He was, in his modest burial, a participant in the same religious system that ordered the spectacular tombs of the pharaohs and their officials.

He was the pyramid age in its human, ordinary dimension.

The Climate That Made Egypt

One of the aspects of Old Kingdom Egypt that is easy to overlook — precisely because the monuments are so durable and so impressive — is the role of environmental conditions in the civilization’s rise and, eventually, its fall.

The agricultural productivity of the Nile Valley that made the Old Kingdom possible was not an inevitable or permanent feature of the landscape.

It depended on the annual Nile flood, which in turn depended on monsoon rainfall in the Ethiopian highlands.