Thank you for a beautifully written and thought provoking piece. The US is also filled with wonderful beaux art museums filled with stolen loot. I share the guilt: I love to go to them, and if we gave it all back, most of it I would never see.
Museums are complicated spaces, to be sure. Kind of like families, they force you into certain roles—owner, colonized, consumer, visitor or, caretaker… it’s all there.
Reusing ancient statuary and construction makes sense given the difficulty and cost of their construction in the ancient world. One wonders how much reusing monuments was a cover for touted prosperity...or a contributing factor to what actual prosperity occurred after the savings.
Adding one's own touches to a monument of another's glory also fits in with Egyptian liturgical practice, which saw ancient hymns and texts combined and developed in novel ways over the centuries, even swapping out one deity or Pharaoh for another as a text was reused and copied to another temple. The story told then becomes not just the person or liturgy of the past, or the present, but of both. For Pharaohs the legitimacy gained through a lineage seemed more common than trying to blot out a prior rival.
This wouldn’t have been expressed in a tit-for-tat political way, as Americans do it, as inherited from the ancient Romans, but in a much more nuanced and unspoken way—modeled, not verbalized. Thus, I see the reuse of literally hundreds of monumental statues from Amenhotep III as a visible claim of what this king (and his son!) did in Egypt. It was a rejection of solar kingship at the same time it was an embrace of it. Confusing! Everyone would have seen these statues carted off to be recarved and repositioned. That was a wound carved into the reputation and image of Amenhotep III. But those in the know would have also seen that new colossal images of Ramses II—like those at Abu Simbel or at the hearing ear temple at Karnak—show him with a portrait inspired by Amenhotep III and his reuse of those statues. So it’s a complicated relationship—resentment of an 18th Dynasty kingship that pushed too far but a wish to be perceived as Sun King II.
Hmm I see. Granted ancient history requires some speculation on the part of historians, but this particular interpretation of the evidence, and the assumptions underlying it, are more than I'm willing to conjecture.
There is much more evidence pointing towards a problematic love-hate relationship with late 18th dynasty kings by ramesside rulers. Whereas the perception of thutmose III is all love all the time…. I have written about this issue in my article on the ramesside period in the Oxford history of the ancient near east. You can look there for more detail.
Hopefully the local university has a copy of Volume III so I can check it out...otherwise it's a day trip to the city.
Reading a paper by Peter Brand*, it seems the majority of usurping other Pharaohnic monuments was done in specific periods in the New Kingdom. The post-Ramesses II rulers, Horemheb and Tutmose III seems to stand out. Given the political instability of the 19th Dynasty I gleaned from the abstract of your article, the former definitely makes sense. Yet when Brand covers Ramesses II, he seems to be an exception:
"These annexations, however, were selective and not part of any larger program of damnatio memoriae against either his own immediate ancestors, or other illustrious kings of the past whose monuments he reinscribed."
Apparently Ramesses II would reuse statues from as far back as the Middle Kingdom, and even re-inscribed Horemheb's name after erasing it earlier. He goes on to say the motivation was "...to promote his own rule at a time when few living Egyptians could remember any other pharaoh." So it seems less like a directed beef with Amenhotep III versus a general PR campaign, based often on location (such as processional routes) if anything else.
* Brand, Peter, 2010, Usurpation of Monuments. In Willeke Wendrich (ed.), UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, Los Angeles, pp. 4-5.
Yup. And reusing Amenhotep III’s statuary in such numbers also has a political edge to it, a kind of revenge against the 18th dynasty. Take it, cover it all with gold leaf, and voila! Instant prosperity for your Ramesside populism!
Thank you for a beautifully written and thought provoking piece. The US is also filled with wonderful beaux art museums filled with stolen loot. I share the guilt: I love to go to them, and if we gave it all back, most of it I would never see.
Museums are complicated spaces, to be sure. Kind of like families, they force you into certain roles—owner, colonized, consumer, visitor or, caretaker… it’s all there.
Therein lies the richness, but of course it comes at a cost.
Reusing ancient statuary and construction makes sense given the difficulty and cost of their construction in the ancient world. One wonders how much reusing monuments was a cover for touted prosperity...or a contributing factor to what actual prosperity occurred after the savings.
Adding one's own touches to a monument of another's glory also fits in with Egyptian liturgical practice, which saw ancient hymns and texts combined and developed in novel ways over the centuries, even swapping out one deity or Pharaoh for another as a text was reused and copied to another temple. The story told then becomes not just the person or liturgy of the past, or the present, but of both. For Pharaohs the legitimacy gained through a lineage seemed more common than trying to blot out a prior rival.
This wouldn’t have been expressed in a tit-for-tat political way, as Americans do it, as inherited from the ancient Romans, but in a much more nuanced and unspoken way—modeled, not verbalized. Thus, I see the reuse of literally hundreds of monumental statues from Amenhotep III as a visible claim of what this king (and his son!) did in Egypt. It was a rejection of solar kingship at the same time it was an embrace of it. Confusing! Everyone would have seen these statues carted off to be recarved and repositioned. That was a wound carved into the reputation and image of Amenhotep III. But those in the know would have also seen that new colossal images of Ramses II—like those at Abu Simbel or at the hearing ear temple at Karnak—show him with a portrait inspired by Amenhotep III and his reuse of those statues. So it’s a complicated relationship—resentment of an 18th Dynasty kingship that pushed too far but a wish to be perceived as Sun King II.
Hmm I see. Granted ancient history requires some speculation on the part of historians, but this particular interpretation of the evidence, and the assumptions underlying it, are more than I'm willing to conjecture.
There is much more evidence pointing towards a problematic love-hate relationship with late 18th dynasty kings by ramesside rulers. Whereas the perception of thutmose III is all love all the time…. I have written about this issue in my article on the ramesside period in the Oxford history of the ancient near east. You can look there for more detail.
Hopefully the local university has a copy of Volume III so I can check it out...otherwise it's a day trip to the city.
Reading a paper by Peter Brand*, it seems the majority of usurping other Pharaohnic monuments was done in specific periods in the New Kingdom. The post-Ramesses II rulers, Horemheb and Tutmose III seems to stand out. Given the political instability of the 19th Dynasty I gleaned from the abstract of your article, the former definitely makes sense. Yet when Brand covers Ramesses II, he seems to be an exception:
"These annexations, however, were selective and not part of any larger program of damnatio memoriae against either his own immediate ancestors, or other illustrious kings of the past whose monuments he reinscribed."
Apparently Ramesses II would reuse statues from as far back as the Middle Kingdom, and even re-inscribed Horemheb's name after erasing it earlier. He goes on to say the motivation was "...to promote his own rule at a time when few living Egyptians could remember any other pharaoh." So it seems less like a directed beef with Amenhotep III versus a general PR campaign, based often on location (such as processional routes) if anything else.
* Brand, Peter, 2010, Usurpation of Monuments. In Willeke Wendrich (ed.), UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, Los Angeles, pp. 4-5.
Yup. And reusing Amenhotep III’s statuary in such numbers also has a political edge to it, a kind of revenge against the 18th dynasty. Take it, cover it all with gold leaf, and voila! Instant prosperity for your Ramesside populism!
What evidence is there that Ramesses II held such a grudge against Amenhotep III?
All the Star Wars references Kara, my nerd heat sings! ❤️