Thebes

← Encyclopedia

Four hundred miles upriver from the delta the Nile narrows between desert cliffs, and on its eastern shore a provincial town once kept a minor god. The Egyptians called the place Waset, the city of the was-scepter, and the god was Amun, the Hidden One, one local power among the many that each Egyptian district carried. There was nothing in the early town to suggest what it would become. Its princes ruled a stretch of Upper Egypt; its god shared a modest shrine. Then the princes won a war, and the god rose with them, and for some five hundred years the city of Amun was the spiritual capital of the largest empire the Nile had yet carried — its temples on the east bank the largest religious buildings ever raised, its dead kings hidden in a desert valley across the water.

Waset, and the war that made it a capital

The town that the Greeks would call Thebes lay on both banks of the river in Upper Egypt, at the bend of the Nile where modern Luxor now stands. Its rise was not gradual. For more than a century the north of Egypt had been held by foreign kings, the Hyksos, whose Asiatic dynasty ruled the delta from the city of Avaris while the native line at Thebes held only the south. From that southern court the war of liberation was waged. The Theban kings of the Seventeenth Dynasty fought the Hyksos up the river; Ahmose, founder of the Eighteenth, drove them out of Egypt altogether and pursued them into Palestine. With that expulsion, around 1550 BCE, the period historians call the New Kingdom began, and Thebes — the seat of the victorious house — became the capital of a reunified land.

The god of the winning city rose with its kings. Amun, once a local Theban deity, was fused with the old sun-god Ra of Heliopolis into Amun-Ra and hailed as king of the gods, the power who had granted the victory and now sanctioned the empire. As Thebes became the seat of conquest, the wealth of an empire reaching to the Euphrates and deep into Nubia flowed back to its temples as offerings due to Amun. Within the city the chief cult was that of a divine family — Amun, his consort Mut, and their son the moon-god Khonsu — the grouping the priests called the Theban Triad. By the standards of the age the city grew immense; at the height of the New Kingdom Thebes may have been the largest city in the world, its population reckoned in the tens of thousands.

The god himself carried in his name the quality that made his rise possible. Amun means the Hidden One, the power that is present and unseen, and in the theology that grew up around the imperial cult that hiddenness was raised into a doctrine: Amun was the god behind the gods, whose true form no other deity knew, who concealed himself even from the rest of the divine company while pervading all of them. The hymns sung in his Theban temples make him at once the most exalted and the most secret of beings — the One who made himself into millions, whose face is hidden from his children, whose name is kept apart. It was a theology suited to an empire’s chief god: a deity large enough to stand over every local power of the Nile valley without displacing any, the unseen king of a visible world.

The political weight of the place was always partly the weight of its priesthood. The temples of Amun controlled land, grain, gold, and labor on a scale that rivaled the crown. By the later New Kingdom the estate of Amun at Thebes held a vast share of Egypt’s cultivated land, herds, ships, and workshops, and the offerings of an empire — the tribute of Nubia and Syria, the spoils of war itemized on the temple walls — passed through its storehouses. The chief priest of Amun at Thebes became one of the most powerful men in Egypt, master of an institution whose wealth was a standing rival to the throne itself. That power was tested once, dramatically, in the fourteenth century BCE, when the king Akhenaten suppressed Amun in favor of a single radiant sun-disk, the Aten, closed the Theban temples, and moved his court north to a virgin site. The reform did not outlive him. His successors restored Amun, struck Akhenaten from the king-lists, and the Theban priesthood returned more entrenched than before — so entrenched that by the end of the New Kingdom the High Priests of Amun ruled the south of Egypt outright, in their own right, alongside the kings in the north.

The east bank of the living

The sacred geography of Thebes divided along the river as cleanly as life from death. The sun rose over the east bank, and there stood the temples of the living god; the sun set over the west, and there lay the houses of the dead. A visitor on the east bank stood among the largest religious buildings the ancient world produced.

The greater of the two great temples was Karnak, the precinct of Amun-Ra raised and rebuilt across some two thousand years into the largest religious complex ever built — not one temple but an accumulation of pylons, courts, obelisks, and processional ways, each reign stacking its stone on the last. Its heart is the Great Hypostyle Hall, a roofed forest of one hundred and thirty-four columns, the central twelve of them rising above twenty meters with capitals broad enough to crowd a hundred men; Seti I cut the reliefs of its northern half and his son Ramesses II completed the south. Around the inner courts the kings raised obelisks of red Aswan granite, one of Hatshepsut’s pair still standing upright near thirty meters tall.

The columns of the Great Hypostyle Hall in the Precinct of Amun-Ra at Karnak. Photograph by Vyacheslav Argenberg, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.

Two miles to the south, joined to Karnak by a stone avenue lined with ram-headed and human-headed sphinxes, stood the temple of Luxor, set close against the river. Luxor was less a house for the daily cult than a stage for one supreme annual rite, the festival of Opet. In the second month of the inundation, when the river was rising, the images of the Theban Triad were carried out of Karnak in their gilded barques and brought in procession to Luxor — along the river by water, or down the sphinx avenue by land. There, in the temple’s inner rooms, the rite renewed the king. The Egyptian frame held that the pharaoh possessed a divine double, his royal ka, the indwelling spirit of kingship passed from one ruler to the next; at Luxor that ka was refreshed and the king reborn as the son of Amun, his right to rule re-conferred by the god himself. The festival lengthened with the centuries — eleven days under Thutmose III, twenty-seven by the death of Ramesses III — and remained, through the whole New Kingdom, the central public act of Theban religion: the moment the hidden god came out into the light and the kingship was made new in him.

Within the sealed sanctuaries the priests served the god in the older, secret rhythm of the daily cult — the image woken, washed, clothed, and fed each dawn and closed away each night — the same liturgy performed across Egypt, but here at a scale of wealth no other city could match. (On the resident clergy and their later sovereignty, see the priests of Amun; on the learned class of temple servants across Egypt, the Egyptian priesthood.)

The west bank of the dead

Across the river the desert began, and with it the work of eternity. The kings of the New Kingdom abandoned the visible pyramid of their ancestors — a pyramid was a signpost for robbers — and chose concealment instead. Into the limestone of a remote wadi behind the western cliffs they cut their tombs, long descending corridors and pillared halls driven deep into the rock and sealed. The valley is presided over by a natural peak, el-Qurn, whose shape is roughly pyramidal, as though the abandoned royal pyramid had been left standing by the hand of nature over the whole necropolis; the peak was itself venerated, the dwelling of a cobra-goddess of the dead. This is the Valley of the Kings, where for some five hundred years, from the Eighteenth Dynasty to the Twentieth, the pharaohs were buried — more than sixty tombs cut and numbered, the first of them likely that of Thutmose I.

The tombs’ walls carry the texts and images by which the Egyptian dead crossed into the afterlife — the journeys of the sun through the night hours of the Duat, the rites that restored the senses to the mummy, the great reckoning in which the heart was weighed. The body was made fit for that journey by the funerary liturgy: the opening of the mouth that gave the dead king back his breath and speech, the offerings that sustained his ka, the spells that freed his ba to move between tomb and sky. Almost every royal tomb in the valley was emptied by robbers in antiquity. One was not: the small tomb of the boy-king Tutankhamun, cut into the valley floor and buried under later debris, lay nearly intact until Howard Carter opened it in 1922 and found the shrines, the gold, and the nested coffins still in place — the single discovery that fixed the valley in the modern imagination.

The dead kings did not lie alone. Along the edge of the cultivation, between the river and the cliffs, the pharaohs raised their mortuary temples — establishments where their cult was maintained and offerings made to their memory after death, distinct from the hidden tombs themselves. The most striking is the temple of the woman who ruled as king, Hatshepsut, built against the cliff-face at Deir el-Bahari in three colonnaded terraces that seem to grow out of the rock behind them. Further south stood the Ramesseum, the mortuary temple of Ramesses II, where a fallen colossus of the king once lay broken in the sand — the ruin that, seen by a traveler, gave the English poet Shelley his “Ozymandias.”

The mortuary temple of Hatshepsut, cut in terraces against the western cliff at Deir el-Bahari. Photograph by Gary Todd, Wikimedia Commons, CC0 (public domain).

A second valley to the south held the tombs of the principal queens and royal children, and the slopes between were honeycombed with the rock-cut chapels of the Theban nobility — viziers, mayors, priests, and overseers — their walls painted not with the solemn underworld books of the kings but with the work and pleasures of life on the river: harvests and hunts, banquets and musicians, the catalog of a good Egyptian’s days set down so that they might continue forever. The whole western range was a single immense necropolis, the city of the dead facing the city of the living across the water, and the boundary between them was the river itself, crossed by the funeral barge as the sun crossed each evening from east to west.

The work of the necropolis was done by a community of craftsmen who lived apart in their own walled settlement, Deir el-Medina, on the desert margin between the valleys. These were the draftsmen, sculptors, and stonecutters who cut and painted the royal tombs, and because the dry sand preserved their village and their refuse, more is known of their daily lives — their wages in grain, their lawsuits, their strikes when the rations failed, their own modest tombs — than of almost any other community of the ancient world.

”Hundred-gated Thebes,” and the long afterlife

The fame of the city traveled far beyond Egypt. When Achilles, in the ninth book of the Iliad, refuses Agamemnon’s gifts, he measures the wealth he scorns against the richest place a Greek could name: not even the treasures of “Thebes in Egypt, where the houses are stuffed with the greatest store of wealth — Thebes which is a city of a hundred gates, and from each two hundred warriors sally forth with horses and chariots.” The hundred gates were a Greek’s hyperbole for the great pylons of its temples, and the epithet stuck: to the Greeks this was Thebai hekatompyloi, hundred-gated Thebes, to distinguish it from their own seven-gated Thebes in Boeotia. The Egyptian and the Hebrew name was simpler — No, or No-Amon, the City of Amun.

By the time the Greeks sang of it, the city’s greatness was already passing. The capital had drifted north; the empire had contracted. In 663 BCE the city fell to a foreign army for the first time, when the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, pursuing his war against the Kushite kings who then ruled Egypt, took Thebes and carried off its wealth to Nineveh. The shock of it reached the Hebrew prophets: the book of Nahum, foretelling the fall of Nineveh in turn, holds up the ruin of No-Amon as the measure of what an empire’s fall would look like — “Art thou better than populous No, that was situate among the rivers… yet was she carried away, she went into captivity.” The temples of Amun were repaired and the cult continued for centuries more, through the Ptolemies and into Roman times, but the city never again ruled.

What it kept was its monuments, and these drew the first tourists. On the west bank stood two seated colossi of the pharaoh Amenhotep III, sole survivors of his vanished mortuary temple. After an earthquake in 27 BCE cracked the northern statue, it began at dawn to give out a faint ringing sound as the morning warmth spread through the stone. Greek and Roman visitors took the singing figure for Memnon, the Ethiopian hero of the Trojan war greeting his mother the Dawn, and came to hear the voice; more than a hundred of them carved their names and verses on the legs and feet, the emperor Hadrian among the pilgrims. When a Roman repair around 199 CE rebuilt the broken upper courses, the statue fell silent and has not spoken since.

The Colossi of Memnon, two seated statues of Amenhotep III, the only survivors of his mortuary temple. Photograph by MusikAnimal, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The ancient city slept under the river-mud and the houses of the living for a thousand years. The medieval village of Luxor grew up inside the standing courts of the Luxor temple; a mosque was built over its accumulated rubble, high above the buried colonnade. When European travelers and then archaeologists came in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they cleared the temples, traced the avenue of sphinxes, mapped and emptied the royal tombs, and lifted Tutankhamun’s gold into the light. In 1979 the whole of it — Karnak and Luxor on the east bank, the Valley of the Kings and Queens, the mortuary temples and the workmen’s village on the west — was inscribed as a single World Heritage site, Ancient Thebes with its Necropolis. The provincial god of a southern town, raised by a war to be king of the gods, still presides over the largest ruins his people left, on the river where the living and the dead once faced each other across the water.

Among the great cult-centers of Egypt, Thebes was the city of the empire and its god; Memphis had been the city of the first kings and of Ptah the craftsman; Abydos was the burial-place of Osiris and the goal of the pilgrim dead. Each carried a different face of the one people who lived along the Nile in the order of maat.

→ In the library: Budge — The Book of the Dead (Papyrus of Ani, 1913) · Budge — Egyptian Magic (1899)

→ Related: Amun · Akhenaten · Priests Of Amun · Karnak Temple Complex · Luxor Temple · Ancient Egypt · Opening Of The Mouth · Memphis · Abydos · Saqqara · The Egyptians · The Egyptian Priesthood · The Assyrians · Nineveh · Ra · Ptah · Maat · Ka Egyptian Soul · Ba Egyptian Soul · Weighing Of The Heart · Hathor · Heliopolis · Pyramid Texts