The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (63 page)

THE APPEARANCE OF RANK SOCIETIES IN EGYPT

For two millennia, from roughly 7,000 to 5,000 years ago, the population of the Nile Valley grew at a spectacular rate. Each year the flooding Nile carried tons of organic mud north from tropical Africa, overflowing its banks and providing a new layer of fertile alluvium. These floods also flushed out the accumulated salts from the previous year, preventing the problems of salinization that accompany canal irrigation.

From January through April the Nile was low. By mid-May villagers near Khartoum could tell that the water was rising. Downstream near Aswan, in southern Egypt, it took until June for the flooding to show. By early July high water had reached the location of modern Cairo. Here the Nile broke up into dozens of channels called distributaries, fanning out over the river’s delta. By September the flood was so high that all farmland was inundated, and low-lying depressions had become marshes. Finally, by the end of November, the water had receded, leaving a new layer of mud on which to plant.

Today we know that the water is coming from Uganda. The ancient Egyptians did not. In their cosmology all water was connected to
Nun,
a vast reservoir beneath the earth. The Nile flooded every year because water from Nun bubbled up from caverns near Aswan. The Egyptians predicted the start of the flood by observing a star named Sothis, which disappeared for 70 days each year and reappeared in the predawn sky around June 23.

In the first century
A.D.
, long after the events of this chapter, the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder visited Egypt. He reported that the Egyptians of that period measured the height of the Nile flood with instruments called
nilometers.
The units of rising water were called
ells,
and they were considered so accurate a predictor of harvest size that they determined the taxes paid by farmers along the Nile. In the words of Pliny a flood of only 12 ells meant hunger; 13 ells, sufficiency; 14 ells, joy; 15 ells, security; and 16 ells, abundance.

At various times between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago, societies displaying wealth and rank appeared along the Nile. Like the rank societies of Northern and Southern Mesopotamia, these Egyptian societies were sufficiently varied in architecture, burial ritual, and craft activity to be assigned different names. To put them into context, we must establish a few geographic landmarks.

The arid region along the border between Egypt and the Sudan is referred to as Nubia. Here the Nile cuts through some very hard stretches of granite bedrock, leaving a series of rapids called the Five Cataracts of the Nile. The Second Cataract, near Wadi Halfa, lies to the east of Bir Kiseiba and Nabta Playa. The First (or northernmost) Cataract, near Aswan, lies at the point where the waters of Nun allegedly bubbled to the surface. From this cataract, it is 750 miles to the Mediterranean.

North of Aswan the Nile runs straight for a time and then turns east, north, and west again in a loop called the Great Bend of the Nile. The Great Bend is the scene of famous landmarks such as the Valley of the Kings and the ancient cities of Karnak, Luxor, and Abydos. North of the Great Bend the Nile passes Tell el-Amarna, the capital of the ruler Akhnaten.

This stretch between the First Cataract and Amarna is Upper (as in upstream) Egypt, and it played a major role in the creation of Egypt’s first-generation kingdom. Lower (as in downstream) Egypt lies to the north of Amarna and includes such landmarks as ancient Memphis, the pyramids of Giza, the Nile delta, and the modern city of Cairo.

The early villages of Upper and Lower Egypt had a number of features in common. Included were circular houses; the growing of wheat, barley, and flax; the raising of sheep, goats, and cattle; coppersmithing; active trade with the Southern Levant; and the ritual burial of animals.

Now let us consider the differences. Most villages of Upper Egypt buried their dead facing west, toward the setting sun. Their burials showed precocious use of silver, lapis lazuli (a semiprecious blue stone from the Near East), gold from Nubia, coral from the Red Sea, and ivory from East Africa. Their elite used abundant cosmetics, which they ground on effigy palettes of slate or siltstone.

Many early villages of Lower Egypt buried their dead facing east, toward the rising sun. Their use of sumptuary goods was modest compared to Upper Egypt. Some villages were large and appear multiethnic, with several distinct house types. Their copper came from southern Jordan and the Sinai Peninsula. Perhaps because of their well-watered delta setting, they were able to raise many more pigs than the Upper Egyptians.

Between Upper and Lower Egypt was a stretch of river with fewer villages per square mile, like a sparsely occupied frontier between competing rank societies.

LOWER EGYPT

The 60-acre village of Merimde Beni-Salame once occupied a Nile distributary in the western delta. Its occupants grew wheat, barley, and lentils, herded sheep, goats, and cattle, and raised hundreds of pigs, abandoning Merimde only after the distributary changed its course 6,000 years ago. The Nile supplied Merimde with hippopotamus, crocodile, and waterfowl; the desert to the west supplied it with antelope, gazelle, and ostrich.

Originally discovered by archaeologist Hermann Junker in the 1920s, Merimde has been extensively excavated over the years. There are hints that extended families occupied clusters of circular huts. The wickerwork roof of each hut was supported by a large central post and a series of small outer posts.

In some cases huts were grouped into a kind of residential compound, set apart from neighboring compounds by a reed-bundle fence. Included within these compounds were the following features: basketry-lined granaries like those of the Fayum; large water jars set in the ground with their mouths at the surface; and threshing floors where cereal grains could be separated from chaff.

The compounds of circular huts at Merimde remind us of those built by many clan-based societies of central and East Africa today. Such compounds contrast strongly with the residences of the Samarran and Halaf societies in Northern Mesopotamia, with which they were contemporary. The Northern Mesopotamian societies had more signs of rank and built large, rectangular, extended-family houses.

One of the largest villages of Lower Egypt was Ma’adi, on the east side of the Nile near Cairo. Because of encroachment by modern Cairo, the site’s full extent will never be known. Occupied between 6,000 and 5,000 years ago, Ma’adi overlapped in time with the ‘Ubaid societies of Mesopotamia.

At least three types of houses were built at Ma’adi, suggesting differences either in rank or ethnicity. The simplest houses, amounting to round huts or oval shelters, had posts of tamarisk wood. Floors were often below ground; to make it easier to descend into the hut, the occupants used hippopotamus bones as steps.

Interspersed with these oval huts were rectangular buildings made from logs and mud; the largest of these was roughly 17 by 10 feet. We do not know whether these were ritual houses or the residences of privileged families.

Finally, in one area of Ma’adi, there was a group of truly unusual houses. These were subterranean residences, excavated six to ten feet below ground. Their entrances were slanting passageways with steps cut into them. Around the margins of the residential chamber, the builders had driven posts into the floor to support a roof of woven mats. In the center of each floor was a sunken hearth.

These subterranean houses at Ma’adi were remarkably similar to those of Shiqmim, a village near Beersheba in the Negev district of the Southern Levant. This similarity was no coincidence; the Ma’adi houses also contained pottery similar to that found at Shiqmim. It is likely, therefore, that a small enclave of traders from the Negev lived at Ma’adi.

Any trade, of course, was a two-way one. A prehistoric village in the Gaza district of the Southern Levant, known simply as “Site H,” seems to have been a trade enclave filled with goods from Lower Egypt.

One of the resources Ma’adi wanted most was copper, for which there was a foreign source. Analyses of the trace elements in Ma’adi’s copper artifacts, according to Andreas Hauptmann, indicate that most of the copper came from the mines of Feynan in southern Jordan. Some of the copper ore was made into ingots for transport. These ingots would later be melted and cast into adzes, axes, fishhooks, pins, wire, or copper sheets.

Copper is heavy, but the people of Ma’adi had a new form of transportation: the donkey. Wild donkeys are native to North Africa and had been hunted for thousands of years. Roughly 5,500 years ago the Egyptians domesticated them. Pack trains of donkeys escalated trade, the way pack trains of llamas did in the Andes. In the twinkling of an eye, archaeologically speaking, donkeys spread to the Levant and were on their way to Mesopotamia.

In addition to its varied house types there are other signs that Lower Egypt may have been a multiethnic society. There were at least three cemeteries at Ma’adi, and although their occupants had been buried at somewhat different moments in time, the skeletons show a range of anatomical features. Burials in the south cemetery, for example, seemed to represent people who were taller and more heavily built and had biological ties to central or eastern Africa. Cemeteries elsewhere at Ma’adi contained skeletons whose biological ties were to the populations of the Mediterranean basin. In later periods the Egyptian state would make a point of depicting both African and Mediterranean people in its art.

Many burials in the south cemetery at Ma’adi had little in the way of sumptuary goods. Other people in the same cemetery, however, were buried with ivory combs in their hair, polished stone vases, and elegant cosmetic palettes. It is likely that Ma’adi society not only had differences in rank but neighborhoods of people with different ethnic identities and beliefs about the afterlife. Such diversity probably resulted from the fact that the highly productive Nile delta was a magnet for settlers in an otherwise desolate region. One way that such diverse groups could be integrated was by occupational specialization: farmers, herders, potters, traders, and coppersmiths all needed each other’s products.

The discovery of a likely defensive palisade and ditch at Ma’adi suggests that not everyone attracted by the delta was peaceful. Like the cotton and coca lands of Peru’s middle river valleys, the Nile delta was coveted by ambitious neighbors. With the wisdom of hindsight, we know that some of those ambitious neighbors lived in Upper Egypt. Let us now look at them.

UPPER EGYPT

In Upper Egypt the Nile alluvium was a ribbon of green between dusty cliffs. Among the preferred sites for villages were rocky spurs descending from the cliffs, close to alluvium but too high to be flooded.

Typical of the smaller villages was Hemamieh, to the east of the Nile between Amarna and the Great Bend. Here the villagers grew cereals, legumes, and flax, raised sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs, fished the river and harvested palm fruits, and collected the same sedge bulbs seen earlier at Wadi Kubbaniya. They lived in circular huts three to eight feet in diameter, with domed, mud-plastered roofs. A section of mud wall 30 feet long extended out from Hut 242, perhaps marking the limits of a residential compound. Another hut was found to be filled with dried sheep or goat dung, which is used as fuel in the region today.

Archaeologists Fekri Hassan and T. R. Hays conducted a survey of sites within the Great Bend of the Nile. They found that 5,800 to 5,500 years ago most villages had populations of 50 to 250 people. Some 5,500 to 5,200 years ago there were fewer but larger villages and more evidence of sumptuary goods. Evidently an emerging Upper Egyptian elite was concentrating its followers in larger and more defensible settlements.

One of the largest communities in the Great Bend was Naqada, some 20 miles north of Luxor. The people of Naqada had discovered that gold could be mined in the mountains of Nubia, between the Nile and the Red Sea coast. Some 5,600 to 5,400 years ago Naqada’s elite families were occupying rectangular houses with courtyards and mud-brick walls, while commoner families continued to live in circular huts. The people of Naqada were weaving both flax and wool, using the potter’s wheel, and brewing beer from barley and wheat.

During the 1890s pioneering archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie began work at Naqada. He detected an ancient division of the community into a “north town” and “south town” and found three different prehistoric cemeteries. Petrie excavated a staggering 2,200 burials from these cemeteries and left no doubt that Naqada society had hereditary rank. Its elite members were buried in mud-brick tombs with gold and silver baubles; combs and bangles of ivory; lapis lazuli; obsidian from Turkey or the Aegean; amazonite, a blue-green stone from the Sahara; flint daggers with silver or ivory handles; cosmetic palettes in the shape of fish and other creatures; and vases carved from attractive stone.

Some nobles were buried with lower-ranking individuals who may have been servants or slaves. Commoners at Naqada were buried in simple graves, with pottery vessels but little or no evidence of sumptuary goods.

Tomb 1863 at Naqada was noteworthy. It held the remains of a young girl buried with a stone vase, two cosmetic palettes, ivory bracelets, a bone comb, a pottery dish imported from the Sudan, and a seal imported from Mesopotamia. It is unlikely that this girl had achieved enough in her short life to deserve such offerings; she must have been born to a family of high rank.

In Naqada’s south town Petrie found what he believed to be a thick, mud-brick fortification wall. This wall tells us to expect archaeological evidence for chiefly competition, dense concentrations of farmers, craftsmen, and warriors, and the intensified agriculture necessary to support them all.

CHIEFLY CYCLING AND UNIFICATION

Upper Egypt presents us with clear examples of chiefly cycling. According to Egyptologist Barry Kemp, at least three competing rank societies arose between 5,500 and 5,200 years ago (
Figure 58
). One lay in the Great Bend and had Naqada as its paramount center. The second lay downstream from the bend, in the Abydos region, and had a town called This as its paramount center. The third society lay upstream, between the Great Bend and the First Cataract. The paramount center of this society was Nekhen, a town better known by its Greek name, Hierakonpolis. These societies seem to have been very powerful, so powerful that Irving Goldman would probably have assigned them to his stratified category.