Afterglow of Empire

Aidan Dodson

Description

- A highly readable look at a rarely covered period of Egyptian history
- Same style and engaging storytelling as Dodson's bestsellers Amarna Sunset and Poisoned Legacy
CONTENTS
Preface ix
Abbreviations and Conventions Used in Text xiii
Maps xvii
Introduction: Imperial Egypt
1 The Fall of the House of Rameses 3
2 Of Tanis and Thebes 39
3 The House of Shoshenq 83
4 Disintegrations 113
5 Saviors from the South? 139
6 From Humiliation to Renaissance 169
Appendices 181
1 The Absolute Chronology of the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period 181
2 Outline Chronology of Ancient Egypt 190
3 Correlation of Reigns, Regnal Years, and Pontificates 195
4 Hieroglyphic Titularies of Kings and God’s Wives 202
5 Genealogies 228
Sources of Images 235
Notes 237
Bibliography 285
Index 315

Sujets

• Histoire
• Egypt
• Ancient
• History

Informations

• Publié par: The American University in Cairo Press
• Date de parution: 05 novembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781617979675
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 25 Mo

Extrait

AFTERGLOW OF EMPIRE
AFTERGLOW OF EMPIRE
EGYPT FROM THE FALL OF THE NEW KINGDOM TO THE SAITE RENAISSANCE
AIDAN DODSON
The American University in Cairo Press Cairo New York
This electronic edition published in 2020 by
The American University in Cairo Press
113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt
One Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10020
www.aucpress.com
Copyright © 2020 by Aidan Dodson
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN 978 977 416 9250
eISBN 978 161 797 9675
To Martin Davies, Esq.: President of the Egypt Society of Bristol, Vice-President of the Egypt Exploration Society—and most importantly, friend!
CONTENTS
Preface
Abbreviations and Conventions
Maps
Introduction: Imperial Egypt
1 The Fall of the House of Rameses
2 Of Tanis and Thebes
3 The House of Shoshenq
4 Disintegrations
5 Saviors from the South?
6 From Humiliation to Renaissance
Appendices
1 The Absolute Chronology of the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period
2 Outline Chronology of Ancient Egypt
3 Correlation of Reigns, Regnal Years, and Pontificates
4 Hieroglyphic Titularies of Kings and God’s Wives
5 Genealogies
Sources of Images
Notes
Bibliography
PREFACE
T his book, like my previous volumes on the ends of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties, 1 represents a distillation of research and thinking that goes back many years. In the present case, my first real acquaintance with the intricacies of the Third Intermediate Period and its immediate precursor and successor eras was gained something over three decades ago, when as a schoolboy I first perused a copy of Kenneth Kitchen’s seminal book on the topic.
The publication of the first edition of that work in 1973 (with updates in 1986 and 1996) put forward an analysis and historical reconstruction that were so impressive that for some years its conclusions became all but canonical. However, as the 1980s proceeded, scholarly studies that in many cases had originally intended to refine the Kitchen picture began to raise issues that gave rise to significant questions as to the correctness of what had now become orthodoxy. 2 These multiplied in the following years, resulting in a collapse of many significant aspects of the consensus, significant ramifications of which were explored at a conference at Leiden University in the Netherlands in October 2007.
In addition, the same period saw assaults on ‘orthodox’ views of the period from more radical standpoints, which questioned not only the detail, but also the whole chronological structure of ancient history prior to the seventh century bc . These new paradigms attempt to lower all dates prior to the start of the New Kingdom by a number of centuries, resulting in a very significant compression of the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period, requiring overlaps of reigns and dynasties far in excess of anything seriously attempted before. 3 The fact that the proponents of these views came largely from outside the established academic community prompted many ‘orthodox’ scholars to dismiss their proposals out of hand, 4 although others attempted to meet the challenge head-on by analyzing the evidence put forward and demonstrating its (often fatal) flaws. 5 On the other hand, the ‘radicals’ have not infrequently raised important issues which, if not necessarily having the implications claimed, do have an impact on the orthodox picture and can in fact be incorporated into it. 6
A side issue is that the challenge of the radicals has driven a number of conventional scholars into the bunker, from where they attempt to defend their current orthodoxy rather more fiercely than had hitherto been the case, perhaps fearful of allowing the radicals some kind of oblique victory. As a result, attempts at challenging the chronological consensus—even in a relatively modest way—can risk being dismissed out of hand as potentially giving comfort to the radicals by showing flaws in the received wisdom, or simply as a result of having used an argument previously deployed by one of them.
For my own part, engagement with these radicals—broadly my academic contemporaries—led me to start retesting the conclusions generally reached on various aspects of the period, resulting in a series of stand-alone studies, some of which stood the test of time, some of which did not. Among the former was building on a ‘radical’ observation to verify the existence of a hitherto unnoticed king Shoshenq (IV); 7 among the latter an ill-fated attempt at making the reign of Pasebkhanut II entirely contemporary with that of Shoshenq I. 8 I also produced a number of more general accounts of the period 9 which, however, did not attempt to address any issues beyond those I had already dealt with separately.
However, an invitation to write entries on various individual kings for a forthcoming encyclopedia of ancient history led to my beginning to take a closer look at the detail of many parts of the Third Intermediate Period and the late Rameside Period. This led me away from some positions I had long accepted, and prodded me into writing the book-length treatment with which I had been toying for some years. Furthermore, my dear friend Professor Salima Ikram, who had invited the aforesaid contributions, at the same time increased pressure on me in this direction, citing the lack of an up-to-date and accessible treatment that she could set for her students.
Against this background, this book’s intent is therefore to provide an ‘accessible’ account of the Third Intermediate Period, and the immediately preceding and succeeding decades, informed by the latest data and addressing the key issues that are presently the subject of active debate, while testing any ‘received wisdom’ before choosing to accept it. As always with such a work, there is an inherent tension between providing a coherent and readable narrative of events and taking into account a range of variant views that may include questioning whether some events even took place. All I can say is that I have aimed to steer a course that minimizes the number of assumptions and maximizes the reading of hard data in the most straightforward way.
Chronologically, while fully understanding and sympathizing with the issues that have given rise to ultra-radical revisionism, I find it impossible to accept the two key assumptions that make anything more than a few decades’ adjustment practicable: discarding all conclusions predicated on the pre-Ashur-dan II (late tenth century) segment of the Assyrian King List, 10 and denying the equation between the Biblical Egyptian king ‘Shishak’ and Shoshenq I, founder of the Twenty-second Dynasty. On the other hand, it seems to me clear that the current strict orthodoxy concerning the absolute dating (i.e., in terms of years bc ) of the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period is no longer viable, and that some degree of adjustment of dates—downward—is both necessary and desirable.
To do otherwise is to make the macro-level chronological tail wag the micro-level dog, a course that is particularly undesirable when this is used to damn as ‘impossible’ potential solutions to longstanding anomalies that are otherwise convincing and internally coherent. This becomes even more the case when it is realized that that ‘tail’ depends entirely on the long-held assumption that Assyrian chronology is absolutely reliable back into the fourteenth century—and thus that the earlier part of the Assyrian King List is an accurate record of pre-tenth century dynastic history.
As already noted, while I would not take the ultimately nihilistic position that this King List tradition should simply be discarded, it must certainly be tested where possible, and as a result the chronology adopted as the underlying framework of this book incorporates a modest revision of pre-tenth century dates, in particular a lowering of the long-canonical 1279 bc accession date of Rameses II to 1265. The justification will be found in Chapter 1, where I endorse a proposal that reigns in the late Twentieth Dynasty that have historically been regarded as consecutive were actually in part contemporary; and in Appendix 1, which reviews the broader chronological issues, including the Assyrian King List tradition.
As has already been indicated, my thinking on the period has been stimulated by various formal and informal discussions over the past three decades. Accordingly, I must thank in particular Peter James, Robert Morkot, and David Rohl for their friendly provocations, and a wide range of other friends and colleagues for information and debate in both formal and informal contexts. I am also indebted to Tine Bagh and Salah El-Masekh for help in gaining access to monuments in Copenhagen and at Karnak, respectively, and to Giuseppina Lenzo, Frédéric Payraudeau, and Troy Sagrillo (as well as Peter James and Robert Morkot) for advance copies of as yet unpublished work. Reg Clarke, Martin Davies, Claire Gilmour, Salima Ikram, and my wife Dyan Hilton are also to be thanked for their scrutiny of the typescript, and Martin as usual for the free run of his photographic archive. All remaining errors and cases of fuzzy or faulty logic are of course entirely my responsibility!
July 2011
The history of ancient Egypt is a movable feast, with discoveries of fresh evidence through excavation and epigraphy, and reassessments of material long known means that books are rarely “up to date” even at the moment of publication. The passage of the best