chapter 9
Chapter 9 - In The Shadow of Jubilation
"As for the king, the good god, Sekhemkheperure: he is the best of scribes, wise like Djehuty in the ways of the land. He sees into the hearts of men and knows the secrets of the gods. He has spent long in the House of Life, reading the scrolls of ancient times that have come down to us..."
It had been over sixty-five years since a pharaoh had ruled long enough to celebrate a Heb Sed - the thirty-year jubilee that truly elevated a living king to godhood. Neferseshemptah was in fact the first pharaoh since the great Ramesses II to live long enough to celebrate one, and at the end of his thirtieth year on the throne - in January of 1148 BCE by the commonest estimate - he ran the courses as vigorously as if he was young and virile. Indeed, Neferseshemptah seems to have had the good fortune to keep excellent physical health throughout his long life, unlike most of his sons. Senwosret had been carried off by tuberculosis four years earlier, while two others of his sons - one by Gilukhepa and one by a minor wife - had also died in the intervening years. His second son by Great Royal Wife Merytneferet, named Neferseshemptah for his father, had already died by year sixteen, and this left the King with only two surviving sons. One of these was a youth of fourteen, Khaemweset, by a minor wife of the harem. The other was the Great King of Hatti, Mursili - Neferseshemptah's son Amunhotep - who had ruled the Hittite Empire for nine years. He had brought the gods, the language and the culture of Egypt into the very heart of Hatti and slowly, insidiously transformed the nation.
In the process, he had immensely strengthened it too. The Hittite army had been thoroughly reorganised along Egyptian lines. Highly trained, with educated and expert commanders, the new Hittite army was a combination of Egyptian and Hittite warriors, bolstered by former Greek and Phoenician mercenaries, and commanded by skilled men who had largely risen from the ranks. If the majority of commanders were Egyptians few people commented on it: by now it was beginning to seem oddly natural that native Egyptians - and Hittites raised in Egyptian culture - had become central to Hittite government and military leadership. Amunhotep had 'adopted' the youthful sons of major Hittite nobles ensuring they wouldn't rebel against him again, having them educated and indoctrinated in Egyptian culture. Indeed, it had become fashionable now in Hattusa for young nobles and commoners alike to worship at the shrines to Amun-Ra and the other Egyptian gods scattered around the city. The entrance to Amunhotep's palace compound in the heart of the city was flanked by two basalt statues of the king as seated pharaoh, modelled on the ancient statue of Khafre that still sits to this day in his temple at Rostja, and even Hittite soldiers now prayed to Set and Wepwawet as well as to the Hittite war gods. Trade with Egypt that flowed through the Levant had made Hattusa prosperous again after a period of decline and by now his rule was not only accepted but appreciated by the majority of the empire's population.
After consolidating his power in Hatti, Amunhotep had also developed intense ambitions. His first campaign outside of core Hittite territory, in his seventh year, had been the reclaiming of three cities overrun by Assyria in the days of his grandfather Kuzi-Teshub's reign; Assur-dan had reacted less than promptly, and his counterattack had been swiftly repelled. By this ninth year, Amunhotep's army was pushing farther south and east into Assyrian territory proper, ransacking towns and forcing Assur-dan's army to engage with them directly. Border skirmishes and the move-countermove game of sieges swiftly escalated into fullscale war on a scale rarely before seen. Sustained campaigns were rare in the late Bronze Age; few had been seen since the fateful years of Ahmose's war against the occupying Hyksos in Egypt more than three hundred years before, but Amunhotep's standing, largely volunteer army had proven itself ideally suited to playing the long game. Assyria had never faced a situation quite like this before and as Assur-dan lost his border cities the populations of towns closer to the Assyrian heartlands began to flee south and east along the rivers. Many appear to have joined up with the various nomadic Aramaean tribes in the region but within a few decades most of these tribes would simply vanish from the map as conflict in the area intensified. Whether they were wiped out or absorbed by the larger powers, nothing of them remained by 1100 BCE.
On Amunhotep's domestic front he had married a priestess of the storm god Teshub in 1150, who had given him twin daughters, although he had so far spent more time on campaign than in the marriage bed so it was whispered among his courtiers that sons would not be forthcoming any time soon!
Few in Egypt paid a great deal of attention to the growing conflict in Mesopotamia. After Neferseshemptah's jubilee celebrations, the court and the nation's elite were more concerned about succession: no matter how physically healthy the king was, he was almost seventy and living on borrowed time. In this era few nations had clearly defined succession laws: it was usually taken as given that the ruler's eldest son, or a suitable son-in-law if there was no living son, would succeed, but as evidenced by the number of times a powerful vizier or general had taken the throne - including Neferseshemptah himself - it was by no means an absolute rule. In this case the king's only living son still in Egypt was the young Khaemweset and while the more ambitious nobles and officials no doubt relished the opportunity to rule through a child puppet king, most of Neferseshemptah's sons had died young and the worry was that this one would too before he had the chance to father children of his own. The king had arranged a marriage for his son with Aahmeset, the daughter of the High Priest of Ptah, but it would not be entered into until both were sixteen and the member of court were well aware that the king might not last another two years.
So it was that even while Egypt lived through its most prosperous and peaceful time in many centuries, a seed of conspiracy was planted among the upper echelons of society. It seems to have begun with various members of court nobility, spearheaded by a man named Panehesy. Despite his name - "the Nubian", Panehesy was a hereditary erpa-ha and smer, whose family had been governors of the Mennefer region apparently for over a thousand years. It's unclear whether or not they wanted to place one of their own on the throne or just to rule through the young Khaemweset were he to take power, but the conspiracy to take control of the reins of power grew to include several chiefs of the army as well as an overseer of the royal harems and even some of the priesthood of Ptah. While Neferseshemptah had been in his prime nobody would ever have dared conspire against him: for all the suspicious beginnings of his reign, he had given Egypt everything he had promised and more. But now as he aged, a shadow grew, aimed not at him, but the power vacuum that would result should he die before Khaemweset came of age.
