Egypt: The Old Kingdom

Egypt was once thought to be the location of the earliest civilization. The father of history, Herodotus, certainly thought so. He wrote of an encounter with Egyptian priests during the 5^th century B.C. during which they explained to him how the lines of Pharaohs extended thousands of years back into the past and thus suggesting that Egypt predated all other societies. Proud as the Greeks were, even they assumed that the Egyptians were the inheritors of the oldest methods and manners which distinguished men from the primitive, illiterate wanderers that still roamed the face of the earth in his day and for a long time afterward.

Modern discoveries would convince many scholars and archaeologists that Sumer was, in fact, older. However, no one can deny the hold that ancient Egypt exerts on our view of the past. Even today, after one hundred years of reading about the historical primacy of Sumer in school textbooks, it is Egypt which allures us with its pyramids, its mysterious Sphinx and its history which intertwines with that of the Bible and Greek Mythology. Egypt is the land of the Hebrews’ slavery and Menelaus’ exile after the long Trojan War. Egypt sits there still, thousands of years later, burdened and mute with the stone architecture of nearly forgotten ancestors.

Perhaps the first things that come to mind when we think of ancient Egypt are its pharaohs. Especially in our democratic age, we are intrigued by these despots who apparently wielded supreme power over masses of people and could force them to labor at massive architectural projects that would endure thousands of years. The pharaohs were worshipped as both representatives of the gods and as gods themselves, who would go to join the gods in heaven after their physical death here on earth.

The first of the pharaohs was apparently a man named Menes. According to the semi-mythical tales recorded by the Egyptians, he united the previously existing southern and northern kingdoms into one Egyptian demesne. A double crown, its red and white parts representing the two kingdoms, was worn by the pharaohs of the first dynasty and those that followed.

After Menes come nearly three thousand years of pharaohs. This series of dynasties was not uninterrupted. The Old Kingdom endured under several dynasties that ruled more or less in sequence for one thousand years. Sometime around 2150 BC, long droughts and famines brought chaos into the land and toppled the pharaohs for several generations.

The paucity of data that exists about communities which existed prior to the Old Kingdom is intriguing. We know, or profess to know, that men passed through certain stages of technological and social development in the years after the last glacial maximum of the present ice age. We know that the people of Jericho came to possess a certain level of urban sophistication and organization by sometime around 7,000 B.C. Pharaonic Egypt came into existence toward the end of the 4^th millennium B.C. What form Egyptian society took in the millennia previous to that is somewhat mysterious. They certainly did not come out of the wilderness and build the pyramids in a matter of centuries. Long years of learning through trial and error and through deduction and induction must have preceded these accomplishments. Did they learn everything from the Sumerians? Were there other sources of knowledge for the Egyptians? These are questions with which archaeologists and historians continue to struggle as they ponder the few artifacts and relics that remain from this time period.