The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt (1 Viewer)

[Combat]

New book coming out in March looks interesting:

In this landmark work, one of the world’s most renowned Egyptologists tells the epic story of this great civilization, from its birth as the first nation-state to its final absorption into the Roman Empire—three thousand years of wild drama, bold spectacle, and unforgettable characters.

Award-winning scholar Toby Wilkinson captures not only the lavish pomp and artistic grandeur of this land of pyramids and pharaohs but for the first time reveals the constant propaganda and repression that were its foundations. Drawing upon forty years of archaeological research, Wilkinson takes us inside an exotic tribal society with a pre-monetary economy and decadent, divine kings who ruled with all-too-recognizable human emotions.

Here are the years of the Old Kingdom, where Pepi II, made king as an infant, was later undermined by rumors of his affair with an army general, and the Middle Kingdom, a golden age of literature and jewelry in which the benefits of the afterlife became available for all, not just royalty—a concept later underlying Christianity. Wilkinson then explores the legendary era of the New Kingdom, a lost world of breathtaking opulence founded by Ahmose, whose parents were siblings, and who married his sister and transformed worship of his family into a national cult. Other leaders include Akhenaten, the “heretic king,” who with his wife Nefertiti brought about a revolution with a bold new religion; his son Tutankhamun, whose dazzling tomb would remain hidden for three millennia; and eleven pharaohs called Ramesses, the last of whom presided over the militarism, lawlessness, and corruption that caused a crucial political and societal decline.

Riveting and revelatory, filled with new information and unique interpretations, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt will become the standard source about this great civilization, one that lasted—so far—longer than any other.

 

[Combat]

NY Times review today:

An emotionally fraught transition from one regime to the next, with no clear-cut successor to the previous ruler. Worries about stability and the maintenance of law and order. Fears about foreign meddling and influence. The army at least temporarily filling the political vacuum and overseeing a transition.

This sequence of events — which may sound familiar to those who followed this year’s overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s ruler of nearly three decades — actually occurred, the scholar Toby Wilkinson said in a recent essay in The Wall Street Journal, more than 3,000 years ago, after the death of the boy-king King Tutankhamen, when the army stepped in to maintain order and act as power broker.

As its title indicates, Mr. Wilkinson’s new book, “The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt,” is about those long-ago days of the pharaohs and does not grapple with developments in that country after the death of Cleopatra in 30 B.C. But the volume does shed light on patterns in Egyptian history and the ways in which the country’s geography (which made it susceptible to invasion and attack) and “the sharp dichotomies of nature in the Nile Valley” (flood and drought, fertile land and arid desert) amplified what Mr. Wilkinson sees as a national proclivity to view “the world as a constant battle between order and chaos” — a tendency that he says the country’s leaders often played upon to justify their domineering, autocratic rule.

Although the book offers way more detail about lesser-known pharaohs and lesser-known battles than the lay reader could possibly want to know, Mr. Wilkinson — a fellow of Clare College at Cambridge University — writes with considerable verve, and his narrative provides an acute understanding of how the Egyptian brand of divine kingship evolved over the centuries, how its pharaohs used their mastery of the architectural and decorative arts to glorify themselves (and cement their historical reputations) and how intertwined the monarchy’s power became with religion and the military.

Mr. Wilkinson is nimble at conveying the sumptuous pageantry and cultural sophistication of pharaohnic Egypt. He deconstructs the elaborate writings and funerary iconography, noting that “the Egyptians were adept at recording things as they wished them to be seen, not as they actually were,” and that tomb decoration was “designed, above all, to reinforce the established social order,” for instance, showing a tomb’s owner dominating every scene, towering in size over his family and workers. In addition Mr. Wilkinson provides an intriguing account of how archaeologists and historians have pieced together portraits of ancient Egypt’s kings, including Narmer, the first ruler of a united Egypt (whose reign began around 2950 B.C.) ; the warrior king Thutmose III, who secured Egypt’s control over the Transjordan; the eccentric Akhenaten who declared himself a co-regent with the sun; and Ramesses II, who ruled for an astonishing 67 years and would be immortalized in Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias.”

After studying ancient Egypt for more than 20 years Mr. Wilkinson says he found himself growing “increasingly uneasy about the subject of my research” — increasingly aware of “the darker side of pharaonic civilization,” which has often been glossed over, he says, by the “misty-eyed reverence” that many scholars have shared with tourists.

“We marvel at the pyramids,” he writes, “without stopping to think too much about the political system that made them possible. We take vicarious pleasure in the pharaohs’ military victories — Thutmose III at the Battle of Megiddo, Ramesses II at the Battle of Kadesh — without pausing too long to reflect on the brutality of warfare in the ancient world. We thrill at the weirdness of the heretic king Akhenaten and all his works, but do not question what it is like to live under a despotic, fanatical ruler.”

Arguing that the ancient Egyptians “invented the concept of the nation-state that still dominates our planet,” Mr. Wilkinson writes that the country’s earliest kings not only “formulated and harnessed” traditional tools of leadership — like using ideology and ceremony to unite a disparate population and bind it to the state — but also used more malign instruments like police surveillance, xenophobia and the brutal repression of dissent to cement their power.

In fact this book draws a sobering portrait of what daily life was like for ordinary Egyptians. Foot soldiers (who actually fought barefoot) were subject to frequent beatings and had to subsist on meager rations, which were supposed to be supplemented “by foraging and stealing.” And peasants, who did not have access to the doctors and dentists available to the wealthy, suffered from a range of debilitating diseases like tuberculosis and parasitical infections. To make matters worse, high taxes, the uncertain nature of agriculture in the Nile Valley (either too much water or too little) and the constant threat of famine combined to make daily life feel perennially precarious.

Small wonder, then, Mr. Wilkinson says, that fervent belief in an afterlife — once largely the preserve of the ruling class, who regarded mummification and pyramids as vehicles for overcoming death — spread gradually to the population at large. The nature of an afterlife changed too. Whereas the wealthy, Mr. Wilkinson writes, “had been content to look forward to an afterlife that was essentially a continuation of earthly existence,” Egyptians increasingly came to hope for “something better in the next world,” to believe in the idea of “transfiguration and transformation” — an idea that “would echo through later civilizations and ultimately shape the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

Mr. Wilkinson argued in his Wall Street Journal essay that Egyptian history has a “depressing habit of repeating itself.” In much the same way that the Old Kingdom ended in fragmentation and civil war, so did despotism in the Middle Kingdom give way to weakness and confusion that left the country vulnerable to invasion. A band of Theban loyalists would succeed against all odds in expelling these foreigners known as the Hyksos, and Egypt would reassert itself as a great imperial power, controlling a territory that stretched more than 2,000 miles. But the glorious era of the New Kingdom too would come to an end with the rise of other powers in the region, including Assyria, Persia, Greece and Rome.

“The last act of Egypt’s great drama,” Mr. Wilkinson observes, “was played out in the streets of Alexandria with a cast of characters as famous as any: Caesar, Mark Antony, and Cleopatra. With her death, in 30, Egypt became a Roman possession and its 3,000-year-old pharaonic tradition came to an end.”

 

[Currahee Chris]

thanks for sharing that- sounds really interesting. Will want to see more. It's hard to find books that actually discuss the Egyptians on a level I can understand- sounds like this book might do it.

Interesting when you think of the 3,000 years of their history. Great scene on Rome when Pullo and Vorenus were in hiding under some of the ancient relics. Pullo remarked that Egypt was powerful way before Rome ever existed- gives an idea how old Egyptian culture is.