With the Pre-Dynastic Kings and the Kings of the First Three Dynasties at Abydos

THE fairy story of the resurrection from the dead of the pre-dynastic kings, and of the bringing back to actuality of the misty kings of the first dynasties at Abydos, still goes on.

We seem to be able to speak face to face with five at any rate of Manetho’s ten kings, Ka, Ro, Zeser, Narmer, and Sma, — men who lived and died before Mena, or Aha-Mena, the first king of the first dynasty, came to the throne of Upper and Lower Egypt.

Those of us who remember the day when our mothers gravely assured us that the creation of the world was according to Bible chronology put at 4004 B. C. are now able to know the manners and habits, the amusements, the life’s work and belief, and the funeral customs of King Ka, who presumably found it a pleasant thing to behold the sun upon the fields, and to feel the shadow of the palm groves at Abydos, as long ago as 4900 B. C.

But thanks to Dr. Flinders Petrie and his enthusiastic band of fellow workers, we can now not only know the funeral furniture of the tombs of kings who were before Mena was, but we can reach back and give hand-grasp to the shadowy presences of a prehistoric race, whose civilization was not far if anything behind the civilization of those pre-dynastic kings who used the same palettes for eye paint, drank from the same alabaster drinking cups, washed hands in the same diorite wash-bowls, cut their meat up with the same flint knives, and hoed their fields with the same flint hoes. There are now known to exist seventy-five to seventy-nine prehistoric seals of sequence dates, which overlap the time of the pre-dynastic kings, and thus for the first time it has been established that Egyptian history in the valley of the Nile runs forward from the farthest past without a break, and prehistoric man is seen to be a civilized being of consideration before the times of the kings who preceded Aha-Mena, the first king of the first dynasty, whose date is approximately put at 4777 B. C.

During the season 1900—1901, Dr. Flinders Petrie completed the exploration of the royal tombs at Abydos, in the royal burying place between the Temple of Sety and the hill to the south, with the result that, as far as the dynastic time went, a continuous record of seventeen kings was proved. These included : —

Of the pre-dynastic kings, spoken of now as belonging to Dynasty O, remains of objects marked with the royal names proved the existence of Ka, Zeser, Narmer, and Sma. Later search among broken fragments of pottery, and on seals from the tomb near the tomb chamber of Bener-Ab, the daughter of Mena, showed that a fifth king, whose name was Ro, must be added to the above list. Whereabouts he shall be added it is difficult to say ; he cannot be far from Ka, but the existence of a large amphorashaped jar in his tomb looks as if he lived in a time that knew the potter’s art, and Ka appears to have been before the potter. The clay sealing is of yellow marl, not black mud as was the fashion of Ka’s time, and the sealing is of the more advanced type of the seals in Narmer’s day. Dr. Flinders Petrie has therefore placed him second on the list of pre-dynastic kings, and for a “memoria technica ” we may remember that just as in the Greek alphabet the letter “po” succeeds to “ Xi, ” so King Ro in his list of royal personages between 4900 and 4777 B. C. succeeds to King Ka.

Not the least interesting part of the year’s work, as far as the dynastic arrangement went, was the discovery in Beit Khallaf, twelve miles north of Abydos, of two royal tombs of the third dynasty ; they were red brick mastabas of great size, above chambers hewn in the rock, and the mastabas of the servants of these kings Ha-Nekht and NeterKhet were round about them. The art of making bowls out of the hardest stone had reached perfection at this time. The beauty of the finish of the alabaster vessels in Neter-Khet’s tomb is undeniable. Tables for offerings too of great size were in vogue at this period, and it is pretty clear that the appetites of the “Kas” or Doubles of the king in the Land of Shades had increased. The explorers found in the long gallery of Neter-Khet’s tomb the ashes of the burning of a completely stored granary. Neter-Khet had evidently determined if there was corn in Egypt there should be corn in Amenti also, and that in abundance. But Neter-Khet’s tomb had special interest for the architect. In it was a double stairway of ninety feet that descended parallel with the two sides of the tomb chamber to the eighteen underground chambers of the dead. At the bottom the passage turned south under an archway, the first use of the arch in building yet discovered.

As for the art of the coppersmith, that too had evidently received encouragement under the kings of the third dynasty. Not only was a set of copper tools found, but a copper vessel with a spout in good condition was taken out of the tomb of Ha-Nekht. Close beside it was a worked flint scraper; the age of bronze and stone went hand in hand.

While Mr. Garstang’s men were at work at Beit Khallaf, he was also superintending the excavations of five hundred tombs in an undisturbed burial ground of the old kingdom at Mahasna, and unearthing not only specimens of fine jeweler’s craft, — the gold necklet chains now in the Cairo Museum, — but a very interesting series of button seals, which seem to have been the personal ornament of most of the gentlemen of that old kingdom before the scarab seal was introduced. The dandies of the button-seal time were evidently particular about their eye paint. Mr. Garstang brought to light many copper mirrors which had been stowed away for the use of the Ka when he came to visit his body, or when that body should rise from its sleeping and come on earth a second time.

While Mr. Mace and Mr. Garstang were working, the one at Abydos, the other at Mahasna and Beit Khallaf, Mr. R. McIver was busy at a prehistoric burial place, El Amrah. We now know how the prehistoric men built their houses, for Mr. McIver discovered a model of a house showing the door at one side and two windows at the end. It seemed to be above the average of many Irish cabins of our day, and quite as likely to be comfortable as any of the sheiks’ houses I had seen up the Nile. These prehistoric men of El Amrah were excellent basket weavers, and the Nubians to-day seem to have got no further in the patterns they weave. It is clear they believed in face paint, for many of the baskets contained the green malachite they used, and one of the slates on which they ground up their paint had still some of it adhering to it. There may have been medicine men amongst them. One dress showed that from the wrist to the elbow its wearer had had his little ivory toilet outfit, which he would need in putting on the color before he danced his dance or worked his fetich. Dancing was certainly an accomplishment of the prehistoric folk, for on one of the wavy-handled jars, whose handles were perforated for hanging in a draft for coolness’ sake on to the saddle-bow on a journey, there was evidence of a dancing scene in which the performers were using castanets.

Nor were the children forgotten. A pottery doll with curly black hair was found with other dolls of clay, one of which was evidently the work of a potter who had a good sense of the grotesque ; the prehistoric nurses had evidently ideas of fun, and liked to hear the youngsters laugh. As to the animals of that old time, if we are to trust the find at El Amrah, the ostrich abounded, and a horned sheep of the “Mouflon ” type was known. Hunters seem to have used harpoons of ivory, forked lances of flint, flint arrows, stone maces, and rope nooses or springes. Ivory was an object of luxury, and was finely worked. The skilled man of the day was the hard-stone bowl-maker, but the potter was beginning to be an artist, and while he worked the black-topped ware or the salmon-colored ware, he seemed to care for color as well as for form, and to have already begun to think of pattern, in white on black ware and paintings from the life on the yellow ware.

Our main interest after all must be with the kings at Abydos. From Ka’s tomb have come pottery jars of a cylindrical shape, which bear his name and some other signs written in ink. The writing is rude, but we shall probably agree that writing even as rude as this means civilization that has advanced far; and I confess I felt that the corridors of time seemed to have lengthened as I gazed on the queer little pair of hands, joined with a curved stroke to signify arms, upon that cylinder jar of Ka, which was written on nearly 6800 years ago.

Narmer must have been a big man in his day, and was buried in great state. He was not content with the size of the tombs that went before him, and he set the fashion, which Sma and Mena followed, of a very large dwelling-house for Eternity. All that we glean from his tomb is that ebony and ivory were objects of royal favor, that serpentine as well as alabaster was worked for his hand’s use, that the hooded snake and the plover were thought fit subjects for the decorator’s art, and that the king was fond of a game of draughts, for part of his draught board remains with us to this day.

Sma, the last king of the pre-dynastic time, and the probable predecessor of his son-in-law Mena, seems, by the fragments rescued from his tomb, to have cared for the crystal-worker’s craft. This king drank from cups of syenite and used antimony powder for the brightening of his eyes. The ivory lids of his kohl-slates have been preserved. One little bit of news which links the first dynasty to this pre-dynastic line of kings comes to us from his tomb. An ivory rod, on which the name of the King Sma and the name of Neit-hotep are engraved, suggests that Neit-hotep was the daughter of Sma, and as we know from the tomb at Nagada that Mena had a wife named Neit-hotep, it is probable that Mena was son-in-law to the king. Sma must have had clever ivory workers about him ; a bit of bull-legged furniture in his tomb tells us as much.

As for Neit-hotep, there were found in the tomb of Zer other fragments of her toilet-table, which had possibly come into the possession of her handmaidens, and when these were buried alongside Zer, the queen’s gifts would be buried with them as their most valued possession, — a little hint this of personal loyalty and of friendly relations between queen and servants. From AhaMena’s tomb come signs that the goldsmith flourished in his day; a tiny curved bar of gold found therein weighing 216 grains was perhaps the gold standard of weighing gold in his day. The ivory and ebony tablets found in his tomb and elsewhere tell us that AhaMena was looked upon as born of the dog-faced god Anubis, and we are able to glean from these tablets that he must have been a successful warrior, for captives with their hands bound behind their backs and others weighted with heavy neck-chains are here depicted, and one old gentleman with a very Jewish type of countenance does obeisance, holding a palm branch in his hands. The dome-shaped huts thatched with reeds, the towers and battlemented forts and villages are hinted at, and a suggestion is made that human sacrifices are in fashion, if we may trust Dr. Flinders Petrie’s interpretation of a seene wherein an executioner seated before another seated figure stabs him to the heart while an officer of state stands by. I confess I thought it simply a dinnerparty scene, and that the executioner was really the host offering a bit of the best of the dish to his dear friend. Of animals, the oryx, the elephant, the hippopotamus, the stork, and the scorpion abound, and are thought worthy of representation on seal or ivory or wood. There is no evidence that milch cattle, as in the days of the prehistoric folk, are kept, but from one of the most remarkable ebony tablets discovered of Mena’s day, it is clear that the noble sport of wild-bull hunting was indulged in. The engraver of the bull in the net-snare might almost have inspired the maker of the celebrated Vapheio cup, so full of life is his design. The hunters of Mena’s day appear to have used flint for their spearheads and arrowheads, and the king’s friends determined he should not pass into the other world without some of the best; nor did they forget the king’s obsidian knife. As for the king’s table, his majesty was provided with a horn if his lips felt the diorite too cold or alabaster too heavy for drinking from.

The house boat as we see it on the Thames seems to have been known in a slightly different form to Mena, and the seed-beds of the Fayum were probably one of his favorite sporting grounds.

There is a delightful little bit of poetry introduced into this chapter of the history of Mena, by the finding of several articles of a girl’s toilet-table in a tomb which the king may well have visited with tears. One of these is a fine wooden comb, another a fan handle, belonging to a young princess who was probably Mena’s daughter. Her name — Bener-Ab, “Sweet of Heart ” —occurs on a tablet on which Mena’s name is inscribed, and those who gaze on the ivory figure of a young girl clad in a long robe and with her hands crossed upon the breast, discovered in the tomb, can understand why Mena gave her the name of “Sweet-heart,” how he must have loved her in the days of long ago, and what bitter tears were shed at her departing.

The find of the season was made in the many-chambered tomb of the king who succeeded Mena, Zer or Zer-Ta by name. It is clear from the tablets and bits of pottery pictures that the arts of peace had gone forward. The king was fond of his chess or some game analogous to it, and the gaming pieces are ivory lions couchant of really excellent modeling. Copper tools are seen now to have come into use. The flaking of flint has developed, so that the spearheads are notched as well as flaked to a fine edge, and crystal now is actually worked both into arrowheads and knives. The tattooer is a person of importance; his little flint-spiked tattoo instrument is preserved. Fashion in hairdressing has made it obligatory that ladies should as far as possible wear their own hair, and even in old age not be bald-headed, and here we have given from the dust of 67 00 years an excellent example of a hair plait, and a false fringe, — the curl of it as good as when it left the wigmaker’s hand.

As for pottery, this now is sought for and brought from far across the sea. For here in a northwestern cell of the tomb of Zer was discovered a group of offering vases, caked together by the resins which melted when at some time the contents of the tomb of Zer were set on fire; in this black and charred mass of clay jars and unguent and resinous wrappings were found not only vases and alabaster jars of Egyptian make of the time of Zer, but with them clay vases of a slender shape, with handles such as were unknown in Egypt, and which could only be of European make, and may very well have come from the Ægean potter’s hands 4700 B. C.

It was not only in pottery that advances had been made; fragments of ivory bracelets with checkered pattern were found. A marble vase sculptured all over with ropework pattern in relief was discovered. But the great discovery in the tomb of Zer was the examples of jeweler’s work, which as the oldest examples of the craft known are worth description.

The arm of the queen of Zer, that had all through her centuries of sleep worn these four beautiful bracelets, had been broken from her body when the tomb was plundered, and hastily, because of its ornaments, stowed away in a crevice in the wall. It had not been discovered by the builders of the Osiris shrine in the time of Amenhotep III., and for one thousand years votaries who passed with offerings close by never noticed it. It had escaped the eagle eye of the ravaging Copt, and very fortunately for Dr. Petrie had not been recognized for what it was worth by M. Amelincau and his diggers. Dr. Petrie has trained his workmen to believe that they will be well and justly paid for anything they bring him, and they went off at once to Dr. Petrie’s assistant, reported the find, and were able to give the arm with the bracelets intact into their employer’s hands.

The originals are now in the Cairo Museum, but careful casts have been made and brought to England. The first bracelet consists of a series of façades with the Royal Hawk above, alternate gold and turquoise. The turquoise hawks were made probably in the time of Aha-Mena, and came from another bracelet, for they have been originally threaded with beads between them ; the gold hawks are of the more finished type of the Horus hawk of King Zer. The man who worked the golden hawks cast them each in a double mould, and burnished with such perfect nicety that only an expert could tell they had not been cast by “cire perdue ” process.

The second bracelet has a gold rosette or daisy as its central ornament, flanked by beads of turquoise and gold, these again flanked by dark purple beads of lapis lazuli, and these in turn by golden balls. The second half of the bracelet shows a similar arrangement, but without the rosette, and the arrangement of gold and lapis-lazuli beads is reversed. The jeweler who beat out the halves of the golden balls and soldered the two parts of each together must have been a past master in the art of soldering, just as the man who arranged the beads of gold and turquoise and purple lapis lazuli in the two other bracelets must have been a past master in the art of color arrangement. The form of the barrel-shaped beads of gold in one, and the hourglass beads of gold and amethyst in the fourth bracelet, show great knowledge of the need of variety in ornament; and the skillful threading of the fourth bracelet and the lashing of the hair — which was used to connect the bracelet to the separate beads with finest gold wire — show marvelous skill and dexterity. The jewelry found at Dahshur was in age two thousand years later; it does not show a greater knowledge of variety of design nor finer work.

It is clear that in the time of Zer women were well cared for and indulged, even if we had not a little picture on an ivory tablet preserved to us of the king with the queen upon his knees ; and it is pretty certain that if Queen Zer came amongst us at this day she would ask for the jeweler’s bazaar, but she would also probably ask for her dwarf to be her companion thither, for a drawing on a piece of hard stone found in the tomb shows us a dwarf.

Of the other tombs, one may note that the great stairway that took the explorers down into the tomb chambers of DenSetui allowed them to bring up from the dead evidence of cruel destruction of important bits of history in the careless breaking and casting aside of tablets of wood and ivory; but at least Dr. Petrie was able to discover that King Den used in his day a golden seal for his judgments, and a glance at the king’s own seals shows that this king was a mighty hunter before the Lord; he is seen to spear the crocodile and to hunt the hippopotamus, while from the dust of his entombment was brought the oryx horns which had been used to make a bow for the king, with arrows of reed pointed with long ivory points ; some of them, stained red as if for magical purpose, were lying near. This king had dealings with the potters across the sea. Ægean pottery was found in his tomb also, and, to judge by the amount of carven fragments, encouraged home arts also; copper chisels were in use in his time. How his table was furnished we know not, but his friends apparently remembered he had a weakness for sycamore figs; they were found dried in abundance.

Of the second dynasty tombs, the one that gave most valuable information as to the order of the royal houses was the tomb of Perabsen, the fourth king. His gray syenite steles that were discovered not only bear his royal name with the Jackal above the cartouche, but show by their shape that Phallic worship had its votaries in his day. Little was found in the great tomb with its side chambers and its inclosing passage or circumambulatory. It had been well cleared out. But the king seems to have been a fisherman, and large copper fish-hooks had been left with him when he slept with his fathers.

Three vase inscriptions from this tomb tell us of Hotepahaui, the first king of the second dynasty — 4514 B. c. ; and the diorite bowl which Horus Ranab, the king, had used for the washing of his hands had evidently been appropriated by another king; Ranab’s name had been erased, and the inscription had been made to run thus: —

“ For the daily washing of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt Neteren.”

Thus Dr. Petrie was able to reconstruct the order of the kings, — Hotepahaui, Ranab, and Neteren, which agrees with the order upon a certain ancient statue in the Cairo Museum.

The tomb which was perhaps of greatest interest as far as finds went, next to the tomb of Zer, was that in which Khasekhemui, the last king of the second dynasty, had been buried, probably about the year 4212 B. c., —Khasekhemui, the lover of cornelian beads and glazed pottery and diorite bowls that the sun might shine through.

It was a vast mausoleum this, with a central stone chamber for the king’s body, and no less than fifty-eight store chambers for the treasure chattels and retinue of the king in the world of spirit. In store chamber number fortyfour was a magnificent diorite bowl that looked almost as if the old hand hollowing and finish had been superseded by a lathe.

But the great find was a series of little white marble and cornelian bowls for toilet use, which were in the passage opposite chamber twenty-one. The neatness with which the man who stored these with unguent had capped them with beaten gold, in jam-pot fashion, and tied on the caps with twisted gold thread and sealed them with clay, was astonishing. The handiest member of the Apothecaries’ Hall would have envied him his skill. Gold must have been plentiful in Khasekhemui’s days; for when the broken-china-mender came round to the royal palace it is clear that the keeper of the king’s pantry had given him a broken bowl to mend, but charged him to see to it that he only used gold rivets.

Nor was gold the only metal that was cared for in Khasekhemui’s time. Copper chisels, copper tool moulds to the number of 194, and copper bowls were brought forth to the light, and from the store chamber number twenty, copper axes were also taken.

Travelers up the Nile have doubtless landed, and ploughing through the golden yellow sand drifts have entered that quaint double temple at Kom Ombo dedicate to Darkness and to Light. It has remained for the tomb of Khasekhemui to furnish us with a copper libation bowl with a double spout, which was probably used by the king who took the name of the “Rising of the peaceful double power of the two gods in him, ” when he bowed his head in the temple of Set and Horus and poured libation to the double principle of Evil and Good which he felt so near to him. Always above the name of the king upon his seal is shown the figures of Set and Horus, the Jackal and the Hawk; and that copper libation bowl with its double spout is a memorial of an ancient king of Abydos, who perhaps dimly felt, as centuries after the Psalmist understood, that “the darkness and the light are both alike to Thee.”

One other treasure came forth from the sand of Khasekhemui’s mighty grave. It was the king’s sceptre. The handle of the sceptre is wanting, and of the two pieces only one came to England ; the other portion, about five inches long, was reserved for the Cairo Museum. It is made of sard cylinders upon a copper rod, the cylinders of the sard being banded together by solid rings of gold.

The tombs of this first and second dynasty have at any rate made us feel that though the great men of the time were users of flint knives and drank for the most part out of stone mugs, they knew the worth of ornament, had an eye for color, and honored the hand of the craftsman in gold and ivory, ebony, alabaster, and diorite, and went to their graves in full belief that work well done here would outlast death, and find use and glory beyond the Veil.

Still, in the third season, the romance of that great resurrection of the royal dead at Abydos runs on. Dr. Petrie and his wife, Mr. Caulfield, Mr. Weigall, and Mr. Christie have returned from their campaign bearing in their hands, it is true, no jewelry like the bracelets of the queenly wife of Zer, no golden standard weight of the age of Mena, but bringing in their hands, what is of infinitely more importance, proof that amounts to proof positive, that the prehistoric times overlapped the historic days; that Abydos was a place of fame even before the time of Ka, and that very gradually the age of the masterworker in flint gave way to the age of the master-worker in pots, and that the civilization which in the age of Ka enabled men with brush of paint to write swiftly or draw strongly the hieroglyphics of the day in a flowing cursive style upon the commonest pieces of pottery was not the beginning of things in the valley of the Nile.

But the great work of the season from the historian’s point of view was the being able by careful measurements of the depth at which any fragments of flint, or vase, or pot, or ornament, or bronze was found, in the soil above the clean sand of the desert, and by careful comparison of the objects found with the shapes of objects from the prehistoric cemeteries, or from the royal tombs of Abydos, to determine to what age they belonged, and so to build up a kind of standard of time and date during which the shapes were permanent, and to show how these various shapes changed as time went on.

It was fortunate for posterity that M. Amelincau and his merry jar-breakers had not had the luck to come upon these tombs. Not only was it possible to obtain a very large amount of dated pottery of the first dynasty unbroken, but comparisons with the vases and jars found elsewhere in the Temenos and in the royal tombs enabled much to be known or guessed at. It was clear to Dr. Petrie that, with one exception, the tomb chamber did not contain vases of stone or alabaster at all up to the finish of those in the kings’ tombs. It looked also as if the stone vase was held to be so valuable that, if whole vases were not obtainable, parts of broken ones were considered as serviceable for the use of the dead. Another fact was plain. There must have been a series of standard shapes of alabaster vases in vogue, and great care had been taken to see that specimens of all these varieties of cylinder jars had been deliberately placed in each tomb. The Temenos of Abydos has not yielded up all its secrets yet, but it has told us many things, and added no inconsiderable flavor to the romance of the history of the first dynasty and the times that immediately preceded it. We wait for the final exploration of this centre of the oldest historic civilization and worship by the banks of Nile, and the grist of next season’s labors, with the keenest interest and expectation.

H. D. Rawnsley.