A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [33]
The label-maker’s job was, however, deadly serious: to keep his leader looking invincible and semi-divine, and to show that Den was the only man who could guarantee what Egyptians, like everybody else, wanted from their rulers – law and order. Within the pharaoh’s realm, everybody was expected to conform and to take on a clear Egyptian identity. The message of our sandal label is that the price of opposition was high and painful.
This message is carried not only in the image but also in the writing. There are some early hieroglyphs scratched into the ivory which give us the name of King Den and, between him and the enemy, the chilling words ‘they shall not exist’. This ‘other’ is going to be obliterated. All the tricks of savage political propaganda are already here – the ruler calm and victorious, set against the alien, defeated, misshapen enemy. Who he is we don’t know, but on the right of the label is an inscription which reads: ‘The first occasion of smiting the east’. As the sandy ground beneath the figures rises to the right-hand side, it has been suggested that the enemy comes from Sinai in the east.
The area that King Den’s unified Egyptian state was able to coerce and control is staggering. At its height, it included virtually all the Nile Valley from the Delta to what is modern Sudan, as well as a huge area to the east up to the borders of Sinai. I asked the archaeologist Toby Wilkinson what building a state on this scale required:
This is an early period in Egypt’s history, when the nation is still being consolidated, not so much territorially as ideologically and psychologically. The king and his advisers are looking for ways to reinforce Egypt’s sense of its own nationhood, and support for their regime. I think they realized, as world leaders have realized throughout history, that nothing binds a nation and a people together quite so effectively as a foreign war against a common enemy, whether that enemy is real or manufactured. And so warfare plays really a key role in the consolidation of the Egyptians’ sense of their own nationhood.
It’s a discouragingly familiar strategy. You win hearts and minds at home by focusing on the threats from abroad, but the weapons that you need to crush the enemy also come in handy when you’re dealing with domestic opponents. The political rhetoric of foreign aggression is backed up by very brisk policing at home.
So the apparatus of the modern state had already been forged at the time of King Den, with enduring consequences which were artistic as well as political. Only power of this order could organize the enormous building projects that these early pharaohs embarked on. Den’s elaborate tomb, with granite shipped from hundreds of miles away, and the later, even grander pyramids were possible only because of the extraordinary control which Egyptian pharaohs could exercise over the minds and the bodies of their subjects. Den’s sandal label is a miniature masterclass in the enduring politics of power.
12
Standard of Ur
Wooden box inlaid with mosaic, found at the royal cemetery of Ur, southern Iraq
2600–2400 BC
At the centre of pretty well all great cities, in the middle of the abundance and the wealth, the power and the busy-ness, you’ll usually find a monument to death on a massive scale. It is the same in Paris, Washington, Berlin and London. In Whitehall, for example, just a few yards from Downing Street, the Treasury and the Ministry of Defence, the Cenotaph marks the death of millions in the great wars of the last century. Why is death at the heart of our cities? Perhaps one explanation is that in order to retain the wealth and power that our cities represent, we have to be willing to defend them from those who covet them. This object, from one of the oldest and richest cities of them all, seems to say quite clearly that the power of cities to get rich is indissolubly linked to the power to wage and win wars.