The Ruler's Mask and the Ruler's Enemy

Just below the cosmetic saucer, the third band in the composition depicts a moment immediately after the bound prisoners emerge from the wild place they are shown as entering in the band above. (The blow remains unrepresented in that wild place.) The metaphorical and narrative relation between the third band and the rest of the image is complex and, in view of the missing information once contained in the lost portions of the palette, somewhat uncertain. Presented at noticeably larger scale than any others in the image, implying their preeminent place in the narrative, are two figures flanking a lion disemboweling a fallen enemy. The latter could be a chieftain or, at least, could symbolize an army, territory, or population inimical to the ruler. His arms are unbound, and he has been stripped of his penis sheath; in the literal terms that are operative here, he has been—like his "twins" above and below—captured, condemned, and killed, his broken body thrown onto the battlefield or into the wilderness.

The identity of the lion is more mysterious. It is conceivable that the image should be taken literally at this point—in the same way the Hunter's Palette (Fig. 28) might be interpreted—as depicting a lion actually mangling the abandoned body of one of the executed enemies he encounters in scavenging. But unlike the vultures and ravens, the lion is not naturally a scavenger; rather, he attacks and kills his own prey. Moreover, the structure of the overall image—with two bands already presented, viewing from top to bottom, prior to this group—suggests that the lion has metaphorical connotations. Each of the four bands in the image pairs a metaphorical representation of the ruler, his power, and its preconditions and consequences—the wild dog or jackal in the top band, the standards and official in the second band, and the vultures and ravens in the bottom band—with a group consisting of three enemy figures.

According to this scheme the lion in the third band, paired with a group of three slain enemies, stands in for the ruler. (For a discussion of the lion on the Battlefield Palette as the king, see, for example, Spencer 1980: no. 576.)

An association between the lion and the "ruler" —whether this real identity is a matriarch, a village headman, or a hereditary national monarch—seems to have been current from the late Nagada II/III period (for instance, on the incense burner from Grave L24, Qustul, Nubia [Williams 1986]). In later Egyptian state religion and canonical iconography, the king's identity—like that of some divinities—was continuous with or immanent in other creatures; for example, early dynastic lion sculptures, probably set up in temple grounds, may have had associations with the monarch (Davis 1981b; Adams 1984). On the Narmer Palette (Fig. 38) the figure of King Narmer, depicted in human form in his identity as king of Upper Egypt, is singled out in scale and compositional placement in the same way as the lion on the Battlefield Palette.

We cannot be certain, however, that the later beliefs about the king's nature were held also in late prehistoric society, despite the possibility of some available associations between lions and "rulers." And other representations must have been current as well: here the evidence reviewed in this study is quite direct. As the Oxford and Hunter's Palettes imply, associations between animals and human beings involve something other than direct symbolic equation; rather, they are complex metaphorical patterns of relationship, poorly understood even for later canonical Egyptian art (see Davis 1989: 77–82). For instance, on the Hunter's Palette, ruler and lion are not identical but stand as victor to vanquished, unseen to seen, representer to represented, and so forth.

Whether or not late prehistoric rulers or Egyptian pharaohs (or both) were imagined to have a nature including an animal aspect or appearances, the ruler's human aspect should still be distinguished from his animal, which—unless we happen to believe Egyptian iconography—must be understood as symbolic and so interpreted in the scene of representation. Given that the human person of the ruler wielding the blow against his enemy does not literally appear in the image on the Battlefield Palette, the lion that does appear—either as separate from or as a symbolic aspect of the ruler—masks the ruler's presence.

The lion probably "is" the ruler in a general, extended sense; but this statement is shorthand for a particular relationship of representation we should

not elide if we hope to understand the images under consideration. For example, it is not clear why the lion's tail is curving up between his legs rather than floating over his back, as might be more natural (and as was certainly more usual in late prehistoric and early dynastic depictions of lions in general [see Baumgartel 1960: 100; Davis 1981b; Adams 1984]). Nevertheless, like many apparently insignificant or fortuitous details in these images, this one makes sense in the context of the chain of replications. If the lion on the Battlefield Palette does represent the ruler, the image maker may be specifically concerned to differentiate his lion-ruler, not exposed to an attack from behind, from the earlier lion-enemies —for on the Hunter's Palette, an upraised tail had exposed the lion's anal-genital region to the lead hunter's arrow. Indeed the end of the Battlefield lion's tail stands in quite vividly for the beast's phallus—the bulbous tip emerges like the glans of the penis—and therefore, in the metaphorics of the image as a whole, for the phallus of the ruler.^[4] On the Hunter's Palette the anal-genital region is the site of the lion-enemy's defeat, his powerlessness before his human antagonist standing at a distance from him and coming up behind; thus, on the Battlefield Palette, the anal-genital region of the lion-ruler is securely defended and aggrandized. It is almost certain that the maker of the Battlefield Palette had seen the Hunter's Palette, for the two lions have much in common stylistically, except, precisely, for the way each has been inserted into the narrative metaphorics. Clearly the possibility of attack from behind concerns the maker of the Battlefield Palette in that the enemies killed by the ruler or his minions have their heads twisted around. What is behind them, what they see or do not see there, continues to be a subject of representation. In fact the third band of the image is quite straightforward about these relations: it relates or narrates them as its subject. Whereas the left-hand, escaping, fleeing, or freed enemy looks back over his shoulder to see the lion-ruler—protected from behind by his tail—facing away from him and mauling the fallen enemy, the right-hand dead enemy cannot see the lion-ruler; he faces in the other direction, and his eyes are plucked out by a scavenging raven.

An image does not always produce or enable a viewer to render a successful presentation of the narrative it ostensibly intends; in fact, for a variety of reasons, depiction always exceeds narrative statement as such (see the Appendix).

Prior to exploring some striking examples of these difficulties in the Narmer Palette, the central passage of depiction in the third band of the image on the Battlefield Palette—the representaton of the lion-ruler and his enemy—serves as a preliminary case in point.

Because the image maker was attempting to pull together the three axes of the scene—left and right, up and down or above and below, and in and out or back and forward—he had considerable trouble rendering the figure of the fallen enemy. Depicted in profile and with what seems to be a broken back, the enemy looks sightlessly up at the lion who masks the ruler placed "above" the scene (or, from the point of view of the fallen enemy, "behind" his forward representation in the figure of the lion). But we should look carefully at the way the enemy's thighs, arms, and legs appear in relation to the forequarters of the lion. The lion's right forward leg, in front of the other leg, is placed on the enemy's left leg, thrown to the right over his abdomen (the stretched muscle around the iliac crest is carefully rendered); but the lion's left forward leg, "behind" the other, is placed on what seems to be the enemy's right arm, thrown to the left over his midriff, for the enemy's head is actually—just as we would expect—twisted around. The image maker depicted the enemy as totally twisted around himself and bent around the forequarters of the lion in a half-circle on the ground.

All the obliquity and torque in the larger scene of the enemy's defeat—what served on the Oxford Palette (Fig. 26) as the key to the cipher of the image and on the Hunter's Palette (Fig. 28) as the entire mechanism of representation—is advanced into and made literal in the enemy's very body in the scene on the Battlefield Palette. Just as the viewer "twists" and breaks apart the image on the palette to unfold its narrative of the defeat of an enemy, so does the narrative text twist and break apart the image maker's production of the depicted figure of the enemy. As we will see with the Narmer Palette, the blow that falls within the literal depiction also hits the image maker producing that depiction in the scene of representation as a whole.

In the pictorial text the enemy's head, although twisted around, appears to face upward. If the enemy is bent in a half-circle around the lion's forequarters "back" to "front," then the viewer—looking "down" at the image and inter-

preting this figure—reconstructs the enemy as gazing sightlessly not just at the lion "above" him but also out at the viewer . The pictorial text finds a literal means to relate how the viewer figuratively stands behind and looks over the shoulder of the lion beneath whom the enemy gazes back upward in his moment of death. This is to say, in turn, that the human person of the ruler must stand beside and behind the viewer on this side of the depiction. The "twisting around," the mechanism of the scene of representation on the Hunter's Palette, is now embedded as the central node of the intersection of the three axes of literal depiction on the Battlefield Palette—left and right, across the bands of the composition; up and down, between the tiers; and back and forth, in the fictive space that the pictorial text attempts to render. Given that the construction is ambiguous and the image maker was undeniably disconcerted in his efforts at rendition, it is not surprising to find the "twisting around" elsewhere in the scene of representation as well: the image maker, as viewer, goes through contortions in attempting to render the body of the enemy twisted around by the ruler; the enemy's body is deformed in a wild space where the ruler, as we have seen, stands not only before his enemy but also behind the viewer. The image maker's own narrative—or, more exactly, his "voice" as the image's narrator—thus expresses the positions of both ruler and enemy, positions that can never be reconciled.