Dan Snow's History Hit - A Guide to Ancient Egypt

Episode Date: December 6, 2023

Egypt was a vast kingdom of the ancient world. Its rulers were considered gods and wielded tremendous power and wealth. Egyptian scholars, astrologists and thinkers pioneered in their fields. Lasting for millennia, the kingdom's influence on culture, economics and politics was felt across North Africa and beyond, even centuries after it was gone.This episode tells you everything you need to know about Ancient Egypt - guided by Dr. Campbell Price, Curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum, Dan embarks on a whistle-stop tour of this iconic kingdom.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up now for your 14-day free trial.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History of Ancient Egypt, Pyramids, Pharaohs, Gods, the Nile. We've got it all on this podcast. We've decided to go a bit bonkers. We've decided to go crazy. We are going to do the whole thing from A to Z, from Dynasty 1 to Dynasty 31. In fact, we're going to go before, we're going to go Dynasty minus 1 and we're going to go beyond 31 as well.

So you're going to get the whole thing here. The reason we're doing this, I'll tell you. We just published a book, History Hit Missandei, available in all good bookshops. The sections on ancient Egypt are the ones that have been most widely shared and fed back on. People out there are fascinated by ancient Egypt, so go and grab the book. It makes a great Christmas present. But in the meantime, here is an episode of the podcast all about ancient Egypt. It's kind of everything you need to know. We decide to pack into one glorious podcast episode the whole history of ancient Egypt. And there's very few people who can do that properly. And one of them is Dr. Campbell Price. He is head of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum,

the most wonderful museum. You've got to go and check it out. And he offered a few months ago to take me on a wild ride through the entire history of ancient Egypt, and I held him to that promise, and here he is. This is the rise, the full rise, full rise, and final fall of the pharaonic Egypt. Enjoy. Enjoy. T-minus 10.

The atomic bomb dropped on Hir to have you on the podcast. Hi again, Dan. Great to be on. Well, the trouble is I'm going to work you hard today because you on the podcast. Hi again, Dan. Great to be on. Well, the trouble is I'm going to work you hard today because you're so brilliant. I've had too many questions every time I meet you, and I thought we'd just do a big look at the whole thing. Okay. Because we did a podcast on Babylon, and that was interesting,

and I've realized there's such an interest in the pre-classical cultures, the ancient Near East, and I want to situate, I need to get Egypt sorted in my mind compared to what's going on in the Fertile Crescent. So is the first dynasty important? What happens before the first dynasty? What's going on in Egypt? Well, I think the problem, Dan, is Egyptologists tell ourselves things

that make Egyptology seem more important. So if we start at the beginning, so dynasty one, a major question in egyptology is yeah what relationship does egypt have with mesopotamia who's you know everyone wants to be first with writing or royal imagery or you know whatever um the single thing if you ask most egyptologists what is the the first monumental thing They would probably say the Narmer palette, which you've seen in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Have I?

It is a sizable, like the size about almost a metre tall, supersized version of a makeup palette where you grind pigment to apply to the face. Okay. So this is ostensibly a historical scene where you see the king of the south of egypt beating up the king of the north of egypt and so this gives us the myth the narrative the historical reality of egypt being unified okay so we're pretty sure the egyptians told themselves this story but it's really very

convenient for an egyptologist that this image just on its own explains the origin the genesis of egyptian civilization okay so you guys can go there you go there was a north and a south they conquered it and now we can get into what dynasty one yeah yeah start of dynasty one okay and so before that there would have been cultures societies living up and down the Nile, very fertile. Well, I mean, I think if you visited Egypt 5,000 years ago, because we're talking about the origin of the pharaonic state, I don't like the word state because, you know, we have an idea of a modern state.

It wasn't like that. But there is centuries before Narmor, we know archaeologically, people are making pots with the same decoration in the north and the delta as they are in the south

so there's a communication going on so probably and you just suggested it they kind of coalesce these groups around the very fertile river and the river banks

and they are doing farming and then small groups become bigger towns become bigger and then people someone in charge says carve up that rock yes yeah or go and fight the town next door or let's do both at the same time okay and and what date is that so this is roughly 3000 bc right 3000 bc and what's going on in the fertile crescent sort of there's something equivalent happening they use things like there are little motifs which appear on the narmar palette you know floral motifs or images of a

griffin like with intertwining two griffins with intertwining necks which you see in what we now call the middle east as well interesting so you know an egyptian modern egyptian might say oh well we invented it and a modern ir Iraqi might say, but we invented it. And the jury's out. The thing about the Nama palette is Egyptologists have used it to explain a single historic event. And I'm deeply sceptical of that. Yeah, because these cultures could have been fighting each other up and down the Nile constantly. Yeah, OK.

But we have the Nama palette. Yes. that time we get dynasty one yes he kicks off dynasty one right much who's he he is Nama so Nama kicks off dynasty one yeah so his name means fighting catfish okay so you don't want to mess with them okay I thought like I was with you there was a journey I was like fighting cat cool fighting cat fish there was a journey. I was like, fighting cat, cool. Fighting cat, fish. Yeah. Hmm. Not quite as cool.

But because of the survival of that, we kind of, that's why we date dynasty one, but there could have been other namas a little bit further back. Okay. Yes.

So we begin with the very convenient dynasty one and start the counting of the dynasties up to the Ptolemies. Yeah. But then other evidence pops up for people

like this guy called Scorpion. Oh, no. So you have to have dynasty minus one. Yeah, zero. Dynasty zero. Okay. And dynasty zero is quite a flexible concept. I bet it is.

So it's not Dwayne the Rock Johnston, although the story of Scorpion did, I think, in some way. It's by the Hollywood movie. Okay, so we're going to go with Narmer. Yes, Narmer. And so he's the person we've chosen in a way. We've perhaps slightly arbitrarily decided

he's going to be the founding father of ancient Egypt. Yes. And to some extent, the ancient Egyptians themselves forget about Narmer. And then he and possibly one of his successors, a guy called Hor Aha, whose name means literally the fighter. A better name.

So, you know, we've got a bit of a military sense. We're getting a sense of what these guys were about. These guys coalesce into one kind of mythic figure called Menes. And Menes means the founder. Oh, interesting. So, is it just chance that someone called the founder kicks things off?

Probably not. But we're not a million miles out then by locating the beginning of the pharaonic project as being at nama i mean maybe a few generations out but the egyptians thought it was about then as well okay that's interesting yeah okay so then we get when do we get pyramids because they're early on aren't they they're early and it's funny because when you say you know Cleopatra lived closer in time to us than to the pyramids. That is giving you the overall sweep of pharaonic Egypt is a hell of a long time. The pyramids you're right are early doors.

So the first pyramid is dynasty three. So we're only quite early in the numbering. And that's a guy called Djoser. dynasty three so we're only quite early in the numbering and that's a guy called joser and he or maybe his putative architect a guy called m hotep who's probably just a high official and not actually an architect sitting with blueprints together they come up with this the first major stone building in the world the step pyramid which has got six massive limestone structures like a wedding cake and that's it then for about the next thousand years there is pyramid building and they only stop building pyramids when there's a sense of it's a massive billboard rob Rob, rob me. Please rob this. So yeah,

so, so JOSER sometime around 2800 is doing pyramids. But when you go to that state pyramid today and you just think, yeah, as you say,

it's the first monumental structure on this earth. On the planet. Wild. Yeah. So exciting. The thing I like about the state pyramid,

if you look at even second world war reconnaissance pictures, it looks like it's in the middle of the desert. And it's not now. It's been cleared. If you visited recently, it's been cleared. So you can visit it and there's a nice pathway.

And it's part of a whole complex, which was a kind of afterlife palace for the king. So people say pyramid and you imagine pointy things in the middle of the desert well A it's not in the middle of the desert and B it's not really a pointy thing by that point because they've not developed the smooth sided

true pyramid it's quite lush around there I remember well perhaps that's more modern but there's canal there's irrigate there's just

on the edge of yeah the Nile's moved a bit you know the course has fluctuated but that's an important point pyramids and tombs were always meant

to be close to fields where offerings were going to come from. You don't want to be in the middle of a desert not being given bread and beer and wine and onions. Onions. So we get the wonderful step pyramids. Then when do you get the straight-sided pyramids, the flat ones at Giza?

So that's a few generations later, maybe just over 100 years later um i got the the real unsung hero of pyramid construction is not king kufu who builds the great pyramid it's his dad so kufu's dad is called sneferu and he is responsible for two probably three pyramids so in terms of pyramid volume he is the biggest pyramid builder in the history of egypt and indeed the world so he experiments in a sense he fills in the sides of a step pyramid that kind of falls a bit to rack and ruin but then he tries again with a smooth-sided pyramid. It doesn't quite work.

Possibly he's intending it to look like a very squat obelisk. That's another story. And then he perfects the true pyramid, what we call the Red Pyramid, and that looks like something out of a Hollywood movie. Wow. And, I mean,

just the number of people, the resources that supply. What's that tell us about what we're now calling the Old Kingdom? I mean, just the number of people, the resources that's a ploy. What's that tell us about what we're now calling the Old Kingdom? I mean, lots of people? Potentially lots of people. You're right. So we're in the Old Kingdom, this beginning of this conventional division of time by Egyptologists.

So the Old Kingdom is, as most of the rest of Pharaonic time, was a land of farmers so remember there's the annual flood so when the nile burst its banks in the summer it doesn't happen now because of the aswan high down but when it burst its banks for a few months your fields are underwater so a lot of people would be called up in a kind of corvée. Nothing else to do. You've got nothing else to do. Why not come to the Royal Pyramids site, the Royal Building Project, and the king will pay for you.

So you'll be looked after. You'll have doctors, you'll have food, you'll have drink, you'll have entertainment, you'll have somewhere to stay, and you can go back and brag to your families. For a few months I was, you know, floating blocks. You've built a building that would be astonishing even now if it was built.

And we're used to mad people building mad things in Qatar. But like, even now, if you built a pyramid, you'd be like, that's kind of, that's amazing. So what would it have been like 5,000 years ago?

It would be, yeah, it would be worth talking about for sure. And so often, Dan, you know, we look at ancient Egypt through the experience of more recent history, colonialism, modern ideas of politics and dictatorship. And we think, gosh, either the kings were splendid godlike beings or they were tyrannical, dreadful pieces of work. And I think that the truth is probably in between. of work and I think that the truth is probably in between so you know if you're a farmer in the south of Egypt and you go up to the building project near what is now Cairo and you spend a

few months a year there the fact you did it may have been such an honor even just to be involved in the project may have conferred some magical religious you know afterlife possibilities on you that maybe other people wouldn't get so yes it would be hard work i'm not denying building a pyramid of two and a half million blocks is hard and we don't really know how they did it but it was hard work and i think being part of the team would be fun because we've got the names of some of the gangs so you have in names like friends of kufu or drunkards of kufu yeah that's interesting you know it's there's a could be a laugh there's a vibe there yeah i know i i get you in trouble whenever i ask you this but because when you say you don't exactly know how they built

it that's true but that does not mean that aliens built it first but that just for the audience like you don't act in terms of engineering and construction we don't know how they did it do we yeah for the record yeah and no one no one seriously believes it was alien um extraterrestrial life forms it was egyptian people working hard using boats so i mentioned the flood you had me at boats so there's a quarry you can see it from the giza plateau there's a quarry on the other side of the um the river on the eastern bank of the nile when the flood rises you take your boat and you right up there at the quarry and then you float it over right up pretty much to the pyramid site and gosh not 20 years ago there was an incredible find made by an egyptian french mission on the Red Sea coast of basically the diary of one of the guys that had been floating the blocks. So it's, you know, people think historical discoveries,

we're never going to find an account of how they built the pyramids. This was as close as we could get. So a guy called Merer was in charge of getting blocks in this kind of rota up onto the pyramid probably near the end of construction based on the date of the king's reign um but that gives you an insight into the day-to-day how do you build a pyramid you float blocks up to the site and you probably use a ramp to get them up into place. For me, the highlight of the pyramids is actually not the pyramids, but is the ship, is the boat. Oh, the boat. The very boat.

I burst into tears when I saw that. It was the most beautiful thing as a boat person. Okay, so we've got these pyramids being built. We've got an old kingdom. Geographical extent, are we moving into Libya with the Middle East? Because North Mediterranean, obviously. To the south, you've got Sudan. Is it stretching up the Nile a bit? So the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom are well aware of what they called Nubia. So this area

to the south of Egypt, what we would now call Southern modern Egypt, the north of modern Sudan. But they have relationships with the peoples to the west, what people we would call Libyans. So later in the Old Kingdom, Dynasty 5 to Dynasty 6, you get officials bragging about having gone on trading expeditions. They're not claiming that as an empire. Egypt is Egypt. Egypt is the Nile Valley down to Aswan, basically. And that's it.

And pretty much that continues for most of Pharaonic history. basically. Okay. And that's it. And pretty much that continues for most of Pharaonic history. Really? Okay. So when they do mess about into what is now Syria,

Palestine or Libya it's not a sense like a Roman or a British Imperial sense of trying to make the world Rome. Okay.

It's a foray. It's a foray. They want stuff. And potentially clientism. Yeah. And so when you look on a tomb chapel wall in the New Kingdom

and you see all these guys bringing, you know, golden rings to the Pharaoh's court, it looks a lot like tribute. And we use words like viceroy and derbar and these very British colonial terms. Actually, I think you're right. There would be more of a sense of exchange. There would be raids.

There would be going and grabbing stuff because the Egyptians in some sense in some ways that sometimes were more powerful but then sometimes the non-Egyptians pushed back but you do have this quite useful fact don't you of pretty extreme desert in Sinai so to the east pretty extreme desert western deserts uh Mediterranean to the north so there's a protection there nature's nature's protection okay so we're moving through the pyramid builders the old kingdom

you say they're building for how long do you say they're building pyramids? in total so the step pyramid of Djoser is like the book ended

by one in the late middle kingdom and between the two of them is about a thousand years okay a thousand years wow okay but so the old kingdom why does the old kingdom

come to an end? what's he's rolling his eyes, folks. Okay, in short, we can make it a very short process. Right. There's a complex socioeconomic reason. Basically, the power,

which previously, in the time of the pyramids, Dynasty IV, is with the royal family, pretty much. Power expands. A number of officials expand. They take themselves off, it seems, to the regions of Egypt.

And then the central authority of the king weakens somewhat. And it doesn't help the last king of the old kingdom proper, Pepi II, lives to be possibly nearly 100 years old. So, you know, that creates dynastic uncertainty. Okay, so this is actually an example of a long-lived king causing instability by the length of his reign yes interesting and there's what your your basic common garden bit of civil war bit of collapse there are definitely factions there's egypt this is something really important that people often forget egypt today in the ancient world was and still is regional it is like many places it has a strong set of regional identities in the record sometimes

the king seems to be all powerful and he is telling everyone in the regions what to do that situation becomes more transparent probably by what we call the first intermediate period when that power of the king, the monarchy in Memphis, near modern Cairo slips and so the local rulers the nomarchs as we call them

which seems rather unfair the local governors, they take back control if you like And I hate to do this, but not unlike Chinese history, where you get these strong kind of dynastic periods, and then you get these quite radical interregnums and quite creative, quite destructive, and then something else emerges.

Yes. Yeah, something else comes out of that. The interesting thing about the first intermediate period is we have archaeological evidence for some kind of change in the conception of the elite elites become more kingly it's not like you know day one we're in the first intermediate period everyone change your pottery no change your crockery it's not like that but in later periods in the middle kingdom those those Middle Kingdom Egyptians are looking back,

casting the so-called First Intermediate Period as a time of chaos, out of which the great and the just and the enlightened kings of the Middle Kingdom have come. We saved you from... Yes. So actually, if you were in the Intermediate Period, you might be thinking, life's all right.

Yeah. I'm having a great old time. Yes, exactly. Yeah, well, that's interesting. Listen to Dan Snow's history to my ancient egypt a whole lot of it more coming up i'm matt lewis and i'm dr alan orionaga and in god medieval we get into the greatest mysteries the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings,

Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit,

wherever you get your podcasts. How long would that intermarriage period be? A couple of hundred years. Not long. Not long, except if the time between the Battle of Trafalgar and today. It's crazy, isn't it? In the sweep of Egyptian pharaonic history. What can happen in a couple of hundred years, right?

That's amazing. So does the Middle Kingdom begin with a bang? Is there a founder, a more identifiable founder, who says, don't worry, we're back in the game. Here's a Middle Kingdom. Yes. So the person recognized as the kind of second Narmer, the reunifier, is a guy called montu hotep neb right trips off the tongue um and he comes from the south again so narmer is a southerner who

kind of takes over the north so um the hometown of our friend montu hotep is a little known place called thebes okay modern luxor and that is what absolutely pins that place to the map and that is now why luxor is such an incredible open-air museum is because montohotep's family once they conquered the rest of egypt essentially went back to honor their local god amun and is he reaching back to the old kingdom for its symbols, for its language, to boost the dignity of his own pharaonic rule? I think actually Montuhotep II, Nebhepetre, is actually more radical than that. He does some kind of weird new things.

It's later kings who follow him, who are maybe slightly less sure of their own position. They look back to the past and use ancient symbols. And they're still building their own pyramid. And they are still building pyramids. We're not quite sure whether Montuhotep builds a pyramid himself, possibly, but he's got some very innovative ideas about architecture. Do we know where Montuhotep is buried?

At Thebes, yes. So he creates a temple tomb structure near, right next to, in fact, although he doesn't realise it, the female pharaoh Hatshepsut's temple. So that's why that area is very sacred. Deir el-Bahri. Deir el-Bahri. But we've found his, have we? We've not found his body.

His body has never been found. Of course. But we've found his wives. And he's got quite a harem going on there. Well, again, I hate to say harem. He has got a group of elite women who are buried there who are priestesses of Hathor and who are, you know, very significant ladies.

It's so interesting when we talk about this and we said this before to each other. So there's moments of great familiarity with this history because there's moments of ambition and conquest and desire and belief.

But then there's moments of complete confusion, obscurity. Yes. What is their relationship with him and with each other and what are they doing?

Isn't it wonderful? It's tantalising. It's tantalising and you've got to remember nothing was written for a modern historian. The't go artisan is not writing that text for you or i to say aha this is the historical reality because historical reality was not of course to the people who lived through certain times it was important but recording it didn't obey the rules of the gods. Oh, okay. The gods want perfection.

And if you want to be perfect for eternity, you don't represent things as they are. Oh, interesting. Like Instagram. Yes. Okay, something like that. So you've got the Middle Kingdom. Yes.

Do you get a female pharaoh in the Middle Kingdom? You do. So several very powerful war leaders, I guess you could say. So Egypt's military ambitions expand out of Egypt in Dynasty 12. So we've now got to number 12 in the dynasty counting system. So we're talking maybe 1900 to 1700 BC. Okay.

By this point. And that finishes with the last great pyramid complex, that of Amenemhat III, and his is based on Djoser's pyramid complex. That's why I say they're bookending pyramid construction. So after Amenemhat III snuffs it, eventually his daughter becomes pharaoh, and she is the pharaoh.

She is a woman. Pharaoh regnant. And she is ruling, not married to another pharaoh. She's doing it on her own. Wow. Yeah. Cool. And this military ambition, again, it's raids?

It's raids. So it's going north, it's going west, it's going south. Actually, in Manchester Museum, where I work, there's a great account of a chap called Sobek Koo who says he was a soldier under two of these 12th dynasty kings and he talks about taking hands and he talks about you know raiding corpses on the battlefield and being rewarded for it by the king so there's a real sense of pride it's not just him other soldiers boast about i was in the following of the king on essentially a raid into the levant is um is he's in a privileged position are they deciding

how and when to use violence or are there other groups coming in from the levant and raiding the egyptians um the evidence points towards the egyptians doing it for themselves so that's a nice position to be in. You have this bastion defended by sea and desert, and then you occasionally decide you want to leave that space. Ah, but you mentioned bastions there. That's a good point at which to mention these incredible fortresses. And they're building them down towards Nubia,

so in the south towards Sudan. Yeah, because Nubia is the weak, because they can just hop on a boat and come down river, right? So that feels vulnerable. In a sense, but there are cataracts in the river, you know, these massive boulders. But because of the Aswan High Dam being raised in the 1960s, a lot of these sites are flooded now under Lake Nassar.

But the amount of masonry i say masonry mud brick architecture that is lost that has dissolved like an alka seltzer i mean puts the pyramids to shame so you get this sense of stone building in the old kingdom but in the middle kingdom those pyramids the cores of them are made of mud bricks and then these massive flipping fortresses built to the south yeah maybe to just impress the nubians maybe to regulate trade or maybe because there was a real threat yeah exactly where they had to say okay we're gonna have to keep an eye on the the nile traffic interesting and middle runs from let's just quickly get the base you said 1900s 1900s say uh to to 1600 1650 so middle only 300 years or so classical age you know great works of art

great works of jewelry not demeaning it literature um but yeah three or so centuries and what happens at the end of the middles well Well, a bit more decentralisation, but then there is an influx of a non-Egyptian group, the Hyksos. Famous, Hyksos. And they bring, on balance it seems likely,

that they bring horses, which the Egyptians haven't encountered before. Interesting, the old horse. Not the last time it will inflict a catastrophic defeat on a mighty civilisation. So they're coming from coming from we think probably coming from the east yes so up towards what's now

modern turkey yeah so they're they're coming down they're not controlling all of egypt egypt in pockets has egyptian governance but there's a great uh text where one king is complaining about hearing hippos in the distance and this is all a metaphor for non-egyptian control of egypt so ultimately this period is called the second intermediate period you get the hyksos there it's a crucible of conquerors that kind of central asian steppy horse you know it's extraordinary isn't it? Because Egypt, of course, is so fertile. It's such great Arab land. If Egypt doesn't have a central power to defend itself, maybe people just come along and think,

actually, we'd rather graze our herds here, please. Why would you not want to be there? So the Hyksos, but then reestablishment of indigenous rule. Yes. And so this is the secondary unification under another Theban family so the Thebans are doing it yet again modern Luxor a chap called Kamosi his brother son male relative Akmosi they boot out the Hyksos and establish the glorious new kingdom golden age of ancient egypt dynasty 18 and 18 it was the absolute ballers right you've got one like one after the other yeah world class yeah i mean really some

impressive really impressive warriors impressive culture champions impressive uh god kings so akhmosi the first oh well now we think he's Akhmose II. Because we found another Akhmose. But we've got Tuthmosis there, haven't we? Yes, the four kings called Tuthmosis. And we've got Amenhotep. Four of them. Which one's the builder? Well, my favourite Amenhotep is actually Amenhotep II.

Because he is a real kind of playboy prince who becomes a bit of a nasty piece of work when he's the king he's got a love of horses so by this point the military have absorbed that new technology so amanhotep the second we've got a chariot harness finial at manchester museum which may have come from his chariot with his name on it and it it says, fear of him is throughout the lands. So it's one of these kind of threatening statements. He boasts about firing arrows from his chariot into a copper target. So he's a mean piece of work.

And is his son Amenhotep III? No, his grandson is Amenhotep III. Is he the one described as the builder? Yeah, he's a big builder yeah he builds a lot right yeah exactly colossi of memnon that's right are just a fragment of this massive kind of counterpoint to karnak so karnak's on the east amenhotep the third builds this ginormous uh mansion of millions of years one of the most impressive aspects of which was over a thousand stone statues of the goddess sehmet so whether it's turen new york chatsworth house if you've seen

one of those it came from that temple that's cool of amanhotep the third and then you've also got the hatchet suit in that how could we not mention hatchship suits so she is the co-ruler the aunt the stepmother of tutmos the third so this is before amanhotep the third and she rules very successfully as the female pharaoh of egypt for 20 years amazing and her temple we know about and it's beautiful and images again of these expeditions quite far afield to get precious items and trade goods and yeah i, it seems we have this impression, and again, we're looking through a very modern filter at this. It seems that she kind of eschews this idea of military conquest for trading,

explicit trading with Punt, the land of Punt, which may be Horn of Africa area, Eritrea maybe. And she has this incredible expedition that goes off for years and she doesn't know what's happened to them. You know, there's no live feed coming back about what's happened to this massive trading expedition. They build these ships on the Nile Valley,

flat pack them and take them across the desert, build them again on the Red Sea coast. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings.

Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. And sail to Punt and bring her back lots of nice fancy things like panther skins and incense trees very nice yeah

and beautifully recorded on the walls of that temple as well yes so her stepson is Thutmose stepson the Napoleon

of ancient Egypt yeah exactly you're grimacing there but what's he Napoleonising where's he carving out those conquests where's he going

Napoleon is Thutmose III of France. Sorry, of course. But no, it's just a kind of a lazy comparison because I think Thutmose III rules a long time. So he comes to the throne. His father dies. Thutmose II, that's the husband of Hatshepsut,

female pharaoh, dies when Thutmose III is really young, like a toddler young. So that's why she takes over. She steps in and yeah, there's much debate about this. So eventually she disappears from the scene, the historical scene, about 20 years later. Then he goes on to rule for another 30 years and he has lots of military expeditions he builds lots he makes a mark on his own

but I suspect rather than viewing Hatshepsut as a wicked stepmother he views her as a role model and her foreign sorties are viewed very positively actually by Tupelo III Well he'd'd been wise to try and use her as a example then we get on his fourth who is akhenaten and the whole move to amana and changing the religion and that's i mean he's just a whole separate thing yeah yeah tootin carmen's dad tootin carmen's dad maybe his granddad but um yeah i mean this is the the

most unusual episode probably in pharaonic history akhenaten well changes his name for a start and then says right chaps we're going to move the capital city to a god forsaken part god's forsaken part of egypt middle egypt and And he just does things very differently. He looks very weird. He must be quite unpopular because he does like to show himself being surrounded pretty constantly by a military escort.

So you get the sense that people are not entirely chuffed that he's changed the majority of religion. But his revolution experiences a counter-revolution. Tutankhamun comes along and restores the worship of good old Amun, the god of Thebes. So the god of Thebes has been restored.

Then we are into the next few dynasties. We've got some Ramesseses now, do we, coming into the story? They join the chat. Yes, this kind of Arabist new kids on the block. Immediately following Tutankhamunen there's an older statesman there's a general there's a military general a guy called Horemheb

neither of them have any children so they bring on a chap called Ramesses and he has a son and a grandson living so there's a dynasty

already in waiting and so that's dynasty 19 Ramesses the second wham bam thank you Ram is you know by any stretch of the imagination,

he's a pretty mega Egyptian king. Rules for 66 years, over 100 children probably. He's a busy man. He builds lots, lots and lots and lots. And if you go to Egypt today, the royal name, the cartouche, and the oval shape you will encounter most is that of Usur Matra Setep Enra, Ramesses II. And astonishing temples, Ramessium, amazing. Fighting against people in the Levant? Yes, the Hittites. He's most well known for the Battle of Kadesh,

which he fights when he's fairly young. And he says in his numerous accounts of this that he finds himself alone and the other soldiers aren't fighting with him. And he has got to take on the might of this foreign army himself, although he's on foreign land at the time. So there's a real sense of reportage here. You get the sense there was an army scribe

recording something of the military expedition new kingdom comes to an end is it with the persian invasion not so much the persians that's a little bit later um so dynasty 19 comes to an end because again rameses had lived a long time he's succeeded by eventually by his 13th son a guy called merin pata who's fairly old when he comes to the throne you know a child of a an older ruler and the following kings are a bit naff to be frank then along comes a new dynasty ramses the third he gets involved in some fairly threatening, he's repelling, repulsing foreign invasion from Libya, from the Sea Peoples, from various Confederate groups. So he, by some measure, is the last great Egyptian hero king. I think Ramses III.

He's keeping the show on the road. He's keeping the show on the road. What date is he? He's like the 1100s BC. Yeah, the Greeks, unfortunately, are really stepping up at this point. Yeah. Troublesome, troublesome.

Things are, yeah, in the Near East, in the Eastern Mediterranean in general, things are getting complicated. And so the new kingdom ends with Egypt internally facing some kind of socioeconomic strife. There is a strike, the first recorded strike in human history.

The guys who are building the king's tomb down their tools in the reign of Ramses III, he's assassinated by one of his wives who wants to advance the case of her son. And yeah, the new kingdom ends in another decentralised situation in Egypt. so then a few centuries of just sort of decentralization and then the persians or yeah the persians come along um well there are libyan kings who had been settled probably as part of the army part of a kind of mercenary force in

the army taking on the the guise of egyptian pharaohs yes the mantle of kingship is with them the nubian kings right for about a century they're very successful actually they've interesting Are you talking on the guys of Egyptian pharaohs? Yes, the mantle of kingship is with them. The Nubian kings, for about a century, they're very successful, actually. They have interesting foreign relations. And then the Assyrians come along, and they're pretty nasty. They sack Thebes.

We've got an Assyrian helmet at Manchester Museum where it looks like an Egyptian soldier just knocked the helmet off the guy's head. And then eventually, yes, the Persians come along and they rule as dynasty 27. So they style themselves not very convincingly as Egyptian kings. You know, Darius, not that bothered about being an Egyptian king.

Xerxes, last Persian Egyptian king. So is Alexander the Great an Egyptian fairy? What dynasties are? Ah, so he kicks out the Persians. The Persians disappear. There's a moment of indigenous rule. Then the Persians come back and Alexander sweeps in and either he's the invader or he's the liberator of Egypt.

And he is dynasty 31, you could say, before the Ptolemies. And he sets up the Ptolemies. One of his leading generals Ptolemy gets that bit of the empire when it all gets partitioned and quite successful I mean generations of Ptolemies will rule Egypt as Greeks as light-skinned Greek rulers. As Macedonian Greeks I mean the family of course is Egyptian components. It does rule Egypt yeah. Okay okay so they're not like a foreign ruling caste? They are to an extent,

because remember they're based in Alexandria, they're not based in Memphis. They're trying to keep the Memphite or the indigenous priesthood on side, which is a job. But they are probably speaking Greek and dressing like contemporary Hellenistic Macedonian Greeks. Okay. But doing some intermarrying?

Doing some intermarrying, trying to keep an eye on the temples. And it's funny, in the Ptolemaic period, we have more historical accounts for incestuous marriage, infighting, murder,

scheming, revolts, that probably happened before. We just don't know about them because of the nature of the record. And it all kind of comes down to Cleopatra, who attempts to steer a course through the internal politics of the Roman Empire yeah fails to do so in the end and then Egypt becomes a Roman province indeed I mean she's a canny politician to an extent but ultimately as you say that game is lost and battle of Actium

she and Mark Antony die and then Octavian sweeps in, and Egypt becomes, for a few centuries, part of the Roman Empire. She styles herself as a pharaoh, so she's the last. The Roman emperors don't take on the symbol, the regalia of the pharaohs, do they? They do to an extent in some temples.

The thing about Cleopatra is she styles herself in true pharaonic fashion as a living goddess. Okay. And she follows her Ptolemaic forebears in that but i just think other than maybe hadrian the roman emperors are not that bothered about egypt yeah i mean hadrian's an egyptophile and he loves the place he deifies his boyfriend antinous and he ships lots of obelisks back to Rome and that's why more standing obelisks can be found in Rome than in all of Egypt wow and also I my greatest ever trip I've been to the quarry where Hadrian chopped the rock the great granite quarry for the enormous pillars that are now on

outside the pantheon in Rome and you can go to the desert of Egypt and you can see the pillars that have been they've been working on them and put down tools and left them in there abandoned them yeah oh I've not been there oh that's great

let's go anyway thank you I'm at the end of this conversation I've worked out something where I've been in Egypt where you haven't been that's a real buzz for me

thank you so much how can people well they should go and visit the Manchester Museum absolutely we're free just reopened I've been there recently.

You have. It's box office. Hurtling towards a million visitors. So cool. Congratulations. Thanks. All the hard work's paid off. Good to see you, man.

Thank you. you