In the alphabet of Egyptology, Abydos comes first. It is the last resting place of the first kings of the first dynasty, 5,000 years ago. It is the birthplace of the cult of the divine king. It is also the launchpad for the Egyptian cult of death. Abydos is several kilometres from the Nile, and roughly halfway between Cairo and Aswan: a long way from both ancient Memphis, and the stunning temples of Thebes and Luxor. But Egyptology begins in Abydos, in the first systematic evidence of the Egyptian pact with mortality.
It is where the pharaoh's undertakers buried his ships of the desert - a flotilla of 20m-long planked craft to ferry the dead king to his afterlife - and ritually killed and buried donkeys to carry his goods. They killed and buried his servants, too, to tend him beyond the grave.
Archaeologists confirmed earlier this year that a set of graves around two ceremonial courtyards had in one case been made at the same time, and in the second case sealed at the same time. Since mummification at the time was too primitive to preserve bodies for long, the logic is that the servants all died at the same time. David O'Connor, of the Abydos early dynastic project, is not in much doubt: these were human sacrifices.
"The majority of Egyptologists suspect they were deliberately killed. In fact definitive evidence has been very difficult to secure," he says. "It turned out to be a very peculiar population. All of the people there were young adult males. So there was no gender variation, no age variation. That looked like a very intentionally deposited group of people."
Abydos is not a new site. Flinders Petrie, a giant of the science, dug there almost a century ago, to explore the graves of kings with names like Narmer and Aha, who lived and died around 3100BC. By then the two lands of upper and lower Egypt had been united, and the Egyptians were doing business in both the southern Levant, home now to Israel and Jordan, and Nubia to the south: an empire was beginning to take shape. Aha - the name means Fighter - was the first king of the first dynasty. Narmer ("Vicious Catfish") was the last king of what is now called dynasty zero.
"I love that," says O'Connor. "Egyptologists! We started from dynasty one and then discovered there were kings before one. So we have a dynasty zero, which by the way expands infinitely because we keep finding earlier and earlier people who were probably kings."
O'Connor is a professor of Egyptian art and archaeology at New York University, and cura tor emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania's Egyptian museum. He passed through London recently to address a Bloomsbury Academy summer school on his work as a co-director of the Abydos project. This is a painstaking new look at the place where, he says, the Egyptian idea of kingship took a quantum leap.
A representation of Narmer shows him wearing what became known as pharaonic regalia, and striking the attitude of a man about to smite his enemies. This is the characteristic pose of the kings for the next 3,000 years. Long before the first pyramids, Egypt had begun to take shape. Just north of the tombs that Flinders Petrie explored is a series of royal mortuary monuments. Nobody knows for certain their purpose, but the guess is that they were part of the cult of the kings, because each one - all of them once-walled courts or enclosures - is linked with a royal tomb. These courts were linked with subsidiary graves, and it was in these - entered by ancient tomb robbers, stripped of valuable jewellery, the bodies often disturbed - that the researchers found grisly evidence of human sacrifice.
"These dead kings are being provided with everything they need in the afterlife. They are put in their coffins, and their bodies are treated in some way and all the rest of it. But in their graves they also put clothing, jewellery, furniture, huge masses of food and drink," O'Connor says. What do kings need? They need people to look after them and attend to them. "They literally gathered groups of servants and courtiers together, probably the very people from the court of that particular king, and just killed them, at the time of the burial, and buried them alongside the king's grave and also alongside his mortuary monument a mile away to the north," says O'Connor.
And then there are the boats. Out there in the desert, 11km west of the river, are not just human graves but boat graves. There are 14 boats, each one of them 20m long, built of planking lashed together and caulked with a kind of oakum made of reed pulp, each with its own independent tomb superstructure.
"They are the earliest planked boats in the world by far. And there are 14 of them," exclaims O'Connor. "It's not like, oh, we have found a bit of a planked boat. We have got these 14 boats sitting there."
The evidence is in the sand, and only in the sand. In 3000BC there was already a calendar, and writing, but written material from the era is rare. So the Egyptologists must construct their picture of the vanished world from the bones and artefacts preserved by the arid dust and rejected by tomb raiders. But the picture confirmed in writings from a much later era is already clear in the first dynasty. Death is a journey and, for a king, a very well-prepared one. More puzzling are the enclosures associated with each royal traveller. They were once surrounded by thick walls, 9m high. One of them still has its walls. The others have been levelled, and not by accident. In any given enclosure all the walls were reduced to the same height and the remaining stumps were packed with sand and gravel transported for the purpose.
"What seemed to have happened to these enclosures was: you had the burial, the king was taken out to his tomb a mile to the south. The king's body may have visited the structure built for him, but we don't know that. They all have a chapel at one end, otherwise they are empty . . . we can show that the chapels were used over a period for cults but apparently not a very long period: some weeks, some months, we cannot quantify it. But at some time very early in the history of this monument it was literally demolished, deliberately cut down," O'Connor says.
Why was the monument, so painstakingly constructed, knocked down so soon after?
"Like everything else, it is being buried, it is being transferred into the afterlife. The servants and the courtiers are put in graves and put into the afterlife; boats are buried, donkeys are buried," he says. "But you can't bury something that is 30ft [9m] high, so they reduce it in height before they bury it."
The graves had been plundered, probably within weeks of the sacrificial burials. The raiders were not interested in jars of wine or stone vases, but the upper parts of the bodies were disturbed in a way that suggested that jewellery and necklaces had been torn from them. The lower limbs remained in place. The coffins were pulled apart but left in place.
It's a strange dichotomy, says O'Connor. "How can all of this happen and then these robberies follow almost immediately? You have to recognise that for the people who robbed these tombs, the wealth they were going to acquire simply outweighed any concerns about violating the dead. And the Egyptians were very aware of this, so that later on when they had link inscriptions on their tombs, they would have curses against anyone who disturbed the chapel or tried to rob the tomb.
"But, in fact, we discover these tombs have often been robbed, and this is a practice that goes all the way back to the first dynasty. It was a fact of life in ancient Egypt."