By calling up such fears King Amenhotep's malediction reached to the core of the national nightmare: the horror of loneliness; of the death of the spirit; of the breaking of family succession; and the act of rape which denied the very legitimacy of the miscreant's children. Oblivion in this world, in the next, and for all eternity. On the other hand, the second half of the royal proclamation offered rewards for aiding the spirit of his faithful scribe which were the precise opposite of the curse: the traditional blessing of a life of a ~ ~o years, the promise of family succession to official appointments, the boon of a fine tomb whose mortuary cult would have its offerings and rituals doubled by special royal donation. Security in this world, in the next world, and for all eternity. This royal decree, a bureaucracy of promises to encourage Ramose and all his fellows, was engraved in hieroglyphs upon a large stela (an inscribed stone).

The government in which Ramose served was headed by two viziers who, apart from the King, were the highest civil authority in the land. For thousands of years there had been only one vizier in Egypt, but with the rise of the empire the job had been split into two halves: one vizier governing Lower Egypt from the city of Memphis at the apex of the Nile delta, the other governing Upper Egypt from Thebes. Under these two officials came all the myriad functionaries of the state administration, tax officers, city mayors and all the rest. The vizier also kept close contact with the high priests, the commanders of the army and the chancellor controlling the royal household. At the time of Ramose's transfer to the temple of the King's Scribe Amenhotep, the Vizierate of Upper Egypt was administered by Paser, shown by his statues as a sleekly confident man, whose father was the High Priest of Amun and whose mother was the head of that god's harem. Paser held the title of 'Hereditary Prince' and was also 'Count and Overseer of Thebes, the Southern City', and it was there, on the west bank, that he held his daily court: sitting on a dais on a throne-like cushioned chair at the end of a large pillared hall, a carpet at his feet, a baton of state in his hands and the written laws of Egypt open before the attending scribes. All around him, just as statues stood around the gods' shrines in the halls of the temples, stood the officers of administration and the ministers of state. And each man would step forward to tell his part of the business of Upper Egypt. There were also private petitioners at the court, each seeking a personal judgement or a special benefit from the Vizier. All the business of this daily court was recounted by the Vizier in his regular interviews with the King.

The viziers were also responsible for the supervision of the west bank at Thebes, the domain of the royal funerary temples and the cemeteries of the nobles and the kings, the 'Place of Truth'. Paser was the man 'to whom the west of Thebes was entrusted', the Vizier who knew all 'the secrets of the work of Anubis (the slim black jackal-god who oversaw the embalming of the dead). There it was that Vizier Paser ordered the excavation of a grand tomb for himself in the cemetery of the nobles under the western cliffs, with elaborate columned halls decorated with statues and wall reliefs. Deep underneath this chapel a burial chamber was excavated to hold both himself and his wife Tiy and here the Vizier planned to lie in a coffin of red granite that had been given to him by King Seti ~ as a special mark of royal favour. Texts inscribed in the tomb prayed that the Vizier might rest in his burial vault for ever and that Paser, who had stood at the very side of the King, whose ears were filled with truth and had heard the teachings of Amun, would receive offerings in the chapel above to sustain his spirit for all eternity.

Dying and decay were made into a rite: the royal corpse was mummified, changed from a naturally-decaying body into a man-made object. First the viscera were removed, the king's body being split open with a flint, and the priest who performed this 'killing' ritually fled after his cutting was completed, to escape the forces of the state. Then, after long ceremonies of wrapping and encoffining, the royal cadaver, now dried out, re-sewn, reshaped, half man, half statue, was taken to the Great Place where the tombmakers had excavated the elaborate theatre which would house the last act of the drama: the entry of the king into the underworld.

The royal burial was a mass of rites so old, so densely packed with twisting metaphors of the universal order and royal destiny that not even the officiating priests understood their full sign)ficance. What was readily appreciated, however, was that all the elaborate ritual of the burial established the dead king, who had abdicated his earthly powers, as a god; it was the essential act which alone could establish the legitimacy of the new king as the true son of a god. So the dead king was sent to join the immortal gods, where his tremendous power would strengthen the forces of nature which they maintained. The king's individuality had been overtaken at his death by his office and his role in the state; a subtle expression of the idea that man loses his identity within the machinery of government. Similarly, there were many animal gods, species rather than individual beasts, who straddled the same gulf between nature and the state, between men and the endless power of the gods as did the king. A hawk-headed human deity, Horus, flew with the sun, and the kings flew with him; Thoth, another bird, a wise ibis, was the god of writing and mathematics; Osiris, the mummyking of the underworld who took the dead king into himself, controlled hordes of frightful flesh-eating animals; and the dead king was daily pushed to one of his resurrections by another little animal, a beetle who rolled him out on to the horizon each morning with the sun to leave his mummy, shell-like, back in the underworld of the royal tomb.

Thus the ancient Egyptians recognized a profound connection between dying and renewal, between evening and morning, winter and spring, death and the forces of fertility. And whilst the royal tombs that Ramose and the gangs made contain nothing about the personalities of the kings that they hold, they teem with life: humans, animals and monsters swarm over their walls. Here, deep in the earth, in the 'interior' as the gangs sometimes called the Great Place, the dead kings put their power at the service of the world, joined all the processes of recreation and renewal; the vaults that the tombmakers excavated were designed to hold within them the essence of creation. And as the tombs held the life force within them, so there was an inevitable connection there with the sexual, the erotic. The royal tomb was also a womb set in the mother of mothers, Hathor of the Western Mountain, and the dead king was her ritual lover, his sarcophagus the couch on which creation was sparked. All around the head of the valley of the Great Place, deep under the enfolding cliffs of the Western Mountain, the dead kings lay in silent conclave, each in pitch-dark chambers filled with the images of a multitude of gods.

Priests had performed rituals upon these figures and brought them to life, and so real were they to the tomb artists who had made them that they offered prayers to them. One carpenter, a man of the work gangs who had made wooden figures of the gods, called himself 'a maker of god's image', whilst the gods sculpted in relief on the walls of the kings' tombs were called the 'gods and goddesses of the Tomb'. And just as the deep sanctity of these icons was easily appreciated by the workmen, so they also understood that the royal tombs they had cut under the western horizon were the underworld, and called them the 'Horizons of Eternity'.