A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2 Quotes

“The Egyptian Origins of the Semitic Alphabet’.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

“Several more novel terms for the pharaonic state came into play during the times of the re-founded kingdom. ‘Sema Towy’, for example – ‘the joiner of the two lands’ – along with the phrase that is commonly translated in the Champollionesque tradition as ‘King of Upper and Lower Egypt’ – king of the valley and the delta – or, more literally, reflecting the images of its elegant hieroglyphs, as ‘king of the lands of the sedge and the bee’. This poetic visual opposition of a green reed – juncus maritimus – with a hard dry black and yellow insect – vespa orientalis – defines the two regions of the kingdom by opposing the rushy flatlands of the delta with the thin strip of the river’s black silty valley set within the yellow desert. And here, once more, the ancient scribes are describing the physical characteristics of the region of the lower Nile as dualities, just as the valley landscape of the homeland of the new kings was itself a landscape of dualities.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

“Nor, indeed, that Erman and Sethe had similarly described that period in the Berlin seminars, thus colouring the background against which Gardiner and Breasted and later generations would transcribe and translate the Lamentations, Admonitions and Disputes. They had seen the worm within the rose. The mighty kingdom that had built the Memphite pyramids, so it was generally agreed, had suffered a similar fate to the Roman Empire as envisaged by the Victorians: weak government and moral decadence had occasioned a descent to anarchy. In reality, however, there is little evidence that pharaoh had controlled a highly structured bureaucracy similar to that of a contemporary state, and modern archaeology and the standing monuments tell a very different story: that, for example, the ending of the 400-year activity of making monuments from blocks of stone had been part-provoked by changes in the environment”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

“Sheik Muftah Culture”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

“In similar fashion, the assumption that the texts within the pyramids were products of a dawn-land of primitive religion long served to isolate those dark columns of hieroglyphs from the living world that drew them. As Harold Hays, one of the Pyramid Texts’ most acute commentators recently observed; ‘the agent and event are erased, and without them there is no human history.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

“Most earlier egyptologists, however, had assumed that such celebrated sites as Aswan, Edfu and Hierakonpolis, Memphis, Buto and Bubastis had once been ancient cities. Yet Memphis of the ‘White Walls’ – the Memphis of the Greek and Roman travellers and of nineteenth-century imagination – was sustained by markets and a monetary economy, and the Old Kingdom had been very far removed from such classical or modern concepts of urban life. The fundamental nature of that most ancient state was agricultural. The gulf between Memphis and its provinces was not nearly as great as one might at first imagine. Even the royal residence was set beside canals and at the edge of farmland. And, certainly, the life style of the court as it is depicted in its courtiers’ myriad tomb chapels is always shown as country life and never as taking place within the confines of some kind of city.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

“Manifested in its networks of tithing, collection and supply, the efficacy of this unique culture was reaffirmed at the beginning of every reign when the state machine began to build another pyramid. So the architecture of the pyramid complexes manifests the living systems of that state in good hard stone, and the structures of tithing and supply which had enabled their construction continued to be acted out in dramatic continuation after pharaoh’s death in rites of offering. Like the inhabitants of the early farming settlements, at Abusir, the state system operated within the archaic theatres of life and death. These are the fundamental principles that explain all of the surviving manifestations of the pharaonic kingdom of the lower Nile. It was not a complex system. Though to modern minds its splendidly sophisticated and often enigmatic relics might first suggest the operation of a near-modern state with an elaborate theology, in reality they are a millennial duplication, elegant, consistent and concise, of a single set of rites – the rites of presentation and of offering, on which the state was founded.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

“As a sun god, Re would be described by later scribes as a life creator and sustainer, whilst the daily progress of his disk through the sky made him a measurer of time. So as sons of Re, the living kings were similarly identified as the creators and sustainers of the state and, like the sun god, they too ordered human time. Without Re and his earthly son, therefore, the order and the very time in which the royal court existed would cease, and thus the valley of the lower Nile would no longer sustain the order of pharaonic culture.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

“At all events, the traditional assumption that the pharaohs had ruled like European kings and kept closed harems is based on those traditional translations, on nineteenth-century courtly manners and, ultimately, Champollion’s secular vision. Better to drop such Eurocentric notions along with the quaint assumption that the ‘family’ of the king held genius in its generations and was stuffed with princely craftsmen, architects and engineers endowed with the abilities to raise vast pyramids and make some of the world’s great sculptures. Better to conceive the Old Kingdom court as an environment where such talents had been cultivated within a series of courtly households grouped around that of the ruling house. And the single central office in that rare society was that of pharaoh. It sustained the living and the dead. It alone bestrode the households of the gods and those of humankind. No wonder, then, that unlike the households of the courtiers there is no evidence of an established order of direct familial succession for the throne.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

“Coupled with efficient systems of tithing and supply conducted in the name of pharaoh, the valley’s prodigious fertility had promoted such colossal surpluses within the state that, after some four centuries, the government was able to conceive and undertake the construction of four colossal pyramids and their attendant temples.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

“So it is not surprising that Champollion and his successors had assumed that ancient Egyptian society had a similar composition to traditional Western European society; that it too had consisted of peasants, land-owning aristocrats, soldiers, sailors and the clergy. And that, in turn, led to the use of such terms as ‘king’ and ‘prince’, ‘peasant’, ‘soldier’ and ‘priest’, which, though there is scant contemporary evidence for such structures, gives the easy impression of early European governmental institutions.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

“For though Europe has no deserts and no Nile, Champollion and Ramesses both lived in small-scale wheat-based economies founded on the technologies of the Middle Eastern Bronze Age. Broadly speaking, the material elements of those two economies – stone-cutting and metal-smelting, animal husbandry and farming and the everyday technologies of house and home – weaving, potting, baking, brewing, cheese-making and the rest – were much the same.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

“The supreme irony in this is that though written texts were never at the heart of pharaonic culture, those that have survived have played a major role in the construction of modern ancient Egypt. Such a fundamental role, in fact, that ever since Jean François Champollion deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs in the early nineteenth century, the study and translation of pharaonic texts has continuously distorted a broader understanding of that ancient culture.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom