The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt Page 5

  In keeping with the ancient Egyptian ideal, perpetuated in temple reliefs and inscriptions, Manetho’s dynasties emphasized a single, unbroken succession of kings stretching back to “the time of the gods” and ultimately to the moment of creation itself. In turn, this ideal reflected the doctrine promulgated by the pharaonic court. According to this doctrine, the creator god Atum set the pattern for kingship at “the first time,” and each subsequent ruler was the legitimate inheritor of a divinely sanctioned form of government. The reality, of course, was rather different. At times of national disunity, several rulers based in different parts of the country were able to claim royal titles and rule concurrently. Hence, our modern understanding of Egyptian history regards Manetho’s Twenty-second, Twenty-third, and Twenty-fourth dynasties as at least partially overlapping. Recent scholarship has shown some of his dynasties (such as the Seventh) to be wholly spurious, the result of a misunderstanding of the ancient temple records, while the Ninth and Tenth dynasties seem to represent only one ruling family, not two. These corrections and modifications aside, Manetho’s system has proved impressively robust and durable. Above all, the fact that it remains the most convenient way of dividing up ancient Egyptian history underlines the centrality of monarchy to his—and our—understanding of pharaonic civilization.

  Indeed, as a form of government, kingship was quintessentially Egyptian. Among the early civilizations of the ancient world, only Egypt embraced this particular mode of rule from the very beginning of its history. In Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), city-states based their identity on their local temples, so it was the high priests who wielded the greatest political and economic power. Only later did a monarchical system develop, and it was never as thoroughgoing or omnipotent as its Egyptian counterpart. In the Nile Valley, kings seem to have ruled the people from prehistoric times. Recent excavations in the early royal burial ground at Abdju have uncovered graves dating back to around 3800. One of them contained a pottery beaker painted with perhaps the earliest image of a king. It shows a tall figure with a feather in his hair, holding a mace in one hand, and in the other, a rope binding three captives. The subjugation of enemies and the distinctive combination of feather headdress and mace—which is also found in the prehistoric rock art of the Eastern Desert—identify the scene as royal, even though the ruler in question probably controlled only a limited territory. Kingship also seems to have developed elsewhere in Upper Egypt at about the same time, as suggested by a fragment of pottery from Nubt decorated with a crown, and by a monumental complex of pillared halls in the desert close to Nekhen.

  By around 3500 the unmistakable iconography of kingship was given full expression in a tomb at Nekhen known as the Painted Tomb. One of the inside walls of this burial chamber was plastered and painted with a frieze showing a royal figure taking part in various ritual activities. The decoration is dominated by a spectacular procession of boats, but in one corner of the scene the king is shown smiting three bound captives. This motif, already prefigured on the Abdju vase, became the defining image of Egyptian kingship. We see it repeated on the Narmer Palette and thereafter on temple walls until the very end of pharaonic civilization. The imagery of early kingship was as enduring as it was violent.

  CROWN AND SCEPTER

  DURING THE PROCESS OF STATE FORMATION, THE ARTISTIC EXPRESSION of royal rule underwent rapid development, to keep pace with the changing notion of kingship itself. We can trace the changes in a series of ceremonial objects and commemorative inscriptions. Particularly striking is the so-called Battlefield Palette, an object similar to the Narmer Palette but dating to a century or so earlier. Whereas Narmer’s monument gives pride of place to an image of the king in human form, the older palette shows the ruler instead as a huge lion, trampling and goring his enemies who lie prostrate on the field of battle. The intention was to present the king as a force of nature. In a similar vein, a contemporary inscription carved at Gebel Sheikh Suleiman, near the second Nile cataract in Nubia, shows the victorious Egyptian king as a giant scorpion, holding in its pincers a rope that binds the defeated Nubian chief. From Narmer’s own time, an ivory cylinder shows the king as a vicious Nile catfish, beating rows of prisoners with a large stick. The message was clear: the king was not just a mere mortal who ruled by virtue of his descent and leadership abilities; he also embodied the strength and ferocity of wild animals, superhuman powers granted to him by divine authority. Elevating themselves above their subjects, Egypt’s prehistoric rulers were intent on acquiring godlike status.

  These trends culminate in the Narmer Palette. Its very form harks back to a time when wandering cattle herders lived a seminomadic existence, carrying everything they needed with them and using their own bodies as canvasses for their art. In such a society, face paint played a central role in the ritual life of the community, and cosmetic palettes were a favorite and prized possession. But by Narmer’s time, the palette had been transformed into a vehicle for proclaiming the omnipotence and divinity of the king.

  The decoration of the Narmer Palette likewise spans two worlds and two ages. The shallow well that betrays the object’s practical origins is formed by the entwined necks of two fabulous creatures, held on leashes by attendants. These “serpopards” (leopards with serpentine necks) are not Egyptian in origin. They come from the artistic canon of ancient Mesopotamia. Their presence on an early Egyptian artifact points to a period of intense cultural exchange between two of the great cultures of late prehistory, when ideas and influences from the valleys of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates reached the distant banks of the Nile. Egypt’s predynastic rulers were intent upon promoting their own authority and influence. To do so, they needed tried and trusted means to display their power, and they were quite happy to borrow ideas from abroad, if the ideas served the purpose. So, for a few generations, Egyptian elite culture adopted a range of Mesopotamian imagery, especially artistic motifs to represent complex or difficult concepts, such as the notion of kingship itself (a rosette) or the reconciliation of opposing forces by the ruler (two intertwined beasts). But once the borrowed ideas had achieved the desired effect, they were discarded just as quickly, in favor of indigenous cultural expressions—the only exception being the Mesopotamian-inspired style of architecture adopted for the king’s palace and other royal buildings. The Narmer Palette captures this pivotal moment in cultural history: Mesopotamian motifs appear on one side, exclusively Egyptian motifs on the other. Egyptian civilization had come of age and was finding its own voice.

  Prehistoric and historic modes of expression are likewise reflected in the depiction of Narmer himself. On one side he is shown as a wild bull, tearing down the walls of a rebel stronghold and trampling the hapless enemy underfoot. Turn the palette over, and the representation of the ruler as a wild animal has been relegated to the past. The image of the victorious king in human form now dominates. The ideology of royal authority had not changed, but its representation was undergoing a profound transformation. From now on, it was not thought appropriate to depict the king as an animal. His newly acquired divinity required a more elevated and sophisticated representation.

  Monarchs throughout history have adopted elaborate trappings to distinguish themselves from their subjects. Royal regalia encodes the different attributes of kingship, providing a kind of visual shorthand for a complex underlying ideology. In Christian monarchies a crown surmounted by a cross symbolizes that the king’s temporal power is subject to a greater, divine authority (the orb reinforces the same message), while a scepter stands for power tempered by justice. In ancient Egypt, regalia was similarly used to convey the nature of royal authority. Once again, many of the elements have prehistoric origins. The earliest symbol of office yet discovered in Egypt dates back to 4400, more than fourteen centuries before the foundation of the dynastic tradition. It is a simple wooden staff, about a foot long, with knobbed ends, found buried next to its owner in a grave at el-Omari, near modern Cairo.

  Wielding a big stick is, of course, the
most basic expression of authority, and a wooden staff remained the identifying badge of high office throughout ancient Egyptian history. Monarchy, however, has a tendency to elaborate. So early in the development of Egyptian kingship, the simple stick evolved into a more complex object, a scepter. As we have seen, an ivory scepter in the shape of a shepherd’s crook survives from a predynastic royal tomb at Abdju, and the crook became so closely identified with sovereignty that it was adopted as the hieroglyphic sign for the word “ruler.” Together with the flail or goad—a stick with knotted cords or strings of beads attached to one end—it came to symbolize the office of kingship, more specifically the monarch’s duty to both restrain and encourage his flock. These two key items of royal regalia betray the prehistoric origins of Egyptian civilization. They recall a past where livelihoods were dominated by animal husbandry, where the man wielding the crook and flail—the man controlling the herds—was the leader of his community. A similar echo is heard in the peculiar item of regalia worn by Narmer on both sides of his palette, a bull’s tail. This was intended to demonstrate that the king embodied the power of the wild bull, perhaps the most awesome and ferocious of ancient Egyptian fauna, and the tail provided a subconscious link between the dynastic monarchy and its predynastic antecedents.

  A crown is the quintessential emblem of monarchy. Sovereigns have always distinguished themselves by wearing a special form of headdress that, at its most basic level, elevates the wearer above the populace (literally and metaphorically). Like the concept of the nation-state, crowns seem to have been an ancient Egyptian invention. And in keeping with the Egyptians’ worldview, their kings wore not one but two distinctive crowns, to symbolize the two halves of their realm. From earliest historic times, the red crown was associated with Lower Egypt. It consisted of a squat, squarish cap with a tall tapering projection rising from the back, and attached to the front of this projection was a curly protuberance reminiscent of a bee’s proboscis. Its counterpart, the white crown—tall and conical with a bulbous end—was the symbol of Upper Egypt. This neat equation shows the Egyptians’ love of binary divisions, but it is also an artificial creation. Archaeological evidence from the prehistoric period suggests that both crowns originated in Upper Egypt (the crucible of kingship), the red crown at Nubt and the white crown farther south, beyond Nekhen. Following the unification of the country, it made perfect sense to recast the northern red crown as the symbol of northern Egypt, keeping the southern crown as the symbol of the south. The ancient Egyptians were particularly good at inventing traditions. In the middle of the First Dynasty, about a century after Narmer, the royal iconographers took the obvious step of combining the red and white crowns into a single headdress, the double crown, to symbolize the ruler’s dual dominion. Thereafter he had a choice of three distinct headpieces, depending upon which aspect of his authority he wished to emphasize.

  If art could be used to project the king’s authority, how much more effectively could architecture do the same, but on a monumental scale. Like other totalitarian rulers throughout history, Egypt’s kings had an obsession with grand buildings, designed to reflect and magnify their status. From the very beginning of the Egyptian state, the monarchy showed itself adept at using architectural vocabulary for ideological purposes. It chose to emphasize one particular style of building as the visible expression of kingship. A façade composed of alternating recesses and buttresses—which create a highly effective pattern of light and shade in Egypt’s sunny climate—had first been developed in Mesopotamia, in the middle of the fourth millennium B.C. Like other cultural borrowings during the period of state formation, this distinctive architectural style, known as palace-façade architecture, found a receptive audience among Egypt’s early rulers. It was both exotic and imposing: ideal as a symbol of royal power. So it was swiftly adopted as the architecture of choice for the king’s palaces, including the royal compound in the capital city of Memphis, which served as the principal seat of government. With its whitewashed exterior, this building known as White Wall must have been a dazzling sight, comparable in its symbolism to the White House of a modern superpower. Other royal buildings throughout the land were consciously modeled on White Wall, and an architectural motif of foreign origin rapidly became one of the hallmarks of the Egyptian monarchy.

  TITLE ROLE

  THROUGHOUT PHARAONIC HISTORY, ICONOGRAPHY AND ARCHITECTURE retained important roles in projecting the desired image of kingship to the people. Iconography and architecture were especially effective in a country such as Egypt, where up to 95 percent of the population was illiterate. But in the ancient world, the main threat to a king rarely, if ever, came from the masses. The people a monarch needed to keep on his side, above all, were his closest advisers. The small group of literate high officials who ran the administration were in a better position than most to pose a threat to the reigning king. Of course, such individuals generally owed their position, status, and wealth to royal patronage, and therefore had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. However, Egypt’s masterful royal propagandists devised a subtle means of bolstering kingship among the literate class. In the process, they raised the office to a position of virtual unassailability.

  The solution lay not in iconography but in writing. Hieroglyphs were first developed in the late prehistoric period for a rather prosaic purpose, to facilitate record keeping and enable economic control over a geographically extensive territory. But the ideological potential of writing was swiftly realized. On the Narmer Palette, for instance, signs are used to identify the main protagonists (the king, his followers, and his enemies) and to label the principal scenes. Words could just as easily be employed to convey the fundamental essence of kingship through royal titles. In the contemporary Western world, titles have generally lost their former potency, although some, such as “commander in chief” and “defender of the faith,” still carry echoes of a former age of deference and rigid hierarchies. In ancient Egypt, names and titles were highly significant, and the early development of the royal titulary, the royal protocol of titles, exploited this to the full.

  The most ancient of all royal titles, in use even before Narmer’s time, was the Horus title. It explicitly identified the king as the earthly incarnation of the supreme celestial deity, Horus, who was worshipped in the form of a falcon. This made a statement as bold as it was uncompromising. If the king was not just the gods’ representative on earth but an embodiment of divinity, his office could not be challenged without destroying the whole of creation. The message was reinforced at every available opportunity. The king’s seal, stamped on commodities to mark royal ownership, or carved in stone on royal monuments, showed the falcon god standing on top of a rectangular frame containing the king’s Horus name, the name which expressed the king’s identity as the earthly incarnation of Horus. The frame was designed to resemble a gate in the royal compound. The not so subliminal message was that the king within his palace operated under divine sanction and was himself a god incarnate. As a statement of monarchical rule, it was direct and unanswerable.

  A second royal title, attested from the reign of Narmer’s successor, took royal propaganda a stage further. It was written with the signs of a vulture and a cobra, representing two goddesses. Nekhbet the vulture was associated with Nekheb (modern Elkab), a town opposite Nekhen in the heart of Upper Egypt. Wadjet the cobra was the goddess of Dep, one of the twin towns that made up the important delta city of Per-Wadjet (modern Tell el-Fara‘in); she therefore stood for Lower Egypt. Choosing two ancient deities to symbolize the two halves of the country, and making both goddesses joint protectors of the monarchy, was a clever move, creating from strands of local belief and custom a national theology, centered on the person of the king. The adoption of the red and white crowns was part of the same process. So was the prominence given to the delta goddess Neith in the names of early royal wives. Narmer’s wife, for example, was called Neith-hotep, “Neith is satisfied.” From the marshes of the north to the souther
nmost Nile Valley, all the major cults—and their followers—were drawn into the ideology of kingship. It was a brilliant demonstration of the unite-and-rule concept, a theological takeover of the entire country.

  The third royal title, adopted at the same time as the double crown, represented a further elaboration and definition of the king’s role. It comprised two Egyptian words, “nesu bity,” literally translated as “he of the reed and bee” but more elegantly rendered “dual king.” While the precise derivation is obscure—on one level, the reed may have symbolized Upper Egypt and the bee Lower Egypt—the meaning was wide-ranging and sophisticated. It embraced the many pairs of opposites over which the king presided and which he alone kept in balance: Upper and Lower Egypt, the black land and the red land, the realms of the living and the dead, and so on. The title also reflected the most fundamental dichotomy at the heart of Egyptian kingship, the contrast between the sacred office (nesu) and the secular function (bity). The nesu bity title reminded the king’s followers that as well as head of state he was also god on earth—an irresistible combination.