MIDEAST 293- Midterm 1

Mastaba

• bench-like funerary structure

• term means bench in arabic

• tombs for the elite and officials

• used in the development of the step pyramid

• had offering shrines (in a room called the serdab) with statues of the diseased

Red Land, Black Land

• a sign of the duality of Egypt

• Tawy ("the two lands")

• "kemet" = the black land where silt is deposited during inundation

• black land is the nile valley (fertile soil, lots of people live there)

• black land has nutrition

• "deshret" = where nobody lives, dessert and sad

• black land is the nile valley (fertile soil, lots of people live there)

• red land = foreign land

• red land is sandy, less people live there

• black land has nutrition

Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt

• Nile Delta = Lower Egypt

• "ta-shemau"

• Lower Egypt --> more marshy land, produces reeds (which makes papyrus), humid

• Nile Valley = Upper Egypt

• "ta-mehu"

• Upper Egypt --> floodplains, lots of silt, grows a lot of grain for bread and beer

Wadi Hammamat

• the desert valley from the Nile to the Red Sea

• major mining region that had a lot of expensive natural resources

• resources lie copper, tin, gold, greywacke

• expeditions to Wadi Hammamat were recorded bc they were such administrative feats

• material for the king's sarcophagus was collected here

• dangerous territory

texts:

• papyrus map of wadi hammahat

• mentuhotep iv quarrying inscriptions

Manetho

• 255-240 BCE

• Ptolemaic period

• wrote the Aegyptiaca-- a written history of the past kings of Egypt

• actual work is lost

• wrote in Greek (Egypt was ruled by Greece at that time)

• his work is cited and referenced in other scholarly works hundreds of years after him

• the pyramids of Ancient Egypt were already ancient to him

Kinglists

• historical records of the ruling kings of Egypt

• sometimes people would leave out kings if they were not considered "worthy" (ex. female kings, kings that were considered weak or their succession was challenged, etc)

• people would make seals/impressions of the kinglists and press them on clay

• offered legitimacy to kings/dynasties and were often found in tombs/pyramids

• palermo stone is an example of a kinglist

Ma'at

• the egyptian concept of order

• relates back to the idea of duality: order over chaos, etc (ma'at vs. isfet)

• kings were expected to keep ma'at

• divine order

Naquada Culture

• late predynastic period

• can be divided into naquada 1, 2, and 3

• material culture-- seeing how culture changes through changes in material goods/objects

• had Tomb 100

• sites in Upper Egypt (like Hierakonpolis)

• showed shift from burials in ground to people in power getting tombs

Umm el-Qaab at Abydos

• burial ground/funerary site dating to predynastic period/first dynasty

• earliest evidence of written language found here

• there were subsidiary graves-- people were killed and buried near the person in power

• narmer palette was found here

Step Pyramid

• 3rd dynasty

• built by King Djoser

• showed the transition to the old kingdom period

• built out of stone, not out of mudbrick like previous burial tombs

• built in stages-- a mastaba, then a smaller pyramid encompassing the mastaba, then a larger pyramid encompassing all three

• built at Saqqara

Sneferu

• king of the 4th dynasty

• built the first true pyramid

• built three pyramids at daishur and meidum

• used the most stone out of all the kings for building pyramids

Abusir Papyri

• 5th dynasty

• administrative papyri that details people leaving offerings at the temple of a king that passed 50 years prior to the abusir papyri

• showed that people still worshipped the kings after their passing

• showed records of important temple items being repaired

Merer

• 4th dynasty senior administrator

• wrote a logbook that recorded the transport of Tura limestone (which was prized for how white it was) to Khufu's pyramid

• logbook detailed transporting the limestone, paying workers in bread

Pyramid town of Giza

• 4th dynasty

• a town where workers (administrators, builders, craftsmen, etc) for the pyramids of Giza lived

• workers for Giza were likely part of a corvee labor force

• bakeries found at the site make us think that bread and beer formed the majority of the workers diet

• there was also evidence of meat (cattle/goat/sheep slaughter and fish)

hieratic

• an older script of egyptian

• a "cursive" form of heiroglyphs

• used for day-to-day writing (tax documents, letters, etc) until the development of the demotic script

• Merer's logbook was written in hieratic

Hieroglyphs

• ancient egyptian writing system

• "sacred carving" in greek

• each hieroglyph was a picture of something in the world to represent what they depict

• also used the rebus principle

• the rosetta stone was monumental in helping us decipher hieroglyphs

scribe

• scribes were writers and record keepers

• highly educated--> literacy rates in egypt were low (esp in the old and middle kingdom) so scribes were elite officials

• would go to scribal schools to learn the trade of writing and reading

Ankhtifi

-9th-10th dynasty (first intermediate period)

• nomarch of the 2nd and 3rd nomes

• talked about giving bread to the ungry and clothing to the naked, etc etc et

• talks about taking care of towns in crisis

• brags about how his nome didn't go hungry while upper egypt was starving

• talks about himself like a king-- talks about how Horus fetched him to rehabilitate nome of Edfu