Early Dynastic Egypt
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CHAPTER THREE HISTORICAL OUTLINE
THE EARLY DYNASTIC PERIOD: TERMINOLOGY AND DEFINITION
Ancient Egyptian civilisation—as defined by the use of monumental hieroglyphics and the institution of divine kingship—endured over a period of some three millenniums. With such a long stretch of time to study, Egyptologists have found it necessary to divide Egyptian history into broader periods. These tend to follow the known pattern of internal political developments, corresponding to eras of unified government and the intervening periods of political fragmentation. The time-span that concerns us here is the first such period, standing at the beginning of the Egyptian historical sequence. The formative phase of Egyptian civilisation is sometimes referred to as the ‘Archaic’ period (Emery 1961). However, the term ‘archaic’ implies a value-judgement based upon hindsight. Moreover, it seems an unfair label to apply to the dynamic and sophisticated early culture of the Nile valley, and its use is waning amongst Egyptologists who study the period (for example, Spencer 1993). Hence, the more neutral and descriptive term, ‘Early Dynastic’, is preferred here.
For convenience, Egyptologists have adopted the finer division of Egyptian history into dynasties drawn up by the third-century BC historian, Manetho. Although based upon the ancient sources available to Manetho at the time, in most cases the dynasties are not divisions which would have been recognised by the ancient Egyptians themselves. The composition and demarcation of Manetho’s dynasties have been continually modified as scholarly understanding of Egyptian history has improved.
The pyramids of the Memphite necropolis have struck Egyptologists, both ancient and modern, as the most characteristic, and awesome, ancient Egyptian monuments. The construction of the first pyramid, under King Netjerikhet/Djoser of the Third Dynasty, has therefore been regarded as a major turning point in Egyptian history. For this reason, the Third Dynasty is often assigned to the Pyramid Age, more usually termed the Old Kingdom (for example, Trigger et al. 1983; Malek 1986:124; Kemp 1989:14). This view of the past—whereby the pyramids were seen as the beginning of the first major flowering of Egyptian civilisation—relegated Manetho’s first two dynasties to a dimly known and poorly studied position at the beginning of the dynastic age. Dramatic advances in our understanding of early Egypt have taken place in the last half-century. No longer is the formative phase of Egyptian civilisation a half-understood ‘dark age’. Important though they are, the royal mortuary complexes (including the pyramids) no longer constitute the sole landmark or index of achievement from third millennium BC Egypt. Our appreciation of Egyptian culture in a broader sense continues to deepen and, as it does so, the similarities between the Third Dynasty and the preceding period become increasingly apparent. Despite the innovation of pyramid-building, Egyptian civilisation of the Third Dynasty shares more in common with the First and Second Dynasties than
with the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth, the age of true pyramids. For this reason, a number of recent studies have placed the Third Dynasty in the Early Dynastic period, beginning the Old Kingdom with the Fourth Dynasty (for example, Quirke and Spencer 1992:33 and 36; cf. Shaw and Nicholson 1995:89). Although a scholarly convenience with little ancient relevance, this view seems to accord much better with the evidence for early Egyptian civilisation, and is adopted here.
Although, for our purposes, the end of the Early Dynastic period is fixed at the accession of King Sneferu—the first king of the Fourth Dynasty—the precise beginning of the period is, and is likely to remain, impossible to define. As we have seen, we now know of several kings who lived and reigned before the beginning of Manetho’s First Dynasty. A new chronological term had to be found to describe these rulers, and logic dictated ‘Dynasty 0’. Although this is a rather unsatisfactory term on many accounts, it has been widely adopted. It is fairly certain that at least some of the rulers assigned to ‘Dynasty 0’ exercised only regional power. Although a few of the kings at the end of the sequence—and therefore on the threshold of the First Dynasty—may have ruled over much or all of Egypt, it is as yet impossible to pin-point the exact moment at which the country was first unified politically under a single king. For this historical outline, the beginning of the First Dynasty, and more specifically the reign of Narmer, will be taken as a starting-point.
SOURCES
The source material for the history of the Early Dynastic period is diverse and often fragmentary, but with care it can be pieced together to provide a reliable picture of the first three dynasties. Sources can be divided into two broad categories, contemporary records and later accounts, each carrying its own inherent biases and problems. An understanding of the context in which particular inscriptions were produced is necessary before they can be used as historical sources.
Contemporary records
Obviously, contemporary records are more reliable as they present firsthand information about the activities of Egypt’s early rulers. As we shall see in Chapter 6, contemporary sources such as year labels are by no means objective. They recorded only those events which the court considered significant and which presented the institution of kingship in the best light. None the less, they can be used, with care, to illuminate the time in which they were made. The same is true of royal monuments, comprising ceremonial palettes, maceheads, inscribed slabs, stelae and stone architectural elements from royal buildings. These present the iconography of early kingship, but in doing so may yield historical information, for example by recording the king’s (inevitable) victory over his enemies in a military campaign. A number of rock-cut inscriptions from the eastern and western deserts and the Sinai provide valuable information about the extent of Early Dynastic activity in Egypt’s peripheral regions, and the ability of the court to organise expeditions outside the Nile valley. Perhaps the most abundant inscriptions from the first three dynasties are the numerous seal-impressions from tombs and settlements. These are the
main source for analysing the structure and functioning of the Early Dynastic administration, and the context of particular seal-impressions may afford important historical information, such as the order of succession. Here, two recent discoveries have made a significant impact. Excavations in the royal cemetery at Abydos have revealed impressions from the necropolis seals of Den and Qaa (Figure 3.1). The former lists in chronological order the kings of the First Dynasty from Narmer to Den, with the addition of the queen mother (and probable regent during Den’s minority), Merneith. Qaa’s seal lists all eight kings of the First Dynasty, confirming the order established by scholars from other, more fragmentary, sources. Finally, a large number of artefacts bearing royal inscriptions can be useful in filling in some of the gaps in our historical knowledge. In particular, the stone vessels amassed by Netjerikhet to furnish his Step Pyramid complex (Lacau and Lauer 1959) include many examples from earlier reigns, and these have proved invaluable in establishing the internal history of the Second Dynasty. Moreover, inscribed stone vessels provide the only evidence for a few ephemeral rulers. During the First Dynasty especially, large pottery vessels were often inscribed with the name of the king, sometimes accompanied by a short inscription detailing the contents.
Later accounts
Accounts of the first three dynasties written in later periods have clearly been filtered through a number of generations, and must therefore be treated with caution. In general, the later the account, the more prone it will be to distortion. The various king lists of the New Kingdom (Redford 1986) offer a starting-point for reconstructing the Early Dynastic order of succession but, with the exception of the Turin Canon, they only record the kings who were viewed as legitimate in the eyes of the New Kingdom pharaohs. The Turin Canon (Gardiner 1959) does seem to have aimed at historical accuracy, and must have drawn upon temple archives for much of its information, but it remains doubtful whether the reign lengths given for kings who lived more than a millennium before the document was compiled can be treated as reliable. Even less reliable is the historical information gleaned by Herodotus
in the fifth century BC—although some details have subsequently been corroborated by archaeological excavation – and that by Manetho a century-and-a-half later, the latter preserved only fragmentarily in the works of later writers. The accounts of Herodotus and Manetho were written at least two-and-a-half thousand years after the Early Dynastic events themselves. At such a distance, accuracy cannot be expected. As with all ‘history’, the material presented reflects the concerns of the chronicler’s own period. Manetho’s division of Egypt’s rulers into dynasties has been adopted by Egyptologists and does seem partially to reflect historical circumstances. However, the royal names given by Manetho have proved notoriously difficult to equate with the names recorded in the Early Dynastic sources themselves; moreover, some of the more fantastic details about individual kings appear to stem from the realm of myth and cannot be taken as historically accurate. For these reasons, in the historical outline which follows, details provided by Manetho and Herodotus have been deemed too unreliable for inclusion (contra Emery 1961). The emphasis has been placed upon contemporary Early Dynastic sources, with one notable addition. The later source which has been used is not without its problems, but is generally accepted by scholars to present an accurate, if
partial, view of Early Dynastic history. This is the Palermo Stone and its associated fragments which together comprise the royal annals.
Figure 3.1 Rulers of the First Dynasty: contemporary lists. Reconstructed impressions from necropolis seals: (1) the seal of Den (after Dreyer 1987:36, fig. 3); (2) the seal of Qaa (after Dreyer et al. 1996:72, fig. 26).
The Palermo Stone is the name given to the main fragment of an annals stone which records the reigns of the kings of Egypt from before the First Dynasty to the Fifth Dynasty (Schäfer 1902; Helck 1982). The original stone, a large basalt slab, must have been considerably larger than the portion preserved in the Palermo Museum, and various attempts have been made to reconstruct its original dimensions and appearance (Daressy 1916; Borchardt 1917; Ricci 1917; Kaiser 1961a; Helck 1974; O’Mara 1979; Barta 1981). A second substantial, but heavily abraded piece from the same stone or a close copy is displayed in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and is known as the Cairo fragment
(Gauthier 1914; and see Figure 3.2). Several smaller fragments in Cairo and London fill in small gaps (Gauthier 1914; de Cénival 1965), although the authenticity of at least one of these fragments is questionable (O’Mara 1979). There is still some debate about the age of the Palermo Stone and the Cairo fragment. The entries on the Palermo Stone end in the Fifth Dynasty, and an Old Kingdom date has been proposed for the monument. However, it is also possible that the stone represents a later copy of an Old Kingdom original. Clearly, the later the monument, the greater the potential for inaccuracies, copying mistakes and invention. What makes the Palermo Stone and Cairo fragment so important are the registers which record the reigns of Early Dynastic kings. Each reign is divided into compartments, with one compartment for each year. Each year is identified by one or more significant events, recorded in very abbreviated form. Many of these eponymous events are concerned with the festivals and rituals of kingship, shedding light on the nature of that institution in the Early Dynastic period but providing very little information for the writing of ‘history’. Indeed, given the practicalities of administration, it seems very likely that each year of a king’s reign would have had to be ‘named’ in advance. The events chosen would, therefore, necessarily have been of a predictable nature, such as pre-planned royal visits, recurrent festivals and the dedication of cult statues. From the middle of the First Dynasty, the compartments on the Palermo Stone also record the height of the annual inundation in palms and cubits. If accurate, these records are an invaluable source for climatic and ecological fluctuations over a period of some five-hundred years (Bell 1970). The topmost register of both fragments records, in more abbreviated form, a line of kings who ruled before the beginning of the First Dynasty. It is impossible to say whether this reflects the historical reality of late Predynastic Egypt, or is simply an articulation of the later tradition of mythical rulers before Menes. The fact that some of the kings are shown wearing the double crown led to early speculation about the possible political unification of Egypt before the beginning of the First Dynasty, speculation which recent excavations have confirmed as having some foundation. Much of the historical value of the annals lies in their presumed original completeness, and many scholars have attempted reconstructions in order to establish both the Early Dynastic order of succession and the reign lengths of the early kings. None of the reconstructions to date can be treated as anything other than informed guesswork, and all assume that the annals began with the reign of Aha—a supposition which may be erroneous, in the light of the recent discovery of a year label of Aha’s predecessor, Narmer (Giddy 1996:30). We may have to admit that a totally convincing reconstruction of the royal annals is not achievable, unless further fragments of the same or similar stones come to light. None the less, the individual records contained in the surviving portions can yield significant information about the first three dynasties. Just as important, they tell us something about the Egyptians’ own sense of history (O’Mara 1996).
Figure 3.2 Royal annals. The Cairo fragment (new collation from the original).
THE FIRST DYNASTY
Ironically, it is the First Dynasty, the remotest sequence of kings in the Early Dynastic period, that is the best understood, in terms of the number of rulers and the order of their succession. The Abydos king list and Manetho agree in recording eight kings for the First Dynasty, and this number is confirmed by the recently discovered necropolis sealing of Qaa. Indeed, this sealing provides the best contemporary evidence for the historical
accuracy of Manetho’s First Dynasty. The original identification of Merneith as a king, rather than a queen regent (Petrie 1900:5, chart opposite p. 1), caused some confusion, leading to Narmer’s exclusion from the dynasty and a focus on Aha as the first king. There is no doubt that Aha’s reign was marked by important innovations; none the less, first place in the sequence of eight kings properly belongs to Narmer (Lauer 1966:169– 70; Shaw and Nicholson 1995:18 and 89; contra Baines 1995:131), and the Den and Qaa necropolis sealings confirm that this was the belief of subsequent generations of Egyptians as well. The difficulties in correlating the names recorded in later king lists (usually the nbty names) with those attested on the monuments (usually the Horus names) have confused what should be a relatively straightforward picture. The debate about the true identity of Menes—first king of the First Dynasty according to the Abydos list and Manetho—has also muddied the waters (Emery 1961:32–7). Those scholars who identify Menes with Aha posit the existence of an ephemeral King Athothis between Aha and Djer (Dreyer 1987:39) in order to make up the required eight rulers for the dynasty as a whole, although no such ruler is attested on contemporary monuments or inscriptions. (The possible royal tomb at Abydos comprising the pit B40 with or without the adjacent tomb B50 has been attributed to ‘Athothis’ on the basis of its location and design [Dreyer 1990:67–71], although there are no inscriptions to support this view, and the necropolis sealing of Qaa would seem to argue against the existence of an extra king between Aha and Djer.) Despite such difficulties, something of a consensus has been reached about the composition of the First Dynasty, greatly assisted by new discoveries, especially in the royal cemetery at Abydos. The duration of the First Dynasty cannot be estimated with any precision, since accurate historical records are, for the most part, absent from this early period. Estimates depend to a large extent on hypothetical reconstructions of the Palermo Stone and its associated fragments, together with a notional figure of twenty-five to thirty years for a generation. Various scholars have proposed figures ranging from two hundred to two-hundred-and-forty years for the eight kings of the First Dynasty (Lauer 1966:184, especially n. 5), but such guesses are unlikely to be improved upon without new, more precise, historical evidence.
Narmer
So
me time around 3000 BC the king whom we know as Narmer acceded to the throne of Egypt. The contemporary writings of his name—usually abbreviated to a single sign, the catfish (which had the phonetic value n r in later periods)—make it rather unlikely that his name was read as ‘Narmer’; however, this name is universally used and will no doubt remain so until an acceptable alternative reading is proposed. According to Manetho, the First and Second Dynasty kings originated from Thinis (or This), the capital of the Abydos region, thought to lie near—or indeed under—the modern town of Girga. The presence of First and late Second Dynasty royal tombs at Abydos seems to confirm Manetho’s account, since Abydos was the principal necropolis of the Thinite region. Whether or not Narmer had a royal residence at This, he clearly felt strong enough ties to the region and to his Predynastic forebears to maintain the tradition of being buried in the ancient ancestral necropolis. If Narmer is to be associated with the historical and/or legendary figure of Menes (Lloyd 1988:10), he may have been the first King of Egypt to reside at Memphis. Herodotus recounts how Menes diverted the course of the Nile to