Egypt's Legacy

The Archetypes of Western Civilization: 3000 to 30 BC

Michael Rice

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134492558
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on Jungian psychology to show why Egypt has been so important in the history of Western civilisation, Michael Rice explains the majesty and enduring appeal of Egyptian civilization.

Jung claimed that there exist certain psychological drives dormant in our shared unconscious: these are the archetypes. From the omnipotent god to the idea of the nation state, the formulation of most of these archetypes is owed to ancient Egypt.

Michael Rice sets out to recover the sense of wonder that the Egyptians themselves felt as they contemplated the world in which they lived, and the way they expressed that wonder in the religion, art and literature. He traces the story of Egyptian civilization from its emergence in the third millennium BC to its transformation following the Macedonian conquest in 30 BC.

CHAPTER I
THE NATURE OF ANCIENT EGYPT

Egypt is the most ancient of all nation states. When virtually all the rest of the world was locked in the immemorial and seemingly unchanging life of the stone-age hunters and scavengers, a civilisation at once majestic and totally assured rose on the Nile’s banks. Its very existence changed the course of human history, to an extent unequalled by any ancient people, only to be approached by the creative and intellectual inheritance bequeathed to the world by the Egyptians’ near contemporaries, the Sumerians of southern Iraq.

That Egypt is the first community known to history which can be called a’nation-state’, makes it unique. The Sumerians have the lead over Egypt in terms of historical chronology in, for example, the invention of writing and, possibly in the creation of pervasive bureaucracies in the form of the temple administrations which were the principal system of government in the little cities into which the polity of Sumer was, from early times, fragmented. However, the Sumerians never developed an integrated and coherent political structure over a widespread area, uniting disparate local traditions and ideologies, as the early rulers of Egypt certainly did. The Sumerian city-states remain individual, often warring and certainly divergent political entities; in Egypt the idea of unity, of nationhood, was first an ideal and then, when the Kingship became fully potent, a political reality.¹

To set what was about to happen in the Nile Valley into the historical perspective of those of its contemporaries with whom it may properly be compared and to explain why it is qualitatively different from them, it is necessary to look at what has come to be known as ‘the ancient Near East’, in the latter part of the fourth millennium BC. By this term, which at once reveals the Eurocentric nature of historical studies over the past two hundred years, is generally meant the lands which comprise Anatolia, the Levant, Mesopotamia (Iraq and parts of northern Syria), the Syro-Arabian deserts, the Arabian peninsula and the Arabian Gulf, and the north-eastern quadrant of Africa, especially the Valley of the Nile and the mainly desert regions contiguous to it. Sometimes parts of Central Asia and Western Pakistan (the Indus Valley) are included in the term but historically and geographically they are peripheral, though from time to time they were influenced by, as much as they themselves influenced, the ‘Near East’ proper.

It was in the northern boundaries of this region, in the Levant, northern Mesopotamia and northern Iran, that the crucial experience of the domestication of plants and animals first occurred on a scale which resulted in the eventual establishment of permanent, settled communities. These agrarian communities in time developed permanent architecture, the practice of art (of which they were not of course the forerunners), the codification of systems of belief and the formalisation of rituals and liturgies directed towards placating the influence of unseen forces in human affairs.

These patterns of existence broadly persisted from the end of the last glaciation, c.10000 BC (known in archaeological terms as the Epi-Palaeolithic), and throughout the neolithic, which is identified by the use of stone tools, often of a considerable sophistication of manufacture, and the practice of domestication. In its later phases the neolithic also developed the conversion of metal ores, either by cold-hammering or, latterly, by smelting, leading eventually to the more advanced societies of the Bronze Age.

By the beginning of the fifth millennium a profoundly significant development occurred in what was to become one of the key areas of the ancient Near East. This was in the southern extremity of the valley of the two great rivers which flowed southwards through an otherwise empty and generally desolate landscape, to debouch into the upper reaches of the Arabian Gulf, the inland sea which separates Arabia from Iran and which opens eventually into the Indian Ocean. Here an immigrant people, whose origins are still entirely unknown, entered the land and set about the creation of one of the most significant and enduringly influential ancient societies of which we have knowledge.

These immigrants into southern Iraq were the Sumerians. ‘Sumerian’ is, strictly speaking, a linguistic term which can with assurance only be used to describe the southern Mesopotamian civilisation some two thousand years later when its people conferred their greatest boon on mankind, the invention of writing. There is, however, little doubt that the immigrants of 5000 BC were the ancestors of the Sumerians, when they can be named as such, after two millennia of historical anonymity.

The characteristic unit of Sumerian society was the city. Whilst the earliest southern Mesopotamian communities were undoubtedly agricultural, the nature of the land, an eerie combination of desert, marsh and immensely fertile silt deposited by the swift-flowing and unpredictable rivers on which the people depended for their existence, was such that small permanent communities were established which, by a neucleonic process, coalesced and formed larger settlements. These in time could be called ‘cities’, with developed administrations and systems of government.

It appears that at first the dominant influence in Sumerian corporate life was the temple. For the Sumerians the belief which defines the relationship between the visible world and that of the gods was that each city was the domain of an individual divinity. The gods were visualised as superhuman in form and character: the temple was the focus of the city and, in so far as it was the earthly ‘home’ of the presiding god, the reason for the city’s existence.

But the city as a place of corporate religious events was only one of its functions; it was also a centre for exchange and trade, a meeting place and a refuge in times, all too frequent in the Sumerian experience, of strife. The cities of southern Mesopotamia developed into independent political entities, anticipating the Greek city-states of several thousand years later. The ‘religious’ emphasis of the city changed as its political character became the occasion for the assertion of the ambitions of secular rulers. These were termed in Sumerian ‘lu-gal’, literally the ‘great man’ who probably first assumed the leadership of the community in times of stress; the analogy with the ‘dux bellorum’, represents a precisely comparable phenomenon.

In addition to its contribution to human progress by the invention of writing, Sumer was responsible for two other introductions which entirely changed the lives of those who came after its comparatively brief existence. These were, on the one hand, the concept of law, by which the relationship of the individual to his fellows and of the individual to the community could be regulated, and, on the other, monumental architecture.

The origin of Sumerian architecture, whose buildings were the largest structures known before the erection of the Pyramids in Egypt, can be traced back to the beginnings of settled life in the south of Mesopotamia. At Eridu, the earliest known settlement in Sumer, a little shrine lies at the lowest level of a sequence of increasingly complex buildings, which culminates three thousand years later in the ziggurat, which dominated the city, sacred to the god Enki, and which was built c.2000 BC.

As a distinct political entity Sumer really only survived for a millennium and a half, falling finally under the effects of its own fractious nature, demonstrated by the patchwork of little states, and the submersion of the communities by the Semitic-speaking peoples who by the latter part of the third millennium made up the bulk of the population. From this time forward the history of most of the ancient Near East is dominated by the fortunes of the speakers of Semitic languages.

It was not only the Semitic-speakers who sounded the knell of Sumerian civilisation. To the east, on the Iranian plateau and especially in the southwest, had evolved Elam, a civilisation which was comparable in some respects with Sumer, though its evolution was on somewhat different lines.

For one thing—and that one fairly crucial—Elam seems to have created a far more centralised administration than did Sumer, though the temples of Elam were powerful and were even, apparently, to influence the development of Egypt in its early centuries. Although Elam adopted writing very soon after it had appeared in Sumer and borrowed Sumerian cuneiform as its script, the language remains untranslated; in consequence less is known about early Iran than is the case of its neighbour to the west. It will be seen that Elam’s influence and hence its material and intellectual resources must have been considerable to have had the effect on Egypt which they certainly seem to have had.

Both Sumer and Elam developed one particular product which was to prove of great importance in the centuries which followed its appearance in the early fourth millennium. This was the cylinder seal which was used to identify property in preliterate societies, large caches of which have survived to provide a treasury of information regarding the lives of the peoples who employed them. It is from the evidence of the seals derived from Sumer and Elam that the connections between them and the emerging Egyptian state, far away to the west, can in part be charted.

Thus we have the situation at the dawn of history (or, more prosaically, in the last quarter of the fourth millennium BC) that three centres in the Near East, Sumer, Elam and Egypt, each stand at the threshold of a complex society. Each of them gives some evidence of the factors which permit a society to be classified as complex: urbanisation, writing, a system of law or government, large-scale or monumental architecture, the management of resources, formalised religious cults and organisation, trade and the production of surplus, the arts. To these may be added the establishment of hierarchies, social classes, specialisation of professions and trades and the creation of a standing or periodically levied army.

Whilst there are many similarities between Sumer and Elam, Egypt presents an entirely different outline, the consequence perhaps of its African roots, which gave it a dimension of experience wholly at odds with its contempories. It is this which accounts for Egypt’s unique character and which marks out its legacy to the world as quite other, both in degree and in kind, from its Western Asian peers.

Two factors especially make the Egyptian experience of the development of a complex society different from its contemporaries. From its earliest beginnings Egypt was conceived as a nation-state. Once the objective of unification was, as it were, expressed by the first Egyptian kings the basic political, religious and social components of the society were seen as valid from one end of the Valley to the other; although there were local traditions these were swiftly subsumed into the distinctively Egyptian corporate identity. This was not at all the situation in Sumer, where individual variations, in religious practices for example and even in the titles adopted by the leading officials of the cities, were emphasised and retained tenaciously.

One compelling reason why Egypt was so wholly exceptional in the impact which it had on later cultures was that it simply endured for so long. Sumer disappeared as a discrete entity around 2000 BC and its very existence seems to have been forgotten, though the language continued to be retained in temple liturgies. An occasional antiquarian-minded ruler of the empires which eventually succeeded Sumer might preserve the records of earlier kings, or the rich corpus of myth which seeped through into the consciousness of later ages. Elam, though it brought down Sumer in the end, did not survive as a separate political or cultural entity and so had little direct influence on the rapidly developing societies which flowered all over the region in the third and second millennia.

For century after century Egypt flourished, the legends of its wealth, power and mystery constantly accreting until the reputation of the Two Lands was preserved as massively as the stone monuments which Egyptian kings so diligently constructed. By virtue of its unique celebrity Egypt swiftly became the archetype of all complex Near Eastern societies, its reputation coalescing into the very image of the pristine kingdom, the exemplar of the ways in which human societies should be governed—in an ideal world.

That the world was not ideal resulted inevitably in the decline of Egypt and the extinction of its unique culture. But the pattern had been set and, even in its ruined state, Egypt stood for later ages as the witness to what was once the Golden Age.

By the early decades of the third millennium before the present era that Golden Age was beginning to acquire a clear definition of its principal characteristics. Egypt developed a high and complex culture with all the trappings of statehood: Kingship, the flourishing of the arts and architecture, a sophisticated, elegant way of life and a profound sense of ‘the other’, the spiritual counterpart of the material existence. Nowhere else in the world was there anything like it.

That this was a very remarkable state of affairs seems to have been recognised by those foreigners who, early on, came into contact with Egypt. Herodotus, a highly perceptive and creative historian, clearly believed that the Egyptians’ experience was quite unlike that of the people of any other lands of which he had knowledge. Then as now the material remains of the early civilisation of Egypt invoked awe: it might be said, rightly so. Herodotus had the advantage of speaking with men who were still in touch with the traditions which had given life to Egypt, no matter that in his time those traditions were largely ghostly images of the reality that once they had been.

For two thousand years at least before Herodotus’ time the people of the ancient Near East had intimate and sustained knowledge (if not, perhaps, understanding) of Egypt. Traders had carried pottery, stone vessels, seals, ivory, gold inlays and all the riches of the courts of the Nile to the rulers of lesser lands: sometimes goods, or ‘tribute’ as the Egyptians not unreasonably preferred to consider them, were brought from the Aegean, from Syria or Palestine to the Nile. Thus was Egypt known, but its mystery grew rather than diminished as a result of those who had such contact with her and who carried back to their own lands tales, not lessened in the telling, of all the wonders of which the King of Egypt was master.

The prevailing impression of Egypt, then as now, was of the splendour and scale of its buildings, the only works of men which seemingly defy time. Herodotus wrote ‘Concerning Egypt itself I shall extend my remarks to a great length, because there is no country that possesses so many wonders, nor any that has such a number of works which defy description.’² This was the view of Egypt current long before Herodotus’ lifetime and it was to persist long after it.

The Greeks marvelled at Egypt’s civilisation and the remains of its greatness. They were the Egyptians’ most ardent admirers, and attributed much of their own culture to the influence of the Nile people, even accepting that the knowledge of the Olympians, the Greeks’ own fractious pantheon, originated in Egypt. The Greeks believed that the Egyptians were the first people to introduce the worship of the gods and to give them names.

The Egyptians themselves asserted, and the Greeks agreed with them, that their way of life, its institutions and the beliefs which informed it, were god-given. In times before memory Egypt had first been ruled by the gods, then by a race of semi-divine beings. The arts of civilisation were transmitted to men by the mysterious Followers of Horus, the Spirits of the Dead; Egypt had been favoured beyond all other lands by these divine and semi-divine presences.

Plato complicated the picture of Egypt’s ancestry considerably by introducing the idea of Atlantis to the world. His story, with its portrayal of a sort of idealised Greek island kingdom with marked Egyptian overtones, has persuaded many, not all of them romantics or fantasists, that Egypt was the offspring of a lost continent, its rulers a class of priest-kings who escaped its destruction, so graphically described in the Timaeus and the Critias.

Those for whom the Atlantis myth was too rational an explanation turned to other, more exalted sources for the origins of Egypt. These saw the Nile civilisation being brought to earth by visitors from the stars, extraterrestrials who, for reasons best known to themselves, came down and implanted the seeds of high culture in the fertile soil of the Nile Valley. Such ideas, despite all reason, are still with us.

Although it is easy to dismiss the wilder explanations of Egypt’s origins as the nonsense which they no doubt are, the fact remains that the appearance of so high a culture as Egypt’s, suddenly and with virtually no antecedents, is deeply perplexing. In the space of a few centuries, on either side of 3000 BC , when the whole of the rest of the world had little to show by way of the refinements of living, Egypt stands fully realised, with a material culture whose influence still resonates across the world. Egypt’s belief systems and principles of ordered government still determine much of what is accepted as civilised living in societies which are governed by considerations of order, a concept which, it will be demonstrated, is wholly Egyptian.

Most scholars, who are not encouraged to speculate about the mistier realms of Atlantean kings or beings from distant stars, have tended to eschew the question of the more remote origins of Egyptian civilisation, preferring to present such evidence as they have been able to unearth, either by way of excavation or in their libraries, and to allow the evidence to speak for itself. This is an entirely proper procedure, but it is one which leaves a void at that very point when Egypt suddenly soars away into a creative and social empyrean, leaving far behind the simple neolithic origins from which it must be presumed to have developed.

Before the middle of the fourth millennium, c.3500 BC, Egypt presents a cultural configuration little different from that of the rest of the ancient Near East. Some of its later preoccupations are already to be seen, certainly: the protection of the dead, the making of fine if simple artifacts, the origins of the cults honouring the supernatural forces which were to be such powerful presences in later centuries. But nothing here would have predicted the burst of energy which created ‘pharaonic’ Egypt, signalled by the appearance of the first kings, just before the end of the fourth millennium BC.

Even after 3500 BC, when the evidence of more advanced cultures appears in the sequence which scholars identify by the site at Naqada in southern Egypt where first they were recognised, the products of the Valley people are handsome, demonstrating a concern for form and a commitment to high standards of aesthetic and technical excellence. But in this their products were not significantly different from the pottery, stoneware and adapted raw materials made by contemporary peoples of Mesopotamia, Syria and parts of Iran (see, for example, Mellaart 1967). Then, at the beginning of the First Dynasty of kings, the situation changes totally and Egypt takes on a character different, not merely in degree but in kind, from all of its contemporaries.

Historic Egypt seems to have no beginnings but suddenly springs, apparently autochthonous and entire, from the rich black land of the Valley. The history of human societies has shown that the presence of a man or men of genius and determination in a particular society can bring about change and the advancement of technology or culture to an entirely unforeseen degree. Such men may be great kings like Alexander or the promoters of revolutionary ethical or religious ideas like Confucius or Mohammed. In their own generation or later they may exercise the sort of charismatic influence which changes the lives of those who come after them forever.

In Egypt it is possible, even likely, that the whole process was begun, as it was certainly continued, by such a man or men of exceptional attainment and genius. In the early dynasties the kings and their ministers were clearly exceptionally talented and exceptionally well focused: in the first two dynasties, for example, which lasted for some five hundred years in all, most of the essentials of ancient Egyptian society were defined and laid down. In the Third Dynasty Imhotep, the builder of the complex raised to ensure the immortality of King Djoser Netjerykhet, is to be numbered amongst the handful of supreme creative innovators whose names are known, from all of human history.

Some scholars, writing from the standpoint of the late twentieth century and bred in the traditions of scientific humanism, have been inclined to assess the achievements of the early Egyptians, remarkable though they acknowledge them to be, as little more than the outcome of a benign empiricism, with chance, a fortunate discovery, or the natural evolution of a fairly simple idea, being set into a canon of practice which led on, in the fullness of time, to the Pyramids.³ This view sees no essential difference in the Egyptian experience from many others in the history of complex societies: it assumes that the great public works built in the early centuries of Egypt’s existence are the products of an essentially simple technology.

The importance of technology in the development of even so high-flown a society as Egypt is well demonstrated by the remarkable ease with which the Egyptians, from very early on in their progress towards nationhood, manipulated stone. No other people, certainly not in the fourth millennium BC, handled stone with the delight in its variety of colours and textures and in its qualities as a medium for the expression of form, as did the Egyptians, treating it almost as if it were a plastic substance. Their ability to handle the most intractable stones with...