Volume 150, Issue 2

This article presents the publication of three royal calcite fragments from the basement of the Egyptian museum Cairo, illustrated with different funerary depictions on both sides. On the front side they are decorated with varied sections from the sixth, seventh and eighth hour of the Book of the Gate – showing also at one of them the personal name with a cartouche of Seti I, and on the reverse side there are some small texts from the spells 72, 180, 181 of the Book of the Dead inscribed. Due to their depicted scenes and textual representations, these fragments refer to the same decorative program of the fragments of the sarcophagus lid of Seti I, and also their characteristic traits show consistency with the similar iconographic and the paleographic features of the lid’s fragments. Thus, these fragments can be identified as part of the sarcophagus lid of Seti I and belonging to his decoration units, which are providing an innovative perspective for illustrated funerary literature and a significant combination between an underworld book and other diverse religious texts at the beginning of 19th Dynasty.

Reedition of P. BM EA 10077, a unique mummification contract from Ptolemaic Thebes, rejecting earlier interpretations linking the document with the provision of embalming materials and the seventy-day mummification period.

The tomb owner’s figure dominates scenes displayed on elite tomb-chapel walls, forming an essential part of the medium’s repertoire. Yet among funerary models, the tomb owner rarely appears. While the two artistic media exhibit many similarities in design, their representation of the tomb owner forms one of several distinguishing features that are rarely acknowledged. This paper examines the presence and absence of the tomb owner in wall scenes and funerary models from the Old and Middle Kingdom periods. It is here proposed that this difference in representation can be explained by the two artistic media’s contrasting technical properties and location in the tomb.

The present paper deals with some hieratic ostraca from Gurna, stored in the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo (NMEC). These ostraca are written on one side only, with black ink. They were found during the excavations led by Edda Bresciani in the 1970s from Thutmose IV’s temple at Gurna together with other ostraca written in different scripts: Demotic, Greek, and Coptic. The ostraca are administrative, and their topics are various. According to the content, as well as the paleography of script, these ostraca probably date to the 18 th Dynasty and the Ramesside period. O. NMEC No. 409 and O. NMEC No. 339 probably date to the 18 th Dynasty while O. NMEC No. 406, O. NMEC No. 342, and O. NMEC No. 449 are dated to the Ramesside period.

In this paper, it is intended to put a spotlight on some of the more interesting sections of the Coffin Texts, originating from human error, visible in the variation between the witnesses. Besides showing the sections of text with these variations, explanations are provided on how the distinct variations could have occurred. For this paper, three topics of variation will be discussed: Variation due to errors caught by the scribes, variation due to redaction, by replacing pronouns with the name of the owner or changing double columns into singular columns or by abbreviating sections of text and finally variations due to homophony.

The Coptic correspondences of Thebes are not only characterized by the variety of topics but also by some formulae that have become a distinctive feature of this region. The aim of the present paper is to publish four Coptic letters on ostraka; they are now kept in the Abou El-Goud storage magazine in Luxor. Although there is no information on their provenance, they are certainly written in the Theban area.

This article offers the first edition of a Demotic papyrus fragment of early Roman date and of uncertain, probably Fayumic, provenance in the collection of the Hamburg State and University Library Carl von Ossietzky. The fragment preserves parts of two columns of a hitherto unattested enigmatic religious work, for which mostly only distant and short parallels can be found in the evidence currently available to us in any of the Egyptian languages and scripts used in the Late and Graeco-Roman Periods. The only relatively close parallel that we are aware of is a slightly modified form of a sentence that occurs in the composition known as ‘The Great Decree Issued to the Nome of the Silent Land’. The vocabulary and the meagre parallels suggest that we may be catching a glimpse of a previously unknown work of Osirian religious literature. This article provides a general introduction, a transcription and translation of the text, as well as a commentary.

The quantification of Ancient Egyptian drugs has been the subject of debate since the end of the 19 th century due to the lack of the units of measurement in the medical papyri and ostraca. While the reading of one of the main units, the corn-measure, was relatively clear from the beginning due to its specific set of numbers, the other main unit, the dja, could be identified and correctly calculated only at the beginning of the 21 st century. In addition to these systems, some recipes of the Papyri Ebers and Hearst use another measure which seems to be restricted to honey. The article gives an overview of previous proposals for its definition, suggests a new reading and, after re-evaluating the recipes in question, it presents its most probable volume value.

The wooden tablet Leipzig ÄMUL 5512 has been studied a few times but the understanding of crucial parts is still problematic. A detailed analysis is given here, including questions of its materiality. It is proposed that it documents the settlement of a dispute about the permission to bury somebody, probably with in a rather narrow family circle.

The ancient Egyptian herbal genre remains poorly documented, with only two fragmentary herbal treatises and a few handfuls of isolated herbal entries preserved. Recently, however, an herbal treatise has come to light, which is so far only published in part, and which provides important new information on this branch of ancient Egyptian medical practice. The treatise is recorded in pLouvre E 32847 + pCarlsberg 917 and differs significantly from the rest of the extant herbal corpus in that it concerns a single plant and its seed exclusively. As such, the treatise represents a subtype of the herbal genre, which we might term the specialized herbal . It presents a more nuanced image of the herbal genre and the reasons for recording botanical knowledge. At the same time, certain passages in the treatise mirror the structure, vocabulary, and grammatical constructions found in the rest of the corpus, confirming that herbals existed in a standardized format already at the beginning of the New Kingdom, if not earlier. In this paper I present an overview of the extant herbal corpus and discuss what the addition of the specialized treatise in pLouvre-Carlsberg means for our understanding of the herbal genre in ancient Egypt<fnote> This paper is derived from a chapter of my unpublished PhD dissertation, Medical Science in Ancient Egypt: A Translation and Interpretation of Papyrus Louvre-Carlsberg (pLouvre E 32847 + pCarlsberg 917) (Copenhagen, 2020).</fnote>.

Study of Harwerre’s inscription at Serabit el-Khadim (IS 90; year 6 of Amenemhat III). Part 1 offers a philological discussion and new translation of this difficult text. Part 2 shows how the textual composition is patterned throughout on all hierarchical levels. (A proposal for calibration in prosodically patterned Middle Kingdom texts is outlined, differing from both Fechtian “metrics” and Fosterian “thought couplets.”) The patterning extends to deep rhythmical levels, supporting the hypothesis that the text could have been recited on occasions. The overall form of the composition, at once bipartite and concentric, foregrounds the turn to success brought about by the king’s “might” ( bȝw ). Superimposed on this, a concentric framing, rhythmical patterning, and phonetic echoes concur in celebrating “Hathor” ( ḥwt-ḥr ) as lady of the “beautiful skin” ( ỉnm nfr ). Part 3 relates the textual composition to its contexts: the stela on which it is inscribed, the place where that stela stands, and the time of Amenemhat III. This is tightly integrated with the other pictorial and written elements on the stela whose two faces mediate between the powers in the sanctuary (eastern face) and the incoming visitor (western face). On the western face, the turn to success through the king is set in the exact middle lines 13–14 of the 26-line long textual inscription, meeting the incoming visitor at roughly eye’s height. Echoes of Harwerre’s text in neighboring inscriptions of the immediately following years attest to the local reception of an out-of-the-ordinary text and monument. The product of a composer versed in the patterns of contemporary poetry, the text is a token of a productive reception of such during the reign of Amenemhat III.

The 18 th Dynasty of Egypt saw the introduction of various new artistic elements often described as ‘expressive’ or ‘naturalistic’. This development appears to have occurred within a short time span, and many of its details remain unclear. This article examines this phenomenon with particular focus on palace decorations from Tell el-Dab’a, Malqata and Amarna. The three sites display many artistic commonalities, despite the changes in temple decoration that occurred within the same period. It is proposed that this discrepancy reflects two separate strands of artistic development, namely (i) a canonical style predominantly found in religious and funerary contexts; and (ii) a ‘dynamic’ style that is epitomised by the palace decorations. Analyses are made regarding the development of the dynamic style, its influence on Amarna art, as well as the mechanism of its transmission.