A typical American male of my generation has his mental image of Ancient Egypt formed by three sources; watching The Mummy on late night T.V., The Ten Commandments on Holy Saturday and National Geographic specials on PBS. From this Egypt seems a land of mystery and magic, full of hidden knowledge and ancient curses. From Herodotus, we learn that this is also how late Dynastic Egyptians were viewed by the larger world. To the ancient Greeks and Romans, who revered antiquity, the older, the better, and nothing could be better than Egypt. The Egyptians were rightfully proud of this continuity; “hallowed traditionalism” is how they might have put it. Modern critics might more unkindly call it “tired stasis”. What are we to make of them?

With all humility, I admit to not being a neophyte on Egyptian history, but I’m far from an expert. To me, the height of the Pharaohs seemed to be the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties, the era of Thutmose III, the “Napoleon of Egypt”, of the heretic Akhenaton, of the most famous of all Egyptians (through an accident of history), Tutankhamen, and of Ramses the Great. This was the era of Karnak and Luxor, of Abu Simbel and the Valley of the Kings. Over the course of my readings on Egypt, I’ve seen John Wilson’s The Burden of Egypt referenced and recommended. It’s the classic, yet controversial, work on the civilization of the Egyptians. And it’s completely changed my mind on the subject.

Wilson’s work isn’t a standard chronological history of Egypt, but rather a “cultural” history that works inside the historical narrative to address broad themes. As such, one doesn’t read this for the construction of the Pyramids or the details of the Battle of Kadesh, but rather for the essential themes of Egyptian Civilization and how those developed or changed over time. Given the state of our knowledge of Egypt (especially in 1951, when this was written), this works well.

To start, an unusual aspect of Egyptian Civilization is that it formed rather quickly. In pre-dynastic times, there was a rather long build-up, from the first settlement of the Nile valley, until the rather rapid burst of culture and technological development just prior to the unification of Egypt. As is often the case from then on, it seems that outside influences penetrated the Sinai Desert. It appears that the slightly older civilization of Sumeria has some faint echoes in Egypt, but not the other way around. Details about this are unfortunately lost, as the nature of Lower Egypt’s alluvial soil destroys papyri and other such materials, which we have in abundance from the deserts of Upper Egypt.

This burst of innovation culminated in the era of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Dynasties, the height of the Old Kingdom. Here we see Egypt in full-flower, with all aspects of the next 2500 years present. Politically, the Pharaoh stands alone at the pinnacle of the “pyramid” of state. For all practical purposes, he was the government. Everything went through him. One sees this in titles of office like “Overseer of the Domain of the Palace” or “Overseer of all Works of the King”. Words for government don’t exist outside of King or rule. This incredible centralization, on a scale only dreamed of by the Caesars, enabled the constructions of the vast works which still capture the imagination of mankind today. Wilson remarks on the rapidity of the evolution. Only a century passed from the Step Pyramid of Zozer (the first great stone building in the world, to the Great Pyramid of Khufu, which wouldn’t be rivaled in height for 3000 years. In the visual arts, like sculpture and painting, the conventions were in place. Later Egyptian art almost always drew upon Old Kingdom models.

This golden youth of Egypt was followed by its first crisis, a period which had he written in a later era, Wilson may well have described as the era of “Brezhnevisation”, Egypt’s Sixth Dynasty. The illusion of great central control was maintained only by the exponential increase in the size and authority of the bureaucracy, eventually morphing into breakaway local dynasties.

Following the extraordinarily long reign of Pepi II, came the First Intermediate Period in which Egypt, for the only time in its history, saw the low question the high. Works such as the writings of Ipu-wer, condemning the Pharaoh and blaming him for the decline of the nation are unheard of both before and after this time. Coupled with this decline in central authority is the broadening of the idea of an afterlife. Initially, only the Pharaoh, as a god, and then his immediate family were allowed the consolation of eternal life. As the bureaucracy and nobility increased in importance, they too entered into the afterlife. As the Egyptians viewed the next world as more or less a continuation of this one, you’d need servants and such, and thus entered the common people. Tombs increased both in number and elaboration from this time on, into the forms we find so quintessentially Egyptian today.

As order was restored in the Middle Kingdom, Egyptian literature reached its classical stage, with works like the Story of Sinuhe composed at the beginning of the Twelfth Dynasty. The nascent individualism of the First Intermediate Period was slowly lost as the Pharaohs of the Eleventh and Twelfth Dynasties gained in power, though they never seem to have recaptured the absolutism of the Old Kingdom. The title Wilson uses for this chapter is “The King as the Good Shepherd” to reflect the change in emphasis from fearsome god-king to a benevolent god on earth tending to his people.

The final turning point came with the Hyksos invasion and subsequent expulsion. The first Pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty drove deep into Asia, at first in pursuit of their erstwhile overlords. This was not permanent, and though Thutmose I campaigned over the Euphrates, it doesn’t appear that there was meant to be permanent control over the Levant. Egypt had a choice. The hinge was the joint reign of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III. Wilson describes it thus:

“The reigns of Hat-shepsut and of Thut-mose III contrast strongly in the activities of the state. She records no military campaigns or conquests; he became the great conqueror and organizer of empire. Her pride was in the internal development of Egypt and in commercial enterprise; his pride was in the external expansion of Egypt and in military enterprise”

Egypt chose empire. With that, nothing would ever be the same again.

The wealth of the Levantine and Nubian provinces of the empire changed Egypt in fundamental ways. The victorious Pharaohs granted enormous amounts of money and land to the priesthoods of their apparently beneficent gods, creating huge independent sources of power. This could only last as long as the goods of the empire poured in.

When this was challenged by Akhenaton, the illusion was shattered. His pursuit of a new religion made him ignore Asia, as he focused all on the creation of a new capital and new faith. The Amarna Revolution upturned art, religion and culture, which Wilson amply covers. Atenism and Amarna provoked a counter-revolution at the time of Tutankhamen. The old priesthoods reestablished their dominance. A new Dynasty of vigorous rulers, the Nineteenth, attempted to restore the empire, but the attempt under Seti and Ramses II was ephemeral. As Wilson notes, even the great works of that time, like the Hypostyle Hall, are not to the same standard as earlier monuments (a surprise to a non-expert like myself), often built cheaply and quickly.

With the failure of empire, the basic joy of life seems to have been lost. At the end of the Nineteenth Dynasty, rather abruptly, tomb images change from happy portrayals of the life of the tomb’s occupant, to a recounting of the rites of their death. There was a brief revival under Ramses III and then a succession of Egyptianized foreign dynasties ruled, but Egypt was never again to be the military power it had been. Religion became more and more a matter of magic and soothsaying, which is how the Greeks and Romans saw it, rather than the older system of “ma’at” or right living and right acting. The culture froze into mere imitation of earlier modes. This senescence went on for half a millennium, showing the basic strength of Egyptian culture, but no new growth or even revival was possible.

What can we learn from this? First is that empire with no effort to expand the basic metorpole can be seen as something like the red giant stage in the life of a star, where the expansion is enormous and at the surface impressive, but short-lived and towards the end of the star’s life. The difference between the Egyptian and, say the Greeks and Romans, was that there was no effort to extend the concept of being Egyptian to areas outside of Egypt. While Libyans and Nubians ruled Egypt in the post-New Kingdom era and were “more-Egyptian-than-the-Egyptians”, this was always in Egypt. Egyptians had an idea of being a “chosen people” but that idea was tied to Egypt itself. Second, is that the early emergence of Egyptian Civilization and its crystallization by the Fourth Dynasty meant that there was no idea of progress. There was only a turning back to old established forms, and as the Fourth Dynasty was confined to Egypt, there could only be Egypt in Egypt. Perhaps this was inevitable, but perhaps, has Egypt returned to its traditional policies at the time of Hatshepsut, and devoted itself to internal affairs, it may have survived the storms of Assyria and Persia and been strong enough to influence outsiders, and maybe even survive, as did India or China.

The Burden of Egypt is a wonderful complement to a standard history. As for what Wilson would have us think about the Egyptians, I think the answer is that we can say that 3,000 years seems a good run, and one that we can admire. ( )

Edition: // Descr: iii, 344 p. : ill., maps 20.5 cm. // Series: Call No. { } First Published as The Burden of Egypt Contains Chronology, A Note on Translations, Abbreviations, List of Illustrations, and Index. // //