John Romer > Quotes

“Petrie found nothing that disproved the pyramidologist's assumption that the Great Pyramid had been built according to a master plan. Indeed, he describes the Pyramid's architecture as being filled with extraordinary mathematical harmonies and concordances: those same strange symmetries that had so haunted the pyramidologist.

Petrie not only noted, for example, that the proportions of the reconstructed pyramid approximated to pi - which others have since elaborated to include those twin delights of Renaissance and pyramidological mathematicians, the Golden Section and the Fibonacci Series ...”
― John Romer, The Great Pyramid: Ancient Egypt Revisited

“For though Europe has no deserts and no Nile, Champollion and Ramesses both lived in small-scale wheat-based economies founded on the technologies of the Middle Eastern Bronze Age. Broadly speaking, the material elements of those two economies – stone-cutting and metal-smelting, animal husbandry and farming and the everyday technologies of house and home – weaving, potting, baking, brewing, cheese-making and the rest – were much the same.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

“Nor, indeed, that Erman and Sethe had similarly described that period in the Berlin seminars, thus colouring the background against which Gardiner and Breasted and later generations would transcribe and translate the Lamentations, Admonitions and Disputes. They had seen the worm within the rose. The mighty kingdom that had built the Memphite pyramids, so it was generally agreed, had suffered a similar fate to the Roman Empire as envisaged by the Victorians: weak government and moral decadence had occasioned a descent to anarchy. In reality, however, there is little evidence that pharaoh had controlled a highly structured bureaucracy similar to that of a contemporary state, and modern archaeology and the standing monuments tell a very different story: that, for example, the ending of the 400-year activity of making monuments from blocks of stone had been part-provoked by changes in the environment”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

“Coupled with efficient systems of tithing and supply conducted in the name of pharaoh, the valley’s prodigious fertility had promoted such colossal surpluses within the state that, after some four centuries, the government was able to conceive and undertake the construction of four colossal pyramids and their attendant temples.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

“Here, then, pottery has come to stand as a kind of history. Nor, in the case of the Badarians, does this equation seem unreasonable. For each one of their high-shining pots was conceived as a precious visual object, a kind of presentation. That the same few forms were carefully repeated down through generations also shows that each and every one of these precious vessels was part of a consciously maintained tradition. For both their makers and their users, the presentation which the potters offered was that of a mark of identity of a distinctive community, in the same way that today the corpse of someone buried with one of those same pots is known as a ‘Badarian’. It is this identification of a prehistoric community by pottery type and modern place name that provides the basis of a meta-history for late prehistory; a chronology of ceramic type and form which has recently been extended to take in all of Egypt’s history and which has become so all-pervasive that everything excavated within the orbit of the Nile is now dated and defined by the pottery that is its inevitable accompaniment.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

“A further difficulty in understanding such early texts is that their translation can only be accomplished by reference to other, later texts. And here a paradox arises, for to assume that Metjen’s inscriptions are merely ‘primitive’ versions of later similar examples, and that gaps in their understanding may be resolved by reference to the fuller texts of later times serves to deny internal change within a society that, in Sneferu’s day, was clearly undergoing a series of colossal transformations. It is the very nature of most grammars and dictionaries, moreover, to provide compacted, generalizing visions of the language of the culture in which they deal and this, as far as the traditional vision of ‘ancient Egypt’ is concerned, has created a jargon-filled vocabulary with its own internal mythologies, so that, however rigorous or erudite the act of translation may have been, it often serves to bewitch the genuine relics of the past and reinforce a vision of an ‘ancient Egypt’ held by earlier generations of lexicographers and philologists. That, of course, is how Metjen can appear to be like an English squire, and Imhotep, an Egyptian Leonardo”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

“It is precisely because these images were not designed to symbolize abstract ideas and were made in absolute conformity to the craftsmen’s rules of image making, that any intellectual processes that may have been involved in their creation have been effectively disguised. What is left, however, is something of the environment in which they were created; their time and place, that dramatic point in time when work on Sneferu’s pyramids was coming to its conclusion, an age that had seen an unprecedented mass of humanity linked in a single purpose, building for the king who was the centre of the state, the sustainer of its order and the prosperity of the court. Here, then, the relief artists drew out the vital qualities of the state machine in human form and, in so doing, they created some of the oldest known images of the pharaonic gods.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

“As a sun god, Re would be described by later scribes as a life creator and sustainer, whilst the daily progress of his disk through the sky made him a measurer of time. So as sons of Re, the living kings were similarly identified as the creators and sustainers of the state and, like the sun god, they too ordered human time. Without Re and his earthly son, therefore, the order and the very time in which the royal court existed would cease, and thus the valley of the lower Nile would no longer sustain the order of pharaonic culture.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

“The Egyptian Origins of the Semitic Alphabet’.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

“Sheik Muftah Culture”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

“Several more novel terms for the pharaonic state came into play during the times of the re-founded kingdom. ‘Sema Towy’, for example – ‘the joiner of the two lands’ – along with the phrase that is commonly translated in the Champollionesque tradition as ‘King of Upper and Lower Egypt’ – king of the valley and the delta – or, more literally, reflecting the images of its elegant hieroglyphs, as ‘king of the lands of the sedge and the bee’. This poetic visual opposition of a green reed – juncus maritimus – with a hard dry black and yellow insect – vespa orientalis – defines the two regions of the kingdom by opposing the rushy flatlands of the delta with the thin strip of the river’s black silty valley set within the yellow desert. And here, once more, the ancient scribes are describing the physical characteristics of the region of the lower Nile as dualities, just as the valley landscape of the homeland of the new kings was itself a landscape of dualities.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

“At all events, the traditional assumption that the pharaohs had ruled like European kings and kept closed harems is based on those traditional translations, on nineteenth-century courtly manners and, ultimately, Champollion’s secular vision. Better to drop such Eurocentric notions along with the quaint assumption that the ‘family’ of the king held genius in its generations and was stuffed with princely craftsmen, architects and engineers endowed with the abilities to raise vast pyramids and make some of the world’s great sculptures. Better to conceive the Old Kingdom court as an environment where such talents had been cultivated within a series of courtly households grouped around that of the ruling house. And the single central office in that rare society was that of pharaoh. It sustained the living and the dead. It alone bestrode the households of the gods and those of humankind. No wonder, then, that unlike the households of the courtiers there is no evidence of an established order of direct familial succession for the throne.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

“With such continuing and pressing reasons for the development of an efficient system of supply, it is hardly surprising that in the last centuries before the coming of the kings, Naqadan culture was, of itself, carefully and deliberately standardized. As Renée Friedman, one of Hierakonpolis’s modern excavators, has described, its wonderfully diverse tradition of ceramics now suffered a ‘striking and complete loss of regional intervariability’; a remarkable uniformity of the products of the potters’ studios all up and down the lower Nile that would remain throughout the best part of pharaonic history.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

“Most earlier egyptologists, however, had assumed that such celebrated sites as Aswan, Edfu and Hierakonpolis, Memphis, Buto and Bubastis had once been ancient cities. Yet Memphis of the ‘White Walls’ – the Memphis of the Greek and Roman travellers and of nineteenth-century imagination – was sustained by markets and a monetary economy, and the Old Kingdom had been very far removed from such classical or modern concepts of urban life. The fundamental nature of that most ancient state was agricultural. The gulf between Memphis and its provinces was not nearly as great as one might at first imagine. Even the royal residence was set beside canals and at the edge of farmland. And, certainly, the life style of the court as it is depicted in its courtiers’ myriad tomb chapels is always shown as country life and never as taking place within the confines of some kind of city.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

“basic”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

“The supreme irony in this is that though written texts were never at the heart of pharaonic culture, those that have survived have played a major role in the construction of modern ancient Egypt. Such a fundamental role, in fact, that ever since Jean François Champollion deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs in the early nineteenth century, the study and translation of pharaonic texts has continuously distorted a broader understanding of that ancient culture.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

“The first age of pyramid building – the half-century from Djoser to Sneferu – had seen an intellectual revolution conducted in architecture and stone images. And part of that took place within this limestone temple, with the dust of pyramid making rising from the desert plain behind them, as some of Sneferu’s courtiers and craftsmen created images personifying the various aspects of the kingdom, from the rhythms of the river and the order of the state to the gods themselves; and all of them identified, drawn and situated as elements of the economic engine, natural and man-made, that would fuel the pharaonic state till its ending.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

“After Quibell and Green, the following decades saw the wide adoption of those evolutionary principles of intellectual development so alluringly described by the likes of Freud and Frazer. These held that the ‘primitive’ – that is, the non-Western mind which, they imagined, was expressed in Narmer’s Palette – was the opposite of the scientific mind and close to the world of ‘feeling’ and to mystical and childish thoughts, where savage passions lurk just beneath the surface. Once again, this was based on the assumption that the behaviour of ancient peoples was similar to that of nineteenth-century tribal communities which had been studied and evaluated by the founding fathers of anthropology – people who often shared the same attitude to their subjects as their colonial administrators and whose view of their subjects has now become a part of intellectual history. And yet the vision still prevails. Kings like Narmer are portrayed as living in a time when humans were ‘closer to nature’ than we are today, and Narmer, the first pharaoh, is presented as a primal hero whose killing gesture symbolized the struggle of humanity emerging from the chaos of the primitive world. Thus everything is explained; ancient people were automatons with no facility for thoughtfulness, and all you have to do for their explanation is to find the key with which to wind up their imaginary clockwork. As for the early kings, caught in imaginary wars and forever planning for a mumbo-jumbo afterlife, Narmer’s gesture is explained as a method of filling his contemporaries with shock and awe.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

“Fifty years earlier, before its sandstone blocks were carried off to serve as the foundations of a factory in a nearby town, the ruins of a little temple had stood upon that hill. And it was there, in the footings of a vanished temple, by the remnants of a prehistoric shrine, that Quibell and Green uncovered a vast agglomeration of courtly objects, a cache such as had not been seen before and has never since been equalled in all of Egypt: a pair of beautiful life-sized pharaonic statues made of sheets of beaten copper; a golden image of a hawk with glittering obsidian eyes still standing in its ancient shrine; two splendidly engraved cosmetic palettes; some prehistoric slaughtering knives; a remarkable collection of stone vases; a heap of mace heads piled like potatoes, some of which were vividly engraved in a manner similar to the cosmetic palettes. And in amongst all this, suffused by ground-water and penetrated by the roots of thorn and halfa grass, lay a mass of ivories which, Quibell remarked, ‘resembled potted salmon’, but on inspection proved to be hundreds of separate and delicately carved objects from the time of the first kings but which were so cemented and decayed that they are still under restoration to this day.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

“Set within communal cemeteries, such burials were also part of a continuing connection between the communities of the living and the dead. Just as the living, at the time of funeral, arranged separate identities for all the dead, so the memories of the buried dead provided the people of the living settlements with a collective and individual history, a kind of afterlife. The dialogues that the Badarians conducted in their cemeteries, therefore, gave the entire community, the living and the dead together, a powerful and continuing resonance. Such acts are not explained as ‘symbolism’ or ‘offerings to the dead’. Saturated with human care and contact, a visual and tactile intelligence was at work within these small communities which is not easily reduced to sentences on a page. In the broader scheme of things the activities of the Badarian burial parties mark a change from people thinking about the basic activities of farming and the transformation of natural processes, to thinking with some of the things that they themselves had made.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

“Manifested in its networks of tithing, collection and supply, the efficacy of this unique culture was reaffirmed at the beginning of every reign when the state machine began to build another pyramid. So the architecture of the pyramid complexes manifests the living systems of that state in good hard stone, and the structures of tithing and supply which had enabled their construction continued to be acted out in dramatic continuation after pharaoh’s death in rites of offering. Like the inhabitants of the early farming settlements, at Abusir, the state system operated within the archaic theatres of life and death. These are the fundamental principles that explain all of the surviving manifestations of the pharaonic kingdom of the lower Nile. It was not a complex system. Though to modern minds its splendidly sophisticated and often enigmatic relics might first suggest the operation of a near-modern state with an elaborate theology, in reality they are a millennial duplication, elegant, consistent and concise, of a single set of rites – the rites of presentation and of offering, on which the state was founded.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

“the erection of Djoser’s pyramid provided pharaoh’s subjects with visible evidence of the power of the transport and supply systems that they had built over the previous half-millennium and which were the very essence of the state.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

“In similar fashion, the assumption that the texts within the pyramids were products of a dawn-land of primitive religion long served to isolate those dark columns of hieroglyphs from the living world that drew them. As Harold Hays, one of the Pyramid Texts’ most acute commentators recently observed; ‘the agent and event are erased, and without them there is no human history.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

“So it is not surprising that Champollion and his successors had assumed that ancient Egyptian society had a similar composition to traditional Western European society; that it too had consisted of peasants, land-owning aristocrats, soldiers, sailors and the clergy. And that, in turn, led to the use of such terms as ‘king’ and ‘prince’, ‘peasant’, ‘soldier’ and ‘priest’, which, though there is scant contemporary evidence for such structures, gives the easy impression of early European governmental institutions.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt, Volume 2: From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom

“So the Badarians stored their harvests in large clay bins within their desert settlements, where they also ground their grain as they required and sometimes, too, they turned their flour to bread, for loaves were found in several of their graves. A form of porridge also appears to have been a common food, ladled out of the cooking pots into hand-sized bowls from which it was consumed, perhaps, with the aid of the delicately made spoons of bone and horn and ivory which were also buried with the dead. Meat too, was on the menu, and in generous quantities. Alongside their domesticated herds of oxen, sheep and goats, hunting and gathering were still considerable activities; the bones of birds and fish were also plentiful inside the settlements, as were wild seeds and pulses and the roots of reeds and grasses, some of which could be as sweet as filberts whilst others would have been so fragrant yet so bitter that they could only have served as perfume.”
― John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid