Here is a City
A City on the banks of the Nile
Big and noisy and prosperous
Here is a City
Feel its vigour, its energy, its lure...
Who would dare rule this City?
A City febrile with ambition
A City of people rooted in the loam of a fertile soil
A City that feeds a greater state
A City that needs to defend itself from jealous neighbours
Envious tribes of foreign armies
With their swords and spears and arrows
And their longing for conquest of a land of plentiful
harvests
And of a City whose very streets are paved with golden slabs
of power
So how do you rule such a City?
The answer was found 5000 years later
Embedded in the mud of the great river Nile -
A label
A tiny square sliver of Hippopotamus ivory
So small
So seemingly insignificant
Carrying a message from the past
A message that we all understand so well today
A message so simple and deadly and obvious...
How do you rule a City?
‘With force’
And who would rule such a City?
Well there is his image scratched into the ivory label –
An expressive, elegant picture of violence:
A man with a club and a whip
Smiting his fallen enemy
King Den himself, Pharaoh of all Egypt
Royally bashing brains in a visceral act of subjugation
His victim, a man from Sinai
Misshapen and smaller in stature
Knows now who rules this land
As he and his brothers are obliterated from history
Because there are words too scratched into the ivory
Chilling to the marrow
Stark and malicious
A message to heed for all around
“They shall not exist”
For King Den, like a god has power over life and death
And rules by fear and might
The City people see
How he smites the Tjesem and the Luntju nomads
See how with ruthless efficiency he destroys the Setjet of
the East
Taking their women for his harem
Terrified sex slaves at his beck and call
The City people see
How his enemies cower before his mighty fist
How he humiliates them and crushes them beneath his feet
Death in the desert, blood in the sand
The City people see this and bow low before their King
For this is how you rule a City
A tyrant once trod the streets of an ancient City
In sandals made of the finest leather
Footwear labelled perhaps for the afterlife
Laid carefully by his side in his elaborate tomb
Crafted from granite mined hundreds of miles away
And should his soul awake in Heaven
Will his retainers and servants be there too
Ready to obey his Royal commands?
For one hundred and thirty six of them were strangled after
his death
And buried nearby
Eternal slaves waiting for their master’s command
Men and women of a Pharaoh’s City
Waiting for the voice of a despot to resurrect them from
their ignoble graves
And there have been many Cities since
Many great Cities and many great states
And there have been wars and tyrants and Kings and rulers
And Cities have been burned and bombed
Women enslaved and raped
There has been genocide and ethnic cleansing,
And refugees and atrocities that persist in their capacity
to appal...
Civilizations it seems are built by people for whom history
is not a lesson
But rather – an example.
