Ancient Egyptian Kingship.

• Author: O'Connor, David

Edited by DAVID O'CONNOR and DAVID E SILVERMAN. Probleme der Agyptologie, 9. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 1995. Pp. xxxiii + 347 HFl 180, $103.

The concept of kingship was central to ancient Egyptian civilization and has long been an object of study by Egyptologists. For many years Henri Frankfort's Kingship and the Gods, first published in 1948 (Chicago: Univ. at Chicago Press), was the standard volume on this subject. It emphasized the king's divinity over his human attributes. A subsequent contribution to the debate by Georges Posener in De la divinite du pharaon (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1960) focused on the human side of the king's nature. Further important contributions to our understanding of the balance between the king's divine and human natures were made by Hans Goedicke in his Die Stellung des Konigs im Alten Reich (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1960) and Erik Hornung in Geschichte als Fest (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1966). The following thirty years have witnessed new work on individual aspects of kingship, but until now, no volume has synthesized subsequent research on this topic.

O'Connor and Silverman remedy this gap. They have gathered in this volume seven essays under three headings: "General Characterization of Kingship," "Historical Studies of Kingship," and "Analysis and Interpretation of Royal Architecture."

In part one, John Baines reports on the current consensus concerning the extent of the king's divine nature, noting that the king is the meeting point of the divine and human in this world. Baines discusses the legitimation of kings and of kingship and evaluates the level of dissent against both kinds of claims to legitimacy. The discussion is thought-provoking though often speculative. Part one continues with Silverman's essay on the nature of kingship. Silverman believes that the increased democratization of funerary religion among the non-royal elite caused a corresponding increase in god-like claims by the king. He further posits that these assertions culminated in Amenhotep III's assumption of divine status and in the claim that his son Akhenaten was sole intermediary with the gods.

In part two, Baines examines the fascinating evidence for Dynasty 0 recently discovered at Abydos by the German expedition under Gunther Dreyer. Dreyer has unearthed a dynasty that pre-dates the traditional First Dynasty, during which many of the artistic conventions known to be normative later were developed. Baines'...