The development of the Pharaonic state in the course of the fourth millennium BC produced a nation under the rule of one single king stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the First Cataract in the south. This state is thought to have crystallized late in that millennium, and it may have resulted from the gradual but aggressive expansion of a smaller kingdom in the south at the cost of states or chiefdoms in the north. That would be in keeping with modern theories in which competition, or even warfare, is regarded as instrumental for early state formation (Bard and Carneiro 1989; Warburton 1997: 51-7; Kemp 2006: 73-8). Evidence for actual warfare is lacking, but the slaying of captives is an important motive in funerary iconography of Chalcolithic elite burials (see Chapter 2). Whatever the exact process, later Egyptian kings always emphasized that they ruled over ‘‘The Two Lands,’’ that is a dual territory, the south and the north. Even more specifically, the common word for ‘‘king,’’ nesu (‘‘He of the Reed’’) was the title for the king of the south (rendered by Egyptologists as ‘‘King of Upper Egypt’’), whereas a separate title (bity ‘‘He of the Bee’’) denoted the same Pharaoh as king of the north (‘‘King of Lower Egypt’’). Administrative texts sometimes refer to the two separate zones (a-resy ‘‘Southern District’’ and a-mehty ‘‘Northern District’’), but, as a rule, there was no separation of these two zones in the departments of government. However, the vizirate, the highest government office below kingship, was at times divided between two functionaries, one for the north and one for the south. Also, during those periods in which the central government was not able to maintain its control over the whole of Egypt (the so-called Intermediate Periods), there were rival kings in the north and south. Despite the north-south division apparent in royal ideology and, on occasions, government administration, Pharaonic Egypt should be regarded as a unified state with a single government.
Modern definitions of a state require that its central government rules over a defined and politically independent territory, and that usually it is represented within
This territory at central, provincial, and local levels (e. g. Claessen and Skalnlk 1978: 586-7). These three levels of administration in Ancient Egypt will now be examined more closely.
World History
