Marbles and mosaics on display
Britons are glued to their TV screens to watch a new series which has fuelled a fixation on ancient Egypt, writes Jenny Jobbins from London
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(top) Statue of Thutmosis III in green graywacke, (down) map showing the roads leading across the ridge of Megiddo and the positions of the two armies at the beginning of the battle
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Not since King Tut's exhibition in 1975 has the British nation been so enthralled by Egyptian history and this time there are no long daily queues for admittance to the British Museum. Attention is focussed not on treasure but on history itself, and it peaks at 9pm on Thursdays when the nation tunes to Channel Four to watch a historical reenactment which brings the past to life.
What is gripping the British is real stories of real events from the past, resurrected from texts written on papyrus or inscribed on temple walls and dramatised with full cinematic effect.
The tales -- four of them in the series -- are taken from actual texts which have been faithfully reproduced for TV. Even the language spoken by the Egyptian actors is as authentic as can be imagined: many of the spoken words have been taken directly from the ancient texts. Historians and linguistic experts have painstakingly attempted to reproduce the sound of the ancient Egyptian language "as it was spoken". Thus, if the resulting cadences of the ancient language sound a little like those of colloquial Arabic, the cause might lie not with the accent of the Egyptian actors but with the similarly Semitic origin of the language.
The first episode, The Road to Megiddo, was the story of the Battle of Megiddo, fought in Palestine under the direction of the 18th-Dynasty Pharaoh Tuthmosis III in May 1458 BC against foreign rebels led by the black-bearded Prince of Kadesh. We are quickly immersed in the trappings of the army with its uniforms (or lack of them), chariots -- "lightweight war machines" -- and weapons. Here the programme veers slightly into fiction, naming some of the motley group of soldiers -- a young professional Nubian soldier and the officers Ahmose and Nakht, one born an aristocrat, the other risen through the ranks. The officers are equipped with ivory-tipped arrows and bows of imported birch while the lower ranks are armed with axes, knives and spears. We see new recruits being put through their paces, wrestling to test their manhood. Through this, Jeneni the scribe (whose name we know) records the preparations for battle, the long, hot march to Megiddo and the battle itself. It was his words that were inscribed on the wall of Tuthmosis's new temple at Karnak and from which the story is taken word for word, though part of the more mundane record of the soldiers' lives was taken from a script written by a soldier in Syria.
There is no doubt which side the programme is on. "If the rebels win," says narrator Bernard Hill, "Egyptian civilisation will crumble."
When young Tuthmosis was drawn into this battle to end all battles he was an untried and inexperienced monarch who had recently stepped into the royal sandals of his stepmother, Queen Hatshepsut. Nonetheless, he gallantly marches his army through the desert towards Megiddo. The location, of course, is stunning.
On the eve of battle, we hear the Pharaoh's own words concerning the Prince of Kadesh as recorded by Jeneni: "He is there now. He has gathered the troops of all the countries bordering Egypt." Tuthmosis decides to lead his army through the pass of Aruna. His generals disagree, saying they will certainly be ambushed. Tuthmosis insists. He swears that Amun loves him and will protect him. He gets his way and leads his 10,000 men in single file through the narrow gorge of the Aruna pass.
Meanwhile, the Prince of Kadesh, dressed in black on a black horse with gold trimmings, is waiting to ambush Tuthmosis elsewhere, on the southern route to his capital of Megiddo. Outwitted, he scrambles back to his stronghold. Tuthmosis is already within sight of the town.
Early in the morning of 15 May 1458 BC, the command was given for the Egyptian army to move. The text says: "Tuthmosis anointed his peasant soldiers with perfumed oils to bring them good fortune." The half-naked soldiers, their bodies protected by only a leather shield, meet in battle, Pharaoh faithfully reenacting the familiar chariot posture and the troops leaping at each other with all the panache of the cast of Mel Gibson's Braveheart. The battle scene is certainly realistic. When it was over: "They fled towards the city, but the gates were closed. The people lowered ropes of cloth and hauled them up," Jeneni recorded of the fleeing Kadesh army.
Here, however, the Egyptian generals made a tactical mistake. Instead of taking their chance and attacking the town, they allowed the "other ranks" to waste time looting the personal effects of the dead Syrians "while the enemies' champions lie stretched out like fish on the ground," wrote the disgusted Jeneni.
He did not record how many Egyptians fell in the battle, but medical texts tell us how surgeons treated the wounded -- and the programme showed this a little too graphically. It seems most of the wounded, though, died from infection. A papyrus, describing the lives of three young brothers who were all taken for soldiers, says of the third, "When he reaches manhood his bones are shattered." The Egyptians showed no mercy to their enemies and measured their own success by collecting severed hands.
Pharaoh's forces, however, did not yet have a victory in this battle. The greed of the foot soldiers had been the Egyptians' undoing.
The generals were now in disgrace for letting their soldiers loose on the battlefield instead of taking Megiddo. "Every chief of every country that has revolted is there," Tuthmosis scolded. Now unable to win by force of arms, he set out to starve the rebels into submission. The siege lasted six months. In December, the rebel leaders surrendered by sending out their children, who were then taken off to Egypt as hostages -- to be killed if their fathers rebelled again.
Upon his return to Egypt, we see the triumphal Pharaoh entering the freshly painted Hypostyle Hall at Karnak. Well away from the temple walls, however, keening peasant women throw sand in their hair and mourn the sons who will not come home. The gap between ruler and people is very clear.
In the final part of the text, the Prince of Kadesh and other rebel leaders come to pay obeisance to Tuthmosis. "Never again will I rise up against Tuthmosis," are the final words of the text, spoken by the defeated prince. Tuthmosis went on to win another 17 campaigns and to go down in history as one of Egypt's greatest generals. When he died in 1325 BC, his empire stretched "as far as the circuit of the sun".
Such intimate glimpses of ancient life show how close we are to, rather than distanced from, the past.
