The First Pharaohs

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Hey guys, I hope you're doing well.

I am much better, you'll be delighted to hear.

Since my last intro, I've recovered from my illness and I'm currently on my way back from work after a day at History Hit Towers, doing more ancients prep and also wrapping up this interview being released to you now.

It's all about the first pharaoh, so some 5,000 years ago.

What I love about this is that these figures, they're very different to the likes of Tutankhamun or Ramesses or Cleopatra, famous names of ancient Egyptian pharaohs today.

I really do hope you enjoy.

Our guest is Professor Aidan Dodson from the University of Bristol.

He's written about these earliest pharaohs.

He was the man to get on the show for this topic and he delivered the goods.

Enjoy.

Few ancient cultures endured as long as Egypt.

Over thousands of years, some 30 dynasties ruled over this prestigious land.

The famous Cleopatra, the last pharaoh, lived closer to us today than the first kings of a unified Egypt, the so-called first dynasty that emerged in around 3000 BC.

It's their enigmatic story that we're delving into today.

A tale of looted tombs, of scorpion kings, and astonishing archaeological finds.

Who exactly were these earliest pharaohs?

What did ancient Egypt look like at the time?

And just how much information do we have surviving about these rulers who lived 5,000 years ago before the pyramids?

This is the story of the first pharaohs, with our guest, Professor Aidan Dodson.

Aiden, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

Nice of you to invite me.

Now, we've all heard the name Pharaohs, we all know about the ancient Egyptian pharaohs, but it feels, Aiden, going this far back in time with the first pharaohs, this feels a lesser known, dare I say, a bit more enigmatic, a period in ancient Egyptian history, just simply because of how far back in time going.

Yeah, and the amount of data we have from that period is pretty small.

Although, actually, ironically, that we've got better data from the earliest part of it than the bits which sort of follow on from that.

But yeah, in comparison with the sort of data we've got for most later periods of Egyptian history, it is extremely difficult to sort of get one's hands around properly.

And indeed, it was the last part of ancient Egyptian history which was sort of rediscovered by modern scholars.

By the late 19th century, we'd sort of got our history back through to the pyramids reasonably well.

Okay, there's huge amounts of gaps to fill in, but basically, we'd got the broad picture.

But prior to that, it was a complete blank, apart from a few sort of legendary accounts.

Then, amazingly, during the 1890s, everything changed by the discovery of a couple of sites.

And from that point onwards, we've been able to integrate that in.

But still, there's not a lot of questions still to be answered during that era.

How do you, as archaeologists, manage to push back the knowledge of the time period of we know when it comes to ancient Egypt?

Is it revisiting certain sites and literally just digging a little deeper to find those earlier layers?

Or is it just coming across brand new sites that we didn't know about, but has evidence from very early on?

I think those that the 1890s, when we were rediscovering that stuff, it was really looking at bits of sites which had never been touched before, particularly at Abydos.

The site was well known and had been dug really since the early days of Egyptology.

However, the bit further into the desert hadn't really been touched until the 1890s, when a guy called Amelinur discovered the site, which turned out to be the cemetery of the kings of the first dynasty and a couple of the second dynasty.

Mithley made a bit sort of a pig's ear of the whole process.

So then Flinders Petrie, who's often regarded as being the sort of father of scientific archaeology in Egypt, then took over the site.

And by the time he'd finished working in the very beginning of the 20th century,

we'd been able to, because we had the complete sequence of tombs of the first dynasty kings, we've got the history of the first dynasty.

But then we just got some floaters after that.

And still, the second and third dynasties represent problems.

Part of it, and it's even in, it seems quite clear that even the ancient Egyptians had problems with the second and third dynasties, which are in big handfuls from about 2800, 2600-ish BC,

because the king lists which survive, which had been written over a thousand years after that particular date, don't agree as to who ruled during the second and third dynasties.

Either the number of kings, their order, and

what their names are and all those kinds of things.

So it's quite clear that our archaeological problems, we're trying to sort them out, were even there for the the ancient Egyptians, because clearly there were holes in the records which they were using when they were writing up these king lists in about 1300 BC, so well over a thousand years after the events.

Is there a feeling that with these earliest pharaohs, before that archaeology comes to light, that even maybe therefore in ancient Egypt and much, much later, thousands of years after they're existing, do they almost become slightly mythological figures?

There's less confirmation as to whether they actually existed or not.

Yeah, well, in fact, Petrie and a couple of others who are writing in the 1890s, just before the discoveries of Toby Doss, are actually saying that the existence of these first two or three dynasties is purely on a literary basis and is therefore no more solid than the ancient kings of Ireland, legendary kings of England, and all those kinds of things.

All they are, the names are recorded in

the writings of a Greek writing historian from the third century BC.

But that's about it.

By then, then, well, then they also then start finding them in some of these ancient Egyptian king lists.

But again, there's inconsistencies, and there's nothing solid to actually sort of,

there's no material naming any of these people.

And then suddenly, at the Baidos,

you've then suddenly got them all appearing.

Although there's still issues because the names which the later historians, both ancient Egypt and sort of the Greek era, the names they're using are not necessarily the ones which were the principal ones being used in the earliest times.

Because Egyptian pharaohs have the five names.

And for most of Egyptian history, the two which are written in cartouches, these ovals,

are the ones which they're known by posterity.

So the king lists have these cartouche names.

They don't invent cartouches until the third dynasty.

So therefore, these earliest pharaohs on their own monuments are known by different names of their titularies.

And it looks as though, when they come to writing these king lists later on, they're almost making up cartouche names for them because they need them from the format of the list.

Some of them we can actually trace back to names not written in cartouches, but more obscure parts of the titularies, some of these earlier people.

So, we know where some of them come from, but there's some where we have absolutely no no real idea as to why they're called what they're called in the in the king list.

So all of this really caused lots of doubts.

But then gradually, once these Abydos tombs have been found, it could start working out what order they were in and then started to try and make the connections.

But there's still a few issues.

The city of Abydos feels like a place that surely will be coming back to as this chat goes on.

And just briefly as well, Aiden, before we delve more into the background, you mentioned those ancient Greek and ancient Egyptian historians who are writing these kings lists thousands of years after the first pharaoh first dynasties existed is this I got my notes is this a figure like Manetho well Manetho is the key one yeah because from the loss of the knowledge of Egyptian language in what the fourth century AD and its redecipherment in the 19th century Manetho and also to some degree Herodotus and some of these others were the only

game in town so actually the whole idea of dynasties comes from Manetho.

One of the problems with Manetho is we don't actually have original Manetho.

His original, sort of full, as far as we can make out, full narrative history of Egypt was lost somewhere in the

late antiquity, probably.

So, all we've actually got of Manetho are quotations by later historians from him.

And even they don't actually agree that the versions we've got, because clearly people were writing excerpts from it, people were miscopying some of these things, and therefore, what we have for the first three dynasties, which is the ones we're talking about really today,

they differ between the individual versions of Manith,

people who are the excerpts of Manetho, just in the same way that the ancient Egyptian king lists also differ.

So there's clearly a sort of almost Chinese whispers kind of thing going on here.

And trying to work out what the originals of half of these things were is quite problematic.

And sometimes there's a scholarly debate over whether or not these differences are simply due to incompetent copying, or there is something more deep and meaningful about it as far as traditions are concerned.

You know, like whether or not some of the ancient Egyptian king lists, the differences are due to a northern tradition versus southern tradition,

or you know,

miscopying, confused copyists, because actually there's a couple of kings on the king lists who actually we now realize actually

are notations for data missing.

Wow.

So there's a cartoon of a king called Hu Jeffer.

We now realize that Hu Jeffer,

never was ever called Hu Jeffer, it means king gap in the records,

which looks as though somebody had done this.

But of course, in the various transmissions, when somebody, it's then sort of, it hasn't realized this is an allotation of there's a bit of a miss there's something missing here they've then said oh this is a king put him in a nice cartouche put him in the king list wow okay well there you go it's funny and there's actually we've actually some early books have got a who jeffer the first and who jaffa the second but it actually is two data missing entries in a much earlier compilation there you go pharaoh data missing the first and pharaoh data missing the second love that well as you've highlighted earlier we are going to focus the line share on this chat on those earliest dynasties you said three there, so we'll see if we can get to the third one in our chat today as well.

But to also kind of help us set the scene, Aiden, let us go then back 5,000 years to before the time of the first dynasty in Egypt.

Can you paint us a picture of what Egypt looks like before the first pharaohs, this pre-pharaonic stage?

Because this also feels very enigmatic and very interesting.

Yeah, what we've got prior to in big handfuls 3000 BC seems to be an egypt which is made up of lots and lots of small villages and towns

people had settled along the nile

probably about a thousand years or so prior to that when the desiccation of the of north africa had meant that the deserts where they previously what is now desert which had previously been savannah and sort of places where you could live had become uninhabitable.

So therefore, over probably a thousand years or two thousand years, we would gradually come down to the edge of the Nile.

Then what you get is, so therefore they're settling in various locations.

And there's a certain sort of cultural homogeneity

in the south and the north.

In fact, actually, it seems a kind of cultural homogeneity going down into Nubia as well, which is the very southern part of modern Egypt, northern part of modern Sudan.

And then a rather different kind of culture in the north, in the delta leading up to the Mediterranean.

And that actually, that distinction of cultures between the north and the south really continues throughout Egyptian history.

You can always find, as I say, certain sort of stylistic things tend to differ.

And then, insofar as we can,

our assumptions anyway, are these various villages and towns start grouping together.

And gradually, by the time we're in the late centuries of the fourth millennium,

that we've probably got a reasonably coherent southern kingdom.

Whether there ever was a northern kingdom is unclear.

Of course, the Nile Delta is poorly known archaeologically simply because it's too soggy.

One of the great things about Egypt and the southern Egypt is because most of it is desert, you've actually got good preservation of material.

That's not the case in the north.

So, and there is later a sort of a fiction of a northern kingdom, but whether it really ever existed out of the minds of later chroniclers is

a big question.

But then, so late fourth millennium, you've got a southern kingdom, and then what seems to happen is that that expands probably a mixture of peaceful and partly military expansion until around 3000 BC when we have the formal unification.

And the fact that we even think there is such a thing is that there is a thing called the Nama palette, which is a stone palette.

One side it shows Nama, a king of the south, smiting a northerner and on the back it shows him wearing the crown of the north.

So therefore ever since it was discovered in the late 1890s again the late 1890s is the key period for when we start understanding these earlier times.

It's been interpreted as being a commemorative item for the unification.

And although there's been all sorts of discussions around

that is a true concept it seems to be that because it's with Nama is where we start getting the succession of kings.

So all of that would tend to sort of suggest that there is a genuine event which was contemporaneously commemorated by the Latin Nama Pak.

It's clearly a piece of work from around the 3000s.

It's not sort of a later mock-up of something to commemorate something which should have happened but may not have done.

So I think we're reasonably happy that happens.

And then we get a couple of centuries of the first dynasty, where you seem to have a united country.

And this is where a lot of the sort of basics of Egyptian civilization come together.

Art starts to evolve.

We start finding the beginnings of coherent writing because we do actually have a few hieroglyphic signs from prehistoric times.

But the first time we actually find attempts to actually write something is then.

So the first dynasty is very much sort of the point which lays all the ground rules for what ancient Egypt is later going to be.

And from the archaeology, do we get a sense that the southern part of Egypt and the northern parts, do they keep their regional distinctiveness almost, even if they're unified?

Like, for instance, do we see more examples of rock art from southern Egypt compared to further north, or do we see a distinctive style of pottery in the north compared to the south and so on?

It's mainly a pottery thing, because again, because of the nature of the delta, you certainly haven't got the kinds of locations of rock art and things which you would get, you get in the south.

But there's enough to suggest that they are distinctive, with probably the the north having more cultural links into the Levant, whereas the south has the links bored back into Africa.

But again, tracing all of this is problematic because of the lack of archaeological material from the north.

What we have is very limited.

And

as far as quantity and quality is concerned, there's not a similar amount from both sides.

You can actually make a reasonable comparison.

There's just so the southern material overwhelms the northern.

I'm sorry to bring you back a little bit before the first dynasty again, but this this was also something I found really interesting from your answer, Aiden.

So if you get the sense that, you know, the cities were coming together, it feels like, before this unification, but you almost get these bigger polities at this time.

But we don't have pharaohs, but it seems like we have kings or rulers and maybe militaristic figures.

Well, calling these people pharaohs is an anachronistic thing.

Ah, okay.

Because the first Egyptian kings to be called pharaoh didn't rule until 1500 years later.

Right.

Okay, so you don't see from the evidence of the first dynasty they're calling themselves pharaohs straight away?

Not at all.

Now, the first time we find a king calling himself a pharaoh is probably about 1300 or so BC.

So

we're talking 3,000.

The thing is, though, that the word Pharaoh as a word for an Egyptian king is really sort of has actually come into the English language from the Bible.

Although, say, people some people get a bit sniffy about saying, well, they didn't call themselves pharaohs until much later.

Writing in English saying Pharaoh is shorthand for king of Egypt.

It's one word rather than three words.

It's also quite useful in the end sense when you've sometimes got female rulers as well.

You can use them, use that.

So it's just worthwhile saying that when we're talking about pharaohs during this podcast, we are talking about a general term, which has become an English word for Egyptian king.

At the time, we think they probably were probably calling themselves

Nesuti, which is the ancient Egyptian word for king.

And some of the documents, they do have that in.

So I'm just saying we're using Pharaoh's a nice shorthand word here.

And in fact, when I was writing my book, I put in the introduction, you know, basically, colleagues who think I'm being anachronistic, I know I am.

Please go away and get real.

Adrian, you're throwing a spanner in the works there, but it's an important spanner of the works, first of all.

But I can ask, I'm going to ask actually about a particular.

Yeah, Carrie, carry on.

I thought, actually, I've also throw that in because there'd be some listener who is going, but they didn't call themselves.

I know that.

Well, can I ask

because this name is so interesting, and having watched The Mummy when I was very, very young, was it the mummy or one of the others?

You know, what I'm going to ask about.

It's this so-called scorpion king that you have in the surviving records.

Can you tell us about this figure or these figures?

Because they sound extraordinary.

It's possibly two kings scorpion.

And the reason why we call them that is simply because their name is written with a figure of a scorpion.

We're assuming that is probably Selk, which is the ancient Egyptian word for scorpion, but as we don't know for certain, that's how they were called his scorpions, that we can be called Chalking.

The one we know definitely exists is just before the unification.

There is a mace head which was found at a site which is also where the Nama Palate was found in the south of Egypt.

And on it, it has this king wearing the crown of Upper Egypt, southern Egypt, and he is cutting the first sod from an irrigation canal.

And he is the first royal individual to be depicted in what you might call the traditional Egyptian style.

So he is right on the very boundary between prehistory and history.

Now there is a tomb at Abydos

where some of the hot shirts have got a scorpion written on them.

So it's possible that that is his tomb and it lies very close to the first dynasty tombs.

There has been some debate over the precise dating of this tomb, however.

So if it is how some of us would date it, it is the same scorpion.

However, if some people want to date this tomb about 100 years earlier, it can't be the same scorpion as on the mace head.

But that's really all we know about him.

All we know is he is a king, presumably, of southern Egypt, just before the unification, whether he's one generation before or a generation or two, but still at that point between the two, between pre-unification and unification Egypt.

Do we get a sense that it was led by events like climate change or a military event?

I mean, do we have any idea what was the catalyst behind the unification?

Not really, because we've got so the only data we have is the fact it exists.

It happens.

We know later on there is climate change, certainly another,

about 500 years or so later.

However, there seems to be no indication from what I understand of the paleoclimatic studies of anything happening there.

My own view is it's really sort sort of, it's probably the result of,

it's almost a logical extension.

As you're getting a larger and larger state, it makes sense for more of it to come together.

And also, once you've got to a certain point, you can start doing things, for example, as far as sort of irrigation and all those sorts of things.

So therefore, there's a logic that once you've got some kind of reasonably sized polity, which is doing stuff, for that polity to extend its power over the next bit, either willingly or unwillingly.

So I think there's a degree, I think, of almost economic determinism.

It makes sense to get something larger.

And if you look at the history of Europe and so on, again, sort of you get to a point where little city-states don't really work particularly, where you need something a bit bigger.

But also, you can't, I don't think you could, I don't think you can rule out the idea of some particular person's personal ambition.

You know, again, you know, there's back in the 1960s, there was a very much a tendency that everything to do was down to social process and the economic process.

But actually, I think we've now moved back to the point that occasionally things are kicked along by a personal idea.

You know, if we think in terms of Alexander, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, you know, for good for better or worse, there are virtue points in time where things get kicked ahead.

And also, when those things happen, perhaps are driven by personal ambition, but then then survive or not, that may then indicate more about the underlying sort of social and economic side of things.

So, my suspicion it may be a bit of both.

That all the logic, you know, to perhaps like using the American manifest destiny kind of idea, was all possibly there in the South and possibly amongst people in the North as well.

But then, possibly that it was a particular king, Nama, by the looks of things, who actually said, right, I'm going to do something about this rather than let it go on for

another few generations.

But again, we don't know because we've got all we have are a few individual things.

And if without the Nama palette, we would sort of have a we'd still be sort of in bits.

All we know is that all age traditions said that there was a unification, but luckily, here we've actually got something contemporary which seems to commemorate that unification rather than it being something which, as I said earlier on, some early historians thought the whole thing may have simply been a sort of creation myth put together by later Egyptians to sort of justify their existence.

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Well, let's explore this earliest in inverted commas Pharaoh now, the man that you've mentioned, Aiden, and I've already mentioned in this conversation, Nama.

Can you tell us what we know about this figure?

And you've also mentioned the Nama palette, but because it feels such an integral archaeological discovery, perhaps the most recognizable name from this early period, it'd be great to also delve into the details of what we know about it and why it's so significant.

So take it away.

Okay.

Okay.

Let's kick off with actually the Nama Palate itself.

It was found at a site Gehiriconpolis in southern Egypt, which is

probably about 50 miles or so south of modern Luxor, found by a team led by James Quibel, one of the outstanding archaeologists of the earlier years of late later years of the 19th century through into the 20th century.

In fact, Quibel is a quite important archaeological figure for the study of the early Danat dynasties because having worked at Heraconpolis, he later worked at Saqqara and discovered tombs covering the whole period which we're talking about today.

And it was found in a pit in the temple site, along with another very ancient thing.

So it looks as though it had been in the temple originally, you know, with some kind of commemorative thing.

And then when the temple was rebuilt, a few centuries later, it and various other ancient items, which couldn't be disposed of because they were clearly recognised as being quite important, were then buried in a pit underneath the temple so that they were still there, even if they were no longer sort of around.

And that idea of burying surplus temple material is quite common in Egyptian history.

Karnak, much later on, there are tens of thousands of statues were buried in a clear-up in Greek or Roman times.

So that's what that is.

And so on one side, it depicts the king smiting a northern enemy, and on the back, wearing the crown of the north apart from that we have very little information on him we know that that during his time there was a trade going out into the east a few graffiti have been found in sinai which indicates there's that there's a trade routes into palestine like gaza at that time the archaeology that gaza was prominent even back then Yes, absolutely, because it's basically Gaza and sort of the rest of southern Palestine.

It's very much the trade route going through north and also to the east as well.

Gaza is important because, given everything else is heavily basically desert beyond, it's the way through into Egypt along the Mediterranean coast across the top of the top of the Sinai and into the Nile Delta.

So we've got some stuff there.

Otherwise, we've got his tomb at Abydos.

It's one of the last really small ones.

His immediate successors start going much larger as far as their tombs are concerned.

But that's really about it as far as actually contemporary material is concerned.

And his name, Nama, seems to be then forgotten.

However, in later legends and also in the king lists, there's a king called Menes

who appears.

And he appears both in the Egyptian king lists, in Memetho, in Herodotus.

I think Diodorus also talks about him.

So he's clearly the unifier king.

And while a debate in Egyptology has been whether or not Nama is really Menes,

and if so, whether or not the name Menes appears in anything contemporary, or whether Menes is actually his successor, a king called Hor Aha.

My view is that he's most probably is indeed Nama, because if you try and line up the various cartouches, if you like, in the king lists versus what we know is the list of kings from the first dynasty, Menes really has to be Nama.

It doesn't really quite work.

The trouble is that also the king lists, one of them has a different number of kings from another one.

There's a whole long debate which has been going on since the 1890s about who still hasn't been fully resolved.

But I think Nama and Menes are probably the same individual and they are the sort of great unifier of Egypt.

And do we then get a sense that as we see time and time again where there is this step change, you know, there's this ruler who creates a big change in the region, for instance, with Nama or Menes and unifying Egypt.

Do we get the sense that it's actually with their successors, the following rulers, who are the ones who kind of cement this new regime, this new administration, and NAMA's just the beginning.

I mean, what do we know about what follows and how they solidify their control?

Pretty well, all the data we've got, really, is from the Royal Tombs of Zabaidos.

But what we can see in that

is that things like the Royal Titulary start to evolve towards what we then we later know as being the royal titular.

When we start looking at bits of artistic production from them, we start seeing things evolving.

Because it's interesting, actually, that the art we see under on the Nama palette,

there are icons on that and the basic approach, which is still to be found in Roman times.

Like there's a smiting scene of Nama on the palette, it's pretty well identical to one of Nero being shown smiting, you know.

So

you can see more text starting to grow.

Clearly, although hieroglyphs exist at the beginning of the first dynasty, they're not writing full sentences.

They're not a literary language yet.

That probably takes possibly another century before you start getting proper

joined up things.

But all of those are there.

Things like the Jubilee Festival, which we see going way into the future, is there by the middle of the dynasty.

So it looks as though fairly rapidly the pharyonic state as it comes to exist is there.

perhaps within the first sort of few decades after the unification and then sort of becomes more becomes sort of codified if you like as time goes by

but always about say the problem is all we've got are these robbed tombs and a few odd bits and pieces from elsewhere so I think we can see the big picture but trying to understand the detail and exact sequencing of all this is a bit more problematic.

The one rather interesting thing we see however is that soon after unification we have large scale human sacrifice at the royal tombs

which crescendos probably a century after the unification, then rapidly drops off again.

So, whether that's saying something about the power of the monarchy to be able to command people to, you know, compile people's deaths, to accompany the dead king in the next world.

But what's interesting about that is that a few centuries later, Ur, as the city of Ur becomes a big thing in Mesopotamia, that they have the death pits that have this same kind of thing.

You read my mind.

I was literally about to ask about that connection.

It's not contemporary, it's a few centuries later.

But it does look as though there is something about when a state forms, there's initially sort of taking it to beyond its logical limits and then scaling back once you've got beyond that.

So that's possibly part of the whole

setting up of the idea of an infallible, all-powerful

monarch,

what we know, the Pharaoh,

in the sense of how that institution is to be seen for the next 3,000 years.

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Do you think from the start, although they're not using the word, you know, Pharaoh yet, that there is that idea growing from very early on that yes, they are the king, but they also may well have a divine aspect to them too?

I think so, yes.

Although, so we don't actually sort of get made explicit until a bit later on, where you actually start getting titles like son of the sun god and things like that.

But I think there's an implication there of a divine king, but exactly what that means has to be sort of interpreted back from material centuries or even millennia later on.

One of the dangers in working with this era is that we're seeing it through the lens of the ancient Egypt that we recognize from the New Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, Old Kingdom.

And there's always a temptation to say, ooh, that therefore is something which validates what we think we always have to be quite careful of and

one needs to try and avoid being too enthusiastic about being a about sort of interpreting by what does all this mean without prefixing what's up well if they're thinking in the same way that people a thousand years later did then maybe that the idea of the divine king is already there fully fledged fully formed or whether it's something more subtle we honestly can't tell on the state of the data at the moment.

And the problem is that, also, from what we can understand about what they are able to express in writing, it's unlikely that the

concepts which we find set out in detail later on could have been written down at that time.

So, the likelihood of finding a papyrus or something else for the first dynasty, which says the same sort of stuff about kingship, which stuff from a thousand, two thousand years later does, is very highly unlikely so i don't think we're ever going to get over that hurdle i think with and more i think most importantly i think we just need to make sure that we are very clear in our own minds how little we know and don't rush to try and you know interpret stuff too much in light of how things have evolved over the next millennium or more this also feels i'm guessing is a question where we have some archaeology but maybe we don't have everything and it's in regards to the place that you've highlighted which seems to be at the center of these earliest pharaohs and learning about them which is abydos agen i do realize that i actually haven't asked whereabouts we're talking along the nile with abydos and can you also give us a sense of how prominent a city do we think abydos was for these earliest pharaohs abydos is i can't remember how many kilometers it's a bit north of ruxor anyway it takes about they take nowadays you can drive it in about two and a half hours give an idea and that's why that's on the motorway used to be about four hours if you were going along the nile so that gives people a vague idea look in american terms let's say two hours from books his later on certainly it becomes the cult center of the dark god of the dead osiris

and is therefore one of the most holy cities in egypt

going back to the time when we're talking here it's certainly been a burial place

going back into prehistory and as we move into later prehistory we get much larger we get larger tombs including the one potential one of scorpion i talked about earlier on and then after the unification it then becomes the place to be seen dead in, if you're a pharaoh.

And that runs on to the end of the first dynasty, as that.

And after that, it continues to be an important cemetery, going right the way through Egyptian history into Roman times.

And at various points in time, it becomes a royal cemetery again.

It's never, again, seems to be a full dynastic cemetery in the sense of every king of a lion is buried there.

But say it's a very important location.

There are

important festivals of Osiris there, which seems to be almost like the medieval passion plays.

And that ties in actually with the royal tombs of the First Dynasty, however, in that over a thousand years later, in the 13th dynasty, one of the tombs of one of the kings of the First Dynasty, which had long since been robbed and in various civil wars, which had been in between, was identified actually as the tomb of Osiris

to be used as part of the Passion play.

And a great big recumbent figure of Osiris carved in stone was placed in the burial chamber of that tomb, which actually belonged to a king called Jur, who actually was also the king who had the largest number of subsidiary burials, these human sacrifices I was talking about.

It's also probably in the most prominent location.

The whole site is lumpy and bumpy, but it's got quite on the highest point as well.

So anyway, so it was identified as the tomb of Osiris, and we know that pilgrims used to go there.

We've got evidence for pilgrims as late as about a thousand BC or even later than that.

So it becomes that.

Probably the reason why it became the place of Osiris, which may well have been, because Osiris was, according to myth, an early king.

It was recognized that the earliest kings of Egypt were all buried at Abydos.

Ergo.

Two plus two equals Osiris is buried there, right?

And therefore, presumably, they sent a team of priests to go and find the tomb of Osiris,

which they probably found the one which was in best condition.

And then that was then tarted up to become the pilgrimage spot.

And it's again, there's some good parallels in medieval, you know, medieval Europe where there is these burial places of saints and so on are miraculously discovered.

which often are actually some early monarch or duke or others cemetery.

So those are good parallels.

So therefore that becomes a magnet hub for that.

Now just to say a bit about the topography of it, what you've got is deep in the desert, you've got the actual cemetery, which is known today as Umel Gab, mother of pots, which is an Arabic name.

It was covered with potsherds, some of which were from the robbery of the original tombs.

But also, there was lots of votives and water pots and so on brought by the pilgrims.

which all covered the site.

So it's always Umel Gab, the whole area anyway.

So you've got that deep in the desert.

But But then on the edge of the cultivated land, because basically Egypt, what you've got is the Nile, a narrow, fairly narrow strip of cultivated land, and then the desert, which was called the cultivation.

And on the edge of the desert, overlooking that, the kings of the First Dynasty built great rectangular enclosures of brick.

And those seem to have been the public part of the tombs up at Umil Gab.

There's about a kilometre or so of desert between the two of them.

So that it looks like these great rectangular enclosures.

This is where the funeral took place, where ceremonies were carried on for a while,

the body then being carried on up to Umel Gab.

Those enclosures then fall out of use and what's left of the cult of the individual king is up at the tomb because outside the tomb you've got two steely with stone slabs with the king's name written on them, which mark out the offering place for the king's tomb, which is basically a brick-lined cutting in the desert gravel.

At this stage, we're not talking about rock-cut passageways or anything.

Simply at Acha Umil Gab, the geology isn't good enough for that.

So you just dig a great big hole, line it with mud brick, then subdivide it to make the various chambers.

What went over the top has been a matter of debate because the superstructures were lost thousands of years ago.

and there have been all sorts of suggestions.

But the one which seems to fit the archaeology best is a sort of almost a tumulus of gravel.

So they were sort of low mounds, but on the side facing the Nile was these two steely,

and that was where the cult of the kings was carried out.

And quite a few of those steely survive, split between the Grand Egyptian Museum, the Old Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and there's a couple which were were then went to British Museum and into over to the States as part of division of finds.

So actually we've got, remarkably, we've actually got the offering places for these tombs as well, which is stuff we haven't actually got for the first suffering.

So if I say the First Dynasty is interesting because you've actually got a really quite good archaeological package, if you like, for their tombs.

And also, talking about tombs, in addition to the ones that the Bidas of the Kings,

with the unification, Necropolis of Saqqara, just outside cairo comes into use

and you start getting large tombs being built there for the high officials because after the unification although the kings continue to be buried in the far south a new capital city called memphis is built up in the north at the point where the nile valley and the nile delta come together it's effectively roughly opposite cairo on the other side of the river from cairo and in the desert beyond that is the necropolis of Saqqara is set up, which is one of the longest serving ones.

And the earliest tombs there are all of officials and possibly even members of the royal family of the pharaohs who are buried down at Abydos.

Now, back in the 1950s when these were discovered, there was a bit of confusion because

it was thought that these, well, the Saqqara tombs might actually be the real tombs of the kings.

where the ones at Abydos were cenotaphs.

We now know that's not the case and that these are tombs of officials and members of the royal family.

But it's interesting there that we find this again in Egyptian history later on, that you carry on being buried in your hometown as a king, even though the center of political gravity has shifted up to the north.

So clearly, Abydos, going back to your original question about the significance of it, the fact that although the king was probably living and ruling hundreds of kilometers away in the north, his body was still being brought back for burial in the south.

There you go.

And it's also so interesting, I'm glad we're kind of wrapping up this chat by also talking about Saqqara, because of course you have the oldest step pyramids, don't you?

The step pyramid of Josa, but the fact that that's 2500 BC, so after this, but it shows, doesn't it, this kind of gives you more context to understand that Saqqara is important for hundreds of years before that, hence why you then get the big monumental constructions there.

And also it's worthwhile pointing out that some of the kings of the second dynasty are actually buried at Saqqara.

So it's really

the first dynasty who stick like glue to Abydos.

It's when you've got a change of dynasty that we then have

the sort of burial centre of gravity shifts to the north, where, with an exception at the end of the second dynasty, I'm sure we'll be talking about a bit later on, that's where the kings are buried right the way through until the end of the old kingdom, until about 2200 BC.

Well, Aiden, I mean, you mentioned talking later on.

We haven't got time to do it this time.

However, because we've just kind of almost packaged the first dynasty today, one, that lets people learn more from your book, which covers more than just the first dynasty.

And two, it paves the way that we can do a sequel in time about the second and third dynasties as well, which I know you've done a lot of work about.

And the archaeology, I'm presuming, from those dynasties is equally interesting, yet enigmatic.

It would say more enigmatic.

So that's the thing.

We've got a pretty good idea about the first dynasty.

And then they begin the second dynasty, and then it all goes to rats right the way through until even with the step pyramid, that's sort of an island of of stability in a whole load of political uncertainty.

And it's not then until we get the reign of Snefru at the beginning of the fourth dynasty that it all sort of starts coming together.

So, yeah, the second and third dynasties are a horrible mess, which actually makes them very, very interesting.

Makes a great point

to work on stuff where you don't have the data or having to sort of deal with a whole load of contradictory stuff rather than periods where you're just dealing with tiny details where the big picture is

clear.

Okay, well, I'm sure we'll return to cover that interesting, extraordinary story in due time.

Aiden, this has been fantastic.

Last but certainly not least, you have written a book which covers the story of the emergence of these first pharaohs, it is called.

Yes, the first pharaohs of Egypt, their lives and afterlives, published by the American University in Cairo Press a couple of years ago, but available through all online booksellers.

All good bookshops.

Yes, in good bookshops.

Aiden, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

Very happy to be with you.

Cheers.

Well, there you go.

There was Professor Aiden Dodson giving you an introduction to the story of the first pharaohs who lived some 5,000 years ago, the first dynasty of ancient Egypt.

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