ALSO BY TOBY WILKINSON
Early Dynastic Egypt
Royal Annals of Ancient Egypt
Genesis of the Pharaohs
The Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Ancient Egypt
Lives of the Ancient Egyptians
The Egyptian World (editor)
Copyright © 2010 by Toby Wilkinson
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in the United Kingdom by Bloomsbury Publishing, Plc., London, in 2010.
All images reproduced in the insert sections are courtesy of the Werner Forman Archive, with the
exception of the pectoral of Princess Mereret, which is reproduced courtesy of Sandro Vannini/Corbis.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Wilkinson, Toby A. H.
The rise and fall of ancient Egypt / Toby Wilkinson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-0-679-60429-7
1. Egypt—History—To 332 B.C. 2. Egypt—History—332–30 B.C. I. Title.
DT83.W658 2011 932—dc22 2009047322
www.atrandom.com
Maps by John Gilkes
v3.1
FOR BEN AND GINNY
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
—PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, “Ozymandias”
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Timeline
Author’s Note
Introduction
DIVINE RIGHT (5000–2175 B.C.)
1. IN THE BEGINNING
2. GOD INCARNATE
3. ABSOLUTE POWER
4. HEAVEN ON EARTH
5. ETERNITY ASSURED
PART I:
END OF INNOCENCE (2175–1541 B.C.)
6. CIVIL W AR
7. PARADISE POSTPONED
8. THE FACE OF TYRANNY
9. BITTER HARVEST
PART II:
THE POWER AND THE GLORY (1541–
1322 B.C.)
10. ORDER REIMPOSED
11. PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES
PART III:
12. KING AND COUNTRY
13. GOLDEN AGE
14. ROYAL REVOLUTION
MILITARY MIGHT (1322–1069 B.C.)
15. MARTIAL LAW
16. W AR AND PEACE
17. TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY
18. DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD
PART IV:
CHANGE AND DECAY (1069–30 B.C.)
19. A HOUSE DIVIDED
20. A TARNISHED THRONE
21. FORTUNE’S FICKLE W HEEL
22. INVASION AND INTROSPECTION
23. THE LONG GOODBYE
24. FINIS
PART V:
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Photo Insert
Notes
Bibliography
About the Author
TIMELINE
All dates are B.C. The margin of error is within a century or so circa
3000 B.C. and within two decades circa 1300 B.C.; dates are precise
from 664 B.C. The system of dynasties devised in the third century B.C. is
not without its problems—for example, the Seventh Dynasty is now
recognized as being wholly spurious, while several dynasties are
known to have ruled concurrently in different parts of Egypt—but this
system remains the most convenient method for subdividing ancient
Egyptian history. The broader periods are more modern scholarly
conventions.
EARLY DYNASTIC PERIOD, 2950–2575
OLD KINGDOM, 2575–2125
FIRST INTERMEDIATE PERIOD, 2125–2010
MIDDLE KINGDOM, 2010–1630
SECOND INTERMEDIATE PERIOD, 1630–1539
NEW KINGDOM, 1539–1069
THIRD INTERMEDIATE PERIOD, 1069–664
LATE PERIOD, 664–332
MACEDONIAN DYNASTY, 332–309
PTOLEMAIC PERIOD, 309–30
AUTHOR’S NOTE
PROPER NAMES
Names of ancient Egyptian people and places have been given in the
form most closely approximating the original usage (where this is
known), except when the classical form of a place-name has given rise
to a widely used adjective. Therefore, “Memphis” (and “Memphite”) are
used instead of “Men-nefer” or the earlier “Ineb-hedj,” “Thebes”
(“Theban”) rather than “Waset,” “Sais” (“Saite”) instead of “Sa,” and
“Herakleopolis” (“Herakleopolitan”) instead of “Nen-nesut.” For ease of
reference, the modern equivalent is given in parenthesis after the first
mention of an ancient place-name in the text, and the ancient
equivalents are given for classical toponyms.
For reasons of accessibility, the names of the Persian and Greek
rulers of Egypt in the sixth to first centuries B.C. have been given in their
classical and anglicized forms, respectively: for example, Darius
instead of Dariyahavush, Ptolemy rather than Ptolemaios, Mark Antony
instead of Marcus Antonius.
The Roman numerals (e.g., Thutmose I–IV, Ptolemy I–XV) are a
modern convention, used to distinguish between different kings in a
sequence who shared the same birth name. Throughout most of
Egyptian history, the kings were referred to principally by their throne
names; these are formulaic, often long-winded, and generally
unfamiliar except to Egyptologists.
DATES
All dates are B.C., except in the Introduction and Epilogue or unless
explicitly stated. For dates before 664 B.C., there is a margin of error
that ranges from ten to twenty years for the New Kingdom to as much
as fifty to a hundred years for the Early Dynastic Period; the dates
given in the text represent the latest scholarly consensus. From 664 B.C.
onward, sources external to Egypt make a precise chronology
possible.
INTRODUCTION
TWO HOURS BEFORE SUNSET ON NOVEMBER 26, 1922, THE ENGLISH Egyptologist
Howard Carter and three companions entered a rock-cut corridor dug
into the floor of the Valley of the Kings. The three middle-aged men
and one much younger woman made an unlikely foursome. Carter was
a neat, rather stiff man in his late forties, with a carefully clipped
mustache and slicked-back hair. He had a reputation in archaeological
circles for obstinacy and a temper, but was also respected, if
somewhat grudgingly, for his serious and scholarly approach to
excavating. He had made Egyptology his career but, lacking private
means, was dependent on others to fund his work. Fortunately, he had
found just the right man to bankroll his current excavations on the west
bank of the Nile at Luxor. Indeed, his patron was now beside him to
share in the excitement of the moment.
George Herbert, fifth earl of Carnarvon, cut a very different figure.
Raffish and debonair, even for his fifty-six years, he had led the life of
an aristocratic dilettante, as a young man indulging his love of fast
cars. But a driving accident in 1901 had nearly cost him his life; it had
left him weakened and prone to rheumatic pain. To spare himself the
cold, damp air of English winters, he had taken to spending several
months each year in the warmer, drier climate of Egypt. So had begun
his own, amateur interest in archaeology. A meeting with Carter in
1907 inaugurated the partnership that was to make history. Joining the
two men on this “day of days”—as Carter was later to describe it—
were Carnarvon’s daughter, Lady Evelyn Herbert, and Carter’s old
friend Arthur “Pecky” Callender, a retired railway manager who had
joined the excavation only three weeks earlier. Although a novice to
archaeology, Callender had a knowledge of architecture and
engineering that made him a useful member of the team. His
carefulness and dependability appealed to Carter, and he was well
used to Carter’s frequent mood swings.
Howard Carter and the governor of Qena province greet Lady Evelyn Herbert and Lord Carnarvon on
their arrival at Luxor station, November 23, 1922. SOURCE UNKNOWN
Just three days into the excavation season (which was due to be the
last season—even Carnarvon’s fortune was not inexhaustible),
workmen had uncovered a flight of steps leading downward into the
bedrock. Once the staircase had been fully cleared, an outer blocking
wall had been revealed, covered with plaster and stamped with seal
impressions. Even without deciphering the inscription, Carter had
known what this meant: he had found an intact tomb from the period of
ancient Egyptian history known as the New Kingdom, an era of great
pharaohs and beautiful queens. Was it possible that beyond the
blocking wall lay the prize for which Carter had been striving for seven
long years? Was it the last undiscovered tomb in the Valley of the
Kings? Always a stickler for correctness, Carter had put decorum first
and ordered his workmen to refill the flight of steps, pending the arrival
from England of the expedition’s sponsor, Lord Carnarvon. If there was
a major discovery to be made, it was only proper that patron and
archaeologist should share it together. So on November 6, Carter sent
a telegram to Carnarvon: “At last have made wonderful discovery in
Valley; a magnificent tomb with seals intact; re-covered same for your
arrival; congratulations.”
After a seventeen-day journey by ship and train, the earl and Lady
Evelyn arrived in Luxor, to be met by an impatient and excited Carter.
The very next morning, work to clear the steps began in earnest. On
November 26, the outer blocking wall was removed to reveal a
corridor, filled with stone chips. From the pattern of disturbance
running through the fill, it was clear that someone had been there
before: robbers must have entered the tomb in antiquity. But the seal
impressions on the outer blocking wall showed that it had been
resealed in the New Kingdom. What might this mean for the state of
the burial itself? There was always the possibility that it would turn out
in the end to be a private tomb, or a cache of funerary equipment
collected from earlier robbed tombs in the Valley of the Kings and
reburied for safety. After a further day of strenuous work, in the heat
and dust of the valley floor, the corridor was emptied. Now, after what
must have felt like an interminable wait, the way ahead was clear.
Carter, Carnarvon, Callender, and Lady Evelyn found themselves
before yet another blocking wall, its surface also covered with large
oval seal impressions. A slightly darker patch of plaster in the top lefthand corner of the wall showed where the ancient robbers had broken
in. What would greet this next set of visitors, more than three and a half
thousand years later?
Without further hesitation, Carter took his trowel and made a small
hole in the plaster blocking, just big enough to look through. First, as a
safety precaution, he took a lighted candle and put it through the hole,
to test for asphyxiating gases. Then, with his face pressed against the
plaster wall, he peered through into the darkness. The hot air escaping
from the sealed chamber caused the candle to flicker, and it took a few
moments for Carter’s eyes to grow accustomed to the gloom. But then
details of the room beyond began to emerge. Carter stood
dumbstruck. After some minutes, Carnarvon could bear the suspense
no longer. “Can you see anything?” he asked. “Yes, yes,” replied
Carter, “wonderful things.” The following day, Carter wrote excitedly to
his friend and fellow Egyptologist Alan Gardiner, “I imagine it is the
greatest find ever made.”
Carter and Carnarvon had discovered an intact royal tomb from the
golden age of ancient Egypt. It was crammed, in Carter’s own words,
with “enough stuff to fill the whole upstairs Egyptian section of the
B[ritish] M[useum].” The antechamber alone—the first of four rooms
entered by Carter and his associates—contained treasures of
unimaginable opulence: three colossal gilded ceremonial beds, in the
shapes of fabulous creatures; golden shrines with images of gods and
goddesses; painted jewelry boxes and inlaid caskets; gilded chariots
and fine archery equipment; a magnificent gold throne, inlaid with silver
and precious stones; vases of beautiful translucent alabaster; and,
guarding the right-hand wall, two life-size figures of the dead king, with
black skin and gold accoutrements. The royal name on many of the
objects left no doubt as to the identity of the tomb owner: the
hieroglyphs clearly spelled out Tut-ankh-Amun.
By curious concidence, the breakthrough that had allowed ancient
Egyptian writing to be first deciphered, and had thus opened up the
study of pharaonic civilization through its numerous inscriptions, had
occurred exactly a century before. In 1822, the French scholar JeanFrançois Champollion published his famous Lettre à M. Dacier, in
which he correctly described the workings of the hieroglyphic writing
system and identified the phonetic values of many important signs.
This turning point in the history of Egyptology was itself the result of a
long period of study. Champollion’s interest in ancient Egyptian writing
had been prompted when he’d first learned about the Rosetta Stone
as a boy. A royal proclamation inscribed in three scripts (Greek,
demotic characters, and hieroglyphics), the stone had been
discovered by Napoleonic troops at el-Rashid (Rosetta) during the
French invasion of 1798, when Champollion was eight years old, and it
was to provide one of the main keys to the decipherment of Egyptian
hieroglyphics. Champollion’s early genius for languages had enabled
him to become proficient in Greek and, crucial in this endeavor,
Coptic, the liturgical language of the Egyptian Orthodox Church and a
direct descendant of ancient Egyptian. Armed with this knowledge,
and with a transcription of the Rosetta Stone, Champollion correctly
translated the hieroglyphic version of the text and so began the
process that was to unlock the secrets of ancient Egyptian history. His
grammar and dictionary of the ancient Egyptian language, published
posthumously, allowed scholars, for the first time, to read the words of
the pharaohs themselves, after an interval of more than two thousand
years.
At the same time that Champollion was working on the mysteries of
the ancient Egyptian language, an Englishman, John Gardner
Wilkinson, was making an equally important contribution to the study of
pharaonic civilization. Born a year before Napoléon’s invasion,
Wilkinson traveled to Egypt at the age of twenty-four and stayed for the
next twelve years, visiting virtually every known site, copying countless
tomb scenes and inscriptions, and carrying out the most
comprehensive study of pharaonic monuments undertaken to that
point. (For a year, in 1828–1829, Wilkinson and Champollion were
both in Egypt, traveling and recording, but it is not known if the two ever
met.) On his return to England in 1833, Wilkinson began compiling the
results of his work and published them four years later. The threevolume Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, together
with the two-volume Modern Egypt and Thebes (published in 1843),
was and remains the greatest review of ancient Egyptian civilization
ever accomplished.
Wilkinson became the most famous and most honored Egyptologist
of his age, and is regarded, with Champollion, as one of the founders
of the subject. Just a year before Wilkinson died, Howard Carter was
born, the man who was to take Egyptology—and the public fascination
with ancient Egypt—to new heights. Unlike his two great forebears,
Carter stumbled into Egyptology almost by accident. It was his skill as
a draftsman and painter, rather than any deep-rooted fascination with
ancient Egypt, that secured him his first position on the staff of the
Archaeological Survey at the age of seventeen. This brought Carter
the opportunity to train under some of the greatest archaeologists of
the day—including Flinders Petrie, the father of Egyptian archaeology,
with whom he excavated at Amarna, the capital city of the heretic
pharaoh Akhenaten and the probable birthplace of Tutankhamun. By
copying tomb and temple scenes for various expeditions, Carter
became intimately acquainted with ancient Egyptian art. His firsthand
knowledge of many of the major archaeological sites would, no doubt,
have been supplemented by reading the works of Wilkinson. So it was
that, in 1899, Carter came to be appointed inspector general of
monuments of Upper Egypt, and four years later of Lower Egypt. But
his hot temper and stubbornness brought his promising career to an
abrupt end when he refused to apologize after an altercation with
some French tourists, and he was promptly sacked from the
Antiquities Service (then under French control). Returning to his roots,
Carter earned his living for the next four years as an itinerant
watercolorist, before joining forces with Lord Carnarvon in 1907 to
begin excavating, once again, at Thebes.
After fifteen long, hot, and none-too-fruitful years, Carter and his
sponsor finally made the greatest discovery in the history of
Egyptology.
After sunset that November day in 1922, the astonished party made its
way back to Carter’s house for a fitful night’s sleep. It was impossible
to take in everything that had happened. They had made the greatest
archaeological discovery the world had ever seen. Nothing would be
the same again. But one final question nagged at Carter. He had found
Tutankhamun’s tomb, and the bouquets of flowers left over from the
royal funeral, but did the king himself still lie, undisturbed, in his burial
chamber?
The new dawn brought with it a feverish rush of activity, as Carter
began to appreciate the immensity of the task that lay before him. He
realized he would need to assemble—and quickly—a team of experts
to help photograph, catalogue, and conserve the vast number of
objects in the tomb. He started contacting friends and colleagues, and
informed the Egyptian antiquities authorities about the spectacular
discovery. A date of November 29 was agreed upon for the official
public opening of the tomb. The event would be covered by the world’s
press, the first major archaeological discovery of the media age.
Thereafter, it would be impossible for Carter to retain control of the
situation. If he wanted to solve the mystery of the king’s final resting
place, quietly, and in his own time, he would have to do so before the
official opening, and go behind the backs of the antiquities officials.
On the evening of November 28, a matter of hours before the press
were due to arrive, Carter and his three trusted companions slipped
away from the crowds and entered the tomb once more. His instinct
told him that the black-skinned guardian figures framing the right-hand
wall of the antechamber had to indicate the location of the burial
chamber. The plaster wall behind them confirmed as much. Once
again Carter made a small hole in the plaster wall, at ground level, just
big enough to squeeze through, and with an electric flashlight this time
instead of a candle, he crawled through the opening. Carnarvon and
Lady Evelyn followed; Callender, being a little too portly, stayed
behind. The three inside found themselves face-to-face with an
enormous gilded shrine that filled the room. Opening its doors
revealed a second shrine nested within the first … then a third, and a
fourth shrine concealing the stone sarcophagus. Now Carter knew for
certain: the king’s burial lay within, having been undisturbed for thirtythree centuries. After squeezing back out into the antechamber, Carter
hastily, and rather clumsily, disguised his unauthorized break-in with a
basket and a bundle of reeds. For another three months, no one else
would see what Carter, Carnarvon, and Lady Evelyn had seen.
The public unveiling of Tutankhamun’s tomb made newspaper
headlines around the world on November 30, 1922, capturing the
public’s imagination and generating a wave of popular interest in the
treasures of the pharaohs. But there was more to come. The official
opening of the burial chamber on February 16, 1923, was followed a
year later by the lifting of the one-and-a-quarter-ton lid from the king’s
immense stone sarcophagus—a feat expertly accomplished by
Callender with his engineering background. Inside the sarcophagus,
there were yet more layers protecting the pharaoh’s body: three nested
coffins, to complement the four gilded shrines. The two outer coffins
were of gilded wood, but the third, innermost coffin was of solid gold.
Inside each coffin there were amulets and ritual objects, all of which
had to be carefully documented and removed before the next layer
could be examined. The whole process, from lifting the lid of the
sarcophagus to opening the third coffin, took more than eighteen
months. Finally, on October 28, 1925, nearly three years after the
discovery of the tomb and two years after Carnarvon’s untimely death
(not from the pharaoh’s curse but from blood poisoning), the moment
was at hand to reveal the boy king’s mummified remains. Using an
elaborate system of pulleys, the lid of the innermost coffin was raised
by its original handles. Inside lay the royal mummy, caked in
embalming unguents that had blackened with age. Standing out from
this tarry mess, and covering the king’s face, was a magnificent
funerary mask of beaten gold in the image of the young monarch.
Above his brow were the vulture and cobra goddesses, and around his
neck was a broad collar of inlaid glass and semiprecious stones.
Carter and Tutankhamun had come face-to-face at last.
Howard Carter cleaning Tutankhamun’s second coffin.
© GRIFFITH INSTITUTE, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
The mask of Tutankhamun is perhaps the most splendid artifact ever
recovered from an ancient civilization. It dazzles us today as it did
those who first beheld it in modern times, almost a century ago. During
the 1960s and ’70s, it formed the highlight of the traveling
Tutankhamun exhibition, drawing crowds of millions around the world,
from Vancouver to Tokyo. Although I was too young to visit the show
when it came to London, the book published to accompany the
exhibition was my first introduction to the exotic world of ancient Egypt.
I remember reading the book on the landing at home, at age six,
marveling at the jewels, the gold, the strange names of kings and
gods. The treasures of Tutankhamun planted a seed in my mind that
was to grow and flourish in later years. But the ground had already
been prepared. A year earlier, at the age of five, while leafing through
the pages of my first childhood encyclopedia, I had noticed an entry
illustrating different writing systems. Never mind the Greek, Arabic,
Indian, and Chinese scripts: it was the Egyptian hieroglyphics that
captured my imagination. The book gave only a few signs, but they
were enough to allow me to work out how to write my own name.
Hieroglyphs and Tutankhamun set me on the path to becoming an
Egyptologist.
Indeed, writing and kingship were the twin cornerstones of
pharaonic civilization, the defining characteristics that set it apart from
other ancient cultures. Despite the efforts of archaeologists to uncover
the rubbish dumps and workshops that would reveal the daily lives of
ordinary citizens, it is the abundant written record and the imposing
edifices left behind by the pharaohs that continue to dominate our view
of ancient Egyptian history. In the face of such powerful testimonies,
perhaps it is not surprising that we are inclined to take the texts and
monuments at face value. And yet the dazzling treasures of the
pharaohs should not blind us to a more complex truth. Despite its
spectacular monuments, magnificent works of art, and lasting cultural
achievements, ancient Egypt had a darker side.
The first pharaohs understood the extraordinary power of ideology—
and of its visual counterpart, iconography—to unite a disparate people
and bind them in loyalty to the state. Egypt’s earliest kings formulated
and harnessed the tools of leadership that are still with us: elaborate
trappings of office and carefully choreographed public appearances to
set the ruler apart from the populace; pomp and spectacle on grand
state occasions to reinforce bonds of loyalty; patriotic fervor expressed
orally and visually. But the pharaohs and their advisers knew equally
well that their grip on power could be maintained just as effectively by
other, less benign means: political propaganda, an ideology of
xenophobia, close surveillance of the population, and brutal repression
of dissent.
In studying ancient Egypt for more than twenty years, I have grown
increasingly uneasy about the subject of my research. Scholars and
enthusiasts alike are inclined to look at pharaonic culture with mistyeyed reverence. We marvel at the pyramids, without stopping to think
too much about the political system that made them possible. We take
vicarious pleasure in the pharaohs’ military victories—Thutmose III at
the Battle of Megiddo, Ramesses II at the Battle of Kadesh—without
pausing too long to reflect on the brutality of warfare in the ancient
world. We thrill at the weirdness of the heretic king Akhenaten and all
his works, but do not question what it is like to live under a despotic,
fanatical ruler (despite the modern parallels, such as in North Korea,
that fill our television screens). Evidence for the darker side of
pharaonic civilization is not lacking. From human sacrifice in the First
Dynasty to a peasants’ revolt under the Ptolemies, ancient Egypt was
a society in which the relationship between the king and his subjects
was based on coercion and fear, not love and admiration—where
royal power was absolute, and life was cheap. The aim of this book is
to give a fuller and more balanced picture of ancient Egyptian
civilization than is often found in the pages of scholarly or popular
works. I have set out to reveal both the highs and the lows, the
successes and the failures, the boldness and the brutality that
characterized life under the pharaohs.
The history of the Nile Valley lays bare the relationship between
rulers and the ruled—a relationship that has proved stubbornly
immutable across centuries and cultures. The ancient Egyptians
invented the concept of the nation-state that still dominates our planet,
five thousand years later. The Egyptians’ creation was remarkable, not
only for its impact, but also for its longevity: the pharaonic state, as
originally conceived, lasted for three millennia. (By comparison, Rome
barely managed one millennium, while Western culture has yet to
survive two.) A key reason for this remarkable survival is that the
philosophical and political framework first developed at the birth of
ancient Egypt was so well attuned to the national psyche that it
remained the archetypal pattern of government for the next one
hundred generations. Despite prolonged periods of political
fragmentation, decentralization, and unrest, pharaonic rule remained a
powerful ideal. A political creed that harnesses itself to a national myth
can embed itself very deeply in the human consciousness.
It is extremely difficult to engage with a culture so remote in time and
place from our own. Ancient Egypt was a sparsely populated tribal
society. Its polytheistic religion, its premonetary economy, the low rate
of literacy, and the ideological dominance of divine kingship—all these
defining characteristics are utterly alien to contemporary Western
observers, myself included. As well as a familiarity with two centuries
of scholarship, the study of ancient Egypt thus requires a huge leap of
imagination. And yet, our common humanity offers a way in. In the
careers of ancient Egypt’s rulers, we see the motives that drive
ambitious men and women revealed in the pages of history for the very
first time. The study of ancient Egyptian civilization likewise exposes
the devices by which people have been organized, cajoled,
dominated, and subjugated down to the present day. And with the
benefit of hindsight, we can see in the self-confidence of pharaonic
culture the seeds of its own destruction.
The rise and fall of ancient Egypt holds lessons for us all.
T
HE PYRAMIDS OF GIZA ARE THE DEFINING SYMBOL OF ANCIENT Egypt. In historical
terms, they mark the first great flowering of pharaonic culture, the Old
Kingdom. Yet the pyramids and the sophisticated culture they
represent did not spring into existence fully formed without a long
period of gestation. The origins and early development of civilization in
Egypt can be traced back to at least two thousand years before the
pyramids, to the country’s remote prehistoric past.
Over a period of many centuries, communities living in the fertile Nile
Valley and the dry grasslands to the east and west developed the main
cornerstones of Egyptian culture, their distinctive outlook shaped by
their unique natural environment. As competing territories were forged,
through trade and conquest, into the world’s first nation-state, the pace
of social development accelerated, and by the advent of Egypt’s first
dynasty of kings, all the main elements were in place.
The subsequent eight centuries witnessed the emergence of a great
civilization, and its fullest expression is in those most iconic of
monuments on the Giza plateau. Yet, as the Egyptians themselves
knew only too well, order and chaos were constant bedfellows. As
quickly as it had blossomed, the overstretched state withered under
pressures at home and abroad, bringing the Old Kingdom to an
inglorious end.
Part I of this book charts this first rise and fall of ancient Egypt, from
its extraordinary birth to its cultural zenith at the height of the Pyramid
Age, and its subsequent decline—the first of many such cycles in the
long history of the pharaohs. If there is one defining feature of this
period, it is the ideology of divine kingship. The promulgation of a
belief in a monarch with divine authority was the most significant
achievement of Egypt’s early rulers. The belief embedded itself in the
Egyptian consciousness so deeply that it remained the only
acceptable form of government for the next three thousand years. For
sheer longevity, this type of monarchy ranks as the greatest political
and religious system the world has ever known. The belief in this
system was expressed through art, writing, ceremony, and, above all,
architecture, such expression providing both the inspiration and the
justification for massive royal tombs.
The officials who served the king and whose administrative genius
built the pyramids left their own monuments, too, their lavishly
decorated sepulchres a testament to the sophistication and resources
of the court. But there was also a darker side to royal government. The
appropriation of land, forced labor, a scant regard for human life—
these were characteristics of the Pyramid Age as much as grandiose
architecture was. The ruthless exploitation of Egypt’s natural and
human resources was a prerequisite for achieving the state’s wider
ambitions, and it set the scene for the following centuries of pharaonic
rule. While kings ruled by divine right, the rights of their subjects
interested them little. This would be an abiding theme in the history of
ancient Egypt.
CHAPTER 1
IN THE BEGINNING
THE FIRST KING OF EGYPT
IN A TALL GLASS CASE IN THE ENTRANCE HALL OF THE EGYPTIAN Museum in Cairo
stands an ancient slab of fine-grained greenish-black stone, about two
feet high and no more than an inch thick. Shaped like a shield, it is
carved on both sides in low relief. The scenes, though still crisp, are
difficult to make out in the diffuse, hazy light that filters down through
the dusty glazed dome in the museum ceiling. Most visitors barely give
this strange object a second glance as they head straight for the
golden riches of Tutankhamun on the floor above. Yet this modest
piece of stone is one of the most important documents to survive from
ancient Egypt. Its place of honor at the entrance to the Egyptian
Museum, the world’s greatest treasure-house of pharaonic culture,
underlines its significance. This stone is the object that marks the very
beginning of ancient Egyptian history.
The Narmer Palette, as it is known to Egyptologists, has become an
icon of early Egypt, but the circumstances of its discovery are clouded
with uncertainty. In the winter of A.D. 1897–1898, the British
archaeologists James Quibell and Frederick Green were in the far
south of Egypt, excavating at the ancient site of Nekhen (modern Kom
el-Ahmar), the “city of the falcon” (classical Hierakonpolis). The
nineteenth century was still the era of treasure seeking, and Quibell
and Green, though more scientific in their approach than many of their
contemporaries, were not immune from the pressure to discover fine
objects to satisfy their sponsors back home. So, having chosen to
excavate at Nekhen, a site eroded by countless centuries and largely
devoid of major standing monuments, they decided to focus their
attentions on the ruins of the local temple. Though small and
unimpressive by comparison with the great sanctuaries of Thebes, this
was no ordinary provincial shrine. Since the dawn of history, it had
been dedicated to the celebration of Egyptian kingship. The local
falcon god of Nekhen, Horus, was the patron deity of the Egyptian
monarchy. Might the temple, therefore, yield a royal treasure?
The two men worked away, and their initial results were
disappointing: stretches of mud brick wall; the remains of a mound,
faced in stone; a few worn and broken statues. Nothing spectacular.
The next area to be investigated lay in front of the mound, but here the
archaeologists encountered only a thick layer of clay that resisted
systematic excavation. The city of the falcon seemed determined to
keep its secrets. But then, as Quibell and Green struggled their way
through the clay layer, they came upon a scatter of discarded ritual
objects, a motley collection of sacred paraphernalia that had been
gathered up and buried by the temple priests some time in the remote
past. There was no gold, but the “Main Deposit”—as the
archaeologists optimistically called it—did contain some interesting
and unusual finds. Chief among them was a carved slab of stone.
There was no doubt about what sort of object they had found. A
shallow, circular well in the middle of one side showed it to be a
palette, a grindstone for mixing pigments. But this was no workaday
tool for preparing cosmetics. The elaborate and detailed scenes
decorating both sides showed that it had been commissioned for a
much loftier purpose, to celebrate the achievements of a glorious king.
Beneath the benign gaze of two cow goddesses, a representation of
the monarch himself—shown in the age-old pose of an Egyptian ruler,
smiting his enemy with a mace—dominated one side of the palette.
The archaeologists wondered who he was and when he had reigned.
Two hieroglyphs, contained within a small rectangular panel at the very
top of the palette, seemed to provide the answer, spelling out the
monarch’s name: a catfish (“nar” in the Egyptian language) and a
chisel (“mer”)—Narmer. Here was a king previously unknown to
history. Moreover, the style of the carvings on the Narmer Palette
pointed to a very early date. Subsequent research showed that Narmer
was not just an early king; he was the very first ruler of a united Egypt.
He came to the throne around 2950, the first king of the First Dynasty.
In the mud of Nekhen, Quibell and Green had stumbled upon ancient
Egypt’s founding monument.
The Narmer Palette WERNER FORMAN ARCHIVE
While Narmer may be the first historical king, he is not the beginning
of Egypt’s story. The decoration of his famous palette shows the art of
the Egyptian royal court and the iconography of kingship already in
their classical forms. However, some of the palette’s stranger motifs,
such as the intertwined beasts with long serpentine necks and the bull
trampling the walls of an enemy fortress, hark back to a remote
prehistoric past. On his great commemorative palette, Narmer was
explicitly acknowledging that the cornerstones of Egyptian civilization
had been laid long before his own time.
THE DESERT BLOOMS
AS THE NARMER PALETTE DEMONSTRATES ON A SMALL SCALE AND FOR an early
date, the Egyptians achieved a mastery of stone carving unsurpassed
in the ancient, or modern, world. Diverse and abundant raw materials
within Egypt’s borders combined with great technical accomplishment
to give the Egyptians a highly distinctive medium for asserting their
cultural identity. Stone also had the advantage of permanence, and
Egyptian monuments were consciously designed to last for eternity.
The origin of this obsession with monumentality was in the Western
Desert, near the modern border between Egypt and Sudan. The
remote spot is known to archaeologists as Nabta Playa. Today, a
paved main road carves through the desert only a mile or two away,
bringing construction traffic to Egypt’s New Valley project. But until very
recently, Nabta Playa was as far away from civilization as it was
possible to get. Its main distinction was as a pit stop on the crosscountry route between the desert springs of Bir Kiseiba and the shores
of Lake Nasser. The flat bed of an ancient, dried-up lake—or playa—
together with a nearby sandy ridge, certainly make Nabta an ideal spot
for an overnight camp. There is, however, much more to the site than a
casual first glance would suggest. Scattered throughout the landscape
are large stones—not naturally occurring boulders but megaliths that
had been hauled from some distance away and set up at key points
around the edge of the playa. Some stand in splendid isolation, as
sentinels on the horizon; others form a linear alignment. Most
remarkable of all, on a slight elevation a series of stones has been set
out in a circle, with pairs of uprights facing each other. Two pairs are
aligned north to south, while two more point toward the midsummer
sunrise.
Previously unknown and entirely unexpected, Nabta Playa has
emerged from obscurity as the ancient Egyptian Stonehenge, a
sacred landscape dotted with carefully placed stone structures.
Scientific dating of the associated sediments has revealed a startlingly
early date for these extraordinary monuments, the early fifth millennium
B.C. At that time, as in even earlier periods, the Sahara would have
been very different from its current arid state. On an annual basis,
summer rains would have greened the desert—filling the seasonal
lake, and turning its shores into lush pasture and arable land. The
people who migrated to Nabta Playa to take advantage of this
temporary abundance were seminomadic cattle herders who roamed
with their livestock across a wide area of the eastern Sahara. Large
quantities of cattle bones have been excavated at the site, and traces
of human activity can be found scattered over the ground: fragments of
ostrich eggshells (used as water carriers and, when broken, for
making jewelry), flint arrowheads, stone axes, and grindstones for
processing the cereals that were cultivated along the lakeshore. With
its seasonal fertility, Nabta offered semi-nomadic people a fixed point
of great symbolic significance, and over generations they set about
transforming it into a ritual center. Laying out the stone alignments
must have required a large degree of communal involvement. Like
their counterparts at Stonehenge, the monuments of Nabta show that
the local prehistoric people had developed a highly organized society.
A pastoral way of life certainly needed wise decision-makers with a
detailed knowledge of the environment, close familiarity with the
seasons, and an acute sense of timing. Cattle are thirsty animals,
requiring a fresh supply of water at the end of each day’s wandering,
so judging when to arrive at a site such as Nabta and when to leave
again could have been a matter of life and death for the whole
community.
Prehistoric rock art in Egypt’s Eastern Desert TOBY WILKINSON
The purpose of the standing stones and the “calendar circle” seems
to have been to predict the arrival of the all-important rains that fell
shortly after the summer solstice. When the rains arrived, the
community celebrated by slaughtering some of their precious cattle as
a sacrifice of thanks, and burying the animals in graves marked on the
ground with large, flat stones. Under one such mound, archaeologists
found not a cattle burial but a huge sandstone monolith that had been
carefully shaped and dressed to resemble a cow. Dated, like the
calendar circle, to the early fifth millennium B.C., it is the earliest known
monumental sculpture from Egypt. Here are to be found the origins of
pharaonic stone carving—in the prehistoric Western Desert, among
wandering cattle herders, a millennium and more before the beginning
of the First Dynasty. Archaeologists have been forced to rethink their
theories of Egypt’s origins.
On the other side of Egypt, in the Eastern Desert, equally
remarkable discoveries have been made, confirming the impression
that the arid lands bordering the Nile Valley were the crucible of
ancient Egyptian civilization. Thousands of rock pictures pecked into
the sandstone cliffs dot the dry valleys (known as wadis) that
crisscross the hilly terrain between the Nile and the Red Sea hills. At
some locations, usually associated with natural shelters, overhangs, or
caves, there are great concentrations of pictures. One such tableau, by
a dried-up plunge pool in the Wadi Umm Salam, has been likened to
the Sistine Chapel. Its images constitute some of the earliest sacred
art from Egypt, prefiguring the classic imagery of pharaonic religion by
as much as a thousand years. Like their sculpture-loving counterparts
at Nabta Playa, the prehistoric artists of the Eastern Desert seem also
to have been cattle herders, and pictures of their livestock—and the
wild animals they hunted out on the savanna—feature heavily in their
compositions. But instead of using megaliths to signify their deepest
beliefs, they exploited the smooth cliff faces offered by their own
environment, turning them into canvases for religious expression.
Gods traveling in sacred boats, and ritual hunts of wild animals, are
key themes in the pharaonic iconography first attested in the Eastern
Desert rock art. The inaccessible and inhospitable character of the
region today belies its pivotal role in the rise of ancient Egypt.
GATHERING SPEED
ONGOING SURVEY AND EXCAVATION AT SITES ACROSS THE WESTERN and Eastern
deserts is revealing a pattern of close interaction between desert and
valley peoples in prehistory. Rather unexpectedly, the semi-nomadic
cattle herders who roamed across the prehistoric savanna seem to
have been more advanced than their valley-dwelling contemporaries.
But in a lesson for our own times, the cattle herders’ vibrant way of life
was made extinct by environmental change. Beginning in about 5000,
the climate of northeast Africa began to undergo a marked shift. The
once predictable summer rains that for millennia had provided cattle
herders with seasonal pasture away from the Nile became steadily
less reliable. Over a period of a few centuries, the rain belt moved
progressively southward. (Today the rains, when they fall at all, fall over
the highlands of Ethiopia.) The savannas to the east and west of the
Nile began to dry out and turn to desert. After little more than a few
generations, the desiccated land was no longer able to support thirsty
herds of cattle. For the herders, the alternative to starvation was
migration—to the only permanent water source in the region, the Nile
Valley.
Here, the earliest settled communities, along the edge of the
floodplain, had been established in the early fifth millennium B.C.,
broadly contemporary with the megalith builders of Nabta Playa. Like
the cattle herders, the valley dwellers had also been practicing
agriculture, but in contrast to the seasonality of rainfall in the arid
regions, the regime of the Nile had made it possible to grow crops
year-round. This would have given the valley dwellers the incentive and
the wherewithal to occupy their villages on a permanent basis. The way
of life the valley dwellers developed is known to Egyptologists as the
Badarian culture, after the site of el-Badari, where this lifestyle was first
recorded. The local vicinity was ideally suited to early habitation, with
the juxtaposition of different ecosystems—floodplain and savanna—
and excellent links to a wider hinterland. Desert routes led westward to
the oases, while a major wadi ran eastward to the Red Sea coast. It
was through these avenues that the Badarian way of life was strongly
influenced by the early desert cultures.
One such influence, an interest in personal adornment, stayed with
the ancient Egyptians throughout their history. Another development
with long-term ramifications was the gradual stratification of society
into leaders and followers, a small ruling class and a larger group of
subjects. This was a system that owed much to the challenging lifestyle
faced by pastoral seminomads. These external stimuli and internal
dynamics began to transform Badarian society. Over many centuries,
gradual changes took root and began to accelerate. The rich grew
richer and began to act as patrons to a new class of specialist
craftsmen. They, in turn, developed new technologies and new
products to satisfy their patrons’ ever more sophisticated tastes. The
introduction of restricted access to prestige goods and materials
further reinforced the power and status of the wealthiest in society.
The process of social transformation, once started, could not be
stopped. Culturally, economically, and politically, prehistoric society
became increasingly complex. Egypt was set on a course toward
statehood. The final drying-out of the deserts around 3600 must have
injected further momentum into this process. A sudden increase in
population—when those living in the deserts migrated to the valley—
may have led to greater competition for scarce resources,
encouraging the development of walled towns. More mouths to feed
would also have stimulated more productive agriculture. Urbanization
and the intensification of farming were responses to social change but
were also a stimulus to further change.
Under such conditions, communities in Upper Egypt began to
coalesce into three regional groupings, each probably ruled by a
hereditary monarch. Strategic factors help to explain the early
dominance of these three prehistoric kingdoms. One kingdom was
centered on the town of Tjeni (near modern Girga), a site where the
floodplain narrowed and allowed the town’s inhabitants to control river
traffic. This area was also where trade routes from Nubia and the
Saharan oases met the Nile Valley. A second territory had its capital at
Nubt (“the golden,” modern Nagada), which controlled access to gold
mines in the Eastern Desert via the Wadi Hammamat, on the opposite
bank of the river. A third kingdom had grown up around the settlement
of Nekhen, which, like Tjeni, was the starting point for a desert route to
the oases (and thence to Sudan) and, like Nubt, controlled access to
important Eastern Desert gold reserves, in this case the more
southerly deposits reached via a wadi directly opposite the town.
The rulers of these three territories did what all aspiring leaders do:
they sought to demonstrate and enhance their authority by political,
ideological, and economic means. Their unquenchable thirst for rare
and valuable objects, whether gold and precious stones from the
deserts of Egypt or exotic imports from far-off lands (such as olive oil
from the Near East and lapis lazuli from Afghanistan), stimulated
internal and external trade. The authority to remove such items
permanently from circulation was a particularly powerful statement of
wealth and privilege, so the burials of the elite became increasingly
elaborate and richly furnished, building upon a tradition of grave goods
that stretched back to Badarian times. The development in all three
territories of special burial grounds, set aside for the local ruling class,
is a sure sign of strongly hierarchical societies. With three kingdoms
vying for dominance, the inevitable clash was not long in coming.
The precise train of events is hazy, for this was an era before written
texts. However, by comparing the size and magnificence of tombs in
the three localities, we can get some indication of who was winning the
battle for supremacy. Certainly, the burials at Nekhen and Abdju
(classical and modern Abydos, the necropolis serving the town of
Tjeni) outstrip their counterparts at Nubt. The later reverence shown to
Nekhen and Abdju by Narmer and his successors—in contrast to their
relative lack of interest in Nubt—points in the same direction.
An intriguing recent discovery, once again in the Western Desert,
may even record the moment at which Tjeni eclipsed Nubt. The desert
between Abdju and Nubt is crisscrossed by tracks, many of which
have been in use for thousands of years. These overland paths
happened to offer a quicker, more direct route than the river, because
of the wide bend the Nile describes at this point in its course. Next to
the principal route between Abdju and Nubt, a rock-cut tableau seems
to record a victory by the prehistoric ruler of Tjeni, perhaps against his
rival. Winning control of the desert routes certainly would have given
Tjeni a decisive strategic advantage, allowing it to outflank its neighbor
and cut it off from access to trade with areas farther south.
It can be no coincidence that, during exactly the same period, a ruler
of Tjeni built the largest tomb of its time anywhere in Egypt, in the elite
cemetery at Abdju. The tomb was designed to resemble a miniature
palace, and its unparalleled size and contents—which included an
ivory scepter and a cellar of the finest imported wine—mark it out as a
true kingly burial. Furthermore, its owner was clearly a ruler whose
economic influence spread far beyond his Nile Valley homeland.
Among the most remarkable finds from the tomb were hundreds of
small bone labels, each inscribed with a few hieroglyphic signs. Each
label was once attached, by means of a cord, to a box or jar of
supplies for the royal tomb. The inscriptions record the quantity, nature,
provenance, or ownership of the contents, demonstrating—from the
very dawn of writing—the ancient Egyptians’ predilection for record
keeping. Not only are these labels the earliest Egyptian writing yet
discovered, but the places they mention as the sources of
commodities include the shrine of Djebaut (in modern Tell el-Fara‘in)
and the town of Bast (modern Tell Basta) in the Nile delta, hundreds of
miles north of Abdju. The ruler of Tjeni who built this impressive
sepulchre was well on the way to becoming the king of all Egypt.
One monarch ruling from Tjeni with control over the Nile delta,
another based at Nekhen with access to sub-Saharan trade: there
were now just two players left in the game. It is frustrating that there is
virtually no evidence for the last phase of the struggle, but the
preponderance of martial motifs on decorated ceremonial objects
from the period, and the construction at Nubt and Nekhen of massive
town walls, strongly suggests that military conflict was involved. So
does the incidence of cranial injuries among the late predynastic
population of Nekhen.
The final outcome was certainly clear-cut. When the dust settled, it
was the line of kings of Tjeni that claimed victory. Their control of twothirds of the country, combined with access to seaports and to the
lucrative trade with parts of the Near East (modern Syria, Lebanon,
Israel, and Palestine), proved decisive. Around 2950 B.C., after nearly
two centuries of competition and conflict, a ruler of Tjeni assumed the
kingship of a united Egypt—the man known to us as Narmer. To
symbolize his conquest of the delta—perhaps the final battle in the war
of unification—he commissioned a magnificent ceremonial palette,
decorated with scenes of triumph. In a gesture of homage to his
erstwhile rivals (or perhaps to rub salt into their wounds), he dedicated
the object in the temple at Nekhen … where it lay until its retrieval from
the mud 4,900 years later.
GIFT OF THE NILE
GIVEN THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND SCHOLARLY EFFORT INVOLVED IN rediscovering
Narmer, it is humbling to acknowledge that his relatively recent
identification as the first king of ancient Egypt merely confirms the
account given by the Greek historian Herodotus, writing twenty-four
centuries ago. For the father of history, there was no doubt that Menes
(another name for Narmer) had founded the Egyptian state. It is a
salutary lesson that the ancients were often far cleverer than we give
them credit for. Herodotus also made another fundamental observation
about Egypt, which still captures the essential truth about the country
and its civilization: “Egypt is the gift of the Nile.”1 Flowing through the
Sahara, the Nile makes life possible where otherwise there would be
none. The Nile Valley is a linear oasis, a narrow strip of green
hemmed in on either side by a vast and arid desert, boundless and
bare. The rise of ancient Egypt is to be traced as much in the river and
its character as in the archaeology of graves, rock pictures, and
megaliths.
The environment of the Nile Valley has always had a profound effect
on its inhabitants. The river molds not only the physical landscape, but
also the way in which the Egyptians think about themselves and their
place in the world. The landscape has influenced their habits and
customs, and from an early period it imprinted itself upon their
collective psyche, shaping over the course of generations their most
fundamental philosophical and religious beliefs. The symbolic force of
the Nile is a thread that runs through pharaonic civilization, starting with
the Egyptians’ myth of their own origins.
According to the most ancient account of how the universe was
formed, in the beginning there was nothing but a watery chaos,
personified as the god Nun: “The great god who creates himself: he is
water, he is Nun, father of the gods.” 2 A later version of the creation
myth described the primeval waters as negative and frightening, the
embodiment of limitlessness, hiddenness, darkness, and
formlessness. Yet despite being lifeless, the waters of Nun
nevertheless held the potential for life. Although chaotic, they held
within them the possibility of created order. This belief in the
coexistence of opposites was characteristic of the ancient Egyptian
mind-set, and was deeply rooted in their distinctive geographical
surroundings. This view was reflected in the contrast between the arid
desert and the fertile floodplain, and in the river itself, for the Nile could
both create life and destroy it—a paradox inherent in its peculiar
regime.
Until the construction of the Aswan Dam in the early twentieth century
A.D. and its larger twin, the Aswan High Dam, in the 1960s, the Nile
performed an annual miracle. The summer rains falling over the
Ethiopian highlands swelled the Blue Nile—one of two great tributaries
that join to form the Egyptian Nile—sending a torrent of water
downstream (in this case, north). By early August, the approaching
inundation was clearly discernible in the far south of Egypt, both from
the turbulent sound of the floodwaters and from a noticeable rise in the
river level. A few days later, the flood arrived in earnest. With an
unstoppable force, the Nile burst its banks, and the waters spread out
over the floodplain. The sheer volume of the flood caused the
phenomenon to be repeated along the entire length of the Nile Valley.
For several weeks, all the cultivable land was underwater. But as well
as destruction the inundation brought with it the potential for new life: a
layer of fertile silt deposited by the floodwaters over the fields, and the
water itself. Once the flood retreated, the soil emerged again, fertilized
and irrigated, ready for the sowing of crops. It was thanks to this annual
phenomenon that Egypt enjoyed such productive agriculture—when
the Nile flood was sufficient but not too powerful. Deviations from the
norm, both “low Niles” and “high Niles,” could prove equally
catastrophic, leaving crops to desiccate with insufficient water or
drown in waterlogged fields. Fortunately, in most years the inundation
was moderate and the harvest bountiful, providing a surplus beyond
the immediate subsistence needs of the population and allowing a
complex civilization to develop.
In fact, Egypt was doubly blessed by its geography. Not only did the
river bring the annual miracle of the inundation, but the river’s shaping
of the valley’s topography also proved highly beneficial to agriculture. In
cross section, the Nile Valley is slightly convex, with the highest land
lying immediately next to the river—the remnants of old levees—and
lower-lying areas located at the edges of the floodplain. This made the
valley especially suitable for irrigation, both by the natural floodwaters
and by artificial means, since water would automatically come to rest,
and remain longest, in the fields farthest from the riverbank—
potentially the very areas most prone to drought. Moreover, the long,
narrow floodplain naturally divides into a series of flood basins, each
compact enough to be managed and cultivated with relative ease by
the local population. This was an important factor in the consolidation
of early kingdoms, such as those based at Tjeni, Nubt, and Nekhen.
The fact that Egypt was unified under Narmer instead of remaining a
series of rival power centers or warring city-states—the situation in
many neighboring lands—can likewise be attributed to the Nile. The
river has always provided an artery for transport and communication,
serving the whole country. All life in Egypt ultimately depends on the
life-giving waters of the Nile, so in ancient times no permanent valley
community could have survived more than a few hours’ walk from the
river. This proximity of the population to the Nile allowed a dominant
authority to exercise economic and political control on a national scale
with relative ease.
As the country’s defining geographical feature, the Nile was also a
powerful metaphor for all Egyptians. For this reason, Egypt’s rulers
gave the river and its annual inundation key roles in the state ideology
that they developed to underpin their authority in the eyes of the
population at large. The political value of religious doctrine can be
seen most strikingly if we look at one of the earliest creation myths,
developed at Iunu (classical and modern Heliopolis). According to the
story, the waters of Nun receded to reveal a mound of earth, just as dry
land would appear from the floodwaters after the inundation. This story
underscored the ever present potential for creation in the midst of
chaos. The primeval mound then became the setting for the act of
creation itself, with the creator god emerging at the same time as the
mound, sitting upon it. His name was Atum, which, characteristically,
means both “totality” and “nonexistence.” In Egyptian art, Atum was
usually represented wearing the double crown of kingship, identifying
him as the creator not just of the universe but also of ancient Egypt’s
political system. The message was clear and unambiguous: if Atum
was the first king as well as the first living being, then created order
and political order were interdependent and inextricable. Opposition to
the king or his regime was tantamount to nihilism.
A slightly different version of the creation myth explained how a reed
grew on the newly emerged mound, and the celestial god, in the form
of a falcon, alighted on the reed, making his dwelling on earth and
bringing divine blessing to the land. Throughout the long course of
pharaonic history, every temple in Egypt sought to emulate this
moment of creation, siting its sanctuary on a replica of the primeval
mound in order to re-create the universe anew. The rest of the myth
recounts the origins of the essential building blocks of existence: the
male and female principles; the fundamental elements of air and
moisture; the earth and sky; and, finally, the first family of gods, who,
like the waters of Nun from which they arose, embraced both orderly
and chaotic tendencies. In total, Atum and his immediate descendants
numbered nine deities, three times three expressing the ancient
Egyptian concept of completeness.
The essential interest of the story, apart from its philosophical
sophistication and its subtle legitimation of royal government, is that it
demonstrates the force with which the Egyptians’ unique environment
—the combination of regularity and harshness, dependability and
danger, and an annual promise of rebirth and renewal—imprinted itself
on the people’s collective consciousness and determined the pattern
of their civilization.
THE TWO LANDS
THE NILE WAS NOT JUST THE CAUSE AND INSPIRATION OF ANCIENT Egyptian culture; it
was also the unifying thread running through Egyptian history. It
witnessed royal progresses, the transport of obelisks, the processions
of gods, the movement of armies. The Nile Valley and delta—“the Two
Lands” in the Egyptians’ own terminology—are the backdrop to the
rise and fall of ancient Egypt, and their particular geography is key to
understanding Egypt’s long and complex history.
There are no surviving maps of Egypt in ancient times, but if there
were, one startling difference would leap off the page. The ancient
Egyptians oriented themselves to the south, because it was in the
south that the Nile rose, and it was from the south that the annual
inundation arrived. In the ancient Egyptian mind-set, south lay at the
top of their mental map, north at the bottom. Egyptologists perpetuate
this unorthodox view of the world by calling the southern part of the
country Upper Egypt and the north Lower Egypt. In accordance with
this orientation, the west lay to the right (the two words were
synonymous in ancient Egyptian), the east to the left. Egypt itself was
known affectionately as “the Two Banks,” underlining the fact that the
country was synonymous with the Nile Valley. An alternative, more
familiar designation was Kemet, “the black land,” referring to the dark
alluvial soil that gave the country its fertility; this was often contrasted
with Deshret, “the red land” of the deserts. As for the Nile itself, the
Egyptians had no need of a special name: it was simply Iteru, “the
river.” In their world, there was no other.
Despite its unifying influence, the Nile is far from uniform in
character. On its course from sub-Saharan Africa to the Mediterranean
Sea, it molds the terrain through which it flows into a great diversity of
different landscapes, each of which the ancient Egyptians learned to
harness. In their worldview, the river began its course at the first
cataract, a series of spectacular rapids near the modern city of Aswan,
the rapids caused by the intrusion of hard, resistant granite across the
narrow Nile Valley. The rumbling sound made by the floodwaters each
inundation season, as they poured through the restricted channels and
over exposed rocks, led the ancient Egyptians to believe that the flood
itself originated in a deep underground cavern beneath the cataract.
On the boulder-strewn island of Abu (classical and modern
Elephantine), in the middle of the Nile, the people worshipped this
force of nature in the guise of the ram god Khnum, while a Nilometer
on the island, for measuring the height of the flood, gave an early
indication of the inundation’s strength each year. With its dangerous
rapids and submerged rocks, the cataract region is hazardous to
shipping, but the ancient Egyptians turned this to their advantage. Abu,
meaning “elephant (town)” and named for its importance in the ivory
trade, became Egypt’s southern border post, an easily defensible
location that overlooked and controlled the river approach from lands
farther south. It also formed the natural point of departure for caravans
heading overland, via the Kurkur, Dunqul, and Salima oases, to join up
with the Darb el-Arba‘in (“forty days road”), the main north-south transSaharan trade route, which runs from El Fasher in the Darfur region of
Sudan to Asyut in Egypt. Ongoing archaeological surveys are steadily
revealing the ancient importance of desert tracks, and it is clear that
control of these well-worn trade routes was strategically just as
important as control of river traffic. The importance of Abu and other
early centers was due to their favorable location for both types of
travel. Throughout ancient Egyptian history, Abu and the first cataract
region marked the beginning of Egypt proper. When Egyptian ships
sailing north from conquered territories passed Biga Island, at the
head of the cataract, their crews must have rejoiced, for they knew they
were home at last.
North of Abu, the Nile Valley is at its narrowest, flowing between
cliffs of hard Nubian sandstone. Here, the strip of agricultural land on
either side of the river is extremely compressed—no more than a
couple of hundred yards wide in some places—and, as a result, this
part of southern Upper Egypt never supported a large population. But it
has other natural advantages that the ancient Egyptians were swift to
exploit. In particular, wadis lead from both banks of the Nile deep into
the surrounding deserts, providing access to trade routes and to the
sources of valuable raw materials such as gemstones, copper, and
gold. These factors compensated for the relative scarcity of agricultural
land and made the southern Nile Valley a major center of economic—
and hence political—developments throughout Egyptian history, from
Nekhen in prehistoric times to nearby Apollonopolis Magna (modern
Edfu) in the Roman Period.
A major transition in the geology of the Nile Valley occurs at Gebel
el-Silsila, forty miles north of Abu, where Nubian sandstone gives way
to the softer Egyptian limestone. The towering sandstone cliffs that
extend to the water’s edge at this point were obvious markers for
boats plying up- and downriver. The cliffs also provided a readily
accessible quarry for large sandstone blocks, supplies for major
building projects in the later phases of pharaonic civilization.
Beyond Gebel el-Silsila, the landscape is gentler, the cliffs lining the
valley lower and more eroded, and the floodplain wider. With greater
agricultural potential, the region is able to sustain a larger population
than areas farther south. This was a key factor in the rise and steady
growth of Thebes, the largest city in Upper Egypt for most of ancient
Egyptian history. The main centers of habitation were always situated
on the east bank of the Nile, where the floodplain is at its widest, while
the dramatic cliffs of the west bank and the broad expanse of low
desert at their foot offered ideal locations for burial—close enough to
the city for convenience, yet far enough away to maintain an essential
separation. Thebes was thus divided, both geographically and
ideologically, into a city of the living (where the sun rose) and a city of
the dead (where the sun set). The city also benefited from the
extensive network of desert tracks behind the hills of the west bank.
Keenly contested, control of these cross-country express trails
conferred a major strategic advantage, and played a decisive role at
important moments of Egyptian history. In addition, they allowed
Thebes to regulate access to Nubia from the north.
As the Nile enters the great “Qena bend,” it swings to the east,
bringing it closer to the Red Sea than at any other point in its course.
The east bank was therefore the obvious point of departure for
expeditions into the Red Sea hills—with their gold mines and stone
quarries—and beyond to the shores of the Red Sea itself. Throughout
pharaonic times, the Egyptians sent trading expeditions to the distant
and fabled land of Punt (coastal Sudan and Eritrea)—expeditions that
left from Red Sea ports. In the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, the Red
Sea offered the quickest maritime route to India, and the deserts to the
east of the Qena bend were a hive of commercial and military activity.
Continuing northward past the Qena bend, the Nile Valley changes
character again, becoming much wider, with only distant vistas of ageeroded bluffs. Ironically, although it is one of the most agriculturally
productive parts of the country, northern Upper Egypt generally
remained something of a backwater, because of its comparative
isolation from the main centers of political power. A notable exception
was the prominence of Tjeni during the prehistoric period and early
dynasties, which probably resulted from its command of the shortest
route from the Nile to the oases. In later periods, the great antiquity of
Abdju as a royal burial ground gave it a religious significance, and it
became the most important pilgrimage site in the whole of Egypt, a
status it retained throughout pharaonic times. In the civil war that
followed the collapse of the Old Kingdom state, Abdju was a key prize,
and the surrounding region would be fought over many times in the
periodic conflicts that erupted between rival power centers in the north
and south of Egypt.
Continuing downstream, there is a marked constriction in the Nile
Valley at the modern city of Asyut. The name Asyut is derived from the
ancient Egyptian place-name Sauty, meaning “guardian,” and the
moniker is well chosen, for Asyut guards both the northern approach to
the riches of Upper Egypt, and, from the other direction, the southern
approach to the capital city and the Mediterranean ports. Hence, Asyut
was always a natural “break point” in the territorial integrity of Egypt:
when the country split into northern and southern halves, as it did
during various periods, the border was generally drawn at Asyut. The
city also guards the Egyptian terminus of the Darb el-Arba‘in, the forty
days road, so Asyut is a place of huge strategic importance.
North of Asyut, the lush, expansive fields resume, imparting a serene
and timeless beauty to the stretch of valley sometimes called Middle
Egypt. Once again, desert routes from the west bank provide easy
access to the Saharan oases and thence to Sudan. However, the most
notable feature here is not the valley itself but the large, fertile
depression of the Fayum, fed by a subsidiary Nile branch, the Bahr
Yusuf, which leaves the main river at Asyut. Birket Qarun, the vast
freshwater body at the heart of the Fayum, brings life to the
surrounding Sahara. In ancient times the area would have teemed with
wildlife, and the lake’s shores supported abundant vegetation and
productive agriculture. From the very beginning of pharaonic history,
the Fayum was a popular location for royal retreats and summer
palaces. In the Middle Kingdom and Ptolemaic Period in particular, it
was the focus of major irrigation and land reclamation activities, which
in effect created “another Egypt” in the Western Desert.
Strategically, the most important location in the whole of Egypt is the
point where the Nile Valley broadens out and the river divides into
many distributaries as it flows toward the Mediterranean Sea. This
region formed the junction between Upper and Lower Egypt, and the
ancient Egyptians called the area “the balance of the Two Lands”; after
unification, it was the obvious location for the capital city, since it
commanded both parts of the country. Home to ancient Memphis and
modern Cairo, the apex of the delta has remained the administrative
hub of Egypt for more than five millennia. Its importance in pharaonic
times is underscored by the pyramids that line the edge of the desert
escarpment west of Memphis for a distance of nearly twenty miles.
In ideological and political terms, the ancient Egyptians gave Lower
Egypt and Upper Egypt equal prominence; yet our modern
understanding of the delta still lags far behind that of the Nile Valley.
The main reasons are the steady accumulation of silt over centuries,
burying many of the ancient remains, and the area’s difficult and
uncompromising terrain. The contrast with the narrow, well-defined
valley could not be greater. The delta comprises great expanses of flat,
low-lying land, stretching to the horizon, interrupted only by the
occasional stand of palm trees. Hazardous marshes and a multitude of
small waterways make cross-country travel particularly difficult. The
delta offers fertile grazing land and bountiful agriculture, but it is
marginal land, at perennial risk from the inundation or the sea. (The
ancient Egyptians clearly recognized this, referring to Lower Egypt as
Ta-Mehu, “flooded land.”) It was also Egypt’s exposed northern flank,
with the western delta prone to incursion by Libyans and the east
prone to migration and attack by people from Palestine and beyond.
The fringes of the delta were surrendered to foreign domination during
periods of national weakness, and were fortified at times of strong
central government—as a buffer zone against attack and as a base for
military campaigns to defend and widen Egypt’s borders. At the end of
pharaonic history, the delta rose to prominence because of its
Mediterranean links and its proximity to the other centers of power in
the ancient world, notably Greece and Rome.
As the Nile nears the end of its course, the marshlands of Lower
Egypt give way to brackish lagoons fringing the coast, and the sandy
shores of the Mediterranean. This is a shifting landscape, poised
between dry land and sea, and it served as a further reminder to the
ancient Egyptians of the precarious balance of their existence. Their
whole environment seemed to emphasize that the maintenance of
created order relied upon the balance of opposites: the fertile black
land and the arid red land, the east as the realm of the living and the
west as the realm of the dead, the narrow Nile Valley and the broad
delta, and the annual struggle between the chaotic floodwaters and the
dry land.
If the geography of Egypt molded the psyche of its inhabitants, it was
the particular genius of the country’s early rulers to cast the king as the
linchpin who alone could maintain the forces in equilibrium.
CHAPTER 2
GOD INCARNATE
LONG LIVE THE KING
THE UNIFICATION OF EGYPT IN 2950 CREATED THE WORLD’S FIRST nation-state.
Today, this form of political and social unit seems both natural and
inevitable: our prosperity (or poverty), our rights and duties, our
freedoms (or lack of them) are all profoundly affected by our nationality.
With the exception of Antarctica, the entire surface of our planet is
divided up into countries, numbering more than two hundred. Yet it was
not always so. Before the late fourth millennium B.C., there were no such
states. Identity and loyalty were based instead on family, community, or
region. The concept of a nation-state—a political territory whose
population shares a common identity—was the invention of the ancient
Egyptians.
Beginning with Narmer, Egypt’s early kings found themselves the
rulers of an entirely new form of polity, one bound together as much by
governmental structures as by shared values. It was an unprecedented
challenge: to foster a sense of nationhood among diverse people,
spread out over an area extending from the first cataract to the shores
of the Mediterranean Sea. The creation of a distinctive sense of
Egyptianness ranks as one of the greatest achievements of Egypt’s
early rulers. At its heart lay a large measure of self-interest. The
doctrine of divine kingship defined pharaonic civilization, produced
such iconic monuments as the pyramids, and inspired the great tombs
and temples that stand to this day.
The dominance of monarchy in ancient Egyptian culture and history
is underlined by the system we use for dividing up the three-thousandyear span between the reign of Narmer and the death of Cleopatra.
Rather than focusing on cultural achievements (such as Stone Age,
Bronze Age, Iron Age), Egyptian chronology employs a scheme based
on dynasties of kings. In a way that seems particularly appropriate for
one of the most conservative of all ancient cultures, the basic system
we use today remains the same as that devised by Manetho, an
ancient Egyptian priest and historian who lived twenty-three hundred
years ago. Looking back at the history of his own country, and assisted
by temple records, Manetho divided Egypt’s kings into thirty ruling
houses, or dynasties. His scheme started with Menes (the king we
know as Narmer) as the founder of the First Dynasty (circa 2950), and
ended with Nectanebo II (Nakhthorheb) as the last king of the Thirtieth
Dynasty (360–343 B.C.). For historical completeness, modern scholars
have added a Thirty-first Dynasty, comprising the Persian conquerors
who briefly ruled Egypt between the demise of Nakhthorheb and the
conquest of Alexander the Great. The Macedonian and Ptolemaic
dynasties, founded by Alexander and Ptolemy respectively, were not
included within Manetho’s original scheme. Although these dynasties
comprise kings of non-Egyptian origin and represent, to some extent,
a break with the pharaonic system of government, they do emphasize
the continued importance of dynastic kingship in the later history of
ancient Egypt.
In keeping with the ancient Egyptian ideal, perpetuated in temple
reliefs and inscriptions, Manetho’s dynasties emphasized a single,
unbroken succession of kings stretching back to “the time of the gods”
and ultimately to the moment of creation itself. In turn, this ideal
reflected the doctrine promulgated by the pharaonic court. According
to this doctrine, the creator god Atum set the pattern for kingship at
“the first time,” and each subsequent ruler was the legitimate inheritor
of a divinely sanctioned form of government. The reality, of course, was
rather different. At times of national disunity, several rulers based in
different parts of the country were able to claim royal titles and rule
concurrently. Hence, our modern understanding of Egyptian history
regards Manetho’s Twenty-second, Twenty-third, and Twenty-fourth
dynasties as at least partially overlapping. Recent scholarship has
shown some of his dynasties (such as the Seventh) to be wholly
spurious, the result of a misunderstanding of the ancient temple
records, while the Ninth and Tenth dynasties seem to represent only
one ruling family, not two. These corrections and modifications aside,
Manetho’s system has proved impressively robust and durable. Above
all, the fact that it remains the most convenient way of dividing up
ancient Egyptian history underlines the centrality of monarchy to his—
and our—understanding of pharaonic civilization.
Indeed, as a form of government, kingship was quintessentially
Egyptian. Among the early civilizations of the ancient world, only Egypt
embraced this particular mode of rule from the very beginning of its
history. In Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), city-states based their identity
on their local temples, so it was the high priests who wielded the
greatest political and economic power. Only later did a monarchical
system develop, and it was never as thoroughgoing or omnipotent as
its Egyptian counterpart. In the Nile Valley, kings seem to have ruled
the people from prehistoric times. Recent excavations in the early royal
burial ground at Abdju have uncovered graves dating back to around
3800. One of them contained a pottery beaker painted with perhaps
the earliest image of a king. It shows a tall figure with a feather in his
hair, holding a mace in one hand, and in the other, a rope binding three
captives. The subjugation of enemies and the distinctive combination
of feather headdress and mace—which is also found in the prehistoric
rock art of the Eastern Desert—identify the scene as royal, even
though the ruler in question probably controlled only a limited territory.
Kingship also seems to have developed elsewhere in Upper Egypt at
about the same time, as suggested by a fragment of pottery from Nubt
decorated with a crown, and by a monumental complex of pillared halls
in the desert close to Nekhen.
By around 3500 the unmistakable iconography of kingship was
given full expression in a tomb at Nekhen known as the Painted Tomb.
One of the inside walls of this burial chamber was plastered and
painted with a frieze showing a royal figure taking part in various ritual
activities. The decoration is dominated by a spectacular procession of
boats, but in one corner of the scene the king is shown smiting three
bound captives. This motif, already prefigured on the Abdju vase,
became the defining image of Egyptian kingship. We see it repeated
on the Narmer Palette and thereafter on temple walls until the very end
of pharaonic civilization. The imagery of early kingship was as
enduring as it was violent.
CROWN AND SCEPTER
DURING THE PROCESS OF STATE FORMATION, THE ARTISTIC EXPRESSION of royal rule
underwent rapid development, to keep pace with the changing notion
of kingship itself. We can trace the changes in a series of ceremonial
objects and commemorative inscriptions. Particularly striking is the socalled Battlefield Palette, an object similar to the Narmer Palette but
dating to a century or so earlier. Whereas Narmer’s monument gives
pride of place to an image of the king in human form, the older palette
shows the ruler instead as a huge lion, trampling and goring his
enemies who lie prostrate on the field of battle. The intention was to
present the king as a force of nature. In a similar vein, a contemporary
inscription carved at Gebel Sheikh Suleiman, near the second Nile
cataract in Nubia, shows the victorious Egyptian king as a giant
scorpion, holding in its pincers a rope that binds the defeated Nubian
chief. From Narmer’s own time, an ivory cylinder shows the king as a
vicious Nile catfish, beating rows of prisoners with a large stick. The
message was clear: the king was not just a mere mortal who ruled by
virtue of his descent and leadership abilities; he also embodied the
strength and ferocity of wild animals, superhuman powers granted to
him by divine authority. Elevating themselves above their subjects,
Egypt’s prehistoric rulers were intent on acquiring godlike status.
These trends culminate in the Narmer Palette. Its very form harks
back to a time when wandering cattle herders lived a seminomadic
existence, carrying everything they needed with them and using their
own bodies as canvasses for their art. In such a society, face paint
played a central role in the ritual life of the community, and cosmetic
palettes were a favorite and prized possession. But by Narmer’s time,
the palette had been transformed into a vehicle for proclaiming the
omnipotence and divinity of the king.
The decoration of the Narmer Palette likewise spans two worlds and
two ages. The shallow well that betrays the object’s practical origins is
formed by the entwined necks of two fabulous creatures, held on
leashes by attendants. These “serpopards” (leopards with serpentine
necks) are not Egyptian in origin. They come from the artistic canon of
ancient Mesopotamia. Their presence on an early Egyptian artifact
points to a period of intense cultural exchange between two of the
great cultures of late prehistory, when ideas and influences from the
valleys of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates reached the distant banks of
the Nile. Egypt’s predynastic rulers were intent upon promoting their
own authority and influence. To do so, they needed tried and trusted
means to display their power, and they were quite happy to borrow
ideas from abroad, if the ideas served the purpose. So, for a few
generations, Egyptian elite culture adopted a range of Mesopotamian
imagery, especially artistic motifs to represent complex or difficult
concepts, such as the notion of kingship itself (a rosette) or the
reconciliation of opposing forces by the ruler (two intertwined beasts).
But once the borrowed ideas had achieved the desired effect, they
were discarded just as quickly, in favor of indigenous cultural
expressions—the only exception being the Mesopotamian-inspired
style of architecture adopted for the king’s palace and other royal
buildings. The Narmer Palette captures this pivotal moment in cultural
history: Mesopotamian motifs appear on one side, exclusively
Egyptian motifs on the other. Egyptian civilization had come of age
and was finding its own voice.
Prehistoric and historic modes of expression are likewise reflected
in the depiction of Narmer himself. On one side he is shown as a wild
bull, tearing down the walls of a rebel stronghold and trampling the
hapless enemy underfoot. Turn the palette over, and the representation
of the ruler as a wild animal has been relegated to the past. The image
of the victorious king in human form now dominates. The ideology of
royal authority had not changed, but its representation was undergoing
a profound transformation. From now on, it was not thought
appropriate to depict the king as an animal. His newly acquired divinity
required a more elevated and sophisticated representation.
Monarchs throughout history have adopted elaborate trappings to
distinguish themselves from their subjects. Royal regalia encodes the
different attributes of kingship, providing a kind of visual shorthand for
a complex underlying ideology. In Christian monarchies a crown
surmounted by a cross symbolizes that the king’s temporal power is
subject to a greater, divine authority (the orb reinforces the same
message), while a scepter stands for power tempered by justice. In
ancient Egypt, regalia was similarly used to convey the nature of royal
authority. Once again, many of the elements have prehistoric origins.
The earliest symbol of office yet discovered in Egypt dates back to
4400, more than fourteen centuries before the foundation of the
dynastic tradition. It is a simple wooden staff, about a foot long, with
knobbed ends, found buried next to its owner in a grave at el-Omari,
near modern Cairo.
Wielding a big stick is, of course, the most basic expression of
authority, and a wooden staff remained the identifying badge of high
office throughout ancient Egyptian history. Monarchy, however, has a
tendency to elaborate. So early in the development of Egyptian
kingship, the simple stick evolved into a more complex object, a
scepter. As we have seen, an ivory scepter in the shape of a
shepherd’s crook survives from a predynastic royal tomb at Abdju, and
the crook became so closely identified with sovereignty that it was
adopted as the hieroglyphic sign for the word “ruler.” Together with the
flail or goad—a stick with knotted cords or strings of beads attached to
one end—it came to symbolize the office of kingship, more specifically
the monarch’s duty to both restrain and encourage his flock. These two
key items of royal regalia betray the prehistoric origins of Egyptian
civilization. They recall a past where livelihoods were dominated by
animal husbandry, where the man wielding the crook and flail—the
man controlling the herds—was the leader of his community. A similar
echo is heard in the peculiar item of regalia worn by Narmer on both
sides of his palette, a bull’s tail. This was intended to demonstrate that
the king embodied the power of the wild bull, perhaps the most
awesome and ferocious of ancient Egyptian fauna, and the tail
provided a subconscious link between the dynastic monarchy and its
predynastic antecedents.
A crown is the quintessential emblem of monarchy. Sovereigns have
always distinguished themselves by wearing a special form of
headdress that, at its most basic level, elevates the wearer above the
populace (literally and metaphorically). Like the concept of the nationstate, crowns seem to have been an ancient Egyptian invention. And in
keeping with the Egyptians’ worldview, their kings wore not one but
two distinctive crowns, to symbolize the two halves of their realm. From
earliest historic times, the red crown was associated with Lower
Egypt. It consisted of a squat, squarish cap with a tall tapering
projection rising from the back, and attached to the front of this
projection was a curly protuberance reminiscent of a bee’s proboscis.
Its counterpart, the white crown—tall and conical with a bulbous end—
was the symbol of Upper Egypt. This neat equation shows the
Egyptians’ love of binary divisions, but it is also an artificial creation.
Archaeological evidence from the prehistoric period suggests that
both crowns originated in Upper Egypt (the crucible of kingship), the
red crown at Nubt and the white crown farther south, beyond Nekhen.
Following the unification of the country, it made perfect sense to recast
the northern red crown as the symbol of northern Egypt, keeping the
southern crown as the symbol of the south. The ancient Egyptians were
particularly good at inventing traditions. In the middle of the First
Dynasty, about a century after Narmer, the royal iconographers took
the obvious step of combining the red and white crowns into a single
headdress, the double crown, to symbolize the ruler’s dual dominion.
Thereafter he had a choice of three distinct headpieces, depending
upon which aspect of his authority he wished to emphasize.
If art could be used to project the king’s authority, how much more
effectively could architecture do the same, but on a monumental scale.
Like other totalitarian rulers throughout history, Egypt’s kings had an
obsession with grand buildings, designed to reflect and magnify their
status. From the very beginning of the Egyptian state, the monarchy
showed itself adept at using architectural vocabulary for ideological
purposes. It chose to emphasize one particular style of building as the
visible expression of kingship. A façade composed of alternating
recesses and buttresses—which create a highly effective pattern of
light and shade in Egypt’s sunny climate—had first been developed in
Mesopotamia, in the middle of the fourth millennium B.C. Like other
cultural borrowings during the period of state formation, this distinctive
architectural style, known as palace-façade architecture, found a
receptive audience among Egypt’s early rulers. It was both exotic and
imposing: ideal as a symbol of royal power. So it was swiftly adopted
as the architecture of choice for the king’s palaces, including the royal
compound in the capital city of Memphis, which served as the principal
seat of government. With its whitewashed exterior, this building known
as White Wall must have been a dazzling sight, comparable in its
symbolism to the White House of a modern superpower. Other royal
buildings throughout the land were consciously modeled on White
Wall, and an architectural motif of foreign origin rapidly became one of
the hallmarks of the Egyptian monarchy.
TITLE ROLE
THROUGHOUT PHARAONIC HISTORY, ICONOGRAPHY AND ARCHITECTURE retained
important roles in projecting the desired image of kingship to the
people. Iconography and architecture were especially effective in a
country such as Egypt, where up to 95 percent of the population was
illiterate. But in the ancient world, the main threat to a king rarely, if
ever, came from the masses. The people a monarch needed to keep
on his side, above all, were his closest advisers. The small group of
literate high officials who ran the administration were in a better
position than most to pose a threat to the reigning king. Of course,
such individuals generally owed their position, status, and wealth to
royal patronage, and therefore had a vested interest in maintaining the
status quo. However, Egypt’s masterful royal propagandists devised a
subtle means of bolstering kingship among the literate class. In the
process, they raised the office to a position of virtual unassailability.
The solution lay not in iconography but in writing. Hieroglyphs were
first developed in the late prehistoric period for a rather prosaic
purpose, to facilitate record keeping and enable economic control
over a geographically extensive territory. But the ideological potential
of writing was swiftly realized. On the Narmer Palette, for instance,
signs are used to identify the main protagonists (the king, his followers,
and his enemies) and to label the principal scenes. Words could just
as easily be employed to convey the fundamental essence of kingship
through royal titles. In the contemporary Western world, titles have
generally lost their former potency, although some, such as
“commander in chief” and “defender of the faith,” still carry echoes of a
former age of deference and rigid hierarchies. In ancient Egypt, names
and titles were highly significant, and the early development of the royal
titulary, the royal protocol of titles, exploited this to the full.
The most ancient of all royal titles, in use even before Narmer’s time,
was the Horus title. It explicitly identified the king as the earthly
incarnation of the supreme celestial deity, Horus, who was worshipped
in the form of a falcon. This made a statement as bold as it was
uncompromising. If the king was not just the gods’ representative on
earth but an embodiment of divinity, his office could not be challenged
without destroying the whole of creation. The message was reinforced
at every available opportunity. The king’s seal, stamped on
commodities to mark royal ownership, or carved in stone on royal
monuments, showed the falcon god standing on top of a rectangular
frame containing the king’s Horus name, the name which expressed
the king’s identity as the earthly incarnation of Horus. The frame was
designed to resemble a gate in the royal compound. The not so
subliminal message was that the king within his palace operated under
divine sanction and was himself a god incarnate. As a statement of
monarchical rule, it was direct and unanswerable.
A second royal title, attested from the reign of Narmer’s successor,
took royal propaganda a stage further. It was written with the signs of a
vulture and a cobra, representing two goddesses. Nekhbet the vulture
was associated with Nekheb (modern Elkab), a town opposite Nekhen
in the heart of Upper Egypt. Wadjet the cobra was the goddess of
Dep, one of the twin towns that made up the important delta city of PerWadjet (modern Tell el-Fara‘in); she therefore stood for Lower Egypt.
Choosing two ancient deities to symbolize the two halves of the
country, and making both goddesses joint protectors of the monarchy,
was a clever move, creating from strands of local belief and custom a
national theology, centered on the person of the king. The adoption of
the red and white crowns was part of the same process. So was the
prominence given to the delta goddess Neith in the names of early
royal wives. Narmer’s wife, for example, was called Neith-hotep, “Neith
is satisfied.” From the marshes of the north to the southernmost Nile
Valley, all the major cults—and their followers—were drawn into the
ideology of kingship. It was a brilliant demonstration of the unite-andrule concept, a theological takeover of the entire country.
The third royal title, adopted at the same time as the double crown,
represented a further elaboration and definition of the king’s role. It
comprised two Egyptian words, “nesu bity,” literally translated as “he of
the reed and bee” but more elegantly rendered “dual king.” While the
precise derivation is obscure—on one level, the reed may have
symbolized Upper Egypt and the bee Lower Egypt—the meaning was
wide-ranging and sophisticated. It embraced the many pairs of
opposites over which the king presided and which he alone kept in
balance: Upper and Lower Egypt, the black land and the red land, the
realms of the living and the dead, and so on. The title also reflected the
most fundamental dichotomy at the heart of Egyptian kingship, the
contrast between the sacred office (nesu) and the secular function
(bity). The nesu bity title reminded the king’s followers that as well as
head of state he was also god on earth—an irresistible combination.
POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE
RULERS OF ALL KINDS, BUT ESPECIALLY HEREDITARY MONARCHS, HAVE instinctively
recognized the cohesive power of ceremony and display, the capacity
of public ritual to generate popular support. The ancient Egyptians
were masters of royal ceremony, and from an early period. An
elaborately decorated stone mace head, found alongside the Narmer
Palette at Nekhen, shows an earlier king (known to us as Scorpion)
performing an irrigation ceremony. The king uses a hoe to open a dike
while an attendant, stooping before the royal presence, holds a basket
ready to receive the clod of earth. Fan bearers, standard-bearers, and
dancing women add to the sense of occasion. In this vivid tableau from
the dawn of history, we get a flavor of early royal ceremonies: ritually
charged events that emphasized the king’s role as guarantor of
prosperity and stability.
Another mace head from the same cache records a different, though
equally resonant, ceremony. This time the presiding king is Narmer,
enthroned on an elevated dais under an awning, wearing the red crown
and carrying the crooklike scepter. Beside the dais stands the
customary pair of fan bearers, accompanied by the king’s sandal
bearer and chief minister. Behind them are men wielding big sticks—
even a sacral monarchy needed security. The ceremony, too, has a
militaristic flavor, its main act being the parade of captured booty and
enemy prisoners before the royal throne. In a stark analogy, three
captive antelope inside a walled enclosure are shown next to the
parade ground. The ideological connection between warfare and
hunting, between the unruly forces of nature and the king’s opponents,
remained potent through Egyptian history.
“King Scorpion” performs an irrigation ceremony. WERNER FORMAN ARCHIVE
A recent reexamination of the early town at Nekhen, including the
place where Narmer’s palette and mace head were discovered, offers
a further, tantalizing insight into the practice of early kingship. The area
hitherto identified as a temple to the local falcon god Horus may not
have been a temple at all, but instead an arena for royal ceremony.
According to this interpretation, the mound in the center of the walled
enclosure may have been a raised dais for the king’s formal
appearances. The open ground in front of the mound could have been
used for rituals like a parade of prisoners. If so, the Narmer mace head
may picture the actual scene at such an event. Certainly, the objects
found at Nekhen seem to reflect a cult of monarchy. Decorated ivories
from the Main Deposit depict large mace heads erected on poles in
an enclosure, so perhaps the Narmer and Scorpion mace heads were
originally used to identify and demarcate a royal arena. Looking
beyond Nekhen to the rest of Egypt, buildings previously identified as
shrines may be reinterpreted in the same way, as centers of the royal
cult. Certainly, the king and his deeds dominate the written and artistic
record of the early dynasties, with other deities playing only supporting
roles. The question of where the gods are in early Egyptian culture may
have an unsettling answer: in early Egypt, the kings were the gods.
Monarchy was not just an integral part of religion; the two were
synonymous.
This would remain the dominant theme of pharaonic civilization until
the very end, but it had a dark side. Looking again at the Narmer and
Scorpion mace heads, the objects themselves—setting aside their
decoration—tell us something about the character of Egyptian
monarchy. Mace heads were symbols of authority from prehistoric
times, for obvious reasons—a person wielding a mace was met with
respect and obedience. The fact that mace heads were adopted as
symbols of kingly power speaks volumes about the nature of royal
authority in ancient Egypt. The scenes on the Narmer Palette are a
further reminder of the brutality that underpinned Egyptian kingship. On
one side of the palette, the king is shown with a mace, ready to smite
his enemy. On the other side, Narmer has not only defeated his
adver...
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