Pharaoh

Egypt, 3100 BCE. Before the pyramids. Before the pharaohs. Before history itself.

A king called Narmer is marching north with an army, and he has brought along a carver to make it permanent.

Sesh is a craftsman at the temple complex of Hierakonpolis, trained in the emerging visual language of a civilisation that has not yet learned to write. When the king launches a campaign to unify Upper and Lower Egypt by force, Sesh is ordered to accompany the army - not as a soldier, but as a witness. He will see the battle, the killing, the taking of the northern crown. And when he returns to his workshop, he will carve what happened on a slab of grey-green siltstone that has been prepared for the purpose.

But carving is not seeing. Stone has room for the king and the mace and the kneeling enemy. It does not have room for the boy who died with an expression of surprise. It does not have room for the chief who watched the mace come down and did not close his eyes. It does not have room for the woman standing at the edge of the settlement with a child on her hip, watching the army come.

What Sesh carves will become the Narmer Palette - the most important artifact in Egyptian history, the earliest known image of a king wearing both crowns, the founding document of a civilisation that will endure for three thousand years. The smiting pose he invents will be replicated by every pharaoh who follows. The visual grammar he develops will become the language of Egyptian art. He is creating the template for eternity, and he doesn't know it.

PALETTE is a novel about what we choose to remember and what we let disappear. About the distance between what happened and what the stone says happened. About the man who carved the first chapter of Egyptian civilisation and walked away without knowing what he had done.

The second book in the PHARAOH series, a collection of standalone historical novels spanning three thousand years of Egyptian civilisation. Each book tells the story of a different pharaoh's reign through the eyes of the people who lived it.