CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

EGYPT AND MESOPOTAMIA



Alice Stevenson

INTRODUCTION

O

n 2 June 1923 the London Illustrated Newspublished an article entitled ‘The most
important historical relic ever found in Egypt’ detailing a lecture in which
Flinders Petrie described a recent purchase by the Louvre. The photograph central to
the piece was of a carved ivory handle, bearing distinctly Mesopotamian imagery, into
which was set a quintessential Egyptian Predynastic ripple-flaked knife: the Gebel el-
Arak knife. For Petrie, the find had re-opened the ‘whole question of the relations of
early civilisation in Egypt’ (Petrie 1917 : 26 ). He viewed it as proof that Sumer and Susa
were the originating area for his ‘Dynastic race’, who he believed had invaded Egypt
at the end of the prehistoric period and instigated Dynastic civilisation. Although his
theory continued to be advanced for many years by some (e.g. Emery 1961 : 39 – 40 )
more sophisticated accounts of the manner in which Mesopotamian elements were
incorporated into the early Egyptian world were being formulated. Henri Frankfort
( 1924 , 1941 , 1951 ) rejected Petrie’s model and was the first to synthesise comprehensively
the evidence for the impact of these supposed Eastern imports:

Egypt, in a period of intensified creativity, became acquainted with achievements in

Mesopotamia; that it was stimulated; and that it adapted to its own development

such elements as seemed compatible with its efforts. It mostly transformed what it

borrowed and after a time rejected even these modifications.

( 1951 : 110 )

His eloquent characterisation of the role of Mesopotamian cultural elements in Egypt
of the late fourth and early third millennium BC(Frankfort 1951 : 110 ) remains today,
some sixty years later, succinctly accurate.
Egypt has long been compared to Mesopotamia (e.g. Trigger 1993 ; Baines and Yoffee
1998 ). As Frankfort noted, however, for the study of the development of Egyptian
society from the mid-fourth to early third millennium BCUruk period, Sumer is more
than a convenient comparative case study; it was a source and a mediator of some
exotic goods and imagery that influenced the indigenous formation of elite cultures
in Egypt, as the Gebel el-Arak knife materialises. Nevertheless, in the Egyptian first
dynasty of the early third millennium BC, Mesopotamian influences disappear from the
archaeological record completely. This marks the end of centuries of selective and