6000 to 5000 BCE · Africanspan
The macehead reaches Egypt from Sudan a long way ahead of Narmer
›Read the full entryClose
A macehead is a shaped stone fitted to a club. In the sixth millennium BCE people were laying them in graves in Sudan, in communities along the Nile confluence whose languages belonged to the Nilo-Saharan family. Only later did the object turn up regularly in the graves of Upper and Middle Egypt. It travelled the same corridor that carried pottery styles, burial habits and loanwords downstream, and it changed jobs on the way, from an offering to the dead into a badge of royal power. By about 3100 BCE that transformation was complete. The Narmer macehead, a carved stone sphere showing the king who joined the two halves of Egypt, is one of the objects every Egyptology course puts on the first slide. Its family tree runs south. The item chosen to commemorate the founding of pharaonic Egypt came out of the Nilo-Saharan world that made pharaonic Egypt possible.
A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.