Kings without a biography
We know the First Dynasty mostly through objects, not stories. No chronicle of the period survives, and the Egyptian king lists written over a thousand years later begin with a founder called Menes, who may be Narmer or his successor Aha, or a memory of both. What we have are royal names on jars, seals and labels, a few carved palettes and maces, and the tombs. From these we can rebuild a sequence of eight kings: Narmer (or Aha), Aha, Djer, Djet, Den, Anedjib, Semerkhet and Qa’a, over roughly two centuries.
There is also a woman. Merneith, probably the mother of Den, seems to have ruled while he was a child. Her tomb at Abydos is as large as a king’s, and her name appears on a seal in the list of kings. She may be the first woman we know of to hold power in Egypt.
A name in a palace
The first kings wrote their names inside a serekh, a rectangle drawn as the front of a palace, with a falcon standing on top. The falcon is Horus, the sky god, and the message is that the king is Horus living in his palace. This “Horus name” was the main royal title for centuries; the oval cartouche came later. On the stela of King Djet, now in the Louvre, the serekh holds a single sign, a snake, which is why he is sometimes called the Serpent King.
Writing itself was very new. The earliest Egyptian signs, on small labels from a tomb at Abydos, date from a little before 3200 BCE, about the same time as the first writing in Mesopotamia. Whether one influenced the other is still debated, but the two systems look completely different.
The king who strikes
The Palette of Narmer shows on one side the king wearing the white crown of Upper Egypt, beating a kneeling enemy, and on the other wearing the red crown of Lower Egypt, inspecting rows of beheaded foes. It used to be read as the record of a single war that united Egypt. Today most scholars see it as a ceremonial image of what a king does, defeat chaos, rather than a news report. The same gesture, the king with raised mace, appears on Den’s sandal label and was carved on temple pylons until Roman times. With the palette, the rules of Egyptian art are already in place: the most important figure is the largest, scenes sit in horizontal bands, and bodies combine profile and frontal views.
Tombs at Abydos, servants included
The kings were buried at Umm el-Qaab, “mother of pots”, a stretch of desert at Abydos named after the broken offering vessels that still cover it. Their tombs were brick-lined pits roofed with timber, under low mounds, with storerooms for food, wine, furniture and stone vessels. Flinders Petrie excavated them in 1899-1900, after a French explorer had already dug through them without recording much, and still recovered labels, seals and jewellery.
Around the royal tombs lie rows of small graves. Around Djer’s there are 318, around Merneith’s 41. They held servants, officials, women and craftsmen, apparently buried at the same time as the king, perhaps killed to serve him in the afterlife. The practice stopped by the end of the dynasty and never returned. Later Egyptians replaced the people with images and models of servants. A thousand years later, the tomb of Djer was believed to be the tomb of the god Osiris, and pilgrims left offerings there for centuries.
A capital in the north
While the kings were buried in the south, they governed from the north. According to tradition, the first king founded Memphis at the head of the Delta, the point from which the whole country could be controlled. On the desert edge above it, at North Saqqara, the British archaeologist Walter Emery excavated large mudbrick tombs of the First Dynasty, with façades of recessed panels like the walls of a palace. They probably belonged to the high officials who ran the new state. Their builders were learning to work on a large scale, and within a few generations the next dynasties turned these flat tombs, called mastabas, into the first pyramids.
Where to see it
The royal tombs of Umm el-Qaab are at Abydos, about 160 km north of Luxor, near the temple of Seti I, which most visitors come to see. The Palette of Narmer is in the Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square in Cairo. The sandal label of Den is in the British Museum in London, and the stela of Djet in the Louvre in Paris.
Sources
- T. Wilkinson, Early Dynastic Egypt (1999).
- British Museum, “Label from the sandal of King Den” (EA 55586).
- E. Teeter (ed.), Before the Pyramids: The Origins of Egyptian Civilization, Oriental Institute (2011).
- UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, “Palettes (Predynastic and Early Dynastic)” (2009).
- W. M. F. Petrie, The Royal Tombs of the First Dynasty (1900-1901).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline, “Egypt, 8000-2000 B.C.”.
