Seventh and Eighth Dynasties

In the summary of Manetho by Africanus, the Seventh Dynasty consists of seventy pharaohs of Memphis who ruled together for seventy days. Eusebius gives five pharaohs and seventy-five days. No historian takes the figure literally. It reads as a picture of chaos, in which pharaohs came and went so fast that nobody counted them. Most Egyptologists regard the Seventh Dynasty as spurious, that is, as a label that does not correspond to a real family of pharaohs. The pharaohs who do appear in the lists after Netjerkare are therefore usually all put in the Eighth Dynasty.

The best source is the Abydos King List of Seti I, whose entries 40 to 56 cover this time. After Netjerkare it gives short names such as Menkare, Neferkare Neby, Djedkare Shemai, Neferkare Khendu, Merenhor, Nikare, Neferkare Tereru, Qakare Ibi, Neferkauhor and Neferirkare. Many are built on the throne name of Pepi II, Neferkare, perhaps because each new pharaoh wished to borrow the glory of the last great ruler. The Turin Canon would have given the lengths of the reigns, but it is badly damaged here. Of most of these pharaohs we know nothing but a name, and the order of some of them is uncertain.

The pharaohs were probably based at Memphis, but their power reached little further. Provincial governors, the nomarchs, had long been turning their offices into family property, and in these years they ruled their districts almost alone. The pharaohs relied on the nomarchs of Coptos in Upper Egypt, and royal decrees found at Coptos name a pharaoh Neferkauhor as honouring the local family of Shemai and his son Idi with high offices. Scholars describe the state at this time as quasi-feudal. The pharaoh was still the source of all legitimacy, but the real work of government was done in the provinces.

One pharaoh of the period left a monument that can still be seen. Qakare Ibi built a small pyramid at South Saqqara, close to the pyramid of Pepi II. Its chambers are carved with Pyramid Texts, the old spells that ensured the pharaoh's rise to the sky, and so show that the court at Memphis still kept the funerary traditions of the Sixth Dynasty. The Turin Canon gives Ibi two years, one month and one day. It is the only large building of the two dynasties, and it shows both what was kept and how much was lost, because it is far smaller than the pyramids of earlier pharaohs.

Many authors link the fall of the Old Kingdom to a dry spell known as the 4.2-kiloyear event, a change of climate that is dated to about 2200 BCE and affected large parts of the Near East. Egyptian texts from the following decades speak of years of famine. The governor Ankhtifi of Hierakonpolis boasts of feeding his own province while Upper Egypt starved. Some researchers also link the drying of Lake Faiyum about 2200 – 2150 BCE to a drought. But there is no consensus. Others have argued that the Nile floods were not low in these years, and the exact part of climate in the collapse remains debated.

The Eighth Dynasty was overthrown by rivals from Herakleopolis Magna, who founded the Ninth Dynasty. No source from the time describes this change, and scholars still debate whether it was a single coup or a slow loss of ground. Some, such as Papazian, would rather see the Eighth Dynasty as the last stage of the Old Kingdom than as the start of the First Intermediate Period. In the chronology used on this site the Old Kingdom ends in 2118 BCE, and the story continues with Khety I of Herakleopolis and the First Intermediate Period.

The Seventh and Eighth Dynasties are better understood as a time of change than as a list of kings. Their rulers were short-lived, poorly documented and dependent on the provinces, yet they kept the pyramid, the Pyramid Texts and the royal title alive until the end. Anyone who reads the names in the Abydos King List should remember that most of them rest on one line in a list written eight centuries later. The little that is certain shows an old state losing its centre.