The nature of the Egyptian kingship, though it is the oldest such institution on earth, is extremely complex. The titles of the king reveal something of this complexity and of the careful policy of consolidation and conciliation which the early kings practiced, with eventual total and distinguished success. In all cases in matters which touched their sacred and royal character they adopted symbolisms which were attributed to the two parts of the double realm.
Throughout Egyptian history the king bore five ‘Great Names’ from the time of his accession. The first and most prestigious of the names the king of Egypt bore was his Horus name. This he assumed at his coronation: it was full of power for by its assumption he became not only king of Egypt but also the incarnate god, whose name preceded his own. Two of his other titles were established during the First Dynasty; of these the nesu-bit, is depicted hieroglyphically by two ideograms, the sedge, growing plentifully in the waterways of Upper Egypt, and the bee, symbolizing the northern lands.
At some time there may have been a Sedge King and a Bee King (there was a temple consecrated to the northern goddess Neith, ‘The House of the Bee’), though nothing survives to confirm this. They would have been chieftains of the congeries of tribes which assembled under their standards; the king of the united Egypt assumed their titles to himself and so demonstrated his paramountcy over the Two Lands. Ever afterwards the nesu-bit name of Sedge and Bee was to be understood as ‘King of Upper and Lower Egypt’. It was introduced during the reign of King Den, the third king of the First Dynasty, counting from Narmer.
The second title, which demonstrated the new line of kings’ concern to conciliate their subjects of the two disparate regions of the Valley is the nebty name. This was first proclaimed in the reign of King Anedjib, the fifth king of the founding dynasty and is altogether a more cogent and impressive symbol for the supreme power of the god who was also king of Egypt. It linked the two tutelary goddesses of the kingdoms, hitherto to be assumed to have been in opposition. They are respectively Nekhbet, the Vulture of the South, and Uadjet, the rearing Cobra of the North. In the titulary of the kings they perch upon two baskets; they are read as ‘He of (belonging to) the Two Ladies’, hence the transliteration ‘Lord of the Two Lands’. Always, thereafter, the two goddesses were the special protectors and familiars of the king and were always in attendance on him. Nekhbet was always to be seen hovering behind or above the king, her great wings spread around his head: she would even extend the power of her protective presence to his possessions or of those most favoured by him. Uadjet, in some ways a more dangerous divinity, was bound around the head of the king or around his crown (in later times at least) where, rearing up, with her hood spread malevolently, she would release a blast of furious energy to destroy the king’s enemies. Both goddesses are powerful and dramatic symbols which, when they are combined, are most formidable.
The combination of these two dominant and hitherto contending goddesses was a subtle act of political judgment. It was also characteristic of many of the actions of the founders of the kingdom who exercised a sublime and sensitive tact when, coming down river as conquerors from the south, they needed, whenever possible, to subdue the northern part of their prospective dominions and its protagonists by peaceable means, as much at least as by force. That Egypt continued virtually at all times throughout its immense history to be unified (despite the perpetual paradox of the existence of the two kingdoms), except for those interludes which themselves came to be anathematized as unholy exceptions to a rule of nature, was a tribute to the genius of the founders of the state.
Later, in the Old Kingdom, the title ‘Golden Horus’ was added to the titulary and, in the Fifth Dynasty, the final accolade, Sa Ra, ‘Son of Ra’. In Egypt the idea of the king as god is indistinguishable from the role of art as propaganda. It was an audacious concept to elevate a man, no matter how much endowed with genius or accustomed to the dispensation of power, to the level of the godhead. If it was not to be rapidly exposed as absurd (the god with a bad head cold, a bilious god, the god defecating) this literal apotheosis had to be absolute and uncompromising: from the time of the Scorpion at least the king was depicted as a superhuman figure, towering over mortals, utterly splendid and awesome. In the promotion of the king in this role, an essentially political conception and not a religious one, art in all its forms had a decisive function to discharge.
Unity was not achieved only through political means, however; the king’s authority had to be asserted quickly and with devastating effect. Two documents from the end of the predynastic period testify to this process; both are amongst the most celebrated and the most important of Egyptian artefacts. Both, too, contribute their evidence to the debate on the nature and extent of foreign influences in Egypt in the Naqada II period, from which they derive, or from the years immediately following it.
World History
