[126]So F. W. Geers and Thorkild Jacobsen; see Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods, 406, n. 35.
[127]Frankfort, loc. cit.
[128]The Akkadian rulers were themselves apparently too close to the period of local autonomy to draw up a single king list for the whole land. This was done under Utuhegal (ca. 2100 B.C.), the destroyer of the Gutian invaders who had overthrown the rule of Akkad. Utuhegal’s “pride in new independence and in the ‘kingship’ which had been brought back” led to the compilation of the country-wide list in which the traditional lists of local rulers of the important cities were combined (Thorkild Jacobsen, The Sumerian King List, Chicago, 1939). Thus a conception of kingship established by the Sargonid dynasty was projected into the past.
[129]Iraq, IX (1947), 15.
[130]H. Frankfort, S. Lloyd, and T. Jacobsen, The Gimilsin Temple and the Palace of the Rulers at Tell Asmar (Chicago, 1940), 4, 177-80.
[131]Near Abydos, in Upper Egypt ([Fig. 51]).
[132]The name is written with the sign of the scorpion, but we do not know how it was pronounced.
[133]Alexander Scharff, “Archaeologische Beitraege zur Frage der Entstehung der Hieroglyphenschrift,” Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.-Hist. Abt. (1942), Heft 3, 10, n. 17. Gunn, Annales du Service des Antiquités de l’Egypte, XXVI, 177 ff., had seen in the rekhyt the people from Lower Egypt. Gardiner, Ancient Egyptian Onomastica, I, 100-8, discussed the use of the word at length and hesitated to accept Gunn’s conclusion because in later times they are not confined to Lower Egypt; but by then the term, and the use of the lapwing sign, had become purely conventional.
[134]We confine ourselves to this, the most obvious, aspect of the Narmer palette as a work of art. But its extraordinary significance for the history of art has recently been fully discussed by H. A. Groenewegen-Frankfort, Arrest and Movement, An Essay on Space and Time in the Representational Art of the Ancient Near East (London and Chicago, 1951), 20-3.
[135]For the unique features of this scene see H. A. Groenewegen-Frankfort, op. cit., 19.