The cult of the Royal Placenta is one of the more curious aspects of the Egyptians’ reverence for the king as incarnate god. It is of immense antiquity, for the cult was well established by the late predynastic period. By the time of the unification the placenta had assumed the status of one of the gods of Egypt and was thus carried as a standard before the king.
The placenta is the membrane adhering to the walls of the womb in which the embryo is contained. At birth the placenta is discharged and forms what is popularly known as the ‘afterbirth’. When it is depicted on the royal standard it retains the elliptical shape it might be supposed to have when it contained the embryo, lying in wait to be born.
For the early Egyptians the placenta was evidently invested with exceptional power. The king’s placenta was carefully retained and protected throughout his lifetime; on the evidence of examples in the tombs of lesser figures in the state, it was probably buried with him. If it were to be damaged or destroyed, appalling disaster would result. No other part of the royal anatomy seems to have warranted the same care and reverence as did the placenta. Not even the royal prepuce was accorded comparable honour. In any case, circumcision does not seem generally to have been practiced in the early centuries, to judge by the evidence of a number of men represented uncircumcized in statues and reliefs. Only the placenta was raised to the status of a divinity.
The reason for the placenta’s exceptional status is not difficult to find. Because of its uniquely intimate connection with the living body of the god-king, protecting him from the moment of conception, growing with him in the womb and, in a very real sense, giving him life, it was conceived of as another emanation of the king himself. The placenta was thus a form of twin, the witness of the king’s alter ego, which, at his birth, was born into the realm of the gods. As his twin it coexisted eternally with the king and so the king himself was, at the instant of his birth, two indivisible entities, demonstrating once again one of the most basic and enduring canons of the belief of the Egyptians, which manifested itself in the perpetually reiterated theme of duality. The king was the link between the world of the gods and the world of men, existing eternally and equally in both. All his titles were dualized; he was, in this sense, his own twin.
In the earliest periods the king’s procession was led by the canine god, Wepwawet, ‘Opener of the Ways’. He guided the king both in the exercise of his royal functions and in war. On the standard on which Wepwawet is borne before the king a curious, balloon-like object stands before him. This is thought to represent the royal placenta which thus, under Wepwawet’s protection, is carried with honour in the king’s state appearances.
The cult of the placenta is to be seen at its highest manifestation in the earliest periods of which there are documentary records surviving. As the long process of Egyptian history unfolded the role of the placenta gradually diminished, though it certainly never entirely disappeared. Even in later times the royal placenta was still accorded an honoured place in the company of the king, though probably only the wisest and most astute of seers would have been able to account for its presence in the king’s entourage at all.
The standards borne before the king probably represent the chiefs who supported Narmer in his bid to unify the Two Kingdoms. They are leading the king to ten headless bodies, lying on their backs with their severed heads between their feet. Above them Horus stands before what may be his archaic shrine, made of reeds. Behind him is a high-prowed ship, again of that type which is frequently described as ‘Mesopotamian’. This, and the scenes portrayed on the Jebel el Arak knife handle described below, may be the most explicit recognition of the assistance given by Mesopotamians to the victorious princes when they started out on their program of unification.
On the reverse, the design is dominated by representations of fantastic quadrupeds with the bodies of lions and huge arching necks on which are balanced feline heads. These confront each other, held on leashes by two attendants or handlers of somewhat un-Egyptian appearance. The circular area which they make by the twining of their necks is probably where the kohl would have been ground, if these particular palettes had ever been used for so mundane a purpose.
The motif of confronted long-necked, feline-headed monsters is familiar in the iconography of late-fourth—early-third-millennium western Asiatic designs, particularly those employed in Mesopotamian and Elamite cylinder seals.11 The device of two serpopards which entwined necks is especially typical of Elamite designs, perhaps the source of much of the western Asiatic influence in Egypt, around the time of the unification. It appears first in Egypt in the Hierakonpolis Tomb 100; it disappears after the First Dynasty. Confronted feline heads are also found amongst the chlorite carvings of the Arabian Gulf in the early third millennium.12
A third register completes the reverse side of the Narmer Palette. A great bull, no doubt a manifestation of the king himself or of one of his principal allies, is ‘hacking down’ the walls of a fortified city, with its huge curving horns. A naked man, presumably the prince or the governor of the city, lies prostrate beneath its hoofs.
The symbolism of the early palettes is very complex. Most of the examples which survive have animals as their most important protagonists and only the Narmer Palette and those known as the Hunters and the Battlefield palettes particularly emphasize humans. The Bull and the Lion are important elements in several of them, though the king seems still to be portrayed either in his own form or in the form of a falcon. This marked disappearance from the iconography of royal monuments in the First Dynasty of the Bull and Lion possibly marks their elimination from the politics of Egypt at this still formative period of the unification. Thus, the argument goes, the Bull Prince and the Lion Prince, once powerful chiefs allied to the Falcon Prince, were excluded from power and the animals which symbolized them were largely dropped from the heraldic catalogue. It is an intriguing suggestion for which there is not the slightest real evidence.
The Narmer Palette is rich in that symbolism which was to persist throughout Egyptian history: only the serpopards eventually disappear. No part of the palette is more potent than those elements which relate to the king and which deal with his power. This indeed was the unique importance of the king, that he subsumed in his own person the entire land of Egypt and everything in it. His overwhelming sovereignty is nowhere better represented than in the royal crowns, the two most important of which Narmer is himself shown as wearing.
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