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Old Kingdom of Egypt: The Age of the Pyramids

The Old Kingdom of Egypt (circa 2613-2181 BCE) is also known as the “Age of the Pyramids” or “Age of the Pyramid Builders” as it includes the great 4th Dynasty when King Sneferu perfected the art of pyramid building and the pyramids of Giza were constructed under the kings Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure.

The historical records of this period, the 4th-6th Dynasties of Egypt, are scarce, and historians regard the history of the era as literally “written in stone” and largely architectural in that it is through the monuments and their inscriptions that scholars have been able to construct a history. The pyramids themselves relay scant information on their builders, but the mortuary temples built nearby and the stelae that accompanied them provide kings’ names and other important information.

Further, inscriptions in stone found elsewhere from the time record various events and the dates on which they occurred. Finally, the tomb of the last king of the 5th Dynasty, Unas, provides the first Pyramid Texts (elaborate paintings and inscriptions inside the tomb), which shed light on the religious beliefs of the time.

The pyramids, though, are primarily what the Old Kingdom is most famous for. Scholar Marc van de Mieroop writes how the Old Kingdom is “possibly unparalleled in world history for the amount of construction they undertook” (52). The pyramids at Giza and elsewhere during this period required unprecedented bureaucratic efficiency to organize the necessary labor force, and this bureaucracy could only have functioned under a strong central government. Van de Mieroop continues:

Most of the 20-some kings compelled thousands of laborers to quarry, transport, put in place, and decorate vast quantities of stone in order to construct royal mortuary monumnets. They diverted enormous resources from the entire country for this purpose, filling a 70-kilometer-long stretch of the desert edge along the west bank of the Nile near modern Cairo with huge monuments still awe-inspiring today despite the ravages of time.

(52)

The 4th Dynasty of the Old Kingdom was a time of progress and a strong centralized government that could command the kind of respect necessary for such building projects. During the 5th and 6th Dynasties, however, the priesthood began to grow in power, primarily through their hold over the very mortuary practices that gave rise to the great pyramids, empowering the local officials of the districts, and the kingship suffered a loss in prestige. The Old Kingdom began to collapse as more and more local governors assumed more power over their regions, and the central government at Memphis was increasingly seen as irrelevant.

At the end of the 6th Dynasty, there was no longer a central government of note, and Egypt entered a period of social unrest and reformation known as the First Intermediate Period (2181-2040 BCE), during which Egypt was ruled regionally by local magistrates who made and enforced their own laws. The rise of these local officials (nomarchs) and the power of the priesthood were not the only causes of the collapse of the Old Kingdom, however, in that a severe drought toward the end of the 6th Dynasty brought famine, which the government could do nothing to alleviate. Scholars have also pointed to the exceptionally long reign of Pepi II of the 6th Dynasty as a contributing factor because he outlived his successors and left no heir to the throne.

Many scholars today no longer see the end of the Old Kingdom as a “collapse” so much as a transition to the new paradigm of the First Intermediate Period of Egypt, when local rulers governed their districts directly, and the kind of wealth previously only available to nobility became more widespread. The long-standing designation of a political and cultural collapse at the end of the 6th Dynasty is still considered viable, however, in that the central government’s loss of power and wealth led directly to the regional rule of the district nomarchs.

The Third Dynasty & the Old Kingdom

The term “Old Kingdom” was coined by archaeologists in the 19th century in an attempt to demarcate Egypt’s long history. The Egyptians themselves did not refer to this period by that name and had no term to differentiate between the period that preceded or succeeded it. Scholars traditionally included the Third Dynasty of Egypt (circa 2670-2613 BCE) in the period of the Old Kingdom because of the Pyramid of King Djoser at Saqqara, the first pyramid ever built in Egypt, seemed to link that dynasty to the building efforts of the 4th Dynasty.

The last king of the Third Dynasty was related to the first king of the 4th, and Djoser and his successors ruled from Memphis (“the white walls”), which remained the capital during the Old Kingdom. Recent scholarship, however, rejects that view, as the construction of Djoser’s pyramid is more in keeping with the Early Dynastic Period in Egypt (circa 3150-2613 BCE) than the Old Kingdom, as are cultural practices and observances.

Djoser’s architect Imhotep (circa 2667-2600 BCE) revolutionized construction in Egypt by building the king’s tomb at Saqqara out of stone. Prior to Imhotep’s innovation, tombs and other structures were built of mud brick. The early tombs of Egypt were mud-brick mastabas, but Imhotep wanted a lasting memorial to his king and so created a complex with a stone pyramid as its center and surrounding temples, thus inventing the paradigm that would be followed by every dynasty that followed to greater or lesser degrees.

Further, it was during the Third Dynasty that the independent states of the country came to be known as nomes (districts) directly under the rule of a centralized government at Memphis. These developments in architecture, politics, and also in religious practices – all a departure from the past – made it clear to Egyptologists that the Third Dynasty was the beginning of a new period in Egypt’s history and should be included in the Old Kingdom rather than the Early Dynastic Period.

Today, however, scholars see the Third Dynasty as a transitional phase more closely linked to the earlier period than the latter. Even though Djoser’s pyramid of stone was a wholly new creation, it still utilized Early Dynastic Period techniques. The pyramid at Saqqara is actually a stack of mastabas rather than a true pyramid, and regarding the political reforms and creation of nomes, the central government of the Third Dynasty did not have the reach nor command the resources of the 4th Dynasty. For these reasons and others, the Old Kingdom is now thought to begin with the 4th Dynasty of Egypt, although it should be noted that this claim is not universally accepted among scholars.

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