Old Kingdom Egypt Begins
The Old Kingdom of Egypt, which began around 2700 BCE, was the first great era of centralized royal power in the Nile Valley. Best known as the age of the pyramids, it saw pharaohs rule a unified state as living gods, and it set patterns of kingship, administration, and monumental building that shaped Egyptian civilization for more than two thousand years. The dating is approximate, and scholars place the start anywhere from about 2700 to 2600 BCE depending on how they treat the transition from the preceding period.
The foundations were laid in the Early Dynastic Period, when Upper and Lower Egypt were joined into one kingdom, traditionally credited to a ruler later remembered as Narmer or Menes. By about 3000 BCE the Egyptians had hieroglyphic writing, a royal court, and a tradition of burying elite dead in mudbrick tombs called mastabas. The annual Nile flood gave the country dependable harvests, and the river served as a transport highway, which made it unusually easy for a central government to collect surplus grain and labor. Historians still debate how much of the unification was gradual and how much was conquest.
The new era is usually dated to the Third Dynasty, whose king Djoser built the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, designed by his official Imhotep. Raised in stone rather than mudbrick, it was among the largest stone structures yet built. Later kings refined the form, and in the Fourth Dynasty, Sneferu, Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure built the true pyramids, including the Great Pyramid at Giza, which probably took decades to complete. Evidence from workers' towns near Giza suggests the builders were largely organized laborers who were fed and housed by the state, rather than the slaves of popular imagination.
The pharaoh stood at the top of a bureaucracy of viziers, scribes, and provincial governors who managed taxation, quarrying, and expeditions to obtain materials such as cedar from the Levant and copper and turquoise from Sinai. Religion reinforced royal authority. The king was seen as the earthly embodiment of Horus and, after death, as united with Osiris and the sun god Ra. Pyramid complexes served as tombs and as centers of ongoing cults that supported the king's afterlife. By the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, the Pyramid Texts, the oldest known religious writings in Egypt, were being carved inside royal pyramids.
The Old Kingdom ended around 2200 BCE. Causes likely included the growing wealth and independence of provincial officials, the cost of royal cults, the long reign of Pepi II, and possibly severe droughts and low Nile floods, though the relative weight of these factors is debated. Central authority fragmented into the First Intermediate Period. Yet the Old Kingdom remained a model of order and greatness, and later dynasties looked back to its monuments, art, and ideals of kingship as a golden standard.