“Ghost City” is attacked by a lion, “Owl City” by a hawk, “Palm City” by two hawk nome-standards, and another, whose name we cannot guess at, is being opened up by a scorpion.

[Illustration:  050.jpg (left) OBVERSE OF A SLATE RELIEF.]

The operating animals evidently represent nomes and tribes of the Upper Egyptians.  Here again we see the same crenelated walls of the Northern towns, and there is no doubt that this slate fragment also, which is preserved in the Cairo Museum, is a monument of the conquests of Narmer.  It is executed in the same archaic style as those from Hierakonpolis.  The animals on the other side no doubt represent part of the spoil of the North.

Returning to the great shield or palette found by Mr. Quibell, we see the king coming out, followed by his sandal-bearer, the Hen-neter or “God’s Servant,"* to view the dead bodies of the slain Northerners which lie arranged in rows, decapitated, and with their heads between their feet.  The king is preceded by a procession of nome-standards.

[Illustration:  051.jpg (right)]

Above the dead men are symbolic representations of a hawk perched on a harpoon over a boat, and a hawk and a door, which doubtless again refer to the fights of the royal hawk of Upper Egypt on the Nile and at the gate of the North.  The designs on the mace-heads refer to the same conquest of the North.

* In his commentary (Hierakonpolis, i. p. 9) on this scene, Prof.  Petrie supposes that the seven-pointed star sign means “king,” and compares the eight-pointed star “used for king in Babylonia.”  The eight-pointed star of the cuneiform script does not mean “king,” but “god.”  The star then ought to mean “god,” and the title “servant of a god,” and this supposition may be correct. Hen-neter, “god’s servant,” was the appellation of a peculiar kind of priest in later days, and was then spelt with the ordinary sign for a god, the picture of an axe.  But in the archaic period, with which we are dealing, a star like the Babylonian sign may very well have been used for “god,” and the title of Narmer’s sandal-bearer may read Hen-neter.  He was the slave of the living god Narmer.  All Egyptian kings were regarded as deities, more or less.

The monuments Khasekhemui, a king, show us that he conquered the North also and slew 47,209 “Northern Enemies.”  The contorted attitudes of the dead Northerners were greatly admired and sketched at the time, and were reproduced on the pedestal of the king’s statue found by Mr. Quibell, which is now at Oxford.  It was an age of cheerful savage energy, like most times when kingdoms and peoples are in the making.  About 4000 B.C. is the date of these various monuments.

[Illustration:  052.jpg OBVERSE OP A SLATE RELIEF.]