These achievements, in virtually every department of the state and of life, resounded down the centuries; they were in large part the work of a succession of extraordinary figures, the earliest rulers of the united land of Egypt, and their immediate colleagues and supporters. Between 3200BC and 2700 BC they seeded Egypt deep in the fertile soil of the Valley; for another five hundred years what they planted flourished wonderfully. Though the early kings are often shadowy figures, the shadows which they cast on the history of mankind are very great.
The early Egyptians had a particular genius, never remotely approached by any other ancient society, for devising symbols which instantly encapsulate complex and diverse concepts. They are the supreme symbolists; every aspect of their society — art, religion, and the life which revolved around the king — reflects this strange and very individual quality. Kingship was the ultimate Egyptian institution: the king represents the absolute focus of all early Egyptian history. The kingship was personified, in what is surely one of the most inspired images in the entire course of symbolism, as a golden hawk soaring limitlessly high above the world. The hawk is a creature of the sun, infinitely remote, one whose natural habitat is the empyrean, the exalted firmament which lay beyond the Imperishable Stars. Not even the majestic lion nor the raging, dominant bull, though they were both creatures associated with the kingship in early times, quite achieved the breathtaking vision of the falcon of gold as the ultimate icon in which the concept of sovereignty was so perfectly enshrined. The king of Egypt was himself a falcon, the reincarnation of Horus, the falcon-god.
The Egyptians recognized that if a man, with all the too unmistakable evidences of humanity, was to be exalted above all other men and to be given absolute rulership over them, his simple mortality must be thrust down and his mortal nature replaced by something altogether more sublime. Thus came the audacious idea of recognizing the holder of the kingship as himself divine, his divinity confirmed by his assumption of the crowns and regalia which were the marks of the ruler of the Dual Kingdom. It is a neat equation, even if, like the serpent which eats its own tail, the argument strikes the dispassionate observer as notably circular.
The course of Egyptian history produced thirty dynasties of kings according to the compilation of the Hellenistic historian Manetho.2 We are concerned here with the period which preceded the welding together of the disparate elements which represented the polity of the Valley into the nation-state which was to become Egypt, generally called the predynastic period, and then with only the first six groups of historic kings; of these the first two are the most immediately important, as well as the most tantalizing and obscure. The later dynasties all produced remarkable men but it is the kings of the Early Dynastic period who were the begetters of Egyptian civilization, even in its most luxuriant flowering; it was their immediate successors, the sovereigns of the Old Kingdom, who drew on the benefit of their extraordinary enterprise.
Even so, the kings whose names are recorded as comprising the First Dynasty were not the first kings in Egypt. The origins of the Egyptian kingship, though it is without doubt the most ancient in the world, are lost in the obscurities of the later centuries of the prehistoric period, in the latter part of the fourth millennium BC.3 It is only with the coming of writing that it is possible to put names to the kings with any sort of assurance. But before this time there are hints of prehistoric chieftains, even of kings who ruled part or all of the land which was to become Egypt. Their names are often matters of conjecture; the material remains associated with their rule are sparse and fragmentary though, as will be seen, sophisticated techniques of excavation and analysis are now revealing more and more about the times in which they lived. We can only glimpse them occasionally through the prehistoric, preliterate miasma; nonetheless, they were the forerunners of the kings of historic times. Their titles, elements of their regalia, customs associated with their roles as the links between the visible and the unseen worlds, were abstracted and adapted by the later kings for their own use and for the augmentation of their own majesty. The various crowns, the crook, the flail, the bull or monkey tail, the lion’s and the leopard’s pelts, all were once the properties of lesser princes which came to add to the splendour of the universal king who ultimately triumphed over all of them, sovereign and alone.
World History
