Losing Sight, Being Upright

To reiterate, on the right side of the central pair of lion-ruler and fallen enemy a prisoner lies on the ground, stripped of his penis sheath, his arms bound and his eyes being plucked out by a scavenging raven. This victim is matched on the left side of the central pair by the figure of another enemy—one who is able to see—standing upright, with arms unbound. The only enemy figure not directly confined, attacked, or approached by one of the ruler's representatives, he apparently escapes death, perhaps freed by the ruler. As he seems to edge or "tiptoe" to the sidelines or outside the scene—toward the mastered ground, beyond the literal depiction, whence the representatives of the ruler had ad-

vanced and where the ruler himself is placed—the upright enemy looks over his shoulder to witness the lion's victory over the fallen enemy. The lion does not see him, for he faces in the other direction, but nonetheless the escaping enemy acknowledges what he sees—namely, the defeat of his comrade—and lifts his hand in recognition.^[5]

In sum the third band of the image—escaping enemy, lion-ruler and fallen enemy, dead enemy—depicts the ruler's position and the victim's alternatives in relation to it, like differently constructed groups on the Hunter's Palette (Figs. 28–30). The victim may be allowed the three axes of "life" —left/right, up/down, back/forward—or may lose them, precisely according to what the ruler gives or withholds in a decisive blow establishing the order of the depicted scene.

Complicated to describe in prose, the ingenious narrative format of the image, once identified, is quite straightforward. In the context of existing images like the ones we have already considered, it must have been readily legible to contemporary viewers. Although we have examined how the viewer gradually unfolds the narrative in the process of viewing, working back and forth among many passages of pictorial text, it is useful to organize our results in a brief review of the entire narrative in uninterrupted sequence. (Notice, however, that this review is not a summary of the narrative experience; a viewer does not obtain the entire narrative all at once or uninterruptedly but rather generates it through repetitions and recollections of pictorial text and interpretations of ellipsis and ambiguity. Rather, the summary states what a viewer, in looking back retrospectively over his or her viewing of the Battlefield Palette, presumably knows he or she has obtained precisely as the narrative coherence of that viewing. It is also a partial statement of what a viewer, having constructed the narrative of the Battlefield Palette, might then take to the viewing of other, "later" images in the chain of replications, such as the Narmer Palette [Fig. 38]; once encountered, these later images require the viewer's retrospective experience with the earlier one.)

The image is divided into four zones, each depicting an episode in a narrative of the ruler's victory in capturing, judging, killing, and disposing of the bodies of three enemies. The story begins on the left side of the top band with

a vivid depiction of the battlefield with strewn enemy corpses. While the missing material precludes a definitive interpretation, the scene probably depicts the immediate aftermath of the battle. If this is so the top left group of enemies represents those killed in battle, and the following bands represent the capture of surviving enemies who will be judged (top right band and second band), then killed by the ruler or his representatives (third band) and tossed onto the field (fourth band). Whereas the top band would thus be the logical beginning of the narrative, it could also depict enemies to be killed after being judged by the ruler or his representatives; the wild dog or jackal is apparently binding a surviving enemy, a group that resembles the enemies with standards on the left and the enemy and robed personage on the right in the band below. This scene—perhaps it is confined to the right side of the top band—would be a later episode in the entire narrative of the ruler's contest against his enemies. The two possibilities are not mutually exclusive and seem to be separated as the left and right portions, the "first" and the "next," of the "beginning" of the narrative. Especially if the top band included a cipher key or "hieroglyphic" symbol in the upper right corner, then it would be an announcement of the general theme as well as an instruction for viewing. Certainly as narrative material the top band is a preliminary run-through of the principal events of battle and capture, setting up a frame of reference for the more detailed representation of the theme in succeeding bands. In other words it has the narrative status both of beginning the story and of providing a textual image of the entire sequence.

The story proceeds in the second band to present three captured enemies being prepared for actual or ritual slaughter by the ruler's representatives. It implies that the captives are being brought before the ruler for judgment—they are being marched "toward" some goal or fate—although his person does not directly appear. The ellipsis is filled in by the following, bottom two bands, which show the dead enemies (one with arms still bound) as well as one living, freed or fleeing enemy. Because the third band contains the figure of the lion best construed as representing the ruler and what can then be interpreted as the victim's alternatives, the viewer is able retrospectively to construe the center of

the second band, the cosmetic saucer, as the wild place where the ruler actually confronts his enemies, condemns them to death, and carries out the execution.

The third band dramatizes the ruler's decision and explicitly states the fortunes of, and the alternatives facing, the enemies—with special focus on a principal enemy, presumably the enemy leader, represented as the special target of the ruler's leonine power, his ferocity and implacability "as a lion," inviolable "from behind" whereas the enemies are in danger there. Although one enemy on the left side of the band manages to escape or has been freed—he seems to acknowledge or accept the ruler—another enemy on the right side and the enemy leader himself have been executed and left to the scavengers on the field.

As a kind of "fade-out," and echoing the first band, the bottom band concludes the story with another view of the battlefield, a more literal presentation of material covered indirectly in the zone above it. The splayed corpses of the enemies who did not recognize the ruler are left to rot as scavenger birds pick apart their eyes and limbs.

This review indicates that it is possible to follow the story—as a sequence of four bands viewed top to bottom, with passages of depiction arranged from left to right—as obeying chronological and causal logic, with some foreshadowing and flashback introduced to construct the prinicpal ellipsis, the presence and place of the ruler's blow. But another construction is equally possible, shifting the specific metaphorical and narrative valence of individual motifs. As episodes of the story the four bands can also be understood to thread together two strands running parallel simultaneously—namely, the scenes of death and destruction on the battlefield (top left, third, and fourth bands) and the scenes of capture, judgment, and killing by the ruler (top right, second, and third bands). In an image that relates the ruler capturing, judging, and killing his enemies in the process of doing battle with them, it is easier to construe the third band as part of the story of death on the battlefield if the lion in the third band is taken literally as a scavenging animal rather than metaphorically as a representation of the ruler. But these two strands of story material cannot be separated absolutely, and either construction of a story line with its appropriate pictorial text is possible. Indeed, it is significant that the image maker appears

not to have cared which particular interpretation of the image a viewer adopted. As well as producing a tightly constructed ellipsis, the text permits narrative ambiguity, multiple unfoldings of the narrative logic in different elliptical sequences realized by the pictorial text, and hence a substantial metaphorical play with what would otherwise be the discrete, specific "meaning" of motifs.