ABSTRACT
Shortly before 2000 bc, a dynasty of provincial governors in Thebes restored unity in Egypt and made Thebes the capital of the new unified realm. The most powerful kings of the Middle Kingdom were those of the twelfth dynasty. The Middle Kingdom was the golden age of Egyptian culture, especially literature. It was the period in which hieroglyphs acquired their classical shape and literary works gained an exemplary quality, making them ‘classics’. In Mesopotamia, the early second millennium saw the birth of two nations that were to dominate the history of that region for the following fifteen hundred years: Assyria and Babylonia. After the fall of the Third Dynasty of Ur, southern Mesopotamia fell back to the former situation of independent city states. It was in the second millennium, too, that the cultures of Crete and Mycenae reached their greatest heights, after a development that can be traced back to the third millennium bc.
