids. The first pyramid of Egypt was built at Saqqara by the great architect Imhotep for King Djoser during the Third Dynasty. Kings of the Fourth Dynasty were responsible for the Great Pyramids of Giza. By the end of the Fifth Dynasty, King Unas was the first to include Pyramid Texts in his pyramid tomb. Temples dedicated to the sun god Re also become common in the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties. King Pepi II (Sixth Dynasty) is arguably the last great king of the Old Kingdom as he was the last king for almost two hundred years to whom monumental architecture in the form of a pyramid was attributed. After his reign, Egyptian kings seemed to lose significant influence and power, which was notably evinced by a decline in royal building programs (which were so central to previous kings’ reigns) and growing regionalism (e.g., officials preferring to build tombs in the provinces versus the capital). The causes of this decline, however, are still very much debated, and some of the major hypotheses are explored below. This book shows, though, that a contributing factor was the subversion of royal mortuary power by local esteemed dead.

The Decline of the Old Kingdom

Not only is there debate as to the causes of the decline of the Old Kingdom, but there is also debate as to when it ended.⁵ In this book, I favor chronologies that end the Old Kingdom with the Sixth Dynasty, thus including the Seventh and Eighth Dynasties in the First Intermediate Period because of these kings’ inability to effectively rule a unified Egypt (cf. Shaw 2000). Many theories have been put forth to explain the decline of the Old Kingdom: foreign invasion (Jansen-Winkeln 2010), climatic stress (Bárta 2009, 52), an overgrown bureaucracy (Müller-Wollermann 2014, 4), and a failing economy (Kanawati 1980, 131). These theories, though, need not be mutually exclusive. If Miroslav Bárta is correct in proposing that droughts and other climatic issues correlate to the end of the Old Kingdom, then it certainly would have accelerated and exacerbated other social, political, and economic problems (2009; F. Hassan 1997; cf. Moreno García 1997). While Juan Carlos Moreno García does not, to my knowledge, deny that there were any climatic issues, he clearly refutes the environmental catastrophe theory, describing it as simply untenable (2015, 80). He argues that contrary to traditional interpretations of the end of the Old Kingdom, recent archaeological research shows no trace of climatic or subsistence crisis.… It appears, then, that the end of the monarchy had finally more to do with internal struggles between competing sectors of the ruling elite and with control of wealth flows than with environmental causes (79). While I cannot confirm or assess the status of the climate near the end of the Old Kingdom, I agree with Moreno García’s final point, that competition within the ruling elite contributed to the end of centralized authority.

Renate Müller-Wollermann points out that Karl Jansen-Winkeln’s theory of foreign invasion has chronological issues, and is, thus, also not the most likely cause (2014, 5). Additionally, citing Römer (2011) and Warden (2014), Müller-Wollermann draws attention to evidence that undermines the theory of economic collapse (2014, 5). Of note, archaeology has made some things clear: Near the end of the Sixth Dynasty, foreign interactions, trade, and expeditions decreased noticeably (5). Regionalism also heightened observably, with towns, rather than nomes (large administrative districts), becoming the normative local scale (Jansen-Winkeln 2010, 287–90). Offices became increasingly inheritable, making power more and more localized (Müller-Wollermann 2014, 4).

In the Fourth Dynasty, the title of tjaty, or vizier (ṯɜtj⁶), makes a notable appearance, referencing the king’s second in command. During this period, those who held the title of tjaty also regularly carried the titles king’s son, or king’s son of his body.⁷ In fact, these titles were used by nearly all of the highest-ranking officials (not just tjaty) in Egypt during the Fourth Dynasty. Of the sixteen Fourth-Dynasty tjaty identified by Nigel Strudwick, 100 percent have a variation of king’s son as their principal title (1985, 308).⁸ Strudwick’s data indicate fifty-one tjaty are known from the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, with seven holding a variation of the title king’s son—that is only 14 percent (307–8). Bárta, however, asserts that all but one tjaty of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties drop this title (2013, 270–71; cf. Strudwick 1985, 307–8).⁹ Unfortunately, Bárta does not point his reader to primary source evidence here, nor does he include a list of tjaty whom he is counting. In either case, this is politically significant, as the men who held the second-highest political position in Egypt (tjaty) were no longer justifying their position through their real or ascribed royal lineage. Moreover, during the reign of Pepi II (the fifth of seven kings of the Sixth Dynasty) there is specific evidence for changing relations between the royal Residence and the more distant districts, or provinces. For example, at this time, officials with the title Overseer of Upper Egypt were almost exclusively buried outside of the capital, a trend opposite to that is observed with prior kings, which suggests growing regionalism (Müller-Wollermann 2014, 4).

Tomb biographies and decoration (i.e., the Second Style) also display greater variation and innovation in the Sixth Dynasty (Russmann 1995; Brovarski 2008). Particularly relevant is the shift from tomb biographies that exclusively extol the tomb owner’s unique relationship to the