With photograph and illustration
The historical importance of the Palermo Stone has long been overshadowed by the famous Rosetta Stone, but Jill Kamil says it is now being reconsidered as a legitimate historical record of ancient Egypt
The so-called Palermo Stone is the largest and best preserved fragment of a rectangular slab of basalt known as the Royal Annals of ancient Egypt's Old Kingdom. Its origin is unknown, but it may have come from a temple or another important building.
The stone has been in Palermo in Sicily -- hence its name -- since 1866, and is now in the Museo Archaeologico. Other fragments of the same slab appeared on the market between 1895 and 1963, and are now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and the Petrie Museum at University College London.
The extract from the Royal Annals, the "King List" of predynastic rulers, is in the upper register of the Palermo Stone. It is followed by the annuals of the kingdom of Egypt from its inception up to the kings of the Fifth Dynasty. Below each name, the years are named by important events, most of a ritual nature, and the height of the Nile inundation is noted at the bottom.
Some 13 major studies have been undertaken on the fragments of the stone, and ever since the first was published by Heinrich Schöfer in 1902 scholars have been divided as to how to interpret the implications of the text. Some have insisted that the predynastic kings listed on the stone indeed existed, although no further evidence had yet come to light. Others held the view that their inclusion on a King List was only of ideological value -- which is to say, in order to show that before the unification of the Two Lands of Upper and Lower Egypt by Narmer/Menes there was chaos. Disorder before order. Strange to say, outside of scholarly circles, the stone was not widely known. Or maybe not so strange in view of the fact that the stone was in fragments and of no artistic value.
Now, however, we know the truth at last, because archaeologists have identified as many as 15 predynastic kings listed on the Palermo Stone. They were real. They existed. And the Palermo Stone, with its apparently cryptic series of notations, can be given its historical worth.
The stone reveals that the earliest kings, before the beginning of the historic period, travelled widely and with some regularity. It also records that, in the Early Dynastic periods, which is to say between 2890 and 2686 BC, copper smelting was already taking place and statues in this medium were being fashioned. Also that military campaigns carried out in Nubia resulted in the capture of 7,000 slaves and 200,000 head of cattle. There were quarrying expeditions to the turquoise mines of Sinai; and 80,000 measures of myrrh, 6,000 units of electrum, 2,900 units of wood, and 23,020 measures of unguent were imported from Punt on the coast of modern Somalia. This was no primitive struggling community on the threshold of civilisation. This was an already established society that was forging its own character and establishing an identity.
When Toby Wilkinson of the University of Cambridge, author of Early Dynastic Egypt, presented a paper on the Palermo Stone at the International Egyptology Conference held in London in December 2000, he resuscitated interest in the stone. In fact, it is astonishing that in this day and age of computer technology, he was the first scholar to bring together and examine all seven fragments of the stone as a whole. He cited early arguments for and against the significance of the text, and concluded that it was carved for display purposes (somewhat like the Rosetta Stone) to register an ancestor cult, and to chart an unbroken line of succession up to the reign of the Fifth-Dynasty king Sneferu, which came at a great peak of prosperity; a period when great monuments were built and when no fewer than 40 ships brought wood from an unknown region outside the country.
See the above page for the full story.
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