THE DECORATION OF NARMER PALETTE

THE DECORATION OF NARMER PALETTE

The king is gripping the hair of the captive (whose facial features seem Egyptian rather than Libyan or Asiatic), and the latter has two ideograms ﬂoating to the right of his head. These two small images are presumed by most Egyptologists to be the early hieroglyphs for ‘harpoon’ (w‘) and ‘lake’ (ˇs), which would either phonetically spell out the foreign name ‘Wash’, or refer to someone whose name, title, or even place of origin was actually ‘Harpoon (lake)’. It seems likely that the falcon holding a harpoon, depicted as one of the group of enigmatic signs above the decapitated bodies on the front of the palette (see above) is also communicating the idea of the defeat of Wash/Harpoon by the king in the guise of the Horus-falcon.
In front of the king, and above the captive, the falcon-god Horus hovers, holding a schematically rendered captive by a rope attached to the man’s nose. This captive has six papyri protruding from his back, and it has been suggested that this identiﬁes the rebus as ‘6,000 captives’, on the basis that each of the papyrus plants already signiﬁes the number 1,000 as they later would in the pharaonic period. An alternative reading is that this group of plants is an iconographical reference to the homeland of the captive, which might have been the papyrus-ﬁlled land of northern Egypt. It is possible that the ‘harpoon’ and ‘lake’ signs may be intended to refer to the king’s captive as well as to the one held by the falcon, so that both may actually be the same person/people. In the lowest section of this side of the palette are two prone naked human ﬁgures, who are presumably also intended to be either captives or dead enemies. Each of these has a sign to the left of his face and both of their bodies are twisted so that their faces are pointing leftwards, i.e. in the same direction as the two captives above (and in the opposite direction to the king and the sandal-bearer).

The visual appearance and the very complex content of the Narmer Palette’s decoration have been the subject of constant discussion ever since its discovery. The style of the images and the identiﬁcation of the king as Narmer demonstrate that it was created at the end of the 4th millennium bc, when many of the most distinctive elements of Egyptian culture were emerging. The images already incorporate a number of highly characteristic features of pharaonic art, such as the arrangement of the picture into a series of horizontal ‘registers’, the semi-diagrammatic depiction of people and animals as a combination of frontal and sideways elements, and the use of size as a means of indicating each individual’s relative importance. The latter is very much the iconography of power.
In a cross-cultural study of the palette, the Canadian archaeologist, Bruce Trigger, points out that the speciﬁc ‘Egyptianness’ of the smiting scene can be counterbalanced by various aspects of the iconography that seem to be universal. Pointing out the obvious contrast between the king’s elaborate regalia and his virtually naked victim, he cites the Victory Stele of Eannatum (c.2560 bc), on which the god Ningirsu wields a mace over a group of naked enemies trapped in a net. He also notes the tradition among North American Iroquoians of stripping captured warriors of some of their clothing and ornamentation, and the Akkadian depictions of ‘naked, fettered
captives’. He makes a fascinating comparison with a Maya scene on a carved lintel from Yaxchilan, showing a ruler called Bird-Jaguar capturing two of his enemies (c.ad 755). In the Maya scene, the richly clothed triumphant warriors contrast with the semi-naked defeated rulers, one of whom is held by his hair. As Trigger concludes,

Although the scene on the Narmer palette does not necessarily depict the capture in battle of an adversary, the psychological afﬁnities between these two representations are very close, notwithstanding their having evolved wholly independently of one another, in different hemispheres, and far removed in time.