The new societies that emerged in the Nile Valley became increasingly hierarchical. At the apex was a small, wealthy elite who exercised power over the mass of subjects, controlled trade and a network of supply, and acted as patrons to a new class of craftsmen skilled at working both hard and soft stone and fashioning artefacts from copper, gold, silver and ivory for their personal use. Pottery painters began to draw intricate images on bowls, pots and vases, developing a tradition of illustration and design that led eventually to hieroglyphic writing.
The elite were also increasingly influenced by the notion of resurrection. In preparing for an afterlife, their burial practices became ever more elaborate. They set aside for themselves separate cemeteries with tombs that were richly decorated and filled with valuable grave goods. And they arranged for the bodies of the dead to be embalmed and wrapped in resin-soaked linen cloths – mummified – to ensure the survival of their undying spirits.
Life and death for the rest of the population meanwhile remained simple. Most subjects were subsistence farmers and fishermen living in mud houses in small villages, who produced agricultural surpluses that were heavily taxed and who were required to provide labour for government projects. They were buried in rudimentary sandpits without coffins or grave goods.
Because rainfall levels were so negligible, the fate of the Nile Valley communities depended entirely on the annual flooding of the river. Each year, following the deluge of monsoon rains in highlands deep in the African interior, the river rose dramatically, reaching a peak in July and August before receding in September, enabling farmers to plant crops which matured during winter months and could be harvested in spring. In good years, the floodplains, enriched by deposits of silt, produced huge agricultural surpluses. But bad years were a common hazard. High floods destroyed homes and buildings and inundated fields. Low floods left the land parched and barren, resulting in famine. Accounts in the Bible later spoke of ‘seven fat years and seven lean years’.
The rhythms of the Nile affected all life. Among the host of local deities and household spirits that Nile communities worshipped, the role of Hapi, the Lord of the River and its flooding, figured prominently. The flood was commonly known as ‘the arrival of Hapi’, which villagers celebrated by throwing sacrifices, amulets and other offerings into the river in the hope of securing a good year.
The Nile also served as an artery for communications and trade, a unifying thread linking distant communities. Travel on the river benefited not only from currents flowing northwards but from prevailing winds blowing southwards. Boats were sent to the far south to obtain luxury raw materials such as ivory, ebony, incense and exotic animal skins. From the north came commodities such as copper ingots and aromatic oils.
As valley societies became more organised, the pace of innovation quickened. By 5,100 years ago, the ruling elite had begun to experiment with an indigenous pictorial system of writing using hieroglyphs. The earliest known evidence of Egyptian writing was found on small bone labels attached to grave goods in the ornate tomb of a local potentate buried at the royal cemetery at Abydos, near the ancient city of Tjeni, in about 3100 BCE. Early writings were recorded on clay tablets or palettes, inscribed on wet clay before it dried. Subsequently, Egyptians developed a prototype paper from crushed papyrus reeds woven together.
For several centuries, three small kingdoms in the Nile Valley vied with each other for control of territory and trade. But in the final outcome it was the kings of Tjeni (near modern Girga) who managed to extend their power over the whole of the Nile Valley, or Upper Egypt, as it became known. The kings of Upper Egypt then proceeded to incorporate into their realm the Delta region, or Lower Egypt, the fan-shaped alluvial plain to the north that stretched to the shores of the Mediterranean.
The unification of Egypt nearly 5,000 years ago marked the emergence of the world’s first nation-state. Its rulers – a succession of dynasties of pharaohs that lasted for 3,000 years – acquired the status of gods and devoted their time to demonstrating their divine authority and omnipotence. They built huge royal tombs and temples, financed royal building projects on a lavish scale and presided over one of the most dazzling civilisations in human history.
PART I
Egypt and Nubia
1
LAND OF THE PHARAOHS
One of the most treasured possessions of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo is an ancient siltstone slab, about two feet high, carved with expert precision on both sides with scenes depicting the exploits of King Narmer, the first pharaoh to rule over the Two Lands of Egypt. On one side, Narmer is portrayed as the triumphant king of Upper Egypt, wearing its ‘White Crown’, standing over a kneeling prisoner, grasping him by the hair and threatening to strike him with a mace. Looking on with approval is the falcon god Horus, the patron deity of the Egyptian monarchy, holding a tether attached to six papyrus plants, the symbol of Lower Egypt. On the other side, Narmer is shown wearing the ‘Red Crown’ of Lower Egypt, inspecting two rows of decapitated corpses whose genitals have been cut off. The purpose of the Narmer Palette, as it is known by Egyptologists, was to signify the power and force that lay behind pharaonic rule.
The greatest challenge facing Narmer and his successors in the First Dynasty was to consolidate their control over diverse peoples, numbering about one million, scattered across a state that now stretched from the southern frontier at the Nile’s First Cataract to the shores of the Mediterranean. One of their early decisions was to construct a new capital at Memphis, a strategic location on the west bank of the Nile at the junction between Upper and Lower Egypt, enabling them to keep an equal grip over the Two Lands. Lying a few miles south of modern Cairo, Memphis remained a focal point of Egypt for most of its dynastic history. To guard the southern frontier, First Dynasty pharaohs built a fortress at another strategic location – an island on the Nile at the First Cataract known as Abu or Elephantine, named for its role in the ivory trade.
The pharaonic system established during the First Dynasty eventually encompassed every aspect of life in Egypt. A state bureaucracy was set up to bring the entire country under royal control. Upper Egypt was divided into twenty-two provinces and Lower Egypt into twenty provinces, each administered by provincial governors answerable to the king. A network of officials ensured that taxes on trade and agricultural produce were paid to support the Crown and its grand projects. Peasant farmers were required to hand over a proportion of their crops or serve in lieu as conscripts on royal projects, quarrying stone or digging canals. Whole swathes of land were appropriated as royal property. Royal workshops turned out a wide range of products such as stone vases, leather, linen and basketry, providing further revenues for the treasury. Royal power became absolute.
All this was sanctified by ceremonies, rituals and royal writs proclaiming the reigning pharaoh to be a living god, the earthly incarnation of the supreme celestial deity, Horus. The pharaoh’s seal – serekhs inscribed on trade goods to mark royal ownership or carved in stone on royal monuments – showed Horus standing on top of a rectangular panel within which the pharaoh’s ‘Horus name’ was written. According to inscriptions on a piece of basalt stela known as the Palermo Stone, King Narmer’s successor, Aha, conducted a biennial tour of inspection in Egypt, imposing his presence on local communities, delivering legal judgements and ensuring that taxes were collected, in an event called the ‘Following of Horus’. The notion of divine kingship became deeply embedded in Egyptian consciousness. As manifestations of the divine, the pharaohs were seen as the guarantors of stability and prosperity, in this life as well as the next.
Much of the wealth that First Dynasty pharaohs and their entourages enjoyed was directed towards building increasingly elaborate tombs and funerary enclosures, designed to provide them with every comfort for the afterlife. The trend continued during the Second Dynasty when stone as well as mud bricks were used for the first time. The funerary buildings for the last of the Second Dynasty kings, Khasekhemy, were constructed on a mon
umental scale. The perimeter walls, made of mud-brick, were more than sixteen feet thick and nearly sixty feet high. The tomb consisted of fifty-eight rooms with a central burial chamber made of quarried limestone. Khasekhemy’s funerary possessions included huge quantities of copper tools and vessels, pottery vessels filled with grain and fruit, and a fleet of boats to help him navigate into the afterlife. The quest for eternity became an abiding preoccupation. Egypt’s pharaohs expected to continue to reign after death, traversing the heavens in the company of gods.
During the Third Dynasty, further leaps were made in tomb design. At a site on the edge of the desert escarpment at Saqqara, overlooking the capital city of Memphis, an Egyptian nobleman named Imhotep supervised the construction of a pyramid of six steps to house the tomb of Netjerikhet (Djoser), a pharaoh who reigned in the twenty-seventh century BCE. The Step Pyramid at Saqqara was the first monument in the world to be built entirely of stone. Rising to a height of 204 feet, it was the tallest building of its time. And its construction marked the beginning of the Pyramid Age.
Compared to all previous structures, the logistical undertaking at Saqqara was immense. Pyramid building required a highly organised supply system involving quarries, mines, shipyards, storehouses, workshops and a labour force of thousands. The pyramid itself consisted of 600,000 tons of limestone blocks. Its main burial chamber was made up of ten blocks of granite, each weighing twelve and a half tons, which had been transported by river barge from quarries at Aswan. But the construction went further. The pyramid was set within a forty-acre complex of buildings enclosed by a mile-long rectangle of perimeter walls built of fine white stone. It is estimated that the quantity of copper chisels needed to cut such a vast assembly of stone blocks would have amounted to seventy tons’ worth, delivered to workshops from newly opened copper mines in the eastern desert.
The peak of pyramid building came a century later during the Fourth Dynasty – about 4,500 years ago. Shortly after ascending to the throne, King Khufu ordered the construction of a burial place grander than any of the tombs built for his predecessors. The site he chose was the Giza plateau, further downstream from Saqqara. Over a period of twenty years, a labour force numbering tens of thousands – stonemasons, toolmakers, craftsmen, quarry workers and haulage crews, many of them peasant conscripts – worked relentlessly to complete the monument before the pharaoh’s death. The scale of the endeavour was extraordinary. By the time Khufu’s Great Pyramid was complete, it consisted of 2.3 million blocks of stone, each weighing on average more than a ton, reaching a height of 480 feet; the slopes of the outer surface were covered by a layer of polished white casing stone that glittered in the sun. The entire edifice was engineered with remarkable precision. The base, extending over more than thirteen acres, was a near-perfect square closely aligned to the four cardinal points of the compass, with a precise orientation to true north. In later ages, the Great Pyramid was regarded as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It remained the tallest building in the world for the next thirty-eight centuries.
Khufu’s son, Khafra, added his own pyramid complex at Giza. It reached a similar height but included a striking additional feature: alongside the causeway leading to his pyramid, facing eastwards towards the rising sun, stood a huge guardian statue of a recumbent lion with a king’s head that later became known as the Great Sphinx. Measuring 200 feet long and rising to a height of 65 feet above the desert floor, it served as a dramatic symbol of royal power.
Khafra’s successor, Menkaura, built a third pyramid at Giza, but it was on a much smaller scale. Egypt’s pharaohs could no longer sustain the economic drain of funding such colossal monuments.
Instead of concentrating on size, pharaohs of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties transformed the inner chambers of their pyramids with elaborate decorations and a series of other innovations. The walls of King Unas’s burial chamber, constructed in the twenty-fourth century BCE, were covered in columns of carved hieroglyphs, painted in blue. The inscriptions – an assorted compendium of prayers and spells – constitute the world’s oldest collection of religious writings. They were intended to assist Unas on his journey to the afterlife and ensure that he would dwell in ‘lightland for all eternity’. Some texts recorded testimony from oral traditions dating back to the earliest Egyptian dynasties; others dealt with more contemporary beliefs. Further texts were added to the tombs of nine subsequent kings and queens.
Among the inscriptions, two gods figured prominently. One was Ra, the sun-god of Heliopolis, a religious centre that lay to the north-east of Memphis on the east bank of the Nile (now a Cairo suburb). The cult of Ra had been growing in importance since the Third Dynasty. Fourth Dynasty pharaohs incorporated the name into their own titles, using the epithet ‘son of Ra’. Fifth Dynasty pharaohs built a series of temples dedicated to Ra, with inscriptions emphasising the sun-god’s role as the ultimate giver of life and the moving force of nature, with which they claimed to be associated. Under royal patronage, the cult of Ra rapidly became the most powerful in the land.
The other prominent god recorded in the Pyramid Texts was Osiris, king of the land of the dead – the underworld. Originally a local deity in the eastern Delta, associated with agriculture and annually recurring events in nature such as the Nile floods, Osiris evolved into a potent symbol of the renewal of life after death with which Fifth Dynasty pharaohs sought to identify themselves. In the Pyramid Texts, King Unas is referred to as Osiris Unas.
The Sixth Dynasty was followed by a succession of weak kings who proved unable to hold Egypt together. In place of royal control, provincial officials amassed ever more authority, leading to the collapse of central government and the end of what historians would subsequently call the Old Kingdom, an era renowned for its pyramid-building. One thousand years after its foundation, Egypt fragmented along regional lines, suffering more than a century of civil war. Compounding the chaos was a prolonged period of low Nile floods. Famine spread from one village to the next. In an autobiographical text inscribed on the pillars of his rock tomb, Ankhtifi, a local ruler, wrote: ‘The whole country has become like locusts going upstream and downstream [in search of food].’
During the Middle Kingdom, an era beginning in the twenty-first century BCE and lasting 400 years, pharaohs ruled over a united Egypt once more, re-establishing economic prosperity and fostering a renaissance in literature, art and architecture. Using irrigation, thousands of new acres were put under cultivation. Trade expeditions were sent to the Levant and to Punt, an African land towards the southern end of the Red Sea.
The founder of the Middle Kingdom, Mentuhotep II, was a dynastic ruler from Thebes in Upper Egypt who emerged as the victor in the civil war and went on to stamp his authority over the whole country. Thebes had previously been no more than a small provincial town on the east bank of the Nile, but now became the new national capital. Selecting a location for his burial ground, Mentuhotep chose a site at Deir el-Bahri, on the west bank of the Nile opposite Thebes, where a colossal tomb was carved for him out of steep cliffs rising above the river valley. To demonstrate his national power, Mentuhotep commissioned a series of temples and cult buildings across Egypt proclaiming him to be a ‘living god, foremost of kings’.
The pharaohs’ preoccupation with eternal life eventually spread to other sections of the Egyptian population. No longer was the pharaoh regarded as having the sole right to an afterlife in the company of gods. Senior officials began inscribing on the sides of their wooden coffins passages and illustrations adapted from the Pyramid Texts and other sacred texts providing a set of instructions on how to safely reach the afterlife (heaven) and on how to avoid the many dangers and demons that lurked along the way (hell). Coffin Texts, as they were later known, also offered advice on such matters as how to ‘assemble a man’s family in the realm of the dead’.
Other ideas that gained currency included the notion that all people – and not just kings – possessed the ba, a spiritual force said to represent the e
ssence of an individual’s unique characteristics, that was able to survive death. The population also came to believe that they could gain direct access to deities rather than via the king or priests. In a further break with tradition, individuals began to take part in the rites of Osiris, receiving blessings that had once been restricted to kings. Osiris became a universal god, symbolising the triumph of good over evil and the promise of immortality for all Egyptians. With royal encouragement, the cult of Osiris reached new heights and was celebrated at festivals and ceremonies, displacing a host of other deities and beliefs.
Once their control of Egypt was fully restored, the pharaohs of the Middle Kingdom sought opportunities to extend their power and wealth in the region, notably in Wawat (Lower Nubia), the lands of the Nile Valley lying south of the First Cataract. As a major source of gold and copper, Nubia had long excited the attention of Egypt’s rulers. Expeditions had been sent there since the Sixth Dynasty. An account of a journey by the explorer Harkuf describes his caravan returning ‘with three hundred donkeys laden with incense, ebony, precious oil, grain, panther skins, elephant tusks, throw sticks: all good tribute’.
When Wawat leaders became increasingly assertive during the twentieth century BCE, Amenemhat I, a Twelfth Dynasty pharaoh, ordered a campaign to crush them. Returning from Wawat, a triumphant vizier boasted: ‘I sailed upstream in victory, killing the Nubian upon his land, and I sailed downstream, uprooting crops and cutting down the remaining trees. I put the houses to the torch, as is done to a rebel against the king.’ To enforce their hegemony over Lower Nubia, pharaohs of the Twelfth Dynasty constructed a chain of massive forts stretching from the First Cataract all the way to the southern end of the Second Cataract where a new southern frontier for Egypt was established.
The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour Page 2