Another mace head from the same cache records a different, though equally resonant, ceremony. This time the presiding king is Narmer, enthroned on an elevated dais under an awning, wearing the red crown and carrying the crooklike scepter. Beside the dais stands the customary pair of fan bearers, accompanied by the king’s sandal bearer and chief minister. Behind them are men wielding big sticks—even a sacral monarchy needed security. The ceremony, too, has a militaristic flavor, its main act being the parade of captured booty and enemy prisoners before the royal throne. In a stark analogy, three captive antelope inside a walled enclosure are shown next to the parade ground. The ideological connection between warfare and hunting, between the unruly forces of nature and the king’s opponents, remained potent through Egyptian history.
A recent reexamination of the early town at Nekhen, including the place where Narmer’s palette and mace head were discovered, offers a further, tantalizing insight into the practice of early kingship. The area hitherto identified as a temple to the local falcon god Horus may not have been a temple at all, but instead an arena for royal ceremony. According to this interpretation, the mound in the center of the walled enclosure may have been a raised dais for the king’s formal appearances. The open ground in front of the mound could have been used for rituals like a parade of prisoners. If so, the Narmer mace head may picture the actual scene at such an event. Certainly, the objects found at Nekhen seem to reflect a cult of monarchy. Decorated ivories from the Main Deposit depict large mace heads erected on poles in an enclosure, so perhaps the Narmer and Scorpion mace heads were originally used to identify and demarcate a royal arena. Looking beyond Nekhen to the rest of Egypt, buildings previously identified as shrines may be reinterpreted in the same way, as centers of the royal cult. Certainly, the king and his deeds dominate the written and artistic record of the early dynasties, with other deities playing only supporting roles. The question of where the gods are in early Egyptian culture may have an unsettling answer: in early Egypt, the kings were the gods. Monarchy was not just an integral part of religion; the two were synonymous.
This would remain the dominant theme of pharaonic civilization until the very end, but it had a dark side. Looking again at the Narmer and Scorpion mace heads, the objects themselves—setting aside their decoration—tell us something about the character of Egyptian monarchy. Mace heads were symbols of authority from prehistoric times, for obvious reasons—a person wielding a mace was met with respect and obedience. The fact that mace heads were adopted as symbols of kingly power speaks volumes about the nature of royal authority in ancient Egypt. The scenes on the Narmer Palette are a further reminder of the brutality that underpinned Egyptian kingship. On one side of the palette, the king is shown with a mace, ready to smite his enemy. On the other side, Narmer has not only defeated his adversaries, but dealt them utter humiliation. He is shown inspecting rows of decapitated bodies that have suffered the added indignity of having their genitals cut off. The victims’ heads and penises are placed between their legs; only one of the dead has been allowed to retain his manhood. Uncomfortable as it may be, we must assume that the ancient Egyptians of Narmer’s time routinely humiliated their defeated enemies in this way.
At the pinnacle of Egyptian society, the king embodied this ruthless streak. While on the one hand he was keen to portray himself as the unifier of the country, a divine presence on earth who maintained created order, royal iconography also made it abundantly clear that defending creation meant meting out destruction to the king’s enemies, be they from outside or inside his realm. Narmer and his predecessors had won power by violent means, and they would not hesitate to use violence to retain power. The visual propaganda employed to promote the monarchy—the king as a lion, a giant scorpion, a fierce catfish, a wild bull, or a mace-wielding superhero—was unashamedly brutal. It was both a promise and a warning.
In this context, one of the most jarring scenes from early Egypt is the band of decoration around the top of the Scorpion mace head. The tableau consists of a series of royal standards, each symbolizing a different aspect of the king’s authority. But they are not just standards; they are also gallows. From each one hangs a crested bird with a rope around its neck. In hieroglyphic writing, the lapwing (“rekhyt” in ancient Egyptian) symbolized the common people, as opposed to the small circle of royal relatives (pat) who wielded power. On the Scorpion mace head, the common people have been hanged on the gibbets of royal power. It is a message that would be repeated later in Egyptian history. For example, the base of a statue of King Netjerikhet (also known as King Djoser), builder of the first pyramid, is decorated with archery bows (denoting foreigners) and also lapwings—so that the king could trample underfoot his subjects as well as his enemies. Egyptologists have recoiled at the underlying symbolism of such scenes, but it is inescapable. Autocratic regimes live and die by force, and ancient Egypt was no exception.
The most chilling example of this tendency can be seen in the tombs of Egypt’s early rulers. At Nubt, an elite burial dating to around 3500 contained more than the expected array of grave goods. Around the walls of the tomb, the excavators found a series of human long bones, and in the center a collection of skulls. The dismembered bodies of several individuals had clearly been interred with the tomb owner. At Nekhen, bodies in the predynastic cemetery show frequent evidence of scalping and decapitation. At nearby Adaima, two individuals had had their throats slit before being decapitated. The archaeologist who found them thought they might have been early examples of self-sacrifice, loyal retainers killing themselves in order to accompany their master to the grave.
But the First Dynasty royal tombs at Abdju suggest a different, more sinister, explanation.
Under Narmer’s successors of the First Dynasty, the royal tomb itself was accompanied by a series of subsidiary graves for members of the court. In one case, the king’s afterlife companions were all in the prime of life when they died, with an average age of twenty-five years or younger. In another royal tomb from the end of the First Dynasty, a single roof covered the servants’ graves as well as the king’s chamber. Both examples provide unequivocal evidence for the sacrifice of retainers, since it is impossible that an entire retinue would conveniently die at the same time as its monarch. However, this could have been self-sacrifice: perhaps the bonds of loyalty were so strong that servants willingly took their own lives when their master died. Recently, however, closer inspection of the subsidiary graves has swept away this explanation , for the bodies show evidence of death by strangulation. The conclusion is as grim as it is shocking: Egypt’s early kings had the power of life and death over their subjects and did not hesitate to use it to demonstrate their own authority. To be a member of the common people meant a life of subjugation; to be a member of the king’s inner circle meant a life of fear. Neither can have been particularly pleasant.
Retainer sacrifice peaked at a relatively early stage: the tomb of Djer, third king of the First Dynasty (circa 2900), was surrounded by 318 subsidiary burials. It seems as if Egypt’s rulers, having acquired absolute power, were eager to try it out. Those buried around the king, to serve him faithfully in the afterlife, included his pets alongside his human attendants. The fact that the same mortuary provision was considered appropriate for both dogs and concubines speaks volumes about the status of royal servants at the early Egyptian court. After the reigns of Djer and his successor Djet, the practice of retainer sacrifice seems to have declined before stopping abruptly at the end of the First Dynasty. But one cannot help wondering if it was economic rather than ideological reticence that put an end to the practice. After all, eliminating an entire entourage at the end of each reign was hugely wasteful of talent, and the ancient Egyptians were nothing if not practical.
Human sacrifice is also depicted on labels from the royal tombs. Some of these dockets, which were originally attached to jars and boxes of supplies, are inscribed with scenes of royal activities. Two such labels, evidently commemorating the same event, show a man kneeling down with his arms tied behind his back. In front of him, on the floor, there is a large basin. Its purpose is gruesomely clear, for another man stands over the victim with a long knife, ready to plunge it into his chest. There is no written text to shed further light on this scene, but there can be little doubt that it involved the ritual killing of a human prisoner as part of a ceremony of kingship.
By means of the objects buried within it and the servants interred around it, the royal tomb was designed to enable the king to continue presiding at royal ceremonies for all eternity. As such, the tomb was the essential guarantor of kingship and, from the rise of ancient Egypt until the demise of the pharaohs, the most important construction project of each reign. The preparation of the king’s burial must have absorbed huge effort and expenditure, in labor, materials, and human life. It is often argued that the people of Egypt made the investment willingly, as their side of a contract that guaranteed the prosperity and survival of the country. Of course the person advancing that ideology was the king himself. It was in the monarchy’s own interests to promote its role in national unification. In reality, the king’s motivation was self-interest.
The First Dynasty royal cemetery at Abdju, with its hierarchy of the king’s tomb surrounded by the burials of his retainers, was simply a concrete manifestation of Egyptian society—a state totally dominated and controlled by one man. The creation and implementation of this ideology helped to fashion pharaonic civilization, but at a price. With the rise of ancient Egypt, the relentless march of state control had begun in earnest.
By Toby Wilkinson in "The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt", Random House, USA, 2010, excerpts chapter 2. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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