ANCIENT EGYPTIAN KINGSHIPS

ANCIENT EGYPTIAN KINGSHIPS

Egyptian kingship (including a late Predynastic model royal sceptre, carved from ivory) stretched back at least 150 years earlier than the beginning of the 1st Dynasty. Many modern Egyptologists have used explicitly anthropological approaches to the study of the formation of the state in early complex societies, but for Emery’s generation of archaeologists, the ‘culture history’ approach was still the main paradigm in archaeology. As the Canadian archaeologist Bruce Trigger puts it, Almost all cultural change in the archaeological record was attributed to the diffusion of ideas from one group to another or to migrations that had led to the replacement of one people and their culture by another.

The latter fashion is exempliﬁed in the work of W.M.F. Petrie, who, in discussing the prehistoric development of Egypt, explained all cultural changes in terms of mass migrations or the arrival of smaller groups who brought about cultural change by mingling culturally and biologically with the existing population. Petrie saw no possibility of signiﬁcant cultural change without accompanying biological change. Bryan Emery was keen to promote the idea that the emergence of Egyptian civilization at the end of the 4th millennium was the result of the invasion or immigration of the so-called Dynastic Race (or ‘Followers of Horus’) from Mesopotamia. Now, however, the massive advances in our knowledge of prehistory and recent excavations of Predynastic and early Dynastic sites, particularly the early royal necropolis at Abydos and the city and cemetery at Hierakonpolis, have demonstrated extremely convincingly that the development and inauguration of the pharaonic age was largely an indigenous Egyptian phenomenon, arising steadily, and almost inevitably, out of processes of late Predynastic social, economic, and political change within the Nile Valley.

The Narmer Palette is just one of a number of surviving elite artefacts primarily comprising votive palettes, mace-heads, and ivories from late prehistory and the ﬁrst two dynasties. These items of so-called ‘mobiliary art’ (i.e. art that can be carried around) provide a rich corpus of early Egyptian iconography and early hieroglyphs, and, as we will see in the chapter on writing, the distinction between pure symbols and words is a difﬁcult one to make at this date. Single items, or groups of objects, have often been used to create theories concerning the emergence and uniﬁcation of the early pharaonic state. Several other signiﬁcant palettes and mace-heads were also found by Quibell and Green at Hierakonpolis, including fragments of a large limestone ritual pear-shaped mace-head that also bears the signs spelling out the name Narmer. This appears to show not war-like scenes but ones that are more obviously to do with early rituals associated with kingship, one of which is interpreted as the ﬁrst known version of the ritual known as h‘ty-bity: ‘the appearance of the King of Lower Egypt’.