The second of the southern predynastic cultures identified with Naqada now appears, in the form of the second Naqada horizon. In fact, the Naqada II or Gerzean phase presents a natural succession from its immediate predecessor, with the important difference that it was responsive to a much more powerful and, it would appear, more sustained alien influence than either of those which it followed. The Naqada II period is marked by dynamic changes in Egypt, when these foreign influences seem especially to have heightened the native Egyptian genius and to have produced a galvanic series of new advances in the Valley’s society. At much the same time the appearance in southern Iraq of the Sumerians in their role of city-builders initiated the long course of Mesopotamian history by changing the established character of the earlier, modest villages and little settlements into social and political structures considerably more formidable in scale. It should however be emphasized that such foreign influences in Egypt that can be identified at this time are essentially peripheral to the strong and distinctly Egyptian persona which is already very much in evidence, throughout parts of the deserts which could support habitation and throughout the Valley.
The Naqada II phase is crucial to the formation of the dynastic state. The settlements which were apparent in the Naqada I phase now grow considerably, in the case of Naqada, Hierakonpolis, ThisAbydos and other, less important centres which became, to all intents and purposes, cities. An engaging model of a town wall from this period shows two little watchmen peering apprehensively over the top of it, on the look-out, presumably, for marauders.30 One of the problems of living in cities was early on found to be their capacity for exciting the envy and the predatory instincts of peoples living outside their walls.
All forms of manufactured goods proliferate: stone vessel carving becomes an industry which was to be one of the glories of Egyptian art for the next half millennium. Pottery takes on a form quite different from that which characterized the first Naqada period; made in an attractive pale brown to pinkish fabric it is decorated with a brilliant repertory of drawings and designs applied in paint before firing. Some of these are abstract, others repeat the repertory of ships, animals, and hunting introduced in Naqada I. The earliest Naqada II pottery seems to be influenced by foreign forms: vessels supplied with filter spouts and triangular lug handles look like imitations of wares produced by the Uruk potters of Mesopotamia.31 By this time, t, 3400 BC, Uruk pottery production had spread widely from its home in southern Mesopotamia; it has been assumed that the Uruk-style wares (but not Uruk pottery itself) that inspired the Egyptian potters reached Upper Egypt by land routes through Palestine, suggested by the discoveries at Buto. However, a trans-Arabian route is equally feasible; a westward route across the northern deserts, from the head of the Arabian Gulf westwards, had long existed.
The Naqada II people seem to have been much impressed by boats. Whether this implies that they were originally from a region where water transport was even more important than it was in Egypt, is not certain; it may simply have been a sensible response to their proximity to the river. But an extraordinary number of their productions, painted on pottery and carved in or on slate and schist, represent boats. Clearly these are often sacred vessels and as such were the ancestors of the sacred barques in which Egyptian divinities, like their Sumerian counterparts, were accustomed to travel. The representations of boats from this period often contain enigmatic passengers, often in threes and frequently represented with feathers in their hair; many are presented with extraordinary elegance and a highly developed sense of form, showing figures leaping from the boats almost balletically. They are, demonstrably, works of art of high accomplishment.
The Naqada II preoccupation with boats, which probably included seagoing craft as suggested by the representations on the rock walls of the Upper Egyptian deserts and wadis, including the Wadi Hammamat which links the Nile Valley with the Red Sea, indicates at least the possibility of the
Valley people having maintained quite far reaching trade routes and relations with foreigners who came from distant lands. At this time, too, considerable specialization in the work of the craftsmen becomes apparent, when contact with south-west Asia appears to be most active.
Precious metals now begin to be used with some frequency in Upper Egypt. Gold and silver were both accessible to the Valley people though the silver that they used particularly was in fact a ‘white gold’, a natural amalgam of the two metals found in its native state. The prodigality with which gold in particular is used at this time indicates a marked upturn in the taste of the Egyptian clients who commissioned the vessels and artefacts on which it was used and in their ability to recompense the artists and craftsmen who produced them, as well as being able to maintain the mining expeditions necessary to obtain the ore. Mining became one of the principal industries of Egypt in Naqada II times, with expeditions to Nubia for stone (also a source of gold) and to the turquoise mines of Sinai.
CONTACT WITH SOUTH-WEST ASIA
Whether there was direct contact between the Egyptians of the late predynastic period and the people of south-western Asia of the late Ubaid, Uruk, and Jemdet Nasr periods is not clear and what is still more obscure is the reason that prompted the contact between them. The solution which envisages the south-western Asian people (it is hardly right yet to call them either Sumerians or Elamites) becoming aware of the Nile Valley as a source of gold, is attractive. After all the Valley was rich in gold, but how the easterners might have acquired the knowledge of it is another matter; the Sumerians did however sustain long exchange routes and knew of the supplies of copper which were available in Oman.
It is possible that if there were traders in touch with the Delta, as seems most likely, they may have encountered reports of the mineral riches of southern Egypt. The theory of the Mesopotamians’ search for gold having brought them into contact with the Valley people also proposes an influx of specialists and craftsmen into Egypt drawn there by the reports of the riches of the little independent ‘courts’ which, it is clear, were established in various of the predynastic centres of population such as This (the location of which is uncertain but probably lies in the region of Abydos), Naqada and Hierakonpolis. The names of the lesser rulers who actually preceded the kings of Egypt, rather than those of the ‘demi-gods’ of the national myth, have been found recorded on the rocks of southern Upper Egypt; unfortunately many are judged indecipherable. It was in all probability as a result of the search for gold that these ‘princes’ sought to control the trade routes and the access to its sources from their various strongholds. It would have been to their courts that the gold-hungry easterners made their way.
EGYPT AND SUMER COMPARED
In considering the possibility of contacts between the people of the Nile Valley and the Mesopotamians there is an important distinction to be made between the impact of this post-Neolithic phase, with which we are dealing, on the peoples of the two regions. In Sumer the whole pattern of the society underwent a radical and permanent change as the city came to predominate as the characteristic Sumerian social institution. In Egypt the shift from the Badarian and Naqada I cultures and the impact of the foreign influences, whilst they produced real effects and marked changes, were more important in inspiring a rapid development of the unique Egyptian personality which was to establish itself over the next few hundred years.
This autochthonous personality remained as the essential form of the society for as long as the society lasted. Considered in another way, the Naqada II phase is an intermission (though an intensely creative one) between the late Neolithic stages of the Valley society’s development and the coming of the great dynasts who were to unite the Two Lands into the Dual Kingdom and thus create the historic Egyptian state.
In historic times the Egyptians were always deeply resentful of any incursions by foreigners into their land; they resisted them vigorously, though with varied success. However, in those early years the influence from the east seems to have been more benign and hence more acceptable; at least it does not appear to have been resisted and, in so far as it touched off some important elements in Egypt’s development, seems to have been of quite a different quality from the barbarous onslaughts of the largely savage tribes, whom the Egyptians in later times identified dismissively as the ‘sand dwellers’, originating in the north and east.
The apparently common factors which manifest themselves in Egypt and Sumer around this time are too many not to warrant some speculation about the possibility of their common, or at least their related, origin. A comparative examination of the two peoples is appropriate by reason of their close geographical proximity and the fact that they emerged at roughly the same time in their historic form.
A glance at the map will show that Egypt and Sumer are not really far distant from each other, though they are separated by formidable desert barriers which stretch eastwards from the Nile to the western borders of Sumer, with the Red Sea dividing most of Egypt from Arabia; seen from space the proximity of the two lands is even more telling. By early historic times there was a caravan route running north-eastwards out of Egypt, skirting Sinai and climbing up the coastline of the eastern Mediterranean, where it linked with other routes from the Sumerian cities which ran into the Middle Euphrates region to sites such as Habuba Kabira across western Iraq into Jordan and Syria. Even in historic times this route was hazardous, the caravans being preyed on equally by ferocious nomads and the guardians of the cities which straddled the routes; then, if those dangers were surmounted, they survived only at the mercy of the desert, which, though it may have been marginally less dreadful than it is today, would have produced problems of the logistics of survival of immense difficulty for such early travellers. As there is no evidence for the domestication of the camel until long after this time, to speak even of ‘caravans’ in the earliest period is really anachronistic; if pack animals were employed at all they were probably the fractious and argumentative ass and the onegar. The land routes could hardly have been the most efficient or the most generally used until long after the period with which we are concerned.
Yet contact was established very early on between the predynastic Egyptians and the Mesopotamians, seemingly in sufficient depth for the later people to have left unmistakable material evidence of their influence on Egypt. The evidence, scanty and often unrelated though it is, makes it clear that the influences at work ran from Sumer or Elam to Egypt and not, apparently, in the opposite direction, at least until very much later. It seems likely that the contacts began early in the fourth millennium and continued until the two civilizations reached the point where each assumed its distinctive historical character at the end of the millennium and the beginning of the third.
That the two societies, Egypt and Sumer, developed along parallel but wholly disparate lines is a matter of history and would be explained by the entirely different environment which was to be found in Mesopotamia and in Egypt. For centuries Egypt was insulated from any pressure of other peoples which the Egyptians themselves could not easily contain; the majestic flow of the god-congested Nile, once its power was harnessed, provided the means for a standard of living which confirmed the Egyptians in their view that they were the favoured children of the gods, living in an ideal world.
The control of water supplies was obviously of profound importance to both people. Both cultures developed alongside powerfully flowing rivers. Of all ancient technical achievements, after the discovery of the methods of crop cultivation and herd management, unquestionably the most important was the recognition that the inundations of the great rivers could be harnessed and the land around them made fertile by the controlled distribution of water. That the control of the rivers’ flood was a major preoccupation of the state in Egypt as well as in Sumer is evident from the archaic representations of the earliest kings engaged in the ritual cutting of canals.
According to their own traditions, the Egyptians were from the earliest times so expert in the practice of irrigation that Narmer himself, the supposed unifier of the Two Kingdoms, displaying a positively heroic enthusiasm for hydraulic engineering, is said to have diverted the course of the Nile to found his capital city at Memphis, near the borders of Upper and Lower Egypt. Certainly in historic times major river works were constantly undertaken by the central as well as by the provincial administrations of Egypt.
The discovery of many of the techniques of this branch of engineering by a river people could have been as the result of an empirical process of accident, observation, and experiment. But the fact that both the Egyptians and the Sumerians developed irrigation programs so early and thus made possible the extraordinary advances of their societies, more or less simultaneously, makes the possibility of yet another area of contact and exchange of ideas between them seem more likely than chance or the uncertainties of simultaneous invention.
It is particularly at this point, as the Naqada II horizon appears in the latter part of the fourth millennium, that men who were either Sumerians or who knew Sumer well entered the Nile Valley and contributed to the foundation of the most wholly monolithic political society known until perhaps the present day. In this characteristic, incidentally, Egypt was very different from Sumer, for the political structure which developed in the valley of the Twin Rivers was characterized by a multitude of little city states, constantly struggling for a short-lived hegemony, one above the rest. Never, whilst Sumerian culture flourished, was a lasting empire established over the little cities, except at the very end of their existence in the Ur III period, c.2020 BC which, it will be seen, was a time of general upheaval in much of the Near East. With the collapse of the so-called ‘Neo-Sumerian’ empire, with its capital at Ur, the Sumerians disappear from history, their language retained only as a liturgical medium.32 It was only when the influence of semiticspeaking peoples began to predominate at the end of the third millennium, coming in from the deserts which surrounded Sumer, that one interest was able to assert itself over all the others, exemplified by the creation of the empire of Sargon the Great.