In the previous chapter, we looked at the ways in which important Egyptian cultural artefacts of late pre-Dynastic times preserved strong indications of their African origins. Towards the end of the chapter, however, we encountered some evidence that in at least one foundational area of Egyptian symbology – its mythography of the Nile – an opposing impulse became manifest in Dynastic times. The symbolic ideology of Dynastic Egypt took little account of the vast African extent of the river beyond Egypt's southern borders – not even, it would appear, once Egyptian armies and expeditions had penetrated as far south as the Fourth Cataract during New Kingdom times. We need to consider, therefore, the contra-indicators, accumulating almost from the very founding of the Egyptian state, which suggest that Egyptians did not in fact see themselves as part of a greater north-east Africa, let alone of any larger ‘African’ entity.

The first and foremost feature of Dynastic Egypt to consider is the provenance, nature and expressive iconography of the cult of pharaonism itself. We have already seen it to be closely related to and expressed in terms of ‘bull talk’ and the pre-Dynastic phalanx of African-Egyptian zoomorphic beliefs. But how did such notions continue to develop and manifest in Dynastic times? Many of the animal deities remained, some remarkably unchanged from what must have been their earliest African realisations. The bull-pharaoh, however, must have followed a more intricate track from the relatively simple metaphor of pharaoh-as-bull to the full metaphysics of divine kingship and eternal existence. E.L.R. Meyerowitz, in a work exploring connections between divine kingship in Egypt and Ghana, argues that ‘the idea of the divine Pharaonic monarchy, rule by a god, [is] founded on a broad African soubassement’ (cited by Shavit, 2001, 209). Similar points have often been made (Seligman, 1934; Evans-Pritchard, 1948; and see Hoffman, 1980, 257–264), but what substance is there to this claim? More to the point, what would be the relevance to the present study of resolving the possibility that the Egyptian notion of divine kingship had some exo-Egyptian and African origin?