Mesopotamian and even Iranian cultural influences appear in Upper Egypt
that are not found in Lower Egypt. However, there is no conclusive evidence
for an early sea-route trading relationship, and whatever contacts were made
were not sustained into the pharaonic period. Egypt and Sumer did not
become direct trading partners.
Egypt’s integration into the long-distance trade network that spanned
southwestern Asia must have been heartily welcomed even if it often led to
war with Mesopotamian and Anatolian states over control of the lands bor-
dering the eastern Mediterranean shore. As a trading partner, Egypt had
much to offer. From the pharaoh’s workshops came exquisite craft goods
ranging from ivory-inlaid furniture to amulets in the form of scarabs (dung
beetles, which became a widely used motif symbolizing resurrection) cut
from semi-precious stones or products in faience, a ceramic made from pow-
dered quartz. These were mostly luxury items designed to reinforce the
status of elites. Like Sumer, Egypt also produced a huge grain surplus, an
archaeologically invisible product that is assumed to have been traded to
people who lived in less bountiful environments like the desert or moun-
tains. Nevertheless, what the outside world wanted most from Egypt was
gold.
Gold deposits were located in Upper Egypt, the most productive being
in the wadis (dry river beds) of the eastern desert between the Nile Valley
and the Red Sea. It was this gold that first attracted outside traders,
including, perhaps, Sumerians, to Upper Egypt. The need to organize the
mining and control the trade prompted the early states of Upper Egypt to
become more centralized and militarized: it was no accident that Egyptian
unification was achieved by the rulers of Upper Egypt who conquered Lower
Egypt. Early in Egyptian history royal expeditions were dispatched to the
most productive of the wadis, the Wadi Hammamat, but in later periods
permanent camps were established in some wadis and the mines worked by
gangs of criminals, political prisoners, and slaves under the most horrid of
conditions.
In addition to exploiting their own deposits, the Egyptians got much gold
from Nubia, the land immediately south of Upper Egypt. The Nile below
Egypt has a deep channel that in places provided a good transportation cor-
ridor but is broken over the length of 1,000 miles by a series of six cataracts,
each a lengthy sequence of impassable rapids. Land caravans had to move
traffic around the cataracts, or there was an alternative route that took tra-
velers west of the Nile Valley across the desert through a series of oases that
exited in Upper Nubia. This was the quickest, if not the most comfortable
or sometimes most secure, road for tapping into the products of Africa’s
interior.
In Nubia gold could be found in shallow surface workings as well as in
riverside deposits. Amethyst, carnelian, and diorite were also available; one
quarrying operation is reported to have involved 1,000 men and an equal
42 Land of gold