The unification is known almost entirely through a single extraordinary object, the Narmer Palette, discovered at Hierakonpolis in 1897 and 1898 in a cache of votive equipment inside the temple of the falcon god Horus. Carved from siltstone and shaped like the cosmetic palettes used for grinding eye paint, but far too large and elaborate to have served that ordinary purpose, it shows a king named Narmer on one side wearing the tall White Crown of Upper Egypt and, on the other, the Red Crown of Lower Egypt, in each case triumphing over enemies. Rows of decapitated bodies, a bull trampling a fortified town, and two long-necked serpopards with intertwined necks fill the surrounding registers with imagery of conquest and cosmic containment. Because it was deposited as a temple offering rather than as a public monument or an administrative record, historians read it as much as a religious and ceremonial statement as a historical one.
Archaeologists and historians, including Ian Shaw and Donald Redford in their surveys of early Egypt, are careful to note that the palette very likely commemorates and consolidates, in a single symbolic image, a political and cultural process of unification that had been underway gradually across the preceding Naqada period, rather than recording one literal military campaign on one particular day. What the object fixes permanently, whatever its precise historical referent, is the image of a single ruler wearing both crowns as the visible proof that Egypt's two halves belonged under one authority.