Egypt Civilization

11/18/23, 3:24 PM ancient Egypt -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia
ancient Egypt
ancient
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Egypt,
civilizatio Introduction
n in Introduction to ancient Egyptian
northeaste civilization
Sphinx and the Great Pyramid of rn Africa The Predynastic and Early Dynastic
Khufu periods
that dates
Side view of the Sphinx with the Great The Old Kingdom (c. 2575–c. 2130
from the
Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops) rising in BCE) and the First Intermediate period
the background, Giza, Egypt. 4th (c. 2130–1938 BCE)
millenniu The Middle Kingdom (1938–c. 1630
m BCE. Its many achievements, preserved in its BCE) and the Second Intermediate
period (c. 1630–1540 BCE)
art and monuments, hold a fascination that
continues to grow as archaeological finds The New Kingdom (c. 1539–1075 BCE)
expose its secrets. This article focuses on Egypt Egypt from 1075 BCE to the
Macedonian invasion
from its prehistory through its unification under
Macedonian and Ptolemaic Egypt
Menes (Narmer) in the 3rd millennium BCE—
(332–30 BCE)
sometimes used as a reference point for
Roman and Byzantine Egypt (30 BCE–
Egypt’s origin—and up to the Islamic conquest 642 CE)
in the 7th century CE. For subsequent history
through the contemporary period, see Egypt.
Introduction to ancient Egyptian civilization

Life in ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt can be thought of as an oasis in the desert of northeastern Africa, dependent on
the annual inundation of the Nile River to support its agricultural population. The country’s
chief wealth came from the fertile floodplain of the Nile valley, where the river flows between
bands of limestone hills, and the Nile delta, in which it fans into several branches north of
present-day Cairo. Between the floodplain and the hills is a variable band of low desert that
supported a certain amount of game. The Nile was Egypt’s sole transportation artery.
https://www.britannica.com/print/article/180468 1/89
The First Cataract at Aswān, where the riverbed is turned into rapids by a belt of granite, was
the country’s only well-defined boundary within a populated area. To the south lay the far less
hospitable area of Nubia, in which the river flowed through low sandstone hills that in most
regions left only a very narrow strip of cultivable land. Nubia was significant for Egypt’s
periodic southward expansion and for access to products from farther south. West of the Nile
was the arid Sahara, broken by a chain of oases some 125 to 185 miles (200 to 300 km) from
the river and lacking in all other resources except for a few minerals. The eastern desert,
between the Nile and the Red Sea, was more important, for it supported a small nomadic
population and desert game, contained numerous mineral deposits, including gold, and was the
route to the Red Sea.
To the northeast was the Isthmus of Suez. It offered the principal route for contact with Sinai,
from which came turquoise and possibly copper, and with southwestern Asia, Egypt’s most
important area of cultural interaction, from which were received stimuli for technical
development and cultivars for crops. Immigrants and ultimately invaders crossed the isthmus
into Egypt, attracted by the country’s stability and prosperity. From the late 2nd millennium
BCE onward, numerous attacks were made by land and sea along the eastern Mediterranean
coast.
At first, relatively little cultural contact came by way of the Mediterranean Sea, but from an
early date Egypt maintained trading relations with the Lebanese port of Byblos (present-day
Jbail). Egypt needed few imports to maintain basic standards of living, but good timber was
essential and not available within the country, so it usually was obtained from Lebanon.
Minerals such as obsidian and lapis lazuli were imported from as far afield as Anatolia and
Afghanistan.
Agriculture centred on the cultivation of cereal crops, chiefly emmer wheat (Triticum
dicoccum) and barley (Hordeum vulgare). The fertility of the land and general predictability of
the inundation ensured very high productivity from a single annual crop. This productivity
made it possible to store large surpluses against crop failures and also formed the chief basis
of Egyptian wealth, which was, until the creation of the large empires of the 1st millennium
BCE, the greatest of any state in the ancient Middle East.
Basin irrigation was achieved by simple means, and multiple cropping was not feasible until
much later times, except perhaps in the lakeside area of Al-Fayyūm. As the river deposited
alluvial silt, raising the level of the floodplain, and land was reclaimed from marsh, the area
available for cultivation in the Nile valley and delta increased, while pastoralism declined
slowly. In addition to grain crops, fruit and vegetables were important, the latter being
irrigated year-round in small plots. Fish was also vital to the diet. Papyrus, which grew
abundantly in marshes, was gathered wild and in later times was cultivated. It may have been
used as a food crop, and it certainly was used to make rope, matting, and sandals. Above all, it
provided the characteristic Egyptian writing material, which, with cereals, was the country’s
chief export in Late period Egyptian and then Greco-Roman times.
Cattle may have been domesticated in northeastern Africa. The Egyptians kept many as draft
animals and for their various products, showing some of the interest in breeds and individuals
that is found to this day in the Sudan and eastern Africa. The donkey, which was the principal
transport animal (the camel did not become common until Roman times), was probably
domesticated in the region. The native Egyptian breed of sheep became extinct in the 2nd
millennium BCE and was replaced by an Asiatic breed. Sheep were primarily a source of meat;
their wool was rarely used. Goats were more numerous than sheep. Pigs were also raised and
eaten. Ducks and geese were kept for food, and many of the vast numbers of wild and
migratory birds found in Egypt were hunted and trapped. Desert game, principally various
species of antelope and ibex, were hunted by the elite; it was a royal privilege to hunt lions
and wild cattle. Pets included dogs, which were also used for hunting, cats, and monkeys. In
addition, the Egyptians had a great interest in, and knowledge of, most species of mammals,
birds, reptiles, and fish in their environment.
Most Egyptians were probably descended from settlers who moved to the Nile valley in
prehistoric times, with population increase coming through natural fertility. In various periods
there were immigrants from Nubia, Libya, and especially the Middle East. They were
historically significant and also may have contributed to population growth, but their numbers
are unknown. Most people lived in villages and towns in the Nile valley and delta. Dwellings
were normally built of mud brick and have long since disappeared beneath the rising water
table or beneath modern town sites, thereby obliterating evidence for settlement patterns. In
antiquity, as now, the most favoured location of settlements was on slightly raised ground near
the riverbank, where transport and water were easily available and flooding was unlikely.
Until the 1st millennium BCE, Egypt was not urbanized to the same extent as Mesopotamia.
Instead, a few centres, notably Memphis and Thebes, attracted population and particularly the
elite, while the rest of the people were relatively evenly spread over the land. The size of the
population has been estimated as having risen from 1 to 1.5 million in the 3rd millennium BCE
to perhaps twice that number in the late 2nd millennium and 1st millennium BCE. (Much
higher levels of population were reached in Greco-Roman times.)
Nearly all of the people were engaged in agriculture and were probably tied to the land. In
theory all the land belonged to the king, although in practice those living on it could not easily
be removed and some categories of land could be bought and sold. Land was assigned to high
officials to provide them with an income, and most tracts required payment of substantial dues
to the state, which had a strong interest in keeping the land in agricultural use. Abandoned land
was taken back into state ownership and reassigned for cultivation. The people who lived on
and worked the land were not free to leave and were obliged to work it, but they were not
slaves; most paid a proportion of their produce to major officials. Free citizens who worked
the land on their own behalf did emerge; terms applied to them tended originally to refer to
poor people, but these agriculturalists were probably not poor. Slavery was never common,
being restricted to captives and foreigners or to people who were forced by poverty or debt to
sell themselves into service. Slaves sometimes even married members of their owners’
families, so that in the long term those belonging to households tended to be assimilated into
free society. In the New Kingdom (from about 1539 to 1075 BCE), large numbers of captive
slaves were acquired by major state institutions or incorporated into the army. Punitive
treatment of foreign slaves or of native fugitives from their obligations included forced labour,
exile (in, for example, the oases of the western desert), or compulsory enlistment in dangerous
mining expeditions. Even nonpunitive employment such as quarrying in the desert was
hazardous. The official record of one expedition shows a mortality rate of more than 10
percent.
Just as the Egyptians optimized agricultural production with simple means, their crafts and
techniques, many of which originally came from Asia, were raised to extraordinary levels of
perfection. The Egyptians’ most striking technical achievement, massive stone building, also
exploited the potential of a centralized state to mobilize a huge labour force, which was made
available by efficient agricultural practices. Some of the technical and organizational skills
involved were remarkable. The construction of the great pyramids of the 4th dynasty (c. 2575–
c. 2465 BCE) has yet to be fully explained and would be a major challenge to this day. This
expenditure of skill contrasts with sparse evidence of an essentially neolithic way of living for
the rural population of the time, while the use of flint tools persisted even in urban
environments at least until the late 2nd millennium BCE. Metal was correspondingly scarce,
much of it being used for prestige rather than everyday purposes.
In urban and elite contexts, the Egyptian ideal was the nuclear family, but, on the land and
even within the central ruling group, there is evidence for extended families. Egyptians were
monogamous, and the choice of partners in marriage, for which no formal ceremony or legal
sanction is known, did not follow a set pattern. Consanguineous marriage was not practiced
during the Dynastic period, except for the occasional marriage of a brother and sister within
the royal family, and that practice may have been open only to kings or heirs to the throne.
Divorce was in theory easy, but it was costly. Women had a legal status only marginally
inferior to that of men. They could own and dispose of property in their own right, and they
could initiate divorce and other legal proceedings. They hardly ever held administrative office
but increasingly were involved in religious cults as priestesses or “chantresses.” Married
women held the title “mistress of the house,” the precise significance of which is unknown.
Lower down the social scale, they probably worked on the land as well as in the house.
The uneven distribution of wealth, labour, and technology was related to the only partly urban
character of society, especially in the 3rd millennium BCE. The country’s resources were not
fed into numerous provincial towns but instead were concentrated to great effect around the
capital—itself a dispersed string of settlements rather than a city—and focused on the central
figure in society, the king. In the 3rd and early 2nd millennia, the elite ideal, expressed in the
decoration of private tombs, was manorial and rural. Not until much later did Egyptians
develop a more pronouncedly urban character.
The king and ideology: administration, art, and writing

In cosmogonical terms, Egyptian society consisted of a descending hierarchy of the gods, the
king, the blessed dead, and humanity (by which was understood chiefly the Egyptians). Of
these groups, only the king was single, and hence he was individually more prominent than
any of the others. A text that summarizes the king’s role states that he “is on earth for ever and
ever, judging mankind and propitiating the gods, and setting order [maʿat, a central concept] in
place of disorder. He gives offerings to the gods and mortuary offerings to the spirits [the
blessed dead].” The king was imbued with divine essence, but not in any simple or unqualified
sense. His divinity accrued to him from his office and was reaffirmed through rituals, but it
was vastly inferior to that of major gods; he was god rather than man by virtue of his potential,
which was immeasurably greater than that of any human being. To humanity, he manifested
the gods on earth, a conception that was elaborated in a complex web of metaphor and
doctrine; less directly, he represented humanity to the gods. The text quoted above also gives
great prominence to the dead, who were the object of a cult for the living and who could
intervene in human affairs; in many periods the chief visible expenditure and focus of display
of nonroyal individuals, as of the king, was on provision for the tomb and the next world.
Egyptian kings are commonly called pharaohs, following the usage of the Bible. The term
pharaoh, however, is derived from the Egyptian per ʿaa (“great estate”) and dates to the
designation of the royal palace as an institution. This term for palace was used increasingly
from about 1400 BCE as a way of referring to the living king; in earlier times it was rare.
Rules of succession to the kingship are poorly understood. The common conception that the
heir to the throne had to marry his predecessor’s oldest daughter has been disproved; kingship
did not pass through the female line. The choice of queen seems to have been free; often the
queen was a close relative of the king, but she also might be unrelated to him. In the New
Kingdom, for which evidence is abundant, each king had a queen with distinctive titles, as
well as a number of minor wives.
Sons of the chief queen seem to have been the preferred successors to the throne, but other
sons could also become king. In many cases the successor was the eldest (surviving) son, and
such a pattern of inheritance agrees with more general Egyptian values, but often he was some
other relative or was completely unrelated. New Kingdom texts describe, after the event, how
kings were appointed heirs either by their predecessors or by divine oracles, and such may
have been the pattern when there was no clear successor. Dissent and conflict are suppressed
from public sources. From the Late period (664–332 BCE), when sources are more diverse and
patterns less rigid, numerous usurpations and interruptions to the succession are known; they
probably had many forerunners.
The king’s position changed gradually from that of an absolute monarch at the centre of a
small ruling group made up mostly of his kin to that of the head of a bureaucratic state—in
which his rule was still absolute—based on officeholding and, in theory, on free competition
and merit. By the 5th dynasty, fixed institutions had been added to the force of tradition and
the regulation of personal contact as brakes on autocracy, but the charismatic and superhuman
power of the king remained vital.
The elite of administrative officeholders received their positions and commissions from the
king, whose general role as judge over humanity they put into effect. They commemorated
their own justice and concern for others, especially their inferiors, and recorded their own
exploits and ideal conduct of life in inscriptions for others to see. Thus, the position of the elite
was affirmed by reference to the king, to their prestige among their peers, and to their conduct
toward their subordinates, justifying to some extent the fact that they—and still more the king
—appropriated much of the country’s production.
These attitudes and their potential dissemination through society counterbalanced inequality,
but how far they were accepted cannot be known. The core group of wealthy officeholders
numbered at most a few hundred, and the administrative class of minor officials and scribes,
most of whom could not afford to leave memorials or inscriptions, perhaps 5,000. With their
dependents, these two groups formed perhaps 5 percent of the early population. Monuments
and inscriptions commemorated no more than one in a thousand people.
According to royal ideology, the king appointed the elite on the basis of merit, and in ancient
conditions of high mortality the elite had to be open to recruits from outside. There was,
however, also an ideal that a son should succeed his father. In periods of weak central control
this principle predominated, and in the Late period the whole society became more rigid and
stratified.
Writing was a major instrument in the centralization of

the Egyptian state and its self-presentation. The two
basic types of writing—hieroglyphs, which were used for
monuments and display, and the cursive form known as
Egyptian hieroglyphic numerals
hieratic—were invented at much the same time in late
predynastic Egypt (c. 3000 BCE). Writing was chiefly
used for administration, and until about 2650 BCE no
continuous texts are preserved; the only extant literary
texts written before the early Middle Kingdom (c. 1950
BCE) seem to have been lists of important traditional
information and possibly medical treatises. The use and
Egyptian hieratic numerals
potential of writing were restricted both by the rate of
literacy, which was probably well below 1 percent, and
by expectations of what writing might do. Hieroglyphic writing was publicly identified with
Egypt. Perhaps because of this association with a single powerful state, its language, and its
culture, Egyptian writing was seldom adapted to write other languages; in this it contrasts with
the cuneiform script of the relatively uncentralized, multilingual Mesopotamia. Nonetheless,
Egyptian hieroglyphs probably served in the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE as the model
from which the alphabet, ultimately the most widespread of all writing systems, evolved.
The dominant visible legacy of ancient Egypt is in works

of architecture and representational art. Until the Middle
Kingdom, most of these were mortuary: royal tomb
complexes, including pyramids and mortuary temples,
and private tombs. There were also temples dedicated to
Egyptian Book of the Dead the cult of the gods throughout the country, but most of
Illustration from an Egyptian Book of these were modest structures. From the beginning of the
the Dead, c. 1275
New Kingdom, temples of the gods became the principal
BCE
monuments; royal palaces and private houses, which are
, showing the jackal-headed god of the
dead, Anubis, weighing the soul of the very little known, were less important. Temples and
scribe, Ani. tombs were ideally executed in stone with relief
decoration on their walls and were filled with stone and
wooden statuary, inscribed and decorated stelae (freestanding small stone monuments), and, in
their inner areas, composite works of art in precious materials. The design of the monuments
and their decoration dates in essence to the beginning of the historical period and presents an
ideal, sanctified cosmos. Little in it is related to the everyday world, and, except in palaces,
works of art may have been rare outside temples and tombs. Decoration may record real
historical events, rituals, or the official titles and careers of individuals, but its prime
significance is the more general assertion of values, and the information presented must be
evaluated for its plausibility and compared with other evidence. Some of the events depicted
in relief on royal monuments were certainly iconic rather than historically factual.
The highly distinctive Egyptian method of rendering nature and artistic style was also a
creation of early times and can be seen in most works of Egyptian art. In content, these are
hierarchically ordered so that the most important figures, the gods and the king, are shown
together, while before the New Kingdom gods seldom occur in the same context as humanity.
The decoration of a nonroyal tomb characteristically shows the tomb’s owner with his
subordinates, who administer his land and present him with its produce. The tomb owner is
also typically depicted hunting in the marshes, a favourite pastime of the elite that may
additionally symbolize passage into the next world. The king and the gods are absent in
nonroyal tombs, and, until the New Kingdom, overtly religious matter is restricted to rare
scenes of mortuary rituals and journeys and to textual formulas. Temple reliefs, in which king
and gods occur freely, show the king defeating his enemies, hunting, and especially offering to
the gods, who in turn confer benefits upon him. Human beings are present at most as minor
figures supporting the king. On both royal and nonroyal monuments, an ideal world is
represented in which all are beautiful and everything goes well; only minor figures may have
physical imperfections.
This artistic presentation of values originated at the same time as writing but before the latter
could record continuous texts or complex statements. Some of the earliest continuous texts of
the 4th and 5th dynasties show an awareness of an ideal past that the present could only aspire
to emulate. A few “biographies” of officials allude to strife, but more-nuanced discussion
occurs first in literary texts of the Middle Kingdom. The texts consist of stories, dialogues,
lamentations, and especially instructions on how to live a good life, and they supply a rich
commentary on the more one-dimensional rhetoric of public inscriptions. Literary works were
written in all the main later phases of the Egyptian language—Middle Egyptian; the
“classical” form of the Middle and New kingdoms, continuing in copies and inscriptions into
Roman times; Late Egyptian, from the 19th dynasty to about 700 BCE; and the demotic script
from the 4th century BCE to the 3rd century CE—but many of the finest and most complex are
among the earliest.
Literary works also included treatises on mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and magic, as
well as various religious texts and canonical lists that classified the categories of creation
(probably the earliest genre, dating back to the beginning of the Old Kingdom, c. 2575 BCE, or
even a little earlier). Among these texts, little is truly systematic, a notable exception being a
medical treatise on wounds. The absence of systematic inquiry contrasts with Egyptian
practical expertise in such fields as surveying, which was used both for orienting and planning
buildings to remarkably fine tolerances and for the regular division of fields after the annual
inundation of the Nile; the Egyptians also had surveyed and established the dimensions of
their entire country by the beginning of the Middle Kingdom. These precise tasks required
both knowledge of astronomy and highly ingenious techniques, but they apparently were
achieved with little theoretical analysis.
Whereas in the earliest periods Egypt seems to have been administered almost as the personal
estate of the king, by the central Old Kingdom it had been divided into about 35 nomes, or
provinces, each with its own officials. Administration was concentrated at the capital, where
most of the central elite lived and died. In the nonmonetary Egyptian economy, its essential
functions were the collection, storage, and redistribution of produce; the drafting and
organization of manpower for specialized labour, probably including irrigation and flood
protection works, and major state projects; and the supervision of legal matters.
Administration and law were not fully distinct, and both depended ultimately on the king. The
settlement of disputes was in part an administrative task, for which the chief guiding criterion
was precedent, while contractual relations were regulated by the use of standard formulas.
State and temple both partook in redistribution and held massive reserves of grain; temples
were economic as well as religious institutions. In periods of decentralization similar functions
were exercised by local grandees. Markets had only a minor role, and craftsmen were
employees who normally traded only what they produced in their free time. The wealthiest
officials escaped this pattern to some extent by receiving their income in the form of land and
maintaining large establishments that included their own specialized workers.
The essential medium of administration was writing, reinforced by personal authority over the
nonliterate 99 percent of the population; texts exhorting the young to be scribes emphasize that
the scribe commanded while the rest did the work. Most officials (almost all of whom were
men) held several offices and accumulated more as they progressed up a complex ranked
hierarchy, at the top of which was the vizier, the chief administrator and judge. The vizier
reported to the king, who in theory retained certain powers, such as authority to invoke the
death penalty, absolutely.
Before the Middle Kingdom, the civil and the military were not sharply distinguished. Military
forces consisted of local militias under their own officials and included foreigners, and
nonmilitary expeditions to extract minerals from the desert or to transport heavy loads through
the country were organized in similar fashion. Until the New Kingdom there was no separate
priesthood. Holders of civil office also had priestly titles, and priests had civil titles. Often
priesthoods were sinecures: their chief significance was the income they brought. The same
was true of the minor civil titles accumulated by high officials. At a lower level, minor
priesthoods were held on a rotating basis by “laymen” who served every fourth month in
temples. State and temple were so closely interconnected that there was no real tension
between them before the late New Kingdom.
Sources, calendars, and chronology

For all but the last century of Egyptian prehistory, whose neolithic and later phases are
normally termed “predynastic,” evidence is exclusively archaeological; later native sources
have only mythical allusions to such remote times. The Dynastic period of native Egyptian
rulers is generally divided into 30 dynasties, following the Aegyptiaca of the Greco-Egyptian
writer Manetho of Sebennytos (early 3rd century BCE), excerpts of which are preserved in the
works of later writers. Manetho apparently organized his dynasties by the capital cities from
which they ruled, but several of his divisions also reflect political or dynastic changes—that is,
changes of the party holding power. He gave the lengths of reign of kings or of entire
dynasties and grouped the dynasties into several periods, but, because of textual corruption
and a tendency toward inflation, Manetho’s figures cannot be used to reconstruct chronology
without supporting evidence and analysis.
Manetho’s prime sources were earlier Egyptian king lists, the organization of which he
imitated. The most significant preserved example of a king list is the Turin Papyrus (Turin
Canon), a fragmentary document in the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy, which originally
listed all kings of the 1st through the 17th dynasty, preceded by a mythical dynasty of gods
and one of the “spirits, followers of Horus.” Like Manetho’s later work, the Turin document
gave reign lengths for individual kings, as well as totals for some dynasties and longer
multidynastic periods.
In early periods the kings’ years of reign were not

consecutively numbered but were named for salient
events, and lists were made of the names. More-
extensive details were added to the lists for the 4th and
5th dynasties, when dates were assigned according to
Palermo Stone biennial cattle censuses numbered through each king’s
The Palermo Stone, first side reign. Fragments of such lists are preserved on the
Palermo Stone, an inscribed piece of basalt (at the
Regional Museum of Archaeology in Palermo, Italy), and related pieces in the Cairo Museum
and University College London; these are probably all parts of a single copy of an original
document of the 5th dynasty.
The Egyptians did not date by eras longer than the reign of a single king, so a historical
framework must be created from totals of reign lengths, which are then related to astronomical
data that may allow whole periods to be fixed precisely. This is done through references to
astronomical events and correlations with the three calendars in use in Egyptian antiquity. All
dating was by a civil calendar, derived from the lunar calendar, which was introduced in the
first half of the 3rd millennium BCE. The civil year had 365 days and started in principle when
Sirius, or the Dog Star—also known in Greek as Sothis (Ancient Egyptian: Sopdet)—became
visible above the horizon after a period of absence, which at that time occurred some weeks
before the Nile began to rise for the inundation. Every 4 years the civil year advanced one day
in relation to the solar year (with 3651/4 days), and after a cycle of about 1,460 years it would
again agree with the solar calendar. Religious ceremonies were organized according to two
lunar calendars that had months of 29 or 30 days, with extra, intercalary months every three
years or so.
Five mentions of the rising of Sirius (generally known as Sothic dates) are preserved in texts
from the 3rd to the 1st millennium, but by themselves these references cannot yield an
absolute chronology. Such a chronology can be computed from larger numbers of lunar dates
and cross-checked from solutions for the observations of Sirius. Various chronologies are in
use, however, differing by up to 40 years for the 2nd millennium BCE and by more than a
century for the beginning of the 1st dynasty. The chronologies offered in most publications up
to 1985 have been thrown into some doubt for the Middle and New kingdoms by a restudy of
the evidence for the Sothic and especially the lunar dates. For the 1st millennium, dates in the
Third Intermediate period are approximate; a supposed fixed year of 945 BCE, based on links
with the Bible, turns out to be variable by a number of years. Late period dates (664–332 BCE)
are almost completely fixed. Before the 12th dynasty, plausible dates for the 11th can be
computed backward, but for earlier times dates are approximate. A total of 955 years for the
1st through the 8th dynasty in the Turin Canon has been used to assign a date of about 3100
BCE for the beginning of the 1st dynasty, but this requires excessive average reign lengths, and
an estimate of 2925 BCE is preferable. Radiocarbon and other scientific dating of samples from
Egyptian sites have not improved on, or convincingly contested, computed dates. More-recent
work on radiocarbon dates from Egypt does, however, yield results encouragingly close to
dates computed in the manner described above.
King lists and astronomy give only a chronological framework. A vast range of archaeological
and inscriptional sources for Egyptian history survive, but none of them were produced with
the interpretation of history in mind. No consistent political history of ancient Egypt can be
written. The evidence is very unevenly distributed; there are gaps of many decades; and in the
3rd millennium BCE no continuous royal text recording historical events was inscribed. Private
biographical inscriptions of all periods from the 5th dynasty (c. 2465–c. 2325 BCE) to the
Roman conquest (30 BCE) record individual involvement in events but are seldom concerned
with their general significance. Royal inscriptions from the 12th dynasty (1938–1756 BCE) to
Ptolemaic times aim to present a king’s actions according to an overall conception of
“history,” in which he is the re-creator of the order of the world and the guarantor of its
continued stability or its expansion. The goal of his action is to serve not humanity but the
gods, while nonroyal individuals may relate their own successes to the king in the first
instance and sometimes to the gods. Only in the decentralized intermediate periods did the
nonroyal recount internal strife. Kings did not mention dissent in their texts unless it came at
the beginning of a reign or a phase of action and was quickly and triumphantly overcome in a
reaffirmation of order. Such a schema often dominates the factual content of texts, and it
creates a strong bias toward recording foreign affairs, because in official ideology there is no
internal dissent after the initial turmoil is over. “History” is as much a ritual as a process of
events; as a ritual, its protagonists are royal and divine. Only in the Late period did these
conventions weaken significantly. Even then, they were retained in full for temple reliefs,
where they kept their vitality into Roman times.
Despite this idealization, the Egyptians were well aware of history, as is clear from their king
lists. They divided the past into periods comparable to those used by Egyptologists and
evaluated the rulers not only as the founders of epochs but also in terms of their salient
exploits or, especially in folklore, their bad qualities. The Demotic Chronicle, a text of the
Ptolemaic period, purports to foretell the bad end that would befall numerous Late period
kings as divine retribution for their wicked actions.
The recovery and study of ancient Egypt
European interest in ancient Egypt was strong in Roman times and revived in the Renaissance,
when the wealth of Egyptian remains in the city of Rome was supplemented by information
provided by visitors to Egypt itself. Views of Egypt were dominated by the classical tradition
that it was the land of ancient wisdom; this wisdom was thought to inhere in the hieroglyphic
script, which was believed to impart profound symbolic ideas, not—as it in fact does—the
sounds and words of texts. Between the 15th and 18th centuries, Egypt had a minor but
significant position in general views of antiquity, and its monuments gradually became better
known through the work of scholars in Europe and travelers in the country itself; the finest
publications of the latter were by Richard Pococke, Frederik Ludwig Norden, and Carsten
Niebuhr, all of whose works in the 18th century helped to stimulate an Egyptian revival in
European art and architecture. Coptic, the Christian successor of the ancient Egyptian
language, was studied from the 17th century, notably by Athanasius Kircher, for its potential to
provide the key to Egyptian.
Napoleon I’s expedition to and short-lived conquest of

Egypt in 1798 was the culmination of 18th-century
interest in the East. The expedition was accompanied by
a team of scholars who recorded the ancient and
contemporary country, issuing in 1809–28 the
Rosetta Stone Description de l’Égypte, the most comprehensive study
The Rosetta Stone, basalt slab from to be made before the decipherment of the hieroglyphic
Fort Saint-Julien, Rosetta (Rashīd),
script. The renowned Rosetta Stone, which bears a
Egypt, 196
decree of Ptolemy V Epiphanes in hieroglyphs, demotic
BCE
; in the British Museum, London. script, and Greek alphabetic characters, was discovered
during the expedition; it was ceded to the British after
the French capitulation in Egypt and became the property of the British Museum in London.
This document greatly assisted the decipherment, accomplished by Jean-François
Champollion in 1822.
The Egyptian language revealed by the decipherment and decades of subsequent study is a
member of the Afro-Asiatic (formerly Hamito-Semitic) language family. Egyptian is closest to
the family’s Semitic branch but is distinctive in many respects. During several millennia it
changed greatly. The script does not write vowels, and because Greek forms for royal names
were known from Manetho long before the Egyptian forms became available, those used to
this day are a mixture of Greek and Egyptian.
In the first half of the 19th century, vast numbers of antiquities were exported from Egypt,
forming the nucleus of collections in many major museums. These were removed rather than
excavated, inflicting, together with the economic development of the country, colossal damage
on ancient sites. At the same time, many travelers and scholars visited the country and
recorded the monuments. The most important, and remarkably accurate, record was produced
by the Prussian expedition led by Karl Richard Lepsius, in 1842–45, which explored sites as
far south as the central Sudan.
In the mid-19th century, Egyptology developed as a subject in France and in Prussia. The
Antiquities Service and a museum of Egyptian antiquities were established in Egypt by the
French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette, a great excavator who attempted to preserve sites from
destruction, and the Prussian Heinrich Brugsch, who made great progress in the interpretation
of texts of many periods and published the first major Egyptian dictionary. In 1880 Flinders
(later Sir Flinders) Petrie began more than 40 years of methodical excavation, which created
an archaeological framework for all the chief periods of Egyptian culture except for remote
prehistory. Petrie was the initiator of much in archaeological method, but he was later
surpassed by George Andrew Reisner, who excavated for American institutions from 1899 to
1937. The greatest late 19th-century Egyptologist was Adolf Erman of Berlin, who put the
understanding of the Egyptian language on a sound basis and wrote general works that for the
first time organized what was known about the earlier periods.
Complete facsimile copies of Egyptian monuments have been published since the 1890s,
providing a separate record that becomes more vital as the originals decay. The pioneer of this
scientific epigraphy was James Henry Breasted of the Oriental Institute of the University of
Chicago, who began his work in 1905 and shortly thereafter was joined by others. Many
scholars are now engaged in epigraphy.
In the first half of the 20th century, some outstanding

archaeological discoveries were made: Howard Carter
uncovered the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922; Pierre
Montet found the tombs of 21st–22nd-dynasty kings at
Tanis in 1939–44; and W.B. Emery and L.P. Kirwan
Howard Carter
Howard Carter
found tombs of the Ballānah culture (the 4th through the 6th century CE) in Nubia in 1931–34.
The last of these was part of the second survey of Lower Nubia in 1929–34, which preceded
the second raising of the Aswān Dam. This was followed in the late 1950s and ’60s by an
international campaign to excavate and record sites in Egyptian and Sudanese Nubia before
the completion of the Aswan High Dam in 1970. Lower Nubia is now one of the most
thoroughly explored archaeological regions of the world. Most of its many temples have been
moved, either to higher ground nearby, as happened to Abu Simbel and Philae, or to quite
different places, including various foreign museums. The campaign also had the welcome
consequence of introducing a wide range of archaeological expertise to Egypt, so that
standards of excavation and recording in the country have risen greatly.
Excavation and survey of great importance have continued in many places. For example, at
Ṣaqqārah, part of the necropolis of the ancient city of Memphis, new areas of the Sarapeum
have been uncovered with rich finds, and a major New Kingdom necropolis is being
thoroughly explored. The site of ancient Memphis itself has been systematically surveyed; its
position in relation to the ancient course of the Nile has been established; and urban
occupation areas have been studied in detail for the first time.
Egyptology is, however, a primarily interpretive subject. There have been outstanding
contributions—for example in art, for which Heinrich Schäfer established the principles of the
rendering of nature, and in language. New light has been cast on texts, the majority of which
are written in a simple metre that can serve as the basis of sophisticated literary works. The
physical environment, social structure, kingship, and religion are other fields in which great
advances have been made, while the reconstruction of the outline of history is constantly being
improved in detail.
The Predynastic and Early Dynastic periods
Predynastic Egypt
The peoples of predynastic Egypt were the successors of the Paleolithic inhabitants of
northeastern Africa, who had spread over much of its area; during wet phases they had left
remains in regions as inhospitable as the Great Sand Sea. The final desiccation of the Sahara
was not complete until the end of the 3rd millennium BCE; over thousands of years people
must have migrated from there to the Nile valley, the environment of which improved as the
region dried out. In this process the decisive change from the nomadic hunter-gatherer way of
life of Paleolithic times to settled agriculture has not so

far been identified. Sometime after 5000 BCE the raising
of crops was introduced, probably on a horticultural
scale, in small local cultures that seem to have penetrated
southward through Egypt into the oases and the Sudan.
Several of the basic food plants that were grown are
native to the Middle East, so the new techniques
probably spread from there. No large-scale migration
need have been involved, and the cultures were at first
largely self-contained. The preserved evidence for them
is unrepresentative because it comes from the low desert,
where relatively few people lived; as was the case later,
most people probably settled in the valley and delta.
The earliest known Neolithic cultures in Egypt have been

Egypt, ancient found at Marimda Banī Salāma, on the southwestern
Sites associated with Egypt from
edge of the delta, and farther to the southwest, in Al-
Predynastic to Byzantine times. Fayyūm. The site at Marimda Banī Salāma, which dates
to the 6th–5th millennium BCE, gives evidence of
settlement and shows that cereals were grown. In Al-
Fayyūm, where evidence dates to the 5th millennium
BCE, the settlements were near the shore of Lake Qārūn,
and the settlers engaged in fishing. Marimda is a very
large site that was occupied for many centuries. The
inhabitants lived in lightly built huts; they may have
buried their dead within their houses, but areas where
burials have been found may not have been occupied by
dwellings at the same time. Pottery was used in both
cultures. In addition to these Egyptian Neolithic cultures,
Egypt, ancient
others have been identified in the Western Desert, in the
Predynastic to Byzantine times, Second Cataract area, and north of Khartoum. Some of
Nile delta region. these are as early as the Egyptian ones, while others
overlapped with the succeeding Egyptian predynastic
cultures.
In Upper Egypt, between Asyūṭ and Luxor (Al-Uqṣur),

have been found the Tasian culture (named for Dayr
Tāsā) and the Badarian culture (named for Al-Badārī);
these date from the late 5th millennium BCE. Most of the
evidence for them comes from cemeteries, where the
Egypt, ancient burials included fine black-topped red pottery,

ornaments, some copper objects, and glazed steatite
Predynastic to Byzantine times, beads. The most characteristic predynastic luxury
Thebes region.
objects, slate palettes for grinding cosmetics, occur for
the first time in this period. The burials show little differentiation of wealth and status and
seem to belong to a peasant culture without central political organization.
Probably contemporary with both predynastic and dynastic times are thousands of rock
drawings of a wide range of motifs, including boats, found throughout the Eastern Desert, in
Lower Nubia, and as far west as Mount ʾUwaynāt, which stands near modern Egypt’s borders
with Libya and Sudan in the southwest. The drawings show that nomads were common
throughout the desert, probably to the late 3rd millennium BCE, but they cannot be dated
precisely; they may all have been produced by nomads, or inhabitants of the Nile valley may
often have penetrated the desert and made drawings.
Naqādah I, named for the major site of Naqādah but also called Amratian for Al-ʿĀmirah, is a
distinct phase that succeeded the Badarian. It has been found as far south as Al-Kawm al-
Aḥmar (Hierakonpolis; ancient Egyptian Nekhen), near the sandstone barrier of Mount
Silsilah, which was the cultural boundary of Egypt in predynastic times. Naqādah I differs
from its Badarian predecessor in its density of settlement and the typology of its material
culture but hardly at all in the social organization implied by the archaeological finds. Burials
were in shallow pits in which the bodies were placed facing to the west, like those of later
Egyptians. Notable types of material found in graves are fine pottery decorated with
representational designs in white on red, figurines of men and women, and hard stone mace-
heads that are the precursors of important late predynastic objects.
Naqādah II, also known as Gerzean for Girza (Jirza), is the most important predynastic
culture. The heartland of its development was the same as that of Naqādah I, but it spread
gradually throughout the country. South of Mount Silsilah, sites of the culturally similar
Nubian A Group are found as far as the Second Cataract of the Nile and beyond; these have a
long span, continuing as late as the Egyptian Early Dynastic period. During Naqādah II, large
sites developed at Al-Kawm al-Aḥmar, Naqādah, and Abydos (Abīdūs), showing by their size
the concentration of settlement, as well as exhibiting increasing differentiation in wealth and
status. Few sites have been identified between Asyūṭ and Al-Fayyūm, and this region may
have been sparsely settled, perhaps supporting a pastoral rather than agricultural population.
Near present-day Cairo—at Al-ʿUmāri, Al-Maʿādi, and Wādī Dijlah and stretching as far south
as the latitude of Al-Fayyūm—are sites of a separate, contemporary culture. Al-Maʿādi was an
extensive settlement that traded with the Middle East and probably acted as an intermediary
for transmitting goods to the south. In this period, imports of lapis lazuli provide evidence that
trade networks extended as far afield as Afghanistan.
The material culture of Naqādah II included increasing

numbers of prestige objects. The characteristic mortuary
pottery is made of buff desert clay, principally from
around Qinā, and is decorated in red with pictures of
uncertain meaning showing boats, animals, and scenes
Egyptian clay vessel with human figures. Stone vases, many made of hard
Painted clay vessel with flamingos and stones that come from remote areas of the Eastern
ibexes, Gerzean culture, Egypt, c.
Desert, are common and of remarkable quality, and
3400–c. 3100
cosmetic palettes display elaborate designs, with outlines
BCE
; in the Roemer-Pelizaeus Museum, in the form of animals, birds, or fish. Flint was worked
Hildesheim, Germany. with extraordinary skill to produce large ceremonial
knives of a type that continued in use during dynastic
times.
Sites of late Naqādah II (sometimes termed Naqādah III) are found throughout Egypt,
including the Memphite area and the delta region, and appear to have replaced the local Lower
Egyptian cultures. Links with the Middle East intensified, and some distinctively
Mesopotamian motifs and objects were briefly in fashion in Egypt. The cultural unification of
the country probably accompanied a political unification, but this must have proceeded in
stages and cannot be reconstructed in detail. In an intermediate stage, local states may have
formed at Al-Kawm al-Aḥmar, Naqādah, and Abydos and in the delta at such sites as Buto
(modern Kawm al-Farāʿīn) and Sais (Ṣā al-Ḥajar). Ultimately, Abydos became preeminent; its
late predynastic cemetery of Umm al-Qaʿāb was extended to form the burial place of the kings
of the 1st dynasty. In the latest predynastic period, objects bearing written symbols of royalty
were deposited throughout the country, and primitive writing also appeared in marks on
pottery. Because the basic symbol for the king, a falcon on a decorated palace facade, hardly
varies, these objects are thought to have belonged to a single line of kings or a single state, not
to a set of small states. This symbol became the royal Horus name, the first element in a king’s
titulary, which presented the reigning king as the manifestation of an aspect of the god Horus,
the leading god of the country. Over the next few centuries several further definitions of the
king’s presence were added to this one.
Thus, at this time Egypt seems to have been a state unified under kings who introduced
writing and the first bureaucratic administration. These kings, who could have ruled for more
than a century, may correspond with a set of names preserved on the Palermo Stone, but no
direct identification can be made between them. The latest was probably Narmer, whose name
has been found near Memphis, at Abydos, on a ceremonial palette and mace-head from Al-
Kawm al-Aḥmar, and at the Palestinian sites of Tall Gat and ʿArad. The relief scenes on the
palette show him wearing the two chief crowns of Egypt and defeating northern enemies, but
these probably are stereotyped symbols of the king’s power and role and not records of
specific events of his reign. They demonstrate that the position of the king in society and its
presentation in mixed pictorial and written form had been elaborated by the early 3rd
millennium BCE.
During this time Egyptian artistic style and conventions were formulated, together with
writing. The process led to a complete and remarkably rapid transformation of material
culture, so that many dynastic Egyptian prestige objects hardly resembled their forerunners.
The Early Dynastic period (c. 2925–c. 2575 BCE)
The 1st dynasty (c. 2925–c. 2775 BCE)
The beginning of the historical period is characterized by

the introduction of written records in the form of regnal
year names—the records that later were collected in
documents such as the Palermo Stone. The first king of
Egyptian history, Menes, is therefore a creation of the
ancient Egyptian tablet
Figure perhaps representing Menes later record, not the actual unifier of the country; he is
on a victory tablet of Egyptian King
Narmer, c. 2925–c. 2775 known from Egyptian king lists and from classical
BCE
sources and is credited with irrigation works and with
. founding the capital, Memphis. On small objects from
this time, one of them dated to the important king Narmer but certainly mentioning a different
person, there are two possible mentions of a “Men” who may be the king Menes. If these do
name Menes, he was probably the same person as Aha, Narmer’s probable successor, who was
then the founder of the 1st dynasty. Changes in the naming patterns of kings reinforce the
assumption that a new dynasty began with his reign. Aha’s tomb at Abydos is altogether more
grandiose than previously built tombs, while the first of a series of massive tombs at Ṣaqqārah,
next to Memphis, supports the tradition that the city was founded then as a new capital. This
shift from Abydos is the culmination of intensified settlement in the crucial area between the
Nile River valley and the delta, but Memphis did not yet overcome the traditional pull of its
predecessor: the large tombs at Ṣaqqārah appear to belong to high officials, while the kings
were buried at Abydos in tombs whose walled complexes have long since disappeared. Their
mortuary cults may have been conducted in designated areas nearer the cultivation.
In the late Predynastic period and the first half of the 1st dynasty, Egypt extended its influence
into southern Palestine and probably Sinai and conducted a campaign as far as the Second
Cataract. The First Cataract area, with its centre on Elephantine, an island in the Nile opposite
the present-day town of Aswān, was permanently incorporated into Egypt, but Lower Nubia
was not.
Between late predynastic times and the 4th dynasty—and probably early in the period—the
Nubian A Group came to an end. There is some evidence that political centralization was in
progress around Qustul, but this did not lead to any further development and may indeed have
prompted a preemptive strike by Egypt. For Nubia, the malign proximity of the largest state of
the time stifled advancement. During the 1st dynasty, writing spread gradually, but because it
was used chiefly for administration, the records, which were kept within the floodplain, have
not survived. The artificial writing medium of papyrus was invented by the middle of the 1st
dynasty. There was a surge in prosperity, and thousands of tombs of all levels of wealth have
been found throughout the country. The richest contained magnificent goods in metal, ivory,
and other materials, the most widespread luxury products being extraordinarily fine stone
vases. The high point of 1st-dynasty development was the long reign of Den (flourished c.
2850 BCE).
During the 1st dynasty three titles were added to the royal Horus name: “Two Ladies,” an
epithet presenting the king as making manifest an aspect of the protective goddesses of the
south (Upper Egypt) and the north (Lower Egypt); “Golden Horus,” the precise meaning of
which is unknown; and “Dual King,” a ranked pairing of the two basic words for king, later
associated with Upper and Lower Egypt. These titles were followed by the king’s own birth
name, which in later centuries was written in a cartouche.
The 2nd dynasty (c. 2775–c. 2650 BCE)
From the end of the 1st dynasty, there is evidence of rival claimants to the throne. One line
may have become the 2nd dynasty, whose first king’s Horus name, Hetepsekhemwy, means
“peaceful in respect of the two powers” and may allude to the conclusion of strife between two
factions or parts of the country, to the antagonistic gods Horus and Seth, or to both.
Hetepsekhemwy and his successor, Reneb, moved their burial places to Ṣaqqārah; the tomb of
the third king, Nynetjer, has not been found. The second half of the dynasty was a time of
conflict and rival lines of kings, some of whose names are preserved on stone vases from the
3rd-dynasty Step Pyramid at Ṣaqqārah or in king lists. Among these contenders, Peribsen took
the title of Seth instead of Horus and was probably opposed by Horus Khasekhem, whose
name is known only from Kawm al-Aḥmar and who used the programmatic epithet “effective
sandal against evil.” The last ruler of the dynasty combined the Horus and Seth titles to form
the Horus-and-Seth Khasekhemwy, “arising in respect of the two powers,” to which was
added “the two lords are at peace in him.” Khasekhemwy was probably the same person as
Khasekhem after the successful defeat of his rivals, principally Peribsen. Both Peribsen and
Khasekhemwy had tombs at Abydos, and the latter also built a monumental brick funerary
enclosure near the cultivation.
The 3rd dynasty (c. 2650–c. 2575 BCE)
There were links of kinship between Khasekhemwy and the 3rd dynasty, but the change
between them is marked by a definitive shift of the royal burial place to Memphis. Its first
king, Sanakhte, is attested in reliefs from Maghāra in Sinai. His successor, Djoser (Horus
name Netjerykhet), was one of the outstanding kings of Egypt. His Step Pyramid at Ṣaqqārah
is both the culmination of an epoch and—as the first large all-stone building, many times
larger than anything attempted before—the precursor of later achievements. The pyramid is set
in a much larger enclosure than that of Khasekhemwy at Abydos and contains reproductions in
stone of ritual structures that had previously been built of perishable materials. Architectural
details of columns, cornices, and moldings provided many models for later development. The
masonry techniques look to brickwork for models and show little concern for the structural
potential of stone. The pyramid itself evolved through numerous stages from a flat mastaba (an
oblong tomb with a burial chamber dug beneath it, common at earlier nonroyal sites) into a
six-stepped, almost square pyramid. There was a second, symbolic tomb with a flat
superstructure on the south side of the enclosure; this probably substituted for the traditional
royal burial place of Abydos. The king and some of his family were buried deep under the
pyramid, where tens of thousands of stone vases were deposited, a number bearing
inscriptions of the first two dynasties. Thus, in perpetuating earlier forms in stone and burying
this material, Djoser invoked the past in support of his innovations.
Djoser’s name was famous in later times, and his monument was studied in the Late period.
Imhotep, whose title as a master sculptor is preserved from the Step Pyramid complex, may
have been its architect; he lived on into the next reign. His fame also endured, and in the Late
period he was deified and became a god of healing. In Manetho’s history he is associated with
reforms of writing, and this may reflect a genuine tradition, for hieroglyphs were simplified
and standardized at that time.
Djoser’s successor, Sekhemkhet, planned a still more grandiose step pyramid complex at
Ṣaqqārah, and a later king, Khaba, began one at Zawyat al-ʿAryan, a few miles south of Giza.
The burial place of the last king of the dynasty, Huni, is unknown. It has often been suggested
that he built the pyramid of Maydūm, but this probably was the work of his successor, Snefru.
Inscribed material naming 3rd-dynasty kings is known from Maghāra to Elephantine but not
from the Middle East or Nubia.
The organizational achievements of the 3rd dynasty are reflected in its principal monument,
whose message of centralization and concentration of power is reinforced in a negative sense
by the archaeological record. Outside the vicinity of Memphis, the Abydos area continued to
be important, and four enormous tombs, probably of high officials, were built at the nearby
site of Bayt Khallaf; there were small, nonmortuary step pyramids throughout the country,
some of which may date to the 4th dynasty. Otherwise, little evidence comes from the
provinces, from which wealth must have flowed to the centre, leaving no rich local elite. By
the 3rd dynasty the rigid structure of the later nomes, or provinces, which formed the basis of
Old Kingdom administration, had been created, and the imposition of its uniform pattern may
have impoverished local centres. Tombs of the elite at Ṣaqqārah, notably those of Hezyre and
Khabausokar, contained artistic masterpieces that look forward to the Old Kingdom.
The Old Kingdom (c. 2575–c. 2130 BCE) and the First Intermediate
The Old Kingdom

The 4th dynasty (c. 2575–c. 2465 BCE)
The first king of the 4th dynasty, Snefru, probably built the step pyramid of Maydūm and then
modified it to form the first true pyramid. Due west of Maydūm was the small step pyramid of
Saylah, in Al-Fayyūm, at which Snefru also worked. He built two pyramids at Dahshūr; the
southern of the two is known as the Blunted Pyramid because its upper part has a shallower
angle of inclination than its lower part. This difference may be due to structural problems or
may have been planned from the start, in which case the resulting profile may reproduce a
solar symbol of creation. The northern Dahshūr pyramid, the later of the two, has the same
angle of inclination as the upper part of the Blunted Pyramid and a base area exceeded only by
that of the Great Pyramid at Giza. All three of Snefru’s pyramids had mortuary complexes
attached to them. Snefru’s building achievements were thus at least as great as those of any
later king and introduced a century of unparalleled construction.
In a long perspective, the 4th dynasty was an isolated

phenomenon, a period when the potential of
centralization was realized to its utmost and a
disproportionate amount of the state’s resources was
used on the kings’ mortuary provisions, almost certainly
Blunted Pyramid at the expense of general living standards. No significant
The Blunted, Bent, False, or 4th-dynasty sites have been found away from the
Rhomboidal Pyramid, so named
Memphite area. Tomb inscriptions show that high
because of its peculiar double slope,
built by King Snefru in the 4th dynasty officials were granted estates scattered over many
(c. 2575–c. 2465 nomes, especially in the delta. This pattern of
BCE
landholding may have avoided the formation of local
), Dahshūr, Egypt.
centres of influence while encouraging intensive exploitation of the land. People who worked
on these estates were not free to move, and they paid a high proportion of their earnings in
dues and taxes. The building enterprises must have relied on drafting vast numbers of men,
probably after the harvest had been gathered in the early summer and during part of the
inundation.
Snefru’s was the first king’s name that was regularly written inside the cartouche, an elongated
oval that is one of the most characteristic Egyptian symbols. The cartouche itself is older and
was shown as a gift bestowed by gods on the king, signifying long duration on the throne. It
soon acquired associations with the sun, so that its first use by the builder of the first true
pyramid, which is probably also a solar symbol, is not coincidental.
Snefru’s successor, Khufu (Cheops), built the Great Pyramid at Giza (Al-Jīzah), to which were
added the slightly smaller second pyramid of one of Khufu’s sons, Khafre (more correctly
Rekhaef, the Chephren of Greek sources), and that of Menkaure (Mycerinus). Khufu’s
successor, his son Redjedef, began a pyramid at Abū Ruwaysh, and a king of uncertain name
began one at Zawyat al-ʿAryan. The last known king of the dynasty (there was probably one
more), Shepseskaf, built a monumental mastaba at south Ṣaqqārah and was the only Old
Kingdom ruler not to begin a pyramid. These works, especially the Great Pyramid, show a
great mastery of monumental stoneworking: individual blocks were large or colossal and were
extremely accurately fitted to one another. Surveying and planning also were carried out with
remarkable precision.
Apart from the colossal conception of the pyramids

themselves, the temple complexes attached to them show
great mastery of architectural forms. Khufu’s temple or
approach causeway was decorated with impressive
reliefs, fragments of which were incorporated in the
Great Sphinx 12th-dynasty pyramid of Amenemhet I at Al-Lisht. The
The Great Sphinx, near Giza, Egypt. best known of all Egyptian sculpture, Khafre’s Great
Sphinx at Giza and his extraordinary seated statue of
Nubian gneiss, date from the middle 4th dynasty.
The Giza pyramids form a group of more or less completed monuments surrounded by many
tombs of the royal family and the elite, hierarchically organized and laid out in neat patterns.
This arrangement contrasts with that of the reign of Snefru, when important tombs were built
at Maydūm and Ṣaqqārah, while the King was probably buried at Dahshūr. Of the Giza tombs,
only those of the highest-ranking officials were decorated; except among the immediate
entourage of the kings, the freedom of expression of officials was greatly restricted. Most of
the highest officials were members of the large royal family, so that power was concentrated
by kinship as well as by other means. This did not prevent factional strife: the complex of
Redjedef was deliberately and thoroughly destroyed, probably at the instigation of his
successor, Khafre.
The Palermo Stone records a campaign to Lower Nubia in the reign of Snefru that may be
associated with graffiti in the area itself. The Egyptians founded a settlement at Buhen, at the
north end of the Second Cataract, which endured for 200 years; others may have been founded
between there and Elephantine. The purposes of this penetration were probably to establish
trade farther south and to create a buffer zone. No archaeological traces of a settled population
in Lower Nubia have been found for the Old Kingdom period; the oppressive presence of
Egypt seems to have robbed the inhabitants of their resources, as the provinces were exploited
in favour of the king and the elite.
Snefru and the builders of the Giza pyramids represented a classic age to later times. Snefru
was the prototype of a good king, whereas Khufu and Khafre had tyrannical reputations,
perhaps only because of the size of their monuments. Little direct evidence for political or
other attitudes survives from the dynasty, in part because writing was only just beginning to be
used for recording continuous texts. Many great works of art were, however, produced for
kings and members of the elite, and these set a pattern for later work. Kings of the 4th dynasty
identified themselves, at least from the time of Redjedef, as Son of Re (the sun god); worship
of the sun god reached a peak in the 5th dynasty.
The first two kings of the 5th dynasty, Userkaf and Sahure, were sons of Khentkaues, who was
a member of the 4th-dynasty royal family. The third king, Neferirkare, may also have been her
son. A story from the Middle Kingdom that makes them all sons of a priest of Re may derive
from a tradition that they were true worshipers of the sun god and implies, probably falsely,
that the 4th-dynasty kings were not. Six kings of the 5th dynasty displayed their devotion to
the sun god by building personal temples to his cult. These temples, of which the two so far
identified are sited similarly to pyramids, probably had a mortuary significance for the king as
well as honouring the god. The kings’ pyramids should therefore be seen in conjunction with
the sun temples, some of which received lavish endowments and were served by many high-
ranking officials.
Pyramids have been identified for seven of the nine kings of the dynasty, at Ṣaqqārah (Userkaf
and Unas, the last king), Abū Ṣīr (Sahure, Neferirkare, Reneferef, and Neuserre), and south
Ṣaqqārah (Djedkare Izezi, the eighth king). The pyramids are smaller and less solidly
constructed than those of the 4th dynasty, but the reliefs from their mortuary temples are better
preserved and of very fine quality; that of Sahure gives a fair impression of their decorative
program. The interiors contained religious scenes relating to provision for Sahure in the next
life, while the exteriors presented his “historical” role and relations with the gods. Sea
expeditions to Lebanon to acquire timber are depicted, as are aggression against and capture of
Libyans. Despite the apparent precision with which captives are named and total figures given,
these scenes may not refer to specific events, for the same motifs with the same details were
frequently shown over the next 250 years; Sahure’s use of them might not have been the
earliest.
Foreign connections were far-flung. Goldwork of the period has been found in Anatolia, while
stone vases named for Khafre and Pepi I (6th dynasty) have been found at Tall Mardīkh in
Syria (Ebla), which was destroyed around 2250 BCE. The absence of 5th-dynasty evidence
from the site is probably a matter of chance. Expeditions to the turquoise mines of Sinai
continued as before. In Nubia, graffiti and inscribed seals from Buhen document Egyptian
presence until late in the dynasty, when control was probably abandoned in the face of
immigration from the south and the deserts; later generations of the immigrants are known as
the Nubian C Group. From the reign of Sahure on, there are records of trade with Punt, a
partly legendary land probably in the region of present-day Eritrea, from which the Egyptians
obtained incense and myrrh, as well as exotic African products that had been traded from still
farther afield. Thus, the reduced level of royal display in Egypt does not imply a less
prominent general role for the country.
High officials of the 5th dynasty were no longer members of the royal family, although a few
married princesses. Their offices still depended on the king, and in their biographical
inscriptions they presented their exploits as relating to him, but they justified other aspects of
their social role in terms of a more general morality. They progressed through their careers by
acquiring titles in complex ranked sequences that were manipulated by kings throughout the
5th and 6th dynasties. This institutionalization of officialdom has an archaeological parallel in
the distribution of elite tombs, which no longer clustered so closely around pyramids. Many
are at Giza, but the largest and finest are at Ṣaqqārah and Abū Ṣīr. The repertory of decorated
scenes in them continually expanded, but there was no fundamental change in their subject
matter. Toward the end of the 5th dynasty, some officials with strong local ties began to build
their tombs in the Nile valley and the delta, in a development that symbolized the elite’s
slowly growing independence from royal control.
Something of the working of the central administration is visible in papyri from the mortuary
temples of Neferirkare and Reneferef at Abū Ṣīr. These show well-developed methods of
accounting and meticulous recordkeeping and document the complicated redistribution of
goods and materials between the royal residence, the temples, and officials who held
priesthoods. Despite this evidence for detailed organization, the consumption of papyrus was
modest and cannot be compared, for example, with that of Greco-Roman times.
The last three kings of the dynasty, Menkauhor, Djedkare

Izezi, and Unas, did not have personal names
compounded with “-Re,” the name of the sun god
(Djedkare is a name assumed on accession); and Izezi
and Unas did not build solar temples. Thus, there was a
Nekhbet slight shift away from the solar cult. The shift could be
Nekhbet, the vulture goddess, linked with the rise of Osiris, the god of the dead, who is
hovering over Menkauhor, Egypt,
first attested from the reign of Neuserre. His origin was,
25th–24th century
however, probably some centuries earlier. The pyramid
BC
. of Unas, whose approach causeway was richly decorated
with historical and religious scenes, is inscribed inside
with spells intended to aid the deceased in the hereafter; varying selections of the spells occur
in all later Old Kingdom pyramids. (As a collection, they are known as the Pyramid Texts.)
Many of the spells were old when they were inscribed; their presence documents the
increasing use of writing rather than a change in beliefs. The Pyramid Texts show the
importance of Osiris, at least for the king’s passage into the next world: it was an undertaking
that aroused anxiety and had to be assisted by elaborate rituals and spells.

No marked change can be discerned between the reigns of Unas and Teti, the first king of the
6th dynasty. Around Teti’s pyramid in the northern portion of Ṣaqqārah was built a cemetery
of large tombs, including those of several viziers. Together with tombs near the pyramid of
Unas, this is the latest group of private monuments of the Old Kingdom in the Memphite area.
Information on 6th-dynasty political and external affairs is more abundant because inscriptions
of high officials were longer. Whether the circumstances they describe were also typical of
less loquacious ages is unknown, but the very existence of such inscriptions is evidence of a
tendency to greater independence among officials. One, Weni, who lived from the reign of Teti
through those of Pepi I and Merenre, was a special judge in the trial of a conspiracy in the
royal household, mounted several campaigns against a region east of Egypt or in southern
Palestine, and organized two quarrying expeditions. In the absence of a standing army, the
Egyptian force was levied from the provinces by officials from local administrative centres
and other settlements; there were also contingents from several southern countries and a tribe
of the Eastern Desert.
Three biographies of officials from Elephantine record trading expeditions to the south in the
reigns of Pepi I and Pepi II. The location of the regions named in them is debated and may
have been as far afield as the Butāna, south of the Fifth Cataract. Some of the trade routes ran
through the Western Desert, where the Egyptians established an administrative post at Balāṭ in
Al-Dākhilah Oasis, some distance west of Al-Khārijah Oasis. Egypt no longer controlled
Lower Nubia, which was settled by the C Group and formed into political units of gradually
increasing size, possibly as far as Karmah (Kerma), south of the Third Cataract. Karmah was
the southern cultural successor of the Nubian A Group and became an urban centre in the late
3rd millennium BCE, remaining Egypt’s chief southern neighbour for seven centuries. To the
north the Karmah state stretched as far as the Second Cataract and at times farther still. Its
southern extent has not been determined, but sites of similar material culture are scattered over
vast areas of the central Sudan.
The provincializing tendencies of the late 5th dynasty continued in the 6th, especially during
the extremely long reign (up to 94 years) of Pepi II. Increasing numbers of officials resided in
the provinces, amassed local offices, and emphasized local concerns, including religious
leadership, in their inscriptions. At the capital the size and splendour of the cemeteries
decreased, and some tombs of the end of the dynasty were decorated only in their subterranean
parts, as if security could not be guaranteed aboveground. The pyramid complex of Pepi II at
southern Ṣaqqārah, which was probably completed in the first 30 years of his reign, stands out
against this background as the last major monument of the Old Kingdom, comparable to its
predecessors in artistic achievement. Three of his queens were buried in small pyramids
around his own; these are the only known queens’ monuments inscribed with Pyramid Texts.
The 7th and 8th dynasties (c. 2150–c. 2130 BCE)
Pepi II was followed by several ephemeral rulers, who were in turn succeeded by the short-
lived 7th dynasty of Manetho’s history (from which no king’s name is known) and the 8th, one
of whose kings, Ibi, built a small pyramid at southern Ṣaqqārah. Several 8th-dynasty kings are
known from inscriptions found in the temple of Min at Qifṭ (Coptos) in the south; this suggests
that their rule was recognized throughout the country. The instability of the throne is, however,
a sign of political decay, and the fiction of centralized rule may have been accepted only
because there was no alternative style of government to kingship.
With the end of the 8th dynasty, the Old Kingdom system of control collapsed. About that time
there were incidents of famine and local violence. The country emerged impoverished and
decentralized from this episode, the prime cause of which may have been political failure,
environmental disaster, or, more probably, a combination of the two. In that period the
desiccation of northeastern Africa reached a peak, producing conditions similar to those of
contemporary times, and a related succession of low inundations may have coincided with the
decay of central political authority. These environmental changes are, however, only
approximately dated, and their relationship with the collapse cannot be proved.
The First Intermediate period

The 9th dynasty (c. 2130–2080 BCE)
After the end of the 8th dynasty, the throne passed to kings from Heracleopolis, who made
their native city the capital, although Memphis continued to be important. They were
acknowledged throughout the country, but inscriptions of nomarchs (chief officials of nomes)
in the south show that the kings’ rule was nominal. At Dara, north of Asyūṭ, for example, a
local ruler called Khety styled himself in a regal manner and built a pyramid with a
surrounding “courtly” cemetery. At Al-Miʿalla, south of Luxor, Ankhtify, the nomarch of the
al-Jabalayn region, recorded his annexation of the Idfū nome and extensive raiding in the
Theban area. Ankhtify acknowledged an unidentifiable king Neferkare but campaigned with
his own troops. Major themes of inscriptions of the period are the nomarch’s provision of food
supplies for his people in times of famine and his success in promoting irrigation works.
Artificial irrigation had probably long been practiced, but exceptional poverty and crop failure
made concern with it worth recording. Inscriptions of Nubian mercenaries employed by local
rulers in the south indicate how entrenched military action was.
The 10th (c. 2080–c. 1970 BCE) and 11th (2081–1938 BCE) dynasties
A period of generalized conflict focused on rival dynasties at Thebes and Heracleopolis. The
latter, the 10th, probably continued the line of the 9th. The founder of the 9th or 10th dynasty
was named Khety, and the dynasty as a whole was termed the House of Khety. Several
Heracleopolitan kings were named Khety; another important name is Merikare. There was
intermittent conflict, and the boundary between the two realms shifted around the region of
Abydos. As yet, the course of events in this period cannot be reconstructed.
Several major literary texts purport to describe the upheavals of the First Intermediate period
—the Instruction for Merikare, for example, being ascribed to one of the kings of
Heracleopolis. These texts led earlier Egyptologists to posit a Heracleopolitan literary
flowering, but there is now a tendency to date them to the Middle Kingdom, so that they
would have been written with enough hindsight to allow a more effective critique of the sacred
order.
Until the 11th dynasty made Thebes its capital, Armant (Greek, Hermonthis), on the west bank
of the Nile, was the centre of the Theban nome. The dynasty honoured as its ancestor the
God’s Father Mentuhotep, probably the father of its first king, Inyotef I (2081–65 BCE), whose
successors were Inyotef II and Inyotef III (2065–16 and 2016–08 BCE, respectively). The
fourth king, Mentuhotep II (2008–1957 BCE, whose throne name was Nebhepetre), gradually
reunited Egypt and ousted the Heracleopolitans, changing his titulary in stages to record his
conquests. Around his 20th regnal year he assumed the Horus name Divine of the White
Crown, implicitly claiming all of Upper Egypt. By his regnal year 42 this had been changed to
Uniter of the Two Lands, a traditional royal epithet that he revived with a literal meaning. In
later times Mentuhotep was celebrated as the founder of the epoch now known as the Middle
Kingdom. His remarkable mortuary complex at Dayr al-Baḥrī, which seems to have had no
pyramid, was the architectural inspiration for Hatshepsut’s later structure built alongside.
In the First Intermediate period, monuments were set up by a slightly larger section of the
population, and, in the absence of central control, internal dissent and conflicts of authority
became visible in public records. Nonroyal individuals took over some of the privileges of
royalty, notably identification with Osiris in the hereafter and the use of the Pyramid Texts;
these were incorporated into a more extensive corpus inscribed on coffins (and hence termed
the Coffin Texts) and continued to be inscribed during the Middle Kingdom. The unified state
of the Middle Kingdom did not reject these acquisitions and so had a broader cultural basis
than the Old Kingdom.
The Middle Kingdom (1938–c. 1630 BCE) and the Second Intermediate
The Middle Kingdom

Mentuhotep II campaigned in Lower Nubia, where he may have been preceded by the
Inyotefs. His mortuary complex in Thebes contained some of the earliest known depictions of
Amon-Re, the dynastic god of the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom. Mentuhotep II
was himself posthumously deified and worshiped, notably in the Aswān area. In
administration, he attempted to break the power of the nomarchs, but his policy was
unsuccessful in the longer term.
Mentuhotep II’s successors, Mentuhotep III (1957–45 BCE) and Mentuhotep IV (1945–38
BCE), also ruled from Thebes. The reign of Mentuhotep IV corresponds to seven years marked
“missing” in the Turin Canon, and he may later have been deemed illegitimate. Records of a
quarrying expedition to the Wadi Ḥammāmāt from his second regnal year were inscribed on
the order of his vizier Amenemhet, who almost certainly succeeded to the throne and founded
the 12th dynasty. Not all the country welcomed the 11th dynasty, the monuments and self-
presentation of which remained local and Theban.
The 12th dynasty (1938–c. 1756 BCE)
In a text probably circulated as propaganda during the reign of Amenemhet I (1938–08 BCE),
the time preceding his reign is depicted as a period of chaos and despair, from which a saviour
called Ameny from the extreme south was to emerge. This presentation may well be
stereotyped, but there could have been armed struggle before he seized the throne.
Nonetheless, his mortuary complex at Al-Lisht contained monuments on which his name was
associated with that of his predecessor. In style, his pyramid and mortuary temple looked back
to Pepi II of the end of the Old Kingdom, but the pyramid was built of mud brick with a stone
casing; consequently, it is now badly ruined.
Amenemhet I moved the capital back to the Memphite area, founding a residence named Itjet-
towy, “she who takes possession of the Two Lands,” which was for later times the archetypal
royal residence. Itjet-towy was probably situated between Memphis and the pyramids of
Amenemhet I and Sesostris I (at modern Al-Lisht), while Memphis remained the centre of
population. From later in the dynasty there is the earliest evidence for a royal palace (not a
capital) in the eastern delta. The return to the Memphite area was accompanied by a revival of
Old Kingdom artistic styles, in a resumption of central traditions that contrasted with the local
ones of the 11th dynasty. From the reign of Amenemhet major tombs of the first half of the
dynasty, which display considerable local independence, are preserved at several sites, notably
Beni Hasan, Meir, and Qau. After the second reign of the dynasty, no more important private
tombs were constructed at Thebes, but several kings made benefactions to Theban temples.
In his 20th regnal year, Amenemhet I took his son

Sesostris I (or Senwosret, reigned 1908–1875 BCE) as his
coregent, presumably in order to ensure a smooth
transition to the next reign. This practice was followed in
the next two reigns and recurred sporadically in later
Sesostris I times. During the following 10 years of joint rule,
Sesostris I, detail of a limestone Sesostris undertook campaigns in Lower Nubia that led
statue, Egypt, c. 1900
to its conquest as far as the central area of the Second
BCE
Cataract. A series of fortresses were begun in the region,
.
and there was a full occupation, but the local C Group
population was not integrated culturally with the conquerors.
Amenemhet I apparently was murdered during Sesostris’s absence on a campaign to Libya,

but Sesostris was able to maintain his hold on the throne without major disorder. He
consolidated his father’s achievements, but, in one of the earliest preserved inscriptions
recounting royal exploits, he spoke of internal unrest. An inscription of the next reign alludes
to campaigns to Syria-Palestine in the time of Sesostris; whether these were raiding
expeditions and parades of strength, in what was then a seminomadic region, or whether a
conquest was intended or achieved is not known. It is clear, however, that the traditional view
that the Middle Kingdom hardly intervened in the Middle East is incorrect.
In the early 12th dynasty the written language was regularized in its classical form of Middle
Egyptian, a rather artificial idiom that was probably always somewhat removed from the
vernacular. The first datable corpus of literary texts was composed in Middle Egyptian. Two of
these relate directly to political affairs and offer fictional justifications for the rule of
Amenemhet I and Sesostris I, respectively. Several that are ascribed to Old Kingdom authors
or that describe events of the First Intermediate period but are composed in Middle Egyptian
probably also date from around this time. The most significant of these is the Instruction for
Merikare, a discourse on kingship and moral responsibility. It is often used as a source for the
history of the First Intermediate period but may preserve no more than a memory of its events.
Most of these texts continued to be copied in the New Kingdom.
Little is known of the reigns of Amenemhet II (1876–42 BCE) and Sesostris II (1844–37 BCE).
These kings built their pyramids in the entrance to Al-Fayyūm while also beginning an
intensive exploitation of its agricultural potential that reached a peak in the reign of
Amenemhet III (1818–1770 BCE). The king of the 12th dynasty with the most enduring
reputation was Sesostris III (1836–18 BCE), who extended Egyptian conquests to Semna, at the
south end of the Second Cataract, while also mounting at least one campaign to Palestine.
Sesostris III completed an extensive chain of fortresses in the Second Cataract; at Semna he
was worshiped as a god in the New Kingdom.
Frequent campaigns and military occupation, which lasted another 150 years, required a
standing army. A force of this type may have been created early in the 12th dynasty but
becomes better attested near the end. It was based on “soldiers”—whose title means literally
“citizens”—levied by district and officers of several grades and types. It was separate from
New Kingdom military organization and seems not to have enjoyed very high status.
The purpose of the occupation of Lower Nubia is

disputed, because the size of the fortresses and the level
of manpower needed to occupy them might seem
disproportionate to local threats. An inscription of
Sesostris III set up in the fortresses emphasizes the
Egypt: crowns weakness of the Nubian enemy, while a boundary marker
The crown of Lower Egypt (left) and and fragmentary papyri show that the system channeled
the crown of Upper Egypt (right), both
trade with the south through the central fortress of
worn by King Sesostris III, Egypt, 19th
century Mirgissa. The greatest period of the Karmah state to the
BCE
south was still to come, but for centuries it had probably
; in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo.
controlled a vast stretch of territory. The best explanation
of the Egyptian presence is that Lower Nubia was annexed by Egypt for purposes of securing
the southern trade route, while Karmah was a rival worth respecting and preempting; in
addition, the physical scale of the fortresses may have become something of an end in itself. It
is not known whether Egypt wished similarly to annex Palestine, but numerous administrative
seals of the period have been found there.
Sesostris III reorganized Egypt into four regions corresponding to the northern and southern
halves of the Nile valley and the eastern and western delta. Rich evidence for middle-ranking
officials from the religious centre of Abydos and for administrative practice in documents
from Al-Lāhūn conveys an impression of a pervasive, centralized bureaucracy, which later
came to run the country under its own momentum. The prosperity created by peace, conquests,
and agricultural development is visible in royal monuments and monuments belonging to the
minor elite, but there was no small, powerful, and wealthy group of the sort seen in the Old
and New Kingdoms. Sesostris III and his successor, Amenemhet III (1818–c. 1770 BCE), left a
striking artistic legacy in the form of statuary depicting them as aging, careworn rulers,
probably alluding to a conception of the suffering king known from literature of the dynasty.
This departure from the bland ideal, which may have sought to bridge the gap between king
and subjects in the aftermath of the attack on elite power, was not taken up in later times.
The reigns of Amenemhet III and Amenemhet IV (c. 1770–60 BCE) and of Sebeknefru (c.
1760–56 BCE), the first certainly attested female monarch, were apparently peaceful, but the
accession of a woman marked the end of the dynastic line.
Despite a continuity of outward forms and of the rhetoric of inscriptions between the 12th and
13th dynasties, there was a complete change in kingship. In little more than a century about 70
kings occupied the throne. Many can have reigned only for months, and there were probably
rival claimants to the throne, but in principle the royal residence remained at Itjet-towy and the
kings ruled the whole country. Egypt’s hold on Lower Nubia was maintained, as was its
position as the leading state in the Middle East. Large numbers of private monuments
document the prosperity of the official classes, and a proliferation of titles is evidence of their
continued expansion. In government the vizier assumed prime importance, and a single family
held the office for much of a century.
Immigration from Asia is known in the late 12th dynasty and became more widespread in the
13th. From the late 18th century BCE the northeastern Nile River delta was settled by
successive waves of peoples from Palestine, who retained their own material culture. Starting
with the Instruction for Merikare, Egyptian texts warn against the dangers of infiltration of
this sort, and its occurrence shows a weakening of government. There may also have been a
rival dynasty, called the 14th, at Xois in the north-central delta, but this is known only from
Manetho’s history and could have had no more than local significance. Toward the end of this
period, Egypt lost control of Lower Nubia, where the garrisons—which had been regularly
replaced with fresh troops—settled and were partly assimilated. The Karmah state overran and
incorporated the region. Some Egyptian officials resident in the Second Cataract area served
the new rulers. The site of Karmah has yielded many Egyptian artifacts, including old pieces
pillaged from their original contexts. Most were items of trade between the two countries,
some probably destined for exchange against goods imported from sub-Saharan Africa.
Around the end of the Middle Kingdom and during the Second Intermediate period, Medjay
tribesmen from the Eastern Desert settled in the Nile valley from around Memphis to the Third
Cataract. Their presence is marked by distinctive shallow graves with black-topped pottery,
and they have traditionally been termed the “Pan-grave” culture by archaeologists. They were
assimilated culturally in the New Kingdom, but the word Medjay came to mean police or
militia; they probably came as mercenaries.
The Second Intermediate period

The increasing competition for power in Egypt and Nubia crystallized in the formation of two
new dynasties: the 15th, called the Hyksos (c. 1630–c. 1523 BCE), with its capital at Avaris
(Tell el-Dabʿa) in the delta, and the 17th (c. 1630–1540 BCE), ruling from Thebes. The word
Hyksos dates to an Egyptian phrase meaning “ruler of foreign lands” and occurs in Manetho’s
narrative cited in the works of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (1st century CE), which
depicts the new rulers as sacrilegious invaders who despoiled the land. They presented
themselves—with the exception of the title Hyksos—as Egyptian kings and appear to have
been accepted as such. The main line of Hyksos was acknowledged throughout Egypt and may
have been recognized as overlords in Palestine, but they tolerated other lines of kings, both
those of the 17th dynasty and the various minor Hyksos who are termed the 16th dynasty. The
15th dynasty consisted of six kings, the best known being the fifth, Apopis, who reigned for up
to 40 years. There were many 17th-dynasty kings, probably belonging to several different
families. The northern frontier of the Theban domain was at Al-Qūṣiyyah, but there was trade
across the border.
Asiatic rule brought many technical innovations to Egypt, as well as cultural innovations such
as new musical instruments and foreign loan words. The changes affected techniques from
bronze working and pottery to weaving, and new breeds of animals and new crops were
introduced. In warfare, composite bows, new types of daggers and scimitars, and above all the
horse and chariot transformed previous practice, although the chariot may ultimately have
been as important as a prestige vehicle as for tactical military advantages it conferred. The
effect of these changes was to bring Egypt, which had been technologically backward, onto
the level of southwestern Asia. Because of these advances and the perspectives it opened up,
Hyksos rule was decisive for Egypt’s later empire in the Middle East.
Whereas the 13th dynasty was fairly prosperous, the Second Intermediate period may have
been impoverished. The regional centre of the cult of Osiris at Abydos, which has produced
the largest quantity of Middle Kingdom monuments, lost importance, but sites such as Thebes,
Idfū, and Al-Kawm al-Aḥmar have yielded significant, if sometimes crudely worked, remains.
Aside from Avaris itself, virtually no information has come from the north, where the Hyksos
ruled, and it is impossible to assess their impact on the economy or on high culture. The
Second Intermediate period was the consequence of political fragmentation and immigration
and was not associated with economic collapse, as in the early First Intermediate period.
Toward the end of the 17th dynasty (c. 1545 BCE), the Theban king Seqenenre challenged
Apopis, probably dying in battle against him. Seqenenre’s successor, Kamose, renewed the
challenge, stating in an inscription that it was intolerable to share his land with an Asiatic and
a Nubian (the Karmah ruler). By the end of his third regnal year, he had made raids as far
south as the Second Cataract (and possibly much farther) and in the north to the
neighbourhood of Avaris, also intercepting in the Western Desert a letter sent from Apopis to a
new Karmah ruler on his accession. By campaigning to the north and to the south, Kamose
acted out his implicit claim to the territory ruled by Egypt in the Middle Kingdom. His
exploits formed a vital stage in the long struggle to expel the Hyksos.
John R. Baines Peter F. Dorman
The New Kingdom (c. 1539–1075 BCE)
The 18th dynasty (c. 1539–1292 BCE)
Ahmose
Although Ahmose (ruled c. 1539–14 BCE) had been preceded by Kamose, who was either his
father or his brother, Egyptian tradition regarded Ahmose as the founder of a new dynasty
because he was the native ruler who reunified Egypt. Continuing a recently inaugurated
practice, he married his full sister Ahmose-Nofretari. The queen was given the title of God’s
Wife of Amon. Like her predecessors of the 17th dynasty, Queen Ahmose-Nofretari was
influential and highly honoured. A measure of her importance was her posthumous veneration
at Thebes, where later pharaohs were depicted offering to her as a goddess among the gods.
Ahmose’s campaigns to expel the Hyksos from the Nile River delta and regain former
Egyptian territory to the south probably started around his 10th regnal year. Destroying the
Hyksos stronghold at Avaris, in the eastern delta, he finally drove them beyond the eastern
frontier and then besieged Sharuḥen (Tell el-Fārʿah) in southern Palestine; the full extent of his
conquests may have been much greater. His penetration of the Middle East came at a time
when there was no major established power in the region. This political gap facilitated the
creation of an Egyptian “empire.”
Ahmose’s officers and soldiers were rewarded with spoil and captives, who became personal
slaves. This marked the creation of an influential military class. Like Kamose, Ahmose
campaigned as far south as Buhen. For the administration of the regained territory, he created
a new office, overseer of southern foreign lands, which ranked second only to the vizier. Its
incumbent was accorded the honorific title of king’s son, indicating that he was directly
responsible to the king as deputy.
The early New Kingdom bureaucracy was modeled on that of the Middle Kingdom. The vizier
was the chief administrator and the highest judge of the realm. By the mid-15th century BCE
the office had been divided into two, one vizier for Upper and one for Lower Egypt. During
the 18th dynasty some young bureaucrats were educated in temple schools, reinforcing the
integration of civil and priestly sectors. Early in the dynasty many administrative posts were
inherited, but royal appointment of capable officials, often selected from military officers who
had served the king on his campaigns, later became the rule. The trend was thus away from
bureaucratic families and the inheritance of office.
Amenhotep I
Ahmose’s son and successor, Amenhotep I (ruled c.
1514–1493 BCE), pushed the Egyptian frontier southward
to the Third Cataract, near the capital of the Karmah
(Kerma) state, while also gathering tribute from his
Asiatic possessions and perhaps campaigning in Syria.
Amenhotep I The emerging kingdom of Mitanni in northern Syria,
Limestone sculpture of Amenhotep I, which is first mentioned on a stela of one of
Egypt, c. 1500 Amenhotep’s soldiers and was also known by the name
BCE
of Nahrin, may have threatened Egypt’s conquests to the
.
north.
The New Kingdom was a time of increased devotion to the state god Amon-Re, whose cult
largely benefited as Egypt was enriched by the spoils of war. Riches were turned over to the
god’s treasuries, and as a sign of filial piety the king had sacred monuments constructed at
Thebes. Under Amenhotep I the pyramidal form of royal tomb was abandoned in favour of a
rock-cut tomb, and, except for Akhenaton, all subsequent New Kingdom rulers were buried in
concealed tombs in the famous Valley of the Kings in western Thebes. Separated from the
tombs, royal mortuary temples were erected at the edge of the desert. Perhaps because of this
innovation, Amenhotep I later became the patron deity of the workmen who excavated and
decorated the royal tombs. The location of his own tomb is unknown.
Thutmose I and Thutmose II

Lacking a surviving heir, Amenhotep I was succeeded by one of his generals, Thutmose I
(ruled 1493–c. 1482 BCE), who married his own full sister Ahmose. In the south Thutmose
destroyed the Karmah state. He inscribed a rock as a boundary marker, later confirmed by
Thutmose III, near Kanisa-Kurgus, north of the Fifth Cataract. He then executed a brilliant
campaign into Syria and across the Euphrates River, where he erected a victory stela near
Carchemish.
Thus, in the reign of Thutmose I, Egyptian conquests in the Middle East and Africa reached
their greatest extent, but they may not yet have been firmly held. His little-known successor,
Thutmose II (c. 1482–79 BCE), apparently continued his policies.
Hatshepsut and Thutmose III

At Thutmose II’s death his queen and sister, Hatshepsut,
had only a young daughter; but a minor wife had borne
him a boy, who was apparently very young at his
accession. This son, Thutmose III (ruled 1479–26 BCE),
later reconquered Egypt’s Asian empire and became an
outstanding ruler. During his first few regnal years,
Thutmose III theoretically controlled the land, but
Hatshepsut governed as regent. Sometime between
ancient Egyptian empire under Thutmose III’s second and seventh regnal years, she
Thutmose III assumed the kingship herself. According to one version
The ancient Egyptian empire during of the event, the oracle of Amon proclaimed her king at
the rule of Thutmose III (1479–26
Karnak, where she was crowned. A more propagandistic
BCE
account, preserved in texts and reliefs of her splendid
).
mortuary temple at Dayr al-Baḥrī, ignores the reign of
Thutmose II and asserts that her father, Thutmose I,
proclaimed her his successor. Upon becoming king,
Hatshepsut became the dominant partner in a joint rule
that lasted until her death in about 1458 BCE; there are
monuments dedicated by Hatshepsut that depict both
Egyptian sculpture: head of a
kings. She had the support of various powerful
queen
personalities; the most notable among them was
Head of a queen, brown quartzite
sculpture from Egypt, c. 1479–25
Senenmut, the steward and tutor of her daughter
BCE
Neferure. In styling herself king, Hatshepsut adopted the
; in the Brooklyn Museum, New royal titulary but avoided the epithet “mighty bull,”
York.
regularly employed by other kings. Although in her
reliefs she was depicted as a male, pronominal references
in the texts usually reflect her womanhood. Similarly, much of her statuary shows her in male
form, but there are rarer examples that render her as a woman. In less formal documents she
was referred to as “King’s Great Wife”—that is, “Queen”—while Thutmose III was “King.”
There is thus a certain ambiguity in the treatment of Hatshepsut as king.
Her temple reliefs depict pacific enterprises, such as the

transporting of obelisks for Amon’s temple and a
commercial expedition to Punt; her art style looked back
to Middle Kingdom ideals. Some warlike scenes are
depicted, however, and she may have waged a campaign
Temple of Queen Hatshepsut in Nubia. In one inscription she blamed the Hyksos for
The Temple of Queen Hatshepsut at the supposedly poor state of the land before her rule,
Dayr al-Baḥrī, Thebes, Egypt, 15th
even though they had been expelled from the region
century
more than a generation earlier.
BCE
.
During Hatshepsut’s ascendancy Egypt’s position in Asia
may have deteriorated because of the expansion of Mitannian power in Syria. Shortly after her
death, the prince of the Syrian city of Kadesh, stood with troops of 330 princes of a Syro-
Palestinian coalition at Megiddo; such a force was more than merely defensive, and the
intention may have been to advance against Egypt. The 330 must have represented all the
places of any size in the region that were not subject to Egyptian rule and may be a schematic
figure derived from a list of place-names. It is noteworthy that Mitanni itself was not directly
involved.
Thutmose III proceeded to Gaza with his army and then to Yehem, subjugating rebellious
Palestinian towns along the way. His annals relate how, at a consultation concerning the best
route over the Mount Carmel ridge, the king overruled his officers and selected a shorter but
more dangerous route through the ʿArūnah Pass and then led the troops himself. The march
went smoothly, and, when the Egyptians attacked at dawn, they prevailed over the enemy
troops and besieged Megiddo.
Thutmose III meanwhile coordinated the landing of other army divisions on the Syro-
Palestinian littoral, whence they proceeded inland, so that the strategy resembled a pincer
technique. The siege ended in a treaty by which Syrian princes swore an oath of submission to
the king. As was normal in ancient diplomacy and in Egyptian practice, the oath was binding
only upon those who swore it, not upon future generations.
By the end of the first campaign, Egyptian domination

extended northward to a line linking Byblos and
Damascus. Although the prince of Kadesh remained to
be vanquished, Assyria sent lapis lazuli as tribute; Asian
princes surrendered their weapons, including a large
Thutmose III number of horses and chariots. Thutmose III took only a
Thutmose III smiting his Asian foes, limited number of captives. He appointed Asian princes
detail of a limestone relief from the
to govern the towns and took their brothers and sons to
Temple of Amon at Karnak, Egypt,
15th century Egypt, where they were educated at the court. Most
BCE eventually returned home to serve as loyal vassals,
. though some remained in Egypt at court. In order to
ensure the loyalty of Asian city-states, Egypt maintained
garrisons that could quell insurrection and supervise the delivery of tribute. There never was
an elaborate Egyptian imperial administration in Asia.
Thutmose III conducted numerous subsequent campaigns in Asia. The submission of Kadesh
was finally achieved, but Thutmose III’s ultimate aim was the defeat of Mitanni. He used the
navy to transport troops to Asian coastal towns, avoiding arduous overland marches from
Egypt. His great eighth campaign led him across the Euphrates; although the countryside
around Carchemish was ravaged, the city was not taken, and the Mitannian prince was able to
flee. The psychological gain of this campaign was perhaps greater than its military success, for
Babylonia, Assyria, and the Hittites all sent tribute in recognition of Egyptian dominance.
Although Thutmose III never subjugated Mitanni, he placed Egypt’s conquests on a firm
footing by constant campaigning that contrasts with the forays of his predecessors. Thutmose
III’s annals inscribed in the temple of Karnak are remarkably succinct and accurate, but his
other texts, particularly one set in his newly founded Nubian capital of Napata, are more
conventional in their rhetoric. He seems to have married three Syrian wives, which may
represent diplomatic unions, marking Egypt’s entry into the realm of international affairs of
the ancient Middle East.
Thutmose III initiated a truly imperial Egyptian rule in Nubia. Much of the land became
estates of institutions in Egypt, while local cultural traits disappear from the archaeological
record. Sons of chiefs were educated at the Egyptian court; a few returned to Nubia to serve as
administrators, and some were buried there in Egyptian fashion. Nubian fortresses lost their
strategic value and became administrative centres. Open towns developed around them, and,
in several temples outside their walls, the cult of the divine king was established. Lower Nubia
supplied gold from the desert and hard and semiprecious stones. From farther south came
tropical African woods, perfumes, oil, ivory, animal skins, and ostrich plumes. There is
scarcely any trace of local population from the later New Kingdom, when many more temples
were built in Nubia; by the end of the 20th dynasty, the region had almost no prosperous
settled population.
Under Thutmose III the wealth of empire became apparent in Egypt. Many temples were built,
and vast sums were donated to the estate of Amon-Re. There are many tombs of his high
officials at Thebes. The capital had been moved to Memphis, but Thebes remained the
religious centre.
The campaigns of kings such as Thutmose III required a large military establishment,
including a hierarchy of officers and an expensive chariotry. The king grew up with military
companions whose close connection with him enabled them to participate increasingly in
government. Military officers were appointed to high civil and religious positions, and by the
Ramesside period the influence of such people had come to outweigh that of the traditional
bureaucracy.
Amenhotep II
About two years before his death, Thutmose III appointed his 18-year-old son, Amenhotep II
(ruled c. 1426–1400 BCE), as coregent. Just prior to his father’s death, Amenhotep II set out on
a campaign to an area in Syria near Kadesh, whose city-states were now caught up in the
power struggle between Egypt and Mitanni; Amenhotep II killed seven princes and shipped
their bodies back to Egypt to be suspended from the ramparts of Thebes and Napata. In his
seventh and ninth years, Amenhotep II made further campaigns into Asia, where the Mitannian
king pursued a more vigorous policy. The revolt of the important coastal city of Ugarit was a
serious matter, because Egyptian control over Syria required bases along the littoral for inland
operations and the provisioning of the army. Ugarit was pacified, and the fealty of Syrian
cities, including Kadesh, was reconfirmed.
Thutmose IV
Amenhotep II’s son Thutmose IV (ruled 1400–1390 BCE)

sought to establish peaceful relations with the Mitannian
king Artatama, who had been successful against the
Hittites. Artatama gave his daughter in marriage, the
prerequisite for which was probably the Egyptian cession
Thutmose IV of some Syrian city-states to the Mitannian sphere of
Gray granite sculpture of Thutmose IV, influence.
Egypt, 15th century
BCE Foreign influences during the early 18th

. dynasty
During the empire period Egypt maintained commercial
ties with Phoenicia, Crete, and the Aegean islands. The
Egyptians portrayed goods obtained through trade as
foreign tribute. In the Theban tombs there are
representations of Syrians bearing Aegean products and
Egypt: tomb painting of Aegeans carrying Syrian bowls and amphorae—
Detail of a wall painting from a tomb in indicative of close commercial interconnections between
Thebes, Egypt, c. 1450
Mediterranean lands. Egyptian ships trading with
BCE
Phoenicia and Syria journeyed beyond to Crete and the
.
Aegean, a route that explains the occasional confusion of
products and ethnic types in Egyptian representations. The most prized raw material from the
Aegean world was silver, which was lacking in Egypt, where gold was relatively abundant.
One result of the expansion of the empire was a new appreciation of foreign culture. Not only
were foreign objets d’art imported into Egypt, but Egyptian artisans imitated Aegean wares as
well. Imported textiles inspired the ceiling patterns of Theban tomb chapels, and Aegean art
with its spiral motifs influenced Egyptian artists. Under Amenhotep II, Asian gods are found in
Egypt: Astarte and Resheph became revered for their reputed potency in warfare, and Astarte
was honoured also in connection with medicine, love, and fertility. Some Asian gods were
eventually identified with similar Egyptian deities; thus, Astarte was associated with Sekhmet,
the goddess of pestilence, and Resheph with Mont, the war god. Just as Asians resident in
Egypt were incorporated into Egyptian society and could rise to important positions, so their
gods, though represented as foreign, were worshiped according to Egyptian cult practices. The
breakdown of Egyptian isolationism and an increased cosmopolitanism in religion are also

reflected in hymns that praise Amon-Re’s concern for the welfare of Asians.
Amenhotep III
Thutmose IV’s son Amenhotep III (ruled 1390–53 BCE) acceded to the throne at about the age
of 12. He soon wed Tiy, who became his queen. Earlier in the dynasty military men had served
as royal tutors, but Tiy’s father was a commander of the chariotry, and through this link the
royal line became even more directly influenced by the military. In his fifth year Amenhotep
III claimed a victory over Cushite rebels, but the viceroy of Cush, the southern portion of
Nubia, probably actually led the troops. The campaign may have led into the Butāna, west of
the ʿAṭbarah River, farther south than any previous Egyptian military expedition had gone.
Several temples erected under Amenhotep III in Upper Nubia between the Second and Third
cataracts attest to the importance of the region.
Peaceful relations prevailed with Asia, where control of Egypt’s vassals was successfully
maintained. A commemorative scarab from the king’s 10th year announced the arrival in
Egypt of the Mitannian princess Gilukhepa, along with 317 women; thus, another diplomatic
marriage helped maintain friendly relations between Egypt and its former foe. Another
Mitannian princess was later received into Amenhotep III’s harem, and during his final illness
the Hurrian goddess Ishtar of Nineveh was sent to his aid. At the expense of older bureaucratic
families and the principle of inheritance of office, military men acquired high posts in the civil
administration. Most influential was the aged scribe and commander of the elite troops,
Amenhotep, son of Hapu, whose reputation as a sage survived into the Ptolemaic period.
Amenhotep III sponsored building on a colossal scale,

especially in the Theban area. At Karnak he erected the
huge third pylon, and at Luxor he dedicated a
magnificent new temple to Amon. The king’s own
mortuary temple in western Thebes was unrivaled in its
Colossi of Memnon size; little remains of it today, but its famous Colossi of
The Colossi of Memnon, stone statues Memnon testify to its proportions. He also built a huge
of Amenhotep III, near Thebes, Egypt,
harbour and palace complex nearby. Some colossal
14th century
statues served as objects of public veneration, before
BCE
. which men could appeal to the king’s ka, which
represented the transcendent aspect of kingship. In Karnak, statues of Amenhotep, son of

Hapu, were placed to act as intermediaries between supplicants and the gods.
Among the highest-ranking officials at Thebes were men of Lower Egyptian background, who
constructed large tombs with highly refined decoration. An eclectic quality is visible in the
tombs, certain scenes of which were inspired by Old Kingdom reliefs. The earliest preserved
important New Kingdom monuments from Memphis also date from this reign. Antiquarianism
is evidenced in Amenhotep III’s celebration of his sed festivals (rituals of renewal celebrated
after 30 years of rule), which were performed at his Theban palace in accordance, it was
claimed, with ancient writings. Tiy, whose role was much more prominent than that of earlier
queens, participated in these ceremonies.
Amenhotep III’s last years were spent in ill health. To judge from his mummy and less formal
representations of him from Amarna, he was obese when, in his 38th regnal year, he died and
was succeeded by his son Amenhotep IV (ruled 1353–36 BCE), the most controversial of all
the kings of Egypt.
Amenhotep IV (Akhenaton)
The earliest monuments of Amenhotep IV, who in his fifth regnal year changed his name to
Akhenaton (“One Useful to Aton”), are conventional in their iconography and style, but from
the first he gave the sun god a didactic title naming Aton, the solar disk. This title was later
written inside a pair of cartouches, as a king’s name would be. The king declared his religious
allegiance by the unprecedented use of “high priest of the sun god” as one of his own titles.
The term Aton had long been in use, but under Thutmose IV the Aton had been referred to as a
god, and under Amenhotep III those references became more frequent. Thus, Akhenaton did
not create a new god but rather singled out this aspect of the sun god from among others. He
also carried further radical tendencies that had recently developed in solar religion, in which
the sun god was freed from his traditional mythological context and presented as the sole
beneficent provider for the entire world. The king’s own divinity was emphasized: the Aton
was said to be his father, of whom he alone had knowledge, and they shared the status of king
and celebrated jubilees together.
In his first five regnal years, Akhenaton built many temples to the Aton, of which the most
important were in the precinct of the temple of Amon-Re at Karnak. In these open-air
structures was developed a new, highly stylized form of relief and sculpture in the round. The
Aton was depicted not in anthropomorphic form but as a solar disk from which radiating arms
extend the hieroglyph for “life” to the noses of the king and his family. During the
construction of these temples, the cult of Amon and other gods was suspended, and the
worship of the Aton in an open-air sanctuary superseded that of Amon, who had dwelt in a
dark shrine of the Karnak temple. The king’s wife Nefertiti, whom he had married before his
accession, was prominent in the reliefs and had a complete shrine dedicated to her that
included no images of the king. Her prestige continued to grow for much of the reign.
At about the time that he altered his name to conform with the new religion, the king
transferred the capital to a virgin site at Amarna (Tell el-Amarna; Al-ʿAmārinah) in Middle
Egypt. There he constructed a well-planned city—Akhetaton (“the Horizon of Aton”)—
comprising temples to the Aton, palaces, official buildings, villas for the high ranking, and
extensive residential quarters. In the Eastern Desert cliffs surrounding the city, tombs were
excavated for the courtiers, and deep within a secluded wadi the royal sepulchre was prepared.
Reliefs in these tombs have been invaluable for reconstructing life at Amarna. The tomb reliefs
and stelae portray the life of the royal family with an unprecedented degree of intimacy.
In Akhenaton’s ninth year a more monotheistic didactic name was given to the Aton, and an
intense persecution of the older gods, especially Amon, was undertaken. Amon’s name was
excised from many older monuments throughout the land, and occasionally the word gods was
expunged.
Akhenaton’s religious and cultural revolution was highly

personal in that he seems to have had a direct hand in
devising the precepts of the Aton religion and the
conventions of Amarna art. In religion the accent was
upon the sun’s life-sustaining power, and naturalistic
Akhenaton, Nefertiti, and their scenes adorned the walls and even the floors of Amarna
daughters
buildings. The king’s role in determining the
King Akhenaton (left) with Queen
composition of the court is expressed in epithets given to
Nefertiti and three of their daughters
under the rays of the sun god Aton, officials he selected from the lesser ranks of society,
Egypt, mid-14th century including the military. Few officials had any connection
BCE with the old ruling elite, and some courtiers who had
; in the State Museums, Berlin.
been accepted at the beginning of the reign were purged.
Even at Amarna the new religion was not widely accepted below the level of the elite;
numerous small objects relating to traditional beliefs have been found at the site.
Akhenaton’s revolutionary intent is visible in all of his actions. In representational art, many
existing conventions were revised to emphasize the break with the past. Such a procedure is
comprehensible because traditional values were consistently incorporated in cultural
expression as a whole; in order to change one part, it was necessary to change the whole.
A vital innovation was the introduction of vernacular forms into the written language. This led
in later decades to the appearance of current verbal forms in monumental inscriptions. The
vernacular form of the New Kingdom, which is now known as Late Egyptian, appears fully
developed in letters of the later 19th and 20th dynasties.
Akhenaton’s foreign policy and use of force abroad are less well understood. He mounted one
minor campaign in Nubia. In the Middle East, Egypt’s hold on its possessions was not as
secure as earlier, but the cuneiform tablets found at Amarna recording his diplomacy are
difficult to interpret because the vassals who requested aid from him exaggerated their plight.
One reason for unrest in the region was the decline of Mitanni and the resurgence of the
Hittites. Between the reign of Akhenaton and the end of the 18th dynasty, Egypt lost control of
much territory in Syria.
The aftermath of Amarna

Akhenaton had six daughters by Nefertiti and possibly a son, perhaps by a secondary wife
Kiya. Either Nefertiti or the widow of Tutankhamun called on the Hittite king Suppiluliumas
to supply a consort because she could find none in Egypt; a prince was sent, but he was
murdered as he reached Egypt. Thus, Egypt never had a diplomatic marriage in which a
foreign man was received into the country.
After the brief rule of Smenkhkare (1335–32 BCE), possibly a son of Akhenaton, Tutankhaten,
a nine-year-old child, succeeded and was married to the much older Ankhesenpaaten,
Akhenaton’s third daughter. Around his third regnal year, the king moved his capital to
Memphis, abandoned the Aton cult, and changed his and the queen’s names to Tutankhamun
and Ankhesenamen. In an inscription recording Tutankhamun’s actions for the gods, the
Amarna period is described as one of misery and of the withdrawal of the gods from Egypt.
This change, made in the name of the young king, was probably the work of high officials.
The most influential were Ay, known by the title God’s Father, who served as vizier and regent
(his title indicates a close relationship to the royal family), and the general Horemheb, who
functioned as royal deputy and whose tomb at Ṣaqqārah contains remarkable scenes of Asiatic
captives being presented to the King.
Just as Akhenaton had adapted and transformed the religious thinking that was current in his
time, the reaction to the religion of Amarna was influenced by the rejected doctrine. In the new
doctrine, all gods were in essence three: Amon, Re, and Ptah (to whom Seth was later added),
and in some ultimate sense they too were one. The earliest evidence of this triad is on a
trumpet of Tutankhamun and is related to the naming of the three chief army divisions after
these gods; religious life and secular life were not separate. This concentration on a small
number of essential deities may possibly be related to the piety of the succeeding Ramesside
period, because both viewed the cosmos as being thoroughly permeated with the divine.
Under Tutankhamun a considerable amount of building

was accomplished in Thebes. His Luxor colonnade bears
detailed reliefs of the traditional beautiful festival of
Opet; he decorated another structure (now only a series
of disconnected blocks) with warlike scenes. He affirmed
Tutankhamun: funerary mask his legitimacy by referring back to Amenhotep III, whom
Gold funerary mask of King he called his father. Tutankhamun’s modern fame comes
Tutankhamun, Thebes, Egypt, 14th
from the discovery of his rich burial in the Valley of the
century
Kings. His tomb equipment was superior in quality to the
BCE
; in the Grand Egyptian Museum, fragments known from other royal burials, and the
Giza. opulent display—of varying aesthetic value—represents
Egyptian wealth at the peak of the country’s power.
Ay and Horemheb
Tutankhamun’s funeral in about 1323 BCE was conducted
by his successor, the aged Ay (ruled 1323–19 BCE), who
headrest; Tutankhamun tomb in turn was succeeded by Horemheb. The latter probably
Headrest in the form of the god Shu ruled from 1319 to c. 1292 BCE, but the length of his
with two crouching lions, from the
poorly attested reign is not certain. Horemheb dismantled
tomb of Tutankhamun, c. 1340
many monuments erected by Akhenaton and his
BCE
; in the collection of the Egyptian successors and used the blocks as fill for huge pylons at
Museum, Cairo.
Karnak. At Karnak and Luxor he appropriated
Tutankhamun’s reliefs by surcharging the latter’s
cartouches with his own. Horemheb appointed new
officials and priests not from established families but
from the army. His policies concentrated on domestic
problems. He issued police regulations dealing with the
Tutankhamun's tomb, Valley of
the Kings misbehaviour of palace officials and personnel, and he
Tutankhamun's tomb (lower left) in the

reformed the judicial system, reorganizing the courts and
Valley of the Kings, Thebes, Egypt, selecting new judges.
14th century
BCE The Ramesside period (19th and 20th

. dynasties) (1292–1075 BCE)
Horemheb was the first post-Amarna king to be considered legitimate in the 19th dynasty,
which looked to him as the founder of an epoch. The reigns of the Amarna pharaohs were
eventually to be subsumed into his own, leaving no official record of what posterity deemed to
be an unorthodox and distasteful interlude. Having no son, he selected his general and vizier,
Ramses, to succeed him.
Ramses I and Seti I

Ramses I (ruled 1292–90 BCE) hailed from the eastern
Nile River delta, and with the 19th dynasty there was a
political shift into the delta. Ramses I was succeeded by
his son and coregent, Seti I, who buried his father and
provided him with mortuary buildings at Thebes and
temple of Seti I Abydos.
Hallway in the temple of Seti I,
Thebes, Egypt, 13th century Seti I (ruled 1290–79 BCE) was a successful military
BCE leader who reasserted authority over Egypt’s weakened
. empire in the Middle East. The Mitanni state had been
dismembered, and the Hittites had become the dominant
Asian power. Before tackling them, Seti laid the groundwork for military operations in Syria
by fighting farther south against nomads and Palestinian city-states; then, following the
strategy of Thutmose III, he secured the coastal cities and gained Kadesh. Although his
engagement with the Hittites was successful, Egypt acquired only temporary control of part of
the north Syrian plain. A treaty was concluded with the Hittites, who, however, subsequently
pushed farther southward and regained Kadesh by the time of Ramses II. Seti I ended a new
threat to Egyptian security when he defeated Libyans attempting to enter the delta. He also
mounted a southern campaign, probably to the Fifth Cataract region.
Seti I’s reign looked for its model to the mid-18th dynasty and was a time of considerable
prosperity. Seti I restored countless monuments that had been defaced in the Amarna period,
and the refined decoration of his monuments, particularly his temple at Abydos, shows a
classicizing tendency. He also commissioned striking and novel reliefs showing stages of his
campaigns, which are preserved notably on the north wall of the great hypostyle hall at
Karnak. This diversity of artistic approach is characteristic of the Ramesside period, which
was culturally and ethnically pluralistic.
Ramses II
Well before his death, Seti I appointed his son Ramses II,
sometimes called Ramses the Great, as crown prince.
During the long reign of Ramses II (1279–13 BCE), there
was a prodigious amount of building, ranging from
religious edifices throughout Egypt and Nubia to a new
Ramses II cosmopolitan capital, Pi Ramesse, in the eastern delta;
Detail of the face of the Colossus of his cartouches were carved ubiquitously, often on earlier
Ramses II, Temple of Luxor, Thebes,
monuments. Ramses II’s penchant for decorating vast
Egypt, 13th century
temple walls with battle scenes gives the impression of a
BCE
. mighty warrior king. His campaigns were, however,
relatively few, and after the first decade his reign was
peaceful. The most famous scenes record the battle of Kadesh, fought in his fifth regnal year.
These and extensive accompanying texts present the battle as an Egyptian victory, but in fact
the opposing Hittite coalition fared at least as well as the Egyptians. After this inconclusive
struggle, his officers advised him to make peace, saying, “There is no reproach in
reconciliation when you make it.” In succeeding years Ramses II campaigned in Syria; after a
decade of stalemate, a treaty in his 21st year was concluded with Hattusilis III, the Hittite
king.
The rise of Assyria and unrest in western Anatolia encouraged the Hittites to accept this treaty,
while Ramses II may have feared a new Libyan threat to the western delta. Egyptian and
Hittite versions of the treaty survive. It contained a renunciation of further hostilities, a mutual
alliance against outside attack and internal rebellion, and the extradition of fugitives. The gods
of both lands were invoked as witnesses. The treaty was further cemented 13 years later by
Ramses II’s marriage to a Hittite princess.
The king had an immense family by his numerous wives, among whom he especially
honoured Nefertari. He dedicated a temple to her at Abū Simbel, in Nubia, and built a
magnificent tomb for her in the Valley of the Queens.
For the first time in more than a millennium, princes

were prominently represented on the monuments.
Ramses II’s fourth surviving son, Khaemwese, was
famous as high priest of Ptah at Memphis. He restored
many monuments in the Memphite area, including
temple of Abu Simbel pyramids and pyramid temples of the Old Kingdom, and
Entrance to the temple of Abu Simbel, had buildings constructed near the Sarapeum at
near Aswān, Egypt, 13th century
Ṣaqqārah. He was celebrated into Roman times as a sage
BCE
and magician and became the hero of a cycle of stories.
.
Merneptah
Ramses II’s 13th son, Merneptah (ruled 1213–04 BCE), was his successor. Several of
Merneptah’s inscriptions, of unusual literary style, treat an invasion of the western delta in his
fifth year by Libyans, supported by groups of Sea Peoples who had traveled from Anatolia to
Libya in search of new homes. The Egyptians defeated this confederation and settled captives
in military camps to serve as Egyptian mercenaries.
One of the inscriptions concludes with a poem of victory (written about another battle),
famous for its words “Israel is desolated and has no seed.” This is the earliest documented
mention of Israel; it is generally assumed that the exodus of the Jews from Egypt took place
under Ramses II.
Merneptah was able to hold most of Egypt’s possessions, although early in his reign he had to
reassert Egyptian suzerainty in Palestine, destroying Gezer in the process. Peaceful relations
with the Hittites and respect for the treaty of Ramses II are indicated by Merneptah’s dispatch
of grain to them during a famine and by Egyptian military aid in the protection of Hittite
possessions in Syria.
Last years of the 19th dynasty

Upon the death of Merneptah, competing factions within the royal family contended for the
succession. Merneptah’s son Seti II (ruled 1204–1198 BCE) had to face a usurper, Amenmeses,
who rebelled in Nubia and was accepted in Upper Egypt. His successor, Siptah, was installed
on the throne by a Syrian royal butler, Bay, who had become chancellor of Egypt. Siptah was
succeeded by Seti II’s widow Tausert, who ruled as king from 1193 to 1190 BCE, counting her
regnal years from the death of Seti II, whose name she restored over that of Siptah. A
description in a later papyrus of the end of the dynasty alludes to a Syrian usurper, probably
Bay, who subjected the land to harsh taxation and treated the gods as mortals with no offerings
in their temples.
The early 20th dynasty: Setnakht and Ramses III

Order was restored by a man of obscure origin, Setnakht (ruled 1190–87 BCE), the founder of
the 20th dynasty, who appropriated Tausert’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings. An inscription of
Setnakht recounts his struggle to pacify the land, which ended in the second of his three regnal
years.
Setnakht’s son Ramses III (ruled 1187–56 BCE) was the last great king of the New Kingdom.
There are problems in evaluating his achievements because he emulated Ramses II and copied
numerous scenes and texts of Ramses II in his mortuary temple at Madīnat Habu, one of the
best-preserved temples of the empire period. Thus, the historicity of certain Nubian and Syrian
wars depicted as his accomplishments is subject to doubt. He did, however, fight battles that
were more decisive than any fought by Ramses II. In his fifth year Ramses III defeated a
large-scale Libyan invasion of the delta in a battle in which thousands of the enemy perished.
A greater menace lay to the north, where a confederation of Sea Peoples was progressing by
land and sea toward Egypt. This alliance of obscure tribes traveled south in the aftermath of
the destruction of the Hittite empire. In his eighth regnal year Ramses III engaged them
successfully on two frontiers—a land battle in Palestine and a naval engagement in one of the
mouths of the delta. Because of these two victories, Egypt did not undergo the political
turmoil or experience the rapid technical advance of the early Iron Age in the Near East.
Forced away from the borders of Egypt, the Sea Peoples sailed farther westward, and some of
their groups may have given their names to the Sicilians, Sardinians, and Etruscans. The
Philistine and Tjekker peoples, who had come by land, were established in the southern
Palestinian coastal district in an area where the overland trade route to Syria was threatened by
attacks by nomads. Initially settled to protect Egyptian interests, these groups later became
independent of Egypt. Ramses III used some of these peoples as mercenaries, even in battle
against their own kinfolk. In his 11th year he successfully repulsed another great Libyan
invasion by the Meshwesh tribes. Meshwesh prisoners of war, branded with the king’s name,
were settled in military camps in Egypt, and in later centuries their descendants became
politically important because of their ethnic cohesiveness and their military role.
The economic resources of Egypt were in decline at that time. Under Ramses III the estate of
Amon received only one-fifth as much gold as in Thutmose III’s time. Even at the great temple
of Madīnat Habu, the quality of the masonry betrays a decline. Toward the end of his reign,
administrative inefficiency and the deteriorating economic situation resulted in the
government’s failure to deliver grain rations on time to necropolis workers, whose
dissatisfaction was expressed in demonstrations and in the first recorded strikes in history.
Such demonstrations continued sporadically throughout the dynasty. A different sort of
internal trouble originated in the royal harem, where a minor queen plotted unsuccessfully to
murder Ramses III so that her son might become king. Involved in the plot were palace and
harem personnel, government officials, and army officers. A special court of 12 judges was
formed to try the accused, who received the death sentence.
Many literary works date to the Ramesside period. Earlier works in Middle Egyptian were
copied in schools and in good papyrus copies, and new texts were composed in Late Egyptian.
Notable among the latter are stories, several with mythological or allegorical content, that look
to folk models rather than to the elaborate written literary types of the Middle Kingdom.
Ramses IV
Ramses III was succeeded by his son Ramses IV (ruled 1156–50 BCE). In an act of piety that
also reinforced his legitimacy, Ramses IV saw to the compilation of a long papyrus in which
the deceased Ramses III confirmed the temple holdings throughout Egypt; Ramses III had
provided the largest benefactions to the Theban temples, in terms of donations of both land
and personnel. Most of these probably endorsed earlier donations, to which each king added
his own gifts. Of the annual income to temples, 86 percent of the silver and 62 percent of the
grain was awarded to Amon. The document demonstrates the economic power of the Theban
temples, for the tremendous landholdings of Amon’s estate throughout Egypt involved the
labour of a considerable portion of the population; but the ratio of temple to state income is
not known, and the two were not administratively separate. In addition, the temple of Amon,
which figures prominently in the papyrus, included within its estates the king’s own mortuary
temple, for Ramses III was himself deified as a form of Amon-Re, known as Imbued with
Eternity.
The later Ramesside kings

The Ramesside period saw a tendency toward the formation of high-priestly families, which
kings sometimes tried to counter by appointing outside men to the high priesthood. One such
family had developed at Thebes in the second half of the 19th dynasty, and Ramses IV tried to
control it by installing Ramessesnakht, the son of a royal steward, as Theban high priest.
Ramessesnakht participated in administrative as well as priestly affairs; he personally led an
expedition to the Wadi Ḥammāmāt (present-day Wādī Rawḍ ʿĀʾid) quarries in the Eastern
Desert, and at Thebes he supervised the distribution of rations to the workmen decorating the
royal tomb. Under Ramses V (ruled 1150–45 BCE), Ramessesnakht’s son not only served as
steward of Amon but also held the post of administrator of royal lands and chief taxing master.
Thus, this family acquired extensive authority over the wealth of Amon and over state
finances, but to what extent this threatened royal authority is uncertain. Part of the problem in
evaluating the evidence is that Ramesside history is viewed from a Theban bias, because
Thebes is the major source of information. Evidence from Lower Egypt, where the king
normally resided, is meagre because conditions there were unfavourable for preserving
monuments or papyri.
A long papyrus from the reign of Ramses V contains valuable information on the ownership of
land and taxation. In Ramesside Egypt most of the land belonged to the state and the temples,
while most peasants served as tenant farmers. Some scholars interpret this document as
indicating that the state retained its right to tax temple property, at an estimated one-tenth of
the crop.
Ramses VI (ruled 1145–37 BCE), probably a son of Ramses III, usurped much of his two
predecessors’ work, including the tomb of Ramses V; a papyrus refers to a possible civil war at
Thebes. Following the death of Ramses III and the disrupted migrations of the late Bronze
Age, the Asian empire had rapidly withered away, and Ramses VI is the last king whose name
appears at the Sinai turquoise mines. The next two Ramses (ruled 1137–26 BCE) were obscure
rulers, whose sequence has been questioned. During the reigns of Ramses IX (ruled 1126–08
BCE) and Ramses X (1108–04 BCE), there are frequent references in the papyri to the
disruptions of marauding Libyans near the Theban necropolis.
By the time of Ramses IX the Theban high priest had attained great local influence, though he
was still outranked by the king. By Ramses XI’s 19th regnal year the new high priest of Amon,
Herihor—who seems to have had a military background and also claimed the vizierate and the
office of viceroy of Cush—controlled the Theban area. In reliefs at the temple of Khons at
Karnak, Herihor was represented as high priest of Amon in scenes adjoining those of Ramses
XI. This in itself was unusual, but subsequently he took an even bolder step in having himself
depicted as king to the exclusion of the still-reigning Ramses XI. Herihor’s limited kingship
was restricted only to Thebes, where those years were referred to as a “repeating of [royal]
manifestations,” which lasted a decade.
With the shrinkage of the empire, the supply of silver and copper was cut off, and the amount
of gold entering the economy was reduced considerably. During the reign of Ramses IX the
inhabitants of western Thebes were found to have pillaged the tombs of kings and nobles
(already a common practice in the latter case); the despoiling continued into the reign of
Ramses XI, and even the royal mortuary temples were stripped of their valuable furnishings.
Nubian troops, called in to restore order at Thebes, themselves contributed to the depredation
of monuments. This pillaging brought fresh gold and silver into the economy, and the price of
copper rose. The price of grain, which had become inflated, dropped.
The Ramesside growth of priestly power was matched by increasingly overt religiosity.
Private tombs, the decoration of which had been mostly secular until then, came to include
only religious scenes; oracles were invoked in many kinds of decisions; and private letters
contain frequent references to prayer and to regular visits to small temples to perform rituals
or consult oracles. The common expression used in letters, “I am all right today; tomorrow is
in the hands of god,” reflects the ethos of the age. This fatalism, which emphasizes that the
god may be capricious and that his wishes cannot be known, is also typical of late New
Kingdom Instruction Texts, which show a marked change from their Middle Kingdom
forerunners by moving toward a passivity and quietism that suits a less expensive age.
Some of the religious material of the Ramesside period exhibits changes in conventions of
display, and some categories have no parallel in the less abundant earlier record, but the shift
is real as well as apparent. In its later periods, Egyptian society, the values of which had
previously tended to be centralized, secular, and political, became more locally based and
more thoroughly pervaded by religion, looking to the temple as the chief institution.
While Ramses XI was still king, Herihor died and was succeeded as high priest by Piankh, a
man of similar military background. A series of letters from Thebes tell of Piankh’s military
venture in Nubia against the former viceroy of Cush while Egypt was on the verge of losing
control of the south. With the death of Ramses XI, the governor of Tanis, Smendes, became
king, founding the 21st dynasty (known as the Tanite).
Egypt from 1075 BCE to the Macedonian invasion
The Third Intermediate period (1075–656 BCE)
The 21st dynasty

At the end of the New Kingdom, Egypt was divided. The north was inherited by the Tanite
21st dynasty (1075–c. 950 BCE), and although much of the southern Nile River valley came
under the control of the Theban priests (the northern frontier of their domain was the fortress
town of Al-Hība), there is no indication of conflict between the priests and the Tanite kings.
Indeed, the dating of documents, even at Thebes, was in terms of the Tanite reigns, and
apparently there were close family ties between the kings and the Thebans. Piankh’s son,
Pinudjem I, who relinquished the office of high priest and assumed the kingship at Thebes,
was probably the father of the Tanite king Psusennes I. Some members of both the Theban
priestly and the Tanite royal lines had Libyan names. With the coming of the new dynasty, and
possibly a little earlier, the Meshwesh Libyan military elite, which had been settled mainly in
the north by Ramses III, penetrated the ruling group, although it did not become dominant
until the 22nd dynasty.
Beginning with Herihor and continuing through the 21st dynasty, the high priests’ activities
included the pious rewrapping and reburial of New Kingdom royal mummies. The systematic
removal of such goods from the royal tombs by royal order during the 20th dynasty
necessitated the transfer of the royal remains in stages to

two caches—the tomb of Amenhotep II and a cliff tomb
at Dayr al-Baḥrī—where they remained undisturbed until
modern times. Dockets pertaining to the reburial of these
mummies contain important chronological data from the
Egyptian sculpture: face from a 21st dynasty.
coffin
Face from an Egyptian coffin, wood, The burials of King Psusennes I (ruled c. 1045–c. 997
gesso, and pigment, probably from BCE) and his successor, Amenemope (ruled c. 998–c. 989
Thebes, c. 1070–945
BCE), were discovered at Tanis, but little is known of
BCE
; in the Brooklyn Museum, New York. their reigns. This was a period when statuary was
usurped and the material of earlier periods was reused.
At Karnak, Pinudjem I, who decorated the facade of the Khons temple, usurped a colossal
statue of Ramses II, and Psusennes I’s splendid sarcophagus from Tanis had originally been
carved for Merneptah at Thebes. Much of the remains from Tanis consists of material
transported from other sites, notably from Pi Ramesse.
After the demise of Egypt’s Asian empire, the kingdom of Israel eventually developed under
the kings David and Solomon. During David’s reign, Philistia served as a buffer between
Egypt and Israel; but after David’s death the next to the last king of the 21st dynasty, Siamon,
invaded Philistia and captured Gezer. If Egypt had any intention of attacking Israel, Solomon’s
power forestalled Siamon, who presented Gezer to Israel as a dowry in the diplomatic
marriage of his daughter to Solomon. This is indicative of the reversal of Egypt’s status in
foreign affairs since the time of Amenhotep III, who had written the Babylonian king, “From
of old, a daughter of the king of Egypt has not been given to anyone.”
Libyan rule: the 22nd and 23rd dynasties

The fifth king of the 21st dynasty, Osorkon I (ruled c. 979–c. 973 BCE), was of Libyan descent
and probably was an ancestor of the 22nd dynasty, which followed a generation later. From
Osorkon’s time to the 26th dynasty, leading Libyans in Egypt kept their Libyan names and
ethnic identity, but in a spirit of ethnicity rather than cultural separatism. Although political
institutions were different from those of the New Kingdom, the Libyans were culturally
Egyptian, retaining only their group identity, names, and perhaps a military ethos. Toward the
end of the 21st dynasty the Libyan leader of Bubastis, the great Meshwesh chief Sheshonk I
(the biblical Shishak), secured special privileges from King Psusennes II (ruled c. 964–c. 950
BCE) and the oracle of Amon for the mortuary cult of his father at Abydos. The oracle
proffered good wishes not only for Sheshonk and his family but, significantly, also for his
army. With a strong military backing, Sheshonk eventually took the throne. His reign (c. 950–
929 BCE) marks the founding of the 22nd dynasty (c. 950–c. 730 BCE). Military controls were
established, with garrisons under Libyan commandants serving to quell local insurrections, so
that the structure of the state became more feudalistic. The dynasty tried to cement relations
with Thebes through political marriages with priestly families. King Sheshonk’s son Osorkon
married Psusennes II’s daughter, and their son eventually became high priest at Karnak. By
installing their sons as high priests and promoting such marriages, kings strove to overcome
the administrative division of the country. But frequent conflicts arose over the direct
appointment of the Theban high priest from among the sons of Libyan kings and over the
inheritance of the post by men of mixed Theban and Libyan descent. This tension took place
against a background of Theban resentment of the northern dynasty. During the reign of
Takelot II, strife concerning the high priestship led to civil war at Thebes. The king’s son
Osorkon was appointed high priest, and he achieved some semblance of order during his visits
to Thebes, but he was driven from the post several times.
The initially successful 22nd dynasty revived Egyptian influence in Palestine. After Solomon’s
death (c. 936), Sheshonk I entered Palestine and plundered Jerusalem. Prestige from this
exploit may have lasted through the reign of Osorkon II (ruled c. 929–c. 914 BCE). In the reign
of Osorkon III (ruled c. 888–c. 860 BCE), Peywed Libyans posed a threat to the western delta,
perhaps necessitating a withdrawal from Palestine.
The latter part of the dynasty was marked by fragmentation of the land: Libyan great chiefs
ruled numerous local areas, and there were as many as six local rulers in the land at a time.
Increased urbanization accompanied this fragmentation, which was most intense in the delta.
Meanwhile, in Thebes, a separate 23rd dynasty was recognized.
From the 9th century BCE a local Cushite state, which looked to Egyptian traditions from the
colonial period of the New Kingdom, arose in the Sudan and developed around the old
regional capital of Napata. The earliest ruler of the state known by name was Alara, whose
piety toward Amon is mentioned in several inscriptions. His successor, Kashta, proceeded into
Upper Egypt, forcing Osorkon IV (ruled c. 777–c. 750 BCE) to retire to the delta. Kashta
assumed the title of king and compelled Osorkon IV’s daughter Shepenwepe I, the God’s Wife
of Amon at Thebes, to adopt his own daughter Amonirdis I as her successor. The Cushites
stressed the role of the God’s Wife of Amon, who was virtually the consecrated partner of
Amon, and sought to bypass the high priests.
The 24th and 25th dynasties

Meanwhile, the eastern capital in the Nile River delta, Tanis, lost its importance to Sais in the
western delta. A Libyan prince of Sais, Tefnakhte, attempting to gain control over all Egypt,
proceeded southward to Heracleopolis after acquiring Memphis. This advance was met by the
Cushite ruler Piye (now the accepted reading of “Piankhi," ruled c. 750–c. 719 BCE), who
executed a raid as far north as Memphis and received the submission of the northern rulers (in
about 730 BCE). In his victory stela, Piye is portrayed as conforming strictly to Egyptian norms
and reasserting traditional values against contemporary decay.
After Piye returned to Cush, Tefnakhte reasserted his authority in the north, where, according
to Manetho, he was eventually succeeded by his son Bocchoris as the sole king of the 24th
dynasty (c. 722–c. 715 BCE). Piye’s brother Shabaka meanwhile founded the rival 25th
dynasty and brought all Egypt under his rule (c. 719–703 BCE). He had Bocchoris burned alive
and removed all other claimants to the kingship.
In this period Egypt’s internal politics were affected by the growth of the Assyrian Empire. In
Palestine and Syria frequent revolts against Assyria were aided by Egyptian forces. Against the
power of Assyria, the Egyptian and Nubian forces met with little success, partly because of
their own fragmented politics and divided loyalties.
Although the earlier years of King Taharqa (ruled 690–664 BCE), who as second son of
Shabaka had succeeded his brother Shebitku (ruled 703–690 BCE), were prosperous, the
confrontation with Assyria became acute. In 671 BCE the Assyrian king Esarhaddon entered
Egypt and drove Taharqa into Upper Egypt. Two years later Taharqa regained a battered
Memphis, but in 667 BCE Esarhaddon’s successor, Ashurbanipal, forced Taharqa to Thebes,
where the Cushites held ground. Taharqa’s successor, Tanutamon, defeated at Memphis a
coalition of delta princes who supported Assyria, but Ashurbanipal’s reaction to this was to
humiliate Thebes, which the Assyrians plundered. By 656 the Cushites had withdrawn from
the Egyptian political scene, although Cushite culture survived in the Sudanese Napatan and
Meroitic kingdom for another millennium.
The Late period (664–332 BCE)
Assyria, unable to maintain a large force in Egypt, supported several delta vassal princes,
including the powerful Psamtik I of Sais. But the Assyrians faced serious problems closer to
home, and Psamtik (or Psammetichus I, ruled 664–610 BCE) was able to assert his
independence and extend his authority as king over all Egypt without extensive use of arms,
inaugurating the Saite 26th dynasty. In 656 Psamtik I compelled Thebes to submit. He allowed
its most powerful man, who was Montemhat, the mayor and the fourth prophet of Amon, to
retain his post, and, in order to accommodate pro-Cushite sentiments, he allowed the God’s
Wife of Amon and the Votaress of Amon (the sister and daughter of the late king Taharqa) to
remain. Psamtik I’s own daughter Nitocris was adopted by the Votaress of Amon and thus
became heiress to the position of God’s Wife. Essential to the settling of internal conflicts was
the Saite dynasty’s superior army, composed of Libyan soldiers, whom the Greeks called
Machimoi (“Warriors”), and Greek and Carian mercenaries, who formed part of the great
emigration from the Aegean in the 7th and 6th centuries BCE. Greek pirates raiding the Nile
delta coast were induced by Psamtik I to serve in his army and were settled like the Machimoi
in colonies at the delta’s strategically important northeastern border. Trade developed between
Egypt and Greece, and more Greeks settled in Egypt.
The Saite dynasty generally pursued a foreign policy that avoided territorial expansion and
tried to preserve the status quo. Assyria’s power was waning. In 655 BCE Psamtik I marched
into Philistia in pursuit of the Assyrians, and in 620 BCE he apparently repulsed Scythians from
the Egyptian frontier. During the reign of his son Necho II (610–595 BCE), Egypt supported
Assyria as a buffer against the potential threat of the Medes and the Babylonians. Necho was
successful in Palestine and Syria until 605 BCE, when the Babylonian Nebuchadrezzar
inflicted a severe defeat on Egyptian forces at Carchemish. After withdrawing his troops from
Asia, Necho concentrated on developing Egyptian commerce; the grain that was delivered to
Greece was paid for in silver. He also built up the navy and began a canal linking the Nile with
the Red Sea. Under Psamtik II (ruled 595–589 BCE) there was a campaign through the Napatan
kingdom involving the use of Greek and Carian mercenaries who left their inscriptions at Abu
Simbel; at the same time, the names of the long-dead Cushite rulers were erased from their
monuments in Egypt. Psamtik II also made an expedition to Phoenicia accompanied by
priests; whether it was a military or a goodwill mission is unknown.
The next king, Apries (ruled 589–570 BCE), tried unsuccessfully to end Babylonian
domination of Palestine and Syria. With the withdrawal of Egyptian forces, Nebuchadrezzar
destroyed the temple in Jerusalem in 586 BC. In the aftermath of his conquest, many Jews fled
to Egypt, where some were enlisted as soldiers in the Persian army of occupation. Apries’
army was then defeated in Libya when it attacked the Greek colony at Cyrene, some 620 miles
(1,000 km) west of the Nile delta; this led to an army mutiny and to civil war in the delta. A
new Saite king, Amasis (or Ahmose II; ruled 570–526 BCE), usurped the throne and drove
Apries into exile. Two years later Apries invaded Egypt with Babylonian support, but he was
defeated and killed by Amasis, who nonetheless buried him with full honours. Amasis returned
to a more conservative foreign policy in a long, prosperous reign. To reduce friction between
Greeks and Egyptians, especially in the army, Amasis withdrew the Greeks from the military
colonies and transferred them to Memphis, where they formed a sort of royal bodyguard. He
limited Greek trade in Egypt to Sais, Memphis, and Naukratis, the latter becoming the only
port to which Greek wares could be taken, so that taxes on imports and on business could be
enforced. Naukratis prospered, and Amasis was seen by the Greeks as a benefactor. In foreign
policy he supported a waning Babylonia, now threatened by Persia; but six months after his
death in 526 BCE the Persian Cambyses II (ruled as pharaoh 525–522 BCE) penetrated Egypt,
reaching Nubia in 525.
As was common in the Middle East in that period, the Saite kings used foreigners as
mercenaries to prevent foreign invasions. An element within Egyptian culture, however,
resisted any influence of the resident foreigners and gave rise to a nationalism that provided
psychological security in times of political uncertainty. A cultural revival was initiated in the
25th dynasty and continued throughout the 26th. Temples and the priesthood were overtly
dominant. In their inscriptions the elite displayed their priestly titles but did not mention the
administrative roles that they probably also performed. Throughout the country, people of
substance dedicated land to temple endowments that supplemented royal donations. The god
Seth, who had been an antithetic element in Egyptian religion, came gradually to be proscribed
as the god of foreign lands.
The revival of this period was both economic and cultural, but there is less archaeological
evidence preserved than for earlier times because the economic centre of the country was now
the delta, where conditions for the preservation of ancient sites were unfavourable. Prosperity
increased throughout the 26th dynasty, reaching a high point in the reign of Amasis. Temples
throughout the land were enhanced and expanded, often

in hard stones carved with great skill. The chief
memorials of private individuals were often temple
statues, of which many fine examples were dedicated,
again mostly in hard stones. In temple and tomb
frieze: feline on falcon heads decoration and in statuary, the Late period rejected its
Feline on falcon heads, limestone immediate predecessors and looked to the great periods
relief from Egypt, 664–630
of the past for models. There was, however, also
BCE
significant innovation. In writing, the demotic script, the
; in the Brooklyn Museum, New York.
new cursive form, was introduced from the north and
spread gradually through the country. Demotic was used to write a contemporary form of the
language, and administrative Late Egyptian disappeared. Hieratic was, however, retained for
literary and religious texts, among which very ancient material, such as the Pyramid Texts,
was revived and inscribed in tombs and on coffins and sarcophagi.
The Late period was the time of the greatest development of animal worship in Egypt. This
feature of religion, which was the subject of much interest and scorn among classical writers,
had always existed but had been of minor importance. In the Late and Ptolemaic periods, it
became one of the principal forms of popular religion in an intensely religious society. Many
species of animals were mummified and buried, and towns sprang up in the necropolises to
cater for the needs of dead animals and their worshipers. At Ṣaqqārah the Apis bull, which had
been worshiped since the 1st dynasty, was buried in a huge granite sarcophagus in ceremonies
in which royalty might take part. At least 10 species—from ibises, buried by the million, to
dogs—were interred by the heterogeneous population of Memphis, Egypt’s largest city.
Egypt under Achaemenid rule

The 27th dynasty
According to the Greek historian Herodotus, who visited
Egypt in about 450 BCE, Cambyses II’s conquest of
Egypt was ruthless and sacrilegious. Contemporary
Egyptian sources, however, treat him in a more
favourable light. He assumed the full titulary of an
Egypt under Persian rule Egyptian king and paid honour to the goddess Neith of
Egypt as part of Achaemenid (Persian) Sais. His unfavourable later reputation probably resulted
Empire, 6th–5th century
from adverse propaganda by Egyptian priests, who
BCE
.
resented his reduction of temple income. Darius I, who
succeeded Cambyses in 522 BCE and ruled as pharaoh
until 486 BCE, was held in higher esteem because he was concerned with improving the
temples and restored part of their income, and because he codified laws as they had been in the
time of Amasis. These stances, which aimed to win over priests and learned Egyptians, were
elements of his strategy to retain Egypt as a lasting part of the Persian Empire. Egypt, together
with the Libyan oases and Cyrenaica, formed the sixth Persian satrapy (province), whose
satrap resided at Memphis, while Persian governors under him held posts in cities throughout
the land. Under Darius I the tax burden upon Egyptians was relatively light, and Persians
aided Egypt’s economy through irrigation projects and improved commerce, enhanced by the
completion of the canal to the Red Sea.
The Persian defeat by the Athenians at Marathon in 490 BCE had significant repercussions in
Egypt. On Darius I’s death in 486 BCE, a revolt broke out in the delta, perhaps instigated by
Libyans of its western region. The result was that the Persian king Xerxes reduced Egypt to
the status of a conquered province. Egyptians dubbed him the “criminal Xerxes.” He never
visited Egypt and appears not to have utilized Egyptians in high positions in the
administration. Xerxes’ murder in 465 BCE was the signal for another revolt in the western
delta. It was led by a dynast, Inaros, who acquired control over the delta and was supported by
Athenian forces against the Persians. Inaros was crucified by the Persians in 454 BCE, when
they regained control of most of the delta. In the later 5th century BCE, under the rule of
Artaxerxes I (ruled 465–425 BCE) and Darius II Ochus (ruled 423–404 BCE), conditions in
Egypt were very unsettled, and scarcely any monuments of the period have been identified.
The 28th, 29th, and 30th dynasties

The death of Darius II in 404 BCE prompted a successful rebellion in the Nile delta, and the
Egyptian Amyrtaeus formed a Saite 28th dynasty, of which he was the sole king (404–399
BCE). His rule was recognized in Upper Egypt by 401 BCE, at a time when Persia’s troubles
elsewhere forestalled an attempt to regain Egypt.
Despite growing prosperity and success in retaining independence, 4th-century Egypt was
characterized by continual internal struggle for the throne. After a long period of fighting in
the delta, a 29th dynasty (399–380 BCE) emerged at Mendes. Achoris (ruled 393–380 BCE), its
third and final ruler, was especially vigorous, and the prosperity of his reign is indicated by
many monuments in Upper and Lower Egypt. Once again Egypt was active in international
politics, forming alliances with the opponents of Persia and building up its army and navy. The
Egyptian army included Greeks both as mercenaries and as commanders; the mercenaries
were not permanent residents of military camps in Egypt but native Greeks seeking payment
for their services in gold. Payment was normally made in non-Egyptian coins, because as yet
Egypt had no coinage in general circulation; the foreign coins may have been acquired in
exchange for exports of grain, papyrus, and linen. Some Egyptian coins were minted in the 4th
century, but they do not seem to have gained widespread acceptance.
Aided by the Greek commander Chabrias of Athens and his elite troops, Achoris prevented a
Persian invasion; but after Achoris’s death in 380 BCE his son Nepherites II lasted only four
months before a general, Nectanebo I (Nekhtnebef; ruled 380–362 BCE) of Sebennytos,
usurped the throne, founding the 30th dynasty (380–343 BCE). In 373 BCE the Persians
attacked Egypt, and, although Egyptian losses were heavy, disagreement between the Persian
satrap Pharnabazus and his Greek commander over strategy, combined with a timely
inundation of the delta, saved the day for Egypt. With the latent dissolution of the Persian
Empire under the weak Artaxerxes II, Egypt was relatively safe from further invasion; it
remained prosperous throughout the dynasty.
Egypt had a more aggressive foreign policy under Nectanebo’s son Tachos (ruled c. 365–360
BCE). Possessing a strong army and navy composed of Egyptian Machimoi and Greek
mercenaries and supported by Chabrias and the Spartan king Agesilaus, Tachos (in Egyptian
called Djeho) invaded Palestine. But friction between Tachos and Agesilaus and the cost of
financing the venture proved to be Tachos’s undoing. In an attempt to raise funds quickly, he
had imposed taxes and seized temple property. Egyptians, especially the priests, resented this
burden and supported Tachos’s nephew Nectanebo II (Nekhtharehbe; ruled 360–343 BCE) in
his usurpation of the throne. The cost of retaining the allegiance of mercenaries proved too
high for a nonmonetary economy.
Agesilaus supported Nectanebo in his defensive foreign policy, and the priests sanctioned the
new king’s building activities. Meanwhile, Persia enjoyed a resurgence under Artaxerxes III
(Ochus), but a Persian attack on Egypt in 350 BCE was repulsed. In 343 BCE the Persians once
again marched against Egypt. The first battle was fought at Pelusium and proved the
superiority of Persia’s strategy. Eventually the whole delta, and then the rest of Egypt, fell to
Artaxerxes III, and Nectanebo fled to Nubia.
The 4th century BCE was the last flourishing period of an independent Egypt and was a time of
notable artistic and literary achievements. The 26th dynasty artistic revival evolved further
toward more-complex forms that culminated briefly in a Greco-Egyptian stylistic fusion, as
seen in the tomb of Petosiris at Tūnah al-Jabal from the turn of the 3rd century BCE. In
literature works continued to be transmitted, and possibly composed, in hieratic, but that
tradition was to develop no further. Demotic literary works began to appear, including stories
set in the distant past, mythological tales, and an acrostic text apparently designed to teach an
order of sounds in the Egyptian language.
The second Persian period

Artaxerxes dealt harshly with Egypt, razing city walls, rifling temple treasuries, and removing
sacred books. Persia acquired rich booty in its determination to prevent Egypt from further
rebelling. After the murder of Artaxerxes III, in 338 BCE, there was a brief obscure period
during which a Nubian prince, Khabbash, seems to have gained control over Egypt, but
Persian domination was reestablished in 335 BCE under Darius III Codommanus. It was to last
only three years.
Edward F. Wente John R. Baines Peter F. Dorman

Macedonian and Ptolemaic Egypt (332–30 BCE)
The Macedonian conquest

In the autumn of 332 BCE Alexander the Great invaded Egypt with his mixed army of
Macedonians and Greeks and found the Egyptians ready to throw off the oppressive control of
the Persians. Alexander was welcomed by the Egyptians as a liberator and took the country
without a battle. He journeyed to Siwa Oasis in the Western Desert to visit the Oracle of
Amon, renowned in the Greek world; it disclosed the information that Alexander was the son
of Amon. There may also have been a coronation at the Egyptian capital, Memphis, which, if
it occurred, would have placed him firmly in the tradition of the kings (pharaohs). The same
purpose may be seen in the later dissemination of the romantic myth that gave him an
Egyptian parentage by linking his mother, Olympias, with the last king, Nectanebo II.
Alexander left Egypt in the spring of 331 BCE, having divided the military command between
Balacrus, son of Amyntas, and Peucestas, son of Makartatos. The earliest known Greek
documentary papyrus, found at Ṣaqqārah in 1973, reveals the sensitivity of the latter to
Egyptian religious institutions in a notice that reads: “Order of Peucestas. No one is to pass.
The chamber is that of a priest.” The civil administration was headed by an official with the
Persian title of satrap, one Cleomenes of Naukratis. When Alexander died in 323 BCE and his
generals divided his empire, the position of satrap was claimed by Ptolemy, son of a
Macedonian nobleman named Lagus. The senior general Perdiccas, the holder of Alexander’s
royal seal and prospective regent for Alexander’s posthumous son, might well have regretted
his failure to take Egypt. He gathered an army and marched from Asia Minor to wrest Egypt
from Ptolemy in 321 BCE; but Ptolemy had Alexander’s corpse, Perdiccas’s army was not
wholehearted in support, and the Nile crocodiles made a good meal from the flesh of the
invaders.
The Ptolemaic dynasty

Until the day when he openly assumed an independent
kingship as Ptolemy I Soter, on November 7, 305 BCE,
Ptolemy used only the title satrap of Egypt, but the great
hieroglyphic Satrap stela, which he had inscribed in 311
BCE, indicates a degree of self-confidence that transcends
Ptolemy I Soter his viceregal role. It reads, “I, Ptolemy the satrap, I
Portrait of Ptolemy I Soter on a silver restore to Horus, the avenger of his father, the lord of Pe,
tetradrachm coin, Alexandria, Egypt,
and to Buto, the lady of Pe and Dep, the territory of
3rd century
Patanut, from this day forth for ever, with all its villages,
BCE
. all its towns, all its inhabitants, all its fields.” The
inscription emphasizes Ptolemy’s own role in wresting
the land from the Persians (though the epithet of Soter, meaning “Saviour,” resulted not from
his actions in Egypt but from the gratitude of the people of Rhodes for his having relieved
them from a siege in 315 BCE) and links him with Khabbash, who about 338 BCE had laid
claim to the kingship during the last Persian occupation.
Egypt was ruled by Ptolemy’s descendants until the death of Cleopatra VII on August 12, 30
BCE. The kingdom was one of several that emerged in the aftermath of Alexander’s death and
the struggles of his successors. It was the wealthiest, however, and for much of the next 300
years the most powerful politically and culturally, and it was the last to fall directly under
Roman dominion. In many respects, the character of the Ptolemaic monarchy in Egypt set a
style for other Hellenistic kingdoms; this style emerged from the Greeks’ and Macedonians’
awareness of the need to dominate Egypt, its resources, and its people and at the same time to
turn the power of Egypt firmly toward the context of a Mediterranean world that was
becoming steadily more Hellenized.
The Ptolemies (305–145 BCE)
The first 160 years of the Ptolemaic dynasty are

conventionally seen as its most prosperous era. Little is
known of the foundations laid in the reign of Ptolemy I
Soter (304–282 BCE), but the increasing amount of
documentary, inscriptional, and archaeological evidence
Hellenistic world, 2nd century

from the reign of his son and successor, Ptolemy II
Philadelphus (285–246 BCE), shows that the kingdom’s
BCE
administration and economy underwent a thorough
Egypt as part of the Hellenistic world,
c. 188 reorganization. A remarkable demotic text of the year
BCE 258 BCE refers to orders for a complete census of the
. kingdom that was to record the sources of water; the
position, quality, and irrigation potential of the land; the
state of cultivation; the crops grown; and the extent of priestly and royal landholdings. There
were important agricultural innovations in this period. New crops were introduced, and
massive irrigation works brought under cultivation a great deal of new land, especially in Al-
Fayyūm, where many of the immigrant Greeks were settled.
The Macedonian-Greek character of the monarchy was vigorously preserved. There is no more
emphatic sign of this than the growth and importance of the city of Alexandria. It had been
founded, on a date traditionally given as April 7, 331 BCE (but often cited as 332 BCE), by
Alexander the Great on the site of the insignificant Egyptian village of Rakotis in the
northwestern Nile River delta, and it ranked as the most important city in the eastern
Mediterranean until the foundation of Constantinople in the 4th century CE. The importance of
the new Greek city was soon emphasized by contrast to its Egyptian surroundings when the
royal capital was transferred, within a few years of Alexander’s death, from Memphis to
Alexandria. The Ptolemaic court cultivated extravagant luxury in the Greek style in its
magnificent and steadily expanding palace complex, which occupied as much as a third of the
city by the early Roman period. Its grandeur was emphasized in the reign of Ptolemy II
Philadelphus by the foundation of a quadrennial festival, the Ptolemaieia, which was intended
to enjoy a status equal to that of the Olympic Games. The festival was marked by a procession
of amazingly elaborate and ingeniously constructed floats, with scenarios illustrating Greek
religious cults.
Ptolemy II gave the dynasty another distinctive feature when he married his full sister, Arsinoe
II, one of the most powerful and remarkable women of the Hellenistic age. They became, in
effect, co-rulers, and both took the epithet Philadelphus (“Brother-Loving” and “Sister-
Loving”). The practice of consanguineous marriage was followed by most of their successors
and imitated by ordinary Egyptians too, even though it had not been a standard practice in the
pharaonic royal houses and had been unknown in the rest of the native Egyptian population.
Arsinoe played a prominent role in the formation of royal policy. She was displayed on the
coinage and was eventually worshiped, perhaps even before her death, in the distinctively
Greek style of ruler cult that developed in this reign.
From the first phase of the wars of Alexander’s successors, the Ptolemies had harboured
imperial ambitions. Ptolemy I won control of Cyprus and Cyrene and quarreled with his
neighbour over control of Palestine. In the course of the 3rd century a powerful Ptolemaic
empire developed, which for much of the period laid claim to sovereignty in the Levant, in
many of the cities of the western and southern coast of Asia Minor, in some of the Aegean
islands, and in a handful of towns in Thrace, as well as in Cyprus and Cyrene. Family
connections and dynastic alliances, especially between the Ptolemies and the neighbouring
Seleucids, played an important role in these imperialistic ambitions. Such links were far from
able to preserve harmony between the royal houses (between 274 and 200 BCE five wars were
fought with the Seleucids over possession of territory in Syria and the Levant), but they did
keep the ruling houses relatively compact, interconnected, and more true to their Macedonian-
Greek origins.
When Ptolemy II Philadelphus died in 246 BCE, he left a prosperous kingdom to his successor,
Ptolemy III Euergetes (246–221 BCE). Euergetes’ reign saw a very successful campaign
against the Seleucids in Syria, occasioned by the murder of his sister, Berenice, who had been
married to the Seleucid Antiochus II. To avenge Berenice, Euergetes marched into Syria,
where he won a great victory. He gained popularity at home by recapturing statues of Egyptian
gods originally taken by the Persians. The decree promulgated at Canopus in the delta on
March 7, 238 BCE, attests both this event and the many great benefactions conferred on
Egyptian temples throughout the land. It was during Euergetes’ reign, for instance, that the
rebuilding of the great Temple of Horus at Idfū (Apollinopolis Magna) was begun.
Euergetes was succeeded by his son Ptolemy IV Philopator (221–205 BCE), whom the Greek
historians portray as a weak and corrupt ruler, dominated by a powerful circle of Alexandrian
Greek courtiers. The reign was notable for another serious conflict with the Seleucids, which
ended in 217 BCE in a great Ptolemaic victory at Raphia in southern Palestine. The battle is
notable for the fact that large numbers of native Egyptian soldiers fought alongside the
Macedonian and Greek contingents. Events surrounding the death of Philopator and the
succession of the youthful Ptolemy V Epiphanes (205–180 BCE) are obscured by court
intrigue. Before Epiphanes had completed his first decade of rule, serious difficulties arose.
Native revolts in the south, which had been sporadic in the second half of the 3rd century BCE,
became serious and weakened the hold of the monarch on a vital part of the kingdom. These
revolts, which produced native claimants to the kingship, are generally attributed to the native
Egyptians’ realization, after their contribution to the victory at Raphia, of their potential
power. Trouble continued to break out for several more decades. By about 196 BCE a great
portion of the Ptolemaic overseas empire had been permanently lost (though there may have
been a brief revival in the Aegean islands in about 165–145 BCE). To shore up and advertise
the strength of the ruling house at home and abroad, the administration adopted a series of
grandiloquent honorific titles for its officers. To conciliate Egyptian feelings, a religious synod
that met in 196 BCE to crown Epiphanes at Memphis (the first occasion on which a Ptolemy is
certainly known to have been crowned at the traditional capital) decreed extensive privileges
for the Egyptian temples, as recorded on the Rosetta Stone.
The reign of Ptolemy VI Philometor (180–145 BCE), a man of pious and magnanimous
character, was marked by renewed conflict with the Seleucids after the death of his mother,
Cleopatra I, in 176 BCE. In 170/169 BCE Antiochus IV of Syria invaded Egypt and established
a protectorate; in 168 BCE he returned, accepted coronation at Memphis, and installed a
Seleucid governor. But he had failed to reckon with the more powerful interests of Rome. In
the summer of 168 BCE a Roman ambassador, Popillius Laenas, arrived at Antiochus’s
headquarters near Pelusium in the delta and staged an awesome display of Roman power. He
ordered Antiochus to withdraw from Egypt. Antiochus asked for time to consult his advisers.
Laenas drew a circle around the king with his stick and told him to answer before he stepped
out of the circle. Only one answer was possible, and by the end of July Antiochus had left
Egypt. Philometor’s reign was further troubled by rivalry with his brother, later Ptolemy VIII
Euergetes II Physcon. The solution, devised under Roman advice, was to remove Physcon to
Cyrene, where he remained until Philometor died in 145 BCE. It is noteworthy that in 155 BCE
Physcon took the step of bequeathing the kingdom of Cyrene to the Romans in the event of his
untimely death.
Dynastic strife and decline (145–30 BCE)
Physcon was able to rule in Egypt until 116 BCE with his sister Cleopatra II (except for a
period in 131–130 BCE when she was in revolt) and her daughter Cleopatra III. His reign was
marked by generous benefactions to the Egyptian temples, but he was detested as a tyrant by
the Greeks, and the historical accounts of the reign emphasize his stormy relations with the
Alexandrian populace.
During the last century of Ptolemaic rule, Egypt’s independence was exercised under Rome’s
protection and at Rome’s discretion. For much of the period, Rome was content to support a
dynasty that had no overseas possession except Cyprus after 96 BCE (the year in which Cyrene
was bequeathed to Rome by Ptolemy Apion) and no ambitions threatening Roman interests or
security. After a series of brief and unstable reigns, Ptolemy XII Auletes acceded to the throne
in 80 BCE. He maintained his hold for 30 years, despite the attractions that Egypt’s legendary
wealth held for avaricious Roman politicians. In fact, Auletes had to flee Egypt in 58 BCE and
was restored by Pompey’s friend Gabinius in 55 BCE, no doubt after spending so much in
bribes that he had to bring Rabirius Postumus, one of his Roman creditors, to Egypt with him
to manage his financial affairs.
In 52 BCE, the year before his death, Auletes associated with himself on the throne his
daughter Cleopatra VII and his elder son Ptolemy XIII (who died in 47 BCE). The reign of
Cleopatra was that of a vigorous and exceptionally able queen who was ambitious, among
other things, to revive the prestige of the dynasty by cultivating influence with powerful
Roman commanders and using their capacity to aggrandize Roman clients and allies. Julius
Caesar pursued Pompey to Egypt in 48 BCE. After learning of Pompey’s murder at the hands
of Egyptian courtiers, Caesar stayed long enough to enjoy a sightseeing tour up the Nile in the
queen’s company in the summer of 47 BCE. When he left for Rome, Cleopatra was pregnant
with a child she claimed was Caesar’s. The child, a son, was named Caesarion (“Little
Caesar”). Cleopatra and Caesarion later followed Caesar back to Rome, but, after his
assassination in 44 BCE, they returned hurriedly to Egypt, and she tried for a while to play a
neutral role in the struggles between the Roman generals and their factions.
Her long liaison with Mark Antony began when she

visited him at Tarsus in 41 BCE and he returned to Egypt
with her. Between 36 and 30 BCE the famous romance
between the Roman general and the eastern queen was
exploited to great effect by Antony’s political rival
Mark Antony Octavian (the future emperor Augustus). By 34 BCE
Mark Antony, detail of a marble bust; Caesarion was officially co-ruler with Cleopatra, but his
in the Vatican.
rule clearly was an attempt to exploit the popularity of
Caesar’s memory. In the autumn Cleopatra and Antony
staged an extravagant display in which they made grandiose dispositions of territory in the east
to their children, Alexander Helios, Ptolemy, and Cleopatra Selene. Cleopatra and Antony
were portrayed to the Roman public as posing for artists in the guise of Dionysus and Isis or
whiling away their evenings in rowdy and decadent banquets that kept the citizens of
Alexandria awake all night. But this propaganda war was merely the prelude to armed conflict,
and the issue was decided in September 31 BCE in a naval battle at Actium in western Greece.
When the battle was at its height, Cleopatra and her squadron withdrew, and Antony
eventually followed suit. They fled to Alexandria but could do little more than await the
arrival of the victorious Octavian 10 months later. Alexandria was captured, and Antony and
Cleopatra committed suicide—he by falling on his sword, she probably by the bite of an asp—
in August of 30 BCE. It is reported that when Octavian reached the city, he visited and touched
the preserved corpse of Alexander the Great, causing a piece of the nose to fall off. He refused
to gaze upon the remains of the Ptolemies, saying “I wished to see a king, not corpses.”
Government and conditions under the Ptolemies

The changes brought to Egypt by the Ptolemies were momentous; the land’s resources were
harnessed with unparalleled efficiency, with the result that Egypt became the wealthiest of the
Hellenistic kingdoms. Land under cultivation was increased, and new crops were introduced
(especially important was the introduction of naked tetraploid wheat, Triticum durum, to
replace the traditional husked emmer, Triticum dicoccum). The population, estimated at
perhaps three to four million in the late Dynastic period, may have more than doubled by the
early Roman period to a level not reached again until the late 19th century. Some of the
increase was due to immigration; particularly during the 2nd and 3rd centuries, many settlers
were attracted from cities in Anatolia (Asia Minor) and the Greek islands, and large numbers
of Jews came from Palestine. The flow may have decreased later in the Ptolemaic period, and
it is often suggested, on slender evidence, that there was a serious decline in prosperity in the
1st century BCE. If so, there may have been some reversal of this trend under Cleopatra VII.
Administration
The foundation of the prosperity was the governmental system devised to exploit the country’s
economic resources. Directly below the monarch were a handful of powerful officials whose
authority extended over the entire land: a chief finance minister, a chief accountant, and a
chancery of ministers in charge of records, letters, and decrees. A level below them lay the
broadening base of a pyramid of subordinate officials with authority in limited areas, which
extended down to the chief administrator of each village (kōmarchēs). Between the chief
ministers and the village officials stood those such as the nome steward (oikonomos) and the
stratēgoi, whose jurisdiction extended over one of the more than 30 nomes, the long-
established geographic divisions of Egypt. In theory, this bureaucracy could regulate and
control the economic activities of every subject in the land, its smooth operation guaranteed by
the multiplicity of officials capable of checking up on one another. In practice, it is difficult to
see a rigid civil service mentality at work, involving clear demarcation of departments;
specific functions might well have been performed by different officials according to local
need and the availability of a person competent to take appropriate action.
By the same token, rigid lines of separation between military, civil, legal, and administrative
matters are difficult to perceive. The same official might perform duties in one or all of these
areas. The military was inevitably integrated into civilian life because its soldiers were also
farmers who enjoyed royal grants of land, either as Greek cleruchs (holders of allotments)
with higher status and generous grants or as native Egyptian machimoi with small plots.
Interlocking judiciary institutions, in the form of Greek and Egyptian courts (chrēmatistai and
laokritai), provided the means for Greeks and Egyptians to regulate their legal relationships
according to the language in which they conducted their business. The bureaucratic power was
heavily weighted in favour of the Greek speakers, the dominant elite. Egyptians were
nevertheless able to obtain official posts in the bureaucracy, gradually infiltrating to the
highest levels, but in order to do so they had to Hellenize.
Economy
The basis of Egypt’s legendary wealth was the highly productive land, which technically
remained in royal ownership. A considerable portion was kept under the control of temples,
and the remainder was leased out on a theoretically revocable basis to tenant-farmers. A
portion also was available to be granted as gifts to leading courtiers; one of these was
Apollonius, the finance minister of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who had an estate of 10,000
arourae (about 6,500 acres [2,630 hectares]) at Philadelphia in Al-Fayyūm. Tenants and
beneficiaries were able to behave very much as if these leases and grants were private
property. The revenues in cash and kind were enormous, and royal control extended to the
manufacture and marketing of almost all important products, including papyrus, oil, linen, and
beer. An extraordinarily detailed set of revenue laws, promulgated under Ptolemy II
Philadelphus, laid down rules for the way in which officials were to monitor the production of
such commodities. In fact, the Ptolemaic economy was very much a mixture of direct royal
ownership and exploitation by private enterprise under regulated conditions.
One fundamental and far-reaching Ptolemaic innovation

was the systematic monetarization of the economy. The
monarchy also controlled this from top to bottom by
operating a closed monetary system, which permitted
only the royal coinage to circulate within Egypt. A
glass bowl sophisticated banking system underpinned this practice,
Bowl of pressed mosaic glass, operating again with a mixture of direct royal control and
believed to be from Alexandria, Egypt,
private enterprise and handling both private financial
1st century
transactions and those that directed money into and out
BCE
; in the Victoria and Albert Museum, of the royal coffers. One important concomitant of this
London. change was an enormous increase in the volume of trade,
both within Egypt and abroad, which eventually reached
its climax under the peaceful conditions of Roman rule. There the position and role of
Alexandria as the major port and trading entrepôt was crucial: the city handled a great volume
of Egypt’s domestic produce, as well as the import and export of luxury goods to and from the
East and the cities of the eastern Mediterranean. It developed its own importance as an artistic
centre, the products of which found ready markets throughout the Mediterranean. Alexandrian
glassware and jewelry were particularly fine, Greek-style sculpture of the late Ptolemaic
period shows especial excellence, and it is likely that the city was also the major production
centre for high-quality mosaic work.
Religion
The Ptolemies were powerful supporters of the native
Egyptian religious foundations, the economic and
political power of which was, however, carefully
controlled. A great deal of the late building and
restoration work in many of the most important Egyptian
Apis temples is Ptolemaic, particularly from the period of
Apis, the ancient Egyptian bull deity, about 150–50 BCE, and the monarchs appear on temple
painted on the bottom of a wooden
reliefs in the traditional forms of the Egyptian kings. The
coffin, c. 700
native traditions persisted in village temples and local
BCE
; in the Roemer-Pelizaeus Museum, cults, many having particular associations with species of
Hildesheim, Germany. sacred animals or birds. At the same time, the Greeks
created their own identifications of Egyptian deities,
identifying Amon with Zeus, Horus with Apollo, Ptah with Hephaestus, and so on. They also
gave some deities, such as Isis, a more universal significance that ultimately resulted in the
spread of her mystery cult throughout the Mediterranean world. The impact of the Greeks is
most obvious in two phenomena. One is the formalized royal cult of Alexander and the
Ptolemies, which evidently served both a political and a religious purpose. The other is the
creation of the cult of Sarapis, which at first was confined to Alexandria but soon became
universal. The god was represented as a Hellenized deity and the form of cult is Greek, but its
essence is the old Egyptian notion that the sacred Apis bull merged its divinity in some way
with the god Osiris when it died.
Culture
The continuing vitality of the native Egyptian artistic tradition is clearly and abundantly
expressed in the temple architecture and the sculpture of the Ptolemaic period. The Egyptian
language continued to be used in its hieroglyphic and demotic forms until late in the Roman
period, and it survived through the Byzantine period and beyond in the form of Coptic. The
Egyptian literary tradition flourished vigorously in the Ptolemaic period and produced a large
number of works in demotic. The genre most commonly represented is the romantic tale,
exemplified by several story cycles, which are typically set in the native, Pharaonic milieu and
involve the gods, royal figures, magic, romance, and the trials and combats of heroes. Another
important category is the Instruction Text, the best known of the period being that of
Ankhsheshonq, which consists of a list of moralizing maxims, composed, as the story goes,
when Ankhsheshonq was imprisoned for having failed to inform the king (pharaoh) of an
assassination plot. Another example, known as Papyrus Insinger, is a more narrowly
moralizing text. But the arrival of a Greek-speaking elite had an enormous impact on cultural
patterns. The Egyptian story cycles were probably affected by Greek influence, literary and
technical works were translated into Greek, and under royal patronage an Egyptian priest
named Manetho of Sebennytos wrote an account of the kings of Egypt in Greek. Most striking
is the diffusion of the works of the poets and playwrights of classical Greece among the
literate Greeks in the towns and villages of the Nile River valley.
Thus there are clear signs of the existence of two interacting but distinct cultural traditions in
Ptolemaic Egypt. This was certainly reflected in a broader social context. The written sources
offer little direct evidence of ethnic discrimination by Greeks against Egyptians, but Greek and
Egyptian consciousness of the Greeks’ social and economic superiority comes through
strongly from time to time; intermarriage was one means, though not the only one, by which
Egyptians could better their status and Hellenize. Many native Egyptians learned to speak
Greek, some to write it as well; some even went so far as to adopt Greek names in an attempt
to assimilate themselves to the elite group.
Alexandria occupied a unique place in the history of literature, ideas, scholarship, and science
for almost a millennium after the death of its founder. Under the royal patronage of the
Ptolemies and in an environment almost oblivious to its Egyptian surroundings, Greek culture
was preserved and developed. Early in the Ptolemaic period, probably in the reign of Ptolemy
I Soter, the Alexandrian Museum (Greek: Mouseion, “Seat of the Muses”) was established
within the palace complex. The geographer and historian Strabo, who saw it early in the
Roman period, described it as having a covered walk, an arcade with recesses and seats, and a
large house containing the dining hall of the members of the Museum, who lived a communal
existence. The Library of Alexandria (together with its offshoot in the Sarapeum) was
indispensable to the functioning of the scholarly community in the Museum. Books were
collected voraciously under the Ptolemies, and at its height the library’s collection probably
numbered 500,000 or more papyrus rolls, most of them containing more than one work.
The major poets of the Hellenistic period, Theocritus, Callimachus, and Apollonius of Rhodes,
all took up residence and wrote there. Scholarship flourished, preserving and ordering the
manuscript traditions of much of the classical literature from Homer onward. Librarian-
scholars such as Aristophanes of Byzantium and his pupil Aristarchus made critical editions
and wrote commentaries and works on grammar. Also notable was the cultural influence of
Alexandria’s Jewish community, which is inferred from the fact that the Pentateuch was first
translated into Greek at Alexandria during the Ptolemaic period. One by-product of this kind
of activity was that Alexandria became the centre of the book trade, and the works of the
classical authors were copied there and diffused among a literate Greek readership scattered in
the towns and villages of the Nile valley.
The Alexandrian achievement in scientific fields was also enormous. Great advances were
made in pure mathematics, mechanics, physics, geography, and medicine. Euclid worked in
Alexandria about 300 BCE and achieved the systematization of the whole existing corpus of
mathematical knowledge and the development of the method of proof by deduction from
axioms. Archimedes was there in the 3rd century BCE and is said to have invented the
Archimedean screw when he was in Egypt. Eratosthenes calculated Earth’s circumference and
was the first to attempt a map of the world based on a system of lines of latitude and longitude.
The school of medicine founded in the Ptolemaic period retained its leading reputation into the
Byzantine era. Late in the Ptolemaic period Alexandria began to develop as a great centre of
Greek philosophical studies as well. In fact, there was no field of literary, intellectual, or
scientific activity to which Ptolemaic Alexandria failed to make an important contribution.
Alan Edouard Samuel Alan K. Bowman

Roman and Byzantine Egypt (30 BCE– 642 CE)
Egypt as a province of Rome

“I added Egypt to the empire of the Roman people.” With these words the emperor Augustus
(as Octavian was known from 27 BCE) summarized the subjection of Cleopatra’s kingdom in
the great inscription that records his achievements. The province was to be governed by a
viceroy, a prefect with the status of a Roman knight (eques) who was directly responsible to
the emperor. The first viceroy was the Roman poet and soldier Gaius Cornelius Gallus, who
boasted too vaingloriously of his military achievements in the province and paid for it first
with his position and then with his life. Roman senators were not allowed to enter Egypt
without the emperor’s permission, because this wealthiest of provinces could be held militarily
by a very small force, and the threat implicit in an embargo on the export of grain supplies,
vital to the provisioning of the city of Rome and its populace, was obvious. Internal security
was guaranteed by the presence of three Roman legions (later reduced to two), each about
6,000 strong, and several cohorts of auxiliaries.
In the first decade of Roman rule the spirit of Augustan imperialism looked farther afield,
attempting expansion to the east and to the south. An expedition to Arabia by the prefect
Aelius Gallus about 26–25 BCE was undermined by the treachery of the Nabataean Syllaeus,
who led the Roman fleet astray in uncharted waters. Arabia was to remain an independent
though friendly client of Rome until 106 CE, when the emperor Trajan (ruled 98–117 CE)
annexed it, making it possible to reopen Ptolemy II’s canal from the Nile to the head of the
Gulf of Suez. To the south the Meroitic people beyond the First Cataract had taken advantage
of Gallus’s preoccupation with Arabia and mounted an attack on the Thebaid. The next Roman
prefect, Petronius, led two expeditions into the Meroitic kingdom (c. 24–22 BCE), captured
several towns, forced the submission of the formidable queen, who was characterized by
Roman writers as “the one-eyed Queen Candace,” and left a Roman garrison at Primis (Qaṣr
Ibrīm). But thoughts of maintaining a permanent presence in Lower Nubia were soon
abandoned, and within a year or two the limits of Roman occupation had been set at Hiera
Sykaminos, some 50 miles (80 km) south of the First Cataract. The mixed character of the
region is indicated, however, by the continuing popularity of the goddess Isis among the
people of Meroe and by the Roman emperor Augustus’s foundation of a temple at Kalabsha
dedicated to the local god Mandulis.
Egypt achieved its greatest prosperity under the shadow of the Roman peace, which, in effect,
depoliticized it. Roman emperors or members of their families visited Egypt—Tiberius’s
nephew and adopted son, Germanicus; Vespasian and his elder son, Titus; Hadrian; Septimius
Severus; Diocletian—to see the famous sights, receive the acclamations of the Alexandrian
populace, attempt to ensure the loyalty of their volatile subjects, or initiate administrative
reform. Occasionally its potential as a power base was realized. Vespasian, the most successful
of the imperial aspirants in the “Year of the Four Emperors,” was first proclaimed emperor at
Alexandria on July 1, 69 CE, in a maneuver contrived by the prefect of Egypt, Tiberius Julius
Alexander. Others were less successful. Gaius Avidius Cassius, the son of a former prefect of
Egypt, revolted against Marcus Aurelius in 175 CE, stimulated by false rumours of Marcus’s
death, but his attempted usurpation lasted only three months. For several months in 297/298
CE Egypt was under the dominion of a mysterious usurper named Lucius Domitius
Domitianus. The emperor Diocletian was present at the final capitulation of Alexandria after
an eight-month siege and swore to take revenge by slaughtering the populace until the river of
blood reached his horse’s knees; the threat was mitigated when his mount stumbled as he rode
into the city. In gratitude, the citizens of Alexandria erected a statue of the horse.
The only extended period during the turbulent 3rd century CE in which Egypt was lost to the
central imperial authority was 270–272, when it fell into the hands of the ruling dynasty of the
Syrian city of Palmyra. Fortunately for Rome, the military strength of Palmyra proved to be
the major obstacle to the overrunning of the Eastern Empire by the powerful Sāsānian
monarchy of Persia.
Internal threats to security were not uncommon but normally were dissipated without major
damage to imperial control. These included rioting between Jews and Greeks in Alexandria in
the reign of Caligula (Gaius Caesar Germanicus; ruled 37–41 CE), a serious Jewish revolt
under Trajan (ruled 98–117 CE), a revolt in the Nile delta in 172 CE that was quelled by
Avidius Cassius, and a revolt centred on the town of Coptos (Qifṭ) in 293/294 CE that was put
down by Galerius, Diocletian’s imperial colleague.
Administration and economy under Rome

The Romans introduced important changes in the administrative system, aimed at achieving a
high level of efficiency and maximizing revenue. The duties of the prefect of Egypt combined
responsibility for military security through command of the legions and cohorts, for the
organization of finance and taxation, and for the administration of justice. This involved a vast
mass of detailed paperwork; one document from 211 CE notes that in a period of three days
1,804 petitions were handed into the prefect’s office. But the prefect was assisted by a
hierarchy of subordinate equestrian officials with expertise in particular areas. There were
three or four epistratēgoi in charge of regional subdivisions; special officers were in charge of
the emperors’ private account, the administration of justice, religious institutions, and so on.
Subordinate to them were the local officials in the nomes (stratēgoi and royal scribes) and
finally the authorities in the towns and villages.
It was in these growing towns that the Romans made the most far-reaching changes in
administration. They introduced colleges of magistrates and officials who were to be
responsible for running the internal affairs of their own communities on a theoretically
autonomous basis and, at the same time, were to guarantee the collection and payment of tax
quotas to the central government. This was backed up by the development of a range of
“liturgies,” compulsory public services that were imposed on individuals according to rank
and property to ensure the financing and upkeep of local facilities. These institutions were the
Egyptian counterpart of the councils and magistrates that oversaw the Greek cities in the
eastern Roman provinces. They had been ubiquitous in other Hellenistic kingdoms, but in
Ptolemaic Egypt they had existed only in the so-called Greek cities (Alexandria, Ptolemais in
Upper Egypt, Naukratis, and later Antinoöpolis, founded by Hadrian in 130 CE). Alexandria
lost the right to have a council, probably in the Ptolemaic period. When it recovered its right in
200 CE, the privilege was diluted by being extended to the nome capitals (mētropoleis) as well.
This extension of privilege represented an attempt to shift more of the burden and expense of
administration onto the local propertied classes, but it was eventually to prove too heavy. The
consequences were the impoverishment of many of the councillors and their families and
serious problems in administration that led to an increasing degree of central government
interference and, eventually, more direct control.
The economic resources that this administration existed to exploit had not changed since the
Ptolemaic period, but the development of a much more complex and sophisticated taxation
system was a hallmark of Roman rule. Taxes in both cash and kind were assessed on land, and
a bewildering variety of small taxes in cash, as well as customs dues and the like, was
collected by appointed officials. A massive amount of Egypt’s grain was shipped downriver
both to feed the population of Alexandria and for export to Rome. Despite frequent complaints
of oppression and extortion from the taxpayers, it is not obvious that official tax rates were all
that high. In fact the Roman government had actively encouraged the privatization of land and
the increase of private enterprise in manufacture, commerce, and trade, and low tax rates
favoured private owners and entrepreneurs. The poorer people gained their livelihood as
tenants of state-owned land or of property belonging to the emperor or to wealthy private
landlords, and they were relatively much more heavily burdened by rentals, which tended to
remain at a fairly high level.
Overall, the degree of monetarization and complexity in the economy, even at the village
level, was intense. Goods were moved around and exchanged through the medium of coin on a
large scale and, in the towns and the larger villages, a high level of industrial and commercial
activity developed in close conjunction with the exploitation of the predominant agricultural
base. The volume of trade, both internal and external, reached its peak in the 1st and 2nd
centuries CE. However, by the end of the 3rd century CE, major problems were evident. A
series of debasements of the imperial currency had undermined confidence in the coinage, and
even the government itself was contributing to this by demanding increasing amounts of
irregular tax payments in kind, which it channeled directly to the main consumers—army
personnel. Local administration by the councils was careless, recalcitrant, and inefficient. The
evident need for firm and purposeful reform had to be squarely faced in the reigns of
Diocletian and Constantine.
Society, religion, and culture

One of the more noticeable effects of Roman rule was the clearer tendency toward
classification and social control of the populace. Thus, despite many years of intermarriage
between Greeks and Egyptians, lists drawn up in 4/5 CE established the right of certain
families to class themselves as Greek by descent and to claim privileges attaching to their
status as members of an urban aristocracy, known as the gymnasial class. Members of this
group were entitled to lower rates of poll tax, subsidized or free distributions of food, and
maintenance at the public expense when they grew old. If they or their descendants were
upwardly mobile, they might gain Alexandrian citizenship, Roman citizenship, or even
equestrian status, with correspondingly greater prestige and privileges. The preservation of
such distinctions was implicit in the spread of Roman law and was reinforced by elaborate
codes of social and fiscal regulations such as the Rule-Book of the Emperors’ Special Account.
The Rule-Book prescribed conditions under which people of different status might marry, for
instance, or bequeath property, and it fixed fines, confiscations, and other penalties for
transgression. When an edict of the emperor Caracalla conferred Roman citizenship on
practically all of the subjects of the empire in 212 CE, the distinction between citizens and
noncitizens became meaningless; however, it was gradually replaced by an equally important
distinction between honestiores and humiliores (meaning, roughly, “upper classes” and “lower
classes,” respectively), groups that, among other distinctions, were subjected to different
penalties in law.
Naturally, it was the Greek-speaking elite that continued to dictate the visibly dominant
cultural pattern, though Egyptian culture was not moribund or insignificant. One proof of its
continued survival can be seen in its reemergent importance in the context of Coptic
Christianity in the Byzantine period. An important reminder of the mixing of the traditions
comes from a family of Panopolis in the 4th century, whose members included both teachers
of Greek oratory and priests in Egyptian cult tradition. The towns and villages of the Nile
valley have preserved thousands of papyri that show what the literate Greeks were reading
(e.g., the poems of Homer and the lyric poets, works of the Classical Greek tragedians, and
comedies of Menander). The pervasiveness of the Greek literary tradition is strikingly
demonstrated by evidence left by an obscure and anonymous clerk at Al-Fayyūm village of
Karanis in the 2nd century CE. In copying out a long list of taxpayers, the clerk translated an
Egyptian name in the list by an extremely rare Greek word that he could only have known
from having read the Alexandrian Hellenistic poet Callimachus; he must have understood the
etymology of the Egyptian name as well.
Alexandria continued to develop as a spectacularly beautiful city and to foster Greek culture
and intellectual pursuits, though the great days of Ptolemaic court patronage of literary figures
had passed. But the flourishing interest in philosophy, particularly Platonic philosophy, had
important effects. The great Jewish philosopher and theologian of the 1st century, Philo of
Alexandria (Philo Judaeus), brought a training in Greek philosophy to bear on his
commentaries on the Bible. This anticipated by a hundred years the period after the virtual
annihilation of the great Jewish community of Alexandria in the revolt of 115–117 CE, when
the city was the intellectual crucible in which Christianity developed a theology that took it
away from the influence of the Jewish exegetical tradition and toward that of Greek
philosophical ideas. There the foundations were laid for teaching the heads of the Christian
catechetical school, such as Clement of Alexandria. And in the 3rd century there was the vital
textual and theological work of Origen, the greatest of the Christian Neoplatonists, without
which there would hardly have been a coherent New Testament tradition at all.
Outside the Greek ambience of Alexandria, traditional Egyptian religious institutions

continued to flourish in the towns and villages, but the temples were reduced to financial
dependence on a state subvention (syntaxis), and they became subject to stringent control by
secular bureaucrats. Nevertheless, like the Ptolemies before them, Roman emperors appear in
the traditional form as Egyptian kings on temple reliefs until the mid-3rd century, and five
professional hieroglyph cutters were still employed at the town of Oxyrhynchus in the 2nd
century. The animal cults continued to flourish, despite Augustus’s famous sneer that he was
accustomed to worship gods, not cattle. As late as the reign of Diocletian (285–305), religious
stelae preserved the fiction that in the cults of sacred bulls (best known at Memphis and at
Hermonthis [Armant]) the successor of a dead bull was “installed” by the monarch.
Differences between cults of the Greek type and the native Egyptian cults were still highly
marked, in the temple architecture and in the status of the priests. Priests of Egyptian cults
formed, in effect, a caste distinguished by their special clothing, whereas priestly offices in
Greek cults were much more like magistracies and tended to be held by local magnates. Cults
of Roman emperors, living and dead, became universal after 30 BCE, but their impact is most
clearly to be seen in the foundations of Caesarea (Temples of Caesar) and in religious
institutions of Greek type, where divine emperors were associated with the resident deities.
One development that did have an important effect on this religious amalgam, though it was
not decisive until the 4th century, was the arrival of Christianity. The tradition of the
foundation of the church of Alexandria by St. Mark cannot be substantiated, but a fragment of
a text of the Gospel According to John provides concrete evidence of Christianity in the Nile
valley in the second quarter of the 2nd century CE. Inasmuch as Christianity remained illegal
and subject to persecution until the early 4th century, Christians were reluctant to advertise
themselves as such, and it is therefore difficult to know how numerous they were, especially
because later pro-Christian sources may often be suspected of exaggerating the zeal and the
numbers of the early Christian martyrs. But several papyri survive of the libelli—certificates
in which people swore that they had performed sacrifices to Greek, Egyptian, or Roman
divinities in order to prove that they were not Christians—submitted in the first official state-
sponsored persecution of Christians, under the emperor Decius (ruled 249–251). By the 290s,
a decade or so before the great persecution under Diocletian, a list of buildings in the sizeable
town of Oxyrhynchus, some 125 miles (200 km) south of the apex of the delta, included two
Christian churches, probably of the house-chapel type.
Egypt’s role in the Byzantine Empire

Diocletian was the last reigning Roman emperor to visit Egypt, in 302 CE. Within about 10
years of his visit, the persecution of Christians ceased. The end of persecution had such far-
reaching effects that from this point on it is necessary to think of the history of Egypt in a very
different framework. No single point can be identified as the watershed between the Roman
and Byzantine period, as the divide between a brighter

era of peace, culture, and prosperity and a darker age,
supposedly characterized by more-oppressive state
machinery in the throes of decline and fall. The crucial
changes occurred in the last decade of the 3rd century
Byzantine Empire, 6th century
and the first three decades of the 4th. With the end of
Egypt as part of the Byzantine Empire,
persecution of Christians came the restoration of the
c. 565
property of the church. In 313 a new system of
CE
. calculating and collecting taxes was introduced, with 15-
year tax cycles, called indictions, inaugurated
retrospectively from the year 312. Many other important administrative changes had already
taken place. In 296 the separation of the Egyptian coinage from that of the rest of the empire
had come to an end when the Alexandrian mint stopped producing its tetradrachms, which had
been the basis of the closed-currency system.
One other event that had an enormous effect on the political history of Egypt was the founding
of Constantinople (now Istanbul) on May 11, 330. First, Constantinople was established as an
imperial capital and an eastern counterpart to Rome itself, thus undermining Alexandria’s
traditional position as the first city of the Greek-speaking East. Second, it diverted the
resources of Egypt away from Rome and the West. Henceforth, part of the surplus of the
Egyptian grain supply, which was put at 8 million artabs (about 300 million litres) of wheat
(one artab was roughly equivalent to one bushel) in an edict of the emperor Justinian of about
537 or 538, went to feed the growing population of Constantinople, and this created an
important political and economic link. The cumulative effect of these changes was to knit
Egypt more uniformly into the structure of the empire and to give it, once again, a central role
in the political history of the Mediterranean world.
The key to understanding the importance of Egypt in that period lies in seeing how the
Christian church came rapidly to dominate secular as well as religious institutions and to
acquire a powerful interest and role in every political issue. The corollary of this was that the
head of the Egyptian church, the patriarch of Alexandria, became the most influential figure
within Egypt, as well as the person who could give the Egyptian clergy a powerful voice in the
councils of the Eastern church. During the course of the 4th century, Egypt was divided for
administrative purposes into a number of smaller units but the patriarchy was not, and its
power thus far outweighed that of any local administrative official. Only the governors of
groups of provinces (vicarii of dioceses) were equivalent, and the praetorian prefects and
emperors were superior. When a patriarch of Alexandria was given civil authority as well, as
happened in the case of Cyrus, the last patriarch under Byzantine rule, the combination was
very powerful indeed.
The turbulent history of Egypt in the Byzantine period can largely be understood in terms of
the struggles of the successive (or, after 570, coexisting) patriarchs of Alexandria to maintain
their position both within their patriarchy and outside it in relation to Constantinople. What
linked Egypt and the rest of the Eastern Empire was the way in which the imperial authorities,
when strong (as, for instance, in the reign of Justinian), tried to control the Egyptian church
from Constantinople, while at the same time assuring the capital’s food supply and, as often as
not, waging wars to keep their empire intact. Conversely, when weak they failed to control the
church. For the patriarchs of Alexandria, it proved impossible to secure the approval of the
imperial authorities in Constantinople and at the same time maintain the support of their power
base in Egypt. The two made quite different demands, and the ultimate result was a social,
political, and cultural gulf between Alexandria and the rest of Egypt and between Hellenism
and native Egyptian culture, which found a powerful new means of expression in Coptic
Christianity. The gulf was made more emphatic after the Council of Chalcedon in 451
established the official doctrine that Christ was to be seen as existing in two natures,
inseparably united. The council’s decision in effect sent the Egyptian Coptic (now Coptic
Orthodox) church off on its own path of monophysitism, which centred around a firm
insistence on the singularity of the nature of Christ.
Despite the debilitating effect of internal quarrels between rival churchmen, and despite the
threats posed by the hostile tribes of Blemmyes and Nubade in the south (until their
conversion to Christianity in the mid-6th century), emperors of Byzantium still could be
threatened by the strength of Egypt if it were properly harnessed. The last striking example is
the case of the emperor Phocas, a tyrant who was brought down in 609 or 610. Nicetas, the
general of the future emperor Heraclius, made for Alexandria from Cyrene, intending to use
Egypt as his power base and cut off Constantinople’s grain supply. By the spring of 610
Nicetas’s struggle with Bonosus, the general of Phocas, was won, and the fall of the tyrant
duly followed.
The difficulty of defending Egypt from a power base in Constantinople was forcefully
illustrated during the last three decades of Byzantine rule. First, the old enemy, the Persians,
advanced to the Nile delta and captured Alexandria. Their occupation was completed early in
619 and continued until 628, when Persia and Byzantium agreed to a peace treaty and the
Persians withdrew. This had been a decade of violent hostility to the Egyptian Coptic
Christians; among other oppressive measures, the Persians are said to have refused to allow
the normal ordination of bishops and to have massacred hundreds of monks in their cave
monasteries. The Persian withdrawal hardly heralded the return of peace to Egypt.
In Arabia events were taking place that would soon bring momentous changes for Egypt.
These were triggered by the flight of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina and by
his declaration in 632 CE of a holy war against Byzantium. A decade later, by September 29,
642, the Arab general ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ was able to march into Alexandria, and the Arab
conquest of Egypt, which had begun with an invasion three years earlier, ended in peaceful
capitulation. The invasion itself had been preceded by several years of vicious persecution of
Coptic Christians by Cyrus, the Chalcedonian patriarch of Alexandria, and it was he who is
said to have betrayed Egypt to the forces of Islam.
The Islamic conquest was not bloodless. There was desultory fighting at first in the eastern
delta, then Al-Fayyūm was lost in battle in 640, and a great battle took place at Heliopolis
(now a suburb of Cairo) in July 640 in which 15,000 Arabs engaged 20,000 Egyptian
defenders. The storming and capture of Trajan’s old fortress at Babylon (on the site of the
present-day quarter called Old Cairo) on April 6, 641, was crucial. By September 14 Cyrus,
who had been recalled from Egypt 10 months earlier by the emperor Heraclius, was back with
authority to conclude a peace. Byzantium signed Egypt away on November 8, 641, with
provision for an 11-month armistice to allow ratification of the treaty of surrender by the
emperor and the caliph. In December 641 heavily laden ships were dispatched to carry Egypt’s
wealth to its new masters. Nine months later the last remnants of Byzantine forces left Egypt
in ships bound for Cyprus, Rhodes, and Constantinople, and ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ took Alexandria
in the name of the caliph. The new domination by the theocratic Islamic caliphate was
strikingly different from anything that had happened in Egypt since the arrival of Alexander
the Great almost a thousand years earlier.
Byzantine government of Egypt
The reforms of the early 4th century had established the basis for another 250 years of
comparative prosperity in Egypt, at a cost of perhaps greater rigidity and more-oppressive
state control. Egypt was subdivided for administrative purposes into a number of smaller
provinces, and separate civil and military officials were established (the praeses and the dux,
respectively). By the middle of the 6th century the emperor Justinian was eventually forced to
recognize the failure of this policy and to combine civil and military power in the hands of the
dux with a civil deputy (the praeses) as a counterweight to the power of the church authorities.
All pretense of local autonomy had by then vanished. The presence of the soldiery was more
noticeable, its power and influence more pervasive in the routine of town and village life.
Taxes were perhaps not heavier than they had been earlier, but they were collected ruthlessly,
and strong measures were sanctioned against those who tried to escape from their fiscal or
legal obligations. The wealthier landowners probably enjoyed increased prosperity, especially
as a result of the opportunity to buy now state-owned land that had once been sold into private
ownership in the early 4th century. The great landlords were powerful enough to offer their
peasant tenants a significant degree of collective fiscal protection against the agents of the
state, the rapacious tax collector, the officious bureaucrat, or the brutal soldier. But, if the life
of the average peasant did not change much, nevertheless the rich probably became richer, and
the poor became poorer and more numerous as the moderate landholders were increasingly
squeezed out of the picture.
The advance of Christianity

The advance of Christianity had just as profound an effect on the social and cultural fabric of
Byzantine Egypt as on the political power structure. It brought to the surface the identity of the
native Egyptians in the Coptic church, which found a medium of expression in the
development of the Coptic language—basically Egyptian written in Greek letters with the
addition of a few characters. Coptic Christianity also developed its own distinctive art, much
of it pervaded by the long-familiar motifs of Greek mythology. These motifs coexisted with
representations of the Virgin and Child and with Christian parables and were expressed in
decorative styles that owed a great deal to both Greek and Egyptian precedents. Although
Christianity had made great inroads into the populace by 391 (the year in which the practice of
the local polytheistic religions was officially made illegal), it is hardly possible to quantify it
or to trace a neat and uniform progression. It engulfed its predecessors slowly and untidily. In
the first half of the 5th century a polytheistic literary revival occurred, centred on the town of
Panopolis, and there is evidence that fanatical monks in the area attacked non-Christian
temples and stole statues and magical texts. Outside the rarefied circles in which doctrinal
disputes were discussed in philosophical terms, there was a great heterogeneous mass of
commitment and belief. For example, both the gnostics, who believed in redemption through
knowledge, and the Manichaeans, followers of the Persian prophet Mani, clearly thought of
themselves as Christians. In the 4th century a Christian community, the library of which was
discovered at Najʾ Ḥammādī in 1945, was reading both canonical and apocryphal gospels as
well as mystical revelatory tracts. At the lower levels of society, magical practices remained
ubiquitous and were simply transferred to a Christian context.
By the mid-5th century Egypt’s landscape was dominated by the great churches, such as the
magnificent church of St. Menas (Abū Mīna), south of Alexandria, and by the monasteries.
The latter were Egypt’s distinctive contribution to the development of Christianity and were
particularly important as strongholds of native loyalty to the monophysite church. The origins
of Antonian communities, named for the founding father of monasticism, St. Anthony of
Egypt (c. 251–356), lay in the desire of individuals to congregate about the person of a
celebrated ascetic in a desert location, building their own cells, adding a church and a
refectory, and raising towers and walls to enclose the unit. Other monasteries, called
Pachomian—for Pachomius, the founder of cenobitic monasticism—were planned from the
start as walled complexes with communal facilities. The provision of water cisterns, kitchens,
bakeries, oil presses, workshops, stables, and cemeteries and the ownership and cultivation of
land in the vicinity made these communities self-sufficient to a high degree, offering their
residents peace and protection against the oppression of the tax collector and the brutality of
the soldier. But it does not follow that they were divorced from contact with nearby towns and
villages. Indeed, many monastics were important local figures, and many monastery churches
were probably open to the local public for worship.
The economic and social power of the Christian church in the Nile River valley and delta is
the outstanding development of the 5th and 6th centuries. By the time of the Arab invasion, in
the mid-7th century, the uncomplicated message of Islam might have seemed attractive and
drawn attention to the political and religious rifts that successive and rival patriarchs of the
Christian church had so violently created and exploited. But the advent of Arab rule did not
suppress Christianity in Egypt. Some areas remained heavily Christian for several more
centuries.
Alan K. Bowman
Citation Information
Article Title: ancient Egypt
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 17 November 2023
URL: https://www.britannica.comhttps://www.britannica.com/place/ancient-Egypt
Access Date: November 18, 2023

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11/18/23, 3:24 PM ancient Egypt -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia

Introduction to ancient Egyptian civilization

The king and ideology: administration, art, and writing

Writing was a major instrument in the centralization of

The dominant visible legacy of ancient Egypt is in works

Sources, calendars, and chronology

In early periods the kings’ years of reign were not

The recovery and study of ancient Egypt

Napoleon I’s expedition to and short-lived conquest of

In the first half of the 20th century, some outstanding

life of Paleolithic times to settled agriculture has not so

The earliest known Neolithic cultures in Egypt have been

In Upper Egypt, between Asyūṭ and Luxor (Al-Uqṣur),

Sites associated with Egypt from

The material culture of Naqādah II included increasing

The Early Dynastic period (c. 2925–c. 2575 BCE)

The 1st dynasty (c. 2925–c. 2775 BCE)

The beginning of the historical period is characterized by

The 2nd dynasty (c. 2775–c. 2650 BCE)

The 3rd dynasty (c. 2650–c. 2575 BCE)

The Old Kingdom

In a long perspective, the 4th dynasty was an isolated

Apart from the colossal conception of the pyramids

The 5th dynasty (c. 2465–c. 2325 BCE)

The last three kings of the dynasty, Menkauhor, Djedkare

The 6th dynasty (c. 2325–c. 2150 BCE)

The 7th and 8th dynasties (c. 2150–c. 2130 BCE)

The First Intermediate period

The Middle Kingdom

The 12th dynasty (1938–c. 1756 BCE)

In his 20th regnal year, Amenemhet I took his son

Amenemhet I apparently was murdered during Sesostris’s absence on a campaign to Libya,

The purpose of the occupation of Lower Nubia is

The 13th dynasty (c. 1756–c. 1630 BCE)

The Second Intermediate period

John R. Baines Peter F. Dorman

The New Kingdom (c. 1539–1075 BCE)

The 18th dynasty (c. 1539–1292 BCE)

Thutmose I and Thutmose II

Hatshepsut and Thutmose III

Her temple reliefs depict pacific enterprises, such as the

By the end of the first campaign, Egyptian domination

Amenhotep II’s son Thutmose IV (ruled 1400–1390 BCE)

BCE Foreign influences during the early 18th

breakdown of Egyptian isolationism and an increased cosmopolitanism in religion are also

Amenhotep III sponsored building on a colossal scale,

represented the transcendent aspect of kingship. In Karnak, statues of Amenhotep, son of

Akhenaton’s religious and cultural revolution was highly

The aftermath of Amarna

Under Tutankhamun a considerable amount of building

Tutankhamun's tomb (lower left) in the

BCE The Ramesside period (19th and 20th

Ramses I and Seti I

For the first time in more than a millennium, princes

Last years of the 19th dynasty

The early 20th dynasty: Setnakht and Ramses III

The later Ramesside kings

The Third Intermediate period (1075–656 BCE)