Dan Snow's History Hit - The Origins of Ancient Egypt

Episode Date: February 11, 2024

All this week Dan is delving into the history, mystery and legacy of Ancient Egypt. Discover how this mighty empire grew from nomadic settlers to the Nile and how its magnificent wonders were built. Dan explores the life of the most powerful Pharaoh Rameses II, of the ideological muse and Queen Nefertiti as well as Egypt's conquest at the hands of the Persians, Greeks and Romans.Today we’re starting at the very beginning. How and where exactly does Ancient Egypt begin? To answer this question, Dan is joined by Egyptologist Dr Chris Naunton.Produced by James Hickmann, Mariana Des Forges and Dougal PatmoreEnjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

One of the biggest and in some ways spectacular tombs in the Valley of the Kings is that of Ramesses II. You go down a reasonably small dark passage and then it just opens up in front of you, chamber after chamber. The hieroglyphs on the walls, untouched since they were carved and painted there 3,000 years ago. It was closed the last time I was in the Valley of the Kings, so Yana, my producer on this podcast, and I had the entire place to ourselves. It's very odd being down there alone. A huge tomb carved into the mountainside of a desert valley. Alone with all

those drawings of huge significance when they were carved 30 centuries ago. Intercessions with the gods on behalf of the dead pharaoh. Still in situ, very different to seeing them once they've been torn out and placed in a museum. You feel more connected in those tombs in the valley than I think you do anywhere else. And the Valley of the Kings as a whole is just a place like no other in the world. And I think it's one of the reasons that we are still so obsessed with ancient Egyptian civilization. with ancient Egyptian civilization. Its tombs, but also its enormous civil engineering projects, from its pyramids to its mortuary temples.

We're fascinated by its antiquity, by the belief systems, the pantheon of gods, the technology, the pharaohs, and the lives of the everyday people. Whenever we do Ancient Egypt on this podcast, it goes bonkers. You, the audience, seem to love it, so we thought we'd give you a bit more of it. This week on Downslow's History, we are going to go big on some Egyptian podcasts. We're going to bring you some shows on some of the biggest, most recognisable Egyptian topics. From the Great Pyramid of Giza, Ramesses II to Nefertiti, who was dubbed the most beautiful queen in Egypt, but who was almost certainly so, so much more than that.

A royal colleague to her husband Akhenaten, a power broker, a priestess, and possibly even a pharaoh in her own right. We're also going to talk about the fall of this mighty civilisation at the hands of both the Macedonians, the Persians and the Romans. And the resulting remarkable blend that emerged. Its different cultures met and shared and exchanged and has left us with some of the most remarkable mummies in Egyptian history. unbreakable mummies in Egyptian history. Joining me throughout this series is a raft of experts, including the historian Bethany Hughes, the archaeologist Joyce Tilsley, and our resident Egyptian expert on the podcast,

who we love, Dr. Campbell Price. Today we're going to start at the very beginning of this mighty civilization that grew up, that sprang up along the banks of the Nile. And we're going to ask how and why and where exactly does ancient Egypt begin? To answer this question, I'm joined by one of my favourites, the excellent Egyptologist, veteran of this podcast, Dr Chris Naunton. Chris, what was Egypt before Egypt? Chris, what was Egypt before Egypt? Gosh, that's a good question, isn't it?

What is Egypt? How does it come about? Well, I suppose, Dan, that Egypt is the place and the people, the people who gathered around the Nile Valley in the Delta region, initially probably in disparate groups who came to settle in the fertile bit of what we now call Egypt, and who eventually came to have similar cultures. The beginning of the ancient Egypt that we recognise is the point at which those disparate groups of people come together under one ruler, that's probably important, with a more or less universal set of icons, religious beliefs, language, system of writing, style in art, architecture. If all those things coming together is the sort of beginning of a recognisable

ancient Egypt, the beginning of the dynastic period, then that in some ways is the starting point to answering that question. And prior to that, it's just groups of people trying to make a life. Just people trying to get along, but linked by this extraordinary highway that would have been pretty easy to travel on and along and across, which was the Nile. That was presumably the heart of everything. That is the key to everything. Yes, absolutely. So actually, the beginnings of a recognisable unified nation state, ancient Egypt, happens far enough back in time that actually the climate was, if not at that point, then slightly prior to that point,

slightly different from the kind of very dry desert landscape that we know now. Probably there was a point when groups of people were able to live off the land away from the river, but that changes with climate change. And as the desert gets drier and we come to the point where nothing really grows there, nothing can really live there, then people need to go somewhere else where things do grow and they can feed themselves. And the areas immediately either side of the Nile and the branches of the Nile in the Delta region where the main part of the river splits,

those areas fed by the water from the river were agriculturally productive. So it was like a magnet for people. And you're absolutely right. It is the starting point for everything. So climate change gives us ancient Egypt, right? So that's a hot take. It does. Yeah, it does. I think that's fair. I mean, obviously you put it much more succinctly than I did, but yeah, I think you're right. I'm just lowbrow. We hear about upper and lower Egypt. Is that significant? I mean,

as all these little entities or sort of communities are joining up, the last stage of that is two larger sort of kingdoms, is it? The Upper and the Lower? One of the things I think is so incredibly striking about ancient Egypt is that at this beginning point, beginning of the dynastic period, so many of the aspects of this culture that would remain central to its identity for the following, you know, 3,000 years or so, are in place at that point. And the idea of the two lands, Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt, is apparently a crucial part of the story of what happens when the nation comes into being, as it were. It's probably more complicated than this, but one important part, perhaps, of if there was a kind of

moment, if it's right to speak of a kind of a moment at which ancient Egypt comes into being, one important component part of that is the unification of what by this point was not just loads of little groups of people all over the place but perhaps two main groups two lands north and south the southern part being the upper part of egypt this being the higher ground and the ground from which the nile flows from south to north and lower egypt being the delta region and the point at which the river splits approximately the point at which the river splits appears to the point at which the river splits, appears to have been the sort of boundary between those two lands and would continue to be a boundary even after the point at which the

country is united. So that idea of two lands, two lands coming together, unification of the two lands, that is central to the Egyptians' myth of their own country, if you like, for the following 30 centuries. That's incredibly impressive, right? I mean, in China today, we talk about the extraordinary success of the idea of China. It has lasted two and a bit millennia. But the Egyptians, what you're saying, had a continuity of the way that they kind of thought about Egypt, the way they thought about the world, religion, language that went on for, you know, 30 centuries. That's crazy. Yeah, it is. I mean, it's one of the great achievements of ancient Egypt is its longevity. And obviously, there's a great deal of change in that time. You know, so if you ask yourself, would somebody from the end of that period, the end of the 30th dynasty, your man in the street have been able to understand

your man in the village 30 centuries before that. Maybe not in the same way that we might have difficulty understanding the English of sort of early medieval. But those key features of that myth of state, two lands, one ruler, we eventually come to call him the pharaoh, the monarch, one ruler, we eventually come to call him the pharaoh, the monarch, whose power and dominion over his people and his country is symbolised by various identifying markers borrowed from animals, lions, falcons, that kind of thing, bull. All of those things are in place right at the beginning and would remain in place for this huge span of time which obviously speaks to an incredible sort of stability within the country but also the crucial importance of there being a kind of myth of state if you're going to succeed if you're going

to unify people and have them all pulling together in the same direction you know and over the centuries doing things like invading other people's countries and defending their own territory if you're going to have people organized in that way then it's pretty handy to have a set of beliefs that you are the best or you know you are unique because of this feature and that feature and for those to be very visible and clear for everyone to see exceptionalism baby exceptionalism absolutely successful imperial project needs um so So you've got Lower Egypt. The only thing I know about Lower Egypt is that it was represented by the cobra, wasn't it, on the pharaonic headwear. Yes.

Do we know the names of these people? Because I always think of Egyptian history starting at the first dynasty. But do we know about these kings or pharaohs in these two states that preceded it? Well, the best really we have in terms of the names of individual people is that over the course of the last few decades, actually, the graves of a number of clearly very high status individuals have been discovered at the site of Abydos, which is the first dynasty royal cemetery. of the highest status people, let's call them kings, and they appear to be older than the first dynasty and their names are known and they're written in hieroglyphs. The first kings of a unified ancient Egypt are the first kings of the first dynasty,

so the ancient historian Benetho would have it. Then these earlier kings must have been from a time before that and they've come for that reason to be referred to by Egyptologists as a kind of dynasty zero. So we know the names of those people, but of almost nobody else. And they, of course, probably come into the story right at the moment, just before that unification. So in terms of anything older than that, we're pretty much in the dark. So Chris, is this when you're telling me there's a dynasty zero, we're like to get

dynasty minus one and minus two? I suppose the thing is that that group of kings, the so-called Dynasty Zero, I mean, we're making a lot of assumptions here that they were a line of successive monarchs. If we were to uncover another group of named individuals elsewhere, you could argue that they were earlier or just from a different part of the country. But who knows?

Yeah, it's absolutely clear that there must have been rulers of a certain kind at that point and probably earlier as well. The chances of uncovering their names are pretty slim, I think, but who knows? Let's go south to Upper Egypt. Pretty similar, pretty similar story there, pretty similar culture and traditions developing, or does it look quite distinct? Pretty similar story there, pretty similar culture and traditions developing, or does it look quite distinct? There are clearly differences. We know enough about the material culture of these earlier groups to see both a distinctiveness from one part of the world to another, but also the process of a kind of homogenising of culture across the country. So there are certain centres in both Upper and Lower Egypt which seem to have been the centres of power and probably the places which kind of dictated to everywhere else,

you know, which style of pot was going to be the one that was going to become, you know, used everywhere or, you know, particular icons would come to spread throughout the country. or particular icons would come to spread throughout the country. It's very striking. About 20 years ago, a Polish mission in the Delta discovered some astonishing gold figures of a very kind of un-Egyptian style, if you like, almost without precedent from anywhere else in Egypt. And this is clearly the remnants of a culture

that eventually was supplanted or whose uniqueness eventually came to be sort of rubbed away by this process of homogenising whereby, you know, another people's way of depicting the human form or whatever comes to dominate. And now I'm saying that it sounds a little bit sad, doesn't it? Because it's almost like there was all this diversity among all these different people at a certain point. And then at this moment where we all think, oh, yay, hooray, look, ancient Egypt. Actually, what's happening is that all that diversity is being sort of gotten rid of as one group comes to be supreme over all the others. One of the reasons it's thought, possibly, that you have this kind of very complicated set of conflicting religious beliefs and myths,

which endure a long time after the period of the first dynasty. One possible explanation for why there were all these conflicting beliefs. So, for example, the god Ra does this, but also in a different thing he does that. And in one strand of the belief, Horus is related to such and such, but in another, somebody else. How's that? Well, actually, this might just be echoes of this time when there was a much greater diversity of beliefs. And perhaps these all originally represented completely different gods.

They came to sort of be closely connected enough that they all end up having the same name. But the reason these stories are all so weird and different is that perhaps everybody just believed different things originally. You listened to Dan Snow's history hit. Stick with us. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history.

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by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. as i'm listening to i'm thinking how could a 19th century our prejudices are like we just love big empires like yes now we can get onto ancient egypt where they did massive things and built enormous stuff and built sort of gigantic states and and i wonder if one day well our historiography will come back to place like oh actually we're much more interested in these fragile like you know different cultures and how they were all so it was so heterogeneous and heterodox and interesting like it's quite fascinating as you say we're all just waiting for the big event to take place like why why do we love do we love the big state? Well, no, absolutely.

Well, and of course, I think we have to remember that, you know, increasingly this is the direction that a lot of research into the way that history unfolded in Egypt is taking. We have to remember that most probably the winners, as it were, so, you know, if there was a winner who unified the country, you know, yay, that person might have been great, in inverted commas, but possibly not that nice, you know? A little bit of conquering here and there and taking things...

You know, certainly the Nama Palate, which we should talk about, which appears to commemorate possibly the final military victory which unifies all of the peoples of Egypt, that does not show everybody concerned to have welcomed this development. You know, there's definitely kind of goodies and baddies. And, you know, if history is written by the victors, this is absolutely Nama's version of events. And those guys with their arms tied behind their backs might actually have been the nicer people. Who knows? But of course, you're absolutely right. That's not how we see it. We just think, yay, Nama's won, hurrah.

Well, let's get on to that. Who does win? Who's Nama? So this object I refer to, which we call the Nama palette, is in your sort of top 10 most significant individual objects to have survived from ancient Egypt undoubtedly. We call it a palette, it's not a kind of painter's palette, it is a ceremonial in this case version of the kind of flat surface that would have been used to mix pigments probably for makeup, that kind of thing. And objects like this had come to have ceremonial value by the time of the very beginning of the first dynasty. This one is called Narmere because it features at much larger scale than any of the other figures who are depicted, human figures who are depicted in the relief decoration on both sides, an individual who apparently has the name

Narmere written with these two hieroglyphic signs, a catfish Nar and a chisel Mer. And he's shown in what again is a pose which comes to be established as an essential part of the iconography of kingship over the course of many centuries after this, in what we call the smiting pose, holding in one hand by the hair his defeated enemies while in the other hand he holds up a mace a weapon above his head at the moment immediately before he brings this down on their heads you know bashes them into submission and Namir is shown variously in different parts of this in in the decoration on this palette, wearing what is, again, very recognisably the white crown of Upper Egypt and the red crown, both of them have very

distinctive shapes, of Lower Egypt, symbolising his rule over both the two lands. He's shown wearing a bull's tail. There is a falcon kind of design which appears in various places. Falcon comes to be associated with the god horus the living king is the embodiment of horus the god horus all of these aspects of the iconography of this palette these become established as part of the iconography of kingship and although it's not entirely clear whether these scenes capture genuine historical events or this is just by this point what Pharaoh was thought to do, we can't be absolutely sure and people are still arguing. But it seems likely, I think,

that there is at least some echo of a genuine historical event here. And that somebody, whether it was Naamera or a predecessor of his, was the person to, by military conquest, finally take control of all of these various different groups within Egypt and unify them under his rule. So then the great question is, is Namir really the very first king? Is this all to be taken at face value? This is a battle which he won, and in doing so he established it himself as the first king of Egypt, this is a battle which he won. And in doing so, he established it himself as the first king of Egypt. Or is it just that he's the latest incumbent on the throne and is sort of seen to be doing ceremonially, ritually, the things that somebody else had actually done a little bit earlier? That's not really clear. So the big question really is, should we identify Namae with the first king of the first dynasty in the king lists,

whose name is normally not Namae, but Meni or Menis, something like this. And most Egyptologists, I think, in the absence of better evidence, we've run with the idea that, yeah, actually Namae and Meni are one and the same. So this is the moment at which ancient Egypt comes into being. And it's in the Egyptian Museum, isn't it? The Nama Palate. And I urge everyone to go and Google it. He's holding a kneeling prostrate figure by the hair. He's holding aloft his wand of office or whatever it is.

And it's the most brilliant articulation or depiction of imperial might, isn't it? It's extraordinary. But as you say, then again, Tutankhamen has lots of images of him smiting down Nubians and all the rest of them, and he probably didn't do that, so who knows, who knows. There you go. So many mysteries. Yes.

So we've got Nama, so we think he might be the first. What date are we at here? Are we around 3000s or 100-ish? Yeah, exactly. If you think of it being 3000 BC, 3100 BC, so very approximately 5,000 years ago. We can't be absolutely precise, as you know, about the dates of events like this. But 3100 is roughly when we think this happened, yeah.

So then we're off. We're off to the races, right? How long before we get the pyramid builders? Is that a couple of kings away? The very first pyramid is built at the beginning of the third dynasty by Netriket's Djoser. is built at the beginning of the third dynasty by Netriket's Djoser. And that takes place at around about 2700 BC, slightly afterwards. So we've got three or four centuries worth of first and second dynasties before that point. So the pyramid, of course, the pyramid of Djoser, the very first one, is a landmark moment in terms of what

human beings were able to achieve in building on that sort of scale building in stone but it's important to remember that in the lead-up to that the kings of the first and second dynasties were themselves building on a monumental scale not a huge amount of what they probably built has survived but their tombs, as far as we can tell, more or less all of those tombs have survived at Abydos and probably Saqqara. Those are monumental in scale as well, just of course the pyramids capture the imagination that bit more so, but the monumental tombs of the first and second dynasties were also mighty impressive. And so it's not just a symbolic start date. I mean, it feels like Egypt goes into another gear

here, does it, in terms of monumentalism? What about its writing, its ideas? Is unity followed by an expansion in other fields? That's a very good question. And I suppose, you know, we're still a bit short of evidence to be really clear about that. Thanks to the discovery of the Narmal Palate we know absolutely that hieroglyphic writing is in place, is in use at the beginning of the first dynasty. The discovery of the tomb, UJ tombs at Abydos, the tombs of the dynasty Zero Kings establishes that hieroglyphs are in use for writing the names of rulers prior to that. We know also that monumental tombs are being constructed from Dynasty Zero, and the Narman Palette gives us all of this iconography. That sort of thing is then kind of building, if you like. So the

hieroglyphic script comes to be more and more complex. It comes to be used for more and more things. It comes to be used to write more and more words, it seems. So its use is increasing. If you fast forward to the point at which you get the construction of something as large as a pyramid, the Pyramid of Djoser, even if we don't have the documented evidence for exactly how this happened, it's impossible to think that it happened without the organisation of huge numbers of people and huge quantities of resource, principally stone, but all the other things that go into creating a big monument like that. And it's impossible to imagine those things being organised at scale like that without a like that. And it's impossible to imagine those things being

organised at scale like that without a complex administration. And you can't have that without writing being widespread and used by lots of people. You've also, at that point, you can't just have a king and then a load of sort of serfs. You have to have skilled workers and you probably also have a kind of managerial class by the time you're doing something on that scale as well. So you've got an increasing kind of bureaucracy. You can see this developing through the first, second and third dynasty, not very much later by the time, say, of the fourth dynasty, which is when pyramid building reaches its zenith. we've got increasing numbers of people who are not the king, who we can say at least are capable of building monumental

tombs. So these are people with a bit of wealth and a bit of status, some of whom are capable of commissioning at least short hieroglyphic inscriptions to decorate their monuments. And this, I think, is testament to a growing bureaucracy within Egypt. And it's kind of boring to say it, but I always think actually that Egypt monuments on that scale, armies of that size, conquest of territory on that scale. You just can't do that without organising people. And we see that growing. You can't smite anyone or build anything without the pen pushers. That is just the simple lesson from history, Chris. Of the pharaohs that we know about, attested pharaohs, how many tombs have we found, what proportion, how many tombs are out there and are we going to find one of an undisturbed nature pretty much like Tutankhamen's in our

lifetime? Chris, take it away. So the key to understanding this here is that you've got periods in Egyptian history when the country was strong and pharaoh was strong and able to draw on lots of resources and able to build massive tombs that have endured. And one of the staggering things about ancient Egypt is that over the course of the 3,000 years or whatever it is of dynastic history, we have just about every single one of the tombs of those kings who ruled at a time when the country was strong and stable and the king was able to build an enduring monument. So if that's sort of one half out of a couple of hundred, there's the other half of rulers we know about whom ruled at a time when Egypt wasn't so strong and steady and the king not able to command such resources and therefore

tombs were smaller, corners were cut in terms of construction type and materials, and those tombs haven't survived anywhere near as well. So if you look at the total number of tombs, down until the end of the Ptolemaic period, with the death of Cleopatra VII and her husband, Mark Antony, conquest of Egypt by Octavian, who becomes Augustus Caesar, this is the last point at which Egypt has its independence. From the beginning of the first dynasty down until that point, you've got about 212 tombs. Of those, I think it's around about half are known. And then the other half are these much more kind of ephemeral tombs that quite honestly, we shouldn't have such great

expectations of being able to find. The crucial thing that allows people to write books about lost tombs is that every so often in those groups of powerful pharaohs, you've got conspicuous gaps. So even in the New Kingdom, 18th, 19th and 20th dynasties, period of the Valley of the Kings, there are gaps. You know, where is the tomb of Tartan Isaiah II? Where is the tomb of Ramses VIII? Why aren't they in the Valley of the Kings? there are gaps. You know, where is the tomb of Tut-Nose-A, the second? Where is the tomb of Ramses, the eighth? Why aren't they in the Valley of the Kings? Where are they? You know, and this was the same question that Howard Carter was asking himself up until November 1922. Where

is this Tutankhamun? Why haven't we got his tomb? This is very strange. We've got everybody else's tomb. Why not his? While there were people saying, well, no, no, no, no, no, you're not going to find it. The valley's exhausted now. We've done all the digging. Carter and others were saying, hang on though, this gap is too conspicuous. This is too difficult to explain. He must have had a tomb. And he was right. So are we going to find any more?

There are still conspicuous gaps. So maybe. It's okay. So let me, just for my own purposes, because I get asked this now so often every time anyone hears you on the podcast. So of the ones that we should know about, of the ones that we'd expected to know about, we do know pretty much all those, but with a couple of interesting exceptions,

like Thutmose II and Ramses VIII. Most of the ones we don't know about, which is approximately 50%, are from the difficult, contested, upheavally periods of Egyptian history. Yeah, exactly. If I could just add one thing, though, to that, and that is that in the last 10 years, two tombs from those strange, difficult, ephemeral periods concerning ephemeral rulers, two of those tombs have been found, just in the last 10 years. So actually, there are still dozens and dozens of those. It could be that they've disappeared, but the last 10 years would tell you that they haven't all disappeared so even then you know there's a possibility but they were pretty looted were they or yes they were in in the case of one which was

the remains of a pyramid no real superstructure to it but the remains of a pyramid we just had the remains of a coffin and a canopic box and a couple of bones in the other one the entire body of the king was there, not very much by way of grave goods. So this is not another Tutankhamun. I'm certainly not trying to suggest that. But, you know, the entire body of that king, Senebkayi of the second intermediate period at some point,

difficult to say when, was discovered and that tomb was decorated. His name was in there. You know, as I say, we're not quite talking about Tutankhamun level sensational, but for Egyptologists anyway, exciting. Not too shabby. No, no, not at all. Not at all. I'll take it. Chris Norton, thanks for coming back on. Thanks, Dan. Thanks for having me. Good to speak to you. Thanks for listening to this podcast. We've got plenty more Egypt this week. Coming up tomorrow, the Great Pyramid of Giza with Bethany Hughes.

The original, the oldest, the tallest, and the most lasting of all of the seven wonders of the ancient world. It's truly a marvellous, marvellous object. And as you'll hear, it's just a part of a much larger necropolis. Remember to hit follow in your podcast app to get the next episode tomorrow