Descent Group Competition and Economic Strategies in Predynastic Egypt

Abstract

During the late fourth and early third millennia BC the pristine state of Egypt arose from a group of independent, Neolithic agricultural villages. The traditional explanation of the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt is that Narmer conquered the Delta. A diachronic model based on intergroup competition suggests that a gradual coalescence of polities occurred. Chiefdoms at Nagada, Thinis, and Hierakonpolis are hypothesized to have formed in the middle Predynastic and were then absorbed by the Hierakonpolis polity in the later fourth millennium. Later, the Upper Egyptian polity absorbed the Deltaic one. If such a model is accurate, it may be possible to identify intragroup competition at the level of a single polity (as well as interpolity competition). Here, a mortuary analysis of the large Predynastic cemetery at Naga-ed-Dêr indicates that several descent groups used the facility simultaneously. Grave inventories indicate that the different groups experienced economic trajectories consistent with a competition model. At various times in the use of the cemetery, different groups displayed greater amounts of wealth, and it was derived from different sources. In the earliest phase of the cemetery, trade was directed toward the south. In the second phase evidence of outside trade vanishes at about the time of the Chalcolithic collapse in the Southern Levant. In the third phase, trade rebounds, but now it is oriented toward Syria and Mesopotamia. The outside contacts appear to have been an important element in elites’ gaining and justifying positions of power. The political unification of Egypt may be the result of the efforts of Upper Egyptian chieftains to control the lucrative trade routes with Southwest Asia; the creation of an Egyptian state may then be seen as an unintended consequence, in that it resulted not from the tenuous political unification forged putatively by Narmer, but from a series of actions throughout the first two dynasties to retain and extend economic, political, and ideological control of the Nile Valley.