Egypt at the Crossroads: The Geopolitics of Pharaonic Imperialism

The analysis of Egyptian imperialism in terms of crude economic interest—that is, as a predatory and self-conscious search for immediate and direct wealth (e.g., tribute, deliveries of precious items, and customs), as well as for direct political con­trol over a given area—would be reductive, if not entirely misleading.

Another critical element explaining Egyptian expansion abroad was the need to obtain strategic commodities that were scarce or simply absent in the Nile Valley. Certainly Egypt was celebrated for its immense agricultural wealth, but it was impoverished in metal ore and wood. Timber, for instance, was an indispensable commodity for architectural projects, shipbuilding, or the manufacture of specific components of military chariots, but had to be mainly imported from abroad. As for metals, copper was available close to the Nile Valley (in Sinai, the Jordan Valley, and the Eastern Desert, for instance) but its exploitation usually involved the col­laboration of local populations. Tin, however, was a central Asian commodity only available through trade. Finally, gold ore lay in close proximity to Egypt. The most noteworthy deposits were in Nubia and the Eastern Desert. The latter could be exploited directly by means of mining expeditions, but access to Nubian gold was not so easy, thus necessitating different political solutions that ranged from con­quest (for instance, in the New Kingdom) to forms of collaboration/partnership with Nubian powers (in the Middle Kingdom).

A further aspect of Egyptian imperialism concerns the role played by mobile populations bordering the Nile Valley. Usually described in pharaonic sources as marauding troublemakers and bandits, they entered in fact into competition with Egyptian authorities for the use of grazing land in areas scarcely populated within Egypt itself, like Lower and Middle Egypt. Furthermore, archaeology reveals that they kept autonomous and extensive trade networks through the Western Desert and the Sinai, and also that some mobile populations, like the so-called Pan-Grave culture of the Eastern Desert, apparently carried out trade activities along the Nile Valley during the first half of the second millennium bce. Far from the backward populations depicted in Egyptian sources, mobile populations were important vectors of exchanges, and their relations with Egyptian authorities oscillated be­tween collaboration, competition, and conflict for the exploitation of the resources of the Nile Valley.

Recent archaeological work in different areas of Northeast Africa and the Levant has proven essential for a deeper knowledge of the exchange routes and of flows of wealth in which Egypt was involved. The discovery of the ancient site of Balat (i.e., the oasis of Dakhla, in the Western Desert)—a third millennium pharaonic set­tlement in the Eastern Sahara—as well as the traces of an ancient trail connecting Balat to the Uweinat region, which was marked out with inscriptions, reveals that Egyptian expeditions were traveling hundreds of miles into the desert in search of pigments and incense.^[32] Silver, base metals, and slaves were imported from the Levant at the end of the third millennium, according to the inscription of Iny.^[33] Meanwhile a slightly later tomb of an official buried at Elephantine describes his role as supplier of goods from Nubia, the southern Red Sea, and the Levantine coast. A new inscrip­tion from the necropolis of Dashur mentions several military expeditions sent to Lebanon and further north at the beginning of the second millennium,^[34] while the excavation of Tell el-Dab'a, in the Eastern Delta, has revealed an active naval and trading base connecting Egypt with the Levant in the Middle Kingdom. Around 1650 bce, it became the capital of the kingdom of the Hyksos (an independent polity that existed in the Eastern Delta around 1750-1550 bce with a strong pres­ence of peoples from the southern Levant). Tell el-Dab'a became the center of their Egyptian-Levantine multicultural state that was heavily involved in trade with the Levant and that corresponded through letters with both Mesopotamia and Nubia.

What emerges from this very selective evidence is not only that Egypt was in­volved in trade, contacts, and exchange routes covering a far wider ranging area than previously supposed, but also that the traditional assumption of Egypt as the uncontested geopolitical actor in this region deserves considerable qualification. Accordingly, in contrast to the central role attributed to Egypt and the pharaohs (based solely on boastful texts and triumphant scenes), a more balanced picture would examine the aims, nature, and extent of Egyptian foreign relations. Certainly, Egypt was a strategic crossroads that connected Northeast Africa and the Red Sea to the Levant, the Aegean, and the Near East, but now—through this new lens—it did so in competition with other powers.

Two important considerations should then be highlighted about the role of Egyptian imperialism. On one hand, periods of strong, centralized pharaonic au­thority were concomitant with the creation of infrastructure aimed at controlling the routes through which commodities moved. Three types of infrastructure figure prominently in the archaeological and written record. First, certain harbors at the limits of the kingdom—like Avaris/Tell el-Dab'a in the Eastern Delta, Elephantine in the southernmost border of Egypt, and Ayn Sukhna and Mersa/Wadi Gawassis on the Red Sea—served as the main terminals for state-sponsored expeditions. Second, there were fortresses and chains of forts founded several hundred kilometers from the Egyptian borders, in the middle of potentially hostile territory, that served as checkpoints and trading centers. Their isolated location seems un­tenable on strictly military grounds, so their purpose must have been more com­mercial than defensive (the term “factory” would be probably better suited). This applies to Zawiyet Umm el-Rakham on the Libyan coast, Buhen, Mirgissa, and the fortresses founded around the Second Cataract, in Nubia, where the papyrological and epigraphic record reveals the importance of trade.

On the other hand, it can be observed that trade networks flourished in periods when the pharaonic state split into competing polities. The Egyptian Delta in those periods became more Levantine in terms of its political and economic ac­tivities. Political fragmentation (as happened at the end of the Old, Middle, and New kingdoms) produced a political landscape of small and ephemeral polities with petty kings at their head, perhaps linked by hierarchical ties to the more pow­erful centers (like Tell el-Dab'a in the late Second Intermediate Period, as shown by inscribed scarabs). Another consequence was a more fluid circulation of Levantine populations and pastoral elements (possibly including Libyans) into Lower and Middle Egypt,^[39] in an economic environment where trade flourished and external contacts became more active. It is significant that Egypt's reunification and rein­corporation of the Delta were usually accompanied by its administrative and po­litical reorganization. It was also marked by negative references to pastoral and/ or foreign populations, as literary compositions such as the Teaching for Merikare or The Prophecy of Neferty show. Upper Egypt, on the other hand, appears more stable, with the Theban region serving as the primary political focus, probably because of its strategic role as a crossroads linking maritime and land routes in Northeast Africa (serving as both the “horizontal axis” linking the Western Desert and the Red Sea, and the “vertical axis” through which the Nile flowed). But its iso­lation from the Mediterranean shore (where the trade routes ended), coupled with Nubian competition on the Nile, meant that any durable hegemony depended on control over its northern and southern rivals. Nubians, Lower Egyptian polities, and Thebans thus appear alternately to fight, ally, and collaborate until one of them finally imposed its supremacy over the region and its trade routes. Over the centuries, the Hyksos, Theban, Kushite, and Saite dynasties exemplify such outcomes.

Given this geopolitical environment, two conclusions can be inferred about Egyptian imperialism. On one hand, the primary aim of pharaonic foreign policy was to control (and, when possible, monopolize) the flows of wealth circulating through Northeast Africa, the Red Sea, and the southern Levant—from Cyrenaica to Byblos and from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean—to capture the lucrative trade routes developed in periods of state incapacity and to eliminate rivals.^[40] On the other hand, however, this inevitably led to conflict with other powers advancing similar claims, whether they stood at the starting point of such routes—in inner Africa and the southernmost Red Sea—or at their end in the Levant. The end of the Middle Bronze Age, in this respect, marks a turning point. The trade routes that flourished during this period were followed, for the first time, by several subsequent phenomena. The first was a durable imperial intervention by Mesopotamian, Anatolian, and Nilotic powers in the Syro-Levantine area. The second was the Egyptian conquest of Nubia (at a time when Nubia was involved in long-distance contacts with the Indian Ocean and Punt). The third, and final, was large-scale military conflict with Libyan populations. Later, the collapse of the Late Bronze Age superpowers gave way to a new wave of flourishing trade and polit­ical fragmentation (in South Arabia, Phoenicia, Transjordan, Palestine, Syria, and Lower Egypt), which was followed in turn by the appearance of “world empires” seeking to control, for the first time, the Near East in its entirety, including its Nilotic and Arabian edges.