The First Intermediate Period: what happens when a state breaks down

The Old Kingdom of Egypt lasted for roughly five hundred years. Its kings built the great pyramids at Giza. Its government could send officials, tax collectors and work crews along a river valley more than a thousand kilometers long. Then, around 2181 BCE, that system came apart. Historians call the period that followed the First Intermediate Period. It lasted until about 2055 BCE. Today's lesson asks a simple but important question: what happens when a state breaks down? First, some vocabulary. A state is an organized government that claims authority over a territory and its people. A dynasty is a line of rulers from one family, or one ruling group, who follow each other on the throne. Egyptian history is divided into numbered dynasties. This system comes mostly from a priest named Manetho, who wrote in Greek about three hundred years before Christ. His original work is lost. We know it only through later writers who quoted it, so we must use it with care. The word "intermediate" simply means "in between." The First Intermediate Period lies between two periods of strong, unified rule: the Old Kingdom before it and the Middle Kingdom after it. It covers the Seventh and Eighth Dynasties, then the Ninth and Tenth, and the early part of the Eleventh. Every date in this lesson is approximate. A chronology is a system for dating the past, and different chronologies of Egypt differ by a few decades. A word about method before we begin. Historians do not only ask what happened. They also ask how we know. For this period, that second question is unusually hard. The state that produced so many records in the Old Kingdom was producing fewer. So we will keep returning to the evidence, because the limits of the evidence are part of the story. Let us start with the last great king of the Old Kingdom, Pepy II, of the Sixth Dynasty. He is famous for the length of his reign. Tradition says he ruled for more than ninety years. That figure comes from the Turin Canon and from Manetho. The Turin Canon is a king list, a document that names rulers in order and gives the length of each reign. It was written on papyrus, a paper-like material made from a river plant, many centuries after the Old Kingdom. Historians debate the ninety years. Some accept a very long reign. Others suspect the number is inflated or garbled in copying. Almost everyone agrees, though, that his reign was exceptionally long. Why does that matter? A king who rules for many decades outlives his sons, his heirs and many of his advisers. When he finally dies, the question of who should succeed him can become confused. After Pepy II, the sources show short and poorly documented reigns. We do not know the exact order or length of these kings. That uncertainty is itself a clue. When a state is working well, it records its kings carefully. When the record becomes thin, something has usually gone wrong. Why did the state weaken? Scholars point to several causes that interacted. No single cause is accepted by everyone, and a good historian is suspicious of any story that offers only one. Let us take the causes one at a time, and then ask how they fit together. The first cause is decentralization. This means that power moves away from the center and toward the regions. Egypt was divided into provinces, which the Greeks later called nomes. Each was governed by an official called a nomarch, a provincial governor. In the early Old Kingdom, these officials were appointed by the king and could be moved or replaced. Their careers depended on the crown. But over the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, something changed. Provincial offices increasingly became hereditary. That word means that an office passes from parent to child, like a family property, and not by royal choice. At the same time, officials began to be buried in their home provinces, instead of near the king's pyramid. Archaeologists treat burial place as evidence, and here is why. To be buried beside the king was to show that your status came from him. To be buried at home, in a grand tomb among your own people, was to say that you were a local leader in your own right. So the change in tombs points to a change in loyalty and power. The center was becoming weaker, and the provinces stronger. Notice that this was a slow process, running across perhaps two centuries. It was not a sudden revolt. The state was not hit from outside. It was gradually hollowed out from within. The second cause is the cost of royal patronage. Patronage means giving wealth, land or privileges to people in return for their support. Egyptian kings needed to do this. Pyramids were enormously expensive. Each pyramid stood in a complex that included temples, and each complex had a mortuary cult. A mortuary cult is a group of priests and workers who provide offerings to a dead king, so that his spirit can live on. These cults were meant to last forever, so they needed land and income forever. To support them, kings granted tax exemptions to temples and to funerary foundations. A tax exemption means freedom from a duty to pay, or to provide labor. Each exemption helped the person who received it. But each also reduced what the crown could collect. Over generations, the king gave away part of the very wealth that made him powerful. This is a common problem in the history of states. A government may weaken itself by buying loyalty with permanent privileges. A one-time payment can be stopped. A permanent exemption cannot easily be taken back, because taking it back looks like an attack on the gods or on the dead. Notice how the first two causes connect. As the provinces grew stronger, the king needed to keep their loyalty, and one way to do so was with grants and privileges. Those grants drained the royal income. A smaller income made it harder to control the provinces. So the problems fed each other. Historians call this kind of pattern a feedback loop, where one change strengthens the next. The third cause is climate, and here we must be especially careful. Many scholars link the end of the Old Kingdom to a period of low Nile floods and growing dryness around 2200 BCE. Egypt depends on the Nile flood. Each summer, rain far to the south raises the river. The water spreads over the fields and leaves behind rich black soil. Farmers then plant their crops. If the flood is too low, less land can be planted, and the harvest is smaller. Several years of low floods in a row could bring famine. Researchers have found evidence of a dry period across a wide region, often called the 4.2 kiloyear event. A kiloyear is a thousand years, so the name means "the event of about 4,200 years ago." The evidence comes from climate proxies. A proxy is an indirect clue, such as chemical traces in lake sediments, that lets scientists estimate past conditions. Nobody measured rainfall in 2200 BCE, so proxies are the only way to know. This theory is influential, but it is debated. Some historians argue that it is overstated. They note that the dating of climate evidence is not always precise enough to match it neatly with political events. They also stress that the political weakening of the crown seems to have begun well before the dry period. So a fair summary is this. Low floods may have made a weak state weaker. But many historians would put political explanations first, and treat climate as a possible pressure and not the sole cause. This is a good example of a general rule. A natural disaster hurts a strong state and a weak state differently. A strong government can store grain, move food and keep order. A weak one cannot. The fourth cause, as we saw, is the succession problem after the very long reign of Pepy II. Put these four together. A crown with shrinking income. Provincial families with growing independence. Possibly a run of poor harvests. And a royal line in confusion. No one of these has to be a catastrophe. Together, they make a state very fragile. Now let us look at the period after the Old Kingdom. The Seventh and Eighth Dynasties continued to claim kingship from Memphis, the old capital, near modern Cairo. The sources for them are poor. Manetho, as preserved by later writers, gives a famous figure for the Seventh Dynasty: seventy kings who ruled for seventy days. This cannot be literally true. Most historians read it as a garbled memory of very rapid turnover, with many short reigns and rulers who left almost no record. The exact order and length of these kings remain uncertain, and we should say so plainly. The Eighth Dynasty is somewhat better documented. Some of its kings appear in the Abydos King List. This is a list of royal names carved on a temple wall at Abydos, a sacred city in southern Egypt. It was made in the New Kingdom, many centuries later. So it is a later source, and it may be selective. A few monuments from the period also survive. One of the best known is a decree of a king named Demedjibtawy, found at Coptos, a town in Upper Egypt. Here we should explain two terms. Upper Egypt is the southern part of the country, up the river. Lower Egypt is the northern part, near the Mediterranean Sea, including the Delta where the Nile spreads out. The names can seem backward, but they follow the flow of the Nile, which runs from south to north. The Coptos decrees are valuable because they show kings still trying to rule. A decree is a formal royal order. These texts show kings issuing orders and protecting officials in Upper Egypt, far from Memphis. Think about what this tells us. The kings still claimed authority over the whole land. They still used the old forms of royal command. But a decree carved in stone is also a sign that obedience could no longer be taken for granted. The reach of the kings at Memphis was shrinking, even while their claims stayed large. Next, the country divided between rival centers. Around 2160 BCE, a line of rulers based at Herakleopolis took control of northern and middle Egypt. Herakleopolis lay near the entrance to the Fayum, a fertile depression west of the Nile. Modern historians call these rulers the Ninth and Tenth Dynasties. In the south, another family rose at Thebes, in the region of modern Luxor. Its early rulers were named Intef. Historians number them Intef I, II and III, and they belong to the early Eleventh Dynasty. They began as local leaders and gradually extended their control over more of southern Egypt. So Egypt now had two centers of power. The north was held from Herakleopolis. The south was increasingly held from Thebes. Between them lay the middle of the country, and there the two sides came into conflict. This conflict is documented especially around Abydos and around Asyut. Asyut was a major provincial center, and its nomarchs were loyal to Herakleopolis. Their tombs contain long texts, and these are among our best sources for the northern side of the struggle. Two of these rulers are named Tefibi and Khety. We need to understand what kind of text these are. They are autobiographical inscriptions. That means texts in which a tomb owner tells the story of his own life and achievements, carved on his tomb wall. Their purpose is to praise the owner and to show the gods and visitors that he deserves a good afterlife. So they tell us how these men wanted to be remembered, not necessarily what exactly happened. Still, they show something important. Provincial rulers could be powerful, loyal to a distant king by choice and not just by obedience, and ready to fight. War was a real part of the age. This brings us to the central question of evidence. Historians distinguish between primary and secondary sources. A primary source is a document or object created at the time being studied. A secondary source is a later account, or a modern study, that interprets earlier evidence. For the First Intermediate Period, the primary sources are mostly provincial tombs and their inscriptions, a few royal decrees, and archaeological finds such as pottery and burials. The later sources include Manetho and the king lists. The balance is unusual. In the Old Kingdom, the royal pyramids and their records dominate. Here, it is local people who speak to us, because the center no longer does. The most vivid of these voices is Ankhtifi. His tomb is at Mo'alla, in southern Egypt. He was a nomarch who came to govern several districts, and his tomb inscriptions are among the most famous documents of the period. He describes a famine. He says that Upper Egypt was dying of hunger. At the same time, he says that he fed his own district, and then gave grain to neighboring districts as well. He presents himself as a savior of his people. Here we must be careful. This is a boast carved on a tomb wall. Ankhtifi had every reason to exaggerate his own generosity and the suffering around him. Even so, the text is strong evidence that food shortages were serious in at least part of the south, and that a local leader could gain prestige by managing them. It also shows how politics worked in a time of weak kingship. A king's basic duty was to feed and protect his people. When the king could not do that, a governor who could might win their loyalty instead. This is how power can move from a center to the regions. It does not always move through rebellion. Sometimes it moves because local leaders simply do the work that the center no longer does. The tomb of another official, Hetepi, at El-Kab, also belongs to this age and adds to our picture of provincial life. Alongside the tombs, there is a group of literary works that seem to reflect the period. Literature here means texts composed as writing, such as speeches, dialogues and poems, rather than practical records like decrees or accounts. The best known is the Admonitions of Ipuwer. In it, a speaker describes a country turned upside down. The river is full of blood. People are hungry. Servants take the place of masters. Tombs are robbed. The Prophecies of Neferti also describe a land in disorder, and predict that a king will come from the south and restore order. The Instruction for Merikare is a text of advice addressed to a king of Herakleopolis. In it, an older king gives guidance to his son and reflects on his own mistakes. And the Dispute between a Man and His Ba is a dialogue in which a person, weary of life, argues with his own soul. The ba was one part of a person in Egyptian belief, often shown as a bird with a human head. These works are rich, but they raise a serious problem. When were they written? This is debated. Some may come from the First Intermediate Period itself. But several, especially Ipuwer and Neferti, may be Middle Kingdom compositions. If so, they are not eyewitness reports of the collapse. They may use the memory of collapse as a literary theme, and as a way to deliver a political message. A Middle Kingdom king, for example, could be shown as the one who rescued Egypt from chaos. The promised savior from the south in Neferti can be read that way. A historian who reads such a text has to ask: is this a report of what happened, or a work meant to persuade? The honest answer is that we do not know the exact dates of these works, and scholars still argue about them. This leads to the question of what breakdown actually looked like. The texts offer a dramatic picture of famine, violence and social inversion. Social inversion means that the normal order of rank is reversed, so that the poor rule and the powerful fall. Egyptians feared this deeply, because their idea of a good world depended on order. They called that order maat, a word often translated as truth, justice or right balance. A king's duty was to uphold maat. When the king failed, disorder seemed to follow. So Egyptian writers had a strong reason to describe a weak state as a world turned upside down. This does not make their descriptions false. But it means the descriptions were shaped by a way of thinking, and scholars caution against reading such laments literally. Archaeology gives a more mixed picture, and it works as a useful check on the texts. It shows that the period was not a total cultural collapse. Local centers flourished. Provincial art and pottery developed regional styles, rather than copying the royal workshops of Memphis. Burial goods became more widely available. So hardship was real in some places, such as the famine described by Ankhtifi. In other places there is evidence of continuing prosperity. The correct picture is uneven, not uniformly dark. This is a good lesson for any student of history. A written lament and a buried pot can tell different stories, and a careful historian puts them side by side. One of the most important developments was religious. In the Old Kingdom, a collection of spells for the afterlife, called the Pyramid Texts, was carved inside royal pyramids. In the First Intermediate Period and after, spells of a similar kind appear on the coffins of people who were not kings. These are called the Coffin Texts. They developed from the older Pyramid Texts, and they expanded access to afterlife beliefs beyond the king. Some scholars describe this as the democratization of the afterlife. The phrase means that something once reserved for a king spread to many more people. But that term is itself debated. Democracy means rule by the people, and the people who could afford a coffin covered in written spells were still a limited group. So many historians prefer to say that access widened, and to avoid suggesting that everyone gained an equal place. Even so, the change reveals something. When the king's power weakened, his special religious privileges were also taken up by others. Political change and religious change moved together. Now we can see why historians disagree about the label "collapse." The older view, rooted in the Egyptian texts, saw a dark age of chaos. In that view, a great civilization fell into anarchy and then recovered. The modern view is more cautious. It stresses decentralization, which is the shift of power to local centers, and regional experimentation, in which provinces developed their own styles and leaders. It sees real hardship in some places and prosperity in others. Debates continue about the role of climate, about the reliability of the literary sources, and about how far the period should be called a collapse and how far a reorganization. Notice that the two words carry different judgments. A collapse is a loss. A reorganization can be a change of form, and even a gain. The truth probably lies in between, and it probably depended on where you lived and who you were. Finally, we come to the reunification. The long conflict between Herakleopolis and Thebes was eventually won by the south. The decisive ruler was Mentuhotep II of the Eleventh Dynasty. His reunification of the country is usually dated to about 2055 BCE, though this date, like all the others, is approximate. His campaigns are not recorded in the detail we would like, and historians reconstruct them from scattered evidence. But by the end of his reign Egypt again had one king. His rule marks the start of the Middle Kingdom. Notice something about how this ending happened. The new unity did not come from the old center at Memphis. It came from a provincial family at Thebes, one of the regional powers that the breakdown had created. In a sense, the decentralization of the earlier period produced the leaders who later put the country back together. That is a reminder that breakdown and recovery are not always opposites. Sometimes the same forces drive both. What should we learn from this period? First, states do not usually fail for one reason. Here, a weakening crown, rising provincial power, the cost of royal patronage, a problem of succession, and possibly drought all combined. Second, the loss of central power does not mean the end of society. Egyptians kept farming, burying their dead, writing and believing in maat. They organized themselves locally, and some of them thrived. Third, the sources must be read critically. A boast on a tomb wall and a lament in a poem are both shaped by the purpose of their authors. The skill of the historian is not only to collect such texts but to ask who made them, when, and why. And fourth, we should be honest about what we do not know. The dates, the order of the kings of the Seventh and Eighth Dynasties, and the dates of key literary works all remain uncertain. This leads directly to our next lesson, on the Middle Kingdom and the idea of recovery. There we will ask how the kings who reunited Egypt rebuilt the state, how they dealt with the powerful provincial families, and how memories of the breakdown shaped their ideas of kingship. The First Intermediate Period was not only an ending. It was also the experience from which the next age of Egypt was built.