The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt Read online

  The superior technology of bronze, together with an increase in trade income, facilitated an upsurge in state construction projects, and Khasekhemwy was by far the most prolific builder in Egypt’s early history. He dedicated new temple buildings throughout Upper Egypt and completed his cult enclosure at Nekhen before turning his attention to Abdju. Following in the footsteps of his immediate predecessor, he chose the ancient burial ground of kings for his own funerary monuments. His enclosure at Abdju dwarfed even its counterpart at Nekhen, and dominates the surrounding area to this day. As for the royal tomb, the king’s architects chose an entirely new design, combining elements from First Dynasty and early Second Dynasty traditions. It was as if he were announcing that all the developments of Egyptian civilization up to that point were being brought together under his leadership. And he was looking to the future, too. His burial chamber was lined with carefully dressed blocks of limestone, on a scale that had never been attempted before. It was a taste of things to come.

  It used to be thought that Khasekhemwy confined his building projects to Upper Egypt. But recent survey and excavation suggest that he decided to make his mark in the north as well. Far out in the desert at Saqqara, beyond the modern tourist trail, beyond even the reach of the camel drivers, lie the remains of a truly vast enclosure. It is most easily visible in aerial photographs; on the ground its walls are discernible only as a low ridge. The dimensions are staggering: it measures a quarter of a mile wide by nearly half a mile long. No wonder its local Arabic name is Gisr el-Mudir, “the enclosure of the boss.” Partial excavation of the walls shows that they were built of huge stone blocks laid in sloping courses, while the corners are of solid masonry construction. No inscriptions have yet been found to confirm the date of the Gisr el-Mudir, but it looks increasingly likely that it was built by Khasekhemwy—a third monumental enclosure of his reign. In its finished state, it would have been by far the biggest and most impressive royal monument Egypt had ever seen. Khasekhemwy had brought the country to the threshold of a new age.

  PYRAMIDS AND POLITICS

  TODAY, THE GISR EL-MUDIR IS BUT A SHADOW OF ITS FORMER SELF. The reason is not that it was left unfinished, nor that it was poorly built. The explanation lies within view, on the skyline of Saqqara—the Step Pyramid of King Netjerikhet. The builders of Egypt’s first pyramid did what their successors would do throughout Egyptian history: they looked around for a ready source of building stone and found it in a nearby monument. Rather than going to the trouble of quarrying new stone, they simply dismantled the Gisr el-Mudir and reused its blocks to build something even grander. The result, the Step Pyramid, dominates our view of the Third Dynasty (2650–2575) just as it dominates the landscape. The ruler for whom it was built was Khasekhemwy’s immediate heir and chosen successor. But if Netjerikhet inherited his father’s predilection for grand designs, he was equally determined to eclipse Khasekhemwy’s achievements. He would take the visible expression of absolute power to new heights—literally as well as metaphorically.

  The Step Pyramid at Saqqara WERNER FORMAN ARCHIVE

  The Step Pyramid started life ambitiously enough, as a huge mastaba tomb, built in stone to last for eternity. It rose in one single step, towering above the king’s burial chamber, a mountain of stone to replicate the primeval mound of creation. In a brilliant flash of inspiration, the two elements of the earlier royal burials at Abdju—a tomb and a separate funerary enclosure—were combined into a single monument, by constructing a huge wall around the mastaba. From the outside, it resembled White Wall at nearby Memphis and thus announced its royal associations. The space inside the enclosure was filled with a collection of dummy buildings, for this was the grandest of all stage sets, designed as an eternal backdrop for the ceremonies of kingship.

  For the first time in history, the brilliant conception and execution of a royal monument can be attributed to a known individual. His name echoes down the centuries as the epitome of ancient Egyptian wisdom and learning: Imhotep. A statue base from the entrance colonnade of the Step Pyramid—where it could be seen by all those entering the enclosure—bears his name together with that of his king. Although Imhotep bore a string of titles (royal seal bearer, first under the king, ruler of the great estate, member of the elite, greatest of seers, and overseer of sculptors and painters), he is nowhere explicitly named as the architect of the Step Pyramid. Yet it was as the pyramid’s architect that he achieved posthumous fame, and he is the only plausible candidate. Nobody else held such a prominent position at the court of King Netjerikhet, nobody else was immortalized within the Step Pyramid complex itself. Imhotep’s extraordinary vision saw the development of the royal tomb from a single-stepped mastaba to a four-stepped pyramid and finally to a six-stepped form, the tallest building of its time. The idea for the stepped shape may already have been latent within Egyptian ideology, but the translation of this idea into stone, on a monumental scale, was Imhotep’s lifetime achievement. His innovation marks the beginning of the Pyramid Age, and it had far-reaching effects.

  The administrative effort required for pyramid building was greater than anything Egypt had developed to date. A step change in government organization was needed, and one of the first moves was the creation of the post of vizier, a single individual in overall charge of the government machine, reporting directly to the king. The vizier was hence Egypt’s chief minister, with the added power that came from direct access to the monarch. Netjerikhet’s inner circle of trusted lieutenants—who are better known than any of their predecessors—likewise exemplify the increasing professionalism of the court: Ankh and Sepa were district administrators; Ankhwa was the controller of the royal barque; Hesira was master of the royal scribes, perhaps the leading civil servant; and Khabausokar was the controller of the royal workshops. The old system of royal relatives holding a portfolio of unrelated offices was being replaced by a more structured bureaucracy, opened up, for the first time, to career professionals drawn from a wider section of society and promoted on merit. As Egypt embarked on pyramid building, the pyramids were building Egypt.

  This quiet revolution in government is particularly well illustrated by the career of Metjen. His tomb inscription from Saqqara includes the earliest extensive autobiographical text, and it charts his rise from humble storehouse clerk to a position in local government, followed by promotion to the governorship of several delta provinces. At the end of his career, as a trusted courtier, Metjen was appointed controller of the king’s pleasure palace in the Fayum. It was a pattern of advancement that would be followed for many centuries to come. From now on, the history of ancient Egypt would be made by private individuals as well as their royal masters.

  The reign of Netjerikhet (2650–2620) and the achievements of his court were so impressive that his successors in the Third Dynasty pale into insignificance by comparison. Most are little more than obscure names in the historical record—Sekhemkhet, Khaba, and Sanakht. None left a monument even approaching the Step Pyramid in scale (although several tried). Only when we reach the end of the Third Dynasty and the reign of King Huni (2600–2575) do the advances of the Pyramid Age manifest themselves. Yet, unless a ruined pyramid at Meidum has been misattributed, Huni did not indulge in pyramid building on a lavish scale. His greatest contribution to the future glories of pharaonic civilization was far more prosaic, but no less significant—its architectural manifestation not one gigantic pyramid but a series of small ones, scattered throughout the provinces of Egypt. From those monuments discovered so far, a clear building program emerges. The southernmost pyramid was constructed on the island of Abu, always a favored location for statements of royal power. This monument and its associated palace were named “the diadem of Huni.” Moving downstream, the king commissioned another pyramid at Djeba (modern Edfu); a third at el-Kula, near Nekhen; a fourth at Tukh, near Nubt; and a fifth at Abdju. Further monuments in the series have been identified at Zawiyet el-Meitin, in Middle Egypt; Seila, at the entrance to the Fayum; and Hut-heryib
(modern Tell Atrib), in the delta. Each of the locations was either a provincial capital or an important regional center. Abu was the capital of the first province of Upper Egypt, Djeba the capital of the second, and Nekhen the capital of the third. Huni’s intention seems to have been to erect a visible marker of royal power in every province. And, to judge from the Abu pyramid, collection centers for the royal treasury were also part of the plan. The monuments were not just symbols of the king’s authority throughout the country; they were also practical instruments of that authority in the central management of the economy. For the local population, the small step pyramid in their midst would have served as a constant reminder of their economic duty to the state: a duty to pay their taxes to support the court and its projects. From the state’s point of view, the monuments and their associated administrative buildings—with one facility in each province—made the collection of revenue both easier and more systematic.

  At the end of the Third Dynasty, the monarch and his administration had achieved their ultimate goal: absolute power. The stage was set for the greatest royal project the world had ever seen.

  CHAPTER 4

  HEAVEN ON EARTH

  GRAND DESIGNS

  THE PYRAMIDS AT GIZA ARE THE SOLE SURVIVING WONDER OF THE ANCIENT world. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon have disappeared without a trace; the Temple of Diana at Ephesus lies in ruins; but the pyramids stand, as awesome and enduring today as when they were first built four and a half thousand years ago. Of the three pyramids built by successive generations of kings in the Fourth Dynasty, it is the oldest and biggest, the Great Pyramid of King Khufu, that attracts the most attention—and deservedly so. It is truly vast, built from 2.3 million blocks of stone, each weighing on average more than a ton, and covering an area of thirteen acres. A simple calculation reveals that the builders would have had to set one block of stone in place every two minutes during a ten-hour day, working without a pause throughout the year for the two decades of Khufu’s reign (2545–2525). Once completed, at 481 feet high, the Great Pyramid remained unsurpassed in scale until modern times. For forty-four centuries, until the completion of the Eiffel Tower in A.D. 1889, it was the tallest building in the world. Yet despite its massive size, it is engineered and aligned with breathtaking precision, its orientation to true north diverging by only one twentieth of one degree. More than any other monument in the world, the Great Pyramid seems to defy rational explanation. Little wonder that it has attracted wild speculation about its construction, meaning, and purpose. Theories range from the unorthodox (its blocks are made of an ancient type of concrete) to the downright dotty (the blocks were moved by sound waves), and a whole host of otherworldly builders have been invoked to account for its bewildering size and perfection, including refugees from Atlantis and visitors from another planet. The truth is, if anything, even more amazing. The Great Pyramid was, indeed, the product of something extraordinary: not extraterrestrial intelligence but a superhuman authority. This radical new projection of royal power had a profound significance for ancient Egyptian civilization as a whole, and to understand its origins, we need to go back a generation before the Great Pyramid, to the reign of Khufu’s father.

  The Egyptians’ penchant for monumentality can be traced back to prehistoric times at Nabta Playa; the construction of a vast edifice of stone was first fully realized during the reign of Khasekhemwy, at the end of the Second Dynasty; and the first pyramid was built for his successor, Netjerikhet, at the beginning of the Third. But the advent of the true, geometrical pyramid during the reign of Sneferu (2575–2545), first king of the Fourth Dynasty and father of Khufu, marked something quite new—not just the perfection of an architectural form or a change in the concept of the royal afterlife, but the transformation of the relationship between the king and his people. As was so often true in ancient Egyptian history, the new order was initially proclaimed in the king’s titles. For his Horus name, the most ancient and symbolically most significant element of the royal titulary, Sneferu took the phrase “neb maat.” The common translation, “lord of truth,” scarcely does it justice. In ancient Egyptian ideology “maat” was the embodiment of truth, justice, righteousness, and created order—in short, the divinely ordained pattern of the universe. The word “neb” meant not just “lord,” but “possessor,” “owner,” and “keeper.” Sneferu was announcing nothing less than a new model of kingship. For him, the exercise of power was no longer confined to dispensing justice. It meant having a monopoly on truth. The king’s word was the law because the king himself was the law. If this smacked more of divine than human authority, that was the point.

  To reinforce this blunt message, Sneferu adopted a new title, netjer nefer. It meant, simply, “the perfect god.” Is that really how his subjects saw him? Throughout history, megalomaniacs and tyrants have used such epithets—“father of the nation,” “dear leader”—but the terms usually have a hollow ring. Modern experience suggests that the titles are more about brainwashing and subjugation than the expression of popular acclaim. And yet, when it comes to ancient Egypt, scholars still balk at such an interpretation. A leading expert on the Pyramid Age has written that “support for the system was genuine and widespread” and that “coercive state mechanisms, such as police, were conspicuous by their absence.”1 Unless Fourth Dynasty Egypt was a utopian society, never again experienced in human history, this rose-tinted view seems highly unlikely. When the head of state is “the perfect god,” opposition becomes not just unwise but unthinkable. When the king also controls the written record, it is hardly surprising that accounts of repression or brutality are absent. Archaeology, however, reveals something more of the truth.

  Throughout the first three dynasties, Egyptian society retained much of its prehistoric character. The material culture was largely dominated by forms (of pottery, stone vessels, even statuary) derived from predynastic antecedents. The major regional centers were still those from the period of state formation, places such as Inerty, Nekheb, Tjeni, Nubt, and Nekhen. Beyond the immediate confines of the royal court, society, too, seems to have been organized along ancient, traditional lines, dominated by family, regional, and perhaps tribal loyalties. All that seems to have changed at the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty. New styles of pottery and sculpture were promulgated by the court to be produced in state workshops. New towns were founded by the state to replace the earlier centers of power—Iunet (modern Dendera) displaced Tjeni as the regional administrative capital, Thebes grew at the expense of Nubt, and Djeba eclipsed Nekhen. It is tempting to see these phenomena as parts of a deliberate and coordinated government policy designed to snuff out local autonomy and replace it with a new, absolute dependency on central authority. Even in the mortuary sphere, the king’s commanding presence held sway. Anyone with any position whatsoever in the vast machinery of government now sought to be buried in the court cemetery, founded by the king and dominated by his own gigantic funerary monument, rather than being interred in their local burial ground, hallowed by age and ancestral ties.

  The first of these new court cemeteries grew up at Meidum, a rather remote site near the entrance to the Fayum. The choice of location was significant in itself. By breaking with tradition and eschewing the existing royal burial grounds of Abdju and Saqqara, Sneferu was distancing himself from his ancestors, too. His was an avowedly forward-looking age, in which power would be independent of inheritance. As such, the age demanded a bold, new architectural statement. So Sneferu’s engineers and builders set to work on a monument designed to surpass anything that had been attempted before. Although it followed the basic form of Netjerikhet’s Step Pyramid, the Meidum pyramid was altogether grander in scale, rising up in eight giant steps (against Netjerikhet’s six), and was half again as high as its predecessor. In a further break with tradition, the complex of buildings surrounding the Step Pyramid was abandoned in favor of an elongated plan, with the various architectural elements laid out along an axis. This led eastward from the pyramid itself, via a
small temple and a stone causeway to a valley temple on the edge of cultivation. The east-west orientation, replacing the northern alignment of Third Dynasty royal monuments, was no accident either—Sneferu’s final journey would consciously mirror the sun’s course across the heavens, from its rising in the east to its setting in the west. As “the perfect god,” the king was publicly associating himself with the supreme divinity and source of all life.

  But even this was not enough for a ruler of Sneferu’s vaunting ambition. After about a decade on the throne, with the Meidum pyramid all but complete, the king embarked upon an even more audacious project. Once again, he chose a virgin site (modern Dahshur) at the southern end of the great necropolis of Memphis. Perhaps deliberately, his chosen spot was within sight of Netjerikhet’s Step Pyramid, but—as if to drum home the message that his was a new era—Sneferu had plans for an entirely new form of monument: Egypt’s first true geometric pyramid. The subtle solar symbolism of the Meidum complex would be replaced by the overt representation of a shaft of sunlight, rendered in stone on a monumental scale. The name of the Dahshur pyramid, Appearance, used the same word as the rising of the sun. A new age had truly dawned. An eight-and-a-half-acre site was cleared for construction, and the plans were for the most majestic pyramid yet, with sides rising at a steep angle of 60 degrees to a height of nearly five hundred feet. A subsidiary pyramid for the king’s ka (eternal spirit), a small side chapel, a long stone causeway, and a valley temple for the celebration of the royal mortuary cult were laid out at the same time, as part of a single grand design.