“And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains, Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias (1818)
The famous 19th century British poet Percy Shelley was able to masterfully convey the vibe emanating from the remnants of Egypt’s past. The sonnet tells about a mighty ancient ruler who was both feared and revered during his life. And yet all that remained of his worldly glory were an inscription and a tumbled statue in the middle of nowhere.
My previous blog post looked at how Egypt’s geography and certain aspects of ancient Egyptian culture contributed to the civilization’s popularity in modern culture. This time, I plan to delve into the peculiarities of ancient Egyptian history.
The Most Famous Ancient Egyptians: The Last Queen and the Forgotten King
There is a reason I described Egypt as the “the phantom titan of the ancient world”. By the time the Romans conquered the country in 30 BC, Egyptian civilization was already over 3000 years old. Throughout the three millennia that preceded Roman rule, Egypt had been ruled by 33 different dynasties.
Yet it is not a history that school history textbooks go deep into. If you try to think about the most famous figures of ancient Egyptian history, two names quickly come to mind: Cleopatra and Tutankhamun. But let’s look at these two examples. Tutankhamun’s reign was practically uneventful; moreover, his existence had been forgotten. He was made famous by the discovery of his tomb, the first undisturbed crypt of a pharaoh found in Egypt. As for Cleopatra…her reign was a complete disaster that brought about the fall of Egypt.
Cleopatra
But can you easily recall the names of any of the kings that ruled the country during its zenith? Can you easily recall the names of any officials or artists?
And yet what we know of 3000 years of history are just fragments, little glimpses of a vast past. Most of Egyptian history is still a mystery, hidden under the Saharan sands and the Nile's silt. The best preserved era is the Hellenistic period that lasted for about 300 years, from the conquest of the country by Alexander the Great in 330 BC until the end of Cleopatra’s reign.
The Ancient War Against Memory
There are several reasons why much of ancient Egyptian history was lost to time, but probably the main reason were the specifics of ancient Egyptian historiography. We all know the expression like “history is written by the victors” and “rewriting history”. Ancient Egyptians were not just masters of rewriting history; they were masters of erasing it.
Egypt had been ruled by 33 dynasties. Dynastic changes were often the result of civil wars, rebellions, and palace coups. Historically, when a new dynasty establishes, it tends to find sources of its legitimacy in order to cement their authority and create their legacy. This was especially important in a society like Egypt where pharaohs were viewed as divine representations of the gods. Philosophically explaining why one personification of the gods took power away from another by force in the annals of history was a tricky task. So in order to establish the legitimacy of a new dynasty, the memories of the previous one had to be destroyed. Measures taken to achieve these results included removing inscriptions, defacing statues, looting tombs, and moving capitals. As dynasty replaced dynasty, these events had a tendency of repeating over and over again. Sometimes, cases of the erasure of history happened within the same dynasties as well when the new pharaoh tried to destroy all memories of their predecessor due some personal grievances. Some rulers claimed the achievements of their predecessors as their own in attempts to inflate their own legacies, thus making the task of reconstructing past events even more difficult.
A pharaoh erased from history. Photo by Hedwig Storch. Licenced under CC BY-SA 3.0
The image above shows an example of one such war against memory. The inscriptions related to to Thutmose III were left intact; references to his predecessor, Hatshepsut, were destroyed.
Whatever reminders lingered of one event got mixed with whatever memories remained from a different time, so by the time of Classical Antiquity, Egyptian history had already become much fictionalised, becoming more akin to folklore.
Out of the Sands: Recovered Parts of Ancient Egyptian History
For a long time after the end of the Antiquity, the main remaining sources of ancient Egyptian history were Greek and Roman authors, and due to the authority classical texts held over scholarship throughout the centuries, their claims had largely remained unquestioned. However, the decipherment of hieroglyphs and the series of excavations undertaken throughout the 19th and 20th centuries shed new light on this ancient civilization. And it turned out that what the accounts of the classical authors often did not match with the stories told on the uncovered stelae and papyri.
Below are some of the facts about Egyptian history that Egyptologists have been able to reconstruct.
Egypt had an empire for a certain period. The Pharaoh Thutmose III conquered the Levant and reached as far as the bank of the Euphrates River in northern Syria.
Lusk, M. (2017, July 20). Temple of Karnak, Wars of Thutmose III. World History Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.worldhistory.org/image/6894/temple-of-karnak-wars-of-thutmose-iii/
Licenced under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
That time saw the appearance of the first case of a system that modern political scientists and international relations experts would have called a “bipolar world”, at least in the case of the eastern Mediterranean region, as Egypt and the Hittite Kingdom fought to expand their spheres of influence. Ramesses II spent a notable part of his reign fighting the Hittites. He led Egyptian forces against the Hittite army at the Battle of Kadesh in northern Syria. Despite it being one of the biggest military engagements of the ancient world, it is still unclear which side won at Kadesh…as both the Egyptians and Hittites claimed victory in their respective inscriptions. At the same time, Ramesses’ reign was a golden age of Egyptian architecture with the construction of some of ancient Egypt’s most famous monuments such as the Temples of Abu Simbel and the Ramesseum.
Modern loose interpretation at the The Pharaonic Village in Cairo of a Battle scene from the Great Kadesh reliefs of Ramses II on the Walls of the Ramesseum
Princess Hatshepsut, the daughter of one of the pharaohs, practically usurped power from her nephew and ruled for over twenty years. In order to position her as the true heir of her father, she was mainly depicted as a male ruler.
Statue of Hatshepsut
The Pharaoh Akhenaten attempted what was probably the first known state-wide religious reformation in history. During his rule, worship of the traditional Egyptian pantheon was replaced with the cult of a single supreme deity: the god Aten, who tended to be depicted as a sun disk.
Worship of the Sun God Aten
Egypt was the only major civilization of the Mediterranean region to survive what archaeologists call “the Bronze Age Collapse”. As Mycenae, the Hittite Kingdom, and Ugarit fell, Egypt held out. Under Ramesses III, the Egyptians successfully repelled the attacks of the mysterious Sea Peoples.
The military campaigns Sea Peoples devastated the eastern Mediterranean during the12th century BC
As yet only parts of ancient Egyptian history have been reconstructed, so we can only imagine what other events are still waiting their turn to emerge out of obscurity.
Classical Sources About Ancient Egypt
Already back in the first century AD, in his work Against Apion, the Jewish historian Josephus Flavius stated that no written Egyptian historical sources remained. This statement shows that during time of Classical Antiquity, memories of earlier Egyptian history had already become a distant echo.
Nevertheless, Antiquity was the period when some of the most notable secondary sources about ancient Egyptian history were written. These works would go on to become the canonical version of the history of Ancient Egypt in both Europe and the Middle East.
The first source is Histories by Herodotus, which has survived until nowadays intact. The second book of Histories is practically fully dedicated to the history of Egypt. Herodotus himself was an ancient Greek historian from the city-state of Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, who lived in the middle of the 5th century BC.
Another major classical work about Egyptian history is Manetho’s History of Egypt. Manetho was a priest who lived in Ptolemaic Egypt during the 3rd century BC. Whilst the History of Egypt was an influential account back in those days, it has not survived. All that remains are extracts, quotes, and references as they were recorded in the works of later Latin, Byzantine, Jewish, and Armenian authors.
And yet neither of the two works give us enough information about the general narrative of ancient Egyptian history.
Herodotus describes Egypt as the world’s most ancient civilization and claims that the land had been ruled by 330 kings. At the same time, he flippantly skips over most of that period, not even mentioning the majority of the kings or historical events that took place throughout several millennia. Herodotus becomes more descriptive whilst covering the rule of later kings, but even then those accounts are very anecdotal, more akin to ancient Greek myths. For example, one account centres on a blind Pharaoh and his quest to regain his sight via miraculous means. In another, a different king tries to come up with creative ways to identify a burglar who had broken into his treasury; the burglar himself, in turn, uses his wit to avoid falling into the Pharaoh’s traps. The story of the third Pharaoh gets connected to the myth of the Trojan War whilst also adding a plot twist to the famous tale. Whilst fleeing from Sparta, Paris and Helen’s ship gets washed ashore in Egypt where they are brought before King Proteus. Having found out that Helen had left her husband Menelaus for Paris, Proteus forbids Helen from leaving Egypt as he could not permit such a transgression. In the end, Paris came back to Troy alone, and the real reason the Trojan War took place, according to Herodotus, was because the Trojans had failed to convince the Greeks that Helen was not in Troy.
Herodotus, "the Father of History"
Compared to Herodotus, Manetho provides a list of the dynasties that ruled Egypt prior to the Persian conquest in the 4th century BC. And yet the surviving fragments lack detail. The History of Egypt provides lists of kings for most of the dynasties. However, in the case of some dynasties, such as the Twentieth Dynasty, even the names of the kings are not provided, only the number. Hence, around 3000 years of political, military, social, and cultural history were left unacknowledged with a few exceptions.
I have previously mentioned Ramesses II, the second ruler of the Nineteenth Dynasty, his campaigns and architectural projects. However, the Manetho summarises his whole reign in one sentence: informing the readers that he ruled for 66 years.
Unsurprisingly, Akhenaten and his religious reforms are omitted completely. Even a vaguely similar name cannot be found in Manetho’s vision of the Eighteenth Dynasty.
However, what I find surprising is the lack of references to the invasions of the Sea Peoples in the History of Egypt, especially taking into account that the event they are associated with, known as "the Bronze Age Collapse", was a turning point in the history of the eastern Mediterranean. These events mainly took place during the reign of Ramesses III of the Twentieth Dynasty. And yet, Manetho only mentions that the Twentieth Dynasty was ruled by a total of 12 kings whilst keeping them nameless and not providing any context.
What makes the version of ancient Egyptian history written by classical authors even more confusing is the fact that Herodotus and Manetho often contradict each other, even in cases when they, technically, should not.
A prime example of this contradiction is related to the construction of the Giza Pyramids.
Who Built the Pyramids According to Ancient Authors
Traditionally, the tallest of the three pyramids was known as the Pyramid of Cheops. This is due to Herodotus attributing its construction to a pharaoh of the same name. According Manetho’s chronology, the pyramid was built during the rule of a pharaoh named Suphis. Modern Egyptologists normally associate the pyramid with Khufu, the ruler of the Fourth Dynasty.
However, Herodotus’ Cheops and Manetho’s Suphis cannot really be considered the same figure. Cheops allegedly ruled for 56 years whilst Suphis ruled for 63 years, but the main disparity is not because of differently attributed lengths of reign; even different authors that quoted Manetho sometimes attributed different reign lengths for several of the kings. It is because Cheops and Suphis are placed in different historical periods. If you make calculations based on the numbers Herodotus provided, then it appears that Cheops ruled just a few centuries prior to Herodotus' time. Manetho, in contrast, lists Suphis among the rulers of the Fourth Dynasty, placing him in a more distant past. Archaeologists generally believe that the pyramids were built in the middle of the third millennium BC. So Suphis is identifiable with Khufu.
The identity of the ruler behind the construction of the smallest of the three pyramids is also unclear. The structure was traditionally known as the Pyramid of Mykerinos, named after the pharaoh who built it, according to Herodotus. Mykerinos was said to have been one of the successors of Cheops. Egyptologists tend to attribute the pyramid to Menkaure, another Forth Dynasty king like Khufu. Manetho mentions a ruler named Menkheres among the rulers of the Fourth Dynasty. Hence, Menkaure can be identified with Menkheres.
Menkaure, the pharaoh commonly associated with smallest of the Giza Pyramids
However, Manetho dates the building of this pyramid to the reign of queen Nitocris, the last ruler of the Sixth Dynasty. A queen of the same name appears in Herodotus’ Histories, projected to an uncertain time period long before Cheops and Mykerinos. Herodotus’ version of the queen is not connected to the construction of any of the pyramids. Instead, she appears as the central character of another myth-like story that would have had the potential to become an Athenian drama. She takes vengeance on the courtiers who had murdered her brother, the previous ruler, by inviting them to a banquet at an underground chamber which she orders to be flooded during the festivity, killing the treacherous courtiers but drowning herself in the aftermath.
The Phantoms of Ancient Egypt
When discussing Egyptian history, especially the version handed down to us by the authors of Antiquity, I cannot skip over a phenomenon that I like to call “historical phantoms”. You are probably wondering: what are these? A historical phantom is a persona associated with a certain period of history whose deeds and achievements were described by later authors. However, these names do not appear in any documents or inscriptions dating from their supposed eras nor has their existence been supported by any known archaeological evidence.
Herodotus’ Histories is particularly abundant with historical phantoms.
Case I
One particular example was a ruler named Sesostris. According to Herodotus, Sesostris was a powerful warrior king who conquered neighbouring peoples and erected many monuments to commemorate his victories. It was even stated that he fought against the Scythians in Thrace. It is important to bear in mind that Thrace was a geographic region centred on present-day Bulgaria. There is no evidence that proves the Egyptian armies had gone as far as Thrace and Sesostris does not appear in any of the recovered lists of Egyptian Pharaohs.
But a lack of evidence opens up opportunities for speculation. I believe that the character of Sesostris is an amalgamation of two of Egypt’s greatest warrior kings I mentioned previously: Thutmose III and Ramses II. As time went on, the details of their reigns had been forgotten. And yet some echoes remained, becoming more twisted as generation upon generation of authors tried to retell whatever information was left.
But how do the Scythians fall into this? The nation Herodotus called "the Scythians" in that context were probably the Hittites. The Hittites were once a powerful kingdom with a fierce warrior culture. The kingdom had fallen and the Hittites had been assimilated among the other ethic groups of Asia Minor centuries before Herodotus’ time. It does not seem that the ancient Greeks had knowledge of the past existence of the Hittites. They do not even appear in the myths about the Trojan War even though they would have been Troy’s neighbours at the time the war supposedly took place. Still, it appears that the distant memories of the Egyptian-Hittite wars lingered, but became associated with the Scythians.
The Scythians were renowned as skilled horsemen across the ancient world
That is not really a big surprise. Both the Hittites and the Scythians belonged to the Indo-European group of ethnicities. So even if their cultures might not have been particularly similar, they were still related at least linguistically. In some way, the association was also a result of both nations being skilled in mounted warfare. The Scythians were a nomadic group, so they heavily relied on cavalry attacks during warfare. They were known as skilled horsemen. As for the Hittites, they had practically revolutionised ancient warfare when they devised their light yet three-man chariots. Moreover, part of the Cimmerians, a nomadic group that was an offshoot of the Scythians, migrated into Asia Minor around 8th century BC, thus settling in the former Hittite heartland, so no wonder one got mistaken for the other.
Hittite relief depicting lion-hunt
And what about Thrace? That was probably an error Herodotus or one of his sources made as they projected the battles that took place in Syria onto a different region.
Case II
I have mentioned the famous pharaoh Cheops previously. Herodotus’ version of Cheops is another historical phantom. And just like with Sesostis, I think he is a type of amalgamation of at least two Egyptian pharaohs as well. Herodotus described Cheops as a tyrannical ruler who had mobilised the masses to build the Great Pyramid whilst also closing down temples. The latter part is particularly intriguing as it is unclear from Herodotus’ writing what connection one act could have had to the other. It is clear that Cheops was partially inspired by Khufu, the Fourth Dynasty ruler who Egyptologists tend to consider the king who ordered the construction of the pyramid. But the other part of Cheops seems to have been inspired by…a warped memory of Akhenaten.
Khufu (left) and Akhenaten (right): the kings that inspired the story of Cheops?
As I wrote previously, Akhenaten was a Pharaoh who altered the religious life of Ancient Egypt during his reign when he replaced the classical Egyptian pantheon with the cult of the single deity, Aten, as the official religion of the kingdom. Whilst it does not appear as if he went as far as closing down the temples of the other deities, he did remove all imagery of the old gods from the iconography of Egypt’s social and cultural life during his reign. This is what, I think, was later interpreted as Cheops’ closure of temples. Some time after Akhenaten’s death, his enemies, including the priests of the gods he had turned away from, did all they could to erase all reminders of him from history for his policies. And yet it looks like the memory of Akhenaten’s deeds continued to linger in some form even when his name was forgotten.
So what do we have? One of the most memorable and recognisable ancient civilizations, and yet all that remained of most of its 300-year old history are a few inscriptions and questionable stories told by authors who lived centuries later. Who knows what dramatic and fascinating events got forgotten? The reasons ancient Egyptians went to great lengths to try to erase them from history adds mystique. And yet that is one of the reasons that make ancient Egypt so popular in fiction. Imagination can fill any gap.
And perhaps some of these forgotten events simply went against the rules of the natural world as we know it? The next entry in this series will look at the traditions of ancient Egyptian magic and esotericism.
In the meantime, I have a few questions for the readers.
Questions for the readers:
Ancient Greek authors considered Egypt’s the most ancient civilization. Modern archaeology shows it was likely not the case. What is the world’s oldest civilization, in your opinion?
Other than Cleopatra and Tutankhamun, what other names do you immediately recall when thinking about famous figures of ancient Egyptian history?
Which one of the Egyptian pharaohs described in the blog post was the prototype of Shelley’s Ozymandias?
What other known figures of popular history from across the world are actually “historical phantoms”?
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