Читать книгу A History of Ancient Egypt - Marc Van De Mieroop - Страница 15

Where are the borders of ancient Egypt? Arabic speakers today use the same name for the modern country of Egypt as did the people of the Near East in the millennia BC, Misr. Other people employ a form of the Greek term Aegyptos, which may derive from Hikuptah, the name of a temple and neighborhood in the city Memphis. It is easy to equate the ancient and modern countries, but today’s remarkably straight borders, which imperial powers drew in modern times, do not mark the limits of ancient Egypt. We can better envision those by using as a starting point what is and always was the lifeline of the country, the Nile. Running through a narrow valley south of modern Cairo and fanning out into a wide alluvial plain north of the city, the river enables people to farm, live in villages and cities, and build and create the monuments and other remains we use to reconstruct the country’s history. From the 1st cataract at Aswan to the Mediterranean Sea it forms the core of Egypt, today as in the past. The people who lived in this core reached beyond it into the western and eastern deserts and upriver south of the 1st cataract. At times their reach was extensive, affecting distant places in the west, areas along the Mediterranean coast in the east and north, and parts of the Nile Valley deep into modern Sudan.

It is not always obvious how far ancient Egypt extended, and our ability to determine that often depends on research priorities and modern events. As tourists still do today, the earliest explorers of ancient Egypt focused their attention almost exclusively on the Nile Valley, where monuments and ancient sites are visible and in easy reach. It requires a different effort to venture into the deserts beyond the valley, very inhospitable and so vast that ancient remains are not always easy to find. Yet the ancient Egyptians traveled through this hinterland and settled in oases. In recent years, archaeologists have spent much more time investigating these zones than they did before, a deliberate shift of research strategies. Sometimes the move is less voluntary. When the modern Egyptian state decided to construct the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s, it was clear that the artificial lake behind it would submerge a vast zone with ancient Egyptian remains. Thus archaeologists rushed to the region, producing in a short time span many more data than had been collected in a hundred years of earlier research.

Despite the greater attention that archaeologists now devote to the areas of Egypt outside the Nile Valley, they still spend most of their time in the core area, and conditions in the valley dictate to a great extent how we view the ancient country. It is easy to think that Egypt was a place of tombs and temples only, as those so dominate the remains visible today. Built of stone or carved in the rocks, they are well preserved, a preservation aided by the fact that they are often located at the desert’s edge, out of the reach of Nile floods and of farmers who need land for fields. Compared to tombs and temples, the remnants of ancient cities and villages, built in mud brick in a valley that was annually flooded before the construction of the Aswan dams, are paltry. Mostly buried underneath thick layers of later deposit, only small areas of them have been excavated, and we rely often on a number of settlements connected to funerary complexes in the desert to reconstruct urban and village life. Ancient Egypt was an urban society, albeit with smaller cities than elsewhere in the Near East, yet information about the conditions of the people when alive often is obscured by the mass of evidence we have on the dead.