An ancient king—heralded by standard bearers and trailing a retinue of soldiers, fan bearers, powerful beasts and deities—projects power and military might in elaborate scenes carved into the very rock in the Egyptian desert. Rock art tableaux at the ancient site of Nag el-Hamdulab, created some 5000 years ago, are thought to have been done by the hands of professional artists close to the royal court. They are the earliest known depictions of a pharaoh wearing the “white crown” of dynastic power, and they represent the transition between pre-Dynastic Egypt’s religious processions into the tax-collecting tour of a triumphant monarch. Interpreted and presented for the first time by an international team of experts in the journal Antiquity, the “most important
