Qualla: Hierakonpolis

Hierakonpolis: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Quibell, James Edward, 1867-1935; Green, F. W; Petrie, W. M. Flinders (William Matthew Flinders), Sir, 1853-1942, Public domain. On a slab of dark green stone, carved more than five thousand years ago, a king raises a mace to strike a kneeling enemy. He wears the tall white crown of Upper Egypt. On the reverse, the same king - now crowned with the red crown of the north - strides past rows of beheaded foes. This object, the Narmer Palette, is often called the first page of Egyptian history: the moment a single ruler claims both halves of the land. It was dug out of the ground at a place the Egyptians called Nekhen and the Greeks called Hierakonpolis, the City of the Falcon. Long before the pyramids, this dusty stretch of Upper Egypt was where the idea of Egypt itself took shape.

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Image: Quibell, James Edward, 1867-1935; Green, F. W; Petrie, W. M. Flinders (William Matthew Flinders), Sir, 1853-1942 | Public domain

Hierakonpolis: Before the Pharaohs

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Map created from DEMIS Mapserver, which are public domain. Koba-chan, CC BY-SA 3.0. People settled at Nekhen astonishingly early. The first communities here may date back to around 4400 BC or even earlier, in the cultures archaeologists call Badarian and Amratian - farmers and herders living along the river terraces in the centuries before writing. By about 3400...

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Image: Map created from DEMIS Mapserver, which are public domain. Koba-chan | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hierakonpolis: The City of the Falcon

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC0. Nekhen was sacred to Horus, the falcon-god, and claimed to be his earthly home - the place where, in myth, his body was entombed. Here the Egyptians raised one of their oldest temples, a mound-shrine to the falcon that would be rebuilt again and again across the millennia. That r...

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Image: CC0

Hierakonpolis: The Oldest Painted Tomb

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frederick William Green (March 21, 1869–1949); James Edward Quibell (1867-1935), Public domain. Among Nekhen's most remarkable finds is Tomb 100, the oldest known Egyptian tomb decorated with a painted mural - its plastered walls covered, around 3500 to 3200 BC, with images that would echo through Egyptian art for the next three thousand years. The scene shows a procession ...

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Image: Frederick William Green (March 21, 1869–1949); James Edward Quibell (1867-1935) | Public domain

Hierakonpolis: The World's First Zoo

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting) and NordNordWest, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 2009, excavators at Nekhen uncovered something no one expected: a menagerie dating to around 3500 BC, the oldest known animal collection in the world. The bones told an extraordinary story. Buried here were creatures kept by the town's early elite - hippopotami, crocodiles, a ...

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Image: Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting) and NordNordWest | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hierakonpolis: Digging Up a Beginning

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC0. Nekhen has drawn archaeologists for well over a century, and the digging has not always been gentle. The first major excavators, James Quibell and Frederick Green, uncovered the Main Deposit in 1897–98 but recorded their work so carelessly that scholars still argue over exactly w...

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Image: CC0