hello everyone here's part two of this week uh we're looking at the middle kingdom of egypt um the middle kingdom of egypt really the where we mark the middle kingdom of egypt as historians is really with the reunification um what's known as the reunification and the rise of the pharaoh meant to hotep the second of the eleventh dynasty he conquered the heracles he conquered heracleopolis in 2033 bce and he re-expanded the kingdom of egypt into nubia and sinai which had been claimed by various different cultures by 2033 bce so really he takes over these three cities again all in the name of egypt uh and here we really with meant to hotep the second and his success in these three cities we begin to see the cult of the ruler that is the worship of the pharaoh as a god-like figure there is a deification or the um creation of a god myth of the pharaoh during life which is then carried into death and we see that with the building of the pyramids which are really supposed to be these kind of big burial tombs for gods right and the pharaohs are there because the pharaohs at this moment begin to be seen as gods the twelfth dynasty was um started a upward ascendance in egyptian culture uh there was a usurpation of mentuhotep the uh fourth uh by amenomet um the first and this was done through a possible civil war we understand some of this by an old text the oldest text of ancient egyptian society that we hold today called the prophecy of nefertiti that tells us that tells us about the old kingdom which we discussed last week and how it was going to be taken over by a pharaoh a god-like pharaoh of the south or at least this is what it appears to tell us in truth um there is no historian that knows exactly what the prophecy of nefertiti says and we can't be sure that it's talking necessarily about an actual pharaoh or if it's a story or if it's supposed to be some sort of symbolic piece of writing we just we don't know for sure however it does appear to give an actual prophecy because it is what happens uh the usurpation by amenamet the first through the past through the civil war that could have occurred uh was a southern usurpation and he made an alliance with the no marks this created again a social shift kind of like we see in babylon where there was a landed elite that is a landed aristocracy and an end of an absolute power of authority by a pharaoh and there was an establishment of a co-regency so that is um two families or two groups of people ruling together uh sen usret iii who was pharaoh from 1878 to 1839 bce really helped to create a relationship with the mediterranean world um that is he created a kind of trade system through the entire mediterranean basin which helped to fortify uh the delta the cities of delta and sinai he continued his expansion into the oasis and controlled rece important resources for those trade routes so he even because of his success in trade and in um kind of creating this system of waterways he was able to gain a stronger control over the city of nubia and he created certain administrative reforms that weakened the control of the nomarchs so we begin to see kind of an erosion of that dual group rule and you begin seeing a rise again of the absolute power of the pharaoh by the time we get to amenimot the third we really start getting a golden age of the middle kingdom of egypt ahmedabad iii ruled from 1860 to 1814 bce and he continued that expansion that senriset started of the oasis mining giving him more and more access to raw materials that were necessary he built the great canal of meru which again expanded the waterways for trade um and he was also responsible in his time for the black pyramid of dasher which is one of the um greatest pyramids of the egyptian empire at this moment and along with the entire hawara funeral complex so we get more of these pyramids more of these big funeral complexes which showed the god-like strength of the pharaohs after they passed but the pyramids were also a show of power to anyone who tried to um i guess for lack of a better term tried to usurp egyptian power um they also used pyramid forms because the egyptians believed that the world was created on this kind of primordial mountain um so it was also a symbol of the creation of the world almost like the creation of the world was made by the egyptian pharaohs by these god-like beings that were mortals and ruling over this very powerful empire unfortunately after amanda math iii there is a succession crisis uh no one's really sure who's supposed to take power and there was a four-year reign by um a weaker pharaoh named sobek sobek neferu which was not very successful there's an intermediate period after ammanama eventually there is the collapse of the 12th dynasty which was a manamats dynasty and a return to a kind of regionalism um the 13th dynasty controlled middle egypt up until the city of memphis the 14th dynasty controlled the nile delta so there was this split and powerful in power um and canaanites which were another um group with a possible um connection to the israelites might have been part of that nile delta 14th dynasty but we can't be sure here is where you start seeing more spread of a semitic culture that is what later will become on the culture of the hebrews and semitic is significant of the language hebrew language is a semitic language um this was ira and ironically stable period uh for egypt and the middle kingdom even though there's kind of all of this back and forth between who's actually in control eventually we see an egyptian um writing this word hixos right um and hixos is egyptian for rulers of foreign countries so we can't really be sure who the hixos are but the 13th and 14th dynasty eventually start to decline as well because of a combination of plague and famine uh nomadic pastoralists in the amorite period of mesopotamia start dying out because of plague and famine and there's an invasion and simultaneous migration into the egyptian middle kingdom um by these hixos whoever the hixos may be this all we know is that this term means not egyptian um so it could be westerners coming in from europe it could be israelites it could be uh babylonians it could be any number of people however the invasions were often done through horse chariot and various types of weaponry from this period there you can see a picture of a crossbow so it was a pretty sophisticated technological time so this happened rather quickly this invasion by these hixos the hixos eventually ended up taking control of both the 13th and 14th dynasty territories there's an unspecified number of rulers in this period there's about four confirmed but some of them were possibly related some of them were possibly not related we're not really sure but there was an establishment of a separate dynasty in thebes uh between the 16th and 17th dynasties and these were all areas that were conquered by foreigners hixos and and uh they acted as vassals for one another