Archaeology from Space

by Sarah Parcak

  Wealth pours in from home, too. The establishment of new cattle estates in the Delta gives the court and pyramid builders alike regular access to beef and creates employment for generations of families like Meryt’s. Royal agricultural settlements, including those granted to mortuary cults, feed workforces tens of thousands strong and still generate surpluses.3

  To organize an increasingly complex national administration, and more significantly, its tax dues, a provincial system of nomes—similar to states or provinces—divides the country into 22 Upper Egyptian and 20 Lower Egyptian units. They are led by nomarchs, or regional governors.4 It’s possible that the nome designation originally referred to areas of good cattle pasture, similar to where Meryt and her family live. Cows and their welfare are that precious.

  But far enough from court to consolidate power, local officials farm homegrown influence, too. Change and decentralization of power begin under King Djedkare Isesi (2414–2375 BC). Instead of loyally deriving influence by constructing their tombs around the royal pyramids, nomarchs are buried in their own provinces with private mortuary cults. Commoners also gain religious privileges normally reserved for royalty and noblemen.

  And far to the south, Nubia starts to flex its muscles. By Dynasty 6, new and stronger Nubian cultures rise, and diplomatic contact is left to governors in Aswan, rather than the king’s officials.

  By the time Pepi I (2321–2287 BC) takes the throne, the massive, decorated tombs of self-eulogizing provincial officials display unashamed wealth and power, when for generations, royal pyramids had shrunk in scale. The Pyramid Texts—wall-to-wall esoteric prayers carved throughout the royal burial chambers—are their crowning glory.5 Nevertheless, the texts required less manpower, and, being hidden from sight, they hardly made the same statement as the massive earlier monuments.

  Pepi eventually tries to join what he can’t beat, marrying the daughter of a provincial official from Abydos in Upper Egypt. That sounds pretty shrewd, but he wasn’t consistent: he also granted a tax exemption to the mortuary cult of Sneferu at Dashur when the king’s cut of any royal mortuary cult was too valuable an asset to simply give away.

  The silt hits the alluvial fan, so to speak, when Pepi II (2278–2184 BC) inherits the throne at the age of six and rules for nearly a century. More tax exemptions hemorrhage wealth and cripple the central administration, and rule becomes hereditary in the provinces, no longer granted by the king himself. Worse still, massacres of Pepi II’s troops occur in Nubia and Sinai. Any idea of expansion is kicked out of bounds.

  The Final Frontier

  There’s no better evidence for mission-abort abroad than an Old Kingdom fortress on the western Sinai coast, on a beach by the Red Sea. I was lucky enough to work there on Greg’s mission between 2002 and 2010, until a latter-day Intermediate Period rendered Sinai too volatile. It’s a beautiful site—we very much hope to return one day. The site is a circular stone structure that measures 40 meters in diameter and has walls 7 meters thick and more than 3 meters tall on the northern side. It housed an Egyptian expedition during a series of seasonal missions to mine copper and turquoise.6

  Egypt’s broad-scale growth created demand for exotic raw materials. Anyone of means wanted amulets or jewelry fashioned from turquoise, since it was sacred to Hathor, the goddess of love and fertility, and everyone needed copper. From stonemasons’ chisels and carpenters’ tools, to knives and axes, personal accessories such as mirrors and razors, and statues and vessels for cultic equipment and even makeup, copper ore, not stone, built Egypt. Access to the mines was essential.

  Over the course of our fieldwork at this unique fort, we estimated that at least four or five expeditions had used it prior to a catastrophic storm surge that partly destroyed it. As “storm surge” suggests, these waves form in the Red Sea during extreme weather events. The seaward walls were covered in a cement-like coating of salt spray, and the western bastion, or quay, was partially churned up, with beach pebbles and shells mixed with broken construction blocks.

  Presumably to prevent the fort from being reused by potentially hostile locals, or possibly just to relocate it, the Egyptians dismantled some of it prior to 2200 BC. They thinned the walls to 20 centimeters on the southern side, walled up its western doorway, and used grapefruit-size cobblestones to close its interior entry passage. And then they abandoned it.

  None too surprising, in hindsight. With the major damage sustained during the postulated wave, and reduced confidence in reinforcements arriving from the mainland, it was time to get the heck out of Dodge and go home to face an uncertain future. It’s a sobering thought that we might have found evidence for one of Egypt’s last mining trips to Sinai, prior to the fall of the Old Kingdom.

  Around the end of Pepi II’s rule, in an increasingly fragile Egypt, only a final straw was needed to bring the central government down.

  * * *

  “Meryt, not there.” Seneb yanked his hoe back, just as Meryt hopped from one mound of silt to the next. “And not there, either.”

  Scraping the ditches clear, Teti grinned. Another front tooth had recently fallen out. Giggling, Meryt jumped down into the dry field.

  “Sons,” Father said, panting, “we must get this finished today.” Lean, wiry, and drenched from the furious summer heat, he smashed his hoe down into soil dark as his sunburned skin. “Meryt, please fetch some water.”

  She found their jar beneath a sycomore fig. Irrigation canals stretched all the way to the river. Mounds stood ready to trap the precious water after it rose; inundation had made it up to these fields since before Seneb was born.

  That night, Mother prepared extra beer to celebrate. She tied her dark curls back into a knot, laughing at Father’s silly jokes, and the oil lamp lit her smile. Falling asleep, Meryt puzzled over the sand-brown lines on Mother’s teeth, when her own were pale and smooth.

  * * *

  “Little sister, wake up.”

  She blinked. It was long after bedtime.

  “Teti?” He sat her up, pointing at the window.

  “Look. Sopdet is rising again. Inundation will be soon—we’ll race boats all the way to the fig tree.” Through heavy eyes, she stared at the brightest light in the sky—the star Sopdet never lied.

  But the next day, when the town gathered at the riverside where priests inspected the notched pillar, the river showed no sign of flooding.

  A week later, at the same spot, people held their children close, their voices hushed, and the priests seemed pale. Returning home, Meryt’s family passed a docked ship loaded with sweet-smelling lumber. Half the deck was empty. Grave faced, a dignitary and a troop detachment disembarked and headed toward the governor’s enclosure, while a deckhand secured the mooring stake. Father greeted him in surprise.

  “Nakht? How long has it been?”

  “Hotep!” The friends embraced. “Years. Years, since I last sailed to Byblos.” He frowned at the cedarwood. “I’m not sure why we bothered. There was a time His Majesty’s name meant something.”

  “Are things that troubled, at Memphis…?”

  Seneb hovered nearby, listening, but Meryt pulled on Teti’s hand. Down the stone steps, by the pillar, they squatted down, measuring finger spans from the water to the second-lowest notch.

  “Mother! Come and see how low it is!” But Mother didn’t seem to want to. She gazed downriver toward the cemetery.

  Father had his hand on Seneb’s shoulder when they climbed back up. The older boy’s face was no more cheerful than the dignitary’s.

  “Teti, leave that now. I want you both to come with me to the granary.”

  “But it’s still full,” said Seneb. Father shook his head.

  “It’s time you learned to measure grain carefully.” Meryt looked up at Mother, feeling her fingers grow tight around her hand.

  “And I must teach you to weave, my love.”

  Settlement Patterns in the Delta

  At this moment, we need to zoom out to understand the importance of Te
ll Ibrahim Awad, Meryt’s home, for our story. My remote-sensing project in the Delta in the early 2000s only added a layer to the 700 archaeological sites known from previous excavations and surveys. In the summer of 2003, while we were excavating at Tell Tebilla, weekend sorties to verify my findings on the ground gave valuable opportunities to explore the larger settlement patterns within the site’s immediate 50-by-60-kilometer surroundings.

  Rather than restricting myself to “new” sites highlighted by the satellite imagery, I also investigated some of the known ones; for so many, all we have is a dot on a map, with no dating information. A fieldwalking visit to those “blank pages” seemed useful, to collect, record, and date pottery or any other visible evidence of material culture on the surface.

  I then looked for parallels at other sites, consolidating my findings with known dating evidence from sites in my survey region and from the entire Delta. It was the Delta’s first large-scale settlement-pattern overview. What I found was puzzling.

  From everything collected in the eastern Delta, we know of Old Kingdom remains at 29 archaeological sites.7 That settlement evidence confirms ancient texts and reveals expansion that coincided with the state’s increased stability, prosperity, and growth. But when I looked at the site evidence during the Old Kingdom’s immediate aftermath, I found evidence for only four settled sites. Across the whole Delta, east and west, we see 36 Old Kingdom sites drop to just 11 in the First Intermediate Period, between 2160 and 2055 BC.

  Something caused wide-scale abandonment in my survey area, while the Egyptians struggled on in only four places. Mendes, the regional capital to the south of Tell Tebilla, has a residential area apparently dating to this time,8 Tell Sharufa has surface pottery,9 as does Tell Akhdar,10 and Tell Ibrahim Awad, the home of Meryt and her family, contains a cemetery.11 I started sifting through all the archaeological and textual data to find out why these places remained settled, and the answer has startling implications for why and how Egypt’s great Pyramid Age ended.

  * * *

  Men passed water jars from hand to hand, irrigating the thirsty crops. What cattle remained must be fed, somehow. Sores glared, red and angry, where empty hide draped from their shoulders and hips.

  Now 10 and 12, Teti and Seneb together could just manage the huge jar Father passed. Beyond the work chain, the fields looked as if nothing was ever there except for thorns and tough grass that the cows could not eat. After the workday, no daylight would be left for the family to water their field.

  Where fodder used to grow, there was dust. More blew away with every breeze, and Meryt had no time to help, working from dawn until sundown at her loom beside Mother’s.

  The low-flood year had been hard, the granaries emptied, by the time Sopdet finally dragged the river from its bed last summer. A better year followed, a little respite. But a month ago, when the star’s brilliance lifted the town’s hopes, no floodwaters came at all.

  The governor strode along the line with a scribe behind him. He paused.

  “I’ve considered your idea, Hotep,” he said quietly. Father bowed his head.

  “Thank you, sir. If we can repair the canals upstream…” The governor nodded, and the scribe unrolled blank papyrus and wetted his brush, awaiting the governor’s decision.

  “The canals to the pasturelands belong to the royal estate.” Father pressed his eyes closed, strain in his thin shoulders as he hauled the next jar to Seneb.

  “I’m sorry, sir. It was not my place—”

  “And I see no reason why we should not maintain them. If the king sends no one to do so.” Father looked up.

  “Then we can cut a new branch from them, get water back to the higher fields?” But as the governor agreed, the jar slipped from Teti’s hands midtransfer and poured water at the man’s feet. Blushing under Seneb’s whispered rebuke, Teti bowed double and apologized. The governor smiled slightly, considering the boys’ limbs, no meatier than a gazelle’s.

  “Hotep, if your sons are to do a man’s work, they should have a man’s ration.” Gesturing to the scribe, who scribbled quickly, he walked up the chain.

  Within days, the governor organized the project. Soon, crops began to grow, and greenness returned to the pasturelands. When harvest came, so many had worked on the new canals that rations poured into every family’s granary.

  Meryt paused while weeding their vegetables, moist from the new branch ditch that Father and Seneb had cut. Her slight body tired quickly. Breathing deeply, she bared her canines, reflected in the black ditchwater. Striped, like Mother’s. Meryt smiled; something else to share with her. In three years, she had become a skillful weaver, however little she had grown.

  “Are you finished, love? Come and help me thread the warp.” The call rang from the door, past the empty stable.

  “Coming, Mother.” She stabbed out another water-stealing weed and stood up.

  Her eyes narrowed. Dust rose like an ostrich plume from the road beyond the fields.

  “Mother! Mother, come!”

  Hurrying up onto the flat roof, they looked out. From north and west, roads were choked with people. Families, or what was left of them; some clutched possessions, but most lacked the strength. Every bone showed through their skin. Mother pressed a hand to her mouth.

  “Meryt, you know how we offer to your aunts, in the cemetery?” Meryt frowned. Mother’s muffled voice sounded so strange.

  “The little-girl aunts?”

  “Yes, my love. No older than you. This is why.” She wiped her eyes. “Come, we are all children of the Nile. We must gather food and take it to the town entrance.”

  “But Seneb says our granary is less than half-full…”

  “Do you want our hearts to weigh heavy on the balance? We must uphold ma’at…” She turned toward the stairs. “Even if the king does not.”

  When the Nile Fails …

  You’ve probably heard that Egypt was the breadbasket of the ancient world. If this was so, then the Nile was the bakery. The country’s fortunes have long been intertwined with the river, its canals, and the agricultural fields and desert resources flanking the Nile Valley.12

  The Blue Nile originates at Lake Tana in the Ethiopian plateau, and the White Nile at Lake Victoria farther south; they converge at Khartoum in Sudan.13 The Nile flows year-round due to the rains that fall nearly every day in the equatorial lake region,14 but the two sub-Saharan lakes are only filled by annual monsoon rainfalls, welling up in Asia from late May to June, before blowing east to Africa. The lakes’ swollen waters flood the Nile tributaries.

  Before the construction of dams in Aswan to control the flooding, completed in 1902 and 1970, the monsoon waters gushed northward into the Egyptian Nile. Nilometers, or built structures for measuring the waters’ height, can still be seen today on the ancient island of Elephantine in Aswan, while the elaborate decoration of the Islamic Period Nilometer on Rhoda Island in Cairo shows the flood’s enduring importance. Yearly flood levels were recorded, high and low, as well as the general water level.

  While too high a flood caused destruction, good flood levels meant a plentiful harvest, good fishing, and better pasture, both watering the soil and nourishing it with silt. Since taxation was based on the flood height, it also directly affected the royal treasury.

  But the well-organized system of dikes and canals that extended the land suitable for agriculture broke down when flood levels were low. If a poor monsoon rainfall blew in from India, the Ethiopian highlands produced a much-decreased peak flow of water, which meant low floods in Egypt and reduced crop yields. Famine wasn’t always inevitable: in their tomb inscriptions, local governors and leaders proudly celebrate their efforts to manage scarce water resources.

  As the Nile flowed northward to the Mediterranean Sea, its seven branches created a complex landscape in Egypt’s Delta, and raised the alluvial plain about a meter every 1,000 years by depositing silt. It’s important evidence of the floodwaters’ annual reliability, both flushing and fertilizing
the land.15 Ancient settlements clustered around the channels, for this farmland, access to trade routes, and local and regional transportation.

  If the Nile failed to flood at the right levels, the smaller settlements along the Nile branches could wither and die like appendages starved of blood.16

  * * *

  The floods failed. And failed again. Just as the governor’s stonemasons built another impressive chamber for his tomb, Father cut a grave for Teti.

  He dug as neatly as he could, but now so many other pits ate into the rock-hard ground, stretching out from the old cemetery. Outside the town walls, around the huts of the refugees’ alleys, the vultures and wild dogs circled.

  “That will not happen to him,” he said through gritted teeth, sharpening a broken pick-head. Nothing he had could be bartered for a better one; there was no copper.

  By sunset, Mother lowered a bundle tightly wrapped in her own linen into the ground. He weighed nothing, for a boy of 13.

  They were sealing the dusty infill stone by stone when a figure strode up the hill with a squadron of soldiers.

  “Hotep, my draftsman told me. Which of them…?” The governor looked behind him, at the emptiness in Seneb’s expression, the fragile bones prominent in his sister’s cheeks. No taller than an eight-year-old, when her twelfth year had just begun. Her dark eyes were hollow, but she stared right at him, ferocious in her grief.

  “My younger son, sir,” said Father, rising slowly from a bow. Seneb could not take his eyes from the stones.

  “But the extra grain I allotted you…”

  “We were grateful, my Lord. But after so long, it was no longer enough.”