The king of Egypt, it might be said, had a crown for every occasion. Their variety is considerable but the two shown on the palette were of special power, the high White Crown of Upper Egypt and the Red Crown of Lower Egypt. Although it is not an infallible principle, gods of Upper Egypt like Set tend generally to wear the White Crown whilst the gods of the northern kingdom, like Neith (actually a goddess), wear the Red.
In a dazzling feat of synthesis an archaic designer of genius, retained by the king some time after the unification, came up with a brilliant stroke of propaganda, to combine the two crowns into one. This became a telling and highly evocative symbol of the union; its name signifies ‘the Two Powerful Ones’, the goddesses of the Two Kingdoms. It was first employed during the reign of King Den, when many of the most notable aspects of the royal administration were first formulated.
In consequence of their particularly intimate connection with the person of the king, both in a physical sense and because they were first among the
Figure 5.4 The Two Crowns, of Upper and Lower Egypt, were themselves divine. The Red Crown of Lower Egypt is the earlier known, a sherd of Naqada I pottery bearing a representation of it dating from the mid-fourth millennium; it was also regarded as the more holy. It is probable that it was originally associated with the rulers of Naqada and that its Lower Egyptian (northern) attribution was a consequence of Naqada lying to the north of the eventually victorious city of This/Abydos in the struggle for the dominance of the Valley.
Source: reproduced by courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
More obvious manifestations of his claim to the sovereignty, the crowns represented one of the most enduring elements in the Egyptian belief in the immutability of the world. The crowns were evidence of the special care which the gods had of the people of the Valley and their warrant for Egypt’s eternity. Even when the collapse came at the end of the Old Kingdom the crowns endured.
The crowns, not surprisingly, were themselves divine. They were members, in the early periods, of the personal retinue of divinities which
Attended the king; their role was the protection of the king and the destruction of his enemies. Special chapels were built for the housing of the crowns, so sacred were they.
The earliest Egyptian representation of the White Crown of the south, is on the Narmer palette. The earliest representation of the Red Crown, traditionally identified with the northern Kingdom is much earlier and is moulded on a pottery sherd recovered from a southern site, Naqada, and quite firmly dated to the Naqada I period, in the middle of the fourth millennium, t, 3500 BC.13 Although Upper Egypt was usually regarded as the senior partner in the Dual Monarchy, the Red Crown of Lower Egypt was considered the more holy. This may be because of its greater antiquity; it may also be that the White Crown was derived, as seems possible, from a Western Asiatic prototype and the Red Crown was regarded as superior by reason of its authentic Egyptian origin. The Western Asiatic precedent for the White Crown is to be found on a late fourth millennium cylinder seal from Susa. Figures wearing such crowns seem to be participating in some sort of revel or orgy. In another the White Crown is worn, apparently, by two monkeys.14
The dualism of the two crowns may reflect another interpretation of reality, the more so since the antiquity of the Red Crown inevitably calls again into question the reality or otherwise of the northern kingdom and whether it really existed at all, at any rate in terms of a political entity which represented the Delta region. Perhaps ‘the north’ meant that part of the Valley below the Falcon’s domains; the Red Crown may therefore have been part of the regalia of another southern prince whose lands with his capital at Naqada, were absorbed by the conquering family of princes from still further south. When it was decided, for political reasons, to identify a northern kingdom to mirror the southern one, once the unification was securely under way, it would be entirely possible that the crown from downstream would be adopted as a northern symbol. But this is speculation, nothing more; the decision to use the Red Crown to ‘balance’, as it were, the White, may have been yet another coup by the royal propagandists. What is certain, however, is that the Red Crown always came first in precedence, always enjoying a more exalted reputation than its white peer, despite the latter’s identification with the south and the origins of the kingship.
World History
