City of the Dead

THE BACKGROUND TO HUY’S EGYPT

    The nine years of the reign of the young pharaoh Tutankhamun, 1361-1352 BC, were troubled ones for Egypt. They came at the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty, the most glorious of all the thirty dynasties of the empire. Tutankhamun’s predecessors had been mainly illustrious warrior kings, who created a new empire and consolidated the old; but just before him a strange, visionary pharaoh had occupied the throne: Akhenaten. He had thrown out all the old gods and replaced them with one, the Aten, who had his being in the life-giving sunlight. Akhenaten was the world’s first recorded philosopher and the inventor of monotheism. In the seventeen years of his reign he made enormous changes in the way his country thought and was run; but in the process he lost the whole of the northern empire (modern Palestine and Syria), and brought the country to the brink of ruin. Now, powerful enemies were thronging on the northern and eastern frontiers.
    Akhenaten’s religious reforms had driven doubt into the minds of his people after generations of unchanged certainty which went back to before the building of the pyramids one thousand years earlier, and although the empire itself, already over 1,500 years old at the time of these stories, had been through bad times before, Egypt now entered a short dark age. Akhenaten had not been popular with the priest-administrators of the old religion, whose power he took away, or with ordinary people, who saw him as a defiler of their long-held beliefs, especially in the afterlife and the dead. Since his death in 1362 BC, the new capital city he had built for himself (Akhetaten - the City of the Horizon), quickly fell into ruin as power reverted to Thebes (the Southern Capital; the northern seat of government was at Memphis). Akhenaten’s name was cut from every monument, and people were not even allowed to speak it.
    Akhenaten died without a direct heir, and the short reigns of the three kings who succeeded him, of which Tutankhamun’s was the second and by far the longest, were fraught with uncertainty. During this time the pharaohs themselves had their power curbed and controlled by Horemheb, formerly Commander-in-Chief of Akhenaten’s army, but now bent on fulfilling his own ambition to restore the empire and the old religion, and to become pharaoh himself — he did so finally in 1348 BC and reigned for twenty-eight years, the last king of the Eighteenth Dynasty, marrying Akhenaten’s sister-in-law to reinforce his claim to the throne.
    Egypt was to rally under Horemheb and early in the Nineteenth Dynasty it achieved one last glorious peak under Rameses II. It was by far the most powerful and the wealthiest country in the known world, rich in gold, copper and precious stones. Trade was carried out the length of the Nile from the coast to Nubia, and on the Mediterranean (the Great Green), and the Red Sea as far as Punt (Somaliland). But it was a narrow strip of a country, clinging to the banks of the Nile and hemmed in to the east and west by deserts, and governed by three seasons: spring, shemu, was the time of drought, from February to May; summer, akhet, was the time of the Nile flood, from June to October; and autumn, peret, was the time of coming forth, when the crops grew. The ancient Egyptians lived closer to the seasons than we do. They also believed that the heart was the centre of thought.
    The decade in which the stories take place — a minute period of ancient Egypt’s 3,000-year history - was nevertheless a crucial one for the country. It was becoming aware of the world beyond its frontiers, and of the possibility that it, too, might one day be conquered and come to an end. It was a time of uncertainty, questioning, intrigue and violence. A distant mirror in which we can see something of ourselves.
    The ancient Egyptians worshipped a great number of gods. Some of them were restricted to cities or localities, while others waxed and waned in importance with time. Certain gods were duplications of the same ‘idea’. Here are some of the most important, as they appear in the stories:

AMUN
The chief god of the Southern Capital, Thebes. Represented as a man, and associated with the supreme sun god, Ra. Animals dedicated to him were the ram and the goose.
ANUBIS
The jackal god of embalming.
ATEN
The god of the sun’s energy, represented as the sun’s disc whose rays end in protecting hands.
BES
A dwarf god, part lion. Protector of the