Books of The Times: Abrupt Regime Change in Egypt Is Nothing New. Just Ask Thutmose III.

Source: all-breaking-news.com

This sequence of events which may sound familiar to those who followed this years overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak, Egypts ruler of nearly three decades actually occurred, the scholar Toby Wilkinson said in a recent essay in The Wall Street Journal, more than 3,000 years ago, after the death of the boy-king King Tutankhamen, when the army stepped in to maintain order and act as power broker.

As its title indicates, Mr. Wilkinsons new book, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, is about those long-ago days of the pharaohs and does not grapple with developments in that country after the death of Cleopatra in 30 B.C. But the volume does shed light on patterns in Egyptian history and the ways in which the countrys geography (which made it susceptible to invasion and attack) and the sharp dichotomies of nature in the Nile Valley (flood and drought, fertile land and arid desert) amplified what Mr. Wilkinson sees as a national proclivity to view the world as a constant battle between order and chaos a tendency that he says the countrys leaders often played upon to justify their domineering, autocratic rule.

Although the book offers way more detail about lesser-known pharaohs and lesser-known battles than the lay reader could possibly want to know, Mr. Wilkinson a fellow of Clare College at Cambridge University writes with considerable verve, and his narrative provides an acute understanding of how the Egyptian brand of divine kingship evolved over the centuries, how its pharaohs used their mastery of the architectural and decorative arts to glorify themselves (and cement their historical reputations) and how intertwined the monarchys power became with religion and the military.

Mr. Wilkinson is nimble at conveying the sumptuous pageantry and cultural sophistication of pharaohnic Egypt. He deconstructs the elaborate writings and funerary iconography, noting that the Egyptians were adept at recording things as they wished them to be seen, not as they actually were, and that tomb decoration was designed, above all, to reinforce the established social order, for instance, showing a tombs owner dominating every scene, towering in size over his family and workers. In addition Mr. Wilkinson provides an intriguing account of how archaeologists and historians have pieced together portraits of ancient Egypts kings, including Narmer, the first ruler of a united Egypt (whose reign began around 2950 B.C.) ; the warrior king Thutmose III, who secured Egypts control over the Transjordan; the eccentric Akhenaten who declared himself a co-regent with the sun; and Ramesses II, who ruled for an astonishing 67 years and would be immortalized in Shelleys poem Ozymandias.

After studying ancient Egypt for more than 20 years Mr. Wilkinson says he found himself growing increasingly uneasy about the subject of my research increasingly aware of the darker side of pharaonic civilization, which has often been glossed over, he says, by the misty-eyed reverence that many scholars have shared with tourists.

We marvel at the pyramids, he writes, without stopping to think too much about the political system that made them possible. We take vicarious pleasure in the pharaohs military victories Thutmose III at the Battle of Megiddo, Ramesses II at the Battle of Kadesh without pausing too long to reflect on the brutality of warfare in the ancient world. We thrill at the weirdness of the heretic king Akhenaten and all his works, but do not question what it is like to live under a despotic, fanatical ruler.

Arguing that the ancient Egyptians invented the concept of the nation-state that still dominates our planet, Mr. Wilkinson writes that the countrys earliest kings not only formulated and harnessed traditional tools of leadership like using ideology and ceremony to unite a disparate population and bind it to the state but also used more malign instruments like police surveillance, xenophobia and the brutal repression of dissent to cement their power.

In fact this book draws a sobering portrait of what daily life was like for ordinary Egyptians. Foot soldiers (who actually fought barefoot) were subject to frequent beatings and had to subsist on meager rations, which were supposed to be supplemented by foraging and stealing. And peasants, who did not have access to the doctors and dentists available to the wealthy, suffered from a range of debilitating diseases like tuberculosis and parasitical infections. To make matters worse, high taxes, the uncertain nature of agriculture in the Nile Valley (either too much water or too little) and the constant threat of famine combined to make daily life feel perennially precarious.

Small wonder, then, Mr. Wilkinson says, that fervent belief in an afterlife once largely the preserve of the ruling class, who regarded mummification and pyramids as vehicles for overcoming death spread gradually to the population at large. The nature of an afterlife changed too. Whereas the wealthy, Mr. Wilkinson writes, had been content to look forward to an afterlife that was essentially a continuation of earthly existence, Egyptians increasingly came to hope for something better in the next world, to believe in the idea of transfiguration and transformation an idea that would echo through later civilizations and ultimately shape the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Mr. Wilkinson argued in his Wall Street Journal essay that Egyptian history has a depressing habit of repeating itself. In much the same way that the Old Kingdom ended in fragmentation and civil war, so did despotism in the Middle Kingdom give way to weakness and confusion that left the country vulnerable to invasion. A band of Theban loyalists would succeed against all odds in expelling these foreigners known as the Hyksos, and Egypt would reassert itself as a great imperial power, controlling a territory that stretched more than 2,000 miles. But the glorious era of the New Kingdom too would come to an end with the rise of other powers in the region, including Assyria, Persia, Greece and Rome.

The last act of Egypts great drama, Mr. Wilkinson observes, was played out in the streets of Alexandria with a cast of characters as famous as any: Caesar, Mark Antony, and Cleopatra. With her death, in 30, Egypt became a Roman possession and its 3,000-year-old pharaonic tradition came to an end.