The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

by Toby Wilkinson

  At about the time that hedgehogs and hippos were making their appearance among grave goods, another afterlife accessory arrived on the scene, a curious little object that encapsulates the Egyptians’ genius for invention and their intensely practical attitude toward problem solving. Thanks to its rapid rise in popularity, the object in question is now ubiquitous in museum collections the world over: the funerary figurine. The ancient Egyptian term was shabti, perhaps derived from the word for “stick” and reflecting the rudimentary modeling of the earliest examples. But this was no ordinary stick figure. It had a far more important, magical purpose. Its origins lie in the period of civil war, and, as ideas go, it was startlingly simple. Without royal workshops full of well-trained craftsmen, or sculptors and painters to decorate their tombs, the Egyptians faced a serious dilemma. If their mummified body were destroyed, how would the ka be sustained, and whence would the ba return each night after its celestial wanderings? A substitute body was the answer, and its early form was exceptionally crude, a small sticklike figure made from mud or wax, perhaps wrapped in a few shreds of linen to represent mummy bandages, and supplied with its own miniature coffin fashioned from some scraps of wood. The quality of the finished product hardly mattered. Once in the tomb, magic would put right any deficiencies in the workmanship. So began the tradition of funerary figurines, an emergency measure in an age of unrest and uncertainty. But with the reunification of Egypt under King Mentuhotep and the subsequent flowering of court culture in the Middle Kingdom, royal workshops returned, and finely crafted statues and painted tombs became available, at least to the elite, once more. Yet the funerary figurine did not disappear. It came to represent something different but just as useful—a servant to assist the deceased for all eternity.

  Shabti WERNER FORMAN ARCHIVE

  With an Osirian view of the afterlife now dominant, the shabti really came into its own. For there was one major drawback to spending an eternity in the Field of Offering. While it might be an agricultural idyll, with well-watered fields yielding abundant crops, every Egyptian knew all too well that agriculture—even in such ideal conditions—involved hard physical labor. Particularly arduous and backbreaking was the annual repair of dikes, ditches, and waterways following the inundation, essential to restoring the irrigation network to full working order. Every able-bodied individual was pressed into service for this vital communal task, excavating and carrying baskets of sand and silt from field to field—all in the hot, humid, mosquito-infested conditions that followed the retreat of the floodwaters. Would this be an inescapable chore in the afterlife, too? Surely there was some way of avoiding such unpleasantness for all eternity. The solution was a stroke of genius. The little stick figure that had previously substituted as a body for the deceased retained its basic function as a stand-in, but now, instead of providing a home for the ka and ba, it would answer the call to work on behalf of its owner. Servant figurines from the late Middle Kingdom were duly equipped with miniature agricultural implements, such as hoes and baskets, and just in case they should forget, a brief hieroglyphic text, carved on their body, reminded them of their principal duty:

  O shabti, detailed to [serve] me … if I am summoned or if I am detailed to do any work that is to be done in the afterlife … you shall detail yourself to me every time, [whether] for maintaining the fields, irrigating the banks, or ferrying sand from east to west. “Look, here I am,” you shall say.2

  When it came to life after death, a shabti was the perfect insurance policy.

  TRUTH WILL OUT

  ONE FINAL, CRUCIAL ASPECT OF THE AFTERLIFE ADVENTURE ALSO MADE its first appearance in the years following the collapse of the Old Kingdom. Like the Coffin Texts, magical objects, and servant figurines, the concept of a last judgment reflected the mixture of hope and fear that beset the ancient Egyptians in their musings about life after death. Perhaps more than any other feature of Egyptian religion, the idea of a final, inevitable reckoning before a divine judge had a profound and lasting impact on the subsequent development of pharaonic beliefs. Unlike hedgehogs, hippos, and shabtis, the last judgment was picked up by other religious traditions of the Near East as well, notably Christianity.

  The imaginary geography of The Book of Two Ways began with the Island of Fire, where the wicked were consumed in flames but the good were provided with refreshing water for their arduous journey through the underworld. The concept of trial by fire is an ancient one, but this relatively simplistic notion of judgment—whereby the unrighteous dead were separated from the righteous by means of a single, swift test—was itself to be refined in the flames of social change. Once again, the shattered illusions that accompanied the breakup of the Egyptian state proved a fertile breeding ground for new ideas. In troubled times, death came to be seen not as a mere transition to another dimension of creation but as a discontinuity, a break that might prove terminal. Whether an individual achieved rebirth as a divine being or suffered a second death depended on his or her own actions during life. The literary text known as The Instruction for King Merikara, purportedly composed by a Herakleopolitan king, summed up this new belief:

  When a man remains after passing away,

  His deeds are set alongside him.…

  He who reaches [the next life] without wrongdoings

  Will exist there like a god.3

  In this scheme of things, virtue was no longer enough—it had to be accompanied by freedom from vice. In inscriptions of the period, the boastfulness and bombast typical of Old Kingdom autobiographies are joined for the first time by notes of doubt and defensiveness. A man might enumerate his many qualities and achievements but also take pains to state “I never spoke a falsehood against any living person.”4 The negative confession, a declaration not to have committed a prescribed list of wrongful acts, became an essential component of the judgment process.

  Vindication before the divine tribunal required more, however, than a mere denial of wrongdoing. It involved a fundamental assessment of a person’s true worth, a weighing of their good and bad deeds in order to arrive at a balanced judgment of their character. Only those who passed this calculation of differences were deemed fit to join Osiris and live forever. On his stela from Abdju, the Eleventh Dynasty general Intef confidently proclaims that his “voice is true in the calculation of differences.” In other words, he has been justified and found worthy of resurrection as a transfigured spirit. From such tentative beginnings, the concept of judgment rapidly acquired a central place in Egyptian funerary religion, to the extent that the term “true of voice” became the most common euphemism for “deceased.” In a society as obsessed with bureaucracy and accountancy as ancient Egypt was, it is perhaps not surprising that theologians imagined the weighing of a person’s worth taking place on a giant set of goldsmith’s scales. The accuracy of the balance perfectly expressed the unerring judgment of the divine tribunal. A spell from the Coffin Texts describes the scales as “that balance of Ra on which Maat is lifted up,”5 indicating that the judgment is authorized by Ra himself, god of the sun and of creation, and that the deeds of the deceased are to be weighed against Maat, the goddess of truth. In this ultimate assessment, there was no room for cheating. The outcome of the judgment process was visualized as all the deceased being separated into groups, the justified and the unjust, “numbering the dead and counting the blessed spirits.”6 The differing fates of the two groups were crystal clear.

  With eternal survival at stake in the last judgment, the fevered Egyptian imagination swung into action. Conceiving further hurdles hand in hand with the means of overcoming them seems to have given the ancient Egyptians the courage to face the uncertainties of death. In the case of judgment before the tribunal, the greatest danger was that one’s own heart—seat of the intellect, fount of emotion, and storehouse of memories—might decide to bear false witness and so tip the balance against a favorable verdict. To counter this awful risk, powerful magic was required. Somehow, the heart had to be prevented from blurting out u
ntruths (or hidden truths) that might seal its owner’s fate. The ingenious solution was a new type of amulet, first introduced into burials in the late Middle Kingdom. It took the familiar shape of a scarab beetle, a potent symbol of rebirth (because young beetles hatch from a ball of dung, emblematic of death and decay). But unlike other scarab amulets, this one had a human head and was engraved with a protective spell, addressed to the heart. After the body had undergone mummification, the heart scarab was placed over the heart, with clear instructions as to how the organ should behave at the moment of truth:

  Do not stand up against me

  Do not witness against me,

  Do not oppose me in the tribunal,

  Do not incline against me.7

  In time the heart itself came to stand for the deceased and his deeds, and the pictorial representation of the weighing of the heart against the feather of truth became an essential image on funerary papyri, an encapsulation of the final judgment. It remains one of the most instantly recognizable, characteristic, and evocative scenes from the entire repertoire of ancient Egyptian art.

  And the concept of a “dreadful day of judgment, when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed” is still with us, four thousand years later.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE FACE OF TYRANNY

  BRAVE NEW WORLD

  VICTOR IN THE CIVIL WAR AND REUNIFIER OF THE TWO LANDS, KING Mentuhotep was fêted by later generations of Egyptians as a great founder figure, on a par with Menes, the mythical first king of the First Dynasty. Yet fate decreed that Mentuhotep’s descendants did not long enjoy his hard-won spoils. After the brief and unspectacular reigns of two more Mentuhoteps, the royal line of the Theban Eleventh Dynasty, of Intef II and Mentuhotep, faltered. In its place, a new family rose to power, to claim the throne and the prize of kingship.

  The Twelfth Dynasty (1938–1755) was the most stable line of kings ever to rule over ancient Egypt. For a period of 180 years, eight monarchs, representing seven generations of a single family, governed the Two Lands. Under their firm control, Egypt prospered materially and culturally. It was the golden age of ancient Egyptian literature, when many of the classics were composed. Craftsmanship reached new heights, with craftsmen creating the most exquisite jewelry to survive from the ancient world. Egypt’s reach and influence were extended more widely than ever before, and in new directions, embracing the Aegean, Cyprus, and Anatolia as well as the Red Sea coast and Nubia. And, above all, the Nile Valley and delta themselves were reordered into a unified, well-regulated, and efficient country, a recentralized state to banish the recent divisions of civil war.

  This description of the Twelfth Dynasty is factually accurate. Yet it is misleading in one crucial respect—it signally fails to capture the prevailing mood of the period. Literary works focus on uncomfortable themes such as world-weariness (Dispute Between a Man and His Soul), national upheaval (The Admonitions of Ipuwer), and regicide (The Instruction of Amenemhat I for His Son). The glowing picture of Middle Kingdom civilization that finds favor in some histories of ancient Egypt is jarringly at odds both with writings from that time and with the evidence for internal politics and government. From its very inception, the Twelfth Dynasty set out to change the way Egypt was ruled and the way society was organized. Its was a utopian vision—or dystopian, depending on your standpoint—of absolute order, underpinned by a rigid bureaucratic framework and by the suppression of all dissent. In the business of government, the kings of the Twelfth Dynasty displayed a ruthless streak, entirely in keeping with the policies of their Old Kingdom forebears. In their determination to establish rock-solid internal security, they outdid all their predecessors, deploying sophisticated propaganda alongside brute force, subtle persuasion backed up by terror tactics. Beneath the outward show of glittering high culture, darker forces were at work.

  The prevailing tone of Twelfth Dynasty rule was established at its outset. Given that the founder of the new royal line was a commoner by birth, it is scarcely surprising that the official record does not document the manner of his accession. But there are enough hints to suggest the likely course of events. The last king of the Eleventh Dynasty, Mentuhotep IV (1948–1938), was the namesake of the great reunifier but seems entirely to have lacked his leadership qualities. He had inherited his forebear’s strongly Theban outlook, but not his wider ambitions. Provincial by nature as well as by background, he left no major monuments. The principal accomplishment of his short reign was to dispatch a quarrying expedition to the Black Mountains of the Wadi Hammamat, to bring back a block of stone for the royal sarcophagus. Details of the expedition were recorded in four inscriptions, cut into the quarry face. Although they pay due reverence to the king as the mission’s sponsor, and wish him (insincerely, one imagines) “millions of jubilees,” they give the credit for the expedition’s success to its actual leader, and the man behind the inscriptions: “the member of the elite, high official, overseer of the city, vizier, overseer of officials, lord of judgment … overseer of everything in this entire land, the vizier Amenemhat.”1 The next time we encounter a man named Amenemhat in high office, he is lord of the Two Lands and son of Ra, the founder of the Twelfth Dynasty. Although the transition from king’s right-hand man to monarch is not explicitly attested, there can be little doubt that Amenemhat I took full advantage of his unrivaled position at court to seize the throne when it fell vacant, or when the opportunity arose.

  There are strong indications that the new dynasty came to power in lawless times, by means of a coup d’état rather than by peaceful succession. A remarkable series of inscriptions in another stone quarry, at Hatnub in Middle Egypt, give a vivid account of struggles within Egypt during Amenemhat I’s reign (1938–1908). Written during the tenure of the local governor Nehri, the texts are unusually dated to his years of office, not those of the reigning king. This extraordinary assumption of the kingly prerogative by a mere provincial official suggests all was not well with the age-old model of royal government. The inscriptions themselves tell of rebellion, famine, plunder, invading armies, and civil strife. And at the heart of the unrest was the palace itself: “I rescued my town on the day of fighting from the sickening terror of the royal house.”2 There is no more chilling reference to tyrannical monarchy in all of Egyptian history. Amenemhat I had chosen his Horus name well. “He who pacifies the heart of the Two Lands” had a deliberately aggressive undertone, and the long hand of royal “pacification” reached even beyond the Nile Valley, into the vast expanses of the Sahara. An experienced desert huntsman and overseer of the Western Desert named Kay was called upon to lead a counterinsurgency operation, to seek out and round up fugitives from the new regime. On Kay’s funerary stela are the words, “I reached the western oasis, I investigated all its tracks, I brought [back] the fugitives I found there.”3 Under Twelfth Dynasty rule, there would be no hiding place for rebels.

  Yet opposition was not so easily crushed. The king seems to have faced attack from several quarters, including internal dissent along Egypt’s two banks. A funerary stela from the time refers to a naval campaign along the Nile and a dawn raid against a landing stage, while the contemporary inscription of the regional governor Khnumhotep I, in his tomb at Beni Hasan, alludes to the same mission: “I sailed with His Majesty to the south in twenty cedar ships. Then he returned, kissing the earth [for joy], because he had driven him from the Two Banks.”4 The foe is deliberately left unnamed. Inscribing his name in sacred hieroglyphs would have given him the possibility of eternal life, but he was clearly a homegrown rebel, perhaps even the last king of the Eleventh Dynasty or one of his adherents. Moreover, the reliefs in Khnumhotep’s tomb (and the tombs of his immediate successors) show Egyptians attacking fellow Egyptians in full-scale urban warfare—unprecedented scenes in deeply unsettled times.

  Eventually, the king’s forces triumphed, and Amenemhat I lost no time in appointing his loyal lieutenants to key posts in the administration. Khnumhotep was appointed mayor of the regional capital of Me
nat-Khufu; elsewhere in Middle Egypt, nomarchs whose families had served under the Eleventh Dynasty were summarily dismissed, to be replaced by trusted loyalists who owed everything to the current regime. Egypt’s new master was tightening his grip on the levers of government.

  RENAISSANCE RULER

  BOLSTERED BY HIS SUCCESS IN REPRESSING INTERNAL DISSENT, THE king set about restoring the status of the monarchy. Since time immemorial, the two most important roles of the sovereign had been to uphold order and to satisfy the gods. Having done the first, it was time for the second. Amenemhat I duly ordered construction to begin on a great temple to his patron deity, the Theban god Amun. After all, Amenemhat meant “Amun is at the forefront.” So nothing less than the grandest temple in the land would suffice. Before the Twelfth Dynasty, Egyptian temples had been very modest affairs—small, often irregular constructions of mud brick, with only a sparing use of stone for doorways, thresholds, and the like. The most imposing buildings in Egypt were not the temples of deities but the pyramids of kings. Amenemhat changed all that, inaugurating the tradition of monumental edifices dedicated to the major gods and goddesses. Little remains of the Middle Kingdom temple of Amun at Ipetsut (modern Karnak)—it was unceremoniously swept away by later royal builders—but it must have dominated the adjoining city, making a powerful statement of royal power. The complex measured more than 330 feet long by 214 feet broad and was enclosed by two thick perimeter walls. Inside stood the sanctuary, fronted by a magnificent stone terrace, and surrounded by a maze of corridors and storerooms. By comparison with the trifling provincial temples of the Old Kingdom, it was staggering in its scale. It was also a harbinger of things to come. Amenemhat I and his successors would show an insatiable appetite for state-planned construction, the architectural manifestation of their new order.