The Culture of Ancient Egypt by John A. Wilson;

Author:John A. Wilson; [Wilson, John A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1951-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

IX

IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT

Later Dynasty 18 (about 1375–1325 B.C.)

When the hard shell of long-established custom is placed under insistent pressure along a new plane, something is certain to crack. A sacred society which has always emphasized its unchanging status cannot easily accommodate itself to a new order, with the vulgarization and alienation of its basic forms of expression. In theory, one would expect a conflict between the traditionalists and the modernists as the agonizing crisis of the culture. Such a conflict may have been the main feature of the antagonism between Hat-shepsut and Thut-mose III. If so, its virulence must have been relieved by the immediate success, materially and spiritually, of empire. Conservatism could not easily withstand the sweeping glory of military victory and the sudden increase in wealth and power for the ruling forces of Egypt. Thus the vulgarization and alienation of the cherished Egyptian system are clearly visible in a period of prosperity and evident self-satisfaction, that century between the Battle of Megiddo, around 1468 B.C., and the death of Amen-hotep III, around 1375 B.C. We may not doubt that there were conservative grumblers at the rapid and subversive changes affecting the land, but their criticism made little impression in an unparalleled era of luxury and world acclaim.

When violent and irreconcilable conflict finally did break out, in the Amarna age, the antagonists did not line up simply as conservatives and modernists, as priestly isolationists and militaristic imperializers. That issue apparently was dead with Hat-shepsut. The pious retention of Egypt’s aloof superiority to all other cultures was not recognized as being the burning issue in the new contest for power. Nor did the crisis bring forward any party which clearly and emphatically demanded a return to the simpler and purer ways of pre-Empire Egypt. The line-up of the protagonists in the struggle was more complicated than that, and what we are able to see is a contest for the essential power in the land, with modernism being a forceful expression of that contest.

The spotlight throws itself upon pharaoh and the priesthood of Amon as the prominent opponents in the contest for power, and this focus is correct. But the pharaoh Akh-en-Aton appeared as the champion of the new in religion—particularly universalism—in domestic manners and morals, in art, and in language and literature, although he was elaborately disinterested in the empire, which had provoked the new. Pharaoh showed no desire to return to the ways of Hat-shepsut and earlier ages, even though his formal retirement from the capital at Thebes to a new, rural capital at Tell el-Amarna was a withdrawal from a cosmopolitan center of modern excitement. By implication, the priesthood of Amon was fully committed to the aggressive maintenance of empire, which had so enriched their temple, but was elaborately disinterested in the new fads in manners and morals which had come in with empire. Each party was apparently grasping for the current power in this great state, without relation to the past or to ideologies deriving from the past.

In

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.