Volume 145, Issue 2

Since my articles on the Overseers of Upper Egypt appeared in ZÄS 140 and ZÄS 141, I have become aware of three additional overseers. They are listed below.

Publication of the inner face of the cover of the inner coffin Milano E 0.9.40147 belonging to an untitled . It contains short awakening-texts for the sake of Osiris (e. g., the owner of the coffin) arranged as the 12 hours of day and night. The hours are represented as kneeling goddesses in adoration bearing a sun-disk on their heads for the day or a star for the night. The texts of both sides are of different types, the hours of the day being called “embodiment” of Horus and those of the night “doors”. The composition is the same as on the sarcophagi of the Napatan kings Anlamani and Aspelta. To date the version from the Milano coffin has only been dealt with en passant.

The paper discusses three irregularities in the regional distribution of personal names in Middle Kingdom sources, which may be linked to regional language varieties. One feature, the sound change , occurs predominantly in sources from the Memphis-Faiyum region. The two other features, the use of the negative word and the possessive prefix , are confined to Theban and Southern Upper Egyptian sources. The latter two features become standard in Late Egyptian; thus, the evidence presented in the paper contributes to the discussion on the possible dialectal status of Late Egyptian during the Middle Kingdom.

Publikation einer hieroglyphischen Ritzinschrift, die vermutlich Heinrich Brugsch 1853 bei seinem Aufenthalt in den Tempeln von Philae hinterlassen hat.

A recent re-publication of the so-called Hymns to the Diadem (pMoscow 314) is an occasion to take up some questions related to that manuscript. It is shown that the original dating to the 17 th (or very early 18 th ) dynasty is correct against the new proposal to date it to the reign of Amenemhet III, and that synchronically the beneficiary of the ritual is a god, even if it is likely to be an adaption of a royal ritual. Linguistic details point towards a date for the composition in the Old Kingdom. Several philological problems are discussed, and weaknesses in the new edition are pointed out.

A discussion of the Egyptian phrase “beneficent king” in light of new demotic data. Further commentary on A. Stauder’s evaluation of the dating of Neferty is presented within the context of the northeast Egyptian delta.

The case of Wahibreemakhet, son of Alexikles and Zenodote, is the most prominent example for the high status that Greeks – as mercenaries or advisors – could attain in Egypt under the Saite pharaohs. The present article argues that his final resting place should be identified in a tomb at Saqqara that was probably discovered by agents of Giovanni Anastasi in the 1820s and that contained not only Wahibreemakhet’s elaborate stone sarcophagus (now in Leiden), canopic jars (in Stockholm) and shabtis (in various collections), but also a set of limestone tomb reliefs recording spells from the Book of the Dead that are today in the collection of the British Museum and that were once erroneously attributed to ‘Campbell’s tomb’ at Giza. Wahibreemakhet’s rich burial, dating to the decades around 600 BC, and his ranking title ‘Royal Sealer’ illustrate both his social status and his assimilation to Egyptian culture.

Egyptologists have paid much attention to inscribed administrative seals and their impressions. By contrast, the so-called figure seals, which render no or hardly any text, but instead use icons and signs inspired on hieroglyphs which however yield no coherent sense, have received far less attention. Usually this material is related to the lower strata of society. According to current interpretations, it is rooted in the Egyptian culture of the later Old Kingdom and First Intermediate Period. The phenomenon would be a corollary of the decreasing prominence of central state authority in this era. Proceeding from a number of recent early Old Kingdom finds from al-Shaykh Saʽīd/Wādī Zabaydā, the present article argues that a) figure seals were continually in use from the late Predynastic until the late Old Kingdom and b) different from what is commonly assumed, stamp seals were in existence long before the late Old Kingdom. The article challenges the relationship between these object categories and developments specifically in late Old Kingdom Egypt.

The notion of Duat plays a major role in ancient Egyptian funerary beliefs. Yet, a single definition of this notion is impossible to achieve, as it underwent a process of evolution over thousands of years without ever designating just one unambiguous place at a time. In this context, an approach based on cognitive linguistics and on the significance of the determinatives accompanying the word Duat can be exploited to shed more light on this elusive concept. The focus will be here on the Pyramid Texts and the Coffin Texts as well as the intermediary phase of transmission of the funerary literature during the period between the end of the Old Kingdom and the beginning of the Middle Kingdom.