Whilst the unification of Egypt used traditionally to be ascribed to Narmer, it is now generally accepted that he probably reunified the Two Lands, restoring the work of an earlier prince of his house, whose name is no longer known. This original unification may have taken place between one hundred and one hundred and fifty years before Narmer’s time. It is clear that there were rulers prior to the First Dynasty who controlled all or a substantial part of the Valley. Inscriptions of these shadowy kings have been recovered from sites including Abydos, one of the most important centres of the early kingship. These include Iry-Hor (though his existence has been questioned)18 and Ka.
At Kafr Tarkhan, a site south of Cairo, inscriptions have been assigned to an otherwise unknown king, the Horus Crocodile.19 It is possible that he was reigning in northern Upper Egypt at the same time as the early Thinite kings at Abydos. It has already been noted that there is a possibility that there were two late predynastic kings whose names are rendered ‘Scorpion’. The king who appears on the large ceremonial macehead from Hierakonpo-lis, opening an irrigation channel, is well-attested; the recent German excavations at Abydos have produced a grave which may have been attributed to another ‘Scorpion’ dating to earlier times, t, 3300 BC.20
Some of the First Dynasty royal names seem to represent symbolic creatures related perhaps to the special group or society to which the king belonged. Thus Narmer is ‘Catfish-Chisel’; ‘The Falcon Catfish-Chisel’ is more or less what his name and title mean, and its peculiar character is not diminished by the knowledge that in later times the catfish came to signify an abomination. The situation becomes still more confused when it is recalled that fish were often execrated as the enemies of Horus and his father Osiris, since one of them, the oxyrhynchus, was thoughtless enough to consume the penis of Osiris when his body was cut into pieces and scattered throughout Egypt by Set. In certain rituals, in later times, fish were trampled under foot to signify their fate as Horus’s enemies. In the First Dynasty, however, this does not apply; many representations of fish survive and there were fish cults celebrated in the temples. A number of ivory fish were recovered from Narmer’s supposed tomb; other representations, particularly in the form of schist palettes, also survive in considerable quantity, but only during the First Dynasty.
Narmer is said to have reigned for sixty-four years, the term attributed to him by Manetho which is not intrinsically improbable. This means that he must have assumed the throne as a very young man, the veritable Horus, vigorous and youthful. His ‘portraits’ show him as a mature man, stately and confident. He is a slender, obviously not tall (though convention makes him tower above his contemporaries), fine-boned, bearded, altogether rather an elegant figure. Invariably, he is shown crowned and dressed in the complex royal regalia: lion tail, Hathor bedecked apron and sandals, these last sometimes carried by a young attendant, perhaps his son or some favoured courtier.
A striking survival from the early First Dynasty is a small ivory figure of an unknown king, now in the British Museum.21 Though tiny it is powerful and vigorously carved. It depicts the king wearing the Upper Egyptian crown, hunched in his Heb-Sed cloak worn at the time of the Jubilee ceremonies. His cloak is richly embroidered.
A more equivocal portrait, however, traditionally attributed to the first king of united Egypt, exists in the Petrie Collection in University College, London.22 This limestone head, from Abydos, is a disturbing piece; the king (or god, for it has been suggested that it is from a statue of the ithyphallic Min) has a distinctly epicene and decadent look about it, not at all like the clear-cut figure who appears on the great palette. However, the rather long upper lip and wide-set eyes do strongly recall the portrait of Narmer on his great palette and of the young attendant, perhaps the king’s heir, who is portrayed with him.
MASTABAS AND FUNERARY PALACES
A very large proportion of the material evidence which survives from ancient Egypt and which provides most of what is known about the life of the people of the Two Lands at all periods throughout its history is supplied by the contents of the tombs in which they caused themselves to be buried, in the forlorn belief that their remains would thus be preserved for all eternity. This contribution of the tomb furnishers to history applies particularly in the time of the early dynasties when tomb building, always one of Egypt’s most prosperous industries, first assumed real importance.
The monumental tombs of the First Dynasty are, by any standards, very remarkable buildings. They are amongst the earliest examples of monumental architecture, of any form anywhere in the world, with the exception of Sumer where religious buildings of prodigious scale had been erected in the cities since early in the fourth millennium and, more modest in construction and design, in the late fifth.
The building of great funerary monuments is the most immediate and obvious change in matter anywhere else. The first to be identified, other than that so disastrously savaged by Amelineau, was found at Naqada, the city of the god Set, by Jacques De Morgan in 1896. A little later Petrie began his series of historic excavations at Abydos where a number of these great tombs were excavated and described by him. He had little doubt that they were the tombs of the kings and he published them as such.23 So matters remained until excavations of comparable structures were carried out on the immense mortuary site at Saqqara, overlooking the ancient capital Memphis, built at ‘the balance of the Two Lands’. From the mid-1930s W. B. Emery excavated a series of huge mud-brick rectangular buildings on the escarpment of Saqqara which, as he worked through them, he became convinced were the actual tombs of the kings; indeed he was able to attribute each huge building with firm assurance to every king of the First Dynasty, bar one.24
But where, Egyptologists asked themselves, did this leave the monuments at Abydos, particularly as no actual burials had been found in any of them, a disconcerting absence of material evidence? Originally Emery had ascribed the first Saqqara tomb which he excavated to a high official of the First Dynasty, Hemaka, whose sealings were found inside the monument.25 But then doubts arose, for it was questioned whether divine kings would have willingly accepted the idea of their courtiers, no matter how great, being buried in tombs apparently far more imposing than their own.
A solution to the problem of what now appeared to be two sets of royal tombs, in only one of which, in the nature of things, could the king actually have been buried, was then proposed. Because of their superior size it was decided that the Saqqara tombs were the actual places of burial, a view which was strengthened by the fact that evidence for actual burials had been found in several of them whereas this was not the case in Abydos. It was therefore concluded that, with the Egyptian enthusiasm for dualism, for expressing everything in terms of related or paired opposites, the Abydos ‘tombs’ must have been cenotaphs, which the king’s spirit would have been considered to have occupied. The two monuments thus reiterated the idea of the dual kingship, with the monuments reflecting the royal duality of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt.
Subsequently another factor emerged which changed the view of the situation once again. The monuments at Abydos are strung out along an area known as the Umm al-Qa’ab; beyond the town and behind a temple dedicated to the very ancient canine god Khentiamentiu (the forerunner of Osiris) the remains of a very large structure with panelled and buttressed walls has been identified. This is one of some of the most remarkable of all archaic survivals in Egypt, once frequently called the ‘Castle of Khasekhemwy’, but now more usually known by its Arabic name, Shunet ez-Zebib; another is located at Hierakonpolis. Both of these date from the end of the Second Dynasty. These are colossal, towering structures built of mud brick, now sombre and menacing in their ruin, but once gleaming brilliantly white.
It seems likely that the First and Second Dynasty kings built these huge structures as ‘funerary palaces’ (as they have been well-named) and located them close to their tombs, which are themselves comparatively modest, representing only a part of an enormous complex. They contained magazines, shrines, and, perhaps, dummy buildings like those which later graced the Netjerykhet complex at Saqqara and earlier, the ‘model estate’ in the great Saqqara tomb 3357, attributed to the reign of King Aha.26 The courts were probably the locations of important religious ceremonies or commemorations.
It has been suggested that these buildings were dwellings for the spirit of the king, attended by the spirits of the courtiers, artisans, women, and even dogs, all of whom were sacrificed in various quantities throughout the First Dynasty. The buildings were almost certainly replicas of the palaces in which the kings lived; their walls rose at least thirty feet and in their day must have been magnificent and imposing structures.
There are notable and curious differences between the two types of funerary monument, in their differing locations. The substructures were not dissimilar but their superstructures were quite different. In some cases the monuments at Saqqara appeared to contain a small tumulus or burial mound inside the tomb, encased in brick. Sometimes this casing was stepped, leading some authorities to see here the origin of the Stepped Pyramid of the Third Dynasty. In Abydos and indeed in most important predynastic burials a tumulus was built up over the burial pit. Thus was the archaic tumulus mound incorporated even in the most extravagant tombs.
Other than their size the most notable feature about the buildings in both locations (and the others at Naqada, Abu Rowash, Tarkhan, and Giza which can be compared with them) is the repetitive design of recessed panelling and buttressing on their facades. This, it is generally agreed, is borrowed from the facades of temple buildings at Uruk in Sumer, from the end of the fourth millennium, when the unification of Egypt was achieved; indeed, the tombs at Saqqara are altogether very reasonable replicas of the plans of pre-Sumerian temples, a circumstance that could hardly be the consequence of chance.
It can only be a matter for wonder that at so very early a date there were men in Egypt capable of designing buildings of this size and of this complexity, supervising the construction processes involved, and carrying out the interior designs and furnishings. It is difficult to see how they acquired their skills, other than by contact with the only people of the time who did have experience of large-scale architectural projects, the Sumerians who had a tradition of sophisticated architecture reaching back for nearly a thousand years before the formal unification of Egypt.
What Sumerian architects would have been doing in Egypt is another matter. It can hardly be that travelling merchants brought with them the idea, for example, of recessed temple facades, persuaded the local Egyptian chiefs (with whom it is presumed they had commercial relations) to adopt them as the facade decorations of their palaces, subsequently of their tombs and, simultaneously, as the most important element in the royal badge, the serekh. The fact, too, that there are so many of these great monuments suggests a matter of royal policy firmly applied and not the casual borrowing of a random idea from a distant and alien culture.
The precision with which the great tombs are built is as striking as the scale on which they were planned and executed; with other examples of early Egyptian craftsmanship there seems to be little tentative about even the earliest monuments, rather the buildings and the materials from which they are constructed are handled with a vigorous assurance and elan. Development of technique and of architectural form can indeed be observed throughout the First and Second Dynasties but these are again always redolent of an assured tradition. The interiors, honeycombed with magazines and store-rooms, were richly decorated, gleaming with gold leaf and filled with the opulent products of armies of artificers. The exterior walls, recessed and buttressed in the tradition apparently inherited from Uruk centuries before, were painted white. Interestingly, the recessed buttressing itself is more complex in design in the earlier part of the dynasty. The lavishness with which every detail of the tombs’ decoration was executed is breathtaking; in addition to the pilasters covered in gold leaf, and there were rich paintings on the walls, imitating the interiors of the palaces. Some of the tombs had their interior walls whitewashed also, and coloured paint was applied to the surface, recalling the painting of the Hierakonpolis Tomb 100.
It is unrewarding to look to the native Egyptian domestic architectural traditions of the fourth millennium for any understanding of the remarkable revolution in form and design which is represented by the royal funerary monuments of the First Dynasty. Something is known of the houses for the living in both the Naqada I and Naqada II periods. In the first, the huts which the people constructed were flimsy affairs, little more than ‘hides’; in Naqada II times more extensive building techniques were acquired and quite substantial structures came to be built, to judge from the models of houses which have been recovered from sites of the period. Nothing is known of palatial buildings — if such existed — or temples, other than the little reed or wicker shrines which represent the cult centres of the north and south.
World History
