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By Root 572 0

songs would strike a strange note in a noble’s tomb of the Old Kingdom, which vigorously expressed the material and naive expectations of the life to come. In the Fourth Dynasty the individual boasts of his deeds and his promotions. “I was greatly praised on account of it; never had the like been done by any noble before me.” The biographical inscriptions of the First Intermediate Period still brag about great deeds. “I rescued my city,” says one nobleman pointedly, “from the terrors of the royal house.” (Well, really!—as Khufu might have said.) But there is a new emphasis in the texts of this period, an almost anxious affirmation of other deeds and other accomplishments, which contrasts sharply with the pride in advancement or in wealth.

I gave bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, and clothing to the naked. I buried the aged. I was a father to the orphan, a husband to the widow. I did no wrongdoing against the people; it is what the god hates. I have rendered justice, which the king desired.

This is a composite, from many inscriptions, of claims to virtue that characterize this period. It is superfluous and needlessly cynical to point out that some of the men who made these claims may have been sinners of the deepest dye. What is significant is the fact that the claims were made, and had to be made. The quest for immortality must be almost as old as man himself. Even the ape-faced Neanderthal hunters buried their dead with the tools they would need in another life and with food to supply them on that longest of journeys. As society became more complex and life more pleasant and desirable, the human animal sought ever more means to ensure a continuance of plea sure: elaborate tombs, magical supplies of food and comforts, complex methods of preserving the body, gold and jewels and boasts of high office. But he could never be sure. He could never know for certain that his gold was the proper medium of exchange in Paradise. The upheaval of the First Intermediate Period gave the doubts of the Egyptian greater poignancy. So during this time, along with cynicism and hedonism, we see an attempt to substitute other values for the ones that had proved inadequate—values which, being invisible and intangible, were not susceptible to decay.

There are vague references to a judgment of the dead as early as the Pyramid Texts, but we do not get a clear picture of the concept until after the collapse of the Old Kingdom. The judge is Re, the sun god; and the creature that stands before the bar of justice is the human soul. “Your fault will be expelled and your guilt will be expunged, by the weighing of the scales on the day of reckoning characters; and it will be permitted that you join with those who are in the sun-bark.” The image of the scales of justice requires no commentary. In the balances were weighed the sins and the virtues of the dead man, and only good deeds could insure eternal life.

The questions asked by the men of this troubled age so far in the past are not unique to their times, nor peculiar to their culture. They are the universal questions asked by all men who have ever pondered the tragedy of life and the mystery of death. Never before nor after, perhaps, until the Hebrew prophets began their long debate with God, did men express the questions so clearly nor with such eloquence as did the Egyptians of the First Intermediate Period and Middle Kingdom.

For two generations after the end of the Sixth Dynasty we know very little about actual events. The clouds of dust that arose from the collapse of that mighty edifice, the Old Kingdom, obscure events and people. Manetho lists a Seventh and an Eighth Dynasty, but they could only have lasted for about a quarter of a century, and the ephemeral “kings” have left almost no contemporary records. The names and titles of local princes appear instead, in the tombs and in the quarries.

Around 2160 B.C. the clouds thin out a bit, in one area at least. That area was the Fayum, the great oasis-lake just south of the Delta. Here, in the city of Herakleopolis, a powerful family