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7Early Dynastic Egypt:

A Socio-Environmental/AnthropologicalHypothesis of ‘Unification’

Dmitri B. ProussakovInstitute of the Oriental Studies, Moscow

FOREWORD

It is attributed to Ancient Egypt, proceeding in particular from physiogra-phy of the land, a kind of historically predetermined and non-alternative al-gorithm of transition from ‘primitive condition’ to unified state: the so-called ‘second pathway of evolution of most ancient societies’ (Djakonov 1997b). Natural limitation of people's living space within narrowness of the Nile valley, gripped by mortal deserts, is believed to have been a guarantee of impossibility of emergence of self-dependent polities there, similar to those of Sumer. In other words, it is a question of imminence of territorial gathering of Egypt successively along the Nile by the strongest ‘nome’ (‘chiefdom’) through warfare already at the incipient stage of politogenesis (cf. Bard and Carneiro 1989). In general, at present it is considered proved that the Ancient Egyptian unified state, stretching from the First Cataract of the Nile to nearly the seaside margins of Lower Egypt (the Lower Land, the Delta), had arisen by the very outset of the Early Dynastic (‘archaic’) pe-riod of pharaonic history (Wilkinson 2001: 47–52).

Traditional scholarship (cf. Proussakov 1994, 2001b, 2001c, 2001d) as-sociates the earliest state formation in Egypt with gradual population growth (e.g., Wilson 1965: 31) – although, for lack of relevant information, this idea can hardly be substantiated with true calculations. Moreover, ar-chaeological data is considered by some scholars to argue rather in favor of irregular settlement and paucity of inhabitants of protodynastic Upper Egypt

Proussakov / Early Dynastic Egypt: A Socio-Environmental/Anthropological Hypothe-sis of ‘Unification’, pp. 139–180

The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analogues(the Upper Land, the Valley), the cradle of Egyptian state organization (O'Connor 1972; Mortensen 1991)1. As indisputable, a thesis is often cited that agricultural developing of the Nile floodplain could not have managed without national-scale irrigation works, the latter thus being among decisive factors of Egyptian ethnogenesis (e. g., Krzyzaniak 1977: 127–128) – al-though it follows by no means from either written or material sources that general irrigation system had actually existed in the Early Dynastic, as well as in the Old Kingdom Egypt (cf. Schenkel 1974; Hassan 1997).

Various theories of ‘archaic’ politogenesis in Egypt reveal qualitative differences in views on basic problems of state formation in the Nile valley, in particular, on the starting and culmination points of this process. Contro-versy is rather maintained than solved by conjectures that, in case of Egypt, a number of ‘classic’ preconditions of state emergence were lacking, such as: competition for resources, since with enormous natural (agricultural, etc.) potential of the country, its prehistoric population had been compara-tively small; external military threat, since at that time it could have come from nowhere; influence of foreign countries (first of all Mesopotamia), since it could not have been determining owing to all-sufficiency of au-tochthonous Egyptian protocivilization (Kemp 1991: 31–32).

But the principal problem, to my mind, is that in fact none of archaeo-logical sources, neither taken separately nor in combination with others, can witness to existence of the unified state in the Early Dynastic Egypt.

‘ARCHAIC’ ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE:PRO OR CONTRA UNIFICATION?

Origins of pharaonic Egypt are usually associated with a ‘Thinite Kingdom’ in the Upper Land, a polity named after This, the native ‘town’ of most an-cient pharaohs (Emery 1939: 81). It has been insisted for a long time that, in the late Fourth Millennium B.C., a ‘Thinite Kingdom’ had risen abruptly above the rest of Egyptian ‘chiefdoms’ and subjugated them within the bor-ders of a centralized state.

The rise of This is pictured eloquently by a number of artifacts. Among them, the most famous one is the palette of ‘Narmer’ (Quibell 1898b: Taf. XII–XIII; 1900: pl. XXIX), one of the earliest dynasts, representing him lifting a mace against a kneeled foe and considered to be a monument to his triumph over the Delta just conquered by the Upper Land. As an argument for unification of the whole of Egypt by ‘Narmer’ the fact is adduced, that on his palette ‘Narmer’ is depicted both in the white crown of Upper Egypt (recto) and in the red crown of Lower Egypt (verso) (e.g., Gardiner 1966: 403–404).

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Doubtless, ‘Narmer’ could have fought the Delta polity successfully and boasted about his achievements by putting on the red crown. I would not hasten, however, basing myself just upon evidence of this kind, to draw the fundamental conclusion of state unification at the very outset of the Dynas-tic era in Egypt. As far as we know, Horus Khasekhem, king of the late Second Dynasty, fought the Delta polity in his turn, having smitten tens of thousands (!) of its natives (Quibell 1900: pl. XXXIX–XLI). Hence, there had been most likely no final unification of the Upper and Lower Lands ei-ther under ‘Narmer’ or under other dynasts preceding Khasekhem, and nei-ther red nor double (white-and-red) crown on their heads proves the oppo-site viewpoint.

In comparison, though on some artifacts ‘Narmer’ is pictured as catfish (nr) lifting a stick against captives-nw (Libyans) (Quibell 1900: pl. XV, 7; Kaplony 1963: Taf. 5, Abb. 5; Dreyer et al. 1998: Abb. 29; Taf. 5, c), scholars avoid deducing from this that he had ever conquered Libya and an-nexed it to Egypt; they prefer the idea that nothing but a victorious raid of ‘Narmer’ upon his ‘western neighbors’ had taken place (Perepelkin 2000: 71).

Likewise, not quite reliable argument in favor of Thinite absolutism in ‘archaic’ Egypt is the carrying out of distant military expeditions, led by kings throughout the country and abroad (Emery 1961: 59–60). It is well known that pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty had marched nearly through the length and breadth of Syria–Palestine (e. g., Urk. IV: 663–731), but at the same time it is obvious that they had never been actual con-querors of this region (cf. Steindorff and Seele 1957; Stuchevskij 1967; Proussakov 2004).

Even more disputable are assumptions that Egypt could have been under one ruler's power already in protodynastic time. For instance, ‘Scorpion’ of the so-called ‘Dynasty 0’ was declared by some Egyptologists, on the grounds of a few separate artifacts found scattered between Hierakonpolis and Tura, to be the possessor of at least the Valley (Postovskaja 1952). Meanwhile, details of these finds are as follows: ‘Scorpion’'s macehead from Hierakonpolis, for instance, was discovered more than a century ago under obscure circumstances in an unordered group of votive objects, and a potsherd from Tura with a graffito pertaining to ‘Scorpion’'s reign was un-earthed in a robbed burial. Such evidence is hardly enough to prove the hegemony of the earliest ‘kings’ over Egypt. Would someone insist, on the ground of an artifact with the name of Amenhetep III found in Mycenae (Pendlebury 1950: 241), that Eighteenth Dynasty pharaohs possessed the Peloponnesus?!

Lack of convincing evidence of political unification of the Early Dynas-

Proussakov / Early Dynastic Egypt… 141

The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analoguestic Egypt, nevertheless, does not prevent us from being sure that Thinite rulers, obtaining typical insignia of later pharaohs, bearing partial pharaonic titulary, included by Manetho in the general pharaohs' list, etc., enjoyed some prominent social status in comparison with that of a ‘chief’. In case of ‘Thinite Kingdom’ we are probably dealing with a sort of advanced polity, with the level of self-organization exceeding that of the rest of ‘archaic’ ‘ranked communities’ (‘chiefdoms’) in Egypt. In other words, in the course of political evolution in the prehistoric Nile valley, an abnormal fluctuation had probably happened, provoked by some unaccounted phenomenon and still ignored by theories of Egyptian state formation. If so, the process of unification in ‘archaic’ Egypt, instead of progressing gradually in time and space, might have been divided into two stages: first, amidst ‘chiefdoms’ of the Valley, a higher organized community had ‘suddenly’ arisen; next, through long interaction (both armed and peaceful) between this commu-nity and more or less autonomous ‘chiefdoms’, a unified state of the Two Lands was formed.

NATURAL FACTORS

To evolve this hypothesis, paleoenvironmental data should be taken into ac-count (Proussakov 1999b). In my historical reconstructions, I base myself on the latest model of the Holocene climate, worked out in the Global En-ergy Problems Laboratory, Moscow Institute of Energy, Russia (Klimenko 1997; Klimenko and Proussakov 1999; Proussakov 1999a; Proussakov 2002). According to this model, global cooling after Atlantic optimum cul-minated ca. 3190 B.C. in a climatic anomaly with the lowest temperature in the Northern Hemisphere during last 9000 years (1ºC lower than today). As a result, climate of Egypt became much drier and, due to decrease of evapo-ration, perhaps even somewhat hotter than at present (Klimenko, personal communication). Thus, at the dawn of Dynastic age the Nile valley, shelter-ing refugees from desertified savannahs and wadis (cf. Midant-Reynes 2000: 232), might have itself suffered from a series of droughts and crop failures, probably echoed in a legend of great famine under Horus Djet, king of the early First Dynasty (Emery 1961: 73).

Ca. 3000 B.C., Northeast Africa enjoyed an increased rainfall, the sub-pluvial having terminated in 2900 to 2800 B.C. (Klimenko, personal com-munication). The next peak of desiccation in Egypt possibly fell on the late Third Dynasty, while in the reign of Sneferu, the founder of the Fourth Dy-nasty, abundant rainfall recommenced at least in Lower Egypt (Proussakov 1999b: 104–114).

So Egyptian state emerged under rather severe climatic conditions, and

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the Early Dynastic period as a whole evidenced considerable variations of climate in the Nile valley.

Late Fourth Millennium B.C. is marked by another global environmen-tal event, namely, culmination of the Ocean post-Würm transgression (Kaplin 1973; Pirazzoli 1996)2. Given stabilization of the Delta modern shoreline by the Sixth Millennium B.C., when both rising level of the Mediterranean and isostatically balanced plain of the Delta are estimated to have been about 10–12 m lower than today (Stanley 1988; Stanley and Warne 1993a, 1993b), it seems likely that at the peak of transgression, irre-spective of the sea-level stand (higher or not) relative to its present position (e. g., Fairbridge 1961; Pirazzoli 1987), vast areas of the Delta had been submerged. Mythological tradition believed Osiris, the first king of Egypt, to have ascended the throne after the Flood that covered the Earth (Naville 1904). Manetho wrote about the Flood that preceded the Dynastic rule in Egypt (Palmer 1861: 93). In accordance with Egyptian chronicle and eu-static nature of the Ocean post-glacial transgression, Sumerian ‘King List’ of the Third Dynasty of Ur (Jacobsen 1939) informs us that enthronement of real, non-legendary Mesopotamian kings (the First Dynasty of Kish, con-temporary with the Third Dynasty of pharaohs), had taken place after the Flood as well (Djakonov 1997a: 49).

The Mediterranean transgression alone might have changed drastically geo- and sociopolitical situation in protodynastic Egypt. Ecological degra-dation of inundated lands of the Delta was pregnant with their economic and cultural decline and, finally, with the earliest state emerging in the Val-ley.

The Valley landscape, in its turn, is argued to have undergone a modifi-cation in the late Fourth Millennium B.C., following the so-called ‘Ne-olithic drop’ of the Nile (Heinzelin 1968: fig. 5). This phenomenon, being part of high-amplitude post-glacial ups and downs of the Nile floodplain, is not fully understood (Butzer and Hansen 1968: 330–331), but its terminal phase is possibly registered in an authentic historical document (Proussakov 1996). Nilometer records on the Palermo Stone (Schäfer 1902; Daressy 1916; Helck 1982) reveal a considerable decrease of the Nile floods under the late First to the early Second Dynasty (Bell 1970), with one abnormally high inundation in the reign of Horus Den, king of the First Dynasty (Schäfer 1902: Taf. I, 3, num. 3). This ‘superflood’ of 8 ‘cubits’ and 3 ‘fin-gers’ has been even called a kind of ‘world-ordering’ magic fiction, offi-cially timed to the Sed-festival – ‘rejuvenation’ (e. g., Mat'e 1956) of Den (Helck 1966). In the light of the estimated ‘Neolithic drop’, however, this flood is more likely not to be fictitious but a real event, an echo of prehis-


The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analoguestoric Niles (Proussakov 1999b: 85–89). After floods of such a scope had ended, the Valley must have become much more suitable for colonization and agricultural development.

The natural factors in question, in view of their utmost significance in molding the environment of Egyptian protocivilization, should be con-nected directly with archaeological evidence concerning the Early Dynastic ‘unification’ in Egypt.

A SOCIO-ENVIRONMENTAL RE-INTERPRETATION:(HORUS) ‘NARMER’ AND HIS ‘CAPTIVES’

On the votive macehead of ‘Narmer’ (Quibell 1900: pl. XXVI B), a hiero-glyphic numerical inscription is carved, usually interpreted as calculation of people and cattle captured by this ruler in Lower Egypt. The figures are enormous: 120 thousand men3 and almost two million (?!) heads of large and small livestock. Never afterwards had pharaohs boasted of taking such great loot: with the exception of Amenhetep II (the Eighteenth Dynasty) who informs us he had once brought to Egypt about 90 thousand Asians, the highest numbers of their foreign captives varied within the limits of sev-eral hundred to several thousand people (Berlev 1989). Given these data, figures on the macehead of ‘Narmer’, the ruler of a rudimentary ‘kingdom’ without developed military organization, look at least strange.

The Early Dynastic kings had obviously fought much and cruelly. Their aggressive temper is probably mirrored in Thinite ‘throne’ names, such as: ‘Scorpion’, ‘Catfish’4, ‘Fighter’, ‘Grasper’ (?), ‘Snake’, etc. ‘Shining-with-a-sceptre’ Khasekhem of the Second Dynasty alone had slain about 50 thousand inhabitants of the Lower Land (Quibell 1900: pl. XXXIX–XLI). ‘Narmer’'s ‘feat’, however, is a far more curious event, worthy of special attention.

The idea of armed seizure and holding captive of more than hundred thousand people at the very onset of Dynastic age in Egypt seem quite in-credible. It is hard to believe that any of ‘chiefdoms’ of the Nile valley, in-cluding the newly advanced ‘Thinite Kingdom’, possessed enough man-power and material resources to do this. Some scholars distrusted ‘Narmer's trophy account completely, considering it to be an exaggeration: either some symbol or just an empty boast (Meyer 1913: § 208; Avdiev 1948: 29; Baumgartel 1960: 115; Millet 1990). Others, trusting it basically, talked of a mass migration, without explaining reasons for such an outstanding de-mographic phenomenon, however (Breasted 1915: 49; Perepelkin 2000: 92). It has also been supposed that figures on ‘Narmer’'s macehead repre-sent the results of a population census (Petrie 1939: 78) or total calculation

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of people ever captured by ‘Narmer’ in warfare, timed to his Sed (Berlev 1989: 89).

In addition to this, let us try to explain the phenomenon of ‘Narmer’'s ‘captives’, bearing in mind the hypothesis of excessive flooding and swamping of the Delta at the peak of the Mediterranean transgression in the late Fourth Millennium B.C. (Proussakov 1999b: 67–77; 2001d: 28–32). A decrease in the area of dry, livable land of Lower Egypt might have driven its natives up to the Valley. In the reign of ‘Narmer’, i.e., when transgres-sion in the Delta had presumably reached its apogee, migration turned into a mass flight. Besides, the idea of an exodus of the populace from ecologi-cally degraded regions of the ‘archaic’ Delta correlates perfectly with ar-chaeological evidence of a ‘sudden invasion’ of Egyptians into southern Canaan about that very time (Yeivin 1960; Oren 1973; Gophna 1976; Gophna and Gazit 1985). I would assume the people, calculated by ‘Narmer’, to have been in fact not prisoners of war but refugees from the inundated parts of Lower Egypt to the Valley territories under control of This (livestock is likely to have belonged to them, on average 15 heads per person). In this case, figures on ‘Narmer’'s macehead would look quite real-istic.

These figures, however, are accompanied by ideogram (Gardiner 1976: A13) used instead of the complete writing of the idiom sr-n – the ‘killed-living’, or ‘captive’ (Faulkner 1991: 250; Wb. IV: 307, 12). Accord-ing to Berlev's interpretation, based on later Egyptian written sources (e.g., those of the Middle Kingdom), the ‘killed-living’ was the name of a seized but, for some reason, not slaughtered foe, who nevertheless was regarded by Egyptians to have been killed magically at the very moment of devising evil against Egypt (Berlev 1989: 87–89). On the other hand, it seems not quite obvious that direct analogies may always be made between concepts and terms of ‘archaic’ times and those, for instance, of the Middle King-dom, separated from the Early Dynastic protostate by more than a millen-nium. In other words, it is not necessary to consider ‘archaic’ sr(w)-n(w) to have been foreigners, ‘naturalized’ exactly by means of an armed raid. In the case of ‘Narmer’'s ‘captives’, this term probably just pointed to their subordinate position in a ‘chiefdom’ they were constrained to join under different circumstances, as I guess, being forced to abandon their native country by catastrophic environmental change. Finally, nothing prevented ‘Narmer’ and his administration from calling assimilated immigrants the ‘killed-living’ – ‘captives’ for reason of pure prestige.

Subjugation of such a multitude of people could not fail to result in un-precedented growth of personal authority of Thinite rulers and to raise the


The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analoguesmilitary-economic potential of the ‘Thinite Kingdom’. For instance, the ‘captives’ might have been recruited to build Memphis, the future capital of Egypt, under ‘Narmer’'s successor Horus Aha. Here the large-scale prepara-tory works alone demanded numerous working hands: according to Herodotus, the foundation of Memphis was preceded by the Nile's course diverted (cf. Jeffreys and Tavares 1994), a large territory drained, and a lake dug [II, 99]. Archaeological excavations reveal the Memphis region to be rather densely populated at the earliest Dynastic times (Saad 1969). Hence, this is possibly just an area to which the bulk of the refugees from Lower Egypt had been forced to move. Moreover, Memphis' foundation it-self was perhaps the direct consequence of local concentration of a migrat-ing populace along the Valley's northernmost stretch adjacent to the Delta's apex: people had to be given shelter and provided with some labor.

Having increased substantially the strength of their subjects, Thinite dy-nasts obtained a fair chance to suppress rival chiefs of Egypt and become leaders in the fight for hegemony over the country, up to its final political unification under the power of the dynastic clan. 120 thousand of the in-comers with their enormous livestock, if true, must have ‘suddenly’ turned ‘Narmer’'s ‘chiefdom’ into the greatest and richest community in the Nile valley. In other words, in view of the correlation between population growth and complexity of social organization (e. g., Carneiro 1967, 1970, 1972; Dumond 1972; Korotayev 1997), the necessity to assimilate lots of migrants from ecologically degraded lowlands of the Delta had probably made the ‘Thinite Kingdom’ ‘fluctuate’ into the embryo state in Egypt.

THIS–MEMPHIS:ENCLAVE PROTOSTATE AND MECHANISM OF ITS GENESIS

So taking into account paleoenvironmental data, I advance a hypothesis that the Early Dynastic state in Egypt never embraced the whole country, but emerged locally under the falcon ‘totem’ (Horus of the pharaohs), and acted towering above the rest of Egyptian ‘chiefdoms’ with their lower levels of self-organization.

The foundation of Memphis by Horus Aha had hardly shaken the ‘capi-tal’ status of This, the hearth of dynastic power. Monumental tomb super-structures (mastabas) of ‘archaic’ kings, queens and higher officials have been discovered both at Saqqara near Memphis and at Abydos (Umm el-Qaab) near This. Irrespective of whether cenotaphs (Emery 1949, 1954, 1958; Lauer 1957) or true tombs (Perepelkin 1956; Kemp 1966, 1967; Kaiser 1981; Dreyer 1991) the Early Dynastic funeral monuments at Aby-dos are, all of them together with those at Saqqara suggest that This and

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Memphis to have been centers for worshipping the deceased rulers, i.e., ma-jor sites of crystallization of the earliest state in Egypt (cf. Postovskaja 1959).

But how did Thinite dynasts manage to found Memphis and control its populous5 surroundings, not being sovereigns of the whole of Egypt? In-deed, This of the Upper Land and Memphis of the Lower Land were sepa-rated by hundreds kilometers of the Valley. How could territorial posses-sions of the same state have been so distant from each other and have inter-spersed among them independent, autonomous communities?

The answer to these questions lies in the organization of large landed property in Egypt of the ‘Pyramid Age’. It is known that, territorially, es-tates of the Old Kingdom pharaohs, nomarchs and nobles were not continu-ous but scattered throughout the country (Savel'eva 1962: 55; Perepelkin 1988: 184). In view of this phenomenon, the idea of a limitation of ‘ar-chaic’ Egyptian state within just a few enclaves of the Valley and the Delta does not seem unthinkable at all. Moreover, taking into account the closest historico-evolutionary kinship of the Early Dynastic and the Old Kingdom epochs (Proussakov 2001d; cf. Janssen 1978), geographical discontinuity and dispersion of large pharaohs' and ‘private’ (prw dt) estates of the latter may be interpreted as nothing but a copy of territorial structure of ‘archaic’ Egypt.

In addition to present views on the Early Dynastic Egypt (e.g., Kemp 1995; Spencer 1996; Perepelkin 2000; Wilkinson 2001), I postulate: territo-rially, the Egyptian ‘archaic’ state was not integrated but was characterized by discrete enclaves, arranged in mosaics of self-dependent ‘chiefdoms’. This protostate had two ‘capital’ hearths: the Thinite ‘nome’, the ancestral land of pharaohs, and the Memphite ‘nome’, populous and strategically sit-uated, thus giving the early kings evident advantages in the fight for the unification of the Two Lands.

Besides This and Memphis, the Early Dynastic protostate is likely to have included (possessed or controlled) some more territorial units. First, these are Hierakonpolis, the most ancient center of the Horus cult in Upper Egypt (Newberry 1904), and neighboring Elkab across the river (Quibell 1898a), devoted to the vulture-goddess Nekhbet whose name, along with that of Horus, appears in the titles of the Early Dynastic kings (Legge 1908; Müller 1938). Next, there is probably Koptos (Petrie 1896), the ‘domain’ of ithyphallic god Min honoured by Thinite kings from time to time with the ceremony of ‘birth’ (raising of statue?) (Schäfer 1902: Taf. I, 2, № 9; 5, № 10); besides, not far from Koptos, at Naqada, a tomb of the ‘archaic’ queen Neithhotep has been discovered (Morgan 1897; Borchardt 1898). In


The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analoguesthe Delta, this is doubtless Buto (Pe), the ‘residence’ of the cobra-goddess Wadjet who, paired with Nekhbet of Upper Egypt, personified one of the pharaoh's sacred titles. Sais of the Lower Land should be also mentioned, the native ‘town’ of some of the Early Dynastic queens named after the Saite goddess Neith; the latter was probably honored by Thinite kings themselves: for instance, Horus Aha is believed to have built (Emery 1961: 51) or visited (Wilkinson 2001: 320) a shrine of Neith at Sais (Petrie 1901b: pl. III A, 5; X, 2).

In the light of my hypothesis, archaeological data on regular communi-cations between This, Memphis and ‘filial’ settlements of the ‘Thinite Kingdom’ may be understood as follows: neither the inevitable hostile ac-tions of ‘aliens’ nor the long dividing spaces (in particular, Middle Egypt in the course of Bahr Yusef) had been insuperable obstacles to the efficient functioning of the enclave protostate. But what was the mechanism of its formation and development? The ‘driving gear’ of this mechanism is quite obvious. Predynastic Gerzean (Naqada II) pottery is abundantly covered with drawings of large, many-oared boats (Petrie and Quibell 1896: pl. XXXIV, 40–47; LXVI, 2–10; LXVII, 11–14; Petrie 1901a: pl. XVI, 40–42; XX, 1–12; Petrie 1939: pl. XXXV, XXXVI). Judging from the draw-ings, these were not papyrus flat-boats for fishing or hunting in shallow thickets, but most likely cargo vessels with deck superstructures, possibly with wooden equipment and, doubtless, taking aboard numerous oarsmen (and passengers?) (Petrie 1914: fig. 29)6. The beloved decorative theme of Gerzean potters reveals large boat to have played a significant part in every-day life of Egyptians long before emergence of state in the Nile valley, be-ing perhaps connected particularly with military and ritual activities of tribal elites (Quibell and Green 1902: pl. LXXV–LXXVIII; Case and Payne 1962: pl. I a, b).

The main point is that such vessels allowed their crews selective colo-nization of the Nile banks, sailing safely to occupied territories. In this re-spect, boat crews avoiding destructive overland battles seem to be far more potent colonizing detachments in comparison with gangs of men on foot. In contrast to settled land, the Nile belonged to no one, since no chief is likely to have controlled enough manpower and material resources to block and paralyze transport communications along ‘his’ segment of the river-bed. It is just the possibility of unlimited boat transit through ‘territorial waters’ of independent ‘chiefdoms’, providing exchange of people, goods and infor-mation, that I suggest to have been a foundation of sociopolitical and eco-nomic integrity of the ‘Thinite Kingdom’ notwithstanding the distances be-tween its enclaves. In other words, the conception of regular boat communi-

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cations by the Nile possibly reveals the basic mechanism of state formation in Egypt, alternative to those of ‘population pressure on land’, ‘chain reac-tion of intestine wars’, etc.

The role of large many-oared boat in the establishing of pharaonic civi-lization looks even more notable in view of natural environments of proto-dynastic Egypt. The Nile is estimated to have been much higher in prehis-toric times than after the so-called ‘Neolithic drop’ (see above). This esti-mation correlates with archaeological evidence of the comparatively sparse population of prehistoric Upper Egypt (cf. Pérez Largasha 1995), probably caused by heavy Nile floods, swamping and destroying cultural hearths in the Nile floodplain and thus making it uncomfortable for settled life (cf. Vinogradov 1997). Destructive Niles are likely to be among fundamental preconditions of not continuous but dispersed occupation of the Valley by prehistoric peoples. Primary boat ‘havens’ on the Nile (‘archaic’ centers of floodplain colonization?) are depicted, for instance, on the seals of the Sec-ond Dynasty king Set Peribsen, in the form of oval enclosures with three boats inside (Kaplony 1963: Taf. 76, Abb. 283, 285; Taf. 77, Abb. 286; Petrie 1901b: pl. XXII, 178–180) – a kind of royal estate named ‘the ships of the king’ (Griffith 1901).

Let us remember in this connection the details of Memphis' foundation expounded to Herodotus by Egyptian priests (II, 99). We are used to the idea that the civilizational development of Egypt started with the irrigation of the Nile valley. Meanwhile, it had been explained clearly already to Herodotus that building of Memphis was preceded by hard drainage ef-forts, and only next was an irrigation project realized by digging a lake and filling it with the Nile water. In other words, the main problem of ‘archaic’ settlement in Egypt was actually not irrigation of lands but, on the con-trary, their large-scale drainage. We may add to it an observation that ‘Scorpion’'s macehead, depicting this king hoeing the bank of a channel (Quibell 1900: pl. XXVI C), is ‘an exception amongst early royal iconogra-phy which generally makes no reference to irrigation works’ (Wilkinson 2001: 46).

Taking all this into account, large many-oared boats may be considered to be not simply the most important transportation and communication fa-cilities in the ancient Nile valley, but the main means of colonization of Egypt. My idea is that the Gerzean and, to some extent, ‘archaic’ settlement of the Egyptian floodplain was practiced not so much overland by groups on foot as from the River by crews of large boats, built probably owing to the vital necessity to transport numerous warriors, hunters and workers.


The Early State, Its Alternatives and AnaloguesThis deduction seems to be documented. Three boats are carved on a

wooden label of king Horus Aha from Abydos, in the second line from the bottom (Petrie 1901b: pl. III A, 5; X, 2). The first boat is sailing between two settlements (fortresses?) encircled by walls, while two others are mov-ing in tandem, each crowned with similar pictures of a hoe side by side with an oblong horizontal sign. The meaning of the latter, because of the primi-tiveness of ‘archaic’ writing, may only be guessed. At the same time, the combination with the hoe-like sign in mature hieroglyphic writing forms only the sign (‘pool’) (Gardiner 1976: N37; Wb. IV: 397). In this combina-tion (‘pick excavating a pool’) (Gardiner 1976: U17, 18; Wb. V: 188), hiero-glyphs under consideration designate the so-called ‘established settlement’ – grgt (Perepelkin 1988: 134–135). It is noteworthy that in the Old King-dom this was the special term for settlements emerging from artificially drained lands (Savel'eva 1962: 42–43; 1967).

This wooden label has a duplicate reproducing the scene with three boats, except for a single distinction. In this case, the outline of an oblong sign paired with a hoe above one of the boats in tandem is beyond any doubt: this is a regular rectangle, of strong resemblance to the ‘pool’ hiero-glyph (Petrie 1901b: pl. III A, 6; XI, 2)7. So pictures on both labels are likely to encode information about the foundation of settlements in the flooded Nile valley by boat crews. Moreover, it may be supposed that the two ‘fortresses’ the first boat is sailing between are those very settlements on the completion of their establishing.

Besides, the top line of these labels is believed to represent the founda-tion of the sanctuary of Neith in Sais by Horus Aha (Emery 1961: 51). Above the sanctuary (i.e., side by side with it) boats are pictured, probably those used by the king and his suite to get to their destination. In general, nothing prevents us from interpreting these sources as evidence for the paramount importance of boats as means of ‘archaic’ colonization of Egypt and communications between enclaves of the Egyptian protostate.

‘HORUS IN A BOAT’: A RELIGIOUS-IDEOLOGICAL FACTOROF EARLY DYNASTIC STATE FORMATION

In addition to ‘archaic’ sources, boats appear in great number in the annals of the Palermo Stone, where they are connected mainly with biennial cere-monial trips of the Early Dynastic kings-Horuses and their ‘followers’ (msw r) through the country (e.g., Beckerath 1956; Kaiser 1959, 1960). These trips had both administrative and ritual reasons, the latter lying, briefly, in the general belief that the godlike ruler, traveling within his pos-sessions and marking their limits by his presence, thus established the world

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order (e. g., Ardzinba 1982; Veinberg 1986; cf. Assman 1984, 1989, 1990). Representation of these actions on the Stone as ‘followings of Horus in a boat’ probably points to implanting in Egyptians' consciousness of direct association of the divine Pharaoh-‘creator’ with boat sailing on the Nile, embodied in the hieroglyph ‘falcon in boat’ (Berlev 1969; Gardiner 1976: G7*).

Primordially associated with the king-Horus ‘putting Egypt in order’, the Nile large boat of the ‘unification’ epoch is likely to be the prototype of the Egyptian sacred bark by which gods together with deceased pharaohs voyaged through heaven and the netherworld, securing the universal har-mony. This cosmological conception is argued to have underlain the state cult of sun-god Ra in the Old Kingdom (e.g., Korostovtsev 1941; Anthes 1959). On the other hand, at the very outset of the ‘archaic’ period, cen-turies before turning Ra to the supreme deity of Egypt, boats were buried next to mastabas, being thus already considered necessary to the earliest kings in their afterlife. Long before the famous ‘solar bark’ of pharaoh Khufu (Jenkins 1980; Lipke 1984) and the Fifth Dynasty pharaohs' giant mud-brick boats at the ‘solar temples’ (Borchardt, Bissing and Kees 1905–1928; Kaiser 1956), a brick boat-like construction almost 20 m long (either imitation of a boat or sarcophagus for a real vessel) had been erected by the supposed tomb of Horus Aha (Emery 1939: pl. 3, 8)8. Similar constructions have been attributed to other ‘archaic’ rulers, such as queen Merneith (Emery 1954: fig. 203), king Den (Emery 1949: pl. 19, A), and others (cf. O'Connor 1995)9. Moreover, ceremonial (?) wooden boats of the Early Dy-nastic time were unearthed far from Thinite kings' and officials' necrop-olises, for instance, in cemeteries of Helwan (Wilkinson 1996).

Such an aspect of the boat sacralization as its decisive role in resistance to the ‘universal entropy’ probably correlates with the fact that, for prehis-toric and ‘archaic’ Egyptians, the boat was the most reliable, if not the only, instrument of large-scale colonization of the Nile valley, allowing people to surmount its natural ‘chaos’, settle throughout Egypt and maintain regular communications between settlements scattered all over the country.

In view of the obvious impossibility of anyone's exercising total armed control over Egypt by means of ‘archaic’ technics and weapons (Gorelik 1993), deification of kings as guarantors of the universal order seems to have been the religious-ideological factor used in the attempted national consolidation of most ancient Egyptians, partly compensating for territorial discontinuity and military-administrative immaturity of the Early Dynastic protostate. It is hardly coincidental that activities of kings of the First and Second Dynasties are represented on the Palermo Stone mainly as carrying


The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analoguesout a series of rituals, such as ‘followings of Horus’, Sed-festivals, founda-tions of sanctuaries, ‘births’ of gods, etc. This fact reveals an increased at-tention already of the earliest Thinite administration to ‘propaganda’ of su-pernatural qualities of Egyptian dynasts.

A SOCIO-ENVIRONMENTAL RE-INTERPRETATION:HORUS DEN THE ‘GREAT’ AND HIS SED

According to authentic official sources, one of the greatest ‘archaic’ kings was Horus Den of the First Dynasty (e.g., Godron 1990). On his monu-ments, he entitles himself the ruler of the Two Lands (Schäfer 1902: Taf. I, 3, № 3), wears the ‘sovereign’ double (white-and-red) crown (Petrie 1900: pl. XV, 16) and uraeus (Spencer 1980: pl. 53, cat. 460), strikes the East (ibid.), smites wntjw (tribesmen of Arabian desert and Sinai?) (Schäfer 1902: Taf. I, 3, № 2), crushes a place named wr k (Schäfer 1902: Taf. I, 3, № 10), destroys fortresses (Petrie 1900: pl. XV, 16–17), harpoons hip-popotami (Kaplony 1963: Taf. 93, Abb. 364; Schäfer 1902: Taf. I, 3, № 8).

This account of a ‘perfect’, powerful reign is supplemented, dissonantly at first glance, by the Palermo Stone record of the disastrous Nile in the year of Den's Sed-‘jubilee’10. This anomalously high flood (8 ‘cubits’ and 3 ‘fingers’) resulted in ‘inundation (mt) of all the commoners of the West, North and East’ (Schäfer 1902: Taf. I, 3, № 3, 4)11. Such a catastrophe looks quite contradictory to the Sed ideology, including pharaoh's magic re-juvenation and physical reinforcement. In other words, this deluge would be able to annihilate the ‘world-ordering’ achievements of Horus Den as the king of the unified Egypt.

It is highly remarkable, however, that in the record of Den's ‘super-flood’, Egypt appears to be inundated not completely. Indeed, the South is missing here. At the same time, this part of the world is depicted separately on a label of Den from Abydos with another scene of Sed12, where the swt-plant symbolizing the South (the Upper Land) is inscribed in a rectangle of a ‘temple’ or ‘estate’ wt (Petrie 1900: pl. XI, 14; XV, 16). This inscription may be read as ‘estate (of the king?) of the Upper Land’ and interpreted as an ‘ordered’ complex of Upper Egyptian domains under actual control of Horus Den, opposed to the rest of Egypt thrown into ‘chaos’ by the deluge, including the Delta (‘North’). If so, a report about the disastrous flood in Den's ‘rejuvenation’ year, not tabooed but inserted in official annals, looks like a kind of victoriously-magic declaration of the king. Celebrating his ‘jubilee’, the ‘divinely reinforced’ Horus Den inundates territories and sinks ‘commoners’ beyond the bounds of his kingdom, in the ‘reversed’, hostile world. Thus Den demonstrates his supernatural power over populations of

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the ‘wrong’ regions of Egypt and creates ‘order from chaos’, clearing these regions of their resident evil.

It is noteworthy that sinking ‘commoners of the West, North and East’ are depicted on the Palermo Stone in the form of the bird rjt (lapwing). On the macehead of ‘Scorpion’ (Quibell 1900: pl. XXVI C), these very birds, hung by their necks on the standards of the ‘nomes’, symbolize the defeated enemies of the king.

So Egyptian sources themselves seem to present arguments for the alienation of a great part of Egypt from the ‘Thinite Kingdom’ and, accord-ingly, argue against the idea of unification of the whole country as early as under the ‘archaic’ dynasties. At the same time, Den's resolution to oppose, plainly and menacingly, the dynastic possessions to those of independent ‘chiefdoms’ of Egypt, may be perceived as one more sign of the outstand-ing position of Horus Den among the ‘Founding Fathers’ of pharaonic civi-lization.

In addition to this, no ‘following of Horus’ in the reign of Horus Den is recorded on the Palermo Stone (Schäfer 1902: Taf. I, 3). Rejection (?) of the ceremony which, per se, is a distinctive feature of immaturity of the ‘ar-chaic’ Egyptian state (cf. Helck 1975: 22, 34), suggests ‘Den's kingdom’ to have enjoyed relatively effective administration saving the king from the necessity of regular ‘divine appearances’ in his Lands. Indeed, Den's reign is estimated to have generated a lot of new administrative offices, inter-preted as evidence of qualitative progress of the state under this king (Pos-tovskaja 1947). This advanced administration may have been supervised by the prominent official Hemaka (Emery 1938), whose name in ‘archaic’ doc-uments is written side by side with serekh (the Horus name) of Den (Petrie 1900: pl. XI, 14; XV, 16).

The estimated ‘administrative boom’ under Den was obviously accom-panied with (and partly initiated by?) rapid expansion of storage facilities of the ‘Thinite Kingdom’: Den's reign, as none before, is represented by nu-merous seals of overseers of granaries, wine-cellars and other storehouses for royal provisions (Petrie 1900: pl. XXI–XXIII). Development of the gov-ernment-owned storage facilities, first of all granaries, must have increased the immunity of Egyptian protostate against destructive impacts, such as wars and natural disasters (droughts, inundations, etc.).

On the other hand, all this apparent progress in self-organization of the Egyptian society of the mid-First Dynasty had by no means favored the fur-ther quick evolution of the ‘Thinite Kingdom’ from a number of geographi-cally dispersed enclaves to a state, unifying the whole country. Among likely symptoms of political decline of the First Dynasty after Den is recov-


The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analoguesery, at least under Horus Semerkhet, of the previous importance of the ‘fol-lowings of Horus’ as the principal events of the year (Petrie 1900: pl. XII, 1–2; XVII, 26, 29).

ENCLAVE STRUCTURE OF THE EARLY DYNASTICPROTOSTATE AS A HINDRANCE TO ‘UNIFICATION’

Claims of the Thinite kings to dominate Egypt, especially as earthly person-ifications of one of countless deities worshipped in the Nile valley, could not fail to have provoked counteractions of other ‘totems’ to the ambitious activities of the rulers-‘falcons’. It is known that ‘archaic’ Egypt witnessed at least two serious dynastic crises.

The first one is often associated with a kind of national religious-ideo-logical collision, namely, ‘reincarnation’ of some Thinite kings from Ho-ruses into Seths (e.g., Newberry 1922). The earliest ‘revolutionary’ trans-formation of Horus Sekhemib, king of the Second Dynasty, into Seth Perib-sen, however, looks rather like an attempt to overcome the crisis, probably originating in the reign of Horus Adjib. This king of the First Dynasty (the successor of Den) is famous for a pyramid-like step superstructure ‘hidden’ inside mastaba S3038 at Saqqara (Emery 1949: 82–89; pl. 21–26, 32–35). It is noteworthy that this mortuary architectural ‘innovation’ reveals itself directly after the reign of Horus Den, i.e., at the apogee of the First Dynasty power. So the ‘protopyramid’ of Adjib (?) probably mirrors the intention of the dynastic clan, on reaching its temporal political and administrative sta-bilization, to strengthen itself ideologically as well, raising the Thinite rulers' divine status. This intention seems not to have been abandoned under Horus Qaa, the last king of the First Dynasty, whose (?) tomb constructions included an offering-temple inside the same enclosure (Emery 1958: pl. 2, 24–25), as if anticipating the pyramid complexes (and the royal mortuary cult practices?) of the Old Kingdom. Taking all this into account, the politi-cal decline of This–Memphis in the late First to the early Second Dynasties may be associated, in particular, with negative reaction to the reinforced kings-Horuses of ‘followers’ of other gods, first of all Seth of Upper Egypt (Velde 1967).

Another large-scale crisis of the Early Dynastic power, that of the mid-Third Dynasty, had been preceded by far more impressive demonstration of triumph of the King-Horus in comparison with administrative and building experiments of the First Dynasty. This is the Step Pyramid of Horus Net-jerikhet (Djoser), the first colossal tomb superstructure of stone in Egypt (Firth and Quibell 1935; Lauer 1936–1939). Similar to Horus Adjib with his ‘protopyramid’ who followed Den the ‘Great’, Djoser succeeded to the

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mightiest kings of his epoch (Horus Khasekhem, see below).Among probable conditions of dynastic crises under consideration, pre-

venting ‘archaic’ Egypt from political unification, territorial discontinuity of ‘Thinite Kingdom’ may be mentioned, with areas under the rival's con-trol between its enclaves, such as Ombos, half-way from This to Hierakon-polis, famous for the worship of Seth the ‘Ombite’ (Nbwtj) (Kees 1980: 194–199). Traces of Seth are found in Middle Egypt as well, for instance, in the 10th nome downstream from This. It has been argued that the local Seth was paired with Horus, and depiction of these hostile deities as a couple of falcons in one or two boats (but cf. Griffith 1959) symbolized their recon-ciliation (Kees 1924: 12 ff.). According to another, much better grounded point of view, however, there was no any ‘reconciled’ couple of Horus and Seth in the 10th nome of the Valley, and the paired local deity in boats was Seth in his own person (Berlev 1969: 14). At the same time, not far from here, in the 12th nome, a temple of a specific deity ‘Horus in a boat’ existed (Kamal 1902), probably reminding us of particular difficulties of ancient boating (including ‘followings of Horus’) through Middle Egypt; it must be emphasized that this version of Horus was inseparable from its boat (Berlev 1969: 13, 15–18).

In view of this, any discord between ‘archaic’ dynasts and chiefs of au-tonomous territories separating enclaves of the ‘Thinite Kingdom’ is likely to have been pregnant with a real threat to the political and economic in-tegrity of the Early Dynastic protostate. Had not Sekhemib-Peribsen re-placed or supplemented (Garnot 1956) the dynastic falcon ‘totem’ by that of Seth exactly for the purpose of pacifying the ‘followers’ of the latter in their rebellion against Horus as the royal deity? If so, what may have been the price of such a ‘compromise’?

To answer this question, let us pay attention to the fact that ‘followings of Horus in a boat’ on the Palermo Stone (recto) are often interchangeable, among others, with ceremonies of king's ‘appearance’ (t) as the ruler now of the Upper Land (t nswt), now of the Lower Land (t bty), and now of the Two (Upper and Lower) Lands (t nswt-bty). It is remarkable that, in the Stone records, the one-Land ‘appearances’ seem to be geographically connected to corresponding parts of Egypt. For instance, right under in-scription of the ‘uprising’ of the king of the Upper Land a note is made about ‘birth of Min’, the god of Koptos (Schäfer 1902: Taf. I, 2, № 9), most likely pointing exactly to Upper Egypt as the destination of the previous year's ‘following’ of the king. Another time, inscription of the ‘appearance’ of the king of the Lower Land is followed, in the same year compartment, by record of the running of the sacred bull Apis worshipped in Memphis


The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analogues(Schäfer 1902: Taf. I, 3, № 12), where the ritual of ‘appearance’ had proba-bly taken place. In other words, visiting his up-river and down-river do-mains by turns, a Thinite king is likely to have appeared before local popu-lation in a certain ceremonial image, specific to the land, claiming his rights to the visited region.

Moreover, the ‘Two Lands’ in the Early Dynastic period was probably the name not of the unified (Upper and Lower) Egypt, but just of southern and northern groups of enclaves of the ‘Thinite Kingdom’, separated by Middle Egypt. This idea eliminates contradiction between the statement that Thinite kings never ruled the whole of Egypt, and the fact that they offi-cially and unhesitatingly entitled themselves the rulers of both Upper and Lower Lands.

Turning back to the ‘archaic’ dynastic crises, now it is especially inter-esting to recall the lack at Abydos of royal tombs of the early Second Dy-nasty up to the reign of Horus Ninetjer. In addition to this, fifteen-year ex-tract from Ninetjer's annals on the Palermo Stone reveals a significant de-tail. Here, Ninetjer ‘appears’ only once as king of the Upper Land (Schäfer 1902: Taf. I, 4, № 2) and once as king of the Two Lands (Schäfer 1902: Taf. I, 4, № 4), while for the remaining eleven years his ‘followings of Ho-rus’ alternate with his ‘appearances’ only as king of the Lower Land, as if Ninetjer's power was limited mainly to this part of Egypt. It is noteworthy that series of Ninetjer's ‘appearances’ in Lower Egypt becomes stable right after the year, the most likely principal event of which (according to the Stone logic) must have been the ‘appearance’ of king of Upper Egypt, but which is commemorated instead by the destruction of two settlements (Schäfer 1902: Taf. I, 4, № 8). This military action is probably an episode of the Second Dynasty kings' struggle for access to their possessions in the Upper Land.

Proceeding from all this, I argue that political crisis of the late First to the early Second Dynasties in Egypt was aggravated by the break of regular communications between Memphis and This with the severance of Thinite kings from their ‘ancestral domain’ in the Upper Land. It is hardly by acci-dent that the royal ‘archaic’ necropolis at Abydos was ‘revived’ under Ninetjer's successor Sekhemib, who was the first to adopt the ‘throne’ name of Seth. So the price paid by ‘chiefdoms’ of the Valley for such dynastic ‘compromise’ as ‘reincarnation’ of the King-Horus into Seth, one of the greatest divine authorities of Upper Egypt, may have been the non-interfer-ence of Seth worshippers in communications between northern and south-ern enclaves of the ‘Thinite Kingdom’.

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A SOCIO-ENVIRONMENTAL RE-INTERPRETATION:TWO CYCLES OF THE EARLY DYNASTIC ‘UNIFICATION’

In the light of the aforesaid, two cycles of the Early Dynastic state forma-tion in Egypt are visible, each of them including gradual political reinforce-ment and, finally, obstruction of the royal power ‘in response’ to attempts of its ideological substantiation. Stabilization of Horus as the ‘state’ god, however, seems to be in a steady progression from the first to the second cycle, since the assumed political collapse of the Third Dynasty after Horus Netjerikhet (Djoser) is not marked by ‘divine transformations’ of the Thi-nite kings into Seths.

This progress was obviously based in part on the state territorial expan-sion and consolidation, evidenced by small step pyramids of the late Third Dynasty (?) (cf. Wilkinson 2001: 103–104), such as pyramids of Seila in the Fayum depression (Borchardt 1900), Zawiyet al-Meitin in Middle Egypt (Weill 1912), Naqada in the vicinity of Ombos (Petrie and Quibell 1896), al-Kula near Hierakonpolis (Stiénon 1950). The pyramid of Naqada, for in-stance, may be associated with the absorption of the Ombos area by royal enclaves of This and Hierakonpolis, in other words, with the unification of southern Upper Egypt by the latest ‘archaic’ kings (cf. Kemp 1991: fig. 8, 13).

This idea squares with the assumption that under Horus-Seth Khasekhemwy (late Second Dynasty) a kind of centralized agrarian depart-ment appeared in the Koptos nome, the region of Ombos location (Pos-tovskaja 1947). Thereupon, the following coincidence is notable. Serekh of Khasekhemwy has a ‘postscript’ ‘two gods pacified in him’, i.e., the king. These gods (Horus and Seth) are represented as two falcons sitting on stan-dards (Kaplony 1963: Taf. 82, Abb. 309, 310; Petrie 1901b: pl. XXIII, 192), and a quite similar pair of falcons on standards designates the ‘totem’ of Koptos pictured on some seals of Khasekhemwy beside his serekh (Kaplony 1963: Taf. 83, Abb. 313; Petrie 1901b: pl. XXIII, 197). There is an impression that Horus-Seth Khasekhemwy connected his magic ‘pacifi-cation of gods’ with real achievement of the dynastic internal policy, namely, military conquest or peaceful annexation to the ‘Thinite Kingdom’ of such Seth's ‘lair’ as the so-called Theban bend of the Nile. Here we pos-sibly discover one more historical detail of the Early Dynastic state forma-tion in Egypt.

In the context of unification, the pyramid at Zawiyet al-Meitin is of es-pecial interest as well, since it points to the penetration of the power of Ho-rus to Middle Egypt. On the other hand, in the light of the distribution of small pyramids along the Valley, late ‘archaic’ Middle Egypt still looks rel-


The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analoguesatively free from influence of the ‘Thinite Kingdom’ in contrast to the southern Upper Land, what may have been one of the preconditions of de-cline of the Third Dynasty.

The Early Dynastic crises were probably caused not only by socio-polit-ical conditions, but to some extent also by ecological factors. Thus, the ‘failure’ of the late First and the early Second Dynasties correlates in histor-ical scale with termination of the estimated ‘Neolithic drop’ of the Nile. This natural phenomenon, if true, must have entailed a drastic transforma-tion of the living-space of the ‘archaic’ Egyptians. In view of this, the colli-sion ‘Seth contra Horus’ may be guessed to have been in a certain relation-ship with great environmental change, able to awaken in Egypt social forces eager to substitute another ‘totem’, the creator and guarantor of the univer-sal order, for the royal deity. Decline of the Third Dynasty, in its turn, seems to coincide exactly with the dry episode preceding the climatic sub-optimum of the mid-Third Millennium B.C. (Klimenko, Klimanov, and Fy-odorov 1996).

So the evolution of ‘archaic’ Egypt towards unification, with the initial stage at the peak of the post-Würm transgression of the Ocean, takes the form of the socio-environmental rhythms, conflicting with current but quite artificial subdivision of pharaonic history into Dynasties and Kingdoms.

The last thesis seems to be in accord with the views on the pharaohs' succession of ancient Egyptians themselves. For example, (Horus) ‘Narmer’, once numbered by scholars with the so-called ‘Dynasty 0’, now is considered to be the founder of the First Dynasty (e.g., Emery 1961; Wilkinson 2001). This displacement is based on ‘archaic’ seals unearthed at Abydos, representing ‘Narmer’'s serekh among those of the ‘traditional’ First Dynasty. Let us take into account, however, that one of these seals ranks the ‘dynasty’ from ‘Narmer’ to Den, including the ‘king's mother’ Merneith (Dreyer 1987: Abb. 2, 3; Taf. 4, 5; Kaiser 1987: Abb. 1, 2), while another one ranks it from ‘Narmer’ to Qaa, without queen Merneith (Dreyer et al. 1996: Abb. 26; Taf. 14 b, c). This prompts us to think that ‘archaic’ Egyptians never distinguished determinate successions of their rulers, so we moderns hardly need to do this, moving ‘Narmer’ or somebody else from one conventional dynasty to another.

The accepted dividing line between the First and the Second Dynasties (Horus Qaa / Horus Hetepsekhemwy) is artificial and archaeologically unascertainable as well (cf. O'Mara 1979: 201), being lost in the dark of the socio-ecological crisis (Proussakov 1999b: 40–99). Moreover, even such a striking symbol of pharaonic civilization as the Step Pyramid of Djoser, of-ten considered in connection with the onset of the new historical age (the

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Old Kingdom) in Egypt, in this respect looks rather like a false landmark. Since erection of the Step Pyramid was followed by a decline of the ‘Thi-nite Kingdom’ against the background of the desiccation of Northeast Africa, it is more logical to associate this superstructure not with the onset of the next, but with the termination of the previous cycle of politogenesis13. Collapse of the Third Dynasty, so profound that we know neither its later kings nor duration (Wilkinson 2001: 94–105), does not allow us to talk about the fully established unified state in the Early Dynastic Egypt.

We have even less reasons to talk about the beginning, from the Third Dynasty, of the Old Kingdom as an advanced (in comparison with ‘archaic’ time) civilizational stage in Ancient Egypt.

TO THE DISCUSSION: KHASEKHEM (WY) – WHO IS WHO?

Seth Peribsen was not alone in his ‘ideological recreancy’ among the Thinite kings. As it has been mentioned above, another king of the Second Dynasty, Khasekhemwy, entitled himself Seth in addition to his title of Horus. Horus-Seth Khasekhemwy is believed to have been the direct predecessor and father of Horus Netjerikhet (Djoser), the founder of the Third Dynasty and builder of the first colossal pyramid of stone in Egypt.

In other words, Khasekhemwy's reign may be associated with the period of political stabilization of the ‘Thinite Kingdom’ after the decline of the late First to early Second Dynasties. One more argument in favor of reinforcement of the dynastic power in the time of Khasekhemwy is that in ‘his’ line of the Palermo Stone annals king's ‘appearances’ are always those of the king of both the Upper and Lower Lands (Schäfer 1902: Taf. I, 5). It is also notewor-thy that Khasekhemwy's tomb at Abydos was one of the largest among local tombs of the Thinite kings, and contained rich implements including a golden scepter inlayed with cornelian (Petrie 1901b: V). Finally, Khasekhemwy is said to have built in Hierakonpolis a temple, of which a granite door-post re-mained with this king's double (of Horus and Seth) name (Quibell 1900: pl. II).

It is most remarkable, however, that biennial boat trips (‘followings’) of Horus-Seth Khasekhemwy through Egypt are recorded on the Palermo Stone as ‘followings’ of Horus alone, without a mention of Seth (Schäfer 1902: Taf. I, 5, № 1, 3, 5). This interesting detail returns us to the problem of the identification of the latest kings of the Second Dynasty (e.g., Wilkin-son 2001: 91–94). In particular, it may be considered as a confirmation of the thesis (Perepelkin 2000: 82, 116) of probable identity of king Khasekhemwy (‘Shining-with-two-sceptres’) and his supposed predecessor,


The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analogueswho bore a very similar name, Khasekhem (‘Shining-with-a-sceptre’), and titled himself exclusively Horus. According to this point of view, the last king of the Second Dynasty had at first been named Khasekhem, but after subjugation of his internal rivals acquired another scepter and turned into Khasekhemwy. It is generally believed that two scepters in the king's name symbolized the unity of the Two Lands (Upper and Lower Egypt) under his power.

According to the opposite point of view, Khasekhem and Khasekhemwy were different rulers, enthroned one after another in the just-mentioned or-der. King Horus Khasekhem is famous first of all for a crushing defeat of the Delta, with annihilation of about 50 thousand indigenes (Quibell 1900: pl. XXXIX–XLI). Besides, he probably wanted to emphasize that ‘his’ Ho-rus is the ruler of the Upper Land, the ‘ancestral’ possession of Seth (Velde 1967: 61–62). This desire is surmised from the fact that the falcon-Horus on Khasekhem's serekh is pictured in the white crown of Upper Egypt (Quibell 1900: pl. XXXVI–XXXVII), contrary to the ‘archaic’ tradition of repre-senting kings' Horus names without any crowns on the falcon's head. It is not impossible that this white crown of Horus Khasekhem had to demon-strate to Egyptians, regardless of whether or not quite yet it was true, that Horus deprived Seth of the power over the Upper Land.

In view of the suppression of ‘rebellion’ in the Delta and the proclama-tion of victory over the ‘kingdom of Seth’ in the Valley, not Khasekhemwy but Khasekhem may seem to have been actually the direct predecessor of rise of the ‘Thinite Kingdom’ under Djoser. Khasekhemwy left no such pronounced a trace as the subjugator of Egypt, moreover, he made ‘conces-sions’ to Seth, and thus is hardly associated with preparation for the tri -umph of Djoser as the king-Horus. In other words, in the light of available data, is it not more logical to interchange the two kings' names in the suc-cession Khasekhem – Khasekhemwy?

This idea is in contradiction to the current Egyptological concept that, irrespective of the number of kings called ‘shining-with-sceptres’, Khasekhemwy is the last name chronologically. This conclusion is based on the postulate that not one (sm) but rather two sceptres (smwj) could have symbolized the unification of the Upper and Lower Lands. Hence, none other than Khasekhemwy, despite his ‘compromise’ with Seth, must be re-garded as the king who brought Egypt under the power of Horus.

The postulated necessity of having two regalia to symbolize the unity of the Two Lands of Egypt, however, may be prejudiced. Autocracy is repre-sented not worse by one sceptre or some other single sign of the supreme power. Did not ancient Egyptians themselves think like this? For instance,

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the crown of the king of the whole Egypt (smtj) joined the white crown of the Upper Land and the red crown of the Lower Land. Otherwise the unity of Egypt was designated by plants of the Upper and Lower Lands not taken separately but interlacing with one another. Similarly, should not two scep-tres of Khasekhemwy not descend from, but evolve into one sceptre of Khasekhem?

In this case, the sequence of kings – successors of the late First to the early Second Dynasties crisis looks somehow more ‘harmonious’: 1) Sekhemib-Peribsen, who replaced (?) the royal deity Horus with Seth (an attempt to overcome the crisis); 2) an uncertain group of rulers, who left no memory except obscure king-lists of later times (the post-crisis syndrome); 3) Horus-Seth Khasekhemwy, who ‘pacified’ Horus and Seth (overcoming of the crisis); 4) Horus Khasekhem, who removed Seth from the king's title (political stabilization of the ‘Thinite Kingdom’); 5) Djoser, who raised the divine authority of the king-Horus to unprecedented heights (the apogee of dynastic power within this cycle of ‘unification’).

A SOCIO-ANTHROPOLOGICAL VIEW: GIFT-EXCHANGE

For all the military activities of the Thinite kings, from ‘Narmer’ to Khasekhem, the armed force could not have been the only means of resolu-tion of domestic conflicts in the Early Dynastic Egypt. The political, eco-nomic and technological immaturity of ‘archaic’ protostate was redoubled by the necessity for Egyptians to adapt themselves to varying and, besides, rather difficult climatic and landscape conditions. There is thus an a priori ground for an assumption that a military hegemony over Egypt not only of any chief, but of Thinite dynasts as well, could not be altogether true. Hence, a peace treaty must have played a significant part in interrelations of ‘Thinite Kingdom’ and ‘chiefdoms’ of the ‘archaic’ Nile valley.

To ratify such a treaty, ancient rulers might have acted differently, for instance, presenting opponents with material gifts or celebrating rituals pleasant to opponents. The Palermo Stone probably records such phenom-ena, namely, erections of the so-called ‘fortresses of gods’ (Schäfer 1902: Taf. I, 2, № 7; 3, № 6–8?; 5, № 10), the sanctuaries presumably devoted to ‘making alliances’ between Thinite kings and ‘provincial’ deities, i.e., chiefs' and priests' cliques (Savel'eva 1992: 23). These royal gifts look at the same time like ritual and material ones (honoring local ‘totems’ by the dynastic clan and sacred constructions as such). The material part of the gift obviously included regular offerings carried out in the ‘fortresses’, judging


The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analoguesfrom the name of one of these shrines: kbw ntrw (‘Libation of Gods’) (Schäfer 1902: Taf. I, 5, № 10).

On the whole, circulation in ‘primitive’ communities of substantial valu-ables (food, land, goods), as well as of ceremonial items, labor and other services, is embraced by the phenomenon of ‘gift-exchange’ (Moss 1996). Anthropological theory emphasizes its non-economic nature, placing it far from modern ideas of material profit and rational market. The gift-ex-change, obliging those high-borne and wealthy to give, take, and compen-sate, originated in magic outlooks of primeval consciousness. Demonstra-tive wastefulness signified close relations or kinship with spirits and deities – actual possessors of all the earthly and heavenly goods. Hence, it was an important precondition for reaching and keeping a high social status or hier-archic rank.

On the contrary, the rejecting of the gift-exchange (i.e., a ‘declaration’ of inability to give and compensate) was pregnant with loss of personal sa-credness, dethronement and even assassination of a ruler by his own sub-jects. The killing of chiefs grown feeble and deprived of their supernatural talent for providing their tribes with ‘divine gifts’, such as good weather conditions, lots of game, abundant livestock and crops, seems to have been the usual practice in predynastic Egypt. This is corroborated by Sed, the great festival of ‘rejuvenation’ and ‘reinforcement’ of the pharaoh in a cer-tain year of his reign. Ancient ideology of kingship, in particular, consid-ered the king to be the guarantor of productive forces of the country, an-swering for the life and prosperity of his subjects in exchange for their loy-alty. From this point of view, one can envision the pharaoh striking a bar-gain with gods and enjoying patronage of his ‘celestial relatives’ in ex-change for propaganda and material providing for their cult (‘do ut des’) (Posener 1955: 41).

This formula, however, does not explain the gift-exchange phenomenon completely. The gift was considered to be a part of spiritual and physical substance of the donor and had a magic power over the recipient, who be-came a dependent of the ‘benefactor’ from the moment of taking the gift. The gift must have been compensated in proper time to return it to its native ground and not to let it pursue a debtor, doing to him harm, threatening him with devastation and even death. At the same time, it was hastily to reject the gift promising to recipient so much troubles, since this might have been understood as inability to compensate, and deprived a debtor of social rights. The principle of the fusion of a man and his property, underlying such a ‘Weltanschauung’, seems to have functioned in the Old Kingdom Egypt (Proussakov 2001d: 82–112), what may be illustrated with the so-

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cio-‘economic’ category (nj) dt, i.e., the property ‘of flesh’ of its owners (as a rule, high officials) (Perepelkin 1966, 1986, 1988).

The nobility are known for particularly zealous compensation of gifts received from chiefs and, especially, subordinates. Only the equivalent ex-change established social parity with ‘creditors’, while excessive compen-sation secured personal independence from whoever it may be, including rulers themselves.

From the idea of gift-exchange a ‘paradox’ follows, that the more au-thority had been delegated to the ‘Thinite Kingdom’ by ‘chiefdoms’ in the course of ‘unification’ of Egypt, the more respect the kings must have shown to the chiefs' personal and social status, especially being unable to eliminate domestic antagonisms by means of warfare. In theory, the closer to the power over Egypt Thinite kings approached, the higher their duty of the excessive gift rose local ruling cliques ancestral to nome elites.

Relations of this kind are in no way associated with some total bureau-cratic hierarchy implicitly submitting to absolute autocracy. Briefly, gift-ex-change based upon the geographically dispersed (enclave) structure of fam-ily, communal or tribal land possessions and their remnants may have been a serious obstacle to the ‘unification’.

Was the gift-exchange actually inherent to the ancient Egyptian soci-ety14, and are there any reasons to reckon it among fundamental factors of state formation in ancient Egypt?

A SOCIO-ANTHROPOLOGICAL RE-INTERPRETATION:(HORUS) ‘NARMER’ AND HIS ‘CAPTIVES’

Let us return to the Early Dynastic history. Titles of Thinite kings reveal a remarkable detail. While serekhs of Horus Aha and his successors are crowned with figures of falcon, it is far from being the rule with serekhs of Aha's predecessors. For example, serekhs on both sides of the famous ‘Narmer’'s palette, as well as the king's name written separately on verso, are not accompanied by falcon-Horus, although the latter appears on the palette in a symbolic scene of subjugation of the Delta or some of its ‘chief-doms’ (Horus ropes to ‘Narmer’ the Lower Land planted with papyri and an indigene's head) (Quibell 1898b: Taf. XII–XIII; 1900: pl. XXIX).

On ‘Scorpion’'s macehead the king is named without reference to Horus either (Quibell 1900: pl. XXVI C), although significance of this macehead, as well as of ‘Narmer’'s palette, from the viewpoint of deification of kings in ancient Egypt is beyond doubt. Moreover, both ‘Scorpion’ and ‘Narmer’ were obviously associated with Horus, since they used not only ‘truncated’


The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analoguesbut also complete, ‘falconine’ serekhs represented on ‘Narmer’'s macehead from Hierakonpolis, on the above-mentioned seals of the First Dynasty and other monuments (Quibell 1900: pl. XXVI В; Kaiser and Dreyer 1982: Abb. 14.34). The conclusion is that in the case of predecessors of Aha we deal with ‘intermediate’ rulers, not bearing the Horus name constantly but just trying it on in their official titles.

These ‘hesitations’ may seem quite logical, taking into account that ‘ar-chaic’ (Thinite) kings originated from the Upper Land, while Horus is be-lieved to have been the native deity of the Lower Land. In view of this, it is also logical that ‘Narmer’ is represented on recto of his palette in the white crown of the Valley, receiving power over the Delta from the ‘hand’ of none other than falcon-Horus. As for ‘non-falconine’ serekhs on ‘Narmer’'s palette, they probably constitute evidence that, by the events recorded on the palette, king ‘Narmer’ had not become ‘Horus’ yet. In other words, that his clan had been just advancing among tribal elites of Egypt and, hence, manifested immaturity in the ‘ideology of kingship’.

But what finally made the earliest Thinite rulers, in their choice of a dy-nastic deity, give a falcon of the Delta the preference over all the ‘totems’ of their native Upper Land?

Let us remember the ‘fabulous’ 120 thousand ‘captives’ immortalized on the votive macehead of ‘Narmer’. When I classified them as migrants from the Delta territories, damaged by the Mediterranean's transgression into the Valley lands controlled by ‘Narmer’'s ‘chiefdom’ (see above), the question nevertheless remained unanswered: but how did ‘Narmer’ manage, in the absence of state organization and military-technical superiority, to es-tablish his influence upon such a great number of strangers?

The answer is probably ‘read’ on the macehead itself, above ‘Narmer’'s suite, in the form of regular serekh with a falcon. Exactly falcon-Horus, transformed into the dynastic deity and included in the official title of the ruler, may have guaranteed a kind of ‘archaic’ political compromise, namely, voluntary submission of migrants from the Delta to Thinite dy-nasts.

In this connection, ‘Narmer’'s label recently unearthed at Abydos may be also taken into consideration (Dreyer et al. 1998: Abb. 29). Its top compart-ment represents a series of pictograms in the following order, from left to right: a standard with falcon (?) – catfish (i. e. ‘Narmer’) without falcon, lifting a mace against a man crowned with a plant typical for the Delta (obvious rem-iniscence of recto of ‘Narmer’'s palette) – ‘Narmer’'s serekh with falcon. This composition looks like a stepwise record of events as follows: a ‘totem’ from Lower Egypt ‘migrates’ into the title of a chief from Upper Egypt after subju-

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gation by this chief of a tribe from Lower Egypt.So, in case of ‘Narmer’'s ‘captives’, we probably have nothing but a

variant of gift-exchange, when intertribal submission was compensated ‘rit-ually’, by exaltation of the submitted ‘totem’ up to the status of the supreme deity. Morally, such an ‘exchange’ may have satisfied both the ‘winners’, who announced the capture of the whole nation, and the ‘losers’, who kept worshipping their ancestral god even though henceforth incarnated in the Thinite kings.

GIFT-EXCHANGE AS A FACTOR OF POLITOGENESISIN PHARAONIC EGYPT

Socio-political rise of chiefs above tribesmen and foes was often arranged so as to give it not just symbolic but also a quite visual sense. During corre-sponding ceremonies, chiefs ascended ladders or stages wherefrom they distributed their ‘gifts’ to commoners crowded below (Moss 1996: 137). The picture of a festival with participation of ‘captives’ on the macehead of ‘Narmer’ answers this ethnographic model perfectly: the ruler is repre-sented here sitting on a platform with nine steps, which dominates an area where the festival develops. Powerful Horus Den, judging from his famous wooden label (Petrie 1900: pl. XI, 14; XV, 16), watched his Sed celebra-tion(s) from a step pedestal as well.

The conception of a combination of symbolic (magic) and real elements in ‘archaic’ rituals of Sed suggests an association of chiefs' ‘triumphal’ pedestals with pharaohs' skyward tombstones, embodying in pure form the religious-ideological doctrine of absolute supremacy of divine rulers of Egypt. The closest parallel may be drawn between Sed step pedestals of ‘ar-chaic’ kings and the Step Pyramid of Djoser towering above architectural complex with typical Sed symbolics.

Moreover, there was probably a certain connection between the Early Dynastic and the later social activities of national scale in Egypt, including erection of cult objects. This connection is likely to have originated first of all in the naturally seasonal character of public works and ceremonies in the Nile valley. It is known that socio-economic life of ancient Egyptians had been divided into three seasons: t – ‘inundation’ (July–November), time of the Nile flood covering vast areas of the country; prt – ‘emergence’ (of flooded lands or sprouts?), the so-called ‘winter’ (November–March), time of sowing and ripening; and šmw – ‘shallow water’, the so-called ‘summer’ (March–July), time of harvesting and storage works. Taking into account such a cycling of ecological conditions in the Nile valley, it may be argued


The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analoguesthat the ancient Egyptian social organism had a variable morphology. Thus, during ‘inundation’ the living-space and agricultural activities in Egypt re-ceded abruptly, forcing cultivators and other floodplain workmen to look for different occupations and gather on the ‘high ground’ inaccessible to floodwaters.

According to the Palermo Stone, from the coming of the Nile flood, i.e., at the beginning of every year, the dynastic clan was usually plunged into an atmosphere of ritual festivity (Schäfer 1902), kings' ‘followings’ through Egypt and their ‘appearances’ as rulers of the Upper or/and Lower Land be-ing accompanied with calculations of lands, livestock and gold, ‘births’ (erections of statues?) of various local gods and buildings of their shrines. In other words, there are enough allusions to widespread exchange of cere-monial services, with redistribution of considerable material resources, be-tween the ‘Thinite Kingdom’ (pharaohs) and ‘chiefdoms’ (nomes). All this gift-exchange ‘initiated’ by annual floods of four-months duration, with participation of chiefs, nobility, priesthood and commoners of Egypt, in-vites us to connect it directly with the emergence and further functioning of fundamental social institutions of pharaonic civilization.

AFTERWORD:‘BOAT CREW’ AND THE EARLY STATE IN EGYPT

Enclave structure of the ‘archaic’ protostate in the Nile Valley and Delta could not fail to have affected the socio-political and economic relations in pharaonic Egypt of the following epochs. Indeed, it is currently known that most labor in the Old Kingdom household, be it farming, craft or building, enjoyed collective organization, and nothing but the crew of an ‘ideal boat’ (Berlev 1972: 8), with its basic principles of coordination, seems to have been the archetype of working gangs of the Old Kingdom pattern (Pere-pelkin 1988). The archaeological monuments, mainly reliefs and inscrip-tions in nobles' tombs of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, reveal that ‘boat crews’ (jzwt) was the name of working detachments engaged in all the branches of the Old Kingdom economy.

The hypothesis of ‘unification’ advanced in this paper connects the ‘boat crew’ with predynastic and, partly, ‘archaic’ colonization of Egypt which, in view of the Nile floodplain ecology, is argued to have succeeded only owing to large boats with their big teams of warriors and workers. So the boat is likely to have laid a foundation for the military and economic power of communities of the most ancient Egypt. For instance, on the pal-ette of ‘Narmer’ (verso) a boat is pictured with two rows of decapitated foes beside it (Quibell 1898b: Taf. XII). Nothing prevents us from the interpreta-

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tion of this episode as being the destruction of ‘boat crews’, the enemy's main armed force, two parallel rows of killed ‘sailors’ associating with ‘left board’ and ‘right board’ – detachments of the Old Kingdom gangs of work-men (cf. Berlev 1972: 8–9; Eyre 1987: 12). Thinite kings themselves doubtlessly used boats for military purposes: the Palermo Stone report about the demolition of two settlements by Horus Ninetjer (Schäfer 1902: Taf. I, 4, № 8) is preceded by depiction of a boat, allowing us to reckon the latter among the main means of realization of the campaign.

Performance of peaceful labor functions by ‘boat crews’ of the Early Dynastic time is testified too, for instance, by numerous pictures of boats on the unfinished pyramid of Djoser's successor Sekhemkhet, left by the pyra-mid builders (Goneim 1957: fig. 18–24) who had probably arrived on these very boats. In short, overland working teams of the Old Kingdom in Egypt may have been named ‘boat crews’ because population of the Nile flood-plain had originally associated capable groups of workmen of all specializa-tions with gangs sailing in boats (Proussakov 2001d: 66–69).

The principles underlying an enclave protostate and gift-exchange seem to have been relevant in ancient Egypt at least to the Middle Kingdom in-clusive. I argue, for instance (Proussakov 1999b, 2001d), that the so-called Middle Kingdom ‘feudalism’ (Schenkel 1964) originated not in the First In-termediate but in the ‘archaic’ period, when the basis of nomarchs' eco-nomic and administrative self-dependence had been laid, typical for Egypt of at least the ‘Pyramid Age’ (from the Third to the Thirteenth Dynasties of Manetho). Remnants of primitive egalitarian interrelations between nomes and the royal ‘Residence’ seem to have been abolished only in the course of the transformation of the early state through the Middle Kingdom to the New Kingdom ‘empire’ (Proussakov 2001d: 113–140). At the same time, multifunctional ‘boat crews’ disappeared from the ancient Egyptian house-hold, having dissolved in the rigidly ranked socio-professional structure of the mature unified state (Bogoslovskij 1981; Berlev 1984).

NOTES1 It must be taken into consideration, however, that the ancient archaeological

evidence in Egypt may have been destroyed or made inaccessible by the later allu-viation, advancing desert dunes, natural and/or anthropogenic changes of the Nile channel, land use, etc.

2 A summary of different views on this problem (e.g., Mörner 1971; Clark, Far-rell and Peltier 1978), with detalization for pharaonic Egypt, see in (Proussakov 1999b: 67–77; 2001a: 50–73; 2001d: 28–32).


The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analogues3 According to Butzer's estimations, more than half of the ‘archaic’ Delta popu-

lation (Butzer 1976: tab. 4).4 Judging from depictions, this fish is most likely the rather dangerous

Malapterurus electricus of the Nile.5 This follows, for instance, from excavations of ancient cemeteries at Helwan,

where Saad's expedition alone discovered about ten thousand burials of the Early Dynastic time (Saad 1947, 1951). It has been argued that ‘archaic’ cemeteries of Helwan belonged mainly to populations of the newly-built Memphis (Wilkinson 1996, 2001).

6 W. M. Flinders Petrie reckoned up to sixty oars on boats of this kind and sup-posed their crews to have amounted to several dozen men (Petrie 1901a: 15).

7 This is an argument against reading the hieroglyphs under consideration as mrw, a kind of coniferous wood (O'Connor 1987).

8 This brick vessel is ‘moored’ to a funeral model of an estate (Emery 1954), the composition having something in common with my interpretation of scenes with boats on Aha's labels from Abydos as foundation of settlements on the Nile banks by boat crews.

9 If great ‘archaic’ tombs at Saqqara are not the royal ones, the earliest known king's boat burial is that of Khasekhemwy (Wilkinson 2001: 257).

10 During his long reign, Den celebrated probably not one but two Seds (Dreyer et al. 1990: 80).

11 This inscription is often read as ‘census of all the people of the west, north and east’ (Emery 1961: 74; Wilkinson 2001: 76). I translate it differently (cf. Kees 1933: 29; 1961: 50) because, first, in the light of my translation, the Stone reports of the highest Nile and its likely effect on Egypt, taken jointly with each other, in -crease considerably the historical probability of each other. Nothing but heavy in-undation, as an outstanding event, is most likely to have been recorded by annalists in connection with the year of the Nile flood so close in volume to prehistoric de-structive floods. On the other hand, if this record were just a ‘magic fiction’ (Helck 1966; cf. Proussakov 1996), it would have been hardly followed by something looking so much like information about catastrophic inundation on a national scale.

Next, the controversial term mt is written here in the full and clear form of the word ‘inundation’, the only distinction from dictionary canon (Faulkner 1991: 114; Wb. II: 122) being that the ‘water’ determinative in this case is represented not by three wavy signs n, but by three horizontal rectangles . But such a rectangle desig-nates a pool, i.e., the same water and thus hardly transforms the meaning of this term, especially taking into account the translation of as ‘flooded land’ (Savel'eva 1992: 37, 70). Besides, this graphical variation may be explained purely technically. Carving in a small compartment of the Palermo Stone of three closely situated signs n with numerous sharp teeth – concentrators of mechanical strains could result in flaking of the Stone surface and spoiling of the whole inscription; rectangles-‘pools’ lessened this risk.

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12 The modern viewpoint that this is not Sed but a ceremony t nswt-bty – ‘ap-pearance of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt’ (Wilkinson 2001: 210, 212) seems to me ungrounded.

13 Let us bear in mind an observation that, save Manetho, all ancient chronogra-phers of Egypt placed Djoser not at the beginning but at the end of a certain histori-cal period (O'Mara 1980: 93).

14 For more data see (Proussakov 2001d: 70–91, 95–100, 110–112, 139). For in-stance, food offerings of the royal ‘Residence’ (hnw) to the kings' mortuary temples in written sources of the Old Kingdom (e.g., Posener-Kriéger 1976) are named ex-actly ‘gifts’ (wt). Such a terminology by Egyptians themselves is an argument for the existence of gift-exchange in pharaonic Egypt, the gifts in this case having been obviously ‘compensated’ by regular temple services in honour of divine pharaohs.

It is also noteworthy how Egyptian priests treated their ceremonial implements, often made of valuable or rare materials. These objects were entered into special lists where, in particular, injuries were recorded which were received by the things during rituals. The injuries were calculated, with priests serving as witnesses (Savel'eva 1992: 94–95). It is remarkable that damaged things were not replaced by new ones immediately, but continued to be used as if no substitution could have been found for them (for instance, because of a lack of the materials they were made of), or as if injuries had done no harm to their magic qualities. The last idea agrees with information of deliberate spoilage of ritual implements as the peculiar gift to gods and spirits of the dead, a kind of sacrificial destruction which proposed indispensable compensation from the ‘beyond’ and increased the value of things physically damaged in ceremonial manipulations (Moss 1996: 107, 165). So ritual objects in ancient Egypt were probably injured not accidentally, because of priests' negligence, but purposely, within priests' professional duties, first of all those of the vital gift-exchange with the ‘beyond’.

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