Egypt

One of the secrets of Egypt is the River Nile. The Greek historian Herodotus said that Egypt is the gift of the Nile and until modern times, when the river was tamed by the building of the Aswan Dam, the Nile flooded every year covering the fertile land along its banks, and when the flood receded it left behind the rich silt which enabled abundant crops to be cultivated.

It was not always like this. In the Ice Age, when tundra covered Europe, the rain-bearing air streams of the Gulf Stream were forced south and the rains fell over North Africa and the Sahara was a rich grassland covered with animals. At the end of the Ice Age the rains moved north and the Sahara gradually became a desert and it is only in the narrow valley of the Nile that fertility continued and those living along it could live a rich and easy life.

In fact Egypt was rather late in benefiting from the agricultural revolution. It was the land of Mesopotamia and around the East Mediterranean which saw the growth of the first agricultural villages and indeed even towns, but it was not until rather after 5000 BC that the new farming way of life began in Egypt. At first there were only small villages, but by around 3,500 the pace began to accelerate, and in upper Egypt that is around modern Luxor around 500 miles south of Cairo, a number of major settlements began to emerge. At three of these, Hierakonpolis, Naqada and Thinis, some tombs began to be bigger and richer than others: of a more complex ‘stratified’ society began to emerge.

Unification

Then in the years leading up to 3000 BC, the pace began to change very rapidly. The three princedoms merged into one, and then the whole country was unified: the long Nile valley - known as Upper Egypt, was joined with the fertile Nile Delta- known as Lower Egypt, in a single kingdom, under a king known as the Pharaoh, and the world’s first mega-state was born.

What were the reasons for this? And why, once founded, did this Egyptian state prove so long-lived, maintaining its traditions for over 3,000 years? The Nile was marvellously fertile, and this led to co-operation. Given even a modest level of organisation, a huge surplus could be produced over and above what was needed to live, and this in itself encouraged the emergence of rulers to ensure the necessary co-operation. This did not indeed need to be very large scale. It is often said that a unified kingdom was needed to control the Nile floods; yet it appears that control of the canalisation was always local - this was an aspect of life where the Pharaoh did not interfere.

More potent perhaps was the fear of famine. Should the inundation fail - and this happened occasionally - then starvation ensued. It was best to build up reserves, perhaps for several years, and a powerful ruler could organise this. This in turn led to the heart of the Egyptian economy, the system of ‘redistribution’ where everyone contributed a proportion of their harvest to the rulers, who in turn redistributed it in times of famine, or more frequently as past of great feast to celebrate the bounty of the rulers - and thus build up their power.

Living together in towns and villages also enabled a certain amount of specialisation to take place - grain could be brewed into beer, grapes could be turned into wine, tallow for candles could be extracted for animal fats, linen could be worked, baskets could be woven. But the really big advantage of building up a petty chief into a major king was security The greatest danger was that of conflict with one’s neighbours and if this could be eliminated, prosperity would be ensured, and it was this fear of ‘unrule’ that kept the Egyptian state together.

With the unification of the two halves of Egypt, a new ‘capital’ was established at Memphis. This lies at the base of the delta on the border between ‘Upper’ and ‘Lower’ Egypt, thus signifying the unification of the two halves of the country. Today it is just 10 miles south of Cairo which enjoys the same benefits of its situation at the root of the Nile delta. And it was from there that the first and indeed the most grandiose of all the great Egyptian constructions took place - the building of the pyramids.

The building of the major pyramids all took place within a short period of little more than 200 years, and all were built on the west bank of the Nile, out in the desert, in a strip of little more than 20 miles from north to south.

The earliest - the triumphal prototype of all other pyramids was the Step Pyramid, build by the Pharaoh Zoser at Sakkara, just opposite the capital of Memphis.

Then came the great experimental period, when no less than three pyramids were built by the same Pharaoh, Sneferu, Zoser’s successor. The first was built at Meidum, on what proved to be the southernmost of all the main pyramids. This turned out to be a failure, and today it survives as a central core, surrounded rising from a huge heap of rubble.

He then moved up to Dahshur, in the central zone, and built a second pyramid, today knows as the Bent Pyramid. He began by building it at far too steep an angle, but half way through, he realised his error and completed it at a lesser angle. He then went on to build a third pyramid, adjacent to it, known as the Red Pyramid, which was the first true pyramid, and became the model for all subsequent pyramids.

Then came the ‘Great’ Pyramid. The next Pharaoh, Khufu, on what turned out to be the northern extremity of the pyramid strip, on a low plateau at Giza, today immediately opposite the modern city of Cairo. The hill was well chosen, for the solid limestone both provided a firm and flawless foundation, and also at the side an excellent quarry from which the most of the stones of the pyramids could be quarried. This turned out to be the greatest pyramid of all; his successor, Khafre, built a second pyramid, almost as large, adjacent to it, while his successor, Menkaure, built the third royal pyramid at Giza, the smallest of the three, though being on slightly higher ground, it appears bigger than it really is.

This orgy of pyramid building, and the huge amount of stone quarrying and stone moving that it entailed, exhausted Egypt, and never again was a pyramid built on such a scale. At the end of the 6th dynasty, in 2,150, the unity of Egypt was threatened, and we enter the first of the two intermediate periods, - Dark ages when the king lists become jumbled and confused. Then a century later, the middle kingdom was re-established, but this too is followed by the second intermediate period, when - horror of horrors - Egypt was ruled by a foreign dynasty, known as the Hyksos.

The second great period of Egyptian history began in 1550, when the Hyksos were ejected by a new dynasty from Thebes, that is modern Luxor, and as a result the monuments of this second ‘new’ Kingdom are centred round Luxor. By this time fashions had changed. Pyramids were out, and instead the Pharaohs were buried in shaft graves cut into the hillside. At Luxor the Nile takes a vast bend to cut through a low range of hills, and these hills, on the west form a magnificent backdrop to the monuments. The site chosen for the royal burials was in an otherwise insignificant side valley, known as the Valley of the Kings, and it is here that all the later Pharaohs were buried. The most famous of all today was the most insignificant in his lifetime - Tutankhamun who was so insignificant the entrance to his tomb was buried under the entrance works to one of his successors, and therefore buried, - only to be rediscovered by Howard Carter in 1923 - almost intact, with a marvellous collection of treasures that today occupy room after room after room in the museum at Cairo.

However by this time the emphasis was shifting, from tomb to temple. Almost from the beginning, the tombs or pyramids up on the high ground were accompanied by a temple in the galley, on the edge of the fertile land. At Thebes this was taken to the extreme, and the great pharaohs vied each other to build magnificent temples at the foot of the hills, overlooking the river.

The greatest of all is that Ramesses II, the greatest Pharaoh of the new kingdom who reigned for 60 years and extended Egyptian rule almost ot the borders of modern Turkey. The temple he built - the Ramesseum is the most magnificent of all. It is best known from the poem of Byron on Osimandias ( A corruption of the Greek name of Rameses) ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert’. They are certainly not in the desert, - they are in the middle of a temple, but they are certainly vast as our photo of one of the hands shows. What is of particular interest however is that the temple is surrounded by acres of warehouses and granaries - sufficient it has been calculated to provision a town of 20,000 inhabitants for a year. It reminds us that these temples were not just places of ritual and cult but also performed a very major economic function as the places where the Pharaohs gathered in their dues and were able to redistribute their largess to the people.

However the greatest temples of all were not the funerary temples on the west bank of the Nile but the two great temples on the East Bank where the ancient Egyptians had their major town. One in the town of Thebes itself and another just a mile away at Karnak linked to the town centre by an avenue of sphinxes and which today is second only to the pyramids as a second marvel of ancient Egypt.

What was life like for the ordinary Egyptian? Outside all the tombs and temples there is little to see of dwellings in ancient Egypt. There are several workman’s villages built to house the workers building the various temples laid out in rows and rows of identical dwellings. There is also the new town built by the heretic Pharaoh Akenaten at Tel el Amarna also a very utilitarian place. But the great granaries surrounding the temples remind us of the essential economic foundations of Ancient Egypt. It was a redistribution economy where a proportion of all produce was dedicated to the Pharaohs and later re-distributed either directly or as secondary produce. They never made the change to money and the market economy. Certainly towards the end of the Middle Kingdom there is increasing evidence that bronze and bronze equivalents were being used to provide equivalent values of different goods, but the essential change-over to money was never made. The Egyptians, in spite of all their magnificence remained barbarians, - even if the best example of a ‘higher’ barbarism.

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