Free Early Dynastic Egypt by Toby A. H. Wilkinson Page A

very development of Egyptian writing can be seen in this context (Postgate et al. 1995), and the bone labels from tomb U-j emphasise the link between economic activity (especially long-distance trade) and bureaucratic sophistication. Since their control of resources gave the rulers of Predynastic Upper Egypt their political authority, it was clearly of great importance to ensure that accurate records were kept of receipts and deliveries, and that property was easily identified. The serekh —a panelled rectangle representing a section of the facade of the royal palace— seems to have been chosen as a mark of royal ownership. A serekh incised or painted in
ink on a vessel denoted that the contents were the produce and/or property of the royal court. At first, a simple serekh was enough to convey this message; later, the individual ruler incorporated his name within the panel to specify ownership more precisely (Müller 1938:13–17; cf. Kaiser and Dreyer 1982: fig. 14). Serekh s incised or painted on pottery vessels for this purpose constitute our earliest corpus of royal names. The distribution of particular royal names gives an indication, albeit a rough one, of the extent of a king’s economic influence or political power. Hence, it is possible in some degree to trace the rise of the Egyptian state. Whereas vessels bearing the names of some kings (such as ‘Ka’) are attested rather rarely, Narmer’s name has been found incised on vessels from sites throughout Egypt and southern Palestine, emphasising that his rule probably extended over the entire Nile valley and beyond.
     
THE DYNAMICS OF STATE FORMATION
     
As we have seen, the various trends which led to the formation of the Egyptian state were gradual processes which began in the early Predynastic period. Increasing social stratification, the development and expression of an ideology of rule, the spread of Upper Egyptian technology and other cultural attributes throughout the country, the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a few ruling families, the intensification of foreign trade, the invention of writing and the emergence of a literate bureaucracy: these were not sudden developments, although the pace of change seems to have accelerated during the last quarter of the fourth millennium BC. What is clear is that these processes did not affect all regions of the country to the same extent. Local and regional factors such as the economic resource base, topography, communications and distance from the centres of power affected to a considerable extent the pace of developments at individual sites (Malek 1986:26; Wilkinson 1996b: 89–90). Those localities which already enjoyed economic and political influence continued to develop rapidly, whilst the quieter backwaters (for example, Middle Egypt) participated hardly at all in the momentous changes sweeping the country. Indeed, it is likely that many smaller farming communities were relatively unaffected by Egyptian unification and the advent of a national government, except that they now paid taxes to the central treasury rather than to local or regional élites. When considering state formation in Egypt, it is important to recognise this pattern of regional variation, and of local variation within regions. The process was not a monolithic one, and although its ultimate effects were felt throughout Egypt, certain localities played a much greater role in determining the outcome.
Although the characteristics of early states are broadly similar for different regions of the ancient world, the factors involved in state formation are likely to have varied according to particular circumstances (Cohen 1978). Different authors have postulated different ‘prime movers’, that is principal factors, for the emergence of the Egyptian state (Bard 1994:1–5). These include population pressure (Carneiro 1970; Bard and Carneiro 1989), prompting Upper Egyptian rulers to annex the fertile fields of the