Ancient Egyptian Nekhen, or modern Kom el-Ahmar (‘Red Mound’) is a huge and sprawling site located 50 miles south of Luxor on the West Bank of the Nile. It is popularly known by its ancient Greek name Hierakonpolis (‘City of the Falcon’), as it was the cult centre of the falcon god Horus. In fact, it is the largest Predynastic settlement known in Egypt, and runs for about 1.5 miles north to south along the Nile, and some 2 miles from east to west, from the cultivation on the flood plain, across the desert, to the cemetery HK6. At its height, in the Naqada Period (c.3800-3500 BC), Hierakonpolis was probably the largest urban settlement or ‘town’ along the Nile, and the capital of an Upper Egyptian kingdom; it was clearly still of some significance in the Early Dynastic Period, with activity at the site continuing until at least Ptolemaic times. The various excavations that have taken place at Hierakonpolis since the end of the 19th century have unearthed a wealth of fascinating – and often spectacular – archaeological evidence pertaining to the Predynastic and Early Dynastic Periods, unrivalled in Egyptian archaeology; what follows is but a summary of that evidence.
James Quibell and Frederick Green at Hierakonpolis
The first archaeological description of Hierakonpolis was undertaken by Dominique Vivant Denon, one of the savants who accompanied Napoleon’s military campaign in Egypt, from 1798 to 1799. He recorded the remains, now lost, of a substantial Ptolemaic temple at the site. The temple was removed in the middle of the 19th century, when its sandstone blocks were used as building material for a sugar factory in Esna. Hierakonpolis was put firmly on the Egyptological map by the English archaeologist James Quibell during his excavations at the site in 1898. He found the ‘Main Deposit’ – a remarkable and diverse cache of votive material comprising hundreds of artefacts – in a series of pits and chambers that had been dug below an Old Kingdom mud-brick temple. Quibell, who was sent there in 1897 by Flinders Petrie (funded by Petrie’s Egyptian Research Account), was later joined at Hierakonpolis by fellow archaeologist and compatriot Frederick Green. Petrie had recognised the site’s archaeological potential after his brief visit there in 1887. It is worth pointing out that Green and Quibell lived in the New Kingdom tombs, leaving many remnants of their stay in the Tomb of Hormose while working at Hierakonpolis between 1887 and 1899. Quibell was assisted by his future wife, Annie Pirie, who commented in her later book A Wayfarer in Egypt (1939): ‘Of all the different dwelling places, give me for choice, if for not too long a time, a good tomb.’
The Main Deposit
The most famous objects discovered in the Main Deposit are, of course, the Narmer Palette and the mace-heads of King Narmer and King ‘Scorpion’. They are the most significant artefacts yet known from the so-called ‘Unification Period’, when the Two Lands of Upper and Lower Egypt were united, marking the beginning of the Dynastic Period.
