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I am new to egyptian studies. I've looked over numerous postings in the archive and have not found any mention related to this topic. Is there one conventional concensus on it or is it yet another topic of debate?
Thank you
Posts: 23 | From: New York | Registered: Oct 2006
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The 32nd dyansty but during the Ptolemies there was a short indepedent rule by a pharaoh in Upper Egypt.
However, the kingslist;anal stones and Manetho all conclude different chronologies and rulers. Nothing is %100 percent conclusive when examining the sources for different rulers in ancient Egypt.
Posts: 8675 | From: Tukuler al~Takruri as Ardo since OCT2014 | Registered: Feb 2003
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The 32nd dyansty but during the Ptolemies there was a short indepedent rule by a pharaoh in Upper Egypt.
I recall this long winded post from you...
quote:Originally posted by ausar: The vast majority of popular books on ancient Egypt say, if they deign to mention it at all, that the last "native" pharaoh was Nectinebo II of the XXX dynasty, who was deposed by the Persians in 343 BC.
These vast majority of books are wrong. The reason for this is quite simple. Most Egyptophiles tend to think that Egyptian history came to an end with the Persian invasion of 343 BC. Alexandria BY Egypt wasn't Alexandria IN Egypt, the Ptolomies were ethnically Greeks anyway and with a few exceptions like Alexander the Great and Cleopatra VII, nothing afterwards really counts.
Christine Hobson, in her book The World of the Paraohs, is typical of this attitude: "The succeeding generations of Ptolomies, and their sister-wives called Cleopatra were benevolent though patronizing towards the native Egyptians..." implying that Egyptian civilization died a slow but peaceful death.
Slow it may have been, but the indigenous Egyptians did not go peacefully into cultural oblivion. They went kicking and screaming all the way to the very end.
A series of native Pharaohs raised the flag of rebellion against Persian and Greek domination, and at one point succeeded in achieving independence for most of the country for about twenty years. Others lasted anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of years and liberated anywhere from a few villages to the entire country.
Some of these leaders should be recognized as genuine pharaohs, and at least one or more new "dynasties" should be set up for them.
Who were these people and why haven't you heard of them before? It's and interesting story...
In the year 344 BC, the Persian army under the command of Shah Artaxerxes III Ochus, smashed into Egypt and after a year of heavy fighting emerged victorious. Pharaoh Nectenebo II grabbed all the treasure his slaves could carry and fled south, setting a rump stated in Edfu where he died in 341.
The Persian Shah began his reign as Paraoh by stabbing to death the sarapis bull, and as one might expect, wasn't very popular among the natives. Ochus wasn't all that popular with the people back home either, and was murdered by his trusty aide Bagoas in 338. Shah-Pharaoh Arses tried to get revenge for his father's death but forgot which cup had the poison in it. His successor was Darius III, a third cousin who was the last male in the family left alive.
The assassination of the hated foreign king inspired the Egyptians to revolt, and in 337, a mysterious prince named Khababash makes his appearance, and by January of 336 had reconquered Upper and Middle Egypt, and by the end of spring liberated the entire country. He was crowned Pharaoh in Memphis in the summer of that year.
For a little under two years Egypt was free and independent, but it was not to last. For in late 335 the Persians under Darius were back and Khabbabash got the cabosh. The third Persian occupation of Egypt would last two and a half years. Alexander the Great was already King of Macedon.
Khabbabash reigned over all of Egypt longer than many other recognized pharaohs did. His reign and decrees were recognized by Ptolemy I Soter in his famous "satrap" stele of 308, yet as far as we know, Manetho didn't. The reason for that has to do with Egyptian politics of the time, who's details we'll never know.
Khabbabash is listed as a pharaoh of sorts by Alberto Carpececi and Nicolas Grimal in their recent books. I would place him in an ephemeral XXXII dynasty of his own lasting from 337 to 335, the Persians being the XXXIst.
But Khabbabash isn't the last "native" pharaoh either. Alexander, his brother and son were the XXXIII dynasty and the Ptolomies the XXXIVth. The XXXV dynasty, which lasted from 207 to 186 BC is the most unloved, disrespected and ignored by egyptophiles of them all. When mentioned at all in popular literature, which is rare, Pharaohs Harmachis (207-199) and Ankmachis (199-186) are referred to in distasteful terms such as "usurper" or by putting the word pharaoh in quotes.
But who were these guys? Where did they come from? How much of Egypt did they rule? How come they've been banished from most histories? What follows is the story of Egypt's forgotten civil war. It is generally agreed that the first of the bad Ptolomies was the fourth, Philopater (r.224-207). Philopater was a man of his time, the Hellenistic age, which was much like the early renaissance over two thousand years later. Both were ruled by men who were homicidal thugs with impeccable taste in art.
This description fit Philopater to a "t". He'd bumped off much of his family, and was at war at all times with Meroë to the south and the Selucid empire to the east, and was very much into over consumption. The historian Polybius says that his reign was a "perpetual festival." "Perpetual festivals" are expensive things, and the ruling class never paid taxes if it could help it. This was the job of the indigenous Egyptian peasants, the Fellahin.
The Greeks had little or no respect for the Fellahin, whom they considered to be filthy barbarians. The Fellahin themselves, after centuries of foreign rule, had little self-esteem. There was a revolutionary literature circulating, tales of Khabbabash and the heroes Inaros and Amyrtaes I, who fought the Persians centuries before and Amytrtaes II, who freed Egypt and founded the short-lived XXVIII dynasty, and the indigenous pharaohs who succeeded him. But those days were over. There was no real hope.
Then history intervened. In 221, Antiochus III, the Selucid King of Asia, decided that Coloe-Syria, (present-day Israel) was rightfully his and announced his intention to "repossess" it. After a year of peace talks had failed, Antiochis attacked. Philopater was in a fix. His crack troops were losing and pretty soon the Selucid army would be banging on the gates of Egypt proper. So he took the desperate chance of arming the Fellahin.
In 217, the Selucids were indeed at the gates. The place was Raphia a few miles to the west of Gaza, and with a 55 thousand strong Greek-Fallahin mixed army and superb generalship, the Egyptians won the day. The Selucids were routed.
The triumph a Raphia was to be an extrodinarily expensive victory. The Fallahin ceased to be passive and grumbled more audibly. Nationalism became more widespread.
Philopater went back to his perpetual festival and spent the rest of his reign whooping it up. Tax rates soared.
By 207, the Fallahin had had enough. In Edfu a fellow with the same name as the newly tonsured high priest at Memphis raised the flag of revolt. From Edfu, the revolution went north, and soon All upper Egypt was in Fallahin hands. Except a brief interval in 199, it was to remain so for twenty years.
Very little is known about this kingdom. There are about 12 known documents and graffiti which survive from the Fallahin side, and a few stele on the Ptolomaic side(One of these latter you may have heard of, it's called the Rosetta Stone). From these and a few ancient historians, the history of the XXXV dynasty goes something like this:
Harmachis (also known as Hugronaphor) raised the flag of revolt at the end of 207. In October of 205, Thebes is captured and he's immediately crowned pharaoh. Abydos, Coptos and several other cities join the new state, and Egypt is divided into two hostile states. Harmachis dies in 199 BC and there is a dispute over the succession. Ptolomaic troops use this termoil to press an attack and temporarily takes back upper Egypt and occupies Thebes. But they can't hold it. A close relative of Harmachis called Ankmachis takes control of Fallahin forces and is declared pharaoh by July or August and by the end of the year the status quo is revived.
But not for long. The Fallahin pressed northwards gaining popular support and by 197 they controlled the east bank of the Nile as far north as the southernmost delta.
What was Philopater doing about all this? He debauched himself to death in 205. His Sister-wife Arsinoe was murdered immediatly afterwards. The deaths were kept secret for about a year until too many people began asking too many questions. Five year old Ptolemy V Epiphanies became pharaoh in 204 with the late queen mother's killers as regents. They were lynched that year and a more legal regency set up.
The OTHER Harmakis, High Priest of Memphis, and himself a Fellahin, knew that a baby king leading a crumbling, discredited monarchy was perfect landscape for a major power grab and that's what he did. The Memphis priesthood began demanding concessions, and they got them, lots and lots of them. They now were practically shadow kings, and as such had a stake in the northern dynasty.
The coincidence of the Southern Pharaoh and the Memphite High priest having the same name has caused some, notably Daniel MacBride, head of the Canadian Institute in Egypt, to suggest that they were one and the same person. While this is a fascinating, especially noting that Dorothy Thompson says in her book Memphis Under the Ptolomies that High Priest Harmachis presided over Epiphanies' coronation. While the idea that the southern Pharaoh didn't die in 199 but was captured during the attack of that year and was later forced to preside over his enemy's 197 coronation is beautifally twisted, it would have been mentioned in all the accounts of the event and it wasn't in any. Pity.
In 197 Lycopolis, in the delta was in Southern hands. Having given massive consessions to the Memphite priesthood and with their full support, the Northern army was able to get the manpower neccessary to defeat the South and save the kingdom. The 13-year-old Epiphanies was coronated at Memphis shortly afterwards
Lower and much of Middle Egypt was in Ptolemaic hands, but Upper Egypt remained stubbernly independant for another nine years. In or around 188, Epiphanies appointed General Conanus generalissimo of Upper Egypt with extrodinary powers and the mission to get rid of Ankmachis and his state once and for all .
This was done in August of 185, and the story of the conquest of Thebes and the arrest of the now ex-pharaoh is told on a stele that survives, but whose text I haven't found yet. The Fallahin would rebel again and again, most notably in 135 and 88, when the Ptolomies came within a whisker of being overthrown. They'd rebel against the Romans too, but that's another story.
The main objections to giving dynastic status to Khabbabash, Harmachis and Ankmachis is that Manetho didn't mention the first, they didn't last long enough and latter two were too late and never actually controlled all of Egypt. All of these objections can be easily answered. As we all know, Manetho listed thirty dynasties in his history. Thirty is a round number with probably some mystical significance. In making up his system, he divided some dynasties, such as the IVth and Vth, which are really one and added a few, like the XIVth and XXIVth, which were merely local potentates with good press agents, or the VIIth (seventy pharaohs for seventy days), which was largely an allegorical fiction.
The XXIVth, for example, controlled only a part of the Nile delta for twelve years and existed completely within the timespan of the XXVth, which predated it by a good twenty years. The XXXVth and the Ptolomies had precisly the same situation, except that the XXXVth dynasty lasted two decades longer.
The time objection is more substantial. Putting aside the VIIth, the shortest dynasty was the XXVIII which lasted only three and a half years, about a year longer than Kabbabash. Here the number thirty is important, because he was first in a series of four unrelated pharaohs (plus two children who reigned a total of a half a year) who succeded each other, Latin American style, between 404 and 380. In order to have an even thirty, instead of 29 or 32, Manetho created the artificial XXIX dynasty. Clearly, he didn't like the idea of minidynasties and was forced by athetics to place Amytrtaes II in a dynasty of his own.
The Persian XXXI dyansty is a modern invention. Manetho put the second occupation of Egypt as part of the XXVIIth, completely ignoring the well documented fact (he had Darius' autobiography available, to him after all) that Cambysus and Darius were unrealated to each other. However, this "all foreigners look the same" idea could be used to make a "dynastic skeleton" of the last centuries of the preroman era which would fit the facts and do justice to all those heroic revolutionaries who failed to dislodge "foreign" rule:
XXXI: Persians 343-323 XXXII: Macedonians (Alexander's family, the Ptolomies, and the Selucid Antiochus IV Epiphanies, who was Pharaoh for a few months in 169-168) 323-30
XXXIII: Indegenes (Khabaabash, Harmachis, Ankmachis, Dionysius Peroserepis, who liberated much of upper Egypt in 165, Harsiesis, who did the same for a couple of years around 132, and other occasional rebels.) 337-80
Had they lived a couple of centuries earlier Harmakis and Ankmachis would have undoubtably have been recognized as legit. It's about time they were, for they were the last genuine indiginous rulers Egypt would have until Gamel Abdul Nasser, over two thousand years later. They were truly the last of their kind.
I'm formulating some more questions relevant to this topic. But first I had to have this clarification. In light of your response, some of my questions may be premature so I must reasses. Thank you.
Posts: 23 | From: New York | Registered: Oct 2006
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Thanks, Supercar! Just what I needed. Too bad I have to go to bed right now. I'll be back...
Posts: 23 | From: New York | Registered: Oct 2006
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