Masa Documentary Subscribe and Share Egypt Before The Pharaohs | who lived in Egypt before the pharaohs | documentary Direct Link : https://youtu.be/CqhOREFEqnI Press Here To View All Documentaries In playlist : https://goo.gl/JB4Dr9 ------ There have been various accounts of pre-pharaonic Egypt but hitherto no one book which dealt with the subject adequately. This book now fills the gap and fills it splendidly. The author devoted his PhD studies to the topic and took part in the Hierakonpolis excavations. He skilfully combines a most useful digest of the literature with entertaining accounts of the history of the research and of the characters involved. In the earlier part attention is rightly concentrated on the period from 12000-6000 BC when experiments were going on in the exploitation of grain as a food source. For a time there was quite a stir at the possibility of 'an independent Egyptian invention of agriculture', but present evidence does not in fact demonstrate a progression from wild grain exploitation to village farming. Increased aridity after 10000 BC or Nile Valley flooding have been advanced as reasons for this non-fulfilment of potential. The best explanation for the violence evidenced in the stone points embedded in the burials of the Jebel Sahaba cemetery, dated between 12000 and 5000 BC, still seems to be competition for scarce resources. The author provides a useful corrective to the later Egyptian view of the peoples of the Sahara as desert barbarians by showing that in earlier times the position was reversed, since they contributed 'those critical innovations like farming, cattle pastoralism and long-distance trade'. There may be some oversimplification here, and the writing on early Saharan and sub-Saharan food-production is less up-to-date than most of the rest of the book. The sources of Egyptian 'divine kingship' are viewed as developments native to Upper Egypt, as evidenced by the increasing incidence there in the predynastic archaeological record of the symbols of the power and prestige of an emerging elite, contrasted with the absence of such things in Lower Egypt. Frankfort's view that the divine kingship idea arose out of a common African substratum is rejected in favour of it being a peculiarly Egyptian invention which became available to those rulers of African kingdoms and states who consciously sought props for their regimes. Although the author could not be accused of belonging to the old school of hyperdiffusionists he nevertheless illustrates this idea with one of those 'trait-chasing' pictures characteristic of that school, in which a Yoruba woodcarving made less than 100 years ago is juxtaposed to an Egyptian Archaic ivory statue 5,000 years old. No consideration is given to the third alternative, of convergence, in which similar responses were made to similar needs over a wide extent of space and time Carneiro saw the causative factors for the emergence of the ancient Egyptian state in the warfare between different groups, with expanding populations competing for limited agricultural land constricted by the desert. Hoffman cites Butzer, in contradiction of this idea, to the effect that in predynastic times the whole of the Nile Valley was not equally densely populated and that agricultural land was not particularly scarce; and suggests that the prevalence of warfare was more due to competition between emerging local rulers and elites for the trappings which provided the supporting props and symbols of power and authority. For the emergence of the Egyptian state, therefore, Hoffman invokes Renfrew's 'multiplier principle', in which one or more of a number of interacting factors cross a critical threshold to set up a chain reaction with all the others. Eight such factors are listed and explored – population, environmentaI change, technology, subsistence, social stratification, religion and the cult of the dead, trade and warfare. It is suggested that the crucial one may have been, not a general rise in population, but comparatively sudden concentrations of population around a number of separate ceremonial centres in Upper Egypt in the two or three centuries before 3100 BC. Another factor which may have played a part but which is ignored in this book is energy capture. The harnessing of oxen to the plough, the investment of energy in making irrigation works to utilise the force of gravity, the use of the same energy source for down-river transport and of wind-power for sailing upstream, and the domestication of the donkey as a pack animal – all these injected additional energy into the system and helped to bring about the 'take-off' point resulting from the 'multiplier principle'. ------- who lived in Egypt before the pharaohs before the pharaohs egypt's mysterious prehistory egypt before the pharaohs pdf civilization before pharaohs papyrus of turin who ruled egypt first civilizations older than egypt

• published: 11 Nov 2017
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