The appearance of writing, the unification of the country, and the establishment of a capital at Memphis mark the beginning of what is known as the Early Dynastic period, the First to Third Dynasties (c.3000-2613 Bc). (See Emily Teeter (ed.), Before the Pyramids: The Origins of Egyptian Civilization, Chicago, 2011, for an excellent illustrated survey of this early period.) This is the world’s first stable monarchy—in contrast to the battling city-states of Mesopotamia. In these 400 years a model of kingship was developed. By 2500 BC the myth had developed that the king was the direct heir of the sun god Ra. Ra, it was said, impregnated the ruling queen (appearing to her usually in the guise of her husband). Thoth, the herald of the gods, then appeared to her to tell her that she was to give birth to the son of Ra. The royal couple thus acted as surrogate parents for their successor, and ‘son’ succeeded ‘father’ without a break. The king’s wife was traditionally referred to as ‘the one who unites the two Lords’. The earlier tradition of Horus as protector was absorbed into the myth by making Horus a member of Ra’s family, and the god continued as the special protector of the king against the forces of disorder personified by Seth. In essence the king had a dual nature, the divine emanating through his human form.
On the succession of a new king there was a coronation ceremony, the kha, the word also used for the appearance of the sun at dawn, when the king was given his divine name that was afterwards written together with his existing personal name alongside the symbols of Upper Egypt (a sedge plant) and Lower Egypt (a bee). After thirty years of a reign there was the jubilee ceremonial of sed, when the king received the renewed allegiance of the provinces of Egypt wearing first the White Crown of Upper Egypt and then the Red Crown of Lower Egypt. Each province brought their local gods for him to honour. Part of the ceremony involved the king running a circuit of boundary stones that symbolized the full extent of his territory as if to confirm his fitness to rule.
Ceremonial was important but not enough. Although the ideology of the divine king was imposed in Egyptian life from the earliest times, his survival rested on being able to keep order (any loss of control was traditionally rationalized as a sign that the gods had withdrawn their support), and this involved bureaucratic expertise. From early times taxes were collected in kind by the court and then stored in granaries before being rationed out to support building projects and the feeding of labourers. Reserves were kept for emergency feeding. The sophistication of the system can be shown by the annual records of the height of the Nile floods from which the expected crop yield for the year could be calculated in advance. The Palermo stone (so-called because it is now housed in a museum in Palermo, Sicily) of about 2400 BC records these details in an important list of annals of earlier dynasties, which in itself shows how hieroglyphs were being used to systematically record the past. The king may also have controlled foreign trade, as it was the court that was the main consumer of raw materials and centre of craftsmanship.
The administrative complex around the royal court at Memphis was known as Per Ao, The Great House, a name used eventually, from about 1400 bc for the king himself, pharaoh. Heading the administration was the vizier, whose roles included overseeing the maintenance of law and order and all building operations. Then there were a host of other officials, with titles such as ‘elder of the gates, ‘chief of the secrets of the decrees, and ‘controller of the Two Thrones, whose functions have been lost. It can be assumed that there were strong links with provinces, whose boundaries may have been based on much earlier states, as without these order could not have been maintained or resources channelled upwards to the court. The appearance of monumental ‘palace fa9ade’ tombs along the Nile is the clearest sign that the royal administration was making itself felt throughout the kingdom. The Palermo stone also records royal progresses along the Nile every two years that allowed direct supervision of affairs by the king.
Resources were not only needed to sustain the king and his officials in life. From the earliest dynasties it was believed that at the death of a king his divinely created spirit, the ka, would leave his body and then ascend to heaven, where it would accompany his father, the sun god, Ra, on the boat on which Ra travelled through each night before reappearing in the east. However, certain formalities had to take place if the king was to reach his destination safely. The body of the king had to be preserved, its name recorded on the tomb, and the ka had to be provided with all it needed for the afterlife. It could not survive without nourishment.
These requirements were the same for all Egyptians, but only the kings could normally travel to the other world. Others, at this period, had to be content with an existence within the tomb or possibly in a shadowy underworld underneath it. However, those officials who had enjoyed his special favour might be able to rise with the king, and the custom grew of placing their tombs next to those of the kings in the hope that they would go to heaven with him as his attendants in the afterlife. It was a shrewd way of encouraging loyalty from leading nobles and officials.
Originally the bodies of the kings had been buried in mudbrick chambers. These gradually became more elaborate, the body being buried deeper and deeper in the ground, probably to protect the fine goods that were now buried with it. The deeper the body was buried, however, the more likely it was to decay (a body left in sand near the surface normally dried out from the warmth of the sun), and so there developed the process of embalming to fulfil the requirement that the body should be preserved. The viscera from queen Hetepheres of the Fourth Dynasty, mother of Khufu (Greek Cheops), the great pyramid-builder, have survived from c.2580 bc but no full mummy now survives earlier than one from the Fifth Dynasty (c.2400 bc). By the New Kingdom the art of embalming was to have developed into a complex ritual providing the world with one of its most enduring images of Egyptian civilization.
The early kings were buried in the sacred city of Abydos, far up in Upper Egypt, a recognition of their origin as southerners. Typically the tombs had a central burial chamber, walled with timber and surrounded by store-rooms for goods and subsidiary graves for officials. Near each tomb was a walled funerary enclosure where
Rituals relating to the cult worship of each king were carried out. Despite plundering over the centuries, enough material survives to show that the tombs were filled with pots (containing food and drink for the afterlife), well-crafted stone vessels, sometimes finished in gold, and objects in copper and ivory. Another burial ground developed at Saqqara near Memphis. It used to be believed that the graves of the early kings were actually here, with those at Abydos being merely cenotaphs. Now it seems that the tombs at Saqqara, finely constructed though they might be, are in fact those of leading officials. The need to provide luxury goods for the kings’ and his courtiers’ survival in their afterlife appears to have been the catalyst for a major explosion in the arts during the Early Dynastic period.
Once the shafts of the tomb had been dug out and the surrounding chamber completed, the whole was finished off with a rectangular building over the tomb at ground level. These constructions have been nicknamed ‘mastabas’, after the benches that are found outside modern Egyptian houses. The mastabas of early tombs, royal and otherwise, were often constructed in the form of a model palace. It was the convention to build in a false door through which it was believed the ka would be able to cross. Within the door a stone gravestone known as the stele was placed. On the stele were inscribed the names and titles of the deceased, often with a representation of him seated at a table enjoying his offerings. Sometimes a list of the offerings was included, the idea being that the mere act of reading the list by the deceased could cause them to materialize and sustain the ka even if there was nothing real to eat.
World History
