The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

A gay man, a non-binary, and a heretic walk into a bar, and….

…they’re all Egyptian pharaohs. Which places us firmly in the matter of The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt by Toby Wilkinson. It is a volume that is both estimable on its own merits, and improbable for me: I’m the guy who’s gonna hurl if he has to watch one more documentary on The Pyramids, with the attendant, burning question of “What did they do with the rubble?” As you might expect, there’s considerably more to ancient Egypt than television would have one believe, and Wilkinson does an outstanding job of covering the period 5000 B.C. to 30 B.C. in a relatively compact, 486-page volume.

That comes out to 10.23 years per page, for the statistically minded. Not that size matters.

The Egyptian creation myth involved a sort of proto-god (titan) calling forth a dome of land from a disorganized cloud of chaos, a dome upon which the god Horus alighted in an act of anointment and blessing. A tree branch may or may not have been involved, depending on your denomination. In the author’s view, this legend sets up a number of Jungian-like patterns in Egyptian thought and organization, specifically a tendency to see the world in terms of contrasting, co-existing opposites. Chaos and order, desert and flood, river valley and delta…all were competing opposites that dominated ancient Egypt.

Nothing spices up history like written records. In the case of ancient Egypt, those records take the form of hieroglyphics, a writing system with a surprising history of its own. As in, the whole thing seems to have been created as a project. Since hieroglyphs are based on pictograms, I always assumed that they evolved over time from some sort of cave paintings. Not so…turns out hieroglyphics arrived whole-cloth at the end of the prehistoric period. Apparently the Egyptians had run across cuneiform record keeping while trading with the Sumerians and wanted something similar for themselves, although generalized for use beyond just accounting. So improbable as it seems, they set out to create a system of writing, maybe with focus groups or something. As our author points out, nobody else has come up with a better explanation, not even the ancient Greeks. (Ancient Egypt is so old that it was “ancient history” – and mystifying – even to the ancient Greeks.)

The first king of Egypt whose name is recorded was a fellow named Narmer, in about 2950 B.C. Which we know from the Narmer Palette, a lovely bit of stone carving that was used to…mix make-up. Yep, from the beginning the Egyptians had a love of heavy make-up, it wasn’t just MGM. There were other rulers before Narmer, each claiming to be the earthly incarnation of the celestial god, Horus. (The same one who alighted on the dome and/or branch in the creation myth.) The formula Narmer and his predecessors had hit upon was brilliant in its simplicity: playing off the Egyptian belief in dichotomy, the Egyptian kings made out that they and they alone maintained the balance between chaos and order. To oppose the king was to destroy that balance and lead to the destruction of humanity.

“Après Moi, le déluge,” said Louis XIV, “After me, the flood.” The regal act hadn’t changed much in the intervening 4,600 years.

Narmer is the founder of the First Dynasty, nomenclature that again goes back to the Greeks. Roughly 700 years later, Narmer’s Old Kingdom world was starting to fray. The Egyptians were now up to the Eighth Dynasty and had been undergoing internal strife since the Sixth. Enter Neferkara Pepi II, who ascended the throne in 2260 B.C. at the age of six and who ruled for some six decades. Normally a long reign is good for a country, stability often leading to prosperity. Not so under Pepi II, whose reign had the unfortunate luck to see continued internal strife, the rise of the Nubians to their south as a military competitor, and a series of low Niles (drought years) that led to widespread suffering and starvation. Pepi II, meanwhile, was involved in a romance with one of his generals, with military and civil operations suffering as a result. (Never sleep with the staff. Just don’t.) Our author does not record what happened to the general, but Pepi managed to live so long that nobody could figure out just who was in line to succeed him.

Gay or not, Pepi had produced a son and heir, but Dear Old Dad lived so long the son was himself elderly when he ascended and had only a brief rule. And there the confusion begins. On several levels. Enter Neitiqerty Siptah, a ruler of uncertain origin and even more unclear gender. The name is masculine, as befits a king, although later (but still old) attributions describe her/him as a queen. (Quit snickering.) As intriguing as Neitiqerty is, the rule was brief and left no monuments.

That was in 2125 B.C. or so. Half a millennium later, in 1473 B.C., you had a female ruler, Hatshepsut, widow of Thutmose II, who was regent to her son, Thutmose III. (She may also have been the one actually in charge while Thutmose II was alive, she certainly thought she was.) She needed an official title of some sort, and “king” wasn’t working for her. After trying all sorts of weirdness with pronouns, her advisors hit on the gender-neutral term, “pharaoh.” That title stuck for both the male and female rulers who followed, largely because it beat all hell out of “they/them/it.” Without knowing it, every time you’ve talked about “the pharaohs of Egypt,” you’ve been making a nod to gender-nonconformity in the ancient world. Very enlightened of you.

And it was light, in a round-about way, that got our heretic pharaoh into trouble.

Amenhotep IV, later Akhenaten, ruled from 1353-1336 B.C. and not only is he famous, so is his whole family. He was married to Nefertiti, she of the bust-in-Berlin fame, quite a beauty. And his kid was King Tut (Tutankhamun), who had a big museum circuit splash in the A.D. 1970s. Akhenaten started out uneventfully enough but got religion along the way. Somewhere along the line, the pharaohs had switched from Horus (remember him?) as the source of their authority to Amun, the god of renewal and the rising sun. Although thus elevated in importance over Horus, Amun remained one powerful god among many. Akhenaten got in his head that (a) he — and thereby Egypt — worshiped the Aten, the actual disk of the sun; and that (b) the Aten was the one and only god, early monotheism.

To which end, Akhenaten got busy building a new capital city for Egypt, modestly named Akhetaten, plus a bunch of open-roofed temples throughout the country, the better to worship the already-hot Egyptian sun. Akhenaten is having a bit of a “moment” just now based largely on Philip Glass’s setting of his life and a recent, well-received Metropolitan Opera production. (“The body waxing made me a countertenor!” said the lead singer, who appeared nude.) Real history is less kind to Akhenaten. The entire population suffered a sense of dislocation with the rejection of the traditional gods, and Akhenaten’s building program drained the treasury. In his brief reign King Tut was doing a lot of damage control, restoring the old order.

Eventually, however, the place got all tourist-y.

Starting about 1069 B.C., Egypt suffered military losses and foreign invasion. First the Libyans, then the Nubians, the Greeks, the Romans…from an international empire, Egypt had descended to a wealthy country that was being ruled and divided by others. The one theme to each foreign incursion was that the invaders all went native, seduced by the place, right down to Mark Antony. The last pharaoh of Egypt – fittingly, given the title – was a woman, Cleopatra VII. (Yes, the one Elizabeth Taylor made famous.) She was also completely and thoroughly Greek, a descendant of Alexander the Great’s general, Ptolemy.

The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt is intended for a popular audience, and its cover proudly proclaims itself as a “New York Times Bestseller.” However immodest the banner, the success is warranted. While endnotes are sprinkled very lightly through the text, there is a copious section of chapter-specific notes on general sources for the material. My only quibble is that on occasion the author digresses from the action to point out that the ancient Egyptians were not nice people. Those of us who grew up on sword-and-sandal movies during the Eisenhower Administration had already gotten the memo. But the digressions are few and frankly, the author’s heart really doesn’t seem to be in them…which for our purposes is a good thing. Charmingly, he puts his “Acknowledgments” at the end of the book rather than the beginning. That section turns out to be worth the read, since Wilkinson first teases “a personal introduction that got this whole ball rolling,” and then at the end he thanks “Michael…for his many nights alone in front of the television.”

Um-hum. Michael, wherever you are, it was worth it.