The First Intermediate Period, however, was not just a time of disorder in terms of the succession to the throne of Egypt; it was also a period of crisis and of new developments, both of which deeply affected the whole of Egyptian society and culture. This point can be appreciated as soon as we turn to the evidence of the monuments. The Old Kingdom mortuary complexes of the kings and the highest officials in the cemeteries of the capital, Memphis, play a prominent part in shaping our ideas of the Egyptian state. This series of spectacular buildings came to a halt after the reign of Pepy II, and they were revived only by Mentuhotep II with his mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri in western Thebes.
To match this state of affairs, the upper chronological limit of the First Intermediate Period is sometimes raised to include the three decades during which the last kings of the Memphite line after Pepy II still held power. While taking liberties with the scheme whereby Egyptian history is divided into dynasties, this approach is not wholly unjustified. In fact, large-scale building may be understood as good evidence not only for the nature of the core institutions of the state but also for the fact that they were still actually functioning. The glaring gap in the monumental record during the First Intermediate Period therefore suggests that the social system had become fragmented, both in its political organization and in its cultural patterns.
It is equally apparent, however, that the First Intermediate Period archaeological and epigraphic data indicate the existence of a thriving culture among the poorer levels of society, as well as vigorous social development in the provincial towns of Upper Egypt. Rather than being an outright collapse of Egyptian society and culture as a whole, the First Intermediate Period was characterized by an important, though temporary, shift in its centres of activity and dynamism.
To understand both the crisis of the pharaonic state and the processes that ultimately led to the re-establishment of a unified political organization on a new basis, it is crucial to investigate the ways in which political institutions were rooted in society. Much of Egyptian history tends to concentrate on the royal residence, the kings, and ‘court culture’, but in writing the history of the First Intermediate Period it is necessary to focus instead on provincial towns and on the people themselves, who make up the most basic elements of society.
World History
