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Ancient Egyptian Imperialism



Ellen Morris









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This book is dedicated to Sev and Jules with love and gratitude.

Acknowledgments

Chapters of this book have been written in many different places. I would like to express my gratitude to the curators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I held a Jane and Morgan Whitney Art History Fellowship in 2008–2009. Special thanks are due to Dorothea Arnold, Diana Craig Patch, and Janice Kamrin. Chapters for the book were also written while I was employed at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, and I am particularly grateful to Roger Bagnall and Chuck Jones for their support. I would also like to thank Michael Brown and Laura Holt—the latter of whom worked many miracles obtaining particularly tricky interlibrary loans during the time I spent resident at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe. My former student and research assistant, Rachel Kronberg, was also a great help to me that year on this and other projects. Finally, I am deeply appreciative of the support of my colleagues in the Department of Classics at Barnard College and at Columbia University, especially Helene Foley, Kristina Milnor, Nancy Worman, and John Ma. Meredith Wisner, Barnard’s resident expert on permissions, also provided valuable assistance in the final stages of preparing the images.

In terms of individual scholars and friends, Josef and Jennifer Wegner have been very generous in sharing information on their research and also in granting me rights to utilize their detailed illustration of the scene from Meryre II’s tomb that is discussed in the Epilogue. I am also extremely grateful to Georges Soukiassian, Clara Jeuthe, Julia Budka, Amihai Mazar, and Tony Mills for permission to utilize up‐to‐date plans of their excavations as well as to Franck Monnier for allowing me to publish his illustration of Aniba. My thanks are also due to Stuart Tyson Smith, Jeff Blakely, Amihai Mazar, Julia Budka, Vincent Francigny, Nadine Moeller, Jana Mynářová, Aaron Burke, James Hoffmeier, Lindsey Weglarz, Jacob Damm, Tony Mills, Colin Hope, Olaf Kaper, Laurent Bavay, and to numerous other scholars who have shared their insights and the results of their investigations into Egypt’s imperial endeavors with me. The main challenge in writing this book has been keeping up with all of the recent excavations and re‐examinations of Egypt’s imperial past. The amount of new work published within the past few years alone is both daunting and exciting, and I hope that I have done at least some of it justice.

Finally, I appreciate the thoughtful commentary of three anonymous reviewers and also the graduate student participants in Egypt and the Outside World, a seminar at UCLA taught by Kara Cooney, who all read and commented on an earlier draft of this manuscript. Participants in the seminar were Danielle Candelora, Nadia Ben‐Marzouk, Carolyn Arbuckle MacLeod, Jordan Galczynski, Jeffrey Newman, Marissa Stevens, Luke Brenig, Vera Rondano, Rose Campbell, and Michael Moore. I look forward to enjoying the work of these scholars in the years to come.

Most directly responsible for the success of this project are Haze Humbert and Janani Govindankutty, my editor and project editor at John Wiley & Sons, to whom I owe a great deal of thanks for their skill and patience. Finally, I am deeply grateful to Severin Fowles, whose love, support, artistic ability, and various areas of expertise I have drawn upon throughout this project, as well as to Andrew Miller and my parents (Dee Morris, Wendy Deutelbaum, and David Morris), who read over the page proofs and helped me see the text with new eyes. The encouragement of a great many more family, friends, and colleagues, was crucial and, moreover, much appreciated!

Chronology of Ancient Egypt

Late Predynastic (Nagada II) Period 3500–3200
Protodynastic (Nagada III) Period 3200–3000
Early Dynastic Period (Dynasties 1–2) 3000–2686
 First Dynasty 3000–2890
 Second Dynasty 2890–2686
Old Kingdom (Dynasties 3–6) 2686–2160
 Third Dynasty 2686–2613
 Fourth Dynasty 2613–2494
 Fifth Dynasty 2494–2345
 Sixth Dynasty 2345–2181
First Intermediate Period 2181–2055
 Seventh and Eighth Dynasties 2180–2160
 Ninth and Tenth Dynasties 2160–2025
 Early Eleventh Dynasty 2125–2055
Middle Kingdom 2055–1650
 Late Eleventh Dynasty 2055–1985
 Twelfth Dynasty 1985–1773
 Thirteenth Dynasty 1773–after 1650
 Fourteenth Dynasty 1773–1650
Second Intermediate Period 1650–1550
 Fifteenth Dynasty 1650–1550
 Sixteenth Dynasty 1650–1580
 Seventeenth Dynasty 1580–1550
New Kingdom 1550–1069
 Eighteenth Dynasty 1550–1295
 Nineteenth Dynasty 1295–1186
 Twentieth Dynasty 1186–1069

Introduction

Every book has its germ of inspiration, which, mostly, long precedes its publication date. In the case of this book, I trace the idea back to the winter semester of 2003, when I taught a class titled State and Empire in the Ancient Near East at the University of Michigan. Between the first meeting and the final exam, the American government had rattled its saber at Saddam Hussein, scrambled for allies, declared war, arguably shocked and awed its opposing army, declared “mission accomplished,” and installed its second American governor.

Although I appreciate the numerous ways in which global media coverage, smart bombs, corporate interests, and other facets of modernity have transformed the practices of war in the past 3500 years, what struck me repeatedly as I covered the empires of the Hittites, the Assyrians, and the Persians, was how much remained fundamentally recognizable. As I lectured on the elaborate lengths to which the Hittites and the Assyrians would typically go to assemble allied forces1 and to justify their casus belli before their enemies and their gods,2 the American government spent January, February, and much of March mounting a case for war before the United Nations and assembling a Coalition of the Willing. The Hittites and Assyrians both likewise anticipated the American PSYOP (psychological operations) campaigns of aerial leaflet distribution over Iraq by yelling up exhortations directly to the people who peered down from besieged city walls, urging them to abandon loyalty to their ruler.3

As the specter of war loomed closer, the Americans bargained long and hard, though eventually to no avail, to be allowed to invade northern Iraq from Turkish soil. This proposed point of entry was the same as Mursili I of Hatti had employed to demolish Babylon in 1595 BCE, a pyrrhic victory that the king did not long survive. Indeed, in the centuries that followed, this ancient road would be the main highway traveled—now in the opposite direction—by countless Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian armies looking to extend their influence into lands formerly under Hittite sovereignty.

In mid‐March, after a final ultimatum of the type typically offered by the Hittites and Assyrians to rival rulers,4 the Americans declared war and attempted—via a spectacular display of power—to cow Saddam Hussein’s forces into submission. While the United States deployed 1,700 air sorties in order to induce feelings of hopelessness among Iraqi soldiers, the ancient imperialists mustered massive armies against city‐states, obliterated as much as possible of their enemy’s agricultural and industrial wealth, and liberally applied the most gruesome of terror tactics. Of his attack on the fortified city of Tela, for example, Ashurnasirpal II records:

In strife and conflict I besieged (and) conquered the city. I felled 3,000 of their fighting men with the sword. I carried off prisoners, possessions, oxen, (and) cattle from them. I burnt many captives from them. I captured many troops alive: from some I cut off their arms (and) hands; from others I cut off their noses, ears, (and) extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I made one pile of the living (and) one of heads. I hung their heads on trees around the city. I burnt their adolescent boys (and) girls. I razed, destroyed, burnt, (and) consumed the city.5

Such displays were far in excess of the effort necessary to achieve a military victory and clearly were designed to communicate the message that resistance was, and always would be, futile.

Assyrian campaigns, at least those recorded in the official annals, by and large achieved the same quick blush of (often ephemeral) success as met the Americans. In the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the country was to be governed by an American, just as the rulers of the Hittites, Assyrians, and Persians had once sent members of their own inner courts to administer areas deemed too politically unstable to rule themselves in a manner acceptable to imperial interests. By term’s end, then, our class had witnessed a drama that in many essential facets had been playing out in the same geographical region for millennia. But such dynamics are not tied to place.

Imperialism in Ancient Egypt

While I am fascinated by the structure and trajectory of empires generally, my area of expertise and special interest is pharaonic Egypt. Many of the same issues I explored with my class in 2003, therefore, brought Egypt to mind as well. At various points in its expansive history, Egypt exercised dominion over a heterogeneous assortment of polities and people (from Nilotic villages, to “kingdoms” based in mountain strongholds, to cosmopolitan port cities, to the arid haunts and oases frequented by Bedouin). The many examples of Egypt’s experimentation with empire remain largely unknown to scholars interested in the comparative studies of imperial systems, although the work of individuals such as Barry Kemp, Stuart Tyson Smith, Robert Morkot, Bruce Trigger, W. Paul van Pelt, and a handful of others who have published in cross‐disciplinary venues has done much to remedy this situation. In general, however, it may be safely stated that Egyptologists tend to write for other Egyptologists and for specialists in the ancient Near East when undertaking the crucial work of analyzing particular campaigns, archives, or excavations.

My own contribution to the study of Egyptian imperialism can easily be enfolded into this last critique. The question I pose in my book The Architecture of Imperialism: Military Bases and the Evolution of Foreign Policy in Egypt’s New Kingdom is big: namely, how do Egypt’s military bases, as they evolved over the course of the New Kingdom, enlighten shifts in its imperial priorities? Yet the great mass of data brought to bear on this question limits its readership to scholars already invested in regional specifics. It is a pleasure, then, to step back and to craft a book with a much wider focus for a more diverse audience. As its title implies, Ancient Egyptian Imperialism is intended to interest equally readers for whom Egypt is the main attraction and also those whose curiosity is piqued primarily by investigations into grand strategy, low‐level insurgencies, back‐room deals, and all the internal complexities of empire. It seeks therefore to explore not only the actions of empires but also—just as importantly—the reactions to them, divergent as these often are.

This book is organized around central imperial themes, each of which is explored in depth at a particular place and time in Egypt’s history. Chapter 1, “Trade Before Empire; Empire Before the State,” takes as its premise that strong parallels can be drawn between the formation of Egypt’s first unified government and the country’s later imperial interventions. Escalating tensions between regional centers in Upper Egypt in late prehistory (c. 3500–3200),6 for example, led to an elite preoccupation with obtaining exotic goods in order to express power and to augment it. Just as trade proceeded, prompted, and facilitated empire in the colonial scramble for Africa, so expeditions to the north and south assumed a much more martial character just prior to the advent of the First Dynasty, when the political unification of the state was unambiguously accomplished. Within the Nile Valley and in southern Canaan, Protodynastic and Early Dynastic (c. 3200–2686) efforts were made to eliminate middlemen, to regularize extraction, and to co‐opt resources, just as would be accomplished later when Egypt’s frontiers were farther flung. This early internal colonization, then, which sought to harness the resources of a newly defined nation‐state for the benefit of its ruling elite, not only provided a backbone for the pharaonic state; it also created a foundational template for the expansion and consolidation of political power.

Chapter 2, “Settler Colonialism,” traces another imperial project, this time undertaken at the end of the Old Kingdom in the late Fifth and Sixth Dynasties (c. 2400–2181). At this time Egyptian settlers were drawn in large numbers to a remote oasis in Egypt’s Western Desert. Motivations for this venture are difficult to decipher. Large‐scale settlement certainly followed initial explorations for minerals and other resources. Dakhla’s special allure at this juncture, however, may have been due to the combined effect of a string of perilously low floods in the Nile Valley (likely decreasing agricultural profits and putting pressure on individual farmers) and the rise of increasingly ambitious rulers in Lower Nubia (whose internal conflicts and ambivalent relations with Egypt threatened the profitability of state‐sponsored trading ventures). These dual factors provided strong economic incentives for potential settlers to farm oasis land and for the central government to exploit desert routes to Nubia. This chapter discusses what is presently known about the evolution and nature of this state‐sanctioned settlement as well as the relations between the Egyptian colonists and the indigenous inhabitants of Dakhla Oasis.

Egypt’s Middle Kingdom (c. 1985–1650) occupation of Lower Nubia and the legacy thereof is the subject of Chapters 3 and 4. “Military Occupation” explores how Twelfth‐Dynasty pharaohs attempted to assure themselves unfettered access to highly valued Nubian resources (such as gold, valuable stones and minerals, as well as sub‐Saharan trade goods) by erecting a series of massive mud‐brick fortresses in Lower Nubia, each of which was at first staffed primarily by rotating garrisons. Throughout the Twelfth Dynasty, archaeological and textual evidence suggests that the Egyptian and the riparian Nubian population kept their interactions to a minimum, perhaps due to mutual enmity. As has been noted by various scholars, conquered populations for whom armed resistance is not an option often practice aggressive boundary maintenance. Evidence from this period in Nubia’s history is thus brought into dialogue with Britain’s ultimately unsuccessful efforts in the early portion of the twentieth century CE to lure the largely pastoralist population of occupied Sudan into abetting their own subjugation.

In the early Thirteenth Dynasty (c. 1773–1650), due to worsening economic conditions in Egypt’s core, imperial soldiers began to settle permanently in the Nubian fortresses and to engage in a much more collaborative manner with the surrounding communities. When the state finally collapsed during the Second Intermediate period (c. 1650–1550), Egyptian and Nubian interactions intensified further, and the former occupiers even unabashedly switched loyalties to the Nubian kingdom of Kush! Chapter 4, “Transculturation, Collaboration, Colonization,” follows this initial cultural détente between Egyptian and Nubian communities to a point in the mid‐Eighteenth Dynasty (c. 1450), at which time pharaonic armies had reconquered and secured their hold on the region. The inhabitants of Lower Nubia had of their own accord selectively adopted aspects of Egypt’s material culture, and this process intensified markedly post‐conquest, such that in the absence of strong contextual clues it is extremely difficult to distinguish “Egyptians” from “Nubians” north of the Third Cataract.

Chapter 4, thus, considers two important factors in the turn toward the expression of an apparent Egyptian identity in New Kingdom Nubia. The first is the well‐attested practice on frontiers and in colonial settings of men from the imperial culture and local women raising families together that are culturally neither “his” nor “hers.” As generations progress, bicultural families often curate socially significant aspects of their paternal heritage, while continuing to embrace aspects of a more deeply rooted local culture, such as foodways, that tend to be passed down through the maternal line—a dynamic that highlights the vital importance of gender in any nuanced discussion of empire. By virtue of sustained interaction and transculturation, ethnically mixed communities not only forge a hybrid that is all their own but also retain the ability to deploy aspects of their dual heritage strategically. Thus, in the Second Intermediate period, Nubio‐Egyptians might highlight their indigenous identity when seeking to interact with Nubian neighbors and with the Kerman forces that controlled their land. Descendants of the same community, however, seem to have played up their status as Egyptians‐by‐descent when pharaonic armies once again reasserted their dominance.

The second factor in such a seeming switch of cultural allegiance in the New Kingdom is the effect of imperial policies for promotion—policies dictating that individuals could only rise in the new regime if they shed outward signs of their indigeneity and, presumably, encouraged their family to do likewise. This process, well attested in Ptolemaic Egypt among other colonial situations, results in the rather ironic situation that the more indigenous a local leadership becomes under colonial rule, the less indigenous it looks. Neither abandoned nor forgotten, traditional material signatures typically become for a time far less visible.

Chapter 5 shifts northward in space and back slightly in time to the very beginnings of Egypt’s New Kingdom empire in Syria‐Palestine (c. 1550). “Motivation, Intimidation, Enticement” argues that Egypt’s empire wasn’t envisioned at its origins. After Theban rulers succeeded in defeating and expelling the Syro‐Palestinians who had dominated the Delta during the Second Intermediate period, they launched a series of pre‐emptive strikes to protect their realm. The lucrative nature of the booty, the relative ease with which Egypt could extend its area of influence, and the seduction of international power, it is argued, were unexpected and exciting. Once the Egyptians decided not to retreat back behind their borders but rather to keep control, however, they needed to rely on methods other than brute force. Increasingly included in their imperial arsenal, then, were veiled threats, deft diplomacy, and even outright bribery. Despite these efforts at incentivizing collaboration, Egypt’s empire in the early Eighteenth Dynasty remained essentially informal and, as such, inherently unstable.

Rulers like Pachacuti, Gengis Khan, Shaka Zulu, and Qin Shi Huang are primarily famous for their radical reorganizations of army, infrastructure, and empire. The keystone of any successful empire, of course, is the creation of an efficient infrastructure that allows people, goods, and information to travel from the peripheries to the core (and vice versa) with maximum speed and safety. The reforms of these rulers and those of Thutmose III (c. 1479–1425)—their Egyptian counterpart—helped extend and stabilize their conquests. Under Thutmose III’s watch, the Egyptian empire was transformed from an intermittent smash‐and‐grab operation to an efficient and predictable machine. Thutmose’s reforms—the subject of the sixth chapter, “Organization and Infrastructure”—aimed to naturalize Egypt’s control, facilitate resource extraction, reliably provision armies and imperial functionaries, and ensure that local rulers internalized early on a healthy dose of Egyptian ideology, such that they would accept their new status as mayors (rather than kings). With the aid of imperial tutelage and infrastructure, the pharaoh intended that locals, with limited oversight, would administer their country for the twin benefits of Egypt’s revenue and reputation.

Chapter 7, “Outwitting the State,” argues the perhaps unsurprising point that Egypt’s vassals had no desire to run their realms for Egypt’s benefit. Nor did the population of Syria‐Palestine necessarily appreciate the extra overlay of extraction. An archive of diplomatic correspondence, unearthed at the city of Amarna in Egypt and covering roughly three decades (c. 1362–1332), offers an invaluable glimpse into the ways that the region’s inhabitants and vassals managed to subvert Egypt’s authority. From the reports of vassals, we learn that disaffected subjects did not hesitate to stage coups against rulers they felt were too tightly intertwined with imperial interests. Others simply voted with their feet, heading for mountainous zones where everyone knew Egypt’s armies were loath to tread. If situated in the contested border zone between rival powers, vassals had the unique opportunity—and one that they routinely took advantage of—to play one great power against another. Even for those closer to the core, however, it was still possible to “safeguard” Egyptian stores in the absence of an Egyptian official, to employ dissimulation to mask seditious acts, and to impugn one’s rivals such that imperial armies might be manipulated into acting against them.

Perhaps because the many loopholes that locals could utilize to exploit the system had become increasingly apparent over time, the Egyptians again restructured their system of governance at the very end of the Eighteenth Dynasty or the beginning of the Nineteenth (c. 1300). Chapter 8, “Conversions and Contractions in Egypt’s Northern Empire,” focuses on the manner in which Egypt intensified its presence in the heart of its territory, thereby rendering it much more visible to Canaanites and archaeologists alike. As part of this strategic conversion, the pharaonic state created purpose‐built bases stocked with many of the comforts of home. Egyptians stationed abroad could live in an Egyptian‐style dwelling, eat Nilotic fish, savor the taste of geese, and drink “Egyptian” beer from Egyptian‐style jars. The more pious and patriotic among them could also, increasingly, worship Amun and his close associate, the divine king, in an Egyptian‐affiliated temple. At such temples, too, Canaanites were evidently encouraged to deliver taxes to Amun, although locals may have greeted this particular reform in religio‐economic practice with muted enthusiasm. Indeed, the notion of discrepant experiences of empire, especially with regard to the co‐existing highs and lows in prosperity observed in the most securely held areas of Egypt’s northern empire at this time, is crucial to the chapter’s project. Considerations of contractions—both of foreign mercenaries to staff Egyptian bases and, in another sense, of the sphere of Egypt’s effective control in the decades following the death of Ramesses III—round out these meditations on the country’s northern empire.

The final chapter, “Conversions and Contractions in Egypt’s Southern Empire,” redirects focus southward again to Egyptian‐held Nubia. While Chapter 4 already considered numerous conversions—of soldiers to settlers, troop commanders to mayors, and Nubian rulers to Egyptian‐style nobles—this chapter considers two further fundamental changes wrought by Egyptian imperialism. First, when Egypt extended its authority into Upper Nubia at the beginning of the New Kingdom, it chose not to emulate the fortress system by which its Middle Kingdom predecessors had governed Lower Nubia. Rather, it sponsored the building of a number of lightly fortified Egyptian‐style towns, each of which possessed a temple at its heart. Such administrative temple‐towns, it must have been believed, would not only attract Egyptian settlers but would also encourage Nubians from this previously unconquered region to move into them and thereby to settle into an Egyptian pattern of life.

Not surprisingly, given the nature of the towns, the New Kingdom imperial government also oversaw a number of conversions in the sphere of religion. For instance, in the south especially they strategically altered the visage of the god Amun into a ram‐headed manifestation, likely intended to attract the devotion of Nubians. With similar intent, the Egyptian government re‐envisioned a prominent—and no doubt spiritually significant—mountain as the heart of a complex dedicated to Amun’s worship. Finally, in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties especially, they constructed massive stone‐built temples throughout Nubia in an effort to convert the southernmost portion of the empire into a temple‐based economy capable of subsidizing a variety of extractive enterprises. Scattered evidence suggests, however, that many of these temples may have been administered by Nubians, both in order to secure the loyalty of prominent families and also in acknowledgment of the fact that the “Egyptian” administration in Nubia was increasingly Nubian. Such incorporation of influential Nubians into Amun’s cult no doubt accounts for the fact that the god’s reign in Nubia far outlasted that of Egypt’s New Kingdom pharaohs.

The contractions noted in the chapter’s title refer not only to the progressive diminishments of the territory over which Egypt claimed dominance, but also metaphorically to the contractions that herald a birth. As Egypt’s control in the region became ever more precarious at the very end of the Twentieth Dynasty, Nubians seemed to become increasingly invested in resuscitating elements of their traditional material culture. This trend intensified after Egypt ceded control completely, and it resulted finally in the birth of a powerful Nubian kingdom based at Napata, the site of the aforementioned holy mountain. In legitimizing their own expanding empire, these new indigenous rulers drew quite deliberately upon both Nubian and Egyptian models. Indeed, fittingly enough, it was none other than the divine, ram‐headed Amun who would give his blessing to Nubia’s invasion and annexation of Egypt (c. 730). An investigation of imperial conquests both by Egypt and of Egypt could, of course, go on well into modern times. The end of this book is not the end of the story. It is but a preface.

Ancient Egyptian Imperialism and its Project

Political scientists, anthropologists, and comparative historians have added immeasurably to our understandings of empire, crafting models and charts that claim (with varying degrees of success) to fashion order out of chaos and find method in madness. This book is indebted to the insights of these theorists and draws upon their work throughout. The creation and/or reification of classificatory schemes, however, is not an end goal of this work. Empires, like sharks, must swim or die, and as such, I would argue, constitute moving targets. These predatory beasts are difficult to classify, not only because they adjust their tactics rapidly in response to challenges to their authority, but also because even the very same empire at the very same period may look quite different in its various nooks and crannies. As Sue Alcock has cogently observed:

…to manufacture a rigid typology into which any individual empire slots neatly is neither feasible nor desirable, for more often than not all of the above strategies are to be seen at work in one and the same empire, operating in different locations.… There is the additional complication that these different strategies could be implemented at different stages in the rise or decline of an empire.… Imperial systems are nothing if not dynamic in nature.7

Neither uniformly “direct” nor “indirect” in their rule, Egypt’s empires most often combined aspects of multiple—often seemingly contradictory—organizational models, because what worked well in some contexts failed abysmally in others.

Empires are complex entities, and I am interested in the experimental nature of imperialism—how a whole host of variables affected decisions regarding the structure of government. A jostling crowd of related questions thus vies for attention. How, for instance, did the goals at the outset of empire change over time in dialogue with the responses of individual peoples and with unforeseen logistical challenges? What pre‐existing political structures (and infrastructures) were to be found in a given region, and how did their presence influence choices made and policies implemented? What pushback or support did imperial administrators receive in various regions? Did factional schisms in dominated peripheries or in central administrations influence imperial decisions and trajectories? What experiments failed (from the perspective of either the ruler or the ruled), and how did these failures influence subsequent decisions? How often and to what degree did imperial blueprints undergo revisions, and when did it happen that they were scrapped entirely? What factors, it is crucial to ask, accounted most fundamentally for the discrepant experiences of empire?

Throughout this work analogies are drawn to tactics employed by imperial governments and by dominated peoples in a wide variety of historically documented empires, both old world and new. These comparative examples are not intended to obscure vital differences that distinguish one society and situation from another. Rather, I draw upon these comparisons especially when the rationale behind a given choice is more clearly explicated than it is in Egypt’s own empire and when it adds extra nuance or perspective to the discussion. These comparative examples are good to think with. They likewise help combat any notions either of Egyptian exceptionalism or that the somewhat small scale of Egypt’s expansionary efforts (by comparison perhaps to those of Assyria, Persia, or Rome) would disqualify it from the status of empire. Critiqued often for its insularity, Egyptology stands to benefit from attending to contemporary dialogues. As should be evident, however, it also has a vast amount to contribute to such conversations. It is in the spirit of abetting such disciplinary cross‐fertilization, then, that Ancient Egyptian Imperialism is offered.

Notes