Who Built the Pyramids?

An entirely new chapter 4 for Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom

The second edition of Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom was published in January. It is available on Kindle or in any good South African bookshop. Over the last few months, paid subscribers have received early versions of seven chapters. Find them here: Chapter 3, Chapter 5, Chapter 11, Chapter 16, Chapter 20, Chapter 27, Chapter 33 and Chapter 36. Consider a paid subscription to read them – and this one – in full.

‘On the first side of the slate we see the large figure of the king, grasping the hair of an enemy in the left hand, and preparing to smite him with a mace held in the right. Behind the king is his body-servant, as on the mace-head. In front is the royal hawk holding a cord which passes through the lip of a captive. The plants beneath the hawk are the hieroglyphs for 6000, showing the number of prisoners.’¹

This is how the British Egyptologist James E. Quibell describes his discovery in 1898 of what has become known as the Narmer Palettes. The two 63-centrimeter-tall, beautifully preserved palettes show King Narmer wearing the crown of Upper Egypt on one and the crown of Lower Egypt on the other. The presence of both Upper and Lower Egypt is the reason many scholars believe that Narmer, who ruled somewhere between 3200 and 3000 BCE, was the first king of a unified Egypt and thus founder of the First Dynasty.

But the palettes offer tantalising clues of more than just Egypt’s political history. It describes a stratified society, with a king and servants and captives. It describes warfare and writing. Carved from a single piece of flat, soft dark grey-green siltstone (Quibell wrongly described it as ‘slate’) and mostly used for grinding cosmetics, the palettes represent the work of miners, stone masons, soldiers, artisans, scribes, and priests. Egypt in the fourth millennium was clearly more complex than the simple agricultural society we painted in the previous chapter.

That is because the shift to farming, specialisation, surplus production and trade allowed urbanisation. Non-farming specialists like blacksmiths, potters and tailors had every reason to live in close proximity, so that when the farmers brought their surplus production to market, they could trade with all the specialists in one place. This meant that villages developed in those areas where such specialists would gather and trade – a market – typically a place that was easy to access and close to a water source. This, in a very stylised way, is how towns and cities were established in the ancient world.

And, as the Narmer Palettes so vividly illustrate, we also neglected a crucial component that characterises the emergence of civilisations: rulers. The surpluses these farmers produced also had to be protected, either from animals or, more commonly, from other humans. This necessitated a system of defence and, consequently, the emergence of another specialist: the soldier. Armies required leadership, which gave rise to more complicated forms of social organisation. Instead of the egalitarian structure of the hunter-gatherer societies, agricultural societies typically had strong social hierarchies. Inequality was thus born.

But, just like in Chapter 3, here is another timing conundrum: Grains were first domesticated 10,000 BCE, yet the first cities and states – Nippur and Uruk in Sumer, for example, or Memphis in Egypt – would only emerge in the fourth and third millennium BCE. Why would it take several millennia for such complex societies to emerge?