The Early Dynastic Period is a relatively recent designation in the history of Egyptology. Just four decades ago, Egypt’s formative phase languished in scholarly obscurity, little known, little studied, and barely acknowledged. Alan Gardiner, for instance, in his otherwise magisterial history Egypt of the Pharaohs (Gardiner 1961), included the period as something of an afterthought, appended to the main text as an epilogue for the sake of completeness but clearly not thought fit to occupy pole position at the beginning of the great dynastic story. Writing at the same time, even the most devoted archaeologist of early Egypt, Bryan Emery, labeled the period - somewhat dismissively and with more than a hint of embarrassment - ‘‘Archaic Egypt’’ (Emery 1961). For Gardiner, Emery, and other Egyptologists of their generation, ancient Egypt proper, in all its majesty and glory, began with the pyramids. What came before could be skipped over as a dark age, meagrely attested in the archaeological and textual records and of no great consequence.
If, today, Egypt before the pyramids is studied as an important subject in its own right - as an era which saw the cornerstones of pharaonic civilization crafted, perfected, and firmly embedded - it is due to the fieldwork and scholarship of a new generation of Egyptologists who, from the late 1960s onwards, set about uncovering Egypt’s early civilization. Through the survey and excavation of new sites (notably Elephantine at the First Cataract, Buto in the Delta, and a clutch of sites in modern Israel), the re-examination of areas previously dug (especially Abydos and Hierakon-polis in Upper Egypt, Saqqara and Helwan in the Memphite area), and the re-assessment of existing data, Early Dynastic Egypt - as it has been appropriately re-designated (Wilkinson 1999) - has emerged from the shadows and into the spotlight of Egyptological enquiry. It now enjoys, if not equal significance with such great cultural milestones as the Old Kingdom or Eighteenth Dynasty, then at least parity of esteem in scholarly circles. It is recognized as a key period during which the mechanisms of rule, the ideology of divine kingship, and the artistic and architectural
Canons of court culture were successfully formulated and promulgated, laying the foundations for the succeeding two and a half thousand years of pharaonic civilization. Early Dynastic Egypt is the subject of specialist journals (notably Archeo-Nil) and the focus of specialist international conferences (e. g. Hendrickx et al. (eds.) 2004). Moreover, archaeologists schooled in anthropological approaches to material culture, where a lack of inscriptions is no bar to analysis, have transformed the study of early Egypt (e. g. Wengrow 2006) and, thereby, of pharaonic civilization as a whole. In a very real sense, the study of Early Dynastic Egypt, the johnny-come-lately of Egyptology, is making its presence felt in the discipline at large.
Yet the period itself still defies precise demarcation. It is conventional to define the Early Dynastic Period as the era between the unification of Egypt and the beginning of the Pyramid Age. The difficulty is that neither phenomenon can be pinned down precisely to the satisfaction and agreement of all scholars. Some Egyptologists take a traditional view, dating political unification and the emergence of Egypt as the world’s first nation-state to the beginning of the First Dynasty (be that the reign of Narmer or his successor, another long-running debate). Others interpret the archaeological evidence from places like Abydos and Hierakonpolis as indicating that Egypt was unified and governed as a single country several centuries before the traditional starting-point of the dynastic sequence. Recently discovered impressions of necropolis seals from the Early Dynastic royal cemetery at Abydos (Wilkinson 1999: 62 and fig. 3.1) suggest that, while the process of political unification certainly began before the First Dynasty (Wilkinson 2000a), the early Egyptians themselves regarded Narmer as something of a founder figure. Hence it is more than a scholarly convenience to regard him as the first king of the Early Dynastic sequence.
Similar difficulties attend the end of the Early Dynastic Period. It is true that the stepped monument of Netjerikhet-Djoser (the first king of the Third Dynasty) marks the beginning of the pyramid-building tradition and the final abandonment of the ancestral royal cemetery at Abydos in favor of the Memphite necropolis. Yet, at the same time, the Step Pyramid perhaps has more in common with its First and Second Dynasty predecessors than with the true pyramids of the Fourth Dynasty. In cultural and political terms, the transition from the Third to the Fourth Dynasty certainly represents a major break, whereas there is considerable continuity between the Second and Third Dynasties - even if Manetho was correct in asserting that the first two dynasties hailed from This while the Third had its roots in the Memphite region. For this reason, many scholars place the Third Dynasty within the Early Dynastic Period, while others restrict discussion to the first two dynasties. Of course, such debates are entirely academic. While neat chronological divisions may be useful for historians, they mean nothing - or very little, at most - when studying a civilization at the human level.
World History
