Egypt, Old Kingdom

The first stone

Drafted from (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2000)formation

Before about 2650 BC nobody anywhere had built at monumental scale in dressed stone. Buildings were mud brick, reed, timber and matting almost everywhere, including royal buildings, including most of every tomb — the one exception was a single royal burial chamber, cut in dressed limestone for Khasekhemwy a few decades earlier, and nothing built since had gone beyond that one room. Then Djoser's official Imhotep built at Saqqara a stepped structure of dressed limestone sixty metres high, inside a rectangular enclosure five hundred metres long, and the enclosure is full of buildings that are not buildings — solid stone dummies with false doors and no interiors, reproducing in limestone the reed-bundle columns, timber roofs and matting fences of a palace complex.

The whole thing is an argument about permanence made by translating perishable architecture into stone. It is also the first building in the world at that scale in that material, and its architect is one of the very few non-royal Egyptians of the third millennium whose name was still being said two thousand years later.

What it altered

What Djoser's step pyramid altered was the state. A pyramid is not primarily a building project. It is a permanent apparatus for quarrying, hauling, feeding, housing, rostering and accounting, running for the length of a reign, absorbing a large share of the kingdom's disposable surplus, and requiring a bureaucracy to exist in order to work. From Djoser onward the Egyptian state is organised around producing one of these per king, and the whole fiscal apparatus — the assessment on land and herds, the biennial cattle count, the redistribution through state and mortuary estates — is substantially the machinery that grew up to supply them.

The ordinary vocabulary of historical turning points does not fit it. The events that are supposed to change a kingdom are battles, sieges, treaties, revolts, successions, conversions, and the moving of a capital — nearly all of them military or dynastic. Egypt's two most consequential centuries consist of building something that reorganised the state around building it, and there is no word for that.

The other Egypt

There is a second Egypt that everybody means when they say the word: the New Kingdom, 1550 to 1077, ruled from Thebes — Hatshepsut and Thutmose and Amarna and Kadesh, an empire in Nubia and the Levant, a million square kilometres at its widest.

The Old Kingdom is five hundred years long, ends fourteen hundred years before that one begins, is ruled from Memphis, and reaches perhaps four hundred thousand square kilometres, less than half as much. It is also the Egypt everybody has heard of. The pyramids, the Sphinx, the mummies of the popular imagination, and the idea of Egypt as a country preoccupied with death and permanence are all this one and not the other.

The divergence between how much ground a state held and how large it looms afterwards is not unusual in this region — Old Babylon looms larger than Ur III, which was bigger and better organised; Middle Elam supplied two neighbouring civilisations with the monuments they are now known by and is remembered by almost nobody. Here it is the two Egypts, and the smaller one won.

What Uni was asked to do

Drafted from Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, Volume I: The First to the Seventeenth Dynasties (1906)expansion

Uni served three kings and had his career carved on a slab in his tomb at Abydos. It is the longest secular text to survive from the Old Kingdom, and it was written to boast — which is why it is useful, because a man boasting tells you what he thought was worth boasting about.

Alone with the queen's case

He began as a minor official and rose to be a judge attached to Nekhen. His account of that period is mostly about intimacy with the king, repeated in a formula that does not vary: because the king loved me more than any official of his, than any noble of his, than any servant of his.

Then comes the passage that no other Egyptian document has an equivalent for.

Legal proceedings were begun in private, in the harem, against the queen Imtes. The king had Uni brought in to hear the case alone. No chief judge and vizier at all, no prince at all was there, but only I alone — and Uni, whose office at the time was merely superior custodian of the domain of Pharaoh, wrote the record himself with one other judge.

He states plainly why this was extraordinary: never before had one like me heard the secret of the royal harem. Something happened to a queen of Egypt and the only man permitted in the room was a mid-ranking official chosen for being trusted. What the case was about, and what became of her, the inscription does not say, and no other source supplies it.

An army of many ten thousands

The second half is a war, and it is the earliest detailed account of an Egyptian army in the field.

The king made war on the Asiatic Sand-dwellers, and Uni says the levy was raised from the entire country: the whole south from Elephantine northward, both sides of the Delta, the fortresses — and contingents from Irthet, Medja, Yam, Wawat and Kau in Nubia, and from the Libyan land of Temeh. Nubians were being conscripted into Egyptian armies as a matter of course centuries before the empire that is usually credited with it.

Uni was put at the head of it, and what he wants noticed is not the command but the discipline. Not one of them, he says, quarrelled with his neighbour; not one plundered dough or sandals from a wayfarer; not one took bread from any town. An officer describing his own army's supply behaviour in that much detail is telling you what usually happened.

The account of the campaign itself is a chant, the same clause repeated with the damage changed each time:

This army returned in safety, after it had hacked up the land. This army returned in safety, after it had overturned its strongholds. This army returned in safety, after it had cut down its figs and its vines.

Then: after it had slain troops there, in many ten thousands.

He was sent five times, because the Sand-dwellers kept coming back. On the last occasion he loaded the troops into ships and landed them behind a ridge, and every rebel among them was killed — an amphibious flanking movement, in a text from the Sixth Dynasty.

What the document is evidence of

Uni was not a general by training. He was a palace administrator who was handed an army because the king trusted him, and then handed a quarrying expedition, and then a canal.

That is the Old Kingdom state at its most capable: it could raise tens of thousands of men from every province and from beyond its southern frontier, feed them well enough that their commander thought their restraint worth recording, send them into Palestine five times, and put them on ships. And it could do all of that through a man whose qualification was that the king liked him — because the apparatus was the king's household, and had not yet become anybody else's property.

More than the gifts of Punt

Drafted from Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, Volume I: The First to the Seventeenth Dynasties (1906)expansion

Harkhuf was a caravan conductor at Elephantine, on the southern frontier, and he led four expeditions south into Nubia for two kings. He had the story of them carved on the façade of his rock tomb opposite Aswan, seven columns of text on each side of the door, which is where it still is.

The fourth expedition is the one everybody remembers, and it is remembered because of what he chose to put on the front of his tomb: not his own account of it, but a letter he received.

The letter

Pepi II had come to the throne as a child. Harkhuf sent word north that he was returning from the land of Yam with the army safe and with great and beautiful gifts — and among them a dancing dwarf from the land of spirits, like the one a treasurer had brought back from Punt generations earlier. He added, and the king quotes it back to him, that never before had one like him been brought by anybody who had visited Yam.

The reply is the earliest surviving letter from an Egyptian king, and it does not read like a state document.

Come northward to the court immediately; thou shalt bring this dwarf with thee, which thou bringest living, prosperous and healthy from the land of spirits, for the dances of the god, to rejoice and gladden the heart of the king.

Then the instructions, which are the part worth reading twice. When he goes down into the boat with you, appoint excellent people who shall be beside him on each side of the vessel; take care lest he fall into the water. When he sleeps at night, appoint excellent people to sleep beside him in his tent, and inspect ten times a night.

And then, with no ceremony at all:

My majesty desires to see this dwarf more than the gifts of Sinai and of Punt.

The king promises a greater reward than the earlier treasurer got, and adds that orders have already gone out to every store-city and every temple on the route to supply the expedition without stinting.

What the letter is evidence of

Two things, and both are about the state rather than the child.

Harkhuf did not carve his own campaigns on his tomb front and mention the letter in passing. He carved the letter, in full, including the king's fussing about the boat. The most valuable thing a frontier official could display, permanently, to everybody who came to his tomb, was proof that the palace had written to him personally.

And the postscript about provisioning shows how the machine worked. A single returning caravan triggered instructions to every storehouse along the Nile to feed it. That is the same apparatus that quarried and hauled and rostered for the pyramids, turned outward, and it is the only army Egypt had.

The other kind of expedition

The same reign supplies the other half of the picture, from the tomb of Pepi-nakht, another Elephantine nobleman.

He led two campaigns into Nubia. Then he was sent to the Red Sea coast, to recover the body of a nobleman who had been killed by the Sand-dwellers while building his ship there for the voyage to Punt.

An official murdered on a beach while assembling a ship, and a second official sent hundreds of kilometres to bring his corpse home: that is the reach of the Old Kingdom at its furthest, and its limits, in one commission.

Giza

Drafted from (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2000)peak

Khufu's pyramid is 146 metres high as built, about 2.3 million blocks, the base level to within a couple of centimetres across thirteen acres, the sides aligned to true north to within a twentieth of a degree. It was the tallest structure made by human beings for something like thirty-eight centuries, until a cathedral spire in Lincolnshire in the fourteenth century AD. His son and grandson built the second and third pyramids beside it; the Sphinx is carved from a knoll left in Khafre's quarry.

The Fourth Dynasty covers about a hundred and twenty years, and by any measure — resources commanded, ground held, and what it left standing — it is the peak.

Not slaves

The workforce question has a clear answer and it is worth stating because the wrong one is so widely held. Excavation of the workers' settlement south-east of the pyramids has produced bakeries, breweries, dormitories, a cattle and sheep supply operation on an industrial scale, and a cemetery of workers buried in small tombs of their own with their titles on them. The picture is of a permanent skilled core of a few thousand and a much larger rotating corvée drawn from the provinces, fed by the state, organised in named gangs whose graffiti survive on the blocks.

The labour system was also the military system. Old Kingdom Egypt had no standing army. Expeditions to the Sinai turquoise mines, to the Nubian quarries and up the Levantine coast were raised out of the same provincial apparatus that raised the pyramid gangs, and the men who led them describe themselves in their tomb autobiographies as officials who conducted an expedition, not as soldiers. One conscription, two uses.

What a state that does this looks like

Kemp's account treats the pyramid not as an extravagance a strong state could afford but as the thing the state was doing. The surplus was extracted, moved to the capital, converted into a monument and an endowed mortuary cult, and the cult then continued to consume revenue in perpetuity — every dead king kept his estates, his priests and his offerings, forever, in principle.

That is the mechanism the last chapter is about, because the compounding is obvious once stated. A state that permanently alienates a share of its land and labour to each dead king, and never releases any of it, has a fixed and rising charge on a fixed agricultural base. The Old Kingdom ran that arrangement for five centuries.

The scale afterwards

The Fourth Dynasty is the maximum and nothing later approaches it. Fifth and Sixth Dynasty pyramids are smaller, built with rubble cores that have largely collapsed, and the effort visibly shifts from the size of the structure to what is written inside it: the Pyramid Texts, first cut in the burial chamber of Unas around 2350, are the oldest substantial religious literature in the world.

Whether that shift shows a state with less to spend or a state choosing to spend it differently is not a question any measurement settles, and it is the question that matters most about the fifth and sixth dynasties.

The provinces become hereditary

Drafted from Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization (2018)contraction

For most of the Old Kingdom the important people were buried at the capital. Officials of the Fourth Dynasty have their tombs in the fields around their king's pyramid at Giza, arranged in rows, facing the monument they had spent their careers supplying. Where a man is buried is a statement about where his career and his loyalty belonged, and for two hundred years the answer was: with the king.

From the Fifth Dynasty and increasingly through the Sixth, the provincial governors start being buried in their own provinces, in rock-cut tombs in the cliffs above their own towns, with autobiographical inscriptions about what they did for their own people. The office of nomarch becomes hereditary. Titles that had been royal appointments become family property.

That is the Old Kingdom's decline, and it happened in the cemeteries before it happened anywhere else.

The other half of the arithmetic

Running the other way was the mortuary endowment. Every king's cult was endowed with land, personnel and a permanent claim on revenue, and endowments were exempted from tax and corvée by royal decree — a number of these decrees survive, which is how we know it was systematic. Temples accumulated the same exemptions.

Each dead king therefore removed a portion of the productive base from the state's reach and kept it removed. Over five centuries and roughly two dozen kings, on an agricultural base that could not be expanded, the compounding is not subtle. Kemp's reading is that the Old Kingdom state was progressively starving itself by a mechanism that was also its central religious obligation and could not be stopped without stopping being Egypt.

What that compounding produced, at the very end of the line, is the subject of the next chapter.

The longest reign

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

Pepi II came to the throne as a small child and did not leave it for over ninety years. That is the longest reign attested for any monarch anywhere, and the Old Kingdom did not outlast it by much.

Ninety years

The traditions disagree only about the details. Manetho has him six years old at his accession and continuing to his hundredth year. Eratosthenes gives him a full century. The Turin king-list gives over ninety years, and Breasted saw no reason to doubt it.

Consider what that means for a state whose entire organising principle was a living king. Officials appointed in his first decade were dead long before the last. A nomarch could inherit his father's office, hold it for forty years, and hand it to his own son without the throne changing hands once. Every arrangement made in the provinces had ninety years to settle, harden and become customary, and there was never a succession to interrupt it — which is exactly the process the previous generation of nomarchs had begun, running now without the one event that could have checked it.

And the man at the centre, however capable at fifty, was a child at the beginning and very old at the end. A system that concentrates everything in one person is most exposed precisely when that person lasts longest.

Then nothing

What happened next is not obscure because scholars disagree. It is obscure because the writing stops.

Several brief reigns followed, possibly including a queen called Nitocris, to whose name later ages attached absurd legends. Two kings, Iti and Imhotep, sent officials to the Hammamat quarries for stone for their pyramids and statues, and may belong here or may belong two dynasties earlier. Breasted's summary is unimprovable: after the death of Pepi II all is uncertain, and impenetrable obscurity veils the last days of the Sixth Dynasty.

There was no conquest. No foreign army came. What Breasted describes is a mechanical outcome: the power of the landed barons had become a centrifugal force which the pharaohs could no longer withstand, the nomes gained their independence, and the kingdom fell to pieces into the petty principalities of prehistoric times.

Roughly a thousand years of continuous development from the unification ended with Egypt in approximately the political condition it had been in before it began.

The thing they kept trying to get back

The most striking fact about the Old Kingdom is not how it ended but how long its ending went on mattering.

Two thousand years later, at the very close of Egypt's independence, priests were still being appointed to maintain the mortuary cults of these kings. Breasted's judgement is that in the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty the whole effort of Egypt's priests and scholars was to restore the religion, life and government which in their imagination had existed in the Old Kingdom — a period they were further away from than we are from imperial Rome, and which they were reconstructing from monuments rather than from memory.

The pyramids were a thousand years old when Tutankhamun was buried. They were older to him than he is to us. What ended when Pepi II finally died was not merely a dynasty; it was the only version of Egypt that every later version would measure itself against and describe as a golden age.

The drought argument

Drafted from (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2000)aside?What aside means

There is a second explanation for the collapse, and it is worth going through carefully, because what to do with a climatic argument is a methodological question as much as a historical one.

The claim: around 2200 BC there was a sustained arid episode across the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East — the event that appears in the palaeoclimate literature under a decidedly unpoetic name — which reduced the Nile flood for a run of years. Lower floods mean smaller harvests on a system with no storage margin to speak of, and famine follows.

The Egyptian evidence adduced for it is textual and comes from the wrong side of the collapse: provincial tomb inscriptions of the First Intermediate Period in which governors say, in the first person, that they fed their people in years of hunger, gave grain to the starving, and kept their nome alive when others died. Ankhtifi of Mo'alla says the whole of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger and that men were eating their children.

Why it belongs on the page as disputed rather than accepted or dropped

The dispute is not about whether the drought happened or when. Nobody serious denies that the climatic downturn happened. What is disputed is how much explanatory weight it should carry against the internal mechanism the previous chapter describes — hereditary provincial office, compounding mortuary endowments, a ninety-year reign — which is sufficient on its own and does not need a drought.

And the boasting-about-famine inscriptions are not neutral evidence for famine. They are a genre. A provincial governor asserting that he alone fed his people while everyone else starved is making a political claim in a period when the central state had stopped being the thing that fed anybody, and one would expect the genre to exist whether or not the Nile was low.

The general point

It is a rule of this project never to estimate a number, on the grounds that an estimate stated flatly reads afterwards as a fact. The same hazard applies to causes. A single-cause climatic explanation is unusually attractive because it is clean, quantitative-sounding and external, and because the palaeoclimate record is genuinely good — but the strength of the evidence that a drought happened is not evidence about what it did, and running the two together is the same move as averaging two sources into one figure.

So the downturn stays on the record as a real hinge, dated and impossible to leave out of how this period ended, with its disputed status carried openly rather than resolved by omission. The Ur III letters about the fall of Ur and the Middle Elamite new capital face the same problem and get the same treatment: a hinge entered, and its status as a hinge marked disputed, rather than a decision smuggled in by silence.

Three tombs at Siut

Drafted from Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, Volume I: The First to the Seventeenth Dynasties (1906)afterlife

After 2181 there is no Egypt to write the history of, and for about a century and a half the entire contemporary written record of the country consists of three inscribed tombs cut high into the cliffs above Asyut.

They belong to three successive lords of the Lycopolite nome: Tefibi, his son Kheti, and another Kheti whose relation to them is unclear. All three carry the same titles — hereditary prince, count, wearer of the royal seal, sole companion, superior prophet of Upwawet, lord of Siut — and none of them is a king.

The condition of the evidence

Breasted is blunt about what he is working with. The tombs were first copied by Napoleon's expedition and then neglected for most of a century, during which they were used as a stone quarry and, in his word, frightfully mutilated. Griffith produced a careful text between 1886 and 1888, working from the wreckage and from earlier fragmentary copies.

The language, Breasted adds, is exceedingly obscure and difficult, and together with the state of the stone this often makes translation quite impossible; his restorations make no claim to reproduce the lost words but merely indicate the probable connection.

So the only contemporary account of a century and a half of Egyptian history is three damaged wall texts that a leading Egyptologist could not always read.

What Tefibi says about himself

What survives is worth having anyway, because of what these men thought worth recording.

Tefibi asks everyone who passes the tomb to pray for him. Then he sets out his government. He was open-handed to everyone, of excellent plans, useful to his city, of open face toward a petition and toward the widow. He was, he says, a Nile for his people.

And then the line that says most about the period:

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.

A ruler's proudest claim is that a stranger could sleep in the open. That is not what the lords of the Old Kingdom boasted about, because it had not needed saying.

He also records that his son succeeded him without opposition while still a child — a child of a cubit high, which is the height of a newborn — and that the city rejoiced over him and remembered the good his father had done.

The war

The rest of the inscription is a civil war, and it is the clearest account of it that survives.

The southern nomes, from Elephantine northward, united against him. He beat them on the west bank and drove them as far as the fortress of the port of the South; crossed to the east bank and beat a second army there; broke up a hostile fleet; and afterwards had the opportunity to promote deserving officers.

These lords of Asyut were the standing supporters of the weak kings at Herakleopolis, holding a buffer against the princes of Thebes who would become the Eleventh Dynasty and eventually reunite the country.

They never name a single one of the Thebans they fought. They name only one of the kings they served — Merikare.

What the Old Kingdom left

Not a successor state. A country that had gone on producing, for five centuries, the largest stone buildings anyone would build for four thousand years, and which now could not produce a king whose name a neighbouring province thought worth carving.

What it did leave was the provinces, and specifically the men in them. The hereditary nomarchs whose rise is the story of the Old Kingdom's last century turn out to be the only functioning government left when the centre goes, and one of their lines eventually put the country back together. The institution that dissolved Egypt is the institution that carried it through.