THE NARMER PALETTE

THE NARMER PALETTE

The palette is one of the ﬁrst exhibits to be encountered by visitors to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. It is a shield-shaped slab of greenish stone, 63 cm high, with carved low-relief decoration on both faces, and it is usually dated to the ﬁnal century of the 4th millennium bc. On the front, there is a depiction of intertwined long-necked lions (‘serpopards’) held on leashes by two bearded men. Symmetrical pairs of ‘tamed’ beasts such as these seem to be adapted from early Mesopotamian, perhaps Elamite, iconography, but in an Egyptian context, they may speciﬁcally represent the enforced uniﬁcation of the two halves of the country, which is a theme in Egyptian art and texts throughout the pharaonic period.

The circle formed by the entwining necks of the serpopards ingeniously creates the depression or saucer in which pigments for eye-paint might have been crushed (the original purpose of these palettes), but it is unclear whether such signiﬁcant ceremonial artefacts as the Narmer Palette were ever actually used for this function. Highly charged ritual objects such as these perhaps transcended the supposed function of the thing itself, as they took on the role of offerings dedicated to the Hierakonpolis temple. On other ceremonial palettes of similar type, the circular depression can have the unwanted effect of interrupting the smooth ﬂow of the scenes depicted – compare for instance the ‘Two-dog Palette’, also excavated by Quibell and Green at Hierakonpolis, where there are once again two long-necked lions on the front, but the depression simply sits between the necks rather than being created by them (or the ‘Battleﬁeld Palette’, where the depression interrupts a row of captives).

In the top register on the front of the palette, above the two serpopards, the artist has carved the striding bearded ﬁgure of an early Egyptian ruler, probably identiﬁed as a man called Narmer, judging by the hieroglyphs both in front of him and in the serekh frame in the centre of the top of the palette, between the two cow’s
heads. He is shown in the so-called Red Crown, which is ﬁrst attested on a potsherd dating to the Naqada I period (4000–3500 bc) and eventually became connected with the control of Lower Egypt (but whether it had yet developed this association in the time of Naqada I or even Narmer is uncertain). He is also carrying a mace and a ﬂail, and wearing a tunic tied over his left shoulder, with a bull’s tail hanging from the waist.