|
|
|
The Nile from the tropics
in what is today
Uganda
The great sun god Re sinks
into the Underworld
|
|
Between 9000 and 4000 BCE, northern Africa and the Sahara were grass and woodland with an abundance of rainfall, rivers, lakes, fish and other aquatic life. Anthropologists speculate that from North Africa's Mediterranean coast, people migrated into the Sahara and that people migrated into the Sahara from the south. There communities raised sheep and goats, as people did along the Mediterranean coast. And communities of people fished in the lakes and rivers of the region, using intricately made bone harpoons and fishing hooks, some using nets with weights and other tools for harvesting aquatic creatures. Living a settled life, people began using pottery and growing food, using stone and wooden tools. To the east, along the upper Nile, including what was to be Nubia, people by 6000 BCE were growing sorghum and millet and a wheat believed to be of African origin. And by 4000 BCE, people in the middle of the Sahara region were raising cattle. Then around 3500 BCE the climate of North Africa began to dry, perhaps in part because of overgrazing - wetness needing vegetation as well as vegetation needing water. The Sahara started to change from grass and woodland to desert.
Anthropologists speculate that some people fled the drying to the northern Nile River, taking with them their cultivation of wheat, barley, flax, various vegetables and their goats and sheep. And perhaps some people in western Sahara retreated southward to wetter land, taking with them their pigs, sheep, goats, cattle and knowledge of farming. In the Ethiopian highlands, herding and farming appeared, people there growing a cereal crop called tef and starchy stalks called enset. Remaining in the Sahara region were sparse populations of dark skinned people and also a people called Berbers, the Berbers occupying territory near the Mediterranean Sea. Those who had migrated to the northern Nile were related to the Berbers, or at least the languages of the two people were related - a language classified as Afro-Asian. And scholars speculate that the Afro-Asian dialect had origins with people who had come to Africa from the eastern side of the Red Sea.
Meanwhile, in Africa south of the desert region many had begun small-scale farming and raising cattle. Those living in the continent's equatorial forests continued to rely almost exclusively on their hunting and gathering, which provided them with all they needed. It would be want and deprivation elsewhere that would mother new ways of doing things, and these people saw no reason to hack clearings to grow food that was already sufficient for their few numbers.
South of the Sahara, the raising of cattle was at first limited to regions without the blood sucking tsetse fly, which could spread disease fatal to both cattle and people. It took many generations for people to build immunities to local diseases, which kept migrant communities from growing in the moist valleys and thickly wooded regions where the tsetse fly thrived. In some other parts of Africa where inadequate rain or other conditions discouraged farming, people continued to gather food that grew wild. Using exquisitely hand-crafted spears, bows and arrows, animal snares and poisons, they hunted small game. And with food supply limited, the populations of these various areas remained sparse, unlike what was developing along the northern Nile.
By 1000 BCE, people in western Africa would be clearing portions of tropical forest with stone axes and planting yams, harvesting fruits and palm nuts and keeping goats. And east of central Africa's equatorial rain forest, cattle raising was being extended, with cattle raising favored in the drier areas free of the tsetse fly. Tribes that herded more than they farmed were neighbors to those who farmed more than they herded, each tribe believing that their way of life superior to the other.
The waters of the Nile came from annual rains in the tropics to the south of Egypt. The Nile rose in early July, and in October it receded, leaving little water and a layer of black, fertile soil - inspiring people there to call the area the Black Land. Where the soil retained enough moisture, people could grow crops. But for farming to thrive along the Nile, a system of controlling its waters was necessary. To increase their ability to plant, people along the Nile trapped waters when the river rose, and they lined their water basins with clay to prevent the water from sinking into the soil - so there would be water to use when the river dried again. From sometime around 3500 BCE the Egyptians began building a system of dikes and sluices, and around this time Egypt began growing food in greater abundance than elsewhere in Africa. They grew wheat, barley, beans, lettuce, peas, radishes, onions, olives, dates and figs, and they raised cattle, sheep, goats and pigs. The construction would continue for more than a millennium so that by 2000 BCE both sides of the Nile would be a checkerboard of water basins, sluices and canals, with water being drawn from basins upstream whenever water was insufficient downstream.
As desert, Egypt had no violent storms. Egypt had no great floods - nor myth of a great flood. Nor did the Egyptians have the problem with accumulation of salt which periodically ruined Sumerian farms. And living in a desert, Egyptians had little to fear from wild animals. People along the Nile worked with more cheer and confidence than did the people in Sumer. The abundance of food along the Nile allowed a rise in population greater than elsewhere in Africa, and, along the Nile, small villages with rectangular houses of dried mud grew into towns.
The abundance of food and population growth needed for civilization had occurred along the Nile. As in Sumer, enough food was produced to support a variety of non-farmers: traders, merchants, craftsmen, priests, scribes and soldiers. And having the same basic nature as the people of Sumer, people held land as personal property. Some farmers were more successful than others and grew richer. Class divisions arose, as did local governments. Irrigation systems and grain storage had to be maintained, property divisions had to be maintained and disputes mitigated. Large landowners formed aristocracies and allied themselves with kings, or chose who would be king, while most people remained small farmers and were expected to give a share of their crops to their king as taxes and to give free labor for community projects.
As among the Sumerians, communities came into conflict and warred against each other. Local kings vied with each other for wider power and control. And by 3200 BCE, people along the northern 600 miles (960 kilometers) of the Nile had amalgamated into a northern and a southern kingdom. The two kingdoms remained antagonistic toward each other, and in what was most likely a series of wars across generations during the 2900s, one of the kingdoms conquered the other. The conquering king, according to legend, was Menes - the first king of all Egypt.
With the unification of Egypt came a new era of peace and security along the Nile. Along with unity, peace was served too by natural barriers against wandering tribes: the Mediterranean Sea in the north, vast deserts to the east and west, and a great mountain range to the south. Peace benefited Egypt's economy. Egypt's new dynasty of kings provided work for an increasing number of craftsmen. Carpentry increased, aided by the use of copper tools. Brick and stone of fine quality were drawn from nearby quarries and used in building.
Egypt's trade expanded. Tradesmen went north by sea along the coast of the eastern Mediterranean, to the Mountains of Lebanon, from which they imported timber. They traveled south along the Red Sea to the coast just east of the Ethiopian Highlands, south to the coast of eastern-most Africa, and to the southern coast of the Arabian peninsula. They found ivory, rare animals, sweets and the incense that they were to burn in their temples. They traveled south along the Nile into Nubia, and there they acquired more incense and ivory, ebony, animal skins, and boomerangs. And, on at least one occasion, they found a pygmy from the Congo basin, whose appearance entertained the court of Egypt's king.
Contact with other peoples brought one of human history's most recurring developments: the adopting of ideas and techniques. From Mesopotamia, the Egyptians acquired the use of bronze, shipbuilding techniques and artistic motifs. The Egyptians learned to write, but not gradually and starting with pictographs as had the Sumerians. Instead, the Egyptians started with script that had a Sumerian structure. But with time, Egypt's script became distinctively Egyptian.
Egyptian kings (pharaohs in Egyptian) put members of their immediate or extended families in charge of their government's central administration. The kings functioned as makers of law, as chiefs of justice and as supreme priest. And they passed their power and property to their sons. A distance had developed between the kings and common people, and official priests prohibited common people from using rituals that were believed suitable only for the king. And commoners were not recognized as having an afterlife like the king and his associates.
Much of Egyptian writing was religious in nature and concerned with the king's religion, and both the religion of the king and that of the masses had much in common with humanity's earliest religions. The workings of nature were explained as the magic of the gods and as secrets kept by the gods. Seeing spirit as will and the world as working by magic, the Egyptians believed that spirits could permeate anything. They believed that spirits moved in and out of objects and people, that sickness and dreams, being unwilled, were invasions by spirits. And, like the Sumerians, the Egyptians believed that the gods gave order to the world.
Like the religion of the Sumerians, Egyptian religion was built on descriptions of the world created from imagination, passed down from generation to generation and acquiring the authority of tradition. These myths were literal explanations as to how things came to be. Rationalizing myths into abstract poetic symbols would come millennia later. Like the Sumerians, the Egyptians had no idea as to what was distinctly matter and what was distinctly spirit. Also like the Sumerians, the Egyptians had a creation mythology. The religion of the kings and commoners described the world as having begun in watery chaos and the sun as a god having risen from this chaos. The Egyptians believed that while having risen to a mountain top, their sun-god gave form to the universe and created other gods and all living things. They saw their sun god rising each day in the east, descending in the west and disappearing under the world. They saw this descent as a daily death for their sun god, and they saw their sun god as born again each morning as it rose again in the east.
Before Egypt was unified, various communities along the Nile had different names for their sun god. Then, conquest and unification of Egypt brought unification in religion. An aggressive priesthood from the center of power, at the city of Memphis, spread worship of the sun god called Re across the whole of Egypt. The various gods belonging to various shrines along the Nile were joined into a single pantheon of gods with whom the kings of Egypt associated themselves.
From claiming that they ruled Egypt in behalf of the gods, Egypt's kings began to claim that they had been born by the gods, that they were the son or the incarnation of Re. Among the Egyptians the belief spread that their kings were immaculately conceived. The kings believed that as members of the family of the gods they had to keep their bloodline untainted, and, to protect the purity of their blood, kings married their sons to their daughters.
The Egyptians mummified their kings, believing that so long as a king's body survived - and so long as his spirit was fed by offerings of food - his spirit would survive and he would continue in his watch over their safety. A king's organs were preserved in jars, his heart believed to be the center of his being. A connection was made between feelings and the heart - as in the heart beating faster with a rise in emotions. The ancient Egyptians had no idea that it was the brain that organized feelings and the sense-information, including pain. And not knowing what a king's brain was for, the Egyptians threw it away.
The Egyptians saw death as one's spirit moving to a world that the living could not see, to the underworld where the sun went after it set, a place where the social order was the same as in life, with commoners remaining commoners and aristocrats and kings remaining aristocrats and kings. People believed that while their dead king was in the underworld he remained with his body, and to provide their dead king's body a grand place to reside they built great burial chambers of limestone and granite. The king's burial chamber was decorated with artistic depictions of his happier moments so he could cling to that which pleased him. And into the burial chamber the Egyptians put artifacts that they believed would migrate in spiritual form with the king to the underworld.
Egyptians who had little fear of the gods robbed the king's tombs of its treasures, and after this was discovered the burial chambers of kings were put into great pyramids, which allowed more space to hide the king's tomb. One pyramid was the labor of as many as ten thousand workers on the scene at any one time: craftsmen, engineers and common laborers. Archaeologists examining a village of construction workers - a village of men, women and children - estimate that around 20,000 workers labored twenty years to complete one of the great pyramids, that the workers were Egyptians from various parts of Egypt and that they were a community serving the gods.
Smaller pyramids were built for the king's officials and overseers. Believing that the universe had been created from the top of a mountain shaped like a pyramid, the Egyptians believed that from the peak of the pyramid the spirit of the king would begin its climb to a unity with the god Re. They believed that the king's spirit would accompany Re on his daily journey across the sky, into the underworld and back into the sky again.
Like Sumerian religion, Egyptian religion changed. New ideas were added to old ideas - despite instances of disharmony. One new twist in Egyptian religion was the Osiris myth. Osiris was a local god from southern Egypt who developed into one of Egypt's more important gods. By 2400 BCE, Egyptians believed that when the pharaoh died he became the god Osiris. Osiris was seen as the spirit of a real former king, a king who had been murdered by a jealous brother. The brother of the god Osiris was Seth, who was said to have sliced Osiris' body into parts and to have thrown them into the Nile. It was said that Osiris' queen, Isis, grieved and collected the pieces of her husband's body for a proper burial so that his spirit could live among the dead. She invoked the magic of the gods and put her husband's body together again. And, together again, Osiris became ruler of the spirits in the underworld as he had been among those who lived above ground.
The Egyptians believed that as god and ruler of the underworld, Osiris exercised expanded magical powers, that he granted all new life, including the sprouting of vegetation. They believed that Osiris made the annual flooding of the Nile, and they believed that all people had been cannibals until Osiris taught humanity how to make agricultural tools and to grow crops. They came to view Osiris as a god of nature, a god of imperishable life. His evil brother Seth became a god of sterility whom the Egyptians associated with the sandy, barren desert east and west of the Nile. Osiris, the Egyptians believed, passed into one's body when one ate his creation: vegetables - which may have helped Egyptian mothers in feeding their children. Isis became the Egyptian ideal of womanhood. Egyptians believed that it was she who gave women their techniques in grinding grain and weaving cloth, and that it was she who gave to humanity the concept of marriage. And Isis was a model for women mourning the death of their husbands.
Mixed into the Osiris myth was the falcon god, Horus - the son of Osiris and Isis. Because falcons sometimes flew so high that Egyptians lost sight of them, the Egyptians came to think of falcons as lords of the sky associated with their sun god. According to the Osiris legend, Isis sent Horus to avenge the death of Osiris. And Horus became the avenger of all evils.
The Egyptians also believed in a god called Thoth, who was the moon, a god of learning and the inventor of writing, all languages and social order. Thoth was believed to have a wife, the goddess Ma'at, who embodied truth and justice. And the Egyptians believed that one was living in accordance with Ma'at when one did no harm to other people or to cattle.
The Egyptians believed in a goddess of war that had the form of a lioness - in keeping with their belief that war was part of a natural order. They saw cats as like this lioness and therefore as gods, and, because the cats were gods, the Egyptians mummified them. They saw crocodiles as threatening and therefore as embodiments of a demon god. But because crocodiles appeared on sandbanks of the Nile when the river declined, the Egyptians associated this god also with the return of land.
Like many other ancient peoples, the Egyptians believed in the godliness of bulls. Bulls were respected for their physical power, and the Egyptians believed that a bull's presence renewed the fertility of their fields. The Egyptians chose one bull as a god to represent all bulls. Women stripped naked before this bull in hope of ensuring their ability to bear children. Like other peoples, the Egyptians saw their gods as revealing knowledge in small portions, and the Egyptians asked questions of their bull god by taking the bull down a path lined with opposing propositions written on pots. They perceived the bull as choosing between the propositions according to which side it swayed its head. And when the god bull died, the Egyptians mummified its body, and a new bull was chosen as its replacement.
An examination of Egyptian bones and mummies reveals that the ancient Egyptians suffered from arthritis, pneumonia, pleurisy, kidney stones, gallstones, appendicitis and broken bones. The Egyptians also experienced terrible epidemics, including small pox and tuberculosis. They suffered from various waterborne parasitic worms and from many other illnesses known today. The Egyptians saw disease as the work of the demon goddess Sekhmet, and they saw their gods Re, Thoth and Isis as important healing gods. To treat their maladies, especially at the king's court, the Egyptians had physicians and dentists. They had specialists in gynecology and veterinary medicine. They treated internal illnesses, eye and skin diseases, and they used emetics and bandages. They chanted incantations while one of various medicines was applied: beer, woman's milk mixed with oil and salts, goat's milk with honey, oils or other plant and animal substances. And they tried exorcisms to remove from one's body whatever evil spirit was creating the illness.
Egypt's politics, like its religion, changed. Local authorities who had been appointed by ministers at the king's court were allowed to bequeath their positions to their sons. Their descendants became hereditary nobles, and they believed that their positions were part of the god-given order. The new hereditary nobles wished to be united with Osiris after death, as was the king. And if the opportunity presented itself - if a king were weak or lazy - some nobles ruled their domains without interference from the king.
Feuds within royal families and problems involving the succession of kings led to the demise of many Egyptian dynasties. When the eighth dynasty collapsed, around 2130 BCE, nobles took control over what had been units of the king's army stationed in their area, and these nobles began to rule on their own. Kings remained, at least in name, but for two centuries no pharaoh ruled over the whole of Egypt, and common people suffered under the control of local nobles. This happened during a period of unusual dryness in Africa and low flooding of the Nile. Famine appeared. Common Egyptians became violent, and anarchy swept north and south along the Nile. Peasants seized property. Servants overpowered their masters and made their masters servants. It was written that the high born were full of lamentations and the poor full of joy. And taking advantage of the anarchy, people from Nubia (called Cush by the Egyptians) came north and settled in Egypt, as did mercenaries from elsewhere.
Rebellions in different areas failed to unite with each other, and eventually nobles with armies suppressed the uprisings. Amid the warring, the same tendency that brought unity to Egypt a thousand years before brought unity to Egypt again. One ruler (from Thebes ) spread his power over the whole of Egypt. Shortly thereafter, around 1900 BCE, someone usurped power at Thebes. This was Amenemhet I, who began a new dynasty - the twelfth. And his rule that was to be different from that of the pharaohs of previous dynasties.
The new king had learned from the past. He believed that it was his duty to promote justice - as embodied in the goddess Ma'at. The worship of Ma'at now included a belief that during the social upheavals the gods had abandoned Egypt and that it had been prophesied that a king would come and end the injustice. And it was believed that the prophecy had been fulfilled. The king was aware that poor people and nobles expected their king to be more concerned with their welfare than had kings centuries before, that they expected a system of justice that redressed mistreatment. The king and his ministers were more concerned than were previous kings about protecting common people from exploitation. The king opened positions in government to people of ability from outside his family.
Nobles were allowed to retain some of their powers, and they received recognition of the place in the afterlife that they had wanted. Commoners were also recognized as having an afterlife, and it was now believed that commoners would meet Osiris when they died, and that Osiris, working with Ma'at, would judge people entering the underworld. The Egyptians now believed that before one entered the underworld, his or her sins were put onto scales of justice. An ostrich feather represented Ma'at, and if an individual's sins outweighed the ostrich feather he was rejected. Commoners saw their sins as weighing little, for most of them expected an eternal afterlife of paradise in pleasant labor, maintaining their earthy status amid kindly gods.
Peace and stability had returned to Egypt. The trade that had fallen away during the upheavals returned, and the kings of the Twelfth Dynasty, from around 1900 to 1750 BCE, helped Egypt's trade and economy rise to new heights. But not all Egyptians were content. Hopes had been raised, and some Egyptians expressed disappointment. More than a thousand years before the prophets of the Old Testament, an Egyptian priest wrote a denunciation of the rich for what he saw as their injustice to the poor. He wrote that the poor still had no power to save themselves from the abuse of those who were younger and stronger than they. Another Egyptian, Amenemope, wrote a book of thirty chapters that objected to how society was structured. He wrote that people should earn their bread by their own labors, that they should be content with little, should tolerate the weaknesses of others, should forgive others their transgressions and should rely on their gods for serenity.
Recommended Books
A History of Africa, by J.D. Fage, 1996 (prehistory to post-independence)
A Short History of Africa, by Roland Anthony Oliver and J.D. Fage, 1988
Ancient Egypt, by J. E. Manchip White, 1970
Ancient Egypt: a Social History, by Bruce G. Trigger
to the top
|
ancient world
|
Sargon and the Vanishing Sumerians
Copyright © 1998 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.
address of this article: http://www.fsmitha.com/h1/ch02.htm