Neferneferuaten:
Glorious is the Splendour
of the Sun
By Robin Gordon
Auksford 2024
©
Copyright
Robin Gordon, 2024
PART
III:
NEFERKHEPERURE-
WAENRE
13.
Celebration, Paranoia,
and
Flattery
The heb-sed
of year 9 was a comparatively modest affair, for the
King was already planning a major jubilee for year 12, a celebration
that would outshine even the glorious heb-sed of his father’s
30th year as ruler.
The festivities celebrated the completion of the City of the
Horizon of the Rising Sun, and it marked a further development in
Akhenaten’s religious outlook. The full, didactic
name of
the Aten was changed. The reference to Shu was expunged. The
Aten
would henceforth be known as “(Living Re, Ruler of the
Horizon,
Rejoicing in the Horizon) (in His Name of Re, the Father, who appears
as the Sun-disc)” with his name enclosed in two cartouches as
befitted the Universal King.
Throughout the city and throughout the Two Lands the usual
festivities were held. People ate and drank to excess and
sang
and danced till they were exhausted. Many, of course, had
little
idea that what they were celebrating was the next stage of
Akhenaten’s religious revolution. The King had
ordered
celebration. Celebrations were much less frequent than they
had
been when the land as protected by all the gods. It was an
opportunity not to be missed, and in many places, whatever the King
might or might not have decreed, the parties were dedicated to the
goddess of drunkenness, Hwt-hor.
The viziers and the Treasurer were worried. Even
though the
celebrations of Akhenaten’s heb-sed had been
muted, coming on top
of the colossal expense of building a whole new capital city, they had
revealed that the national treasury was almost empty.
The King’s mood changed from sunny to
stormy. His
bosom companion and most trusted counsellor was at hand.
“Nnngh!
Kemet is the wealthiest country
in the
world. If Your Majesty is short of treasure it is
because Your
Most Gracious Majesty is being cheated.
Your own
property is
being withheld from
you by
ill-intentioned people.”
“My tax-gatherers are out throughout the Two
Lands,”
said the King. “You organise them
yourself.”
“I am not talking about tax-gatherers,”
said
Ay. “They are Your Majesty’s most loyal servants, and
they collect as much
as they can, and more than
the people are willing
to pay, all to serve
Your Majesty.”
Ay forbore to mention that the excessive taxes, that he
encouraged his collectors to extort from the peasantry, did not all
find their way into the Royal Treasury. Ay, as organiser of
the
revenues, had thought it better to encourage the tax-gatherers to
greater efficiency by allowing them to keep a certain percentage for
their own use. The King had no need to know of such
administrative details, nor was it necessary for anyone in the
government to know that a certain proportion of the taxes found its way
into Ay’s own coffers, a just reward for his loyalty to the
King.
“Your Majesty’s
revenue-collectors,” he
continued, “can tax the poor
and the middle classes, but wealth
is concentrated in the
temples of the old, disgraced gods, and their
priests are keeping it from
Your Majesty. Your Majesty’s
father the
Justified and Glorified King Nebmaatre, always used to point
out to his
ministers that the old priesthoods owned
about half the
country’s wealth, and especially the priests of Amun.
They
own vast
amounts of farmland. They own herds of cattle and whole
villages of
people. They have hoarded
wealth for generations and
persuaded Your Majesty’s glorious ancestors to make over to them
huge
amounts of gold and treasure, huge
numbers of cattle and slaves,
huge tracts
of fertile land to reward their so-called gods for the
achievements that were entirely due to the Kings
themselves.
These priests are nothing but
deceivers, and Your Majesty should claim
back from them the wealth they have hidden from you,
because it is
yours by right.”
Queen Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti and Queen Tiye counselled
caution
but the King was afire with the desire to restock his treasury with the
wealth of the temples of the old gods. He summoned his army
commanders and ordered them to send out troops to strip the temples of
their wealth and expunge the names of the old gods from their monuments.
Horemheb, now
the chief recruitment officer, counselled caution. Natives of
Kemet would be very unwilling to carry out orders that included
desecrating temples, taking away their wealth and chiselling out from
monuments the names of gods they had been brought up to
revere.
Ay, of course, had a solution to this, as he told Akhenaten privately:
the army of Kemet employed mercenaries from various countries, and none
of them had any sort of allegiance to the old gods.
“Send out
the mercenaries.
They will do Your Majesty’s bidding. And
may I advise Your Majesty to remember the Teachings of Amenemhat,
a
King who was assassinated, who gave advice to his son to enable him to
avoid the same fate: Beware
of those subjects who are nobodies / of
those of whose plotting one is not aware.”
“That,”
thought Ay, “was a very
good day’s work. I have
persuaded the King to attack the temples,
which will make him very
unpopular, and I have managed
to make him suspicious of
his generals,
which will make him nervous and more open to my
suggestions. Soon
I will be the only
person in
the Two Lands that he feels he can trust,
and I might very well be made co-ruler.
I think, when that
happens, I shall call myself ‘Ay, the Upholder of
Justice,’*1
shee-hee-hee-hee.”
The King grew
more and more suspicious, perhaps with some good reason. The
cheering crowds that had lined the Royal Road for his daily progress
from his residence in the north to the Great Palace in the Central City
had dwindled, and the few spectators who still watched no longer
cheered.
Akhenaten
summoned Commander Mahu, the chief of police. After their
conversation a squad of police, often led by Mahu himself, ran
alongside the King’s chariot watching for any sign of
hostility
from the watchers.
Letters arrived
from the vassal kings in the lands along the eastern shore of the Great
Green Sea, letters pleading for aid against hostile neighbours, letters
accusing neighbouring vassal kings of hostility towards the King of
Kemet and of spying for the King of Hatti. The viziers and
the
generals asked for orders. The King ignored everything.
“We
can’t afford to bother with these petty kingdoms,”
he
said. “We have to concentrate on the blatant
disloyalty of
the temple-priests and stop them withholding their taxes. We
have
to obliterate the names of their false gods and break the power of the
priests. We have to concentrate on establishing worship of
the
Aten, the life-giving Sun, the only true deity, throughout the land,
and strengthening the authority of the King, the only begotten son of
the Aten.”
He found some
solace in the company of his queen, Nefertiti, and his beloved
sister-wife Kiya, and also in composing a hymn to his god, the Aten.
Hymn
to the Aten
Introduction
“Beautiful
from the horizon of heaven you rise
and
fill every land with your splendour from high
in the skies.
Fair
are you, dazzling on high above every land.
Your
rays bring the light to the countries all made
by your hand,
for
you are the Sun-God and bring
them as slaves to your son.
Though
distant you make yourself felt where
bright your rays run.
Darkness
When
you are setting and vanish away in the west,
the
land lies in darkness, in death, like
corpses we rest.
The
people who lie in their chambers are blind
as if dead.
Their
property could all be stolen from under
their head.
While
you are
below the horizon the
darkness of night
gives
cover to lions and vermin who creep
in and bite.
Sunrise
When
from the darkness you rise and you
bring back the day,
the
Two Lands in festival brighten
at touch of your ray.
The
people arise and they wash themselves, clothe all
their limbs.
They
raise their arms high to adore you and sing
you their hymns.
The
people will work, and the flocks in their
pasture will eat.
The
trees and the grasses will flourish in light
and in heat.
The
beasts of the fields on their legs will all
prance to adore
your
return, and the birds of the air to greet
you will soar.
Ships
on the River can sail, for you open their way.
Fish
leap in the sea, for even out there you bring
day.
Birth
Foetus
in woman you make and the semen in males,
life
to the babe in the womb, and calm
when he wails.
You
nurse in the womb every child, and when
it is born,
you
open its mouth, give it breath and bring
its life’s dawn.
To
the chick in the egg you give breath, and you
cause it to live
till
it breaks from its shell to enter
the life that you give.
All
peoples of the world
How
manifold are all the things that
you made, although we
can
not understand the great mysteries, how came
to be
the
world you created according to your secret plan,
o
sole god who made every animal, creature
and man,
not
Kemet alone, also Khasu and Kush, foreign
lands,
every
man in his place, with his lifetime laid out
by your hands.
They
have food in their countries. They
differ in nature and speech.
Their
skins are distinct, different
qualities given to each.
Life-giving
water
To
Kemet you bring from the Underworld fresh
inundation
yearly
for crops. You keep people alive, the whole
nation
that
you have created, and all distant lands, for
it’s you,
awesome
in majesty, rising and toiling right through
the
whole day. You place a great river up high in
the sky
to
water the crops in their fields so nothing will die.
O
Lord of Creation, how good
are your plans for all men!
Water
from heaven is given to foreigners, then
forth
from the Underworld comes out the river
you bring
to
water the tilled land of Kemet. Your
praises we sing.
The
whole world
When
you rise and your rays embrace
all the fields so they grow,
the
seasons you make: then they cool when
the temperature’s low
in
winter; then summer will come and they
feel your warm heat.
On
what you have made you look down from
the sky, your high seat.
You
are alone, the unique one, creator. You shine.
You
are so far and yet near. From your
own self you mine
and
cause to exist all those millions
of forms that now live.
Towns,
fields and waterways, roads,
paths and rivers you give.
All
over the world in those villages every eye
can
see you enthroned in the heavens, dazzling
on high.
Those
faces you made so that you’re
in this world not alone,
but
if you depart that’s the end of all
living things known.
The
Only Begotten Son
No-one
can know you, o Aten like me,
your own son.
You
tell me your plans, so that I can know all that
you’ve done.
You
rise and make people to live, then you
set and they die.
You
mark the duration of life. You shine
and each eye
sees
all your beauty, until the time comes when you
set.
Work
will then cease until your return, when you
get
people
to rise and to work for your son, Wa-en-re,
Lord
of the Two Lands, Living in Truth every day,
your
son Akhenaten, son of the Sun, and his wife.
You
grant to them hundreds of millions
of years of long life.
Every King is
surrounded by flatterers. Akhenaten was no
exception.
Perhaps he had even more than most Kings of the Two Lands, for he had
uprooted the court and moved to a new place, where he declared
allegiance to a new form of belief and appointed new men to new
positions. Prominent among them was the oleaginous Panhesy,
who
had done very well for himself out of Akhenaten’s
reforms.
He was now First Servant of the Aten, the wealthiest and most
influential priest in all of Kemet, with an official residence close by
the Great Temple, with its stockyards and slaughter-courts, and a quiet
and spacious villa in the peace of the Southern Suburb.
He was fulsome
in his praise of the King’s Great Hymn to the Aten, as were
other
courtiers, but foremost among them all was Ay.
“Mmmnngh!
Kemet is so very
fortunate in having Your Majesty as
ruler. Your
Majesty is without equal as
King, philosopher, and
theologian, and now
Your Majesty is revealed as
the greatest poet that ever lived
throughout the whole history of
the Two Land. I crave a
boon.
May it please Your Gracious Majesty to allow your humble
and devoted
servant to have
this wonderful work of genius
engraved on
the walls of
his tomb, so that he may contemplate it throughout
eternity.”
Akhenaten
graciously gave his permission and Ay skipped and squirmed in joyful
self-abasement.
“Since we
are speaking of your tomb, Lord Ay,” said
Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti, “I pray you not to forget that
your
wife Tey is to describe herself in her tomb as nursemaid to the
Queen.”
“Nnngh!
Yes. Yes, of course, my Beloved Daughter,” said Ay,
thinking “If it wasn’t for that woman
I’d be ready to
assume the responsibilities of co-ruler. She’s
always in
the way.”
Notes
*1 Ay, the
Upholder of Justice
Many Egyptologist accept Ay’s
title of
“the Doer of Right” as evidence of his right to
rule, but,
since it is likely to have been chosen by Ay himself it can be regarded
as nothing more than self-advertisement
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