241. Culture Growth in Dynastic Egypt
The story of the growth of Egyptian civilization during the Dynastic or historic period is a fascinating one. There were three phases of prosperity and splendor. The first was the Old Kingdom, 3000-2500, culminating in the fourth dynasty of the Great Pyramid builders, in the twenty-ninth century. The second was the Middle or Feudal Kingdom, with its climax in the twelfth dynasty, 2000-1788. After the invasion of the Asiatic Hyksos in the seventeenth century, the New Empire of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties arose, whose greatest extension fell in the reign of Thutmose III, 1501-1447, although the country retained some powers of offensive for a couple of centuries longer. There followed a slow nationalistic decline, a transient seventh century conquest by Assyria, a brief and fictitious renascence supported by foreign mercenaries, and the Persian conquest of 525 B.C., since which time Egypt has never been an independent power under native rulers. A waning of cultural energy, at least relatively to other peoples, had set in before the military decline. By 1000 B.C. certainly, by 1500 perhaps, Egypt was receiving more elements of civilization than she was imparting. She still loomed wealthy and refined in contrast with younger nations; but these were producing more that was new.
Copper smelted from the ores of the Sinai peninsula had apparently come into use by 4000, but remained scarce for a long time. The first dynasty had some low grade bronze; by 2500 bronze containing a tenth of tin was in use. Iron was introduced about 1500 or soon after, but for centuries remained a sparing Asiatic import. In fact, the conservatism that was settling over the old age of the civilization caused it to cling with unusual tenacity to bronze. As late as Ptolemaic and Roman times, when the graves of foreigners abounded in iron, those of Egyptians were still prevailingly bronze furnished.
Quite different must have been the social psychology three thousand years earlier. The first masonry was laid in place of adobe brick to line tomb walls in the thirty-first century; and within a century and a half the grandest stone architecture in human history had been attained in the Pyramid of Cheops. This was a burst of cultural energy such as has been equalled only in the rise of Greek art or modern science.
Glass making seems to have been discovered in Egypt in the early dynasties and to have spread from there to Syria and the Euphrates. The earliest glass was colored faïence, at most translucent, and devoted chiefly to jewelry, or to surfacing brick. Later it was blown into vessels, usually small bottles, and only gradually attained to clearness. From western Asia the art was carried to Europe, and, in Christian times, to China, which at first paid gem prices for glass beads, but later was perhaps stimulated by knowledge of the new art into devising porcelain—a pottery vitrified through.
The horse first reached Egypt with the Hyksos. With it came the war chariot. Wheeled vehicles seem to have been lacking previously. The alphabet, the arch, the zodiac, coinage, heavy metal armor, and many other important inventions gained no foot-hold in Egypt until after the country had definitely passed under foreign domination. The superior intensity of early Egyptian civilization had evidently fostered a spirit of cultural self-sufficiency, analogous to that of China or Byzantine Greece, which produced a resistance to innovation from without. At the same time, inward development continued, as attested by numerous advances in religion, literature, dress, the arts, and science when the Old Kingdom and New Empire are compared. In the eleventh and twelfth dynasties, for instance, the monarchy was feudal; in the eighteenth lived the famous monotheistic iconoclastic ruler Ikhnaton.
The civilization of ancient Egypt was wholly produced and carried by a Hamitic-speaking people. This people has sometimes been thought to have come from Asia, but its Hamitic relatives hold Africa from Somaliland to Morocco even to-day, and there is no cogent reason to look for its ancestors outside that continent.