One reason for the somewhat equivocal reputation which the First Dynasty seems to have enjoyed in the minds of the later generations could be associated with the cults of ritual death, reflected in the funerary practices of the dynasty. The Egyptians were obsessed, as no other people has ever been, with life and its perpetuation. All their beliefs centred on the need to extend life beyond the frontiers of death. To this end also was directed their love of and identification with the living world they saw around them. In apparent contradiction of this principle there are the companies of retainers that the kings of the First Dynasty took with them, who were sacrificed and buried with their royal master or sometimes mistress.
There is something cruelly matter-of-fact about the neat rows (their very neatness is disturbing) of subsidiary burials which surround most of the great burials at Saqqara and many at Abydos and other royal centres. There is no doubt that these interments took place at the same time as the principal was laid in his tomb; the same mound usually covers them all.
Sometimes the occupants of the subsidiary graves were courtiers, harem women or undifferentiated attendants of the king. In some cases they were craftsmen and specialists who might continue to provide their master with their services eternally. The degree of specialization of craft and trade indicated by the inhabitants of the subsidiary graves in the Royal Tombs suggests an incipient class structure or emergent hierarchical society in Egypt, even in the earliest times. The king of Egypt was god; hence, all others must have been equal in his sight. However, it is evident that hierarchies existed, perhaps even in predynastic Egypt, as witnessed by the differing relative sizes of the attendants on the maces of King Scorpion and King Narmer and the palette of the latter. The status of the craftsmen, singled out for the particular honours of ritual death in the service of their master or mistress, suggests the existence of an elite, other than the nobility or the upper class of official.
Throughout Egyptian history and particularly in the early periods there was a developing class of middle-rank people, who occupied an increasingly important place in the fabric of the state and who often penetrated its highest courses. Binding all these influences together was the king. A later description of the majesty of the king of Egypt would have applied even more in the days of the First Dynasty. It ran ‘He is a god by whose dealings one lives, the father and mother of all men, alone, by himself, without an equal’.1
The practice of the immolation of servants was discontinued at the end of the First Dynasty and was allowed to fall into disuse; it was in any case, a most un-Egyptian custom, in conflict with their notions of the integrity of life. But it is wholly in character that ever afterwards a well-founded Egyptian, royal or simple, went on his last great journey attended by quantities of little servant figurines, in wood, faience, pottery, stone, or metal, which would serve as his ‘answerers’ and undertake any disagreeable or distasteful tasks which he might be called upon to discharge, during his progress to the light of perpetual life.
There is only very tenuous evidence for the practice of the ritual killing of servants before the First Dynasty: occasional examples have been suspected at Adaima2 however and evidently at Hierakonpolis (see 87 above). The custom seems particular to the princes of This; certainly, it was adopted by them and their close colleagues on a generous scale. What prompted it is beyond speculation; if we knew more of the ancestry of the Thinite kings we might be able to determine why they followed this barbarous practice, to judge it by subjective standards.
World History
