Ancient Egypt

Foundations of a Civilization

Douglas J. Brewer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138165717
• eBook ISBN: 9781317868576
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: History

Ancient Egypt is a beautifully illustrated, easy-to-read book covering the formative era of the Egyptian civilization: the age before the pyramids. Douglas Brewer shows why an awareness of the earliest phase of Egyptian history is crucial to understanding of later Egyptian culture. Beginning with a quick review of the fields of Egyptology and archaeology, Ancient Egypt takes the reader on a compelling survey of Egypt's prehistoric past. The books tours the Nile Valley to explore its impact on all aspects of life, from day-to-day living to regional politics, and introduces the reader to the Nile Valley's earliest inhabitants and the very first "Egyptians".

CHAPTER 1

Archaeology, Egyptology and prehistory: How we know what we know

Archaeology and its development

Archaeology is an accepted and popular social science taught in universities around the world. As a discipline, archaeology tries to explain what has happened to specific groups of humans in the past and what processes are involved when cultures experience change. Yet, unlike cultural anthropologists, geographers, sociologists and scholars in other related fields of study, archaeologists cannot observe the behaviour of the people they are investigating, nor do they have direct access to the thoughts of these people as recorded in written texts as do the historians. Instead, archeologists can only infer human behaviour and ideas from the materials these people left behind. Materials are recovered by surveying and excavating, then analysed within the context of the associated environment. Most archaeologists’ hypotheses are based solely on recovered artefacts, which they have identified by comparisons to known pieces, hoping that similarity in appearance equates to similarity in function. Technical studies, such as the study of wear patterns, can often augment archaeologists’ comparative analogies by demonstrating how ancient tools were used, thereby providing clues as to their function (scraping, cutting, etc.). Simple logic and references to other known objects of similar design, more often than not, serve as archaeologists’ only means of identification. Naturally, such interpretations are always open to debate and revision and thus underscore the need for archaeologists to publish their results so that additional comparisons and refinements can be made after further discoveries.

Although most cultures throughout time have shown an interest in their past, archaeology as a discipline has its roots in the Italian Renaissance, when fourteenth-century scholars began to question the origins of the ancient Classical monuments located throughout the Mediterranean region. It was clear that they were built by a civilisation prior to Renaissance Europe that in many ways rivalled or even surpassed it. Europeans began travelling to other lands, particularly the Near East and Classical world, to retrieve ancient objects for their governments’ museums or simply to profit from the sale of the pieces. Thus began a collecting spree that continues, at least to some degree, today.

Others with an interest in the past (and who were often spurred on by a nationalistic ideology) turned their eyes to the mounds and monuments within the borders of their own countries. Though neither as overtly spectacular nor as easily recovered as the material remains of the ancient Mediterranean cultures, the artefacts and sites of northern Europe did yield tantalising clues to their ancient makers when subjected to careful study. It was this line of discovery, characterised by painstaking recovery and meticulous documentation, that laid the foundation for the scientific discipline known today as archaeology.

But there were still crucial developments that needed to take place in the fields of geology, biology and the social sciences before modern archaeology could be born. The first of these was the publication of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology from 1830 to 1833, which demonstrated the Earth’s great antiquity and broke the so-called biblical time barrier for the world’s creation. Building on previous work by Cuvier and Hutton, and using evidence he gathered in the region around Mount Etna, Lyell stressed that there are natural (as opposed to supernatural) explanations for all geological phenomena, that the ordinary natural processes of today do not differ in kind or magnitude from those of the past, and that the Earth must therefore be very ancient because these processes work so slowly. Though these concepts may seem obvious to us today, they were revolutionary in Lyell’s time. In addition to laying out the methods and principles that modern geologists use every day, Lyell’s Principles of Geology provided a younger group of scholars the opportunity to speculate on time and change.

BOX 1.1 ♦ The biblical time barrier

Based on genealogies listed in the biblical book of Genesis, seventeenth-century Archbishop Ussher computed the world’s age to be less than 6,000 years old. He went on to establish a date of 4004 BC for the Earth’s creation.

One of those most profoundly influenced by Lyell’s work was a young scientist named Charles Darwin. Darwin’s biological treatise Origin of Species, published in 1859, expounded on the diversity of life and described evolutionary change through time. Simply put, he believed that those groups of living organisms best adjusted to the conditions in which they lived had the greatest chance for survival and passing on their traits to the next generation. By applying the same principle to human culture, scholars now had a mechanism by which to explain why peoples of the past and their societies differed from contemporary ones.

These two concepts – the great antiquity of the Earth and natural selection – were quickly applied to human and extinct animal remains found in the Somme Valley of France, and for the first time scholars began to accept human co-existence with extinct animals, a fact that many people had refused to believe even when confronted with the clear evidence of stone tools lying juxtaposed with ancient bones. In 1869, soon after the acceptance of this co-existence, the first evidence of prehistoric humans in Egypt was reported: stone tools, tens of thousands of years old, found in the Nile Valley.

At the turn of the twentieth century, advances in archaeological methods taking place in the Near East were turning the field from a treasure hunt into a scientific discipline (see Chapter 2). Scholars working in the Americas were particularly influenced by the British archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie’s method of building a chronology using only material remains (i.e. sequence dating or seriation typology; see below and Chapter 2 for detailed explanations of this technique). This was because the indigenous cultures of the Americas either did not have a written language or, as in the case of the Maya, their written language was as yet undecipherable. Thus scholars wanting to create a cultural chronology of the Americas had to do so using pottery or stone tools, because they did not have historical records on which to rely.

Another circumstance that influenced the direction archaeology would take has to do with the disciplines with which the early archaeologists were most closely affiliated. In the Old World, archaeology was basically an outgrowth of history, and the archaeologists were, in general, historians looking at material culture. In the New World, however, archaeologists were more closely affiliated with ethnographers and cultural anthropologists because they were excavating sites that belonged to the direct ancestors of the living peoples whom the anthropologists were studying. Thus, it was perfectly natural for the New World archaeologists to work closely with the anthropologists and borrow their theoretical perspective. At first, this distinction had very little practical impact, as both the historical archaeologists and the anthropological archaeologists were primarily interested in constructing cultural chronologies of their respective regions. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, the two types of archaeology began to diverge. Anthropologists, and by extension anthropological archaeologists, began to focus on questions of process – the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of culture change, in addition to the historical questions of ‘when’ and ‘where’.

Today anthropological (or New World) archaeology is fundamentally a generalising and comparative discipline – it begins with the particulars of a human society and culture, but then compares the culture with others in an attempt to highlight similarities and contrast differences. The data compiled by anthropologists and the methods they employ help archaeologists better understand the ways in which a presumably related ancient culture might have functioned and evolved through time. The continuing closeness of these two fields is demonstrated by the fact that in most American universities cultural anthropology (ethnology) and archaeology are both considered disciplinary sub-fields of anthropology.

What, then, is Egyptology and how does it differ from archaeology? Egyptology is a historical discipline devoted to the study of ancient Egypt. It is modelled on Classical studies of Greece and Rome, which rely on written records to supply chronology, historical data and information about beliefs of the past. Egyptologists work with specific texts to understand nuances of the ancient culture, often within a well-defined time period. Like all historical disciplines, Egyptology is a particularising discipline. That is, it is primarily interested in defining what happened at a specific place and time.

One could argue that Egyptology began with the Egyptians themselves. There is evidence that ancient Egyptians looked back in time, often in awe of their cultural accomplishments. We know that one of Ramesses II’s sons (c.1250 BC) was concerned with the preservation of ancient monuments and worked to clear and identify a number of architectural ruins. The ancient Greeks and Romans were also intrigued by the Egyptians’ accomplishments and wrote extensively on what they encountered when travelling there, a culture by then already over 3,000 years old:

And since Egypt is the country where mythology places the origins of the gods, where the earliest observations of the stars are said to have been made, and where, furthermore, many noteworthy deeds of great men are recorded, we shall begin our history with the events connected with Egypt.

[Diodorus of Sicily, c.58 BC (I:9:9)]

After the Napoleonic wars, Egypt became a protectorate of the British Empire, thereby offering some security to would-be Western travellers. As scholarly works began to be published, Egypt was invaded by adventurers, scholars and artists in a virtual free-for-all to see who could acquire the largest collection of Egypt’s antiquities. Jean-François Champollion’s pub...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures, boxes and plates
• Acknowledgements
• Publisher’s acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1 Archaeology, Egyptology and prehistory: How we know what we know
• 2 Archaeology and Egyptian prehistory
• 3 Environmental reflections
• 4 The Paleolithic: A desert in bloom
• 5 The Neolithic: An agricultural revolution and new way of life
• 6 The Predynastic Period: Egypt in its infancy
• 7 The Late Predynastic: Naqada III and the quest for power
• 8 In search of Egypt’s first Pharaoh
• 9 Early Dynastic life
• 10 New horizons
• Bibliography
• Index