Farming and matriarchyB
Eight thousand years ago the sand dunes of northern Africa were spreading, and great regions of northern Africa were becoming increasingly dry and slowly turning into desert. As northern Africa became drier, herbivores could find nothing to eat there during the dry season, but could still find grass growing in oases and in the Nile Delta -- these places were watered throughout the year by springs or by the never-failing Nile. Hunter-gatherers followed the animals that they hunted, and many found themselves in the Nile Delta.
In the Delta region they came into contact with nomads who wandered through the region, carrying and replanting grass seeds that had been domesticated in the Middle East. It was from these newcomers that the hunter-gatherer women of Africa acquired seeds from the Levant.
In the course of the next thousand years parts of the Delta region were turning green with Middle-Eastern grass, which were sown and reaped by descendants of African hunter-gatherers. These crops of grain were grown by women, while their men hunted.
The farmers of the Egyptian Delta were not ruled by warriors, as were many villages and cities of the Middle East. Rather, the earliest Egyptian societies were egalitarian -- until elite classes took over.
Households were also increasingly ruled by women, because women were the breadwinners. They not only sowed and reaped crops, but they mostly took care of livestock that provided their families with meat and milk. The men of the Delta were pretty much useless.
Cattle herding in the Sahara and the Sahel
By contrast, the Sahara region to the west was a man's world. During periods when rainfall increased in the Sahara, people sometimes moved cattle into those newly green regions and herded them about there, and the cattle were owned by the men who herded them. Since cattle were the basis of wealth, men tended to rule the societies of these nomads.
As the Sahara became increasingly dry, the cattle herders of the Sahara moved south, into the Sahel, and their descendants are still there, many of them still herding about the Fulani-Sudanese cattle that have descended from cattle that had earlier been herded about in the Sahara region.
Farmers in the Nile Valley
Large areas in the Nile Valley were flooded annually by overflow of the Nile. When the water receded, the ground was damp, and rich with silt that had been deposited over a period of thousands of years. This was perfect for planting domesticated crops: grain. lentils and other crops that had been further domesticated in the delta region and in oases.
As in the Delta region, women in these Nile Valley settlements generally elected their own female rulers. and they, also adopted the red crown that was worn by rulers in the Delta Region. This crown advertised the femininity of the ruler.
Body-painting palettes
Body-painting palettes were used by wealthy Egyptians for pulverizing and mixing pigments that they used for painting their bodies. These luxury items, carved out of solid stone by skilled craftsmen,
The scenes carved into them depicted scenes from Egyptian life which often tell us something about early Egyptian society. For instance, when a man and his wife (or a woman and her husband) were depicted on a palette, the wife would invariably be depicted with her arm across her husband's shoulders, indicating possession. (This is the opposite of our own society.)
There is little doubt that less wealthy Egyptians (men and women) also painted their bodies, in order to accentuate attractive features and identify the wearer in various ways, as does lipstick and facial painting does today.
The Egyptian Gender Wars
The people who made up the population of Upper Egypt (the Nile Valley) were not all of local origin; some of them had moved into the region from other places, such as the Western Desert. in particular, a good part of the population at Nekhen -- just short of Mount Silsila, which marked the cultural boundary between Egypt and Nubia, had originated in Nubia, where wealth was based on ownership of cattle, and the cattle were owned and herded about by men.
Nubia was strongly patriarchal, whereas Egyptian society was matriarchal at that time, and the two sets of cultural values clashed. At Nekhen, this clash led to a male revolt, led by men who met in secret at temples with male priests who catered to male worshipers. After a revolt at Nekhen, which replaced the matriarchy there by a patriarchy, a series of gender wars proceeded stepwise along the Nile Valley, from south to north. The king whose war of conquest reached The Mediterranean Sea, far to the north, was named Menes, or alternatively Narmer, and he is generally considered to have been the first Pharoah of Egypt.
It may have been in the course of the Gender Wars that the nose of the Great Sphynx was broken off and that the lion's mane was trimmed back. The invaders may have assumed that the Great Sphynx was meant to represent a woman with a lion's body, since Lower Egypt was led by a matriarchy. To punish the goddess who would presume to be so powerful, the invaders may have cut off the Sphynx's nose and trimmed back the lion's mane in punishment. (The supreme goddess in the early Egyptian pantheon was goddess of the hunt, among other things, so those who punished the Sphynx were not totally mistaken -- people in the Delta might also have considered that the Great Sphynx represented their Supreme Goddess.)
The Palette of Narmer
A graphic illustration of Narmer's animus toward female enemies is to be found on the "Palette of Narmer", which tells the story of his victories. On this small, carefully crafted (pre-literate) slab of stone, Menes, or Narmer, is shown holding the very long hair of a very tiny severed head and flinging the head around. The hair is very long and the head is very tiny because this enemy is female, and the female is further dehumanized by hiding her face.
Narmer is shown barefoot on the Palette because he and his army had to walk through soggy fields while they were fighting in the Delta. A servant walks behind him, carrying his sandals.
An interesting thing about these gender wars, with regard to evolution, is that men who joined Narmer's army, and those who joined the armies that other kings assembled, did not generally pass on their genes -- those who stayed home and guarded their wives' grain supplies were the ones who passed on their genes, and the transitional struggles were a time when the long-headed people of predynastic Egypt were replaced by the round-headed people of dynastic times.
It is doubtful that Lower Egypt was subdued in a single stroke. More likely, the Delta region had to be invaded again and again (by successive Pharoah rulers). Menes knew that subjugation of the Delta Region had barely begun, and this is graphically illustrated by Narmer's gesture of flinging about the severed head.
Narmer is pictured on the Palette wearing two crowns: the white crown and the red crown, which males had not been allowed to wear, even when they had risen ro power through a family connection. The red crown featured external female genitalia to emphasize that it should not be worn by a male in any event.
While red crowns signified the wearer as being female, the white crown was shaped like a phallus, so it was also an ikon that identified the sex of the wearer, and females who later came to power through family connections never wore the white crown.
War and peace
It is probably not proper to call Narmer a Pharoah, although he is sometimes referred to as the first of the Pharoahs. He was simply a military commander who established suzerainty over a number of powerful cities in Upper Egypt and invaded Lower Egypt. He and his direct descendants in the First Dynasty chose to be buried at Abydos, although their real power base was probably further south. It is interesting to note that in spite of Narmer's strongly patriarchal bias, the First Dynasty included at least two queens. They probably ruled in the place of heirs to the throne who were not yet old enough to rule on their own behalf. One of these queens actually made it onto king lists, no doubt because her son felt that she belonged there.
These early rulers of Egypt could only maintain and extend their power by means of war or the threat of war. They did not have integrated communication system by which they could directly maintain control over such a great domain, but successive kings and successive dynasties must have gradually developed institutions that enabled a degree of direct control over Egypt.
As the Delta region and the fertile oases came under direct control of the Pharoahs another problem arose: In spite of being governed by a patriarchal or military administration, Egypt was matriarchal in its social structure, in that women generally ruled the affairs of the family, such as collection of rents and the hiring of servants. This was particularly true in the case of farmers, because women planted the grass seeds, gathered and processed the harvest, and cooked the family meals, and this left little for men to do. The result, for men, was boredom, and this led to conspiracies that were hatched in temples, followed by raids on neighboring communities.
As Pharoahs brought all of Egypt under their direct control, they no longer needed such large armies., and the resulting unemployment of young men made the problem worse. The solution was massive building projects that utilized manpower to quarry giant blocks of stone and to pile them into great pyramids that served as burial places for the rulers of Egypt.
Foreigners, remilitarization of Egypt, political corruption and Semitic rulers
The period of prosperity came to an end when the climate changed and began to vacillate. During dry conditions that affected North Africa and the Levant, strangers migrated into the Nile Delta, which was still well watered by the more consistent flow of the Nile. The newcomers came into conflict with Egyptian farmers in the Delta region, and this caused the remilitarization of Egypt. Corruption became rife in both Upper and Lower Egypt as various cliques jockeyed for power, using military power to support various candidates for the Egyptian throne, and Egypt split into two parts, with rival Pharoahs ruling in Upper and Lower Egypt. Pharoahs succeeded each other in rapid succession in both Upper and Lower Egypt, and this left an opening for relative newcomers to Egypt, mostly Semites from the Levant, to seize power in Lower Egypt. The Semitic rulers of Lower Egypt were known as the Hyksos.
The accession of a Semitic dynasty to the throne of Egypt encouraged still more people to come into Egypt from the Levant. Joseph, the son of Jacob and Rachel, could have been among this new wave of immigrants.
Egyptians remembered the Hyksos as oppressors, and saw their period of rule as a disaster, but the Hyksos had had a much greater knowledge about the outside world than had their Egyptian predecessors, and they brought many new things to Egypt -- including horses and chariots, which later Egyptian Pharoahs used to good effect as a kind of early pony express. that improved communication in their great domain. The later Pharoahs copied the Hyksos practice of establishing diplomatic contacts with the outside world, and then sent armies abroad, collected tribute, and became rich. This new period of prosperity is known to Egyptologists as the New Kingdom.
The Hyksos held onto power in Egypt for about a hundred years, in spite of the fact that they lacked a powerful ideology to support their rule, such as the ideology of war that had supported the expansion of Yamnaya-related peoples. But Semites of the Middle East did later develop three powerful ideologies that are still playing powerful roles in the world today: Judaism, Islam and Christianity.
A dead Egyptian prince
A Pharoah of the New Kingdom, or perhaps the priests who lived off the largess of ordinary Egyptians who worshipped at the temples, decided that there were too many strangers in Egypt who worshipped their own God rather than the Egyptian gods, and did not come to the temples. The Pharoah therefore decreed that the firstborn of each Semitic family should be killed in order to reduce the Hebrew population. (I call them Hebrews because that is the name by which some of their descendants came to be known.)
One day a Hebrew infant, wrapped in a cloth of Hebrew design and placed in a basket by a desperate mother broke through the defenses surrounding the royal family by floating into some reeds where it was found by a Pharoah's daughter. For whatever reason, the male child was was adopted by the royal family, perhaps as a replacement for a stillborn child. All went well until Prince Thutmose revealed to somebody that he considered himself to be a Hebrew.
The Pharoah, when he was informed of this, must have confronted the prince, his daughter and his wife. A decision was reached -- the young man should be exiled -- and the family went into mourning, as it the Prince had died.
Prince Thutmose, of course, was Moses. The Pharoah's daughter would not have given the foundling a Hebrew name, even though he had been wrapped in cloth of Hebrew design. Rather, she had given him an Egyptian name. But "Moses" is clearly a part of that Egyptian name.
The Pharoah must have been profoundly shocked to learn that his son was not his son, and he may have been convinced by Hebrew folklore that the Hebrew deity had wanted to place a Hebrew on the throne of Egypt. Years later, as his own death approached, he took steps to disguise himself as a Hebrew in the afterlife by having his brain left intact inside his skull and having himself circumcised.
A Hebrew on the throne or a heretic?
Upon the "death" of Prince Thutmose, a younger brother became Crown Prince of Egypt. While Prince Thutmose had been a skilled chariot driver, Amenhotep, his younger brother, was a cripple -- he sat in a slouched position, most likely because of an incompletely formed lower thorax, and he went on to have a son whose skeletal remains reveal the same condition. Consequently, the Crown Prince was sent to the Temple of the Sun, where he could contemplate the sun and sky, rather than being assigned duty as Commander of the Troops like his older brother. (He preferred to lie down, rather than to sit, and this task was easy for him.)
After ascending the throne of Egypt (where he sat in a slouched position) Amenhotep changed his name to Akhenaten and decreed that people should worship a god by the name of Aten, or Ra-Amun, above all other gods. Akhenaten's decree threw the priesthood into a tizzy; if people started worshiping just Amun, most of the priesthood would become largely unemployed.
Tutankhamun, Ay and Horemheb
Tutankhamen was missing two ribs and had a club foot. These defects most likely resulted from the many unions in the royal family between brothers and sisters. He was just nine years of age when his father, Akhenaten died and left him the throne of Egypt, and then he himself died nine years after that. This left the throne up for grabs, and Ay grabbed it.
It is absurd to believe that the nine-year-old Tutankhamun, upon the death of his father, took charge of Egypt and ran things until he had a natural death nine years after that. More likely he rebelled when he was eighteen and either committed suicide or was killed by Ay.
Ay had apparently married into the ruling family of Egypt, and had supported Akhenaten's quest to promote Aten above all other gods, but he had switched sides upon the death of Akhenaten, overseeing the the abandonment of Akhenaten's New City, Amarna, and a return of the center of government to Thebes. When the boy-ruler died, Ay grabbed the throne, but Tutankhamun's young widow, in order to head him off, wrote to the Hittite ruler, asking him to send her a husband. Unfortunately, the Hittite ruler's son was murdered as he hurried south from Anatolia, and Ay, with the connivance of male priests, forced a marriage between himself and Tutankhamun's young widow.
Ay was an old man, but he named his nephew as Crown Prince. Unfortunately, The Crown Prince was murdered, so when Ay died the throne of Egypt passed to Horemheb, who had been named Crown Price by Tutankhamun. Horemheb -- the last Pharoah of the Eighteenth Dynasty -- died fourteen years after taking the throne. This released Moses from his vow not to return to Egypt, and he returned to Egypt.
The Amarna letters
The Amarna letters constituted a collection of diplomatic exchanges that was originally stored at Amarna. the New City built by Akhenaten to honor and support Aten, the god of both sun and sky. (The Amarna letters are now distributed among museums and other collections, where they wound up after the Amarna depository had been ransacked by treasure hunters.)
These archives of diplomatic exchanges were essentially the diplomatic archives of Akhenaten, but why were these the only such documents that have been found? (The clay tablets on which they were written, in cuneiform writing, were virtually indestructible.) Most likely. Ay had wanted to expunge every shred of the innovations that had been introduced, so the Egyptians had let it be known that all future diplomatic correspondence should be written in modified Egyptian hieroglyphics, as before.
The modified Egyptian hieroglyphics were designed for communications between Egypt and other nations. In particular, communications between Egypt and the Levant were in a version that was designed to record messages in the Semitic language that was predominately used in the Levant at that time. This was, in turn, to be ancestral to the later Phoenician, Hebrew, Greek and Roman systems of writing.
The Phoenicians simplified the system further, so that it contained only consonants (no words, as such) and the Greeks added vowel sounds. The Hebrew system of writing was more directly descended by the version that
was used in diplomatic exchanges.
The Amarna letters, between Akhenaten's administration and foreign nations, were written in cuneiform, on clay tablets. Most of them were from the kings of city-states that were clients of Egypt and sought Egypt's help in some regard. Those from Levantine city-states were written in a Canaanite dialect of the Akkadian language, in the format that ancient Akkadians had used. This cuneiform format had been invented by the still more ancient Sumerians and adapted by the Akkadians for their own quite different language. The Canaanite dialect that was used in many of the Amarna letters, was in turn ancestral to the Phoenician language and also to Hebrew.
Many of the Amarna letters were from further afield, from places that are today in Turkey, Iraq or Cypress. Some were from the generally hostile Assyrians or from Hittite kings.
The Hebiru
We learn from the Amarna letters that the Hebrews that came out of Egypt with Moses were not the only ones in existence; but the others, known as Hebiru by those who wrote to the Pharoah concerning them, were illiterate nomads who wandered throughout much of the Middle East and caused trouble wherever they went. The stories that could have been told by these wandering nomads were lost to history, because they were illiterate.
The rulers of Shechem, Jerusalem and especially Byblos asked the Pharoah (Akhenaten) to send an Egyptian army to help fight off the marauders, and rulers of the Mitanni and Babylonian Empires also complained about the Hebiru in their letters to the Pharoah. (This, of course was long before Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt.)
Eventually, the Hebiru joined with Joshua in his assault on Jericho, We don't know how many people Moses led out of Egypt, but they were certainly not numerous in comparison with the Hebiru that they found waiting for them in the Levant. We tend to exaggerate the role played by the Hebrews from Egypt, because we know so little about the much more numerous Hebiru.
Ancient city
Jericho is the oldest fortified city in the world. Mesolithic hunters (stone-age people) used the site 11,000 years ago, and then about 10,000 years ago their descendants built massive walls to protect their community from marauders like the Hebiru. They also built a massive stone tower, perhaps so they could see the marauders coming.
They fed a growing population of perhaps 2,000 or 3,000 people by growing grass -- wheat and barley. These crops needed to be irrigated, and the irrigation system that they constructed must have been the largest that the world had yet seen.
The original population had been indigenous, descendants of the hunter-gatherers who had inhabited the site earlier, but about 9,000 years ago some outsiders arrived. They obviously knew about growing crops like barley and wheat, so they might have come from northern Syria. They were part of an early wave of migrating farmers, spreading out from the earliest agricultural settlements.
These outsiders chased out the indigenous people and took their place, but they only stayed for about 1,000 years. Why did they go? They were probably chased out by animal herders.
For the next 1,000 years there was very little occupation of any kind at the site, most likely because the animal herders in that region knew nothing about agriculture; Instead. they lived off the animals that they herded about.
Then, about 8,000 years ago the site was again occupied; but the houses were very primitive, compared with those that had been built earlier. The new occupants were most likely descendants of animal herders who had learned the rudiments of pottery making. They used the pottery to cook and serve cooked grass seeds which they harvested, processed and cooked. The harvest must have been very poor, because the irrigation system was gone. The new occupants would be vulnerable to the whims pf whatever animal herders happened to be roaming about, because the city walls were also gone.
In the course of the next few thousand years the site was sometimes unoccupied. But then, about 5,000 years ago, the city walls were again built, and Jericho again became a city. Then Joshua showed up with his army of marauders;
Joshua and Abraham
After penetrating the city walls Joshua's followers slaughtered the inhabitants of the city and systematically destroyed the city and its walls, as per God's instructions and their own inclination -- they were nomads, and they saw no value in cities and city walls. Instead, these artifacts of stratified society would have posed a long-term threat to to them if they had not been destroyed.
What Joshua and his followers were interested in was the countryside: The women, being modern women, were primarily interested in the grain fields and the men, of course, were interested in the extensive pastures. Ironically, these nomads almost immediately began settling into villages, and then the wealthier ones, as well as the artisans and others who served the wealthy, moved back into the ruins of Jericho and began to rebuild it.
I might note that things had changed since Abraham's time: Abraham had found no fields of grain in the region, nor did he have to destroy any cities -- Jericho and other cities in the region were already in ruins (but grain was grown in Syria and Anatolia at that time), There is no evidence that Abraham's followers did any agricultural work at all, although they might have harvested seeds of grasses that grew of their own accord.
Copyright © 2025 Brilliant Ape - All Rights Reserved.