|
An historical site for learning about the ancient Egyptians including their kings, gods, mythologies, art, architecture, and influences upon human history. Topics Recommended Sites Care to express an opinion on a current or past historical event? Need to ask a question from our many visitors? Just visit our Forum and leave your message.
Please Help Keep Us On the Web. We are a Non-Profit Organization and the cost of continuing is becoming more than we can handle. Therefore, we are asking you to please donate anything you can to help keep us on the web.
|
Ancient Egypt EGYPT'S HISTORY Robert Guisepi, 2004 The Valley of the Nile
Dawn Of Civilization B.C. 5867
It is a far cry to hark back to 11,000 years before Christ, yet borings in the valley of the Nile, whence comes the first recorded history of the human race, have unveiled to the light pottery and other relics of civilization that, at the rate of deposits of the Nile, must have taken at least that number of years to cover.
Nature takes countless thousands of years to form and build up her limestone hills, but buried deep in these we find evidences of a stone age wherein man devised and made himself edged tools and weapons of rudely chipped stone. These shaped, edged implements, we have learned, were made by white-heating a suitable flint or stone and tracing thereon with cold water the pattern desired, just as practised by the Indians of the American continent, and in our day by the manufacturers of ancient (sic) arrow-, spear-, and axe-heads. This shows a civilization that has learned the method of artificially producing fire, and its uses.
Egypt is the monumental land of the earth, as the Egyptians are the monumental people of history. The first human monarch to reign over all Egypt was Menes, the founder of Memphis. As the gate of Africa, Egypt has always held an important position in world-politics. Its ancient wealth and power were enormous. Inclusive of the Soudan, its population is now more than eight millions. Its present importance is indicated by its relations to England. Historians vary in their compilations of Egyptian chronology. The epoch of Menes is fixed by Bunsen at B.C. 3643, by Lepsius at B.C. 3892, and by Poole at B.C. 2717. Before Menes Egypt was divided into independent kingdoms. It has always been a country of mysteries, with the mighty Nile, and its inundations, so little understood by the ancients; its trackless desert; its camels and caravans; its tombs and temples; its obelisks and pyramids, its groups of gods: Ra, Osiris, Isis, Apis, Horus, Hathor - the very names breathe suggestions of mystery, cruelty, pomp, and power. In the sciences and in the industrial arts the ancient Egyptians were highly cultivated. Much Egyptian literature has come down to us, but it is unsystematic and entirely devoid of style, being without lofty ideas or charms. In art, however, Egypt may be placed next to Greece, particularly in architecture.
The age of the Pyramid-builders was a brilliant one. They prove the magnificence of the kings and the vast amount of human labor at their disposal. The regal power at that time was very strong. The reign of Khufu or Cheops is marked by the building of the great pyramid. The pyramids were the tombs of kings, built in the necropolis of Memphis, ten miles above the modern Cairo. Security was the object as well as splendor.
As remarked by a great Egyptologist, the whole life of the Egyptian was spent in the contemplation of death; thus the tomb became the concrete thought. The belief of the ancient Egyptian was that so long as his body remained intact so was his immortality; whence arose the embalming of the great, and hence the immense structures of stone to secure the inviolability of the entombed monarch.
The monuments have as yet yielded no account of the events which tended to unite Egypt under the rule of one man; we can only surmise that the feudal principalities had gradually been drawn together into two groups, each of which formed a separate kingdom. Heliopolis became the chief focus in the north, from which civilization radiated over the wet plain and the marshes of the Delta.
Its colleges of priests had collected, condensed, and arranged the principal myths of the local regions; the Ennead to which it gave conception would never have obtained the popularity which we must acknowledge it had, if its princes had not exercised, for at least some period, an actual suzerainty over the neighboring plains. It was around Heliopolis that the kingdom of Lower Egypt was organized; everything there bore traces of Heliopolitan theories - the protocol of the kings, their supposed descent from Ra, and the enthusiastic worship which they offered to the sun.
The Delta, owing to its compact and restricted area, was aptly suited for government from one centre; the Nile valley proper, narrow, tortuous, and stretching like a thin strip on either bank of the river, did not lend itself to so complete a unity. It, too, represented a single kingdom, having the reed and the lotus for its emblems; but its component parts were more loosely united, its religion was less systematized, and it lacked a well-placed city to serve as a political and sacerdotal centre. Hermopolis contained schools of theologians who certainly played an important part in the development of myths and dogmas; but the influence of its rulers was never widely felt. In the south, Siut disputed their supremacy, and Heracleopolis stopped their road to the north. These three cities thwarted and neutralized one another, and not one of them ever succeeded in obtaining a lasting authority over Upper Egypt. Each of the two kingdoms had its own natural advantages and its system of government, which gave to it a peculiar character, and stamped it, as it were, with a distinct personality down to its latest days. The kingdom of Upper Egypt was more powerful, richer, better populated, and was governed apparently by more active and enterprising rulers. It is to one of the latter, Mini or Menes of Thinis, that tradition ascribes the honor of having fused the two Egypts into a single empire, and of having inaugurated the reign of the human dynasties.
Thinis figured in the historic period as one of the least of Egyptian cities. It barely maintained an existence on the left bank of the Nile, if not on the exact spot now occupied by Girgeh, at least only a short distance from it. The principality of the Osirian Reliquary, of which it was the metropolis, occupied the valley from one mountain to the other, and gradually extended across the desert as far as the Great Theban Oasis. Its inhabitants worshipped a sky-god, Anhuri, or rather two twin gods, Anhuri-shu, who were speedily amalgamated with the solar deities and became a warlike personification of Ra.
Anhuri-shu, like all other solar manifestations, came to be associated with a goddess having the form or head of a lioness - a Sokhit, who took for the occasion the epithet of Mihit, the northern one. Some of the dead from this city are buried on the other side of the Nile, near the modern village of Mesheikh, at the foot of the Arabian chain, whose deep cliffs here approach somewhat near the river: the principal necropolis was at some distance to the east, near the sacred town of Abydos. It would appear that, at the outset, Abydos was the capital of the country, for the entire nome bore the same name as the city, and had adopted for its symbol the representation of the reliquary in which the god reposed.
In very early times Abydos fell into decay, and resigned its political rank to Thinis, but its religious importance remained unimpaired. The city occupied a long and narrow strip between the canal and the first slopes of the Libyan mountains. A brick fortress defended it from the incursions of the Bedouin, and beside it the temple of the god of the dead reared its naked walls. Here Anhuri, having passed from life to death, was worshipped under the name of Khontamentit, the chief of that western region whither souls repair on quitting this earth.
It is impossible to say by what blending of doctrines or by what political combinations this Sun of the Night came to be identified with Osiris of Mendes, since the fusion dates back to a very remote antiquity; it had become an established fact long before the most ancient sacred books were compiled. Osiris Khontamentit grew rapidly in popular favor, and his temple attracted annually an increasing number of pilgrims. The Great Oasis had been considered at first as a sort of mysterious paradise, whither the dead went in search of peace and happiness. It was called Uit, the Sepulchre; this name clung to it after it had become an actual Egyptian province, and the remembrance of its ancient purpose survived in the minds of the people, so that the "cleft," the gorge in the mountain through which the doubles journeyed toward it, never ceased to be regarded as one of the gates of the other world.
At the time of the New Year festivals, spirits flocked thither from all parts of the valley; they there awaited the coming of the dying sun, in order to embark with him and enter safely the dominions of Khontamentit. Abydos, even before the historic period, was the only town, and its god the only god, whose worship, practised by all Egyptians, inspired them all with an equal devotion.
Did this sort of moral conquest give rise, later on, to a belief in a material conquest by the princes of Thinis and Abydos, or is there an historical foundation for the tradition which ascribes to them the establishment of a single monarchy? It is the Thinite Menes, whom the Theban annalists point out as the ancestor of the glorious Pharaohs of the XVIII dynasty: it is he also who is inscribed in the Memphite chronicles, followed by Manetho, at the head of their lists of human kings, and all Egypt for centuries acknowledged him as its first mortal ruler.
It is true that a chief of Thinis may well have borne such a name, and may have accomplished feats which rendered him famous; but on closer examination his pretensions to reality disappear, and his personality is reduced to a cipher.
"This Menes, according to the priests, surrounded Memphis with dikes. For the river formerly followed the sand-hills for some distance on the Libyan side. Menes, having dammed up the reach about a hundred stadia to the south of Memphis, caused the old bed to dry up, and conveyed the river through an artificial channel dug midway between the two mountain ranges. "Then Menes, the first who was king, having enclosed a space of ground with dikes, founded that town which is still called Memphis: he then made a lake around it to the north and west, fed by the river; the city he bounded on the east by the Nile." The history of Memphis, such as it can be gathered from the monuments, differs considerably from the tradition current in Egypt at the time of Herodotus.
It appears, indeed, that at the outset the site on which it subsequently arose was occupied by a small fortress, Anbu-hazu - the white wall - which was dependent on Heliopolis and in which Phtah possessed a sanctuary. After the "white wall" was separated from the Heliopolitan principality to form a nome by itself it assumed a certain importance, and furnished, so it was said, the dynasties which succeeded the Thinite. Its prosperity dates only, however, from the time when the sovereigns of the V and VI dynasties fixed on it for their residence; one of them, Papi I, there founded for himself and for his "double" after him, a new town, which he called Minnofiru, from his tomb. Minnofiru, which is the correct pronunciation and the origin of Memphis, probably signified "the good refuge," the haven of the good, the burying-place where the blessed dead came to rest beside Osiris. The people soon forgot the true interpretation, or probably it did not fall in with their taste for romantic tales. They rather despised, as a rule, to discover in the beginnings of history individuals from whom the countries or cities with which they were familiar took their names: if no tradition supplied them with this, they did not experience any scruples in inventing one. The Egyptians of the time of the Ptolemies, who were guided in their philological speculations by the pronunciation in vogue around them, attributed the patronship of their city to a Princess Memphis, a daughter of its founder, the fabulous Uchoreus; those of preceding ages before the name had become altered thought to find in Minnofiru or "Mini Nofir," or "Menes the Good," the reputed founder of the capital of the Delta. Menes the Good, divested of his epithet, is none other than Menes, the first king of all Egypt, and he owes his existence to a popular attempt at etymology. The legend which identifies the establishment of the kingdom with the construction of the city, must have originated at a time when Memphis was still the residence of the kings and the seat of government, at latest about the end of the Memphite period. It must have been an old tradition at the time of the Theban dynasties, since they admitted unhesitatingly the authenticity of the statements which ascribed to the northern city so marked a superiority over their own country. When the hero was once created and firmly established in his position, there was little difficulty in inventing a story about him which would portray him as a paragon and an ideal sovereign.
He was represented in turn as architect, warrior, and statesman; he had founded Memphis, he had begun the temple of Phtah, written laws and regulated the worship of the gods, particularly that of Hapis, and he had conducted expeditions against the Libyans. When he lost his only son in the flower of his age, the people improvised a hymn of mourning to console him - the "Maneros" - both the words and the tune of which were handed down from generation to generation.
He did not, moreover, disdain the luxuries of the table, for he invented the art of serving a dinner, and the mode of eating it in a reclining posture. One day, while hunting, his dogs, excited by something or other, fell upon him to devour him. He escaped with difficulty and, pursued by them, fled to the shore of Lake Moeris, and was there brought to bay; he was on the point of succumbing to them, when a crocodile took him on his back and carried him across to the other side. In gratitude he built a new town, which he called Crocodilopolis, and assigned to it for its god the crocodile which had saved him; he then erected close to it the famous labyrinth and a pyramid for his tomb.
Other traditions show him in a less favorable light. They accuse him of having, by horrible crimes, excited against him the anger of the gods, and allege that after a reign of sixty-two years he was killed by a hippopotamus which came forth from the Nile. They also relate that the Saite Tafnakhti, returning from an expedition against the Arabs, during which he had been obliged to renounce the pomp and luxuries of life, had solemnly cursed him, and had caused his imprecations to be inscribed upon a "stele" ^1 set up in the temple of Amon at Thebes. Nevertheless, in the memory that Egypt preserved of its first Pharaoh, the good outweighed the evil. He was worshipped in Memphis, side by side with Phtah and Ramses II.; his name figured at the head of the royal lists, and his cult continued till the time of the Ptolemies.
[Footnote 1: The burned tile showing the impression of the stylus, made on the clay while plastic. - Ed.]
His immediate successors have only a semblance of reality, such as he had. The lists give the order of succession, it is true, with the years of their reigns almost to a day, sometimes the length of their lives, but we may well ask whence the chroniclers procured so much precise information. They were in the same position as ourselves with regard to these ancient kings: they knew them by a tradition of a later age, by a fragment papyrus fortuitously preserved in a temple, by accidentally coming across some monument bearing their name, and were reduced, as it were, to put together the few facts which they possessed, or to supply such as were wanting by conjectures, often in a very improbable manner. It is quite possible that they were unable to gather from the memory of the past the names of those individuals of which they made up the first two dynasties. The forms of these names are curt and rugged, and indicative of a rude and savage state, harmonizing with the semi-barbaric period to which they are relegated: Ati the Wrestler, Teti the Runner, Qeunqoni the Crusher, are suitable rulers for a people the first duty of whose chief was to lead his followers into battle, and to strike harder than any other man in the thickest of the fight.
The inscriptions supply us with proofs that some of these princes lived and reigned: - Sondi, who is classed in the II dynasty, received a continuous worship toward the end of the III dynasty. But did all those who preceded him, and those who followed him, exist as he did? And if they existed, do the order and relation agree with actual truth? The different lists do not contain the same names in the same position; certain Pharaohs are added or suppressed without appreciable reason. Where Manetho inscribes Kenkenes and Ouenephes, the tables of the time of Seti I give us Ati and Ata; Manetho reckons nine kings to the II dynasty, while they register only five. The monuments, indeed, show us that Egypt in the past obeyed princes whom her annalists were unable to classify: for instance, they associated with Sondi a Pirsenu, who is not mentioned in the annals. We must, therefore, take the record of all this opening period of history for what it is - namely, a system invented at a much later date, by means of various artifices and combinations - to be partially accepted in default of a better, but without, according to it, that excessive confidence which it has hitherto received.
The two Thinite dynasties, in direct descent from the fabulous Menes, furnish, like this hero himself, only a tissue of romantic tales and miraculous legends in the place of history. A double-headed stork, which had appeared in the first year of Teti, son of Menes, had foreshadowed to Egypt a long prosperity, but a famine under Ouenephes, and a terrible plague under Semempses, had depopulated the country; the laws had been relaxed, great crimes had been committed, and revolts had broken out.
During the reign of the Boethos a gulf had opened near Bubastis, and swallowed up many people, then the Nile had flowed with honey for fifteen days in the time of Nephercheres, and Sesochris was supposed to have been a giant in stature. A few details about royal edifices were mixed up with these prodigies. Teti had laid the foundation of the great palace of Memphis, Ouenephes had built the pyramids of Ko-kome near Saqqara. Several of the ancient Pharaohs had published books on theology, or had written treatises on anatomy and medicine; several had made laws called Kakou, the male of males, or the bull of bulls. They explained his name by the statement that he had concerned himself about the sacred animals; he had proclaimed as gods, Hapis of Memphis, Mnevis of Heliopolis, and the goat of Mendes.
After him, Binothris had conferred the right of succession upon all women of the blood-royal. The accession of the III dynasty, a Memphite one according to Manetho, did not at first change the miraculous character of this history. The Libyans had revolted against Necherophes, and the two armies were encamped before each other, when one night the disk of the moon became immeasurably enlarged, to the great alarm of the rebels, who recognized in this phenomenon a sign of the anger of heaven, and yielded without fighting. Tosorthros, the successor of Necherophes, brought the hieroglyphs and the art of stone-cutting to perfection. He composed, as Teti did, books of medicine, a fact which caused him to be identified with the healing god Imhotpu. The priests related these things seriously, and the Greek writers took them down from their lips with the respect which they offered to everything emanating from the wise men of Egypt.
What they related of the human kings was not more detailed, as we see, than their accounts of the gods. Whether the legends dealt with deities or kings, all that we know took its origin, not in popular imagination, but in sacerdotal dogma: they were invented long after the times they dealt with, in the recesses of the temples, with an intention and a method of which we are enabled to detect flagrant instances on the monuments.
Toward the middle of the third century before our era the Greek troops stationed on the southern frontier, in the forts at the first cataract, developed a particular veneration for Isis of Philae. Their devotion spread to the superior officers who came to inspect them, then to the whole population of the Thebaid, and finally reached the court of the Macedonian kings. The latter, carried away by force of example, gave every encouragement to a movement which attracted worshippers to a common sanctuary, and united in one cult two races over which they ruled. They pulled down the meagre building of the Saite period, which had hitherto sufficed for the worship of Isis, constructed at great cost the temple which still remains almost intact, and assigned to it considerable possessions in Nubia, which, in addition to gifts from private individuals, made the goddess the richest land-owner in Southern Egypt. Knumu and his two wives, Anukit and Satit, who, before Isis, had been the undisputed suzerains of the cataract, perceived with jealousy their neighbor's prosperity: the civil wars and invasions of the centuries immediately preceding had ruined their temples, and their poverty contrasted painfully with the riches of the new-comer.
The priests resolved to lay this sad state of affairs before King Ptolemy, to represent to him the services which they had rendered and still continued to render to Egypt, and above all to remind him of the generosity of the ancient Pharaohs, whose example, owing to the poverty of the times, the recent Pharaohs had been unable to follow. Doubtless authentic documents were wanting in their archives to support their pretensions: they therefore inscribed upon a rock, in the island of Sehel, a long inscription which they attributed to Zosiri of the III dynasty. This sovereign had left behind him a vague reputation for greatness. As early as the XII dynasty Usirtasen III had claimed him as "his father" - his ancestor - and had erected a statue to him; the priests knew that, by invoking him, they had a chance of obtaining a hearing.
The inscription which they fabricated set forth that in the eighteenth year of Zosiri's reign he had sent to Madir, lord of Elephantine, a message couched in these terms: "I am overcome with sorrow for the throne, and for those who reside in the palace, and my heart is afflicted and suffers greatly because the Nile has not risen in my time, for the space of eight years.
Corn is scarce, there is a lack of herbage, and nothing is left to eat: when any one calls upon his neighbors for help, they take pains not to go. The child weeps, the young man is uneasy, the hearts of the old men are in despair, their limbs are bent, they crouch on the earth, they fold their hands; the courtiers have no further resources; the shops formerly furnished with rich wares are now filled only with air, all that was within them has disappeared. My spirit also, mindful of the beginning of things, seeks to call upon the savior who was here where I am, during the centuries of the gods, upon Thot-Ibis, that great wise one, upon Imhotpu, son of Phtah of Memphis. Where is the place in which the Nile is born? Who is the god or goddess concealed there? What is his likeness?"
The lord of Elephantine brought his reply in person. He described to the king, who was evidently ignorant of it, the situation of the island and the rocks of the cataract, the phenomena of the inundation, the gods who presided over it, and who alone could relieve Egypt from her disastrous plight.
Zosiri repaired to the temple of the principality and offered the prescribed sacrifices; the god arose, opened his eyes, panted, and cried aloud, "I am Khnumu who created thee!" and promised him a speedy return of a high Nile and the cessation of the famine.
Pharaoh was touched by the benevolence which his divine father had shown him; he forthwith made a decree by which he ceded to the temple all his rights of suzerainty over the neighboring nomes within a radius of twenty miles.
Henceforward the entire population, tillers and vinedressers, fishermen and hunters, had to yield the tithe of their income to the priests; the quarries could not be worked without the consent of Khnumu, and the payment of a suitable indemnity into his coffers; finally, metals and precious woods, shipped thence for Egypt, had to submit to a toll on behalf of the temple. Did the Ptolemies admit the claims which the local priests attempted to deduce from this romantic tale? and did the god regain possession of the domains and dues which they declared had been his right? The stele shows us with what ease the scribes could forge official documents when the exigencies of daily life forced the necessity upon them; it teaches us at the same time how that fabulous chronicle was elaborated, whose remains have been preserved for us by classical writers. Every prodigy, every fact related by Manetho, was taken from some document analogous to the supposed inscription of Zosiri.
The real history of the early centuries, therefore, eludes our researches, and no contemporary record traces for us those vicissitudes which Egypt passed through before being consolidated into a single kingdom, under the rule of one man. Many names, apparently of powerful and illustrious princes, had survived in the memory of the people; these were collected, classified, and grouped in a regular manner into dynasties, but the people were ignorant of any exact facts connected with the names, and the historians, on their own account, were reduced to collect apocryphal traditions for their sacred archives.
The monuments of these remote ages, however, cannot have entirely disappeared: they existed in places where we have not as yet thought of applying the pick, and chance excavations will some day most certainly bring them to light. The few which we do possess barely go back beyond the III dynasty: namely, the hypogeum of Shiri, priest of Sondi and Pirsenu; possibly the tomb of Khuithotpu at Saqqara; the Great Sphinx of Gizeh; a short inscription on the rocks of Wady Maghara, which represents Zosiri (the same king of whom the priests of Khnumu in the Greek period made a precedent) working the turquoise or copper mines of Sinai; and finally the step pyramid where this Pharaoh rests. It forms a rectangular mass, incorrectly oriented, with a variation from the true north of 4 degrees 35', 393 ft., 8 in. long from east to west, and 352 ft. deep, with a height of 159 ft. 9 in. It is composed of six cubes, with sloping sides, each being about 13 ft. less in width than the one below it; that nearest to the ground measures 37 ft. 8 in. in height, and the uppermost one 29 ft. 2 in.
It was entirely constructed of limestone from neighboring mountains. The blocks are small and badly cut, the stone courses being concave, to offer a better resistance to downward thrust and to shocks of earthquake. When breaches in the masonry are examined, it can be seen that the external surface of the steps has, as it were, a double stone facing, each facing being carefully dressed. The body of the pyramid is solid, the chambers being cut in the rock beneath. These chambers have often been enlarged, restored, and reworked in the course of centuries, and the passages which connect them form a perfect labyrinth into which it is dangerous to venture without a guide. The columned porch, the galleries and halls, all lead to a sort of enormous shaft, at the bottom of which the architect had contrived a hiding-place, destined, no doubt, to contain the more precious objects of the funerary furniture. Until the beginning of this century the vault had preserved its original lining of glazed pottery. Three quarters of the wall surface was covered with green tiles, oblong and lightly convex on the outer side, but flat on the inner: a square projection pierced with a hole served to fix them at the back in a horizontal line by means of flexible wooden rods. Three bands which frame one of the doors are inscribed with the titles of the Pharaoh. The hieroglyphs are raised in either blue, red, green, or yellow, on a fawn-colored ground.
The towns, palaces, temples, all the buildings which princes and kings had constructed to be witnesses of their power or piety to future generations, have disappeared in the course of ages, under the feet and before the triumphal blasts of many invading hosts: the pyramid alone has survived, and the most ancient of the historic monuments of Egypt is a tomb.
Egypt: Gift Of The Nile
Egypt is literally "the gift of the Nile," as the ancient Greek historian Herodotus observed. The Nile valley, extending 750 miles from the first cataract to the Mediterranean, is a fertile oasis cut out of a limestone plateau. Its soil was renewed annually by the rich silt deposited by the flood water of the river that, unlike the unpredictable floods of Mesopotamia, rose and fell with unusual precision. The rise began early in July and continues until the banks were overrun, reaching its crest in September. By the end of October the river was once more contained within its banks.
Predynastic Egypt
By 4000 B.C. Neolithic villagers had begun to build dikes and a canal network to control the Nile for irrigation. As population grew, a central authority was required because this necessary work involved many communities. Two distinct kingdoms emerged: Lower Egypt comprised the broad Nile delta north of Memphis, while Upper Egypt extended southward along the narrow ten- to twenty-mile-wide valley as far as the first cataract at Syene (Aswan). Each kingdom contained about a score of tribal districts, or nomes, which had formerly been ruled by independent chieftains. The Predynastic period ended soon after 3100 B.C. when Menes (also known as Narmer), ruler of Upper Egypt, united the two kingdoms and founded the First Dynasty with its capital at Memphis. As little is known of these first two dynasties, the period is called Egypt's archaic age.
The Old Kingdom
The kings of the Third through the Sixth Dynasties - the period called the Old Kingdom or Pyramid Age - firmly established order and stability and the essential elements of Egyptian civilization. The nobility lost its independence, and all power was centered in the king, or pharaoh (Per-ao, "Great House"). The pharaoh was considered a god rather than the human agent of a god, as was usual in Mesopotamia. As the god of Egypt, the pharaoh owned all the land (although frequent grants were made to temples and private persons), controlled the irrigation system, decided when the fields should be sown, and received the surplus from the crops produced on the huge royal estates. This surplus supported a large corps of specialists - administrators, priests, scribes, artists, artisans, and merchants - who labored in the service of the pharaoh. The people's welfare was thought to rest on absolute fidelity to the god-king. "If you want to know what to do in life," advised one Egyptian writer, "cling to the pharaoh and be loyal ... " As a consequence, Egyptians felt a sense of security that was rare in Mesopotamia. The belief that the pharaoh was a god led to the practice of mummification and the construction of colossal tombs - the pyramids - to preserve the pharaoh's embalmed body for eternity. The ritual of mummification restored vigor and activity to the dead pharaoh; it was his passport to eternity: "You live again, you live again forever, here you are young once more for ever." The pyramid tombs, in particular those of the Fourth Dynasty at Gizeh near Memphis, which are the most celebrated of all ancient monuments, reflect the great power and wealth of the Old Kingdom pharaohs. Although pyramid construction provided employment during the four months of the year when the land was flooded by the Nile, the Egyptian masses performed it primarily as an act of faith in their god-king, on whom the security and prosperity of Egypt depended.
Security and prosperity came to an end late in the Sixth Dynasty. The burden of building and maintaining pyramid tombs for each new king exhausted the state. The Nile floods failed and crops were diminished, yet taxes were increased. As the state and its god-king lost credibility, royal tombs were plundered and government files were thrown into the street. The nobles assumed the prerogatives of the pharaohs, including the claim to immortality, and the nomes again became independent.
For about a century and a half, known as the First Intermediate Period (c. 2200-2050 B.C.), civil war raged among contenders for the throne. Outsiders raided and infiltrated the land. The lot of the common people became unbearable as they faced famine, robbery, and oppression by petty tyrants. "All happiness has vanished," wrote a contemporary. "I show you the land in turmoil, ... Each man's heart is for himself ... A man sits with his back turned, while one slays another." ^17
[Footnote 17: Robert A. Guisepi, Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings, Vol. 1: The Old and Middle Kingdoms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 141-142.]
The Middle Kingdom, c. 2050-1800 B.C.
Egypt was rescued from anarchy by the pharaohs of the Eleventh and Twelfth Dynasties, who reunited the country and ruled from Thebes. Stressing their role as watchful shepherds of the people, the Middle Kingdom pharaohs promoted the welfare of the downtrodden. One of them claimed: "I gave to the destitute and brought up the orphan. I caused him who was nothing to reach [his goal], like him who was [somebody]." ^18 No longer was the nation's wealth expended on huge pyramids, but on public works. The largest of these, a drainage and irrigation project in the marshy Fayum district south of Memphis, resulted in the reclamation of 27,000 acres of arable land. Moreover, a concession that has been called "the democratization of the hereafter" gave the lower classes the right to have their bodies mummified and thereby to enjoy immortality like the pharaohs and the nobility.
[Footnote 18: John A. Wilson, trans., The Burden of Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 117.]
Following the Twelfth Dynasty, Egypt again was racked by civil war as provincial governors fought for the pharaoh's throne. During this Second Intermediate Period (c. 1800-1750 B.C.), the Hyksos, a mixed but preponderantly Semitic people, invaded Egypt from Palestine about 1720 B.C. They easily conquered the Delta and made the rest of Egypt tributary. It was probably at this time that the Hebrew Joseph, who had risen to a high position under a Hyksos king, invited his relatives to settle in the Delta ("the land of Goshen") during a famine.
The New Kingdom Or Empire, c. 1570-1090 B.C.
The Egyptians viewed the Hyksos conquest as a great humiliation imposed on them by detestable barbarians. An aggressive nationalism emerged, promoted by the native prince of Thebes who proclaimed: "No man can settle down, when despoiled by the taxes of the Asiatics. I will grapple with him, that I may rip open his belly! My wish is to save Egypt and to smite the Asiatics!" ^19 Adopting the new weapons introduced by their conquerors - the composite bow, constructed of wood and horn, and the horse-drawn chariot - the Egyptians expelled the Hyksos and pursued them into Palestine. The pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty, who reunited Egypt and founded the new Kingdom, made Palestine the nucleus of an Egyptian empire in western Asia.
[Footnote 19: John A. Wilson, The Burden of Egypt, p. 164.]
The outstanding representative of the aggressive state that Egypt now became was Thutmose III (1490-1435 B.C.). After inheriting the throne as a child, Thutmose was shoved aside by his step-mother, Hatshepsut (1490-1469 B.C.), a former concubine who acted as regent during his minority. Supported by the powerful priests of the sun-god Amon, Hatshepsut proclaimed herself "king." In many of her statues and reliefs she was portrayed wearing the customary royal crown and helmets - sometimes even sporting the royal beard! She employed all the customary royal titles with the exception of "Mighty Bull," which clearly was not appropriate for a woman who described herself as "exceedingly good to look upon, ...a beautiful maiden, fresh, serene of nature, ...altogether divine."
When Hatshepsut died after twenty years of rule, Thutmose ordered her name and inscriptions erased, her reliefs effaced, and her statues broken and thrown into a quarry. Then this "Napoleon of Egypt," as Thutmose III has been called, led his army on seventeen campaigns as far as Syria, where he set up his boundary markers on the banks of the Euphrates, called by the Egyptians "the river that runs backward." Nubia and northern Sudan were also brought under his sway. Native princes of Palestine, Phoenicia, and Syria were left on their thrones, but their sons were taken to Egypt as hostages. Here they were brought up and, thoroughly Egyptianized, eventually sent home to rule as loyal vassals. Thutmose III erected obelisks - tall, pointed shafts of stone - to commemorate his reign and to record his wish that "his name might endure throughout the future forever and ever." Four of his obelisks now adorn the cities of Istanbul, Rome, London, and New York.
Under Amenhotep III (c. 1402-1363 B.C.) the Egyptian Empire reached its peak. Tribute flowed in from conquered lands; and Thebes, with its temples built for the sun-god Amon east of the Nile at Luxor and Karnak, became the most magnificient city in the world. The Hittites and the rulers of Babylonia and Crete, among others, sent gifts, including princesses for the pharaoh's harem. In return, they asked the pharaoh "for gold, for gold is as common as dust in your land."
During the reign of the succeeding pharaoh, Amenhotep IV (1363-1347 B.C.), however, the Empire went into sharp decline as the result of an internal struggle between the pharaoh and the powerful and wealthy priests of the sun-god Amon, the king of the gods. The pharaoh undertook to revolutionize Egypt's religion by proclaiming the worship of the sun's disk, Aton, in place of Amon and all the other deities. Often called the first monotheist (although, as Aton's son, the pharaoh was also a god), Amenhotep changed his name to Akhenaton ("Devoted to Aton"), left Amon's city to found a new capital (Akhetaton), and concentrated upon religious reform. Most of Egypt's vassal princes in Asia defected when their appeals for aid against invaders went unheeded. Prominent among these invaders were groups of people called the Habiru, whose possible identification with the Hebrews of the Old Testament has interested modern scholars. At home the Amon priesthood encouraged dissension. When Akhenaton died, his nine-year-old brother, Tutankhamen ("King Tut," c. 1347-1338 B.C.) - now remembered for his small but richly furnished tomb discovered in 1922 - returned to the worship of Amon and to Thebes, where he became a puppet of the priests of Amon. At this point the generals of the army took control of Egypt.
One of the new army leaders founded the Nineteenth Dynasty (c. 1305-1200 B.C.), which sought to re-establish Egyptian control over Palestine and Syria. The result was a long struggle with the Hittites, who in the meantime had pushed south from Asia Minor into Syria. This struggle reached a climax in the reign of Ramses II (1290-1224 B.C.), the pharaoh of the Hebrew Exodus from Egypt under Moses. Ramses II regained Palestine, but when he failed to dislodge the Hittites from Syria, he agreed to a treaty. Its strikingly modern character is revealed in clauses providing for nonagression, mutual assistance, and extradition of fugitives.
The long reign of Ramses II as Egypt's last period of national grandeur. The number and size of Ramses' monuments rival those of the Pyramid Age. Outstanding among them are the great Hypostyle Hall, built for Amon at Karnak, and the temple at Abu Simbel, with its four colossal statues of Ramses, which has now been raised to save it from inundation by the waters of the High Dam at Aswan (Syene). After Ramses II, royal authority gradually decayed as the power of the priests of Amon rose.
Period Of Decadence, 1090-332 B.C.
During the early part of the Period of Decadence the Amon priesthood at Thebes became so strong that the high priest was able to found his own dynasty and to rule over Upper Egypt. At the same time, merchant princes set up a dynasty of their own in the Delta. Libyans from the west moved into central Egypt, where in 940 B.C. they established a dynasty whose founder, Shishak, was a contemporary of King Solomon of Israel. Two centuries later Egypt was conquered by the black Kushites of Nubia, who established the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty and ruled from Napata, near the Fourth Cataract. Kushite domination ended in 671 B.C., when the Assyrians of Mesopotamia made Egypt a province of their empire. The Egyptianized Kushite rulers transferred their capital southward to Meroe, just above the Sixth Cataract. Here they recorded their royal annals in a script based on Egyptian hieroglyphs, and when they died their bodies were mummified and laid to rest in small replicas of the pyramid tombs of the Old Kingdom.
Egypt enjoyed a brief Indian summer of revived glory during the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty (663-525 B.C.), which expelled the Assyrians with the aid of Greek mercenaries. The revival of ancient artistic and literary forms proved sterile, and after attempts to regain Palestine failed, "the king of Egypt came not again any more out of his land" (2 Kings 24:7). Only the commercial policies of these rulers were successful. In about 600 B.C., to facilitate trade, Pharaoh Necho ordered a canal dug between the Nile mouth and the Red Sea (it was later completed by the Persians), and he commissioned a Phoenician expedition, which circumnavigated Africa in three years - a feat not to be duplicated until A.D. 1497 by the Portuguese.
The thirty Egyptian dynasties which had existed for nearly three thousand years came to an end when Egypt passed under Persian rule in 525 B.C. Two hundred years later this ancient land came within the domain of Alexander the Great.
Egyptian Society And Economy
Although most Egyptians were virtual serfs and subject to forced labor, class stratification was not rigid, and people of merit could rise to a higher rank in the service of the pharaoh. The best avenue of advancement was education. The pharaoh's administration needed many scribes, and young men were urged to attend a scribal school: "Be a scribe, who is freed from forced labor, and protected from all work....he directeth every work that is in this land." Yet then as now the education of a young man was beset with pitfalls: "I am told thou forsakest writing, that thou givest thyself up to pleasures; thou goest from street to street, where it smelleth of beer, to destruction. Beer, it scareth men from thee, it sendeth thy soul to perdition." ^20 [Footnote 20: Adolf Erman, The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians, trans. Aylward M. Blackman (London: Methuen & Co., 1927), pp. 190, 196, 197.] Compared with their Greek and Roman successors, Egyptian women enjoyed extraordinary freedom. Equality of the sexes in Egypt is reflected in statues and paintings. Wives of pharaohs and nobles are shown standing or sitting beside their husbands, and little daughters are depicted with the same tenderness as little sons. The right of succession to the throne was based on royal descent from the mother as well as the father. Marriages between brothers and sisters often took place within the ruling family to assure the most divine strain and reduce the number of rival claimants to the throne. Business and legal documents show that women in general had rights to own, buy and sell property without reliance on legal guardians, and to make wills and testify in court. A few became scribes and members of the administration. The economy of Egypt has been called "theocratic socialism" because the state, in the person of the divine pharaoh, owned the land and monopolized commerce and industry. (Compare the role of temples in the collectivized economy of the Early Sumerian period.) Because of the Nile and the proximity to the Mediterranean Red seas, most of Egypt's trade was carried on by ships. Boats plied regularly up and down the Nile, which, unlike the Tigris and the Euphrates, is easily navigable in both directions up to the first cataract at Aswan (Syene). The current carries ships downstream, and the prevailing north wind enables them to sail upstream easily. Trade reached its height during the Empire, when commerce traveled along four main routes: the Nile River; the Red Sea, which was connected by caravan to the Nile bend near Thebes; a caravan route to Mesopotamia and southern Syria; and the Mediterranean Sea, connecting northern Syria, Cyprus, Crete, and Greece with the delta of the Nile. Egypt's indispensable imports were lumber, copper, tin, and olive oil, paid for with gold from its rich mines, linens, wheat, and papyrus rollsthe preferred writing material of the ancient world. (Our word paper is derived from the Greek papyros.)
Egyptian Religion
During the Old Kingdom Egyptian religion had no strong ethical character. Relations between humans and gods were based largely on material considerations, and the gods were thought to reward those who brought them gifts of sacrifice. But widespread suffering during the First Intermediate Period led to a revolution in religious thought. It was now believed that instead of sacrificial offerings the gods were interested in good character and love for one's fellows: "More acceptable [to the gods] is the character of one upright of heart than the ox of the evildoer....Give the love of thyself to the whole world; a good character is a remembrance." ^21
[Footnote 21: From "The Instruction of Meri-ka-Re" in The Burden of Egypt, trans. John A. Wilson, p. 120.]
Osiris, the mythical god of the Nile whose death and resurrection explained the annual rise and fall of the river, became the center of Egypt's most popular religious cult when the new emphasis on moral character was combined with the supreme reward of an attractive afterlife. "Do justice whilst thou endurest upon earth," people were told. "A man remains over after death, and his deeds are placed beside him in heaps. However, existence yonder is for eternity....He who reaches it without wrongdoing shall exist yonder like a god." ^22 The original premoral myth told how Osiris had been murdered by Seth, his evil brother, who cut the victim's body into many pieces. When Isis, the bereaved widow, collected all the pieces and wrapped them in linen, Osiris was resurrected. The moralized Osiris cult taught that Osiris was the first mummy and that every mummified Egyptian could become another Osiris, capable of resurrection from the dead and a blessed eternal life.
[Footnote 22: From "The Instruction of Meri-ka-Re" in The Burden of Egypt, trans. John A. Wilson, p. 119.]
But only a soul free of sin would be permitted to live forever in what was described as the "Field of the Blessed, an ideal land where there is no wailing and nothing evil; where barley grows four cubits high, and emmer wheat seven ells high; where, even better, one has to do no work in the field oneself, but can let others take care of it." ^23 In a ceremony called "counting up character," Osiris weighed the deceased's heart against the Feather of Truth. If the heart was heavy with sin and outweighed the Feather of Truth, a horrible creature devoured it. During the Empire the priesthood of Osiris became corrupt and claimed that it knew clever methods of surviving the soul testing, even if a person's heart were heavy with sin. Charms and magical prayers and formulas were sold to the living as insurance policies guaranteeing them a happy outcome in the judgment before Osiris. They constitute much of what is known as the Book of the Dead, which was placed in the tomb.
[Footnote 23: Quoted in George Steindorff and George Hoyingen-Huene, Egypt (Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin, 1943), p. 23.]
Akhenaton's religious reformation was directed against the venal priests of Osiris as well as those of the supreme god Amon. As we have seen, Akhenaton failed to uproot Amon and the multiplicity of lesser gods; his monotheism was too cold and intellectual to attract the masses who yearned for a blessed hereafter.
Mathematics And Science
The Egyptians were much less skilled in mathematics than were the Mesopotamians. Their arithmetic was limited to addition and subtraction, which also served them when they needed to multiply and divide. They could cope with only simple algebra, but they did have considerable knowledge of practical geometry. The obliteration of field boundaries by the annual flooding of the Nile made land measurement a necessity. A knowledge of geometry was also essential in computing the dimensions of ramps for raising stones during the construction of pyramids. In these and other engineering projects the Egyptians were superior to their Mesopotamian contemporaries. Like the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians acquired a "necessary" technology without developing a truly scientific method. Yet what has been called the oldest known scientific treatise, The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, was composed during the Old Kingdom. Its author described forty-eight cases requiring surgery, drawing conclusions solely from observation and rejecting supernatural causes and treatments. In advising the physician to "measure for the heart" that "speaks" in various parts of the body, he recognized the importance of the pulse and approached the concept of the circulation of the blood. This text remained unique, however, for in Egypt as elsewhere in the ancient Near East, thought failed to free itself permanently from domination by priests and bondage to religion. The Greeks were to be the first to accomplish this task.
The Old Kingdom also produced the world's first known solar calendar, the direct ancestor of our own. In order to plan their farming operations in accordance with the annual flooding of the Nile, the Egyptians kept records and discovered that the average period between inundations was 365 days. They also noted that the Nile flood coincided with the annual appearance of the Dog Star (Sirius) on the eastern horizon at dawn, and they soon associated the two phenomena. (Since the Egyptian year was six hours short of the true year, Julius Caesar in Roman times corrected the error by adding an extra day every four years.)
Monumentalism In Architecture
Because of their impressive, enduring tombs and temples, the Egyptians have been called the greatest builders in history. The earliest tomb was the mud-brick mastaba, so called because of its resemblance to a low bench. By the beginning of the Third Dynasty stone began to replace brick, and an architectural genius named Imhotep, now honored as "the father of architecture in stone," constructed the first pyramid by piling six huge stone mastabas one on top of the other. Adjoining this Step Pyramid was a temple complex whose stone columns were not freestanding but attached to a wall, as though the architect was still feeling his way in the use of the new medium. The most celebrated of the true pyramids were built for the Fourth Dynasty pharaohs Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure. Khufu's pyramid, the largest of the three, covers thirteen acres and originally rose 481 feet. It is composed of 2,300,000 limestone blocks, some weighing fifteen tons, and all pushed and pulled into place by human muscle. This stupendous monument was built without mortar, yet some of the stones were so perfectly fitted that a knife cannot be inserted in the joints. The Old Kingdom's eighty pyramids are a striking expression of Egyptian civilization. Their dignity and massiveness reflect the religious basis of Egyptian society - the dogma that the king was a god who owned the nation and that serving him was the most important task of the people.
As the glory and serenity of the Old Kingdom can be seen in its pyramids, constructed as an act of faith by its subjects, so the power and wealth of the Empire survives in the Amon temples at Thebes, made possible by the booty and tribute of conquest. Here on the east side of the Nile stand the ruins of the magnificient temples of Karnak and Luxor. The Hypostyle Hall of the temple of Karnak, built by Ramses II, is larger than the cathedral of Notre Dame. Its forest of 134 columns is arranged in sixteen rows, with the roof over the two broader central aisles (the nave) raised to allow the entry of light. This technique of providing a clerestory over a central nave was later used in Roman basilicas and Christian churches.
Sculpture And Painting
Egyptian art was essentially religious. Tomb paintings and relief sculpture depict the everyday activities that the deceased wished to continue enjoying in the afterlife, and statues glorify the god-kings in all their serenity and eternity. Since religious art is inherently conservative, Egyptian art seldom from the traditions established during the vigorous and self-assured Old Kingdom. Sculptors idealized and standardized their subjects, and the human figure is shown either looking directly ahead or in profile, with a rigidity very much in keeping with the austere architectural settings of the statues.
Yet on two occasions an unprecedented naturalism appeared in Egyptian sculpture. The faces of some of the Middle Kingdom rulers appear drawn and weary, seemingly reflecting the burden of reconstructing Egypt after the collapse of the Old Kingdom. An even greater naturalism is seen in the portraits of Akhenaton and his queen, Nefertete, which continued on into the following reign of Tutankhamen. The pharaoh's brooding countenance is realistically portrayed, as is his ungainly paunch and his happy but far from godlike family life as he holds one of his young daughters on his knee or munches on a bone. The "heretic" pharaoh, who insisted on what he called "truth" in religion, seems also to have insisted on truth in art. Painting in Egypt shows the same precision and mastery of technique that are evident in sculpture. However, no attempt was made to show objects in perspective, and the scenes give an appearance of flatness. The effect of distance was conveyed by making objects in a series or by putting one object above another. Another convention employed was to depict everything from its most characteristic angle. Often the head, arms and legs were shown in side view and the eyes, shoulders, and chest were shown in front view. Writing And Literature
In Egypt, as in Sumer, writing began with pictures. But unlike the Mesopotamian signs, Egyptian hieroglyphs ("sacred signs") remained primarily pictorial. At first the hieroglyphs represented only objects, but later they came to stand for ideas and syllables. Early in the Old Kingdom the Egyptians took the further step of using the alphabetic characters for twenty-four consonant sounds. Although they also continued to use the old pictographic and syllabic signs, this discovery had far-reaching consequences. It influenced their Semitic neighbors in Syria to produce an alphabet that, in its Phoenician form, became the forerunner of our own.
Egypt's oldest literature is the Pyramid Texts, a body of religious writing found inscribed on the walls of the burial chambers of Old Kingdom pharaohs. Their recurrent theme is a monotonous insistence that the dead pharaoh is really a god and that no obstacle can prevent him from joining his fellow gods in the heavens.
The troubled life that followed the collapse of the Old Kingdom produced the highly personal literature of the First Intermediate Period and Middle Kingdom. It contains protests against the ills of the day, demands for social justice, and praise for the romantic excitements of wine, women, and song as a means of forgetting misery. The universal appeal of this literature is illustrated by the following lines from a love poem, in which the beloved is called "sister":
I behold how my sister cometh, and my heart is in gladness. Mine arms open wide to embrace her; my heart exulteth within me; for my lady has come to me.... She kisseth me, she openeth her lips to me: then am I joyful even without beer. ^24
[Footnote 24: George Steindorff and Keith E. Steel, trans., When Egypt Ruled the East (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), p. 125. Copyright 1942 by the University of Chicago Press.]
A classic of Egyptian literature is Akhenaton's Hymn to the Sun, which is similar in spirit to Psalm 104 in the Old Testament ("O Lord, how manifold are thy works!"). A few lines indicate its lyric beauty and its conception of one omnipotent and beneficient Creator:
Thy dawning is beautiful in the horizon of the sky, O living Aton, beginning of life!... How manifold are thy works! They are hidden before men, O sole god, beside whom there is no other. Thou didst create the earth according to thy heart While thou wast alone. ^25
[Footnote 25: Quoted in J. H. Breasted, The Dawn of Conscience (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1939), p. 284.]
Basic Patterns Of Egyptian Society
Unlike Mesopotamia and the Middle East, where an original river-valley basis to civilization ultimately gave way to the spread of civilization throughout an entire region, Egyptian civilization from its origins to its decline was focused on the Nile River and the deserts around it. The Nile focus also gave a more optimistic cast to Egyptian culture, for it could be seen as a source of never- failing bounty to be thankfully received, rather than a menacing cause of floods. Egyptian civilization may at the outset have received some inspiration from Sumer, but a distinctive pattern soon developed in both religion and politics.
Farming had been developed along the Nile by about 5000 B.C., but some time before 3200 B.C. economic development accelerated, in part because of growing trade wi,h other regions including Mesopotamia. This economic acceleration provided the basis for the formation of regional kingdoms. Unlike Sumer, Egypt moved fairly directly from precivilization to large government units, without passing through a city-state phase, though the first pharaoh, Narmer, had to conquer a number of petty local kings around 3100 B.C. Indeed Egypt always had fewer problems with political unity than Mesopotamia did, in part because of the unifying influence of the course of the Nile River. By the same token, however, Egyptian politics tended to be more authoritarian as well as centralized, for city-states in the Mesopotamian style, though often ruled by kings, also provided the opportunity for councils and other participatory institutions.
By 3100 B.C. Narmer, king of southern Egypt, conquered the northern regional kingdom and created a unified state 600 miles long. This state was to last 3000 years. Despite some important disruptions, this was an amazing record of stability even though the greatest vitality of the civilization was exhausted by about 1000 B.C. During the 2000-year span in which Egypt displayed its greatest vigor, the society went through three major periods of monarchy (the Old, the Intermediate, and the New Kingdoms), each divided from its successor by a century or two of confusion.
In all its phases, Egyptian civilization was characterized by the strength of the pharaoh. The pharaoh was held to be descended from gods, with the power to assure prosperity and control the rituals that assured the flow of the Nile and the fertility derived from irrigation. Soon, the pharaoh was regarded as a god. Much Egyptian art was devoted to demonstrating the power and sanctity of the king. From the king's authority also flowed an extensive bureaucracy, recruited from the landed nobles but specially trained in writing and law. Governors were appointed for key regions and were responsible for supervising irrigation and arranging for the great public works that became a hallmark of Egyptian culture. Most Egyptians were peasant farmers, closely regulated and heavily taxed. Labor requisition by the states allowed construction of the great pyramids and other huge public buildings. These monuments were triumphs of human coordination, for the Egyptians were not particularly advanced technologically. They even lacked pulleys or other devices to hoist the huge slabs of stone that formed the pyramids. Given the importance of royal rule and the belief that pharaohs were gods, it is not surprising that each of the main periods of Egyptian history was marked by some striking kings. Early in each dynastic period leading pharaohs conquered new territories, sometimes pressing up the Nile River into present-day Sudan, once even moving up the Mediterranean coast of the Middle East. One pharaoh, Akhenaton, late in Egyptian history, tried to use his power to install a new, one-god religion, replacing the Egyptian pantheon. Many pharaohs commemorated their greatness by building huge pyramids to house themselves and their retinues after death, commanding work crews of up to 100,000 men to haul and lift the stone. The first great pyramid was built around 2600 B.C.; the largest pyramid followed about a century later, taking 20 years to complete and containing 2 million blocks of stone, each weighing 5 1/2 tons.
Some scholars have seen even larger links between Egypt's stable, centralized politics and its fascination with an orderly death, including massive funeral monuments and preservation through mummification. Death rituals suggested a concern with extending organization to the afterlife, based on a belief that, through politics, death as well as life could be carefully controlled. A similar connection between strong political structures and careful funeral arrangements developed in Chinese civilization, though with quite different specific religious beliefs.
Ideas And Art
Despite some initial inspiration, Egyptian culture separated itself from Mesopotamia in a number of ways beyond politics and monument building. The Egyptians did not take to the Sumerian cuneiform alphabet and developed a hieroglyphic alphabet instead. Hieroglyphics, though more pictorial than Sumerian cuneiform, were based on simplified pictures of objects abstracted to represent concepts or sounds. As in Mesopotamia the writing system was complex, and its use was, for the most part, monopolized by the powerful priestly caste. Egyptians ultimately developed a new material to write on, papyrus, which was cheaper to manufacture and use than clay tablets or animal skins and allowed the proliferation of elaborate record keeping. On the other hand, Egypt did not generate an epic literary tradition.
Egyptian science focused on mathematics and astronomy, but its achievements were far less advanced than those of Mesopotamia. The Egyptians were, however, the first people to establish the length of the solar year, which they divided into 12 months each with three weeks of ten days. The week was the only division of time not based on any natural cycles. The achievement of this calendar suggests Egyptian concern about predicting the flooding of the Nile and their abilities in astronomical observation. The Egyptians also made important advances in medicine, including knowledge of the workings of a variety of medicinal drugs and some contraceptive devices. Elements of Egyptian medical knowledge were gained by the Greeks, and so passed into later
The pillar of Egyptian culture was not science, however, but religion, which was firmly established as the basis of a whole world view. The religion promoted the worship of many gods. It mixed magical ceremonies and beliefs with worship, in a fashion common to early religions almost everywhere. A more distinctive focus involved the concern with death and preparation for life in another world, where in contrast to the Mesopotamians the Egyptians held that a happy, changeless well-being could be achieved. The care shown in preparing tombs and mummifying bodies, along with elaborate funeral rituals particularly for the rulers and bureaucrats, was designed to assure a satisfactory afterlife, though Egyptians also believed that favorable judgment by a key god, Osiris, was essential as well. Other Egyptian deities included a creation goddess, similar to other Middle Eastern religious figures later adapted into Christian worship of the Virgin Mary; and a host of gods represented by partial animal figures. Egyptian art focused heavily on the gods, though earthly, human scenes were portrayed as well in a characteristic, stylized form that lasted without great change for many centuries.
Stability was a hallmark of Egyptian culture. Given the duration of Egyptian civilization, there were surprisingly few basic changes in styles and beliefs. Egyptian emphasis on stability was reflected in their view of a changeless afterlife, suggesting a conscious attempt to argue that persistence was a virtue. Change did, however, occur in some key areas. Egypt was long fairly isolated, which helped preserve continuity. The invasions of Egypt by Palestine toward the end of the Old Kingdom period (about 2200 B.C.) were distinct exceptions to Egypt's usual self-containment. They were followed by attacks from the Middle East by tribes of Asian origin, which brought a period of division and chaos, including rival royal dynasties. But the unified monarchy was reestablished during the Middle Kingdom period, during which Egyptian settlements spread southward into what is now the Sudan, setting origins for the later African kingdom of Kush.
Then followed another period of social unrest and invasion, ending in the final great kingdom period, the New Kingdom, around 1570 B.C. During this period trade and other contacts with the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean, including the island of Crete, gained ground. These contacts spread certain Egyptian influences, notably in monumental architecture, to other areas. It was during the New Kingdom that Egyptians first installed formal slavery, subjecting people such as the Jews. It was also in this period that the pharaoh Akhenaton tried to impose a new monotheistic religion, reflecting some foreign influence, but his effort was renounced by his successor Tutankhamen, who restored the old capital city and built a lavish tomb to celebrate the return to the traditional gods. After about 1150 B.C., new waves of invasion and internal conspiracies and disorganization, including strikes and social protest, brought fairly steady decline. A project by History World International
|
