PART THREE
The world’s first cities and states emerged in the river valleys of North Africa and Asia about 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. In what are today Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan and India, people came together to live for the first time in settlements larger than villages, and there is evidence of kings, rulers and great inequalities of wealth and power; at this time, too, writing first developed as a means of controlling growing populations. There are important differences between these early cities and states in the three regions: in Egypt and Iraq they were very warlike, in the Indus Valley apparently peaceable. In most of the world, people continued to live in small farming communities which were, however, often part of much larger networks of trade stretching across wide regions.
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Hippopotamus ivory label, found at Abydos (near Luxor), Egypt
AROUND 2985 BC
There’s a compelling, beguiling showbiz mythology of the modern big city – the energy and the abundance, the proximity to culture and power, the streets that just might be paved with gold. We’ve seen it and we’ve loved it, on stage and on screen. But we all know that in reality big cities are hard. They’re noisy, potentially violent and alarmingly anonymous. We sometimes just can’t cope with the sheer mass of people. And this, it seems, is not entirely surprising. Apparently, if you look at how many numbers we’re likely to store in our mobile phone, or how many names we’re likely to list on a social networking site, it’s rare even for city dwellers to exceed a couple of hundred. Social anthropologists delightedly point out that this is the size of the social group we would have had to handle in a large Stone Age village. According to them, we’re all trying to cope with modern big-city life equipped only with a Stone Age social brain. We all struggle with anonymity.
So how do you lead and control a city or a state where most people don’t know each other, and you can interact personally with only a very small percentage of the inhabitants? It’s been a problem for politicians for more than 5,000 years, ever since the groups we live in exceeded the size of a tribe or village. The world’s first crowded cities and states grew up in fertile river valleys: the Euphrates, the Tigris and the Indus. This chapter’s object is associated with the most famous river of them all, the Nile. It comes from the Egypt of the pharaohs, where the answer to the question of how to exert leadership and state control over a large population was quite simple: force.
If you want to investigate the Egypt of the pharaohs, the British Museum gives you a spectacular range of choices – monumental sculptures, painted mummy cases, and much more – but I’ve chosen an object that came quite literally from the mud of the Nile. It’s made from a tusk of a hippo, and it belonged to one of Egypt’s first pharaohs – King Den. Perversely for an object that’s going to let us explore power on a massive scale, it is tiny.
It is about 5 centimetres (2 inches) square, it’s very thin, and it looks and feels a bit like a modern-day business card. In fact, it’s a label that was once attached to a pair of shoes. We know this because on one side is a picture of those shoes. This little ivory plaque is a name tag for an Egyptian pharaoh, made to accompany him as he set off to the afterlife, a label which would identify him to those he met. Through it, we’re immediately close to these first kings of Egypt – rulers, around 3000 BC, of a new kind of civilization that would produce some of the greatest monumental art and architecture ever made.
The nearest modern equivalent I can think of to this label is the ID card that people working in an office now have to wear round their necks to get past the security check – though it’s not immediately clear who was meant to read these Egyptian labels, whether they’re aimed at the gods of the afterlife or perhaps ghostly servants who might not know their way around. The images themselves are made by scratching into the ivory and then rubbing a black resin into the incisions, making a wonderful contrast between the black of the design and the cream of the ivory.
Before the first pharaohs, Egypt was a divided country, split between the east–west coastal strip of the Nile Delta, facing the Mediterranean, and the north–south string of settlements along the river itself. With the Nile flooding every year, harvests were plentiful, so there was enough food for a rapidly growing population and, frequently, surplus to trade with. But there was absolutely no extra fertile land beyond the flooding area, and as a result the ever more numerous people fought bitterly over the limited amount of land. Conflict followed conflict, with the people from the Delta eventually being conquered by the people from the south just before 3000 BC. This united Egypt was one of the earliest societies that we can think of as a state in the modern sense, and, as one of its earliest leaders, King Den had to address all the problems of control and coordination that a modern state has to confront today.
Engraved on the back of the label is a pair of sandals
You might not expect to discover how he did this from the label on his shoes, but Den’s sandals were no ordinary shoes. They were high-status items, and the Keeper of the Sandals was one of the high court officials. It’s not so surprising, then, that on the back of the label we have a clear statement of how this pharaoh exercised power; nor, perhaps, that the model which evolved in Den’s Egypt 5,000 years ago resonates uncannily around the world to this day.
On the other side of the label is an image of the owner of the sandals, dressed in a royal headdress with a mace in one hand and a whip in the other. King Den stands in combat, authoritatively smiting an enemy who cowers at his feet. Of course, the first thing we look for is his sandals but, disappointingly, he’s barefoot.
This little label is the first image of a ruler in this history of humanity. It’s striking, perhaps a bit disheartening, that, right at the beginning, the ruler wants to be shown as commander-in-chief, conquering his foe. This is how, from earliest times, power has been projected through images, and there’s something disturbingly familiar about it. In its simplified forms and its calculated manipulation of scale it is eerily reminiscent of a contemporary political cartoon.
The label-maker’s job was, however, deadly serious: to keep his leader looking invincible and semi-divine, and to show that Den was the only man who could guarantee what Egyptians, like everybody else, wanted from their rulers – law and order. Within the pharaoh’s realm, everybody was expected to conform and to take on a clear Egyptian identity. The message of our sandal label is that the price of opposition was high and painful.
This message is carried not only in the image but also in the writing. There are some early hieroglyphs scratched into the ivory which give us the name of King Den and, between him and the enemy, the chilling words ‘they shall not exist’. This ‘other’ is going to be obliterated. All the tricks of savage political propaganda are already here – the ruler calm and victorious, set against the alien, defeated, misshapen enemy. Who he is we don’t know, but on the right of the label is an inscription which reads: ‘The first occasion of smiting the east’. As the sandy ground beneath the figures rises to the right-hand side, it has been suggested that the enemy comes from Sinai in the east.
The area that King Den’s unified Egyptian state was able to coerce and control is staggering. At its height, it included virtually all the Nile Valley from the Delta to what is modern Sudan, as well as a huge area to the east up to the borders of Sinai. I asked the archaeologist Toby Wilkinson what building a state on this scale required:
This is an early period in Egypt’s history, when the nation is still being consolidated, not so much territorially as ideologically and psychologically. The king and his advisers are looking for ways to reinforce Egypt’s sense of its own nationhood, and support for their regime. I think they realized, as world leaders have realized throughout history, that nothing binds a nation and a people together quite so effectively as a foreign war against a common enemy, whether that enemy is real or manufactured. And so warfare plays really a key role in the consolidation of the Egyptians’ sense of their own nationhood.
It’s a discouragingly familiar strategy. You win hearts and minds at home by focusing on the threats from abroad, but the weapons that you need to crush the enemy also come in handy when you’re dealing with domestic opponents. The political rhetoric of foreign aggression is backed up by very brisk policing at home.
So the apparatus of the modern state had already been forged at the time of King Den, with enduring consequences which were artistic as well as political. Only power of this order could organize the enormous building projects that these early pharaohs embarked on. Den’s elaborate tomb, with granite shipped from hundreds of miles away, and the later, even grander pyramids were possible only because of the extraordinary control which Egyptian pharaohs could exercise over the minds and the bodies of their subjects. Den’s sandal label is a miniature masterclass in the enduring politics of power.