Ancient Egypt
Elements of its Cultural History

  by Sjef Willockx

  
 


15. The Two Kingdoms

During the Predynastic Period, the Egyptian nation was slowly formed in a series of steps. These steps were in the Delta (Lower Egypt) probably not the same as in the Valley (Upper Egypt). It seems that the people of Upper Egypt were more territorial driven than those from the Delta, where commerce and trading seem to have been more important. In the south, struggles between competing communities over time led to ever greater territorial units, which in their turn contested for dominion over the Nile valley as a whole. In this way, a united kingdom arose that we may in hindsight call the Upper Egyptian kingdom. In the meantime, the Delta region seems to have remained less unified, probably right until the beginning of the 1st dynasty of a united Egypt. As far as we can tell today, there never was a unified Lower Egyptian kingdom, serving as an opposite number for the Upper Egyptian kingdom. 

Nevertheless, the fiction of two predynastic kingdoms, whose supposed unification once marked the birth of the Egyptian state, was later cultivated with great zeal - and this already at the very beginning of the 1st dynasty. On the Narmer palette, we see the king with both the Red Crown of Lower Egypt, and the White Crown of Upper Egypt. And on an ivory label of Narmer's successor Aha, we see the symbols of the two goddesses Nekhbet and Wadjet (the patron goddesses of Upper and Lower Egypt) in a format that won't change for three millenia. Right until the very end of Egyptian history, the king of Egypt was king of Upper Egypt and king of Lower Egypt. His reign started with his uniting the Two Lands, marking the beginning of a new and happy era. And during his Jubilee or Sed festival, he acts with the White Crown as king of Upper Egypt, and with the Red Crown as king of Lower Egypt.

The reasons for this tenaciously sticking to a reality that never was are not entirely clear. It may originally have served a political purpose: an energetic stressing of the Lower Egyptian identity as being on a par with the Upper Egyptian identity may have been helpful in a process of reconciliation.

After the successful completion of the integration of the Delta into the kingdom, the concept of two pre-existing kingdoms of equal standing soon acquired the status of a tradition, which for the tradition-revering Egyptians automatically meant that it would never be abandoned again. At that point, other mechanisms may have played a part in reinforcing it, such as a desire to present unity as comprising of two balanced opposites, or even a simple preference for symmetry. In any event, after centuries of use, it became a fiction as elaborately and festively decorated as a rococo cabinet.

The main instrument for this ornamentation was the use of symbols. During the procedures of coronation and the Sed festival, the fiction could to some extent be brought to life through the enactment of ceremonies, but for the rest of the time, one depended on the use of symbols to point to this doctrine of the Two Kingdoms.

The Egyptians were masters in combining several symbols into one meaningful picture. The Red Crown and the White Crown were combined in the Double Crown. Nekhbet and Wadjet were brought together in the rubric of the Nebty name, as part of the royal titulary. Likewise, the Bee and the Sedge were combined in the rubric to the first cartouche name. On a wall of the great hypostyle of the Amun temple at Karnak, we see the Souls of Nekhen and the Souls of Pe together carrying Amun’s bark.

It is a known routine of the "primitive" mind: heap together lots and lots of meaningful allusions, weaving them into a tight web of references and cross-references. You can put it then around your shoulders as a shawl, to keep you warm and comfortable...

Yet even in the symbol-laden context of kingship, not everything that came in pairs was connected to the Two Kingdoms. The "crook and flail" e.g. were never treated as symbols of Upper and Lower Egypt: both probably have their origin in Lower Egypt (see the chapter about the god Andjety in Three Egyptian Gods: Amentet, Andjety & Anubis, elsewhere on this site.)


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