I have wanted to read Bauer's books for years and my husband gifted the volume set to me for Christmas. (We used her The Story of the World, Vol. 4, in our homeschool many years ago.) This is one book that I am doing a written narration for every reading so it is taking a lot more time. I have devised a plan for finishing the first volume by the end of April, the second by the end of August, and the last by year's end. It is a lot of reading, and I have to be consistent every day.
For this entry, it will be over part of chapter 4, Creation of an Empire (pages 22-24). Near the end of the last chapter she told how there were firsts: first kings by hereditary and then the rise of the aristocracy (ruling class by birth). Both of these ideas (kings and born aristocracy) haven't gone away. But she ended with Kish being the central city because of its strategic location on the rivers and how trade with other cities had strengthened its authority. However, Kish rulers didn't appear to be overly ambition and didn't really conquer other cities. That was to come from another nation. That's where we pick up.
Southwest of Sumer, the Scorpion King was making his move through the Nile river valley. The Scorpion King is somewhere between a myth and history. There isn't much about him other than a carving on a ceremonial dagger. But he made his attempt to conquer the world around 3200 BC.
The Scorpion King was of African descent of people who lived on either side of the Nile river valley. Centuries before his birth, when Sumer was ruled by Alulim, the Nile river valley was probably uninhabitable. Every year the heavy rains swelled the Nile and flooded the land. The hunter-gatherers rarely hung around. They settled in the lands to the west and east, along the Red Sea. In those years the climate was cooler and wetter and the Sahara was grassy, proven by archaeological finds of trees and plants under the sand.
As the weather got hotter and drier the Nile floods also became less extreme. The people who'd traveled through the Sahara now made their way to the well-watered Nile valley. They were able to withstand the short duration of flooding and even captured some water for storage to irrigate their fields during the drier months. They settled and planted along the banks where dark silt built up. They hunted the wildlife: ibex, hippopotami, cattle, fish, birds, etc. These, along with some from the Red Sea area, were the first settlers of the Nile valley, or the first Egyptians.
(She has a footnote here that I haven't read yet.)
Unlike Sumer, the Nile valley had all that it needed, except wood. They had animals for hunting and work, copper, stone, papyrus, flax, etc. The Nile pretty much supplied all their needs. They did trade with the east for ivory and the west for shells, the north for semiprecious stones.
The Nile river ran through a valley 500 miles long, bordered by cliffs and flatlands. The floodwaters began upstream in what we know now as the Ethiopian highlands, through two cataracts (not sure what that means), and down to a flat plain where it branched off to form the Nile delta.
Because the Nile flowed from south to the north, it was clear to the Egyptians that every other river ran backwards. They had only one word for north, downstream, and back of the head. There was one word for south, upstream, and face. To orient oneself, an Egyptian always turned toward the south, the flow of the Nile. When they buried the dead, the head pointed south and the feet to the west; south was life (Nile) and death was the Sahara (westward), where they'd come from.
The Egyptians gave their land two names, Kemet meaning Black Land, because black was the color of life and resurrection. The other was Deshret, meaning Red Land. The line was so distinct that a man could bend over and place one hand on the Black Land (fertile earth) and the other on the Red Land (sun baked desert).
This doubleness was echoed in their civilization. Much like Sumer with its "streaming-in" of people, cities in Egypt had grown by 3200 BC. The city of Nubt was the strongest city in the south due to the gold mines along the east-west route, while the Hierakanopolis was the second strongest. Unlike Kish, Eridu, Ut, Uruttu, and such from last chapter, these two cities were not separate but identified themselves as part of the White Kingdom, under the ruler who wore the White Crown. In the north there was Heliopolis and Buto which banded together under the Red Kingdom. The king of the Red Kingdom wore, wait for it, a red crown. But it had a cobra shape on the front and he had a cobra-goddess who would spit venom at his enemies. The two kingdoms, White and Red, were like the Red and Black Lands; world is made up of balanced and opposing forces.
(Reminds me of the Red Rose and the White Rose... War of the Roses many many years later in a different place.)
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