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 miles 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 70ft 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 in the spring 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 curator 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. A mile 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. "You can just see that the whole idea is that that deceased king is going to have the same needs and expectations in the afterlife as a living king in this world. And I think the sacrificial burials are a logical development of that."
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, seven miles west of the river, are not just human graves but boat graves. There are 14 boats, each one of them 70ft 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."
Only one of the boats has been partly exposed. They will stay in the sand, where they have been kept safe for 5,000 years, until experts can identify the wood and advise on excavation. There is a limit to how much the Abydos team can dig: part of their site disappears under a modern Coptic cemetery, which cannot be disturbed. But in addition to dead courtiers and ships of the desert, the researchers have yet more poignant evidence of traffic in the next world: donkeys.
"These graves were packed with donkeys. Why does the king want donkeys? What is the primary transport animal in ancient Egypt? The donkey. So one has a herd of donkeys to deliver material to him in the afterlife; one has got a fleet of ships to convey materials around for him; and it all fits this pattern of providing the humans who will do it for him. So a lot of what we are finding in one way or another reinforces the idea not just that these human sacrifices took place, but that at one level the idea was: the king needed all this, didn't he? And therefore he should have it," he says. "It is also clear that because this custom doesn't exist earlier, it marks a new plateau in the definition of kingship in Egypt."
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, 30ft 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 after so short a time?
"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 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.
Which once again raises the puzzle of ancient Egypt: it was inhabited by people mysteriously obsessed with security after death, and by people with a much more familiar obsession with getting rich quick. Stranger still, the first asset-strippers must have included the people who prepared the tombs.
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, incurring the wrath of the supernatural. 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 certainly goes all the way back to the first dynasty. It was a fact of life in ancient Egypt."
Egyptologists are scientists with time on their hands: too much time. The archaeological challenge runs the length of the Nile in space and for more than 5,000 years in time. O'Connor believes 90% of Egypt has never been touched by archaeology. There is a lot to be done and it must be done in a landscape continuously used and re-used by one of the fastest growing populations on the planet. New techniques, however, have begun to reveal new things.
A magnetometer survey - which reveals disturbed ground or fabricated structures under the random drifts of ground cover - exposed a dramatic find: the first royal enclosure of the first king of the first dynasty: Aha himself, his name confirmed by a seal on a jar. Not surprisingly, archaeologists dream of making discoveries. "It's the only thing that keeps us going," O'Connor says cheerfully. "Otherwise it's really crappy."