Rameses III King of Egypt

Palestine Exploration Quarterly

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Rameses III King of Egypt: His Life and Afterlife; Afterglow of Empire: Egypt from the Fall of the New Kingdom to the Saite Renaissance Rameses III King of Egypt: His Life and Afterlife, by A. Dodson, 2019, Cairo/New York: The American University in Cairo Press, x + 189 pp., 131 illustrations (colour and b&w), £29.95 (hardcover), ISBN 978-977-416-940-3; Afterglow of Empire: Egypt from the Fall of the New Kingdom to the Saite Renaissance, (revised and updated edition), by A. Dodson, 2020, Cairo/ New York: The American University in Cairo Press, xxviii + 372 pp, 130 illustrations (b&w), £14.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-977-416-925-0

Peter James

To cite this article: Peter James (2021) Rameses III King of Egypt: His Life and Afterlife; Afterglow of Empire: Egypt from the Fall of the New Kingdom to the Saite Renaissance, Palestine Exploration Quarterly, 153:1, 70-74, DOI: 10.1080/00310328.2021.1877410 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00310328.2021.1877410

Published online: 15 Mar 2021.

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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ypeq20 PALESTINE EXPLORATION QUARTERLY 2021, VOL. 153, NO. 1, 70–79

BOOK REVIEWS

Rameses III King of Egypt: His Life and Afterlife, by A. Dodson, 2019, Cairo/ New York: The American University in Cairo Press, x + 189 pp., 131 illustrations (colour and b&w), £29.95 (hardcover), ISBN 978-977-416-940-3

Afterglow of Empire: Egypt from the Fall of the New Kingdom to the Saite Renaissance, (revised and updated edition), by A. Dodson, 2020, Cairo/New York: The American University in Cairo Press, xxviii + 372 pp, 130 illustrations (b&w), £14.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-977-416-925-0

One can easily get protective of one’s ‘favourite’ Pharaoh. So, it was with some trepidation that I opened the first of the two volumes under review. In the main, I was very pleasantly surprised. Aidan Dodson presents an excellent up-to-date popular account of Ramesses III’s reign, lavishly documented with a selection of colour photographs (mainly by the author) and reproductions. The effect is enhanced by the paper quality and binding, which make a handsome volume, though the index leaves much to be desired. And, as a criticism of both books under review, the references at the end lack running chapter headings, or better still, page numbers. While it does not really attempt to offer major new insights, Rameses III accurately reviews recent developments in scholarship which have rescued Ramesses III from the doldrums, his claimed achievements having suffered from ‘bad press’, particularly with respect to his activities in the Levant. Dodson accepts the now current view (Kitchen 2012; Kahn 2016; James 2017a; Redford 2018) that Ramesses III probably did, as he claimed, campaign as far north as Syria. Dodson (p. 151) notes the change of mind of ‘the former sceptic’, Kenneth Kitchen (1991, 238) who once claimed that Ramesses III campaigned no further north than Edom! And while he was not Egypt’s last ‘great pharaoh’ in military terms, Ramesses III can certainly be called the last great pharaoh of the New Kingdom, not only for his cam- paigns but for his vast building programme and other cultural activities. Much of the interest in this Pharaoh naturally springs from his conflict with the so-called ‘Sea Peoples’. At the very beginning of the book Dodson (p. 1; repeated on the back jacket cover) offers this keynote address to his readers, to stress the pivotal importance of Ramesses III’s records (mainly those on the Medinet Habu temple) for understanding the turbulence at the close of the Bronze Age:

… pressures were now building up outside this golden circle of Egypt, Palestine, Mesopota- mia, and the Hittite Empire, and may have been an impetus toward the [earlier] treaty of peace and friendship agreed between the Egyptians and Hittites in the middle of the thir- teenth century, after some decades of warfare. ‘Non-state’ actors from the Aegean and beyond, in the northwest, combined with others from Libya to upset the status quo, culminating in what has been termed the ‘Bronze Age collapse’ that left the region unrecognisable by the end of the twelfth century. Here Dodson, like most Egyptologists, adheres to a very traditional model of the ‘Sea Peoples invasion’, with newcomers arriving in the Levant from as far away as the Balkans PALESTINE EXPLORATION QUARTERLY 71 and the Central Mediterranean. Much is a matter of opinion, of course, but one must ask: why ‘“non-state” actors’ from so far away? Dodson himself notes the resurgence of Assyria (a state) as a possible reason for the rapprochement between Egypt and Hatti (p. 31) but then skips to the far northwest for the intruding ‘outsiders’. The attack on the Hittite Empire and even- tually Egypt was made—according to Ramesses III’s Year 8 inscription—by an organised coalition who took action after a ‘conspiracy’. Strictly speaking, how do we know that outsiders—and there were certainly some Aegean or Cypriot elements among the aggressors— were not invited in, with some local ‘state’ involvement in the Levant? Dodson describes how shortly before the rise of the 20th Dynasty under Ramesses III’s father Setnakhte, the Egyptian government itself was in thrall to the chancellor Bay, ‘aman of possible Syrian heritage’ (pp. 5–6); he apparently accepts the idea that he may have been the ‘Irsu’ (or Sw)ofPapyrus Harris I, a Kharu (Syrian) who made ‘all the land’ subject to him (p. 7). Here Dodson could have mentioned Goedicke’s idea (1979,13–14) that the ‘land’ in question was the empire in Syro-Palestine, an idea which would make an identifi- cation of Irsu with Bay less likely. While Goedicke’s translation was overly intuitive in some instances, his point about Irsu should not be overlooked (see James 2015, 248–49 and Wallenfels 2019, 494). Dodson also notes how a rival party to the embryonic 20th Dynasty had ‘attempted to defend itself from the onslaughts of Setnakhte by trying to lure in mercenaries from Syria-Palestine’. All three cases concern interfering Asiatics (cf. Kahn 2010) and suggest that we should turn our focus more on the Levant itself for the reasons why the Hittites and Egyptians made peace under Ramesses II and then why their two empires crumbled. When the page turns from the 12th century, we enter an age of rising nationalism and ‘mini-empires’—Tarhuntassa/Tabal in Cilicia; Carchemish and Aram in Syria; and Israel and the Philistine pentapolis in Palestine. At the same period, the crystallisa- tion of what we call ‘Phoenicia ’, as an economic, cultural, and maritime powerhouse, can be seen from both the archaeological and literary records (the Egyptian story of Wenanum). While the ‘Sea Peoples’ are usually thought to have been responsible for the destruction of LBA Ugarit, Bikai (1978, 74) long ago pointed out that the main benefactors would have been the Phoenicians to the south, who she argued must have been involved. Dodson is duly cautious in handling the patchy identifications of the ‘Sea Peoples’, mostly based on name similarities with various Mediterranean peoples (pp. 38–39). But the subject is such a minefield that it was perhaps inevitable that he would step on one, by stating that the Teresh are not mentioned at Medinet Habu. A captured chief of the ‘Teresh of the sea’ is mentioned and even depicted by Ramesses III at his mortuary temple (see conveniently Adams & Cohen 2013, 654–55). After recounting the Pharaoh’s military successes, Dodson devotes sections to his officials, the Deir el Medina workmen and Ramesses III’s family. The last two topics are intimately connected to Ramesses III’s decline from popularity, culminating in workmen’s strikes and the plot by some of the court to murder him. Dodson suggests that the unrest was triggered by rising grain prices and food shortages (seen from the complaints of various workmen who went on strike) and aggravated by the lack of clarity as to who was the Pharaoh’s chief wife and legitimate successor. The plot succeeded; Dodson highlights many interesting details, such as the fact that the deceased Ramesses III nominally presided over his own murder trial, a telling reminder of pharaonic power (p. 74)! A specialist in funerary archaeology, Dodson comes into his own with the last chapters which deal with the burial of Ramesses III, the subsequent treatment of his mummy and his disappearance from history until rediscovery in the 19th century. The history of archaeology, when written well (as Dodson does) is always enjoyable. Brief mention is made (p. 137) of the 19th-century suggestion that Ramesses III was the prototype for the Sethōs also called 72 BOOK REVIEWS

Rhamessēs’ of Manetho (Fr. 50), said to have possessed a great cavalry and navy and to have fought against Phoenicia and Cyprus. Though placed in the late 19th Dynasty by Manetho, the deeds of this composite pharaoh ‘are almost certainly based on Ramesses III from direct observation of the Medinet Habu reliefs’ (Kokkinos 2015, 162, n. 52). It may not only be the pictorial record that was studied but also the accompanying texts, as there is a string of Cypriot toponyms near the opening of his Great Asiatic list (Wainwright 1961, 76). Dodson may have missed here evidence that Ramesses III was still remembered (or redis- covered?) centuries after his death by Ptolemaic savants. It seems that Ramesses III was never completely forgotten, as we can see from the folkloric story about the avaricious king ‘Rhamp- sinitos’ related by Herodotus (2.121). My main complaint about Rameses III is that more on issues like this, plus more discus- sion of religious, literary, artistic and other cultural developments, would have been welcome.Butonemustunderstandtheconstraintsimposedbypublisherswhoareoften reluctant to publish lengthy books with paper that allows good quality photographic reproduction. The second volume, a new and revised edition of Afterglow, is a book of a very different kind. Aimed more at specialists, it goes into far more detail and, because of the nature of the subject (the Third Intermediate Period, hereafter TIP) is far more controversial. One rarely has the pleasure of reviewing the same book twice and there is much correction and improvement from the first edition (2012), some at this reviewer’s instigation. However, and though again this is only a matter of opinion, the model offered for the 21st Dynasty still contains what seem to this reviewer to be serious methodological errors. Dodson eschews the growing trend to accept that some of the High Priests of Amun, namely Herihor and Pinudjem I, used their own regnal years once they had adopted royal titles—as increasingly argued (Jansen-Winkeln 2006; James & Morkot 2010; 2013). Instead, Dodson prefers to allocate their years to the rulers of Tanis, despite the fact that the datelines in question come from Upper Egypt. So, for example, instead of assigning a Year 15 attested under king Herihor to that ruler (or to the whm-mswt) he ascribes it to an unattested joint era of both Nesiba- nebdjedet I (Smendes) and Herihor. Nesibanebdjedet is barely attested at Thebes—from only a graffito-like inscription and a stela which records how he was seated at Memphis when he sent some help for emergency repairs to Luxor temple. Likewise, Dodson accepts the convincing idea that Psusennes I was the son of Pinudjem I; but along with it the awkward idea that Pinudjem I used the datelines of Psusennes I (pp. 61–62). This creates an extraordinary anomaly: we would have to accept that a king with full titles (Pinudjem I) used the regnal years of his son. It barely needs stating that such a practice is totally unprece- dented in Egyptian history. One could say much more here on the 21st Dynasty, but one further point will suffice as it touches on Dodson’s expressed desire to lower the dates of the Egyptian New Kingdom. In earlier articles he argued a complete overlap between Pasebkhanut (‘Psusennes’) II and Shoshenq I, the last and first kings of the 21st and 22nd dynasties respectively. Effectively Pasebkhanut II would be counted as ‘shadow king’, with his reign subtracted from the length of the TIP (Dodson 2000). Dodson was later persuaded to withdraw this suggestion by a new piece of evidence, a fragment of the Karnak Priestly Annals published by Payraudeau (2008). Though very damaged this shows a succession of rulers: Siamun, Pasebkhanut and Osor[kon]. Dodson (2009) took this as meaning that Pasebkhanut II was recognised as full king and renounced the ‘shadow king’ idea. But his supporting evidence for Pasebkhanut II being a ruler in Lower as well as Upper Egypt is unconvincing. It rests solely on some anon- ymous burial remains and the crude nature of the faience shabtis with the name Pasebkhanut (no prenomen), both found in the antechamber of the tomb of the first Pasebkhanut at Tanis. PALESTINE EXPLORATION QUARTERLY 73

Yet it is well known that a pharaoh could have more than one set of shabtis of highly differing quality. As noted in Rameses III (p. 118), the surviving examples of that king’s burial ‘are of a range of types and materials’, from bronze to wood. Otherwise, as Dodson notes, ‘no monu- ments of Pasebkhanut II’s reign seem to survive at Tanis or its environs’ (pp. 80, 256, n. 240). The new Annals fragment would allow an even greater overlap between the end of the 21st and beginning of the 22nd Dynasties than that originally perceived by Dodson. Shoshenq I is absent from the document, and as there is no prenomen, the king Osor[kon] could be Osorkon II (see James 2017b, 337). The reigns of Siamun and Psusennes would have to be lowered relative to Shoshenq I’s, in step with the genealogical evidence that Siamun was of roughly the same generation as Osorkon I (see James et al. 1998,32–33 & Fig. 7.3). As to the reign of Psusennes II, although his highest year dates are 13 and 19, Dodson allocates him 26 years (pp. 80, 196) because of ‘overall chronological considerations’. Psusennes I, who has no attested year dates gets 50 years! Outsiders to Egyptology may well be surprised by this profligate allocation of time, but this is symptomatic of the conventional Egyptian chronology. To stress again the fundamental importance of TIP chronology to Levantine archaeology, every arguably unnecessary year added to it is another year added to the ‘Dark Age’ of Syro-Palestine, where the chronology is largely dependent on the Egyptian. Since 1987 the reviewer and colleagues have, perhaps notoriously (but increasingly less so, see e.g., Wallen- fels 2019), been arguing for a major reduction in Third Intermediate Period chronology—to alleviate the interconnected ‘Dark Age’ problems throughout the Mediterranean and Near East. Dodson has been aware of our arguments since their inception and debates them fre- quently. So, some acknowledgement (or rebuttal) in Afterglow of our published minimal chronology for the 22nd Dynasty (Morkot & James 2015), based solely on the monumental evidence, would have been welcome. Nevertheless, Dodson clearly appreciates the pressure of the wide range of evidence which recommends a lowering of New Kingdom dates—as reflected in the revised version of Appendix 1 on absolute chronology (pp. 181–89). Because of the uncertainties in Egyptian dating, there has been increasing appeal to synchron- isms with Mesopotamia. Dodson accepts the possibility of multiple dynastic lines in Assyria, masked by the ‘amuletic’ purpose of the Assyrian Kinglist which was to present a long and unbroken sequence of rulers (James et al. 1991, 295–302). It is encouraging to see that he retains his opinion (from the first edition of Afterglow) that the standard date of 1279 BC for the beginning of Ramesses II’s reign is now ‘untenable’. Using the cycles offered by lunar dating, he prefers a ‘conservative’ 1265 BC, but not ruling out ‘yet lower options’ that ‘would permit a reduction of Twenty-first Dynasty reign lengths down to their contempora- rily attested minima …’ (p. 189). Three options are tabulated on p. 185, the lowest being 1248/9 BC. Finally, in Rameses III (p. 137) there is an interesting mention of how the 19th century scholar Rossellini dated the start of the Pharaoh’s reign to 1476 BC (corr.: actually 1474), com- pared to the presently accepted 1176 BC, a staggering reduction of three centuries. Whether Dodson will one day sanction a further drop in the dates by another two centuries or so remains to be seen … .

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Dodson, A., 2000. ‘Towards a Minimum Chronology of the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period’, BES 14, 7–18. Dodson, A., 2009. ‘The Transition between the 21st and 22nd Dynasties Revisited’, in G. P. F. Broekman, R. J. Demarée & O. E. Kaper (eds), The Libyan Period In Egypt, Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 103–12. Goedicke, H., 1979. ‘Irsu, the Kharu’, in Papyrus Harris. Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 71, 1–17. James, P., 2015. ‘The kings of Jerusalem at the Late Bronze to Iron Age Transition – Forerunners or Doubles of David and Solomon?’, in P. James & P. van der Veen (eds), Solomon and Shishak, Oxford: BAR International Series 2732, 236–57. James, P., 2017a. ‘The Levantine War-records of Ramesses III: changing attitudes, past, present and future’, Antiguo Oriente 15, 57–147. James, P., 2017b. ‘Review of A. Dodson, Afterglow of Empire: Egypt from the Fall of the New Kingdom to the Saite Renaissance (2012)’, PEQ 149.4, 336–39. James, P., Kokkinos, N., Thorpe, I. J., 1998. ‘Mediterranean Chronology in Crisis’, in M. S. Balmuth & R. H. Tykot (eds), Sardinian and Aegean Chronology – Studies in Sardinian Archaeology V, Oxford: Oxbow Monographs, 29–43. James, P. & Morkot, R., 2010. ‘Herihor’s Kingship and the High Priest of Amun Piankh’, JEH 3.2, 231–60. James, P. & Morkot, R., 2013. ‘Two Studies in 21st-Dynasty Chronology: I. Deconstructing Manetho’s 21st Dynasty; II. The Datelines of High Priest Menkheperre’, JEH 6.1, 219–56. James, P., et al., 1991. Centuries of Darkness: A challenge to the conventional chronology of Old World archaeology, London: Jonathan Cape. Jansen-Winkeln, K., 2006. ‘Relative Chronology of Dyn. 21’, in E. Hornung, R. Krauss and D. A. Warburton (eds), Ancient Egyptian Chronology, Leiden: Brill, 218–33. Kahn, D., 2010. ‘Who is Meddling in Egypt’sAﬀairs? The Identity of the Asiatics in the Elephantine Stele of Sethnakhte and the Historicity of the Medinet Habu Asiatic War Reliefs’, Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 2.1, 14–23. Kahn, D., 2016. ‘The Historical Background of a Topographical List of Ramesses III’, in R. Landgráfová & J. Mynářová (eds), Rich and Great: Studies in Honour of Anthony J. Spalinger on the Occasion of his 70th Feast of Thoth, Prague: Charles University in Prague), 161–68. Kitchen, K. A., 1991. ‘Review Feature: Centuries of Darkness. Egyptian Chronology: Problem or Solution?’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 1.2, 235–39. Kitchen, K. A., 2012. ‘Ramesses III and the Ramesside Period’, in E. H. Cline & D. O’Connor (eds), Ramesses III: The Life and Times of Egypt’s Last Hero, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1–26. Kokkinos, N., 2015. ‘Josephus and Greek Chronography: Troy, Solomon, Shishak and Ramesses III’,inP. James & P. G. van der Veen (eds), Solomon and Shishak, Oxford: BAR International Series 2732, 155–89. Morkot, R., & James, P., 2015. ‘Dead-Reckoning the Start of the 22nd Dynasty: From Shoshenq V back to Shoshenq I, in P. James & P. van der Veen (eds), Solomon and Shishak, Oxford: BAR International Series 2732, 20–41. Redford, D. B., 2018. The Medinet Habu Records of the Foreign Wars of Ramesses III, Leiden: Brill. ’ Payraudeau, F., 2008. ‘De nouvelles annales sacerdotales de Siamon, Psousennès II et Osorkon Ier , BIFAO 108, 293–308. Wainwright, G. A., 1961. ‘Some Sea-Peoples’, JEA 47, 71–90. Wallenfels, R., 2019. ‘Shishak and Shoshenq: A Disambiguation’, JAOS 139.2, 487–500.