Before the Pyramids: The Origins of Egyptian Civilization with Emily Teeter

good evening everyone I'd like to welcome you all this evening to the Oriental Institute I'm Gil Stein the director of the Institute and I'm delighted to see such a large turnout for the opening of our new exhibit before the pyramids I hope everyone is particularly well groomed this evening because we're being simulcast to a University of Chicago alumni group in Omaha so I want to the shout out to our UFC homeboys in in Omaha it's really a pleasure to acknowledge the the support of a number of people in groups who have made this wonderful exhibit possible first and foremost I'd like to thank Tom and Linda Hagee for their very generous support of this particular exhibit and it's just yet another example of their long-standing friendship and involvement with the Oriental Institute so thank you very much tom I also wanted to thank the American Research Centre in Egypt on their director Gary Scott who's with us this evening for their support of this exhibit and it's wonderful to see you back here and we're glad that your proximity to Tucker ear Square in Cairo wasn't harmful to you so welcome and thank you again on behalf of the Oriental Institute I also want to thank exelon Corporation who was a great corporate friend to the Oriental Institute and they also provided very generous support to us and finally you as the members of the Oriental Institute your your support financial and with your time and interest and involvement is also a crucial element in this exhibit so we deeply appreciate your your interest and involvement in what we do this exhibit is a real milestone in many ways for the Oriental Institute and I think it epitomizes the very best that we can do in combining both our public function of trying to make parts of the history of the ancient Near East accessible to a broader public and also in terms of scholarly excellence which I think you will see in this exhibit as well and in its remarkable catalog the problem of the pre-dynastic in Egypt is a very important and little understood one the idea of the origins of the Egyptian state is not well known and is really only a product of the last century really since sir Flinders Petrie you're going to hear a lot more about that from our exhibit curator Emily Teeter I just wanted to single out this exhibit as a case where the Institute through its collections and through some wonderful loans has been able to really shed a wonderfully informative and new light on the origins of the Egyptian state I mentioned loans because our exhibit is mostly drawn from our own Holdings but we have two extraordinary objects that the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford has very generously loaned to us and you'll be seeing them and Emily will be talking about them as well so I wanted to acknowledge the the director of the Ashmolean Museum dr. Christopher Brown and liam mcnamara also from the Ashmolean museum who made sure that the objects arrived safely and I hope both doctors Brown and McNamara are satisfied with them with the results I also finally before turning it over I wanted to thank Emily Teeter and the staff of the museum for their remarkable efforts in putting this exhibit together as you will see it's really an extraordinary achievement in presenting the wide range of material culture and social processes that led to the development of the Egyptian state so on that note I'd like to turn it over to my colleague Emily Teeter and welcome you again I've got all sorts of electronics up here so I'm trying to get settled I'm also there are seats down in front so please if you want to come forward there are places to sit well we have been looking forward to this day for several years we're delighted it's here we're very very happy with the result and we hope that you enjoy this exhibit also the themes of the show are really twofold one is that the foundations of Egyptian civilization started a thousand years before the pyramids now generally people think the pyramids that's the beginning of Egyptian history right you know it's very very early but we want to really expose this rather more hidden millennium of Egyptian history the things very the very underpinnings of Egyptian culture were founded during this time for example the idea of life after death the idea of a divine king worship of the gods the invention of writing all of these innovations started in the early dynastic and the preceding pre-dynastic periods now the material in the show in the time period we're talking about is about 4000 to about 2600 BC now another major theme in this exhibit is that many of the first features of Egyptian culture the earliest features of Gyptian culture were retained and they provide again the underpinning of Egyptian art and iconography for the next 3,000 years to give you a couple quick examples of this this is a plaque that's in the exhibit it dates to about 3,000 BC it's a votive plaque was left in a temple 3000 BC 600 BC 2500 years difference and you can see exactly the same sort of motifs or this the Narmer palette we have a cast of it in our exhibit we couldn't get the original out of Cairo they weren't going to loan it but this is the 3100 BC this is 50 BC 3000 years later and so it is really very very important to take a look at this period it was so very influential in creating Egyptian culture our show consists of about a hundred and thirty objects from the Oriental Institute's collection most of this is excavated by British groups under Flinders Petrie then we have the two master works from the Ashmolean museum which I am still just astounded that we have them and we're very very grateful to the Ashmolean for collaborating in this project now one of the major incentives to do this show was to really look at the state of pre-dynastic Egypt because for example what I learned in graduate school 2530 years ago it's basically all wrong it's changed so dramatically that there are knowledge of the pre-dynastic is evolving very very rapidly and a lot of this is due to new excavations in the northern part of the country because in the early 20th century most of our information came from the southern part of the country for example all of our material comes from the South because they simply there were not the excavations going on in the north and so this has really completely changed our idea of the rise of the state and the relationship of the southern and northern parts of Egypt there are certain themes that run through the exhibit first one is the Nile Valley talking about the natural resources and how the early Egyptians exploited them and also trade in contact each up was never in isolation it was constantly in contact and doing cultural sort of trades with her neighbors to the north south and east and to the west another theme is the discovery of the pre-dynastic period another of the bulk of the show really is pre-dynastic culture where you'll see really very good examples of pottery stonework carved stone pallets and stone tools another small case deals with earliest writing because the first writing appears about 3200 BC the very end of the pre-dynastic period and then there's quite a bit of discussion of religion during this period and particularly how it religion affected kingship or vice versa so there is discussion of the first kings and their burials and what we can tell about religion and the idea of kingship from those materials and then the last panel is the legacy of the pre-dynastic period so looking at the discovery of the pre-dynastic period of course the big figure here is Flinders Petrie the British archaeologist he was responsible for excavating many of the pre-dynastic sites and as I said most of the material in the show is from Petrie excavations one of his major contributions to our understanding of the pre-dynastic period was how do we date material before the advent of writing one of his great contributions was called sequence dating he did an examination of different types of pottery and arranged pottery by type by form and then he rearranged each type to express what looked like developments sometimes one style of pottery became more complex sometimes it became simpler but he did a sequence of these pots this does not mean he was giving exact dates to any of this material he was doing relative dates so he can tell what was earlier and what was later this was extremely important because when with these early burials of the pre-dynastic date most of these burials have a lot of pottery in them but then there are also associated objects carved ivories stone other types of things so by having this relative dating of the pottery Petrie could also assign dates to these other types of material that were found on the tombs in our exhibit we have a really lovely example of sequence dating this is the classic wavy handled jar which shows a progression from this is actually the original shape is copied from pottery from the Levant although this material is made in Egypt we know from from the type of clay and so you have those great little wavy handles and then they tend to get the jars tend to get more cylindrical getting more and more cylindrical the wavy handles start being more of a decoration and circling the jar getting flattened until right about before the first dynasty these wavy handles turn into a little sort of rope like design around the top of the vessel and then by dynasty one you start having them made in calcite and so this shows it shows several hundred years or about probably 500 years of development in this pottery sequence so this is really one of the major major achievements of Petrie some of the most beautiful objects in the show are among the oldest this is the black top red where most of the states from about about 3800 BC to about 3400 BC and there's been a lot of debate and how this was made first of all this is made out of clay which was mined along the Nile River so it was locally sourced clay very carefully worked to remove the impurities and then it was it was burnished and fired the blacktop this beautiful lustrous black is from inverting the vessel into like ash or some sort of material in the kiln and that black band also creates a less porous surface on the pottery which of course is a desirable thing if you want to have liquids in these but very very beautiful objects and also from this period from the different styles of it it looks as if even at this early date you're beginning to have craft specialization where there are people who are full-time artisans at this time this has to do really with the environment of Egypt because Egypt was a very very easy area to grow crops in and so it didn't require the entire population to be farming to feed everyone so you could actually release large numbers of the population to do specialized work like crafts which is one of the reasons the Egyptian crafts are that really crafts are so very very beautiful then the next sort of the next progression in pottery is about 3800 - about 3,300 BC BC this is called the decorated ware for pretty good reasons and you can see it has a very very different look and this is it really it it's a it's a real leap in technology for ancient Egypt this pottery the clay is called Morel and it is mined out in the deserts so you have to make an effort you have to go out there you're not gathering it next to the Nile so that alone is an expression of the value of these of these pots the morale also has to be fired in a much higher temperature which necessitated the invention of better and more efficient kilns and so we really see a whole sort of revolution in poverty during this time now these pots as you can see are decorated the thing that's very interesting about them is that there is a very very small range of decoration that normally appears on these which again indicates that it's probably done by certain workshops that are specializing in these pots another very interesting aspect of these is very often when these have been recovered from tombs they were empty and so it was not the contents of the vessel that had value it was the vessel itself and this makes a lot of sense when we start looking at the iconography the paintings on these and recent work on this has suggested that these are you know airy in nature so for example this this one these large boats the boats are a very very common feature on this decorated where these were obviously very large boats these are oars coming down cabins and then a symbol a pole with a standard that it probably refers to a deity or to a location these are thought to be probably boats that conveyed the deceased to the burial ground this type of symbol which occurs commonly also has been interpreted interpreted as a animal hide that stretched perhaps an animal hide to wrap a body in other motifs that we see are refer to regeneration there are palm trees and different types of things that refer to fertility and rebirth so these seem to have been funerary works and very very beautiful ones now stone work is really fabulous during this period in fact the earlier stone work is better than the later stone work by about the 2nd 3rd dynasty by the end of the 3rd dynasty stone work starts getting it's just not as nice as it was now first of all what you can see from this is the range of different types of stone of colors and patterns that they were working so there was very clearly an aesthetic value of this they're going out in search of very specific looks of stone and patterns so it's very clear that these are not just vessels I mean you can certainly make a container out of clay much more easily than you can make one out of stone and so again these are high-value items that reflected the prestige of the owner there have been some very interesting reconstructions of making these vessels the tools are very simple they are a little hard to see here but this is a called a wobbly drill it's an upright with two stones that creates downward force and centrifugal centrifugal force to spin so you turn the top of this there's a bit in the end of it no doubt the copper bits are aided a lot by putting sand putting abrasive like granite sand that actually probably does most of the cutting so there have been reconstructions of this one one small vessel about ten centimeters tall and ten centimetres in diameter to required 22 hours 22 and a half hours to to carve now it's also very interesting because some of these are very very labor-intensive this is the oldest object in the exhibit the states to 4,000 BC it is made out of basalt a very very hard stone basalt is mined primarily in the north and this comes from a lot of these show up in the south so we already have trade but also this very early form is so kind of whimsical because you already have this cute little triangular foot on it so they're doing much more than just making a vessel they're making something that's pleasing they also have these little lug handles probably those were originally to secure a lid over the top of the vessel and as I said the whimsical I mean the sense of playfulness in the stoneware is absolutely spectacular this is a piece that dates to about 3200 see it's made out of Brescia and there are a number of these known in form of some sort of bird and I have I have not heard a really satisfactory explanation of what's going on with these but it's it's not the only piece of this form then it's very interesting there's a lot of interplay between pottery and stone these date to roughly 3200 BC and what we have on the right is a rough where beer pot of beer jar now when the Egyptians start doing almost industrial scale brewing and baking they need vessels for the beer and so they start making this very rough actually this is a pretty nice example sometimes they're much much rougher than this but what I think is so funny is this is an imitation of that done in a very very precious red and yellow Brescia so it's something like showing off but they can have a beer jar made out of really very very beautiful stone when in fact this would have been adequate and it goes the other way also this is a very nice pear this is a standard shape the squat jar with the lug handles and this is an imitation in pottery so this is a cheap version of this and puts these spirals these wonderful little goofy spirals are supposed to be imitations of the large scale veining of these pots so it's really very charming these things have a lot of personality well religion in the earliest periods we have evidence from tombs from temple deposits we have some images of rituals and we have some remains of temples themselves primarily just the foundation trenches or rather postholes to give us an idea of what the building may have at least the layout of the building it's very clear from the earliest periods that there is a belief in life after death and of course our pit burial in our permanent gallery is a good example of this this dates to about 3200 BC in the earliest times of course bodies were not mummified they were placed directly into the the sand without mummification and of course they naturally dried out creating natural a little bit later bodies would have been wrapped in maths or reads or hides like the hides we saw on the decorated wear but by dynasty one there is a lot more experimentation and by dynasty one in fact some of these burials are in coffins this remains of a coffin er around around this body we do know that there are rituals for the dead there are the remains of a shrine at hire accomplice which is located in the necropolis so the assumption is it is associated with funerary rituals also it's quite interesting some of the potter's pottery shops are located right next to cemeteries as if they're making pots specifically for burials we know from the earliest period the Egyptians were already polytheistic because we have the names of gods now oddly enough there are very few images of gods from this very early period what we have are images of the king and this and I'll talk about this in just a minute it seems like we have a little different emphasis than we have in later Egyptian history the major gods who are Neath this is a very beautiful miniature vessel you can see it just like the ones I've shown you in the sequence dating with the name Neath Hosts hotep Neath is content so we have a lot of our evidence about these deities because the compounding of personal names they incorporate the names of gods another God was wept wha-what who is the jackal form God and he is called the opener of the waves and he was thought to open the way to the necropolis and also open the way to the kings success in military but as I said there are very few images of gods other than the cult standards the poles with a picture of an animal now a major feature of religion from the early period is the presence of offering rituals from the very early time we can tell that there was the idea that individuals would give the god or gods something in anticipation of help from the God or as thanks for the gods help in acknowledgment of the God's help so we already have this kind of reciprocal offering and relationship between people and the gods that is very very much a feature of Egyptian religion all through the rest of the Egyptian of dipsh in history and we have a nice selection of some of these little offerings from the temple at Abydos for example a little scorpion with a couple little beady eyes the tail is broken off this might have been offered to the God maybe two as a cure for scorpion stings all through Egyptian history we have a lot of different things associated with scorpion sting so it was a it was a current concern to the Egyptians or model offering vessels these are little tiny miniature fonts offering vessels that are copies of vessels that we certainly know of from later periods that were used all for next 3,000 years and later these are little miniature very inexpensive copies that individuals could buy presumably and then leave at the temple these materials and faience also suggest that in this very early period these are probably dynasty one that there is already a series of workshops that are making offerings specifically for people who are going to the temples because you don't really make faience at home and another extraordinary example this is a little ivory boy it's probably early Old Kingdom but again this idea of the early iconography being or the iconography of each of being sets so so early here he has his finger to his mouth which is the standard representation of children throughout Egyptian history so this is I think one of the earliest examples of that motif well the rise of the state is of course a very important part of the story of early Egypt and we are very very lucky that one of the objects we have from the Ashmolean is an absolutely iconic piece this is called the battlefield palette and it's this is of course before writing this is probably about 3200 BC and it shows defeated men their legs just sort of helplessly like swimming almost and here we have images of Egyptian gods probably a falcon and a and an Ibis on these cult standards again this is an image of something having to do with deity and you can see here the gods have these standards have sprouted arms and they've pinion the arms of these enemies behind their back and they're being sort of frog-marched forward and so it's a scene of the subjugation of enemies by the Egyptian state now the other side of it is really very very beautiful a major theme that we see in early dynastic art and pre-dynastic art is the sense of duality is the sense of order and chaos and this is absolutely essential in the understanding the role of the King because the king was the individual who maintained order and and suppress chaos now the sense of duality is seen for example in the crowns you know upper and lower egypt the red and white crown the lily and the papaya and the papyrus all these sorts of things and so here what we think is going on is this is a date poem which needs human assistance to be fertilized so this would represent the controlled part of nature man's control of nature and then perhaps these some very grumpy looking animals are probably the wildness of nature so again doing this contrast of wild and subdued which we see over and over and over again now the next piece that tells the story about the rise of the state is being told by the cast of the Narmer palette and I'm sure most of you know the story of this this is very important because first this is the first example where we see the two crowns this is the crown of southern Egypt and the crown of northern Egypt shown together on this monument and so when this was discovered at the end of 1800s many people thought that this commemorated a specific battle and Egypt was united politically United by this king because he is the first to be shown with both of these crowns but you can see again this this classic pose of the king smiting an enemy which is also the icon for smiting chaos the king being ordered and a falcon the symbol of the god Horus which is an incarnation or that the king is the earthly incarnation of the god Horus with a subduing again a person from the marshes from the north so you get this whole again this idea of the North versus the South and you can see that this is very much like the upper part of the battlefield palette the same position of the men who are just lost were who defeated and then the other side with the King with the crown of northern Egypt with the gods in procession leading up to defeated decapitated and castrated enemies of Egypt and then here again we have this idea of wild and tamed the wild animals being tamed by by people now the idea of kings and religion this is a wonderful little ivory plaque ivory piece of ivory with an image of King Dan one of the early kings of the first dynasty holding a mace and a staff here is wet wha-what it's a canine on a step on a standard which is slightly broken away but it's very clear increasingly clear that religion in the early period seems to be more about the king than it is about the gods and this is really quite new perspectives that are being put forward and I think there's a lot of proof for this for example as I mentioned there are very few images of gods there are images of kings so who's important here also we have architectural expressions of this this is at Abydos the site where the Kings were first kings of the first dynasty and most some of the kings of the second dynasty were buried and there are enormous enclosures this was built by King ahem who will take a look at in a minute these were it seems to be places where rituals of the King were enacted just very recently David O Connor has has discovered that they're the kings of the first dynasty it looks like when they die their enclosure is dismantled and the successor built a new one so these are not funerary enclosures these apparently do not have a use in the funerals of the kings these are used during the lifetime of the Kings added by tous near this but probably not associated with was a whole fleet of boats these were entombed encased and that along with the evidence we have texts that refer to the followers of Horus the followers of Horus are the gods who come to adore the King and so it's suggested that these enclosures are places where the gods would come and adore the King and so there's a tremendous amount of emphasis emphasis on the king as the central being in early Egyptian theology there was from the very early period many different ways to differentiate the King from his subjects and to proclaim the status of the king and one is by the use of what is called a CEREC this is supposed to be a little palace facade it looks like this element at the Djoser complex so it is a palace with the horus falcon on top and the name of the king is written within it so it's actually the king Kings name being the king himself inside his palace with the with the falcon it's sort of his incarnation as the as the falcon god is horus on top of it and so this is also a very interesting thing because I know I know most even really with cartoons cartoons do not start being used until the end of the 3rd dynasty and so this is an early way that they are making very clear this the relative status of the King versus non Kings because in a society with a very very limited literacy rate very low literacy rate if you saw us Eric it meant the presence of the King and so a very very effective way of again stressing what you put the most important part of the society is namely the Kings and then of course we have the differentiation of the King from the subjects by crowns this sort of thing and other types of motifs now one of the great pieces in our exhibit again this is a loan from the Ashmolean we are absolutely delighted to have this piece it is a statue of the last king of the second dynasty his name is Cossack M his name means who shines forth with power or his power shines forth this is a very very important statue it is thought to be the oldest inscribed statue of a king known from Egypt it is as you can tell it looks art history will follow this for the next three thousand years the frontality of the statue the blockiness of the throne the pose of the King this is established very very early and it continues on for three thousand years he wears the white crown of southern Egypt he has a robe on that may be associated with a ritual called the hem set or the Jubilee which is known from other monuments for example the Narmer mace head so a very very important statue and we actually know a little bit more about the reign of Casa hem apparently when he came to the throne Egypt was embroiled in civil war that the the state the state's unity had broken down and during his reign he was able to reunify the state an image of symbol of that is he changed his name from Cossack m to Casa hem we which means his double power shines forth so of a sense of the northern and southern parts of the country but the statue is really incredible because the base when you look at this they take a very good look at their little scratchie scenes of fallen enemies kind of like this just scrolled all over the place these are the defeated enemies and you notice there they're literally under his feet and we see this also from later Egyptian statuary but the front of the statue has this really great inscription that says that he defeated forty seven thousand two hundred and nine precisely foreign enemies and here's here's the northern enemy just like we saw on the Narmer palette with the with the with the papyrus coming out of the head so these are northern enemies so but now issue is is this a historical document or is it not a historical document you know you'd say well he must have counted this if you've got forty seven thousand two hundred and nine you know you must know what he's talking about but it gets very very squirrely trying to figure out what is fact and what is wishful thinking what is commemoration because from later periods we have scenes that repeat for our example several times in the Old Kingdom there is a scene of a king defeating a Libyan Libyan chieftain and says he took X number of prisoners exactly that same scene is known about four more times space through Egyptian history for the next several thousand years so either this Libyan you know I had like nine lives you know well spaced out or we have to be very careful to take some of these historical records with a grain of salt if so this would be again a reminder of the king is capable of doing this that this is the role of the king well the power of the King is also very evident in the in the royal tombs for example this is the tomb of Jer at Abydos these become very very complex the middle of this would have had a very large wooden shrine to the body of the King and then there would have been offerings left around in the tomb now these tombs were robbed in antiquity several times so we really don't know what was in them but we've got little bitsy pieces of the material and it gives you an idea a little hint of how rich these burials were for example from the from the tomb we have a lot of different weapons and we have bone arrowheads and then we have things that are just really kind of ridiculous crystal arrowheads if it's wretched excess it's showing off its we see this very often because the Kings have the monopoly over the best materials over the best workmen they can do basically whatever they want and so we see this really kind of over-the-top production of things that could be done in much simpler materials but it reflects of course the power and prestige of the King or things like beautiful examples of ivory from the tombs this is from the tomb of Jer and this is a leg of a piece of furniture it's quite small so it might have been from a game box or a little chest but in the form of a animals hoof on a little spool but beautifully carved and again it's if this is ivory of course is very precious and they're using it in big quantities in fact from this tomb we have a lot of ivory inlays that are overlays that covered presumably wood furniture and a thing I find so sort of funny about this is you you could interpret these geometric patterns as being basketry or rush ware or some sort of rush which is the material that ordinary people would make their furniture out of and so the kings are perhaps making wood furniture covering it with ivory and saying oh it's you know it's just you know looks like rush you know so there's this incredible conspicuous Consultant consumption going on in this in this period now the power the king is also expressed by the subsidiary subsidiary burials the kings of the first dynasty and some of the second and also some of the enclosures of first dynasty Kings were surrounded by these rows of little graves and some of the Kings had over 300 of these tombs around their own tomb the question is well what are these they most of them had at one time had burials in them the nature of the circumstances of these barrels is is hotly contested Gunther Dreyer who's been working my toes pointed out that most of the bodies when they are intact enough seem to be around 25 years old and so it seems kind of unlikely that 300 people who are about 25 years old or dying a natural death all at the same time and also architectural II there's some hints because these seem to be roofed at one time giving us the impression that these people were probably sacrificed and buried next to the king and it's up it's really very appointed because each of these tombs presumably it originally had its own little two marker these have all been scattered away from the tombs and so they're out of context but we have three of them in the exhibit and so these are really the lifeline to immortality of these people to Eternity because their name was recorded so these people had enough status and cachet to warrant being buried next to the king but also to be commemorated by a tombstone with their name on it the one on the left is irika II her name means it's a woman my companion is my call or my cause my companion and the one on the right is session ke she who guides my car so they also vary with these names that incorporate this concept of CAW clearly there's already this rather sophisticated idea of the soul in the afterlife now it's quite interesting also the material from the tombs of the quarters is very simple it's very similar to that of the of what is found in the royal tombs for example this really fabulous little game piece in the form of a lioness this was found in a subsidiary burial but these examples of these also come from the royal tombs so it's very possible we're looking at the Kings giving gifts to these quarters servants whatever their status was and then another example from subsidiary burials just extraordinary workmanship these have to be coming out of royal workshops from the type of the stone and the quality of the carving really very beautiful but they are from subsidiary burials well in summary then I hope that this exhibit gives you a new appreciation of the importance of the earliest era in the formation of Egyptian culture thank you very much

Channel: The University of Chicago

Views: 412,185

Rating: 4.4113979 out of 5

Keywords: ancient egypt lecture, before the pyramids the origins of egyptian civilization, ancient egypt history lectures, the origin of egypt, before the pyramids, emily teeter, emily teeter egyptologist, emily teeter chicago, ancient egypt lectures online, the origin of egyptian civilization, predynastic egypt, Predynastic and Early Dynastic, ancient history lecture, lectures on history, oriental institute, university of chicago, uchicago, ancient egypt, oi100

Id: GEWGy6gP1jw

Length: 40min 14sec (2414 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 20 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/treeforface]

This was a nice short lecture, especially if you're interested in any of the eras of ancient Egypt.

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