At the end of the Old Kingdom large-scale royal building programs came to a halt. Yet, with the increasing prosperity of the provinces and a rise in population, it became necessary for the provinces to be administered locally rather than from the royal residence at Memphis, and the nomarchs lived and were even buried in their nomes. Ultimately, the central government collapsed and foreign trade seems to have ceased. The Ninth/Tenth Dynasty established a power basis at Herakleopolis some 100 km upstream from the old capital at Memphis. However, these dynasties never controlled the whole country and civil war broke out. In Upper Egypt Ankhtifi, nomarch of the third nome of Upper Egypt, tried to gain control over neighboring territories by force. The fragmentation of the country and violence only ended when one of these regional rulers, Mentuhotep II, defeated all others and united Egypt again. Based on texts the First Intermediate Period has often been seen as a very unstable period with civil war and even cannibalism caused by famine.
A different picture emerges from excavations of cemeteries from the First Intermediate Period, however, which indicates a redistribution of wealth as well as cultural innovations. All the archaeological evidence points to an increased effort to prepare tombs of the deceased for the afterlife rather than a decline in tomb-building caused by economic hardship. In general, mastaba tombs and rock-cut tombs had already become larger at the end of the Old Kingdom and this process continued. Tombs contained several chambers for multiple burials. Grave goods took the form of wooden offering bearers, statues, and even whole miniature copies of workshops. The cartonnage mask, a colored mask made from linen and gypsum to cover the head of the mummy, was introduced. Religious texts, the so-called Coffin Texts, were inscribed on the coffins of the elite and stressed the importance of social ties, these mirroring the change in tomb architecture allowing for multiple burials.
World History
