Introduction About Ancient Egyptian History
All history is clearly reliant on some form of chronological framework, and a great deal of time has been spent on the construction of such dating systems for ancient Egypt. Ever since the first Western-style history of Egypt was written by an Egyptian priest called Manetho in the third century BC, the 'pharaonic period', from c.^ioo to 332 BC, has been divided into a number of periods known as 'dynasties', each consisting of a sequence of rulers, usually united by such factors as kinship or the location of their principal royal residence. This essentially political approach has served very well over the years as a way of dividing up Egyptian chronology into a series of convenient blocks, each with its own distinctive characteristics. It is, however, becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile this politically based chronology with the social and cultural changes revealed by excavations since the 1960s.
Chronology As Egyptian historical and archaeological data have expanded and diversified, it has become apparent that Manetho's system simple, durable, and convenient though it is often strains to contain the many new chronological trends and currents that can be perceived outside the simple passing of the throne from one group of individuals to another. Some of the new work shows that at many points in time Egypt was far less culturally unified and centralized than was previously assumed, with cultural and political changes taking place at different speeds in the various regions. Other analyses show that short-term political events, which have often tended to be regarded as the paramount factors in history, may often be less historically significant than the gradual processes of socio-economic change that can transform the cultural landscape more overwhelmingly in the long term.
Just as the long 'pre-Dynastic' periods of Egyptian prehistory are commonly understood as sequences of cultural rather than political developments, so the Dynastic Period (as well as the Ptolemaic and Roman periods) has begun to be understood not only in terms of the traditional sequence of individual kings and ruling families but also in terms of such factors as the types of fabric being used for pottery, and the painted decoration applied to wooden coffins. Modern Egyptologists' chronologies of ancient Egypt combine three basic approaches. First, there are 'relative' dating methods, such as stratigraphic excavation, or the 'sequence dating' of artefacts, which was invented by Flinders Petrie in 1899. In the late twentieth century, as archaeologists have developed a more subtle understanding of the ways in which the materials and design of different types of Egyptian artefacts (particularly ceramics) changed over time, it has become possible to apply forms of seriation to many different types of object. Thus Harco Willems's seriation of Middle Kingdom coffins, for instance, has provided a better understanding of cultural changes in the various provinces of iith-i3th-Dynasty Egypt, complementing the information already available about national political change during the same period. Secondly, there are so-called absolute chronologies, based on calendrical and astronomical records obtained from ancient texts. Thirdly, there are 'radiometric' methods (the most commonly used examples of which are radiocarbon dating and thermoluminescence), by means of which particular types of artefacts or organic remains can be assigned dates based on the measurement of radioactive decay or accumulation.
Radiocarbon Dating and Egyptian Chronology The relationship between the calendrical and radiometric chronological systems has been relatively ambivalent over the years. Since the late 19405, when a series of Egyptian artefacts were used as a benchmark in order to assess the reliability of the newly invented radiocarbon dating technique, a consensus has emerged that the two systems are broadly in line. The major problem, however, is that the traditional calendrical system of dating, whatever its failings, virtually always has a smaller margin of error than radiocarbon dates, which are necessarily quoted in terms of a broad band of dates (that is, one or two standard deviations), never capable of pinpointing the construction of a building or the making of an artefact to a specific year (or even a specific decade). Certainly the advent of dendrochronological calibration curves allowing the spans of radiocarbon years to be converted into actual calendar years—represents a significant improvement in terms of accuracy. However, the vagaries of the curve and the continued need to take into account associated error mean that dates must still be quoted as a range of possibilities rather than one specific year. The prehistory of Egypt, on the other hand, has benefited greatly from the application of radiometric dating, since it was previously reliant on relative dating methods (see Chapters 2 and 3). The radiometric techniques have made it possible not only to place Petrie's 'sequence dates' within a framework of absolute dates (however imprecise), but also to push Egyptian chronology back into the earlier Neolithic and Palaeolithic periods. From Prehistory to History: Late Predynastic Artefacts and the Palermo Stone There are only a small number of artefacts from the late Predynastic Period that can be used as historical sources, documenting the transition into full unified statehood.
These are funerary stelae, votive palettes, ceremonial maceheads, and small labels (of wood, ivory, or bone) originally attached to items of elite funerary equipment. In the case of the stelae, palettes, and maceheads, it was clearly the intention that they should commemorate many different kinds of royal act, whether the King's own death and burial or his act of devotion to one of the gods or goddesses. Some of the smaller, earlier labels (particularly those recently excavated from the late Predynastic 'royal tomb' U-j at Abydos, see Chapter 4) are simply records of the nature or origins of the grave goods to which they were attached, but some of the later labels, from the Early Dynastic royal graves at Abydos, employ a similar repertoire of depictions of royal acts in order to assign the items in question to a particular date in the reign of a specific king. If the purpose of this mobiliary art of the late fourth and early third millennia BC was to label, commemorate, and date, then their decoration has to be seen as resulting from the desire to communicate the 'context' of the object in terms of event and ritual. Nick Millet has particularly demonstrated this in his analysis of the Narrner macehead, which was part of a group of late Predynastic and early pharaonic votive items (including the Narmer Palette and Scorpion Macehead) excavated by Quibell and Green in the temple precinct at Hierakonpolis. The analysis of the scenes and texts on these objects is complicated by our modern need to be able to distinguish between event and ritual. But the ancient Egyptians show little inclination to distinguish consistently between the two, and indeed it might be argued that Egyptian ideology during the pharaonic period particularly in so far as it related to the kingship was reliant on the maintenance of some degree of confusion between real happenings and purely ritual or magical acts. With regard to the palettes and maceheads, the Canadian Egyptologist Donald Redford suggests that there must have been a need to commemorate the unique events of the unification at the end of the third millennium BC, but that these events were 'commemorated' rather than 'narrated'. This distinction is a crucial one: we cannot expect to disentangle 'historical' events from scenes that are commemorative rather than descriptive or, at least, if we do so we may often be misled. One of the most important historical sources for the Early Dynastic Period (3000-2686 BC) and the Old Kingdom (2686-2160 BC) is the Palermo Stone, part of a 5th-Dynasty basalt stele (£.2400 BC) inscribed on both sides with royal annals stretching back to the mythical prehistoric rulers. The main fragment has been known since 1866 and is currently in the collection of the Palermo Archaeological Museum, Sicily, although there are also further pieces in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, and the Petrie Museum, London. The slab must originally have been about 2.1 m. long and 0.6 m. wide, but most of it is now missing, and there is no surviving information about its provenance. This document along with the 'day-books', the annals and 'king-lists' inscribed on temple walls, and the papyri held in temple and palace archives was doubtless the kind of document that Manetho consulted when he was compiling his history or Aegyptiaca. The text of the Palermo Stone enumerates the annals of the kings of Lower Egypt, beginning with the many thousands of years that were assumed to have been taken up by mythological rulers, until the time of the god Horus, who is said to have given the throne to the human king Menes. Human rulers are then listed up to the 5th Dynasty. The text is divided into a series of horizontal registers divided by vertical lines that curve in at the top, apparently in imitation of the hieroglyph
for regnal year (renpet), thus indicating the memorable events of individual years in each king's reign. The situation is slightly confused by the fact that many Old Kingdom dates appear to refer to the number of biennial cattle censuses (hesbet) rather than to the number of years that the king had reigned; therefore the number of'years' in the Old Kingdom dates may well have to be doubled to find out the actual number of regnal years. The types of event that are recorded on the Palermo Stone are cult ceremonies, taxation, sculpture, building, and warfare that is, precisely the type of phenomena that are recorded on the protodynastic ivory and ebony labels from Abydos, Saqqara, and various other early historical sites. The introduction of the renpet sign on the labels, in the reign of Djet, makes this comparison even closer. There are two differences, however: first, the labels include clerical information, while the Palermo Stone does not, and, secondly, the Palermo Stone includes records of the Nile inundation, whereas the labels do not. Both of these types of information seem to have occupied the same physical part of the document's format that is, the bottom of the record. Redford suggests that this shows that the Old Kingdom genut (the royal annals that are assumed to have existed at this date, but have not survived except in the form of the Palermo Stone) were concerned with hydraulic/climatic change, which, with its crucial agricultural and economic consequences, was potentially the most important aspect of change as far as the reputation of each individual king was concerned. This kind of hydraulic information would, however, have perhaps been regarded as irrelevant to the function of the labels attached to funerary equipment. King-Lists, Royal Titles, and the Divine Kingship Apart from the Palermo Stone, the basic sources used by Egyptologists to construct the traditional chronology of political change in Egypt are Manetho's history (which, unfortunately, has survived only in the form of excerpts compiled by the later authors Josephus, Africanus, Eusebius, and George Syncellus), the so-called king-lists, dated records of astronomical observations, textual and artistic documents (such as reliefs and stelae) bearing descriptions apparently referring to historical events, genealogical information, and synchronisms with non Egyptian sources, such as the Assyrian king-lists. For the 28th~3oth Dynasties, the Demotic Chronicle (Papyrus 215 in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris) serves as a unique early Ptolemaic source concerning political events in this last phase of the Late Period, compensating to some extent for the dearth of historical information provided by the papyri and monuments of this date (as well as the fact that Manetho gives only the names and reign lengths of the kings). Wilhelm Spiegel berg and Janet Johnson have shown that careful translation and interpretion of the 'oracular statements' in this pseudo-prophetic document can shed new light not only on the events of the period (such as the suspected co-regency between Nectanebo I and his son Tachos) but also on the ideological and political context of the fourth century BC. Like most other ancient peoples, the ancient Egyptians dated important political and religious events not according to the number of years that had elapsed since a single fixed point in history (such as the birth of Christ in the modern Western calendar), but in terms of the years since the accession of each current king (regnal years). Dates were, therefore, recorded in the following typical format: 'day 2 of the first month of the season per&t in the fifth year of Nebmaatra (Amenhotep III)'. It is important to be aware of the fact that, for the Egyptians, the reign of each new king represented a new beginning, not merely philosophically but practically, given the fact that dates were expressed in such terms. This means that there would probably have been a psychological tendency to regard each new reign as a fresh point of origin: every king was, therefore, essentially reworking the same universal myths of kingship within the events of his own time. One important aspect of the Egyptian kingship throughout the pharaonic period was the existence of a number of different names for each individual ruler. By the Middle Kingdom, each king held five names (the so-called fivefold titulary), each of which encapsulated a particular aspect of the kingship: three of them stressed his role as a god, while the other two emphasized the supposed division of Egypt into two unified lands. The birth name (or nomen), such as Rameses or Mentuhotep, introduced by the title 'son of Ra', was the only one to be given to the pharaoh as soon as he was born. It was also usually the last name given in inscriptions identifying the king by his whole sequence of names and titles. The other four names Horus, nebty ('he of the two ladies'), (Horus of) Gold, and nesu-bit ('he of the sedge and the bee') were given to him at the time of his installation on the throne, and their components may sometimes convey something of the ideology or intentions of the king in question. As far as the rulers of Dynasty o and the beginning of the Early Dynastic Period were concerned, we know only their 'Horus names', typically written inside a serekh frame (a kind of diagram of the palace gateway), upon which a Horus-falcon was perched. It was the late ist-Dynasty ruler Den (c.29oo BC) who was the first to hold a nesu-bit name (Khasty), but it was not until the reign of Sneferu, 2613-2589 BC, in the 4th Dynasty, that this name was first framed by the familiar cartouche shape (an encircling loop that perhaps signified the infinite extent of the royal domain). The title nesu-bit has often been translated as 'King of Upper and Lower Egypt', but it actually has a much more complex and significant meaning. Nesu seems to be intended to refer to the unchanging divine king (almost the kingship itself), while the word bit describes the current ephemeral holder of the kingship: the one individual king in power at a specific point in time. Each king was, therefore, a combination of the divine and the mortal, the nesu and the bit, in the same way that the living king was linked with Horus, and the dead kings, the royal ancestors, were associated with Horus' father Osiris. It was primarily because of the Egyptians' sense of each of their kings as incarnations of Horus and Osiris that the tradition of the worship of divine royal ancestors developed. This convention, whereby the current ruler made obeisance to his predecessors, is the reason for the creation of the so-called king-lists, which were lists of royal names mainly recorded on the walls of tombs and temples (most notably the iQth Dynasty temples of Sety I and Rameses II at Abydos), but also in the form of papyri, only one example of which survives (the so-called Turin Canon), or remote desert rock carvings, as with the list at the Wadi Hammamat siltstone quarries in the Eastern Desert. The continuity and stability of the kingship were preserved by making offerings to all those kings of the past who were regarded as legitimate rulers, just as we see Sety I doing in his cult temple at Abydos. It is usually presumed that king-lists were among the sources used by Manetho in compiling his history. The Turin Canon, a Ramessid papyrus dating to the thirteenth century BC, is the most informative of the Egyptian king-lists. From the Second Intermediate Period (1650-1550 BC), it stretched back with reasonable accuracy to the reign of the ist-Dynasty ruler Menes (^.3000 BC), and even beyond that into a mythical prehistoric time when the gods ruled over Egypt. Each king's reign was recorded in terms of years, months, and days. It also provides some support for Manetho's system of dynasties by incorporating a break at the end of the 5th Dynasty (see Chapter 5). The king-lists were not concerned so much with history as with ancestor worship: the past is presented as a combination of the general and the individual, and the constancy and universality of the kingship are celebrated through the listing of specific individual holders of the royal titulary. In his commentary on Herodotus Book II, Alan Lloyd writes, 'Since all historical study involves general and particular, attempting to place particular phenomena against a background of general principle or law, there is always a tension between the two, and this tension is resolved in Egypt overwhelmingly in favour of the latter.' The conflict between the general and the particular is undoubtedly an important factor in ancient Egyptian chronology and history. The texts and artefacts that form the basis of Egyptian history usually convey information that is either general (mythological or ritualistic) or particular (historical), and the trick in constructing a historical narrative is to distinguish as clearly as possible between these types of information, taking into account the Egyptians' tendency to blur the boundaries between the two. The Swiss Egyptologist Erik Hornung describes Egyptian history as a kind of'celebration' of both continuity and change. Just as the living king could be regarded as synonymous with the falcon god Horus, so his individual subjects (from at least the First Intermediate Period onwards) eventually came to identify themselves with the god Osiris after their deaths. In other words, the Egyptians were used to the idea of portraying human individuals as combinations of the general and the particular. Their own sense of history therefore comprised both the specific and the universal in equal measure.
The Role of Astronomy in Traditional Egyptian Chronology The task of the modern historian of ancient Egypt is usually to attempt to tie together all the strands of evidence in the form of individuals' biographies on the walls of tombs, lists of kings on temple walls, stratigraphic evidence of archaeological excavations, and a whole range of other pieces of information. In the pharaonic, Ptolemaic, and Roman periods, the 'traditional' absolute chronologies tend to rely on complex webs of textual references, combining such elements as names, dates, and genealogical information into an overall historical framework that is more reliable in some periods than in others. The so-called intermediate periods have proved to be particularly awkward phases, partly because there was often more than one ruler or dynasty reigning simultaneously in different parts of the country. The surviving records of observations of the heliacal rising of the dog-star Sirius serve both as the linchpin of the reconstruction of the Egyptian calendar and its essential link with the chronology as a whole. The goddess Sopdet, known as Sothis in the Graeco-Roman period (332 BC-AD 395), was the personification of the 'dog-star', which the Greeks called Seirios (Sirius). She was usually represented as a woman with a star poised on her head, although the earliest depiction, on an ivory tablet of the ist-Dynasty king Djer (0.3000 BC) from Abydos, appears to show her as a seated cow with a plant between her horns. Since a depiction of a plant is used as the ideogram meaning 'year' in the pharaonic writing system, the Egyptians may have already been correlating the rising of the dog-star with the beginning of the solar year, even in the early third millennium BC. Along with her husband Sah (Orion) and her son Soped, Sopdet was part of a triad that paralleled the family of Osiris, Isis, and Horus. She was therefore described in the Pyramid Texts as having united with Osiris to give birth to the morning star. In the Egyptian calendrical system, Sopdet was the most important of the stars or constellations known as decans, and the 'Sothic rising' coincided with the beginning of the solar year only once every 1,460 years (or, more accurately, 1,456 years). We know that this rare synchronization of the heliacal rising of Sopdet with the beginning of the Egyptian civil year (or 'wandering year', as it is sometimes described, given that it gradually falls behind the solar year at a rate of about a day every four years) took place in AD 139, during the reign of the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius, because the event was commemorated by the issue of a special coin at Alexandria. There would have been earlier heliacal risings in 1321-1317 BC and 2781-2777 BC, and the period that elapsed between each such rising is known as a Sothic cycle. Two Egyptian textual records of Sothic risings (dating to the reigns of Senusret III and Amenhotep I) form the basis of the conventional chronology of Egypt, which, in turn, influences that of the whole Mediterranean region. These two documents are a 12th-Dynasty letter from the site of Lahun, written on day 16, month 4, of the second season in year 7 of the reign of Senusret III, and an 18th-Dynasty Theban medical papyrus (Papyrus Ebers), written on day 9, month 3, of the third season of year 9 in the reign of Amenhotep I. By assigning absolute dates to each of these documents (1872 BC for the Lahun rising in year 7 of Senusret III, and 1541 BC for the Ebers rising in regnal year 9 of Amenhotep I), Egyptologists have been able to extrapolate a set of absolute dates for the whole of the pharaonic period, on the basis of records of the lengths of reign of the other kings of the Middle and New kingdoms. It is not possible, however, to be totally confident of the absolute dates cited above, since the precise dating is dependent on our knowledge of the location (or locations) where the astronomical observations were made. It used to be assumed without any real evidence that such observations were made at Memphis or perhaps Thebes, but Detlef Franke and Rolf Krauss have argued that they were all made at Elephantine. William Ward, on the other hand, suggested that they are all more likely to have been separate local observations, which would have resulted in a time lag in terms of the various 'national' religious festivals (that is, both the observations and the corresponding festivals may actually have taken place at different times and in different parts of the country). This continuing uncertainty means that our astronomical linchpins are in reality somewhat floating, although it should be noted that the differences between the 'high' and 'low' chronologies (based largely on assumptions concerning different observation points) are usually only a few decades at most.
Co-Regencies
One of the peculiarities of Egyptian chronology, provoking both confusion and debate, is the concept of the 'co-regency', a modern term applied to the periods during which two kings were simultaneously ruling, usually consisting of an overlap of several years between the end of one sole reign and the beginning of the next. This system seems to have been used, from at least as early as the Middle Kingdom, in order to ensure that the transfer of power took place with the minimum of disruption and instability. It would also have enabled the chosen successor to gain experience in the administration before his predecessor died. It seems, however, that the dating systems during co-regencies may have differed from one period to another. Thus i2th-Dynasty coregents may have each used separate regnal dates, so that overlaps occurred between the kings' reigns, producing examples of so-called double dates, when both dating systems were used to date a single monument (see Chapter 7). In the New Kingdom, there are no certain instances of double dates, therefore a different system seems to have been used. In the reigns of Thutmose III 1479-1425 BC and Hatshepsut 1473-1458 BC, for instance, year dates appear to have been counted with reference to Hatshepsut's accession, as if Hatshepsut
had become ruler at the same time as Thutmose III. It is a moot point as to whether separate dates were used by two kings during the possible co-regencies of Thutmose III-Amenhotep II and Amenhotep III Amenhotep IV. The arguments for and against a co-regency between the two latter kings have been carefully reviewed by Donald Redford and later by William Murnane. However, there is still considerable controversy over the question of which coregencies actually took place and how long they lasted. There are also some scholars (including Gae Callender in Chapter 7 of this volume) who argue that co-regencies may never have occurred at all. 'Dark Ages' and Other Chronological Problems Some of the problems encountered in Egyptian chronology have already been mentioned, such as the potential confusion of links between astronomical observations and specific dates, the uncertainty as to which co-regencies (if any) actually occurred, and the assumption that the Egyptians of the pharaonic period and later continually dated events according to an artificial 'wandering' civil year of 365 days, which was rarely synchronized with the real solar year. There are also, of course, a number of other Egyptian historical problems, ranging from unreliability of sources (for example, Manetho's history, given that we neither know his sources nor have his original text) and frequent uncertainty regarding lengths of kings' reigns (for example, the Turin Canon says that Senusret II and III have reigns of nineteen and thirty-nine years respectively, whereas their highest recorded regnal years on documents that are actually contemporary with their reigns are only six and nineteen). Egypt, like other cultures, has periods in history that are more or less documented than others, and it is primarily this patchiness in the survival of archaeological and textual records from different dates that has led to the assumption that there were 'intermediate periods', when the political and social stability of the pharaonic period appeared to have been temporarily damaged. Thus, those periods of political and cultural continuity described as the Old, Middle, and New kingdoms were each thought to be followed by 'dark ages', when the country became disunited and weakened by conflict (either civil war between provinces or invasion by foreigners). This scenario was both denied and bolstered by Manetho's history. First, Manetho created a misleading air of continuity in the succession of kings and dynasties through his assumption that only one king could occupy the throne of Egypt at any one time. Secondly, his descriptions of some of the dynasties corresponding to the times of the intermediate periods suggest that the kingship was changing hands with alarming rapidity. The study of the Third Intermediate Period has become one of the most controversial areas of Egyptian history, particularly during the 19905, when it has been subjected to intensive study by a number of different scholars. Three areas of investigation have blossomed. First, several aspects of the culture of the period (for example, ceramics and funerary equipment) have been analysed in terms of changes in such factors as style and materials. Secondly, anthropological, iconographic, and linguistic studies have been undertaken with regard to the 'Libyan' ethnic identity of many of the 2ist-24th-Dynasty rulers. Thirdly, and most crucially from the point of view of the history of the pharaonic period as a whole, it was argued by a small number of scholars that the period of 400 years occupied by the Third Intermediate Period (and numerous other, roughly contemporaneous, 'dark ages' elsewhere in the Near East and the Mediterranean) may have been artificially inflated by historians. They suggested that the New Kingdom might have ended not in the eleventh century but in the eighth century BC, leaving a much smaller gap of about 150 years between the end of the 2oth Dynasty and the beginning of the Late Period. Such a view, however, has been widely dismissed, not only because Egyptologists, Assyriologists, and Aegeanists have been able to refute many of the individual textual and archaeological arguments for chronological change, but also, more significantly, because the scientific dating systems (that is, radiocarbon and dendrochronology) almost always provide solid independent support for the conventional chronology. Indeed, the irrelevance of such tinkering with the conventional chronological framework, given the overwhelming and increasing significance of scientific dates, has been memorably described by the classical archaeologist Anthony Snodgrass as 'a bit like a detailed scheme for re-organizing the East German economy, produced in 1989 or early 1990'. On a more cultural, rather than chronological level, the significance of the most basic historical divisions (that is, the distinctions between the Predynastic, pharaonic, Ptolemaic, and Roman periods) have begun to be questioned. On the one hand, the results of excavations during the 19805 and 19905 in the cemeteries of Umm el-Qae ab (at Abydos) suggest that before the ist Dynasty there was also a Dynasty o stretching back for some unknown period into the fourth millennium BC. This means that, at the very least, the last one or two centuries of the Tredynastic' were probably in many respects politically and socially 'Dynastic'. Conversely, the increasing realization that Naqada III pottery types were still widely used in the Early Dynastic Period shows that certain cultural aspects of the Predynastic Period continued on into the pharaonic period (see Chapter 4). Whereas there are definite political breaks between the pharaonic and Ptolemaic periods, and between the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, the gradually increasing archaeological data from the two latter periods have begun to create a situation where the process of cultural change may be seen to be less sudden than the purely political records suggest. Thus it is apparent that there are aspects of the ideology and material culture of the Ptolemaic Period that remain virtually unaltered by political upheavals. Instead of the arrival of Alexander the Great and his general Ptolemy representing a great watershed in Egyptian history, it might well be argued that, although there were certainly a number of significant political changes between the mid-first millennium BC and the mid-first millennium AD, these took place amid comparatively leisurely processes of social and economic change. Significant elements of the pharaonic civilization may have survived relatively intact for several millennia, only undergoing a full combination of cultural and political transformation at the beginning of the Islamic Period in AD 641.
Historical Change and Material Culture There has been an enormous growth in the study of Egyptian pottery in the late twentieth century, both in terms of the quantity of sherds being analysed (from a wide variety of types of site) and in terms of the range of scientific techniques now being used to extract more information from ceramics. Inevitably the improvement in our understanding of this prolific aspect of Egyptian material culture has had an impact on the chronological framework. The excavation of part of the city of Memphis (the site of Kom Rabie a) in the 19805 provides a good instance of the ways in which more sophisticated approaches to pottery have enabled the overall process of cultural change to be better understood. Pottery vessels can be arranged in terms of relative date by such traditional techniques as seriation of cemetery material and the analysis of large quantities of stratified material at domestic or religious sites, but they can also be given fairly precise absolute dates either by the conventional method of association with inscribed or artistic material (particularly in tombs) or by the use of such scientific techniques as thermoluminescence dating. Some scholars have begun to study the ways in which vessel and fabric types change over the course of time. Thus, the form of pottery bread moulds, for instance, underwent a dramatic change at the end of the Old Kingdom, but it is not yet clear whether the source of this change lies in the social, economic, or technological spheres of life, or whether it is merely the result of a change in 'fashion'. Such analyses show that processes of change in material culture took place for a whole variety of reasons, only some of which were linked to the political changes that tend to dominate conventional views of Egyptian history. This is not to deny the many connections between political and cultural change, such as the correlation between centralized production of pottery in the Old Kingdom and resurgence of local pottery types during the more politically fragmented First Intermediate Period (and then the renewed homogenization of pottery during the more unified i2th Dynasty). In the study of certain phases of Egyptian history, such as the emergence of the unified state at the beginning of the pharaonic period or the decline and demise of the Old Kingdom, scholars have sometimes examined numerous environmental and cultural factors in order to explain sudden important political changes. One of the problems with this selective attention to non-political historical trends, however, is the fact that we still know so little about environmental and cultural change during periods of stability and prosperity, such as the Old and Middle kingdoms, that it is much more difficult to interpret these factors at times of political crisis. The increased study of pottery vessels and other common artefacts (as well as environmental factors such as climate and agriculture) are beginning to create the basis for more holistic versions of Egyptian history, in which political narratives are viewed within the context of long-term processes of cultural change.
Egyptian 'History' Art and texts throughout the pharaonic period continued to maintain the Predynastic and Early Dynastic tension between recording and commemorating, which might be characterized as the distinction between, on the one hand, the utilitarian labels attached to grave goods, and, on the other hand, such ceremonial votive items as palettes and maceheads, described above. We know that the purpose of the early funerary labels was to use history as a means of dating particular things, and that the purpose of such mobiliary art as the palettes and maceheads as well as of stelae and temple reliefs in the pharaonic period—was not to record historical events but primarily to use them as a means of commemorating universal acts undertaken by specific rulers or by royal officials. In the mortuary temple of Rameses III at Medinet Habu there is a scene in which the Libyan chieftain Meshesher is brought into the presence of the king. This is obviously intended to be a record of the surrender of a particularly important foreign individual, whose personal humiliation encapsulates the defeat of his people, but to the lefthand side we can also see the careful assembling and counting of a pile of Libyans' hands this alerts us to one of the ways in which the scene differs from a more modern Western historical tableau. It is part of a relief in a mortuary temple and as such it is fulfilling the king's piety to the gods. Just as private individuals in the New Kingdom inscribed 'autobiographical' texts on the walls of their tomb chapels to remind the gods of their piety and beneficence, so the reliefs in royal mortuary temples were intended to symbolize a kind of accounting procedure, a visual quantification of the success achieved by the king both for and through the gods. The Egyptian sense of history is one in which rituals and real events are inseparable the vocabulary of Egyptian art and text very often makes no real distinction between the real and the ideal. Thus the events of history and myth were all regarded as part of a process of assessment, whereby the king demonstrated that he was preserving Maat, or harmony, on behalf of the deities. Even when an Egyptian monument appears to be simply commemorating a specific event in history, it is often interpreting that event as an act that is simultaneously mythological, ritualistic, and economic.
