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EARLY DYNASTIC EGYPT <../../index.htm>*

*_Proussakov, Dmitriy Borisovich <../Proussakov.htm>_. Nature and Man in
Ancient Egypt. Moscow: "Moskovskiy Litsei", 1999.
*
(*DOWNLOAD* this summary as a doc file HERE <../Proussakov.htm>)

*SUMMARY*

Environmental interpretations of social history have become a matter of
growing scientific interest. In this respect, pharaonic Egypt is among
the richest as well as unique fields of research: besides the Nile
Valley, there were few regions in the ancient world where everyday
interdependence of man and nature has been so close and effective a
factor in the social and political genesis. The extent of our knowledge
about the ecology of Ancient Egypt allows us to begin a dynamic
reconstruction of the environmental conditions during the emergence of
pharaonic civilization as well as through its several thousand-year
evolution. At the same time, the importance and true range of natural
/processes/ which influenced Ancient Egyptian history have yet to be
sufficiently estimated. In other words, the environment in its
transformations has never been interpreted by scholars as one of the
main characters in the "dramatic theater" of pharaonic civilization.
This can partly be explained by the omission of relevant information or,
even, the use of obsolescent scientific data. Examples of this include,
among others, information on the changes of the Holocene climate. This
monograph presents an important first step in the socio-ecological
history of Ancient Egypt in the chronological limits from the Fourth to
Second Millennium BC (all dates in this Summary are calendar).
This research bases itself upon the latest reconstruction of
the Holocene temperature fluctuations in the Northern Hemisphere by
Prof. V. V. Klimenko & colleagues (Moscow Institute of Energy). This
reconstruction permits us to see that, in addition to the notorious
desiccation of the late Third Millennium BC, followed by a series of
severe droughts in the Nile Valley, the Egyptian climate during the
pharaonic time passed through several considerable variations which have
been overlooked until now. Besides, this up-to-date palaeoclimatological
model presents us with quite new ideas of influence upon the historical
development of Ancient Egyptian civilization of climatically conditioned
environmental processes, such as the eustatic Ocean level oscillations
and changes of the Nile flood discharge, among others.
The fundamental point of the conception of pharaonic
socio-ecological history herein is the idea of a series of /three
socio-ecological crises/ which originated in the resonance of
destructive social-political tendencies as well as disastrous
environ-mental transformations in Egypt. Since most of the scientific
data used in this research has never been used for the Egyptological
purposes, this monograph focuses attention deliberately on the
ecological aspect of the research.
The First Socio-Ecological Crisis which resulted in the
emergence of the centralized state in Egypt is linked here, first of
all, with the Mediterranean trans-gression in the Nile Delta within the
post-glacial (Flandrian) eustatic transgression of the World Ocean.
According to most of the geo-physical theories, Flandrian trans-gression
approached its upper level in the Fourth Millennium BC, several
centuries after the culmination of the Atlantic Climatic Optimum, the
warmest episode of the Holocene (with a mean global temperature 1,4°C
higher than today). In the light of D. Stanley's lithostratigraphic
explorations in the Nile Delta, in the Fifth Millennium BC, when the sea
level was about 10 m lower than today, the Delta appears to have been
dry and quite suitable for farming and livestock herding. Favorable
ecological conditions in the neolithic Lower Egypt should have attracted
numerous migrations from the Western and Eastern Deserts which would
have been driven by the desiccation of North Africa which started in the
late Fifth Millennium BC. In the first half of the Fourth Millennium BC,
the socio-economical development of the Delta seems to have outrun
considerably that of Upper Egypt; in addition to this, the predynastic
settlement of the Valley was obviously delayed by extremely high Nile
floods and, on the contrary, by still quite comfortable ecological
living conditions in the vicinities of the Nile floodplain.
According to Herodotus, however, in the time of the first
Egyptian kings, the Delta was totally inundated; in conformity with this
information, the archaeological data show that the early Egyptian state
was born in the Valley. It is suggested here that the Delta was
inundated by the catastrophic Mediterranean transgression which
drastically changed the geo-political situation in Egypt. Substantial
reduction of the living space in Lower Egypt, approximately in the late
Gerzean period, is considered as one of the main preconditions of the
First Socio-Ecological Crisis of Ancient Egyptian civilization.
To estimate the effect of the rising sea upon the Delta in the
Fourth Millennium BC, different reconstructions of the eustatic process
in the Holocene were taken into account in this research. Not long ago,
they were all brought to a couple of initial models. According to R.
Fairbridge's version, in the Fourth Millennium BC, the Ocean level
surpassed the modern one by 3-4 m and, since then, has experienced
damped oscillations within the limits of ±1-3 m. The alternative theory
of F. Shepard suggested that the post-glacial ocean has never exceeded
its modern level but approached it "exponentially". The subsequent
discoveries of tectonic, isostatic, geoidal as well as other eustatic
factors revealed geographical and temporal dis-similarity of the
Holocene eustasy dynamics; in particular, different shorelines showed
both an increase of the post-glacial sea levels above the modern one as
well as the absence of such an uprise. At the same time, the up-to-date
lithostratigraphy of the Nile Delta allows us to suggest that, in both
cases, the Delta must have suffered a catastrophic inundation at the
peak of Flandrian transgression in the Fourth Millennium BC.
The transgression hypothesis provides us with quite new
possibilities of inter-pretation for the emergence of statehood in the
Nile Valley and, simultaneously, a new explanation for the phenomenal
capture of 120 thousand men by the 0-dynasty King Narmer in Lower Egypt
(according to K. Butzer's estimations, more than half of the Delta
population!). This figure (if not symbolic) is too enormous to believe
in its adequacy with the range of tribal wars, but looks absolutely
realistic if we suppose that the "captives" were refugees who migrated
from the ecologically degraded Delta on a mass scale as the culmination
of the Mediterranean transgression approached. It is just that very
demographic phenomenon which could be linked with the origins of state
in Egypt: in a short time period and, apparently, for the first time in
history, one of the Egyptian tribal communities grew in such a
proportion that its survival demanded a prompt hierarchization which, in
turn, finally brought Narmer's chiefdom to the state-forming level of
the social stratification. At the same time, in the case of
protodynastic Egypt, since the population growth necessary for state
formation had probably been a /local anomaly/, the so-called Early
Kingdom state (the First and Second Dynasties) is likely to have been a
kind of /advanced/ social subsystem inside the Egyptian nation,
occupying primarily a limited territory of Egypt and, for two-three
centuries, gradually expanding its hegemonic position over the rest of
the country. Proceeding from this theory, the Early (Thinitic) Kingdom
of Egypt should be defined as the "0 Intermediate Period" according to
the mature centralized state which emerged not before the Third Dynasty.
Thus, the Egyptian social-political system under the First and Second
Dynasties better qualifies as the bifurcational "early state".
The mass migration of people from the submerging Delta into
Upper Egypt in the protodynastic time is likely to have been favored by
the improvement of ecological conditions in the Valley after the
so-called "Neolithic drop" of the Nile. This process ended, presumably,
on the threshold of the Second Dynasty and its final stage is probably
fixed by the Nile flood-level records of the Palermo Stone. Diminishing
of the level and area of the river floods, on the one hand, could have
eased the social cataclysm of the mass migration; on the other hand, it
could have helped the development of local hotbeds of basin irrigation
in the Nile floodplain into a kind of network and further integration of
Egyptian population.
Besides eustatic transgression, the predynastic epoch witnessed
a global climate change. The Atlantic Climatic Optimum with its
moistening was followed by a steep fall of temperature in the Northern
Hemisphere during the Fourth Millennium BC; in particular, this fall was
accompanied by the settling of arid conditions in the Northeast Africa.
It should be stressed, however, that until approximately 3800-3700 BC, the
climate of Egypt is considered to have remained rather warm and moist.
Sharp cooling happened only ca. 3600 BC; it is noteworthy that this
climatological landmark coincides with the rough date of considerable
social and technological progress in the Nile Valley which is associated
with the transition from Naqada I (Amratian) to Naqada II (Gerzean)
archaeological cultures in Egypt. The minimum temperature (about 2,4°C
less than at the peak of the Atlantic Optimum over a thousand years
before) was reached ca. 3190 BC. Since the Egyptian climate at that time
is con-sidered to have become much drier and probably slightly hotter
than today, it follows that the emergence of state in Egypt took place
in drought conditions which could have been the supplementary factor of
the supposed political immaturity of the "Early Kingdom".
Ca. 3000 BC the climate of Egypt became more moist and remained
so until ca. 2900-2800 BC. This was followed by a short-term episode of
dry conditions, apparently synchronous with the "dark age" of the late
Third Dynasty. Sometime under Snefru, the founder of the Fourth Dynasty,
abundant rainfall had set in Egypt; this precipitation growth marked the
beginning of the Subboreal Climatic Optimum whose first peak embraced
the reign of the Fourth and Fifth Dynasties. Warm and moist climate
provided sufficient Nile discharge as well as productive agriculture in
the Nile floodplain, thus being one of the main factors of comparative
socio-ecological stability and durability of the centralized state in
the Egypt of the Old Kingdom.
Among the factors of the socio-ecological stability in the Old
Kingdom, the hypothetical Mediterranean regression in the Third
Millennium BC takes an important place. The scientific data and
information of the written sources allow us to raise the question that
in the time of the Third-Fifth Dynasties, the sea was receding and
clearing more and more area of the Delta. It is argued here that this
regression stimulated the return wave of settlement of Lower Egypt
(obviously together with the population growth) and facilitated the
drainage works and extensive farming in the Delta in the first half of
the Old Kingdom. Besides, starting with the Fifth Dynasty, retreat of
the Mediterranean is likely to have induced the kings to endow temples
and high officials with lands in Lower Egypt; this "generosity" was
probably one of the factors restraining the political crisis and
centrifugal forces in the late Old Kingdom.
Decline of the Old Kingdom was accompanied by environmental
deterioration in Egypt. Under the Sixth Dynasty, the development of the
Subboreal Climatic Opti-mum was interrupted by a fall of global
temperature, with culmination ca. 2055 BC and at about a 0,5°C total
temperature decrease. As a result, the climate of Northeast Africa
became much drier, the rainfall ceased, deserts came close to the river
valley, sand dunes began to invade the cultivable floodplain, the
ground-water table sank, the Nile discharge and, correspondingly, flood
levels reduced. Archaeological sources reveal simultaneous symptoms of
progressive economic crisis in Egypt. Local power, together with
distributive function, came to pass into the hands of nomarchs;
politically, the Old Kingdom was tending toward disintegration.
Obviously, some radical reforms in the social structure of
Egypt of the post-Old-Kingdom time could have been induced by the
ecological catastrophe of the last half of the Third Millennium BC.
Thus, it is seen here that progressive reduction of the Nile flood level
stimulated the first experiments of the substitution of professional
"individual" cultivators for non-specialized gangs of workmen in
agriculture. At the same time it should be stressed that the reason for
the social-political crisis in the late Old Kingdom is certainly not due
exclusively to ecological factors. Moreover, contrary to the wide-spread
point of view in the light of modern palaeoclimatological
reconstructions, severe droughts and very low Nile levels had nothing to
do with the break-up of the Old Kingdom: decline of the centralized
state began 150-200 years before the culmination of this famous
ecological catastrophe which, in fact, coincided with the emergence of
the Middle Kingdom in Egypt.
The epoch of the First Intermediate Period and Middle Kingdom
is called here the Second Socio-Ecological Crisis of Ancient Egyptian
civilization. The First Inter-mediate Period was characterized by
drastic desiccation of the Nile drainage-basin, the reduction of Nile
discharge to a minimum during the pharaonic time, and the considerable
fall of the level of Lake Moeris in the Fayum depression. Environmental
disaster and political disintegration of Egypt disturbed the irrigation
infrastructure of the country. Famine and internal wars seem to have
devastated some regions of the Nile Valley. The Egyptian community found
itself in natural and social conditions which demanded the search for
quite different strategies of adaptation and principles of
self-organization. The Second Socio-Ecological Crisis was an epoch of
the working-out and strengthening of such strategies and principles, the
civilizational bifurcation between the half-archaic Old Kingdom, and the
advancing New Kingdom "Empire".
According to hypothesis proposed here, one of the fundamental
stages of this reorganization was the revolution in irrigation
technology connected with the in-vention of the derivation channels
which brought the Nile water to the so-called "high lands" outside the
floodplain. The first mention about these channels in Egyptian writings
occurs in the First Intermediate Period - the time of the lowest Nile
levels in the pharaonic history. Thus, these channels are seen as having
a kind of "response" to the catastrophic drop of the Nile discharge and
the means to compensate the loss of the most productive, naturally
flooded lands in the Nile Valley. Adapting to the new living conditions,
Ancient Egyptian society turned to the regular anthropogenic
trans-formation of its containing landscape.
The culmination of the "hydraulic revolution" in Egypt in the
time of the Second Socio-Ecological Crisis occurred in the Twelfth
Dynasty by the unique irrigation system in the Fayum oasis which allowed
artificial irrigation in part of the cultivable territory of Lower
Egypt, including providing the necessary Nile level in years of low Nile
discharge. Together with derivation channels, the Fayum irrigation
network, based on the renewable water resources of Lake Moeris, must
have favored the increase of resistibility of the Ancient Egyptian
socio-economic system to disastrous environmental changes, in
particular, those of climate influencing the regime of the Nile. At the
same time, one should note the controversial nature of the wide-spread
point of view that the newly-drained area in the Middle Kingdom Fayum
appeared to have become a granary promoting the prosperity of Egypt as a
whole. The culculation showed that the new lands developed in the Fayum
depression in the time of the Twelfth Dynasty could supply food, on the
peak of their crop capacity, to only about 55 thousand men - obviously,
the population of the kings' domain situated in the Middle Kingdom epoch
in the Fayum oasis and its vicinities. Rich and economically stable
Fayum which made kings exclusively wealthy compared to any nomarch, was
apparently one of the main preconditions of the central power growth.
This, in turn, favored not only the return of Egypt from "feudalism" to
the centralized state, but may be also explain one of the emerging
trends of much more unified so-cial-political organization - a
characteristic feature of the so-called New Kingdom "Empire".
The mechanism of power unification in the context of the
discussed irrigation innovations in Ancient Egypt during the Second
Socio-Ecological Crisis could have occurred as follows: according to
Herodotus, it took six months to refill Lake Moeris up to the volume
which allowed the effective watering of the area embraced by the
irrigation network of the Fayum hydraulic system. It is likely that, to
guarantee the sufficient water income to the Lake, the spontaneous
digging by the Upper Egyptian nomarchs of the channels, thereby taking
water away from the Nile, should have been suppressed by the kings. As
the real power in Ancient Egypt was neccessarily connected with the
right to exercise control over irrigation, depriving nomarchs of such a
right was equivalent to abolishing of one of the basic principles of
their might and sovereignty which was not eliminated even by the
strongest Fourth Dynasty and supported the "feudal"-political structure
of the intermediate stage between the Old and New Kingdoms. Thus, the
aspiration of the pharaohs of the Eleventh-Twelfth Dynasties for total
control over the irrigation infrastructure of Egypt may have been one of
the preconditions of the final suppression of the nomarchs-landowners as
well as the transition of the Ancient Egyptian political system to a
more hierarchized and centralized state administration of the "imperial"
pattern in the New Kingdom.
At the same time a working hypothesis is suggested here that
the most difficult living conditions in the Egypt of the Second
Socio-Ecological Crisis forced the rulers (nomarchs during the First
Intermediate Period and, later, pharaohs of the Middle Kingdom) to
"descend from the pedestal" and take an active role in the everyday life
of their subjects. This could have favored the loss, postulated by J.
Posener, of tra-ditional Egyptian beliefs in the divinity of the Pharaoh
- the formerly inalienable attribute of the state ideology of the
Ancient Egyptian Old Kingdom.
Reverting to palaeoecology, it is necessary to consider that,
in the early Second Millennium BC, the global temperature rise
recommenced, and, ca. 1800 BC, the upper peak of the Subboreal Climatic
Optimum set in with the total temperature growth of 1,8°C compared to
the cold climatic anomaly of the late Fourth Millennium BC. This warm
stage was characterized by the highest wet levels of Northeast Africa
for the last 5000 years; following the increase of precipitation, the
Nile discharge is estimated to have grown almost twofold. It is
noteworthy that this episode of comfortable environmental conditions in
Egypt coincided chronologically with the "golden age" of the Middle
Kingdom (i. e. the Twelfth Dynasty).
This climatic optimum, however, was rather short-termed: with
the following several decades, the next temperature fall began and, as a
result, Egypt in the late Middle Kingdom could have suffered a series of
severe droughts and crop failures along the lines of the First
Intermediate period. Up to ca. 1680 BC, the global tem-perature
decreased almost by 0,6°C. From then, until the end of the New Kingdom,
the temperature oscillated closely to the modern values. Thus, the
ecology of the New Kingdom was characterized by comparative climatic
invariability which was one of the main environmental conditions of the
socio-ecological stability during the reign of the Eighteenth-Nineteenth
Dynasties, the time "when Egypt ruled the East".
The collapse of the New Kingdom under the Ramessides (i. e.
Twentieth) Dy-nasty is discussed here in the context of the Third
Socio-Ecological Crisis of Ancient Egyptian civilization. The starting
point of the argument was K. Butzer's reconstruc-tion of the alluvial
Nile floodplain formation and, in particular, the assumption that in the
Second Millennium BC (owing to the cessation of the monsoon rains in
Ethiopia), the silt deposition in the Nile Valley was interrupted. Lack
of silt, the natural fertilizer of Egyptian soils, must have had a
certain effect on the cultivable alluvial lands: their quality must have
fallen. Being interpreted in the light of this supposition, the data of
the Wilbour Papyrus - the great cadastre compiled in the reign of Ramses
V - allows us to hypothesize that the alluvial land productivity in
Egypt of the New Kingdom was reduced by half in the time of Ramessides.
The exhaustion of lands, together with population growth, demanded the
development of additional agricultural areas. Just with the land
deficiency caused by gradual degradation of soils in the Nile
floodplain, the extensive working of the so-called "high lands" during
the New Kingdom and the total cultivation of the Delta under Ramses II
could be connected. The last measure seems to have improved the
situation in Lower Egypt. Despite this, however, the socio-ecological
crisis progressed: settled for centuries, in different ecological and
social conditions, the structure and working mechanisms of the New
Kingdom agriculture were damaged irreversibly. The written sources
mention a large lack of crop revenues to the state granaries, mass ruin
of "individual" farmers, and admini-
strative repressions of tax defaulters. The economical decline and
progressive political disorder in Egypt undermined the pharaohs'
authority in Asia and Nubia. Finally, the Third Socio-Ecological Crisis
culminated in disintegration of the centralized Egyptian state.
In the First Millennium BC, the Nile floods increased, and
accelerated depo-sition of silt in the Nile floodplain took place. This
phenomenon is likely to be con-nected with temperature growth of the
early Tenth - late Ninth Centuries BC. Infor-mation of Ancient and
Egyptian written sources allows us to estimate the silt accumu-lation in
the Third Intermediate Period - Late Kingdom Egypt as twofold in
com-parison with that of the Old - New Kingdom time. Accelerated silting
was also characteristic for the predynastic Egypt. Finally, it is
postulated here that /pharaonic civilization emerged and developed
within strictly limited period of geo- and hydro-logical history of the
Holocene Nile Valley, notable for the minimum rate of alluvium
deposition in the river floodplain in the historical epoch/. If Egypt
herself was "the gift of the Nile", Ancient Egyptian civilization was
"the gift of the flood" and could survive only under the condition of
/optimum (or close to it) correlation between flood levels and level of
the floodplain terrac/e, which ensured a sufficient area of natural
irrigation or, at least, allowed to do with the most simple means of
artificial irrigation of the "high lands". Such a correlation seems to
have been settled after the so-called "Neolithic drop" of the Nile in
the late Fourth Millennium BC and broken in the First Millenium BC, what
must have resulted in the decline of the working irrigation system and
demanded from the Late Egyptian population radical administrative,
eco-nomical and technological reorganization. It is just this
reorganization, in which the final political collapse of the pharaonic
Egypt is hypothesized to have been rooted.
[/To be continued/].
*Dmitry Proussakov*

Criticism and proposals are welcome: prusakov at prusakov.msk.ru
<mailto:prusakov at prusakov.msk.ru>

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