A History of Ancient Egypt

Marc Van De Mieroop

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781119620891
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Egyptian Ancient History
• Index: History

Explore the entire history of the ancient Egyptian state from 3000 B.C. to 400 A.D. with this authoritative volume

The newly revised Second Edition of A History of Ancient Egypt delivers an up-to-date survey of ancient Egypt's history from its origins to the Roman Empire's banning of hieroglyphics in the fourth century A.D. The book covers developments in all aspects of Egypt's history and their historical sources, considering the social and economic life and the rich culture of ancient Egypt.

Freshly updated to take into account recent discoveries, the book makes the latest scholarship accessible to a wide audience, including introductory undergraduate students. A History of Ancient Egypt outlines major political and cultural events and places Egypt's history within its regional context and detailing interactions with western Asia and Africa. Each period of history receives equal attention and a discussion of the problems scholars face in its study. The book offers a foundation for all students interested in Egyptian culture by providing coverage of topics like:

• A thorough introduction to the formation of the Egyptian state between the years of 3400 B.C. and 2686 B.C.
• An exploration of the end of the Old Kingdom and First Intermediate period, from 2345 B.C. to 2055 B.C.
• An analysis of the Second Intermediate Period and the Hyksos between 1700 B.C. and 1550 B.C.
• A discussion of Greek and Roman Egypt between 332 B.C. and A.D. 395.

Perfect for students of introductory courses in ancient Egyptian history and as background material for students of courses in Egyptian art, archaeology, and culture, A History of Ancient Egypt will also earn a place in the libraries of students taking surveys of the ancient world and those seeking a companion volume to A History of the Ancient Near East.

1
Introductory Concerns

Rather make my country’s high pyramides my gibbet and hang me up in chains.

(Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra Act 5, scene 2)

The tourist to Egypt who sails up the Nile from Cairo to Aswan gazes upon an abundance of grandiose monuments, often remarkably well preserved despite their enormous antiquity. Many of them are icons of ancient Egypt and have been so for centuries. Shakespeare’s audience recognized the image Cleopatra conjured up when she called the pyramids her gallows. Modern guided tours always include these same pyramids, as well as the great Amun temple at Luxor with the royal tombs across the river, and the much smaller temple of Isis at Philae between the Low and the High Aswan dams. These monuments, spread over hundreds of miles, are all different from what surrounds the traveler at home, alien in their function, their form, and their use of images and writing. They share so many characteristics that it is easy to forget that their builders lived countless years apart. More time passed between the construction of the pyramids at Giza and the building of the Philae temple we now see, than between the latter temple’s inauguration and us.

1.1 What is Ancient Egypt?

Chronological boundaries

It may seem easy to look at something – a monument, coffin, statue, or inscription – and call it ancient Egyptian, but it is not so simple to draw the boundaries of ancient Egypt both in time and space. In the late 4th century AD, the Roman emperor Theodosius issued an edict closing all Egyptian temples and dispersing the priesthood. His act ended the knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphs, which could no longer be taught. Can we take the withdrawal of official support for ancient Egyptian cults and writing systems as the end of ancient Egypt? Theodosius’s edict only affected a small minority of people that had long been under threat. Ancient Egyptian cultural characteristics had been immersed in a world inspired by Hellenistic, Roman, and Christian ideas for centuries. Certainly in political terms Egypt had lost its separate identity hundreds of years earlier. From the Persian conquest in 525 BC onward, but for brief spells of independence, the land had been subjected to outside control. In native traditions the Persian rulers were still considered part of the long line of Egyptian pharaohs, but their successors were different. Modern historians do not call the Greek and Roman rulers of Egypt pharaohs, although their Egyptian subjects continued to represent them with full pharaonic regalia. Is “Egypt after the pharaohs” no longer part of ancient Egyptian history then? Individual scholars and institutions use different approaches. Some histories of ancient Egypt end with Alexander of Macedon’s conquest in 332 BC, others at the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC, yet others run into the Roman Period up to 395 AD and Theodosius’s reign.

It is always difficult to draw a line after an era in history, as all aspects of life rarely changed simultaneously. More often the change in the sources that modern scholars use determines where they end historical periods. In Egypt’s case the gradual replacement of the traditional Egyptian language and writing systems by the Greek language and script necessitates a different type of scholarship. Most specialists of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing do not easily read Greek sources and vice versa. Although the ancient Egyptian scripts survived after the Greek conquest of the country, there was a constant increase in the use of Greek writing, which turns the modern study of Egypt into a different discipline. Yet, Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt in many respects preserved ancient Egyptian traditions and customs, so I will include a discussion of that period in this survey.

If the disappearance of ancient Egyptian writing in the late 4th century AD heralds the end of the civilization, does its invention around 3000 BC indicate the beginning? No single event announced a new era, but from around 3400 to 3000 BC radical changes that were clearly interrelated took place in Egypt and forged a new society. Those innovations included the invention of writing, a process that lasted many centuries from the earliest experiments around 3250 to the first entire sentence written out around 2750. In the last centuries of the 4th millennium BC the unified Egyptian state arose, and that period can serve as the beginning of Egyptian history despite its vague boundaries. Naturally, what preceded unification – Egyptian prehistory – was not unimportant and contained the germs of many elements of the country’s historical culture. Hence, I will sketch some of the prehistoric developments in this chapter to make the influences clear, but the creation of the state with the coincident invention of writing and other aspects of culture will indicate the start of Egypt’s history here.

Geographical boundaries

Where are the borders of ancient Egypt? Arabic speakers today use the same name for the modern country of Egypt as did the people of the Near East in the millennia BC, Misr. Other people employ a form of the Greek term Aegyptos, which may derive from Hikuptah, the name of a temple and neighborhood in the city Memphis. It is easy to equate the ancient and modern countries, but today’s remarkably straight borders, which imperial powers drew in modern times, do not mark the limits of ancient Egypt. We can better envision those by using as a starting point what is and always was the lifeline of the country, the Nile. Running through a narrow valley south of modern Cairo and fanning out into a wide alluvial plain north of the city, the river enables people to farm, live in villages and cities, and build and create the monuments and other remains we use to reconstruct the country’s history. From the 1st cataract at Aswan to the Mediterranean Sea it forms the core of Egypt, today as in the past. The people who lived in this core reached beyond it into the western and eastern deserts and upriver south of the 1st cataract. At times their reach was extensive, affecting distant places in the west, areas along the Mediterranean coast in the east and north, and parts of the Nile Valley deep into modern Sudan.

It is not always obvious how far ancient Egypt extended, and our ability to determine that often depends on research priorities and modern events. As tourists still do today, the earliest explorers of ancient Egypt focused their attention almost exclusively on the Nile Valley, where monuments and ancient sites are visible and in easy reach. It requires a different effort to venture into the deserts beyond the valley, very inhospitable and so vast that ancient remains are not always easy to find. Yet the ancient Egyptians traveled through this hinterland and settled in oases. In recent years, archaeologists have spent much more time investigating these zones than they did before, a deliberate shift of research strategies. Sometimes the move is less voluntary. When the modern Egyptian state decided to construct the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s, it was clear that the artificial lake behind it would submerge a vast zone with ancient Egyptian remains. Thus archaeologists rushed to the region, producing in a short time span many more data than had been collected in a hundred years of earlier research.

Despite the greater attention that archaeologists now devote to the areas of Egypt outside the Nile Valley, they still spend most of their time in the core area, and conditions in the valley dictate to a great extent how we view the ancient country. It is easy to think that Egypt was a place of tombs and temples only, as those so dominate the remains visible today. Built of stone or carved in the rocks, they are well preserved, a preservation aided by the fact that they are often located at the desert’s edge, out of the reach of Nile floods and of farmers who need land for fields. Compared to tombs and temples, the remnants of ancient cities and villages, built in mud brick in a valley that was annually flooded before the construction of the Aswan dams, are paltry. Mostly buried underneath thick layers of later deposit, only small areas of them have been excavated, and we rely often on a number of settlements connected to funerary complexes in the desert to reconstruct urban and village life. Ancient Egypt was an urban society, albeit with smaller cities than elsewhere in the Near East, yet information about the conditions of the people when alive often is obscured by the mass of evidence we have on the dead.

What is ancient Egyptian history?

The question “what is history” is much too wide‐ranging and thorny to address here, but before embarking on reading a book‐long history of ancient Egypt it may be useful to see how it applies to that ancient culture. Less than 200 years ago many would have said that ancient Egypt does not have history. In the early 19th century, the influential philosopher of history Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) proclaimed that cultures without accounts of the past resembling historical writings in the western tradition had no history. But the discipline has moved on enormously, and most historians today consider all literate cultures – including ancient Egypt – worthy of study. The field of “world history” goes further and includes the world’s non‐literate societies in its purview. This attitude erases the distinction between history and prehistory, a step whose consequences are not yet fully appreciated. It has the benefit for students of ancient Egypt that it removes the awkward problem of what sources they use in their research. Historians mostly consider textual sources to be the basis of their work, but in the case of Egypt we have to wait until the 2nd millennium BC for a written record that is rich and informative about multiple aspects of life. Archaeological and visual remains are often the sole sources for earlier periods, and they stay very important throughout the study of ancient Egyptian history. Writing Egypt’s history thus requires a somewhat different approach than for other periods and places where narrative and documentary sources provide a firm outline.

This book is called “A History of Ancient Egypt,” because it is clear that many other “histories” can be written, each with their own emphasis and intent. Historians can concentrate on political, social, economic, or cultural issues, each of which will provide a different picture of the society they discuss. Most basic surveys build their structure around political history and focus on the deeds of kings and their entourages. This will also be the case here, although it does not monopolize the account, and I will also address other concerns. The choices I made are personal but inspired by other treatments of the subject. Ideally, more attention would have been given to the ancient Egyptians who w...