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Titles of the Egyptian king

Senenmut’s name and title, steward of Amon

Cartouches of Thutmose III

Cartouche of Amenhotep II

Cartouche of Akhenaton

The god Aton in original form

Aton as a sun disk, with rays ending in hands

Cartouche of Ramses II

Cartouche of Psamtik

List of Color Illustrations in Photograph Insert

Hemiun the Vizier

Queen Hetepheres’ burial chamber

Pyramid texts

Hatshepsut

Senenmut

Temple of Deir el Bahri

Hatshepsut’s Red Chapel, Open Air Museum at Karnak

Thutmose III

Thutmose III’s tomb, decoration of burial chamber

Fat Amenhotep III

Canopic chest of Tutankhamon

Colossus of Akhenaton

Kiya, Hermopolis

Amenhotep, son of Hapu

Temple of Ramses II, Abu Simbel

Temple of Ramses III, Medinet Habu, Luxor

Pyramids of Meroe

List of Maps

Ancient Egypt

Nubia

The Near East During the New Kingdom Period

Three Roads to Megiddo

Setting of the Battle of Kadesh

One

THE TWO LANDS

The Nebti name of Menes

GEB THE HUNTER

One bright summer afternoon in the year 5263 B.C., a man stood on the cliffs high above the Nile Valley. He was slightly built and only a few inches over five feet in height; his brown body was naked except for a kilt of tanned hide. But he held himself proudly, for he was a tall man among his people, and a leader of men. The people he led clustered about him—women peering timidly out from a tangle of black hair, hushing the children in their arms; men bearing their weapons, bow and arrow and stone ax. The wind blew hot behind them; they had turned their backs on the desert. Once it had not been desert. Once, in the time of their ancestors, there had been water, and green growing things, and animals to kill for food. Now the god had withdrawn his hand from their homeland. And so they looked with bright apprehensive eyes into the new land below, a green slash of life cutting through the growing desolation all around. The leader’s keen vision saw the gleam of water and the flicker of birds’ wings; his hunter’s ears caught the far-off bellow of a hippopotamus. There was food below, and water; yet still the leader of the tribe hesitated. He knew the old life, with all its perils. Could he face the more chilling peril of the unknown and, unaware of destiny, take the first step toward the pyramids?

It is a pity that this picturesque episode must belong to fiction rather than history. Some of the details may be true. The first prehistoric cultures in Egypt are dated to around 5500 B.C., but not even the miracle of carbon 14 could give a date so specific as the one mentioned above. At some point in the remote past, man came out of the desert into the valley of the Nile and settled into small villages. He may have looked something like the leader of the tribe who, in a historical novel, would be christened Geb or Ab, or something equally monosyllabic and prehistoric. But it is unlikely that a single man with a vision initiated the transition from nomadic hunters to village farmers. The change took place over long centuries.

Admittedly, the signs of the great change are not dramatic when they are seen in dusty museum cases—flint knife blades and arrowheads, not very different at a casual glance from the crude tools of the hunters; tattered scraps of a woven basket that once held grain; the bones of a dog, appearing, to an untrained eye, like the bones of any wild beast. Yet the transition is more important than the pyramids and more exciting, in its implications, than the golden treasure of a Tutankhamon. We find ourselves here at the beginning of a long and momentous chapter in the great book of man. As the pages turn, we will meet kings and conquerors, poets and inventors. We will conjure up visions of treasure unsurpassed by the most luxuriant forms of imaginative fiction; we will encounter the darker aspects of the human spirit as well as its bright triumphs. Yet never again, perhaps, will we see the human animal take a step so gigantic as this first one, little known and poorly recorded as it is.

Scholars usually place the first “revolution” in