Around the year 1200 AD, the medieval
Arab traveler and scholar Abd Al-Latif Al-Baghdadi departed from his hometown
of Baghdad and set out on a journey of exploration.
As a young man, Al-Baghdadi had studied law, medicine, and philosophy, and was
inspired by the works of classical philosophers; in particular,
Aristotle. At the turn of the 13th century, Al-Baghdadi embarked on a series
of journeys that would take him to many of the great cities in the region. He
traveled to Mosul, to Jerusalem, Damascus, and Aleppo, and eventually, around the
year 124, his journey took him across the Sinai Desert to the banks of the
Nile. On his travels, Al-Baghdadi wrote a book that was part travel account and
part philosophy, entitled The Book of Edification and Admonition. In it, he
recalls the remarkable impression that Egypt made on him. Egypt is a land of wondrous monuments
and strange stories. It consists of a valley enclosed by two ranges of hills;
one to the east, and one to the west. The Nile runs between them until it reaches
Lower Egypt, where it divides into branches, all of which flow out into the
sea. The Nile is unusual for its length. We know of no other river in the
inhabited world that covers a greater distance. As Al-Baghdadi traveled around Egypt, he
was struck by the incredible variety of ancient remains he saw; great temples of
stone and tomb complexes crumbling beside the waters of the Nile. But none
of these compared to the most fabled of all Egypt's monuments, which rose over
the horizon not far from the city of Memphis, at a place called Giza. The ancient monuments in Egypt are
such as I have never seen nor heard tell of in other lands. First among them are
the pyramids. They are very numerous. All are situated on the Giza side of the
Nile and extend in the direction of Memphis, spread out along a distance of
about two days journey. Some are big, others small; some are of clay and mud brick, but
most are of stone. Some are stepped, but most of them taper smoothly. Of all these pyramids, three
stood out for their seemingly impossible immensity. Turning to the pyramids that
everyone talks about, points at, and characterizes in terms of their sheer
size, there are three laid out in a straight line at Giza. Two of them are
particularly enormous, and it is with these two that the poets have been
infatuated. The spectacle is so awe- inspiring that your sight will falter as
you try to take it all in. Al-Baghdadi wrote accounts of the
local people who lived close to these vast remains. He describes some who climbed to
the tops of these structures, and others who quarried them for their fine-cut
stone. Others still became obsessed with exploring the hidden tunnels and
chambers that branched out beneath the pyramids. In one of the great pyramids,
there is an opening that allows people to gain entry. It leads them into narrow
corridors, labyrinthine passageways, well shafts, pitfalls, and other such features, as
appear in the accounts of those who venture inside and explore the innermost
parts. Many people, obsessed by the pyramid and filled with fanciful ideas
about it, are inspired to penetrate its depths, but they always end up at some
place beyond which they cannot go. They spoke of how the pyramid was full of
bats, and how these bats grow to the size of
pigeons. There are inscriptions on the stones, written in the ancient characters
that no one understands. In the entire land of Egypt, I have never found a
single person who so much has claimed to have heard of anyone who knew how to
read them. He even seems to have visited the
Sphinx nearby, which was then buried up to its neck in the sands. Also, by the three pyramids, at a
distance from them of rather more than a bow-shot, the likeness of a most enormous
head and neck protrudes from the ground. The people call it old father dread , and
assert that its body is buried in the ground. The face is handsomely, indeed
admirably portrayed, with a touch of elegance and beauty about the features,
as if a smile were playing across them. Above all, Al-Baghdadi was impressed
by the mastery of engineering it must have required to build such
constructions and to have them survive for such a stretch of time. The construction of the pyramids
was carried out according to a methodology remarkable in respect both
to design and to precision of execution. This is what has enabled the
pyramids to endure time's passing eras; or rather, it is meant that time itself
has had to endure the era of the pyramids. Noble intellects gave the
pyramids their all; pure minds exhausted their every effort for their sake;
enlightened souls outpoured their loftiest capabilities on their design, to
stand as exemplars that are the pinnacle of the possible. Because of this, they all
but speak aloud of their builders, telling us what sort of folk they were,
giving voice to their intellects, relating the stories of their lives and times. When Al-Baghdadi visited Giza
around the year 1200, the Great Pyramid was the tallest man-made structure in
the world, and had been for more than 3,700 years.
All that time, it had testified to the greatness of a civilization that
had grown up on the banks of the Nile, a civilization that had passed through
countless periods of flourishing and decay, and then finally disappeared
beneath the sands of the desert. My name's Paul Cooper, and you're
listening to the Fall of Civilizations Podcast. Each episode, I look at a
civilization of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes
of history. I want to ask, what did they have in common? What led to their fall,
and what did it feel like to be a person alive at the time who witnessed the end
of their world? In this episode, I want to tell the story of one of the most iconic
cultures ever produced by humankind; the civilizations of Egypt's Nile Valley. I
want to show how this series of related societies grew up in the floodplains of
their great river, and built some of the most enduring and recognizable
structures in the world. I want to tell the story of how they rose, how they
endured, and how they finally faded from history altogether. The story of Egypt is one of
the greatest and longest epics in all of history. Many empires would consider
themselves lucky to last through the reigns of thirty-one kings, but Ancient Egypt
would see the reign of thirty-one dynasties of kings, lasting for more than three thousand
years. In the time since, historians have long struggled with this panoply of
rulers and eras, and have tried to wrestle the history of Egypt into neat
categories. They typically split its history into three sets of
dynasties, commonly known as the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, and the New
Kingdom. Between these are a number of intermediate periods when the central
power of its kings failed and the land divided. Throughout this history, Egypt's
empire would ebb and flow, just like the great river that gave it life. That river
was the greatest watercourse of the entire Afro-Eurasian landmass,
the river Nile. The Nile finds its source in Lake
Victoria, the largest lake in Africa. It's a body of water about the
size of Georgia, or nearly the size of Ireland. The gigantic Lake Victoria
drains into the river known as the White Nile, which is joined by the so-called
Blue Nile further downstream at Khartoum, the capital of
Sudan. From there, it flows for a further 2,000 km across the Nubian and Egyptian
deserts to Cairo, where it branches out into a wide delta and empties into the
Mediterranean Sea. Next to the Amazon River, the Nile is
either the longest or second-longest river on
Earth. It runs for 6,800 km, or around a sixth of the way around the
Earth, and its drainage basin covers a tenth of the entire landmass of
Africa. Egypt itself has an extremely arid climate, and its inland territories
experience virtually no rainfall. If geography had been only a
little different and Lake Victoria had not begun to drain westwards, we can only
imagine how differently history might have gone. For at least the last
five thousand years, every blade of grass and every tree in the Nile Valley, every
animal and every person to ever live, every priest and every king, owes their
existence solely to this river. Human presence in Egypt is among
the oldest in the world. After evolving in the region of East Africa, modern
humans migrated primarily along this corridor, and from there spread to the
rest of the world. The Nile is, in a sense, the highway
down which all of humanity has once passed. As one of our first stops along
our great journey, Egypt is home to human remains of astonishing
antiquity. Stone tools worked by archaic humans have been discovered in Nile
deposits dating to as early as 600,000 years ago, and modern Homo sapiens
followed in the last 100,000 years or so. These migrations likely happened
during one of the many African humid periods that have occurred over the last
millions of years. These are times when shifts in the
planet's climate caused rains to fall on the Sahara Desert.
During these periods, the desert bloomed into a verdant grassland, home to animals
and people, and when the period ended, the grasses would die, the animals would
leave, and the sands would return. It's thought that this cycle has
occurred more than two hundred times since the desert first formed eight million years ago. The earliest peoples in this region
lived by hunting and fishing, and left behind stone tools and a multitude of
rock paintings. From about the year 13,000 BC,
in one of the Sahara's driest periods in history, the Sebilian culture began
gathering wild wheat and barley, and from there developed their own domesticated
strains. From 9,000 BC, people began to weave thread from wool, and another humid
period began. One enigmatic stone circle at the
desert site of Nabta Playa dates to around 7,500 BC, when the Sahara was a range of
rolling grasslands once more. This stone monument may have been
used to mark the movements of stars at different times of the year, so that
people could keep track of cycles like the harvest and the migration of animals
for hunting. Nabta Playa has been called Egypt's Stonehenge, but this doesn't
quite do it justice, since it was built at least five thousand years before the first
stones of Stonehenge were ever laid. When the last Ice Age ended and the
Sahara once more dried up, any peoples who had been living and herding in its
grasslands would have been driven out of their ancestral home. They would have
wandered across the newly-formed desert until they reached the only stretch of
green in the midst of all that sand. That was the banks of the Nile, and here they
would make their home. These peoples would build a
collection of scattered settlements reaching up and down the river, but
slowly, as more and more people were driven to the riverbank to survive,
these began to coalesce into larger towns, cities,
and finally, kingdoms. The Ancient Egyptians referred
to the whole region by the name the two lands , referring to the long Nile Valley
in the south and the delta that spread out in the north, close to the sea. These
were the two lands that today we call Upper and Lower Egypt.
Surprisingly, for a modern person who orients their maps facing north, the
Egyptians thought of their world in the opposite direction.
As a consequence, their word for east was the same as their word for
left , and west the same as right . In the Egyptian mind, they were always facing
upstream, waiting for the annual floods to arrive.
If you find this confusing, as we continue, just remember that southern
Upper Egypt is the region upstream, and northern Lower Egypt is
downstream. For many people at this time, the lands along the riverbank would
have constituted their entire world. The Egyptians referred to the
river's floodplain as Kemet, or the black land , due to the rich, dark soil
left behind by its life-giving floods. This land was the realm of the
noble god Horus, who had the head of a falcon, the god of life, protection, and
healing. If you walked just an hour in either direction, you would soon reach
what they called Deshret, or the red land . This was the inhospitable desert
stretching out on all sides; roasting hot, largely devoid of water and shade, and
inhospitable to most life. These deserts were presided over by
the god Set, the god of chaos and violence. The Nile itself they knew
simply by the name Iteru, or the river , since in their world there was no other. The Egyptian world began in Upper
Egypt far up the reaches of the Nile at a place now known as
Aswan. Here, a belt of hard granite crosses the landscape and forces the
river waters into shallow whitewater rapids, running over boulders and through
rocky channels called cataracts. This word comes from the Greek
word kataraktes , or rushing down . Today, the waters of these cataracts
have been tamed by the construction of the Aswan Dam, but in ancient times, they
could be a rushing torrent. Each year, when the floodwaters passed through this
rocky stretch of the river, they made such a thundering sound that the Earth
itself could shake, and this led the Ancient Egyptians to believe that the
waters were coming up from beneath the Earth, bursting out of vast, subterranean
seas. At Aswan, they built a temple on an
island in the middle of those rushing waters, and here worshiped that primeval
force. The fast-flowing waters at Aswan made it a natural barrier to ships, and
prevented any further exploration upriver. For this reason, for much of its
early history, this was where Ancient Egyptian influence ended, the final
extent of their power and border of their empire.
Beyond Aswan was the southern lands of Nubia, and for this reason,
Egyptians would also refer to it as the narrow gateway to the
south . The temple island in the Aswan cataracts was known to the Egyptians as
Abu, the Egyptian word for elephant , since it was a hub for the ivory trade with
these southern lands. The Greeks would follow this example, and named the place
Elephantine. From here, trade caravans would pass over land south to the Darfur
region of Sudan, bringing gold, ivory, and other goods. But north of Aswan,
everything was considered to be Egypt, as Herodotus records.
All the land watered by the Nile in its course was Egypt, and all who
lived lower down than the city Elephantine and drank the river's water
were Egyptians. Such was the oracle given to them.
Luckily for the Egyptians, the Nile flows from the south to the north, while
the prevailing winds blow in the other direction, meaning that you could use the
winds to sail against the current as far as Aswan without too much effort. But the
return journey would be even easier, allowing the river waters to simply
carry you along. A ship heading downstream to the north from Aswan would
see for some time only rocky desert and the river bordered by cliffs of hard
Nubian sandstone. This is not a land well-suited
to agriculture, but in ancient times, these valleys were sources of natural
resources like gemstones, copper, and gold. Further north, the red cliffs fall away,
and the floodplain around the river gets wider.
Here, the landscape would have blushed green, and a larger population could be
supported. It was in this region that the desert city of Thebes would grow up,
which the Egyptians called Waset. This would one day become the most
powerful city in Upper Egypt, the capital of the desert regions. The living part of an Egyptian
city, its houses and markets and workshops, tended to be built on the
eastern bank of the river, where the sun rises, while the western bank, where the
sun set, was used only for burials and tombs. Sailing further north, you would
reach the area we call Middle Egypt, and the floodplain gets wider
still. This region would have been full of wildlife and
vegetation. Some way to the west of the river, the waters divert and fill a large
oasis known as Faiyum, which sprouts like a broad leaf from the stem of the
Nile. In ancient times, this lake was home to large populations of Nile crocodile,
so that the settlement on the shore would be known by the Greeks as
Krokodeil polis, or Crocodile City . Here, Egyptians apparently even
tamed crocodiles in their temples, as Herodotus recounts. Now, for some of the Egyptians, the
crocodiles are sacred animals. Those who dwelt about Thebes and about the lake
of Moiris hold them to be most sacred, and each of these two peoples keep one
crocodile selected, which has been trained to tameness, and they put hanging
ornaments of stone and of gold into the ears of these, and anklets round the
front feet, and they give them food appointed and victim of sacrifices, and
treat them as well as possible. In other places, crocodiles were
hunted for food using ingenious but risky methods. A man puts the back of a pig
upon a hook as bait, and lets it go into the middle of the river, while he
himself upon the bank of the river has a young live pig, which he beats; and the
crocodile, hearing its cries, makes for the direction of the sound, and when he is
drawn out to land, first of all, the hunter plasters up his eyes with muck; and
having done, so he very easily gets the mastery of him. But if he does not do so,
he has much trouble. Also living in the river were
the animals that the Greeks would call river horses , or hippopotamus,
our hippopotamus. The river horse is sacred
in districts of Papremis, but for the other Egyptians it is not sacred, and this is
the appearance which he presents; he is four-footed, cloven-hoofed like an ox, flat-
nosed, with a mane like a horse, and showing teeth like tusks, with a tail and
voice like a horse, in size as large as the largest ox; and
his hide is so exceedingly thick that when it has been dried, shafts of
javelins are made of it. The most strategically important
location was what the Egyptians called the balance of the two
lands . This was the place where the river split into its delta.
As the crossroads between Upper and Lower Egypt, this was always the
natural place for the capital when the empire was united.
This location would give rise to the city of Memphis, and in turn, to
modern Cairo, and it is here that the Egyptians would build their most famous
and lasting monuments. Each year, the monsoon rains
falling in the highlands of Ethiopia and Central Africa would swell the river, and
the annual flood would arrive. This happened with such regularity,
around the middle of August, that the Egyptians timed it using the rising of
the star Sirius. In the fifth century BC, Herodotus wrote
the following description of these floods. When the Nile is in flood, it
overflows in places as far as two days journey from either bank. The Nile comes
with a rising flood for a hundred days from the summer solstice, and when this tale of
days is complete, it sinks again with a diminishing stream, so that the river is
low for the whole winter, till the summer solstice again.
The Egyptian year was divided into three seasons; the flood season of Akhet,
the growing season of Peret, and the harvest season of Shemu.
Once the flood waters receded in early autumn, the land was refreshed and
fertilized with rich Nile mud, and new crops could be grown. In this black mud,
farmers grew emmer wheat, barley, beans, and lentils throughout the cooler winter
season, and when summer came again, the grain was ready to be
harvested. Egyptian life was held in this delicate balance.
Each year, if the river flooded too little or too much, the results could
be devastating, as one Ancient Egyptian hymn to the Nile makes clear. If he is greedy, the whole land
suffers; great and small fall moaning; people are changed at his
coming. When he rises, then the land is in joy, then every belly is glad, every jaw
has held laughter. Since their lives depended so
greatly on these floods, the Egyptians developed ingenious systems for
measuring them. At the cataracts of Aswan, they built a series of devices known as
Nilometers. These often take the form of towers with deep wells inside that allow
the river to flow in, with measurements inscribed on their walls in Egyptian
cubits. Each year, ancient people would anxiously check these Nilometers to see how
high the water was rising that year, and whether it would be a time of famine, a
time of plenty, or a time when they would need to hastily build some flood defenses. During the period known as the
pre-dynastic era, the two halves of Egypt were divided, and this division was
cultural as well as political. The desert people of southern Upper Egypt worshiped
their own god Nekhbet, who was commonly depicted as a griffon vulture, a powerful
and majestic bird. These people were likely darker-
skinned, and had more of a cultural and linguistic connection with the southern
lands of Nubia and Sub-Saharan Africa, their rulers sometimes even
intermarrying with the royalty of southern kingdoms. Meanwhile, the people
of northern Lower Egypt paid deference to the god Wadjet, usually shown as an
Egyptian cobra. They had more genetic influence
from North Africa and the Mediterranean, and may have been somewhat lighter-
skinned. The kings of southern Upper Egypt ruled while wearing a white,
bulbous crown, while the kings of the north wore a red crown with a spiraling
representation of a cobra emanating from it. The kingdoms that ruled over these
regions were always fluid, but the geographical distinction between Upper
and Lower Egypt always held sway. But around the year 3000 BC, or more than
five thousand years ago, all that began to change. That was because of a king of a
kingdom called Thinis. His name was Narmer. The figure of Narmer is wreathed in
mystery, and what little we know about him has been pieced together from fragments
of inscriptions and a few significant artifacts. Narmer was born under the
personal name Menes, but chose Narmer as his Horus name or king name when he came to
the throne of Thinis, and this name perhaps gives us some sense of his
personality. That's because Narmer means something like fighting
catfish . The Nile catfish that the king clearly admired
is a remarkable species. It's a predatory fish, a nocturnal hunter that can grow up
to 1.2 meters long, or about the size of a dolphin, and uses a form of naturally-
generated electricity as a weapon. Using a unique organ in its body, it can
generate an electric shock of up to 350 volts that stuns its prey. In the largest
catfish, this shock can be enough to stun an adult human, and the Egyptians were
fascinated by this unique property. They depicted these shock-and-awe predators
on painted wall murals, and even experimented with using the weak
electric charges of young specimens as a treatment for
arthritis. We might imagine that this King Narmer wanted to emulate some of the
characteristics of these surprise hunters, but whether it was their patience lying
in wait for their enemies, the tenacity of their surprise attacks, or the shock and
awe with which they stunned their prey, we may never know. Virtually the only
source we have for this period is a carving known as the Narmer Palette, which
contains only a handful of cryptic clues. One side of this carved artifact
shows King Narmer standing over a defeated enemy, gripping him by the hair in one
hand and raising a mace in the other. It's a clear sign of
domination. Here, Narmer is shown wearing the white, bulbous crown of his native
Upper Egypt, suggesting that he bludgeoned his rivals there into
submission. On the other side, the carving shows the king leading an army, while
ranks of his defeated enemies lie before him. Below this, an image of a bull is
shown tearing down the walls of a fortress with its horns. On this side of
the carving, Narmer is wearing the Red Crown of Lower Egypt. From this, we might assume
that he set out on a campaign of conquest and successfully brought the
two lands of Egypt together. Two mythical animals carved on one side of the Narmer
Palette stand with their long necks intertwined, perhaps representing the
coming together of the two sides of Egypt, their lives and their fates now
inextricably bound. This was a union that would see the
newly-united Egypt grow to become one of the most influential societies in early
human history. At first, Egyptian culture was
heavily influenced by the slightly older civilizations of Mesopotamia, like
the Sumerians. Egyptian palaces were often
built to a Sumerian design, and they used Sumerian motifs in their art, too. But by
at least the year 3000 BC, Egypt had matured its own indigenous artistic
culture and its own system of writing. The Greeks would later refer to
these by a word which means sacred carving , or hieroglyph. The Egyptian hieroglyphs are
a mixed writing system that uses a variety of phonetic symbols, as well as a
collection of symbols that represent whole words. For example, an image of a
man holding up his hand to his mouth could be used to represent the common
word eat , but other symbols that represented groups of consonants could
be used to spell out other less common words, names, or
places. Hieroglyphs emerged a little after the invention of cuneiform in
Mesopotamia, and it's possible they were inspired by this older writing system. In
Mesopotamia, we can see the gradual evolution of the cuneiform writing
system from its earliest symbolic roots, but in Egypt, the earliest discovered
example of hieroglyphs show the symbols springing into existence already fully-
formed in a complex system. This suggests that they may have been developed all at
once as a conscious effort, and were perhaps even devised by a single
person. The Egyptian hieroglyph for ruler was the shepherd's crook, since the king
was considered to be a kind of shepherd for his people. Egyptian kings would even
symbolize their royalty by holding a gilded, curved crook modeled after those
used by shepherds, and these kings have come to be known as pharaohs. The word pharaoh derives from
the Egyptian word per aa , meaning great house , and it has stuck in the popular
imagination as the name used for any Egyptian ruler, partly due to its use in
the Bible. But there is actually no evidence that it was used to refer to
Egypt's rulers until nearly two thousand years after Narmer s
lifetime. Up until that time, throughout the first eighteen dynasties of Egypt's
history, its rulers were simply referred to as kings or Neswet , and by epithets
such as His Majesty . Still, the term pharaoh has gained such currency and
popular usage that it's still used to refer to all the rulers of Egypt across
the ages. The pharaoh in Ancient Egypt was
considered the living embodiment of the falcon god Horus and the son of the sun
god Ra. One later hymn praises the figure of
the king. Pharaoh is the lord of wisdom whose
mother knows not his name. Pharaoh's glory is in the sky; his might is in the
horizon. Pharaoh is the bull of the sky who shatters all at will, who lives on
the being of every god. Perhaps most famously of all, the
Egyptians were compelled by their religious beliefs to embalm the bodies of
the dead, ritually cleansing them in preparation for the afterlife.
The Greek Herodotus, who traveled widely in Egypt, wrote about the
specialist embalmers who would prepare bodies in this way in exchange for a
fee. They, whenever a corpse is conveyed to them, show to those who brought it
wooden models of corpses made like reality by painting, and demonstrate on
these the best of the ways of embalming; the second which they show is less good
and also less expensive, and the third is the least expensive of all. Having told
them about this, they inquire in which way they desire the corpse of their
friend to be prepared. With the price negotiated, the
embalmer could begin their work, the grizzly process of which Herodotus
also describes. First, with the crooked iron
tool, they draw out the brain through the nostrils, extracting it partly thus and
partly by pouring in drugs; and after this, with a sharp stone of Ethiopia, they
make a cut along the side and take out the whole contents of the belly, and when
they have cleared out the cavity and cleansed it with palm wine, they cleanse
it again with spices pounded up. Then they fill the belly with pure myrrh and
with cassia and other spices, and sew it together again. Having done so, they keep
covered up in natron for seventy days, and then they wash the corpse and roll its
whole body up in fine linen cut into bands, smearing those beneath with gum,
which the Egyptians use generally instead of glue.
Mummification was expensive, and only those with wealth could afford it; rich
merchants, royal officials, and of course, the pharaoh himself. One inscription on the walls of
a tomb for the pharaoh Unus gives a sense of the kinds of prayers and
blessings that might have been spoken while these rituals took place; this one to the
sun god Amun-Ra and the moon god Thoth. Sun and Thoth, take Unus with you, that
he may eat of what you eat of, that he may drink of what you drink of, that he
may sit where you sit, that he may sail in what you sail in.
The booth of Unus is plaited of reeds; the flood of Unus is in the Marsh
of Offerings; his feast is among you, gods; the water of Unus is wine, like the sun.
Unus will circumnavigate the sky like the sun; Unus shall course the sky. Upon coming to the throne of the
newly-united Egypt, King Narmer built a new capital, perfectly placed at the balance
of the two lands, where the river met the delta. This city would become known as
Inebu-hedj, or the city of white walls , but today we know it as Memphis.
The kings who followed Narmer would rule from this new capital, but
they spent much of their time traveling between palaces, and when they died, their
bodies were still taken back to Narmer s home region of Thinis in Upper Egypt to be
mummified and buried in the city's ancestral burial ground at
Abydos. That was until the reign of a king named Hotep-sekh-emwy.
He ruled from about 2,900 BC, and started what has been
called the second dynasty of Egypt, and he took the decision to start a new
burial ground near Memphis so that Egypt's pharaohs could be buried close
to their new capital. For the site of this new burial
ground, he chose a place on the western bank of the river, the side where the sun
sets, at a vast, open place called Saqqara. Saqqara is situated on a raised plateau
that the floodwaters of the Nile do not reach. Visually, it would have been
striking to ancient people, as the place where the green river lands end and the
dead sand of the desert abruptly begins. For this reason, it may have been
considered a crossing place between death and life,
the perfect place for a necropolis, or a city of the dead.
For kings who wanted their tombs to be remembered, it also had the benefit of
being highly visible from the new capital of Memphis.
Over the coming centuries, this site would become full of tombs of kings
and queens, and countless royal attendants and nobles who followed them
into the afterlife. At first, these tombs were
built in a form known as a mastaba, large, rectangular constructions built of mud
brick and promising their inhabitants a rebirth into the next life.
These could be very large, but they were still relatively
unassuming. But soon, Egyptian pharaohs would get even more ambitious with their
burial arrangements. This ambition truly began
with the rule of a pharaoh named Netjerikhet Djoser. The reign of Djoser begins the period
known as the Old Kingdom, which would last for the next five hundred years. Djoser was the
son of a king named Khasekhemwy, who had reunited Egypt after a period of turmoil,
during which the northern delta rose in rebellion. With order now restored, Djoser
clearly wanted to keep it that way. Rather than continuing to travel around
the country as pharaohs before him had done, he moved to a permanent capital at
Memphis, where he could keep a better eye on the restive northern
riverlands. Over his nearly three decades of rule, he set about an ambitious
program of construction, rebuilding temples, and throwing up fortresses all
along the river, but it was in the manner of his burial that he would truly leave
his mark. When Djoser began the construction of
his final resting place, it looked a lot like the mastaba tombs of the kings that
had come before, but his royal architect soon began dreaming of a more ambitious
structure. He was a visionary chancellor and engineer who held numerous official
titles in the kingdom, including head of the royal shipyard , royal seal bearer , and
overseer of all stone works . His name was Imhotep. Imhotep s name means the one who
comes in peace , and he was born in the 27th century BC, but beyond that, much of
what we know about him has been distorted by myth and legend. He was
something of a polymath; a priest, a statesman, a scribe, physician, and
architect, and even gained fame as a magician. He also has the distinction of
being perhaps the first non-royal person to be recorded in any detail by
history. As the king's most trusted architect, Imhotep was put in charge of
the construction of Djoser's tomb, but it would not be a regular mud brick mastaba
like his predecessors. In fact, Imhotep was
determined to build this tomb out of stone. This stone would need to be
quarried from the bedrock nearby, roughly cut into blocks.
But as this stone mastaba rose out of the desert, Imhotep seems to have
had an idea. With this stronger building
material, the structure could support more weight, and so, there was no real
reason to stop building. Once the first mastaba was
built, he experimented with placing another smaller one on top of it, and
then another on top of that, creating a stepped design like a wedding
cake. Originally, Imhotep planned to build this construction four tiers high, but
soon he became even more daring. By the time it was finished,
Djoser's tomb stood six layers high. It was perhaps the world's first large-scale
construction made from cut stone, and rising to a height of sixty-two meters, it was likely
also the tallest building on Earth. Finally, the stepped pyramid of
Djoser was complete, and when the king died, he was laid to rest in a granite chamber
beneath the great edifice, surrounded by a maze of tunnels.
Djoser s pyramid was a revolutionary step in Egyptian
architecture, and it would stand as a challenge to all the kings who would
follow him, a challenge that they would find irresistible. The difficulties that
engineers like Imhotep faced in building these pyramids were enormous, but their
achievement becomes even more impressive when you consider that these monuments
also had to be built fast. Today, Egypt is littered with the
remains of half-built pyramids. These were abandoned halfway
through their construction, usually because the pharaoh who commissioned
them had died early. Once a pharaoh was dead, it seemed
no one saw any point in continuing to build his tomb. After all, there was a new
pharaoh now, and construction on his pyramid would have to begin right
away. For this reason, pyramids usually had to be completed, at the very least,
within thirty years. Only the kings with the longest
and most stable reigns would ever live to see the final capstone placed. The next pharaoh after Djoser was
a man named Sekhemkhet, who may have been Djoser's brother, and he would join the
ranks of the unfinished. As soon soon as he came to
the throne, he began the construction of another stepped pyramid of immense
ambition, sure to dwarf his brother's achievement. But only the first layer of
the pyramid was built when Sekhemkhet died, just six or seven years into his reign, and
the pyramid was abandoned. Another king, Khaba, also died
after six years, before his stepped pyramid could be completed.
To build each pyramid, the Egyptians would require enormous amounts
of laborers, as many as 100,000 per pyramid, with about 10,000 laboring at
any one time. There's a widespread misconception that these monuments were
built by armies of slaves, but most historians now believe this not to be
true. Slavery was an aspect of Egyptian society, as it was across the ancient
world, and slaves were mostly taken from prisoners of war, and also from those who
fell into debt or committed serious crimes. But slaves were mostly used as
domestic servants, or if they were unlucky, toiled in extraction industries
like mining and quarrying. These were considered an
underclass, and would not have been trusted with the construction of such
important and sacred buildings. In fact, evidence shows that
the pyramid builders were a mixture of professional artisans and laboring
peasants who worked seasonally in exchange for rations.
The life of an Egyptian farmer was dictated by the coming and going of
the annual floods, and there were only a few times of year when they could be
meaningfully employed in the fields. For the rest of the time, they would have
leased out their services to construction projects, the digging of
canals and other public works, and construction of pyramids. While they labored for the king,
these workers drank beer three times a day, and ate meat
regularly. They toiled in three-month shifts, and were divided into teams of twenty men.
The discovery of their graffiti, hidden on the inward-facing sides of some stone
blocks in the pyramids, shows that they gave themselves playful and boisterous
team names, some of which have been recorded. The Friends of Khufu .
The Vigorous Gang . The Followers of the Powerful White Crown of Khufu . Those Who
Know the Pharaoh . The Drunkards of Menkaure . It seems their supervisors fostered
a sense of team pride and healthy competition, perhaps giving honors and
extra beer rations for those who shifted the most blocks.
Doubtless the work was backbreaking, but over the following
millennium, millions of Egyptians would take this deal.
Perhaps they also felt a sense of pride at the great constructions they
were taking part in, which if all went well, they would live to see
completed. These laborers were sufficiently respected that any who died
during the construction were buried in tombs within the royal complex, their
bodies forever a part of the monolith they had given their lives to build, an
honor that would never have been given to a slave. The vast administrative effort of
building these tombs over the next centuries required a fundamental
restructuring of Egyptian government. In the past, most of the high positions of
state had been doled out to the pharaoh's family, but with such ambitious
projects to be completed, skilled people would be needed.
In the decades that followed, individual functions of government such
as the Master of Scribes and Controller of Workshops were separated out, and
these roles were delegated to capable individuals who were promoted on
merit. The Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson summarizes the transformation in the
following terms. As Egypt embarked on pyramid-
building, the pyramids were building Egypt. This new caste of civil servants
took pride in their work. One Egyptian text of the fifth dynasty records the advice
that a vizier named Ptah-Hotep gave to his son about how to be a successful administrator.
Let not your heart be puffed up because of your knowledge. Be
not confident because you are a wise man. Take counsel with the ignorant as well
as the wise. Good speech is more hidden than the emerald, but it may be
found even among maidservants at the grindstone.
Still, the failures of the kings that followed Djoser must have left a
mark on the empire's morale. Their crumbling, half-finished pyramids stood
in the desert as an image of kingship that could also be fragile and
fleeting. With his stepped pyramid, Djoser had laid down a provocation that would
have to be answered. But it wasn't until the reign of a king named Sneferu that
someone would rise to the challenge. Sneferu's full name was
Hor-neb-Ma at-Snefru-waj; Horus, Lord of Ma at, has perfected me .
Ma at, in Egyptian religious belief, was the embodiment of justice and truth,
sometimes portrayed as a goddess wearing an ostrich feather on her head, who kept
the stars and the seasons in their regular patterns and maintained
peace. Opposed to her in their theology was the concept of
Isfet; chaos, darkness, and disorder. This was sometimes depicted as
a great coiling serpent. For the most part, Sneferu s name
seems to have been appropriate. Under the protection of Ma at, he reigned for as
long as forty-eight years, a time of prosperity and stability. His accession to the
throne is remembered in the later Egyptian source, the Prisse Papyrus.
The majesty of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Huni, came to the
landing place of death, and the majesty of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt,
Sneferu, was raised up as a beneficent king in this entire land.
During his half-century on the throne, Sneferu would secure his place as
Egypt's most ardent and determined pyramid-builder.
With the failure of the last kings to build a stepped pyramid to
match Djoser s, Sneferu began to wonder if he could build something even better, a
pyramid that conformed to a perfect geometrical shape. He had a vision of a
pyramid with polished, smooth sides, unlike anything the world had seen
before. His first attempt to accomplish this would be at the pyramid of Meidum. There is some debate about whether the
Meidum pyramid was built by Sneferu or by his predecessor Huni, but we can assume they
wouldn't compete for the honor, as it stands as one of the most impressive
failed pyramids in history. The Meidum pyramid was built in
several stages. First, it was a stepped pyramid of
similar design to Djoser s, and then this interior structure was
encased in a steep shell of white limestone, creating a high and narrow
point. The effect would have been beautiful. That is until one day, as the
pyramid neared completion, when the entire weight of the stone facing began
to collapse in all directions. We can only imagine the noise
and calamity that must have accompanied this; the workers leaping clear of the
wreckage, the overseers watching aghast as an avalanche of painstakingly cut stone
poured off the side of the pyramid. The moment this happened, Sneferu ordered the
construction to be halted. Workmen inside the interior chambers simply put down
their tools and left. Today, the burial chamber inside the
pyramid is still unfinished, with raw, uncarved walls and wooden supports still
in place, which were usually removed after construction.
Sneferu must have been devastated, but he wasn't
discouraged. Soon, he tried again with a pyramid at the site of
Dahshur, just to the south of the royal necropolis of Saqqara. This pyramid was intended to be
tall, and its sides were even steeper than the first. His workmen began to
construct it with a sharp 53-degree slope to its sides, and this time, Sneferu must have
hoped that he would get the pyramid he dreamed of. But this would not turn out
to be the case. This second pyramid was built on ground that was only soft sand
and shale. As the pyramid took shape and its
weight climbed into the millions of tonnes, they found that the stone was sinking
into the earth and causing cracks to appear in the structure.
We can only imagine how it felt to be the architect who had to
bring this bad news to the king, the son of Ra, the living embodiment of the god
Horus. The workmen tried everything they could, from adding new supporting blocks
to the base to propping up subsiding sections with huge beams of cedar wood,
but it was hopeless. It became clear that if they continued the pyramid as planned,
it would likely collapse just as the first one had.
The pharaoh Sneferu seems to have listened to reason. He consented to allow
his workmen to hurriedly finish the pyramid with a reduced angle of only
43 degrees and a final height reduced by twenty- five meters. This means that today, the pyramid has
a peculiar snub-nosed appearance that has given it the name the bent pyramid .
It s clear that Sneferu still wasn't satisfied. He now ordered the
construction of a final pyramid one kilometer to the north, combining everything his
craftsmen had learned from the first two. This one was now built with a 43-degree
incline from the beginning, more evenly distributing the weight on the earth, and
finally, Sneferu got the pyramid he desired. This was the first structure
that truly took the iconic shape of an Egyptian pyramid, and would be used as a
model for those that would be built in years to come.
It was 105 meters high, nearly twice the height of Djoser's pyramid and the
world's new tallest building, and its geometrical perfection
was undeniable. When Sneferu died, he was
buried in this pyramid according to his wishes, and his son took the throne.
He would be the greatest pyramid-builder of all. His name was Khufu. As a boy, Khufu must have seen his
father Sneferu obsessed with the construction of his three
pyramids. We can imagine the young prince listening in on his father's
conversations with his architects, the tension and anger as the first two
pyramids failed, and then the final triumph of the red pyramid. Perhaps
as a boy, he dreamed of one day building such a monument for himself. We know very little about Khufu
or what his reign was like, but it's clear that he was inspired by one thing;
size, and above all, the desire to build the largest pyramid that would ever
stand. Learning from his father's mistakes on the bent pyramid and likely
inheriting some of his architects, Khufu elected to build his tomb some fifteen
kilometers to the northwest of Saqqara, on a shelf of strong limestone just outside
Memphis, at a place called Giza. When construction began on the
Great Pyramid, there must have been some uncertainty about whether it would even
be possible. It was built using an estimated 2.3 million large, stone blocks,
weighing a total of six million tonnes, and when its first layer was completed, it
was the size of more than ten football pitches. Its builders used predominantly
local limestone quarried from nearby on the Giza Plateau to build the pyramid's
interior structure, and these were bound together with lime mortar packed with
straw and charcoal. Luckily, these organic remains
in the pyramid mortar can be carbon dated, allowing archaeologists to date
the pyramids with scientific certainty to this period.
But while rough stone would do for the main body, the king's burial
chamber at its heart was made of blocks of hard granite brought from Aswan, since
it needed to resist the crushing weight of millions of tonnes of stone above it.
The fine limestone blocks of its outer shell were quarried at a place called
Tura, on the other side of the river. The stone from these quarries was of
exceptional quality, a pale white in color, almost like marble.
For this reason, it was highly prized for use on the interiors of
tombs, and the perfect casing for a pyramid. This limestone was cut out of
underground tunnels in these quarries and dragged down to the banks of the Nile,
where it was loaded onto barges to be carried downstream.
In order to ease the transportation of these stones, the
Egyptians dug a series of canals and artificial harbors that came right up to
the base of the pyramids, one of which was known as She-Khufu, or the pool of
Khufu . One papyrus has been uncovered, the oldest ever found, that is the work
journal of an overseer named Merer. In it, he records the process of
this perhaps less than exhilarating task. Day 25: Inspector Merer spends the
day hauling stones in Tura South; spends the night at Tura.
Day 26: Inspector Merer casts off from Tura loaded with stone; spends the
night at the pool of Khufu. Day 27: Sets sail loaded with stone;
spends the night at the pyramid. Day 28: casts off from the
pyramid in the morning; sails upriver to Tura South. Day 29: Inspector Merer spends the day hauling
stones in Tura South; spends the night at Tura. Day 30: Inspector Merer spends the
day hauling stones in Tura South; spends the night at Tura. Remarkably, the pyramid was
oriented perfectly to true north, with one of its faces at each point of the
compass, suggesting that the Egyptians must have used measurements of the
stars in order to align it, the only method by which they could have achieved
such accuracy. With the kingdom's now
exceptional organization, it's been estimated that it took only about twenty-
three years to build, with the final stones being placed around 2560 BC. Upon its completion, the Great Pyramid
of Giza would stand 147 meters high, or nearly forty stories.
It was the tallest man-made structure in the world, and would remain
so for nearly four thousand years. The building that eventually
surpassed it, the wooden spire of Lincoln Cathedral in England, completed in 1311,
would stand for little more than two centuries before it collapsed in a
storm. Today, Khufu has cemented his name into history with the construction of
these monuments, but other than his ambitious pyramid, little else is known
about him. The only representation of him ever found is a single statuette carved
from ivory, and ironically for a man so obsessed with grand scale, this statue is
only seven centimeters, or less than three inches, tall. When Khufu died around
2525 BC, his son Djedefre would take the throne. But his reign was short, and when
he died, another of Khufu s sons became pharaoh. His name was Khafre.
The pharaoh Khafre would follow in his father's and grandfather's footsteps,
and build a grand pyramid of his own. He would place it right beside his father s,
but for some reason, he declined to build it any higher.
It could be that his builders, perhaps tiring of this mania for ever bigger and
better pyramids, simply told him that it wouldn't be possible to build any bigger.
It may be that Khafre worried that it would have appeared unseemly to one-up
his dead father quite so ostentatiously. Perhaps for this reason,
Khafre's pyramid would be a differential three- and-a-half meters shorter than his father's,
although he he was sure to place it on a slightly higher shelf of limestone,
meaning that from many angles, it appears taller. Coupled with slightly steeper,
angled sides, this meant Khafre was also able to build his pyramid with perhaps
350,000 fewer stone blocks, a saving that his teams of laborers and stonemasons no
doubt appreciated. Today, the pyramid of Khafre
is the only pyramid at Giza to retain any of its original casing stones of
smooth, white Tura limestone, which still cling to the top-third of the structure,
perhaps since its steeper sides made it more difficult for stone thieves to
extract the very top of its masonry. This allows us to picture how
these monuments would have looked in their golden age, the smooth, white sides
that must have gleamed blindingly in the the desert sun, and at night shone in the
light of the moon. These pyramids were also likely
capped with a stone known as a pyramidion, usually carved of diorite or
granite, and carved with hieroglyphs. Some examples of these
pyramidions have been found with distinctive grooves that suggest that
they were encased in a decorative metal, either copper or shining electrum, an
alloy of gold and silver. Since the pyramidions for the Giza
pyramids have never been found, it's unknown whether their tops were encased
in metal, but if they were, it would have made them an even more impressive sight,
a gleaming pinnacle reaching up to the heavens. Within only a hundred years or so
of the construction of Djoser's first stepped pyramid, all of Egypt's largest
pyramids had already been built, all by only three generations of the same
family. But almost from the moment the final capstone was placed on Khafre's
massive monument, enthusiasm for enormous pyramids began to wane. The pharaoh Menkaure, the son of Khafre
and grandson of Khufu, also built his pyramid at Giza around 2510 BC, but his
would be significantly smaller. It's not even a tenth the size of the
Great Pyramid, and only two-thirds the size of even Djoser's stepped
pyramid. One explanation for this was that Menkaure didn't expect to live long
enough to build such a grand construction as his
predecessors. Herodotus records one piece of tradition about the pharaoh Menkaure,
which recounts how an oracle told him that his reign would be short.
As a result, he determined to make the best of the time he had, and perhaps this
left him little time for pyramid-building. The king deemed this unjust, and
sent back to the oracle a message of reproach, blaming the god; why must he die
so soon, whereas his father and his uncle had lived long? He caused many lamps to
be made, and would light these at nightfall and drink and make merry. By
day or night, he never ceased from reveling, roaming to the marsh country and the
groves and whenever he heard of the likeliest places of pleasure. Whether there's any truth to
this or not, it's clear Menkaure had different priorities to Khufu and Khafre,
and his more modest pyramid seems to have broken the spell of his family's
one-upmanship. For the next thousand years, pharaohs
would continue to build pyramid tombs, but they would be mostly at a much
reduced scale, and they would cut bigger and bigger corners in their
construction. Instead of a solid limestone structure, these later
monuments would often be a simple limestone shell encasing a core of mud
brick, or simply earth and sand. For this reason, little remains of these later
pyramids other than melancholy heaps alone in the desert.
Slowly, the practice would begin to die out altogether.
The reason Egyptians stopped building pyramids was partly due to
changes in religious attitudes towards burial, but it also seems to have stemmed
from concern over tomb-robbers. After all, a pyramid was
essentially an enormous sign announcing to the world that the richest man in
Egypt was buried there. From the earliest days, people were drawn to the tombs of
long-dead kings to attempt to steal their treasures.
One tomb inscription of a royal architect named Ineni gives us a
clue about these changing priorities. He writes that he constructed his king s
tomb not in an ostentatious declaration of power, but in total secrecy. I supervised the excavation of
the cliff tomb of His Majesty alone, no one seeing, no one hearing. Even with these secret tombs,
grave-robbers were still a constant concern. One pharaoh of the later New
Kingdom would order an inspection of his predecessors tombs, and his inspectors
brought back troubling news. The tomb of the king; it was found
that the evildoers have damaged it by forcing an opening into the main
chamber of his tomb, through the passage wall of the sanctuary of Nebamen,
superintendent of the grain stores of the king. In the funerary place, the body of
the king had been removed, and the tomb of his royal spouse, the royal lady of
Nubshas, was empty. The robbers had laid violent hands on them.
It wasn't just the precious treasures inside that were
stolen. As the overseer Merer had found, cutting the limestone blocks from the
quarries of Tura was one of the most time-consuming parts of construction.
For this reason, pharaohs who felt more pressed for time sometimes despoiled
previous pyramids of their cut stone in order to speed along their own
monuments. One Middle Kingdom text known as the Instruction of Merikare advises
kings against this shameful practice. Do not despoil the monument of another,
but quarry stone in Tura. Do not build your tomb out of ruins,
using what has been made for what is to be made.
In place of constructing their own pyramids at Saqqara or Giza, the later
pharaohs would be buried at a place near Thebes that the Egyptians called the
Great and Majestic Necropolis of the Millions of Years of the Pharaoh , or
sometimes the Great Field , but today it is known as the Valley of the
Kings. Here, a natural rock formation known as el-qurn, or the horn, rises above a
series of dramatic red cliffs. When viewed from the entrance to
the tombs here, this pointed peak somewhat resembles a natural
pyramid. It's possible that this convenient landform may have relieved
some of the pressure on Egypt's pharaohs and allowed them an equally prestigious
place to be buried, while freeing up an untold amount of energy and manpower in
the kingdom. Egypt's manual laborers could
perhaps breathe a sigh of relief. Slowly, the age of the pyramids came to an end. Still, that was a long time in the future,
and throughout the fourth and fifth dynasties of Egypt, royal monument
construction continued confidently. But in the sixth dynasty,
around the 23rd century BC, construction began to decline.
Part of the reason for this was an increasing decentralization of the
empire and a gradual weakening of the power of the king.
The final pharaoh of the Old Kingdom was named Pepi II.
He came to the throne at the age of six, and ruled for more than sixty years.
Pepi was an excitable and enthusiastic child, as we can see from one tomb
inscription by one of his officials named Harkhuf.
Harkhuf had a long and illustrious career. He served
as the mayor of one of Egypt's southern provinces in the region of the
Nile cataract of Aswan, the narrow gate to the south.
The highlight of his life was the four journeys of exploration he
undertook on behalf of his pharaoh, following the Nile down into the heart
of Central Africa into what the Egyptians called the horizon lands . He
wrote a full account of one of these expeditions on the walls of his tomb.
I accomplished it in seven months. I brought back from there all sorts of
beautiful, exotic produce, and was praised for it very greatly. I came back with three
hundred donkeys laden with incense, ebony, precious oil, grain, leopard skins, and
elephant tusks. The boy pharaoh Pepi was so
delighted with Harkhuf's trip that he wrote a letter directly to him. The letter was
likely written on fragile papyrus and has not survived, but luckily, Harkhuf was so
proud of this sign of royal favor that he had the letter copied out word for
word on the wall of his tomb, his proudest moment etched into stone for
eternity. In it, we get a sense for the voice of this excitable young king.
You know how to do what your lord loves and favors. You wake and you sleep
planning to do what your lord loves, favors, and commands. Unique friend Harkhuf!
Pepi was especially excited by a small man that Harkhuf had come across in
East Africa and had brought back with him, perhaps either a man with dwarfism
or a member of the so-called pygmy tribes of Central Africa. You have further said in this message
that you have brought a dwarf of the god's dances from the land of the
horizon-dwellers. Come downstream to the residence at once. Hurry and bring with
you this dwarf that you have brought alive, prosperous, and healthy, for the
king. When he goes down with you into the boat, have excellent people around him on
deck lest he fall in the water. My Majesty wishes to see this particular dwarf
more than the produce of the lands. However, as a pharaoh, Pepi was
relatively ineffectual. During his childhood, his
mother and grand viziers seem to have done much of the ruling, and as an adult, he
continued a relatively hands-off approach to the kingdom.
For much of its history, Egypt had been governed by regional
administrators known as nomarchs, who were appointed by the pharaoh to rule
over their regions on his behalf. Pepi's long reign saw an
increasing amount of power passing to these regional governors.
Gradually, their positions became hereditary rather than appointed,
so that single families began to amass large amounts of power, and their tombs
became larger and more elaborate with every passing year.
These nomarchs were soon beginning to look a lot like feudal lords or even
petty kings, and even began fighting amongst themselves. Meanwhile, the once
boy king Pepi was now entering his seventies, frail and increasingly detached from the
business of ruling. This might not have been a death
blow for the kingdom, but it was around this time that a record drought
descended over Egypt and the entire Eastern Mediterranean, starting around
the year 2,200 BC. This climate shift we have
encountered before; it is known as the 4.2 kiloyear event, and has been
implicated in the collapse of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, and
perhaps even the Indus Valley civilization in India and
Pakistan. In Egypt, the result of this event was a series of years in which the
Nile floods were much reduced, and agriculture came under immense pressure.
The drought was so severe and long-lasting that the verdant lake at
Faiyum that once stood sixty-five meters deep completely dried up over the next fifty
years, and crop yields would have plummeted. The long reign of a pharaoh
was usually good news for the kingdom. It tended to generate a period
of stability and often prosperity, but when a king's rule went on too long,
it had the tendency to create what we might call the old king problem .
The long reign of the pharaoh Pepi, along with his multiple wives, meant
that he had countless children, many of them now old men themselves with
children and grandchildren of their own, and they were all impatient to see this
old king pass on so that they would get their chance to rule. When Pepi finally
died around 2175 BC, what followed was a succession
crisis of immense proportions. The chaos serpent of Isfet
now wound its way around all the lands of Egypt. In the two decades that followed, the
kingdom would see no fewer than seventeen pharaohs come and go, some perhaps dying
of old age, and others no doubt killed by their rivals.
The only one of these kings to survive more than a year on the throne
was a man named Ibi, who even, somewhat optimistically, tried his hand at
building a pyramid at the royal burial ground of Saqqara. But this monument was a
testament to the now much-reduced state of the empire.
Standing at little more than thirty meters high, it was smaller than the pyramids
of some of the earlier kings wives. On top of that, it was lazily constructed around
a core of mud and limestone chips. King Ibi, the man who was to be
buried under this sad monument, ruled for only two years, one month, and a day,
and likely did not control all of Egypt. Now, local nomarch governors declared
independence and ruled their provinces alone. Their tombs around this time stop
referring to the reign of a pharaoh, and are full of boasts and elaborate titles
that they seem to have invented for themselves. One tomb inscription for a
powerful nomarch named Ankhtifi demonstrates how the centralized power of the king
was declining. I am the vanguard of the men,
the rear guard of the men; a leader of the land through active conduct, strong
in speech, collected in thought, for I am without Peer, who spoke out when people
were silent, on the day of fear, when Upper Egypt was silent. Ankhtifi recalls the time of famine
that swept over the land as crisis after crisis rocked the struggling Old Kingdom.
All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger to such a degree that everyone
had come to eating his children, but I managed that no one died of hunger in
this province. The entire country had become like a starved grasshopper, with
people going to the north and to the south in search of grain.
Egypt was now fracturing into something like the shape it had been before King
Narmer had fused it into a stable centralized state nearly eight hundred
years before. Refugees were flooding the roads. Another later Egyptian writer
called Ipuwer, who lived in the period following this chaos, describes people
resorting to theft to survive, and violence spreading. The guardians of the house say, Let us go
and steal. The snarers of birds have formed themselves into armed bands. The
peasants of the delta have provided themselves with shields. A man regards
his son as his enemy. The wrongdoer is in every place. The inundation of the Nile
comes, yet no one goes out to plough. Ipuwer describes a widespread economic
collapse, during which trade from foreign lands dried up.
The skilled masons who built pyramids now labor on farms, and those who tended
the boat of the gods are yolked together in ploughing.
Men do not go on voyages today. What shall we do for cedar wood for
our mummies, in coffins of which priests are buried, and with the oil of which men
are embalmed? They come no longer. Everything
is in ruins. Laughter is dead. If I only knew where god was,
I would make offerings to him. Throughout this period of about two
hundred years, some at least must have dreamed of a better time awaiting them in the
future. Another text written after this time, known as the Prophecy of Neferti,
contains a prediction that a ruler would come who would end this time of strife. A king will come. He will take the
white crown; he will wear the red crown. He will unite the two mighty lands.
Rejoice, ye people of his time. The Asiatics will fall to his sword, and the
Libyans will fall to his flame. The rebels belong to his wrath, and the
treacherous in heart belong to the awe of him.
The man who would fulfill this prophecy, or rather, the man in whose
reign the prophecy was more likely written, would reunite Egypt and usher in
a new age of stability. His name was Nebhepetre Mentuhotep II. Mentuhotep was a king in the city of
Thebes in Upper Egypt. Sitting on the eastern bank of the
Nile, about eight hundred kilometers from the Mediterranean, Thebes is one of the sunniest
and driest cities in the world. It had been the capital of its own province
throughout the Old Kingdom, but had always been something of a backwater and
somewhat influenced by the African culture of Nubia.
But during the more than a century of chaos that surrounded the collapse of
the Old Kingdom, Thebes slowly grew to become the capital of the south, and its
kings began referring to themselves as the great overlord of Upper Egypt.
It was a city where tightly-packed rows of houses, granaries, and workshops
clustered around the central temple to the god Amun,
and its people clearly sought a break from the suffocating influence of
the kings in Memphis. But in the north, near the
traditional center of Egyptian power, an ambitious and ruthless rival was also
amassing its forces. This was centered around the city
of Henen-Nesut in Lower Egypt, in the verdant region between the river Nile and
the great lake at Faiyum, a region that the desert Thebans dismissively called the
marshlands . This city would later be known as Heracleopolis, or the city of
Hercules . For about a hundred years during this time of dissolution, Thebes and
Henen-Nesut had fought bitter wars over small border regions, forts, and roads, but
neither side could ever gain the upper hand. That was until the reign of the
king of Thebes, Mentuhotep. He was named after the Theban god of
war, and came from a line of warlike kings. He clearly desired to bring this
series of conflicts to a decisive conclusion and reunite the fractured
kingdom of old. The final confrontation between
north and south would be sparked by a rebellion in the city of Thinis, once
home to King Narmer, and which was now one of the vassals of Thebes.
Delighted by this development, the northern power of Henen-Nesut seized
the opportunity, and marched south into the desert to capture the town. War soon raged across all
Egypt. At one point, the northerners pushed south and captured the ancient,
sacred city of Abydos, and there unleashed a wave of destruction against
its temples and palaces. One later text known as the
Instruction to Merikare purports to be written by a king of northern Henen-Nesut,
who is racked with guilt for the destruction of this sacred city.
Lo, a shameful deed occurred in my time; the province of Theese was ravaged.
Though it happened through my doing, I learned it after it was done. There was
retribution for what I had done, for it is evil to destroy.
Beware of it! A blow is repaid by its like. To every action, there is a response. This response would come in the
form of a thundering reprisal by the king of Thebes, Mentuhotep. He would march into the north and
defeat the armies of Henen-Nesut. Next, he rounded on the northern
capital. When he captured it, all of the funerary monuments of its kings were
defaced and destroyed, perhaps suggesting a sacking of the city. Whatever the
northerners had done to the sacred center of Abydos, it was clearly visited
upon them and their city tenfold. Mentuhotep now swept through
Northern Egypt, and the provincial governors saw the writing on the wall,
and swore fealty to him. After nearly two centuries of dissolution, the two halves
of Egypt were once again united. The period that followed, known as the
Middle Kingdom of Egypt, would last for around three hundred years, but it has not
left an impressive archaeological record. Compared to the towering pyramids
of the Old Kingdom and the architectural magnificence of the later New Kingdom, it
stands out as something of a dull time for grand monument construction.
But it did experience a flourishing in another area; that is, in
the realm of Egyptian literature. One famous story written
around this time is called the Tale of Sinuhe. It narrates the life of a man who
traveled north into Palestine and beyond, but who eventually becomes homesick and
decides to return to Egypt. Another collection of stories was
written around this time, a kind of ancient Arabian Nights, known as the
Tales of Wonder. It relates a number of
fantastical stories, imagining that they were told to the great Pharaoh Khufu of
the Old Kingdom by his three sons. Another story written during the
Middle Kingdom is known as the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, a kind of ancient
Gulliver s Travels. It is remarkable for its innovative structure, a tale within a
tale about a sailor shipwrecked in the Mediterranean who finds himself on an
island ruled by a gigantic serpent. A storm came up, with us on the
open sea, and no chance for us to reach harbor. The wind grew sharp and made a
constant moaning, and there were hungry fourteen-foot-high waves.
A piece of wood of some sort hit me, and then the ship was dead.
Of all those fine men, not a one survived. Then I was carried to a desert
island by a swell of the great green sea. The man speaks with the great serpent,
who tells him a sad story of his own, that his whole family was killed when a
star fell to Earth. The serpent tells the man not to fear, that a ship will
eventually pass by the island and rescue him, and reassures him that he will soon
have a great story to tell. Now, you are going to spend one
month, and then another, until you finish four months on this island; then a ship
will come from Egypt with sailors in it whom you know, that you may go with them
toward home and die in your own city. What joy for one who lives, to tell
the things he has been through when the suffering is over! Finally, the predicted ship arrives, and
the man is rescued. At last the ship arrived just as
he had foretold. I climbed a lofty tree and recognized the sailors in the ship,
and went running to report it. Then I descended to the shore near where
the ship was. I hailed the crew and offered thanks beside the sea to the Lord of
the Isle, and those on board did likewise. We have examples of myths and
legends written before this time, and religious texts, but this is not the
story of some bygone king or the actions of the gods. It's a story about an
ordinary man in a fantastical situation, told seemingly just for the
entertainment value of telling a story, and for that reason, it is possibly the
first true piece of literature. It was likely written around the year 1900 BC, and is
therefore nearly four thousand years old. The lives of Egypt's pharaohs take up so
much of the usual discussion of its history partly because they are the ones
who commissioned the inscriptions, the monuments, and the statues. But as the
Middle Kingdom's flourishing of literature continued, we get more and
more of a sense of what life was like for ordinary people in the Nile
Valley. One text of this period known as the Papyrus Lansing gives a
fascinating insight into the lives of Egypt's common people.
It is written as a piece of rhetoric by a master scribe to one of
his pupils, attempting to convince him to become a scribe in turn, and from
this, we get a wonderful impression of all the ways that people could
make their living in the land of Egypt. Young fellow writing, to him who
knows it, is more profitable than any profession. It is pleasanter than bread
and beer, than clothing, than oil. Yes, it is more precious than an inheritance in
Egypt, than a tomb in the west. Look for thyself with your own eye; here, all the
professions are set before you. The washer-man spends the whole day going
up and down, every limb of his is a-weary, whitening the clothes of his neighbors
every day. The potter is smeared with mud, like
a man in mourning; his hands and feet are full of clay. He is like one who lives in
the bog. The cobbler mixes tanning lotions;
his odor is marked, his hands are red with dye, like one who is smeared with
his blood. The florist makes bouquets and
makes the wine jar stands beautiful; he spends a night of toil sweating, like one
on whose body the sun is shining. The merchants fare downstream and
upstream, and are as busy as can be, carrying wares from one town to another,
and supplying him that hath not. If thou hast any
sense, be a scribe. Whether or not daily life was truly that
bad for all these other workers, we can't tell, because of course, none of them
wrote down how they felt. Most of Egypt's people were peasant
farmers, and even when they practiced these other professions, they likely
engaged in some farming, too. These peasants did not own the land they
worked, and were required to give most of the food they produced to the crown or
to their local temple. To supplement their diets, most
houses kept private kitchen gardens, too, which the women would tend while the men
went out to the fields. Egyptian women were also
responsible for baking the bread they ate every day.
Bread in Egypt was made primarily with emmer wheat. Dough was often pressed
into clay molds and baked, and at times, people got creative, baking bread in
spirals like the cinnamon swirl, and using shaped molds to bake loaves in the form
of animals. Those who could afford it also
baked cakes and pastries out of the finest flour, sweetened with dates and
honey. Alongside their bread, Egyptians ate a
varied diet including garlic and spring onions, lettuce, celery, cucumbers, gourds,
and melons. They supplemented these with high-
protein beans and pulses, like lentils and chickpeas, and a kind of edible tuber
known as a tiger nut that grows at the base of wetland sedges.
All of this was cooked in olive oil, at least from the time the
pyramids were built. At times, they would also eat meat,
primarily beef, lamb, pork, and goat, as well as quail, pigeon, duck, geese, and
partridge. Mice were even eaten at times, and even hedgehogs.
The Egyptians cooked these spiky creatures by wrapping them in wet
clay and baking them in it, and when the clay was cracked open afterwards, it took
the hedgehog's spines with it. The Egyptians also made cheese and even foie gras,
made from force-feeding geese. One text written by a scribe to
the queen Nefertari urges people to share with others the food they have.
Do not eat bread while another stands by without extending your hand to
him. As to food, it is here always. It is man who does not last; one man is rich,
another is poor, but food remains for him who shares it.
Beer was exceptionally popular in Egypt, and people consumed it daily. As a
result, breweries were important centers of industry.
Beer was thought to have been given to Egypt by the goddess Hathor, the
goddess of beauty, music, and dancing, and breweries were watched over by the
goddess Tenenet; so, fittingly, many beer factories were run by women. Some of
these were enormous and were capable of brewing more than a million liters a
year. They used large pottery vats propped up on mud bricks over crackling
fires, and inside these they heated barley and water, then left the mixture
to ferment before flavoring the brew with honey and syrups made of dates and
other fruit. There was even one annual festival
called the Tekh Festival, that would become known as the Festival of Drunkenness . During this fiesta, Egyptians
would drink as much beer as they could, and then fall asleep together in a large
hall. They would then be awoken all together by the loud beating of drums. It
was said that in the moment just after waking, some of them would meet the
goddess Hathor herself. Egypt was one of the most stable
and prosperous agricultural societies in the ancient world, but it was a society
built entirely on the collection and storage of grain. As a result, there was
one ever-present danger; that was the presence of mice and rats.
Grain was stored in large circular granaries within the towns, shaped like
beehives, and freshly-harvested wheat or barley was poured in through a hole in
the top to be preserved in the hot, dry air. When grain was needed for bread-
making or beer-brewing, it was taken from a small door in the bottom of these
granaries. But if mice got into this storage or even ate the grain while it was still
in the fields, then thousands of hours of work could be wasted, and people might
even starve. But thankfully, Egyptians were
able to rely on one particular set of allies; that was the domestic cat. There were two major breeds of wild
cat native to Egypt; the jungle cat, or Felis chaus, and the African wild cat,
Felis silvestris lybica. Of these, the African wild cat had
something of a calmer temperament, and so, was most commonly bred as a pet, with
evidence of their domestication in Egypt from at least five thousand years ago. These cats were kept around Egyptian
settlements for their obvious utility both in controlling mice and with their
almost supernatural reflexes for their ability to kill venomous snakes.
But it's clear that the Egyptians also enjoyed their company, and even
loved them. Some particularly beloved pets were
buried with tiny offerings intended to serve them well in the cat afterlife.
The Greek writer Diodorus of Sicily recalls seeing Egyptians performing
burial ceremonies for their cats. When one of these animals dies, they
wrap it in fine linen, and then, wailing and beating their breasts, carry it off
to be embalmed, and after it has been treated with cedar oil and such spices
as have the quality of imparting a pleasant odor and of preserving the body
for a long time, they lay it away in a consecrated tomb. While the earliest domestication of the
house cat took place elsewhere in the fertile crescent, it was in Egypt that it
accelerated dramatically. As cats got used to their
new survival niche, they in turn began to adapt. They largely lost their original
camouflage coatings, became smaller, and even developed new ways of signaling to
their human patrons with soft insistent cries, modulated
to similar frequencies as a human baby.
Fittingly, the Egyptian word for cat was miu . Over time, this adoration of their
feline companions seems to have become a religious reverence, too.
With their ease and grace, cats in Egypt were associated with femininity,
and paintings in tombs often show the house household dog sitting below a
man's chair while a cat sits under the woman's chair.
One goddess named Bastet would soon become revered, and she manifested
as a woman with the head of a house cat. Bastet became a god of fertility, and
women would appeal to her during times of childbirth and pregnancy.
Diodorus later records seeing an Egyptian festival during which cats
were ritually fed. For the cats, they break up bread
into milk, and calling them with a clucking sound, set it before them, or
else they cut up fish caught in the Nile and feed the flesh to them raw. All who
meet these animals fall down before them and render them with honor.
The Egyptians were also fiercely protective of their feline companions, as
Diodorus recounts. Whoever kills a cat, whether
intentionally or unintentionally, he is certainly put to death,
for common people gather in crowds and deal with the perpetrator most
cruelly, sometimes doing this without waiting for a trial.
The worship and veneration of cats would continue throughout all the
thousands of years of Ancient Egyptian history, and for the cats, it is perhaps
something that they have never quite forgotten. The Middle Kingdom was not
just a time of entertainment and pleasure. With the mania for pyramid-
building somewhat subsided, certain pharaohs engaged in large-scale
construction projects to strengthen and develop the empire. One king spent much
of his life on a vast irrigation project around the oasis at Faiyum, determined to
turn it into a productive swathe of farmland. Another built a large series of
defensive walls in the Nile Delta, hemming Egypt off from the people of the
wider Middle East, whom the Egyptians called Asiatics.
These people were often depicted in their paintings with lighter,
more yellowish skin than the Egyptians, and were held in general contempt as
uncivilized barbarians. The Egyptians soon began
pushing their sphere of influence into this area, expanding their territory
north along the Mediterranean coast and into Palestine. They crossed the Sinai
Desert and subjugated the Phoenician city of Byblos. Then they turned their
attention south to Eastern Africa, what the Egyptians called the horizon lands ,
the lands of the Nubians. Like the light-skinned Asiatics in the
north, the Egyptians considered the southern Nubians different to them, and
usually depicted them with darker skin than Egyptians, and more typically
African features. At this time, these kingdoms were relatively underdeveloped,
and were easy prey for an aggressive and expansionist Egypt. We've already seen that the first
cataract of the Nile was at Aswan, where the granite bedrock forced the water
into a series of rushing whitewater rapids. If an Ancient Egyptian traveled
upriver beyond Aswan and into the horizon lands, they would encounter five
more major cataracts of the Nile. These are each places where the
river becomes shallow and travel by boat becomes difficult, and so, there were
natural stops along any journey upriver. They were also the obvious place to draw
borders. During the Middle Kingdom, Egypt marched into the horizon lands multiple
times, and pushed its southern border as far as the second cataract.
Around the 1860s BC, one Middle Kingdom king named Senusret III marched
even further south into the Nubian kingdoms of Kush and Punt. He
remembers this brutal campaign in one inscription. The Nubians are wretches,
craven-hearted. My Majesty has seen it; it is not an untruth. I have captured their
women, I have carried off their subjects, poisoned their wells, killed their cattle,
cut down their grain, set fire to it. In this remorseless fashion, Senusret
marched beyond the second cataract and built a powerful set of fortresses.
We get a sense for their purpose from the names the Egyptians
gave to them. One of them at Askut was named Crushing the Nubians , while another
at Shalfak was named Subduing the Foreign Lands . In another imposing fortress at
Semna, now more than four hundred kilometers upstream from the former border of Aswan,
Senusret left a stone monument with the following triumphant inscription.
Year 16, third month of winter; the king made his southern
boundary. I have made my boundary further south than my father's. I have added to
what was bequeathed me. As for any son of mine, who shall maintain this border
which my Majesty has made, he is my son. But he who abandons it, who fails to
fight for it, he is not my son. He was not born to me. These forts were manned by powerful
units of Egyptian soldiers tasked with keeping order among the newly-colonized
Nubians. To this end, they engaged in a paranoid surveillance regime of the
local people. To the pharaoh Senusret, they sent back
constant updates on papyrus scrolls about the movements of even the most
minute groups of Nubians, some of which have survived.
The patrol who went forth to patrol the desert edge from the fortress
Khesef-Medja ew in year 3, month three of the growing season, have come to report to me
saying, we have found the tracks of thirty-two men and three donkeys. All these dispatches end in the same way,
with the same comforting offer of reassurance to the king.
All the affairs of the king's domain are safe and sound. All the affairs
of the master are safe and sound. But we have reason to believe that
King Senusret was not entirely reassured. He is famous for the numerous
sculptures he had made of himself, statues carved from black diorite that
depict him in strangely realistic fashion, unlike any depictions of a
pharaoh that had come before. In these statues, his ears are extended to
enormous proportions like a bat, perhaps projecting the image of a king who heard
every movement in his kingdom, relayed by his extensive system of spies.
Three of these statues in particular show the king first as a boy,
then as a man, and finally in old age. In this final statue, we get a sense for the
mental toll it took on a man to sit at the top of this paranoid system; the
pharaoh's weary sunken eyes, his haggard face contorted in an expression of
eternal worry. Today, these three statues stand as
a kind of metaphor for the state the Egyptian Middle Kingdom had sunk into
during during its final decades. Senusret's son, Amenemhat III, did
just as his father's inscriptions had urged, and held the southern border
against the Nubians. But following his reign, Egypt
was once more plunged into a succession crisis. The crisis was so severe that
their next king was something that had until then been almost unthinkable; a
woman. Her name was Sobekneferu, possibly the
daughter, sister, or wife of the previous pharaoh. She was probably not the first
woman to hold power in Egypt, but she was the first one to attain the full
official title of a king. Sobekneferu used masculine titles in her inscriptions, and
one statue of her even shows her wearing an unconventional mixture of male and
female clothing. However, she did not succeed in
slowing the dynasty's decline. She died after ruling for only four
years, and did not leave any heirs. After that, the serpent Isfet
uncoiled once more, and Egypt slid into chaos. During the time that followed,
known as the Second Intermediate Period, there were 150 years during which at
least fifty kings ruled. Egypt once again split in two, and
local governors stopped mentioning the king in their tomb inscriptions.
The pyramids of this period had already become small and meager,
mostly built from mud brick, but now their construction stopped altogether.
Some kings were even buried in simple shaft tombs, little better than
commoners. Much of the Nile Delta of Lower Egypt had already broken away from
the empire, and now in the south, the people of Nubia were in open
rebellion. One by one, the Egyptians were forced to let go of their southern forts,
abandoning them to the Nubians. Once a symbol of the empire's
confidence, these powerful fortresses now became unprecedented military assets for
their enemies, and bases from which powerful raiding parties ranged ever
farther into Egypt. The cruelty that the Egyptians had shown to their Nubian
neighbors was now being paid back in full. With the northern and southern
borders convulsed in conflict, Egypt's trade links with the rest of the world
were severely disrupted. It was also during this time
or perhaps later that the entire Mediterranean, in fact,
most of the world, witnessed one of the largest natural disasters in
human history. That is the eruption of the
volcano Thera, now known as the Greek island of Santorini, only seven hundred
kilometers from the Egyptian coast. It's likely that the Egyptians
would have heard the deep boom of this explosion, which went off with the force
of several hundred atomic bombs. When the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa
erupted in 1883, the explosion was heard more than three thousand kilometers away,
and it s thought that the Thera explosion was at least four times more
powerful. Today, the seawater-filled volcanic crater left by the eruption is
more than ten kilometers wide. This event may have ejected more than forty
square kilometers of rock into the atmosphere. The black plume would have
been riven with volcanic lightning, and it would have triggered tsunamis ten meters
high that would have devastated coastal regions, as well as causing a volcanic
winter. The eruption may have wiped out the Minoan civilization on Crete in one
blow, perhaps inspiring part of the Atlantis myth, and
chronicles as far away as China record a period when the sky turned a
strange yellow color, and crop yields fell. One Egyptian inscription known as
the Tempest Stelae may record some memory of this terrifying event. The gods expressed their discontent.
The gods made the sky come with a tempest. It caused darkness in the
western region. The sky was unleashed, more powerful on the mountains than the
turbulence of the cataract at Aswan. Each house, each shelter that they
reached, were floating in the water like the barks of papyrus outside the royal
residence for days. Volcanic ash, or tephra, would have
begun to rain down on the whole region, and today could be detected at virtually
every site in the Eastern Mediterranean. Spurred by this natural disaster and
exacerbated by the collapse of the Egyptian administration, soon famine once
more descended on the land. Among all of this, a powerful and
mysterious force of outsiders must have been watching.
They came from the Eastern Mediterranean region from across the
Sinai Desert, and they intended to conquer Egypt and rule it for themselves.
These people were known as the Hyksos. The word Hyksos comes from the
Egyptian phrase hekau khasut , meaning rulers of foreign lands .
Where exactly the Hyksos were from is unknown, but it's thought they may
have originated in the region of Syria, and one thing seems to have been behind
their great military success, and that was the chariot. At this point, some form of
chariot had been used by various societies for many
centuries. Vehicles like a kind of war cart with four solid, wooden wheels
pulled by donkeys are depicted on the Sumerian standard of Ur, which was
created around the time that the pyramids of Giza were being built. But
Egypt had never experimented with this kind of vehicle, and over the preceding
millennium, the technology had taken huge leaps forward.
The chariots that the Hyksos brought into Egypt for the first time
had two wheels with spokes, light and fast, and they were each pulled by two
powerful animals that had been recently introduced to the region, the horse. These chariots were strong and mobile
battle platforms that could break enemy battle lines, while onboard archers with
powerful bows could pelt enemies with missiles. Whether the Hyksos arrived in
Egypt as a violent invasion or a more peaceful migration is somewhat up for
debate. People from the north have been settling in the Nile Delta for centuries,
and much of the population there was already what the Egyptians would
consider foreign by the time the Hyksos rulers arrived. But the Hyksos were
clearly not pacifists. They set up their own kingdom
in the Nile Delta, with its capital at Avaris, and in a devastating blow to
Egyptian morale, even swept south to capture the ancient capital of Memphis.
One much later source named Manetho records the arrival of the Hyksos. By main force, they easily seized the
country without striking a blow, and having overpowered the rulers of the
land, they then burned our cities ruthlessly, razed to the ground the
temples of the gods. Finally, they appointed as king one
of the number he had his seat at Memphis, levying tribute from Upper and Lower
Egypt, and always leaving garrisons behind in the most advantageous positions.
The pyramids, that great symbol of Egyptian prestige, were now in foreign
hands. Egyptian kings would now retreat back to their former capital in Upper
Egypt, the city of Thebes. With the Nubians increasingly
powerful in the south, and now the new threat of these Hyksos kings looming from
the north, the weakened Egyptians increasingly felt like they were being
crushed in a vice. For a time, it must have seemed like the
age of an independent Egypt was over. One king named Kamose, who came to
the throne of Thebes around 1555 BC, would put this intolerable situation in
the following terms. I should like to know what serves
this strength of mine when a chieftain is in Avaris and another in Kush, and I
sit united with an Asiatic and a Nubian, each in possession of his slice of Egypt,
and I cannot pass by him as far as Memphis. No man can settle down when
despoiled by the taxes of the Asiatics. I will grapple with him, that I may rip
open his belly! My wish is to save Egypt and to smite the Asiatic! King Kamose may have had a very personal
reason to hate the Hyksos. The mummified remains of the
previous pharaoh, his father, have been uncovered, and modern analysis shows that
he suffered brutal wounds to the head from a heavy, bladed weapon. These blows
must have sliced his cheek and fractured his jaw and skull, leading many to
conclude that he died on the battlefield. The king's body was then rushed back to
Thebes, where it was hastily mummified. If Prince Kamose saw his
father's body in this state as it was carried back into the city, we can only
imagine the kind of hatred that must have burned in his heart towards the
Hyksos invaders in the north. But many in Kamose's court were
clearly afraid of what a war with the Hyksos would do to the fragile state of
the country. One text known as the Carnarvon Tablet
describes how they appealed to their king to maintain the peace.
We are tranquil in our part of Egypt. Aswan at the first cataract is
strong, and the middle part of the land is with us. Men till for us the finest of
their lands. They allow our cattle to pasture in the papyrus marshes. Corn is
sent for our swine. Our cattle are not taken away. He holds the land of the
Asiatics; we hold Egypt. Only when one comes against us, should we act against him.
But Kamose refused. He wanted to strike a blow at
the Hyksos, but he knew that he would have to secure the southern border first and
recapture the old fortress of Buhen, just before the second cataract of the Nile.
Buhen was one of the strong-walled bastions built by Senusret III, and it was
one of the only forts the Egyptians built from stone rather than brick. But
since the collapse of the Middle Kingdom, its garrison had served a Nubian lord
from the kingdom of Kush. If the southern border was to hold
while Kamose expelled the Hyksos in the north, he would need to recapture the
fort of Buhen. Kamose marched south, preparing to
assault the fort, but it seems that upon sighting the enormous Egyptian army on
the horizon, the citizens of the fortress got the message and decided to swear
allegiance to the pharaoh without a fight. With this powerful fort now
holding the south, Kamose marched back to Thebes and prepared for the next
campaign season, when he would seek to bring war to the Hyksos and unite Egypt
once more. In the third year of his reign,
Kamose struck. I sailed north in my might to
repel the Asiatics through the command of Amun, with my brave army before me
like a flame of fire and the archers atop our fighting decks.
Kamose's fleet descended swiftly on the Hyksos in what appears to have been
something of a surprise attack. Caught off guard, the foreigners were defeated
and the vengeance of Kamose was terrible. When day dawned, I was upon him
as if it were a hawk. When breakfast time came, I overthrew him, having destroyed
his walls and slaughtered his people, and made his wife descend to the river bank.
My army acted like lions with their spoil chattels, cattle, fat, honey dividing
their things, their hearts joyful. As for Avaris on the two rivers, I laid
it waste without inhabitants; I destroyed their towns and burned their homes to
reddened ruin-heaps forever, because of the destruction they
had wrought in the midst of Egypt; they who had allowed themselves to hearken to
the call of the Asiatics, had forsaken Egypt, their mistress.
The king of the Hyksos immediately appealed to his Nubian ally,
the king of Kush, for help. At one point, the Egyptians intercepted a secret
message traveling south along the desert roads, the contents of which they recorded. Have you noticed what Egypt has
done against me? The ruler who is there, Kamose, penetrates my territory even
though I have not attacked him as he has you. He chooses these two lands in
order to afflict them, my land and yours, and he has ravaged them. Come northward;
do not flinch. Then we shall divide up the towns of Egypt. When this messenger returned to
the embattled Hyksos king, shamefaced and with the letter undelivered, he must have
known that all was lost. The war came to a swift end, and Kamose
recounts, with perhaps some exaggeration, his heroic return to Thebes. What a happy home trip for the
ruler! Life! Prosperity! Happiness! With his army ahead of him! They had no casualties,
nor did anyone blame his fellow, nor did their hearts weep! I moored on home soil
during the season of inundation; the riverbank was resplendent! Thebes was
festive; women and men had come to see me, every woman hugged her neighbor, no one
was tearful. His son Ahmose would press this
advantage, and in an even more devastating campaign, seized the ancient
capital of Memphis. Ahmose would be the first
pharaoh in at least a hundred years to recapture the great pyramids of Giza, and
we can imagine imagine his feelings as he gazed up at the monuments of his
ancestors Khufu and Khafre, by now already more than a thousand years old.
It's clear that the site inspired him, and he would even build a pyramid of
his own in Upper Egypt at the site of Abydos. This was one of the first
pyramids built for an Egyptian pharaoh since the fall of the Middle Kingdom, and
it was clearly designed as a symbol of renewal of the empire's great legacy.
But it would also be the last ever pyramid built by an Egyptian ruler.
After securing the Nile Delta, Ahmose marched north and even crossed the
Sinai, smashing through the traditional heartland of the Hyksos people, and seizing
territory in Palestine in the region of modern Gaza.
After that, he returned to the southern people of Kush, and pushed the
empire's borders farther south than they had ever been,
beyond the second cataract to the river island of Sai, now in northern
Sudan. From its lowest ebb, Egypt had suddenly reemerged as a major regional
power. This was the age of the New Kingdom. During the five centuries of the New
Kingdom, Egypt would reach its greatest territorial extent and construct some of
its most impressive monuments and artifacts. Despite recapturing Memphis,
its kings saw no reason to move the capital again, and so they now once again
ruled from the city of Thebes, far up the river in Upper Egypt.
By now, Egypt had also adopted the technology of the horse-drawn chariot from
their Hyksos foes, and its armies were now made up of powerful contingents of these
vehicles. During these centuries, Egypt saw the rule of its first great woman
pharaoh, Hatshepsut, who was one of its most prolific builders. She constructed the
towering temple complex at Karnak and the stately mortuary temple known as the
Holy of Holies. She also undertook a voyage in five ships to the land of Punt,
somewhere in Africa, and brought back incense trees and other goods to Egypt,
which she celebrated in one inscription. The ships returned with the
marvels of the land of Punt and with all the good woods of Ta-Netjer, with heaps of
incense, with trees producing green fragrance, with ebony and pure ivory,
with gold and green agates found in the land of the Amu, with hides of the
panthers of the south. Never since the beginning of the world have the like of
these wonders been brought by any king. The New Kingdom would also see some
of the most striking dramas emerge in the royal courts of Egypt. Of these, none
have drawn so much attention as the story of one pharaoh. He has been
described by some as a revolutionary, by others as a visionary, and by others
still as simply insane. He was a ruler named Amunhotep IV. Amunhotep came to the throne around
1350 BC. He had inherited his name from his father, who had ruled as Amunhotep III. Like most Egyptian names, it
included the name of a god, Amun, and it meant Amun is satisfied . Amun had long been the god of
the city of Thebes, and was considered the god of fertility and of the wind. But
when the Hyksos were expelled from Egypt and Thebes became the capital once more,
this god Amun was given something of a promotion. He was unified with the
sun god Ra to create a compound deity now known as Amun-Ra, the perfect symbol
of the power of a new united Egypt. Amun-Ra was depicted as a man
bearing a golden staff and wearing a high crown, and later would be shown with
blue skin. This new deity was placed at the
head of all the various gods that the Egyptians worshiped; the king of the
gods and creator of the universe. One hymn to Amun-Ra describes
the primacy of his position. Lord of truth, father of the
gods, maker of men, creator of all animals, lord of things that are, creator of the
staff of life. The pharaoh Amunhotep IV would
keep his name for the first four years of his rule, but around his fifth year on
the throne, he made the unprecedented decision to change his royal name. That's
because he had a vision of a new system of belief that he wanted to spread over
all of Egypt. He wanted to do away with the messiness of Egyptian religion and
the system of different gods in different cities, different temples and
cults and priests. He devised a new system of worship that focused not on
any god but on the sun itself, which he seems to have believed was his true
father. This new god would be depicted as a bare, impersonal disc showering the
Earth with beams of light. It would be called simply the orb, or in Egyptian, the
Aten. One surviving hymn to the Aten, perhaps even written by the pharaoh
himself, shows the enormous power this new god was supposed to have. O sole god, like whom there is no
other, thou didst create the world according to thy desire.
You are in my heart; there is no other who knows you. Every land chatters
at his rising every day. Around year five of his reign, the
pharaoh Amunhotep abandoned his old name that paid respect to the god Amun,
and changed it to a new name for his new god. This new name meant effective spirit
for the Aten . He was now the pharaoh Akhenaten. Akhenaten is the first recorded
person in history to have started a new religion by himself. He was also the
first monotheist. In Akhenaten s kingdom, only the
Aten could be worshiped. Temples to Amun were eventually shut down, and all
worship of the former god was banned. The king even sent out workmen and soldiers
to all corners of Egypt, where they burst into temples with hammers and chisels,
and chipped the name of Amun off the walls. His determination to rid his
kingdom of Amun was so great that he even sent workmen climbing to the top of
the red pyramid of Sneferu to chip the name of Amun from the pyramid's topmost
capstone. To the Egyptians, used as they were to placating a whole host of deities
with prayers and offerings, this radical shift must have seemed like a
frightening and risky gamble. Many must have feared to turn their backs on their
old, trusted gods and consort with this new and untested ideology.
But the king's word was the king's word, and for the most part, they
seem to have fallen into line. At first, Akhenaten converted old
temples in Thebes to the Aten, and even began constructing some new ones, but he
soon went off the idea. Thebes' old temples were
covered with carvings and hieroglyphs praising the other gods, and the depth of
their history couldn't be erased overnight. Thebes was also home to a
powerful priestly class that resisted his reforms.
In answer to this problem, Akhenaten took the remarkable decision to build an
entirely new capital. He would build it out in the middle of the desert, at a
completely uninhabited location halfway between Memphis and Thebes. He would
call this city the horizon of the Aten , or in Egyptian, Akhetaten. Standing out on the bare and level
plain where he hoped to build his new city, the pharaoh Akhenaten gave the
following proclamation to his courtiers. The Aten desires that there
be made for him a monument with an eternal and everlasting name.
It is Aten, my father, who gave me counsel concerning it. No official has
ever given me counsel, not any of the people who are in the entire land.
At Akhetaten, I shall make the house of Aten. This new city would be furnished
with everything a royal capital needed; palaces for Akhenaten and his chief wife
Nefertiti, along with his four other wives, gardens, tombs, administrative buildings,
and workshops, and of course, a vast temple complex to the new god, Aten.
Construction of this city would take at least eight years, and when it was
finished, in the twelfth year of his reign, Akhenaten held a magnificent
ceremony. The year was 1342 BC. At his new capital, Akhenaten received
delegations from all over the region, from the Hittites, from Syria and islands
in the Mediterranean like Cyprus and Crete, as well as from the Nubian lands
of Punt and Kush in the south, all here to bear witness to the glory of his new
city and his successful conversion of his empire.
The priests may have grumbled, the common people may have fretted, but he
had finally done it. The ceremony must have been grand, full of celebration and
pomp, musicians and dancers, the burning of incense, and feasts of fine foods.
We can imagine the foreign guests listening to the singing of hymns like
the following to the new god, Aten. Thou didst create the world
according to thy desire; all men, cattle, and wild beasts, whatever is on Earth
going upon its feet, and what is on high, flying with its wings. The countries of
Syria and Nubia, the land of Egypt, thou settest every man in his place, thou suppliest their necessities. Their tongues are separate in speech, and their natures as well. Every one has his food, and his time of life is reckoned. But the consequences of this piece
of royal pageantry were dire. A plague had been spreading around the
Middle East for some time now, affecting lands in Syria and the Hittite Empire in
what is now Turkey. One group of texts written around
this time, known as the Hittite Plague Prayers, invoke the gods to deliver them
from this disaster. For twenty years now, people have
been dying in Hatti. Will the plague never be removed from Hatti? I cannot control
the worry in my heart. I can no longer control the anguish of my soul.
With foreign dignitaries coming from all over the region with large
entourages and doubtless groups of slaves in tow, a deadly dose of this
disease arrived that year in the heart of Egypt, and from there would have
spread all up and down the Nile. If Akhenaten had hoped that this ceremony
would secure his people's confidence in his new god, then it couldn't have
backfired more dramatically. In the pandemic that
followed, no one was safe. Numerous deaths may even have occurred within Akhenaten's
family, perhaps including his mother, his wife, and three of his
daughters. If the situation was so severe, even in the relatively protected
royal court, we can assume that in the population at large, the effects were
even more devastating. For the people of Egypt, this incomprehensible disaster
must have seemed like the judgment of the old gods on the man who had so
arrogantly turned his back on them. Akhenaten died only a few years later,
around 1335 BC, after seventeen years of rule. After his death, some members of his
family attempted to maintain the cult of the Aten in the now plague-ravaged new
capital of Akhetaten. They would take turns to rule for
the next four years, but seemingly without much success.
Now, the whole empire seemed like it was teetering on the brink of
collapse. But eventually, one of Akhenaten s sons, a boy of only eight years old,
came to the throne. His father had given him the
hopeful name Tutankh-Aten, or living image of the Aten , but he would not rule
under it for long. Turning his back on his father's new faith and to enormous
celebration around the empire, in the third year of his rule, he changed his
name to the one we now remember him by, the living image not of Aten, but of
the old god Amun, now triumphantly welcomed back by the people of Egypt.
His name was Tutankh-Amun. As symbolized by his change of name,
the boy king Tutankh-Amun rowed back a great number of his father's attempted reforms.
He ended all worship of the god Aten, and reinstated Amun to supremacy in
Thebes. Tutankh-Amun lifted the ban on the cults of other gods, and restored the
traditional privileges of the priesthood. Many temples to the Aten in
Thebes and elsewhere were torn down, and their painted bricks were used as filler
in the walls of other temples. Everyone seemed to be in agreement; the
whole sorry business of Akhenaten was better off forgotten. Today, the boy king Tutankh-Amun
is perhaps the most famous of all the Egyptian pharaohs, more famous than the
great Khufu and Khafre of Giza, or the pharaoh's Djoser and Sneferu, who perfected
the pyramid form. He's more famous than Kamose or Ahmose,
who reunited the kingdom and expelled the Hyksos, more famous than his colorful
father Akhenaten or the great queen Hatshepsut. But there's nothing in his reign
that really warrants that level of recognition. In fact, this boy king died
while still a teenager after only nine years of rule.
He does seem to have been a good king, and popular, and set Egypt back on
course after his father's erratic reign. But the source of his fame was really
one of absolute historical accident. When he died in 1323 BC, the boy
king Tutankh-Amun was buried in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings. It was not a
particularly resplendent royal tomb, and a far cry from the glorious pyramids of
the Old Kingdom. But shortly after it was sealed, there was a chance flash flood in
this portion of the necropolis, and the doorway to the tomb was buried in sand
and rock. This left it completely concealed. For the next
3,300 years, tomb robbers would scour the Valley of the Kings, stealing from nearly
every one of the great pharaoh's tombs, making away with their treasures,
removing their mummies, and despoiling their decorations.
But buried in the sand, Tutankh-Amun s tomb remains sealed.
For this reason, it was completely untouched until the year 1922,
when it was uncovered by the Egyptologist Howard Carter, and all its
artifacts were recovered to international astonishment.
Today, the most glorious of these, the golden burial mask of Tutankh-Amun,
is one of the most famous objects from the ancient world, a resplendent
image of royal wealth and power. At times, it can be hard to
remember that this golden image is also a portrait of a boy who had power thrust
upon him in a time of upheaval and strife, looking up at us from the dark
depths of the ages. The New Kingdom of Egypt would
reach its highest point around fifty years after the reign of Tutankh-Amun.
It would come during the rule of perhaps the greatest Egyptian pharaoh.
He came to the throne under the name Ramesses II, but he would go down in history
as Ramesses the Great. Ramesses came to the throne at the
age of fourteen, in 1279 BC. At the time, Egypt's Mediterranean
coast was being ravaged by groups of pirates, and he spent much of his early
rule dealing with this nuisance. But he is most famous for pushing the
boundaries of Egypt far to the north into the region of Syria.
Over the preceding centuries, a powerful rival had grown up in the
mountains of what is today Turkey, and was steadily spreading its influence in
all directions. This was the powerful Hittite
Empire, centered on their hill fortress capital of Hattusha.
The Hittites were a relatively new power in the region, but their territory
was wealthy and extensive. They had mastered the use of
chariots in warfare, turning them from light hit-and-run vehicles into heavy,
armored shock troops. For the last two centuries, Egypt had been fighting
increasingly bitter wars with them over who would control the region of
Palestine. In the fourth year of his reign, Ramesses II gathered an
expeditionary force and marched across the Sinai Desert to Gaza, and from there
marched north. One epic poem written about this
expedition exalts in the enormous force that Ramesses brought. His Majesty journeyed northward, his
infantry and chariotry with him. He began to march on the good way. Every foreign
country was trembling before him. Their chiefs were bringing their tribute, and
all the rebels were coming, bowing down through dread of the personality of His Majesty. Ramesses' aim was to capture the
strong fortress city of Kadesh, situated along the sandy banks on a fork of the
Orontes River. For years now, Kadesh had been
playing the Hittites and Egypt off against one another, allying first with
one, then the other. Now, Ramesses was determined to finally seize Kadesh for Egypt. He marched north with four of his
divisions, named after the gods Amun, Ra, Seth, and Ptah. With him he brought thousands
of chariots, and one unit of elite chariot riders he sent by sea, telling
them to land on the coast and ride inland to meet him on the day that he
arrived at Kadesh. At first, everything seemed to be
going well. On his way, the pharaoh's scouts captured a pair of tribesmen from
the Shasu people, who told him that the Hittite king was cowering further to the
north. He was afraid of the might of Egypt, they said. He had left Kadesh
defenseless. Excited by this news, Ramesses threw all caution to the wind and
hastened northward to seize the city with only one of his four divisions, his
prided Amun troops, but this would prove to be a fatal mistake.
Ramesses didn't know it yet, but these Shasu tribesmen were actually
agents of the Hittite king sent to lure him into a trap. When he arrived at Kadesh, Ramesses set
up his camp beside a stony brook, and his scouts set out into the surrounding
landscape to detect any threats. Some of these scouts ran into a pair of Hittite
soldiers who had been lying low in the undergrowth, watching them. They
skirmished and the Egyptians managed to capture the Hittites.
After perhaps a stern beating, these men revealed what lay waiting for
the Egyptians nearby, the full might of the Hittite armies amassed in an ambush,
hidden behind the looming fortress of Kadesh. The Kadesh poem records this
imposing force. Now the wretched foe of Hatti had
come, having gathered all foreign countries to the very ends of the sea; the land of
Hatti in its entirety. They covered the mountains and the valleys like the
grasshoppers with their multitudes. He left neither silver nor
gold in his land, but despoiled it of all its possessions, and gave them to all
foreign countries to bring them with him to combat. Ramesses flew into a rage with his
generals for allowing this to happen. He had hurried ahead with his Amun division,
and now he was critically overstretched, with his reinforcements in the Ra
division still on the road. The Hittites would not allow the
Egyptians to regroup. Before the Ra division could arrive, a terrifying force
of 2,500 Hittite chariots burst out of hiding and swept across the river
plain. Hittite chariots were the tanks of their day, heavy and armored, their riders
covered in chain mail down to their toes. These chariots rolled in and
smashed into the Ra regiment, who frantically tried to form a shield wall.
The Hittites scattered this division completely, and then rounded on
the Egyptians camp. Ramesses was surrounded, cut off from
his reinforcements and now outnumbered. But in this dire situation,
he recounts how he rallied his men and led them in a desperate charge against
the enemy. I found the 2,500 spans of
chariotry, in whose midst I was, becoming heaps of corpses before my horse. Not
one of them found his hand to fight, for their hearts quailed in their bodies
from terror of me, and all their arms were powerless so they could not shoot,
nor find their courage to seize their javelins. Whether or not this self-
aggrandizing account is an accurate depiction of that day, it's clear that
the tide did begin to turn. The Egyptian soldiers were elite
fighters, and many of the Hittite forces may have been mercenaries or
conscripts. After destroying the Ra division and sweeping into the Egyptians
camp, the chariots became bogged down, and many of the Hittite soldiers, believing the
battle to be already over, began looting rather than press their advantage.
More Egyptian reinforcements were soon arriving from the south, and as
the bloody afternoon wore on, that contingent of elite charioteers that had
been sailing up the coast also arrived on the scene.
The arrival of this cavalry on the horizon was enough to steel the resolve
of the Egyptian troops and break the will of the Hittites. Ramesses gives a florid rendition of
what happened next. I made them plunge into the water
as crocodiles plunge, for they were falling upon their faces, one on another,
as I slew among them whom I desired. Neither could one look behind him, nor
could another turn about, and whoever of them fell, he could not raise himself. The Hittite army withdrew, with
many of their soldiers pushed into the Orontes River.
When the next day dawned, the two sides clashed again, but both had been
fatally weakened by the previous days fighting. After a few hours of bloody
slaughter, Ramesses withdrew, and the Hittite king sent him a peace offer.
The pharaoh's hands were tied. The Egyptians lacked any siege
equipment to breach the strong walls of Kadesh, and the only option to take the
city would have been a lengthy siege, during which Ramesses would have found his
forces exposed to attack, poorly supplied, and prone to encirclement.
Instead, he decided to declare victory and march back to Egypt.
The Hittites in turn also declared victory, and the city of Kadesh would
slip out of Ramesses' grasp. Despite the overflowing praise of
Ramesses and his glorious victory in the Kadesh poem, the war actually ended with
a stalemate, and the question of the city remained unresolved.
But it's clear that Ramesses thought back to his role during the
battle with no small amount of pride, and he would decorate the walls of his
temple at Abu Simbel with a vast low- relief carving of every one of the
battle s twists and turns. The war with the Hittites would
drag on for a further fifteen years, and during this time, Egypt would often
capture territory along the Mediterranean coast, only to lose it
again the very next year. Before long, both sides grew weary of this
grinding conflict. The war was finally brought to
an end with what has gone down in history as the first written peace
treaty, the text of which has survived. Behold, Hattusili, the ruler of the
Hittites, binds himself by treaty to Ramesses, chosen one of Ra, the great
ruler of Egypt, beginning today, so that perfect peace and brotherhood may be
created between us forever; he being in brotherhood and peace with me, and I
being in brotherhood and peace with him forever. The treaty was written on silver
tablets, with both the Hittites and the Egyptians being given a copy. Its text
was written in both hieroglyphics and Hittite cuneiform, but the two
translations do have slightly different wordings. In a diplomatic stroke of
genius, the Egyptian version claims that the Hittites had come begging Egypt for
peace, which the Egyptians graciously accepted, while in the Hittite version, it
is the Egyptians who asked to end the war. With both sides thus able to save
face, the destructive conflict was allowed to come to an end, and nearly a
century of relative peace ensued. Despite the the pride Ramesses took
in his battles, today it is this peace treaty that we most remember, and a
replica of it hangs on the walls of the United Nations headquarters in New York. After what seemed like a lucky
escape at Kadesh, Ramesses would turn his attention away from war and towards
construction. He spent the next decades of his rule building temples and
monuments up and down Egypt, and today, his name is the one that appears on the
most surviving monuments of any pharaoh. This is partly due to his
prolific building campaign, but also due to the fact that he ensured his name was
inscribed more deeply in the stone than any other pharaoh, so deep that it could
never be erased. Ramesses II would rule for a total of
sixty-six years, and would be remembered as perhaps Egypt's greatest pharaoh. His
full Egyptian name was Usermaatre Setepenre Ramesses, which the Greeks would later
render into a name they found easier to pronounce; they would call him Ozymandias.
More than a thousand years later, the Greek writer Diodorus of Sicily
would visit Egypt and write an account of visiting one monument to Ramesses II. At its entrance, there is a pylon
constructed of variegated stone two plethora in breadth and forty-five cubits high.
The inscription upon it runs, King of kings am I, Ozymandias.
If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one
of my works. Ramesses would also build a new capital for
his empire, and with his military ambitions lying in the north, he decided
to place it in the northeast of the Nile Delta, and in characteristic fashion, he
named it after himself, calling it Per-Ramesses, or the house of
Ramesses . One Egyptian poem would celebrate the beauty of this new city. The residence is pleasant in life; its
field is full of everything good. It is full of supplies and food every day, its
ponds with fish and its lakes with birds. Its meadows are verdant with grass, its
banks bear dates, its melons are abundant on the sands. Its granaries are so full
of barley and emmer wheat that they come near to the sky; red wedj fish swim in
the canal of the resident city, which live on lotus flowers.
This city of Per-Ramesses has long been associated with the city of Ramesses,
referred to in the Hebrew Book of Exodus, the second book of the Hebrew
Bible. Exodus describes a population of enslaved Hebrews forced to work on the
construction of the city. The reality of the Exodus story has
long been debated, and most historians now consider it to be a piece of ancient
literature. There is no evidence for a large population of Hebrew slaves ever
living in Egypt, or that the city of Per- Ramesses was built by slaves at all. More
likely, it was built using the Egyptians usual combination of skilled artisans
and seasonal peasant laborers. But with the proximity of the
Nile Delta to the Levantine coast, it's certainly not impossible that some of
these laborers were Hebrew people who had traveled across the Sinai to sell
their labor in Egypt. If that were the case, then for one
reason or another, they left no impression in the archaeological record,
but perhaps printed an indelible mark on our collective imaginations. When Ramesses finally died in 1213 BC,
he was probably nearly ninety years old. His reign had been one of Egypt's
golden ages, but his long rule had once again created that old king problem; all
of his heirs were now also old men. By the time of his death, twelve of his oldest
sons had already died, and now his thirteenth son took the throne at the age
of about seventy. He was the pharaoh Merneptah. But only a few years into this
man's reign, Egypt was attacked by a devastating new enemy.
These were the Libyan people to the west of the Nile Delta.
The king of Libya, a man named Meryey, had seemingly planned his attack
for some time. All of a sudden, a large Libyan army flooded through Egypt's
northwestern border, and they were reinforced with groups of people from
all over the Mediterranean, perhaps from Greece, Sardinia, Sicily, and elsewhere
across the sea. These were a diverse group of peoples that had suddenly begun
to appear in increasing numbers across the Eastern Mediterranean.
They would later become known as the sea peoples.
The pharaoh Merneptah remembers this event on one carved stelae. The wretched fallen chief of Libya, Meryre,
son of Ded, has fallen upon the country of Tehenu with his bowmen; Sherden, Shekelesh,
Ekwesh, Lukka, Teresh, taking the best of every warrior and every man of war of his
country. He has brought his wife and his children; leaders of the camp, and he has
reached the western boundary in the fields of Perire. The pharaoh Merneptah defeated this invasion,
and as a warning to any others who would try such a surprise attack, he had many
of the invading soldiers impaled along the road into Memphis.
The princes are prostrate, saying, Mercy! Not one raises his head among
the nine bows. Desolation is for Tehenu; Hatti is pacified; plundered is the Canaan
with every evil. Hurra is become a widow. All lands together, they are pacified. But these lands would not stay
pacified for long. After the death of the pharaoh
Merneptah around 1204 BC, Egypt entered a period of civil strife, with the
descendants of Ramesses fighting over who would take the crown.
Against this backdrop, the entire region also once again began to
experience a series of record droughts. What caused this climate
shift is uncertain. As we saw in our second
episode on the Bronze Age collapse, the cause may have been volcanic, with a large
eruption taking place in the Icelandic volcano of Hekla around this time. Others
have proposed that an eruption in Sicily around 1300 BC may have been to blame, or
that the super volcano Thera in Santorini may have resumed some activity some five
hundred years after its last enormous eruption. The cause may not have been
volcanic at all, and could have been due to variations in the sun's activity or
weather systems in the Atlantic, depriving the Mediterranean of moisture.
The reality was much as it is today; the planet's climate system is fragile,
interconnected, and chaotic, and even relatively small changes in its
equilibrium can have devastating effects. During this time, formerly green
lands became dry and arid, and more plants suited to desert landscapes
flourished. Analysis of sediment cores and oxygen isotopes in cave mineral
deposits have all shown that the 13th and 12th centuries BC saw much less rain
than the preceding centuries. Alongside this scientific
evidence, we can see marks of severe drought in the region's written records, too. Egypt's great rivals, the Hittites, in
their stony mountains, were hit particularly hard by the
drought. One Hittite text has come down to us that seems to capture the spirit
of this age, and it is known as the myth of Telepinu.
It comes from a poetic convention known as the vanishing god
myth, which describes how a certain deity is so offended by the misdeeds of
humanity that he flies into a fit of sorrow and abandons his
duties. Telepinu was a god of farming, fertility, and the weather. The beginning
of the text has been lost, so we don't know what it was humanity did to provoke
his rage, but the poem describes its deadly consequences. Thereupon, soot beset the windows;
smoke beset the house. The ashes lay crammed on the hearth. Off stalked
Telepinu. Grain and abundance he took away from field and meadow.
Off to the copses stalked Telepinu, and in a copse he buried
himself. Forthwith, the seed ceased to yield produce; oxen, sheep, and men ceased
to breed, while even those that had conceived did not bear.
Hillsides were bare; trees were bare and put forth no new branches.
Pastures were bare; springs ran dry. A famine arose in the land; men and gods
alike were about to perish of hunger. While the Egyptians may have
celebrated this weakening of their great rival, in Egypt, the situation was hardly
any better. One text dated to around the year 1200 BC is called the Lament to Amun,
and it stands as a wail of sorrow in a darkening age. Come to me, father Amun, protect me
in this bitter year of confrontation. God shines in the sun, yet
he will not shine. Winter crowds hard upon summer; months happen backwards;
disheveled hours lurch drunken by. Those cut down in high places cry out to you,
Amun; these words came on the the poisoned air, spoken by herdsmen in
fields and marshes, by those who beat clothes on the banks of the river, by
district police deserting their precincts, by horned beasts on our
burning deserts. From this period of unrest and
the chaos in Egypt's royal court, which lasted for about a century, a military
strongman named Setnakhte would eventually rise to power.
He would rule for only three years before dying and passing the throne on to his
young son. This boy was the empire's last hope
to turn around its floundering fortunes, and if such a hope was to be sustained,
there was only one name he could possibly rule under.
His parents would name him after his great predecessor, who had ruled
nearly a century before and fought at the battle of Kadesh. And so, this boy would
rule as Ramesses III. This new boy king Ramesses was a
determined and tenacious ruler, and it's clear that he openly admired and sought
to emulate the legendary pharaoh of old. He even went so far as to name
all his own sons after the sons of Ramesses II, and also gave them all the
same positions in his court. It was clear he wanted to do
everything he could to recreate the glory days that had slipped out of
Egypt's grasp, as he writes in one of his inscriptions.
Rejoice ye, O Egypt, to the height of heaven, for I am ruler of the
south and north upon the throne of Atum. The gods have appointed me to be king
over Egypt, to be victor, to expel them for her from the countries; they decreed
to me the kingdom while I was a child, and my reign is full of plenty. Under other circumstances, Ramesses
might have been one of Egypt's great rulers, but the entire region was soon to
be convulsed in a series of bitter wars. One of the great drivers of these
conflicts was the loose collection of peoples that had first appeared in the
reign of the pharaoh Merneptah, and who are known as the sea peoples. These invaders were now
descending on the entire region in ever- greater numbers, apparently spurred by
widespread crop failures in Northern and Western Europe. Already, powerful trading
cities like the port town of Ugarit had been attacked by sea, seemingly by
complete surprise, and they were destroyed so thoroughly that they were
never reoccupied. The Egyptians great rivals, the Hittites,
were now on the brink of collapse, as trade networks around the region went
into freefall. Ramesses remembers this time of
strife as these northern Invaders descended on the coast. The northerners in their isles were
disturbed, swept away in battle. Not one stood before their lands; from Kheta,
Carchemish, Arvad, Alasa, they were wasted. They set up a camp in one place in Amor.
They desolated his people and his land like that which is not. When news of the sea people's attacks
came to Ramesses, he would have been pharaoh for about eight years. He had already
repelled two further invasions from Libya and must have been rising in
confidence. But the news troubled him, and soon he got word that the fleet of the sea
peoples was on the move and were heading to Egypt, as he recounts in the inscription
on his mortuary temple at Medinet Habu. They came with fire prepared before
them, forward to Egypt. Their main support was Peleset, Thekel, Shekelesh, Denyen, and
Weshesh. Their lands were united, and they laid their hands upon the land as far as the
Circle of the Earth. Their hearts were confident, full of their plans. Ramesses knew that these attackers would
have to be stopped, and he decided that he would make his stand at the mouth of
the Nile, the lush, fertile delta. He would have to play to what
strengths the Egyptian army still had in this challenging terrain.
He decided to lay an ambush and give the sea peoples a surprise attack
of their own. Now, it happened through this god, the
lord of gods, that I was prepared and armed to trap them like wild fowl. I
equipped my frontier at Zahi, prepared before them. The chiefs, the captains of
infantry, the nobles, I caused to equip the harbor-mouths like a strong wall,
with warships, galleys, and barges. They were manned completely from
bow to stern with valiant warriors bearing their arms, soldiers of all the
choicest of Egypt, being like lions roaring upon the mountaintops. Their
horses were quivering in their every limb, ready to crush the countries under
their feet. As the enemy's ships amassed, Ramesses
gathered archers on the banks, supported by spearmen and cavalry in their
thousands, all concealed in the reeds. The tension must must have been tremendous,
all the soldiers of the Egyptian army holding their breath and waiting for
that first sign of an enemy ship. Then at last, a sail was
sighted. After that came another and another, until the whole fleet of the sea
peoples was in sight. The Egyptians must have been able to hear the creak of
10,000 oars, the beating of the drums, the shouts of the helmsmen and soldiers.
Then, once the sea people's ships were within range, Ramesses
struck. Arrows flew out of the reeds and rained down on the ships.
Panicked, the invaders attempted to land on the banks, but as they did, the
Egyptian spearmen appeared out of the treeline and met them with a shield
wall. While the enemy was held at bay, the Egyptian navy sailed in down the river. Those who reached my boundary, their
heart and their soul are finished forever and ever. As for those who had
assembled before them on the sea, the full flame was in their front, before the
harbor-mouths, and a wall of metal upon the shore surrounded them. They were
dragged, overturned, and laid low upon the beach; slain, and made heaps from stern to
bow of their galleys, while all their things were cast upon the water.
Thus, I turned back the waters to remember Egypt, and when they even
mention my name in their land, may it consume them with fear.
The pharaoh's plan had worked. The Egyptians were the first people to turn
back these sea-going invaders and stop their campaign of destruction.
Ramesses inscription at Medinet Habu ends on the following triumphant note. Rejoice ye, O Egypt; I have expelled
your mourning which was in your heart, and I have made you dwell in peace. Those
whom I have overthrown shall not return. But despite their victory, the
land of the pharaohs now stood alone in a devastated region.
Virtually every other society around them had been gutted and reduced
to ash. Numerous long-established civilizations, the Mycenaean Greeks,
the Hittites, Ugarit, and Babylon had collapsed, and civil order had given way
to chaos. The precarious trade routes on which they had all relied to supply them
with bronze and other commodities were now broken, and Egypt's economy went
into a steep and unstoppable decline. By the end of this period, which has
become known as the Late Bronze Age collapse, Egypt was a shadow of its
former self. As other enemies encroached on its
borders, Egypt was able to fight them off, but its treasury became so depleted that
it never fully recovered its imperial power. The first workers strike in
recorded history happened during the 29th year of Ramesses III's reign, when
Egypt could no longer provide food rations for its elite artisans who were
constructing the king's tomb in the village of Deir el-Medina. The lack of
rations went on so long that the workers eventually marched through the town
shouting the following chant. We're hungry. There's no more
clothing, no more oil, no more fish, no more vegetables. Send word to the
pharaoh. If food was not reaching these crucial workers, we can only imagine the
dire situation in the wider kingdom. The dispute dragged on for weeks, with one
leader of the protest even threatening to damage a royal monument if they were
not paid. If was a threat that they would never have dared to make unless the
authority of the pharaoh was beginning to be seriously undermined. Ramesses III ruled for another
two decades after his battle with the sea peoples, for a total reign of thirty-one
years, but by the year 1156 BC, some members of his family were beginning to
get impatient. In the Egyptian court, all of
the women, the king's wives and mother and other consorts, all lived together in
a large palace complex with its own land. This was convenient for the king,
but it could also encourage courtly intrigue. There was a strict hierarchy to
the pharaoh's queens, and everyone knew that the children of his main wife were
to be his heirs before any others. Some of the women who were lower down on this
ladder could at times resort to plotting to improve their stations, and perhaps
get their own sons on the throne instead. One of these women was a queen
named Tiye. Tiye was a secondary wife of Ramesses, and
her son Pentawer was not in line for the throne. In order to remedy this situation,
she began a plot that would go down in history as the harem conspiracy.
Soon, she brought in other members of the king's household and even
high ranking members of the government, as one later papyrus records.
They are the abomination of the land. The great criminal, who was then
chief of the chamber, was in collusion with Tiye and the women of the harem. He had
made common cause with them; he had begun to bring out their words to their
mothers and their brothers who were there, saying, Stir up the people! Incite
rebellion against their lord! Alarmingly, one of the palace women
had written to her brother named Khaem-waset, a commander of Nubian troops in
the south, and gained his support for their plot. Others had even turned to
supernatural methods, making wax effigies of the king's bodyguards and
laying curses on them to help their scheme. Their plan was clear; to kill
Ramesses and install Queen Tiye's son Pentawer as pharaoh.
The date they chose to strike was during the annual ceremony known as
the Beautiful Festival of the Valley, which was held in Thebes every year at
the new moon of the second month of the harvesting season of Shemu.
During this festival, which was one of the biggest of the year, the pharaoh
would go down to the river in a grand and colorful procession, carrying the
statues of the three gods of Thebes; Amun, Mut, and Khonsu. He would then board
his royal barge and sail with the statues down to the Theban necropolis to
visit his grand temple, as one inscription by a Theban priest describes. We go giving praise to Amun,
kissing the ground before the Lords of the Gods on his festivals, the first day
of Shemu shining, on the day of voyaging to the valley.
Here, the citizens would give offerings of food and drink and flowers,
as the boats sailed on the river with three statues.
As the riotous, days-long festival progressed, the plotters took
advantage of the disruption to make a strike at the king.
It was day fifteen of Shemu, when the pharaoh was relaxing in the royal harem
in the Western Tower of Medinet-Habu, perhaps thinking ahead to his role in
the coming festivities, when a group of assassins crept up on him with knives. Their attack was swift and brutal.
Modern scanning of Ramesses III's mummy reveals that his throat was cut right to
the bone with a sharp weapon, severing the trachea, esophagus, and major blood
vessels. Death would have followed within seconds. Ramesses has no defensive wounds,
suggesting that he was caught completely unawares, but curiously, his big toe was
severed at the time of the attack. This seems like an unlikely injury to
sustain during a struggle, and studies of his mummy have shown that the embalmers
fashioned him a prosthetic toe to take with him into the afterlife. This
suggests that the original toe was never recovered, perhaps indicating that
someone took it as proof that he was dead, or as a grizzly trophy.
Ramesses III had saved Egypt from the sea peoples, but now he lay dying in
a pool of of his own blood, betrayed by his own family.
But the conspirator s plot would not go as planned. In the aftermath of
the bloody assassination, the son of Ramesses III was able to crush the coup
and seize the throne. The plotters were all put on trial, as well as any who had
heard about the conspiracy but failed to report it. In all, twenty-eight people were
executed, and as a final punishment, they were even cruelly renamed after their
deaths. The brother of one of the plotters, who had commanded his Nubian
troops in the south, was originally named Khaemwaset, a name which meant came from
Thebes , but after his execution he was renamed Binemwaset, or evil in Thebes .
Another's name, Meryra, meant beloved of Ra , but he was given the somewhat spiteful
new name Mesedsura, or Ra hates him . Although order had been restored to
the royal succession, Egypt was in a much reduced state. The death of Ramesses was
followed by years of bickering among his heirs. Three of his sons would become
king at different times, each feeling the need to memorialize him and shore up
their own legit legitimacy by reigning as Ramesses IV, VI, and VIII.
In fact, the next eight pharaohs in a row would all be named Ramesses after the
slain king, but many of these rulers were ineffectual and reigned for only a
few years each. Meanwhile, Egypt was increasingly
beset by continuing droughts, lack of seasonal floodwaters, famines, civil
unrest, and official corruption. Against this backdrop, by the
rule of Ramesses XI, a new power had begun to fill the vacuum left by royal
authority. These were the high priests of Amun in Thebes. This priesthood had become not
only very powerful, but exceedingly wealthy. Through a centuries-long game of
acquisition, the Amun priests now controlled two-thirds of all the temple lands
in Egypt and ninety percent of all Egypt's ships, along with mountains of gold.
On top of that, they were the chief prophets and interpreters of the god
Amun-Ra's will, wielding a great deal of influence over the kings and their
decisions. Over the last centuries, they had changed the rules of the priesthood
so that they could pass their positions on to their sons, essentially becoming a
kind of feudal royalty in the baking-hot lands of Upper Egypt. One inscription on
the tomb of a high priest named Nebwenenef describes the power of
this new hereditary role. You are now high priest of Amun. His
treasury and his granary are under your seal. You are chief executive of his
temple, and every foundation of his is under your authority.
The House of Hathor, Lady of Dendera, shall now be under the authority
of your son, as heir to the offices of your forefathers, the position which you
have occupied hitherto. Soon, the high priests in
Thebes became the de facto rulers of Upper Egypt, even having themselves buried in
grand tombs and commanding their own armies. In many ways, the pharaoh had
become something of an irrelevance, and perhaps for that reason,
there would not be a Ramesses XII. With the death of Ramesses XI,
the Egyptian New Kingdom finally fractured less than eighty years after the
victorious battle with the sea peoples. Egypt would never regain its former power. For the next four centuries,
Egypt's influence would undergo a steady but unstoppable
decline. One text written around this time is called the Tale of Wenamun. It
describes an Egyptian diplomat who travels to the north to collect some
cedar wood as tribute from the Phoenician city of Byblos, but while
there, he finds that the name of the pharaoh no longer holds the kind of
sway it used to. Wenamun is robbed on his journey and
appeals to the ruler of Byblos for help. That morning when I had risen, I
went to where the prince was and said to him, I've been robbed in your harbor. Now,
you are the prince of this land. You are the one who controls it. Search for my
money! Indeed the money belongs to Amun-Ra, king of gods, lord of the lands. He said
to me, Are you serious? Are you joking? Indeed, I do not understand the demand
you make to me. To make matters worse, the king of Byblos
refuses to pay the tribute of cedar wood that the pharaoh demands.
Whether this story relates a true event or is simply a piece of
literature, historians aren't sure, but either way, it points to the much-reduced
state of Egypt's standing in the world, something that had clearly become common knowledge.
The 21st dynasty that ruled from the northern Nile Delta through much of the
8th century BC were even descended from Libyan invaders, peoples from along the
North African coast to the west. While the earliest of these Libyan
pharaohs adopted classical Egyptian names, by the 22nd and 23rd dynasties,
they reverted to giving their children more ethnically Libyan names, and even
wearing Libyan feathered headdresses to underline their identity.
Still, these Libyan kings were an unruly bunch who held close to their
old tribal loyalties, and were frequently distracted by warring amongst themselves
and their own lords and generals. Meanwhile, the high priests of Amun
continued to rule Southern Egypt from Thebes. But even further to the south, in
the lands of Nubia, another power was rising. This was the Nubian kingdom of Kush. As one of the two main African
kingdoms to the south of Egypt, Kush was located at the fourth cataract of the
Nile, around the region of Sudan today. For centuries now, this Nubian
kingdom had been crushed beneath the boot of Egypt.
Repeated expeditions up the Nile had seen Egyptian armies stamp out any
sign of a powerful rival appearing in East Africa. But now
with the New Kingdom of Egypt fractured and the Libyan Kings
ruling it in the north, fighting amongst themselves, the Kushites were free to
build their own power base. During Egypt's many attempts to
invade and hold on to the lands in Nubia, Egypt had left a number of powerful
fortresses to the Kushites. One of these had even become the capital of Kush, the
city of Napata, but the Egyptians had also left
behind something else; that is, their religion. The upper classes in Kush had
long adopted Egyptian gods and forms of worship. Kushite rulers even referred to
themselves as the son of Amun . When Herodotus traveled down the
Nile in the following centuries, he described this region, which he knew as Ethiopia. Above Elephantine, the country
now begins to be inhabited by Ethiopians, and half the people of the island are
Ethiopians and half-Egyptians. Near to the island is a great lake,
on the shores of which dwell nomad Ethiopians. The people of the place
worship no other gods but Amun and Osiris. These they greatly honor, and they
have a place of divination sacred to Amun. While Egypt had stopped building
pyramids more than a thousand years earlier, Kushite kings had taken up the
building of pyramids of their own in classic Egyptian style.
In some ways, Kush had become more Egyptian than the Egyptians.
The kingdom was becoming wealthy, too, its economy boosted by the
Nubian gold mines it controlled, and trade with Sub-Saharan Africa.
This wealth soon led to a powerful army.
One king of Kush named Kashta would seize upon the opportunity that the
situation afforded. While the Libyan kings of Egypt
squabbled and fought among themselves, Kashta worked to gain influence over the
high priests of Thebes. Eventually, he had his own daughter appointed to the
powerful title of god's wife of Amun in the great temple of Thebes.
Once she was in that position, she moved to consolidate her power and
claimed Thebes and all Upper Egypt for her father's kingdom of Kush.
The Libyan kings in the Nile Delta, distracted by their civil wars, did
nothing to stop them. Upper Egypt was now ruled by Nubians. When the Kushite king Kashta died,
his son Piye inherited what was now the Kushite Empire.
Sometime around the 720s BC, King Piye marched his Nubian armies down the
Nile and conquered the fracture states of Lower Egypt.
Piye was clearly pragmatic in his approach, and allowed any local governors
to stay in their positions, so long as they swore allegiance to him. A victory
stelae that he carved records his victories, which he dedicates to the old
Egyptian gods. Hear what I have done in exceeding
the ancestors. I am the king, the
representation of god, who issued from the womb marked as ruler, who is feared
by those greater than he, whose father knew and whose mother perceived even in
the egg that he would be ruler, beloved of the gods, the son of Ra, beloved of Amun. His son Shebitku solidified these
conquests and united Egypt once more. For the next century, Egypt would be ruled by
the 25th dynasty, the Nubian pharaohs. Over the decades that followed, these
Nubian rulers showed an enthusiastic adoption of Egyptian culture.
They used the Egyptian language, gave each other Egyptian names, and
worshiped the Egyptian gods with apparent devotion.
They even embarked on an enthusiastic program of pyramid-building
in Nubia, the first that the region had seen in centuries, if nothing quite like
on the grand scale of the Old Kingdom. But this flourishing of Egyptian
culture would not last long. That's because to the north, a power had finally
risen that would eclipse the Egyptian Empire for good.
That was the empire of Assyria. As we saw in our thirteenth episode, Assyria
had arisen in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia, and
by the 7th century BC, was perhaps the most powerful empire on Earth.
They routinely amassed armies of more than 100,000 soldiers, and under the
reign of the paranoid king Esarhaddon, they were now pressing their power far
along along the Mediterranean coast, and soon they dreamed of bringing it to the
banks of the Nile itself. The Nubian pharaoh who would face
them was a man named Taharqa. Taharqa was the fifth king of the
Nubian 25th dynasty, and he was clearly proud of his heritage and his skin color.
He made sure that statues he commissioned were carved from hard, black
granite, polished smooth. He had come to Egypt as a young prince, and had been
chosen to rule after the death of the previous pharaoh, as he writes in one
inscription. I was brought from Nubia among the royal brothers that his
majesty had brought. As I was with him, he liked me more than all his brothers and
his children, so that he distinguished me. I won the heart of all the nobles and
was loved by all. It was only after the royal hawk had flown to heaven that I
received the crown in Memphis. Curiously, Taharqa was also a
believer in the benefits of long- distance running, and insisted that all
his soldiers engaged in nighttime marathon practices.
The king himself was on horseback to see his army running when
he exercised with them on the desert behind Memphis in the ninth hour of the
night. They reached the great lake at the hour of sunrise, and they returned to the
residence in the third hour of the day. This extreme stamina would serve
them well, and he would engage in successful assaults on Libyan positions
across the desert, and capture territory in Palestine.
Throughout his reign, Taharqa was lucky; a series of exceptional Nile
floods led to a period of abundant crops. Funds were clearly so forthcoming
that he donated large amounts of gold to the Temple of Amun, and restored several
religious centers, as one of his inscriptions boasts.
As His Majesty is the one who loves the god, he spends the day and lies
by night seeking what is useful to the gods, building their temples fallen into
decay, giving birth to their structures as in the primeval times, building
their storehouses, endowing altars, presenting them with offerings of fine
gold, silver, copper. Now, the heart of His Majesty is
satisfied with doing what is beneficent to them every day. This land is inundated
in his time as it was in the time of the lord of all, every man sleeping until dawn
and never saying, Oh, I wish I had Egypt was now of a size and
stability that it hadn't seen since the collapse of the New Kingdom almost four
hundred years earlier. It must have looked like the dawn of a new era of prosperity, but
this luck was not to last. In the year 674 BC, in Taharqa's seven-
teenth year on the throne, news came of a terrifying army approaching from the
north. This horde belonged to King Esarhaddon of Assyria. Few foes had ever beaten the
Assyrians on the battlefield, and fear must have spread up and down the Nile.
But somehow, against the odds, Taharqa was able to repel this force.
The later Greek historian Herodotus records a fantastical story in which
the invading Assyrian army was attacked by a horde of nighttime pests. Where the road comes into Egypt,
there enemies came, and during the night were overrun by a horde of field mice
that gnawed quivers and bows and the handles of shields, with the result that
many were killed, fleeing unarmed the next day. For this reason, to this day, a
statue to the Egyptian king stands in a temple with a mouse in his hand. What exactly this account records
is difficult to tell. Perhaps it was an outbreak of plague among the Assyrian
army that forced them to return home. Perhaps it was even a daring nighttime
ambush by Taharqa's men, conditioned as they were to run long distances in the middle
of the night, strike, and then disappear into the darkness.
With their camp smashed and their army in disarray, the Assyrian army
would have been pursued by Egyptian chariots right back to their borders,
but we may never know. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Assyrian sources make
no mention of what must have been a humiliating defeat.
The sting of this embarrassment was clearly sufficient that three years
later, King Esarhaddon amassed an even larger Assyrian army and marched back to
Egypt. This time, there was no standing in its way. The Assyrians flooded into the Nile
Delta, and Taharqa fled from Memphis and into the south. The Assyrian advance was
so speedy that the pharaoh was not able to evacuate his family when he left the
city. Esarhaddon s troops took Memphis, and the Assyrian king wrote the following
gloating inscription about his victory. I slew multitudes of his men and
I smote him five times with the point of my javelin, with wounds from which there
were no recovery. Memphis, his royal city, in half a day, with mines, tunnels,
assaults, I besieged, I captured, I destroyed, I devastated, I burned with
fire. His queen, his harem, his heir, and the rest of his sons and daughters, his
property and his goods, his horses, his cattle, his sheep, in countless numbers, I
carried off to Assyria. The root of Kush I tore up out of Egypt, and not one
therein escaped to submit to me. Over all of Egypt I appointed new kings, viceroys,
governors, commandants, overseers, and scribes. My royal tribute and tax, yearly
without ceasing, I imposed upon them. But if Esarhaddon had hoped to easily
absorb Egypt into his empire, he was mistaken. Just a year later, the Nubian
king Taharqa reappeared in the south, reinforced with troops from the kingdom
of Kush. Numerous governors that Esarhaddon
had installed immediately reverted their loyalties, and the whole Assyrian
conquest looked like it might be undone. Enraged, King Esarhaddon marched
back to Egypt to crush this rebel king, but his health failed on the journey, and
he died in the city of Harran without reaching Egypt. Esarhaddon s son who took the throne
was the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. Virtually his first act as king was to
gather an army and march to the rebellious province of Egypt to finish
what his father had started. Ashurbanipal easily overwhelmed the now
weakened Egyptian forces, recaptured Memphis, and in 663 BC, returned again to
crush another round of rebellions. This time, he marched south up
the Nile River, and bore down on the ancient capital of Thebes.
By that time, the Nubian king Taharqa had died, and his nephew
Tantamani sat on the precarious throne of Egypt. Tantamani met the Assyrians in battle,
but he was defeated, and with him, the last of Egypt's hope would die.
The Assyrian army now rounded on the defenseless city of Thebes.
Ashurbanipal records what happened next on one carved cylinder. This city, the whole of it, I
conquered it with the help of Ashur and Ishtar. Silver, gold, precious stones, all
the wealth of the palace, rich cloth, precious linen, great horses, supervising
men and women, two obelisks of splendid electrum weighing 2,500 talents. The doors
of the temples I tore from their bases, and carried them off to
Assyria. With this weighty booty, I left Thebes.
Against Egypt and Kush, I have lifted my spear and shown my power. The Assyrian sack of Thebes was
the symbolic end of Egyptian power. Though Assyria would not hold
Egypt for long and would itself collapse within only about fifty years, Egyptian
esteem would never truly recover. A century later, Egypt was conquered by the
Persian Achaemenid Empire, and in 343 BC, it was conquered again by the Macedonian
forces of Alexander the Great. When Alexander's empire collapsed,
Egypt would be left in the hands of one of his ex-generals, Ptolemy Soter. For the
next three centuries, Egypt would be ruled by his Greek Ptolemaic dynasty, who
spoke Greek and mostly refused to learn the native Egyptian language.
These Ptolemies were still in power when the tide of Roman expansion swept
across North Africa and finally, over Egypt. The last independent ruler of Ptolemaic
Egypt had a name that in Greek meant glory of her father , from kleos , meaning
glory , and patra , meaning father . Her name was Cleopatra. It's unclear if Cleopatra had
any Egyptian ancestry, as her mother is unknown, but she did at least make an
effort to learn Egyptian, as Plutarch remembers. It was a pleasure merely to
hear the sound of her voice, with which, like an instrument of many strings, she
could pass from one language to another, so that there were few of the barbarian
nations that she answered by an interpreter; to most of them she spoke
herself, as to the Ethiopians, Hebrews, Arabians, Syrians, Parthians, and many
others, whose language she had learned, which was all the more surprising
because most of the kings, her predecessors, scarcely gave themselves
the trouble to acquire the Egyptian tongue. When Rome finally invaded and
occupied Egypt, Cleopatra apparently committed suicide, most likely by
drinking poison or scratching herself with a needle dipped in toxin. The more
florid and famous rendition of her using a venomous snake to kill herself was
suggested by some ancient writers, and whether true or not, has proved
irresistible to generations of poets, including, most famously, William
Shakespeare. With her death in August of the year 30 BC, the final vestige of
independent Egyptian power died, too. On the day of her death, Cleopatra
stood at the height of more than three thousand years of Egyptian history. To her, the
Great Pyramid of Giza was now more than 2,500 years old, meaning that Cleopatra
lived closer to our time than she did to the building of the Great Pyramid, by
more than five hundred years. As Egypt came under ever more
foreign influence, its ancient culture gradually underwent a
transformation. Over the following centuries, as the Greek alphabet became
more prominent, the knowledge of how to read hieroglyphics was slowly lost, as
one medieval Arab visitor records. I asked why the inscriptions
which cover the pyramids of the temples were indecipherable.
He answered, Since the learned men and those who used this
writing have disappeared and Egypt has been occupied by a succession of foreign
peoples, the Greek alphabet and writing have prevailed, and thus, they lost the
understanding of the writing of their ancestors. The last known hieroglyphic inscription
was written in the year 394 AD, at the Temple of Philae, built on an island near
the cataract of the Nile at Aswan. By then, the now-Christianized
Roman Empire had banned the worship of pagan gods in Egypt's temples, but this
religious site was just outside of Rome's borders, and so, worship of the
ancient gods continued here, in the last of Egypt's great temples.
Here, the names of Ra and Ptah, Anubis and Hathor, Amun and Bastet, Seth
and Horus, would still be spoken and sung, the incense still burned, the cats still
fed, the offerings still given, but this island temple was
increasing isolated, surrounded by the crashing waters of a fast-changing world. The last hieroglyphic inscription
records the mournful wish of one scribe named Nesmeterakhem, wishing that his
inscription would endure forever, just like the carvings of his long-dead ancestors. Before Mandulis,
son of Horus, by the hand of Nesmeterakhem, son of Nesmeter, the
Second Priest of Isis, for all time and eternity. Words spoken by Mandulis, lord
of the Abaton, great god. As the last-ever inscription of its
kind, in some ways he got his wish, but it's likely that by the time he chipped
this message into the temple wall, few people alive would know how to
read it. As far as we know, the art of the hieroglyph died with him.
The temple was finally closed at some point in the 530s by the Byzantine
emperor Justinian, and it was converted into a Christian church to Saint
Steven. The age of Ancient Egypt had well and truly come to an end. Some 1,400 years later, in the year
1818, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley would enter into a friendly competition
with his friend, the poet Horace Smith. They had both read in a London newspaper
about the coming arrival in the British Museum of a remarkable fragment of a
statue, brought by ship from the Ramesseum mortuary temple in Thebes in Upper
Egypt. It was the head and torso of a statue of Egypt's greatest pharaoh, the
hero of the battle of Kadesh, Ramesses II. The statue was one of a pair that had
stood at the doorway of his temple. European colonial powers had long
been hungering after that fragment of statue. Napoleon Bonaparte
had even tried to remove it during his time in Egypt in
1798, but he found its bulk of black diorite too heavy to shift.
Now, with wooden rollers and hundreds of workmen pulling ropes, the
British team hauled the statue to the banks of the Nile, where it was
transported down the river and on to London. After reading about this statue,
Smith and Shelly agreed to wager. They would each write a poem inspired by it,
and they would base their work on an extract from the writings of the Greek
historian Diodorus of Sicily, who had once visited Ramesses II's temple in
Thebes. Unfortunately for Horace Smith, history has decisively concluded their
competition, as his poem is little remembered, but Shelley's poem has become a
classic, one of the greatest and most well-known sonnets in the English
language. Titled Ozymandias, it is a poem that has come to stand as an emblem of
the vain, glorious pride of rulers, the inevitable downfall of tyrants, the awe-
inspiring power of time, and the transience of all things. I met a traveler from an antique
land who said, Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the
desert; near them, on the sand, half-sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown and
wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command tell that its sculptor well those
passions read which yet survive, stamped on those lifeless things, the hand that
mocked them and the heart that fed; and on the pedestal these words appear: My
name is Ozymandias, king of kings; look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless
and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away. On the tomb wall of a Pharaoh Intef
of the Middle Kingdom is a piece of literature known as the Harper s Song,
written in Egyptian hieroglyphics. It was a song designed to
be sung at funerals, and is more than 4,200 years old.
At the time of writing his poem Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley could not have
known about this piece of ancient literature, since hieroglyphics would not
be conclusively deciphered for several more years. But across the gulf of four
millennia, he and the unknown author of this song both describe a human emotion
that is all too familiar, the deep sense of awe and melancholy we feel when we
look at ruined places, at the crumbling palaces of long-fallen emperors, at the
tombs of kings whose age has passed into dust. As you listen,
imagine the vast gulf of time that separates our world from
theirs. Imagine the sadness of watching your language forgotten and your cities
crumbled. Imagine the tombs of ancient kings lying opened and robbed, the fallen
pillars of emptied temples half-buried in the sand, which shifts and rolls over
the stones, as the great disc of the sun sets red and blazing for a final time on
the empire of Egypt. One generation passes; another
stays behind. Such has it been since the men of ancient times. The gods of long
ago rest in their pyramids, and yet, the great and blessed likewise
lie buried in their tombs. Yet those who built great mansions,
their places are no more. What has become of them all?
I have heard their words retold time and again, but where
are their dwellings now? Their walls are in ruins and their
places are no more, like something that has never been.
There is no return for them to explain their present state of being,
to say how it is with them, to gentle our hearts until we make our journey to the
place where they have gone. So follow your heart and your
happiness; conduct your affairs on Earth as your heart dictates,
for that day of mourning will surely come for you, so spend your days
joyfully and do not grow weary of living. No man takes his things with him,
and none who go can ever come back again. Thank you once again for listening
to the Fall of Civilizations Podcast. I'd like to thank my voice actors for this
episode; Alexandra Boulton, Lachlan Lucas, Michael Hajiantonis, Tom Marshall-Lee,
Nick Denton, Peter Walters, Rhy Brignell, and Paul Casselle. Readings in Arabic were
performed by Nassim El-Boujjoufi. Readings in Ancient Egyptian were performed by
Seqnenra Mohammad Habib. I'd also like to thank my
historical adviser for this episode, the Egyptologist Dr. Chris Naunton. A full list
of sources can be found in the description below, and are publicly
available on the show's Patreon page. As some of you may be aware, Fall of
Civilizations will soon be available in book form around the world. The book is
called Fall of Civilizations: Stories of Greatness and Decline, by me, Paul Cooper.
It offers the definitive version of the show, updated, expanded, and with maps and
images attached. The book is coming in April of 2024 for UK readers, and later in
the year for listeners in the United States. Please head to fallofcivilizations.com
to find out more information and for pre-order links.
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