Egypt in 2200 BC

Note: This is so far back in time that dates can be off by up to 70 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. The north-eastern Delta not completely under government control.
• Population: about 1 million.
• Major cities: Bubastis, Heliopolis, Memphis (capital), Abydos, Dendera, Elephantine.
• Language: Old Egyptian – in hieroglyphic writing.
• Religion: idol worship in the temples of Ptah, Ra, Hathor, Osiris, Isis, Horus, Seth, Nut, Thoth, etc.
• Government: Pepi II, a god-king of the 6th Dynasty.
• Economy: Command economy. Wheat, barley, flax, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, honey, figs, beer, shoddy pyramids. Gold 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, paper, pyramids, glass, bee-keeping, linen (not cotton or silk). Although Mesopotamia and India have already entered the Bronze Age, Egypt has not, using arsenic instead of tin to harden copper.

The last 100 years: the -2200s:

• Kings:
  • 6th Dynasty: Pepi I, Merenra, Pepi II.
• Queens: Ankhnespepi II ruled as regent when her son, Pepi II, was still a boy.
• Pepi II ruled for 94 years, the longest ever in Egyptian history. He ruled for 79 of the 100 years of the -2200s. He became king at age six and lived to 100, outliving his sons.
• Pyramids continue to be built with rubble cores. With the limestone casing stripped off to build Cairo, they now just look like mounds of rubble. See Pepi II’s pyramid above. His pyramid was only 100 cubits (52.4 metres) tall despite having ruled for 94 years. But this seems to have become the standard size for pyramids. Pyramid Texts are now also standard.
• Harkhuf, an Egyptian explorer, “set forth upon the Ivory Road” and came upon the land of Yam. It was somewhere to the south of Egypt, beyond Nubia. Maybe further up the Nile or maybe in Darfur to the west. In either case it would have been in the land of the Nilo-Saharans, who still live along the grasslands south of the Sahara. Harkhuf was gone seven months and came back with incense, ebony, panther skins, elephant tusks and, what most excited Pepi II, then an eight-year-old boy king, a “pygmy of the god’s dances from the land of the horizon dwellers”.
• Nubia: The Nubian states of Wawat, Setju and Irtjet became one, becoming a threat to Egypt.
• The Sahara Desert is turning grassland into desert, driving famine-stricken herders into the Nile Valley.
• Decentralization continues, weakening the centre. Kings continue to give land and tax breaks to temples – which meant less tax revenue for the central government. In good times it did not matter too much, but not during a megadrought:
• The 4.2-kiloyear event struck in -2200, in Pepi II’s old age. It brought drought to much of the world for over 100 years. It is probably what led to the collapse of civilization in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley.

Meanwhile in Britain, brown-skinned people like the Whitehawk Woman are moving the bluestones of Stonehenge, but they keep falling over.

– 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 in 2300 BC
  • Egypt
  • Egypt: a brief history
  • Ancient Egypt
• Egyptian
  • Egyptian hieroglyphics
• Pyramid Text
• Nubia
• Nilo-Saharans
• Indus Valley
  • The Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-Daro
• The British
  • The British through time: the last 10,000 years
  • Whitehawk Woman
  • Stonehenge

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