Analyzing Collapse: The Rise and Fall of the Old Kingdom

Analyzing Collapse

The AUC History of Ancient Egypt

Edited by Aidan Dodson and Salima Ikram

Volume Two

Analyzing Collapse

The Rise and Fall of the Old Kingdom

Miroslav Bárta

The American University in Cairo Press

Cairo New York

This electronic edition published in 2019

The American University in Cairo Press

113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt

200 Park Ave., Suite 1700 New York, NY 10166

www.aucpress.com

Copyright © 2019 by Miroslav Bárta

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 977 416 838 3

eISBN 978 1 61797 960 6

Version 1

Contents

preface

chronological table

map of ancient egypt

1.    Opening Up the Path: How Complex Societies Rise and Fail

2.    The River Nile and Egyptian History

3.    The Pharaohs and the Rising State

4.    The Foundation of the Empire

5.    The Empire of the Sun God

6.    The Sun at Its Zenith

7.    Kings and Kinglets

8.    The Land Turned Like the Potter’s Wheel

notes

bibliography

Preface

Ifirst came to Egypt in 1991 as an undergraduate student of Egyptology and prehistoric archaeology at Charles University in Prague. The fall of that year was my first excavation in Abusir, a rural site among the pyramid fields, but one of the principal sites of the Old Kingdom period. It proved to be crucial for my future career in many ways.

There I experienced the thrill of observing how monuments, built millennia ago and now fallen into oblivion, were reappearing from the sands of the desert. Such discoveries challenged my imagination and my ability to piece together small fragments of evidence to build a picture of the past. Step by step, as the days passed, the ancient Egyptian world was becoming more and more tangible. Destinies of individual officials were gaining more concrete contours. Their fates started to fill in the outlines of the world they lived in and which they helped to shape. Individual lives of long-forgotten Egyptian officials of both high and lower standing, together with the general characteristics of the Old Kingdom society, were merging together; the micro- and macro-worlds started to form a unified and tightly interwoven whole. It took me quite a long time to reach this level of perception, and I have no doubt that to arrive at a complete state of knowledge and understanding of such a complex society is utterly impossible. This book is an attempt to offer my present perspective on one of several important periods of ancient Egyptian history—one of the first complex civilizations in the history of this planet. This book is a kind of interim testimony to the development of that society.

But ambitious as this sounds, there is yet another aspect of this pursuit that I wish to share: individual archaeological discoveries represent an indispensable micro-world from which a general picture of historical processes several centuries long may be reconstructed. Ancient Egyptian evidence may be viewed from the longue durée perspective. This is an approach formulated by the French School of Annals; it refers to the study of history through mapping and analyzing evidence for specific historical processes over long periods of time, combined with individual historical events and with a strong multidisciplinary component.¹ Only this specific approach of addressing historical issues by means of multidisciplinary research may have significant relevance for comparative studies with other known civilizations. Certainly, each civilization attested on this planet was or is specific and there are no algorithms that could compare them on a unified basis. Equally, there is no way our past can predict our future. Still, past civilizations were shaped and maintained by people like us, people with minds like ours, who were faced with many phenomena we know from our own contemporary world. It is above all the inner dynamics of any given society which offers many points for comparison: rising complexity; growing and proliferating bureaucracy; the role of the state and its eventual erosion; the role of nepotistic structures and interest groups in controlling energy resources and competing with the declining state structures for power and dominance; the importance of the elites and what happens when they fail to perform their duties.² These are just a few phenomena which can be encountered in any given civilization, in any age or location.³ In the same manner, the ways in which any civilization adapts to a changing environment constitute yet another universal phenomenon which has been intensively studied.⁴ All these aspects combined indicate why it is that archaeology sometimes appears to be political. This results from a simple observation, namely that archaeology addresses most of the issues and processes (some of the most important of which are mentioned above) which are present in our own modern world. In fact, multidisciplinary study of the past has become an increasingly strategic discipline, and the analysis of history of longue durée combined with a detailed analysis of individual historical events, with their environmental background and dynamism, is beginning to claim more space in research and is receiving increasing attention from science as such.⁵ The same is true of the comparative study of civilizations.⁶ Last but not least, since Joseph Tainter’s pioneering and still influential study of collapses in different societies and civilizations, it is considered productive to study the mechanisms of crises in which archaeology and history play a dominant role.⁷

Fig. 0.1. Visual metaphor of modern study of history. Tiled windows in the cathedral in Rheims by Marc Chagall. In order to create such impressive windows, each of the colored tiles must be carefully produced; each on its own would be meaningless. To understand any civilization one must do the same—combine single events and longue durée analysis. (M. Bárta)

Therefore, my focus throughout the book will be the following seven rules, which appear to form the essence of every civilization of which we have knowledge, and which can be distilled from comparative study of complex civilizations and longue durée history.

Law One

Every civilization is defined in space and time. It has geographical borders and temporal limits. Archaeology and history are the disciplines that analyze the emergence, rise, apogee, crisis, eventual collapse (understood as a sudden and deep loss of complexity), and the transformations leading to their new evolution. The making and unraveling of any civilization is a procedure that emphasizes the idea of time and process in combination with human agency.

Law Two

Every civilization develops by means of a punctuated equilibria mechanism, according to which major changes happen in a non-linear, leap-like manner when the multiplier effect is present.⁸ Once periods of stasis separating individual leap periods become shorter or disappear completely, one expects a major system’s transformation, most often a sudden and steep loss of complexity (metaphorically called ‘collapse’).

Law Three

Every civilization uses a language that is universally understood by its members (its lingua franca, typically English in our Western world) and a commonly accepted system of values and symbols. Every civilization has major centers characterized by a concentration of population, monumental architecture, a writing system (in most cases), sophisticated systems of communication, systems for storing and sharing knowledge, a hierarchically shaped society, arts, and a division of labor. It also has the ability to redistribute main sources of energy—in other words, it has elites who are able to establish and maintain the so-called social contract and allow the majority of the population to share in the profits generated by the system, which is controlled by a minority with decisive power.

Law Four

If the prevalent tendency within the civilization favors consumption of energy over producing it and investing it in a further increase of complexity, there is a declining energy return on investment (EROI). It means that a coefficient gained from the amount of energy delivered by a specific energy resource (such as water, sun, atom, gas, or coal) divided by the amount of energy necessary to be used in order to obtain that energy resource is becoming less and less significant, and therefore less economically profitable. As a consequence, the original level of complexity cannot be sustained or expanded. Eventually, in leaps rather than gradually, the system will lose its existing complexity and implode. This is what is traditionally and inaccurately called a ‘collapse.’

Law Five

Individual components of a given civilization proliferate and perish through inner mechanisms inherent in the society (changing bureaucracy, quality of institutions, role of the elites and technologies, ideology and religion, mandatory expenses, social system, and so on), and through the ability of the civilization to adapt to external factors such as environmental change. These are the internal and external determinants that shape the dynamics of any given civilization. They are in permanent interaction, in cycles of varying length.

Law Six

The so-called Heraclitus Principle has a major impact on all civilizations: the factors that promote the rise of civilizations are, more often than not, identical with those that usher in their collapse. Thus if we want to understand the precise nature and causes of the collapse, we must study not only the final stage of the system but its very incipient stage, where the roots of the future crisis usually lie.

Fig. 0.2. Visual metaphor of a collapse. Impressive sarcophagus chest left behind in a corridor in the sacred animal cemetery of Serapeum, Saqqara, Egypt, Ptolemaic period. The sarcophagus, which was to contain the body of the sacred Apis bull, never reached its final destination. The works, the faith, the legitimacy of the painstaking work ceased literally overnight; all workers and officials participating in this process walked away on a single day. This is what is typically called a collapse—sudden loss of complexity, lack of economic means, lost legitimacy, and erosion of commonly shared values compromising the social contract. (M. Bárta)

Law Seven

A civilization disappears at the moment when its system of values, symbols, and communication tools disappears, and when the elites lose their ability to maintain the social contract. Yet the collapse does not necessary imply extinction. In most cases, a civilization that has consumed its potential gives way to a new one, usually carried on by the same or a slightly modified genetic substrate of the original population. Collapse in this context is a positive phenomenon, as it removes dysfunctional parts of the system.

All the features in the above seven laws play a role throughout the following chapters, and I leave it to readers to judge their effect and relevance. The study of civilizations in the manner indicated above may in fact turn into strategic directions of research in the years to come. These laws are capable of describing long historical processes from the incipient stage of a civilization through its rise, apogee, decline, collapse, transformation, and reemergence.⁹ Ancient Egypt underwent this cycle at least three times. The study of the rise and fall of the era of the Old Kingdom pyramid builders in multidisciplinary perspective is just a limited part of the large mosaic of human history, but it may prove to be valuable as a description and evaluation of a complex society from its rise to its demise over several centuries, and provide an analysis of its internal and external dynamics.

I would like to thank all my friends and colleagues who read first versions of this text and contributed immensely to its completion—Salima Ikram, Aidan Dodson, and Guy Middleton. I am grateful to Miroslav Verner, Jiří Melzer, and Vivienne G. Callender for many valuable comments, criticisms, and insightful remarks during the process of the work on the manuscript. I also want to thank all my colleagues in the Czech Institute of Egyptology, without whom I would not have been able to complete the necessary research for this book. The American University in Cairo Press provided an excellent environment for the finalization of the manuscript. I owe a lot to just a few persons, and they know who they are.

The work on this book was accomplished within the framework of the Charles University Progress project Q11: Complexity and Resilience: Ancient Egyptian Civilization in Multidisciplinary and Multicultural Perspective.

The present book and research builds on the Czech publication which appeared in 2016 under the title Příběh Civilizace. Vzestup a pád doby stavitelů pyramid (Academia).

Chronological Table

(based largely on Hornung, Krauss, and Warburton 2006: 490–98)

Map. Ancient Egypt. Source: compiled by J. Malátková, Czech Institute of Egyptology

Civilizations are dynamic; they rise and fall; they divide and merge. And, as any student of history knows, civilizations disappear and are buried in the sands of time.¹

This study is devoted to the anatomy of the emergence, rise, and decline of the first ancient Egyptian state—the Old Kingdom, which lasted from the twenty-seventh through the twenty-second centuries bc. During this period, the foundations of ancient Egyptian civilization, which survived for millennia, were laid, elaborated, and refined. Egypt was a gift of the desert and of a global environmental change (the desiccation of the Sahara), but also, to a much greater degree, as the ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote, a gift of the Nile, whose annual flood cycle provided the Egyptians with an enormous amount of energy that supported the emergence, sustenance, and growth of their civilization. Agriculture in the Nile Valley was an extraordinarily high-return activity. The accumulation of wealth that it generated led to the rise of a complex hierarchical society with a powerful elite class, which enabled the construction of costly state projects imbued with symbolic power.

This society’s internal dynamics, combined with climatic cycles and the characteristics of the Nile’s flow, defined many features of ancient Egyptian civilization, from the way in which it operated to the principles of its continuity and longevity. Ancient Egypt shows that a civilization can last as long as its founding ideas are kept alive. The Old Kingdom has been chosen as the core theme of this book because it was during this period that the main pillars were formed which would support ancient Egyptian civilization for the next two millennia.

The reader will certainly remember the sometimes dull history lessons at school, when past cultures and civilizations were presented as long lists of buildings, kings, dynasties, and officially relevant dates. Symbols were often used to represent thousands of years of human development, such as, for Egypt, Khufu’s pyramid at Giza or Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings, or for Mesopotamia, the Code of Hammurabi or the royal cemetery of Ur.

Naturally, ancient Egyptian civilization offers much more than that. Human history is a long and continuous journey reflecting the endless curiosity of the human mind, a path that is exemplified in the history of Egypt. This chapter will attempt to examine in some detail the way states (as major building blocks of a mature civilization), including ancient Egypt of the Old Kingdom, emerge, develop, and eventually fail. It will address many ways these processes are made manifest, explore the internal and external factors that influence long-term developmental trends, and examine whether, and to what degree, such processes may be continuous or marked (‘punctuated’) by sharp and sudden breaks. It will be demonstrated that the era of the pyramid builders is fascinating not just for its birth and rise but also for how and why it failed.

What Is Civilization?

At the end of the nineteenth century it was a relatively common belief that the difference between civilization and earlier stages of human social organization, represented by bands or tribes, was the ability to write.²

As we now know from early Mesopotamia and the Bronze Age Aegean, script originated as a means to record accounting details such as the place of origin and quantity of various commodities.³ Only later did writing develop into a form that could be used to record speech and abstract ideological concepts. Moreover, certain early civilizations (in the Mexican highlands, Peru, West Africa) developed a complex hierarchical society and civilization despite not using script.⁴ Thus, writing alone is not the key to understanding the nature and origins of civilization, although it plays a major role.

The Australian archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe (1892–1957) sought to understand civilizations by identifying their characteristics.⁵ He produced a list of ten major traits:

1.  Large urban centers;

2.  Craftsmen, merchants, clerks, and priests living on the surplus provided by farmers;

3.  Primary producers submitting their surplus to a deity or king;

4.  Monumental architecture;

5.  A ruling class exempted from manual labor;

6.  A system for recording information;

7.  Exact sciences for practical purposes;

8.  Monumental art;

9.  Regular import of different materials—luxury goods as well as raw materials for production; and

10.  Specialized craftsmen controlled politically and economically by secular or religious officials.

Of course there are exceptions to every rule, and it pays to be wary of didactic generalization. In his monumental A Study of History, the historian Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975) emphasizes that every civilization is singular and that development is always specific in many ways and different every time.⁶

A modern analysis of civilizations would thus query whether Childe’s individual traits are really universal. Nonetheless, more than sixty years later his reasoning still seems correct in principle.⁷ Indeed, many modern studies dealing with early civilizations have focused on the very traits he identified, while adding to them at the same time. There are, for instance, broader discussions of the roles played by conflicts and armies, the institution of royalty, the family and kinship ties, and law in the development of civilizations, together with ideology and the role of an elite headed by the monarch.

Bruce Trigger, in his monumental opus Understanding Early Civilizations, argues convincingly against relying on lists to understand as complex a system as a civilization. Yet he falls into the same habit when he attempts to characterize civilizations on the basis of social, economic, and political institutions.⁸ And although recent research is dominated by arguments that favor multidisciplinary approaches to defining the ‘essence’ of a civilization, it seems that one cannot avoid at least some reliance on tentative lists of essential traits, however relative and prone to modifications such lists may be. The argument favoring multidisciplinary approaches for defining an ‘essence’ of a civilization, however, seems to dominate the recent research on the subject which is, nevertheless, not free of bias and one-sided statements.⁹

Fig. 1.1. Pyramids in Giza. These incredible monuments not only embody the ability and potential of the Egyptian Old Kingdom; they also manifest one of the pillars of Egyptian ideology and religion. (M. Bárta)

The development of a civilization and its attendant socioeconomic complexity requires an interaction among most of these essential traits, which influence one another in a multiplier effect, as defined by Colin Renfrew.¹⁰ Without this, even if we have cities sprawling over hundreds of hectares in front of our eyes, it is very difficult to speak about civilization as such if there is no sign of social stratification, such as diversified architecture, socially specific artifacts, stratified settlements, religious centers, significant long-distance trade, or specialized production. The recently much-discussed towns of the Cucuteni–Trypillian culture in Ukraine, which thrived between 5200 and 3500 bc, may serve as a typical example of an entity with very low complexity.¹¹

It is appropriate now to look at traits commonly displayed by the ancient Egyptian civilization. The following attributes characterize ancient riverine civilizations in general, and have been applied to ancient Egypt in particular.¹²

-    It was territorial and maintained its borders;

-   At the time of unification, it was strong enough to be able to invest profits into the specialization of labor and into expansion, which led to further rapid social differentiation and specialization;

-    It had an advanced system of written communication that enabled the gathering, storing, and sharing of information throughout the state (the Egyptian script began to develop well before the unification of the country);¹³

-    At its origins it had a hierarchical social structure consisting of four principal social strata (typical model: king, courtiers, local power representatives, majority population);

-    It was characterized by partial urbanism (existence of towns and large residential agglomerations) and was able to provide for and organize the settlement of new territories under its jurisdiction and control;

-    It had an advanced material culture displaying a considerable degree of standardization and homogeneity;

-    It operated on commonly recognized norms of behavior;

-    It engaged in long-distance trade to import otherwise inaccessible raw materials, which enabled the elites to demonstrate their privileged status;

-   It had an elaborate state ideology and religious system that defended the status quo established during the fourth-millennium Naqada II, if not earlier, which depended on ideology, theology, and divine intent, all formulated to emphasize first the chieftain’s, and later the king’s, exclusive relationship with the gods;¹⁴

-    It had a developed court culture, which identified power through symbols and religion, as exemplified by monumental architecture and art;

-    It implemented projects, especially in monumental architecture, which served on the one hand to justify the existence and privileged status of the monarch and ruling class and, on the other, as a way for the ruling class to share and redistribute a part of its wealth among the lower classes, thus committing most of the population to participate in, develop, defend, and preserve the established system;

-    It was able to exercise power and oversight within its entire territory, as shown by many texts, the iconography of the period, and the administrative titles of administrators;

-    It deployed judicial institutions and a legal system to settle disputes, which helped to reduce the chaos that unavoidably accompanies the growth of state complexity;

-    It was able to wage war beyond the borders of its own territory.¹⁵

For the archaeologist Colin Renfrew, a civilization is a recurring group of artifacts of a particular kind, a unique way that a specific group of people have adapted within defined temporal and geographic boundaries. According to Samuel Huntington, a civilization is characterized by its specific identity.¹⁶ But while the features that characterize different civilizations may vary, each includes most of the features listed above. This may prove helpful in understanding the similarities. Civilization is thus necessarily a polythetic entity.¹⁷

Compared to ancient Egypt, the (city or regional) states of the Near East developed quite differently during the fourth and third millennia bc.¹⁸ Drawing on archaeological research about communities east of the fertile floodplain of the Tigris and Euphrates (the Susian Plain), American archaeologists Henry T. Wright and Gregory H. Johnson produced a theoretical concept of the state, distinguishing between