While browsing the stacks of Memorial Library the other day, I came across a copy of Toby Wilkinson’s The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt. To be honest, I’d been avoiding it for some time. When it was published, Wilkinson made it very clear that he wrote the book with an agenda in mind. He believes that scholars and the general public tend to view pharaonic culture with “misty-eyed reverence,” and his book is an attempt to shatter their rose-tinted spectacles. Despite my misgivings, I had a sense of morbid curiosity about the book. So when I saw it on the shelves, I decided to take a gander at it and see if my fears were grounded in reality.
I decided to start out by seeing what he had to say about the end of the 20th dynasty, which is the period I write about in my fiction. Not surprisingly, his account focuses on the travails of Amenhotep and Panhesy (which form the backdrop of The World Inverted) since that’s the best-documented episode from an otherwise shadowy era. And when I say that it’s the “best-documented episode,” I mean we have a handful of random documents that refer to it in varying levels of detail. But we still know next to nothing about it, and scholars still debate the basic sequence of events.
You would never guess that from Wilkinson’s book, however. He presents a clear narrative that begins when a group of “hungry, desperate, and frustrated” Thebans remove Amenhotep from the high priesthood of Amun because of his “intransigence.” Amenhotep reluctantly appeals to Ramesses XI for help (“[g]roveling to the pharaoh was an unwelcome prospect for Amenhotep, but he knew it was the only path back to power”), and the king dispatches Panhesy, the Viceroy of Kush, to restore the ousted prelate.
But when Panhesy arrives, he brings “the roughness of military justice” with him, complete with summary executions. He also takes control of the royal granaries, which leads Ramesses to grow concerned since he can “sense Thebes and the south slipping away.” He dispatches General Piankh to dislodge Panhesy, but Piankh ends up ravaging Thebes in the requisite “orgy of destruction.”
Piankh’s rule in Thebes is characterized as a “military junta” that rules “with a rod of iron,” and of course Wilkinson quotes Piankh’s famous letter to his wife where he asks her to kill two policemen and throw their bodies into the river. When Piankh dies, his ‘junta’ chooses Herihor (“a mature and capable leader in [Piankh’s] mold”), and Piankh’s widow swiftly marries him in a “brilliantly calculated move” that allows her to retain power.
It’s all very gripping, but Wilkinson has fleshed out the bare facts with a healthy amount of conjecture. We have no idea why Amenhotep was removed from office. We also don’t know Panhesy’s exact role in the affair. Far from being Amenhotep’s savior, he was probably the one to drive him from office (a statement made a few years later records that a certain event occurred “when Panhesy came and suppressed my superior (Amenhotep) though there was no fault in him.”). There’s also no evidence that Panhesy appropriated royal granaries. As Aidan Dodson points out in Afterglow of Empire, the evidence suggests that Panhesy eventually returned to favor, so there’s no reason to assume that his association with the royal granaries indicates anything untoward.
Similarly, we know very little about Piankh. Characterizing him as “an army man through and through, brusque, determined, and ruthlessly efficient” is a bit of a stretch given the lack of any firsthand accounts of his character. While there is some evidence that there may have been some sort of skulduggery going on (including the Nodjmet letter mentioned above), it’s almost impossible for us to draw firm conclusion. We have no idea why he wanted the policemen dead—there’s certainly no evidence that they were “mutter[ing] against the junta!”
All this would be fine if Wilkinson were writing historical fiction. But he isn’t; he’s writing something that purports to be history. I realize that he’s writing for a popular audience and therefore comes under more pressure to liven things up, but I think he should have made it clear where the facts end and his conjecture begins. In the endnotes that accompanied the bit I read, he simply mentions that the end of the 20th dynasty is a “hotly debated topic” and alludes to the disagreements over whether Herihor succeeded Piankh or vice versa.
Thankfully, there’s an alternative if you’re interested in the darker side of pharaonic civilization. Pascal Vernus’s Affairs and Scandals in Ancient Egypt is more limited in scope (he focuses on the end of the New Kingdom), but it does a nice job of examining societal turbulence without resorting to sensationalism.
Codex Lochianus 