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6 Building the Pharaonic state Territory, elite, and power in ancient Egypt in the 3rd millennium BCE juan carlos moreno garcía The aim of this chapter is to study some general trends dealing with the historical construction and transformation of the state administration and its relationship to royal office in ancient Egypt during the 3rd millennium BCE. Pharaonic Egypt has usually been considered an anomaly: nearly from the very beginning it emerges as an unified state encompassing a considerable territory by the standards of ancient polities, especially when compared with the relatively reduced palatial systems and city-states of the ancient Near East in the 3rd millennium or with the Greek poleis prior to the 5th century BCE. Moreover the Egyptian state seems to have been a remarkably solid one, when centuries of unity and apparent stability were broken only by occasional and rather limited episodes of crisis (the “intermediate periods”), immediately followed by a reunification which lasted for some centuries again. This stability is particularly noteworthy within the historical context of the Near East in the 3rd millennium BCE, especially when one thinks about contemporaneous and similar but rather ephemeral episodes of state building such as the Akkad empire or the Ur III kingdom. Another fact which has drawn the attention of historians is the political primacy of Upper Egypt as a reserve of “statehood” for most of Pharaonic history, especially as this region was the focus of the political unification of the country after the Predynastic, the First Intermediate, and the Second Intermediate periods. Even after the end of the New Kingdom this region 186 Juan Carlos Moreno García continued its autonomous existence for some centuries, while the forces of unification were usually led by external actors (Nubians, Assyrians, Achaemenids , Macedonians) or by the new but contested power of the Saite kings, themselves relying on foreign elements such as Greek mercenaries or international trade. But this kind of “regional determinism” may just be a mirage which, in addition to the apparent stability of the kingdom, diverts the focus of research from the very core of the problem: how the state was built and preserved and what were the means employed by the pharaoh to tie together in the long term so large a territory with its many regional foci 6.1. Map of Egypt and the Western Desert. Building the Pharaonic State 187 of power, especially as the provinces regularly rose as alternative centers of authority. The answer to these questions calls for a rethinking of the early Pharaonic state and introducing authority, politics, and territorial organization as key elements of analysis. The Origins of the Pharaonic State: The Rise of Hierakonpolis in Context The origins of the Pharaonic state are difficult to trace because of the scarcity of archaeological and written records and their uneven geographical distribution, being concentrated mostly in a limited number of cemeteries whose urban contexts are largely unknown. Meagre as this evidence might be, Egyptologists accept that some centers of political power arose about the last third of the 4th millennium in several Upper Egyptian localities like Hierakonpolis, Naqada, and Abydos, and that the kings of Abydos accomplished the political integration of the country and the control of neighboring areas through military expeditions against Nubia and the establishment of some kind of commercial “colonies” in southern Palestine which are attested just before and immediately after the unification of the country. However, recent discoveries at Hierakonpolis show that some kind of political authority was already in place at this locality in the first half of the 4th millennium as it displayed its emerging power in an elaborated form, including a life-size statue (Harrington 2004; Jaeschke 2004; for another Predynastic larger than life-size statue from Hierakonpolis, cf. Quibell and Green 1902:15, pl. 57), remarkable “royal” tombs, and complex ritual centers. These tombs precede the first royal burials at Abydos by several centuries and they raise many questions about the relationship between Hierakonpolis (the first “royal” local center?) and Abydos (from whence the first pharaohs came). The importance of Hierakonpolis, at least as a venerable ritual center, was recognized by later pharaohs who built quite impressive monuments there, such as Khasekhemwy, or enriched the local sanctuary with their statues, such as Pepi II. As for Naqada, many clay-sealings dating from Naqada IIb-c have been recovered from a very specific location at South Town, perhaps a kind of institutional or “communal” sector, since most of the clay administrative devices were...

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