Egypt (40 page)

‘And how can they tell?'

He squinted up at me in the strong sunlight.

‘Your heart is weighed in the scales, against the feather of the truth, which belongs to the Goddess Maat, and you have to make a denial of wrongdoing,' I said.

‘And then what?' he insisted.

‘If your heart is heavy with evil or wrongdoing, then it will tip the scales against the feather, and it will be gobbled up by Ammut, who stands waiting by the scales; she's a monster with the head of a crocodile and the hind legs of a hippopotamus. But, if you're clever and quick, before she gets it, you can also ask for forgiveness,' I said.

‘How?' he asked, curious.

‘You have to make an offering to Osiris, because he is God of Truth. You have to say: “Oh lords of justice, put away the evil harm that is in me. Be gracious to me and remove all anger which is in your heart against me.”'

‘So next time you're angry with me, or with any of us, we can say that?'

‘You can try…' I said, smiling.

He was silent for a long moment.

‘So what's it like in the Otherworld?' he asked.

I looked around, at the wide sky and the shining waters, and the city in the distance, with its temple pylons, and its stone palaces and poor districts. I looked to the east, and the mystery of Ra's rebirth, and to the west, the great desert, where Ra set each night in the place of the dead. I looked up at the dark, perfect shape of a falcon silently sweeping across the face of the sun. I thought about the future in which my son would live his life, under a new King, and a new dynasty. I looked down into the green waters of the Great River, ever flowing, and remembered my dead. I remembered my father, and the dead Nubian boys, and Khety, and Ankhesenamun. But their faces didn't haunt me now. I could look them in the eye. I thought about Horemheb's offer. Perhaps, after all, I could make a difference to the world my children would grow up in.

I looked at my young son, staring at me, waiting for a good answer.

‘It's like this,' I replied. ‘It's like this moment.'

Suddenly he called out in excitement. A fish was pulling on his line. And then, to my surprise and his delight, he reeled it in with a skill he must have learned from his grandfather, on those long fishing days without me. And he stood–holding up the silver fish, as it danced and struggled on the line–laughing and grinning proudly.

The King's Wife to Suppiluliuma of the Hittites–‘He who is my husband is dead! I have no son! I do not want to take one of my subjects and make him my husband. I did not write to any other land, I wrote to you! They say sons are plentiful for you. Give me one of your sons. He will be my husband, and he will be King in Egypt!
'

From the Seventh Tablet, The Deeds of Suppiluliuma As Told By His Son Mursilis II

This letter (actually a clay tablet in Akkadian, the lingua franca of international diplomacy at the time) from an Egyptian queen to Suppiluliuma I, the King of the Hittites, was discovered in the Hittite archives, and is a tantalizing clue to one of the most mysterious and compelling unsolved mysteries of the Ancient World.

It is in every way an extraordinary, audacious communication–not least because the Egyptians and the Hittites had been at war for decades, battling for control of the Syrian territories and kingdoms between the borders of their empires, and so such a letter could have been seen as treacherous. But even more significantly, no Egyptian royal had ever made such a request to a foreigner, let alone an enemy; the trade in international royal brides was strictly a one-way affair. And yet here is an Egyptian queen asking her enemy for one of his sons to join her on the throne. It is an extraordinary mystery to rival that of the death of Tutankhamun.

In the letter, the queen is called ‘Dahamunzu', which may be a translation of the Egyptian title
Tahemetnesu
(the King's Wife). For complex reasons of Egyptian chronology and the uncertainty surrounding the translation of the Hittite rendering of Egyptian names, the attribution cannot be certain; some scholars propose a chronology according to which the King's Wife might have been Nefertiti. But the letter is thought by others to have been sent by Ankhesenamun, widow of Tutankhamun, and daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. The latter attribution forms the historical basis of this novel.

Ankhesenamun became the last surviving member of her dynasty, the eighteenth, when her husband Tutankhamun died aged around nineteen. She was probably only twenty-one years old herself at that moment; and she had no heirs. It is thought she was then married to Ay, the powerful courtier who had been closely involved with the royal family since the Amarna period–indeed he might even have been her own great-uncle. Already an old man by the time of the marriage, Ay ruled for only four or five years. His death must have presented Ankhesenamun, at this point perhaps twenty-five or twenty-six years old, with a grave set of dilemmas. How could she rule alone? How could she continue her line? How could she ensure the stability of her own position, and that of Egypt, domestically and internationally? Who could she trust? The elite men of the nobility and the priesthood might well have seemed more like a threat to a young and relatively inexperienced queen, than a source of support. Above all, how could she defend herself against the ambitious challenge for the crown by Horemheb, the general of the Egyptian army? No wonder she wrote in one of the Hittite letters, ‘I am afraid!'

In the eighteenth dynasty other royal women had achieved great power, including Queen Hatshepsut (1473–1458
BC
), who had enjoyed the full support of the Amun priesthood in crowning herself; Queen Tiy, consort of Egypt's own Sun King, Amenhotep III; and, most famously, Nefertiti (c.1380–1340
BC
), principal wife of Akhenaten, whose story is told in
Nefertiti: The Book of the Dead
. But perhaps, due to her youth, relative inexperience of power, and lack of a stable royal marriage and heirs, Ankhesenamun's position at this moment was much more vulnerable.

Egypt in the eighteenth dynasty was the greatest power of the Ancient Near East, and the Hittites were their most confrontational enemy. But after the later collapse of their empire, the Hittites disappeared from history, and not until the late twentieth century did they become the focus of archaeological and historical research. Kingship was hereditary, and the king, addressed as ‘My Sun', acted as high priest for the kingdom. Among his responsibilities were the supervision of annual festivals and the maintenance of the sanctuaries and temples.

Hattusa, the fortified capital of the Hittite homeland, was in central Anatolia (modern Turkey); through the might of their armies (a mixture of professionals, men answering the call of feudal obligation, and mercenary troops), and their control of vassal states and territories, they conquered northern Syria and extended their empire so that it stretched from the Aegean coast of Anatolia as far as Babylon. By the time of the setting of this novel, they had established themselves as one of the key players on the international stage. King Suppiluliuma I (c.1380–c.1346
BC
) was one of the great warrior kings, who corresponded on equal terms with the other kings of the Ancient Near East. But the astonishing success of the Hittite expansion brought them into direct conflict with Egypt.

At the time this novel takes place, the Egyptians and the Hittites had been at war for years. At stake was control of Syria, the crossroads for all the commerce of the Ancient Near East. From the great port of Ugarit, goods from all over the eastern Mediterranean–cedar, grain, gold, silver, lapis lazuli, tin, horses, etc.–would arrive to be sold and distributed via a network of trade routes that stretched south to Egypt, east to Babylon and north-east to Mittani. So Syria was vital for commerce, but it was also strategically indispensable, and the great empires warred and negotiated with each other for influence and dominance over it.

Egypt had long controlled southern and central Syrian territories, which were a source of great profit and political prestige. But Suppiluliuma, in a series of what must have been daring military campaigns, quickly took control of the northern kingdoms and cities of the region from the empire of Mittani. The status quo was threatened, and the region became politically volatile. (It is not hard to recognize the parallels with today's Middle East.) Characters such as Aziru of Amurru, as historically attested, grasped the opportunity to forge alliances that suited their ambitions, and to extend their own territories.

So Ankhesenamun's letter to Suppiluliuma requesting him to send her a son to marry was unprecedented, and came at a time of escalating conflict between the two superpowers. Suppiluliuma was, understandably, very suspicious of her request. According to the annals, he sent a high official to Egypt to investigate. And the following spring, the high official (the Ambassador Hattusa in this novel) returned with a representative of the Egyptian court (Nakht, in the novel) with a further letter:

Why did you say ‘they deceive me' in that way? Had I a son, would I have written about my own and my country's shame to a foreign land? You did not believe me and have said as much to me. He who was my husband has died. A son I have not. Never shall I take a servant of mine and make him my husband. I have written to no other country, only to you have I written. They say your sons are many: so give me one son of yours. To me he will be husband, but in Egypt he will be King
.

According to the annals, Suppiluliuma remained suspicious:

You keep asking me for a son of mine as if it were my duty. He will in some way become a hostage, but King you will not make him
.

But we know that, after further negotiations, a deal was agreed, and his son Zannanza was sent back to Egypt. But then, disaster struck, for Zannanza was murdered on the journey. The Hittites blamed the Egyptians, of course:

When Suppiluliuma heard of the slaying of Zannanza, he began to lament for Zannanza, and to the Gods he spoke thus: ‘Oh Gods! I did no evil, yet the people of Egypt did this to me, and they also attacked the frontier of my country.'

And in the end, what Ankhesenamun might have intended as a radical solution to the problem of her succession, and an attempt to forge a peace treaty through marriage between the two empires, actually raised the stakes of the conflict, and would eventually lead to one of the most famous confrontations of the Ancient World, the Battle of Qadesh, in 1274
BC
.

The dramatic geopolitics of the region–and the sophisticated diplomatic methods of the time–make up the historical panorama of this novel; and I hope the resonances for our modern world, with today's great powers vying for influence for commercial and political reasons in the Middle East, are part of the pleasure of the story. I've drawn on the best available historical and archaeological evidence to reconstruct both the daily world and the drama of high politics in Egypt, Syria and Hatti; and through the eyes and mind of Rahotep, Seeker of Mysteries, I have imagined my way into the events as they might have been experienced by the key players. Above all, I have attempted to tell the story behind Ankhesenamun's mysterious letters, and to solve the twin mysteries of what might have compelled her to resort to such desperate measures, and of who killed Zannanza, and how, and why.

There is no evidence, other than the Hittite annals, for what happened on that return journey to Egypt. However, the Apiru (or Habiru in some translations) are well-attested in Egyptian, Hittite and Mittanian sources. Inanna (known in Akkadian as Ishtar) was the Sumerian goddess of love, fertility and war. She is stunningly depicted in the British Museum's Queen of the Night relief (also known as the Burney Relief), winged, with taloned feet and a headdress of horns topped by a disc, her hands raised to the viewer. (You can see the life, head and heart lines on her palms.) She is holding rod-and-ring symbols. (These appear frequently; what they symbolize is uncertain, but they were only ever held by gods.) She is also attended by lions and owls, standing upon a range of stylized mountains. Her symbol was an eight-pointed star, which in the novel becomes the sign of the Army of Chaos. ‘She stirs confusion and chaos against those who are disobedient to her, speeding carnage and inciting the devastating flood, clothed in terrifying radiance,' according to the ‘Hymn to Inanna'.

My character has borrowed the name and the powers of her goddess. For her, opium is both a commodity and something sacred. Of course psychotropic drugs, especially hallucinogens, have been used for religious and shamanic purposes from prehistoric times. ‘Soma' was a ritual drink of great importance among the early Indo-Iranians, for whom it had the status of a god. There is wide evidence for the cultivation and ritual use of opium throughout the Ancient World–in Neolithic settlements in western Europe, and then in Mesopotamia where the Sumerians called it the ‘joy plant'. The Assyrians and Babylonians also collected ‘poppy juice'. The Ancient Egyptians used mandrake (a fruit) and the lotus (blue water lily) for medicinal narcotic purposes, although it must be said that any exact identification of opium within the herbals and medical papyri is problematic. One likely reference appears in the Ebers Papyrus as a ‘remedy for driving out much crying [in children]'. Base ring juglets, which were shaped to resemble an inverted poppy seed-pod, were probably used to import opium juice from Cyprus. It has also been proposed that opium and lotus flowers were mixed with wine for recreational as well as religious use, because the effective alkaloids were soluble in alcohol. In the novel, the ‘lost valley' of the Army of Chaos is based on the Beqaa valley, where the production of wine and opium, and the rule of tribal militias, remain as active today as they were in the Late Bronze Age.

Alas, there is no other evidence at the time of writing to suggest what might have happened to Ankhesenamun after the murder of Zannanza. Horemheb (1323–1295
BC
) succeeded Ay on the throne of Egypt, and she disappears completely from the historical record. And with her vanishing the great eighteenth dynasty of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, of Tutankhamun and Ankhesenamun, also came to an end; Horemheb, in the iconoclastic custom of new kings, dismantled their temples and usurped their monuments. And then he adopted as his heir a military officer from the delta (Horemheb's own home), who would found a new dynasty: the Ramesside, which would comprise eleven rulers in the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties.