Four thousand two hundred years ago, an ancient Egyptian scribe named Ipuwer lived through the end of the world. Old Kingdom Egypt, one of the world’s first states and a paragon of balance and order, was collapsing into chaos and violence. A period of widespread climate change led to drought in Egypt, and the Nile’s waters dropped lower and lower. A weak king grew even weaker as his entreaties to the gods failed to restore the river’s life-giving floods. The north’s swamps dried up, leaving the country open to invasion, and the south’s endless fields of wheat and barley withered, leading to famine. More and more provinces started breaking with the capital. Civil war ensued.
In response, Ipuwer wrote what may be the first apocalyptic horror text, called Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage. The language may read as stilted and stylized today (being translated1 from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics doesn’t help!), but the experiences Ipuwer describes still haunt how we imagine the apocalypse. “Hearts are violent, plague is throughout the land, blood is everywhere . . . many dead are buried in the river; the stream is a sepulchre . . . the river is blood, yet men drink of it.” In this once thriving landscape now filled with corpses, Ipuwer writes of starving people turning on each other, previously safe roads becoming sites of ambush and murder, frenzied mobs raiding storehouses and even tombs for anything they can sell or eat, parents being forced to kill their children, and desperate people choosing suicide—in ancient Egypt, by feeding themselves to crocodiles—over the struggle to survive. Grief and fear mutate into mayhem and savagery. Once society unravels and the strictures it imposed evaporate, human nature devolves into nothing but violence and cruelty.
One aspect missing from Ipuwer’s account but present in many of the Western tradition’s other early apocalyptic texts is a sense of moral decay. Ipuwer is clear that Egypt’s new wave of violence is the result of the apocalypse, not the cause of it. He reserves his blame for the king who failed to stop the drought and unrest from spiraling out of control: “Authority, Knowledge, and Truth are with you [the King], yet confusion is what you set throughout the land, also the noise of tumult . . . You have acted so as to bring those things to pass.” There is no righteousness applied to the end of Ipuwer’s world.
In the Biblical2 story of Noah’s Ark, however, humans bring catastrophe on themselves: “The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually . . . And God said to Noah, ‘I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them; now I am going to destroy them along with the earth.’” Both Ipuwer’s and the Judeo-Christian god’s attitudes have found their way into how we imagine the horrors of apocalypse today: The bone-deep knowledge that we can’t control it, and the chilling sense that we deserve it.
The drought across Eurasia and the low Nile floods in Egypt at the end of the Old Kingdom have been documented in paleoclimate records like changes in the type of pollen in sediment cores and chemical signals caused by low rainfall preserved in stalactites and stalagmites. A “real” natural disaster that inspired the Biblical flood story, on the other hand, has never been identified. And yet it’s difficult not to notice how many cultures around the world have foundational flood myths. Floods destroy and create worlds in traditions as disparate as Hinduism and the Aztec religion. And of course, the story of Noah’s Ark traces its origin to the much earlier Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh.
Could these myths echo a real experience we know human beings across the world shared, namely the extreme sea level rise caused by melting glaciers at the end of the last ice age? Maybe. But so far, the connection is undeniable in only one place: Australia, where coastal Aboriginal communities still have stories about the floods that consumed their lands between about 9,000 and 7,000 years ago. These myths capture the terror of such a cataclysm, as their characters have prophetic nightmares of corpse-filled landscapes as vivid as the one Ipuwer described.
But they also speak to the ingenuity and resilience that apocalypse has always inspired in the people and communities that experience it. Some Aboriginal myths describe communities successfully building barriers to halt the advancing sea. Rock art from the archipelago of Murujuga off the arid western coast shifted from depicting terrestrial animals like kangaroos to aquatic species including turtles and fish, as their formerly desert-dwelling artists successfully adapted to island life. The Yidinjdji people in northeastern Australia still remember the names of hills, trees, and islands that disappeared under the great flood. Like many other Aboriginal communities, they still know and care for what they call Sea Country.
That deep sense of creativity, continuity, and survival is missing from Ipuwer’s Admonitions, although not from the lived experience of the apocalypse he described. Archaeology in Old Kingdom villages and tombs has revealed that for the people who weren’t as rich and powerful as Ipuwer, societal collapse may have made their lives better. Resources hoarded by the king and his court spread out among the many, and elites’ stranglehold on ancient Egyptian politics and culture weakened. Art forms once reserved for the upper classes, like tomb dioramas, pop up in modest cemeteries all over the country. Ambitious local leaders emerged to shepherd their towns through the hard years, and something resembling a middle class boomed.
Ipuwer knew this was happening. He just didn’t like it. For him, the true apocalypse wasn’t the violence he saw, the hunger he experienced, or the death all around him. It was how the Old Kingdom’s social and economic hierarchies had been turned upside down in the chaos of state collapse. “The land turns round as does a potter’s wheel,” he wrote. “The highborn are full of lamentations, and the poor are full of joy. Every town saith: ‘Let us drive out the powerful from our midst.’”
Ipuwer thought he was writing horror. The river of blood and the joyful poor terrified him equally. Perhaps, four millennia later, we can see what he couldn’t appreciate: that apocalypses are transformations, and who we become is up to us.
Apocalyptic Must-Reads
The Edge of Memory: Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World, Patrick Nunn. (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2019).
The Edge of Memory collects myths about the great flood from around Australia. European missionaries originally recorded written versions of many, even as the colonial state attempted to separate Aboriginal communities from their land, or Country, and force them to forget Sea Country. It didn’t work, and these stories continue to be among the oldest in the world.
The Black Death, edited and translated by Rosemary Horrox. (Manchester University Press, 1994).
The Black Death killed between thirty and sixty percent of everyone in Europe between 1347-1351, making it one of the most apocalyptic experiences imaginable. Like Ipuwer’s Admonitions, this staggering collection of primary sources contains so many images straight out of apocalyptic horror, from mass graves “into which new arrivals were placed in their hundreds, stowed tier upon tier like ships’ cargo” (from the introduction to Boccaccio’s Decameron) to leaderless cults of “flagellants” that roamed from city to city staging spectacles of public penance in which they whipped themselves bloody. It’s hard not to see a reflection of our own COVID-19 trauma in fourteenth century reports of plague survivors forcing themselves to throw parties and weddings but only ever arriving at “a sort of half-happiness.”
The Florentine Codex, Book 12: The Conquest of Mexico, translated by Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble. (The University of Utah Press, 1975).
European colonialism is the worst apocalypse humanity has ever faced, and its horrors continue to spread, too often invisible and unrecognized for what they truly are. Going back to the beginning of this still unfolding story can help us learn to see it as something we have the power, and the obligation, to change. Although The Florentine Codex is often attributed to the Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagún, its true authors were a group of Indigenous scholars from the Tlatelolco neighborhood of Mexico City. In Book 12, they tell the story of the Spanish-Aztec war from their perspective. Hauntingly, they wrote much of it in quarantine during a smallpox outbreak.
The Plague, Albert Camus. (Originally published 1947. Many editions.).
Written as a response to the Nazi occupation of France, The Plague is a sobering but rousing account of human agency and bravery in the face of unavoidable tragedy and inevitable death. Although it’s most famous as a political allegory, it’s also a gripping novel about a deadly disease rampaging through a city that’s been largely abandoned by the rest of the world. I recognized so much about quarantine, uncertainty, and the effects of all-pervading fear from our own pandemic, and I continue to find solace in Camus’s recognition of how long and arduous recovery truly is.
The Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler. (1993, originally published by Four Walls Eight Windows.)
The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents offer a prescient vision of a post-apocalyptic, fascist United States, and a girl who journeys through a hostile landscape to found a community dedicated to embracing change, apocalypse’s greatest gift. But it also contains one of the most unnerving pieces of world building in all of apocalyptic horror: In The Parable of the Sower, even the dogs have turned on humanity.
1. In this essay I quote from translations of the Admonitions printed in Barbara Bell’s article “The Dark Ages in Ancient History in the American Journal of Anthropology (1971).
2. Quotation from The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version, Ed. Michael D. Coogan (Oxford University Press, 2018).
