Thousands of cuneiform texts survive to reveal a world where taxes, war and death were certain, but so were the prayers of the priests to ensure that the sun would shine and rain would fall, crops would grow, sheep would make more sheep, the palm trees would be beautiful at dawn, the canals full of fish.
Uruk and the Sumerian cities were neither unique nor isolated. Cities became the marketplaces, information exchanges, marriage agencies, sexual carousels, fortresses, laboratories, courts and theatres of human community, but there were compromises: city folk had to conform; they could not feed themselves, having lost the skills of the wild and the thrills of the steppe. If the harvests failed, they starved; in epidemics, they died in droves. Sumeria was already in contact with other worlds. Lapis lazuli, the first international luxury commodity, tells the story: mined in Afghanistan, it was traded via the cities of India/Pakistan, to Sumer – mentioned in The Epic of Gilgamesh* – then on to Mari in Syria and all to the way to Egypt, where objects were made with lapis, found in the Abdju temple city.
Around 3500 BC, the villages of Egypt started to consolidate into larger polities. Fifty years later, the king of the south, Tjeni, who was known as Narmer – Catfish – united Egypt under one crown, celebrating his victory with religious festivals, where sacred beer was quaffed, and commemorated in objects: a palette, used to grind and mix male and female cosmetics, shows him killing his enemies with a raised mace, watched by a cow goddess, while on its other side Narmer, shown as a powerful sacred bull, tramples rebels under hoof. Nearby, Narmer marches to view his fallen enemies, who have been beheaded, their penises sliced off. Our first real glimpse of the refinement and brutality of Egypt is a cosmetics artefact – and a pile of penises.
KHUFU AND MOTHER: THE PYRAMID BUILDERS
Egypt was the first African kingdom that we can observe: Egyptian kingship reflected a life where everything depended on the Nile and the sun. Its towns and villages were spread along the thread of the river which gave the soil its richness. The sun crossing the sky every day was regarded as a god, and all life was played out in that daily journey. Kings travelled up and down the Nile – and to the underworld – on splendid boats.
Narmer and his family lived in mudbrick palaces and were buried in mudbrick tombs in the desert at Abdju, where large mudbrick enclosures contained boats to carry them across the sky on their journey to join the sun.
The Egyptian kings thought deeply about life and death and believed in their sacred role, affirmed by a network of temples and priests. Originally different gods were revered in different towns that were gradually agglomerated into a single story symbolizing the union of the two kingdoms – upper and lower Egypt – and the life of the monarch before and after death. Like so many sacred narratives, it was a story of family love, sex and hatred.*
When they died, the kings did not really perish but instead became Osiris while their heirs became Horus. The power of the kings was absolute, demonstrated at this time by human sacrifice. The tomb of the third king of Narmer’s dynasty, Djer, was surrounded by 318 sacrificed courtiers.
Around 2650, King Djoser, also known as Netjerikhet, added a novelty to his tomb: instead of separating the tomb and enclosure, he built them on top of one another to create the step pyramid, six steps high – and it still stands. His minister, the tjati, possessed the vision of his master: his name was Imhotep, so trusted by the king that on the statue base in the entrance both of their names appear. Most probably the minister of the king was also his doctor because, later, Imhotep was worshipped as a god of medicine.
The new king Sneferu, succeeding in 2613, signalled his swagger by his Horus name, neb Maat, lord of truth, righteousness and the sacred order of the universe – and that was not all. His other name, netjer nefer, meant Perfect God. A story in a later papyrus implies Sneferu’s hedonism – he had himself rowed out on to a palace lake by twenty girls wearing just fishing nets – and his aggression, noting that he sent a 170-foot ship Praise-of-the-Two-Lands to raid Nubia where he enslaved captives and seized 200,000 cattle.
Sneferu ordered the building of the Meidum Pyramid, built like all pyramids on an east–west axis, associating the king with the daily journey of the sun. When he attempted an even bigger pyramid at Dahshur, he demanded a steep angle of inclination of 60 degrees, but disaster struck: the foundations were not strong enough and cracks suddenly appeared as the pyramid collapsed in on itself. Now Perfect God ordered a perfect pyramid and it was built fast while the Bent Pyramid was finished (and it still stands 4,000 years later). The Red Pyramid, Sneferu’s third, was completed in record time. Sneferu was surely buried there: a body was found in modern times – but lost.
His widow Hetepheres, daughter, wife and now mother of kings, smoothed the succession of her son Khufu, who built the Great Pyramid at Giza, designed to outdo even his father’s works. She gloried in titles Mother of the Dual King, Follower of Horus, Director of the Ruler, suggesting that if Khufu respected anyone it was her.
Khufu must have been obsessed with his pyramid. It is still perhaps the greatest building of world history: 2.3 million blocks. Its height of 481 feet made it the tallest building on earth until the Eiffel Tower. His workers were arranged in teams which adopted playful names such as King’s Drunkards, perhaps just 10,000 in all, living in a special workers’ village beside the site, with food and medical care provided. He added little pyramids too for his female relations.*
When Khufu’s mother was buried, her tomb was packed with imported treasures, real and depicted. Turquoise came from Sinai, cedarwood from Lebanon, lapis from Afghanistan, ebony and carnelian from Nubia, myrrh and frankincense from Punt (Eritrea/Ethiopia/Somalia, perhaps Yemen) probably brought on ships from Sumer, where a conqueror founded the first empire: his name was Sargon.
MY FATHER I KNEW NOT: SARGON KING-SMASHER
Sargon was a boy abandoned in a basket, rescued and nurtured. ‘My mother was a priestess; my father I knew not,’ he declared in a poetical inscription that may capture his own voice. After all, they were a family of poets as well as potentates. Sargon was born in the northern steppes, ‘the highlands of Azupiranu’, speaking a Semitic language like those that became Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic, instead of Sumerian from the south. ‘My mother conceived me in secret, she gave birth to me in hiding.’ He was a self-creation. ‘She set me in a basket of rushes, she sealed the lid with tar. She cast me into the river but it did not rise over me.’ His enchanted birth, mysterious paternity, obscure concealment, charmed rise – to be repeated in the myths of many world changers, Moses, Cyrus, Jesus – explained the mystical process of how exceptional leaders, throughout history, could rise to power from nowhere.
‘A water carrier Akki rescued him,’ raised him as his own son and appointed him ‘his gardener’: in a society where all prosperity was based on irrigation and rainfall, the river, the water carrier and the garden all represent purity and holiness. Through Akki, young Sargon found service with the king of Kish, Ur-Zababa, descendant of Queen Kubaba, rising to become cupbearer. Power is always personal; proximity is influence; the more personal and absolute the power, the closer to the body the better: cupbearers, physicians, bodyguards and bearers of the royal chamberpot shared its glow. Inanna (later known as Ishtar), the goddess of love, sex and war, appeared to Sargon in a terrifying dream in which he was covered in blood. When he told the king, Ur-Zababa sensed that the blood was his own and ordered his assassination, but Inanna warned him. Sargon reappeared as if nothing had happened, ‘solid as a mountain. Ur-Zababa was afraid,’ unsure if Sargon knew of his duplicity. But then came alarming news.