The Xenophile Historian

Chapter 2: VALLEY OF THE PHARAOHS, PART I

Egypt before 664 B.C.

	The Gift of the Nile
	Most Ancient Egypt
	The Archaic or Protodynastic Era
	The Pyramid Age
	Everyday Life in Ancient Egypt
	Egyptian Mathematics and Science
	Ancient Nubia
	The End of the Old Kingdom
	The Middle Kingdom
	The Second Intermediate Period
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	The Rise of the New Kingdom
	The First Feminist
	Imperial Egypt
	The Amarna Revolution
	The Ramessid Age
	The Third Intermediate Period

Nubia is a territory rich in gold and iron, and it connected Egypt with sub-Saharan Africa, but life there has always been tougher than in Egypt, so for most of history Nubia has lived in the shadow of its northern neighbor. The only area suitable for large-scale farming is the Dongola Reach, the S-curve between the third and fourth cataracts; elsewhere the area that can be cultivated is very narrow, with the desert beginning as close as a hundred yards from the riverbanks. As a result, this land could not support a large population, and it was usually behind Egypt where technological progress was concerned.

Along the last 750 miles of the river, from the first cataract to the Mediterranean, irrigation allowed agriculture in an area much wider than in Nubia, a zone two to thirty miles wide. The soil was renewed annually by the rich silt deposited by the flood water of the river that, unlike the unpredictable floods of Mesopotamia, rose and fell with unusual precision. The rise began in July and crested in September; by the end of October the river was again contained by its banks.

Most Ancient Egypt

The Nile turned out to be a more pleasant river than its Middle Eastern rivals, the Tigris and Euphrates in Iraq. There was plenty of wild game in the form of fish, ducks, lions, crocodiles, hippopotami, baboons, etc. In addition, it is one of the few major rivers in the world that flows north, while the prevailing winds in that region blow from north to south. This made transportation simple: to go north, all one has to do is let the currents carry your boat downstream, and to go south, just raise a sail and let the wind blow your boat the other way. This meant that instead of having the first cities bunch up near the end of the river, as they did in Mesopotamia, the population spread out fairly evenly from the Mediterranean to the first cataract. It also made for rapid growth; in the third and second millennia B.C. Egypt was the most densely populated country in the world.⁽²⁾

The ease of communications also meant that Egypt would unite politically long before anyone else did. They probably started with city-states like Mesopotamia, but by the time the first hieroglyphics appear, the land was well on its way to unification. Apparently the crucial step in the process came shortly after 3000 B.C., with the merging of three city-states in the south: Abydos, Nubt (Naqada) and Nekhen (Hierakonpolis). How this was done is unknown, but the myth of the war between Horus and Set (see below) may be an allegorical tale of the unification struggle; it appears to the author that Nubt first conquered Abydos, only to be overthrown by Hierakonpolis later on. The result was a single state 200 miles long, which wielded power that no other city-state could match. Tradition holds that before the first pharaoh took over, Egypt was divided into two states: Lower (northern) Egypt in the Nile delta, with its capital at Buto, and Upper (southern) Egypt along the river's main channel.⁽³⁾ Presumably this was an intermediate step between the city-states mentioned above and the united Egypt we see later on. There is some confusion as to whether Abydos or Hierakonpolis was the capital of Upper Egypt at this stage; the author believes that Abydos was the capital, even if the ruling family came from farther south, simply because it would make sense to put the capital as far north as possible, if all the action was in the north. Unfortunately, the relatively wet climate of the delta doesn't preserve artifacts as well as Upper Egypt; however, that doesn't rule out the possibility that a united Lower Egyptian state once existed, and that the dense, continuous population of the area is growing crops above the cities and battlefield(s) that were the scene of Egypt's first showdown.

The most important Egyptian myth focused on the power struggle between Osiris, Set and Horus. According to this myth Osiris was the original ruler of Egypt, until the treachery of his jealous brother Set brought him down. Set caught him by displaying a wonderfully crafted wooden box at a banquet, and offered to give it to whomever could fit inside it. One by one the gods tried out the box, and when Osiris got in it, Set and his followers rushed up, nailed the box shut, and tossed it into the sea. The wife and sister of Osiris, Isis, went looking for the box, and she found it in Lebanon, inside a giant cedar tree that sprouted up where it had come ashore. Fearing that Isis would revive Osiris, Set cut the body of Osiris into fourteen pieces and scattered them across the land. Isis recovered all of them except the genitals (which a fish had eaten), patched them together, and resurrected her husband, who then retired from this world to become the lord of the afterlife. The priesthood used this story to teach that Osiris was the first mummy, and that every mummified Egyptian could become like Osiris, capable of resurrection from the dead and enjoying a blessed eternal life.

Despite Osiris' missing piece, he was able to have a son before he left the world for the last time. This was Horus, who challenged Set for rulership over Egypt when he grew up. They met in a great battle, in which Horus lost an eye while Set was castrated. The gods held a meeting afterwards, and they declared Horus the winner, because Set was no longer fit to rule if he could not have children to rule after him. They exiled Set to Asia, and afterwards the Egyptian name for Asians was Setyu, because they expected them to be worshipers of Set. At home Horus became king of Egypt; each pharaoh⁽⁵⁾ afterwards called himself the god Horus in human form, and expected to become a part of Osiris when he died.

The five main characters of the Osiris myth, from left to right: Isis, Horus, Osiris, Set, Set's wife Nephthys.

Around 2840 B.C. the king of Upper Egypt, known as Menes in Greek texts and Narmer in the oldest inscriptions, conquered Lower Egypt, became the first pharaoh, and began what we now call the first (I) dynasty. To mark the beginning of the new era, he married a Lower Egyptian princess, and built a new city called Men-Nefer (Memphis in Greek) at the apex of the delta, right where Upper and Lower Egypt meet. It turned out to be a superb location for a capital; for most of its history Egypt put its capital near Memphis (Cairo is there now). Sakkara (also spelled Saqqara), a site in the desert west of Memphis, became the cemetery for Memphis, but the pharaohs continued to build tombs for themselves alongside those of their ancestors at Abydos, presumably to keep tradition. In the twentieth century it was believed that the larger tombs at Sakkara also belonged to the pharaohs, but because their number exceeds the number of kings that we know of from the first two dynasties, we now believe only officials from the court at Memphis were buried there; the names of the earliest pharaohs are at Sakkara because they insisted on having their names carved and painted larger than the names of their ministers, even on their graves.

Menes encouraged unity by adopting several Lower Egyptian symbols (the cobra, papyrus, and the bee) and putting them alongside Upper Egyptian counterparts (the vulture, lotus, and sut reed). Up to this point Lower Egyptian kings had worn a red scorpion-shaped crown, and Upper Egyptian monarchs had worn a white crown shaped like a bottle, so Menes united them to form the double crown that pharaohs commonly wore afterwards. From time to time, though, the pharaohs might take part in a ceremony that only involved one part of the country, and for that occasion they reverted back to wearing either the white or red crown again. Egypt never forgot that it had been two nations originally, and frequently called itself T3wy, "the Two Lands," for the rest of its ancient history.

The Archaic or Protodynastic Era

The history of ancient Egypt is divided into thirty dynasties, a tradition started by an Egyptian historian named Manetho, in the third century B.C. Usually a new dynasty began when the current ruling family ran out of heirs or was overthrown, and a new family took over.⁽⁶⁾ Inbreeding may have brought down some of them, too. From a very early date they believed that a pharaoh had to have royal ancestry on both sides of his family. Occasionally marrying foreign princesses accomplished this, but more often incest was the answer, with brothers marrying sisters regularly. If there wasn't a sister handy, the king might marry a first cousin, aunt, or even his mother (we have records of some queens outliving their husbands and being passed on to their sons)!

The first two dynasties (2840-2550 B.C., according to my chronology) are commonly called the archaic or protodynastic era, because this was the time when Egyptian culture completed its development. Very little is known about this era, because few artifacts have survived the 48 centuries between then and now. In fact, just about everything we have from before 2000 B.C. comes from the graves of Egypt.

The reason for this is that the ancient Egyptians looked upon the next life as being more important than this one, so they took special care to make sure that their tombs would last. Their houses, even the palaces of the pharaohs, consisted of sun-dried brick, which is practical because it hardly ever rains in Egypt, but when it did rain their buildings melted and had to be replaced. By contrast, they built their temples and tombs of stone, so they still stand today. Because we have learned so much of what we know about the ancient Egyptians through tomb-digging, we probably have a distorted view of what they were really like. The Egyptians were not morbid, weird people, but folks like us who saw the afterlife as being a lot like this life, only better (e.g., if you were a farmer, you would be a farmer again, but the grain would grow nine feet high with hardly any effort!). It was the Egyptians who first said at parties, "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die." Look at it this way: if some archeologist comes along two thousand years from now and tries to learn about our civilization, and he has to go to our cemeteries to learn anything about us, would that give him some strange ideas about how we lived?

Now that the point has been made, let us go to the place where dead men do tell tales. Before the first dynasty the king was put to death when he became too weak to rule. By the time Egypt was united, the Egyptians were giving their kings more than a simple grave; the king and his belongings, plus food and drink, were placed in one or more underground chambers, with an artifical hill of dirt piled up on the surface, and a wall around the hill. Often boats were buried in separate pits, to provide transportation for his journey to the next world. At Abydos, about half a mile from the royal tombs, a chapel surrounded by a wall was constructed as well. Archaeologists call this structure a funerary palace, and one is tempted to compare it with the mortuary temples the pharaohs built later on, but curiously, it was destroyed shortly after it was completed, instead of being allowed to stand for the ages. Either it was only meant to be used at the time of the royal funeral, or each pharaoh was required to tear down his predecessor's funerary palace before he could build his own.

Besides boats, the burial pits around the royal tombs contained the king's servants, concubines, court dwarves, and even dogs and donkeys, who were killed and buried near their king so they could serve him in the afterlife; it is estimated that no less than 318 people were put to death at the funeral of King Zer (Djer), the second or third pharaoh. Merneith, the widow of Djet, the next pharaoh, ran Egypt until her son Den grew up, and thus got to have forty-one retainers buried around her tomb. But the Egyptians have never been a bloodthirsty people, so the royal murders stopped at the end of the I dynasty; none of the II dynasty kings had "satellite burials" around their tombs.⁽⁷⁾ The priests replaced the killing of the king with a jubilee called the heb-sed, which they celebrated when the pharaoh reached the thirty-year anniversary of his reign, and once every three years afterwards. Into the tombs now went pictures and small statues of servants (ushabtis), which were magically expected to come to life and take the place of the real thing.

As the country grew rich, so did the kings. They commissioned artisans to make fine jewelry and works of art for them, and when they died these were buried in the tombs, since ancient Egyptians believed more than anyone else that you can take it with you. But as soon as the contents of the tombs became valuable enough, grave robbers went to work. To protect the king and his possessions, various methods were devised to deter robbers, like filling passages with sand and rubble, false doors, traps, etc. The tomb's security was also improved by putting the king at the bottom of a vertical shaft, which sometimes went down a hundred feet beneath the other chambers. This led to a second problem--when separated from the drying sands and put in a dank chamber walled with brick or stone, the royal corpse rotted. By this time Egyptians had come to believe that the dead needed not only their possessions, but also their original body, in order to have immortality.

We noted in Chapter 1 that the typical predynastic burial consisted of digging a hole in the sand and placing the body in it, along with a few possessions and pots containing food. Under desert conditions the body did not decay, but simply dried out. Thus, when the Egyptians invented mummification, they were trying to duplicate with artificial preservatives what the desert had done naturally.

At first they simply wrapped the head and hands of the dead with linen bandages; this was done to several bodies in the cemetery of Hierakonpolis, before 3000 B.C. By the beginning of the I dynasty they were wrapping the entire body, and soaking the banadages in resin; this retained the original shape of the corpse, but did nothing to keep the flesh from withering away. The oldest example of this practice, a plain wooden box containing a wrapped skeleton, was found at Sakkara in 2003; this may have been a court treasurer or vizier of Hor-Aha, the pharaoh preceding Zer.⁽⁸⁾

The royal embalmers were not content to preserve appearances. Around the beginning of the IV dynasty, they started practicing true mummification. Now before they did the familiar bandaging they dried out the corpse in natron (a form of salt, sodium carbonate to be exact), and usually removed most of the internal organs so they could be dried separately, before decay set in. What the priestly surgeons took out was preserved with natron, in four jars called canopic jars; in their place the body cavity was packed with crushed myrrh leaves or resin-soaked linen. The heart, however, was left in the mummy, because it was thought it would be needed when the dead person appeared in judgment before the god Osiris, to testify that the soul was worthy to enter into Paradise. By contrast, the same embalmers who were careful in preserving all the other parts, thought the brain was unimportant, so if they removed it, they threw it away! The whole process took about 40 days, but they prolonged it to 70 days by reciting prayers and practicing magic every step of the way.

At first mummification was so expensive that only the rich could afford it. Later, when the embalmers developed more effective techniques, they offered the old ones at a discount, so by the time of the New Kingdom, people of ordinary means could afford a funeral that would guarantee them a chance at the afterlife. The poor could never afford even that, though, and continued to bury their dead in the sand the way their ancestors did originally. But you could say the poor had the last laugh, for robbers never bothered their final resting places.

The last step in preparing a royal mummy--
saying the appropriate prayers.

It now appears that the I dynasty ended with a struggle for the throne. One or more of the kings after Den appear to have been usurpers, and the first pharaoh of the II dynasty called himself Hotepsekhemwy, meaning, "peaceful in respect of the two powers." This may refer to an understanding reached between two rival factions, either political or religious. Hotepsekhemwy and the next two kings, Nebra and Ninetjer, had long, prosperous reigns, the evidence of which stands in the tomb complexes they built, the largest since the middle of dynasty I. However, the record becomes extremely difficult to follow after Ninetjer; several kings left artifacts at Sakkara, but nothing has been found from them at Abydos; in the Abydos cemetery, the next king after Ninetjer was Sekhemib, a ruler who left nothing at Sakkara. W. Helck (Thinitenzeit, 1987, p.105) has suggested that Ninetjer divided the country between two sons, crowning one in Memphis and one in Abydos. This is plausible--monarchs in other countries have made stranger arrangements for their heirs--but in a country where the natural geography encouraged unity, it seems odd, to say the least.

Sekhemib appears to have brought on a religious revolution. Previously the pharaohs had placed a picture of the god Horus above the hieroglyphics representing their names. Now Sekhemib changed his name to Peribsen and replaced the falcon of Horus with the Set-animal; then, like Akhenaten would do in a later age, he erased his original name wherever it could be found. He may have done this because the followers of Set, who did not disappear after the original Horus-king conquered them, enjoyed a major revival in the II dynasty, and grew in numbers and influence until the king had to join them to keep them on his side.

How Peribsen wrote his name. From Wikimedia Commons.

Eventually Kha-sekhem prevailed, and restored order. Afterwards he changed his name to Kha-sekhemwy, and wrote it with both the falcon and the Set-animal on top, suggesting a compromise between the Horus and Set worshipers. In addition, he took two titles that suggest peace: "arising in respect of the two powers," and "the two lords are at peace in him." A major upswing in prosperity followed, and Kha-sekhemwy left the largest mastaba of all, a 230 x 59 foot-long building. Like Menes, he celebrated unification by marrying a northern princess, Nemathap, and she was later worshipped as the mother of the next two pharaohs, Sanakht (Nebka) and Zoser (Djoser). Sanakht apparently was a child from a previous marriage, for Egyptian historians marked his rise to the throne as the beginning of the III dynasty (2550-2477). Everything was now in place for the reunited Two Lands to begin the glorious age of the pyramid builders.

The Pyramid Age

To build this mausoleum Imhotep fetched granite, basalt and quartz from Aswan, at the southern border of the country; for an outer coating he selected a fine, white limestone, which came from the hills of Tura, just across the Nile from Sakkara. Peasants were conscripted in droves to carve the stone, transport it on barges to Sakkara, and drag it into place on wooden rollers or sleds. The architectural design, which was changed more than once before it was finished, consisted of six mastabas, stacked one on top of another, each one smaller than the ones below it. This produced a ziggurat-like tower more than 200 feet tall known as the Step Pyramid; the shape was meant to be a spiritual image of a "stairway to Heaven." Around it was built a mile-long wall and an elaborate temple, and under the pyramid was the king's burial chamber and a maze of galleries crammed with more than 40,000 stone vases holding funerary offerings.

The Step Pyramid of Zoser.

Zoser may have considered his tomb a great success, since it was the most impressive building the world had seen up to that time, and people have been talking about both it and him ever since. But such a monument also comes with a serious liability. The pyramid's main function was to protect the king's body and a large portion of his personal possessions until the end of the world, but instead it gave the grave such an obvious marker that nobody could miss it; all the tomb robbers had to do was find out where the entrance was concealed. As one might expect, the typical pyramid was robbed of all its contents--the royal mummy was invariably taken out of its coffin and thrown away--but pharaohs continued to build pyramids for a millennium before they realized there must be a safer and cheaper way to bury themselves.

The next pharaoh after Zoser, Sekhemkhet, tried to outdo him, by building a seven-step pyramid. Imhotep's name appears on a wall surrounding this pyramid, a hint that the great architect outlived his master and served this pharaoh, too. However, Sekhemkhet died after a reign of six years, and only one step of his pyramid had been completed by then. His successors did not bother to finish it, but unlike most royal tombs, robbers did not disturb it, either. The pyramid was discovered in 1951, and the archaeologist who excavated it thought this was another intact burial, like the more famous one of Tutankhamen. He did not find rooms full of treasures, but he was encouraged to find several pieces of gold jewelry, a sealed alabaster sarcophagus, and the remains of a funeral bouquet on top of the sarcophagus. Instead of the lid being on top, as was usually the case, the sarcophagus had a sliding door on one end, but when it was opened, the sarcophagus turned out to be empty. Why wasn't Sekhemkhet in there? It may be that Sekhemkhet, like the pharaohs of the first two dynasties, only wanted to build a cenotaph (false tomb) for himself at Sakkara. Or perhaps he feared that this tomb would be robbed, despite all the precautions, and left instructions for his servants to hold a fake funeral service there, meaning the pyramid and sarcophagus were decoys. Whatever the case, Sekhemkhet's real burial place has never been found, making it another one of Egypt's many unsolved mysteries.

Around the end of the III dynasty, somebody decided that a pyramid with smooth sides would look nicer than a pyramid with steps. The first smooth pyramid attempted, at Meidum, had its steps filled in with bricks, but they fell out, leaving a stone core surrounded by a huge pile of rubble. Years ago it was believed that the collapse happened during the construction, but because no skeletons have been found in the rubble, from workers caught in the disaster, it now appears more likely that the builders abandoned the project when severe structural problems were found, and the collapse of the unfinished pyramid took place some time after that. The architects of the next pyramid must have feared the same trouble would happen again, because when they were halfway done they changed the angle of the slope from 54^o to 42^o, a move which greatly reduced the number of stones on the top; this is the curious Bent Pyramid of Dahshur. They managed to finish this pyramid, but cracks appeared in it from a settling of the foundation, and they had to put wooden beams in the burial chamber to keep it from caving in, meaning the pyramid was unsafe to use. Not willing to give up, Snefru, the pharaoh of the pyramids at Meidum and Dahshur, built a third pyramid right next to the "Bent" one, with a continuous angle of 42^o from bottom to top; this time the builders got it right. This was the first true pyramid, the Red Pyramid of Dahshur.

It may be that the architectural change occurred because a new god from Heliopolis, the sun-god Ra, challenged the supremacy of Horus and Osiris. Egypt was a land where the sun could be felt all year round, and the pharaohs thought it would be good to identify themselves with this blazing power. Ra (also called Re), was represented as a hawk with a sun-disk on his head. The pyramid was now seen as a sort of sunbeam in stone, its sides reproducing the slant of the sun's rays when they broke through the clouds. To honor Ra, temples were built so that their entrances faced east, toward the rising sun, and the first obelisks were built in their courtyards.

Though he kept the people building pyramids, the ancient Egyptians considered Snefru one of their best rulers. This may be because his other activities made the Old Kingdom a roaring success. Besides the pyramids, he was the first pharaoh of the Old Kingdom to lead military campaigns (raids into Nubia and Libya), and he opened up new copper and turquoise mines in the Sinai. Today, however, we remember Snefru as the founder of the IV dynasty (2477-2367 B.C.); his wife, Hetepheres I, was a daughter of Huni, the last pharaoh of the III dynasty, but we don't know how Huni and Snefru might have been related, so we can't tell what kind of transition replaced dynasty III with dynasty IV.

Snefru and Hetepheres were also the parents of Khufu (Cheops in Greek). Under Khufu the Old Kingdom reached its peak, which he symbolized by spending his entire 23-year reign and the resources of the realm to build a giant pyramid at Giza. When completed it became not only the largest tomb ever built, but also the first of the world's seven wonders, the "Great Pyramid." It was laid out with geometric precision; the 755-foot-long sides miss forming a perfect square by less than eight inches, and the structure rises 481 feet from a base that is flat as a table. 2.3 million stone blocks, averaging half a ton each, went into the construction, and were fitted together so closely that a knife cannot be inserted between them. The result was a masterpiece that has dwarfed later, more technologically advanced civilizations, a monument that has produced endless books and speculation ever since.⁽¹⁰⁾

The Pyramids of Giza.

Khufu.

A statue of Hemiunu, Khufu's nephew, vizier, and foreman in charge of building the Great Pyramid.

The labor and resources consumed in building the pyramids of Giza must have bankrupted the country, for nobody after Khufu built on such an extravagant scale. His son Khafre (Chephren) built his pyramid next to Khufu's, but he cut corners by making it a little smaller and putting fewer passages inside it. Khafre also gets credit for building the famous Great Sphinx nearby, a symbol of the king's power which has the body of a lion and the head of a pharaoh, but now it appears that he merely put his name on somebody else's work (a recent study of the sphinx showed signs of water erosion, which only would have happened if it stood when Egypt was a wetter country than it is today). People who think the sphinx has the head of a woman are mistaken.

Khafre's successor, Menkaure (Mycerinus), raised the third pyramid at Giza, but scaled it down so that it was only one third the size of the first two. He may have done this because the cost of conscripting and feeding the workers had gotten too high, but Egyptians remembered him as a kind and pious king, while they called Khufu and Khafre tyrants. The last king of the dynasty, Shepseskaf, didn't even try for a small pyramid, but set up for himself an old-fashioned mastaba at Sakkara. He may have been an opponent of the cult of Ra, which was now identified with the pyramids; note that there is no "Ra" in the name of Shepseskaf. If that was his intention, he failed. The V dynasty (2367-2241 B.C.) saw a return to pyramid building, with impressive temples and obelisks, all dedicated to Ra.

Everyday Life in Ancient Egypt

For a while, at least until the end of the Old Kingdom, the "humanity" caste was subdivided into three groups: Iry-Pat (also spelled Iry-Paut), Henemmet, and Rekhyt. The Iry-Pat were the original nobility, who could trace their ancestry back to the first worshippers of Horus. At first the pharaoh and his courtiers were Iry-Pat only; in the tombs of Old Kingdom nobles, funeral texts pointed it out if the deceased was not Iry-Pat, meaning that he had become successful through some other means besides family connections. As for the other groups, the Henemmet ("Sun People") were the indigenous population of Upper Egypt, while the Rekhyt ("Lapwings"), the original Lower Egyptians, were ranked lowest of all, because they were in the last part of the country to be conquered during unification. The Iry-Pat jealously tried to protect their power by marrying other members of the Iry-Pat group as much as possible, but with commerce and intermarriage being what they are, eventually the differences between the groups blurred until they no longer mattered.

The pharaoh could not be everywhere at once, so it became customary to delegate his duties. Thus, the day-to-day administration of the land became the responsibility of the vizier, who had a host of titles and at least thirty major functions. The vizier oversaw the royal estates, supervised public works, commanded the army and police, commissioned artisans, distributed food to the many laborers and officials who worked for the king, and (most importantly) collected the taxes. To get all this done the vizier employed a large corps of specialists--administrators, priests, scribes, artists, artisans, and merchants. Whatever a person's rank, he was taught that his welfare depended on absolute fidelity to the god-king. "If you want to know what to do in life," advised Ptah-Hotep, a V dynasty vizier, "cling to the pharaoh and be loyal." As a consequence, Egyptians felt a sense of security that was rare in Mesopotamia.

Ranked immediately beneath the vizier was a chancellor, who was followed by the nomarchs. Usually the nomarchs saw themselves as the ones who personally brought the king's righteousness to the provinces. "All the works of the king came into my hand," boasted one nomarch. "There was not the daughter of a poor man that I wronged, nor a widow that I oppressed. There was not a farmer that I chastised, not a herdsman that I drove away. There was not a pauper around me, there was not a hungry man of my time." This, however, was the ideal of government; in practice the main interest was not giving goods and mercy but to get labor and taxes from the peasants. Since it was a barter economy (money would not be invented for millennia to come), taxes were usually taken in the form of crops, and every part of the land was assessed according to its ability to pay. To make sure they did this fairly, markers called nilometers were put in the Nile to measure how high it flooded every year; that way they would know to be lenient in the bad year that followed when the Nile did not rise much, or when it did not rise at all.

In Egypt, both agriculture and government relied on a three-season year. The first season, which ran from August to October, was called Akhet ("Inundation"). This was the time when the Nile flooded the land, and the peasants couldn't work their fields, so this became their vacation time. However, this was also when the pharaoh was most likely to draft them into building pyramids and other monuments, since they weren't doing anything else useful then. Then from November to February, there came a season known as Peret ("The Coming Out"), when the Nile receded, the ground was plowed and crops were planted. The third season, Shemu ("Drought"), was the dry season from March to July when the crops were harvested and the king's tax collectors descended on the land to take their share.

The households of those who worked for the king were quite elegant and comfortable. Such a house was built around an open courtyard, where the main feature was often a decorative pool filled with water lilies. The household staff included bakers, brewers, gardeners, musicians and handmaidens, who were either local-born servants or slaves captured on military expeditions to Libya, Nubia or the Holy Land. Banquets were boisterous affairs, where the main dish was a roasted goose or duck, accompanied by side dishes heaped high with bread, figs, and dates. At these affairs scantily-clad servants handled the needs of guests, while dancers and harpists provided entertainment. Beer and wine were made on the premises, and it was considered a compliment to the host if you got too drunk to get home without help.

As in other places, the government's work generated an endless supply of records, and it became necessary to employ scribes to keep up with them. For a writing medium the Egyptians used papyrus, a reed that grew all over the Nile valley. They laid flat strips of the reed's pithy center down in two layers, one perpendicular and one horizontal; then the strips were moistened, pounded smooth, and dried to form sheets of the first manufactured paper. To write on it they used reeds for pens, and scribes habitually carried a small box containing pens and dried red and black ink (like us, the Egyptian scribes used red to mark something they wanted people to notice, like a "red-letter day" or the name of a famous person). Because papyrus is so much lighter and more easily portable than the clay tablets of Mesopotamia, it would remain one of Egypt's primary exports until the introduction of modern paper-making techniques.⁽¹²⁾

Unlike their Sumerian counterparts, the Egyptians did not replace their decorative picture writing with abstract shapes, but went on drawing pictures of birds, people, snakes and various other objects for the rest of their ancient history, like this:

It was this choice of scripts that made it possible for modern linguists to unlock the code of ancient Egyptian writing. In 1799 Napoleon Bonaparte's military expedition to Egypt uncovered an inscription dedicated to King Ptolemy V, who lived in 200 B.C.; this was the famous Rosetta Stone. The writing on the bottom third of the stone was Greek, which was already commonly known, while hieroglyphics decorated the top and Demotic filled in the middle. A young Frenchman, Jean Francis Champollion, correctly guessed that the three inscriptions all carried the same message, and reasoned that the ancient Egyptian language was Coptic, the same language used in the churches of Egypt. He also had a clue in that Ptolemy's name had already been translated by a British scholar, and it was written in an oval, called a cartouche by the French. This was a writing convention that the ancient Egyptians followed from the beginning to the end of their history; for them a pharaoh's name was so special that it had to be "roped off" from the other words. By applying Coptic sounds to the symbols and using the Greek translation to check his progress, Champollion eventually figured out how the ancient scribes used the enigmatic hieroglyphs, so now they are no longer a mystery.

It took twelve years of study and practice in a scribal school to master the system of writing. The student was not considered literate until he had learned 700 symbols, and discipline was tough, for teachers believed that "A boy's ears are on his back." Yet the prize was worth the pain. Those who succeeded in learning how to write could always find employment; it is estimated that less than two people along a mile-long stretch of the Nile Valley at any given time could read and write. This was the only place in Egyptian society where upward mobility was permitted; a peasant boy who did his homework could rise to become the king's personal secretary, or even his vizier. An exceptional scribe might even get deified; two famous examples were the aforementioned Imhotep, and the XVIII dynasty's Amenhotep, son of Hapu.

Statue of a scribe, from the V dynasty.

Compared with other ancient civilizations, Egypt gave its women extraordinary freedom. Equality of the sexes in Egypt is reflected in statues and paintings. Wives of pharaohs and nobles are shown standing or sitting beside their husbands, and little daughters are depicted with the same tenderness as little sons. The right of succession to the throne was based on royal descent from the mother as well as the father. Business and legal documents show that women in general had rights to own, buy and sell property without reliance on legal guardians, and to make wills and testify in court. A few became physicians, scribes and members of the administration.

As one might expect from this, the priests usually taught the scribes. There were plenty of priests around, since the Egyptian pantheon grew to house more than 2,000 gods. Besides national deities like Osiris and Horus, every town kept its own, and a few were imports from nearby non-Egyptians like the Canaanites. The myths surrounding the gods often clashed on details, like who created the universe (they gave credit for creation at various times to Ra; a deity named Tem or Atum; Ptah, the god of Memphis; and Amen, the chief god of Thebes), so Egyptian mythology is filled with an array of contradictions and inconsistencies that bewilder the non-Egyptian reader. Many of them were represented as animals, so one could say that the Egyptians worshiped anything that moves! Later they gave the gods more human forms; e.g., Horus went from being a falcon to a man with a falcon's head. During periods when certain gods were in favor, their home cities enjoyed prosperity from official patronage, pilgrims and commerce; for example, Heliopolis saw its best years when the pharaohs worshiped Ra.

The priests profited from the support of king and commoner alike. As time went on the gifts, especially those of land, made them powerful enough to act independently of the pharaohs. The position of priest was hereditary--they regularly passed the job from father to son--but only the highest-ranking priests worked full time. Common clergymen and specialists like astrologers, scribes, readers of sacred texts, singers and musicians (the latter were usually women), lived on the temple grounds and performed their sacred duties for one month out of four. While on duty they lived ascetically; they wore white robes and animal skins, abstained from sex, washed themselves frequently, and the men shaved off all body hair, including their eyebrows. When their turn was up, they went back to being lay members for the next three months.

Egyptian Mathematics and Science

The Old Kingdom also produced the world's first known solar calendar, the direct ancestor of our own. In order to plan their farming operations in accordance with the annual flooding of the Nile, the Egyptians kept records and discovered that the average period between inundations was 365 days. There were twelve months of thirty days each, with five holidays at the end of the year to make it an even 365; the new year began with annual flooding of the Nile flood. In this form it passed to the Romans in Julius Caesar's time, to become the Julian calendar.

Ancient Nubia

A-Group artifacts span a seven-hundred-year period, ending with the founding of Egypt's I dynasty (about 3500-2800 B.C.). At first it was thought that the A-Group people were simply nomadic herdsmen, but recently, the discovery of a large cemetery provided evidence that at Qustul, just north of the second cataract, a line of kings ruled there as early as, or even before, the unification of Egypt. The residents of Qustul buried their dead in stone-lined graves, usually in a contracted position facing west, and like the Egyptians, gave them a considerable selection of goods: pottery; jewelry made from shells, bone, ivory, stone or faience; feathers and leather caps, and linen or leather kilts for clothing; palettes for grinding eye shadow; baskets containing food; and clay figurines of people and animals. One grave contained copper axes, a lion's head of rose quartz inlaid with glaze, a mica mirror, and two maces with gilded handles; still others contained Egyptian beer and wine jars; these may have been imports or gifts from Egypt. Archaic Egyptians called Nubia Ta Sety, the "Land of the Bow," because the Nubians were excellent archers.

It now appears that Egypt bartered with Nubia at first, but after they united under the first pharaoh, the Egyptians were strong enough to take what they wanted. An Egyptian relief on a rock near the second cataract shows a Nubian chief tied to the prow of an Egyptian ship, dead bodies floating in the water, and Pharaoh Zer of the I dynasty capturing two Nubian villages. Snefru of the IV dynasty also reported an expedition into Nubia, which brought back 7,000 slaves and 200,000 head of cattle. Nubia declined rapidly, in population and wealth, and the A-Group disappeared, presumably because of the Egyptian advance. By the II dynasty, Egyptian soldiers and merchants were active as far south as Buhen, on the second cataract, and they opened up gold and copper mines in lower Nubia; later on in the IV dynasty, Khufu established diorite quarries.

Buhen and the diorite quarries were abandoned in the V dynasty, and Nubia's population recovered at that time; the Egyptians may have decided to trade with the Nubians again, rather than dominating them. Around 2200 B.C., the C-Group emerged between the first and second cataracts. The C-Group was similar to the A-Group, but showed a preoccupation with livestock: sheep, goats, gazelles, dogs, and most of all cattle. By this time the Egyptians had four names for Nubia:

1. Wawat, the east bank of the Nile, between the first and second cataracts. Later that name would apply to all of lower Nubia.
2. Irtjet, also between the first and second cataracts, but on the west bank.
3. Medja, on the Red Sea coast of modern Sudan. The Medjay were often hired to serve as mercenaries in Egypt.
4. Yam, beyond the second cataract. This was apparently the most powerful Nubian kingdom; after 2000 B.C. the Egyptians called it Kush.

"Come northward to the court immediately; thou shalt bring this dwarf with thee, which thou bringest living, prosperous and healthy from the land of the spirits, for the dances of the god, to rejoice and gladden the heart of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, who lives forever. When he goes down with thee into the vessel, appoint excellent people, who shall be beside him on each side of the vessel; take care lest he fall into the water. When he sleeps at night appoint excellent people, who shall sleep beside him in his tent; inspect ten times a night. My majesty desires to see this dwarf more than the gifts of Sinai and of Punt."

We can assume that the pygmy arrived at the pharaoh's court safely, because Harkhuf had both the record of the expedition and a picture of the pygmy inscribed on the walls of his tomb.

A map of Nubia, from the TourEgypt site.

The End of the Old Kingdom

Until this point, all of the pyramids had blank walls; the pharaohs did not even put their names on them. That changed when Unas, the last pharaoh of the V dynasty, built for himself a pyramid full of inscriptions. These inscriptions are the famous "Pyramid Texts," the oldest existing portion of the Book of the Dead, a collection of prayers and magic spells that was regularly placed in coffins later on to provide the dead with a "how-to" manual for getting safely past the final judgment that every soul was expected to undergo. There is reason to believe that the Pyramid Texts were composed centuries earlier, though, for the Egyptologists who translated them, E. Wallis Budge and Gaston Maspero, reported signs of extensive editing and revision. Budge claimed that "It would seem even at that remote date, the scribes were perplexed and hardly understood the texts which they had before them."⁽¹⁴⁾

Meanwhile, non-royal figures grew more wealthy and powerful. Mereruka, the son-in-law and vizier for Teti, the first pharaoh of the VI dynasty, built for himself a huge mastaba tomb, with thirty-three rooms and halls and excellent sculptures. In the nomes (provinces), the governors had once been appointed by the pharaohs, but gradually their positions became hereditary, and once free of the crown they were less inclined to bow and scrape before the king. Now they chose to build their tombs near their homes, rather than in the same cemeteries as the pharaohs. Some of them even displayed a form of arrogance that their predecessors would not have dared. For example, a nomarch of Hierakonopolis wrote that: "I claimed from King Pepi II the honor of obtaining a sarcophagus, funerary wrappings, and oils for my father."

Maybe the pharaohs were preoccupied with religious duties and preparing for the afterlife, but they also found opportunities to make this life more enjoyable. We already mentioned the trading expeditions to Nubia in the previous section. As early as the II dynasty they also had commercial ships venture into the Red Sea, and from the IV dynasty onward they made regular trips to Byblos in Lebanon. The commodity which attracted them to Byblos was timber, because the only trees that grew in Egypt were date palms, which are suitable for log rollers but a very poor material for carpenters. We believe that the first ships used by the Egyptians were woven out of papyrus reeds--some reed boats were found buried near the I dynasty tombs at Abydos--because there wasn't enough wood to build a seagoing fleet. By the IV dynasty, though, wooden ships were commonplace; two large ones were buried next to Khufu's pyramid. The fleets were not led by independent merchants, but by personal representatives of the pharaohs, who went forth hoping to find royal profits for both themselves and their royal sponsors.

Pepi the boy king enjoyed the longest documented reign in history, coming to the throne at the age of six and according to later historical records, he ruled for ninety-four years. This remarkable tenure should have given him more than enough material to fill his memoirs with, but instead he took credit for the feats of his predecessors. On one wall of his temple are the names of some Libyan chieftains captured by the pharaoh's forces--names copied verbatim from a list written by Sahure, a V dynasty king who ruled some 200 years earlier. He also appears to have exhausted the treasury, because while his own pyramid complex was of suitably massive size, the quality of the construction was no better than that of the other VI dynasty kings. Meanwhile his courtiers had shabby tombs built of mud brick, suggesting that they had fallen on hard times. Finally, he may have overdone it on the pampered royal lifestyle; one story, which I have not been able to verify, claims that Pepi had naked slaves covered with honey, so that the flies in the palace would bother the slaves instead of him!

If Pepi had been a good ruler the country might have recovered, but he was only mediocre at best, and it was unthinkable to replace the living god-king with a more suitable one, so gradually the country went to pot. So did the dynasty; the next king after Pepi only ruled for about a year, and he was followed by a woman named Nitocris, so Pepi may have outlived the rest of his family. Thus, one can say the Old Kingdom died with him.

Now began a period of weakness and chaos between the strong periods of the Old and Middle Kingdoms, which we call the First Intermediate Period. The next two dynasties, the VII and the VIII, appear to have had little control beyond Memphis. For both of them we have a documented total of seventeen kings, who together ruled for a very short time; indeed, the record is so chaotic that Manetho summarized the VII dynasty as "seventy kings, who reigned for seventy days." The pottery made during this time took on different styles in different parts of the country, while portraits became more geometrical, less realistic. This tells us that a single authority no longer governed and set the fashion for the whole land.

The cause of this turmoil was more than just royal weakness. We now know that in the 22nd century B.C., Egypt fell victim to a severe drought, much like the droughts that have afflicted Africa in our own time. For more than one year the summer rains did not fall on the Ethiopian highlands; this meant that the Nile did not flood and Egypt was failed by the natural force which had sustained it for so long. Famine set in as crops failed; mobs of starving vagrants pillaged the countryside, and there is at least one account of cannibalism. There may have an Asian invasion of the eastern Nile delta--Amorite-style pottery has been found there--but we cannot be sure; this is the most poorly documented period in Egyptian history.

The first effect of the famine was that it totally discredited the pharaohs, because they claimed (through Ra) the power to control nature, and insisted on raising taxes in the middle of these hard times. Brute force became a better source of legitimacy than divine right; the nomarchs went from being feudal barons to mini-kings when they assumed the powers and trappings of the pharaohs for themselves. They frequently clashed with each other or formed loose alliances among themselves. The possibility of conflict even extended to the once-tranquil realm of the dead; tombs from this period contain wooden figurines of archers and spearmen, who would presumably serve their master in the next world the same way that real soldiers did in life.

The most powerful nomarchs ruled from Heracleopolis, an Upper Egyptian town fifty-five miles south of Memphis. One of them named Akhtoy declared himself pharaoh; Akhtoy was later described as very cruel, and his successors went down in Manetho's chronicle as the IX and X dynasties. They succeeded in ruling about 60% of Upper Egypt, and the southeastern quarter of the Nile delta; what happened to the rest of Lower Egypt is unknown. In the far south, four nomarchs, those of Thinis (near Abydos), Coptos, Thebes and Hierakonpolis, refused to acknowledge Heracleopolitan authority.

Among the southern cities the newest was Thebes; before the VI dynasty, four villages stood on its site. The first clash on record between them occurred when Inyotef II (Intef) became governor of Thebes, about 1937 B.C. He and the governor of Hierakonpolis raided each other's lands for a decade, before Inyotef suddenly prevailed. With the conquest of Hierakonpolis, Inyotef pushed the southern Theban frontier all the way to the First Cataract; with only the Nubians south of that point, Inyotef and his successors could now concentrate all their attention on the north. Then Inyotef took the titles of kingship for himself, and granted posthumous royalty for his two predecessors. With that move, the Theban nomarchs became the XI dynasty.

After this the XI dynasty seems to have taken Coptos and Thinis without too much fuss, but the next city downstream, Asyut, was strong and had a governor who was loyal to Heracleopolis. Fifty-six years of on-and-off war over Thinis followed; at one point the governor of Asyut, Tefibi, captured Abydos and desecrated its ancient cemetery. The tide finally turned in the 14th year of the reign of Mentuhotep II (1867 B.C.?), when Thinis revolted against the southern pharaoh, and Mentuhotep launched a successful campaign that conquered both Thinis and Asyut. That apparently broke the power of the north; the next eight years saw Mentuhotep fight his way down the river and crush the X dynasty.

The Middle Kingdom

Amenemhet was a worried pharaoh, who moved his capital to Ittowy (also called Lisht), near Memphis, to distance himself from the Thebans and imitate the majesty of earlier pharaohs. Then after ruling for twenty years, he crowned his son, Senusret I, as a co-regent. We don't know if he did this to give Senusret some on-the-job training, or to make sure that his heir would have a firm claim to the throne if he died suddenly. Whatever the reason, Amenemhet set a precedent that worked very well; most of the other XII dynasty pharaohs also had co-regencies. Egyptian religion taught that the pharaoh was a living incarnation of the god Horus, so the people seem to have accepted the idea of two Horuses on earth without much fuss. Despite these actions, Amenemhet never succeeded in getting the upper hand against the defiant nomarchs, some of whom still had private armies. Eventually his guards killed him in bed; the story of his assassination comes to us in a tale where his spirit appears to Senusret I:

"It was after supper when night was come, I took an hour of repose, lying upon my bed. I was tired and my heart began to follow sleep. Of a sudden weapons were brandished and there was talk concerning me, whilst I remained like a snake of the desert. I woke up to fighting, recovering consciousness and realizing it was a fighting of the guard. If I had time to take my arms in hand, I could have beaten off the rebels. But there is none strong at night. None can fight alone. There is no successful issue without a protector."

Senusret (Sesostris in Greek) was on a military campaign in the Libyan desert when he heard the news. He rushed back to court and was able to assert his rightful claim to the throne. After that, he began the task of centralizing the country's political structure, by supporting nomarchs who were loyal to him. This required caution and more than a lifetime of patience, but over a period of 150 years the pharaohs whittled down the power of the nomarchs until they returned to their previous positions as purely local authorities.

The XII dynasty saw prosperity return to Egypt, so its rulers could be lavish on building projects. The XI dynasty had patronized Mentu (Montu), a hawk-faced war god that had not been important previously. Now the Senusrets and Amenemhets gave their favors to another Theban deity: Amen. Amen was promoted above the other gods to become the supreme god of Egypt. He was portrayed rather simply, as a human with a feather crown and not much personality, but as time went on he took on the powers and features of the other gods, especially Ra, so eventually he came to be known as the supreme Amen-Ra. A chapel erected to him in Thebes was steadily enlarged by the New Kingdom pharaohs, to become Karnak, the greatest Egyptian temple of all.

Yet at the same time the pharaohs became somewhat more human. Avoiding the excesses of the Old Kingdom, they built for themselves small pyramids with stone on the outside and a mud-brick core; sometimes the stone was stolen from older pyramids. Instead of talking about their divinity and uniqueness, the Middle Kingdom pharaohs stressed their role as watchful shepherds of the people, and promoted the welfare of the downtrodden. One of them claimed, "I gave to the destitute and brought up the orphan. I caused him who was nothing to reach [his goal], like him who was [somebody]."⁽¹⁵⁾ Moreover, a concession that has been called "the democratization of the hereafter" gave the lower classes the right to have their bodies mummified, and thereby enjoy immortality like the pharaohs and the nobility. Mentuhotep II, for example, built a temple to himself at Deir el-Bahri, across the Nile from Thebes, and nearby he buried sixty warriors who had been killed in the line of duty. By allowing them to be mummified and entombed, next to a monument dedicated to his own spirit, Mentuhotep was rewarding his soldiers by giving them an afterlife, and the opportunity to serve him in the next world.

Click here for a humorous look at what the Middle Kingdom meant for the ordinary Egyptian (opens in a separate window). From the August 2003 issue of Scientific American.

We see a bit of personality in the royal statues at this date. Pharaonic sculpture up to this time had followed a rigid set of rules; all images were idealized portraits, with no display of emotion whatsoever. The nobles had followed these conventions in their own statues previously, but now some of them displayed a squinting, tired-looking visage. This was done to convey two impressions: that those who squinted took their jobs seriously, and that those who squinted disagreed with the rosy story about the world that came from Pharaoh's court. If this marks an opposition party, eventually the king joined it; the two greatest pharaohs of the XII dynasty, Senusret III and Amenemhet III, also showed themselves squinting.

Senusret III, and no, he didn't find a spider in his soup when he posed for this statue!
From WorldArt Web Kiosk.

Above all, the XII dynasty rulers were determined to protect the country from future failures of the Nile. Several of them, from Senusret II to Amenemhet III, worked on an ambitious project to irrigate the Faiyum, a natural depression southwest of Memphis.⁽¹⁶⁾ This involved the digging of a 300-foot-wide canal to form an artificial lake (Lake Moeris) in the middle of the depression. When the Nile flooded, excess water would be diverted into the lake, which would reduce flood damage downstream and provide a water supply to ration out during the dryer months ahead. It also reclaimed 27,000 acres of farmland from the desert, allowing the country to grow and store more food for times of famine.

Amenemhet III, like the first pharaoh by that name, was a tradition breaker. He built himself a brick pyramid at Dahshur, but it was at an elevation so low that ground water damaged the structure, so he built another one at Hawara in the Faiyum. This one had two sarcophagi in it, one for himself and one for his daughter Neferuptah. Apparently Amenemhet loved Neferuptah very much, because her name was carved in a cartouche or oval. We saw earlier that this writing custom was reserved for the names of pharaohs, suggesting that Amenemhet made Neferuptah his heir, instead of the son who actually succeeded him, Amenemhet IV. However, Neferuptah died before her father did, so Amenemhet buried her in his own pyramid until he could build one for her. Neferuptah's small pyramid was opened in 1956, and miraculously, it escaped tomb robbers over the ages--but not nature. The rooms and sarcophagus were nearly filled with water, which had long ago dissolved the mummy and its wooden coffin; only some fine jewelry and a few other objects survived.

Like their predecessors in the latter part of the Old Kingdom, the pharaohs of this era eagerly pursued foreign trade. From a Red Sea port named Sawu, Egyptian ships went to a distant realm called Pwenet (Punt), which was probably modern-day Eritrea.⁽¹⁷⁾ From Punt they brought back frankincense, myrrh, and various trees and animals. The hardest part of the journey was between the Nile and the Red Sea, where caravans had to carry everything across the eastern desert, a journey that could take up to eight days.

Another tempting commercial target was Nubia. Military expeditions under Senusret I conquered the land between the first and second cataracts. They did not administer the lands beyond that point, but a hundred years later Senusret III pushed onward to establish advance military bases. The farthest was Heh (Semna), halfway between the second and third cataracts, where the pharaoh's men built a great fortress, bristling with battlements, "in order to prevent any Negro from passing it by water or by land." Next to it a towering statue of Senusret III was erected, to encourage the submission of all who gazed on it. Meanwhile in the Mediterranean, they increased trade with Byblos and established new relations with another seagoing power, the Minoans of Crete. This gave the Egyptians a more steady supply of timber and olive oil in exchange for their surplus of flax, papyrus, salted fish, ox hides, alabaster and gold.

One Egyptian trade route ran due southwest for an uncertain distance. It began at Dakhla, a remote oasis in the western desert, and followed a chian of outposts where food and water might have been left for caravans, until it reached a plateau named Gilf Kebir. Like Tassili-n-Ajer (see Chapter 1), this area contains rock art, so for a while archaeologists assumed the Egyptians stopped here to trade with desert nomads. Then in 2007 an inscription was discovered in the mountains near the spot where the borders of modern Egypt, Libya and Sudan meet; it was dedicated to Mentuhotep II, so presumably the author of the inscription belonged to an expedition that passed there early in the Middle Kingdom. Now it appears that the Dakhla trade route did not stop in the desert but crossed it, going all the way into Chad to end at either the ancient Lake Bodele, or Lake Chad itself. What they wanted from Chad isn't clear, but the reader should be reminded that because ancient climates were different, a trans-Sahara crossing would have been somewhat less strenuous than it is today.

Finally, the XII dynasty is when Egypt's greatest literature was written. This was due in part not only to the country's prosperity but also because Egyptian writing and grammar were never better than they were at this time; in fact, today's Egyptology students use Middle Kingdom texts to learn hieroglyphics. The troubled life that followed the collapse of the Old Kingdom was responsible for the highly personal nature of Middle Kingdom literature. It contains protests against the ills of the day, demands for social justice, and praise for the romantic excitements of wine, women, and song as a means of forgetting misery. Much of this literature is appealing even today, as shown by the following lines from a love poem, in which the beloved is called "sister":

"I behold how my sister cometh, and my heart is in gladness.
Mine arms open wide to embrace her; my heart exulteth within me; for my lady has come to me . . .
She kisseth me, she openeth her lips to me: then am I joyful even without beer."⁽¹⁸⁾

Middle Kingdom scribes also wrote down a number of exciting stories, which Sir Flinders Petrie published in two volumes entitled Egyptian Tales. The best of these is the Tale of Sinuhe, the adventures of a young noble who runs for his life after hearing a state secret; he lives for many years in Israel, as the guest of a Bedouin chief who reminds us a lot of contemporary Biblical patriarchs like Isaac and Jacob.

As with all other aspects of Egyptian life, the literature was closely tied to the religion. During the Old Kingdom Egyptian religion had no strong ethical character. Relations between humans and gods were based largely on material considerations, and the gods were thought to reward those who brought them gifts of sacrifice. But widespread suffering during the First Intermediate Period led to a revolution in religious thought. It was now believed that instead of sacrificial offerings the gods were interested in good character and love for one's fellows: "More acceptable [to the gods] is the character of one upright of heart than the ox of the evildoer....Give the love of thyself to the whole world; a good character is a remembrance."⁽¹⁹⁾

The new emphasis on moral character now became a prerequisite for an attractive afterlife. No amount of preparation of one's tomb would do a soul any good if it was not free of sin as well. Tomb paintings often show a ceremony where Osiris weighs the deceased's heart against the Feather of Truth, while the soul recites "the negative confession," a list of forty-four sins it did not commit in life. If the heart was heavy with sin and outweighed the Feather of Truth, a horrible creature named Amam devoured it, ending the soul's existence. Those who passed the test went on to the fields of the blessed.

The Weighing of the Heart Ceremony.

Later on in the New Kingdom era, the priesthood of Osiris became corrupt and claimed that it knew clever methods to survive the soul testing, even if a person's heart was heavy with sin. Charms, magical prayers and formulas were sold to the living as insurance policies, guaranteeing them a happy outcome in the judgment before Osiris. Much of this can be found in later editions of the Book of the Dead.

The Second Intermediate Period

Statues and royal burials of XIII dynasty pharaohs have been found at Memphis, Thebes and Avaris, but the Egyptians left very few accounts of this era, so the period of dynasties XIII-XVII is almost as mysterious to us as the First Intermediate Period. What evidence we do have shows a long period of weakness and disunity; Manetho claimed 60 kings for the XIII dynasty and 76 for the XIV; a poorly preserved papyrus, the Turin Canon, reported 175 kings for the whole Second Intermediate Period. The average reign was under five years, and it's pretty safe to say that many of these "kings" were merely the nomarchs of city-states. It is also possible, though far-fetched, that the kings were unrelated to one another, and that some form of "term limitation" was set up, requiring each to step down after a period of time so that somebody else could have a turn wearing the crown. And some were probably deposed, now that the pharaohs no longer had the royal legitimacy they had enjoyed in previous ages. Whatever the reason for political chaos, the Nile may have been an undermining factor, because of massive floods and long droughts, like the seven-year one in the time of Joseph. We also see evidence of poverty in the tombs; a XIII dynasty king, Awibre Hor, did not get a pyramid or even a mastaba, but a simple shaft grave at Dahshur.

During this time more foreigners migrated from Asia and settled in the eastern delta, the Biblical Goshen. In fact, some of the XIII and XIV dynasty rulers had Semitic names, like Amenemhet V the Amu (Asiatic), Yakobaam (Jacob?), Ishpi (Joseph?), and Khendjer ("Pig," what a name!), suggesting that those dynasties had an ancestry that was part Asiatic.

Egyptologists sometimes divide the XIII dynasty into three phases, with the middle phase being the strongest. According to this formula, during the first phase the pharaohs lost control of lower Nubia, and the XIV dynasty captured Middle Egypt (a 200-mile-long stretch of the Nile Valley south of Memphis). Then the XIII dynasty rulers moved the capital upstream from Ittowy to Thebes; this was probably a defensive move, but it could also mean that the old Theban nobility had regained control over the government. Among the middle pharaohs the most successful were Neferhotep I, who did extensive trading with the Phoenicians and Babylonians, and Sebekhotep IV, who recovered Middle Egypt and Nubia with a military expedition that went from Avaris to the Third Cataract. In the third period we see a pharaoh named Dudimose, and then anarchy; indeed, historians do not agree on the names and order of the last kings.

To the south, the Nubian kingdom of Kush grew powerful enough to challenge Egypt. Its capital, Kerma, was located beyond the third cataract and more than 150 miles south of Semna, putting it out of reach of Egyptian forces. The Egyptians seem to have been pleased to trade with Yam in the Old Kingdom, but showed fear and scorn for the state that had replaced it. Archaeologists excavating the Middle Kingdom forts found broken clay tablets with the words Kush or Ruler of Kush; these "execration texts" had been smashed in the hope that this would magically weaken or put a curse on the victim who had been named.

Kerma enjoyed its best years during the Second Intermediate Period, growing to house a population of 2,000 people within a 25-acre walled town. The main structure was a mud-brick building called the Western Defuffa, which still stands 60 feet high; its original purpose is unknown, leading to specuation that it was a temple or trade center. Two miles away, George Andrew Reisner, the archaeologist who excavated Kerma in 1913, found a vast cemetery. Eight of the graves were covered by enormous mounds, the largest the size of a football field. Undoubtedly these were royal tombs; each contained a skeleton of an important person lying on a four-legged bed. However, they didn't leave this world by themselves; like the tombs of the I dynasty pharaohs, these graves contained the bodies of men, women and children in side chambers. Reisner counted 322 victims in one tomb, and the contorted positions of the bodies led him to conclude that they had been buried alive.

The XV dynasty was not Egyptian, but an Asiatic group called the Hyksos. They conquered both the Thebans and the Xoites easily; the most detailed account of them comes from Manetho, but it's not the original manuscript; what we have from him are quotations that have arrived to us second or third hand from three later historians (Josephus, Eusebius, and Africanus), each of which is of questionable authenticity because they contradict each other in matters of dates. Here is the version Josephus gave us:

"There was a king of ours, whose name was Timaeus [Dudimose?]. Under him it came to pass, I know not how, that a blast of God smote us, and there came, after a surprising manner, men of ignoble birth out of the eastern parts, and had boldness enough to make an expedition into our country, and with ease subdued it by force, yet without fighting a single battle with us. So when they had gotten those that governed us under their power, they afterwards burnt our cities, and demolished the temples of the gods, and used all the inhabitants after a most barbarous manner; nay, some they slew, and led their children and their wives into slavery. At length they made one of themselves king, whose name was Salatis; he also lived at Memphis, and made both the upper and lower regions pay tribute, and left garrisons in places that were the most proper for them. He chiefly aimed to secure the eastern parts, as foreseeing that the Assyrians, who had then the greatest power, would be desirous of that kingdom and invade them; and as he found in the Saite nome a city very proper for his purpose, and which lay along the Bubastic channel, but with regard to a certain theologic notion was called Avaris, this he rebuilt, and made very strong by the walls he built about it, and by a most numerous garrison of 240,000 armed men whom he put into it to keep it. Thither Salatis came in summer-time, partly to gather his grain, and pay his soldiers their wages, and partly to exercise his armed men, and thereby to terrify foreigners. When this man had reigned 13 years, after him reigned another, whose name was Beon, for 44 years; after him reigned another, called Apachnas, 36 years and 7 months; after him Apophis reigned 61 years, and then Jonias 50 years and 1 month; after all these reigned Assis 49 years and 2 months. And these six were the first rulers among them, who were all along making war with the Egyptians, and were very desirous gradually to destroy them to the very roots. This whole nation was styled HYKSOS, that is, 'Shepherd-kings'; for the first syllable HYK, according to the sacred dialect denotes a 'king', as is SOS, a 'shepherd'--but this according to the ordinary dialect; and of these is compounded HYKSOS: but some say that these people were Arabians."

Manetho was probably incorrect when he defined the word "Hyksos" as "Shepherd Kings"; we now believe that the word comes from Heka Khasu, meaning "chieftain of a foreign hill-country." Thus, the title of the king/chief became the name of an entire people, much like how we refer to the ancient Peruvians as "Incas," when originally only the king of South America's empire was called by that name.

One might think that with the names and lengths of reigns given above it would be easy to put together a chronology of the Hyksos period, but the total amount of time is 253 years and ten months, longer than the 219 years most historians are willing to allow for the entire Second Intermediate Period! The notable exception to this opinion is Sir Flinders Petrie, who thought that the Second Intermediate Period was 1,660 years long, but few scholars accept this extreme length of time because it causes more problems than it solves. A fragment of the Turin Canon states: "Total, chieftains of foreign countries, 6, making 108 years," and this is believed by most to be the correct length of the XV dynasty.

The identity of the Hyksos themselves is also in question. All we know for sure is that they came from Asia. Some believe that they were an Indo-European tribe, perhaps the Mitannians from northern Iraq or the Cimmerians/Scythians of Russia, because they are described in one source as having red hair and white skin, and also because they used horse-drawn chariots. Immanuel Velikovsky believed that the Hyksos were Amalekites, citing Arab traditions of the Amalekites ruling Egypt, and the similarity of the Amalekite name "Agag" with the Hyksos "Apop" or Apophis; both names become an identical set of consonants in Bronze Age Hebrew script. For the most recent theories and discoveries concerning the Hyksos, see Chapter 2 of my Near Eastern history.

Whoever the Hyksos were, the Egyptians would have been in a poor position to resist them even if it had been a better time. Over the centuries, Egypt had fallen behind Asia in weapons technology; with the Sahara desert protecting the eastern and western frontiers of Egypt, all the Egyptians needed for their defense was enough soldiers to over-awe the nearest Bedouins. If the barbarians developed some new weapon or tactic, the Egyptians turned it to their side by enlisting those they captured into the pharaoh's army, rather than learning it themselves. Unlike the militant states of Mesopotamia, the Egyptian soldiers did not enjoy a privileged place in society. They fought almost nude, the only armor being a large unwieldy shield; they used javelins, small bows and occasionally daggers, while other weapons were unknown to them. The peoples of the Middle East, on the other hand, had spent more than a thousand years improving their ability to kill people and break things, and for that purpose had invented axes, swords, large composite bows, helmets and scale armor. What revolutionized warfare the most was the horse, an animal that was first domesticated by nomads on the steppes Russia a few years earlier. The combination of horse and chariot was a weapon that the Bronze Age footsoldier found nearly unstoppable. The nation which had nothing but scorn for its neighbors for so long now endured the humilation of foreign rule.

After the Hyksos conquered Egypt, they were content to remain in Avaris and take tribute from the rest of the country, using the terror of their chariots to keep the wealth of the land coming in. However, the Hyksos were beguiled enough by the civilization they had conquered to take on Egyptian customs, despite the iron hand policy. They employed Egyptian scribes and tax collectors, wrote in hieroglyphics, worshipped Egyptian gods⁽²⁰⁾, and called their rulers pharaohs. In return they introduced to Egypt an upright loom that improved weaving techniques, the long-necked lute, the lyre, the oboe, the tambourine, and two Middle Eastern fruits, the olive and the pomegranate.

The artifacts we have found in quantity are scarabs, small beetle-shaped seals with the name of a pharaoh or noble carved on the underside. From these we have the names of four Hyksos kings, three named Apopi or Apophis and one named Khayan or Khamudy. These scarabs have been found all over the Holy Land and even in Crete and northern Iraq, showing us that the Hyksos, through conquest or commerce, had influence over quite a large area. The southern frontier of the area they directly ruled was at Qis (Cusae), between Memphis and Thebes. Therefore Egypt and Nubia were divided into three roughly equal parts, with the poorest being the area in the middle that was still under Egyptian rule, cut off from both the wealth of the south and the commerce of the north.

After the XV dynasty, Manetho gives us a XVIth dynasty that ruled from Thebes. Evidence for this is even scantier than what we have for dynasty XV; we're not sure if dynasty XVI was Asiatic or Egyptian, and one could make a claim that it never even existed. Then Thebes came under a stronger native family, what we call the XVII dynasty. The first Theban governors or nomarchs remained in submission to the Hyksos, but by now the Egyptians had learned to use the weapons introduced by their hated masters, so it was only a matter of time before a militant leader came to power among the natives and tried to regain Egypt's independence.

This leader was named Sekenenra Tao II, and the cause of the war is an amusing one; according to one story Sekenenra went to war because the Hyksos king Apophis complained that the hippopotami in a canal at Thebes were keeping him awake at night!⁽²¹⁾ The story doesn't tell us the outcome, but it's safe to say that Sekenenra lost, because we have the physical evidence. His mummy has five fatal skull wounds, and the body was poorly preserved, as if several days, maybe even weeks, went by before it was embalmed. Senkenenra's son Ahmose was only a small child, so the late king's brother, Kamose, took over.

Kamose only appears to have ruled for three years, but was more successful. First he lamented the state of affairs Egypt had fallen into: "Why do I bother to contemplate my victories when there is a chief in Avaris and another in Kush, and I am bound to an Asiatic and a Nubian, each man holding his slice of the Black Land and dividing the country with me?" Then in his third year he marched downstream. He got all the way to Avaris, and plundered the vineyards right under the walls of the Hyksos capital, but couldn't take the citadel itself, so the northern expedition was really a profitable raid. Next he marched south to deal with the Nubians, but we never hear from Kamose after this, leading us to believe that like Sekenenra, he came to a violent end.⁽²²⁾

At this point Ahmose was still just eight years old, so his mother, Ahhotep, now became regent; she successfully managed the country for the next ten years. That involved defending Upper Egypt from intruders. Very few women have gone down in history as military leaders (the most famous exceptions are Boudicca, Zenobia, and Joan of Arc); Ahhotep may be the first one who did. The archaeologist who opened her coffin found a chain with three golden flies on it--ancient Egyptian medals of valor--and golden weapons, a battleaxe and two daggers. Finally, when Ahmose came of age, all Egypt was liberated. Like Kamose, he marched on Avaris, and a long blockade of the citadel followed. In the end Ahmose allowed the Hyksos to leave under a truce, and then he chased them as far as a place in the Holy Land called Sharuhen. Egypt learned much during the years of oppression, and during the next age, that which we call the New Kingdom, Egypt would build its own empire, one that reached all the way to the Euphrates River under its greatest kings.

1. In fact, the Egyptians did not need to use much fertilizer until the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s, which stopped the silt's downstream journey in the newly created Lake Nasser. The dam, however, is a mixed blessing; Lake Nasser is also a great place for fishing!

2. In recent years some utterly ridiculous ideas have been taught in our schools under the name of "Afro-centric education." Basically, these assert that the ancient Egyptians were black, and that their knowledge and wealth was later stolen by white men. Those who put forth such claims are certified black racists, and nothing they teach agrees with the plain facts. For example, on the supposed race of the Egyptians, anthropologists have examined thousands of skeletons and mummies and concluded that as far back as the Old Kingdom, Egypt was inhabited by the same types of people one sees there today: some white, some black, most brown.

3. After unification the city-states became forty or so provinces known as nomes; their governors were called nomarchs.

4. Archeologists have never figured out what animal Set is modeled after. It may have been the jackass, which is associated with him later on, or the okapi, a short-necked giraffe that currently lives in the central African jungle.

5. The word pharaoh comes from per-ao, meaning "great house."

6. Occasionally a major political change also marked the recording of a new dynasty; e.g. Ahmose's successful war of liberation against the Hyksos caused him to be listed as both the last pharaoh of the XVII dynasty and the first of the XVIII.

7. Humorist Larry Gonick suggested this happened when a king came along whose soldiers liked him better than the system, and this king said on his deathbed, "I think I should take some priests with me, boys." This would have immediately given the priests a reason to make changes!
Of course the change in attitude could have been less dramatic. The Egyptians may have stopped burying people and animals around the mastabas because they realized that it is harder to find people willing to work for the government, if they are expected to die when the king does. Or the priests may have simply decided that Pharaoh could wait until all his servants had died of natural causes, before they joined him the next life.

8. One man's treasure is another man's trash. Sir Flinders Petrie found some arm bones wrapped in linen in a plundered mastaba at Abydos, and concluded it was the arm of King Zer himself. When Petrie sent this to the Cairo Museum, the curator, not realizing he had part of the oldest royal mummy, removed four bracelets from the arm to put in a display case, and threw away the arm!

9. Imhotep nearly overshadowed his boss. After his lifetime the Egyptians proclaimed him the god of healing and made statues of him. So did the Greeks, who put him in their myths as Aesculapius, a great doctor who could even bring dead patients back to life.

10. The subject of these books is how and why the Great Pyramid was built in the first place. One suggested that the stone blocks were not really stone, but a form of mortar or cement that was molded into the right shape on the site. Others have speculated on advanced machinery or flying saucers; see what I wrote here about that.

Unfortunately, the figures given by Herodotus on the pyramids are false. He wrote that 100,000 workers did the labor during the three-month flood season of each year, that they spent ten years constructing a causeway to the site, and another twenty years on the actual construction of the pyramid. Excavations of the tombs and campsite of the Giza workers since 1991 have revealed a different story. Now it appears that the maximum number of workers on the site was 20,000, and a fourth of them were skilled workers (artisans, doctors, architects, bakery cooks, etc.) who stayed there all year. Also, they weren't slaves, but well-paid employees; they had plenty of good food to eat, they brought their families along, and if injured on the job, they got the best medical care available. And while it still probably took them 20 years to build the pyramid, they could have done it faster by bringing in more men. Inscriptions on the Red Pyramid of Snefru, which is half as big as Khufu's, claim that it took only two years to build. How a government project could have been completed so quickly is a mystery to me!

To keep track of how many stones were produced, those who supervised the construction of the Great Pyramid required every group of stonecutters to mark the finished stones with their names. Accordingly, most work crews gave themselves names that represented strength, like "The Vigorous Gang" and "The Enduring Gang." One very daring crew signed their stones with a political statement: "How drunk is the king!"

11. By contrast, the temples controlled the economy of Sumerian society.

12. You won't find papyrus growing in Egypt today; it was killed off by modern pollution. The same goes for crocodiles, hippopotami, and most of the other wildlife that flourished there 5,000 years ago.

13. The pyramids still were encased in limestone, but now less-durable bricks replaced the cut stones in the core, and the passages and burial chambers were usually under the pyramid, not in it. Vandals have removed the limestone, and wind erosion did the rest, so now most of these pyramids look like rocky sand dunes.

14. E. Wallis Budge, The Book of the Dead: Papyrus of Ani, New York, Dover, 1967, pg. 6.
Actually, the Egyptians never called any text "The Book of the Dead"; the name is modern. The text Budge translated was originally called "The Book of Coming Forth By Day," and it wasn't the only text used to get one's soul safely to the fields of the afterlife. The current title came from the nineteenth-century tomb robbers who found papyrus scrolls with mummies, and called them Kitab al-Mayyit ("book of a dead person") or Kitab al-Mayyitun ("book of the dead"). Because they couldn't read the writing on the scrolls, they didn't know the subject matter, but were simply stating that they had found a "dead man's book."
An intermediate stage between the Pyramid Texts and the Book of the Dead is called the "Coffin Texts." In the Middle Kingdom, as we shall read later, mummification and a fancy burial became available to members of the middle class, and they wanted the same kinds of prayers and spells that appear in the Pyramid Texts. However, most of them did not have a large tomb where the texts could be inscribed on the walls, so the priests chose to write the texts on the inside of the box-shaped wooden coffins commonly used at this time. But the amount of space for writing on a coffin is strictly limited, and either the tomb's owner or the priests must have been concerned that they might leave out something important, like a spell to restore life and health to a certain part of the body. The solution they came up with was to write everything that mattered on a scroll and stick it in the coffin, whether it was part of the Coffin Texts or not; that became the "Book of the Dead" used thereafter.

15. John A. Wilson, The Burden of Egypt, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1951, pg. 117.

16. The pharaohs may have taken credit for the Faiyum project, but I think the real builder was a foreign-born vizier, namely the Biblical Joseph. For one thing, the canal was named after him: Bahr Yusef (Joseph's canal). Another part of the project was three large administrative centers/grain storehouses, called Hawara. Herodotus called the one in the Faiyum the "Labyrinth." The other two centers were built at Thebes and in the eastern delta; the one in the delta grew to become a city we'll hear about in the next section, Avaris, and many Asiatic immigrants settled around it, including Jacob and his family.

17. We're not sure where Punt is, though the Egyptians visited there as early as the II dynasty. Alternate locations suggested include Somalia, Ethiopia, Mozambique. or some place in the Middle East, like Yemen. However, the Elkab inscription (see footnote #22 below) and a recent examination of mummified baboons, which are said to have come from Punt, leads the author to believe that Eritrea is the best candidate.

18. George Steindorff and Keith E. Steel, When Egypt Ruled the East, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1942, pg. 125.

19. From "The Instruction of Meri-ka-Re" in The Burden of Egypt, pg. 120.

20. The Hyksos built a temple to the Canaanite god Baal in Avaris, and then dedicated it to Set, reasoning that Baal and Set were two names for the same god. We noted earlier that Set was the chief villain in Egyptian mythology, but he was still popular in Lower Egypt (remember Peribsen's revolution in the II dynasty). The Hyksos also liked Apep, a fiery serpent who was the archenemy of Ra; compared to Apep, even Set looked like a good guy. This is not a good way to win friends and influence people!

21. Thebes and Avaris are about 350 miles apart, so those must have been mighty loud animals!

22. In July 2003 British and Egyptian conservators at Elkab, the cemetery of ancient Hierakonpolis, discovered a previously unknown inscription in the tomb of Sobeknakht II, a governor who lived during the XVII dynasty. Here Sobeknakht claimed that he defeated a major invasion from the lands of Kush and Punt. If this is true, it means that the XVII dynasty rulers faced a menace in the south as great as the one that threatened them from the north. Unfortunately, Sobeknakht did not tell us who was pharaoh at the time; our best guess is that the invasion took place while Kamose was busy in the north, because Kamose intercepted a letter from the Hyksos to the Nubians, pleading for them to get involved.

© Copyright 2010 Charles Kimball