Think Like an Egyptian (34 page)

 

 

 

 

The sign for soldier shows a kneeling man equipped with bow and arrows. It was added to words meaning both “army” and “expedition,” of the kind sent out to distant quarries in the desert. Until the New Kingdom, the Egyptians seem not to have maintained a large standing army controlled by the king. Instead, when need arose, men were recruited through a national draft. In the 5th Dynasty a high civil official named Weni was responsible for raising a national army to invade Palestine. He recruited not only through the administrative departments of Egypt but also from the Nubian lands to the south. Although he led the army, he bore no military title. At other times he organized quarry expeditions, boat building, and the clearing of channels through the rocky obstructions of the Nile at Aswan.

Wealthy men in the provinces maintained their own private armies at times. The governor of a province, Amenemhat, describes in his tomb-biography at Beni Hasan how he led troops of 400 to 600 men from his province for royal expeditions either of conquest in Nubia or to find gold in the desert. The dangers were many and he boasts of the safe return of his men. During a huge expedition, of 9,268 men, sent in the reign of Rameses IV (1153-1147 BC) to quarry stone at a not particularly remote site in the Wadi Hammamat, 900 are said to have died, though the causes are not stated.

Weapons were few and simple in the earlier periods. The bodies of 60 soldiers of the early Middle Kingdom buried in a common grave had been attacked by arrows, knives, and clubs, and several had then lain on the ground where they had been pecked and ripped by birds of prey. Spear- and arrowheads were still made from chipped stone. Men wore no special body protection or uniform. Although no sources mention this, we have to assume that all men were obliged to learn and practice fighting skills in their town or village.

From the 16th century BC—just before the New Kingdom—the Egyptians faced far more formidably equipped armies on the battlefields of the Near East and rapidly brought themselves up-to-date. An early victim was King Sekenenra Taa II of the 17th Dynasty (c. 1560 BC). His mummified head shows wounds from dagger, mace, and narrow-bladed ax, some of which pierced his skull. Remarkably X-rays reveal new growth of bone around one of the holes, implying that he must have lived on for a few months at least. The most obvious change in weapons and tactics was the adoption of the chariot (see no. 42), and with it developed an elite class of chariot officer. Bronze weapons proliferated, helmets and scale-armor appeared. Kings built up a standing army divided into regiments, named after gods. Some men volunteered, attracted by the promise of plundered goods and slaves, grants of land at home, and an honorable reputation: “The reputation of a brave man is in his deeds and will never perish in the land,” declares a Nile warship commander, Ahmose, who had fought in the war that reunited Egypt at the beginning of the New Kingdom. Other young men were snatched from their homes and sent to camps. As the New Kingdom wore on, the ranks were swelled with captured soldiers from the Near East, Libya, and the Aegean who now fought for Egypt. Later still came Greek mercenaries. Egyptian society changed profoundly. Officers and soldiers were to be found everywhere. Generals became kings. However, although the king was depicted as a war hero, the celebration of battle did not penetrate far into literature. The scribes maintained their disdain for all manual professions, including that of soldiering.

 

 

 

 

The sign for craftsman depicts the cumbersome tool used to grind out the interiors of stone vases. The vertical shaft was a piece of wood with a natural fork into which a stone grinding-piece could be inserted. The cutting was done by deliberately added quartz grains that were trapped between the grinder and the stone of the vessel. To help the craftsman maintain the necessary pressure, a pair of stone weights were attached to the handle at the top end. Crafting finely finished stone vases was one of the earliest industries in Egypt, developing well before the 1st Dynasty but declining in scale during the Old Kingdom. Its legacy is found in later words that use this sign: “to manufacture,” “workshop,” and “craftsman.” The last word applied to all kinds of arts and crafts, from sculpting to building and to the making of chariots, and also figuratively to the skilled use of words.

There were several titles by which sculptors, outline draftsmen, and builder-architects identified themselves although the status of artist was not distinctive, unlike in modern European culture. From time to time, artists depicted and identified themselves at work in tomb scenes, though this barely counts as a “signature.” Moreover, they were celebrated not for their specific artistic achievements, but as great men and loyal officials. The Step Pyramid of King Djoser at Sakkara, Egypt’s first monument in stone, is an architectural masterpiece of true originality. We can surmise that the great man at Djoser’s court named Imhetep (who much later became a god of healing) was responsible, although none of the titles he bore during his life specifies his architectural role.

A great masterpiece of Egyptian art, the painted limestone head of Queen Nefertiti, was discovered along with many comparable pieces in a room of a private house at Tell el-Amarna, belonging to a man named Thutmose. Attached to his house was a series of tiny sculptors” workshops arranged around a courtyard. His room of busts might have served as a showroom. Some workshops where statues were made must have belonged to temples and perhaps to the palace. But one way by which loyal subjects could advance their careers and position in society was to pay to have a statue or a chariot or some other fine object made and presented to the king, sometimes on the festival of the New Year. Some of these gifts would be passed on to the temples. It is likely that Thutmose was catering to these sorts of private customers. He and other sculptors working at this time had to follow the new conventions that King Akhenaten had introduced. A chief sculptor named Bak, son of another chief sculptor, states that Akhenaten himself gave him instruction.

One rare insight into craft is found in the tombstone of the sculptor Iritisen of an earlier period. He reveals how the creative process was thought to come from the world of supernatural forces. As the possessor of artistic talent he “knew the secrets of the god’s book, the conducting of ceremonies, all the magic with which I was furnished.”

 

 

 

 

Around 1360 BC, King Tushratta of the powerful kingdom of Mitanni, in the upper reaches of the Euphrates river, wrote to the king of Egypt, Amenhetep III, begging for gold so he could decorate a memorial to his grandfather. He ended his plea with the words: “In my brother’s country, gold is as plentiful as dirt.” This reputation has been backed up in modern times with the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb and all its gold ornamentation.

Evidence shows that families who were not from the richest section of society could acquire gold. Brave soldiers were given “gold of valor” by a grateful king, sometimes in the shape of ornamental flies made from gold, which could be hung as pendants from a necklace. Officials were rewarded by the king with collars made of gold beads and pendants. The hieroglyphic sign for “gold” depicts such a collar above a group of three granules (reflecting a common preference for seeing metals derived from granular ore; see no. 3, “Grain”).

The trial records of thieves from the late New Kingdom reveal a black market in gold from thefts from tombs and temples, undertaken with the complicity of junior officials. In a small open space beside a public well at Tell el-Amarna, archaeologists discovered a buried pottery jar containing 23 bars of gold and a quantity of silver fragments and roughly made rings. The burial of valuables in this way was probably a fairly common means of safe storage and does not tell us whether this particular hoard was dishonestly acquired. The gold bars had been made by pouring melted-down gold into grooves scooped by the finger in sand. The total weight was 3.375 kilograms, equivalent to 37 of the ancient units of weight called the “deben” (see no. 90, “Balance”). Since one deben of gold was roughly equal to 200 deben of bronze, the gold bars were worth around 7,400 bronze deben. With this sum one could purchase a herd of around 70 fully grown cattle and feel affluent. Yet gold was not sufficiently common and cheap for it to be used for the purchase of daily goods. According to the numerous records of buying and selling from the village of Deir el-Medina, although bronze and silver were used to value other things and were sometimes given in exchange for them (as if money), gold never was.

Egypt’s gold lay in the hilly, sometimes mountainous desert to the east of Upper Egypt and Nubia. It had to be found, extracted, and brought back to Egypt by armed expeditions. In earlier periods, perhaps mainly the Old and Middle Kingdoms, the easiest deposits to access were not veins in the rocky hillsides but the sandy beds of adjacent valleys that had become filled with detritus, including particles of gold naturally eroded from the hillsides. If a supply of water could be found, the gold particles could be washed out by swirling a mixture of sand and water around a shallow pan; or the gold particles could be picked out by hand-sorting on a table. The quantities in any one place might not have been very great. Successful endeavors relied on the supply of abundant cheap labor and the willingness of the prospectors to travel more or less any distance into the desert. This included the deserts of Nubia, home to hostile local populations.

Egyptian goldsmiths crafted impressive artifacts, from the gold-leaf covering of an entire riverboat used to ferry the portable image of the god Amun of Thebes, to exquisitely fine jewelry that employed slender gold wire, tiny gold granules added to a surface for decorative effect, and hollow frames with narrow edges to hold inlays of glaze and semiprecious stones.

 

 

 

 

Early archaeologists created a scheme for human history based on a threefold development in industrial materials: Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. The names in a very general way reflect the development of technology, but the periods they describe do not correspond with sharp divisions in the use of materials, nor do they represent significant changes in the way that society was organized. Egyptian society in the prehistoric centuries before the 1st Dynasty relied on a substantial and very sophisticated toolmaking industry based on flint, even though copper was used over most of this time (see no. 16, “Sickle”). The Egyptians knew of iron quite early, too, but it remained an exotic and somewhat magical substance until the Persian conquest in the 6th century BC, when ironworking began as an industry. But the gradual replacement of bronze by iron did not herald other kinds of change in society.