Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [138]
The capital of the northern kingdom was at the city of Tanis. The kings of the Nineteenth Dynasty had moved their political center northward, from Memphis to Tanis in the Delta, but had always returned to Thebes in death, to be buried in the holy cemetery on the west bank of the Nile. The Twenty-first Dynasty gave up Thebes entirely. The royal tombs of this period were found by the French archaeologist Pierre Montet, who worked at Tanis during the 1920s and 1930s. He had the good fortune to run into one of the gilded caches which now and then reward the efforts of archaeologists. The tomb of Smendes’s successor, Psusennes I, somehow managed to escape the notice of the industrious tomb robbers. The king himself still rested in it, richly adorned, and in side chambers of the tomb were the mummies of two members of his court, one of whom wore a distinctive and rather handsome gold mask. Montet found seven tombs and half a dozen kings, plus a few favored commoners. The Tanis burials are not as impressive as the unique collection of Tutankhamon, but if the latter had not been known (and if, in 1939, the world had not been preoccupied with grimmer news), the discovery would have made a sensation: the vases and bowls of precious metals, the elegant jewelry, the solid silver hawk-headed coffin and the other treasures of the tombs. The evidences of decline are there, however, not only in the quantity but in some cases the quality of the objects. Some of the best had been recycled. Psusennes’s very sarcophagus was stolen from Merneptah of the Nineteenth Dynasty.
THE QUICK AND THE DEAD
The official transfer of the royal residence to the north stripped Thebes of much of its glory. Long before this time the city of Amon had, for all practical purposes, become a twin entity. On the east bank of the river were the great temples of Karnak and Luxor, the harbor and its attendant buildings, and the residential area inhabited by civil servants, temple officials, and the usual motley lot of anonymous commoners. Across the Nile, under the western cliffs, lay the greater city, which belonged to the dead. For generations the tombs of kings and commoners had honeycombed the hills; a row of great mortuary temples lay along the edge of the narrow cultivated land. The dead were not the only inhabitants of western Thebes, for they required an army of workmen, priests, soldiers, and artists to maintain their Houses of Eternity.
The royal necropoli on the west bank of the Nile had never been completely safe, but with the decline of the throne after the Nineteenth Dynasty, the grisly depredations of the tomb robbers multiplied and often went unpunished. We have a document, one of the most fascinating papyri ever discovered, which gives the details of a series of tomb robberies under Ramses IX, around 1120 B.C. The picture is one of depressing, widespread corruption. The accused are humble workers whose poverty might excuse their crimes, but the most casual reading between the lines makes it clear that more important people were criminally involved. The only bright and shining figure of virtue is that of the accuser, Paser, mayor of eastern Thebes, the city of the living. Paser’s counterpart in western Thebes was named Paweraa. He was not only mayor of the western city but chief of the necropolis police, and one of his primary responsibilities would be the safeguarding of the tombs, royal and otherwise. This was the man whom Paser accused—of negligence at the very least.
If we wanted to be cynical we might speculate about Paser’s motives; like his counterpart across the river, he was a politician, and when politicians fall out the worldly-wise may reasonably look behind the noble speeches. But it is kinder to