[1069 BCE – 333 BCE] Third Intermediate and Late Periods

The year is 1069 BCE. The great Ramesses XI, last king of the New Kingdom, has drawn his final breath. With his death, the unifying authority of the pharaoh, once as solid and enduring as the great pyramids, shatters. Egypt, a civilization defined for millennia by its divine monarchy and unified state, now splinters. In the north, in a new capital named Tanis nestled in the marshy expanse of the Nile Delta, the pharaohs of the 21st Dynasty rule. But their power is a shadow of what it once was. To the south, in the ancient religious heartland of Thebes, real authority lies not with the king, but with the High Priests of Amun-Ra. They command the temple estates, the vast granaries, and the loyalty of the people of Upper Egypt, creating a de facto theocratic state. Egypt is a house divided, a tale of two powers separated by hundreds of miles of river, each claiming legitimacy over a fractured land.

Life in the two centers of power could not be more different. Tanis was a pragmatic capital, its temples and palaces built with stone plundered from the abandoned New Kingdom city of Pi-Ramesses. It was a capital of expediency. Its pharaohs, like Psusennes I, were buried here not in grand rock-cut tombs exposed to the desert sky, but in modest, hidden chambers within the temple enclosure itself. When these tombs were discovered in 1939, untouched by robbers, they revealed breathtaking treasures—most famously the solid silver sarcophagus of Psusennes I, a testament that even in decline, Egypt’s wealth could be staggering. Yet in Thebes, the High Priests controlled the spiritual lifeblood of the nation, overseeing the cult of Amun and governing with divine mandate. They saw themselves as the true guardians of tradition, while the northern kings managed the state’s dwindling international prestige.

This fragile balance could not last. Into this power vacuum stepped a new group: the Libyans. For centuries, tribes of Meshwesh Libyans had been settling in the Delta, first as prisoners of war, then as mercenaries and farmers. They assimilated, adopted Egyptian names, and rose through the ranks of the military. Around 945 BCE, a powerful military leader of Libyan descent named Shoshenq I seized the throne, founding the 22nd Dynasty. He was no foreign invader in the traditional sense, but a man who understood the levers of Egyptian power. He consolidated his rule with shrewd politics, appointing his own son as High Priest of Amun in Thebes, stitching the two halves of the country back together under a single, strong family. To announce his power to the world, Shoshenq—known in the Hebrew Bible as Shishak—marched his armies into the Levant, sacking Jerusalem and carting away its temple treasures. He commemorated this victory on the walls of the great Karnak temple at Thebes, carving a towering relief of himself smiting his enemies, a classic pharaonic pose for a new kind of pharaoh.

The unity Shoshenq forged proved brittle. After his reign, Egypt once again fragmented. Local Libyan chieftains carved out petty kingdoms for themselves, and by the 8th century BCE, the land was a patchwork of warring city-states. As Egypt floundered in disunity, a new, formidable power to the south was watching. The Kingdom of Kush, in what is now modern Sudan, had long been under Egyptian control during the New Kingdom. But now, the tables had turned. The Nubian kings of Kush had become thoroughly Egyptianized, worshipping Egyptian gods, writing in hieroglyphs, and building small, steep-sided pyramids for their tombs. They saw themselves not as foreigners, but as the true inheritors of pharaonic culture, destined to restore Ma'at—divine order—to the chaotic lands to their north.

Around 728 BCE, the Kushite king Piye sailed north with his army. His campaign, documented on a magnificent granite stela, was framed as a holy war to cleanse Egypt of its corrupt, squabbling princes and restore the primacy of the god Amun. One by one, the cities of Egypt fell or surrendered to him. The climax came when the four major kings of the Delta submitted to his authority, completing his conquest. Thus began the 25th Dynasty, the era of the “Black Pharaohs.” These Kushite rulers, such as Shabaka, Shebitku, and Taharqa, governed a vast empire stretching from the deep south up to the Mediterranean. They distinguished themselves with unique regalia, such as a cap-like crown and a distinctive double uraeus, two sacred cobras on the brow symbolizing their dominion over both Kush and Egypt. They were prolific builders, not of new styles, but of revived, classical Egyptian forms, a conscious throwback to the golden ages of the Old and Middle Kingdoms.

But this new Nile Valley empire soon found itself on a collision course with an even greater world power: the relentless and brutal Neo-Assyrian Empire. The two empires vied for control of the Levant, clashing in a series of bloody confrontations. The advanced iron weaponry and siege tactics of the Assyrians were more than a match for the Kushite-Egyptian forces. In 671 BCE, the Assyrian king Esarhaddon drove Pharaoh Taharqa out of Memphis. Then, in 664 BCE, his successor Ashurbanipal marched south and delivered a devastating blow, sacking the holy city of Thebes. The plunder was immense, the psychological shock profound. The fall of this sacred city, once thought inviolable, sent shockwaves across the ancient world.

The Assyrians, content to rule from afar, installed a native Egyptian vassal king in the Delta city of Sais. This king, Psamtik I, was meant to be a puppet, but he was far more ambitious. Biding his time, he built up an army of Greek and Carian mercenaries and, as Assyrian power waned, he systematically drove their garrisons from Egyptian soil and subdued the other local rulers. By 656 BCE, he had reunified Egypt, initiating the 26th Dynasty and a period of revival known as the Saite Renaissance. This era was marked by a deep nostalgia. Artists and architects deliberately copied the styles of the Old Kingdom, a thousand years in their past, in a conscious effort to recapture a lost purity and greatness. The economy thrived on renewed trade with the Greek world, and a new, faster form of writing called demotic was developed for business and administrative records, streamlining daily life.

This final flowering of native Egyptian glory was, however, tragically brief. To the east, another superpower was on the rise: the Persian Empire. In 525 BCE, the Persian king Cambyses II invaded. At the decisive Battle of Pelusium, the Egyptian army was crushed. Egypt became a mere province, a satrapy, in the vast Achaemenid Persian Empire. For the first time, the throne of the pharaohs was occupied by a distant foreign king who ruled from a faraway land. While some Persian kings like Darius I respected Egyptian customs and even undertook building projects, their rule was often resented. The proud spirit of Egypt was not yet extinguished. Over the next two centuries, they launched several rebellions, even managing to win back their independence for short periods under the 28th, 29th, and 30th Dynasties.

The kings of the 30th Dynasty, like Nectanebo I and II, were the last native Egyptians to ever rule as pharaohs. They fought desperately to maintain Egypt’s freedom, commissioning a final burst of magnificent temple construction in a classic pharaonic style. But the might of the Persian Empire was too great. In 343 BCE, the Persians re-conquered the land, and the last pharaoh, Nectanebo II, fled south into obscurity, vanishing from history. The pharaonic age was over. Less than a decade later, in 332 BCE, a new force appeared on the horizon. A young, brilliant Macedonian general named Alexander arrived at Egypt’s shores. Having just defeated the Persians, he was not seen as a conqueror, but as a liberator. His arrival closed this long chapter of struggle and heralded the dawn of a new, Hellenistic age for the land of the Nile.