Three biographies of officials from Elephantine record trading expeditions to the south in the reigns of Pepi I and Pepi II. The location of the regions named in them is debated and may have been as far afield as the Butāna, south of the Fifth Cataract. Some of the trade routes ran through the Western Desert, where the Egyptians established an administrative post at Balāṭ in Al-Dākhilah Oasis, some distance west of Al-Khārijah Oasis. Egypt no longer controlled Lower Nubia, which was settled by the C Group and formed into political units of gradually increasing size, possibly as far as Karmah (Kerma), south of the Third Cataract. Karmah was the southern cultural successor of the Nubian A Group and became an urban centre in the late 3rd millennium bce, remaining Egypt’s chief southern neighbour for seven centuries. To the north the Karmah state stretched as far as the Second Cataract and at times farther still. Its southern extent has not been determined, but sites of similar material culture are scattered over vast areas of the central Sudan.
The provincializing tendencies of the late 5th dynasty continued in the 6th, especially during the extremely long reign (up to 94 years) of Pepi II. Increasing numbers of officials resided in the provinces, amassed local offices, and emphasized local concerns, including religious leadership, in their inscriptions. At the capital the size and splendour of the cemeteries decreased, and some tombs of the end of the dynasty were decorated only in their subterranean parts, as if security could not be guaranteed aboveground. The pyramid complex of Pepi II at southern Ṣaqqārah, which was probably completed in the first 30 years of his reign, stands out against this background as the last major monument of the Old Kingdom, comparable to its predecessors in artistic achievement. Three of his queens were buried in small pyramids around his own; these are the only known queens’ monuments inscribed with Pyramid Texts. The 7th and 8th dynasties (c. 2150–c. 2130 bce)
Pepi II was followed by several ephemeral rulers, who were in turn succeeded by the short-lived 7th dynasty of Manetho’s history (from which no king’s name is known) and the 8th, one of whose kings, Ibi, built a small pyramid at southern Ṣaqqārah. Several 8th-dynasty kings are known from inscriptions found in the temple of Min at Qifṭ (Coptos) in the south; this suggests that their rule was recognized throughout the country. The instability of the throne is, however, a sign of political decay, and the fiction of centralized rule may have been accepted only because there was no alternative style of government to kingship.
With the end of the 8th dynasty, the Old Kingdom system of control collapsed. About that time there were incidents of famine and local violence. The country emerged impoverished and decentralized from this episode, the prime cause of which may have been political failure, environmental disaster, or, more probably, a combination of the two. In that period the desiccation of northeastern Africa reached a peak, producing conditions similar to those of contemporary times, and a related succession of low inundations may have coincided with the decay of central political authority. These environmental changes are, however, only approximately dated, and their relationship with the collapse cannot be proved. The First Intermediate period The 9th dynasty (c. 2130–2080 bce)
After the end of the 8th dynasty, the throne passed to kings from Heracleopolis, who made their native city the capital, although Memphis continued to be important. They were acknowledged throughout the country, but inscriptions of nomarchs (chief officials of nomes) in the south show that the kings’ rule was nominal. At Dara, north of Asyūṭ, for example, a local ruler called Khety styled himself in a regal manner and built a pyramid with a surrounding “courtly” cemetery. At Al-Miʿalla, south of Luxor, Ankhtify, the nomarch of the al-Jabalayn region, recorded his annexation of the Idfū nome and extensive raiding in the Theban area. Ankhtify acknowledged an unidentifiable king Neferkare but campaigned with his own troops. Major themes of inscriptions of the period are the nomarch’s provision of food supplies for his people in times of famine and his success in promoting irrigation works. Artificial irrigation had probably long been practiced, but exceptional poverty and crop failure made concern with it worth recording. Inscriptions of Nubian mercenaries employed by local rulers in the south indicate how entrenched military action was. The 10th (c. 2080–c. 1970 bce) and 11th (2081–1938 bce) dynasties
A period of generalized conflict focused on rival dynasties at Thebes and Heracleopolis. The latter, the 10th, probably continued the line of the 9th. The founder of the 9th or 10th dynasty was named Khety, and the dynasty as a whole was termed the House of Khety. Several Heracleopolitan kings were named Khety; another important name is Merikare. There was intermittent conflict, and the boundary between the two realms shifted around the region of Abydos. As yet, the course of events in this period cannot be reconstructed.
Several major literary texts purport to describe the upheavals of the First Intermediate period—the Instruction for Merikare, for example, being ascribed to one of the kings of Heracleopolis. These texts led earlier Egyptologists to posit a Heracleopolitan literary flowering, but there is now a tendency to date them to the Middle Kingdom, so that they would have been written with enough hindsight to allow a more effective critique of the sacred order.
Until the 11th dynasty made Thebes its capital, Armant (Greek, Hermonthis), on the west bank of the Nile, was the centre of the Theban nome. The dynasty honoured as its ancestor the God’s Father Mentuhotep, probably the father of its first king, Inyotef I (2081–65 bce), whose successors were Inyotef II and Inyotef III (2065–16 and 2016–08 bce, respectively). The fourth king, Mentuhotep II (2008–1957 bce, whose throne name was Nebhepetre), gradually reunited Egypt and ousted the Heracleopolitans, changing his titulary in stages to record his conquests. Around his 20th regnal year he assumed the Horus name Divine of the White Crown, implicitly claiming all of Upper Egypt. By his regnal year 42 this had been changed to Uniter of the Two Lands, a traditional royal epithet that he revived with a literal meaning. In later times Mentuhotep was celebrated as the founder of the epoch now known as the Middle Kingdom. His remarkable mortuary complex at Dayr al-Baḥrī, which seems to have had no pyramid, was the architectural inspiration for Hatshepsut’s later structure built alongside.
In the First Intermediate period, monuments were set up by a slightly larger section of the population, and, in the absence of central control, internal dissent and conflicts of authority became visible in public records. Nonroyal individuals took over some of the privileges of royalty, notably identification with Osiris in the hereafter and the use of the Pyramid Texts; these were incorporated into a more extensive corpus inscribed on coffins (and hence termed the Coffin Texts) and continued to be inscribed during the Middle Kingdom. The unified state of the Middle Kingdom did not reject these acquisitions and so had a broader cultural basis than the Old Kingdom. The Middle Kingdom (1938–c. 1630 bce) and the Second Intermediate period (c. 1630–1540 bce) The Middle Kingdom
Mentuhotep II campaigned in Lower Nubia, where he may have been preceded by the Inyotefs. His mortuary complex in Thebes contained some of the earliest known depictions of Amon-Re, the dynastic god of the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom. Mentuhotep II was himself posthumously deified and worshiped, notably in the Aswān area. In administration, he attempted to break the power of the nomarchs, but his policy was unsuccessful in the longer term.