The first direct ancestor of the alphabetic Latin script in which these lines are written emerged because of copper. Ancient Egyptians mined the metal ore on the Sinai Peninsula in cooperation with the local population.1 Circumstances were far from idyllic, but perhaps not hellish, either. This new script was an unintentional product of the Egyptian and Levantine effort to procure an important raw material. This mundane metal is the central character of the following text. Copper is destined to be positioned between importance and oblivion in the research of the ancient world.2 Copper is forever outshined by gold in ancient Egypt, not only in ancient sources but also in current Egyptological texts and popular imagination.
Copper was at the foundation of several modern human concepts, such as, accidentally, the alphabetic script mentioned above and, more importantly, for using weights of metals as direct and indirect value expressions. Copper provides evidence that such concepts had emerged much earlier than was previously thought or sufficiently established in Egypt.3 While gold was looted on a large scale, copper artefacts were often left untouched and provide statistical information that is otherwise unavailable for early ancient history, complementing written and iconographic sources. Moreover, as copper bears information concerning its provenance and production processes, we can follow its uses throughout society. The present work endeavours to validate the interdisciplinary potential of such studies, which has never been fully realized for ancient Egypt.4 While doing so, I will also demonstrate on copper that early Egypt, including the celebrated Old and Middle Kingdoms, was much more open to the outside world than presumed; it was just highly selective in accepting innovations.5
The objective of the monograph is to present a narrative, a synchronic and diachronic reconstruction of the development and changes of the chaîne opératoire of copper and copper alloy artefacts based on the preserved evidence. The means to that end include various sources—textual, iconographic and palaeographic, archaeological (the material culture, i.e. the metal artefacts themselves) and scientific (analyses of ores and artefacts). By their collection and analyses using the methods of relevant subdisciplines of Egyptology and Egyptian archaeology, a synthesis of the current state of knowledge is pieced together. Prospects of further research will be delineated, and open questions posed at the end. What is new is the ordering of the evidence based on the principle of the chaîne opératoire, of the predictable processing of copper as a material. These chapters encompassing successive parts of the process are divided chronologically, with an effort to see the development in time. By organizing the work according to the principle of the chaîne opératoire, we can identify what the sources tell us and what they do not. Although ancient Egyptians included all ores and semiprecious stones in the category of ꜥꜣ.t, they knew what they needed to do to the ore in practice to produce the metal. Previous attempts are either largely outdated or based only on selected evidence.6 A complete, up-to-date picture of copper extraction, production, use and reuse is lacking. I do not want to play “language games” with the readers and shoehorn the evidence into a particular school of contemporary archaeological theory, as I think that practical questions (i.e. what was important to ancient Egyptians and Nubians) need to be answered first—and they were not.
The chronology of the monograph is delimited at the beginning by the earliest occurrence of copper artefacts in the Badarian culture and at the end by the Dynasty 17 and the end of Second Intermediate Period, in order to examine Egyptian and Nubian copper and copper alloy material culture before the documentable ubiquitous use of tin bronze in the early New Kingdom.7 The “Pyramid Age” in the title could mean the era from Dynasty 3 to Dynasty 17, when the rulers’ predominant form of tombs were pyramid complexes, although it is often perceived only as denotation of the Old Kingdom. To avoid confusion, this narrow meaning is upheld in the title. The text investigates not only this particular “Pyramid Age” but also other periods of pyramid building and the time of copper use that led to it in both Egypt and Nubia. The geographical limits are set by the extent of ancient Egyptian and ancient Nubian Predynastic and dynastic “cultures” in the defined period. This long period can be perceived as an era of a single technology characterized by several predominant traits such as the use of wind-powered furnaces for initial smelting, use of so-called “standard” crucibles for melting and alloying, artefacts made of arsenical copper for practical purposes, gradual increase in the use of tin bronze, and, generally, a rather small scale of the craft. The subject is defined in detail in Chapter 1; Chapter 2 presents a “toolbox” of analytical terms and techniques used further, especially the chaîne opératoire. Following chapters establish the fundamental vocabulary, and then the successive steps of the chaîne opératoire from the expeditions to procure the material to the use of finished artefacts and their recycling. The last analytical Chapter 11 sets ancient Egyptian copper in the Eastern Mediterranean context.
If we try to examine the frequency of the word and its derivatives in the written sources, copper should be considered a marginal raw material down to the end of the Second Intermediate Period. The ancient Egyptian economy was based on crop cultivation and processing for the most part, with “payments” provided predominantly in bread and beer. The crop processing required an independent “bureau” of administration—the “Granary”—šnw.t. Another clear source of the society’s wealth was livestock breeding, reflected in the official year numbering during the era. All other materials, including precious and base metals, were presumably administered by another institution, the White House/Treasury—pr-ḥḏ. I must, therefore, state already here in the preface that copper represents a mere segment of the ancient Egyptian economy, a segment that is better observable than others thanks to the inherent properties of the material, studied by the archaeometallurgical techniques described in Chapter 2.8 According to written sources, the main concern of the ancient Egyptians in the Afterlife was to avoid hunger and thirst and to be clothed well. Yet in the same periods, there are hundreds of archaeological contexts containing complete or fragmentarily preserved copper artefacts. Thus, copper as a material is hiding in plain sight of available ancient Egyptian sources. Interdisciplinary research combining archaeological and archaeometric approaches with the traditional methods of Egyptology is unavoidable to properly understand the social roles that copper played in the periods under study.
Copper was always “foreign” to the Egyptians, yet the demands of the society forced them to procure, mine and use it on a large scale. The period of more than five millennia of documented use and reuse of copper is among the longest in the history of humankind. Every bit of copper ore had to be brought to the Nile Valley; each metal object found within the historical boundaries of the Egyptian nomes was made from imported material. We can see how original ancient Egyptian technological solutions were implemented in practice and how, from time to time, foreign influences reshaped the material culture of Egypt. However, ancient Egyptians were peculiar in their observation of material culture and its reflection in two-dimensional and three-dimensional art, including hieroglyphs. This peculiarity has no exact parallels in contemporary cultures. On the other hand, cuneiform texts provide far more detailed information on the crafts and the handling of material culture than ancient Egyptian written sources.9 The most important evidence from ancient Egypt is visual; there is a wealth of sources dealing with the “techniques of the body” and the use of artefacts. From this clearly follows the importance of archaeometric analyses as a corrective of visual information with its interpretative limits. This area is understudied in ancient Egyptian archaeology, however, being the subject of case studies rather than larger projects.
Most of the responsibility for the lack of metal studies can be attributed to the Egyptologists. Even the latest excavation reports from Egypt contain uncleaned corroded “lumps” of objects, and they are published as such. Archaeometallurgical investigation of the excavated artefacts is rare and complicated by current sampling policies in Egyptian archaeology. Information that arsenical copper was the main material used by Fourth and Third Millennium Egyptians sounds always rather new, and it is, frankly, ignored by popular works on ancient Egypt. In fact, the first author, who wrote on arsenical copper in ancient Egypt, was Martin Gsell in his PhD thesis, published in 1910!10 This work is virtually unknown in contemporary Egyptology, and largely outdated, of course. Yet it can be listed as the first serious book-length attempt to interweave the Egyptological and archaeometallurgical data, therefore first predecessor of what this text attempts again. Further issues of contemporary research lie in communication: Egyptology retains a pluralistic language approach. Recent important works on ancient Egyptian metallurgy and metal artefacts have been written in French and German.11 English is only one of several important languages in Egyptology, not the sole one. In order to synthesize the knowledge, one cannot ignore literature published in other languages, while relying only on texts in English.
The intended readership of this monograph can be divided into three groups. The first one comprises Egyptologists, the research community in which the author was educated. The study of metal artefacts is one of the most underdeveloped fields in Egyptology. Most Egyptologists are not aware of the possibilities and limits of the study of metals (including copper) for a richer understanding of the ancient Egyptian economy and society in general. A society with a delayed return economy would not exist or function without the circulation of materials and a range of standardized units, and Egypt is no exception.12 This monograph is designed as a case study, as a survey of these possibilities and limits, in order to show the archaeological and scientific side of research problems of the artefactual evidence, which was deemed “lückenhaft”13 and even too poor and meagre to be studied in detail compared to written and iconographic sources.
The second group of the intended readership includes non-Egyptologist archaeologists and archaeometallurgists. Ancient Egyptian written sources may not offer such breathtaking detail about the chaîne opératoire of the metallurgy as ancient Mesopotamian written sources,14 but a detailed and complex study of ancient Egyptian sources could address several pertinent research questions of archaeology and archaeometallurgy in general, including the relationship between the written, iconographic and artefactual evidence, the emic and etic definitions of the artefacts, the (attached) craft specialization, the handling of material culture in early civilizations and the emic value of the materials (the value as perceived and expressed by material culture in the past societies, rather than by the archaeologists of the present). Although the ancient Egyptian economy was not monetary, it handled abstract units of value based on metals and relied on metal weighing as one of the main means of value determination. The task of bridging the weighing systems with the broader questions of the artefact regularization still proves to be difficult, if not impossible.15 The possibilities and limits of work with ancient Egyptian sources also in this regard will be explained.
The third group includes everyone else who is interested in research questions connected to the use of ancient Egyptian copper. The only significant hurdle is that by its design and cost, the book is destined to be mostly the staple of academic and professional libraries. However, these should be accessible to anyone with a serious interest and, even if data-heavy, the academic text ought to be understandable to an interested non-professional in the field. The topic of ancient Egyptian copper is among those that are misunderstood by the general public. Perhaps not in academic discourse but anywhere else, the collocation “primitive technology” is thrown around quite often. The evidence on the ancient Egyptian use of copper is plentiful, and the advances in archaeometallurgy allow us to understand matters that could not be understood well using the tools and techniques available decades ago. This casts new light also on long-known written and iconographic sources, as well as material culture. In this regard, ancient Egypt can still offer many new insights into old problems.
(Morenz 2019; Höflmayer et al. 2021).
Examples from the recent literature: copper and metals are missing in the chart of the Early Dynastic state products (T.A.H. Wilkinson 1999, 126). In an overview of the materials available to the “richer and poorer classes” in a recent article, copper is conspicuously missing from either category (Miniaci 2018b, 141, Fig. 1).
And it was, indeed, doubted in the Egyptological research: “Berlev … explains the older šnꜥ.ty = šꜥ.ty as an abstraction meaning simply ‘value’. It seems hardly possible that an abstraction lay at the root of the later unit value, since this would imply a high degree of abstract thinking in the early stages of Egyptian culture” (Janssen 1975, 104). My intention is to demonstrate such degree of abstract thinking for these early periods.
On the other hand, it just cannot be said that the “archaeometallurgy has barely begun” in Egypt (Killick 2009, 402). It already has rich research history, reaching back shortly after the decipherment of hieroglyphs (Brongniart 1826; Vauquelin 1826).
In similar meaning, (T. Schneider 2003b). On accepting innovations, in the context of Egyptian archaeology (Shaw 2012, 97).
Outdated but still useful is (Lucas and Harris 1962). Recently the most often cited text in English on ancient Egyptian metals is (Ogden 2000), but there is important new research published in the last decades, and due to the briefness of the paper, also omissions of the earlier scholarship.
Recently demonstrated for the early New Kingdom at the site of Aniba in Nubia (Odler and Kmošek 2020), with tin bronzes present also in the late Dynasty-17 and early Dynasty-18 burials from Western Thebes (Bissing 1900; Morris 2022).
It would be comparable to having numerous series of the ancient DNA and dietary isotopes documented for the humans, fauna, and flora that was present in ancient Egypt and Nubia in the periods of the study, in addition to the written and iconographic sources. It would profoundly deepen the narratives that the professionals are telling about ancient Egypt.
Cf. for example (Limet 1960; Rouault 1977; Reiter 1997; Guichard 2005). There is also no comparable work to the Sumerian Debate between Copper and Silver (Wischnewski 2017, 217).
(Gsell 1910, 33).
E.g. (Abd El-Raziq et al. 2011; Petschel 2011; Broschat et al. 2018; Marouard 2020; Couton-Perche 2021).
(Bailey 2012, 530–534; Papadopoulos and Urton 2012, 45–46).
(Eichler 1993, 15).
(Limet 1960; Rouault 1977; Reiter 1997).
“While it is already difficult to prove that an object is a weight, it is even more difficult to present watertight evidence for the existence of so-called weight-regulated artefacts. Thousands of bronzes from the European Bronze Age are either often produced in a similar shape or are intentionally fragmented. So far, investigations of any metrological basis for these fragmentations have mostly failed to produce convincing evidence. However, a statistically significant approach has not yet been applied systematically” (Rahmstorf 2019, 2).