HORUS NARMER AND CANAAN: ANOTHER LOOK AT THE PROBLEM OF INTERACTIONS BETWEEN EGYPT AND THE SOUTHERN LEVANT IN THE LATE FOURTH MILLENNIUM B.C
The oldest contacts between Egypt and Canaan, relatively feeble and unstable throughout the Fifth and most of the Fourth Millennium B. C., intensified noticeably in the Protodynastic Period (Naqada III, the last third of the Fourth Millennium B.C.). At that time, penetration of the Egyptians into the Southern Levant took place, evaluated by archaeologists practically unanimously as impetuous and sudden. Experts associated this ‘intervention’, anyway, with activities of the nascent Egyptian state, its culmination matching with the reign of the Dynasty 0 ‘king’ Horus Narmer whose names- serekhs were found in the biggest number on artifacts of the Early Bronze Age I Period during excavations of the Southern Levantine settlements. Initially, it has been thought that Egypt could have exercised an armed conquest of the Western Asian territories under consideration, but this speculation was not confirmed by the materials of further excavations. Alternative scholarly versions were put forward that reconstructed the situation in the context of gift-exchange or trade relations between the two countries, the peaceful colonization of Southern Canaan by the Egyptians, their induced emigration here (possibly due to the overpopulation of the Nile Delta), etc. In addition to the already existing social theories and models of Egyptian - Southern Levantine interactions in the late Fourth Millennium B.C., the author of this paper considers the natural factor, namely, the fact that historical events under discussion unfolded at the peak of the postglacial eustatic (Flandrian) transgression with its threat of flooding of significant coastal areas of the Egyptian lower reaches.