If not the technology, but the appearance of niched architecture can be attributed
to outside inspiration, it might be questioned whether it is necessary to rely on
itinerant Near Eastern peoples to explain the construction of such monuments in
Egypt (cf. Moorey 1987 : 64 ; Hendrickx 2001 : 97 ; Sievertsen 2008 : 800 ; von der Way
1992 : 220 ). Such a movement of people is admittedly conceivable, but the role of oral
transmission of knowledge that accompanied the spread of lapis, seals and possible
sealings cannot be discounted. Pictorial prompts to such narratives certainly occurred
on Sumerian and Susan sealings, such as a sealing from the Red Temple at Uruk (Amiet
1980 : pl. 200 ; Smith 1992 : 238 – 240 ), and these might hypothetically have inspired their
realisation in the Egyptian landscape, although this remains to be examined critically.
LEGACIES
The break in the evidence for Mesopotamian influence in Egypt is often explained by
the apparent collapse of the Uruk expansion. Yet, this cession owes as much to shifts
in the Egyptian world as it does the Sumerian. In the first dynasty, the Egyptian state
sought to consolidate a bounded national identity through ‘internal colonisation’
(Wengrow 2006 : 142 – 146 ) and relations were curtailed around a southern and a
northern border; the Nubian A-group disappears and following the direct expansion
of Egyptian groups into southern coastal Levant in Naqada IIIA–C 1 (Levy and van den
Brink 2002 ), the Egyptian presence recedes markedly.
The disappearance of Mesopotamian images from the elite visual repertoire in the
first dynasty cannot be explained simply as a constriction in social networks as it was
not just the motifs that disappeared: the very medium of their realisation vanished,
never to be revived in subsequent dynasties. The ceremonial palettes, mace-heads and
ivory knife handles are a distinctly late Predynastic phenomenon. As Wengrow ( 2006 :
216 ) has suggested, such ceremonial objects confined these images to restricted material
forms that impeded their incorporation into the wider social world in which they had
little relevance. It would take another florescence in cultural creativity afforded by the
fragmentation of the centralised Old Kingdom c. 2160 BCfor foreign motifs to once
again find an available niche.
The ‘palace-façade’ architecture, on the other hand, was a more enduring feature
perhaps because, unlike the ceremonial objects, they were so visibly rooted in Egyptian
surroundings and thereby normalised. While by 3000 BCsuch structures had largely
disappeared in Mesopotamia, niched façades remained in use for Egyptian tomb
architecture until the late Old Kingdom and in the third dynasty was adopted for stone
sarcophagi. In these contexts niched architecture was unmistakably Egyptian.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
By the time small lapis beads started to filter into the Nile Valley in the latter half of
the fourth millennium BC, Egypt was already on a trajectory of increasing social
complexity. Lapis was caught up in these developments as one material amongst many
that could be drawn upon as a source of social power. Within centuries it was not just
what could be held in the palm, but what could be perceived in the landscape that
might represent most eloquently the impact of foreign imports in the Egyptian world.
Regardless of whether or not specific cultural attributes were or were not Sumerian in–– Alice Stevenson ––