A New Book on the Old Kingdom

I received in the mail today the first volume of the new series, Harvard Egyptological Studies: Towards a New History for the Egyptian Old Kingdom: Perspectives on the Pyramid Age, ed. Peter Der Manuelian and Thomas Schneider (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2015). As expected from Brill publications, the book is beautifully produced.

I do have an essay in the volume ("Did the Old Kingdom Collapse? A New View of the First Intermediate Period" pp. 60-75) but I wanted to highlight two other contributions in the volume.

Miroslav Bárta ("Ancient Egyptian History as an Example of Punctuated Equilibrium: An Outline" pp. 1-17) counters the idea that the Old Kingdom was a static place. He depicts it as having times of stability punctuated by major periods of change. In other words, history actually occurred.

My late friend, Harold Hays ("The Entextualization of the Pyramid Texts and the Religious History of the Old Kingdom" pp. 200-226), takes on the theory of the democratization of the afterlife. Mark Smith, Harco Willems, and others, including myself, have pointed to major problems in the theory and it is great to have Harold's contribution to add to the growing list of refutations of it.

There are several other good essays in the collection that I might recommend another time. I am only disappointed that, for whatever reasons, Ann Roth's and Manfred Bietak's contributions to the conference did not appear in the volume.

General Orders

Every so often some ancient letters bring a particular matter into focus. A set of three letters by the general Piankh is one such group of documents. The first letter runs as follows:

Pharaoh's general to the necropolis scribe Tjaroy, saying: I heard every thing about which you sent me, what you said about this matter of the two policemen, how they are talking about these matters. Get together with Nudjmet and Payshuweben. Send and have these two policemen brought in to the house. Get to the bottom of things quickly. If you find out that what they say is true then put them in a couple of baskets and dump them in the river at night, but don't let anyone find out about it at all.

On another matter: How is Pharaoh going to attack this land? Who is Pharaoh still the boss of? Three months ago I sent a barge but you have not sent me a single tiban of gold or a single tiban of silver. It is okay. Don't worry about it. As soon as this letter reaches you scrounge up a tiban of gold and one of silver and send it to me on a barge.

(P. Berlin 10487 = LRL 21)

We have another letter that deals with this scandal:

Pharaoh's general to the agent Payshuweben, saying: I heard every thing about which you sent me, what you said about this matter of the two policemen, how they are talking about these matters. Get together with Nudjmet and Tjaroy. Send and have these two policemen brought to my house. Get to the bottom of things quickly. Kill them and dump them into the river at night, but don't let anyone find out about it at all.

(P. Berlin 10488 = LRL 34)

The two letters are almost identical for a bit but differ in places. So Payshuweben was to do the actual killing, while Tjaroy was to bring some baskets to dump the bodies into the Nile.

But three people were involved and we have the third letter as well:

Pharaoh's general to the chief of the harem of Amonrasonter Nudjmet in life, prosperity and health, and the favor of Amonrasonter. I ask every god and goddess whom I pass by that you may live and be healthy and I may see you when I return and fill my eyes every day with the sight of you.

I heard every thing about which you sent me, what you said about this matter of the two policemen which you said. They are talking. Get together with Payshuweben and that scribe Tjaroy. Send and have these two policemen brought to my house. Get to the bottom of things quickly. Have them killed and dumped into the river at night.

Write to me about how you are doing. Be well. Be healthy.

(P. Berlin 10489 = LRL 35)

This last letter has the same author and subject matter as the other two letters but is much more polite. It begins with the standard niceties. If anything, it contains more of them than the typical letter of the time. It also ends with pleasantries that seem sincere.

What accounts for the difference? The recipient of the third letter is a woman and the recipients of the other two are men. That accounts for some of the difference. Piankh does not have a woman get her hands dirty with any of the nasty business that he has the other men do. From her title, Nudjmet has a high position in the religious hierarchy. But this does not explain everything. As it so happens, we know from other records that Nudjmet is Piankh's mother. The other two are Piankh's subordinates. As a general he is used to giving orders and so he does.

All three letters ended up in the archive of Tjaroy. So the three individuals apparently did get together.

In an interesting twist, Nudjmet's copy of the Book of the Dead mostly survives split between three museums: P. BM EA 10541 + P. Louvre E.6258 + P. München ÄS 825. (The portion in the Munich museum was destroyed during World War II.) In Nudjmet's negative confession she includes the passages "I have not slain; I have not ordered a murder" (BD 125 A 14-15) and "I have not slain any person" (BD 125 B 5).

We sometimes wonder if the ideals of ancient Egyptian religion actually had an impact on the actual actions of individuals. In some cases it is clear that they did. In this case, we can see that they apparently did not or at least Piankh did not think they should.

And yet, if we wanted to make a case that Piankh was simply irreligious, we might make a case from the first two letters but not the third. In the third letter, Piankh certainly expresses the normal pieties. A few year later, Piankh became the High Priest of Amun and even received an oracle from the god.

Hints of What We are Missing

Friedhelm Hoffmann and Joachim Quack in their invaluable collection, Anthologie der demotischen Literatur, spend some time reconstructing what we know of Egyptian narratives that appear only in scattered fragments but do not have enough material for contiguous translation. Among these collections they note a particular interest in narratives circulating in the Greco-Roman period (332 B.C.-A.D. 314) about events in the Middle Kingdom (2000-1800 B.C.) One of these narratives has Sesostris (which?) invading Arabia, "India, Libya, Ethiopia, Asia, and even Europe." (p. 177). We have no contemporary records of any of these conquests, but they seem to have been considered history in the Greco-Roman period. These fragments provides hints of the literature that circulated in Egypt and their own memories of their glorious past. It provides us with a sense of the immense amount of material about the past that we are missing.

Is This a Coincidence?

Looking through P. Mil. Vogl. III today, I noticed a series of demotic contracts from Ptolemaic Egypt where various women appear to be selling themselves into slavery. In every single case the name of the woman's father is listed as "I don't know."

In modern times there is a clear connection between a lack of fathers and poverty. Is this ancient evidence for that same phenomenon?

Pepi II

When I was a graduate student I encountered a theory, told me by one of my professors, that connected the demise of the Old Kingdom with the lengthy reign of Pepi II. The theory was that after Pepi kept on living, and living, and living after completing his pyramid and that the workers had nothing to do and so the country collapsed. This would not, however, explain why the country waited until after his death to collapse.

The basic facts of Pepi's reign are not as clear as other Pharaohs.
Manetho assigns Pepi II a reign of ninety-four years, which would make him the longest reigning monarch of human history. Unfortunately, Manetho lived nearly two millennia after Pepi II. The highest regnal year attested in contemporary monuments is the year of the thirty-third cattle count. The cattle counts were at most two years apart. So that would give a date of sixty-six years at most, which is still a lengthy reign.

That Pepi II came to the throne while still young seems apparent from his preserved letter to Harkhuf where he suggests eager but unwise measures in the treatment of people.

The pyramid of Pepi II is a standard size pyramid. The interior is decorated with many pyramid texts.

That there was a change in Egypt very quickly after the death of Pepi II is clear. Whether that change was a good thing or a bad thing is not as clear. At this point, we simply do not have enough information to tell whether Pepi II reigned too long, but if that is the case, he certainly was not the last to do so.