18. Egypt - Fall of the Pharaohs

Around 1200 AD, the medieval Arab traveler and scholar Abd Al-Latif Al-Baghdadi set out from his hometown of Baghdad and set out on a journey of exploration. As a young man, Al-Baghdadi had studied law, medicine and philosophy, and was inspired by the works of classical philosophers; in particular, Aristotle. In the early 13th century, Al-Baghdadi embarked on a series of journeys that would take him to many of the region's great cities. He traveled to Mosul, Jerusalem, Damascus and Aleppo and finally, around the year 124, his journey took him through the Sinai Desert to the banks of the Nile. During his travels, Al-Baghdadi wrote a book that was partly an account of journey and partly philosophy, entitled The Book of Edification and Admonition.

In it he remembers the notable impression that Egypt made on him. Egypt is a land of wonderful monuments and strange stories. It consists of a valley enclosed by two chains of hills; one to the east and one to the west. The Nile flows between them until it reaches Lower Egypt, where it divides into arms, all of which flow into the sea. The Nile is unusual in its length. We know of no other river in the inhabited world that covers a greater distance. While Al-Baghdadi traveled through Egypt, he was impressed by the incredible variety of ancient remains he saw; great stone temples and tomb complexes crumbling by the waters of the Nile.

But none of them compare with the most legendary of all the monuments of Egypt, which rose on the horizon not far from the city of Memphis, in a place called Giza. The ancient monuments in Egypt are such as I have never seen or heard of in other lands. First among them are the pyramids. They are very numerous. All are situated on the Giza side of the Nile and extend in the direction of Memphis, for a distance of approximately two days' travel. Some are big, some are small; some are made of clay and adobe, but most are made of stone.

Some are stepped, but most taper gently. Of all these pyramids, three stood out for their seemingly impossible immensity. As for the pyramids that everyone talks about, points out and characterizes in terms of their great size, there are three arranged in a straight line at Giza. Two of them are particularly enormous, and it is these two that poets have

fall

en in love with. The spectacle is so impressive that your eyesight will weaken as you try to take it all in. Al-Baghdadi wrote accounts of the local population who lived near these vast remains. He describes some who climbed to the top of these structures and others who quarried them for their finely carved stone.

Still others became obsessed with exploring the hidden tunnels and chambers that branched beneath the pyramids. In one of the great pyramids, there is an opening that allows people to enter. It leads them to narrow corridors, labyrinthine passages, shafts, traps, and other such features, as they appear in the accounts of those who venture within and explore the innermost parts. Many people, obsessed with the pyramid and filled with fanciful ideas about it, are inspired to penetrate its depths, but they always end up somewhere beyond which they cannot go. They talked about how the pyramid was full of bats and how these bats grow to the size of pigeons.

There are inscriptions on the stones, written in ancient characters that no one understands. In all the land of Egypt I have never found a single person who so claimed to have heard of someone who knew how to read them. He even appears to have visited the nearby Sphinx, which was later buried up to its neck in sand. Furthermore, next to the three pyramids, at a distance from them more than a bowshot, the figure of an enormous head and neck protrudes from the ground. People call him old father dread and claim that his body is buried in the ground.

His face is beautifully portrayed, in fact admirably, with a touch of elegance and beauty in the features, as if a smile passed through them. Above all, Al-Baghdadi was impressed by the mastery of engineering it must have required to build such constructions and make them survive for so long. The construction of the pyramids was carried out according to a remarkable methodology both in terms of design and precision of execution. This is what has allowed the pyramids to stand the test of time; or rather, it means that time itself has had to endure the era of the pyramids.

The noble intellects gave everything to the pyramids; pure minds exhausted all their efforts for their good; Enlightened souls poured out their highest capabilities into their design, to stand as examples that are the pinnacle of the possible. Because of this, they almost speak out loud about their builders, telling us what kind of people they were, giving voice to their intellects, telling the stories of their lives and times. When Al-Baghdadi visited Giza around the year 1200, the Great Pyramid was the tallest man-made structure in the world and had been for more than 3,700 years. All this time, he had borne witness to the greatness of a civilization that had grown on the banks of the Nile, a civilization that had gone through countless periods of flourishing and decline, and finally disappeared beneath the sands of the desert.

My name is Paul Cooper and you are listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast. In each episode, I look at a civilization from the past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask what did they have in common? What led to his down

fall

and how did it feel to be a living person at that time who witnessed the end of his world? In this episode, I want to tell the story of one of the most iconic cultures ever produced by humanity; the civilizations of the Nile Valley in Egypt.

I want to show how this series of related societies grew on the floodplains of their great river and built some of the most durable and recognizable structures in the world. I want to tell the story of how they emerged, how they resisted, and how they finally disappeared from history entirely. The history of Egypt is one of the greatest and longest epics in all of history. Many empires would consider themselves lucky to survive the reigns of thirty-one kings, but Ancient Egypt would see the reign of thirty-one dynasties of kings, lasting over three thousand years. Since then, historians have long struggled with this panoply of rulers and eras, and have attempted to classify Egyptian history into clear categories.

They generally divide their history into three sets of dynasties, commonly known as the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, and New Kingdom. Between these are a series of intervening periods in which the central power of their kings failed and the country was divided. Throughout this history, the empire of Egypt had ups and downs, just like the great river that gave it life. That river was the largest watercourse in the entire Afro-Eurasian continental mass, the Nile River. The Nile has its origin in Lake Victoria, the largest lake in Africa. It is a body of water the size of Georgia, or almost the size of Ireland.

The gigantic Lake Victoria flows into the river known as the White Nile, which is joined downstream by the so-called Blue Nile in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. From there it runs for another 2,000 kilometers through the deserts of Nubia and Egypt to Cairo, where it branches into a wide delta and empties into the Mediterranean Sea. After the Amazon River, the Nile is the longest or second longest river on Earth. It is 6,800 km long, or about one-sixth of the way around the Earth, and its drainage basin covers one-tenth of the entire landmass of Africa. Egypt itself has an extremely arid climate and its interior territories experience virtually no precipitation.

If the geography had been just a little different and Lake Victoria had not started flowing west, we can only imagine how different history would have been. For at least the last five thousand years, every blade of grass and every tree in the Nile Valley, every animal and every person that has ever existed, every priest and every king, owes its existence solely to this river. The human presence in Egypt is among the oldest in the world. After evolving in the East African region, modern humans migrated primarily along this corridor and from there spread to the rest of the world.

The Nile is, in a sense, the highway along which all of humanity once passed. As one of our first stops on our great journey, Egypt is home to human remains of astonishing antiquity. Stone tools worked by archaic humans have been discovered in Nile deposits dating back 600,000 years, and modern Homo sapiens followed in the last 100,000 years or so. These migrations probably occurred during one of the many African wet periods that have occurred over the past few million years. These are times when changes in the planet's climate caused rain to fall in the Sahara desert. During these periods, the desert blossomed into a green grassland, home to animals and people, and when the period ended, the grasses died, the animals left, and the sands returned.

This cycle is believed to have occurred more than two hundred times since the desert formed eight million years ago. The first people of this region lived from hunting and fishing, and left behind stone tools and a multitude of cave paintings. Approximately from the year 13,000 BC. C., in one of the driest periods in the history of the Sahara, the Sebylian culture began to collect wild wheat and barley, and from there developed its own domesticated varieties. From 9,000 BC. C., people began to weave woolen threads and another wet period began. An enigmatic stone circle at the desert site of Nabta Playa dates back to around 7,500 BC.

C., when the Sahara was once again a chain of undulating grasslands. This stone monument may have been used to mark the movements of the stars at different times of the year, so that people could keep track of cycles such as harvesting and the migration of animals for hunting. Nabta Playa has been called the Stonehenge of Egypt, but this does not do it justice, as it was built at least five thousand years before the foundation stones of Stonehenge were laid. When the last Ice Age ended and the Sahara dried up once again, any people who had been living and grazing on its grasslands would have been driven from their ancestral home.

They would have wandered through the newly formed desert until they reached the only green stretch in the middle of all that sand. These were the banks of the Nile, and here they would make their home. These towns would build a collection of scattered settlements stretching up and down the river, but slowly, as more and more people were pushed to the river's edge to survive, these began to coalesce into towns, cities, and eventually kingdoms. bigger. The ancient Egyptians called the entire region the two lands, referring to the long Nile valley in the south and the delta that stretched in the north, near the sea.

These were the two lands that we today call Upper and Lower Egypt. Surprisingly, for a modern person who orients his maps towards the north, the Egyptians thought of the world in the opposite direction. As a consequence, his word for east was the same as left, and west the same as right. In the Egyptian mentality, they were always looking upstream, waiting for the annual floods to come. If this is confusing, as we continue, remember that southern Upper Egypt is the upstream region and northern Lower Egypt is downstream. For many people at that time, the land along the riverbank would have made up their entire world.

The Egyptians referred to the river's floodplain as Kemet, or the black earth, because of the rich, dark soil left behind by its life-giving floods. This land was the kingdom of the noble falcon-headed god Horus, the god of life, protection and healing. If you walked just an hour in any direction, you would soon reach what they called Deshret, or the red land. This was the inhospitable desert that stretched on all sides; A very hot place, largely devoid of water and shade, and inhospitable to most life. These deserts were presided over by the god Set, god of chaos and violence.

They knew the Nile itself simply by the name of Iteru, or river, since in their world there was no other. The Egyptian world began in Upper Egypt, high on the Nile, in a place now known as Aswan. Here, a belt of hard granite crosses the landscape and pushes the river waters into shallow rapids, rushing over rocks and through rocky channels called falls. This word comes from the Greek word kataraktes, which means to rush. Today, the waters of these falls have been tamed thanks to the construction of the Aswan Dam, but in ancient times they could be a rushing torrent.

Each year, when the flood waters passed over this rocky stretch of the river, they made a sound so thunderous that the Earth itself could shake, and this led the ancient Egyptians to believe that the waters rose from beneath the Earth, gushing forth from vast underground seas. In Aswan, they built a temple on an island in the middle of those rushing waters, and here they worshiped that force.primitive Aswan's swift waters made it a natural barrier to ships and prevented any further exploration upstream. For this reason, for much of its early history, this was where Ancient Egypt's influence ended, the final extent of its power and the frontier of its empire.

Beyond Aswan lay the southern lands of Nubia and for this reason the Egyptians also referred to it as the narrow gate to the south. The temple island at the Aswan Falls was known to the Egyptians as Abu, the Egyptian word for elephant, as it was a center for the ivory trade with these southern lands. The Greeks followed this example and called the place Elephantine. From here, trade caravans would pass through southern lands to the Darfur region of Sudan, bringing gold, ivory and other goods. But north of Aswan, everything was considered Egypt, as Herodotus records. All the land watered by the Nile in its course was Egypt, and all who lived below the city of Elephantine and drank the water of the river were Egyptians.

Such was the oracle given to them. Luckily for the Egyptians, the Nile flows from south to north, while the prevailing winds blow in the opposite direction, meaning that you could sail upstream to Aswan without too much effort. But the return trip would be even easier, allowing the river waters to simply carry him away. A ship heading downriver north from Aswan would for some time see only a rocky desert and the river bordered by cliffs of hard Nubian sandstone. This is not land suitable for agriculture, but in ancient times, these valleys were sources of natural resources such as precious stones, copper and gold.

Further north, the red cliffs disappear and the floodplain around the river widens. Here the landscape would have turned green and a larger population could be supported. It was in this region that the desert city of Thebes would grow, which the Egyptians called Waset. This would one day become the most powerful city in Upper Egypt, the capital of the desert regions. The habitable part of an Egyptian city, its houses, markets and workshops, were usually built on the eastern bank of the river, where the sun rises, while the western bank, where the sun set, was used only for burials and tombs. .

Sailing further north, you reach the area we call Middle Egypt, and the alluvial plain widens even further. This region would have been full of wildlife and vegetation. A little further west of the river, the waters divert and fill a large oasis known as Faiyum, which sprouts like a broad leaf from the stem of the Nile. In ancient times, this lake was home to large populations of Nile crocodiles, so the settlement on the shore would be known to the Greeks as Krokodeil polis, or Crocodile City. Here, the Egyptians apparently even domesticated crocodiles in their temples, as Herodotus tells it.

Now, for some Egyptians, crocodiles are sacred animals. Those who lived around Thebes and the lake of Moiris consider them extremely sacred, and each of these two peoples chooses a crocodile, which has been trained for tameness, and places hanging ornaments of stone and gold in the ears of these, and bangles around their front feet, and they give them special food and sacrificial food, and they treat them as well as possible. Elsewhere, crocodiles were hunted for food using ingenious but risky methods. A man puts the back of a pig on a hook as bait and lets it go to the middle of the river, while he himself on the river bank has a live young pig which he beats; and the crocodile, hearing his cries, heads towards the direction of the sound, and when he is dragged ashore, first of all, the hunter covers his eyes with dung; and once this is done, he very easily manages to master it.

But if he doesn't do it, he will have a lot of problems. Also living in the river were animals that the Greeks would call river horses, or hippopotamus, our hippopotamus. The river horse is sacred in the districts of Papremis, but to the other Egyptians it is not, and this is the appearance it presents; He is quadruped, with a cloven hoove like an ox, a snub nose, with a mane like a horse and showing teeth like fangs, with a tail and voice like a horse, as large in size as the largest ox; and its skin is so thick that, once dry, it is used to make javelin shafts.

The most strategically important place was what the Egyptians called the balance of the two lands. This was the place where the river divided into its delta. As a crossroads between Upper and Lower Egypt, this was always the natural location for the capital when the empire was united. This location would give rise to the city of Memphis and, in turn, modern Cairo, and it is here that the Egyptians would build their most famous and enduring monuments. Every year, the monsoon rains that fell in the highlands of Ethiopia and Central Africa caused the river to rise and the annual flood came.

This happened with such regularity, in mid-August, that the Egyptians timed it based on the rising of the star Sirius. In the 5th century BC, Herodotus wrote the following description of these floods. When the Nile overflows, it overflows in places within a two-day journey from either bank. The Nile comes with an increasing flood for one hundred days from the summer solstice, and when this count of days is completed, it sinks again with a decreasing current, so that the river is low throughout the winter, until the summer solstice. summer again. The Egyptian year was divided into three seasons; the Akhet flood season, the Peret growing season and the Shemu harvest season.

Once the flood waters receded in early autumn, the land was refreshed and fertilized with rich Nile mud, and new crops could be grown. In this black mud, farmers grew wheat, barley, beans and lentils during the coldest season of winter, and when summer came again, the grain was ready to be harvested. Egyptian life was maintained in this delicate balance. Each year, if the river floods too much or too little, the results could be devastating, as an Ancient Egyptian hymn to the Nile makes clear. If you are greedy, the whole land suffers; great and small fall moaning; people change with his coming.

When he rises, then the earth rejoices, then every belly rejoices, every jaw contains laughter. Since their lives largely depended on these floods, the Egyptians developed ingenious systems to measure them. At the Aswan Falls they built a series of devices known as nilometers. They often take the form of towers with deep wells inside that allow the river to flow, with measurements inscribed on their walls in Egyptian cubits. Each year, the ancients anxiously checked these nilometers to see how high the water was rising that year and whether it would be a time of famine, a time of plenty, or a time when they would need to hastily build some flood defenses.

During the period known as the predynastic era, the two halves of Egypt were divided, and this division was both cultural and political. The inhabitants of the southern desert of Upper Egypt worshiped their own god Nekhbet, who was commonly depicted as a griffon vulture, a powerful and majestic bird. These people were probably darker-skinned and had more cultural and linguistic connection to the southern lands of Nubia and sub-Saharan Africa, and their rulers sometimes even intermarried with royalty from the southern kingdoms. Meanwhile, the people of northern Lower Egypt paid deference to the god Wadjet, usually represented as an Egyptian cobra.

They had more genetic influence from North Africa and the Mediterranean, and may have had somewhat lighter skin. The southern kings of Upper Egypt ruled with a white, bulbous crown, while the northern kings wore a red crown from which emanated a spiral representation of a cobra. The kingdoms that ruled these regions were always fluid, but the geographical distinction between Upper and Lower Egypt always prevailed. But around 3,000 BC, or more than five thousand years ago, all that began to change. That was thanks to a king of a kingdom called Thinis. His name was Narmer. The figure of Narmer is shrouded in mystery, and the little we know about him has been reconstructed from fragments of inscriptions and some important artifacts.

Narmer was born under the personal name of Menes, but he chose Narmer as his Horus name or king's name when he ascended the throne of Thinis, and this name perhaps gives us some idea of ​​his personality. That's because Narmer means something like fighting catfish. The Nile catfish that the king clearly admired is a remarkable species. It is a predatory fish, a nocturnal hunter that can grow up to 1.2 meters long, or about the size of a dolphin, and uses a naturally generated form of electricity as a weapon. Using a unique organ on its body, it can generate an electrical discharge of up to 350 volts that stuns its prey.

In the largest catfish, this impact can be enough to stun an adult human, and the Egyptians were fascinated by this unique property. They depicted these striking predators in painted murals, and even experimented with using the weak electrical charges of young specimens as a treatment for arthritis. We could imagine that this Narmer King wanted to emulate some of the characteristics of these surprise hunters, but whether it was their patience in stalking their enemies, the tenacity of their surprise attacks or the shock and fear with which they stunned their prey. , we may never know. Virtually the only source we have for this period is a carving known as the Narmer Palette, which contains only a handful of cryptic clues.

One side of this carved artifact shows King Narmer standing over a defeated enemy, grabbing him by the hair in one hand and raising a mace in the other. It is a clear sign of dominance. Here, Narmer is shown wearing the white, bulbous crown of his native Upper Egypt, suggesting that he beat his rivals there into submission. On the other side, the carving shows the king leading an army, while ranks of his defeated enemies stand before him. Below is the image of a bull knocking down the walls of a fortress with its horns. On this side of the carving, Narmer wears the Red Crown of Lower Egypt.

From this we can assume that he undertook a campaign of conquest and managed to unite the two lands of Egypt. Two mythical animals carved into the side of the Narmer Palette stand with their long necks intertwined, perhaps representing the union of the two sides of Egypt, their lives and destinies now inextricably linked. This was a union that would see the newly united Egypt grow into one of the most influential societies in early human history. At first, Egyptian culture was heavily influenced by slightly older civilizations from Mesopotamia, such as the Sumerians. Egyptian palaces were often built to a Sumerian design and they also used Sumerian motifs in their art.

But at least around the year 3000 BC. C., Egypt had matured its own indigenous artistic culture and its own writing system. Later, the Greeks would refer to them with a word meaning sacred carving or hieroglyph. Egyptian hieroglyphs are a mixed writing system that uses a variety of phonetic symbols, as well as a collection of symbols representing entire words. For example, an image of a man raising his hand to his mouth could be used to represent the common word eat, but other symbols representing consonant clusters could be used to spell other less common words, names, or places. Hieroglyphics emerged shortly after the invention of cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia and may have been inspired by this older writing system.

In Mesopotamia, we can see the gradual evolution of the cuneiform writing system from its earliest symbolic roots, but in Egypt, the first discovered example of hieroglyphics shows that symbols emerged into existence already fully formed in a complex system. This suggests that they may have been developed all at once as a conscious effort, and perhaps were even devised by a single person. The Egyptian hieroglyph for ruler was the shepherd's crook, since the king was considered a kind of shepherd of his people. Egyptian kings even symbolized their royalty by holding a curved, golden staff inspired by those used by shepherds, and these kings have come to be known as

pharaohs

.

The word pharaoh derives from the Egyptian word per aa, meaning great house, and has remained in the popular imagination as the name used for any Egyptian ruler, in part due to its use in the Bible. But there is actually no evidence that it was used to refer to the rulers of Egypt until almost two thousand years after Narmer's life. Until that time, throughout the first eighteen dynasties of Egyptian history, its rulers were referred to simply as kings or Neswet, and by epithets such as the Majesty of him. Still, the term pharaoh has gained such popularity and popular usage that it is still used to refer to all of Egypt's rulers throughout the centuries.

The pharaoh in Ancient Egypt was considered the incarnationalive of the falcon god Horus and the son of the sun god Ra. A later hymn praises the figure of the king. Pharaoh is the lord of wisdom whose mother does not know his name. The glory of Pharaoh is in heaven; His power is on the horizon. Pharaoh is the bull of heaven that destroys everything at his whim, who lives off the being of each god. Perhaps most famous of all, the Egyptians were forced by their religious beliefs to embalm the bodies of the dead, ritually cleansing them in preparation for the afterlife.

The Greek Herodotus, who traveled widely in Egypt, wrote of specialist embalmers who prepared bodies in this way for a fee. They, every time a corpse is brought to them, show those who brought it to them wooden models of corpses made real by painting, and demonstrate the best embalming methods on them; The second one they show is less good and also less expensive, and the third one is the least expensive of all. Having told them this, they ask in what way they wish their friend's body to be prepared. With the price negotiated, the embalmer could begin his work, the grayish process of which Herodotus also describes.

First, with the twisted iron tool, they extract the brain through the nostrils, extracting it partly in this way and partly by pouring in drugs; and after this, with a sharp Ethiopian stone, they make a cut in the side and take out all the contents of the belly, and when they clean the cavity and cleanse it with palm wine, they clean it again with crushed spices. above. Then they fill the belly with pure myrrh, cassia, and other spices, and sew it up again. Once this is done, they keep it covered with natron for seventy days, and then they wash the corpse and roll its entire body in fine linen cut into strips, smearing those underneath with gum, which the Egyptians generally use instead of glue.

Mummification was expensive and only those who had money could afford it; rich merchants, royal officials and, of course, the pharaoh himself. An inscription on the walls of a tomb of Pharaoh Unus gives an idea of ​​the types of prayers and blessings that might have been said during these rituals took place; this to the sun god Amun-Ra and the moon god Thoth. Sol and Thoth, take Unus with you, so that he may eat what you eat, so that he may drink what you drink, so that he may sit where you sit, so that he may sail in what you sail.

The cabin of Unus is woven of reeds; the flood of Unus is in the Swamp of Offerings; His feast is among you, gods; The water of Unus is wine, like the sun. Unus will circumnavigate the sky like the sun; Unus will roam the sky. Upon coming to the throne of the newly united Egypt, King Narmer built a new capital, perfectly located at the balance of the two lands, where the river met the delta. This city would become known as Inebu-hedj, or the city of the white walls, but today we know it as Memphis. The kings who followed Narmer would rule from this new capital, but they spent much of their time traveling between palaces, and when they died, their bodies were still taken back to Narmer's home region, Thinis in Upper Egypt, to be mummified. and buried in the city's ancestral cemetery at Abydos.

That was until the reign of a king called Hotep-sekh-emwy. He ruled from approximately 2,900 BC. C. and began what has been called the second dynasty of Egypt, and made the decision to start a new cemetery near Memphis so that the

pharaohs

of Egypt could be buried near their new capital. For the site of this new cemetery, he chose a place on the western bank of the river, the side where the sun sets, in a vast, open place called Saqqara. Saqqara is situated on a high plateau untouched by the floodwaters of the Nile. Visually, it would have been striking to the ancients, as it is the place where the green land of the river ends and the dead sand of the desert abruptly begins.

Therefore, it could have been considered a place of intersection between death and life, the perfect place for a necropolis or a city of the dead. For kings who wanted their tombs to be remembered, it also had the advantage of being highly visible from the new capital of Memphis. Over the following centuries, this site would be filled with the tombs of kings and queens, and countless royal attendants and nobles who followed them into the afterlife. At first, these tombs were built in a form known as mastaba, large rectangular constructions built of mud bricks that promised their inhabitants a rebirth into the afterlife.

They might be very large, but they were still relatively simple. But soon, the Egyptian pharaohs would become even more ambitious with their funeral arrangements. This ambition actually began with the rule of a pharaoh named Netjerikhet Djoser. Djoser's reign begins the period known as the Old Kingdom, which would last for the next five hundred years. Djoser was the son of a king named Khasekhemwy, who had reunified Egypt after a period of turmoil, during which the northern delta rebelled. Once order was restored, Djoser clearly wanted to keep it that way. Instead of continuing to travel the country as the pharaohs before him had done, he moved to a permanent capital at Memphis, where he could better keep an eye on the restive riverlands of the north.

During his nearly three-decade rule, he undertook an ambitious building program, rebuilding temples and erecting forts along the river, but it was in the form of his burial that he would truly leave his mark. When Djoser began construction of his final resting place, it closely resembled the mastaba tombs of previous kings, but his royal architect soon began dreaming of a more ambitious structure. He was a visionary chancellor and engineer who held numerous official titles in the kingdom, including head of the royal dockyard, bearer of the royal seal, and supervisor of all stone work. His name was Imhotep.

Imhotep's name means one who comes in peace, and he was born in the 27th century BC, but beyond that, much of what we know about him has been distorted by myths and legends. He was something of a scholar; priest, statesman, scribe, doctor and architect, and even gained fame as a magician. He also has the distinction of being perhaps the first non-royal person recorded in detail in history. As the king's most trusted architect, Imhotep was put in charge of the construction of Djoser's tomb, but it would not be a normal adobe mastaba like his predecessors. In fact, Imhotep was determined to build this tomb in stone.

This stone would have to be quarried from nearby bedrock, roughly cut into blocks. But when this stone mastaba emerged from the desert, Imhotep seems to have had an idea. With this stronger building material, the structure could support more weight and therefore there was no real reason to stop building. Once the first mastaba was built, he experimented with placing a smaller one on top and then another on top, creating a tiered design like a wedding cake. Initially, Imhotep planned to build this construction four levels high, but he soon became even more daring. When completed, Djoser's tomb was six layers high.

It was perhaps the world's first large-scale construction made of carved stone and, at a height of two hundred feet, it was probably also the tallest building on Earth. Finally, Djoser's step pyramid was completed, and when the king died, he was buried in a granite chamber beneath the great building, surrounded by a labyrinth of tunnels. The Pyramid of Djoser was a revolutionary step in Egyptian architecture and would constitute a challenge to all the kings who followed him, a challenge they would find irresistible. The difficulties that engineers like Imhotep faced in building these pyramids were enormous, but his achievement becomes even more impressive when you consider that these monuments also had to be built quickly.

Today, Egypt is littered with the remains of half-built pyramids. These were abandoned halfway through construction, usually because the pharaoh who commissioned them had died prematurely. Once a pharaoh died, it seemed that no one saw any point in continuing to build his tomb. After all, there was now a new pharaoh and the construction of his pyramid would have to begin immediately. For this reason, the pyramids normally had to be completed within a minimum of thirty years. Only the kings with the longest and most stable reigns would live to see the final cornerstone laid. The next pharaoh after Djoser was a man named Sekhemkhet, who may have been Djoser's brother, and would join the ranks of the unfinished.

As soon as he ascended the throne, he began the construction of another step pyramid of immense ambition, which will surely eclipse the achievements of his brother. But only the first layer of the pyramid was built when Sekhemkhet died, just six or seven years into his reign, and the pyramid was abandoned. Another king, Khaba, also died six years later, before his step pyramid could be completed. To build each pyramid, the Egyptians would need enormous numbers of workers, up to 100,000 per pyramid, and around 10,000 working at any one time. There is a widespread misconception that these monuments were built by slave armies, but most historians now believe this is not true.

Slavery was an aspect of Egyptian society, as it was throughout the ancient world, and slaves came primarily from prisoners of war and also from those who fell into debt or committed serious crimes. But slaves were mainly used as domestic servants or, if they were unlucky, they worked in extractive industries such as mines and quarries. These were considered a lower class and would not have been entrusted with the construction of such important and sacred buildings. In fact, evidence shows that the pyramid builders were a mix of professional craftsmen and peasants who worked seasonally in exchange for rations.

The life of an Egyptian farmer was dictated by the comings and goings of the annual floods, and there were only a few times of the year when they could be meaningfully employed in the fields. For the rest of the time they would have rented their services to construction projects, digging canals and other public works, and building pyramids. While working for the king, these workers drank beer three times a day and ate meat regularly. They worked in three-month shifts and were divided into teams of twenty men. The discovery of their graffiti, hidden on the inner sides of some stone blocks in the pyramids, shows that they gave themselves fun and boisterous team names, some of which have been recorded.

Khufu's friends. The vigorous gang. The followers of the mighty white crown of Cheops. Those who know the pharaoh. The drunks of Menkaure. It seems that their supervisors fostered a sense of team pride and healthy competition, perhaps giving honors and extra helpings of beer to those who changed the most blocks. The work was undoubtedly grueling, but over the next millennium, millions of Egyptians would accept this arrangement. Perhaps they also felt pride in the great constructions in which they participated and that, if all went well, they would live to see them completed. These workers were respected enough that anyone who died during construction would be buried in tombs within the royal complex, and their bodies would forever be part of the monolith they had given their lives for, an honor that would never have been bestowed upon them. a slave The enormous administrative effort of constructing these tombs over the following centuries required a fundamental restructuring of the Egyptian government.

In the past, most high state positions had been distributed among the pharaoh's family, but with such ambitious projects to complete, skilled people would be needed. In the following decades, individual government functions, such as those of Master of Scribes and Controller of Workshops, were separated and these functions were delegated to capable people who were promoted according to their merits. Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson summarizes the transformation in the following terms. While Egypt was embarking on building pyramids, the pyramids were building Egypt. This new breed of civil servants took pride in their work. An Egyptian text from the Fifth Dynasty records advice that a vizier named Ptah-Hotep gave to his son on how to be a successful administrator.

Do not let your heart swell because of your knowledge. Don't trust yourself because you are a wise man. Consult both with the ignorant and with the wise. The good word is more hidden than the emerald, but it can be found even among the maids who work at the grindstone. Still, the failures of the kings who followed Djoser must have left a mark on the morale of the empire. Its ruined and half-finished pyramids stood in the desert like an image of royalty that could also be fragile and fleeting. With his step pyramid, Djoser had posed a provocation that had to be responded to.

But it wasn't until the reign of a king named Sneferu that anyone rose to the challenge. Snefru's full name was Hor-neb-Ma at-Snefru-waj; Horus, Lord ofMaat, has perfected me. Ma at, in Egyptian religious belief, was the embodiment of justice and truth, sometimes portrayed as a goddess wearing an ostrich feather on her head, who kept the stars and seasons in their regular patterns and maintained peace. . Opposed to it in her theology was the concept of Isfet; chaos, darkness and disorder. She was sometimes represented as a large coiled snake. Overall, the name Esnofru seems to have been appropriate. Under the protection of Ma at, she reigned for forty-eight years, a time of prosperity and stability.

Her accession to the throne is remembered in a later Egyptian source, the Prisse Papyrus. The majesty of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Huni, came to the place of death, and the majesty of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Sneferu, arose as a beneficent king throughout this land. During his half century on the throne, Esnofru would secure her place as Egypt's most ardent and determined pyramid builder. Faced with the failure of the last kings to build a step pyramid to match Djoser's, Sneferu began to wonder if he could build something even better, a pyramid that conformed to a perfect geometric shape.

He had a vision of a pyramid with smooth, polished sides, unlike anything the world had seen before. His first attempt to achieve this would be at the pyramid of Meidum. There is some debate as to whether the pyramid of Meidum was built by Esnofru or his predecessor Huni, but we can assume that they would not compete for the honor, as it is one of the most impressive failed pyramids in history. The Meidum pyramid was built in several stages. First, it was a stepped pyramid of similar design to that of Djoser, and then this inner structure was enclosed in a steep shell of white limestone, creating a tall, narrow point.

The effect would have been beautiful. That was until one day, when the pyramid was nearing completion, when the entire weight of the stone began to collapse in all directions. We can only imagine the noise and calamity that must have accompanied this; workers jumped away from the rubble, supervisors watched in horror as an avalanche of carefully carved stone fell from the side of the pyramid. The moment this happened, Sneferu ordered the construction to stop. The workers inside the inner chambers simply left their tools and left. Today, the burial chamber inside the pyramid is still unfinished, with rough, uncarved walls and wooden supports still in place, which were usually removed after construction.

Esnofru must have been devastated, but not discouraged. He soon tried again with a pyramid at the site of Dahshur, just south of the royal necropolis of Saqqara. This pyramid was intended to be tall and its sides were even steeper than the first. His workers began to build it with a steep slope of 53 degrees on its sides, and this time, Sneferu must have hoped to obtain the pyramid he dreamed of. But this would not be the case. This second pyramid was built on land that was just soft sand and shale. As the pyramid took shape and weighed millions of tons, they discovered that the stone sank into the earth, causing cracks to appear in the structure.

We can only imagine how it felt to be the architect who had to bring this bad news to the king, the son of Ra, the living incarnation of the god Horus. Workers tried everything they could, from adding new support blocks to the foundation to propping up the sunken sections with huge cedar wood beams, but it was no use. It became clear that if they continued with the pyramid as planned, it would likely collapse just as the first one had. Pharaoh Snefru seems to have listened to reason. He agreed to allow his workers to hastily finish the pyramid with a reduced angle of only 43 degrees and a final height reduced by eighty feet.

This gives the pyramid a peculiar snub-nosed appearance today, which has given it the name curved pyramid. It is clear that Esnofru was still not satisfied. He now ordered the construction of a final pyramid a kilometer to the north, combining everything his craftsmen had learned from the first two. This was now built with a 43 degree inclination from the beginning, more evenly distributing the weight over the earth, and finally, Sneferu got the pyramid he wanted. This was the first structure to truly take on the iconic shape of an Egyptian pyramid and would be used as a model for those to be built in the years to come.

It was 105 meters high, almost twice the height of Djoser's pyramid and the new tallest building in the world, and its geometric perfection was undeniable. When Snefru died, he was buried in this pyramid according to his wishes and his son took the throne. He would be the greatest pyramid builder of all. His name was Khufu. As a child, Khufu must have seen his father Snefru obsessed with building his three pyramids. We can imagine the young prince listening to his father's conversations with his architects, the tension and anger when the first two pyramids failed and then the final triumph of the red pyramid.

Perhaps when he was a child he dreamed of one day building a monument like this. We know very little about Khufu or what his reign was like, but it is clear that he was inspired by one thing; size and, above all, the desire to build the largest pyramid that ever existed. Learning from his father's mistakes at the leaning pyramid and probably inheriting some of its architects, Cheops decided to build his tomb about fifteen kilometers northwest of Saqqara, on a platform of strong limestone outside Memphis, in a location called Giza. When construction of the Great Pyramid began, there must have been some uncertainty about whether it would be possible.

It was built using approximately 2.3 million large blocks of stone, weighing a total of six million tonnes, and when its first layer was completed, it was the size of more than ten football fields. Its builders predominantly used local limestone quarried from the nearby Giza Plateau to build the pyramid's inner structure, and these were joined with lime mortar filled with straw and charcoal. Fortunately, these organic remains in the pyramid mortar can be carbon dated, allowing archaeologists to date the pyramids with scientific certainty to this period. But while rough stone would serve for the main body, the king's burial chamber in the center was made of blocks of hard granite brought from Aswan, as it needed to withstand the crushing weight of millions of tons of stone on top.

The fine limestone blocks of its outer layer were quarried from a place called Tura, on the other side of the river. The stone from these quarries was of exceptional quality, pale white in color, almost like marble. For this reason, it was highly prized for use inside tombs and the perfect covering for a pyramid. This limestone was extracted from underground tunnels in these quarries and dragged to the banks of the Nile, where it was loaded onto barges to be transported downstream. To facilitate the transportation of these stones, the Egyptians dug a series of artificial canals and ports that reached the base of the pyramids, one of which was known as She-Khufu, or Cheops's Pool.

A papyrus, the oldest ever found, has been discovered, which is the work diary of a foreman named Merer. In it, he records the process of this perhaps uninspiring task. Day 25: Inspector Merer spends the day hauling stones in Tura Sur; He spends the night in Tura. Day 26: Inspector Merer sets sail from Tura loaded with stones; He spends the night at Khufu's pool. Day 27: he sets sail loaded with stone; Spend the night at the pyramid. Day 28: departure from the pyramid in the morning; sail upriver to Tura Sur. Day 29: Inspector Merer spends the day hauling stones in Tura Sur;

Spend the night in Tura. Day 30: Inspector Merer spends the day hauling stones in Tura Sur; Spend the night in Tura. Surprisingly, the pyramid was perfectly oriented towards true north, with one of its faces at each point of the compass, suggesting that the Egyptians must have used measurements from the stars to align it, the only method by which they could have achieved such accuracy. With the now exceptional organization of the kingdom, its construction is estimated to have taken only about twenty-three years, with the final stones being laid around 2560 BC. Once completed, the Great Pyramid of Giza would be 147 meters high, or almost forty stories.

It was the tallest man-made structure in the world and would remain so for almost four thousand years. The building that finally surpassed it, the wooden spire of Lincoln Cathedral in England, completed in 1311, stood for just over two centuries before collapsing in a storm. Today, Khufu has cemented his name in history with the construction of these monuments, but apart from his ambitious pyramid, little else is known about him. The only representation of him ever found is a figurine carved from ivory, and ironically, for a man so obsessed with grand scale, this statue measures only seven centimeters, or less than three inches, high.

When Khufu died around 2525 BC. C., his son Djedefre would take the throne. But his reign was brief, and when he died, another of Khufu's sons became pharaoh. His name was Khafre. Pharaoh Khafre would follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and build his own great pyramid. He would place it right next to his father's, but for some reason he refused to build it higher. It could be that his builders, perhaps tired of this mania for bigger and better pyramids, simply told him that it would not be possible to build any bigger ones. Khafre may have been concerned that it would have seemed unseemly to surpass his dead father in such an ostentatious manner.

Perhaps for this reason, Khafre's pyramid would be twelve feet shorter than his father's, although he made sure to place it on a slightly higher limestone platform, meaning that from many angles it appears taller. . Coupled with the slightly steeper and angled sides, this meant that Khafre was also able to build his pyramid with perhaps 350,000 fewer stone blocks, a saving that his teams of workers and stonemasons no doubt appreciated. Today, the Pyramid of Khafre is the only pyramid at Giza to retain any of its original smooth white limestone stones from Tura, which still cling to the top third of the structure, perhaps because its steeper sides made more difficult to pass the stone. thieves to remove the top of your masonry.

This allows us to imagine what these monuments would have looked like in their golden age, the smooth, white sides that must have shone blindingly under the desert sun and at night glowed in the moonlight. These pyramids were probably also topped with a stone known as a pyramidion, usually carved from diorite or granite, and with carved hieroglyphics. Some examples of these pyramidions have been found with distinctive grooves suggesting they were encased in a decorative metal, either copper or bright electro, an alloy of gold and silver. Since the pyramidons of the Giza pyramids have never been found, it is unknown whether their tops were clad in metal, but if they were, they would have been an even more impressive sight, a gleaming pinnacle rising to the sky.

Approximately one hundred years after Djoser's first step pyramid was built, all of Egypt's largest pyramids had already been built, all by just three generations of the same family. But almost from the moment the last cornerstone of Khafre's enormous monument was laid, enthusiasm for the massive pyramids began to wane. Pharaoh Menkaure, son of Khafre and grandson of Khufu, also built his pyramid at Giza around 2510 BC, but his would be significantly smaller. It is not even a tenth the size of the Great Pyramid, and only two-thirds the size of even the step pyramid of Djoser. One explanation for this was that Menkaure did not expect to live long enough to build a building as grand as his predecessors.

Herodotus records a tradition about Pharaoh Menkaure, telling how an oracle told him that his reign would be short. As a result, he decided to take advantage of the time he had and perhaps this left him little time to build pyramids. The king considered this unfair and sent a message of reproach to the oracle, blaming the god; Why should he die so soon, while his father and his uncle had lived a long time? He had many lamps made, and he lit them at dusk and drank and was merry. Day or night, he never ceased to amuse himself, wandering through the marshy areas and groves and whenever he heard of the most likely places of pleasure.

Regardless of whether there is any truth to this or not, it is clear that Menkaure had different priorities than Cheops and Khafre, and his more modest pyramid seems to have broken his family's spell of superiority. Over the next thousand years, the pharaohs would continue to build pyramid tombs, but mostly on a much smaller scale, and they would take increasing shortcuts in their construction. RatherA solid limestone structure, these later monuments would often be a simple limestone shell enclosing a core of mud bricks or simply earth and sand. For this reason, few remains remain of these later pyramids other than solitary heaps of melancholy in the desert.

Little by little, the practice would begin to disappear completely. The reason the Egyptians stopped building pyramids was partly due to changes in religious attitudes toward burial, but it also appears to be due to concerns about tomb robbers. After all, a pyramid was essentially a huge billboard announcing to the world that the richest man in Egypt was buried there. From the earliest days, people were attracted to the tombs of long-dead kings to try to steal their treasures. An inscription on the tomb of a royal architect named Ineni gives us a clue to these changing priorities. He writes that he built the king's tomb not in an ostentatious declaration of power, but in total secrecy.

I supervised the excavation of His Majesty's tomb on the cliff alone, with no one seeing or hearing. Even with these secret tombs, grave robbers remained a constant concern. A pharaoh of the later New Kingdom ordered an inspection of the tombs of his predecessors, and his inspectors brought disturbing news. The king's tomb; It was discovered that miscreants had damaged him by forcing an opening into the main chamber of his tomb, through the passage wall of the shrine of Nebamen, superintendent of the king's grain stores. At the burial site the king's body had been removed and the tomb of his royal wife, the royal lady of Nubshas, ​​was empty.

The thieves had violently seized them. It wasn't just the precious treasures inside that were stolen. As foreman Merer discovered, cutting the limestone blocks from the Tura quarries was one of the most time-consuming parts of construction. For this reason, pharaohs who felt more pressed for time sometimes stripped earlier pyramids of their carved stone to speed up their own monuments. A Middle Kingdom text known as the Instruction of Merikare advises kings against this shameful practice. Do not take away another's monument, but stone from a quarry in Tura. Do not build your tomb on ruins, using what is already made for what is to be done.

Instead of building their own pyramids at Saqqara or Giza, later pharaohs would be buried at a place near Thebes that the Egyptians called the Pharaoh's Great and Majestic Million-Year Necropolis, or sometimes the Great Field, but today It is known as the Valley of the Kings. Here, a natural rock formation known as el-qurn, or the horn, rises above a series of spectacular red cliffs. When viewed from the entrance to the tombs, this pointed peak looks a bit like a natural pyramid. This convenient landform may have relieved some of the pressure on the pharaohs of Egypt and allowed them to bury an equally prestigious site, while freeing up an untold amount of energy and manpower in the kingdom.

Egypt's manual workers could perhaps breathe a sigh of relief. Little by little, the era of the pyramids came to an end. Still, that was a long time in the future, and during the fourth and fifth dynasties of Egypt, the construction of royal monuments continued confidently. But in the sixth dynasty, around the 23rd century BC. C., construction began to decline. Part of the reason for this was a growing decentralization of the empire and a gradual weakening of the king's power. The last pharaoh of the Old Kingdom was called Pepi II. He ascended the throne at the age of six and ruled for more than sixty years.

Pepi was an excitable and enthusiastic girl, as we can see from the inscription on a tomb of one of her officials named Harkhuf. Harkhuf had a long and illustrious career. He served as mayor of one of Egypt's southern provinces in the Nile Cataract region of Aswan, the narrow gate to the south. The highlights of his life were the four voyages of exploration he undertook on behalf of his pharaoh, following the Nile into the heart of Central Africa, to what the Egyptians called the lands of the horizon. He wrote a full account of one of these expeditions on the walls of his tomb.

I achieved it in seven months. He brought from there all kinds of exotic and beautiful products, and he was highly praised for it. I returned with three hundred donkeys loaded with incense, ebony, precious oil, grain, leopard skins, and elephant tusks. The boy Pharaoh Pepi was so enchanted by Harkhuf's journey that he wrote him a letter directly. The letter was probably written on fragile papyrus and has not survived, but fortunately, Harkhuf was so proud of this sign of royal favor that he had the letter copied word for word on the wall of his tomb, his proudest moment etched in stone for eternity.

In it, we get a sense of the voice of this excitable young king. You know how to do what your master loves and favors. You wake up and sleep planning to do what your lord loves, favors and commands. Unique friend Harkhuf! Pepi was especially excited about a small man that Harkhuf had come across in East Africa and brought with him, perhaps a man with dwarfism or a member of the so-called pygmy tribes of Central Africa. Furthermore, you have said in this message that you have brought a dwarf from the dances of the earth god of the inhabitants of the horizon.

Come downriver to the residence immediately. Hurry and bring with you this dwarf whom you have brought alive, prosperous and healthy, for the king. When he goes down with you in the boat, have excellent people on deck around him so that he does not fall overboard. My Majesty wishes to see this particular dwarf more than the produce of the lands. However, as pharaoh, Pepi was relatively ineffective. During his childhood, his mother and his grand viziers appear to have largely ruled, and as an adult he continued a relatively hands-off approach to the kingdom. For much of its history, Egypt had been ruled by regional administrators known as nomarchs, who were appointed by the pharaoh to govern their regions on his behalf.

During Pepi's long reign, an increasing amount of power passed to these regional governors. Gradually, their positions became hereditary rather than appointed, so that individual families began to accumulate large amounts of power and their tombs became larger and more elaborate with each passing year. These nomarchs soon began to look a lot like feudal lords or even minor kings, and even began to fight among themselves. Meanwhile, the once child king Pepi was now entering his seventies, frail and increasingly removed from the task of governing. This may not have been a fatal blow to the kingdom, but it was around this time that a record drought descended on Egypt and the entire eastern Mediterranean, beginning around 2200 BC.

We have encountered this climate change before; It is known as the 4.2 kiloyear event and has been implicated in the collapse of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, and perhaps even the Indus Valley civilization in India and Pakistan. In Egypt, the result of this event was a series of years in which Nile flooding was greatly reduced and agriculture came under immense pressure. The drought was so severe and long-lasting that the green Faiyum Lake, once sixty-five meters deep, completely dried up over the next fifty years, and crop yields would have plummeted. The long reign of a pharaoh used to be good news for the kingdom.

It tended to create a period of stability and often prosperity, but when a king's rule lasted too long, it tended to create what we might call the old king's problem. Pharaoh Pepi's long reign, along with his multiple wives, meant that he had countless children, many of them already elderly with children and grandchildren of their own, and they were all impatient to see this old king die so that they would have the opportunity to rule. . When Pepi finally died around 2175 BC. C., what followed was a succession crisis of immense proportions. The chaos serpent of Isfet now roamed all the lands of Egypt.

Over the next two decades, the kingdom would see no fewer than seventeen pharaohs come and go, some perhaps dying of old age and others no doubt murdered by their rivals. The only one of these kings to survive more than a year on the throne was a man called Ibi, who even, with some optimism, attempted to build a pyramid in the royal cemetery at Saqqara. But this monument was a testament to the now greatly reduced state of the empire. At just over thirty meters high, it was smaller than the pyramids of some of the wives of previous kings.

On top of that, it was lazily built around a core of mud and limestone chips. King Ibi, the man who was to be buried under this sad monument, ruled for only two years, one month and one day, and probably did not control all of Egypt. Now, the local nomarch governors declared independence and governed their provinces alone. Their tombs around this time cease to refer to the reign of a pharaoh, and are full of elaborate boasts and titles that they seem to have invented themselves. An inscription on the tomb of a powerful nomarch named Ankhtifi demonstrates how the king's centralized power was declining.

I am the vanguard of men, the rearguard of men; a leader of the land through active conduct, strong in speech, serene in thought, for I have no Peer, who spoke when the people were silent, in the day of fear, when Upper Egypt was silent. Ankhtifi recalls the time of famine that struck the land as crisis after crisis shook the struggling Old Kingdom. All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger to the point that each one had even eaten his children, but I managed to ensure that no one died of hunger in this province. The entire country had become a hungry grasshopper, and people went north and south in search of grain.

Egypt was now fracturing into something resembling the shape it had been before King Narmer merged it into a stable centralized state nearly eight hundred years earlier. Refugees flooded the roads. Another later Egyptian writer named Ipuwer, who lived in the period after this chaos, describes that people resorted to theft to survive and that violence was widespread. The guardians of the house say: Let's steal. Bird hunters have formed armed bands. The farmers of the delta have provided themselves with shields. A man considers his son to be his enemy. The evildoer is everywhere. The Nile flood comes and no one goes out to plow.

Ipuwer describes a widespread economic collapse, during which trade from foreign lands dried up. The skilled masons who built the pyramids now work on farms, and those who tended the ship of the gods work together at the plow. Men today do not undertake trips. What will we do with the cedar wood for our mummies, in the coffins in which priests are buried and with whose oil men are embalmed? They don't come anymore. Everything is in ruins. Laughter is dead. If he knew where God was, he would make offerings to him. Throughout this period of some two hundred years, some must have at least dreamed that a better time awaited them in the future.

Another text written after this time, known as the Neferti Prophecy, contains a prediction that a ruler would come who would end this time of strife. A king will come. He will take the white crown; He will wear the red crown. He will unite the two mighty lands. Rejoice, people of his time. The Asiatics will fall before his sword and the Libyans will fall before his flame. The rebellious belong to his wrath, and the treacherous in heart belong to his fear. The man who fulfilled this prophecy, or rather, the man in whose reign the prophecy was probably written, would reunite Egypt and usher in a new era of stability.

His name was Nebhepetre Mentuhotep II. Mentuhotep was king of the city of Thebes in Upper Egypt. Located on the eastern bank of the Nile, about eight hundred kilometers from the Mediterranean, Thebes is one of the sunniest and driest cities in the world. It had been the capital of his own province throughout the Old Kingdom, but it had always been something of a backwater and somewhat influenced by the African culture of Nubia. But during more than a century of chaos surrounding the collapse of the Old Kingdom, Thebes slowly grew to become the southern capital, and its kings began to refer to themselves as the great overlord of Upper Egypt.

It was a city where tightly packed rows of houses, granaries, and workshops were clustered around the central temple dedicated to the god Amun, and the people there clearly sought a respite from the stifling influence of the kings of Memphis. But in the north, near the traditional center of Egyptian power, an ambitious and ruthless rival was also gathering his forces. This centered around the city of Henen-Nesut in Lower Egypt, in the green region between the River Nile and the great lake of Fayoum, a region that the desert Thebans disdainfully called the marshes. This city would later be known as Heracleopolis, or the city of Hercules.

For about a hundred years during this time of dissolution, Thebes and Henen-Nesut hadThey fought bitter wars over small border regions, forts and roads, but neither side could gain the upper hand. This was until the reign of the king of Thebes, Mentuhotep. He is named after the Theban god of war and comes from a line of warrior kings. He clearly wished to bring this series of conflicts to a decisive conclusion and reunite the fractured kingdom of yesteryear. The final confrontation between the north and the south would be provoked by a rebellion in the city of Thinis, once home to King Narmer, and which was now one of the vassals of Thebes.

Delighted by this development, the northern power of Henen-Nesut seized the opportunity and marched south into the desert to capture the city. The war soon spread throughout Egypt. At one point, the northerners advanced south and captured the ancient and sacred city of Abydos, unleashing a wave of destruction against its temples and palaces. A later text known as the Instruction to Merikare purports to be written by a northern king of Henen-Nesut, wracked with guilt over the destruction of this sacred city. Behold, in my time a shameful event occurred; Theese province was devastated. Although it happened through my action, I learned it after I did it.

There was retribution for what he had done, because it is evil to destroy. Careful with that! A blow is paid with something similar. For every action there is a response. This response would come in the form of thunderous retaliation from the king of Thebes, Mentuhotep. He would march north and defeat the armies of Henen-Nesut. He then headed to the northern capital. When he captured it, all the funerary monuments of his kings were defaced and destroyed, perhaps suggesting a sacking of the city. Whatever the northerners had done to the sacred center of Abydos had clearly decimated them and their city.

Mentuhotep now devastated northern Egypt and the provincial governors saw the sign on the wall and swore allegiance to him. After almost two centuries of dissolution, the two halves of Egypt were united again. The period that followed, known as the Middle Kingdom of Egypt, would last about three hundred years, but has not left an impressive archaeological record. Compared to the towering pyramids of the Old Kingdom and the architectural magnificence of the later New Kingdom, it stands out as a dull era for the construction of great monuments. But it did experience a flourishing in another area; that is, in the field of Egyptian literature.

A famous story written around this time is called The Tale of Sinuhe. It tells the life of a man who traveled to northern Palestine and beyond, but who eventually becomes homesick and decides to return to Egypt. Around this time another collection of stories was written, a kind of ancient Arabian Nights, known as Tales of Wonders. He tells a series of fantastic stories, imagining that his three sons told them to the great Pharaoh Khufu of the Old Kingdom. Another story written during the Middle Kingdom is known as The Tale of the Shipwrecked Mariner, a type of Gulliver's ancient travels.

It stands out for its innovative structure, a story within a story about a sailor who is shipwrecked in the Mediterranean and finds himself on an island ruled by a gigantic snake. A storm broke out and we were in the open sea, with no possibility of reaching port. The wind grew stronger and made a constant moan, and there were hungry waves fourteen feet high. Some kind of piece of wood hit me and then the boat was dead. Of all those good men, none survived. Then I was swept away to a desert island by the waves of the great green sea.

The man talks to the great snake, who tells him his own sad story: his entire family died when a star fell to Earth. The snake tells the man not to fear, that a ship will eventually pass by the island and rescue him, and assures him that he will soon have a great story to tell. Now, you are going to spend a month, and then another, until you are four months on this island; Then a ship will come from Egypt with sailors whom you know, so that you can go home with them and die in your city.

What joy for those who live, to tell the things they have gone through when the suffering ends! Finally the planned ship arrives and the man is rescued. Finally the ship arrived as planned. I climbed a tall tree and recognized the sailors on the ship, and ran out to report it. Then I went down to the shore near where the boat was. I greeted the crew and offered seaside thanks to the Lord of the Island, and those on board did the same. We have examples of myths and legends written before this time, and religious texts, but this is not the story of some deceased king or the actions of the gods.

It is a story about an ordinary man in a fantastic situation, told apparently only for the entertainment value of telling a story, and for that reason it is possibly the first true work of literature. It was probably written around 1900 BC. C. and, therefore, it is almost four thousand years old. The lives of Egypt's pharaohs occupy much of the usual debate about its history, in part because they were the ones who commissioned the inscriptions, monuments and statues. But as the flowering of literature in the Middle Kingdom continued, we increasingly have a clearer idea of ​​what life was like for ordinary people in the Nile Valley.

A text from this period known as the Papyrus Lansing offers a fascinating insight into the lives of the common people of Egypt. It is written as a piece of rhetoric by a master scribe addressed to one of his students, trying to convince him to become a scribe himself, and from this we get a wonderful impression of all the ways people could earn money. life in the world. land of Egypt. A young writer, for whom he knows, is more profitable than any profession. He is more pleasant than bread and beer, than clothing and oil. Yes, he is more precious than an inheritance in Egypt, than a tomb in the West.

See yourself with your own eyes; here, all professions are presented before you. The washerman spends the whole day coming and going, every limb of him is tired, bleaching his neighbors' clothes every day. The potter is smeared with clay, like a man in mourning; His hands and feet are full of mud. He is like someone who lives in the swamp. The cobbler mixes tanning lotions; His smell is marked, his hands are red with dye, like one who is anointed with his blood. The florist makes bouquets and embellishes wine jars; He spends a night at work sweating, like the one on whose body the sun shines.

Traders travel downriver and upriver, and are as busy as they can be, carrying goods from one city to another and supplying those who do not have them. If you have any sense, be a writer. We can't say whether daily life was really that bad for all these other workers, because, of course, none of them wrote down how he felt. Most Egyptians were peasants, and even when they practiced these other professions, they probably also engaged in some agriculture. These peasants did not own the land they worked and had to give most of the food they produced to the crown or their local temple.

To supplement their diets, most homes also had private gardens, which the women tended while the men went out into the fields. Egyptian women were also responsible for baking the bread they ate every day. Bread in Egypt was made mainly from emmer wheat. The dough was often pressed into clay molds and baked, and sometimes people got creative, baking bread in spirals like cinnamon swirl and using shaped molds to bake animal-shaped breads. Those who could afford it also baked cakes and pastries with the best flour, sweetened with dates and honey. In addition to bread, Egyptians ate a varied diet that included garlic and chives, lettuce, celery, cucumbers, pumpkins, and melons.

They supplemented them with protein-rich beans and legumes, such as lentils and chickpeas, and a type of edible tuber known as tiger nuts that grows at the base of wetland reeds. All of this was cooked in olive oil, at least since the pyramids were built. Sometimes they also ate meat, mainly beef, lamb, pork and goat, as well as quail, pigeons, ducks, geese and partridges. Sometimes they even ate mice and even hedgehogs. The Egyptians cooked these spiky creatures by wrapping them in wet clay and baking them in it, and when the clay split open later, it took away the hedgehog's spines.

The Egyptians also made cheese and even foie gras, made from force-fed geese. A text written by a scribe of Queen Nefertari urges people to share the food they have with others. Do not eat bread while another is standing without extending your hand. As for food, it's always here. It is the man who does not last; One man is rich, another is poor, but the food remains for those who share it. Beer was exceptionally popular in Egypt and people consumed it daily. As a result, breweries became important industrial centers. Beer was thought to have been given to Egypt by the goddess Hathor, the goddess of beauty, music and dancing, and the goddess Tenenet watched over the breweries;

For this reason, many breweries were run by women. Some of them were huge and capable of producing more than a million liters a year. They used large ceramic jars resting on clay bricks over crackling fires, and inside them they heated barley and water, then let the mixture ferment before flavoring the drink with honey and syrups made from dates and other fruits. There was even an annual festival called the Tekh Festival, which would become known as the Festival of Drunkenness. During this festival, the Egyptians drank as much beer as they could and then fell asleep together in a large hall.

Then, all together they were awakened by the loud beating of the drums. It was said that at the moment just after waking up, some of them would meet the goddess Hathor herself. Egypt was one of the most stable and prosperous agricultural societies in the ancient world, but it was a society built entirely on the gathering and storage of grain. As a result, there was an ever-present danger; that was the presence of mice and rats. Grain was stored in large circular granaries within cities, shaped like beehives, and freshly harvested wheat or barley was poured through a hole in the top to preserve it in the warm, dry air.

When grain was needed to make bread or brew beer, it was taken through a small door located at the back of these barns. But if mice were to get into this warehouse or even eat the grain while it was still in the field, then thousands of hours of work could be wasted and people could even starve. But fortunately, the Egyptians were able to rely on a particular set of allies; That was the house cat. There were two main breeds of wildcats originating in Egypt; the jungle cat, or Felis chaus, and the African wildcat, Felis silvestris lybica.

Of these, the African wild cat had a calmer temperament and was therefore most commonly bred as a pet, with evidence of its domestication in Egypt dating back at least five thousand years. These cats were kept in Egyptian settlements for their obvious usefulness both in controlling mice and for their almost supernatural reflexes due to their ability to kill poisonous snakes. But it is clear that the Egyptians also enjoyed their company and even loved them. Some particularly beloved pets were buried with small offerings intended to serve them in the afterlife. The Greek writer Diodorus of Sicily remembers seeing Egyptians perform funeral ceremonies for their cats.

When one of these animals dies, they wrap it in fine linen and then, crying and beating their chests, they carry it to be embalmed and, after having treated it with cedar oil and spices that have the quality of imparting a pleasant aroma. smell and to preserve the body for a long time, they deposit it in a consecrated tomb. While the earliest domestication of the domestic cat took place elsewhere in the Fertile Crescent, it was in Egypt where it accelerated dramatically. As the cats became accustomed to their new survival niche, they in turn began to adapt. They largely lost their original camouflage layers, became smaller, and even developed new ways of signaling their human patrons with soft, insistent cries, modulated at frequencies similar to those of a human baby.

Fittingly, the Egyptian word for cat was miu. Over time, this adoration for their feline companions appears to have also developed into a religious reverence. With their ease and grace, cats in Egypt were associated with femininity, and tomb paintings often show the domestic dog sitting under a man's chair while a cat sits under the woman's chair. A goddess named Bastet would soon be worshiped and manifested as a woman with the head of a house cat. Bastet became a god of fertility and women appealed to her during times of childbirth and pregnancy. Diodorus later records seeing an Egyptian festival during which she was ritually fed to cats.

For the cats, they break the bread in milk and, calling them with acluck, they put it in front of them, or they cut up the fish caught in the Nile and feed them the raw meat. Everyone who encounters these animals prostrates themselves before them and pays them honor. The Egyptians were also fiercely protective of their feline companions, as Diodorus relates. Whoever kills a cat, whether intentionally or not, will certainly be sentenced to death, because ordinary people gather in crowds and treat the perpetrator with the greatest cruelty, sometimes without waiting for a trial. The cult and veneration of cats would continue throughout the thousands of years of Ancient Egyptian history, and for cats, it may be something they have never completely forgotten.

The Middle Kingdom was not only a time of entertainment and pleasure. Once the mania for pyramid building subsided, certain pharaohs engaged in large-scale construction projects to strengthen and develop the empire. One king spent much of his life on a vast irrigation project around the Faiyum oasis, determined to turn it into a productive strip of farmland. Another built a large series of defensive walls in the Nile delta, isolating Egypt from the peoples of the Middle East, whom the Egyptians called Asiatics. These people often appeared in his paintings with lighter, yellower skin than the Egyptians, and were generally despised as uncivilized barbarians.

The Egyptians soon began to extend their sphere of influence into this area, expanding their territory northward along the Mediterranean coast and into Palestine. They crossed the Sinai Desert and subjugated the Phoenician city of Byblos. Then they turned their attention southward, toward East Africa, what the Egyptians called the lands of the horizon, the lands of the Nubians. Like the light-skinned Asians of the north, the Egyptians considered the southern Nubians different from themselves and generally depicted them as having darker skin than the Egyptians and with more typically African features. At the time, these kingdoms were relatively underdeveloped and easy prey for an aggressive and expansionist Egypt.

We have already seen that the first cataract of the Nile was at Aswan, where the granite bedrock forced the water to form a series of fast-flowing rapids. If an ancient Egyptian were to travel upriver beyond Aswan and into the lands beyond, he would encounter five major waterfalls of the Nile. These are places where the river becomes shallow and boat travel becomes difficult, so there were natural stops along any upstream journey. They were also the obvious place to draw boundaries. During the Middle Kingdom, Egypt advanced into the lands of the horizon several times and pushed its southern border to the second cataract.

Around the 1860s BC. BCE, a Middle Kingdom king named Senusret III marched further south toward the Nubian kingdoms of Kush and Punt. He remembers this brutal campaign in an inscription. The Nubians are miserable and cowards. My Majesty has seen it; it's not a lie. I have captured your women, I have kidnapped your subjects, I have poisoned your wells, I have killed your cattle, I have cut your grain, I have set you on fire. In this ruthless manner, Senusret marched beyond the second cataract and built a mighty set of fortresses. We have an idea of ​​their purpose from the names the Egyptians gave them.

One of them in Askut was called Crush the Nubians, while another in Shalfak was called Subdue the Foreign Lands. In another imposing fortress at Semna, now more than four hundred kilometers upstream from the ancient border of Aswan, Senusret left a stone monument with the following triumphant inscription. Year 16, third month of winter; the king established the southern boundary of it. I have set my limits further south than my father's. I have added to what was bequeathed to me. As for any son of mine who maintains this boundary that my Majesty has made, that is my son. But the one who abandons her, the one who does not fight for her, is not my son.

He wasn't born for me. These forts were manned by powerful units of Egyptian soldiers tasked with maintaining order among the newly colonized Nubians. To this end, they engaged in a paranoid regime of surveillance of the local population. Pharaoh Senusret was sent constant updates on papyrus scrolls about the movements of even the smallest groups of Nubians, some of whom have survived. The patrol that went out to patrol the edge of the desert from the Khesef-Medjaew fortress in year 3, month three of the growing season, came to report to me saying that we have found the footprints of thirty-two men and three donkeys.

All of these dispatches end in the same way, with the same comforting offer of reassurance to the king. All the affairs of the king's domain are safe and sound. All the master's affairs are safe and sound. But we have reason to believe that King Senusret was not entirely calm. He is famous for the numerous sculptures he made of himself, statues carved from black diorite that depict him in a strangely realistic manner, unlike any previous depiction of a pharaoh. In these statues, his ears extend to enormous bat-like proportions, perhaps projecting the image of a king who listened to every movement of his kingdom, transmitted by his extensive spy system.

In particular, three of these statues show the king first as a child, then as a man, and finally in old age. In this final statue, we get a sense of the mental toll it took on one man to sit at the top of this paranoid system; the pharaoh's tired sunken eyes, his haggard face contorted into an expression of eternal worry. Today, these three statues are a kind of metaphor for the state into which the Egyptian Middle Kingdom had sunk during its last decades. Senusret's son, Amenemhat III, did exactly as his father's inscriptions asked him to do and held the southern border against the Nubians.

But after his reign, Egypt was once again plunged into a succession crisis. The crisis was so serious that its next king was something that until then had been almost unthinkable; a woman. Her name was Sobekneferu, possibly the daughter, sister or wife of the previous pharaoh. She was probably not the first woman to hold power in Egypt, but she was the first to obtain the full official title of king. Sobekneferu used masculine titles in her inscriptions, and a statue of her even shows her wearing an unconventional mix of masculine and feminine clothing. However, she failed to stop the dynasty's decline.

She died after ruling only four years and left no heirs. After that, the serpent Isfet uncoiled once again and Egypt fell into chaos. During the time that followed, known as the Second Intermediate Period, there were 150 years during which at least fifty kings ruled. Egypt once again split in two and local governors stopped mentioning the king in their tomb inscriptions. The pyramids of this period had already become small and few, mostly built of mud bricks, but now their construction stopped completely. Some kings were even buried in simple pit tombs, little better than those of commoners. Much of the Nile delta in Lower Egypt had already broken away from the empire, and now, in the south, the people of Nubia were in open rebellion.

One by one, the Egyptians were forced to abandon their southern forts, abandoning them to the Nubians. These powerful fortresses, once a symbol of the empire's confidence, now became unprecedented military assets for its enemies and bases from which powerful raiding parties pushed deeper and deeper into Egypt. The cruelty that the Egyptians had shown to their Nubian neighbors was now being rewarded in full. With the northern and southern borders convulsed by conflict, Egypt's trade links with the rest of the world were severely disrupted. It was also during this time, or perhaps later, that the entire Mediterranean, in fact most of the world, witnessed one of the greatest natural disasters in human history.

It is about the eruption of the Thera volcano, now known as the Greek island of Santorini, just seven hundred kilometers from the Egyptian coast. It is likely that the Egyptians would have heard the deep roar of this explosion, which exploded with the force of several hundred atomic bombs. When the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa erupted in 1883, the explosion was heard more than three thousand kilometers away, and the Thera explosion is believed to have been at least four times more powerful. Today, the seawater-filled volcanic crater left by the eruption is more than ten kilometers wide. This event may have ejected more than forty square kilometers of rock into the atmosphere.

The black column would have been torn apart by volcanic lightning and would have caused tsunamis ten meters high that would have devastated coastal regions, in addition to causing a volcanic winter. The eruption may have wiped out the Minoan civilization of Crete in one fell swoop, perhaps inspiring part of the myth of Atlantis, and chronicles as far away as China record a period when the sky took on a strange yellow color and the yields of crops decreased. An Egyptian inscription known as the Steles of the Tempest may record some memory of this terrifying event. The gods expressed their discontent.

The gods caused the sky to come with a storm. It caused darkness in the western region. The sky was unleashed, more powerful over the mountains than the turbulence of the Aswan waterfall. Every house, every shelter they reached, floated in the water like papyrus bark outside the royal residence for days. Volcanic ash, or tephra, would have begun to rain over the entire region and today could be detected in practically all places in the eastern Mediterranean. Spurred on by this natural disaster and exacerbated by the collapse of the Egyptian administration, famine soon descended upon the land once again.

Amid all this, a powerful and mysterious force of outsiders must have been watching. They came from the eastern Mediterranean region from across the Sinai Desert and intended to conquer Egypt and rule it for themselves. These people were known as the Hyksos. The word Hyksos comes from the Egyptian phrase hekau khasut, meaning rulers of foreign lands. It is unknown where exactly the Hyksos were from, but it is believed that they may have originated in the region of Syria, and one thing seems to have been behind their great military success, and that was the chariot. At this point, various societies had used some type of chariot for many centuries.

The Sumerian banner of Ur, which was created around the time the pyramids of Giza were being built, depicts vehicles such as a type of war chariot with four solid wooden wheels pulled by donkeys. But Egypt had never experimented with this type of vehicle and, over the previous millennium, technology had made enormous advances. The chariots that the Hyksos first brought to Egypt had two spoked wheels, light and fast, and each of them was drawn by two powerful animals recently introduced to the region, the horse. These chariots were strong, mobile battle platforms that could break enemy battle lines, while onboard archers with powerful bows could launch missiles at enemies.

Whether the Hyksos came to Egypt as a violent invasion or a more peaceful migration is up for debate. People from the north have been settling in the Nile Delta for centuries, and much of the population was already what the Egyptians would consider foreigners when the Hyksos rulers arrived. But it was clear that the Hyksos were not pacifists. They established their own kingdom in the Nile delta, with their capital at Avaris, and in a devastating blow to Egyptian morale, they even headed south to capture the ancient capital of Memphis. A much later source called Manetho records the arrival of the Hyksos.

With the main force, they easily seized the country without striking a single blow and, having defeated the rulers of the country, they mercilessly burned our cities and razed the temples of the gods. Finally, they appointed one of those who had their seat in Memphis as king, collecting tribute from Upper and Lower Egypt, and always leaving garrisons in the most advantageous positions. The pyramids, a great symbol of Egyptian prestige, were now in foreign hands. The Egyptian kings would now retreat to their ancient capital in Upper Egypt, the city of Thebes. With the Nubians becoming more powerful in the south, and now the new threat of these Hyksos kings looming from the north, the weakened Egyptians increasingly felt as if they were being crushed in a vice.

For a time, it must have seemed that the era of independent Egypt was over. A king named Kamose, who ascended the throne of Thebes around 1555 BC. C., would explain this intolerable situation in the following terms. I would like to know what use this strength of mine is when one leader is in Avaris and another in Kush, and I feel united with an Asiatic and a Nubian, each in possession of his portion of Egypt, and I cannot pass by him so far. Like Memphis. No man can establish himself when he is despoiled by the taxes of the Asiatics.

I will fight him to open his belly! My wish is to save Egypt and hurt the Asians! King Kamose may havehad a very personal reason for hating the Hyksos. The mummified remains of the previous pharaoh, his father, have been discovered, and modern analysis shows that he suffered brutal head wounds from a heavy, bladed weapon. These blows must have cut his cheek and fractured his jaw and skull, leading many to conclude that he died on the battlefield. The king's body was then rushed to Thebes, where he was hastily mummified. If Prince Kamose saw his father's body in this state as he was being carried back to the city, we can only imagine the kind of hatred that must have burned in his heart towards the Hyksos invaders in the north.

But many at Kamose's court clearly feared what a war with the Hyksos could do to the fragile state of the country. A text known as the Carnarvon Tablet describes how they appealed to their king to keep the peace. We are quiet in our part of Egypt. Aswan at the first cataract is strong, and the middle part of the earth is with us. Men cultivate the best of their lands for us. They allow our cattle to graze on the papyrus marshes. Corn is sent for our pigs. They don't take our livestock from us. Own the land of the Asiatics;

We control Egypt. Only when someone comes against us, we should act against him. But Kamose refused. He wanted to strike a blow at the Hyksos, but knew that first he would have to secure the southern border and recapture the ancient fortress of Buhen, just before the second cataract of the Nile. Buhen was one of the strong walled bastions built by Senusret III, and was one of the only forts that the Egyptians built with stone instead of brick. But since the collapse of the Middle Kingdom, his garrison had served a Nubian lord from the kingdom of Kush.

If the southern border was to hold while Kamose drove the Hyksos from the north, he would need to recapture the fort of Buhen. Kamose marched south, preparing to assault the fort, but it seems that upon sighting the huge Egyptian army on the horizon, the citizens of the fortress got the message and decided to swear allegiance to the pharaoh without fighting. With this powerful fort now controlling the south, Kamose returned to Thebes and prepared for the next campaigning season, when he would attempt to bring the war to the Hyksos and unite Egypt once more. In the third year of his reign, Kamose attacked.

I sailed north with all my strength to repel the Asiatics under the command of Amun, with my brave army before me like a flame of fire and the archers high on our battle decks. Kamose's fleet quickly attacked the Hyksos in what appears to have been some kind of surprise attack. Taken by surprise, the foreigners were defeated and Kamose's revenge was terrible. When dawn came, I approached him as if he were a hawk. When breakfast time came, I overthrew him, having destroyed his walls and massacred his people, and brought his wife down to the river bank. My army behaved like lions with their property stripped, cattle, fat, honey, distributing their things, with a happy heart.

As for Avaris, in the two rivers, I left it without inhabitants; I destroyed their cities and burned their houses to red ruins forever, because of the destruction they had caused in the midst of Egypt; those who had allowed themselves to listen to the call of the Asians had abandoned Egypt, his lover. The king of the Hyksos immediately asked for help from his Nubian ally, the king of Kush. At one point, the Egyptians intercepted a secret message traveling south along desert roads, the contents of which they recorded. Have you noticed what Egypt has done against me? The ruler there, Kamose, enters my territory although I have not attacked him as he has attacked you.

He chooses these two lands to afflict, my land and yours, and he has devastated them. Come north; don't flinch. Then we will divide the cities of Egypt. When this messenger returned to the beleaguered Hyksos king, embarrassed and without delivering the letter, he must have known that all was lost. The war ended quickly and Kamose recounts, perhaps with some exaggeration, his heroic return to Thebes. What a happy journey home for the ruler! Life! Prosperity! Happiness! With his army before him! They had no casualties, nor did anyone blame his companions, nor did his hearts cry! I moored on home land during the flood season;

The riverbank was sparkling! Thebes was festive; Women and men had come to see me, each woman hugged her neighbor, no one cried. His son Ahmose would take advantage of this advantage and, in an even more devastating campaign, seize the ancient capital of Memphis. Ahmose would be the first pharaoh in at least a hundred years to recover the great pyramids of Giza, and we can imagine his feelings as he contemplated the monuments of his ancestors Cheops and Khafre, which are now more than a thousand years old. . It is clear that the site inspired him, and he would even build his own pyramid in Upper Egypt at the site of Abydos.

This was one of the first pyramids built for an Egyptian pharaoh since the fall of the Middle Kingdom, and was clearly designed as a symbol of renewal of the empire's great legacy. But it would also be the last pyramid built by an Egyptian ruler. After securing the Nile Delta, Ahmose marched north and even crossed the Sinai, laying waste to the traditional heartland of the Hyksos people and seizing territory in Palestine in the region of modern Gaza. After that, he returned to the southern town of Kush and pushed the empire's borders further south than they had ever been, beyond the Second Cataract to the river island of Sai, now in northern Sudan.

From its nadir, Egypt had suddenly re-emerged as a major regional power. This was the era of the New Kingdom. During the five centuries of the New Kingdom, Egypt would reach its greatest territorial extent and build some of its most impressive monuments and artifacts. Despite recovering Memphis, their kings saw no reason to move the capital again, so they now ruled once again from the city of Thebes, upriver in Upper Egypt. By then, Egypt had also adopted horse-drawn chariot technology from its Hyksos enemies, and its armies now consisted of powerful contingents of these vehicles. During these centuries, Egypt saw the rule of its first great pharaoh, Hatshepsut, who was one of its most prolific builders.

She built the imposing Karnak temple complex and the majestic mortuary temple known as the Holy of Holies. She also undertook a voyage in five ships to the land of Punt, somewhere in Africa, and brought incense trees and other goods to Egypt, which she celebrated in an inscription. The ships returned with the wonders of the land of Punt and with all the good woods of Ta-Netjer, with heaps of incense, with trees that produced green fragrance, with ebony and pure ivory, with gold and green agates found in the land of the Amu, with skins of the southern panthers.

Never since the beginning of the world has any king brought such wonders. The New Kingdom would also see some of the most surprising dramas emerge in the royal courts of Egypt. Of them, none has attracted as much attention as the story of a pharaoh. Some have described him as a revolutionary, others as a visionary, and still others as simply a madman. He was a ruler named Amunhotep IV. Amunhotep came to the throne around 1350 BC. He had inherited his name from his father, who had ruled as Amunhotep III. Like most Egyptian names, he included the name of a god, Amun, and meant that Amun is satisfied.

Amun had long been the god of the city of Thebes and was considered the god of fertility and wind. But when the Hyksos were expelled from Egypt and Thebes became the capital again, this god Amun received a promotion of sorts. He unified with the sun god Ra to create a composite deity now known as Amun-Ra, the perfect symbol of the power of a new united Egypt. Amun-Ra was depicted as a man carrying a golden staff and wearing a high crown, and would later be shown with blue skin. This new deity was placed at the head of all the gods that the Egyptians worshiped; the king of the gods and creator of the universe.

A hymn to Amun-Ra describes the primacy of his position. Lord of truth, father of the gods, maker of men, creator of all animals, lord of things that exist, creator of the foundation of life. Pharaoh Amunhotep IV would keep his name for the first four years of his rule, but around his fifth year on the throne, he made the unprecedented decision to change his royal name. This is because he had a vision of a new belief system that he wanted to spread throughout Egypt. He wanted to end the disorder of Egyptian religion and the system of different gods in different cities, different temples, cults and priests.

He devised a new system of worship that centered not on any god but on the sun itself, which he seems to have believed was his true father. This new god would be represented as a naked and impersonal disk that would bathe the Earth with rays of light. He would be called simply the orb, or in Egyptian, Aten. A surviving hymn to Aten, perhaps even written by the pharaoh himself, shows the enormous power this new god was supposed to have. O only god, as there is no other, you created the world according to your desire. You are in my heart;

There is no other who knows you. Every land talks every day about its rise. Around the fifth year of his reign, Pharaoh Amunhotep abandoned his old name that respected the god Amun and changed it to a new name for his new god. This new name meant effective spirit for Aten. Now he was Pharaoh Akhenaten. Akhenaten is the first person in recorded history to start a new religion by himself. He was also the first monotheist. In Akhenaten's kingdom, only Aten could be worshiped. The temples dedicated to Amun were eventually closed and all worship of the old god was prohibited.

The king even sent workers and soldiers to every corner of Egypt, where they broke into the temples with hammers and chisels and cut the name of Amun from the walls. His determination to rid his kingdom of Amun was so great that he even sent workers to climb to the top of the red pyramid of Sneferu to engrave Amun's name on the pyramid's highest cornerstone. To the Egyptians, accustomed as they were to placating a host of deities with prayers and offerings, this radical change must have seemed a terrifying and risky gamble. Many must have feared turning their backs on their old, trusted gods and associating themselves with this new and untested ideology.

But the king's word was the king's word, and for the most part, they seem to have agreed. At first, Akhenaten converted old temples in Thebes to Aten, and even began building some new ones, but he soon abandoned the idea. The ancient temples of Thebes were covered in carvings and hieroglyphics praising other gods, and the depth of its history could not be erased overnight. Thebes was also home to a powerful priestly class that resisted his reforms. In response to this problem, Akhenaten made the remarkable decision to build an entirely new capital. He would build it in the middle of the desert, in a completely uninhabited place halfway between Memphis and Thebes.

He would call this city the skyline of Aten, or in Egyptian, Akhetaten. Standing out on the bare, flat plain where he hoped to build his new city, Pharaoh Akhenaten gave the following proclamation to his courtiers. Atón wishes that a monument be made for him with an eternal and imperishable name. It was Aton, my father, who advised me on this matter. No official has ever given me advice, nor have any of those in the entire country. In Aketaton I will make the house of Aten. This new city would be equipped with everything a royal capital needed; palaces for Akhenaten and his main wife Nefertiti, along with his four other wives, gardens, tombs, administrative buildings and workshops and, of course, a vast temple complex dedicated to the new god, Aten.

The construction of this city would take at least eight years, and when it was completed, in the twelfth year of his reign, Akhenaten held a magnificent ceremony. It was the year 1342 BC. In his new capital, Akhenaten received delegations from across the region, from the Hittites, from Syria and from Mediterranean islands such as Cyprus and Crete, as well as from the Nubian lands of Punt and Kush in the south, all here to bear witness for the glory of his new city and the successful conversion of his empire. The priests may have complained, the common people may have fretted, but he had finally done it.

The ceremony must have been grand, full of celebration and pomp, musicians and dancers, burning of incense and feasting of excellent foods. We can imagine the foreign guests listening to the singing of hymns like the next to the new god, Aten. You created the world according to your desire; all men, cattle and wild beasts, everything that is on the earth, walking on their feet, and everything that is on high, flying with its wings. To the countries of Syria and Nubia, to the land of Egypt, you put everyone in their place, you provide for their needs. Their languages ​​are separate in speech, and so are their natures.

Each one has his food and the length of his life is counted. But the consequences of this display of royal pomp were disastrous. A plague was spreading through the Middle East sincesome time ago, affecting lands in Syria and the Hittite Empire in what is now Türkiye. A group of texts written at this time, known as the Hittite Plague Prayers, call on the gods to deliver them from this disaster. For twenty years, people have been dying in Hatti. Will the plague of Hatti never be eliminated? I can't control the worry in my heart. I can no longer control the anguish of my soul.

With foreign dignitaries arriving from all over the region with large retinues and no doubt groups of slaves in tow, a deadly dose of this disease reached the heart of Egypt that year, and from there it would have spread throughout the Nile. Had Akhenaten expected that If this ceremony ensured the trust of his people in their new god, then it could not have failed more dramatically. In the pandemic that followed, no one was safe. Numerous deaths may even have occurred within Akhenaten's family, including perhaps his mother, his wife, and three of his daughters. If the situation was so serious, even in the relatively protected royal court, we can assume that in the general population the effects were even more devastating.

To the people of Egypt, this incomprehensible disaster must have seemed like the ancient gods' judgment on the man who had so arrogantly turned his back on them. Akhenaten died only a few years later, around 1335 BC. C., after seventeen years of government. After his death, some members of his family attempted to maintain the cult of Aten in the new capital of Akhetaten, now ravaged by the plague. They would take turns ruling for the next four years, but apparently without much success. Now, the entire empire seemed to be on the verge of collapse. But finally, one of Akhenaten's sons, a boy of only eight years old, came to the throne.

His father had given him the hopeful name of Tutankh-Aten, or living image of the Aten, but she would not rule with him for long. Turning his back on his father's new faith and the enormous celebrations throughout the empire, in the third year of his rule, he changed his name to the one we now remember him, the living image of Aten, but of the ancient god Amun. , now received triumphantly by the people of Egypt. His name was Tutankh-Amun. As symbolized by his name change, the boy king Tutankh-Amun turned back a great number of his father's attempts at reform.

He put an end to all worship of the god Aten and restored Amun to supremacy in Thebes. Tutankh-Amun lifted the ban on cults of other gods and restored the traditional privileges of the priesthood. Many temples dedicated to the Aten at Thebes and elsewhere were torn down, and their painted bricks were used as filler in the walls of other temples. Everyone seemed to agree; It was better to forget the whole sorry business of Akhenaten. Today, the boy king Tutankh-Amun is perhaps the most famous of all the Egyptian pharaohs, more famous than the great Cheops and Khafre of Giza, or the pharaohs Djoser and Sneferu, who perfected the pyramidal form.

He is more famous than Kamose or Ahmose, who reunited the kingdom and expelled the Hyksos, more famous than his colorful father Akhenaten or the great queen Hatshepsut. But there's nothing about his reign that he really deserves that level of recognition. In fact, this boy king died when he was still a teenager, after only nine years of rule. He appears to have been a good and popular king, and to have gotten Egypt back on track after his father's erratic reign. But the source of his fame was actually an absolute historical accident. When he died in 1323 BC. C., the boy king Tutankh-Amun was buried in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings.

It was not a particularly resplendent royal tomb and was a far cry from the glorious pyramids of the Old Kingdom. But shortly after it was sealed, there was a possible flash flood in this part of the necropolis, and the entrance to the tomb was buried in sand and rock. This left him completely hidden. For the next 3,300 years, tomb robbers would roam the Valley of the Kings, robbing almost all of the great Pharaoh's tombs, taking his treasures, removing his mummies, and stripping away his decorations. But buried in sand, Tutankh-Amun's tomb remains sealed. For this reason, it remained completely intact until 1922, when it was discovered by Egyptologist Howard Carter, and all its artifacts were recovered to international amazement.

Today, the most glorious of them, the golden funerary mask of Tutankh-Amun, is one of the most famous objects of the ancient world, a resplendent image of royal wealth and power. Sometimes it can be difficult to remember that this golden image is also a portrait of a child who had power thrust upon him in a time of turmoil and strife, looking down upon us from the dark depths of time. The New Kingdom of Egypt would reach its peak about fifty years after the reign of Tutankh-Amun. It would come during the rule of perhaps the greatest Egyptian pharaoh.

He came to the throne under the name Ramses II, but would go down in history as Ramses the Great. Ramses ascended the throne at the age of fourteen, in 1279 BC. At the time, Egypt's Mediterranean coast was being devastated by groups of pirates, and he spent much of his first government dealing with this nuisance. But he is most famous for pushing Egypt's borders northward into the region of Syria. Over the previous centuries, a powerful rival had grown in the mountains of what is now Turkey and was steadily extending his influence in all directions. This was the powerful Hittite Empire, centered on its mountain fortress capital of Hattusha.

The Hittites were a relatively new power in the region, but their territory was rich and extensive. They had mastered the use of tanks in warfare, converting them from light hit-and-run vehicles into heavy, armored shock troops. For the past two centuries, Egypt had been fighting increasingly bitter wars with them over who would control the region of Palestine. In the fourth year of his reign, Ramses II assembled an expeditionary force and crossed the Sinai Desert to Gaza, and from there marched north. An epic poem written about this expedition exalts the enormous strength that Ramses brought. His Majesty traveled north, with his infantry and her chariots.

He began to walk down the right path. All foreign countries trembled before him. His leaders brought his tribute, and all the rebels came prostrating themselves for fear of the personality of his Majesty. Ramses' goal was to capture the strong fortress city of Kadesh, situated along the sandy shores at a fork of the Orontes River. For years, Kadesh had been pitting the Hittites against Egypt, allying himself first with one and then the other. Now Ramses was determined to finally seize Kadesh for Egypt. He marched north with four of his divisions, named after the gods Amun, Ra, Seth and Ptah.

With him he brought thousands of chariots and a unit of elite horsemen which he sent by sea, telling them to land on the coast and ride inland to meet him the day he arrived at Kadesh. At first everything seemed to be going well. On their way, the pharaoh's scouts captured a pair of Shasu tribesmen, who told him that the Hittite king was hiding further north. They said he was afraid of the power of Egypt. He had left Kadesh helpless. Thrilled by this news, Ramses abandoned all caution and rushed north to seize the city with only one of his four divisions, his proud troops of Amun, but this would prove to be a fatal mistake.

Ramses didn't know it yet, but these members of the Shasu tribe were actually agents of the Hittite king sent to lure him into a trap. When he arrived at Kadesh, Ramses set up his camp next to a stony stream and his scouts delved into the surrounding landscape to look for any threats. Some of these explorers came across a pair of Hittite soldiers who were lying in the brush, watching them. They clashed and the Egyptians managed to capture the Hittites. Perhaps after a severe beating, these men revealed what awaited the Egyptians nearby: the full power of the Hittite armies gathered in ambush, hidden behind the imposing fortress of Kadesh.

Kadesh's poem records this imposing force. Now the unfortunate enemy of Hatti had arrived, having gathered together all the foreign countries to the ends of the sea; the land of Hatti in its entirety. They covered the mountains and valleys like grasshoppers with their multitudes. He left neither silver nor gold in his land, but stripped it of all his possessions and gave them to all foreign countries to take with them into battle. Ramses became furious with his general for allowing this to happen. He had rushed forward with his Amun division, and was now critically overloaded, with his reinforcements in Ra's division still on the way.

The Hittites did not allow the Egyptians to regroup. Before the Ra division could arrive, a terrifying force of 2,500 Hittite chariots emerged from hiding and crossed the river plain. Hittite chariots were the tanks of their time, heavy and armored, their riders covered in chain mail to the toes. These chariots entered and crashed into Ra's regiment, who was frantically trying to form a shield wall. The Hittites dispersed this division completely and then surrounded the Egyptian camp. Ramses was surrounded, isolated from his reinforcements and now outnumbered. But in this terrible situation, he tells how he gathered his men and led them in a desperate charge against the enemy.

I found the twenty-five hundred lights of the chariots in whose midst I was turning into piles of corpses before my horse. None of them found their hand to fight, for their hearts shook in their bodies with the terror of me, and all their arms were helpless so that they could not shoot, nor find the courage to take up their javelins. Whether or not this aggrandizing account is an accurate description of that day, it is clear that the tide began to turn. Egyptian soldiers were elite fighters and many of the Hittite forces may have been mercenaries or recruits.

After destroying the Ra division and entering the Egyptian camp, the chariots became stuck and many of the Hittite soldiers, believing that the battle was already over, began to loot rather than press their advantage. More Egyptian reinforcements soon arrived from the south, and as the bloody afternoon wore on, the contingent of elite charioteers who had been sailing up the coast also arrived at the scene. The arrival of this cavalry on the horizon was enough to strengthen the determination of the Egyptian troops and break the will of the Hittites. Ramses offers a flowery interpretation of what happened next.

I made them dive into the water like crocodiles dive, because they fell face down, one on top of the other, while I killed among them whomever I wanted. Neither one could look back, nor another could turn, and he who fell could not get up. The Hittite army retreated and many of its soldiers were pushed into the Orontes River. When the next day dawned, the two sides clashed again, but both had been fatally weakened by the fighting of the previous days. After a few hours of bloody slaughter, Ramses retreated and the Hittite king sent him an offer of peace.

Pharaoh's hands were tied. The Egyptians lacked siege equipment to breach the strong walls of Kadesh, and the only option for taking the city would have been a prolonged siege, during which Ramses would have found his forces exposed to attack, poorly supplied, and prone to being surrounded. . Instead, he decided to declare victory and march back to Egypt. The Hittites, in turn, also declared victory and the city of Kadesh would escape from Ramses' hands. Despite the overflowing praise of Ramses and his glorious victory in the Kadesh poem, the war ended in a stalemate and the question of the city remained unresolved.

But it is clear that Ramses remembered his role during the battle with no small amount of pride, and would decorate the walls of his temple at Abu Simbel with a huge bas-relief carving of each of the twists and turns of the battle. The war with the Hittites would continue for fifteen more years, and during this time, Egypt often captured territory along the Mediterranean coast, only to lose it again the following year. Before long, both sides grew tired of this devastating conflict. The war finally came to an end with what went down in history as the first written peace treaty, the text of which has survived.

Behold, Hattusili, the ruler of the Hittites, is bound by treaty to Ramses, the chosen one of Ra, the great ruler of Egypt, from this day forward, so that perfect peace and brotherhood may be created between us forever; He being in brotherhood and peace with me, and I being in brotherhood and peace with him forever. The treaty was written on silver tablets and a copy was given to both the Hittites and the Egyptians. Its text was written in both hieroglyphs and Hittite cuneiform, but the two translations have slightly different wording. In a stroke of diplomatic genius, the Egyptian version states that the Hittites had come to beg Egypt for peace, which the Egyptians graciously accepted, while in the Hittite version, it was the Egyptians who asked to end the war.

Once both sides were able to save face, the destructive conflict was allowed tocame to an end and almost a century of relative peace ensued. Despite the pride Ramses felt in his battles, today it is this peace treaty that we remember most, and a replica of it hangs on the walls of the United Nations headquarters in New York. After what seemed like a lucky escape at Kadesh, Ramses turned his attention from war and focused on construction. He spent the next decades of his rule building temples and monuments throughout Egypt, and today, his name is the one that appears on most surviving monuments of any pharaoh.

This is due in part to his prolific building campaign, but also to the fact that he ensured that his name was etched deeper into the stone than any other pharaoh, so deeply that he could never be erased. Ramses II would rule for a total of sixty-six years and would be remembered as perhaps the greatest pharaoh of Egypt. His full Egyptian name was Usermaatre Setepenre Ramses, which the Greeks would later make into a name that was easier for them to pronounce; They would call him Ozymandias. More than a thousand years later, the Greek writer Diodorus of Sicily would visit Egypt and write an account of his visit to a monument to Ramses II.

At the entrance to it is a pylon built of variegated stone, two plethora wide and forty-five cubits high. The inscription reads: King of kings am I, Ozymandias. If anyone wants to know how great I am and where I am, let them surpass one of my works. Ramses would also build a new capital for his empire, and with his military ambitions in the north, he decided to locate it in the northeast of the Nile delta and, characteristically, named it after him, calling it Per- Ramses. , or the house of Ramses. An Egyptian poem would celebrate the beauty of this new city.

The residence is pleasant in life; His field is full of everything good. It is filled with provisions and food every day, its ponds with fish and its lakes with birds. Its meadows are full of grass, its banks have dates, its melons abound in the sands. Their barns are so full of barley and spelled that they reach to heaven; In the canal of the resident city swim red wedj fish, which live on lotus flowers. This city of Per-Ramesses has long been associated with the city of Ramses, which is referenced in the Hebrew Book of Exodus, the second book of the Hebrew Bible.

Exodus describes a population of Hebrews enslaved and forced to work in the construction of the city. The reality of the Exodus story has long been debated, and most historians now consider it a piece of ancient literature. There is no evidence that a large population of Hebrew slaves ever lived in Egypt, nor that the city of Per-Ramesses was built by slaves. It was most likely built using the usual Egyptian combination of skilled craftsmen and seasonal peasant workers. But given the proximity of the Nile Delta to the Levantine coast, it is certainly not impossible that some of these workers were Hebrews who had traveled through the Sinai to sell their labor in Egypt.

If that were the case, then, for one reason or another, they left no mark on the archaeological record, but perhaps left an indelible mark on our collective imagination. When Ramses finally died in 1213 BC. C., he was probably almost ninety years old. His reign had been one of the golden ages of Egypt, but his long rule had once again created the old king problem; all of his heirs were now also old. At the time of his death, twelve of his eldest sons had already died, and now his thirteenth son came to the throne at the age of about seventy years.

It was Pharaoh Merneptah. But just a few years into this man's reign, Egypt was attacked by a devastating new enemy. This was the Libyan town west of the Nile Delta. The king of Libya, a man named Meryey, had apparently planned his attack for some time. Suddenly, a large Libyan army invaded Egypt's northwestern border and was reinforced with groups of people from all over the Mediterranean, perhaps from Greece, Sardinia, Sicily, and other places across the sea. These were a diverse group of peoples who had suddenly begun to appear in increasing numbers throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Later they would be known as the people of the sea.

Pharaoh Merneptah commemorates this event on a carved stele. The unfortunate fallen leader of Libya, Meryre, son of Ded, has fallen upon the country of Tehenu with his archers; Sherden, Shekelesh, Ekwesh, Lukka, Teresh, taking the best of every warrior and every man of war in his country. He has brought his wife and his children; leaders of the camp, and he has reached the western boundary in the fields of Perire. Pharaoh Merneptah defeated this invasion and, as a warning to anyone else attempting such a surprise attack, had many of the invading soldiers impaled along the road to Memphis.

The princes prostrate themselves saying: Mercy! No one raises his head among the nine arches. Desolation is for Tehenu; Hatti calms down; Canaan is plundered with all evil. Hurray has become a widow. All the lands together are pacified. But these lands would not remain pacified for long. After the death of Pharaoh Merneptah around 1204 BC. BC, Egypt entered a period of civil conflict, with the descendants of Ramses fighting over who would take the crown. In this context, the entire region also began to once again experience a series of record droughts. It is not known for sure what caused this climate change.

As we saw in our second episode on the Bronze Age collapse, the cause may have been volcanic, and around this time a large eruption occurred on the Icelandic volcano of Hekla. Others have proposed that an eruption in Sicily around 1300 BC may have been to blame. C., or that the Thera supervolcano on Santorini may have resumed some activity about five hundred years after its last huge eruption. The cause may not have been volcanic at all and could be due to variations in the sun's activity or weather systems in the Atlantic, which deprive the Mediterranean of moisture. The reality was very similar to today;

The planet's climate system is fragile, interconnected and chaotic, and even relatively small changes in its balance can have devastating effects. During this time, previously green lands became dry and arid, and more plants adapted to desert landscapes flourished. Analyzes of sediment cores and oxygen isotopes in cave mineral deposits have shown that in the 13th and 12th centuries BC. C. it rains much less than in previous centuries. In addition to this scientific evidence, we can also see marks of severe drought in the written records of the region. Egypt's great rivals, the Hittites, in their rocky mountains, were especially affected by the drought.

A Hittite text has come down to us that seems to capture the spirit of this time and is known as the myth of Telepinu. It comes from a poetic convention known as the myth of the missing god, which describes how a certain deity is so offended by the misdeeds of humanity that he suffers a fit of sadness and abandons his duties. Telepinu was a god of agriculture, fertility and climate. The beginning of the text has been lost, so we do not know what humanity did to provoke his wrath, but the poem describes the deadly consequences of it.

Then soot covered the windows; Smoke invaded the house. The ashes lay in heaps on the hearth. Telepinu walked away. He took grain and abundance from the field and meadow. Telepinu went to the forest and buried himself in a grove. Immediately the seed stopped bearing fruit; Oxen, sheep and men stopped procreating, while even those who had conceived did not give birth. The slopes were bare; The trees were bare and did not put forth new branches. The pastures were empty; the springs dried up. There was famine in the land; Men and gods were about to die of hunger.

While the Egyptians may have celebrated this weakening of their great rival, in Egypt the situation was not much better. A text dated around 1200 BC. C. is called Lamento amón and represents a lament of pain in a time of darkness. Come to me, Father Amun, protect me in this bitter year of confrontation. God shines in the sun, but he will not shine. Winter presses hard on summer; the months happen in reverse; The disheveled hours pass drunkenly. To you, Amon, those who have fallen on high cry out; These words came in the poisoned air, spoken by the shepherds in the fields and in the swamps, by those who beat the clothes on the banks of the river, by the district police who abandoned their police stations, by the horned beasts in our burning deserts .

From this period of unrest and chaos in the royal court of Egypt, which lasted approximately a century, a military strongman named Setnakhte would eventually rise to power. He would rule for only three years before dying and passing the throne to his young son. This child was the empire's last hope to turn around its faltering fortunes, and if that hope was to be maintained, there was only one name under which he could rule. His parents would name her after his great predecessor, who had ruled almost a century earlier and had fought at the Battle of Kadesh. And so, this child would rule as Ramses III.

This new king, Ramses, was a determined and tenacious ruler, and it is clear that he openly admired and sought to emulate the legendary pharaoh of old. He even went so far as to name all of his children after the children of Ramses II, and also gave them all the same positions in his court. It was clear that he wanted to do everything possible to recreate the days of glory that had escaped Egypt's reach, as he writes in one of his inscriptions. Rejoice, O Egypt, to the highest heaven, for I am ruler of the south and the north on the throne of Atum.

The gods have made me king of Egypt, to be victorious, to expel them from the lands through it; They decreed the kingdom to me when I was a child, and my kingdom is full of abundance. Under other circumstances, Ramses might have been one of Egypt's great rulers, but the entire region would soon be convulsed by a series of bitter wars. One of the great drivers of these conflicts was the dispersed group of peoples who first appeared during the reign of Pharaoh Merneptah and who are known as the sea peoples. These invaders were now descending upon the entire region in increasing numbers, apparently spurred by widespread crop failures in northern and western Europe.

Powerful trading cities such as the port city of Ugarit had already been attacked by sea, apparently by complete surprise, and were destroyed so completely that they were never occupied again. Egypt's great rivals, the Hittites, were now on the brink of collapse, while the region's trade networks went into free fall. Ramses remembers this time of conflict when these invaders from the north descended on the coast. The northerners on their islands were disturbed and swept away by the battle. No one stood before their lands; of Keta, Carchemish, Arvad and Alasa, were wasted. They set up camp in a place of Love.

They devastated their people and their land as something that is not. When Ramses received news of the Sea People attacks, he would have been pharaoh for about eight years. He had already repelled two more invasions from Libya and his confidence must have been growing. But the news disturbed him and he soon learned that the fleet of the sea peoples was on the move and headed for Egypt, as he relates in the inscription of his mortuary temple at Medinet Habu. They came with fire prepared before them, heading towards Egypt. His main supporters were Peleset, Thekel, Shekelesh, Denyen and Weshesh.

Their lands joined together and they placed their hands on the earth until the Circle of the Earth. His hearts were confident, full of his plans. Ramses knew that these attackers would have to be stopped and decided to resist at the mouth of the Nile, the lush and fertile delta. He would have to take advantage of the strengths the Egyptian army still had in this challenging terrain. He decided to lay an ambush and give the sea peoples a surprise attack of their own. Now through this god, the lord of the gods, I was prepared and armed to catch them like wild birds.

I equipped my border in Zahi, ready before them. I made the chiefs, the infantry captains, and the nobles equip the mouths of the harbor like a strong wall, with warships, galleys, and barges. They were fully manned from stem to stern, with brave warriors bearing their weapons, soldiers of all the best in Egypt, who were like lions roaring upon the mountain tops. Their horses trembled in every limb, ready to crush the countries under their feet. As the enemy ships accumulated, Ramses gathered archers on the banks, supported by thousands of spearmen and cavalry, all hidden among the reeds.

The tension must have been tremendous, all the soldiers of the Egyptian army holding their breath and waiting for the first sign of an enemy ship. Then, at last, a sail was sighted. Then came another and another, until the entire fleet of the sea peoples was in sight. The Egyptians must have been able to hear the creak of 10,000 oars, the beating of drums, the shouts of helmsmen and soldiers. Then, once the ships of thesea ​​people came within range, Ramses attacked. Arrows flew out of the reeds and rained down on the ships. Panicked, the invaders attempted to land on the banks, but as they did so, Egyptian spearmen appeared outside the tree line and greeted them with a wall of shields.

While the enemy was held at bay, the Egyptian navy sailed down the river. Those who reached my limits, their hearts and souls are finished forever and ever. As for those who had gathered before them at the sea, the burning flame was before them, before the mouths of the harbor, and a metal wall on the shore surrounded them. They were swept away, overturned and thrown onto the beach; They were killed and their galleys were piled up from the stern to the bow, while all their belongings were thrown into the water. So I made the waters recede to remember Egypt, and when they mention my name in their land, may it consume them with fear.

Pharaoh's plan had worked. The Egyptians were the first people to drive back these maritime invaders and stop their campaign of destruction. The inscription of Ramses at Medinet Habu ends on the following triumphant note. Rejoice, O Egypt; I have removed the mourning that was in your hearts, and I have made you dwell in peace. Those I struck down will not return. But despite their victory, the land of the pharaohs now stood alone in a devastated region. Virtually every other society around them had been gutted and reduced to ashes. Many long-established civilizations—the Mycenaean Greeks, the Hittites, Ugarit, and Babylon—had collapsed and civil order had given way to chaos.

The precarious trade routes that everyone had relied on for supplies of bronze and other goods were now broken, and Egypt's economy entered a steep and unstoppable decline. At the end of this period, which is known as the collapse of the Late Bronze Age, Egypt was a shadow of its former self. When other enemies invaded its borders, Egypt was able to fight them, but its treasury became so depleted that it never fully recovered its imperial power. The first workers' strike in recorded history occurred during the 29th year of the reign of Ramses III, when Egypt could no longer provide food rations to its elite artisans who were constructing the king's tomb in the village of Deir el-Medina.

The lack of rations lasted so long that the workers finally marched through the city shouting the following song. We are hungry. There is no more clothing, no oil, no fish, no vegetables. Send a message to Pharaoh. If food did not reach these crucial workers, we can only imagine the dire situation throughout the kingdom. The dispute dragged on for weeks, with one protest leader even threatening to damage a royal monument if they were not paid. It was a threat they would never have dared make unless the Pharaoh's authority began to be seriously undermined. Ramses III ruled for another two decades after his battle with the Sea Peoples, for a total reign of thirty-one years, but in 1156 BC.

C., some members of his family were beginning to get impatient. In the Egyptian court, all the women, the king's wives and mother and other consorts, lived together in a large palace complex with their own land. This was convenient for the king, but could also encourage court intrigue. There was a strict hierarchy among the pharaoh's queens and everyone knew that the children of his main wife would be his heirs before anyone else. Some of the women who were lower on this scale could sometimes resort to conspiracies to improve their positions and perhaps get their own sons on the throne.

One of these women was a queen named Tiye. Tiye was Ramses' secondary wife and her son Pentawer was not in line for the throne. To remedy this situation, she initiated a plot that would go down in history as the harem conspiracy. Soon, he brought in other members of the king's household and even high-ranking members of the government, as a later papyrus records. They are the abomination of the earth. The big criminal, who was then head of the chamber, was in cahoots with Tiye and the women of the harem. He had made common cause with them; He had begun to proclaim his words to his mothers and his brothers who were there, saying: Riot the people!

He incites rebellion against his lord! Alarmingly, one of the palace women had written to her brother named Khaem-waset, a commander of the Nubian troops in the south, and gained her support for her plot. Others had even resorted to supernatural methods, making wax effigies of the king's bodyguards and cursing them to aid his plan. His plan was clear; kill Ramses and install Queen Tiye's son, Pentawer, as pharaoh. The date they chose to attack was during the annual ceremony known as the Beautiful Valley Festival, which was celebrated in Thebes each year on the new moon of the second month of the harvest season of Shemu.

During this festival, which was one of the most important of the year, the pharaoh went down to the river in a large and colorful procession, carrying the statues of the three gods of Thebes; Amun, Mut and Khonsu. He would then board his royal barge and sail with the statues to the Theban necropolis to visit his great temple, as described in an inscription by a Theban priest. Let us praise Amun, kissing the earth before the Lords of the Gods on his festival, the first day of the brightness of Shemu, the day of the journey to the valley.

Here, citizens made offerings of food, drink and flowers, while boats sailed down the river with three statues. As the riotous, days-long festival progressed, the conspirators took advantage of the interruption to attack the king. It was the fifteenth day of Shemu, when the pharaoh was resting in the royal harem in the Western Tower of Medinet-Habu, perhaps thinking about his role in the upcoming festivities, when a group of assassins crept up on him with knives. His attack was fast and brutal. Modern scanning of the mummy of Ramses III reveals that his throat was cut to the bone with a sharp weapon, severing the trachea, esophagus and major blood vessels.

Death would have followed in a matter of seconds. Ramses has no defensive wounds, suggesting that he was caught completely off guard, but, curiously, his big toe was cut off at the time of the attack. This seems like an unlikely injury to suffer during a fight, and studies of his mummy have shown that embalmers fashioned him a prosthetic finger to take with him into the afterlife. This suggests that the original finger was never recovered, perhaps indicating that someone took it as proof that he was dead or as a grizzly bear trophy. Ramses III had saved Egypt from the sea peoples, but now he lay dying in a pool of his own blood, betrayed by his own family.

But the conspirator's plot did not go as planned. After the bloody murder, the son of Ramses III was able to crush the coup and seize the throne. All the conspirators were tried, as were all those who had heard about the conspiracy but did not denounce it. In total, twenty-eight people were executed and, as a final punishment, even had their names cruelly changed after their deaths. The brother of one of the conspirators, who had commanded his Nubian troops in the south, was originally called Khaemwaset, a name meaning from Thebes, but after his execution he was renamed Binemwaset, or wrong in Thebes.

Another's name, Meryra, meant loved by Ra, but they gave him the new, somewhat spiteful name, Mesedsura, or Ra hates him. Although order in the royal succession had been restored, Egypt was in a greatly reduced situation. Ramses' death was followed by years of disputes between his heirs. Three of his sons would become kings at different times, each feeling the need to commemorate him and shore up his own rightful legitimacy by reigning as Ramses IV, VI and VIII. In fact, the next eight consecutive pharaohs would be named Ramses in honor of the slain king, but many of these rulers were ineffective and reigned for only a few years each.

Meanwhile, Egypt became increasingly beset by continuing droughts, lack of seasonal flooding, famine, civil unrest, and official corruption. In this context, during the rule of Ramses XI, a new power had begun to fill the void left by royal authority. These were the high priests of Amun in Thebes. This priesthood had become not only very powerful, but extremely wealthy. Through a centuries-long acquisition game, the priests of Amun now controlled two-thirds of all temple lands in Egypt and ninety percent of all Egyptian ships, along with mountains of gold. Furthermore, they were the main prophets and interpreters of the will of the god Amun-Ra and exercised great influence over the kings and their decisions.

Over the past few centuries, they had changed the rules of the priesthood so they could pass on their positions to their sons, essentially becoming a kind of feudal royalty in the hot lands of Upper Egypt. An inscription on the tomb of a high priest named Nebwenenef describes the power of this new hereditary role. You are now high priest of Amun. His treasure and his barn are under your seal. You are the CEO of his temple, and all its foundations are under your authority. The House of Hathor, Lady of Dendera, will now be under the authority of your son, as heir to the offices of your ancestors, the position you have held until now.

Soon, the high priests of Thebes became the de facto rulers of Upper Egypt, even buried in large tombs and commanding their own armies. In many ways, the pharaoh had become somewhat irrelevant and perhaps for that reason there would be no Ramses XII. With the death of Ramses XI, the Egyptian New Kingdom finally fractured less than eighty years after the victorious battle with the Sea Peoples. Egypt would never regain its former power. Over the next four centuries, Egypt's influence would suffer a steady but unstoppable decline. A text written at this time is called The Tale of Wenamun.

It describes an Egyptian diplomat who travels north to collect cedar wood as tribute from the Phoenician city of Byblos, but while he is there, he discovers that the pharaoh's name no longer has the kind of influence that he used to have. Wenamun is assaulted on his journey and appeals to the ruler of Byblos for help. That morning, when I got up, I went to the prince and said to him: I have been robbed in your port. You are now the prince of this land. You are the one who controls it. Look for my money! In fact, the money belongs to Amun-Ra, king of the gods, lord of the lands.

He said to me: Are you serious? Are you kidding? In fact, I don't understand the demand you make of me. To make matters worse, the king of Byblos refuses to pay the tribute of cedar wood that the pharaoh demands. Historians are not sure whether this story relates a real event or is simply a piece of literature, but either way, it points to the greatly diminished state of Egypt's position in the world, something that had clearly become common knowledge. The 21st dynasty that ruled from the northern Nile delta for much of the 8th century BC. C. was even descended from Libyan invaders, people from the northern coast of Africa to the west.

While the early Libyan pharaohs adopted classical Egyptian names, in the 22nd and 23rd dynasties they again gave their children more ethnically Libyan names and even wore Libyan feather headdresses to underline their identity. Still, these Libyan kings were a rebellious group who remained faithful to their old tribal loyalties and were frequently distracted by wars between themselves and their own lords and generals. Meanwhile, the high priests of Amun continued to rule southern Egypt from Thebes. But even further south, in the lands of Nubia, another power was emerging. This was the Nubian kingdom of Kush. As one of the two major African kingdoms south of Egypt, Kush was located at the fourth cataract of the Nile, around the present-day region of Sudan.

For centuries, this Nubian kingdom had been crushed under the boot of Egypt. In repeated expeditions up the Nile, Egyptian armies had eliminated any sign of a powerful rival appearing in East Africa. But now, with the New Kingdom of Egypt fractured and the Libyan kings ruling in the north, fighting among themselves, the Kushites were free to build their own power base. During Egypt's numerous attempts to invade and hold the Nubian lands, Egypt had left several powerful fortresses to the Kushites. One of them had even become the capital of Kush, the city of Napata, but the Egyptians had also left something else; that is, their religion.

The upper classes of Kush had long adopted Egyptian gods and forms of worship. The Kushite rulers even referred to themselves as sons of Ammon. When Herodotus traveled along the Nile in the following centuries, he described this region, which he knew as Ethiopia. Above Elephantine, the country now begins to be inhabited by Ethiopians, and half the population of the island are Ethiopians and half Egyptians. Near the island there is a large lake, on the shores of which nomadic Ethiopians live. The local people worship no other gods except Amun and Osiris. They honor them greatly and have a divination place sacred to Amun.

Although Egypt had stoppedbuilding pyramids more than a thousand years earlier, the Kushite kings had resumed building their own pyramids in the classical Egyptian style. In some ways, the Kush had become more Egyptian than the Egyptians. The kingdom was also becoming wealthy, its economy boosted by the Nubian gold mines it controlled and trade with sub-Saharan Africa. This wealth soon gave rise to a powerful army. A king of Kush named Kashta would take advantage of the opportunity the situation offered him. While the Libyan kings of Egypt quarreled and quarreled among themselves, Kashta worked to gain influence over the high priests of Thebes.

Finally, he had his own daughter given the powerful title of wife of the god of Amun in the great temple of Thebes. Once he was in that position, he acted to consolidate his power and claimed Thebes and all of Upper Egypt for his father's kingdom of Kush. The Libyan kings of the Nile Delta, distracted by their civil wars, did nothing to stop them. Upper Egypt was now ruled by the Nubians. When the Kushite king Kashta died, his son Piye inherited what was now the Kushite Empire. Sometime around 720 BC. C., King Piye marched his Nubian armies down the Nile and conquered the fractured states of Lower Egypt.

Piye was clearly pragmatic in his approach and allowed local governors to remain in office as long as they swore allegiance to him. A victory stele he carved records his victories and dedicates them to the ancient Egyptian gods. Listen to what I have done by surpassing the ancestors. I am the king, the representation of god, who came out of the womb marked as a ruler, who is feared by those older than him, whose father knew and whose mother perceived even in the egg that he would be a ruler, loved by the gods, the son of Ra, beloved of Amun.

His son Shebitku solidified these conquests and united Egypt once again. Over the next century, Egypt would be ruled by the 25th dynasty, the Nubian pharaohs. Over the following decades, these Nubian rulers displayed an enthusiastic embrace of Egyptian culture. They used the Egyptian language, gave themselves Egyptian names, and worshiped the Egyptian gods with apparent devotion. They even embarked on an enthusiastic pyramid-building program in Nubia, the first the region had seen for centuries, although nothing like the grand scale of the Old Kingdom. But this flowering of Egyptian culture would not last long. This is because a power had finally emerged in the north that would eclipse the Egyptian Empire forever.

That was the empire of Assyria. As we saw in our thirteenth episode, Assyria had emerged in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia and, in the 7th century BC. C., was perhaps the most powerful empire on Earth. They routinely amassed armies of over 100,000 soldiers, and under the reign of the paranoid King Esarhaddon, they were now extending their power along the Mediterranean coast, and soon dreamed of taking it to the banks of the Nile itself. The Nubian pharaoh who would face them was a man named Taharqa. Taharqa was the fifth king of the 25th dynasty of Nubia and was clearly proud of his heritage and the color of his skin.

He ensured that the statues he commissioned were carved from hard black granite and polished smooth. He had arrived in Egypt as a young prince and had been chosen to rule after the death of the previous pharaoh, as he writes in an inscription. I was brought from Nubia among the royal brothers whom his majesty had brought. Since I was with him, he loved me more than all his brothers and his children, so he distinguished me. I won the hearts of all the nobles and was loved by everyone. Only after the royal falcon had flown into the sky did I receive the crown in Memphis.

Interestingly, Taharqa also believed in the benefits of long-distance running and insisted that all of his soldiers participate in nightly marathon practice. The king himself was on horseback to watch his army run as he exercised with them in the desert behind Memphis at the ninth hour of the night. They reached the great lake at dawn and returned to the residence at the third hour of the day. This extreme resistance would serve them well and they would engage in successful attacks on Libyan positions across the desert and capture territory in Palestine. Throughout his reign, Taharqa was lucky; A series of exceptional Nile floods brought about a period of abundant harvests.

The funds were clearly so generous that he donated large amounts of gold to the temple of Amun and restored several religious centers, as one of his inscriptions boasts. As His Majesty is the one who loves the god, he spends the day and lies at night seeking what is useful to the gods, building their temples that have fallen into decay, giving life to their structures as in primitive times, building their warehouses, providing altars, presenting them with offerings of fine gold, silver and copper. Now, the heart of His Majesty is content to do what suits them every day.

This land is flooded in his time as it was in the time of the lord of all, every man slept until dawn and never said, Oh, I wish I had. Egypt now had a size and stability it had not seen since the collapse of the New Kingdom almost four hundred years earlier. It must have seemed like the dawn of a new era of prosperity, but this luck was not to last. In the year 674 BC. In Taharqa's seventeenth year on the throne, news arrived that a terrifying army was approaching from the north. This horde belonged to King Esarhaddon of Assyria.

Few enemies had ever defeated the Assyrians on the battlefield, and fear must have spread along the Nile. But somehow, against all odds, Taharqa was able to repel this force. The later Greek historian Herodotus records a fantastic story in which the invading Assyrian army was attacked by a horde of nocturnal plagues. Where the road enters Egypt, enemies arrived, and during the night they were invaded by a horde of field mice that gnawed at quivers, bows, and shield handles, with the result that many died, fleeing unarmed the next day. For this reason, to this day, in a temple there is a statue of the Egyptian king with a mouse in his hand.

It is difficult to know what exactly this account records. Perhaps it was an outbreak of plague among the Assyrian army that forced them to return home. Perhaps it was even a daring nighttime ambush by Taharqa's men, conditioned as they were to run long distances in the middle of the night, attack, and then disappear into the darkness. With their camp destroyed and their army in disarray, the Assyrian army would have been pursued by Egyptian chariots to their borders, but we may never know. It is perhaps not surprising that Assyrian sources make no mention of what must have been a humiliating defeat.

The pain of this shame was clearly enough for King Esarhaddon three years later to gather an even larger Assyrian army and return to Egypt. This time, there were no obstacles in his way. The Assyrians flooded the Nile delta and Taharqa fled from Memphis to the south. The Assyrian advance was so rapid that Pharaoh was unable to evacuate his family when he abandoned the city. Esarhaddon's troops took Memphis and the Assyrian king wrote the following inscription rejoicing in his victory. I killed a multitude of his men and wounded him five times with the point of my javelin, with wounds from which there was no healing.

Memphis, his royal city, in half a day, with mines, tunnels, assaults, I besieged, captured, destroyed, devastated, burned with fire. His queen, her harem, her heir, and the rest of his sons and daughters, their property and goods, their horses, their cows, and their sheep, in countless quantities, I took to Assyria. I uprooted the root of Kush from Egypt, and no one from there escaped to submit to me. Above all of Egypt I appointed new kings, viceroys, governors, commanders, overseers and scribes. My royal tribute and my tax, annually without ceasing, I imposed upon them. But if Asarhaddon expected to easily absorb Egypt into his empire, he was wrong.

Barely a year later, the Nubian king Taharqa reappeared in the south, reinforced with troops from the kingdom of Kush. Numerous governors that Asarhaddon had installed immediately reverted allegiances to him, and it seemed that the entire Assyrian conquest might be undone. Enraged, King Esarhaddon returned to Egypt to crush this rebellious king, but his health failed during the journey and he died in the city of Harran without reaching Egypt. The son of Esarhaddon who ascended the throne was the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. Practically his first act as king was to gather an army and march into the rebellious province of Egypt to finish what his father had started.

Ashurbanipal easily overcame the now weakened Egyptian forces, recaptured Memphis, and, in 663 BC. C., he returned again to crush another round of rebellions. This time, he marched south along the Nile River and headed toward the ancient capital of Thebes. At that time, the Nubian king Taharqa had died and his nephew Tantamani occupied the precarious throne of Egypt. Tantamani faced the Assyrians in battle, but was defeated and with him Egypt's last hope would die. The Assyrian army then surrounded the defenseless city of Thebes. Ashurbanipal records what happened next on a carved cylinder. This city, all of it, I conquered with the help of Ashur and Ishtar.

Silver, gold, precious stones, all the riches of the palace, rich fabrics, precious linens, great horses, supervising men and women, two obelisks of splendid electro that weighed two thousand five hundred talents. I tore the doors of the temples from their bases and took them to Assyria. With this heavy booty I left Thebes. Against Egypt and Kush, I raised my spear and showed my power. The Assyrian sack of Thebes was the symbolic end of Egyptian power. Although Assyria would not hold Egypt for long and would collapse in just fifty years, Egyptian esteem would never truly recover. A century later, Egypt was conquered by the Achaemenid Persian Empire and, in 343 BC.

C., was conquered again by the Macedonian forces of Alexander the Great. When Alexander's empire collapsed, Egypt would be in the hands of one of his former generals, Ptolemy Soter. For the next three centuries, Egypt would be ruled by its Greek Ptolemaic dynasty, who spoke Greek and mostly refused to learn the native Egyptian language. These Ptolemies were still in power when the tide of Roman expansion swept across North Africa and eventually Egypt. The last independent ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt had a name that in Greek meant glory of her father, from kleos, meaning glory, and patra, meaning father.

Her name was Cleopatra. It is not clear whether Cleopatra was of Egyptian ancestry, as her mother is unknown, but she at least made an effort to learn Egyptian, as Plutarch recalls. It was a pleasure simply to hear the sound of her voice, with which, like a many-stringed instrument, she could pass from one language to another, so that there were few barbarian nations to whom she responded with an interpreter. ; to most of them she herself spoke, as to the Ethiopians, Hebrews, Arabs, Syrians, Parthians and many others, whose language she had learned, which was all the more surprising since most of the kings, her predecessors, barely took the hassle of acquiring the Egyptian language.

When Rome finally invaded and occupied Egypt, Cleopatra apparently committed suicide, probably by drinking poison or scratching herself with a needle dipped in toxin. Some ancient writers suggested the most florid and famous interpretation of her using a poisonous snake to commit suicide, and whether true or not, it has proven irresistible to generations of poets, including her most famous, William Shakespeare. With her death in August 30 BC. C., the last vestige of independent Egyptian power also died. On the day of her death, Cleopatra was at the height of more than three thousand years of Egyptian history. For her, the Great Pyramid of Giza was now more than 2,500 years old, meaning that Cleopatra lived closer to our time than to the construction of the Great Pyramid, for more than five hundred years.

As Egypt came under increasing foreign influence, its ancient culture gradually underwent a transformation. Over the following centuries, as the Greek alphabet became more prominent, the knowledge of how to read hieroglyphs was slowly lost, as a medieval Arab visitor records. I asked why the inscriptions covering the temple pyramids were indecipherable. He replied: Since the scholars and those who used this script disappeared and Egypt was occupied by a succession of foreign peoples, the Greek alphabet and writing prevailed and therefore they lost the understanding of the writing of their ancestors. The last known hieroglyphic inscription was written in 394 AD, in the temple of Philae, built on an island near the Nile cataract in Aswan.

By then, the now Christianized Roman Empire had banned the worship of pagan gods in the temples of Egypt, but this religious site was just outside the borders of Rome, so the worship of the ancient gods continued here, in the last of the great temples of Egypt. Here, the names of Ra and Ptah, Anubis and Hathor, Amun and Bastet, Seth and Horus, would still be spoken and sung, incense would still be burned, cats would still be fed, offerings would still be given, but this island temple was increasingly isolated. , surrounded by the crashing waters of a rapidly changing world.The last hieroglyphic inscription records the sad wish of a scribe named Nesmeterakhem, who wanted his inscription to last forever, like the carvings of his long-dead ancestors.

Before Mandulis, son of Horus, by the hand of Nesmeterakhem, son of Nesmeter, the Second Priest of Isis, for all time and eternity. Words spoken by Mandulis, lord of the Abaton, great god. Being the last inscription of its kind, it somewhat fulfilled his wish, but it is likely that when he carved this message on the temple wall, few people alive knew how to read it. As far as we know, the art of hieroglyphs died with him. The temple was eventually closed sometime in the 530s by the Byzantine emperor Justinian, and converted into a Christian church dedicated to Saint Stephen.

The era of Ancient Egypt had truly come to an end. Some 1,400 years later, in 1818, the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley would engage in a friendly competition with his friend, the poet Horace Smith. They had both read in a London newspaper about the forthcoming arrival at the British Museum of a remarkable fragment of a statue, brought by ship from the Ramesseum mortuary temple at Thebes in Upper Egypt. It was the head and torso of a statue of Egypt's greatest pharaoh, the hero of the Battle of Kadesh, Ramses II. The statue was part of a pair that had stood at the entrance to his temple.

The European colonial powers had been longing for that fragment of a statue for a long time. Napoleon Bonaparte had even attempted to remove it during his stay in Egypt in 1798, but discovered that most of the black diorite was too heavy to move. Now, with wooden rollers and hundreds of workers pulling ropes, the British team dragged the statue to the banks of the Nile, where it was transported downriver to London. After reading about this statue, Smith and Shelly agreed to gamble. Each of them would write a poem inspired by him and base his work on an extract from the writings of the Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily, who once visited the temple of Ramses II at Thebes.

Unfortunately for Horace Smith, history has decisively put an end to his competition, as his poem is little remembered, but Shelley's poem has become a classic, one of the greatest and best-known sonnets in the English language. . Titled Ozymandias, it is a poem that has become an emblem of the vain and glorious pride of rulers, the inevitable fall of tyrants, the overwhelming power of time and the transience of all things. I knew a traveler from an ancient land who said: Two enormous trunkless stone legs stand in the desert; Near them, on the sand, half sunken, lies a destroyed face, whose frown, wrinkled lips and grimace of cold authority say that its sculptor read well those passions that still survive, stamped on those lifeless things, the hand that mocked of them and the heart that fed; and on the pedestal these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;

Look at my works, Mighty Ones, and despair! There's nothing left. Around the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, stretch the lonely and level sands in the distance. On the wall of the tomb of a Middle Kingdom pharaoh Intef is a piece of literature known as Harper's Song, written in Egyptian hieroglyphs. It was a song designed to be sung at funerals and is more than 4,200 years old. At the time of writing his poem Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley could not have known anything about this piece of ancient literature, as the hieroglyphs would not be conclusively deciphered for several years.

But across the chasm of four millennia, he and the unknown author of this song describe a human emotion that is all too familiar to us, the deep sense of wonder and melancholy we feel when we look at ruined places, the ruined palaces of ancient buildings. . fallen emperors, in the tombs of kings whose age has turned to dust. As you listen, imagine the vast gulf of time that separates our world from theirs. Imagine the sadness of seeing your language forgotten and your cities crumbling. Imagine the tombs of ancient kings opened and plundered, the fallen pillars of empty temples, half buried in the sand, moving and rolling over the stones, while the great disk of the sun turns red and burning for the last time over the empire.

Of Egipt. A generation passes; another is left behind. This has been the case since ancient times. The gods of old rest in their pyramids, and yet the great and blessed also lie buried in their tombs. However, those who built large mansions no longer have their places. What has become of all of them? I have heard their words repeated over and over again, but where are their homes now? Its walls are in ruins and its places no longer exist, like something that has never existed. There is no return for them to explain their current state of being, to tell how they are doing, to soften our hearts until we make our journey to the place where they have gone.

So follow your heart and your happiness; conduct your affairs on Earth as your heart dictates, because that day of mourning will surely come for you, so spend your days with joy and do not get tired of living. No man takes his things with him, and none of those who leave can ever return. Thank you once again for listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast. I would like to thank my voice actors for this episode; Alexandra Boulton, Lachlan Lucas, Michael Hajiantonis, Tom Marshall-Lee, Nick Denton, Peter Walters, Rhy Brignell and Paul Casselle. Nassim El-Boujjoufi ​​​​did the readings in Arabic.

Seqnenra Mohammad Habib gave readings in ancient Egyptian. I would also like to thank my historical advisor for this episode, Egyptologist Dr. Chris Naunton. A full list of sources can be found in the description below and they are publicly available on the show's Patreon page. As some of you may already know, The Fall of Civilizations will soon be available in book form worldwide. The book is called The Fall of Civilizations: Stories of Greatness and Decline, written by me, Paul Cooper. It offers the definitive version of the show, updated, expanded and with attached maps and images. The book will arrive in April 2024 for UK readers and later in the year for US listeners.

Head to fallofcivilizations.com for more information and pre-order links. Every pre-order helps improve the book's ranking and supports the program. I love hearing your thoughts and responses on Twitter, so come and let me know what you thought. You can follow me @PaulMMCooper, and if you want updates on the podcast, announcements about new episodes, as well as images, maps and reading suggestions, you can follow the podcast at Fall_Of_Civ_Pod, with underscores separating the words. This podcast can only continue with the support of our generous subscribers on Patreon. You keep me going, you help me cover my costs, and you help me keep the podcast ad-free.

You've also allowed me to spend more time researching, writing, recording and editing, to deliver the episodes to you faster and give them as much life and detail as possible. I want to thank all my subscribers for making this happen. If you enjoyed this episode, consider heading over to patreon.com/fallofcivilizations_podcast, or just Google Fall of Civilizations Patreon. That's P-A-T-R-E-O-N, contributing something and helping keep the podcast going. For now, all the best and thanks for listening.