The experience of the Egyptians at the end of the fourth millennium and for much of the third was of life in an essentially pristine society, one of the very few occasions in the history of humankind when that term could be used with confidence. It must be insisted that pristine does not imply primitive: quite the opposite, in Egypt’s case. The Egyptians’ world really was new: after the millennia-long Stone Age Egyptian man woke to a splendid dawn. From the evidence of his art he saw himself as part of a universal order, of the totality of nature, presided over by the immanent god himself. From this perfection of order came that assurance, a calm acceptance of oneness with the divine and with the works of the divine, which is the peculiar mark of Egyptian society at this time. In later times, from the Fourth Dynasty onwards, portraits of individuals show them, tranquil and poised, with their eyes fixed on some distant vision; sometimes the expression is so rapt as to be almost ecstatic.
The sense of assurance and security which the god-ordained and directed nature of Egyptian society induced was the product of Egypt’s physical topography. By the will of gods she was protected on all sides from incursion, largely also from contamination, by less fortunate or more envious peoples. After the late predynastic flow of influences from the east which, it will be seen, stimulated rather than confused him, the Egyptian was able to cultivate in peaceful certainty his responses to the world around him. Although a member of one of the most resourceful, creative and richly developed societies known to man he was not dependent on a vast library of received impressions flowing into him from outside himself. Such pressures as there were came from a wholly Egyptian environment, were benevolent and in no way alien to him. Nothing that happened outside the Valley affected him; this could, of course, be said of many peoples in many different times and places but all those who lived after the first half of the third millennium were, willy-nilly, increasingly influenced by the aspirations, inventions, or ambitions of others. For the Egyptian in the early centuries, this was simply not so; he lived alone within his own world, with his own kind. He could, as it were, listen to the sound of the world turning and, listening, learn from the sound of its motion. No other influence pervaded the supremely tranquil environment in which he was so securely lodged.
The Egyptians valued order above most other qualities. Order and truth were one and their preservation was the highest good. The king, it was said, ruled in truth; to sustain the truth and order of the universe was the most solemn charge to which even a king of Egypt might aspire. To know what is true, to be able to define and order the world so that it conforms with its own essential nature, requires an absolute assurance on the part of whoever may set out upon such a task. The certainty that they were not as other men, that their land was different from all other lands and that they alone had certain and unimpeded access to the highest order of divinity, was deeply engrained in the Egyptian consciousness from the very earliest days. Partly this was the consequence, no doubt, of being ruled by an immanent divinity, of knowing that God was a near neighbour, perpetually guiding the universe of which Egypt was, quite clearly, the centre. The Egyptians had a sense of being peculiarly fortunate, singled out by a high and benevolent destiny. They did not proclaim their sense of selection with the strident assertiveness of the much later Hebrews or with the rather icy arrogance of the Chinese (who simply doubted the actual humanity of the rest of mankind, despite some appearances to the contrary), and certainly not with the often implacable cruelty of Christian apologists. The Egyptians, with a tranquil assurance which can sometimes be exasperating, merely knew that they were the favoured children of the gods. They did not need to proselytize — that would have been futile — or to demand recognition for their distinctiveness, for that would have been irrelevant. Nothing could dent the certainty of their fortune or the security which it induced.
Nothing, that is, until after a thousand years the Golden Age which was early Egypt disintegrated in near-anarchy and confusion. But this time was distant and mercifully unknown to the creators of the Egyptian state. They could see, for the evidence was all about them, how favoured was their land. But, in a land which was to become a byword for antiquity and the unchanging harmony of life, man was a comparative latecomer. Before man came the Valley was the preserve of a rich and diverse fauna which flourished throughout the millennia, until the climate began significantly to change, probably in the sixth millennium BC.
World History
