Speaking Beyond the Destruction of Their Names

The blog post for this week has been written by Carlein Boers, a political scientist and ancient history enthusiast from the Netherlands. After watching numerous reruns of the animated classic ‘Asterix and Cleopatra’ from the age of five, she developed a lifelong interest in the Amarna Period and the fall of the Roman Republic. In the Netherlands, she has taken courses with Egyptologist Huub Pragt and the ‘Huis van Horus’ Association. She first participated in online courses by the Egypt Centre during the 2021 (second or third) COVID lockdown. Carlein has written blogs for the Egypt Centre in the past, focusing on A Look at the Political Legacy of Amarna.

The ancient Egyptians gave great importance to not only preserving the bodies of the deceased, but also to speaking the names of the ones who passed away. They believed that each morning the Ka-soul of the deceased would find its way back to the body; if the body would be disturbed and/or did not recognise their name, the soul would wander the earth aimlessly to haunt the living ‘till eternity. At least, this is what horror movies tell us.

The practice of Damnatio memoriae

During the course Causing Their Names to Live, Dr. Griffin introduced us to fifty individuals whose names and biographies survived to the present day. Rather, it was the mentioning of Damnatio memoriae during the first part of the course that caught my attention. The phrase Damnatio memoriae originates from modern Latin and translates as “condemnation of memory”; in short it is the complete eradication of any written or depiction of a person with the aim of removing them from history until perpetuity (fig. 1). In a society where speaking one’s name or honouring an effigy is essential to the individual’s wellbeing in the afterlife, it must have been the most severe punishment imaginable. The practice of damnatio memoriae can be found in several societies from Agamemnon wanting to destroy any evidence of Priam’s Troy, King Henry VIII replacing any trace of Anne Boleyn by covering it with Jane Seymour’s initials, and most recently Vladimir Putin’s notorious refusal to utter the name of his strongest opposition (the now departed) Alexei Navalny.

Fig. 1: Erased figure of Hatshepsut at Karnak

The ancient Egyptians had a long tradition of damnatio memoriae, which resulted in destroying graves, mummies, statues, depictions, and erasing names from within cartouches in order to simply not mention someone’s existence ever again. The most prominent example that comes to my mind to prove this practice is the Abydos King List (fig. 2), or rather: what is missing on the King List. The list names 76 pharaohs in chronological order and can be found on the temple of Seti I (c. 1300 BC) in Abydos. And here comes the fun part; take an educated guess at whose names are missing from the list, but when you ask a stranger on the street to name an Egyptian pharaoh, they’ll probably name one of these rulers. I’ll give you a minute…

Fig. 2: Abydos King List

Calling into evidence, case no. 1: the case of the famous female pharaoh

The Abydos King List is missing the name of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut (c. 1479–1458 BC), who initially reigned in her stepson Thutmose III’s name only to emerge as an independent ruler. She sought to solidify her succession through her daughter and with the help of a presumed shady advisor/lover Senenmut. Despite being a woman, Hatshepsut donned herself with the traditional king regalia such as the headdress with an uraeus snake and false beard. She even went as far as to marry her daughter, Neferure, as the ceremonial God’s Wife of Amun (fig. 3). Modern feminist love to use her example to show that anything a man can do a woman can do just as well.

Fig. 3: Relief of Neferure (Egypt Centre W1376)

In all fairness, Hatshepsut did accomplish some remarkable things besides managing to stay in power for over twenty years: she pioneered land and trade routes to the Land of Punt (today’s Somalia and Eritrea) and Byblos (Lebanon). She commissioned several great building projects throughout Upper and Lower Egypt, the most famous being her mortuary temple in Deir el-Bahari. For reasons we might never fully know, her stepson Thutmose III went above and beyond to erase her name and depictions after her death (fig. 4). Talk about really not liking the person whose job you took over! By erasing her history, we can only speculate what kind of ruler she really was and what prompted her damnatio memoriae. People today might suggest it is because she was a strong and successful woman overshadowing the old male elite at court. Yet, they failed in their attempt to have her forgotten; Hatshepsut’s name is remembered and spoken today.

Fig. 4: Block with the erased cartouches of Hatshepsut on the left

Calling into evidence, case no. 2: the Amarna pharaohs

At the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty, we have another number of names missing from the Abydos King List: Akhenaten, Smenkhkare (possibly Nefertiti), Tutankhamun, and Aye. Long did Egyptologists doubt the existence of these pharaohs as the names were not to be found either on the king lists nor in the famous temple complex of Karnak/Thebes, or in the Valley of the Kings. From what Egyptologists can reconstruct about the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty, it was Horemheb who was responsible for making the names of his predecessors disappear. Again, without knowing exactly what happened in Egypt during the Amarna reign that made people hate Akhenaten and his immediate family. Just as quickly as their royal city of Amarna emerged as a new power centre, although it disappeared in the desert sands after which seemed to be an overnight destruction. The names of Akhenaten and Nefertiti were hacked out of their cartouches (fig. 5) while his mother’s name (Tiye) remained revered. This indicates to me that the hatred against Akhenaten was truly focussed on him and his immediate descendants.

Fig. 5: Defased images of Akhenaten and Nefertiti

 

We might never have known about the Amarna royals if some traces of their existence hadn’t survived, such as the Amarna talatat blocks. Talatat (limestone) blocks that had been used in Amarna were repurposed to fill the inner Second Pylon at Karnak. The decorated talatat blocks remained untouched by time until their discovery in the twentieth century when they emerged to tell us their story and provide a face for long forgotten kings and queens. From the sands of Amarna appeared beautiful art, such as the bust of Nefertiti in sculptor Thutmose’s workshop (fig. 6). To this day, millions of tourists flock to Berlin’s Neues Museum to gaze on Nefertiti’s face. The search for her tomb still causes controversy as became apparent when a couple of years ago Nicholas Reeves presented his theory on where she might be found.

Fig. 6: Plaster cast of Nefertiti's bust (Egypt Centre 1991)

Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun marked the beginning of an Egypt-craze all over the Western world and mass tourism to Egypt’s ancient sites. Horemheb’s attempt to erase Tutankhamun’s name from prosperity might have contributed to his tomb’s location being forgotten and thus hidden from tomb robbers. When Carter opened the tomb, he found a nearly undisturbed grave filled with golden “wonderous things”. Today, Tutankhamun’s image is commercialized as immortalised in Steve Martin’s SNL sketch (https://youtu.be/FYbavuReVF4?si=HOPqyQMLgsnbEvaw). Mention ancient Egypt and most people will have his golden death mask come to mind (fig. 7).

Fig. 7: Golden mask of Tutankhamun

Though Horemheb and the Thebes elite attempted to have the names erased from history, the names of Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and Tutankhamun are still spoken today.

 

Calling into evidence, case no.3: Queen Cleopatra

Cleopatra VII Philopator was ancient Egypt’s last reigning pharaoh; her death brought an end to an independent Egyptian kingdom that would henceforth be a province in the Roman empire. Cleopatra was last in the line of the Ptolemaic dynasty that claimed ancestry to both the ancient Egyptian pharaohs as well as Alexander the Great (fig. 8). Sources speak of her intelligence, knowledge of literature, languages and mathematics, wit, scheming, and beauty. Asterix and Obelix speak of her nose. The story of Cleopatra and Roman consul and general Marc Antony was immortalised by subsequently Cicero, Plutarch, Shakespeare, and to the moment when Elizabeth Taylor met Richard Burton’s Marc Antony on the film set of the 1960s classic Cleopatra.

Fig. 8: Cleopatra and Caesarion at Dendera

It is now believed that Cleopatra did not die of suicide using a serpent’s venomous bite, but rather was secretly executed by Emperor Augustus. After her death it wasn’t enough to erase her name from temple sites, Augustus made sure her memory was trashed. Cue to stories of Cleopatra seducing Rome’s great but helpless generals and using her charms and poison to rule the eastern part of the Roman Empire. She was portrayed as a scheming harlot with an unsatisfiable hunger for power, yet showed cowardice when she sailed away from the battle scene of Actium before the fight was over. Even her death was used to vilify her; it was said that she had abandoned her people by choosing suicide over remaining on Egypt’s throne as a Roman protectorate.

 

Today, Cleopatra catches our imagination in fiction and as a feminist icon. Her life and legacy still stir controversy as recent as a 2023 Netflix documentary series. All of this despite Rome’s attempt to slander her memory. Speaking beyond her (still to be discovered) tomb, Cleopatra’s name is still spoken today.

 

In conclusion: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!

It is mesmerising to me that the names of Egyptian monarchs who had their names eradicated by their successors are known in the twenty-first century. We don’t know much about either their character nor their style of ruling their kingdom; maybe they were horrible human beings and deserved their punishment of damnatio memoriae. Yet, somehow theirs are the names that survived into our times, which are often spoken today. Their names and images have been iconised and commercialised. We in the twenty-first century allowed their names to speak beyond their graves and thus, inherently, securing the survival of their Ka-soul.

 

Bibliography

Cooney, Kara 2014. The woman who would be king. New York: Crown.

Cooney, Kara 2020. When women ruled the world. Six queens of Egypt. Washington, DC: National Geographic.

Goldsworthy, Adrian 2010. Antony and Cleopatra. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Hawass, Zahi (ed.) 2018. Tutankhamun: treasures of the golden pharaoh. The centennial celebration. New York: Melcher Media.

Reeves, Nicholas 2022. The complete Tutankhamun, revised and expanded ed. London: Thames & Hudson.

Reeves, Nicholas 2001. Akhenaten: Egypt’s false prophet. London: Thames & Hudson.

Schiff, Stacy 2010. Cleopatra: a life. New York: Little, Brown and Co.

The Rest is History Podcast by Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook (they have an excellent mini-series on both Cleopatra and Tutankhamun)