The Middle Kingdom and the idea of recovery

Lesson A ended with the Old Kingdom breaking apart and Egypt entering the First Intermediate Period. This lesson begins where that one stops. It asks a harder question than "what happened next?" It asks what recovery actually means. When a state comes back after a collapse, is it the old state returning? Or is it something new that wears old clothes? Egyptian kings of the Middle Kingdom said they were restoring the past. Modern historians are not so sure. Let us look at the evidence and decide how far the claim holds. First, some vocabulary. A kingdom, in Egyptian history, is a long period of strong rule by a unified state. The Middle Kingdom runs from about 2055 BCE to about 1650 BCE. Many scholars focus on its core, which is the reunification under the Eleventh Dynasty and the Twelfth Dynasty, ending around 1800 BCE. The Thirteenth Dynasty is a weaker coda, a closing section. As in Lesson A, every date here is approximate. Different chronologies differ by a few decades. We begin in the south. After central authority fragmented, Egypt was held together only by local power. A nomarch was a provincial governor, the ruler of a region called a nome. In the Old Kingdom, nomarchs were royal officials. In the First Intermediate Period, many became hereditary lords, passing their office to their sons. By about 2100 BCE, two large powers faced each other. In the north and middle of the country stood a line of kings based at Herakleopolis. Historians call them the Ninth and Tenth Dynasties. In the south stood a family based at Thebes, today the city of Luxor. This was the Eleventh Dynasty. Its early rulers were several men named Intef. Thebes was then a modest provincial town. It would later become one of the great cities of the ancient world. The man who ended the war was Nebhepetre Mentuhotep II. He ruled for about fifty-one years. Historians usually place his defeat of Herakleopolis around his thirty-ninth year, so roughly 2055 BCE. How do we know about the war? We have inscriptions that record the Theban victory. We also have a striking archaeological find. At Deir el-Bahri, on the west bank of the Nile at Thebes, the American archaeologist Herbert Winlock found a tomb holding the bodies of about sixty soldiers. They had died in battle, probably during an assault on a fortress. Their bodies had been wrapped and buried together with honor. This is physical evidence of the fighting. It does not tell us which battle it was, so we must be careful not to attach it too firmly to one campaign. Mentuhotep II also changed how he presented himself. Every Egyptian king had a Horus name, one of several official names, which identified him as the earthly form of the falcon god Horus. Mentuhotep II changed his Horus name more than once during his reign. One later form announced him as the uniter of the Two Lands. The Two Lands means Upper and Lower Egypt, the south and the north. The name was a statement of purpose. The king claimed to have made Egypt one again. His great monument shows how mixed the new age was. At Deir el-Bahri he built a mortuary complex, a group of buildings meant to serve a king's tomb and his cult after death. It used terraces and colonnades, which are rows of columns. It may have had a central mass of masonry, but scholars disagree about what stood there. It was not a classic pyramid. It looked to the Theban landscape and to local building traditions. The complex also held chapels and tombs for royal women. Mentuhotep II appears in art in different guises. Sometimes he wears the red crown of the north. Sometimes he is shown with the dark skin and wrapped form associated with Osiris. Osiris was the god of the dead and of renewal. This is a hint of something important. The king was a victorious soldier, but he also wanted to be seen as a figure of regeneration, a word meaning the making of new life. His successors, Mentuhotep III and Mentuhotep IV, ruled for shorter times. Then the dynasty ends in obscurity. We have little clear evidence about how. Next we meet a man named Amenemhat. An inscription from the reign of Mentuhotep IV names a vizier by that name. A vizier was the highest official under the king, in charge of justice and administration. This vizier led an expedition to the Wadi Hammamat, a desert valley where fine stone was quarried. Many historians think this vizier became King Amenemhat I, founder of the Twelfth Dynasty. That is an inference, not a proven fact. The name is the same and the timing fits, but no document says so directly. If it is true, a bureaucrat took the throne. That would be a notable event in a society that said kingship came from the gods. Amenemhat I ruled from about 1985 to 1956 BCE. He made a decision that tells us much about his plans. He built a new capital. He called it Itjtawy, meaning "Seizer of the Two Lands." The site has not been located with certainty. It lay near the entrance to the Faiyum, a fertile depression west of the Nile, and probably close to the modern village of Lisht, where he built his pyramid. Notice the choice. Thebes was the home of his predecessors, but he moved north, to the point where the narrow valley meets the Delta. From there a king could control both halves of the country. The name of the city itself is a political claim. His pyramid at Lisht is also revealing. Excavators found that it used blocks taken from Old Kingdom monuments, including some from the Giza and Saqqara areas. Its design copied older royal tombs, with a casing, a causeway, and a temple. The reuse of old stone could mean respect. It could also mean convenience. Historians read it both ways, and we should hold both readings. What is clear is that the Twelfth Dynasty looked back to the Old Kingdom for its models. Relief carving of the period also echoes the styles of Memphis, the old capital. This is the visible side of the claim that Egypt was being restored. Now we reach a source that shows what the claim was for. The Prophecies of Neferti is a literary text. It is set in the reign of the Fourth Dynasty king Snefru, long before. A wise man named Neferti is summoned and asked to foretell the future. He describes a land in chaos. The Nile is dry, the sun is veiled, and the order of society is upside down. Then he announces that a king will come from the south, a man named Ameny, son of a woman from Nubia. Ameny is the short form of Amenemhat. This king will drive out enemies, and, in the text's words, order will be restored and disorder will be driven out. Here we meet two key Egyptian ideas. Maat was the order of the world, a word covering truth, justice and balance. Isfet was its opposite, meaning disorder, falsehood and chaos. The king's task was to uphold maat and defeat isfet. Neferti is a prophecy written after the event, a device we call prophecy after the fact. The author pretends to predict what has already happened. It is widely read as propaganda, which means material meant to shape opinion for a political aim. Its aim was to show that Amenemhat I, a man who may not have been of royal birth, was the rightful savior. The text does not say he seized the throne. It says he was fated to rule. This leads to one of the biggest debates in the field. Several Middle Kingdom texts describe a country in collapse. The Admonitions of Ipuwer describes a land where the poor become rich, the rich are hungry, and the river is full of blood. The Instruction for Merikare, which is advice from a Herakleopolitan king to his son, speaks of war and damage in the land. Older scholarship treated these as eyewitness accounts of social revolution. The idea was that the First Intermediate Period was a time of terrible upheaval. More recent scholars, including Gerald Kadish and Richard Parkinson, argue that these are literary works. They say the texts use the image of chaos as a theme, in the way later writers use storms or plagues. In this reading, describing chaos was a way to praise order. The texts show us how the Egyptians thought, but they are not simple reports. Another view holds a middle position. The authors may have exaggerated, yet they drew on real memory of hardship. We have some independent evidence. Tomb inscriptions from nomarchs of the period boast of feeding their people during famine. One example is Ankhtifi of Mo'alla, who claims he fed his region while others starved. Boasts are also not neutral. But they suggest real hunger was possible. So the careful answer is this. Hardship was probably real, but the dramatic picture of total collapse belongs partly to literature and politics. Lesson A touched on this problem. Here it matters because the Twelfth Dynasty gained legitimacy from the picture of chaos it claimed to have cured. Amenemhat I's reign ended violently. We know this from a text called the Instruction of Amenemhat. In it, the dead king speaks to his son Senusret. He describes waking at night after his evening meal and finding armed men attacking him. The text appears to be written for Senusret, to support his succession, and it is a literary work, so we cannot treat every detail as fact. Yet the Story of Sinuhe, our next source, supports the idea of a crisis. Sinuhe is an official in the entourage of Senusret, who is away on campaign in Libya. News arrives that the old king has died. Sinuhe overhears something, panics, and flees the country. He lives for many years among people in the Levant, the lands along the eastern Mediterranean, today Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine. He prospers there, marries a chief's daughter, and fights a duel with a local champion. But in old age he longs to be buried in Egypt. The king invites him home, and he returns to honor and a proper tomb. Sinuhe is among the most loved works of Egyptian writing. It is also a political statement. It shows a king who forgives and welcomes, and it says that life outside Egypt, however rich, is empty without burial in the homeland. It also gives glimpses of real contact with the Levant. As a story it is not history, but it reflects a world of travel and exchange. Senusret I, who succeeded his father around 1956 BCE, took a step to avoid another crisis. He ruled with his father for some years. This is called a co-regency, an arrangement in which two kings reign together, usually a king and his chosen heir. The aim was to make succession safe, because the heir was already crowned when the old king died. Several Twelfth Dynasty kings seem to have used it. But historians debate some cases. Dates carved on monuments sometimes fit a co-regency, yet they can be read in other ways. So we say that the practice is well supported for some reigns and uncertain for others. The dynasty reached its height with two kings in the nineteenth century BCE. Senusret III ruled from about 1878 to 1839 BCE. Amenemhat III ruled from about 1860 to 1814 BCE. The overlap in these dates reflects the uncertainty of chronology and possibly a co-regency, which is debated. Under these two the state seems at its most confident. Look first at Nubia. Nubia is the region south of Egypt, along the Nile in what is now southern Egypt and northern Sudan. It was a source of gold, stone, and trade goods from deeper in Africa. The Twelfth Dynasty built a chain of great fortresses near the Second Cataract, a rocky stretch of rapids that made river travel difficult. Buhen, Semna and Mirgissa are the best known. Their walls were thick, with ditches, bastions, and carefully planned gates. Excavations show that they were not just forts. They also served as trading posts and customs points. At Semna, Senusret III set up a boundary stele, an upright carved stone slab. It forbids Nubians from sailing north past the fort, except for those coming to trade. It also boasts about the king's courage and calls any son of his who keeps the border not his son. The words are those of a king who wants to be seen as tough. Yet the policy also tells us something practical. Egypt was controlling the flow of people and goods. We also have the Semna dispatches. These are reports on papyrus from the frontier. They record the movements of Nubian groups and the watching of desert paths. They show a state that gathered information and sent it up a chain of command. Such sources are rare and precious, because most of our texts are monuments written for kings, not working papers. Now look at the home front. Amenemhat III led a large project in the Faiyum. This was a lake basin fed by a channel from the Nile. Engineers regulated the flow and reclaimed land, which means turning marsh or lake edge into farmland. This increased the area under cultivation. Amenemhat III built pyramids at Dahshur and Hawara, and his Hawara complex was later so large that Greek writers called it the Labyrinth. We know this from classical authors such as Herodotus. They saw it centuries later, and their descriptions come with the usual limits of travelers' reports. The deeper change was in administration. Here the claim of restoration begins to look thin. Bureaucracy means a system of officials who carry out the work of government under set rules and ranks. In the Old Kingdom, high posts often went to royal relatives. In the Middle Kingdom, the bureaucracy grew and seems to have been more open to men of lower rank. Titles multiplied. The vizier, the treasurer, and many overseers managed fields, labor, and storehouses. Papyri such as the Reisner Papyri, which record work gangs and building projects, show the detail of this management. An older view spoke of a "rise of the middle class," as if a new social group took power. Most scholars now think that phrase overstates the case. There clearly were more middle-ranking officials, and we see them in the records. But the idea of a class with its own interests is hard to prove. What about the nomarchs? In the early Twelfth Dynasty, nomarchs were still powerful. Their huge rock-cut tombs at sites such as Beni Hasan, Deir el-Bersha and Meir are full of paintings and long biographical texts. The nomarch Khnumhotep at Beni Hasan records his family's position and even shows a group of Asiatic visitors arriving with eye paint. But after the reign of Senusret III, these grand provincial tombs stop appearing. The old hereditary governors seem to fade. Did the king deliberately break them? Some historians think so, and see a centralizing policy. Others argue that the change was gradual, and that officials were being drawn to the court, so that careers moved away from the provinces. The evidence is a silence, the absence of tombs, and silences are hard to read. What we can say is that by the late dynasty, power sat more clearly with the king and his officials. This brings us to the heart of the question. Was the Middle Kingdom a recovery? In some ways, yes. The country was reunited. The pyramids returned. Art looked back to Memphis. The king again commanded labor and resources across the whole valley. But there are good reasons to call it a new creation. The capital moved. The king's image changed. Older royal statues show a calm, ageless face. Statues of Senusret III show a lined, heavy-eyed face that looks tired and burdened. Scholars debate what that means. Some see a new realism about the cost of rule. Others see a carefully chosen image of a watchful king. Either way, it differs sharply from the Old Kingdom. The idea of kingship also shifted. In the Old Kingdom, the king was close to a god, distant and remote. In Middle Kingdom texts he is often a shepherd, someone who cares for his flock. A shepherd's duty is to feed and protect. This idea of duty, of the king answering for the welfare of his people, grew stronger after the experience of breakdown. It does not mean kings became gentle. Senusret III's boundary stele is not gentle. But the language of responsibility is new in emphasis. Religion changed as well. Abydos, in Upper Egypt, was the cult center of Osiris. During the Middle Kingdom it became a place of pilgrimage. Many people set up small stelae there, hoping to share in the god's festivals after death. At the same time, the Coffin Texts appear. These are spells written on the insides of coffins, descended from the older Pyramid Texts. The Pyramid Texts had been for kings alone. Now officials and others used similar spells to guide them through the afterlife. Scholars sometimes call this a "democratization" of the afterlife. That word is useful but risky. Only people who could afford a painted coffin had access. So it widened the circle without opening it to everyone. Still, it shows that something once reserved for the king was now claimed by others, perhaps as a result of the collapse of royal monopoly. Egypt also looked outward. Expeditions went to the Sinai for turquoise, a blue-green stone prized for jewelry. They went to the Wadi Hammamat for stone, and by sea to Punt, a land on the Red Sea coast whose exact location is debated, for incense and goods. Evidence from Byblos, a port in modern Lebanon, shows Egyptian objects and links to local rulers. Execration texts are a further source. These are lists of enemy names, written on pottery or figures and then smashed in a ritual meant to destroy them by magic. They list rulers and places in Nubia and the Levant, and so they give us a rough map of how Egypt saw its neighbors. People from the Levant, whom Egyptians called Asiatics, also moved into the eastern Delta in growing numbers. Many came to work, trade, or serve. This slow settlement set the stage for later events at a site called Avaris. The dynasty ended without drama. Amenemhat IV ruled briefly. Then Sobekneferu, a daughter of Amenemhat III, took the throne around 1806 BCE and ruled for under four years. She is the first woman whose reign as king is securely attested. We know her from monuments and from king lists. After her the Twelfth Dynasty ended, perhaps for lack of a male heir, though we cannot be sure. The Thirteenth Dynasty, from about 1800 to 1650 BCE, is harder to understand. Many kings ruled, often for only a few years. Yet the administration kept working for a time. Viziers and officials seem to have given stability even when kings changed fast. This shows how far the state now rested on the bureaucracy and not only on the person of the king. Eventually, control weakened. Rulers in the Delta, people of Asiatic origin whom historians call the Hyksos, took power in the north and formed the Fifteenth Dynasty. The Second Intermediate Period began. Historians have proposed causes. Some point to low Nile floods, which would cut harvests. Others point to weak succession or to growing migration into the Delta. None of these is firmly established, and several may have worked together. Let us return to our question. The Middle Kingdom was a recovery in the sense that Egypt was reunited and strong again. It was a new creation in how it ruled, how it described the king, and how it opened religion to more people. Its greatest skill may have been in telling the story. By describing the past as chaos and itself as the cure, it made change feel like a return. That is a lesson for any student of history. Those who build the new often claim to restore the old, because the old carries authority. This also prepares us for the next step. The Middle Kingdom ended, as the Old Kingdom had, in fragmentation. A second breakdown raises a new question about how Egypt reacted to the Hyksos in the north and to powers in Nubia in the south. The answer will lead us to the rise of the New Kingdom, and to a very different Egypt with chariots, empire and great conquering kings.