“It might have seemed a fruitless and thankless task to work at Abydos after it had been ransacked by Mariette, and had been for the last four years in the hands of the Mission Amélineau. My only reason was that the extreme importance of results from there led to a wish to ascertain everything possible about the early royal tombs after they were done with by others, and to search even for fragments of the pottery. To work at Abydos had been my aim for years past; but it was only after it was abandoned by the Mission Amélineau that at last, on my fourth application for it, I was permitted to rescue for historical study the results that are here shown.
“Nothing is more disheartening than being obliged to gather results out of the fraction left behind by past plunderers. In these royal tombs there had been not only the plundering of the precious metals and the larger valuables by the wreckers of early ages; there was after that the systematic destruction of monuments by the vile fanaticism of the Kopts, which crushed everything beautiful and everything noble that mere greed had spared; and worst of all, for history, came the active search in the last four years for everything that could have a value in the eyes of purchasers, or be sold for profit regardless of its source; a search in which whatever was not removed was deliberately and avowedly destroyed in order to enhance the intended profits of European speculators. The results are therefore only the remains which have escaped the lust of gold, the fury of fanaticism, and the greed of speculators in this ransacked spot.
“A rich harvest of history has come from the site which was said to be exhausted; and in place of the disordered confusion of names without any historical connection, which was all that was known from the Mission Amélineau, we now have the complete sequence of kings from the middle of the dynasty before Mena to probably the close of the second dynasty, and we can trace in detail the fluctuations of art throughout these reigns.” *
At the time when Professor Maspero brought his history of Egypt to a close, the earliest known historical ruler of Egypt was King Mena or Menés.**
* “The Royal Tombs of the First Dynasty,” Parts I.-II.
(Eighteenth and Twenty-first Memoirs of the Egypt
Exploration Fund), London, 1900-1902.
** See Volume I., page 322, et seq.
Mena is the first king on the fragmentary list of Manetho, and the general accuracy of Manetho was supported by the accounts of Herodotus and other ancient writers. For several centuries these accounts were accepted as the basis of authentic history. With the rise of the science of Egyptology, however, search began to be made for some corroboration of the actual existence of Mena, and this was found in the inscriptions of a temple wall at Abydos, which places Mena at the head of the first dynasty; and, allowing for differences of language, the records of Manetho relating to the earlier dynasty were established. Mena was therefore accepted as the first king of the first dynasty up to the very end of the nineteenth century.
As a result of Professor Petrie ‘s recent investigations, however, he has been enabled to carry back the line of the early kings for three or four generations.
The royal tombs at Abydos lie closely together in a compact group on a site raised slightly above the level of the surrounding plain, so that the tombs could never be flooded. Each of the royal tombs is a large square pit, lined with brickwork. Close around it, on its own level, or higher up, there are generally small chambers in rows, in which were buried the domestics of the king. Each reign adopted some variety in the mode of burial, but they all follow the type of the prehistoric burials, more or less developed. The plain square pit, like those in which the predynastic people were buried, is here the essential of the tomb. It is surrounded in the earlier examples of Zer or Zet by small chambers opening from it. By Merneit these chambers were built separately around it. By Den an entrance passage was added, and by Qa the entrance was turned to the north. At this stage we are left within reach of the early passage-mastabas and pyramids. Substituting a stone lining and roof for bricks and wood, and placing the small tombs of domestics farther away, we reach the type of the mas-taba-pyramid of Snofrui, and so lead on to the pyramid series of the Old Kingdom.
