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“Pharaonic Egypt: a Singular Pathway to Statehood in the Early Bronze Age”

In: Old World: Journal of Ancient Africa and Eurasia
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Juan Carlos Moreno García umr8167 Orient et Méditerranée CNRSFrance

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Abstract

Situated at the crossroads between Northeast Africa, the Mediterranean, the Near East and the Indian Ocean, ancient Egypt was a strategic pathway that facilitated contacts and the circulation of peoples, products and ideas across these vast regions. Sometimes the monarchy took the initiative in these contacts, whereas in other cases, mobile populations, local leaders, itinerant merchants and independent individuals fulfilled such a role. Egyptian regions participated in these exchanges in distinctive ways. Hence, control over wealth flows, access to coveted goods, contacts with privileged trading partners and attracting royal support represented significant moves in their strategies. A constant tension between different political models (centralized, confederacies of cities and territories, regional kingdoms) reemerged through the millennia. This often led to the collapse of the central authority (as it happened around 2160 bc) and was inspired, at least in part, by the political impact of trading activities.

Introduction

It is still commonly held that Bronze Age Egypt stood out as a somewhat idiosyncratic society compared to other regions of Northeast Africa, the Near East or Central Asia. Interpreted as one of the “cradles of civilisation”, where early statehood, writing, urbanism, bureaucracy and fine arts first flourished, Western historiography saw in the land of the pharaohs a prestigious precedent of the nation-states that emerged in Europe, particularly since the beginning of the 19th century. Moreover, pharaonic Egypt provided a reputable link with Western culture too. Being the setting of Biblical stories (Joseph, the Exodus, Jesus’ flight to Egypt), of important historical events that left their mark in European history (one can think, for example, of Alexander and Cleopatra) and of a sophisticated culture highly respected since ancient times (as in the case of Herodotus), modern historians considered ancient Egypt as a sort of exception when compared with other ancient Near Eastern societies. It was the earliest territorial state. It flourished in Africa but shared few or no features with its African neighbours, who were reduced to receiving the benefits of “civilisation” from the more “advanced” Egyptians passively. Its distinctive concern with death, the afterlife and the judgement for the dead, expressed through monumental constructions and elaborated religious compositions, could not but express a high spirituality as well as profound values and beliefs (Nyord 2018). Finally, the remarkable endurance of the pharaonic monarchy and civilisation amidst ancient Near Eastern societies suggested a sort of precocious national identity that, according to Western historiography, crystallised in two ways: an expansionistic ethos toward its Levantine and African neighbours accompanied by a consciousness of cultural superiority; and, in case of foreign conquest, a spirit of resistance which aimed to regain independence and preserve its cultural particularities, as happened under Achaemenid and Macedonian domination. In short, ancient Egypt was interpreted within the framework of the 19th-century Western nation-state model, as if it shared many features of this particular form of modern political organisation. At the same time, Egypt was also inscribed in an evolutionary historical ladder inspired by “orientalism”, in which “oriental civilisations” provided the initial impetus for cultural and socio-political development (ex Oriente lux). A process that culminated, several millennia later, through the Graeco-Roman experience, in a liberal West finally liberated from any trace of despotism and arbitrariness (Reid 2002 and 2015; Jeffreys 2003; Colla 2007; Moreno García 2009; Gange 2013; Carruthers 2014; Matić 2020).

Another idea has influenced the dominant approaches to the pharaonic past. It is the weight of the “civilisational pack”, that is to say, a set of features that allegedly flourished more or less at the same time and characterised the first pristine states. According to this view, the earliest states witnessed the emergence of centralised power, cities, writing, labour division, a complex and hierarchised bureaucracy, taxation and some sort of state-controlled economy (particularly in the organisation of irrigation, extensive agriculture and foreign trade), supported by sophisticated managerial techniques (accounting, task division among specialised governmental departments) (for critiques of this view, cf. Yoffee 2005; Bussmann 2015; Jennings 2016; Graeber and Wengrow 2021). Once again, it is not difficult to see in this interpretation that the earliest polities, being the first steps in a continuous historical sequence leading to modern nation-states, should forcibly share with the latter a similar form of rationality, considered universal, irrespective of the actual conditions prevailing in the Nile Valley or elsewhere.

Territorial (nation-)state and “civilisational pack” constituted thus the basic framework that defined the early Egyptian state, despite severe gaps in our knowledge. For instance, the emergence of writing seems hardly related to bureaucratic and managerial practices. Instead, it seems more concerned with ceremonies and rituals, like keeping alive the memory and high achievements of leaders and their official attributes of power, from royal annals and tribute to rank and function titles (Bussmann 2020 with bibliography). As for urbanism, the scarcity and very modest size of the first settlements, barely comparable with their Mesopotamian or Syrian counterparts, led scholars to think that many of them remained buried under thick layers of sediments in the Nile Valley. So, the large cemeteries found in the Nile Valley were interpreted as the burial places associated with those unknown cities and not, for example, with peoples living at the intersection of the desert and the valley and whose lifestyles were only partly sedentary (Wengrow et al. 2014; Stevenson 2016; Moeller 2016:6–14). Moreover, the official titles so prevalent in the early documentary record (seals, stelae, inscribed labels) could not but express centralised power and an efficient bureaucracy under the authority of a single ruler. Finally, the traditional focus of Egyptology on religious texts, funerary architecture and works of art led to think that ancient Egypt followed a distinctive path, more spiritual and less materialistic than its early neighbours, with administrative documents being much rarer than the great Syrian and Mesopotamian archives. This view still remains well entrenched in Egyptology, a discipline whose contribution to social sciences remains too modest despite the rich potential of pharaonic sources and the original features that characterised early statehood in the Nile Valley. This anomaly explains why pharaonic Egypt only occupies a secondary place in comparative research about ancient states (Verbovsek et al. 2013; Carruthers 2014; Moreno García 2014 and 2020; Jurman 2022).

Since the 2000s, the contributions of archaeology and more sophisticated models borrowed from social sciences are helping overcome traditional interpretations, putting ‘old models’ under increasing scrutiny. Such contributions reveal that early Egypt followed a distinctive path toward political complexity, quite different from the canonical model derived from the “civilisational pack” (Wengrow 2006). Such a path was also defined by the considerable influence of Egypt’s African cultural background and origins, which left a durable cultural and economic impact (Manzo 2022). Furthermore, the exponential increase of archaeological data in the last two decades shows that the circulation of goods, ideas and techniques across Eurasia also reached the Nile Valley, a fact that helps understand the socioeconomic dynamics that coincided across this vast space (Wilkinson 2014). Connectivity and non-institutional actors emerge as powerful features in the dynamics of ancient societies too, including Egypt, whereas landscape and economic archaeology help balance models primarily based on textual evidence. Finally, trade and control over exchange networks appear as crucial agents in the emergence of early polities in several regions of Egypt and Nubia (Moreno García 2022). Judging from the extant evidence, these polities shared similar symbols of power, like representations of palace façades or serekhs inscribed with royal names or using particular types of crowns. Integrating such entities into the nascent pharaonic monarchy was a long process, not exempted from prolonged conflicts. In contrast, implementing an administrative infrastructure over the territory the pharaohs ruled coexisted with regional authorities and autonomous foci of power. In fact, the integration of some regions seems far from complete with the advent of the first pharaohs. Political experimentation, organisational innovations and the gradual co-opting of local leaders were phenomena later relegated by an ideology that emphasised royal agency and a sharp new beginning in Egyptian history, one marked by the rise of the first pharaoh to the throne of an—ideally—unitary monarchy and the foundation of a new capital, Memphis (Moreno García 2018; Feinman and Moreno García 2022).

To conclude, these developments challenge the so-called Egyptian “exceptionalism” that has dominated Egyptology until recently, based on the long duration of the pharaonic civilisation, its territorial state form and its alleged uniqueness among its African and Near Eastern neighbours. They also open fresh perspectives of research and new avenues for comparative studies, an indispensable step to overcome historical meta-narratives that have constricted our interpretation of the pharaonic past.

Urbanism and Fluid Contacts across North-Eastern Africa

One of the most striking features of early Egypt is the modest size of its cities and the scarce evidence for early urbanism (fig. 1). However, mortuary monuments, either of the king or prominent members of his entourage, became massive landscape markers still visible today. Both facts may be explained by the distinctiveness of the Egyptian Neolithic and the importance of pastoralism. According to recent research, Egypt and Nubia shared not only a pastoral lifestyle but also many basic cultural features. Even at a date as late as the Fourth Millennium bc, sedentary life and agriculture still coexisted with mobile lifestyles that included the exploitation of the rich natural resources of the Nile Valley, from fishing and hunting to gathering activities (Gatto 2011; Wengrow et al. 2014). Contacts across considerable distances are well attested too, not only to the Levant but also to the southern Red Sea and, perhaps, the area of Cyrenaica (Bardinet 2008:165–192). Some sites played an essential role in these exchanges and shared similar symbols of power early on. That was the case of the area between Abydos and the Second Cataract of the Nile, where several “royal” and political centres can be traced archaeologically at the necropoleis and sanctuaries of Abydos, Naqada, Coptos, Hierakonpolis and Qustul. Further to the north, Buto and Tell el-Farkha, in the Egyptian Delta, played a similar role as well as Memphis and, probably, the Fayyum area, judging from the monumental tombs built there. The fact that Nubian and Upper Egyptian kings bore the White Crown or that royal names inscribed inside the symbol of a palace façade appear at several locations along the Nile Valley and the southern Levant suggest that a string of polities scattered from Northern Nubia to the Mediterranean shared a common symbolic language of power (Williams 1986; Köhler and van den Brink 2004; Jucha 2012; Köhler 2017). The rich iconography present in Hierakonpolis tomb 100 (around 3500 bc), Nag el-Hamdulab (around 3100 bc: Hendrickx, Darnell & Gatto 2012) and Gebel Sheikh Suleiman (around 3000 bc: Somaglino & Tallet 2014), as well as votive objects discovered at Hierakonpolis (maceheads, palettes), emphasise kingship over any other potential focus of power, like temples. The same impression derives from the mortuary landscapes, the most conspicuous architectural feature of Early Bronze Egypt. Royal tombs laid at the core of a landscape of power that stressed closeness to the king and his kin, including human sacrifices during the reigns of the first pharaohs. Quite significantly, there is no trace of massive divine institutions like the contemporary southern Mesopotamian temples or the palace/temple complexes discovered at Arslantepe (Turkey) (Frangipane 2018). Therefore, royal burials symbolised a particular form of power that depended on personal links and blood ties (real or fictional) revolving around a strong leader/king, at least in Upper Egypt and Nubia. The case of the Delta, particularly its northeastern section, was somewhat different judging from the evidence recovered at Tell el-Farkha. Here the first monumental tombs (mastabas) seem to be a foreign cultural influence, imported to the site by people from Upper Egypt (Ciałowicz & Dębowska-Ludwin 2013; Ciałowicz 2017).

Figure 1
Figure 1

Map of Egypt and Nubia

Citation: Old World: Journal of Ancient Africa and Eurasia 3, 1 (2023) ; 10.1163/26670755-20230002

It seems then that mobility, kinship, and strong leadership centred on kings still characterised the early Egyptian state (Gatto 2011). The fluidity of relations across a sizeable territory apparently prevailed over political centralisation, even at the economic level, judging from the importance of local noble “houses” and scattered royal estates mentioned in the inscribed vessels and seals dated from the period between 3100 and 2650 bc (Moreno García 2013a:187–195). This may explain why the earliest tax system was based on taxes over movable wealth, mainly cattle and gold. Much later evidence from Elephantine, dating around 2600, reveals how the system operated and may have operated in previous centuries. Private people, both men and women, were involved in collecting gold, an operation taxed and administratively controlled by royal agents. This may only be the tip of the iceberg. The many localities that flourished in Lower Egypt along the eastern branch of the Nile may have been involved in trading activities related to copper imported from Sinai (Tassie 2018). Implementing a royal economic and administrative control over the country appears to have been a rather lengthy process punctuated by the foundation of agricultural estates here and there, like “islands of authority”. Only under king Snofru’s reign (2613-2589 bc) were “houses” put definitely under the authority of royal estates, the number of which increased significantly according to the royal annals and the decorative program of Snofru’s funerary temple. In any case, the loyalty of influential provincial leaders was crucial for the stability of the monarchy (Moreno García 2013a). Kings seem thus more interested in controlling flows of wealth (and the revenue derived from it) and neutralising potential rivals, both in Nubia and Egypt, than in implementing a centralised administrative and economic organisation that probably escaped from their actual possibilities. The high symbolic valence of the king and the importance of real or fictive blood links that tied together the kingdom’s elite, manifested in the increasingly gigantic size of royal burials and the use of titles like “king’s son/daughter”, reveal that personal links remained essential. Only a tiny fraction of the elite, primarily its upper sector, produced written and monumental evidence that sufficed in generating a high culture shared by its members. It was a highly codified culture (written culture, art conventions, palatial etiquette, monumental buildings) which radiated from the palace to the provinces and from the upper elite to other social sectors (Baines 2013:1–20; Bussmann 2016). Access to its material expressions was very selective, so few local leaders could afford or were authorised to display it.

Kings were central to this system, but its limits emerged soon because it was incompatible with the increased centralisation of power and resources. The century or so in which the great pyramids were built (2613-2532 bc) epitomised such limits the best. Not by chance, their construction was hand in hand with the multiplication of royal foundations and taxes in the provinces (attested in the annals of king Snofru and the first archives: Posener-Krieger & Demichelis 2004; Tallet 2018), the standardisation and concentration of elite burials around the royal body at Giza and Dahshur and occasional attempts to strengthen the royal presence in the provinces (small step pyramids, land donations to temples) symbolically. In other words, a significant step up in monumentality accompanied the attempts to centralise and mobilise resources, organise the high elites of the kingdom and build a territorial administration. Perhaps the main aim of the great pyramids was to epitomise the symbolic centrality of the king, who focused resources and deference toward his persona. However, a move toward a centralised monarchy based on kinship revealed itself impracticable after a few decades. Hence, power had to be redefined according to new foundations, particularly after 2500 bc. If centralisation was to endure, kings should integrate and associate the local elites more tightly into the monarchy, so kings and local nobles should share similar interests (Moreno García 2019a:61–86).

On the one hand, the core of the ruling class expanded and integrated new people. Hence, the old ideal of kin links tying together royals and dignitaries proved no longer operative. At the same time, the high administration crystallised in a series of administrative departments, each entrusted with particular tasks and with its own hierarchy of functions and established careers: the Granary, the House of Silver, the department of the Royal Documents, the House of Life and others. On the other hand, the provinces were raised to a more prominent role as administrative and decision-making units. Hence, the number of officials in charge of their affairs and the mobilisation of their resources expanded significantly, particularly in Upper Egypt. A concomitant effect was that high provincial administrators began to live, work and be buried in the provinces they managed. Living far from the capital, their autonomy of action manifested symbolically in the construction of local tombs decorated according to the palatial style and cultural codes. From an ideological point of view, this innovation expressed a potent message: the king’s body was no longer the referential focal point neither for the kingdom nor for the burials of the high elite. So, a third innovation appeared then. Personal inscriptions celebrated “doing maat”, that is, doing what was right (maat means justice, rightness) and enumerated standard clauses emphasising moral values, correct behaviour and proper decision-making. At the same time, the introduction and expansion of the cult of Osiris, with its focus on the afterlife, the judgement of the dead and the pious behaviour that guaranteed eternal life, served the same ideological purpose because it projected such values beyond death and introduced the first world salvation religion (Bárta & Dulíková 2015 and 2019).

However, the high values and administrative efficiency proclaimed in the elite monuments were more ideal than real. Administrative documents reveal, for instance, that the mobilisation of resources and workforce was often an ad hoc task, depending on the particularities of each mission. Therefore, specific institutions (temples, royal estates, the palace, local leaders) and not principally governmental departments provided what was needed then. The competencies of these departments frequently overlapped too, while skilled officials were trusted with diverse missions not necessarily connected within their supposed area of competence (Moreno García 2021a). Weni, one of the best-documented officials of the second half of the Third Millennium bc, fits this picture nicely. When he was ordered to raise an army against hostile Levantine populations, it was local officials, temples, royal estates and foreign allies who provided the fighting force and the resources required, not the Granary, the House of Silver or the institutions related to warfare (like the House of Weapons) (Strudwick 2005:354–355). As for the network of royal estates, it continued fully operative then, but their control seems somewhat blurred. Thus, when Herkhouf, a caravan leader from Elephantine, wrote to pharaoh Pepi ii about his immediate arrival in Egypt after a successful trading mission in Nubia, it was not “provincial governors” who supplied and took care of his expedition but local temples and royal estates instead, who received the orders directly from the king (Strudwick 2005:331–332). A similar impression derives from the rich corpus of royal decrees found at the temple of the god Min in Coptos, in southern Egypt. According to them, the Overseer of Upper Egypt, a high official well connected with the royal court—quite often, he was a vizier (the king’s deputy) —monitored the wealth and taxes in the South assisted by several specialised bureaux. However, there is no reference to “provincial governors” assisting him (Strudwick 2005:107–124).

It seems thus reasonable to conclude that the process leading to an increased presence of the monarchy in the provinces meant that the representatives of important local families received honours, symbols of status and honorific titles (like “great chief of the province”) erroneously interpreted as proof of a formal administrative provincial organisation. Quite the contrary, those titles recognised their bearers as holders of local authority and expressed their symbolic integration in the monarchy, including their appointment as holders of ritual positions at the court and in the royal funerary complexes (an example in Strudwick 2005:338). They served as privileged mediators with the palace in local affairs and, in many cases, managed to control the royal estates in their respective territories. Kings needed them if royal authority was to be accepted in the provincial world. Hence the actual royal administration consisted of parallel chains of institutions, some formal (governmental departments, royal estates, temples), others informal (local leaders, patronage networks headed by provincial potentates), which were mobilised and/or collaborated according to ad hoc needs.

Cities played no major administrative role during the Early Bronze Age, to the point that royal estates and temples appear as the main nodal points for riverine trade and regional contacts instead. City elites, on the contrary, seem politically irrelevant, incapable of influencing political affairs as a coherent power, a sort of “national” lobby of cities (Moreno García 2019a:62–63, 88–96). Only provincial leaders figure as prominent local forces in this period. It is then significant that when the monarchy collapsed around 2160 bc, replaced by regional kingdoms and local powers in a context of armed conflicts, the network of royal estates declined sharply, never to be restored to its former expression. In contrast, towns emerged as nodal points of trade and administrative organisation but were incapable again of defending their interests collectively. The reason may lie in the tiny size of many Egyptian towns, dispersed over comparatively long distances along the Nile, so their trading sector’s social weight was modest. If one adds their potentially diverging interests (some more agriculturally focused, others more commercial; some linked to Nubia, others to the Levant; some founded by the crown for specialised purposes, others more organic), the combination of these factors may have limited their capacity to coordinate their interests and become a unified political force capable of influencing the politics of the kingdom.

Regions: Their Political Articulation in the Monarchy

Regions represented potential centres for authority and wealth accumulation, capable of challenging the power of the kings under favourable conditions and inspiring new, alternative political forms. Hence, the role played by regions in the kingdom’s organisation, the modalities of their integration into the monarchy and the diverse political paths they followed within or outside the monarchy, depending on the opportunities and strategies best suited to their elites (collaboration, autonomy, coalitions of regions, independence), are crucial to understanding the organisation of power in Early Bronze Age Egypt (Moreno García 2018; Flammini 2020; Feinman & Moreno García 2022).

Ancient Egypt displayed marked regional differences in its landscape, environment, settlement structure, demographic density, urbanisation, access to trade routes, potential agricultural soil and natural resources. Far from older views which conceived the Nile Valley as a homogeneous stretch of fertile agricultural land surrounded by a harsh desert environment, Butzer’s seminal book Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt (1976) showed that significant differences opposed not only Upper and Lower Egypt but also the diverse regions they included (fig. 2). Since then, surveys and landscape archaeology are helping define the broad picture he outlined, particularly in Lower Egypt, where several projects have been carried out in the last decades (Knodell, Wilkinson et al. 2022:25–26). Thus, the Western branch of the Nile and its adjacent territories had a low population and settlement density, in sharp contrast with the Eastern branch. These surveys also reveal the succession of cyclical periods of expansion and abandonment of settlements, sometimes related to fluctuations in the flows of exchanges and imports of particular commodities from foreign territories (Małecka-Drozd 2021). In the case of Upper Egypt, surveys remain much more limited. For instance, hydrological conditions in its northernmost stretch provoked that substantial areas remained flooded and were inadequate for agricultural purposes until the second millennium bc. Wadis, partially flooded during the inundation season, constituted communication routes between the Upper Egyptian Nile Valley and the deserts both for humans and fauna, and their distinctive vegetation became a refuge for some species like aurochs, antelopes, steppe fauna and, probably, the West African crocodile (Crocodylus suchus). Together with marshes and bush areas, they were ideal for sustaining mobile lifestyles and activities like hunting, fowling, herding and gathering, as recorded in the titles of some officials and the occupations of the inhabitants of several villages close to Gebelein. Agricultural areas were thus only part of a much more diversified landscape.

Figure 2
Figure 2

Main regional centers of power in Egypt and Nubia in the Early Bronze Age

Citation: Old World: Journal of Ancient Africa and Eurasia 3, 1 (2023) ; 10.1163/26670755-20230002

Thanks to the abundance of epigraphic sources, the organisation of power in Upper Egypt is much better documented than in Lower Egypt during the Early Bronze Age. Far from a homogeneous administrative organisation covering all of Upper Egypt, there were considerable differences between provinces, so the local impact of central authorities and institutions, as well as temples and cities, was unequal. However, there is no direct correlation between the actual “density” of royal power in a given province (royal estates, high officials, royal-sponsored institutions) and the degree of autonomy that local potentates enjoyed. There are instances, for example, in which provinces ruled by influential autonomous leaders were well connected nevertheless to the royal court, irrespective of their distance from Memphis. Other provinces, with immense symbolic importance for the monarchy since ancient times, show, on the contrary, a much more limited presence of royal institutions. The distribution of rank and function titles confirms the absence of any homogenous administrative structure covering all of Upper Egypt. In fact, the somewhat uneven distribution of specific titles (like “great chief of a province”, “attendant of a royal pyramid”, and others) and tokens of royal favour (like stone vases inscribed with royal names, high-quality decorative items placed in local temples), their appearance and disappearance over time, suggests that deep forces still insufficiently known dominated the circulation of power between the court and the provinces (Moreno García 2013b).

Hence, the provinces constituted a fertile arena for complex arrangements and compromises between the local agency and central power, between provincial institutions and royal attempts to get a firm grasp on local resources and sources of power. This led to a variety of strategies in which local nobles sought to keep control over their most precious bases of wealth and authority (temples, management of royal estates) while, at the same time, seeking influence in the royal court to preserve and advance their interests. As for kings, they tried to penetrate and assert their authority in the intricate network of social relations and crossed interests that dominated the local sphere through diverse initiatives. They included the promotion of selected provincial officials in the royal administration, the delivery of gifts, the appointment of local nobles to courtly and ritual positions at the royal palace and funerary complex, marriage agreements, the foundation of royal chapels in local temples, land donations to local sanctuaries or the creation of royal estates the management of which—and the revenue derived from it—was subsequently entrusted to local officials. Such strategies aimed to co-opt selected members of the local elites and, in doing so, to break the internal cohesion of those kin groups by promoting individual strategies to the detriment of shared goals (Moreno García 2013b).

However, the collaboration with the monarchy offered the local elites a unique chance to promote and project their interests into a much broader sphere of influence, beyond their immediate provincial horizon. While some members of the most important provincial “dynasties” kept control over key institutions—mainly local sanctuaries—others were sent to the court to be educated with the princes and follow court and/or administrative careers that helped thus promote their family interests. In some cases, provincial officials were trusted with delicate missions, like leading military and trading expeditions abroad, judging their peers and members of the royal family or leading rituals of great symbolic importance close to the kings. When such families controlled provinces situated at strategic crossroads and exchange facilities—for instance, harbours and departure points of desert routes—and managed to administer local temples and royal estates too, then the valuable assets in their hands may tempt them to distance themselves from the central power, increase their autonomy and develop strategies centred on their own interests, not on service to the crown. At the same time, such families may provide crucial support for kings, mainly when a new dynasty arrived on the throne, an excellent occasion to boost their interests, advance their status in the kingdom and integrate with the inner circle of power in the royal palace. The ascension of Weni’s family, native to Abydos, or that of Shemai’s, based at Coptos, which included, in both cases, marriages with the royal family and obtaining high positions, illustrate these trends (Moreno García 2013b).

For these reasons, kings needed to arbitrate effectively between factions and keep a balance between powerful families. They also needed to control durably any potentially dangerous accumulation of wealth and influence in the hands of certain local leaders and, finally, lure the latter’s loyalty through various means, some honorific like courtly titles, marriages with royals, land and gifts donations—others more akin to local expectations, like grants of strategic assets or distribution of wealth. If kings failed in achieving these goals, then local potentates may be tempted to secede from the central authority and lead autonomous political paths, occasionally resulting in the emergence of new polities and innovative forms of power, from confederate associations of cities and petty kingdoms to alliances with foreign powers, either Nubian or other. The so-called “Intermediate Periods”, recurrent throughout Egyptian history, as happened between 2160 and 2050 bc, are rich with examples of such innovations (Moreno García 2013b).

It was around 2160 bc that Coptos and Thebes rebelled against the monarchy, shortly after a period in which the leaders of Coptos enjoyed a unique privileged position in the kingdom—including marrying a princess—and when the Red Sea anchorage of Mersa/Wadi Gawasis, close to Thebes and Coptos, became the main departing point for maritime expeditions to the land of Punt, in the southern Red Sea. However, the relationship between both provinces was punctuated by conflicts too and included episodes like blocking desert tracks to their rivals. Afterwards, the period of political fragmentation that followed witnessed the monarchy’s collapse and the emergence of petty regional powers. Some of them succeeded in becoming kingdoms, like Heracleopolis in the north and Thebes in the south. Other experiments seem short-lived, like the phantom monarchy of king Khui attested at Dara, near Asyut, and probably related to an immense mastaba built there. A particular section of Middle Egypt, between Asyut and Beni Hasan, became a significant node of political power and local autonomy. Their leaders put their loyalty at the service of Heracleopolis until they shifted their alliances and supported Thebes. This process culminated with the reunification of the country and the restoration of a unique monarchy, around 2050 bc, under the reign of the Theban king Mentuhotep ii (Moreno García 2021b).

Nevertheless, the political aid provided to their new Theban lord came at a price. Judging from the epigraphic evidence, some provincial lords of the former Heracleopolitan kingdom took advantage of the new situation. Ahanakhte, the “great chief” of the province of Hermopolis, became a vizier under Mentuhotep ii at a time when Hermopolis seemed to replace Heracleopolis as a crucial node in the traffic of imported aromatic plants. Thus Djehutinakht, a dignitary at the service of Ahanakhte, refers to his superior as “the overseer of priests to whom valuables are brought from foreign lands, (namely) myrrh and galena” (Willems 2007:33). Iha, another dignitary in service to Ahanakht, was “a chieftain of the House of [myrrh, who loc]ked away precious oils” (Willems 2007: 67). Several dignitaries from Hermopolis were the only ones to bear a unique epithet, “one who loves myrrh”. Myrrh was also the primary goal of the first expedition sent to the land of Punt since the late third millennium bc, when Mentuhotep iii, the successor of Mentuhotep ii, sent there one of his officials, Henenu, via Wadi Hammamat, to bring “fresh myrrh” (Obsomer 1995:394–397). The province of Beni Hasan, situated in Middle Egypt too, also benefited from the new political situation. Its leader Khnumhotep I boasted about supporting pharaoh Amenemhat I (1985-1956 bc) against an imprecise rebel whom Nubian and Asian peoples helped. Subsequent leaders served their kings in missions abroad (Nubia, the southern Red Sea, the Levant) and controlled the desert routes leading into the Nile Valley (Moreno García 2017).

Other provincial leaders exercised similar roles. Several graffiti found at Aswan and inscribed around the year 41 of Mentuhotep ii celebrate the arrival of ships of Wawat (Lower Nubia). Among the officials mentioned there, one can mention treasurer Khety (a name typical of Heracleopolitan kings), the director of the 13th province of Lower Egypt Mereri and, finally, Senebi, leader of Meir, in Middle Egypt (Petrie 1888:pl. viii n° 211, 213 and 243; Allen 1996:5). Having in mind that Heni, another leader of the 13th province of Lower Egypt under one of the immediate successors of Mentuhotep ii, was the overseer of Lower Egypt and “great chief” of this province, one of the main land entrance routes into Egypt from the Levant (Somaglino 2015–2016), it seems that these lords succeeded in exploiting the strategic location of their province to gain a prominent role in the reunified kingdom.

These examples show that integrating the Egyptian regions into the monarchy was a multi-layered process that hardly depended on the sole royal will. The incorporation of Lower Egypt during the first centuries of the third millennium bc was a long process punctuated by conflicts, judging at least from the limited evidence available, like the palette and macehead of king Narmer or the statues of king Khasekhemwy, which record conflicts with “northerners” living in Lower Egypt. It was not until the reign of king Snofru (2613-2589 bc) that the monarchy succeeded in implementing an administrative organisation over this area. The foundation of royal estates was fundamental in this process, and the inscriptions of officials like Metjen reveal that pre-existing “houses” in this region were now put under the jurisdiction of royal officials and institutions (Moreno García 2013b:95–96). With the arrival of the Sixth Dynasty under pharaoh Teti (2345-2323 bc), provincial leaders became more visible in the official record. Once more, this process was inseparable from a thorough administrative reorganisation of the provinces. In other words, integrating regions required co-opting their local elites. At the same time, implementing a tax system passed necessarily through such elites’ collaboration and good disposition in exchange for honours and wealth. Thus, the integration of Lower Egypt continued during the Fifth Dynasty and was inseparable from significant land donations to the royal-sponsored cults created there (Strudwick 2005:69–73). Similar donations of royal land to temples and selected officials in Upper Egypt, mentioned in the Coptos decrees, the inscription of Nykaankh of Tehna and the inscription of Sabni of Elephantine, together with the erection of royal chapels in some Upper Egyptian sanctuaries, served to the same purpose and helped to establish a community of interests between kings and local elites. Even remote Balat, in the Western Desert, did not escape this policy. Their leaders obtained privileges sanctioned by royal decrees and, perhaps, royal marriages (Pantalacci 2015).

Hence, the outstanding stability of the monarchy over a millennium (3100-2160 bc) appears somewhat illusory. The incorporation of the regions into a monarchy aiming at increased political control and resource centralisation was a slow process punctuated by conflicts, occasional centralisation ‘peaks’, as it happened during the reigns of Snofru and Kheops (at least judging from their annals and administrative records: Strudwick 2005:66–67; Tallet 2018), and periods dominated by more flexible and pragmatic approaches. The absolutist facade projected by the royal ideology hardly conceals that negotiation, adaptation to local realities, distribution of honours and rewards and mediation between factions were the only guarantee to establish the monarchy on firm ground. Indeed, the pharaonic kingdom displayed considerable resilience to political fragmentation in the long term, a feature unique among other ancient Near Eastern polities, particularly between 3100 and 2160 bc. However, political disruption finally erupted and Egypt entered a prolonged period of political and territorial division (2160-1550 bc), only interrupted by a relatively short episode of monarchical unification between 2050-1800 bc. One can wonder which forces intervened before 2160 bc with such disturbing consequences, why the monarchy could not monitor them and why it took so long to control them again. Obviously, such questions assume that Egypt’s “natural” condition was political unification and that the political forces operating there always intended to achieve this goal. The study of the political forms that emerged in Egypt between 2160 and 1550 bc and their comparison with those that had prevailed previously may cast some light on these topics. Regional integration certainly provides a helpful guiding thread.

Hence, a striking feature of Egyptian history was that Upper and Lower Egypt exhibited divergent political trajectories, the former more easily unified and becoming a sort of “repository of statehood” and legitimacy in times of political fragmentation. Lower Egypt, on the contrary, appears more oriented to the Levant and the Mediterranean, prone to political experimentation due to its multicultural basis and, consequently, less concerned with legitimacy and respect of traditions. The fact that local rulers boasted about their foreign origins in the Hyksos and Libyan periods is significant in this respect. Thus, when the united monarchy ended, Lower and Middle Egypt were politically organised into “confederacies” in which subregions gravitated around a primary focus of power (Heracleopolis, Avaris) with a strong presence of foreign peoples. The resulting political landscape, somewhat “Levantine”, was loosely organised, based on cities and small polities revolving around a hegemonic centre. At the same time, other areas show no clear evidence of superior authority over them. That the impetus for reunification came from the South, more isolated from the Mediterranean, probably aimed to get a more favourable position to control the trade routes crossing Egypt and eliminate rivals, not restoring a unique monarchy. This implies that trade was a powerful yet underestimated political move in early Egyptian geopolitics, capable of inducing long-term dynamics and considerable changes in the balance of power between the monarchy and the regions it ruled (Moreno García 2018 and 2019).

Trade

Recent archaeological and epigraphic evidence reveals the importance of exchangs with neighbouring areas and the integration of Early Bronze Egypt into the trade networks that connected Eurasia with Northeastern Africa and the northern Indian Ocean (Wilkinson 2014; Moreno García 2023)(fig. 3). This evidence also shows that trade with foreign territories was far from being an exclusively royal prerogative or depended exclusively on the royal commands and expeditions sent by the crown. Quite the contrary, private trade coexisted with royal-sponsored missions to neighbouring countries while exchanges continued to flourish after the end of the monarchy around 2160 bc (Moreno García 2019b and 2021b). Both facts confirm that foreign trade was partly independent of any royal initiative and raise many questions about the impact of such activities—and the wealth derived from them—on Egyptian society in two ways. On the one hand, trade may stimulate the emergence of local nodes of wealth accumulation, especially at sites situated at strategic crossroads or controlling crucial facilities and resources. Their elites may thus be tempted to challenge the authority of Pharaoh if their interests diverged from those of the monarchy or if the crown was judged inefficient or a burden towards their socio-economic strategies. On the other hand, kings may create crucial infrastructure to capture and control wealth flows. They also taxed commercial activities, promoted initiatives to get direct access to coveted goods—and bypass mediators in the process—and, finally, may take specific measures to prevent some actors from becoming too powerful, for instance by supporting their rivals. Certainly, there were huge differences in the participation of Egyptian regions in foreign trade. Not only because their proximity—or distance—to important routes and facilities (harbours, trading outposts), but also because of the characteristic of specific goods. Thus, for instance, the logistical demands to access to quarries and mining areas close to the Nile Valley (Sinai, Eastern Desert) were very different from those, much more specialized, requested by river or sea travel to far more distant regions, in Lebanon, the Southern Red Sea or remote African territories. At the same time, the participation of foreign territories changed over time. Thus, for instance, the role of the Southern Levant diminished greatly since 3000 bc while contacts with the northern Levant increased then (Sowada 2009). Finally, royal demands may increase sharply in some occasions because of specific initiatives or projects, only to diminish shortly afterwards. We can only guess the impact that such “peaks” might have on maritime and mobile populations employed for transport and extraction goals, on the regions that supplied the goods demanded or, finally, on the logistic infrastructure implemented by the crown.

Figure 3
Figure 3

The Near East in the Bronze Age

Citation: Old World: Journal of Ancient Africa and Eurasia 3, 1 (2023) ; 10.1163/26670755-20230002

The recently published evidence concerning the commercial contacts between Egypt and Ebla around 2350 bc reveals that trade was based on missions sent by their respective rulers and on activities developed by private traders (Biga and Steinkeller 2021). The inscription of Iny shows that maritime expeditions to the Levant were quite common and confirm the role of Byblos as a mediator in the Egyptian traffic with this region (Marcolin and Diego Espinel 2011). As for the territories extending south and west of Egypt, access to their goods was so vital for ancient Egyptians that it justified the creation of facilities at the oasis of Balat and the transformation of Elephantine into the primary operational basis towards Nubia and beyond. The rulers of Elephantine organised and led caravans to Nubia but also elsewhere, to Byblos and Punt, and built ships close enough to Aamu (=Asian) peoples to be attacked occasionally (Strudwick 2005:328–340). It seems then that the leaders of Elephantine were far more than mere agents of the crown specialised in trade with their Nubian neighbours. They were involved in areas far removed from Elephantine and continued to operate there when the monarchy collapsed, as revealed by the inscription of Setka (Edel, 2008:1743–1744). In other words, the Elephantine leaders controlled their own network of contacts and agents abroad, independently from the monarchy. In any case, Egypt’s role in the international commercial sphere seems specialised in the provision of gold, ivory, valuable linen textiles, exotic goods, aromatic plants and copper. It became thus crucial for the monarchy to ensure a supply of these goods for Egypt, so a basic infrastructure aimed to guarantee their fluid circulation. A string of royal estates (called ḥwt) extending from Elephantine to the Mediterranean provided supplies and logistic support to traders and expeditions (Moreno García 2013a). Balat, in the oasis of Dakhla, played a similar role for the caravans sent to Uweinat and other areas of the Libyan and Nubian Deserts (Cooper 2012; Pantalacci 2013). In other cases, fortresses/emporia, like those created around the Second Cataract of the Nile, aimed to concentrate and facilitate exchanges at spots easily surveyed by the crown. The scale of these fortresses is an excellent sign of the importance of trade between Nubia and Egypt during the early Second Millennium bc. Indirect evidence from Ebla (Syria) and Kadesh/Kültepe (Anatolia) reveals that Ebla, Sippar and Assur agreed to divide Anatolia into three commercial spheres and that Egyptian goods may have travelled to Anatolia through Ebla’s mediation (Barjamovic 2019).

However, Elephantine never became a prominent political actor, perhaps because it remained a modest city, too far from the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, and its vulnerable geopolitical position required the support of either a central power or other regional allies. This was not the case for other localities that flourished as trading centres and crossroads of crucial routes. The foundation of harbours on the Mediterranean coast (Avaris/Tell el-Dab’a) and the Red Sea (Mersa/Wadi Gawasis) are exemplary in this respect because they explain the emergence of two political centres, Avaris and Thebes, respectively, that occasionally seceded from the monarchy and became independent regional powers (Forstner-Müller 2021; cf. also Lange-Athinodorou 2021). Finally, several localities in a section of Middle Egypt (from Asyut to Beni Hassan) managed to keep considerable autonomy in the early second millennium bc while their leaders were involved in foreign contacts and control over access points into the Nile Valley (Moreno García 2017). These examples reveal two different strategies, ranging from secession (Avaris/Tell el-Dab’a, Thebes) to opportunistic shifting alliances from a dominant power to another (Middle Egypt at the end of the Third Millennium bc). Only in some cases can we infer the wealth their elites amassed through the lens of the gigantic funerary monuments they built, as it happened in Middle Egypt in the early Second Millennium bc, or by scattered references to the fiscal privileges they accumulated. This was the case of Coptos in the late Third Millennium bc when the temple of Min obtained and stored metals and precious objects exempted from the taxes usually requested by the Overseer of Upper Egypt. Another text shows that a local chief donated an astonishing quantity of precious items to the local temple around 2100 bc. They included forty gold and copper vessels, gold and silver pieces, lapis-lazuli and turquoise, thirty-six collars decorated with lapis-lazuli, and substantial amounts of incense and myrrh (Strudwick 2005:111–112, 125). The fact that the monarchy had already collapsed or was about to collapse had no apparent effect on the flow of precious items that arrived in this locality. In the ensuing rivalry that pitted Coptos against Thebes, the latter emerged victorious.

Trading facilities may have thus favoured the emergence of alternative nodes of wealth accumulation in Egypt. Avaris/Tell el-Dab’a became one of the most important commercial hubs of the Eastern Mediterranean in the early centuries of the Second Millennium bc, and there is abundant evidence about the settlement of Levantine peoples there. Sometime shortly after 1800 bc, it seceded from the monarchy in what appears to be a peaceful movement that the pharaohs could not or did not wish to stop. The kings of Avaris/Tell el-Dab’a—the so-called Hyksos monarchy—ruled over a kingdom with commercial links with Nubia, Edfu, the Levant and the Aegean. As for the fortresses built in Nubia, they continued to operate after 1800 bc and the end of the monarchy. In some cases, their inhabitants accepted the sovereignty of the Nubian kings, who represented themselves in Egyptian style (Cooper 2018). Hence, the primary goal of these facilities was not military but commercial, and they did not depend on the support of the monarchy for their existence.

To conclude this section, trade was a decisive element that influenced the kingdom’s politics and shaped the alliances of the pharaohs in Egypt and abroad. Iny’s inscription celebrates the arrival of a foreign ruler in Egypt (Marcolin 2022), while Theban king Antef ii celebrated ceremonies at Abydos accompanied by a Nubian prince (Wegner 2017–2018). Egyptian kings campaigned into Nubia and the Levant and established commercial and diplomatic contacts with the rulers of Byblos and Ebla, but also faced coalitions of Nubian and Northeastern African peoples capable of attacking Elkab in Upper Egypt (Davies 2003). Warfare and alliances shaped diverse power configurations in Egypt in which Pharaohs emerged as particular actors, among others. Foreign rulers and Egyptian regional lords also played their cards in such “Great Game”, trying to gain positions and benefit the most from the flows of wealth crossing Eurasia and Northeastern Africa. Capturing or monitoring such flows helped accumulate wealth and power, a struggle that involved many actors and might result in political unification or regional fragmentation, depending on their priorities. Pharaoh Thutmose iii stated in his stela erected at Gebel Barkal, in Nubia, not by chance, that “everything that comes before My Majesty through trade is his” (Helck 1955: 1240,14). At the same time, queen Hatshepsut boasted in the inscription celebrating her maritime expedition to the land of Punt that “exotic goods were brought, and these were brought from there to your fathers, the kings of Lower Egypt, from one to the other since the era of the ancestors, to the kings who were before, in return for many payments” (Sethe 1961: 344). Hence, she obtained now directly what their ancestors struggled to get through numerous mediators and payments.

Infrastructural Power

Implementing the means required to control the territory claimed as theirs took the pharaohs a long time and was subject to periodic transformations during the Third Millennium bc. Once again, pharaonic ideology emphasised values such as continuity, absolute control over people and resources and fidelity to tradition. The reality, nevertheless, was much more nuanced. The Egyptian monarchy proved relatively flexible in adapting to new circumstances and introducing changes when necessary, usually interpreted as royal reforms. Nevertheless, these changes did not depend on the royal initiative, because of its alleged capacity to capture resources and assert its authority over a diversity of peoples, regions and resources. They also relied on the limits imposed by diverse actors with their own agendas. The result was a precarious balance of power, fluctuating between centralisation, political fragmentation and prolonged periods in which less dramatic adjustments guaranteed the reproduction of a social order that met the requirements of kings and high elites. As a consequence, different modalities of kingship operated in Egypt during the Early and Middle Bronze Ages. The analysis of infrastructural power (Ando and Richardson 2017) provides a helpful thread to study the limits, achievements and disaggregating forces behind a formal façade of power that celebrated continuity and the centrality of the king’s will (Moreno García 2018 and 2019).

The most ancient sources reveal that the infrastructural power of the early pharaohs depended on five main pillars. Firstly, control over strategic points that gave access to foreign commodities. The so-called “Egyptian colonies” in the southern Levant at the turn of the Fourth Millennium bc were later replaced by a policy in which harbours (Eastern Delta, Ayn Soukhna and later Mersa/Wadi Gawasis in the northern Red Sea) and direct connections to strategic areas and partners, by land (Nubia, Western Desert) and sea (Punt, Byblos), gained more importance since 2800 bc. Secondly, implementing a tax system in which control over mobile wealth became of paramount importance, principally the periodic census of gold and cattle described in the earliest royal annals. In both cases, a fundamental goal for any Egyptian monarchy was capturing flows of wealth circulating across Egypt and its neighbouring areas, which did not necessarily depend on agriculture and cattle raising (Moreno García 2021a). In other words, it seems that pastoralist lifestyles remained important enough in the early phase of the Egyptian monarchy to justify that cattle—and not cereals— were the basis of the census. The weight of mobile, pastoral populations in the Nile Valley may explain the long, unequal and violent integration of Lower Egypt into the monarchy, as recorded in the palette and macehead of king Narmer and the statues of king Khasekhemwy. Metals, not only precious ones like gold but copper as well, may illustrate how the system operated. Traders, both men and women, known respectively as miter/miteret, were involved in trading activities at Elephantine in the 27th Century bc, mainly concerned with obtaining gold. Crown officials supervised these activities while other agents of the crown administered a network of supply and producing centres extending, at least, from Abydos to Elephantine (Pätznick 2005; Moreno García 2013b:90). A remote outpost at Buhen, just north of the Second Cataract of the Nile, aimed to concentrate, facilitate and control the contacts between Egyptians and Nubians. Miter-traders are also attested at Gebelein (Fiore Marochetti et al. 2003: 246–247, 256), whereas a route led from this locality to the oasis of Kharga (Ejsmond 2018) and the locality of Rizeiqat, close to Gebelein, was called in Egyptian Jw-mjtrw “The island of the miter-traders” (Ejsmond, 2017). Similarly, several localities flourished in the Eastern branch of the Nile because of their involvement in the traffic of copper with the Sinai and beyond (Nigro 2014; Tassie 2018).

Thirdly, the foundation of a network of agricultural and production centres of the crown scattered all over the country, like the ḥwt in the third millennium bc (Moreno García 2013a and 2013b) and the ḫnrt in the first half of the second millennium bc (Quirke 1988). These centres, together with temples, represented a sort of “islands of authority” and nodes of accumulation of wealth, essential to supply the court, the leading institutions of the kingdom, the military and trading expeditions and the teams of workers occupied in diverse tasks, from quarrying to building projects. However, these centres also fulfilled another crucial role: integrating the local elites into the kingdom’s administration and the power structure dominated by the king. The appointment of local nobles as managers of ḥwt, priests in temples and administrators of crown herds and workforce was accompanied by the diffusion of lavish lifestyles and fashions originated in the palace that helped spread a common elite culture and values. The primary expressions of such culture were written productions and decorated tombs. Thus, the fourth pillar was the implementation of a fluid circuit of temple rituals, court ceremonies and social practices that linked the local elites to the royal court and helped share common values and world views. Priestly appointments at royal funerary temples, distribution of rewards in the presence of the court accompanied by flowery discourses and rank protocols, marriage alliances between royals and selected provincial families, education at the court in the company of the princes and being entrusted prestige missions, among others, strengthened the links between the king and the nobility.

The final pillar concerns writing and the circulation of information. Several government departments and offices dealt with keeping and storing documents, like the House of the Royal Documents or the offices mentioned in the decrees of Coptos. Judging from the limited archival evidence that survived from the Third and early Second Millenniums bc, such offices kept lists of mobilized workers, rations, product deliveries, equipment lists, etc. The archives from the funerary temples of kings Neferirkare and Reneferef, the papyri of Gebelein and the recently found papyri at Wadi el-Jarf illustrate how detailed such lists might be (Collombert & Tallet 2021). Other documents consisted in letters and dispatches that kept the palace informed about logistic problems, the arrival of expeditions or the fulfilment of royal orders. However, non-institutional uses of writing are well attested in the private sphere too, like the correspondence of Heqanakhte, a wealthy landowner who gave precise instructions to his household about the management of its resources or the cultivation of their landed assets to get the maximum profit (Allen 2002). The so-called “letters to the dead”, addressed to deceased relatives to implore their help for domestic issues (heritages, divisions of property, household conflicts), provide a unique glimpse into aspects of social life hardly evoked in the official record. Finally, other documents abusively referred to as “contracts”, formalised private transactions, from selling houses to hiring personnel and priests or selling priestly positions. Writing was not reduced to governmental and administrative practices and provided a fundamental tool to manage the country and produce a shared culture. The emergence of biographies with highly formalised content and, later on, of literary texts and mortuary formulae reveals the importance of writing as a vehicle to spread ideological values and its increasing diffusion in Egyptian society. Graffiti inscribed in remote locations show that recording one’s name and actions was of paramount importance in the competitive environment of the royal administration. They also suggest that the cultural codes that emanated from the palatial sphere were broadly diffused among social groups that were not necessarily part of the administration. The creation of a specific type of writing, called Proto-Sinaitic, adopted by southern Levantine peoples that collaborated with the Egyptians in the Sinai and the Western Desert (Goldwasser 2010), shows the influence of such practices.

Conclusion

Ancient Egypt’s distinctive pathway towards statehood in the Early Bronze Age may be explained by several features, such as modest urbanism, the endurance of mobile lifestyles and seasonal gathering activities, the absence of huge economic institutions independent of the crown, the weight of flows of wealth across the Nile Valley and the persistence of some subregions as major nodes of political and economic power. The monarchy proved rather flexible in building alliances with such nodes, harmonising their interests with those of the crown and providing their leaders with wealth and honours beyond their local horizons. Even the implementation of royal institutions and the foundation of estates in the provinces was inseparable from the association of the local elites to these initiatives, usually as managers of temple and agricultural assets. Successive “reforms” enabled the achievement of these goals. However, the intensification of international exchanges at the end of the Third Millennium bc gradually altered the balance of power because it allowed some local leaders to accumulate substantial wealth and political influence. When the monarchy was no longer functional to their interests, they simply seceded, a process that inaugurated a period of political fragmentation and experimentation until a new equilibrium was reached. The monarchy was restored around 2050 bc, but the alliances forged between the new pharaohs and the regional elites limited the kings’ scope of action. Indeed, provincial leaders retained substantial wealth and political power in their hands, and their ability to participate in the international flows of wealth meant, in the end, that the royal basis of power remained unstable and prone to new episodes of territorial fragmentation.

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