For nearly a thousand years even the potential conduit of danger represented by the ‘Asiatics’ was kept securely closed. Peace reigned as securely in the Valley as the king reigned in Memphis. Nothing obtruded to disturb the peaceful development of Egypt, nothing clouded the tranquil progression of day following day, king succeeding king, with apparently only occasional contention in the succession.
By the time of the Old Kingdom, from the Third to the Sixth Dynasties, (t,2868—1,2181 BC), the effect of these long and tranquil centuries on the psychology of the early Egyptians may be imagined; it can also be appreciated in the reliefs of ordinary life carved on the tombs of nobles and court functionaries and in the literature of the time. The Egyptians developed a profound sense of certainty, of the order of the world and of their place in it.
They could no doubt believe that, living in the secure, tranquil, richly endowed land that was theirs, was an existence ordained by a beneficent providence and that, as it had been, so would that life always be. The conservatism which is so often described as one of the most innate characteristics of Egyptian culture comes from this time, laid upon the profound conservatism of the peasant, no matter where he lives.
At this time, from the latter part of the fourth millennium, through the early phase of the dynastic period at the beginning of the third, the vast preponderance of the Egyptian population was engaged in simple agriculture. The population has been estimated, variously, at between one and two million people,19 though the estimate depends largely on guesswork and is probably much too high. They lived, in the main, in small village communities scattered over the Valley floor and, as they became increasingly habitable, in the marshlands of the Delta. Their lives would not have been harsh or unduly arduous: the river and the land were generous and sustained the people relatively comfortably. For the vast majority life would have gone on its tranquil progress, uncomplicated by contact with the court, the Great Ones, or the king.
The Egyptians from the earliest recorded times sustained a lively interest in two other human corporate pastimes, which, typically, they invested with their own particular qualities. These were games playing, particularly board games, and organized sports. In most tombs, from the First Dynasty onwards at least, are to be found a variety of board games. Many of these have animals as the counters: dogs, gazelles, jackals, lions, and bulls all have their turn in different games. The games, so far as it is possible to reconstruct them, are dependent on the throwing of sticks or other equivalents of dice to effect progressive moves. That they were so frequently placed amongst the funerary equipment of a well-appointed Egyptian setting out on his last journey to the west, suggests that they may also have had some ritual significance. However, as the affluent dead of the early dynasties filled their graves with all manner of evidence of their earthly wealth (in the certain belief that they could take it with them) this point need not be argued too exhaustively.
So much of the evidence for the ancient way of life in Egypt comes from tombs that it is difficult to reconstruct what the buildings of the living were like. However, there are occasional glimpses of architecture other than the funerary, from contemporary and later references, for in such matters the Egyptians were conservative, preferring to retain forms over immensely long periods, even if sometimes they were effectively disguised like the mound within the pyramid or the wattle shrine, built in stone in the heart of the later temples.
THE TEMPLES OF EARLY EGYPT
Very little can be said with certainty about the earliest temples to be built in Egypt, or of the ceremonies which were practiced in them. The names of some temples of the First Dynasty may be known from the inscriptions on ivory labels on which temple structures appear to be depicted; from these representations the buildings would seem to be flimsy and unpretentious, as might be expected, probably made from reeds or light timber. The large structure at Hierakonpolis may have been an anticipation of the soaring, majestic temples which were to be associated with Egypt throughout its later history, but these had to wait for their introduction in the Third Dynasty and until the Fourth for their most splendid manifestations in the Valley of the mortuary temples associated with the pyramids, a tradition which was continued, though in somewhat different form, into the Fifth.
Despite Herodotus’ remark, admittedly made at least two and a half millennia after this time, that the Egyptians were the most religious people in the world, it is more likely that the timeless, unchanging, tranquil, and essentially integrated life in the Valley in the early centuries of a united Egypt was precisely the consequence of an absence of specifically religious commitment or involvement. Religion, even in the special sense that the word must be used in early Egypt, was the business of the king and his immediate colleagues; at least this would be the case in respect of national cults. These had as their focus and indeed their whole point and purpose, the person of the king as intermediary between Egypt and the gods.
Local and tribal (or even perhaps clan) cults were a different matter. Each part of Egypt had its complement of greater and lesser divinities; there were, too, the primordial forces of nature like the storm, which were to be propitiated. The preoccupation of the theologians advancing for example, one system of philosophy concerning the origin of Egypt (and hence of the cosmos) against another, Memphis contra Heliopolis as it might be, would have touched the Egyptian in the fields or on the river bank not at all. Only much later, as one of the marks of decay in the Egyptian state, did the priesthoods which emerged in part as the result of the sort of mild ancestor worship to which the cult of the king eventually led, begin to require a formal power base, rooted in the temples.
Like the manoeuvrings of the Christian orders in the later Middle Ages, they sought to advance the worldly interests of one group above another. The rise of ritual and the power of the temples were signs of the beginning of the end for pristine Egypt. The joyful life of the countryside, broadcast so vividly in the reliefs of so many Old Kingdom tombs but drawing on a tradition greatly older, was replaced by solemn processions of gods with their mortal and immortal attendants.
THE SECOND DYNASTY King Hotepsekhemwy
It is not certain that there was an actual dynastic disruption following the death of Qa’a, the last king of the First Dynasty, and the reign of the next king, though Manetho shows a new dynasty beginning.20 That king is Hotepsekhemwy who is acknowledged as the first of the Second Dynasty; his line is, however, still identified as Thinite and it may well be that the kings of this dynasty were related to those of the First Dynasty. His name means ‘The Two Powers are at Peace’, which has been taken to suggest that an earlier dissension between the protagonists of Horus and those of Set, had been resolved. Hotepsekhemwy conducted the funerary ceremonies of his predecessor, which suggests that there was no real break between the First and Second Dynasties. It is possible that Hotepsekhemwy’s tomb and that of his successor, Raneb, may lie under part of the subterranean chambers of the Step Pyramid, to be built in the next dynasty.21
The first kings of the Second Dynasty are obscure figures and little is known of their reigns. We can only presume that the period of their sovereignty was marked by a continuation of that same unrest that marked the final years of the First Dynasty kings. It cannot be certain that the Second Dynasty actually followed the First; they may, in part at least, have been contemporary, ruling different parts of the Valley simultaneously.22
World History
