Egypt, First Intermediate Period

The centre does not hold

formationDrafted from Breasted, A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest (1905)

Pepi II reigned for over ninety years, and when he died the office he had held for so long simply had nowhere obvious to go. Manetho's king-lists credit Memphis with a Seventh Dynasty and an Eighth after him, but neither left a monument, a tomb, or an inscription that any source consulted here can securely date. The mines and quarries of Sinai and Hammamat, which record the passage of every prosperous line of kings before and after this one, fall silent. For something under thirty years, Egypt had kings whose names survive in a list and nothing else.

What was destroyed

Archaeology, rather than any surviving text, supplies the one fact the king-lists cannot: somebody spent real effort tearing the Old Kingdom down. The finest granite and diorite statues of its greatest monarchs were not merely looted but smashed, some of them thrown into the wells built into their own pyramid causeways. Temples were not just stripped of their portable wealth but violated in a way that looks like a settling of accounts rather than ordinary plunder.

No text names who did this or why. The destruction has no author on record - a violence done to a kingship that had just lost the son who still recognised its authority, by people the sources never identify because the sources themselves stopped being written.

What did not stop

What the collapse of the centre did not do is empty the country of government. The nomarchs - hereditary provincial governors whose offices had been quietly becoming family property for two generations before Pepi II's death - kept administering their own nomes through the silence exactly as they had while a king in Memphis still claimed authority over them. Some of them now dated documents by their own years of local rule rather than a Pharaoh's regnal count, which is itself a form of evidence: a scribe only stops counting by the king's years once counting by the king's years has stopped meaning anything.

Breasted, A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest (1905) · Photograph: Dale Cruse · CC BY 2.0

Egypt did not have no government in this period. It had dozens of small ones, each legitimate within its own nome and answerable to nobody above it, waiting to find out which of them, or which outside candidate, would eventually reassemble the rest.

Eighteen kings at Herakleopolis

expansionDrafted from Breasted, A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest (1905)

Order, when it came back, came from a city just south of the Fayum that had been a provincial cult centre since the earliest dynasties and had never before produced a king. Herakleopolis's own nomarchs succeeded in placing one of their number on the throne, founding the line Manetho counted as the Ninth and Tenth Dynasties: eighteen kings in succession, by his own reckoning, over roughly a century.

Almost none of them left anything. The line's founder, a man Manetho calls Akhthoes, survives in exactly one anecdote, and it is not a flattering one: he was, by this account, the most violent king of his age, and was eventually seized with madness and killed by a crocodile. Whether that story is closer to history or to the kind of thing later Egyptians said about a dynasty they had no reason to admire is not something any source consulted here can settle. What is certain is that a family from a town with no previous claim on the kingship took it, by force, from whatever remained of the old Memphite line.

What order looked like from Siut

Asyut (Lycopolis) · Breasted, A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest (1905) · Description de l'Égypte, Antiquités vol. IV, pl. 47 · Public domain

The clearest surviving picture of the Herakleopolitan kingdom does not come from Herakleopolis itself, but from the cliff tombs of a family of nomarchs a hundred and thirty miles to the south, at Siut. Their inscriptions are almost the only contemporary record of this dynasty that survives at all, and what they describe, once the Herakleopolitan kings had a real grip on the country, is a restoration worth boasting about:

Every official was at his post, there was no one fighting, nor any shooting an arrow. The child was not smitten beside his mother, nor the citizen beside his wife. There was no evil-doer... nor any one doing violence against his house.

Another Siut lord put the same claim in terms of a traveller rather than a household:

When night came, he who slept on the road gave me praise, for he was like a man in his house; the fear of my soldier was his protection.

Whatever these lines exaggerate for a tomb wall's own purposes, they are making a specific claim, and it is not one the previous chapter's evidence would have supported: that a period which had begun in destruction with no author on record had, within a generation or two, produced a countryside safe enough to sleep in unguarded.

What the restoration was not

It was not a return to the Old Kingdom's own arrangement. The Siut nomarchs who describe this security are not describing a bureaucracy answering to Herakleopolis in the way the nomes had once answered to Memphis; they are describing their own domain, kept orderly by their own soldiers, under a king they served but did not depend on for their local authority. The nomarchs who had broken the Old Kingdom apart were still there, still hereditary, still armed. What Herakleopolis restored was not the old centralised state but a working peace between a throne and the regional lords who now answered to it on their own terms.

The buffer state

peakDrafted from Breasted, A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest (1905)

South of Herakleopolis, another regional power had been rising for longer than anyone at court might have wished to notice. Thebes, then an obscure provincial town, had produced a family of nomarchs - the Intefs

• ambitious enough that by the time an early Intef held the title "keeper of the Door of the South," the whole southern stretch of the valley was answering to Thebes rather than to Herakleopolis. Intef organised the South in open rebellion, and it was the Herakleopolitan kingdom's good fortune, rather than its own strength, that its most loyal vassals happened to sit exactly between the two capitals.

Tefibi's war

The Siut nomarchs were that vassal. When the Theban confederation pushed north, Tefibi of Siut - probably the son of the Kheti whose own tomb first described the countryside made safe - put his own army in the field against them. He met one Theban force on the west bank and drove it back, recovering territory as far south as a fortress the inscriptions call the "Port of the South." A second army advancing on the east bank was beaten the same way: its fleet driven ashore, its commander forced into the river, the ships themselves apparently taken as prizes.

For a moment, this looks like a war Herakleopolis might win.

The king-maker

Tefibi's own son, also named Kheti, inherited both the military command and the loyalty that came with it. Appointed "commander of the whole land" and "great lord of Middle Egypt," he suppressed a rebellion on the southern frontier in his sovereign Merikare's name and then brought the king south in person, apparently to receive the submission of the reconquered districts directly. Kheti's own account of the return journey is proud rather than modest: his fleet, he says, stretched for miles up the river as it passed his home, and at Herakleopolis, "the city came, rejoicing over her lord... women mingled with men, old men and children."

This is the high-water mark the Herakleopolitan side of the war left any record of - a king escorted home in triumph by a vassal's army, at a moment when the line that would eventually destroy his kingdom had already been pushed back once. Nothing in the Siut tombs suggests anyone at the time thought this was the war's final chapter.

The door of the north

contractionDrafted from Breasted, A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest (1905)

Tefibi's victories bought Herakleopolis time rather than security. The Theban line that had been checked on both riverbanks did not disappear; it produced, within a generation, a nomarch who took royal titles outright. This Intef - counted by later tradition as the first king of a new Theban dynasty - resumed the war his predecessor had lost, and this time the direction of the frontier did not reverse.

What changed hands

Intef pushed north and took Abydos, capital of the Thinite nome and one of the oldest religious centres in Egypt, holding the tombs of kings from the earliest dynasties. He fixed his own new frontier there, calling it the "Door of the North" - in deliberate answer to Elephantine's old title as the "Door of the South" at the opposite end of the kingdom - and this was, in all likelihood, the very fortress Tefibi's own inscriptions had called the "Port of the South" when his army still held it for Herakleopolis. The same position, named from two directions by two rival courts, is as clear a marker as this war left of which side was advancing and which was not.

Intef reigned over fifty years. Real detail about his successor is thin, but the Theban line did not need to press every year to win: it needed only to hold what it took and wait for the north's own resources - never as deep as the south liked to claim, and now permanently committed to a two-front defence against a confederation that showed no sign of losing interest - to run out.

What the Herakleopolitan side could still do

Nothing in the sources suggests panic at Herakleopolis. Merikare's kingship, the buffer of loyal nomarchs at Siut, and whatever remained of the old bureaucratic habits inherited from the Old Kingdom continued to function through this reversal much as they had through the earlier Theban rebellion. What had changed was not the Herakleopolitan kingdom's internal order but its position in a war it was now losing by inches rather than winning by battles - a difference no scribe at Herakleopolis or Siut seems to have thought worth recording while it was still happening.

What Merikare inherited

endDrafted from Breasted, A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest (1905)

Merikare is the last Herakleopolitan king any source consulted here can name with confidence, and his own reign is where the Siut inscriptions - the fullest surviving record of his kingdom, kept by a family who had fought and governed for it across two generations - simply stop. Nothing in what survives describes a final battle, a siege, or a surrender. The tombs that had proudly dated a king's rejoicing at Herakleopolis, and boasted of a nomarch's fleet stretching for miles up the river, do not go on to describe how the war they had been winning by inches turned into one they lost outright.

A kingdom without an ending on record

This is not the same silence that opens the period. The silence around the Sixth Dynasty's fall was a silence about everything - no monuments, no inscriptions, no named kings at all for a generation. The silence around Merikare's own end is narrower and stranger: a well-documented dynasty, served by a loyal and literate provincial nobility that had recorded two generations of campaigns in careful detail, simply runs out of things to say about itself at the one moment a reader most wants to know what happened.

What can be said is only the shape of it. Thebes held the frontier Tefibi had once pushed back to Herakleopolis's advantage; the Theban kings who followed continued pressing north; and at some point in that pressure, the Herakleopolitan throne Merikare had inherited from a line of eighteen kings ceased to exist. No source consulted here names the battle, if there was a single battle, or the terms, if there were any terms to be had.

Where the rest of the war is told

The country Mentuhotep II inherited when Thebes finally took the north is a story told from the winning side, on the record of the kingdom that followed this one - the same war, the same frontier, the same two rival thrones, narrated from Thebes rather than from Herakleopolis. What Merikare himself lost, and how he lost it, is not recorded by anyone who was there to write it down. A century and a quarter that had begun with a kingship nobody could reassemble ends with one that nobody thought to finish describing.