Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [21]
We don’t know a lot about Menes, but actually it is more than we might expect to know about a legendary character. Indeed, as we proceed we will find ourselves saddled with that archaeological rarity, an embarras de richesses. In Holmesian terms, it might be called “The Perplexing Problem of the Duplicate Tombs.”
Two hundred miles north of Luxor lies the very ancient holy city of Osiris, god of the dead. It is called Abydos, and it was a place all the kings of Egypt delighted to honor. Before Osiris came to dwell there, it was the sanctuary of another, even older, mortuary god, and pilgrims from all over Egypt laid their bones in that sanctified ground in order to win greater glory in the world to come. The tomb of Osiris himself was there; its exact location was well known to the devout Egyptians.
When archaeologists began to excavate at Abydos, they were not expecting to find Osiris, nor did they. What they did uncover was almost equally unexpected—tombs of the kings and queens of the First Dynasty, including the tomb of King Aha. The excavators must have felt almost as much awe as they would have felt at finding Osiris himself.
One of the first people to excavate at Abydos was—correct. William Flinders Petrie. He won permission to dig at the site only after some difficulty, for the concession had been given by the Department of Antiquities to another archaeologist, a Frenchman named Emile Amelineau. It is considered courteous these days to give the early excavators a polite tip of the hat, in tribute to their intentions if not their methods; but it is hard to say anything very complimentary about Amelineau. He drove Petrie to distraction. Indeed, most people drove Petrie to distraction, for few of them could live up to his high standards, and he did not brook fools lightly. In the case of Amelineau we can sympathize with Petrie, because after the French excavator had dismembered the site of Abydos, Petrie was given the pieces. Amelineau had removed all the interesting items he found, without—to Petrie’s fury—keeping records of how and where they were found. He had also ruthlessly destroyed much of the material he could not carry away. Yet Abydos was to show Petrie’s ability in all its glory. His publication is still a standard reference work.
Petrie’s thoroughness led him to one spectacular discovery, which Amelineau had missed—the mummified arm of a long-dead king or queen that still wore a set of exquisite bracelets made of gold, amethyst, turquoise, and lapis lazuli. Tomb robbers had rifled the coffin in remote antiquity and ripped off the jewels, arm and all. But something disturbed them in the midst of their job, and they had to run for their lives. In so doing, one of them stuck the mummified arm into a crack in the rock, planning to come back for it later when the heat was off. We may reasonably hope that the ancient gendarmes caught up with this particular member of the third or fourth oldest profession, for he never retrieved his loot. It is surprisingly attractive, this jewelry, and surprisingly well made. It gave Petrie an impression, which is borne out by other research, that the First Dynasty, so near in time to the primitive, was much more complex and sophisticated than one might expect.
This same Abydos tomb, which belonged to a king called Djer, provided a clue to a darker part of Egypt’s past. Most readers know of Sir Leonard Woolley’s discoveries at Ur, in Mesopotamia—the great royal tombs with their treasures of gold and the slaughtered bodies of hundreds of courtiers and slaves, who went to serve their masters in death as they had in life. Egyptologists have been mildly smug about the more civilized habits of their people, who supplied dead kings with wooden servant