Narmer (Menes)

Narmer stands at the threshold of Egyptian history as the king under whom Upper and Lower Egypt were joined into a single state, the achievement that later tradition ascribed to Menes, founder of the First Dynasty. He reigned about 3100 BC; radiocarbon work on his successor's reign allows a range of roughly 3150 to 3050. His name, written with a catfish and a chisel, is usually read as "fierce catfish." A majority of Egyptologists now identify him with Menes, and two seal impressions from the royal cemetery at Abydos, listing the kings of the dynasty in order, name Narmer first. A minority hold that Menes was Hor-Aha, and some class Narmer as the last king of "Dynasty 0" on the strength of his tomb's archaic form. His fame rests on the Narmer Palette, a siltstone ceremonial palette some 63 centimeters tall found by James Quibell and Frederick Green at Hierakonpolis in 1897 to 1898 and now in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo. On one face Narmer wears the white crown of Upper Egypt and smites a northern captive; on the other he appears in the red crown of Lower Egypt. Whether the palette records a real conquest or an ideal of unified kingship is debated, though a year label found at Abydos in 1993 appears to commemorate the same event. His serekh has been found at ten sites in Lower Egypt and nine in Canaan, far more than for his predecessors Ka and Iry-Hor, evidence of a presence in the southern Levant that faded quickly after him. Narmer was buried at Umm el-Qa'ab, Abydos, in two joined mudbrick chambers, B17 and B18, identified as his by Werner Kaiser in 1964; repeatedly plundered, they still yielded inscribed labels, flint tools, and a fragment of an ebony chair. Sealings bearing his name and Hor-Aha's in the great mastaba at Naqada led scholars to regard Neithhotep as his queen and Hor-Aha, who succeeded him, as their son, though recent finds in Sinai have cast doubt on her generation. Manetho gave the dynasty's founder a reign of some sixty-two years, a figure that cannot be tested. Narmer's own inscriptions, nearly a hundred from some twenty-six sites in Egypt, Sinai, and Canaan, remain the surest record of the first king of a united Egypt.