Arcanum

Birth rates crash and plague ravages the land as the central government, ruled by Egypt's Sixth Dynasty, collapses around 2150.

The country slides into anarchy, forfeiting its gains in Nubia and West Asia.

The Memphite monarchs of the short-lived Seventh Dynasty of Manetho's history, “from which no king’s name is known,” are powerless to prevent the breakdown of centralized rule as provincial warlords fight each other over territory.

The Seventh Dynasty is most likely an oligarchy that attempts to retain control of the country.

The Eighth Dynasty rulers, claiming to be the descendants of the Sixth Dynasty kings, also rule from Memphis.

Little is known about these two dynasties since very little textual or architectural evidence survives to describe the period. (Several Eighth Dynasty kings are known from inscriptions found in the temple of Min at Qift in the south; this indicates that their rule was recognized throughout the country. As the combined span of the Seventh and Eighth dynasties encompassed only twenty years, the instability of the throne suggests political decay. Egyptians may have accepted the fiction of centralized rule only because there was no alternative style of government to monarchy.)

While there are next to no official records covering this period, there a number of fictional texts known as Lamentations from the early period of the subsequent Middle Kingdom that may shed some light on what happened during this period.

Some of these texts reflect on the breakdown of rule, others allude to invasion by "Asiatic bowmen.”

In general, the stories focus on a society where the natural order of things of both society and nature is overthrown.

One particularly interesting phrase talks about times of high taxation even when the waters of the river Nile are abnormally low ("Dry is the river of Egypt, and one can cross it by foot").

Traditionally, people are taxed according to the inundation level of the Nile in a given year.

The fact that people are taxed by what they should have been able to grow instead of what they had actually grown suggests a long period of relatively low inundations that historically often lead to famine (an instance of which is recorded on the Famine Stele at Elephantine).

The high taxation also implies an inherent breakdown of rule, reflecting an arbitrary approach not evident during the Old Kingdom.

With the end of the Eighth Dynasty in 2130, the Old Kingdom state collapses.

During the so-called First Intermediate Period that ensues, famine and violence are widespread; sharply increased numbers of burials in cemeteries bear witness to the consequent rise in the death rate.

It is also highly likely that it is during this period that all of the pyramid and tomb complexes are robbed ("Those who were entombed are cast on high ground").

Further lamentation texts allude to this fact, and more directly at the beginning of the Middle Kingdom we begin to see mummies decorated with magical spells that were once exclusive to the pyramid of the kings of the Sixth Dynasty.

Egyptian papyrus documents dating from this age discuss dreams and their interpretations.

In the Chinese historical tradition, the Zhou defeated the Shang and oriented the Shang system of ancestor worship toward a universalized worship away from the worship of Di, the Supreme Being, and to that of Tian, which can either mean the physical sky or the presiding God of Heaven.

They legitimize their rule by invoking the Mandate of Heaven, the notion that the ruler (the "Son of Heaven") governed by divine right but that his dethronement would prove that he had lost the mandate.

Such things that proved the ruling family had lost the Mandate were natural disasters and rebellions.

The doctrine explains and justifies the demise of the Xia and Shang Dynasties and at the same time supports the legitimacy of present and future rulers.

After the Zhou conquest, the Shang practices of bronze casting, writing, and pyromancy—a kind of divination involving the application of heat or fire—continue.

China’s new dynasty (called by historians the Early, or Western, Zhou) is structured similarly to the Shang, operating as a centralized bureaucracy with vassals ruling the peripheral areas.

Consolidation of the Zhou Empire proceeds rapidly.

The cryptic nuclear text of the oracle known as the "I Ching,” or "Book of Changes" is written at the beginning of the first millennium BCE.

The pentatonic scale, a musical scale with five pitches per octave as compared to the major scale of seven distinct notes, is the prevalent musical form in the Far East.

The five notes represent the four cardinal directions and the center.

Manasseh, unlike his reformer father, is, according to the Hebrew Bible, an apostate king who stills any prophetic outcries, reintroduces Canaanite religious practices and even offers his son as a human sacrificial victim.

Soothsaying, augury, sorcery and necromancy are also reintroduced by Manasseh. (The Deuteronomic historian also notes that many innocent persons were killed during his reign.)

The famous sibyl (prophetess) of Cumae supposedly offers Rome’s Etruscan king Lucius Tarquinius Superbus (Tarquin the Arrogant), nine books of prophecies on Rome's destiny in return for half the king's fortune.

When he replies that the price is too high, she burns three books and offers him the other six at the same price.

He refuses, and she burns three more, whereupon he pays the original price for the remaining three.

The so-called Sibylline books are placed in the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill, to be consulted in times of emergency.

Pythagoras’s esoteric theories of numbers and music spread rapidly throughout Greece as a cult.

The Athenian defeat at the close of the Peloponnesian War in 404 marks the emergence of Sparta as the most powerful state in Greece.

The Spartans employ a system of secret writing, the “scytale,” a cylindrical rod around which the sender wraps a length of parchment or papyrus in a spiral.

Words are then written lengthwise along the rod, one letter on each revolution of the strip.

Once unrolled, the strip displays nothing but a succession of meaningless letters; to be read, the strip must be wrapped around a rod of exactly the same diameter as the first.

The bacchanalia, the wild and mystic festivals of the Roman and Greek god Bacchus introduced into Rome from lower Italy by way of Etruria around 200 BCE, were originally held in secret and only attended by women.

The festivals occurred on three days of the year in the grove of Simila near the Aventine Hill, on March 16 and March 17.

Later, admission to the rites was extended to men and celebrations took place five times a month.

According to Livy, the extension happened in an era when the leader of the Bacchus cult was Paculla Annia—though it is now believed that some men had participated before that.

Livy informs us that the rapid spread of the cult, which he claims indulged in all kinds of crimes and political conspiracies at its nocturnal meetings, led in 186 BCE to a decree of the Senate—the so-called Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus, inscribed on a bronze tablet discovered in 1640 in Apulia in Southern Italy, now at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna—by which the Bacchanalia were prohibited throughout all Italy except in certain special cases which must be approved specifically by the Senate.

In spite of the severe punishment inflicted on those found in violation of this decree (Livy claims there were more executions than imprisonment), the Bacchanalia would survive in southern Italy long past the repression.

Modern scholars hold Livy's account in doubt and believe that the Senate acted against the Bacchants for one or more of three reasons.

First, because women occupied leadership positions in the cult (contrary to traditional Roman family values).

Second, because slaves and the poor were the cult's members and were planning to overthrow the Roman government.

Or third, according to a theory proposed by Erich Gruen, as a display of the Senate's supreme power to the Italian allies as well as competitors within the Roman political system, such as individual victorious generals whose popularity made them a threat to the senate's collective authority.