Kingship in Ancient Egypt

What is a king in Ancient Egypt?

There are several Ancient Egyptian words for king: nswt and ity are perhaps the most common. The Ancient Egyptian word for kingship is nsyt. In Ancient Egyptian lists of words ('onomastica'), kings are a separate category of beings. The character of kingship doubtless changed considerably over the three thousand years of Ancient Egyptian history, but there are some constant features:

• from the First Dynasty to the Roman Period (about 3000BC-AD300), the king of Egypt is called Horus (god of order and celestial power), and has a separate 'Horus name', identifying him as a unique manifestation of that god
• from the Fourth Dynasty to the Roman Period (about 2600BC-AD300), the king of Egypt is called 'son of Ra' - for most of that period, the phrase 'son of Ra' is a prominent title placed before the name that the king was given when he was born
• the king of Egypt had a special set of names and titles - by the Middle Kingdom (about 2025-1700 BC) there were five: Horus name, name '(of) the Two Goddesses', Horus-Gold name, title nswt bity (dual king) with another name taken at accession to the throne (throne name), and son of Ra title with birth name
• the throne name and birth name were each written in a special motif, an oval with flat end-line - this was called Sn 'ring' in Egyptian, and seems to correspond to the description of king and sun-god as ruling all that the sun-disk encircles in hieroglyphic inscriptions - early Egyptologists gave the name 'cartouche' to the motif

UC 14335 the goddess Nekhbet as a vulture offers a Sn 'ring' to the name of king Senusret II (written in a cartouche)

The king is by nature divine - he is Horus, and offspring of Ra. However, he is also inhabiting a human body, and is therefore mortal. This duality of divine character and mortal constraints is the essence of Egyptian kingship.

The king is also distinguished by the crowns he wears, and by other items of dress, among which the most prominent include the following:

• the Double Crown, comprising Red Crown (first attested as a motif on a pot sherd from Naqada in southern Upper Egypt, dating to the Naqada Period) and White Crown - the two crowns seem to be designed to form a unit, the White Crown slotting into the Red Crown and being held in place by its distinctive frontal coil; the first monument on which a king is shown wearing both crowns is the siltstone cosmetic palette of king Narmer (depicted on one side of the palette wearing the White Crown, and on the other side wearing the Red Crown); some deities wear one or other of these crowns, but they are not worn by the human subjects of the king
• the headcloth of kingship, in Egyptian 'nemes'
• an adaptation of a close-fitting cap, the Blue Crown (sometimes called 'War Crown' in earlier literature, but more research is needed on the precise meaning of all crowns relative to one another and to their contexts)
• the long straight-edged beard, distinct from a shorter beard worn by officials and a tubular beard with curling rounded end worn by gods
• pleated kilt with ornate frontal panel, in Egyptian 'shendyt'

Depictions of the king often show a rearing cobra at the brow (in Egyptian iart 'the rising goddess', source of the term uraeus often used in Egyptology); the rearing cobra also protects the sun-god, and appears on the solar disk worn by goddesses. This is another feature reinforcing the solar character of Ancient Egyptian kingship.

'red crown'	'white crown'	king's head with a nemes headdress	king with 'blue crown'

The Divine Birth Cycle in Egyptian art

How literally should the title 'son of Ra' be interpreted? In the temple built for queen Hatshepsut as king at Deir el-Bahri, on the West Bank at Thebes (about 1450 BC), there is a cycle of figurative scenes narrating the divine birth of the king. The same sequence of scenes is found for the birth of king Amenhotep III in the temple of Amun at Luxor (about 1375 BC), and again in temples of the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods, where the birth of the god Horus is the subject. This Cycle of Divine Birth shows the creator-god Amun-Ra taking the form of a human man to impregnate the woman chosen to give birth to the future king: she is the human vessel within which the purely divine seed of the creator can grow. Thoth, god of knowledge and writing, appears to the woman to reveal that she is to give birth to the son of the creator.

In addition to these formal royal depictions, there is an earlier informal version in a literary narrative cycle preserved in one copy on a papyrus (Papyrus Westcar, now in the Egyptian Museum, Berlin). The copy dates to the Second Intermediate Period (about 1600 BC); the composition is in a late form of the Middle Egyptian phase of the language, indicating a date of composition in the late Middle Kingdom (about 2025-1700 BC) or Second Intermediate Period (1850-1600 BC). The tale relates the birth of three Fifth Dynasty kings to a woman named Ruddjedet, wife of a priest of Ra in Lower Egypt, during the reign of the Fourth Dynasty king Khufu; the birth is assisted by the goddesses Isis, Nephthys and Heqet, with the god Khnum as their porter.

What are the implications of this narrative?

1. the king is the same substance as the creator - he is not human, but divine
2. there is no such thing as 'royal blood' or a royal family as we might understand it - there is only the direct descent from the sun-god
3. human women are not easily 'sons of Ra' - the sun-god is male, and so his offspring is most naturally also male; nevertheless, there are several cases in Egyptian history where a woman claimed kingship, most notably Hatshepsut, but also Sobekneferu in the Twelfth Dynasty (1800BC) and Tausret in the Nineteenth Dynasty (shortly before 1200 BC)
4. although the king is regularly male, all others in close connection with kingship are female - it is human women who come into direct physical contact with the sun-god to produce the next king, and with the reigning king as his wife; therefore 'king's mother' and 'king's wife' are all-important religious positions in court, higher than 'king's daughter' and 'king's son' - there is no king's father, as that is the sun-god, but, where the sun-god chooses a woman who is not wife of the reigning king, her husband is given the title 'god's father when the child becomes king

Questioning the divinity of the king

Although there seems never to have been any expression of opposition to the belief in the divinity of the king, the mortality of the human body occupied by the king during his reign on earth provided opportunities for attitudes other than reverence. These find expression principally in literature: narrative tales may depict a king with qualities at variance with behavioural norms (Sneferu as lascivious, and Khufu as over-zealous in his quest for knowledge, both in the Tales from the Court of King Khufu, on Papyrus Westcar), and the Teaching of King Amenemhat I seems to describe the murder of the king.

In the limited data on political history, event by event, there are indications of strife at court, and attempted or successful plots against the reigning king:

• a group of documents on papyrus indicate that king Ramesses III was the victim of a conspiracy involving members of court
• from ancient Greek historiographical sources for the Twenty-sixth Dynasty it is known that Ahmose II (Amasis) usurped the throne from Wahibre (Apries)

Such events seem not to have disrupted the structure of kingship and belief in the divinity of the king: human beings have unlimited capacity for adaptation, and devout believers are able to destroy what seems, externally, central to the belief system.

Copyright © 2002 University College London. All rights reserved.