Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [54]
This is the time of tomb models. Americans are fortunate in that they do not have to go to Cairo to see some of the best, which come from the Eleventh Dynasty Theban tomb of the Chancellor Meketre. The Metropolitan Museum, which conducted the excavations, was allowed to keep most of them. They reproduce, in faithful miniature, the estate of a wealthy nobleman. The estate was almost a small village, containing numerous shops or work houses in which various specialized activities were carried on. Life was good, at least for the wealthy. In the Met models one can see the little serfs and craftsmen working away, some in the brewery-bakery (bread and beer went through the same initial process of fermentation), some in the butcher shop, where kicking cattle are given the coup de grâce, others in the stable and the weaver’s shop. A nobleman had to have a regular fleet of boats, so the tomb models included reproductions of several types, including the last bark of all—the barge of the dead upon which, gilded and stiff with resinous bandages, the mummy of the noble lord made pilgrimage to Abydos, the home of Osiris. The journey may have been purely symbolic, but with the model in his tomb the noble could claim that he had performed this useful ritual act.
So skillfully made are these little models that we view them with the delight we would feel for elaborate toys. Of course they were not toys to their owners. The model symbolized the actuality, and the presence of the miniatures in the tomb assured its owner that the real thing would be supplied him in the next world. The models are equivalents of the paintings on the walls of the tomb or the written lists of offerings.
We have a good deal of Eleventh Dynasty tomb material, but the greatest tomb of them all was empty. The alabaster sarcophagus of Mentuhotep was found in his burial chamber under his temple, but the crafty thieves of ancient Thebes had found it long before. Nor was Mentuhotep’s mummy among the royal bodies reburied by the priests of the late period. Presumably it was destroyed by the thieves.
Mentuhotep ruled for some fifty years, and his son was a middle-aged man when he came to the throne. The records of this king are records of peace; the old struggle with Herakleopolis was evidently finished. He was succeeded by another Mentuhotep, number four by modern reckoning. The most interesting fact about this king, who is known to Egyptologists by his Horus name of Nebtawi, is not how he gained the throne, but how he lost it.
The inscriptions of the Wadi el Hammamat quarries begin in the Old Kingdom. The quarries lie along the shortest route from the Nile to the Red Sea; it leaves the river at the great eastward bend just below Thebes, and many of the expeditions that followed the route, on their way to the sea or in search of fine stone, left inscriptions there. King Nebtawi sent an expedition to Hammamat to get stone for his sarcophagus, and the commander of the troop had a long inscription carved on the rock, which told of a marvel that there befell them. A gazelle, great with young, came bounding across the desert and stopped to deliver upon the very stone that had been selected for the lid of the sarcophagus. The gratified gentlemen of the expedition repaid the gazelle by cutting her throat. The inscription does not mention what became of the baby gazelles.
The name of Nebtawi’s commander was Amenemhat. He accomplished his task efficiently, bringing back his force without losing so much as an ass. What intrigues us about the man, though, is not his talent as a servant of the king, but the fact that he did not remain a servant long. Within a few years after his return he finished the job he had begun by putting the king’s body inside the sarcophagus whose construction he had supervised, and then taking the throne of Egypt for himself.
BINDER