Taken from Brian Fagan's The Black Land to Fifth Sun, Helix Books 1998

The River Nile slashes through the arid landscape of extreme northeast Africa like a green arrow. Its course runs more than 4,800 kilometers, from high in the Ethiopian highlands and Lake Victoria in Uganda north to the Mediterranean Sea. For most of Egypt's 1,300 kilometers, the Nile cuts a deep gorge through some of the driest landscape on earth, then fills it with layer upon layer of deep, fertile river silt. The Nile's source rivers, the Atbara and the Blue Nile, rise in the mountainous Ethiopian plateau. Lifeblood of ancient Egyptian civilization, these waterways govern the unchanging cycles of farming life. They have risen, flooded, and flowed far downstream since time immemorial. Each year, they carry the runoff from summer tropical rains into the heart of Egypt. During Akhet, the season of inundation, the water surges downstream, swelling the Nile above its banks, turning the countryside into a vast, shallow lake. Towns and villages become islands on low mounds above the floodwaters. As the current slows, the river drops its silt on the flooded lands, then recedes as the farmers plant their crops on the muddy ground. Then comes Peret, the season of growing, when crops of wheat and barley ripen slowly in the temperate late fall and winter sunlight without the need for watering. After the harvest in March or April, the early summer sun hardens and cracks the ground, aerating the soil and preventing the accumulation of harmful salts in the earth. Shemu, the season of drought, ends with the onset of the next inundation as the year's cycle begins again.

The Greek historian Herodotus called Egypt "the gift of the Nile," and the ancient Egyptians themselves named their homeland kmt, "the black land." The river fertilized and watered their darksoiled fields, and supported lush marshlands and grazing grass for domestic and wild animals. Fish and fowl teemed along the riverbanks. In good flood years, food was plentiful. Yet with all this bounty, life was a form of agricultural Russian roulette. A fast-moving Nile could sweep villages, fields, and animals away in a torrent of muddy rapids. The wise farmer stored a reserve against sudden floods or poor inundations, or for when famine spread across the dusty fields. Despite this uncertainty, the Egyptians considered the great river the source of life. The divine Nile was part of the Egyptians' cosmic order, an integral part of their lives from birth to death. Their notions of the environment, life, religion, kingship, and government flowed from their dependence on the organized oasis that was the Nile.

I have traveled by felucca (a lateen-rigged sailing vessel) upstream of Thebes during a Nile winter. The slow-moving river flows through a patchwork of lush green fields, irrigation canals, groves of date palms, and sycamore trees. For the six winter months, the sun rises in the Eastern Desert, soaking up the heavy dew. At dawn, low mist stirs over mirror-still canals; only waterfowl fly overhead. As the day progresses, the sun passes over the valley, and shadows vanish. Lucent sunlight fills the wide, cloudless sky. The white desert hills shimmer in the heat. Come late afternoon, they turn sandy-gray, mauve, or pink. The afternoon shadows lengthen, and the landscape turns turquoise and gold as the sun sinks behind the Libyan hills to the west. The sun is changeless, the soil and the land persistent. The passing days and months repeat themselves with an inevitable rhythm.

My slow voyage helped me to understand why the ancient Egyptians considered the ideal society on earth to be a reflection of a primordial divine order, embodied by the Nile and the passage of the sun across the heavens. Since the very beginnings of cultivation along the river, small farming communities have embedded themselves symbolically in the fertile floodplain. These well-watered lands were the domain of the living. The ancestors lay in cemeteries on the fringes of the valley, in arid desert. Close ties with the land endure in Egyptian villages today. Pharaohs have come and gone; Assyrian and Roman armies, that conquered cities, have moved on. Christian and Islamic beliefs have left their marks on Nile society. But the humble farming community survives with little change, still tied to the cycles of the river and the sun.

PREDYNASTIC SOCIETIES

People anatomically identical to us settled along the Nile's floodplain at least 100,000 years ago. At the end of the Ice Age some 15,000 years ago, the verdant Nile Valley was a paradise for Stone Age foragers. The river supported large bands of hunters and fisherfolk along its marshy banks. With higher rainfall than today, they spent much of the year ranging over the nearby desert, which then supported arid grasslands. From pollen diagrams of the old Nile Valley flood basins, western Asian lakes, and dried-up Saharan lakes, as wel1 as data from Syrian tree rings and Greenland ice-core data, it is known that after 6000 B.C., severe drought conditions developed over much of western Asia. The people of the Nile moved closer to the river, concentrating in better-watered areas. Faced with serious food shortages, some Egyptian communities domesticated plants and animals as "insurance" against a harsh and unpredictable environment.

The origins of farming along the Nile remain a mystery, because the earliest villages are inaccessible under many meters of floodplain alluvium. Most Egyptologists believe simple farming based on cattle herding and cereal agriculture took hold along the Nile as far south as the Sudan by 5000 B.C., and perhaps much earlier. With population densities relatively low, the average Egyptian subsisted much as Upper Nile villagers do today, by growing wheat and barley and herding animals along the river. Dozens of small communities, each with its own patchwork of farming land tied to surrounding ancestral territory, competed and traded with their neighbors.

The compelling forces that nurtured Egyptian kingship originated in somewhat later riverside societies discovered a century ago by British Egyptologist, Flinders Petrie. A pioneer of scientific excavation along the Nile, Petrie started his career by surveying the Pyramids of Giza in 1880. He set up camp in an abandoned tomb and scandalized Victorian tourists by working in his red underwear. Petrie went on to become a champion of scientific excavation, in an era when nothing had any meaning to an Egyptologist other than an inscription or a sculptural find. Above all, he paid close attention to small artifacts such as painted potsherds.

While digging Naukratis, a late Greek trading city in the Delta, he discovered the value of early Greek pottery as a way of dating Egyptian temples and other structures on-site. Coins and inscribed ornaments in the tightly packed soil of temple and building foundations allowed Petrie to date individual structures and occupational layers, an innovation for the day. Petrie employed 107 men organized into teams, with only 2 trained supervisors to watch over them. Though rough and fast moving by today's standards, he achieved miracles, working with minimal funds and few facilities. He even stored mummies under his camp bed.

In 1894, Petrie heard rumors of a vast cemetery of pottery- rich graves in the desert near Nagada, 24 kilometers south of Thebes in Upper Egypt. He descended on the necropolis in force, and with characteristic thoroughness, cleared nearly 2,000 graves. First, he would send boys out to search for softer spots in the sand. They cleared the edge of the grave, then moved on. Petrie's workmen would then clean out the burial pit until they located undisturbed clay vessels. Next "first class men" would move in to expose the pottery and skeleton, after which a skilled Egyptian would clean up the bones and grave goods for photography and recording. The Nagada dead were humble folk. They lay in shallow graves wrapped in mats or linen shrouds, sometimes accompanied by a few strings of beads or clay pots. At times, plain clay human figurines were also found with the dead.

Who were these simple farmers buried in enormous cemetery complexes? Their graves displayed no signs of wealth and no distinctive kingly regalia. Were they the ancestors of the pharaohs? Petrie soon discovered that the Nagada "predynastic" graves were different from later dynastic tombs. Locating an early royal grave near Nagada itself, he obtained a chronological and cultural link between the earlier sepulchres and the culture of the earliest dynastic Egyptians.

Since Petrie's research, no one has doubted that ancient Egyptian civilization originated among predynastic farming societies along the Nile. A century later, we know that Nagada and Nekhen, upstream of Thebes, were flourishing centers of predynastic culture by 4000 B.C. Neither town was anything more than a small, dense settlement of flimsy, oval huts and animal enclosures with an adjacent enormous cemetery complex. However, they both lay in vital strategic locations, opposite desert valleys leading to remote gold outcrops and to the Red Sea gateway to more distant lands. The villages were located on exceptionally fertile soils. Demographic archaeologist Fekri Hassan has calculated that the Nagada settlements grew enough grain on land at the edge of the floodplain to support about 76 to 114 persons per square kilometer. By clearing trees, removing dense grass growth, building dikes, and digging drainage canals to clear still-inundated acreage, the farmers opened up much larger tracts of agricultural land. By the time the villagers had cultivated four, or even eight, times more ground, they could support as many as 760 to 1,520 people per square kilometer, including officials, traders, artisans, and other nonfarmers. This intensification of agriculture required supervision, careful storage of grain surpluses, and leaders to organize communal projects such as canal digging.

Nagada and Nekhen (Predynatic Socleties)

A mythic world rising from the primordial waters could already have its living equivalent in the exposed mounds of farmland in the midst of receding river water. The beliefs and mythology of the ancient world of the predynastic village and the Nile endured to become a foundation of pharaonic rule. With their unusual spiritual and close ties to the land, the leaders of Nagada and Nekhen gradually assumed the trappings of divinity on earth.

Archaeologists have worked at Nekhen since 1897-98.They discovered that Nekhen was a walled settlement by 3500 B.C., as if fierce rivalries pitted each small kingdom against its neighbors. More recent investigations focus as much on environmental conditions, mapping, and survey work, as on excavation, in attempts to recover detail ignored by earlier, cruder research. The surveys reveal that in 3800 B.C. Nekhen was a village with a few hundred inhabitants. It lay on a protected area of the Nile floodplain, within easy reach of fertile soils and wooded savanna. Over the next 3 centuries, the population mushroomed to as many as 10,500 townsfolk.

By 3500 B.C., a serious drought had gripped the Nile Valley. The people living at Nagada and Nehken had moved from their dispersed villages and into densely populated towns of rectangular mudbrick buildings. Now the realities of political and economic authority changed. The villagers became townspeople, many of them nonfarmers. Nevertheless, we can be sure that their closest spiritual and emotional ties were to their lands.

The early Egyptians' view of the cosmos and creation still revolved around the cycles of the river and the farming year; the months of harsh aridity and the benign sun of winter ripening growing crops. The first town leaders were still influential kin leaders. They had strong ties to ancient village lineages, to riverside lands, and to the cosmos that linked the realms of the living and the dead. Unquestionably, this spiritual world of village and early town life revolved around fertility, Nile floods, and the predictable journeys of the sun.

The people of Nekhen lived in mud-brick houses clustered together. Archaeologist Michael Hoffman traced these houses over almost 40 hectares. Most Egyptians lived in small villages, but Nekhen, like Nagada, was a place where economic and social differences cut across society for the first time. Thus, a few of the more important people owned residences that were set in fenced compounds.

Why did some people acquire more wealth than others? Hoffman believes that Nekhen's leaders went from being farmers to artisans, traders, and pot manufacturers. More than 50,000,000 potsherds litter the Nekhen area. He identified and mapped at least 15 large pottery kiln areas covering an area of more than 950 square meters. Most produced the coarse, ordinary domestic wares used in every local household. A much finer "Plum Red Ware," often found in graves of wealthy individuals, came from kiln sites located in natural wind tunnels in the cliffs overlooking the town cemetery. The potters used the prevailing winds to create the high temperatures needed to fire fine vessels. Each wind-tunnel kiln specialized in different types and quantities of pots, producing many more than could be used locally. Hoffman hypothesizes that these clay products passed up and down the Nile to neighboring communities. The high-grade vessels also served as offerings that were buried with the dead, part of the wealth that accompanied the deceased into the afterlife.

Nekhen's leaders grew wealthy on the Nile trade, despite ecological disaster. A combination of drought conditions, rapacious goat and sheep herds, and deforestation by potters degraded the surrounding grassland. Hoffman believes that some of the local rulers wisely invested their wealth in irrigation agriculture instead of dry farming, thereby insulating the community from famine. They developed water-control systems, raised agricultural productivity, and controlled the stores of grain. These same men developed such secular power from their mastery of the inundation, that they may have become symbolic of the authority of the sun-god?they became rulers on earth of a world created by the sun. These leaders, thus, were the ancestors of the first pharaohs. Their notion of kingship formed the foundation for dynastic Egyptian ideology. In later times, the king was creator on earth, a perfect reflection of the sun in the sky, the two forming a partnership against chaos.

SUCCESSION OF KINGS

Order and stability: these two words epitomize the ideological foundations of Egyptian civilization, which are reflected in the pharaohs' official records. In the third century B.C., an Egyptian priest named Manetho wrote a work entitled Aegyptica. Acquiring information from fragmentary ancient king lists, he set down a list of Egypt's kings and divided them into 30 dynasties. Egyptologists have used Manetho's chronology and other synthesized lists to reconstruct a succession of monarchs extending from more than 3,000 years ago up to the Roman conquest of 30 B.C.

The lists contain significant historical information, and reveal political statements about the continuity of kings. The New Kingdom pharaoh Seti I inscribed a list on the walls of his temple at Abydos around 1290 B.C. He recorded no less than seventy-five royal ancestors, each represented by an individual cartouche. There were serious oversights, however, by Seti's scribes, who omitted periods of political instability or disputed succession. Nevertheless, the inscription sent a message: that the past was a model of good order, a continuous succession of kings, who handed down their thrones to their successors in a single, linear sequence. This is exactly what happened during the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms, the great eras of Egyptian civilization.

Though fragmentary, the so-called Turin Canon, compiled in the reign of Ramesses II (1290-1224 B.C.) appears to contain the list of every pharaoh from Ramesses back to Narmer (or Menes), the first king of unified Egypt. The anonymous author, however, did not stop at Narmer. He ventured even further back to a time when the cosmos and its divine beings met. The Turin scribe added several lines, which satisfied pharaonic ideology. He summarized the reigns of several "spirits"; gods who reigned over Egypt for thousands of years showing how the royal succession descended to a time when the gods themselves were kings.

Thus, the ancient pharaohs and their pyramids, temples, and sepulchres form a linear history that begins with the gods who created the world, projecting a continuous kingship. The Egyptian past is a history of authority and comfort. In fact, pharaohs would sometimes consult their archives for precedents set, in order to adjudicate legal matters or to ensure correct ritual procedures.

A thousand years before the Turin Canon scribe set down his version of Egyptian history, other officials indulged their passion for lists. They recorded kings and the principal events in each year of their reigns down to the Fifth Dynasty. The Palermo stone, carved about 2350 B.C., shows us what Egyptians of the day considered to be important events: religious festivals, creation of statues of the gods, wars, regular taxation, and the height of that year's Nile flood. Administration and piety toward ancestors also formed a part of their history. Official archives journeyed back to the catalytic historical moment when the first pharaoh, King Narmer, unified Upper and Lower Egypt and formed the unified Egyptian state whose beliefs reflected a divine order that required constant care through pageantry and ritual.

EGYPTIAN MYTHOLOGY

About 3000 B.C., the Egyptian vision of civilization?of human existence?stressed the unity of Upper and Lower Egypt, the role of the king as an intermediary to the gods, and the notion of equilibrium as a way of life. The state used myths and mythological scenes to reinforce these ideas in the popular mind, much as we use political propaganda today. Practical knowledge, for example, on how to construct a pyramid or irrigate the fields, was useful, but theoretical research extended spiritual associations drawn from known theological ideas. The scribes taught through rote learning: naming the names of things.

Amenemope, a scribe of the late New Kingdom (ca., 1000 B.C.), wrote a pedagogical text entitled: Beginning of the Teaching for Clearing the Mind for the Instruction of the Ignorant, and for learning All Things That Exist. His book is a list of names for everything from towns to gods, elements of the universe, parts of animals, and all manner of basic knowledge. Egyptian knowledge came from the classification of a known world. It became a convenient method for defining gods, names of places, seasons of the year, and any knowledge absorbed by a well-educated Egyptian.

The names of gods and places allowed the Egyptians to indulge in symbolic geography, an idealized image of the state, in a mythworld created from common experience. The Egyptian world began with primeval waters of nothingness. The god Atum, "the completed one," was the creator, preeminent over the cosmos. He caused the "first moment," raising a mound of solid ground above the primordial waters. The life-giving force of the Sun arose over the land to cause the rest of creation. The Egyptians expressed the moment of creation in a familiar metaphor of the annual Nile inundation, when the brown land emerged from the receding waters. The primordial mound was a compelling image in the Egyptian world. The benben, a sacred stone shaped like a miniature, angular mound, stood in the Temple of Atum at Heliopolis. The shining, gilded capstones of the Pyramids of Giza, benebet, were also symbolic tumult.

The myth of Osiris reinforced the notion of cosmic unity. It was the basis for one of ancient Egypt's most enduring cults, and was told in the Pyramid Texts, the oldest religious literature in Egypt, which was inscribed on the walls of Fifth and Sixth Dynasty pyramids (2465-2150 B.C.). Osiris began as Asari, a man-headed deity of agriculture, but in his later form was slain by his brother Seth. The goddesses Isis and Nephthys found his corpse, stopped its decomposition, and twice brought Osiris back to life when Seth attacked him again. Dead pharaohs became identified with Osiris, for they were equated with Horus, his son, while on the throne. Osiris embodied cosmic harmony. His insignia was the rising Nile, while the moon's constant waxing and waning symbolized his bestowal of eternal happiness.

Nekhen's local god, Horus, and other divines combined human and animal forms, and could even change guises with different roles. Horus, depicted as a falcon-headed human figure, derived his name from the word fury: "the one who is above/far from." The name associated him with the sky. Even the cosmos and the environment eventually assumed concrete form. The earth, Geb, was a woman; the sky, Nut, also a woman. Once a deity took form, a myth or legend developed to explain its origin and associations. The god or goddess received a name during this process.

The gods played a mythical role in the unification of Egypt. The twin deities Horus and Seth, gods of Upper and Lower Egypt, became a cosmic balancing act reflecting the new circumstances of a united land. Their representative on earth resided in one living person: the king, who interceded between the living and divine worlds, just as his village predecessors did for centuries. The king was "the living embodiment" of Horus, the solar deity and protector of kings. The antagonist was Seth, murderer of Osiris and instigator of confusion. Seth brought storms, drought, and even foreigners, into the harmonious Egyptian world. But Egyptian texts speak of Seth as reconciled to his divinely judged role as an opposing force in the ideal balance of harmony.

An Egyptian myth that forms part of the "Memphite Theology," written down during the Late Period, tells how Geb, the deity of Earth and Lord of the Gods, mediated between Horus and Seth, ending their quarrel. "He made Seth king of Upper Egypt in the land of Upper Egypt, up to the place where he was born. And Geb made Horus king of Lower Egypt in the land of Lower Egypt, up to the place where his father [Osiris] was drowned, which is the 'Division of the Two Lands.' " Geb then passed his inheritance to Horus, the son of his firstborn son. " 'I have appointed Horus, the firstborn, he is Horus who arose as King of Upper and Lower Egypt, who united the Two Lands in the Nome of the Wall [province of Memphis], the place in which the Two Lands were united.' " Horus and Seth were reconciled, and united in the "house of Ptah, the 'Balance of the Two Lands' " (Lichtheim 1973, 52-3).

Ancient Egyptian myths shape an intellectual aesthetic, composed within the minds of their creators as an inner world, quite different from the ancient world unearthed by the archaeologist's spade. The origins of kingship along the Nile stem in considerable part from such pervasive mind-sets as order, serenity, and unity, told through these ancient myths.

ORDER, SERENTITY, and UNITY

People have always feared the forces of the natural and spiritual worlds. But early Egyptian art transcends the spiritual and reflects a desire for order in the living world. In 3500 B.C., dozens of small towns and some large kingdoms flourished along the Nile, despite enemies and special rivals. The harsh environment, surrounded by encroaching desert and the risk from fluctuating Nile inundations formed the background of daily life?a life that included military and political rivalries between ambitious local leaders, who were equipped with their own gods and spiritual authorities. A constant undercurrent of violence, war, and siege from neighbors gave life an uncomfortable sense of disorder. Equilibrium gave way to conflict and political confusion. Within a few centuries, a new intellectual order embraced the fundamental ideas that obsessed Egyptian civilization for nearly 3,000 years: order and stability, and their counterpoint?disorder. The rule that kings maintain order in the presence of a supreme divine force (the power of the sun) became the political reality and the intellectual view that brought the universe together in a long-lived relationship with human life and the natural world.

Every pharaoh was king of Upper and Lower Egypt, the Nile Valley, and the fertile delta downstream. The cosmology stressed three ethical values: piety, justice, and order, a concept the Egyptians called ma'at. Ma'at embraces the universe, a cosmic order transformed into a goddess, the daughter of the sun-god Re. Re established ma'at at the time of creation; thus, the structure of the state was not a product of the human brain, but an image of the cosmic order. The goddess Ma'at personified the orderly nature of the sun-god himself. She also manifested herself in the domains of the lord Osiris: earth, vegetation, and water.

Egyptian deities "lived on ma'at,"a phrase often used by the pharaohs to describe their own behavior. Ancient Egyptian religion stressed a close relationship between the living and the gods. Only if humans lived life in harmony with ma'at could they conquer death. Because divine life rose again, ancient Egyptians lived with the unshakable faith that ma'at, the divine order, was absolute and eternal. 

Nekhen art reveals a changing ideological world, one in which animals and humans become tangible forces in the cosmos. It is as if Nekhen's rulers began to devise a set of anthropomorphized concepts as a way of organizing ancient religious beliefs, and their own authority, into a form that made them comprehensible to the general population. The forces of nature became humanized, adorning artifacts, temples, and tombs. In time, they became an integral part of writing. Deities took human form.

Egyptologist Barry Kemp believes that the myth of the Egyptian state and its harmony originated in much earlier beliefs in an ideal world from Upper Egyptian villages. Age-old beliefs of harmony and balanced opposites came together as a single superior force embodied in the figure of the pharaoh, who co-opted ancient Horus and Seth mythology to create a national framework of myth and symbolic geography that was to influence a state more than 1,400 kilometers long. This flexible framework could accommodate the diverse beliefs and religious cults among the 23 nomes (provinces) that made up the kingdom.

The earliest form of Egyptian kingship survives only in occasional prestigious art objects, buildings, and material objects, and in royal sepulchres. Archaeologist Michael Hoffman and Egyptologists Barbara Adams and Carter Lupton excavated curving rows of the sand-filled burial places of Nekhen's elite on the banks of a dry stream named Abu Suffian, located outside the town. The Abu Suffian tombs were humble by the standards of later pharaohs' burial places, but impressive for their day. Though looters had ravaged the sepulchres in ancient times, they left a jumble of rich artifacts behind, including finely made, black-topped clay jars, some bearing complex graffiti scratched into the clay. Flint arrowheads, basket fragments, and pieces of furniture testify to the wealthy leaders. A beautiful diskshaped mace head of polished green and white porphyry was found under a pile of broken artifacts. It is one of the earliest symbols of leadership known from the Nile Valley. Its owner may have been one of the mythical "Divine Souls of Nekhen," the primordial rulers of legendary Egypt.

With meticulous care, Hoffman and his colleagues excavated each tomb in the Abu Suffian cemetery. They undertook a complex salvage operation, using brushes, trowels, and sophisticated recording devices instead of the crude picks and shovels of their predecessors. To their surprise, they discovered that the cemetery was a symbolic map of a unified Upper and Lower Egypt, created at one of the centers of early Egyptian kingship.

The graves straddled the dry Wadi Suffian, which represented the Nile River. The towns at the downstream end of the wadi were in the ancient Lower Egypt style, dug out of the subsoil and lined with mud-brick. Hoffman found groups of three to five graves at this end of the cemetery, as if close members of the family, or the royal court, lay together. Almost nothing remained in the looted sepulchres, except some fine pottery and the remains of a sycamore funerary bed with carved bull's legs. One large tomb excavated many years ago had walls painted with motifs denoting spiritual power, including a motif found on knife blades and other artifacts of a man holding two lions apart. When the excavators scraped the soil around the pits with trowels, they located circular, brown soil discolorations, the rotted stubs of stout wooden posts. These uprights once supported small painted palaces and shrines that covered the tombs, forming a miniature city of fenced enclosures and diminutive buildings. The excavators even located the small holes made by the original surveyors' posts used to align the tombs.

Upstream, on the other side of the dry wadi, the dead lay in rock-cut sepulchres, with the burial chamber of each tomb on one side, a design favored in Upper Egypt. The mourners buried assemblages of sometimes mummified wild and domesticated animals around the tombs, potent symbols of a spiritual world where animals and humans now acted as one.

The Nekhen cemetery commemorates anonymous leaders, whose names are lost to history. We glimpse them only from a scene on a decorated artifact buried many centuries later in a pit. The fragmentary "Scorpion" mace head shows a ruler in full ceremonial dress, with a ritual bull's tail, a symbol of kingly authority, hanging from the back of his belt. He wears the white crown of Upper Egypt and wields a mattock, as if he is digging the foundations for a temple or a town. A scorpion dangles before his face, presumably a depiction of his name. Kinship may already have been synonymous with conquest, for the top of the mace bears a frieze of lapwings hanging by their necks from vertical standards. The hieroglyphic sign (see information in box, following) of a similar small bird, reAhyt, later came to mean "common people," as if Scorpion has returned from a victorious campaign with many commoners as prisoners. Since Scorpion wears only the crown of Upper Egypt, we can deduce that either part of the scene is lost or that he lived before the southern kings conquered the north. Apparently this king ruled before Narmer, the first pharaoh.

The Narmer Palette

A single ceremonial palette from Nekhen commemorating Egypt's first pharaoh brilliantly expresses the powerful symbolism of unification. His name was Narmer, which means "catfish," but his subjects called him Menes. In 3100 B.C. he became the most powerfi~1 person on earth, a leader not of a small chiefdom or a small river valley, but of a unified Egypt.

Two English archaeologists, J. Green and J. Quibell, identified Narmer in 1898. They were digging into ancient Nekhen (Hierakonpolis), located in Upper Egypt, when they unearthed an elaborately decorated stone palette of a type used to hold cosmetic pigment. The 63-centimeter high, green slate palette bears fine carvings of mythical animals with long necks and lionlike heads and commemorates Narmer as the conqueror of the age-old Two Lands of Egypt. On one side, he wears the white crown of Upper Egypt, and carries a pear-shaped mace head in his right hand. He is about to smite a captive, perhaps from the Delta in Lower Egypt. A falcon head (representing the human-headed falcon god Horus) emerges from papyrus reeds carrying a human head above the victim. A sandal bearer follows the king, who stands on two dead enemies. The other side shows Narmer?wearing the red crown of Lower Egypt?and two high officials inspecting rows of decapitated enemies from the town of Buto in the Delta. A central design of intertwined animals symbolizes harmony, balancing images of conquest in the upper and lower registers. At the bottom, a bull destroys a city wall and tramples on its enemies.

The defining event of Egyptian civilization?the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, and the founding of pharaonic kingship? balanced the two Nile kingdoms into a satisfying whole unified by the king. The Narmer palette commemorates this momentous occurrence, using inscriptions and the spare, economic style of hieroglyphs to deliver a clear, unmistakable message of symmetry as a symbol of order. The Narmer palette displays animals engaged in human activities like warfare and conquest. The slate surfaces also bear animal topped standards, as if early deities, like later ones, had animal forms but human behavior. Such images envisaged divine forces; gave them multiple images, traits, and descriptions; and communicated the essence of their being. This may have been the time when the ancient relationship with the sun, the river, and the land developed into an implicit duality of the Egyptian world. Unification, the process of creating a single state along the river from the Two Lands of Upper and Lower Egypt, relied on a balanced duality, as did other philosophical couplings, among them cosmic order and chaos, and light and darkness.

Duality and unification make compelling themes for the Narmer palette, turning it into a symbol of kingship. Real and imagined animals become allegories for the forces of life. The Narmer palette shows carnivores such as lions and dogs acting in harmony in pairs. Other early artistic works dictate a deliberate use of harmony achieved in a turbulent world, of balance between opposing forces. Animals as an untamed life force walk in lines or in registers between parallel lines, again implying an aesthetic consciousness for the first time.

On artifacts and inscriptions from later Egyptian times, kings and gods capture flocks of birds with large nets. The accompanying hieroglyphs stress the symbolism of containment. Another palette from a Nekhen sepulchre depicts a conflict between lions, and other pairs of fighting animals. The lions are in precarious balance, while two savage hunting dogs face one another in a display of mutual strength. Control and harmony show the tautness and formality that characterize Nekhen tomb painting and design.

In another famous statement about unification, King Senusret I of the XII Dynasty (1971-1928 B.C.) had the origin myth inscribed on his mortuary temple at el-Lisht. A vertical sign divides the inscription, a stylized picture of a windpipe that signified the verb "to unite." The inscription tells how: "The gods Horus and Seth, once lords of Lower and Upper Egypt, tie the heraldic plants of their two domains around the hieroglyphic sign for 'unification' " (Kemp 1989, 29). Egyptian legends traced the ancestry of the dynastic pharaohs to the "Followers of Horus," the falcon-headed god and solar deity, who was a manifestation of the living king and his protector. Nekhen, "the City of the Falcons," was Horus's town, and perhaps the founding community of Egyptian kingship.

How and why did the estimated half million or so inhabitants of the Nile Valley in 3000 B.C. come together under a single ruler? None of the obvious factors such as population pressure, food shortages, or long-distance trade?that led to urban civilization in other parts of the world seemed to apply here. Through a combination of archaeological research and evidence from Egyptian documents, we gain a provocative answer to the unification question.

A GAME OF ANCIENT MONOPOLY

Kemp likens the process of unification to a game of Monopoly in which each player maximizes the opportunities thrown out by the dice. In Egypt, both individuals and entire villages took full advantage of favorable locations; access to desirable resources, such as potting clay or gold mines; and chance breaks that came their way. These riverside communities, like Monopoly players, were basically equal opportunists. Inevitably someone, or some hamlet, gained an unforeseen advantage, either from trading expertise, or unusually high crop yields. Equilibrium gave way to the inevitable momentum, where some communities acquired more wealth and more political power than their neighbors the ancient equivalent of building Monopoly hotels on Park Avenue. Their victory made possible a monopoly over local trade, food surpluses, and other commodities, which overrode any possible threat posed by other political or economic players.

Hundreds of Monopoly "games" unfolded in predynastic times. As generations passed, the number of players decreased and the stakes increased as progressively larger chiefdoms vied for economic power and political dominance. Players changed some acquired great influence, then lost it as charismatic individuals died or trading opportunities ended. Egypt, with its fertile land and resources, could withstand such changes for many generations. Surplus grain or toolmaking stone formed the foundation of their strength. The Egyptians also had a genius for weaving a distinctive ideology that imbued leadership and authority with elaborate symbols and rituals. These ideologies became an underlying factor in promoting unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, starting with at least three predynastic chiefdoms that flourished in Upper Egypt around 3500 B.C.: Hierakonpolis, Nagada, and This, near Abydos.

Archaeology, when combined with myth, creates a hypothetical scenario for "unification." Through the discovery of Mesopotamian clay seals from Upper Egyptian sites, we know that by 3500 B.C., the kingdoms of Upper Egypt engaged in major trading enterprises. Direct contact with southern Arabia and Mesopotamia enabled them to bypass ancient trade networks in Lower Egypt. Strong evidence shows that trade traveled across the Eastern Desert. One historical scenario describes a ferocious, but historically undocumented, competition between neighbors, and between the kingdoms of Upper Egypt and the Delta. Inevitably, these rivalries led to decades of fighting along the river, which eventually culminated in the politically developed center of Nekhen conquering its Upper Egyptian neighbors. Nekhen's rulers had embarked on a military campaign, which engulfed al1 of Egypt between the Mediterranean and the First Cataract. By 3100 B.C., a semblance of political unity joined Upper and Lower Egypt as depicted in the symbolic linking of Horus and Seth.

THE GREAT CULTURE

Narmer and his successors were confronted not only with the major practical problem of creating an intellectual framework for a state ruled by a supreme king; but also with the problem of how to project the concept of a unified kingdom of Upper and Lower Egypt to people living in towns and villages the length of the land. Around 3000 B.C., some gifted Egyptians codified a remarkably homogenous intellectual system, building on the works of earlier priests. They created a "Great Culture," a court-created tradition that became the instrument of royal rule. The new culture embraced hieroglyphic writing, formal commemorative art, architecture, and a basic iconography of kingship based on much earlier ideas. The king stood at the center of the country as a divine force, identified in his first name and title as a manifestation of the power of the god in the heavens, Horus the falcon. Scribes wrote the ruler's name inside a panel depicting his palace, denoting the king as Horus, present, alive, and in residence. In time, the palace became a convenient way to refer to the person of the ruler, as per- aa, "the great house." The pharaoh gradually acquired five ceremonial titles, including nebty, "He of the Two Ladies," referring to the protective powers of the cobra-goddess of Lower Egypt and the vulture-goddess of Upper Egypt. By 2500 B.C., the king's titles appeared within an oval cartouche signifying the circuit  of the sun around the universe. A second cartouche named the pharaoh "Son of Re," identifying an even closer kinship with the sun-god. The palace assumed great importance in Egyptian ceremonies, as did the rare ceremonial "appearances" (kha) of the king, which symbolized the rising of the sun at dawn.

The Egyptians elevated the consummate image of what constituted proper form to the pinnacle of aesthetic desirability. The art of the royal court became a self-perpetuating ideal. Carefully selected artists translated these standards into a precise graphical style almost akin to modern commercial art. Dynastic court art combined three major elements: careful use of registers of figures and themes; an intimate connection between figures and hieroglyphs, which became a single channel of communication; and carefully controlled conventions for animal and human figures. The scribes produced informative and truthful pictures, but they were based firmly on elements taken from the mythic and ideal world. Thus, ancient Egyptian art was a carefully constructed style developed as a means of religious communication, which constantly added new components to ancient myths and traditions. Over the centuries, court art and culture expanded to all corners of the kingdom, adding local traditions, and gradually creating a national framework of myth and design.

As unification took hold, ideas of kingship changed considerably. The trappings of kingship assumed ever-greater importance. The king's clothing and regalia became a mantle of divinity?of potency in creation?that symbolized his role as herdsman and protector of the people. In art, inscription, and regalia, the pharaoh became a warrior and a builder. The king passed the goodness of humankind to heaven and received the blessing of the creator and the other gods on earth. Even the earliest types of kingship portray the king alone acting for the common good, surrounded by a chorus of courtiers who praise his every action. His official entourage formed the "followers of Horus," loyal officials who surrounded the king in the palace, and on his royal progresses through the land. They also transmitted his commands to the world outside the palace audience hall. This ideology extended to the Egyptians' classification of themselves as a series of circles around the pharaoh. A solar retinue (henmemet) formed his bodyguard; an inner elite circle (pat) was comprised of advisers and senior officials; and the rest of the people, (reEhyt) made up the outer circle.

The same messages of kingship endured after death, expressed in imposing sepulchres. The earliest dynastic kings lay in a desert cemetery at Abydos, downstream of Nagada. Their brick- lined burial chambers sat in deep pits in the sand, covered by a plain, square enclosure filled with sand and gravel. Pairs of free- standing stone stelae bore the Horus name of the ruler. A separate mortuary temple associated with each sepulchre lay closer to the edge of the floodplain, just beyond the town. Here priests made offerings to the king as a god during his life and after death.

King Khasekhemui (ca., 2640 B.C.), the fifth king of the Second Dynasty, was a vigorous military campaigner, who contributed much to Egypt's unity. His funerary enclosure measures 54 by 133 meters, and is surrounded by a double mud- brick wall. The inner wall is no less than 5.5 meters thick in places. Doorways intersect both walls. Khasekhemui's enclosure followed the sereAh style of paneled facades and recessed entrances developed by King Wadji, the third pharaoh of the First Dynasty. Wadji adopted the sereAh as the heraldic symbol of the king, replicating the facade in a rectangle, with the ruler's name written above, topped by the Horus symbol of a hawk or falcon. The builders created a panel-like effect by making parallel niches in the mud-brick. A single, free-standing funerary palace building stood near the eastern corner of the enclosure, adorned with the same paneled motif.

We know the meaning of Khasekhemui's building because the sereAh style occurs elsewhere, on the facades of early dynastic tombs at Memphis and Nagada. The buried frontages of these graves preserve elaborate painted decoration, which represents now- vanished methods of adorning the walls. Long strips of brightly colored matting lashed to horizontal poles once draped the narrow spaces between the wall niches. The paneled surfaces gave way at intervals to deeper recesses with red-paneled sides. A broader niche stood at the back of each recess, painted red to give the impression of a wooden door. This pattern of panels, niches, and recesses became a standard way of adorning offering places and sarcophagi in later sepulchres. The pitched and decorated palace facade became a symbol of royal authority, and communicated the sense of "palace," and" court." Art and architecture combined to render an image of a divine pharaoh and his royal court at the pinnacle of human existence along the Nile. Privilege was carefully controlled. The pharaoh permitted a few of his most prominent courtiers to use a variation on the palace facade to adorn their tombs.

The king exercised a royal monopoly over his kingdom, at least in theory. The Great Culture did not transform Egypt overnight, for court patronage was at best fitful outside the major towns.

THE KING AS TERRITORIAL CLAIMANT

The pharaoh was the symbol of a unified land. Inevitably, court architecture began to reflect the ideology of a supreme ruler, a god on earth. The relatively modest architectural statement that King Khasekhemui built pales in comparison to that of King Djoser, first pharaoh of the Third Dynasty (ca., 2695 B.C.). Djoser's brilliant architect and chief minister Imhotep codified the myth of the state and the institution of Egyptian kingship in the first monumental building built entirely in stone the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, upstream of modern Cairo. 

Imhotep, a shadowy historical figure, was the son of a famous architect named Kanofer. He achieved fame as a wise court official, architect, scribe, and healer. His Step Pyramid stands in the center of a 278 by 545-meter enclosure. Imhotep fashioned a mastaha (tomb) in six levels, diminishing in size to form a pyramid. The base of the lowest level measures 107 meters from north to south and 122 meters from east to west. The layered, limestone-covered pyramid reached a height of 58 meters.

A maze of subterranean passages attempted to foil tomb robbers, disguising a 28-meter shaft adorned with fine reliefs and blue faience tiles that led to the burial chamber. The tiled walls had the same matting effect used on the royal palace at Memphis. A 3-ton rock plug sealed a granite-lined burial chamber with a 4-meter ceiling. Vast quantities of vases, some bearing the names of earlier kings, were found in these passages, perhaps offerings made by Djoser in honor of his predecessors. Only a mummified left foot remains of the king himself. At the north side of the pyramid stands a boxlike limestone cellar containing a life-size, seated figure of Djoser, wearing the white cloak that was worn at jubilee festivals.

The Step Pyramid is part of a much larger landscape. A thick stone wall with external towers surrounds the enclosure. The builders used a simple version of the now-familiar palace facade motif, with 211 bastions and 14 entrances. The main gateway at the southeastern corner leads to an entrance hall 53 meters long decorated with columns. The hall in turn opens into a vestibule with four pairs of columns. The so-called South Tomb faces the pyramid on the south side of the enclosure. The king's viscera were buried here, his mummy under the pyramid opposite, fulfilling the need for a northern and southern sepulchre, one for each of the Two Lands.

The Saqqara enclosure measures 108 by 187 meters, faced by paneled stone walls. A replica of a royal palace lies at the southwestern corner of the enclosure. A pair of stone, horseshoe- shaped cairns stand at each end of the plaza. They face an elevated throne dies shaded by a canopy at the foot of the Step Pyramid. The steps leading to the dies face the alignment of the cairns. The design of the dies goes back deep into history. A mace head from King Narmer's reign at Nekhen depicts the ruler sitting on a similar canopied dies facing prisoners of war and animals captured in battle, arrayed between territorial markers like those at Saqqara. A god seated in a litter faces the king.

A wooden label from the tomb of King Den of the First Dynasty at Abydos shows a similar scene. Den sits on a canopied dies, a hieroglyphic sign for the year of his reign behind him. The king appears a second time at the foot of the dies, striding between six territorial markers. The same theme appears at Saqqara in two groups of three carved panels on the backs of imitation doorways in underground passages below the Step Pyramid. We see Djoser performing exactly the same ceremony, striding between the territorial markers. Later inscriptions tell us that the cairns were markers of territorial limits, placed in what was called "the field." The ceremony was called "presenting the field."

Egyptians believed kings received "understanding" from the sun-god while still in the womb. The pharaoh was netjer, a god. But deities were of human origin, and, thus, required tombs after death. Unlike the gods, a pharaoh had to observe jubilees of revivification to ensure the continued fertility of the land. The Heb-sed festival, one of the great ceremonies of state, was performed exactly 30 years after the pharaoh's accession?and at more frequent intervals later in his reign. Heb-sed celebrated the earthly power and vigor of the king and always embraced two elements. First, the ruler would appear in full ceremonial regalia and sit on a special dies provided with two thrones, symbolizing Upper and Lower Egypt. Then he would stride around territorial cairns set in "the field," thereby renewing his claim to the kingdom.The Heb-sed festival had profound significance in ancient Egyptian religious life, as it reemphasized the close relationship between the divine king and a unified land.

At Saqqara, a courtyard with a complex of dummy shrines lies on the east side of the enclosure. These solid, dummy structures replicate temporary shrines in timber and matting. Arranged alongside two sides of a rectangular court, these are exactly like buildings built specifically for Heb-sed festivals in later times. A once-canopied throne dies with two flights of steps stands at the south end of the court. Scenes of Djoser visiting local shrines appear in the underground galleries.

The Step Pyramid complex was an elaborate formal setting for the display of kingship?and of the ruler himself?either to his courtiers, or to the populace at large. The setting always comprised a combination of key elements: open space, an elevated place where the king could be seen by large numbers of people, and a token palace where the ruler could don his ceremonial regalia or rest between appearances. In later centuries, the "appearance of the king" was an important occasion, requiring elaborate devices, but the roots of these later ceremonies were already in place at the very beginnings of Egyptian civilization, when kings were both divine and human.

King Djoser's Step Pyramid brought Egyptian royal tombs to a new architectural height. The pyramid and enclosure formed an arena for the eternal pageantry of the king on earth. As supreme territorial claimant and the focus of adoration and worship, the king could appear within the sanctity of his own enclosure on earth.

During the Fourth Dynasty, however, Djoser's successors changed the stepped pyramid into a true pyramid. Around 2575 B.C., King Huni built the pyramid of Meidum. It lay outside the floodplain in the desert. Soaring toward heaven, the pyramid symbolized the sun's rays descending through the clouds to earth, which absorbed the pharaoh into the sun itself. A small mortuary temple and place of offering for the king's spirit stood on the east side, dwarfed by the smooth walls of the pyramid. A walled causeway led to a temple in the valley that was a display of linear architecture quite stark, planar, and powerful. In coming centuries, the architectural effect softened at Giza and elsewhere. The pharaoh was now "Son of Re," worshiped as a god while still alive. By this time, the official theology that was mirrored in formal architectural styles codified a "Great Culture" of Egyptian civilization, which evolved slowly over nearly 2,500 years of pharaonic rule, in what Kemp calls "a cauldron of tradition." Ideology legitimized the rule of a king for over 500 years.

Ancient Egyptian society achieved long-term stability because centuries of pharaohs and their officials wove a tapestry of myth and reality a "Great Culture" to maintain pervasive doctrines of stability and unity. They used architecture and art to assault the senses with mythic statements expressed in their pyramids, shrines, temples, and tombs all stunning examples of how art forms develop out of ritualistic roots and the psychology of its inhabitants. As a result of this powerful message, ancient Egyptian civilization endured for nearly 3,000 years.