by Sarah Parcak
Egyptologists generally view the First Intermediate Period just as its name implies: significant confusion and instability between two periods of greatness. Although at great cost, the Old Kingdom’s end paved the way for a time of innovation and experimentation, almost as if the court had stifled the people’s creativity—central administration had to break down for the rest of Egypt to break free of long-held traditions.
Poorer people became better off in the provinces, reflected in larger tombs and better quality of grave goods. People began to aspire to immortality without the help of the king, and as religion became privatized, the sacred Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts once reserved for royalty appear in tombs and coffins of anyone who could afford the draftsmanship. We also see new types of amulets that displayed different styles and functions, and more elaborate shabti figurines in burials, offered as magical servants in the afterlife. Material culture expressed a swell in regional diversity, with changes to object design, form, and quality. Regional painting styles became just as vibrant, with images depicting daily life.
The king could no longer guarantee ma’at, the balance of the universe. Perhaps, unable to count on him, people dug deep for greater self-reliance, leading to increased confidence and the recognition of their own abilities. That, in turn, brought more social mobility, as in the case of Meryt’s family; the widespread increase in grave goods certainly supports that. But we’ll likely never know for sure.
We do know that the First Intermediate Period nomarch Ankhtifi created an alliance of three Upper Egyptian nomes, and his son, Intef, expanded further to create a Theban kingdom based around Luxor. War raged between the Thebans and another regional group, the Herakleopolitans, for control of Egypt,43 and people’s fortunes changed dramatically. The self-designated Theban “royalty” took over the Herakleopolitans’ stronghold at Asyut, and then their capital at Herakleopolis, thus reuniting Egypt around 2040 BC and bringing a renaissance for the country, the Middle Kingdom. Quite something, for a Game of Nomes.
To understand the consequences of such devastating turmoil and climate change for us today, we cannot dismiss these so-called collapse events as merely political or economic in nature, nor indeed identify climate change as the sole cause. All of these factors intertwined at the end of the Old Kingdom, creating the perfect storm that affected the life of one woman of Tell Ibrahim Awad, among tens of thousands of others. Unearthing the root causes of change requires digging through the evidence. In this instance, getting the bigger picture from space was only the first step.
You’re probably still on that veranda at the Mena House, contemplating dinner as the pyramids’ shadows lengthen across the sand. The enormity of those monuments is only made more significant by understanding the period in which the Egyptians built them. They are a testament to the very formation of the Egyptian state, and all that was lost and gained when that state fell. Egypt would rebound in a new beginning complete with pyramids and ancient power plays that seem more fiction than fact to us today. When the world turns upside down, empires may fall, but people rise, in the most unexpected ways.
8
A Capital Discovery
For ancient Egypt, we have the advantage of hindsight. The Old Kingdom had to end to make way for the creative explosion in the Middle Kingdom.1 What this resilience means for us today—how past cultures have often shown grit when facing insurmountable odds—is an idea we need to study more closely if we are to survive and thrive in future.
Things today do seem dire. Rising oceans, shifting climates, and loss of wildlife habitats rightly concern us. But out of great adversity can come great creativity. By studying such pivotal moments in the historic expression of our humanity, we can see how closely innovation and cultural growth relate to severe societal stress. All will not be lost if modern civilization suffers dramatic setbacks; in fact, much may be gained in the future as we adapt and change.
The Splendor of the “Lost City” of Itj-Tawy
Understanding how and why major periods like the Old Kingdom ended forms the foundation for analyzing how and why societies might rise again. In chapter 7, we left Egypt at the close of the First Intermediate Period. At that time, a king named Mentuhotep II waged war against the Herakleopolitans, defeating them in 2040 BC and earning the name “Subduer at the head of the two lands.”2
After reuniting the country, Mentuhotep II brought its regions back under his control. As things stabilized, he visited northern Nubia for gold, sent missions to quarries and south to the rich lands of Punt, and reopened turquoise mines and quarries in Sinai. Building thus resumed at temples across Egypt.3 The wealth and stability that had declined during the Old Kingdom began to resurge.
Location of Lisht, Egypt [MAP COURTESY CHASE CHILDS]
Nonetheless, Dynasty 12 had a rocky start marked by civil strife. Its new king, Amenemhet I (1991–1962 BC), rose to power after serving as a vizier under Mentuhotep’s grandson.4 He moved the capital to a place he called Amenemhet-Itj-Tawy, “Amenemhet, Seizer of the Two Lands.” Hail seizer?
In the desert overlooking Itj-Tawy, for short, near today’s town of El-Lisht,5 Amenemhet built his pyramid in the style of Old Kingdom funerary monuments, re-creating the glorious past to broadcast his power.6 Anyone who had boosted him on his rise received royal favors like funerary monuments, especially those in charge of regional centers in Middle and Upper Egypt and who helped to create flood basins for water redistribution.7
For the first time in Egyptian history, the king appointed his son, Senwosret I (1971–1926 BC), to be his co-ruler.8 These were tumultuous times, and any shot at stability must have seemed worth taking. Senwosret led military and mining expeditions on behalf of the king and gained sole control of the country after Amenemhet’s possible assassination in the thirtieth year of his rule.9 We don’t know who was responsible: Senwosret was conveniently away on campaign in Libya when his father was killed, if the Middle Kingdom Tale of Sinuhe has any truth in it.10 It’s an adventure that’s well worth a read.
Senwosret I built or enlarged temples at 35 locations, also constructing a pyramid in south Lisht.11 The art and architecture from his reign are just exquisite, funded by Egypt’s burgeoning wealth, the rise of the middle and upper-middle classes,12 and expeditions sent abroad. Sculptors created lifelike statues of the king, and painters covered tomb walls from Dynasty 12 with realistic scenes of Nilotic birds, the colors of their feathers painted in subtle gradation.13
Amid this artistic explosion, we see increasing numbers of bureaucrats, all potential consumers for artisans’ work. Literature blossomed, too: any student of Egyptology today starts by learning Middle Egyptian, the lingua franca of this time.14 Fantastic stories like Sinuhe, teaching tracts, dialogues, new religious texts, and even a gynecological prescription survive.15 This golden era lasted another 200 years until 1750 BC, allowing the royal court at Itj-Tawy16 to flourish and prosper.
Thriving along the Nile, the city bustled with tens of thousands of people. Exotic traders would have rubbed shoulders with local merchants, musicians, artisans, writers, and embalmers, and you can bet the mummy business roared.17 The city had a cemetery containing thousands of burials.18 Out in the desert above the city, behind the limestone hill, or gebel, the king’s innovatively designed pyramid clambered up out of mud-brick construction ramps that still survive.19
Laden barges brought to high-class sculptors pink Aswan granite or dark gray basalt for fine statues and offering tables.20 Other artisans’ workshops specialized in jewelry, alabaster vessels, and wooden models of boats, farming, bread-making, and other household activities, and even miniature soldiers—these little dioramas are an inventive characteristic of Middle Kingdom art and craftsmanship. Just like shabtis, they served as magical attendants for the afterlife.
I first learned about the lost capital at university. My professor discussed the Middle Kingdom and said Itj-Tawy was located somewhere in the floodplain near the pyramid complexes, buried by nearly 4,000 years of Nil
e silt, and would be hard to find. Sounded like a challenge to me.
The Search for Itj-Tawy
In fact, some of the city might still be visible. One of the previous expedition leaders at Lisht, Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Dieter Arnold, noted extensive Middle Kingdom traces along a canal east of Amenemhet I’s pyramid, including pottery, limestone fragments, and column bases.21 A granite altar from the time of Senwosret I also came out of this canal,22 suggesting the potential location of a nearby temple. Nothing ever disappears forever, it seems, except socks.
Where there were some indicative remains, I knew that there had to be more. On the space shuttle Endeavor, in 1994, NASA flew a sensor system to record the entirety of the Earth’s elevation at a resolution of 30 meters. This Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) allowed scientists to create, for free, digital elevation models of any place on Earth. Each image is a collection of thousands of elevation points that appears as a shaded image, with darker points marking higher elevations. You can manipulate the data to exaggerate the higher areas, but you cannot see any details of surface features.
Still, free data is free data. In the spring of 2010, I downloaded the Lisht area and built a 3-D model of the site and the floodplain. I then took Landsat data and using ER Mapper, my standard imagery-processing program, draped it over the 3-D model, giving me a 3-D image of the 4-kilometer-wide floodplain to the east of Lisht.
A nifty aspect of SRTM 3-D models is that you can exaggerate subtle changes in the landscape, so when a dip next to the village of Bamha caught my eye, I maxed out the exaggeration scale in the software. An ancient channel of the Nile appeared clearly, starting at Bamha and running southwest toward the Lisht cemetery. We know the Nile once flowed by the city of Itj-Tawy, but Egyptologists had never put the river close to the site in their maps.
A small raised area also appeared in the fields between Lisht and a modern road. There was only one way to know for sure if it was indeed the remnant of a buried ancient archaeological mound.
Coring near Lisht [PHOTO BY THE AUTHOR]
The Gems in the Core
That fall, alongside Cairo University’s Department of Geology, we went to the site and took deep core samples in key locations. Powered by several very strong local men who helped get through the dense mud and silt, the 10-centimeter-wide core bit down 7 meters.
Elsayed Abbas Zaghloul, a gentleman scholar from Egypt’s National Authority for Remote Sensing & Space Sciences, led the collaboration. We also had two brilliant Egyptological colleagues on the team: Bettina Bader from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, an expert in the pottery of the Middle Kingdom, and Judith Bunbury from the University of Cambridge, a specialist in ancient Egyptian landscapes.
The chances of success would have been small for anyone. You’re looking for a city lost millennia ago where the Nile River has shifted 3 kilometers to the east, possibly destroying any trace of it. Working from the merest hint appearing in the NASA data, you then try to pinpoint any urban evidence, but based on the various locations of other Egyptian capitals, the lost city could be anywhere inside a 20-square-kilometer landscape. And you’re supposed to find it by drilling a 10-centimeter core. That doesn’t even account for the possibility of GPS error, undulations in the landscape, and sheer bad luck.
Even facing ridiculous odds, we drilled. It was like tackling miniature excavation units: our team logged details about soil type, color, density, and inclusions such as stone. We could easily see the earth as it changed over time from silt to clay or sand, and we drew each layer as part of a running plan. I have never in my life seen anyone as excited about dirt as Professor Zaghloul—every time a new core emerged, he would nearly jump for joy at the alternating soil densities. He quickly teased out the history of the land in all its movements; watching him work was like watching a great conductor unravel the wonder of a symphony.
Afterward, we processed each core in water through a series of sieves ranging from 1-centimeter-wide mesh on top to 5-millimeter-wide mesh on the bottom, with gradations in between. Bit by bit, the core gets squelched into the top with water running through into a bucket. It’s mucky but satisfying work, as the sediment sorts itself out based on particle size. Large particles like stones get caught first, and the fine silt runs into the bottom of the bucket under the sieves. Totting up the mass of larger particles versus smaller in each core tells environmental stories, about the energy of the river flow depositing it and how silt deposits change over time, and also gives clues as to how the Nile meanders. Sometimes, if you are lucky, you might even find evidence of past human occupation.
After drilling down 4–5 meters, we hit our metaphorical pot of gold. Well, the pot, at least: the core started to bring up ceramics. Bettina worked her cheerful magic, spreading out the finds and examining each piece. As a pottery guru and world expert in the Middle Kingdom, she can look at a tiny fragment from a 4,000-year-old vessel and come close to telling you its serial number. Bettina seemed quite happy when she was done and called me over: all the pottery dated to the Twelfth and Thirteenth Dynasties. There was a lot of it, and it included some beautiful higher-end ceramic fragments—the fine china your grandmother brings out for family holidays.
Meanwhile, Judith—a sensible geologist with a twinkle in her eye—was hard at work on other items she had whisked away. Beaming, she showed me three stones retrieved from the core: amethyst, agate, and one piece of bright orange polished carnelian, covered in tiny holes from ancient drilling attempts. This was the first time that worked semiprecious stones had been recovered from a coring effort in Egypt, and it’s rare enough to find them in a full excavation.
The Once and Future City
A single core does not a city make, even with results this tantalizing. And if the artifacts did not come from Itj-Tawy itself, I suspected we’d come down on an artisans’ suburb, a district where workshops were so concentrated that our wild stab-in-the-dark drilling stood a chance. The thriving Middle Kingdom court and capital fueled demand, and semiprecious stones were fashionable: just look at the Twelfth Dynasty tomb of Princess Sithathoryunet from Lahun, 30 kilometers to the south, where the royal jewelry includes carnelian, lapis lazuli, amethyst, and turquoise, all set in gold.23 Keeping these rare and beautiful resources flooding into the capital was so important that high officials at court commemorated their expeditions to obtain them in stelae and inscriptions.24 It’s a very far cry from the impoverished end of the Old Kingdom.
No wonder, though, that the area has kept its secrets hidden—5 meters is a lot of silt. As we saw at Tebilla, the Nile shifts over time, silting up once free-flowing channels, and indeed whole occupation areas. That 4-to-5-meter keyhole to the Middle Kingdom burrowed through the silt that the wandering Nile had left in its wake.25 What we do not yet know is when the ancient Egyptians abandoned the capital, or when it disappeared beneath the mud.
The city was perfectly placed, close to the desert for the tombs of the king and his court, and strategically right between the Delta and Upper Egypt. Perhaps built to rival the famed “white walls” surrounding the former capital at Memphis,26 the city had multistory buildings,27 whitewashed and well spaced. Dozens of ships crowded the harbor, and limestone and granite blocks weighed them down, arriving to fuel the increase in ambitious architecture. Picture busy activity in the high desert, where gangs of men dragged stone toward the pyramid sites on sledges.28
It may be that the higher parts of the city can be found close to the modern field surfaces, and we might even be able to excavate the parts of the site closer to the surface. Patience is the hardest part of archaeology, but if the city has waited for 3,800 years to be investigated, it can hopefully wait a few more.
Looted tombs at Lisht, Egypt [PHOTO BY THE AUTHOR]
Excavation Begins
In all honesty, I did not expect to continue my preliminary work at Lisht, much as I wanted to get back for more coring to see if anything in the ancient city was within reach of excavation. The year af
ter our foray into the floodplain in 2010, the Arab Spring broke out, and given the wide-scale looting south of Giza, the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities did not permit any new applications because they felt it was too dangerous.
But I was drawn to the site, especially because I saw looting there in high-resolution satellite imagery after early 2011—more than 800 pits appeared.29 I did not know at the time if these represented looted tombs or just small holes in the ground left after looting attempts.
In the spring of 2015, I traveled to Egypt. Since things had calmed down in the Lisht region, I asked the ministry for a one-day permit to visit and take photographs. The intensity of the damage was shocking; worse still, the looters had targeted many apparently intact tombs. Looting has been taking place since antiquity, but it is painful to see modern evidence firsthand.
I discussed a collaborative project with the then-director of the Dashur and Lisht regions, Mohammed Youssef Ali, to conduct a small survey in the southern part of Lisht and work at a looted tomb. We did not expect to find much left intact.
In December 2015, we broke ground. As the crow flies, the site is 45 kilometers south of the Giza pyramids. It means a two-to-three-hour drive, morning and evening, depending on traffic—a picturesque, if laborious, commute hugging the old course of the Nile along the West Bank. To our right, the pyramids of Abusir, Saqqara, and then Dashur guard the entrance to the chaos of the ancient Egyptian deshret, or desert. To our left, we get a disco-ball sunrise, flashing pink, orange, and yellow through the haze that hangs over the date palms and tilled fields of alfalfa.
The journey gets slightly perilous as we turn into Lisht, slowing down to avoid scraping the tightly packed modern houses. The most colorful homes feature paintings of airplanes, buses, and the Kaaba, the shrine at the heart of the Great Mosque in Mecca, if the householders have made the pilgrimage to Islam’s sacred city.