Kinship, sacred leadership, and conditions for the Emergence of the Egyptian State

CAMPAGNO, MARCELO

Egypt at its Origins 4. Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference ?Origin of the State. Predynastic and Early Dynastic Egypt?

Peeters

Lugar: Leuven; Año: 2016; p. 493 - 504

In the mid-fourth millennium BCE crucial changes occur in the Nile Valley, leading to the formation of a state society, in which a small group imposes its supremacy based on the legitimate monopoly of coercion. This process takes place in a scenario formerly characterised by communities organised through the social predominance of kinship ties. Given that the logic of kinship impedes the possibility of strong social differentiation within a society, the advent of the state requires a context that transcends kinship networks. At the Kraków (2002) and London (2008) colloquia, I considered two Naqada II contexts that could allow propitious conditions for state emergence ? namely, Upper Egyptian wars of conquest, and the concentration of population in urban nuclei such as Hierakonpolis ? inasmuch as both dynamics could imply new permanent bondsbetween previously autonomous kin networks. Here I will consider a different context that may also be propitious for the advent of the state: societies with sacred leadership, in which leaders are conceived as de-socialised beings in relation to their own communities, and therefore, as external beings in reference to kinship principles. This non-kin condition of sacred leaders allows them to be implied in practices not strictly compatible with the kinship logic: for instance, they can be the only ones in having permanent relations with strangers (fugitives, captives, newcomers) who may be incorporated into the community in a subordinate position. Thus, sacred leaders are within society but outside its organising logic, and this de-socialised condition seems to facilitate the emergence of new practices not ruled by kinship logic, such as those implied by the advent of the state. Could sacred leaderships, such as those ethnographers describe in diverse African societies, have existed in the Predynastic Nile Valley? Inasmuch as the king is directly identified as a god, in some way Egyptian divine kingship can be seen as an extreme manifestation of such sacred leaderships. To investigate the issue further, this paper proposes a double reflection on the possible evidence regarding the symbolic status of Predynastic leadership in the Nile Valley, and on the theoretical perspectives that emerge from connecting the nature of sacred leadership to the problem of the origin of the Egyptian state.