Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 4, 2025
For the report of the excavations at Neggadeh was more exact than that of the excavations at Abydos; and the whole contents of the tomb of Neggadeh had been kept together and preserved in a separate room in the Grizeh Museum. The possibility became a reality.
But as we know almost nothing of him, except some unfounded traditions, this sort of relic worship deserves very little respect. The scientific value of the proof that Menes was the king buried in the royal tomb of Neggadeh lies rather in the fact that we have now settled the question of the age of that culture which was presented to us by the excavations of Ballas, Neggadeh and Abydos.
The first light was thrown on the question in the winter of 1894-95 by the excavations of Flinders Petrie in Ballas and Neggadeh, two places on the west bank of the Nile, a little below ancient Thebes. This persevering English investigator discovered here a very large necropolis in which he examined about three thousand graves.
A very skeptical investigator might still have said that the other objects were older, that the potsherds had only fallen accidentally into ruined tombs of an older period; or he might have said quite the contrary, that the potsherds were older than the tombs. At this point occurred the possibility of finding a solution of the question in the objects found in the royal tomb of Neggadeh.
The fortunate discoverer ascribed these to the dynasties of the demigods, who, according to Egyptian tradition, reigned before the kings; but of course this idea met with determined opposition, and indeed especially among his French colleagues. The tomb of Abydos offered, however, on quiet consideration, more material for establishing its date than those of Ballas and Neggadeh.
There can therefore be no doubt that the king buried in the royal tomb of Neggadeh, of whom we had only known the Horus name "The Warrior," had also the name Mn. Now, there is no other known Egyptian king who could be identified with this name Mn than the first king of the first Manethonian dynasty, called Menes by the Greeks.
The discussion stood thus when, in the spring of 1897, the fortunate hand of De Morgan, the former Directeur-général des Services des antiquités égyptiennes, succeeded by renewed excavations in Neggadeh in furnishing the connections between the objects found by Petrie in Ballas and Neggadeh and those found by Amélineau in Abydos.
It is impossible here to go into the philological basis of the identification of Mn and Menes. The final conclusion is this: In Neggadeh, we have before us the tomb of the oldest king of whom the Egyptians had preserved any memory, and whom they considered the founder of the Egyptian monarchy.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking