In the standard work on the subject, The Prehistory of Egypt: From the First Egyptians to the First Pharaohs (2000), Beatrix Midant-Reynes pays close attention to a range of artefacts from ‘the astonishing pharaonic explosion that took place in about 3000 BC’ (169), the culmination of a process that had begun some 800 years earlier. Most famous of these exhibits is a group of carved ceremonial cosmetic palettes, mostly found at Nekhen (Hierakonpolis), the presumed capital or at least a major centre of pre-Dynastic Upper Egypt, situated north of Edfu and now thought of as ‘the cradle of Egyptian kingship’ (Kemp, 1989, 41).

In age, these objects are believed to range from the so-called Ostrich Palette from about 3300 BCE, now in the Manchester Museum, to the Narmer Palette from about 3000 BCE, now in the Cairo Egyptian Museum (Davis, 1992; see Schulz and Seidel, 1998, figures 34–36). It is generally agreed that they date from the Dynasty 0 period when the rulers of the ‘Followers of Horus’ from the south gained control of the Memphis region in the north, extended their power southwards to the Second Cataract, and established a capital at Hierakonpolis and a royal cemetery at Abydos. Much of this activity was impelled by the continuing hyper-arid phase of the Sahara, which set in around 3200 BCE, concentrating populations in the Nile Valley and hastening state-formation. In addition, it is clear that at this critical moment, various major influences from Mesopotamia must have impacted on Nile Valley developments as well. The result was the Naqada II culture, among the most telling signatures of which are the cosmetic palettes under discussion, some twenty of which have survived either wholly or partially (Midant-Reynes, 2000a, 232–240).

Whitney Davis (1992), whose study of these palettes is seminal, regards them as a symbolic record of the period of ‘about eight to ten generations’: the three centuries during which the basic Dynastic state evolved and a ‘hereditary ruling elite’ emerged and began to formulate ‘a self-proclaimed consciousness of the wholeness of the state legitimated by an ideology of cosmic order and divine kingship’ (11).