Reading the history of Ancient Egypt really puts things in perspective. This book covers the pre-dynastic period of Egypt briefly before entering the history of the Pharaohs from the Time Narmer united Upper and Lower Egypt in 2950 BC until the death of Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt (although she was ethnically Macedonian) in 30 BC. The scope is immense In three thousand years, you watch Egypt, rise, fall, rise again, and fall again about a dozen times. Some of these Pharaohs would send expeditions out into the desert and they would find ancient temples and tombs over a thousand years old! They had their own ancient history, and now they're ancient history to us. By the time Caesar lived, and Alexander before him, clearly ancient times for us, they could travel the Nile and admire ancient temples, tombs, and shrines just like we do now, and they did. Even when Narmer seized the throne of united Egypt, he explicitly acknowledged cornerstones of Egyptian civilization that existed long before his time and Pharaohs whose names are lost to history.
Egyptian civilization didn’t fully emerge until the Sahara Desert dried out about 5,400 years ago (3400 BC, 500 years before Narmer), and it is expected to be green again in just a short 15,000 years, meaning that it should be really nice in the year 17000 CE. There are artifacts found in the desert from the fifth millennium BC, likely left by nomadic peoples of the not-yet-fully-desert. When the Sahara dried, nomadic peoples settled along the Nile, giving birth to a cohesive civilization. The Nile was a perfect river- it flooded regularly, providing natural irrigation, and because of all the levees built on it, it came to rise above the valley it inhabited, meaning that the locations of lower elevation were the ones further from the river, nicely balancing the flood and extending the inundation to farmable lands that would otherwise be sand.
Egyptians had a very different view of the world than us. They called the South “Upper Egypt” and the North “Lower Egypt,” because from the South came the Nile, which for them was the top of the world. They also divided the world into the Red Land and the Black Land. The Black land referred to the dark alluvial soil that gave the country its fertility, and the Red land referred to the hot sands that surrounded the good, rich Black Land. Egypt itself was called “the Two Banks,” as it was synonymous with the Nile Valley.
Egyptians invented the modern state as we know it. It was basically a group of men who were parasites on society, using armed bands to take food surpluses from peasants and use them to feed themselves and obtain great wealth. A Pharaoh generally didn’t fear an uprising from the people, rather the danger was the small group of literate officials or generals at the top of Egyptian society. Writing was crucial to the Egyptians, who recorded everything the government did at basically all levels. The earliest Egyptian writing is found in a predynastic tomb that predates Narmer by 150 years, and therefore predates the Epic of Gilgamesh by about 2,000 years.
The largest of the pyramids were built by the Fourth Dynasty and are unique to early Egypt. The Pyramid of Khufu was the tallest building in the world for forty-four centuries, until the Eiffel Tower was constructed. There is an Arabic saying that “Man fears time, but time fears the Pyramids,” and Giza is where Napoleon declared to his troops, “Forty centuries of history look down upon you.”
The Old Kingdom ended with a century of civil war from 2080 BC to 1970 BC, with Thebes, the city led by the Pharaoh Mentuhotep II, victorious over Herakleopolis. This civil war created theological innovations that would endure into the times of the Romans and past the last of the Pharaohs. The sharp distinction that existed between the king and his subjects was diminished and Egyptian people adopted the religion of the state as it democratized. Since this era we find tombs of everyday Egyptians that are small and have various trinkets that were believed to protect them in the afterlife. For example, one doll was buried with many and believed to be a sort of slave to its owner in the afterlife, so that it would do the owner’s share of work in harvesting wheat and other crops, because there was still agriculture in the afterlife. People were buried with scarab beetle amulets and figurines, as it was a symbol of rebirth, due to the fact that it hatches from a ball of dung, a symbol of death and decay.
The Twelfth Dynasty was the most stable to rule over Egypt, and it did so for 180 years between 1938 and 1755. They produced greater literary works than Egypt ever had before, using literature as a form of propaganda. In this dynasty, Egypt’s reach extended through trade across their world, gaining “lapis lazuli… from Mesopotamia and the distant mines of Badakshan, while the silver cups were of Minoan design and must have come from Crete or a Minoan mercantile community in Syria.” The Thirteenth Dynasty, by contrast, was a mess of fifty kings in just 150 years, it being likely rotated between the most powerful families in the land. They were then conquered by Asiatic peoples, the Hyksos, or at least just the northern delta was conquered. Various dynasties rose and fall, and the end of the Middle Kingdom is marked by the invasion of Kush, a Nubian kingdom from modern day Sudan, toppling the Seventeenth Dynasty. It was the lowest Egypt had ever sunk. However, it was to be followed by the New Kingdom, and the Eighteenth Dynasty was the peak of Egyptian civilization, lasting eight generations.
The Hyksos were expelled to begin the Eighteenth Dynasty, though the Hyksos brought administrative as well as technological innovations to Egypt, for example, they introduced Egypt to the chariot. The Eighteenth Dynasty favored incestuous relationships and married brother to sister for several generations. By this point, they stopped building pyramids and large tombs because it was basically an advertisement for grave robbers, so instead they hid their still-magnificent-but-now-secret tombs in the Valley of Kings on the west side of the Nile near Thebes. They were buried on the west side because the sun sets in the west, a symbol of death.
The Eighteenth Dynasty conquered most of the Near East through Lebanon and far south into Nubia. It featured great conquerors from Thutmose to Amenhotep, and even a woman Pharaoh, Hatshepsut. At the end, things got weird. Amenhotep III got really into the cult of the Pharaoh being God and had big celebrations about him being the human incarnation of the sun. His son took the sun stuff a little too seriously. Akhenaten went nuts and tried to make Egypt a monotheistic country and even made his own new capital, named Akhetaten after him. However, his reforms were reversed when he died and his nine-year-old son took over, Tutankhamen, whose name was originally Tutankhaten (Aten meaning sun), but was changed to be more Amun (the old Egyptian God) and less Aten.
The throne passed to a general, and then to the lieutenant he adopted as his heir, Ramesses the First. The Nineteenth Dynast, or the Ramesside Dynasty continued Egyptian hegemony, with Ramesses II and III being great warrior-kings. Ramesses II is the alleged Pharaoh of the Exodus story. Egypt would peak in military might in these centuries from about 1300-1000 BC. Egyptian power would slide again in the Bronze Age Collapse, when nearly all civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean were destroyed by the mysterious Sea Peoples, who invaded the entire region and pillaged it.
Egypt went on to be conquered by the Libyans, the Nubians, the Assyrians, and the Persians. The Pharaohs were no longer the only super powerful godlike men in the area. Other, newer, younger states had risen to overthrow them. Eventually Alexander would conquer Egypt in the 300s BC and then Rome in the 30s BC. Cleopatra was the last queen of Egypt, her and Marc Antony being overthrown by Octavian, the founder of the Roman Empire.
What is there to learn from the history of the Pharaohs. One theme that we shouldn’t forget is that the Pharaohs were autocrats. They were dictators. They enslaved and raped and killed and they should all be remembered as such. They were largely evil men who contributed little and stole much. Something consoling in Egyptian history is the permanence of it, and the way that some things just never change. Something disconcerting is that Egypt passed over 2000 years without an actual Egyptian-born ruler, from the Pharaohs defeated by the Persians to Nasser. Another understanding gotten from studying Egypt is how human progress ebbs and flows. The Egyptians built a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea by Darius I of Persia, a great feat, though it’s important to remember that thousands of slaves likely died in forced labor building it.
It was a good book, if extremely long. I would have liked more focus on the lives of daily Egyptians, as this book was truly about the Pharaohs.
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