The Tempest in the Tempest: The Natural Historian

BULLETIN OF THE EGYPTOLOGICAL SEMINAR he Art and Culture of Ancient Egypt: Studies in Honor of Dorothea Arnold VOLUME 19 2015 BES 19 BULLETIN OF THE EGYPTOLOGICAL SEMINAR he Art and Culture of Ancient Egypt: Studies in Honor of Dorothea Arnold VOLUME 19 2015 BULLETIN OF THE EGYPTOLOGICAL SEMINAR The Art and Culture of Ancient Egypt: Studies in Honor of Dorothea Arnold Edited by: Adela Oppenheim and Ogden Goelet With the assistance of: Dieter Arnold Sara Chen Marsha Hill Anna-Marie Kellen Scott Murphy Pamlyn Smith VOLUME 19 2015 The Egyptological Seminar of New York Contents President Adela Oppenheim, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Compiled by Marsha Hill Bibliography of Dorothea Arnold .................................................................................................... 1 viCe-President Phyllis Saretta James P. Allen The Advent of Ancient Egyptian Literature ................................................................................. 15 treasurer Stewart Driller editors of bes Ogden Goelet, Jr., New York University Susan J. Allen An Offering to Mentuhotep, Son of Mentuhotep-ankhu, Found at Thebes—MMA 26.3.316 ................................................................................................ 25 Adela Oppenheim, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Hartwig Altenmüller Tausret als Königin und Pharao in den Abbildungen ihres Königsgrabes ............................... 41 MeMbers of the board: Matthew Adams, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University Peter Feinman, Institute of History, Archaeology, and Education Sameh Iskander, Ramesses Temple in Abydos Project David Moyer, Marymount Manhattan College Dieter Arnold Some Thoughts on the Building History of the Temple of Mentuhotep Nebhepetre at Deir el-Bahri ................................................................... 59 Felix Arnold The Temple of Ramses II in the Precinct of Hathor at Memphis Part I: Reconstruction and Meaning ............................................................................................. 69 David O’Connor, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University Holeil Ghaly The Temple of Ramses II in the Precinct of Hathor at Memphis Part II: Hathor-Headed Columns .................................................................................................. 79 Copyright © The Egyptological Seminar of New York, 2015 Joan Aruz The Nude Female and the Iconography of Birth .......................................................................... 85 This volume was produced in part with the assistance of: David A. Aston The Faces of the Hyksos: Ceramic Sculpture in the Fifteenth Dynasty .................................. 103 Bettina Bader Disc-Shaped Ornaments of the Early Middle Kingdom ........................................................... 117 Miroslav Bárta A Reassembled False Door from the Time of Nyuserra ............................................................ 131 iv v Daphna Ben-Tor Scarabs from Hatshepsut’s Foundation Deposits at Deir el-Bahri: Insight into the Early 18th Dynasty and Hatshepsut’s Reign ................................................... 139 Rita E. Freed The “Bersha Procession” in Context Part I: An Art Historical Examination ....................................................................................... 293 Robert Steven Bianchi A Hippopotamus for Hera ........................................................................................................... 147 Pamela Hatchfield The “Bersha Procession” in Context Part II: Conservation History and Technical Study .................................................................. 311 Manfred Bietak and Bettina Bader Canon and Freedom of Fringe Art: à propos the Fish Bowls in the Second Intermediate Period ..................................................... 157 José M. Galán 11th Dynasty Burials below Djehuty’s Courtyard (TT 11) in Dra Abu el-Naga ..................... 331 Janine Bourriau and Will Schenck The Last Marl C Potter: Sedment 276A ...................................................................................... 179 Ogden Goelet, Jr. Verse Points, Division Markers, and Copying ............................................................................ 347 Betsy M. Bryan “Just Say ‘No’”—Iconography, Context, and Meaning of a Gesture ....................................... 187 Zahi Hawass Newly Discovered Scenes of Tutankhamun from Memphis and Rediscovered Fragments from Hermopolis ................................................................................ 359 Emilia Cortes From “Weft Fringes” to “Supplementary Weft Fringes”: Thoughts and Discussion on Weaving Evolution in Egyptian Textiles .................................... 199 Denise Doxey The Family of Sehetepibra: A Pair of Unpublished Stelae in New York.................................. 219 Marianne Eaton-Krauss The Original Owner of Egyptian Museum, Cairo JE 46600 .................................................... 225 Biri Fay Ancient Egyptian Art History is Dead: Long Live Ancient Egyptian Art History!............... 237 Richard Fazzini and Mary McKercher An Interesting Pottery Vessel from the Temple of Mut at South Karnak ............................... 241 Peter Feinman The Tempest in the Tempest: The Natural Historian ................................................................ 253 Marjorie Fisher A Recently Discovered Fragment of Senenmut’s Sarcophagus................................................. 263 Marsha Hill A Statuette of Two Men and a Boy from the Amarna Period Part I: Face Facts for Understanding the Sculpture .................................................................. 367 Ann Heywood A Statuette of Two Men and a Boy from the Amarna Period Part II: Materials Analysis and Imaging .................................................................................... 379 Salima Ikram A Torso from the Gayer-Anderson Museum, Cairo................................................................... 389 Sameh Iskander Building Phases of the Temple of Ramesses II at Abydos ......................................................... 393 Peter Jánosi “Bringing the Choicest of Haunches and Fowl…” Some Thoughts on the Tomb of Rehuerdjersen at Lisht-North ................................................ 403 W. Raymond Johnson Sexual Duality and Goddess Iconography on the Amenhotep IV Sandstone Colossi at Karnak ............................................................................. 415 Laurel Flentye Royal Statuary of the Fourth Dynasty from the Giza Necropolis in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo ................................................................................................... 277 Jack A. Josephson Reevaluating the Date of the Abydos Head (MMA 02.4.191) .................................................... 423 vi vii Janice Kamrin The Egyptian Museum Database, Digitizing, and Registrar Training Projects: Update 2012 .................................................................................. 431 Nanette B. Kelekian The Resurrection of Reniseneb .................................................................................................... 441 Peter Lacovara The Menkaure Valley Temple Settlement Revisited .................................................................. 447 David T. Mininberg One Snake or Two: Determining the True Symbol for Medicine ............................................. 455 Paul T. Nicholson, Phillip Parkes, and Caroline Jackson A Tale of Two Tiles: Preliminary Investigation of Two Faience ‘Bricks’ ................................ 463 David O’Connor Who was Merika? A Continuing Debate .................................................................................... 477 Diana Craig Patch An Exceptional Early Statuette from Abydos ............................................................................ 491 Elena Pischikova The Second Tomb of the Vizier Nespakashuty ........................................................................... 501 Deborah Schorsch Bastet Goes Boating ...................................................................................................................... 571 Gerry Scott An Old Kingdom Monkey Vase in the Collection of the San Antonio Museum of Art ........................................................................................................585 Friederike Seyfried Ein weiterer Beleg für ein Gebäude- bzw. Tempelteil, namens RwD-anx(.w)-Jtn in Amarna – zur revidierten Lesung eines Blockes in Privatbesitz ......................................... 591 Hourig Sourouzian Lion and Sphinx Varia in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo........................................................... 597 Rainer Stadelmann Ptah who Listens to Prayers in the Mortuary Temple of Amenhotep III at Thebes ............................................................... 613 Paul Edmund Stanwick Caracalla and the History of Imperial Sculpture in Egypt ...................................................... 619 Isabel Stünkel Notes on Khenemet-nefer-hedjet Weret II .................................................................................. 631 Nicholas Reeves Tutankhamun’s Mask Reconsidered ........................................................................................... 511 Miroslav Verner “Two Vigilant (Pyramids): The Small One and the Large One”— On the First Cult Pyramid in a Queen’s Pyramid Complex ..................................................... 641 Catharine Roehrig Two Tattooed Women from Thebes ............................................................................................. 527 Malcolm H. Wiener Oh, No—Not Another Chronology! ............................................................................................. 649 Ann Macy Roth Upper Egyptian Heliopolis: Thebes, Archaism, and the Political Ideology of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III ................................................................... 537 Kei Yamamoto Iconography of the Sledge in Ancient Egyptian Funerary Art................................................. 665 Wafaa el Saddik A Head for Amenemhat III’s Heb-sed Triad? ............................................................................ 553 Phyllis Saretta Of Lyres, Lions, Light, and Everything New Under the Sun: An Amarna Relief in The Metropolitan Museum of Art .......................................................... 557 viii Christiane Ziegler Note sur la peinture « aux vases » (Louvre D 60 bis) ................................................................. 675 Irit Ziffer Pyramid Myths: Israel in Egypt .................................................................................................. 683 ix Peter Feinman The Tempest in the Tempest: The Natural Historian1 “(8) Then the gods [caused] the sky to come in a tempest of r[ain], with darkness in the western region and the sky being (9) unleashed without [cessation, louder than] the cries of the masses, more powerful than…, [while the rain raged (?)] on the mountains louder than the noise of the (10) cataract which is at Elephantine. Every house, every quarter that they reached […] (11) floating on the water like skiffs of papyrus opposite the royal residence for a period of […] days, (12) while a torch could not be lit in the Two Lands.”2 “The sun is out because good things are happening,” President Barack Obama, Rose Garden, the White House, May 19, 2009.3 What actually happened in the land of Egypt that gave rise to the description in the Tempest Stela of Ahmose? How literally should one take these words of ecological and environmental chaos contained in the stela, or are they to be interpreted another way? The question was reopened nearly two decades ago with the publication of “Texts, Storms, and the Thera Eruption,” by Robert Ritner and Karen Foster, Yale colleagues at the time. As the title of the article suggests, they sought to link the Thera explosion with Ahmose. They wrote: It follows that a volcanic event of Thera’s magnitude should figure in Egyptian and Mesopotamian records. Study of the Tambura [1815], Krakatoa [1883], and later Thera observations shows that we should not expect to find texts describing the actual eruption, but rather mention of one or more of the most spectacular volcanic aftereffects: daytime darkness, thunderous noise, atmospheric disturbances, and vividly colored skies, especially at sunset over a period of several years.4 1 This article is based on a paper presented at the 2007 conference of the American Research Center in Egypt in Toledo, Ohio and is dedicated to Dorothea Arnold. Years ago when I had a radio talk show, Dorothea agreed to be a guest speaker. As it turned out, the appointed time was a dark and stormy day. The first speaker had been asked to discuss Baal so the topic and the weather were a perfect fit. For a speaker on the land that was the gift of the river, the correlation was poor. So while the sky thundered, lightning crackled, and people cowered inside or drove tentatively with headlights at full glare, Dorothea gamely discussed the flooding river that defined Egyptian culture. For her perseverance and dedication amidst the storm, the topic of the Tempest Stela of Ahmose seems most appropriate. 2 Translation by Robert K. Ritner, in Karen P. Foster and Robert K. Ritner, “Texts, Storms, and the Thera Eruption,” JNES 55 (1996), 11. Fragments of the Tempest Stela were discovered at the Third Pylon of the Karnak Temple at Thebes by the French archaeologists between 1947 and 1951. The reconstructed text was published in 1967 by Claude Vandersleyen, who was given access to the photos and records of Pierre Lacau from that excavation. The translation subsequently was revised after the discovery of two more fragments (see E. N. Davis, “A Storm in Egypt during the Reign of Ahmose,” in Thera and the Aegean World III, “Chronology” Proceedings of the Third International Congress, Santorini, Greece, 3-9 September 1989, David A. Hardy and A. Colin Renfrew, eds. (London, 1990), 232; Claude Vandersleyen, “Une tempête sous le règne d’Amosis,” RdE 19 (1967), 123-159; Claude Vandersleyen, “Deux nouveau fragments de la stèle d’Amosis relatant une tempête,” RdE 20 (1968), 127-134. 3 Quoted in Bryan Walsh, “How Green Is He?” Time 173/21 (2009), 34. Foster, “Texts, Storms,” 4. 4 253 BES 19 (2015) Feinman, “The Tempest in the Tempest” Ignoring the issue of why the Mesopotamians should mention these phenomena given their distance from the Mediterranean coast, the authors claimed that the Tempest Stela of Ahmose was precisely such a text.5 To them, the text described a far-reaching cataclysm not confined to Thebes, where the stela was found. Furthermore, the actions taken by Ahmose at Thebes to restore the cosmic order including replacing sacred items, reenclosing sanctuaries, and reerecting fallen statues and offering tables were physically reflective of a repair and restoration mission following an earthquake.6 These scholars were aware that the Thera explosion normally was dated decades prior to the reign of Ahmose, but they chose to interpret the imagery literally as an eyewitness account of contemporary phenomena that could only be explained by Thera. Indeed, Foster ventured that the Tempest Stela “may very well stand as a unique eyewitness account of the Thera eruption.”7 The former New York City colleagues James Allen and Malcolm Wiener then assumed the role of Horus in this academic contretemps obligated to defeat the disruptive explanation of chaos that Foster and Ritner had introduced.8 Or, as they put it in the first paragraph of “Separate Lives: The Ahmose Tempest Stela and the Theran Eruption,” where again the title tells the tale, “[w]e believe that the purported connection is not supported by the evidence.” 9 According to their interpretation, the text suggests that Ahmose initially had not been crowned at Thebes. Therefore one of his official first tasks in Year 1 as king was to visit Karnak, where his coronation would be confirmed by Amun-Re.10 A textual lacuna in the stela possibly referred to a procession involving the image of Amun-Re, which would have been part of this confirmation process.11 Additional deities also may have been involved, which certainly would have been appropriate given that they were witnessing the self-conscious birth of a new dynasty, a rare event in Egyptian history. Certainly, one of the primary duties of the new king would have been to restore the temples of Amun, which had decayed during the Hyksos era, to their rightful state. In the mind of the Egyptians, the catastrophe of the tempest was evidently seen as a manifestation of Amun’s desire that Ahmose return to Thebes and of the gods’ demands that he turn his attention to the state of their temples.12 With this political and theological background in mind, their analysis then focused on the storm. As Allen noted in his portion of the joint article, storms such as the one that had recently occurred in 1994, just prior to the publication of the article, can affect the whole land without there being either a volcanic eruption or an earthquake.13 Wiener elaborated on this point adding that the 1994 storm was monsoondriven, occurred in October and November, and was followed in January 1996 by a second storm. From Wiener’s perspective, the intensity and extent of the ancient event alluded to in the stela significantly exceeded that of the normal annual inundation. This visible expression of divine activity did not impute 5 Ugarit, with its stories of Yam and Baal that date to this time, though the extant versions were written in the 14th century, provides a more appropriate setting for this imagery than Mesopotamia. 6 Foster, “Texts, Storms,” 5-7. Karen P. Foster, “Ahmose and the Eruption of Thera,” NARCE 171 (1996/1), 9-10. 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 powerlessness to the Egyptian deity, but was a tangible expression of displeasure with the historical situation.14 As Allen indicated, a toppled or broken object is not necessarily caused by an earthquake, even though such results are consistent with one. Human actions of commission or omission can lead to the same results. Allen’s interpretation of the text evidenced no conclusive proof for the earthquake that Foster and Ritner had postulated. Instead, he envisioned a more mundane and geopolitically based explanation for the actions of Ahmose: when he left Thebes by boat the situation remained tense vis-àvis the Hyksos, who still controlled portions of Egypt, so traveling with a military escort made sense.15 As Allen concluded: The “tempest” stela of Ahmose clearly offers an historical record of a natural catastrophe that seems to have affected much of Egypt in the first half of the king’s reign—arguably shortly after his accession.16 He offered the following reason or interpretation of the theological underpinnings governing the political actions of the king: …an attempt by the gods [meaning, one supposes, their human representatives (author comment)] to draw the king’s attention to their needs, which might otherwise have been overlooked in the midst of the political crisis facing the new pharaoh.17 Or as the text recounts: How much greater this is than the wrath of the great god, than the plans of the gods!18 Despite the overwhelming adversity suggested by the vivid imagery of the Tempest Stela, Ahmose rose to the occasion and demonstrated that he had the right stuff to resolve the chaotic situation and to restore ma’at, which had been disrupted. The demonstration that all was right with the world expressed through the Egyptian conception of ma’at was an essential component in asserting the legitimacy of the ruler.19 As Allen noted: The restoration of order out of chaos is a prominent theme in the initial inscriptions of every new reign, and this stela obviously belongs to that genre—erected to commemorate not the catastrophe, but the king’s response to it.20 14 Allen, “Separate Lives,” 24. 15 Allen, “Separate Lives,” 19. Allen, “Separate Lives,” 21. Allen, “Separate Lives,” 21. Allen, “Separate Lives,” 3. Allen repeats this line in his analysis (p. 18) and Wiener uses it as well (p. 24). Technically such language is not acceptable academic style although it is precisely how human beings including scholars think. 16 James P. Allen and Malcolm Wiener, “Separate Lives: The Ahmose Tempest Stela and the Theran Eruption,” JNES 57 (1998), 1. 18 Allen, “Separate Lives,” 7, 17. Allen, “Separate Lives,” 7, 8. Allen, “Separate Lives,” 18. Allen, “Separate Lives,” 19. 254 17 19 See Emily Teeter, The Presentation of Maat: Ritual and Legitimacy in Ancient Egypt, SAOC 57 (Chicago, 1997); Miriam Lichtheim, Maat in Egyptian Autobiographies and Related Studies, OBO 120 (Göttingen, 1992); Michael Fox, “World Order and Maaat: A Crooked Parallel,” JANES 23 (1995), 37-48. 20 Allen, “Separate Lives,” 21. 255 BES 19 (2015) Feinman, “The Tempest in the Tempest” While this comment on Egyptian culture is correct, Allen may have taken the Tempest Stela too literally, since his final sentence indicated a possible alternative interpretation. The king’s attention is directed not only to the recent destruction wrought by nature but also [author’s italics added] to the more longstanding ruin caused by human agency and neglect—all of which are seen as legitimate and necessary objects of his duty “to put the land like its original situation.”21 Thus, according to Allen, although there may well have been a storm shortly after Ahmose’s accession, the coincidence of its timing only highlighted the larger and long-term issues. Given the historical context of Ahmose’s reign, such actions by this new king make abundant sense. Temples do decay and it is standard operating procedure for the new king to repair these buildings. Although Hatshepsut later made the false claim that the Hyksos ruled without Re,22 perhaps the claim that they ruled without Amun-Re would have been more appropriate. It is easy to imagine that the maintenance of the Karnak Temple was not a priority of the Hyksos. It would have been difficult for the Theban priests to physically maintain the structures given a probable reduction in income and the ongoing tensions with the Delta-based dynasty. Therefore, it would be perfectly natural for the new king of a new dynasty, who had liberated the land from the rule of foreigners, or was in the process of so doing, to dedicate his reign to restoring the traditional temples of the eclipsed deity of the previous century. This would be true even without a storm or natural catastrophe of any kind. Ironically, Wiener is even more definitive on this point than his coauthor. Whereas Allen referred to human agency and neglect “also” being a factor in the destruction, Wiener wrote, “Rather, he [Allen] believes the terminology of the Stela suggests willful human agency as the cause of the destruction of the tombs and mortuary monuments and neglect as the cause of the damage to temples” without any reference to the storm as a causal agent.23 As a classic example of such a repair and restoration of the temples by a new pharaoh, Wiener offered Tutankhamun’s Restoration Inscription and “interestingly” the Speos Artemidos inscription.24 While Wiener overstated Allen’s actual position, his general approach seems sound. We need to rein in the Egyptological literalism that seeks factual natural phenomena to explain human events. Instead, we should recognize that we are a story-telling species that paints pictures with words and uses nature to reflect social and political conditions. In his examination of the Narmer Palette, Davis noted the leader’s need to demonstrate mastery of the natural and social worlds. We should remain cognizant of that advice in the analysis of the Tempest Stela composed some 1500 years later.25 In this regard, the Thera volcano is an academic red herring that draws scholars like a bee to honey. One should note at this point that the textual exegesis of Foster and Ritner linking Thera to ecological chaos in Egypt has a precedent in Hans Goedicke’s work. However, although he focused on the time of Hatshepsut and not Ahmose, he reached startlingly similar conclusions.26 His examination of the 21 22 23 24 25 26 aforementioned Speos Artemidos inscription created during Hatshepsut’s reign followed the same path as the Foster and Ritner Tempest Stela investigation. He provided the same detailed analysis of the text’s imagery with the same results. Once again there was darkness and a challenge to create light, which he attributed to “a fiery cause outside of Egypt across the Mediterranean with darkness in Egypt as its results.”27 The only rational explanation for the imagery of the text was a corresponding phenomenon in nature: the Thera eruption ash blocking out the sun.28 Goedicke’s analysis, worthy of a premillennialist seeking to find signs of the end days as prophesied in specific biblical texts, had its own endgame in biblical exegesis. It was in the Thera eruption that he found the natural explanation for the Exodus, which he dated to 1473/1472.29 Thus he stands as one of the few Egyptologists willing to take both Hatshepsut and the Bible literally. These literalist analyses of Egyptian texts produced a conundrum. Did the Thera eruption take place in the time of Hatshepsut based on the imagery of the Speos Artemidos inscription or did the Thera eruption take place in the time of Ahmose based on the imagery of the Tempest Stela? Perhaps we should be seeking more than one volcanic eruption of apocalyptic fury to explain these two texts employing similar imagery decades apart. Or maybe there was only a single explosion whose reverberations lasted for an extraordinarily long period of time. It seems unlikely that both texts refer to the same event.30 With the Hatshepsut inscription, instead of turning to Allen and Wiener to counter Goedicke, one can refer to Alan Gardiner and Peter Brand. Back in 1946, Gardiner wrote about Hatshepsut’s cosmic restoration from a political perspective similar to Allen’s analysis of the function of the Tempest Stela. According to Gardiner, Hatshepsut too suffered from legitimacy issues that needed to be resolved in a theologically valid manner consistent with the values of the Egyptian cultural construct based on ma’at: …the whole purpose of the text was evidently to display her as the predestined savior of the country, the restorer of law and order.31 In 2004, Brand, using the technologically modern EEF-list elaborated on this very point without specifically referring to it. Instead, he broadened the scope to encompass the texts of multiple Egyptian rulers. He characterized the texts of Hatshepsut, Tutankhamun, Horemheb, Merneptah, and Merikare as being “typical of a broad genre of royal texts that might be described as ‘chaos turned into order,’” 27 28 29 30 Allen, “Separate Lives,” 21. James Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton, 1950), 231. Allen, “Separate Lives,” 21. Allen, “Separate Lives,” 24. Whitney Davis, “Narrativity and the Narmer Palette,” in Narrative and Event in Ancient Art, Peter J. Holliday, ed. (Cambridge, 1993), 23. 31 Goedicke, The Speos Artemidos Inscription, 7. Goedicke, The Speos Artemidos Inscription, 7. Goedicke, The Speos Artemidos Inscription, 99-104. The debate about the date of the Thera explosion is an ongoing one between the radiocarbon/1628 b.c.e. adherents and the pottery/pumice/1530 b.c.e. supporters. For recent discussions of this conflict see Michael Balter, “New Carbon Dates Support Revised History of Ancient Mediterranean,” Science 312 (5773) (2006), 508-509; Manfred Bietak, “[Review of] Sturt W. Manning, A Test of Time,” BiOr 61 (2004), 199-222; Walter L. Friedrich, Bernd Kromer, Michael Friedrich, et al., “Santorini Eruption Radiocarbon Dated to 1627–1600 b.c.,” Science 312 (5773) (2006), 548; Peter M. Warren, “The Date of the Thera Eruption in Relation to Aegean-Egyptian Interconnections and the Egyptian Historical Chronology,” in Timelines: Studies in Honour of Manfred Bietak II, Ernest Czerny, Irmgard Hein, Herman Hunger, et al., eds., OLA 149 (Leuven, 2006), 305-321; Malcolm H. Wiener, “Chronology Going Forward (With a Query about 1525/4 b.c.),” in Timelines, 317-328. The focus of this paper instead is on the use of natural imagery (of cosmic proportions) in political circumstances. The latest developments on the dating of the Thera eruption to 1627–1600 b.c.e. support this approach, see Hendrik J. Bruins, “Dating Pharaonic Egypt,” Science 328 (5985) (2010), 1489–1490. Alan Gardiner, “Davies’s Copy of the Great Speos Artemidos Inscription,” JEA 32 (1946), 48. Hans Goedicke, The Speos Artemidos Inscription of Hatshepsut and Related Discussions (Oakville, 2004). See also Hans Goedicke, “The Chronology of the Thera/Santorini Explosion,” Ägypten und Levante 3 (1992), 57-62. 256 257 BES 19 (2015) Feinman, “The Tempest in the Tempest” precisely as Allen had suggested in the specific instance of Ahmose.32 Brand further opined that such texts were “highly rhetorical” and “decidedly unhistorical.” 33 While he stated that “[i]t is naïve to take such a text at face value as reporting history,” he recognized that there was a “genuine historical context” contained in such texts.34 However, he warned us that the “Egyptians never meant such a text to be taken at face value as ‘historical.’”35 In this instance, the historical context to be considered in the Tempest Stela was the Hyksos rule and the identification of the hero who ended this stain of foreign rule in Egypt —or at least the individuals who were taking credit for it.36 This interpretation of cosmological imagery in the Egyptian texts correlates with comparable Assyrian imagery. In the third millennium b.c.e., the “Lamentations Over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur” assigns responsibility for the destruction of the city to a storm (lines 137-138), a metaphorical reference to an attack by a foreign enemy.37 Far from being a one-time occurrence, storm and flood imagery were standard motifs in Mesopotamian literature, particularly in relation to assertions of victory by the king. Tukulti-Ninurta I, Shalmaneser III, Sargon II, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and Ashurbanipal all partook of this approach when asserting complete and total victory.38 For these self-proclaimed rulers of the universe, the significance of the deluge was clear: the walled cities of the world had been washed away except for those of the conquering hero. Now out of this resulting chaos, the king at the cosmic center of the world would create a new world order with new temples, new walls, and new cities. The reliefs and inscriptions surrounding him in his palace extolled this new creation by the deity’s counterpart on earth. Even if Ahmose, unlike the Hyksos, had no contact with Mesopotamia, the founder of a new dynasty at the cosmic center in Thebes would have understood the imagery—he was asserting the same claim following his triumph over the Hyksos. One can turn to an even closer source for help in understanding the imagery of disasters in historical Egyptian texts, namely the world’s first Egyptologists, the biblical writers. The biblical account of the Exodus includes passages that can be interpreted as referring to a natural disaster that disrupted the social and ecological world of Egypt. Indeed, scholars and non-scholars have diligently scoured the world on land, sea, and in the air to locate the natural phenomenon or phenomena that would suitably explain the series of plagues in the Book of Exodus.39 Like the Egyptian scholars seeking to link Thera 32 Peter Brand, “Influence of Hyksos (and the Hatshepsut problem),” http://www.egyptologyforum.org/archeof/ EEFarchives.html, April 5, 2004; see also Edward Bleiberg, “Historical Texts as Political Propaganda during the New Kingdom,” BES 7 (1985/86), 5-13. 33 Brand, “Influence of Hyksos.” Brand, “Influence of Hyksos.” 34 35 36 37 Brand, “Influence of Hyksos.” For a modern version of this approach see Naguib Mahfouz, Thebes at War: A Novel of Ancient Egypt (New York, 1944). The author, in the time of British rule in Egypt, depicts the enemy Hyksos princess as a blond-haired, blue-eyed beauty. Ahmose, the darker and valiant Egyptian hero, must resist her charms if his people are to be free. One notes the mixing of historical and fictional people in the telling of the story. One hopes that no Egyptologist in the distant future will use this novel to reconstruct the history of the Egyptians, Hyksos, and Nubians. David Tsumura, Creation and Destruction: A Reappraisal of the Chaoskampf Theory in the Old Testament (Winona Lake, 2005), 184. 38 Tsumura, Creation and Destruction, 183-189. 39 Werner Keller, The Bible as History: A Confirmation of the Book of Books (New York, 1956), 111-112. For a brief historical overview of modern scholarship’s efforts to understand the biblical plagues as natural disasters, see John D. Currid, Ancient Egypt and the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, 1997), 104-107. 258 to the events of the New Kingdom, so too, biblical scholars and interested amateurs have fixated on the Thera explosion as the key to unraveling the story of the plagues. An example of this is Goedicke’s efforts noted above. There is an alternate explanation. Neither the ancient Egyptians nor the ancient Israelites were peoples culturally capable of the concept of The Weather Channel. We should not impose contemporary fixations, values, and knowledge on the peoples of the past. Human beings choose to employ the language of natural disasters, cosmic catastrophes, and even positive heavenly events in historical contexts regardless of whether or not such events in nature had occurred. In other words, it is possible to claim that it is “morning in America” even in a speech given at night. With such an utterance, we should not seek an explanation for how the sun could have risen at such an ungodly hour. We also should not dismiss the metaphor or declare it historically inaccurate simply because it is not literally true. We would be better served to recognize the reality of human modes of communication when addressing social, cultural, and religious concerns. After all the sun was out in every American presidential administration, not just in the Reagan and Obama administrations (see above); furthermore Benjamin Franklin’s famous optimistic analysis at the American Constitutional Convention referred to the image of a rising sun on a chair and not to an astronomical observation. This consistent imagery, centuries apart, is an expression of an American cultural value. Similarly, something else is going on in these Egyptian texts and in their use of storm imagery other than a meteorological report. At this point, we need to remember that the Thebes of Ahmose was not the Thebes we know today. The tombs, temples, and pylons that have made the area even in its ruined state a tourist attraction to this very day scarcely existed at the onset of the 18th Dynasty. While the city had attained prominence during the Middle Kingdom, as a physical presence, it was dwarfed by the constructions of the Old Kingdom pharaohs at Giza. Centuries would pass before Thutmose III, Amenhotep III, Ramses II, and others transformed the site into a vibrant cosmic center of a vast empire. When Ahmose restored and repaired the temples and produced a stela to commemorate these actions, he was marking his turf and boldly designating the city as the cosmic center of the new world order he was creating. He was a new Djoser at Saqqara or a David installing the Ark of Yahweh in what became the City of David. The search for the storm obscures the powerful statement being made by a king who consciously perceived himself as initiating something new in Egyptian history. Never before had foreigners ruled the land; now that day was over. The darkness had ended; the sun had triumphed once again. It was morning in Egypt. The biblical writers knew the Egyptian metaphors of cosmos and chaos. The biblical writers knew the Egyptian concept of ma’at and restoration. The biblical writers knew the Egyptian usage of a topsyturvy world.40 What we have then in the biblical stories of disruption is not a newspaper account of the events of the day, but a statement that the Egyptian cultural construct was bogus, of no validity. The 40 Topsy turvy refers to a world turned upside down. The most famous example in American history occurred when the British troops surrendering at Yorktown played “A World Turned Upside Down.” Perhaps the foremost examples of a reversed Egyptian world occur in the descriptions in “The Instruction Addressed to King Merikare” and in “The Admonitions of Ipuwer.” Few, if any, Egyptologists seek a natural explanation for the claim that the “river is blood.” The assertion by Merikare’s father that in a military confrontation he “engulfed [a city on the southern border] like a flood” better represents the political nature of the boast: a metaphorical expression referring to the historical event of military victory. 259 BES 19 (2015) Feinman, “The Tempest in the Tempest” plagues were polemical expressions of “a severe contempt for the gods of Egypt” 41 although, of course, one still has the right to seek to correlate the plagues with the Thera explosion.42 The biblical writers delivered that message of the collapse of ma’at by drawing on the textual iconography and imagery of the Egyptian cultural construct. They claimed that Pharaoh had failed in his ability to maintain or restore ma’at; therefore he had lost his legitimacy as ruler. The issue here is not the validity of the Israelite assertion that pharaoh failed to restore the social and natural worlds because Amun-Re did not exist and Yahweh was the true God. Nor were the biblical writers asserting that such disruptions actually had occurred. Rather, most extraordinary of all, the biblical writers understood the metaphors of Egypt, which scholars like Allen, Brand, and Gardiner millennia later referred in their academic writings, and consciously applied them against the Egyptians in an historical context. Based on Egyptian standards, pharaoh had failed in his responsibility as pharaoh, which thereby proved the failure of the Egyptian cultural construct. In other words, the biblical plagues stories are counter-Ahmose Tempest Stela, a counter-text for a counter-religion to use Jan Assmann’s term.43 However, by utilizing imagery as a cultural weapon, the biblical writers helped illuminate the very way of life that they sought to negate and help us today to understand the texts of Ahmose and Hatshepsut. Conclusion This paper has taken the position that the Ahmose Tempest Stela is part of the longstanding Egyptian contretemps between cosmos and chaos. The concluding question posed by Allen and Wiener goes to the heart of the investigatory effort: How do the sections of the Stela describing the support of temples and restoration of order differ significantly from other restoration-of-order texts, so as to make the Stela uniquely a reference to damage from the eruption of Thera? 44 The question is not simply limited to other Egyptian texts but extends to Sumerian, Assyrian, Biblical, and American presidential use of images in nature to deliver political messages. The key to unlocking the mysteries of the Tempest Stela of Ahmose is in the responsibility of the king to maintain ma’at as expressed in a specific political context: the struggle of what would become the 18th Dynasty to establish its rule in opposition to the Hyksos. This effort required success on two levels: the human and the divine, meaning what would be classified as the political or social and the natural world today. To simply liberate the land from Hyksos rule was a necessary but insufficient step to legitimize one’s rule. The king also needed to demonstrate divine sanction, meaning that the cosmic order of both the natural and political worlds had been restored and were being maintained.45 41 42 46 The expression of the triumph of cosmos over chaos took many forms in ancient Egypt. As suggested by Aylward M. Blackman and Herbert W. Fairman, the act of harpooning the hippopotamus lent itself to dramatic presentation and provided another means of presenting the message to the Egyptian people, see Herbert W. Fairman, The Triumph of Horus: An Ancient Egyptian Sacred Drama (Los Angeles, 1974); idem, “The Myth of Horus at Edfu: I,” JEA 21 (1935), 26-36; Aylward M. Blackman and Herbert W. Fairman, “The Myth of Horus at Edfu: II. C. The Triumph of Horus over His Enemies: A Sacred Drama,” JEA 28 (1942), 32-38; idem, “The Myth of Horus at Edfu: II. C. The Triumph of Horus over His Enemies: A Sacred Drama (Continued),” JEA 29 (1943), 2-36. The drama also has been brought to stage in undergraduate courses taught by Robyn Gillam, see her “Restaging ‘The Triumph of Horus’ or Hunting the Hippo in Toronto,” KMT 11 (2000), 72-83; and by Peter Piccione, College of Charleston in the spring 2000 term video, “The Victory of Horus: An Ancient Egyptian Sacred Drama.” 47 Josephus, Contra Apionem, in The Complete Works of Josephus, William Whitson, trans. (Grand Rapids, 1981), Book I, 14-15; Donald Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times (Princeton, 1992), 408-422. See also Orly Goldwasser, “King Apophis of Avaris and the Emergence of Monotheism,” in Timelines, 129-133. Currid, Ancient Egypt and the Old Testament, 108, 113. For a detailed attempt to link the plagues to the Thera volcanic eruption see Ian Wilson, Exodus: The True Story Behind the Biblical Account (San Francisco, 1985), 97-127. 43 Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA, 1997). 44 Allen, “Separate Lives,” 28. A famous example from American history illustrates the combination of victory in the heavens and on earth. Civil War historians know that it was Sherman’s army that trampled the vineyards [and everything else]. The song that the soldiers sang expressed cosmic victory in “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” These ancient texts serve a comparable purpose within the context of their own cultures. 45 In ordinary times, an adequate annual flood would be sufficient to demonstrate that all was right with world. With the unprecedented disruption caused by the Hyksos a grander expression was required. This does not mean a 1994-type event did not occur at the onset of Ahmose’s reign, but rather that he had bigger fish to fry or hippos to harpoon in classic Egyptian terminology, as is evident by his conscious attempt to launch a new dynasty and to build a pyramid at Abydos.46 Instead, any such disturbance served as a catalyst to address a bigger issue: the disruption of ma’at that commenced over a century earlier with the onset of Hyksos rule that he now was ending. The Tempest Stela helps us to understand the true depth of the impact the Hyksos had on Egyptian life. It is easy to be casual about the significance of the Hyksos for Egyptian culture. We talk about Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms as if they are all part of a single past. It is hard for us to grasp the concept that by the time of the Hyksos, Egypt already had an historical legacy dating back over 1500 years (a longer time than separates us from the Crusades, a period that the Arabs to this very day recall with great passion). The various king lists, including Manetho’s efforts over a millennia after Ahmose, suggest that the Egyptians had some recognition that their world had been around for a long time. Egypt was the culture of cycles, daily, annual, and Sothic, where the unique was to be denied. Now Egypt had become aware of two unique events: the Thera explosion and Hyksos rule. It certainly is reasonable that the Egyptians would see the two as linked in some way. The efforts to link the Thera eruption to the time of Ahmose and Hatshepsut share critical points in common. Both rulers employed similar images to depict an ecological disruption of cosmic proportions. Both rulers recalled the disruption of ma’at caused by the Hyksos. Both rulers claimed to have restored temples, ma’at, and the Egyptian way of life. Both rulers coped with political events in their respective presents by asserting their legitimacy on earth and in the heavens, in history and in nature, in the capital city and in the world it controlled based on the values of the culture. Ahmose and Hatshepsut were the restorers of ma’at, an action expressed not through the abstract political essay of the op-ed page, but through the language of their times, the metaphors of events in nature. As the result of a singular event in Egyptian history, one observes here the development of a new leitmotif in the Egyptian cultural construct: the identification of the historical Hyksos as a force of chaos overcome by the heroic warrior pharaoh. Seqenenre, Kamose, Ahmose, Hatshepsut, and the anonymous king at the time of “The Quarrel of Apophis and Seqenenre” all are defined in part by the actions on the battlefield and/or in nature against the Hyksos. Furthermore, if Redford, Manetho, and Josephus are right, then perhaps the biblical story of plagues also derives from this same tradition.47 The anomaly in 260 261 BES 19 (2015) this scenario is Ramses II, who remembered the 400-year sojourn of a mighty people from the land of Canaan in the Delta without the use of any cosmic spectacles in nature. By the time of Ramses something had changed in the Egyptian relationship with the Hyksos in a story that has yet to be fully told. If only we had the Hyksos version of these events. Perhaps we do. Institute of History, Archaeology, and Education Abstract The Ahmose Tempest Stela has been a source of contention due to its possible connection to Thera and the question as to whether or not the text should be taken literally. This paper takes the position that the stela is part of the longstanding Egyptian contretemps between cosmos and chaos. The key to unlocking its mysteries is in the responsibility of the king to maintain ma’at as expressed in a specific political context, the struggle of what would become the 18th Dynasty to establish its rule in opposition to the Hyksos. This effort required success on two levels: the human and the divine. 353, see William C. Hayes, “A Selection of Tuthmoside Ostraca from Dēr el-Baḥri,” 262