Читать книгу A History of Ancient Egypt - Marc Van De Mieroop - Страница 32

Manetho’s king list presents Egypt’s political history as a millennia‐long succession of dynasties that all functioned under the same circumstances. In the mid‐19th‐century, a German scholar, Karl Josias von Bunsen, decided to break up this sequence into distinctive cycles of sequential and of parallel dynasties and created the modern system of subdividing Egypt’s ancient history into Kingdoms and Intermediate Periods. Today all Egyptologists use his terms Old, Middle, and New Kingdom to indicate when the state was unified, that is, when there was a single ruler for Upper and Lower Egypt, and they see a similar situation later on in the Late Period, when foreigners regularly ruled Egypt as a unified kingdom. In between those periods of centralized power, scholars recognize Intermediate Periods, when various kings ruled simultaneously in multiple centers. The Early Dynastic Period precedes the entire sequence. Although the principle underlying these modern subdivisions is clear – centralized or decentralized power – there is less agreement on their chronological boundaries. Certain elements are standard: the 4th to 6th dynasties are part of the Old Kingdom, the post‐reunification 11th and 12th of the Middle Kingdom, and the 18th through 20th of the New Kingdom. But some scholars, for example, include the 7th and 8th dynasties in the Old Kingdom, while others see that phase as part of the First Intermediate Period.

These designations impose a mental framework on Egypt’s history that is largely erroneous. The alternation between Kingdoms and Intermediate Periods suggests that there were only two modes of political structure, and that all Kingdoms and all Intermediate Periods were alike. Perhaps this was to an extent true for the Kingdoms, which the Egyptians themselves saw as repetitions of the same conditions, but there were great differences between the various Intermediate Periods. Hence, in recent years scholars have suggested renaming the First Intermediate Period as the Period of the Regions, for example. The designation Late Period also suggests that it was an epilogue and that Egypt’s true history ended with the New Kingdom, an outlook no longer accepted. This universally accepted periodization should thus be used as a handy tool, but not uncritically.