Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [14]
There have been sporadic excavations at Hierakonpolis for over a century. Early expeditions turned up some of the best-known artifacts of the late predynastic—the Narmer palette, the so-called painted tomb, the Scorpion mace head, and so on. In the late 1960s an expedition settled in for the long haul, and it has laid bare innumerable cemeteries, a town site of considerable extent, and the remains of one of the first temples found in Egypt. The temple was dedicated to the god Horus, who became the symbol of kingship and one of the most popular deities of Egypt throughout dynastic history. The fact that Horus was apparently the local god, the sheer size of the town, and the existence of various royal artifacts suggest that Hierakonpolis was the capital of an Upper Egyptian kingdom—one of several, perhaps, with Thinis (Abydos) and Naqada as rivals. Eventually, to make a long story short, the kingdoms became one. Whether diplomacy and royal intermarriage were factors is and probably always will be unknown, but there certainly was a lot of fighting. Scenes of battle and the ceremonial bashing of captives appear on carved objects dating from this period—knife handles, mace heads, and stone palettes.
Presumably a similar process was going on in the Delta, so that eventually there were two kingdoms, one in the north and one in the south. Each kingdom had its own set of symbols and insignias and its own protective gods and goddesses. The king of Upper Egypt wore a distinctive White Crown and the king of Lower Egypt a Red Crown.
Crowns of the king of Egypt Above, right to left: red crown, white crown, double crown Below, right to left: blue crown, Nemes headdress
We know that there were kings of the southland, for one of them was the Unifier, who conquered the north and became the first king of the Two Lands of Egypt. We know his name—Menes. We know when this signficant event happened. It was in 3400 B.C.; or 3110 B.C.; or maybe 2850 B.C.
A relative chronology like Petrie’s presents problems of one order; absolute dating has its own difficulties, and they are not minor ones. The adjective “absolute” may sound misleading. How can a system be absolute when we can give three alternative dates for an event like the beginning of the First Dynasty? We would expect one date, or none at all. Let us now consider some of the techniques used in Egyptian chronology. It is a complicated subject and deserves a section all to itself.
TROUBLES WITH TIME
If the reader is up-to-date on archaeological matters, he may expect a short, snappy answer to all the problems of chronology: carbon 14. He would be mistaken, on two counts: there is nothing short or simple about the radiocarbon process, or its applicability to historical problems; and, in fact, it did not solve the major chronological questions about dynastic Egypt. The process is certainly fantastically useful in other parts of the past, particularly in those very remote eras that are the province of the archaeologist-anthropologist rather than the archaeologist-historian. But in the case of Egypt, the previously established dating system helped to establish the validity of the carbon 14 process rather than the reverse.
The savage reader (to plagiarize Mark Twain) may reasonably ask at this point, “Why talk about it, then?” There are several good, logical answers to the question. One is that the radiocarbon process is very useful in dealing with Egyptian prehistory; another is that carbon 14 is only one of a number of related methods, the great gift of the physical sciences to history, which deserve a more than cursory treatment. But the real reason I want to discuss carbon 14 is because it delights me by its inherent improbability. Eighty years ago, the suggestion that a physicist could tell an archaeologist the age of a piece of wood by purely physical, laboratory techniques would have struck said