it is an ancient mariner...

When this 5000-year-old cosmetics palette, carved from stone to memorialize the Upper Egyptian King Narmer's conquest of Lower Egypt was discovered in 1897, its history told in pictures was quickly recognized as the earliest likely example of "writing" we know of, and it is certainly the earliest known written narrative. Before Narmer's Palette, there was no such thing as history. However there were myths and legends, gods and spirits, soldiers and sailors, and all the ingredients from which narrative history derives.

For example, the god Horus, son of the god Osiris who died and was brought back to life by Isis, had been around for centuries before he was depicted on Narmer's Palette as the victorious king's ally. Horus is the falcon on the obverse side of the object, holding a cord passing through the nostrils of the king of Lower Egypt's decapitated head, which lies in a papyrus swamp. Just below the bird and his gory trophy, we see the Lower Egyptian monarch again, receiving his death blow from his triumphant rival.

This artifact is very old, 50 centuries removed from the present, but recent archaeological discoveries on the island of Crete now indicate that sailors were navigating the waters of the Mediterranean 130,000 years ago, 125 millennia before Narmer's Palette. This establishes the certainty that humans possessed maritime skills before the earliest stirrings of civilization, and even raises the possibility that such skills may predate the human race as we know it.

We already knew that some of the probable real events our race has remembered imperfectly in the form of myths and legends, such as those transmitted to us by Homer as the memorized and sung epic poems Iliad and Odyssey, grew out of semi-forgotten history which must be almost inconceivably old.

Civilization is a relatively new development for our species, but it possessed culture and literature perhaps even before we evolved into our present forms. A discovery like this one naturally causes us to wonder how old the oldest stories are, especially the two stories that people living around the shores of the Mediterranean have been telling each other much longer than anyone can remember and that are told everywhere today. One is about the warrior-sailor who fights in a war across the sea, then gets lost returning home with his men and sails around the Mediterranean for years, bumping into islands and incredible, mythical adventures. The other concerns the god who died and came back to life.

Click on the photo of the obverse (l.) and reverse of Narmer's Palette for a larger view.