V. The City as State: Thebes and the Double Kingdom

Abstract

Upper Egypt remains the most thoroughly documented and most extensively studied region in all of the Double Kingdom. Entire volumes have been devoted to cataloguing the era's monuments and prosopography just in Thebes alone. One school of thought would view Upper Egypt as wholly exceptional: the sole, true dominion of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty in Egypt, with Kuschitenherrschaft farther north seldom amounting to more than a punitive incursion. This chapter discusses the broader divisions of power, strategies of appointment, and modes of succession as these reflect the involvement of the Kushite royal house and the challenges of regional and national governance which it confronted. The chapter first begins with a consideration of the dominant parties resident in Upper Egypt at the inception of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, and subsequently turns to a micro-analysis of one office particularly central to Kushite rule in Egypt: the God's Wife of Amun.Keywords: Bierbrier; Double Kingdom; God's Wife of Amun; Kuschitenherrschaft; Kushite royal house; Thebes; Twenty-Fifth Dynasty; Upper Egypt