The Emergence of Egyptian Civilization
Few civilizations in ancient history fascinate us as much as that of ancient Egypt. Running along the Nile River up to the very mouth of Africa, it was the world’s earliest recorded empire and exerted a cultural influencing reaching as far afield as Europe. But how did this most famous of African kingdoms come to be? As is always the case with great civilizations, it evolved from humble roots over the course of millennia, and yet it became one unified force under the leadership of one mighty leader, the first Pharaoh.
Starting around 8500 BC, Africa’s tropical rain belt expanded northward until it covered the Sahara Desert. With this new supply of annual rainfall, what was once a dry and barren wasteland blossomed into a grassy savanna like we associated with regions further south today. Naturally all this extended pasture invited not only a whole menagerie of the continent’s wildlife into the region, but also a diverse array of African peoples. Some of these migrants would have been related to West Africans, and by proxy today’s African-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans, whereas others would be ancestral to the Sudanese, Ethiopians, and other Northeast Africans. And among these latter would have been the ancestors of the ancient Egyptian and Nubian peoples.
Following these waves of colonization would develop a variety of cultures with distinct lifestyles. Some would have set up villages alongside rivers or newly filled lakes and waterholes, fishing, crafting pottery for storing materials, and harvesting grains of grasses for food; others would have roamed the plains as nomads hunting the wildlife or herding early cattle. What all of them shared in common was the propensity for recording their beliefs and way of life on rocks and cave walls. To this day, their paintings and engravings can be found scattered across the Sahara, providing a glimpse into the lives of these Africans who lived thousands of years ago.
And in the case of those artworks found closer to the Nile basin, some of their themes echo those found in historical Egyptian texts. One example is can be found in the caves of Wadi Sura in Egypt’s far southwest, which portray scenes uncannily like those described in Egyptian religious texts. There are images of people “swimming” in water much like the primordial waters of Nun in Egyptian belief, as well as monstrous creatures believed to have inhabited the Egyptian underworld. Elsewhere in southernmost Egypt, in the area called Nabta Playa, there appears to have thrived a cult of sacrificing and burying cattle, a practice observed both by historical Egyptians and many South Sudanese societies to this day. Notably they buried those cattle in stone-roofed chambers, a possible precedent to the country’s famous tombs.
For all the different cultures it supported, the Sahara’s savanna phase would not last forever. Some time before 5000 BC, the rains began to falter over the years during a period of climatic cooling. The people and their herds needed to migrate back towards permanent sources of water, including the Nile River. As their traditional pastures reverted to desert, the people congregating along the Nile had to adopt a new lifestyle better suited to the Nile Valley’s constraints. Their solution was plant cultivation. At first a minor supplement to their cattle-herding economy, growing crops on the fertile Nile floodplains increased in importance until it provided the staples of the people’s diet. And with this developed a more stationary society of permanent villages, thus sowing in the seeds of a more urban civilization.
By 3500 BC, the settlements along the Nile were merging into a number of larger chiefdoms sharing certain cultural traits. For our convenience, we can sort all these communities into three cultural areas. In the Nile Delta to the north, known as Lower Egypt for its downriver position, there developed the so-called Maadian cultures. Although they had copper tools and maintained close trade relations with Middle Eastern civilizations, the Maadian societies appear to have remained small-scale and egalitarian, with villages of simple huts and few goods buried with their dead. It was in the country’s southern half, known as Upper Egypt, and in northern (or Lower) Nubia where larger and more organized settlements blossomed
In these latter two areas appears the Nile Basin’s first evidence of hereditary monarchs, whom we can consider prototypes for the historic Pharaohs. Already they were promoting themselves as powerful leaders and formidable warriors; even mundane objects like incense burners or cosmetic palettes would have their insignia inscribed into their surfaces. To further emphasize their regal status, these proto-Pharaohs would commission great mudbrick palaces as well as royal tombs (mastabas) where they would be buried with their families, servants, and cattle. One of these chiefdoms, known as Hierakonpolis in Upper Egypt, even featured a royal menagerie with elephants and other African wildlife!
Inevitably such pampered chieftains would have grown up with king-sized egos which didn’t take kindly to like-minded competition. And indeed there is an abundance of imagery from this period depicting warfare between the Nile peoples, with kings smiting their tribal adversaries with maces. Between 3400 and 3200 BC, some of the most formidable warrior-kings would have come from Ta-Seti in Lower Nubia, whose artistic documents mention victories and possibly even a temporary conquest of the Upper Egyptians. But the growing Egyptian chiefdoms had plenty of fighting and conquering to do amongst themselves. Ending this state of regional turbulence would require bringing all these tribes under one chieftain’s mace-wielding fist. And in the end, that chieftain would be a man named Narmer.
Narmer, also remembered as Menes, was a king of Thinis in Upper Egypt who lived around 3100 BC. Already his predecessors had conquered several neighboring chiefdoms in Upper Egypt, but Narmer’s great achievement was not only to seize control of the whole region, but to march north and conquer Lower Egypt. This marked the end of Lower Egypt’s distinctive culture, replacing it with one drawn from Upper Egypt, and became known as the unification of Egypt’s “Two Lands”. Therefore most historians have declared this the founding point of dynastic Egypt proper, with Narmer as the first Pharaoh to rule the country’s entire length. Perhaps as a symbol of his achievement, Narmer is said to have established a new capital in Memphis, near modern Cairo, at the border point between Upper and Lower Egypt. And thereby the world’s first nation-state was born.
Even after their conquest of Lower Egypt, the first dynasty of the greater Egyptian nation was not finished with military affairs. They still needed to protect their territories from rival kingdoms, not least their old enemy Ta-Seti in Lower Nubia. But with a much larger population under their control, the Egyptian rulers could at last rally an army capable of crushing their former conquerors. Shortly after Narmer’s son Aha inherited his throne, he appears to have finished a brutal retribution against Ta-Seti that shattered its power into shreds. It would not be for several more centuries that Lower Nubia would pose a serious threat to Egypt.
But the Egyptians did not limit their aggression to other African peoples. They also expanded their sphere of influence all the way north into the Middle East, establishing outposts along the Levantine coast. To be sure, there is evidence of commerce between them and the natives in this area; Egyptian pottery dating to the First Dynasty has been recovered from southern Israel, whereas Egypt in turn would import cedar wood all the way from Lebanon. But there are still numerous inscriptions from the early Egyptian dynasties that mention fighting against Middle Eastern enemies in Sinai and Israel. And throughout their whole history, the Egyptians would always stereotype Middle Easterners as vile and craven wretches, even giving them the racial slur “sand-dwellers”. Even if they were willing to trade with those strange and exotic people, they never let that get in the way of a consistently ethnocentric worldview.
Not all the developments of the earliest Egyptian dynasties were so violent. Also credited to Narmer and his dynasty was the invention of Egypt’s distinctive hieroglyphic writing. By and large this script would have drawn from the Egyptians’ pre-existing artistic traditions, with all their wildlife and human figures. But of course the development of writing would have benefitted the administration of a much larger domain than any Egyptian chief would have controlled before. Whether or not Narmer himself was responsible for Egyptian writing, it would evolve into multiple forms which ultimately influenced Middle Eastern scripts such as Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek — -the last of which inspired our own modern Latin script!
Of course, the Egyptians are best known for the monumental scale of their architecture. Although the construction of the pyramids would not begin until three dynasties after Narmer, he still took advantage of his enlarged labor force. As the Greek historian Herodotus cited from Egyptian traditions, Narmer once managed to protect Memphis from flooding by setting up levees diverting the Nile’s course away from his new capital. And like their tribal predecessors in Upper Egypt, Narmer’s dynasty continued the tradition of erecting royal tombs in the form of mastabas. These structures were actually the antecedents of pyramids; by stacking up mastabas on top of one another in a peaked form, the Egyptians developed the stepped pyramid shape beginning in the third dynasty under Pharaoh Djoser.
Still, compared to their descendents in later Egyptian history, the very first dynasties might have seemed humble and primitive. But all empires have humble beginnings, and the one Narmer carved out was the very first to enter recorded history. By melding what were once squabbling tribes into the world’s first nation-state, Narmer spread the foundation for one of the mightiest, most influential, and best-known civilizations both in Africa and the ancient world at large.
