iii OccasiOnal prOceedings Of the theban wOrkshOp creativity and innovation in the reign of hatshepsut edited by José M. Galán, Betsy M. Bryan, and Peter F. Dorman Papers from the Theban Workshop 2010 The OrienTal insTiTuTe OF The universiTy OF ChiCaGO iv The Oriental Institute, Chicago © 2014 by The university of Chicago. all rights reserved. Published 2014. Printed in the united states of america. series editors Leslie Schramer and Thomas G. Urban with the assistance of Rebecca Cain Series Editors’ Acknowledgment Brian Keenan assisted in the production of this volume. Cover Illustration The god amun in bed with Queen ahmes, conceiving the future hatshepsut. Traced by Pía rodríguez Frade (based on Édouard naville, The Temple of Deir el Bahari Printed by through Four Colour Imports, by Lifetouch, Loves Park, Illinois USA The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of american national standard for information services — Permanence of Paper v table of contents Preface. José M. Galán, Spanish National Research Council, Madrid ........................................... vii list of abbreviations .............................................................................. xiii Bibliography..................................................................................... xv papers frOm the theban wOrkshOp, 2010 1. innovation at the Dawn of the new Kingdom. Peter F. Dorman, American University of Beirut...................................................... 1 2. The Paradigms of innovation and Their application to the early new Kingdom of egypt. Eberhard Dziobek, Heidelberg and Leverkusen....................................................... Susanne Bickel, University of Basel ............................................................... 21 Luc Gabolde, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (UMR 5140) .................................... Dimitri Laboury, FNRS-University of Liège.......................................................... Betsy M. Bryan, Johns Hopkins University .......................................................... ....................................................... Catharine H. Roehrig, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York .......................................... Jean-Luc Chappaz, Museum for Art and History, Geneva . JJ Shirley, Journal of Egyptian History ............................................................. José M. Galán, Spanish National Research Council, Madrid ............................................. 12. The Composition of the Opening of the Mouth in the Tomb-chapel of Djehuty (TT Jose M. Serrano, University of Seville .............................................................. TT and Their sociocultural Contexts. Andrés Diego Espinel, Spanish National Research Council, Madrid ....................................... 14. unconventional versions: The Theban Tomb of Puiemra, second Prophet of amun under hatshepsut. Barbara Engelmann-von Carnap, University of Heidelberg ............................................. Ellen Morris, Barnard College.................................................................... W. V. Davies, British Museum, London ............................................................. Tamás A. Bács, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest................................................... 411 Charles Bonnet, Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, Paris ........................................ Dominique Valbelle, Université de Paris-Sorbonne, Paris IV/UMR 8167 .................................... v Mitanni Enslaved: Prisoners of War, Pride, and Productivity in a New Imperial Regime 361 15 Mitanni Enslaved: Prisoners of War, Pride, and Productivity in a New Imperial Regime Ellen Morris, Barnard College The early to mid-Eighteenth Dynasty can be considered a transformational moment in Egypt’s social his- tory. The first true northern empire was forged gradually over the course of a century — first through the vengeful conquests of Ahmose, then through the ambitious and exploratory expeditions of Thutmose I, and finally via Thutmose III’s relentless annual campaigning. The last stage, perhaps already anticipated during the joint reign with Hatshepsut,1 took place over the better part of two decades in the middle of the fifteenth century and occasioned such an influx of prisoners of war that the citizens of the imperial center at Thebes found themselves surrounded by foreign slaves. Prior to the New Kingdom, slavery and systems closely akin to slavery were known in Egypt. As in most state societies, there were people who worked plots of land that they did not own but who were effectively tied to the land and were transferred along with it in royal donations or private wills. Such serfdom is not slavery per se, but inasmuch as it renders vulnerable individuals into transferable belongings, it comes close. Corvée labor is also not slavery exactly. Yet when the penalty for choosing not to participate in an assigned public work project was the permanent loss of one’s own freedom and the enslavement of one’s family, the differences seem mostly temporal. True slaves in Old and Middle Kingdom Egypt appear to have consisted in the main of tax-evaders, their unlucky families, and a motley assortment of those found deserving of punishment or irrecoverably in debt. By the Thirteenth Dynasty, people originally sent to work in labor camps could be transferred to private ownership. Intermingled among this population of native Egyptians in one instance was a sizeable number of Syro-Palestinian individuals (Hayes 1972, pp. 92–109), which is the first time a preponderance of foreign slaves is witnessed in documentary evidence. Such a situation, however, seems to have been a reflection of the greatly increased numbers of northerners settled within the country, rather than of any otherwise unattested military activity. To Moses I. Finley, who has written extensively on ancient slave-systems, the slave is analogous to a stranger and a foreigner even within in his own society. Divested of his rights and unable to put his family and community first or to be supported by them in times of trouble, the slave is an isolated entity who is at the absolute mercy of his master (Finley 1998, p. 143). Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that Egypt’s first foray into large-scale slaveholding occurred in the context of war. The notion that slave societies develop in the wake of war is an old one, espoused by Heraclitus and Marx and Engels, among others (Blackburn 1988, p. 267). The transformational moment for Egypt — in which slaves moved from the realm of the anomalous to that of the commonplace — was occasioned by the onset of an extremely aggressive imperial project. The northerners imported into Egypt in shackles were already estranged and already foreign and therefore, like the quintessential slave described by Finely, especially suited to their new station. The fact that the importation of foreign slave labor coincided with the most elaborate building projects known in Egypt since the Great Pyramids is almost certainly no accident. The employment of erstwhile enemies as slaves allowed the burden of corvée labor to be significantly lightened for Egyptian citizens at 1 Joint cartouches found on a few storage jars at sites in the Sinai III’s intensive campaigning may have been laid during the co- and southern Canaan suggest that the groundwork for Thutmose regency (Morris 2005, pp. 40, 65). 361 362 Ellen Morris the same time as awe-inspiring monuments to Egypt’s power were being erected at an unprecedented pace. “Slaves” () now were foreigners, almost exclusively, while unfree Egyptians were “servants” () and thus allowed to maintain — semantically at least — a modicum of dignity (Loprieno 1997, p. 209). In this transformational moment, then, Egypt’s economy was radically reworked, such that much of the hard labor on state projects and institutional land was now undertaken by a new population. But the point that I argue in this essay and illustrate through one specific case study is that this new population was in and of itself symbolic of a new world order. Now, thanks to this glut of foreign chattel, Egyptians of even relatively modest status could view themselves as microcosms of the state — as literal or symbolic masters over an enslaved enemy. The foreign prisoners of war whose entrance and acculturation into Egyptian society are traced in this essay are first depicted at work on the estates of some of Hatshepsut’s most esteemed nobles. To the best of my knowledge, images of these highly recognizable men appear in Egyptian art abruptly during this reign, although admittedly the numbers of decorated tombs constructed prior to this point in the early Eighteenth Dynasty is small. They reach the zenith of their numbers in the sole reign of Thutmose III and gradually disappear from view over the next two generations. In this essay, it is first argued that among the great mass of prisoners that entered Egypt at this time a distinct foreign population is indeed identifiable in these tombs. Second, the dissemination and eventual assimilation of this cadre of prisoners, turned slaves, is charted. Finally, the case is mustered that these men were, in all likelihood, Hurrian warriors fighting on behalf of Mitanni and that the commemoration of their enslavement reflected both a historical reality and at the same time a celebration of Egypt’s newfound and hard-won position of dominance over its neighbors to the