THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL EGYPT

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL EGYPT

By the beginning of the 4th millennium bc, a distinctive civilization had emerged at the northern end of the Nile Valley. Rainfall was (and still is) very low throughout the region, so the rich agricultural land of Egypt (which the ancient Egyptians called Kemet: ‘black land’) was watered by the so-called ‘inundation’, the apparently miraculous annual ﬂooding of the river, which deposited new layers of fertile silt along the riverbanks. The strips of cultivated land vary in thickness on either side, as the river meanders northwards. The River Nile, running northwards from its source in East Africa to the Mediterranean coast, is therefore the single most important element in the geography of Egypt. It divides the country into two sections: ﬁrst Upper Egypt, the southern part, consisting of the land from Wadi Halfa to Cairo, and secondly Lower Egypt, essentially comprising the northern region where the Nile fans out into several branches, forming a large and fertile delta, before disgorging into the Mediterranean. The ancient Egyptians called their country Kemet (referring to the black fertile soil), in contrast to the surrounding Deshret (‘red land’ or desert). Within this simple and curiously symmetrical geographical setting there developed a sophisticated culture, many aspects of which invariably shared these same qualities of balance and harmony.

The archaeology of pharaonic Egypt spans three millennia (c.3100– 332 bc) and encompasses a diverse body of artefacts, architecture, texts, and organic remains. Museums throughout the world contain millions of Egyptian antiquities, and an even greater number of remains are still in situ in the Nile Valley and the Delta, ranging from temples, tombs, and cities to remote rock inscriptions carved on crags in the Libyan Desert, the Eastern Desert, or the Sinai peninsula. Three principal factors have facilitated the survival of an unusual wealth of detail concerning pharaonic Egypt: ﬁrst, an elite group’s penchant for grandiose and elaborate funerary arrangements, secondly, suitably arid conditions of preservation, and ﬁnally the use of writing on a wide variety of media.
The history of the rediscovery of pharaonic Egypt is in many respects the same as that of any other ancient civilization, in that centuries of ignorance and plundering were gradually replaced by the more enlightened approaches of late 19th-century and 20th-century scholars. Within this broad trend, however, various speciﬁc aspects of Egyptology, such as epigraphy, excavation, philology, and anthropology, have progressed at very different rates.