It is not always obvious how far ancient Egypt extended, and our ability to determine that often depends on research priorities and modern events. As tourists still do today, the earliest explorers of ancient Egypt focused their attention almost exclusively on the Nile Valley, where monuments and ancient sites are visible and in easy reach. It requires a different effort to venture into the deserts beyond the valley, very inhospitable and so vast that ancient remains are not always easy to find. Yet the ancient Egyptians traveled through this hinterland and settled in oases. In recent years, archaeologists have spent much more time investigating these zones than they did before, a deliberate shift of research strategies. Sometimes the move is less voluntary. When the modern Egyptian state decided to construct the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s, it was clear that the artificial lake behind it would submerge a vast zone with ancient Egyptian remains. Thus archaeologists rushed to the region, producing in a short time span many more data than had been collected in a hundred years of earlier research.
Despite the greater attention that archaeologists now devote to the areas of Egypt outside the Nile Valley, they still spend most of their time in the core area, and conditions in the valley dictate to a great extent how we view the ancient country. It is easy to think that Egypt was a place of tombs and temples only, as those so dominate the remains visible today. Built of stone or carved in the rocks, they are well preserved, a preservation aided by the fact that they are often located at the desert’s edge, out of the reach of Nile floods and of farmers who need land for fields. Compared to tombs and temples, the remnants of ancient cities and villages, built in mud brick in a valley that was annually flooded before the construction of the Aswan dams, are paltry. Mostly buried underneath thick layers of later deposit, only small areas of them have been excavated, and we rely often on a number of settlements connected to funerary complexes in the desert to reconstruct urban and village life. Ancient Egypt was an urban society, albeit with smaller cities than elsewhere in the Near East, yet information about the conditions of the people when alive often is obscured by the mass of evidence we have on the dead.
What is ancient Egyptian history?
The question “what is history” is much too wide‐ranging and thorny to address here, but before embarking on reading a book‐long history of ancient Egypt it may be useful to see how it applies to that ancient culture. Less than 200 years ago many would have said that ancient Egypt does not have history. In the early 19th century, the influential philosopher of history Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) proclaimed that cultures without accounts of the past resembling historical writings in the western tradition had no history. But the discipline has moved on enormously, and most historians today consider all literate cultures – including ancient Egypt – worthy of study. The field of “world history” goes further and includes the world’s non‐literate societies in its purview. This attitude erases the distinction between history and prehistory, a step whose consequences are not yet fully appreciated. It has the benefit for students of ancient Egypt that it removes the awkward problem of what sources they use in their research. Historians mostly consider textual sources to be the basis of their work, but in the case of Egypt we have to wait until the 2nd millennium BC for a written record that is rich and informative about multiple aspects of life. Archaeological and visual remains are often the sole sources for earlier periods, and they stay very important throughout the study of ancient Egyptian history. Writing Egypt’s history thus requires a somewhat different approach than for other periods and places where narrative and documentary sources provide a firm outline.
This book is called “A History of Ancient Egypt,” because it is clear that many other “histories” can be written, each with their own emphasis and intent. Historians can concentrate on political, social, economic, or cultural issues, each of which will provide a different picture of the society they discuss. Most basic surveys build their structure around political history and focus on the deeds of kings and their entourages. This will also be the case here, although it does not monopolize the account, and I will also address other concerns. The choices I made are personal but inspired by other treatments of the subject. Ideally, more attention would have been given to the ancient Egyptians who were not part of the elites, but this book is intended as an introduction only and hopes to inspire further reading and study.
Who are the ancient Egyptians?
When we think about peoples of the past, we intuitively try to imagine what they would have looked like in real life, to visualize their physical features, dress, and general appearance. Preconceptions very much inspire the resulting image, as is best demonstrated by how popular culture portrays ancient Egyptians and how this has changed over time. Take Queen Cleopatra, for example, the last ruler of the country at least partly of Egyptian descent. The numerous performances of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, on stage or as a movie illustrate how the picture of this woman has evolved. The 1963 Hollywood blockbuster featured the British‐born Caucasian Elizabeth Taylor as the queen; in 2017, the Royal Shakespeare Company cast the English actress Josette Simon, of Antiguan descent, to play the part. The calendar an American beverage company issued in the late 20th century and entitled “Great Kings and Queens of Africa,” included a depiction of Cleopatra as a black African woman. These changes in the queen’s representation did not result from scholarly reconsiderations of ancient data, but from shifting perceptions in the popular mind about the context of ancient Egypt.
It was only recently that traditional scholarship started to acknowledge the African background of Egyptian culture, partly in response to world history’s aim to replace dominant western‐centered narratives with others that focused more on the contributions of other regions, including Africa. At the same time, primarily African diaspora communities wanted the continent’s ancient history to be approached outside a Eurocentric context, and insisted, for example, on the use of the ancient Egyptian term kemet instead of the European one, Egypt. Initially, most Egyptologists bluntly dismissed these proposals, but in recent years a greater willingness to engage with them has developed. Museums now regularly present their Egyptian collections within an African setting, and the study on the interconnections between Egypt and the rest of Africa has intensified. This new attitude has not made it easier to visualize the ancient Egyptians, however, as their relationship with other African peoples is not obvious. While ancient Egypt was clearly “in Africa,” it was not so clearly “of Africa.” Archaeological and textual evidence for Egyptian contacts in the continent beyond its immediate neighbors is so far minimal and limited to the import of luxury items. The contributions of Egypt to other African cultures were at best ambiguous, and in general Egypt’s interactions with Asiatic regions were closer and more evident. Was the same true for the population of the country, and did the ancient Egyptians leave any reliable data that could guide our imagination?
There exist countless pictures of humans from ancient Egypt, but it is clear that these were not intended as accurate portraits, except for some late examples from Ptolemaic and Roman times. Men and women appear in standardized depictions where physical features,