McDONALD INSTITUTE CONVERSATIONS
The Evolution
of Fragility:
Setting the Terms
Edited by Norman Yoffee
The Evolution
of Fragility:
Setting the Terms
McDONALD INSTITUTE CONVERSATIONS
The Evolution
of Fragility:
Setting the Terms
Edited by Norman Yoffee
with contributions from
Tom D. Dillehay, Li Min, Patricia A. McAnany, Ellen Morris,
Timothy R. Pauketat, Cameron A. Petrie, Peter Robertshaw,
Andrea Seri, Miriam T. Stark, Steven A. Wernke & Norman Yoffee
Published by:
McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research
University of Cambridge
Downing Street
Cambridge, UK
CB2 3ER
(0)(1223) 339327
eaj31@cam.ac.uk
www.mcdonald.cam.ac.uk
McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2019
© 2019 McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
The Evolution of Fragility: Setting the Terms is made available
under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives
4.0 (International) Licence:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
ISBN: 978-1-902937-88-5
Cover design by Dora Kemp and Ben Plumridge.
Typesetting and layout by Ben Plumridge.
Cover image: Ta Prohm temple, Angkor. Photo: Dr Charlotte Minh Ha Pham. Used by permission.
Edited for the Institute by James Barrett (Series Editor).
v
Contents
Contributors vii
Figures viii
Tables ix
Acknowledgements x
Chapter 1 Introducing the Conference: There Are No Innocent Terms 1
Norman Yoffee
Mapping the chapters 3
The challenges of fragility 6
Chapter 2 Fragility of Vulnerable Social Institutions in Andean States 9
Tom D. Dillehay & Steven A. Wernke
Vulnerability and the fragile state 12
Mediated political orders: succession and partition 13
The mediated state 19
Conclusions 20
Chapter 3 Why Early Cities Failed: Fragility and Resilience in Bronze Age China 25
Li Min
The first quarter of the second millennium bc: collapse of the great Longshan centres 25
The second quarter of the second millennium bc: the emergence and decline of Erlitou 28
The third quarter of the second millennium bc: the rise and decline of Zhengzhou 33
The fourth quarter of the second millennium bc: the rise and decline of Anyang 35
The first quarter of the first millennium bc: addressing fragility and resilience in the
Zhou political order 38
Conclusion 42
Chapter 4 Fragile Authority in Monumental Time: Political Experimentation in the
Classic Maya Lowlands 47
Patricia A. McAnany
Political experimentation 47
Large ‘anomalous’ aggregations 48
Preclassic Maya lowlands: E-Groups and patron deity shrines 50
Authority and hereditary rulership hybridized: southern lowland Maya experiment 52
Northern ambivalence to monumental time 54
Fragility in its many guises or how political experiments end 56
Final considerations and conclusions 57
Chapter 5 Ancient Egyptian Exceptionalism: Fragility, Flexibility and the Art of Not Collapsing 61
Ellen Morris
Dangers skirted, bullets dodged 61
Politicide, state effects and near death experiences 64
Resiliency 75
An autopsy report on Egypt’s first failed state 76
The case for re-considering the role of a climate hostile to the state 79
Chapter 6 Fragile Cahokian and Chacoan Orders and Infrastructures 89
Timothy R. Pauketat
Cahokian social and material history (ad 950 to 1250) 89
Chacoan social and material history (ad 800s to 1130) 96
Discussion 102
vi
Chapter 7 Diversity, variability, adaptation and ‘fragility’ in the Indus Civilization 109
Cameron A. Petrie
Fragile and/or robust? (Re-)Introducing the Indus Civilization 109
Indus settlements: from village to city (and back?) 110
Diversity, variability and adaptation in the Indus context 116
Mediation of politics and power within Indus settlements: hierarchy, heterarchy
and collective action 119
Mediation of politics and power between Indus settlements: the Indus state debate 121
‘Crisis, what crisis?’; the 4.2 kya event and the Indus 122
Urban ‘stability and fragility’ and rural ‘resilience’ 125
Chapter 8 Fragile States in Sub-Saharan Africa 135
Peter Robertshaw
Three African states 137
State formation 141
Fragile African states 148
Conclusion 154
Chapter 9 Universal Rule and Precarious Empire: Power and Fragility in the Angkorian State 161
Miriam T. Stark
Universal rule and the Angkorian state 162
Context: place, structure and scale 164
The structure of sovereignty: Angkorian landscapes 167
The structure of sovereignty: Angkorian power and patronage 168
Collapse, resilience and patronage 173
Fragility, resilience and regeneration 173
Chapter 10 Negotiating Fragility in Ancient Mesopotamia: Arenas of Contestation and
Institutions of Resistance 183
Norman Yoffee & Andrea Seri
A history of academic resistance to views of the totalitarian nature of political and
economic power in Mesopotamia 184
Fragility in literature 186
Historical examples of fragility and resistance 187
Contestation, resistance and fragilities in early Mesopotamian states 193
Coda 194
vii
Contributors
Tom D. Dillehay
Department of Anthropology, Vanderbilt
University, Nashville, TN 37325, USA
Email: tom.d.dillehay@Vanderbilt.edu
Li Min
Department of Anthropology, A210 Fowler
Building/Box 951510, 308 Charles E. Young Dr.
North, University of California, Los Angeles, CA
90095, USA.
Email: limin@humnet.ucla.edu
Patricia A. McAnany
Department of Anthropology, University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill, 301 Alumni Bldg., Campus
Box 3115, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3115, USA.
Email: mcanany@email.unc.edu
Ellen Morris
Department of Classics & Ancient Studies, Barnard
College, Columbia University, 3009 Broadway, New
York, NY 10027, USA
Email: emorris@Barnard.edu
Timothy R. Pauketat
Illinois State Archaeological Survey, 209 Nuclear
Physics Bldg., MC-571, University of Illinois, 23 E.
Stadium Drive, Champaign, IL 61820, USA
Email: pauketat@illinois.edu
Cameron A. Petrie
Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge,
Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3DZ, UK
Email: cap59@cam.ac.uk
Peter Robertshaw
Department of Anthropology, California State
University, San Bernardino, 5500 University
Parkway, San Bernardino, CA 92407, USA
Email: proberts@csusb.edu
Andrea Seri
History Department, Universidad Nacional de
Córdoba, Pabellón España, Ciudad Universitaria,
5000 Córdoba, Argentina
Email: andrea.r.seri@gmail.com
Miriam T. Stark
Department of Anthropology, University of Hawai'i
at Mānoa, 346 Saunders Hall, 2424 Maile Way,
Honolulu, Hawai'i 96822, USA
Email: miriams@Hawaii.edu
Steven A. Wernke
Department of Anthropology, Vanderbilt University,
Nashville, TN 37325, USA
Email: steven.a.wernke@vanderbilt.edu
Norman Yoffee
Departments of Near Eastern Studies and
Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,
MI 48109, USA (emeritus)
Email: nyoffee@gmail.com
viii
Figures
2.1 Location map of Chimor state. 10
2.2 Location map of Inka empire. 11
2.3 The Inka ruler addresses the huacas. 16
2.4 Schematic of Andean political organization. 17
3.1 Map of major sites mentioned. 26
3.2 The archaeological landscape of the Luoyang Basin. 29
3.3 Turquoise inlaid objects from Erlitou elite burials. 30
3.4 The distribution of archaeological sites associated with Xiaqiyuan material culture. 31
3.5 The routes of campaigns of pre-dynastic Zhou kings. 36
3.6 The mortuary context and the distinctive double-niche construction of Fu Hao’s tomb. 37
3.7 The political landscape of early China from the perspective of Zhouyuan at the turn of the first
millennium bc. 39
3.8 The archaeological landscape of the Quwo Basin in Jinnan. 41
4.1 Plan of Preclassic E Group at Cenote, Belize. 50
4.2 The 33 m-tall Preclassic deity pyramid at Lamanai. 51
4.3 Late Classic funerary pyramid of Tikal ruler, Jasaw Cahn K’awiil. 52
4.4 Part of inscription from Stela C, Quirigua. 53
4.5 Stela D, Copan. 54
4.6 Entrance to burial chamber of Ukit Kan Le’k Tok’ behind ornate white stucco façade on the
Acropolis of Ek’ Balam. 55
5.1 Map of Egypt showing sites mentioned in the text. 62
5.2 First dynasty Abydos. 65
5.3 Steles belonging to the sacrificed retainers of Djer. 65
5.4 Tomb of Qa’a; stele of Qa’a’s sacrificed retainer Sabef. 66
5.5 Major monuments of Saqqara and Abusir until the end of the Old Kingdom. 67
5.6 The body count of slain northerners depicted on Khasekhem’s limestone statue; Horus dominating the
personification of the north from the Narmer palette. 68
5.7 Probable early representations of Seth from Nagada and its environs. 69
5.8 Scorpion macehead, dedicated to the Horus temple at Hierakonpolis. 70
5.9 Seth makes an appearance in the Cairo Annals. 71
5.10 Peribsen with Seth atop his serekh; inscription of a vase dedicated by Horus Khasekhem; Horus-Seth
Khasekhemwy. 72
5.11 Some of the millions of multi-ton blocks that make up Khufu’s pyramid. 74
5.12 Starving Bedouin from the causeways of Sahure. 80
6.1 Location of the Greater Cahokia and Chaco regions. 90
6.2 The physiography of the Greater Cahokia region. 91
6.3 The city of Greater Cahokia, showing its primary precincts. 93
6.4 LiDAR plan map of Cahokia, highlighting monumental features that date to the Lohmann phase. 95
6.5 San Juan Basin physiography and the location of Chaco. 97
6.6 Schematic view of Chaco Canyon’s great house locations. 98
6.7 Aerial view of Pueblo Bonito. 99
6.8 Schematic map of original Chetro Ketl field system. 100
6.9 Aerial view of Peñasco Blanco. 101
7.1 Plans of Indus cities and smaller settlements. 111
7.2 Plan of Mohenjo-daro and expanded views of the Mound of the Great Beth, the DK-Area, and the
HR-Area. 113
7.3 Plan of the ‘Great Hall’ at Mohenjo-daro and isometric view of the ‘Great Hall’ at Harappa. 114
7.4 Maps of the Indus River basin showing the distribution of modern winter and summer rainfall in
relation to the distribution of urban period settlements and urban centres. 117
7.5 Maps of the Indus River basin showing the distribution of modern winter and summer rainfall in
relation to the distribution of post-urban period settlements. 117
ix
8.1 A sampling of the precolonial states of sub-Saharan Africa, together with archaeological sites mentioned
in the text. 136
8.2 The Great Enclosure and adjacent stone walling at Great Zimbabwe. 138
8.3 Khami – restored elite stone walling. 139
8.4 Danangombe – a later Rozvi capital. 139
8.5 Kilwa – audience court of the Husuni Kubwa palace. 140
8.6 Mapungubwe Hill. 143
8.7 Kilwa – the Great Mosque. 146
8.8 Great Zimbabwe – the Great Enclosure viewed from a royal residence area on the hilltop formerly
known as the ‘Acropolis’. 149
8.9 Gedi on the Kenyan coast. 151
9.1 One view of twelfth-century Angkor in its broader Southeast Asian World. 162
9.2 Greater Angkor region (NW Cambodia). 164
9.3 Mapped roads in the Angkorian network. 165
9.4 Angkorian-period inscriptional data: royal vs non-royal. 166
9.5 Banteay Srei inscription, a tenth-century temple constructed by the guru of Prince Jayavarman V. 169
9.6 Angkorian hierarchy, derived from epigraphic sources. 170
9.7 Image of Jayavarman II from South gallery of Angkor Wat. 171
9.8 Oath-swearing to Sūryavarman II on Mount Sivapada, southern gallery of Angkor Wat. 172
9.9 Control as ‘communication corridor’. 175
9.10 Total area under Angkorian ‘control’ from c. 802–1308. 176
10.1 Map of major sites mentioned in the text. 184
10.2 Uruk levels V and IV. 187
10.3 Uruk Eanna level III. 188
Table
6.1 A comparison of Cahokian and Chacoan histories. 92
x
Acknowledgements
I thank Tim Potts, Director of the Getty Museum, for
the grant that funded my residency at the Getty in
autumn 2017, and for funding the ‘fragility’ conference.
Thanks also to Cyprian Broodbank, director of
the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research,
Cambridge, for providing funding for the conference.
Lisa Guzzetta, senior public programmes specialist at
the Getty Museum at the Getty Villa, along with her
staff, organized the logistics for the conference. I could
not wish for a more efficient and graceful colleague.
I also want to thank Alexa Sekyra, Sabine Schlosser
and their staff in the Getty Research Institute for their
support during my stay at the Getty Center. Finally, I
thank Ben Plumridge for his skill and patience in producing
this volume and Emma Jarman for supervising
the process. James Barrett accepted the volume, after
two reviews, on behalf of the McDonald Institute as
an online, open-source and hence easily accessible
publication.
Norman Yoffee, 2019
61
– the centralized state broke asunder and remained so
for nearly a century and a half. Because the length of
this interval between two successive Kings of Upper
and Lower Egypt was so entirely unprecedented, the
final argument here mounted is that there are indeed
climates inimical to political stability.
Dangers skirted, bullets dodged
In contrast to the often-enduring material signatures of
ancient states, most were unstable entities that rarely
lasted long. This argument animates this volume
as well as James Scott’s book Against the Grain. In a
chapter titled ‘Fragility of the Early State: Collapse as
Disassembly’, Scott discusses threats to the stability of
ancient states (Scott 2017, 183–218). Reading through
the chapter with an Egyptologist’s eye, however, one is
struck by how many of these potential state-wrecking
shoals Egypt evaded by virtue of its location in a fertile
river valley at the edge of the Sahara (see Fig. 5.1).
Salinization of the soil
Death by declining yield due to the progressive salinization
of soil was not an issue for the Egyptian state.
The annual inundation blanketed the Nile Valley with
a fresh layer of nutrient-rich soil each year just prior
to the sowing season, and thus fields did not need to
be fertilized or left fallow. Satiric texts composed in
Egypt’s Middle and New Kingdoms dwell at length
on the supposed miseries of the Egyptian peasant
(Caminos 1997). Visitors like Herodotus, who came
from countries where the life of the farmer was indeed
truly miserable, however, were impressed with the
comparative ease of farming in Egypt (Herodotus II.14).
This does not mean that erratic floods, passing pests,
or highly exploitative social and fiscal policies didn’t
cause misery. It simply means that the soil could not
have been more fertile.
In comparison to other early states, Egypt cannot be
considered fragile. From its first through its eighth
dynasty, for instance, pharaoh followed pharaoh for
nearly 800 years (c. 2900–2118 bc).1
Some runners in
this relay stumbled, but others invariably picked up
the sceptre and ascended the throne. Thus, the state
endured as an essentially recognizable and functional
entity for a seemingly unfathomable amount of time.
This is especially notable given that multiple lines of
evidence reveal points of stress and fracture that should
have brought it to its knees many centuries before.
This meditation on the extraordinary longevity of
the first iteration of Egypt’s pharaonic state has three
main sections. It begins with a brief consideration of
the factors that allowed Egypt to skirt dangers that
laid low many comparable polities. This discussion
draws heavily on James Scott’s Against the Grain: A
Deep History of the Earliest States and concludes that
while geopolitics may have saved the state from
many dangers, it could not inoculate it against Scott’s
category of politicide. The second section investigates
three points in Egypt’s history in which the downfall
of the pharaonic regime must have seemed immanent
due to governmental abuses of power, infighting, and
societal schism. This section concludes with a short
discussion of factors that may have led to Egypt’s
remarkable resiliency.
All things – good or not – come to an end, and
the essay concludes by tackling the question of just
what it was that made the demise of the Old Kingdom
different. After the last pharaoh of note died (c. 2153),
the crown passed to the welter of obscure kinglets
who together make up the Eighth Dynasty. Like the
regime that came before them, these rulers did their
best to maintain the unity of the nation by courting a
powerful provincial family and lavishing benefits upon
it. After the last of their number perished (c. 2118),
however – and quite probably well before that point
Chapter 5
Ancient Egyptian Exceptionalism:
Fragility, Flexibility and the Art of Not Collapsing
Ellen Morris
62
Chapter 5
Disease
Egypt’s population was not immune to communicable
diseases, as records from Roman Egypt and other
earlier evidence indicates. Communal burial pits at
Tell el-Dab’a, for instance, suggest that at least some
residents of this city died from a fast-acting contagion
during the Thirteenth Dynasty. Likewise, a well-attested
plague that raged in the Near East and in Cyprus may
also have surfaced in Egypt during the late Eighteenth
Dynasty (Kozloff 2006; David 2017, 280–4). Both ancient
and more modern discussions of pestilence in Egypt
suggest that relatively muted episodes of contagion
struck on an annual basis, often in conjunction with
the khamāsīn winds, which occurred during the spring
months before the Nile’s rise. Indeed, this sickness
was known in ancient Egypt as ‘iAdt rnpt’, the ‘annual
pestilence’ (Contardi 2015, 20–3; Mikhail 2011, 220–1).
Deforestation
Deforestation, admittedly, may have posed far more
of a threat. Certainly, it is notable that the conspicuous
consumption of local woods in monumental architecture
largely ceased in the Fourth Dynasty, perhaps
in an attempt to mitigate a growing crisis. Although
the evidence is frustratingly piecemeal, both text and
archaeology demonstrate a growing investment in the
importation of boatloads of coniferous wood from the
northern Levant as well as acacia wood from Nubia
(Creasman 2015, 47–50). The designation of certain
trees, and indeed groves, as sacred and/or as state or
temple property may well have aided efforts at conservation.
So too, it is likely, would a general reliance
on the use of charcoal, dung, and other scavenged or
harvested combustibles as fuel (Nicholson & Peltenburg
2000, 192).
Figure 5.1. Map of Egypt showing sites mentioned in the text.
0 100 200 300 km
SINAI
PENINSULA
Giza
Saqqara/Abusir/Memphis
Dahshur
Herakleopolis
Abydos
Bersheh
Asyut
Nagada Coptos
Thebes
Tod
Hierakonpolis
Elephantine
‘Ain Asil
DAKHLA
OASIS
KHARGA
OASIS
FARAFRA
OASIS
BAHARIYA
OASIS
FAYUM
OASIS
First cataract
Red Sea
Mediterranean Sea
63
Ancient Egyptian Exceptionalism: Fragility, Flexibility and the Art of Not Collapsing
sands around the Nile’s many mouths, dangerous
currents, unhelpful storms and wind patterns, and
the logistical nightmare of the inundation combined
to repel enemies and keep them out. Likewise, it is
undoubtedly significant that prior to the domestication
of the camel, ground invasions launched by sizeable
non-nomadic forces simply never occurred (Kahn and
Tammuz 2008).
This natural isolation, which served Egypt so
well in the third millennium bc also greatly aided the
rise and enduring strength of the state which, as Scott
has pointed out, depended largely on its own ability to
corral its subjects into effective ‘grain and manpower
modules’ and, moreover, to hold them there, so as
to maximize the surplus of the state (Scott 2017, 122,
152–3). As Robert Carneiro (1970) argued long ago,
many people who live under states and other hierarchical
systems that depend for their existence on
institutionalized inequalities remain because they feel
compelled to do so. If offered an option to leave that
was not profoundly disadvantageous or dangerous,
they would take it.
Some old chestnuts are true: the pharaonic state was a
gift of the Nile
By virtue of its setting, then, Egypt’s Old Kingdom
state was immunized against many of the factors that
often occasioned collapse. As a territorial state based
on the banks of a river, the country could easily be
protected and policed by government agents. The
threat of contagious diseases was minimal, given a
dispersed population, just as was the threat of an
organized invasion. At the same time, however, the
flood ensured that with enough hands to till the soil,
the government could count on a robust surplus
with which it could supply itself with all the manual
labourers, bureaucrats, craftsmen, traders and soldiers
necessary to enact is most ambitious agendas.
Ample agricultural potential is worth next to
nothing without the means to obtain it, and so it
is important to note that the state acted early on to
assert its rights to prime agricultural lands through
the establishment of ‘domains’ and ‘estates’, which
transferred ownership of land to living and dead kings
as well as to gods. Making use of a coercive system that
transformed farmers into serfs, the state concentrated
labour near areas of prime agricultural productivity.
Moreover, in order to ensure that this labour stayed
where it had been gathered, domains may have been
walled, and their administration – as well as that of
‘royal colonists’ – could be paired with that of watchtowers
(Strudwick 2005, 423; Wilkinson 1999, 118–20;
Moreno García 2010, 9–10, 13–14). In addition, just as
Scott observes is entirely characteristic of states (ancient
Deaths due to infectious diseases appear to have
accelerated primarily at times when the pathogen
was new to Egypt (as may have been the case at Tell
el-Dab’a) or when an epidemic occurred in close conjunction
with a famine (Mikhail 2011, 217–18, 229).
The fact that epidemics alone never proved fatal to
the state, however, is likely due to the fact that Egypt
was a territorial rather than a city-state. Communicable
diseases and plagues thrive in the close quarters of
urban settings and thus would indeed ravage a polity
whose population clustered for the most part in a single
centre (Duhig 2009, 50). From the First through the
Sixth Dynasties in Egypt, however, dense populations
outside of the city and pyramid-building projects of
Memphis are difficult to identify. Disease, therefore,
would likely have been localized.
Overreliance on the core
Scott argues that many states failed because the logic
of transportation caused them to place too much
pressure on territory within a 50 km radius of their
centre – the distance a draught animal can traverse
with a full load of grain before the cargo is not worth
its weight. As Scott recognizes, however, waterborne
transport represents a crucial exception (Scott 2017,
205). Linked for 1100 km or so from the First Cataract
to the Mediterranean Sea by a navigable river, Egypt
experienced little practical difficulty in transporting
heavy loads of grain towards its political centre at
Memphis. Throughout most of the Old Kingdom the
monumental and material signatures of the state were
indeed to be found in close proximity to the capital.
This was not, however, because it was too expensive
to build elsewhere. It was because both grain and
manpower were gathered in from the provinces to
the capital in an effort to help materialize the ideology
that Egypt’s elite stood at the centre of the world and
at the apex of its social pyramid.
Problems with porous borders
This category collapses two separate dangers to early
states. The first is the danger of invasions, whether from
predatory ‘barbarians’ or more organized armies. The
other is from population seepage (or hemorrhage in the
worst case scenario). Both of these threats were greatly
alleviated by the fact that the Nile cut a swath through
one of the world’s most formidable deserts. Equally
important was the fact that neighbouring regions
could not easily sustain robust populations and that
the country offered very few points of entry and, conversely,
escape. Indeed, even in the first millennium bc,
when naval technology was far more advanced and
at the service of aggressively expansionistic empires,
very few seaborne invasions were successful. Shifting
64
Chapter 5
such an ambitious ideological agenda, however, the
combination can be deadly. In Egypt, as in numerous
other early states – such as Shang China, Kerma, the
First Dynasty of Ur, Dahomey, and Benin – the natural
deaths of certain particularly important religio-political
figures occasioned the untimely deaths of many others.
In some cases the deceased appear to have been
cultural outsiders (such as prisoners of war), but almost
always these executions were accompanied by the
deaths of insiders – the loved ones and/or the servants
of the deceased. In First Dynasty Egypt, so far as can
be ascertained, the dead were primarily drawn from
the latter category. Given that there is no evidence for
institutionalized slavery at this time, each sacrificed
retainer must be envisioned as firmly enmeshed within
an extensive socioeconomic network of relatives and
friends (Morris 2014).
The First Dynasty began with an instance of
retainer sacrifice the likes of which had not yet been
seen.At his death king Hor-Aha seems to have arranged
to take forty or so people with him to the grave – providing
them with prebuilt tombs situated in the direct
vicinity of his funerary enclosure and mortuary monument,
both at Abydos (see Fig. 5.2). Intriguingly, the
two graves closest to the king’s were larger than the
rest, and one of these apparently belonged to a person
whose name, ‘Pleasant (or Sweet)-of-heart’ (ImA-ib or
bnr-ib), was inscribed on a comb and other cosmetic
items. The presence, then, of two miniature funerary
enclosures next to the king’s own – enclosures which
also had been provisioned with sacrificed retainers –
led Laurel Bestock to suggest that these belonged to
the same two individuals that had been buried next
to the king and served to compensate them for willingly
having sacrificed their own, particularly highly
valued, lives. The rest of the retainers, archaeological
remains indicate, consisted of young men of military
age, arranged behind their sovereign as if in marching
order (Bestock 2009, 26, 100–102).
This initial experiment with human sacrifice
seems to have been deemed so successful that at the
death of the second king of the First Dynasty the number
of sacrifices increased exponentially. In preparation
for the funeral of King Djer, graves for 587 retainers
had been prepared ahead of time. Now – presumably
to sweeten the pot for participants – the dead were provided
not only with a grave that was provisioned from
royal warehouses and was situated in close proximity
to the king’s own but also with a stele engraved with
their name, image, and occasionally their title (see Fig.
5.3). Legible steles preserve the names and images of
two court dwarves, 11 men and 76 women, each of
whom received a memorialization that was unparalleled
among their contemporaries (Bestock 2009, 33).
or modern), the government created regular censuses
to assess its resources and then imposed levies on
produce, livestock and labour (Wilkinson 1999, 76,
113–14, 220–1; Muhs 2016, 15–16, 29–30).
Politicide, state effects and near death experiences
While Egypt’s enviable geographic position buffered
it from the dangers described above, its government
would have been as vulnerable to Scott’s category
of politicide as any ancient state. According to Scott,
‘Crushing taxes in grain and labour, civil wars and wars
of succession within the capital, intercity wars, oppressive
measures of corporal punishment and arbitrary
abuse may be called state effects, and they can singly
or in combination bring about a state’s collapse’ (Scott
2017, 212–213). Throughout the nearly eight hundred
or so years that the pharaonic state persisted in its first
incarnation, it must have suffered innumerable brushes
with death due to the backlash of such state effects.
In discussions of collapse, dynasties add an extra
element of confusion. In Egypt’s case this is certainly
so. While some breaks in ancient king lists were occasioned
by the cessation of a family line or by changes
of capital or in the extent of territory governed, others
surely mask a bitter end. As Guy Middleton asserts,
viewing history through the lens of dynastic king lists
often obscures our view of ‘distinct political entities
that were independent, rivalrous, and that effectively
created new states or empires’ (Middleton 2017, 23–4).
In the three case studies presented below, I argue that
dynastic breaks mark points at which a severe crisis due
to James Scott’s category of ‘state effects’ occasioned a
radical shift in strategy – a shift deemed necessary, in
fact, for the survival of the state. The issues underlying
the three dynastic breaks are difficult to understand
and were no doubt complex. What follows then are
not necessarily correct reconstructions of each scenario.
They are, however, interpretations of the evidence that
are both plausible and, I hope, potentially generative
of productive discussion.
Abuse of power: the break between the First and Second
Dynasties
The seven kings and one queen regent of Egypt’s First
Dynasty (c. 2900–2730) were involved in a radical
experiment aimed at divinizing the office of kingship.
Given the elaborate royal burials at Hierakonpolis
in the late Nagada I and early Nagada II periods,
such experiments may have had an early precedent
(Friedman, van Neer, & Linseele 2011, 162, 1734).
As numerous ethnohistories attest, rulers who claim
kinship with the gods do not require the backing of a
state. When the resources of a state are coupled with
65
Ancient Egyptian Exceptionalism: Fragility, Flexibility and the Art of Not Collapsing
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
II
I
I
I
I|
|
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
100 m100 m
1000 m
= Processional wadi
= Nile valley
High desert
Khentiamentiu
temple
Qa’a
Semerkhet
Merneith
Anedjib
Den
Djet
Djer
Hor-aha
“Western
Mastaba”
Boat burials
Merneith
Djet
Djer
Hor-aha
Unattributed
Donkey
burials
Figure 5.2. First Dynasty Abydos (after Bestock 2009, figs. 1 & 10).
Figure 5.3. Steles belonging to the sacrificed retainers of Djer [a.-c.] and Den [d.-e.] (after Petrie 1901, plates: a. 26, no.
70; b. 26, no. 58; c. 27, no. 96; d. 27, no. 128; e. 27, 129).
a. b. c. d. e.
66
Chapter 5
First Dynasty, King Qa’a, still included chambers for
the internment of 26 individuals, one of whom, judging
by the length of the titles on his funerary stela, appears
to have been extremely important (Petrie 1900, 44–5,
pl. 30; see Fig. 5.4). In Zhou Period China, a poem
of mourning was written for three similarly socially
significant sacrificial victims. About one it was said
that he ‘was the pick of all our men; But as he drew
near the tomb-hole his limbs shook with dread. That
blue one, Heaven, takes all our good men’ (quoted in
Chang 1974, 6–7). Grief and horror, one suspects, must
have increasingly displaced awe as the predominant
emotion that the custom of retainer sacrifice evoked
among those subject to the state.
The apparent termination of human sacrifice at
the start of the Second Dynasty (c. 2730) almost assuredly
indicates that the custom had come to be seen as
an unjustifiable abuse of power. Qa’a had constructed
chambers for his sacrificed retainers within the substructure
of his own tomb, and his successor appears
to have buried him according to his wishes (Wilkinson
1999, 82–3). That Hotepsekhemwy himself desired to
break with the past, however, is strongly suggested by
the fact that he abandoned the ancestral royal cemetery
at Abydos. Instead, he moved his burial monument
north to Saqqara and, moreover, to a part of Saqqara
Of all types of conspicuous consumption, that of
the lives of loyal subjects provokes the most strenuous
societal discussions. It is also the most costly – as
the state loses labour that might otherwise have been
channelled in its service and often expends resources
in compensating the families of those who willingly
sacrificed their lives. Thus, in the face of rising costs
and increased societal resentment, it is perhaps not
surprising that the numbers of retainers sacrificed at
the death of First Dynasty kings steadily decreased and
that a corresponding emphasis was placed on the quality
of royal retainers rather than their quantity (Morris
2014, 85–6). That said, the grave of the last king of the
Figure 5.4. (a) Tomb
of Qa’a (Petrie 1900, pl.
60); (b) stele of Qa’a’s
sacrificed retainer Sabef
(after Petrie 1900,
pl. 31, no. 48).
large
dishes Model
vases
Dwarf?
Grain
Dwarf
captive
ivory
ox bones
skull
0 5 10 15 m.
b.
a.
67
Ancient Egyptian Exceptionalism: Fragility, Flexibility and the Art of Not Collapsing
Hotepsekhemwy not only changed the location
and style of his tomb, he also appears to have eliminated,
or virtually eliminated, the custom of retainer
sacrifice. While the disturbed state of known and
suspected Second Dynasty tombs at Saqqara precludes
certainty on this matter, neither skeletal material nor
other commemorative or otherwise indicative objects
exist. Indeed, this is true not only with respect to the
tombs of royals at Saqqara but also with respect to
those of the highest elite, who had likewise indulged
in retainer sacrifice in the First Dynasty, albeit to a
much more modest extent. Thus, the physical relocation
of the royal tomb and its radical rethinking
undoubtedly marked a movement more political
that bore no associations with the monumental mastaba
tombs of the First Dynasty’s innermost elite. The new
tomb, which departed from its predecessors in structure
as well as locale, however, may have consciously preserved
royal resonances. As Colin Reader has argued
persuasively, the positioning of Hotepsekhemwy’s
tomb with respect to the Abusir wadi echoed the
spatial relationship of the First Dynasty tombs to the
processional wadi that led to the funerary enclosures
at the valley’s edge (Reader 2017, 85–6; see Fig. 5.5).
Thus, and not for the last time, a pharaoh might jettison
aspects of royal tradition or ideology that he deemed
tainted and yet seek to curate others that enhanced the
recognizably sacral character of kingship.
Djedkare-Isesi
Pepi I
Gisr el-Mudir
Sekhemkhet
Netjerikhet
(Djoser)
Userkhaf
Teti
Lepsius 29
Archaic
mastabas
Unas
Raneferef
Neferirkare
Sahure
L-shape
enclosure
Hotepsekhemwy
Ninetjer
Niuserre
LAKE
LAKE
LAKE
SAQQARA
ABUSIR
ARCHAIC
MEMPHIS?
processionalwadi?
Merenre
0 250 500 m
Figure 5.5. Major monuments of Saqqara
and Abusir until the end of the Old
Kingdom (after Reader 2017, 73, fig. 1).
68
Chapter 5
and were inscribed in eleven pyramids belonging to
kings and queens from the late Fifth until the Eighth
Dynasty, nearly 18 per cent of the spells reference the
god Seth. In these texts, Seth appears as an enemy of
Horus and, like him, to have been grievously wounded
in their battles. In the end, however, the injuries of both
gods healed, the two reconciled, and Seth utilized his
strength to uphold the rightful order of the cosmos
(Griffiths 1960, 1–27; Turner 2013, 16–17, 71–84). While
it is dangerous to reverse-engineer religion into politics,
this story of war and peace – in which ‘Seth dwelling in
Nubet, Lord of Upper Egypt’ (Utterance 222) – played
such a staring role likely had its origins in the armed
encounters and alliances of prehistory.
In the Nagada II period (c. 3500–3325), the towns
of Hierakonpolis and Nagada possessed elite cemeteries
and graves that archaeologists have identified as
royal. In ancient Nekhen (later designated Hierakonpolis,
or City of the Hawk, by the Greeks), it is surely
significant that the earliest known (Nagada IIA–B)
complete and unambiguous representation of a falcon
in Egypt’s history was found in an enigmatic pillared
hall situated within the funerary precinct of tomb 23,
the resting place of a ruler. Fragments of three other
falcon figurines were subsequently identified, one
from the same complex and two others from subsidiary
graves associated with tomb 16, the very earliest
royal burial at Hierakonpolis – or for that matter in
Egypt as a whole (Nagada IC–IIA). It is worth noting
that falcons are not known from Cemetery T at Nagada
or Cemetery U at Abydos, the other two cemeteries at
which elite graves in the Nagada IIC–D period suggest
the presence of local aggrandizers (Hendrickx, Friedman
2007, & Eyckerman 2011, 130–2).
Early images of Seth are difficult to identify with
certainty. Canids that bear a resemblance to Seth’s cult
than spatial. In occasioning this departure from past
practice, Hotepsekhemwy may have succeeded in
rescuing divine kingship from a dangerous decline in
perceived legitimacy. In folk tales, after all, the creature
that demands the sacrifice of noble youths is almost
always a monster – and one destined, moreover, soon
to be slain at the hands of a hero.
Religio-political schisms: the break between the Second
and Third Dynasties
The Second Dynasty (c. 2730–2590) ended at some point
following King Khasekhem’s brutal slaughter of close to
50,000 of his Lower Egyptian subjects. Numbers of the
slain and images of their distorted corpses decorate the
bases of two statues in which the king is posed wearing
a crown of Upper Egypt (see Fig. 5.6a). Fittingly, he
dedicated these commemorations to an Upper Egyptian
shrine – that of the god Horus at Hierakonpolis
(Quibell 1900, pl. 39, 40). What appears at first glance
like a drastic response to a regional rebellion, however,
may well have been the result of tensions that had both
cosmic and terrestrial manifestations. These events are
intriguing precisely – and frustratingly – due to the
fact that only tantalizing hints remain. What is certain,
however, is that the upheaval that marked the end of
the Second Dynasty was traumatic enough to persuade
the sovereign who followed to make a decisive break
with the practices of his predecessor.
By way of background it is vital to understand
the ideological importance of the god Horus and also
that of his rival Seth. The tradition that Seth had fought
Horus, the avatar of the rightful king, for the throne of
Egypt but had eventually admitted defeat and worked
to support him is a powerful and overarching theme
in the Pyramid Texts, Egypt’s first corpus of religious
literature. In these spells, which are of varying antiquity
Figure 5.6. (a) The body count of slain northerners depicted on Khasekhem’s limestone statue, dedicated at the Horus
temple at Hierakonpolis (after Quibell 1900, pl. 40; (b) Horus dominating the personification of the north from the
Narmer palette, dedicated at the Horus temple at Hierakonpolis (after Quibell 1898, fig. 13).
a. b.a.
69
Ancient Egyptian Exceptionalism: Fragility, Flexibility and the Art of Not Collapsing
The identification is far from iron clad, however, and
at least two similar vessels are thought to have come
from neighbouring polities (Hendrickx 2009, 207, fig.
18, 2 and 4). Even more intriguing are two slightly
creature – and would be contemporary in time with
the falcons at Hierakonpolis – appear in conjunction
with Barbary sheep in the imagery of White Cross-lined
pottery excavated at Nagada (see Figs. 5.7a. and 5.7b).
Figure 5.7. Probable early representations of Seth from Nagada and its environs. 7a. From a White Cross-lined vase,
Nagada tomb 1644 (after Hendrickx et al. 2009, fig. 18.1); 7b. From a White Cross-lined bowl, Nagada tomb 1644 (after
Hendrickx et al. 2009, fig. 18.3); 7c. Three views of a model Seth standard and a Horus figurine, Nagada tomb 721 (after
Petrie 1896, pl. 60, nos. 13, 15 and Crowfoot Payne 1993, fig 4, no. 16); 7d. Seth and Horus on standards similar to 7c.
Rock art from the mouth of the Wadi of the Horus Qa’a, west of Nagada. (after Darnell 2009, 97, fig. 19); 7e. Rock art
showing Seth in the entourage of Horus, Gebel Tjauty, west of Nagada (after Darnell 2002, 19).
a. b. c.
d.
e.
70
Chapter 5
If Nagada and Hierakonpolis appear to have
been the two most powerful polities in the Nagada
II period, whose elites likely competed for status and
supremacy in Upper Egypt, the true beneficiary of
their rivalry appears to have been the rulers of Abydos,
who would appropriate the divine personage of the
falcon and incorporate the god into their own royal
titulary. These Abydene kings subdued both Nagada
and Hierakonpolis by the start of the Nagada III period
and disrupted their traditional power structures. At
Hierakonpolis, the rulers of Abydos supported the
establishment of a temple to the god Horus in his role
as the as patron deity of the rightful king. The fate of
Nagada is less certain, but the local elite seem to disappear
for a period rather than to have been reoriented
and remunerated, as at Hierakonpolis (Bard 1989,
240–5; Friedman 2008, 23–6; Hassan, van Wetering,
Tassie 2017, 95–6, 120–2).
By the period just prior to the First Dynasty, however,
Nagada may have become a much more active
and enthusiastic supporter of the new state. Certainly,
on a large votive macehead donated to the temple at
Hierakonpolis, Seth animals are depicted subduing
rebels for the king alongside the cult fetishes of other
polities (see Fig. 5.8). Likewise, a roughly contemporary
rock inscription at Gebel Tjauty, west of Nagada, seems
later (Nagada IIC–D) figurines excavated from tomb
721 at Nagada. One of these depicted a falcon that may
have been encased in lead (Ashmolean 1895.136 and
1895.137). Alongside it, however, was an animal that
looks a great deal like the Seth animal, especially if the
missing ears and tail (signalled by drilled holes) had
stood straight up. What is vitally important about this
potential representation of the god, however, is that
it was pierced, apparently to serve as the ornament
on a model standard (see Fig. 5.7c). Similar standards
appear in a contemporary rock carving discovered in
the desert west of Nagada in conjunction with a scene
involving boats and wild bovids (see Fig. 5.7d).
Standards in the late Nagada II–III periods seem
to have done double duty, referencing both deities and
the polities that claimed these deities as their patrons.
In Dynastic times, the town of Nagada (a.k.a. Nubt or
Gold Town) would be defined by its temple to Seth
and its allegiance to a deity that was known to be as
powerful as he was problematic. It is significant, then,
that archaeological evidence demonstrates that the
area around this temple in prehistory not only saw
the town’s earliest urban occupation but remained its
symbolic centre even when economic and administrative
activity shifted southward (Hassan, van Wetering,
Tassie 2017, 91–2, 94).
Figure 5.8. Scorpion macehead, dedicated to the Horus temple at Hierakonpolis (after a drawing by K.M. Ciałowicz
published in Adams and Ciałowicz 1997, 8, fig. 1).
71
Ancient Egyptian Exceptionalism: Fragility, Flexibility and the Art of Not Collapsing
Dynasties strongly suggests (Turner 2013, 16), it is
also worth noting that Seth’s hometown of Nagada
may have furnished the First Dynasty with one of its
earliest and most prominent queens, Neithhotep. If
not, the massive mastaba erected at Nagada in which
her name is frequently attested assuredly belonged to
her son (Wilkinson 1999, 37–8, 70; van Wetering 2012,
111–5). Regardless, relations between Nagada and
Abydos were clearly intimate.
During the entirety of the First Dynasty, Horus
far eclipsed his rival-turned-partner in visibility and
importance, and no hint of discord is noted. Even
the name of the first king of the Second Dynasty
– Hotepsekhemwy (The-two-powers-are-satisfied) –
appears unsettling only in retrospect. Much about the
Second Dynasty remains obscure, and some speculate
that a possible rebellion of two towns in Ninetjer’s
thirteenth year heralded the fracturing of a unified
pharaonic state, though the writing leaves it ambiguous
as to whether the apparently Egyptian towns
were being founded or destroyed (Dodson 1996, 23)!
A badly damaged section of the Cairo annals (see Fig.
5.9) also shows two consecutive years, apparently
to show the Seth animal in the entourage of the Horus
king (Darnell 2002, 19; see Fig. 5.7e.). While Nagada
would be the Upper Egyptian site most closely associated
with Seth in Dynastic times, the presence of two
Seth animals on the Scorpion macehead may suggest
that his worship had already spread farther afield. In
this context the repeated evocation and apposition of
the ‘mounds of Horus’ and the ‘mounds of Seth’ in
the pyramid texts is striking (Turner 2013, 74–5, 78,
81–3, utterances 213, 224–225, 306, 308, 359, 424, 470,
474–475, 477, 480, 572, 612, 665).
In seeking to unify the realm, the rulers ofAbydos
acknowledged Seth as a partner of Horus – one of the
‘Two Lords’, occasionally depicted as two falcons, or
even envisioned as a composite entity that could be
embodied in the king himself. That this notion was
present already in the First Dynasty is indicated by
a title witnessed in the steles of three First Dynasty
women interred in the posthumous retinue of Djer
and Den, namely [She] ‘who sees Horus-Seth’ (See
Fig. 5.3c–e; te Velde 1967, 68–71). If these women
were subsidiary wives of the king, as the adoption of
this same title by queens of the Fourth through Sixth
Figure 5.9. Seth makes an
appearance in the Cairo Annals,
Main Cairo Fragment (CF1), reigns
of Ninetjer and Peribsen (Wilkinson
2000; fig 4).
(?) (?) (?) (?)
72
Chapter 5
Seven (all unfortunately obscured) years following
Seth’s debut in the annals, the ascension of King
Peribsen is recorded.2
Unlike any ruler before or after,
Peribsen replaced the falcon in his ‘Horus’-name with
a Seth animal (Figs. 5.9 and 5.10a; Wilkinson 2000, 74).
This king likewise promoted the message – expressed
on a contemporary cylinder seal – that Seth of Nagada
had ‘given the Two Lands to his son, Peribsen’. As if
to clarify that this was no casual change of allegiance,
Peribsen even dropped the name of Horus from his
funerary domain, being the first king ever to do so. His
decision to construct his tomb at Abydos – deep in the
royal cemetery of the First Dynasty – must also have
been ideologically loaded (Wilkinson 1999, 89–91, 121).
The unrest that presumably prompted Peribsen’s
abrupt shift in loyalties seems to have continued to
percolate in the succeeding reign. Peribsen’s successor,
King Khasekhem, assumed the name ‘The-powerappears’
– surmounted, as was traditional, with a
Horus falcon – and undertook military action against
northern forces. Interestingly, most of what we know
of these struggles comes from gifts that he dedicated
to the temple of Horus at Hierakonpolis. Inscriptions
on two votive stone vases read ‘Year of fighting the
northern enemy in front of the city of Nekheb,’ a
locale directly across the river from Hierakonpolis!
Directly facing the king’s serekh and in front of the
year name was a depiction of Nekheb’s chief deity, a
vulture that grasped the hieroglyphs for ‘rebel’ with
one claw and the symbol for a unified Egypt with the
other (Fig. 5.10b).
If the fighting started in Nekheb against northerners
or those acting on behalf of a northern rival, it
eventually led to carnage. According to the inscriptions
on the king’s statues, Khasekhem slaughtered
perhaps as many as 48,205 northern foes. Considering
the findspot of his memorials, it is notable that the king
seems to have indulged in some artistic intertextuality
with the Narmer palette, which – given the fact that
it was interred in the same deposit as Khasekhem’s
statue – was likely on display at the time he donated
his statues. On both monuments, the northern enemy
who had to be defeated in order for the victorious king
to (re)unify his country lay prostrate, hooked by the
nose and sprouting the papyrus-plant ideograph for
the north from his body (compare Fig. 5.6a with 5.6b).
At some point following his victory, Khasekhem
added a dual to his name, so it read: ‘The-two-powers-appear’.
Moreover, he topped the serekh of this
modified ‘Horus’-name with a Seth animal in addition
to the falcon, strongly implying that the ‘two powers’
were none other than Horus and Seth. Khasekhemwy
also added the perhaps optimistic epithet: ‘The two
lords are at peace in him’ (Fig. 5.10c; Wilkinson 1999,
from Ninetjer’s reign, in which the god Seth was
paired with walled enclosures, one crenellated and
one rectangular (Wilkinson 2000, 203). If at the end of
Ninetjer’s reign the god Seth was receiving an unusual
amount of attention, the theory that the Horus of Gold
throne name in fact referenced the king’s relationship
to the god of ‘Gold-town’ is bolstered. Ninetjer, after
all, is designated with a ‘gold name’ – thought to be
a predecessor of the Horus of Gold name – on this
very same monument (Griffiths 1959, 64–81; 1960;
Wilkinson 2000, 119).
Figure 5.10. (a) Peribsen with Seth atop his serekh,
seal impression from Abydos (after Petrie 1901, pl. 22,
no. 179); (b) Inscription on a vase dedicated by Horus
Khasekhem to the Horus temple at Hierakonpolis (after
Quibell 1900, pl. 38); (c) Horus-Seth Khasekhemwy in
whom the Two Lords are at peace, seal impression from
Abydos (after Petrie 1901, pl. 23).
a.
b.
c.
c.
b.
a.
73
Ancient Egyptian Exceptionalism: Fragility, Flexibility and the Art of Not Collapsing
active construction on the pyramid at any one time,
behind these stone-haulers it is suggested that 23,000
additional men were busy quarrying more blocks,
providing water, baking bread, building ramps and
slipways, sharpening tools, feeding, transporting,
and butchering animals, preparing meat and meals,
registering tools, repairing tools, and so on (Lehner
1997, 224–5).
This number takes into consideration only those
working on the Giza Plateau – not the tens of thousands
of others who quarried stone elsewhere, mined
copper and fashioned tools, herded cattle, etc. Indeed,
the tireless journeys of a man named Merer and his
levied team of workmen, as recorded in the earliest
papyri yet found in Egypt, is a case in point. In the
span of any given ten-day week, this man and his
crew made two or three round trip journeys from the
limestone quarries at Tura to harbours near the Giza
Pyramids – loading stone, ferrying stone, unloading
stone, and then beginning the cycle once more (Tallet
2017, 160). It is difficult to imagine that any family
would have been unaffected by the demands of the
pyramid builders – which continued unabated for
over a century.
Egyptologists not infrequently compare the creation
of the great Fourth Dynasty pyramids to a public
works project in which an essentially beneficent state
provided its citizens with income as well as a chance to
participate in a collective enterprise that ‘would have
developed a sense of identity and common purpose
with the state’ (Tavares 2011, 277). Ethnoarchaeological
experiments and excavations in the barracks and
cemeteries of the Workmen’s Village at Giza, however,
tell a story of backbreaking labour, close quarters, and
rigid surveillance that render Khufu’s reputation as a
tyrant – attested in a Middle Kingdom story as well as
in tales told to Herodotus – readily understandable. It
would appear, then, that to many of those dragooned
into building the great pyramids – whether as part of
their labour tax or as the sum of their entire working
life – such monuments provoked more resentment
than pride (Fig. 5.11).
Disaffection with the state may not have been limited
to the labouring classes. In seeking to materialize
their power via the creation of massive and increasingly
technologically perfect feats of engineering, the
Egyptian state had to radically increase its supply
of literate officials. The creation of this bureaucracy
interpolated an educated middle class into a system
that prior to the pyramid-building endeavour had
only accounted for two types of people: nobles (iri-pat)
and commoners (rxyt). Men like Merer, however, who
meticulously kept their records and served the state
were neither one nor the other, and their numbers
91–4). Given that in later times both Horus and Seth
possessed cult centres and partisans in the Delta as
well as Upper Egypt, the exact nature of the religiopolitical
conflict (and, indeed, even whether emphasis
should best be placed on the religio or on the political)
remains frustratingly difficult to determine. What is
apparent, however, is that, following this slaughter,
Khasekhemwy focused his energy on preparing his
mortuary monuments at Abydos, in the same cemetery
as his strongly Sethian predecessor.
The degree to which the two powers were indeed
satisfied in the aftermath of this late Second Dynasty
massacre is perhaps dubious. Certainly, the next king
who came to power acted so as to distance himself
from his predecessor. Available evidence suggests
that Netjerikhet was a son of Khasekhemwy who
buried his father with honour at Abydos, just as
Hotepsekhemwy had done for Qa’a at the start of
the Second Dynasty (Dreyer et al. 1996, 71–2; Dreyer
1998). Like Hotepsekhemwy, however, Netjerikhet
intentionally disassociated himself from his predecessor
by moving the site of the royal burial back to
Saqqara.3
Moreover, as if to enshrine his message of
unity in stone, he commissioned an entirely innovative
funerary monument that stressed as a central message
throughout its architectural programme the unity of
both Upper and Lower Egypt and the king’s role in
maintaining that unity. As a testament to the success of
his mission, no king of the Old Kingdom would return
to be buried at Abydos nor would any commission
offerings, as Netjerikhet had, to Khasekemwy’s cult
(O’Connor 2009, 176, 178). Moreover, this same king
appears to have acted quickly – and perhaps quite
literally – to bury old grievances, for the objects on
which Khasekhem had memorialized his slaughter
were quickly whisked out of sight. Seth too, had had
his day and was never again destined to surmount a
royal serekh.
Abuse of power: the break between the Fourth and Fifth
Dynasties
In terms of the ability of a state to conspicuously consume
human lives, the Fourth Dynasty (c. 2543–2120)
rivalled the First. At the time that Snefru began work
on the first of the three full-sized pyramids completed
in his reign, a fundamental restructuring of society
had been mandated, for the demands of the state on
its subjects had never been higher. In order to complete
the Great Pyramid, constructed by Snefru’s son
at Giza, for example, it has been estimated that one
2611 kg block of stone would have had to have been
moved into place every two minutes of each daylight
hour of Khufu’s reign. Likewise, while it seems that
only 1360–2000 men could have been employed in
74
Chapter 5
to the modest nature of his tomb, there are no signs
that he had ever set his sights on a pyramid complex
(Stadelmann 1998, 70).
Why the Egyptians inserted a dynastic break
between Userkaf and Sheseskaf – rather than Menkaure
and Shepseskaf – is unclear, given that the former pair
seem united both in the unusual formation of their
names and also in their decision to situate their comparatively
modest mortuary monuments at Saqqara.
Indeed, the positioning of Userkaf’s pyramid, nestled in
the shadow of Netjerikhet’s own, speaks volumes (see
Fig. 5.5). In choosing this locale, Userkhaf positioned
himself as heir to Netjerikhet’s legacy rather than that
of the Fourth Dynasty pharaohs. In addition, Userkhaf
scaled down the size of his pyramid from that of Menkaure,
such that it was only 73.3 m to a side and 49 m
high (as opposed to roughly 105 m to a side and 65 m.
high). In an even more profound innovation, he allowed
the interior to be made up of artfully stacked limestone
rubble, which rendered the process of building it far
less labour intensive. When finished with fine limestone
blocks, the pyramid would have occasioned awe but
without the accompanying aftertaste of exploitation.
increased without any effort on the part of the state to
enfold them in its ideology or its governing structure.
Fourth Dynasty political power seems instead to have
been jealously guarded by the royal family and those
Memphite officials chosen to marry into it. From this
nepotistic core orders were dispatched and obedience
was expected. The imbalance of power must have been
acutely obvious, however, for in return for the goods
and services rendered, communities located outside
the country’s capital enjoyed neither local autonomy
nor any archaeologically observable signs of royal
largess (Bárta 2013a, 162–5; Moreno García 2013a, 95).
While no documentation of contemporary unrest
has survived, its existence can perhaps again be surmised
given the profound break with previous practice
that took place in the last reign of the Fourth Dynasty
and in a much more pronounced manner in the Fifth
(c. 2435–2306). The last king of the Fourth Dynasty,
Shepseskaf, made pious donations to Menkaure’s
burial cult, however, he emphatically did not follow his
predecessor’s example. After six or eight years of rule,
the king was buried in a mastaba at South Saqqara, and
while the brevity of his reign undoubtedly contributed
Figure 5.11. Some of the millions of multi-ton blocks that make up Khufu’s pyramid (Photo published with permission
of Franck Monnier).
75
Ancient Egyptian Exceptionalism: Fragility, Flexibility and the Art of Not Collapsing
its essential characteristics and functions (Middleton
2017, 42). So far, three instances have been examined
in which abuses of power and dangerous divisions in
society threatened the fabric of the Egyptian state. The
fact that the state recovered its footing at each point
of potential (or actual) rupture and persisted, without
break, as a recognizable entity would indicate that
the pharaonic state possessed an unusual capacity
for resilience and reformation. Indeed, considering
that each successive iteration of the state seems to
have corrected abuses, one wonders whether the Old
Kingdom’s governing structure might indeed fall into
Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s category of the ‘antifragile’ – a
concept he applies to entities that not only absorb shock
but ultimately become better for it (Taleb 2014, 3).4
Early Egypt’s extraordinary capacity for resilience
is perhaps attributable to two main factors: one
geopolitical and the other ideological. The first factor
that aided the pharaonic state’s capacity for resilience
is simply that the Nile Valley affords statehood for
reasons already referenced, i.e., it is both extremely
fertile and circumscribed. Thus, so long as the government
can prove itself either powerful or beneficial
(and especially if it is seen as both), dominance is
relatively easily established. The second factor is that
the ideological underpinning of pharaonic kingship
seems to have allowed for the notion that while the
office of kingship (nsw) was eternal and god given, its
occupant was a discrete individual (Hm) (Goedicke
1960, 17–37, 51–79). Thus, any failure in governance
was not the fault of kingship per se but rather the failure
of a particular king to rule in accordance with divinely
inspired righteous order (ma’at).
An apparently longstanding ‘law of the pharaoh’
commanded: ‘Let the possessions be given to him who
buries’ (Kemp 2006, 310). Thus, adherence to their own
law may well account for why transfers of power that
one expects should have been fraught appear so orderly
in the archaeological record. For example, with respect
to the case studies presented above, mud sealings
demonstrate the involvement both of Hotepsekhemwy
in Qa’a’s burial and of Netjerikhet in Khasekehmwy’s
(Wilkinson 1999, 83, 95). Nor did kings of the Fifth
Dynasty repudiate their predecessors, though they
made every effort to distinguish themselves from them.
This royal ideal that privileged the peaceful transition
of power lasted for millennia. Thus both Amasis and
Octavian granted that royal funerary rites be performed
for their bested rivals in a bid, presumably, to placate
the partisans of their enemies and to increase the odds
that their own assumption to power – irregular as it was
– would be regarded as at least somewhat legitimate.
Such rites were useful in that they promoted the notion
that kingship was larger than any individual ruler or
The rest of the Fifth Dynasty kings followed suit in the
construction of their own monuments (Lehner 1997,
140–54). While the modest scale of the Fifth Dynasty
pyramids is commonly attributed to practical concerns
rooted in the availability of state funds or quality bedrock
(Bárta 2005, 186), the accompanying religious and
governmental reforms issued by this regime suggest that
these monuments were scaled back purposefully, and
perhaps primarily, in order to signal the Fifth Dynasty’s
commitment to ameliorating discontent.
The wholesale devotion of the Fifth Dynasty kings
to the cult of Re is well known from their lavish royal
donations to his cult at Heliopolis, the establishment of
sun temples at Abu Sir, and the likely dissemination of
propaganda that the Fifth Dynasty’s legitimacy came
not from any tenuous genetic tie to the Fourth Dynasty
sovereigns but rather from their direct descent from
the Sun God. In the end, however, their governmental
reforms were what likely did the most work towards
rendering them legitimate in the eyes of their subjects.
These sovereigns acted quickly to eliminate nepotism
and to radically expand access to government offices
among the class of officials that the pyramid-building
project had created and yet failed to embrace. These
new officials boasted of their roles and responsibilities
in a bevy of biographical inscriptions, and it is perhaps
no accident that Fifth Dynasty mastabas constitute the
most impressive private monuments of Egypt’s Old
Kingdom (Bárta 2013a, 165–72).
Fifth Dynasty kings also made a concerted effort
to expand their relevance to areas outside the Memphite
core. To this end, the kings donated land, labour
and workshops to provincial temples and sponsored
work at sites likeAbydos, El-Bersheh, Tod, and Karnak.
Important individuals were newly awarded oversight
of state and temple property in their own hometowns
and felt free to bequeath these positions to their heirs
in documents that they inscribed in their own elaborate
provincial tombs (Moreno García 2007, 322–3;
2013a, 196–7). In the words of Miroslav Bárta (2013a,
166), the effects of the Fifth Dynasty reforms were to
make kingship more ‘socially obliged’ such that state
revenues were now far more open to mid and high
level officials who, in turn, dispensed benefits to their
own network of supporters. Such moves to lessen the
abuses of power while expanding access to its benefits
undoubtedly defused dangerous levels of tension
among both upper and lower classes of society.
Resiliency
Resiliency in ecological or sociocultural spheres refers
to the ability of a system to reorganize after suffering a
disturbance such that, although altered, it still retains
76
Chapter 5
have dimmed. It may have been, however, that issues
of illegitimacy and instability long predated the Eighth
Dynasty. The first king of the Sixth Dynasty (Teti), for
instance, may well have been assassinated, the second
(Userkara) a usurper, and the third (Pepy I) plotted
against by his own wife (Kanawati 2003, 4). Thus, of
Pepy II’s dynastic forebearers, his direct predecessor
(Merenre) may have been the only king that was neither
a conspirator nor one conspired against – at least
so far as is known.
Only one possible attempt to unseat Pepy II is
known, and this incident is only hinted at in a much
later folktale that survived in at least three iterations.
Known from the New Kingdom and the Twenty-Fifth
Dynasty, the tale may have little bearing on the actual
situation in the Sixth Dynasty, but – like many tales
– one suspects it was indeed built around a kernel of
truth. The story concerns the attempt of an individual,
who had gained knowledge of a clandestine affair
between Pepy II and one of his generals, to denounce
the king in front of the court. Given that Egyptian
religious texts condemned such relations – at least for
the passive partner – and that the king was, before
all else, mankind’s primary advocate before the gods,
this revelation about Pepy’s sexual behaviour would
indeed have been alarming. Each time the official
attempted to reveal his sovereign’s secret, however,
he found that the Overseer of the Court thwarted him.
According to the text, ‘he made the singers sing, the
musicians make music, the acclaimers, acclaim, and
the whistlers whistle, until the Pleader of Memphis
left without them hearing; (then) they stopped booing
him’ (Parkinson 1991, 55). A humorous tale from a
much later time, of course, is hardly a credible historical
source, but if Pepi II’s proclivities were an open
secret, this may also have led to a diminishment of
the office of kingship in the eyes of those who might
otherwise have held it in awe.
Some have suggested that if the figureheads at
Egypt’s core were perceived to be increasingly ineffectual,
people in positions of power elsewhere in
the country might well have felt free to act in their
own interests, however illicitly. Certainly, during or
in the immediate aftermath of Pepi II’s reign, a high
official from Elephantine was accused of embezzlement
(lit. ‘robbery’) with respect to state activity in
Nubia (Manassa 2006). One must imagine, however,
that corruption and graft occurred at all times among
officials whose responsibilities placed them in charge of
resources and under only loose oversight. To indict an
entire reign for corruption on the basis of an accident
of preservation, then, appears premature.
In the end, it is unlikely that blame for the death
of the Old Kingdom can be squarely attributed to a
regime. Indeed, in the wake of deeply unpopular predecessors,
the impulse of new pharaohs was to erase
all evidence of the offending monarch(s) and to align
themselves – through artifice or archaism – with former
kings of better repute.
An autopsy report on Egypt’s first failed state
Although the Egyptian state was far less fragile than
the vast majority of its ancient equivalents, it was not
invincible. It failed very shortly after the reign of the
Sixth Dynasty king Pepi II from a combination of many
of the same ailments that appear to have laid low its
less long-lived equivalents. If scholars of failed states
can be compared to coroners, the autopsy reports
that have been filed for Egypt’s Old Kingdom state
are typically equivocal. Below, however, a variety of
different diagnoses are couched together within three
broad categories in an admittedly speculative order of
escalating importance: death by management failure
and a corrosive loss of legitimacy, death by disaffection,
and finally death by a drastic diminishment of
spiritual and physical capital.
Death by management failure and a corrosive loss of
legitimacy
There is considerable confusion as to the length of Pepi
II’s reign. The Turin Cannon gives a figure exceeding
ninety years, which would suggest that the king had
come to the throne unfit to rule and – unless he were
truly extraordinary – would have left it the same way.
The lack of attested regnal years for the last quarter
century of Pepi’s reign has often been blamed on
the king’s increasing irrelevancy to regional rulers
and to an ever more impoverished elite. A graffito
in Pepy II’s pyramid, however, suggests that he died
and was buried in his sixty-fourth regnal year. If so,
his reign (c. 2216–2153) would have been comparable
to Ramessses II’s in length, and no extended period
of irrelevancy need be posited (Müller-Wollermann
2014, 3). Sixty years, however, would still have been
over twice the average lifespan of an ancient Egyptian,
and so an increasingly fragile monarch may well have
been viewed as an ominous avatar for the troubled
state of the state.
Whatever the length of Pepi II’s enormously long
rule, he must, like Ramesses II, have outlived scores
of crown princes. Of the scramble of short-lived kings
that made up the subsequent Eighth Dynasty, one
was certainly a son of Pepi II and others aggressively
asserted kinship with him – however tenuous or fictive
it may have been – by virtue of their choice of throne
name. If numerous claimants assumed the crown in
rapid succession, the lustre of the office would quickly
77
Ancient Egyptian Exceptionalism: Fragility, Flexibility and the Art of Not Collapsing
Large estates belonging to the king, the gods, or
deceased royals formed the backbone of the provincial
economy. Depending on their purpose, these estates
likely sent varying amounts of produce to Memphite
institutions, but much was also stored locally in order
to subsidize the travel expenses of court functionaries
or underwrite governmental expenses. Such had
always been the case. What was different in the late
Sixth Dynasty, however, was that the elites who now
controlled these stores and increasingly appended titles
such as ‘overseer of the granary’ and/or ‘overseer of
the treasury’ to their vita, stood at the apex of local
patronage systems (Kanawati 1980, 129–30; Strudwick
1985, 292; Papazian 2013, 63–6). Such elites thus no
doubt found themselves newly empowered to make
decisions about how local wealth would be dispensed.
Their increasing co-option of offices such as ‘overseer
of priests’ – which might stay in the same family for as
many as eight generations – for instance, allowed local
potentates to distribute lucrative and prestigious positions
to a network of supporters whose fortunes were
now directly tied to their own (Moreno García 2013a,
124–7; 2013b, 198–200, 202, 205; Bárta 2013a, 172–3).
Estates yielded soldiers as well as grain, and this
too may have played a role in altering the balance of
power. Little is known about the responsibility for
mustering young men for war or work in the early Old
Kingdom, although then, as later, it appears to have
fallen to administrators bearing titles such as ‘overseer
of works of the king’, ‘overseer of the phyles of Upper
Egypt’, and ‘overseer of the missions of the young
men’. By the late Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, however,
these men likely lived in the regions from whence they
drew labour. Certainly, other officials, such as Weni or
Sabni of Elephantine, mustered troops directly from
the towns and estates they administered (Eyre 1987,
18–20; Moreno García 2010, 21–3, 25; Spalinger 2013,
466–68). Should a late Old Kingdom ruler have wished
to curtail the defacto hereditary authority of a local
family and impose his own man from the outside,
then, those sent to enact his orders would assuredly
have encountered not only a community united against
this interference but also a formidable cadre of local
militia. Indeed, it is likely no coincidence that the title
‘overseer of a troop’ is noted with relative frequency at
the end of the Old Kingdom (Moreno García 2015, 5).
The likelihood of encountering resistance from
local militias no doubt accounted for the pronounced
preference of Sixth and Eighth Dynasty rulers for
employing enticements rather than brute force to
convince local rulers of their relevance. Thus, from
the reign of Pepi I on, pharaohs often offered the sons
and daughters of provincial families unprecedented
power within the core of the kingdom as high officials
failure of management on the part of its rulers or even
to a progressive loss of legitimacy. Even if the lengthy
rule of Pepi II indeed induced a feeling of stagnation,
upwards of ten Memphite viziers are known from his
reign (in addition to seven provincial counterparts),
and each should have infused a renewed administrative
energy to the realm (Strudwick 1985, 301–3).
Hereditary monarchies, after all, are designed from
the start to withstand a complete absence of governing
from the king: whether that individual might be
teething, mentally deficient, deemed deviant, or else
increasingly infirm. In such cases, it is high officials
who make important decisions, courtiers who meticulously
stage-manage official appearances, and palace
musicians who do their very best to drown out any
incoming complaints.
Death by disaffection
One nearly universal suspect in the demise of the Old
Kingdom is a restructuring of the government that
ceded an unprecedented degree of power to regional
authorities, who were typically members of powerful
local families. The radical expansion of Egypt’s
bureaucracy in the Fifth Dynasty, while no doubt
popular among ambitious members of the educated
classes, seems from repeated attempts at restructuring
later in the dynasty to have placed an increasing strain
on the central government. Fifth Dynasty experiments
with allowing some provinces a greater degree of
administrative autonomy must have been deemed
predominantly successful, as by the Sixth Dynasty,
the government had introduced the title, ‘great chief
of the nome’ to most Middle and Upper Egyptian
provinces. Such men shared power with – or were
occasionally functionally equivalent to – other locals
who also exercised control over large estates on behalf
of the crown and/or who were promoted to positions
of authority in the central government as overseers
of Upper Egypt or even as viziers (Moreno García
2013a, 124–46).
Prior to the Sixth Dynasty, the profoundly unequal
distribution of monumental architecture and other
archaeologically visible signifiers of wealth between
the government’s centre and its provinces suggests that
the former’s interest in the latter had resided almost
solely in what it could requisition. While the crown
likely intended its reform to increase efficiency and
to lessen the drain on its coffers that the support of
an overblown bureaucracy entailed, the advantages
of this approach were counterbalanced by risks. In
subcontracting oversight of provincial affairs to locals,
for instance, the central government lessened its ability
both to micromanage revenues and to coopt all
significant sources of social power.
78
Chapter 5
repeatedly assigned at least partial blame for this sad
state of affairs. These tax exemptions – in evidence
already at the beginning of the Sixth Dynasty but better
attested towards the end of it – generally forbade
crown officials from charging their expenses to the
protected estate. In addition, the crown promised
not to requisition its property or personnel as part of
routine corvée labour extractions or on an as-needed
basis (Strudwick 2005, 102–15).
While the crown would indeed have reduced
its access to revenue by virtue of these decrees, especially
if the surviving documents were only the tip
of the iceberg, three factors suggest that this practice
was more a symptom of weakness than a cause. First,
in most cases the estate is exempt from only certain
impositions and taxes – not necessarily all. Second,
the vast majority of institutions were not exempt.
Thus, donkeys that were not requisitioned from the
funerary estate of one particular queen mother could
presumably be requisitioned from those of all other
queen mothers and their noble kin, not to mention
the pyramid towns of all but the couple of exempted
parties as well as the innumerable royal estates that
littered the country and were especially prominent in
the Delta (Moreno García 2013b, 190–2; 203–4).
Finally, the crown seems often to have exempted
sources of revenue that it could afford to exempt. The
governors in Dakhleh, for instance, occupied an oasis
hundreds of kilometres deep in the desert, and their
mastabas were far grander than any others in Egypt
during the reign of Pepi II. Thus, it would appear that
if Egyptian armies had tried to requisition revenue by
force, they would have failed. At the other extreme,
however, the exemption granted to the community
tending Menkaure’s funerary temple would appear
far more impressive if this squalid tenement had never
been excavated (Lehner 2002, 7; Kemp 2006, 207–9).
Indeed, the exemption granted to this ‘sacred slum’
was most likely intended primarily to provide the
priests with an incentive to stay put and to keep the
derelict cult functional.
The gradual impoverishment of elites at the end
of the Old Kingdom is not in dispute. The role of an
ecological downturn in occasioning this impoverishment,
however, is. Recent assessments of the period
discount any role of the environment in occasioning
the breakdown of the centralized state, although no
compelling heuristic alternative is advanced (Moreno
García 2015, 5; Gee 2015, 61–2; Contardi 2015, 14–8;
Schneider 2017, 319).5
These authors tend to muster
three main arguments. 1. The 28 firsthand narratives of
individuals who claimed to successfully protect their
people from dangerous food shortages were in fact
opportunistically making a mountain out of a mole hill.
and as queens. At the same time, they acted to assert
their own presence in important regional temples via
the donation of royal statues and the establishment of
appended ka-chapels (Moreno García 2013a, 122, 137–8;
2013b 199). Royal statues, such as those exhumed from
Hierakonpolis, were not, however, likely maintained
solely out of an enthusiasm for the cult of the divine
king. Royal donations of land and property sweetened
the pot for local powerbrokers and – no doubt – further
fuelled the centrifugal forces already in motion.
The fact that officials in the late Fifth and Sixth
Dynasties took charge of affairs in their own localities
to a greater degree than ever before in the history of the
pharaonic state, however, need not have occasioned
the downfall of the central government. Indeed, the
main problem with the disaffection hypothesis is
that the state seems to have functioned perfectly well
throughout the vast majority of the Sixth Dynasty.
Limited local autonomy appears to have been ceded
to provinces south of Memphis, yet there is no indication
that regional rulers even remotely rivalled the
king (Strudwick 1985, 346). In the north, meanwhile,
the crown maintained its former hold over property
in the fertile regions of the Nile Delta and the Fayum
Oasis. Certainly, it is notable that for most of the Sixth
Dynasty, kings seem to have had more than enough
funds to procure resources from the northern Levant
as well as from sub-Saharan Africa (Cooper 2012;
Ward 1963, 23–7). So long as the crown possessed
unparalleled wealth and a perceived religiopolitical
potency – and so long as it shared some of this wealth
and continued to refrain from the exploitative and
divisive policies of the past – even those located at its
margins seem to have been content to support it. What,
then, changed at or shortly after the death of Pepy II?
Death by drastic diminishment of spiritual and physical
capital
Toward the end of the Sixth Dynasty, state finances took
a turn for the worse. This is perhaps most obviously
reflected in the mortuary remains of its functionaries.
Pepi II, with his unusually long reign, managed
to construct a perfectly respectable pyramid. What
is notable, however, is that beginning in the reign
of Merenre, the numbers of Memphite officials who
could afford a high-status burial shrunk precipitously
(Bárta 2013b, 269). Indeed, by the latter portion of
Pepi II’s reign virtually no one in in the capital or the
provinces could afford an imposing mastaba tomb,
save the governors of Dakhleh Oasis.
The practice of granting of tax exemptions to
temples and associated funerary establishments (Abydos
and Coptos), pyramid towns (Dahshur and Giza),
and royal and private ka-chapels (Coptos) has been
79
Ancient Egyptian Exceptionalism: Fragility, Flexibility and the Art of Not Collapsing
I will draw upon evidence for documented famines
in later periods in Egypt’s history to highlight certain
observations about famines that are not necessarily self
evident but which are crucial for gaining perspective
on the scattered sources of information pertinent to
the First Intermediate Period.
The case for re-considering the role of a climate
hostile to the state
Most of the studies that discount climate as an agent
for change in Egypt draw upon an article published by
Nadine Moeller in 2005. In this valuable essay, Moeller
reviewed all of the available scientific studies that had
been used to argue that a series of droughts and low
floods had occasioned the collapse of Egypt’s Old
Kingdom. Some of these studies, she found, were more
convincing than others. For example, a study of changing
settlement patterns at the island of Elephantine,
she concluded ‘provides firm evidence for relatively
low flood levels during the 6th Dynasty’ (Moeller 2005,
156). She cautioned, however, that scientists who took
climatic change at the end of the third millennium
as a given may well have been inclined to a certain
amount of confirmation bias when interpreting their
data (Moeller 2005, 158). Such studies, she suggested,
might include investigations of Nile sediments from
the Delta, dune encroachment into towns and formerly
fertile fields, and variation in Fayum lake levels.
After reviewing the various studies, she concluded
that climate change in Egypt was no doubt real,
but appeared to be ‘a long-term, gradual development
towards generally drier conditions’ (Moller 2005, 167),
an assessment that agrees with evidence mustered by
Miroslav Barta (2015) and colleagues at Abu Sir, reevaluations
of the dating for the collapse of urbanism
in the southern Levant (Höflmayer 2014, 132), evaluations
of evidence pertinent specifically to the eastern
Mediterranean (Finné, Holmgren, Sundqvist et al.
2011, 3169), and with the view that scenes of starving
bedouin carved on the causeways of Fifth Dynasty
kings were as relevant as they were self-serving (see
Fig. 5.12; Morris 2017, 134–5).
Moeller’s caution concerning the dangers of
confirmation bias and circular arguments is important
and well taken. Since Moeller’s article, debates about
the so-called 4.2-kiloyear bp aridification event have
continued. Given that there is at least as much (if not
more) prestige in debunking a controversial theory
as there is in confirming it, and given that most of the
authors involved in subsequent studies are climate
scientists and have no investment one way or another
in the veracity of Egyptian texts, let me briefly refer to
a selection of studies published after 2005 that have
Famines were nothing unusual. These local grandees
simply took advantage of the lack of a strong king in
order to take credit for food distribution. 2. A rash of
‘pessimistic literature’ set (or reasonably thought to
be set) in the First Intermediate Period but penned
(certainly or likely) during the Middle Kingdom should
be viewed both as warnings regarding the danger of
life without a strong king ruling a unified country and
also as reflective of an interest in exploring the notion
of theodicy. 3. Any ecological downturn that there
might have been would have occurred gradually and
so the state would have had time to adjust.
In his investigation of the epistemological perspective
that has coloured the reconstruction of the
end of the Old Kingdom and life during the First Intermediate
Period, Thomas Schneider (2017, 319) quotes
Ailiezer Tucker’s definition of the benchmark for the
veracity of historiography: namely that it is important
to privilege hypotheses that increase the likelihood
of the evidence more than others. I will thus end this
essay by arguing that while privileging a monocausal
explanation for the end of the First Intermediate Period
is undoubtedly naïve and wrongheaded, ignoring
testimonies from first-hand accounts, later meditations
on trauma, and a rash of scientific studies risks
an unnecessarily defeatist approach. That the Old
Kingdom monarchy was crippled by its inability to
use its privileged position with the deities (on the
one hand) and its unparalleled stores of grain (on the
other) to help its people in their time of need is indeed
a hypothesis that fits Tucker’s benchmark for approval.
The hypothesis that deteriorating environmental
conditions helped bring about the end of the Old
Kingdom is also potentially useful for explaining why
it would take almost a century and a half (c. 2118–1980)
before another ruler could extend his dominion over
the entirety of the country. It has been the aim of this
paper thus far, after all, to argue that Egypt affords
statehood and that even in the face of politicide, the
pharaonic system was remarkably resilient. In all past
periods of unrest, societal frustration seems to have
been quelled by the installation of a new government
and by the righting of perceived wrongs. So the
important question with respect to the Sixth Dynasty
is perhaps less why it fell than why it took so long
(by Egyptian standards) before anyone picked up its
pieces and put it back together again.
In order to make my case for bringing climate
back into the equation, let me begin by marshalling
an assemblage of recent and diverse scientific studies
that demonstrate that the ecological downturn that
coincided with the end of the Old Kingdom was not
business as usual and that the reports of eyewitnesses
should not be deemed histrionic. With this point made,
80
Chapter 5
the climate change postulated by the 4.2 ka bp event
that has been argued to have caused widespread suffering
throughout the eastern Mediterranean world.
A team of scientists examining brine sediments in the
northern Red Sea reached a similar conclusion. The
results of their study led them to state that the timing
and strength of the reconstructed environmental
changes around 4200 cal yr bp are suggestive of ‘a major
drought event’ that affected northern Africa as well as
Mesopotamia (Arz, Lamy, Pätzold 2006, 432, 439–40).
Within Egypt proper, recent coring at Saqqara
has revealed a metre thick layer of dune sands over
areas that had previously been arable fields (Hassan,
Hamdan, Flower et al. 2017, 62).6
At this site as well
as Abusir, Giza, and Abu Rowash, other geomorphological
studies revealed that the deposition of slope
and aeolian deposits occurred at the same time as
dramatically low floods. These low floods, in combination
with unusually intense bursts of rain, triggered
catastrophic flash floods that have left ample evidence
of their destruction in the Memphite cemeteries and
appear even have led to significant archaeological
innovations in tomb design7
(Welc & Marks 2014,
131; Kuraszkiewicz 2016). The effects of low floods
and intense rain may also be seen in the fact that
Lake Qarun was effectively cut off from the Nile and
received a significant input of sand, likely the result of
sheet-floods (Marks, Salem, Welc et al. 2018, 76). These
two factors, Fabian Welc and Leszek Marks conclude,
‘caused a rapid collapse of the Old Kingdom at about
4200 cal bp’ (Welc & Marks 2014, 124).
If adding heavy rains to the list of contributory
factors leading to the breakdown of the state appears
hyperbolic, a brief foray into more recent history may
be illustrative. In his book Nature and Empire in Ottoman
Egypt, Alan Mikhail writes that the torrential downpours
of 1757–1758 and of 1790 set off a chain of events
found additional evidence for adverse climatological
events that are posited to have led to an aridification
the like of which had not been seen since the dawn of
the state and/or to catastrophically low floods. These
studies employ a variety of different methods and have
examined evidence from numerous locales.
Studies undertaken at the sources of the Nile are
particularly important, given that the inundation was
far more crucial to Egypt’s long-term health than any
rain that fell within its borders.At Lake Tana, the source
of the Blue Nile in Ethiopia, magnetic and geochemical
coring has revealed a drought event at roughly 2200 bc,
i.e., during the reign of Pepy II. The effects of this dry
spell were aggravated because they coincided with ‘a
short period when outflow ceased from Lake Victoria,
at the source of the White Nile,’ convincing the authors
to support the position that reduced Nile flow was
indeed a contributing factor in the collapse of the Old
Kingdom state (Marshall, Lamb, Huws et al. 2011, 147,
159). Even Karl Butzer, who had argued forcefully in
the past against climate-driven explanations for the
collapse of the Old Kingdom (Butzer 1997, 245, 261)
argued in 2012 that the limnological record of Lake
Turkana – which indicated that the Omo watershed
in western Ethiopia that fed it generated only minimal
influx around approximately 2100 bc – suggested that
‘Nile failures probably unleashed a severe subsistence
crisis that helped trigger an economic breakdown near
the end of Pepi II’s reign’ (Butzer 2012, 3633–4).
With reference to suffering to the north and east
of Egypt, Sturt Manning and his colleagues utilized the
technique of dendro-14
C-wiggle-matching to examine
the tree-ring sequences of a cedar coffin and funerary
boat from the First Intermediate Period and Middle
Kingdom respectively (Manning, Dee, Wild et al., 2014,
401, 414). Their conclusion was that an off-set within
the period of roughly 2200–1900 bc was consistent with
Figure 5.12. Starving Bedouin from the causeways of Sahure (12a. after Hawass and Verner 1996, 185, fig. 2a) and
Unas (12b. after Drioton 1943, fig. 3).
a.
b.
a.
b.
81
Ancient Egyptian Exceptionalism: Fragility, Flexibility and the Art of Not Collapsing
Syria, which caused some 30,000–50,000 individuals to
immigrate into the Nile Valley in search of sustenance.
Two successive insufficient inundations, however,
meant that Egypt, too, was in a state of crisis. The price
of grain rose to more than 13 times the standard rate,
people began resorting to famine foods (including,
according to the chroniclers, human flesh), plague
spread throughout the country, and at the peak of
its devastation it is estimated that as many as 3,000
persons a day perished (al-Maqrīzī 1994, 43–7; Sabra
2000, 141–3).
The fact that most of those that fled to Egypt were
pastoralists from Cyrenaica recalls a statement from
the record of a campaign that Merneptah undertook
c. 1208 bc, right at the beginning of the chaotic half
century or so that marked the end of the Late Bronze
Age. The report states by way of prologue that Libyan
tribesmen had emigrated en masse to the Nile Delta
in order to ‘seek out the necessities (of life) for their
mouth[s]’ and once there were ‘fighting to feed their
stomachs daily’ (Kitchen 2003, 4). Notably, references
to famine abound in contemporary diplomatic
correspondence, and Merneptah boasted that he had
‘caused grain to be taken in ships, to keep alive this
land of Hatti’ (Singer 1999, 716–9). Destruction levels
and the abandonment of major population centres are
evident throughout the Eastern Mediterranean at this
time, bearing witness to mass population displacement.
While Merneptah kept his throne, Canaan and
Nubia attempted to rebel against pharaonic rule, and
political chaos soon brought down his dynasty. The
succeeding regime (c. 1190–1077) is known for rampant
tomb robbery, labour strikes, multiple instances of
mob violence, hit and run attacks by desert dwellers,
increasing regionalism, and finally for the breakdown
of the central state. While the intermittent spikes in
grain prices noted in late Nineteenth and Twentieth
Dynasty sources may be related more to administrative
inefficiency than to famine, it is notable that documents
from this period provide more direct and indirect references
to hunger and to the extraordinary purchasing
power of foodstuffs than those from any period since
the advent of the Twelfth Dynasty (O’Connor 1982,
875–6; Kemp 2006, 314, Contardi 2015, 17)
In the late Old Kingdom, evidence for large-scale
population movements typical of those catalyzed by
drought conditions can be seen in the reoccupation
of the Nubian Nile Valley, the Sinai landbridge, and
in Egypt’s increased confrontations with Bedouin,
as the inhabitants of areas dependent on rainfall in
North Africa and the southern Levant converged upon
the Nile Valley and also threatened Egypt’s interests
outside of it. Indeed, the pharaonic initiative to colonize
Dakhleh Oasis (a region whose water was not
that led to a governmental crisis. These rains wrecked
field systems, ruined crops, and destroyed supplies
of stored grain. Further, the unexpected floods also
sent thousands of rats to seek dry land together with
humans, which led to a particularly devastating bout
of plague. Not restricted to the poorer districts of Cairo,
the pestilence of 1791 slew Egypt’s highest official as
well as many in his administration (Mikhail 2011, 218,
227–8). As Mikhail writes, ‘The plague indeed caused
quite a crisis of leadership in Ottoman Egypt, as no
appointed leader could stay alive long enough to rule
effectively’ (Mikhail 2011, 222). It would appear, then,
that the causes and effects of the combined calamity of
1790–1791 may provide a gruesome, if fitting parallel
to what archaeology has revealed concerning the end
of the Old Kingdom. Mikhail concludes, ‘The flood of
the fall of 1790, therefore, contributed to the ravages
of plague in the spring of 1791. The combination of
these forces with drought in the fall of 1791 resulted
in widespread famine, severe price inflations, and
massive death’ (Mikhail 2011, 229). Considering the
magnitude of the crisis, it was useful to the survival
of the Ottoman state that its sultan resided outside
Egypt’s borders!
Lessons from the longue durée
Numerous accounts of more modern famines in
Egypt’s history, particularly those that occurred in
the well-documented Mamluk and Ottoman periods,
allow for the recognition of a few important patterns.
Efficient governments, for example, could generally
ameliorate the damage caused by Nile floods that
were either dangerously high or dangerously low. In
such cases, before inflation caused too much suffering
among the poor, rulers and other grandees would step
in and either sell grain at below the market rate or
else simply distribute it. While occasional instances of
rioting might occur – as in the famines of ad 1336 and
1394 – the government that acted quickly and efficiently
in the face of a short-lived ecological downturn could
aid its people and avert disaster (Sabra 2000, 144–5,
148–50; Raphael 2013, 99).
Inadequate floods seem to have occurred at least
once a generation. As Fekri Hassan has observed,
however, Egypt’s most horrific experiences with famine
and suffering occurred at much longer intervals
– often depriving even the oldest sufferers of a parallel
within the living memory of those they’d known. The
effects were most acutely felt when inadequate floods
persisted over two or more years, occurred within
short intervals of one another, and/or coincided with
extended region-wide droughts (Hassan 1997, 57–9).
From 1294 to 1295, for instance, a serious drought
struck the Eastern Mediterranean from Cyrenaica to
82
Chapter 5
963–971, 1294–1296, 1694–1695, 1784 and 1790–1796,
which provoked widespread anger and demonstrations
in response (al-Maqrīzī 1994, 29–30, 47; Mikhail
2011, 217–218, 229–30). Whether the aftermath of mob
violence may also be seen in the scorch marks left
over from fires that destroyed the late Sixth Dynasty
Governor’s palace at ‘Ain Asil in Dakhleh Oasis or in
the disordered corpses of over 35 people recovered
beneath burnt heaps of rubble outside a late Old Kingdom
temple platform at Mendes is unclear, but ‘Let us
drive out the strong among us!’ was remembered as a
rallying cry characteristic of the time (Enmarch 2008,
223, similarly 228–9 Simpson 2003, 153, 155; Soukiassian
1997, 17; Redford 2010, 46–50).
It is worth noting that in order to temper the
effects of famine, Mamluk and Ottoman governments
awarded tax breaks and fostered an economy of patronage
among their highest elites – two tactics, discussed
above, that Egypt’s late Old Kingdom administration
also employed (Sabra 2000, 135–6; Mikhail 2011,
2016–7; Raphael 2013, 99–100). In these latter periods,
such economic interventions often staved off disaster
– but it helped that Egypt was only one component
of a much larger empire. These same strategies, while
they may at first have decreased stress and increased
the agility of the Old Kingdom government, would
not have worked over a period of ever-increasing
aridity. Regional granaries, by their very nature, run
dry more quickly than centralized stores, and they
do not allow the dearth of one region to be as easily
complimented by the plenty of another. Thus, at the
very end of the Old Kingdom the centre did not hold,
and things fell apart.
The Egyptian state had weathered destabilizing
adversities before, including serious and systemic
abuses of power, as well as regional unrest, and even
regicide. While these adversities prompted abrupt
changes of regime, they did not stop the state altogether.
Some other ruler had always stepped up to
right wrongs and assume the reins. The question, then,
is why this case was different. Accounts of historically
attested famines may, again, aid our understanding
of why Egypt – if it had suffered from a prolonged
drought and intermittent low Niles – may have had
a difficult time recovering. Adequate inundations, it
seems, were no panacea unless arable land could be
quickly cultivated. In the aftermath of serious famines
in Egypt, finding the animal- and manpower to work
the soil was difficult. In areas hardest hit by famine,
people had generally consumed both unripe crops
and draught animals. Moreover, villages were often
almost entirely depopulated as peasants who did not
die often left for cities so as to be closer to what aid
there was and to escape increasingly lawless conditions
dependent on the Nile) in the Sixth Dynasty may also
have been undertaken both to increase Egypt’s food
supply and to give its traders a means of bypassing
the newly reoccupied and politically fractious Lower
Nubian Nile Valley. Egypt’s emergence from isolationism
in the Late Old Kingdom, then, was probably
to some degree defensive, and it is notable that once
strong leadership re-emerged in the Delta during
the late First Intermediate Period or the early Middle
Kingdom, border security became a top priority
(Jansen-Winkeln 2010; Morris 2018, 49–52).
It is possible that an increase in urbanism and in
the construction of town walls in the Sixth Dynasty
may be taken as the material signatures of an elevated
unease that existed within Egypt proper (Moeller 2016,
186). Such a conclusion need not necessarily be drawn.
As Juan Carlos Moreno García points out, a burgeoning
population might be read as a sign of health, and
in the southern Levant, for example, the presence of
town walls is often interpreted as an indication of civic
pride (Philip 2003, 109–23; Moreno García 2015, 8).
Thus, the increased provincial autonomy typical of the
Sixth Dynasty could well have motivated local elites
to invest in their towns. In the third century ad, for
example, Egyptian provincial cities flourished during
an extended period of crisis largely because wealthy
citizens – newly empowered to act as city councillors
– now saw the glory of their city as adding lustre to
their own self-worth (Bagnall 1993, 55–9).
Bearing the aforementioned caveats in mind,
it may still be safely stated that in pharaonic Egypt
nucleation and walls are especially characteristic of
unsettled times. Moreover, multiple lines of evidence
make it clear that any walls erected were put to good
use during the ‘long First Intermediate Period’, which
might be argued to extend up to the point at which
Amenemhet I’s foes surrendered their arms. Violence
– as witnessed in elevated death rates and signs of
trauma, biographical inscriptions, and in the unprecedented
visibility of soldiers as well as real, model,
and depicted weapons – left its scars in the material
and epigraphic record (O’Connor 1974; 27–9; Hayes
1978, 277–80; Morris 2006; Duhig 2009, 60–1; Moeller
2016, 244–5).
Dry climates tend to be incendiary
When an efficient administration in Egypt’s history
mitigated the effects of a short famine, the benefits
of paying taxes were obvious. Inefficient, inattentive,
or avaricious elites, however, could exacerbate (or
even cause) crises and served as lightning rods for
discontent during ecological downturns. Perceived
abuses of the social contract that bound a government
to its people occurred during the famines of 952–953,
83
Ancient Egyptian Exceptionalism: Fragility, Flexibility and the Art of Not Collapsing
in sight, aggrandizers increasingly took up the question
of just who should assume the righteous burden
of safeguarding the nation’s stores. Within twenty
years, strong men, based first at Herakleopolis in the
fertile Fayum and slightly later in Thebes, carved out
kingdoms that would eventually clash. Like a phoenix
rising from the ashes (or like a B-grade horror film,
depending on your perspective) the pharaonic state
would be reborn. Whether this repeat performance was
greeted with relief or depression no doubt depended
on individual circumstances. The strength of Egypt’s
state lay – almost equally, it seems – in its ability both
to help and to harm.
References
ASAE = Annales du Service des Antiquités de L’Égypte
Adams, B. and K.M. Ciałowicz, 1997. Protodynastic Egypt.
Buckinghamshire: Shire Publications.
al-Maqrīzī, T., 1994 [1405]. Mamluk Economics. A Study and
Translation of al-Maqrīzī’s Ighāthah, trans. A. Allouche.
Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Arz, H.W., F. Lamy, J. Pätzold, 2006. A pronounced dry event
recorded around 4.2 ka in brine sediments from the
northern Red Sea. Quarternary Research 66: 432–441.
Bagnall, R.S., 1993. Egypt in Late Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton
UP.
al-Baghdādi, ‘A., 1964 [1204]. The Eastern Key, trans. K. H.
Zand et al. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd.
Bard, K.A., 1989. The evolution of social complexity in predynastic
Egypt: an analysis of the Naqada Cemeteries.
Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 2(2): 223–48.
Bard, K.A. and R.L. Carneiro, 1989. Patterns of Predynastic
settlement location, social evolution and the circumscription
theory. Cahiers de la Recherche de l’Institut de
Papyrologie et d’Egyptologie de Lille 11, 15–23.
Bárta, M., 2005. Location of the Old Kingdom pyramids in
Egypt. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 15(2), 177–91.
Bárta, M., 2013a, Kings, viziers, and courtiers: executive
power in the Third Millennium bc, in Ancient Egyptian
Administration, ed. J.C. Moreno García. Boston: Brill,
153–75.
Bárta, M., 2013b Egyptian kingship during the Old Kingdom.
in Experiencing Power, Generating Authority: Cosmos,
Politics, and the Ideology of Kingship in Ancient Egypt and
Mesopotamia, eds. Hill, J.A., P. Jones, & A.J. Morales.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 257–83.
Bárta, M., 2015. Long term or short term? Climate change and
the demise of the Old Kingdom, in Climate and Ancient
Societies, eds. S. Kerner, R. J. Dann, and P. Bangsgaard.
Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press University
of Copenhagen, 177–95.
Bestock, L., 2009. The Development of Royal Funerary Cult at
Abydos: Two Funerary Enclosures from the Reign of Aha.
Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.
Butzer, K.W., 1997. Sociopolitical discontinuity in the Near
East c. 2200 bce: scenarios from Palestine and Egypt,
(al-Baghdādi 1964, 55l, 60l, 62r, 63r–63l; 64l; al-Maqrīzī
1994, 41–3, 46; Sabra 2000, 160, 167; Mikhail 2011, 217;
Raphael 2013, 67, 73, 85).
Over time, droughts ease, and catastrophically
low floods – while more frequent in certain eras than
others – tend only to last a handful of years at most.
During the First Intermediate Period, it is no doubt
as erroneous to envision a time of unremitting misery
and peril as it is to ignore attestations that life during
this period could be particularly challenging. Even the
‘calamitous’ fourteenth century in Europe, after all,
saw feasts among its many famines. Moreover, in the
aftermath of the blackest plagues it could happen that
‘the poor moved into empty houses, slept on beds, and
ate off silver. Peasants acquired unclaimed tools and
livestock, even a wine press, forge or mill left without
owners, and other possessions they never had before’
(Tuchman 1978, 117). Those who had always been at
the bottom of Egypt’s social order, therefore, may
have had little desire to reinstate the state, even if life
without its security forces and infrastructure was as
alarming as it was exhilarating.
Making Egypt great again
If the breakdown of the central state in Egypt lasted
longer than it ever had before during the First Intermediate
Period, it was not, in fact, laid low for long (at
least by comparison to many other ancient states profiled
in this volume). Two dominant theories are often
invoked to explain the rise of the state: one coercive
and the other managerial (see with regard to Egypt
Bard and Carneiro 1989 vs. Hassan 1988). Proponents
of the first theory argue that states were won at spear
point and maintained by force. By contrast, advocates
of the managerial view highlight the state’s scalar
advantage in buffering its citizens from the effects of
famines, incursions, or other social ills. In light of these
two very different perspectives, then, it is important
to note that the first individuals who gained power in
the aftermath of the state’s collapse were those who
boasted of their active involvement in helping the
people of their districts survive an extended period of
crises (Vandier 1936; Moreno García 1997, 3–92). These
boasts, while obviously self-serving, needn’t be untrue.
On the other hand, it is equally important to observe
that some, like Ankhtify, paired their boasts with tales
of aggressive actions against neighbouring polities.
Thus, perhaps, the phenomenon of state formation is
capacious enough to encompass both paradigms even
within a single instance.
After eight hundred years, Egypt had an indelible
template for pharaonic rule.As noted at the start of this
work, the Nile Valley afforded statehood, and so once
the river recovered and steady surpluses were again
84
Chapter 5
ed. M.A. Powell. New Haven: American Oriental
Society, 5–47.
Finné, M., K. Holmgren, H.S. Sundqvist et al., 2011. Climate
in the eastern Mediterranean, and adjacent regions,
during the past 6000 years – a review. Journal ofArchaeological
Science 38, 3153–73.
Friedman, R., 2008. Cemeteries of Hierakonpolis. Archéo-Nil
18, 9–29.
Friedman, R., W. Van Neer, & V. Linseele, 2011. The elite
predynastic cemetery at Hierakonpolis: 2009–2010
update, in Egypt at Its Origins 3: Proceedings of the Third
International Conference “Origin of the State. Predynastic
and Early Dynastic Egypt”, London, 27th July – 1st August
2008, eds. R.F. Friedman and P. N. Fiske. Leuven:
Peeters, 157–191.
Gee, J., 2015. Did the Old Kingdom collapse? A new view
of the First Intermediate Period. Towards a New History
for the Egyptian Old Kingdom: Perspectives on the
Pyramid Age, ed. P. Der Manuelian and T. Schneider.
Leiden: Brill, 60–75.
Goedicke, H., 1960. Die Stellung des Königs im Alten Reich,
Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.
Grdseloff, B., 1944. Notes d’épigraphie archaïque. ASAE
44, 279–302.
Griffiths, J.G., 1959. Remarks on the Horian elements in the
royal titulary. ASAE 56, 63–86.
Griffiths, J.G., 1960. The Conflict of Horus and Seth from Egyptian
and Classical Sources. Liverpool: Liverpool UP.
Hassan, F.A., 1988. The Predynastic of Egypt. Journal of World
Prehistory 2(2), 135–85.
Hassan, F.A., 1997. The dynamics of a riverine civilization:
a Geoarchaeological Perspective on the Nile Valley,
Egypt. World Archaeology 29(1), 51–74.
Hassan, F.A., M.A. Hamdan, R.J. Flower et al., 2017. Holocene
alluvial history and archaeological significance of the
Nile floodplain in the Saqqara-Memphis region, Egypt.
Quaternary Science Review 176, 51–70.
Hassan, F.A., J. van Wetering, & G. Tassie, 2017. Urban
development at Nubt, Nagada region, Upper Egypt,
during the Predynastic – Protodynastic period, in
Egypt at Its Origins 5. Proceedings of the Fifth International
Conference “Origin of the State. Predynastic and Early
Dynastic Egypt”, Cairo, 13th–18th April 2014, ed. B.
Midant-Reynes and Y. Tristant. Leuven: Peeters, 81–127.
Hawass, Z. and M. Verner, 1996. Newly Discovered Blocks
form the Causeway of Sahure (Archaeological Report).
Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts.
Abteilung Kairo 52, 177–186 with plates 53–56.
Hayes, W.C., 1978. The Scepter of Egypt: A Background for
the Study of the Egyptian Antiquities in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. Vol 1: From the Earliest Times to the End of
the Middle Kingdom. New York. New York: Metropolitan
Museum of Art.
Hendrickx, S., R. Friedman & M. Eyckerman, 2011. Early
falcons, in Vorspann oder formative Phase? Ägyptien und
der Vordere Orient 3500–2700 v. Chr., ed. L.D. Morenz
& R. Kuhn. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 129–62.
Hendrickx, S., et al., 2009. Late Predynastic/Early Dynastic
rock art scenes of Barbary sheep hunting in Egypt’s
Western Desert. From capturing wild animals to the
in Third Millennium bc Climate Change and Old World
Collapse, ed. Dalfes, H.N., G. Kukla, H. Weiss. NATO
ASI Series I: Global Environmental Change 49. Berlin:
Springer-Verlag, 245–296.
Butzer, K.W., 2012. Collapse, environment, and society.
PNAS 109(10), 3632–9.
Caminos, R.A., 1997. Peasants, in The Egyptians, ed. S.
Donadoni. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1–30.
Carneiro, R. L., 1970. A theory of the origin of the state.
Science, New Series 169, No. 3947, 733–38.
Chang, K.C., 1974. Urbanism and the king in ancient China.
World Archaeology 6(1), 1–14.
Contardi, F., 2015. Disasters connected with the rhythm of
the Nile in the textual sources, in Egyptian Curses 2:
A Research on Ancient Catastrophes, ed. G.C. Vittozzi.
Rome: Istituto di Studi sul Mediterraneo Antico, 11–26.
Cooper, J., 2012. Reconsidering the location of Yam. Journal
of the American Research Center in Egypt 48, 1–21.
Creasman, P.P., 2015. Timbers of time: revealing international
economics and environment in antiquity, in
There and Back Again – the Crossroads II: Proceedings of
an International Conference Held in Prague, September
15–17, 2014, eds. J. Mynářová, P. Onderka, and P.
Pavúk. Prague: Charles University in Prague, 45–58.
Crowfoot Payne, J., 1993. Catalogue of the Predynastic Egyptian
Collection in the Ashmolean Museum. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Darnell, J.C., 2002. Theban Desert Road Survey in the Egyptian
Western Desert, Vol 1: Gebel Tjauti Rock Inscriptions 1–45
and Wadi el-Hôl Inscriptions 1–45. Oriental Institute
Publications 119. Chicago: Oriental Institute of the
University of Chicago.
Darnell, J.C., 2009. Iconographic attraction, iconographic
syntax, and tableaux of royal ritual power in the Preand
Proto-dynastic rock inscriptions of the Theban
Western Desert. Archéo-Nil 9, 83–107.
David, R., 2017. Illness from afar. Epidemics and their aftermath,
in Pharaoh’s Land and Beyond. Ancient Egypt and
its Neighbors, eds. P.P. Creasman and R.H. Wilkinson.
New York: Oxford UP, 271–85.
Dodson, A., 1996. The mysterious 2nd dynasty. KMT 7(2),
19–31.
Dreyer, G., et al., 1996. Umm el-Qaab. Nachuntersuchungen
im frühzeitlichen Königsfriedhof 7./8. Vorbericht.
Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts,
Abteilung Kairo 52, 11–81.
Dreyer, G., 1998. Der erste König der 3. Dynastie, in Stationen:
Beiträge zur Kulturgeschischte Ägyptens, Rainer
Stadelmann gewidmet, ed. H. Gusch & D. Polz. Mainz:
Philipp von Zabern, 31–4.
Drioton, E., 1943. Une representation de la famine sur
un bas-relief égyptien de la Ve dynastie. Bulletin de
l’Institut du Désert d’Egypte (Cairo) 25, 45–54.
Duhig, C., 2009. They are Eating People Here! Anthropology
and the First Intermediate Period. Beyond the
Horizon: Studies in Egyptian Art, Archaeology and History
in Honour of Barry J. Kemp Vol I, ed. S. Ikram and A.
Dodson. Cairo: Publications of the Supreme Council
of Antiquities, 45–87.
Eyre, C.J., 1987. Work and the organisation of work in the
Old Kingdom, in Labor in the Ancient Near East,
85
Ancient Egyptian Exceptionalism: Fragility, Flexibility and the Art of Not Collapsing
Mikhail, A., 2011. Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Moeller, N., 2005. The First Intermediate Period: a time of
famine and climate change? Ägypten und Levante 15,
153–67.
Moeller, N., 2016. The Archaeology of Urbanism in Ancient
Egypt from the Predynastic Period to the End of the Middle
Kingdom. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Moreno García, J.C., 1997. Études sur l’administration, le pouvoir
et l’idéologie en Égypte, de l’Ancien au Moyen Empire.
Ægyptica Leodiensia 4. Liège: C.I.P.L.
Moreno García, J.C., 2007. The state and the organisation of
the rural landscape in the 3rd millennium bc pharaonic
Egypt, in Aridity, Change and Conflict in Africa: Proceedings
of an International ACACIA Conference held at
Königswinter, Germany October 1–3, 2003, eds. M. Bollig
et al. Köln: Heinrich-Barth-Institut, 313–30.
Moreno García, J.C., 2010. War in Old Kingdom Egypt
(2686–2125 bce), in Studies on War in the Ancient Near
East. Collected Essays on Military History. Münster:
Ugarit Verlag, 5–41.
Moreno García, J.C., 2013a. The territorial administration of
the kingdom in the 3rd Millennium, in Ancient Egyptian
Administration, ed. J. C. Moreno García. Boston:
Brill, 85–151.
Moreno García, J.C., 2013b. Building the pharaonic state:
territory, elite, and power in ancient Egypt in the 3rd
millennium bce, in Experiencing Power, Generating
Authority: Cosmos, Politics, and the Ideology of Kingship
in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, eds. Hill, J.A., P.
Jones, & A.J. Morales. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 185–217.
Moreno García, J.C., 2015. Climatic change or sociopolitical
transformation? Reassessing late 3rd millennium bc
in Egypt, in 2200 bc – A Climatic Breakdown as a Cause
for the Collapse of the Old World?, eds. H. Meller, H.W.
Arz, R. Jung and R. Risch, Tagungen des Landesmuseums
für Vorgeschichte Halle 13, 1–16.
Morris, E., 2014. (Un)Dying loyalty: meditations on retainer
sacrifice in Ancient Egypt and elsewhere, in Violence
and Civilization: Studies of Social Violence in History
and Prehistory, ed. Rod Campbell. Oxford: Oxbow
Books, 61–93.
Morris, E., 2017. Prevention through deterrence along
Egypt’s northeastern border: or the politics of a
weaponized desert. Journal of Eastern Mediterranean
Archaeology and Heritage Studies 5(2), 133–47.
Morris, E., 2018. Ancient Egyptian Imperialism. Hoboken, NJ:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Muhs, B., 2016. The Ancient Egyptian Economy 3000–30 bce.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Müller-Wollermann, R., 2014. End of the Old Kingdom, in
UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, eds. W. Grajetzki &
W. Wendrich. Los Angeles, 1–9. Available at: http://
digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/
zz002hzfs1
Nicholson, P.T. and E Peltenburg, 2000. Egyptian faience,
in Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology, eds. P.T.
Nicholson & I. Shaw. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
177–94.
women of the ‘Acacia House’, in Desert animals in the
Eastern Sahara: Status, economic significance, and cultural
reflection in antiquity. Proceedings of an Interdisciplinary
ACACIA Workshop held at the University of Cologne,
December 14–15, 2007, eds. H. Riemer et al. Köln: Heinrich-Barth-Institut,
189–244.
Höflmayer, F., 2014. Dating catastrophies and collapses in
the Ancient Near East: the end of the first urbanization
in the Southern Levant and the 4.2 ka bp event, in
Overcoming Catastrophes: Essays on Disastrous Agents
Characterization and Resilience Strategies in Pre-Classical
Southern Levant, ed. L. Nigro. Rome: „La Sapienza“
Expedition to Palestine & Jordan, 117–40.
Hornung, E., R. Krauss, and D. Warburton, 2006. Ancient
Egyptian Chronology. Leiden: Brill.
Jansen-Winkeln, K., 2010. Der Untergang des Alten Reiches.
Orientalia 79(3), 273–303.
Kahn, D. & O. Tammuz, 2008. Egypt is difficult to enter: Invading
Egypt –A game plan (seventh-fourth centuries bce).
Journal for the Society of Egyptian Antiquities 35, 37–66.
Kanawati, N., 1980. Governmental Reforms in Old Kingdom
Egypt. Warminster: Aris & Phillips.
Kanawati, N., 2003. Conspiracies in the Egyptian Palace: Unis
to Pepy I. New York: Routledge.
Kemp, B.J., 2006. Ancient Egypt. Anatomy of a Civilization,
Second edition. New York: Routledge.
Kitchen, K.A., 2003. Ramesside Inscriptions: Translated andAnnotated
Translations. Vol. IV: Merneptah and the Nineteenth
Dynasty. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Kozloff, A., 2006. Bubonic plague during the reign of Amenhotep
III? KMT 17(3), 36–46.
Kuraszkiewicz, K.O., 2016. Architectural innovations influenced
by climatic phenomena (4.2 ka event) in the late
Old Kingdom (Saqqara, Egypt). Studia Quaternaria
33(1), 27–34.
Lehner, M., 1997. The Complete Pyramids. London: Thames
& Hudson.
Lehner, M., 2002. Sacred slum: life and death of a pyramid
town. Aeragram 5(2), 7.
Marshall, M.H., H.F. Lamb, D. Huws et al., 2011. Late Pleistocene
and Holocene drought events at Lake Tana, the
source of the Blue Nile. Global and Planetary Change
78, 147–61.
Mathieson, I, E. Bettles, J. Clarke et al., 1997. The National
Museums of Scotland Saqqara Survey Project 1993–1995.
Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 83, 17–53.
Manassa, C., 2006. The crimes of Count Sabni reconsidered.
Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde
133, 151–63.
Manning, S.W., M.W. Dee, E.M. Wild et al., 2014. High-precision
dendro-14
C dating of two cedar wood sequences
from First Intermediate Period and Middle Kingdom
Egypt and a small regional climate-related 14
C divergence.
Journal of Archaeological Science 46, 401–16.
Marks, L., A. Salem, F. Welc et al., 2018. Holocene lake
sediments from the Faiyum Oasis in Egypt: a record of
environmental and climate change. Boreas: An International
Journal of Quaternary Research 47(1), 62–79.
Middleton, G.D., 2017. Understanding Collapse.Ancient History
and Modern Myths. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
86
Chapter 5
Stadelmann, R., 1998. Royal tombs from the Age of the Pyramids,
in Egypt: The World of the Pharaohs, ed. R. Schulz
& M. Seidel. Köln: Könemann, 47–77.
Strudwick, N., 1985. The Administration of Egypt in the Old
Kingdom: The Highest Titles and their Holders. Boston: KPI.
Strudwick, N., 2005. Texts from the Pyramid Age. Atlanta:
Society of Biblical Literature.
Taleb, N.N., 2012. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.
New York: Random House.
Tallet, P., 2017. Les papyrus de la mer Rouge, vol. I: Le “journal
de Merer” (papyrus Jarf A et B). Cairo: Institut français
d’archéologie.
Tavares,A., 2011. Village, town and barracks: a fourth dynasty
settlement at Heit el-Ghurab, Giza, in Old Kingdom, New
Perspectives: Egyptian Art and Archaeology 2750–2150 bc,
eds. N. Strudwick and H. Strudwick. Oxford: Oxbow
Books, 270–77.
Tuchman, B.W., 1978. A Distant Mirror. The Calamitous 14th
Century. New York: Ballantine Books.
Turner, P.J., 2013. Seth – A Misrepresented God in the Ancient
Egyptian Pantheon? British Archaeological Report International
Series 2473. Oxford: Archaeopress.
Vandier, J., 1936. La famine dans l’Egypte Ancienne. Cairo:
Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale du Caire.
van Wetering, J., 2012. Relocating De Morgan’s Royal Tomb
at Naqada and Identifying Its Occupant, in Prehistory
of Northern Africa. New Ideas and Discoveries, ed. J.
Kabaciński et al. Poznań: Muzeum Archeologiczne w
Poznaniu, 91–124.
Velde, H. te, 1967. Seth, God of Confusion. A Study of His Role
in Egyptian Mythology and Religion. Leiden: E.J. Brill.
Ward, W.A., 1963. Egypt and the East Mediteranean from
Predynastic times to the end of the Old Kingdom. Journal
of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 6(1), 1–57.
Welc, F., and L. Marks, 2014. Climate change at the end
of the Old Kingdom in Egypt around 4200 bp: New
geoarchaeological evidence. Quaternary International
324, 124–33.
Wilkinson, T.A.H., 1999. Early Dynastic Egypt. New York:
Routledge.
Wilkinson, T.A.H., 2000. Royal Annals of Ancient Egypt: The
Palermo Stone and its Associated Fragments. New York:
Kegan Paul International.
Notes
1 All dates for the pharaonic period are taken form the
chronological chart in Hornung, Krauss, & Warburton
2006, 490–3.
2 These annals may have omitted the reigns of three poorly
attested kings, including that of Sened, whose funerary
cult at Saqqara was serviced in the Fourth Dynasty by the
same priest who also served Peribsen’s cult (Grdseloff
1944, 294; Wilkinson 2000, 203).
3 The suggestion that Khasekhemwy may have built a
mortuary monument for himself under what would
become the Western Massif in Netjerikhet’s Step Pyramid
(Stadelmann 1998, 53) or else constructed a funerary
enclosure at Saqqara (Mathieson, Bettles, Clarke et
al. 1997, 53) remains unsubstantiated and is perhaps
O’Connor, D.B., 1974. Political Systems and Archaeological
Data in Egypt: 2600–1780 bc. World Archaeology 6(1),
15–38.
O’Connor, D.B., 1982. Egypt, 1552–664 bc, in The Cambridge
History of Africa, vol I: From the Earliest Times to c. 500 bc,
ed. J.D. Clark. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 830–1087.
O’Connor, D.B., 2009, Abydos: Egypt’s First Pharaohs and the
Cult of Osiris. New York: Thames & Hudson.
Papazian, H., 2013. The central administration of the resources
in the Old Kingdom: departments, treasuries, granaries
and work centers, in Ancient Egyptian Administration,
ed. J. C. Moreno García. Boston: Brill, 41–83.
Parkinson, R.B., 1991. Voices from Ancient Egypt. An Anthology
of Middle Kingdom Writings. Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press.
Petrie, W.M.F., 1900. Royal Tombs of the First Dynasty 1900–
1901. London: Egypt Exploration Fund.
Petrie, W.M.F., 1901. Royal Tombs of the Earliest Dynasties 1901,
Part II. London: Egypt Exploration Fund.
Philip, G., 2003. The Early Bronze Age of the Southern
Levant:A LandscapeApproach. Journal of Mediterranean
Archaeology 16.1, 103–32.
Quibell, J.E., 1898. Slate palette from Hieraconpolis. Zeitschrift
für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 36, 1: 81–84,
taf. 12, 13.
Quibell, J.E., 1900. Hierakonpolis, Part I. London: Bernard
Quaritch.
Raphael, K., 2013. Climate and Political Climate: Environmental
Disasters in the Medieval Levant. Leiden: Brill.
Reader, C., 2017. An Early Dynastic ritual landscape at
North Saqqara: an inheritance from Abydos? Journal
of Egyptian Archaeology 103(1), 71–87.
Redford, D.B., 2010. City of the Ram-Man. The Story of Ancient
Mendes. Princeton: Princeton UP.
Regulski, I., 2009. Investigating a new Dynasty 2 necropolis
at South Saqqara. British Museum Studies in Ancient
Egypt and Sudan 13: 221–37.
Sabra, A., 2000. Poverty and Charity in Medieval Islam. Mamluk
Egypt, 1250–1517. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Schneider, T., 2017 “What is the past but a once material
existence now silenced?”: The First Intermediate Period
from an epistomological perspective, in The Late Third
Millennium in the Ancient Near East. Chronology, C14,
and Climate Change, ed. F. Höflmayer. Oriental Institute
Seminars 11. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Scott, J.C., 2017. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest
States. New Haven: Yale UP.
Shaw, I., 2000. The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt. New
York: Oxford UP.
Simpson, W.K.S., 2003. An Anthology of Stories, Instructions,
Stelae, Autobiographies, and Poetry, Third Edition. New
Haven: Yale UP.
Singer, I., 1999. A political history of Ugarit, in Handbook
of Ugaritic Studies, ed. W.G.E. Watson and N. Wyatt.
Leiden: Brill, 603–733.
Soukiassian, G., 1997. A governors’ palace at ‘Ayn Asil,
Dakhla Oasis. Egyptian Archaeology 11, 15–17.
Spalinger, A., 2013. The organisation of the pharaonic army
(Old to New Kingdom), in Ancient Egyptian Administration,
ed. J.C. Moreno García. Boston: Brill, 393–478.
87
Ancient Egyptian Exceptionalism: Fragility, Flexibility and the Art of Not Collapsing
an outside invasion. Given the difficulties organized
empires such as the Assyrians, Neo-Babylonians, and
the Persians faced in their own efforts to penetrate the
Delta with camels and warships, any organized invasion
should be ruled out. That Egypt received numerous
unwanted refuges in a time of drought, however, is
quite likely.
6 As the Egyptians would put it, ‘the desert is throughout
the land’ (Ipuwer 3.1; trans. Enmarch 2008, 223).
7 Ipuwer’s observation is perhaps pertinent: ‘O, yet the
many dead are buried in the river; the flood is a grave,
while the tomb had become a flood’ (Ipuwer 2.6–7, trans.
Enmarch 2008, 222).
doubtful (Reader 2017, 80–2). Given that the king was
certainly buried at Abydos, it is unlikely that he would
have been the sole Early Dynastic king to provide himself
with two tombs, though the notion that the Gisr
el-Mudir was intended to serve as a heb sed court or as
an arena to celebrate his reunification of the country is
intriguing (Regulski 2009, 227–8).
4 The fact that Taleb’s area of expertise lies in modern
finance rather than ancient Egypt is apparent from
his characterization of the pharaonic nation-state as
ephemeral (Taleb 2014, 96).
5 The exception to this rule is Karl Jansen-Winkeln (2010,
233–9), who argues that the Old Kingdom fell due to