Page 25 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

The Cities 7

in a people’s revolution and a sack of the palace by looters. Men-
tuhotep II seizes the opportunity and marches north, puts down
the revolution and takes over the government of the whole of
Egypt. He retains Thebes as his capital, and during his reign
and that of his three successors, all called Mentuhotep, an influx
of architects and sculptors from Memphis changes Thebes from a
provincial town to a worthy capital city with the palaces and
temples that befit the state. Mentuhotep III had a minister of
state called Amenemhet who traced his family to the line of

Intefs, and it may be his son, also called Amenemhet, who was
minister of state under Mentuhotep V.
We are now close to 2000 b.c., and it is only a year or two
ago that our laborer heard of the raids into the delta made by
desert tribes both from the east and the west. They coincided
with a popular rising probably, though we do not know, confined
to the delta. Both the invasions and the rising were firmly re­
pressed by the minister of state, Amenemhet. But Amenemhet is
ambitious, and perhaps believes that he belongs to the legiti­

mate line of Intef. From the time when he suppressed the rising
he is the real power in the land and it can only be a question
of time before he deposes Mentuhotep V and declares himself
pharaoh. It is to rumors of dynastic change that the sunrise of
this morning ushers in the Second Millennium b.c.

The sun was already an hour up in the sky over Mesopotamia
when its first rays reached the valley of the Nile. Between the
valley of the Euphrates and the Tigris and that of the Nile lie
eight hundred miles of desert, and only rarely does news of what
is happening in one valley reach the other in less than four or

five months. The workers now going out to the fields of Meso­
potamia know nothing of Amenemhet’s rise to power, and
scarcely anything of life and customs and history in Egypt. They
have their own life and their own traditions.
They too, like the Egyptians, are descendants of the old
farmers. Over four millennia ago the hunters of the foothills to
the east of the valley began to bum off the grass and plant com,
and build their small adobe villages in the north of the land.

They were not the first farmers in the world. That honor must