Middle Kingdom of Egypt

And we dated that and we were able to demonstrate that level three was younger than level two.

In other words, the tomb of Osiris thing, which is in level three, we were able to demonstrate that that was added in the Middle Kingdom, which was when they were obsessed with tombs of Osiris.

That was the thing then.

Okay,

There were religious writings, astronomical treatises, scholarly manuals, and texts dealing with sacred geography and temple organizations.

Some material preserved much older compositions, including writings associated with Middle Kingdom tombs.

There was even a work known as the Book of the Temple, describing the architecture of an ideal temple and the duties of its personnel.

So you have this situation where architectural knowledge could be preserved in writing, copied by trained specialists, and transmitted across generations.

And the interesting thing is that they demonstrate astronomical orientation already playing a part in prehistoric Egyptian ceremonial life.

Then you get to the actual Egyptian star clocks, which are extraordinary.

During the Middle Kingdom, the Egyptians produced what are called diagonal star tables.

These survive on coffin lids and consist of organized arrangements of star groups known as decans.

It's all well and good studying these esoteric aspects that are distinct and marvellous and grand, but when it comes down to it, the things we should really be interested in are these people.

Montohotep's reunification of Egypt marked a new beginning, the dawn of what would become known as the Middle Kingdom and the rise of Thebes.

Montohotep made it the new spiritual heart of Egypt.

and it would stay that way for the next 2,000 years.

The first to build at Deir el-Bahri was Monta Hote, the founder of a reunified Egypt.

He was so influential that almost 600 years later, female pharaoh Hatshepsut built her own funerary temple right next door to tap into the religious and political power of her illustrious predecessor.

In the Middle Kingdom, life for ordinary people was on the up.

Food was plentiful.

The University College London collection also confirms that some of these compositions continued to be copied and used long after the Old Kingdom, which means we're looking at a tradition that was deliberately preserved across successive periods of Egyptian history.

But were these teachings restricted to the pharaohs, or did ordinary Egyptians eventually gain access to the same ideas? That's where the coffin texts become particularly important, because during the Middle Kingdom, beginning around 2000 BC, related religious compositions appeared on the coffins of officials and other members of Egyptian society.

The Dutch Egyptologist Adriaan de Buck began publishing his monumental edition of these writings in 1935, eventually documenting an enormous body of material associated with the afterlife.

Some compositions developed from the earlier pyramid texts, while others introduced additional themes, including the transformation of the deceased into different forms and the possibility of reunion with family members beyond death.

And one of the most extraordinary features is something called the Book of Two Ways, discovered on Middle Kingdom coffins from the Deir el-Bursa region.

These compositions contain actual diagrams of routes through the realm of the dead, showing dangerous passages, obstacles, and the ways by which the deceased might reach a blessed existence.

The Egyptologist Leonard Lesko published a major study of the Book of Two Ways in 1972, and Wael Sherbini produced an extensive reassessment in 2017 using original and previously unpublished material.

Just like that at Lowe's.

You know, we have surviving models depicting organized grain storage along with like scribes and workers measuring and recording what was being collected.

One, what's it called? The Middle Kingdom granary model in the...

Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

Ramses are the new kingdom.

Avaris are the middle kingdom, 13th century.

So when Manfred Betak digs up a huge population of Semitic-speaking peoples with Semitic culture living in the city of Avaris for several hundred years, and then, at the end of that period, these Semites all leave, depart with their belongings, and abandon the city.

He says, that to me sounds exactly like Israelites.

They have donkeys, in some cases, that were buried with them.

This is not Egyptian practice.

Kevin Sorbo, because he was part of the documentary Patterns of Evidence, says the only time that the archaeology shows massive numbers of Semites living in ancient Egypt is in the early period around the Middle Kingdom.

And perhaps you've already heard about this, but now we'll go through something called the Hyksos dynasty, the Shepherd Kings dynasty.

The Oxyrhinicus Papyri suggests that Imhotep became a medical demigod during the rule of the 4th Dynasty King Menkaure, a mere 100 years after his death.

Middle Kingdom tombs, such as that of King Inteph, featured verses of the Harper's Song.

Some of these verses contained references to Imhotep and his teachings, illustrating that even royalty revered Imhotep's work sufficiently to want to include it in their funerary rituals.

This cult endured for centuries, with the Turin Papyri illustrating that Imhotep's epithets were increased during the New Kingdom, where he gained the titles of chief scribe, high priest, sage, and son of Ptah, the latter essentially making Imhotep a demigod.