In Egypt, between 3100 and 2686 BC, the First Dynasty pharaohs become gods, the Second suffer civil war, and the Third rule a reunited Egypt.
The battling cities of Mesopotamia had no national identity; each was its own little kingdom. At the beginning of the third millennium, the only nation in the world stretched from the southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea at least as far upriver as the city of Hierakonpolis. Egypt was a kingdom like a knotted piece of string, over four hundred miles long, and so narrow in places that an Egyptian could stand on the desert that marked its eastern border and see right across the Nile to the wastes beyond the western frontier.
The nation’s capital, the white city of Memphis, lay just south of the Delta, on the border between the ancient Lower and Upper Kingdoms. The site had little else to recommend it; the plain was so wet that, according to Herodotus, Narmer’s first job was to build a dam to keep the water back. Even twenty-five hundred years later, Herodotus adds, “this bend in the Nile is closely watched…they strengthen the dam every year, because if the river decided to burst its banks and overflow at this point, Memphis would be in danger of being completely inundated.”
Narmer’s unification, and his establishment of Memphis as a single Egyptian capital, brings an end to predynastic Egypt. His son followed him to the throne, and was in turn succeeded by six more kings assigned by Manetho to the so-called First Dynasty of Egypt; an actual, formalized, royal succession.
What these eight kings were up to, in the six hundred years that they governed over unified Egypt, is more than a little obscure. But we can glimpse the growth of a centralized state: the establishment of a royal court, the collection of taxes, and an economy that allowed Egypt the luxury of supporting citizens who produced no food: full-time priests to sacrifice for the king, skilled metalworkers who provided jewelry for the court’s noblemen and women, scribes who kept track of the growing bureaucracy.
The third king of the dynasty, Djer, sent Egyptian soldiers out on the first official expeditions past the borders of Narmer’s kingdom. On a rock 250 miles south of Hierakonpolis, near the Second Cataract, an engraved scene shows Djer and his army triumphant over captives; these were most likely the indigenous people of Lower Nubia, who before long would be entirely gone from the area, driven out by bad weather and Egyptian invasions. Egyptian troops also marched northeast, along the coast of the Mediterranean, towards the area which would later be called southern Palestine.
Den, two kings later, extended another cautious finger outside Egypt’s borders. He led his men over into the Sinai peninsula, the triangle of land between the northern arms of the Red Sea. Here Den, according to a carved scene in his tomb, clubbed the local chieftains into submission, in a victory labelled, “The first time that the east was smitten.”
These victories were theoretically won on behalf of all Egypt, both north and south. But in death, the First Dynasty rulers reverted to their Upper Egyptian identity. They were buried in their homeland: at Abydos, far, far south of Memphis.
This was no simple graveyard. Common Egyptians might still be laid at the desert’s edge in the sand, faces turned west. But Egyptian noblemen, society’s second rank, lay in a grand graveyard on the high desert plain of Saqqara, just west of Memphis. And the kings buried at Abydos were entombed in brick or stone rooms sunk into the ground, surrounded by a positive embarrassment of human sacrifice. Almost two hundred dead attendants cluster around Den, while Djer was buried in the company of three hundred courtiers and servants.
These kings may have been uneasy about the loyalty of the north, but in their deaths they wielded a startling autocracy. Any man able to compel the deaths of others as part of his own funerary rites has advanced well beyond the tentative force employed by the earliest Sumerian rulers.
It isn’t easy to tease out exactly why this power was expressed by way of human sacrifice. By the time that the pharaohs of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasty were laid to rest, the Egyptians were carving along the walls of their tombs an entire postburial agenda for the dead: the ascent from the pitch-black chambers of the pyramids to the sky, the crossing of the waters that divide life from afterlife, a warm welcome from the waiting gods. But these “Pyramid Texts” date, at the earliest, from half a millennium after the sacrificial burials at Abydos. When the First Dynasty kings were interred, the Egyptians had not even begun to embalm their dead. The royal bodies were wrapped in rags, sometimes soaked in resin, but this did nothing to preserve them.
We can deduce, though, that the kings were going to join the sun in his passage across the sky. Buried beside the kings at Abydos lie fleets of wooden boats, some a hundred feet in length, in long pits roofed over with mud brick. On First Dynasty engravings, the sun-god is shown travelling across the sky in a boat. Presumably the pharaoh and the souls buried with him would use their boats to accompany him (although one of the grave complexes at Abydos has, not boats, but a herd of sacrificial donkeys for the king’s use, suggesting that he at least might have been heading somewhere else).
Assuming that the kings reached the next life on the other side of the horizon, what were they going to do there?
Possibly, the pharaoh would continue his royal role; we have no Egyptian proof for this, but Gilgamesh, once dead, joined the gods of the underworld to help run the place. If the early pharaohs were believed to continue their kingly functions in the afterworld, the sacrificial burials make a kind of sense. After all, if a king’s power only lasts until his death, he must be obeyed during his life, but there is no good reason to follow him into death. If, on the other hand, he’s still going to be waiting for you on the other side, his power becomes all-encompassing. The passage to the undiscovered country is simply a journey from one stage of loyalty to the next.
Given the tensions between north and south, the First Dynasty kings needed this kind of authority to hold the country together. The theological underpinnings for the king’s power are laid out by the “Memphite Theology,” written on a monument called the Shabaka Stone (now in the British Museum). The stone itself dates from much later in Egypt’s history, but the story it bears is thought by many Egyptologists to go all the way back to the earliest Egyptian dynasties.
There are many later elaborations of the tale, but its center is simple. The god Osiris is given the rule of the entire earth, but his brother Set, jealous of his power, plots his death. He drowns Osiris in the Nile. The wife (and sister) of Osiris, the goddess Isis, hunts for her missing husband-brother. When she finds his drowned body, she bends over him and half-resurrects him. Osiris is alive enough to impregnate her, but not quite alive enough to stay on earth. Instead he becomes king of the underworld. The son born to Isis after Osiris descends to his new realm, Horus, becomes king of the living realm.
As king of the living, the god Horus was associated with the sun, the stars, and the moon: in other words, he was (as Egyptologist Rudolf Anthes suggests) “that celestial body which appeared conspicuous either at day or night…the permanent ruler of the sky, who unlike the sun did not vanish at night time.” The power of Horus did not wax and wane.
The early pharaohs of Egypt claimed to be the earthly embodiment of Horus, carrying with them that power which does not “vanish at night time,” or with death. Nevertheless, all kings die. So Egyptian theology adapted to the inevitable. When the pharaoh died, he was no longer considered to be the incarnation of Horus. He became instead the embodiment of Osiris, who was both king of the underworld and the father of Horus, king of the living realm. The earthly son of the dead pharaoh now took on the role of the incarnate Horus, which demonstrates the practical uses of such a system; it provides a neat way to legitimize succeeding rulers. The new king wasn’t just the son of the old king. He was, in a sense, his father’s reincarnation. Pharaohs might die, but the real power of kingship never bit the dust. The king of Egypt was not, first and foremost, an individual: not Narmer, or Den, or Djer. He was the bearer of a Power.
Sociologists call this arrangement “positional succession.” It explains the growing tendency of Egyptian kings to claim the names of their predecessors; these names aren’t just names, but descriptions of particular aspects of the undying kingship. It also makes a little more sense out of the tendency to marry sisters (and sometimes daughters). When a pharaoh succeeds his father, his mother (the previous pharaoh’s wife) is, in a sense, his wife as well; he has, after all, become (in some sense) his father. It is still a number of centuries before Oedipus runs into difficulties over this. For the Egyptians, family was the obvious place to find a wife.
Adjib, the fourth king of the First Dynasty, added a new descriptive title to his royal appellations: the nesu-bit name. Although these two Egyptian words have the sense of “above” and “below,” nesu-bit doesn’t express the pharaoh’s rule over Upper and Lower Egypt. Rather, the nesu-bit seems to refer to the realms above and below. The nesu is the divine power of government, the above kingship that passes from king to king; the bit is the mortal holder of this power, the king below.
Adjib, the first king to claim this title, had trouble hanging onto the bit; perhaps the first historical example of protesting too much. His grave is surrounded by sixty-four sacrificed Egyptians, tribute to his position as holder of the kingship above. On the other hand, his tomb, the earthly monument to the king below, is the shabbiest at Abydos. Worse, his name has been chipped away from various monuments where it was originally carved.
The man who did the chipping was Semerkhet, the next pharaoh. His removal of his predecessor’s name was his attempt to rewrite the past. If the names that the pharaohs gave themselves expressed their eternal hold on the kingship above, writing them down, in the magically powerful signs of the hieroglyphs, carved them into the fabric of the world below. To deface the written name of a pharaoh was to remove him from earthly memory.
The attempt to erase Adjib suggests that Semerkhet was a usurper at best, and an assassin at worst. His seizure of the kingship below seems to have succeeded; he built himself a lovely tomb, much bigger than Adjib’s, and poured so much sacred incense into it that the oil soaked three feet down into the ground and could still be smelled when the tomb was excavated in the early 1900s. But his efforts to claim the nesu, the kingship above, were less triumphant. “In his reign,” Manetho records, “there were many extraordinary events, and there was an immense disaster.”
This cryptic remark isn’t glossed by any later commentator. But the land around the Nile reveals that towards the end of the First Dynasty, the Nile floods lessened dramatically. By the Second Dynasty, the flooding was, on average, three feet lower than it had been a hundred years before. If lessening floods had slowly pinched Egypt’s farmers in a vise of lessening harvests, a tipping point of discontent might have arrived just as the usurping Semerkhet was busy defacing Adjib’s monuments all over Egypt.
Egypt relied for its very life on the regular return of the Nile flood, an event which varied from year to year in its details, but remained essentially the same. In his role as sun-god, Horus carried with him the same combination of change and stability: each sunrise and sunset is different, but each morning the sun reappears on the eastern horizon. The title of nesu-bit suggests that the king himself had begun to represent this doubleness of unchanging eternal power and its mutating, earthly manifestation. The king, buried, came back again as his own son, like but different. He was like a perennial plant that returns with a different color of flower but the same root.
For Semerkhet to be erasing a pharaoh’s name—the first time, so far as we know, that this happens—must have been a shocking insult to this budding conception of kingship, a little like the sudden discovery that a pope who has been issuing ex cathedra declarations for years was elected by a miscount of the College of Cardinals. If the Nile flood then began to drop, with no apparent end to the receding waters in sight, one of those unchanging verities which the king was supposed to embody was also suddenly in flux. What would happen next; would the sun fail to come up?
Semerkhet’s reign ended with an upheaval in the royal house extreme enough to cause Manetho to start a “Second Dynasty.” Most ominous of all—for the pharaohs, if not for the courtiers—the sacrificial burials stop.
It’s unlikely that the Egyptian kings suddenly developed a new respect for human life, as some historians tend to imply (“The wasteful practice of human sacrifice ended with the First Dynasty”). More likely, the believability of the claim to the unquestioned power of Horus took a nosedive. The Second Dynasty king could no longer compel human sacrifice, perhaps because he could no longer guarantee that he and he alone held the position of nesu-bit. He could no longer promise that he had the undoubted right to escort those souls past the horizon in royal procession.
In this Second Dynasty, which is generally considered to have begun around 2890, an indeterminate number of kings reigned. Following on the drought (proof of the king’s uncertain control over life and death), civil war broke out and raged for years. The war reached its height during the reign of the next-to-last king, Sekemib, when an inscription notes that the southern army fought “the northern enemy within the city of Nekheb.”10 Nekheb, the ancient city of the vulture-goddess, was the eastern half of Hierakonpolis. It lay over a hundred miles south of Abydos, far into Upper Egypt. For a northern, Lower Egyptian rebellion to get this far suggests that during the Second Dynasty, the southern, Upper Egyptian hold on the empire was almost broken.
Although Sekemib himself was a southerner, the inscriptions that bear his name suggest that he may have been a ringer: a northern sympathizer, perhaps even of northern blood. Instead of writing his titles with the sign of the god Horus beside them, he wrote them next to the sign of the god Set.
Set, the brother and murderer of Osiris (and the enemy of Osiris’s son Horus), had always been more popular in the north. In later years he was pictured with red hair and a red cloak, reflecting the color of the Red Kingdom, Lower Egypt. He was the god of wind and storm; the bringer of clouds and sandstorms, the only powers strong enough to blot out the sun and bring it to the horizon before its time.
Set’s hatred for his brother Osiris and for his brother’s son Horus was more than simple jealousy. After all, Set was a blood relation of the king of the gods. He too felt that he had a claim to rule over Egypt. Old tales assured the Egyptians that, even after the murder, Set and Horus quarrelled over their competing claims to be the strongest, the most virile, the most deserving of rule over the earth. At one point, their arguments degenerate into a wrestling match. Set manages to tear out Horus’s left eye, but Horus gets the better of his uncle; he rips off Set’s testicles.
It’s hard to imagine a less ambiguous resolution. The two, both kin and enemy, are struggling over the right to pass along the succession. Horus removes his uncle’s ability to do so, and eventually inherits the throne. But Set’s jealousy has already led him to commit the world’s most ancient crime, the murder of a brother.
The hatred between Set and Horus is a reflection of the hostility between north and south, between two peoples with the same blood. Sekemib’s allegiance to Set rather than Horus shows that the quarrel over who should control Egypt was alive and well. And when he died, a Horus-worshipper named Khasekhem came to the throne and took up the sword. He rallied the southern army and, after vicious fighting, overcame the northern enemy. Two seated statues of this triumphant king, both found at Nekhen (the western half of Hierakonpolis), show him wearing only the White Crown of Upper Egypt; around the base of his throne, the broken bodies of northerners lie in defeated heaps.
Egypt had survived its first civil war. Under Khasekhem, a king who deserves to be better known, it entered into the Third Dynasty, a time of peace and prosperity during which Egypt’s pyramid-builders were able to develop their art.
The Third Dynasty owed its wealth to Khasekhem’s efforts to rebuild Egypt’s trade routes. Armed excursions out of the Delta had been abandoned, but during Khasekhem’s reign inscriptions at the coastal city of Byblos, which did a huge trade in cedar logs cut from the mountain slopes nearby, began to record the arrival of Egyptian merchant ships. It owed its existence to Khasekhem’s political marriage; he took as wife a princess from Lower Egypt, Nemathap, whose name and identity have survived because she was later given divine honor as the Third Dynasty’s great founding matriarch. And it owed its peace not only to Khasekhem’s generalship, but to his shrewdness in dealing with the Set problem.
After the war’s end, Khasekhem changed his name. But rather than adopting a northern name that would honor Set, or claiming another title that would glorify the southern Horus, he chose a middle course. He became known as Khasekhemwy, “The Two Powerful Ones Appear”—a name which was written with both the Horus falcon and the Set animal above it. Temporarily, the two powers had been reconciled.
The reconciliation is reflected in the ancient myths as well. After the battle between Horus and Set, Horus recovers his missing eye from Set and gives it to his father, now ensconced as Lord of the Dead, as tribute. But Set also gets his own back; he rescues his testicles.
The conflict between the two powers, while balanced, has not gone away. Horus manages to keep hold of his power over Egypt, but Set, whose ability to father heirs is (theoretically, anyway) restored, continues to plot a hostile takeover. In a whole series of stories from a few centuries later, Horus and Set carry on an ongoing battle of wits that involves, among other things, Horus’s sperm and a piece of lettuce. The jokes, which almost always involve someone’s genitals, cover a real and present threat. Set’s power doesn’t diminish. He never leaves. He’s always there, hovering, threatening to upset the orderly passing down of the nesu-bit name by pressing his own claims.
