Ancient Egypt by Ian Shaw

Author:Ian Shaw [Shaw, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192584212
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2020-12-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Identity

The Narmer Palette includes scenes in which either the king himself or his divine alter-egos (the falcon-god Horus on one side and a bull on the other) dispatch or humiliate foreigners and enemies. As we have seen, these images are part of the paraphernalia of Egyptian stereotypical kingship, but they are also part of the iconography through which the ancient Egyptian population perhaps defined and reaffirmed themselves as a people and as a nation, in contrast to what they saw as the chaotic sea of foreignness that lay beyond their borders. It is unclear whether the figure held in captivity by the Horus falcon on the Narmer Palette was a Libyan or an Asiatic, or whether this was a case of civil war and the prisoner is a Lower Egyptian, in the process of being forcibly integrated into a united Upper and Lower Egyptian kingdom. We might also ask whether the two prone figures in the lower part of the palette, and also the decapitated and emasculated human figures on the other side of the palette, are Lower Egyptians or foreigners. Did Upper Egyptians regard Lower Egyptians as quasi-foreigners during the final phase of the Predynastic? Were the king and his courtiers not ‘Egyptian’ themselves but invaders from the Near East, as Egyptologists such as Petrie and Emery argued? If so, which figures on the palette were the true Egyptians?

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