Napatan Temples: a case Study from Gebel Barkal

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XI. Kingship Regained, Lost, and Reconceived - with Comments on the Nubian Campaign of Psammeticus II.
During the New Kingdom, the Egyptians had seen Gebel Barkal only as a manifestation of Karnak, but now the Kushites and their priestly backers made a conscious, if subtle, effort to distinguish the two places. They now began calling the mountain Nst-t3wy ("Throne of the Two Lands") in the singular, while Karnak remained Nswt-t3wy ("Thrones of the Two Lands") in the plural (Robisek 1989, 92, Amn. 22; Pamminger 1992, 106; eg. Dunham 1970, 23, fig. 13). Exactly what was intended by this distinction is not entirely clear, but it seems likely to have been a move to give precedence to Gebel Barkal as the real center of the kingship (i.e. "throne").
With his massive constructions at Napata, his epic literary chronicles, and his exquisite bas-reliefs, Piye set a high standard for his successors to follow. Although Shabaqo and Shebitqo were too preoccupied with events in Egypt to expend their energies in their homeland, Piye was even outdone by his son Taharqa, who put the ultimate stamp on the Gebel Barkal site. Exhibiting a rich knowledge of mythology and a bold imagination, he erected monuments here that complemented one another as well as the natural setting in ingenious ways and seemed to create a vivid fusion of the real world and the mythological. Under Taharqa's care the Barkal site became an elaborate stage set for the celebration of past, present, and eternal monarchy, and the perpetual recreation of the world.
In its most basic form, as we have seen, the Barkal pinnacle was understood to be the living ithyphallic god with whom the king united to become the ka, which made him eligible to receive the crown. In another form the pinnacle was a gigantic statue of the king's uraeus, whose divine double perched on his crown. The pinnacle, standing 74.5 m high, rose nearly parallel to the mountain's cliff. At its summit, it was 5 m lower than the cliff edge and 11 m distant from it. The pinnacle peak was completely inaccessible to man by normal means. Taharqa, however, conceived the idea to scale it and to adorn it.
By mounting a pair of shadufs on the cliff edge, Taharqa's engineers were able to raise a number of wooden beams into the ravine between the cliff and pinnacle and to set them into sockets, cut for the purpose. Ultimately they were able to construct a series of fifteen stages that allowed men to climb to the top of the pinnacle's "White Crown" (fig. 48). There, on the precipitous face overlooking the temples, they carved a panel of inscription, about 1 1/2 x 3 m in area. Although the te⁶⁵ts were too high to be read from the ground, they recorded, at least in part, Taharqa’s conquests over Tjemehu (southern Libyans) and Mentiu-Setet (Asiatic Bedouin). Today they are almost completely weathered away. Bronze nails still embedded in the stone, however, reveal that the masons had also covered the panel entirely with gold sheet, which would have made it the most conspicuous feature of the mountain. The gold sheeting perhaps linked the pinnacle symbolically with an obelisk (Van Siclen 2001, II 562).
Under the gilded panel, Taharqa's masons cut a shallow alcove, about 1 m high, with niche, suggesting the place where a small statue once stood. This statue, now lost, had almost certainly represented the king. On either side this figure had been sheltered from the wind by walls built of rough masonry and mortar. Both the statue, as well as the stones and mortar, had evidently been lifted from the ground with ropes and pulley mounted on⁶⁶the end of a stationary crane arm that had been set in a diagonal channel cut on the west side of the pinnacle peak. Since no more than three or four men could have worked safely on the pinnacle top at once, the crane and its ropes must have been operated by gangs of men standing on the cliff.
Close observation of the rough face of the pinnacle revealed that it had also been extensively filled with crude masonry and mortar, all of which, too, had been hoisted up by means of this crane. The purpose of these fills was evidently to conceal cracks and cavities in the rock and perhaps to enhance the shape of the pinnacle. The construction was an almost unbelievable feat of engineering and daring (Kendall 1994), and one hates to think how many of the workmen may have lost their lives while trying to fulfill the king's wishes. It seems to have been an elaborate effort on Taharqa's part to ensure that he, in the form of his statue, would be forever united with the pinnacle, which, as Kamutef, was really both his father and mother. His union with Kamutef ensured that he would always be united with his ka. His union with his uraeus ensured that he would always be king.
Taharqa seems to have felt that the mountain, which was inhabited by all the great goddesses, required more explicit female expression, so he undertook the construction or complete renewal of the temples of the goddesses Hathor and Mut, B 200 and 300. He was probably also the sponsor of the temples of the royal uraeus goddesses Nekhbet and Wadjet, Pr-wr and Pr-nsr (B 1100 and 1150), which appear to have been part of the same series. Today the only well-preserved temple among these is B 300, which was built just west (left) of the base of the pinnacle. In the New Kingdom, this temple had been free-standing, but in his reign Taharqa rebuilt it as a deep rock cut shrine with a built outer structure and pylon. The columns along its axis took the form of sistra and colossal Bes images. These were apotropaic and obviously had the purpose of pacifying the goddess in her form as the leonine “Eye of Re” before she emerged from the sanctuary (Robisek 1989, 77-78). On the unpublished rear wall the goddess is shown lion-headed on the right ("south") together with the ram-headed Amun of Napata, while on the left ("north") she is human-headed as she stands with the anthropomorphic Amun of Karnak. The Bes columns, however, can also be understood as the amuletic symbols of childbirth (Malaise 2001, I 180).
In his building inscription, Taharqa says that he found the temple built by the "ancestors" in "humble work" (k3t nds), and that he rebuilt it as "splendid work" (k3t mnh). Here again there seems to be a word-play, for k3t also means "vagina, birth passage" (the feminine of k3=ka="phallus") (Faulkner 1964, 283). Taharqa, in other words, rebuilt this temple "for his mother Mut …as a splendid birth passage". Built beside the phallic pinnacle, the temple would have had the effect of rendering the mountain female so that it became a symbolic womb. As we have seen above (Section IX), in the Napatan Period the king was crowned in B 1100, which was then a free-standing temple in front of the pinnacle. He then crossed from it into B 300 through a private passage and from there into the mountain via B 300. Once inside, he united with his "Mother", the goddess Mut, who then symbolically gave birth to him as her child, the living ka, which fulfilled the meaning of Kamutef. At this point the king became the new-born god. The temple was perhaps the prototype of the mammisi or "birth houses" of later Egyptian temples (Arnold 1999, 285-288). Mut's wearing of the Double Crown suggested her role as "Mother of Kingship." In later Meroitic times, Gebel Barkal was actually represented anthropomorphically as a goddess with head in the form of a dome-shaped mountain with rearing uraeus (Dunham and Chapman 1952, pl. 7 A).
Dazzling as are the meanings of these constructions, they pale against the meanings designed into Taharqa's funerary monument. 10 km northeast of Gebel Barkal on the opposite side of the river, Taharqa founded a new royal cemetery at Nuri. The location was far from the old ancestral cemetery at el-Kurru, and the tomb was unlike anything that had been built before in the Sudan or would be built in the future (Dunham 1955, 6-16, pls. 3-4). The tomb underground was a near duplicate of the Osireion at Abydos (Leclant 1984, 1115; Aufrère, Golvin, and Goyon 1994, 43-44). Its huge columned chamber was rock cut and planned so that the deceased king within his coffins rested on a built platform in the middle of a grand gallery. The floor of this gallery was below the water table, so that the king's mummy on its bier would be surrounded by water, just like the Creator on the Primeval Hill emerging from the Nun at the beginning of time. The enormous pyramid constructed over the tomb - in two or three separate enlargement phases - was probably also associated with the Primeval Hill and the benben stone of Heliopolis, as pyramids had been since earliest times (Lehner 1997, 29, 34-35). The extraordinary thing about the pyramid is that it was placed ⁶⁷t exactly the point on the horizon where the sun rose at New Year's Day when the sunrise was observed from the summit of Gebel Barkal. The pyramid was situated so that when observed from Gebel Barkal at sunrise on that day, the sun would rise from the horizon directly over its point. The ancient Egyptian New Year's Day occurred about a month after the summer solstice and coincided with the start of the inundation (Daumas 1980, 466-467). The tomb thus became a symbol of the eternal annual rebirth of the deceased king, who had become the Eternal king Osiris, buried within. This god, awakened each year on the anniversary of his earthly coronation, personified the rising river and became the bearer of fertility each New Year. By a peculiarity of the local geography, the pyramid, when viewed from Gebel Barkal, was within a few degrees of the vanishing point of the river on the horizon, from which the inundation emanated.
Spells 162 and 163 of the Book of the Dead reveal that the pinnacle on Gebel Barkal was conceived as a standing statue of Osiris, wearing the White Crown (see above, Section V). When one stands on the summit of Taharqa's pyramid and looks toward Gebel Barkal, he will see that the pinnacle has a particularly strong resemblance to the god in profile. Some four months after New Year's Day and after the official start of the Nile inundation was the festival of Khoiakh, which symbolized the official end of the inundation and the death of Osiris (about mid-November) (Spalinger 2001, 521). Just as New Year's Day was approximately one month after the summer solstice, the Khoiakh festival was approximately one month before the winter solstice. Therefore on the date of the Khoiakh festival, if one were to stand on the summit of Taharqa's pyramid, he would see the sun set directly behind the figure of Osiris on Gebel Barkal, symbolizing the god's "death". Five days later was the festival of the primeval Amun-serpent Nehebkau, which symbolized a kind of return to primordial time and a second New Year , which was associated again with the birth of the king as the living Horus (Spalinger 2001, 531). During this period the sun would have moved several degrees to the right, setting over Gebel Barkal so as now as to highlight the "crown" in the mountain.
Due to the reverse direction of the Nile here, Taharqa's tomb, still on the "west" bank, paradoxically lay to the east, the place of sunrise and rebirth. Gebel Barkal, on the "east" bank, lay paradoxically to the west, the place of sunset and death. The tomb and the mountain, thus, symbolized Creation, death and rebirth simultaneously. They were opposites, yet they were also the same. All of the opposites, in fact, were perceived to be united in Gebel Barkal and its pinnacle and became synonyms: present and past, upperworld and underworld, living and dead, east and west, north and south, male and female, god and goddess, father and mother, parent and child, god and king, etc. It was the spectacular realization of Egyptian theological speculation. It also created a perfect convergence of another pair of opposites (at least to our way of thinking): mythology and reality.
Gebel Barkal, under Taharqa, was designed - with obvious optimism - to be the ultimate and permanent center of kingship in the Nile Valley. It was to be the eternal link between the Creator god and mankind, and between the eternal king and the living king. Assyria's invasions of Egypt in the latter decade of Taharqa's reign, and his disastrous defeats at their hands, however, seemed to signal the god's sudden and unexplainable withdrawal of support (FHN I 181-190). At this point theologians would have attempted to rationalize the horror and chaos in Egypt by drawing parallels from mythology. The current period must be the end of one time and the beginning of another. Taharqa's defeat and death at Napata must be a repeat of Osiris' murder at the hands of Seth. Osiris' death was not an end but a beginning, for like Osiris at the beginning of time, Taharqa, too, would be avenged by a son or successor, a living Horus, who would drive out the evils and restore ma'at in the land once again. These were possibly the underl⁶⁸ing motives behind the design of his tomb, which may have remained under construction for some time after his death.
The expected redemption of the Dynasty under Tanwetamani would not be realized. The Assyrians invaded the Thebaid and sacked Thebes. Soon Upper Egypt and Thebes fell under the sway of the Saites, who had been Assyrian collaborators (Elgood 1951, 74-75). The Kushites would have considered them usurpers. These events must have been perplexing for the Amun priests and galling for the rulers, who were now exiled in Napata and militarily exhausted. The volatility of the situation was somewhat defused by the Saites, who allowed the old Kushite theocracy to retain their priestly offices at Thebes well into Dynasty 26, but the certainty of their control over Upper Egypt would have been an obvious sore point with Kush, even sixty years after the unofficial transfer of power in Egypt (Ibid, 93). The Amun cult, at least as it was understood by the Nubian priesthood, demanded of its royal champions that they control "the two Karnaks." The unresolved issue of control over Thebes would doubtless have been at the root of the conflict between Egypt and Kush in 593 BC. Another cause would have been the continuing pretensions of the Kushite kings to the Egyptian crown through the authority of the god of Gebel Barkal. On the bark stand of Atlanersa, for example, Amun of Gebel Barkal promises the king "Upper and Lower Egypt as recompense for this monument" (Reisner 1918, 105). In Anlamani's stele from Kawa, the king speaks of himself as the living descendent of "the Kings of Upper Egypt and the Kings of Lower Egypt" (FHN I 221).
The direct causes of the war between Kush and Egypt in 593 are unknown but not hard to imagine. As Psammeticus' Tanis Stele relates, a messenger came to him and reported that "The Nubians are planning to fight with you." Why would they plan to do this, after nearly seventy years of relative calm? Early in his reign Psammeticus made a ceremonial visit to the Amun temple at Byblos (Elgood 1951, 93-94). Knowing the Egyptian king was occupied elsewhere, the reigning Kushite monarch may have seen this as his chance to retake the Thebaid. His plans obviously were not kept secret enough to prevent their discovery by Egyptian spies. Hearing the news, Psammeticus quickly returned, marshalled his transport ships, troops and all their necessary supplies and horses, and sent them southward into Nubia on a preemptive strike. The army, as we know from a graffito at Abu Simbel consisted of two divisions: one comprised of native troops and the other of foreign mercenaries. Judging by the 4200 prisoners that this army later took at Pnubs, we can probably reasonably estimate its own number at between 4000 and 7000 men.
Lazslo Török has recently discussed at length the textual evidence for Psammeticus' invasion of Kush and has come to the conclusion that the Egyptian army never reached Napata and that the evidence linking the campaign with Aspelta is "not compelling" (Török 1997, 366, 371, and in FHN II 279-290). Given the archaeological evidence published since Török's publications, as well as some new data I will present here, I believe Török's conclusions are far off the mark, and that the army did indeed attack Napata. Not only do I believe the army attacked Napata but also that Gebel Barkal was the primary objective of the campaign (Kendall 1991, 308).
The evidence for violent destruction at Gebel Barkal, both during the reign of Aspelta and contemporary with Psammeticus' campaign, is considerable and difficult to attribute to any other factor than enemy action. Since Gebel Barkal lies on the right bank of the Nile, beyond which there were no predatory desert tribes, makes it difficult to conceive what enemy could have inflicted such damage, if not the invading Egyptians. The Barkal palace (B 1200, Level II), which contains inscriptions of both Anlamani and Aspelta, was completely gutted by fire during Aspelta's reign (Reisner Diary, Jan. 31, 1919). In 1996, while excavating in the same level, my team found dramatic deposits of charcoal and remains of charred palm logs from the fallen roof beams lying on the floors and against the walls inside the rooms (Kendall 1997, 322-323, 323-333). The neighboring temples B 500 and B 800/900 were also damaged by fire, and Aspelta's statue was the last in a group of ten royal statues that had originally stood inside B 500 and had been toppled and broken. Some of the pieces of these statues were later dumped together with burned debris into the space of room B 904, which was then charred and roofless from the same fire (Kendall 1996, 468-470). Even on the other side of the river, we find the same pattern of evidence. At Sanam, shortly after the completion of the Aspelta chapel, the Taharqa temple was burnt and left unrestored (Griffith 1922, 85). The Treasury at Sanam was also destroyed by fire, and the latest name found in its ashes was that of Anlamani (Griffith 1923, 82, 86-87, 89). All these buildings appear to have been deliberately set on fire at about the same time.
Both the Karnak and Shellal Stelae of Psammeticus describe a decisive Egyptian victory in the region of Pnubs (FHN I 279-286), but, contrary to Török's opinion that these were reports of his army's "final victory" and of "the southernmost point reached by the Egyptians" (Török 1997, 371), the texts, to my mind, seem a record only of the first news the king received. A graffito at Abu Simbel (FHN I 288) speaks of a fleet going upstream to Kerkis, "as far as the river allowed," which may refer only to the Second Cataract region. Zurawski (1998, 80-81), however, has credibly linked "Kerkis" to Terkis (Soniyat), the place where the Nile, as one sails upstream from the Third Cataract, suddenly turns to the northeast, forcing the sailor against the current and the prevailing wind. It is the place beyond which sailing ships can proceed no further. It lies about 112 km downstream from Napata. Zurawski, while imagining that the army with its transport ships passed some 200 km beyond Pnubs, concludes, like Török, that it did not reach Napata. This scenario, however, would seem to require some telltale signs of damage at Kawa, but none has yet been reported.
The Tanis Stele tells a quite different story than the other texts (Manuelian 1984, 365-371). It states that Psammeticus sent an army to "the land of Shas", from which, by the next line, it had reached "[…]r-[g?]-ba", where the "capital" (hnw) of the "king" (kw3r) was, "along with the town called 'The Cliff'" (T3-Dhn[t])" The text then speaks of a "great carnage" being made there, of the "burning/roasting of the king" and of trees being cut down. The text abruptly ends with the phrase "Psametik, living forever, given life like Re forever."
Török takes "Shas" here to be Sai Island, south of the Second Cataract, and concludes that the text describes an action on or near Sai where the king was then residing, The Shellal/Karnak versions, on the other hand, record a victory at Pnubs south of the Third Cataract, in which the Egyptian army took 4200 prisoners. Neither one of these texts mentions Napata by name, so Török, unimpressed with the archaeological evidence at Barkal and Sanam, concludes that army never reached Napata and did not pass beyond Pnubs (FHN I 286). The key geographical name in the Tanis Stele is, of course, T3-Dhn(t) ("The Cliff"), which Török equates with a hill on Sai. Earlier scholars equated it with locations at Korti and Dongola (Török 1997, 372-373). Yet the obvious equation would be T3-Dhn(t) = Gebel Barkal, especially given the references to a royal residence, and a "burning".
I have shown in this paper that Karnak and Gebel Barkal were called by the same name: Nswt-T3wy ("Thrones of the Two Lands") and "southern Heliopolis" because they were conceived as northern and southern manifestations of the same place. I have also shown that the mountain at the northern border of the Thebaid was called T3-Dhnt, and like Gebel Barkal, it was associated with Amun (as Sobek), with the Primeval Hill and with a stone serpent (Aufrere and Golvin 1997, 221-223; Brovarski 1984, 2002; Allen 1974, 85, Spell 108). It stands to reason then that the mountain at the southern border of the Thebaid would also be known by the same name, since the two were obviously manifestations of the same place. Török has doubted that T3-Dhn(t) in the Tanis Stele is Gebel Barkal because Napata is not specifically named, yet we need only recall the Coronation Stele of Aspelta to see that when the army gathered at Gebel Barkal for the selection of the king it was said to be, not at Napata, but at hnw dmi Dw-w'b rn.f ("the residence-town called Pure Mountain") (FHN I 234), which is an almost identical construction to that in the Tanis Stele: hnw pw n kw3r nty im hn'dmi T3-Dhn rn.s (the residence of the king was located there together with the town called 'The Cliff') (Manuelian 1984, 367). Normally Amun of Gebel Barkal is called nb Nswt T3wy hry-ib Dw W'b ("Lord of the Thrones of the Two Lands, who is in Pure Mountain"), but in the Year 3 Stele of Piye, he is uniquely called nb Nswt T3wy Dhn W'b ("Lord of the Thrones of the Two Lands of Pure Cliff"). The editors of FHN have translated dhn w'b, as did Reisner, as (Amun…) "who appoints and is pure," but the context surely requires a parallel with Dw W'b. Perhaps even double meanings are intended. The word dhn , however, is an interesting one, in view of what we know of Gebel Barkal, for it not only means "cliff " but also "forehead" and "diadem with uraeus" (Erman and Grapow 1931, Bd. 5, 478-479).
Török expresses surprise that the place name Pnubs occurs in the Shellal/Karnak stelae, which were put on display for local audiences in the south, who knew where Pnubs was situated, while the Tanis version contained "obscure" place names that would have been virtually unknown to people in the north (Török 1997, 373). I think, in fact, we can look at this another way. The accounts of the Battle of Pnubs would have been erected at Shellal and Karnak to inform the southerners of Psammeticus' victory in Nubia. Given the pro-Kushite sentiment of Upper Egypt, he would not have wished to disclose his army's depredations at "southern Karnak." His Tanis audience, on the other hand, completely familiar with the term "T3-Dhn(t)" would have been highly receptive to the news of Psammeticus' destruction of the Kushite sanctuary, which had authorized Kushite tyranny over them for the entire previous century.
There is not enough information in the texts to reveal Psammeticus' battle plans, but we can be sure that he divided his forces and made a two-pronged attack. One army marched very conspicuously over the Third Cataract and upriver to Pnubs to draw attention to itself and to form the focus of Kushite resistance. Another smaller force probably left the main army shortly after Sai and struck out across the Nubian desert with their pack animals, marching by night. After a journey of some 225 km they would have attacked Gebel Barkal suddenly from the rear, done their damage, and departed as quickly as possible. We may only speculate on how Sanam was damaged. Did these troops leave via the desert, or did they proceed downriver in commandeered river craft? Did they meet Theocles' fleet at Kerkis, near Old Dongola?
Gebel Barkal must surely have been the planned objective of Psammeticus' campaign because it was the center of a cult that gave the Napatan rulers a claim to Upper Egypt, if not all of Egypt. The ceremonies held there, and the colossal pyramids being built there, allowed the Kushites to trumpet their claims to the Saite throne and to advertise their connection with the greatest pharaohs of the past, who were thought to have come from Gebel Barkal since the beginning of time. The primeval crown, the royal uraeus and kingship they claimed were theirs by authority of the mountain's god, who was also the god of Karnak, and as long as they could maintain this tradition with impunity, Psammeticus' legitimacy and that of his dynasty could always be questioned. By ravaging and looting the Barkal sanctuary and the royal palace there, by slaughtering the priests and residents, and by damaging or destroying the other towns and temples downstream, Psammeticus could be released from doubts about his own legitimacy and force the Kushites once and for all away from his borders and into inner Africa. This disaster was surely the event that forced the Kushites to look southward and to give up their dream of reuniting Nubia and the Thebaid. It would have led them to re-conceive the very nature of Amun's domain as well as the definition of their own kingship. Now "the Two Lands" and "Kemet" would be names they would apply to Nubia (FHN II 406, 446). Perhaps they reconceived their Nubian empire now as a "mirror image" of their former Egyptian, in which the great bend of the Nile acted as the reflector that reversed the shape of the world. The "northern Karnak" and royal capital (i.e. Meroe) now lay at the south, while the "southern Karnak" became, more than ever, the center - the center of Creation and of the world, and the center and birthplace kingship.

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