The earliest known western visitor to Hierakonpolis was Vivant Denon in 1798 as a member of the Napoleonic Expedition to Egypt. At Hierakonpolis, aside from considerable amounts of habitation and structural debris, he noted an eroded but intact portal to a much destroyed sandstone building of substantial size. This edifice was, no doubt, the Ptolemaic temple which once stood in the alluvium over the town-mound of ancient Nekhen. His drawing published in the volumes describing his adventures and the subsequent reproduction of this charming scene on a dinner plate for Napoleon's Egyptian dinner service remain the only information we have about this structure.

Subsequent visitors reported on Dynastic tombs and other inscribed monuments scattered throughout the area . Yet, it was only Petrie who seems to have noticed the wide extent of the debris covering the low desert. During a brief visit in 1887, he was stunned by the high quality of the flint work littering the surface, but puzzled by the strange nature of the pottery, which, less than ten years later at Nagada, he would be the first to describe . Ironically, it was Petrie's spectacular finds at Nagada that sparked the illicit flood of Predynastic artifacts from Hierakonpolis. Prompted by the mass of material appearing on the Luxor antiquities market, Petrie's newly formed Egyptian Research Account dispatched J.E. Quibell and F.W. Green to salvage the site in 1897.

The initial focus of this first scientific examination of the site was the large rectangular mud-brick structure which dominates the low desert . This structure continues to be called a fort, although it is clearly an Early Dynastic funerary enclosure similar to those found at Abydos built for the mortuary cult of the Dynasty I-II kings. The "Fort" has been attributed to King Khasekhemwy of Dynasty II on the basis of a fragmentary granite lintel discovered near its entrance in 1934 by Lansing . Structural similarities to Dynasty II funerary enclosures at Abydos generally support this attribution .

The Fort stands at the northern edge of the mouth of Wadi Abul Suffian which bisect the desert sites. To either side of the wadi, spread along the edge of the cultivation, Quibell and Green faced a desert which appeared much dug over by sebakh (fertilizer) diggers and antiquities dealers. Nevertheless, they did succeed in finding some intact Predynastic graves in the vicinity of the Fort and made some interesting finds in the Early Dynastic mastabas to the north. Yet, despite testing various sherd clusters both to the east of the Fort, which resulted in the discovery of Old Kingdom granaries, and also further west into the wadi, which revealed what apparently were kilns, the investigators failed to recognize the domestic nature of the majority of the deposits. What they called the "Predynastic Cemetery" is in fact the largest Predynastic settlement still extant.

Dismayed by the results of their desert exploration, Quibell and Green turned to the low rectangular mound in the cultivation which seemed equally unpromising. All remnants of the Ptolemaic temple were gone, having been removed some thirty year prior to build a factory in Esna. Since that time, the town-mound had suffered considerable reduction. Any misgivings they might have had were soon abated when, during the first week of work, they discovered the gold and copper cult statue of the hawk god, Horus. This statue had been carefully buried in a pit beneath the floor of a room. This room was one of five which formed part of the mud-brick temple of Dynastic date. This spectacular find was soon followed by the discovery, in similar circumstance beneath the floor of another room, of a life size copper statue of King Pepi I of Dynasty VI within which a similar statue of his young son, the future king Merenre had been placed. These statues remain the earliest large scale metal statuary to come down to us from antiquity. The same pit contained a pottery lion and the schist statue of King Khasekhemwy, among other less dramatic finds.

More was yet to come. To the east, below the floor level of another set of chambers, lay heaps of objects generally clustered by type: mace heads, ivory statuettes, stone statues, faience figurines, pottery, and so forth, known collectively as the "Main Deposit." Among the hundreds of objects in this cache of discarded temple furnishings were some of the most important documents of the Proto- and Early Dynastic periods: the large ceremonial maceheads of Scorpion and Narmer (see figure 9.41) and the Narmer Palette, to name but a few.

In the following season, Green, working alone and with great care, continued his exploration of the town-mound. There, below the level of the Dynastic mud-brick temple, he discovered a sloping, oval stone wall or revetment constructed of small, naturally exfoliated sandstone blocks. This revetment, which stood about 2.5m high and encased a mound of clean white sand, served as the raised platform for the Dynasty I temple to which the objects from the Main Deposit presumably were dedicated. His stratigraphic observations indicated that this structure antedated Dynasty II deposits, but sat upon Predynastic debris, and thus the revetment has been dated to Dynasty I.

Such finds seemed to confirm the ancient traditions concerning the site. Nevertheless, due to the more or less portable nature of the objects, it remained unclear whether the actions of the early kings commemorated on these objects necessarily indicate that Hierakonpolis was a locale intimately associated with the birth of the unified state. On the other hand, such a cache justified Wilson's proposed translation of Nekhen as "reliquary." Doubts about the date of deposition suggested these fine offerings could have been dedicated at any time in this national shrine.

Besides the investigation of various Early Dynastic dwellings within the town-mound, Green also cleared a series of large tombs located at the southern end of the desert site. Although known to the natives for some time and essentially robbed out, one tomb still retained justly famous painted scenes on its plastered walls. The similarity of the boat depictions in this "Painted Tomb" to pottery motifs current in the Nagada IIc-d phase served to date the grave. Yet other motifs such as scenes of smiting and "master of the animals," linked this tomb to Early Dynastic iconography and indicated for the first time that the temporal distance between the late Gerzean and the Early Dynastic was not great. The importance of this fact for confirmation of the status of Hierakonpolis at the end of the Predynastic was unfortunately obscured by the disputed function of the tomb. Its unique paintings and unusual mud-brick lining of both the walls and floor led some scholars to suggest that the tomb was in fact a small temple. This controversy was finally put to rest with the publication of Green's excavation notes and photographs.

Ostensibly to locate missing portions of the important historical pieces from the Main Deposit, but no doubt in an attempt to duplicate the spectacular successes of Quibell and Green, Garstang made further excavations at Nekhen in 1905-6. Although he did recover the head of a lapis lazuli figurine which matched the body found by Quibell (now in Oxford), and unbeknownst to him also a fragment of the schist statue of Khasekhemwy, he had to satisfy his backers in Liverpool with the spoils from 166 Late Predynastic (Nagada IIc-III) graves found within the Khasekhemwy funerary enclosure. Remarkably, despite the excavation of Early Dynastic houses within Nekhen, Garstang failed to note the extensive domestic refuse littering the desert. Like Quibell and Green before him, he took this debris for the despoiled remains of Predynastic graves.

It was not until 1908 that H. De Morgan, brother of the explorer of the Nagada region, recognized the desert deposits to the south of the Fort as "kitchen-middens". Trained by his older brother in an appreciation of prehistory, H. de Morgan examined these remains with great gusto but unfortunate technique. He found that wonderful lithic implements could be retrieved from these deposits with ease by attacking the surface with rakes (!). During two seasons of exploration he recovered many interesting objects from both the settlement and tombs. Unfortunately his premature death in 1909 prevented publication of his result until 1984.

As a result, the credit for identifying the Predynastic Town of Hierakonpolis goes to Brunton who made a quick visit to the desert sites in 1927 after completing his work in the Badari region. In a few hours time, Brunton filled his pockets with several interesting sherds (figure 9.4). Examples of Petrie's C ware and three pieces he suggested might be Badarian provided the first indication of the remote age of the desert occupation.

Brunton's observations, however, made little impression on the next visitor to the site. In 1934, Lansing obtained the concession to excavate at Hierakonpolis with the express purpose of supplementing the Old Kingdom holdings of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Upon clearing the forecourt of the Old Kingdom rock-cut tombs located behind the Fort, much to his surprise, he found the stela of the late Middle Kingdom Priest of Horus of Nekhen, Horemhauef. The search for further Old Kingdom material at the foot of the tombs led only to the clearance of more Predynastic graves. Tests further into the wadi revealed important and apparently well preserved Predynastic localities including a pottery kiln, a rock shelter, and an Early Dynastic rock-cut tomb . None of these he felt compelled to mention other than in passing. The long awaited publication of Lansing's excavations is now being prepared by Dr. Diana Patch.