All the royal mastabas at Saqqara and the funerary palaces at Abydos are surrounded by the subsidiary burials of servants and lesser figures in the court. No one can speculate with any hope of certainty about the attitude of those Egyptians who were obliged to go down into the grave with the great men or women whom they served. With rare exceptions, such as that cited in the previous chapter, little trace has been found of resistance amongst these subsidiary dead, no general signs of dreadful struggles as was evident, centuries later, in the mass graves at Kerma, far to the south (in what was, for the average Egyptian, deepest Africa), nor the chilling if faintly farcical episode of one of the women in the drama of the death pit at Ur in Sumer, who seems to have been a little late for her own funeral and who slipped in after her companions, to join the ranks of those about to die. The Egyptians were buried in orderly tombs, neatly laid out with appropriate offerings; presumably they had administered to them some sort of tranquillizing drug or swift-acting poison, to carry them out of this world into the promise of the next or, more brutally, clubbed into insensibility. The argument which most scholars advance to account for what appears to be the placid acceptance of premature death is that by this means only would they expect to achieve immortality, as part of the retinue of the eternal king, as at this time there was no belief in the general application of eternal life beyond the king and his immediate entourage. It is as good an explanation as any.
Though they brought an entirely unprecedented degree of civilization and prosperity to Egypt there is undoubtedly a sense of strangeness which surrounds the reputation of the kings of the First Dynasty. Whilst there is clearly a progression from a relatively simple chieftaincy demonstrated by the predynastic kings, to a high and fully articulated monarchy, the actual transition is marked with considerable suddenness. To those accustomed to the splendour of the kings of Egypt as their image has descended to the modern world, there is something disconcerting about the customs and rituals which attend the kings of the First Dynasty. Although much of the immemorial legacy of Egypt descended from their times and many of the attributes associated with the kingship were laid down in their reigns, there
Is an uneasy quality about their occupancy of the thrones. Even their origins are mysterious.
They were honoured greatly by later generations as the founders of the kingship and of the unified kingdoms, but their memories seem also to have been feared. At some time after the end of the dynasty all the tombs in which the kings and high officials were buried, on the escarpment at North Saqqara looking down on Memphis, at Abydos and at Helwan, were destroyed in immense conflagrations. The fires were intense and the destruction of the houses of these great dead was without doubt deliberate. Somehow the customary explanation, of dynastic upheavals and the vindictiveness of their political opponents, seems inadequate for so violent a manifestation of rejection carried out with such ruthless determination over the whole country.
World History
