The Narmer Palette, also known as the Great Hierakonpolis Palette or the
Palette of Narmer, is a significant Egyptian archeological find, dating from
about the 31st century BC, containing some of the earliest hieroglyphic
inscriptions ever found. It is thought by some to depict the unification of
Upper and Lower Egypt under the king Narmer. On one side, the king is
depicted with the bulbed White Crown of Upper Egypt, and the other side depicts
the king wearing the level Red Crown of Lower Egypt. Along with the Scorpion
Macehead and the Narmer Maceheads, also found together in the Main Deposit at
Nekhen, the Narmer Palette provides one of the earliest known depictions of an
Egyptian king. The Palette shows many of the classic conventions of Ancient
Egyptian art, which must already have been formalized by the time of the
Palette's creation. The Egyptologist Bob Brier has referred to the Narmer Palette
as "the first historical document in the world".
The Palette, which has survived five millennia in almost perfect condition,
was discovered by British archeologists James E. Quibell and Frederick W. Green,
in what they called the Main Deposit in the Temple of Horus at Nekhen, during
the dig season of 1897–1898. Also found at this dig were the Narmer Macehead and
the Scorpion Macehead. The exact place and circumstances of these finds were
not recorded very clearly by Quibell and Green. In fact, Green's report placed
the Palette in a different layer one or two yards away from the deposit, which
is considered to be more accurate on the basis of the original excavation notes.
It has been suggested that these objects were royal donations made to the temple.
Nekhen, or Hierakonpolis, was the ancient capital of Upper Egypt during
the pre-dynastic Naqada III phase of Egyptian history.
Palettes were typically used for grinding cosmetics, but this palette is
too large and heavy to have been created for personal use and was probably a
ritual or votive object, specifically made for donation to, or use in, a
temple. One theory is that it was used to grind cosmetics to adorn the statues
of the gods. The Narmer Palette is part of the
permanent collection of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. It is one of the
initial exhibits which visitors have been able to see when entering the
museum. It has the Journal d'Entrée number JE32169 and the Catalogue Général
number CG14716. Description
The Narmer Palette is a 63-centimetre tall, shield-shaped, ceremonial palette,
carved from a single piece of flat, soft dark gray-green siltstone. The stone has
often been wrongly identified, in the past, as being slate or schist. Slate is
layered and prone to flaking, and schist is a metamorphic rock containing large,
randomly distributed mineral grains. Both are unlike the finely grained,
hard, flake-resistant siltstone, whose source is from a well-attested quarry
that has been used since pre-dynastic times at Wadi Hammamat. This material
was used extensively during the pre-dynastic period for creating such
palettes and also was used as a source for Old Kingdom statuary. A statue of
the 2nd dynasty pharaoh Khasekhemwy, found in the same complex as the Narmer
Palette at Hierakonpolis, also was made of this material.
Both sides of the Palette are decorated, carved in raised relief. At the top of
both sides of the Palette are the central serekhs bearing the rebus
symbols n'r and mr inside, being the phonetic representation of Narmer's
name. The serekh on each side are flanked by a pair of bovine heads with
highly curved horns, thought to represent the cow goddess Bat. She was
the patron deity of the seventh nome of Upper Egypt and was also the deification
of the cosmos within Egyptian mythology during the pre-dynastic and Old Kingdom
periods of Ancient Egyptian history. The Palette shows the typical Egyptian
convention for important figures in painting and reliefs of showing the
striding legs and the head in profile, but the torso as from the front. The
canon of body proportion based on the "fist", measured across the knuckles,
with 18 fists from the ground to the hairline on the forehead is also already
established. Both conventions remained in use until at least the conquest by
Alexander the Great some 3,000 years later. However the minor figures in
active poses, such as the king's captive, the corpses and the handlers of
the serpopard beasts, are much more freely depicted.
= Smiting side= As on the other side, two human-faced
bovine heads, thought to represent the patron cow goddess Bat, flank the
serekhs. The goddess Bat is, as she often was, shown in portrait, rather
than in profile as is traditional in Egyptian relief carving. Hathor, who
shared many of Bat's characteristics, is often depicted in a similar manner. Some
authors suggest that the images represent the vigor of the king as a
pair of bulls. A large picture in the center of the
Palette depicts Narmer wielding a mace wearing the White Crown of Upper Egypt.
On the left of the king is a man bearing the king's sandals, once again flanked
by a rosette symbol. To the right of the king is a kneeling prisoner, who is
about to be struck by the king. A pair of symbols appear next to his head,
perhaps indicating his name or indicating the region where he was from.
Above the prisoner is a falcon, representing Horus, perched above a set
of papyrus flowers, the symbol of Lower Egypt. In his talons, he holds a
rope-like object which appears to be attached to the nose of a man's head
that also emerges from the papyrus flowers, perhaps indicating that he is
drawing life from the head. The papyrus has often been interpreted as referring
to the marshes of the Nile Delta region in Lower Egypt, or that the battle
happened in a marshy area, or even that each papyrus flower represents the
number 1,000, indicating that 6,000 enemies were subdued in the battle.
Below the king's feet is a third section, depicting two naked, bearded
men. They are either running or are meant to be seen as sprawling dead upon
the ground. Appearing to the left of the head of each man is a hieroglyphic sign,
the first a walled town, the second a type of knot, probably indicating the
name of a defeated town. = Serpopard side=
Below the bovine heads is what appears to be a procession. Narmer is depicted
at nearly the full height of the register, emphasizing his god-like
status in an artistic practice called hierarchic scale, shown wearing the Red
Crown of Lower Egypt, whose symbol was the papyrus. He holds a mace and a
flail, two traditional symbols of kingship. To his right are the
hieroglyphic symbols for his name, though not contained within a serekh.
Behind him is his sandal-bearer, whose name may be represented by the rosette
appearing adjacent to his head, and a second rectangular symbol that has no
clear interpretation but which has been suggested may represent a town or
citadel. Immediately in front of the pharaoh is a long-haired man,
accompanied by a pair of hieroglyphs that have been interpreted as his name:
Tshet. Before this man are four standard bearers, holding aloft an animal skin, a
dog, and two falcons. At the far right of this scene are ten decapitated
corpses, with heads at their feet, possibly symbolizing the victims of
Narmer's conquest. Above them are the symbols for a ship, a falcon, and a
harpoon, which has been interpreted as representing the names of the towns that
were conquered. Below the procession, two men are
holding ropes tied to the outstretched, intertwining necks of two serpopards
confronting each other. The serpopard is a mythological creature whose name is a
portmanteau of the words "serpent" and "leopard" The circle formed by their
curving necks is the central part of the Palette, which is the area where the
cosmetics would have been ground. Upper and Lower Egypt each worshipped lioness
war goddesses as protectors; the intertwined necks of the serpopards may
thus represent the unification of the state. Similar images of such mythical
animals are known from other contemporaneous cultures, and there are
other examples of late-predynastic objects which borrow similar elements
from Mesopotamian iconography. At the bottom of the Palette, a bovine
image is seen knocking down the walls of a city while trampling on a fallen foe.
Because of the lowered head in the image, this is interpreted as a
presentation of the king vanquishing his foes, "Bull of his Mother" being a
common epithet given to Egyptian kings as the son of the patron cow goddess.
This posture of a bovine has the meaning of "force" in later hieroglyphics.
Scholarly debate on the Palette The Palette has raised considerable
scholarly debate over the years. In general, the arguments fall into one of
two camps: scholars who believe that the Palette is a record of actual events,
and other academics who argue that it is an object designed to establish the
mythology of united rule over Upper and Lower Egypt by the king. It had been
thought that the Palette either depicted the unification of Lower Egypt by the
king of Upper Egypt or recorded a recent military success over the Libyans or the
last stronghold of a Lower Egyptian dynasty based in Buto. More recently,
scholars such as Nicholas Millet have argued that the Palette does not
represent a historical event, but instead represents the events of the
year in which the object was dedicated to the temple. Whitney Davis has
suggested that the iconography on this and other pre-dynastic palettes has more
to do with establishing the king as a visual metaphor of the conquering hunter
caught in the moment of delivering a mortal blow to his enemies. John Baines
has suggested that the events portrayed are "tokens of royal achievement" from
the past and that "the chief purpose of the piece is not to record an event but
to assert that the king dominates the ordered world in the name of the gods
and has defeated internal, and especially external, forces of disorder.
In popular culture The Narmer Palette is featured in the
2009 film Watchmen. The Australian author Jackie French used the Palette,
and recent research into Sumerian trade routes, to create her historical novel
Pharaoh. The Palette is featured in manga artist Yukinobu Hoshino's short
story "The temple of El Alamein". The Palette is also featured in The Kane
Chronicles by Rick Riordan where the actual palette is fetched by a magical
shwabati servant instead of just a picture to Carter's utter horror.
See also Libyan Palette
Warka Vase Kish tablet
References Bibliography
Brier, Bob. The First Nation in History. History of Ancient Egypt. The Teaching
Company. 2001. Kinnaer, Jacques. "What is Really Known
About the Narmer Palette?", KMT: A Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt, Spring
2004. Wilkinson, Toby A. H. Early Dynastic
Egypt Routledge, London 1999, ISBN 0-415-18633-1.
Grimal, Nicolas Christophe A history of Ancient Egypt. Wiley-Blackwell, London
1996, ISBN 0-631-19396-0. Kemp, Barry J. Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of
a Civilization Routledge, London 2005, ISBN 0-415-23550-2.
Davis, Whitney Masking the Blow: The Scene of Representation in Late
Prehistoric Egyptian Art. Berkeley, Oxford 1992, ISBN 0-520-07488-2.
External links Narmer Palette - Archaeowiki.org
High resolution photograph of the Narmer Palette
Good images of Narmer Palette Scroll down to the drawing of the Palette and
take the link to the photographs published by Francesco Rafaele.
The Narmer Palette: The victorious king of the south
Narmer Palette Narmer Palette
Corpus of Egyptian Late Predynastic Palettes Images of more than fifty such
palettes with various motifs