Smiting the Asiatics

The colours have faded after five thousand years, but the incised lines on the temple walls are still clear and sharp. Pharaoh grasps a cowering victim by the hair and prepares to dash his brains out with a mace. The captive is portrayed as tiny, and so is everyone else – sandal-bearer, sunshade-carrier, soldiers – except for the king himself, who looms over the scene like a giant.

The ritual slaughter of Egypt’s enemies – usually either Asiatics or Libyans – appears countless times on buildings, slate palettes and ceremonial mace-heads, from archaic times right up until the Greek and Roman occupations of The Black Land. It is taken to represent Pharaoh’s ability to keep Egypt’s enemies at bay, and is assumed – since every Pharaoh seems to do his share of smiting – to be purely symbolic, with no particular reference to historical reality.

Maybe. But the ancient Egyptians were not always the peaceful folk whose architecture and artefacts we so admire, safe and snug in their fertile river valley. In early dynastic times the North African climate changed dramatically; what had been grasslands, well-watered with numerous rivers and oases, turned into arid plains devoid of plant and animal life. Only the Nile and its delta retained the ability to support human populations, and only then if its inhabitants switched from hunting and gathering to a settled system of fishing and farming.

The Nile was a lifeline. Its ownership was fiercely contested. Tribes from the eastern and western deserts had no choice: if they couldn’t capture a slice of Egypt’s watercourse they would starve. So perhaps smiting would-be invaders was a regular role for the king and his men-at-arms. Maybe, also, clubbing captives was a real-life ritual as well as a subject for ceremonial art.

We think of the Egyptians as civilised people. For three thousand years their way of life was so well-organised and so well-regulated – based on the Nile’s flood and the crop-surplus it produced – that they could devote a large percentage of GNP to cultural pursuits: art, artefacts and architecture which achieve near-perfection and still inspire astonishment today. We would describe them as nature-lovers, but perhaps they didn’t think of it quite like that; the animals, fish, birds and plants which they painted so vividly were simply their world – and what other world was there? To an Egyptian, life was so pleasing that they hoped it would continue, after death, in exactly the same way.

Order meant everything to them. The country was run like clockwork by an army of bureaucrats. It is unlikely that the peasants’ life was anything but arduous, but they usually had plenty to eat and could bring up large families: Egypt was always populous. Every so often able-bodied males were conscripted during the flood season to work on one of the king’s building projects. We assume this was an imposition, but perhaps it wasn’t; excavations at the Giza pyramid field have uncovered enormous kitchens supplying bread, beer, meat and fish to the labour-force; there were also hospitals. The Greek idea that the pyramids were built by slaves was always nonsense. On the contrary: the workers were highly-valued and well cared-for.

It is fair to conjecture that the pyramids, temples and tombs were built by enthusiasts, supported by families and neighbours who revelled in the scale and magnificence of these gigantic projects. There may be a good analogy with the erection of medieval cathedrals in Europe. If so, it is probable that providing the king with his eternal resting-place had a unifying, nation-building effect; it is even possible that this was its principal purpose.

If the King lived for ever, so would his subjects... hopefully. His relatives and attendants could buy a stronger guarantee by erecting their tombs close to his. In every case, as the paintings and reliefs attest, the idea was to make sure that the Egyptians’ heaven on earth – hunting, feasts, parties, gardens, dancing, adornment... pure pleasure... would continue posthumously.

This serene existence came at a price, but it wasn’t paid by the Egyptians. Gold, copper and precious stones were plundered from Sinai, Nubia and the Western Desert, whether the locals liked it or not. Thousands of prisoners of war were brought back from raids to work in Pharaoh’s mines and quarries. Foreigners had to be kept out; we see them mocked on pyramid causeways – almost caricatures, alien and ugly, nothing like the ever-youthful Egyptians. They are either starving, with their ribs sticking out, or parading in front of the king with their arms bound behind their backs.

Or being smited.

This was the Bronze Age. Homer’s Greeks and Trojans thought nothing of killing every man, woman, child and animal in a captured city. It was considered peculiar if they didn’t. To be a hero meant killing another hero, enslaving his family and stealing his property. I try to remember, when I look at a delicate painting of Egyptian princesses smelling lotus-flowers five thousand years ago, that for Egypt’s neighbours life was anything but a bowl of roses.