5 Egypt in the Old Kingdom (ca. 2649–2150 B.C.)

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Egypt in the Old Kingdom (ca. 2649–2150 B.C.)

Egypt’s Old Kingdom (Dynasties 3–6, ca. 2649–2150 B.C.) was one of the most dynamic periods in the development of Egyptian art. During this period, artists learned to express their culture’s worldview, creating for the first time images and forms that endured for generations. Architects and masons mastered the techniques necessary to build monumental structures in stone. Sculptors created the earliest portraits of individuals and the first lifesize statues in wood, copper, and stone. They perfected the art of carving intricate relief decoration and, through keen observation of the natural world, produced detailed images of animals, plants, and even landscapes, recording the essential elements of their world for eternity in scenes painted and carved on the walls of temples and tombs.

These images and structures had two principal functions: to ensure an ordered existence and to defeat death by preserving life into the next world. To these ends, over a period of time, Egyptian artists adopted a limited repertoire of standard types and established a formal artistic canon that would define Egyptian art for more than 3,000 years, while remaining flexible enough to allow for subtle variation and innovation.

Between 9000 and 4000 BCE, northern Africa and the Sahara were grass and woodland with an abundance of rainfall, rivers, lakes, fish and other aquatic life. Anthropologists speculate that from North Africa's Mediterranean coast, people migrated into the Sahara and that people migrated into the Sahara from the south. There communities raised sheep and goats, as people did along the Mediterranean coast. And communities of people fished in the lakes and rivers of the region, using intricately made bone harpoons and fishing hooks, some using nets with weights and other tools for harvesting aquatic creatures. Living a settled life, people began using pottery and growing food, using stone and wooden tools. To the east, along the upper Nile, including what was to be Nubia, people by 6000 BCE were growing sorghum and millet and a wheat believed to be of African origin. And by 4000 BCE, people in the middle of the Sahara region were raising cattle. Then around 3500 BCE the climate of North Africa began to dry, perhaps in part because of overgrazing – wetness needing vegetation as well as vegetation needing water. The Sahara started to change from grass and woodland to desert.

Agriculture along the Nile

Anthropologists speculate that some people fled the drying to the northern Nile River, taking with them their cultivation of wheat, barley, flax, various vegetables and their goats and sheep. And perhaps some people in western Sahara retreated southward to a wetter climate, taking with them their pigs, sheep, goats, cattle and knowledge of farming. In the Ethiopian highlands, herding and farming appeared, people there growing a cereal crop called tef and starchy stalks called enset. Remaining in the Sahara region were sparse populations of dark skinned people and also a people called Berbers, the Berbers occupying territory near the Mediterranean Sea. Those who had migrated to the northern Nile were related to the Berbers, or at least the languages of the two people were related – a language that has been classified as Afro-Asian. And scholars speculate that the Afro-Asian dialect had origins with people who had come to Africa from the eastern side of the Red Sea.

Meanwhile, in Africa south of the desert region many had begun small-scale farming and raising cattle. Those living in the continent's equatorial forests continued to rely almost exclusively on their hunting and gathering, which provided them with all they needed. It would be want and deprivation elsewhere that would mother new ways of doing things. People in the equatorial forests saw no reason to hack clearings to grow food that was already sufficient for their few numbers.

South of the Sahara, the raising of cattle was at first limited to regions without the blood sucking tsetse fly, which could spread disease fatal to both cattle and people. It took many generations for people to build immunities to local diseases, which kept migrant communities from growing in the moist valleys and thickly wooded regions where the tsetse fly thrived. In some other parts of Africa where inadequate rain or other conditions discouraged farming, people continued to gather food that grew wild. Using exquisitely hand-crafted spears, bows and arrows, animal snares and poisons, they hunted small game. And with food supply limited, the populations of these various areas remained sparse, unlike what was developing along the northern Nile.

By 1000 BCE, people in western Africa would be clearing portions of tropical forest with stone axes and planting yams, harvesting fruits and palm nuts and keeping goats. And east of central Africa's equatorial rain forest cattle raising was being extended, with cattle raising favored in the drier areas free of the tsetse fly. Peoples that herded more than they farmed were neighbors to those that farmed more than they herded, each side believing that their way of life was superior to the other.

Agriculture and Power Politics along the Nile – to the 8th Dynasty

The waters of the Nile came from annual rains in the tropics to the south of Egypt. The Nile rose in early July, and in October it receded, leaving little water and a layer of black, fertile soil – inspiring people there to call the area the Black Land.

New analysis, described by BBC News on 4 September 2013, describes groups beginning to settle along the Nile between the years 3700 and 3600 BCE.

For farming to thrive along the Nile, a system of controlling its waters was necessary. To increase their ability to plant, people trapped waters when the river rose, and they lined their water basins with clay to prevent the water from sinking into the soil so there would be water to use when the river dried again. From sometime around 3500 BCE the Egyptians began building a system of dikes and sluices, and around this time Egypt began growing food in greater abundance than elsewhere in Africa.

The Nile today, flowing
from the tropics in Uganda

The Egyptians grew wheat, barley, beans, lettuce, peas, radishes, onions, olives, dates and figs, and they raised cattle, sheep, goats and pigs. The construction would continue for more than a millennium so that by 2000 BCE both sides of the Nile would be a checkerboard of water basins, sluices and canals, with water being drawn from basins upstream whenever water was insufficient downstream.

As a desert, Egypt had no violent storms. Nor did the Egyptians have the problem with accumulation of salt which periodically ruined Sumerian farms. The abundance of food that they produced allowed a rise in population greater than elsewhere in Africa. Along the Nile, small villages with rectangular houses of dried mud grew into towns.

As in Sumer, enough food was produced to support a variety of occupations: traders, merchants, craftsmen, priests, scribes and soldiers. And like the people of Sumer, the Egyptians held land as personal property. Some farmers were more successful than others and grew richer. Class divisions arose, as did local governments.

Irrigation systems and grain storage had to be maintained. Property divisions had to be maintained and disputes mitigated. Large landowners formed aristocracies and allied themselves with kings, or they chose who would be king – while most people remained small farmers and were expected to give a share of their crops to their king as taxes and to give free labor for community projects.

Communities came into conflict and warred against each other. Local kings vied with each other for wider power and control. Looking back to around 3200 BCE, people along the northern 600 miles (960 kilometers) of the Nile had amalgamated into a northern and a southern kingdom. The two kingdoms remained antagonistic toward each other, and in what was most likely a series of wars across generations during the 2900s, one of the kingdoms conquered the other. The conquering king, according to legend, was Menes – the first king of all Egypt. The identity of Menes has been the subject of debate. The aforementionedBBC News article (4 September, 2013) describes archaeologists as believing that "Egypt's first king, Aha, came to power after another prominent leader, Narmer, unified the land." It describes a team of researchers at the University of Oxford as able to date the reigns of "the next seven kings and queens – Djer, Djet, Queen Merneith, Den, Anedjib, Semerkhet and Qa'a – who with Aha formed Egypt's first dynasty." The researchers date this dynasty as beginning by about 3100 BCE.

With the unification of Egypt came a new era of peace and security along the Nile. Peace was served not only by unity but also by something lacking in Mesopotamia: natural barriers against wandering peoples. There was the Mediterranean Sea in the north, vast deserts to the east and west, and a great mountain range to the south. Peace benefited Egypt's economy. Egypt's new dynasty of kings provided work for an increasing number of craftsmen. Carpentry increased, aided by the use of copper tools. Brick and stone of fine quality were drawn from nearby quarries and used in building.

Egypt's trade expanded. Tradesmen went north by sea along the coast of the eastern Mediterranean, to the Mountains of Lebanon, from where they imported timber. Tradesmen traveled south along the Red Sea to the coast just east of theEthiopian Highlands, south to the coast of eastern-most Africa, and to the southern coast of the Arabian peninsula. They found ivory, rare animals, sweets and the incense that they were to burn in their temples. They traveled south along the Nile into Nubia, and there they acquired more incense and ivory, ebony, animal skins, and boomerangs. And, on at least one occasion, they found a pygmy from the Congo basin, whose appearance entertained the court of Egypt's king.

Contact with other peoples brought one of human history's most recurring developments: cultural diffusion, in other words the adoption of ideas and techniques. From Mesopotamia, the Egyptians acquired writing, the use of bronze, shipbuilding techniques and artistic motifs.

Authoritarian Rule

Egyptian kings (pharaohs in Egyptian) put members of their immediate or extended families in charge of their government's central administration. Kings functioned as makers of law, as chiefs of justice and as supreme priests. And they passed their power and property to their sons. A distance had developed between the kings and common people. Official priests prohibited common people from using rituals that were believed suitable only for the king. And commoners were not recognized as having an afterlife like the king and his associates.

From the political claim that they ruled Egypt in behalf of the gods, Egypt's kings began to claim that they had been born by the gods, that they were the son or the incarnation of the sun god Re, and that they were immaculately conceived. The kings believed that as members of the family of the gods they had to keep their bloodline untainted, and they believed that to protect the purity of their blood they should marry their sons to their daughters.

Local authorities who had been appointed by ministers at the king's court were allowed to bequeath their positions to their sons. Their descendants became hereditary nobles, and they believed that their positions were part of the god-given order. The new hereditary nobles wished to be united with Osiris after death, as was the king. And if the opportunity presented itself, some nobles ruled their domains without interference from the king.

Egypt's pyramids were political creations. They were the burial place of kings. One pyramid was the labor of as many as ten thousand workers on the scene at any one time: craftsmen, engineers and common laborers. Archaeologists examining a village of construction workers – a village of men, women and children – estimate that around 20,000 workers labored twenty years to complete one of the great pyramids. Smaller pyramids were built for the king's officials and overseers. It was politics and culture in sharp contrast to an advanced democracy in the 21st century, where a political leader might lose office or go to jail for spending government money on a project that benefited himself or his family.

The Egyptians were not far removed from the views of magic and spirits held by hunter gatherers. A king's burial chamber was decorated with artistic depictions of his happier moments so he could cling to that which pleased him. And into the burial chamber the Egyptians put artifacts that they believed would migrate in spiritual form with the king to the underworld. Egyptians who had little fear of the gods robbed the king's tombs of its treasures, and after this was discovered the burial chambers of kings were put into great pyramids, which allowed more space to hide the king's tomb.

The ancient Egyptians believed that from the peak of the pyramid the spirit of the king would begin its climb to a unity with their sun god, Re. They believed that the king's spirit would accompany Re on his daily journey across the sky, to disappear down into the underworld and rise again the next day.