* Professor Petrie’s arguments, although home out by the
evidence that he produces, have from time to time been
criticised. M. Naville, for example, endeavours to prove
that the buildings in the desert are not literally tombs,
but rather temples for the cult of their Ka; and that there
ought not to be kings anterior to Mena, particularly at
Abydos: “Narmer” is really Boethos, the first king of the
second dynasty. According to M. Naville, Boethos, Usaphis,
and Miebidos are the only kings as yet identified of the
early time. M. Naville also suggests that Ka-Sekhem and Ka-
Sekhemui are two names for one king.
From the time of Mena has come down to us an ebony tablet, as shown in the illustration. This is the most complete of the inscriptions of this king, and was found in two portions in the tombs marked B 18 and B 19. The signs upon the tablet are most interesting. On the top line, after the cartouche of Aha-Mena, there are two sacred boats, probably of Sokaris, and a shrine and temenos of Nit. In the line below is seen a man making an offering, and behind him is a bull running over undulating ground into a net stretched between two poles, while at the end, standing upon a shrine, is a bird, which appears to be the ibis of Thot. A third line shows three boats upon a canal or river, passing between certain places, and it has been reasonably conjectured that the other signs in this line indicate these places as being Biu, a district of Memphis; Pa She (or “the dwelling of the lake”), the capital of the Fayum; and the Canal of Mer, or Bahr Yusef. So far this tablet contains picture signs, but the fourth line gives a continued series of hieroglyphics, and is the oldest line of such characters yet discovered. Mr. F. LI. Griffiths translates these characters as “who takes the throne of Horus.”
In the north-west corner of the tomb, a stairway of bricks was roughly inserted in later times in order to give access to the shrine of Osiris. That this is not an original feature is manifest: the walls are burnt red by the burning of the tomb, while the stairs are built of black mud brick with fresh mud mortar smeared over the reddened wall. It is notable that the burning of these tombs took place before their re-use in the eighteenth dynasty; as is also seen by the re-built doorway of the tomb of Den, which is of large black bricks over smaller red burnt bricks. It is therefore quite beside the mark to attribute this burning to the Kopts.
The tomb of King Zer has an important secondary history as the site of the shrine of Osiris, established in the eighteenth dynasty (for none of the pottery offered there is earlier than that of Amenhôthes III.), and visited with offerings from that time until the twenty-sixth dynasty, when additional sculptures were placed here.
Afterwards it was despoiled by the Kopts in erasing the worship of Osiris. It is the early state of the place as the tomb of King Zer that we have to study here, and not its later history.
The tomb chamber has been built of wood; and the brick cells around it were built subsequently against the wooden chamber, as their rough, unplastered ends show; moreover, the cast of the grain of the wood can be seen on the mud mortar adhering to the bricks. There are also long, shallow grooves in the floor, a wide one near the west wall, three narrow ones parallel to that, and a short cross groove, all probably the places of beams which supported the wooden chamber. Besides these there was till recently a great mass of carbonised wood along the north side of the floor. This was probably part of the flooring of the tomb, which, beneath the woodwork, was covered with a layer of bricks, which lay on clean sand. But all the middle of the tomb had been cleared to the native marl for building the Osiris shrine, of which some fragments of sculpture in hard limestone are now all that remain.