THE MIDDLE KINGDOM IN EGYPT: INTERNAL HISTORY FROM THE RISE OF THE HERACLEOPOLITANS TO THE DEATH OF AMMENEMES III

Abstract

THE HERACLEOPOLITAN KINGDOM About 2160 b.c. , after several decades of nominal occupancy by the weak rulers of the end of the Sixth Dynasty and the Memphite kinglets of the Seventh and Eighth Dynasties, the throne of Egypt was claimed by Achthoes, the governor of the Twentieth Nome of Upper Egypt, whose city, called by the Egyptians Heneneswe and by the Greeks Heracleopolis , occupied the site of present-day Ihnāsya el-Medīna, on the west side of the Nile, just south of the entrance to the Faiyūm. Assuming the throne-name Meryibre, Achthoes evidently set about imposing his rule upon his fellow nomarchs with such vigour that he has been described by Manetho as ‘behaving more cruelly than his predecessors’ and doing ‘evil to the people of all Egypt’. Though his control of the eastern Delta and its mixed Egyptian and Asiatic population is open to question, he was apparently recognized as king throughout the rest of Egypt as far south as Aswān, where his name has been noted in a rock inscription at the First Cataract. It is by no means certain, as was once thought, that his adherents failed to take over This and the sovereignty of his second successor, Neferkare, seems to have been acknowledged in the three southernmost nomes of Upper Egypt. Elsewhere the names of Achthoes I occur on an openwork bronze vessel from Asyūt, a stronghold of the new regime in the Thirteenth Nome of Upper Egypt, on an ebony staff from Meir in the Fourteenth Nome, and on a fragment of an ivory coffer from El-Lisht, eighteen miles south of Memphis.

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