The Golden Falcon Read online

  Then, in an act of unprecedented sacrilege and venality, the high priest of the Karnak temple ordered the systematic plunder of all the tombs around Thebes, including those in the royal valleys, to finance an internecine war between the provincial governor and the viceroy of Nubia for control of Upper Egypt. Grave robbery was not confined to the New Kingdom period and it was a perennial and well documented problem throughout the entire dynastic history of Egypt. So severe was the problem, one of the most respected sons of Ramesses II, Prince Khaemwaset, undertook the restoration of grave sites and tombs of royal predecessors in the vast Memphite necropolis, just south of modern Cairo.

  It was late in the afternoon when my father returned to the question he posed at lunch. If the kings of Egypt were concerned about tomb robbery, why did they continue to build tombs so vulnerable to the attentions of robbers? The question also raised the corollary. In a culture so deeply steeped in the sanctity of death and the need to preserve the bodies of the deceased so they would serve as the periodic host to the departed spirit, why was grave robbery such a common and ubiquitous event?

  I was not to know, at the end of the afternoon’s discussion, these two questions would acquire an increasing significance over the next few years; nor could I know that a mind greater than mine had pondered on the same question 3,000 years ago.

  Chapter 1 - A ROYAL FUNERAL

  Egypt - 1279 BC

  The solar barque, well past its zenith, sailed slowly towards the western horizon. The valley walls surrounding us darkened under lengthening shadows cast by the peaks of the Theban Hills, causing a slight chill to descend upon the sacred place. The nobles, lower orders of the priesthood, soldiers, pall bearers and musicians had earlier departed the necropolis at the conclusion of the internment. It had been a long and sombre day. Hours earlier,at King Seti’s mortuary temple on the west bank of the Nile, the high priest had intoned the last prayer,

  ‘You are placed upon the gilded bier which will be drawn by unblemished acolytes; the road will be sprinkled with perfumed waters until you reach the door to your tomb. Your children weep with loving hearts. Your mouth has been opened by the sem-priest so you shall regain life. Your purification has been performed. Horus opens your eyes and ears, your flesh and bones being now perfect in all that appertains to you. Spells and glorifications are recited for you. You come in your former shape, as on the day you were born. There stands before you the son whom you love and your courtiers make obeisance. You now go to the land given by Amun, into the sepulchre of the West where you will be enfolded in the warm embrace of Lord Osiris.”

  After the recitation of the final orison in the temple courtyard, Divine Seti’s funeral procession had assembled. First to leave was a detachment of high ranking officers of the Royal Guard, spears reversed, leather helmets and breastplates gleaming, followed by musicians playing a solemn elegy on their pipes and drums. Priests chanted paeans of adoration to the dead king as they moved outwards through the portal of the last pylon ahead of the pallbearers and their grim burden. The pallbearers, their bodies glistening with fragrant oils, strained under the weight of the gold coffin lying beneath its pure white pall on the bier as they raised it up on their shoulders. Behind the coffin walked his son, Ramesses, attended by the high priest and the vizier. There followed a large congregation of the nobility and provincial governors. Others, high born, formed into ranks reflective of their station in the Kingdom.

  As the cortege made its passage out of the temple and onto the sacred way, it passed through a multitude of Theban citizens, their heads lowered in sorrow. Many wept freely whilst others trilled ululations of grief, all stricken with sadness as they paid homage to their ruler who now began the final stage of his journey to eternity. At the end of the double row of sphinxes lining the esplanade to the temple, the pallbearers lowered the bier onto a gilded sled and moved forward. They took up hauling ropes and stepped out, with a slow, measured tread, along the processional route towards the looming hills. Well before Queen Hatshepsut’s temple, the road branched to the right and the pace of the procession slowed as the pathway up to the plateau steepened. At the crest, a squad of Royal Guards formed a barrier across the route preventing commoners from advancing any further into the hallowed necropolis.

  The descent gradually flattened as the path reached the valley floor from behind outcrops of rock shielding its entrance. Stretched out before the funeral party, the Great Place widened into a long, barren ravine, hemmed in by sheer walls buttressed by roughly formed hills between which the road wound sinuously. Seti had chosen to build his tomb almost at the end of the first of the many smaller culverts leading off the valley floor.

  Standing outside the entrance was Meketre, the architect who had overseen the construction of the royal tomb, with a party of priests who had been given the honour of placing the coffin deep within the tomb. Big, muscular men all, they reverentially lifted the coffin from its bier, carried it through the entrance, passed the heavily carved doors and disappeared from view. Others, who would erect the shrines around the sarcophagus after its granite lid was lowered and sealed, followed. The king, high priest, Seti’s brother and the vizier moved through the portal. The attending mourners fell back, talking amongst themselves in hushed whispers.

  Finally, the priests re-appeared, formed two lines flanking the entrance ramp and fell to their knees as the new king emerged into the brilliant sunlight. He stood calm and erect, his face transfigured with grief and his eyes bright with emotion. He raised his arms in supplication to the gods, said a silent prayer and turned to those assembled before him. He recited the traditional funerary text, “You live again, you revive again, and you have become young again and forever. My people, the divine pharaoh has begun the great voyage to join the companionship of the gods. May Menmaetre Seti long remain in our hearts and minds. He will live millions of years. Long may Divine Seti live.”

  The assemblage fell to its knees, raised their arms heavenwards, and repeated “Long may the Divine Seti live.” They rose and turned their faces homewards, departing in silence. A small group remained and watched High Priest Udjahorresnet affix his seals to the ornamented cedar doors protecting the tomb’s entrance. Ramesses stood motionless, observing the final act in the elaborate ceremonies that attended the passage of his father into the Second Life. Seti had worn the red and white double crown for only seventeen years but what glorious years they were!

  It was a scant four decades since General Horemheb had reached out and seized the throne after King Ay’s death. Horemheb had risen to prominence during the turbulent years following the religious chaos created by the heretical King Akhenaten, the negligible reign of the ephemeral King Smenkhkare and the ineffectual rule of the young, effete Tutankhamen. Tutankhamen had died without an heir and General Ay, then commander of Pharaoh’s army, took the throne to himself. He was an old and spent man at the time of his accession and Egypt cried out for a strong, vigorous ruler. Horemheb, recognising the need and the opportunity, grabbed the crown with determined hands.

  The kingdom’s stability had declined during Akhenaten’s reign of insane religious fervour. The traditional gods were angered, the people thrown into confusion and Egypt increasingly threatened by newly aroused and hostile Nubians to the south, intransigent marauders from the Libyan Desert and their clients along the western coastline. More ominously, the new ruler of the militant Kingdom of Hatti, far to the north of our country’s borders, sharpened his weapons and beat the war drums. Like all carrion eaters, he thought Egypt was in its death throes and he could make a feast of its corpse. When he learnt of Horemheb’s daring move, it was reported that he broke his sword against the statue of Baal in frustration.

  With great energy and a clear vision, Horemheb threw himself into reforming the kingdom’s administration. To strengthen the legitimacy of his reign, he first ensured that his seizure of the crown received priestly sanction at the temples in Luxor and Karnak. In return for their blessing, he extolled the virtu
es of Amun and restored the economic power of the priesthood by returning temple lands confiscated by the heretic. As quickly as he expunged the symbols of Akhenaten, he raised up three pylons at the Temple of Amun and began planning the great pillared hall, a monument he failed to commence before his death.

  Horemheb understood the urgency of restoring ma’at throughout the land as one of his most serious responsibilities because ma’at, the antonym of chaos, injustice and lack of sound governance, is the precept embodying the very bedrock of Egyptian civilisation. Each king is judged by his ability to create prosperity and stability throughout the realm with success validating his role as the intercessory between the deities and his subjects.

  Upon his death, a king’s heart is placed on the scales that stand next to Anubis, the jackal headed guardian of the dead, and weighed against a feather given by the goddess Maat. If a ruler had been truly fastidious in his religious observance and preserved the kingdom and its people against harm, then Osiris, Lord of the Underworld, would see the feather outweigh the heart, judge favourably and assure the immortality of the king’s soul. However, if the king had failed in his sacred and secular duties, and the scales of justice dipped against him, then Osiris tossed his heart to the Great Devourer, Ammut, who consumed it. His soul was cast into perpetual darkness and all hope of an eternal life was extinguished in an instant.

  Horemheb chose as his successor, his vizier and loyal deputy, Pa-Ramessu, who was himself elderly when he came to the throne. On his accession, the new king adopted ‘Ramesses’ as his regnal name. After a short reign he died, exhausted by a lifetime of devotion to Egypt, and his son Seti, a man whom Horemheb had foreseen to be possessed of vitality and ambition, ascended the throne. His reign witnessed a robust strengthening of pharaonic rule which greatly enhanced the power and prestige of the fledgling dynasty. In a series of brutal military campaigns, Seti restored Egypt’s control over the peoples of Palestine and Syria who had threatened to align themselves with the Kingdom of Amurra, an ally of the ever bellicose Hittites.

  Seti next turned his attention southwards and stormed into the Kingdom of Kush, ruthlessly crushing any ambitions the Nubians held of freeing themselves from the Egyptian yoke. Thousands were enslaved and wagons returned to Thebes, sagging under the burden of booty captured. The campaign gave the kingdom iron fisted control over the prodigious Nubian gold mines and the endless shipments of bullion provided the king with the financial sinews to embellish his rule with a string of glittering monuments.

  To add muscle to his reign, Seti established the city of Pi-Ramess in the Delta at the gates of the road to Palestine. He spent lavishly, heavily fortifying both the citadel and the surrounding area until the city became a vast trading centre and military encampment with armouries, stables, temples and barracks. Seti’s son, the second to carry the name Ramesses, received his early military training at Pi-Ramess and, as a young warrior, accompanied his father on punitive missions against the Nubians. On a monumental stela at Abydos, King Seti announced to his people, ‘Crown my son, Ramesses, King so that I may see his accomplishments while I still live’, making clear his intention to establish a powerful dynasty on the solid foundations of his achievements.

  Before Seti’s passing, Ta Set Aat, the Great Place, had witnessed the entombment of fourteen kings and one queen since the time of the re-established kingdom two hundred years earlier. Many of the queens and royal children were interred in a pleasant vale at the foot of the Theban Hills, south of the pharaonic burial ground. Apart from the muted incantations of priests offering devotionals at the shrine tables before the tombs of deceased rulers and the infrequent sounds of workmen engaged in quarrying a tomb for the reigning king, the valley was a place of profound dignity shrouded in an almost eerie silence. Here lay the valiant kings, who wrested control of Egypt from the barbarian hands of the Hykos rulers, the warrior kings and the great builders who followed. Memories of their legacy hung heavily in the air.

  Seti built his tomb in Ta Set Aat which, due to its proximity to the great temples across the Nile, had been designated the necropolis of the kings from the time of the restoration of Egyptian rule under King Ahmose. High above Ta Set Aat loomed Dehenet, a peak resembling the great pyramids north of Memphis, a mountain sacred to Horus and abode of the goddess Meretseger.

  During the building of his father’s tomb, Ramesses had taken a keen interest in the symbolism of its architecture. Now, as the funeral procession turned back towards the river and the crossing to Thebes, Ramesses addressed the young man who was his new and untried principal builder, Royal Architect Sennefer, one of the few to be invited to remain for the final blessing and sealing of the tomb.

  “We must talk of my death.”

  Chapter 2 - A KING’S CONCERNS

  Egypt – 1278 BC

  From a time early in the dawn of our civilisation, even before the reign of the legendary King Menes, exulted as the first ruler to unite Upper and Lower Egypt, the people of the Nile valley believed they would attain an eternal afterlife, if their mortal existence was judged to have been righteous. From the pharaoh down to the most humble peasant, the need to arrange the preservation of their bodies and a burial site appropriate to their station in life was, for most, the pre-eminent consideration of their time on earth. Egyptians viewed their life as merely a transient period of preparation for the immortality awaiting them after their death.

  This belief was of paramount importance to those who ruled the kingdom. The pharaoh was acknowledged as the earthly manifestation of the hawk-headed god Horus,son of Isis and Osiris, and his soul would be granted the eternal companionship of the gods. It was his destiny to be a faithful servitor to Amun-Re and spend his days amidst the royal oarsmen who propelled the solar barque across the sky.

  The first royal necropolis had been established centuries earlier at Abydos. Even though the seat of government had moved many times, each king sought to build an elaborate tomb in preparation for the liturgy surrounding his death and his passage, first to the court of judgement before Osiris, and then onto an immortal life basking in the endless radiance of the solar disc. The sacred falcon, bearer of his ba, or soul, flew between heaven and earth, returning to the royal burial chamber in an act of perpetual re-unification between his preserved remains and eternity.

  In the years before his accession, Ramesses had purposely visited the principal necropolises throughout the kingdom. He keenly studied royal tombs whilst offered private veneration to his predecessors, a responsibility that would only become an imperative when he was crowned the Pharaoh. He examined the simple subterranean grave sites of the earliest kings, noting their decayed circumstances, and the subsequent mud brick tombs. He stood in awe before the massive pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure on the Giza plateau and contemplated the lesser pyramids strewn like scattered jewels in the great Memphite necropolis. He reflected often on his own death and tomb.

  He admired the new style of mortuary temple created by Mentuhotep in the eleventh era and so gracefully emulated, in more recent times, by Queen Hatshepsut in the stark, arid bay beneath the towering ramparts of the Theban Hills. The most recently built royal mortuary temples, clustered thickly on the western plain opposite Thebes, provided much of the inspiration he would later use when it came to creating his own Temple of a Million Years. Nor did he fail to notice the grandeur with which certain kings sought to perpetuate their power through their monuments and he was intimately aware of every attempt, successful or otherwise, to immortalise their legacy.

  He knew that King Djoser built the first pyramid some 1,400 years before his own birth. Djoser and his architect son, Imhotep, were the first to build massively in stone, a revolutionary departure from traditional practice when mud brick was the only material used in building.

  The three overwhelming limestone and granite clad pyramids at Giza, together with the smaller pyramids to the north and south of Memphis, were the first truly visible manifestations of the pharaonic power. The earl
ier style of mausoleum entombed their occupants in structures of little architectural significance, whereas the pyramids served not only as seemingly indestructible testaments to the imperium of the kings but, in Ramesses mind, they also performed another more significant function.

  He believed they offered unassailable protection to the king’s body in its life eternal because buried deep under the enormous mass of stone lay the burial chambers of the kings who dictated their creation. He also entertained an irreverent thought. Nobody would forget the names of the rulers who built the Giza pyramids. Their names would be known for as long as their monuments endured and he thought that would be a very long time.

  The monuments were a spectacular statement of regal power frozen in stone. Built on a ridge high above the Nile and safe from floodwater damage, they stood sharply etched against the sky, their sides clad in finely cut limestone and polished granite and crowned with a pyramidion sheathed in precious electrum, the alloy of gold and silver. When bathed in the rays of the sun shining down from the Barque of Re on its daily voyage across the heavens, they gleamed like immense beacons. He filed away in his mind that these were the most impressive monuments anywhere in Egypt whilst wondering why no subsequent pharaoh had not built as massively.