QUEEN OF DENIAL Chapter Two

 

I know just what the Pharaoh was looking for – a spot where the sandstone cliffs closed in to within half a mile of the river, and where the once-in-a-century flash floods had sliced a V-shaped notch in the canyon rim, carving a dry canyon or wadi opening toward the river. 

Perhaps the King already had such a location in mind, or perhaps Bek, his Chief of Works, knew just the spot where every morning the sun-god Aten would first dramatically peek into the life giving valley of the Nile. The spot they chose was 100 miles south of the Old Kingdom capital of Memphis, and 150 miles north of the New Kingdom capital of Thebes. Here, almost equal distance between the two historical power centers of Egypt, Amenhotep IV decided to begin his revolution.

The Pharaoh was able to build his new city of Aketaten almost at will because of a recent technological import, the shaduf (above). Wikipedia explains this was “an upright (tripod) frame on which is suspended a long pole... At the long end of this pole hangs a bucket, skin bag, or bitumen-coated reed basket. The short end carries a weight...When correctly balanced... some effort is used to pull an empty bucket down to the water, but only the same effort is needed to lift a full bucket...a shaduf can raise over 2,500 liters (of water) per day.” With this relative new tool, irrigation ditches and fields to grow enough coarse wheat, beans and lentils to feed a city could be established anywhere along the Nile.

But the King could have no secrets from his Grand Vizier, who was also the High Priest of Amun-Ra. And it was that priest,  Huy, through his bureaucrats up and down the river, who assisted in planning and assembling for this assault upon the god Amun Ra. Only the power of the army would have kept Huy from striking back in defense of his god and his own power. Still, throughout 1347 and 1346 B.C.E. , as preparations continued, Thebes must have been a very tense place.

On  13 October of 1345 B.C.E., the fifth year of the Pharaoh’s reign, at the beginning of the cool winter months, they dedicated the start of construction of Aketaten, the "Horizon of the Aten". 

To the east of the 8 mile long construction site a walled village had been prepared for the artisans, foremen and skilled workers - some 64 simple mud brick row houses in a neat rectangle, with a guard house at the only exit. With 5 – 10 men per house, this would have contained over 600 workers. In addition each region would have paid part of their yearly taxes with unskilled workers, who would sleep and eat in tents or in the open.

First to be built was the Chapel of the Great Temple to Aten - the rest of the temple would come in time.  At the same time the royal palace and estates were started, barracks for soldiers and military headquarters, all to the north of the new temple.  

A ditch separated this section from the central city, with large houses for court officials and priests of Aten, each with their own grain storehouses, and, of course, more temples to Aten.  Here, as well, were homes for the clerks and head servants, and the workshop of the highest ranking member of the division of Works who moved to Aketaten, such as Bek's assistant, Thutmose, the sculpture.  

As you moved southward through the city along the “Royal Road”, the homes got smaller, all white washed mud brick and built quickly. The western edge of the city was the High Priest Street, ending in the large temple granaries among the slums and workers' apartments of the southern section.

Carved into the crowding cliffs were to be the tombs of the priests and functionaries who had converted to the new faith.  

And up the canyon leading toward that V-shaped notch in the cliff, in what became the royal wadi, was to be carved the magnificent tomb of Nefertiti and her King, Amenhotep IV.  It was at the dedication and ground breaking ceremony that the King took the next step in his revolution.  

He publicly changed his name.  The Pharaoh decreed that henceforth he would be known as Akhenaten, “The Spirit of Aten”.  It was a declaration of war between the power of the King and his god Aten, and the power of Huy and his god Amun Ra.

“His Majesty mounted a great chariot of electrum, like the Aten when He rises on the horizon and fills the land with His love, and took a goodly road to Aketaten, the place of origin (where Aten's light first fell on the Nile each morning), which (the Aten) had created for Himself that he might be happy therein. It was His son Akhenaten (the Pharaoh), who founded it for Him...Heaven was joyful, the earth was glad (and) every heart was filled with delight when they beheld him.”

His new city had no walls, as if the King were defying Huy to move against him. But Huy could afford to be patient. The strength of Amun Ra (above) did not spring merely from the wealth of its most powerful acolytes such as Huy, but also from its appeal to the masses. They trusted the god “who hears the prayer, who comes at the cry of the poor and distressed..”  Even when he didn't.  Most Egyptians confessed their sins to the merciful and forgiving Lord of Thebes, Amun Ra. “Though it may be that the servant is normal in doing wrong, yet the Lord is normal in being merciful. The Lord of Thebes does not spend an entire day angry...As the Ka (soul) endures, thou will be merciful” And Huy knew the power of this simple idea, that the world was not created merely to please the kings and queens, but that they were created to serve the world. Amun Ra was the faith of the people. Aten was the faith of the King. And they both were moves toward monotheism.

While his new capital was being prepared, Akhenaten, who had been Amenhotep IV, returned to Thebes and step by step pushed his revolution. All donations to Amun Ra were temporarily diverted to the priesthood of Aten, to support construction of Aketaten . And over time that would become permanent. In 1343 B.C.E. the Pharaoh left Thebes for the last time, taking his dear wife, Nefertiti, his harem, his advisers and most of the government to his new city. None were allowed follow him to Aketaten, unless they had publicly renounced Amun Ra and the other old religions, and sacrificed to Aten. This meant that none could appeal their case directly to the king unless they had first converted. That a small statue of Osiris found within the site of Aketaten, shows that for many, this conversion was a matter of convenience only.

Next, the Pharaoh decreed that all other faiths were apostate, and illegal. He ordered the closure of all temples to Osiris, Isis, Ptah, Mut and Amun Ra. Further  he order the desecration of the images of all other Egyptian gods.  The carved name of the gods, their “ren”, was to be scratched out of the blessings and oaths inscribed in all temples and tombs. It was an act of desecration under the old religion, for without a ren the gods could not assist the deceased to rise from the dead. In effect, it damned the Pharoah's own father, and all fathers and mothers of all of Egypt to the eternal cold night. 

Some  destruction was carried out in Thebes, but the absence of resistance to this royal decree seems to indicate it was carried out in few other places in Egypt. And, since Akhenaten had sworn to never leave Aketaten (above) again, it was unlikely he would ever know of this defiance. The Pharaoh continued to issue edicts. And increasingly they were ignored. Either he was willing to be lied to, or he was unaware his self imposed isolation was depriving him of control of everything beyond the the walls of his new palace. Or he had lost his mind.

Nine years after he had ascended the twin thrones of Egypt, in 1341 B.C.E., the King's mother, Queen Tiji, arrived in Aketaten unannounced, and without conversion to Aten. She was delivering a message to the King, and he would have to listen to her. The relationship between divine kings and their mothers is always difficult for the King. It may be easy to convince strangers that you are a god, but your mother remembers how you came into the world, and it was not aboard a chariot of electrum. It was Tiji who convinced her son to cool down his revolution. But whether she told him his decrees were being ignored, or warned him the army had reached the breaking point of support is unclear. But we know that after her visit the revolution abruptly came to a halt. There would be no more changes in Egypt. And we know that Tiji did not stay in Aketaten very long.

The king did not renounce his new faith. Nor did he leave Aketaten. But he restricted himself to rides on the Royal Road that went no where except to his daily absolution in the Great Temple of Aten,. His life became centered on his beloved main wife-sister, now called Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti, “The Aten is radiant of radiance because the beautiful one has come.” And I think it was now she sat as a model for the sculptor Thutmose, as he created one of the most famous icons of art in the history of the world.

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QUEEN OF DENIAL Chapter One

 

I warn you that meeting an icon in person is almost always disappointing. Kings and queens, gods and saints, zealot and demagogue are really just stone cold reflections of their acolytes' vision. Real heroes have feet of clay, and it is the clay that is usually the interesting part. With clay you can shape mountains, build palaces, sculpt river valleys, hold warm food or a cold drink, even record legends. But what are you to do when you meet an icon that is both stone and clay? What are we to make of Queen Nefertiti?

At first glance she is a contradiction, the definition of feminine beauty and royal imperiousness, at once immediate and distant, warm and lifeless. She is iconically Egyptian, and yet she now sits alone in a room in Berlin, Germany. She is a Mona Lisa in sandstone, and clay and plaster, powdered glass and arsenic sulfide, coal and beeswax. And so lifelike you might expect her to suddenly rise and walk out of the room, except she is 4,300 years old. And she has no legs. She is the illusion of a genius, a display of talent and skill that humans would not achieve again until Michelangelo turned stone into an apprehensive David. And yet she was abandoned, discarded as sacrilegious trash, forgotten in the ruins, not worth picking up or going back for. And we are forever in the debt of the fools who wanted her forgotten forever.

The real woman was bred to be a ruler, bred to be a breeder of rulers, who only produced six girls for her husband. Because of that it was the men in her lives who defined Nefertiti. Her father Ay was ambitious, and used her beauty to grasp for power. Her husband, a scarecrow of a misshapen prince who became the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV was one of the most powerful and extraordinary mad men in history. And likely her brother. She was immortalized by the artist Thutmose, a bureaucrat, the Chief of Works for the Pharaoh, but who was artist enough to dare capture her honest humanity in plaster. And she was saved from obscurity by a Prussian academic, Ludwig Borchardt, an overachiever, a dedicated student of ancient Egypt, a savvy horse trader, and a fervent German nationalist. And to her list of admirers and fans  we have to add Adolf Hitler and George Patton and an arrogant Egyptian archaeologist. Consider all of that and you might begin to understand the difficulty in finding the real woman behind the statue. 

The dominance of those men might explain why we do not know her real name. History records her as Nefertiti (above), which translates as “The Beauty Has Come”. And that she was. But that name was bestowed by her husband, and royal Egyptians changed their names every time they changed their roles in life. Her younger sister's name was Mutbenret, a common girl's name meaning “Sweet one of Mut”. Mut was the mother goddess of Egypt. Unless they had a different father (which was certainly possible) Nefertiti's original name was probably closer to her sister. As a queen of the Nile, Nefertiti was also known as the Great Royal Wife, Lady of Grace, Sweet Love, Lady of all Women, Lady of the Two Lands, Mistress of Upper and Lower Egypt. And Egypt was the stage upon which she performed all of her roles, those of the living breathing woman, and those of a stone and plaster icon, missing an eye to keep her a icon soulless.

An ancient Egyptian proverb says “Help yourself and the Nile will help you.” Egypt has been defined by the river for 12,000 years, since the sluggish White and pulsing Blue Nile first joined and began chasing the retreating Mediterranean Sea northward. From their junction just above the 5^th cataract (modern day Khartoum), the Nile traverses 1,200 miles of desert in a great S curve. Then, at Aswan and the first cataract, the now placid river heads north for another 930 miles, a mile wide moving oasis dividing lifeless sands, to modern day Cairo. Over its final 100 miles above Cairo the river divides into two again, the Damietta and the Rosetta channels,  before reaching the sea. And it was here, in the 150 mile wide Nile Delta that Lower Egypt was born first.  Later, three hundred miles lower on the river,  Upper Egypt formed around the city of Abydos. About 3150 B.C.E. (5,000 years ago), the two kingdoms were united when Namer, ruler of Lower Egypt took as his bride the Upper Egyptian princess Neithhotep, meaning “loved of Neith”.

At the end of 1350 B.C.E., when Amenhotep III died after 38 years on the throne, the capital of Egypt was Thebes. Egypt had reached its pinnacle – of wealth and power and influence and art. But the 45 year old man who wore the twin crowns had grown timid and fat, racked by debilitating arthritis and that most Egyptian of ailments, dental abscesses – developed by a life time of grinding sand grains in every mouthful of food. Amenhotep III's devotions to the minor god Aten, the sun disk, grew to match his agonies. His great wife, Tyie, had assumed many of his duties, as he prepared to enter the city of the dead. Only near the end was the Pharaoh's eldest surviving son, who had been schooled away from Thebes, finally brought back to the palace. His absence had kept him safe but woefully inexperienced in palace politics.

The term Pharaoh began as the name of the King's “Great House” - his palace. But it had come to refer not only to the god-man on the throne, but to the palace servants, the bureaucrats and functionaries, much as the term “White House” is used today. This institutionalized Pharaoh was supported by two pillars of power, the army which obeyed only the King's commands and the priesthood of the god Amun-Re (pronounced Amun-Ra). The god Amun had started as a local deity of Thebes, but through centuries of donations by wealthy nobility and even Pharaohs, the god Amun-Re had grown to ultimate power, co-opting many of the old gods into an all encompassing triad deity, the father, son and holy ghost. According to an Egyptian proverb, “All gods are three... He who hides his name as Amun (the invisible father), he appears to the face as Re (the sun), whose body is Ptah.(the creator). By 1350 B.C.E. the priesthood of Amun-Re controlled up to 30% of all land in Egypt, vast wealth and estates, armies of slaves and fleets of ships; even more numerous than the Pharaoh's or the army's.

The man who placed the twin crowns of Egypt on Amenhotep IV's head was the High Priest Amenhotep-Huy (above). He had also been the previous Pharaoh's Vizier, or chief of staff, and his was “Director of Works for Upper and Lower Egypt”, Superintendent of the Harem; Overseer of the Double Treasury of the Great Royal Wife, and Steward of Queen Tiji.  And he continued in those posts under the new Pharaoh, because Huy had allies in both the government and the faith, making him the second most powerful man in Egypt. In some ways, the most powerful. In addition Huy was a wealthy man in his own right, from a powerful delta family. He personally owned large estates and an exclusive resort on the “Reed Sea” where he rewarded his supporters with lavish vacations. He had even dared to dictate to the old and weak previous Pharaoh.

The new young ruler (above) waited, squirming against the restraints placed on him by Huy. At first he went about his duties, dedicating several new temples in Thebes and its religious suburb of Karnak, including one close to his father's heart, the Gempaaten (“the Aten is found in the estate of the Aten”). Most of these temples had been started by his father, and built by his chief architect Bek. But it seems Amenhotep had begun to feel out those around him. We know he encouraged Bek to turn away from the standardized art of his father - and Huy. Amenhotep urged Bek to draw and sculpt more closely from life. The young king and his beautiful wife spreading such revolutionary messages must have set off sparks of support among the young artisans in his service.

After two years Amenhotep and Nefertiti had two daughters (above), Meritaten (she who is loved of Aten) and Meketaten (she who is protected by Aten). As their names indicated, the Pharaoh had begun to turn his private face away from Amun- Re. He was growing more determined that when he finally had a son, the boy should never be forced to kowtow before a mere functionary, a priest like Huy. An idea was forming in Amenhotep's mind, a way to freedom, a sweeping away of the old way of doing things  breathing new life into his Kingdom, and using some of that great wealth his father had guarded to restrain the smothering Priesthood of Amun-Re.

In the third year of his reign, Amenhotep IV ordered Bek to dispatch royal engineers up the Nile, looking for a spot away from Thebes where a new city could be established, a new city dedicated to the god Aten. What he did not tell anyone yet, was that he intended this new city be the new capital of Egypt; to be named Akhetaten

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BIRTH OF THE BOYCOTT

 

I can describe the exact moment of conception. On the evening of 22 September, 1880,  Father John O’Malley was sharing a meal with American journalist James Redpath. At some point during dinner the priest noticed the American had stopped eating. 

When queried, Redpath (above)  explained, “I am bothered about a word. When a people ostracize a land grabber..." Redpath then struggled for a moment, before explaining, "But ostracism won't do" 

According to Redpath Father O'Malley (above, center) then, "...tapped his big forehead, and said, 'How would it do to call it "to boycott him?” , “Redpath wrote later, "He was the first man who uttered the word, and I was the first who wrote it.” (Talks About Ireland, 1881) And thus was born another contribution to the English language. Of course the importance of this invention requires a little explanation.

Freed from its incubator in the central highlands of  Mexico, 'Phytophthora infestans' -  the Potato Blight - arrived in Ireland in the 1830’s. By then the humble potato had become the primary food for the 8 million people of Ireland. It could be grown almost year round. It produced so much protein per square foot that a family could be supported on a quarter of an acre of land. But because of this dependence, in the decades after 1845, the blight created "The Starving Time". Each year more and more of the crop was consumed by the moldy blight.  And because it did its work underground, unseen, its ravages would not be realized until the attempt to harvest the crop.  By 1855  20% of the population of Ireland had starved to death, and another 20% had emigrated.

The British government struggled to respond to the disaster with church based relief, but religious bigotry and politics then compounded the human misery.  The English landlords were mostly Protestant and the Irish farmers were Catholic. Potatoes were molding away in the fields. But wheat, which was growing healthy and abundant in Ireland, was too expensive for the starving Irish to buy,  thanks to the internal tariffs called the Corn Laws enforced by the English Parliment. 

These were duties (taxes) charged on grain imported into any part of the British Empire. This was done to protect the Irish and English landowners from having to compete with cheap American or European wheat.  But by 1880, of the four million souls still surviving on the emerald isle, fewer than 2,000 owned 70% of the land. The three million tenant farmers owned nothing, not even their own homes, and over the two previous years their rents had been increased by 30%, and many were being thrown out of the their ancestral rented homes (above).  And to be expelled meant starvation. The very life was being squeezed out of the people of Ireland.  Law and order demanded it.

Meanwhile, most of the largest, wealthiest landowners, those benefiting from the Corn Law duties, were absentee landlords, Englishmen and women who hired local farmers to manage their Irish estates. “Captain" Charles Cunningham Boycott was one of these local farm owners/managers.  Those tenants who could not pay their higher rent were evicted by the managers. Those who were evicted usually died (above). To argue it was not intended as “genocide” misses the point. Intended or not, it was mass murder. Ireland was teetering on the edge of a social disaster.

On Tuesday, 3 July, 1880, outside the quaint village of Ballinrobe, County Mayo, three men emptied their revolvers into the head and face of twenty-nine year old David Feerick,  an agent for an absentee landlord.  No one was ever charged with that murder.  In early September, outside of the same village, “Captain” Charles Boycott, called on the tenants to harvest the oat crop of absent landlord Lord Erne. 

“Captain” Boycott (above) would be described by the New York Times (in 1881) as 49 years old; "a red faced fellow, five feet eight inches tall, the son of a Protestant minister who had served in the British Army." However he earned his title of Captain not in the military but for his daring attitude in sport. Besides managing Lord Erne's property, Boycott owned 4,000 acres of Irish farmland for himself, farmed by his own tenant farmers.  The day he called Lord Erne's tenants back to work, Boycott also informed the tenants that their wages were being cut by almost half.  The tenants simply refused to work at those starvation wages.

The Boycott family and servants by themselves struggled for half a day to cut and harvest the oats (above) before admitting defeat. Mrs. Boycott then appealed to the tenants personally. They responded to her by bringing in the oat crop before the winter rains ruined it.

On Sunday, 19 September 1880,  Irish politician Charles Stuart Parnell (above), addressed a mass meeting in the town of Ennis.  Parnell called on the crowd to shun any who took over the property of an evicted tenant. 

“When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must show him on the roadside when you meet him, you must show him in the streets of the town, you must show him at the shop counter, you must show him in the fair and the marketplace, and even in the place of worship, by leaving him severely alone — putting him into a kind of moral Coventry — isolating him from his kind like the leper of old.”  

It was the birth of the modern non-violent protest. Unstated, was the reality that this was a religious war, the Catholic south of Ireland against the Protestant controlled north and England.

On Tuesday, 22 September, 1880, a local process server, under orders from "Captain Boycott",  and accompanied by police, issued eviction notices to eleven of Lord Erne's tenants.  The tenants were not surprised. Speaking of Boycott, one tenant told a local newspaper, “He treated his cattle better than he did us.”  

The server would have issued even more eviction notices, but a crowd of women began to throw mud and manure at the agent and his police escort (above) until they had to retreat into the Boycott home. That night, in the house of Father O'Mally, the word "Boycott", as a verb, was invented.  It was put to immediate use.

The next morning, Wednesday, 23 September, a large crowd from Ballinrobe (above) marched to the Boycott home and urged the servants to leave. By evening the Boycotts and a young niece living with them, were alone in the house.

A letter written by “Captain” Boycott was published in the London Times. It made no mention of the raising of rents, only of the refusal to pay those rents. It made no mention of the cutting of salaries, only of the refusal to work. 

It did detail the travails of Captain Boycott and his family (above). His mail was not being delivered. He was followed and mocked whenever he left his farm, and had to travel with an armed escort. “The shopkeepers have been warned to stop all supplies to my house. I can get no workmen to do anything, and my ruin is openly avowed…”

Harper's Weekly Illustrated News for 18 December, 1880,  reported what happened next. “A newspaper correspondent first started the idea of sending assistance to Captain Boycott…one person alone promised to get together 30,000 volunteers.  Mister Forester, Chief Secretary for Ireland, at once vetoed the project of an armed invasion…

"It was accordingly decided to pick out some fifty or sixty from the great number of Orange (Protestants) from northern Ireland who were anxious to volunteer. Under military protection (of 1,000 troops) these men harvested Captain Boycott’s crops… The cost of this singular expedition was about ten thousand pounds…” (over 200,000 American dollars, today).

It took two weeks under military guard for the inexperienced Ulster men to bring in the crop of turnips, wheat and potatoes, valued by Captain Boycott as worth about three hundred and fifty pounds ($8,000).  Mr. Parnell estimated the harvest had cost the English government “one shilling for every turnip.”

Boycott left Ireland with his family on Wednesday, the first of December, 1880,  shrouded in the back of a military ambulance (above) and escorted by soldiers.  His exit had been achieved by nonviolence. He never returned to Ireland. Someone described his exile as the “death of feudalism in Europe".   Or perhaps, with more hope, the birth of modern Ireland.

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