Egyptian Middle Kingdom

Politics and institutions

The Middle Kingdom was Egypt reunited. Around 2055 BCE Montuhotep II of Thebes ended the divisions of the First Intermediate Period, beat the Herakleopolitan north and the delta's nomads, and ruled again as king of the Two Lands. His successors of the twelfth dynasty moved the capital north to a new city near the old Memphis, took to naming sons as co-regents so succession never hung in doubt, and rebuilt the state around appointive officials: provincial governors lost their hereditary power, and the king's men — treasurers, overseers, scribes — ran Egypt from center to nomes. Senusret III's reform of the districts stripped the nomarchs of their last privileges, and the tomb biographies of the period's officials, boasting of feeding their people in lean years, record the bargain of service the state offered.

Economy and finance

The Middle Kingdom rebuilt Egypt's prosperity on land and water. The Fayum basin was drained and diked into some of the richest farmland of the Nile valley, the granaries of the state — and the pyramid towns around them — fed a population larger than any before, and mining parties worked the turquoise of Sinai and the gold and amethyst of Nubia. Trade reached outward by land and sea: cedar from Byblos, exotic goods from Punt on the Red Sea, and the produce of Nubia moving north under the eyes of the fortresses. The period's prosperity rested on administration as much as on the flood: registers, ration lists and the granary economy of the co-regencies kept the surplus where the state could spend it.

Society and culture

The Middle Kingdom was Egypt's classical age of letters. The Story of Sinuhe — an official's flight to the Levant and return — and the Instruction for Amenemhat, the murdered king's voice from beyond the grave, were copied in schools for a thousand years; the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant argued justice before the high steward, and the Satire of the Trades ranked every profession below the scribe's. Realism entered the royal face: the portraits of Senusret III show care and age where Old Kingdom kings showed calm. The kings built pyramids again — smaller, with a maze — Amenemhat III's mortuary complex at Hawara was famed in antiquity as the Labyrinth, and the eroded colossi of the Fayum still watch the fields they drained.

Military and frontiers

The Middle Kingdom's wars were wars of position. In Nubia the kings of the twelfth dynasty campaigned yearly, then fixed the frontier at the Second Cataract with a chain of massive fortresses — Buhen, Semna, Uronarti — thick-walled, granaried and garrisoned, the most sophisticated fortifications of the Bronze Age world, built to control the river traffic and the gold. In the Levant the armies of Amenemhat II and Senusret III raided and took tribute toward Shechem and the coast, without conquest. Against Egypt's own south the policy was volume: the fortresses regulated Nubian movement as much as they defended it. When the dynasty's later kings weakened, the forts held the south while the delta, undefended, filled with the Asiatic settlers who would become the Hyksos.

Foreign relations

The Middle Kingdom's diplomacy was trade with a thin crust of force. Byblos was the partner of record: its princes took Egyptian titles and gifts and sent the cedar fleets south, a relationship old enough to be custom. To Punt the state sent expeditions by way of the Red Sea ports, where the harbor works of the period have been excavated. In Nubia the fortress system divided diplomacy from force: caravans passed at controlled crossings, Medjay nomads served as scouts and police, and the gold convoys ran under escort. Toward the Levant the kings preferred tribute to rule. The system's weakness was its northern edge — the delta, where Asiatic settlers and the rising Hyksos dynasty were outside every treaty the Middle Kingdom had learned to write.

Legacy and influence

The Middle Kingdom became Egyptian memory's golden mean. Later Egyptians looked back to it as the age of order — the model the New Kingdom's founders claimed to restore — and its literature stayed in the school curriculum for a thousand years, making Sinuhe's Egypt the standard Egyptian of the scribes. Its fortresses at Semna and Buhen, its Labyrinth at Hawara and its pyramid towns still mark the Nile between Cairo and Wadi Halfa. Its end — the Hyksos takeover of the delta by 1650 BCE and the Second Intermediate Period — was remembered as the fall from order, the trauma against which Egyptian kingship defined itself for the rest of antiquity. As a state form — appointive officials, co-regency, frontier forts — it is Egypt's most complete early model of a centrally administered state.