Egypt in 2300 BC

From the Pyramid Text of Pepi I.

Note: This is so far back in time that dates can be off by up to 75 years or so. I follow the dates in “The Princeton Dictionary of Ancient Egypt” (2008) by Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson. 

• Location: north-eastern Africa, the last 1,000 km of the Nile where ships can freely sail north of the rocky Cataracts.
• Population: about 1 million.
• Major cities: Buto, Heliopolis, Memphis (capital), Abydos, Dendera, Koptos, Hierakonpolis, Elephantine.
• Language: Old Egyptian – in hieroglyphic writing.
• Religion: idol worship in temples of Ptah, Ra, Hathor, Osiris, Isis, Horus, Seth, Nut, Thoth, etc. Ptah of Memphis is now the creator of the universe, not Ra of Heliopolis. First mention of Amun. In a thousand years he will be the top god.
• Government: Pepi I, a god-king of the 6th Dynasty.
• Economy: Command economy. Wheat, barley, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, honey, figs, beer, pyramids. Gold and slaves from Nubia, copper, turquoise and malachite from Sinai, wine and oil from Palestine, cedar wood from Byblos, myrrh from Punt (Somalia?).
• Currency: none.
• Transport: Nile River, sail boats, barges, donkeys. Roads, horses, and wheel transport are rare, camels unknown.
• Technology: irrigation, mud bricks, stone blocks, copper (stiffened with arsenic, bronze not yet in common use), paper, pyramids, glass, bee-keeping, life-sized copper statues.

The last 100 years: the -2300s:

• Kings:
  • 5th Dynasty: Djedkara, Unas.
  • 6th Dynasty: Teti, Userkara, Pepi I.
• Queens: Iput, who was the daughter of Unas, wife of Teti, and mother of Pepi I, likely ruled when Pepi I was a boy.
• Pyramids continue in the rubble-core style of the -2400s. Since all pyramids have long ago been stripped of anything valuable and movable, including their outer casing of white limestone, the pyramids from this period now look like mounds of rubble. But in the -2300s something new was added, something that could not be stripped away:
• Pyramid Texts: In the room where Unas’s body was laid to rest in a black coffin, the ceiling was blue with golden stars and the walls filled with hieroglyphs carved in alabaster and painted in the blue of the watery abyss of the underworld. This was the first ever Pyramid Text, the oldest surviving religious text in Egypt. The following kings and queens put Pyramid Texts in their pyramids too.
• Pyramid Texts were made up of hundreds of ancient spells to help the king or queen in the afterlife. The spells were ancient even then. Most probably came from the “secret knowledge” found in the now-vanished libraries of temples and palaces. The hieroglyphs were seen as so powerful that its serpents and scorpions were dismembered. The theology is an inconsistent mix of solar, stellar and Osirian, each with its own sort of afterlife.
• Memphite theology: Unas as king pushes a Memphite theology featuring Ptah. It seems priests of the solar theology of Ra had become too powerful.
• The centre continues to weaken: governors out in the provinces continue to grow in power and wealth. Some no longer care to be buried as near as possible to the king’s pyramid but in their own provinces.
• Men-nefer Pepi – “Pepi’s Beautiful Foundation” – was the name of Pepi’s pyramid complex, his city of the dead outside Memphis. It is where the Greek name “Memphis” comes from. The Egyptians called Memphis Ineb-hedj, “White Walls”.

Meanwhile in Britain, brown-skinned people like the Whitehawk Woman are re-erecting the bluestones of Stonehenge.

– Abagond, +2023. 

See also:

• Egyptian century of the week
  • Egypt in 3100 BC
  • Egypt in 3000 BC
  • Egypt in 2900 BC
  • Egypt in 2800 BC
  • Egypt in 2700 BC
  • Egypt in 2600 BC
  • Egypt in 2500 BC
  • Egypt in 2400 BC
  • Egypt
  • Egypt: a brief history
  • Ancient Egypt
• Egyptian
  • Egyptian hieroglyphics
• Pyramid Text
• Egyptian gods
  • Ptah
  • Horus
  • Seth
  • Ra
  • Isis
  • Amun
• The British
  • The British through time: the last 10,000 years
  • Whitehawk Woman
  • Stonehenge

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