Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [132]
Not very exciting, is it? Yet there is material for a thrilling historical novel here, and hints of dark events, murder, betrayal, and conspiracy. Bay’s influence did not endure; a recently discovered inscription calls him the great enemy, and proclaims that the king has had him killed. One would love to know why Siptah (or someone else in power) took this step. Chancellor Bay would make a splendid eminence grise, like Cardinals Mazarin and Richelieu three thousand years later and, like them, the lover of the queen regent. Or was he a hated rival of the lady, who finally became powerful enough to order his execution? It’s pure fiction. The players in this drama are two-dimensional; we don’t know much about them, except for the fact that they all, including Tausert, had rather nice tombs in the Valley of the Kings. There is another tomb in the valley connected with Tausert and her husband, Seti II; the so-called Gold Tomb, though small in size and obviously not of royal dimensions, contained a cache of jewelry that was one of the most impressive found up to that time.
Among the loot was a pair of very small silver gloves, with a number of rings inside the fingers. Nothing organic had survived. It may well be that the theory suggested by one scholar is correct: that the burial was that of a small prince or princess, and that when the modern excavator cleaned out the silver gloves he threw away the rotted flesh and bone of a royal child.
Tausert’s successor was Setnakhte, a man of unknown antecedents, who took over her elegant tomb in the Valley of the Kings and was buried there after a reign of only a few years. Like Hatshepsut’s, Tausert’s mummy is missing, unless one of the unidentified females in the royal cache is hers.
Setnakhte is considered the founder of a new dynasty—the Twentieth—but his chief claim to fame is that he fathered Ramses III.
The name had already become one to reckon with, and Ramses III’s aping of his predecessor was certainly deliberate; it is too exact and too consistent to be otherwise. Ramses III built grandly and without undue modesty. His most famous monument is his mortuary temple, which today bulks large upon the West Bank of the Nile across from Luxor, not far from the mortuary temple of his idol, Ramses II. Medinet Habu is the name given to the temple of the third Ramses; it has been studied with more intense concentration than has any other Egyptian temple. The Oriental Institute has been copying texts and excavating in and around the temple for more than thirty years. The results fill several immense volumes, each about half as tall as I am, and they may truthfully be said to be as precise and accurate as any product of modern archaeological methods can be. If you visit Medinet Habu—which you certainly will do if you go to Luxor, since it is part of the standard tour—you will be struck by the yards and yards of inscriptions. I have a personal interest in these texts because I spent one semester translating some of them, and I contemplated the inscribed walls with loathing. The laudatory texts are as turgid and repetitive and pompous as the architecture. Once again—compare it with Deir el Bahri.
Medinet Habu was more than a temple. The king had a palace here, one of a number that he maintained, with the usual offices and servants’ quarters. Ramses entertained his harem in the gate house, and the reliefs that survive here are chastely indicative of the purpose of the structure. In defense of the adverb, let me add that the Egyptians saw nothing shocking about nudity; climate and common sense alike decreed relatively few garments in informal situations.
The Medinet Habu reliefs and inscriptions tell of