La violence à l'époque prédynastique

From the myth of the unification of Egypt to the earliest known historical documents, violence seems ubiquitous. This article focuses on archaeological evidence of violence at the dawn of the early dynasties. It reviews the data from work carried out in Adaima and Hierakonpolis; the reality of human sacrifice; and the status of subsidiary tombs at Abydos and in large Early Dynastic cemeteries. This paper also considers the corpus of iconographie documents (Decorated vessels, the painted wall of Tomb 100 at Hierakonpolis and decorated palettes) to question the social practices of violence and its political rhetoric when the Egyptian state was forming.