The Story of Hekanakht

Among those awaiting the life-giving waters of the Nile around the year 2002 BC was a well-to-do farmer named Hekanakht, whose lands were locatedon the river’s west bank, near the village of Nebeseyet, about 10 miles southwest of Theves. It was early in the Middle Kingdom, during the 11th Dynasty when Sankhkare Mentuhotep III was pharaoh. The country was again united after a debilitating civil war between two royal houses, and the reigning king was a strong ruler whose immediate predecessors had fostered anew trade, art, and agriculture. In the month of August, the star Sopdet had already made its heralding appearance, and the Nile was overflowing its banks, but the inundation had not peaked nor had the waters yet reached Hekaakht’s property.

Hekanakht was restless and uneasy. Instead of being on his own estate during this critical period, directing his workers and overseeing a multitude of vital chores, he was far from his home, and would be away for many months fulfilling ceremonial and administrative duties for a client. Hekanakht had been appointed ka priest for Ipi, a royal official, who had died, leaving estates whose produce provided the upkeep for his tomb. As ka priest, Hekanakht was paid to oversee the tomb, locate near his own villa, for which he collected a fee from Ipi’s estates, far to the north, which he was currently visiting.

It was his own property, however, that Hekanakht thought about as the flooding progressed. He had left a young man by the name of Merisu, most likely his eldet son, in charge of his l ands and household. Yet without Hekanakt to direct him, would Merisu be trustworthy and effective.

Hekanakht wa taking no chances. He had been sending a series of letters home, dispatching them with Sihathor, presumably another of his sons, who trekked to and from his estate as his command. Hekanakht may have written his letters himself, or he may have dictated them to a scribe. Assuming he summoned a scribe, the learned man arrived, clad as was Kekanakht in a kilt with an embroidered border—a rectangular piece of linen that was wrapped around his hips and tucked under a belt—which reached to the midclaves and left his upper body uncoered. The two men exchanged a few traditional greetings: “Welcome in peace!” and “In peace, in peace!” Then after cutting off from a roll of coarse, straw-colored papyrus a sheet about 10 inches square, the scribe brushed his reed pen across a cake of water-moistened black ink and started taking down the words dictated by Hekanakht. With each dip of his brush, he created about nine signs.

Hekanahkt began by admonishing Merius to “be very active in cultivating. Take great care that the see of my grain be preserved and all my property be preserved since I am holding you responsible for this.” In one caustic moment after another, Hekanakht laid out instructions, warned Merisu of the ills that would befall hi if his orders were not precisely followed, declared his anxieties about a quarrel that was disturbing his household, expressed his affection for another of his sons, Snefru, and chided Merisu for past failures.

Among these lapses was one that affected Hekanakht’s daily sustenance: On his current business trip, Hekanakht was require to provide some of his own food, so he requested grain form his stock back home. But instead of good, fresh grain, Merisu and sent him stale, dry barley. Hekanakht was outraged at being slighted in this way and thought longingly of his table back home. In the dining room of his comfortable house, a splendid chamber with its walls painted in two colors divided by a decorative border, Hekanakht enjoyed his dinner, joined by Iutenheb, his second wife; Ipi, his elderly mother; Hetepet, a female relative who lived with them; his chief retainers and their families; and his daughters and sons with their respective spouse and children.

The diners sat on stools or mats around small tables, while household servants presented them with reed dishes piled high with portions of roast duck or goose, perhaps chosen from among the fattest of the fowl raised in his own pens, and surrounded by delicious vegetables. As the steaming hot food was brought in from his kitchen, in an open-air room at the back of the house, the aroma of its seasonings—onion, garlic, dill, parsley, thyme, coriander, marjoram, or cumin—wafted through the room.

Yet there he was, far from home, and his sons could not even provide him with fresh barley! How then could Merisu be trusted to run the entire estate? Hekanakht added words of bitter complaint to his letter: “Is it not the case that you are happy eating good barley while I am neglected?”

His thoughts then turned back to the oncoming Nile flood. It was during this interval before the level of the flood was known that the Egyptians negotiated a numbr of land-renting deals, and Hekanakht had such a transaction in mind. He instructed Merisu to order two of his men to take some of the cloth that the women of his household had recently woven and use it to rent additional land, to be cultivated with emmer wheat and barley. “Don’t settle on just anybody’s land,” he cautioned Merisu; “ask for some from Hau the Younger.”

Hekanakht contemplated the added land with satisfaction. After the inundation had ebbed, when the ground was firm enough to walk on, his peasants would loosen the soil with simple hoes to prepare it for sowing. Typically an advancing line of workers, carrying the seed in a leather bag or basket, scattered it across the ground, while supervisors urged them to “make haste,” perhaps mindful of Hekanakht’s command to  “make the most of my land, strive to the utmost, dig the ground with your noses!” To prevent birds from eating the seeds, the laborers brought sheep and goats to the field to tread them deep into the soil.

In order to bury the seed further, as well as to aerate the soil, the farmers plowed the fields with an implement composed of a blade of hardwood that splayed into a pair of handles. Usually the plow was pulled by a pair of oxen: but at times, other workers would do the pulling.

The success or failure of Hekankht’s current harvest, however, rested with Merius. “Sow that farm with barley,” Hekanakht now dictated, but “if it turns out to be a big inundation, you shall sow it with emmer.” Some acreage, no doubt, would be set aside to grow flax that subsequently could be woven into cloth; the ripened seeds of the mature flax yielded another important product, linseed oil, one of several plant oils used for lamps, cooking, and cosmetics.

It was not only farming matters that were weighed heavily upon Hekanakht. Within his large, fractious household, domestic squabbles often erupted, and disgruntled relatives and retainers wrote him letter recounting their grievances. His youngest son, Snefru, for example, was his special favorite, but he sense that the boy was not being properly cared for in his absence. He reminded Merisu of how much Snefru meant to him. “Greet Snefru a thousand times and a million times,” he declared effusively. “Take great care of him. Give him an allowance,” he commanded, adding, “There is no one more important than he in the house including yourself.” After Snefru has finished the cultivation work assigned to him, said Hekanakht, “send him to me.”

He then turned his attention to a conflict that was ripping apart his family. At the center of the acrimony was his second wife. Iuntenheb, who was being mistreated by the other members of his household. He suspected that his children, still grieving for their deceased mother and resentful of his new wife, were there chief instigators of the of the offenses against Iuteneb, but evidently a woman named Senen had been particularly disrespectful. He instructed Merisu to “turn the housemaid Senen out of my house” as soon as he received the letter. Hekanakht did not, however, let Merisu off without the reprimand: “It is you who let her do evil to my wife,” he charged.

The domestic wrangling was not halted by simply getting rid of Senen, Hekanakht discovered. A few weeks later, he dictated another letter, this time addressed to his mother, Ipi, and the rest of his family, in which he chided them for a series of transgressions against one another. For example, their female relative Hetepet had recently reported that she had not been allowed to see her hairdresser and certain other of her attendants. In his letter, Hekanakht appeared to feel that depriving a woman of her hairdresser was a gross insul. And it was true that almost as soon as a woman of high social standing woke up, she would call for this important attendant to being the time-consuming job of shaping her long hair or wing into many tiny black braids or ringlets.

As for Hekanakht’s darling son Snefru, the spoiled young man had refused to visit his father. Yet Hekanakht indulged this child in a manner opposite of his harsh treatment of Merisu. To the youngest and weakest members of the household he was kind and protective. If Snefru didn’t want to join his brothers in cultivating the land, that was all right, and “if Snefru wants to be in charge of those bulls, you should put him in charge of them,” he asserted. “Whatever else he wants, let him enjoy what he wants.”

In the meantime, however, the problem with Iutenheb, instead of being resolved, took a turn for the worse. One of Hekanakht’s dependents apparently had become enamored of Iutenheb and had taken advantage of his master’s absence form the household. “Whoever shall make any sexual advance against my new wife, he is against me and I am against him,” Hekanakht warned. He then lashed out plaintively at his family: “You will respect my wife for my sake!” For all his anger, Hekanakht’s heart must have lifted a bit as he though of Iutenheb, for he at last decided on a course of action to ensure that his wife would no longer be harassed by the family. “Send Iutenheb to me,” he dictated to the scribe.

While his business trip might be brightened by Iutenheb’s presence, Hekanakht surly yearned to be back home, working in his comfortable quarters, or relaxing in his bathroom, where his servants would bring cool water to pour over him while he stood in the shallow bathtub, essentially a stone slab with a low slanting surface that allowed the water to drain into a hole. Like many Egyptians who washed several times a day, Hekanakht was probably fastidious about his person and his clothes. Of course he bathed daily while on his trip, and was shaved and combed by barbers as always, but while he was away from home he probably missed the deference he received in his own household.

There was little time for such musing, however, for the flooding was now more advanced and its level was becoming a source of concern. At the peak of the inundation in a normal year, flood basins in the valley and delta were covered to an average depth of about five feet, with the water remaining in them for many weeks. Yet the country did not become one vast lake. A considerable amount of land lay beyond the flood’s usual reach, particularly in the valley, and even the delta had many patches of high ground. The extent of the Nile’s rise was unpredictable, and at times the normally beneficent river became a devouring monster, bursting through banks and dikes, sweeping away villages, drowning livestock, and lingering so long that the basins and the planting for the next year was thrown off schedule. In other years—and sometimes many years in successions—the flood was inadequate, and large segments of the population were in danger of starvation, the rich as well as the poor.

By the time of Hekanakht’s second letter, it had become clear that the flood was low, and the harvest would be inadequate that year. Hekanakht gave instructions for grain to be doled out from the reserves on his estate. He listed each of his dependents and the amount they should receive. “The whole land is perished, while you are not hungry,” he reminded his family. Perhaps he exaggerate the hardship of others so that his relatives would be more grateful for their grain allotments, for he also alleged, quite improbably, that “they are beginning to eat men here.” When Merisu received Hekanakht’s letters, he took them to an empty tomb that was located near Hekenakht’s estate, where he read and then discarded them. They were swept, along with other trash, into a hole in the tombs floor. In addition to these first two letters, there were six more documents that Hekanakht sent to Merisu. The additional communications dealt exclusively with business matters. Perhaps,  by that time, Hekanakht had sorted out his family problems, or perhaps he postponed their resolution until he returned. His further messages offer no clues.

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