L’État c’est moi (‛I am the state’) declared Louis XIV according to historical legend, and it is tempting to view the ancient Egyptian state too as being identical with its king, given that he was a key figure in myth and speculative thought. However, the Sun King’s statement, if not apocryphal, would have been pointless if it had been true: the early modern French state functioned without much direct input from its king. One can discuss French royalty without referring to the French state, as one can discuss ancient Egyptian kingship – as in the previous chapter – without much reference to the Egyptian state. Kingship was an indigenous institution and the ideological centre of the state, but it was not identical with it.

Anyone who investigates an artefact from ancient Egypt will soon discover a human dimension; the fingerprint of a potter impressed on a bowl, or a correction made by an accountant on a sheet of papyrus. It is exciting to discover that people who lived millennia ago seem to have been like ‘us’. Yet the funerary beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, the gigantic pyramids of Giza, and the god-like pharaohs remain enigmatic, and it is the recognition that people imagined the world differently in the past that fascinates most people today. This book explores the gulf between pots and pyramids, between shared human experience and what sets Egypt apart from other societies.

In 1946, the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy (1900–1989) designed a new village for the inhabitants of Qurna, just a few kilometres to the west of their old village on the West Bank at Thebes. New Qurna, later renamed Fathy Village, was a state initiative for the protection of ancient Egyptian rock tombs, upon which the villagers had built their homes. Most of the villagers resisted having to leave, and the project came to an end uncompleted in 1952. Fifty years later, after violent conflicts including about landholding rights, the villagers were eventually resettled. New Qurna was an innovative project insofar as it employed traditional building technology. For instance, Fathy built the houses from sun-dried mud bricks instead of fired bricks or concrete. The bricks were locally available, comparatively cheap, and were proven to maintain a good climate in a house throughout the year. Fathy became known worldwide for his ‛architecture for the poor’.

At the conference ‘Urbanization and Cultural Development in the Ancient Near East’, held in 1958, John Wilson provocatively claimed that ‘Egypt through the New Kingdom’ was ‘a civilization without cities’.1 More than six decades later, most archaeologists would reject his statement, given the evidence for Egyptian cities and other larger settlements in the New Kingdom, but is the same true of the Old and Middle Kingdoms? The question would be simple to answer if the task was simply to compare the excavated remains reviewed in Chapter 4 with settlements unequivocally defined as cities. But such an approach risks treating settlements as discrete units of analysis, dissociated from broader social and cultural patterns.

The landscape of north-east Africa is spectacular. Inhospitable deserts abruptly meet the lush, pulsatile floodplain of the Nile River (Figure 3.1). To the west of the Nile Valley and Delta, wide sand dunes extend into the Sahara, interrupted by scattered rock formations. Five large and a series of smaller oases offer opportunities for life in the Western Desert, while the Fayum depression has been connected to the Nile Valley since the early second millennium. To the east of the Nile Valley lie the Eastern Desert and the Sinai Peninsula, which are rocky. Each of these habitats was occupied by a variety of groups, each with their distinctive lifestyles.

In a beautifully written cultural history of mortal remains, Thomas Laqueur enquires into ‘how and why the dead make civilization’. Death for him is the fundamental ‘other’, in the face of which humans constitute their lives and civilise their behaviour. Unlike Philippe Ariès in his outline of a history of death in Europe, Laqueur sees more continuities than ruptures across periods and cultures. For Egyptologists who study such extraordinary expressions as pyramids, mummies, and Coffin Texts, it can be helpful to be reminded that Egyptian funerary culture is but one of humankind’s attempts at coping with death. Yet Laqueur moves blithely from the Upper Palaeolithic to Greek philosophy. His neglect of Egypt is a tacit rebuttal of the commonly held opinion that Egyptian funerary culture, with its wealth of splendid tombs, is unique. In fact, tombs and burials constitute a huge amount of archaeological evidence for the Old and Middle Kingdoms (Figure 7.1). They provide rich information on society and culture, and despite many blind spots and biases in the record they are an extremely dense source of evidence for the study of the pyramid age.

By the early Old Kingdom, steep social hierarchies had developed in Egypt. A small group of individuals at the top seemed to hold the fate of the country in their hands, as only the ‛ruling classes’, to use Marxist-inspired terminology, commanded the resources to express their ideas and practices. In durable materials and at places favourable for preservation, the texts, inscriptions, paintings, sculpture, and monumental architecture commissioned by the elite shaped modern perceptions of ancient Egypt. Other types of evidence, such as the workmen’s huts, simple graves, and local community shrines discussed in this book seem merely to fill the gaps and are hardly ever used to develop alternative approaches to the traditional narrative.

The ancient Egyptians were part of a continuous web of people living on the African, Asian, and European continents and the islands between them (Figure 6.1). Lifestyles and habitats varied greatly across this region, but cities and palaces emerged in many areas during the third and early second millennia bc that functioned as regional collecting points and hubs of interregional exchange. Objects connected people over long distances. The circulation of foreign products and styles contributed to an awareness of identity and otherness. In a hymn of the New Kingdom, the god Aten is praised for having created all human beings in Syria, Nubia, and Egypt, distinguishing them by their spoken languages, skins, and characters. Egyptian visual display expressed ethnic differences explicitly by emphasising features of the body, such as hairstyles, skin colour, tattoos, and clothing, though how people behaved towards stereotypes is difficult to gauge. The integration of material remains in the analysis and a refined interpretation of written and visual sources show that practices of contact were multilayered.

The pyramid age began after a centralised polity formed along the Lower Nile in the late fourth and early third millennia bc and ended before Egypt rose to empire in the second half of the second millennium. It saw the unfolding of the Egyptian state, which affected the lives of people across north-east Africa. Archaeologists equate the pyramid age with the Early and Middle Bronze Ages, so these terms are frequently found in discussions of synchronisms across the Mediterranean and the Near East, but they are uncommon in Egyptology when describing internal developments in Egypt and interactions with societies in north-east Africa. From the later nineteenth century ad, the pyramid age was subdivided into the Old and Middle Kingdoms. The term First Intermediate Period, a period portrayed retrospectively in ancient Egyptian texts as a time of chaos, only became widely used after the First World War, possibly in response to contemporary experiences following the breakdown of the European concert of powers.1

There have been significant advances in settlement archaeology in north-east Africa over the past fifty years.1 The number of excavated settlements has increased substantially, and new fieldwork methods have brought to light settlement remains previously hidden from the eyes of archaeologists (Figure 4.1). Most ancient Egyptians probably lived in villages and rural estates that have long been archaeologically elusive. Larger settlements are gradually appearing on maps of ancient Egypt, but towns represent just one – and not the most pertinent – type of settlement in the archaeological record of the pyramid age. Settlements built for the purpose of the state have left a rather clear footprint on the ground.