CONSTRUCTING ANCIENT EGYPT

CONSTRUCTING ANCIENT EGYPT

The Narmer Palette was discovered about a metre away from a buried collection of ceremonial objects dating to the Late Predynastic and Early Dynastic periods (c.3100–2700), including ceremonial cosmetic palettes, mace-heads, and carved ivory ﬁgurines. This assemblage of artefacts discovered by Quibell and Green – and described by them as the ‘main deposit’ – has since proved to be one of the most important sets of evidence for our understanding of the beginnings of the Egyptian state. Unfortunately, because of a lack of accurate published plans and stratigraphic sections from the site, the full signiﬁcance and the true date of this crucial early ﬁnd remain unclear. In the vicinity, the excavators also discovered several valuable pieces from somewhat later in Egyptian history, including two unique copper alloy statues of the late Old Kingdom ruler Pepi I (2321–2287) and the golden head of a falcon which is perhaps part of one of the cult statues worshipped in the temple.

The mixture of objects of different dates suggests that they comprised a whole series of royal gifts to the temple, but we have no way of knowing whether each piece was brought to the temple in person by a number of rulers from the late Predynastic through to the Old Kingdom, or whether they were all dedicated en masse by a later ruler in the Old or Middle Kingdoms.Some of Quibell’s comments on the excavation of the ‘main deposit’ and the immediately surrounding area convey a rather honest despair that their techniques were not quite equal to the task:
Day after day we sat in this hole, scraping away the earth, and trying to disentangle the objects from one another; for they lay in every possible position, each piece in contact with ﬁve or six others, interlocking as a handful of matches will, when shaken together and thrown down upon a table.
In Egypt before the Pharaohs, the American prehistorian Michael Hoffman summarized just how much of a hash seems to have been made by Quibell and Green (although it would also be a mistake to underestimate the complexity of their task at Hierakonpolis).Sadly we do not even know for sure where the most graphic piece of evidence, the Narmer Palette, actually came from. It was evidently found near the Main Deposit but not actually with the other material. From Green’s ﬁeld notes (Quibell kept none!) it seems to have been found a metre or two away, and Green noted in the 1902 publication that it was found in a place directly associated with an apparently Protodynastic level, which would date it to a generation or two before the uniﬁcation of the Two Lands in 3100 B.C. But two years earlier, in the ﬁrst report published on Hierakonpolis by Quibell, it was labelled as coming from the Main Deposit proper, a feature that may be as late as the Middle Kingdom (ca. 2130–1785 B.C.).