The Violence of State Creation
The rock art of the Eastern Desert descends to us from remote prehistoric times.1 Inherent already in the thematic content are the overtones of coercion and violence: men corral a variety of animals using some sort of netting; hunters spear or lasso an oryx; a falcon hovers menacingly; pairs of men seem to be engaging in combat.[658] [659] In many cases these petroglyphs have a practical intent, not a commemorative one.
A direct message underlies the signs. They signal where the game is to be found, or where the transit corridor lies. Only in the hand-to-hand combat do we touch upon a theme with deeper roots and a longer history. The motif of two men squaring off against each other, with weapons or bare hands, recalls similar scenes in the archaic art of the Nile Valley[660] eventually to enter the hieroglyphic script. From the arrangement of two men fighting on equal ground the scene finds a parallel in which one of the combatants proceeds to dominate the other in size and position, and prepares to deal the death blow.[661]The violence described above is pictographic, but a rather obvious symbolism is also employed.[662] As the Predynastic era draws to a close so the minor arts adopt motifs of a chastening, if not intimidating, nature, many drawn from Mesopotamian glyptic. A bull gores a prostrate human being or demolishes a fort;[663] a falcon, scorpion and lion, each armed with a hoe, break down fortified enclosures;[664] lions tear apart passive prey; fantastic longnecked beasts snarl at each other and have to be restrained.[665] These creatures, at the moment we catch sight of them in the contexts listed above, have become ‘power symbols' in the process of coalescing into the character of a leader.
This all attests to a single event in the history of the Nile Valley: violent competition at a local level for control of resources, as Egypt was drawn inexorably within the Uruk world economic system.[666]In the turmoil of the last two centuries of the fourth millennium bce we are witnessing the creation of a new office, namely kingship. This function, without antecedent in the ancient world, does not derive legitimacy through a terrestrial, ancestral line, and contemporary and Old Kingdom documents rarely mention father, siblings or extended family. The king of Egypt is presented as a larger-than-life colossus, dawning like a terrifying star. When his ancestry has to be mentioned, we are taken into the celestial realm: his father is ‘Atum', the all-inclusive; or Geb, the earth; the yellow-faced king of the baboons; or just about any other supernatural power. For the king is not a transmogrified chief, he is not at the moment of his appearance considered a member of a dynasty. He is a divine ‘Big-man' who comes out of eternity and eventually will go back to eternity. He acts alone, stands by himself, makes his own alliances and his own laws, extends universal sway. The rise of ‘Big-man' (wr in Egyptian), or ‘Pharaoh'[667] [668] [669] is best seen in the light of circumscription theory, as a response to the Uruk world system. Important knock- on effects included the creation of a royal ideology, the political and cultural union of the country and the appearance of the nation state. Unheralded and without precedent, a new collegium, a ‘civil service', had to be created and with it such bureaucratic mechanisms as a calendar, taxation, weights and measures and a writing system.11
Benign and peaceful as these innovations sound, force and punishment were concomitants of the process. During the period of the rapid evolution of the nation state in the Nile Valley, an atmosphere of belligerence and violent expansion hangs over the incipient society.
The very names adopted by the kings of the First Dynasty (c. 3100-2900 bce), as avatars of the falcon Horus, speak of violent retribution meted out to any who dare to oppose them: ‘Horus is a fighter', ‘Horus is a scalper', ‘Horus is a cobra', ‘Horus is one who decapitates', ‘Horus is an extractor of the heart', ‘Horus with raised arm'. One of the longest-lived scenes in world art - the earliest examples date to the fourth millennium bce, the latest to Roman times - the ‘head-smiting' scene, graphically indicates what happens to those who contravene the king's will.12 Intended primarily as a tableaux for public consumption, this scene shows a dominant figure (in historic times the king) about to crush the skull of a grovelling enemy sprawled at his feet. The sharp contrasts which characterised the ideology of life in the Nile Valley have had a pejorative affect: the executioner is trim, athletic, clean-shaven and welldressed; the enemy naked, dishevelled and thoroughly disreputable. The enemy may be native or foreign: contravention of Pharaoh's laws brings the same punishment.The Egyptians do not hesitate to indicate their thorough contempt for such people. Senwosret III (mid nineteenth century bce) is one who shows no mercy to the enemy who have attacked him; attacking when he is attacked, desisting when one ought to desist... the Nubian has but to hear a sound, and he falls at a voice; it is (merely) answering him that makes him retreat, if one is aggressive against him, he turns tail. Retreat and he becomes more aggressive. They are certainly not people to be respected, they are craven wretches. My Majesty has seen them! It is not a lie![670]
Akhtoy III (twenty-first century bce) tells us how northerners struck him:
Speak now of the Bow-people! Lo, the vile Asiatic! It goes ill with the place where he is, lacking in water and covered in brushwood, the paths thereof tortuous because of the mountains. He never dwells in one place, but has been forced to wander through want, traversing the lands on foot. He has been fighting since the time of Horus, never conquering nor yet being conquered.1[671]
Such people are sub-human, fit only for servitude: care and mercy need not characterise their treatment.[672] [673] [674]
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