History of ancient Egypt

• 1. Introduction

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  The history of ancient Egypt stretches from the earliest nomadic hunter-gatherers sheltering along the Nile during the Pleistocene all the way to Cleopatra VII, whose death in 30 BC brought nearly three thousand years of pharaonic civilization to a close. That span is almost impossible to hold in the mind at once. How did a loose scatter of riverside settlements become the most recognizable civilization in the ancient world? What forces caused it to collapse, rebuild, and collapse again? And what exactly happened in those final centuries when foreign kings one after another declared themselves sons of Egyptian gods? Those are the threads this documentary will pull.

• 2. Before the Pharaohs

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  Along the Nile in the 12th millennium BC, people were already grinding grain using the earliest type of sickle blades, a sharp break from the hunting and fishing cultures that preceded them. Rock carvings and artefacts left along Nile terraces and in oases are nearly all that survives of these early inhabitants.

  Geological evidence and computer climate modeling point to natural climate changes around the 8th millennium BC as the event that gradually dried out the extensive pastoral lands of North Africa. By the 25th century BC, the Sahara had fully formed. That slow desiccation pushed the ancestors of the Egyptians toward the Nile more permanently, nudging them away from seasonal movement and toward settled life.

  The oldest known domesticated cattle remains in Africa come from the Faiyum, dated to around 4400 BC. By the 6th millennium, Nile society was organized enough to engage in large-scale agriculture and to construct substantial buildings; mortar was in use by the 4th millennium. Barley and emmer wheat were raised and stored in pits lined with reed mats, alongside cattle, goats, and pigs. Linen was woven.

  From around 4500 BC, the Tasian culture appeared in Upper Egypt. Its name comes from the burials found at Deir Tasa, on the east bank of the Nile between Asyut and Akhmim. The Tasians produced the earliest known blacktop-ware: pottery painted black on its top and interior. The Badari culture followed, refining the same pottery tradition; its sites are Chalcolithic rather than Neolithic, a distinction significant enough that scholars resist merging the two cultures entirely.

  The Amratian culture, named after the site of El-Amrah about 120 km south of Badari, brought a new ceramic tradition called white cross-line ware alongside continuing blacktop production. More strikingly, trade networks were already operating: a stone vase from the north appeared at el-Amreh, and copper not native to Egypt was apparently imported from the Sinai Peninsula or Nubia. Obsidian and small amounts of gold came definitively from Nubia during this period.

  The Gerzeh culture, or Naqada II, followed and is widely regarded as the period when the foundation for ancient Egypt was truly laid. Cities of around 5,000 residents grew from larger settlements. Adobe replaced earlier construction materials. Copper increasingly displaced stone for tools and weapons. Silver, gold, and lapis lazuli imported from Badakhshan in present-day Afghanistan were used ornamentally. By the 33rd century BC, the land had resolved into two distinct kingdoms: Upper Egypt to the south and Lower Egypt to the north, divided roughly at the area of modern Cairo.

• 3. Unification and the Old Kingdom

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  Around 3150 BC, Egypt became a unified state. According to Egyptian tradition, the first king was Menes, said to have joined Upper and Lower Egypt. Archaeological findings complicate that picture: the Narmer Palette, the most famous evidence for unification, records a ruler named Narmer as the final king of the Naqada III period and the first to claim both lands. Menes is now thought by many scholars to have been one of the titles of Hor-Aha, the second pharaoh of the First Dynasty.

  Prior to unification, autonomous villages occupied the land. With the early dynasties, the country was reorganized under royal governors, and the pharaoh became the organizing center of Egyptian life. This culture, with its art, architecture, customs, and social structure all closely tied to religion, proved remarkably stable and changed little over nearly 3,000 years.

  The Old Kingdom is generally dated from the Third Dynasty through the Sixth, spanning roughly 2686 to 2181 BC. Its royal capital was Memphis, where Djoser, who reigned from 2630 to 2611 BC, established his court. Djoser is also credited with ordering the construction of the first pyramid, the Pyramid of Djoser, in the necropolis of Saqqara.

  The Old Kingdom reached its zenith under the Fourth Dynasty. Sneferu, its founder, is believed to have commissioned at least three pyramids and moved more stone and brick than any other pharaoh. His son Khufu erected the Great Pyramid of Giza. Khufu's son Khafre and grandson Menkaure completed the Giza pyramid complex. Recent excavations near the pyramids, led by Mark Lehner, uncovered a large city that appears to have housed, fed, and supplied the pyramid workers. Those workers, it is now understood, were not slaves but a corvee of peasants drawn from across Egypt, supplemented by a large crew of specialists including stonecutters, painters, mathematicians, and priests.

  The Fifth Dynasty, which began with Userkaf around 2495 BC, saw the cult of the sun god Ra rise in importance. Less effort went into pyramid complexes; more went into sun temples at Abusir. The dynasty's last king, Unas, was the first to have the Pyramid Texts inscribed inside his pyramid. Egypt's trade reach extended to the Syrian coast for cedar wood, and expeditions traveled to the Land of Punt, possibly the Horn of Africa, for ebony, ivory, and aromatic resins.

  The Sixth Dynasty, spanning 2345 to 2181 BC, saw the pharaoh's power erode as nomarchs accumulated hereditary authority and became effectively independent. The extraordinarily long reign of Pepi II Neferkare, from 2278 to 2184 BC, ended in succession struggles and civil war. Then, in the 22nd century BC, the 4.2 kiloyear event struck the region, producing consistently low Nile flood levels. Famine and collapse followed, and the Old Kingdom ended.

• 4. Collapse, Recovery, and the Hyksos

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  By 2160 BC, a new line of pharaohs, the Ninth and Tenth Dynasties, had consolidated Lower Egypt from their capital at Heracleopolis Magna. A rival line, the Eleventh Dynasty based at Thebes, reunited Upper Egypt. Around 2055 BC, the Theban forces defeated the Heracleopolitan pharaohs, and the reign of Mentuhotep II opened the Middle Kingdom.

  Mentuhotep II commanded military campaigns south into Nubia and reorganized Egypt's civil administration by placing a vizier at its head. His successor Mentuhotep III organized an expedition to Punt and presided over some of the finest Egyptian carvings. The Twelfth Dynasty that followed built a new capital, Itjtawy, located near present-day Lisht. Senusret I continued campaigns into Nubia and subdued the Libu during his forty-five year reign. Senusret III, who reigned from 1878 to 1839 BC, was a warrior king who built massive forts across the country to establish formal boundaries.

  Amenemhat III, who reigned from 1860 to 1815 BC, is considered the last great pharaoh of the Middle Kingdom. Egypt's population had begun to exceed food production under his reign, prompting him to order exploitation of the Faiyum and expand mining in the Sinai Peninsula. He also invited settlers from Western Asia to labor on Egyptian monuments. Late in his reign, the Nile flooding began to fail again. Some of those invited settlers would eventually seize power as the Hyksos.

  The Hyksos first appeared in Egypt around 1650 BC, taking control of Avaris and moving rapidly south to Memphis, ending the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Dynasties. The Aegyptiaca of Manetho records that their leader Salitis founded the Fifteenth Dynasty. Modern scholarship has raised the possibility that this was more migration than military conquest; either way, the weakened condition of the existing dynasties left them unable to resist. The Hyksos established Memphis as their capital and Avaris as their summer residence, pushing steadily south until Thebes itself fell around 1580 BC, briefly.

  The salvation of Egypt came from the Seventeenth Dynasty. Its last two kings were Seqenenre Tao and Kamose. Ahmose I then completed the expulsion of the Hyksos from the Nile Delta, restored Theban rule over all of Egypt, and reasserted Egyptian power in Nubia and the Southern Levant. His reign opened the Eighteenth Dynasty and the New Kingdom.

• 5. The New Kingdom at Its Height

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  Hatshepsut, one of the most unusual figures of the New Kingdom's Eighteenth Dynasty, was a female pharaoh, a rare occurrence in Egyptian history. She extended Egyptian trade south into present-day Somalia and north into the Mediterranean, ruling for twenty years through widespread propaganda and political skill. Her co-regent and successor, Thutmose III, later ordered her name removed from her monuments; but during his own reign, from around 1479 to 1425 BC, the word pharaoh transformed from a term for the king's palace into a direct form of address for the king himself.

  Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten in honor of the god Aten and pursued what is often described as history's first instance of monotheism, the exclusive worship of the Aten, called Atenism. This seriously disrupted Egyptian society. Akhenaten built a new capital at Amarna, giving his era its modern name, the Amarna Period. The distinctive Amarna artistic style diverged sharply from Egyptian convention. Under successors including Tutankhamun and Horemheb, the old gods were restored and much Amarna-era art and architecture was defaced or destroyed. When Horemheb died without an heir, he named Ramesses I, founding the Nineteenth Dynasty.

  Ramesses II, known as the Great, arguably represents the peak of ancient Egypt as a nation-state. He reigned for 67 years from the age of 18 and built the Abu Simbel temples on the Nubian border, among many other monuments. His campaigns to recover Levantine territories lost by the Eighteenth Dynasty culminated at the Battle of Kadesh in 1274 BC, where he led Egyptian armies against the Hittite king Muwatalli II. This confrontation is recorded as history's first known military ambush. The tomb he built for his sons in the Valley of the Kings became the largest funerary complex in Egypt.

  The Twentieth Dynasty's defining ruler was Ramesses III, who reigned roughly three decades after Ramesses II. In Year 8 of his reign, the Sea People invaded Egypt by land and sea simultaneously; Ramesses III defeated them in two major battles. He also fought off Libyan tribesmen in his Year 6 and Year 11. The cost of these campaigns drained Egypt's treasury steadily. In Year 29 of his reign, the first known strike in recorded history occurred when food rations could not be provided to the royal tomb-builders and artisans of Deir el-Medina. Something in the atmosphere was blocking sunlight and suppressing global tree growth for nearly two full decades until 1140 BC; the Hekla 3 eruption in Iceland has been proposed as a cause, though its dating remains disputed.

• 6. Fragmentation and Foreign Rule

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  After the death of Ramesses XI, power split between Smendes in the north, ruling from Tanis, and the High Priests of Amun at Thebes, who held effective control of the south while nominally acknowledging Smendes as king. Smendes founded the Twenty-First Dynasty. Notably, both the priests and the pharaohs of this period came from the same family, making the division less absolute than it appeared.

  The first king of the Twenty-Second Dynasty, Shoshenq I, was a Meshwesh Libyan who had served as commander of armies under the last ruler of the Twenty-First Dynasty. He unified the country and brought stability for over a century, notably by placing control of the Amun clergy under his own son. The country eventually fractured again; by 818 BC, Shoshenq III of the Twenty-Second Dynasty controlled Lower Egypt while Takelot II and his son ruled Middle and Upper Egypt.

  From the south, the Nubian king Piye, founder of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, pushed north to crush his Libyan opponents in the Delta and managed to reach Memphis. His opponent Tefnakhte submitted but was allowed to remain in Lower Egypt, where he founded the short-lived Twenty-Fourth Dynasty at Sais. Piye was succeeded by his brother Shabaka, then by his two sons Shebitku and Taharqa. Taharqa reunited the Two Lands and built an empire matching the New Kingdom in size. He and other Twenty-Fifth Dynasty pharaohs built or restored temples and monuments along the Nile valley including at Memphis, Karnak, Kawa, and Jebel Barkal. This was also the first period since the Middle Kingdom to see widespread pyramid construction, many of them in what is now Sudan.

  From about 700 BC, war with Assyria shifted from a question of whether to a question of when. Thebes was eventually occupied and Memphis was sacked. From 671 BC on, the Assyrians expelled the Nubians and handed power to client kings of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty. Psamtik I, the first king recognized over all of Egypt, brought stability during a 54-year reign from the capital at Sais. Four successive Saite kings guided Egypt from 610 to 526 BC, keeping Babylonian pressure at bay partly through Greek mercenaries. Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar II briefly invaded Egypt itself in 567 BC during war with Pharaoh Amasis.

  Persia then absorbed Egypt. The Persian king Cambyses assumed the title of Pharaoh, called himself Mesuti-Re, meaning Re has given birth, and founded the Twenty-Seventh Dynasty, joining Egypt with Cyprus and Phoenicia in the sixth satrapy of the Achaemenid Empire. A period of independence followed when the Egyptians revolted under Amyrtaeus in 404 BC during a succession crisis after the reign of Darius II. The Thirtieth Dynasty, established in 380 BC, lasted until 343 BC; Nectanebo II was the last native king to rule Egypt. Artaxerxes III reconquered Egypt from 343 to 332 BC before Alexander the Great arrived.

• 7. Alexander and the Ptolemies

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  In 332 BC, Alexander III of Macedon took Egypt from the Persians with little resistance. He visited Memphis and made a pilgrimage to the oracle of Amun at the Siwa Oasis, where the oracle declared him the son of Amun. He appointed Greeks to virtually all senior posts and founded Alexandria to serve as the new capital. Early in 331 BC, he led his forces away to Phoenicia and never returned to Egypt.

  After Alexander's death in Babylon in 323 BC, one of his closest companions, Ptolemy, was appointed to govern Egypt. Ptolemy repelled an invasion by Perdiccas in 321 BC and consolidated his position through the Wars of the Diadochi, which ran from 322 to 301 BC. In 305 BC, he took the title of Pharaoh and, as Ptolemy I Soter, or Saviour, founded the dynasty that would rule Egypt for nearly 300 years.

  The later Ptolemies adopted Egyptian customs deliberately: they married their siblings, portrayed themselves on public monuments in Egyptian style and dress, and participated in Egyptian religious life. The Egyptians accepted them as successors to the pharaohs. All male rulers of the dynasty took the name Ptolemy; queens regnant were typically called Cleopatra, Arsinoe, or Berenice.

  The most famous member of the line was the last, Cleopatra VII, known for her involvement in the Roman political conflicts between Julius Caesar and Pompey, and later between Octavian and Mark Antony. Her apparent suicide at the moment of Roman conquest in 30 BC ended Ptolemaic rule and, with it, the long thread of pharaonic civilization that had begun more than three millennia earlier along the banks of the Nile.