THE END OF THE OLD KINGDOM

The fundamental dynamic of the society which rose in Egypt in the third millennium was both theocratic and theocentric in a quite literal sense. The prosperity and survival of Egypt was the dominant concern of the Egyptian state; indeed the king, who brought together in his own person all the diverse elements of the natural world, humanity and divinity, was acknowledged as a god precisely because only thus could he, with absolute assurance, determine the fates and ensure that the Egyptian state was protected from all harm. There is thus really no such construct as ‘Egyptian religion’, as later ages would understand the term: to an Egyptian of the early third millennium the concept of religion would be meaningless. The integration of identity, survival, the state, and the rituals recognizing the gods’ (or perhaps a sole divinity’s) concern for Egypt was absolute. The most disastrous consequence of the approaching crisis at the end of the Old Kingdom, when in some cases even the shrines of the gods and the supposedly eternal mansions of the kings were ruthlessly destroyed by the mob, was the separation of religion into a discrete function.

The rulers of the Middle Kingdom, who reimposed order on Egypt were, it might be said, gods only by courtesy. The priesthood, already emerging as a power in the state in the middle of the third millennium, grew more powerful still and contributed in large part to the collapse of the Old Kingdom. The priests emerged at last with a significance almost equal to the king’s power. Gradually religion (as the modern world might understand the term) became separated from its exclusive relationship with the kingship and became something to whose benefits all men might individually aspire. By the time of the New Kingdom, in the second half of the second millennium, the essential Egyptian ethos, as promulgated during the thousand years to the end of the Old Kingdom, was hopelessly and irrevocably corrupt.

The Fifth and Sixth Dynasties represented the culmination of the long sequence which started with the little communities which began to cling to the Valley in the sixth and fifth millennia. The supreme elegance and confidence of Fifth and Sixth Dynasty art is the most emphatic statement of this

Final triumph of the Egyptian spirit. Paradoxically — and Egypt is ever the land of paradox — the seeds of change, even of destruction, were already germinating, soon to flower and smother the true, native spirit.

However it was achieved, the absolute role of the king was diminished. From being something very like the immanent manifestation of the supreme divinity, he became merely one of many gods; he was content to row in the barque of Re or to act as his scribe, a far cry from his earlier unique divinity. As the king’s power declined and that of the temples’ rose, the great nobles were not slow to assert their interest and that of their families.