Post by anansi on Apr 13, 2016 4:45:27 GMT -5
ESR peeps the link below is chock full of info about the pre-unification of Kmt about as good a resource as one can find
1 - Premise
The origin of the Serekh as a representation of the royal authority of Late Predynastic and Early Dynastic Egyptian kings is an argument which requires a premise of historical character.
There is a number of questions of wider range about Late Predynastic Egypt which have not yet found a proper answer. Some of these problems are also connected with the evidence provided by the early "serekhs" and by their possible function and geo-chronological distribution.
State-formation in Egypt is a common object of debate; there are some general theories each focussing on different factors or causes and proposing alternative processes and modalities which would have lead to the concretization of the Dynastic State.
The way in which a more complex kind of society originated in Egypt could have been either a peaceful (/trade-based one: Trigger, Wildung, Köhler) or rather a conflictual/military one (classical model followed by Kaiser, Helck, von der Way) or perhaps a combination of both (and of further interacting factors; Hoffman, Kemp, Bard).[1
The archaeological data and their interpretations have undergone an outstanding renewal in the last twenty years. Yet they remain more or less unbalanced. For example the Late Predynastic (L.P.) and Early Dynastic (E.D.) period in the Delta was very poorly known before the beginning of excavation campaigns in the 1980s and the publications of E.C.M. van den Brink edited volumes of 1988, 1992 on Nile Delta. Now we have a good quantity and quality of data for that region, from both cemeteries and settlements; this contrasts with the documentation from Upper Egypt and Nubia which, for the same period, is (owing to different reasons) mainly deriving from funerary contexts, with the important exceptions of isolated finds at Koptos, Naqada, Armant, desert widians (rock graffiti) and, especially, the more substantial and recently excavated contexts at Hierakonpolis, Adaima and at Elephantine (E.D.). Furthermore, contrarily to what can be said for some southern cemeteries, namely those of Abydos (U, B), Hierakonpolis (Loc. 6, Loc. 33 tomb 100) or Qustul L, Seyala 137, which have been convincingly demonstrated as belonging to the local or regional chiefs, no similar proposal or conclusion has been drawn, to my knowledge, for any Lower Egyptian (L.E.) cemetery or tomb (also those which yielded royal insignia like pottery incised/painted serekhs) of Naqada IIC-IIIC1 (c. 3500-3000BC).
There are indeed some indications which seem to suggest that there could have existed independent regions or at least localities up to the very end of Dynasty 0; these conclusions are generally based on the occurrence of royal names (as Horus Crocodile, Scorpion II and others) which haven't been (yet) recovered in the Abydos L.P. cemeteries. But as we have seen, in L.E. during Naqada IIIA-B we don't know any cemetery which may be certainly attributed to local polities' rulers: this heavily influences our opinion about Abydos: the absence of the mentioned evidence leads us to believe that the Thinite could have already been at that time the leaders of the whole Egyptian Nile Valley. But this is far from being an ascertained fact, although remaining a concrete possibility. The 'political' situation of early Naqada III L.E. and Delta is, therefore, still a partial riddle.
All these factors must be taken into account, for they risk to bias our view of the processes developed during Naqada III. One of the central points here, is just the role of the Abydos élite before Naqada IIIC - beginning of Dynasty 1 (circa 3060 BC): should the enormous amount of gravegoods and imported Palestinese wine-jars found in Scorpion's tomb U-j at Abydos be interpreted as a clue that this king already reigned all over Egypt (in Naqada IIIA1/a2, i.e. 200±50 years before Narmer), or can we only assume he had overwhelmed the other regional polities of the Qena bend area (such as Naqada: cf. the Gebel Tjawty panel)? Surely long distance trade with Southern Levant (espec. luxury goods as wine, oil, cedar wood, resins) was already very important for Upper and Lower Egyptian societies at that time (and even before: e.g. Maadi, Buto). But we are not impelled to presuppose a U.E. monopoly for that, and not even a colonization of Near Eastern centres; this latter circumstance seems to have only occurred late in Dynasty 0 up to the first half of Dynasty 1.
Probably the Thinites initially availed of trade intermediaries: in the case of the Southern Levant route, these middlemen must have been the North Egyptians, whose culture -up to early Naqada II- still differed from the Southerners' "Naqadian" one.
We don't know when did these relations (if any) cease and whether did the Thinites exploit an alternative trade-route via the Wadi Hammamat and Red Sea as it's been also proposed. In Naqada IIIA-B, there is no trace of any royal name (before *Iry-Hor and especially Ka and Narmer) which has been identified in distant spots of the Nile Valley: the exception is king (?) "Double Falcon", known from U.E. [Adaima, Abydos(?)] to N. Sinai and S. Palestine. But it has not been demonstrated that this serekh (cf. the different variants in, van den Brink, Archéo-Nil 11, 2001) is a personalized one, thus identifying a precise early Naqada IIIB ruler's name. Stan Hendrickx has expressed his perplexities about the actual value as a personal royal name of all the plain, anonymous and even some apparently 'personalized' serekhs pre-dating those of late Naqada IIIB (ab Horus Ka).
This period was an age of transition, equally or even more than the Early Dynastic was. We can follow the evolution of determined 'patterns' which led to incredible achievements of the late Dynasty 0, in turn brilliantly pursued in the dynastic times. On the other hand, a number of other paths (which however make up an equally significant part of L.P. archaeological data characters) were abandoned and did not survive to the rapid changes and turmoiled centuries of the political unification and/or to the radical re-canonization and new organization of the First Dynasty state.
To adequately follow the growth of the pre- and early- dynastic civilization, we should analyze both the differences/breaks between them and the elements of continuity/evolution; every single feature of the material culture we are facing with must be properly studied: the evident character that manufacts, their attributes and other products express (primary use, style and typology, technology and material used, diffusion) but also their more hidden or concealed aspects (ideology and symbolic value, eventual hidden purpose and 'esoteric' meaning).
The early royal name is one of these patterns of which we can analyze the structure (graphic compound form), meaning, diffusion and historical evolution, in order to attempt to isolate relevant data not only for the specifical matter but, as we'll see, for wider range objectives too.
]
The origin of the Serekh as a representation of the royal authority of Late Predynastic and Early Dynastic Egyptian kings is an argument which requires a premise of historical character.
There is a number of questions of wider range about Late Predynastic Egypt which have not yet found a proper answer. Some of these problems are also connected with the evidence provided by the early "serekhs" and by their possible function and geo-chronological distribution.
State-formation in Egypt is a common object of debate; there are some general theories each focussing on different factors or causes and proposing alternative processes and modalities which would have lead to the concretization of the Dynastic State.
The way in which a more complex kind of society originated in Egypt could have been either a peaceful (/trade-based one: Trigger, Wildung, Köhler) or rather a conflictual/military one (classical model followed by Kaiser, Helck, von der Way) or perhaps a combination of both (and of further interacting factors; Hoffman, Kemp, Bard).[1
The archaeological data and their interpretations have undergone an outstanding renewal in the last twenty years. Yet they remain more or less unbalanced. For example the Late Predynastic (L.P.) and Early Dynastic (E.D.) period in the Delta was very poorly known before the beginning of excavation campaigns in the 1980s and the publications of E.C.M. van den Brink edited volumes of 1988, 1992 on Nile Delta. Now we have a good quantity and quality of data for that region, from both cemeteries and settlements; this contrasts with the documentation from Upper Egypt and Nubia which, for the same period, is (owing to different reasons) mainly deriving from funerary contexts, with the important exceptions of isolated finds at Koptos, Naqada, Armant, desert widians (rock graffiti) and, especially, the more substantial and recently excavated contexts at Hierakonpolis, Adaima and at Elephantine (E.D.). Furthermore, contrarily to what can be said for some southern cemeteries, namely those of Abydos (U, B), Hierakonpolis (Loc. 6, Loc. 33 tomb 100) or Qustul L, Seyala 137, which have been convincingly demonstrated as belonging to the local or regional chiefs, no similar proposal or conclusion has been drawn, to my knowledge, for any Lower Egyptian (L.E.) cemetery or tomb (also those which yielded royal insignia like pottery incised/painted serekhs) of Naqada IIC-IIIC1 (c. 3500-3000BC).
There are indeed some indications which seem to suggest that there could have existed independent regions or at least localities up to the very end of Dynasty 0; these conclusions are generally based on the occurrence of royal names (as Horus Crocodile, Scorpion II and others) which haven't been (yet) recovered in the Abydos L.P. cemeteries. But as we have seen, in L.E. during Naqada IIIA-B we don't know any cemetery which may be certainly attributed to local polities' rulers: this heavily influences our opinion about Abydos: the absence of the mentioned evidence leads us to believe that the Thinite could have already been at that time the leaders of the whole Egyptian Nile Valley. But this is far from being an ascertained fact, although remaining a concrete possibility. The 'political' situation of early Naqada III L.E. and Delta is, therefore, still a partial riddle.
All these factors must be taken into account, for they risk to bias our view of the processes developed during Naqada III. One of the central points here, is just the role of the Abydos élite before Naqada IIIC - beginning of Dynasty 1 (circa 3060 BC): should the enormous amount of gravegoods and imported Palestinese wine-jars found in Scorpion's tomb U-j at Abydos be interpreted as a clue that this king already reigned all over Egypt (in Naqada IIIA1/a2, i.e. 200±50 years before Narmer), or can we only assume he had overwhelmed the other regional polities of the Qena bend area (such as Naqada: cf. the Gebel Tjawty panel)? Surely long distance trade with Southern Levant (espec. luxury goods as wine, oil, cedar wood, resins) was already very important for Upper and Lower Egyptian societies at that time (and even before: e.g. Maadi, Buto). But we are not impelled to presuppose a U.E. monopoly for that, and not even a colonization of Near Eastern centres; this latter circumstance seems to have only occurred late in Dynasty 0 up to the first half of Dynasty 1.
Probably the Thinites initially availed of trade intermediaries: in the case of the Southern Levant route, these middlemen must have been the North Egyptians, whose culture -up to early Naqada II- still differed from the Southerners' "Naqadian" one.
We don't know when did these relations (if any) cease and whether did the Thinites exploit an alternative trade-route via the Wadi Hammamat and Red Sea as it's been also proposed. In Naqada IIIA-B, there is no trace of any royal name (before *Iry-Hor and especially Ka and Narmer) which has been identified in distant spots of the Nile Valley: the exception is king (?) "Double Falcon", known from U.E. [Adaima, Abydos(?)] to N. Sinai and S. Palestine. But it has not been demonstrated that this serekh (cf. the different variants in, van den Brink, Archéo-Nil 11, 2001) is a personalized one, thus identifying a precise early Naqada IIIB ruler's name. Stan Hendrickx has expressed his perplexities about the actual value as a personal royal name of all the plain, anonymous and even some apparently 'personalized' serekhs pre-dating those of late Naqada IIIB (ab Horus Ka).
This period was an age of transition, equally or even more than the Early Dynastic was. We can follow the evolution of determined 'patterns' which led to incredible achievements of the late Dynasty 0, in turn brilliantly pursued in the dynastic times. On the other hand, a number of other paths (which however make up an equally significant part of L.P. archaeological data characters) were abandoned and did not survive to the rapid changes and turmoiled centuries of the political unification and/or to the radical re-canonization and new organization of the First Dynasty state.
To adequately follow the growth of the pre- and early- dynastic civilization, we should analyze both the differences/breaks between them and the elements of continuity/evolution; every single feature of the material culture we are facing with must be properly studied: the evident character that manufacts, their attributes and other products express (primary use, style and typology, technology and material used, diffusion) but also their more hidden or concealed aspects (ideology and symbolic value, eventual hidden purpose and 'esoteric' meaning).
The early royal name is one of these patterns of which we can analyze the structure (graphic compound form), meaning, diffusion and historical evolution, in order to attempt to isolate relevant data not only for the specifical matter but, as we'll see, for wider range objectives too.
]
xoomer.virgilio.it/francescoraf/hesyra/Dyn0serekhs.htm
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