Prehistoric climatic change had gradually dried up most of Egypt outside the valley of the Nile itself. Yet that narrow strip of fertile land was enough. The mud washed down from the interior highlands and deposited there made agriculture easy. On the banks of silt 1,100 kilometers long and anything from six to twenty wide, the first Egyptians were able to start farming. Their land slowly turned into a long straggling oasis, surrounded by desert and rock. It was importantly different from ancient Mesopotamia as a setting for a new stage of human development.
The Egyptians needed no such reclamation works as the Sumerians. The Nile was friendlier than the Tigris and Euphrates. Like them, it flooded each year, but it did so predictably; its floods were not sudden, surprising disasters but so regular that they set the pattern of the agriculture year.
In about 3300 ac, substantial numbers of people already lived along some five to six hundred kilometers of the lower Nile in villages and hamlets not much separated from one another.
These Egyptians at first seem to have thought of themselves as members of clans rather than settled communities Cities did not develop along the river until thousands of years had passed, perhaps because there was no power for Fiji neighbors to threaten the farmers and encourage them to live in towns for protection.
From these hieroglyphics there emerges a narrative, Egypt was by 3000 ic already organized into two kingdoms, northern and southern, Lower and Upper, Egypt. Soon, the records say, a king from the south called Menes conquered the north and established a dynasty which lasted until 2884 BC, ruling from Memphis in Lower Egypt. This was a realm approximately 1,000 kilometers long – a much bigger affair than any other contemporary state. What is government meant is hard to say, but it is an impressive achievement to have established even a claim to rule so big an area. More striking still, this began some 2,000 years during which Egypt was usually under one ruler one religious system, and one pattern of government and society, while no important influence intruded from the outside.
There were ups and downs; the state was sometimes strong and prosperous sometimes weak and poor. Nonetheless, this is still astonishing continuity and it made possible great achievements whose physical remains would long fascinate mankind as its greatest visible inheritance from antiquity.
The state itself was the embodiment of Egyptian civilization. It was centered first at Memphis, the capital of the Old Kingdom. Later; under the New Kingdom, the capital was normally at TWebes. These two places were great religious centers and palace complexes; they were not really cities with lives apart from government. Partly this was because Egypt’s kings had not emerged as ‘big men’ in a city-state community which originally deputed them to act for it. Nor were they simply men like others subject to gods who ruled all men, great or small. They were themselves to be gods.
Most Egyptians, though, were peasants, providing labor for great public works and the surplus upon which a noble class, the bureaucracy and a great religious establishment could subsist. The land was rich enough and was increasingly improved by irrigation techniques which were some of the earliest manifestations of the remarkable capacity to mobilize collective effort which Egyptian government long showed. Vegetables, barley, emmer were the main crops of the fields laid out along the irrigation channels; the diet they afford was supplemented by poultry, fish and game (all of which figure plentifully in Egyptian art). Cattle were used for traction and plowing at least as early as the Old Kingdom. With little change, this agriculture sustained Egypt until modern times.
The religious life of ancient Egypt also greatly struck foreigners. Yet it remains something with which it is difficult to come to grips, an all-pervasive framework, as much taken for granted as the circulatory system of the human body, rather than an independent structure such as what later came to be understood as a church.
Whatever religion in ancient Egypt meant, for almost the whole duration of their civilization, the ancient Egyptians show a remarkably consistent tendency to seek through it a way of penetrating the variety of the flow of ordinary experience so as to reach a changeless world most easily understood through the life the dead lived there. Perhaps the pulse of the Nile is to be detected here, too; each year it swept away and made new, but ts cycle was ever recurring, changeless, the embodiment of a cosmic rhythm.
The supposed prowess of her religious and magical practitioners and the spectacular embodiment of a political achievement in art and architecture explains much of Egypt’s continuing prestige. Yet if her civilization is looked at comparatively, it seems neither very fertiLe nor very responsive. Stone architecture Is the only major innovation for a long time after the coming of literacy; the Egyptians invented the column. ‘Technological history suggests a people slow to adopt new skills, reluctant to innovate once the creative jump to civilization had been made. There is no definite evidence of the presence of the potter’s wheel before the Old Kingdom; for all the skill of goldsmiths and coppersmith, bronze-making does not appear until well into the second millennium Bcand the lathe only much later still. The bow-drill was almost the only tool for the multiplication and transmission of energy available to Egyptian craftsmen. Though papyrus and the wheel were known under the First Dynasty, Egypt had been in touch with Mesopotamia for getting on for two thousand years before she adopted the well-sweep, by then long in use to irrigate land in the other river valley.
The Middle Kingdom was effectively inaugurated by a powerful king who reunified the kingdom from his capital at Thebes. For about a quarter-millennium after 2000 nc, Egypt enjoyed a period of recovery and there was a new emphasis on order and social cohesion.
The New Kingdom in its prime was internationally very successful and left rich physical memorials. There was under the Eighteenth Dynasty almost a renaissance of the arts, a transformation of military techniques by the adoption of Asiatic devices such as the chariot, and, above all, a consolidation of royal authority.
Colossal resources of labor were massed under the direction of outstanding civil servants, but only to set up the greatest tombstones the world has ever seen. Craftsmanship of exquisite quality was employed but to make grave goods.
Only its sheer staying power remains amazing. it worked for a very long time, undergoing at least two phases of considerable eclipse, but recovering from them, seemingly unchanged. Survival of such a scale is a great material and historical success what remains obscure is why it should have stopped at survival. In the end, even Egypt’s military and economic power made little permanent difference to the world and her civilization was never successfully spread abroad.