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The Evolution of Early Egyptian Civilization: Issues and Evidence Author(s): Robert J. Wenke Reviewed work(s): Source: Journal of World Prehistory, Vol. 5, No. 3 (September 1991), pp. 279-329 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25800600 . Accessed: 15/08/2012 20:31

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Journal of World Prehistory, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1991

The Evolution of Early Egyptian Civilization: Issues and Evidence

Robert J. Wenke1

Egypt's cultural evolution between 4000 and 2000 B. C. is reviewed in and related to methodological and theoretical issues in contemporary archaeology. Recent archaeological evidence from the Nile Delta is analyzed in the context

of the cultural integration of the Nile Valley and Delta after about 3200 B. C.

KEY WORDS: Egypt; Predynastic-Old Kingdom.

INTRODUCTION

Ancient Egypt, like ancient Greece, has cultural themes so potent that they have reverberated through history. The whole complex of ancient Egyptian "culture"?its hieroglyphs, pyramids, religion, and other elements?not only has fascinated people through the millennia, but also has stimulated generations of scholars, from Herodotus to the present, to seek some deeper, more com

prehensive understanding of history. Indeed, with the recent publication of a

Jungian analysis of ancient Egypt (Rice, 1989) and a racial/ethnic interpretation (Bernal, 1987), one might now fairly claim that nearly every major "theory" of history has been applied to the Egyptian past, from the metaphysical to the

psychological to the materialist (e.g., Herodotus, 1972; Toynbee, 1935; Frank fort, 1956; Childe, 1934; White, 1949; Wittfogel, 1957; Harris, 1977, 1979; Smith, 1928; also see Carneiro, 1970; Butzer, 1976; Krzyzaniak, 1977; Hoff man, 1979; Hassan, 1988; Wenke, 1989a; Janssen, 1978).

'Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, DH-05, Seattle, Washington, 98195.

279

0892-7537/91/09O0-O279$06.50/O ? 1991 Plenum Publishing Corporation

280 Wenke

The archaeological record from which this long interpretive tradition has been derived has recently been the subject of several insightful analyses (e.g., Trigger, 1983a; Hassan, 1988; Kemp, 1983, 1989). This paper is not intended as a review of these reviews; instead, I focus narrowly on recent archaeological evidence about several specific transformations that were central to Egypt's emergence as a complex society, particularly the cultural integration of Upper and Lower Egypt?the defining process, in a sense, in the evolution of the

Egyptian state. Most reviews of Egypt's archaeological record have been prefaced with a

jeremiad about the quality of the relevant data, and unfortunately, it is still true

that the archaeological evidence we have about early Pharaonic Egypt is a pro foundly inadequate and biased sample. Moreover, the "Ancient Egypt" that is the subject of this long interpretive tradition is a farrago of archaeological "evi

dence," interpretations of this evidence, and interpretations of these interpre tations. "Ancient Egypt" in this sense is a work of art?a blending of materials and ideas that, like all great art, has important but different meanings to people of many different times and cultures.

For the reader now flinching at the dire prospect of some form of decon

structionist/postprocessualist analysis of Egyptian archaeology?or, worse, yet another review of the intellectual pretensions of the "New Archaeology"?I hasten to add that my objective is to provide a straightforward summary and

analysis of the empirical record of early Egyptian complex societies. To reflect

accurately, however, issues in contemporary archaeological theory, one must

consider the views of the many scholars who assert that any attempt at some

thing like a "straightforward summary and analysis of the empirical record of

early Egyptian complex societies" is a futile quest for something that is not

there (Young, 1988; Shanks and Tilley, 1989). I think that the central argu ments of this "postprocessual" and "critical" perspective have been thor

oughly rebutted (e.g., Watson, 1990; Renfrew, 1989; Trigger, 1989); but some

of the issues raised in these epistemological controversies are relevant to this

paper because they concern the differences in objectives that have often divided the various scholars who have analyzed ancient Egypt.

My chronological focus (Fig. 1) is the first great dynastic cycle of Egypt, from about 4000 to about 2000 B.C., during which the core elements of ancient

Egyptian civilization first appeared. My geographical focus is the main Nile

Valley and Delta (Fig. 2)?particularly the Delta. Recent research has demon strated the inaccuracy of the traditional notion of ancient Egypt as culturally a "sealed test tube," for Egypt was influenced during its entire formative era by

Western Asian cultures. I have noted what I consider the most important aspects of this issue, but a full treatment of Egypt's external relations is beyond the

scope of this paper.

Early Egyptian Civilization 281

NILE

LEVELS upper egypt

lower egypt

& the fayyum

calibrated c14|

dates from

selected sites

lower

nubia

pales

tine

MESO

Ipotamia!

low I high

3000 +

4000+

a

Old Kingdom Kom el-Hisn

Early Dynastic (Archaic)

Protodynastic (Naaada hi) Terminal

Predynastic Gerzeaa (Nagada ii)

Amratian

(Nagada I)

Desert

Neolithic

Late Predynastic

Middle Predynastic

Early Predynastic

Late Fayyum and Merimda

Neolithic

, Nagada (South Town)

' Hierakonpolis

Nagada

Fayyum Neolithic 'Hemamieh

Merimda * Minshat Abu Omar

Abkan/ Khartoum! Variant/

Post Shamar

kian

Shamar kian

other cultures

Early Bronze Age iii

Early Bronze Age ii

Early Bronze Age i

Late Chaico

lithic

Ghassu lian

Jericho viii

Ur iii Larsa

Akkadian]

Early Dynasty

i iii

Jemdet Nasr Late Uruk

Early Uruk

Late Ubaid

Pottery [Neolithic

Merimda

Early Fayyum Neolithic

Qa, 6000 bc

Fig. 1. A cultural chronology of Egypt and adjacent areas (after Trigger, 1983, Fig. 1.1; Hassan, 1988). Despite some radiometric dating results that conflict with this chart (e.g., Haas et a/., 1987), the period correlations between Egypt and Southwest Asia are supported by both radio

metric dates (e.g., Hassan and Robinson, 1987) and relative artifact seriations (e.g., von der

Way, 1987).

PRELIMINARY THEORETICAL ISSUES

Systematic archaeological research on early Egyptian complex societies is over a century old, and it is appropriate to preface a review of this research by considering briefly the ancient questions at the heart of all such historical inquiry:

What is the point? What can we hope to know about the past? Is there any

282 Wenke

MEDITERRANEAN SEA

QATTARA DEPRESSION

WAD IV NATRUN

Abu Ghalib,vAHeli Giza.fCA

Sakkara*. Dahshur*,

Kasr es-Sagha

FA YUM

HerakleoooliS'

BAHARIYA OASISo

- KILOMETRES

Fig. 2. The Egyptian Nile Valley and Delta, with principal ancient and modern settlements.

Many distinguishing characteristics of Egypt's early complex societies have been explained in terms of the sharp demarcation of Egypt's agricultural zone by inhospitable deserts, the

transport potential of the Nile, and other environmental variables, but such environmental cultural correlations do not constitute necessary and sufficient explanations of early Egyptian cultural evolution.

reasonable basis to believe that early civilizations such as Egypt can be com

pared, explained, or understood in terms of general principles that are not trivial and self-evident?

The long, convoluted debates on these issues (e.g., Salmon, 1982; Dun

nell, 1982; Watson, 1990; Trigger, 1989) have been so inconclusive they do

Early Egyptian Civilization 283

not warrant extended discussion here. Nonetheless, to evaluate what we know about the origins of early Egyptian cultural complexity, it is necessary to exam ine the research objectives of those who have analyzed Egypt's archaeological record.

Most scholars of ancient Egypt have sought simply to reconstruct ancient

Egyptian life, document its history, and understand its social and intellectual

expressions; they have attempted to determine how pyramids were built, how

many years Pepy II reigned, whether Narmer was a real historical individual, how the royal bureaucracy functioned, the nature of4'divine kingship,*' and so forth. Egyptologists have not entirely neglected the modern social sciences (e.g.,

Weeks, 1979; Bietak, 1975; Assmann, 1987), but judging from the literature, they have been unenthusiastic about the most basic premise of traditional social

science, namely, that a major objective of archaeological and historical analysis is to formulate an empirically based explanatory science. Guksch (1985, p. 1), for example, perceives 44in egyptology an isolationist position with regard to results and models . . . from other sciences and a shying away from synthetic statements as if egyptologists share the ancient Egyptians' fear to travel beyond the realm and to die on foreign soil." Similarly, Frandsen states that "It is no secret that Egyptologists are not in the forefront of the modern transformations of the humane and social sciences" (1979, p. 167).

Barry Kemp has eloquently expressed a primary reason why Egyptologists have been unimpressed by most social science-oriented analyses:

It is a feature of many modern treatments of the origin of early states to work, as it were, from the bottom upwards, starting with a group of standard topics: population pressure, agricultural improvements, the appearance of urbanism, the importance of trade and information exchange. The state, by this view, arises autonomously from, or

with broad anonymous interrelations between, groups of people and their environment, both the natural and the socioeconomic. States are, however, built on the urge to rule and on visions of order. Although they have to work within the constraints of their lands and people they generate forces, initiate changes, and generally interfere. In looking at the state, therefore, we should keep to the forefront of our minds this generative power that works from the top downwards and from the center outwards. (1989, p. 7)

Many social science-oriented archaeologists would agree with Kemp's crit icisms of traditional explanations for the rise of the state. Attempts by Childe

(1934), Wittfogel (1957), Harris (1977, 1979), and others to formulate general models of cultural evolution on the basis of correlations between technoenvi ronmental and demographic variables and social and political patterns and pro cesses stimulated a great deal of creative research, and there is still much of value about these ideas [especially, I think, in the case of Carneiro (1970)]. But

many contemporary scholars argue that identifying correlations among these

variables, patterns, and processes does not and cannot "explain" all important aspects of the evolution of ancient civilizations (e.g., Hassan 1988, p. 166;

Trigger, 1986, 1983a; Bard, 1987, 1991; Hoffman, 1979). In fact, Kemp's

284 Wenke

critique of traditional models of state formation is aimed at a theoretical per

spective that, for the most part, has few contemporary adherents.

But does contemporary archaeology, or social science in general, offer a

powerful theoretical alternative to traditional research methods and objectives in the analysis of ancient Egypt?

Perhaps the most radical perspective in contemporary theoretical archae

ology is a strictly materialist and evolutionary approach. Some archaeologists have argued that it is not possible to formulate a true science of the behavior of

extinct peoples and that the long chains of inference that must be constructed

to link the existing archaeological remains with such concepts as "class con

flict" and "political domination" cannot be measured in the archaeological record and treated scientifically. Dunnell (1982, 1991), for example, argues that

archaeology can never be a science of behavior, because behavior does not

exist?artifacts exist; and, because any science must deal with phenomena, a

scientific archaeology must deal with artifacts, not with inferred behavior. Yet

such a science of artifacts cannot be like physics, Dunnell has argued, because the artifactual record is primarily one created by evolutionary processes, in con

trast to the uniform timeless laws that govern the physical universe (also see

Rindos, 1984; Lumsden and Wilson, 1981; Boyd and Richerson, 1985; Wenke, 1981; Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza, 1973; Kirch, 1990; R. N. Adams, 1981;

Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, 1981). I think a materialist-evolutionary approach has considerable potential, but

like all science?it is extremely reductionistic and cannot provide "common

sense" interpretations of ancient Egypt that appeal to human motivations and

behavior, and thus it will be unsatisfactory to many scholars. I illustrate the

application of materialist-evolutionary analyses below, in the context of

explaining variability in Old Kingdom pyramid construction.

A more widely held perspective in contemporary archaeology is that

archaeologists can use theories and methods from a broad range of social and

natural sciences to formulate an explanatory science of the past that can encom

pass many aspects of social structures, human intentions, social-class relation

ships, and other ideological elements (e.g., Salmon, 1982; Watson, 1990; Schiffer, 1988; Earle and Preucel, 1987; Johnson, 1987; Wright, 1985; Payn ter, 1989). The archaeological science these individuals envision, in contrast to the materialist evolutionary perspective, is ultimately a science of behavior, and

they use concepts from economic geography, demography, systems theory, and other modem social sciences to interpret the archaeological record.

In contrast to both of these perspectives, other archaeologists have argued that it is precisely the ideologies and behaviors of ancient societies and individ uals that must be the focal point of archaeological analysis but that empirical scientific epistemologies are fundamentally inappropriate for understanding the

past (e.g., Shanks and Tilley, 1987a, 1987b, 1989; Hodder, 1985; Leone et

Early Egyptian Civilization 285

al., 1987). Shanks and Tilley, in particular, drawing on the work of Derrida

(e.g., 1978), Foucault (1986), and others have argued that, just as one cannot

assign a definitive single meaning to a text, one cannot make an empirically verified and definitive interpretation of the archaeological record. We create the

past, they argue, and our interpretations of the past are limited by, and arise out of, our own cultural context.

Debates about the relative merits of these and other perspectives [see, for

example, the 1989 exchange between Shanks and Tilley and Trigger, Renfrew, and Wenke (1989b), and others in the Norwegian Archaeological Review] are

largely beyond the scope of this paper, but I consider them briefly here, both because they have begun to have some impact on studies of Egypt (e.g., Has

san, 1988) and because they are directly relevant to the question of what we know?and can know?about the Egyptian past.

Kemp, for example, expresses a view of historical causation that presents problems for some social science-oriented archaeologists:

Why did ancient Egypt decline and its civilization fail? The same answer applies as to all civilizations: too great and too prolonged a rejection of systematized life in favor of freedom to manoeuvre. If the work of Middle Kingdom Egypt?and of equiv alent periods of bureaucratic dominance in ancient China, the Indus Valley, Mesopo tamia and Pre-Columbian Central and South America?had been pursued as a peaceful continuum, converting all who encountered it to enthusiastic support for order and the

beauty of logical systems of government, then by now a Utopian world order might well have been achieved. But anarchic love of disorder and the rejection of authority are

equally part of the human personality. History is a record of the struggle between the two polarities of the mind?order and disorder, acceptance and rebellion (as the ancient

Egyptians themselves perceived). Both the rise and fall of civilization are present in each one of us. (1989, p. 180)

In his excellent analysis of ancient Egypt, Kemp gives considerable weight to environmental and technological variables, and the above quotation is by no

means his ultimate and complete account of Egypt's developmental mechanics; but explanations based on presumed psychological predispositions such as an "anarchic love of disorder" would, from the perspective of the social sciences, have little explanatory power. Are we to suppose that in some cases states failed to develop in otherwise suitable surroundings because the people there failed to

develop the ideology of state control? Assertions that the explanation of the rise and fall of civilizations is to be found in the qualities of the human mind are

indisputably true, but they end comparative analyses of ancient civilizations,

except those concerned with the evolution of human cognitive structures and mechanisms.

Even for those who assume that the intentions and ideologies of long-dead preliterate peoples are a legitimate field of study, Kemp's perspective poses some problems. Shanks and Tilley (1987a, b, 1989), for example, and many other contemporary "critical archaeologists" (Leone et al., 1987), assume as a major premise that one invents the past rather than discovers it and that one

286 Wenke

cannot help but invent a past that is a reflection of one's socioeconomic and

political heritage and context. Thus, the "too great and too prolonged a rejec tion of systematized life in favor of freedom to manoeuvre" that Kemp suggests as a reason why all the great ancient civilizations collapsed might be viewed as

simply an expression of his sociopolitical context as an academic in twentieth

century England. The importance of these and other epistemological issues is vividly illus

trated by the problems scholars have had simply in defining the analytical units with which to study the past. Labeling ancient Egypt at some point or other a

"state," for example, based on the inferred appearance of characteristics such as centralized government or a class structured society, is more a description than an analysis. To many scholars such typologies are inexact, atheoretical

categorizations of a continuous and multidimensional underlying variability. McGuire argues that such "an approach inevitably degenerates into taxonomic

arguments: What is a simple society? What is a state? Transforming types into variables eliminates the either/or decisions inherent in a typological methodol

ogy and makes taxonomic arguments largely irrelevant" (1983, p. 95; Rindos, 1984; Yoffee, 1979; cf. Wright, 1977a, p. 301, 1977b).

Figure 3 illustrates some of these issues: How do we decide where to draw a boundary line that defines a "state" in such a pattern of continuous variabil

ity? One needs a theory or assumption that tells one which variable or variables are critical and what changes in variable states and values "mean."

The obvious solution to these and many other epistemological issues might seem to be an eclectic-synthetic approach: one could integrate evidence from

every relevant discipline and build an ever more complete understanding of ancient Egypt. We could, for example, use geophysics to reconstruct ancient Nile hydraulics and thereby explain why Old Kingdom settlements in the Delta were built almost exclusively on geziras; we could then use survey data to show that these settlements increased in number during the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties; texts of this period would tell us that these settlements probably increased in number because of tax incentives conferred by a pharaoh interested in protecting his eastern frontier (Badawy, 1967); finally, those scholars so inclined could look for a general theory of history in Marx (1932, 1973; Friedman and Row

lands, 1977b; Shanks and Tilley, 1989), in Weber (1947, 1968), in evolution

ary theory (Dunnell, 1980), or in some other source. One could, in sum, attempt to understand this ancient culture in a multifaceted way (Trigger, 1986).

Such an eclectic-synthetic approach, however, does not resolve all prob lems. The Narmer Palette, for example, suggests changes in ancient Egyptian perceptions and the history of the relationship of the Nile Delta and Valley, and

archaeological evidence (reviewed below) supports this in the form of the even tual homogenization of artifact styles in the Valley and Delta. But from some

perspectives, these epigraphic and archaeological data are entirely complemen

a b c d e f g

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"D m onj -i a 2 a

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2 O 5' a # S < ?o ;? * - ? Oq? ? z 3 5 a

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Fig. 3. Some hypothesized variables in Egyptian cultural evolution. Values for some of these variables are estimated from various published data; others

are simply hypotheses based on inadequate samples. The variables here are (A) coefficient of rank-size distribution of settlement size, (B) population in

millions (after Butzer, 1976), (C) population density per square kilometer (after Butzer, 1976), (D) lake volumes and stream discharge in east Africa (after Butzer, 1976), (E) percentage of domesticated animals in total faunal assemblage (estimated from reports on excavated materials), (F) price of farmland per unit (in silver) (after Baer, 1962), and (G) monumental

architecture

in cubic meters of worked stone (after Kemp, 1983, Fig. 2.1). Many M other variables could be plotted (e.g., average transport distance of craft items), but even with the variables plotted here, the problem of social typologies ?S is evident: At what point is Egypt a "state"? By analyzing archaeologically measurable variables, the analytical focus is placed on changes in evolutionary

tempo and mode that are fundamental to cultural

change

(compiled and drawn by M. Lehner, N. Pyne, and R. Wenke).

288 Wenke

tary only if one is attempting to reconstruct Egyptian culture history. The ancient

Egyptian ideas that one reads into or discerns in something like the Narmer

Palette do not have the same scientific standing or utility that measurable vari

ations in ceramic styles do; indeed, from a materialist perspective the "cultural

integration" of the Nile Valley and Delta may be defined as, and in effect mean

nothing more than, measurable, statistically analyzable changes in artifact styles and distributions. Similarly, most sociological/behavioral interpretations of early states emphasize "power" and "domination" as effective concepts with which

to categorize and analyze early complex societies (Haas, 1982; Hassan, 1988; Maisels, 1990, p. 10; also see Wallerstein, 1976; Kohl, 1981; Friedman and

Rowlands, 1977a). But, did some early civilization fail to appear because it did

not evolve appropriate power structures? How would we know? The extent to

which it is possible to measure "domination" directly in the archaeological record and treat it scientifically is unclear, and some reject such concepts as

useful in an empirical science of archaeology (e.g., Dunnell, 1991). Nor will a synthetic-eclectic approach satisfy the postprocessualists who

claim that an empirical understanding of the past in neutral scientific terms is

misdirected and impossible. In the following review of the Egyptian archaeological record I have illus

trated these varied perspectives on the past and some of the epistemological

problems they entail. In general, I conclude that interpretations of the history and social-political-economic structures of ancient Egypt cannot be encom

passed in the logical framework and concepts of a truly materialist science and,

conversely, that a truly materialist science of the archaeological record?even

if that science is eventually developed into a much more powerful system than

imagined today?will not satisfy most scholars because they want to understand

the past in the common-sense terms that translate the artifacts into the familiar

behaviors of our experience.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF ANCIENT EGYPT

It may seem self-evident that to understand what happened in ancient Egypt we have to analyze the variability over time in such variables as Nile flood

fluctuations and pyramid construction (Fig. 1), but some scholars argue that this concept of time is inadequate as a basis for understanding ancient societies.

"Chronology may be crucial to social change, at points of sudden discontinuity, but for the most part we may expect it to be irrelevant in pre-capitalist social forms because of the absence of events which build on each other" (Shanks and Tilley, 1987a, pp. 184-185). Similarly, Kemp suggests that the Egyptians derived a great sense of stability from a view of time in which a

" [continuity

of orderly kingship was the principal image" (1989, p. 24). I focus here, however, on a scientific sense of chronology that allows us

Early Egyptian Civilization 289

to compare Egypt to other civilizations and to analyze its internal dynamics in terms of the modes and tempos of evolutionary change (Fig. 3).

The principal data with which to construct such a chronology are ancient

texts, radiocarbon dates, and variations in artifact styles. No texts existed in the crucial developmental period between 4000 and 3000 B.C., and even though some texts recording Egyptian chronology are thought to date to the third mil lennium B.C. (e.g., the Palermo Stone), these textual sources are ambiguous, and scholars differ on their interpretation (e.g., Baer, 1970; Stadelmann, 1985,

p. 294). The Turin Papyrus and Mantho's Chronicle provide lists of kings that form the basis for the later chronology, and for the periods after the Old King dom, the text-based chronologies provide several points that seem to be well fixed by references to datable astronomical events (reviewed by Hassan and

Robinson, 1987, p. 125; Lehner etal, 1990). Hassan and Robinson (1987) found good agreement between the radiocar

bon chronology and the traditional age estimates for the period between the First and the Fifth Dynasties and for some later periods. Dates from eight samples of acacia and sycamore wood from the tomb of Djoser, for example, are highly consistent and average 2680 ? 104 Cal B.C., which compares well with Edwards' (1970) estimate of 2686 B.C. for this tomb. They also compared historical and radiocarbon dates in order to correlate the chronology of Egypt and Southwest Asia.

Geyh et al., (1989) found an approximate fit between the historical dates and the radiocarbon dates for a large sample of Old Kingdom dates, except for the Sixth Dynasty, but they question the use of radiometric dating to infer pre cise chronologies because of sample contamination and correction-curve ambi

guities (1989, pp. 74-75).

Despite this overall correspondence, some recent radiocarbon dates con

trast sharply with the historical chronology. In our own study we (Haas et al., 1987) found that 64 samples of carbonized organic materials taken from many

Old Kingdom pyramids, temples, and tombs averaged (both conventional and AMS dates) about 374 years older than the text-based traditional chronology suggests (Hayes, 1970). Various explanations of this discrepancy have been considered (e.g., the "old wood" problem), but none is particularly convinc

ing, and the significance of these results remains unclear.

Dendrochronology has some possibilities in Egypt, because wood pre serves so well there, but the many logs and artifacts made of Levantine conifers have never been systematically analyzed.

The styles of Palestinian and Mesopotamian artifacts found in Egyptian sites?particularly the Syro-Palestinian styles of pottery at Maadi (Kantor, 1965), Buto (von der Way, 1987, 1988), Tell Ibrahim Awad (van den Brink, 1988, p. 80), Mendes (Brewer et al., 1991), and many Upper Egyptian sites, as well?seem to support the period correlations between Egypt and Southwest Asia (Fig. 1).

290 Wenke

Traditional artifact typologies such as those produced by Tixier (1963) and

Petrie (1900a; also see Needier, 1981) still are the units in which the chronology of the early states of Egyptian cultural evolution is analyzed but these types

(e.g., "Meidum Bowl," "Fayyum A point") must all be assumed to be amal

gams of stylistic, functional, and random variability. Numerous scholars have

argued that the methods used to create such units are far from optimal (Spauld

ing, 1979; Dunnell, 1986; Read, 1982; Whallon, 1982; Close,, 1988; Lewis,

1986). Recently Egyptian pottery typologies have been recast in the form of

hierarchical attribute analyses (Arnold, 1981; Bourriau, 1981; Kroeper, 1989;

Ballet, 1990, Fig. 1). Various other scholars, however, argue that more effec

tive typologies and classifications can be constructed with nonhierarchical meth

ods (e.g., Dunnell, 1970, 1986; Read, 1982; also see Whallon and Brown,

1982; Aldenderfer, 1987).

THE ECOLOGICAL CONTEXT OF EARLY EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION

Through most of Egypt's early history such simple factors as floodplain width and flood basin size "explain," in a statistical sense, most of the varia

bility in settlement location, size, and density. Butzer has shown (1976, Fig. 14), for example, that archaeological site density can be predicted with consid

erable accuracy by an inverse function of floodplain width. But what is the

significance of such relationships? Shanks and Tilley (1989), for example, con

sider that the physical environment is little more than background to the real

theater of archaeological analysis?the social, political, and ideological systems that determine how people interact with their physical environments.

Butzer, in contrast, argued that "sociological hypotheses are by them

selves inadequate to explicate the processes involved in the emergence of flood

plain civilizations" (1978, p. 18), and he suggests that "[tjhere is growing evidence that the economic history of ancient Egypt was primarily one of con

tinuous ecological readjustment to a variable water supply, combined with

repeated efforts to intensify or expand land use in order to increase productivity.

It is in this sense that hydraulic civilization in Egypt remains inconceivable without its ecological determinants

. . . ." (1978, p. 17). Butzer (1978, p. 17), for example, estimates a 30% decline in Nile dis

charge during the course of the Old Kingdom and links this to the collapse of

the political order after the death of Pepy II (ca. 2167 B.C.) (also see Hassan, 1986, 1988; Hassan and Stucki, 1987; Bell, 1970). Similarly, several scholars

have suggested that declining rainfall after the end of the Pleistocene forced

desert populations into the Nile Valley and thus directly led to agricultural econ

omies (Childe, 1934; Hassan, 1984b). Brewer found evidence (1991) in fish

remains that during the Predynastic Period Nile floods were decreasing, the

Early Egyptian Civilization 291

climate was becoming more arid, and there was increased variability in winter

temperatures. In sum, the Nile Valley's unique physical geography has been adduced as

a proximate explanation of almost every aspect of Egyptian civilization, from its great ideological uniformity (as facilitated by the Nile's transport potential), to its largely nonurban settlement patterns (a function in part, at least, of the

homogeneity of agricultural potential along the Nile and the narrow confines of the Valley) (reviewed by Butzer, 1976, 1988; Hassan, 1988). The determining effects of the Nile Delta's physical geography, however, are less clear. Goe dicke notes (1988) that the ancient Egyptian name for the Delta may derive from the word for "aquatic plains" or "flooded land," but on the basis of about 550 hand augerings and various soil profiles, de Wit and van Stralen report that

although "according to historical sources, marshes were well known in the delta in ancient times, hardly any marshlike deposits . . . were found during the entire

survey" (1988, p. 138). They suggest that marsh deposits could have been obliterated by the climate and conditions of the ancient Delta, but their evidence and other data suggest that marshy conditions did not restrict agriculture or

settlement in this region. In a survey of an area of the eastern Delta, Van Wesemael (1988; also see

el-Kasim, 1988) found the following. (1) All the habitation sites found during the survey were built either on levees (nine sites) or on higher parts of geziras, the middle Pleistocene sand formations (i.e., geziras now buried by alluvial

sediments; four sites). (2) No sherds were found on the highest parts of the

geziras, probably because "the tops of the geziras were only used as refuge during extremely high Nile floods. These locations were too far from the agri cultural fields" (Van Wesemael, 1988, p. 129). (3) No sherds were found on

the northeastern sides of the geziras, because these "areas were probably back

swamps in which sand, eroded from the geziras, was deposited" (Van Wese

mael, 1988, p. 129). (4) The oldest sherds found were of the Old Kingdom period, and these were found only in occupations situated on the "higher parts of the middle Pleistocene sand" (Van Wesemael, 1988, p. 129); but the sherds found in occupations situated on the levees were exclusively of post-Old King dom age. Van Wesemael warns that "this does not necessarily mean that during the Old and Middle Kingdom settlement areas were restricted to the geziras. However, due to shifting watercourses and high sedimentation rates, levees formed during the Old and Middle Kingdom (ca. 2686-1750 B.C.) have been covered with a thick layer of sediment and, therefore, do not appear in the

uppermost 2 meters of alluvial sediments" (Van Wesemael, 1988, p. 129). (5) No sherds were found on the surface of some tells because they had been cov

ered with a "layer of clayey materials of eolian origin" (1988, p. 130; also see

Wunderlich, 1988). Coutellier and Stanley (1987) used deep borings and other methods to ana

292 Wenke

lyze deposits that relate to four major Holocene Nile branches. They calculate Holocene sedimentation rates at 500 cm per 1000 years and conclude that the Delta's coastal margin migrated northward by as much as 50 km during the past 5000 years (a progradational rate of 10 m per year). If so, the Delta's conditions of settlement were different at 8000 B.P. and for some time thereafter, since

many levees?the favored settlement location?were just forming, and the sea coast and associated lagoons and marshes were much farther south. Nonethe

less, if the 5800 B.P. (uncorrected) radiocarbon date (Krzyzaniak, 1988, 1989) from auger samples from Minshat Abu Omar (from above a layer containing pottery) is representative, the Delta may have been occupied from the period of initial agriculture in Egypt onward, and there seems to have been no ecolog ical barrier to substantial settlement there throughout the Holocene.

THE EVOLUTION OF EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION: 5000-2000 B.C.

The agricultural basis of early Egyptian complex societies has recently been thoroughly reviewed by Hassan (1986; also see Wendorf, 1980; Wenke

etaL, 1988a; Trigger, 1983a).

Egypt's primary domesticates of the Pharaonic era, the wheat/barley, sheep/goat combination, were almost certainly introduced from Southwest Asia, but the Egyptian record offers important examples of independent evolution of domesticates and agricultural technologies that have much to offer for current models of agricultural origins (e.g., Henry, 1989; McCorriston and Hole, 1991) and for the determinants of the spread (e.g., Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, 1981) of agricultural economies (Caton-Thompson and Gardner, 1934; Wendorf and

Schild, 1976; Close and Wendorf, 1987; Close, 1987; Wendorf, 1980; Ginter and Kozlowski, 1983, 1984, 1988; Kozlowski and Ginter, 1989; Wenke etal., 1988a; Brewer, 1987, 1991; Eiwanger, 1982, 1984, 1987; Smith, 1989).

Kozlowski and Ginter conclude, for example, on the basis of artifact styles, that both the Fayyum and the Merimda Beni Salama communities, which are still the earliest known agricultural settlements in Egypt, "had one and the same

ancestor, with the cradle land in the Near East, and more specifically in the Jordan Valley" (1989, p. 176). Others have argued a northwest African origin (Butzer, 1976), a Sudanese origin (Arkell, 1975; Cialowicz, 1989, p. 265), and a Saharan origin (reviewed by Hassan, 1988; also see Kuper, 1989).

In any case, by about 4000 B.C., Egyptian agriculture was a productive mix of cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, wheat, barley, and other crops and animals that provided the basis for the subsequent evolution of Egyptian civilization.

In terms of environmental, agricultural, and basic demographic variables, the period from about 4000 to about 2000 B.C. can be considered a single epoch of transformation, during which Egypt's settlement patterns, functional inter

dependence and complexity, and other primary variables underwent parallel

Early Egyptian Civilization 293

changes in evolutionary tempo and direction, culminating in the mature Old

Kingdom state, just prior to 2000 B.C. The primary question, then, is What were the major determinants of both

the initial complex Egyptian societies and their subsequent evolution? This

question entails important subsidiary questions, such as by what processes and mechanisms did the Nile Valley and Delta integrate socially, economically, and

politically? What were the social, political, economic, administrative, and ide

ological organizational principles and mechanisms of the early Egyptian state? and How does Egypt compare to other early states in its evolutionary devel

opment?

The Physical Anthropology of Ancient Egyptians

From the beginnings of research in Egypt, scholars have sought some of the answers to the above questions by trying to trace the "genetic" affinities of the ancient Egyptians, and this issue continues to be debated. Bemal (1987), for example, argues that much of Classical Greek culture was derived from

Egypt and that Egyptian culture, in turn, had been in significant part a product of black African cultures?a view rejected by most Egypt specialists but accepted by various African-American scholars. African-American scholars are, how

ever, only the latest to "claim" the ancient Egyptians. Deny (1956), for exam

ple, argued that peoples from South or Southwest Asia were the main genetic ancestors of the Egyptians of the Pharaonic period. As Trigger notes (1983a, pp. 12-13), various early scholars concluded?on dubious evidence?that the earliest Predynastic Egyptian peoples were negroid but that there were repeated incursions of "Hamito-Semitic" peoples and that this "Dynastic Race" brought

with them the advanced civilization expressed in Early Dynastic Egypt. Emery (1961, pp. 39-40), Edwards (1971, pp. 40-41), Petrie and Quibell (1896), and others argued variants of this position.

The data with which to evaluate these idea are ambiguous. Too few Egyp tians of the Neolithic period have been found (e.g., Henneberg et al., 1989) to determine their similarity to other groups. Trigger (1983a), citing Batrawi (1945, 1946), concludes that skeletal remains from Upper Egypt show very little change from the Predynastic into the late historical period and that, although "there was some variation within the population, the Upper Egyptian people were

mostly small in stature and had long narrow skulls, dark wavy hair, and brown skin .... Skeletons found at Merimda, El-Omari and Ma'adi suggest that the

Predynastic inhabitants of the Delta were taller and more sturdily built than the

Upper Egyptians and that their skulls were broader" (1983a, p. 12). But he

disputes the conclusion of others that northern populations brought "civiliza tion" into Egypt. Berry and Berry (1967, 1973) see great genetic stability and

homogeneity persisting through the Old and Middle Kingdoms, with conse

294 Wenke

quent increases in heterogenity in the New Kingdom and later periods (also see

Angel, 1972; Keita, 1988, 1990). Leek analyzed the remains of approximately 118 men, women, and children buried in Cheops' western necropolis at Giza, and he concluded that only a few of the skulls exhibited any "negroid charac teristics" (1986, p. 190).

The general appearance of people as presented in early Pharaonic paintings and sculptures contrasts with sub-Saharan Africans, and many scholars interpret these representations to show the ancient Egyptians as a Mediterranean type small, with delicate extremities, brown skin, and dark hair (straight or wavy) and eyes (reviewed in Trigger, 1983a). This is what one would expect on the basis of the geographic-demographic context. The "races" of the world were

largely created by physical barriers to gene flow, such as the Himalayas and the Sahara, and despite no doubt continuous gene flow down the Nile, the Sahara isolated Egypt to some extent from sub-Saharan populations, even during wetter intervals. Gene flow between Egypt and Southwest Asia and the Mediterranean

would probably have increased in frequency from the period of agricultural origins onward, based on evidence of increasing commodity exchange. Con

trasting distributions through time and space of cranial and dental physical char acteristics would be expected, depending on whether agriculture and early cultural complexity were the direct result of the migrations of North Africans and Southwest Asians into the Nile Valley between about 6000 and 3000 B.C.

or, alternatively, if the gene pool of Egypt remained more or less the same

during these transitional epochs and it was the cultural elements, not the people of Southwest Asia, that were introduced to Egypt.

Samples of human remains relevant to this issue, however, are inadequate to test these possibilities.

In addition to these various studies of the racial origins of ancient Egyp tians, there is considerable evidence about Egyptian diet and disease (reviewed

by Loveil, 1990; also see Greene, 1972; Klug and Beck, 1985; Martin et al., 1984; Molto, 1988; Neilsen, 1970; Podzorski, 1982; Saffirio, 1972; Cook et

al., 1988; David, 1986). This topic and the large body of literature involving the use of craniodental morphometrics to determine genetic relatedness (e.g.,

Harris and Weeks, 1973; David 1986) are beyond the scope of this paper.

The Early and Middle Predynastic Origins of Egyptian Civilization: Ca. 4000-3400 B.C.

Figures 4-6 illustrate the basis for the traditional view that Egyptian com

plex societies first appeared in Upper Egypt (Hassan, 1988; Trigger, 1983a; Bard, 1987, 1991; Hays, 1984; Petrie, 1900b, 1901a, b, 1902). Predynastic cemeteries and settlements have been recorded at many locations in Upper Egypt, but their density appears to decline sharply north of Badari. Butzer

Early Egyptian Civilization 295

Fig. 4. Major Predynastic Egyptian sites (after Trigger, 1983; Hassan, 1988, Bard, 1991). Most of these sites were occupied for some period

between about 4000 B.C. and 3000 B.C. Many are cemeteries. Most settlement sites were small agricultural communities. Hierakonpolis, Nagada, and Abydos were among the largest Predynastic settlements.

observes that the low settlement density in the areas between Memphis and the

Upper Egyptian sites may have resulted from the great size of the natural flood basins in Middle Egypt, which "would have required massive labor to bring under control'' (1978, p. 16). Also, the intensity of modern settlement in Mid dle Egypt is such that early remains are likely obscured.

296 Wenke

Kom el-Hisn <Kufur Nigm?

El-Beda .J-Ginn ^bu Omar i/ahim Aw ad

Merimda?\ El-Qatta* Abu Roash* (

Zawyet el-Aryan?\i AbusirO. Saqqara \

Yahudiya Maadi

Lahun. A

GhuraD.^,arageh SidmantV

busir el-Meleq

/ Awlad el-Sheikh

USheikh Timai j?Sheikh Ibada

y Matmar \??Mustaggidah

i*Qaw

., ,EI-Ahaiwa Kawamil* P.Naga ed-Deir Mahasna. Tesaid

Abydos* m El-Amra

Abu Umuri? El-Tariff

ArmanU,/

lagada Hammamat

Gebelein ?\ \.Ed-Deir Messawiah.l _ 4 _ . . w ^vjEast Sebaieh

Muhammeriahv\?pi K_h HierakonpolinXaq el Qara Naq el-Hagg Zidan*\

/ El-Masaid

EI-Kubbaniya,\?Elephantine

Fig. 5. Major Early Dynastic Egyptian sites (after Trigger, 1983, Fig. 1.2; van den Brink et at., 1989. Most of these sites were occupied for some period between about 3000 B.C. and 2600 B.C. Note the increased number of Delta sites, compared to the Predynastic period, during this

period traditionally considered the period of initial Egyptian "state" for mation.

By about 3600 B.C., however, large communities existed in Lower Egypt, at Maadi and nearby sites (Fig. 4), and even if the demographic, economic, and political center of Egypt was still in Upper Egypt, beginning after about 3400 B.C. population growth and economic expansion seem to have been most

rapid in the north. But to what extent was the Delta inhabited before about 3400

Early Egyptian Civilization 297

Fig. 6. Some major Old Kingdom Egyptian sites (after Trigger, 1983; van den Brink, 1988). Between about 2600 B.C. and about 2100 B.C., the number and size of settlements in Egypt increased substantially. Hundreds of known Old Kingdom sites do not appear on this map. Some of the

apparently largest Old Kingdom settlements, such as Memphis, have never been systematically excavated.

B.C.? Occupations in the Fay yum and at Merimda, on the western edge of the

Delta, indicate that people certainly lived in Lower Egypt and at least on the Delta's margins before 4000 B.C., but there are few sites that span the period between 4000 B.C. and about 3700 B.C., when settlement density rose sharply in Upper Egypt and important cultural changes occurred.

298 Wenke

It is possible that remains of early and mid-Predynastic Delta settlements have not yet been found simply because they are so deeply buried. Krzyzaniak (1988, 1989) had to auger deeply into the watertable near Minshat Abu Omar to find the remains that have so far yielded the earliest radiocarbon dates for the Delta (5800 BP). But settlement in the Delta seems always to have been on or close to the large sand and gravel mounds (geziras) produced by Nile floods, and despite centuries of looting and excavation, there is little evidence that these mounds ever were substantially occupied during the first half of the fourth mil lennium B.C.?when Hierakonpolis and Nagada were already large and func

tionally complex communities.

Interpretations differ concerning the nature of the first Egyptian complex societies to evolve in Upper Egypt. Kemp (1983) suggested that once Hiera

konpolis and a few other sites emerged as large settlements, Predynastic Egypt's settlement pattern was a "primate" one, meaning that a few very large settle ments contained much of the population. Using the same data, Hassan, how

ever, argues that in the Predynastic period and "even in Dynastic times [the pattern] was a strongly log-normal (rank) system" (1988, p. 162). Primate dis tributions are associated with rapid changes toward greater centralization and differentiation of economic functions, but log-normal distributions are associ ated with economic and sociopolitical systems in which there is relatively little centralization of power or administration (Johnson, 1977). Hassan interprets this log-normal pattern to be principally a reflection of the constraints of the Nile Valley's geography: the narrow (ca. 2-km or less) cultivable strip of land

along the Nile limits the growth of preindustrial settlements in a way that Meso

potamian communities, for example, were not. Hassan (1986, p. 162) suggests that towns in Egypt were differentiated separately on the basis of their admin

istrative, economic, and religious importance and that, in some periods, towns in Egypt were deliberately located to maximize control over specific areas?not

simply in response to the forces of market economies.

Various scholars (e.g., Lewarch, 1977) have questioned the application to

archaeological data of models derived from modem economies, but natural selection does operate on human communities?the eventual apparent preem inence of Memphis, for example, may have been legitimized by complex reli

gious and ceremonial traditions, but it also is ideally placed for maximum economic integration of the Nile Valley and Delta and for orchestrating the cultural interactions with Egypt's foreign neighbors; an Old Kingdom national

political center in the Dakhla Oasis would have been inefficient, no matter what

religious traditions might have sanctioned it. Locational geographic models can be applied to archaeological settlement

pattern data with more effect if the composition, and not just the size and loca

tion, of communities can be determined, and we have some basic data in this

regard. Early and mid-Predynastic sites at Merimda and Maadi in Lower Egypt

Early Egyptian Civilization 299

and at Nagada, Hemamieh, and other sites in the south were composed of cir cular huts, a few meters or less in diameter, separated by animal pens, storage bins, trash pits, and other features of simple domestic economies. In the area

around Nagada, for example, Hassan (1988; Hassan, et al., 1980; also see

Fattovich, 1979, 1984) found numerous small settlements that date to about

3750 B.C., most of them apparently the remains of simple communities made

up of 50-250 people who lived in compounds of pole-thatch huts. In subsequent periods, such communities were transformed into much larger communities in the typical Middle Eastern pattern of rectangular mudbrick buildings sharing one or more walls. What we know about these architectural changes comes

mainly from larger sites, such as Hierakonpolis, which contains the complete Badarian-Amratian-Nagada (or Gerzean) sequence (Hoffman, 1974, 1980, 1982; Hoffman et aL, 1986; Harlan, 1985; Friedman, 1990a; Hassan, 1984a), and later periods as well (Fairservis, 1986). Hoffman concluded that Hierakonpolis

was initially settled about 4000 B.C. by colonists from more northern parts of

Upper Egypt. He attributed the rapid growth of the community to the ecological diversity and the exceptional agricultural potential of the region. Hoffman sug

gested that there was a "population explosion" at Hierakonpolis between 3800 and 3400 B.C., reaching a regional population of 5000-10,000 people in the central area of the site. He concluded that this community was already func

tionally differentiated, in that Hierakonpolis at this time seems to have been a

major pottery producer for Upper Egypt, in general, and also produced vases, maceheads, palettes, and other commodities in fine stone. This economy was

based on productive cereal agriculture and intense exploitation of domesticated

cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs. And because of the impressive size and rich contents of some tombs of this era, Hoffman suggested that this differentiated

economy operated in the context of significant social ranking. Between 3400 and 3200 B.C. the people of Hierakonpolis built a large cobblestone foundation that Hoffman and his co-workers suggested supported a "fortified palace, tem

ple, or administrative center" (Hoffman et al.9 1986, p. 184), as well as a thick mudbrick wall around part of the settlement, and some large mudbrick tombs. This and other evidence led Hoffman and his co-workers to conclude that at

about 3200 B.C., Hierakonpolis became the capital of a southern Egyptian state, and they argue that one of the important implications of their research is that it demonstrates that "the development of Egyptian civilization was an essentially internal and uninterrupted process" (1986, p. 183; Hoffman, 1988, 1989).

The site of Nagada may have been as important as Hierakonpolis in the

early Predynastic. Hassan suggests that although Predynastic Hierakonpolis and

Nagada were compact nucleated settlements with perhaps a few thousand inhab

itants, they "were probably not major centers of population and their function must have been primarily symbolic of a new order of life and a center of sacred shrines and deities" (1988, p. 162), and he estimates that no more than 2% of

300 Wenke

the residents of any Predynastic Upper Egyptian nome would have been occu

pational specialists (1988, p. 162). At the South Town area of Nagada, Barocas et al., found "state authority devices" in the form of clay sealings that were

widely used to "lock" containers and room doors, and they conclude that these

sealings seem "to place . . . South Town within the context of the incipient

Egyptian State" (1989, p. 301). The only known Lower Egypt sites contemporary with the evolving Upper

Egyptian state centered at Hierakonpolis and Nagada are Maadi and a few nearby communities (Fig. 4). Radiocarbon dates (Hassan, 1988) indicate initial settle ment here at about 3650 B.C. and several centuries of occupation thereafter

(Close, 1988, p. 171). Maadi comprised scores of semisubterranean pit houses covered by thatch roofs supported by poles (Menghin, 1931, 1932, 1934; Caneva a/., 1987; Casini, 1988; Rizkana and Seeher, 1984, 1985; Bokonyi, 1985). In the variability of their contents, Maadi's hundreds of graves indicate at least some social ranking, but it is the functional changes in the community that are most important. Many hundreds of Syro-Palestinian pots have been found at Maadi, reflecting strong connections to Syro-Palestine and, probably, to the evolving Uruk-Jemdet Nasr states of Greater Mesopotamia. Caneva and her co-workers report that Maadi's lithics also tie it "in a wide network of

communication, including the Levant and reaching northern Syria" (1989, p. 291). Hassan sees "unequivocal evidence of trade as distinct from informal, occasional transactions" (1988, p. 160) at Maadi, and he notes that the site included a "commercial" zone, in which the "separation of the stores and

magazines from the dwellings suggests a commercial enterprise" (1988, p. 160). Caneva and her co-workers see"marked craft specialization in . . . activities such as metallurgy, lithic industry, stone vase production and, above all, pottery manufacture" (1989, pp. 291-292; Casini, 1988). The remains of apparently domesticated equids have been found at Maadi (Bokonyi, 1985), and these ani mals may have been used in overland trade with Palestine.

Kemp notes that "there is growing evidence that the culture of Maadi was

representative for other regions of the Nile Delta proper" (1989, p. 44; also see Kaiser, 1985; Debono, 1956; Saad, 1969), but despite the evidence of

Maadi's functional complexity, he invidiously compares this Buto-Maadi cul ture to what he sees as the more developed southern centers.

It might seem somewhat paradoxical on ecological grounds that Lower

Egypt and the Delta were not the initial heartland of cultural complexity in

Egypt, since they have wide areas of fertile land, more resource diversity than the south because of its Mediterranean littoral, and the stimulating effects of contacts with Southwest Asia. But as Trigger (1983a) has noted, the initial cultural primacy of Upper Egypt may be linked to the fact that the levees of

Upper Egypt were probably easier for primitive agriculturalists to farm because the smaller size of the Upper Egyptian natural flood basins made them easier

Early Egyptian Civilization 301

to control (also see Butzer, 1978). Carneiro's model (1970) of early state for mation may also apply here: he suggested that population growth in sharply circumscribed agricultural environments?of which the Nile Valley is a prime example?would lead to competition for resources, which, in turn, would lead to the development of state organizations as an outgrowth of military institu tions. This idea may have some applicability to Egypt (Bard and Carneiro, 1989). Even though the evidence suggests little population pressure in this sense for Egypt at any time until late in its history, when we compare Upper and Lower Egypt it is evident that Upper Egypt is much more sharply circumscribed

by natural barriers to agricultural extension, and this could have generated at least a more intense form of cultural interaction and even competition in Upper

Egypt. Eiwanger (1987; also see Endesfelder, 1984) linked some of the Predy

nastic cultural changes to increased trade in copper and other artifacts, but Kemp (1989, p. 31) concludes that it "strains the evidence needlessly to promote trade into a major force" in these evolutionary changes.

Hassan (1988), Trigger (1983a), Hoffman (1979), Bard (1991), and others have argued that for the problem of explaining the evolution of complex soci eties in Egypt, the most important changes in the Predynastic period may have been the evolution of ritual systems and expanded lines of political authority. Changes in the nature of political control and other ideologies seem to be evi dent in iconographic representations (reviewed by Hassan, 1988), and recently there have been several attempts to measure the changes in Predynastic social structure by analyzing statistically variations in Predynastic graves (Atzler, 1971-1972, 1981, 1986; Bard, 1991; Eiwanger, 1987).

The Predynastic?Early Dynastic Transition: Ca. 3400?2700 B.C.

By 3000 B.C. the whole of the Nile Valley and Delta was occupied, from the Mediterranean to the Nubian frontier, and the oases of the Western Desert as well (Figs. 5 and 6).

Most scholars suspect that the process by which Egypt was politically uni fied was a violent one (Fig. 7). Evidence regarding the possibility that Egyptian developments were stimulated by contacts with Southwest Asia, however, is less clear. Kemp (1989, pp. 31-32) discounts the importance of such connec

tions, whereas Redford (1989) attributes somewhat more significance to them. Redford (1989) has documented the apparent presence of Semitic elements in

early written Egyptian and suggests that the initial confrontation between Asiatic and Upper Egyptian cultures may have occurred in the eastern Delta.

Redford notes (1989) that traditional interpretations of Egypt's history from the Gerzean period through the First Dynasty argue a kind of "Drang nach

Norden," with the forces of political unification and expansion moving up the

302 Wenke

Fig. 7. Barry Kemp's reconstruction (1989) of the initial

stages of early state formation in Egypt. Most models of

early Egyptian cultural evolution assume a military con

quest of Lower Egypt and the Delta by an Upper (southern)

Egyptian polity that was more complexly organized than that of Lower Egypt.

Nile Valley, engulfing the Delta, and expanding into Asia, but that "there is one element that is particularly difficult to accommodate within this south-north

sweep of Egyptian political evolution, and that is the clear evidence in Gerzean and later sites of artifacts and artifact (and architectural) styles that are Syro Palestinian and Irano-Mesopotamian in origin" (1989, p. 1). He observes that for years scholars have debated what kinds of contacts these elements reflect,

Early Egyptian Civilization 303

and he sees in these debates "a tendency toward an Egyptian view of the world, in which all things are in balance, and thus to postulate a priori an early and

independent Delta polity opposing an independent Valley polity, and the even

tual union of these" (1989, p. 2; also see Frankfort, 1956, pp. 15-23). The Narmer Palette, the Libyan Palette, and a few other objects figura

tively represent scenes that some consider illustrations of the events of the polit ical unification of Egypt, but these are to some extent equivocal. Kaiser (1985), Schulman (1988), and others have challenged the notion that the Narmer Palette commemorates the initial unification of Egypt, arguing that Egypt was unified much earlier. Millet sees in his analysis of the Narmer Palette "a final demotion from [the palette's] once proud position as a unique historical document record

ing and celebrating the pivotal event in Egyptian history to that of a mere dated

royal gift, given to the temple in a year named (as it happens) after a successful

campaign in the north" (1990, p. 59). Kemp (1989, pp. 43-44), too, disputes the notion that the Delta was an

independent polity roughly equal to the south in development, suggesting that it "is naive to equate material culture and its 'level' with social and political complexity. We must accept that some degree of political and social centrality had developed in the Delta by late Predynastic times .... [But] the archaeo

logical evidence points to a marked disparity in the rate of development toward

centrality in the closing stages of prehistory" (1989, p. 44). This is an important issue because it involves a fundamental process com

mon to all early states, the addition of component regions to a central polity and their subsequent administration. There is a large body of literature on this

"core-periphery" problem, and Egypt apparently offers the possibility to ana

lyze the determinants and processes of this aspect of early state formation. But how do we measure archaeologically these determinants and pro

cesses? A traditional method of measuring shifts in political power centers is

through analyzing the location of monumental architecture and mortuary cults.

Emery's (1961) excavations of Early Dynastic tombs at North Saqqara, for

example, revealed the lavish wealth of some segments of Lower Egyptian soci

ety, but the actual tombs of the First Dynasty rulers and of some of their suc cessors appear to be at Abydos, in the area known as Umm el-Qa'ab (Kemp, 1989, p. 53). O'Connor (1989, p. 83; also see Kaiser and Dreyer, 1982) has

detailed variations in the sizes, shapes, and orientations of First Dynasty funer

ary enclosures at Abydos, and he concludes (as had Kemp, Kaiser, and others

earlier) that Abydos, not Saqqara, was probably the site of royal burials for both First and late Second Dynasty rulers.

The construction of the step-pyramid at Saqqara may mark the point at

which the northward shift in Egypt's cultural center of gravity reached the loca tion it is still at today?at the juncture of the Nile Valley and Delta?although at various times the political and administrative center of Egypt shifted back to

304 Wenke

Upper Egypt (e.g., Thebes). But what does this shift mean in social, political, and economic terms, and how can it be measured? Trigger (1983a, p. 47) and others have pointed out that the simple presence of Upper Egyptian artifacts or

artifact styles in Lower Egyptian settlements does not demonstrate significant political or cultural integration. But when

we compare the Delta's earliest arti facts with those of the Early Dynastic occupations elsewhere, we see evidence that the similarity of artifact styles between the Valley and the Delta dramati

cally increases, that all sizes of sites share in this pattern of stylistic similarity, and that it encompasses not just one kind of artifact, but others as well.

Buto?the legendary capital of Predynastic Lower Egypt?has been shown

(von der Way, 1987, 1988) to contain deposits dating to at least the late fourth millennium B.C. These early levels are beneath the watertable and excavations have revealed only a few hundred square meters of occupations. But the exca vators found clay cones, pottery, and other artifacts that reflect contacts with Southwest Asian states, specifically the Amuq F period settlements in northern

Syria, and probably by way of trade connections through that area to settlements in the Tigris, Balikh, Khabur, and Upper Euphrates region (von der Way, 1987,

pp. 247-249). The clay cones?though probably of local manufacture?are sim ilar to those used at Uruk-Warka and other Mesopotamian sites to decorate

temple buildings (they were usually painted and embedded in mosaics on mud brick building walls), von der Way concludes that Maadi, which contained many Southwest Asian pottery vessels of this same approximate time period, was only a way station on overland routes to the east, but that Buto was a port?perhaps the most important Delta port?for ships carrying commodities to and from Palestine and the Uruk state (1987, p. 257).

In addition to these putative sea routes, eastern Delta settlements and Pal estinian communities were probably linked by short land routes. It is also pos sible that there were direct sea routes from the Tigris-Euphrates delta to a Red Sea port on Egypt's coast, perhaps opposite the Wadi Hammamat. As Trigger notes (1983a, p. 38), this would explain why Susian, as opposed to central

Mesopotamian, influences seem strong for a short period of the Predynastic and

why this influence seems limited to Upper Egypt (Tutundzic, 1989). Buto, Maadi, and other early Lower Egyptian sites (Fig. 8) may indicate

the first stages of changes in which Lower and Upper Egyptian communities

began to participate in the same ideological systems, and this process seems to have occurred in the context of increasing functional differentiation, even if the level of this differentiation, and the growing functional interdependence of which it is a part, remains at a comparatively low level (van den Brink, 1988). One

must consider the possibility that by about 3000 B.C. the importance of Egypt's contacts with Southwest Asia was a major factor in reshaping the demographic pattern of Egypt and its socioeconomic fabric. Syro-Palestinian artifacts are in evidence at most Early Dynastic Delta sites, and it is interesting in this context

Early Dynastic

Period

Dynasty 0/ Naqada III Naqada lid

Naqada lie

Naqada lib Naqada II a

el-Tell el-Iswid (S) str.X-VIII

settlement and cemetery area str. VII

settlement with intramural burial

str.VI-IV settlement str.W-I settlement

Tell Ibrahim Awad

phase III cemetery phase II phase 1

Tell FaraNn/Buto

Schicht V-IV Schicht III

Schicht

II

Schicht I

Minshat Abu Omar grave group 4 grave group 3 c (Narmer)

grave group 3 b (Scorpion) cemetery

grave group 3 a grave group 2 cemetery

grave group 1 cemetery

Maadi settlement settlement settlement

Merimde cemetery

Ez.el-TellrT.IWorJ cemetery cemetery (Narmer)!

cemetery

Fig. 8. Stratigraphic correlations of early Delta sites (from van den Brink et al., 1989, Fig. 4.2.2) (after van den Brink, 1989). Archaeologically defined, the cultural integration of the Nile Valley and Delta is simply changes in Delta ceramics and architecture from distinctive local forms to those that resemble those of Upper Egypt. This change is evident at Tell Ibrahim Awad (see above), for example, which, although apparently continuously occupied

during the periods diagrammed, exhibits a relatively radical change in artifact and architectural styles between phase I and phase II. Recent excavations at Mendes (Brewer al., 1991) indicate that it contains occupations contemporary with Schicht III, V, and IV at Buto and, possibly, with Schicht II.

306 Wenke

that both Hierakonpolis and Nagada shrank in size in this period?although Kemp suggests that this "marks a fundamental change in the nature of settle

ment, bound up with the appearance of true urbanism in Egypt: the shift from low density settlements to walled brick-built towns of far higher population density" (1989, pp. 38-39).

In addition to these indications of expanding external relations, there are

signs that after 3500 B.C. relationships among Egypt's Nile Valley and Delta communities were also changing. The earliest Predynastic Delta pottery from

Buto, Tell Iswid, and Tell Ibrahim Awad, for example, is quite distinct from that of the south, van den Brink found 4 m of deposits at Tell Ibrahim Awad and notes that the earliest levels contain Predynastic pottery in styles "clearly differing from contemporary sites in the Nile Valley and therefore possibly reflecting an original Delta culture ..." (1988, pp. 77; also see Kohler, 1990; van den Brink et al., 1989). van den Brink found this same pattern at Tell Iswid, with the earliest levels containing the remains of small hut-like circular struc tures and ceramics in the earliest distinctive Delta styles, and the later occu

pations comprising rectangular mudbrick structures and ceramics that show

stylistic similarities to Nile Valley traditions.

Figure 8 correlates some of the most important Delta sites relating to the

integration, and debates continue about the significance of discontinuities in the

stratigraphic sequences observed at these sites and differences in their compo sition (e.g., van den Brink et al., 1989, pp. 80-82).

Variations in mortuary cult lavishness cannot be assumed to be infallible indicators of social-economic hierarchies, but it might be significant that the late Predynastic mortuary cults of the Delta seem less elaborate than their Nile

Valley counterparts. About 400 late Predynastic and Early Dynastic graves have been found at the east Delta site of Minshat Abu Omar (Kroeper, 1988; Kroeper and Wildung, 1985). Kroeper has divided the Predynastic graves at Minshat Abu Omar into four groups, based on contents, construction techniques, and location. These groups may be from somewhat different time periods and/or reflect different social groupings. They vary in their contents, in the number and diversity of pottery, stone vessels, flint knives, stone palettes, copper arti

facts, jewelry of carnelian, amethyst, and?rarely?gold, and other objects. There is, however, no evidence at this point of juveniles having been buried with extraordinary amounts of grave goods?which is often taken as a sign of inherited status.

Excavations by Bakr (1988) at Ezbet el-Tell, in the eastern Delta, also revealed graves, most dating to about the First Dynasty. Some of these were two-room mudbrick tombs that contained a ceramic coffin enclosing a body and, and in a smaller annex, stone and pottery vessels, palettes, jewelry, and other

objects. Bakr (1988, pp. 50-51) reports finding Narmer's name written on two different pots.

Early Egyptian Civilization 307

Krzyzaniak recorded 12 Late Predynastic and Early Dynastic sites in the

region east of Minshat Abu Omar, and he notes that artifacts from these sites are similar to those from elsewhere in Egypt and, thus, that this "seems to point to . . . close contacts between the eastern Delta and the Egyptian Nile Valley" (1989, p. 282).

Mendes and other Delta sites reflect the same pattern as Minshat Abu Omar, Tell Ibrahim Awad, and Ezbet el-Tell (Fig. 8), and together they indicate that

by about 3000 B.C. the Delta was densely settled and had artifacts that were

very similar in style to those of Middle and Upper Egypt. Indications of Narm er's name on pots at Delta sites and this stylistic uniformity suggest that by the end of the Early Dynastic period the Valley and Delta were already integrated socioeconomically and politically and probably had been for some time. Ser ekhs that seem to be the Horus name of kings have been found on pottery vessels at many Early Dynastic sites, including Beda, in the far eastern Delta. Trigger suggests that these may be names of rulers of small Delta states that were already trading with southwest Asia (1983a, p. 47), but the artifact stylistic similarity of these sites to those elsewhere in Egypt suggests a considerable degree of socioeconomic interaction with the national Egyptian state.

In both Upper and Lower Egypt it is evident that there were significant alterations in both the range of products and their methods of manufacture. Most

early complex societies saw a period in which labor-intensive, highly decorated

pottery was replaced by mass produced forms of much less aesthetic appeal. As Trigger notes, although Egypt experienced the same phenomenon, this "does not indicate a decline in cultural or aesthetic standards. Instead it suggests that

pottery no longer served as a medium of artistic expression . . ." (1983a, p. 64). In fact, the appearance of these mass-produced forms of pottery seems to be a prime indicator of increasing complexity in the institutions administering and controlling craft production. Johnson (1987), R. McC. Adams (1981), and others have concluded that the rapid development of Southwest Asian states occurred during the period when the beautiful painted wares of the early fourth millenium were largely replaced by the unimpressive, mass-produced beveled rim bowl. Egyptian pottery seems to have made a parallel transition in the Early Dynastic period but its culmination was in the Old Kingdom period, when var ious low-fired wares including "bread molds" were the dominant ceramic types. Egypt ad Southwest Asia might be expected to show a parallel change to gov ernmental control of ceramic?and other craft?production but also some vari ations, as there were quite different transportation mechanisms (the Nile via-a

vis Southwest Asian city-states), but this subject has never been systematically analyzed.

Ceramics were, of course, just one of the many commodities whose pro duction and distribution changed in the Early Dynastic period. Woodworking became a much more important craft than it had been previously, possibly as a

308 Wenke

result of parallel developments in making copper tools (Trigger, 1983a, pp. 63

64), and Early Dynastic stone vessels are found all over the country in a great variety of shapes and sizes (al-Khouli, 1978). Some vessels from the Delta have

recently been studied by Kroeper (1989) and Krzyzaniak (1989), and the great number and styles of these vessels suggest not only substantial Early Dynastic Delta occupations but also Egypt's rapidly increasing stylistic homogeneity in this period.

Of this transition, Trigger says that the "crucial factor in the emergence of new traditions of craftsmanship seems to be that it was at the beginning of

the Early Dynastic Period, or slightly before, that certain craftsmen came under the patronage and control of the royal court" (1983a, p. 67). He goes on to contrast Egypt and Mesopotamia in this regard, suggesting that it was the fact that Egypt was under the highly centralized control of one government that allowed Egyptian craftsmen to undertake such monumental and expensive arts

and craft projects (1983a, p. 67). The transition from early simple agricultural communities at about 4000 B.C. to the expansionist empire that Egypt was by 2100 B.C. was also remarkably rapid when one considers the parallel transfor mation in Southwest Asia.

In summary, by about 2700 B.C. every element of cultural complexity traditionally associated with early civilizations had appeared in Egypt, from a

national religious ideology to government controlled administration of major craft production. The Early Dynastic settlement pattern (Fig. 5) included some

settlements that may have been home to thousands of inhabitants, but it is unclear how complexly organized they were in terms of the number of economic and

political functions they provided. In general, until very late in its history Egypt seems to have been a powerful centralized state that nonetheless was based on

thousands of small, largely self-sufficient (in terms of subsistence) communi

ties, with only modest centralization of economic production.

Old Kingdom Egypt: The Imperial Transformation

Soon after about 2700 B.C. Egypt entered the great "Pyramid Age" and into the historical era as well, for the many surviving Old Kingdom documents

provide a vivid picture of life in this age. The florescence of Egyptian literature, art, architecture, and other cultural

elements during the Old Kingdom is well documented. Hundreds of tombs,

temples, and other sites have been investigated, but some of the most important Old Kingdom sites, such as Memphis, have never been systematically exca vated. The known Old Kingdom settlement pattern (Fig. 6) is doubtless just the remnant of a much more complex and extensive system that has been partially destroyed or obscured. Wright (1986) specifically excluded Egypt from his

comparative review of early civilizations because its regional settlement pat

Early Egyptian Civilization 309

terns are poorly known. Because of the preservation problems noted above, it

is unlikely that we shall ever have Egyptian data comparable to those of, for

example, Southwest Asia, but recent research has provided a great deal of new

information. The Old Kingdom saw the continuation of some developmental trends that

began far back in the Predynastic, and one could argue that Old Kingdom Egypt was different from Early Dynastic Egypt primarily in a quantitative sense. Kemp

(1983, p. 71) considers the Old and Middle Kingdom periods to be a "unitary

phase," and he sees the Middle Kingdom as essentially a reestablishment of

the cultural forms of the Old Kingdom, after a period of change in the First

Intermediate Period.

Egypt's history in the Old Kingdom and many aspects of its religion, mor

tuary cults, dynastic succession, and other materials have been reviewed in

detail by Kemp (1983, 1989). My focus here is on several topics that most

directly relate Old Kingdom Egypt to the primary trends in demographics, eco

nomics, and general socioeconomic development of the Early Dynastic and Pre

dynastic periods, particularly with regard to areas in which there has been

considerable recent research.

Old Kingdom Egypt is interesting in this regard because since at least the

time of Marx, Old Kingdom Egypt has been considered as a prime example of

a particular type of ancient social form, a form which Wittfogel called "Oriental

Despotism," a variant of "Hydraulic Civilizations." In more recent analyses, the Old Kingdom period provides Egypt's best example of the "pristine state," in that it is developmentally comparable to Sumerian, Harappan, Aztec, Inca, and early Chinese states. Indeed, most of the early models of evolving cultural

complexity were based on comparisons between Old Kingdom Egypt and other

early civilizations (e.g., Steward, 1949; Carneiro, 1970; Service, 1975).

Kemp argues that to understand a civilization such as Old Kingdom Egypt, we must understand the Great Tradition:

Ancient Egypt provides an early case history of the dynamics of the Great Tra

dition of culture .... It also enlarges our understanding of the scope of myth in society. . . . Myth is not only a narrative form of expression. Myth statements which do not

require verbalization can be conveyed powerfully through art and architecture. They

provide a distinctive dimension to the assault on the senses which lies at the heart of

state ideologies. (1989, p. 107)

And he suggests (1983, p. 71) that divine kingship is "the most striking feature of Egypt" in the Old and Middle Kingdoms. Divine kingship provided the

mechanisms through which the Egyptian state was controlled and legitimized, and it was a unique blend of ideas about how the pharaoh received his legiti macy through direct descent from the gods (Helck, 1970; Kemp, 1983, pp. 74

76). Egypt's ideology on the nature of kingship seems to have differed some

310 Wenke

what from Mesopotamian societies, where the king was viewed as a human

being, although in direct in contact through rituals with the gods. But the com mon element here is the important role played by national religious cults in all

early states: as many scholars have noted, these religious cults are superbly efficient at motivating people at minimal costs to perform vital social functions.

Any early state that did not develop a national religious cult that made it right and proper to fight in wars, pay taxes, share irrigation water, revere the king, and so forth, would have been at a tremendous disadvantage?and there is no

evidence that any ancient civilization evolved without developing a complex ideology that involved religious legitimization of important social functions, and there is no evidence that the ancient Egyptians were unique in the essential mechanisms that evolved to link ideological elements with social functions.

The nature of the Old Kingdom economy is not well documented archae

ologically, but texts and tomb paintings describe a wide range of arts and crafts.

Some documents give ranks of administrators and these have been widely used to infer the nature of Old Kingdom central government administration (Baer, 1960; Strudwick, 1985). The taxation system was apparently thorough and effi

cient: revenues could be assessed even on the basis of the "canals, lakes, wells,

waterbags, and trees" of an estate (Goedicke, 1967, pp. 56, 72). Kemp says one "must imagine a network of government agencies spread throughout the

country, attempting by bureaucratic methods total assessment and management of resources" (1983, p. 83; also see Ghoneim, 1977; Helck, 1962, 1974; Zibel

ius, 1978). Kemp suggest that Old Kingdom Egypt's agricultural resources were of

three distinct kinds: estates directly owned by the crown; estates that belonged to pious foundations?that is, individuals contributed land or other resources to found charitable estates, some of whose produce went to support cults or to the central government, but "whose relationship to the crown was a subtle one"

(1983, p. 82; also see Jacquet-Gordon, 1962; Posener-Krieger, 1976); and estates that were held by private individuals and were subject to taxation.

When we try to match these various documentary records against the known

archaeological record, however, there are difficulties. At the level of simple demographics, even though there is some evidence of overall population growth in Egypt during its formative periods, the rates of growth appear to have been slow. During this same period there were at least some technological improve ments in agriculture and craft production, and probably some relocation of peo

ple from one area to another, as economic conditions changed, so the actual effects and causes of the overall pattern of population growth may be difficult to asses: population "density" can be thought of in terms of numbers of people per unit of general economic productivity, rather than simple per unit of land. In any case, there seems no evidence that population growth somehow "drove" the cultural changes of Egypt's formative periods.

Early Egyptian Civilization 311

Nonetheless, some areas that were heavily occupied in the Old Kingdom period appear to have been only lightly occupied in previous periods (Figs. 4-6). The rate of population growth in the Old Kingdom may have been seri

ously underestimated in Fig. 3, given that in most areas of the Delta where

systematic surveys have been done (e.g., van den Brink, 1988), scores of small Old Kingdom sites have been found, and many other Old Kingdom and pre Old Kingdom sites are probably buried and thus unknown.

Old Kingdom settlements appear to have been widely distributed in the rest of Egypt, as well, even in peripheral areas, such as the Dakhla Oasis (Mills, 1984), but other formerly inhabited areas, such as the Fay yum, seem to have been largely abandoned (Arnold and Arnold, 1979; Wenke et al., 1988a).

Despite the overall population growth of the Old Kingdom period, there seem to have been few exceptionally large sites. Urban communities proved such efficient methods for preindustrial societies to accomplish all the functions

necessary to sustain cultural complexity that in Mesopotamia, China, the Indus

Valley, and other early states the long-term trend was toward rapidly increasing urbanism; yet Egypt's contrasting character in this regard has often been noted

(Wilson, 1960; Butzer, 1976). Mesopotamian urbanism, in the sense of not only large settlements but also communities in which a significant proportion of the

populace was occupational specialists, seems to have been spurred by various factors having to do with the increased efficiency such settlements provided in the organization and control of craft production (Wright and Johnson, 1975),

regional administrative command and control institutions (Johnson, 1977, 1982, 1987), strategic relocations of people for military purposes (R. McC. Adams

1981), and other factors (Hole, 1987, 1990; also see Trigger, 1985). Egypt may have been less urbanized than Mesopotamia simply because of the Nile

Valley's ecological uniformity and the Nile's transport potential, but the situ ation is somewhat more complex. Old Kingdom settlement location and size were determined not just by local and regional environments, but by national and international political and economic forces, and in any case, the Old King dom settlement pattern cannot be interpreted solely in terms of economic ratio

nality, of course. Various scholars have noted (Badawy, 1967; Redford, 1986) that the pharaohs personally directed the settlement of Egypt, and they did so

for a variety of secular motives, including the consolidation of royal power, stimulation of economic development, and defense of the frontiers. Trigger (1983a, p. 47; Geodicke, 1969-1970) raises the possibility that the northeastern

Delta was not incorporated into the Egyptian state "even as late as the Old

Kingdom," but the extreme stylistic similarity of the Old Kingdom ceramics from even the small sites that van den Brink reports (1988) probably reflects

strong cultural ties and interactions, as does the presence of the same styles and evidence of state administrative documents at Kom el-Hisn, in the western Delta.

The Old Kingdom settlement pattern comprised at least five distinct types

312 Wenke

of settlements. (1) A national "capital" at Memphis?although Memphis' sta tus is based almost wholly on textual information, as its early levels remain unexcavated (Smith and Jeffreys, 1986; Jeffreys, 1985), and it is not known if Old Kingdom Memphis was functionally more complex than other communities or just larger. (2) Large, walled towns. Most of the major Old Kingdom Upper Egyptian settlements seem to have been walled complexes of tightly packed mudbrick houses. Hierakonpolis and Abydos both grew substantially during the Old Kingdom, compared to their Early Dynastic occupations (Kemp, 1983, pp. 98-100). The substantial enclosure walls at many Old Kingdom sites may imply some degree of central planning and design, but most of them are not precise rectangles or squares?they have long straight sections that sometimes form curvilinear patterns. Kemp suggests that the lack of uniformity in wall layout indicates that they were built on local initiative, not under the direction of the central government (1989, p. 138). Few of the Old Kingdom sites in the Delta seem to have been enclosed in walls, but it is entirely possible that these Old

Kingdom Delta settlements in fact had walls that have long since have been

destroyed by the action of the sebakhiin?farmers who dig out old occupations and use the sediments for fertilizing and raising agricultural fields. (3) Forts and trading entrepots. The Old Kingdom settlement pattern also included forts and trading entrepots, such as Buhen and Elephantine. These seem to be marked

mainly in terms of their positions on the periphery of the Old Kingdom state and may have included Delta settlements as well. They tend to be walled, medium-sized communities on strategic points on the Nile or other trading routes. (4) Pyramid towns. At Abusir, Giza, and elsewhere there are substantial Old Kingdom settlements (e.g., Kromer, 1978) directly associated with pyra mid complexes, and it appears that although the population of these commu nities might have been partly seasonal, there was a permanent group of

administrators, artisans, and others, and eventually some of these became "for tified villages" (Kemp, 1989, pp. 146-148). (5) Small provincial villages and towns. As noted above, van den Brink's surveys in the eastern Delta have revealed many such small settlements, and there is reason to believe that similar densities would be found in many areas despite the great destruction of the Old

Kingdom record through reoccupation and alluviation. We have substantial data from only a few of these five categories of set

tlements. For the smaller and medium-sized communities, our most detailed evidence comes from Kom el-Hisn, in the western Delta (Fig. 9) (Wenke et

al., 1988b; Wenke, 1986, 1989a; Wenke and Redding, 1985, 1986; Moens and Wetterstrom, 1988; Buck, 1989; Zartman, 1989). Kom el-Hisn appears to have been quite similar in location, general configuration, and ceramics to the scores of Old Kingdom sites van den Brink (1988) located in the eastern Delta. As a

provincial capital, Kom el-Hisn probably had some regional political impor tance, but it seems also to have been an ordinary rural agricultural town. It was

Early Egyptian Civilization 313

Fig. 9. Old Kingdom architecture at Kom el-Hisn. Kom el-Hisn may be similar in size, archi tecture, and geographic context to the many other known Old Kingdom Delta communities

(see van den Brink, 1988), but few of these have been excavated.

314 Wenke

a large community in the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties and in most later periods as well. Old Kingdom Kom el-Hisn's environment was, as it is today, well watered and heavily vegetated. Hamroush (1989; also see Buck, 1989) suggests that Kom el-Hisn's occupations rest on a point bar deposit associated with an extinct stream connected to a major Nile distributary?a location similar to that of most other known small Old Kingdom Delta sites (van den Brink, 1988).

Most of the main occupational mound is composed of Old Kingdom mud brick buildings, mainly in the form of small rooms containing hearths, storage features, smoke-blackened pottery, burned organic materials, and other traces of domestic activities. In general, none of the buildings we have so far revealed exhibits evidence of vastly different construction cost or use. Nor do there appear to be major differences in construction or contents of buildings when comparing the three different building phases that comprise the Old Kingdom period here.

We have excavated only a small random sample of Kom el-Hisn, but the evidence to date seems most consistent with the supposition that Kom el-Hisn was a specialized government-sponsored cattle-raising settlement or transport station on the routes to Libya. (1) There is almost no evidence of local craft

production. (2) Artifact styles are impressively similar to those at Old Kingdom sites all over Egypt, from Giza to the Dakhla Oasis, implying strong cultural ties to the central Old Kingdom state. (3) Inscribed clay sealings found at Kom el-Hisn probably reflect direct import or export of commodities to government stores. (4) There is a radical difference between Kom el-Hisn and Nile Valley sites in cattle-bone frequencies, which, combined with the evidence that cattle

dung was a main source of fuel, may reflect cattle raising and export as a pri mary economic activity?and it now appears as though many other Delta sites have similarly high ratios of pig remains to cattle remains. [Redding (1989) has

argued that the predominance of the pig in the Egyptian diet well into New

Kingdom times (Hecker, 1982) suggests that there was little intensification of

agriculture until well after the Old Kingdom (also see Moens and Wetterstrom, 1988; D'Andrea, 1989; Boessneck and von den Dreisch, 1988)]. (5) The rela

tively minor differences in construction costs and contents of the buildings and

apparently restricted range of economic activities and social classes at Kom el Hisn are consistent with a community primarily made up of subsistence farmers.

Excavations at Tell Basta (Bakr, 1982; Habachi, 1957), a Delta site that

appears to have been much larger than Kom el-Hisn, revealed Old Kingdom tombs, sculpture, artifacts, and other materials, but the composition of the Old

Kingdom settlement there is unclear. Our excavations at Mendes (Brewer et

aL, 1991; Friedman, 1990b) and previous work (Hansen, 1967; Wilson, 1982) reveal that site to have been a large and diverse Old Kingdom community, with

gypsum tombs for local priests and extensive complexes of mudbrick buildings comprising a wide range of artifacts. In antiquity, Mendes probably lay on a

major branch of the Nile and, like Buto, may have been a main connecting point between Africa and Asia, via both maritime and overland routes.

Early Egyptian Civilization 315

In the Nile Valley, Old Kingdom settlements seem to have been small by Mesopotamian standards and relatively simply organized. Analyses of Old

Kingdom fortified settlements at Buhen (O'Connor, 1987), Elephantine (Kaiser, etal., 1988), and elsewhere have revealed that these settlements were important parts of the imperial administration of Egypt. These major Old Kingdom towns

along the Nile were probably flanked by scores of agricultural hamlets, which for the most part have been destroyed or buried.

Provincial Old Kingdom settlement patterns probably changed consider

ably over time, paralleling national sociopolitical changes (Kanawati, 1977). Baer's analysis of rank and title in the Old Kingdom (1960) illustrated the great complexity and change in Old Kingdom bureaucratic hierarchies. Kemp (1983, p. 108) suggests that in Upper Egypt the control of local affairs by the pharaoh's overseer was gradually diluted during the late Old Kingdom, culminating in the

appearance of provincial governors, or nomarchs. Trigger (1984a) raises the

possibility that a slow but continuous expansion and elaboration of society and

economy in the Old Kingdom may have been accompanied by growing com

plexity and power of provincial administrative institutions. The apparent emer

gence of powerful nomarchs in the Sixth Dynasty may reflect a reduction of

pharaonic power (cf. Strudwick, 1985), but the pharaohs of this period were

still able to send expeditions to Nubia and Palestine and exert considerable internal control as well.

Much of what is known about Old Kingdom dynastic succession, ideology, social structure, and aesthetic traditions comes from the more than a century of research on cult centers at Giza, Saqqara, and adjacent areas (reviewed by Kemp, 1983, 1989; Reisner and Smith, 1955), but only recently have these been systematically excavated. Lehner's research at Giza (1991), for example, has shown that the structures west of the Second (Khafra) Pyramid that have

long been considered barracks for workmen almost certainly were storage facil ities. Excavations by Lehner and Hawass southeast of the Mycerinus Pyramid, south of the modern cemetery of Nazlet Zaman, revealed what was very prob ably a community occupied during the period in which the pyramids were con

structed.

The Egyptian pyramids themselves may be precise reflections of changing levels of functional relationships and, to some extent, of the causal elements in

the changing functional structure of Old Kingdom Egypt. They also offer an

illustration of contrasting theoretical perspectives on the general nature of

archaeological explanations. In a sense, the construction of the great pyramid complex at Giza seems to be uninterpretable without considering the ideological character of the early Egyptian state and even the mentalities of the pharaohs who commanded the construction of this vast complex of monuments. Lehner

(personal communication, 1983, 1985) has argued that the three pyramids at

Giza, the Sphinx, and other monuments may have been part of a single plan, not simply the result of successive independent construction projects. At a more

316 Wenke

basic level, however, various scholars (White, 1949; Steward, 1949) consid ered pyramids and similar expressions of energy "waste" to have been the

products, not just of the whims of the pharaohs, but of fundamental socioeco nomic determinants. Kemp, for example, enumerates the positive results of

Egyptian pyramid building, including "the economic stimulus broadly equiv alent to 'built-in obsolescence' in modem technological societies" (1983, p. 87), that continued construction of mortuary cult centers would provide. Sim

ilarly, as noted above, the replacement in Egypt, and in most early complex societies, of ceramics that were invested with great effort and aesthetic meaning to mass-produced wares is best understood not as a decline in the aesthetic sensitivities of the individuals involved, but as a functional response to chang ing socioeconomic conditions. Even the "decline" of Upper Paleolithic art into the drab Mesolithic material culture can be interpreted as a response to the

greater stability and productivity of Mesolithic economies. The general idea here is that some forms of societal "waste," including elaborate Pleistocene

artifacts and beautifully decorated Predynastic Egyptian pottery, serve various

functions, including the signaling of social and economic ties. Once societies have evolved more efficient mechanisms to meet such societal needs, the ways in which material culture is invested with aesthetic meaning can also be expected to change.

From this perspective, the Egyptian pyramids might be viewed as a form

of energy "waste" that, somewhat paradoxically, is a positive contribution to

the societies that build these monuments. How else could we explain the fact that people built huge pyramids in Egypt, Mexico, Mesopotamia ("ziggur ats"), and even the Mississippi Valley? In fact, the amount of energy per capita per year expended in ancient Egypt, even at the height of the pyramid period, may not have greatly exceeded that of Mesopotamia, where every major build

ing had to be constructed with staggering numbers of individually produced, dried, carried, and set mudbricks.

Dunnell (1990) has explained the spatial distribution and timing of the

pyramid and mound building episodes in North American prehistory in terms of the change to agricultural economies. He argues that these mortuary cults were most elaborate in areas where foraging economies and early agricultural economies were most marginal, and that they acted as focal points in redistrib utive economies that linked many small groups in ways that contributed to their

long term survival. The gradual disappearance of these cults he considers to be a reflection of the greater stability of the maize-beans-squash agriculture that

quickly displaced other economies in this entire region. If we consider the Egyptian pyramids from a similar viewpoint, we might

interpret the spurt of monumental construction projects in the Old Kingdom to reflect instabilities associated with the rapid centralization of the Old Kingdom

Early Egyptian Civilization 317

economy and political system in this period, in combination with the rapid

development of contacts with foreign countries, and other factors. If so, then

the decline of pyramid building after the Old Kingdom may reflect a national

reorganization of the economy or administrative institutions in the stable forms

that persisted in Egypt for many centuries afterwards. But this is a complex matter. The Middle Kingdom saw continued construction of massive temples, and to some extent the energy formerly invested in pyramids was simply redi

rected into other architectural forms. And Kemp notes that pyramid construction

might have slowed at the end of the Old Kingdom because of the cost of main

taining existing cult centers (1989, p. 143). Also, the pyramids were just one

expression of conceptually similar investments in tombs, obelisks, etc. Sei

dlmayer has shown (1987) that in the Qau-Matmar area, at least, the First Inter

mediate Period involved no change in apparent richness of tombs. Moreover, Kanawati's assessment of the texts and tombs is that there was no decline in

royal power in the late Old Kingdom, as is commonly supposed (1977). Thus, it would seem that the labor and resources invested in the pyramids must some

how be scaled to other energy expenditures and other variables.

There seems to have been no major transformation of the basic economy

during the period when pyramid construction diminished that would be analo

gous to the change in the North American east, as discussed by Dunnell, but

many factors could have combined to reduce expenditures on pyramid com

plexes in Middle Kingdom Egypt: many lavish tombs and other complexes were

still being built, there may have been a rise in the power of provincial nobles

and greater diversion of resources to these provinces, and trade with Nubia and

the Mediterranean world probably became more systematized. In general, Old Kingdom Egypt saw an intensification of the trends, already

observed in the Predynastic and Early Dynastic, toward a concentration of

national political and economic institutions in Lower Egypt and the Delta?

probably reflecting the growing importance of Egypt's foreign relations and the

vast agricultural potential of the Delta. But southern sites such as Abydos remained important mortuary centers, and Hierakonpolis and other southern

towns were inhabited until at least the late Old Kingdom. In international trade

Old Kingdom Egypt was a major consumer of lumber from Palestine and prob

ably many other commodities as well. Redford notes that epigraphic evidence

about Old Kingdom Egypt's relationship to Western Asia indicates that Egyp tians viewed Western Asia as belonging to the pharaoh, but none of the vocab

ulary of colonial administration and empire building that typifies some later

periods is evident; and he argues that Old Kingdom dynasts exploited Western

Asia for goods and labor through trade and conquest, but also through intimi

dation (1986). In sum, the combined archaeological and documentary evidence indicates

318 Wenke

that Old Kingdom Egypt was a functionally differentiated, hierarchically orga nized, expansionist polity that included all the characteristics traditionally asso ciated with preindustrial cultural complexity.

SUMMARY

The central questions considered in this paper?when, how, and why the Nile Valley and Nile Delta were integrated?must be considered to be only partially answered. Evidence recently derived from Delta sites has changed some

interpretations of Egypt's origins as a complex society, and no doubt future research will change current interpretations. But the larger questions of the nature and potential of our knowledge about the Egyptian past remain, despite this recent research, and these questions are more important than the particulars of Egyptian history and far more intractable.

I have considerable sympathy for the view that many scholars seem to take, either implicitly or explicitly, that centuries of futile epistemological debates should long since have convinced us that the only sensible way to study the

past is to apply a synthetic approach in which one uses every discipline, from

sedimentology to semiotics, that is relevant to such inquiry; that one suspend the hopeless quest for an empirical science of history modeled on the physical and biological sciences; that one accept that valid "explanations" and "under

standing" far exceed the narrow positivist scientific sense of those terms; and that by narrowly focusing on the physical environments, demographics, and

mechanics of goods production and distribution, while ignoring the ideologies of the ancients, only a primitive and unsatisfying understanding of antiquity can result (Trigger, 1983b, 1984b).

Nonetheless, I have tried to illustrate why this seemingly obvious and com mon-sense solution to the disparate objectives of various scholars, despite its

many virtues, is not considered a satisfactory solution by everyone. The anal

ysis presented above of variations in Egyptian pyramid construction illustrate some of these issues. Is there any realistic sense in which we can "explain" why pyramid construction is distributed through a particular period of ancient

Egyptian history and space? From a materialist scientific perspective, the designs and intentions of the people who built these monuments cannot be scientifically measured and are unnecessary, or at least dependent, variables in the explana tion of variations in time and space of pyramid construction. Others, however,

might argue that for any real understanding of these monuments, one must con sider the ideological context out of which they arose.

These ancient issues will probably have little impact on how research on the Egyptian past is conducted in the foreseeable future. Traditional methods of excavation and interpretation offer the kinds of data and understandings that

Early Egyptian Civilization 319

appeal directly to simple human curiosity about the nature of life in the remark able culture that was ancient Egypt.

In sum, Egyptian civilization, as it evolved between 4000 and 2000 B.C., constitutes a primary "test case" to which all the great debates about the nature of historical inquiry can be referred, but many questions remain about what

exactly it is that we know?and can hope to know?about the Egyptian.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In this paper I have relied heavily on the research of Barry Kemp, Fekri

Hassan, Edwin van den Brink, Mark Lehner, and Bruce Trigger, among others. I thank Fekri Hassan, Frank Hole, Joy McCorriston, and Kathryn Bard for

providing me with copies of unpublished papers. I am particularly grateful to Nanette M. Pyne for editing this manuscript, preparing the illustrations, and

organizing the bibliography. I thank the National Science Foundation and the

Bioanthropology Foundation (courtesy of Roxie Walker) for funding our field work in the Delta, the Egyptian Antiquities Organization for their collaboration in this research, and Dr. Angela Close, for both her editorial assistance with this paper and her patience.

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