One of the most familiar of the motifs from western Asia that crept into Egyptian design at this time is that of the heroic figure wrestling with wild animals, a thoroughly un-Egyptian concept but one which is associated with the countless representations of Gilgamesh in later Mesopotamian times, though Gilgamesh himself reigned in Uruk within the historic period, c,2650bc. This same motif is dramatically recorded in the Hierakonpolis
Tomb 100 painting and on a strikingly beautiful ceremonial dagger found at Jebel el Arak in Upper Egypt, a site at the point where the Wadi Ham-mamat, the dry-course route from the Red Sea, reaches the Nile Valley.
The Jebel el Arak knife15 is a remarkable survival because, apart from the documentary significance of its decoration, it is itself an outstanding example of two great ancient technologies. The handle of the dagger is beautifully carved in ivory with an assurance and mastery which requires its maker to have been an artist of high achievement and secure tradition. The figures are carved naturalistically, set into their ground with sensitivity and with no suggestion of the ‘primitive’. The blade, on the other hand, is the culmination of the old Stone Age technique of stone flaking, here brought to a degree of precision and elegance which is quite exceptional. The result is exquisite, a ‘ripple-flaked’ blade of a translucent fineness as far removed from the rough hand-axes of Palaeolithic times from whose tradition it descends, as is the Saqqara complex of King Netjerykhet from the mud-walled hut of the prehistoric chief to whom the knife may have been an object of justifiable pride.
On one face of the dagger’s handle is represented a tall and majestic figure, his head turbaned like a Sumerian, wearing a long flowing robe of a type which is familiar from Elam; no Egyptian of the time, as far as we know, would have been seen alive or dead in such a costume. He has been identified16 as a very early manifestation of the god Anhur, the patron of the city of This, whose rulers ultimately took the crowns. Whoever he is, the protagonist, with a curiously complacent expression on his face, grasps a lion in either hand as he stands on a rock, often the site of appearance of Mesopotamian divinities, as we know from many similar representations on seals and stone carvings. Two dogs, of a massive, distinctly un-Egyptian breed, gaze at him fondly as he subdues the two great felines. The turbaned, robed, and bearded figure is also known from Sumerian contexts of the earliest periods — late fourth, early third millennia — in three-dimensional form. Another Egyptian example is a partially preserved figure wearing a long Asiatic type of robe recorded on the ‘Two Gazelle’ palette, where he appears to be leading forward a bound captive.17 If the identification with Anhur is correct the knife-hilt may be considered as recording an incident in the rise of This to ultimate supremacy in the Valley.
The lions have attracted considerable interest since the discovery of the knife at the end of nineteenth century, for they are clearly a pair of the massive, powerfully built and heavily-maned Asiatic lions, quite different from the African lion which was once native to Egypt. Their presence on the knife’s hilt has suggested to some that it is the work of a craftsman to whom the Asiatic lion was more familiar than the African and that therefore the knife’s design must be considered another of the many borrowings from Asiatic or Mesopotamian iconography and that it commemorates incidents which attended the ultimate seizure of power over the Valley by the princes of This, epitomized by a Thinite divinity and a pair of lions which were distinctly alien to the fauna of the Nile Valley. With the ships of ‘Mesopotamian’ type which are also illustrated on the hilt, the knife’s iconography is strongly suggestive of something more than a merely incidental Mesopotamian borrowing.
On the other side of the handle of the Jebel el Arak knife a scene of exceptional historical interest is depicted, for it seems to show the people of the Nile Valley in battle with seaborne opponents whose high-prowed ships, some bearing standards which look like the crescent of Sin-Nanna the Sumerian moon god, suggest that they may have come from Mesopotamia. Naked but for penis sheaths the contenders are locked together in a battle, real or symbolic, which must in either event have seemed important enough for the Egyptians to record it as they did.
World History
