Raneb in turn was succeeded by Ninetjer, who seems to have reigned for a considerable period. He was probably buried in a huge tomb at Saqqara which has been the subject of recent excavations.23 Rather surprisingly, his name appears in an especially intriguing context, particularly for the secondary theme of this book, the possibility of some sort of contact between Early Dynastic Egypt and Mesopotamia. In eastern Saudi Arabia the remains, sadly depleted, of large tumulus fields near Dhahran, link that part
Figure 6.1 The serekh of King Ninerjer of the Second Dynasty (c.2750bc) appears on this seal, found in a tumulus near Dhahran in Saudi Arabia. How it came to be placed in a second millennium tomb in eastern Arabia is not known. There is no evidence that it had travelled so far in the king’s lifetime; rather it seems likely that it was cached in the Dhahran tomb many centuries after his death.
Sources: J. Zarins et al., 'Excavarions at Dhahran South: The Tumuli Field (208-2)’, 1983. A Preliminary Report. ATLAL 8: 40 (incorrectly arrribured in the text); pl. 52 k. National Museum, Riyadh cat. No. 246, B-2.
Of the peninsula with the island of Bahrain, which lies in the Gulf some twenty kilometres away, to the east. The predominant culture of the Arabian Gulf, Dilmun, probably had its origins in eastern Arabia. Two quite substantial settlements have been found there, at Abqiaq and Tarut, the latter a notable production centre for finely carved and decorated chlorite vessels.24 This part of the Arabian coast was included in the polity of Dilmun and even as late as the nineteenth century AD, cartographers included it in the general topographical description, Bahrain.25
The Dhahran tumuli are contemporary with and similar in construction to the much larger fields of mounds in Bahrain. In one of the Saudi mounds, designated B.2 by the excavators from the Saudi Arabian Department of Antiquities in 1983,26 what appears to be a seal bearing the serekh of
Ninetjer was found. With it were other assorted seals from several periods, some of them much later than the date of the construction of the tumulus itself, which is the second half of the third millennium or even of the regnal dates of Ninetjer which are t, 2865 BC.
The fact that his seal was found amongst such a collection of others, much later in date, probably precludes it having been taken to Saudi Arabia during the time of his reign or even close to it; little incidentally is known of the events of his kingship. However, B.2 seems to have been chosen, for whatever reason, to hold a cache of seals: nine stamp seals, some with South Arabian inscriptions, one with a possible Aramaic inscription and two which came from levels associated with Neo-AssyrianNew Babylonian ceramics. Several other Egyptian or Egyptianizing seals were found in the same burial mound. The excavators note that a seal with a hieroglyphic inscription was found in a hoard of silver in Bahrain but this dates from the seventh century BC.27
In the circumstances the discovery of Ninetjer’s seal in B.2 cannot be taken to indicate contact between Egypt and eastern Arabia in the Second Dynasty. It cannot, of course, be entirely ruled out, but its presence with such a medley of seals would suggest that another explanation must be sought. Unlikely though it may seem, perhaps there was a collector of seals resident or travelling in eastern Arabia in the latter half of the first millennium BC (the terminus post quem being indicated by the latest of the seals) who, for whatever reason, cached his collection in B.2, but was never able to return to recover it.
Ninetjer is however, to be remembered for another reason: the oldest surviving statue of an enthroned Egyptian king is attributed to him. The execution of the sculpture is fairly crude but the pose adopted was to continue to be used throughout the whole of Egyptian history.28 His statue predates the more celebrated ones, in a similar pose, of the last of the dynasty, King Khasekhemwy. Ninetjer was buried at Saqqara in a large, subterranean tomb, in land on which the Step Pyramid complex of King Netjerykhet was to be built in the next reign.
Egypt continued to develop her institutions and her rich culture during the reigns of the kings of the Second Dynasty; the evidence, however, is very scanty and the sequence of the kings is only known because the names of the first three appear in order on a statue of a kneeling official, of a slightly later date.29 After the dominant and forceful sovereigns of the First Dynasty their early Second Dynasty successors seem pale figures by comparison. Indeed, it is difficult to consider those of the Second Dynasty, or at least the early members of the dynasty, as being in the same class of monarch at all. It is possible that they may have been a small local dynasty, of which there must have been many in pre-First Dynasty times, which somehow got itself acknowledged as national rulers.30 Egypt did not decline in prosperity during the rule of the Second Dynasty. This is very clear from the building of an immense mastaba tomb for one of the viziers, Ruaben, at Saqqara where the early kings of the dynasty also chose to be buried, forsaking Abydos.31
According to some king-lists Ninetjer was succeeded by Sened, about whom virtually nothing is known. It would have been doubted that he existed at all were it not for an inscription belonging to a Fourth Dynasty priest, Sheri, who was responsible for maintaining Sened’s cult at Giza, which thus had survived for at least a hundred years.32
As the Second Dynasty unfolded it is evident that some of the ancient influences in the Valley, dormant or repressed during the First Dynasty, began again to stir. Some sort of reaction against the Thinites seems to have occurred and this found its focus evidently in the deep-rooted honours paid by the southern people to the god Set, a southern god, associated with the desert, storm, and violence. He is portrayed as an enigmatic creature, human in body but with a strange, canine and long-muzzled head, with sharply pointed ears. There is little doubt that he is a conflation of a human form with the Egyptian hound, of the same breed as the dog-gods of Egypt, including Anubis and Wepwawet.
Set seems to have been the god of the people of the south, whereas Horus is an aristocratic figure, associated with the princes of This. It might have been expected that the Thinites would have attempted to reconcile the divinity of their house with that of the people on whom their power would ultimately come to rest; there is in fact clear evidence that the early kings reverenced both Horus and Set particularly in the titles of the queens. Nonetheless, the early dynastic conflicts were mythologized as a conflict between Horus and Set, when the two antagonists were locked in a titanic struggle for rule over Egypt after the alleged murder by Set of his brother Osiris, who was, if only in mythological terms, the primeval king.
World History
