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Welcome to Voices of Ancient Egypt, the podcast for people who don't just want to learn about ancient Egypt, but want to understand it on a deeper, more meaningful level. I'm Melinda Nelsonhurst, an Egyptologist with a PhD in the field and years of experience teaching at the university level, working in Egypt, and training students around the world to read real ancient Egyptian texts. I've spent decades studying this civilization in a traditional academic setting, so you don't have to. And so you can access knowledge that's usually locked behind academic walls. This podcast brings ancient Egyptian history, beliefs, and language to life and shows you that learning hieroglyphs is possible no matter your age, background, or schedule. So whether you want to read hieroglyphs in museums, on social media, or on your next trip to Egypt, you'll find the tools, stories, and encouragement to make it real right here. Let's hear the voices of the ancient world together. Hello, hello, and welcome back to the Voices of Ancient Egypt podcast. I'm so excited to have you with me today and talk about something about ancient Egyptian history, but a little bit different than maybe some of the other things we've talked about. You could sort of envision standing in front of an ancient Egyptian king list. Maybe you're in the British Museum looking at the partial one there from Ramses II, or you're on a trip to Egypt, or you live in Egypt, and you're visiting the site of Abydos or Abydos and looking at Seti I's king list there, you see the rows of king's names in those ovals, those cartouches, how they're all neatly in order, of the order that the kings reigned in. And it strikes you that sign in the gallery you're in that says New Kingdom, or the guidebook you're reading there as you're at the temple in Egypt. Talk about the time in ancient Egypt in terms of periods like New Kingdom, which is the time from which these particular king lists come from, if you're using that designation. But then you realize as I look at these Egyptian texts, as I'm reading these kings' names and seeing the order, there's nothing about anything like New Kingdom or anything similar. And that's when you realize that that guidebook or that placard in the museum is giving you a completely different view of history than the ancient Egyptians had. And the closer you get to the actual texts, the more interesting and complicated and alive ancient Egypt becomes. So what are the differences in these dating systems and how did they come about? Why do we have a king list like this from ancient Egypt and the ways that they dated things on ancient monuments by king's names and the year of that king's reign, for example, versus when we talk about these numbered dynasties, like when we say dynasty 19, for example, or then what does it mean when we say New Kingdom or Middle Kingdom, and where do all these terms come from? So the ancient Egyptians themselves kept track of time and years in relation to kings. So it was really all about who was ruling at the time. Now, this is of course because these dates show up in very official ways in documents. So it revolves around the official class of people, the king and his court. So for example, they would date things based on how many years into a king's reign it was. So for example, year five under Tapmuza, for example, or they might use the throne name instead of a birth name, Tapmoza being a birth name. So it might be, you know, year nine under Usurmat Re Satapen Re, which is Ramses II's throne name, for example. And then it just started over again with the next king. And this was how they organized talking about when things happened, when a monument was created, when a war took place, when a king died and the next one came to the throne. And there's a real cyclical element to this, and this is no accident. This is because in ancient Egypt they had a concept of both linear time, which tends to be pretty much like the modern Western view in terms of, you know, one thing happens after another on a straight line. This is why we call it linear, but they also had a concept of cyclical time, this idea that certain things repeated. So, for example, the daily cycle of the sun, the annual cycle of the sun, the cycle of plant life, the seasons, how you grew the crops, all these things happened in a cyclical way. And so this way of keeping track of time with each king also was a kind of cycle, right? Because with each king dying and the next one coming to the throne, this repeats a cycle. And with every king, you have that new cycle and it just continues on while also going along that linear history. Because when we look at the king list, it's one king after another in chronological order, the way that we might think of it today, although very much with a lot of omissions, because these king lists also had political motivations behind them, and sometimes maybe not completely accurate records as well. So they're gone in this order, though. And so you see in this dating system both the linear and the cyclical concepts of time. And these are some of the wonderful things that you start to notice and really get to know when you learn how to read some of these texts for yourself. For example, the dates that we're talking about, the you know, year five or year nine under such and such king, are one of the first things that my students in scribal school learn. And that is because they are all over the place on monuments that you're gonna see, whether in museums or on a trip to Egypt. So they're a wonderful thing to learn and can help to take you deeper into these things. Now that's not to say that the ancient Egyptians didn't have some other views, maybe related to the sequence or history of time too. They did sometimes look back on particular times and either think of them negatively or demonize them even, or possibly glorify them in particular ways. And this also oftentimes, though, linked into political motivations as well, in terms of how the current king who is ruling things wanted people to look at past times compared to the current time under his reign. So if that's how the ancient Egyptians sort of dealt with time on a regular basis in terms of how they dated objects, how they might then look back at history as a kind of list of kings, very much a politically motivated one, of course, but still kind of a view of history, and also in literature sometimes, with looking back and coloring the view of certain time periods in a certain way? How do we go from that to the system of dynasties that you might have heard of before, right? Where you here might have heard of like Dynasty IV when the pyramids of Giza were built, or dynasty 19 when Seti and Ramses, who we were just talking about, who had those kingless, lived, or whatever dynasty it might be. And how did we get into these other time period names that you've probably heard, like I talked about at the beginning, like New Kingdom or Old Kingdom or Second Intermediate Period, any of these? And the story is really quite different for each of these. So we ended up with this system of dynasties. You might think that this is a completely modern arbitrary division of Egyptian history, and you would be quite right in making such an assumption in general, because that's very often the case with a lot of time periods when we go back and classify things for the use of history. And this is the case with some of the time periods we are going to talk about in a little bit. However, when it comes to the system of dynasties, these actually come from ancient times. Now, not as far back as what I was just talking about in what we call the New Kingdom or 19th Dynasty, or we want to maybe talk about a specific king's reign like Seti I, who had that big king list at Abidos commissioned. But it does come from ancient times. It comes from an Egyptian historian who lived during the third century BCE named Monetho. And you might recall that Manito actually came up during our last episode on deciphering hieroglyphs, and that's because he wrote a history of Egypt, and he wrote it in Greek. Now he wrote it in Greek because it was commissioned by the king at the time who was one of the early kings of the Ptolemaic dynasty, that is the Greek-Macedonian kings who spoke Greek. So they wanted this actually written in Greek. But because it was Greek, it also was readable to people before hieroglyphs were deciphered, and it actually helped Champollion figure out a lot of Egyptian names when he was working on the decipherment. So if you want to hear more about that, you can go back to the episode before this one, which is number 26. So in many ways, Monetho's history and its list of kings that it had in it, and the way he divided those kings into dynasties or like these groupings, are similar to and probably built from these earlier king lists, like the ones we talked about at the beginning. But he took things a bit further and decided to organize the kings into these groups, or at least as far as we know, he's the earliest. It's possible there could have been attempts to do this before. Now, why Manitho grouped particular kings together is sometimes a bit of a mystery because he doesn't follow the same idea that we might think of today when we think of a dynasty. We usually think of a dynasty as being a line of rulers who are all related to each other, often father to son to next son, and so on and so forth. And sometimes this is the case in Manito's groupings. Sometimes the kings are all related, they're all from the same family, sometimes they're even all in a linear line of father to son succession, though not always, even if they're related. But other times he has groups that he splits or keeps together for ways that are a little bit harder to understand. Sometimes this is because of his understanding of what happened in history at the time, such as whether Egypt was split into multiple kingdoms at the time, it was disunified, you could say, or if it had been recently reunified after a period like this. And sometimes his groupings actually simply seem to have to do with where the kings were ruling from. There were kings that all ruled from the same city, so we'll put them in the same number dynasty. And in many ways, Minetho's system actually does fit with older traditions from ancient Egypt, that is, you know, listing the kings in chronological order, for example. And also the ancient Egyptians believed in some concepts called Ma'at and Isfet, and I'll talk a little bit more about those in a second. But sometimes they applied this idea of these two concepts to particular situations that are happening either currently or in the recent past. So you can think of Ma'at. You might have heard of Ma'at before, and you might have heard of it translated as like truth or justice or something like that. I tend to think of it as more like divine order. I honestly, most of the time, though, I don't even translate the concept because I think it kind of encompasses all of these ideas to some extent, and we don't have a perfect word for it in English, so I often just call it ma'at. But for our sake of discussion today, I will define it as essentially being like the concept of divine order that is the way that things should be, the way that things should run, and the way that people should act. All of these things sort of fall under divine order. And then they also had this opposing concept called isfet, which we could think of as chaos. That's the closest translation for it in English. It's this lack of ma'at, really, the lack of divine order. And so sometimes when they looked back at particular times as positive or negative, like I mentioned earlier, those views revolve around these concepts of ma'at and isfet. So for example, literature during what we now call the Middle Kingdom, and I'll talk a little bit about why we call it that in a minute, looked back at the time period right before then, what we now call the first intermediate period, and portrayed that period as a chaotic and difficult time, a time of isvet, a time without central control and a lot of problems. They conveyed it as, you know, very chaotic, lack of water and food, people in social order being all disrupted, you know, people who used to be high up in society, now down, and people who were down, now up, and so on and so forth. And of course, this is in a in part, at least, if not fully, really meant for royal propaganda because it's contrasting the current time that has a strong king controlling a unified Egypt. It's contrasting that with a perhaps exaggerated, chaotic period of disunity that came before. However, this is a concept that recurs and runs throughout ancient Egyptian culture and beliefs and the way that the proper way things should run was viewed. So, for example, though, Manetho split the same royal family into two dynasties, dynasties 17 and 18, and he did this because Egypt was reunified during that family's rule. So he took the king who was successful at finally finishing the reunification of the country, that is Ahmoza, and made him the first king of the 18th dynasty. Even though there is no break in the family line, he's related to the kings who came right before him, closely related, immediate family members, in dynasty 17. So sometimes Benito divided the kings up in these different kinds of ways, presumably based on the information he had and what he felt like was logical based on these concepts of not just family linkage, but things also like unity and disunity, or Ma'at and Isfet. So that brings us to these larger divisions of times that I've mentioned and alluded to already. So these are the time periods that today Egyptologists usually call the Old Kingdom, the first intermediate period. This is putting them in chronological order, by the way, the Middle Kingdom, the second intermediate period, the New Kingdom, the Third Intermediate Period, the Late Period, and then the Ptolemaic period, or sometimes that's lumped in as sort of the Greco-Roman period along with the Roman period after the Ptolemaic. So these are purely modern conventions, as you might have guessed by now. And these really come just from the last couple hundred years. They're quite new. There were actually multiple versions of this during the 19th century, of like how to divide up ancient Egyptian history into multiple periods or kingdoms. And the one that has survived now down to us now is the one that had basically three main divisions of old, middle, and new kingdoms. So these were originally how the time was divided up, at least before what we now call the late period. Everything before that was lumped into these three categories. And it wasn't until the 20th century that ancient Egyptian history was further divided by adding intermediate periods. Now, these are typically periods when Egypt was itself divided, that is politically divided, and ruled by more than one king in different locations. So it could be divided into just two parts, it could be many parts depending on the time period. Now, before the 20th century, though, these times were just lumped in with the main kingdom period. So, you know, the second intermediate period didn't exist as a concept yet. That was just part of the Middle Kingdom, for example. And interestingly, these were not created all at once, these intermediate periods, but rather added in over several decades during the 20th century. And the third intermediate period was the last one to be added, and that didn't even happen until the 1970s. So it kind of begs the question like, why? Why even have these categories when we already have some older divisions of ancient Egyptian history that come down to us from ancient times, particularly monethos of dividing into dynasties? Now, I think the main reason is probably simply our human desire to sort and categorize things, right? We like to lump things together, seeing like these are sort of similar, but then this is a bit different. So let's call these by these category names, right? Um, but also it can be convenient when you're studying history and you're studying archaeology to have some larger time frames to use. Because if we're talking about, for example, an archaeological site or maybe a particular artifact, sometimes we can't always be super precise on the date of it. It doesn't necessarily have a king's name on it, for example. So we might not be able to say a particular year or king's reign. And sometimes the information we have is not even enough for a particular dynasty. But even some of the hardest material to interpret can be understood well enough, generally, to be a fit into one of these larger time periods. So they can be convenient in that kind of way to be able to say, like, okay, this thing right here comes from the Middle Kingdom, for example. Now, one of the issues though with this categorization is not only is it modern and different from the ancient Egyptian view, but this whole concept of intermediate periods implies that these were times of little to no importance. Or even perhaps the idea of that they were like dark ages. And the reality is, of course, that life went on during these times. People living in them didn't go, geez, we're in an intermediate period. This is really dark, right? And these periods are just as worthy of study and respect as any other time period. Honestly, in some ways, I would argue that these periods can be harder to study, but also more interesting because of that. So while they can be harder to study because there are fewer large monuments that were created during these times, that is, these are the things that tend to survive really well because they're made out of less perishable materials like stone, and they can be larger, they're easier to find, and so forth. But at the same time, these periods are fascinating in their own right. And in fact, sometimes we actually see more evidence of certain types during these time periods because the wealth can seem to be distributed in a different way. So, for example, if we look at the late Middle Kingdom and Secondary Media period, you see a wider variety of people commissioning and setting up objects that we call steely. These are these stone slabs that look kind of like modern tombstones, although they had a bit of a different use in ancient Egypt. And, you know, when you look at the earlier Middle Kingdom, you only have like the very tippy top of society, the highest officials, the most wealthy people who are setting these up generally, especially in certain places, like near the Osiris Temple at Abydos. And then this shifts around the later part to end of the Middle Kingdom and into what we call the second intermediate period. And you have this wider variety of monuments. Now, the individual objects might be smaller. They might seem less fancy, for example. Maybe they were less expensive. It's a little bit hard to say now, looking back how expensive they were. They certainly were still very expensive. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they were inexpensive or cheap. They were very expensive. They just might be a little less so than those earlier ones that very few people were commissioning. And the thing is, we don't know exactly why that happened. It seems like maybe there was a bit of a different distribution of wealth. Maybe some people had a little more than they did before. Perhaps it's a loosening of regulations about who had access to what, for example. We don't a hundred percent understand this. And honestly, I think that's what makes periods like this so interesting, so absolutely fascinating to figure out what is going on here, why do we have these changes? And this makes them, I think, so incredibly worthy of study. So when we look at these three systems, the dating by a king's reign, and occasionally making a big list of kings in order, and the grouping of kings into dynasties, and then finally the further grouping of dynasties and kings into kingdoms and periods. When we look at these, we might think of them as different in so many ways. But at the same time, they also share some things in common, most especially the concepts of Ma'at and Isfet. And while the recent division of ancient Egyptian history into kingdoms and periods is in many ways artificial and even arbitrary and in some ways problematic, like we just talked about, it also aligns with this ancient Egyptian concept of Ma'at and Isfet that we see in Egyptian culture and we see coming out, for example, in the Middle Kingdom literary pieces we talked about that look at times of disunity as times of isfet. And they're contrasted with these times of unity and order or times of Ma'at. So in that way, our modern division actually still aligns with this. And that's one of the most rewarding things about learning about ancient Egyptian history, going deeper and learning to read the texts for yourself as well, the texts that these ancient Egyptians left behind, whether they are these smaller and more frequent stele of the later parts of the Middle Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period, or it's the king lists or other high-level pieces left by kings. The more you're able to read and dig into, the more you spot these patterns and differences and connections also. You spot the differences between the guidebook or short placard and the real story. Your understanding goes deeper because there's so much more that you can now access. And until next time, stay curious.