1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Turning Points in Ancient History) (11 page)

T
owering more than sixty feet high and destined to stand guard for the next thirty-four hundred years, even as the mortuary temple that stood behind them was looted for its magnificent stone blocks and slowly crumbled into dust, the two huge statues standing at the entrance to Amenhotep III’s mortuary temple at Kom el-Hetan were, and still are, erroneously called the Colossi of Memnon as a result of a mistaken identification with Memnon, a mythological Ethiopian prince killed at Troy by Achilles. Each statue depicts a seated Amenhotep III, pharaoh of Egypt from 1391 to 1353 BC. In part because of this erroneous identification, the Colossi were already famous two thousand years ago, visited by ancient Greek and Roman tourists familiar with Homer’s
Iliad
and
Odyssey
, who carved graffiti on the legs. One of the Colossi—after being damaged by an earthquake in the first century BC—was known for giving off an eerie whistling sound at dawn, as the stone contracted and expanded with the cold of night and heat of day. Unfortunately for the ancient tourist trade, restoration work during the Roman period in the second century AD finally put an end to the daily “cries of the god.”
¹

However, fascinating as they are, it is not the two Colossi that are critical to our story of important events in the fourteenth century BC, but rather the fifth of five statue bases standing in a north–south row within the boundaries of where the mortuary temple once stood. The temple was located on the west bank of the Nile, near what is now known as the Valley of the Kings, across from the modern city of Luxor. The five bases each held a larger-than-life-sized statue of the king, although they were not nearly as tall as the Colossi placed at the entrance
to the temple. The court in which they stood contained almost forty such statues and bases in all.

T
HE
A
EGEAN
L
IST OF
A
MENHOTEP
III

Each of the five bases, as well as many of the others, is inscribed with a series of topographical names carved into the stone within what the Egyptians called a “fortified oval”—an elongated oval carved standing upright, with a series of small protrusions all along its perimeter. This was meant to depict a fortified city, complete with defensive towers (hence the protrusions). Each fortified oval was placed on, or rather replaced, the lower body of a bound prisoner, portrayed with his arms behind his back and bound together at the elbow, sometimes with a rope tied around his neck attaching him to other prisoners in front of and behind him. This was a traditional New Kingdom Egyptian method of representing foreign cities and countries; even if the Egyptians didn’t actually control these foreign places or were not even close to conquering them, they still wrote the names within such “fortified ovals” as an artistic and political convention, perhaps as symbolic domination.

Together the names on these statue bases formed a series of geographical lists that designated the world known to the Egyptians of Amenhotep III’s time, in the early fourteenth century BC. Some of the most important peoples and places in the Near East at that time were named on the lists, including the Hittites in the north, the Nubians in the south, and the Assyrians and Babylonians to the east. Taken as a whole, the lists were unique in the history of Egypt.

But what immediately strikes us is that the list carved by the stonemason on the fifth statue base contained names never before mentioned in Egyptian inscriptions. They were the names of cities and places located to the west of Egypt—strange names, such as Mycenae, Nauplion, Knossos, Kydonia, and Kythera, written on the left front and left side of the base, and with two more names written separately on the right front side of the base, as if they were titles placed at the head of the list: Keftiu and Tanaja.

What was the meaning of this list and what did the names represent? For the past forty years, modern archaeologists and Egyptologists have been debating the significance of the fifteen names found on this statue base, now commonly referred to as the “Aegean List.”

Fig. 5a–b. Colossi and Aegean List of Amenhotep III (photographs by E. H. Cline and J. Strange).

German archaeologists originally excavated the statue base, and its companions, in the 1960s, but sometime in the 1970s it was accidentally destroyed. According to one unverified story, members of a local Bedouin tribe built a fire under the base and poured cold water onto it in an attempt to crack off the inscribed panels, in order to sell them on the antiquities market. The official version is that wildfires in the area caused the damage. Whoever, or whatever, the culprit, the entire base was shattered into nearly a thousand pieces. Until recently, only a few color photographs of the original base were left for archaeologists, which was most unfortunate, for the names on the list are so distinctive that thirteen of the fifteen had never previously been seen in Egypt … and never would be again.

What modern tourists to the site now see (usually as they are passing by the ruins in an air-conditioned bus on their way to the nearby Valley of the Kings) are the statue bases, and the statues upon them, being reassembled once again, to stand beneath the sun-drenched skies for the first time in more than three thousand years. In 1998, a multinational team led by Egyptologist Hourig Sourouzian and her husband Rainer Stadelmann, the former director of the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo, reopened the excavations at Kom el-Hetan. They have been excavating there every year since and have recovered the fragments of the destroyed Aegean List statue base, as well as those of its neighbors. They are now in the process of reconstructing and restoring them. The eight hundred pieces from the Aegean List alone took more than five years to piece together.
²

Only two of the names on the Aegean List were already familiar to the Egyptian scribes and to modern Egyptologists—the two that seem to be the names used as titles at the top of the list:
Keftiu
, which was the Egyptian word for the island of Crete, and
Tanaja
, which seems to have been the Egyptian word for mainland Greece. These two names began to appear in Egyptian texts during the time of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III, nearly a century earlier, but never in the company of specific toponyms of individual cities and areas in the Aegean.

The other names on this statue base list were so unusual, and yet almost instantly recognizable, that the first Egyptologist to publish them in English, the eminent professor Kenneth Kitchen of the University of Liverpool, was initially hesitant to suggest a translation for them, for fear of scholarly ridicule. In his first short note on the statue base inscription,
which was only a few pages long in the 1965 issue of the scholarly journal
Orientalia
, Kitchen remarked cautiously: “I hardly like to put the following idea on record; readers may ignore it if they wish. The two names ‘Amnisa and Kunusa look uncomfortably like Amniso(s) and … Knossos, famous ancient settlements on the north coast of Crete.”
³

In the years since then, a number of scholars have worked on deciphering the names on the list and the meaning behind their appearance. The German scholar Elmar Edel published the first thorough consideration of all five statue base lists in 1966; a second edition, updated and with revisions and emendations, was published just a few years ago, forty years later, in 2005. In that interval, many other scholars devoted much thought and ink to the possible interpretations of the list.
⁴

First on the list, after the headnames of Keftiu (Crete) and Tanaja (mainland Greece) come a few names of important Minoan sites on Crete, including Knossos and its port city of Amnisos, followed by Phaistos and Kydonia, listed in an order that goes from east to west. All of these either had Minoan palaces or, in the case of Amnisos, functioned as a port for a nearby Minoan palace. Next on the list comes the island of Kythera, positioned midway between Crete and mainland Greece, and then important Mycenaean sites and regions on mainland Greece, including Mycenae and its port city of Nauplion, the region of Messenia, and perhaps the city of Thebes in Boeotia. Last on the list are more names from Minoan Crete, this time in order from west to east and including Amnisos again.

The list looks suspiciously like an itinerary of a round-trip voyage from Egypt to the Aegean and back again. According to the order of the names, the voyagers from Egypt went first to Crete, perhaps to visit the Minoan royalty and merchants with whom, by this point, the Egyptians had been familiar for almost a century. They then continued, via Kythera, to mainland Greece to visit the Mycenaeans—the new power on the scene, who were taking over the trade routes to Egypt and the Near East from the Minoans about this time. And then they returned to Egypt via Crete as the fastest and most direct route, calling at Amnisos for water and food as one of the last stops on the homeward journey, just as they had made that port their first stop shortly after setting out.

The lists on the statue bases as a whole catalog the world known to the Egyptians of Amenhotep III’s time. Most of the names were already
known from other documents and treaties; among these familiar names were the Hittites and the Kassites/Babylonians (about whom more below), as well as cities in Canaan. The Aegean place-names, however, were (and still are) exceptional and were carved in a particular order. Some were even specifically recarved, for the first three names were recut (to their present values) at some point before or while the list was on display.
⁵

Some scholars believe that this list is merely propaganda, idle boasting by a pharaoh who had heard of faraway places and yearned to conquer them or wished to convince people that he had. Others believe that the list is not mendacious self-aggrandizement, but is based on factual knowledge and actual contacts in that long-ago time. This latter explanation seems more likely, for we know, from the numerous other depictions in tombs of nobles dating to the time of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III in the fifteenth century BC, that there were multiple contacts with the Aegean during that earlier time, including instances in which diplomatic ambassadors and/or merchants came to Egypt bearing gifts. It is probable that such contacts continued into the next century, during the reign of Amenhotep III. If so, we may have here the earliest written record of a round-trip voyage from Egypt to the Aegean, a voyage undertaken more than thirty-four centuries ago, a few decades before the boy king Tut ruled the eternal land.

The suggestion that we are looking at the documentation of an early fourteenth-century BC voyage from Egypt to the Aegean, rather than a record of Mycenaeans and Minoans coming to Egypt, seems plausible for the following fascinating reason. There are a number of objects with the cartouche (royal name) of either Amenhotep III or his wife Queen Tiyi carved upon them that have been found by archaeologists at six sites scattered around the Aegean area—on Crete, mainland Greece, and Rhodes. There is a correlation between the Aegean find-spots of these objects and the sites named on the Aegean List, for four of the six sites are included among the names carved on it.

Some of these inscribed objects are simply scarabs and small stamp seals, but one is a vase; all have the cartouche of either the pharaoh or his wife. Most important are the numerous fragments of double-sided plaques made of faience, a material halfway between pottery and glass, which were found at Mycenae, probably the leading city in
fourteenth-century BC Greece. These fragments, of which there are at least twelve, come from a total of nine or more original plaques, each measuring about six to eight inches in length, about four inches wide, and less than an inch thick. All had Amenhotep III’s titles baked onto them in black paint, reading on both sides of each plaque, “the good god, Neb-Ma’at-Re, son of Re, Amenhotep, prince of Thebes, given life.”
⁶

Egyptologists refer to these as foundation deposit plaques. They are normally found, at least in Egypt, placed in specific deposits under temples or, sometimes, statues of the king.
⁷
They function much as time capsules do in our present culture, and as such deposits have done since the Early Bronze Age in Mesopotamia. Their presumed purpose was to ensure that the gods and future generations would know the identity and generosity of the donor/builder, and the date when the building, statue, or other construction was completed.