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

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  FOR CENTURIES NOW—perhaps for millennia—the cities on the plain had grown enough wheat to support their burgeoning populations through irrigation: digging channels from the riverbanks into reservoirs, so that rising waters would flow into storage tanks, from where they could be channelled in dryer months over the fields.

  But the waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates, although fresh enough to support life, were very slightly salty. When this faintly brackish water sat in reservoirs, it collected more salt from the mineral-rich land. It then ran out over the fields and stood in the sun. Most of the water soaked into the earth, but some evaporated, leaving slightly more salt on the ground than had been there before.

  This process, called salinization, eventually led to such a concentration of salt in the ground that crops began to fail.55 Wheat is particularly sensitive to salt in the earth. Accounts from the Sumerian cities show, in the years before 2000 BC, a progressive switchover from wheat to barley, which can tolerate more salt. But in time even barley refused to grow in the salty soil. Grain grew scarce. So did meat, since there was not only less grain for humans, but less for animals, who had to be taken farther and farther afield to find grass.

  Right around the reign of Shu-Sin, a Sumerian scribe notes that the earth in certain fields has “turned white.”1 An occasional proverb shows that the problem of rising salt was on farmers’ minds; in a collection from the same time, one proverb asks, “Since beggars don’t even know enough to sow barley, how can they possibly sow wheat?” Another proverb remarks that only a “male” rising of the river—presumably, a particularly powerful one—will “consume the salt” in the soil.2

  The farmers of Sumer were not so ignorant of basic agriculture that they did not understand the problem. But the only solution was to avoid planting every other year, in a practice called “weed fallowing”—allowing weeds with deep roots to grow, lowering the water table and allowing salt to wash back down beneath the topsoil.3 In the meantime, what would the cities of Sumer eat? And how would the increasingly strict tax burden, made necessary by a large and highly structured bureaucracy organized by Shulgi and preserved by his heirs, be shouldered?

  In the absence of weed fallowing, fields could grow so toxic that they would have to be abandoned entirely, perhaps for as long as fifty years, to allow the soil to recover. This made the Amorite trespass on Sumer’s fertile fields not a matter of annoyance, but of life and death. The Mesopotamian plain did not have an unlimited expanse of fields; it is what anthropologists call “circumscribed agricultural land,” sharply defined by surrounding mountains and deserts.56

  The growing scarcity of grain made the Sumerian population generally hungrier, less healthy, more fractious, and less able to defend itself. Lacking the full measure of grain tax, the court of the Ur III Dynasty could not pay its soldiers. The trespassing Amorites could not easily be driven away.

  In the first three years of his reign, Shu-Sin lost progressively more of his frontier. By the fourth year, he was desperate enough to try a brand-new strategy, one unused before: he ordered a huge wall, 170 miles long, built across the plain between the Tigris and the Euphrates, in a frantic attempt to keep the Amorites away.

  The wall was ultimately useless. Shu-Sin’s son, Ibbi-Sin, soon gave up even the pretense of defending the fields behind it. Poverty, disorder, and invasion led to bits of his realm flaking off, falling not only to marauding Amorites but to his own hungry and discontent people. When Ibbi-Sin had been on the throne for two years, Eshnunna, in the far north of his remaining empire, rebelled and refused to pay tribute, and Ibbi-Sin did not have the soldiers to bring the city back into the fold. The year afterwards, the Elamite king of Anshan—a principality which had been technically free from Sumerian domination, but which had made an alliance with Shulgi by marriage, fifty years before—rejected the half-century-old treaty and drove the Sumerians back out of Susa. Two years later, Umma broke free; three years later, in the eighth year of Ibbi-Sin’s reign, the prestigious city of Nippur refused to acknowledge his lordship any longer.

  Worse was to come. As his power declined, Ibbi-Sin had taken to granting his military commanders more and more autonomy. In the tenth year of his reign, one of these commanders, a man of Semitic descent named Ishbi-Erra, made his own play for power.

  Ur was suffering from famine, thanks to those salty fields and a lack of grain and meat; Ibbi-Sin sent Ishbi-Erra, his trusted commander, north to the cities of Isin and Kazallu to fetch supplies. A series of letters preserved on clay tablets reveal Ishbi-Erra’s strategy. First, Ishbi-Erra wrote to his king, explaining that if Ibbi-Sin sent more boats up the river and gave Ishbi-Erra even more authority, he could bring the grain; otherwise, he simply was going to have to stay in Isin with it.

  I have spent twenty talents of silver on grain, and I am here in Isin with it. Now, though, I have heard reports that the Martu have invaded the center of the land between us. I can’t get back down to you with this grain unless you send me six hundred boats and put me in charge of both Isin and Nippur. If you do this, I can bring you enough grain for fifteen years.4

  This was bald-faced extortion, which became clear to Ibbi-Sin when the governor of Kazallu also wrote him, complaining that, under cover of collecting grain for his king, Ishbi-Erra had seized Nippur, plundered a couple of nearby cities, asserted his dominance over several more, and was now threatening to take over Kazallu as well. “Let my king know that I have no ally,” the governor complained, pathetically, “no one to walk at my side.”

  18.1 The Disintegration of Sumer

  Ibbi-Sin was helpless to do anything against Ishbi-Erra, who had many of his soldiers and most of the food. His return letter to the governor of Kazallu has the testiness of desperation:

  I gave you troops, and I put them at your disposal. You are the governor of Kazallu. So how is it that you did not know what Ishbi-Erra was up to? Why didn’t you…march against him? Now Ishbi-Erra can claim to be king. And he isn’t even Sumerian. Sumer has been prostrated and shamed in the assembly of the gods, and all the cities that were your responsibility have gone straight over to Ishbi-Erra’s side. Our only hope is that the Martu will capture him.5

  The Amorites didn’t capture Ishbi-Erra, and—as Ibbi-Sin had feared—the straying commander announced himself the first king of “Isin Dynasty,” with his capital city at Isin and his territory the northern lands that had once belonged to Ur. The Isin Dynasty would resist Amorite capture and rule over the northern part of the plain for two hundred years. Meanwhile, Ibbi-Sin was left with only the very heart of his disintegrating empire, Ur itself, under his control.

  At this point, the vultures landed. In 2004, the Elamites—now reunited into one, Sumerian-free realm under the rule of a king named Kindattu—were ready to revenge themselves for decades of domination. They swept over the Tigris, broke down the walls of Ur, burned the palace, levelled the sacred places, and brought a final and shattering end to the Sumerian era. The fields that were not already barren from salt were burned, and Ibbi-Sin himself was dragged away as a captive to Anshan.

  Later poems mourn the fall of Ur as the death not just of a city, but of an entire culture:

  Corpses were piled at the lofty city gates,

  on the streets where festivals had been held, heads lay scattered,

  where dances had been held, bodies were stacked in heaps….

  In the river, dust has gathered,

  no flowing water is carried through the city,

  the plain that was covered in grass has become cracked like a kiln.6

  Ur’s collapse showed not just the weakness of Ibbi-Sin but, more ominously, the impotence of the moon god Nanna and the patron deities of the fallen cities, gods who could not protect their own.

  Father Nanna,

  your song has been turned into weeping,

  your city weeps before you, like a child lost in a street,

  your house stretched out its hands to you,

  it cries, “Where are yo
u?”

  How long will you stand aside from your city?7

  Abram and Terah had fled from Ur and from the worship of the moon-god, afraid that he could not protect them. Ultimately he could not even protect his own temple. The old nature-god, like the fields of Ur themselves, had lost his potency.

  The age of the Sumerians was finally over. Semites, both Akkadian and Amorite, and Elamites dominated the plain, which would never again be as fertile as it had been back in the days of the earliest kings, when fresh water ran through green fields.57

  Part Three

  STRUGGLE

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Battle for Reunification

  Between 2181 and 1782 BC, Mentuhotep I reunites fractured Egypt, and the Middle Kingdom begins

  FOR A CENTURY AND A HALF, Egypt had no pharaoh worthy of the name.

  Abram had arrived in the country sometime during the rule of the Ninth or Tenth Dynasty, two families of kings who probably overlapped. According to Manetho, the Ninth Dynasty was founded by a king named Achthoes, who began a royal line and ruled all of Egypt from Herakleopolis, farther south. Achthoes, he tells us, was the most cruel ruler Egypt had ever seen; he “hurt people all over Egypt.”1

  This king, who appears in inscriptions as “Akhtoy I,” was actually the governor of the province centered at Herakleopolis; the tradition of his cruelty most likely stems from his armed attempt to seize all of Egypt. Almost as soon as Akhtoy was dead (Manetho says that he went mad and was eaten by a crocodile, the instrument of divine vengeance), another “pharaoh” announced himself much farther to the south. His name was Intef, and he claimed to rule all of Egypt from Thebes.

  Manetho says that Akhtoy’s Ninth Dynasty was followed by a Tenth Dynasty, and then neatly by an Eleventh Dynasty. What actually happened was that the Ninth and Tenth Dynasties and the Eleventh Dynasty ruled simultaneously. “Rule” is a kind word; unruly sets of warlords were fighting each other for the right to claim nominal control of Egypt, while other provincial governors went on doing as they pleased. An inscription from one of these governors (or nomarchs; the territories ruled by the nomarchs were known as nomes) shows a complete disregard for the royal pretensions in Herakleopolis and Thebes. “[I am] overseer of priests, overseer of desert-countries, overseer of mercenaries, great overlord of the nomes,” Ankhtifi boasts. “I am the beginning and the peak of mankind.…I surpassed the feats of my ancestors…. All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger and people were eating their children, but I did not allow anybody to die of hunger in this nome…. Never did I allow anybody in need to go from this nome to another one. I am the hero without equal.”2 In his own eyes at least, Ankhtifi is the equal of any pharaoh.

  Manetho’s neat succession of dynasties is produced by his determination to stuff all of this chaos into the framework of the old dynastic successions. Even more than fifteen hundred years after the fact, Manetho cannot quite admit that the authority of Horus-on-earth has entirely disappeared. In this, he is far from alone. What inscriptions survive from the period show that Egyptian scribes either ignored the reality of their kingdom’s breakdown (other ancient king lists pretend that the Ninth and Tenth dynasties never happened and pick up partway through the Eleventh),3 or tried to put it in slightly less threatening terms. Egypt had not fallen into anarchy. No; the old north-south hostility had just made a temporary return. Clashes between the north and south were nothing new, and in the past a pharaoh had always risen to reunify the whole mess.

  So we find Intef I, the Theban pretender, calling himself “King of Upper and Lower Egypt” in his own inscriptions.4 This was more than a little grandiose, as he certainly was not king of Lower Egypt and probably didn’t control all that much of Upper Egypt either. Nevertheless, it put him firmly into the tradition of Upper Egyptian pharaohs who had managed to bring the rebellious north back under control. Intef’s soldiers fought, more than once, with troops from Herakleopolis, in a re-creation of those old battles between north and south. Meanwhile, rival nomarchs clashed, Western Semites wandered into the Delta, and Egypt’s great past receded a little further. “Troops fight troops,” an account from the period reads. “Egypt fights in the graveyard, destroying tombs in vengeful destruction.”5

  Then, halfway through the Eleventh Dynasty, Mentuhotep I came to the throne of Thebes.

  Mentuhotep, who was named after the Theban god of war, spent the first twenty years of his reign fighting his way north into Lower Egypt. Unlike Narmer and Khasekhemwy before him, he had to campaign not only against the soldiers of the northern king, but also against the nomarchs in his way. One of his first great victories was against the governor of Abydos; the ferocity of the takeover is marked by at least one mass burial, a tomb containing sixty soldiers all killed in the same battle.6

  As he fought his way north, the soldiers of the Tenth Dynasty ruler at Herakleopolis retreated in front of him. Just before Mentuhotep reached Herakleopolis, the Tenth Dynasty king who reigned there died. The scramble for succession threw the defense of the city into disorder, and Mentuhotep marched into it with ease.

  Now he held both Thebes and Herakleopolis, but Egypt was far from united. The nomarchs were not keen to give up their long-held powers; battles with the provinces continued for years. Portraits of Egyptian royal officials during this time tend to show them carrying weapons, rather than papyri or other tools of office, suggesting that going to the office remained chancy for quite a long time.7

  But by the thirty-ninth year of his reign, Mentuhotep was finally able to alter the writing of his name. His new Horus-name was, unsurprisingly, “Uniter of the Two Lands.” In fact, his forty-year struggle for power had almost nothing to do with north-south hostility; but the old paradigm of civil war gave him a much better chance to cast himself as a great pharaoh who had rescued Egypt once again.

  His spin was successful. Not long afterwards, his name begins to appear in inscriptions next to that of Narmer himself. He is praised as a second Narmer, equal to the legendary king who had first pulled Upper and Lower Egypt together into one.

  MENTUHOTEP’S REIGN was the end of the First Intermediate Period and the beginning of Egypt’s next period of strength, the Middle Kingdom. He ruled, according to Manetho, for fifty years.

  Although tomb inscriptions identify at least five different women as his wives, no inscriptions that date from his reign mention a son.8 The next two kings had no blood link to him or to each other, and the third was a commoner: Amenemhet I, who had served Mentuhotep III as vizier. It seems that the idea of a divine royal bloodline, if honored in theory, had passed away in practice.

  Amenemhet I is the first king of Dynasty Twelve. A southerner by birth (according to inscriptions, his mother was from Elephantine, far into Upper Egypt), Amenemhet immediately put himself into the line of great unifiers by building himself a brand-new capital city, just as Narmer had, to celebrate his hold over the country. He called this new city, twenty miles south of Memphis, “Seizer of the Two Lands” (“Itj-taway”).9 It would serve him as his own balancing point between north and south; Memphis, still a center of worship of the Egyptian pantheon and home to Egypt’s most sacred temples, was no longer the place where the pharaoh made his home.

  Amenemhet also commissioned scribes to write a “prophecy” about him, a document which began to circulate through Egypt very near the beginning of his reign. This “Prophecy of Nerferti,” supposedly from the reign of King Snefru five hundred years before, begins with King Snefru brooding over the possibility that Egypt will fall to Asiatic invaders from the east (a clear case of a later worry imposed on a much earlier time, since this possibility probably never occurred to Snefru). Fortunately, Snefru’s sage has a happy prediction:

  A king will come from the South….

  He will take the White Crown,

  He will wear the Red Crown….

  Asiatics will fall to his sword,

  Rebels to his wrath, traitors to his might….

  [He] will build the Walls-of
-the-Ruler

  To bar Asiatics from entering Egypt.10

  Amenemhet then proceeded to carry out the prophecy. With the help of his son Senusret, he led an expedition against the “sand dwellers” who had infiltrated the Delta.11 He also built a fortress east of the Delta to keep other invaders out and named it, not surprisingly, Walls-of-the-Ruler.

  Near the end of his reign, Amenemhet was powerful enough to build himself a pyramid near his new city of Itj-taway. It was only a small pyramid, but it stood as a monument to the return of the old order. Amenemhet must have felt himself to be walking in the footsteps of his great predecessors Narmer and Khufu and Khafre. The pharaoh’s might was on the upswing once more.

  Then Amenemhet was murdered.

  SENUSRET I WROTE the story of his father’s assassination shortly afterwards, in his father’s own voice. “I awoke to fighting,” the dead Amenemhet says, “and I found that it was an attack of the bodyguard. If I had quickly taken weapons in my hand, I would have made the wretches retreat…. But there is none mighty in the night, none who can fight alone…. my injury happened while I was without you, my son.”12

  A few more details are contained in a story from slightly later, the “Tale of Sinuhe.” According to this account, Senusret was campaigning down south in “the land of the Libyans,” the desert west of the Nile, where desert-dwellers had long troubled the Egyptian border. Hearing the news of his father’s murder, Senusret left his army behind and flew like a hawk back north to Itj-taway, a long and difficult journey. As the crown prince approached, the courtier Sinuhe fled from the palace up into the land of the Asiatics because he was certain that he would be suspected of involvement in the crime.