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Preface

I first came to Egypt in 1991 as an undergraduate student of Egyptology and prehistoric archaeology at Charles University in Prague. The fall of that year was my first excavation in Abusir, a rural site among the pyramid fields, but one of the principal sites of the Old Kingdom period. It proved to be crucial for my future career in many ways.

There I experienced the thrill of observing how monuments, built millennia ago and now fallen into oblivion, were reappearing from the sands of the desert. Such discoveries challenged my imagination and my ability to piece together small fragments of evidence to build a picture of the past. Step by step, as the days passed, the ancient Egyptian world was becoming more and more tangible. Destinies of individual officials were gaining more concrete contours. Their fates started to fill in the outlines of the world they lived in and which they helped to shape. Individual lives of long-forgotten Egyptian officials of both high and lower standing, together with the general characteristics of the Old Kingdom society, were merging together; the micro- and macro-worlds started to form a unified and tightly interwoven whole. It took me quite a long time to reach this level of perception, and I have no doubt that to arrive at a complete state of knowledge and understanding of such a complex society is utterly impossible. This book is an attempt to offer my present perspective on one of several important periods of ancient Egyptian history—one of the first complex civilizations in the history of this planet. This book is a kind of interim testimony to the development of that society.

But ambitious as this sounds, there is yet another aspect of this pursuit that I wish to share: individual archaeological discoveries represent an indispensable micro-world from which a general picture of historical processes several centuries long may be reconstructed. Ancient Egyptian evidence may be viewed from the longue durée perspective. This is an approach formulated by the French School of Annals; it refers to the study of history through mapping and analyzing evidence for specific historical processes over long periods of time, combined with individual historical events and with a strong multidisciplinary component.¹ Only this specific approach of addressing historical issues by means of multidisciplinary research may have significant relevance for comparative studies with other known civilizations. Certainly, each civilization attested on this planet was or is specific and there are no algorithms that could compare them on a unified basis. Equally, there is no way our past can predict our future. Still, past civilizations were shaped and maintained by people like us, people with minds like ours, who were faced with many phenomena we know from our own contemporary world. It is above all the inner dynamics of any given society which offers many points for comparison: rising complexity; growing and proliferating bureaucracy; the role of the state and its eventual erosion; the role of nepotistic structures and interest groups in controlling energy resources and competing with the declining state structures for power and dominance; the importance of the elites and what happens when they fail to perform their duties.² These are just a few phenomena which can be encountered in any given civilization, in any age or location.³ In the same manner, the ways in which any civilization adapts to a changing environment constitute yet another universal phenomenon which has been intensively studied.⁴ All these aspects combined indicate why it is that archaeology sometimes appears to be political. This results from a simple observation, namely that archaeology addresses most of the issues and processes (some of the most important of which are mentioned above) which are present in our own modern world. In fact, multidisciplinary study of the past has become an increasingly strategic discipline, and the analysis of history of longue durée combined with a detailed analysis of individual historical events, with their environmental background and dynamism, is beginning to claim more space in research and is receiving increasing attention from science as such.⁵ The same is true of the comparative study of civilizations.⁶ Last but not least, since Joseph Tainter’s pioneering and still influential study of collapses in different societies and civilizations, it is considered productive to study the mechanisms of crises in which archaeology and history play a dominant role.⁷

Fig. 0.1. Visual metaphor of modern study of history. Tiled windows in the cathedral in Rheims by Marc Chagall. In order to create such impressive windows, each of the colored tiles must be carefully produced; each on its own would be meaningless. To understand any civilization one must do the same—combine single events and longue durée analysis. (M. Bárta)

Therefore, my focus throughout the book will be the following seven rules, which appear to form the essence of every civilization of which we have knowledge, and which can be distilled from comparative study of complex civilizations and longue durée history.

Law One

Every civilization is defined in space and time. It has geographical borders and temporal limits. Archaeology and history are the disciplines that analyze the emergence, rise, apogee, crisis, eventual collapse (understood as a sudden and deep loss of complexity), and the transformations leading to their new evolution. The making and unraveling of any civilization is a procedure that emphasizes the idea of time and process in combination with human agency.

Law Two

Every civilization develops by means of a punctuated equilibria mechanism, according to which major changes happen in a non-linear, leap-like manner when the multiplier effect is present.⁸ Once periods of stasis separating individual leap periods become shorter or disappear completely, one expects a major system’s transformation, most often a sudden and steep loss of complexity (metaphorically called ‘collapse’).

Law Three

Every civilization uses a language that is universally understood by its members (its lingua franca, typically English in our Western world) and a commonly accepted system of values and symbols. Every civilization has major centers characterized by a concentration of population, monumental architecture, a writing system (in most cases), sophisticated systems of communication, systems for storing and sharing knowledge, a hierarchically shaped society, arts, and a division of labor. It also has the ability to redistribute main sources of energy—in other words, it has elites who are able to establish and maintain the so-called social contract and allow the majority of the population to share in the profits generated by the system, which is controlled by a minority with decisive power.

Law Four

If the prevalent tendency within the civilization favors consumption of energy over producing it and investing it in a further increase of complexity, there is a declining energy return on investment (EROI). It means that a coefficient gained from the amount of energy delivered by a specific energy resource (such as water, sun, atom, gas, or coal) divided by the amount of energy necessary to be used in order to obtain that energy resource is becoming less and less significant, and therefore less economically profitable. As a consequence, the original level of complexity cannot be sustained or expanded. Eventually, in leaps rather than gradually, the system will lose its existing complexity and implode. This is what is traditionally and inaccurately called a ‘collapse.’

Law Five

Individual components of a given civilization proliferate and perish through inner mechanisms inherent in the society (changing bureaucracy, quality of institutions, role of the elites and technologies, ideology and religion, mandatory expenses, social system, and so on), and through the ability of the civilization to adapt to external factors such as environmental change. These are the internal and external determinants that shape the dynamics of any given civilization. They are in permanent interaction, in cycles of varying length.

Law Six

The so-called Heraclitus Principle has a major impact on all civilizations: the factors that promote the rise of civilizations are, more often than not, identical with those that usher in their collapse. Thus if we want to understand the precise nature and causes of the collapse, we must study not only the final stage of the system but its very incipient stage, where the roots of the future crisis usually lie.

Fig. 0.2. Visual metaphor of a collapse. Impressive sarcophagus chest left behind in a corridor in the sacred animal cemetery of Serapeum, Saqqara, Egypt, Ptolemaic period. The sarcophagus, which was to contain the body of the sacred Apis bull, never reached its final destination. The works, the faith, the legitimacy of the painstaking work ceased literally overnight; all workers and officials participating in this process walked away on a single day. This is what is typically called a collapse—sudden loss of complexity, lack of economic means, lost legitimacy, and erosion of commonly shared values compromising the social contract. (M. Bárta)

Law Seven

A civilization disappears at the moment when its system of values, symbols, and communication tools disappears, and when the elites lose their ability to maintain the social contract. Yet the collapse does not necessary imply extinction. In most cases, a civilization that has consumed its potential gives way to a new one, usually carried on by the same or a slightly modified genetic substrate of the original population. Collapse in this context is a positive phenomenon, as it removes dysfunctional parts of the system.

All the features in the above seven laws play a role throughout the following chapters, and I leave it to readers to judge their effect and relevance. The study of civilizations in the manner indicated above may in fact turn into strategic directions of research in the years to come. These laws are capable of describing long historical processes from the incipient stage of a civilization through its rise, apogee, decline, collapse, transformation, and reemergence.⁹ Ancient Egypt underwent this cycle at least three times. The study of the rise and fall of the era of the Old Kingdom pyramid builders in multidisciplinary perspective is just a limited part of the large mosaic of human history, but it may prove to be valuable as a description and evaluation of a complex society from its rise to its demise over several centuries, and provide an analysis of its internal and external dynamics.

I would like to thank all my friends and colleagues who read first versions of this text and contributed immensely to its completion—Salima Ikram, Aidan Dodson, and Guy Middleton. I am grateful to Miroslav Verner, Jiří Melzer, and Vivienne G. Callender for many valuable comments, criticisms, and insightful remarks during the process of the work on the manuscript. I also want to thank all my colleagues in the Czech Institute of Egyptology, without whom I would not have been able to complete the necessary research for this book. The American University in Cairo Press provided an excellent environment for the finalization of the manuscript. I owe a lot to just a few persons, and they know who they are.

The work on this book was accomplished within the framework of the Charles University Progress project Q11: “Complexity and Resilience: Ancient Egyptian Civilization in Multidisciplinary and Multicultural Perspective.”

The present book and research builds on the Czech publication which appeared in 2016 under the title Příběh Civilizace. Vzestup a pád doby stavitelů pyramid (Academia).