Around 3100 BCE, as Upper and Lower Egypt edged toward unity, artisans at Hierakonpolis carved a shield-shaped greywacke palette nearly two feet tall. One face sets the scene: King Narmer strides in the White Crown of Upper Egypt, fist raised to strike a captive while Horus perches above papyrus sprouting Lower Egypt’s marsh—an image of conquest already fixed in formal Egyptian style. The other face flips the story. Now in the Red Crown, Narmer leads a triumphal procession past decapitated foes; below, two long-necked serpopards twist together, their intertwined throats framing the cosmetic well and hinting at the entwining of the Two Lands. At the base, a royal bull batters a walled town, sealing the king’s victory.Every detail follows a brand-new visual grammar: hierarchical scale, the composite pose that shows each body part from its most informative angle, and the serekh cartouche that spells Narmer’s name beside bovine heads of the goddess Bat. These conventions—already mature on the palette—would guide Egyptian art for three millennia.Five thousand years later the palette lay almost intact beneath the temple floor at Hierakonpolis. Excavators James Quibell and Frederick Green lifted it in 1898, alongside maceheads of Narmer and the Scorpion King, and scholars saw in its twin crowns the earliest picture of a unified Egypt. Too large and ornate for personal toilette, the palette had served as a ritual gift to Horus’s shrine, its ground pigments once touching divine statues.Today, catalogued as JE 32169 in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum, the Narmer Palette stands near the entrance: a dark, finely carved witness to the moment Egypt’s first kings forged a single realm and invented the visual language to proclaim it.