This policy of promoting the local elite to high office, carried out in the provinces as well as in the capital, contained within itself the seeds of the dissolution of central power (Muller-Wollermann 1986), even though the king tried to maintain his control by ensuring that the education of the youth of elite families was carried out in the palace itself. During the First Intermediate Period this inherent danger generated major figures supported by wide-ranging powers of patronage who were able to take over from the enfeebled monarch and present themselves as a refuge in the face of current troubles. Moreover, it is not impossible that these troubles had been provoked by an impoverishment of the population created by strong pressures exerted at the same time by the monarchy and wealthy local potentates (Moreno Garcia 1999: 268-9; 2005). An index of their new power is provided by the fact that families kept control of a nome and its temple for several generations, the latter being a key element in the rural economy and source of significant revenue (Moreno Garcia 2006a, 2006b), e. g. at Akhmim (the temple of Min, the lineage of Kheti/Tjeti), Coptos (the temple of Min again), and Elkab (the temple of Nekhbet, for eight generations). Private sanctuaries, on the model of the royal hut-ka, are known at Balat, capital of the Dakhla Oasis, around the governors’ palace of the Sixth Dynasty, where each potentate had his own chapel constructed (Soukiassian, Wuttmann & Pantalacci 2002), or around the temple, as at Coptos (Shemai, Eighth Dynasty): the governors are, therefore, promoting under royal authority a veritable ancestor cult, celebrating the antiquity of their own lineage (Moreno Garcia 2005b). Certain of these nomarchs even acquired at the end of the Sixth Dynasty, the status of ‘‘saints,’’ e. g. Pepinakht Heqaib at Elephantine, first deified at the governors’ palace built to the southwest of the (future) temple of Khnum (Dorn 2005), then in a specific sanctuary, further to the north, which was constantly enlarged from the Middle Kingdom onwards (Franke 1994). Other governors, like Izi at Edfu (career from Djedkare to Teti), only enjoyed a posthumous cult much later (during the Second Intermediate Period in his case: Bowe 2004; Moeller 2005b: 36-41), which does not in any way call into question the importance they had acquired during their lives. The phenomenon is also known in the capital during the First Intermediate Period with the deification of many viziers, like Kagemni and Bia, a phenomenon that also affects kings, e. g. Unis and Pepi I, cases which have their origins in private rather than royal initiatives (Malek 2000).
In addition to political and social phenomena, the horizons of the Sixth Dynasty were also darkened in terms of external relations where Egypt had to confront a more hostile environment (Redford 1992: 56-69; Miroschedji 1998: 30-1; Moreno Garcia 2004: 260-9). That did not prevent the dispatch of commercial expeditions to traditional destinations, such as the land of Punt on the Red Sea, the opening up of long distance routes to the Dakhla Oasis (Kuhlmann 2005) or the maintenance of diplomatic relations with the powers of the Levant, such as the city of Ebla in Syria (attested by a vase of Pepi I, if one can rely on the presence of such an easily portable object). The coastal city-states of the Levant became an important theatre of operations, even though this has its earlier precedents, as in the scenes of the capture of towns in the mastabas of the Fifth Dynasty. The arrival of semi-nomadic Amorite pastoral groups destabilized the region and provoked a succession of Egyptian military expeditions against the ‘‘Amu’’ six of which are related by Weni and one by Heqaib; such repetition of military action does not suggest that these activities were particularly effective (Redford 1992: 48-55). This menace even affected Sinai, control of which had been guaranteed since the Third Dynasty without the need for any specifically military installations (Parcak 2004), but the presence of a circular stone fort, 44 m in diameter, recently discovered at Tell Ras Budran in South Sinai, bears witness to this marked change in conditions (Mumford 2006). The end of the Old Kingdom would open the gateways of the north coast of Sinai and of the eastern Delta to the Amorites, who would colonize them during the First Intermediate Period (Oren and Yekutieli 1990).
On the Nubian front, the monarchy kept control of Lower Nubia, periodically asking for the submission of the chiefs of the regions of Medja, Irtjet, and Wawat (in the annals of Pepi I, precise toponyms lost; Merenre from inscriptions at the First Cataract). Expeditions intended to bring back exotic products or timber for naval construction were repeatedly carried out by the princes of Elephantine, but from the middle of the Sixth Dynasty they took on a warlike appearance with raids, massacres of the chiefs’ families and processions of prisoners taken to Memphis (Vercoutter 1992: 333-42): cf. the biographies of Harkhuf (Obsomer 2007) and of Pepinakht Heqaib (Strudwick 2005: 327-40), or the decree of Pepi I for Snefru and the royal annals for the endowment of prisoners (Baud & Dobrev 1995: 32-3). They bear witness to a reaction by the Pharaonic monarchy to a growing hostility which was indubitably generated by the resurgence of Nubian power under the C-Group people who repopulated Lower Nubia and Kerma in Upper Nubia (Edwards 2004: 17-18). This phenomenon would lead Egypt in the Middle Kingdom to build powerful forts to control the region.
The end of the Old Kingdom as a period and the ‘‘kingdom’’ as a territorial entity with the loss of control of the fringes, appears, then, as the product of the interaction of various forces consisting of an amalgam of social and political change (monarchic crisis, relations between capital and province, competition between local elites, networks of patronage) and significant geopolitical upheavals. An aggravating factor, whose effects were only felt in the long term, was the desiccation that affected the area in the last centuries of the third millennium and which certainly weighed heavily on Egyptian society which remained fundamentally rural, and whose agricultural practices and population patterns had to be modified to adapt to the new environment (Moeller 2005a). To all these long term destabilizing factors we can certainly add more localized but serious troubles at the Memphite court. Beyond doubt the long reign of Pepi II precipitated things. Two conflagrations occurring during his reign could suggest a climate of great tension, if not of real revolution. One is the sack of the governors’ palace at Balat, in the distant Dakhla Oasis, where the building was pillaged and then set on fire at its key points (Soukiassian, Wuttmann & Pantalacci 2002: 10, 522-3); the other is the fire around the temple of the ram-god at Mendes in the Delta, where about thirty bodies have been discovered scattered about in the rubble (Redford 2001b: 2; 2005: 8).
FURTHER READING
The best synthesis on the history and society of the Old Kingdom is in Spanish: Moreno Garcia 2004; a still valuable introduction is Malek 1986 and Kemp in Trigger, Kemp, O’Connor, and Lloyd, 1983: 71-182; see also now the papers of Verner, Kahl, Stadelmann, and Altenmiiller in Redford, (ed.) 2001: 585-605. Updated chronologies will be found in Hornung, Krauss, and Warburton (eds.) 2006. On kingship see in O’Connor and Silverman (eds.) 1995, and on royal action as reflected in the annalistic record consult Wilkinson 2000, though needing supplementing from Baud and Dobrev 1995. For royal families, elite and administration, see Baud 1999, Roth 2001, and Strudwick 1985. For the artistic achievements of the period, see the catalogue Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1999. On pyramids see Lehner 1997. The main necropoleis of (in north-south order) Abou Rawash, Giza, Abusir, and Saqqara are studied in Valloggia 2001, janosi 2005, Verner 2002, and Lauer 1977. For an urban site, see Soukiassian, Wuttmann, and Pantalacci 2002. The most important texts of the Old Kingdom are translated in Faulkner 1986, Roccati 1982, and Strudwick 2005. For the Abusir papyrus archives see Posener-Kridger 1976, and now Verner, Vymazalovti, and Posener-Kri{;ger 2006.
World History
