A History of Ancient Egypt Quotes

“It is precisely because these images were not designed to symbolize abstract ideas and were made in absolute conformity to the craftsmen’s rules of image making, that any intellectual processes that may have been involved in their creation have been effectively disguised. What is left, however, is something of the environment in which they were created; their time and place, that dramatic point in time when work on Sneferu’s pyramids was coming to its conclusion, an age that had seen an unprecedented mass of humanity linked in a single purpose, building for the king who was the centre of the state, the sustainer of its order and the prosperity of the court. Here, then, the relief artists drew out the vital qualities of the state machine in human form and, in so doing, they created some of the oldest known images of the pharaonic gods.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

“The first age of pyramid building – the half-century from Djoser to Sneferu – had seen an intellectual revolution conducted in architecture and stone images. And part of that took place within this limestone temple, with the dust of pyramid making rising from the desert plain behind them, as some of Sneferu’s courtiers and craftsmen created images personifying the various aspects of the kingdom, from the rhythms of the river and the order of the state to the gods themselves; and all of them identified, drawn and situated as elements of the economic engine, natural and man-made, that would fuel the pharaonic state till its ending.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

“A further difficulty in understanding such early texts is that their translation can only be accomplished by reference to other, later texts. And here a paradox arises, for to assume that Metjen’s inscriptions are merely ‘primitive’ versions of later similar examples, and that gaps in their understanding may be resolved by reference to the fuller texts of later times serves to deny internal change within a society that, in Sneferu’s day, was clearly undergoing a series of colossal transformations. It is the very nature of most grammars and dictionaries, moreover, to provide compacted, generalizing visions of the language of the culture in which they deal and this, as far as the traditional vision of ‘ancient Egypt’ is concerned, has created a jargon-filled vocabulary with its own internal mythologies, so that, however rigorous or erudite the act of translation may have been, it often serves to bewitch the genuine relics of the past and reinforce a vision of an ‘ancient Egypt’ held by earlier generations of lexicographers and philologists. That, of course, is how Metjen can appear to be like an English squire, and Imhotep, an Egyptian Leonardo”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

“the erection of Djoser’s pyramid provided pharaoh’s subjects with visible evidence of the power of the transport and supply systems that they had built over the previous half-millennium and which were the very essence of the state.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

“After Quibell and Green, the following decades saw the wide adoption of those evolutionary principles of intellectual development so alluringly described by the likes of Freud and Frazer. These held that the ‘primitive’ – that is, the non-Western mind which, they imagined, was expressed in Narmer’s Palette – was the opposite of the scientific mind and close to the world of ‘feeling’ and to mystical and childish thoughts, where savage passions lurk just beneath the surface. Once again, this was based on the assumption that the behaviour of ancient peoples was similar to that of nineteenth-century tribal communities which had been studied and evaluated by the founding fathers of anthropology – people who often shared the same attitude to their subjects as their colonial administrators and whose view of their subjects has now become a part of intellectual history. And yet the vision still prevails. Kings like Narmer are portrayed as living in a time when humans were ‘closer to nature’ than we are today, and Narmer, the first pharaoh, is presented as a primal hero whose killing gesture symbolized the struggle of humanity emerging from the chaos of the primitive world. Thus everything is explained; ancient people were automatons with no facility for thoughtfulness, and all you have to do for their explanation is to find the key with which to wind up their imaginary clockwork. As for the early kings, caught in imaginary wars and forever planning for a mumbo-jumbo afterlife, Narmer’s gesture is explained as a method of filling his contemporaries with shock and awe.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

“With such continuing and pressing reasons for the development of an efficient system of supply, it is hardly surprising that in the last centuries before the coming of the kings, Naqadan culture was, of itself, carefully and deliberately standardized. As Renée Friedman, one of Hierakonpolis’s modern excavators, has described, its wonderfully diverse tradition of ceramics now suffered a ‘striking and complete loss of regional intervariability’; a remarkable uniformity of the products of the potters’ studios all up and down the lower Nile that would remain throughout the best part of pharaonic history.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

“Fifty years earlier, before its sandstone blocks were carried off to serve as the foundations of a factory in a nearby town, the ruins of a little temple had stood upon that hill. And it was there, in the footings of a vanished temple, by the remnants of a prehistoric shrine, that Quibell and Green uncovered a vast agglomeration of courtly objects, a cache such as had not been seen before and has never since been equalled in all of Egypt: a pair of beautiful life-sized pharaonic statues made of sheets of beaten copper; a golden image of a hawk with glittering obsidian eyes still standing in its ancient shrine; two splendidly engraved cosmetic palettes; some prehistoric slaughtering knives; a remarkable collection of stone vases; a heap of mace heads piled like potatoes, some of which were vividly engraved in a manner similar to the cosmetic palettes. And in amongst all this, suffused by ground-water and penetrated by the roots of thorn and halfa grass, lay a mass of ivories which, Quibell remarked, ‘resembled potted salmon’, but on inspection proved to be hundreds of separate and delicately carved objects from the time of the first kings but which were so cemented and decayed that they are still under restoration to this day.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

“Set within communal cemeteries, such burials were also part of a continuing connection between the communities of the living and the dead. Just as the living, at the time of funeral, arranged separate identities for all the dead, so the memories of the buried dead provided the people of the living settlements with a collective and individual history, a kind of afterlife. The dialogues that the Badarians conducted in their cemeteries, therefore, gave the entire community, the living and the dead together, a powerful and continuing resonance. Such acts are not explained as ‘symbolism’ or ‘offerings to the dead’. Saturated with human care and contact, a visual and tactile intelligence was at work within these small communities which is not easily reduced to sentences on a page. In the broader scheme of things the activities of the Badarian burial parties mark a change from people thinking about the basic activities of farming and the transformation of natural processes, to thinking with some of the things that they themselves had made.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

“Here, then, pottery has come to stand as a kind of history. Nor, in the case of the Badarians, does this equation seem unreasonable. For each one of their high-shining pots was conceived as a precious visual object, a kind of presentation. That the same few forms were carefully repeated down through generations also shows that each and every one of these precious vessels was part of a consciously maintained tradition. For both their makers and their users, the presentation which the potters offered was that of a mark of identity of a distinctive community, in the same way that today the corpse of someone buried with one of those same pots is known as a ‘Badarian’. It is this identification of a prehistoric community by pottery type and modern place name that provides the basis of a meta-history for late prehistory; a chronology of ceramic type and form which has recently been extended to take in all of Egypt’s history and which has become so all-pervasive that everything excavated within the orbit of the Nile is now dated and defined by the pottery that is its inevitable accompaniment.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

“So the Badarians stored their harvests in large clay bins within their desert settlements, where they also ground their grain as they required and sometimes, too, they turned their flour to bread, for loaves were found in several of their graves. A form of porridge also appears to have been a common food, ladled out of the cooking pots into hand-sized bowls from which it was consumed, perhaps, with the aid of the delicately made spoons of bone and horn and ivory which were also buried with the dead. Meat too, was on the menu, and in generous quantities. Alongside their domesticated herds of oxen, sheep and goats, hunting and gathering were still considerable activities; the bones of birds and fish were also plentiful inside the settlements, as were wild seeds and pulses and the roots of reeds and grasses, some of which could be as sweet as filberts whilst others would have been so fragrant yet so bitter that they could only have served as perfume.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

“basic”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid