Volume 152, Issue 2

The famous Tomb Robbery papyri provide a vivid example of how criminal law was practiced in ancient Egypt. Ransacking royal tombs and temples was considered a capital crime, punishable by death. In this context, the victim was represented by the state. Anything used in the commission of the crime was deemed a “criminal tool,” and criminal investigation and forensic evidence at the crime scene aimed to identify such tools. According to the texts of those papyri, “the instrumentalities of crime” used by the tomb robbers included items for opening, smashing, digging, traction, and lighting. Additionally, the robbers used tools to cover up the traces of the crime, such as setting fire to looted tombs and temples.

The present study provides new data on funerary practices performed during the Old Kingdom at Gebelein (Upper Egypt) through the analysis of the tomb and the funerary equipment with the headrest of a complete wrapped and cloaked body with painted face bandages (S16731), which was radiocarbon dated to the 4 th dynasty becoming the oldest securely-dated mummy that reproduces facial features through paintings on bandages.

A new witness of a part of the CT 335 spell, the most frequent of Coffin Text spells as far as we know, has recently been found on the head (north) side of an inner coffin from the tomb QH31 at Qubbet el-Hawa. The coffin might belong to a woman and has been archaeologically dated from the twelfth dynasty. This paper discusses the archaeological context of the coffin, its materiality, some peculiarities of the text and the script, and proposes the De Buck’s nomenclature system siglum A7A for the coffin of which this object was a part.

This article aims to publish a limestone stela from Saqqara, currently in the Grand Egyptian Museum, Giza (CG 34049/GEM 5888). It was found at Saqqara in January 1862 by Luigi Vassali. It dates to the late Eighteenth Dynasty, reign of King Amenhotep III, New Kingdom, on the basis of its stylistic, iconographic, and epigraphic details. It is extremely well-preserved regarding its scenes and inscriptions, but the colours of the paintings have faded. The stela records a significant title of Ahmose, namely sš ḥsb iḥw n pr imy-r ḫtmt , ‘Scribe and Reckoner of the Cattle of the house of the Overseer of the Seal/ the Chief Treasurer’. The article describes the stela, deals with its individual scenes, inscriptions, idiosyncrasies, iconographic, phraseological, provincial, and genealogical criteria, and focuses on the significant titles and offices of its individuals. The publication of this stela is an addition to the corpus of stelae from the Saqqara necropolis during the late Eighteenth Dynasty.

The study presents an analysis of a large hieratic liturgical ostracon discovered among the burial equipment of the owner of the Abusir shaft tomb AW6, Wahibremeryneith. The text contains an ascension liturgy based on Spells 251–253 and 249 of the Pyramid Texts. A study of its content and parallels shows that in its basic form, the liturgy was formed in the late(?) Middle Kingdom and standardized sometime prior to the writing down of the text of Wahibremeryneith, most likely at the time of heightened archaizing tendencies at the turn of the Third Intermediate and Late Periods. It then remained in use at least until the 30 th Dynasty.

The primary publication of the papyrus from Athribis in Upper Egypt is currently housed in the El-Shaikh Hamad magazine (Sohag). This paper provides a detailed description of the papyrus, whose paleographic features suggest a late date, possibly from the Roman period. It also explores the enigmatic nature of the text, which lacks exact parallels, raising questions about its coherence and purpose. The paper raises the question of whether it was intentionally created as a coherent piece or if it originated from using the papyrus as a scribbling pad. The author suggests that the papyrus may have been a magical amulet based on the positioning of the depictions and the presence of cipher letters. The deciphering of the text is described as a significant challenge, and the author hopes that the publication of this article will attract scholars to further study and interpret this mysterious papyrus.

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct and analyse the genealogical tree of a hitherto unknown temple family that was active in the Memphite area during the 26 th (Saitic) and 27 th (Achaemenid) Dynasties. By studying and comparing the inscriptional evidence available in the vast epigraphic corpus from the Memphite Serapeum, which in fact is the richest source of information for both regional and local family networks, we can obtain valuable insights into six successive generations of this family, spanning from the mid-seventh to the early fifth centuries BC. Although the eastern Nile Delta was the main cultic hub for worship of Banebdjed, all documented members of this family fulfilled different roles in serving Ptah, Sokar, and Banebdjed in Memphis. The hereditary nature of these positions persisted through multiple generations, whereas the family’s position and status appear to remain intact into the late reign of Darius I, the second Persian king of Egypt, at which point the available source material ceases. Ultimately, various family members formed marital unions within their temple community by marrying the daughters and sons of other local temple officials, while carefully adhering to the preexisting familial onomastic traditions.

The publication of a coffin recently uncovered after a looting, most presumably at Abusir el-Meleq, provides an opportunity to bring together a group of coffins with similar iconographic, textual and palaeographic characteristics that appear to have been produced by the same workshop. Stylistic analysis of the decorative programme on these coffins suggests that they date from the late 4 th or 3 rd century BC. The publication of this coffin and the comparisons with other coffins which can be attributed to the same necropolis and/or workshop add to our still very fragmentary knowledge of the evolution of decorative programmes on coffins from northern Middle Egyptian necropolises.

The study examines the relationship between the priestly title (“priest of Maat”) and the ideal autobiographies, suggesting that they both fill the same social-religious role, i. e. – to present and display the tomb owner’s relation to Maat. As a result, they are mutually exclusive, and gradually replace one another. The paper concludes with some methodological remarks concerning the study of the title and its significance.

Two Egyptian antiquities were examined in the Repository of Archaeology of the Museum of Natural Sciences of Caracas. Through Antonio Guzmán Blanco, former president of Venezuela, Venezuelan ethnologist Gaspar Marcano sent one of them from Paris in early 1889. When it arrived in Caracas, German-Venezuelan naturalist Adolfo Ernst, the newly appointed director of the National Museum, acquired it for this collection. This piece is a bronze statuette of Osiris, and another, also submitted by Guzmán Blanco himself, is a Thoth amulet. Both items reflect the cultural trend of South American elites in obtaining exotica in general, as European privileged people did, and Egyptian objects in particular, at the same time the British Empire controlled Egypt, and the fascination for the past of this North African country reignited in European lands again. These pieces resemble those made in the Late Period and Ptolemaic Period (c. 7 th –1 st BCE). This pair of items deposited in the Museum of Natural Science of Caracas adds a second public collection in Venezuela that houses ancient Egyptian material. Along with confirming the existence of these two Egyptian objects, it constitutes a new record for a public Egyptological collection for Latin America and the world.

This paper forms the second part of our study of parallel inscriptions preserved in the temples of Edfu and Athribis. It focuses on a list of aromatic woods. Central to these inscriptions is the term nenib , previously identified with styrax but more plausibly understood as a broader category of scented materials. The paper presents a detailed, synoptic edition and translation of the Nenib-lists from both Edfu and Athribis, accompanied by a critical review and analysis of their multiple layers of meaning, including religious, cultic, symbolic, and linguistic dimensions. The investigation continues our proposed framework for understanding how botanical and aromatic materials were conceptualized and classified in Egyptian textual and cultural contexts.