Figure 2.5 Excavations at Coptos revealed three statues dated around 3300 of the god of fertility Min, about 4 meters high and carved in limestone. They represent the god in an entirely different way from what would become the norm after Egyptian art forms became standardized with the creation of the unified state. The symbols on the statue’s legs are also unlike those used later on. Oxford, AM 1894.105e. From Barry Kemp, “The Colossi from the Early Shrine at Coptos in Egypt,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 10:2 (2000), 211 ‐242: p. 212 fig. 1.
Bureaucracy
A state with Egypt’s expanse required a structure that enabled the collection of resources and the communication of central demands throughout the territory. The strong focus on the king made the state’s administration very centralized. Officials owed allegiance to him, not to an abstract concept of the state. As was the case for kings, we know officials best through their burials. At Saqqara, the cemetery overlooking the city of Memphis, appear a number of substantially sized mastaba‐tombs of high officials and members of the royal family dating to the 1st and 2nd dynasties. The officials sometimes listed their titles, and their names appear on the labels found in royal tombs, which indicate that they were responsible for a delivery. These short writings show that a bureaucracy existed from the foundation of the Egyptian state onward. The number of officials’ tombs is relatively small, however, and it seems that the administration was not yet extensive. But it was the precursor of later Egyptian bureaucracies.
The men’s duties included the collection of resources from all over the land. From the late Predynastic period on, royal tombs at Abydos accumulated goods from distant places. The labels found in tomb U‐j seem to contain the names of estates from Upper and Lower Egypt whose produce was sent to support the buried dead. Throughout Early Dynastic times and later on, the concept survived that domains in various parts of Egypt were set aside to provide for the king, in life and in death. Production in them was organized in such a way that a surplus existed for that purpose. Ideologically their countrywide distribution reaffirmed the king’s role as a unifier of the land. At the same time, all other producers probably owed some type of dues – in kind; currency did not exist – to the court, which administrators collected and used in support of the state’s infrastructure. In order to assess the amounts each region could provide, the court undertook censuses. The “Following of Horus” event commemorated regularly in the Palermo Stone annals seems to have been such an exercise, while a biennial cattle count took place starting in the early 2nd dynasty.
From the Early Dynastic Period on, Egypt was subdivided into units that we call nomes, after the Greek term for regional administrative districts. Each nome had its territory, name, and symbol, a system that was fixed by the 5th dynasty and survived into the Graeco‐Roman Period, albeit with changes over time. An official was responsible for them and represented the king locally. The nome‐system enabled the administration of the country in a methodical and uniform manner. It made it easier to assess dues and to deal with local issues. The drawback for the king was that officials – we call them nomarchs, a modern designation that takes into account multiple ancient Egyptian titles and disregards temporal changes – could develop a local power base, which in times of weak central government enabled them to gain autonomy.
At the apex of the entire bureaucracy was the king. The center of the state was wherever he was. Manetho, who lists the capital of each dynasty, states that the first two dynasties were from This or Thinis. Since all kings of the 1st dynasty and two of the 2nd were buried at Abydos and kings were buried near their capital in later periods, we locate the ancient city in Abydos’s vicinity, probably beneath the modern town of Girga, where it is impossible to excavate. The capital’s position near Abydos suggests that the dynasty 0 lords buried there were the main forces behind the unification of Egypt, but its location was too far from the Delta to be strategically ideal. It is thus no surprise that the administrative capital of Early Dynastic Egypt was farther north, at Memphis alongside the officials’ burial site at Saqqara. In the Old Kingdom Memphis did become Egypt’s political capital. The city was perfect for that purpose as it lies just south of where the Nile Valley and Delta meet, and the early high administrators of the state were in closer contact with the two parts of the land there than at Abydos. One of the ancient names of the Memphis region was Ankh‐tawy, “The Life of the Two Lands,” which reasserted the ideological union of Upper and Lower Egypt.
The ideology of the Early Dynastic state thus incorporated all the elements that defined ancient Egypt for 3000 years or more afterward. It was a union of Upper and Lower Egypt held together by the king, whose powers as an incarnation of the god Horus ensured order in the universe. Official norms and beliefs had a countrywide impact: The gods were organized in a single pantheon, official art and architecture adhered to court standards, and all people in Egypt handed over part of their labor to the state. An administration carved the country up into units and collected dues, while embodying the king’s power locally.
Special Topic 2.1 Canons of Egyptian art
State formation and the imposition of a common rule over the entire country came with a reform of artistic practices that applied to all official art and remained the canon throughout Egyptian history into Roman times. The imposition of these rules was absolute. Even carvings on rock surfaces in the desert conformed to the new iconography of the state, which focused on the king. From the Early Dynastic Period on, all formal monuments – reliefs, paintings, and statues – adhered to the same principles.
Figures were firmly placed on a level horizontal base line and the representation of the rest of the body started from that line. In the Middle Kingdom a grid with 18 equidistant horizontal lines contained the body up to the hairline: six lines for the distance from the soles of the feet to the knees, nine to the buttocks, 10 from the knees to the neck, and two from the base of the neck to the hairline. A vertical line from the ear down bisected the torso. Various periods used somewhat different proportions, and figures could be squatter or more slender, but the basic ideas remained the same.
Egyptian artists aimed to show as much as possible of the human body. In relief sculptures they depicted a person in profile, but represented certain elements in full view forward so they could be seen clearly. They showed the chest frontally and placed an enlarged eye near the side of the head. They attached a woman’s breast in profile to the frontal chest. A man’s legs were set apart so that the one farthest from view was visible; a woman’s legs were together.
Artists represented elite members of society in select poses only and in perfect physical condition and of an ideal age. For men the age was full‐grown, either youthful or more mature; for women it was youthful only. In some periods men appeared with signs of fatigue or old age on their faces, but that is rare. The flesh was painted in conventional colors: men, who spent time outdoors, were red‐brown; women, who stayed indoors, yellow. Non‐elites appeared in more varied poses – doing manual labor, for example – but with the same skin colors and proportions. Foreigners were shown as caricatures almost: Syrians had pointed beards, Nubians curly hair, and so on.
The aim of the artists was not to present a portrait of the person but an idealized form without a specific visual identity. The inscription on the representation stated who it was. It was thus easy to usurp an image: one could just remove the existing name and replace it with one’s own.
2.5 The Invention of Writing
All these ideological structures of the Egyptian state were facilitated, if not made possible, by the existence of writing. The origins and development of early