The Ancients - How Ancient Egypt Stayed Egyptian

Episode Date: January 3, 2021

The length of time between the rule of Cleopatra and the erection of the Pyramids is the same as that between now and the birth of Jesus Christ. With that in mind, it is perhaps no surprise that some periods of Ancient Egypt fall beneath the radar. The Late Period of Ancient Egypt, however, is not without drama. These final centuries are characterised by repeated invasions and leadership by foreign rulers. Chris Naunton is an Egyptologist, writer and broadcaster. He spoke to Tristan about the influence of external forces on Ancient Egyptian society from the Third Intermediate Period through the Late Period. This included Libyan, Assyrian, Persian and, notably, an Ancients’ favourite, the Macedonian Alexander the Great.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and happy new year. We are kicking off 2021 with a bang in this podcast because we have got on the show the one, the only, one of the greatest Egyptologists of our time, Dr Chris Norton. In this podcast, we're going to be covering hundreds of years of ancient

Egyptian history focusing on the last millennium BC. This was a time when there was a lot of outside influence on Egypt but nevertheless we see Egyptian culture remaining strong. So we're going to be looking at the Libyan influence, we're going to be looking at the 25th dynasty. We're going to be looking at the Assyrians, the Persians and even the Macedonians. And this is a fantastic chat. We cover topics stretching from the importance of powerful local officials at Thebes during the 25th dynasty all the way down to several hundred years later to the mysteries surrounding the tomb and body of Alexander the Great. So without further ado, here is Chris Naunton. Chris Naunton, it is an absolute pleasure to have you on the show.

Thank you very much, Tristan. Thank you for having me. Absolute pleasure to be here. Now, we are focusing on Egypt at a time when it bears witness to several significant invasions in its ancient history. Yeah this is a relatively, I think it's fair to say, if not little known then lesser known time in Egyptian history. It's easy to forget that ancient Egypt, the ancient Egypt of gods with animal heads and hieroglyphs and pyramids and mummies and things lasted for about 3,000 years. And we know some periods within that much better than others. But the last few

centuries of that time are characterised, at least in the top level politics, by repeated invasion and the influence of groups of foreigners. And I find this very, very interesting, but it's underappreciated for one reason or another. So I guess that's what we're going to explore today. Absolutely. And just before we start, something which also seems really extraordinary from this period is how ancient Egypt's unique culture remains strong, well, can we say throughout? Yeah, yeah. I think you've hit the nail on the head there actually and in some ways that is the key point I think here and a point that you could apply to Egypt's Mabry from the very beginning of the time when that part of the world was settled almost down to the present day but certainly that ancient culture of all those things

I mentioned pyramids and hieroglyphs and mummies and things was remarkably strong, enduring, and also consistent. Things changed. So if you know your Egyptian language, you know, a specialist could recognise the difference between a Middle Kingdom inscription and a Ptolemaic inscription pretty easily. So things did change. But at the same time, on the surface, everything is remarkably similar for 3000 years. That's an inconceivably long period of time for us, I think. That is absolutely astonishing, isn't it? Especially when you think Roman history, as it were, we could perhaps think of it a thousand years or so, but Egypt said almost three times that, and there it's even more. Absolutely astonishing.

I always think this sort of comparison, there's things you can say like, if he was a real historical individual, Jesus Christ is 2,000 years away from us in time. That's two thirds of the length of Egyptian history. By the time Cleopatra was around, the pyramids were more than 2,000 years old. So the pyramids were further away in time from Cleopatra than the Romans are from us. Crazy. Well, let's focus then on this late period of ancient Egyptian history that we mentioned just now. And let's dive into the background first of all, because the first period I really like to look at is, I think the period is called the Libyan period. What timeframe are we talking

about here, Chris? We are talking about, well, I suppose the academic in me wants to say that there's no very clear beginning and end point to a lot of these phases. But if you think the Libyan period corresponds roughly to the end of either the 20th or the 21st dynasty, the influence is there in the 21st dynasty. But the beginning of the 22nd dynasty, which arrives in the 10th century BC, think about roughly 950 BC, very approximately. Egyptologists like me are a little bit wary of absolute dates because we can't be in many cases, certainly not before a certain point, very sure about exactly in which year BC or AD things happened. But if you think 10th century BC, so that's the 900s, a Libyan comes to be pharaoh and he establishes a line of Libyan, that's non-Egyptian foreign kings, from the west of Egypt, the territory that's now

the modern country of Libya. And so, of course, in the case of the Libyans, that doesn't happen in a single moment, like in a moment of, say, military conquest. It happens after a gradual process of movement of people from Libya into Egypt, settling, coming to be influential in local areas, and ultimately coming to be influential on a kind of national scale. So their influence is there at the latest in some form or another from the beginning of the 20th dynasty. Ramesses III tells us that he engaged them in battle. And of course, being Egyptian pharaoh, the way he tells the story, he was triumphant. But it seems likely actually that the Libyan, if not invaders, then settlers, migrants, had come to cross into the Nile Valley and settle

from that sort of time. And their influence grows and grows and grows and grows. And that's not very easy for us to see in the archaeological record. But like I say, by the time you have a Libyan on the throne of the whole of Egypt at the beginning of the 22nd dynasty, clearly they had come to be very influential. And I appreciate this must be quite a hard question to answer because it sounds like the sources for this period, we don't have many about it. But do we know much about the Libyan influence on Egyptian society at this time? That's a great question. The problem, I think, is not so much one of absence of sources or that there isn't evidence or information. It's that the kinds of things we are trying to see in the evidence

are difficult to see. So to give you a sort of obvious example, if we're looking for foreign influence or foreign presence, one way we might be able to tell that would be through individuals attested in the archaeological and textual record who have names which are clearly not Egyptian names. So Egyptian people with Egyptian names have names that can be translated into things like Amun is satisfied, King Amunhotep Amun is satisfied. So that's clearly an Egyptian name evoking the name of an Egyptian god. When you've got a name that appears not to be composed of Egyptian words, it's just a load of letters and sounds, that's more likely to be a foreign name written phonetically in hieroglyphs. So if you were to turn up, or I were to turn up,

the Egyptians would have a way of writing Tristan or Chris, but those names wouldn't have any meaning in the Egyptian language. Does that make sense? So you can see people in the record and you can see foreigners, but sometimes you can't. Because what if you turned up in Egypt and said, well, it'd be much easier for me to get on in Egyptian society if I took the name Amenhotep. So you call yourself Amenhotep and you say, well, I'm going to do away with my English language and customs and dress and that sort of thing because it's just going to get me beaten up, quite honestly. So I'm going to become an Egyptian. So that masks, to some extent, Libyan presence and influence. As far as we know, these people who we call Libyans, and by the way, that's not the name they gave themselves. We're actually talking about a number of different small groups, tribal sort of sized groups,

the names of some of which we know. So one of them is called Ma, one of them is called Meshwesh. There is a group called Libu, which is close enough to the word Libyan. But collectively, we archaeologists, Egyptologists call them Libyans because they all came from the West, from modern day Libya. But they, as far as we know, none of these groups had a written language at all. But they adopted the Egyptian language and script. They also adopted But they adopted the Egyptian language and script. They also adopted, when they come to be visible in the record as high-ranking officials or ultimately as pharaoh, they adopt all of the trappings of those Egyptian positions.

So army generals are called army generals using the Egyptian word for army general. And when they come to be the monarch, if you like, they don't have their own term. They use all the Egyptian terminology, pharaoh, son of Ra, etc, etc. And apparently they come to believe in Egyptian gods and to build Egyptian temples to Egyptian gods, etc, etc, etc, etc. But a couple of absolutely brilliant studies of the Libyan period and Libyan culture were undertaken, in particular by the person who was my supervisor at the University of Birmingham, an Egyptologist called Anthony Leahy, who in the 1980s began to realise that some aspects of society in this period which had changed may have been attributable to Libyan influence. So we have Libyans clearly in important positions using Egyptian titles, including ultimately Pharaoh. But it isn't as though the Egyptians simply come along and become Egyptians. That's not the case. And

eventually, after a lot of study of society at this time, there's several aspects of society and practice and belief at this time which do change. So one of the obvious ways in which things change is that the country becomes decentralised from the end of the New Kingdom, beginning of the 21st dynasty, down until really the beginning of the 26th, which is a period of around about five centuries. The country sort of swings between being ruled by a single individual, so very centralised, to very devolved, where you have the country being ruled by lots of little independent rulers in different places. And for a long time, that process of devolution was attributed to some sort of economic decline. Why did the power of the pharaoh wane? Well, maybe he ran out of money or things went rubbish. But one or two very influential scholars from the 1980s onwards began to see things slightly differently and to look at this as being the result of Libyan influence.

And the Libyans have a different way of doing things. The Libyans had come from these tribal, small units in Libya. Maybe none of those people wanted to govern a massive, settled country like Egypt. They just wanted to settle in their local area and to govern on the basis of family relationships, tribal family relationships, over a small territory. So maybe that's why you get Egypt splitting into these little units. It's actually living in And maybe that's also why there's a switch away from monumental tomb construction, very large elaborate tombs, to smaller undecorated tombs in which lots of people are not quite crammed together but buried in groups, family groups.

Maybe even though all the obvious things like coffins and inscriptions and other burial equipment are all very Egyptian looking, maybe this shift away from big decorated tombs to shafts with family groups in it again is because that's the way the Libyans wanted to do things. So as I was saying it's not necessarily that there's a lack of evidence there probably is overall a reduction in the quantity of evidence but it's also that the things that might be the cause of the big changes are not so visible in the kinds of evidence we have. One other thing to say on that is that part of the split of the country is that there's a sort of rebalancing of the political geography. So in the New Kingdom,

the city of Memphis was the sort of administrative and main capital city, and Memphis is located at the point at which the River Nile splits into branches into the Nile Delta. It's said to be at the balance of the two lands, the delta and the Nile Valley. But another incredibly important site is Thebes to the south, which is the centre of the Egyptians' principal deity, Amun. By the later New Kingdom and into the third intermediate period, the Libyan period, the north has become much more important. And the Libyans seem to have settled much more in the north than in the Nile Valley, for one reason or another. And they came to be very influential in places like Tanis, which is the successor capital to the 19th and 20th dynasty capital at Paramasi, in Sias, which is in the western delta, various other cities in the

delta. And the delta, because the ground is wet, because of a high water table, because of the splits of the Nile, the ground is generally lower, we're closer to the Mediterranean Sea, etc. It preserves archaeological material a lot less well than the Nile Valley and the deserts generally. So for that reason, there's probably a bias in the evidence against this period, because the stuff is happening, important stuff is happening in a place where it doesn't survive so well. And it's taken a long, long time for us to arrive at this understanding. And I think this partly explains why, as we were saying at the very beginning here, this period is underappreciated and less well understood. It needs a very close scrutiny of the evidence to get at these things. Absolutely. And it's extraordinary and really interesting how

the devolved nature of Egypt at this time, it might not be evidence that Egypt was in decline at this time. It was just perhaps the Libyan heritage, shall we say. It's just a different way of doing things. Yeah, I mean, I think those of us who study these so-called intermediate periods are a bit resistant to the idea of the old story of decline and fall. Yeah, things are just a bit different. One scholar who's a specialist in the Libyan period, very eminent professor Kenneth Kitchen of the University of Liverpool, who's quite long retired, one of the great gurus of our subject, he's very fond of pointing out that although the Libyan period, third intermediate period, so-called, is supposed to be a period of decline, look at the

grave goods of the 21st and 22nd dynasty pharaohs. We're all very well aware of Tutankhamun's solid gold death mask. There's about six or seven solid gold death masks in the royal tombs at Tanis. They're not quite on a par with the new kingdom, with the tomb of Tutankhamun, but you cannot say that these were poor people. There's a ton of precious materials in there. I mean, literally, you know, gold and silver, solid silver coffins, incredibly beautiful. But for one reason or another, they're very little known. You know, everybody knows the death mask of Tutankhamun. Every man on the street will recognise the death mask of Tutankhamun. But the death mask of Susenis I? Not so much. Most people would probably say,

isn't that Tutankhamun? But no, these were very wealthy and powerful people, just not so well known to us. And so what happens to this devolved Libyan-influenced Egypt as time goes on? What's the next big power on the scene, as it were? Well, so to some extent, the Libyans aren't really able to sort of take over the whole country. They don't become the only force in the country. And the period plays out over the course of, let's say, sort of three, three and a half centuries, during which time there are obviously still Egyptians in Egypt. Libyans themselves are probably becoming more acculturated and integrated and more Egyptian the longer they're there. So we have Libyans mingling with Egyptians, Libyans probably becoming more and more acculturated and more and more Egyptian. But the next big moment of change comes in the middle of the

8th century BC, very approximately around 750, when a new group of foreigners, this time from the south in what is now Sudan, from a kingdom we call Kush, they called Kush, came to be, from a kingdom we call Kush, they called Kush, came to be first of all Egyptianised. So again, a little bit like our Libyans, they were foreign, but had adopted Egyptian customs and practice. They had adopted the worship of Amun, for example. They had adopted the Egyptian language in the hieroglyphic script, at least for monumental inscriptions. But actually, in this case, we know that they had their own language and they had their own system of writing, which appears eventually. They would eventually come to adopt pyramids as the mode of building royal tombs, and they became militarily powerful enough to invade Egypt and take it over. So we knew from ancient records that there was a group of kings, the 25th Egyptian dynasty, who hailed from

Ethiopia, which is not the Ethiopia of the modern country we know, but Ethiopia in the classical sense of everything to the south of Egypt. But as I say, they called themselves Kushites, the kingdom of Kush. And so this period, the period of the 25th dynasty, when these foreigners established themselves as a new line of kings from about 750 BC down to 664 BC, we can be clear about that date. That period is also referred to as the Kushite period of Egypt. What it looks like on the surface, and we have an incredibly important and incredible historical document, which is called the Victory Stealer or the Triumphal Stealer of King P. His name is sometimes P, P-I-Y-E or Pianchi. We're still not really sure whether we need to read the Ankh sign in his name. We need to vocalise that or not. So

P or Pianchi. And this stealer is a record of his military conquest of the country. And according to what he tells us, he was essentially sort of offended that Egypt wasn't ruled by one king, and that it was ruled by lots of little kings here and there. And so this is incredible in that it's a window on this particular moment in time. And it's actually the key to unlocking a problem which archaeologists would have had up to this point, which is that you've got a super abundance of kings' names in the archaeological record that can't be fitted into any of the dynasties we know about. And we now understand, thanks to the Pianchi stele, that that's because there wasn't just one king,

which would be our normal assumption, but there were kings everywhere, none of them ruling more than a particular local area. At the same time, to make things even more confusing, there were other individuals who didn't bother to use the word king. They used other titles, but who had equivalent authority. So Egypt was actually divided between all these local rulers and Pianki decided that he would invade and establish himself as the only king. So he knocks them all out and takes over, thus establishing a new giant empire that stretches all the way almost as far down into Sudan as the Sixth Cataract. The capital city of Sudan, Khartoum, is just a little way beyond the Sixth Cataract. So it's a huge, huge territory, Egypt and Sudan

altogether. Actually, what we understand was kind of happening under the surface is that those local kings, kinglets and chiefs and others sort of retreated for a little bit, waited to see if the coast was clear and then just came back. And that dynamic probably continued to be the way things worked for the next century or so, with the Kushites as the sort of notional rulers of the whole of the country, but with lots of local rulers probably holding sway unofficially in their local areas. So there's an uneasy kind of truce between the two. And in fact, much as Pianky tells us that the reason he wanted to go to Egypt

to establish himself as king is because he thought that was the right thing. And the god Amun approved it and asked him to do it. More likely, this is a classic territorial and economic grab. And in fact, the Kushites extend their territory up into beyond Egypt to the north and east. So they go through Sinai and into the Levant, into what's now Israel, Palestine, and take control of some of the territory there. And so in this way, they control all of the economic resources of this whole stretch of territory. And that would get them into trouble because in the Levant, they were nibbling away at another empire's economy. And that is the empire of the Assyrians, who didn't

like this, so tried to get rid of the Kushites. The Kushites went away a bit and came back in. And eventually, they had to have several goes at it. And there's a period of about 20 years during which Kush and Assyria are kind of on and off at war with Egypt in the middle. And eventually, the Assyrians get absolutely fed up with the Kushites so they invade Egypt not so much to take Egypt over they're not really seems that concerned about Egypt but what they want is to stop the Kushites from annoying them on their sort of southern boundary so they chase the Kushites all the way eventually all the way as far south as Thebes. They sack Thebes, which is a big moment for this great Egyptian city, carry off a load of treasure, as you would, possibly left behind some stuff of their own.

There's an Assyrian-style helmet that was discovered in Thebes by Flinders Petrie, which might have been left there by an Assyrian soldier at this point. It's a lovely, maybe, bit of evidence of a known historical event. We don't often see the marrying up of something we have in texts with archaeological record. We don't very often have that. Anyway, so the Assyrians come to be in charge. But actually, as I say, what they do is they chase the Kushites out, but then they're not particularly interested in Egypt. So they leave it alone. And in the place of the Kushites, after a few years, a new native dynasty comes to rule over the country. Libyan descended, 26th dynasty,

based at Sias in the Western Delta. And for this reason, this period, 26th dynasty, which lasted about 150 years, comes to be known as the Sait period after the city of Sias. Saite period after the city of Sias. And the 26th dynasty is also genuinely a point at which the country seems to be reunified. So it's not one figurehead king with lots of little kings underneath. It's genuinely a reunified country. And this is the beginning of what Egyptologists tend to call the late period, which lasts for another 300 years-ish. And it is often thought of as the last of the great kind of peaks, as opposed to the troughs. So the 26th dynasty brings to an end this Libyan and Kushite,

sometimes called intermediate period of supposed decline. But as we've been saying here, but the more important thing, I think, is not so much decline as foreign influence. It's extraordinary, keeping on that topic of foreign influence a bit longer, how the Assyrians, it's as if they go in, make their mark, then they go out very quickly, compared to what had gone before them, where you had this dynasty which had lasted more than 100 years? Yeah, it is very interesting. And in some ways, when you look at what had happened during the period of the Kushites,

the invasion of the Assyrians, and then also what happens afterwards as well, for centuries, what's clear is that Egypt is of interest to all these different powers. It's always at the centre of the world, almost. It's of great interest. That's why you get successive powers invading. They don't all have exactly the same way of doing things and they don't always seem to have exactly the same aims in mind. The Assyrians strike you as sort of slightly unusual

in that they don't seem to have been particularly interested in staying and they are unusual in that they didn't seem to have any interest in establishing their own king and incidentally the last of the Assyrian emperors to act decisively in Egypt is Ashurbanipal, an exhibition about whom was put on at the British Museum a couple of years ago so people may well know the name Ashurbanipal very well for various reasons, including because of that exhibition. Ashurbanipal doesn't seem to have been interested in becoming pharaoh of Egypt,

whereas that's exactly what the Libyans did. It's exactly what the Kushites did. And following the Assyrians, you have this period of 26th dynasty, Libyan descended, but essentially Egyptian rule. Then you've got other waves of foreigners as well, two waves of Persians and then Macedonians and ultimately Romans and all of those groups installed their leader as pharaoh, adopting all of the customs, adopting hieroglyphs,

ostensibly belief in Egyptian gods, temple building, all of these things. The Assyrians are unusual in apparently having no interest in that. They sort of take control, but by proxy. They do it through their envoys or through approved locals. You mentioned a bit earlier Thebes and the whole importance of Thebes as a city in ancient Egyptian society. And do we see in this period radical changes to certain parts of the administration? see in this period radical changes to certain parts of the administration, but also in regards to the prominent local families, do they also seem to retain their significance throughout? That's a great question. So underpinning that is the idea that these local families are important and you're dead right that they are. So even during the pre-Libyan times, even during the pre-libyan times even in the new kingdom certain titles and offices were to

some extent hereditary so in other words important positions could be passed from father to son to grandson to great-grandson and that can be problematic but in any case it does lead to the development of particularly important and influential families. And when they become important and influential enough, that's when the dynamic becomes interesting because you have the situation in which they may hold some cards which they can play against Pharaoh. And this idea of inheritance of titles becomes particularly acute in the Libyan period. And again, that may be attributable to the Libyan way of doing things and the importance of families and inheritance of these kinds of things. And in some instances, the spontaneous appearance of local kings. So of course,

when you've got a centralised state, a new king only arises, to use the Egyptian word, A new king only arises, to use the Egyptian word, when the last one dies. And the new one, there will have been successional crises here and there, but a lot of the time the successor will have been known for a long time. So there'll be no question as to who's going to take over when dad dies. And even if there were successional crises, it would most often be between sons or other members of the family. There wouldn't be anybody else competing for it. In the Libyan period, when you have kings just spontaneously appearing, that's in some cases because these families who had held on to particular positions became so important that they came to have the status of a king in a local area.

So they just declared themselves pharaoh. So when you have an incoming group, such as the Kushites or the Assyrians, they have this pre-existing situation to reckon with. So in order to take charge, you need an army. That's the obvious way of taking charge is you just beat everybody up. But once you're there, assuming you don't kill everybody and the whole world world there's some negotiating to be done and this is exactly what you're getting at i think you can see this in our records so yet another aspect of the libyan period which again speaks to their way of doing things is that on their monuments and this means typically statues, coffins, stele, those are the main

kinds of objects that bear lengthy inscriptions. You often have the name of the person who's inside the coffin or the person who the statue represents or the person who's dedicating the stele, but they also give information about their families, most commonly father, perhaps also sons, possibly brothers and sisters, possibly grandfather, you know, great-grandfather. And in some cases, and this becomes very acute again in the Libyan period, you have long sequences going back generations and generations and generations. And when we take all of that information all together, you can actually start to construct incredibly complicated family trees because the same people crop up on different monuments. So you might have a long string of father, grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great, great-great-great, etc, etc. But then somebody somewhere along the

line says, oh, my brother was such and such. And then you can add their huge string of mother, father, etc, etc. So we're able to see these incredibly influential families and yes at the time Kushites Assyrians come along in some cases these families are disrupted so you'll see this sudden disappearance or not quite disappearance of a family but you might see a family which has held a particularly influential position mayor of the city of Thebes let's say which suddenly after generations and generations, disappears from that family and spontaneously appears in another family. And we attribute that to the influence of a new regime, a new line of kings coming in and saying, you lot are much too powerful

and you're going to cause us trouble. So we're going to take this important office and we're going to give it to our friends over here because they'll be much more helpful to us and in some cases you can see that the beneficiaries of this new way of doing things are from the same part of the world so as you might expect Kushites spontaneously appear in the records approximately the beginning of the 25th dynasty, in important positions. So it looks as though the Kushites have come along and as a way of strengthening their influence, they remove existing influential people and put their own in. And that has a really interesting effect on the record and also on the archaeology. We're beginning to understand more and more and

more that, for example, in the Theban necropolis, the cemeteries of Thebes, we can see Kushite burial customs appearing. And even more interesting than that, there's sort of a mixture of Egyptian and Kushite customs. So they might have names written in hieroglyphs, or they might have traditional Egyptian burial equipment, but where they are depicted, they are depicted wearing Kushite clothes, or something like that. It's a really super interesting sort of mixture of the two. Maybe even very clever, very deliberate way of sort of balancing the two things. You know, we're in Egypt, we're being buried in an Egyptian cemetery, but we don't want to lose our Kushite identity. And one particular family which really strikes me when looking at your work and looking at Thebes at this period, was that of I know who you're going to say. Montaumhart. Yes Montaumhart. Yeah I'm glad you

mentioned him. Montaumhart is an extremely influential local official in Thebes at the end of the 25th dynasty. He's very well attested in the archaeological record. We have a lot of statues and other monuments belonging to him. There's a very fine attested in the archaeological record. We have a lot of statues and other monuments belonging to him. There's a very fine stone bowl in the British Museum. He's represented by a number of extremely fine statues. As I say, he has an enormous tomb. By the way, this period, the end of the 25th and into the 26th, is a time of a revival in monumental tomb construction.

So where that goes away in the Libyan period, it comes back in the 25th century. We're not quite, it's not entirely clear why, but it may well be to do with sudden concentration of power and wealth in local officials in Thebes. And they build on a scale that is grander than anything that's gone before. These tombs, again, are not terribly well known.

It's not possible to visit the really spectacular ones, sadly, but they are immense, really, really spectacular monuments. I hope there'll come a time when it's possible for more people to see them, because that will certainly help understand the period. Anyway, I digress. Montaum Hearts is one of these tombs, and he, aside from being well known, is somebody whose family, by extension, is well known, and it's clear that his family spontaneously, more or less, came to prominence at the beginning of the 25th dynasty. So it may well be that they were very clever in the negotiations at the time the Kushites came to power. And the Kushites coming to power and the end of a previous regime

is the reason they suddenly become influential. But Montaum Hart is the pinnacle of this. His predecessors and, to some extent, his successors were also influential, but he's the zenith of this. And he accumulates a huge list of titles, which show him to have had influence in various different parts of the administration, in the civil administration, but also the temple. And he came eventually to claim the title Overseer of Upper Egypt, which gives him, if you take it at face value, authority over a vast, vast chunk of

Egypt. Certainly he's on a level with other kings. He never uses that title, but he's certainly on that level. And what's really super interesting about him is that we can tell that he was influential in the time of the Kushites and must have been approved. And probably they are the reason he was as influential as he was. One of his wives was a Kushite princess, so there's a marriage alliance thing going on there. But he manages also to crop up in the Assyrian records as an approved local ruler in Thebes, on the approved Assyrian list. So he very cannily manages to wheedle his way in with the Kushites' enemies. So he jumps ship, in other words. And also, even better than that, once the Assyrians have sort of disappeared and we are in the era, the new era of the 26th dynasty, the Sayites,

their takeover of the south of Egypt, Sayis is in the western delta in the north, their takeover of the south is commemorated and marked by the installation of a daughter of the new Saite king to the most important priestly office in Thebes in the region. And this is commemorated on a stela and there's a big ceremony. The person who's overseeing all of this in Thebes, welcoming the new princess in, the new Saite princess is Montuum Hart. So he survives again. He's number one at the time of the Kushites and the Assyrians and the Saites, which either tells

us that he is incredibly canny. It also suggests that he's really very powerful. And actually, whoever comes along, Montaum Hart is the man who is in charge in Thebes. So if you want to take over the south of the country, it's actually Montaum Hart who's in charge. He's the man you've got to keep on side. And that speaks to an interesting dynamic within the country. So he's a hugely influential figure, I think, at least as... It's funny, every so often I get asked, who's your favourite pharaoh? And I never really know how to answer that question. It's a bit like I don't have a favourite animal. Who's my favourite pharaoh? I never really know how to say that. But actually, maybe my answer should be Montemart. He's not pharaoh. He never claimed that. But he's

that powerful and he's that important. And that I think says, it's instructive about what we understand when we say pharaoh. Because your first point of departure would be whoever the pharaoh is, is the most important man in the country. Actually, at that point, maybe not so. Wander Emhart must be this extraordinary figure for the rich, thanks to this amazing archaeology that has survived about him, if we can understand the high levels to which important families could reach in this period. Yeah, absolutely. I think it just causes us, like I say, to question the nature of power and the nature of control and what that really means. You could also construct a fairly interesting timeline of how we have come to this understanding. So from centuries and centuries

ago, we have Manetho's Aegyptiarcha, a history of Egypt written in the early Ptolemaic, which tells us that in the 25th dynasty there's a line of Ethiopian kings. Okay, great. They succeeded, if you read Manetho, they succeeded, the 25th succeeded the 24th and they were succeeded by the 26th. No reason to think that that was any different a process from the 17th being succeeded by the 18th and 19th and 20th. It doesn't give you any sense of the fact that actually the 24th doesn't really exist, not to any great extent. They were only influential in size. They were also contemporary, but with both the 23rd and the 22nd, just all in different places. This is how we now understand things. The Kutraites come along and end all those dynasties officially,

but actually all those lines probably just carried on, as we were saying. And there's no mention of Montemhart in any of this at all. You get the peace dealer I mentioned, and the peace dealer is the thing that explains that, oh God, there's actually loads of kings all at once. So that transforms everything there. And then you get all this information about Montaumhart, including the Assyrian records written in cuneiform

on the wall of a palace in Iraq, explaining that Montaumhart is in charge at Thebes, you know, jaw-dropping moment for us. And then somebody digs up a stele at Karnak, explaining that Samtec I installed his daughter as the god's wife of Amun at the beginning of the 26th century. And there he is again. And it's only when these things come out of the ground, or somebody over in Iraq reads a cuneiform inscription and says, hang on, Manti Manhe of Thebes. The lyrics are a bit like Montaum Heart. Must be the same, right?

It's only when you put all of these things together that you get this very different picture from the one that Manetho presents, which is the one that's the sort of simplest, easiest to understand version of history. That's amazing. And Chris, just going on from that, I mean, Montemart, that archaeology is absolutely remarkable. You perhaps have mentions of him all the way in Iraq, in Assyria at that time. And you mentioned Manetho just there, and you mentioned earlier the Persians. So let's go on to the later, shall we say, invasions into Egypt in antiquity. Because after the Assyrians, you get another power from that part of the world, the Persians, they leave their mark on Egypt. Yes, they do. By the time,

certainly of the Assyrians, it's impossible to understand what's going on internally in Egypt without taking a wider perspective and looking at the Near East, at least as a whole, and ultimately further around the Mediterranean towards Greece as well. Actually, the Assyrian Empire comes to an end not very long after Ashurbanipal's final defeat of the Kushites. Ashurbanipal is actually really the last great ruler of the Assyrian Empire. And again, it's a very striking aspect of Egypt's history. And it's clearly one of the reasons why it was able to stay as stable as it was for so long, that its geography, it makes it kind of naturally defensible somehow. So, you know, it could potentially have been attacked from the south by Sudan as it was, but the Sudanese kings, the Kushites, were Egyptianised.

So back to this idea of whether Egypt would be sort of supplanted in this way. Well, no, because even when the Kushites came along, they were Egyptianised. And when the Libyans had come along, they were also, they became acculturated, they became Egyptians in some sense. What's happening in the Near East is slightly different in that you've got these different groups, generally with a lot of the same sorts of cultural markers again. So the use of the cuneiform script and the worship of certain gods, but there are variations, and at least in terms of the way we understand the history,

you've got the decline of the Assyrians based at cities like Nineveh, and they are supplanted by a new group which comes to be very powerful towards the end of the 7th century BC. They're Neo-Babylonians. Neo-Babylonians don't actually last for... They're not very influential for a very, very long period of time, but ultimately there's another sort of growing power in the region, hailing from

area of modern day Iran, the Persians, who come to dominate the Near East, and indeed Egypt. So at the end of the 26th dynasty, which remains in power in Egypt for about 150 years, the Persians had come to expand into the territory right up to the edge of Egypt. And the final king of the 26th dynasty is the third pharaoh with the name Samtec, Semeticus, to use the Greek version of the name. And he is engaged in battle by the Persians up in the northeast delta at the site of Pelusium on the coast, is defeated. up in the northeast delta at the site of Pelusium on the coast is defeated and this ushers in a new era of Persian domination over the country and this line of Persian kings establishes itself

as the 27th dynasty. The Persians ruled Egypt via a kind of envoy, a satrap to use their word. And they came to rule Egypt for another century or so, but during which time there are revolts and rebellions. And depending on what's going on elsewhere in the Persian empire at the time, their grip on Egypt was kind of tighter or looser. of tighter or looser. And there comes a point when eventually they are ousted and supplanted by three further native Egyptian dynasties, 28th, 29th and 30th. But none of these is very long lasting. The 30th is the longest and two kings during the 30th dynasty, both of whom have, to use the Greek form of the name, they're both called Nectanebo. They have different, similar but different Egyptian names, Nebef and Nachtorcheb. And these two kings, in particular in the 30th dynasty, managed to establish themselves for some

time. They are the last native rulers to build on any sort of great scale. And actually some of their monuments are very fine. There's some extremely fine sculpture from the time. But they are ultimately also again defeated by the Persians, who, as far as they were concerned, never gave up on Egypt. So the time of the 28th, 29th and 30th dynasties in Egypt is not, as far as they were concerned, not really a time when they went away, but just when, you know, they had slightly lost direct control of Egypt. So the defeat of Nexenibo II, you know, is a return to normal service, if you like. There's another just short of two decades worth of Persian rule. And

this time round, that group of Persians did not constitute a dynasty that was recognised by Manetho. So the 30th dynasty is not succeeded by a 31st. Historians sometimes refer to that second Persian wave as the 31st dynasty, but they weren't recognised by Manetho in that way. And that period of just slightly short of two decades of second wave of Persians was ultimately brought to an end because by this time Alexander of Macedon, Alexander the Great, was hell-bent on defeating the Persians and conquering the whole known world. And as part of his pursuit of the Persians, he arrived in Egypt, defeated the satrap very easily. And again,

somewhat in contrast to, certainly to the Assyrians, but in keeping with the approach of the Libyans, the Kushites and the Persians prior to him, Alexander very much, even though in some ways Egypt was really only a stop on his way around the Mediterranean and into the Near East, he stayed for a few months and established himself. He was crowned as pharaoh in Memphis. He sought the blessing of the Oracle of Amunet Siwa famously. We are led to believe that as a religious man himself he was really awed by the Egyptians' piety and by their investment in their gods and their temples.

He also must have been aware that by this point Egypt was a very, very long-lasting, very grand and great civilisation and the monuments would have borne that out as well. And so he took all of this on, and he was crowned Pharaoh Alexander, and you can go and see monuments in Egypt with Alexander depicted in the Egyptian style, standing side on with his name written in hieroglyphs inside a cartouche with an Egyptian coronation name, following a 19th dynasty classic traditional example. And so he came to be pharaoh and so again in that way you've got somebody and nobody's in any doubt that alexander the great and his macedon at this point was the preeminent power in the world and would continue to be for a few years

but egypt you know remains egypt he doesn't come in and and make it greek he himself took on the egyptian way of doing things probably partly He himself took on the Egyptian way of doing things, probably partly thinking that was the canny way of doing things, hearts and minds, etc. But he may have not had much choice in that. He may have very well have found the Egyptian culture was strong enough that it wouldn't have made any sense to try and resist it. And it's not just Alexander who seems to do a similar thing, who's a member of the Macedonian royal family, because after Alexander's death, you have the king who succeeds him, I believe Philip Aridaeus III. You see images of him also as a pharaoh, I believe, at Karnak.

Yeah, you do. Philip Aridaeus is very relatively short-lived in Egypt. He was also, so we are led to believe, not entirely of sound mind. I'm not quite sure what the polite way of putting this is. He didn't have the mental capacity really to rule, but he was the successor. And yes, as you say, there is a very beautiful shrine at Karnak, which was erected in his name. And however competent he was as pharaoh, it doesn't really matter. He was pharaoh and he was recognised as such and a monument erected in his name as such. He was also succeeded by Alexander the Great's own son who became Alexander IV of Macedon, Alexander II of Egypt and there's a scattering of monuments of his. He didn't last very long either. In fact there's a period of, it's not entirely clear when this

came to an end, but a period of probably around about three decades, two to three decades following the death of Alexander, when Philip Aridas is in charge, Alexander of Macedon is briefly in charge. But the real power from a couple of years after Alexander's death is one of his generals called Ptolemy. Ptolemy at a certain point seems to have set his sights not on taking over Alexander's entire empire, and some of the successors were after that. Ptolemy, it seems, wanted to control Egypt and a little bit of territory around and about. A lot. Yeah. Ptolemy gradually established himself and was ultimately crowned in, I think, around about 305 BC as pharaoh.

themselves and was ultimately crowned in, I think, around about 305 BC as pharaoh. So he didn't do this immediately, but he seems to have manoeuvred himself into the position of being the ruler of Egypt by stealing Alexander's dead body from where it had been lying for a couple of years in Babylon, carting it off to Egypt, taking Philip Aridaeus with him for a bit of support, but also probably more importantly, legitimacy. Philip, of course, is Alexander's half-brother. That's the important thing. Knowing very well that whoever shall be the one to bury Alexander's body will appear very much like the designated successor. And Ptolemy decides that he needs the body to do this, and also he's going to bury the body in Egypt, Ptolemy decides that he needs the body to do this,

and also he's going to bury the body in Egypt, which is going to make Egypt, which he's decided he wants, a really crucial part of the post-Alexander empire as the place where the body is buried. And it's also going to manoeuvre him into position. And he achieves this. And we don't know all the ins and outs of how this happened, but it does seem that Alexander's body ultimately came to rest in Egypt, probably at Memphis for a while.

But then once it came to be built, the city that Alexander himself had founded on the coast, Alexandria, was probably the site of a new monumental tomb where the body was laid to rest. And Ptolemy, as I say, waits a while to make it official, but eventually is crowned pharaoh and inaugurates a new dynasty of kings and queens. Most of the males called Ptolemy, all of the main rulers called Ptolemy, most of the female rulers, and it becomes incredibly complicated, Ptolemy. Most of the female rulers called Cleopatra. So there were 15 Ptolemies, depending on whether you think the 15th was really in power or not, certainly 14, and seven Cleopatras, concluding with the seventh, naturally, who is our famous Cleopatra. One question I'm dying to ask,

because it's something that really fascinates me, is that you have mentioned earlier, the last native Egyptian pharaoh, Nectar Nebo II, he is exiled. We know in the British Museum there is his sarcophagus. We know that that sarcophagus was in Memphis at the time that Ptolemy takes Alexander's body to Memphis. Could it be that for a small amount of time at least, Ptolemy housed Alexander the Great's body in that empty sarcophagus that we can now see in the British Museum? that we can now see in the British Museum? The short answer is yes. I love this story.

So that sarcophagus was observed certainly no later than the 16th century in Alexandria in the courtyard of a mosque, the Mosque of the District of El Atarín, which had come to be known as the Mosque of St Athanasius and was probably built on a church of the same name. In other words, a site with a very long history. And the sarcophagus from the off, when it's first observed by travellers, when they first document that they see it, they were all very clear that this was an ancient Egyptian thing. And by the time of Napoleon's invasion, at the end of the 18th century, 1798,

and the couple of years that followed, it had come to be known as the tomb of Alexander the Great. The sarcophagus had come to be known as the tomb. That's clearly not a tomb as such, but maybe it was the sarcophagus. And importantly, at this point, although people recognised because of the hieroglyphs and because of the gods and goddesses on the side that it was ancient Egyptian, nobody can read the inscriptions because the knowledge of how to read the inscriptions had been completely lost. So for a while people took this at face value, this is the tomb of Alexander the Great. So what else would a good European expedition do on coming across a monument like this? Take it. So the French took it with the intention that it should go back home for the edification of the French people, probably to go on display in the Louvre.

But then the French are defeated by the British and the British seize all of their antiquities as part of the arrangement, including most famously the Rosetta Stone, but also, just as importantly, the supposed tomb of Alexander. So this goes to the British Museum, where, as you say, it still is, and where you can go and see it in the sculpture gallery. When Jean-François Champollion cracked the code of hieroglyphs and enabled the world to read the inscriptions, the inscriptions were read and it turns out, as you say, it's the sarcophagus of Nectanebo II. Oh, so maybe it's not the tomb of Alexander after all. It's nothing to do with him. It's the tomb of Nectanebo II. Oh. But actually, Nectanebo II, as you rightly say, was the last native king. He was defeated by the Persians. And the Persians are subsequently defeated a couple of decades later by Alexander. So the sarcophagus is at least kind

of close in time. We also know that Nectanebo was, as you say, exiled. So quite possibly never buried in it. And let's not forget that the Egyptians don't make burial equipment like tombs and sarcophagi when somebody dies, not in the case of a pharaoh anyway. These things are in production a long time before the person has died because it takes a very long time. So probably what happened is that this sarcophagus was made and then never used, and it was probably hanging around in Memphis.

And as you rightly say, that's exactly where we're led to believe Ptolemy brought the body. So when Ptolemy was looking for somewhere to bury Alexander, did he actually put it in that sarcophagus for a while? And did he then move the body in that sarcophagus, which is the last sarcophagus made for an Egyptian king before Alexander's time? Did he then take the body and the sarcophagus to Alexandria, which is where it was found? That does kind of make sense. Another intriguing aspect of this story, in some ways, my favourite part of the story is that most histories explain that Netanyahu was defeated by the Persians and then chased into Cush. He was

chased out of Egypt, never to return, possibly took refuge in the court of the Cushite king. That would make sense. But there is a story in a romanticised, fictionalised account called the Alexander Romance, which actually begins with the story of how Alexander was born. And according to this story, Nexon Ebo didn't flee to Cush. He went in the opposite direction to Macedon. This is supposedly before Alexander's birth, where he would meet Olympias, the wife of the then king Philip of Macedon. And she, I think, is wanting to conceive a child. And so he goes disguised as a magician. And he says, oh, I hear you can't conceive a child.

Well, I should think I could probably help you with that, he says. What's going to happen is a god will come to you and, you know, do the deed and you won't mind that and you'll have a child. And that would be great because he's a god, so he'll definitely have all the necessary virtues for conception. And your son will turn out to be sort of godly so that'd be okay. She's like oh great. And of course Nectanebo is the person who's going to disguise himself as Amun, sleeps with Olympias, she has a child and that child turns out to be Alexander. Contrary to all of the established stories that you know Alexander's father is really Philip. And if this is true then

this means that actually Alexander is the son of Nectanebo, which gives an even stronger connection between Alexander the Great and this sarcophagus, which is now in the British Museum. The Alexander romance story is almost certainly concocted at the behest of Ptolemy or somebody on his behalf, because it's just such a very convenient way of connecting the last native ruler of Egypt with the current line under Ptolemy. And ultimately, the reason for the French belief in the idea that the Skophagos was the tomb of Alexander in the first place is because of legend. So why not? If nothing else, it's a great story. It is a really amazing story. And I think, does it really affirm all that you've been chatting about for the last hour or so from the Libyan kings down to

Ptolemy, that we see this thread continuing that the strength of Egyptian culture and this idea by many of the kings how they want to associate themselves with Egyptian culture, whether it be earlier or whether it be Ptolemy perhaps trying to link Alexander the Great with the last native ruler of Egypt. Yeah, I think it does. You're absolutely right. That's the thread that runs through all of this, is that successive groups of non-Egyptians from various different parts of the world come to Egypt for whatever reason and come to adopt its customs. And even when you have somebody as powerful as Alexander the Great

and an empire as powerful as his with armies all over the known world at this point and with also importantly with Greek culture and the Greek language spreading around that world thanks to Alexander and his conquests even in the face of all of that that tidal wave of a very strong and rich culture. Egypt largely resists it. So Egypt is certainly changed by Alexander and the Ptolemies more than it had been changed by the Libyans, Kushites, Assyrians, Persians. But it's still, if you went to Egypt at the end of the Ptolemaic and had Cleopatra show you around, certainly in Alexandria you'd see some very Greek-looking buildings and some Greek-looking statuary and that sort of thing. But you would

also see obelisks, hieroglyphic inscriptions, pharaohs, kings and queens being depicted in what at first glance looks like absolutely the Egyptian artistic style. And if you went pretty much anywhere else in the country, and the further south you go, the less Greek influence there would be, the more Egyptian culture would seem to be strong. You'd never know that anybody from the classical world had come along. And that remains the situation for a very long time. It's only really with the coming of Christianity and ultimately Islam that things begin to look really different. That's a sort of sweeping and generalisation and oversimplification as well. But if Egypt is no longer the country of

hieroglyphs and people standing on their side and pagan gods and beliefs, it's because of Christianity and subsequently Islam as well. But that's for another day. That's another story, maybe. That's for another day, another story, another podcast indeed. Chris, that was a brilliant chat. Last off, your new book is now out and it is called? It's called Egyptologists' Notebooks, which is illustrated history of Egyptology. I guess it's a kind of how we got to know what we know and what we were talking about today. Chris, once again, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's a pleasure.

Thanks, Tristan. Thanks soistan thanks so much been great fun Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова