The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

by Toby Wilkinson

  But there was more to it than mere magic. The king could look forward to a glorious rebirth because he commanded absolute obedience—from deities as well as mere mortals. As far as the king’s relationship with the gods was concerned, he had might, as well as right, on his side. This rather shocking presumption is given voice in one of the most chilling of Unas’s Pyramid Texts. Dubbed “the Cannibal Hymn,” its graphic imagery has made it (in)famous. A brief extract gives the flavor:

  Unas is he who eats people, who lives on the gods …

  Unas is he who eats their magic, swallows their spirits:

  Their big ones are for his morning meal,

  Their middle ones for his evening meal,

  Their little ones for his night meal,

  Their old males and females for his burnt offering.1

  The king’s theologians and hymnographers had excelled themselves in conveying the starkest of messages: Unas was omnipotent because he had literally consumed and assimilated the powers of the divine realm in all their manifestations. Nothing and no one could stand in his way of achieving cosmic immortality.

  Such a tyrannical attitude toward the gods did not bode well for the king’s relationship with his mortal subjects. The reign of Unas has left little in the way of evidence for historic events—a battle scene showing Egyptians fighting Asiatics is a rare exception—but one particular series of scenes from his pyramid causeway suggests a grim episode with dreadful human consequences. The images of famine, rendered in excruciating detail, are horribly familiar to modern audiences, who are accustomed to scenes of misery and degradation emanating from the African continent. On the Unas causeway, the tableau is just as harrowing: a man on the verge of death is supported by his emaciated wife, while a male friend grips his arm; a woman desperate for food eats the lice from her own head; a little boy with the distended belly of starvation begs a woman for food. The mental and physical anguish is real enough, yet there are no inscriptions to identify the starving people. It is scarcely conceivable that they were supposed to be native Egyptians, since the whole purpose of art in a funerary context—especially in the king’s pyramid complex—was to immortalize an ideal state of affairs. The only logical conclusion is that the famine victims are desert tribespeople, the descendants of Egypt’s prehistoric cattle herders, who continued to eke out a precarious existence in the arid regions to the east and west of the fertile Nile Valley. Their parlous state was illustrated to contrast with the good fortune of the Egyptians; the miserable wretchedness of those living beyond Unas’s rule served both as a stark reminder and as a warning to his own subjects. For all the outward piety of the Fifth Dynasty kings, an older model of despotic monarchy had never entirely gone away.

  CRACKS IN THE EDIFICE

  ALL THE PROPAGANDA OF ART AND ARCHITECTURE, OF TEXT AND IMAGE, might buy the king immortality, but it could not bring him an heir. Mocking Unas’s self-promotion as the founder of a new age, fate decreed that he should die without a son to inherit his kingdom. The throne passed instead to a commoner, a man called Teti, who swiftly married his predecessor’s daughter to secure his legitimacy. So began the Sixth Dynasty (2325–2175), in an atmosphere of uncertainty, court intrigue, and barely managed crisis that was to haunt it until the very end.

  Famine victims WERNER FORMAN ARCHIVE

  With his rather tenuous claim to the kingship, Teti needed to surround himself with trusted lieutenants. Their magnificent, decorated tombs at Saqqara, nestling close up against the royal pyramid, testify once again to the critical importance of royal patronage for career advancement, but also to the claustrophobic oligarchy of Teti’s court. The vizier Kagemni exercised unrivaled authority as the king’s right-hand man. His successor, Mereruka, enjoyed great wealth and status, and luxuries unimaginable to the majority of the population. He could indulge his palate with haute cuisine of the most exotic kind: the scenes of animal husbandry in his tomb go beyond the normal depictions of cattle rearing to include semidomesticated antelopes eating from mangers, cranes being force-fed (it seems foie gras was on the menu in Sixth Dynasty Egypt), and—most bizarre of all—hyenas being fattened for the table.

  Such refined pleasures were the reward for ultraloyal service to the king, and were designed to ensure that Teti’s closest advisers were also his strongest supporters. Yet the greatest danger to his crown, and indeed his life, came not from his chief ministers but from disgruntled royal relatives, especially the male offspring of minor wives. For them, an attemped coup, however risky, was the only alternative to a life of idle frustration. If the historian Manetho is to be believed, Teti suffered just such a fate, succumbing to assassination in a palace plot. The contemporary evidence, too, points to a hiatus in the succession, with an ephemeral king, Userkara, ruling for the briefest of periods after Teti’s demise and not deemed worthy of mention in biographies of the time. Little wonder, perhaps, that when Teti’s chosen heir, Pepi I, finally achieved his birthright and was enthroned as king, he pursued a policy of extreme caution. He placed an unusual degree of trust in a very few high officials, notably his own mother-in-law—whom he appointed vizier for Upper Egypt—and brother-in-law, Djau. Pepi pursued a vigorous policy designed to reassert royal prestige by commissioning cult chapels dedicated to himself at important sites throughout the land, from Bast, in the central delta, to Abdju and Gebtu (modern Qift), in Upper Egypt. (By contrast, temples dedicated to local gods were still virtually unknown in a country where public works focused entirely on kingship.) But while such bold architectural statements of the king’s power might have convinced the populace, the statements were less effective at stifling dissent among his entourage.

  Our best insight into palace politics during Pepi’s forty-year reign (2315–2275) comes from the tomb autobiography of a career courtier named Weni. He rose from the humble position of storehouse custodian to a financial position in the palace administration. Proximity to the king duly brought opportunities for advancement, and Weni was promoted to overseer of the robing room and head of the palace bodyguard , becoming a key confidant of the monarch. As a measure of the trust placed in him by his sovereign, Weni was given responsibility for sensitive judicial matters: “I heard a case alone with the vizier, in complete confidence. [I acted] in the name of the king for the royal harem.”2 The royal harem, comprising the households of the king’s female relatives and minor wives, was an important institution in its own right. It owned land and operated workshops (notably for textile manufacture), and was thus a potential power base for an ambitious rival to the reigning king. Throughout ancient Egyptian history, palace intrigue and attempted coups would often originate inside the harem. It was therefore vitally important for the king to have someone on the inside he trusted implictly, someone who could provide surveillance and report back to his royal master. In Weni the king had chosen well. Thanks to his diligence, a plot against Pepi I was discovered before it could achieve its seditious aims. To keep the lid on such a dangerous act of treason, the matter had to be investigated and the perpetrators brought to justice quickly and quietly. Weni duly obliged:

  When secret proceedings were launched in the royal harem against the “great of sceptre” [that is, the queen], His Majesty sent me to judge on my own. There was no judge, no vizier, no official there, only myself alone.… Never before had one like me heard a secret of the royal harem; but His Majesty made me judge it, for I was excellent in His Majesty’s heart, more than any [other] official of his, more than any noble of his, more than any servant of his.3

  Weni’s rewards were commensurate with his loyal service: promotion to the rank of “sole companion” and a stone sarcophagus, a token of status usually reserved for members of the royal family. The great monolith was transported “in a great barge of the residence together with its lid, a false door, an offering table, two jambs, and a libation table”4 by a company of sailors under the command of a royal seal bearer. This show of royal favor must have been a signal honor. Being responsible for the king’s s
afety had its compensations.

  But in the uncertain world of the Sixth Dynasty, the dangers to an Egyptian ruler came not only from his own palace. Beyond the borders of Egypt, too, less fortunate peoples—those very nomads so mercilessly caricatured in Unas’s reliefs—were starting to view the Nile Valley’s wealth with increasingly greedy eyes. These “sand dwellers,” as the Egyptians disparagingly called them, now rebelled against centuries of domination, provoking an immediate and savage response. Weni was put in charge of the operation to suppress the insurgency. Swapping the gilded opulence of the royal robing room for the dusty field of battle, he led an army of Egyptian conscripts and Nubian mercenaries through the delta to engage the rebels in their desert homeland of southern Palestine. Using a classic pincer movement, Weni ordered half of the army to proceed by boat, landing in the enemy’s rear, while the other half marched overland to launch a frontal attack. This strategy carried the day for the Egyptians, but the nomads were no pushovers. Weni boasted, rather shallowly, that “His Majesty sent me to lead this army on five occasions, to crush the land of the sand dwellers every time they rebelled.”5

  ECLIPSE

  THE USE OF MERCENARIES FROM NUBIA TO BOLSTER A CONSCRIPT ARMY showed a renewed interest by Egypt’s rulers in the lands to the south of the first cataract. And for once Egyptian concern was not merely directed at exploiting Nubia’s human and mineral resources. Along the upper reaches of the Nile, new powers were beginning to stir—powers that, if left unchecked, might disrupt the trade routes with sub-Saharan Africa and threaten Egypt’s economic interests. The Egyptian government responded to the growing risk with a raft of policy initiatives. A fortified outpost of the central administration was established in the distant Dakhla Oasis, a key point along the desert route between Egypt and Nubia. The town of Ayn Asil was provided with strong defensive walls and garrisoned with soldiers under the oasis commander. As part of the same military infrastructure, all major access routes into and out of the oasis were guarded by a network of watch posts. Situated on hills, within signaling distance of one another, and supplied directly from the Nile Valley, the guard stations allowed Egyptian security personnel to keep an eye on all movements of people and goods entering or leaving the area. By such means, Egypt could both safeguard its crucial trade routes and help to prevent infiltration by hostile Nubians.

  Under Pepi I’s successor, Merenra, Weni was appointed governor of Upper Egypt, the first commoner to hold this strategically important post. Weni gave the king eyes and ears in the far south of the country, the better to monitor developments across the border in Nubia. Merenra even made a personal visit to Egypt’s southern border to receive a delegation of Nubian chiefs. By this unprecedented gesture he hoped, no doubt, to secure their continuing loyalty to Egyptian overlordship or, failing that, at least a promise to refrain from outright hostility. However, a one-off royal visit and second- or thirdhand reports from a local official were scarcely a good enough basis for deciding matters of national security. What was needed was firsthand intelligence from Nubia itself. This would form the third plank of the government’s new policy toward its restive southern neighbor.

  The frontier town of Abu was Egypt’s gateway to Nubia. Its inhabitants knew the upper Nile better than any of their compatriots, and many had close economic or family links with the Nubian population just over the border. Government-sanctioned expeditions into Nubia had been taking place sporadically since the reign of Teti, at the beginning of the Sixth Dynasty. The time had come to place these reconaissance missions on a more systematic footing, and of all the people in Abu none was better qualified to undertake such a mission than the chief of scouts. He, after all, was the government official responsible for maintaining security and for ensuring that the peoples of Nubia and beyond delivered a steady supply of exotic products to the royal treasury. On Merenra’s orders, the chief of scouts, a man named Harkhuf, set out with his father, Iri, on an epic journey. His ultimate destination was the distant land of Yam, far up the Nile, beyond the limits of Egyptian control. The one-thousand-mile return trip took seven months, at the end of which Harkhuf and Iri returned safely to Egypt, laden with exotic goods for their sovereign.

  Just as valuable must have been the intelligence they brought with them about political developments in Nubia. So troubling were the reports that Harkhuf was sent to Yam a second time. Abandoning the pretense of a trade expedition, the intrepid traveler acknowledged the true purpose of his eight-month mission: “I returned through the region of the realm of the ruler of Satju and Irtjet, having opened up those foreign lands.”6 What Harkhuf reported back to his master was an alarming development in the political geography of lower Nubia. The local population, for so long subservient to the Egyptians, was showing signs of wishing to reassert its autonomy. The coalescence of districts such as Satju and Irtjet was a dangerous warning sign that Egypt could not afford to ignore.

  Taking account of these new political realities on his third expedition to Yam, Harkhuf studiously avoided the river valley, following instead the Oasis Road. On arrival at Yam, Harkhuf discovered to his dismay that its ruler had left to fight his own battle against the Tjemeh people of southeastern Libya. Old political certainties were crumbling, and across northeast Africa, lands were in a state of flux. Undeterred, Harkhuf set out immediately in pursuit of the Yamite chief, following him to Tjemeh land. The rendezvous accomplished, the two men concluded their negotiations to mutual satisfaction. Harkhuf embarked on the journey home “with three hundred donkeys, laden with incense, ebony, precious oil, grain, panther skins, elephant tusks, throw sticks—all good tribute.”7 However, the situation in lower Nubia was now more hazardous than ever for an Egyptian envoy. Harkhuf swiftly discovered that the chief of Satju and Irtjet had added the whole of Wawat (lower Nubia north of the second cataract) to his growing territory. Such a powerful chief was not about to allow Harkhuf and his considerable booty to pass unhindered. Only the presence of an armed escort provided by the Yamites allowed Harkhuf to continue his journey unmolested.

  Suddenly, Egypt was no longer the only serious power in the Nile Valley. Under its very nose, upstart Nubian chiefs had taken control, threatening Egypt’s centuries-old domination. It was a dramatic reversal of fortune for the most prosperous and stable nation of the ancient world. Only decisive leadership might hope to restore Egyptian hegemony. Yet soon after Harkhuf’s return, Merenra died, leaving the throne to a boy of six. The infant king, Neferkara Pepi II, was not in a position to offer any kind of guidance to his beleaguered country. At home, government was exercised by a regency council, headed by the king’s mother and uncle. As for foreign affairs, the inexperienced advisers seem to have decided to maintain a semblance of continuity by sending Harkhuf on his fourth (and final) journey to Yam. But gone, it seems, was the intelligence-gathering motive of earlier missions. Instead , this was to be an old-fashioned trade expedition, its objective to bring back exotic tribute for the new sovereign. This act of homage would serve publicly to proclaim Egypt’s continued authority over neighboring lands, even as that authority ebbed away. It was the ancient Egyptian equivalent of fiddling while Rome burned.

  Harkhuf abided loyally by his new orders and found just the trophy to delight his six-year-old monarch: “a pygmy of the god’s dances from the land of the horizon dwellers.”8 News of this dancing pygmy from the ends of the earth reached the boy king back in Egypt. Pepi II hurriedly penned an excited letter to Harkhuf, urging him to hurry back to the royal residence with his precious human bauble:

  Come northward to the residence immediately! Hurry and bring this pygmy with you … to delight the heart of the Dual King Neferkara, who lives forever. When he goes down with you into the ship, appoint excellent people to be around him on both sides of the ship, lest he fall into the water! When he lies down at night, appoint excellent people to lie around him in his hammock. Inspect ten times per night! My Majesty wants to see this pygmy more than the tribute of the Sinai and Punt!9

 
; Receiving personal correspondence from the king (albeit a boy of six) was the ultimate accolade for an Egyptian official. Harkhuf had the complete text of the royal letter inscribed on the façade of his tomb, in pride of place next to the account of his four epic expeditions. It was to stand as an eternal testament to his sovereign’s favor.

  Pepi II’s boyish exuberance may have touched the heart of an old retainer, but it was hardly an effective remedy for a country beset by problems, internal and external. In Nubia, the coalition of states first reported by Harkhuf in the reign of Merenra grew increasingly powerful and increasingly troublesome to Egyptian interests. One of Pepi’s senior officials, the chancellor Mehu, was killed by hostile locals while on an expedition to Nubia, and his body had to be retrieved by his son in the course of a difficult mission. Although the Egyptian presence remained strong in the Dakhla Oasis, Egypt had effectively lost control of events in Nubia.

  At home, too, authority was slipping from the government’s grasp. The devolution of political power to provincial officials, instigated in the late Fifth Dynasty, had proved both unwise and unstoppable. Local bigwigs—some now calling themselves “great overlord” of their province—were amassing ever more authority, arrogating to themselves a combination of civil and religious offices. When a mere local magistrate like Pepiankh of Meir could revel in a list of dignities that covered an entire wall of his tomb—member of the elite, high official, councilor, keeper of Nekhen, head man of Nekheb, chief justice and vizier, chief scribe of the royal tablet, royal seal bearer, attendant of the Apis, spokesman of every resident of Pe, overseer of the two granaries, overseer of the two purification rooms, overseer of the storehouse, senior administrator, scribe of the royal tablet of the court, god’s seal bearer, sole companion, lector-priest, overseer of Upper Egypt in the middle nomes, royal chamberlain, staff of commoners, pillar of Kenmut, priest of Maat, privy to the secret of every royal command, and favorite of the king in every place of his—then, clearly, the system was out of control. Officials were now so busy feathering their own nests and ensuring their own eternal existence that they neglected the future well-being of the Egyptian state. In matters of traditional royal patronage, too, the central government seems to have lost its way. Outwardly, Pepi II’s pyramid was the model of a Sixth Dynasty royal monument, complete with Pyramid Texts. But much of the decoration of the pyramid temple was slavishly copied from Sahura’s complex at Abusir. With artistic creativity stalled, looking back to an earlier golden age was an easy refuge for an administration that had lost its way.