In his important article, “The urban Revolution” (1950), archaeologist V. Gordon Childe listed traits of early civilizations, most of which characterize what had evolved in Egypt by ca. 3000 Bc. Central to the Early Dynastic Egyptian state - and all subsequent dynasties - was the institution of kingship. The king ruled through an administrative bureaucracy, and writing was an important invention which greatly facilitated state administration. The capital of Memphis was founded at this time, although there was a concentration of sites in the general area before the 1st Dynasty. Administrative centers would also have been founded throughout the country - to facilitate governing the large territorial state. But urbanism of the type found in contemporaneous Sumer (in southern Mesopotamia), where there were competing city-states, was not characteristic of Early Dynastic Egypt. This was a moneyless society, and taxes were paid to the state in the form of agricultural surplus, which supported the king, his government, and full-time specialists, including court-sponsored craftsmen. Formal art styles developed, and court-centered art from this time onward becomes distinctively Egyptian in style.
Ancient Egyptian society was highly stratified. Such a society was legitimized by ideology, including the ideology of a king with a divine role - a form of state religion in which he had a special connection to the gods. In Early Dynastic times there were cults of both state and local gods, which did not become syncretized with state religion until later. Perhaps most ideologically important from Early Dynastic times onward was the mortuary cult. Although large cult temples are well preserved from later times, in the Early Dynastic Period the most impressive monumental architecture of the state (and its highest officials) is tombs at Abydos and Saqqara. Conscripted labor, as a form of tax payment to the state, was probably used to build such monuments. There is no evidence for slavery until later, in the second millennium Bc, and even then slaves were not employed for large construction projects.
The stability of the Early Dynastic state suggests that institutions of control had been successfully implemented during Dynasty 0. Although there is no evidence for a full-time standing army until the Middle Kingdom, the king must have controlled a military that could be used when needed, internally as well as externally, the latter including expansion into neighboring regions (see 5.8). Evidence of increased long-distance trade is seen in Early Dynastic Egypt, much of which was probably controlled by the crown. Important for such trade was large-scale boat-building, not only to control communication and movement of goods and materials on the Nile, but also for long-distance trade that did not
Map 5.4 Earty Dynastic sites in Egypt and Palestine.
Use overland routes. For large seafaring ships, as well as some monumental constructions, cedar was imported from the Levant, which required state logistics.
Royal palaces have not been identified archaeologically for the Early dynastic Period. The best evidence for kingship, symbolized in the mortuary cult, is the royal cemetery at Abydos, in the area called the “umm el-Qa’ab,” which means “mother of pots.” First examined by Emile Amelineau, seven tomb complexes were later excavated by Flinders Petrie at the beginning of the 20th century. More recent investigations of the Ist-Dynasty royal tombs have been conducted by Gunter Dreyer. Although for some time it was thought that North Saqqara was the burial place of the Early Dynastic kings, because of the large, niched mud-brick tombs there, Werner Kaiser and Barry Kemp have convincingly argued that Abydos was the real royal cemetery (Figure 5.8). Stelae with royal names are found only at Abydos, and the combination of tomb plus royal funerary “enclosure” (located closer to the edge of cultivation at Abydos) is much larger than any tomb at North Saqqara.
Khasekhemwy
Figure 5.8 Plan of the Early Dynastic Royal Cemetery at Abydos. Source: W M. Flinders Petrie, The Royal Tombs of the Earliest Dynasties. London: Egypt Exploration Fund, 1901. used by permission of the Egypt Exploration Society.
To the southwest of the three large chambers of Aha’s tomb complex (Cemetery B) at Abydos in the umm el-Qa’ab cemetery are the large subterranean tombs of six kings (Djer, Djet, den, Anedjib, Semerkhet, and Qa’a) and one queen, Merneith, den’s mother, who probably served as regent. Although the tombs were originally covered with mounds, they had all been robbed in antiquity. Renovations were made during the Middle Kingdom, when Djer’s tomb was converted into a cenotaph for the god Osiris.
Box 5-D State formation
Ancient Egypt is an important example of an early state, and as such it is often discussed in anthropological theories of socio-cultural development. Beginning in the mid-20th century, a number of theoretical works to explain the rise of complex society and early states/civilization appeared, including Julian Steward’s Theory of Culture Change (1955), Karl Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism (1957), and Leslie White’s Evolution of Culture (1959). Steward’s and White’s books were particularly influential in the development of theory in processual archaeology during the 1960s.
A major concern of processual archaeology was explaining the processes underlying the origins of the state. Earlier scholars like the 19th-century anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan had focused on stages that led from savagery to barbarism to civilization. Following Lewis Binford, a number of processual archaeologists sought to reconstruct processes and social organization from archaeological data and many adopted Elman Service’s (neo-)evolutionary stages of bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states.
Morton Fried, a cultural anthropologist, proposed that there was a difference between pristine states, those that developed without having a template of former states, and secondary states, which developed later in response to already existing and increasingly predatory, expansionist states. Although city-states may have arisen somewhat earlier in southern Mesopotamia, the Early Dynastic Egyptian state is unquestionably an example of a pristine state - and one of the earliest known states in the world.
State formation in Egypt has been discussed by Michael Hoffman, whose excavations at Hierakonpolis uncovered evidence of craft specialization (pottery and bead production). Hoffman identified long-distance trade and exchange of goods as prime movers of socio-political complexity - significant factors in the formation of the Egyptian nation-state. Kathryn Bard’s analysis of burials at Naqada and Armant suggested increasing social rank and differentiation in the Naqada culture as a factor in the rise of the early state. While disagreeing with Wittfogel’s hypothesis that management of (large-scale) irrigation works provided the political structure of the early state, Karl Butzer wrote that the primeval (Predynastic) nomes, with their economic base of hydraulic agriculture, provided the political infrastructure for military ventures that led to state unification. Another perspective is offered by Fekri
Hassan, who proposed that in later Predynastic times ideology and ritual systems, especially of a female goddess cult, became increasingly important along with expanded political authority. These and other theories of Egyptian state formation are discussed by Robert Wenke in his overview of the evolution of Egyptian civilization.
More recently, scholars such as Christiana Kohler have argued for distinguishing between the formation of regional “proto-states” in the Nile Valley (later fourth millennium Bc), and the later formation of the large territorial state which dominated Upper and Lower Egypt. Looking at the most recent archaeological evidence of the Predynastic cultures, Branislav Andelkovic has proposed that Robert Carneiro’s “circumscription theory” is the best starting point for modeling state/political evolution in Predynastic Egypt.
Since 1970 some environmentally deterministic theories of state formation have been challenged by post-processual archaeologists (see 1.6) and others, who suggest that focusing too much attention on the environment and population promotes a tendency to ignore ideology, social values, and the actions of individuals (agents). Whether general theories from the social sciences can explain Egyptian phenomena has also been questioned by some Egyptologists.
With more excavated data, much more is known at present about the particular circumstances of the rise of complex society and the early state in Egypt than in the mid-20th century, when generalizing theories for these phenomena in Egypt and elsewhere were being developed. Although such theories may now be seen as having less universal explanatory force, two kinds of evolution can be discussed for ancient Egypt: specific evolution, documenting the trajectory of this ancient culture, and general evolution, comparing Egypt’s trajectory to other early civilizations. Important insights may still be obtained from cross-cultural and comparative studies of early civilizations, as Bruce Trigger’s book, Understanding Early Civilizations. A Comparative Study (2003), so elegantly demonstrates. Charles Spencer’s model of territorial expansion and primary state formation also offers a cogent explanation for the formation of the world’s six earliest states, in Mesoamerica, Peru, Asia (west, south and east) - and Egypt.
All of the 1st-Dynasty royal burials, including Aha’s in Cemetery B, were associated with small rectangular burials of men and women, who were probably palace retainers sacrificed at the time of the king’s burial, to serve him in the afterlife. In these subsidiary graves were burial goods, such as pots and carved stone vessels, but many also had crudely carved stelae with the names of the deceased in hieroglyphs. Dwarfs, who may have been royal attendants, and dogs were also found in some of these burials. Associated with Aha’s tomb complex were the burials of 33 young males, 20-25 years old, near which were the burials of seven young lions. Covering an area of ca. 70 x 40 meters, Djer’s tomb has the most subsidiary burials (338). After his burial the number of human sacrifices decreased and the practice disappeared in the 2nd Dynasty.
The earlier royal tombs in the Umm el-Qa’ab cemetery (of Djer and Djet) consist of large pits lined with mud-brick, with short walls perpendicular to the pit’s inside walls, which formed storage chambers. In the central part of these and the later royal tombs was a large wooden shrine for the burial. By the time of Den’s reign an external staircase was added, which made it possible to construct the entire tomb, including roofing, before the king’s burial. To prevent grave robbing, the staircase was blocked off by a portcullis, and slabs of black and red granite from Aswan lined the burial chamber - the earliest use of this very hard stone in a royal monument. In this tomb, which has recently been restored, the German archaeologists found the debris of many grave goods, including pots and their seal impressions, stone vessels, inscribed labels, carved ivory and ebony artifacts used for furniture and box inlays, and hundreds of huge wine jars.
In the later tomb of King Semerkhet, entered by a ramp and not a staircase, Petrie found the ramp saturated “three feet” deep with perfumed oil, still strongly scented after 5,000 years. The oil was most likely imported from Palestine. That such a large quantity of imported oil would be consumed in a royal burial suggests the importance of prestige goods for royal burials and long-distance trade on a large scale. Other examples providing evidence of such trade include the bracelets in gold, turquoise, lapis lazuli, and amethyst that Petrie found on a human forearm hidden in a wall of the tomb of Djer.
The last king of the 1st Dynasty, Qa’a, also built a tomb at Abydos, but only two more royal tombs are found there, built by Peribsen and Khasekhemwy, the last two kings of the 2nd Dynasty. The location of the other royal burials of the 2nd Dynasty remains unknown, but the tombs of Hetepsekhemwy, Raneb, and Nynetjer may have been built at Saqqara, where their seal impressions have been found associated with two huge underground galleries to the south of Djoser’s Step Pyramid complex (3rd Dynasty). The third royal burial may have originally been in an underground gallery now within Djoser’s complex, where thousands of stone vessels of Early Dynastic date have been found. Why these 2nd-Dynasty royal burials were at Saqqara and not in the royal cemetery at Abydos cannot be explained. But perhaps it is better to ask why the tombs of Peribsen and Khasekhemwy were at Abydos, when the evidence points to their 2nd-Dynasty royal predecessors, and 3rd-Dynasty successors, being buried at Saqqara.
The earliest convention of writing the royal name is in the format of the serekh, a rectangular design perhaps symbolizing the niched facade of a palace, with the king’s name in hieroglyphs above (Figure 5.9). The serekh is usually surmounted by the Horus falcon, but Peribsen’s serekh is surmounted by a “Seth” animal/god (a fantastic animal with a broad tail), which possibly suggests some change in the symbolism of kingship. Although specific events of this period can only be hypothesized, resolution of some kind of political conflict may have occurred under the next king, who first used the Horus name Khasekhem. Later this king’s serekh was surmounted by both the Horus falcon and the Seth animal, with his name changed to (the dual form) Khasekhemwy, which means “the two powers have appeared.” His epithet, “the two lords are at peace with him,” may symbolize a reunified country.
Khasekhemwy’s tomb at Abydos is very unlike the royal Ist-Dynasty tombs there. Consisting of a long “gallery” excavated in a deep pit, it had 58 storage rooms along the sides and a burial chamber made with quarried limestone. Grave goods removed from this tomb
Figure 5.9 1st-Dynasty limestone stela of King Djet with his name framed by the royal serekh and surmounted by the Horus falcon, from his tomb at Abydos. Source: The Art Archive/Musee du Louvre Paris/Dagli Orti/Werner Forman Archive.
By Amelineau included many copper tools and vessels, stone vessels (some with gold covers), and chert tools. Some pots were filled with real fruit and grain.
At Abydos the best examples of monumental architecture in the Early Dynastic Period are the royal funerary enclosures, called “fortresses” by earlier archaeologists working there. Khasekhemwy’s complex, known as the Shunet el-Zebib, is the best preserved of these enclosures, which have been investigated since the 1980s by David O’Connor (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University). Built of mud-brick, the Shunet el-Zebib covers an area 124 X 56 meters, and has 10-11-meter-high walls still standing. Evidence of cult activities within this enclosure include the remains of a chapel, in which incense has been retrieved by the excavators, and beer jars left as offerings near the north gateway. A similar enclosure,
Though smaller, also associated with Khasekhemwy, is located at Hierakonpolis, which was possibly the enclosure for a palace or temple. Given the scale of such monuments, conscripted labor (corvee) was probably used in their construction.
To the northwest of Djer’s enclosure at Abydos, three new structures - each with small, subsidiary burials - have recently been discovered and excavated (Figure 5.10). Unlike the later and much larger funerary enclosures, each built for one king, these three structures (named Aha I, II and III) were all associated with Aha. Laurel Bestock (Brown University), the excavator of Aha II and III, has suggested that the two smaller enclosures were built next to Aha’s larger one (Aha I) for two persons of lesser status than the king’s, perhaps members of the royal family. All three structures also contained interior chapels.
The 1st Dynasty funerary enclosures at Abydos also had exterior subsidiary burials, probably of sacrificed humans, and ten donkeys had been buried next to the enclosure (of unknown ownership) southwest of Aha I. Fourteen boat burials were also discovered at Abydos by O’Connor’s team, just outside the northeast wall of Khasekhemwy’s enclosure, although the stratigraphic evidence shows that they are earlier in date than this enclosure, and are aligned with another structure of the 1st Dynasty. Buried in pits were shallow wooden boats 18-21 meters long, with mud-brick placed inside and around the outside of the hulls. As these boat burials had no functional purpose, their meaning must have been symbolic, most likely related to royal use in the afterlife.
At Abydos the paramount role of the king and the ideology of kingship are symbolized in the royal mortuary architecture. Located in a special cemetery that would later have cultic significance for the god Osiris, the royal 1st-Dynasty tombs symbolized a new political order, with a state religion headed by a king to legitimize this order. Widely held beliefs
Aha III
Aha II
Figure 5.10 Plan of the three funerary enclosures from Aha’s reign, Abydos. Source: David O’Connor, Abydos: Egypt’s First Pharaohs and the Cult of Osiris. London: Thames & Hudson, 2011, Figure 91. Used by permission of David O’Connor.
About death had resulted in the evolution of a mortuary cult, which first developed in Middle and upper Egypt in the fourth millennium bc. By the 1st Dynasty the king was accorded the most elaborate form of burial in this mortuary cult, which was a politically motivated transformation of the belief system.
What is unusual about the Abydos royal funerary enclosures is that, according to an hypothesis of david o’Connor and Matthew Adams, who excavated the Aha I, structure, each enclosure seems to have been intentionally dismantled following the king’s death - symbolically transferring the structure for the king’s use in his afterlife. The only still-standing enclosure there was that of Khasekhemwy, the last king of the 2nd Dynasty. This last royal monument at Abydos of the Early Dynastic Period possibly represents the beginning of a time when the permanent monumentality of the royal mortuary structure had important symbolic meaning.
The Dynastic state and society were highly stratified. This can be seen in the stratified classes of burials from the 1st Dynasty onward. In the Memphis area the burials also symbolize the administrative hierarchy, which formed the centralized government of the early state. The highest state officials were buried at North Saqqara, where English archaeologists, including Walter Emery, excavated a number of large Ist-Dynasty tombs with elaborately niched mud-brick superstructures before and after World War II. Tomb 3357, of an unknown official of the reign of Aha, has a niched superstructure surrounded by a double mud-brick wall, 48.2 x 22 meters in area (Figure 5.11). The superstructure was divided into 27 chambers, below which was the tomb pit with five large chambers. To the north of the tomb was a “model estate,” where small-scale rooms, three granaries, and a boat-grave, all in mud-brick were found. With other large burials, North Saqqara continued to be the highest-status place of non-royal burial in the 1st Dynasty, with much smaller contemporaneous tombs to the north in the Wadi Abusir. But in the 2nd Dynasty there is a much greater variety of tomb sizes at North Saqqara, from tombs as large as those of the 1st Dynasty to quite small ones, sometimes wedged in between the larger tombs.
Beautifully crafted grave goods in the 1st-Dynasty tombs at North Saqqara, as well as in royal tombs at Abydos, are also evidence of craft specialization, centered around the royal court and its highest officials. The carved and inlaid disks found in the North Saqqara tomb of Hemaka (#3035), who was royal seal bearer (chancellor) under Den, are examples of such artifacts (Figure 5.12). Prestige goods, sometimes made of exotic imported materials, not only represent full-time craft specialization, most likely of artisans working for the court, but also a reward system to honor valued officials - which helped to ensure their loyalty and diligence in the state bureaucracy. But this reward system also seems to have extended to lower-status officials in some of whose tombs imported artifacts are also found.
SCALE METRES
Figure 5.11 Section of the 1st-Dynasty Tomb 3357 at North Saqqara. Source: W B. Emery, Archaic Egypt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991 [1972], p. 54. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
Figure 5.12 Carved disk from Hemaka’s tomb, North Saqqara. Source: Werner Forman Archive/ Egyptian Museum, Cairo.
Across the river from Saqqara is the naqada III and Early Dynastic cemetery at Helwan, where more than 10,000 burials were excavated by Egyptian archaeologist Z. Y. Saad in the 1940s and 1950s and subsequently by the Egyptian Antiquities organization. Excavations in what remained of this cemetery resumed in 1997 under the direction of Christiana Kohler, who has also identified elite burials of Naqada IIIA (pre-1st Dynasty) onward there. Significantly, the Helwan Early Dynastic tombs are smaller than the largest ones at North Saqqara; some had a carved offering scene over the entrance. Helwan was probably another cemetery for Memphis officials, but of lower status than those buried at North Saqqara. A number of Early Dynastic cemeteries are found throughout Egypt. At Minshat Abu Omar in the Delta, eight large “elite” burials of the 1st and 2nd Dynasties have been excavated, as well as smaller graves of the period (see 5.5). Early Dynastic graves that were excavated by Petrie at Tarkhan contained contracted burials in pits that were roofed and lined with mud-brick or wood. The simplest burials of this period were in unlined pits, such as those in the Fort Cemetery at Hierakonpolis, and contained only a few pots. Such a variety of tomb and superstructure size and design, and number and type of grave goods, suggest many social levels in Egypt in the Early Dynastic Period, as well the importance of the mortuary cult for all social classes.
More recently, the Tarkhan burials have been studied by Christopher Ellis and Toby Wilkinson. At Tarkhan, as at Helwan, there are a number of Naqada III burials - about 1,300. Differentiated and high-status burials at Tarkhan date to Naqada IIIA-B, but Ellis points out that such differentiation definitely decreased in Naqada IIIC. The burial evidence possibly suggests the existence of a local polity there in Naqada IIIA-B, which was eclipsed
In Naqada IIIC times when the Early Dynastic state was emerging with its capital at Memphis. But given that the evidence for such a polity is only from burials, the existence of such a polity is speculative.
The large number of Early Dynastic burials in the Memphis area - on both sides of the river, of high to middle status - represents the major evidence for the emergence of a capital city there, and indirectly for urbanism, as settlement evidence at Memphis from most periods, but especially from the earliest levels, is not well preserved. In 1996 David Jeffreys (University College London) drilled cores in the ground to the east of the North Saqqara cemetery, where the early city would probably have been located. Results suggest that although there may be undisturbed layers of Early Dynastic occupation, they are buried under the water table, requiring expensive excavation techniques.
As the Early Dynastic state consolidated its control throughout Egypt, administrative centers would have been founded to facilitate state control. At Hierakonpolis, in the ancient town (Kom el-Ahmar), an elaborately niched mud-brick gateway was excavated in 1969 and interpreted as the gateway to an Early Dynastic “palace.” Possibly this was a royal administrative center, and this type of architecture was symbolic of the early state. At Elephantine a rectangular fortress was built in the 1st Dynasty and by the end of 3rd Dynasty the entire town was fortified. This was an Egyptian town, which by then had become the state’s southern border.
Cult centers of deities were undoubtedly located within Early Dynastic towns, but, like the towns, have not been well preserved. Scenes of temples or shrines are found on inscribed labels from Ist-Dynasty tombs, and some inscribed stone vessels found in Djoser’s pyramid complex were taken from earlier cult centers. There is also some archaeological evidence of early cult centers, of both local and state gods. In the northern Delta at Buto mud-brick buildings excavated by Thomas von der Way in the 1980s have been identified as an Early Dynastic royal residence complex, with much more of this complex uncovered since excavations resumed there in 2000.
At Tell el-Farkha in the northeast Delta two shrines have been found within a large administrative/cult complex on the Western Kom dating to Dynasty 0/1st Dynasty (see 5.2). In the shrine in the western part of this complex, with strata dating to the early 1st Dynasty, was a jar containing more than 60 small objects - votive figurines of humans and animals in hippopotamus ivory along with models of vessels and other artifacts. More votive objects, including a faience cylinder seal and a whole ostrich egg, were later found there in four storage jars. Tools used to make stone vessels have also been excavated in another room in this part of the complex. But by the 2nd Dynasty the Western Kom, with its cult/administrative complex, was abandoned.
At Coptos in Upper Egypt Petrie excavated three limestone figures of a local fertility god (Min?), which probably date to late Predynastic times (Naqada III), beneath the floor of the later temple of Isis and Min. From pieces in the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford University) a statue originally over 4 meters high can be modeled: its size alone suggests a ceremonial context. In the far south at Elephantine another cult center of a local deity was excavated by German archaeologists. Beneath an 18th-Dynasty temple of the goddess Satet was a very simple early shrine, consisting of several rectangular mud-brick walls within an enclosed space formed naturally by granite boulders. Some of the votive figurines found beneath the later temple were Early Dynastic in style.
X
Figure 5.13 Location of the “Main Deposit,” Hierakonpolis. Source: J. E. Quibell and F. W. Green, Hierakonpolis II. London: Egyptian Research Account, 1902, Plate 72.
Evidence of an Early Dynastic state cult center comes from Hierakonpolis. In the late 19th century British archaeologists James Quibell and Frederick Green excavated within an 18th-Dynasty temple complex at Hierakonpolis, where they found several ritual deposits of earlier artifacts. In or near the so-called “Main deposit” (Figure 5.13) were the Narmer Palette and macehead, the macehead of King Scorpion, and inscribed stone vessels and a statuette of Khasekhem. Small votive figurines, of humans and animals, were also found along with hundreds of decorated ivories (mostly of hippopotamus canines), including one inscribed with narmer’s name and another with den’s. Also located in the same area were the remains of what was believed to be an early temple, consisting of a low oval revetment of sandstone blocks, ca. 42 x 48 meters, filled with sterile sand brought from the desert.
Liam McNamara has suggested that this revetted mound was actually a cult area for the performance of ceremonies associated with kingship. Although in dynastic times Hierakonpolis/Nekhen became less important as a place, it was the cult center for the god Horus, associated with the living king. It is significant that Narmer’s Palette and macehead were found there: they most likely were royal donations to a cult center (of some sort) that was ideologically associated with the king/state from Dynasty 0 onward.
World History
