Together, we continue the series "The Lives of the Egyptians" by reading the encyclopedia of the story of civilization by Will Durant, which gives a great space to the civilization of ancient Egypt, and today we stop with Queen Hatshepsut.
Will Durant says:
The Hyksos, who are Bedouins from Asia, invaded Egypt, dismembered, burning its cities and demolishing its structures and squandering its wealth. They destroyed many of its art features, and subjected the Nile Valley for two centuries to the rule of “shepherd kings.” The ancient civilizations were small islands in seas of barbarism. Or luxury shops surrounded by hungry and envious hunters and shepherds with a warlike tendency, and its fortresses were subject to cracking and collapsing from time to time. They too soon became fat and affluent and lost their authority, and the Egyptians reunited them and waged a brutal war in which they wanted to liberate their country. They expelled the Hyksos, and founded the Eighteenth Dynasty, which reached the country in its days a degree of strength and glory that it had not reached before.
Perhaps this conquest rejuvenated Egypt with the new blood it brought into it, but it marked the beginning of a long and bitter struggle between Egypt and West Asia that lasted for a thousand years. West Asia in order to prevent the attack on its lands later, and he subjugated all the countries located between the sea coast and Qaramish in the interior, and placed there garrisons of his own, and imposed tribute on them, then returned to Thebes, heavy with spoils and crowned with glory that always crowns the task of killing human beings.
At the end of the thirtieth year of his reign, he raised his daughter Hatshepsut to the throne to be his partner in the king, and after him her husband and brother ruled for her father in the name of Thutmose II, and he recommended on his deathbed that Thutmose III, son of Thutmose I, succeed him from one of his concubines, but Hatshepsut sculpted this young man who rose His star later, and accounted for below him the king, and proved that she is not different from the kings in anything except that she is a female, although she did not even recognize this difference, because the sacred traditions required every Egyptian to be the son of the great god Amun, and for this Hatshepsut prepared the kit To be male and to be holy, I invented a biography for her that stated that Amun descended on Ahmose, Umm Hatshepsut, in an abundance of perfume and light, and this was well received, and when he came out of her, he announced that Ahmose would give birth to a daughter who radiates on earth all the strength and valor of God. After the great queen wanted to satisfy the whims of her people, and perhaps she also wanted to satisfy a latent desire in her chest, she worked on drawing on the monuments the image of a bearded warrior, and although the remaining inscriptions from her reign speak of her with the feminine pronoun, she calls her "son of the sun" and "lord of the two countries." When she appeared in front of her people, she would wear men's clothes and wear a false beard.
Perhaps she had the right to decide for herself that she would be a man or a woman, because she became one of the best rulers who sat on the throne of Egypt - and they are many - and among the most successful of them. Outside Egypt, without loss, a great expedition was sent to Punt (it is likely that Punt is the eastern coast of Africa), and it opened a new market for Egypt's trade, and brought many good things to its people. And she worked to beautify Karnak by erecting two large beautiful obelisks in it, and built in Deir el-Bahari the grandiose structure that her father had planned, and repaired some of the ruins of the ancient structures of the Hyksos kings. It was built when the Asians were in the middle of the northern land demolishing what was there before them.” Then she built herself a secret ornate tomb next to the sand-covered mountains on the west bank of the Nile, in a place that was later called the “Valley of the Tombs of the Kings.” Her successors followed suit, until the number of graves carved in the hills was about sixty royal tombs, and even the city of the dead began to compete in its population with Thebes, the city of the living, and the “western edge” in the ancient Egyptian cities was the home of the dead of the upper class; And if they said that so-and-so had "goed west," they meant by saying this that he died.
Wed, Sep. 8, 2021
