YOUR INTRODUCTION TO ANCIENT EGYPT
MORE THAN 10,000 YEARS AGO, man the hunter followed his prey out of the dying grasslands of northeast Africa and made the marshy banks of the Nile his camp. Out of that ancient confrontation of man and river grew one of Earth's first great civilizations.
The story of early civilization in Egypt, and of its decline and fall, is a tale of farmers and Pharaohs, potsherds and pyramids, temples and tombs and untiring scholarship; a story of conquests and conspiracies, of priests and gods and the minarets of Islam. It is all these things encompassed in the sweep of the larger epic – often stately, sometimes chaotic, but always in motion – of a river and a people who wrested greatness from its narrow valley.
NILE FLOOD NRTURES LAND. The Nile valley north of the Sudan rests in the hot sands of Egypt and nubia like a fragil green stem supporting its blossom, the Delta. The Nile is the only conqueror of the Sahara. It is the sole source of life and the chief artery of movement for the people of the lands it traverses.
The river is born of the union of two main branches. The turbulent Blue Nile cascasdes from the Ethiopian highlands and intrudes upon the serene northward flow of the White Nile at Khartoum. There, the stronger single stream, soon bolstered by its only tributary, the Atbara, begins its passage through the desolation of Nubia. In this barren land the even flow of the river is six times distrubed by natural barriers of crystalline rock that create the Nile's cataracts.
At each such barrier the river gorge narrows, and the stream roars over glistening black rock before resuming its normal pace. Five cataracts downstream from Khartoum, just south of the present Sudan-United Arab Republic border, the river eddies into Lower Nubia. Two hundred miles farther, at the First Cataract ( the writers of geography numbered them as they encountered them, north ot south), the Nile crosses the last bed of granite and enters Upper Egypt. Here, the desert that hugged the Nubian Nile so closely in its upper reaches begins to relax it strangle hold. The sere escarpments fall back from the river bed, but are never more than thirteen miles from each other across the thread of water.
Each year, from June to October, a Nile swollen by Ethiopian rains and dark with Ethiopian soil floods this broadened valley, renews it with fresh deposits, and recedes. This is the pulsebeat of Egypt, and the caprice of the river can spell feast or famine for the land. The Nile, in the main, has been kind. The flat land here, and the Faiyam depression, the bud on the Nile stem, are rich with silt and green with life – foresunners of the incredibly fertile heartland of Lower Egypt, the moist and often marshy Delta. Aptly did the early Egyptians call their domain “the black land.”
The seed of civilization sprouted in the black land around 5000 B.C. in the guise of domestic barley. Man the cutivator took the first step of a twenty-century march that led to the dazzling Egypt of history. While the nile rose and subsided 2,000 times, its people progressed in the characteristic slow motion of man's early history, where giant steps are perceptible only in retrospect. The stages in its evolution – Tasian, Badarian, Amratian, and Gerzean –are tags derived from the names of archeological sites, each of which epitomizes a step in Egypt's advance.
Neolithic farming villages, typified by Deir Tasa and El Badari, became cities, then city-states of a distinctly Egyptian character. Experiment, improvisation, and invention, stimulated by an increasing foreign trade in goods and ideas, were the substance of Egypt's prehistory. Metal as added to stone, clay, ivory, and wood as raw material for the imagination; and as decoration began to vie with utlity, minor crafts became major art.
By 3500 B.C. the city-states of the Nile had combined into separate kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt, which faced each other in uneasy coexistence. The carved slate palettes and ivory knife handles of the period bear elaborate symbolic scenes of kings, battles, cities, and captives – glimpses of the time. These scenes are labeled with short sequences of tiny pictures: Egypt's first hieroglyphs. With them, Egypt could at least record the turbulent history it was making.
The story of Egypt has had a host of tellers. Many writers of classical antiquity knew the land of the Pharaohs in its fltering old age; some visited it. The Greek writer Herodotus, whom Cicero called the “father of history,” was the first tourist to describe Egypt. His anecdotal account paints vivid picture of the land in the 5th century B.C. Two hundred years later, Manetho, a priest of the Nile Delta, compiled a chronicle of Egypt's kings, listing the 30 basic dynasties that spanned history from the first Pharaoh to the decade before Alexander the Great.
In 1822 Jean-Francois Champollion stunned the scholarly world by deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. With this breakthrough, the science of Egyptology was born. Exactly 100 years later Lord Carnarvon and archelologist Howard Carter gazed through a newly pierced wall into the incredibly splendid tomb of the young Pharaoh Tutankhamun. Today, carbon-14 dating and other scientific techniques of the Atomic Age give scholars new tools with which to reconstruct early life along the Nile.
WARRIOR KING RULED AS FIRST PHARAOH. According to Herodotus and Manetho, Egypt's national history began when Menes, the first Pharaoh, united the Upper and Lower Kingdoms of late prehistory. Egyptologists place the date at 3100 B.C., and cautiously identify Menes as Narmer, the conquering warrior figure on the slate palette found at Hieracongpolis in 1898. Little is known of the immediate successors of Menes. The first two dynasties, tradition says, came from the city of This, or Thinis, and ruled from Memphis, the fortified captial built by Menes on land reclaimed by diverting the course of the Nile. After this so-called Protodynastic Period, which lasted about 400 years. The Pharaohs were to guide Egypt through three distinct eras of prosperity, the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms.
In 2650 B.C., the Pharaoh Djoser embarked upon his afterlife in a unique step pyramid that rose from the sand to dominated all the tombs of his predecessors; with this monument of the Old Kingdom, or the age of pyramids, had come into being. This first period of Egypt's greatness endured for 500 years, an era of total royal power wielded by the god-kings of Memphis.
The former stateliness of Memphis and the mood of its time are suggested in the surviving majesty of the city's necropolis, which extended from Saqqara north to Abu Rawash and south to Maidum. The art of the pyramid culminated in the three simple and symmetrical structures still to be seen on the desert edge at Giza. They have stood in inanimate dominion over the sands for 4,500 years – an expression of the eternity sought by their builders.
The centralized power of Memphis fell in 2160 B.C. In the confusion, Egypt divided. The IXth and Xth Dynasties, the kings of Heracleopolis, ruled the Delta and valley north of Abydos, while the princes of a hitherto insignificant town. Thebes, rose to lead the rebellious district to the south. Around 2040 B.C. the balance shifted. Theban strength prevailed, and Egypt was precariously united. Soon a worried Pharaoh, Amenemhet I, moved his capital from Thebes northward to Ittowy, a city somewhere in the more strategic area near Memphis. Prosperity returned to the land.
During the Middle Kingdom, the god-kings of the Nile became slightly more human: the power of the Pharaoh derived more from ability than godhood. The royal pyramids became smaller, and tombs of nobles and mour officials grew more elaborate. A secure Egypt, guarded on the south by the massive system of defensive fortresses along the Batn el Hagar, just above the Second Cataract, traded far beyond its borders; Lebanon, Sinai, and distant Punt sent exotic woods, gold, slaves, and other luxuries demanded by the dynamic riverside civilization.
In 1786 B.C. the first horse-drawn war chariots rolled into the Delta, bringing Asiatic nomads whose bronze weapons dealt the middle Kingdom its fatal blow. These Hyksos invaders rulled Egypt from the city of hatwaret, or Avaris, probably Tnis, in the eastern Delta. But in time the Egyptians, reinforced by the very weapons that had subugated them, rose under Ahmose I of Theves to expel the invaders in 1567 B.C.
THEBES – ZENITH OF EMPIRE. The essence of Egypt's 500-year Age of Emprire, the New Kingdom, is frozen in the surviving grandeur of the ruins of Thebes. Here, on a broad plain bisected by the Nile, Pharaohs built monuments that have staggered the imagination of every succeeding generation. Even Homer knew of the place:
Where, in Egyptian Thebes, the heaps of precious ingots gleam,
The hundred-gated Thebes, where twice ten score in martial state
Of valiant men with steeds and cars march through each massy gate.
The kings of Thebes ruled amid the glory of the living city on the east bank; they completed their earthly journeys in the Valley of the Kings, just over the opalescent hills that rise behind the mortuary temples of the City of the Dead on the west bank. These were Egypt's mightiest rulers: Thutmosis I, first conqueror of all Nubia and the lands northeast as far as Syria; the female Pharaoh Hatshepsut; Thutmosis III, under whom the empire reached its greatest extent; Amenophis II, “the Magnificent,” stabilizer of the prosperous empire; and Ramesses II, the greatest builder of antiquity.
The golden age of the Egyptian Empire wavered only once. The XVIIIth Dynasty Pharaoh Amenophis IV changed his name to Akhenaten, founded a new capital, Akhetaten, 240 miles north of Thebes, and initiated a short-lived religious reformation based on the worship of one god, the Aten, or sun's disk. In his zealous preoccupation, Akhenaten neglected the foreign affairs of Egypt and lost many of the conquests of his predecessors. Upon the death of this heretic king, Horemheb and the first Ramessides restored the supremacy.
Eleven centuries before the birth of Christ, the Egypt of the Pharaohs faltered for the lst time and slipped into a 1,000-year decline. Weakened and dying, the country lay vulneralbe to the rapid succession of lien empires nd faiths that boiled out of the neighboring lands.
In the 8th centiry B.C., Upper Nubia, an unruly stepchild continually dominated and exploited by generations of Pharaohs, spawned a dynasty of kings who marched north with their armies, laid siege to the stongholds of Egypt, and became Pharaohs themselves. Assyrians, invading the Delta in 660 B.C., forced these Nubians back to the Land of Kush and their capital, Napata, near the Fourth Cataract.
FOREIGN FORCES DESTROYED EMPIRE. The egypt of old rose only once to cry out against the humiliating tug of war that racked its dying empire. The rulers of the XXVIth Dynasty at Sais ousted the Assyrians and initiated a brilliant but brief renaissance of the arts, strong native rule, and public prosperity that ended when the Persian armies invaded in 525 B.C. Two centuries later, Alexander the Great included Egypt in his conquered world and left it to be ruled by his general Ptolemy I. With the death of Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies, in 30 B.C., the Empire of the Nile perished.
After Cleopatra, alien cultures continued to invade the valley like Nile floods. Each left its mark and withdrew. Romans put the southern boundary of their Egyptian province at El Maharraqa and fortified Qasr Ibrim against the increasingly belligerent rulers of distant Kush. Around A.D. 300, the Emperor Diocletian invited a desert tribe, the Nobatae, to occupy Nubia and safeguard Egypt's troubled frontier.
Christianity had inflitrated Roman Egypt by the fourth century; in the sixth, the Nobatae were converted, and Nubia's highest level of development became manifest in the Christian kingdoms of the Nubian Nile.
Toward the middle of the seventh century Islam engulfed the Mediterranean world. Christian, or Coptic, Egypt fell in 640, and Arabs built their first Egyptian capital, El Fustat, within sight of the Pyramids of Giza. Christian Nubia held off total Moslem conquest until the 16th century.
Egypt, center of the Arab world, is still the land watered by the Nile. The river's bounty in changeless. But modern Egypt's needs have grown beyond the Nile's capacity to fill them. Today, 10,000 years after man the hunter camped along its shores, man the builder raises a giant dam at Aswan to capture the stream's floodwaters, reclaim the desert, and widen his domain to satisfy his demands and his dreams.
