by Sarah Parcak
“Gods have mercy. Why did you not ask for more?”
“From whose table would you have taken it?” The governor looked across the town, uncomfortable under Meryt’s gaze. “Sir, a priest told me they no longer offer to the snake goddess. There are no snakes in the fields. No mice. They have been eaten.” Dry-eyed, her face haggard, Mother put her arm around him.
Meryt watched the governor clench his jaw. He muttered something. The breeze flicked an ostrich feather in one soldier’s headband, and she took Mother’s hand, remembering the view from the rooftop. The town’s generosity had counted for nothing. The governor swallowed.
“We must ask support from my allies; their canals still flow. Take your family south, Hotep, and secure grain for us all. I see you are an honest man.”
They left the next day, carrying what little they had. Meryt looked back at the cemetery and promised Teti she would return.
The Old Kingdom’s Collapse
As Pepi II’s four-generation rule fell into stagnancy, grand royal building projects were a distant memory. Those structures now symbolize for me the fleeting nature of power and glory—rulers in the Old Kingdom had it all, but they spent it. Their successors just had to make do. Only one small pyramid, belonging to a king named Qakare Ibi, is known from Dynasty 8 (2181–2161 BC).17
Egypt teetered, then fractured into two ruling polities, as nomarchs built up their own armies. With Dynasty 8 established at Memphis, and Dynasties 9 and 10 (2161–2010 BC) at Herakleopolis,18 about 100 kilometers south of Cairo, other ruling centers grew at Luxor (Thebes), and farther south at Mo’alla and Edfu.19 Those regional rulers developed marriage alliances with each other and used their increased wealth to support the development of diverse regional art styles with unusual color schemes and variable quality. The sidelined kings were no longer relevant.
Egypt would never be the same.
The End of an Era
Egyptologists debate fiercely how and why the Old Kingdom ended.20 We can see social, political, and economic factors at play, but the situation was without doubt complicated.21 Some have suggested that the drying climate provided an additional push.
Repeated low floods may have caused the abandonment of sites in the eastern Delta that our settlement survey revealed. The archaeological and textual evidence from Egypt and farther afield suggests the river played a far larger role than previously assumed.22 To see the effect of a consistent lack of water, not just one or two years of low Nile floods, we have to turn to later descriptions.
Unhelpfully, no priest set their Nilometer readings in stone, but Islamic Period hydrologists were more generous to modern-day researchers. Between 1053 and 1090 AD, 28 out of 40 floods were low, causing inflation, starvation, cannibalism, and plague. Egypt’s population dropped from 2.4 million to 1.5 million in one century. An eyewitness report from 1068 AD describes a starving woman offering her jewels in exchange for a small measure of wheat.23
Blame the 4.2 ka BP Event
At the close of the Old Kingdom, it’s not just Egypt in trouble, but everyone across the ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Meet the catchiest moniker in science: the “4.2 thousand years Before Present event,” or “4.2 ka BP event,” to friends. Culminating around 2200 BC, something very big and very bad happened. It encompassed changes in monsoon patterns and Mediterranean westerlies, leading to droughts and cooling periods across Africa and Asia.24 But what evidence can we see for a potential drought in Egypt, and at Lakes Turkana and Tana in Kenya and Ethiopia?
Some of the best evidence for the 4.2 ka BP event in Egypt comes from records of Ethiopian highland precipitation. Environmental coring at Lake Turkana, and at Lakes Abhe and Zway-Shala in the Ethiopian highlands, show lower water levels around 2200 BC, which reflect a downturn in the Indian monsoons.25 We also see low base flow and discharge levels from the White Nile26 as the rain clouds that filled it moved south. Conversely, when the rain clouds shifted north again, Egypt’s floodwaters increased.27
Across the Delta, a series of deep core samples revealed a lens of iron hydroxides, mineral residues left by intense dryness in floodplain soils. Plants absorb iron to grow, but in a period of drought, the struggling vegetation cannot absorb nutrients, and the iron remains in the soil.28 The dates of the soil samples with the iron hydroxides fall neatly between 2200 and 2050 BC—right across the end of the Old Kingdom.29
Feeble vegetation cannot hold the land in place. Any rainfall or wind erodes soil by the ton: Buto, a site in the Delta,30 has a 1-meter-thick sterile deposit with no sherds or any material culture whatsoever, which may be connected to the late Old Kingdom.31 Nothing flourished but the deserts. At Memphis32 and Dashur,33 sands swamped the monuments, a process of desertification connected to climate change that can be seen today with the growth of the Sahara in northern Africa.34 Evidence for the 4.2 ka BP event stacks up with core analysis throughout the Mediterranean and Near East—and beyond.
In India, oxygen isotope analysis of river plankton indicates weak monsoons in that period, the potential root of the problem. Cave deposits from Israel show a drop-off in rainfall, while lake deposits in Turkey are full of arid, wind-blown silt and sand, with little tree pollen. That’s also when the Akkadian Empire tumbled in modern-day Syria and Iraq, while agricultural lands in northern Mesopotamia were abandoned, and refugees reportedly fled to southern Mesopotamia. Total chaos. Nearly 20 different records connected to vital weather patterns suggest a global climate event that lasted for years.35
This was no misfortune explicable to the Egyptians through meteorology. For them, the rise of the star Sopdet—our Sirius—announced the floods around the summer solstice, but only the gods’ favor filled the riverbed. One of the king’s main duties as interlocutor with the gods was to maintain ma’at, or divine balance. Low floods were a sign of ma’at being badly disrupted, seen as an indication that the king was not doing his job—leaving the people defenseless.
There is great irony in all this, to our modern eyes. Egyptians famously worshipped the sun god Re, one of their most important deities, and, as it turns out, the sun was a likely culprit in the widespread upheaval. Climate experts believe that the 4.2 ka BP event may have been caused by fluctuations in solar radiation, which could have had an impact on regional temperatures and thus the normal monsoon patterns.36 In light of that, perhaps it was Re’s displeasure that caused the Old Kingdom’s demise.
* * *
From the weaving workshop near the city’s temple, the fields were so far away, they were a green haze to Meryt. The water was such an expanse here in the south that at first it terrified her.
“How could this great river betray us?” she muttered, helping Mother while Father petitioned the governor for grain. “I’ll go down there and throw a stone at it!” Mother smiled. But she no longer laughed so readily.
Father’s negotiations took time. There were so many soldiers and citizens to feed here, and the king—who had already lived forever—had finally gone into the West. The governor here could rely on only himself.
From her seat by the window, Meryt watched Nubian delegations disembark, tall and proud, and dressed in colorful leather, with gold and ebony earrings. She stared, wide-eyed, at one representative leading a cheetah. They could not be sent away empty-handed.
“Meryt. Watch how you draw your shuttle or that linen won’t fit a doll, let alone a priest.” Meryt laughed.
They barely saw Seneb. A letter from the governor at home in the north had granted him scribal training in the House of Life. Father had been speechless for hours at the honor. Now Seneb sat up late by the oil lamp, practicing complex calligraphy; he drew Meryt all the signs that featured cows.
A month after they arrived, she went to wave Father off with the first grain shipment, bound for home.
“The gods will look after you here, my love,” he said, but Meryt looked down at the sandbanks near the water’s surface and shivered.
The river sucked years away. From his travels, Fathe
r brought news that their town hung on, though only the cemetery was growing. One afternoon, Meryt wound between granaries fringing the temple like termite mounds to deliver linens to the House of Life. At the door, chatting to a soldier with a bow almost taller than Meryt, Seneb waved.
“Little sister, join us. Intef, my friend, this is Meryt.” Puzzled, she looked up at the young Nubian.
“Intef? But…” She stammered, not knowing how to phrase it. “That’s an Egyptian name.” His smile was bright, with a gap between his smooth front teeth.
“My nickname. The governor says I remind him of his son, Intef. We train together.”
“Don’t you miss your home…?”
Bustling out, a bald old priest took the bundled linen from her arms.
“Now, Seneb, those priests’ rotas won’t copy themselves.”
“Of course, teacher, I was just about…” Chuckling, the priest drew him inside, a hand on the young man’s shoulder.
“Once a snare is nicely set, my son, you leave it to do its work.” Seneb smiled and looked back. Laughing at something Intef said, Meryt tucked her dark hair over her ear.
In time, she told him of her childhood on the cattle estates, and when they married, Intef gave her a beautiful bowl engraved with cattle, burnished to a shine, glossy and fat.
“My people also cherish their herds, Meryt. We will not forget, even though our home is here, now.”
Sopdet came and went, and sometimes the river rose well and sometimes poorly. The governor, and then his son, fought to keep something in the granaries.
Intef and Seneb built onto Mother’s house and eventually the old lady took care of all their children while hers were working. Meryt was grateful, trading her finest linen for ducks, medicines, and a celebratory turquoise ring the day Seneb admitted his oldest nephew Teti into the House of Life.
Meryt set out lunch while Father rested beneath the date palm in their courtyard, watching Mother scoop up a little girl with Intef’s perfect, gap-toothed smile. Laugh lines around Mother’s eyes ran deeper than the irrigation ditches. Meryt sighed. Had her friends from the fields lived to enjoy something like this?
The summer that Meryt’s youngest daughter married, her son Teti helped Seneb paint the texts onto Mother’s coffin and, only months later, Father’s. With his sons, Intef carried it down into the rock-cut tomb in the western cliffs.
Meryt brushed dust from his tight curls, peppered gray now.
“Thank you, my love,” she murmured. “Such a burial, after everything they suffered…” He squeezed her shoulders, his dark eyes steady.
“Our family is strong. Together, we afford it.” Then Intef smiled. “And Seneb’s priestly connections were not unhelpful.” She laughed, wiping away tears. “Go, love. I’ll wait for you.”
She carried wooden boats commissioned years ago down into a chamber lit with a single oil lamp. Her parents’ things were stacked together, tidily, carefully, more dishes than Mother ever had at home. Enough food offerings for eternity. Side by side, the coffins gleamed.
But while Seneb’s sons read the prayers for sealing the door, shaven-headed and austere in their priestly robes, Meryt looked north. Downstream to where her brother Teti lay, alone.
The Real Story of Tell Ibrahim Awad
Tell Ibrahim Awad was a major settlement and seemed to survive the drought while other towns were abandoned. Maybe, like cities during crises today, Tell Ibrahim Awad was a haven to which struggling populations moved. Nearby Mendes was doubtless affected by the lower levels of the Mendesian and Sebennytic Nile branches,37 but its importance as the regional center of the eastern Delta perhaps made it a potential refuge, able to command resources even when they were scarce elsewhere. This may have drip-fed to its neighbors.
It may not be so surprising that people scraped by there. When cultures experience environmental distress, some archaeologists believe people leave the affected cities and lead simpler lives, more widely dispersed—a sort of early survivalism, if you will, with less competition for resources. This left fewer mouths to feed in these large Delta settlements.38
Surviving was still a struggle, though. Potential evidence has emerged for widespread death through starvation or disease at Tell Ibrahim Awad, where Meryt once lived and eventually died. She was one of 74 individuals excavated from a cemetery in use through the Old Kingdom, the First Intermediate Period (or FIP), and the Middle Kingdom.
Among them, the average age at death dropped from 45 years at the end of the Old Kingdom to 36 in the later FIP, mainly due to poor nutrition.39 Also, among adults from the early Middle Kingdom, a higher percentage of teeth showed enamel hypoplasia, a sign of health stress while the teeth were being formed, perhaps reflecting the dire hunger of their childhoods at the end of the FIP. It’s visible in the mouth as striping or pitting on the teeth. Growing up through the Old Kingdom collapse, Meryt and her mother would have shown their difficult start every time they smiled, for life.
The subsequent upturn in fortune was just as visible. Archaeologists noted that 31 to 32 percent of the individuals were buried with grave goods in the FIP. That percentage doubled in the early Middle Kingdom, reflecting a trend of recovery seen across Egypt among the wealthier lower classes.40
Though affected by the drought at the end of the Old Kingdom, Upper Egypt didn’t seem to suffer so badly. The broad main branch of the Nile held countless billions of gallons more water than the river’s subdivided channels in the Delta. Cities such as Edfu, located about 90 kilometers south of Luxor, appear to have thrived in the FIP, and some Nile Valley towns even show population expansion. In fact, settlements in Upper Egypt acted as regional centers following their growth in power and influence as the Old Kingdom waned.
Even so, various inscriptions give a clear sense of hard times of desperate scarcity, instability, and a land in crisis, and the texts are some of the most dramatic of all the writing we have from Egypt. At least seven inscriptions make direct reference to drought or a “time of sandbanks,” when the Nile was so low its bed broke the surface. Nomarchs record providing food for displaced persons,41 and governors from one part of Egypt could well have reached out for help from another.
* * *
“Mother, you are too old to make the journey.”
Tall and with his father’s lustrous tight curls, Teti frowned, hands on his hips. His belly was growing rounder. His younger son nodded behind him, willowy in his lector priest’s kilt, no matter how Meryt tried to stuff him with roast duck. She thanked the gods daily for their generosity.
“I am not as old as that,” she said, packing the beautiful cow bowl into a nest of linen. At the kitchen door, a powerfully built young man shifted the bow on his shoulder.
“Grandmother, no. Not with the strife between Herakleopolis and Memphis … My unit will be deployed before Sopdet rises.”
Meryt smiled. “Then perhaps I can accompany you north?” He bit his lip. Hadn’t Grandfather always said an argument with her was so much wasted breath? Teti sighed.
“Surely Father wanted you to stay with him?” he said. Meryt put bread and cooked beef into pottery cups and set a beer jar ready.
“My love, he did not ask.”
As her hair had turned to gray and then to white, Intef had brushed it back to look into her face so often, and still, he had not asked. She smoothed the pale line where she had worn her turquoise ring. It rested with him now.
With her offerings in a woven bag, she walked through the bustle of the city, past the temple. When she used to weave in this neighborhood, the streets were not so crowded. But now, after ever more people fled the drought’s cruelty, the close-packed houses formed self-contained villages, homes from home. The tales those new arrivals told still drove Meryt from her sleep, calling out for her family.
A ferryman rowed her across to the west bank. The stela that stood next to her parents’ tomb was not so far up the hillside.
“Intef, my beloved,” she said, pouring the beer for him, a
nd her parents. “Seneb’s sons will lead your cult. And our children will come to you, in their time.”
She knew the offering prayers by heart. The chamber beneath her was crammed, painted vividly with motifs from his home and the south. Running her fingers over the stela’s inscribed words, she did not know which was Intef’s name. The desert wind whisked through the sand and rocks.
“I will find you again in the Field of Rushes.” Slowly, stiffly, she got to her feet and walked down the hill. She did not look back.
So soon, Meryt stood aboard a ship, ready to meet the gods with a heart that would not weigh heavy against Ma’at’s feather. Nor did her bags: a few fresh-mined amethysts to barter for a simple burial, with letters of commendation to a grandson of the fair-minded governor she remembered. The south wind pushed at her back. By her feet was the bowl that held all her memories and a box of shabtis inscribed with the name of Teti, son of Hotep.
She would go to the canal to pick reeds for him. Perhaps she had not forgotten how to make a boat.
The End of an Era
We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Old Kingdom state collapsed. The evidence suggests that climate change played an essential role in the state-level collapse—and in Meryt’s imagined life. Tombs left by the nomarchs42 show how they filled the power vacuum created by the absence of centralized government, and that their rise in power continued into the First Intermediate Period. Certainly, regional prosperity such as Upper Egypt’s was insufficient to support international expeditions for quarrying, mining, and trade. Without them, and with an undernourished workforce, pyramid construction was impossible. Perhaps a strong, rich central government might have held off the drought’s effects for a few years, but we can only imagine whether the Old Kingdom would have survived even then.