During the 10th to 7th centuries BC, Egypt was ruled by kings whose backgrounds would have perplexed an Egyptian of earlier centuries. In its hierarchy of peoples, the Egyptians placed themselves above all others, reserving particular scorn for their immediate neighbours in north-eastern Africa: the Nubians in the south, and the Libyans to the west. Yet at the beginning of the 7th century, Egypt’s paramount ruler was a Nubian, and regional thrones were occupied by kings of Libyan descent – including a line who had once been the undisputed pharaohs of the whole of Egypt.
Early in the 12th century BC, Merenptah and Ramesses III had both fought against the Libyans, and during the latter part of the Twentieth Dynasty considerable trouble was caused in Thebes by bandits penetrating from the Western Desert. However, very little is known of Libyans in Egypt itself. It is therefore surprising to find Libyan names among the sons of Herihor, the priest-king at Thebes at the beginning of the Twenty-first Dynasty, depicted in a procession in the Temple of Khonsu at Karnak. One can only assume that among the wives of Herihor was a woman of Libyan background, and that her sons were given names deriving from her ancestral region. A Libyan name, Masaharta, also appears among the sons of another Theban priest-king, Panedjem I. Indeed, he was apparently the eldest son, becoming High Priest at Karnak when his father transitioned to pharaonic status.
Then, some three-quarters of a century later, Pharaoh Amenemopet of Tanis was succeeded by a man with the Libyan name Osorkon. Osorkon was son of a Chief of the Libyan Meshwesh tribe named Shoshenq (A), and the descendant of three generations of like-titled individuals, whose ultimate ancestor was listed in a later text as simply ‘the Libyan’. Osorkon (known today as ‘the Elder’, having been discovered after the ordinals assigned to kings of the name had been fixed in Egyptology) presumably owed his right to the throne to the ancestry of his Egyptian-named mother Mehytemweskhet, although data are lacking.
Heritage on the River Thames