The Political History of Ancient Egypt

Egypt was divided between “Upper Egypt,” the southern stretch of the Nile
Valley that relied on the Nile floods for irrigation, and “Lower Egypt,” the
enormous delta region where the Nile meets the Mediterranean. The two
regions had been politically distinct for centuries, but (according to both
archeology and the dating system created by Manetho) in roughly 3100 BCE
Narmer, a king of Upper Egypt, conquered Lower Egypt and united the
country for the first time. The date used for the founding of the Old Kingdom
of Egypt, 2680 BCE, is when the third royal dynasty to rule all of Egypt
established itself. Its king, Djoser, was the first to commission an enormous
tomb to house his remains when he died: the first pyramid. The Old Kingdom
represented a long, unbroken line of kings that presided over the first full
flowering of Egyptian culture, architecture, and prosperity.
The Old Kingdom united Egypt under a single ruling house, developed systems of record-
keeping, and formed an all-important caste of scribes, the royal bureaucrats who mastered
hieroglyphic writing. Likewise, the essential characteristics of Egyptian religion emerged
during the Old Kingdom, especially the idea that the king was actually a god and that his
rule ensured that the world itself would continue – the Egyptians thought that if there was
no king or the proper prayers were not recited by the priests, terrible chaos and

destruction would reign on earth .

The Old Kingdom was stable and powerful, although its kings did not use that
power to expand their borders beyond Egypt itself. Instead, all of Old
Kingdom society revolved around the production of agricultural surpluses
from the Nile, efficiently cataloged and taxed by the royal bureaucracy and
“spent” on building enormous temples and, in time, tombs. The pyramids of
Egypt were all built during the Old Kingdom, and their purpose was to house
the bodies of the kings so that their spirits could travel to the land of the
dead and join their fellow gods in the afterlife (thereby maintaining ma’at -
sacred order and balance).
The pyramids are justly famous as the ultimate example of Egyptian
prosperity and ingenuity. The Great Pyramid of Khufu, the single largest
pyramid of the period, contained over 2.5 million stone blocks, each weighing
approximately 2.5 tons. The sheer amount of energy expended on the
construction of the pyramids is thus staggering; it was only the incredible
bounty of the Nile and its harvests that enabled the construction of the
pyramids by providing the calories consumed by the workers and draught
animals, the wealth used to employ the supporting bureaucracy, and the size
of the population that sustained the entire enterprise. Likewise, while the
details are now lost, the Old Kingdom’s government must have been highly
effective at tax collection and the distribution of food, supplies, and work
teams. Pyramids on the scale of the Old Kingdom would have been all but
impossible anywhere else in the world at the time.
A major factor in the stability of Old Kingdom Egypt was that it was very
isolated. Despite its geographical proximity to Mesopotamia and Anatolia,
Egypt at the time was largely separated from the civilizations of those
regions. The Sinai Peninsula, which divides Egypt from present-day Palestine
and Israel, is about 120 miles of desert. With a few violent exceptions, no
major incursions were able to cross over Sinai, and contact with the cultures
of Mesopotamia and the Near East was limited as a result. Likewise, even
though Egypt is on the Mediterranean, sailing technology was so primitive
that there was little contact with other cultures via the sea.
Around 2200 BCE, two hundred years after the last pyramids were built, the
Old Kingdom collapsed, leading to the First Intermediate Period. The reason
for the collapse is not clear, but it probably had to do with the very
infrequent occurrence of drought. There are written records from this period
of instability that make it clear that Egyptians knew very well that things had
been fundamentally upset and imbalanced, and they did not know what to
do about it. The kings were supposed to oversee the harmony of life and yet
the royal dynasty had collapsed without a replacement. This disrupted the
entire Egyptian worldview.
In turn, this disruption prompted a development in Egyptian religion. The
Egyptian religion of the Old Kingdom had emphasized life on earth; even
though the pyramids were tombs built to house the kings and the things they
would need on their journey to the afterlife, there are no records with details
about how most people would fare after they died. This changed during the
First Intermediate Period, when the Egyptians invented the idea that the
suffering of the present life might be overcome in a more perfect world to
come. After death, the soul would be brought before a judge of the gods,
who would weigh the heart on scales against the ideals of harmony and
order. At this point, the heart might betray the soul, telling the god all of the
sins its owner had committed in life. The lucky and virtuous person, though,
would see their heart balance against the ideal of order and the soul would
be rewarded with eternal life. Otherwise, their heart would be tossed to a
crocodile-headed demon and devoured, the soul perishing in the process.
Monumental building ceased during the Intermediate Period – there were no
more pyramids, palaces, or temples being built. A major social change that
occurred was that royal officials away from the capital started to inherit titles,
and thus it was the first time there was a real noble class with its own
inherited power and land. Some historians have argued that a major cause of
the collapse of royal authority was the growth in power of the nobility: in
other words, royal authority did not fall apart first and lead to elites seizing
more power, elites seized power and thereby weakened royal authority. The
irony of the period is that the economy of Egypt actually diversified and
expanded. It seems to have been a time in which a new elite commissioned
royal-inspired goods and hence supported emerging craftspeople.
The Middle Kingdom was the next great Egyptian kingdom of the ancient
world. The governor of the city of Thebes reunified the kingdom and
established himself as the new king (Mentuhotep II, r. 2060 – 2010 BCE). One
major change in Egyptian belief is that the Middle Kingdom rulers still
claimed to be at least partly divine, but they also emphasized their humanity.
They wrote about themselves as shepherds trying to maintain the balance of
harmony in Egypt and to protect their people, rather than just as lords over
an immortal kingdom. Their nobles had more power than had the nobility of
the Old Kingdom as well, playing important political roles on their lands.
Starting during the Middle Kingdom, the kings made a major effort to extend
Egyptian power and influence beyond the traditional “core” of the kingdom
in Egypt itself. Egypt exerted military power and extracted wealth from the
northern part of the kingdom of Nubia (in present-day Sudan) to the south,
and also established at least limited ongoing contact with Mesopotamia as
well. The kings actively encouraged immigration from outside of Egypt, but
insisted that immigrants settle among Egyptians. They had the same policy
with war captives, often settling them as farmers in the midst of Egyptians.
This ensured speedy acculturation and helped bring foreign talent into Egypt
While no more pyramids were ever built - it appears that the nearly obsessive
focus on the spirit of the king after death was confined to the Old Kingdom -
the Middle Kingdom was definitely a period of stability and prosperity for
Egypt as a whole. A fairly diverse body of literature survived in the form of
writings on papyrus, the form of paper made from Nile reeds monopolized by
Egypt for centuries, that suggests that commerce was extensive, Egyptian
religion celebrated the spiritual importance of ordinary people, and fairness
and justice were regarded as major ethical imperatives.
Things spun out of control for the Middle Kingdom starting in about 1720
BCE, roughly 300 years after it had been founded, leading in turn to the
Second Intermediate Period. Settlers from Canaan (present-day Jordan, Israel,
Lebanon, and parts of Syria) had been streaming into Egypt for generations,
initially settling and assimilating into Egyptian society. By about 1650 BCE,
however, a group of Canaanites founded what was known as the “Hyksos”
dynasty, an Egyptian term which simply means “leaders of foreigners,” after
they overthrew the king and seized power in Lower Egypt. While they started
as “foreigners,” the Hyksos quickly adopted the practices of the Egyptian
kings they had overthrown, using Egyptian scribes to keep records in
hieroglyphics, worshiping the local gods, and generally behaving like
Egyptians.
The most significant innovation introduced by the Hyksos was the use of
bronze. There was very limited use of bronze in Egypt until the Second
Intermediate Period, with both weapons and tools being crafted from copper
or stone. Bronze, an alloy of copper and zinc or nickel, required technical skill
and access to its component minerals to craft. The finished product was far
harder and more durable than was copper alone, however, and with the
advent of large-scale bronze use in Egypt thanks to the Hyksos, the
possibilities for the growth of Egyptian power increased greatly. Bronze had
already been in use for over a thousand years by the time it became common
in Egypt, but when it finally arrived with Canaanite craftsmen it radically
altered the balance of power. Up to that point, Egyptian technology,
especially in terms of metallurgy, was quite primitive. Egyptian soldiers were
often nothing more than peasants armed with copper knives, spears with
copper heads, or even just clubs. Egypt's relative isolation meant that it had
never needed to develop more advanced weapons, a fact that the Hyksos
were able to take advantage of, belatedly bringing the large-scale use of
bronze with them.
In 1550 BCE, the Second Intermediate Period ended when another Egyptian
king, Ahmose I, expelled the Hyksos from Egypt. Thus began the New
Kingdom, the most powerful to date. This was also when the Egyptian kings
started calling themselves pharaohs, which means “great house,” lord over all
things. Using the new bronze military technology, the New Kingdom was able
to expand Egyptian control all the way into Mesopotamia. A major change in
the New Kingdom was the power of the military. Bronze was the key factor,
but also important was the adoption of composite bows: bows that are made
from strips of animal bone and sinew, glued together. A composite bow was
much more powerful than a wooden one, and they greatly enhanced the
power of the Egyptian military. One in ten men was impressed into military
service, supplemented with auxiliaries from conquered lands as well as
mercenary forces.
While the Egyptians had always considered themselves to be the favored
people of the gods, dwelling in the home of spiritual harmony in the
universe, it was really during the New Kingdom that they actively
campaigned to take over foreign lands. The idea was that divine harmony
existed only in Egypt and had to be brought to the rest of the world, by force
if necessary. By 1500 BCE, only 50 years after the founding of the new
kingdom, Egypt had conquered Canaan and much of Syria. It then conquered
northern Nubia. The pharaohs dispatched communities of Egyptians to settle
conquered lands, both to pacify those lands and to exploit natural resources
in order to increase royal revenue.
The New Kingdom pharaohs enlisted the leaders of the lands they had
conquered as puppet kings, surrounded by Egyptian advisors. The pharaohs
adopted the practice of bringing many foreign princes of the lands they had
conquered back to Egypt. There, a prince would be raised as an Egyptian and
educated to think of Egyptian civilization as both superior to others and their
own. Thus, when they returned to rule after their fathers died, these princes
would often be thoroughly assimilated to Egyptian culture and would
naturally be more loyal to the pharaoh; using this technique, the New
Kingdom was able to create several “puppet states,” places with their own
rulers who were loyal to Egypt, in the Near and Middle East.
The New Kingdom was also the great bureaucratic empire of Egypt. The
pharaohs divided Egypt into two administrative regions: Upper Egypt, up the
Nile and governed from the city of Thebes, and Lower Egypt, near the Nile
delta where it drained into the Mediterranean and ruled from the city of
Memphis. Regional administrators did the important work of drafting
laborers, extracting taxation, and making sure that agriculture was on track. A
single royal official of vast personal power, the vizier, oversaw the whole
system and personally decided when to open the locks on the Nile to allow
the floodwaters out each year.
While royal officials and the priesthoods of the gods held significant power
and influence during the New Kingdom, the king (now known as the pharaoh)
still ruled as a living god. The pharaohs were still thought to be divine, but
that did not mean they simple bullied their subjects. Many letters have
survived between pharaohs and their subordinates, as well as between
pharaohs and other kings in foreign lands. They played tax breaks, gifts, and
benefits off to encourage loyalty to Egypt rather than simply threatening
people with divine power or armies.
In addition to the New Kingdom’s expansionism, the governments pursued
new forms of monumental architecture. While the construction of pyramids
never occurred after Old Kingdom, Egyptian kings remained focused on the
creation of great buildings. They continued to build opulent tombs, but those
were usually built into hillsides or in more conventional structures, rather
than pyramids. The monumental architecture of the New Kingdom consisted
of huge temples and statues, most notably the Great Temple at Abu Simbel in
northern Nubia, built under the direction of the pharaoh Ramses II at some
point around 1250 BCE. There, gigantic statues of the gods sit, and twice a
year, the rising sun shines through the entrance and directly illuminates three
of them, while the god of the underworld remains in shadow.
 Figure 3.2.2:
The imposing entrance to the Great Temple of Abu Simbel.
Detailed records of noteworthy pharaohs survive from the New Kingdom. The
New Kingdom saw the only known female pharaoh, a woman who ruled from
1479 to 1458 BCE. Her name was Hatshepsut; she originally ruled as a regent
(i.e. someone who is supposed to rule until the young king comes of age) for
her stepson, but then claimed the title of pharaoh and ruled outright. She
ruled for 20 years, waged war, and oversaw a period of ongoing prosperity.
There were enormous building projects under her supervision, and it was
also under her reign that large quantities of sub-Saharan African goods
started to be imported from Nubia: gold, incense, live elephants, panther
skins, and other forms of wealth. When she died, however, her stepson
Thutmose III took the throne. Decades after he became pharaoh, for reasons
that are unclear, he tried to erase the memory of his mother’s reign, perhaps
driven by simple resentment over how long she had held power.
Another pharaoh of note was Amenhotep IV (r. 1353 - 1336 BCE). Amenhotep
was infamous in his own lifetime for attempting an ill-considered full-scale
religious revolution. He tried to focus all worship of the Egyptian people on
an aspect of the sun god, Ra, called Aten. He went so far as to claim that Aten
was the only god, something that seemed absurd to the resolutely
polytheistic Egyptians. He renamed himself Akhenaten, which means “the
one useful to Aten,” moved the capital to a new city he had built, sacked the
temples of other gods, and even had agents chisel off references to the other
gods from buildings and walls. All the while, he insisted that he and his
queen, Nefertiti, be worshiped as gods themselves as the direct
representatives of Aten. Historians do not know why he tried to bring about
this religious revolution, but one reasonable theory is that he was trying to
reduce the power of the priests, who had steadily become richer and more
powerful over the centuries at the expense of the pharaohs themselves.
Akhenaten’s attempted revolution was a disaster. In the eyes of common
people and of later pharaohs, he had fundamentally undermined the very
stability of Egypt. In the eyes of his subjects, the royal person was no longer
seen as a reliable spiritual anchor – the pharaoh was supposed to be the
great protector of the religious and social order, but instead one had tried to
completely destroy it. This was the beginning of the end of the central
position the pharaoh had enjoyed in the life of all Egyptians up until that
point.
Akhenaten’s son restored all of the old religious traditions. This was the
young king Tutankhamun ("King Tut") (r. 1336 – 1326), who is important for
restoring the religion and, arguably, for the simple fact that his tomb was
never looted by grave robbers before it was discovered by a British
archaeologist in 1922 CE. It provided the single most significant trove of
artifacts from the New Kingdom yet found when it was discovered, sparking
an interest in ancient Egyptian history all over the world.
 Figure 3.2.3: The sarcophagus of King
Tutankhamun.
A new dynasty of pharaohs ruled the New Kingdom in the aftermath of
Akhenaten’s disastrous experiment, the most powerful of which was Ramses
II (r. 1279 - 1213). Ramses campaigned against the growing power of an
empire in the north called the Hittites, one of the major empires of the
Bronze Age period (considered in more detail in the next chapter). He ruled
for an astonishingly long time and reputedly sired some 160 children with
wives and concubines. He also oversaw the construction of the Great Temple
of Abu Simbel noted above. Ramses was, however, the last of the great
pharaohs, with all of those who followed working to stave off disaster more
so than expand Egyptian power.
The New Kingdom collapsed in about 1150 BCE. This collapse was part of a
much larger pattern across the ancient Middle East and North Africa: the
collapse of the Bronze Age itself. In the case of Egypt, this took the form of
the first of a series of foreign invasions, that of the “Sea People,” whose
origins have never been determined despite concentrated scholarship on the
question. Later, invaders referred to as “gangs of bandits” from what is today
Libya, to the west of Egypt, further undermined the kingdom, and it finally
fell into a long period of political fragmentation. A long period of civil war and
conflict engulfed Egypt, and from that point on Egypt proved vulnerable to
foreign conquest. In the course of the centuries that followed Assyria, Persia,
the Greeks, and the Romans would, one after the other, add Egypt to their
respective empires.
Detailed records of noteworthy pharaohs survive from the New Kingdom. The
New Kingdom saw the only known female pharaoh, a woman who ruled from
1479 to 1458 BCE. Her name was Hatshepsut; she originally ruled as a regent
(i.e. someone who is supposed to rule until the young king comes of age) for
her stepson, but then claimed the title of pharaoh and ruled outright. She
ruled for 20 years, waged war, and oversaw a period of ongoing prosperity.
There were enormous building projects under her supervision, and it was
also under her reign that large quantities of sub-Saharan African goods
started to be imported from Nubia: gold, incense, live elephants, panther
skins, and other forms of wealth. When she died, however, her stepson
Thutmose III took the throne. Decades after he became pharaoh, for reasons
that are unclear, he tried to erase the memory of his mother’s reign, perhaps
driven by simple resentment over how long she had held power.
Another pharaoh of note was Amenhotep IV (r. 1353 - 1336 BCE). Amenhotep
was infamous in his own lifetime for attempting an ill-considered full-scale
religious revolution. He tried to focus all worship of the Egyptian people on
an aspect of the sun god, Ra, called Aten. He went so far as to claim that Aten
was the only god, something that seemed absurd to the resolutely
polytheistic Egyptians. He renamed himself Akhenaten, which means “the
one useful to Aten,” moved the capital to a new city he had built, sacked the
temples of other gods, and even had agents chisel off references to the other
gods from buildings and walls. All the while, he insisted that he and his
queen, Nefertiti, be worshiped as gods themselves as the direct
representatives of Aten. Historians do not know why he tried to bring about
this religious revolution, but one reasonable theory is that he was trying to
reduce the power of the priests, who had steadily become richer and more
powerful over the centuries at the expense of the pharaohs themselves.
Akhenaten’s attempted revolution was a disaster. In the eyes of common
people and of later pharaohs, he had fundamentally undermined the very
stability of Egypt. In the eyes of his subjects, the royal person was no longer
seen as a reliable spiritual anchor – the pharaoh was supposed to be the
great protector of the religious and social order, but instead one had tried to
completely destroy it. This was the beginning of the end of the central
position the pharaoh had enjoyed in the life of all Egyptians up until that
point.
Akhenaten’s son restored all of the old religious traditions. This was the
young king Tutankhamun ("King Tut") (r. 1336 – 1326), who is important for
restoring the religion and, arguably, for the simple fact that his tomb was
never looted by grave robbers before it was discovered by a British
archaeologist in 1922 CE. It provided the single most significant trove of
artifacts from the New Kingdom yet found when it was discovered, sparking
an interest in ancient Egyptian history all over the world.
A new dynasty of pharaohs ruled the New Kingdom in the aftermath of
Akhenaten’s disastrous experiment, the most powerful of which was Ramses
II (r. 1279 - 1213). Ramses campaigned against the growing power of an
empire in the north called the Hittites, one of the major empires of the
Bronze Age period (considered in more detail in the next chapter). He ruled
for an astonishingly long time and reputedly sired some 160 children with
wives and concubines. He also oversaw the construction of the Great Temple
of Abu Simbel noted above. Ramses was, however, the last of the great
pharaohs, with all of those who followed working to stave off disaster more
so than expand Egyptian power.
The New Kingdom collapsed in about 1150 BCE. This collapse was part of a
much larger pattern across the ancient Middle East and North Africa: the
collapse of the Bronze Age itself. In the case of Egypt, this took the form of
the first of a series of foreign invasions, that of the “Sea People,” whose
origins have never been determined despite concentrated scholarship on the
question. Later, invaders referred to as “gangs of bandits” from what is today
Libya, to the west of Egypt, further undermined the kingdom, and it finally
fell into a long period of political fragmentation. A long period of civil war and
conflict engulfed Egypt, and from that point on Egypt proved vulnerable to
foreign conquest. In the course of the centuries that followed Assyria, Persia,
the Greeks, and the Romans would, one after the other, add Egypt to their
respective empires.