You could then issue as select statement like " select * from articles limit 7 order by nArticleKey descending" (maybe it should be "top" instead of "limit", check your MySLQ syntax) and feed those to the front page.
select * from articles order by nArticleKey desc limit 7
although a better way would be to include a date stamp on the article (which i see you already have, and assuming you have done it in mysql friendly - "Y-m-d H:i:s" then you can do this and get them in reverse chronological order (newest article first)
select * from articles order by date desc limit 7
and on the "archive page"
select * from articles order by date desc limit ,7 or something like that, see the mysql documentation under the select syntax