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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.
Excerpted from an article by Jill Kamil for Al-Ahram Weekly
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