3 Egypt and the Cycle of Empire

Rise

Founder of Egypt

Sargon of Akkad was not the first emperor: that honour (if honour it is) goes to an Egyptian king who united the two halves of Egypt into a single state. This achievement was reflected in the crown that thereafter served as the symbol of Egyptian rulership: the ‘double crown’, which included the tall white crown of upper (southern) Egypt and the swept-back red crown of lower (northern) Egypt. The conquest may have been by a king called Narmer. He is represented as a conqueror who ruled over both halves of Egypt on the exquisitely carved ‘Narmer’s palette’, one of the most significant archaeological objects ever found, alongside the Rosetta stone and Hammurabi’s stele. The tablet may show symbols of the cities he conquered, and the apparently decapitated corpses indicate the violence that accompanied the beginnings of united Egypt.

Link

The unification of Egypt was one of the most successful and long-lived of imperial conquests, as the land was geographically a natural unit. From the first cataract in the south at Aswan down to where the delta eases into the sea, the smooth, slow current of the Nile forms a mighty and permanent highway that connected every Egyptian city. Packed into the rich farmland of the Nile’s floodplain between the inhospitable ‘red land’ of the desert to either side, the Egyptians shared a language and syncretized the gods of their various cities to form a unified pantheon. While Egyptian power sometimes conquered lands beyond, the waters of the Nile created an identity that transformed Egypt from empire to nation.

The Nile is the world’s longest river, stretching over 4,000 miles from its mouth in the Mediterranean to its origin in Lake Victoria in Central Africa. Because of consistent weather patterns, the Nile floods every year at just about the same time (late summer), depositing enormous amounts of mud and silt along its banks and making it one of the most fertile regions in the world. The essential source of energy for the Egyptians was thus something that could be predicted and planned for in a way that was impossible in Mesopotamia.

The Egyptians themselves called the Nile valley “Kemet,” the Black Land, because of the annually-renewed black soil that arrived with the flood: a swath of land between 10 and 20 miles wide (and in some places merely 1 or 2 miles wide) made up of the incredibly fertile soil. This created an enormous surplus of wealth for the royal government, which had the right to tax and redistribute it (as did the Mesopotamian states to the east). Beyond that strip of land were deserts populated by people the Egyptians simply dismissed as “bandits” – meaning pastoral nomads and tribal groups, not just robbers.

Conquest

Narmer’s unification of  Egypt under a line of kings was the first such imperial foundation we know of in history, but it was far from the last. Imperial conquests and kingly dynasties pop up with increasing frequency wherever agriculture spreads. While kingly empires are the most common kind in premodern times, there are other types of imperial government as well, including republican, democratic, and oligarchic systems. While these differences are important in their way, just as important are other cultural differences — of law, of gender roles, of social stratification — that affected people within the empire and distinguished daily life in one empire from another. Conversely, there are many similarities that empires tend to share precisely because they are empires. We will examine these similarities throughout this chapter using Egypt as our main example.

Almost every empire comes into being via conquest or the threat of conquest. In cases such as Narmer or Sargon, the conquest is by a king using the resources of the state he leads to subjugate his neighbours. The conquering group can also be a stateless society, such as a tribal confederation, which takes advantage of favourable circumstances to invade and subjugate either similarly stateless neighbours, or a settled civilization that for whatever reason has become vulnerable.

The instrument of imperial conquest is the campaigning army. In some cases, such as the Macedonian empires of Alexander and his successors, or the nomad-ruled empires of the Huns or Mongols, the campaigning army had a nearly permanent existence and formed the core of the imperial state; in others it was created as needed using pre-existing imperial authority. Armies are enormously large and complex entities that take different forms in different cultures, but they share certain similarities, particularly those which are able to consistently fight and win battles in foreign territory. The main problem is how to bring together, organize and feed thousands (or tens or hundreds of thousands) of soldiers while they march and fight in hostile territory.

Mobilizing requires institutions to summon together huge numbers of people in a prompt and effective way. This is much easier if the people are eager to go on campaign, which can be the case if the culture celebrates warfare and and a history of successful conquest, and/or if the enemy is hated by the population based on past hostilities. But it is generally much harder to motivate soldiers to attack others than to defend against an attack. Even if the population is willing, the soldiers still must be identified, notified, gathered and organized, which given the vast quantities of people involved will not be a simple task.

Empires recruit their soldiers in a variety of different ways. Militia were mentioned in the previous chapter. For aggressive campaigns that take soldiers into enemy territory, a militia made up of the entire male population is less practical, and often communities will be asked to furnish some number of men each time a campaign is announced. Generally the community will also provide them with food and military gear, including weapons. A more formal arrangement can designate certain men or families as having military responsibilities, sometimes in return for land or special privileges. If these responsibilities are hereditary and tied in to land-ownership and high social status, the system is often called ‘feudalism’, where an aristocratic, military land-owning class plays a central role in the society.

An alternative, more centralised structure involves a standing army or the use of mercenaries or conscripts. What these all have in common is a body of full-time soldiers paid a salary by the state. ‘Conscripts’ generally indicates a less permanent organisation, such as when troops are levied periodically for wars and might return to civilian life after the war is over, whereas a professional army usually indicates long service including in peacetime. Mercenaries are distinguished from either of these by owing no special loyalty to the state that they fight for other than their pay; often they are foreign, organised into some kind of autonomous military company that has taken on short or long-term service in return for wages and perhaps the prospect of loot.

Once the campaigning army is gathered and marched into enemy territory it must be fed. Feeding huge numbers of people for weeks or months is a huge planning challenge, and failing in it leads to starvation and disaster. It can partly be done by plundering the invaded lands, but even this requires substantial organization, to ensure that the army can function and defend itself while scouring the area for food and is operating in a time and place where enough food is available to be taken. But campaigning armies generally must organize complex networks of ship transports and wagons to provide themselves with reliable supplies. The larger the scope of the imperial conquests, the further the campaigning army must venture from its home territory, and the harder it is to arrange the delicate transport system needed to keep the army alive.

A campaigning army is like a city on the move, often larger than all but the hugest contemporary cities. Aside from the soldiers, many other people are usually part of the army — particularly labourers working to transport the food and equipment, but also ‘camp-followers’ of many kinds — merchants, doctors, cooks, entertainers, sex workers, messengers, bureaucrats, craftsmen and engineers. Armies generally campaigned for only part of the year, but that still meant spending months marching, camping in the field, living outdoors. Wherever they went they left a huge impact. Like a locust swarm, they ate everything in their path, often leaving famine behind. In territory they saw as hostile, they spread unimaginable suffering and destruction. A swath of burned villages and devastated lands filled with murder, rape and enslavement were the normal accompaniments of campaigning armies, and farmers and other civilians learned to flee for the safety of woods and mountains at the approach of troops. Those peasants who avoided the hostile soldiers might still starve to death months later, with their seed grain stolen and their animals butchered and eaten. Even ‘friendly’ armies were likely to take food and property at will, and undisciplined soldiers were an unpredictable danger to everyone in their vicinity, notoriously prone to theft, vandalism, and sexual assault.

Conquest of civilized lands required the ability to capture fortified cities, which is enormously difficult. The two main ways of capturing a resisting fortified city is by siege or assault. Sieges require an army large enough to surround the city, cutting off any ability of the city to draw in food from the countryside. For port cities, this also requires coordinating with a fleet to blockade the city from the sea, a difficult and complex task in itself. While the siege goes on, the besieging army must be able to feed itself by plundering the countryside and transporting food from afar, a task made enormously easier with access to sea or river transport. Maintaining control and motivation in an army for months or years under difficult conditions in order to starve a city into submission is an administrative and organizational challenge that can be failed in myriad ways.

Assaulting a city requires technological and organizational expertise, to allow the attacking army to break through, destroy or surmount the city’s fortifications with enough troops to overcome (usually) large numbers of (usually) very motivated defenders. Solutions included tunnelling under and collapsing walls, battering rams to break gates and walls, missile engines such as catapults, concentrated arrow fire to kill or push away defenders, and ladders, ramps or towers to gain access to the walls. Such skills and techniques were difficult to develop, and we generally find them used by successful, expansionist empires. Some of the earliest evidence for many of these techniques is in the surviving art of the Assyrian empire, a Mesopotamian kingdom that first began subjugating its neighbours in the second millennium BC.

When cities were captured by a campaigning army, they were often sacked, which ranged from a relatively orderly stealing of valuables up to the total destruction of the city and the massacre or enslavement of its whole population. In order to encourage cities to surrender rather than resist, many expansionist empires developed a policy of destroying cities that defended themselves, while offering gentler treatment to cities that surrendered immediately. This could involve detailed negotiations around the terms of surrender, including the tribute or taxes that would be paid by the surrendering city, supplies or shelter it might offer to the army, and what government institutions it might retain. As time passed many of the most prosperous cities in Eurasia changed overlords repeatedly, weathering the rise and fall of empires via careful diplomacy and strategic surrender. Catastrophe was never far, however, depending on the decisions and whims of mighty generals with few checks on their power when they marched at the head of an army on campaign.

A campaigning army could fail for many reasons. It could be defeated by a defending army in a battle; it could starve on campaign; it could fail to capture the key cities or fortifications that it needed to. One of the most common causes of a failed campaign was the spread of disease in the campaigning armies. Armies generally were one of the best environments imaginable for bacteria and viruses to spread: dense gatherings of people living in poor conditions, often malnourished and travelling from place to place. In more modern times where we have reliable numbers, disease always killed many more soldiers in campaigning armies than battles did. This surely was also the case in ancient times, and we have some dramatic stories of armies being destroyed or sieges broken by the spread of disease. Disease could be especially demoralizing since its natural causes were not understood and it could be easily interpreted as a curse from the gods, as it is represented in the Greek epic poem The Iliad when it threatens the Greek siege of Troy. Similarly, the survival of Jerusalem when Sennecharib campaigned against it is represented in the Tanakh as a divine intervention that struck down the Assyrians, and could have been connected to a plague in the campaigning army.

If the campaigning army overcame and conquered its foes, the subjugated population could face many different outcomes. At the worse end, they might be massacred or driven off their land. One tactic employed by some empires, for example the Assyrians, was relocating subjugated populations into new places, which made them easier to control. Sometimes these fates were reserved for aristocrats and elites, with the peasants left alone. Some amount of enslavement was very common. Often, new leaders would be installed, either foreign governors from the conquering culture, or local elites chosen to act as puppets. When Egypt controlled the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, it usually governed by installing subservient local rulers supported by small garrisons of Egyptian soldiers. Sometimes ‘colonies’ were founded, meaning here groups of settlers from the conquering culture that were given land to live inside the subjugated territory, often forming a new town or city. This was sometimes used as a way to reward the soldiers of the victorious army, and it had the advantage of that the colonists could keep an eye on their subjugated neighbours and help maintain the imperial power, particularly if they were veteran, retired soldiers. Regardless of what other changes were imposed, every empire would implement its system of local wealth extraction, mobilizing taxes, workers or troops via its imperial institutions for the benefit of the imperial center (called the metropole). The extent of these impositions varied greatly, often limited by inefficient bureacratic institutions and the quiet resistance of local elites to be less heavy than the rulers would have preferred.

Rule

Culture

The process of creating an empire (as opposed to simply plundering or destroying neighbours) requires either creating or co-opting state institutions in order to keep control over the subjugated people. For both Sargon and Narmer, there were existing governments in the cities that they conquered that they could use as the basis for their local administrations. This form of empire was common, where central institutions of empire were minimal, and the empire contained the pre-existing states it had conquered as mostly autonomous units, whose main responsibility was to deliver taxes and labour to the metropole. Since city-states were generally the first and most basic kind of state unit, it was quite natural for empires to incorporate cities that had long histories and traditional institutions without substantially disrupting their internal affairs. The prospect of remaking the local society on a new pattern was an ambitious, difficult undertaking.

While empires often impacted their subjects mainly through taxes and forced labour, they also integrated the lands they ruled linguistically and culturally. Some empires tried to impose their religion, language, political structures, or other habits throughout the lands they ruled. And sometimes these institutions spread via imitation and transmission quite independently of any intention of the imperial rulers. The status and power of the dominant culture in an empire could inspire others to assimilate, gradually spreading a shared set of values and practices throughout the land. And, in the other direction, the rulers of an empire could assimilate to the culture of their subjects. This happened especially when a smaller, non-civilized group of conquerors took over an already established and somewhat homogenous empire — for example China, Rome or Persia, all of which were conquered at various points by uncivilized neighbours and whose cultures shaped their conquerors at least as much as they were themselves reshaped.

When a conquering group was ethnically different from the conquered population, an ethno-racial hierarchy could emerge, where the new aristocratic class of the empire was the conquering ethnicity. If the ruling group believed its ethnic identity to be hereditary, the boundaries of the aristocracy became racial — that is, based on ancestry that divided people into distinct and hierarchical hereditary groups. This may have happened in Sargon’s empire, with Akkadians taking on a dominant role over subjugated Sumerians, and some element of ethno-racial hierarchy was very common in pre-modern empires (and modern ones, for that matter). This could take the form of a ruling elite where only members of the dominant ethnicity formed the aristocracy, or a more informal situation where the dominant ethnicity partly shared and diffused its power.

State Religion

Regardless of the origins of an empire, if it lasted any length of time it combined coercive power with social legitimacy. This legitimacy was rooted partly in concrete benefits imperial rule gave to the population, and partly in popular acceptance of the rightfulness and desirability of imperial rule. A major component of this cultural legitimation was the development of a state religion, which in one way or another supported the existing rulers as having a divine mandate to govern. These state religions took pre-existing cults, gods and practices and recast them in ways to offer support for the state.

We can see an aspect of this at work in the religion of the first empire, Egypt, with its famous pantheon of gods: Horus, Ra, Osiris, Isis, Thoth, Maat, Hathor, Anubis, Set, Ptah, Amun, Re, Sekhmet, Nefertem, Bastet, and so on, through hundreds of deities. The vast majority of the gods of the Egyptian pantheon can be identified as having been local gods worshipped in particular cities. When the Egyptian cities were unified into the kingdom of Egypt, the local gods could come to greater prominence, spreading their worship along the Nile — especially those favored by the royal family or backed by powerful priesthoods and temple complexes, . The popularity of certain gods, as seen in depictions, inscriptions and invocations that have survived to the present day, grew and shrank over time. Any attempt to impose an overall order on the Egyptian pantheon — a project first attempted by the Egyptian priesthood themselves early in its history — was made problematic both by the profusion of gods, often with overlapping identities and domains, and by the way that the religion itself changed over the millennia of Egyptian history.

One early, important Egyptian myth was that of the death and resurrection of Osiris. Osiris, the god who ruled Egypt as king, is killed by his brother Set, but is resurrected by his wife Isis and impregnates her. She gives birth to their son, Horus, and hides him until he can avenge his father and depose Set from his stolen throne. Osiris then reigns in the underworld as lord of the dead and Horus takes his place as king of Egypt, returning righteous rule to the land. This mythological cycle became one of the most retold in Egypt, found in many versions in many places. One reason for this is the role it played in legitimating the Egyptian kingship. The ruling king was understood as the embodiment of Horus, his dead father as Osiris, and upon the king’s death he takes on a new position in the underworld even as his son rises to take his place.

The myth also draws a clear distinction between unrighteous rulership (seized by force, unjust to the people) and righteous kingship (passed on by heredity, rightly ordered, executing justice). The key concept is expressed in the ancient Egyptian word ma’at, sometimes personified as a goddess, the wife of Thoth, god of writing and knowledge. Ma’at was the righteous ordering of the world, uniting order, truth and justice into the correct, harmonious system of life. The concept presupposes a natural state of affairs that is divine, eternal and good, but which can be upset by incorrect action. In individual life, a person could live either according to ma’at by dealing honestly, kindly and benevolently with others or disrupt the right order of things by departing from ma’at. This was particularly important for the kings of Egypt, who as the ideology developed depicted themselves as the ‘lords of ma’at’, whose rule was the most important part of the divine order. As one 25th century BCE document puts it,

Ma’at is good and its worth is lasting.
It has not been disturbed since the day of its creator,
whereas he who transgresses its ordinances is punished.
It lies as a path in front even of him who knows nothing.
Wrongdoing has never yet brought its venture to port.
(Frankfort, Henri. Ancient Egyptian Religion. p. 62.)

The faithful adherence to ma’at was essential both for ordinary material prosperity and for spiritual health; both for the security of the social order and for the stability of nature. The annual flooding of the Nile, the steady winds that blew south from the Mediterranean, the natural cycle of growth in flocks and crops, all reflected the fundamentally good order in nature that ma’at represented; droughts, earthquakes, famines, and epidemics were deviations from this order and might be effects of failures in the human order of ma’at upheld by the king and his deputies. The order in the state and the order in nature were intimately connected.

Ma’at also became essential to the Egyptian conception of the afterlife and immortality. Egyptians developed the idea that the soul would survive the death of the body and, passing through the underworld with the aid of magic spells past dangerous guardians, would face a test of its righteousness in life. The heart of the dead person would be weighed on a scale against a feather, representing ma’at; if it was burdened with misdeeds the heart would be consumed by the fearsome crocodile-headed goddess Ammit, condemning the deceased to a restless afterlife instead of blissful continuation in the company of the gods. Texts providing the spells needed to navigate the difficult journey were written on coffins and inside tombs. One of these spells lists the many various sins that would violate ma’at, including theft, murder, lying, lawbreaking, fornication, profiteering grain, disobeying the king, and cursing the gods.

By supporting the rightful place of the king at the head of the state, and connecting the social structure of Egypt with divinely ordained order, the Egyptian religion supported obedience to governing power alongside wide-ranging moral expectations. But the support that the Egyptian religion provided to the state went beyond values; the institutions of temples and priesthood were also essential parts of the government. Unlike in Sumer, Egyptian temples were not centers of the government bureacracy, but they still had an important role in Egyptian life.

Priests, like scribes, went through a prolonged training period before beginning service and, once ordained, took care of the temple or temple complex, performed rituals and observances (such as marriages, blessings on a home or project, funerals), acted as doctors, healers, astrologers, scientists, and psychologists, and also interpreted dreams. They blessed amulets to ward off demons or increase fertility, and also performed exorcisms and purification rites to rid a home of ghosts. Their chief duty was to the god they served and the people of the community, and an important part of that duty was their care of the temple and the statue of the god within.

The temples of ancient Egypt were thought to be the literal homes of the deities they honored. Every morning the head priest or priestess, after purifying themselves with a bath and dressing in clean white linen and clean sandals, would enter the temple and attend to the statue of the god as they would to a person they were charged to care for. The doors of the sanctuary were opened to let in the morning light, and the statue, which always resided in the innermost sanctuary, was cleaned, dressed, and anointed with oil; afterwards, the sanctuary doors were closed and locked. No one but the head priest was allowed such close contact with the god. Those who came to the temple to worship only were allowed in the outer areas where they were met by lesser clergy who addressed their needs and accepted their offerings. During festivals, however, the statues of the god were taken out of the sanctuaries and carried about in the streets or onto boats on the Nile. Public religious festivals were key events, offering exciting spectacles and mass rituals and celebrations. The representation of gods via sacred statues that were the centres of local cult worship was a phenomenon that went far beyond Egypt, common in one form or another throughout the Mediterranean.

Law and Judgement

While religion offered legitimacy to imperial rule, this legitimacy was also always connected to the government’s role as the provider of law and justice. This can be seen very clearly in the oldest fully surviving law code, that of the Babylonian king Hammurabi, who ruled a Mesopotamian empire from 1795-1750 BCE. Hammurabi’s laws were inscribed on stone pillars, called steles, some of which have survived to the present day. The upper part of the stele depicts Hammurabi standing in front of the Babylonian god of justice Shamesh, emphasizing the divine origin of Hammurabi’s rule and laws. The lower portion of the stele contains a ‘prologue’, the collection of 282 laws, and an ‘epilogue’. The prologue and epilogue contain, among other things, claims about the divine origins and justic of Hammurabi’s rule, stating, for example, that  “Anu and Bel (two gods) called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak, so that I should rule over the black-headed people (meaning Mesopotamians) like Shamash and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind.”

One particularly influential principle in the code is the law of retaliation, which demands “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” The code listed offenses and their punishments, which often varied by social class, showing that there were legal differences between aristocrats and commoners, and also different statuses within these social classes. While symbolizing the power of the King Hammurabi and associating him with justice, the code of law also attempted to unify people within the empire and establish common standards for acceptable behavior. Some laws from Hammurabi’s Code include:

These laws prescribe a variety of fines, corporal punishments, mutilations, and liberal use of the death penalty. They offer insight into quite diverse aspects of Mesopotamian culture of the time. Law 129 punishes adultery by a woman by drowning both her and the male adulterer, but allows for mercy to be shown at the husband’s discretion. Law 195 seems to enforce patriarchal authority over the household, threatening harsh punishment to a son who strikes his father. Law 137 requires that a man separating from his wife or the mother of his children return her dowry and provide further support for her and her children. Law 15 makes harboring escaped slaves punishable by death, suggesting both strong government support for the institution of slavery and illustrating the harsh means by which social hierarchy was enforced under Hammurabi.

No similar law code has survived for ancient Egypt, and we should not assume that Hammurabi’s laws were especially representative of ancient laws generally. But we do have some understanding of both the laws of ancient Egypt and the institutions which administered and enforced them. The courts which administered the law were the seru (a group of elders in a rural community), the kenbet (a court on the regional and national level) and the djadjat (the imperial court). The vizier, who was the highest ranking bureaucrat in the government under the king, was the supreme judge, responsible for ensuring that ma’at was mantained. If a crime were committed in a village and the seru could not reach a verdict the case would go up to the kenbet and then possibly the djadjat (but this seems a rare occurrence). Usually, whatever happened in a village was handled by the seru of that town.

Many of the cases heard involved disputes over property following the death of the patriarch or matriarch of a family. There were no wills in ancient Egypt but a person could write out a transfer document making clear who should receive which portions of property or valuables. Then as now, however, these documents were often disputed by family members who took each other to court. There were also instances of domestic abuse, divorce, and infidelity addressed by the legal system.

Compared to women in many other ancient societies, women in ancient Egypt had considerable legal rights and freedoms. Egypt’s gender roles meant that women were usually defined primarily by their husbands and children, while men were defined by their occupations. This difference could leave women more economically vulnerable than men. For example, in the village of craftspeople who worked on the pharaoh’s tomb at Deir el Medina, houses were allocated to the men who were actively employed. This system of assigning housing meant that women whose husbands had died would be kicked out of their homes as replacement workers were brought in. Despite such vulnerability, Egyptian law treated the sexes similarly in many respects. Cases involving infidelity were filed by both sexes and the punishment for the guilty could be severe. A husband whose wife had an affair could forgive her and let the matter go or he could prosecute. If he chose to take his wife to court, and she were found guilty, the punishment could be divorce and amputation of her nose or death by burning. An unfaithful husband who was prosecuted by his wife could receive up to 1,000 blows but did not face the death penalty.

Egyptian women could own property, and tax records show that they often did. Egyptian women could also take cases to court, enter into legally binding agreements, and serve actively as priestesses. Women could sue for divorce as easily as men and could also bring suits regarding land sales and business arrangements. There were also female pharaohs, most famously Hatshepsut who ruled for twenty years in the fifteenth century BCE. One last, perhaps surprising, legal entitlement of ancient Egyptian women was their right to one-third of the property that a couple accumulated over the course of their marriage. Married women had some financial independence, which gave them options to dispose of their own property or divorce. Therefore, while women did face constraints in terms of their expected roles and had their status tied to the men in their families, they nevertheless enjoyed economic freedoms and legal rights not commonly seen in the ancient world.

There were no lawyers in ancient Egypt. A suspect was interrogated by the police and the judge in court and witnesses were brought in to testify for or against the accused. Since the prevailing belief was that a person who had been charged was guilty until proven innocent, witnesses were often beaten to make sure they were telling the truth. Once one had been charged with a crime, even if one were finally found innocent, one’s name was kept on record as having been a suspect. As such, public disgrace seems to have been as great a deterrent as any other punishment. Even if one were completely exonerated of all wrong-doing, one would still be known in one’s community as a former suspect.

It was because of this that people’s testimony regarding one’s character – as well as one’s alibi – was so important and why false witnesses were treated so harshly. Anyone who purposefully and knowingly lied to the court about a crime could expect punishment ranging from amputation to death by drowning. One might falsely accuse a neighbor of infidelity for any number of personal reasons and, even if the accused were found innocent, they would still be disgraced. A false charge, therefore, was considered a grave offense and not only because it disgraced an innocent citizen but because it called into question the efficacy of the law.

By enforcing laws and maintaining order, empires both enhanced their legitimacy and suppressed potential threats to their authority. Banditry, corruption, disorder and crime all undermined respect for the government and forced the population to rely on themselves for safety. But harsh laws or heavy taxes could also engender hatred of and resistance to the government, creating displaced people and refugees hiding from and defying imperial authority. Such outlaws were also prospective rebels, and although most popular uprisings against ancient governments were suppressed and ruthlessly punished, on some occasions they could be a potent threat to the survival of the empire.

Fall

Each ancient empire, no matter how triumphant the inscriptions of its conquering monarchs or how vast its domains, eventually came to an end. What exactly constitutes the end of an empire can be a complex question — the most famous ‘fall’ of empire, that of Rome, has spawned endless debate, including many who question whether it ‘fell’ at all. What might seem like the end of an empire to its kings — their heirs being deposed from the throne or dying out — is not usually seen as especially significant by anyone else, if the replacement lineage keeps the same laws and institutions as before. Rather, we can identify several different ways empires can decline or end.

Loss of Territory/Dissolution – Imperial cores control a subjugated periphery: if the core loses control of part of the periphery the empire shrinks. If it loses all its imperial possessions, it may remain a state, but is no longer an imperial state. For example, Sargon of Akkad conquered his Mesopotamian empire from 2234-2279 CE and ruled from the city of Kish; his empire collapsed around 2154 CE under attacks from the Gutians, a neighbouring ethno-linguistic group. The Gutians did not found their own empire; rather, imperial authority dissolved entirely for a time and the largest states in Mesopotamia were once again city-states — mostly the same ones as before the Akkadian empire. Similarly, Athens for a time in the 5th century CE ruled an empire in the Aegean sea, but lost its empire in the Peloponnesian war against Sparta and with it its imperial status, although it continued to be an independent state until its conquest by Philip II of Macedon (see the next chapter for more details on this). In both these cases the metropole lost its imperial possessions and became once again an ordinary city-state.

Conquest – More dramatically, an empire can be defeated by an external rival such that the government of the imperial state is disbanded but the territory is incorporated into a new empire. The extent to which this constitutes a ‘fall’ of the empire can be disputed if the conquering group maintains many of the previous institutions and occupies a similar territory. In some cases, the old elites are even integrated into the new government, creating an additional layer of continuity between the ‘old’ empire and the new. The impact of conquest is more dramatic and undeniable when the empire is incorporated into a pre-existing empire, its core being subjugated and disempowered, now ruled from a new and distant metropole. Egypt, for example, was conquered by the Assyrian empire in 671 CE and ruled from Nineveh for forty years.

Destruction – In some cases, an empire can end more physically and finally. In order of increasing completeness: an empire’s capital can be destroyed together with the dissolution of its power; the core population can be substantially killed, dispersed or enslaved; or the core territory can be depopulated/abandoned. Obviously smaller imperial cores are more susceptible to destruction than large ones, and city states in particular can be completely annihilated if a conquering army so chooses. Empires can also be vulnerable over longer time-frames to destruction via climate change and environmental collapse, especially of they are based on islands or areas that are marginal for agriculture.

Transformation – Even if the government and culture of an empire never comes to a definitive end, the course of time inevitably brings change with it, and if an empire endures long enough it may change enough to be unrecognizable. For example, the Roman empire, although losing much of its western territory in the 5th century CE, maintained its eastern half until the final conquest of Constantinople in 1453 CE. But in that time period, the Eastern Roman Empire changed so much that it is barely recognizable when compared to the empire as it had existed in earlier times. It no longer spoke Latin; Christianity became central to its identity; it occupied a different location than when it originated; it replaced its republican government with absolute monarchy; its economy, culture, military and all transformed to a huge extent. One may genuinely question whether it is the ‘same’ empire that first conquered the Italian peninsula and fought wars against Carthage.

Rises and falls of Egyptian empires

Egyptian empire faced several different endings at different points in time. Egyptian imperial rule came to a kind of end for the first time in 2181, after the death of king Pepi II, who left no heirs. For nearly 150 years, local governors (nomarchs) were the real rulers along much of the Nile, and for a time there were two self-proclaimed royal lines, one based in Herakleopolis in the north, the other in Thebes to the south. This time is called the first intermediate period, and it can be fairly described as an end of the first unified empire of Egypt. But it was certainly not an end of Egyptian culture or government, and as far as falls of empires go it seems to have been very mild, with evidence suggesting that rural areas and cities outside of the old capital Memphis became wealthier and more prosperous than before. If the Nomarchs were able to keep order and uphold ma’at while demanding less labor and wealth from their subjects than the old pyramid-building kings in Memphis, then the end of the first Egyptian empire may well have been a blessing for most Egyptians.

This first fall of Egyptian empire is a dissolution of imperial authority, a risk that empires often face. Most common is the scenario where a very successful king/general conquers a large territory and creates and administers an empire that lasts for his lifespan, but begins to dissolve as soon as he dies and can no longer hold it together. In the absence of a strong centralizing force, very often regional aristocrats will take power for themselves, either informally or (if they can get away with it) formally as well, declaring themselves new kings or inventing fictitious royal connections. The old royal family loses its power, either exterminated by new rivals or clinging to some ancestral possessions and status. We will see similar dynamics again with subsequent empires such as Macedon, Rome, the Caliphates, and France.

The first intermediate period came to an end as the nomarchs of Thebes were able to conquer nearby nomes, style themselves kings of Egypt, and eventually defeat all their rivals. This begins the ‘Middle Kingdom’ of Egyptian history, where a succession of kings (and a reigning queen, Sobekneferu) presided over what seems to have been for Egypt a peaceful and prosperous period. Egyptian armies campaigned south of the cataracts and subjugated Nubia, and elaborate mortuary temples and inscriptions give archaeologists a wealth of insight into the culture, religion, and life of the time. Some papyrus narrative texts also survive from this time, such as the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor. This tells the adventures of a man who is shipwrecked and washed up on an island where he meets a gigantic talking snake. The snake ends up being friendlier than one might expect and helps him eventually return to Egypt with a ship full of treasure.

This second unified imperial Egypt is disrupted by the loss of territory to foreigners. A somewhat mysterious non-Egyptian group called the Hyksos come to rule over lower Egypt for about 100 years, from about 1650 to 1500 BCE. Once again, the impact on ordinary Egyptians seems to have been minimal: later Egyptian writers were outraged by this foreign domination but the Hyksos do not seem to have imposed their culture on their subjects or to have caused widespread violence or destruction. Upper Egypt continued under native rulers based in Thebes, and eventually these were able to drive out the Hyksos and reunify Egypt once and for all.

This third ancient Egyptian imperial period, the ‘New Kingdom’, engaged extensive imperial conquests along the Levant, the region bordering the east coast of the Mediterranean. These brought them into correspondence with other major and minor states and empires of the region — Babylon, Assyria, Mitanni, the Hittite kingdom, and the Phoenician cities of the coast. Many documents have survived, including the remarkable Amarna letters, a collection including hundreds of diplomatic letters from rulers throughout the area to the king of Egypt. Many of these date from the reign of the king Akhenaten, an unusual pharaoh who promulgated a new, monotheistic religion, the worship of the sun disc, Aten. A new, innovative art style was promulgated during his reign, but after his death the old religion reasserted itself, together with the traditional style. The New Kingdom once again fell into disunity after the death of Ramses XI in 1070 BCE, with the high priests of Amun in Thebes gradually taking control over the south of the country. This may have been connected to a larger spasm of violence and state collapse that engulfed the eastern Mediterranean at that time, connected to a somewhat mysterious coalition of violent invaders known as the “sea people”.

Other Empires of the Eastern Mediterranean

Despite the various rises and falls of various Egyptian dynasties, from the origins of civilization up until its conquest by Rome Egypt had a distinct and largely independent existence as a unified state, broken by much shorter periods of disunity. The history of its neighbours in Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Greece was less stable. Many different empires rose to prominence and collapsed in the second and first millenium, conquering their neighbours and dominating their region, until eventually their strength waned or they were outmatched by a new power. Some of the more significant and long lasting of these states included several empires based out of Babylon, the Hittites, the Mitanni, Assyria, the Minoans, the Myceneans, the city-states of the Phoenicians, the Medes, and Lydia.

Over time, the average size of these states increased, if not their longevity, and the largest such state ever to exist in the region was created by the conquests of the Persian ruler Cyrus in the middle of the 6th century BCE. Ancient Persia at its height under the dynasty he founded, the Achmaenids, stretched from the Indus river to Egypt and Anatolia, ruling a huge and diverse population via the combination of a complex bureacracy and an aristocratic Persian military elite. We know much more about Persia than many other previous empires because of its close encounters and rivalry with its Greek-speaking neighbours to the west, a fractious collection of city-states, the most powerful of which were Athens and Sparta. It is to this competitive, seafaring ancient Greek culture that we turn our attention in the next chapter.

This chapter is partly adapted from

Western Civilization: A Concise History by Christopher Brooks and is used under a CC BY-NC-SA license.

World History: Cultures, States and Societies to 1500 by Berger et. al. and is used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

World History Encyclopedia: Ancient Egyptian Law by Joshua J. Mark and is used under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

World History Encyclopedia: Ancient Egyptian Religion by Joshua J. Mark and is used under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

Media Attributions

3.1 Narmer Palette by Nicolas Perrault III, in the public domain

3.2 A Map of Old Kingdom Egypt Showing its Administrative Divisions, Major Cities, and Some Trade Routes by Cattette is licensed under CC BY 4.0

3.3 Assyrian Wall Relief Showing Battering Ram, from Palace of Tiglat-Pilesser, c. 860 BCE by Soerfm, in the public domain

3.4 Anubis Sits in Judgement by Jeff Dahl, in the public domain

3.5 Hammurabi’s Code by Fritz Grögel is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

3.6 States Near New Kingdom Egypt by Electionworld is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0