I began writing this book as a sort of celebration of most ancient Egypt, of the origins of a culture which seems to me to be without precedent or equal. I have no idea why so many people from my native island in the North Atlantic, which is after all pretty remote from the Nile Valley, should feel so profound an attraction to Egypt; but they do and I am one of them. From the first moment I set foot in Egypt, more than twenty-five years ago, I have experienced a sense of belonging which is most peculiar: as far as I am concerned it defies explanation. Certainly I do not look for explanations which depend upon a previous incarnation (very dubious) or the occult (idiotic). But the fact remains. . .
When finally I came to Egypt I was fortunate. The elements of chance in my professional life brought me to Egypt at a low point in the country’s long sequence of history; the optimistic upsurge which had seized the people of Egypt after the revolution of 1952 and the debacle of the Anglo—French—Israeli collusion of 1956 (one of the most ill-omened events in the politics of the postwar period) had burned itself out. Egypt was then stuck in that dismal morass of half-baked socialism which was the ruination of so many Third World countries in the 1950s and 1960s. A series of diplomatic and military misadventures further isolated the country. Few visitors went there; the great temples and the other sites surviving from the most majestic civilization yet to be assembled on the face of the earth were empty and desolate. But for the very few it was a time of privilege, to be able to wander uninterrupted amongst these splendid monuments, savouring them and finding them ready to reveal themselves to those who were able to give them time — the most precious of commodities in contemplating the past — in generous measure. It was rather like finding oneself transferred to Egypt in the early nineteenth century, when European travellers were few, though without the discomfort.
Of all Egypt’s localities the one which to me is the most seductive and the most enduring in its interest is Saqqara, the site of the great burials from the time of the archaic kings and of the unique pyramid complex of the Third Dynasty king, Djoser Netjerikhet. I spent long tranquil hours there alone or with a few companions: it is one of the most magical places on earth. As I wandered through the ruined buildings of Djoser’s monument or saw the excavations, conducted by Brian Emery for the Egypt Exploration Society, of the First and Second Dynasty tombs, or ‘read’ the records of life in the Fifth Dynasty tombs of Ti and Mereruka, I became more and more attracted by these early periods, before the end of the Old Kingdom, when the spirit of ancient Egypt was at its most vital, its most vibrant. From that time onwards my interest came to focus on these earlier periods of Egyptian history, with a commensurate delight in the artefacts produced by Egyptian craftsmen in prehistoric times and in the early formative centuries. These were perhaps the first in the history of the world to be conscious of their craft and to take a proper, professional pride in it.
I have always been interested in origins of things, ideas, or institutions. I am especially interested by the development of our species in the postNeolithic period, after the tremendous change from living in hunting bands to the beginnings of settled community life. Hence the origin of the city concerns me profoundly, as do the insecurities or aspirations which led men to live within a city’s walls.
It may be paradoxical, therefore, that I have chosen to write about Egypt in the fourth and third millennia, when the city became established as a historical phenomenon in the burgeoning societies of the Near East. The paradox lies in the fact that the Egyptians, unlike a number of their neighbours and contemporaries, were not great city builders. But they were the inventors of the most advanced and highly developed pristine society that we know, whose beginnings we may observe and attempt to understand. Their failure to build cities on any scale is indeed part of that story.
I am fascinated by the elegance and assurance of early Egypt, by the sumptuous character of the society which grew out of its simple beginnings, by the sophistication and complexity of the institutions which so swiftly were established within it, and by its innocence. The earliest Egyptians were god-ruled but not god-obsessed; they were, in this regard, as in so many others, fortunate.
I too was fortunate in these years to find many friends in Egypt. I was received with equal cordiality in the high, imperial rooms of the British Embassy and in the houses of small officials in little towns. In one such, on a warm summer night, I heard the watch calling the hours, a lantern carried on his shoulder. It was like the end of the second act of Die Meistersinger, but without the tumult.
I travelled up and down the Nile, the first of rivers. Once, I had arranged to meet a boat below the middle Egyptian town of Minia, to sail upstream to the rock tombs of Beni Hasan. I arrived in the little town just before dawn; I was escorted along the river banks just as the sun returned, a god as much as ever he was, through villages to whose inhabitants I must have been as strange a phenomenon as a Martian. We reached the point where a rowing boat was waiting to take me from the west to the east bank, where I would meet the river boat on which I would travel to Beni Hasan. The boatman greeted us; he was a giant, nearly seven feet tall, with flaming red hair, not altogether a common sight in Egypt. His boat was moored a yard or so from the bank; he picked me up, carried me in his arms as he waded in the water and deposited me, with great gentleness, in the boat.2 He did not speak as we crossed the river, nor when I thanked him and said goodbye; he would take nothing from me, but smiled with a curious tenderness and something like complicity. I think he may have been a mute; I suspect that he had been on that stretch of the river for a very long time.
I have tried to respect the findings of contemporary Egyptological scholarship and not to stray too far into the wilder growths of speculation or interpretation. Clearly, I have felt able to raise issues and to discuss possibilities which perhaps few professional Egyptologists would consider appropriate, since current professional thinking leans towards the austere in scholarship and away from the speculative. But what I have written is rooted in an essentially humanistic ground and does not, I hope, disregard the historical proprieties. However, I must acknowledge that it is idiosyncratic in that it pursues issues which interest me especially and that it does not adhere to a very rigid chronological sequence; rather it follows where my particular interest leads.
Egyptology has become, like many aspects of archaeology, intensely specialized. It has the best part of two centuries of scholarship behind it and few professional Egyptologists nowadays are inclined to take a synoptic view; fewer still to venture into areas outside their own specification.
To the members of another professional group I feel that I must also make some reparation. These are the Jungian psychologists who may well feel that I am imperfectly grounded in their discipline, yet have not hesitated to invoke Jung and my understanding of his ideas in an attempt to throw light upon the development of Egyptian society in its earliest manifestations. Again, if I have offended I can only ask for pardon; my admiration for Jung is boundless and I believe that in his system and in the directions he indicated for the analysis of myth, the collective unconscious, and the character of social groupings, lie the best prospect of understanding the nature of the human psyche in its societal context. I have no doubt, however, that the principles which Jung articulated so generously can be applied to the emergence of a society like Egypt’s, with great profit for those who would seek to understand the processes which were at work.
Practitioners of other vocations may, on the other hand, be quite pleased with me and with what I have done. One is a profession to which I belong myself, though nowadays somewhat vicariously: I think I may be said to have pushed back the origins of state propaganda to a very satisfactory antiquity, though perhaps few people will thank me for having done so; heraldry and the designing of all manner of containers equally can be shown to have an ancestry of a very respectable extent. In planning and decision-making in Archaic Egypt, in the interplay of management decision and specialist advice, the processes involved must have been little different from those which now pertain, with the professionals’ exasperation with the whimsicality (or worse) of the client no doubt as powerful a factor then as it is today.
I said that this book began as a celebration of most ancient Egypt; it has not entirely ended as that. For many years I have been deeply interested in and concerned with the archaeology of the Arabian Gulf and of the Arabian peninsula. In this connection I have come increasingly to wonder at the possibility of contact between the peoples of these two nearby but very different cultures. As a consequence I have found myself being drawn further and further into a consideration of where these two may have met, in time as well as in location.
An involvement with the archaeology of the Arabian Gulf is in itself no qualification for pontificating about the origins of Pharaonic Egypt. However, as I have said, I have inevitably found myself becoming aware of the many elements of similarity between Egypt in the late predynastic age and the cultures of Sumer in what is today southern Iraq and Elam, in south-western Iran; the latter is particularly relevant. These similarities have long been known and have frequently been reviewed, but I have been impressed, too, by the curious incidence of similarities in form and content of the art of most ancient Egypt and of some of the cultures which flourished in the Gulf in the late third and early second millennia. The hiatus in time, of something approaching a thousand years in some cases, is perplexing.
It seemed to me that it might be rewarding to look again at what is known as the origins of the Egyptian state from the perspective of the eastern extremity of the Arabian peninsula and from the mysterious rectangular sheet of largely shallow water which comprises the Arabian Gulf. On that almost inland sea and on its shores so much of the early history of ‘man the dweller in cities’ was acted out, so many of the myths which have later influenced the civilized world were given form and substance, and so much of the apparatus of the sort of society which we have come to regard as the normal lot of city-dwelling man was first developed. To look back from the Gulf towards Egypt at the time when both societies were young has proved, indeed, a remarkable vantage point.
Some further consideration of the problems relating to chronology must be given, if only because the various comparisons between Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Gulf, and western Persia which will be made throughout this text depend for their relevance upon their being contemporary, or at least approximately so. Throughout this book I have, in referring to dates, employed what might be termed the ‘conventional chronology’. This assumes that the First Dynasty of Egyptian kings began in the thirty-second century BC, probably t, 3180 BC, though many scholars today who accept the conventional framework of Egyptian chronology regard this date as too early, preferring to place the beginning of the First Dynasty at around 2900BC. It was preceded by some two thousand years of the predynastic period and succeeded by approximately one thousand years of the Archaic period and the Old Kingdom. This generally accepted Egyptological chronology places the collapse of the Old Kingdom following the reign of King Pepi II, at around 2180 BC.
A settled chronology for Egypt is central to the chronological structure of the early historical period in the whole of the ancient Near East. This is why it has always been considered as of such importance; without a secure chronology for Egypt, the history of the early Aegean, the Levant, even of the Mesopotamian cultures, begins to come apart.
The accepted chronology of Egypt is derived from an amalgam of otherwise quite disparate sources. The Egyptians, unhelpfully, had several calendars by which they regulated their years. They were acute observers of the heavenly bodies and were competent, if rather limited, mathematicians. The Egyptian year notionally began with the first appearance of the Dog Star, Sirius, known to the Greeks as Sothis, and to the Egyptians as Sopdet. Its rising was considered by the Egyptians as marking the first day of the first month of the Inundation, the first of the three seasons into which their year was divided.
It is the Greek name for the star which has stuck and the calendar which is inaugurated by the appearance of Sirius is in consequence known as the Sothic calendar. The problem with the Sothic year is that it does not correspond exactly with the solar year, but is shorter than it by approximately six hours. This results in the two years, the Sothic and the solar, gradually slipping apart; the same situation would pertain in the western or Gregorian calendar without the intercalation of a leap year in every four.
The Egyptian year was originally three hundred and sixty days in duration. It was, at some remote time in the past, extended to three hundred and sixty five by the introduction of five extra days but still the six hours’ gap remained. As the years went by and became centuries, the calendar became seriously out of alignment, with all the seasons falling at the wrong time of the year, as it were.
The Egyptians were clearly aware of the deficiency of this calendar and quite happily introduced two others which were more accurate. But they kept records of the Sothic cycle, which takes the formidable term of one thousand, four hundred and sixty years to return to its beginning.
Writing in the third century AD the Roman grammarian Censorinus states that the Sothic and the civil New Years coincided in AD 139. With the known factor of one thousand, four hundred and sixty as the length of the Sothic cycle it is possible to extrapolate to set the beginning of earlier cycles in 1317 BC and 2773 BC. Two inscriptions from the New Kingdom and one from the Middle Kingdom give reasonably firm dates for Sothic risings, though not the beginning of the cycle.
The Egyptian bureaucracy, from the earliest times, kept records of the annual inundation of the Nile, associating them with the reigns of the kings. Of such records the inscribed tablet, of which various fragments survive and which is known as the Palermo Stone, is the most important. By a combination of the extension of the Sothic cycles backwards in time and their alignment with the names of the kings and the length of their reigns in the Palermo Stone and other inscriptions, a rough chronological structure begins to emerge.
In addition to the Palermo Stone, king lists from Abydos, Turin, Saqqara and Karnak have provided information about the names of the Kings and some of the important or striking events of their reigns. Such lists, and possibly others now lost, were doubtless available to Manetho, the High Priest of Heliopolis in the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who reigned from 285 BC to 246 BC. He wrote a history of Egypt, parts of which have survived only in extracts quoted by other authors; these are fragmentary and often corrupt.
Manetho’s history was devised in three parts. The first dealt with the time of the gods, the second with those mysterious figures ‘the spirits of the dead, the demigods’, who were said to have succeeded the gods in the rule of Egypt; the third relates the histories of the mortal kings. It is thus this part which provides the basis for all the records of the kings, published first by followers of Manetho in late antiquity and which still informs all subsequent histories of Egypt.
Clearly Manetho had access to valuable records of the kingship, now lost. He lists thirty dynasties in all, the first beginning with the Unification. Dynasty follows dynasty, neatly but unhistorically; we know that a number of dynasties listed by Manetho as following one upon another were in fact coterminous, or overlapping. In some cases he lists lines of Kings for which there is little or no historical evidence.
Manetho gives, in many cases, estimates for the reign of individual kings and totals for the duration of the dynasties; the two figures do not always tally. It is the attempt to relate Manetho’s computations to known historical sequences which has caused many Egyptologists some very difficult and perplexing arithmetical problems.
The crucial date is, of course, the beginning of the First Dynasty. The estimates for this critical event have become later, over the past century or so, in the most remarkable fashion. The range of dates extends from Petrie’s estimate of 5546BC, a figure which no one would support today, through 3500bc by Hall, 3400 BC by Breasted, down to the more generally accepted range of 3200—3100 BC, promoted by Sewell, Drioton and Vandier, Frankfort, and Hayes, amongst others. Scharff and Moortgat would put the date as late as 2850 BC, nearly three thousand years later than Petrie.
Computing the extent of the predynastic period is even more fraught. To some extent, at least, Petrie’s sequence dating, in itself a helpful device but one of no absolute chronological value, has made the situation more complex. He assumed that one style in pottery making or design followed from another; he assumed, too, that an extended timescale would be required to move from the origins of a form to its elaborated or degenerated successors. In fact, of course, it is impossible to quantify such a sequence, in the sense of applying a timescale to the process. The design of a pot may go through a series of transformations very rapidly; similarly a type like the black-topped vases, originally associated with the Badarians and hence the senior of all Egyptian pottery types, may persist over the centuries, even over millennia.
The fact is that there is really no reliable archaeological evidence to support the accepted dating of the predynastic periods. There is only one stratified predynastic site, and that a very small one, which yields Badarian, Naqada I, and Naqada II levels together; current work at the site of Hier-akonpolis, of which much will be said later in this text, may elucidate the sequence further. Most cautious writers on the predynastic periods are careful to issue a caveat and to observe on what fragile and often antique evidence the generally accepted ideas about the predynastic are based. They are right to do so.
Another disconcerting factor is that though most of the material evidence for the predynastic is drawn from excavated or plundered graves, the quantity of graves concerned is really very small when given the apparent spans of time involved and the extent of the settlements. The argument is usually advanced that predynastic cemeteries, like predynastic settlements, were generally sited on the edge of the cultivation and hence have been long since buried beneath the accretions of centuries of occupation and agriculture. There may well be some truth in this but it is disconcerting nonetheless that a great early dynastic site like the one at Helwan, to the south of Cairo, can yield some ten thousand graves of officials and the like whilst there are no comparable burials known from the immediate predecessors of the Helwan-ites in anything like the same quantity.
It is generally assumed on the basis of the very extensive repertory of pottery and later stone vessel shapes that the predynastic period in Egypt lasted for some two thousand years - from t,5000BC to t,3000BC. Once again, there is no archaeological or historical corroboration for the attribution of such a timescale; it could be five hundred years as easily as two thousand. The problem is compounded by the fact that Egyptian chronology is the control by which the chronologies of the ancient Near East as a whole are formulated. When, for example, a historian observes that Naqada II in Egypt corresponds with the late Uruk in Mesopotamian chronology he really means no more than that it has been agreed that the late Uruk period in Mesopotamia corresponds with Naqada II in Egypt. There are, as yet, simply no absolute standards by which real dates in these early times can be established.
Nor is the evidence of carbon 14 dating altogether conclusive. In any batch of dates obtained from organic materials drawn from the same sources or archaeological horizon there will often be fairly violent discrepancies between the range of one date and another. The archaeologist’s tendency when faced with a number of inconsistencies in the materials for which he is trying to secure a date is, perhaps understandably, to dismiss those which do not conform to recognized time-frames as ‘aberrant’ and to see them as affected by external factors, like changes in the radiation to which they have been exposed, or in some other way infected. Carbon 14 sequences may be useful in determining relative sequences of objects but they are at best of dubious value in computing absolute dates.
There are some disconcerting gaps in the evidence as it stands at present, which may not be evident from the confidence with which some assertions relating to datings are made. These discrepancies tend to be given added support by the discovery of a flourishing mercantile culture in the Arabian Gulf islands and the surrounding coastlands contemporary with the later Old Kingdom, and Akkadian and neo-Sumerian Mesopotamia; this will no doubt focus attention again on the question of chronology. When it was first excavated, the foundation of the great temple complex at Barbar, Bahrain, was dated to the early part of the third millennium. This attribution has now been revised and it is proposed that the first temple was probably built there around the twenty-fourth century BC, not long before the likely end of the Old Kingdom in Egypt. However, as will be seen from the narrative below, there are a number of factors in the context of the Gulf’s archaeology — elements of design, artefacts, and architecture — which would either be more acceptable were they attributable to a period earlier in the millennium than appears to be the case or if their parallels in Egypt could be dated to the end of the third millennium rather than to its beginning.
I have tried, wherever possible, to use illustrations which may not be so familiar to readers of books on Egyptology. The inheritance from Egypt is so exceptionally generous that it seemed to me worth rummaging through some of what might appear to be the more neglected storerooms of that inheritance. To the specialist there will be no revelations, but to those whose concern with Egypt is not professional I hope that some, at least, of these objects will bring surprise and delight, as much as they have done to me.
One last point: Egyptologists will detect an echo in the title which I have given to this book. Egypt’s Making deliberately recalls one of the last books published in his long lifetime by Sir Flinders Petrie, who virtually invented Egyptology. At much the same time I too discovered Egypt through the BBC broadcast of the sounding of the war trumpets of Tutankhamun from the Cairo Museum. As I write this, it is fifty years to the day that the Second World War began in September 1939. So formidable a cluster of anniversaries, great and small, is pleasing, and through the plagiarism of his title I am able to pay some respect to the man who, perhaps more than any other, tried to penetrate the origins of the essential character of the Egyptian state.
At the end of the day, I have had only one aim in writing this book other, obviously, than that of satisfying myself by writing it. It is that I too may direct attention to this magical land, to the less familiar periods of its history, and, in particular, to the origins of its historic institutions. Ancient Egypt is at its most compelling in the wonders which it reveals and the directness with which its people — craftsmen as well as Kings — can speak to us today. If we listen, we may learn, before it is entirely too late.
Michael Rice 1989
World History
