Outside the Nile Valley, expeditions were sent by kings of the Old Kingdom to obtain goods and materials, for which there is much inscriptional evidence. Beginning with Djoser’s reign, there are Old Kingdom rock inscriptions in southern Sinai, in the mining area of the Wadi Maghara, and evidence of an Old Kingdom settlement and industrial area for smelting copper. This settlement was not continuously occupied, but expeditions were sent there by kings of the different dynasties for turquoise and copper.
In the Eastern and Western Deserts there are numerous rock inscriptions of Old Kingdom quarrying expeditions. Kings of the 4*h and 5*h Dynasties sent expeditions to the Wadi Hammamat, to obtain greywacke for statues, and there are inscriptions of Khufu and Radjedef, as well as 5*h-Dynasty kings, at a gneiss quarry in the Nubian Western Desert northwest of Abu Simbel, where stone for Khafra’s seated statue was quarried. Expeditions continued into the late 6*h Dynasty, as rock inscriptions of Pepy II in the Eastern Desert and south Sinai attest.
Dakhla Oasis in the Western Desert was connected to major trade routes along desert tracks - east and north to the Nile Valley through Kharga Oasis, and south to Sudan. At the eastern end of Dakhla Oasis there is extensive evidence of a late Old Kingdom/First Intermediate Period settlement, which was first discovered in 1947 by Akhmed Fakhry. Since 1977 the site of Balat has been excavated by the French Institute of Archaeology, Cairo. A copy of a decree by Pepy II establishing the settlement was found on a stela in one of three funerary chapels belonging to oasis governors. Covering an area of ca. 40 hectares, remains of the settlement include a governor’s palace with vaulted two-story store rooms (reign of Pepy II), an earlier fortified enclosure, and pottery workshops. Also associated with the settlement is a cemetery with six mud-brick mastaba tombs of governors, excavated under the direction of Michel Valloggia (University of Geneva). These mastabas date to the reigns of Pepy I and Pepy II - one belonged to a son of Pepy II - and there are also lower status burials of several types.
Sea-faring expeditions were probably more complicated than overland ones, requiring, in addition to organizational skills, the know-how and materials to build large ships, and navigating and sailing skills. Sneferu sent a large fleet of ships to obtain cedar (probably to the Lebanon), as recorded on the Palermo Stone. In the 5*h-Dynasty mortuary temple of Sahura another sea-faring expedition to the Lebanon is depicted. The cedar boat timbers buried in pits next to Khufu’s pyramid are evidence of such expeditions.
Nubia held special interest to the Egyptians, which is indirectly reflected in the development of Egypt’s border town at Elephantine. Large fortification walls of the 2nd Dynasty were maintained throughout the Old Kingdom. Excavations of the German Archaeological Institute uncovered a 3rd-Dynasty administrative complex with a small step pyramid, but it later fell into disuse when the area was used for craft production, and then for a cemetery. The local goddess Satet also had an important cult center, which in the Old Kingdom was repeatedly rebuilt in mud-brick.
In the early 4th Dynasty Sneferu sent a military expedition to Nubia that, according to the Palermo Stone, returned with 7,000 captives and 200,000 cattle. Who these captives were and where they were from in Nubia cannot be specified. As a result of Egyptian military penetration in Lower Nubia in the 1st Dynasty, the A-Group had disappeared, however, and Sneferu’s expedition probably raided Upper Nubia. At Buhen North, near the Second Cataract, evidence of a fortified town built in the 4*h Dynasty was excavated in the 1960s by the Egypt Exploration Society. Buhen was probably a major trading center with regions to the south, and seals of 4th - and 5*h-Dynasty kings have been found there. But Egyptian control of Lower Nubia ceased by the 6th Dynasty, when indigenous peoples, whom George Reisner called the C-Group, began to be buried there.
The origins of the C-Group are unknown. Potsherds with similarities to a C-Group ware have been found at locations in the Western Desert as far south as the Wadi Howar (northern Sudan) - possible evidence for cultural antecedents to the C-Group. They may have been related to semi-nomadic groups who lived in Upper Nubia (and were related to the A-Group). A-Group peoples may also have moved farther up the Nile - and into the hilly regions to the east of the river. Then when Egyptian presence in Lower Nubia ended in the late Old Kingdom, an opportunity opened up for semi-nomadic peoples to settle in this part of the Nile Valley.
Egyptian expeditions to Punt are known from 5th-Dynasty texts. Although Egypt withdrew from Lower Nubia before the 6th Dynasty, the crown was still very interested in the exotic raw materials that came through Nubia to Egypt. Nubian places/regions that the Egyptian expeditions visited are mentioned in Harkhuf’s tomb inscriptions and other texts, but their locations are debatable. There would be no indigenous writing system in Nubia until the late 1st millennium bc (the Meroitic language, which is imperfectly understood), so historical information about much of Nubian history is only found in Egyptian texts, most of which were written from a biased perspective.
According to David O’Connor’s analysis of the late Old Kingdom textual evidence, Wawat was in Lower Nubia, where the earliest C-Group people were living. Irtjet and Setju were located in Upper Nubia, where a powerful polity would arise at Kerma by ca. 2000 bc - that would later become a great threat to Egypt’s control of Lower Nubia. Yam may have been still farther south, to the west of Punt. Harkhuf’s records of dealings with the leaders of these regions suggest that there were chiefs controlling parts of Wawat, Irtjet, and Setju. A powerful and probably wealthy ruler with control of trade held forth in Yam.
The First Intermediate Period
World History
