Empire2686 BCE – 2181 BCE · 505 years
Egyptian Old Kingdom
The age of pyramid builders — Egypt's first long stretch of unified rule.
What it was
From roughly 2686 to 2181 BCE, the Old Kingdom centralized political power in Memphis and produced the Giza pyramids, the Great Sphinx, and a state apparatus capable of mobilizing tens of thousands of laborers. Drought, weakening central authority, and rising provincial power ended it in the First Intermediate Period.
Why it mattered
The pyramids are the largest stone monuments humans have ever built, and the Old Kingdom's administrative documents are some of the earliest detailed bureaucratic records in existence.
From Wikipedia
In ancient Egyptian history, the Old Kingdom is the period spanning c. 2700–2200 BC. It is also known as the "Age of the Pyramids" or the "Age of the Pyramid Builders", as it encompasses the reigns of the great pyramid-builders of the Fourth Dynasty, such as King Sneferu, under whom the art of pyramid-building was perfected, and the kings Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure, who commissioned the construction of the pyramids at Giza. Egypt attained its first sustained peak of civilization during the Old Kingdom, the first of three so-called "Kingdom" periods, which mark the high points of civilization in the lower Nile Valley.
Wikipedia: Old Kingdom of Egypt·CC BY-SA 4.0
Borders & accuracy
Solid borders are reconstructed from canonical historical-basemap data or hand-crafted from scholarly atlases.
- SOURCEaourednik / historical-basemaps
- DETAILkept-original
- MATCHEDEgypt
- POLITY TYPEstate
Wars of this empire1
Conflicts whose belligerents name this polity, best-documented first.
- Pepi II's Nubian Campaigns2278–2184 BCESignificant
Open in the atlas →Seeks the timeline to 2686 BCE and fits the map to these borders.
Cite as: Egyptian Old Kingdom (2686 BCE – 2181 BCE). War Atlas. https://waratlas.org/e/egyptian-old-kingdom · Sources & methodology