Murder in Ancient Egypt?

The Narmer palette Part II

In Part I of my Narmer Palette analysis, I examined the central and lower images on one side of this famous object. Please read that post before continuing.
This post deals with the other side of the Narmer Palette, addressing every figure except for the upper cartouche.

But first, a step back. As mentioned in Part I, the palette is traditionally interpreted as commemorating the unification of ancient Egypt by Pharaoh Narmer, around 3000 BCE.
However, one might wonder on which grounds archaeologists have come up with this?

The palette has no hieroglyphic inscriptions. There are images, but not what we could define as texts. Mine is a humble question and not meant to sound presumptuous. I often wonder about those little tags attached to museum artifacts and the explanations or context they give. “Coffin lid with stars” or “Scarab, amulet for good fortune in the after life””. These tags dismiss the astronomical meaning of certain images altogether. I have seen this over and over in Egypt. One blatant example is the coffin lit of the dwarf, I have written about on Substack. Here is the link.

Nothing against the dwarf and his importance to a particular king, but the reverse on the coffin (and my point in the article) was all about solar declination, which on the museum tag, is not even mentioned.

But then, of course, there are also official attributions like “the Sphinx was built by Pharao Khafre”. In their book Origins of the Sphinx, Boston University Prof. Dr. Robert Schoch and Robert Bauval give a thorough analysis on how the content of the so-called Dream Stela situated between the Sphinx’s paws was used to “identify” the architect of the Sphinx. This particular Khafre to be or not to be chapter is rather illuminating and much recommended. Not not mention the very bizarre way how the major pyramid got its name.

This being said, I feel free to observe this palette with my own eyes. I look for symbols and patterns, but they have to lead to tangible information. I am not interested in a one-way “mythology” report, where information strands in nowhere land. Things have to end up.

So, what do we actually see?

The first impression is a scene of violence. A bigger male figure seems to hammer a nail into the head of smaller male figure kneeling down. It looks rather bad for that man, no doubt. So, are we looking at a murder in ancient Egypt?

Let us start by making a bold statement: this image does not represent neither a murder nor does it show humans. What we are actually looking at is purely symbolic and represents astronomy.

Size, in arts, often indicates power. The bigger a figure is, the more power it holds. So in this image, the male figure in the centre is very powerful and therefore is either a pharaoh or a god.

He wears the typical hat or crown of Upper Egypt, which was the spiritual centre of ancient Egypt.

In the Narmer palette, the “pharaoh” in the centre of the image is nobody less than the the celestial king, sometimes also referred to as the celestial hunter, Orion. Orion is always shown with an elevated maize in his hand, the symbol of his power. For the Egyptians, Orion was Osiris.

Orion wears a very elaborated belt, for which he -or rather this constellation- is still known today. The belt -prominently visible in the centre of the image-is decorated with four cow heads, which some authors take to represent the goddess Bat, later known as Hathor. However, In Sumeria, Orion was sometimes depicted as the mighty Bull of heaven, a name Gilgamesh was known by.

Below Orion’s maize, there is a small man with a star above his head, clearly identifying this “man” as a constellation or fixed star.

He represents the small constellation of Canis Major, with Sirius as its main star.

He carries Orion’s sandals which means, they are walking on holy (celestial) ground, the celestial equator. The man walks behind Orion/Osiris and therefore rises after him.

The figure, depicted as Osiris’ servant, also holds something in its hand that looks like a canopic jar used to embalm the heart, which was believed to contain the soul of the dead.

In other words, the entire scene is about something or somebody that has died.

To the left of Orion we find a falcon, the symbol of Horus.

The falcon is inserting an instrument into the nose of a figure that only has a head while its body has already been wrapped for mummification.

The procedure aims to extract the brain from the skull during the preservation process. This process is done in order to prepare the body for the after-or new life.

However, to the right of the head there are six Papyrus flowers.

These flowers appear everywhere in Egypt and usually symbolize Lower Egypt and its marshy lands and therefore the cardinal direction of the North.

However, in this particular context, they also represent the six visible stars of the Pleiades. The Pleiades are part of the Taurus constellation, but the artist clearly wants to indicate this particular asterism and not the entire constellation. We will see shortly why this is.

While the mummy apparently points to a dead man, the “death” in this image is not a physical one. Indeed, death can also describe “ending” or even “setting”. The Sun “dies” when it sets. The old Moon “dies” before the New Moon in “born”. When a constellation sets, it “dies “ for the observer. This is what we see here.

Now comes a critical point, the key to understanding the entire scene. When we observe the sky in northern hemisphere, we see things from our particular geocentric position and from our horizon. (Technically speaking, we are using the horizontal coordinate system.)

We face south: this is where we see the planets moving. The East shows the horizon, the rising of the Sun and the stars, the South shows the Zenith and the west is the setting point in the Earth’s daily rotation. In the horizontal coordinate system, “North” is figuratively below out feet.

The Papyrus flower could therefore point to the celestial north as a location, like the Duat or Underworld. So somebody -or something- is going down, is dead, done, or has reached the end of a cycle. That is what the mummy stands for. In other words, the Pleiades are setting. They are dying in the eyes of the observer.

This is admittedly confusing information. Wait for the pieces to fall into place. For now we have Osiris/Orion holding a mace, a Pleiades-mummy who is setting and then there is the “murder victim”.

The identification of the kneeling man – or alleged murder victim- is more difficult. Since the artist did not want to point to the Taurus constellation but only to the Pleiades, the kneeling man must represent another constellation.

In Mesopotamia, Aries was known as the hired man. A field worker or farmer, basically. Is it possible that the Egyptians used the same image for this constellation?!

What we see is Sirius to the left, Orion in the middle, the Pleiades to the right and Aries further down. Please note that I have blacked out other constellations that are not important in this Narmer Palette context.

But why would Orion hammer a nail into the head of Aries?

Nails, like in a pin-board, can be used as markers.

Or if we want to fix two different things, like two pieces of wood, we use a nail.

In the Narmer Palette we are talking about a celestial nail that fixes two different reference frames: the equator and the ecliptic.

Therefore, the nail represents the vernal equinox.

Osiris is the god of the Underworld. The extracting of the brain procedure represents does not just show the setting Pleiades. The image indicates a shift. The Pleiades are above the hired man, and Orion is nailing his head, in other words he is fixing the new vernal equinox onto Aries.
And indeed, the vernal equinox was in the Pleiades around 2200 BCE.

The Image above shows the vernal equinox (little Aries Glyph) in the Pleiades to the right.

The Image below zooms into the same image.

But a few hundred years later, the vernal equinox had shifted to Aries, as shown in the image below.

If the Narmer Palette scene represents, as I think, the vernal equinox at sunset, we should see other constellations to prove the time frame. When the Pleiades set, Leo was culminating and Aquarius was at the Nadir.

We don’t see Leo on this side of the palette, but we see two swimming men below the main figures, who I have already identified in the first part of this article as swimmers: Aquarius, the water-men.