A delight in exotic materials seems to characterize this period of Egyptian history, when the craftsmen of the little communities and their masters sought more and more unusual stones or more sumptuous metals to produce richer and more splendid objects. These in turn became the reason why merchants and the chiefs of other, more distant or less well-endowed communities came to cities like Hierakonpolis and so contributed to the rise, ultimately, of the family which ruled there.
Gold and hippopotamus ivory, both products of the Valley, were such materials. But others, like elephant ivory, shells from the coasts of the Red Sea and even of the Arabian Gulf postulate longer routes for contact and exchange. The most remarkable of such long-distance routes was that which
(a)
(b)
Figure 4.5 Lapis Lazuli was highly valued in late predynasric times and appears frequently in objects associated with the emerging ‘royal’ courts in Upper Egypt. Lapis came principally from Badakhshan in northern Pakistan and was traded across the immense distance separating the mines from the Nile Valley.
(a) A female figurine which, it has been suggested, may have been made in the Arabian Gulf and exported to Hierakonpolis, where it was found and (b) a small figurine of an old man wrapped in a cloak (also a favourite Egyptian motif from Old Kingdom and later times) from Tarut in eastern Saudi Arabia.
Sources: (a) The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; (b) The National Museum, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Brought one of the most sought after, richest, and most splendid of all materials — gold not excepted — the fine stone known as lapis lazuli.
Lapis is, literally, one of the touchstones of sophisticated early civilizations. It was to be found in large quantities in the cities of Sumer whose people valued it highly. It is also known from Iranian sites of the late fourth and early third millennia; it is found extensively in Egypt, around the time traditionally ascribed to the unification.
The most notable element in the story of lapis, apart from its beauty when it is recovered in its finest state, a marvellous, living, royal blue stone, is its place of origin. The sources for lapis have been carefully studied;39 it is customarily asserted that the Badakhshan province of Afghanistan is the only source from which the stone derives. In fact there are three other places which can produce stone of something of the same characteristics as Badakhshan but they are either too distant or inferior in the quality of the stone they yield to merit serious consideration as the source of the exceptionally fine stones which found their way to the early Sumerian and Egyptian palaces and shrines. Quetta on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border has been identified as another source and there are mines in the Pamir mountains.40
The Badakhshan mines are located in the far north-east of Afghanistan, in the region of the Hindu Kush. It is a remote, rough and inhospitable country; the mines are to be found in the Kerano-Munjan Valley. They are some one thousand five hundred miles distant from the nearest point in Mesopotamia, away to the north and west. To reach Egypt the stone would need to travel still further, either traded on by land through the Arabo-Syrian deserts into Palestine and down the coast, or, in this case far more likely, by land down into south-western Persia, then by sea down the Arabian Gulf and onwards, either round the peninsula to the Red Sea shores of Egypt or across the peninsula by a land route, given the somewhat more benign climatic conditions which prevailed in Arabia until about 2000 BC. In either event it is a formidable journey, yet it is clear that in the crucial period around the end of the predynastic period, into the early decade of the First Dynasty, the route must often have been travelled.
Lapis appears in Egypt in graves dated to the early Naqada II period, late in the fourth millennium, often in association with foreign, specifically Mesopotamian elements. It is often found in context with gold or gold-mounted objects and generally and not altogether surprisingly seems to be identified with richer burials, suggesting that its acquisition was a perquisite of the developing elite in the communities which were beginning to demonstrate a formal hierarchic status in the Valley.
Lapis continues to be found in Egyptian funerary contexts up to the end of the reign of King Djet in the mid-First Dynasty; then, abruptly, it stops. It is not known in Egypt again until the Fourth Dynasty some five hundred years later; for the remainder of the First Dynasty after Djet, and in the Second and Third Dynasties, no evidence of its import is to be found. That it was apparently not available during the luxurious and magnificent Third Dynasty is particularly telling.
All the great late predynastic sites have yielded examples of lapis, in the form of beads, jewellery, decorative pieces and inlays. One of the most notable pieces, a standing naked female figure, hands clasped before her in a posture which is more typically Mesopotamian than Egyptian, is really characteristic of neither provenance. It comes from Hierakonpolis. It has been suggested that it might have been made in the region of the Arabian Gulf and exported to Egypt.41
Whilst it is virtually impossible to find an exact parallel to this Hier-akonpolis figurine in the production of Egyptian artists there is a most
Remarkable similarity between it and another, smaller lapis figure from eastern Saudi Arabia. This has been ascribed to a date early in the third millennium BC; it comes from the region of Tarut at that time an important trading centre for the Dilmun culture.
The Tarut figure is of an old man, wrapped in a cloak,42 a subject which, a little curiously, is more popular in the art of early Egypt than it is in comparable times in Sumer or Elam. The stone is more skilfully worked than the Hierakonpolis piece but there is little doubt of their affinity. The treatment of the bold, deep-cut eye sockets is similar in both cases, as is the notable air of tension in both figures. It is difficult not to believe that they both come from the same, or a closely related, tradition.
World History
