The foundation of the unified Egyptian state under the First Dynasty of kings was arguably the single most important political event of the past fifty centuries, anywhere in the world. It marked the beginning of the end of a world which, with relatively minor variations, had endured since Lower Palaeolithic times, a million years or so earlier. Then the ancestors of modern humans and later fully modern Homo sapiens sapiens lived in small communities, bound by common loyalties, with a simple system of community management which, by Neolithic times, probably operated consciously by consensus. A new world began with the recognition of the kingship in Egypt, the emergence of elites and the subsequent creation of the nation-state, of which the king was represented as the divinely-endowed ruler, supported by a highly organized and effective bureaucracy, with the means to organize large-scale projects which both required substantial resources and also stimulated their development. Thus was changed, fundamentally and for all time, the management of human societies. In the future the spoils would go to those societies which adopted the type of structure which the Egyptians first conceived — we still live with the results of that initiative, for better or for worse, to the present day.
To be able to observe, however dimly, the processes by which the first sophisticated political construct in the history of the world evolved, is a very remarkable privilege. It all happened so long ago, in terms of human experience, that the extraordinary nature of the event may not at first be fully apprehended. Yet nothing like the process has ever quite been experienced since that time.
Although the civilization of ancient Egypt was notably benign during its first millennium of its existence it has to be said that the political system devised by the first kings and their ministers is unmistakably totalitarian. A governing ideology imposed over the entire country required an all-pervasive system of control, a cult of personality on the grandest scale, demonstrations of military force and an energetic propaganda machine showing what happened to dissidents or enemies of the state and the consequent coercion of rebels and perceived enemies, a powerful administrating bureaucracy, the construction of
Monumental buildings to demonstrate the enduring power of the state, are all features of a dominant political system determined on the unquestioned continuation of its power. Other lands have emulated Egypt in this aspect of the management of complex societies but in no other land did the system — a several thousand year duality — survive as it did in Egypt.
In recent years the processes by which the kingship emerged in the Nile Valley have become somewhat clearer than earlier analyses allowed. It is true that the principal elements of the Egyptian civilization appeared with exceptional rapidity and were swiftly formalized into a system which endured over the longest time that has been given to any man-made institution, but there is a marked caesura between the predynastic centuries and the beginnings of royal rule. Nonetheless, at the end of the fourth millennium BC the Egypt of historic times developed seamlessly from the experience of all those groups which had streamed into the Valley and which formed the root-stock of what was to constitute the indigenous Egyptian population.
The official myth, which was always sustained by Egypt throughout its history, was that there were originally two kingdoms, of the south and the north respectively, Upper and Lower Egypt. The idea of the Dual Kingdom always appealed greatly to the emerging Egyptian consciousness as giving evidence of the most exalted example of what constituted virtually a national obsession, the expression of all the most important characteristics of the society — divinity, beliefs, customs, the very order of the universe — as being bounded by a duality: for the one there was always the other, in king, gods nature and the ways of men.
Egyptology, however uneasily, tended to accept this myth of origins (without acknowledging it as such) as it developed in the Valley and to seek for material evidence of the existence of Menes, the mythical Unifier, who was conflated with Narmer and was thought to be the most convincing candidate for the first king who actually brought about the combining of the two kingdoms. Generally he seems to have been so regarded by the Egyptians themselves, although Aha, probably his son, was credited as the first king of the First Dynasty. Now it is recognized that the political realities of that crucial time were more complex — and certainly more convincing — as the first recorded example of practical, opportunistic politics and its rewards.
The closing years of the late predynastic period, now generally expressed as Naqada III,1 flowed, imperceptibly no doubt to those who lived through them, into the first years of the Dual Monarchy. The actual division is marked by the coronation, if so formal a ceremony occurred at such an early time in the history of the kingship, of Narmer as the first king of the Two Lands united; given that he is frequently portrayed wearing one or other crown, it is a fair assumption that an actual crowning took place. It will hardly have seemed however, as if the last day of the predynastic age was ending, to be followed by the first day of the First Dynasty, though it was a new dawn indeed, in the world’s first fully structured kingdom.
It is at this point that the person and the office of the king become vital. For most of the next thousand years he was to dominate the scene over which he now towers, the most powerful and majestic potentate yet conceived by man and the unpredictable processes of history. From this time onwards the records surviving from Egypt demonstrate the extraordinary splendour and the complex and carefully managed rituals which surrounded and contained the life of the king. The corporate life of Egypt came more and more to be expressed in powerful dramatic presentations designed to connect living Egypt with the unseen world of the ancestors and the gods. One of the most compelling achievements which can be set to the account of those who managed the round of great ceremonies is their apparent recognition of the significance and cathartic effect of role-playing. No other people of comparable antiquity seems either to have developed this understanding to the extent that the Egyptians did, with elaborate, complex, and highly organized ceremonies in which the principal participants impersonated gods and ancient powers, or to have formalized such role-playing sequences so exactly, setting them down as ritual dialogues of considerable dramatic and literary quality. This faculty was developed to the highest degree in the ceremonies and rituals connected with the king, who now begins to assume his own superhuman role in the unfolding Egyptian drama.
In the ceremonies enacted at the court in the presence and with the participation of the king, or in the principal temples throughout the Two Lands, the king and his assistants assumed the roles of the great gods and their attendants; in effect they became those powers whose goodwill was vital to the life, prosperity, and health of Egypt. They actually took on the personae of the powers by wearing masks and elaborate costumes, by means of which the presence and involvement of the divinities themselves could be channelled.
But there is something more here than the origins of drama, though the elaborate ceremonies, with the participation of a great concourse of players, with music, dance, dramatic effects, and the generous use of aromatics making the delicate air of Egypt heavy with the scent of incense, would have delighted the directors of the most extravagant theatrical productions. The sacred dramas were used to propitiate or to overcome the powers of chaos which the Egyptians believed could threaten the prosperity of the king and hence of Egypt; by acting out the collective apprehensions of the society, they sought to make them capable of being confronted and thus kept in bounds.
Assisting the king in his performance of these ritual dramas were the great officers of state who impersonated the district or nome gods and cosmic divinities who attended the Supreme God, whoever he might for the occasion be thought to be: Ra, Ptah, or Atum for example. The chief priests would take the parts of the divinity who they served, attended by the clouds of assistant priests and acolytes drawn from the temples’ extensive staffs, servitors and retainers.
It is not clear whether women participated in the more general ceremonies: no doubt they had their own rituals in which perhaps the Queen or the Queen Mother (as is still the case in some West African societies) took the principal role. The probability is however that they did take part on the larger state occasions when women closest to the king would have played the goddesses who were members of the Egyptian companies of divinities. In later times ladies of high rank held offices in various of the temples; some were no doubt full-time officiants whilst others were perhaps the equivalents of those medieval ladies who held honorary or lay positions in the great abbeys or cathedral foundations. There does not seem to be any tradition of boys or young men impersonating female roles, though both boys and young girls had an important function as dancers.
Several of the dramas of most ancient Egypt survive. One of them is the ‘Conflict of Horus and Set’, the ritualized version of the mythical struggle between the opposing dualities which made up Egypt’s historical personality. The very fact that this conflict is conventionalized into the form of a drama with carefully presented dialogue and action is very remarkable. ‘The Mystery Play of the Succession’,2 is a work of great antiquity for it is known from the First Dynasty. Its dramatis personae included a mysterious group of characters called ‘The Spirit Seekers’ who disappear after the First Dynasty.
World History
