To the south and east of Naqada was Abydos. It is thought that This, the centre from which the ultimately victorious line of kings came was nearby Abydos, which had been important since predynastic times. The royal stronghold at This is thought to be buried under the modern town of Girga but the kings of the First Dynasty, from Aha onwards, chose Abydos as the location for their funerary monuments. All the First Dynasty kings and two of the Second were buried there and Abydos retained its sacred character throughout Egypt’s existence. Its principal divinity was the canine god, Khentiamen-tiu. He had an important temple dedicated to him which flourished until late in the Old Kingdom. Then he was usurped by Osiris, and not especially important divinity of the locality who may have been known in predynastic times. He was to be wholly identified with Abydos in later times, though he was only to become significant at the end of the Old Kingdom.
Abydos had been the place of burial of the local elite since the days of Naqada I, in the first half of the fourth millennium. Whilst Abydos was the ancient burial place of the rulers of this part of the Valley it was not their political stronghold, which was situated at This. The earliest settlement levels at Abydos date from Naqada III and in the last stages of the predynastic period the largest grave of the time found in the Valley designated U-j by its excavators,3 was clearly the tomb of a high status individual who, on the evidence of the quality of the foreign imports found in the grave, including pottery from Palestine, was probably the ruler of much of the land to the north.
Tomb U-j is perhaps the most important predynastic royal tomb yet discovered but it is not the only one to show evidence of what was probably the development of chieftaincy. From one of the graves in the same cemetery comes a particularly telling artefact, a crook-sceptre,4 indicating that one of what was to be the most familiar items in the royal regalia together with the flail throughout dynastic times, had a very long ancestry. Also recovered from the tomb were one hundred and fifty small ivory labels, with pic-tographs which have identifiable phonetic values and are thus the earliest evidence of writing, dating to t,3350BC, yet found in the Nile Valley.5 The tomb has been attributed6 to a King Scorpion, not the owner of the famous mace from Hierakonpolis, but an earlier ruler of the same name.
In the political upheavals which evidently characterized this period, it seems that Naqada was the first of these centres to lose its status as a candidate to provide the future rulers of the Unified Valley. It was, and remained, an important centre for its tutelary divinity, Set, who was the counterpart of the patron god of the kingship, Horus. Its ruling family was evidently considered to be of special status for King Narmer, perhaps the last predynastic ruler of the Valley who came from This, married Neithhotep who was buried at Naqada and so may have come from there. Perhaps she was the heiress of the princes of Naqada and by marrying her Narmer acquired the lands which they had ruled. In any event, Neithhotep is generally considered to be the mother of Aha, the undoubted first king of the First Dynasty of Egypt and the heir of the princes of This. From this time onwards Abydos was to be identified with the victorious dynasty.
For it was This which eventually seized the prize of the control of the unified Valley, its princes being acknowledged (perhaps with occasional reservations) as Divine Kings, rulers of the cosmos, no less. Why Hierakonpolis lost to This is not known; the principality had contributed much to the development of the concept of the sacred monarchy and it was always to be revered even by the successful dynasts as a place of particular holiness and special significance to the kingship. But, at the end of the day, it was the princes of This, not those of Hierakonpolis, who wore the crowns. On the Narmer palette, the most enduring icon of this momentous series of events (even if it were produced generations after the events it relates) the king is shown wearing the two crowns, of Upper and Lower Egypt, attended by the standards of those princes who, it may be presumed, supported his claim. One of these standards displays ‘The Animal of Set’, a canid, or as some would have it, a composite or mythical creature, which symbolized the ancient god of the desert and the southlands, a fact which may be significant.
World History
