The basic historical outline of the Early Dynastic Period is much more soundly established than even a generation ago (Wilkinson 1999: 60-105), yet major difficulties and gaps in our knowledge remain. Ironically, the First Dynasty - the most remote period of ancient Egyptian history - is better known than the Second and Third Dynasties, but even its parameters are open to debate. One of the most contentious areas of disagreement has been the identity of Egypt’s first ruler, known to posterity as Menes (Emery 1961: 32-7; Wilkinson 1999: 68). Some scholars equate Menes with Narmer, some with Aha, while others see Menes as a mythical conflation of several early rulers. Such disagreements arise, principally, because of the difficulty in correlating the names preserved in later king lists and in the Manethonian tradition (usually the nebty or nesu-bity names) with the Horus names attested on contemporary Early Dynastic monuments. Some pairings, especially in the latter half of the First Dynasty, are generally accepted, but for the earliest rulers the evidence is either capable of differing interpretation or entirely lacking.
The excavation of eight kingly tombs in the First Dynasty royal necropolis at Abydos (plus one queenly burial, belonging to the king’s mother Meri(t)-neith) seems to confirm the king-list tradition of a line of eight rulers beginning with Menes; equating the names attested archaeologically (Narmer, Aha, Djer, Djet, Den, Adjib, Semerkhet, and Qaa) with this historic First Dynasty thus seems relatively certain, despite the protestations of a few scholars (e. g. Dreyer 1987: 39; 1990: 67-71). Yet, even this fundamental building block of Early Dynastic history may be shakier than supposed. Fragmentary inscriptions from the Early Dynastic necropolis at North Saqqara name a king Sneferka who is otherwise unattested in the archaeological record (Ryholt 2008). Epigraphic and contextual evidence points to Sneferka having reigned close in time to Qaa, traditionally regarded as the last ruler of the First Dynasty, although a date for Sneferka in the Second Dynasty cannot be ruled out. The recent discovery of a large mastaba at North Saqqara with, it is reported, inscriptions naming Sneferka (Hawass n. d.) may force Egyptologists to reconsider the extent and composition of the First Dynasty, previously thought to be fairly secure.
The challenges are even greater for the Second Dynasty, perhaps the most poorly known period of ancient Egyptian history. Indeed, most of the Second Dynasty royal tombs have yet to be fully excavated (Munro 1993b; Dodson 1996; van Wetering 2004). The numerous Second Dynasty elite tombs excavated by Emery during his later seasons at North Saqqara remain entirely unpublished. Without securely dated monuments, the Second Dynasty is a serious lacuna in our knowledge of Early Dynastic history and culture. The absence of an agreed pottery corpus for the period - although the re-analysis of the Early Dynastic necropolis at Helwan, with restoration of original tomb groups, holds much promise in this area (Kohler et al. 2005) - combines with an extreme paucity of inscriptions to produce almost total ignorance about economic, political, and social trends during this key phase of Egypt’s early development. While the order of the first three rulers (Hotepsekhemwy, Nebre, Ninetjer) is established with reasonable certainty, many of the remaining kings conventionally allocated to the Second Dynasty - Ba, Nubnefer, Weneg, and Senedj - are little more than names, some known only from secondary contexts (Wilkinson 1999: 82, 87-9).
As a substitute for contemporary accounts, the Palermo Stone, a compilation of royal annals inscribed centuries after the Early Dynastic Period, is used to flesh out the history of the Second Dynasty, but there must be doubts about the reliability of such an approach (Wilkinson 2000). Apparent indications of unrest during the reign of Ninetjer are often adduced to provide a backdrop for the sequence of (seemingly) ephemeral kings that followed his reign, but, in reality, all such reconstructions are highly speculative. The sobering fact is that the evidence is simply too meagre to allow firm conclusions to be drawn. It is scarcely surprising, perhaps, that different generations of Egyptologists have seen in the royal names Sekhemib and Peribsen, from the latter part of the Second Dynasty, either two separate kings or one ruler with two radically different titularies (Wilkinson 1999: 89-91); the same holds true of Khase-khem and Khasekhemwy from the very end of the dynasty, although here the evidence is rather weightier and seems to point to a single ruler. Throughout Egyptian history, the choice of royal name was loaded with political and religious significance, and we assume the same to have been the case in the Early Dynastic Period; yet we are at a complete loss to explain why the kings of the late Second Dynasty practiced such strange habits of nomenclature.
The fog begins to clear with the reign of Khasekhem(wy), if for no other reason than that he left behind an unprecedented number of monuments (cf. Hoffman 1984: chapter 21). His ‘‘Fort’’ at Hierakonpolis and equally imposing Shunet ez-Zebib at Abydos are the two oldest mud-brick structures in the world, but why a king should have built two massive funerary enclosures in Upper Egypt remains a mystery (plate 1). The answer may (or may not) be connected with his change of name. If the even larger, stone-built, enclosure at Saqqara, the Gisr el-Mudir (Mathieson and Tavares 1993; Bettles et al. 1995; Tavares 1998: 1136-7), is to be attributed to Khasekhem(wy) as well - future excavation should be able to provide a definitive answer to this question, at least - then the puzzle becomes even more complex. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, the history of the Second Dynasty is ‘‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’’
Frustrated by the lack of textual data, Egyptologists studying the Early Dynastic Period have, perhaps understandably, concentrated on questions of social change and the dynamics of culture (Kemp 2006: chapter 3), conveniently ignoring the glaring gaps in the underlying chronological framework (although Helck 1987b is a notable exception). It is surely time that these basic historical questions were addressed before firm and lasting progress can be made on other fronts.
World History
