Drawn by Boudier, from a sketch by Petrie, Ten Years’
Digging in Egypt, p. 74, No. 2.
Three or four kings followed him in rapid succession; the least insignificant among them appearing to have been a Monthotpii Nibtouiri. Nothing but the prenomen—Sonkherî—is known of the last of these latter princes, who was also the only one of them ever entered on the official lists. In their hands the sovereignty remained unchanged from what it had been almost uninterruptedly since the end of the VIth dynasty. They solemnly proclaimed their supremacy, and their names were inscribed at the head of public documents; but their power scarcely extended beyond the limits of their family domain, and the feudal chiefs never concerned themselves about the sovereign except when he evinced the power or will to oppose them, allowing him the mere semblance of supremacy over the greater part of Europe. Such a state of affairs could only be reformed by revolution. Amenemhâît I., the leader of the new dynasty, was of the Theban race; whether he had any claim to the throne, or by what means he had secured the stability of his rule, we do not know. Whether he had usurped the crown or whether he had inherited it legitimately, he showed himself worthy of the rank to which fortune had raised him, and the nobility saw in him a new incarnation of that type of kingship long known to them by tradition only, namely, that of a Pharaoh convinced of his own divinity and determined to assert it. He inspected the valley from one end to another, principality by principality, nome by nome, “crushing crime, and arising like Tûmû himself; restoring that which he found in ruins, settling the bounds of the towns, and establishing for each its frontiers.” The civil wars had disorganized everything; no one knew what ground belonged to the different nomes, what taxes were due from them, nor how questions of irrigation could be equitably decided. Amenemhâît set up again the boundary stelae, and restored its dependencies to each nome: “He divided the waters among them according to that which was in the cadastral surveys of former times.” Hostile nobles, or those whose allegiance was doubtful, lost the whole or part of their fiefs; those who had welcomed the new order of things received accessions of territory as the reward of their zeal and devotion. Depositions and substitutions of princes had begun already in the time of the XIth dynasty. Antûf V., for instance, finding the lord of Koptos too lukewarm, had had him removed and promptly replaced. The fief of Siût accrued to a branch of the family which was less warlike, and above all less devoted to the old dynasty than that of Khîti had been. Part of the nome of the Gazelle was added to the dominions of Nûhri, prince of the Hare nome; the eastern part of the same nome, with Monaît-Khûfûi as capital, was granted to his father-in-law, Khnûmhotpû I. Expeditions against the Ûaûaiû, the Mâzaiû, and the nomads of Libya and Arabia delivered the fellahîn from their ruinous raids and ensured to the Egyptians safety from foreign attack. Amenemhâît had, moreover, the wit to recognize that Thebes was not the most suitable place of residence for the lord of all Egypt; it lay too far to the south, was thinly populated, ill-built, without monuments, without prestige, and almost without history. He gave it into the hands of one of his relations to govern in his name, and proceeded to establish himself in the heart of the country, in imitation of the glorious Pharaohs from whom he claimed to be descended. But the ancient royal cities of Kheops and his children had ceased to exist; Memphis, like Thebes, was now a provincial town, and its associations were with the VIth and VIIIth dynasties only. Amenemhâît took up his abode a little to the south of Dahshur, in the palace of Titoûi, which he enlarged and made the seat of his government. Conscious of being in the hands of a strong ruler, Egypt breathed freely after centuries of distress, and her sovereign might in all sincerity congratulate himself on having restored peace to his country. “I caused the mourner to mourn no longer, and his lamentation was no longer heard,—perpetual fighting was no longer witnessed,—while before my coming they fought together as bulls unmindful of yesterday,—and no man’s welfare was assured, whether he was ignorant or learned.”—“I tilled the land as far as Elephantine,—I spread joy throughout the country, unto the marshes of the Delta.—At my prayer the Nile granted the inundation to the fields:—no man was an hungered under me, no man was athirst under me,—for everywhere men acted according to my commands, and all that I said was a fresh cause of love.”
In the court of Amenemhâît, as about all Oriental sovereigns, there were doubtless men whose vanity or interests suffered by this revival of the royal authority; men who had found it to their profit to intervene between Pharaoh and his subjects, and who were thwarted in their intrigues or exactions by the presence of a prince determined on keeping the government in his own hands.
These men devised plots against the new king, and he escaped with difficulty from their conspiracies. “It was after the evening meal, as night came on,—I gave myself up to pleasure for a time,—then I lay down upon the soft coverlets in my palace, I abandoned myself to repose,—and my heart began to be overtaken by slumber; when, lo! they gathered together in arms to revolt against me,—and I became weak as a serpent of the field.—Then I aroused myself to fight with my own hands,—and I found that I had but to strike the unresisting.—When I took a foe, weapon in hand, I make the wretch to turn and flee;—strength forsook him, even in the night; there were none who contended, and nothing vexatious was effected against me.” The conspirators were disconcerted by the promptness with which Amenemhâît had attacked them, and apparently the rebellion was suppressed on the same night in which it broke out. But the king was growing old, his son Usirtasen was very young, and the nobles were bestirring themselves in prospect of a succession which they supposed to be at hand. The best means of putting a stop to their evil devices and of ensuring the future of the dynasty was for the king to appoint the heir-presumptive, and at once associate him with himself in the exercise of his sovereignty. In the XXth year of his reign, Amenemhâît solemnly conferred the titles and prerogatives of royalty upon his son Usirtasen: “I raised thee from the rank of a subject,—I granted thee the free use of thy arm that thou mightest be feared.—As for me, I apparelled myself in the fine stuffs of my palace until I appeared to the eye as the flowers of my garden,—and I perfumed myself with essences as freely as I pour forth the water from my cisterns.” Usirtasen naturally assumed the active duties of royalty as his share. “He is a hero who wrought with the sword, a mighty man of valour without peer: he beholds the barbarians, he rushes forward and falls upon their predatory hordes. He is the hurler of javelins who makes feeble the hands of the foe; those whom he strikes never more lift the lance. Terrible is he, shattering skulls with the blows of his war-mace, and none resisted him in his time. He is a swift runner who smites the fugitive with the sword, but none who run after him can overtake him. He is a heart alert for battle in his time. He is a lion who strikes with his claws, nor ever lets go his weapon. He is a heart girded in armour at the sight of the hosts, and who leaves nothing standing behind him. He is a valiant man rushing forward when he beholds the fight. He is a soldier rejoicing to fall upon the barbarians: he seizes his buckler, he leaps forward and kills without a second blow. None may escape his arrow; before he bends his bow the barbarians flee from his arms like dogs, for the great goddess has charged him to fight against all who know not her name, and whom he strikes he spares not; he leaves nothing alive.” The old Pharaoh “remained in the palace,” waiting until his son returned to announce the success of his enterprises, and contributing by his counsel to the prosperity of their common empire. Such was the reputation for wisdom which he thus acquired, that a writer who was almost his contemporary composed a treatise in his name, and in it the king was supposed to address posthumous instructions to his son on the art of governing. He appeared to his son in a dream, and thus admonished him: “Hearken unto my words!—Thou art king over the two worlds, prince over the three regions. Act still better than did thy predecessors.—Let there be harmony between thy subjects and thee,—lest they give themselves up to fear; keep not thyself apart in the midst of them; make not thy brother solely from the rich and noble, fill not thy heart with them alone; yet neither do thou admit to thy intimacy chance-comers whose place is unknown.” The king confirmed his counsels by examples taken from his own life, and from these we have learned some facts in his history. The little work was widely disseminated and soon became a classic; in the time of the XIXth dynasty it was still copied in schools and studied by young scribes as an exercise in style. Usirfcasen’s share in the sovereignty had so accustomed the Egyptians to consider this prince as the king de facto, that they had gradually come to write his name alone upon the monuments. When Amenemhâît died, after a reign of thirty years, Ûsirtasen was engaged in a war against the Libyans. Dreading an outbreak of popular feeling, or perhaps an attempted usurpation by one of the princes of the blood, the high officers of the crown kept Amenemhâît’s death secret, and despatched a messenger to the camp to recall the young king. He left his tent by night, unknown to the troops, returned to the capital before anything had transpired among the people, and thus the transition from the founder to his immediate successor—always a delicate crisis for a new dynasty—seemed to come about quite naturally. The precedent of co-regnancy having been established, it was scrupulously followed by most of the succeeding sovereigns. In the XIIIth year of his sovereignty, and after having reigned alone for thirty-two years, Ûsirtasen I. shared his throne with Amenemhâît II.; and thirty-two years later Amenemhâît II. acted in a similar way with regard to Ûsirtasen II. Amenemhâît III. and Amenemhâît IV. were long co-regnant. The only princes of this house in whose cases any evidence of co-regnancy is lacking are Ûsirtasen III., and the queen Sovknofriûrî, with whom the dynasty died out.
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a chromolithograph in Lepsius,
Denhm., ii. 133.
It lasted two hundred and thirteen years, one month, and twenty-seven days,* and its history can be ascertained with greater certainty and completeness than that of any-other dynasty which ruled over Egypt.