We continue reading the civilized history of Egypt, and we stop today with the third part of the Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt by the Egyptologist Salim Hassan entitled "On the History of the Middle Kingdom and its Civilization and its Relationship to Sudan and the Asian and Arab Countries".
Salim Hassan says in the introduction to this section:
In the summer of 1940, I completed the writing of the first and second parts of the history of ancient Egypt until the Ihnaic era, that is, the Tenth Dynasty. The flood of accidents and the tyranny of catastrophes is to contact the European scientific community, and to glean from their sources what helps me to produce an adequate research, complete, elements and strong causes. And the dreadful specter of war will disappear, and when the swords settled in their sheaths, and the battles of evil went away from the heads and the interrupted reasons for intellectual cooperation were connected, I began to study all the major scientific research about this era and the eleventh family of it in particular, because this family is still despite the efforts of scientists and researchers revealed It needs someone to reveal its historical facts, clear and free from any impurities of conjecture and intuition.
encyclopedia
The prospector’s pick showed us glorious pages in the social, agricultural, religious and industrial life of the people in this period, which we did not enjoy in another era, and for this we published these pages, replacing them with those dry, repetitive and similar facts that deal with kings and their deeds, which we teach our children with some pretentiousness and fabrication.
If you read the letters “Haqqa Nakht” in this book, you will find in front of you a vivid picture of the life of the Egyptian peasant that was hidden from us for nearly four thousand years. And household, agricultural and economic affairs, which makes you stand stunned and confused in front of the cleverness and technical skill that the people have reached, understanding the ways of life, fascination with them, and creativity in mastering them.
And if the Lord of the Sword studied the paintings of the soldier that we presented in this book, he touched in them the strength of war solidarity, mastery of martial arts, and the position of the soldier among his people, and he knew for the first time in the history of the world the value of dogs in wars and the role they played.
All these glosses appear from time to time, and take us by the hand in those dark shadows which interrupted our course when writing in the history of the eleventh dynasty.
In fact, you do not find two authors of our time agreeing on one opinion when writing about the history of this family, and that the greatest amount written in it does not exceed twenty pages, although we have collected here all possible important historical facts about the life of this family, especially the social aspect. We relied on the original sources as much as the circumstances allowed.
As for the Twelfth Dynasty, which is the golden age of eternal Egypt, the researcher in it, despite the gaps he encounters in its history, does not find it difficult for him to know a history that has the order of eras, the series of events, even if its last part has a thin veil of doubt and ambiguity.
The researcher in Egyptian history since its inception notes that the people of Egypt, after the fall of the old state, made their first social revolution against the rich and kings, and demanded social and religious justice, and they got what they wanted; Thus, he scored the first victory of humanity in the field of struggle for personal freedom and equality between him and the brutal rulers, which led to his equality in the world of the afterlife with kings who considered themselves lords, and that heaven is their only shelter. And it was that the Twelfth Dynasty was founded thanks to a just ruler who appears to be from a popular family, but rather from a Nubian (Sudanese) mother. The country proceeded at a wide and rapid pace towards commercial, industrial and artistic progress, and literature flourished in great prosperity, and the victorious conquests began in the north and south, and this was heralding the establishment of an empire It was a great power that soon extended its authority to all parts of the civilized world in the modern state.
The phenomenon that deserves to be recorded here is that the culture that pervaded the country in this era was the product of the Egyptian soil itself, and the Egyptian thinking itself. It did not seek the help of a foreign country, nor did it take anything from others. Its literature, arts, industries, religion, ways of life, and ruling systems trace its ethnicities to a purely Egyptian origin; For this reason, we called this period “the golden age in Egyptian history.”
We have tried in this chapter of the book to present the actions of each king separately, then we interceded with that with a chapter on the origins of the civilization in this era, especially in terms of Egypt’s relations with its neighboring nations, namely Palestine, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon, Anatolia and Libya, then Sudan and its connection with Egypt since the earliest times. Ages that go back to prehistoric times, and we have discussed the emergence of the Egyptian Empire in Asia and the ties that existed between its people and Egypt in the era of the Twelfth Dynasty. The era of the "Middle State" until the Egyptian conquests in this direction reached beyond the third cataract at the hands of "Senusret III" the great conqueror.
We paid more attention to the study of religious life in this era, so we painted its images as we found them on the monuments, and applied what was revealed in the coffins that distinguished this era, especially what came about the world of the afterlife and how the deceased reaches it, and the obstacles and difficulties he encounters trying to repel the deceased from receiving The beloved delusion, and we have explained this in detail, despite the linguistic difficulties in the text, which we have not previously seen. Most of those who work in archeology did not pay attention to this book, which they called “The Book of the Two Paths,” and I devoted it carefully to the great similarities between it and the myths that we read in the story books about heaven and hell, and because it reveals an aspect of the mental aspects of the people, and shows their philosophical perceptions of the world the hereafter
Sun, Aug. 8, 2021
