The Penguin History of the World

When he died, the New Kingdom had two centuries of life ahead, but their atmosphere is one of only occasionally interrupted and steadily accelerating decline. Symptomatically, Tutankhamon’s widow arranged to marry a Hittite prince (though he was murdered before the ceremony could take place). Later kings made efforts to recover lost ground and sometimes succeeded; the waves of conquest rolled back and forth over Palestine and at one time a pharaoh took a Hittite princess as a bride as his predecessors had taken princesses from other peoples. But there were yet more new enemies appearing; even a Hittite alliance was no longer a safeguard. The Aegean was in uproar, the islands ‘poured out their people all together’ and ‘no land stood before them’, say the Egyptian records. These sea peoples were eventually beaten off, but the struggle was hard.

There followed at some time during these years an episode of huge importance for the future whose exact nature and historicity cannot be established. According to their religious texts compiled many centuries later, a small Semitic people, called by the Egyptians ‘Hebrews’, left the delta and followed their leader Moses out of Egypt into the deserts of Sinai. From about 1150 BC the signs of internal disorganization, too, are plentiful. One king, Rameses III, died as a result of a conspiracy in the harem; he was the last to achieve some measure of success in offsetting the swelling tide of disaster. We hear of strikes and economic troubles under his successors; there is the ominous symptom of sacrilege in a generation of looting of the royal tombs at Thebes. The Pharaoh is losing his power to priests and officials and the last of the Twentieth Dynasty, Rameses XI, was in effect a prisoner in his own palace. The age of Egypt’s imperial power was over. So in fact was that of the Hittites, and of other empires of the end of the second millennium BC. Not only Egypt’s unquestioned power, but the world which was the setting of her glories, was passing away.

Undoubtedly, it is in changes affecting the whole ancient world that much of the explanation of the decline of Egypt must be sought, yet it is impossible to resist the feeling that the last centuries of the New Kingdom expose weaknesses present in Egyptian civilization from the beginning.

These are not easy to discern at first sight; the spectacular heritage of Egypt’s monuments and a history counted not in centuries but in millennia stagger the critical sense and stifle scepticism. Yet the creative quality of Egyptian civilization seems, in the end, strangely to miscarry. Colossal resources of labour are massed under the direction of men who, by the standards of any age, must have been outstanding civil servants, and the end is the creation of the greatest tombstones the world has ever seen. Craftsmanship of exquisite quality is employed, and its masterpieces are grave-goods. A highly literate élite, utilizing a complex and subtle language and a material of unsurpassed convenience, uses them copiously, but has no philosophical or religious ideas comparable to those of Greek or Jew to give to the world. It is difficult not to sense an ultimate sterility, a nothingness at the heart of this glittering tour de force.

In the other scale must be placed the sheer staying-power of ancient Egyptian civilization; after all, it worked for a very long time, a spectacular fact. Though it underwent at least two phases of considerable eclipse, it recovered from them, seemingly unchanged. Survival on such a scale is a great material and historical success; what remains obscure is why it should have stopped there. Egypt’s military and economic power in the end made little permanent difference to the world. Her civilization was never successfully spread abroad. Perhaps this is because its survival owed much to its setting. If it was a positive success to create so rapidly institutions which with little fundamental change could last so long, this could probably have been done by any ancient civilization enjoying such a degree of immunity from intrusion. China was to show impressive continuity, too.