HELWAN

The prosperity which the unification brought to Egypt and in particular to the northern part of Upper Egypt where Memphis the capital was situated is nowhere demonstrated more dramatically than at the site of Ma’sara and Ezbet el-Wadi, near Helwan. There upwards of ten thousand graves have been excavated;3 they are the burial places of officials and others of what might be called the upper bureaucracy who must have provided much of the administrative class of the capital area. Some of the people buried there were no doubt nobles, close to the king and probably his familiars, but none of them seems to have been a royal personage. The quantity of pottery and of personal possessions buried at Helwan was prodigious; for a society to be able to extract at such an early date so much of its material wealth from circulation, generation by generation, displays a remarkable degree of confidence in the kingdoms’ economic future. It must also have been good news for the artists and craftsmen who, also generation by generation, would have been required to replace the wealth of what had become, to a substantial degree, a grave-oriented society.

Amongst the graves at Helwan are examples of the burials of dogs and donkeys;4 as these do not seem to be the subject of cult or religious observance, it may be that they were family pets, since the Egyptians always kept animals about them, as members of their households. The burial grounds at Helwan are of great importance for what they reveal about the quality of life enjoyed by relatively modest people, the officials, courtiers, and those who served the court, during the first flowering of the kingship in Egypt. It must be presumed that the dead buried at Helwan served their royal masters at Memphis which was then in the first phase of its existence as the capital of the Dual Kingdom, and at the great religious centres nearby. These would have included Heliopolis which, even in the very early period, and probably in predynastic times as well, was established as the centre of the cult of the sun, a cult which was only to assume a national status later in the Old Kingdom.

The Helwan graves range from extensive and complex structures comparable with those at Saqqara to relatively modest interments. They were excavated principally in the 1940s and 1950s.5 They are of great importance in assessing the character of life in Egypt during the early centuries, both because of the quality of the objects and architecture which they contain and because their evidence makes necessary the reversal of a number of otherwise long-held ideas about early Egyptian religious belief and funerary practice. The First Dynasty custom of burying boats close to elite tombs appears at Helwan also.

Some doubt has been cast on the original dating of the Helwan tombs. There is evidence that as early as the Epi-Palaeolithic period burials the area was occupied and again in Neolithic times.6 Many are clearly Early Dynastic; others, however, date from as late as the Third Dynasty when many of the architectural techniques which would seem remarkable in an Early Dynastic context have become almost commonplace. However, the interest of Helwan lies in the fact that it is principally a cemetery of the non-noble. As such it shows both the development of tomb-building, reaching down, at a relatively early date into the middle ranks of society and the comparative luxury of the goods with which such people were able to surround themselves in death as in life.

Thus, some of the tombs revealed at Helwan (also at sites such as Abydos and Saqqara) show that already First Dynasty Egyptian architects were confident in the use of stone for walls, ceilings, and staircases. At Helwan nine of the tombs excavated used limestone extensively in their construction;7 however, it must be remembered that this is a tiny percentage of the total excavated. It is frequently asserted that the earliest use of stone was in the late Second Dynasty but quite apart from the revetment of Hierakon-polis, the First Dynasty tombs at Helwan (as well as some of the larger, contemporary tombs at Saqqara) demonstrate that this is not so. Some of the blocks used for the wall and floor the burial chambers are huge,8 suggesting that they are already the products of a long-established and assured tradition.

Helwan has also provided evidence of the advanced nature of the textile industry in First Dynasty Egypt. Wool was used widely, in particular for making the cloaks in which early dynastic men are often portrayed. Linen, too, of exceptional delicacy, equalling the most exquisitely fine, gossamerlike fabrics the like of which have only been made in modern times, was also produced.9 Such fabrics were evidently available on a generous scale and presumably, were made industrially by skilled craftsmen working either on the great magnates’ estates (as is attested from somewhat later times) or, as was probably the case for the fabrics used by the rather less exalted occupants of some of the Helwan graves, produced by craftsmen working on their own account, in workshops like those which existed for the production of stone vessels and pottery containers. An endearing characteristic of the burials at Helwan is that a relatively high proportion of the graves, when compared for example with the contemporary but rather grander tombs at Saqqara and Abydos, contained objects which had been broken during the time of their use and then, thriftily, repaired. In the case both of pottery and of stone vessels this was done by drilling holes in the vessel and its broken part and then binding them together, either with copper wire or with cord.

Most of the Helwan tombs seem to have been destroyed by fire, in conflagrations like those which were destroyed in the First Dynasty tombs at other sites. It is really very strange that this wholesale posthumous destruction was evidently practiced across the land of Egypt, not only of the tombs of the kings and the Great Ones but also of the relatively modest inhabitants of the tombs of Helwan.

Helwan is a pleasant place, some 20 km south of the modern capital of Cairo. It is celebrated today for its medicinal waters and its less salubrious steel plants. Something must have drawn the First Dynasty Egyptians there, to populate such considerable tomb fields. Whatever it was, that impulsion is lost, but the existence of the large numbers of tombs with their substantial architecture and their rich furnishings, calls for a reassessment of another of the long-held beliefs about religious ideas in Early Dynastic Egypt, namely that the prospects of eternal life were first reserved exclusively for the king, then for his closest attendants, and only later for members of the court.

Many of the dead of Helwan, like those of even earlier, predynastic burials, seem to have been laid in a foetal position, as though anticipating rebirth. Whilst nothing could diminish the king’s claim to divinity, in this life as much as in the life after death, it appears that his subjects, or at least those who were buried at Helwan, had quite considerable expectations of immortality.

A study of the architecture of the Helwan tombs has concluded that the use of stone in their construction indicates a high level of building skills available in this region of northern Upper Egypt in the First and Second Dynasties.10 The ability to manipulate stone, it is suggested, may have contributed to the remarkable achievements of the builders of the monuments at Giza. More controversially, it has been cited in another study as possible evidence for an Early Dynastic date for the building of several of the Giza monuments, including the Great Sphinx.11

THE KINGSHIP AND THE NATION-STATE

The invention of the kingship is one of the most enduring of all Egyptian achievements, one with universal significance, from whose forms all successive great kingdoms in the Near East (and perhaps others more distant still) if they did not draw their inspiration certainly demonstrated the same solution in their response to similar social and psychological imperatives. Few, if any of them, however, achieved any semblance of the majesty which the Egyptian kings seem so easily to have assumed.

If human ingenuity or ambition were to set out consciously to create such an institution as the kingship, the Nile Valley would have been amongst the least suitable locations which it would have been possible to choose on which to launch it. The narrow river banks, with the occasional wide expanse of cultivation drawn out and extended over a length quite disproportionate, with the occasional, widely dispersed oasis, would surely seem to be the least favoured ground for such an epoch-making innovation, the invention of the first nation-state in the history of the world.

That the king and his followers even conceived of uniting all the Nile Valley is the measure of the Thinite princes’ ambition. The differences between Upper and Lower Egypt, south and north, in custom, culture, beliefs and rituals were profound; this is demonstrated by the fact that throughout Egyptian history such differences were insisted upon and it was only the king that provided the link between them: he alone was Dual King. The extent of this achievement in welding the entire Valley into one state can be measured, paradoxically, by the fact that the Egyptians maintained the fiction of the separate identities of the two kingdoms throughout the long sweep of Egyptian history. The union of the Two Lands was really an unnatural construct which at various times throughout Egypt’s history, when the central kingship faltered, for example, or when the threat of foreign invasion became a reality, came apart at the seams and the Valley fragmented into small principalities centred on the administrative districts into which both Egypts were divided. Yet, despite this tendency to fracture, the vision of the early kings was so powerful and enduring that always an heroic figure, usually and most significantly from the south, would emerge to impose once again the ancient Thinite concept of the united lands.

The partners of the Thinite prince, who was presumably a young man as the first king of the dynasty is said to have reigned for sixty-four years, were important chieftains like himself, to judge by their standards which he was evidently proud to depict being borne before him on various of the documents which survive from his time; however, he seems to have been accepted as being supreme over them or quickly made himself so. Whether the para-mountcy was by some ancient right attached to the eponym of the Falcon clan or whether it became his as the consequence of some irresistible charisma that he possessed, the Falcon he was and the united Egypt which he was to create was, par excellence, the Falcon’s land. At least one of his peers, the Lord of Ombos, possibly the eponym of the federation of southern clans which honoured the swift hound as its symbol, must have nurtured some reservations about the Falcon’s claims to the sovereignty. But the dissension which the ancient affront to the status of the Set tribes was eventually to precipitate was, for the moment, in the future.

On a day probably in the first quarter of the thirty-second century (c, 3180bc) the Falcon prince set out on his annexation of the land to the north of his patrimony, accompanied, as the stories afterwards told, by the Spirits of the Dead, the demi-gods who were to be immortalized as the Companions or Followers of Horus. Thus the royal propagandists skilfully suggested that he was attended not only by the living ‘Great Ones’ of Egypt but also by a ghostly retinue of heroic figures from the ancient past. An appeal to what was evidently a powerful myth by the prince and his advisors suggests how well they understood their people and those whom they sought to absorb by identifying his advance to the northern kingdom with the shades of long-dead chieftains, whose legends evidently were still current and still capable of exciting a loyal response from the people.

After the years of spasmodic and, it must be presumed, frequently localized rebellion the strong central government of the kings eventually produced a deep and largely a lasting peace throughout the Valley. The Two Lands were, as a consequence of the Valley’s topography, wholly secure and easily capable of efficient defence. To east and west ranged the great deserts. The route through the mountains to the east could be policed with relative ease. To the west the seemingly limitless Libyan desert provided its mantle of protection to the Valley.

CONTROL OF THE SOUTH - NUBIA

To the south only the area below the cataract could provide entry to the barbarous hordes from Africa; the gates to Egypt could be closed against them by the expedient of building guard forts in the gorges of the Valley and, from time to time, by sending punitive expeditions to put down the Nubians and others welling up from Africa, if they seemed minded to intrude upon the Valley’s tranquillity.

Egypt’s relations with Nubia, and indeed with all of black Africa to the south, have only in recent years been reappraised. Historians have tended to assume that the African south was significant to Egypt only as a source of labour, soldiers, precious metals, ivory and rare woods. What was not appreciated until more recent research was the high cultural level achieved by the Nubians from an early date; to what extent their culture was derived from Egypt or to what extent Egypt drew into itself influences from Africa is still disputed.

Some spectacularly rich burials of the late predynastic period have been found in Nubian sites. At Sayala, Nubian chiefs were buried with a fine panoply of imports and very rich objects: copper axes, ingots of copper, chisels, two enormous bird shaped palettes, and two monumental sceptres with gold batons.12 The maceheads which top the sceptres are pear-shaped and on one of the batons was depicted a series of animals, magnificently engraved. This was a superlative object and would have been a prized possession in the Treasury of an Egyptian king; in fact hardly anything quite so fine has been recovered from Egypt of the same period. Sadly this majestic object disappeared from the Cairo Museum soon after its discovery in the early years of this century.