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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