L'Horus Den. Un pharaon bien oublié de la Première Dynastie

A tablet found at Abydos at the end of the last century, lost for many years and rediscovered in 1951, allows us to make some progress in our knowledge concerning King Den, a sovereign of the 1st egyptian dynasty. The data furnished by that tablet and those already known by some other monuments give us a relatively precise sketch of the reign. It seems that some of the problems raised by these monuments can be solved by other inscriptions and representations : the role of the Sinai during the archaic period, the wrongly supposed periodicity of the Sed-festival, whose purpose was to renew the king's strength, the date when the title "King of Upper and Lower Egypt" first appeared. It is a great possibility that the Palermo-stone has been alluded to by the classical authors. The Abydos tablet also gives us a fair idea of what the egyptian language was at the earliest stage of hieroglyphic writing.