The princes of Hierakonpolis may well have had the best claim to the hegemony of the Valley. The ruler of Hierakonpolis was possibly the king known as Scorpion who is celebrated on the large votive macehead from Nekhen on which he is depicted carrying out the ceremonies on the opening of an irrigation channel. It is also possible that, like his counterpart at Naqada, he did not have an heir to succeed him, though he is attended by a young man who holds the pannier into which the earth that the king brakes will be held, a duty often performed by the royal heir.
There is no archaeological evidence of warfare between the presumed contenders: another scene on Narmer’s palette has been interpreted as the king celebrating a triumph over enemies in the Delta, but it is probably unwise to presume that the palettes, which are ceremonial and votive objects, necessarily depict historical events literally. On the other hand, there are other examples which show what appear to be armed engagements in the Valley, in some cases featuring animals prominently which may be symbolic of the chieftains of different clans when they are attacking fortified cities.
The elimination of Naqada from the race may have had significant longterm consequences for Egypt’s future. Naqada was the home of Set, who was probably the principal god of the south in predynastic times. Set and Horus were always portrayed in association, perpetual counterparts, warring but paradoxically united. It may be that Set’s acquisition of an ambiguous reputation in later times was a consequence of his stronghold having lost in its attempt to secure sovereignty over the Valley.
That Hierakonpolis was considered especially venerable, reflected by its enduring prestige and that it possessed an already distinct metropolitan character, is demonstrated by a singular feature of its defensive architecture: its great gateway. Both as a defensive structure and as a piece of urban grandifica-tion, the gateway of Hierakonpolis demonstrates those same niches and recessed and buttressed panelled walls which later became so evident and powerful a symbol as the serekh in which the king’s Horus name was presented.
Hierakonpolis lies 113 kms north of Aswan and approximately 650 kms south of Cairo. It is remarkable enough in being a real and unequivocal city. As we have seen, the city was not an institution which really was a natural product of the Nile Valley: the essentially agricultural nature of the society and its dependence on a widely dispersed peasantry, representing the broad base of an enduring hierarchy culminating in the court which flourished wherever the divine king chose to station himself, militated against the growth of cities in the early centuries. But Hierakonpolis, located opposite the modern site of El Kab, was an exception — and a most notable one.
In the fourth millennium it was a large and prosperous settlement, surrounded by a substantial defensive wall and, later, embellished with its high, niched ceremonial gateway. No other city in Egypt of its time could be compared with it: only, far away in Mesopotamia, lay the city of Uruk which, most improbably, bears such close similarities that it is tempting to describe one as the ‘twin’ of the other.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF HIERAKONPOLIS
Hierakonpolis’ wall was huge; it is no less than 9.5 metres thick in places, a really colossal structure. It consisted of a double skin of mud brick, with a void between them.7 Inside the city was an enclosed temple area; this is unusual for an Egyptian city at any period, for the temple or temples were built on acknowledged sacred sites, but the rest of the city; houses, workshops, palaces for the nobles, grew up around them in cheerful and random confusion. In Sumerian cities, even from the earliest times, matters were ordered somewhat differently. The temple occupied a specific area which was immemorially sacred; it was marked off from the rest of the city by a temenos, a walled area which protected it from the incursions of other, secular buildings. This is what also appears in Hierakonpolis, though the wall which now stands is Thutmosid in date (mid-second millennium BC) but the temple area is walled round, cut off from the rest of the city, like the practice in Sumerian cities of the time.
Inside the temple area, first excavated in the 1890s and then virtually left untouched until very recent times, was found one of the most remarkable caches of objects ever recorded from an ancient Egyptian site — and certainly the most important works of art associated with the Early Dynastic period ever to be found in one place. The Narmer Palette, the Narmer and Scorpion mace-heads, a magnificent seated red pottery lion, the statues of King Khasehem (Khasekhemwy) and the great gold falcon head which, though is dated to the Sixth Dynasty (thus significantly later than the other artefacts cited here) typifies Hierakonpolis more, perhaps, than any other, were all recovered from the temple zone. A remarkable concentration of maceheads, practical weapons as well as monumental votive objects, was so notable that it has led some commentators to propose that the collection represented some form of ceremonial deposit.8
World History
