Pedibastet


By the time Pedibastet Meryamun (818-793 BC) proclaimed himself king of Upper and Lower Egypt, there was no longer such a thing. The authority of the Egyptian kings sitting in Tanis in the lower delta had been increasingly disregarded by the High Priests sitting in Thebes, who effectively controlled Middle and Upper Egypt. Sheshonq III, the Tanite king in power at that time, was further weakened both by his troubled accession to power (he had usurped the throne from his brother Osorkon with the help of the Thebans), and by his acceptance of Hariese as High Priest of Thebes. Sheshonq’s father had managed to keep Hariese away from power for thirty years. But Sheshonq was not in a position to determine Theban politics. It soon would be the other way around.

With Sheshonq III so weakened, Prince Pedibastet of Leontopolis unilaterally proclaimed himself king of Upper and Lower Egypt in his new capital of Leontopolis. The Thebans soon recognized him as the king, and Sheshonq III tacitly accepted the situation. King Pedibastet I had succeeded in creating a new line of Egyptian kings in Leontopolis (which we now call Dynasty 23) that peacefully coexisted for another hundred years with the kings of Dynasty 22 in Tanis. Pedibastet himself reigned for twenty five years. Towards the end of his reign, he appointed his son Iuput I as co-regent, but they appear to have died at the same time, and it is Sheshonq IV who succeeded Pedibastet.

Pedibastet only controlled a very small territory around Leontopolis, an enclave within the land controlled by Sheshonq III. But that enclave remained autonomous for a hundred years without apparent violence. While such acceptance of secession may seem strange to us, Shaw (2000) notes that “The attitude of kings to this progressive fragmentation is of key importance. In the First and Second Intermediate Periods, the division of power within Egypt among two or more rulers was definitely perceived as unacceptable; in the Third Intermediate Period, however, decentralization was not regarded consistently in a negative light… The Libyans were never fully Egyptianized and, in spite of their pharaonic trappings, the kings preferred different patterns of rule to those of their New Kingdom Precursors. A clear instance of this is the Libyans’ apparent tolerance of two or more ‘kings’ simultaneously, each entitled ‘king of Upper and Lower Egypt’, irrespective of their actual sphere of influence. This is not the only sign that the Libyans had adopted the trappings of Egyptian kingship without fully understanding it.”


Bibliography (on Pedibastet)

Clayton, Peter A.
1994 Chronicle of the Pharaohs: The Reign-by-Reign Record of the Rulers and Dynasties of Ancient Egypt. Thames and Hudson, London, UK.

Grimal, Nicolas
1994 A History of Ancient Egypt (Reprint of the 1994 edition, translated by Ian Shaw). Blackwell, Oxford, United Kingdom.

Shaw, Ian
2000 The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt. Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom.






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