"Another solid work of history from an author and historian who truly grasps the mysteries of ancient Egypt." - Kirkus Reviews
Drawing on a lifetime of research, John Romer chronicles the history of Ancient Egypt from the building of the Great Pyramid through the rise and fall of the Middle Kingdom: a peak of Pharaonic culture and the period when writing first flourished. Through extensive research over many decades of work, reveals how the grand narratives of 19th and 20th century Egyptologists have misled us by portraying a culture of cruel monarchs and chronic war. Instead, based in part on discoveries of the past two decades, this extraordinary account shows what we can really learn from the remaining architecture, objects, and writing: a history based on physical reality.
"Another solid work of history from an author and historian who truly grasps the mysteries of ancient Egypt." - Kirkus Reviews
Drawing on a lifetime of research, John Romer chronicles the history of Ancient Egypt from the building of the Great Pyramid through the rise and fall of the Middle Kingdom: a peak of Pharaonic culture and the period when writing first flourished. Through extensive research over many decades of work, reveals how the grand narratives of 19th and 20th century Egyptologists have misled us by portraying a culture of cruel monarchs and chronic war. Instead, based in part on discoveries of the past two decades, this extraordinary account shows what we can really learn from the remaining architecture, objects, and writing: a history based on physical reality.
A History of Ancient Egypt Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom
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A History of Ancient Egypt Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom
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"Another solid work of history from an author and historian who truly grasps the mysteries of ancient Egypt." - Kirkus Reviews
Drawing on a lifetime of research, John Romer chronicles the history of Ancient Egypt from the building of the Great Pyramid through the rise and fall of the Middle Kingdom: a peak of Pharaonic culture and the period when writing first flourished. Through extensive research over many decades of work, reveals how the grand narratives of 19th and 20th century Egyptologists have misled us by portraying a culture of cruel monarchs and chronic war. Instead, based in part on discoveries of the past two decades, this extraordinary account shows what we can really learn from the remaining architecture, objects, and writing: a history based on physical reality.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250030139 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Press |
| Publication date: | 03/07/2017 |
| Series: | A History of Ancient Egypt Series , #2 |
| Pages: | 672 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 2.30(d) |
About the Author
JOHN ROMER has worked in Egypt since 1966 on archaeological digs in many key sites, including the Valley of the King and Karnak. He led the Brooklyn Museum expedition to excavate the tomb of Ramasses XI. He wrote and presented a number of television series, including The Seven Wonders of the World, Romer's Egypt, Ancient Lives, and Testament. He lives in Tuscany, Italy.
Read an Excerpt
A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2
From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom
By John Romer
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2016 John RomerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-4959-4
CHAPTER 1
The Story up to Now
A History in Pyramids
After the Great Pyramid everything changed. The largest and most accurate stone block building ever made, it had been one of four similarly vast monuments that were erected in a hundred-year period at the middle of the third millennium BC. The first two of those gigantic structures were built during the lengthy reign of Sneferu; the third, the Great Pyramid with its extraordinary architectural refinement, in the reign of Khufu, his successor; the last, and the Great Pyramid's majestic partner on the Cairo skyline, for Khafre, probably one of Khufu's grandsons, who had ruled the region of the lower Nile from about 2540 BC. Apart from several other enormous building projects that were undertaken in the same span of time, those four great funerary monuments alone had consumed more than seventeen million tons of limestone. That is to say, for their completion within that single century, around 240 building blocks, each one weighing two and a half tons, would have had to have been set into their positions on one of those four great pyramids in the course of each and every working day.
Those four colossal monuments are the iconic products of the world's first-known state; a Bronze Age kingdom which had consisted of a royal residence with satellites and suppliers and myriad farming settlements set all along the flood plain of the lower Nile. With a combined population, so best estimates would currently suggest, of around a million people the logistics of provisioning the construction of those pyramids – a state-wide system of supply which had transported enormous tonnages of stone and copper, food and timber all up and down the great wide river – would have required the active participation of a large part of the population and put a strain upon the rest. When it was over, the enterprise had transformed the culture of the pharaonic state giving it a unique self confidence, a powerful and mature identity.
After those four great pyramids, a 300-year-long line of smaller royal pyramids was set along the ending of the river's valley one following the other. Together, they span the era that is now known as the Old Kingdom. Each of these lesser later pyramids was built for a different king and all of them were set within a fifteen-mile line stretching southwards from the latitude of modern Cairo down along the high western horizon of the Nile Valley into the sandy desert cemeteries of Saqqara. With their dimensions standardized at around one third of the Great Pyramid's enormous bulk and with their exterior angles and their internal architecture derived from those of the older and much larger pyramids, these later monuments are relatively similar. So Western histories, which are based on narratives of incident and progress, might well conclude that after the construction of those earlier, grander and more innovative monuments, ancient Egypt's history had slowed. What, in reality, had happened was that the focus of the pharaonic court had shifted.
After the four great pyramids, and for the first time in the history of pharaonic culture, all those earlier enterprises were reassessed: the courtly offices and the organizations responsible for their construction, classified, developed and described in a mass of texts and images. The age of continuous cultural innovation had passed forever: from now on that would no longer be the pharaonic way. Over the following two millennia, pharaonic history would take the form of a series of successive periods of dissolution, stasis and renewal accompanied by bouts of deliberation and elaboration, both literary and visual, on life and death within the state that the great pyramid makers had constructed. Along with a few remarkable adventures that would shake the court from top to bottom, the story of those reflections and renaissances comprises a most exotic history, one quite foreign to the modern world.
CHAPTER 2Writing Changes Everything
After 2540 BC, from about the same time that the court masons had started to build royal pyramids far smaller than before, the chapels of the courtiers' tombs which previously had been little more than decorated corridors set into rectangles of stone were expanded and embellished, a metamorphosis of architecture and decoration that grew till it comprised a series of impressive rooms. Several of these celebrated monuments – the tomb chapels of Tiy, Mereruka and Ptahhotep, for example, their shadowed walls covered with scenes of so-called 'daily life' – are now icons of pharaonic culture and firm fixtures on the tourist trail. Freestanding sculptures were also placed within these sumptuous chapels, many of considerable quality. And monumental written texts, which previously had been but sparely used, became a commonplace: texts describing the activities pictured in the reliefs covering the tomb chapels' walls; texts outlining schemes of offerings for the dead and describing lands and titles held or granted by the king; texts telling of a tomb's commissioning or recording an encounter or a correspondence with pharaoh.
About half way through those considerable processes of change, at around 2380 BC, the interior passages and chambers of the royal pyramids, which previously had not had a single image drawn upon their walls, were also engraved with hieroglyphic texts, a practice that continued down to the Old Kingdom's ending. These are the so-called 'Pyramid Texts' and they are the oldest-known body of texts to have survived from ancient Egypt.
Of themselves, the hieroglyphs that were engraved within the tomb chapels and pyramids were neither rare nor innovatory, having been employed for a wide variety of tasks for many centuries. Yet the hieroglyphs engraved within the pyramids were employed in a different manner from anything that had gone before, when for the most part those same signs had been used to record names and titles and simple lists of goods. If such a usage may be considered to have had a grammar, it was a grammar like that held by labelled goods upon a supermarket shelf; that is, the signs and words had mainly served as elements of identification and numeration in a system of stocking and supply which in the case of pharaonic Egypt had provisioned the families and dependents of the kings and the officials of the royal court. Seldom had such usage required the composition of whole sentences and only very seldom had one sentence followed another. By the mid point of the third millennium BC, however, in that turning world as the size of the royal pyramids diminished, the use of hieroglyphic was extended so that it could hold a self-contained writing system with a grammar that seems to have reproduced some elements of spoken language.
Though a few surviving earlier texts anticipate this remarkable development, traditional historians have long regarded this sudden eruption of words and writing within the monuments of the later Old Kingdom as the time when the curtains of the prehistoric past had parted to reveal the living world of ancient Egypt. The contemporary scribes and courtiers, upon the other hand, had not. They considered the previous and now largely silent era when the four colossal pyramids had been built as the age in which their courtly culture gained maturity. And so in later ages, prayers were composed to Sneferu that addressed him as a god and building blocks from the temples that had stood beside the four great pyramids were placed like seeds inside the bulk of smaller, later pyramids. Texts too, that were considered to have been composed in that epic age were regarded with a kind of awe. Ruefully addressing a blank sheet of papyrus, a tongue-tied scribe of later times writes that he hopes to find different words from those used by his ancestors, whilst a passage in another text tells how a king ordered some old scrolls to be spread out before him so that he could see how things should be done 'in a proper manner'. Even the so-called 'Instruction Texts' – compilations of saws and etiquette which list some of the manners of Old Kingdom court society in excruciating detail – defer to the near silent age of the colossal pyramids: the age, so it has recently been suggested, that had been anciently identified as the epitome of the pharaonic state within a century or so of its conclusion.
Given the prestige of the early pyramid-building kings, it is hardly surprising that the first lines of one of those Instruction Texts identifies its author as a prince named Hardjedef, a man whom other texts describe as a son of the Pharaoh Khufu, for whom the Great Pyramid of Giza had been built.
The beginning of the instruction which the hereditary prince and count, the king's son Hardjedef made for his son, named Au-ire. He says:
Reprove yourself in your own eyes in order that another man does not reprove you.
When you prosper, found your household and acquire for yourself a woman who is mistress of her heart, that a son will be born to you ...
In somewhat similar fashion, a passage from a Book of the Dead – from texts written to accompany the dead a thousand years and more after King Khufu's time – describes Prince Hardjedef as having rediscovered the text of a funerary rite that had previously been 'a great secret, unseen and unperceived'.
Such assertions need not be taken at face value. Before the age of printing and modern notions of authorship and copyright, literary attributions had different purposes and meanings from those that we assume today. In claiming ancient authorship, the authors of those later texts – whose literary styles alone show that they were writing many centuries after Khufu's time – may simply have been providing the words they were about to write with the gravitas of deep antiquity.
Yet once there really was a prince of Khufu's time named Hardjedef. His tomb still stands upon the Giza Plateau in the evening shadow of that pharaoh's pyramid. And as a few rare graffiti of 'the work gang [named] Khufu-is-drunk' that are painted on some of its building blocks attest, the prince's massive stone block tomb had been built by some of that king's pyramid makers.
In the manner of his times, Prince Hardjedef was interred underneath the centre of his tomb in a granite sarcophagus which had been lowered down a deep vertical shaft and set into a tiny rock-hewn chamber at the bottom. 'The body', so his excavators found in 1925, 'was intact and in position. Head east, lying on left side, contracted, hands straight out in front of pelvis. Tall old man. Backbone intact but carefully severed between 8th and 9th vertebra ... Skull had toppled over from neck and lay almost in position near south wall opposite the door.'
Hardjedef's tomb is but one of some 200 similarly enormous monuments – the so-called Giza mastabas – which in Khufu's day had been set across that windy plateau in sullen sandy grids. Many other members of the royal household were interred within those same vast cemeteries and in the same manner as Prince Hardjedef, yet most of them today are little more than the names that are inscribed upon their monuments. That single prince alone seems to have gained an aura of celebrity, and that within a century or so of his interment. For when the archaeologists were clearing drifted sand from the area around his tomb they came across the inscribed remnants of several modest monuments set up in later ages. And one of those memorials, after asking passers-by to recite a prayer so that a courtier named Kha could receive more offerings at his tomb, continues by describing Kha as 'one who adores Hardjedef'.
Writing had changed everything. A single prince who present records seem to show had lived and died in a pre-literary age had been transformed into an ageless literary personality. Nor was the potential of this new-found lease of life, this extra presence amongst the living, which previously would have depended on the continuous ration of offerings placed within his tomb chapel, lost on succeeding generations. For in the following millennium court scribes would proudly claim that, rather than colossal tombs, written words were by far the best memorials.
A man is dead; his corpse is in the ground. When all his family are laid in the earth, it is writing that lets him be remembered ... scrolls are more useful than a house or chapels on the west, they are more perfect than palace towers and longer-lasting than a monument within a temple.
Is there anyone here like Hardjedef? Is there another like Imhotep? [another literary personality] ... They are gone, their names might be forgotten but writings cause them to be remembered.
Prince Hardjedef makes several more appearances in later texts, most famously in the elegant calligraphic script of a papyrus – known now as the Papyrus Westcar, and written some five centuries after the prince's lifetime – that tells a series of tales which are all set in the fabled courts of the great pyramid-building kings. These literary courts are a far cry from the hard reality, the dust and haste that must have filled the offices of the overseers of the construction of the four great pyramids. These texts describe tranquil, even hedonistic, palaces, where furniture is made of gold and ebony, where boatloads of scantily clad virgins are set to row across a lake to tickle the royal fancy, and Prince Hardjedef plies the Nile upon a royal barge to bring soothsayers such as the learned Djedi to entertain the king. And after Djedi had performed prodigious acts of magic for his majesty and looked deep into his kingdom's future, Khufu commanded that he was to be sent to 'the house of the king's son Hardjedef, that he may dwell there with him, where his rations should be fixed at one thousand loaves of bread, one hundred jugs of beer, an ox, and one hundred bundles of vegetables. And they did all that His Majesty had commanded'.
Such stories are not as straightforward as they might first appear. Just as it has been observed of Flaubert's Egyptian Diaries that rather than simply recording a visit to nineteenth-century Egypt they are also an elaboration of the accounts of earlier European travellers to the Orient, so, too, the texts that mention Hardjedef are part of a pharaonic literary tradition.
And more than that. For just as Hardjedef, a prince of Khufu's court, lived on in ancient literary memory, so today his name appears in histories of ancient Egypt where, for the lack of any other information, the simple tales of the Papyrus Westcar are taken as a prime source of the history of the period. Hardly a single modern history book, indeed, describes the historical changes that followed the building of the four colossal pyramids without reference to the tales of the Papyrus Westcar. So this slimmest of novellas, written in a different age, has become a part of ancient Egypt's modern history, part of the history of that vital period in which the largest and most complex structures the ancient world would ever make were being erected and the fundamental structures of pharaonic culture were in the process of their definition.
So whilst Hardjedef the man is represented only by his bones and by a tomb upon the Giza Plateau that bears his name, Hardjedef the literary prince appears in both ancient Egyptian literature and also in modern histories as a great sage, as the pious author of religious texts and as a character in tales fit for the Brothers Grimm, in which it is assumed genuine dynastic politics are described. And every fresh-found occurrence of that prince's name, each new-found hieroglyphic epithet, adds weight and substance to this literary figure, whilst that enormous tomb upon the Giza Plateau underlines the fact that this complex, composite, largely literary figure is based, somehow, on cold hard fact.
To that extent, Prince Hardjedef is a perfect metaphor for modern histories of pharaonic culture. Just as the Old Testament, with its descriptions of camels and coinage, of slavery and international warfare, invests its descriptions of Bronze Age Palestine with the ills and angsts of Hellenistic Alexandria where it was compiled and edited, just as Shakespeare's kings are viewed through the politics and preoccupations of his own times, so too our modern histories of ancient Egypt are filled with sentiments and narratives of later times and other cultures. And by far the largest of these influences are from the ages in which egyptology itself was born, which, as with Flaubert's Diaries, was nineteenth-century Europe.
In large part this unusual situation is a product of the lack of any other information to contradict such parochial histories. None of the texts that have survived from ancient Egypt are written histories. All which has survived from that colossal wreck is a myriad of names, epithets and titles, letters, dockets and accounts and some tracts concerning ritual and the afterlife. That, and a few royal records and decrees and some fragments such as the Papyrus Westcar, form a so-called literary corpus that is so ill-preserved that its remnants are presently contained in one stout paperback.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2 by John Romer. Copyright © 2016 John Romer. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Preface xiii
Part 1 After the Great Pyramids - History and Hieroglyphs
1 The Story up to Now - A History in Pyramids 3
2 Writing Changes Everything 5
3 Reviving Hardjedef? 14
Part 2 Making 'Ancient Egypt' - Champollion and his Successors
4 In the Beginning 21
Mise en Scène 21
Lettre a M. Dacier 23
5 The Road to Memphis 30
Champollion in Turin 30
A Point of View 32
Ways and Means - The Innocence of Knowledge 34
Counting Kings - The Turin Canon 35
Counting Time - Into an Unknown Past 39
Champollion Triumphans 43
6 Aftermath 48
Three Kingdoms - The Chevalier Bunsen 48
Denkmäler - Professor Lepsius 51
The Legacy - Champollion's Ancient Egypt 54
Part 3 Old Kingdom - The Giza Kings, 2625-2500 BC
7 The Eloquence of Statues 63
The Giza Sphinx - Stone and History 63
Khafre and the Golden Hawk 65
Hard Histories - A Lineage of Statuary 69
Placing Pharaoh - The Figure at the Centre 73
8 Finding Menkaure - The Excavations of George Andrew Reisner, 1906-10 77
Pyramid Temple 77
Valley Temple 80
9 Royal Households 84
Kings and Queens 84
Queens and Goddesses 87
Mortal and Immortal 88
10 After Giza 91
Marking Time 91
The Palermo Stone and other Annals 92
Time Present and Time Past 96
Time and History 100
Part 4 Old Kingdom - Abusir and After, 2500-2200 BC
11 Abusir and Saqqara 105
Borchardt at Abusir 105
A History in Pyramids 109
Dissolution 112
Restoration 114
12 Meat, Bread and Stone - An Economy of Offering 119
Heliopolis 119
The Abusir Papyri 124
Sun Temples and Slaughterhouses 127
The Value and the Worth of Things 133
13 The Living Court 140
Per'a - The Palace 140
Constancy and Change 145
Modelling the Universe 148
14 The Living Kingdom 151
Copper and the Kings 151
Neki-ankh at Tihna 152
Visiting the Tombs 154
All Along the Valley 157
Scenes from Life 161
15 Cult and Kingdom 169
Of Courtly Cults 169
A History of Gods 173
Seen and Unseen 175
Part 5 Old Kingdom - Ancient Records, Ancient Lives
16 Papyrus to Stone 181
Letters from a King 181
Words and Writing 184
Brief Lives - The Savour of a Courtly Past 186
17 Writing in the Pyramids 194
After Abusir - A History in Pyramids 194
Into the Crypt 199
The Voice inside the Pyramid 203
18 The Dead and the Quick - Processing the Past 206
1880 AD - The Pyramid Texts Discovered 206
Stone to Paper - From Saqqara to Berlin 214
'Studiosus Philologiae' - The Conquest of the Past 218
Grammars and Dictionaries 220
Ancient Records, Modern Histories 224
19 Interpreting the Pyramids 227
Kurt Sethe and the Pyramid Texts 227
Timely Meditations 230
The Bones of the Hell-Hounds Tremble - Primitivism and the Berlin Seminars 232
Reading in the Dark 238
20 Look at Us! - Meet the Courtiers 240
Image and Presentation 240
Ranks and Titles 244
Ordering the Kingdom - Land and Society 249
The Court Abroad 256
Deserts, Boats and Donkeys - The Great Explorers 259
Rich and Richer - Weni of Abydos 273
Part 6 Interregnum -2200-2140 BC
21 Suddenly it Stops 281
History without Pyramids 281
Lamentations and Admonitions 284
Memphis, Herakleopolis and Thebes 287
Why the Centre Had Not Held 290
The Existential Smash-up 297
A Brave New Age - Ankhtifi at Mo'alla 299
Nomes and Nomarchs 303
Peace and War 305
Famine and Plenty 308
Tombs of the Times 309
A Very Local Festival 311
Part 7 Middle Kingdom - Remaking the State, 2140-1780 BC
22 Sema Towy - Binding the Kingdom 317
Names and Graves - A Chronology of Kings 317
The King, the Palace and the State - Designing a New Kingdom 321
At the Beginning - Eastern Thebes 326
Rising like Temples - Western Thebes 330
North to Itj-towy - Moving Close to Memphis 337
Heliopolis and Abydos - Re and Osiris 339
The Mansions of Amun-Re - The Festivals of Thebes 344
23 The Court of Thebes 354
The King's Men - Wadi el-Shatt el-Rigal 354
Sandstone and Limestone 357
Names and Titles 360
The Court Assembled - Western Thebes 363
The Royal Household 366
A Farmer's Archive - The Heqanakht Papyri 371
24 The Materials of State - The Court at Work 379
Copper - The Mines of Sinai 379
Incense - High Sahara 384
The Wonderful Things of Punt 387
Carnelian, Amethyst and Siltstone - The Egyptian Deserts 398
Alabaster - Beside the Nile 407
25 The Levant and Nubia 414
Travellers to an Antique Land 414
The Sinai Station - A Levantine Synthesis 424
Levantine Settlements - Amorites and Tell el-Dab'a 429
Nubian Fortresses 436
Part 8 Middle Kingdom - The Re-made State, 2000-1660 BC
26 The Court at Home 455
The Royal Settlement of Itj-towy 455
A Royal Audience 460
Feeding Pharaoh - Sustaining Itj-towy 464
Floods and the Fayum 469
27 Living in the State 478
Working for the State - The Thinis Dockyards 478
Housing by the State - The Settlement at el-Lahun 481
Community and Being 489
Epilogue - Reflections on a Golden Age 496
The Poetry of Craftsmanship - Middle Kingdom Material Culture 496
Images of Kings 501
Looking Back, Looking Forward - Senwosret III's Abydos Tomb 506
The Mind's Eye - Middle Kingdom Literature 512
Murdered by Eunuchs? - Modern History and Ancient Literature 515
The Ending 520
Chronology 523
Bibliography 527
List of Maps and Figures 607
List of Plates 617
Acknowledgements 619
Index 620