- two quotes by Thomas Schneider, who addresses this topic to some extent in his article “Foreign Egypt: Egyptology and the Concept of Cultural Appropriation” (Ägypten und Levante 13: 155-161).
- As J.D. Ray put it: “Most of the standard histories represent Egypt as self-contained, isolated from its neighbours in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, and rather static. Perhaps many of us would prefer to see it that way; after all, it is simpler.” According to this view, Ancient Egypt, cut off from the outside world, unlike the topographically open cultural landscapes of Syria or Mesopotamia, was able to develop and flourish on its own and consequently stuck to the traditions of its historical identity. …This image of an Egypt that prospered only because of its isolationism and was characterized by a high degree of stability also incorporated 19th century theories which maintained that more recent stages of culture merely assimilated older ones, in a process termed metaphorically “legacy.” This concept influenced much historiography on Egyptian civilization, among others John A. Wilson’s The Burden of Egypt (1951) which is based on that central theme of traditionalism and marginalizes the fact of innovation. A straight line leads from here to the opinion that “no decisions of mankind were ever made in Egypt” such as maintained by Karl Jaspers in his philosophical concept of an Axial Age.
- Schneider then points out that the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction.
- After Joachim Spiegel’s severe criticism of the prevailing vision of an Egyptian traditionalism, several Egyptologists of the second half of the 20th century have emphasized the contrary point that Egypt offers much evidence of inner dynamics. In their eyes, these dynamics brought about considerable diachronic change in Egypt, at times to such an extent that Egypt as a whole was redefined and restructured. At the beginning of his survey of Egyptian history, Erik Hornung deconstructs the old image by reminding the reader of the “ongoing, often stormy changes behind this rigid facade”. Especially noteworthy is a recent judgment by John Baines, which represents the very opposite of the older dogmatic view when he claims that “change was of the essence in Egyptian culture as in others.”
- Any study of Egyptian society over time must therefore account for the delicate balance between continuity and innovation in Egyptian society. To begin with continuity, many elements of Egyptian society remained more or less constant over time. Egyptian ideology required the presence of a king to rule the country, and this king served as the mortal link between people and the gods. There were periods in which multiple kings or a women ruled Egypt, of course, but those did not change Egyptian royal ideology. Another constant was the importance of agriculture, which always remained the backbone of the Egyptian economy. The regular inundation of the Nile provided rich alluvial soil, and Egypt became a prized portion of the Roman Empire for its grain production. The ancient Egyptian language has a longer documented history than any other language and survived until at least the 17th century in the form of Coptic. Nevertheless, there was considerable innovation in Egypt over the centuries. I’ll outline just a few below:
- Language: Old and Middle Egyptian are rather similar. It’s standard to learn Middle Egyptian first, and then one can pick up Old Egyptian fairly quickly. The Egyptian language shifted markedly from Middle to Late Egyptian, however. Late Egyptian is an analytic language rather than synthetic like Middle Egyptian; in other words, it separated its morphemes into separate words. Among other changes, the use of possessive pronouns rather than possessive suffixes becomes common, and articles are used for the first time (e.g. pA and tA, “the”).
- Script: The Egyptians are most famous for their hieroglyphs, but they also used a cursive form of hieroglyphs for papyrus and writing tablets. Hieratic shifted over time; originally it was written in columns, but during the Middle Kingdom it changed to rows. Whereas the Middle Kingdom letters of Heqanakht and the Debate of a Man and His Ba are written in columns, for example, the Tale of Two Brothers (New Kingdom) is written in rows. P. Berlin 3022, a copy of the Tale of Sinuhe, is transitional and uses both rows and columns. Hieratic split toward the end of the New Kingdom into two even more abbreviated and abstract scripts, Demotic (north) and Abnormal Hieratic (Theban area). Demotic became the standard administrative script of the 1st millennium BCE until the use of Greek in the Ptolemaic period. In the first or second century CE, Egypt began using Coptic, essentially ancient Egyptian written with the Greek alphabet and modified Demotic characters. Hieroglyphs remained fairly consistent over the millennia, but they did experience innovation; the temple texts of the Greco-Roman period are particularly complex and use many new hieroglyphs as well as incorporating old hieroglyphs in innovative ways. The most (in)famous of these is the “Crocodile Hymn” from the Temple of Esna, written almost entirely with the crocodile hieroglyph.
- Government: As I noted above, Egypt was typically ruled by a king (Egyptian nsw). Under the king was the vizier (Egyptian TAty). Originally there was only one vizier in Egypt, but the vizierate was split between Upper and Lower Egypt in the 18th Dynasty. This simultaneously made administration easier and limited the power of the vizier(s). During the Old Kingdom, it was princes and other members of the royal family who held the key positions in the government. Gradually, however, elite but non-royal Egyptians began to acquire positions of power, and by the 5th Dynasty, even the vizier could be non-royal. This weakened the king’s hold over his officials, so it was not uncommon for kings to marry their daughters to high officials to secure their loyalty. The administrators of the districts (nomes) of Egypt increasingly acquired power, and with the fragmentation of Egypt at the end of the Old Kingdom, nomarchs ruled as veritable kings within their nomes. Although rulers from Thebes were able to reunify Egypt, the nomarchs remained remarkably powerful in the Middle Kingdom until Senusret III broke their power in the 12th Dynasty and reorganized the administrative structure of Egypt. Egyptian government changed again in the 18th Dynasty; some old offices and titles fell out of use, while new offices like the King’s Son of Kush were created.
- Religion: The popularity of gods in Egypt fluctuated over time. Some of the most prominent gods of the Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom gradually disappeared over time (e.g. Merneith), whereas other gods rose rapidly in prominence (e.g. Amun from the Middle Kingdom onward). Gods from Nubia and the Levant were incorporated into the Egyptian pantheon; Ramesses II named one of his daughters Bint-Anat (“daughter of the goddess Anat”), and Papyrus BN 202 and Papyrus Amherst IX contain a tale of Astarte and the Sea. Temples to the gods became more grandiose over time; whereas the pyramids and pyramid temples were the most impressive stone structures of the Old Kingdom, by far the most impressive stone constructions of the New Kingdom were the beautiful divine temples of Karnak, Luxor, Medinet Habu, and so on. Whereas temples remained largely inaccessible to most Egyptians, a New Kingdom innovation in temple architecture called the contra temple (or Chapel of the Hearing Ear) allowed commoners to interact with the gods of a temple. Indeed, there was a rise in personal piety during the New Kingdom, particularly the 19th Dynasty, and Egyptians began to interact with the gods directly through graffiti, letters, stelae, and offerings. Egyptian priests acquired more power during the New Kingdom until Egypt was split between a king in the Delta and the High Priest of Amun in Thebes during the 21st Dynasty. The creation of the offices of the God’s Wife of Amun and the Divine Adoratrice, typically assigned to female members of the royal family, allowed the king to regain some control over the priesthood and curtail priestly power. Finally, the Amarna period, though short-lived, contained numerous religious innovations and was a remarkable experiment in henotheism.
- Death and burial: The earliest kings of Egypt were buried in mudbrick enclosures that resembled their palaces. Beginning in the 3rd Dynasty, kings were buried in pyramids. Although initially uninscribed, the pyramids of the 5th and 6th Dynasty were decorated with Pyramid Texts, a series of spells designed to ensure that the deceased reached the afterlife. Pyramid building largely disappeared during the First Intermediate Period, when rock-cut tombs became more popular (e.g. the tomb of Ankhtifi at Moalla and the saff tombs of Thebes in the 11th Dynasty). The tomb of Montuhotep II, first king of the Middle Kingdom, was incorporated into his mortuary temple, a rather unique structure in the history of Egyptian architecture. The other kings of the Middle Kingdom returned to building pyramids, but these were primarily mudbrick constructions encased in limestone. Most of the kings of the New Kingdom were buried in the Valley of the Kings in rock-cut tombs, and the government-sponsored village of Deir el-Medina was created to house the workmen and their families. The shift in Egyptian afterlife beliefs has been called a “democratization of the afterlife.” Originally only the king was guaranteed an afterlife, and his servants and retainers acquired an afterlife only through pledged service to him, either being killed upon his death (as in the tombs at Abydos) or by buried in mastaba tombs in close proximity to his pyramid. By the end of the Old Kingdom, however, elites were no longer reliant upon the king for access to the afterlife, and nomarchs and other high officials were often buried in their home districts rather than in the royal pyramid fields. The Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom gave way to the Coffin Texts of the New Kingdom, so called because the spells were painted in elite coffins and no longer limited to kings. Coffin Texts in turn gave way to the funerary papyri of the New Kingdom such as the Book of Coming Forth by Day.
- Technology: Egyptians developed metalworking early on, but they did not begin large scale production of bronze until the New Kingdom; most tools of the Old to Middle Kingdoms were stone or copper. The Egyptians knew of iron in the New Kingdom and even produced a few elite objects out of meteoric iron, but iron production did not become common until the Late Period. Glass production, probably adopted from Syria, was introduced to Egypt during the 18th Dynasty, and the Egyptians began to produce rather beautiful glass vessels and objects (e.g. the Amarna fish). Chariots and horses were likewise introduced to Egypt from the Levant in the Second Intermediate Period and the beginning of the New Kingdom, and chariotry quickly became a key component of the Egyptian military.
- One could also point to changes in diet (e.g. the introduction of the chicken in the 18th Dynasty), clothing, domestic architecture, the status of women, economic activities and trade, methods of warfare, and many more aspects of society. These innovations notwithstanding, the Egyptians considered themselves part of an ancient culture. Their king lists went back to the beginning of the Old Kingdom, and a block from the Ramesseum portrayed a procession of statues of Menes, Montuhotep II, and Ahmose, the founders of the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms, respectively. An Egyptian transported from Old Kingdom Egypt would have recognized many elements of life in New Kingdom Egypt, even if he would have found it difficult to communicate and been bewildered by new developments in town planning and architecture. There are several reasons for cultural continuity in Egypt:
- Egypt tended to incorporate new beliefs and technologies rather than be subsumed by them. In periods of subjugation, such as the Libyan and Nubian dynasties of the first millennium BCE, Egypt’s culture changed only slowly, and the Libyans and Nubians became Egyptianized, portraying themselves as model Egyptian rulers. Egypt had over 2000 years of royal ideology by that point, and the trappings of kingship had been largely fossilized; it was far easier for Libyan and Nubian kings to rule in the Egyptian style rather than try to force a new system of government on Egypt. Indeed, since the Libyans and Nubians acquired writing and administration only from Egypt, it only made sense to utilize the system of governance already in place. Even in the Assyrian and Achaemenid periods, the Egyptian system of governance remained largely unchanged, and it was not until the Ptolemaic period that foreign administrative and judicial practices were imposed on Egypt on a broad scale.Egyptian institutions like the palace and temples tended to promote cultural continuity. Temples in particular proved to be the last bastion of Egyptian learning and culture, dying out only in the 6th century when Justinian closed the last Egyptian temples. Temples were storehouses of texts and records, and the scribal training that took place in temples ensured that new scribes and priests were educated in the history and traditions of Egypt.Egypt had considerable historical awareness. As I noted above, the Egyptians kept careful records of their rulers and historical events. Most of these records, written on perishable materials, have long since disappeared, but there are references to these records in surviving texts. The Egyptian priest Manetho was able to write a complete history of Egypt in the Ptolemaic period based upon these writings.
- Perhaps most importantly, Egypt experienced no large scale collapses. It fractured into multiple centers of power in the intermediate periods, certainly, but it never lost its language, religious system, or system of kingship, and Egyptian ideology promoted the idea of ma’at (divine order) requiring a unified Two Lands. Egypt’s relative isolation made large scale migration possible but less easy than in the Levant or northern Mesopotamia. Another factor was the Nile, which allowed agriculture even in times of severe drought; note that it was only shipments of grain from Egypt to Hatti at the end of the Late Bronze Age that allowed the Hittite Empire to stay afloat. Finally, although Egypt fell under the sway of the Hyksos, Nubians, Libyans, Assyrians, and Persians, these groups formed only a very small percentage of the overall population, and the Egyptian style of governance was not changed drastically in these time periods.
Is Ancient Egypt the longest human civilization?
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