Introduction to ancient Egyptian
civilization
Life in ancient Egypt
Ancient
Egypt can be thought of as an oasis in the desert of northeast Africa,
dependent on the annual inundation of the Nile
to support its agricultural
population. The country's chief wealth
came from the fertile floodplain of the Nile Valley, where the river flows
between bands of limestone hills, and the Nile Delta, in which it fans into
several branches north of modern Cairo. Between the floodplain and the hills is
a variable band of low desert, which supported a certain amount of game. The
Nile was Egypt's sole transportation artery.
The First Cataract at Aswān, where the riverbed is turned into rapids by a
belt of granite, was the country's only well-defined boundary within a
populated area. To the south lay the far less hospitable area of Nubia,
in which the river flowed through low sandstone hills that left a very narrow
strip of cultivable land. Nubia was significant for Egypt's periodic southward
expansion and for access to products from farther south. West of the Nile was
the arid Sahara, broken by a chain of oases some 125–185 miles (about 200–300 kilometers)
from the river and lacking in all other resources except for a few minerals.
The eastern desert, between the Nile and the Red Sea, was more important, for
it supported a small nomadic population and desert game, contained numerous
mineral deposits including gold, and was the route to the Red Sea.
To the northeast was the Isthmus of Suez. It offered the principal route for
contact with Sinai, from which came turquoise and possibly copper, and with
western Asia, Egypt's most important area of cultural interaction, from which
were received stimuli for technical development and cultivars for crops.
Immigrants and ultimately invaders crossed the Isthmus into Egypt,
attracted by the country's stability and prosperity. From the late 2nd
millennium BC on, numerous attacks were
made by land and sea along the eastern Mediterranean coast.
At first, relatively little cultural contact came by way of the
Mediterranean Sea, but from an early date Egypt maintained trading relations
with the Lebanese port of Byblos (modern Jubayl). Egypt needed few imports to
maintain basic standards of living, but good timber was essential and not
available within the country, so it usually was obtained from Lebanon.
Minerals such as obsidian and lapis lazuli were imported from as far afield as
Anatolia and Afghanistan.
Agriculture
centered on the cultivation of cereal crops, chiefly emmer wheat and barley.
The fertility of the land and general predictability of the inundation ensured
very high productivity from a single annual crop. This productivity made it
possible to store large surpluses against crop failures and also formed the
chief basis of Egyptian wealth, which was, until the creation of the large
empires of the 1st millennium BC, the
greatest of any state in the ancient Near East.
Irrigation was achieved by simple means and multiple cropping was not
feasible until much later times, except perhaps in the lakeside area of Fayyūm.
As the river deposited alluvial silt, raising the level of the floodplain, and
land was reclaimed from marsh, the area available for cultivation in the Nile
Valley and Delta increased, while pastoralism declined slowly. In addition to
grain crops, fruit and vegetables were important, the latter being irrigated
year-round in small plots; and fish was vital to the diet. Papyrus,
which grew abundantly in marshes, was gathered wild and in later times was
cultivated. It may have been used as a food crop; and it certainly was used to
make rope, matting, and sandals. Above all it provided the characteristic
Egyptian writing material, which, with cereals, was the country's chief export
in Late Period Egyptian and then Greco-Roman times.
After the introduction of cultivated cereal crops, meat was eaten mainly by
the wealthy. Domesticated animals lost much of their significance for
nutrition, but they retained great cultural importance and practical value.
Cattle may have been domesticated in northeastern Africa. The Egyptians kept
many as draft animals and for their various products, showing some of the
interest in breeds and individuals that is found to this day in the Sudan
and eastern Africa. The donkey, which was the principal transport animal (the
camel did not become common until Roman times), was probably domesticated in
the region. The native Egyptian breed of sheep became extinct in the 2nd millennium
BC and was replaced by an Asiatic breed.
Wool was rarely used, so that sheep were primarily a source of meat. Goats were
more numerous than sheep and were commonly depicted browsing on tree foliage.
Pigs, although subject to some sort of taboo, were raised and eaten. Ducks and
geese were kept for food, and many of the vast numbers of wild and migratory
birds found in Egypt were hunted and trapped. Desert game, principally various
species of antelope and ibex, were hunted by the elite; it was a royal privilege
to hunt lions and wild cattle. Pets included dogs, which were also used for
hunting; cats (domesticated in Egypt); and monkeys. In addition, the Egyptians
had a great interest in, and knowledge of, most species of mammals, birds,
reptiles, and fish in their environment.
Most Egyptians were probably descended from settlers who came to the Nile
Valley in prehistoric times, with increase coming through natural fertility.
In various periods there were immigrants from Nubia, Libya, and especially the Near
East. They were historically significant and may have contributed to
population increase, but their numbers are unknown. Most people lived in
villages and towns in the Nile Valley and Delta. Dwellings were normally built
of mud brick and have long since disappeared beneath the rising water table,
thereby obliterating evidence for settlement patterns. In antiquity, as now,
the most favored location of settlements was on slightly raised ground near the
riverbank, where transport and water were easily available and flooding was
unlikely. Until the 1st millennium BC Egypt
was not urbanized to the same extent as Mesopotamia. Instead, a few centers,
notably Memphis and Thebes, attracted population and particularly the elite,
while the rest of the people were relatively evenly spread over the land. The
size of the population has been estimated as rising from between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000
in the 3rd millennium BC to perhaps
twice as many in the late 2nd millennium and 1st millennium BC. (Much higher levels of population were
reached in Greco-Roman times.)
Nearly all of the people were engaged in agriculture and were probably tied
to the land. All the land belonged in theory to the king, although in practice
those living on it could not easily be removed and some categories of land
could be bought and sold. Land was assigned to high officials to provide them
with an income, and most categories of land paid substantial dues to the state,
which had a strong interest in keeping it in agricultural use. Abandoned land was
taken back into state ownership and reassigned for cultivation. The people who
lived on and worked the land were not free to leave and were obliged to work
it, but they were not slaves; most paid a proportion of their produce to major
officials. Free citizens who worked the land on their own behalf did emerge;
terms used for them tended originally to refer to poor people, although they
were probably not in fact poor. Slavery was never very common, being restricted
to captives and foreigners or to people who were forced by poverty or debt to
sell themselves into service. Slaves sometimes were even married by members of
their owners' families, so that in the long term those belonging to households
tended to be assimilated into free society. In the New Kingdom (from about 1539
to 1075 BC), large numbers of captive
slaves were acquired by major state institutions or incorporated into the army.
Punitive treatment of foreign slaves or of native fugitives from their
obligations included forced labor, exile (in, for example, the oases of the
western desert), or compulsory enlistment in dangerous mining expeditions. Even
no punitive employment such as quarrying in the desert was hazardous. The
official record of one expedition shows a mortality rate of more than 10
percent.
Just as the Egyptians optimized agricultural production with simple means,
their crafts and techniques, many of which originally came from Asia,
were raised to extraordinary levels of perfection. The Egyptians' most striking
technical achievement, massive stone building, also exploited the potential of
a centralized state to mobilize a huge labor force, which was made available by
efficient agricultural practices. Some of the technical and organizational
skills involved were remarkable. The construction of the great pyramids
of the 4th dynasty (c. 2575–c. 2465 BC)
has yet to be fully explained and would be a major challenge to this day. This
expenditure of skill contrasts with sparse evidence for an essentially Neolithic
way of living for the rural population of the time, while the use of flint
tools persisted even in urban environments at least until the late 2nd
millennium BC. Metal was correspondingly
scarce, much of it being used for prestige rather than everyday purposes.
In urban and elite contexts the Egyptian ideal was the nuclear family, but
on the land and outside the central ruling group there is evidence for extended
families. Egyptians were monogamous, and the choice of partners in marriage,
for which no formal ceremony or legal sanction is known, did not follow a set
pattern. Consanguineous marriage was not practiced during the Dynastic Period,
except for the occasional marriage of a brother and sister within the royal
family, and the practice may have been open only to kings or heirs to the
throne. Divorce was in theory easy, but it was very costly. Women had a legal
status only marginally inferior to that of men. They could own and dispose of
property in their own right, and they could initiate divorce and other legal
proceedings. They hardly ever held administrative office but increasingly were
involved in religious cults as priestesses or “chantresses.” Elite married
women held the title “Mistress of the House,” the precise significance of which
is unknown. Lower down the social scale they probably worked on the land as
well as in the house.
The uneven distribution of wealth, labor, and technology was related to the
only partly urban character of society, especially in the 3rd millennium BC. The country's resources were not fed into
numerous provincial towns but instead were concentrated to great effect around
the capital—itself a dispersed string of settlements rather than a city—and
focused on the central figure in society, the king. In the 3rd and early 2nd
millennia the elite ideal, expressed in the decoration of private tombs, was
manorial and rural. Not until much later did Egyptians have pronouncedly urban
values.
The king and ideology: administration, art, and writing
In official terms, Egyptian society consisted of a descending hierarchy of
the gods, the king,
the dead, and humanity (by which was understood chiefly the Egyptians). Of
these groups, only the king was single, and hence he was individually more
prominent than any of the others. A text that summarizes the king's role states
that he “is on earth for ever and ever, judging mankind and propitiating the
gods, and setting order in place of disorder. He gives offerings to the gods
and mortuary offerings to the spirits [the blessed dead].” The king was a god,
but not in any simple or unqualified sense. His divinity accrued to him from
his office and was reaffirmed through rituals, but it was vastly inferior to
that of major gods; he was god rather than man by virtue of his potential,
which was immeasurably greater than that of any human being. To humanity, he
manifested the gods on earth, a conception that was elaborated in a complex web
of metaphor and doctrine; less directly, he represented humanity to the gods.
The text quoted above also gives great prominence to the dead, for whom the
living performed a cult and who could intervene in human affairs; in many
periods the chief visible expenditure and focus of display of non royal
individuals, as of the king, was on provision for the tomb and the next world. Egyptian kings are commonly called pharaohs,
following the usage of the Old Testament. The term pharaoh, however, is derived
from the Egyptian per ʿaa (“great estate”) and goes back to the
designation of the royal palace as an institution. This term for palace was
used increasingly from about 1400 BC as a
way of referring to the living king; in earlier times it was rare.
Rules of succession to the kingship are poorly understood. The common
conception that the heir to the throne had to marry his predecessor's oldest
daughter has been disproved; kingship did not pass through the female line. The
choice of queen seems to have been free: often the queen was a close relative
of the king, but she also might be unrelated to him. In the New Kingdom, for
which evidence is abundant, each king had a queen with distinctive titles, as
well as a number of minor wives.
Sons of the queen seem to have been the preferred successors to the throne,
but other sons could also become king. In many cases the successor was the
eldest (surviving) son, and such a pattern of inheritance agrees with more
general Egyptian values, but often he was some other relative, or was completely
unrelated. New Kingdom texts depict, after the event, how kings were appointed
heirs either by their predecessors or by divine oracles, and such may have been
the pattern when there was no clear successor. From the middle of the 5th
dynasty (c. 2450 BC) to the 19th
(1292–1190 BC) there is no certain
attestation of a prince in the reign of his brother; rival claimants,
therefore, must have been eliminated or silenced after one of them had
succeeded. Dissent and conflict are suppressed from public sources. From the
Late Period (664–332 BC), when sources
are more diverse and patterns less rigid, numerous usurpations and
interruptions to the succession are known; they probably had many forerunners.
The king's position changed gradually from that of an absolute monarch at
the centre of a small ruling group who were mostly his kin to that of the head
of a bureaucratic
state—in which his rule was still absolute—based on office holding and, in
theory, on free competition and merit. By the 5th dynasty, fixed institutions
were added to the force of tradition and the regulation of personal contact as
brakes on autocracy, but the charismatic and superhuman power of the king
remained vital.
The elite of administrative officeholders received their positions and
commissions from the king, whose general role as judge over humanity they put
into effect. They commemorated their own justice and concern for others, especially
their inferiors, and recorded their own exploits and ideal conduct of life in
inscriptions for others to see. Thus the position of the elite was affirmed by
reference to the king, to their prestige among their peers, and to their
conduct toward their subordinates, justifying to some extent the fact that
they—and still more the king—appropriated much of the country's surplus
production for their own benefit.
These attitudes and their potential dissemination through society
counterbalanced inequality, but how far they were accepted cannot be known. The
core group of wealthy officeholders numbered at most a few hundred, and the
administrative class of minor officials and scribes, most of whom could not
afford to leave memorials or inscriptions, perhaps 5,000. With their
dependents, these two groups formed perhaps 5 percent of the early population.
Monuments and inscriptions commemorated no more than one in a thousand people.
According to royal ideology, the king appointed the elite on the basis of
merit, and in ancient conditions of high mortality the elite had to be open to
recruits from outside. In addition, royal caprice resulted in many falls from favor,
especially in the 18th dynasty (1539–1292 BC).
There was, however, also an ideal that a son should succeed his father. In
periods of weak central control this principle predominated, and in the Late
Period the whole society became more rigid and stratified.
Writing
was a major instrument in the centralization of the Egyptian
state and its self-presentation. The two basic forms of writing, hieroglyphs,
which were used for monuments and display, and the cursive form known as hieratic,
were invented at much the same time in late predynastic Egypt
(c. 3000 BC). Writing was chiefly
used for administration and until about 2650 BC
no continuous texts were recorded; the only literary texts written down before
the early Middle Kingdom (c. 1950 BC)
seem to have been lists of important traditional information and possibly
medical treatises. The use and potential of writing were restricted both by the
rate of literacy, which was probably well below 1 percent, and expectations of
what writing might do. Hieroglyphic writing was publicly identified with Egypt. Perhaps because of this association with a single powerful state, its language, and
its culture, Egyptian writing was seldom adapted to write other languages; in
this it contrasts with the cuneiform script of the relatively uncentralized, multilingual
Mesopotamia. Nonetheless, Egyptian hieroglyphs probably served in the middle
of the 2nd millennium BC as the model
from which the alphabet, ultimately the most widespread of all writing systems,
evolved.
The dominant visible legacy of ancient Egypt is in works
of architecture and representational art.
Until the Middle Kingdom, most of these were mortuary: royal tomb
complexes, including pyramids and mortuary temples,
and private tombs. There were also temples dedicated to the cult of the gods
throughout the country, but most of these were modest structures. From the
beginning of the New Kingdom (c. 1539 BC),
temples of the gods became the principal monuments;
royal palaces and private houses, which are very little known, were less
important. Temples and tombs were ideally executed in stone with relief
decoration on their walls and were filled with stone and wooden statuary,
inscribed and decorated stelae (freestanding small stone monuments), and, in
their inner areas, composite works of art in precious materials. The design of
the monuments and their decoration goes back in essence to the beginning of the
historical period and presents an ideal, sanctified cosmos. Little in it is
related to the everyday world and, except in palaces, works of art may have
been rare outside temples and tombs. Decoration may record real historical
events, rituals, or the official titles and careers of individuals, but its
prime aim is the more general assertion of values, and the information
presented must be evaluated for its plausibility and compared with other
evidence. Some of the events depicted in relief on royal monuments were
certainly fictitious.
The highly distinctive Egyptian method of rendering nature and artistic
style were also creations of early times and can be seen in most works of
Egyptian art. In content, these are hierarchically ordered so that the most
important figures, the gods and the king, are shown together, while before the New
Kingdom gods seldom occur in the same context as humanity. The decoration of a
non royal tomb characteristically shows the tomb's owner with his subordinates,
who administer his land and present him with its produce. The tomb owner is
also typically depicted hunting in the marshes, a favorite pastime of the elite
that may additionally symbolize passage into the next world. The king and the
gods are absent in non royal tombs, and overtly religious matter is restricted
to rare scenes of mortuary rituals and journeys and to textual formulas. Temple reliefs, in which king and gods occur freely, show the king defeating his enemies,
hunting, and especially offering to the gods, who in turn confer benefits upon
him. Human beings are present at most as minor figures supporting the king. On
both royal and non royal monuments an ideal world is represented in which all
are beautiful and everything goes well; only minor figures may have physical
imperfections.
This artistic presentation of values originated at the same time as writing,
but before the latter could record continuous texts or complex statements. Some
of the earliest continuous texts of the 4th and 5th dynasties show an awareness
of an ideal past that the present could only aspire to emulate. A few “biographies”
of officials allude to strife, but more nuanced discussion occurs first in
literary texts of the Middle Kingdom. The texts consist of stories, dialogues,
lamentations, and especially instructions on how to live a good life, and they
supply a rich commentary on the more one-dimensional rhetoric of public
inscriptions. Literary works were written in all the main later phases of the
Egyptian language—Middle Egyptian; the “classical” form of the Middle and New
kingdoms, continuing in copies and inscriptions into Roman times; Late
Egyptian, from the 19th dynasty to about 700 BC;
and demotic (texts from the 4th century BC
to the 3rd century AD)—but many of the
finest and most complex are among the earliest.
Literary works also included treatises on mathematics, astronomy, medicine,
and magic, as well as various religious texts and canonical lists that
classified the categories of creation (probably the earliest genre, going back
to the beginning of the Old Kingdom, c. 2575 BC, or even a little earlier). Among these texts, little is
truly systematic, a notable exception being a medical treatise on wounds. The
absence of systematic enquiry contrasts with Egyptian practical expertise in
such fields as surveying,
which was used both for orienting and planning buildings to remarkably fine
tolerances and for the regular division of fields after the inundation; the
Egyptians also surveyed and established the dimensions of their entire country
by the beginning of the Middle Kingdom. These precise tasks required both
knowledge of astronomy and highly ingenious techniques, but they apparently
were achieved with little theoretical analysis.
Whereas in the earliest periods Egypt seems to have been administered almost
as the personal estate of the king, by the central Old Kingdom it was divided
into about 35 nomes,
or provinces, each with its own officials. Administration was concentrated at
the capital, where most of the central elite lived and died. In the nonmonetary
Egyptian economy, its essential functions were the collection, storage, and
redistribution of produce; the drafting and organization of manpower for
specialized labor, probably including irrigation and flood protection works,
and major state projects; and the supervision of legal matters. Administration
and law were not fully distinct and both depended ultimately on the king. The
settlement of disputes was in part an administrative task, for which the chief
guiding criterion was precedent, while contractual relations were regulated by
the use of standard formulas. State and temple both partook in redistribution
and held massive reserves of grain; temples were economic as well as religious
institutions. In periods of decentralization similar functions were exercised
by local grandees. Markets had only a minor role, and craftsmen were employees
who normally traded only what they produced in their free time. The wealthiest
officials escaped this pattern to some extent by receiving their income in the
form of land and maintaining large establishments that included their own
specialized workers.
The essential medium of administration was writing, reinforced by personal
authority over the non literate 99 percent of the population; texts exhorting
the young to be scribes emphasize that the scribe commanded while the rest did
the work. Most officials (almost all of whom were men) held several offices and
accumulated more as they progressed up a complex ranked hierarchy, at the top
of which was the vizier,
the chief administrator and judge. The vizier reported to the king, who in
theory retained certain powers, such as authority to invoke the death penalty,
absolutely.
Before the Middle Kingdom, the civil and the military were not sharply distinguished.
Military forces consisted of local militias under their own officials and
included foreigners, and nonmilitary expeditions to extract minerals from the
desert or to transport heavy loads through the country were organized in
similar fashion. Until the New Kingdom there was no separate priesthood.
Holders of civil office also had priestly titles, and priests had civil titles.
Often priesthoods were sinecures: their chief significance was the income they
brought. The same was true of the minor civil titles accumulated by high
officials. At a lower level, minor priesthoods were held on a rotating basis by
“laymen” who served every fourth month in temples. State and temple were so
closely interconnected that there was no real tension between them before the
late New Kingdom.
Sources, calendars, and chronology
For all but the last century of Egyptian prehistory, whose Neolithic and
later phases are normally termed “predynastic,” evidence is exclusively
archaeological; later native sources have only mythical allusions to such
remote times. The dynastic period of native Egyptian rulers is generally
divided into 30 dynasties, following the Aegyptiaca of the
Greco-Egyptian writer Manetho
of Sebennytos (early 3rd century BC),
excerpts of which are preserved in later writers. Manetho apparently organized
his dynasties by the capital cities from which they ruled, but several of his
divisions also reflect political or dynastic changes, that is, changes of the
party holding power. He gave the lengths of reign of kings or of entire
dynasties and even longer periods. Because of textual corruption and a tendency
to inflation, his figures cannot be used to reconstruct chronology and reign
lengths without supporting evidence and analysis.
Manetho's prime sources were earlier Egyptian king lists, the organization
of which he imitated. The most significant preserved example of a king list is
the Turin
Canon, a fragmentary papyrus in the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy, which
originally listed all kings of the 1st through the 17th dynasty, preceded by a
mythical dynasty of gods and one of the “spirits, followers of Horus.” The
document gave reign lengths for individual kings, as well as totals for some
dynasties and longer periods.
In early periods the kings' years of reign were not given numbers but were
named for salient events, and lists were made of the names. More extensive
details were added to the lists for the 4th and 5th dynasties, when dates were
assigned according to biennial cattle censuses numbered through each king's
reign. Fragments of such lists are preserved on the Palermo Stone, an inscribed
piece of basalt (at the Regional Museum of Archaeology in Palermo, Italy),
and related pieces in the Cairo Museum and University College London; these are
probably all parts of a late copy of an original document.
The Egyptians did not date
by eras longer than the reign of a single king, so a historical framework must
be created from totals of reign lengths, which are then related to astronomical
data that may allow whole periods to be fixed precisely. This is done through
references to astronomical
events and correlations with the three calendars in use in Egyptian
antiquity. All dating was by a civil calendar, derived from the lunar
calendar, which was introduced in the first half of the 3rd millennium BC. The civil year had 365 days and started in
principle when Sirius,
or the Dog Star—also known as Sothis (Ancient Egyptian: II Sopdet)—became
visible above the horizon after a period of absence, which at that time
occurred some weeks before the Nile began to rise for the inundation. Every
four years the civil year advanced one day in relation to the Julian year (with
365 1/4 days), and after a
cycle of about 1,460 years it would again agree with the lunisolar calendar.
Religious ceremonies were organized according to two lunar calendars that had
months of 29 or 30 days, with extra, intercalary months every three years or
so.
Four mentions of the rising of Sirius (generally known as Sothic dates) are
preserved in texts from the 3rd to the 1st millennia, but by themselves these
references cannot yield an absolute chronology. Such a chronology can be
computed from larger numbers of lunar dates and cross-checked from solutions
for the observations of Sirius. Various chronologies are in use, however,
differing by up to 40 years for the 2nd millennium BC
and by more than a century for the beginning of the 1st dynasty. The
chronologies offered in most publications up to 1985 have been disproved for
the Middle and New kingdoms by a restudy of the evidence for the Sothic and
especially the lunar dates. For the 1st millennium, dates in the Third
Intermediate Period are approximate; a supposed fixed year of 945 BC, based on links with the Old Testament,
turns out to be variable by a number of years. Late Period dates (664–332 BC) are almost completely fixed. Before the
12th dynasty, plausible dates for the 11th can be computed backward, but for
earlier times dates are approximate. A total of 955 years for the 1st through
the 8th dynasty in the Turin Canon has been used to assign a date of about 3100
BC for the beginning of the 1st dynasty,
but this requires excessive average reign lengths, and an estimate of 2925 BC is preferable. Radiocarbon and other
scientific dating of samples from Egyptian sites have not improved on, or
convincingly contested, computed dates. Recent work on radiocarbon dates from Egypt
does, however, yield results encouragingly close to dates computed in the
manner described above.
King lists and astronomy give only a chronological framework. A vast range
of archaeological and inscriptional sources for Egyptian history survives, but
none of it was produced with the interpretation of history in mind. No
consistent political history of ancient Egypt can be written. The evidence is
very unevenly distributed, there are gaps of many decades, and in the 3rd
millennium BC no continuous royal text
recording historical events was inscribed. Private biographical inscriptions of
all periods from the 5th dynasty (c. 2465–c. 2325 BC) to the Roman conquest (30 BC) record individual involvement in events but
are seldom concerned with their general significance. Royal inscriptions from
the 12th dynasty (1938–1756 BC) to
Ptolemaic times aim to present a king's actions according to an overall
conception of “history,” in which he is the re-creator of the order of the
world and the guarantor of its continued stability or its expansion. The goal
of his action is not to serve humanity but the gods, while non royal
individuals may relate their own successes to the king in the first instance
and sometimes to the gods. Only in the decentralized intermediate periods did
the non royal recount internal strife. Kings did not mention dissent in their
texts unless it came at the beginning of a reign or a phase of action and was
quickly and triumphantly overcome in a reaffirmation of order. Such a schema
often dominates the factual content of texts, and it creates a strong bias
toward recording foreign affairs, because in official ideology there is no
internal dissent after the initial turmoil is over. “History” is as much a
ritual as a process of events; as a ritual, its protagonists are royal and
divine. Only in the Late Period did these conventions weaken significantly.
Even then, they were retained in full for temple reliefs, where they kept their
vitality into Roman times.
Despite this idealization, the Egyptians were well aware of history, as is
clear from their king lists. They divided the past into periods comparable with
those used by Egyptologists, and they evaluated the personalities of rulers as
the founders of epochs, for salient exploits, or, especially in folklore, for
their bad qualities. The Demotic
Chronicle, a text of the Ptolemaic period, purports to foretell the bad end
that would befall numerous Late Period kings as divine retribution for their
wicked actions.
The recovery and study of ancient Egypt
European interest in ancient Egypt was strong in Roman times and revived in
the Renaissance, when the small amount of information provided by visitors to
the country was compensated for by the wealth of Egyptian remains in the city
of Rome. Views of Egypt were dominated by the classical tradition that it was
the land of ancient wisdom; this wisdom was thought to inhere in the
hieroglyphic script, which was believed to impart profound symbolic ideas,
not—as it in fact does—the sounds and words of texts. Between the 15th and 18th
centuries, Egypt had a minor but significant position in general views of
antiquity, and its monuments gradually became better known through the work of
scholars in Europe and travelers in the country itself; the finest publications
of the latter were by Richard Pococke, Frederik Ludwig Norden, and Carsten
Niebuhr, all of whose works in the 18th century helped to stimulate an Egyptian
revival in European art and architecture. Coptic, the Christian successor of
the ancient Egyptian language, was studied from the 17th century, notably by
Athanasius Kircher, for its potential to provide the key to Egyptian.
Napoleon's
expedition to and short-lived conquest of Egypt in 1798 was the culmination of
18th-century interest in the East. The expedition was accompanied by a team of
scholars who recorded the ancient and contemporary country, issuing in 1809–28
the Description de l'Égypte, the most
comprehensive study to be made before the decipherment of the hieroglyphic
script. The Rosetta
Stone, which bears a decree of Ptolemy V Epiphanes in hieroglyphs, demotic, and
Greek, was discovered during the expedition and was ceded to the British after
the French capitulation; it became the property of the British Museum
in London. This document greatly assisted the decipherment, accomplished by
Jean-François Champollion in 1822.
The Egyptian language revealed by the decipherment and more than 150 years
of study is a member of the Afro-Asiatic (formerly Hamito-Semitic) language
family. The Egyptian is closest to the family's Semitic branch but is
distinctive in many respects. During several millennia it changed greatly. The
script does not write vowels. Because Greek forms for royal names were known from
Manetho long before the Egyptian forms became available, those used to this day
are a mixture of Greek and Egyptian.
In the first half of the 19th century vast numbers of antiquities were
exported from Egypt, forming the nucleus of collections in many major museums.
These were removed rather than excavated, inflicting, together with the
economic development of the country, colossal damage on ancient sites. At the
same time, many travelers and scholars visited the country and recorded the
monuments. The most important, and remarkably accurate, record was produced by
the Prussian expedition led by Karl
Richard Lepsius, in 1842–45, which explored sites as far south as the central Sudan.
In the mid-19th century Egyptology
developed as a subject in France and in Prussia. The Antiquities Service and museum
of Egyptian antiquities were established in Egypt by the French Egyptologist Auguste
Mariette, a great excavator who attempted to preserve sites from destruction,
and the Prussian Heinrich Brugsch made great progress in the interpretation of
texts of many periods and published the first major Egyptian dictionary. In
1880 Flinders
(later Sir Flinders) Petrie began more than 40 years of methodical excavation,
which created an archaeological framework for all the chief periods of Egyptian
culture except for remote prehistory. Petrie was the initiator of much in
archaeological method, but he was later surpassed by George
Andrew Reisner, who excavated for American institutions from 1899 to 1937. The
greatest late 19th-century Egyptologist was Adolf
Erman of Berlin, who put the understanding of the Egyptian language on a sound
basis and wrote general works that for the first time organized what was known
about the earlier periods.
From the 1890s on, complete facsimile copies of Egyptian monuments have been
published, providing a separate record that becomes more vital as the originals
decay. The pioneer of this epigraphy
was Norman de Garis Davies, who was joined in the 1920s by the Oriental
Institute of the University of Chicago and other enterprises. Many scholars are
now engaged in epigraphy.
In the first half of the 20th century some outstanding archaeological
discoveries were made: Howard Carter uncovered the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922;
Pierre Montet found the tombs of 21st–22nd-dynasty kings at Tanis in 1939–44;
and W.B. Emery and L.P. Kirwan found tombs of the Ballānah culture (the 4th
through the 6th century AD) in Nubia in
1931–34. The last of these was part of the second survey of Lower Nubia in
1929–34, which preceded the second raising of the Aswān Dam. This was followed
in the late 1950s and '60s by an international campaign to excavate and record
sites in Egyptian and Sudanese Nubia before the completion of the Aswān High
Dam in 1970. Lower Nubia is now one of the most thoroughly explored
archaeological regions of the world. Most of its many temples have been moved,
either to higher ground nearby, as happened to Abu Simbel and Philae, or to
quite different places, including various foreign museums. The campaign also
had the welcome consequence of introducing a wide range of archaeological
expertise to Egypt, so that standards of excavation and recording in the
country have risen greatly.
Excavation and survey of great importance continues in many places. For
example, at Ṣaqqārah, part
of the necropolis of the ancient city of Memphis, new areas of the Sarapeum
have been uncovered with rich finds, and a major New Kingdom necropolis is
being thoroughly explored. The site of ancient Memphis itself has been
systematically surveyed, its position in relation to the ancient course of the Nile
has been established, and urban occupation areas have been studied in detail
for the first time.
Egyptology is, however, a primarily interpretive subject. There have been
outstanding contributions, for example in art, for which Heinrich Schäfer
established the principles of the rendering of nature, and in language. New
light has been cast on texts, the majority of which are written in a simple meter
that can serve as the basis of sophisticated literary works. The physical
environment, social structure, kingship, and religion are other fields in which
great advances have been made, while the reconstruction of the outline of
history is constantly being improved in detail.
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