Abstract

The Ramesside period saw the contraction of Egypt’s hegemony in the ancient Mediterranean, extraordinary economic contraction and lessening monumental production, and generations of mass migrations, destabilizing Egypt. The period followed Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty, an apex of steady growth, consistent wealth, and high-quality artistic production under able and well-known kings to whom the Ramesside period kings are often compared to their detriment. Should one view the Ramesside period in a different way? Ramesside kings witnessed a steady decline of authority, experiencing palace infighting so intense that it resulted in two civil wars. This period was also punctuated by one of the most devastating social and global apocalypses the Mediterranean and ancient Near East had ever known—the Bronze Age collapse. The fall of the Twentieth Dynasty was part of a larger crisis in economic, political, and climatic systems, not a miscalculation of one or two dynastic families. When the Ramesside kings did finally fall from power, historians draw a stark line between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties, on the one hand, and the Twenty-first Dynasty, on the other, even though decentralized and competitive ruling strategies remained largely unchanged from one period to the next. The historical creation of a crisp division between the New Kingdom and the Third Intermediate Period can be understood as the chief reason why Egyptologists do not see the Ramesside period for what it was, a runway that formed the elements of the ensuing Iron Age.

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