So abrupt a transition, experienced over a very few thousand years, brought with it a deep sense of insecurity. This is especially evident in the lives of the earliest villagers and it is one of the most significant factors in the development of the curious human practice of living in cities. Cities first appeared several thousand years after the process of sedentation began, at the very beginning of the sixth millennium BC (c.5000bc) in southern
Mesopotamia. They developed over the centuries, initially as ‘central places’, serving the needs for defence and communal activity. The latter was often directed towards procedures for survival, like the neutralizing by rituals of invisible forces generally thought to be either malignant or, if properly placated, capable of altering for the better an otherwise discouraging destiny. Eventually they proliferated into a number of small independent communities. Simply living together in close, permanent and inescapable proximity introduced tensions hitherto quite unknown.
Cities were to be of great significance in the development and maintenance of early trade routes, hence of the spreading of different cultures and the promotion of extended communications. Systems of exchange were an early discovery of Homo sapiens sapiens and many cities and owed their foundation to the need to have central places for exchange, collection and distribution, later no doubt of manufacture. This is especially true of the early cities of Mesopotamia and the Levant. Later, the first Egyptian cities probably owe their existence to the need of catering to this imperative, particularly to the control of trade routes and of access to high-value resources. Urban settlements were, however, a somewhat un-Egyptian construct and the city never really became a dominant element of the society which arose in the Nile Valley, possibly because trade itself never assumed a significance comparable with that which it had in other areas of the ancient Near East. It is probably not without significance that as Mesopotamian influence attenuates, around the middle of the First Dynasty, so the city in Egypt declines in importance, to a level from which it was never really to recover, at least until the New Kingdom in the mid-second millennium BC.
Most of the outward forms of the political management even of contemporary societies derive from, or at least have the origins of many of their characteristics, in this time. One vital element, common to the embryonic societies of both Egypt and Mesopotamia, was the pressing need for a strong, central, unifying belief, the product of a motivation similar to that which produced the proto-city. In Sumer this need seems to have been manifested in permanent architectural forms of great proportions which dominated the living space of the cities and of a powerful, all-pervasive priesthood, whose professional interests rose above the individual needs of the city states into which, early on, Sumer had fractured. Egypt followed a comparable but somewhat different course.
THE ELITE OF EGYPT AND SUMER
In Egypt the need for a focus for belief and unity came to be realized around the person of the divine ruler. The Egyptians responded in similar terms as their Sumerian contemporaries when faced with the social pressures arising from sudden population growth. They devised a solution involving, the development of elites and hierarchies which came to personify, as it were, the stability of the society. Only in detail did they differ; in Sumer the priesthood was first of all the repository of power in the emerging city states which represented its polity, to be replaced eventually by ‘Great Men’, who were originally perhaps war-band leaders, who later became permanent fixtures in the society. In Egypt they adopted the far more inspired concept of the divine king.
The powerful urge to create which seems to have seized Egypt in the early years of her unified existence demanded spectacular outlets and responses. Three outstanding achievements must be set to Egypt’s account at this time which represent an extraordinary level of creative accomplishment: these are the institution of the divine kingship, the concept of the unified political state and the construction of monumental funerary architecture, a process which culminated in the pyramid. Each of these is a supreme achievement in its own sphere, the first in philosophical concept, the second in the management of society and the third in the making of an artefact, the pyramid that draws to itself a perfection of form and function which is breathtaking. It will be seen that the pyramid is the culmination of the process and encapsulates both the kingship and the state.
Although it is unfashionable to advance such views today there can be little doubt that Egypt’s astonishingly rapid development in its early centuries was the result of the emergence of a powerful, united and supremely well-focused elite. The persuasion — or coercion — of the presumably disparate polities in the Valley which still survived after the assertion of supreme power by the princes who achieved the unification, must have demanded the application of a dedicated, like-minded and well-organized cadre of able men, ready to accept and to execute a common but highly sophisticated policy across a still largely Neolithic countryside.
These would have included close relations of the newly elevated king and his immediate supporters. If there were other ‘princedoms’ in the Valley at the beginning of the third millennium BC, it is most likely that some individuals, the younger men amongst them perhaps, would have elected to join the star which was rising from This, one of the early centres of trade, cult and power.
The members of this elite group must have been specifically recruited for the crucial task of welding the disparate elements of the Valley society into a homogenous whole. It is possible that the group included women, for queens were important and visible figures in the First Dynasty and women enjoyed a respected place in the society. The members of the group must have expected substantial rewards. From the very earliest days, in the reigns of Narmer and of Aha for example, great brick-built tombs were prepared and equipped to provide for the needs of their owners throughout eternity. The tombs were stocked with riches, many of which testify to extensive international contact and already to a taste which is sumptuous and prodigal.
Later, the bureaucracy of Egypt was to be one of the striking components of the society. High officers bore titles which clearly were of great antiquity, going back at least to the beginnings of the First Dynasty and, in some cases, being derived from the structures which the various ‘courts’ of the pre-unification rulers maintained.
For the first two hundred years of Egypt’s history, when the kings of the Thinite line ruled, the aristocracy maintained their positions and status. Later, in the Second Dynasty, men of evident talent beyond the immediate circle of the king began to appear, whilst in the Third Dynasty the great officers of state owed their places to the king directly and not alone to the dispensation of aristocratic privilege.
World History
