Excavations at Hierakonpolis are currently directed by American and British scholars. They have continued to confirm — if confirmation were needed — how very exceptional a place it is; indeed, although the word is overworked, it bids very fair to be considered as unique in all Egypt. By the middle of the fourth millennium BC Hierakonpolis was a large and thriving city, the first settlement along the Nile which can be so described. It extended over two miles along the flood plain; the land was rich and fertile, supporting a population which, in microcosm, was an abstraction of the population of Egypt at its height. Early housing for the people is one of the aspects of the society in Hierakonpolis, examples of which, remarkably, have survived over these five thousand and more years. The American expedition in its early years found a house of Naqada I period.19 In more recent years a potter’s house was excavated; it had been burned to the ground, a catastrophe which evidently occurred as a result of an accident in the kiln which fired the potter’s productions. A change of wind must have set fire to his house, which was close to his workplace. The excavators believe that the potter, perhaps wisely, rebuilt his house in stone.20
Pottery making was an important trade in Hierakonpolis; indeed it was altogether a major industrial centre. Brewing was another of its occupations: a large-scale installation of pottery vats was found on the north side of the town and its output would have contributed both to Hierakonpolis’ wealth and, no doubt, to the cheerful demeanour of its inhabitants.
Figure 4.3 The temple in Hierakonpolis is the oldest known in Egypt, thus far discovered. It has been carefully reconstructed from its excavated remains by the Hierakonpolis Expedition. A solitary pole in the courtyard displayed an image of the prevailing divinity, in this case the Divine Falcon, Horus, the patron of the Egyptian kingship. Sacrifices to the god were made in the courtyard, which was surrounded by workshops for the craftsmen who supplied the king and the court with objects of high prestige.
Source: from Davies, V. and Friedmann, R. (1999) ‘Egypt’, reproduced by courtesy of S4C International.
The site also produced evidence of Egypt’s oldest surviving temple, an appropriate discovery for a city which was so bound up with the cult of the Divine Kingship. The remains display the essential historic architectural form which was to remain constant through all of Egypt’s history.21 A large oval courtyard contained an image of the god and round its perimeter were workshops in which craftsmen, the ancestors of all those who made the material culture of Egypt so exceptional, practiced their trades, for the greater glory of the gods and of the earthly incarnation present in the city, if indeed a divine ruler was already recognized.
In the early days of the Americans’ work at Hierakonpolis one of the most important archaeological locations to be recognized was part of the predynastic cemetery, designated Area HK 6.22 When work was resumed in the centre of the cemetery, the first grave excavated dating to early Naqada I, yielded a human burial, accompanied by the remains of dogs. The Egyptian affection for dogs, one of the distinct and recurring marks of their culture throughout history, is thus already demonstrated here. The area around the grave (Tomb 13) and its neighbours produced the remains of at least seven domesticated dogs and with them two young males with whom, it must be assumed, the dogs had been buried.23 The adjacent tomb contained the remains of a wholly unexpected companion (or, more likely perhaps, the object of the chase) for the grave’s inhabitants, a juvenile African elephant, which had been buried intact.24
The evidence of rock-art from southern Upper Egypt suggests that the elephant was only present in those regions of the Valley in which the Egyptians had established themselves early in the fourth millennium. The young elephant at Hierakonpolis (and others whose remains have been found at the site) were presumably among the later survivals of the herds before they and the other large animals withdrew to the extreme southern reaches of the Valley, in Upper Nubia. It was over-hunting and the increasing aridity of the climate which drove the larger game further to the south. The two young males and the dogs were perhaps hunters; the whole assemblage may be thought to be some sort of event associated with hunting.
Fragments of two pottery masks were also recovered from the site; thus far, they are without precedent. They have pierced eyeholes, an opening for the mouth and depressions for the nostrils. In the view of the excavators details of the faces represented were comparable with those of figurines of the Naqada II and Naqada III periods.25 One of the masks was humanoid, the other feline.26
Masks were always to be important in Egyptian rituals, as they were in many ancient cultures. By adopting them, the priest or other participant in the temple ceremonies could suppress his own personality and thus is ready to be united with the god. In the later periods there is little doubt that the priests, when impersonating the gods in the great ceremonies in the temples
Figure 4.4 Masks were an essential component in many of the rites conducted in Egyptian temples in historic times, worn by priests impersonating the gods whom they served. An early example of the use of masks comes from Hierakonpolis, in the form of this remarkable pottery face-mask. Naqada I period.
Source: reproduced by permission of the Hierakonpolis Expedition.
And around the king, assumed masks appropriate to the divinity they represented.
The importance of the finds at Hierakonpolis — and doubtless there will be many more — is that they show how deeply rooted the society in Valley really was, even before the formal acknowledgement of the kingship. Whilst the coming of the kings and the subsequent movement northwards up the Valley to a location more central to the two parts of the Dual Kingdom meant a withdrawal from Hierakonpolis and a consequent decline in its relative importance, it was always regarded as a source of the distinctive culture which gave historic Egypt its particular quality.
From the earlier excavations at Hierakonpolis the most arresting discovery which was made, in the fields below the ancient walls of Nekhen, is what seems to be an exceptionally early burial ground of the indigenous elite, the ‘Great Ones’ of Hierakonpolis.27 The burial area which has been excavated was important in the early Naqada I period (t, 3700—3500 BC), a range which has been confirmed by carbon 14 analysis, and again at the beginning of the First Dynasty, c,3200—3100bc. It is from the earlier phase of this time-bracket that the celebrated painted tomb, Tomb 100, which was found — and lost — at the end of the last century descends; however that tomb still remains a unique example, its decorated walls unparalleled.
The group of burials at Hierakonpolis included one which seems to be ancestral to the later stream of royal burials, in a way similar to Tomb 100. This is Tomb 1 in Locality 628 in which a sunken pit was surrounded by triple-coursed mud-brick walls, with wooden planks overlaying it. The walls of the pit were plastered, and it was surmounted by a replica of a temple or palace, made from wooden posts, surrounded by a wooden fence. It is really not difficult in this structure to see the ancestor, no matter how simple, of the later mastaba tombs of the First Dynasty, the great funerary palaces of the Abydos area, and even the supreme funerary complex built for King Netjerykhet at Saqqara many hundreds of years later still.
Other graves in the complex produced material evidence which illuminates the nascent character of the Egyptian state at this period, and confirms the importance of what was happening at Hierakonpolis in bringing it to birth. A macehead of Naqada I shape and the fragments of others suggest that this was a symbol of authority in the earliest times and that the Hier-akonpolis elite (it is too early to call them ‘kings’ or even chiefs) did not condescend to be parted from them in death, thus anticipating the colossal quantities of ceremonial possessions which were to be extracted from later economies and buried with their successors.
A burial (no. 123) in area HK 43 was of two young men, one of whom was seriously malformed; both appeared to have had their throats slashed.29 Another burial (24) also revealed a similar cause of death for its occupant. A woman’s skeleton showed marks of severe battering to the skull.30
These burials and their evidence of severe, violent and purposeful trauma, must prompt the question whether human sacrifice or ritual slaughter, the first of which is well attested in the First Dynasty, was also a custom in much earlier times. The evidence at Hierakonpolis, which is closely paralleled by similar burials at the near-contemporary site of Adai'ma (see 90 below), suggests that it was so.
There were also animal cemeteries, or at least what seem to be the ritual burials of animals at Hierakonpolis, thus giving a further example of the great antiquity of the animal cults which were always to be such a feature of Egyptian belief. Dogs, baboons, bulls, and goats were buried there and, in one case (Tomb 7), what seems to be a sort of family burial of cattle — bull, cow, and calf31 suggesting both the beginnings of the divine family triads which were also always an aspect the Egyptian view of their gods and also the exceptional importance of cattle in the Egyptian view of the world. Indeed, many elements in the evidence from Hierakonpolis seem to point to the people being deeply rooted in the traditions of the Nilotic cattle herders, whose contribution to the ancient Egyptian culture has long been recognized. The Nilotic peoples surviving today in the remote reaches of the Valley and its peripheral areas are probably the living survivors of identical traditions.
By early First Dynasty times the ruler of Hierakonpolis was evidently important enough — and susceptible to influence from far away to the east — to build himself a palace with a handsome niched facade. Hierakonpolis was fortified in the late predynastic period, suggesting that the city’s elite was already experiencing some questioning of its right to rule or at least of threats to its prosperity. The great wall which was built around the city in the early Old Kingdom may well be the successor of earlier fortifications.
Near the grave fields a small group of rock carvings was identified, which perpetuate the themes so well known from those in the eastern desert. These include boats and those from Hierakonpolis have a large upright structure amidships, of the type which is usually described as a shrine or cabin; however it has also been seen as a forerunner of the later Egyptian sarcophagus. In one case the boat, bearing a shrine or sarcophagus amidships, is surmounted by the figure of a bull;32 it is suggested that the intention was to express a royal burial by depicting the principal figure in the story as a bull, one of the manifestations of the king of Egypt.
The prows of the boats are surmounted with the heads of animals, probably the ibex and the gazelle, in the manner of other Egyptian examples and of boats in Sumer and Elam of much the same period. A drawing of a wounded giraffe, a particularly striking representation, is also included amongst the subjects drawn on the rocks.
As we have seen the population of Hierakonpolis in predynastic times was probably not above five thousand. This would mean that virtually everyone in the community would be known to everyone else, at least by sight. It would also produce conditions in which, in a period of exceptional change with creative activity being sustained at a high level, the impact of a charismatic leader — or a group of leaders — would be very great, with stories about their prowess being magnified by repetition and embroidery until they assumed the character of legend.
Whilst the ‘Main Deposit’, found in the temple area at Hierakonpolis by Quibell and Green who excavated there between 1897 and 1900,33 contains some of the most important material from Early Dynastic Egypt, it also represents a problem in the chronology of the earliest periods. Since the Hier-akonpolis material is regarded as amongst the most crucial in establishing the character and quality of life in the earliest days of the unified kingship, the consideration is an important one.
At some time during the Old Kingdom period the temple at Hierakon-polis was rebuilt and many of the most important objects were collected together and placed in a cache which formed the ‘Main Deposit’, found by the excavators. The treasures of the ‘Main Deposit’ were of immense importance: probably no other cache of objects, even including the contents of Tutankhamun’s tomb, matches them for their aesthetic and historical value. Other deposits and caches were found on the site: the objects in them range in time from the late predynastic to the late Old Kingdom.
Petrie was convinced that the Hierakonpolis material was, in effect, all predynastic and based much of his thinking about the chronology of the earliest periods, especially the late predynastic, on this assumption. It is, however, only an assumption, though virtually all of the chronology of Egypt, down to about 2000 BC, depends upon it. Many of the objects in the ‘Main Deposit’ are now seen as later in origin than the late predynastic to which Petrie allocated them. Though the implications of this redating are profound, it does not diminish the importance nor the superlative quality of the objects themselves.
World History
