Book Review: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

Toby Wilkinson has written a fine history of kings, but not of its people. To some degree, he cannot be blamed; our knowledge of ancient Egypt is from stelae, monuments, and the funerary of kings and nobles. Literacy was tightly restricted, held by a caste of scribes, and there was little literature, besides the small efflorescence of the Middle Kingdom. What little we know of how the masses lived we must draw from the paintings and carvings in the tombs of Pharaohs, drawn in lifelike detail in hopes they would serve them in death as in life. The book passes by at a breathless clip; king after king might get a page or two. We linger on the most powerful of the kings, or those who left us the most imposing monuments; on Sneferu, father of Khufu (who built the Great Pyramid at Giza), during whose reign Egypt reached its zenith of pyramid building, simultaneously building the Red Pyramid, the Bent Pyramid, and the Pyramid at Meidum; or on Ramesses II, under whose reign Egypt became the dominant power in the Middle East, and after whose death a long line of Ramesses (so significant was that name) slowly dissipated the power of the state, till with the death of Ramesses XI the empire had dissolved into nothing; or on a host of interesting or peculiar kings. The recurring impression is of the vastness of its history. The Romans are closer to us than they are to the Old Kingdom. You read of pyramids built entirely by manpower, and realize with a start that this is because horses would not yet be domesticated for many hundreds of years. It is inconceivable to us, nowadays, that a land might be stagnant for thousands of years; but those are the bare facts of history.

This is a book to be read for pleasure, not for study. It does not generalize, and does not seek to generalize. Eternal truths can be gleaned from the study of Ancient Egypt, but only in the broad strokes of history, not in the particulars. It is that which I will expand upon later in the essay, but let me say that just because a book may lack applications to today does not mean it is bad. This is an instantly readable book; despite its size, I breezed through it in less than a week. It corrected many of my misconceptions about Egyptian history, (for example, I had long thought that the Ptolemaic rule from aftermath of the conquest of Alexander to the death of Cleopatra was a time of national strength, when in fact the opposite was the case; the land was wracked by rebellions around 200 BC and onwards, and increasingly became the colony of Rome, with kings buying the kingdom in exchange for enormous tributes (in some years reaching to half the government’s entire tax revenue)) and illuminated corners of history I did not so much as know existed, such as the end of the 6th Dynasty, whose last king’s, Neferkara Pepi II, long reign meant that the empire fell apart to his hordes of grandchildren; or the strangely puritanical reign of Piankhi from Nubia, who, believing so utterly in the religion which the Egyptians had imposed generations ago, invaded from the south, appointed new heads of all the major temples, and then left, never to return. The book has a wealth of details. You will learn whence the name “pharaoh” came (the first Queen of Egypt, Hatsheput, unable to legitimate her rule through the institution of kingship; “per-aa”, meaning the Great House, was the favored circumlocution). You will learn when tomb robberies began (and by whom); when hieroglyphics began, and died out; who built the pyramids; the nature of court politics of that era; it is stuffed to the gills with facts. It is this which confines the book to pleasure reading, however, like any old novel.

The study of Ancient Egypt lends us some knowledge of why states form, and why states dissolve. We must first remember that the state, whatever benevolent form it has taken on today, was indisputably a parasitic coterie of armed bandits. It existed to extract grain out of the population, and spend it on the military and the ruler’s wiles. It did provide some public services, storing food for famines, and helped organize the building of the irrigation works, but these are slim. It formed here, and not elsewhere, because of the immense richness of the soil, and the more disquieting reason that one could not flee the narrow band of the river. There is some indication the state formation coincided with climate change reducing the fertility of the land outside the Nile. Groups which lived by oases in the desert dwindled and disappeared. The Nile linked the empire together, binding Upper and Lower Egypt (the Egyptian view of the world follows the Nile down, flipping our view). An agricultural surplus, and a way to bind people, are the two key ingredients of state formation; throughout history, states form last where the earth is inhospitable to dense life, and they form primarily on agricultural land, not herders, because farmers cannot flee with their land. 

On the other side of a dynasty was its inevitable breakup. We can see autocratic states as trying to maintain a thermostatic equilibrium between competing tendencies, either of which will cause it to fall. A state which is totally incompetent will fall. It will rely upon local magnates, who will gradually take more and more power until the king’s power has withered into nothing. This is what happened in the 6th dynasty which ended the Old Kingdom; we believe the 8th (and the possibly distinct, probably fictional 7th dynasty; Menethor, who chronicled all that was known about the chronology of Egypt in 300 BC assigns it 70 kings in 70 days, a metaphor for chaos) rotated who was the titular king amongst the noble families. On the other side of the spectrum, an excessively competent government had a strong military, which could get ideas of its own; the 18th Dynasty, famous for Akhenaten and Tutankhamun, was ended by the military general Horemheb, who started the Ramesside dynasty. To last, the Egyptian state needed to thread the needle.

Those are my thoughts on the book. If you have a strong interest in Ancient Egypt, I would recommend it as an exceedingly readable primer on the whole course of pharaonic Egypt. If your interest is not especially strong, then a brief overview of the chronology should be all that you need.

Images used: The first is the statue of Menkaure of the 4th dynasty, flanked by the goddesses Hathor on the left and Bat on the right. The second is the Narmer Palette, which is a contemporaneous depiction of the first Egyptian pharaoh Narmer. Note the commingling of Mesopotamian motifs like the serpopard, with indigenous symbols.