Authors: Kent Flannery,Joyce Marcus
Manetho divided the Egyptian kings into 30 dynasties by drawing on a number of earlier king lists in the temple archives. Interestingly enough, none of these early texts mention Narmer or Scorpion. They list the founder of Dynasty 1 as Men (in Egyptian) or Menes (in Greek). Such ambiguity is not unexpected at the boundary between history and legend.
Egyptologists group Dynasties 4–6 (4,700 to 4,300 years ago) into a cycle of powerful rulers called the Old Kingdom. They call the next cycle of powerful rulers, Dynasties 11–14, the Middle Kingdom (4,000 to 3,600 years ago). They group Dynasties 18–20 (3,500 to 3,000 years ago) into another cycle of powerful rulers called the New Kingdom. Between these three cycles of centralized power were “Intermediate Periods,” when the governors of provinces had greater autonomy. We use this framework in the pages that follow.
COSMOLOGY AND DIVINE KINGSHIP
Ancient Egypt lay at one extreme of Herbert Lewis’s continuum of monarchies: the king, or
nesw,
was considered a deity. In at least one version of Egyptian cosmology, Re, the Sun, was one of the divine creators of the world and also the first ruler; all subsequent kings were on a par with him. The king was also strongly identified with the palace and by Dynasty 18 had come to be called “pharaoh,” a word derived from
per-aa,
“palace.”
Whenever the king appeared at public events, he was described by the same verb—
khay,
“to shine forth”—used to describe the Sun at sunrise. Any statement made by a ruler exuded
ma’at,
“truth,” “order,” and “justice.”
In another cosmology, Geb, the male Earth deity, and Nut, the female Sky deity, produced four divine children: Osiris, Isis, Seth, and Nephthys. Male Osiris represented the underworld and female Isis the throne of Egypt. They mated to produce Horus, the falcon we already saw associated with the ruler on the Narmer palette. The mating of siblings Osiris and Isis provided cosmological justification for the king’s marriage to his sister or half sister, in the event that she were the most highly ranked bride available. We have seen similar justification for chiefly sibling marriages in powerful Polynesian societies.
The ancient Egyptians had no word for “state.” No such word was needed, because all aspects of the state were concentrated in the ruler. His welfare was so important that even his corpse continued to receive deliveries of food. This fact leads us to one of Egypt’s most talked-about practices: the entombment of the ruler’s mummified body.
There were three parts to the ruler’s soul: the
ka,
the
ba,
and the
akh.
The ka was a vital force that would stay alive as long as it was fed. As a result, rulers frequently paid in advance to have food brought to their tombs.
The ba, often pictured as a human-headed bird, had the power to leave the ruler’s body by day and return at night. The ba could inspect the ruler’s kingdom by flying over it but would have no place to sleep if his body decayed. The tombs of some Egyptian rulers had psychoducts (like the tomb we saw in the Maya city of Calakmul) to facilitate the coming and going of the ba.
The akh was that part of the ruler’s soul that rose to dwell eternally among the stars. Because a king could “shine forth” like the Sun, his akh would twinkle from the night sky forever.
Like the ancient Panamanians, who preserved their chiefs’ corpses by smoking them, the Egyptians sought to preserve the corpse to which the ruler’s ba returned at night. Unfortunately, placing a body in a tomb like King Scorpion’s at Abydos was incompatible with preservation. Even worse was burying the ruler beneath a
mastaba,
a monumental stone or mud-brick platform, as was done to many kings of Dynasties 1 and 3. The sealed mastaba retained too much moisture, and the ruler’s body decomposed.
After centuries of trial and error, Egyptian morticians hit upon several methods of preserving corpses. Which one they used depended upon the rank and wealth of the deceased. Rulers had their internal organs removed and their bodies desiccated in
natron,
or Glauber’s salt, a form of hydrated sodium bicarbonate. The word natron comes from the Wadi el-Natrun, a desert canyon where this salt was available by the ton. After dehydration the body was wrapped tightly in natron-soaked strips of linen.
Not every attempt at dehydration produced a lifelike corpse. Some bodies became rigid, and others turned so black that they appeared to have been dipped in pitch, or natural asphalt. Early archaeologists overheard their workmen describe these blackened corpses with the Arabic word for pitch,
mumiya.
This gave us the word “mummy.”
While the morticians were experimenting with mummification, the kings’ architects experimented with grander and grander mastabas. Finally, one team of Dynasty 3 architects stacked a series of increasingly smaller mastabas one upon another, producing a stepped pyramid.
Some 4,800 years ago, Zoser, a ruler of Dynasty 3, had a stepped pyramid built to cover his future burial site at Saqqara. His architect, a man named Imhotep, at first designed a pyramid of four steps, which was to rise directly over the mastaba. This building was later incorporated into a larger pyramid of six steps, 204 feet tall and measuring 411 by 358 feet at the base.
The Age of Pyramids had begun. Egyptian kings would eventually commission more than 90 pyramids at places such as Saqqara, Dahshur, Meidum, Giza, and Abu Sir, all west of the Nile in Lower Egypt. Some 4,600 years ago, architects learned how to build pyramids with sloping sides instead of steps. Their efforts culminated in the building of three huge Dynasty 4 pyramids at Giza. These monuments reminded Greek visitors of the peaked loaves of bread they called
pyramidia,
giving us the term we use today.
Egypt’s Giza pyramids and Peru’s Moche pyramids had two things in common. Both were built by multiple work gangs that took credit for their contributions. Moche laborers incised their bricks with makers’ marks; Egyptian laborers painted names such as “The North Gang,” “The Victorious Gang,” or “The Drunken Gang” on the stones they contributed. The last name reminds us how often, throughout world history, labor has been rewarded with rations of beer.
Another similarity is that in both regions the largest pyramids were built by first-generation kingdoms. No later Peruvian state produced pyramids equal to the Huacas de Moche, and no later Egyptian dynasty matched the Great Pyramid of Khufu, 478 feet high and 756 feet on a side. Lavish use of corvée labor on monuments was typical of first-generation states; later states usually had other priorities.
THE CHANGING LOGIC OF POLITICAL ADMINISTRATION
The Egyptians were not aware that the kingdom in which they lived had developed from earlier rank societies. They believed that the institution of kingship was as old as Earth. This view fit with a cosmology in which the universe was unchanging, a view to which we will return in our discussion of Egyptian religion.
For most of the societies we have seen so far, the alphas in the dominance hierarchy were supernatural spirits or deities; the betas were ancestors; and the most highly ranked living humans were gammas. The Egyptian monarchy is the first we know of in which the ruler was, in effect, one of the supernatural alphas.
Divine kingship created an enormous gap between the ruler and the next most important authority figure. The governors of the 42 hesps might be hereditary nobles, but they were not the Sun incarnate.
There was a lengthy administrative hierarchy below the ruler. To be sure, it changed over the course of 30 dynasties as offices were raised, demoted, or combined. No summary, including the one we are about to give, could do it justice.
As in the later Hunza state, the king’s second in command was his vizier
(wazir).
During the Old Kingdom, kings tended to name their uncles, brothers, or sons to this post. By the time of the New Kingdom, many rulers had learned that it was better to appoint a loyal commoner than an ambitious noble. The latter might become a usurper.
In addition to the vizier, many Old Kingdom officials were relatives of the king. Close male relatives became state treasurers and high priests; more distant relatives became district officials. The governors of hesps inherited their positions until roughly Dynasty 12, at which point expertise became a more important criterion than noble birth.
The rise of the skilled commoner is exemplified by Uni, an official of Dynasty 6. Uni began his career as “undercustodian of royal domains,” worked his way up to “superior custodian,” and later became a district judge in the hesp of Hierakonpolis. When the king discovered a conspiracy in his own harem, he bypassed the vizier and made Uni his confidential investigator. Uni was next placed in charge of an army and led five campaigns against the Sinai and Southern Levant. Finally, the king named Uni the Governor of the South, an extraordinary honor for a commoner.
Another important office in the Egyptian state was that of the scribe. Thanks to numerous hieroglyphic texts, we know that the chain of command was (1) the vizier, then (2) the scribe, then (3) the overseer, and finally (4) the common laborer. Each hesp had a similar chain of command, allowing orders for corvée labor to travel down the hierarchy while tribute traveled up. So important was tribute that from Dynasties 15–17 the royal treasurer temporarily became more powerful than the vizier.
Because the king was a deity, he was not seen as needing to share power with anyone. Egypt did have a council called a
kenbet,
but its job was to advise the vizier.
A huge staff of servants attended the ruler, including a sandal bearer like the one depicted on the Narmer palette. There were, in addition, keepers of the king’s robes and crown; the king’s barbers; the king’s physicians, cooks, and messengers; and entertainers of various kinds.
At the bottom of the social ladder were slaves, mostly captives taken in war. While slaves were assigned a variety of tasks, Cecil B. DeMille’s notion that they built the pyramids was pure Hollywood. Archaeologist Mark Lehner’s work has shown us that the pyramids at Giza were built by teams of loyal Egyptian commoners, conscripted for the task and housed in special barracks at the state’s expense. Similar teams were drafted to quarry stone, hunt elephants for their ivory, act as porters on royal trading expeditions, and serve as foot soldiers in war. All such workers received standard rations from the state. By the Middle Kingdom, soldiers were being issued wooden tokens shaped like loaves of bread; these tokens could be redeemed for actual bread.
Finally, we should say a word about the impact of divine kingship on the economy. Like protohistoric Hawai’ian chiefs, the Egyptian kings controlled all land, all important resources, and all foreign trade. The economy of Egypt depended on the distribution of raw materials and goods through the king and his agents. This applied not only to gold from Nubia, cedar from Lebanon, wine from the Levant, and spices from Eritrea but also to locally produced commodities such as wheat, barley, cattle, and linen. The word for merchant
(swy.ty)
was unknown before Dynasty 18, and even then it was applied mainly to temple officials who had been granted special permission to engage in foreign trade.
To be sure, there were local markets in which surplus crops, birds, fish, and wild game could be bartered. Such free enterprise, however, remained marginal to the top-down, command economy of the ruler. Working through the governor of each hesp, the king demanded his cut of every cereal harvest, every domestic herd, and every fisherman’s catch. The vast resources brought to his storehouse were used to support the huge staff below him.
The Tension between Palace and Temple
The most significant aspects of the universe for the Egyptians were those that were timeless and unchanging. While Western societies tend to celebrate unique events and individuals, the Egyptians celebrated the static and eternal. This is one reason animals were considered so meaningful. Humans were seen as having unique individual attributes; animals, on the other hand, seemed unaltered generation after generation. The Egyptians respectfully mummified thousands of animals, from wild species such as the ibis, hippo, and crocodile to their own house cats, an animal first domesticated in North Africa.
One of the most sacred creatures was the scarab or dung beetle. Zoologists today know that scarabs create balls of animal dung and lay their eggs in them. The Egyptians were unaware of the eggs. When new scarabs hatched and ate their way out of the ball of dung, the Egyptians thought they were witnessing spontaneous generation. Nothing says immortality like a self-generating creature, hence Egypt’s countless images and amulets of scarabs.
Egypt, as we have seen, was created by unifying the formerly independent districts that became its hesps. Each of these districts had once worshipped its own patron deities and sacred animals. All of these deities and animals were accepted by the Egyptian state. The combined inventory gives the impression of a pantheon of more than 80 gods, but no one person or hesp would have worshipped all of them. Bastet, the cat, was honored at Bubastis in the delta; Sobek, the crocodile, was honored in the Fayum; other districts honored ibises, bulls, vultures, baboons, and so on. In addition to the major deities who were worshipped in temples, there were lesser gods whose images were kept in commoner households. Like Egyptian society itself, the deities had their hierarchy.
The Egyptian temple was known as
hwt ntr,
“the mansion of the god.” As in the Zapotec state, the high priests came from noble families, while their assistants were trained commoners. Many minor priests served on a rotating basis, working three months for the temple and nine months at a secular profession. Among a priest’s duties were directing rituals, sacrificing animals, interpreting dreams, and making astronomical calculations.
In a land where rulers were divine, religion was extremely important. The state funneled grain, oil, beer, wine, and precious metals from the tax collectors to the temple. Temples owned productive land but were not themselves subject to taxation. Many rulers, in fact, bequeathed land to the temple in return for a promise that priests would bring food to their tombs. As the dynasties rolled by, temples became wealthier and high priests more politically powerful.