In one other sphere of the minor arts in Egypt, one which is associated conceptually with writing, there appears to be another definite piece of evidence of contact between the Egyptians and people from the east. This involves the Nile Valley peoples’ use of seals, a practice which, at the time it appears in Egypt, was particularly highly developed in Mesopotamia and Elam.
Seals have a very long and distinguished ancestry. The oldest form of the seal is the stamp which impresses a design on clay or other receptive material. It has been suggested that some of the earliest seals of this form, from the Anatolian settlements on the Konya plain such as Catalhuyuk, may have been used to impress designs on textiles or on the bodies of their users, in the manner of tattoos.45
The seal developed principally as a means of identifying property or certifying the identity of a party to an agreement, in what were largely illiterate communities. The Sumerians and the Elamites developed the seal to a considerable art form. They pioneered a variant on the stamp seal by inventing the cylinder seal which could be rolled out on damp clay and which made a larger, more complex design and one which would permit considerable ingenuity in its execution.
At around the time of the unification, corresponding to the Jemdet Nasr period in Mesopotamia, cylinder seals appear in Egypt for the first time; it is probable that they were employed in the furtherance of trade. Several have been found in graves, presumably of travellers from the east, probably traders. There are reported to be only four certain imports of cylinder seals, the remainder of the seventeen which have been identified, having been locally produced imita-tions.46 As the Egyptian seal-makers did not generally understand Sumerian cuneiform, many of the locally made seals are epigraphically gibberish.
It is probably not without significance that the Old Kingdom word for ‘noble’, which is transliterated as sahu, means literally one to whom the king has granted the privilege of carrying a seal.47 As in the case of the serekh it seems surprising that a high rank in the emerging Egyptian state is identified with a completely alien concept. The hieroglyph group denoting ‘a seal’ is itself sealed with the determinative 84®.
Later the Egyptians abandoned the cylinder and developed their own distinctive seal form, the scaraboid seal, but this was well into the future. Unlike the Egyptians, the Sumerians were formidable travellers, of necessity as much as by choice. The Egyptians saw little point in moving from their Valley where everything had been ordered for their good; the Sumerians always looked beyond the immediate horizon to other, perhaps more generous lands than those in which they had settled. It is certainly possible, as suggested earlier, that they reached Egypt in the course of their travels.
It must be emphasized that, contrary to a view once widely held, there is no unequivocal evidence of a mass or ‘horde’ invasion of Egypt by easterners, immediately before the First Dynasty, though the influence of Mesopotamia is surely indisputable. In the event, it is clear that the antecedents of dynastic Egypt can be discerned as far back as the sixth millennium. Contact with foreigners clearly stimulated the native Egyptian genius in the early periods, but that genius was essentially autochthonous. The origins of the ‘dynastic race’ so long sought by Petrie and other scholars of earlier days, are clearly to be found in Egypt, principally in its southern reaches. From this point onwards the history of Egypt is the history of a man-made institution, the Egyptian kingship.
OTHER MESOPOTAMIAN INFLUENCES
Western Asiatic influences may be detected in the minor arts in Egypt, at the time of the unification, or immediately before it. These may suggest the actual presence of craftsmen from the east or at least a substantial degree of penetration by their ideas, more than might be expected as consequence, for example, of the exchange of goods or their acquisition through the medium of a third party. Amongst these are the appearance of strange saurian creatures with heavy bodies and long necks on which are carried feline heads, depicted on cylinder seals from Mesopotamia and Elam at the end of the
(b)
(c)
Figure 3.9 Fantastic and composite animals are a feature of late predynastic Egypt and of contemporary Near Eastern cultures. Here, confronted ‘serpopards’, long-necked creatures with feline heads come (a) from the Narmer Palette, (b) from a Western Asiatic sealing and, later, (c) from early third millennium eastern Arabia, where the creatures have transmuted to feline-headed serpents.
Fourth millennium and on some of the decorated palettes produced in Egypt. On the handles of combs and knives from Egypt lines of animals are represented which also are echoed in western Asiatic art, particularly in seal-making. Mesopotamian seals themselves were reproduced in Egypt and here it is possible to speculate that their makers were Egyptians since the designs are clearly based on Mesopotamian originals, though often misunderstood or misinterpreted; in some cases the craftsman has tried to reproduce an inscription without understanding it and has in consequence produced gibberish.
‘THE OPENING OF THE MOUTH’
In addition to the Mesopotamian symbols associated with the Egyptian kingship; the strange confronted monsters, the White Crown, cylinder seals of Mesopotamian type found in Egyptian tombs, architectural correspondences such as recessed panelling, the serekh and the pear-shaped maceheads which replaced the disc-shaped Egyptian ones, there may be one other, very distinctive parallel between the cultures of Egypt and Sumer. This involves the ritual in Egypt known as ‘The Opening of the Mouth’.
This ceremony was of crucial importance in ‘awakening to life’ a mummified corpse or a funerary statue. By touching the subject’s lips with a ritual object, latterly an adze, the power of speech and hence of consciousness returned. There are countless representations of the ceremony being conducted by the funerary priests; it was accompanied by the sacrifice of a bull, the foreleg of which was amputated and, still flexing with what seemed to be the life-force, was also held to the lips of the mummy or statue.
Attention has been drawn49 to the similarity of the Egyptian ceremony and a Mesopotamian ritual, intended to give life to a statue. In this case, there appears to be an association with childbirth; there are similarities between the accoutrements of the Egyptian goddess Meskhent and the ancient Sumerian goddess Ninhursag,50 both of whom have responsibilities in overseeing childbirth.
The earliest textual references to the Sumerian ceremony are dated to the Ur III period (t,2050BC), thus, in Egyptian chronology at the threshold of the Middle Kingdom and also, effectively, at the end of Sumer as a distinct entity in Mesopotamia. However the author of the study concerned believes that it may be far older, dating back to times when there were ‘links of some sort with the Egyptian Naqada II culture’.51 The similarities between two such elaborate rituals and the complex and even fanciful concepts behind them are remarkable and can hardly be the consequence of independent or parallel invention; the ideas underlying both ceremonies are simply too distinct. As the scholar responsible for the study remarks ‘The use of the “opening of the mouth” in the statue rituals of these two cultures may thus be part of a larger complex of shared metaphors’.52
World History
