Previously unknown and entirely unexpected, Nabta Playa has emerged from obscurity as the ancient Egyptian Stonehenge, a sacred landscape dotted with carefully placed stone structures. Scientific dating of the associated sediments has revealed a startlingly early date for these extraordinary monuments, the early fifth millennium B.C. At that time, as in even earlier periods, the Sahara would have been very different from its current arid state. On an annual basis, summer rains would have greened the desert—filling the seasonal lake, and turning its shores into lush pasture and arable land. The people who migrated to Nabta Playa to take advantage of this temporary abundance were seminomadic cattle herders who roamed with their livestock across a wide area of the eastern Sahara. Large quantities of cattle bones have been excavated at the site, and traces of human activity can be found scattered over the ground: fragments of ostrich eggshells (used as water carriers and, when broken, for making jewelry), flint arrowheads, stone axes, and grindstones for processing the cereals that were cultivated along the lakeshore. With its seasonal fertility, Nabta offered semi-nomadic people a fixed point of great symbolic significance, and over generations they set about transforming it into a ritual center. Laying out the stone alignments must have required a large degree of communal involvement. Like their counterparts at Stonehenge, the monuments of Nabta show that the local prehistoric people had developed a highly organized society. A pastoral way of life certainly needed wise decision-makers with a detailed knowledge of the environment, close familiarity with the seasons, and an acute sense of timing. Cattle are thirsty animals, requiring a fresh supply of water at the end of each day’s wandering, so judging when to arrive at a site such as Nabta and when to leave again could have been a matter of life and death for the whole community.
Prehistoric rock art in Egypt’s Eastern Desert TOBY WILKINSON
The purpose of the standing stones and the “calendar circle” seems to have been to predict the arrival of the all-important rains that fell shortly after the summer solstice. When the rains arrived, the community celebrated by slaughtering some of their precious cattle as a sacrifice of thanks, and burying the animals in graves marked on the ground with large, flat stones. Under one such mound, archaeologists found not a cattle burial but a huge sandstone monolith that had been carefully shaped and dressed to resemble a cow. Dated, like the calendar circle, to the early fifth millennium B.C., it is the earliest known monumental sculpture from Egypt. Here are to be found the origins of pharaonic stone carving—in the prehistoric Western Desert, among wandering cattle herders, a millennium and more before the beginning of the First Dynasty. Archaeologists have been forced to rethink their theories of Egypt’s origins.
On the other side of Egypt, in the Eastern Desert, equally remarkable discoveries have been made, confirming the impression that the arid lands bordering the Nile Valley were the crucible of ancient Egyptian civilization. Thousands of rock pictures pecked into the sandstone cliffs dot the dry valleys (known as wadis) that crisscross the hilly terrain between the Nile and the Red Sea hills. At some locations, usually associated with natural shelters, overhangs, or caves, there are great concentrations of pictures. One such tableau, by a dried-up plunge pool in the Wadi Umm Salam, has been likened to the Sistine Chapel. Its images constitute some of the earliest sacred art from Egypt, prefiguring the classic imagery of pharaonic religion by as much as a thousand years. Like their sculpture-loving counterparts at Nabta Playa, the prehistoric artists of the Eastern Desert seem also to have been cattle herders, and pictures of their livestock—and the wild animals they hunted out on the savanna—feature heavily in their compositions. But instead of using megaliths to signify their deepest beliefs, they exploited the smooth cliff faces offered by their own environment, turning them into canvases for religious expression. Gods traveling in sacred boats, and ritual hunts of wild animals, are key themes in the pharaonic iconography first attested in the Eastern Desert rock art. The inaccessible and inhospitable character of the region today belies its pivotal role in the rise of ancient Egypt.
GATHERING SPEED
ONGOING SURVEY AND EXCAVATION AT SITES ACROSS THE WESTERN and Eastern deserts is revealing a pattern of close interaction between desert and valley peoples in prehistory. Rather unexpectedly, the semi-nomadic cattle herders who roamed across the prehistoric savanna seem to have been more advanced than their valley-dwelling contemporaries. But in a lesson for our own times, the cattle herders’ vibrant way of life was made extinct by environmental change. Beginning in about 5000, the climate of northeast Africa began to undergo a marked shift. The once predictable summer rains that for millennia had provided cattle herders with seasonal pasture away from the Nile became steadily less reliable. Over a period of a few centuries, the rain belt moved progressively southward. (Today the rains, when they fall at all, fall over the highlands of Ethiopia.) The savannas to the east and west of the Nile began to dry out and turn to desert. After little more than a few generations, the desiccated land was no longer able to support thirsty herds of cattle. For the herders, the alternative to starvation was migration—to the only permanent water source in the region, the Nile Valley.
Here, the earliest settled communities, along the edge of the floodplain, had been established in the early fifth millennium B.C., broadly contemporary with the megalith builders of Nabta Playa. Like the cattle herders, the valley dwellers had also been practicing agriculture, but in contrast to the seasonality of rainfall in the arid regions, the regime of the Nile had made it possible to grow crops year-round. This would have given the valley dwellers the incentive and the wherewithal to occupy their villages on a permanent basis. The way of life the valley dwellers developed is known to Egyptologists as the Badarian culture, after the site of el-Badari, where this lifestyle was first recorded. The local vicinity was ideally suited to early habitation, with the juxtaposition of different ecosystems—floodplain and savanna—and excellent links to a wider hinterland. Desert routes led westward to the oases, while a major wadi ran eastward to the Red Sea coast. It was through these avenues that the Badarian way of life was strongly influenced by the early desert cultures.
One such influence, an interest in personal adornment, stayed with the ancient Egyptians throughout their history. Another development with long-term ramifications was the gradual stratification of society into leaders and followers, a small ruling class and a larger group of subjects. This was a system that owed much to the challenging lifestyle faced by pastoral seminomads. These external stimuli and internal dynamics began to transform Badarian society. Over many centuries, gradual changes took root and began to accelerate. The rich grew richer and began to act as patrons to a new class of specialist craftsmen. They, in turn, developed new technologies and new products to satisfy their patrons’ ever more sophisticated tastes. The introduction of restricted access to prestige goods and materials further reinforced the power and status of the wealthiest in society.
The process of social transformation, once started, could not be stopped. Culturally, economically, and politically, prehistoric society became increasingly complex. Egypt was set on a course toward statehood. The final drying-out of the deserts around 3600 must have injected further momentum into this process. A sudden increase in population—when those living in the deserts migrated to the valley—may have led to greater competition for scarce resources, encouraging the development of walled towns. More mouths to feed would also have stimulated more productive agriculture. Urbanization and the intensification of farming were responses to social change but were also a stimulus to further change.
Under such conditions, communities in Upper Egypt began to coalesce into three regional groupings, each probably ruled by a hereditary monarch. Strategic factors help to explain the early dominance of these three prehistoric kingdoms. One kingdom was centered on the town of Tjeni (near modern Girga), a site where the floodplain narrowed and allowed the town’s inhabitants to control river traffic. This area was also where trade routes from
Nubia and the Saharan oases met the Nile Valley. A second territory had its capital at Nubt (“the golden,” modern Nagada), which controlled access to gold mines in the Eastern Desert via the Wadi Hammamat, on the opposite bank of the river. A third kingdom had grown up around the settlement of Nekhen, which, like Tjeni, was the starting point for a desert route to the oases (and thence to Sudan) and, like Nubt, controlled access to important Eastern Desert gold reserves, in this case the more southerly deposits reached via a wadi directly opposite the town.
The rulers of these three territories did what all aspiring leaders do: they sought to demonstrate and enhance their authority by political, ideological, and economic means. Their unquenchable thirst for rare and valuable objects, whether gold and precious stones from the deserts of Egypt or exotic imports from far-off lands (such as olive oil from the Near East and lapis lazuli from Afghanistan), stimulated internal and external trade. The authority to remove such items permanently from circulation was a particularly powerful statement of wealth and privilege, so the burials of the elite became increasingly elaborate and richly furnished, building upon a tradition of grave goods that stretched back to Badarian times. The development in all three territories of special burial grounds, set aside for the local ruling class, is a sure sign of strongly hierarchical societies. With three kingdoms vying for dominance, the inevitable clash was not long in coming.
The precise train of events is hazy, for this was an era before written texts. However, by comparing the size and magnificence of tombs in the three localities, we can get some indication of who was winning the battle for supremacy. Certainly, the burials at Nekhen and Abdju (classical and modern Abydos, the necropolis serving the town of Tjeni) outstrip their counterparts at Nubt. The later reverence shown to Nekhen and Abdju by Narmer and his successors—in contrast to their relative lack of interest in Nubt—points in the same direction.
An intriguing recent discovery, once again in the Western Desert, may even record the moment at which Tjeni eclipsed Nubt. The desert between Abdju and Nubt is crisscrossed by tracks, many of which have been in use for thousands of years. These overland paths happened to offer a quicker, more direct route than the river, because of the wide bend the Nile describes at this point in its course. Next to the principal route between Abdju and Nubt, a rock-cut tableau seems to record a victory by the prehistoric ruler of Tjeni, perhaps against his rival. Winning control of the desert routes certainly would have given Tjeni a decisive strategic advantage, allowing it to outflank its neighbor and cut it off from access to trade with areas farther south.
It can be no coincidence that, during exactly the same period, a ruler of Tjeni built the largest tomb of its time anywhere in Egypt, in the elite cemetery at Abdju. The tomb was designed to resemble a miniature palace, and its unparalleled size and contents—which included an ivory scepter and a cellar of the finest imported wine—mark it out as a true kingly burial. Furthermore, its owner was clearly a ruler whose economic influence spread far beyond his Nile Valley homeland. Among the most remarkable finds from the tomb were hundreds of small bone labels, each inscribed with a few hieroglyphic signs. Each label was once attached, by means of a cord, to a box or jar of supplies for the royal tomb. The inscriptions record the quantity, nature, provenance, or ownership of the contents, demonstrating—from the very dawn of writing—the ancient Egyptians’ predilection for record keeping. Not only are these labels the earliest Egyptian writing yet discovered, but the places they mention as the sources of commodities include the shrine of Djebaut (in modern Tell el-Fara‘in) and the town of Bast (modern Tell Basta) in the Nile delta, hundreds of miles north of Abdju. The ruler of Tjeni who built this impressive sepulchre was well on the way to becoming the king of all Egypt.
One monarch ruling from Tjeni with control over the Nile delta, another based at Nekhen with access to sub-Saharan trade: there were now just two players left in the game. It is frustrating that there is virtually no evidence for the last phase of the struggle, but the preponderance of martial motifs on decorated ceremonial objects from the period, and the construction at Nubt and Nekhen of massive town walls, strongly suggests that military conflict was involved. So does the incidence of cranial injuries among the late predynastic population of Nekhen.
The final outcome was certainly clear-cut. When the dust settled, it was the line of kings of Tjeni that claimed victory. Their control of two-thirds of the country, combined with access to seaports and to the lucrative trade with parts of the Near East (modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine), proved decisive. Around 2950 B.C., after nearly two centuries of competition and conflict, a ruler of Tjeni assumed the kingship of a united Egypt—the man known to us as Narmer. To symbolize his conquest of the delta—perhaps the final battle in the war of unification—he commissioned a magnificent ceremonial palette, decorated with scenes of triumph. In a gesture of homage to his erstwhile rivals (or perhaps to rub salt into their wounds), he dedicated the object in the temple at Nekhen … where it lay until its retrieval from the mud 4,900 years later.
GIFT OF THE NILE
GIVEN THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND SCHOLARLY EFFORT INVOLVED IN rediscovering Narmer, it is humbling to acknowledge that his relatively recent identification as the first king of ancient Egypt merely confirms the account given by the Greek historian Herodotus, writing twenty-four centuries ago. For the father of history, there was no doubt that Menes (another name for Narmer) had founded the Egyptian state. It is a salutary lesson that the ancients were often far cleverer than we give them credit for. Herodotus also made another fundamental observation about Egypt, which still captures the essential truth about the country and its civilization: “Egypt is the gift of the Nile.”1 Flowing through the Sahara, the Nile makes life possible where otherwise there would be none. The Nile Valley is a linear oasis, a narrow strip of green hemmed in on either side by a vast and arid desert, boundless and bare. The rise of ancient Egypt is to be traced as much in the river and its character as in the archaeology of graves, rock pictures, and megaliths.
The environment of the Nile Valley has always had a profound effect on its inhabitants. The river molds not only the physical landscape, but also the way in which the Egyptians think about themselves and their place in the world. The landscape has influenced their habits and customs, and from an early period it imprinted itself upon their collective psyche, shaping over the course of generations their most fundamental philosophical and religious beliefs. The symbolic force of the Nile is a thread that runs through pharaonic civilization, starting with the Egyptians’ myth of their own origins.
According to the most ancient account of how the universe was formed, in the beginning there was nothing but a watery chaos, personified as the god Nun: “The great god who creates himself: he is water, he is Nun, father of the gods.”2 A later version of the creation myth described the primeval waters as negative and frightening, the embodiment of limitlessness, hiddenness, darkness, and formlessness. Yet despite being lifeless, the waters of Nun nevertheless held the potential for life. Although chaotic, they held within them the possibility of created order. This belief in the coexistence of opposites was characteristic of the ancient Egyptian mind-set, and was deeply rooted in their distinctive geographical surroundings. This view was reflected in the contrast between the arid desert and the fertile floodplain, and in the river itself, for the Nile could both create life and destroy it—a paradox inherent in its peculiar regime.
Until the construction of the Aswan Dam in the early twentieth century A.D. and its larger twin, the Aswan High Dam, in the 1960s, the Nile performed an annual miracle. The summer rains falling over the Ethiopian highlands swelled the Blue Nile—one of two great tributaries that join to form the Egyptian Nile—sending a torrent of water downstream (in this case, north). By early August, the approaching inundation was clearly discernible in the far south of Egypt, both from the turbulent sound of the floodwaters and from a noticeable rise in the river level. A few days later, the flood arr
ived in earnest. With an unstoppable force, the Nile burst its banks, and the waters spread out over the floodplain. The sheer volume of the flood caused the phenomenon to be repeated along the entire length of the Nile Valley. For several weeks, all the cultivable land was underwater. But as well as destruction the inundation brought with it the potential for new life: a layer of fertile silt deposited by the floodwaters over the fields, and the water itself. Once the flood retreated, the soil emerged again, fertilized and irrigated, ready for the sowing of crops. It was thanks to this annual phenomenon that Egypt enjoyed such productive agriculture—when the Nile flood was sufficient but not too powerful. Deviations from the norm, both “low Niles” and “high Niles,” could prove equally catastrophic, leaving crops to desiccate with insufficient water or drown in waterlogged fields. Fortunately, in most years the inundation was moderate and the harvest bountiful, providing a surplus beyond the immediate subsistence needs of the population and allowing a complex civilization to develop.
In fact, Egypt was doubly blessed by its geography. Not only did the river bring the annual miracle of the inundation, but the river’s shaping of the valley’s topography also proved highly beneficial to agriculture. In cross section, the Nile Valley is slightly convex, with the highest land lying immediately next to the river—the remnants of old levees—and lower-lying areas located at the edges of the floodplain. This made the valley especially suitable for irrigation, both by the natural floodwaters and by artificial means, since water would automatically come to rest, and remain longest, in the fields farthest from the riverbank—potentially the very areas most prone to drought. Moreover, the long, narrow floodplain naturally divides into a series of flood basins, each compact enough to be managed and cultivated with relative ease by the local population. This was an important factor in the consolidation of early kingdoms, such as those based at Tjeni, Nubt, and Nekhen.
The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt Page 3
