Ancient Egypt can be thought of as
an oasis in the desert of northeastern Africa, dependent on the annual
inundation of the Nile
River to support its agricultural population.
The country’s chief wealth came
from the fertile floodplain of the Nile valley, where the river flows between
bands of limestone hills, and the Nile delta, in which it fans into several
branches north of present-day Cairo. Between the floodplain
and the hills is a variable band of low desert that supported a certain amount
of game. The Nile was Egypt’s sole transportation artery.
The First Cataract at Aswān, where
the riverbed is turned into rapids by a belt of granite, was the country’s only
well-defined boundary within a populated area. To the south lay the far less
hospitable area of Nubia,
in which the river flowed through low sandstone hills that in most regions left
only a very narrow strip of cultivable land. Nubia was significant for Egypt’s
periodic southward expansion and for access to products from farther south.
West of the Nile was the arid Sahara, broken
by a chain of oases some 125 to 185 miles (200 to 300 km) from the river and
lacking in all other resources except for a few minerals. The eastern desert,
between the Nile and the Red Sea, was more important, for it supported a small
nomadic population and desert game, contained numerous mineral deposits,
including gold, and was the route to the Red Sea.
To the northeast was the Isthmus of Suez. It offered the
principal route for contact with Sinai, from which
came turquoise and possibly copper, and with southwestern Asia, Egypt’s most important area of cultural interaction, from which were received stimuli for
technical development and cultivars for crops. Immigrants and ultimately
invaders crossed the isthmus into Egypt, attracted by the country’s stability
and prosperity. From the late 2nd millennium BCE onward, numerous
attacks were made by land and sea along the eastern Mediterranean coast.At first, relatively little cultural contact came by way of the Mediterranean Sea,
but from an early date, Egypt maintained trading relations with the Lebanese
port of Byblos (present-day
Jbail). Egypt needed few imports to maintain basic standards of living, but
good timber was essential and not available within the country, so it usually
was obtained from Lebanon.
Minerals such as obsidian and lapis lazuli were
imported from as far afield as Anatolia and Afghanistan.
Agriculture centered on the cultivation of cereal
crops, chiefly emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccum) and barley (Hordeum
vulgare). The fertility of the land and general predictability of the
inundation ensured very high productivity from a single annual crop. This
productivity made it possible to store large surpluses against crop failures
and also formed the chief basis of Egyptian wealth, which was, until the
creation of the large empires of the 1st millennium BCE, the greatest of
any state in the ancient Middle East.Basin irrigation was achieved by simple
means, and multiple cropping was not feasible until
many later times, except perhaps in the lakeside area of Al-Fayyūm.
As the river deposited alluvial silt, raising the level of the floodplain, and the land was reclaimed from the marsh, the area available for cultivation in the Nile
valley and delta increased, while pastoralism declined slowly. In addition to
grain crops, fruit and vegetables were important, the latter being irrigated
year-round in small plots. Fish was also vital to the diet. Papyrus,
which grew abundantly in marshes, was gathered wild and in later times
was cultivated.
It may have been used as a food crop, and it certainly was used to make rope,
matting, and sandals. Above all, it provided the characteristic Egyptian
writing material, which, with cereals, was the country’s chief export in Late
period Egyptian and then Greco-Roman times.
Cattle may have been domesticated in
northeastern Africa. The Egyptians kept many as draft animals and for their
various products, showing some of the interest in breeds and individuals that
are found to this day in Sudan and eastern Africa. The
donkey, which was the principal transport animal (the camel did not become
common until Roman times), was probably domesticated in the region. The native
Egyptian breed of sheep became extinct in the 2nd millennium BCE and
was replaced by an Asiatic breed. Sheep were primarily a source of meat; their
wool was rarely used. Goats were more numerous than sheep. Pigs were also
raised and eaten. Ducks and geese were kept for food, and many of the vast
numbers of wild and migratory birds found in Egypt were hunted and trapped.
Desert game, principally various species of antelope and ibex, were hunted by
the elite; it was a royal privilege to hunt lions and wild cattle. Pets
included dogs, which were also used for hunting, cats, and monkeys. In
addition, the Egyptians had a great interest in, and knowledge of, most species
of mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish in their environment.
Most Egyptians were probably descended from
settlers who moved to the Nile valley in prehistoric times, with a population
increase coming through natural fertility. In various periods there were
immigrants from Nubia, Libya,
and especially the Middle
East. They were historically significant and also may have contributed to
population growth, but their numbers are unknown. Most people lived in villages
and towns in the Nile valley and delta. Dwellings were normally built of mud
brick and have long since disappeared beneath the rising water table or
beneath modern town sites, thereby obliterating evidence for settlement
patterns. In antiquity, as now, the most favored location of settlements was
on the slightly raised ground near the riverbank, where transport and water were
easily available and flooding was unlikely. Until the 1st millennium BCE,
Egypt was not urbanized to the same extent as Mesopotamia. Instead, a few
centers, notably Memphis and Thebes,
attracted the population and particularly the elite, while the rest of the people
were relatively evenly spread over the land. The size of the population has
been estimated as having risen from 1 to 1.5 million in the 3rd
millennium BCE to perhaps twice that number in the late 2nd
millennium and 1st millennium BCE. (Much higher levels of population were
reached in Greco-Roman times.)
Nearly all of the people were engaged in
agriculture and were probably tied to the land. In theory, all the land belonged
to the king, although in practice those living on it could not easily be
removed and some categories of land could be bought and sold. The land was assigned
to high officials to provide them with an income, and most tracts required
payment of substantial dues to the state, which had a strong interest in
keeping the land in agricultural use. Abandoned land was taken back into state
ownership and reassigned for cultivation. The people who lived on and worked
the land were not free to leave and were obliged to work it, but they were not
slaves; most paid a proportion of their produce to major officials. Free
citizens who worked the land on their own behalf did emerge; terms applied to
them tended originally to refer to poor people, but these agriculturalists were
probably not poor. Slavery was never common, being restricted to captives and
foreigners or to people who were forced by poverty or debt to sell themselves
into service. Slaves sometimes even married members of their owners’ families,
so that in the long term those belonging to households tended to be assimilated into
free society. In the New Kingdom (from about 1539 to 1075 BCE), large
numbers of captive slaves were acquired by major state institutions or
incorporated into the army. Punitive treatment of foreign slaves or of native
fugitives from their obligations included forced labor, exile
(in, for example, the oases of the western desert), or compulsory enlistment in
dangerous mining expeditions. Even nonpunitive employment such as quarrying in
the desert was hazardous. The official record of one expedition shows a
mortality rate of more than 10 percent.
Just as the Egyptians optimized
agricultural production with simple means, their crafts and techniques, many of
which originally came from Asia, were raised to extraordinary levels of
perfection. The Egyptians’ most striking technical achievement, massive stone
building, also exploited the potential of a centralized state to mobilize a
huge labor
force, which was made available by efficient agricultural practices. Some
of the technical and organizational skills involved were remarkable. The
construction of the great pyramids of
the 4th dynasty (c. 2575–c. 2465 BCE)
has yet to be fully explained and would be a major challenge to this day. This
expenditure of skill contrasts with sparse evidence of an essentially neolithic
way of living for the rural population of the time, while the use of flint
tools persisted even in urban environments at
least until the late 2nd millennium BCE. Metal was correspondingly scarce,
much of it being used for prestige rather
than everyday purposes.
In urban and elite contexts, the
Egyptian ideal was the nuclear family, but,
on the land and even within the central ruling group, there is evidence for
extended families. Egyptians were monogamous, and the choice of partners in
marriage, for which no formal ceremony or the legal sanction is known, did not
follow a set pattern. Consanguineous marriage was not practiced during the
Dynastic period, except for the occasional marriage of a brother and sister
within the royal family, and that practice may have been open only to kings or
heirs to the throne. Divorce was in theory easy, but it was costly. Women had a
legal status only marginally inferior to that of men. They could own and
dispose of the property in their own right, and they could initiate divorce and
other legal proceedings. They hardly ever held administrative office but
increasingly were involved in religious cults as priestesses or “chantresses.”
Married women held the title “mistress of the house,” the precise significance
of which is unknown. Lower down the social scale, they probably worked on the
land as well as in the house.The uneven distribution of wealth, labor,
and technology was related to the only partly urban character of society,
especially in the 3rd millennium BCE. The country’s resources were not fed
into numerous provincial towns but instead were concentrated to great effect
around the capital—itself a dispersed string of settlements rather than a
city—and focused on the central figure in society, the king. In the 3rd and
early 2nd millennia, the elite ideal, expressed in the decoration of private
tombs, was manorial and rural. Not until much later did Egyptians develop a
more pronouncedly urban character.
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