Out of the Black Land - By Kerry Greenwood Page 0,196

air, it will deliver its ‘parent’—a ball of myrrh and semen which produces the new Phoenix. (Squeamish later writers made the bird female and the ‘parent’ an egg, which is much more sanitary).

Then the bird will betake itself to its favourite date palm, make a nest of cinnamon, cassia and frankincense and sing its last song; after which it will summon fire, by cupping its wings, and burn away to ash. The new Phoenix, or the same one, will then fly from Karnak returning only to die, in the same way, after an interval variously described as anything between 500 to 12,000 years.

Tacitus, in his Annals, and agreeing with Herodotus, suggests that it came back to Karnak in AD 34 after 500 years; while Pliny, in Natural History says 1200 years. The best poem about it is by Lactantius, who describes, in gentle elegaics, its escort by the birds, its red and gold colouring and its final and glorious death: ipse quidem, sed non eadem quia et ipsa nec ipsa est, aeternam vitam mortis adepta bono—‘Because she is herself and not herself, gaining eternal life by the boon of death’.

I am, by the way, entirely convinced by Bauvel and Gilbert’s thesis of The Orion Mystery that the pyramids were aligned to the rising of Isis/Sothis/Sirius; and that the Egyptians were aware of the precession of the equinoxes.

This also solved a problem for me. In the remarkable book, Akhenaten: The Heretic King, Redford has shown that Nefertiti was repeatedly depicted as priestess to the Bennu/Benben/Phoenix bird in the form of a black stone—like the pyramid-capping stone in the Cairo museum. This is explained by the hypothesis that this was—like the ka’aba in Mecca—a meteorite, which flew like a firebird and left just a black iron egg behind; from which it would doubtless again arise.

The connection of the Queen to the cult is not obvious, but may be as I have hypothesised—that she signified the divine or cosmic womb, the womb of Isis seeded by Osiris/Orion, who gave birth to the Aten, the mystic unknowable God whose avatar was the disc of the Sun.

I am fairly sure that the Phoenix can be identified with Isis/Sothis/Sirius; and that possibly the interval of 1260 years—a Sothic cycle or Sirius year—regulates the return of the Phoenix.

However, the fact that the iconoclast monotheist Akhnaten has a whole wall and chamber at his new Aten In Splendour temple at Karnak devoted to Nefertiti as the head priestess of the bnbn cult is strange and to my mind must signify more than a desire to confer honour upon his wife. I have suggested some reasons why the King did this.

The Fate of…

Ankhesenamen

No one knows what happened to the sister/wife of Tutankhamen. If she was alive or present at the accession of Horemheb, he would certainly have married her. She did attempt to bring a prince of Assyria to marry her, and he met with a fatal termination of his matrimonial hopes somewhere on the border. Several writers have sentimentalised about her sad fate, notably Desroches-Noblecourt, who thinks that Ay is a good guy and Horemheb a cruel and brutal dictator. It occurred to me, however, that she might have decided to take some hand in her own fate before she expired of acute nomenclature.

Tutankhamen

The young Pharaoh’s mummified body has extensive damage, but it is now hard to tell if it is post or antemortem. If it was postmortem, then someone dropped the Divine Corpse down a lot of stairs.

Ay, who took over the rule of the Black Land, is the obvious suspect.

Mutnodjme

The accidental Queen of Egypt died in childbirth some years after the accession of Horemheb. He never remarried and had no children. After his death, the kingdom went to an old army commander, and thence to a new dynasty.

Horemheb

The warrior Pharaoh died peacefully after reigning for twenty-seven years. He had the temple of the Aten pulled down, and even the tombs of Huy and Ay looted of their treasures (though their bodies were not touched). Despite his bad press, I do see his point.

Horemheb was certainly not a tyrant and his reign smoothed away most of the problems created by the Amarna experiment. However, the kinglist puts him directly after Amenhotep III, giving him a reign of fifty years, and making the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb a real surprise because no one could identify him. Horemheb decided—or the later writers decided it for him—that the Amarna dynasty had been a mistake and that the Pharaoh who should