Middle Kingdom of Egypt

The Middle Kingdom begins with the reunification of Egypt under Mentuhotep II of Thebes, who defeated the rival Herakleopolitan line around 2055 BCE after the political division of the First Intermediate Period, and it is conventionally closed around 1650 BCE with the fragmentation of the Thirteenth Dynasty and the infiltration of the Hyksos into the eastern Delta. Amenemhat I, founder of the Twelfth Dynasty, relocated the royal residence north to Itjtawy near the Faiyum while leaving Thebes established as a major religious center, a dual focus that shaped Egyptian political geography for the rest of pharaonic history. Twelfth Dynasty kings undertook major land reclamation in the Faiyum, built a chain of fortresses to control Nubia and its gold, and left behind some of the most admired literature in the Egyptian language, including the Tale of Sinuhe and instructional texts written for royal and elite audiences.

The period is generally regarded by Egyptologists as a classical age of Egyptian language, art and administration, its literary and artistic standards used as later reference points, though its final century saw increasing rule by kings of shorter reigns and, by its end, growing Near Eastern settlement in the Delta that would produce the Hyksos rulers of the Second Intermediate Period. The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt situates the Middle Kingdom's stability against the more fragile decades that preceded and followed it.

The defining religious development of the Middle Kingdom was the wider availability of funerary texts that the Old Kingdom had reserved for the king alone. Officials and their families now had the Pyramid Texts' spells rewritten, expanded and painted onto the interior of their wooden coffins as the Coffin Texts, a change modern Egyptologists have called the democratization of the afterlife, since it extended the promise of a blessed existence after death well beyond the royal house that alone could claim it under the Old Kingdom.

Alongside this textual shift, the cult of Osiris, god of the dead and of resurrection, rose to national prominence, centered on his cult site at Abydos, where private individuals across the social scale erected memorial stelae and cenotaphs to associate themselves with the god's annual mystery festival and his promise of rebirth, even when they were buried elsewhere. Osiris increasingly absorbed the funerary role that royal solar theology had dominated in the Old Kingdom, so that a Middle Kingdom burial identifies the deceased with Osiris rather than exclusively with Ra, a shift that would deepen further in the New Kingdom's Book of the Dead. The Twelfth Dynasty also formalized the Sed festival and royal jubilee rites and continued temple building for Amun at Thebes, a comparatively minor cult in the Old Kingdom that the Middle Kingdom's Theban rulers began to elevate toward the position it would hold as state god of the New Kingdom empire.