[Music] hello and welcome to today's lecture on the middle kingdom of egypt i'm your professor dr rob steffen and today we're going to look at how egypt responded to the fragmentation and regionalization that arose during the first intermediate period now unlike the roman empire that split up totally for good once it started to break apart egypt was able to re-centralize power in the hands of powerful pharaohs that would reassert their authority over the nile river valley the delta and once again send expeditions abroad in doing so the middle kingdom became a period of flourishing especially for art and literature so if you're sick of feeling torn into journey with me as we reunify the two lands in middle kingdom egypt [Music] you can't talk about the rise of the middle kingdom without setting it within the context of the first intermediate period remember that time was one of fragmentation and regionalization and while it may not have been the total chaos of the ipewer papyrus possibly claims there certainly were political and military struggles one set of kings noted as the tenth dynasty ruled from heracleopolis in lower egypt while a set of very powerful mill marks began to arise in the south near thebes eventually these theban leaders became so powerful they declared themselves kings the new 11th dynasty even though they just ruled over upper egypt in the south now the rise of thieves started with a guy named intef and he started out as a local leader but he soon proclaimed himself to be the king of egypt and the founder of the 11th dynasty now this of course was total crap if he was a king at all it was just of the area right around the city of thebes his successor the creatively named intep ii conquered nearby abidos which was important because it was the burial place of early kings symbolically linking him with egyptian royalty soon he'd be waging war with the heracleopolitan kings in the north after the short rule of intep the third like all right you know enough intefs already power passed to meant to hotep the second who dealt the final blow to the heracleopolitan kings in the north after defeating them meant to hotep the second reunified upper and lower egypt and he was proclaimed king of a unified land and the very first king of the middle kingdom so mehtu hotep's reunification of egypt happened right around 2055 bce and he wasted no time at all picking up where the old kingdom rulers left off he exerted his power with expeditions for precious metals and minerals into the sinai peninsula and he sent military campaigns into nubia to regain southern lands egypt had once lost over the past hundred years he also reasserted central authority restarting the religious cult of the pharaoh and depicting himself with the divine headdresses of amun and men throughout the old kingdom egyptian kings were portrayed as youthful idealized unchanging divine beings and we can see in this statue of cafre that all these elements come together kofray was the builder of the second pyramid at giza and he ruled for more than 25 years meaning that even if he came to the throne relatively young he left relatively old yet when we look at this diorite statue of king cafre it's as though he's preserved with eternal youth his face and body are those of an idealized young man and the falcon the representation of the patron god of kingship horus watches over his back associating with the gods and interestingly it's not just this one statue we can look at this statue of menkaure the builder of the third pyramid of giza flanked by two goddesses and exhibiting the same idealism and youth as kafri and this statue of khufu even though it's you know not as well preserved uh it perhaps may be of lesser quality it still shows similar characteristics to the ones seen here and when you incorporate the texts associated with kings like the pyramid texts they also link kings directly to the gods so at its core that was the ideology the pharaohs were gods here on earth and for all of eternity in the afterlife that all began to change in the first intermediate period and in the middle kingdom the intermediate period showed that kings could be challenged and that the local leaders mere humans could rise up and take hold of the royal reigns and despite meant to hotep the second's reinstatement of the imperial cult the core ideology of kingship had changed now literature as we'll see a little bit later begins to show that bad things can indeed happen to the king and that the king is in fact fallible art begins to depict kings more realistically a little bit less like the idealized youth of the old kingdom and more the way people you know kind of actually looked we can see that here with the statue head of omnimhat iii and the kings themselves begin to portray themselves not so much as distant gods but as leaders who take care of their people so here we can see sanuzrit the first portraying himself as the shepherd of the people literature too also moves away from this purely divine realm to focus on the real world and the problems inherent in it and something known as the instruction of amanemhat the ghost of the assassinated king talks to his son about not trusting anybody a far cry from the invincibility of kings during the old kingdom all this isn't to say that middle kingdom kings were weak since the time of mentuh hotep the second middle kingdom kings did all the things you'd expect successful kings to do wage some wars send out foreign expeditions for resources and construct and rebuild religious monuments one of the distinctive middle kingdom royal strategies for maintaining power and consistency was to make their air co-regent or co-ruler as they got older this way the older king and the younger prince could rule together for a time ensuring that the transition of power would go smoothly once the king died now most scholars believe that the rule of cenuzara iii marks the highest point of the middle kingdom he was so strong that he seems to have abolished no marks all together although the the tombs of local officials at that time still show that you know a they were still quite powerful and wealthy and b they were also devoted to sanuzarat the third despite losing the title of nomarch sanuzarat iii became known as the most militarily powerful king of the middle kingdom as well he led massive successful campaigns in the south anubia modern-day sudan in his 6th 8th 10th and 16th years of his reign and upon his victories he built a series of massive forts along the southern border officially delineating egyptian territory from unconquered territory to the south after gaining power he tightly controlled the access and movement of non-egyptians allowing them into the forts to trade but forbidding any travel by ship north into the egyptian homeland now sunuzura iii's accomplishments were memorialized more than a thousand years later by the greeks he was known to them as cesarous and herodotus claimed that he colonized all of europe while a later greco-roman historian said he once conquered the entire world now these claims right they're clearly outlandish but they do provide valuable information for how sanuzrit iii was perceived by later generations and they likely tell us something useful about the power he wielded during his time as pharaoh every culture has their artistic and literary high points we might think back to shakespeare in the early 1600s or victorian literature or the great russian writers of the 19th century for the ancient egyptians the literary high point was undoubtedly the middle kingdom most scholars believed that this was the time when writing itself the hieroglyphics that represented sounds and syllables and ideas reached their peak but this was also the time when literary content the texts that emerged from these hieroglyphs started to move in new and innovative and complex ways now personally i remember taking hieroglyphics as a class back when i was an undergrad and sure enough we started with middle egyptian now these middle kingdom texts are interesting because of how they deal with the difficulties of like real actual life no longer is it just about how the how great the king is or how wonderful the gods are now we're grappling with like real actual subjects and the themes of these texts can resonate through the ages one of the most famous stories is the debate between a man and his ba the baal was part of one's soul the mobile part that would fly off like a bird between the land of the living in the land of the dead in this story a man is complaining to his ba that life is simply awful and he suggests that he might be better off just going to the west the west being the the afterlife or the land of the dead now hizbah reminds him of all the wonderful things about life and says you'll be dead soon enough enjoy life while you can unfortunately we don't know whether the man took the boss advice or not but this is a relatively deep issue for people to be writing about nearly 4 000 years ago in another text known as the eloquent peasant there's a poor man who's robbed by a wealthy man and they go to court and it turns out that the poor man is like an excellent beautiful speaker and weirdly like the judge likes listening to this guy so much that he keeps delaying any verdict so he can just keep listening to the poor guy go on and on with his amazing speech in court now eventually the man gets justice but this is almost like kafka-esque in terms of its commentary about how far regular poor people must go in order to flatter those in power we saw earlier that one of the shifts during the middle kingdom is that kings started to be portrayed more as shepherds of their people as opposed to aloof deified rulers that doesn't mean that they weren't seen as gods just that they also wanted to convey their practical contributions to helping their people and when it comes to art in the middle kingdom we get somewhat of a similar shift towards everyday life as opposed to simply a focus on the gods and the divine now let's go ahead and take a look at some of the artifacts from the tomb of mecca an official in thebes during the later part of n2 hotep the second's reign his tomb was filled with wooden models of daily life like we can see here with men paddling a boat uh and a peaceful garden is depicted it's over there now everyone knows that the afterlife has to be filled with beer and mecca ra has a miniature wooden model of a brewery as well perhaps the epitome of boring daily life he even has a model of cattle being let out in front of a government building where officials like himself would levy attacks on them so a wooden model of taxation talk about mundane everyday life in the wooden objects in the tomb of meccan rob the daily life in these wooden models also plays out in the reliefs and paintings of non-royal tombs here we're looking at the tomb of knum hotep ii from beni hassan in the middle of egypt we can see canoe hotep riding on a boat through the marshes hunting birds elsewhere we can see knum hotep hunting animals with a bow and fishing with the harpoon and a nearby tomb dating to the middle kingdom we can see people engaged in wrestling and boxing some of ancient egypt's earliest depictions of what we might consider competitive sports even the pharaohs got in on it the real world artistic movement when we look at the way sanuzary iii and amnemhat iii are depicted it's no longer with the youthful idealism of khufu khafre and ming kaori instead they're shown with like lines of age and more realistic features the work of caring for their people is starting to show embodied upon their face so the middle kingdom can't boast the massive pyramids of the old kingdom nor the incredible temples of the new kingdom but culturally in terms of art and literature especially we see a classical age arise one that brings the lofty pharaohs down at least to some extent from their divine perch to be real and true leaders of their people and this movement allows people to embrace the beauty of daily life fishing and gardens and of course brewing beer and it allows them to grapple with the difficulty that life also brings so sometimes development isn't just about how tall your pyramid is it's how deeply you ponder the meaning and complexities of one's own life just a couple lessons you can learn from [Music] you