[RST INTERMEDIATE PERIOD” is the name given to the state in which Egypt found itself at the end of the Sixth Dynasty (ca. 2150 B. C.E.), after the collapse of the Old Kingdom. The intermediate period lasted some hundred and twenty years and ended with the reunification of the realm around 2040. The expression has no equivalent in ancient Egyptian terminology (but neither do the terms “Old/ Middle/New Kingdom” and “Late Period”). In fact, this periodization actively contradicts the king-lists, as they have been transmitted on the Turin papyrus and in Manetho’s history. The king-lists do not testify to any interruption in the line of kings after the Sixth Dynasty. The Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Dynasties follow without a break and are presented as having ruled over all Egypt. But if we look at these “dynasties” somewhat more closely, we find that they translate a state of factual disintegration into a form that preserves the outward appearance of continuity. The Seventh Dynasty consists of “seventy kings” ruling for “seventy days.” This play on the figure seven is a symbolic expression for the condition of relative anarchy that supervened at the end of the Sixth Dynasty. In the case of the subsequent dynasties, the lists transform historical contemporaneity into chronological succession. Whereas the Ninth Dynasty of Herakleopolis really did follow the Eighth Dynasty of Memphis, the Eleventh Dynasty of Thebes was coeval with the Tenth Dynasty of Herakleopolis. The king-lists were not a medium of historiography but an instrument for measuring time and providing chronological orientation—linearity. Charting parallel developments was felt to be
Unnecessary; all that mattered was that the line be perpetuated without any caesura, that there be no “dark ages” or “intermediate periods” resisting inclusion in the grand chronological scheme. Accordingly, intermediate periods are absent from the king-lists. This must not be taken to mean, however, that the continuity the king-lists are at such pains to suggest actually existed in historical reality. In fact, it is patently obvious that the stages of consolidated pharaonic rule we refer to as the “Old” and “Middle” Kingdoms were separated by a fairly long period of crisis in which centralized rule broke down altogether.
It is customary to refer to this interval with the term “Intermediate Period” in order to set it off from the “Kingdoms,” in which central rule functioned as it was designed to. The significance that this short period has gained in Egyptological studies, and also, as I intend to show, in Egyptian cultural memory, is out of all proportion to its relatively short duration, as well as to its relative paucity of notable events.
Events or facts take shape as such only within the framework and on the basis of a particular semantic system. If the semantic system is that of the epoch itself, then the events in question will be referred to in contemporary messages. If it is the semantic system of a later epoch, then the events will only be learned of from sources of a retrospective and commemorative nature. But in neither case do such references necessitate that anything we historians would acknowledge as an “event” actually took place. Messages and memories may give prominence to events that we would hardly classify as such; or they may relate to events that we know cannot have actually happened as they are presented, either because they are contradictory in themselves or because they contradict the testimony of the traces. The testimony of the traces, on the other hand, acquires its status as a readable reference to events retrospectively, from the semantic system operative in our own time. Thus there are three different semantic systems—messages, memories, and traces—to be taken into account when we draw on “events” as the basis for a description of the First Intermediate Period as a historical epoch.
These three semantic systems are of course operative in any historical epoch; interpretative problems arise only when the three systems prove highly divergent. Such is the case with the beginnings of the Egyptian state, for which two entirely different models were developed retrospectively by the Egyptians themselves: the model of petty kingdoms, dating back to well before the unification of the Two
Lands and symbolized by kings wearing either one of the two crowns or the double crown; and the foundation model, symbolized by the figure of a founder-king who inaugurates human rule after the reign of gods and demigods. With the Old Kingdom, however, there are no such divergences: traces, messages, and memories cohere into a unified picture.
With the end of the Old Kingdom this unified picture breaks apart again. Even more clearly than in the predynastic and early dynastic era, the traces, messages, and memories are split up across very different and distinct forms and genres. The traces are archaeological: pottery, architecture, art. The messages are associated with monumental epigraphy: inscriptions on stelae, tomb walls, and statues. Entirely new is the medium of memory, which puts us in the presence of texts of a kind without precedent in the Old Kingdom.
Eor the first time in history, and immediately in a highly eloquent form, we witness the alliance between memory and literature. These texts are poetically crafted, subjectively expressed, highly stylized productions that address issues of a fundamental nature. They were not found on tomb walls or stelae, but on papyri and ostraca (fragments of pottery or chips of limestone bearing a drawing or text)—media designed for dissemination, not fixed to one spot. The content of these texts suggests that they were not limited in their circulation to the two realms of literate culture established in the Old Kingdom, administration and cult. Rather, they belong to a different and new sphere of written culture, which did not fully develop before the Middle Kingdom and which we shall be looking at in more detail in part three. Of interest at this juncture is the fact that the memory of what we now call the First Intermediate Period is a central topic.
The alliance between memory and literature typically expresses itself in forms of glorification like myths and epics that declare the past to be heroic or elevate it to the status of a Golden Age. Yet in Egypt such mythologizing is not found: the First Intermediate Period did not look back to the Old Kingdom as a Golden Age; and when the Middle Kingdom did come to look back to the First Intermediate Period, the image was not heroic but one of catastrophic mayhem. Thus the Middle Kingdom, by means of its retrospective view of the First Intermediate Period, asserted its own claims as a period of restored peace and its own qualification as a Golden Age. The retrospective view of the First Intermediate Period was not nostalgic but
Self-congratulatory. In the alliance between literature and memory, the third confederate is the political state of the Middle Kingdom.
We can divide the First Intermediate Period into three phases:
1. From the end of the Sixth Dynasty to the end of the Eighth Dynasty (2170-2140 b. c.e.). Toward the end of the extremely long reign of Pepy II (2250-2155), central government was no longer able to assert itself against the officials and the nomarchs in their bids for independence both from one another and from the ruling monarch. Under the nominal government of Memphis, real power fell to the rival magnates, a chaotic situation reflected in the king-list as a disproportionate number of kings’ names in a small number of years.
2. The “Herakleopolitan Period” (the Ninth and Tenth Dynasties of Herakleopolis, 2140-2060 b. c.e.). This phase was marked by the simultaneous coexistence of a large number of princelings who subjugated their neighbors and assumed the title of king but who did not attain any supraregional influence, let alone central power. During this period, frontiers dating back to the time of the rival chiefs of the predynastic age reemerge: northern Middle Egypt (formerly el-Omari, Maadi, and Abusir el-Melek) is now represented by Herakleopolis; the northern Upper Egyptian area (formerly This) by Abydos (including Assiut and Koptos); and the southern Upper Egyptian region (formerly Hierakonpolis) by Thebes and Edfu. At the same time, polycentric structures started developing that were to resurface twelve hundred years later in the Third Intermediate Period. For from beneath the monocentric surface of the territorial state dominant in the “Kingdom” phases of Egyptian history, a polycentric deep structure repeatedly broke through whenever the surface crumbled. This alternation between surface and deep structure is mirrored in the change between cooperative and competitive semantic paradigms. In the phases where central rule relaxed its grip, competitive values gained the upper hand over the values favoring integration. In the First Intermediate Period we see this most clearly in the messages in which, as in the period of the unification, the “violent-hearted” asserted themselves.
One king of the Herakleopolitan dynasty, Nebkaure Achthoes (Khety), who reigned around 2100 B. C.E., stands out from the long list of otherwise obscure rulers because two of the most celebrated of ancient Egypt’s literary works—the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant and the Instruction for King Merikare—are associated with his name. In the Eloquent Peasant, Khety makes an appearance as a connoisseur of
Fine oratory, so taken with the Peasant’s rhetoric that he commands that the lawsuit in which the Peasant is involved be artificially prolonged so that he can hear as many of his formal addresses as possible and make a written record of them. The Instruction for King Merikare even purports to have actually been written by Khety. The king’s involvement, though surely fictional, nonetheless associates the Herakleopolitan period and its court with literature in a remarkable way.
3. The Eleventh Dynasty of Thebes. Parallel with developments at Herakleopolis, the Theban nomarchs succeeded in asserting themselves over their neighbors, placing the south under their control, and assuming the title of king. Thus at the end of the Herakleopolitan Period (2120-2060 b. c.e.), the overall situation seemed about to revert to a renewed north-south dualism. Mentuhotep II of Thebes (2060-2010), however, engineered the second unification of the realm in 2040. With this ruler, Egypt returned to the grand style of monumental state architecture. His mortuary temple in the valley of Deir el-Bahri harks back to the grand tradition of the Old Kingdom; its architectural, ideological, and cultic forms remained a model for a long time to come. In Egyptian self-commemoration, Mentuhotep II was revered as a founder king and a unifier of the realm. But central rule had not come back to stay. After the premature death of his successor Mentuhotep III (2010-1998), unrest flared up again. After seven years, the dynamic vizier Amenemhet succeeded in ascending the throne as first king of the Twelfth Dynasty, and peace once again returned.
World History
