Conclusions

The architecture, art, and associated beliefs of the early Old Kingdom clearly evolved from forms of the Early Dynastic period. What is seen in the Step Pyramid complex of Djoser is a transformation of the Early Dynastic tombs into the first monument in the world made entirely of stone—on a truly huge scale. While this monument is also symbolic of the enormous control exercised by the Crown, such power must have been developing incrementally throughout the ist and 2nd Dynasties, following the unification of the large territorial state in Naqada III and Dynasty o.

The Early Dynastic Period was a time of consolidation of the enormous gains of unification, which could easily have failed, when a state bureaucracy was successfully organized and expanded to bring the entire country under royal control. This was done through taxation, to support the Crown and its projects on a grand scale, including expeditions for goods and materials to the Sinai, Palestine, the Lebanon,

Lower Nubia, and the Eastern Desert. Conscription must presumably also have been practised in order to build the large royal mortuary monuments and to supply soldiers for military expeditions. The use of early writing no doubt facilitated such state organization.

There were obvious rewards for those who were bureaucrats of the state, as the early cemeteries on both sides of the river in the Memphis region clearly attest. Belief in the benefits of a mortuary cult, where huge quantities of goods were constantly going out of circulation in the economy, was a cohesive factor that helped to integrate this society in both the north and south. In the early dynasties, when the Crown began to exert enormous control over land, resources, and labour, the ideology of the god-king legitimized such control and became increasingly powerful as a unifying belief system.

The flowering of early civilization in Egypt was the result of major transformations both in socio-political and economic organization and ideology. That such transformations were successful in the Early Dynastic Period is truly remarkable, given that contemporaneous polities elsewhere in the Near East were much smaller in territory and population. That this state was successful for a very long time—a total of about 800 years until the end of the Old Kingdom—is in part due to the enormous potential of cereal agriculture on the Nile floodplain, but it is also a result of Egyptian organizational skills and the strongly developed institution of kingship.