The Eleventh Dynasty was actually a transitional one, for it was part of both the First Intermediate Period and the Middle Kingdom era. More accurately, it was the First Intermediate dynasty that created the Middle Kingdom state. Its point-of-origin was the Luxor area, and its patron deities were the warrior god Month (whose cult center was at Armant, a town ten kilometers south of Luxor), and Amun (whose cult center was located at Kamak). Eventually, however, Amun superseded Month as the dynasty's principal divine patron. By about 2000 AD, the Eleventh Dynasty's re-unification of the Nile Valley had been completed.
Soon after 2000 BC there was a change of dynasty, but the exact circumstances in which this event occurred are unknown. The kings of the Twelfth Dynasty inherited the state created by their Eleventh Dynasty predecessors and proceeded to dominate Egypt for the next two centuries. Theirs was an era of extraordinary artistic achievement. Indeed, in later centuries, Egyptians looked back upon this era as the age in which the highest standards of writing and painting were set.
The Twelfth Dynasty kings shifted the seat of the state from Luxor in the south to Memphis in the north. This process may, in fact, have begun under the last kings of the Eleventh Dynasty, for the Memphis area was a far more natural point from which to preside over all of the Nile Valley than was Luxor. The Twelfth Dynasty monarchs built pyramid complexes for themselves near Memphis (at Dashur, south of Saqqara) and on the outskirts of the Fayyum (then a swampy area where they seem to have maintained royal palaces and hunting preserves). These pyramid complexes featured relatively small pyramids, whose interior construction was of brick. Today, stripped of their outer casing of limestone, they have degenerated into unimpressive hills of mud. However, in their own time, their overall effect was stupendous, for they were extraordinarily sophisticated constructions. Among other things, their temples featured dozens of rooms covered with thousands of square meters of elaborate relief. The Greek geographer Strabo, who visited Egypt two thousand years after the Middle Kingdom Period, saw and admired these monuments. In particular, he marveled at what was probably the pyramid temple attached to the pyramid of the Twelfth Dynasty king Amenemhet 111 at Hawara in the Fayyum. He called it "the Labyrinth," and described it as equal to the Great Pyramid of Giza in grandeur. But today, the site of the "Labyrinth" is an utter ruin, all its stone having been quarried away.
The Eleventh Dynasty kings built tombs for themselves at Luxor, and at least one great Eleventh Dynasty funerary monumentbuilt for a king named Mentu- hotepsurvives there at Deir al-Bahari, just south of Hatshepsut's much later mortuary temple. The Eleventh Dynasty monarchs also began the process of raising up their local patron deity, the Luxor god Amun, to the status of a great national deity and the focus of a new state cultthe Middle Kingdom equivalent of the royal solar cult of the Old Kingdom Period. That Amun was chosen for this critical political role was, for him, very much a matter of luck. Prior to this era, Amun had been a relatively minor deity, celebrated primarily at the small regional center of Luxor. But it was a dynasty from the Luxor area that rose to supreme power throughout Egypt, and Amun benefited by its success and its patronage.. The Eleventh Dynasty's rulers proclaimed Amun as the greatest of the Gods and argued that they were his children (both literally and figuratively): they were the ones upon whom Amun "chose" to confer power over all of Egypt. The kings of the Twelfth Dynasty then decided to continue celebrating Amun as the focus of the state cult, even though they themselves seem not to have come from the Luxor area. Thus the prominence of the cult of Amunwhich became a vital factor in the later history of pharaonic Egyptwas very much the result of a deliberate policy initiated by the Middle Kingdom state. The oldest surviving elements of the Karnak complex date to the Middle Kingdom Period, for at the heart of the great New Kingdom structures built at Karnak lay a Middle Kingdom sanctuary.
In general, the Middle Kingdom period was the first in which monumental architecture in stone began to be devoted to structures unrelated to royal funerary monuments. Although the greatest and grandest structures of the period were still the royal tombs, there is considerable evidence of the building of large stone temples at various points up and down the Nile Valley, Karnak included. However, few of these structures survive, since most were built over or completely reconstructed in the New Kingdom Period. The era of the Twelfth Dynasty was also Egypt's first great imperial age, as Egyptian armies crossed northern Sinai and carried out what were essentially glorified raids into Palestine, leaving behind small garrisons in the Gaza area. At the same time, Egyptian troops marched south of Aswan and seized control over much of Nubia. Huge brick forts were built to keep Nubia under control, and the presence of Egyptians in this area began to have a pronounced "Egyptianizing" influence upon local culture.
