3500–3200 BCE: (The Qustul Incense Burner and the Paraphernalia of Pharaonic Rule — Qustul Elites and Ruler in the Second Half of the Fourth Millennium Parti…

3500–3200 BCE: (The Qustul Incense Burner and the Paraphernalia of Pharaonic Rule — Qustul Elites and Ruler in the Second Half of the Fourth Millennium Participating Together with Their Counterparts in the Naqada Culture of Southern Egypt in Creating the Emerging Culture and Paraphernalia of Pharaonic Rule, the Qustul Incense Burner Depicting a Procession of Three Sacred Boats Proceeding to a Serekh Façade, the Ruler Wearing the White Crown with the Horus Falcon Before Him): The Qustul elites and ruler in the second half of the fourth millennium participated together with their counterparts in the communities of the Naqada culture of southern Egypt in creating the emerging culture and paraphernalia of pharaonic rule. The finds from the Qustul site include images associated with the rising Egyptian dynastic culture, including royal symbolic facades known as serekhs and sacred boats. The Qustul Incense Burner, a particularly well-studied item, depicts a procession of three sacred boats proceeding to a serekh façade. In the first boat is a bound prisoner and a guard standing behind with a mace. The ruler, who wears the White Crown — the royal headwear representative in later centuries of Upper Egypt — sits in the second boat, with the Horus falcon in front of him; while in the last boat stands a feline figure, with a falcon figure behind it, indicating that the feline figure represents a god. Every element of this scene — the serekh, the White Crown, the Horus falcon, the sacred boats, the bound prisoner, the mace-bearing guard — would become a standard element of pharaonic royal iconography. And every one of them appears here, at Qustul, in Nubia, on an artifact from a Nubian royal tomb, predating the unification of Egypt. The iconography of pharaonic power was not invented by the pharaohs. It was co-created by the Nubian rulers of Qustul and their Egyptian counterparts in the Naqada culture, in a collaborative process that straddled the boundary between the Nilo-Saharan-speaking south and the proto-Egyptian-speaking north. The White Crown that the pharaohs wore was first worn by a Nubian king. The Horus falcon that attended the pharaoh first attended a ruler at Qustul. The sacred boats that carried the pharaoh’s image in procession first sailed, in symbolic form, on a Nubian incense burner. Pharaonic civilization was a joint production of the Middle Nile Culture Area, and its most iconic symbols were born in the Nilo-Saharan south.