Combat in Rituals and Festivals

Combat rituals celebrating the Egyptian subjugation of foreigners were associated with a number of religious festivals and celebrations, appearing in the festival cycle in evidence already during the late Predynastic period and later including the Jubilee (reaffirmation of royal power after ideally thirty years on the throne) and the New Kingdom durbar celebrations.^{[352] [353]} With the reign of Amenhotep II (c.

In scenes of wrestling and stick fighting from the Ramesside period, Egyptian soldiers fight foreigners (perhaps themselves in Egyptian service, performing a role in non-lethal combat); the speeches recorded for the Egyptian participants in the matches are in keeping with the non-lethal nature of the activities, and add a light-hearted aspect to the engagements.⁸ Maintaining an association of ritual animal sacrifice and the subjugation of foreigners within later, New Kingdom contexts, fattened cattle for sacrifice could wear between their horns representations of the heads of foreign enemies, small hands attached to the tips of the arm-like horns, the sacrifice of the bovid becoming the symbolic elimination of an icon of foreign power.⁹ In depictions of celebration of Egyptian domination of foreign regions - so in both the durbar scenes of Tutankhamun's (c.

More physically violent, the punishment of foreign enemies may appear as a magical mirroring in the punishment of Egyptian malefactors, with the forks of a pillory post terminating in the heads of foreign enemies. Similarly, on execration figurines, names of foreign enemies and Egyptian rebels and criminals may appear, evidence of the essential equation of all outside the social norm.¹⁰ No Egyptian religious texts describe any concept of innate evil within humans or the cosmos, although people are capable of wickedness;¹¹

Gesellschaft, Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft Sonderheft 108 (Innsbruck: Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft, 2000), pp. 111-45.

8 John Coleman Darnell and Colleen Manassa, Tutankhamun's Armies: Battle and Conquest during Ancient Egypt's 18th Dynasty (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2007), pp. 208-9, 272, nn. 102-7.

9 Jacques Leclant, ‘La “Mascarde” des boeufs gras et le triomphe de l'Egypte', MDAI(K) 14 (1956), 128-45; Anthony J. Spalinger, ‘Chauvinism in the First Intermediate Period', in H. Vymazalova and M. Barta (eds.), Chronology and Archaeology in Ancient Egypt (The Third Millennium B.C.) (Prague: Czech Institute of Egyptology/Karolinum Press, 2008), p. 252.

10 Linda Borrmann, ‘Form Follows Function: der Zeichencharakter der altägyptischen Ächtungsfiguren', in G. Neunert, A. Verbovsek and K. Gabler (eds.), Bild: Ästhetik - Medium - Kommunikation, Gottinger Orientforschungen Ägypten 58 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014), pp. 103-17; Hans-Werner Fischer-Elfert, Abseits von Ma‘at: Fallstudien zu Aussenseitern im Alten Ägypten, Wahrnehmungen und Spuren Altägyptens 1 (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2005).

11 Erik Hornung, Der ägyptische Mythos von der Himmelskuh: eine Ätiologie des Unvollkommenen, 3rd edn, Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 46 (Freiburg and Gottingen: Universitätsverlag Freiburg and Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982), pp. 90-5; Jan Assmann, Ma'at: Gerechtigkeit und Unsterblichkeit im alten Ägypten (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1990), pp. 174-95; Mpay Kemboly, The Question of Evil in Ancient Egypt, Egyptology 12 (London: Golden House Publications, 2010). combat is thus a means of maintaining an equilibrium and expanding the realm of ultimate order - Egypt - against the outer chaos - the region on the edge of which foreign lands teeter. Textually, enemies appear as overwhel­mingly bad, animalistic and chaotic, yet their natures and the actions taken against them usually appear in a formalised language employing a limited number of generalising terms.^[355] Inscriptions of soldiers stress more martial prowess and the capture of prisoners than any overt bloodlust.

Rituals of foreign execration and criminal execution may appear dur­ing the Early Dynastic period, with the apparent beheading of enemies,^[356] perhaps subsequent to a smiting ritual. At the Middle Kingdom Egyptian fortress of Mirgissa, on the Second Cataract in Nubia, a beheaded body, buried in sand with crucibles to represent the fiery punishment of the damned, broken ritual vessels, and execration figures, appears to repre­sent the use of an actual execution within the context of magical practice.1^[357] The king might threaten a foreign ruler with death by fire (attested to by rebels), perhaps related to the burning of execration figures.^[358] The destruction of a donkey, a typhonic animal symbolising chaotic forces and opposition to cosmic order, could also represent the control of enemies both human and more elemental.^[359] Even in the standardised depictions of bound foreigners, the ropes tortuously wrapped around the captives' upper arms are perhaps more evidence of enemies compared to sacrificial birds than representations of actual constraints, the latter attested in visual and textual references to mana­cles and sticks bound to neck and wrists.^[360]

The close association between ritual and warfare continues into the New Kingdom, with cosmological concepts influencing how the Egyptians displayed the results, if not practice, of warfare. Thutmosis I suspended the body of a Nubian leader - killed by the Egyptian ruler himself - from the prow of his vessel during his return to Egypt.

Icons of Power: The Ruler Smites his Enemies and Tramples them Beneath his Soles

In place by the late Naqada II period, with harbingers during Naqada I, and persisting into the Roman period, a scene of the ruler grasping a kneeling enemy, or several foes, and raising a weapon - usually a mace - as though about to smite what he grasps, serves as the principle icon of victory.^[365] Originating in the discoidal and pear-shaped maces of the Predynastic period, the pear-shaped mace survives as the most common weapon symbolising royal domination through violent action. The image of a single triumphant figure violently establishing order over his foes represents a focus on the ruler that develops during the Protodynastic period.

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enemy.

A depiction of a male figure wielding a mace above the head of a bound prisoner (or group of prisoners) recognisably appears at the end of the Naqada II period (as a small vignette within a larger scene of ritual events), and again during Naqada III (as a more prominent element within a depiction of what may be a ritual celebration of the aftermath of a conflict).^[368] In both of those examples the event occurs outside of battle, within a ritual context, and the same striking pose could appear in other rituals as a consecratory gesture.^[369] Evidence from bodies of soldiers dating to the early Twelfth Dynasty suggests that such a blow was indeed given as a coup de grace to hopelessly wounded combatants, and at least some versions of the smiting scene may have been acted out within a ritual setting.^[370] The reigns of both Akhenaton and Merneptah indeed provide evidence for the revelation of royal victory going beyond the display of corpses to the otherwise rarely attested use of impalement of defeated enemy leaders.

According to the texts and iconography of pharaonic power, Egyptian deities both sanctioned warfare and influenced the Egyptians' martial success. By the New Kingdom the Egyptian ruler clearly derives his authority to make war from the gods, who present him with a weapon - usually a sickle sword - while the king adopts the smiting pose; this presentation is common in iconography, and is even attested to as the subject of a dream appearance of the god Ptah. The divine ruler himself would also trample enemies beneath his feet. The bases of statues, the pavements of ritual structures and palaces, and the soles of sandals could bear images of bound enemies, and the handle of a royal sceptre might take the form of an enemy bent in the back-breaking pose of the object of the king's wrath in the gesture of waf-khasout, ‘bending back the foreign lands'.^[371]