Avisitor to Cairo’s fabled Tahrir Square cannot fail to notice the bulk of The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. Within its bright red walls, this neoclassical masterpiece has housed the world’s largest collection of ancient Egyptian artefacts since 1902. While it was built by the French architect Marcel Dourgnon (1858–1911), the museum was originally the brainchild of his compatriot, François Auguste Ferdinand Mariette (1821–1881).² Mariette worked as an archaeologist in Egypt for most of his life, and rose to become Director of Antiquities in Cairo, spurning academic positions in Europe with the words: ‘I would die or go mad if I did not return to Egypt immediately!’ As he grew older, he became convinced that the customary division of finds after an excavation – European and American excavators would collect some of the better antiquities for their own museums back home – was deeply problematic. Attempting to protect Egypt’s heritage, Mariette founded The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in a former magazine in the Bulaq neighbourhood of Cairo in 1858, aiming to create a permanent home for the excavated antiquities and limit the number that were making their way out of Egypt to museums or private collectors. Due to flooding and other damage, the growing collection of museum pieces was moved, first to a former royal palace near the Giza Pyramids and then, in the early years of the twentieth century, to its current purpose-built home in Tahrir Square.
As you make your way through the bustle of the square towards the museum, accompanied by the blaring of car horns, you first arrive in the peculiarly peaceful sculpture garden which fronts the museum entrance. Some of the largest pieces of temple relief, sarcophagi and statues ever taken from Egypt’s soil can be found here. Here too is the ostentatious sarcophagus which contains the remains of Mariette himself – a final reward for his service to the antiquities housed all around him.
One of the most visited exhibits accommodated within the museum’s high-ceilinged, echoing halls is the Royal Mummy Room. Inside this dimly lit space lie some of the greatest kings and queens of ancient Egypt, most of them astoundingly well-preserved thanks to the embalmer’s art. Here rests the body of Ramesses the Great, with tufts of auburn hair still curled at his temples, and his toe- and fingernails still clearly visible. Next to him, the mutilated corpse of the Second Intermediate Period Theban King Seqenenre-Tao, who met his death in battle, the injuries from an axe blow to his skull and several stab wounds still horrifically discernible.
Among the most well-preserved mummies in this august company is that of a middle-aged man with a prominent hooked nose, who lies with closed eyes, a slight smile playing around his lips. He appears – despite his shrunken form – to be sleeping peacefully. This is the body of King Seti I, the second ruler of the 19th Dynasty, the father of Ramesses the Great, and the de facto founder of the Ramesside Period. Born as a noble, but not a royal, Seti was not intended for kingship. But kingship was thrust upon him through an unusual combination of circumstances. As one of the Great Kings of the Late Bronze Age Near East, Seti used his time on the Horus Throne of the Living to reinvigorate Egypt’s foreign policy, society and religious life after years of uncertain royal succession and internal strife. It was Seti’s son, Ramesses II, whom history remembers as ‘the Great’, but it was Seti’s reign which gave him the opportunities to earn his moniker.
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Two great tributaries rise in Africa, one in the Great Lakes region and the other in Lake Tana in Ethiopia. These two waterways, the White and the Blue Nile, merge near the modern city of Khartoum in the Sudan before flowing north towards the Mediterranean. At times the river glides serenely past tilled fields, hemmed in by flat-topped foothills of sandstone or limestone, and at others the edge of desert plateaus constrict it on both sides, rendering the land barren and hostile. It forces its way through five granite cataracts before emerging onto the most abundantly fertile regions of its passage; the Nile Valley of Upper Egypt and the Delta of Lower Egypt. As a result of the differences in history and environment, the land which pharaoh ruled was always considered a union of these two lands, Upper and Lower Egypt. Before the construction of the Aswan High Dam, the river reached these lands heavily laden with silt, which it would deposit during its annual inundation. It was around this yearly occurrence, more than any solar events, that the ancient Egyptians constructed their calendar and measured their time.
The ancient Egyptian year was, unlike the Gregorian year, divided into three seasons: Akhet (Season of Inundation), Peret (Season of Growth) and Shemu (Season of Harvest). Each of the three seasons was in turn subdivided into four months, usually counted as 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th, each being thirty days long, giving an annual total of 360 days. The five additional days, known as epagomenal days, were added to compensate for the difference between the days listed in the civil calendar and the astronomical year. Each of the twelve months was divided into three weeks, each being ten days in length. Unlike many current calendars, the ancient Egyptian did not count the passing years by ascribing to each a number starting from a significant point in time, like the birth of Jesus Christ in the Gregorian calendar or the emigration of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in the Hijri. Instead, they counted the regnal years of the ruling pharaoh and began again when a new pharaoh rose to power. A full date would therefore be provided in the following manner, this particular example being from the fictional Story of Sinuhe which is set during the reign of Amenemhat I:
Regnal Year 30, Month 3 of Akhet (Inundation), Day 7
The date given then is the seventh day in the third of four months of the first season of the thirtieth regnal year of Amenemhat I. In modern terms, this date would fall in early August 1956 BC.
If a modern traveller could have followed the flow of the river in the time of Seti’s ascension, they would have passed by small villages; in the Nile Valley set close to the banks of the river, and in the Delta built on small hillocks to prevent flooding during the inundation.³ The farmers would have been working the soil of their fields with wooden hoes, sowing emmer wheat and barley by hand and leading flocks of animals – cattle, goats and sheep – across the mud to trample the grain into the ground. The wealth of Egypt was in its fertile earth; a gift – as the Classical author Herodotus of Halicarnassus noted – of the Nile. In every village, bakers spent their time huddled around small domed ovens, making bread by slapping a flat circle of dough on their red-hot clay interior, and catching the finished flatbread before it fell into the flames. This method of baking was in many ways comparable to the baking of tandoori naan across much of the Near East, India and China today. Larger loaves of bread were baked in ceramic moulds, and for special feasts and celebrations, bread was baked in the shape of animals and sweetened with figs and dates, or flavoured with spices such as coarsely crushed coriander seeds. Beer was brewed nearby, for it utilized the same basic raw ingredient cereals although bread was mostly made from emmer wheat and beer from barley. Ancient Egyptian beer had little in common with modern ales and stouts; rather it was brewed from cooked grain and malt, fermented in the sun, and equivalent in taste to modern wort.
Fishing boats made from bound reeds would have crowded the river, catching catfish and Nile perch with lines and nets, and hunting hippopotami with large bone harpoons, a dangerous task considering the temperament of these monstrous aquatic mammals. The slow rhythm of the bucolic scene would be interspersed with activity surrounding the major settlements: Elephantine lying on the doorstep to Nubia; Thebes, the town of Amun and the burial site of the New Kingdom pharaohs; Memphis, the city of the white walls, the traditional capital of Egypt since the Early Dynastic Period. The landing areas and harbours would have been bustling with workers carrying amphora of wine and olive oil, ingots of copper, planks of cedar wood traded from Byblos on the Canaanite coast, foreign captives and all manner of mammals, birds and fish, some preserved by drying or brining, others walking unknowingly to the slaughterhouses in the courtyards of villas and palaces.⁴
The focal point of these cities were the temple districts, large stone structures standing out in a sea of mud-brick houses, their undulating temenos walls signifying the divine waters of creation and the inner shrines with golden idols of the local god closed to all but pharaoh himself and the High Priest appointed in his absence. Sculptors and artists worked in the temples, carving statues and relief from blocks of limestone, sandstone, granite, diorite and alabaster birthed from the rock face in quarries across the eastern desert and along Egypt’s southern border. Expeditions sent out by the temples and by royal decree would return with gold from mines in Wadi Hammamat and Wadi Allaqi cast into crude rings for ease of transportation, and turquoise from the mines at Serabit el-Khadim in south-western Sinai.
Much of the metal and precious stones was transformed into images of the gods or jewellery worn by the royal family and their entourage. Some would undoubtedly be traded by the merchants working for the temple institutions, along with the surplus produce of temple lands. Royal scribes, commanders of the army, priests and all manner of officials would have thronged the palaces built near the temple districts, or else taken their ease within the shady tranquillity of their own villas, managing their private fortunes as well as working on the myriad tasks required for the central administration to function. A description of such an elite mansion from Papyrus British Museum 9994 dating to the 20th Dynasty gives a clear impression of their wealth and splendour:
‘Raia has built a beautiful mansion […] It is constructed like a work of eternity. It is planted with trees on all sides. A channel was dug in front of it […] One is gay at its door and drunk in its halls. Handsome doorposts of limestone carved and chiselled. Beautiful doors, freshly carved. Walls inlaid with lapis lazuli. Its barns are supplied with grain, are bursting with abundance. Fowl yard and aviary are filled with geese; byres filled with cattle.’⁵
At the head of this throng of courtiers and wealthy nobles stood the viziers, one for Upper and one for Lower Egypt based in Thebes and Memphis. In theory, pharaoh ruled supreme over all these people, from the viziers and troop commanders in the cities to the farmers and bakers in their villages.
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The Pharaonic civilization dominated Egypt from the Early Dynastic Period (c. 3000 BC) until the defeat of Cleopatra and Mark Antony at the hands of the later Emperor Augustus in 30 BC. Egyptologists sub-divide this extensive period of time firstly into ‘kingdoms’ (Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom), interspersed with periods of either unrest or significant decentralization and weakening of royal power known as ‘intermediate periods’ (First Intermediate Period, Second Intermediate Period and Third Intermediate Period). The most basic division (aside from the reign of individual kings) is the division of Pharaonic history into thirty-two ‘dynasties’, denoting specific ruling houses or families, often hailing from a specific geographical region. The 19th Dynasty for instance, was founded by Ramesses I, a non-royal military officer who most likely came from the north-eastern Delta region. This division of Egyptian history into dynasties is not a chronological tool invented by modern scholars. Rather, it dates back to the enigmatic historian Manetho.⁶
Living during the reign of the early Ptolemaic rulers who had risen to power in Egypt during the third century BC following Alexander the Great’s conquest of the country in 332 BC, Manetho was an Egyptian priest from the Delta city of Sebennytos. He was a native Egyptian, but wrote several important works on Egyptian history in Greek, most likely on the orders of the new Greek-speaking Ptolemaic rulers who wanted to know the history of the country they now controlled. Manetho obliged and, using written sources held in Egyptian temples which have since been lost to history, he composed the Aegyptiaca, a comprehensive overview of the reigns of many Egyptian pharaohs.
Manetho began his recitation of royal reigns with the divine rulers of Egypt, and claimed that during the first 13,900 years of Egyptian history, the country was ruled by various gods, followed by five millennia of rule by demi-gods and finally an additional five millennia where the country was ruled by the Spirits of the Dead. After this (somewhat unlikely) list, Manetho discusses the human rulers of the country, whom he sub-divided into ‘dynasties’ using the Greek term δυναστεία. Manetho’s dynastic division is still broadly maintained in common usage to this day, although several alterations and additions have been made, notably the introduction of Dynasty 0, a dynasty comprised of very early rulers of Egypt whom Manetho does not mention but whose existence has been verified predominantly by archaeological excavation of their tombs.
While Manetho’s broad chronological divisions have been retained in modern Egyptology, there are significant problems with the historicity of his work and its transmission. The most serious of these issues is the fact that no intact copy of the Aegyptiaca has survived. Instead, references and quotations from this work have been preserved only in the writings of later authors, such as the Jewish historian Josephus (AD 37–100), the Roman author Sextus Julius Africanos (AD 160–240) and the Byzantine historian George Syncellus (eighth century AD). These authors biased Manetho’s writings by their own interpretations and the selections they made among his work.
This long gap between the supposed composition of the work in the third century BC and the first mention of its existence more than 300 years later by Josephus also raise significant doubts about the historicity of Manetho himself, and suggests that while he may have composed some type of historical text, the actual authors of the Aegyptiaca post-date him. This theory is also supported by the existence of at least three clearly different versions of the text quoted by various later authors.
In compiling his original manuscript, Manetho (or other authors whose names have not survived) undoubtedly used existing records in the form of king lists.⁷ Such compilations of Egyptian rulers had been in existence at least since the Early Dynastic Period.⁸ During the 5th Dynasty, a more comprehensive king list – known as the Palermo Stone – was carved which, apart from listing kings of Egypt from the 1st to the 5th Dynasty, also included reference to notable events during the reigns of individual kings, such as the raids against Nubia by the 3rd Dynasty King Snefru as well as extensive records of the height of the annual Nile inundation, along with tax records and details of religious activity and building projects. The term ‘Palermo Stone’ is only partially truthful, as the original stela upon which this information was inscribed is in fact broken into seven fragments, only the largest of which is housed in the Regional Archaeological Museum Antonio Salinas in the Sicilian city of Palermo. Smaller pieces are kept in Cairo and the Petrie Museum of Archaeology in London. The original location of the stone is unknown, although it may have originated from the Memphite area, from where it was most likely uncovered during elicit excavations in the 1850s and sold to the Sicilian lawyer Ferdinand Guidano, who donated it to the museum.
No comprehensive king list has yet been discovered from the Middle Kingdom, although the Mit Rahina inscription dated to the reign of Amenemhat II preserves similar lists of military activity, tributes paid to the Egyptian state as well as rewards given to soldiers and courtiers, albeit only during the reign of Amenemhat II himself. Only with the advent of the 18th and 19th Dynasties are more extensive king lists preserved in the historical record. The first of these is the Karnak King List⁹ carved in the Festival Hall of Thutmosis III at the Karnak Temple during the reign of this monarch and currently held in the Louvre Museum in Paris (E. 13481). By comparison to the Palermo Stone and also later king lists, it presents a heavily edited or abbreviated version of Egyptian history listing only sixty-one rulers from Snefru of the 4th Dynasty to Thutmosis III himself. It leaves out most of the rulers of the 13th Dynasty, along with several rulers of the New Kingdom, including Thutmosis III’s own stepmother, Hatshepsut, who ruled as pharaoh before he came of age. By comparison, through archaeological exploration, and from the king lists of the 19th Dynasty, modern Egyptologists count as many as 200 rulers who either ruled alone or shared power during the period between Snefru and Thutmosis III. Along with the heavy-handed historical revisionism, the list is also damaged and many of the names are unreadable.
An additional two king lists are known from the reign of the 19th Dynasty ruler Ramesses II, son of Seti I. One of these, called the Saqqara King List, was found in the mid-nineteenth century in the tomb of the Overseer of Works Tjuneroy at Saqqara.¹⁰ Similarly to the Karnak King List of Thutmosis III, it presents a heavily abbreviated version of the Egyptian royal chronology, listing only fifty-eight rulers from the 1st Dynasty to the reign of Ramesses II. As was customary on 19th Dynasty king lists, the rule of Akhenaten and the other Amarna Period rulers is simply expunged from history as an unworthy interim, as is the rule of the female Pharaoh Hatshepsut and the Hyksos rulers of the Second Intermediate Period. Far more extensive and useful is the Turin Canon,¹¹ which also dates to the reign of Ramesses II. It is a unique document and seemingly preserves the names of well over 200 individual rulers from the 1st Dynasty to the reign of Ramesses II.
Written in red and black ink on papyrus, the document was procured by the notable Italian explorer Bernadino Drovetti (1776–1852) in the early nineteenth century at Luxor, from whom it was purchased by the Egyptian Museum in Turin. Like Manetho, the list begins with a series of mythical and divine rulers of Egypt before listing the reigns of human rulers. Sadly, the papyrus is in a poor state of preservation and has crumbled into hundreds of pieces. Careful restoration work in recent years by the Danish Egyptologist Kim Ryholt has allowed the reconstruction of several hitherto unknown rulers, in particular of the Second Intermediate Period. Despite its damaged state, the Turin Canon remains a crucial piece of evidence. It is administrative in nature and as such preserves a far more objective and complete list of Egyptian rulers than any of the more formal inscribed king lists at Karnak, Saqqara and Abydos.
Formal king lists served primarily a political purpose. They helped to legitimize the ruler who ordered them carved by placing him in an allegedly unbroken framework of semi-divine rulers harking back to a mythical past where the gods themselves ruled the land. The exclusion of rulers who, in various ways, were perceived to have failed to govern correctly or – in the case of the Hyksos – were in effect foreign invaders or occupiers of Egyptian land, served both as a damnatio memoriae – to obliterate their existence from the historical record and from the public memory – but also helped to reinforce the state ideology that the Egyptian monarchy drew its legitimacy on a divinely ordained continuity and stability above all else.
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Semi-permanent human habitation of the Nile Valley likely dates back at least as far as the Lower Palaeolithic Period, when bands of Homo erectus produced stone tools – in particular hand axes in the Acheulean tradition – found across sites in Middle Egypt, in particular around Abydos. Depositional processes, in particular drastic changes to the landscape itself over the last 250,000 years, have scattered many of these tools and objects far from their original contexts, leaving archaeologists unable to make sound judgements concerning which objects belong in which assemblages, and in general providing a fragmentary picture of the very earliest signs of human habitation in the Nile Valley.
With the arrival of the Holocene Wet Phase (c. 9,000 BC), human habitation spread from the confines of the fertile Nile Valley into the western desert, which at the time more resembled a sub-Saharan African steppe or savannah than the desolate sandy wastes of the modern day. Some of these new settlers built their home south-west of the modern city of Aswan in the western desert of Sudan at a region known as Nabta Playa.¹² From around 9,000 BC until the site was abandoned around the 4th Millennium BC, only interrupted by occasional periods of drought, humans inhabited the area, leaving behind rich assemblages of archaeological remains. Stone tools provide scholars with a sequence showing the development of their skill and techniques through the ages; botanical remains show that the inhabitants subsisted primarily on wild grasses and grains, supplemented by proteins from the many animals – buffaloes, gazelles and giraffes – that inhabited their milieu. Gradually, however, the weather patterns altered and the desert became increasingly arid, forcing the inhabitants to migrate into the Nile Valley. Here, those of their ancestors who had opted to remain behind rather than move to the savannah 5,000 years before had established their own cultures, which contained the early seeds of the Pharaonic civilization.
In Upper Egypt, this culture became known as the Naqada Culture, named after the site of Naqada near the modern city of Qift. Originally named by the British archaeologist Flinders Petrie,¹³ it is subdivided into three chronological phases Naqada I (Amratian Culture, 4,400–3,500 BC), Naqada II (Gerzeh Culture, 3,500–3,200 BC) and Naqada III (Semainean, Protodynastic Period or Dynasty 0, 3,200–3,000 BC) which cover the period from roughly 4,400 BC to the foundation of the Egyptian state around 3,200 BC. The foundation or unification of the Egyptian state was caused by an increase in wealth and subsequent growth of strong elites at the Predynastic centre of Thinis in Middle Egypt. Eventually a strong ruler emerged from this area, unified all of Upper Egypt under his leadership and launched a series of campaigns against the various cultures which dominated Lower Egypt, such as the Buto and Ma’adi Cultures, and eventually brought the whole Nile Valley under his control. The name of this ruler was Narmer, although later Classical sources, including Manetho, name him Menes.
The Narmer Palette, one of the most notable artefacts from his reign, appear to show his triumph over the inhabitants of the Nile Delta and contain some of the earliest examples of royal Egyptian iconography, such as the depiction of pharaoh smiting a bound and kneeling enemy, which became tropes of ancient Egyptian art until the Roman Period nearly 3,500 years later. Little else is known about Narmer’s reign, although according to later Classical sources, he may have been responsible for the foundation of the city of Memphis, locating his new capital at the intersection of the Nile Valley with the Nile Delta, a strategically crucial position to occupy which would have allowed him to respond quickly to unrest in either of his newly unified kingdoms, although this claim may be fictitious with power remaining centred around the city of Thinis.
The following two dynasties (the 1st and 2nd) – which are grouped together by Egyptologists as the Early Dynastic Period¹⁴ – are among the most enigmatic and poorly understood periods of Egyptian history. The Egyptian written language, hieroglyphs, had not yet developed much beyond their original function as labels, and the lack of any significant grammatical structure naturally precluded the creation of the types of narrative and funerary texts which have helped to shape our understanding of the later parts of the Pharaonic civilization. From archaeological evidence, we know that the rulers of the Early Dynastic Period chose to be buried in elaborate tombs, located at Abydos in Middle Egypt. Unlike later times, human sacrifice accompanied these burials, with some, such as the tomb of the 1st Dynasty ruler Djer, surrounded by the auxiliary burials of several hundred retainers.
This period also led to the rise of what may have been the two earliest female rulers attested in human history. The first, Neithhotep, was long believed to be a male, based on the frequency with which her name appears in a royal serekh – a rectangular name border which generally denotes kingship – on various objects and inscriptions. More recent research suggests instead that Neithhotep may have been the wife of King Narmer, the first pharaoh of Egypt, and the mother of his son and successor, Hor-Aha. Given the sheer size of her tomb at Naqada and the rich burial goods with which she was interred, it is clear that she held a position of unusual power, and it is a likely interpretation that she served as regent and ruler in her own right after her husband’s death, possibly holding the throne until her son reached maturity. A similar scenario was repeated at the death of Hor-Aha’s grandson, King Djet, whose wife, Mereneith, also ruled as regent and pharaoh of Egypt on behalf of her son, the later King Den.
The rulers of the 2nd Dynasty are even more enigmatic than their predecessors of the 1st Dynasty, although the period seems to have been haunted by unrest, civil war and the fragmentation of the recently unified Egyptian state. Only one ruler is truly well known from this period, the final pharaoh of the dynasty, Khasekhemwy. Known from the Palermo Stone, Khasekhemwy may have been involved in a civil war triggered by his predecessor Seth-Peribsen, whom he defeated, and definitively ended the internal squabbles by reuniting the Two Lands of Upper and Lower Egypt through force of arms, prompting a period of unprecedented royal control and centralization which provided the foundations of the Old Kingdom, the Age of the Pyramids.
The Old Kingdom¹⁵ was in many ways the first ‘peak’ of Egyptian civilization. The written language was expanded in scope and range, resulting in the creation of complex funerary texts, in particular for royal burials, but also the first private biographical accounts, in particular during the 5th and 6th Dynasties. Building on the legacy of the last ruler of the 2nd Dynasty, Khasekhemwy, the first ruler of the 3rd Dynasty, his son King Djoser, consolidated centralized royal power at Memphis and extended Egypt’s sphere of influence by sending expeditions for minerals to Sinai and Nubia. Turning to one of his most senior ministers, Imhotep, whose roles were as far-ranging as Chancellor, High Priest of Heliopolis, Chief Builder and Chief Maker of Vases, he ordered the construction of one of the most significant burial monuments of the ancient world, the Saqqara Step Pyramid. Originally envisaged as a large mastaba – a rectangular mud-brick platform built over a tomb chamber, similar to those used by members of the court and the elite of the time – Imhotep and Djoser extended its scope by constructing a series of five smaller mastabas on top of the initial foundation, each one smaller than the previous, until the monument took the form of a step pyramid. Built from limestone, it constitutes the first monumental stone building in human history, and aside from the pyramid itself, the complex also included a maze of subterranean passages and burial chambers, and above-ground installations such as shrines, pavilions and colonnades used in the perpetuation of Djoser’s mortuary cult.
The first ruler of the 4th Dynasty, Snefru, developed – with the aid of royal architects – the concept of a step pyramid into the more familiar shape of a smooth-sided pyramid. The experiment took three attempts, the first, the Meidum Pyramid, whose outer layers appear to have collapsed, followed by the Bent Pyramid which – as the name suggests – was initially built with a wrong side inclination of over 50 degrees. This was ratified to 43 degrees halfway through the project, giving the pyramid a lopsided or bent appearance. Snefru’s final pyramid, the Red Pyramid at Dashur, was more successfully constructed, and it was in this monument that the king was laid to rest. Not to be outdone by Snefru’s largesse, his successors Khufu, Chefren and Menkaure each built pyramids on the Giza Plateau, including the Great Pyramid of Khufu standing 147 metres tall, the last of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World to remain intact to this day.
The vast expenditure on pyramid building of the 4th Dynasty was not matched by the rulers of the 5th Dynasty, whose funerary monuments are considerably smaller than Khufu’s monstrous construction. Instead, complex funerary formula and rituals, known as the Pyramid Texts, were inscribed on the interior walls of their burial chambers and constitute perhaps the oldest religious texts in the world. They comprised primarily spells and utterances which were designed to allow the spirit of the deceased king to rise from the tomb and ascend to the sky to join with his fellow divinities after death. The afterlife described in these texts is inherently a royal afterlife, and only attainable for royalty. Courtiers and members of the elite obtained access to an afterlife through proximity to the king both in life and death, and as a result, private mastaba tombs cluster around the great pyramids of the Old Kingdom kings, as if jockeying for position and confidence, much as their owners would have done in life. This rigid centralization of both power and religion in the person of the king began to fade during the 6th Dynasty. Powerful regional rulers, known as nomarchs, gained greater autonomy and power, most likely due to the increasing complexity of ruling the country, which necessitated the dissemination of some previously centralized powers and privileges.
The period between the end of the Old Kingdom and the 11th Dynasty is known as the First Intermediate Period. Whereas the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms are perceived as high-points of Egyptian civilization (and also periods of more intense centralization and royal power), the First, Second and Third Intermediate Period are marked by decentralization, the loss of royal power and the fragmentation of the unified state, either into its traditional elements of Upper and Lower Egypt or into smaller provincial centres.
The kings of the 7th and 8th Dynasty appear to have been unable to maintain control of the country and stop or reverse the decentralization begun during the 6th Dynasty. Several kings ruled during this period, but none of them for very long, the entire period lasting perhaps as little as twenty years – with seventeen different kings in all. This greatly weakened dynasty was eventually removed by the ascent of the rulers of the 9th and 10th Dynasties, who ruled from the city of Herakleopolis Magna, and were therefore known as the Herakleopolitan kings. However, like their predecessors, they were unable to retake full control of the country from powerful nomarchs based in particular in Middle Egypt and rival would-be royalty emerging in Thebes.
The relative insignificance of the king as a leader of the country during this period is expressed expertly in the biography of the nomarch Ankhtifi, who ruled the nomes of Edfu and Hierakonpolis and was buried near the modern village of el-Mo’alla. Ankhtifi was allied to the Herakleopolitan kings, and appears to have fought several wars against their rivals in Thebes, who had formed the 11th Dynasty. But even though Ankhtifi was technically in royal service, his biography has none of the fawning adoration of Old Kingdom private biographies which almost obsessively list the owner’s proximity to the king, favours given by the king and specific instances of service to the king. Ankhtifi, by contrast, lists primarily his own achievements, and it is clear that he considers these achievements his alone, not to be shared with a pressured king on a far-away throne:
‘I gave bread to the hungry, and clothing to the naked; I anointed those who had no oil; I gave sandals to him without any; I gave a wife to him who had no wife […] I brought life to the provinces of Hierakonpolis and Edfu, Elephantine and Ombos.’¹⁶
Towards the end of the First Intermediate Period, a new royal house based in the southern city of Thebes eventually succeeded in scoring a series of decisive victories against the Herakleopolitan rulers in the north. After defeating his enemies within Egypt, the Theban King Mentuhotep II launched campaigns against Egypt’s traditional enemies in Nubia and Libya, rekindling the dying flame of royal authority and effectively reuniting Egypt and laying the foundations for the Middle Kingdom.
A potentially dangerous situation occurred when Mentuhotep II’s grandson, King Mentuhotep IV, died without an heir, but the succession crisis was averted when the dead king’s vizier took the throne as Amenemhat I, founding the 12th Dynasty and moving the capital from Thebes to the newly founded settlement of Itj-Tawy, which was probably near modern-day Cairo, although its location has not yet been ascertained by archaeologists.
During the 12th Dynasty, Egyptian literature flourished, and a great deal of fictional compositions have survived to the present day, including The Tale of Sinuhe, which relates the adventures of a courtier who flees Egypt after the murder of Amenemhat I (a murder which may or may not have occurred in reality); The Shipwrecked Sailor, perhaps the earliest example of a robinsonade, which tells the story of a sailor marooned on a magical island inhabited only by a giant talking snake; but also more sombre compositions like The Dialogue Between a Man and His Soul, a deeply philosophical treatise wherein a man burdened by a heavy life disputes with his soul about the merits of the afterlife and the soul exhorts the man to appreciate life and not pursue the attractiveness of death.
The Middle Kingdom also saw Egypt’s foreign policy altered from one based on occasional raids to secure financial gain in the form of loot, to a more regimented occupation of strategic areas to control mineral deposits and trade routes. Multiple forts were constructed along the Nile in Lower Nubia during the reigns of Senwosret I and Senwosret III in particular, while Amenemhat II pursued a more aggressive foreign policy in the Levant, and also expanded Egypt’s trade with the Lebanese city-states.
With this expansion of Egypt’s horizons, however, also came new enemies, in particular the Kingdom of Kush located in Upper Nubia and ruled from the city of Kerma below the Third Cataract. Eventually, when the power of the Egyptian kings began to wane during the 13th Dynasty, the Kushites jumped to fill the power vacuum, taking control of the Egyptian forts in Lower Nubia and pushing the Egyptian sphere of influence north to the First Cataract below Aswan and entirely out of Nubian territory. Though the threat from the ascendant Kerma was no doubt palpable, a far more outlandish enemy had appeared in the late 12th Dynasty and effectively seized control of northern Egypt, forcibly shifting the Egyptian capital to the cities of Abydos and Thebes: the Hyksos.
The term ‘Hyksos’ comes from the ancient Egyptian words heqa khasut, meaning ‘rulers of foreign lands’. While precise identification of their origins is still a subject of much debate, they most likely comprised tribes or groups of Semitic origin from the Levant. Already from the late 12th Dynasty and in particular during the 13th Dynasty onwards, Levantine influences began to appear in the archaeological record of the Eastern Nile Delta, suggesting a gradual influx of non-Egyptian cultural units, rather than an actual invasion. This is particularly visible at the site of Tell el-Dab’a,¹⁷ also known by its ancient name, Avaris. The settlement was originally a planned Egyptian Middle Kingdom city which may have served as a posting station for expeditions to the copper deposits on Sinai or to the Levant. Throughout the 13th Dynasty, more and more typically Levantine traditions (such as donkey burials) and objects become apparent in the archaeological record as the Semitic population grew. By the end of the 13th Dynasty, these Levantine people felt strong enough to found their own royal line of succession, the 14th Dynasty.
The notion of the Hyksos as a brutalizing invasion force can be traced back to the Manetho, who claimed that:
‘After they had subdued our rulers, they burnt down our cities, and destroyed the temples of the gods, and treated the inhabitants most cruelly; killing some and enslaving their wives and their children.’¹⁸
This hyperbolic description is not supported in the archaeological record, although the effective division of the Two Lands at the hands of Levantine foreigners no doubt left a permanent mark on the Egyptian national psyche. During the reign of Hatshepsut, several hundred years after the Hyksos had been removed from Egypt, they were still remembered and described as a manifestation of chaos in royal monumental accounts.
With the shift of Egyptian power from Abydos to Thebes and the rise of the 17th Dynasty, based in Thebes, war eventually erupted between the Egyptians and their Hyksos neighbours in the Delta. The cause of the war is unknown, although a literary story, The Tale of Seqenenre and Apophis, claims that the war began when the Theban King Seqenenre Tao received a letter from the Hyksos King Apophis wherein Apophis ordered Seqenenre to dispose of a Theban hippopotamus pool, because the braying of the beasts kept Apophis awake in his palace in Avaris. Considering that Avaris is more than 800km from Thebes, the letter was clearly meant as a metaphor; indeed it may simply have been a request that Seqenenre Tao pay tribute to the Hyksos to demonstrate his inferior position within Egypt, a demand which then provoked an armed Theban response. Seqenenre Tao led several skirmishes and raids against his northern enemy, and judging from the mutilated state of his mummy he may have died during one of them. His skull is marked by both stab-wounds from daggers and a killing blow from an axe.
Before his death, Seqenenre had, however, fathered two sons, Kamose and his younger brother Ahmose. As Kamose took his father’s throne after Seqenenre’s ignominious end, he received troubling news that the Hyksos were trying to form an alliance with the Kushite king at Kerma and coordinate an attack on the Theban enclave, effectively trapping the Egyptians between two fronts. Kamose summoned his councillors and, evidently frustrated by their pleas for him to maintain the uneasy peace with the Hyksos, he told them:
‘I should like to know what serves this strength of mine, with a prince 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?’¹⁹
Kamose opted to fight his way out of the trap and launched an all-out attack on the Hyksos, although he seems to have focused primarily on seizing control of the country south of Memphis and does not appear to have reached Avaris itself. The campaign was successful, and the Hyksos were left badly bloodied by the loss of territory and also the plundering of their merchant ships which Kamose claims to have undertaken. The cause of Kamose’s death is not known, and his mummy was destroyed shortly after its discovery, but it is possible that he – like his father before him – died in battle against the Hyksos, or suffered death from assassination.
With the war against the Hyksos still raging, the Theban throne was filled by Kamose’s energetic younger brother, Ahmose. Ahmose did what his father and brother could not, and led the Theban army and navy in a frontal attack upon Avaris itself, first capturing the strategically vital settlement of Tjaru which lay on the edge of the eastern Delta. In doing so, he effectively blockaded trade and contact across the Sinai Peninsula in the Levant, leaving the Hyksos isolated in their capital. By the eighteenth year of his reign, after multiple assaults on Avaris, the city finally fell to Ahmose and his army, and the Hyksos were driven out of Egypt. Ahmose pursued them to their stronghold of Sharuhen in modern-day Gaza, besieged the settlement and conquered it after a protracted siege. Determined to create a buffer zone to prevent foreign enemies ever reaching Egyptian lands again, Ahmose campaigned as far north as Lebanon, and possibly to the banks of the Euphrates, although he did not consolidate this new territory, but merely demonstrated that Egypt was now in resurgence after the interim of the Second Intermediate Period. After quelling a rebellion led by an Egyptian rival to his throne in the later part of his reign, Ahmose campaigned in Nubia, retaking the Egyptian forts and fortifications in Lower Nubia from the Kingdom of Kush.
With the end of the Second Intermediate Period, another peak of Egyptian civilization dawned: the New Kingdom, comprising the 18th, 19th and 20th Dynasties. It was a time when foreign affairs and warfare more than anything helped to define the Egyptian civilization. The renascent Egypt exploded onto the world stage during the 18th Dynasty, and in matters of war, trade and diplomacy, Egypt became one of the key players in the ancient Near East and a dominant super-power.
Excursus: Source Material
The study of Seti’s life and his impact on the development of Pharaonic Egypt comes under the remit of Egyptology. This discipline, which concerns the examination of ancient Egyptian culture, society, history, archaeology and language, is by no means a young or novel field of research. Interest in the Egyptian past and history can be traced back to the Ancient Egyptians themselves, who avidly visited and described the monuments of their ancestors. During the Ramesside period, this interest in the past glories amounted essentially to tourism, with officials from the nearby settlement of Memphis going on day trips taken to see Old Kingdom tombs at Saqqara and Giza, blazing a path which millions of tourists have taken since and continue to take to this day. Scholars rely predominantly on textual or archaeological sources to inform us about the ancient Egyptian culture, and this study of the life and times of Seti I is no different. It is therefore useful for readers unfamiliar with Egyptian civilization to understand how this source material – from humble potsherds littering a Delta field to inscribed narratives and depictions showing pharaoh triumphant in battle – has survived to be studied so many millennia after its creation.
With the triumph of Christianity throughout Egypt in the third century AD, the knowledge of how to read the hieroglyphic and hieratic scripts, and by extension how to use many of the historical sources preserved from earlier times, gradually faded from memory, with the last inscription written with hieroglyphic characters carved at the Temple of Philae in AD 394. Almost as soon as the knowledge was lost, scholars sought to recapture it, starting with Classical authors such as the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus (AD 330–395), who wrote a lengthy (and utterly erroneous) treatise on how to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. A hundred years later, the enigmatic scholar Horapollo (fifth century AD) contributed to the debate with his equally inaccurate ‘dictionary’ of hieroglyphs known as Hieroglyphika.²⁰ A copy of Horapollo’s work was subsequently found on the Island of Andros in 1419 and brought to Florence by the monk Cristoforo Buondelmonti (1386–1430). Buondelmonti worked with the notable Florentine scholar Niccolo Niccoli (1364–1437), who was in his turn a close friend of the powerful politician Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464). An avid humanist, Cosimo sponsored the copying and distribution of hundreds of Classical manuscripts among Renaissance scholars, and it was no doubt with Cosimo’s help that the newly discovered Hieroglyphika became an immensely popular source of study among scholars in the late fifteenth century. However, by basing their own assumptions on Horapollo’s incorrect conclusions, Renaissance scholars such as Athanasius Kircher (1601–1680) merely promulgated mistake upon mistake, and none of them succeeded in deciphering the elusive script.
It was not until a chance discovery near the Egyptian city of Rosetta on 15 July 1799 that the decipherment of hieroglyphs finally began in earnest.²¹ While expanding the defences on Fort St Julien during the War of the Second Coalition between Great Britain and France, French soldiers uncovered a large slab of black stone. Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard (1771–1822) observed the excavation of the stone and, realizing that it was an ancient artefact of some significance, he informed his commanding officer, Colonel d’Hautpoul, of the discovery. The two men contacted the commander of the French battalions in Egypt, General Jacques-François de Menou (1750–1810).
During Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt from 1799 to 1801, he had brought with him a corps of ‘savants’, scientific experts in various fields whom he had tasked with discovering as much as possible about the history, environment and geology of Egypt, and to this purpose Napoleon also founded the Institut d’Égypte, a scientific institute in Cairo. It was these French scholars who first realized that the inscriptions on the stone were in three different scripts. The top script was recognized as hieroglyphs, the third as Greek. The middle script was later shown to be demotic. It was also these scholars who first hypothesized that the content of the inscription was the same in all three languages, and that therefore the Rosetta Stone could provide the key to deciphering the hieroglyphic script.
However, British victory in the Second Battle of Aboukir and the subsequent landing of a British army in 1801 stopped the French investigation of the Rosetta Stone in its tracks. The conquering British army demanded the stone as a spoil of war. The besieged French garrison in Alexandria refused to surrender it and other antiquities, and the notes taken by their scholars. The British were adamant, however, to the point where General John Hely-Hutchinson (1757–1832) of the British Army refused to allow any food or goods to be sent into the city after its surrender until the stone and other materials were in British possession. The French high command finally agreed, and delivered the Rosetta Stone to General Hely-Hutchinson’s men – although not before producing copies of the inscription which were duly sent home to Paris. The Rosetta Stone was sent to London in 1802 and presented to the British Museum by George III in June of that year, where it has remained ever since.
With the French retaining their transcriptions of the stone, the race was on to decipher the ancient Egyptian script. Some advances were made by the orientalist Baron A.I. Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838) and the Swedish Diplomat J.H. Åkerblad (1763–1819). De Sacy was able to identify personal names in the demotic script, including that of Ptolemy, and Åkerblad identified various demotic grammatical elements. The biggest advances, and ultimately the key, came from the efforts of Thomas Young (1773–1829) and Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832). Young built on the suggestion of Abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, that cartouches encircled royal names, and successfully identified the name Ptolemy in the hieroglyphic script via de Sacy’s demotic discovery. As a result, Young could assign sound values to some of the hieroglyphic signs. He went on to correctly identify some groups of signs, such as those for ‘king’ and ‘Egypt’. Ultimately, however, it was Champollion who proved that ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs comprised a system made of sound signs (‘phonograms’, like our alphabet) and sense signs (‘ideograms’, pictorial representations of objects) which were used in combination. Most importantly, he clarified that hieroglyphs conveyed a language and had a grammar, and were not, as previously believed, merely sets of magical symbols.²²
After millennia of misunderstandings and downright fictional interpretations of the ancient Egyptian script, the scholars who today research ancient Egyptian society and history have an enviable corpus of textual sources at their disposal. These encompass literary narratives, bombastic monumental accounts of the king and his prowess in war, religious and philosophical treatises, laundry lists, tax accounts and private letters and testaments. In the midst of this apparent largesse, however, it is crucial to bear in mind that it is unclear how much of the original textual material has survived; certainly far more has been lost to the ravages of time than was ever recovered from the sands of Egypt, and as a result, the picture it now presents is fragmentary. Furthermore, tens of thousands of scraps of papyrus and ostraca, sculptural fragments and stela still lie unread in museums and in private collections, and more is found by archaeological missions with each passing year. It should also be noted that, like many ancient societies, the ability to read and write was intrinsically linked to the elite. The vast majority of the Egyptian population were illiterate, and it is unlikely that their stories, beliefs and legends are represented in the textual material which survives to this day.
Archaeological exploration allows modern scholars access to a different assemblage of source material to inform about ancient Egyptian history and society. While early archaeological exploration in Egypt amounted to little more than organized looting and tomb robbery, the nineteenth century saw the birth of a more scientific approach to archaeological exploration, championed to a great extent by the British archaeologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853–1942).²³ Known affectionately as ‘the man who discovered Egypt’, Petrie grew up in Kent and was taught how to survey by his father, William Petrie, an electrical engineer. At an early age, Petrie turned to archaeology, lamenting at the tender age of eight about the rough excavation techniques used to unearth a Roman villa on the Isle of Wight.
After corresponding with the astronomer Charles Piazzi Smyth (1819– 1900), Petrie travelled to Egypt to undertake a survey of the Giza Pyramids over three years. After these initial forays in Egypt, Petrie began excavating on behalf of the newly formed Egypt Exploration Fund, replacing the Swiss archaeologist Edouard Naville (1844–1926) as the Fund’s archaeologist in Egypt in 1884. For more than forty years, Petrie excavated all across Egypt, from Delta sites such as Tanis and Tell Nabasha to the settlements and cemeteries of Gurob and el-Lahun in the Fayum Oasis, and Koptos, Naqada and Tell el-Amarna in the Nile Valley. Petrie employed a more careful excavation method than his predecessors, using fewer – but better-trained – local workmen, running straight trenches rather than simply digging disorganized holes, and recording structures, finds and pottery to the best of his ability in journals and on tomb cards. While his methods are outdated and destructive by today’s standards, Petrie nevertheless helped develop archaeological exploration in Egypt from opportunistic pillaging for financial gain to a careful scientific study of the past. Today, dozens of international and Egyptian missions are carefully at work, unearthing, recording and preserving Egypt’s past.