The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

by Toby Wilkinson

  Entrust [me] to the evening hours:

  May they protect me;

  Entrust [me] to early morning:

  May it put its protection around me;

  I am the nursling of early morning,

  I am the nursling of the evening hours.13

  The death of a king was always a moment of great anxiety. How much more worrying it must have been for the Thebans when the king departing the throne was a war hero of the caliber of Intef II. And yet, a rare account of the moment of succession, recorded by the king’s treasurer, Tjetji, suggests a calm transition from one reign to the next: “The dual king, son of Ra, Intef, who lives like Ra forever … departed in peace to his horizon. Now when his son had descended in his place … I followed him.”14 In fact, the new king, Intef III, was to enjoy but a brief reign of eight years (2018–2010). Theban overlordship of the deserts brought tribute from “the rulers upon the red land” (the desert chieftains), and the famine that had wracked Upper Egypt for more than fifty years seems to have been brought to an end. But while the economy prospered, the prosecution of the war stalled. An uneasy truce may have settled over the battlefield. Theban dominance in the eight southernmost provinces was absolute; Herakleopolitan rule over Middle and Lower Egypt remained unchallenged. And so it might easily have stayed, but for the fact that a divided nation was anathema to the ancient Egyptian worldview. Any king worthy of the name had to be lord of the Two Lands, not merely a provincial potentate.

  REUNIFICATION AND REPRESSION

  THE FINAL CONFRONTATION WAS NOT LONG IN COMING. INTEF III WAS succeeded by a young, dynamic ruler who had inherited his grandfather’s tactical skill and determination. Indeed, the new king, Mentuhotep II, had been named after the Theban god of war, Montu, and was determined to live up to his billing. He chose as his Horus name the phrase Sankh-ib-tawy, “the one who brings life to the heart of the Two Lands.” It clearly signaled his overriding aspiration to reunify Egypt.

  Mentuhotep was helped enormously by unrest in the enemy’s heartland. The new nomarch of Sauty, Kheti II, was encountering serious opposition within his own province. Only a show of force by the crown and the personal attendance of the Herakleopolitan king Merikara allowed the governor’s installation to go ahead. The population of Sauty was starting to think the unthinkable, weighing the advantages of defection to the Theban side. Their embattled nomarch sailed southward at the head of a large fleet, partly as a show of force against the Thebans, partly to prove a point to his own restless population.

  Then, in Mentuhotep’s fourteenth year as king (circa 1996), Tawer—that persistent thorn in the Theban side—rebelled yet again. It was the final provocation. The Theban army swept northward, crushing Tawer and pushing onward into the Herakleopolitan heartland. Sauty was vanquished and its nomarch deposed. Nothing now stood between the Thebans and their ultimate prize, Herakleopolis itself. When Mentuhotep’s army reached the capital of the house of Kheti, they gave full vent to their wrath, burning and destroying tombs in the city’s cemetery. To drive home the point, the Theban king immediately installed one of his most trusted followers as his personal representative in Herakleopolis, putting him in charge of the city’s most important building—its prison. That was the fate that lay in store for any “rebel” unfortunate enough not to have died in battle.

  The ruthless treatment meted out by Mentuhotep to his opponents did not stop at the gates of Herakleopolis. In the heart of troublesome Tawer, he appointed an “overseer of constabulary on water and on land,”15 suggesting a law-and-order crackdown against the inhabitants of this most unruly province. Another of Mentuhotep’s henchmen boasts of taxing “Tawer, Tjeni, and [as far as] the back part of the tenth Upper Egyptian province”16 for his master. This smacks of punitive economic sanctions against formerly hostile territory. Herakleopolitan loyalists who tried to escape retribution by fleeing to the oases were remorselessly hunted down. They had forgotten the Thebans’ mastery of desert routes. The king himself addressed his victorious troops, urging them to pursue troublemakers, and moved to annex the oases and lower Nubia. A garrison installed in the fortress at Abu provided Mentuhotep with a springboard for campaigns against Wawat, while expeditions into the Western Desert were highly effective at disrupting potential enemy supply lines and mopping up any lingering resistance.

  His external borders secured, the king could now turn his attention to matters of internal government. Situated on the east bank of the Nile at a place where cross-country routes through the Eastern and Western deserts converged, the town of Thebes had first come to prominence at the end of the Old Kingdom. With excellent communication links, it made a natural capital for the whole of Upper Egypt. The role of its first family in the recent civil war had merely strengthened its claim to preeminent status. The town itself was still rather small and enclosed by a thick mud brick wall. The tightly packed streets of houses, granaries, offices, and workshops clustered in a grid pattern around the small temple of the god Amun-Ra at Ipetsut (modern Karnak). Like any provincial capital, Thebes had its own local administration. At its head was the mayor, assisted by officials responsible for such essential government tasks as land registration, irrigation and flood protection schemes, and taxation. Since Thebes was a commercial center of some importance, the quays along the river thronged with merchants, unloading their goods for purchase by government agents and private customers. Potters, carpenters, weavers, and tanners; butchers, bakers, and brewers—the backstreets of Thebes were filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of craft and food production (much like the backstreets of any Egyptian town today). Most inhabitants were peasant farmers who lived in simple mud brick dwellings and spent every day tilling the fields, as countless generations of their forebears had done, but the city also played host to a rising number of better-off families, a nascent middle class of tradesmen and lower-ranking bureaucrats with larger houses in the smarter neighborhoods. Had Thebes been any other provincial center, the inhabitants’ horizons might have stayed rather limited, but with the city catapulted to national prominence, opportunities for advancement mushroomed. The good times had arrived.

  Under Mentuhotep, the dynastic seat was formally established as the new national capital, and prominent Thebans were appointed to all the major offices of state. Administrative reforms were soon followed by theological ones. To mark the final phase in the civil war, the king had changed his Horus name to Netjeri-hedjet, “divine of the white crown,” and he now embarked on a radical program of self-promotion and self-deification, designed to restore and rebuild the ideology of divine kingship that had taken such a battering in the years of internal strife. From Abdju and Iunet to Nekheb and Abu, Mentuhotep commissioned a series of ornate cult buildings, more often than not dedicated to himself as the gods’ chosen one. At Iunet, he adopted the unprecedented epithet of “the living god, foremost of kings.” Deification of the reigning king during his lifetime marked a new departure in royal ideology. Mentuhotep was clearly not a man for half measures.

  Casualties of war WERNER FORMAN ARCHIVE

  He also used these monuments to send a stark political message to any remaining would-be rebels in Egypt’s northern provinces. His chapel at Iunet showed him in the age-old pose of smiting an enemy, but the symbolic victim was represented as a pair of intertwined stems of papyrus, symbolizing Lower Egypt. The accompanying inscription emphasized the point, adding “the marshlands” to the traditional list of Egypt’s enemies. A relief from Mentuhotep’s shrine at Inerty, in his Theban heartland, was even more explicit. It showed a line of four kneeling captives, pathetically awaiting their fate of being clubbed to death by the king. First in line—in front of the expected Nubian, Asiatic, and Libyan—was an Egyptian, a representative of the “chiefs of the Two Lands.” For Egypt’s new king, national security began at home. After decades of war and paramilitary activity designed to snuff out all opposition, Mentuhotep felt secure enough to signal his indisputable status as ruler of a reunified Egypt. In typical Egy
ptian fashion, he did so by adopting a new title, a third version of his Horus name: Sema-tawy, “the one who unites the Two Lands.” The factionalism and internal dissent of the time of distress had been consigned to history. Egypt could once again hold its head high as a unified, peaceable nation, ruled by a god-king. The Middle Kingdom had begun.

  Mentuhotep’s lasting memorial epitomizes his determination to reassert the cult of the ruler and project himself as the monarch who restored the tarnished reputation of kingship. In an embayment in the hills of western Thebes—the very same hills that had given his forebears their first military advantage—Mentuhotep ordered work to begin on a lavish funerary monument. As befitted a reunifier, a renaissance king, it amalgamated old and new ideas. The architecture cleverly combined elements from his forebears’ Theban tombs and the Memphite pyramids of the Old Kingdom in a radical and innovative design. The decoration included scenes of battle alongside more traditional images of royalty. Surrounding the royal tomb, burials were prepared for the king’s closest advisers and most loyal lieutenants. In a deliberate echo of the great Fourth Dynasty court cemetery at Giza, the king’s courtiers would surround their monarch in death just as they had in life.

  But the most poignant component of the entire mortuary complex was a simple, undecorated pit, cut into the rock within sight of the king’s vast edifice. This was one of the first parts of Mentuhotep’s grand design to be finished, and the pit contained the linen-wrapped bodies of sixty or more men, stacked one on top of another. In life, they had been strong and tall, with an average height of five feet, nine and a half inches, and between thirty and forty years old. Despite their strength, they had all succumbed to the same fate. The injuries on their bodies were mostly arrow wounds and traumas caused by heavy, rough objects falling from a great height. For these men had been soldiers, slain in battle while attacking a fortified town. Scars showed some to have been battle-hardened veterans. Yet what they’d faced in their final test was not hand-to-hand combat but siege warfare. The arrows and missiles raining down on them from the battlements had killed some outright, their tightly curled hair offering scant protection. Other soldiers, wounded but still alive, had been brutally dispatched on the battlefield by having their skulls smashed with clubs. In the heat of battle, bodies had been left for vultures to peck at and tear. Only after the battle had been won, and the town stormed, could the survivors gather up their dead (some already stiff with rigor mortis), strip them of their blood-soaked clothes, scour the bodies clean with sand, and bandage them with linen, making them ready for burial. No attempt had been made to mummify the corpses, and little distinction had been made between different ranks of the dead. The two officers had simply been bandaged rather more thoroughly and placed in simple undecorated coffins. Finally, before burial, the names of the deceased had been written in ink on their linen wrappings—good Theban names such as Ameny, Mentuhotep, and Intefiqer; intimate family names such as Senbebi (“Bebi’s brother”) and Sa-ipu (“Ipu’s son”); and also names such as Sobekhotep, Sobeknakht, and Sehetepibsobek, which suggest an origin far from Thebes, close to the northern cult centers of the crocodile god Sobek. It seems probable that these slain soldiers, given the unique honor of a ceremonial war grave, had been involved in the decisive battle of the civil war, the final attack on Herakleopolis itself. Some of them may have been local men who nonetheless had supported the Theban army against their own rulers, and so had been especially honored.

  For King Mentuhotep, conqueror of the Herakleopolitans and reunifier of Egypt, erecting a national cenotaph close to his own tomb was a brilliantly calculated piece of propaganda. It would serve as a powerful reminder to his contemporaries, and to posterity, of the sacrifices that Thebes had made in the conflict. It would cause Mentuhotep to be forever remembered as a great war leader. And in a foretaste of his successors’ mode of rule, it would cement the myth of the king and his band of brothers as the defenders of the nation.

  The war grave was a harbinger of something else, too. In the brave new world of the Middle Kingdom, a glorious death would, for many, be a substitute for the joys of life.

  CHAPTER 7

  PARADISE POSTPONED

  SOMETHING TO HOPE FOR

  ANCIENT EGYPT SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN A CIVILIZATION OBSESSED WITH death. From pyramids to mummies, most of the hallmarks of Egyptian culture are connected with funerary customs. Yet, if we look more closely, it was not death itself that lay at the heart of the Egyptians’ preoccupations, but rather the means of overcoming it. Pyramids were designed as resurrection machines for Egyptian kings. Mummies were created to provide permanent homes for the undying spirits of the dead. And if mortuary beliefs and grave goods dominate modern views of ancient Egypt, it is only, perhaps, because cemeteries located on the desert edge have survived rather better than towns and villages on the floodplain. Tombs have provided generations of archaeologists with rich and relatively easy pickings, while the excavation of ancient settlements is difficult, laborious, and decidedly less glamorous. Nonetheless, the importance of afterlife beliefs and customs to the ancient Egyptians cannot be waved away as a mere accident of archaeological preservation. Proper preparation for the next world was deemed an essential task if death was not to bring about utter annihilation.

  Although the hope of an afterlife, and the necessary preparations for it, can be traced back to Egypt’s earliest prehistoric cultures, the century or more of political unrest (2175–1970) following the collapse of the Old Kingdom marked a watershed in the long-term development of ancient Egyptian funerary religion. Many of the characteristic features, beliefs, and practices that would survive until the very end of pharaonic civilization were forged in the crucible of social change that accompanied the period of civil war and its aftermath. The weakening of the monarchy affected all sections of the population to a greater or lesser extent. For the vast majority of the population—the illiterate peasantry—the presence or absence of strong government changed little in the pattern of their lives. Long days of toil in the fields, sowing, hoeing, tending, and reaping, were as predictable as the rising sun. But an ineffective national administration could have devastating longer-term effects for ordinary people and their families. A breakdown in central authority left the way open for unscrupulous local officials to exact punitive levels of taxation. Neglect of the irrigation and flood-protection systems increased the likelihood of poor harvests and famine. The failure of the state to maintain stockpiles of grain took away the peasant farmers’ only insurance policy. Little wonder that eyewitness accounts from the century or so following Pepi II’s death speak of hunger stalking the land. For the small, literate elite at the top of the social pyramid, the effects of the political crisis were perhaps less life-threatening but longer lasting. Senior bureaucrats could be sure of their next meal but not of their next promotion. When the fount of honor dried up, careers built on loyal service to the sovereign were suddenly going nowhere. Influential local families had to look to their own resources to maintain their affluent lifestyles. Shorn of royal patronage and authority, many of them simply decided to go it alone, continuing to govern their communities as before and aggregating to themselves a host of royal prerogatives.

  As old certainties fell away, so did the rigid distinctions between royal and private provision that had characterized the Pyramid Age. As daily existence grew harder and more uncertain, the need for greater certainty beyond the grave became more pressing. If necessity is the mother of invention, the grim realities of life in post–Sixth Dynasty Egypt created a particularly fertile environment for theological innovation.

  In more peaceful and prosperous times, as far as we can judge from the mute record of tombs and grave goods, the ruling class had been content to look forward to an afterlife that was essentially a continuation of earthly existence, albeit stripped of the unsavory aspects. The elaborately decorated tomb chapels of the Pyramid Age reflect an era of certainty and an overwhelmingly materialistic view of life after death. The funda
mental purpose of tomb decoration, indeed of the tomb itself, was to provide the deceased with all the material needs of life beyond the grave. Scenes of busy bakers and brewers, potters, carpenters , and metalworkers; of fishermen landing prodigious catches; of offering bearers bringing joints of meat, poultry, fine furniture, and luxury goods: all were designed to ensure a never-ending supply of food, drink, and other provisions, to sustain the tomb owner in an all too earthly afterlife. While the king might hope for an afterlife among the stars, at one with the forces of the cosmos, that destiny was barred to even his highest officials. In death as in life, there was one rule for the king and another for his subjects.

  Such rigid distinctions weakened and eventually gave way as royal authority waned during the long reign of Pepi II and the strife that followed it. Ideas of a transcendent afterlife in the company of the gods spread through the general population, transforming funerary practices and the wider culture. Earthly success and being well remembered after death were no longer enough. The hope of something better in the next world, of transfiguration and transformation, became paramount. Notions of what lay on the other side of death were elaborated, codified, and combined in ever more inventive formulations. In the process, the ancient Egyptians devised the key concepts of original sin, an underworld rife with dangers and demons, a final judgment before the great god, and the promise of a glorious resurrection. These concepts would echo through later civilizations and ultimately shape the Judeo-Christian tradition.