It is really not at all clear why this cataclysm should have hit so extended a region as it did, embracing Egypt and much of Iraq, and reverberating up the eastern Mediterranean coast. It is likely that it was provoked not only by those influences which came out of the desert but also by another of those relatively minor climatic changes which it is now recognized have had a profound an effect on man’s social progress so frequently. As far as Egypt was concerned, it is known that there was a series of low Nile floods,5 of failures in the inundation, towards the end of the Old Kingdom. In normal circumstances the Nile served its children well but occasionally an exceptionally high or an exceptionally low Nile could bring, on the one hand, devastating floods, on the other unassuageable drought; in either event, it meant tragedy on an immense scale to the people of the Valley.
As the Sixth Dynasty moved towards its end, the political uncertainties rising from the decline of the royal authority and the increasing fragmentation of the administration coincided with a dramatic change in Egypt’s environment. The millennium which had seen the phenomenal development of Egyptian society and culture had enjoyed a period of relatively benign climatic conditions in which agriculture and animal husbandry flourished. The era of poor Niles heralded the onset of a marked aridity when the summer temperature soared; the climate which now characterized Egypt was to remain largely unchanged until the present day.
The low Niles at the end of the Old Kingdom and the hardship which they would have produced amongst the whole population of Egypt which depended upon assured production from the fields, would have been the cause of unrest throughout the Dual Kingdom. The extortions of the feudal nobility (which are clear, if only from the occasional inscription of one who recorded the fact that he stored grain and resources to be distributed to his people, contrasting this with what otherwise might be considered the customary depredations of those of his rank) would have added to the unrest. The king’s power was reduced; the army was probably disaffected and the temples were no doubt extracting whatever advantage they could. The Asiatics and other barbarian tribes sensed the time was right and with devastating effect they fell on Egypt.
The causes of the decline and disintegration of the order established by the kings and which had endured from the time of Aha to the reign of Pepi II, were a combination of what has become a familiar phenomenon in the history of nations. Climate change, gradual in operation but insidious in outcome, adversely affected the social economy of Egypt. Short term political decisions, designed to relieve the problems of the moment with little concern for the longer term, the over-rewarding of powerful elements in the state eroded the central authority whilst advancing the power of the magnates, who were not slow to take advantage of conditions which were so much to their interest. Perhaps for the first time but certainly not for the last, a breakdown of the dominant political structure occurred in the wake of economic crisis and the rise of too powerful subjects, a combination of pressures which an ancient governmental system could not withstand.
The most remarkable conclusion about the decline of the Old Kingdom, despite the trauma attending the end of her most fertile period of the highest achievement, was that Egypt still had two thousand years of history, much of it glorious, still to enjoy. The ancient kings could at least have that satisfaction, from their home beyond the Imperishable Stars.
There are several of what purport to be eye-witness accounts of the calamities which now befell Egypt; one of these survives in the form of a text which has come to be known as ‘the Admonitions of Ipuwer’.6 In this long, mutilated poem, one of the treasures of Egyptian literature and amongst the oldest known surviving texts, Ipuwer, a wise man, laments that the king is old, secure in his palace, unaware of Egypt’s sufferings which are kept from him by venal courtiers. The catastrophes which have struck Egypt are twofold: the incursion of foreigners who have flooded into the Valley unchecked and the total reversal of the established social order. This aspect of the disaster, the envy and rancour of the lesser people in the society, is indeed the most complained of: servant girls can usurp the places of their mistresses, officials are forced to do the bidding of uncouth men and the children of princes are dashed against the wall, all inversions of the order of nature profoundly shocking to the observer who records the events of this melancholy and unprecedented time. It is not, however, certain that the ‘Admonitions’ are quite what they seem to be. It may be that they are an example of a favourite Egyptian literary device, the scribal exercise, in this case probably written well after the events which it claims to describe.7 Nonetheless the ‘Admonitions’ do express vividly what must have been the dismay of those to whom the disintegration of the established order was catastrophic.
There is little doubt that a large part of the destruction of royal and noble tombs (other than the apparently wholesale destructions at the end of the First Dynasty) occurred during this time. Admittedly it was nothing new; tombs were always there to be pillaged not only by robbers seeking their precious contents but also by architects and master builders seeking readily available supplies of cut stone. But the First Intermediate Period undoubtedly witnessed the destruction of much of what had survived from the brilliant centuries of the Old Kingdom. The wonder is that so much still remained for later generations to speculate with awe on what splendours must have attended the lives of kings and nobles alike.
That the Egyptians of later centuries were not entirely indifferent to the depredations that successive destroyers of the ancient tombs, who included kings as well as less exalted robbers, is shown by the efforts of the eldest son of King Ramesses II, Prince Khaemwaset of the Nineteenth Dynasty. He was the High Priest of Ptah and set out on a deliberate policy of identifying, recording and restoring the monuments of those who had preceded his family on the thrones of Egypt. He was his father’s Crown Prince; sadly, he died before the immensely long-lived Ramesses and Egypt lost one who would probably have been a worthy and enlightened king.
The Egyptians themselves looked back to the third millennium as a Golden Age, where there was believed to have been a harmony amongst all things. They identified it with the rule of the great god Re, identified in turn with the sun by the theology of Heliopolis, with Saturn in other philosophies. Re however grew old: the poet described his bones becoming silver, his flesh gold, his hair and beard lapis lazuli. Even in describing the decline of an age the Egyptians could not disavow poetic imagery which recalled their predilection for sumptuous and costly materials, brought to them from distant lands with arduous toil.
THE FIRST INTERMEDIATE PERIOD
There is a small but telling irony in the collapse of the Old Kingdom and of all that it represented, which reveals itself now when considering the direction from which came the final impetus which toppled the established structure of the state. At the end of the fourth millennium influences from Sumer or Elam (and perhaps from the Gulf) reached Egypt and seem to have acted as wholly benign stimuli, contributing to the acceleration of the rate of growth of the embryonic Pharaonic state prodigiously. A thousand years later it was once again influences from the east which entered the Valley but this time, to destroy and not to build.
Certainly, after the end of the third millennium matters in Egypt were never wholly the same again. The upheavals of this time continued for more than a century; it was remarkable enough that anything at all survived. This time of trouble is known to Egyptologists as the First Intermediate Period; during it there is evidence of increased contact with eastern lands, not all of it the consequence of conflict. Trade obviously continued with some vigour and perhaps surprisingly the times produced some of the finest literature to survive from Egypt, of which the Admonitions of Ipuwer is an example but by no means the only one.8
After Pepi II’s death he was succeeded by the son of his old age, Merenre II, who seems to have reigned only for a year when he in turn was succeeded by a queen, Nitocris (Nitiqret).9 At this point history slides into legend: Nitqret is said to have wrought vengeance on the mob which had murdered Merenre her brother and then herself committed suicide.
World History
