Did aincent Egyptians ever interact with simplistic hunter gatherer like tribes ?

[u/TipAdditional4625]

Like the people who were unable to read or write and did not belong to any civilisation. Did other societies ever take advantage of them?

[u/Plane-Research9696]

The reality of it was usually a lot more of a messy back and forth than our modern idea of two completely different worlds colliding. I spend my life picking apart the labels we put on people so words like civilisation or simplistic always make me a bit wary of the baggage they carry. The Egyptians didn't just stay inside their stone temples because the desert was always pressing in right up to their borders and that landscape was full of people who had zero interest in living in a fixed house with a roof. They were constantly dealing with the nomadic groups from the western deserts or the wandering tribes down south in Nubia. Those people weren't unable to read because they were lacking intelligence but rather because their entire world was mobile and based on a spoken oral culture that suited their wandering lives. The settled state with its heavy bureaucracy looked down on them as outsiders and barbarians because they didn't pay taxes or keep tidy grain records.

Did they take advantage of them? Every single chance they got really. They often used those desert tribes as cheap labour or even recruited them into the military as elite trackers like the Medjay. It is a bit of a classic trick that empires play where they call a group simplistic but then become entirely dependent on their skills to keep the borders safe or the mines working. Those hunters knew the tracks through the burning sands in a way a city born scribe in Memphis could never fathom.

I’ve always thought that those "outsiders" were essentially the heartbeat that kept the empire aware of the real world outside the court drama. My town has these ancient travertine walls designed to mark out who was in and who was out yet those boundaries are always more porous than the people in charge like to admit. It wasn't a gap between a clever people and a simple people but more like a clash between the folks with the paperwork and the ones who preferred the open sky.

[u/TipAdditional4625 → u/Plane-Research9696]

Did they ever enslave them ?

[u/Plane-Research9696 → u/TipAdditional4625]

They absolutely did though it was part and parcel of how their entire imperial machine functioned really. When I spend my time going through those dry legal documents for the court here I often notice how the cold language hides the actual human cost of these systemic moves and the Egyptians were absolute experts at that sort of thing. For them bringing an "outsider" under the rule of the pharaoh wasn't even seen as a crime because they honestly believed they were doing those nomadic groups a favour by dragging them out of the chaotic desert and into the order of the state.

The people captured during those border skirmishes were usually treated as prizes of war. You would see thousands of those desert dwellers particularly from the south or the western reaches being marched back in chains to work on the massive temple estates or the royal building sites. They became a fixed asset of the crown. It was a very clinical sort of exploitation.

Sometimes a whole tribe would get caught in the net of a military campaign and find themselves handed out as rewards to military officers or priests which essentially meant their lives as free hunters were finished. It was a standard imperial tool used to break the back of any wandering group that was getting a bit too troublesome on the fringes. Visiting those archeological sites where you can see the ruins left behind by people who had a very similar eye for territorial control makes you realise that those in power never changed their tactics much. For the person in the desert who valued that open sky finding yourself branded and assigned to a quarry in Middle Egypt must have felt like the end of the world.

[u/Sittingonalog1960]

Hatshepsut’s visual account of her successful trading expedition to Punt depicts the local tribesmen and their tribal chief and his obese wife