Scope: Here we will see four very brief dynasties—Egypt’s last gasp at expelling foreigners ruling their country. This was the Third Intermediate Period. In the end Egypt’s last native ruler, Nectanebo II, was forced to flee into Nubia. Egypt’s glory was over.
Outline
I. Dynasty XXVIII had only one king, and he wasn’t much. Amyrtaeus (404-399 BC) was a prince at Sais who declared himself king, but little is known ofhim.
II. Dynasty XXIX (399-380 BC) moved the capital from Sais to Mendes, also in the Delta. There were only two kings.
A. Nepherites I ruled for six years (399-393 BC).
B. Achoris (393-380 BC) was the second and last ruler of the dynasty.
III. Dynasty XXX (380-343 BC) contained the last native rulers of Egypt.
A. Nectanebo I (380-362 BC) ousted Achoris’s son and declared himself king.
1. Combined Greek and Persian forces entered Egypt during the Nile’s inundation, and Nectanebo repelled them. But the Greeks and Persians, it turned out, didn’t trust each other very much.
2. Nectanebo reconstructed several temples.
3. He built his own kiosk, or small temple, on Philae.
B. Djedhor (Teos) (362-360 BC) was the son and successor of Nectanebo.
1. While he was out of the country, his son declared his own son (Djedhor’s grandson) pharaoh.
2. Djedhor fled the country.
C. Nectanebo II (360-343 BC) was the grandson of Djedhor. He hired 20,000 Greek mercenaries to fight the Persians at Pelusium—but lost.
D. Nectanebo erected a shrine to the Dog Star, which rose in July when the Nile did. The Egyptian calendar was important; in fact, our own calendar derives from it.
1. There were three seasons: inundation, emergence, and the dry season.
2. Each season had four months, and each month had three weeks of ten days each, yielding 360 days. To synchronize the calendar with the solar year, the Egyptians added five days, dedicated to feasting and the gods.
E. Nectanebo’s basalt sarcophagus, now in the British Museum, was found in Alexandria.
F. Nectanebo fled to Nubia and disappeared from history. A medieval “Alexander Romance” says Nectanebo fled to the Macedonian court as an Egyptian magician, bedded Olympias (Philip II’s wife), and thus was the father of Alexander the Great. (Alexander was Egyptian!)
IV. Dynasty XXXI (343-332 BC) was the second Persian period.
A. Artaxerxes III (343-338 BC) took command.
1. Temples were sacked, sacred bulls slain, treasures robbed.
2. An absentee king, he was poisoned in Susa.
B. Arses (338-336 BC) was another absentee king. He too was murdered, as seems to have been the tradition in Persia.
C. Darius III (336-332 BC) was the last of the dynasty. His satrap, Mazaeus, opened the gates of the kingdom to Alexander the Great (323 BC).
V. The death of Nectanebo II, the last native ruler of Egypt, was, in a sense, the end of the greatest civilization the world has ever known.
A. The pharaoh, the military, and religion were supposed to be maintained in balance. After the intermediate periods of confusion, the people always returned to the pharaohs for stability.
B. Egypt’s history is defined by the pharaohs. We can trace their “book of the dead” over 3,000 years of history.
1. Pyramid texts were the first form of this “book.” After the First Intermediate Period, the pyramids were robbed and left open for all to see.
2. The coffin texts were the commoners’ version of the pyramid texts, literally written on their own coffins. By the Middle Kingdom, commoners had adopted the same texts as the pharaohs.
3. When all the spells wouldn’t fit on the coffins, they wrote them on papyrus and placed them inside. This is what we know as the Book of the Dead, the culmination of the pyramid and coffin texts.
C. The gods of this culture were constant, worshipped for thousands of years.
D. The priests, the largest bureaucracy in the world, would soon give way to the Greeks, determined to run Egypt like a business. As Greek became the language of business, the ancient language and the hieroglyphs slowly died.
Essential Reading:
Aidan Dodson, Monarchs of the Nile, Chapter XVIII.
Supplementary Reading:
Peter A. Clayton, Chronicle of the Pharaohs, pp. 201, 205.
Questions to Consider:
1. Who is the last native ruler of Egypt?
2. What were some of the factors that contributed to Egypt’s final decline?