Very large numbers of both educated and uneducated Egyptians were employed in the service of the many temples across the land. Their service demanded a great congress of grand and lesser priests, acolytes, tradesmen, labourers and workers of all sorts on the estates which supported them. In the rituals and rites of the temples and the service of the gods the king was, theoretically at least, alone in his relationship with the divine. In theory, therefore, the king, as principal immanent divinity, conducted every ritual in every temple throughout Egypt: the officiating priest was merely his surrogate. In reality, however, the companies of priests attached to the great temples were powerful, sometimes even representing a degree of opposition to the royal authority.
The power of the temples was exercised by these professional priests who lived in them and on their endowments, which could be very considerable. Their duties were various. First and foremost they were responsible for the sacrifices, for maintaining the proper honours appropriate to the god-king. They might be attached to a temple or to a tomb, endowed to keep alive the ka of the dead king: they might conduct the huge and colourful ceremonies which took place in the great temples, year in and year out.
One of the most agreeable characteristics of early Egyptian society is that, whilst intensely autocratic in character, it was nonetheless flexible, permitting men of talent, no matter what their racial or social origins, to move into the highest reaches of the administration. When the king is god, differences in degree amongst his subjects are of relatively minor significance. The selection and training of artists, however, demands a more subtle system, a more precise schedule than the recruitment of officials to administer the royal estates or to officer the levies.
THE ORGANIZATION OF MANUFACTURE
The degree of organization required to maintain the equipment of the temples and the royal courts must have been prodigious. The scale on which the pottery, stone-carving, and copper-casting industries were organized was considerable; when the demands of monumental and funerary architecture are added, the extent of the need for experienced craftsmen in all these fields is obviously formidable. The number of workers in what might be called ‘craft industries’ must, on the evidence of their surviving products, presumably only a fraction of their real output, have been very high, as significant a percentage of the Egyptian population as that, say, employed on the land.
It is rare (though not entirely unknown) to encounter a badly made stone vessel or wasted pot; quality-control standards in early Egypt were exceptionally high, befitting the technical ability of the craftsmen. Standards, by and large, were maintained over hundreds of years and the ability to do that was itself remarkable.
It is intriguing to speculate what sort of administration existed to ensure that the remarkable consistency of design was maintained. We know that royal officials were given, nominally at least, responsibility for the supervision of the making of royal statues, or for the architecture of the royal tomb. However, it is difficult to believe that these great officials, often with many appointments to discharge, were more than the presiding figures over groups of less exalted executives who actually co-ordinated and supervised the work.
It is impossible, however, not to wonder how the Egyptian artificers managed even to meet the demands of their royal clients. In Netjerykhet’s time, for example, tens of thousands of jars, plates, vases, and vessels of every conceivable shape and size were placed in the king’s tomb with lavish prodigality. Presumably some, if not all, of these objects had been used in the palaces of the king; it is possible, however that many were made for funerary purposes alone. To have produced this quantity of stone vases an immense industry must have existed, yet so far little trace of extensive industrial workings has been discovered. This is the more surprising when it is considered that there must have been manufacturing centres or, at the very least, collection points where the products of what must have been an army of outworkers were assembled. Once again the logistics baffle and respect for the organizational powers of the ancient Egyptians soars.
An antiquarian note is struck, incidentally, by the contents of Netjerykhet’s tomb. The names of virtually every king who preceded him on the Two Thrones is found inscribed on the stone vessels, which were piled up in his tomb in such enormous quantity, filling the subterranean magazines. When assembling this collection of vessels Netjerykhet especially honoured a sculptor, Ptahpehen, who held the title ‘Maker of Vases’.2 This perhaps meant more than its apparent modesty suggests, since Imhotep also bore it. Ptahpehen received what must have been the signal privilege of having vases inscribed with his name included amongst the royal cache.
The products of different craftsmen, perhaps of particular workshops or studios, can be detected in different parts of Egypt; there seems, therefore, to have been some sort of national distribution system for the products of workshops to use. This is particularly true of pottery products, where it is also easier to detect. In the case of stoneware however, there is a notable consistency over the years and over the whole land between the various types of vessel manufactured. There is, of course, an amazing medley of forms and sizes: the much vaunted Egyptian conservatism in art (a conservatism which in fact is more apparent than real) did not prevent them from adding new shapes to the catalogue of vessels which they produced. But once a shape or form became accepted it was adopted apparently over many hundreds of square miles, sometimes over the whole country.
If the temples, particularly those consecrated to Ptah, were the repositories of the corpus of approved designs and forms of products manufactured either for the royal service or for the rituals of the temples (a considerable assumption but certainly not entirely insupportable), there must have been some system of information exchange or flow from the temple to the many different and widespread workshops which would have carried out their manufacture. It may have been simply a matter of handing on the techniques from generation to generation, from father to son. Those lines in the normal course of nature must sometimes have been interrupted, yet the forms often survived over very long periods. The traditions of the craftsmen’s work seem to have been living traditions, not merely the work of copyists. Nothing has survived to indicate how the central authority passed on its design instructions: the medium may have been entirely perishable, of course, but some such system must surely have existed.
The principles that apply to the making of stone vases apply equally to most objects of Egyptian manufacture. In the Old Kingdom the walls of tombs and their associated buildings belonging to the royal family and distinguished nobles were customarily decorated with scenes of daily life in Egypt, in the palaces, and in the countryside. Many variations exist and certainly it is often possible to detect the hand of a master in one set of carvings and a more provincial, less talented hand in another. But the designs are broadly consistent and the conventions employed by the artists, the curious distorted frontality, for example, which is so odd a feature of Egyptian portraiture of humans when compared with the absolute literalism often employed for animals, is consistent everywhere in Egypt from the Fourth Dynasty onwards, when seemingly someone had determined that this was how it was to be done.
The ability of Egyptian artists to handle frontality with perfect assurance is demonstrated by their development of stone sculpture in the round. This was a slightly later form in its development than the making of stoneware vessels; for example, predynastic artists rarely seem to have attempted monumental statuary on any real scale, contenting themselves with enchanting miniatures which, nonetheless, are often the ancestors of the later, greater forms. There is some evidence that in the early days they worked in wood for the large-scale statues which adorned the temples.
In late predynastic times ivory was frequently carved in formal, rather rigid shapes. Generally these objects are modestly domestic: combs, ladles, and spoons for example; some of which are already of a formidable elegance.
The Egyptians were always enthusiastic board-game players, and developed a variety of games with counters in the form of animals; some of these, the lions and dogs for example, are especially fine and seem to have within them already the promise of the towering monumental forms to which in the distant future they will be expanded. These will eventually become the adornment of the temple colonnades of massive sphinxes with which later, more pretentious ages loved to ornament the land of Egypt.
Pottery figurines, as well as those carved in ivory, were made in large quantities in early times. Some were clearly votive objects: others are less clear in their purpose but they want nothing in appeal. It may be, however, that the apparently less durable substance of fired clay was not considered so significant by whatever authorities actually determined the form that more significant objects were to take, for there seems to be more random variety in the early decades in the objects made from clay. However, pottery once it is fired has an unequalled capacity to survive and in consequence a wealth of pottery objects has come down to the present time.
THE RISE OF MEMPHIS AND THE POWER OF PTAH
The key to this examination of the organization and direction of manufacturing procedures in early Egypt lies in the shadowed interiors of the great temples dedicated to the supreme craftsman-god, Ptah of Memphis. Of all the great Egyptian divinities Ptah is in many ways the most mysterious. Yet he was to survive throughout Egyptian history, from the earliest times to the latest, a powerful influence in the creative life of the country.
Although he was one of the supreme national divinities, Ptah was particularly identified with the city of Memphis. There, the centre of the royal administration was firmly fixed at the apex of the Delta, where Upper and Lower Egypt meet, south of Cairo. ‘Memphis’ is anachronistic, being a Greek form of the name of the pyramid of Pepi II, which was not built until quite late in the Sixth Dynasty. In earlier times the city was called Ity-tawy; Pepi’s pyramid was called Men-nefer and the Greek corruption of this praise-name produced ‘Memphis’.
Memphis was not only the royal capital; it was also the centre for the cults of the artificer god, the supreme creator god. Ptah was particularly associated with the creator kings of Egypt, those who laid down her foundations so securely in the First Dynasty and, to a lesser degree, in the Second. In the Second Dynasty however, the cult of the sun begins to edge its way into official religion; the names of several of the early kings of the dynasty bear names which are compounded with that of Re, the personification of the sun-in-splendour. Re’s main cult centre was at Iwun, now Heliopolis (the city of the sun, like ‘Memphis’ another Graecism, though a more acceptable one), today a suburb of Cairo.
According to the myths, Memphis was founded by the legendary Unifier, Menes, who is perhaps to be identified with Narmer or Aha. However, archaeology has indicated that there are predynastic levels at Memphis, which show that a settlement of some sort existed there before it was chosen — as indeed seems to have been the case — to become the royal capital.3 The decision to build a city which symbolized the integration of the two domains, was a brilliant and inspired political decision. The fact that, alone of all Egypt’s major settlements, Memphis survived throughout the Dual Kingdom’s history, is yet another proof of the remarkable sense of the techniques of state-building which the founders of the kingship possessed.
Ptah’s origins are obscure. He seems to have been associated with the kings of the First Dynasty; whether this means that he too originated in This (somewhere in the region of Abydos) or in Hierakonpolis is not known. It does appear, however, assuming the legend to be correct, that when the royal capital was established at Memphis Ptah was swiftly recognized as the city’s presiding divinity and the earliest temple in his name was established there.
The High Priest of Ptah at Memphis was one of the greatest of the Great Ones of Egypt, an immensely powerful member of the ruling elite and a close confidant of the king. His was the supreme directing intelligence of the armies of sculptors, potters, craftsmen in jewels, copper, gold, silver, and wood; he, no doubt, was close by whenever a decision affecting the royal tomb or the creation of a great temple was required in the innermost councils of the king. Through the undying traditions of Ptah’s priests the survival of Egyptian forms in architecture and manufacture were doubtless realized.
World History
