The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

by Toby Wilkinson

  To compound the difficulties caused by a weak administration headed by an ineffectual king, a prolonged period of low Nile floods wreaked havoc with Egypt’s agricultural economy. So marked was the drought that the level of Birket Qarun dropped alarmingly, forcing the abandonment of the nearby basalt quarries that had supplied the state’s building projects throughout the Old Kingdom. The lakeshore was now simply too far from the quarry site to make the transportation of huge granite blocks practicable. The inadequate inundations caused widespread crop failure and economic stress on a national scale. In happier times, an effective government could have taken action to alleviate hardship, releasing stocks of grain from the state granaries to feed its hungry population. But Pepi II’s regime seems to have been unable to respond adequately, crippled by inaction. In later periods, Pepi II would be remembered in scurrilous stories as a weak, ineffectual, effeminate ruler, sidetracked from the business of government by a clandestine affair with his army general.

  In truth, much of the problem did indeed lie with the king—not his sexual preferences but his sheer longevity. Usually, a long reign was the sign of a stable dynasty. But Pepi II’s six or more decades on the throne (2260–2175) caused major problems for the succession. Not only did the king see ten viziers come and go, but he outlived so many of his heirs that the royal family struggled to find a single candidate who could command widespread support. Egypt was set on an unstoppable course toward political fragmentation. The young monarch full of boyish exuberance had become a frail old man. In theory immortal (and he must increasingly have seemed so to his subjects), in practice he had gone on too long. His passing, when it finally came, marked both the end of a life and the end of an era. The Old Kingdom had run its course.

  OUR VIEW OF ANCIENT EGYPT IS PROFOUNDLY SHAPED BY THE surviving monuments. The Old Kingdom with its pyramids and the New Kingdom with its temples and tombs loom large in the popular imagination, while the centuries in between, largely devoid of monumental architecture, are barely acknowledged, a forgotten dark age. Yet the social and political developments that took place during this neglected period had a deep and lasting effect on the trajectory of ancient Egyptian history. The weaknesses of a hereditary monarchy, the threat posed by climate change, the dangers of uncontrolled immigration, and the unforeseen consequences of closer foreign ties—all were brought home to the Egyptians in harsh lessons that would test their civilization to the breaking point.

  Amid this chaos, however, Egypt witnessed a second great cultural flowering. The Middle Kingdom was the golden age of literature, when many of the great classics were composed. From the heroic Tale of Sinuhe to the rollicking yarn of The Shipwrecked Sailor, from the overtly propagandist Prophecies of Neferti to the subtle rhetoric of The Eloquent Peasant, and from the metaphysical Dispute Between a Man and His Soul to the burlesque Satire of the Trades, the literary output of the Middle Kingdom reveals ancient Egyptian society at its most complex and sophisticated. Archaeological evidence is prosaic and unsentimental, whereas the surviving writings of the ancient Egyptians allow us to enter into their imaginations, to see the world as they saw it. For this reason the Middle Kingdom seems more immediate, more tangible than many other periods of Egyptian history. For once, we can taste its flavor.

  It was also a time of unrivaled craftsmanship in jewelry and statuary, of international trade and conquest. The city of Thebes rose from provincial obscurity to a position of national prominence. Much of Nubia was conquered and annexed. Egypt emerged on the world stage, foreshadowing its later imperial expansion. The end of the Pyramid Age and the collapse of central authority in the First Intermediate Period might have presaged the terminal decline of ancient Egypt. In fact, they brought about a renaissance, albeit one with a harder edge.

  Part II traces the extraordinary ups and downs of Egyptian civilization in the six centuries between the end of the Old Kingdom and the beginning of the New Kingdom. For the pharaonic state, court culture, and the lives of ordinary Egyptians it was a roller-coaster ride: from political fragmentation and civil war to the restoration of centralized control and cultural renewal, then foreign invasion and the threat of total extinction. In such turbulent times, the Egyptians’ illusions about their place in the world were rudely shattered. Yet far from undermining pharaonic civilization, this collective loss of confidence in the old certainties proved a fertile breeding ground for new ideas.

  So, too, did the rise of the regions and the influence of local traditions. Afterlife beliefs and burial customs, in particular, underwent profound changes in this climate of innovation, with concepts previously reserved for the king being adopted by the wider population, then adapted, elaborated, and codified. In an uncertain world, the promise of an afterlife for all offered a grain of comfort. The result was a set of tenets and practices that would endure for the rest of ancient Egyptian history and influence later religions, including Christianity.

  In the political sphere, the shock of civil war and its lingering aftermath prompted a security clampdown and the introduction of repressive measures throughout the Nile Valley. Despotic, autocractic rule was the prevailing zeitgeist of the the Middle Kingdom. More than any other period of pharaonic history, it challenges our rose-tinted view of ancient Egypt.

  CHAPTER 6

  CIVIL WAR

  APRÈS MOI LE DÉLUGE

  THE DEATH OF PEPI II IN 2175, AFTER A REIGN OF RECORD LENGTH, provoked a dynastic crisis more serious than anything Egypt had faced since the foundation of the state, nearly a thousand years earlier. Disputes over the succession had flared up periodically during the Old Kingdom, but even in the aftermath of palace coups, the powerful forces of conservatism within the royal court had always managed to reimpose order and restore the status quo. This time it was different. Pepi’s designated successor, his son Nemtyemsaf II, did indeed ascend to the throne, but his reign was short. He must have been a very old man himself by the time his centenarian father died. The next ruler, Neitiqerty Siptah, was of uncertain descent, and we cannot even be certain about gender: the name suggests a man, but later tradition identified Neitiqerty as a reigning queen! It was symptomatic of the confusion that now descended on the royal family, the government, and Egypt as a whole. State building projects ground to a halt, and so did foreign expeditions in search of booty. Preoccupied with troubles at home, the faltering government had no appetite for adventures abroad. At the remote outpost of Ayn Asil, in the Dakhla Oasis, for generations a bulwark against foreign infiltration, arson gutted the governor’s palace and destroyed part of the northern town. The desert outposts were abandoned, and with them Egypt’s forward defenses. The civilization of the pyramid builders had reached a nadir.

  After Neitiqerty (who left no monuments or even inscriptions), the throne passed from one weak ruler to another, as almost anyone with a drop of royal blood in their veins—and no doubt several individuals who had none—pressed their claim. In a period of just twenty years, less than a generation after Pepi II’s demise, Egypt saw seventeen kings come and go. Ten of their reigns together spanned a trifling six years. Little wonder that later chroniclers were heartily confused and ended up inventing a wholly spurious Seventh Dynasty. Not that the Eighth—those seventeen ephemeral “monarchs” in succession to Nemtyemsaf II—was really worthy of the title. Five of its kings tried vainly to project an air of legitimacy by adopting the throne name of Pepi II (Neferkara) as their own; one looked back to an even earlier king of the Fifth Dynasty; but all succumbed in short order to the force of rival claimants. Most of the royal inscriptions that have survived from this extraordinary phase of ancient Egyptian history are dated to the first year of a king’s reign. It is as if, knowing that he was unlikely to last long in the post, each new ruler got down to business as quickly as possible, exercising what little authority remained to him before it was stolen away. So we see an otherwise unknown King Iti sponsoring a quarrying expedition to the Wadi Hammamat, to bring back stone for a pyramid that was never built. Another ru
ler, Iyemhotep, sent expeditions both as crown prince and as king but likewise left no permanent memorial.

  The only king of the Eighth Dynasty who managed both to survive more than a year in office—two years, one month, and a day, to be precise—and to leave behind a monument of sorts was Ibi. (From the Fifth Dynasty onward, Egyptian monarchs seem to have had a curious fondness for personal names that sound babyish to our ears, from Izi and Ini to Teti and Pepi, Nebi, Iti, and Ibi. Perhaps this tells us something about the cosseted atmosphere inside the royal apartments.) We can well imagine the feverish activity that gripped the court and what remained of the royal workshops when the newly enthroned king announced his plans for a pyramid at Saqqara, traditional burial place of monarchs since the time of Netjerikhet. Recent experience showed that time was of the essence. In response to the new realities of kingship, Ibi’s architects proposed a monument that might be completed before the wheel of fortune turned once more, bringing yet another ruler to power. The result was hardly a pyramid at all in the expected sense of the word. Although sited in deliberate proximity to the pyramid of Pepi II, it was diminutive by the standards of the Old Kingdom. At 103 feet (60 ancient Egyptian cubits) square at the base, and with a projected height of just 60 feet, it was the same size as the pyramids of Pepi II’s queens—quite a comedown for someone claiming to be the son of Ra. To facilitate the speediest possible construction, the core was built from mud, small stones, and chips of limestone, hardly a recipe for stability or longevity. The descending corridor and underground burial chamber were carved with selections from the Pyramid Texts, and a mud brick chapel was built against the pyramid’s eastern face to serve as a mortuary temple. But the outer casing was never even started; time had caught up with Ibi. He would be the only one of Pepi II’s direct successors even to attempt pyramid building.

  In other ways, too, in defiance of its own impotence, the administration carried on in public as if nothing had changed. The most remarkable documents to survive from the Eighth Dynasty are a collection of royal decrees from the temple of Min at Gebtu, on the east bank of the Nile in Upper Egypt. Since prehistoric times, Gebtu had flourished as the gateway to the Eastern Desert and its abundant mineral resources. The local fertility god, Min, had been adopted as a national deity early in Egyptian history, and his cult center received royal patronage from the very beginning of the First Dynasty. Toward the end of the Old Kingdom, Pepi I and Pepi II added to the temple buildings and endowments. Their successors of the late Eighth Dynasty maintained this tradition, but to very different ends. King Neferkaura, for instance, issued three decrees for public display in the temple. Their purpose was not to augment the temple’s estates or safeguard its personnel from government service, but something altogether more practical and political—to announce the promotion of a royal lackey, Shemai, to the governorship of Upper Egypt. Shemai would have responsibility for all twenty-two provinces from the first cataract to the outskirts of Memphis—and to confirm the succession of his son, Idy, as nomarch (provincial governor) of Gebtu. The weak rulers of the Eighth Dynasty needed all the friends they could muster, and were not averse to using royal privilege to honor and reward their supporters in the regions.

  This debasement of monarchy was carried even further by Neferkaura’s successor, Neferkauhor. In the space of a single day, probably the very day of his accession to the throne (circa 2155), the king issued no fewer than eight decrees to be displayed in the temple at Gebtu. All eight were again concerned with promoting and honoring Shemai and members of his family. Shemai himself was promoted to the office of vizier, while his son succeeded him as governor of Upper Egypt (albeit with a considerably reduced remit). Another son was appointed to a position on the temple staff, a decision commemorated in three separate decrees, one addressed to each male member of the family. A further edict assigned mortuary priests to Shemai and his wife, a privilege previously reserved only for royalty. In a similar vein, their funerary monuments were made from red granite, a material with strong solar connotations and subject to a royal monopoly. The reason for all these honors was made plain in the first of Neferkauhor’s decrees, in which he stipulated the titles and dignities to be borne by Shemai’s wife, Nebet. For she was none other than the king’s eldest daughter and the king’s sole favorite. As soon as Neferkauhor gained the throne, he clearly decided to use his brief period of power to shower his immediate relatives with awards and royal favors. It was the classic behavior of a tin-pot dictator.

  The last of the Gebtu decrees, dated to the reign of Neferkauhor’s successor Neferirkara, forbade anyone to damage the funerary monuments of Shemai and Nebet’s son Idy (now promoted to vizier), or to diminish his offerings. Though issued from the national capital, it was the last gasp of the Memphite monarchy. Its craven favoritism signaled “the almost abject dependence of the Pharaohs at Memphis upon the loyalty of the powerful landed nobility of Upper Egypt.”1 Despite the apparent maintenance of economic stability and the associated prosperity of local cults like that of Min at Gebtu, royal power was waning fast. In the person of Neferirkara—named after an illustrious monarch of the Fifth Dynasty, but in reality a king of shreds and patches—the system of royal government that had served Egypt for a millennium had come to an inglorious end. The political elite and the country at large were totally unprepared for what might follow.

  BIG MEN, BIG IDEAS

  WITH THE COLLAPSE OF CENTRAL AUTHORITY, EGYPT FRAGMENTED along regional lines, returning to the pattern that had existed before the foundation of the state a thousand years earlier. As before, the geography of the Nile Valley—in particular the distribution of irrigation basins—was the main determining factor. The three southernmost provinces formed one natural unit, provinces four and five another, and so on downriver. The political and economic aggrandizement of the provincial governors (nomarchs), a process that had started centuries earlier, reached its logical conclusion as various local potentates declared de facto independence. However, kingship as a model of government was so ingrained in the Egyptian psyche that its replacement by something different was philosophically and theologically impossible. So it was inevitable that one of this new cohort of rulers, even if his authority was strictly limited in extent, would claim royal titles and be acknowledged, grudgingly, as suzerain—or, rather, first among equals—by his fellow leaders.

  The strongman who achieved this recognition of sorts came from the town of Herakleopolis (modern Ihnasya el-Medina) in Middle Egypt. Named Kheti, he was said by the later Egyptian historian Manetho to have been more terrible than any previous king, this verdict reflecting, perhaps, a would-be dynast who pursued his claim to the throne by force, browbeating any opposition into submission. The house of Kheti would reign for a century and a half (2125–1975)—reign, but not rule. Even in its own realm the new dynasty was not universally acknowledged or approved. At the heart of Herakleopolitan power, a local potentate with royal pretensions, “King Khui,” built a massive mud brick tomb, equal in size to many Old Kingdom pyramids—and this act of daring lèse-majesté just a stone’s throw from Sauty (modern Asyut), the city most loyal to the Herakleopolitan dynasty. At the nearby alabaster quarries of Hatnub, the nomarchs dated their expeditions by the years of their own tenure, avoiding all reference to a royal reign. In their tomb autobiographies at Beni Hasan and elsewhere, officials rarely if ever mentioned the king, and were conspicuously silent about their own careers, completely out of character for an ancient Egyptian, and a sure sign of wavering loyalties. With such unpopularity in their heartland, Kheti and his descendants were living in a dream world if they imagined their nominal authority would remain unchallenged for long.

  What dealt their authority a fatal blow was the dynasty’s inability to carry out the most basic duty of kingship—to feed the people. A series of low Niles had weakened the state economy in the reign of Pepi II. Now, in the absence of an effective national government, the long-term effects of poor inundations started to be felt. Famine stalked the land, chal
lenging the ability of provincial governors to look after their own citizens. Some undoubtedly played up the crisis to further their own careers. By acting the savior in a time of trouble, they won both local support and wider renown. A man named Merer boasted that “I buried the dead and fed the living wherever I went in this famine that happened.”2 A contemporary, Iti, let it be known that he fed his hometown, Imitru, “in the painful years” and “gave Upper Egyptian barley to Iuny and to Hefat, [but only] after feeding Imitru.”3