Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [52]
The rise of Thebes (modern-day Luxor) can be traced back to about 2250 B.C., at which time a lady named Ikui in one of the villages of the Theban plain had the happy fortune to be blessed with a son whom she called Intef. He was a prince and a count, and his immediate descendants held the same titles.
A century or so after the birth of Intef, son of Ikui, the insidious air of the southland inflamed the ambitions of one of his descendants. The Theban princes had not been sitting supinely in their local capital while the Herakleopolitans expanded their influence; they had been engaging in a little expansion too, and they eventually extended their control as far south as the First Cataract. Count Intef ’s successor, Mentuhotep I, declared his independence of the kings of Herakleopolis and assumed the royal titles, but it was not until the reign of his younger son that the rivalry flared into bloody conflict. Wahankh Intef II drove the Herakleopolitans north and captured Abydos. A stela describing his prowess, from Wahankh’s tomb at Thebes, is mentioned in a Twentieth-Dynasty papyrus that records the results of an inspection of the royal tombs. Depredations among the tombs had grown increasingly bold, and the investigating committee reported that Intef ’s pyramid, which must have been a small affair of brick, had been “removed”—a pleasantly nonjudgmental verb—but that the stela was still in place, and that “the figure of the king stands on this stela with his hound named Behek between his feet.” Three thousand years after the inspection, in A.D. 1860, Auguste Mariette, then chief inspector of antiquities, found the lower part of the stela still intact. He left it there (one can almost hear Petrie’s remarks on this negligence), and the inevitable happened. When Mariette’s successor, Gaston Maspero, ran across the stela again in 1882, it was in fragments. The pieces were finally collected and brought to the Cairo Museum. The king was a true lover of caninity; he had not one but five of his favorite hounds shown on his stela so that they could enter the western paradise with him.
Truce or stalemate followed the first stage of the war. Then a new man came to the throne of the southern city. His name was also Mentuhotep, and he was the greatest warrior of his warlike line. We give him the number II, though such designations were never used by the Egyptians. (It’s easier to keep track of these fellows by such means than by trying to remember their distinctive throne names, which are often annoyingly similar and which were sometimes changed in midreign.) Within twenty years Mentuhotep II had conquered the rest of Egypt. His opposite number in Herakleopolis was Merikare, who probably found his father’s philosophy small comfort in defeat.
We would certainly like to have a contemporary account of this war, but none has been found. There is indirect evidence of a unique kind bearing on the last great battle, the siege of Herakleopolis. This evidence was discovered by H. E. Winlock, working at Deir el Bahri for the Metropolitan Museum of New York.
Deir el Bahri is part of the great west Theban necropolis area, which includes such marvels as the Valley of the Kings, a large group of nobles’ tombs of the New Kingdom, and the huge mortuary temples of the Ramseses. At Deir el Bahri itself is the beautiful temple of Queen Hatshepsut, arguably the finest and most graceful piece of architecture in all of Egypt. There was an earlier temple at the same site, built by the conquering Mentuhotep. Winlock deserves the credit for the excavation of this temple. It was in very poor condition, but it must have been an impressive sight when it was built. A walled avenue of approach led