The Honouring of Horemheb

This finely carved limestone relief once adorned the tomb chapel of Horemheb, at a time when he was still a general serving under Tutankhamun. It records a moment of high ceremonial theatre, showcasing Horemheb’s huldiging, or formal honouring, for military and diplomatic success.

At the centre, attendants place heavy gold collars around Horemheb’s neck. This is the celebrated “Gold of Honour” (nbw n ḥswt); not a casual gift, but Ancient Egypt’s highest royal reward for loyal service. Such collars, often fashioned from rows of gold beads or crescent-shaped plaques, proclaimed royal favour as visibly as a modern medal. To wear them was to be publicly marked as a man close to the king.

Behind the general stretches a long procession arranged in registers. Prisoners of war are deliberately carved with foreign features and dress, set apart from their Egyptian guards. Victory, order, and hierarchy are all rendered in stone.

Intriguingly, the royal uraeus cobra on Horemheb’s brow (the unmistakable sign of kingship) was added later, after he himself ascended the throne. The relief thus bridges two live; the decorated general and the future pharaoh.

The blocks to which this relief belongs were dispersed among museums in the 19th century, their original positions forgotten. Only in 1975 did excavations at Saqqara relocate Horemheb’s tomb, allowing scholars to reunite surviving blocks and restore the monument’s story. Casts of many fragments now stand once more in their original places, returning honour, rather fittingly, to the man who once received Egypt’s gold.

“Gold of Honour” (nbw n ḥswt)

In the glittering world of New Kingdom Egypt, kings bestowed upon their most loyal and extraordinary servants a spectacular token known to us as the “Gold of Honour” (nbw n ḥswt); a dazzling necklace or set of gold collars given as the highest royal reward. Worn proudly around the neck like a gleaming badge of distinction, these gifts were typically crafted from pure gold beads or rings, sometimes arranged in multiple strands that caught the sun’s rays much as the wearer caught the king’s favour.

Gold itself was no ordinary metal in Ancient Egypt; it was considered the eternal “flesh of the gods,” the radiant substance of the sun-god Re, and a symbol of divine authority and everlasting life, prized above all other materials for its beauty and unchanging lustre.

The tradition of royal gifting with gold collars seems to have taken shape by the early 18th Dynasty, with perhaps the earliest shebyu collars (so called by the Egyptians) recorded in tomb inscriptions from the reign of Ahmose I.

What set the Gold of Honour apart was not just its lavish make but its royal presentation: it could only be received from the pharaoh himself in a public ceremony, and it didn’t confer a new title or office so much as signal a special personal bond and shared glory with the king.

Among a celebrated recipient was Parennefer, Royal Butler and close confidant of Akhenaten, who is depicted in his tomb at Amarna being adorned with many such gold collars; a visual pageant of royal esteem that turns each gleaming link into a story of service, loyalty and high honour.

Summary:

Limestone relief from the Tomb of Horemheb at Saqqara, depicting the then General and later King, as recieving the “Gold of Honour” (nbw n ḥswt)

New Kingdom, 18th Dynasty, c., 1333–1319 B.C.

Now at the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden. H.III.PPPP