In Search of the First Civilizations

by Michael Wood

  Not far from Kom el-Ahmar, in the great temple at Edfu, that same creation myth would be expounded in loving detail for colonial Greek overlords nearly three millennia after Menes’ death. Edfu was commenced after Alexander the Great’s conquest of Egypt, beginning in 237 BC. It was built for the Greek overlords, with minute attention to the traditional Egyptian iconography and sacred architecture. On its walls we learn that every Egyptian temple was a symbolic representation of the original mound of creation, with the simple reed shrine surrounding the perch on which the hawk had landed. And no matter how big the temples became in later ages, the Holy of Holies was still that simple reed shrine. In the inner sanctum at Edfu the polished stone shrine still remains, gleaming in the half-light. Carved on its inner walls, the visitor can still see the line of reeds surrounding the space where the image of the hawk was kept. A whole theory of society was bound up with this myth. For the temple was not only a depiction of the first place, but of the first time, the time when the pattern of a stable society was handed down to humankind; a pattern to be maintained by kingship, law, religion and ritual, and which, it was believed, would suffice for eternity as long as the rituals were correctly performed. The universe then, and civil society, were conceived of as static. Progress, change, new questions, new answers were simply not needed. And indeed they would not be needed until Alexander the Great conquered Egypt three millennia later.

  So in the predynastic period, the time leading up to Menes, the time when ‘Scorpion’ the ‘Fighting Hawk’ ruled ‘the followers of Horus’ at Hierakonpolis, we can see the development of many of the mainstays of later Egypt: efficient farming, metal-working, centrally organized irrigation, pottery, stone-working, ceremonial and monumental architecture, elaborate burials, long-distance trade. The oldest gods are already there in the palettes, labels and sculpture from Nekhen, Abydos and Coptos: hawk-headed Horus, Min from Akhmim and Coptos the wolf god, the vulture goddess, Anubis the jackal god of the dead, Thoth the moon god, the patron of writing, Ptah. Here are familiar forms of worship, the aura of divine kingship, the funerary beliefs and customs, the distinctive artistic styles. These lineaments lasted over three thousand years; they can still be traced into the Muslim period, and in certain cases – for instance the ritual laments and libations, folk medicine, burial rites, birth prayers, seasonal festivals, and even the belief in the ka or double (forbidden by the Koran) – have survived till today.

  For the Egyptians then, divine kingship was the guarantee of a stable cosmos. It is an idea which can be traced across the world from Shang China to Aztec Mexico. And at Abydos those first kings of Egypt were buried with immense brick mortuary temples, their elaborate brick façades imitating those of earthly palaces. For a period, the First and Second Dynasty kings practised human sacrifice, burying royal wives and retainers in the tomb, as was done in Ur of the Chaldees and Anyang, and in classical India, where the practice of Sati, the immolation of royal wives, was only stopped in the nineteenth century. But human sacrifice was rapidly abandoned in Egypt; indeed it went against the grain of the whole of Egyptian culture. The tombs at Abydos were massive brick rectangles with a labyrinth of supply rooms packed with treasures and stores for the afterlife. In 1991 the sensational find here of no less than five full-sized boat burials, three hundred years earlier than the Khufu boat at Giza, shows the extent of this provision for life after death. And so the key themes of Egyptian history were laid down very early; centralized power, royal rituals and the cult of the dead intertwined to form the ideology of the world’s first state.

  THE PYRAMID AGE

  Moving northwards along the Nile, the narrow valley meets the green expanse of the Delta. At this strategic point, close by today’s capital, Cairo, Menes built his royal city Memphis. Early dynastic Memphis is now buried beneath many feet of river silt, but on the sandstone escarpment above the flood plain are the royal cemeteries of Memphis, the great funeral complex of the Third Dynasty kings. At Saqqara the mudbrick architecture of Abydos was turned into stone: the world’s first large-scale stone architecture. The necropolis at Saqqara extends for miles, and was still being embellished in Greek times. But the central feature is a huge ceremonial complex constructed in around 2700 BC for King Zoser. A vast ritual parade-ground was laid out for the reception of tributes and performances of jubilee ceremonies renewing the king’s rule. A series of side chapels enshrined the deities of Nekhen, Nagada and the other upper Egyptian cities. Overshadowing the whole area was a new innovation, a gigantic stepped tomb, 200 feet high: the first of the pyramids. This idea of Zoser and his architect Imhotep (who was later deified) caught on in an extraordinary fashion. In a handful of generations around 2500 BC, a series of gifted Kings, Huni, Senefru, Khufu, Khafre, building bigger and bigger as each seemed to try to outdo his predecessor, created the greatest series of funeral monuments the world has ever seen.

  There are many myths surrounding the building of the pyramids. The Hollywood biblical epic version had slave gangs, whipped along by tyrannical masters. But though slavery existed in ancient Egypt, this was not a slave society; that is, the mass of the workforce was not enslaved. The pyramids were built by free or semi-free peasants. In fact in a long reign it was perfectly possible for a government to mobilize huge-scale state employment to build such monuments using the workforce in the wet season when the Nile flood left idle hands.

  The Egyptian word for a pyramid means ‘a place of ascension’ and in this light perhaps we should compare the pyramid to the artificial mountains built by other cultures, for instance the Babylonians, Maya, Moche and Aztec. All civilizations of course have sought validation for their power over the masses by creating great public symbols. And what more awe-inspiring demonstration could there be of the real power of kings who could command such memorials? But clearly they are more than simply an early example of totalitarian architecture. Scholars now believe that in the Egyptian pyramid the dead king becomes a manifestation of the Sun God himself. In the step pyramid at Saqqara we can see the transitional stage in this idea: a staircase on which the king’s spirit could ascend to heaven and then go back to his tomb. In the same way the ziggurat at Sippar in Babylonia, for example, could be called ‘the stairway to bright heaven.’ The true pyramid is simply an extension of that idea. It is both an image of the rays of the Sun God coming down to earth and a celestial ramp for the ascension of the soul: a typical piece of Egyptian imagination, in which an immaterial concept is represented in such material form. And on winter days in Giza, it is often possible to see the sun breaking through the clouds and shining down at the same angle as the pyramids: a stairway to heaven, formed by the rays of the sun on which the king, ‘nimble and wise, could ascend to the indestructible stars.’

  THE PATTERN OF EGYPTIAN HISTORY

  It is not our purpose to summarize the whole of Egyptian history here, even if that were possible. Our concern is the character of civilization and its ‘great tradition’, and the momentous transformations which eroded that character under the Greeks, the Christians, and the Muslims. For much of its ancient history Egypt remained extraordinarily stable for long periods, with no fundamental change in the ideologies and beliefs which made up the ‘great tradition’: typified perhaps, to the modern eye, in the unchanging style of its art. The Old Kingdom (c.2700–2100 BC) whose zenith was the Pyramid Age, was a time of tremendous royal power as we have seen, and it saw a big increase in population from an estimated half million in the pre-Dynastic period to two or three million in the time of Khufu. This placed great reliance on maximizing the use of the land flooded and fertilized each year by the inundations. Around 2200–2100 BC the same prolonged dry period which caused such problems for the Ur III kings in Iraq brought a series of consistently low floods and precipitated half a century of famine. This helped pull a declining old order apart. The monarchy was overthrown, and for a period Egypt went back to being two lands, as it had been a thousand years before. But the norms and values of Egyptian civilization were
so deeply rooted and enduring that within a century, centralized royal power was restored and a new era of peace and prosperity ensued.

  Again, the impetus came from the south. During the interregnum after the Old Kingdom, a small independent kingdom had grown up around the town of Thebes in Upper Egypt, which now enters Egyptian history for the first time. The Theban Mentuhotep restored the unity of the two lands in 2130 BC and the Theban tradition tended to view him as a second founder comparable to Menes. Thebes itself became the southern ‘capital’ which it remains to this day: testimony to the deep-seated sense of identity existing in Upper Egypt. Mentuhotep and his kin built tombs and a memorial temple to which the image of their patron god Amun was carried by boat in a splendid procession each year: the beginnings of a festival which still takes place today. Through the Middle Kingdom (1991–1786 BC) and the New Kingdom (1587–1085 BC) the once small country town of Thebes was adorned with a series of gigantic shrines and, along the great bowl of western cliffs across the river from the town, a series of huge mortuary temples: the most spectacular assemblage of monuments in the ancient world, a vast city of the dead. Known to the Greeks as ‘God town’, its fame carried down to Homer, who speaks of ‘hundred-gated Thebes’.

  There is no evidence in this long period that people seriously considered alternative forms of government to that of rule by a divine king: indeed evidence for revolts against the Pharaonic state is virtually non-existent (unlike the Greek, Roman and early Islamic periods which were constantly shaken by social uprisings). In modern terms theirs was a provider state, providing a basic standard of living to all its people through control of the resources of the Nile. In return, enormous surpluses could be spent by the rulers on tombs, temples and palaces. Through these great buildings the state expressed its ideologies of power: its belief in the indivisibility of divine and earthly rule, and in the need for a stable cosmos. Such ideas may have been essential requisites for the creation of civilization at the start, and yet, even today, almost all of us still live in nation states with some or all of those same characteristics. Our thinking is still shaped by their religious and social myths, and especially by the myth of the Great Ruler, King or God.

  In the New Kingdom the state seems to have developed into a more pluralistic society, rather than the simple hierarchy we imagine in the Pyramid Age, where everyone knew his place. There was still the massive state apparatus, the priesthood and the bureaucrats whose job was to articulate the state myth handed down from Menes. But it was flexible enough to adapt to a form of rule which in the New Kingdom we would recognize as essentially political. One of the intriguing results of recent research has been to show how the development of professional institutions – army, civil service, ministries, priesthood – led in the end to the day-to-day life of the state being taken over by those who dealt in economic realities. The king was still the divine figurehead but he had much less real power. The world had changed from the sublime theocratic unity of Khufu: it had become a self-directed polity held together by customary rights and obligations which had evolved over an immense period of time, incorporating regional groups, local traditions and immemorial predilections.

  The fact that in the long history of Pharaonic Egypt there seem to have been few attempts to overthrow the existing order suggests that the state was on the whole successful in managing the rural community on which it rested. Without a system of money at the local level, it needed an elaborate and sometimes pettifogging system of redistribution of surpluses to sustain the huge élite and all the service sector. It was patriarchal and to a degree authoritarian. But in that it is not so far from many Near Eastern countries today, especially the traditional landowning classes. But the arbitrariness had to be matched by responsibility. And so it was at the top too. God, as king, had consented to guide the nation. Society had a pledge that the unpredictable forces of nature would be well disposed and bring prosperity and peace, which generally they did, for three thousand years. Nor did the Egyptian view lack ethical content, for truth and justice were ‘what the gods live by’ and were an essential element in the established order. As the great Egyptologist Henri Frankfort said, ‘Pharaoh was not in our sense a tyrant, nor was his service slavery.’

  DECLINE

  The first millennium BC saw periods of prosperity but long periods of foreign rule, from the Assyrian attacks of the eighth century to the Persian conquest of 525. During the seventh century for a brief time Egypt was still a first-rank power in the Near East, but from then on its life as an independent state was as a second-rate force struggling to preserve its autonomy against more ruthless and powerful oriental neighbours, with whose military prowess they could not compete. Egypt now entered a ‘stark decline’ as one modern scholar has put it, enduring two periods of domination under the Persian empire. Gradually its rulers responded to the new military technology, employing Greek mercenaries and commanders, adapting their administration and making halting steps towards a money economy. But there was no fundamental change: the overall impression is of continuity of ancient practice with no question of a radical restructuring of Egypt’s institutions. Indeed there was much harking back to the great days of the Old Kingdom in the art and architecture of the time. In that sense, rather like early nineteenth-century China, however successful and enduring, their state was now stuck in the past, surrounded by powerful neighbours who were no longer organized as theocratic states. Perhaps the greatest change though was the idea that the king was no longer divine; no longer the repository of righteousness, truth and justice, or the ally of the gods. The first millennium BC was a time of great brutality and upheaval across the Near East, and it may be that the ideological basis of Egyptian civilization was already undermined before it fell to the Greeks in the fourth century BC.

  GREEK EGYPT: ALIENS IN AN ANCIENT LAND

  In 332 BC Egypt was conquered by Alexander the Great, and then Egyptian civilization turned away from its immemorial roots towards the sea and a wider world. For thousands of years far back in time even before the days of a United Kingdom of Egypt, the Egyptians had looked no further for their contacts than Arabia and the Red Sea, Nubia in Africa, Syria and Palestine. But now with the Greek conquest and the founding of Alexandria, a shift in the centre of gravity of Egyptian history took place. For the next thousand years they would find themselves part of a Greek-speaking Mediterranean world. This signalled the beginning of the end of traditional ancient Egyptian culture: it was gradually transmuted by the dynamic internationalizing culture of the Hellenistic age which extended as far as central Asia and formed one of the important foundations of the later Islamic world.

  In these changes Alexandria was a great catalyst. In the first century BC a Roman author could write that ‘Alexandria is without doubt the first city of the civilized world, in size, in elegance, in riches and in luxury.’ ‘It’s paradise here,’ said the poet Herodas. ‘You can get anything you want – money, shows, games, women, wine, boys, the best library in the world, in short all earthly delights.’ Like twenties New York, Hellenistic Alexandria was a land of opportunities whose streets were paved with gold. It drew immigrants of all kinds; bankers, clerks, engineers, poets, even religious drop-outs, whose lives have been rescued from oblivion by the extraordinary wealth of archive material from papyrus dumps at sites such as Oxyrhynchus. Here was the Macedonian recluse Ptolemaios who was so moved by the Egyptian religion that he went native, rather like a Western Hare Krishna devotee in India, serving the rest of his life in the temple of the Serapeion in Memphis; or Dryton the Greek cavalry officer who married a local girl and whose family in the next generation were already beginning to lose their Greek identity. Their tales were symptomatic: Greeks could go native, learn the local language and assimilate; but Egyptians were much less willing to give up their customs, and for most of the period the Greeks still remained aliens in a foreign land. This is not to say that the cultures did not meet. In the catacombs of Alexandria the visitor can still enter the weird and w
onderful world where Egyptian and Greek and Jewish and Oriental religion and magic intermingled. The Greeks who came to Egypt were very open-minded about the local gods. The experience of Mediterranean paganism made it easy for them to identify Amun with Zeus or to say the Egyptians worshipped Aphrodite the Goddess of Love under the name of Hathor.

  How this worked in practice can be seen in the Kom el-Shukafa tomb deep below the streets of Alexandria, which dates from the second century AD. At first sight it looks like a typically Egyptian tomb fronted by papyrus columns with the winged disc of the sun behind, and a row of cobras’ heads along the façade. But when we look closer we see figures in ancient Egyptian poses but with Graeco-Roman faces. On either side of the door are guardian serpents, but carrying the snake-entwined staff of Hermes, the Greek guide of souls. Inside the tomb itself the sarcophagi are decorated with traditional Greek funeral motifs: bunches of grapes, wreaths, cattle-skulls and masks, but above them are the ancient gods of Egypt. Isis is protecting the sacred bull with her outstretched wings; Thoth the God of Wisdom is there; the hawk-headed Horus tends the mummy of the dead. There is even the jackal-headed Anubis, the guardian of the dead, wearing Graeco-Roman military gear. This then is the strange synthesis that emerged in Hellenistic and Roman Alexandria, the ‘crossroads of the entire world’ (Dio of Prusa, c.70 AD).