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2	The River Nile and Egyptian History

Climate and climate change have had an omnipresent role in human development. Water and moisture can turn a desert into paradise; their absence can do the opposite. There is no life without water, and sooner or later people and societies start moving away from places where it is scarce. Ancient Egypt was no exception. Cultures and civilizations emerged in the Nile Valley because of the long-term drought of the Western and Eastern Deserts, and the Old Kingdom came to an end partly because of long-term aridiﬁcation.¹

The collapse of the Old Kingdom and other important entities in the Near East and elsewhere began at the same time: about 2200 bc.² The following pages will look at the climate change that took place in Egypt during the third millennium bc, focusing in particular on the main features of the period preceding that date.

Two extreme opinions seem to dominate the current debate around environmental change around 2200 bc.³ The ﬁrst is that there is no indication of climate change at that time. The second makes use of signiﬁcant proxy data and defends the conclusion that many societies collapsed around this time due to a major deterioration in the climate.⁴

Nile Floods and the Palermo Stone

In Egypt, the main source of information on climate change is evidence about the rise and fall of the Nile. This phenomenon was, and in fact still is, the alpha and the omega of life in the valley. Nile ﬂood levels were meticulously recorded until the completion of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s, as the yearly measurement was of paramount importance in the Egyptian cyclical calendar.⁵

The earliest such data come from the early third millennium bc and are preserved on the Palermo Stone, and to a lesser extent on what is commonly called the South Saqqara stone.⁶ The Palermo Stone was once part of a much larger monument that recorded the main events in each year of Egypt’s existence as a uniﬁed country, from the advent of the ﬁrst king of the First Dynasty to some time in the ﬁrst half of the Fifth Dynasty, some six centuries later. It also listed the Predynastic rulers of (at least) Lower Egypt. The overall composition survives in seven fragments (not all of which necessarily come from the same original monument), but a substantial portion of the stone is lost.⁷

On its front side the Palermo Stone preserves a signiﬁcant portion of the Royal Annals of the Old Kingdom. The space is divided into six horizontal registers inscribed with hieroglyphic texts running from right to left. The top register contains a list of Predynastic rulers of Lower Egypt. The following registers contain the names of the kings of uniﬁed Egypt, of the First to Fourth Dynasties. The second register starts with signiﬁcant events in the last years of the rule of a First Dynasty king, probably Hor-Aha or Narmer, but the name is damaged. The details of Fifth Dynasty kings are on the back. Entries on the surviving fragments end with the reign of King Neferirkare, the third king of the Fifth Dynasty. In addition to the names of kings and the heights of yearly ﬂoods, the text includes the names of other members of the royal family, including the mothers of kings, who played a signiﬁcant role in ancient Egyptian history, especially in matters of succession. Unfortunately, due to the way in which it is broken, it is not certain whether the record ended with King Neferirkare or continued for one or more later rulers.

The registers also record major events that occurred during each king’s reign: the celebration of religious feasts, tax collection, the erection of statues in honor of different deities, building projects (often relating to the construction of royal palaces as major seats of the ‘government’), military campaigns and the resulting booty, and details of the gifts (including land) that the king gave to individual temples, and, most important, the height of the Nile ﬂoods.

Fig. 2.1. The Palermo Stone. (Photo courtesy Museo Archeologico Regionale di Palermo A. Salinas; photo M. Osman)

This was a phenomenon of extraordinary importance. The Nile ﬂood season, akhet in the Egyptian calendar, marked a period of decreased agricultural activity—as the land was under water—when it became possible to transport heavy cargo by water across longer distances and into locations high above the normal level of the river. This was important especially in the transportation of large stone blocks from quarries as far south as Aswan—the origin of red granite, the most expensive building material in the Old Kingdom in terms of acquisition costs—to construction sites throughout Egypt, including the pyramid complexes of the kings.

Most revealing in this respect are the unique papyri discovered by the French archaeologist Pierre Tallet in Wadi al-Jarff on the coast of the Red Sea. They describe the transport of Tura limestone blocks (Tura was a major quarry for limestone for the Giza pyramids across the Nile) and date to the year 26 or 27 of King Khufu, which is the highest attested date for the reign of this ruler. This transport took place between July and November when the waters of the Nile were at their highest and the overland hauling of heavy cargo could be minimized.⁸ One text preserved on the papyrus roll (papyrus B, Section B I) describes the daily routine of moving the stones by boat across the river during the inundation season:

[Day 25]: [Inspector Merer spends the day with his phyle

[h]au[ling]? st[ones in Tura South]; spends the night at Tura South [Day 26]: Inspector Merer casts o. with his phyle from Tura [South], loaded with stone, for Akhet-Khufu; spends the night at She-Khufu. Day 27: sets sail from She-Khufu, sails towards Akhet-Khufu, loaded with stone, spends the night at Akhet-Khufu. Day 28: casts o. from Akhet-Khufu in the morning; sails upriver <towards> Tura South. Day 29: Inspector Merer spends the day with his phyle hauling stones in Tura South; spends the night at Tura South. Day 30: Inspector Merer spends the day with his phyle hauling stones in Tura South; spends the night at Tura South.⁹

The height of the Nile ﬂood was also a factor in the precise calculation of taxes from different types of ﬁelds across the country. Accurate measurement of the height of the ﬂood was thus an inevitable part of the advance calculation of the tax yield from agriculture. An appropriate (neither too high nor too low) annual Nile ﬂood was essential for the year’s crops and thus for the output of the agriculture-based economy of the ancient Egyptians. Both too-low and too-high ﬂoods led to poor harvests and had a direct bearing on the state’s economy.

Records of seventy-two ﬂoods—that is, seventy-two years of the Nile’s history—are preserved on the Palermo Stone for the period from the First Dynasty until the middle of the Fifth Dynasty, speciﬁcally for the period from Djer to Neferirkare. This represents roughly 550 years, meaning that we have less than 13 percent of the expected number of records for the entire period. These are very limited data from which to conduct a detailed analysis of trends, but they do provide enough information to make basic observations.

Of the ﬂoods for which records survive, the largest number is concentrated during the First Dynasty: thirty-four entries altogether. The Second Dynasty has thirteen entries, and the Third Dynasty has fourteen. In contrast, only six have been preserved for the Fourth Dynasty and only ﬁve for the Fifth (from the reigns of Userkaf, Sahure, and Neferir-kare). If the Palermo Stone did indeed contain data for every regnal year of every ruler, there would originally have been several hundred records. Within individual dynasties, the data are once again concentrated in the reigns of just a few kings: ﬂood heights are documented for twelve different years during Djer’s rule, thirteen during what has been estimated as Anedjib’s rule, and the same for Ninetjer. As for the Old Kingdom, ﬁve entries have been preserved from what is estimated to be Djoser’s reign, four from Sneferu’s, and two from Khufu’s.

The spread of the heights of individual ﬂoods is signiﬁcant. The lowest are documented during the rule of King Ninetjer, only 0.52 meters (or exactly one cubit), and Anedjib, 1.04 meters. This latter is the third-lowest Nile ﬂood for which we have records and is 0.5 meters higher than the documented lowest. The highest ﬂood levels occurred during the reign of Anedjib, 4.22 and 3.55 meters, and Djer, 3.15 and 3.20 meters. There is no doubt that both the lowest and the highest ﬂoods had a devastating impact on the state’s economy in those years.

It is interesting that records available from the time of King Anedjib testify to both extremely high and extremely low ﬂoods: the difference is more than three meters. The average inundation, judging from the entries preserved on the Palermo Stone, was approximately 2.04 meters. These data offer a clear view of the importance of ﬂoods to the ancient Egyptians and of the fact that the ﬂooding was not just a monotonous annual event, but one that was anxiously awaited by everyone in Egypt.

Fig. 2.2. Chart showing heights of the Nile ﬂoods as recorded on Palermo Stone. (compilation M. Bárta)

Although the Palermo Stone has been known since the mid-nineteenth century, it was not until the 1970s that the American Egyptologist Barbara Bell identiﬁed its great potential for the systematic evaluation of individual entries relating to the Nile ﬂoods.¹⁰ Her study was followed and developed by Fekri Hassan in the 1980s.¹¹

Interpreting details of the height of Nile ﬂoods has been difﬁcult mainly because we do not know how or where the measurements recorded on the Palermo Stone were taken. But it is evident that this feature was measured continuously for several centuries and the acquired data systematically preserved.

One possibility, mentioned by Prince Omar Toussoun (1872–1944), a prominent member of the Egyptian royal family renowned for his scientiﬁc papers on the Nile and the Coptic monasteries in Wadi Natrun, is that these measurements were taken with a portable Nilometer, which during the periods between ﬂoods was kept in the temple of Apis (Toussoun refers to him as “Serapis”) at Memphis. There is a report dating from the Greco-Roman period that describes a portable Nilometer, but it is possible that such a tool existed two thousand years earlier.¹²

The measured heights of the Nile ﬂoods would have changed over time owing to the deposit of sediments during the rise and retreat of ﬂood waters, which resulted in an estimated accrual of Nile alluvium of ten centimeters over a single century. The change over a thousand years would be up to one meter, even considering that the process was non-linear and its rate may have varied along the Nile Valley. It is known, for example, that sedimentation rates in the Memphite region are much greater than, for instance, at Aswan, the area of the First Cataract of the Nile.¹³

The second possibility is that the ﬂoods were recorded with ﬁxed Nilometers, familiar from many places in Egypt, including several temple complexes. These consist of a descending ramp or staircase leading down to the water table. The ﬂuctuating height of the water level was read off a scale located on the side wall of this structure, within which the water rose during the ﬂood. Nilometers of this kind are best known from temples such as Edfu, Kom Ombo, and Elephantine, although these are dated to much later periods than the one that concerns us here.

Comparing the details on the Palermo Stone with data from the famous medieval Nilometer still standing on Roda Island in modern Cairo shows that the ancient data record realistic differences between minimum and maximum ﬂoods. This suggests that the ﬂood pattern has not changed much over the millennia. The same applies to the Nile oscillations, which at ﬁrst glance may appear to be very large. For example, measurements of the water level from the Roda Nilometer for 1871 to 1902 vary from under 17.6 meters in 1877 and 1899 to 21.4 meters in 1874 (measurements above sea level). The 3.8-meter difference corresponds with similar evidence from the Palermo Stone.¹⁴

Four very high ﬂood levels are recorded during the rule of three First Dynasty kings: Djer—3.15 and 3.20 meters; Den—2.60 meters; Anedjib—4.22 meters. Flood levels recorded during the Second Dynasty were much lower.¹⁵ The average height of Nile ﬂoods during the First Dynasty was 2.32 meters, which means that the four identiﬁed above were very high even for that period. Entries for later dynasties show much lower averages: 1.64 meters during the Second Dynasty, 1.67 in the Third, 1.85 in the Fourth, and 1.69 during the Fifth. Thus, while the average height of ﬂood levels during the Second and Third Dynasties remained practically the same, in the First Dynasty the ﬂoods were 0.70 meters higher.

Fig. 2.3. Example of the Egyptian Nilometer, though from a much later period, on the island of Elephantine, Aswan. Meticulous recording of the annual ﬂood was the foundation of Egyptian economic life. (M. Bárta)

Macklin et al. in their 2015 study gathered all the data available (accumulated over the last twelve thousand years) for the history of the Nile during the Holocene.¹⁶ They identiﬁed six major phases in the development of the Nile during this period, each of which signiﬁed a substantial and abrupt change in its ﬂood regime and had a profound impact on the populations inhabiting the Nile Valley. The ﬁrst phase is dated to the 6400 to 5800 bc interval, which roughly corresponds with the beginning of the desiccation of the Sahara. The second was the period culminating around 4500 bc, characterized by a major drop in temperatures and signiﬁcantly declining water levels in Lake Tana and Lake Victoria. Signiﬁcantly lower ﬂow rates were recorded in the Nile Delta area, and ﬂuvial (river) sedimentation was compensated by marine sedimentation. A large drop in the water levels of the lakes in Faiyum province has been documented for the period from 3700 to 3450 bc. The most important phase in the periods described by Macklin and his research team was the third, from 2800 to 2450 bc, when the ﬂow rate of the Nile again declined steadily.¹⁷ It was no doubt this trend that led to the diachronic settlement drift on Elephantine Island during the third millennium bc (see below).

As a matter of interest, the next period of lower ﬂow rates, lower ﬂood heights, and cooling started around 1600 bc. More recent stages of deteriorating hydroclimatic conditions occur between 1100 and 900 bc and, ﬁnally, between ad 1450 and 1650. It is also worth mentioning that available data show that from ad 200 to 500 the ﬂow rate of the Nile increased, which is an interesting contrast to the decline of the Roman Empire during the same period, or to the documented wave of depopulation of settlements in some Egyptian oases at the beginning of the ﬁfth century. This should be sufﬁcient to demonstrate that the Nile has always played a dominating role in human history in northeast Africa. The ‘temper’ and the tendency of the river toward low or high ﬂoods was a crucial factor for the cultures of antiquity that depended on its omnipotent forces.

Small Houses on the Island

One of the sites where the variability of Nile ﬂoods over the third millennium bc can be studied in some detail is the region of the First Cataract, Elephantine Island in particular, where the main regional settlement was situated at that time. It functioned as a border town guarding the southern frontier, where Egypt proper ended and Nubia began.¹⁸ According to ancient Egyptian tradition, it was at the First Cataract, in a cavern under the island of Bigeh, that the Nile had its source. An image illustrating this is found in the Ptolemaic temple at Philae.

Elephantine Island was formed by the joining of two separate islands that had been continuously settled since the very beginning of the uniﬁed ancient Egyptian state. Long-term German excavations have helped clarify the very close interconnection between the settlement of the island and the Nile ﬂoods, which were here an essential and limiting factor and physical constraint. Some of the observations made during this research complement what we already know about the development of the natural environment and Nile ﬂoods in the third millennium.

During the First Dynasty, the new settlement on Elephantine Island does not descend below 96 m above sea level (ASL) and even the foundations of its fort remain consistently above this line. The extensive network of settlement structures is supplemented during the Second Dynasty by a system of fortiﬁcations for the expanding settlement, but at a somewhat lower height, 94 to 94.5 m ASL (which suggests that the height of the Nile between ﬂoods may have been some 92 to 92.5 m ASL). During the Old Kingdom, a continuous descent of the settlement to increasingly lower levels can be observed. During the Fourth and Fifth Dynasties, the settlement was located below 94 meters ASL, and in one case the plastered ﬂoor of a house lies below 93.55 m ASL. The lowest settlement is recorded toward the end of the Old Kingdom, during the Sixth Dynasty: it lay at only 90.8 to 91.3 m ASL, which is clear evidence that the usual level of the Nile was particularly low in those years. One cannot fail to note that the difference in the heights of settlement levels between the beginning of the uniﬁed state and the end of the Old Kingdom was a striking ﬁve meters.

An interesting development was the return of higher ﬂoods at the end of the Old Kingdom and during the First Intermediate Period, as evidenced by the building of large stone walls that served as a platform on which the ﬂoors of lighter structures could be lifted as high as 92.7 m ASL. Analysis of the accumulated layers has proved, however, that even this ﬂoor level was ﬂooded several times by the swollen river despite being above the height of the average ﬂoods.

The ﬂoor was subsequently raised by another 40 cm, to a height of 93.1 m ASL. At this level, the settlement buildings no longer show any trace of inundation. During the last construction phase, but still before the beginning of the Middle Kingdom, the residential level was raised one last time, to 93.7 m ASL; here, too, there are no traces of ﬂood damage.¹⁹ Archaeological data thus indicate that the island settlement changed dramatically over time, depending on the height of the Nile when a given phase was founded. The pattern of these changes corresponds, of course, with the common long-term trend in the height of the yearly Nile ﬂoods.

As we have seen, evidence from Elephantine Island and the Palermo Stone points to more or less constant average ﬂood levels during the Third to Fifth Dynasties. This brings us back to the question of how and where the height of ﬂood levels was measured. In the Memphite region this may have been done by measuring the height of the water surface above the inundated area of the ﬂoodplain, possibly using a static measuring gauge built at a designated site. If point zero on the scale indicated a ﬁxed height in the surrounding terrain (the Nile alluvium), the ﬂood water level could then have been measured from this point. Since the average height of ﬂood levels during the Third to Fifth Dynasties was practically constant, we can infer that there was no considerable increase in the amount of alluvium over this period (approximately 350 years). If that was the case, it follows that the absolute height of ﬂood levels would have decreased over time.

Fig. 2.4. Elephantine settlement drift throughout the Old Kingdom provides ample evidence for the ﬂuctuation of the annual Nile ﬂoods and their diminishing impact toward the end of the Old Kingdom. (M. Bárta)

And in fact even though the Palermo Stone data are incomplete, the ﬁgures do indicate a trend of decreasing ﬂood levels between the Early Dynastic Period and the latter part of the Old Kingdom. This is supported by the evidence of ﬂoor levels on Elephantine and the study by Macklin et al., which clearly point to progressively lower Nile ﬂoods during the Old Kingdom era.²⁰

The Abusir Beetles

The picture of the climatic context of the Old Kingdom has been supplemented in an interesting way by ﬁnds made at the Czech archaeological mission in Abusir. A mummiﬁcation deposit dating to the period of the rule of Pepy I toward the end of the Sixth Dynasty was discovered in the burial complex of Judge Inti. It contained mostly ceramics and bandages that had been used to mummify a member of the judge’s family, then ritually buried in a side shaft. One of the bowls in the set was covered by a residue of resin—a material commonly applied to desiccated corpses—and some beetles were stuck in it. They were identiﬁed as Poecilus pharaoh, a common insect living in desert zones with high salinity, which can neither migrate nor change its very speciﬁc ecological niche.²¹ The beetles imprisoned in the hot aromatic resin therefore suggest two things: ﬁrst, the strip of land adjacent to the Nile Valley had turned from savannah to desert; second, the wrapping and bandaging and perhaps some other elements of the mummiﬁcation process did not take place near the Nile or some other water source, but in the desert, maybe in the immediate vicinity of the tomb.

The last stone in the mosaic is an observation made by geologists working on a Polish expedition in nearby Saqqara. To the west of King Djoser’s pyramid complex there is a large burial ground dating to the end of the Old Kingdom. This was naturally exposed to many post-deposition factors, including massive strata of shifted material carried by a strong, rapid stream of water that contained layers of mud. Speciﬁc analyses have shown that these layers were deposited by ﬂash ﬂoods running down from the Western Desert plateau (which by then already had a very low water absorption capacity) after torrential rains. Similar strata were also found in Abusir in Old Kingdom burial chambers, which had been robbed and left open. The authors suggest that the extreme rains at the end of the Old Kingdom were caused by the North Atlantic Oscillation.²²

History Repeating Itself?

Having discussed the way environment limited the development of complexity in the ancient Egyptian state, we can now turn our attention to the cyclical nature of history, including the creation, rise, and fall of civilizations.

The work of the medieval Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun and his theory of the cyclical restoration of ruling Islamic dynasties is one of the earliest, most signiﬁcant and inspiring contributions in this context. Ibn Khaldun postulates that societal change is the result of a gradual process. He discusses this theory in great detail in his Muqaddimah, which contains introductory reﬂections to the seven volumes of his Book of Lessons. The latter deals with the history of all the countries, regions, and nations that came into contact with the Islamic world. The part of the Muqaddimah that is probably most relevant to the idea that history is cyclical concerns the natural life span of ruling dynasties. Indeed, Ibn Khaldun comes very close to modern concepts of cyclicity, as encountered in recent research.

Ibn Khaldun’s theory was based on his ﬁnding that a dynasty seldom lasts more than three generations, each of which lasts approximately forty years. After this period of roughly one hundred to 120 years there is a hiatus, which leads on to a new form of government. The description of this mechanism is based on the characteristics of mainly Arab ‘Bedouin’ dynasties:

The ﬁrst generation retains the desert qualities, desert toughness, and desert savagery. (Its members are used to) privation and to sharing their glory (with each other); they are brave and rapacious. Therefore, the strength of group feeling continues to be preserved among them. They are sharp and greatly feared. People submit to them.

Under the inﬂuence of royal authority and a life of ease, the second generation changes from the desert attitude to sedentary culture, from privation to luxury and plenty, from a state in which everybody shared in the glory to one in which one man claims all the glory for himself while the others are too lazy to strive for (glory), and from proud superiority to humble subservience. Thus, the vigour of group feeling is broken to some extent. People become used to lowliness and obedience. But many of (the old virtues) remain in them, because they had had direct personal contact with the ﬁrst generation and its conditions, and had observed with their own eyes its prowess and striving for glory and its intention to protect and defend (itself). They cannot give all of it up at once, although a good deal of it may go. They live in hope that the conditions that existed in the ﬁrst generation may come back, or they live under the illusion that those conditions still exist.

The third generation, then, has (completely) forgotten the period of desert life and toughness, as if it had never existed. They have lost (the taste for) the sweetness of fame and (for) group feeling, because they are dominated by force. Luxury reaches its peak among them, because they are so much given to a life of prosperity and ease. They become dependent on the dynasty and are like women and children who need to be defended (by someone else). Group feeling disappears completely. People forget to protect and defend themselves and to press their claims. With their emblems, apparel, horseback riding, and (ﬁghting) skill, they deceive people and give them the wrong impression. For the most part, they are more cowardly than women upon their backs. When someone comes and demands something from them, they cannot repel him. The ruler, then, has need of other, brave people for his support. He takes many clients and followers. They help the dynasty to some degree, until God permits it to be destroyed, and it goes with everything it stands for.

As one can see, we have there three generations. In the course of these three generations, the dynasty grows senile and is worn out. Therefore, it is in the fourth generation that (ancestral) prestige is destroyed.²³

This is, of course, a text that is several centuries old and refers to nomadic tribes that settled and established local dynasties based on blood relationship and family ties. But it can be used as a kind of intellectual stepping-stone to other historical concepts and reﬂections on history, and the Muqaddimah is valid even today, especially read broadly, in the way it describes cycles that demarcate the rise and fall of distinct social entities, whether dynasties or entire cultures, societies, and civilizations.

Later in the Muqaddimah Ibn Khaldun discusses the inner meaning of change, when a spent dynasty is replaced by another. This does not, to him, necessarily mean doom; it is rather the kind of regenerating, “self-renewing” mechanism that is often associated with the collapse of a social system—that is, with the moment when a system has either spent itself internally or been crippled by external factors and needs to be restructured from the beginning. The system does not cease to exist. It changes, and its transformation requires a period of relatively low complexity, an interval during which it will have few resources to expend on growth.

Vico, Marx, Spengler, and Toynbee

Ibn Khaldun’s notion that civilization developed in cycles was elaborated by a succession of authors, including Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), who theorized that civilization developed in three stages: divine, heroic, and human. Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) and Arnold Toynbee were among the leading twentieth-century proponents of the theory. Karl Marx (1818–83), by contrast, was an advocate of linear development.

Marx needs no special introduction. The founder of the philosophy known as ‘historical materialism’ based his political tracts (in Capital, ﬁrst English edition 1887) on the premise that the purpose of history was to move ever forward in a linear way driven by confrontation between social classes.²⁴ This was supposed to culminate in a struggle between the capitalists and the exploited working class, which would lead to communism—a society where all people were equal. Marx never speciﬁed how communism would develop. Sometimes his contemporaries compared him to Charles Darwin. Spengler, one of the outstanding German philosophers of the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century, identiﬁed eight great civilizations: ancient Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Babylonian, Classical, Arab, Mexican, and the current Western civilization. He distinguished these civilizations in a way that differs signiﬁcantly from Marx’s linear understanding of history. In Spengler’s view—immortalized in his still inﬂuential work Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), originally published in German in 1918—the essence of the development of civilizations and cultures lies in their incessant birth, development, peak, and ﬁnal decline.²⁵ Spengler illustrates their development by analogy to the four seasons: he compares spring to the feudal stage; summer to the expansion of towns existing in harmony with the surrounding countryside; autumn to the onset of decline accompanied by centralistic tendencies, trade boom, secularization—in other words, the alienation of the idea of symbolic forms—and rapid expansion of urban forms of life. Finally, winter is marked by a decline that ushers in rampant plutocracy, loss of identity and ideals, and life in bloated urban agglomerations.

Spengler considered the main developmental stages of the eight great civilizations to be identical and claimed that this allowed predictions to be made about the direction of civilizations that were not yet defunct. He also believed that civilizations had identical life cycles and so would last approximately the same amount of time. This arose from a more general observation that civilizations developed along the same trajectory. Thus, for example, the ﬁrst century in the development of the Antique civilization was from 1100 to 1000 bc. Its parallel, according to Spengler, was the ﬁrst century of our own Western culture, between ad 900 and 1000. He called this “contemporaneity” (Gleichzeitigkeit), and referred to the last developmental stage of any culture as “civilization.” This stage is characterized every time by, among other things, a loss of the meaning of history, artiﬁciality and stagnation, materialism accompanied by loss of religion, the proliferation of sin and a boom of the entertainment industry, a decline of morale and art, explosions of violence, and disastrous wars. What is also remarkable is that he arrived at this position and adopted this attitude to life at the age of just thirty-eight.

Arnold Toynbee, in contrast, earned an international reputation as a result of the comparative method he used to analyze different civilizations. A Study of History, a work in ten volumes published in London between 1934 and 1954, is simply overwhelming, if only for its sheer size. It contains a detailed discussion of more than twenty civilizations, with a focus on the regularities in their development.²⁶ Toynbee concluded that civilizations grew from encounters with both external and internal challenges and were therefore the result of cultural and natural factors. He wrote that civilizations develop and increase in social complexity by coping with problems. Thus, for example, he suggests that ancient Egyptian civilization was formed because the population of the Nile Valley had to cope with Nile ﬂoods.

Toynbee distinguishes nineteen successful civilizations (including “our own” Western one). He then adds four abortive civilizations, which were unable to overcome the challenges they faced, and ﬁve arrested ones, characterized by castes and rigid specialization. According to Toynbee, every civilization is unique because it encountered a distinct set of problems and responded to them in speciﬁc ways. What they all have in common, however, is that the challenges are always being faced by a “Creative Minority”—a relatively small part of the population capable of seeing further ahead and ﬁnding successful solutions. At the beginning of a civilization a religious system may often make a signiﬁcant contribution to successful outcomes. The moment this minority begins to stagnate and loses its ability to resolve problems, it becomes a “Dominant Minority,” which consolidates its privileged status by force. It is then subjected to attack on two fronts: a dominant “internal” proletariat grows up against it within the state, while it is attacked from the outside by an “external” proletariat—a group of people living beyond its boundaries. The Universal State emerges as a result: this is the ﬁnal stage that precedes the civilization’s decline. The Dominant Minority consolidates its positions and a struggle against the majority begins; the minority loses both its creativity and its ability to respond to internal and external challenges.

The one serious drawback of Toynbee’s overview of the development of civilizations is the largely arbitrary manner in which he distinguishes one civilization from another: for example, he presents the Sumerian and Akkadian civilizations as two different entities, but joins the Greek and Roman into a single “Hellenistic” civilization. Toynbee also reﬂected on the fate of contemporary civilizations—Islamic, Hindu, and Far Eastern. He believed they had two basic options for their future: to become in the end a part of the Western civilization, or to develop into a Universal State and ﬁnally to be engulfed by their internal problems.

This small selection of philosophers and historians of civilizational change illustrates that their approach to history was built on the concept of an underlying developmental trajectory, particularly as the consequence of internal factors and dynamics. One issue that they almost entirely neglected (perhaps with the exception of Toynbee) was the impact of the natural environment. This, however, can be explained through the lack of available data about the very concept of climate development and human resilience.

Fig. 2.5. View of one of the earliest dams in human history—built, but never ﬁnished, at the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty in Helwan, Sadd al-Kafara. (M. Bárta)

Multiplier Effect and ‘Punctuated’ History

The nature of historical processes as perceived through archaeological data provides a different perspective on the historical dynamics and the mechanisms of change. The British archaeologist Colin Renfrew published his PhD dissertation, in 1972, on the origins and history of the Cycladic society and its impact on the later Minoan, Mycenaean, and Greek civilizations.²⁷ The Cycladic culture characterizes prehistoric development on the Aegean Sea’s Cycladic islands, which emerged around 3200 bc and disappeared during the transition between the third and second millennia bc. It went through several distinct phases as it developed.

The genesis and development of the Cycladic civilization provided Renfrew with a platform on which to demonstrate, relying on systems theory, a phenomenon known as the ‘multiplier effect.’ Renfrew showed that no advanced culture, society, or civilization could be taken as a homogenous continuum, but was composed of various subsystems with speciﬁc features and functions. Traditionally, we can identify subsistence, technological, social, symbolism, and trade and communication subsystems. The subsistence subsystem covers the role and function of sources of livelihood, the manner in which they are acquired and used, and the practical and symbolic importance attached to them. The technological subsystem involves the speciﬁc human actions that lead to the manufacture of artifacts or to increasingly specialized production processes. Its basic building elements are humanity’s practical world of needs and symbolic world of ideas, the raw materials required to produce artifacts, and the artifacts themselves. The social system consists of the varied conduct and norms governing human interaction. The complexity of these relations grows in proportion to the complexity of the system. The symbolic system involves activities and attitudes relating to language, religion, art, science, and other ways in which humans express their state of knowledge of the world, views of the world, and attitudes toward it. And, ﬁnally, the trade and communication system involves commercial strategies and relations and the movement of goods, be they raw materials, artifacts, or know-how.²⁸

Of course, these subsystems interact all the time and inﬂuence one another; any one alone would lose its purpose and ability to function. Moreover, it is difﬁcult to clearly separate the individual subsystems. Their interfaces are usually transitional, and the same activity may fall within more than one system at the same time. More complex civilizations, like ancient Egypt, China, and others that used script, can be said to have an additional subsystem—the administration. This refers to the manner in which the society’s functions are administered and represents another speciﬁc and vital sphere of human activity, which plays a key role in the civilization’s rise and fall.

Renfrew’s theory resembles another currently rather neglected theory, also formulated in 1972, by two Harvard paleontologists—Niles Eldredge and Steven Jay Gould. Gould may be better known to readers because of his books popularizing geology, paleontology, and natural science research in general. But both scientists concluded, by studying the fossil record of trilobites and snails and analyzing the dynamics of their development and morphological transformations, that there was no such thing as a gradualist evolutionary development. They proposed a new theory—or rather, a new view of the theory of evolution: that it proceeds in leaps. In invertebrates, a species cycle would typically take ﬁve to ten million years, while specialization changes would usually occur within a rough interval of ﬁve to ﬁfty thousand years, and the system leaps through those time frames. This is the root of Eldredge and Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibria.²⁹

Fig. 2.6. A set of mummiﬁcation pottery with preserved remains of beetles dating to the reign of Pepy I. Abusir, tomb of Inti. (M. Bárta)

This theory is no longer a part of the current discourse in evolutionary biology, mainly because it ignores symbiotic events (hereditary transfer of part or all of the genome).³⁰ But, like Renfrew’s work, it is interesting to the study of the Old Kingdom and Egyptian history because it postulates that change takes place in leaps, not in gradual progression. Renfrew’s multiplier effect theory takes a similar approach. This is Eldredge and Gould’s greatest contribution to the philosophy of the dynamics of long-term processes: their thesis of variable velocity of diachronic development (development in time), which is punctuated by leap moments separated by long periods of sustained development as if free of any fundamental shifts. This idea is crucial to understanding processes that for thousands of years governed the voyage of individual societies, cultures, and civilizations through time.

When studying the mechanism of the development of any society—not only its collapse—the principle of punctuated equilibria explains how the system moves from one developmental stage to another. Historical development is not linear and does not change at a constant rate; it happens in leaps. A period of uneventful stasis is followed by abrupt fundamental changes when all of Renfrew’s subsystems interact.

The archaeologist and the historian should be in pursuit of the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, which unites the community in question and sets it apart from what came before and what came after. Continuity and innovation, permanence and change, uniqueness and commonness are integral aspects of the orientation of a modern scientist in time and space in a world of defunct civilizations and cultures (and of those that still cling to life). The angle of view, range of knowledge, and preferences of the scientist are also important. We cannot succeed in understanding a society without synergy between nature and social sciences, and the archaeologist and historian must take into account all possible subsystems that together make up that society—or, more speciﬁcally, how and when these subsystems interact.

Based on the theory of punctuated equilibria, major turning points can be identiﬁed in Egypt in the third millennium bc, which we will now look at in detail. We will consider dividing the history of Egypt during the Early Dynastic Period and the Old Kingdom into stages based not on Manethonic dynasties, but on fundamental transformations within the society of the day. These periods had their rulers, of course, and we will see that the individual has always played a signiﬁcant role, some to such an extent that they changed the course of history (although only when born into a context with a strong potential for change).

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