Rarely do I come across works of art that make my blood run almost cold with excitement. One such image, carved on a stone cosmetic palette some 5,000 years ago, has fascinated Egyptologists as the first fully articulated example of Egyptian royal representation—so that it seems to stand as a symbol of dynastic Egypt itself.
The palette shows a king named Narmer about to smite a foe who is paralyzed with fear. Over the millennia, this scene was repeated thousands of times in relief carvings and paintings. Smiting images virtually identical to that on the Narmer Palette are depicted on Egyptian temple pylons as late as the Roman period. Moreover, its visual power was such that the image was also adopted by other peoples who were heavily or partially Egytianized, such as the Phoenicians (first millennium B.C.) and the Meroitic people of the Sudan (c. 250 B.C.-350 A.D.).
Narmer, however, exists on the verge of history, moving in and out of view. Although Narmer is not mentioned in the king lists, he apparently ruled a kingdom in predynastic Egypt. The historical dynasties begin with the 1st Dynasty (c. 2950–2775 B.C.), though this dynasty was preceded by earlier kings, referred to in 018such Egyptian sources as the Palermo Stone.a These kings, some of whom are attested by contemporaneous material, are loosely identified by Egyptologists as Dynasty 0 (c. 3200–2950 B.C.),b but the territorial extent of their rule and the political organization of their realms are virtually unknown.
This, then, is the mystery of Narmer’s palette: One of the most powerful symbols of pharaonic Egypt was created before the dynasties existed. So who was King Narmer, and what is the meaning of the imagery carved on his palette?
The Narmer Palette was discovered by the British archaeologists James Quibell and Frederick Green in 1898 at Hierakonpolis (pronounced “hyra-KON-plis”) in southern Egypt. It was probably originally a votive object in an early temple (of which very little has survived). This temple was built toward the beginning of Dynasty 0 and probably continued in use during the 1st Dynasty and 2nd Dynasty (2775–2650 B.C.).1 At some point, the palette—along with a number of other items, including a limestone macehead also containing the name of Narmer—was removed from the temple and carefully buried in the temple’s vicinity.
Our picture of the period before and after Narmer is developing rapidly because of new discoveries and increased scholarly interest in the origins of pharaonic Egypt. The 1st and 2nd Dynasties are documented by Egyptian king lists and by royal monuments, inscriptions and art works produced during the reigns of these kings.
Narmer apparently ruled a unified Egypt that included Upper (southern) Egypt and Lower (northern) Egypt. On one face of the Narmer Palette, the principal figure wears the high conical crown of Upper Egypt, while on the other he wears the “chair-shaped” crown of Lower Egypt. Scholars continue to debate whether Narmer was the last king of Dynasty 0 or the first king of the 1st Dynasty. In later Egyptian sources, the latter king is called Meni (meaning Founder), so some scholars identify Narmer as Meni and consider Narmer/Meni Egypt’s first dynastic pharaoh. Also, recently discovered seal impressions from the Early Dynastic royal cemetery at Abydos, in southern Egypt, list Narmer in association with 1st Dynasty kings.2 But these seal impressions may simply indicate that Narmer was buried in the same cemetery as those (1st Dynasty) kings.
Narmer’s royal name is inscribed on objects found as far apart as southern Egypt and Canaan.3 Although we do not know for certain a single one of his accomplishments, he left behind an astonishing memorial of his tenure: his palette.
The Narmer Palette belongs to a tradition of stone cosmetic palettes that goes back as early as the fifth millennium B.C. Generally found in graves, these palettes were used as mortars for grinding colorful mineral ores (copper, galena) to produce a cosmetic powder that was mixed with liquid and then applied around the eyes and to other parts of the body. Normally, these palettes have only minimal, if any, decoration; around Narmer’s time, however, artisans began producing larger and more richly decorated 019palettes.4 Some of these, including the Narmer Palette, are so large and elaborately decorated that they almost certainly were not actually used for grinding mineral ore into cosmetic powder; rather, they served some other symbolic or aesthetic purpose.
Made of a dark, gray-green siltstone, the palette is 25 inches long and only half an inch thick. Both faces are covered with relief carving, including signs that are part of a hieroglyphic writing system (for example, the signs representing the king’s name). Recent discoveries by the German archaeologist Günter Dreyer in the Early Dynastic royal cemetery at Abydos show that the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphs antedate Narmer by at least a century, and probably considerably more.5
Unlike most of its predecessors, the palette is decorated with imagery that in style and organization conforms to the essential features of later Egyptian art. This is clearly evident in the depiction of the smiting king and the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt. But it is also more subtly apparent in other ways. The artist who made the palette paid careful attention to scale, making the more prestigious characters larger than the less prestigious ones; this principle became critically important 022in later Egyptian art, and deified pharaohs even came to be depicted in colossal statues. Also, the scenes on both faces are organized in clearly demarcated horizontal registers, the governing principle in almost all later two-dimensional art in Egypt.
Both faces of the palette have the same imagery on the upper rim, which helps unify the imagery of the object as a whole. Two heads with human faces and curving bovine horns flank a central serekh (a rectangular frame, thought to symbolize a palace, enclosing hieroglyphs) with the king’s name. Narmer’s serekh consists of a frame enclosing a catfish and a chisel. Read together as a rebus, the initial phonemes of the ancient Egyptian words for “catfish” and “chisel” form the sound “Narmer,” but the signs can also be translated as two words, variously read as Cleaving Catfish, Butchering Catfish, Mean Catfish and, on my suggestion, Striking Catfish.
Below the upper rim, the carvings on the palette are divided into three registers on the front face and two on the back face. The central register on the front face has a blank circular area designated for the grinding of cosmetics. (Although many commentators have identified the face with the smiting scene as the front, the palette’s front face must in fact be the side where the mineral ores were ground, if only symbolically on such a “ceremonial” palette.) This cosmetic area is emphasized by magnificently rendered beasts called serpopards (wild felines with elongated necks), whose serpentine necks encircle the grinding area.
On the front face’s top register, King Narmer, wearing the red crown of Lower Egypt and flanked by two officials, follows a procession of four standard bearers. The procession appears to be moving toward the right side of the register, where ten of the king’s enemies are lying. These enemies have been decapitated, with their heads placed between their legs; and all but one of the enemies have been castrated.6
Below this scene, in the bottom register, a bull tramples another enemy while knocking down a towered fortification wall.
In the upper register on the back of the palette, the king, accompanied by an attendant and now wearing the white crown of Upper Egypt, raises a mace to strike an enemy, whose hair the king grasps in his left hand. The upper right of this register is occupied by a falcon standing on a piece of land from which papyrus grows. The land is personified by a man’s head, which is controlled—like a domesticated animal—by a rope through the nose that is grasped by 023the falcon, which has sprouted a human arm for the purpose.
The small bottom register shows two of the king’s enemies, who are either fleeing or, more likely, dead (the man on the left, for instance, has apparently been castrated).
How do these various scenes relate to one another? The American Egyptologist Whitney Davis has suggested that they form a narrative. According to Davis, the bottom register on the back shows enemies fleeing toward the fortress depicted in the bottom register on the front, which the king (represented as a bull) attacks and conquers. The narrative then moves to the upper scene on the back. Here the king’s divine patron, the falcon—identified as Horus, the falcon-headed sky god who was the embodiment of kingship—presents the enemy to the king, who wears the high crown of Upper Egypt. The king then prepares to deliver a powerful blow to the head of one of the enemy, perhaps representing their leader. In Davis’s view, the central register on the front (the entwined serpopards) is the “metaphorical equivalent” of the blow’s hitting home; that is, the blank cosmetic area represents the enemy’s caved-in head. The top register on the back represents the result of this and other executions.7
Although most scholars feel Davis pushes the evidence too far, a consensus holds that the scenes on the Narmer Palette probably resonate with each other in meaningful ways to tell a story.
Both the smiting scene and the scene with the serpopards, for example, imply that dangerous forces can be brought under control—by the king and falcon, and by the men who hold the threatening serpopards on leashes. Also, the two top registers share the theme of defeated and executed (or about-to-be-executed) opponents, as well as the presence of the same distinctive attendant to the king (who carries the king’s sandals, perhaps suggesting that the king is walking on sacred ground.c There is also the repeated motif of the falcon, which looms large on the back and appears as a tiny image above the decapitated victims on the front.
Although most scholars agree that the imagery on the Narmer Palette is purposive and highly structured, opinion varies enormously as to what the images mean. One problem, paradoxically, is that the palette seems so prototypical; many of its features (the two crowns, the falcon, the serekh, and so on) are charged with meaning in later Egyptian art, and this invites us to “read” the imagery as if it were the work of those later dynastic pharaohs. But it is not. The palette is predynastic, and we cannot assume that its images had the same meaning in Narmer’s day as they had a thousand years later.8
For example, signs that might be hieroglyphs appear near the ten decapitated opponents, near the about-to-be-executed prisoner (in the smiting scene) and near the enemies depicted in the bottom registers on both sides of the palette. From later examples of Egyptian art, we might assume that these signs identify the enemies of the king or the events associated with the enemies’ defeat. Yet these signs have not settled the question of just who these enemies are. As one scholar humorously notes, the enemy on the Narmer Palette has been variously identified as anything from “a Libyan, Lower Egyptian, an inhabitant of the Western Delta or Buto, the chief of Elephantine, some valley inhabitant, an Asiatic Easterner, Transjordanian, Palestinian, bedouin to ‘anyone’s guess’.”9 In other words, these early hieroglyphs are very difficult to translate, compared to later ones.
Another example of the difficulties in “reading” the Narmer Palette through the lens of later art has to do with the surprising fact that some of Narmer’s enemies are 052castrated and some are not. During the latter part of the New Kingdom (1550–1075 B.C.), dead enemies who were circumcised had a hand lopped off to facilitate body counts but enemies who were uncircumcised (a practice offensive to the Egyptians) had their penises lopped off.10 Are the enemies depicted on Narmer’s palette to be read in these terms, despite their much earlier date (2,000 years earlier!)?
Because of these problems, some scholars insist that the Narmer Palette must be interpreted according to its own historical circumstances. The palette was carved around the time of the development of the Egyptian “nation-state,” which continued to become larger and more centralized over the millennia.d Thus one Egyptologist connects the imagery on the palette to late-prehistoric scenes of hunting and warfare; this “subjugation motif” represents the “contrast of order and chaos” and becomes “integrated in early state ideology as expressed on the Narmer Palette”—for example, in the leashed serpopards, the head controlled by the falcon, the king’s smiting the enemy, and the bull’s attacking the fortress.11
A promising avenue of research was suggested in 1990 by the late Egyptologist Nicholas Millet of the Royal Ontario Museum: The scenes on Narmer’s palette might incorporate the names of the years of the object’s manufacture and presentation to the temple. If this is so, the scenes on Narmer’s palette might refer to specific events that occurred during Narmer’s reign, but in a highly stylized manner—as suited to an object in a temple.12 This idea was subsequently given additional support by Günter Dreyer’s discovery of a “year-label” of King Narmer (such year-labels were attached to objects or materials deposited in tombs to indicate when they were made or produced) with an image of the smiting scene very similar to the one on Narmer’s palette. To Dreyer, the smiting scene in both cases can be read as a year name—that is, the year that Narmer conquered the Libyan marshland—though this interpretation remains in question.13
My own contribution has been to draw attention to the likely functions of “ceremonial” palettes like Narmer’s. In their imagery, these palettes consistently differentiate between front face (with the cosmetic area) and back face. This is important, I believe, because such palettes were used in temple rituals involving the cosmeticizing of divine images. As in the later temple ritual, early images of deities probably received ritual attention that in part mimicked the morning routines of royalty and nobility—being bathed, clothed and applied with cosmetics. In ritual, all these seemingly mundane acts were symbolically charged: Painting around the images’ eyes, for example, protected them from supernatural harm and empowered them to “see,” and hence create. The circular cosmetic decoration relates to the ritual usage, while the decoration on the back (which may also include imagery relating to early kingship) acts as an apotropaic protection for the more sacred, and hence more vulnerable, front face.14
The multiplicity of ideas, observations and theories about the Narmer Palette testify to its power and its ambiguity. In Narmer’s day, the meanings conveyed by the palette may have been crystal clear, which of course does not mean they were not also ideologically powerful and aesthetically beautiful. For us, however, so many millennia later, the Narmer Palette is necessarily a different object from the one its makers made, “read” and beheld. In this sense, the Israeli Egyptologist Orly Goldwasser has described the Narmer Palette as a “poetic accomplishment,” one that comes to mean many things across the ages.15
Now the palette is on display in the Cairo Museum. It rests in relative isolation, mounted on a tall, dark pedestal and supported by unobtrusive framing. It seems to float in the air as one approaches—a fascinating, baffling, beautiful object, perhaps to remain forever enigmatic.
Rarely do I come across works of art that make my blood run almost cold with excitement. One such image, carved on a stone cosmetic palette some 5,000 years ago, has fascinated Egyptologists as the first fully articulated example of Egyptian royal representation—so that it seems to stand as a symbol of dynastic Egypt itself. The palette shows a king named Narmer about to smite a foe who is paralyzed with fear. Over the millennia, this scene was repeated thousands of times in relief carvings and paintings. Smiting images virtually identical to that on the Narmer Palette are depicted […]
You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.
The Palermo Stone (c. 2400 B.C.) was originally a basalt stela 6.5 feet high and 3 feet wide, inscribed on both sides with royal annals stretching back to prehistoric times. Although most of the stone is now missing, the principal extant fragment is in the Palermo Archaeological Museum, in Sicily, while smaller fragments are in London’s Petrie Museum and Cairo’s Egyptian Museum.
2.
The period from the 1st through the 2nd Dynasty is called the Early Dynastic period; some scholars, though I am not one of them, include the 3rd
3.
In later times, Egyptians habitually took off sandals before traversing sacred spaces, such as temples and tomb chapels. Also, in the Bible, as Moses approaches the burning bush, God tells him, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground” (Exodus 3:5).
4.
A particularly controversial point is whether the scenes on the Narmer Palette include references to actual historical events. In 1998 the American Egyptologist Frank Yurco reiterated an idea also expressed by earlier scholars that the palette shows Narmer as the “conqueror of the Delta” and the “first attested unifier of all Egypt.” Other scholars, however, flatly contradict this notion, following John Baines’s suggestion that the scenes on Narmer’s palette refer to a “ritual affirmation of conquest, not a real event.”
Endnotes
1.
For the discovery of the palette, see Barbara Adams, Ancient Hierakonpolis Supplement (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, Warminster, 1974). For the date of the temple, see Adams, “Early Temples at Hierakonpolis and Beyond,” in Centenary of Mediterranean Archaeology 1898–1997, International Symposium Cracow, October 1997, (Cracow, 1999), pp. 15–28.
2.
Toby H. Wilkinson, Early Dynastic Egypt (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 60–94.
3.
See Thomas E. Levy, Edwin C.M. van den Brink, Yuval Goren and David Alon, “New Light on King Narmer and the Protodynastic Egyptian Presence in Canaan,” Biblical Archaeologist 58:1 (March 1995), pp. 26–35.
4.
Beatrix Midant-Reynes, The Prehistory of Egypt (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), chapter 7 and p. 264, chart 3. On the palettes, see most recently E. Christiana Köhler, “History or Ideology? New reflections on the Narmer Palette and the nature of Foreign Relations in Pre- and Early Dynastic Egypt,” in Edwin C.M. van den Brink and Thomas Levy, eds., Egypt and the Levant. Interrelations from the 4th through the early 3rd Millennium B.C. (London: Leicester University Press, 2002), pp. 505–507.
5.
Günter Dreyer, Umm el-Qaab I. Das prädynastische Königsgrab U-j und seine frühen schriftzeugnisse (Mainz: Verlag Phillip von Zabern, 1998), pp. 47–83, 113–145, 181–188; and Wilkinson, “Did the Egyptians invent writing?”, in Bill Manley, ed., The Seventy Great Mysteries of Ancient Egypt (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), pp. 24–27.
6.
Vivian Davies and Renée Friedman, “The Narmer Palette: a Forgotten Member,” Nekhen News 10 (1998), p. 22.
7.
Whitney Davis, Masking the Blow: The Scene of Representation in Late Prehistoric Egyptian Art, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 165–178.
8.
See the discussion and references in D. Wengrow, “Rethinking ‘Cattle Cults’ in Early Egypt: Towards a Prehistoric Perspective on the Narmer Palette,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 11:1 (2001), pp. 91–104; and Köhler, “History or Ideology?” Note also the useful survey Jacques Kinnaer, “What is Really Known About the Narmer Palette?” KMT 15:1 (2004), pp. 48–54. See also John Baines, “Origins of Egyptian Kingship,” in David O’Connor and David Silverman, eds., Ancient Egyptian Kingship (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), pp. 109–121. For a more extensive and controversial presentation, see Davis, Masking the Blow.
9.
Köhler, “History or Ideology?” p. 504.
10.
See, for example, James Henry Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1906), vol 3:, pp. 247–249, 255; vol. 4: pp. 30–31.
11.
Köhler, “History or Ideology?” p. 511.
12.
Nicholas B. Millet, “The Narmer Macehead and Related Objects,” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 27 (1990), pp. 53–9.
13.
Dreyer, “Egypt’s earliest historical event,” Egyptian Archaeology. The Bulletin of the Egypt Exploration Society 16 (2000), pp. 6–7. See also Köhler, “History or Ideology?” p. 508.
14.
O’Connor, “Context, Function and Program: Understanding Ceremonial Slate Palettes,” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 39 (2002, published in 2004), pp. 5–25.
15.
Orly Goldwasser, “The Narmer Palette and the ‘Triumph of Metaphor’,” Lingua Aegyptia. Journal of Egyptian Language Studies 2 (1992), p. 79.
