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By Root 660 0

one commends the Egyptians for their stubborn hatred of foreign domination, or damns them as oath breakers, one must confess that they did not lie down until they were dead. Asshurbanipal left a man called Necho, of Sais, in charge of Egypt when he went home. Necho, of course, rebelled the first chance he got, and Necho’s son Psamtik I was the founder of what Manetho calls the Twenty-sixth, or Saite, Dynasty. Psamtik must have had some of the old spark. He succeeded in persuading his bickering fellow nobles to unite against the Assyrians and got control of Thebes by ordering the God’s Wife at that place to adopt his daughter. Of course Psamtik didn’t put it so crudely; the famous stela describing the adoption of the princess by her predecessor stresses the fact that Psamtik did not arbitrarily remove this lady, who was of the family of Taharka. (In fact, Psamtik’s daughter didn’t actually assume the title until after the death of the older lady. All very civil and, if I may say so, ladylike.) By uniting Egypt he ended the Third Intermediate Period, so, just for the record, we are now in the Late Period.

The success of Psamtik gave his subjects an illusion of rebirth, and modern scholars sometimes refer to the Twenty-sixth Dynasty as a renaissance. A surge of real vitality produces new cultural features, which resemble the products of other renaissances only in the strength and creativity of the impulse that gave them birth. But when the impetus and the vigor are lacking, a backward-looking society may strive to emulate the past by imitating its external symbols. That is what happened in the Saitic revival of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty.

Copying is the most striking manifestation of the revival of painting—a copying so anxious and so exact that the men of this time reproduce, line for line, the decoration of the tombs of the Old and Middle Kingdoms. To be fair, not all art was slavishly imitative; beginning in the preceding dynasty, perhaps under the influence of the energetic Cushite rulers, we see a new style in sculpture. It is found, at its best, in certain heads of kings and nobles. They are hard—hard in surface and in style, formalized, and yet giving an impression of realism. These two seemingly contradictory impressions, naturalism and formalism, are found in the same work of art, and the result is remarkable. Some of the most interesting sculptures belonged to a certain Mentuemhat, who was not a king but a priest and major of Thebes.

The altered mood of the wisdom literature is equally indicative of the change in national attitudes, though it began earlier than the Twenty-sixth Dynasty; dating such texts is difficult, since they were copied and recopied, but it is likely that the first dates from the late Ramesside period and the second from even later. There is a wistful charm in some of the late wisdom texts; in some ways the sentiments they express are more sympathetic to us than the rather cold-blooded practicality of earlier advice to the young. Take this section, from the “Instructions” of a father to his son:

Double the food which thou givest thy mother, carry her as she carried thee. She had a heavy load in thee, but she did not leave it to me. After thou were born she was still burdened with thee; her breast was in thy mouth for three years, and though thy filth was disgusting, her heart was not disgusted. When thou takest a wife, remember how thy mother gave birth to thee, and her raising thee as well; do not let thy wife blame thee, nor cause that she raise her hands to the god.

There is plenty of sentiment in this passage, although the tone and the candid selection of details raise it above mere sentimentality. Now compare the words of Ptahhotep of the Fourth Dynasty on a similar subject:

If thou art a man of standing, thou shouldst found a house hold and love thy wife at home, as is fitting. Fill her belly, and clothe her back; ointment is the prescription for her body. Make her heart glad, for she is a profitable field for her lord.

Tastes may differ as to the relative wisdom of these excerpts,