Soldier of the Pharaoh

Introduction

Geography has blessed Egypt with the protection of a series of sharply defined natural borders that for many centuries provided the ideal defence against unwelcome guests. Inhospitable deserts east and west demarcate the limits of Egyptian life with the sureness and abruptness of a single line, and the shelving beaches of the Nile Delta prevent passage as effectively as any fortification wall. In the south, though the land is cut by the Nile, a series of six cataracts distributed over nearly 1,400 kilometres of valley makes passage in either direction extremely difficult. Secure within these geographical boundaries, Egypt very early developed as a neat, self-contained, isolated unit. The bountiful Nile, whose annual flooding deposited a fertile layer of silt each year, provided all life's necessities and many of its luxuries - even if there was a regrettable shortage of good indigenous timber for shipbuilding. There was no real need for anyone to venture abroad and, in the words of the Greek historian Herodotos (b. c. 484 BC), Egypt was 'the gift of the river' (2.5.1).

Yet the First Intermediate Period (2181-2055 BC), a time when the Nile valley was divided among petty warring principalities, bore witness to many border settlements falling prey to outsiders. The upshot of this political disunity and instability was, of course, the increasing militarization of Egyptian society, a process reflected in funerary art where the peaceful domestic or agricultural scenes of Old Kingdom art are replaced by portrayals of warlords surrounded by their armed retainers. And so the pharaohs of the Middle Kingdom (2055-1650 BC), though determined to keep Egypt in isolation, were obliged to pay more attention to military affairs and to frontiers than did their predecessors. A sizeable standing army, which included foreign auxiliaries, was maintained, and the two narrow points of entry into the Nile valley, north and south, were firmly plugged.

In its Old Kingdom phase Egypt had pursued little political contact with the outside world. The pharaohs had occasionally dispatched expeditions to the Sinai, Libya or Nubia in search of precious metals and stones, the exotic such as ebony and ivory, and the mundane such as livestock and slaves. At the same time Egyptian merchants had kept up a lively trade with the coastal town of Byblos to import olive oil and cedar wood. Since there was no apparent need for a permanent standing army, apart from a royal retinue, armies of young men were periodically conscripted on a relatively ad hoc basis for a variety of labour-intensive purposes, from quarrying and trading expeditions, to military campaigns and the policing of civil disturbances. Everything was to change when Egypt was drawn into the international arena and had to defend its own gates.