Das agyptische Konigtum im Spannungsfeld zwischen Innen-und Aussenpolitik im 2. Jahrtausend v. Chr.

• Author: Enmarch, Roland
• Position: Book review

Das agyptische Konigtum im Spannungsfeld zwischen Innen-und Aussenpolitik im 2. Jahrtausend v. Chr. Edited by ROLF GUNDLACH and ANDREA KLUG. Konigtum, Staat und Gesellschaft Fruher Hochkulturen, vol. 1. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2004. Pp. x + 432, illus. [euro]64.

This volume, comprising the papers of a research group based at the Johannes Gutenburg-Universitat Mainz, is the first in a projected interdisciplinary series on kingship in early high cultures. It builds on the Beitrage zur altagyptischen Konigsideologie sub-series of Agypten und Altes Testament 36.1-3 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997-2003), and is primarily concerned with the impact of foreign relations and social networks on royal ideology.

Several of the contributions are by Rolf Gundlach. In the first (pp. 1-17), he provides a broad overview of the subject, concentrating on Egypt's intercultural relations from the collapse of the Old Kingdom to the New Kingdom. He offers several rather complicated diagrammatic models of cultural contacts, illustrating the relationship between the "three realities" of lived experience, its embodiment in recoverable

sources, and the ideological meaning or aims that these sources also reflect.

His central argument, which is extended in a second article (pp. 73-91), is that Egyptian kingship was confronted with a series of crises throughout its history, and reacted with a series of re-assertions and reinterpretations of royal ideology. The most severe crisis was provoked by the Hyksos hegemony, before which the Egyptian state had perceived itself as the whole world (Weltstaat), with a largely ideological approach to foreigners as subservient or inimical chaotic forces. After the expulsion of the Hyksos, Egypt was merely one state among many (Staat in der Welt), and royal ideology struggled, ultimately unsuccessfully, to reassert the older world-view in the face of this new reality. Gundlach's arguments perhaps oversimplify a little, partly due to the broad scope of his survey, and there are some points of detail that might be disputed (a striking case in point is his reading of royal ideological re-interpretations in the Eighth and Ninth Dynasties, pp. 75-76). Nevertheless the overall portrait of trends in royal ideology over the course of the second millennium seems convincing, even if the labelling of each new phase as a "crisis" is a little overdramatic.

In a third article (pp. 119-219), Gundlach examines one such crisis more fully: the...