ptian 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. In Abydos a number of inscriptions had
been found which, rude as they were, showed that the people buried in
the tombs had known the hieroglyphic system of writing. The occurrence
of so-called "Horus names" in these inscriptions was especially
important. For every old Egyptian king had a long list of names and
titles, and among them a name surmounted by the picture of a hawk
(i.e., Horus), and called on that account the "Horus name." As the
name is, at the same time, written on a sort of standard, it is also
called the "Banner name." Such "Horus" or "Banner names" occur, then,
on the objects found by Amelineau. Accidentally, one of these names
occurs, also, on a statue in the Grizeh Museum which, according to its
style, is one of the oldest statues which the museum possesses. Thus
it became evident that the Abydos objects were, in any case, to be
placed in the earliest period of Egyptian history.

The discussion stood thus when, in the spring of 1897, the fortunate
hand of De Morgan, the former Directeur-general des Services des
antiquites egyptiennes, succeeded by renewed excavations in Neggadeh
in furnishing the connections between the objects found by Petrie in
Ballas and Neggadeh and those found by Amelineau in Abydos. He
discovered, not far from the necropolis, excavated by Petrie, the tomb
of a king which, on the one hand, contained pottery and tablets like
those found by Petrie, and on the other, objects entirely like those
found by Amelineau. Thus it was proved that both Petrie's tombs and
those of Amelineau belonged to the same period, and, indeed, the
oldest period, of Egyptian history, before the third dynasty. They
were older than the most ancient objects which we had thought that we
possessed. But it was still impossible to date them exactly.

At this point, an epoch-making discovery of Dr. Sethe, privat-docent
at the University of Berlin, placed the whole matter at a single
stroke on a comparatively sure foundation. He pointed out that the
inscriptions on a few unassuming potsherds from Abydos contained not
only Banner names of old kings, but also their ordinary names. These
names were not inclosed, as later, in cartouches,