Ancient Dynasts

This week: the cruelty of monarchy; some notes on Ancient Egypt; and a tech firm ruins the Tube map.

There was half a second, when the news of the King’s illness broke, when I felt almost disappointed. Not because I had been hoping for exactly the sort of long and glorious new Caroline reign which a major health scare of this kind seems likely to preclude, you understand (the man’s 75, this was never going to happen). Instead it was because, when word of breaking news of national importance began to spread, I momentarily wondered if the Prime Minister was pressing the button on an election.

But no, of course not: not quite 17 months into his reign, Charles III has been diagnosed with an as yet-unspecified cancer. At risk of treason – given the scenario in which Rishi Sunak clings onto power until the very last possible day, 28 January 2025, which feels more and more plausible by the hour – it seems possible this terrible fag-end Tory government could become the first in UK history to outlive two monarchs.

Then again, it might not. The sudden announcement, plus his youngest son rushing to his bedside, could mean that the nation should expect the worst. But it might merely mean that the King is going to be off duty for some time, that the Palace know they can’t plausibly hide the fact, and that Harry, Duke of Sussex still – despite the media’s weird insinuations otherwise – loves his dad. It’s pointless to speculate, but there are column inches and rolling news broadcasts to fill, so people are speculating all the same. The I newspaper has found a constitutional expert to claim we are now in a “soft regency”. The Independent has been live-streaming footage of Buckingham Palace, which surely raises questions about whether they understand what cancer actually is. There have also been a load of “what it feels like to be diagnosed with cancer” essays: it does not, you’ll be shocked to learn, feel great.

The whole affair does highlight a strange cruelty of our system for selecting a head of state, however: the heir either inherits young enough to enjoy the job at the cost of losing a parent, or they are hanging around kicking their heels until they’re nearing old age. Charles, after all, is hardly the only Prince of Wales to be well-past his prime by the time he got the job. By the time George IV finally became king, aged 57, he’d spent decades cultivating a reputation for scandal and spending that alienated him from public and parents alike. A century later, Edward VII (inherited age 59) did much the same, shagging actresses and generally pissing about, thus garnering a reputation as a playboy that ruined his relationship with his (admittedly difficult) mother, Queen Victoria. 

Charles, a record-breaking 73 when he came to the throne, comes out rather well by comparison: he may have spent decades writing interfering letters to ministers, but he’s also campaigned for the environment and ended up in a second marriage to a woman he’d transparently loved for half a century. At least medieval princes could burn off some energy by fighting crusades, or the French, or occasionally their own dads: it’s not clear how their modern successors, sometimes waiting decades to come into their inheritance, are supposed to spend their lives. 

There have been a number of moments these last couple of years that have made me to warm to King Charles: the footage of him laughing and joking with Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill, since installed as First Minister of Northern Ireland, and a woman whose entire career has been premised on wanting him gone; that of him greeting then Prime Minister Liz Truss with the words, “Dear, oh dear”. But a big one was the unguarded tears he shed at the Queen’s funeral. This wasn’t merely the King, it was a man who’d just lost his mum. 

It feels a deeply messed up system of government that forces someone to deal with those two ideas at the exact same moment. And if monarchy remains a symbol of a nation deeply divided along lines of wealth and class, it’s arguably cruel to those on the inside of the system, too – even if the speedy medical attention and unimaginable wealth no doubt brings some consolation.

Hey, I have a book coming out! 

You know this by now but I’m going to remind you every week, sorry. This week’s commendation comes from my wonderful Paper Cuts colleague Miranda Sawyer:

Somehow, Jonn Elledge turns geopolitical history into a funny, fascinating and revealing insight not only into the world today but into the frailty and determination of the human spirit. Packed with “I never knew that” information (the sort that you read out to anyone in the room with you), A History Of The World In 47 Borders shows us that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it plays out in weird ways right under our noses. He’s such a lovely writer. A delight from start to finish.

I’m not saying that made me cry but I’m also not saying it didn’t. Every pre-order helps, so you know what to do. 

Anyway, the first essay in the book concerns the unification of Ancient Egypt in 3100 BCE, which brings me to…

Some notes on the dynasties of ancient Egypt

It can be hard to get your head around quite how much Ancient Egyptian history there is. The line of kings and queens of which Charles III is the scion, one of the oldest extant monarchies on Earth, has existed for a little under 1,200 years; but we as a nation apparently find this a bit much, so when teaching it to kids we tend to lop off the first couple of centuries and start in 1066. 

By the time the Normans turned up in Hastings, though, the Egyptians had something like 4,000 years of recorded history behind them. There’s a bit of Egyptian history commonly termed “the late period”, which begins in the 7th century BCE and ends in the 4th when the Greeks arrive. (The Romans are still several centuries off.) It overlaps, in other words, with a fairly early bit of which we would generally term “ancient history”. The late period. 

Understandably, then, those who study all this have tended to break it down into chunks in order to make it legible. And once a system is in place, it can be hard to displace it.

Which is, one assumes, how Ancient Egypt ended up with a system of periodisation that makes little sense, even to the most casual of observers: entire dynasties that probably didn’t exist; others which probably did but are somehow left out entirely.

Basics, first. The history of Ancient Egypt has traditionally been split into 33 dynasties: the first of these is known as the 1st Dynasty, the 4th as the 4th Dynasty, 18th as the 18th Dynasty, all the way up to… well, we’ll be coming back to that. That’s a lot of dynasties to keep track of, so generally speaking Egyptologists divide the history up into broader chunks, too: the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms, periods when the country was powerful and united and everything was basically brilliant providing you were pharoah; and Intermediate Periods, essentially dark ages, periods of division or foreign domination when everything fell to bits. 

The originator of this tripartite division of Egyptian history turns out to be a 19th century German by the magnificent name of Christian Charles Josias von Bunsen, who proposed dividing it up into Altes Reich, Mittleres Reich and Neuese Reiche (old, middle and new empires). But his scheme left no room for intermediate periods, bunged both old and middle kingdoms into the Old Empire, and turned what is known today as the Second Intermediate Period into the Middle One. It took several decades of archaeology and argument to settle on the scheme in use today which is, in any case, a matter of convention, rather than actual, objective reality. 

Image: Wikipedia.

This is probably one reason why different authorities seem to disagree on where the line between these various bits should go. The early dynastic period which precedes the Old Kingdom, for example, includes either the first two dynasties (Wikipedia, History.com) or the first three (Britannica) depending on who you ask. That’s because the moment a civilisation embarks upon a period of greatness is, if anything, even harder to pin down than when it falls (and we all know how hard that can be). The case for starting the Old Kingdom with the 3rd Dynasty, an Egyptologist of my acquaintance tells me, is that this is when the capital moved to Memphis, suggesting a new phase in the country’s development and a shift in the balance of power; the case for the 4th is that this is when it started using that power to get into the pyramid building game in a big way. Ultimately, though, it’s judgement call – or, as my Egyptologist friend says, “It’s all made up anyway”. Great stuff.

It gets worse.