The Narmer Palette

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.

The Narmer Palette did not surface alone. James Quibell and Frederick Green found it during their 1897 to 1898 season inside the Main Deposit, a cache of votive objects excavated within the Temple of Horus at Hierakonpolis, though the two men's own field notes recorded the exact findspot and arrangement of the cache too loosely for later archaeologists to reconstruct it with full confidence. What is not in doubt is the company the Palette kept there: the Narmer Macehead, the Scorpion Macehead and, deposited generations later in the same sacred ground, a statue of the Second Dynasty king Khasekhemwy, carved from the same stone as the Palette itself. Egyptologists read the whole group as royal donations to the temple rather than as objects the sanctuary had always stored, which is part of why the Palette is treated first as an offering to Horus and only second as a record meant for any human audience.

The object also belongs to a specific and largely vanished genre of Egyptian craft. Ordinary Egyptians of the Naqada period ground cosmetics on small, plain stone palettes, and the shallow depression formed where Narmer's own two long necked serpopards intertwine, on the reverse face, is exactly the kind of grinding surface that ordinary form would have provided, scaled up on an object almost certainly too large and heavy for anyone to have actually used it that way. One long standing theory holds that palettes of this ceremonial kind ground cosmetics for the statues of the gods rather than for any living person. Other decorated ceremonial palettes from the same period survive, but none combines the completeness, scale and precision of carving that has made Narmer's the genre's defining example rather than merely one surviving instance of it.