44. Scorpion Was Here
An escarpment 20 miles northwest of Luxor, Egypt, is an unlikely place for a message center: Only the vast Sahara lies farther to the west. But in April, Egyptologists John Coleman Darnell and Deborah Darnell, a husband-and-wife team from Yale University, reported finding an ancient bulletin board there, a collection of notes carved in the rock face by travelers over the millennia—including what may be one of the world's oldest historical documents.
The story is told by an engraving on a three-foot-wide triangular limestone surface that dates to 3250 B.C. It depicts a ruler leading a procession back to the ancient city of Abydos after capturing the king of the rival state of Naqâda. A chiseled figure of a stork holding a serpent—imagery early Egyptians used to convey the triumph of order over chaos—immediately precedes the procession. According to John Darnell, the stork and serpent symbols clue readers in to what the event meant to the people of Abydos: "It's a clear and—even this many millennia later—successful attempt to impart an interpretation of a historical event." Another symbol pair identifies the ruler of Abydos as King Scorpion, a being associated with the founding of the first dynasty. Archaeologists had long dismissed King Scorpion as a mythical figure, but the Darnells suspect he may have been a real person who unified various southern kingdoms that later conquered the rest of Egypt.
Why carve this wall? Darnell says the spot lies along a shortcut that may have enabled King Scorpion to attack a weak point in Naqâda defenses. "The tableau tells what he did. The location probably tells how he did it." — Jeffrey Winters
