Thus, even under the Old Kingdom, Egypt is a country in a high state of civilisation; a centralised government, a high level of technical skill, a religion in exuberant development, an art that has reached its zenith, a literature that strives upward to its culminating point,—this it is that we see displayed in its monuments. It is an early blossom, put forth by the human race at a time when other nations were yet wrapped in their winter sleep. In ancient Babylonia alone, where conditions equally favourable prevailed, the nation of the Sumerians reached a similar height. Any one who will compare these two ancient civilisations of Babylonia and Egypt cannot fail to see that they present many similarities of custom; thus in both the seal is rolled upon the clay, and both date their years according to certain events. The idea that some connection subsisted between them, and that then, as in later times, the products of both countries were dispersed by commerce through the world about them, is one that suggests itself spontaneously. But substantial evidence in support of this conjecture is still lacking and will probably ever remain so.
The great age of the Old Kingdom ends in a collapse, the body politic breaks up into its component parts, and the level of civilisation in the provinces sinks rapidly. But it rises again no less rapidly, when, at the close of the third millennium B.C., Egypt is once more united under a single sovereign.
The Middle Kingdom, as we customarily call this epoch, is a second season of efflorescence; indeed, it is the time upon which the Egyptians of succeeding generations looked back as the classic period of their literature; and many centuries later, boys at school were still patiently copying out the wise lessons which the first king of the period imparted to his son, or the adventures of his contemporary, Sinuhe, and thereby learning the elegance of style in which the Egyptians of the Middle Kingdom were such adepts. This, moreover, is the epoch in which, so far as we know, the Egyptian arms were first carried to remoter lands; at this time Nubia became an Egyptian province, and the gold of its desert thenceforth belonged to the Pharaohs. The memory of this extension of the sway of Egypt survived among the Egyptians of later days, embodied in the semi-mythical figure of the great King Sesostris. When legend reports that this monarch likewise subjugated distant lands to the north, we have now no means of judging how much truth there may be in the tale. But this we can see, that at that time Egypt maintained commercial relations with the countries of the Mediterranean; for their dainty vases are found in Egyptian rubbish heaps of the period, and may have been imported into the Nile valley then, as later, as vessels for containing delicate foreign oils.
These palmy days of the second period of Egyptian history lasted for barely two hundred years, and then a time of political decadence again set in, and Egypt for some centuries passes almost out of sight. One thing only do we know of its fortunes during this interval, namely, that it once more fell a prey to barbarian conquerors. The Hyksos—presumably a Bedouin tribe from the Syrio-Arabian desert—long reigned in Egypt as its lords. But the sway of these barbarians was naturally lax, and while the foreign great king abode in his camp on the Delta, Egyptian princes ruled as his vassals in the great cities of Egypt. And when, as was inevitable, the might of the barbarians waned, the might of these dynasts increased, till one of them, who ruled in the little city of Thebes in distant Upper Egypt, rose to such a height of power as to gain the mastery, not only over the other princes, but ultimately over the Hyksos themselves. About the year 1600 B.C. we find Egypt free once more, and under the sceptre of this same upper Egyptian line which has rendered the names of Thebes, its city, and Amen, its god, forever famous. The New Kingdom, the greatest age that the Nile Valley ever saw, has dawned.
The power of the kingdom waxed apace beyond its borders. Tehutimes I and his son, the indefatigable warrior, Tehutimes III, subdued a region that extended northward to northern Syria and southward to the Sudan; Egypt became the neighbour of the kingdom of Mitani [or Mitanni] on the Euphrates, of the rising power of Assyria, of ancient Babylonia. The two ancient civilisations which had been developing for thousands of years in Mesopotamia and the valley of the Nile were thus brought into direct contact, and we shall hardly be wrong in saying that during these centuries a great part of the civilised world whose heirs we are, met together in a common life. A brisk trade must have developed as a result of this new relation of country to country. The countries of the Mediterranean, where the so-called Mycenæan civilisation was then in its prime, had their part in it, as is proved by the discovery of numerous Mycenæan vessels in the tombs and ruins of the New Kingdom, and no less by the productions of Egyptian technical art which have been brought to light from the seats of Mycenæan civilisation.
The effect of these altered relations upon Egypt is easy to see. Vast wealth pours into the country and enables the Pharaohs to erect the gigantic fabric of the Theban temples. But at the very time when the spirit of ancient Egypt finds its most splendid transfiguration in these buildings, it begins to suffer loss and change. The old simple garb no longer beseems the lords of so great an empire; it must give place to a costlier. The antiquated literary language handed down from days of old is gradually superseded by the vulgar tongue. And if the Egyptians had up to this time looked proudly down upon all other nations as wretched barbarians, they must have found this narrow-minded view untenable when once they had met face to face the equally ancient civilisation of Babylonia and the vigorous growth of Syrian and Mediterranean cultures. The sons of Egypt’s Asiatic vassals attend her king, their daughters sit in his harem; Syrian mercenaries form one regiment of his bodyguard, foreign captives work on the edifices he builds. His officers, military and civil, have all made some stay on Asiatic soil, and his “letter-scribe” can read and write the cuneiform characters of Babylonia. The commerce which led foreign merchants to Egypt must have acted no less powerfully; they brought in silverware, wood of various kinds, horses and oxen, wine, beer, oil, and unguents, and carried away in return the manifold products of Egyptian industry and Egyptian crafts. In the long result not only does their traditional fear of foreigners pass away, but Asiatic fashions actually come into vogue among cultured Egyptians. They coquet with foreign Canaanitish phrases, and think it permissible to offer up prayer to Baal [Bel] Astarte, and other gods of alien peoples. Asiatic singing-girls set the lyre of their native land in place of the old Egyptian harp, and many an intellectual possession may have migrated into Egypt with their songs.
It is far harder to gauge in detail the effect of Egyptian supremacy on Asia and Europe. We can see from the discoveries made in these countries what a quantity of small Egyptian wares in glass and faience, silver and bronze, was exported during this period, and we may further conclude that this was the time when the industrial art of Syrio-Phœnicia acquired its Egyptianised style. Similarly we may conjecture that it was then that our civilisation adopted all those things which were undoubtedly invented or perfected on Egyptian soil, and which we meet with even in the very oldest Greek and Etruscan times—the forms of household furniture, of columns, statues, weapons, seals, and many other things which still play their part in our daily life, though we are all unconscious of their Egyptian origin. At that period, when Egypt held the first place in Asia and Europe, a stream of Egyptian influence must have flowed out upon the whole world—a stream of which we still can guess the force only from these traces it has left.