GIRLS OF THE HAREM

 

I come home in the morning light,
My mother says "When you gonna live your life right?"
Oh ,mother, dear, We're not the fortunate ones,
And girls, They wanna have fun.

I could call the Pharaoh's women a harem, but that conjures up  images of sex starved coquettes -  a male Egyptologist's fantasy if ever there was one. It also seems an inefficient use of resources, feeding and clothing so many sperm receptacles. In truth these women were multi-taskers. For example, we know the Pharaoh's "harem" had a very nice choir.

But besides harmonizing, the ladies of the harem must have earned their keep between reproductive sessions by cutting ribbons at temple openings, encouraging teenagers to just say no to drugs and reminding stone masons of their vital role in the Pharaohonic economy. Proof of the importance of women in Ancient Egypt can be found in events which occurred some 4,200 years ago, at the end of what is called "The New Kingdom" - which gives you some idea of how old Ancient Egypt really is..er, was.  In the spring of 1167 B.C.E. Ramses III sat down to talk with his wives, and he almost did not get up again

Usimare (Ramses III's real name) was a good example of the vagaries of picking a Pharaoh. He was tall for the age - about 5.8", smart, competent and dedicated. His reign should have been as successful as his idol's, Ramses II, who during his 67 years of rule (according to tradition) threw those freeloading Israelites out Egypt. But Usimare was also a really unlucky guy.  

Just before Usimare became Pharaoh a large volcano in Iceland blew its top, and the shadow of its ash cloud badly damaged Egyptian harvest. The price of wheat skyrocketed, and entire classes of farmers and fishermen became hobos, stealing that they could not buy, be it food or a new place to live.

In the Middle East they were called Philistines, and they spent a couple of hundred years bringing "tsuris" to the upstart Israelites. In Tunisia they established Carthage, and a thousand years later became the Roman Republic's worst enemy. In Egypt they were called the Sea Peoples, and fighting them off left the treasury flat broke. That distant volcanic eruption wasn't Ramses III's fault, but he got the bill. He just wasn't lucky. He wasn't even lucky in his death, in that he did not die fast enough.

The phone rings in the middle of the night,
My father yells "What you gonna do with your life?"
Oh, daddy, dear,
You know you're still number one,
But girls, They wanna have fun

By the spring of 1167 B.C.E., poor, unlucky and broke Ramses III was about 65 years old and had been Pharaoh for thirty-two years. He had dragged his entire court to Thebes for the five day celebration of his Heb-Sed, or Feast of the Tail of the Jackal. There were parades, dinners, banquets and lots of drinking, and on the fourth day the Pharaoh had to "run" a course and shoot arrows to prove he was still physically fit enough to rule. What the New Kingdom would have done if the old boy had not been up to it, I don't know. But in the Old Kingdom they used to kill him if he was too feeble.

His harem had of course come with him, headed by his new Great Wife Isis and her boy,  22 year old newly crowned Prince Heqamatre, and also Prince Pentaweret, who was  Queen Tey aka Tiy's son.  Now  Penatweret was just a few months younger than Heqamatre. But that slight seniority had moved Heqamatre next in line to be Pharaoh over Pentaweret, and replaced Tey with Isis as the Great Wife..  

Ramses III could have overridden these automatic adjustments in his royal household if he had felt one heir more suited than the other, but for whatever reason he did nothing. And that would prove to be a fatal choice because Tey was the kind of a girl who took her place in the harem hierarchy very seriously.

Well, she wasn't a girl, she was a grown woman who had given birth to three sons, and she was at least forty years old by now. Listen,  Tey must have been an impressive broad, because six of the other wives sided with her in this matter. And they were all the daughters of rich and powerful families.  Money always matters.

In addition, Tey had considerable support from the bureaucracy which maintained the harem. Chief of the Chamber, Pebekkamen, and his assistant were down with her plan, as well as Peynok, Overseeer Of The Harem,  and his scribe and seven royal butlers, who were all titled members of the bureaucracy. 

Tey also managed to draw the army into her conspiracy. The sister of an officer in the Nubian Archers, who was one of the "harem six", urged her brother to "Incite the people to hostility! And come thou to begin hostility against thy lord." Well, I suppose, she could have been more circumspect. 

In any case, Tey even had conspirators working inside the Thebian police force. She was also attempting to seduce the head of the Egyptian Treasury, which was called The White House. And Tey even managed to enlist Iroi, Ramses III's personal priest-physician. But it appears he was the only priest who joined the conspiracy.

Some boys take a beautiful girl,
And hide her away from the rest of the world.
I wanna be the one to walk in the sun.
Oh, girls, They wanna have fun.

See, ancient Egypt was peppered with temples, large and small, and each had their priests and their grain fields to support them, and slaves to work those fields. By the best estimates, 14 % of the irrigated land and 2% of the population were owned by the temple priests. The temples also owned 500,000 head of cattle, 88 large ships and some 53 workshops and shipyards. And in 1167 B.C. all of this was tax exempt, which shifted more of the tax burden onto the lesser nobles and the peasants. Does any of this sound familiar?

Ramses III tried to reduce his expenses by replacing his bureaucrats and parts of the army with slaves, supplied by royal families acting as independent contractors.  But Ramses III also contributed to this power shift to the priesthood by continuing to donate large sums to the temples. Gold and silver went straight out of the government coffers and into the collection plates. Ramses III boasted on a temple wall, "I did mighty deeds and benefactions...for the gods and goddesses of South and North." Those benefactions hastened the bankruptcy of the national treasury. Familiar again, right?

Just three years before this original "Year of the Woman" the artisans working in the royal tombs had stopped work because their pay had stopped. Ramses crushed this first worker's revolt in history as if he were the Governor of Florida   But that wildcat strike indicated that Tey was not just trying to make her son Pharaoh, she was trying to reverse the decline of the power of The Pharaohs.  The whole thing came to a head, say the ancient accounts, when Ramses III  decided to spend a night with the girls.

Since Ramses III's mummy was discovered in 1886 we know that the Pharaoh received no knife or spear wounds. And his skeleton reveals no broken bones. I'll bet that Usimare was poisoned, not killed but weakened enough that within a few days after setting down to break bread,  he died, perhaps of heart failure or dehydration or diarrhea.  A hint is that in later centuries, Egyptians invoked Ramses III's name when seeking divine assistance in the case of snake bite. And like a snake, Ramses III lashed out from his death bed against those who had stepped upon him.

In three scandalized trials conducted after Ramses III's death, twenty-seven men and six women were convicted of treason, including her boy, Pentaweret.  Pentaweret was forced to drink poison. Every one else, including Tey herself  was slowly simmered to death on a barbecue, cooked until the flesh was just falling off their bones. And then their bones were ground up and their ashes were scattered to the four winds, condemning the immortal souls of these original resurectionists to wander the after-life without a body.  Tough, I know. But if you are going to shoot at the Pharaoh, you had better not miss.

And it is a shame Tey did miss. In his will, Ramses III donated 86,400 slaves to the estates of the god Amon's temples. His son and heir, Heqamatre, became Ramses IV, but he ruled for just six years. Ramses now followed Ramses with such rapidity that the High Priest of el-Kab who had helped Ramses III celebrate his Heb Sed, was still in office when Ramses IX died in 1111 B.C.E. By then the priest were  the power in Egypt, and the country was run for their benefit, sort of like the bankers run America today, and Egypt slipped into a centuries long dark age.  

When the working day is done,
Oh, girls, They wanna have fun.

Ah, if only the poison Tey aka Tiy used had been quicker, then the New Kingdom might have lasted a few hundred years longer, and women might have played a bigger part in history. After all, the girl just wanted to have fun.

- 30 -

IN FLANDERS FIELDS

 

I remind you that landscape is history, and as proof I offer the green “ponder lands” 30 miles south of the North Sea coast, and 10 miles north of Lilli, France. Politically this is Belgium, but morally it is a haunted landscape, described by a 21^st century writer as “...bleakness...dismal (where) winds howl across flat fields and whip through villages, wrapping around church steeples and belfries” 

To the English of a certain generation this will always be “Wipers”, a poor pronunciation of the French “Ypres” (Ipres).  

Here over four horrible years in the second decade of the 20^th century, hundreds of thousands of mostly young men from Germany and the British Empire endured the unendurable, day after miserable day engaged in static trench warfare and the clumsy, expensive and stupid attempts to break it.

So many are buried here in marked and unmarked graves that their bones make up no small portion of the soil. And many were buried alive.

A trench in the Great War meant survival, protection from artillery shells and machine gun fire. But here in the “le plat plays”, the 'flat country' in the local Flemish dialect, any digging or shelling uncovered a clinging, grasping yellowish brown clay, perpetually dripping with water. It coated everything it touched. It added pounds to boots, and subtracted warmth from soaked wool uniforms.

At the slightest shower, trenches and “dugouts” flooded. Those who existed here fought rats grown fat on the corpses that littered no-man's-land between the trenches, suffered from fungus inspired trench foot, trench mouth, and dysentery, cholera and typhus. The Germans had it marginally better, because they were ensconced on the 'high ground' of the Messines-Ypress Ridge, all of thirty feet above the worst of it. Unable to dig too deep, the Germans built concrete pill boxes above the ground. The British soldiers, without benefit of such amenities, endured not only the constant damp and the clay, but having German snipers and artillery observers overlooking their every move.

So it was the British who were were forced to explore the terrain below ground. Test drills discovered the yellow clay was waterlogged because about 70 feet further down was an impervious layer of hard brown clay, which trapped the ground water above it. But 30 dry feet below that was a soft blue clay, just damp enough to be perfect for tunneling. Early in 1915 recruiters went out to the mining districts of Britain, Canada and Australia, looking for volunteers.

One company of 600 miners signed up on a Thursday morning in Yorkshire, and were doing preliminary digging the following Wednesday afternoon in Flanders. In all, 33 companies were formed from three continents, but the procedures were the same at all 21 tunnels begun west and south of the Messines ridge. First, about a quarter- mile behind the front, a large steel conduit (above) was driven straight down for fifty feet. Using this as a shield against the oozing yellow muck, the miners then dug straight down to the blue clay. A gallery was then cleared at the bottom of the shaft and a winch lift installed to the surface. Then, divided into four to eight man teams, each company of royal engineers would begin to tunnel toward the German trenches.

The “Kicker” would lay on his back, supported at an angle by a heavy board or sand bags. Using his feet and legs, he would thrust a spade into the clay, slicing away about 9 inches with each push. A “Bagger” would shove the clumps into burlap sacks and pile them atop a rubber wheeled trolley, which a pair of “Tammers” would then push down rails toward the entrance.  Seventy bags were required for every foot of tunnel dug. At the gallery the bags would be winched to the surface, where every night regular army work teams removed the clay for careful disposal. German aircraft kept watch for dry clay on the surface, as this was proof of tunneling.

The trolley returned with pre-cut wooden bracing in 9 inch sections. To avoid the sounds hammering, the bracing was designed to be held in place by the tendency of the blue clay to swell on exposure to the air. Each crew worked a 6 to 12 hour shift at the face, with 8 hours off. The crews then rotated to operating and repairing the air and water pumps and the winches. Bunk rooms were carved off the tunnel shafts. Underground the miners were reasonably safe from all but the heaviest German shells, but the tension and claustrophobia insured that every four days the entire company had to be rotated behind the lines, one hour of Rest and Recovery for every sixteen hours spent in the tunnels.

The tunnels were dark, cold and often flooded with ice cold water. Over one six week period one mining company had 12 men killed by methane and carbon dioxide gas, with 28 sent to hospital and another 60 treated in the unit. Besides the constant threat of cave-ins, the exhausted men suffered all of the usual infections of trench warfare plus those caused by breathing stale air. A surface soldier, artilleryman Charles Brett, with the 47^th London Division, observed that “When the tunnellers emerged above ground they could easily be distinguished by their poor pallid faces. We who lived, or died,...daily subject to bombing, shelling or sniping, pitied them from the bottom of our hearts”

One tunnel was abandoned after it collapsed under a German counter-mine, and it was decided three others would not be used because of various problems. But after two years of digging, by May of 1917, over a million pounds of high explosives were packed into 17 tunnels – – about 40,000 pounds in each – directly under the German trenches atop the Messenes Ridge.

The pre-assault bombardment began on Tuesday, 8 May, 1917  and continued for two weeks. On Wednesday, 23 May, it became heavier, as the artillery was increased to 2,300 guns.  So heavy was the bombardment - 3.5 million shells a week - that German front line troops were rotated back for relief every other day. Almost 90% of the German artillery behind the Messnes Ridge was destroyed under this bombardment. 

The night before the grand assault, Eton educated General Herbert Plumer (above), told his staff, “Gentlemen, we may not make history tomorrow, but we shall certainly change the geography.”

At 2:50 in the morning, Thursday, 7  June, 1917  the British artillery barrage suddenly ceased. The silence that crashed over the trenches was deafening. German infantry clambered out of their dugouts and raced to their weapons. The British were in luck, as at this precise moment, the positions were being relieved, and the trenches were filled with twice as many defenders as usual. 

At 3:00 A.M. a white star shell exploded above the German positions, illuminating the stark landscape. And then at 3:10 A.M., in the words of one miner, “All hell broke loose”.

The 17 blasts were clearly heard a hundred miles away in London. The tunneler continued, “In the pale light it appeared as if the whole enemy line had begun to dance....

...then, one after another, huge tongues of flame shot hundreds of feet into the air, followed by dense columns of smoke, which flattened out at the top like gigantic mushrooms...The whole scene was majestic in its awfulness.” And it all happened over a period of just 30 seconds.

The largest mine, labeled as “Spanbroekmolen” and planted 88 feet below ground level, left a crater 40 feet deep and 280 feet in diameter. Before the eyes of Second Lieutenant J.W. Naylor, “The earth seemed to tear apart...The whole ground went up and came down again. It was like a huge mushroom.” 

And Private John Rea Laister wrote after the war, “Arms, legs, trees, bricks coming down all over the place....I thought, 'I wonder how many poor buggers, have gone up with that lot'.”

The artillery began an immediate walking barrage, with the advancing infantry right behind.

 By 10:00 that morning all the first day's objectives had been achieved. And for the first (and only) time in World War One, the defense suffered more causalities than the attackers. British casualties were 24,564, killed, wounded and missing.

They captured 7,354 German soldiers, with perhaps another 4-5,000 Germans missing and presumed dead in the blasts, and 23,000 wounded. The British front line advanced three miles and dug into their new positions, in front of yet another line of German trenches, a line which would not be breached until late in 1918. On the Western front in World War One, this “Bite and Hold” at Messenes Ridge was considered a major success.

For all the effort and sacrifice, there were no more large scale “Mining Campaigns” in World War One. No where else did the combination of soil and static positions combine to make it a viable option. And with time, the effort and sacrifice was largely forgotten...

...at least until Friday, 17 June,  1955.  That afternoon a thunderstorm passed over the old battlefield. And when a bolt of lightening struck a telephone pole placed directly above one of the three unused and abandoned mines, it set off the 38 year old explosives.  The resulting blast created a hole 60 feet deep and 120 feet wide (above). Windows in houses for miles around were shattered. Luckily, the only causality was a single cow.

That blast revived interest in the mining operations, and the last unexploded mine was finally located midway though the first decade of the 21^st century, beneath a placid farm with the name of La Basee Cour - The Base Court.  Sixty year old farmer Roger Mahieu, insisted he was not worried about the 22 tons of explosives buried 80 feet under his house. “It's been there all that time, why should it decide to blow up now?”

Except,  the same question is asked before most catastrophes, like World War One.

- 30 -