The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  Most likely, the pattern of daily life still varied from city to city. The spread of Harappan civilization was not exactly the ancient equivalent of an invasion by the Borg.39 But the similarity between such widely separated cities must have required close communication (not to mention enforcement), and even so no messages have survived for us. During this period the Harappan script (whatever it says) also became standardized in its form and, presumably, its use.

  Yet it has no message for us. The cities of Harappa remain free of personality. If they are like the Borg, it is in the absence of any voice who emerges as an I from the collectiveness of the Harappan experience.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The First Collapse of Empire

  Between 2450 and 2184 BC, the excesses of the pharaohs trouble the people of Egypt and the Old Kingdom ends

  MEANWHILE, EGYPT was suffering from the opposite problem: too many personalities, all of them wanting to be remembered forever.

  Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid, was succeeded first by his eldest son, who didn’t reign long enough to build anything in particular, and then by his next son, Khafre. Khafre ruled for sixty-six years according to Manetho and fifty-six by Herodotus’s count.40 Either way, he kept the throne for a very long time.

  Khafre, Herodotus tells us, “carried on in the same manner” as his father. Like Khufu, he spent so much energy in building that he neglected the gods and did not reopen the sanctuaries. “The Egyptians loathe Chephren [Khafre] and Cheops [Khufu] so much that they really do not like to mention their names,” Herodotus adds.1 Whatever severe measures Khufu had resorted to in the building of his pyramid were repeated in the reign of his son. Khafre’s own pyramid, the so-called Second Pyramid, was only thirty-four feet shorter than the Great Pyramid. But Khafre built it, craftily, on higher ground, so the casual spectator is tricked into thinking that the Second Pyramid is taller.

  He also left another spectacular monument: the Sphinx, a mysterious limestone sculpture, part lion and part falcon, with a man’s face (probably a portrait of Khafre himself, although there is still plenty of argument over this point). The huge creature gazes to the east. It is usually referred to as a statue made from “living rock,” which simply means that it was carved on a piece of rock already sticking out of the ground, rather than constructed elsewhere and moved into place.

  15.1. Sphinx. The Sphinx at Giza, with the Great Pyramid behind it. Photo credit Galen R. Frysinger

  The origin of the sphinx-figure itself is totally unknown. Later, the Greeks tell marvelous stories about it which had no currency at all in the third millennium. Khafre may even have invented it, since the only sphinx which may be older41 is a small female sphinx-figure which was discovered in the ruins of his oldest son Djedefre’s unfinished tomb. There is no way to know whether it dates from Djedefre’s day, or was tossed there later.2

  Like the Great Pyramid, the Sphinx has attracted its share of nutty theories: it dates from 10,000 BC and was built by a disappeared advanced civilization; it was built by Atlanteans (or aliens); it represents a zodiacal sign, or a center of global energy.

  The elaborate explanations are totally unnecessary. The falcon was identified with Horus, while the lion was identified with the sun and thus with the sun-god, Ra, and Ra’s divine colleague Amun (this was a local god who came to be identified with Ra, sometimes as the composite god Amun-Ra). To have a statue half-lion, half-falcon, guarding the place where your soul would exist eternally, was to claim the protection of Egypt’s most powerful gods. To put your own face on the statue was to claim their identity. The name “sphinx” is a Greek corruption; the original Egyptian name for the figure was probably “shesepankh,” or “living image.”3

  Possibly Khafre needed to invent a new proof of his divinity because, as Herodotus hints, the Egyptians were getting fed up with the exacting demands of their ruler. In fact, Khafre was the last builder of a huge pyramid and the last big spender of his people’s energy. His son Menkaure was forced to retrench and reform.

  Herodotus tells us that, according to Egyptian tradition, Menkaure reopened Egypt’s temples and sanctuaries, raised the people from the misery which his predecessors had inflicted on them, and ruled them kindly.42 Menkaure’s pyramid stands as additional proof of change: the Third Pyramid is only 228 feet tall, half the size of Khufu’s. It still required vast use of resources, but nothing like the lifetime of man-hours demanded by the previous pyramids.

  Menkaure’s relative benevolence, Herodotus explains, came from conscience; he “disapproved of what his father had done.”4 Perhaps Menkaure did indeed object to the monumental architecture of his father and grandfather. However, it is just as possible that he was bowing to the inevitable: a slump in the ability of the Fourth Dynasty pharaohs to command the kind of obedience from the huge mass of Egyptian workers necessary to build a Great Pyramid. If he suspected that a revolt was on the way, a visible and public retrenching, leaning towards the merciful, was not only shrewd but unavoidable.

  It was also lasting. The huge Fourth Dynasty pyramids, which have come to represent all of Egyptian history for so many students, stand as historical curiosities in the Egyptian landscape; no later pharaoh ever topped them. The pharaohs had tested the limits of their divine authority, and had come to the end of it. Menkaure could not compel the same unquestioning service as his father and grandfather.

  The discovery of the limits of divine power seems to have led to an increasing decline in pharaonic fortunes, as if Menkaure’s admission of his own limitations had started Egypt down a slippery slope that ended in a swamp of anarchy.

  The traditional account of Menkaure’s reign, related to Herodotus by the priests at Memphis, suggests that Menkaure found himself in a bind. The gods were so displeased with Menkaure’s rule that they sent him a message: Menkaure would die before the end of his seventh year of rule. At this, Menkaure was indignant. He found it horribly unfair that Khufu and Khafre, who had

  closed the sanctuaries, ignored the gods, and ruined men’s lives, had lived a good many years, while a god-fearing man like himself was going to die so soon. A second message came from the oracle, explaining that it was precisely because he was a god-fearing man that his life was being cut short—that he had not behaved as he should. Egypt was supposed to suffer for a hundred and fifty years, and his two predecessors had understood that, while he had not.5

  This extremely strange punishment tale suggests that there was an inherent tension between divine identity and merciful rule. The pharaoh’s godlike status was related, in fact, to his willingness to exploit it. To show compassion was to show weakness. In that case, the unlimited power of a godlike ruler was inherently self-limiting; it would only run itself up to the point where the pharaoh either backed down or the people revolted.

  And in fact this is exactly what happened to the Fourth Dynasty. Menkaure died abruptly and left the throne to his son Shepseskaf, who only managed to hold onto power for four years, and who didn’t even rate a pyramid; he was buried in a mastaba tomb, an old-fashioned grave at the old graveyard at Saqqara, where his Third Dynasty predecessors lay. The Fourth Dynasty was ended.

  TYRANNY MAY HAVE LED to the dynasty’s end, but there is another possible factor.

  Since the king was divine, he obviously needed to marry another divinity to maintain the divinity of his heirs. The royal family did not admit that any other mortal in Egypt shared in this quality. So the king’s siblings were the only possible wives on offer.

  Following the example of his predecessors, Khafre married his half-sister, Khamerernebty I; Khamerernebty I gave birth to a son and daughter, Menkaure and Khamerernebty II. Menkaure, on ascending the throne, then married his full sister, who was also his cousin, since Khamerernebty I, by marrying her half-brother, became her own daughter’s half-aunt. (She also became both Menkaure’s mother and his mother-in-law, a challenging role for any woman.) Shepseskaf was thus his father’s son, his grandmother’s great-nephew, and his mother’s firs
t cousin once removed.

  The alert reader is probably wondering, at this point, why all these people didn’t have three heads. Intermarriage of blood relations tends to reproduce a limited genetic pool, so damage in the genes is more likely to show up. In Europe, thousands of years later, decades of royal matches between blood relatives produced a slew of illnesses and imbecilities. Ferdinand I of Austria, whose mother was also his double first cousin once removed, liked to pack himself into a wastepaper basket and roll down the hall, and his most coherent utterance was reportedly, “I am the emperor! I want dumplings!”

  15.2. Khafre’s Descendents.

  It is possible that the genetic code was a little less fragile, so long ago. There also may have been a certain self-selection going on; if you had the choice of a handful of siblings for your spouse, you were likely to pick the most vigorous and healthy, thereby perhaps avoiding damaged genes. On the other hand, the rapid falloff of the pharaoh’s power after Menkaure might hint at trouble in the royal bloodline. Statues of Menkaure himself show a slightly odd-shaped head with weirdly prominent eyes, although Menkaure himself seems to have been in full possession of his wits. However, his oldest son by his sister Khamerernebty II, Prince Khuenre, lived just long enough to be proclaimed heir, and then succumbed to some unknown illness before his father’s death; Menkaure himself seems to have died very suddenly; and Menkaure’s second son, Shepseskaf, had an entirely undistinguished and very brief reign.

  There is also the peculiar survival of a story (again transmitted via Herodotus) that Menkaure fell in love with his own daughter and raped her, after which she hanged herself in grief. Herodotus himself remarks, “But this is all nonsense, in my opinion,”6 and it probably is; given the usual cheerful incest in the Egyptian royal family, it is unlikely that an Egyptian princess would find this act as shocking as we do, and the story also says that the daughter was Menkaure’s only child, which is demonstrably false. But this legend of inbreeding is the only one which survives as an explanation for the dynasty’s end.

  THE PHARAOHS of the Fifth Dynasty were not marked by a huge infusion of fresh blood. The first Fifth Dynasty pharaoh, Userkaf, was Menkaure’s first cousin once removed; he also married his second cousin, Menkaure’s daughter. Nevertheless, the breaking of the father-to-son succession also hinted at other changes.

  A papyrus which is probably five hundred years later than Userkaf, but much much earlier than Manetho, chalks up the change in dynasty to a prophecy; Khufu was told that his son and grandson would rule, but that the throne would then go to three sons of the high priest of the sun-god Ra, the priest who served at the sun-god’s chief temple in Heliopolis. These children, gold-skinned, would be attended at their births by the gods themselves.7

  In other words, power was shifting from the palace towards the temples. The Fifth Dynasty pharaohs—there were probably nine, all of them more or less undistinguished—built very small pyramids, but during this century five new temples were built to the sun-god. The first was erected by Userkaf himself; a boat for Ra’s use lies at its south edge, and it boasted in front of it an obelisk, a stone tower pointing upwards at the sky, the home of Ra. The top of the obelisk was a miniature pyramid covered in gold that glowed in the rays of the sun like a miniature sun itself.

  During the Fifth Dynasty, the pharaoh also became more closely identified with the sun-god. He had been Horus and Osiris; now he was the son of Ra.8 This likely brought him further under the control of the sun-god’s high priests, who could convey to him his father’s words.

  Instead of the earthly incarnation of a god, the king was now the son of a god, a subtle but meaningful demotion. The rings of divine power had rippled outwards, and the pharaoh was no longer the central and unquestioned conduit of it. And the idea of the pharaoh’s continuing presence on earth after death had also begun to fade. During the Fifth Dynasty, the entire progression of the spirit after death into another world was laid out in writing for the first time. The last pharaoh of the dynasty, Unas, was buried in a small pyramid with detailed incantations written along the walls, intended to make sure that he got where he was going. These Pyramid Texts, which became standard decoration for the burial chambers of the next dynasty of pharaohs, clearly indicate that Unas was leaving his people.43 “Oh Ra,” begins Spell 217, “This king Unas comes to you, your son comes to you.” King Unas’s identification with Horus and Osiris is mentioned in passing. But more attention is given to the fact that he will now ascend with Ra, rise to the sky, and “go up on high,” there to live “in the embrace of [his] father, the high and distant Ra.”9

  When Unas left his people, he apparently did so without issue, and a brief tussle over the throne ensued. The next dynasty that came to the throne, the Sixth Dynasty, had an even foggier vision of its own divinity; its pharaohs married commoners. This could have infused the royal family with new vigor and brought it back to power, but it was too late. Other blood successions had risen to challenge the power of the royal line. Over the course of a hundred years or so, the governors of various Egyptian provinces, bureaucrats who had always been appointed by the crown, had seized on periods of chaos at Memphis to pass their power to their sons.44

  As a result, the first pharaoh of the Sixth Dynasty, Teti, now ruled an Egypt that contained, in essence, small hereditary states with their own “royal families.” Teti himself took as his Horus-name the title Seheteptawy, which means “He who pacifies the Two Lands.”10 The startling return of the north-south hostility, something which had sunk from view beneath the surface of Egyptian unity, is only one hint of the currents now pulling at Egypt. Others are glimpsed in Manetho, who adds that Teti was assassinated by his own bodyguard; the divinity of the pharaoh had once made him untouchable, but this had now begun to fracture. Teti’s successor, Pepi I, had to put down an assassination plot in his own harem.11 His oldest son was dethroned and replaced by a six-year-old named Pepi II, clearly a figurehead for a powerful palace faction.

  Pepi II is credited with a ninety-four-year rule, the longest in Egyptian history. But rather than representing a time of stability, this century stands as one when the pharaoh ruled in name only. Noblemen, priests, and palace officials increasingly broke the kingdom apart between them. Pepi II, the last king of the Old Kingdom of Egypt, stayed in power for so long because he had so little actual power.

  Towards the second half of Pepi II’s long reign, Egypt—already practically divided into smaller kingdoms, united only by the conventional agreement that the throne in Memphis in fact governed the whole country—began to unravel in earnest. It is difficult to point to one precipitating event, but it seems almost certain that the Nile floods dropped once again, as they had towards the end of the First Dynasty. The western desert seems to have been pushing at the edges of Egypt’s cultivable land, an event which may have caused a certain level of panic.

  Documented events related to the end of the Sixth Dynasty are scarce. Our best source is the Egyptian king list, which, as Colin McEvedy remarks in his atlas of the ancient world, follows Pepi II with a “downright goofy dynasty”: a Seventh Dynasty with seventy pharaohs in seventy days.12 The numerical repetition must be symbolic. The number seven didn’t yet have the significance of completion that it gained later on, in the sacred writings of the Israelites; more likely the scribes keeping the king list multiplied the number of the dynasty by ten to demonstrate total chaos.45

  After the wasteful Fourth Dynasty squandering of Egyptian lives and money, the weakness of the royal family’s genes, and the natural self-limiting nature of the pharaoh’s divinity, drought provided the final push over the edge. For a little more than a hundred years, rival dynasties would rule in different cities and Egypt would be divided between battling kings. The Sixth Dynasty was the last of the Old Kingdom of Egypt; the next four dynasties would belong to the disorganized time known as the First Intermediate Period.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The First Barbarian Invasions

  Between 227
8 and 2154 BC, Gutian hordes invade the Akkadian lands and the Third Dynasty of Ur drives them out

  THE AKKADIAN EMPIRE, now under Sargon’s son Manishtushu, was looking to expand. Unlike Egypt, Agade found that its greatest enemies still lay outside its own borders.

  Manishtushu’s inscriptions boast that he was just as warlike as his father. He brags of conquering yet more territory for the empire, even travelling across the Persian Gulf by ship in order to fight against “thirty-two kings gathered against him,” where “he defeated them and smote their cities.”1 There may be more smoke than fire in this. Although he brags of his conquests, the areas that appear to have paid tribute to him seem to be those which Rimush had already subdued. “These are no lies!” one victory inscription ends up. “It is absolutely true!”2 (which tends to suggest the opposite, like the title “Legitimate King” in the mouth of a usurper).

  Manishtushu’s fourteen-year reign is mostly interesting because he fathered Naram-Sin the Great, the grandson of the great Sargon and the Akkadian king who would spread the empire to its greatest extent. Like his grandfather, Naram-Sin fought constantly. One of his steles announces nine victories in a single year; another, the unimaginatively titled Victory Stele, shows his victory over a tribe in the western Elamite territory. The Akkadian borders also crept over to swallow Susa, one of Elam’s twinned capital cities. But Awan remained free, with Elamite resistance to the growing western threat centered there.

  Ignoring the Elamite king’s independence, Naram-Sin gave himself the titles “King of the Four Quarters of the World” and “King of the Universe,” in self-puffery excessive even for ancient Mesopotamia. His name in cuneiform appears next to a sign that indicates godship,3 and the Victory Stele shows his huge figure standing above his battling armies, in the position that the gods occupy in earlier engravings. Naram-Sin did not need any gods to bless his battles. He could do that all by himself. So far as we can tell, Naram-Sin was the first Mesopotamian king to lay hold of godlike status during his life; it is an action that shows a certain maturity in the power of the throne.