The Beginning of (Sacred) History in Egypt

1. The era around 3000 BCE was distinguished by Egyptian historiography itself. King lists and annals reach back to this period and various cultural and technological innovations are credited to it. Such depth of historical memory was a function of its conditioning possibility, the advent of writing. 2. Writing did not come alone. The later 4th and early 3d millennia BCE witnessed a series of processes which constitute an epistemological breakthrough. These included instances of urban concentration, craft specialization, technological innovations in agriculture and architecture, integration into supra-regional and international trade networks, emergence of regional political entities and associated modes of élite display. The evidence associated with these developments raises complex methodological issues of representativeness, and for the integration of the written, pictorial and archaeological records. Traditional Egyptological narratives of political unification through territorial accretion now yield to models of cultural, ideological, economic and political integration, stressing the interplay of longue durée with radical changes, local perspectives and centrally induced processes. Writing was not only, nor even primarily, a technology of administrative control, but a component of a broader semiotic revolution, in complex engagement with other, mostly pictorial and highly restricted modes of celebration and display. 3. Egyptian “sacred history” referred to a foundational First Time (sp tpy), to be ritually re-enacted and celebrated in the present in response to the ever-threatening chaos. Egyptian sacred history was itself a historical product, associated with the emergence of ideologically defined ‘national boundaries.' The fixation of rules of decorum and the development of centrally-sponsored formal culture designed a means of expressing “sacred history.” These concepts defined Egyptian civilization for millennia to follow - inter alia making it “distinctively Egyptian” in the layman's eye - and the methodological issues raised for Egyptological historiography.