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ANCIENT HISTORY LIBRARY

 

THE CAMBRIDGE ANCIENT HISTORY

 

CHAPTER XI

THE EARLY DYNASTIC PERIOD IN EGYP

by I. E. S. EDWARDS, F.B.A.

Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities, British Museum

I.

THE EARLY MONARCHY AND THE UNIFICATION OF EGYPT

 

Tradition and a substantial body of indirect evidence suggest strongly that Egypt, in the period immediately preceding the foundation of the First Dynasty, was divided into two independent kingdoms: a northern kingdom, which included the Nile Delta and extended southwards perhaps to the neighbourhood of the modern village of Atfih (Lower Egypt) and a southern kingdom comprising the territory between Atfih and Gebel es-Silsila (Upper Egypt). The residences of the kings are believed to have been situated at Pe, in the north-west Delta, and at Nekhen (Hierakonpolis), on the west bank of the river near Edfu, both of which, in historical times at least, possessed important sanctuaries of the falcon-god Horus, the patron deity of the rulers. In the vicinity of Pe lay Dep, the seat of a cobra-goddess Uadjit (Edjo); the two places were together known in the New Kingdom and later under one name Per-Uadjit (House of Edjo), rendered as Buto by the Greeks. Across the river from Nekhen stood Nekheb (El-Kab), where a vulture-goddess Nekhbet had her sanctuary. Both goddesses came to be regarded at a very early date, perhaps while the separate kingdoms were in being, as royal protectresses.

Even such information about this period as was recorded in the king-lists is largely lost and what remains is difficult to interpret. The first line of the fragmentary Palermo Stone consists of a series of compartments, seven only being entirely preserved, each of which contains a name and a figure of a king wearing the crown of Lower Egypt, but no historical events are mentioned. Manetho speaks of the predecessors of the kings of the First Dynasty as the ‘Spirits of the Dead, the Demigods’. In the Turin Canon, which dates from Ramesside times, the last predynastic rulers are called both the ‘Spirits who were Followers of Horus’ and the ‘Followers of Horus’. With what appeared to be well-reasoned arguments Kurt Sethe maintained that these epithets could be applied to the kings of Pe and Nekhen, in virtue of being adherents to the cult of Horus, and could also be explained as the Egyptian equivalent of Manetho’s ‘ Spirits of the Dead, the Demi­gods’. As a general description of kings of the remote past the term ‘Followers of Horus’ does occur sporadically in Egyptian texts dating from the end of the Second Intermediate Period until Ptolemaic times, and in a fragmentary papyrus of Roman date, which may well preserve an ancient tradition, two successive entries refer to the ‘Souls of Pe, Followers of Horus as Kings of Lower Egypt’ and the ‘Souls of Nekhen, Followers of Horus as Kings of Upper Egypt’. This usage of the term seems however to have been a relatively late development which resulted from a misinterpretation of the early dynastic records.

At most, only two predynastic kings, both of Upper Egypt, are known from contemporary records, one bearing a name which has generally been read as Ka and the other being indicated by the hieroglyphic sign representing a scorpion. In some cases the name of Ka is written anomalously beneath the panelled door of the serekh—the rectangular frame surmounted by the falcon of Horus within which the official names of kings were inscribed. It is, however, far from certain that Ka is the correct reading of the name; several authorities have preferred to regard the single sign with which it is written as a cursive form of a scorpion, thereby identifying this king with his supposed successor, and the suggestion has also been made that the name should be read as Sekhen. Scorpion is the first king of whom any historical details are known, owing to the discovery at Hierakonpolis of some fragments of a limestone mace-head decorated with scenes in relief commemorating symbolically episodes in his life. The scenes are arranged in three registers: in the uppermost register there is a series of standards, each surmounted by the emblem of a particular nome. Suspended by a rope from every standard is either a bow or a lapwing, the rope being tied around the neck of each bird. When bows—always nine in number—occur on later monuments, they symbolize the enemies of Egypt, and the lap­wing, as a hieroglyph, represents the Egyptian populace. It has therefore been surmised that the scene portrayed in this register commemorates the victory of a group of Upper Egyptian nomes, under the leadership of Scorpion, over foreigners, living in the oases and neighbouring deserts, and some Egyptians, possibly of the Lower Egyptian kingdom, dwelling either in the Delta or somewhat further south. In the middle register Scorpion, wearing the crown of Upper Egypt and holding a hoe in his hands, initiates the digging of an irrigation canal; an attendant stands before him holding a basket to receive the soil removed. Possibly the artist’s intention was to show the measures taken by the king to develop the land after his victory. The surviving portion of the lowest register shows the Nile, on the bank of which the previous ceremony had taken place, and some men engaged in agricultural work on two islands formed by its waters.

It seems evident that steps—perhaps not the first—towards the subjugation of the northern kingdom were taken by Scorpion. How far he was able to advance cannot be precisely determined. A pot found at the protodynastic cemetery of Tura was once thought to bear his name and to indicate that he had penetrated to that region, but further study has shown that this reading was incorrect. Nevertheless his conquest may have reached a point as far north as the apex of the Delta. He may even have captured the eastern part of the Delta, but it is improbable that he overcame the entire northern kingdom, because the mace-head shows him wearing only the white crown of Upper Egypt; there is no parallel scene of the king with the red crown as ruler of Lower Egypt, although the suggestion has been made that a king seated under a canopy and wearing the crown of Lower Egypt who is represented on a fragment of another mace-head from Hierakonpolis is to be identified with Scorpion. The distinction of completing the conquest and of uniting the two kingdoms belongs, in all probability, to Narmer, who is thought to have been Scorpion’s immediate successor. A remarkable record of this victory is preserved on the famous slate palette from Hierakonpolis. On the obverse Narmer, followed by his sandal-bearer, is shown smiting with a mace a captured Delta chieftain, possibly belonging to the north-western nome which had a harpoon as its ensign. Above the victim is a monogram composed of a falcon perched on a papyrus plant and a human head attached to a body deliberately flattened in order to resemble the hieroglyph of foreign land; tied to the nose is a cord, held by a hand projecting from the falcon’s breast. Since the falcon was the hieroglyphic sign for the god Horus and the papyrus was the symbol of Lower Egypt, it has been conjectured that the whole group means: ‘Horus brings (to the king) captives of Lower Egypt.’ The sequel to this scene appears in the uppermost of three registers on the reverse, where the king is shown, accompanied by attendants, going out to inspect the slain northerners who, with their severed heads between their feet, are set out in two rows. It is unlikely that pure chance is responsible for the fact that the king wears the crown of Upper Egypt in the first scene and of Lower Egypt in the second; far more probable is it that the sculptor intended to show that this victory marked the final defeat of the northern kingdom and the assumption of its crown by Narmer.

Another palette, of which only the lower portion is preserved, may well refer to a continuation of the same campaign by Narmer, but since no name is given, the identification cannot be proved. One face of the palette depicts rows of cattle, asses and rams, and some trees once thought to be olives. Among the trees is a hieroglyphic group reading Tjehenu-land, which is believed to have been situated in Libya, near the north-western limits of the Delta. Narmer certainly conducted a campaign against this region, as is attested by an ivory cylinder from Hierakonpolis, bearing his name and that of Tjehenu-land, which shows prisoners captured in the battle. On the other face of the palette there are seven rectangular outlines with crenellated sides representing walled towns. Within each rectangle is the name of a city, while above it stood originally a bird or animal, only four of which (a falcon, a lion, a scorpion and twin falcons on perches) have sur­vived. Each of these creatures hacks with a mattock at the wall of the town which it surmounts. The identification of the individual towns presents serious difficulties, but it has been presumed that all of them lay in Tjehenu-land and that their downfall led to the capture of the booty shown on the opposite side of the palette. Equally difficult to determine is the exact significance of the various creatures attacking the walls: they have been explained as royal titles—not, however, of Narmer but of Scorpion—and as symbols of either the divine or the human allies of the king whose victory the palette commemorates If they represented Scorpion himself, it might have been expected that his name would be distinguished in some way and not merely included among his titles; moreover, there is no other evidence to suggest that Scorpion ever succeeded in reaching the north-western Delta. It seems rather more likely, therefore, that deities were intended and that they symbolized the falcon-king of Hierakonpolis—supposedly Narmer—and the leaders of those nomes which assisted him in his campaign against the North.

Closely connected with the problems raised by this palette is the question of the character of the relationship between the Horus-king and the local rulers of other nomes at the time of the conquest. The most important contemporary sources of information are Scorpion’s mace-head, a damaged mace-head of Narmer, the two palettes already mentioned and two fragments of palettes, one in the Louvre and the other in the Ashmolean Museum. Both the mace-heads and the Narmer palette undoubtedly display nome-standards, so integrated into the general design as to suggest that their respective nomes played an important part in the main events depicted. Even more graphically portrayed are the scenes on the two fragments: five standards which terminate in hands pulling together on a single rope are shown on the Louvre fragment; on the Ashmolean Museum fragment (which joins a larger fragment in the British Museum depicting a battlefield) two standards with projecting arms are represented leading two bound captives. In the absence of any king’s name, neither of these two fragments can be precisely dated, but their style strongly suggests that they belong to the period of Scorpion and Narmer. Prominent among the various standards are those bearing the wolf-god Wepwawet of Asyut, the ibis of the Fifteenth Lower Egyptian nome and the symbol of Min of Akhmlm and Koptos, together with those of other nomes which are less easily identified. The purport of all these scenes is hard to comprehend unless it be supposed that the nomes represented contributed materially to the conquest of unification. It is possible, moreover, that they also denote that the reigning king of Hierakonpolis was not the omnipotent despot of later times, but rather the leader of a confederation of nomes fighting as allies against a common enemy. Some authorities who hold this view consider that these allies of the falcon-king or their local gods— and not the predynastic kings of Pe and Nekhen—were the real Followers of Horus whose true identity must, in that case, have been forgotten in later times. In favour of this explanation is the undoubted fact that from the Old Kingdom onwards similar standards in representations of the Sed-festival—itself a re­enactment of the episodes in the conquest of unification—are described in the accompanying texts as the ‘Gods, Followers of Horus’. From the same period there is also evidence that the Followers of Horus could mean members of the king’s retinue, while at an even earlier date a biennial tour of inspection by river made by the king and his entourage was called the ‘ Following of Horus’.

According to the Turin and Abydos king-lists the first king of Egypt was Meni, who is to be identified with Men (Miv) of Herodotus and Menes, the founder of Manetho’s First Dynasty. Not without reason, however, it has been doubted whether the name occurs in any contemporary document and, in consequence, whether a person so named ever existed. In order to account for its appearance in later times, it has been suggested that the name, which means ‘He who endures’, was coined as a mere descriptive epithet denoting a semi-legendary hero who in the remote past had unified the Two Lands under one crown and whose true name had been lost. In that event ‘Menes’ might conceal the personages of Ka, Scorpion and Narmer. But it is far from proved that Menes is not mentioned in at least one inscription dating from the beginning of the historical epoch. An ivory label from Naqada, now in the Cairo Museum, bears the Horus name of Aha side by side with the framework of a building, within which is the royal title ‘Two Ladies’ (nbty) and a single hieroglyph (mn) which most authorities have taken to represent the name Menes. At one time it was thought that these two names belonged to the same king, Menes being the nbty-name of the Horus Aha. A more plausible explanation is, however, that the label records the construction by Aha of a funerary booth (wrmt) for the deceased Menes, who would thus have been his immediate predecessor, but it does not necessarily follow from this interpretation that the king in question was the Horus Narmer. Nevertheless there are other grounds for supposing that Aha was Narmer’s successor. Indeed no further demonstration that Narmer and Menes were one and the same person would be required if it were not also possible that the building is not a funerary booth, but a shrine (sh) inscribed with its name ‘The Two Ladies Endure’. A clay seal-impression from Abydos which bears the name of Narmer alternating with the sign mn has been considered to provide proof of the identity of Narmer and Menes, but it is hard to believe that the omission of the title ‘Two Ladies’ before Men is not significant. Men, in this instance, may be the name of an official or a prince, who was entitled to use the seal, or it may be the verb, the whole group having the meaning ‘Narmer endures’.

Scribal mistakes certainly occurred in the lists of early dynastic kings as they were recorded in later times, but in most instances these mistakes can be explained, and it is apparent that they arose through simple confusions or through the inability of copyists to recognize correctly hieratic signs. Of the general soundness of the tradition which the lists preserve there can be no doubt. No suspicion of a misreading has been entertained by scholars in the case of Menes. That it represents the nbty-name, and not the Horus-name, may be deduced from the fact that the nbty-names are given in the lists for subsequent kings of the First Dynasty. The third king in the Abydos list, of whose name nothing except the royal determinatives is preserved in the Turin Canon, is Iti, who is securely identified by the Cairo Annals with the Horus Djer. Unless it be supposed, as one writer has suggested, that the second king, also called Iti in the Turin Canon but Teti in the Abydos list, is to be equated with an ephemeral king whose Horus-name is not known, the Horus Aha alone remains to occupy the second position, leaving the Horus Narmer to be identified with Menes. This conclusion accords well with the evidence of his famous slate palette. As the founder of the First Dynasty tradition may well have credited him with a greater share in the achievement of the unification of the Two Lands than was his due, and to that extent he may be regarded as a legendary figure.

II.

THE FOUNDATION OF MEMPHIS

Herodotus states that Menes, besides establishing the Egyptian monarchy, founded the city later called Memphis and its temple dedicated to the god Ptah. In order to do so at the place chosen, Menes was obliged to construct a dyke some hundred stades to the south, which diverted the course of the river and protected the city against flooding during the annual inundation. Since Herodotus obtained this information from the priests of Ptah, who might be suspected of a natural desire to glorify their temple by associating its foundation with the illustrious Menes, it is necessary to examine his account and to assess its inherent probability. There is certainly no reason to doubt that the construction of a dyke would have been required before the city could be built. Until the introduction of modern methods of irrigation, the whole of the Giza province owed its protection from inundation to a dyke in the neighbourhood of Wasta. Such a dyke probably existed in the time of Herodotus, but did not necessarily date back to Menes. Diodorus, apparently quoting a Theban tradition received from Hecataeus, ascribes the foundation of Memphis to a Theban king Uchoreus, whose name may well be a corruption of ’Oxvpeús, which would be a translation of Menes. The two historians are therefore virtually in agreement. Manetho does not mention the actual foundation of the city, but says that a palace was built there by Athothis, the successor of of Menes—a statement which need not however imply that Athothis was the first king to build a palace in Memphis. A king-list, formerly on the wall of a Nineteenth Dynasty tomb in the Memphite cemetery of Saqqara and now preserved in the Cairo Museum, begins with the name of Anedjib, which may mean that the priestly owner of the tomb wished to attribute the foundation of Memphis to the sixth king of the First Dynasty, but no other evidence supports this assumption. While tombs and funerary equipment dating from the beginning of the First Dynasty have been discovered in abundance at Saqqara, traces of an earlier occupation are absent; it must therefore be admitted that at present there is nothing to suggest that the tradition quoted by Herodotus is in any important respect unsound.

Two further questions concerning Memphis which require consideration are its original name and the motive which prompted its foundation. The name Memphis belonged in the first instance to the pyramid of the Sixth Dynasty king Phiops I (Men-nefer-Pepi) at South Saqqara and was only later applied to the city itself. Previously it was called the ‘White Wall’ or ‘White Walls’, sometimes abbreviated to the ‘Wall’ or ‘Walls’. White was the national colour of the Upper Egyptian kingdom and a city founded by the victorious king of the South on captured territory might have been named the ‘White Wall’ to emphasize the victory; equally it could be a purely descriptive name referring to the white gesso with which its walls of mud-brick were covered. The explanation offered by the early commentators of Thucydides that the city was so named because it was built of white stone, whereas other cities were built of brick, is fanciful, for it is improbable that the skilled labour necessary for cutting so much stone would have been available at the beginning of the First Dynasty. With regard to the purpose of its foundation, Menes may well have intended it to serve as a bastion for the protection of Upper Egypt against possible attacks from the inhabitants of the Delta. On the other hand, being situated at the junction of the Two Lands, it stood at the most convenient point for directing the affairs of the newly-unified kingdom and may therefore have been designed from the beginning as the capital and the site of the royal residence. Some support for this view is to be found in the Palermo Stone and Cairo Annals, which show that two of the most important elements in the coronation of the early dynastic kings were the ceremonies of ‘Uniting the Two Lands’ and ‘The Procession around the Wall’, both of which undoubtedly took place at the White Wall and were intended to commemorate the two outstanding deeds of Menes, namely the unification of the monarchy and the foundation of the White Wall. If the White Wall had merely been a fortress and not the capital, it is unlikely that the commemoration of its foundation would have figured so prominently in the coronation ceremonial or that the coronation would have been performed within its precincts. Manetho, however, associates the First and Second Dynasties with This, in the neighbourhood of Abydos, but his assertion may be interpreted as meaning that they were of Thinite stock and not that This was their seat of government.

III.

THE CEMETERIES OF ABYDOS AND SAQQARA

The problem of the status of Memphis in the beginning of its history is linked with the difficult question of where the early dynastic kings were buried. Archaeological discovery has shown that rulers were generally buried near their capitals, even if the capital did not coincide with their place of birth. When Amélineau, and subsequently Petrie, uncovered at Abydos several ‘tombs’ containing objects inscribed with the names of one queen and all the kings of the First Dynasty, and of two kings belonging to the Second Dynasty, it seemed highly probable, particularly in view of the Manethonian tradition connecting these dynasties with This, that the actual sepulchres of the kings had been found. The absence of human remains in the ruined burial-chambers could easily be explained as being due to the operations of robbers. Nevertheless some misgivings concerning the purpose of these ‘tombs’ were expressed soon after their discovery, but their title was not seriously challenged until 1938, when a large brick mastaba containing sealings with the name of Aha was excavated by W. B. Emery in the early dynastic cemetery of North Saqqara. Further excavations brought to light additional mastabas which, by their contents, could be dated to later kings (and to two queens) of the First Dynasty, and, as a result, the contention of their excavator that among them lie the actual tombs of six of the eight kings who comprised the First Dynasty has been accepted by several authorities. Other writers have felt unwilling to go further than to admit that the weight of evidence is in favour of Saqqara or have preferred to remain neutral.

In almost every respect the problems set by the two cemeteries are different. At Abydos an unbroken series of ‘tombs’ could be ascribed each to a particular royal owner, not only by mud sealings and other inscribed objects but, in the case of Narmer, Djer, Djet, Den, Mer(it)neith, Semerkhet, Qaa and Peribsen, by stelae bear­ing their names which stood in pairs, one pair outside each ‘tomb’. Although no stelae were recovered from the ‘tombs’ of Aha, Anedjib and Khasekhemwy, there is no reason to doubt that they were originally provided with them. More than eight hundred subsidiary graves were constructed in trenches around the First Dynasty ‘tombs’ from the ‘tomb’ of Djer onwards, and a further five hundred, which were dated to Djer, Djet and Mer(it)neith, were arranged in three hollow rectangles at a short distance to the north-east of the main cemetery. The occupants of these graves, apart from a few domestic animals, were members of the royal harem and persons who had been in the service of the owner of the principal ‘tomb’, but the discovery of an arm with four bead­bracelets of gold and semi-precious stones, which had been hidden by a robber in a hole in the north wall of the ‘tomb’ of Djer, left little room for doubt that the burials had also included some women of high rank, perhaps queens. To sum up the problem of the royal ‘tombs’ at Abydos, it can be said that neither their ownership nor their sepulchral nature is open to question; what is in doubt is whether they were ever occupied or intended to be occupied by those whose names were inscribed on the stelae. If they were mere cenotaphs a further difficulty arises, because some reason must then be found to account for their construction. But first it is necessary to summarize the evidence on which the claim that the real tombs of the First Dynasty kings lie at Saqqara is based.

Near the edge of the escarpment at the north-east corner of the Saqqara necropolis excavations conducted intermittently between 1935 and 1956 revealed twelve large mud-brick mastabas of the First Dynasty, some with subsidiary graves comparable with those which surrounded the royal ‘tombs’ at Abydos but much less numerous. Like the latter ‘tombs’ they had been subjected to ruthless pilferage. Structurally, however, they were better preserved and some of the burial-chambers contained human remains. There can be no doubt therefore that these mastabas were actual tombs. The whole problem in this cemetery is the determination of ownership, for none of the mastabas yielded even a fragment of a royal stela and only one non-royal stela was found. Inscribed material included in the equipment enabled each mas- taba to be dated to a particular reign, but did not provide clear evidence of the identity of the person for whom it was built. That the owners were persons of very high rank is attested both by the quantity and the quality of their funerary equipment and by the size of the mastabas, on average nearly twice as large as the royal ‘tombs’ at Abydos. Is it to be imagined that even the highest officials would build larger and finer tombs than the kings under whom they held office? If the answer be in the negative it seems necessary to suppose that some of the twelve mastabas at Saqqara belonged to kings and the remainder perhaps to other royal persons of importance. On the evidence of the inscribed objects among their contents two mastabas can be ascribed to queens, Mer(it)neith and Herneith, and one each to Aha, Djet and Anedjib. Since no objects were found bearing the names of either Narmer or Semerkhet, three only of the eight First Dynasty kings remain as claimants for the seven outstanding tombs: Djer, Den and Qaa. For these kings inscriptional evidence provided a choice of three mastabas for Den and two each for Djer and Qaa, the only criteria in the cases of the mastabas of Djer and Den being size and, to some extent, the relative wealth of the funerary equipment. Neither criterion can be regarded as a safe guide because what has survived of the equipment is mainly the result of chance, and determination by size would entail taking into account large mastabas elsewhere, particularly at Naqada, Tarkhan, Giza and Abu Rawash. It is indeed not impossible that the famous mastaba at Naqada found by De Morgan in 1897 was the real tomb of Narmer, although both Queen Neithhotpe and an official whose name is written with three birds, probably ostriches, have undeniable claims to be considered as its owner. The larger of the two mastabas dated to Qaa possessed two features of great interest and perhaps suggestive of royal ownership. The first was an imposing mortuary temple reminiscent, both in its orientation on the north side of the tomb and in its plan, of the mortuary temple of the Step Pyramid of Djoser. Within this temple, in a chamber partly paved with limestone, were found the lower portions of two wooden statues, approximately two-thirds life-size, certainly objects of great rarity at this period. The second, rather enigmatic, feature was the single subsidiary grave situated between the mastaba and the eastern enclosure wall. This grave belonged not to a humble member of the household but to a very high official named Merka whose stela was found lying nearby. So high an official, it may reasonably be supposed, would hardly have been buried in such a relatively simple grave if the owner of the principal tomb were not the king himself.

Excavations at Saqqara have not yet revealed tombs for Peribsen and Khasekhemwy, the two Second Dynasty kings represented in the Abydos cemetery. Nevertheless, a Fourth Dynasty priest named Shery, who was buried at Saqqara, records in his tomb inscriptions that he was the Overseer of the Priests of Peribsen. Since it is unlikely that he would have been buried far from the scene of his official duties, it may be inferred that Shery superintended the mortuary cult of Peribsen at Saqqara and consequently that Peribsen, at least, had built a tomb there. Shery moreover mentions that he served the mortuary cult of Peribsen’s predecessor Sened in the same capacity, but Sened’s tomb also has not yet been found. A possible clue to the whereabouts of both these tombs may be offered by the existence of two other large tombs cut in the rock beneath the causeway and the mortuary temple of King Unas which have been ascribed, on the evidence of seal impressions, to two of the first three kings of the Second Dynasty, Reneb and Nynetjer. Neither of these two kings nor Sened possessed a ‘tomb’ at Abydos, so that even if conclusive proof were forthcoming that they were buried at Saqqara they would still fall into a different category from Peribsen. Such as it is, however, the evidence from Saqqara seems to show that the Manethonian tradition, according to which the Third Dynasty was the first dynasty associated with Memphis, need not be interpreted to imply that earlier kings were not buried in the Memphite necropolis at Saqqara.

Later Egyptian history provides several instances of the construction of more than one tomb for a king, the best known perhaps being Djoser’s Step Pyramid and South Mastaba at Saqqara and Sneferu’s two pyramids at Dahshur. Thus there is no inherent improbability in the assumption that the kings whose ‘ tombs ’ were situated at Abydos were also the possessors of other tombs elsewhere. Architecturally the Abydos ‘tombs’ display features, including the round-topped stelae, which seem to be Upper Egyptian in origin, whereas the Saqqara mastabas preserve the house-tomb tradition of Lower Egypt; since the dual role of the king was emphasized in so many ways in life it would not be strange if in death he were given two tombs, one as king of Upper Egypt and the other as king of Lower Egypt. The suggestion has, however, been made that the Abydos ‘tombs’ were constructed for the mock burials of the kings at their Sed-festivals, a later parallel to which may exist in the Eleventh Dynasty ‘tomb’ of Nebhepetre Mentuhotpe situated within the precincts of his funerary temple and rock-tomb at Deir el-Bahri. Whether this suggestion be right or not it is remarkable how many inscribed objects referring directly or indirectly to Sed-festivals were found at Abydos, whereas very few recognizable allusions occur on objects discovered in the Saqqara mastabas; a limestone relief showing two figures of a king in Heb Sed dress, obtained from the shaft of a Third Dynasty mastaba, is, however, believed to date from the First Dynasty.

Neither of the theories put forward to explain the purpose of the ‘tombs’ at Abydos can easily be reconciled with the fact that they included one ‘tomb’ of a queen, but the exceptional privileges which she enjoyed in other respects render her position in the state difficult to determine. A further problem left unresolved is why Abydos should have been chosen as the location of the second tomb, especially if it were intended for the Heb Sed, a festival usually celebrated at Memphis. There is certainly evidence that some of the last predynastic kings of Upper Egypt were buried (or at least built cenotaphs) at Abydos, so that its choice by the kings of the Early Dynastic Period may be explained as merely a continuance of a practice already established, prompted perhaps by a desire to possess temporary residences which they could inhabit when visiting their forbears. But why were the tombs (or the cenotaphs) of these forbears at Abydos if their seat of government lay at Hierakonpolis? If the Manethonian tradition associating the early dynastic kings with This is sound the explanation may be that their immediate ancestors, who were presumably also of Thinite stock, chose to be buried in their place of origin. On the other hand it is possible that even at this early period Abydos was regarded with particular reverence. In later times, when it had become the centre of the cult of Osiris, Sesostris III, Amosis I and Sethos I built cenotaphs, and countless private persons erected stelae, on its sacred territory. It is indeed not illogical to suppose that the early kings chose Abydos as the site for the cenotaphs for the very reason which led to the transference of the dead Osiris from his home in the Delta to Abydos. What the precise reason may have been is problematical, but perhaps it was related to the special attributes of the local god Khentiamentiu, Chief-of-the-Westerners, as the guardian of the dead.

 

The Cemeteries of Abydos : Egypt Exploration Fund

Abydos : Petrie, W. M. Flinders

Excavations at Saqqara, 1905-1906

Excavations at Saqqara, 1907-1908

Excavations at Saqqara, 1911-12: the tomb of Hesy

 

IV.

THE SUCCESSORS OF MENES

 

Manetho declares that, after a reign of sixty-two years, Menes was killed by a hippopotamus. Diodorus, perhaps preserving a more fanciful version of the same tradition, avers that he was attacked by his own dogs when in the neighbourhood of Lake Moeris, but was saved by a crocodile which carried him across the lake to safety. Menes accordingly marked his gratitude by building on the shore of the lake a city—Crocodilopolis—and by decreeing that crocodiles should live and breed in the lake unmolested. The legend, which contains obvious anachronisms, is patently devoid of historical value, an invention by priests of later times who wished to connect their cult with Menes. A scribe’s palette in the Berlin Museum bears an inscription which shows that the Greek tradition crediting Menes with the construction of a temple for Ptah at Memphis dates back at least to the Nineteenth Dynasty. If he is to be identified with the Horus Narmer, as seems likely, the occurrence of his name on a rock in the Wadi el-Qash, east of Thebes, indicates that Menes or one of his officers conducted an expedition to the eastern desert, though for what purpose is unknown.

The final year and a half of Aha’s reign, which lasted according to Africanus for fifty-seven years and according to Eusebius for twenty-seven years, are probably recorded on the Palermo Stone, but only the biennial royal tour of inspection (sms Hr) and the creation of a figure of the god Anubis are mentioned. His name, which means the Fighter, was possibly indicative of his character and of the requirements of the time: one of the few extant records of his reign, a wooden label found at Abydos, commemorates a campaign against the Nubians, which may mean that he conducted a war in the northern Sudan or that it was he who extended the southern boundary of Egypt beyond Gebel es-Silsila, its probable limit in the time of Menes, to the Nubian nome terminating at Elephantine. Some other plaques bear representations of Egyptian captives, and one scene is accompanied by an inscription which reads: ‘Receiving Upper and Lower Egypt’; his main preoccupation therefore appears to have been to consolidate the work of his predecessor in unifying the country and to establish the authority of the Double Crown over the whole length of the Nile Valley from the First Cataract to the Mediterranean coast. As an indication of his policy towards the inhabitants of the Delta, it is significant that he placed on record the foundation of a temple to Neith, the goddess of Sais, which suggests that he was anxious to placate the conquered northerners. According to Manetho, Menes’ successor, whom he calls Athothis, was the author of some works on anatomy, a tradition which seems to date back at least to the time of the New Kingdom, for the compiler of the Ebers medical papyrus asserts that a preparation for strengthening the hair was invented for the mother of a king named Teti, who may have been Aha, though it is also possible that the founder of the Sixth Dynasty was the king in question.

In the Abydos king-list the third king of the dynasty is Iti, better known by his Horus-name Djer which has sometimes been incorrectly read as Khent. Seventeen of a total of approximately fifty years occupied by his reign are recorded on the Palermo Stone and the Cairo Annals, but the events mentioned are mainly of religious rather than historical interest. One year, almost exactly in the middle of his reign, is however called ‘The Year of smiting the land of Setjet’—a name which, though applied in later times to the whole of western Asia, was probably restricted in the Early Dynastic Period to Sinai; it is tempting to speculate whether the turquoise of the four bracelets found in Djer’s ‘tomb’ at Abydos was not secured as a result of this campaign. Perhaps it also brought about the peaceful conditions necessary for obtaining the ore for some hundreds of copper objects discovered at Saqqara in the brick mastaba which contained Djer’s seal-impressions, but copper in considerable quantities was available nearer home in the eastern desert and the early kings may have mined only turquoise in Sinai. His name is carved on a rock at Wadi Haifa accompanied by a battle scene which, in spite of its damaged condition, affords good evidence that his army reached the Second Cataract. It is possible ttat he also conducted a campaign agamst tlie Libyans. Queen Herneith, whose mud-brick mastaba at Saqqara ft dated to his reign, is thought to have been his wife. At a hter date which cannot be predsely fixed his ‘tomb’ at Abydos was regarded as the grave of and in consequence, underwent some structural alterations in the Eighteenth Dynasty; the vast numbers of pots deposited there by pilgrims led the Arahs to call its immediate neighbourhoocl Umm el-Qaab ‘The Motbier of pots’, a name ft has retamed to the present day.

Manetho omits from his list both Djer and his successor Djet and substitutes for them the names Kenkenes and Uenephes. Uenephes can hardly be anything but a faulty transcription of the Egyptian wnn-nfr, normally rendered Onophris, a synonym for Osiris, particularly in view of the supposed connexion of Osiris with the ‘tom ’ of Djer; a different kind of confusion may have led to the introduction of Kenkenes. The fourth king in the Abydos list is called Ita, a name which is not far unlike Iterty, found on a label in conjunction with the Horus Djet and is thought to be his nbty-name. Historical details of his reign are exceedingly sparse, but nothing in the archaeologjcal evidence now available suggests that any break of continuity occurred in the political and cuftural development observable under his predecessors. One of his subject possibly the leader of an expeditionti scratched the king‘s name on a rock in the Wadi Miah some fifteen mfies east of Edfu along a route known to have been used m ptolemaic times by caravans proceeding from the Nile Valley to the port of Berenice on the Red Sea coast. Meagre though this information is, it suggests that Djet was able to despatch expeditions, of either a military or a commercial character, outside the Nile Valley.

One of the most puzzling personages of the Early Dynastic Period is Mer(it)neith. Theophorous names compounded with Neith usually belonged to women, and consequently most authorities have deduced that Mer(it)neith was female; the rule, however, is not invariable. None of the instances adduced for the spelling of this name with the inclusion of the feminine termination t is free from doubt, but its omission in hieroglyphic writing at this period would not necessarily have any grammatical significance. It is at least clear that no king was intended, for the royal titles are never prefixed. If Mer(it)neith was a woman she must have attained a position seldom, if ever, equalled by a member of her sex in early dynastic times. One inscription mentions her treasury, which suggests that she possessed sovereign status. Her ‘tomb’ at Abydos differed in no material respect from the ‘tombs’ of the kings: like Djer and Djet she was provided with attendants, some of whom were interred within her own complex and others in the neighbouring cemetery. One peculiar feature, however, was the absence of any jar-sealings bearing her name; when a name occurred it was in nearly every instance that of Djet’s successor Den, but the sealings were for the most part different in design and content from those found in Den’s own ‘tomb’. Some examples appear more primitive than the sealings of Den and it may not be without significance that a piece of ivory inscribed with the name of Mer(it)neith was found in the tomb of Djer, while at least one of her jar-sealings bore the name of Djet’s vineyard. From this slender evidence it may be conjectured that she was born in the time of Djer and that she died early in Den’s reign; the equipment and construction of the mastaba at Saqqara, which contained objects and jar-sealings inscribed with her name, would seem to support this dating—a deduction which need not depend on whether Merfitjneith was in reality the owner. As a mere hypothesis it may be suggested that she served as regent, perhaps while Den was still a minor, and died before relinquishing the office. Such a position could only have been occupied by a woman if she had been a queen, which might imply that she was the wife of Djet and the mother of Den.

Two features, which subsequently became characteristic of royalty, make their first appearance on objects dating from the time of Den: one is the so-called double crown (shmty, ‘the two powerful ones’) and the other a title (perhaps read in this period as niswt-bity, but later having the phonetic value ni-sw-bit, the literal meaning of which is ‘He who belongs to the sedge and the bee’. In effect, the title means ‘King of Upper and Lower Egypt’, though in origin it may have referred particularly to the towns of Heracleopolis and Sais. As the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Den’s name was written with a hieroglyphic depicting hill-country repeated twice; this group possesses two values, Khasty and Semty, and it is not clear which reading should be adopted in this instance. The later Egyptians themselves experienced some difficulty with the name, but for a different reason: when written cursively in ink the hieroglyph for hill-country resembled two other signs, which in duplicate would read Septy and Qenqen respectively. Hence Khasty or Semty appears on the Abydos list as Septy, and Manetho reproduces the same reading, but with its later value Hesepty, and transcribes it into Greek as Usaphais. The introduction of Kenkenes instead of Djer into Manetho’s First Dynasty may have originated with some scribe who, when copying two possibly incomplete manuscripts, included both Qenqen of one document and Septy of the other without realizing that they stood for the same king.

Although the surviving archaeological material from the time of Den is considerable, very few details of his personal history are known. A recently discovered fragment naming Den has proved that the fourteen years of a king, chronicled in the third line of the Palermo Stone, refer to his reign and are not the annals of his successor Anedjib, as was once supposed. That he was an energetic and enterprising ruler who encouraged the arts and crafts and developed the administrative machinery of the kingdom is evident. Two of his officials, Hemaka and Ankhka, are mentioned by name on many contemporary dockets and jar-sealings. In quantity, the objects recovered from the mastaba at Saqqara attributed at the time of its discovery to Hemaka represent the largest single collection of funerary equipment so far discovered in any tomb of the Early Dynastic Period. An ivory docket from Abydos shows the king smiting a kneeling Asiatic with a mace—a scene which is described in the accompanying inscription as ‘The First Time of smiting the East(erners)’; whether this docket is to be interpreted as a record of an historical event, signifying a military campaign against the inhabitants of Sinai or the nomads of the eastern desert, or merely as commemorating a ceremonial episode is a matter for conjecture. Possibly the ‘Easterners’ were the same people as the ‘Nomads’ mentioned in the third line of the Palermo Stone as the victims of a similar fate. Two other dockets from Abydos, which also agree with an entry on the Palermo Stone, record incidents in the king’s Sed-festival, which in later times often marked the conclusion of thirty years’ rule; its position on the stone certainly indicates that the festival occurred early in the second half of a reign which may have exceeded fifty-five years. In later times Den acquired a legendary reputation as the king in whose time certain spells in the Book of the Dead were found, and his name also figures in connexion with medical prescriptions in the Ebers papyrus and in the Berlin medical papyrus.

Anedjib followed the example of Den in adopting the title ‘King of Upper and Lower Egypt’, but usually combined with it a new title composed of two falcons on perches. This title (nbwy—‘The Two Lords’) identified the king with Horus and Seth, symbolizing Lower and Upper Egypt respectively. His personal name was Merpe (or Merpebia), which appears as Merbapen in the Saqqara list and Miebis in Manetho. Such archaeological evidence as is now available seems to indicate that his reign was short, which may explain why his ‘tomb’ at Abydos was the poorest in construction and least productive in material remains of any king of the First Dynasty. Again, the missing portion of the royal annals between the Palermo and the Cairo fragments is not believed to have contained more than fourteen year-frames; within the gap it is necessary to fit the whole of Anedjib’s reign and an unkown number of years of the reign of Den. A claim sometimes advanced for Anedjib that he was the first king to reside in Memphis is based solely on the unexpected occurrence of his name at the head of the Saqqara king-list, Menes and his four immediate successors being omitted.

According to the Cairo fragment of the royal annals, which preserves his reign in its entirety, Semerkhet ruled for eight years and some months. His personal name underwent in the course of time vicissitudes of a kind closely analogous to those already noted in the case of Den. A hieroglyphic sign, which represented a man clothed in a long garment and holding a stick and which seems to have had the consonantal value of iry-ntr, was mistaken for a very similar sign reading smsw or smsm, the name thus appears in the Turin Canon as Semsem and in Manetho as Semempses. In place of the nbwy-title adopted by Anedjib, Semerkhet combined the nbty (Two Ladies) with the ‘King of Upper and Lower Egypt’ title, for reasons which are now obscure. Several of the fragments of stone vases found in his ‘tomb’ at Abydos had originally borne the names of Mer(it)neith, Den or Anedjib, but Mer(it)neith and Anedjib were invariably erased. Examples of the inclusion of vessels inscribed with the names of preceding kings are not uncommon in tombs of this period, and the erasures made in this instance suggest that Semerkhet wished to disown two of his predecessors, perhaps regarding them as usurpers; why Den should have been treated with greater respect is not evident. It is strange that Semerkhet’s Sed-festival, which, is shown on fragments of vases from Abydos, appears not to be mentioned in the Cairo Annals, unless it was included in one of the two year-frames of this reign which are now illegible. Manetho’s statement that a very serious calamity befell Egypt under Semerkhet is not confirmed by contemporary records.

Inscriptions of Qaa, the eighth and last king of the First Dynasty, show identical Horus and personal names; Sen, which sometimes takes the place of Qaa after the nbty-title, is probably not a name but is the verb ‘to embrace’, the meaning of the whole group being ‘The Two Ladies embrace (the Horus Qaa)’. The Abydos and Saqqara king-lists and also the Turin Canon give his personal name as Qebeh(u), which apparently owes its origin to a twofold error: in the first instance Qaa was misread as Qeb and subsequently the latter was confused with Qebeh(u), a mistake made possible by the fact that, in hieroglyphic writing, qb and qbh shared a common determinative. Scarcely any information regarding his reign, apart from the bare assertion that he lived to celebrate his second Sed-festival, can be extracted either from the numerous objects found in his ‘tomb’ at Abydos or from the inscribed stone vessels of his time buried under Djoser’s pyramid. Some of his jar-sealings show the name of Semerkhet erased; Anedjib’s name, on the other hand, was allowed to stand, which suggests that Qaa regarded his predecessor with the same dis­favour as Semerkhet, in his turn, had evinced towards Anedjib. A relic of Semerkhet’s unpopularity may perhaps be detected in his omission from the Nineteenth Dynasty Saqqara list, which includes both Anedjib and Qaa.

Nothing is known of the circumstances in which the First Dynasty came to an end. Manetho concludes the dynasty with a king named Bieneches or Ubienthes, both of which seem to represent Baunetjer of the Turin and Saqqara lists. Contemporary inscriptions mention two problematical Horus-names in conjunction with sacred buildings known to have belonged to Qaa. One of these names is written with a single hieroglyph representing a bird, the true reading of which has not yet been determined; the other name may be read Seneferka, Sekanefer or Neferseka. If the owners of these names were independent rulers they were probably ephemeral followers of Qaa. There is certainly no clear evidence that Qaa’s sovereignty was ever challenged by a rival line of dynasts or that the end of his reign was marked by untoward happenings affecting the normal course of succession. The Turin Canon enumerates the kings of the First and Second Dynasties in unbroken sequence, giving the first indication of a break in continuity at the beginning of the Third Dynasty. Of the length of time occupied by the First Dynasty, widely divergent estimates have been given by modern historians using the same data. Contemporary annals, mainly in the form of ivory and wooden dockets, show that regnal years were not numbered, as in later times, but were named after some important event, usually of a religious character. So few dockets of this kind have however been preserved that they are useless for compiling even a skeleton chronology of the period. The Fifth Dynasty Palermo Stone and Cairo Annals, though invaluable, have proved to be capable of more than one reconstruction. Manetho gives an aggregate of 253 years for the dynasty, but the figures attributed to the individual reigns total 263 years—a number which seems too high to be reconciled with the annals, even after making the maximum allowance for the lacunae.

Little more than the names and order of succession of the kings belonging to the first part of the Second Dynasty has yet been established with any probability; of their deeds and the political conditions of their time virtually nothing is known. An inscription on the shoulder of a stone statuette, thought to date from the end of the Second Dynasty, in the Cairo Museum gives the Horus-names of the first three kings, Hetepsekhemwy, Reneb and Nynetjer, probably in their right order. The apparent inversion of the names of Hetepsekhemwy and Reneb on a stone vessel found in the pyramid temple of Mycerinus, although disconcerting, has been plausibly explained as the result of a usurpation by Reneb. Hetep­sekhemwy (‘The Two Powers are at peace’) bore the personal name Hetep which, when written in hieratic, was misread so that it appears as Bedjau in the Abydos list, and the hieratic writing of Bedjau was in turn misinterpreted to give Baunetjer of the Turin Canon and the Saqqara list. Bedjau is however preserved in Manetho as Boethos and Bochos. The name Bedjapu, which occurs before five kings of the Fourth and Fifth Dynasties on a writing-board of the Fifth Dynasty found at Giza, may also be derived from Bedjau.

Reneb (Re is [my] Lord), whose tomb-stela is now in the Metropolitan Museum, provides the earliest example of a royal name compounded with the name of the sun-god of Heliopolis, which suggests that the cult of this deity, although not destined to attain full power until the Old Kingdom, was already temporarily in the ascendant. Presumably Reneb is to be identified with Kakau of the New Kingdom lists and Kaiechos of Manetho, but the explanation remains to be discovered. Either he or Nynetjer bore the personal name Nubnefer. Nynetjer in any case possessed a personal name which was identical with his Horus-name; it is this name which the Abydos and Saqqara lists reproduce in the corrupt forms Banetjeren and Banetjeru followed by Manetho who reads Binothris. Although nearly half of Nynetjer’s reign is recorded on the Palermo Stone, the only historical fact which can be ascertained is that he ruled for about thirty-eight years; the entries on the stone, apart from enumerating the biennial censuses of the king’s property, refer exclusively to the construction of buildings and the celebration of various festivals. His immediate successors, Weneg and Sened, are even more obscure. Vases inscribed with the name of Weneg, and certainly dating from his time, were found under the Step Pyramid. Sened, although known from a fragment of an inscribed vase discovered at Giza, is better attested by inscriptions in the Fourth Dynasty tomb at Saqqara, whose owner styles himself ‘Overseer of the Priests of Sened in the (Saqqara) necropolis, Shery’. The names of both kings appear in the later lists, Sened (Sethenes in Manetho) without undergoing any radical change of form, but Weneg, owing to a scribal misunderstanding, becoming Wadjnes, literally ‘Green-of- Tongue’, which in Coptic would be rendered Wet-las and which Manetho gives as Tlas. In view of the professed association of the second king of the dynasty with the solar cult, it is perhaps sig­nificant that Weneg should have been chosen as a royal name, because a god Weneg, who must have been venerated in early times, is described in the Pyramid Texts of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties as the ‘son of Re’.

Shery, besides being a priest of Sened, served the mortuary cult of the next king of the Second Dynasty, Peribsen, in the same capacity. Peribsen’s name, in contemporary inscriptions, is preceded not by the traditional Horus-title, but by the Seth-title and, in one instance, by Seth-Re. An interesting commentary on this new title is provided by one of his seal-impressions which reads: ‘The Ombite (i.e. Seth) hath given the Two Lands to his son Peribsen’. The discovery in his ‘tomb’ at Abydos of jar-sealings inscribed variously with the Seth Peribsen and with the Horus Sekhemib (niswi-bity and nbty Sekhemib Perenmaat) led to the deduction, which has, however, not gained universal acceptance, that the two names were borne by one king who discarded his original Horus-name and title and adopted a new name with the title of Seth. It is unfortunate that the evidence on this point is equivocal, for the problem has a vital bearing both on the assess­ment of Peribsen’s claim to the throne and on the interpretation of some records of historical importance belonging to the Horus Khasekhem. If Peribsen was not originally a Horus-king, he may not have been of Hierakonpolite stock, but may perhaps have been a native of some place in the province of the god Seth, whose centre was Ombos, the modern Naqada. In that event it is conceivable that Peribsen and Khasekhem ruled concurrently, the former over the territory north of Gebelein and the latter over the region between Gebelein and the First Cataract; a state of affairs implying that the unity of the kingdom was temporarily broken would thus have existed. If, on the other hand, Peribsen ascended the throne as the Horus Sekhemib, no Ombite ancestry or division of authority need be postulated, but it must be supposed that the change of name and title was governed by religious or political causes. There is, however, evidence that the early dynastic kings were always closely associated with both Horus and Seth, and consequently the substitution of one deity for the other in the royal titulary need not point to changes of a revolutionary nature. Nevertheless, the innovation was certainly not without its significance, and it is at least arguable from the title Seth-Re that Peribsen was responsible for introducing the cult of Seth into Heliopolis.

The monuments of Khasekhem are chiefly characterized by their emphasis on his military achievements. One of the most graphic is a fragmentary relief which, when complete, showed the king kneeling on a prostrate Nubian, whose body, like that of the Northerner on the palette of Narmer, was depicted in the shape of the hieroglyph for foreign land; beneath the scene is an inscription reading ‘Excellent Sandal against foreign lands, the Horus Khasekhem’—an epithet which appears to have been no idle boast. Another reference to a campaign in the south may perhaps be detected in a scene carved on a number of commemorative vases which represent the vulture-goddess Nekhbet before the serekh of the king binding the symbolical plants of Upper and Lower Egypt with one claw and holding in the other a ring containing two hieroglyphic signs spelling the word Besh. The interpretation of Besh is, however, extremely problematical; at different times it has been explained as the personal name of the king, as the name of a Libyan people dwelling in the neighbourhood of El-Kab and as a more northern Libyan tribe domiciled near the Faiyum. The title of the scene, ‘The Year of fighting and smiting the Northerners’, favours the last interpretation, but no final proof is yet forth­coming. Khasekhem’s most important campaigns were certainly conducted in the north, and it is to these wars that the reliefs and inscriptions on the bases of his two statuettes refer, although the number of slain recorded—47,209 on one statuette and on the other 48,205—is certainly hyperbolical. Such campaigns within the confines of Egypt itself can only have been necessitated by a breakdown in the authority of the crown; it is difficult to believe that the circumstances which led to the adoption of the Seth-title by Peribsen were not ultimately the cause of Khasekhem’s military exploits. An imaginative account of his struggle may perhaps be contained in the so-called Myth of Horus, which is inscribed on a wall in the Ptolemaic temple of Edfu. According to this text, Horus, accompanied by his harpooners (msntlw), defeated the followers of Seth, who assumed the forms of crocodiles and hippopotami, in a series of river battles between Edfu and the sea-coast. Having completed the conquest, Horus returned southwards to quell an insurrection at Shashert in Nubia and, after accomplishing this task, he divided among his followers the territory which had previously been controlled by the adherents of Seth. While the general purport of the myth is not inconsistent with the victories recorded on the monuments of Khasekhem, the possibility that it reflects events of a later period, such as the expulsion of the Hyksos or the overthrow of the Persians, cannot be excluded. It is at least unlikely that Khasekhem’s northern campaign occurred during the lifetime of Peribsen, for if Peribsen had been defeated in battle it is hard to understand how he came to have a ‘tomb’ at Abydos, unless the ‘tomb’ was built and partly equipped while Peribsen was still alive and, for some reason was not dismantled after his defeat. If, however, the monuments of Khasekhem describe a struggle for the kingship which followed the death of Peribsen, the existence of the ‘ tomb ’ would not be surprising, because subsequent developments suggest that a policy of appeasement towards the adherents of Seth was soon introduced.

An even more perplexing question than Khasekhem’s connexion with Peribsen is whether the former is to be identified with Khasekhemwy or was succeeded by him. Alone among the kings of Egypt, Khasekhemwy adopted the dual title of Horus and Seth. His serekh frequently contains his personal name, Nebwy Hetepimef, added to his official name, and the group thus written may be rendered ‘The Horus and Seth Khasekhemwy, the Two Lords (i.e. Horus and Seth) are at peace in him’. It seems clear, therefore, that a reconciliation had been effected between the followers of the two deities; whether it occurred under Khasekhem, whose name was altered to Khasekhemwy in order to signalize the event, or under a different king called Khasekh­emwy from the time of his coronation, cannot be deduced with any certainty. The absence of a ‘tomb’ at Abydos which may be ascribed to Khasekhem, whereas the ‘tomb’ of Khasekhemwy in that cemetery has been found, and the similarity of the two names support the conjecture that Khasekhem and Khasekhemwy represent only one person; on the other hand, it may be argued that the conditions for bringing about the reconciliation would have been more favourable under a new king.

As a consequence of the restoration of peace and order, a marked advance in technical achievements occurred under Khasekhemwy. According to the Palermo Stone, which preserves the records of the last six of the seventeen years of his reign, a copper statue of the king was made in his fifteenth regnal year, showing that the figures of Phiops I and Merenre found at Hierakonpolis were by no means the first to be produced in that metal. It is also stated that two years previously he built a temple of stone named ‘The Goddess Endures’—an assertion which finds support in the fact that the chamber of his Abydos ‘tomb’ was composed of hewn limestone. Moreover, fragments of granite door-jambs carved with inscriptions and reliefs which were found at Hierakonpolis and at El-Kab display a thorough mastery over this stone. In these and in many other respects it is evident that the reign of Khasekhemwy was culturally the forerunner of the Old Kingdom. He was closely related to Djoser, the second king of the Third Dynasty, whose mother was almost certainly the ‘Mother of the King’s Children’, Nymaathap. Jar-sealings bearing her name were discovered in the Abydos ‘tomb’ of Khasekhemwy and consequently it has sometimes been supposed that she was Khasekhemwy’s queen. In the Turin Papyrus, however, the accession of Djoser is marked as the beginning of a new dynasty, which, if he was the son of Khasekhemwy, would be surprising. It seems possible, therefore, that Nymaathap was Khasekhemwy’s only child and that she married a prince who was not in the direct line of succession.

Contemporary records of the later kings in the Second Dynasty differ widely from the names in the New Kingdom king-lists. The Turin Canon and the Saqqara list give as the successors of Sened: Aka [(or Neferkare), Neferkasokar, Hudjefa and Bebty (or Beby). The Abydos list mentions only Djadja. Both Bebty and Djadja may be misreadings of a hieratic writing of Khasekhemwy, hile Hudjefa has been explained as being originally intended not as a name but as a scribal note meaning ‘lacuna’. Manetho’s last four kings in the dynasty bear the names Chaires, Nefercheres, Sesochris and Cheneres. To these kings alone he ascribes reigns which in aggregate amount to 120 years. His total of 302 years for the whole dynasty, however, exceeds estimates based on other sources of evidence by about a century.

Statue of a courtier Ihy (2200 BC

 

V.

ROYALTY AND THE STATE

 

The whole structure of the Egyptian constitution was founded on the general acceptance of the doctrine that its rulers were divine. Throughout the Early Dynastic Period, with the exception of the reigns of Peribsen and Khasekhemwy, every king bore the title of Horus and thus signalized his claim to be the earthly embodiment of that deity; Peribsen and Khasekhemwy modified this practice only to the extent of adopting a different divine identity. At death, when a new incarnation of Horus had succeeded to the throne, the deceased king surrendered the right to his Horus-titles; for this reason the New Kingdom royal lists consistently enumerate the kings under their personal names, to which the nbty-title had generally been prefixed in contemporary inscriptions. Perhaps the fact of deification was considered as implicit in the assumption of kingship and needed to be marked by no special ceremony either at the coronation or at the jubilee festival (Heb Sed), when the principal ceremonies of the coronation were re-enacted. The royal annals describe the coronation as the ‘Rising of the King of Upper Egypt, Rising of the King of Lower Egypt, Union of the Two Lands and Procession around the Wall’, which suggests that the ritual was mainly intended to commemorate the early division of the land into two kingdoms, the unification of these kingdoms under one crown and the foundation of Memphis by Menes. Being a deity, the king was doubtless entitled to the same degree of reverence from his subjects as other gods and he, in turn, was expected to conform with the supposed divine code of behaviour. Like the gods, he married and had children. Several of the queens of the Early Dynastic Period are known by name: Neithhotpe, Mer(it)neith, Herneith and Nymaathap are the only queens who figure in contemporary inscriptions, but the Cairo Annals record that Khenthap and Betrest (?) were the mothers of Djer and Semerkhet respectively, and it may therefore be assumed that they were the wives of Aha and Anedjib. The fact that the mothers are mentioned in this manner strongly suggests that the right of succession to the throne was, already at the beginning of Egyptian history, transmitted through the principal queen, who was variously called ‘She who unites the Two Lords’ , ‘She who sees Horus and Seth’ and ‘Mother of the King’s Children’. Princes and princesses are seldom mentioned by name at this period, but princesses seated on litters are occasionally included in representations of ceremonies, sometimes accompanied by their tutor. Normally the royal family lived together in the palace, built mainly of mud brick; no early example of such a building has yet been discovered, but it is not unlikely that the façade is reproduced in the design of the serekh (literally, proclaimer), within which the Horus-name of the king was written. The interior of the palace was probably divided into official and domestic quarters, the latter comprising the harem, the ‘Mansion of Life’ or royal dining-room, wine-cellar, the slaughter-house, and certainly many other sections which are not specified in extant inscriptions. Courtiers, whose numbers must have been very considerable, were graded according to their position, the most exalted being the ‘Controller of the Two Thrones’, ‘He who is at the head of the King’, and possibly several bearing the title ‘One concerned with Royal Affairs’. In virtue of his supposedly divine nature, the king ruled as an absolute monarch with complete authority over both secular and religious affairs. He was, however, assisted by a body of officials whose titles, found on seal-impressions, fragments of stone vases and other ‘documents’, constitute the chief, though lamentably inadequate, source of information for reconstructing, in broad outline, the political and social organization developed by Menes and his immediate successors. As in later times, the administration was centred on the capital and had its branches in the provinces. At the head of the central administration stood the ‘King’s House’, which exercised jurisdiction not only over such matters as were considered to be the sole prerogative of the king, but also over all the other government departments. Perhaps the records from which the archivists of the Fifth Dynasty compiled the Palermo Stone and its congeners in the museums of Cairo and University College were kept in the ‘King’s House’. Usually, as its name implies, the king presided in person over this House, with the ‘Master of the Secrets of the (Royal) Decrees’ as his principal lieutenant, a ‘Companion’ serving as a senior official and a body of scribes to perform the clerical duties. The suggestion has been made that a hieroglyphic group tt, borne by a person who is represented in company with the king’s sandal-bearer and other royal attendants on the slate palette and mace-head of Narmer, is to be explained as an early method of writing the title tzty, which, in the Old Kingdom and later, signified ‘Vizier’. It seems more likely, however, that tt is to be connected either with wtt ‘beget’, so that it would signify‘son’, ‘crown-prince’ or with ztt ‘tutor’. Nevertheless the title tity is attested by vase-inscriptions dating from before the time of Djoser, all with reference to a certain Menka, but its bearer may not have occupied the same exalted position as the viziers of the Old Kingdom. Menka’s two other titles ‘He of the Curtain’ and ‘Judge’, however, show that the office was already one of great importance. Perhaps the highest administrative official was the ‘Chancellor’, who was in charge of the White House and the Red House, as the Treasuries of Upper and Lower Egypt were called, after the national colours of the Two Lands. His staff consisted of one or more ‘assistants’ and ‘scribes’. Their functions, in so far as they can be deduced, comprised not only the supervision of national revenue, which included, by the end of the Second Dynasty, the organization of the biennial ‘census of gold and of fields’, but also the collection and distribution of various stores, such as oils and certain other products which were levied as taxes. In such capacities they probably played a leading part in the biennial royal tour of inspection, the ‘Following of Horus’ recorded on the Palermo Stone. Together with the King’s House, the two Treasuries received the wine from the royal vineyards, apparently situated in the neighbourhood of Memphis and always supervised by a high state official. How prominently the control of provisions figured in the economic and administrative organization is shown by the many different departments which dealt with commissariat: cereals were at all times the particular care of the ‘Granaries’, second in importance only to the ‘Treasuries’; perhaps the ‘ Office of the Miller’ was a subdepartment of the ‘Granaries’, where the corn was ground; the distribution of supplies to the temples and to courtiers and other privileged persons was conducted from the ‘House of the Master of Largess’, a department closely linked with the ‘Mansion of Life’ in the palace; the ‘Food Office’ is often mentioned in the documents, but little is known of its activities beyond what may be deduced from the name and from the conjecture that the vineyards were under its control; fats were kept in a special storehouse called the ‘House of Cattle-fat’. Military affairs probably required the attention of a permanent branch in the administration; nothing is known of the constitution of the army and its terms of service are completely obscure. At the end of the Second Dynasty, under Khasekhemwy, an ‘Overseer of the Foreign Country’ is found, but it is not clear whether the title was intended to designate an official charged with foreign affairs in general or referred in a more restricted sense to some particular land beyond the frontiers of Egypt.

Numerous problems confront any inquiry into the methods of provincial administration adopted by the early dynastic kings. Is it, for instance, to be assumed that the nomes of Upper Egypt and of the Delta were administered in the same way? Social conditions in the Two Lands probably differed fundamentally: the predynastic Upper Egyptians were mainly a nomadic folk who had settled in communities distributed at intervals along the banks of the river, whereas the inhabitants of the Delta seem to have congregated in groups at no great distance apart; a system of government, perhaps feudal in character, suited to the needs of Upper Egypt would have been impracticable in the North, where a more urban regime would seem to have been more appropriate. After the unification, it is likely that a measure of uniformity in governmental control was introduced, at least in the highest posts, linking the provinces with the central administration, although special privileges may have been accorded to some of the southern nomes in recognition of their service to Menes. How many of his successors respected the claims of these nomes to preferential treatment and in what way such events as the political upheaval which culminated in the accession of Peribsen may have affected the whole machinery of provincial government are questions which cannot at present be answered. Of titles borne exclusively by provincial officials, contemporary documents preserve only two or possibly three: ‘Keeper of Nekhen’ a less specific epithet usually rendered ‘Administrator of a Province’ and ‘Hereditary Prince’. The ‘Keeper of Nekhen’ (literally, He who belongs to Nekhen [?]) was probably a kind of viceroy of the southernmost nomes, whose seat at Nekhen owed its origin to the historical association of that city with the founders of the First Dynasty. In later times the office carried with it the title of ‘Count’ a rank ascribed to Ankhka in the reign of Den, who, however, is not known to have held the post of ‘Keeper of Nekhen’. The appointment of a similar dignitary in Lower Egypt, the ‘Keeper of Pe’, may not have been initiated until the Third Dynasty. Several wine-jar sealings of the First Dynasty are inscribed with the title, and often the name, of the ‘Administrator’ of the nome in which the vineyard was situated; there is no clear evidence that the specialized significance of ‘Customs’ Official’, which perhaps prevailed in the Fourth and Fifth Dynasties, was attached to this title in the Early Dynastic Period. The few instances on record of an ‘Hereditary Prince’ connect the office with that of the High Priest of Heliopolis. Future discoveries, not only in the Delta, but also in Upper Egypt, may well show that many of the provincial offices and institutions attested by monuments of the Third and Fourth Dynasties, such as the Council of the ‘Tens of Upper Egypt’, originated in early dynastic times.

 

statue of Tjeteti

VI.

FOREIGN RELATIONS

 

It is unlikely that any close or regular connexions were maintained between Egypt and the neighbouring countries in the period immediately preceding and following the institution of the united monarchy. The evidence, admittedly sparse, points rather to brief migratory movements towards the Nile Valley, intermittent commercial dealings and isolated military expeditions by the Egyptians either in defence of their frontiers or to obtain a commodity not readily available at home. Anthropological research may some day shed much-needed light on what was perhaps the most important of the migrations by establishing the identity of the so-called ‘Armenoids’ or ‘Dynastic Race’, whose presence in Egypt at the beginning of the dynastic period, although discounted by many authorities in the past, has been further attested by recent excavations. Physically these people differed unmistakably from the predynastic Egyptians: whereas the latter were unusually small in stature and possessed long and narrow skulls (about 132 mm. in breadth), the newcomers were more massively built and their skulls (about 139 mm. in width) were appreciably broader than those of their predecessors. The quantity and distribution of the skeletons hitherto found suggest that the ‘Dynastic Race’ entered Egypt in considerable numbers from the north, where the purest examples of their racial types have been discovered; this fact alone would suggest that the immigrants came from Asia, but it is doubtful whether the assertion sometimes made that they were Armenoids is anatomically justifiable. Before the end of the First Dynasty they had already penetrated southwards as far as Abydos and were becoming merged into the general population—a process which appears to have been intensified with the passage of time. So long as the origin of this people remains unexplained, it is difficult to determine what fresh knowledge they may have brought with them to Egypt, but it is probable that a generous share of the credit for the acceleration in cultural progress observable at this time should be ascribed to their presence. Perhaps the Semitic elements in the structure and vocabulary of the Egyptian language were also introduced by them. Archaeological evidence suggests that they provided the ruling class and that they adapted their way of life to conform with the customs already prevailing in their new home; in this respect they set a precedent which was to be followed by successive invaders of the Nile Valley down to Roman times.

SOUTHERN MESOPOTAMIA

Foremost among the indications of early contacts between Egypt and southern Mesopotamia must be counted the occurrence in both countries of a small group of remarkably similar artistic designs, mostly embodying animals. Fantastic monsters in the shape of serpent-necked lions, such as are carved on the Narmer and Ashmolean palettes, possess striking parallels on seals and seal-impressions discovered at Uruk and on a cylinder seal in the Louvre which, although its provenance cannot be proved, is generally considered to be of Mesopotamian origin and to date from the Uruk-Jamdat Nasr period. Both on the Narmer palette and on the seals, the necks of the monsters are interlaced—a well-attested motif in Mesopotamian art, to which the interlaced serpents found on three protodynastic Egyptian knife-handles may be an additional artistic parallel. Equally typical of Mesopotamian products is the antithetical arrangement of these monsters and serpents. As a variation of the same motif, a central feature is sometimes introduced into the antithetical group: some slate palettes and one very early First Dynasty engraved cylinder are decorated with two giraffes separated by a palm-tree; occasionally the central figure is a human figure. Without doubt the best Egyptian illustration of this latter class appears on the famous ivory knife-handle from Gebel el-Araq which portrays in finely carved relief a bearded man clothed in Sumerian costume and holding apart two fierce lions; so closely does the composition of this scene resemble the so-called Gilgamesh motif, frequently represented on Mesopotamian seals, that the source of its inspiration can hardly be questioned. Also Mesopotamian in character are the ships with high and almost perpendicular prow and stern, and the lion attacking the hindquarters of a bull, which decorate other parts of the same knife-handle. Several objects, including mud seal-impressions, ivory knife-handles and combs and a fragment of a slate palette, display a regular Mesopotamian trait in the arrangement of animals in file; a serpentine mace-head from Hierakonpolis and a shell plaque of unknown provenance show a continuous file of overlapping animals, but more usually the animals are spaced in broken file and divided into registers. As a class, ceremonial mace-heads with sculptured decoration, like those of Scorpion and Narmer, are reminiscent of Mesopotamian art.

In a somewhat different category from the decorative motifs must be placed two productions, one of which was also shared by certain neighbouring countries, while the other may have attained a similar form in Egypt and Mesopotamia through a parallel, but independent, process of development. These productions were the engraved cylinder and a distinctive kind of brick architecture exemplified in Egypt by mastabas of the Naqada type. Outside Egypt and Mesopotamia, engraved cylinders were used at the beginning of the historical era in Elam, Anatolia, north Syria and elsewhere, but it can hardly be without significance that two of the earliest specimens found in Egypt are indistinguishable in style and decoration from some Mesopotamian cylinders of the Jamdat Nasr period, and the most probable explanation seems to be that they were imported from that country. These cylinders were discovered in tombs of the second Naqada period; the history of two other cylinders of the same kind is not ascertainable, but there can be little doubt that they also came from Egypt. When, early in the First Dynasty, the Egyptians began to manufacture their own cylinders, they sometimes, as has already been shown, imitated Mesopotamian styles of decoration, which alone would suggest an association with Mesopotamia in the minds of the makers; coupled with the evidence provided by the four earlier cylinders, the indications pointing to a Mesopotamian ancestry for the Egyptian cylinder are more telling than any arguments which can be advanced in favour of other parentage. More problematical is the architectural connexion which has been claimed between the Naqada type of brick mastaba and Mesopotamian brick temples with facades similarly composed of alternating projections and recesses. It is true that excavation in Mesopotamia has revealed the more primitive wooden constructions from which this style of architecture was no doubt derived, and that the earliest Mesopotamian examples in brick are considerably older than the first mastabas of the Naqada form found in Egypt, where they appear quite suddenly at the beginning of the First Dynasty, but it is possible to account both for the absence of any known Egyptian archetype in wood and for the discrepancy in time by assuming that brick tombs of the Naqada pattern were a Lower Egyptian development of predynastic times, only adopted by the Upper Egyptians after the conquest of unification; if that be the case the putative antecedents of this kind of mastaba must be sought in the regions, hitherto largely unex­cavated, of the Delta. In these circumstances, it seems necessary to suspend judgement, but not without recognizing that tangible evidence in support of a Mesopotamian origin is already at hand, whereas the arguments favouring independent evolution in the two countries are still hypothetical.

Although unrelated morphologically, Sumerian and Egyptian hieroglyphic scripts show certain affinities, which may not be merely fortuitous, in the mechanical principles employed. Signs were not used only to denote the objects depicted, but also other words of like sound which were difficult or impossible to represent pictorially: thus, in Egyptian hieroglyphs, the sledge and the mace signified respectively both these actual objects and the verbs ‘be complete’ and ‘be bright’. It is evident, therefore, that, at least in their developed usage, the two hieroglyphs mentioned had gained a phonographic value. By a further extension of the same principle, signs acquired a syllabic value, which in Egyptian writing specified only the consonantal composition of the syllable, in contrast with the Sumerian syllabic signs which defined also the vocalic content. Finally, though examples are very rare in the oldest Egyptian texts, both scripts added signs as determinatives to words (in Egyptian invariably as suffixes, but in Sumerian more often as prefixes) in order to indicate their general sense. Only in one respect, the invention of the consonantal alphabetic signs, did the Egyptians possess a graphic element unknown to the Sumerians, although the latter employed single signs as vowels. In spite, however, of the similarities, the divergences in method, when considered in combination with the purely native character of Egyptian hieroglyphs, are too significant to be disregarded, and it is probably correct to assess the Sumerian contribution to the Egyptian science of writing as mainly suggestive and limited to imparting a knowledge of the underlying principles. With this assistance the Egyptians proceeded to develop one of the most characteristic and lasting features of their civilization.

While the historical fact that contacts between southern Mesopotamia and Egypt existed in protodynastic times can be demonstrated, the nature of these contacts is far from clear. Commercial intercourse, which might appear at first sight to furnish the simplest explanation, must be regarded as unlikely because of the absence of any trace of Egyptian influence on Mesopotamian productions during the Jamdat Nasr and first Early Dynastic Periods; the movement seems to have been in one direction only—from East to West—and, unless future excavations bring to light some evidence of a corresponding movement in the reverse direction, it is necessary to conclude that the bearers of the Mesopotamian influences were Sumerians who migrated to Egypt and settled in the Nile Valley. By what route the immigrants travelled and entered the country it is difficult to decide, but two approaches were geographically possible: either by way of the Red Sea and thence by land through one of the wadis (perhaps the Wadi Hammamat) to the Nile Valley, or by way of Syria and the isthmus of Suez to the Delta. In favour of the Red Sea route it may be argued that the foreign ships noted on the Gebel el-Araq knife-handle suggest that the immigrants were seafarers; moreover, some of the earliest traces of their presence in Egypt have come to light in the neighbourhood of the western end of the Wadi Hammamat. It is, however, noticeable that the period when Mesopotamian influence can most easily be detected coincides with the conquest leading to the unification of the Two Lands, at the time when Upper Egypt might have been expected to appropriate certain productions which had formerly been confined to the North. Clearly, the problem cannot be solved with any degree of finality while the early levels of the Delta remain virtually unexplored and it is by no means inconceivable that the immigrants reached Egypt by more than one route. There are good grounds for believing that the number of immigrants was not such as to constitute an. invasion and that the flow could not have continued after the beginning of the First Dynasty; otherwise they must surely have exercised a deeper and more prolonged influence on Egyptian cultural and technical development. The decorative motifs in which Mesopotamian inspiration can be discerned were either integrated into an Egyptian setting or entirely adapted by the substitution of subjects familiar to the Egyptians but foreign to the Sumerians, as in the case of the antithetical group displaying so essentially African an animal as the giraffe or the dibatag; furthermore the employment of these motifs, at no time common, was discontinued soon after the foundation of the united monarchy. Extant specimens of sculptured mace-heads all belong to the age of Scorpion and Narmer. Cylinder-seals, which seldom—and only at their first appearance—betray in their ornamentation the origin ascribed to them, remained in general use until the end of the Old Kingdom, when they were superseded first by the button seal and then by the scarab, but were sometimes used archaistically in later times. The Naqada style of mastaba, if its architecture should ultimately be shown beyond doubt to have been derived from Mesopotamia and thus warrant its inclusion in this category, did not outlive the First Dynasty before being succeeded by a mastaba of a simpler and less distinctive external design. Hieroglyphic writing, alone among the possible contributions of early Mesopotamia, gained a permanent and unchallenged footing in Egypt, but the reason for its retention lies in the singular position which it immediately assumed in the religous concept of the Egyptians combined with their extreme conservatism in such matters.

SYRIA, PALESTINE AND SINAI

Excavations at Byblos have yielded conclusive proof that Egyptian products were reaching Syria from very early times. The first object which can be precisely dated is a fragment of a polished stone vase bearing the name of Khasekhemwy; a figure of squatting ape, a gold bead and two gaming-pieces may, however, be ascribed to the protodynastic period, while a slate palette in the form of a bird is characteristic of predynastic workmanship. The fact that these objects lay beneath the pavement of a temple dating from the Middle Kingdom suggests that they had formed part of the property of an earlier sanctuary which had been rebuilt; without doubt they were brought as propitiatory offerings to the local goddess, the ‘Mistress of Byblos’, by Egyptian traders. In later times the main purpose of such missions was to obtain timber from the Lebanon. Perhaps the commodity sought by the first traders was cedar-oil which is mentioned in an inscription dating from the time of Anedjib. Moreover, various pottery vessels found in early dynastic tombs display Syrian features either in their decoration or in their shape; how many of these vessels actually came from Syria, perhaps filled with oils and resins, and how many may have been made in Egypt as deliberate imitations cannot be determined, but, even if statistical analysis could prove that the ratio of imports to local manufacturers was small, the occurrence of a foreign class of ceramics in a country already well provided with established wares implies some familiarity with its place of origin, if not also with the special products with which the vessels were particularly associated.

The discovery of Egyptian objects at Byblos, a port, suggests that traffic between Egypt and Syria was conducted by sea. Passage by land would have presented serious practical difficulties in the conveyance of merchandise and would only have been feasible if the intervening territory had been either under Egyptian control or occupied by friendly peoples. Some slight evidence of sporadic intercourse between Egypt and Palestine is admittedly available, perhaps from the time of Narmer, but not enough to indicate a close relationship. Sinai, as in later times, was in all probability the abode of undisciplined bedawin whose presence would have rendered transport through its sandy wastes an extremely hazardous operation: Djer and Den claim to have engaged the local inhabitants in combat. The historical inference to be drawn from these scraps of information seems rather to be that the early dynastic kings periodically found it necessary to assert themselves against the bedawin, either in defence of the eastern Delta or for the purpose of obtaining turquoise and possibly copper, than that Sinai was included within the Egyptian realm and only became the scene of punitive action in times of revolt.

LIBYA

Of the various Libyan peoples who figure on Egyptian monuments, only the dwellers in the region called Tjehenu are attested in texts of the Early Dynastic Period, unless the enigmatical Besh, mentioned on the vases of Khasekhem, is to be regarded as referring to a Libyan folk. Painted scenes on the walls of Old Kingdom temples depict the people of Tjehenu with several typically Egyptian features: their skins are dark red, a short beard projects from the chin, on the brow they have a tuft of hair suggestive of the royal uraeus, an animal’s tail hangs from the back of the girdle and in front, even when the figures are of women, is suspended the phallus-sheath often worn by Egyptians when represented on slate palettes and other objects of the protodynastic and predynastic times. The people themselves are called Hatiu-a, ‘Princes’, probably on account of their regal-looking attire; for the same reason and also because they sometimes bear Egyptian names it is likely that they were closely akin to the Egyptians. Perhaps the separation of the two peoples resulted from the incomplete subjection of the Hatiu-a by the Upper Egyptians in the war of unification; two objects dating from that time, one inscribed with the name of Narmer, record victories in the land of Tjehenu, but otherwise the documents of the Early Dynastic Period, apart from labels of jars denoting that their contents consisted of Tjehenu-oil (generally considered to have been olive oil), contain no mention of Tjehenu-land or of its inhabitants. There can be little doubt, however, that the traditional enmity between the Egyptians and both the Libyans and the Asiatics of Sinai, which so often found expression in parallel scenes carved on the walls of later temples, originated at this time.

NUBIA

Ethnically the predynastic Egyptians and the main body of the so-called A-group of dwellers in Lower Nubia probably belonged to the same branch of Hamitic people; whether they spoke the same language cannot be ascertained in the absence of written documents. Culturally also the inhabitants of the two countries in the Early Predynastic Period were identical; divergences are first detectable in Nubian tombs of the Middle Predynastic Period and become more marked with each succeeding age until the final disappearance of the A-group at the end of the Third Dynasty. Being far removed from the influence of those forces which brought about so rapid an advancement in protodynastic Egypt, the Nubians were unable to keep pace with their more fortunate relatives in the North. Early dynastic tombs in Nubia were not only more poorly furnished than contemporaneous tombs in Egypt, but were still provided with pottery and other funerary equipment of a kind not found in Egyptian tombs after late predynastic times. The frontier between the two countries, when first established, probably lay somewhere in the vicinity of Gebel es-Silsila, which may explain why the Egyptians called the region southward to the First Cataract, comprising the first Upper Egyptian nome of the historical lists, the ‘Nubian Land’. Perhaps the wooden docket of Aha, which mentions the smiting of the ‘Nubian Land’, commemorates the annexation of this territory rather than a military expedition into Lower Nubia. A mutilated battle scene carved on a rock at Wadi Haifa bears the name of Djer, who may have been the actual conqueror. The Palermo Stone records that an unnamed king of the First Dynasty, who was undoubtedly Den, smote the ‘Nomads’ but this designation was applied by the Egyptians to all their neighbours and it is more likely that the particular ‘Nomads’ overcome by Den were the inhabitants of Sinai. Kha-sekhem, in his graphic inscription discovered at Hierakonpolis, leaves no room for doubt that the Nubians suffered the same severe treatment at his hands as the rebellious northern Egyptians; the circumstances of the time were, however, exceptional and the king may have found it necessary to obviate any risk of attack from the rear before advancing towards Middle Egypt and the Delta. Normally relations between the two peoples were of a pacific character limited, in the main, to an exchange of merchandise. Ebony and ivory were probably among the regular commodities traded by the Nubians in return for articles such as pottery and stone vessels manufactured in Egypt.

 

VII.

RELIGION AND FUNERARY BELIEFS

 

Political and social changes of so fundamental a kind as those which occurred in Egypt under the First and Second Dynasties were almost certainly accompanied by religious developments of far-reaching significance: some deities whose domain had previously been confined to one locality probably gained wider recognition, while others may have suffered a diminution in status. Few of these vicissitudes are capable of demonstration, not only because the religious history of the preceding period is largely conjectural, but also because the early dynastic records are extremely fragmentary and difficult to interpret; even in those rare instances in which sufficient evidence exists for showing that a particular deity was of importance in the First and Second Dynasties, it is generally impossible to decide whether the distinction was newly acquired or already achieved in the predynastic period. To this uncertain category it is necessary to relegate Horus, about whose early geographical connexions opinion is at present divided. One fact alone stands out as fairly evident, namely that in virtue of his position as god of Nekhen, the seat of the rulers of Upper Egypt before the unification of the Two Lands, he became the patron deity of the conquerors of Lower Egypt and of their immediate successors. Nekhen was, however, only one of the centres in which Horus was worshipped in early times and the problem, which on the information now available seems to defy solution, is whether some of the other sanctuaries of the Horian cult, notably those of Pe and Behdet, were founded before or after the cult was established at Nekhen; in other words, whether Horus was in the first instance a god of Lower or of Upper Egypt. Relying mainly on later sources, some authorities take the view that his original home lay in the Delta and that the diffusion of the cult into Upper Egypt occurred in predynastic times as the result of a conquest of the South—formerly the province of Seth—by the inhabitants of the North. Advocates of the southern origin of Horus, on the other hand, deny the theory of the predynastic invasion and maintain that the advance of the cult northwards was a concomitant of the subjugation of the North by Scorpion and Narmer. Since the weight of evidence appears evenly balanced, judgement on this vital question and on a wide range of ancillary issues must be reserved. Nevertheless, the kindred problem of the position occupied by Seth in early dynastic times cannot be passed over without comment. On the mace-head of Scorpion1 two standards bearing the Seth-animal are displayed in a setting which suggests that his worshippers, comprising the inhabitants of a group or confederation of nomes centred around his native town of Ombos (Naqada), were among the chief allies of the Horus-king in his northern conquest. A similar explanation may also account for the adoption of the titles ‘Two Lords’ (i.e. Horus and Seth) by Anedjib and ‘She who unites the Two Lords’ and ‘She who sees Horus and Seth’ by queens; if so, the titles designated the king as ruler of Upper Egypt only and it must be assumed that Seth was singled out from the other gods of Upper Egypt, who were also the king’s allies, as a mark of particular respect, though the reason for the choice is not apparent. Later tradition in the main, however, ascribed to the two gods, when they were not depicted as adversaries, the role of representatives of Lower and Upper Egypt; the titles, if understood in this sense, would conform, except in order of geographical precedence, with the nbty and niswt-bity titles of the king. Whichever explanation is to be preferred and whatever view is taken of the relationship between Horus and Seth in the preceding period, it seems evident that, by early dynastic times, the adherents of the two gods were living in a state of amity, probably based on considerations of political expediency and subject to temporary interruption, as is demonstrated by the monuments of the Seth-king Peribsen and his Horian successor Khasekhem.

Among the relatively small number of deities who are actually attested in early dynastic documents, Ptah, in virtue of being the principal god of Memphis, must have occupied a privileged position, and yet he is represented only twice on the extant monuments of this period. Neither of the two etymologies put forward to explain his name, with the meanings ‘Opener’ and ‘Sculptor’ or ‘Engraver’ respectively, can be accepted without reserve on account of the late appearance of their Semitic roots in Egyptian writings; nevertheless the title of his High Priest, ‘Greatest of Artificers’, although not frequent in the Early Dynastic Period, and the designation of another craftsman who may have been attached to this priesthood, the ‘Carpenter, Sculptor and Maker (?) of Stone Vases’, denote that Ptah was early regarded as the patron of arts and crafts. How many of the extravagant claims attributed to Ptah in the text of King Shabako date from the Early Dynastic Period cannot be assessed, for the original text, as a whole, seems to have been a product of the ensuing age when the priests of Memphis were endeavouring to assert the supremacy of their god over the more favoured sun-god of Heliopolis. Two other Memphite deities, the bull Apis and the mummified falcon Sokar, are better documented, their festivals being recorded both on inscriptions of the First Dynasty and on the Palermo Stone and Cairo Annals. By the Old Kingdom, at latest, Neith also possessed a sanctuary at Memphis ‘North of the Wall’, so named in contrast with the sanctuary of Ptah ‘South of his Wall’ which tradition ascribed to Menes. Primarily, however, Neith was at all times associated with the town of Sais in the western Delta, where her temple, called the ‘House of the Bee’, was situated; the adoption of her crown by the kings to symbolize their sovereignty over Lower Egypt, the royal title ‘He who belongs to the Bee’ and the frequent occurrence of her name in theophorous compounds, of which Neithhotpe and Mer(it)neith are only two of the many known or suspected instances, prove that the kings of the First Dynasty regarded this goddess with particular esteem and suggest that her cult held a predominant position in Lower Egypt at the end of the predynastic period. Among the deities who figure with Seth on the protodynastic mace-heads and palettes are Min of Akhmim and Koptos, Wepwawet, the wolf-god of Asyut, the ibis of Thoth, whose cult was associated in early times with the Fifteenth Lower Egyptian nome, and the jackal-god Anubis, all of whom seem to have been admitted as allies by Scorpion and Narmer. The vulture Nekhbet of El-Kab and the serpent Uadjit of Buto appear as protecting goddesses in connexion with the personal names of kings, first on the ivory tablet of Menes and regularly from the accession of Semerkhet. Deities whose significance at this time is more obscure include Bastet, the cat-headed goddess of Bubastis, Sopd of Saft el-Hinna in the eastern Delta, Sobk, the crocodile-god of the Faiyum, Seshat, the goddess of writing, Khnum, the ram-god of Antinoopolis and such lesser members of the pantheon as Mafdet, a feline goddess, Kherty, a ram-god of Letopolis, Neser, a fish-god, and Ash, an anthropomorphic god with the head of the animal of Seth. No trace can be found in the early dynastic records of Osiris, whose cult was early associated with that of Andjety at Busiris. Of the undoubted existence of the sun-cult at this time, the name of the king Reneb, the composite god Seth-Re and the title of the Heliopolitan high-priest ‘Greatest of the Seers’ constitute the sum of the written evidence hitherto recovered. Incomplete and partly fortuitous though the catalogue of deities preserved from this period must be considered, it is noteworthy both that divine iconography had, to a great extent, been finally established and that the proportion of Lower Egyptian deities is higher than might have been expected at a time when Upper Egypt was politically predominant. A legi­timate inference from this latter fact seems to be that the new rulers freely recognized the deities of the conquered peoples as a means of securing their acquiescence and friendly co-operation.

Excavations carried out on early dynastic sites have so far failed to bring to light any religious texts. That such works were compiled appears likely from numerous passages in the Pyramid Texts of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties referring to practices and conditions which were out of date at that period, and from the priestly title ‘Scribe of the God’s Book’ found on early dynastic vases. In the absence of written evidence it is necessary to turn for information to material remains, which consist of little more than tombs and their contents; the scope of possible investigation is consequently limited in the main to beliefs regarding the Next Life.

Tombs of the Early Dynastic Period were of two types: pits of varying size and interior construction surmounted by circular, oval or rectangular mounds of stones and gravel, which differed in no essential respect from the predynastic graves, and secondly mastabas built of mud brick. The objects buried in the pit tombs suggest that the needs of the after-life were thought to be similar to those of this life, but nothing definite is revealed about its nature or its surroundings. Nor can any clear inference be drawn from the orientation of the body. In the majority of cemeteries it was laid, tightly or loosely contracted and wrapped in woven reed matting or in linen, on the left side facing eastwards, but the earlier custom of placing the body on the left side facing westwards was very often maintained. Only the most elaborate pit­tombs give the impression of having been designed as houses. Mastabas however were probably regarded from the first as houses in which the dead would reside and enjoy their protection and amenities. This character, perhaps a legacy of Lower Egyptian practices in predynastic times, is plainly illustrated in the sub­structures of some of the Second Dynasty mastabas at Saqqara, which included not only apartments believed to represent quarters for the domestic staff and possibly even stalls for cattle, but also a bathroom and a lavatory. Easily distinguishable in this complex of rooms is the bedchamber where the deceased was placed, sometimes in a wooden coffin, itself in the form of a house, and sometimes lying on a bed. Near the body, on pottery dishes ready for consumption, might be set a complete meal consisting of cereals, fish, meat, sweets and fruit, and ajar of wine. Large quantities of similar provisions were stored elsewhere in the tomb, while further supplies of fresh food were probably brought by relatives and laid in the larger of the two niches on the east side of the superstructure. A curious custom, which seems to have been connected with alimentation, was the attaching of bulls’ heads, modelled in clay and provided with real horns, to a brick bench at the base of the palace facades of some of the First Dynasty mastabas at Saqqara. When, perhaps before the end of the First Dynasty, the funerary stela was introduced into the equipment of the mastaba in order to supplement by magical means the supply of provisions, the bull’s head was included as an item in the list of offerings, together with the heads of birds and antelopes, to serve as an abbreviation for the hieroglyph showing the entire animal, a graphic device which was retained in the offering-lists of later times. On the basis of somewhat slender evidence it has been suggested that some funerary stelae of the Second Dynasty found at Saqqara were placed near the top of the larger offering niche outside the superstructure, and thus in the same position as their successors in false-doors of the Old Kingdom mastabas. Several stelae of a similar kind discovered in the Second Dynasty tombs at Helwan were, however, placed face downwards at the lower ends of shafts in the ceilings of the burial chambers, apparently with the intention of enabling the deceased without moving to enjoy the benefits which they conferred by magic. Somewhat paradoxically the shafts themselves seem to have been designed to allow the spirit of the deceased more easily to leave and re-enter the tomb. How far they may have wished to travel is not revealed, but the provision of a wooden boat buried in a brick- or mud-lined pit outside some of the mastabas at Saqqara, Helwan and Abu Rawash suggests that journeys of some distance, perhaps to attend festivals, were envisaged. If the royal ‘tombs’ at Abydos were indeed cenotaphs it must be supposed that the spirits of their owners possessed the power to transport themselves thither from Saqqara, a distance of about three hundred miles.

There is no reason to suppose that the beliefs which led to the development of mummification in the Old Kingdom were not also held in earlier times. Continuity of existence depended, it was thought, on the preservation of the body or at least on the provision of a stone or wooden figure which the spirit could occupy through the powers of magic if the body were destroyed. While graves were merely shallow pits and bodies were separated from the sand by nothing more than a layer of linen or matting, physical decay was prevented by the desiccating properties of the warm, dry sand. Deeper tombs cut in the substratum of rock and covered by a superstructure of mud-brick, although giving greater protection against interference, deprived the body of the natural benefits afforded by close proximity to the sand. That the Egyptians of the Early Dynastic Period soon became aware of this consequence may be inferred from the fact that already in the Second Dynasty they had devised a method of preserving the outward form of the body by placing under the bandages, in which the various limbs and members were individually wrapped, linen pads soaked in a resinous substance and moulded to the appropriate shapes. There is, however, no trace either of the removal of the most quickly decomposable organs or of the impregnation of the body with salt or natron, both of which were regular opera­tions in the process of mummification. In general, it must be concluded that various kinds of magic, and particularly the spoken word, were invoked in order to ensure continuity of existence and, by implication, the preservation of the body. Some relics at least of the spells uttered by the mortuary priests in earlier times are to be found among the Pyramid Texts, the most obvious being the spells with allusions to conditions which no longer prevailed in the pyramid tombs of the Old Kingdom, for example, ‘Cast the sand from thy face’ and ‘The bricks are removed for thee from thy great tomb’. Considerable reliance must also have been placed in the power of imitative magic. Apart from the confidence placed in it as a means of supplying the material needs of the dead, faith in its efficacy may be detected in the inclusion of wooden figures of nearly life size, no doubt to serve as substitutes for the body, in the funerary equipment. Hitherto only a very few fragments of these figures have been found and the rarity of their occurrence strongly suggests that in the Early Dynastic Period their possession was a privilege confined to royalty. Even the humblest of mortals, however, might entertain the hope of physical preservation through the agency of the mound of sand and rock piled above the grave, which in origin was probably intended merely to mark the position of the grave in order to prevent accidental disturbance and to enable relatives to locate it when bringing their offerings. How early in its long history a magical significance was attached to it is unknown, but the discovery that some of the mud-brick mastabas of the early First Dynasty at Saqqara embodied within the superstructure a mound of sand overlaid with brick, which had no structural purpose, shows that by that time it had become an important feature. It is not difficult to imagine that the reason for this development was the supposed resemblance of the mound to the Primeval Hill which had emerged from the waters of chaos—the so-called High Sand—and on which the creator-god had manifested himself at the creation of the world. By the action of imitative or symbolic magic the mound above the grave, notwithstanding its purely practical origin, would, it was believed, acquire the same vital power as the Primeval Hill and thus be able to impart life to the corpse lying beneath it.

Situated in close proximity to several of the large tombs of the First Dynasty were rows of subsidiary graves in which members of the deceased’s household and certain other dependants were buried. At Abydos and Abu Rawash the graves were provided with roughly carved stelae bearing the names of the occupants, some of whom were undoubtedly women, a few apparently captives of war. Among the twenty subsidiary graves surrounding the mastaba dated to the time of Mer(it)neith at Saqqara were a number which belonged to artisans whose trades were indicated by the tools and other objects buried with them: model boats with perhaps a boat-builder, knives with a butcher, copper and flint tools with a stone vase carver, pots of pigment with a painter and pottery vessels with a potter. Similarly at Giza, in association with the mastaba dated to Djer, one of the graves contained two palettes which suggested that the deceased was a scribe or an artist. While it is evident that the occupants of subsidiary graves were intended to serve the owner of the principal tomb in the Next Life, it is very difficult to judge to what extent they were buried at the time of the funeral of their patron, either alive or after receiving a lethal dose of poison. In the Abydos ‘tombs’ of Semerkhet and Qaa only is it certain that the superstructure of the principal ‘tomb’ covered the subsidiary graves, and consequently there can be little doubt that all the burials in each ‘tomb’ were made at one and the same time. Elsewhere the subsidiary graves lay outside the principal tomb, either at intervals apart or in long trenches with brick partition walls between the graves. Both these arrangements, and particularly the detached pattern, allow of the possibility that the persons concerned were buried individually when they died a natural death, unless it can be shown that the graves in any one trench were all roofed by a single superstructure. That separate superstructures were, at least sometimes, built has been proved by the discovery at Saqqara of a series of sixty-two trench-graves, each with its own mastaba-form superstructure. Reisner, after a re-examination of the evidence at Abydos, maintained that the number of burials which were undoubtedly made in the mass was but a fraction of the many hundreds found in the subsidiary graves surrounding the royal ‘tombs’. In spite of the insufficiency of the evidence to show the extent of the practice of human sacrifice during the Early Dy­nastic Period, the fact of its existence cannot be questioned. If the number of subsidiary graves bears any relation, as is probable, to the number of persons sacrificed, the custom reached its peak under Djer, whose two ‘tomb’ complexes at Abydos contained more than 590 subsidiary graves, and thereafter declined, twenty-six graves only being found in the ‘tomb’ of Qaa. If it was continued throughout the Second Dynasty the scale was probably further reduced, but the only evidence available comes from the ‘tomb’ of Khasekhemwy at Abydos which Reisner estimated contained not more than ten or fifteen subsidiary burials.

 

nikare with his wife and daughter c. 2420-2389 BC

VIII.

ARCHITECTURE, SCULPTURE AND THE SMALL ARTS

 

Apart from the massive brick ‘fortress’ enclosures with panelled faces at Abydos and Hierakonpolis, standing examples of early dynastic buildings are almost entirely confined to tombs. Two groups of model buildings in mud-brick associated with the mastaba dated to Aha at Saqqara provide an exception, but their purpose is uncertain; they have been compared, on the one hand, with the dummy chapels in the Heb Sed court of Djoser, and, on the other, with rows of objects figured at the top of the blue-tiled panels of the Step Pyramid and thought to represent granaries. Traces of temples have been found both at Abydos and at Hierakonpolis, and a mortuary temple showing affinities with the mortuary temple of Djoser has been excavated in the enclosure of a mastaba at Saqqara dating from the time of Qaa. Early dynastic sacred edifices and dwellings were certainly built of soft and perishable materials, including matting of woven reeds attached to frameworks of wood, and they were probably dismantled when their purpose had been fulfilled or when replacement was considered necessary. Nevertheless, it should not be supposed that because they were so constructed they were invariably simple in design and devoid of artistic character. Contemporary representations of shrines and temples on ivory and wooden tablets and cylinder seals show that these buildings embodied many distinctive architectural features, some of which were reproduced in the stone monuments of later times, notably in the Step Pyramid enclosure.

Cemeteries of the Early Dynastic Period have been found at more than forty places in Egypt between Gebel es-Silsila in the south and El-Qatta on the west side of the Delta near its apex. The greater number of these cemeteries contain, however, only the graves of simple people or minor officials, which have little architectural interest except in so far as they demonstrate that the open corbel vault built of brick was employed as early as the Second Dynasty. Far more instructive are the monumental tombs, and especially the group of mud-brick mastabas at Saqqara. When newly built these mastabas must have presented a most colourful appearance in contrast with the monotony of their desert surroundings. A well preserved example, dated to the reign of Qaa, showed that the mud-brick walls of the superstructure were overlaid with a coat of mud-plaster covered with white lime stucco. On this surface were painted, in imitation of woven reed hangings, geometrical patterns of many kinds executed in red, white, black, blue, green and yellow. Some evidence has been found to suggest that trees were planted around the superstructures, but their botanical species has not been identified.

At the beginning of the First Dynasty the substructure of a mastaba usually consisted of a shallow trench cut in the rock-bed of the desert. This trench was divided by cross-walls into a series of compartments, the middle and largest compartment becomingthe burial-chamber while the other compartments served as store­chambers for provisions and other funerary equipment. All were roofed with wooden beams supporting a ceiling of planks, and the rock walls, coated with mud-plaster, were faced with woven reed mats. Above this trench, and extending far beyond its limits on ground level, a rectangular superstructure was built of mud-brick, its main axis running, like that of the trench, approximately north­south. The outer faces of the walls, which on the longer sides inclined inwards from the base to the top, were constructed in the form of alternating panelled recesses and projections, an architectural design known as the palace façade; the inner faces were perpendicular and plain. Within the hollow superstructure, at least in some early mastabas and possibly in all at Saqqara, a low rectangular mound of sand and rubble cased with brick was erected on ground-level directly over the burial-chamber but covering a larger area. Intersecting walls were built at somewhat irregular intervals from all four inner sides of the superstructure dividing the whole of the lower part of the interior into a large number of rectangular compartments. Inside these compartments, the floors of which were raised by means of sand to the level of the top of the mound, were stored pots, stone vessels and objects of a less personal kind than those placed in the substructure. Sand and rubble were put in the space between their timber roofs and the brick roof of the mastaba. Since no large mastaba with its upper portion intact has survived, the shape of the roof is not known with certainty, but there can be little doubt that it was curved. In every probability it was bounded at each end by a flat parapet, a feature reproduced in the wooden coffins of the Second Dynasty, but it is also possible that the four walls of the superstructure formed a continuous parapet of such a height that the roof was concealed from view. Surrounding the building was an enclosure wall, on the north side of which lay, at least in some instances, a brick-lined boat-pit. The subsidiary tombs, simple pits surmounted by plain mastabas with rounded top and one niche at the southern end of the east wall, were also constructed outside the enclosure wall in single rows set parallel to the sides of the main mastaba.

Until the latter part of the First Dynasty no significant change, apart from a progressive increase in size, occurred in the outward form of the monumental mastabas. Internally a gradual process of development continued throughout the period. Substructures were cut to a greater depth in the rock and were in consequence less easy of access both to the tomb-robber and to those charged with performing the burial. The large mastaba dated to Den, and once thought to be the tomb of Hemaka, furnishes the earliest example of a new method of approach to the substructure by a wooden-roofed passage which sloped downwards to the burial­chamber from the floor of the open corridor outside the east wall of the superstructure. Three massive slabs of limestone, set in grooves cut in the rock-walls of the passage, were lowered by means of ropes, after the fashion of portcullises, in order to block the way to the burial chamber when the body, enclosed in a wooden coffin, had been laid to rest. No doubt the mouth of the passage was filled with rubble and covered, like the rest of the open corridor, with a brick paving. Besides the portcullises and the sloping passage, part of the floor of which was cut in steps, this mastaba included as a new feature three small storerooms entirely hollowed out of the rock and connected with the burial chamber by doors. An elaboration found in a mastaba dated to the reign of Anedjib was the development of the simple brick-cased mound within the superstructure into a long mound with steps at the sides, a feature which time may show to have been the architectural ancestor of the Third Dynasty step pyramids. One of the two monumental mastabas in the Saqqara group dated to the reign of Qaa provides evidence not only of the discontinuance of the practice of incorporating store rooms in the superstructure, but also of the approaching end of the palace facade, the west side of this tomb being merely panelled with a series of evenly spaced pilasters. The same mastaba has preserved the latest known example of the brick bench on which were mounted model bulls’ heads. A most important innovation was a mud-brick temple, built on the north side of the mastaba within the inner enclosure wall, one of the rooms of which was paved with slabs of limestone. Its smaller coeval, situated a short distance to the north, possessed few of the characteristics of the First Dynasty: apart from a single niche at the southern end of the east side, the exterior walls were plain and the interior of the superstructure, although divided by cross­walls into large compartments, was entirely filled with sand. An unexpected discovery in the enclosure was a row of four subsidiary tombs, the burial-chamber of one of which was roofed with a leaning barrel-vault of brick which supported a sand-filled brick superstructure with curved roof.

The subsequent architectural history of the early mastaba may be summarized as a continuation of the process of deepening and enlarging the substructure and the general adoption of the plain superstructure without interior storerooms. Sporadic examples of the palace façade, usually only partial, are known from the Second Dynasty and even later, but they are not typical. As a rule the niches were reduced to two of unequal size, one at each end of the east face, the larger being at the southern end. No longer was the substructure excavated from above as a pit; it was entirely tunnelled in the rock from the lower end of the entrance stairway. In the early part of the Second Dynasty the stairway led to a large apartment which was divided by walls of brick into an entrance hall and a number of chambers, the burial-chamber being hollowed out on the west side of the entrance hall. Later in the dynasty all the chambers were hewn separately on each side of a passage leading from the bottom of the stairway. At the same time the mouth of the stairway, instead of lying outside the mastaba, was located under the superstructure, the rubble filling of which could therefore not have been put in place until after the funeral.

It is not difficult to deduce that the motive underlying both the deepening and the elaboration of the substructure was the hope of gaining greater security for the body and the funerary equipment; less clear is the reason for the change in the external design of the superstructure. It is however possible that the niches in the palace façade, whatever its origin, had come to be regarded in the main as false-doors to the compartments in the superstructure which were used as storerooms. When the superstructure was no longer used for the storage of objects, false-doors in such numbers lost their purpose and, in consequence, were reduced to two, one, the main dummy entrance to the tomb, being the place where offerings were laid and the other perhaps being considered as a subsidiary entrance.

Comparison between the monumental mastabas of Saqqara and the royal ‘tombs’ at Abydos is made difficult by the almost complete destruction of the superstructures in the Abydos group. Nevertheless it is clear that the substructures of the First Dynasty at Abydos, though smaller, resembled both in their method of construction and in their course of development the substructures at Saqqara. The initial operation in each cemetery was the excavation from above of a rectangular open pit. In the earliest ‘tombs’ at Abydos the entire area of the pit, apart from a lining of mud-brick around the walls, was occupied by a single chamber built of wood. The three succeeding ‘tombs’, belonging to Djer, Djet and Mer(it)neith, were larger, and the wooden chamber, which may have been partitioned by interior walls of wood, was supported at the sides by buttresses of mud-brick, the spaces between the buttresses in the ‘ tombs’ of Djer and Djet being used for the storage of funerary equipment. Den’s ‘tomb’ was chiefly notable for the granite floor of its burial-chamber, but it also marked, as did the contemporaneous mastabas at Saqqara, the introduction of an entrance stairway, a feature which thenceforth became regular. Until the time of Semerkhet, all the subsidiary burials were placed outside the main ‘tomb’. Semerkhet and Qaa however used for their subsidiary graves the space between the sides of the pit and the burial-chamber, which in the ‘tombs’ of Den and Anedjib had been filled with thick linings of mud-brick. Since the superstructures covered the entire pit and the stairways led only to the burial-chamber and some storerooms, the bodies must have been placed in the subsidiary graves before the superstructures were built. What form these superstructures, and those of the preceding ‘tombs’, were given is very uncertain. That their sides were plain, and not decorated with the palace façade, is clear from the traces of the retaining wall found above the ‘tomb’ of Djet, and Reisner’s suggestion that the earliest ‘tombs’ were covered with simple mud-brick mastabas has not been disputed. However his theory that the superstructures of the ‘tombs’ of Djer and Djet rose by two and three steps respectively to a flat summit, about eight and twelve metres in height, has not found favour with more recent writers, who prefer to regard their super­structures either as low flat-topped mounds of sand held together by rectangular retaining walls of brick or as higher structures of the same character but with curved or slightly domed roofs.

Peribsen and Khasekhemwy alone among the ten kings of the Second Dynasty built ‘tombs’ at Abydos. Unlike the mastabas of their period at Saqqara, these ‘tombs’ were constructed of mud-brick in open pits, the ‘tomb’ of Peribsen consisting of a burial-chamber surrounded by about a dozen storerooms and an outer corridor running between the brick lining of the pit and the back-walls of the storerooms. Khasekhemwy’s ‘tomb’, which covered a much larger area, had more than fifty compartments, chiefly storerooms but the eight nearest to the burial-chamber appear to have been reserved for subsidiary burials. The most interesting feature of the ‘tomb’, however, was the burial-chamber itself (about 5-25 m. by 3-0 m.); the floor and walls of which were constructed of dressed limestone blocks laid in regular courses. Very different in character were two cavernous tombs at Saqqara tunnelled seven metres belowground-level and later partly covered by the Pyramid temple of King Unas. On the evidence of mud­sealings found therein these tombs have been ascribed respectively to Nynetjer and to either Hetepsekhemwy or Reneb.

Manetho quotes a tradition, which appears to date back at least to Ramesside times, that it was Imhotep, Djoser’s architect, who invented the technique of building with hewn stone. Possibly there is some truth in the tradition, for, although the Palermo Stone records that an unnamed king at the end of the Second Dynasty erected a stone temple, the earliest known buildings composed entirely of stone are those in the Step Pyramid enclosure at Saqqara. Stone had, however, been employed for parts of buildings before the days of Djoser and Imhotep, the granite pavement of Den and Khasekhemwy’s chamber of lime­stone blocks, in their ‘tombs’ at Abydos, being perhaps the two most notable examples. In the mastaba of Herneith at Saqqara and also in a mastaba of the early First Dynasty at Tarkhan, slabs of limestone were laid above the wooden ceilings of chambers, while the same material was used to pave part of the temple attached to the largest of the three mastabas at Saqqara which date from the time of Qaa. Large limestone slabs were also employed for lining the inner walls of the First Dynasty brick mastabas at Helwan, perhaps in order to provide support for stone roofs which have disappeared. Linings of a similar kind were undoubtedly used for this purpose in a brick tomb of the Early Dynastic Period at Hierakonpolis, part of the stone roof of which was preserved. It is clear, from the occurrences at Tarkhan and Helwan that construction in stone was not confined to the tombs of royal persons; perhaps the proximity of the Tura limestone quarries was a contributory factor in the choice of material at Helwan where the pits were cut in gravel, but a similar reason cannot be given for Den’s pavement, which must have been brought from the neighbourhood of Aswan. The skill necessary both for the cutting and for the transport of stone having once been acquired, it might have been expected that an immediate and progressive increase in its employment would have followed; that such a development did not occur may be attributed to a belief that mud-brick, which could easily be produced and handled in quantity, was sufficiently durable and also to the fact that the most essential parts of the tomb, which housed the body and funerary equipment, were in many instances already hewn out of solid rock and needed no further protection.

In sculpture and the small arts, to no less a degree than in architecture, the protodynastic and early dynastic periods were an age of progress and development; artists and craftsmen were experimenting with new technical methods and applying the materials at their disposal to fresh uses, sometimes with remarkable success and sometimes with results which betrayed their inexperience. Complete mastery was, for instance, attained in the production of stone vessels; profiting no doubt from the knowledge inherited from their ancestors, the vase-makers of the First Dynasty manufactured enormous quantities of vessels in alabaster, slate, diorite, breccia, basalt, rock crystal, granite and a variety of other stones, which were never surpassed in quality of form and workmanship. Many notable feats were also achieved by sculptors, especially when carving in relief, although their art was still in its infancy. No class of objects demonstrates the different stages of progress more impressively than the decorated slate palettes of the protodynastic period to the beginning of the First Dynasty. In the examples which are considered to be the earliest, the human and animal figures are usually represented as separate units, without any overlapping, and are evenly distributed in close array over the whole surface of the palette; this method of arrangement is not displeasing to the eye, but the purport of the scene is obscured by the mass of representations, the absence of logical grouping and the uniform size of the figures. Intermediate examples display both overlapping figures and well-spaced groups. The final stage is illustrated by the palette of Narmer—a master­piece judged by any standards—in which the scenes are divided into registers, emphasis is given to the importance of the king by magnifying his stature and some hieroglyphic captions are added. A very similar technique is to be observed on the limestone mace­heads of Scorpion and Narmer, which, by reason of their rounded surface, must have presented more formidable problems in carving and arrangement than the flat or almost flat slate palettes. Of subsequent works, the limestone stelae of Djet and Mer(it)neith, a limestone lintel with figures of recumbent lions in the mastaba of Herneith, the fragmentary slate stela of Khasekhemé and the granite door-jamb of Khasekhemwy show that the art of carving in relief was well maintained throughout the Early Dynastic Period.

Few large sculptures in the round have been discovered in a state of preservation which allows their artistic qualities to be fairly assessed, but it is difficult to believe that the earliest human figures, as exemplified by the specimens found at Hierakonpolis, were not invariably heavy in appearance; nevertheless an alabaster baboon inscribed with the name of Narmer and a granite lion, both in the Berlin Museum, prove that realistic likenesses of animals were sometimes achieved. Before the end of the Second Dynasty a distinct improvement in rendering the features of the human face is perceptible; the granite kneeling figure of an official, now in the Cairo Museum, which bears the names of the first three kings of the dynasty and the slate and limestone statuettes of Khasekhem show a striking liveliness and subtlety of facial expression. Among the small figures in stone, two in the Ashmolean Museum are perhaps the most notable, a basalt standing man and a lapis lazuli standing woman, the first as a vivid piece of sculpture and the second mainly on account of its material, the precise origin of which has not yet been ascertained, although both Abyssinia and Afghanistan have been suggested.

Small objects composed of ivory must be reckoned among the principal works of art of this period. The knife-handles from Gebel el-Araq and elsewhere have already been mentioned; of the many other articles, including cylinders, wands and mace­heads decorated with scenes in relief, perhaps the most impressive is a figure of a bound Asiatic captive carved on a gaming-piece which was found in the tomb of Qaa at Abydos. The incised ivory and wooden dockets are more sketchy in execution, seemingly because they were intended not for display, but merely for recording the year when the article to which they were attached was made. By reason of its softness, ivory lent itself more readily than stone to delicate modelling and to the delineation of detail; these features are especially conspicuous in the small figures carved in the round, an outstanding example being the statuette of a king clad in a woven robe which was found in the temple-deposit at Abydos and is now in the British Museum. Scarcely inferior in artistic quality, but less well preserved, are a number of figurines from Hierakonpolis, while many gaming-pieces in the form of dogs and lions portray these animals in a very lifelike manner.

Despite the fact that their productions were generally among the main objectives of the tomb-robber, some notable examples of clever workmanship by jewellers, metalsmiths and craftsmen of different kinds have survived. The four ornate bracelets, which were still attached to the arm of their female owner when they were discovered in the ‘tomb’ of Djer at Abydos, consist of beads and plaques of gold, turquoise and lapis lazuli fashioned with great skill and arranged with excellent taste. No less pleasing are some necklaces of gold beads engraved with geometric patterns or shaped like snail-shells, two gold amuletic figures of a bull and an oryx, and a gold capsule in the form of a cockroach inlaid with the emblem of Neith in blue paste, all of which were buried in a middle-class grave at Naga ed-Deir. Such a degree of proficiency in the fabrication of gold as is denoted by these isolated objects could have been achieved only by long practice, which presupposes that a considerable supply of this metal, obtained partly from the eastern desert, was available. The coppersmiths of the period were also most accomplished craftsmen: one First Dynasty mastaba at Saqqara alone yielded a vast quantity of well-made copper tools and instruments, while smaller deposits of the same kind have been found elsewhere. In the light of these discoveries the statement on the Palermo Stone that a copper statue of Khasekhemwy was made at the end of the Second Dynasty does not seem incredible, although the figures of Phiops I and his son, dating from the Sixth Dynasty, are the earliest examples in copper which have hitherto been recovered. Of other types of crafts­men whose works have been preserved, the makers of inlay deserve mention, in particular, the makers of five ornamental stone disks found in the tomb formerly attributed to Hemaka, Den’s chancellor. The finest of these disks, which were perhaps spin­ning tops, is composed of black steatite inlaid with slightly raised figures in coloured stones of hounds and gazelles, one hound pursuing a fleeing gazelle and the other seizing a prostrate gazelle by the throat; both technically and artistically it is a work of consummate skill.

Considered as a whole, undoubtedly the most outstanding feature of early dynastic art is its contribution to the succeeding ages: forms and motifs invented during the period remained in use for generations and even, in some cases, until Roman times. The mastaba, which persisted until the end of the Middle Kingdom, is only one instance of such a survival in the field of architecture; the fluted columns of Djoser and the lotus-cluster columns of the Fifth Dynasty may have been translated into stone for architectural purposes in the Old Kingdom, but they were certainly not artistic creations of that time, for the same shapes occur in miniature on early dynastic ivories. Again, the blue glazed faience tiles lining the subterranean chambers of Djoser’s pyramid and mastaba at Saqqara can be paralleled by earlier specimens found at Hierakonpolis and Abydos. Many conventions adopted by Egyptian sculptors of all periods, such as the representation of the king as a towering figure, the placing of the left foot in advance of the right in striding statues, statuettes and reliefs and the classic scene of the king smiting his kneeling enemies with a mace can all be traced to the First Dynasty. It was indeed the age in which the traditional attitudes and attributes received their stereotyped forms.