0222 Starting around 3500 B.C., during the proto-dynastic period of Egypt, petty monarchs are afforded fine burials all along the Nile Valley.  These petty kings give every indication of maintaining military and administrative control in their respective territories.  Graeber and Wengrow ask (more or less), “How do we get from these monarchs to the massive agrarian bureaucracy of First Dynastic Egypt?”

0223 Could it be about death?

The authors imagine debates about the responsibilities of the living to the dead.

Here is an institutional diagram for each little kingdom along the Nile.

0224 The dyadic actuality_2a consists in two contiguous real elements, the living (people) and the dead (ruler).  The contiguity is placed in brackets.  The brackets contain a modern term, “responsibility”.

However, I must keep in mind that the term, “responsibility”, is an explicit abstraction.  The ancient substance in the brackets is not an explicit abstraction.  The ancient substance arises in various questions.  Does the dead hunger?  Does the dead thirst?  The answer is apparent.  Grave goods include bread and pots of fermented wheat beer.

0225 Two innovations, one agricultural and one ceremonial, reinforce one another.  Agricultural improvements include ploughs and oxen, introduced around 3000 B.C.  Ceremonial innovations include networks of obligations and debts, centered around the provisioning of the dead.  Facilities dedicated to baking and brewing appear, first, alongside cemeteries, then later, near palaces and grand tombs.  By the start of the First Dynastic (around 2500 B.C.), bread and beer are manufactured on an industrial scale, enough to supply seasonal armies of corvee laborers working on royal constructions.

0226 The transition from proto-dynastic to First Dynastic differentiates the above institution into the Egyptian state_2bCand the people’s “religious” obligation to the afterlife_2aC.  The conundrum about the local ruler_3aC blossoms into separate social levels for the Pharoah_3bC and the people_3aC.  Order_1bC arises from righteousness_1aC.

0227 Needless to say, the Pharaoh’s order_1b does not reduce to the actuality of the term, “domination”_2a.