UNESCO Ancient Civilizations of Africa (Editor G. Mokhtar)

Ancient Civilizations of Africa
entire country, one of the characteristics of which is extreme length, and
where, consequently, the capital giving the orders is always very distant
from a large portion of the territory. Moreover, because of the very
fickleness of the blood (cf. PI. Intro. 4), one of the central government's
responsibilities was to stock as much food as possible in times of
plenty, to palliate the shortages which might always occur at short notice.
Consequently the leaders, in this case the Pharaoh, must know exactly
what the country had available, so as to be able, in case of need, either
to ration or to distribute the existing resources to the regions most seriously
affected by the famine. This was the basis of Egypt's economic organization
and, in fact, of its very existence. It required on the material level a
complex accounting system for incomings and outgoings, as regards both
commodities and personnel, which explains the essential role devolving on
the scribe in the civilization of ancient Egypt.
The scribe was thus the veritable linchpin of the Pharaonic system.
From the third dynasty, around —2800, the highest state officials had
themselves depicted with the writing-case over their shoulder, and the
princes of the Old Kingdom ordered statues of themselves as crouching
scribes (cf. PI. Intro. 4). In one famous tale the king himself took up the pen,
so to speak, to record what a prophet was about to tell him. The magic
power always associated with writing added to the scribe's importance in
society. To know the name of things was to have power over them. It is
no exaggeration to say that the whole Egyptian civilization rested on the
scribe and that it was writing that permitted its development.
The contrast between Egypt and the Nubian Nile valley gives us a better
understanding of the role of writing and the reasons for its existence in
the emergence and development of the Egyptian civilization. South of the
First Cataract, we are in the presence of a population having the same
composition as that of Upper Egypt. However, Nubia was always unwilling
to accept the use of writing, although the permanent contacts which it
maintained with the Egyptian valley could not have left it in ignorance of
that use. The reason for this state of affairs seems to reside in the difference
in the way of life. On the one hand, we have a dense population
that the requirements of irrigation and control of the river on which its
very existence depends have closely bound into a hierarchical society
where each individual plays a specific role in the country's development.
On the other hand, in Nubia we have a population that at the dawn of
history possessed a material culture equal, if not superior, to that of
Upper Egypt, but the population was divided into smaller groups spaced
farther apart. Those groups were more independent and more mobile,
because stock-raising required frequent moves and played at least as
important a part in the economy as did agriculture, which was very
limited in a valley narrower than in Egypt. The Nubian peoples did not
feel the need for writing. They were always to remain in the domain of oral
tradition, only very occasionally using writing and then solely, it seems, for
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