‘Dark Ages’ and Other Chronological Problems

Some of the problems encountered in Egyptian chronology have already been mentioned, such as the potential confusion of links between astronomical observations and specific dates, the uncertainty as to which co-regencies (if any) actually occurred, and the assumption that the Egyptians of the pharaonic period and later continually dated events according to an artificial ‘wandering’ civil year of 365 days, which was rarely synchronized with the real solar year.

There are also, of course, a number of other Egyptian historical problems, ranging from unreliability of sources (for example, Man-etho’s history, given that we neither know his sources nor have his original text) and frequent uncertainty regarding lengths of kings’ reigns (for example, the Turin Canon says that Senusret II and III have reigns of nineteen and thirty-nine years respectively, whereas their highest recorded regnal years on documents that are actually contemporary with their reigns are only six and nineteen).

Egypt, like other cultures, has periods in history that are more or less documented than others, and it is primarily this patchiness in the survival of archaeological and textual records from different dates that has led to the assumption that there were ‘intermediate periods’, when the political and social stability of the pharaonic period appeared to have been temporarily damaged. Thus, those periods of political and cultural continuity described as the Old, Middle, and New kingdoms were each thought to be followed by ‘dark ages’, when the country became disunited and weakened by conflict (either civil war between provinces or invasion by foreigners). This scenario was both denied and bolstered by Manetho’s history. First, Manetho created a misleading air of continuity in the succession of kings and dynasties through his assumption that only one king could occupy the throne of Egypt at Any one time. Secondly, his descriptions of some of the dynasties corresponding to the times of the intermediate periods suggest that the kingship was changing hands with alarming rapidity.

The study of the Third Intermediate Period has become one of the most controversial areas of Egyptian history, particularly during the 1990S, when it has been subjected to intensive study by a number of different scholars. Three areas of investigation have blossomed. First, several aspects of the culture of the period (for example, ceramics and funerary equipment) have been analysed in terms of changes in such factors as style and materials. Secondly, anthropological, icono-graphic, and linguistic studies have been undertaken with regard to the ‘Libyan’ ethnic identity of many of the 2ist-24th-Dynasty rulers. Thirdly, and most crucially from the point of view of the history of the pharaonic period as a whole, it was argued by a small number of scholars that the period of 400 years occupied by the Third Intermediate Period (and numerous other, roughly contemporaneous, ‘dark ages’ elsewhere in the Near East and the Mediterranean) may have been artificially inflated by historians. They suggested that the New Kingdom might have ended not in the eleventh century but in the eighth century BC, leaving a much smaller gap of about 150 years between the end of the 20th Dynasty and the beginning of the Late Period. Such a view, however, has been widely dismissed, not only because Egyptologists, Assyriologists, and Aegeanists have been able to refute many of the individual textual and archaeological arguments for chronological change, but also, more significantly, because the scientific dating systems (that is, radiocarbon and dendrochronology) almost always provide solid independent support for the conventional chronology. Indeed, the irrelevance of such tinkering with the conventional chronological framework, given the overwhelming and increasing significance of scientific dates, has been memorably described by the classical archaeologist Anthony Snodgrass as ‘a bit like a detailed scheme for re-organizing the East German economy, produced in 1989 or early 1990’.

On a more cultural, rather than chronological level, the significance of the most basic historical divisions (that is, the distinctions between the Predynastic, pharaonic, Ptolemaic, and Roman periods) have begun to be questioned. On the one hand, the results of excavations during the 1980s and 1990s in the cemeteries of Umm el-Qa'ab (at Abydos) suggest that before the ist Dynasty there was also a Dynasty o stretching back for some unknown period into the fourth millennium BC. This means that, at the very least, the last one or two centuries of the ‘Predynastic’ were probably in many respects politically and socially ‘Dynastic’. Conversely, the increasing realization that Naqada III pottery types were still widely used in the Early Dynastic Period shows that certain cultural aspects of the Predynastic Period continued on into the pharaonic period (see Chapter 4).

Whereas there are definite political breaks between the pharaonic and Ptolemaic periods, and between the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, the gradually increasing archaeological data from the two latter periods have begun to create a situation where the process of cultural change maybe seen to be less sudden than the purely political records suggest. Thus it is apparent that there are aspects of the ideology and material culture of the Ptolemaic Period that remain virtually unaltered by political upheavals. Instead of the arrival of Alexander the Great and his general Ptolemy representing a great watershed in Egyptian history, it might well be argued that, although there were certainly a number of significant political changes between the mid-first millennium bc and the mid-first millennium ad, these took place amid comparatively leisurely processes of social and economic change. Significant elements of the pharaonic civilization may have survived relatively intact for several millennia, only undergoing a full combination of cultural and political transformation at the beginning of the Islamic Period in AD 641.